My father, Eric, passed away yesterday at the age of 51.
I will be more or less completely useless for a while.
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Martin the Warrior - Publisher: Philomel
- Year: 1994
- Pages: 384
It may behoove you to read the previous book in this series, Salamandastron
Martin the Warrior marks something of a turning point for the Redwall series: Jacques, for the first time, seems mindful that he is really and truly working with canon and not simply a series of novels tenuously connected by a shared world of anthropomorphic rodents. It’s also the first novel that mentions Redwall the abbey only as an unimportant frame narrative.
Martin the Warrior has maintained a literally revered position in the Redwall canon. Already a dead saint in the first eponymous novel, his story (and the story of the abbey) is given print in the series’ second novel, Mossflower, which is one of the more famous and, if I may say so, still one of the best, Redwall novels. This latest offering in the series seeks to tell the backstory of Martin, whose past was previously shrouded in mystery as a battle-hardened warrior mouse from the hardscrabble northland.
I think Jacques ended up a bit constrained, however; Martin’s notable lack of a love interest in both Mossflower and all the historical narratives means that any love interest for the dashing young mouse warrior must necessarily come to naught or else risk breaking series continuity. Then, too, when working with the cultural centerpiece of the entire series, one can’t simply churn out a slap-dash novel and call it a day….. right?
In all fairness to Jacques, he gives the novel a fair treatment, though he still falls prey to his overblown tendencies in Salamandastron, cramming a few too many perfunctory plot points into the book: a land-based stoat tyrant, a corsair stoat, a pygmy shrew tribe, a heron, a wandering minstrel company of a badger, hares, and mice; wild squirrels, cannibal lizards, fearsome warrior otters, and a brief and understated appearance by quarrelsome shrews; all these characters, in a number of both serious and comedic enterprises, fill Martin the Warrior, though to be sure it raises as many further questions about Martin’s past as it answers—so much so that Jacques would eventual pen Luke the Warrior in order to further flesh out the mouse warrior’s troubled and heroic past.
Martin the Warrior finds our famous hero enslaved in the sea-side fort of Marshank, overseen by the cruel stoat Badrang. This particular tyrant is noticeably less malicious than previous Redwall villains, though perhaps Jacques simply had less space in which to develop his character. He commands the usual motley array of rats, ferrets, and foxes, as well as a contingent of woodland slaves who are in the process of building the huge stone fort—reminiscent of the similar imposing edifice in Mariel of Redwall.
Needless to say, there are number of small skirmishes, capped in the end by a feverish pitched battle for the lives of all involved; the Good Guys™ win, ultimately, but that’s no secret; neither is the fact that Martin lives to play his vital role in Mossflower; more important here, really, are the rest of the characters, who are as lively and interesting as any Jacques has so far written. Time will tell how Martin the Warrior stacks upon, novel-to-novel, against its successors, but I think it remains important in its own right, as well as a bloody good story, regardless.
You may recall that I’ve been to Cleveland before (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6); this year, I was there once again, for the same reason, namely the annual CampusEAI conference.
Our addition to the program this year was relatively recent occurrence, and so this conference came as a bit of a surprise, wedged as it is just before I leave next Monday for the Portal 2008 conference at Gettysburg College.
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Into Thin Air - Publisher: Anchor
- Year: 1998
- Pages: 416
I was supposed to read Into Thin Air when I was a junior in high school, as one of a tripartite summer/fall curriculum about Man vs. Nature themes: the other two books were Junger’s utterly excremental A Perfect Storm and Norman McLean’s indefatigably maudlin Young Men and Fire. The curriculum was created by a man who, I have no doubts, is an excellent educator and human being. I forgive his lapse in judgment w.r.t. reading material mostly because I didn’t read any of the assigned books, generally thumbing through them and faking/blustering my way through tests and class discussions. Either via my own research or the prolonged torture of English class, I later become more intimately familiar with the latter two, but never revisited the first. After thoroughly enjoying Krakauer’s Under the Banner Heaven, I thought it might be a good idea to read the book that I so studiously avoided many years ago
There now, it seems I’ve written far more by way of exposition than I will for review.
Mountain climbing is a particular conceit that I understand intellectually, but will never, ever be able to understand on a visceral level. It takes a particular kind of constitution to purposely endure pain for a literally lofty goal that provides no other remuneration apart of self-satisfaction and maybe an endorsement deal. But climbing Mount Everest is the far end of a long spectrum of ridiculousness that falls indeterminately between a pissing contest, a magnum opus, and a prescription for Risperidone. It is in this mindset that I read about the (supposedly infamous) 1996 ascent of Everest that resulted in an inordinately large number of dead climbers, including several experienced and capable guides.
Jon Krakauer, an avid hobbyist at climbing, found himself on the team of one Rob Hall, a New Zealandder who provided services as a guide for prospective summiters. I should point out here that in writing this exposition, Krakauer himself takes great pains to detail the absurdity of the Everest climb: it’s something primordial and undeniable, he states, beyond any sort of rational explanation. It also represents about 2 months or more of absence from your real life (not to mention at least a year of conditioning), and thousands upon thousands of dollars in Chinese/Nepalese permits, guide services, equipment, and travel. Immediately, then, you will find yourself on one of two possible sides during the first few chapters: (1) you will sympathize with this “call of the wild,” and the unfortunate events of the rest of the book will be the inevitable tragedy that occurs in the pursuit of a dream; (2) you will view the events that follow as the only natural turn of events for a bunch of overzealous dumbshits on power trips who climb into the atmosphere and are surprised when they die of frostbite and cardiopulmonary conditions.
You might conclude from the previous paragraphs that I have a healthy distrust of thrill-seekers and adventurists, and you would be right, insofar as I have a hard time accepting Krakauer’s half-hearted sob story; that is to say, the prolonged mea culpa and blood-weeping tragedy that Into Thin Air morphs into ends up striking me as a bunch of Gore-Tex-clad manly men sitting around a frozen corpse and opining “Well there’s yer problem…”
Krakauer, under the auspices of Respectable Journalism™ accompanies a mountaineering team (one of many) to the summit of Everest during April and May of 1996. The author spends a great deal of time painting character sketches of everyone he meets (and, based on interviews, radio transcript, and likely some of his imagination, people he doesn’t meet). He also makes summitting Everest sound like about as much fun as having one’s bowels messily ripped out through the mouth; whether it’s the squalid, infested Nepalese towns that line the trek to Base Camp, the frigid cold, the blazing solar radiation, the numerous altitude-related medical emergencies, or the near-constant hypoxia and exhaustion, the inexorable march up the vertical is narrated as a series of misfortunes, stations of a/the cross, if you will, the final crucifixion of which is complete and total indifference when standing atop the highest vertical point on planet earth, and of course the continued misery and death of the descent.
I really wish that I had been more attuned to the news coverage of all this when it happened (I was probably busy watching Power Rangers and waiting for my auxiliary hair to grow), since I’d be interested in more context to this whole cluster of events, but am not quite passionate enough about mountain climbing to start reading more Everest accounts. Needless to say, I approached the Into Thin Air with the same credulity with which I approached Under the Banner of Heaven; I respect Krakauer as a journalist, and think most of his work to be excellent; the fact that he has a personal stake in the public perception of Everest ’96 is only a small grain of salt with which to take the book as a whole. I get the impression that he was more or less truthful and fair in his descriptions of people and events, even if some weren’t so happy with the unflattering tone.
I am not sure whether to recommend this book to a general audience; my impetus to read it was personal rather than literary, though I suppose Krakauer’s bona fides as a decent writer and journalist take care of the latter context. If you think you’d be the slightest bit interested in a book about Everest, give it a shot, since it’s probably a good deal more interesting and well-narrated than other accounts. Otherwise, might I suggest a different book by Krakauer?
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A Spot of Bother - Publisher: Vintage
- Year: 2007
- Pages: 368
I can recall with tremendous clarity how surprised I was by Mark Haddon’s debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. It wasn’t that the story was anything spectacular—it was a quirky sort of bildungsroman, at best—but what made it so excellent was the way Haddon had told the whole thing, convincingly, from the perspective of a young autistic boy.
There’s nothing quite so unique about Haddon’s sophomore novel, A Spot of Bother. It deals largely with old storytelling tropes that we’ve heard before, but it manages to do it in a way that’s still uniquely funny. I think perhaps that says something about Haddon’s skill as a writer.
“A spot of bother” is a bit of a double entendre: it’s a quintessentially understated English phrase for an undesirable occurrence (even disaster), but it’s also a literal spot on the hip of George, our retired 62-year-old protagonist, who at the novel’s beginning quite clearly begins to lose his mind. He thinks, for instance, that his spot of discoid eczema is cancer, and despite the assurances of his doctor, his mind is suddenly filled with thoughts of mortality. Meanwhile, his son is gay, his daughter is marrying (again) a man her family dislikes, and George’s wife is having an affair with an old colleague. So what makes this different from a soap or a trashy serial?
There’s something perhaps imperceptible about the novel that manages to catch me. In all honesty, it reminded me very much of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, which was a disturbing(ly normal) portrait of a midwestern family that is simultaneously close and estranged, as the gruff patriarch descends into madness, the addle-brained housewife housewifes herself into oblivion, and a couple of disaffected spawn watch with disgusted interest from the sidelines (except replaced “Midwestern” with “British”). However, The Corrections was ultimately sad, frustrating, and tragic: at the end, Franzen delivers a crushing existentialist blow and lets his readers know that age ravages all, and there is little we can do to escape our fate or even make the world stop and notice. As you might guess from Haddon’s general tendency to comedy, this book isn’t quite like that: in fact, I would dare call Haddon new Nick Hornby. In fact, I might even dare to say that Haddon out-Hornsbys Nick Hornsby.
Since the narrative viewpoint jumps from person to person, it’s difficult to pinpoint a main character in A Spot of Bother, but if I were to base my choice on which character had the highest amount of dramatic irony associated with his character, it would most certainly be George. He’s a bit of a bumbler; truth be told, his problem with madness is never clearly defined or satisfactorily solved; it might be that Haddon is trying to make a point about the ambiguity of such things. After all, George is clearly going insane (hallucinations, &c.), and yet his life remains a great deal simpler than the lives of his family, whose own lack of clarity and distorted self-image and judgement are clearly just as dysfunctional as imagining the floor at a tilted angle, and yet it is George who is debilitated and George who is medicated and George with whom Haddon finally makes a rather stilted plot device near the end, striking a blow against the iconic British reserve.
So, what to say about A Spot of Bother. I’m not sure Haddon lived up to the ingenuity of the his debut novel. There were a lot of familiar tropes in this one, rather shamelessly borrowed from our collective consciousness of soaps, serials, and sitcoms. None of this is to say that it wasn’t a raucous, incredibly entertaining read.