Summer Reading

[akirlu]

One of the upsides of summer is that I'm not taking Chinese; the summer curriculum for languages runs only single-year-intensive courses that pack three quarters' worth of language classes into, not kidding, 9 weeks. Even if I could imagine myself absorbing Mandarin at that rate I can't take a 9-week vacation to fit in the class time. So, no Mandarin until September, though I did sign up for a language exchange partner through the Educational Outreach, and I'm meeting them for coffee for the first time tomorrow afternoon. In the mean time, I've been totally slacking on even reviewing last year's grammar and vocabulary, and instead catching up on some purely recreational reading. I'm still not a fast reader, so there isn't a tonne of it, but it's nice to have some No Pressure reading for a change.

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen - Alan Garner - I picked this up second-hand a while back at Magus Books because I've read some Alan Garner in the past and enjoyed it, and this book in particular seems to be a touchstone of sorts for many of my UK friends and acquaintances. It also seemed like it had a lot of the sort of elements I often like very much. So, I was curious. Summary reaction: I wanted to like it, but mostly, I didn't.

Garner's pacing is uneven and awkward, so the intended suspense didn't build very well for me at all. At one point in a long Things Keep Getting Worse For the Protagonists sequence, I got bored, because Garner wasn't doing much besides Making Things Worse. He wasn't advancing the plot, he wasn't revealing the characters, and he was making an awfully large meal of revealing comparatively small details of the fantastical background. I could see intellectually how it would be terrifying to face the possibility of being trapped in a series of ever smaller disused mine shafts and drowned caves but at no point did I actually feel more than mild discomfort. There were quite a lot more pages left, so obviously, At This Point, They Do Not Die. Throughout the book, major plot points kept whizzing by much too quickly and easily, while largely uneventful or non-developmental interstitial filler drags out entirely too long. We have a very long slog to the final battle and then zip-zip-squirt, book's over. Maybe Garner was engaging in some sort of sophisticated realism there, but reality doesn't make for good story. Not without editing.

Garner's handling of point of view was sadly awkward as well. The two protagonists, Susan and Colin, are a pair of children sent to stay on a farm in small-town Cheshire. Aside from the prologue, for the first 90-odd pages, the story is told in close third person following the two of them. Then in the next chapter the author gets a flash of omniscience and suddenly we're in another location following one of the bad guys, with a good deal more interiority, and discover for the first time that there are internal conflicts among the loosely allied league of bad guys and a local capo of the league is trying to use the McGuffin for herself rather than turn it over to the capo di tutti capi as previously promised. And then the kids show up and we're back to their limited third. This untelegraphed one-two punch swap in POV was wrenching enough to throw me right out of the book and summon dark thoughts about authors who don't plan ahead in the narrative well enough to come up with a better way to enclue the reader. And then I kept bracing for more unexpected shifts in POV, when none were actually forthcoming.

I kept having little twinges of irritated feminism while I read along, too. Not typical for me, I know. But Susan is so abominably wet that it's hard for even as sanguine a post-feminist as myself to ignore. I don't think the book actually tells the children's relative ages but the cover clearly portrays Colin as the younger, so that's the way I have them in my head, yet Colin is forever the one who initiates actions and does things while Susan mostly issues (entirely correct) warnings of danger and then follows submissively after when Colin plunges ahead anyway. After a while I'm muttering, "Susan, grow a spine!" to myself whenever we hit action, but she never does.

It also doesn't help that all of the Good Guys, including ones who certainly ought to know better, are completely and inexplicably obtuse about the location of the McGuffin even when it's right under their noses until the Bad Guys finally grab it and then the Good Guys are all, "Oh, doh! That was the McGuffin! Why didn't I notice earlier, especially since I've been hunting desperately for it for centuries and all?!?"

Perhaps most disappointing was how muddled and leaden I found Garner's use of his mythological sources. As with the pace, Garner seems compelled to tell when he should be showing (i.e. when there's mythic and magical backstory to be told) and show when he should be telling (when were back to the endless quotidian detail). As a result, Garner doesn't manage to make Weirdstone feel very mythic. It's like he's following a recipe and got the measurements for the ingredients all wrong. He's drawing on a mishmash of mythologies -- Celtic, Irish, Norse, English, Manx -- all tossed in the blender and whipped into an unappetizing slurry -- the different sources don't heighten or support each other, they just provide mutually cancelling noise. We're introduced early to the existence of Nastrond, an evil enchanter or living embodiment of all that is evil or whatnot, who wants to destroy the world, but a third of the way through a witch called The Morrigan is whisked on stage with little fanfare and I'm not sure if we're supposed to recognize the name of the Irish war goddess and not need an introduction or explanation of why she's involved in Nastrond's plotting, but we don't get one. Given the presence of a wizard suspiciously like Merlin, you might expect The Morrigan to turn out to be a) some sort of cognate to Morgan le Fey and b) as a consequence, a bigger deal in the book than mostly a plot device, but if you expected that, you'd be disappointed.

Mythological names were particularly annoying. Garner has multiple nicknames for Nastrond, and especially combined with the late introduction of The Morrigan and her faithful hench-whatsit, it's a bitch figuring out just how many baddies there are and which is which, and what the hell is going on anyway. Garner also uses familiar names in creative -- not to say wrong -- ways, as well as slapping new names on familiar characters, which I don't quite see the point of. In Weirdstone, Ragnarok is a place rather than a time, and I winced every time I had to pause and re-parse sentences that mention it. (Luckily I wasn't yet aware that Nastrond is also a place in Norse myth, not a person, or I would have been even more distracted.) On the other hand, the primary forces of good are pretty clearly a sketch of Arthur and his knights sleeping under the hill waiting for the final battle, and their wizard guardian is clearly Merlin, but for some reason none of them are called that. And is there really any good reason to keep pseudo-Norse names for things when all they do is sound clunky in English? Couldn't we just call the Svart-alfar "dark elves" and be done?



I keep seeing this book compared to Susan Cooper, but on the whole, I think if one wants a Susan Cooper novel, the best option will be to go re-read some Susan Cooper

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I realised reading this that I couldn't remember a damn thing about the book... then again it's probably over 30 years since I last read it, which is hardly a surprise.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

This is me too, except for one scene where they're crawling through a tunnel and have to submerge themselves in water without knowing if they'll find air on the other side. Still makes my skin crawl umpteen years later.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yep, that passage in particular really should have creeped me out. I was thinking as I read it, "Boy, this really ought to creep me out." I have a real horror of the idea of drowning in a darkened cave because there's no way to get to the air. And yet I was unmoved. This is when you know there's a problem with the pacing.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't think much of The Weirdstone either. Neither does Garner. He once called it "one of the worst books published in the last twenty years". It's the work of a novice who hasn't yet learned to handle his tools- and gives few hints of the master he was to become.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Ah, right. I hadn't realized that it was his first published novel -- that's a telling point. Tim Powers' first published novel (which I read under the title Forsake the Sky) is really pretty terrible too. After that, he got better.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You say you'd read and enjoyed some Garner before ... do you recall which books?

Weirdstone and Moon aren't my favorites either, and I haven't re-read either in many's the year ... I think what originally made them touchstones was the rarity at the time of novels imbuing hard local geography with such mythic drench, so you take what you can get. (The same way 30s SF fans read and loved such awful dreck, because once you'd absorbed the old masters there was hardly anything else.) At the time you couldn't read Susan Cooper instead because there was no Susan Cooper yet. (Confession: I'm not that fond of her work either. Lloyd Alexander, also not writing fantasy yet then, is better, but by my tastes for the real stuff you have to wait for Garner's next books or even longer for Diana Wynne Jones.)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed The Owl Service years ago. I re-read it a few years ago and still thought it okay. I have Elidor but have no memory of reading it -- not sure if that means I haven't read it or it didn't stick.

Your analysis of the popularity of Weirdstone makes sense to me. It's interesting that Garner didn't think much of it in retrospect, himself. But given how early it is in his career, it makes sense that he hadn't really mastered his craft yet.

[frostfox.livejournal.com]

I am way too close to the book to be able to critical (though it was actually The Moon of Gomrath which changed my life, rather than Weirdstone) but I can see your critique is valid.

Being called Susan and having free range of T'Edge as a young teenager, to say they resonated with me is an understatement.

My mother will still tell you that 'It Is All Alan Garner's Fault'.

FF

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, looking at his biography and the background of the book, I suspect Garner was too close to the place and the material too -- given how much he was working with local legend and geography, and how young he was as a writer, I think he didn't yet have the perspective to prioritize how well something served the story over how closely it matched local legend, his original idea, and other sources. Garner was assembling a patchwork garment, and that is usually trickier than cutting from whole cloth.