Prose Fiction

After writing about Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried, an acquaintance recommended that I also check out another of O’Brien’s novels, Going After Cacciato. That sounded like a good idea to me, so I got a copy of the audiobook edition expecting another war novel along the lines of The Things They Carried.

I was about half-right. It’s partly a war novel, and partly a modern version of Around the World in Eighty Days. Once again, we follow a company of soldiers in the Vietnam War, and roughly half the chapters, interspersed between those about the main narrative, are anecdotes about protagonist Paul Berlin’s experience as a new soldier, much like The Things They Carried. The other half, and the primary narrative of the book, is about one member of the company, Cacciato, going AWOL. Cacciato seems to be not quite retarded, but certainly not too bright, either, and he’s decided to leave the war for Paris. He’s not a coward or a pacifist or anything like that, it’s just that he’s apparently not clever enough to see the consequences of what is, in fact, desertion, and the impossibility of traveling all the way from Vietnam overland to France.

My introduction to Robert Heinlein came during a class I took back at college on the literature of science fiction, the same class where I first read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The timing was perfect, since I was a Libertarian at the time and Heinlein is fairly well-known for his broadly Libertarian views, which feature prominently in his work. That ideological sympathy wasn’t enough to make me a fan of the novel selected for the class, Stranger in a Strange Land, though. The story had some interesting moments, enough that I am glad that I read it, but it features a hippie version of Libertarianism with free love and such, which even then I had little patience for.

It’s October and Halloween is just around the corner, so now’s a perfect time to bring out Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Not the Alan Parsons Project album, though that’s good, too, but Calla Editions’ reprint of the classic collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories.

Now, among the authors typically assigned for high school English, Poe stands out a bit from other members of the literary canon because, though many other canonical authors wrote for popular audiences, Poe’s stories come across as essentially pulp. It revels in the macabre, often hinges on suspense, and he’s primarily known for horror, and that genre is known for getting snubbed by critics. Most of his stories, because they sometimes do rely on the unknown, don’t benefit from re-reading like most great works, and Poe himself was strongly opposed to didactic fiction, so there aren’t many lessons to take from him, besides things like “Don’t bury your sister unless you’re absolutely certain that she’s dead,” or “Never bet the devil your head.” So what’s he doing on lists of canonical authors?

I first read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle back in college, and at the time I loved it. The recent hype around Amazon’s adaptation of the novel made me think of it again, and I decided to re-read it to see how it holds up.

Overall, it’s still very good. The setting is 1962 with an obvious alternate history premise where the Axis Powers won the Second World War, with Germany occupying the Eastern United States, Japan the Western, with a more-or-less autonomous zone between them. How this apparently came about is plausible enough, though I must say that some of the things the Nazis have been up to are rather far-fetched. They apparently have a space programme going to Mars, have drained the Mediterranean, and have wiped out most of Africa (though something apparently went wrong with this project, but details are never explained). They’ve only just invented television, though, so reality has the advantage in idiot box technology.

Is it fair to criticise a book that the author left unfinished at his death? Well, it was published, so I suppose so.

Most of Franz Kafka’s The Castle doesn’t really feel unfinished, anyway. There are a few spots that could use some editing, I suppose, but I wouldn’t have guessed that the author died before completing it until the book stops. That’s probably the main problem, really, which is hardly Kafka’s fault - though there is a note at the end of my audiobook edition about how Kafka intended the novel to end, the manuscript we have just stops in the middle. I sense that the story was likely nearing a conclusion, but obviously it’s still frustrating to have a story just stop with no conclusion at all.

Another audiobook, this time Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, published by Blackstone Audio and narrated by Simon Vance.

Now, when I wrote about Murakami Haruki’s Kafka on the Shore, I criticised the author for being too eager to show off how intelligent he is by name-dropping famous musicians and such at every opportunity. Wilde goes much farther, as a large part of the novel consists of long conversations that don’t seem to have much purpose beyond giving Wilde an opportunity to show the reader how clever he is, or filling a chapter describing the various musical or gemstone collections his protagonist acquires and making sure we all know how much research he did in the lore of these things. To be fair, Wilde is genuinely clever, and his dialogues are often amusing, but they make the novel longer than necessary and quickly begin to feel tedious.

The one benefit of having a very long commute to work each day is that it allows one to get through a lot of audiobooks and podcasts. Not that I actually listen to a lot of audiobooks, admittedly, mainly because I like to mark up my books and share interesting passages on twitter as I go. They do benefit from professional narration, though, like a radio play, and poetry especially benefits from being read out loud. Of course, audiobooks are also a distraction while driving, though if I do get into an auto accident at least I’ll go out listening to something good.

Once in a while, I come across a work of fiction that should be better than it is, and unfortunately Bram Stoker’s Dracula fits firmly into that category. The premise carries the novel through, and the story does have some strong points, but Stoker does a couple of things that undermine the whole work.

The first major problem is that Stoker wrote this as an epistolary novel. I believe this style used to be much more common than it is now, but was already long past its prime when Stoker wrote Dracula, and good riddance. Ideally, the epistolary style adds a sense of realism, making the reader feel like he’s a researcher going through primary documents, rather than reading an artificially constructed narrative. Since much of Dracula is essentially a mystery story, this approach does serve the plot well. However, I found the constant changes in narrator, and the changes in tone, setting, and style that accompanied that, distracting, and it made the novel more difficult to get into. Also, the epistolary style doesn’t do as good a job of conveying action as a basic third-person narration, and overall the novel may have been better if Stoker had simply used the third-person omniscient narrator.

The American release of Tanigawa Nagaru’s Haruhi Suzumiya novels are in the home stretch, with the recent release of The Dissociation of Haruhi Suzumiya. It’s the first of a two-part story, to be concluded in the next and last novel, so I’ll hold off on a full review. There were, however, a few things I found interesting with this one.

The most obvious feature of this novel is that the narrative splits halfway through, and what occurs over the next few days differs significantly between the two versions. Though there is some overlap between the two, the differences aren’t subtle like, say, the “Endless Eight” story arc from a few volumes back. I don’t see any hint as to how these two parallel timelines may relate to each other, except that Kyon, our intrepid narrator, does mention not having encountered a slider yet near the beginning of the book. Is it time for one to finally appear?

Last week I read The Sea, by John Banville. I went into the book essentially blind; I didn’t know much about Banville and didn’t even know what the novel’s about, but an acquaintance whose opinion I highly respect recommended it to me, so I dove in quickly.

The Sea is narrated by a man whose wife is dying, and the novel jumps back and forth between scenes with her and their daughter in the present, and his memories of spending time with a family in a beach town where he spent much of his childhood. I enjoyed Banville’s writing style; he spends a lot of time describing the setting and characters, so the story feels very real. He seems to have taken a great deal of care in how he phrases each statement, choosing just the right words for what he describes and savouring each paragraph. The narrator’s speech, though, still sounds natural, like someone speaking deliberately, trying to convey an experience even as he himself can’t quite tell why it feels significant, as in the following passage: