The never-ending reading list: May ’24 edition

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‘I know,’ you think, ‘I’ll start writing about all the books I read in a month. But I’ll do it starting at the beginning of next month, so I don’t forget all the books.’

The beginning of next month comes around. You forget to write down the books. The middle of the month comes around. ‘I know,’ you think, ‘I’ll start writing about all the books I read in a month. But I’ll do it starting at the beginning of next month, so I don’t forget all the books.’

This carries on till you’re dead or you give up and start in the middle of the month.

I have a system for reading books, which is that I read poetry, non-fiction, then fiction, in that order. But to make sure that I read a good variety of things, I alternate between reading classic books (my definition of classic is, ‘Is the author dead?’ so that, e.g., Philip Roth became ‘classic’, by my morbid definition, sometime after I started this system) and contemporary (by not-dead authors) books. And, also, I read at least one poem every day, and in between each book, I read a short story and an essay from one of my ongoing books of short stories and essays. So, for example, I just read Quoof by Paul Muldoon (poetry, not classic), then I read an essay from The Penguin book of Feminist Writing and a short story from an odd textbook of short stories I picked up secondhand somewhere, and now I’m reading The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby (non-fiction, not classic).

I allow myself some flexibility, so that I don’t get bored. For example, this month I also read everything by Neil Gaiman I’ve not read yet as my ‘fiction, not classic’ read for this cycle. I’ve also been reading The Mahabharata one book at a time, because it’s very long and would have taken several months of continuous reading to get through in one go.

Quoof, by Paul Muldoon

I loved Paul Muldoon when I was an undergraduate, but boy is he hard to get through now I have less time and fewer poetry professors to help explain things to me. I’ve talked before about the skill versus blood dichotomy, and I feel like in this collection Muldoon is unfortunately falling more on the side of having too much technique and not enough feel.

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby buys a lot of books and reads some of them, while feeling ambivalent about the whole project. It’s less a reflection on books and more a reflection on how they make him feel, with a lot of charming honesty along the lines of ‘I sort of forgot what this book was like because I read it on a plane and all I really remember now is the plane,’ which I’m sure we’ve all felt at one point or another. It does, however, make it a bit difficult to take his recommendations all that seriously. Hornby liked a book because he read it while in a good mood, but what if I read it when I’m in a bad mood?

But this is Hornby’s point: there’s no particular point in reading either the classics or the current critical darlings unless you’re having a good time. I agree with him, up to a point. The problem, though, is that he only applies this argument within the province of reading. Hornby clearly thinks that you should read, that it’s bad that many people don’t, that the number that don’t is growing, that the number of young people, in particular, that don’t is growing faster still. But, if people don’t enjoy it, why should they do it? This is exactly the same argument that Hornby applies to ‘reading the classics’, but he never examines how it applies to just plain ‘reading’, which he’s very much in favour of.

On a timely note, Hornby complains in an aside that there isn’t an NHS anymore because the current government and in particular the current prime minister has sold it off. Sound familiar? I imagine it does, as a lot of people agree with that assessment. Except, the government he’s thinking of is Labour, the PM he’s thinking of is Blair, and the year he’s writing in is 2004. So, how can it be that the NHS doesn’t exist anymore because the Tories/Rishi Sunak sold it off, when it was already sold off twenty years ago by Labour/Tony Blair?

This is not a political point. This is a parable about hyperbole.

31 Songs, by Nick Hornby

This was quite fun, in roughly the same way as Spree, and also quite annoying, in roughly the same way as spree. It is very subjective, as good criticism should be, but it doesn’t do enough objectivity, which good criticism must do.

M is for Magic, Fragile Things, The Sandman (vol. 1) and Trigger Warning, by Neil Gaiman

A lot of short stories and one graphic novel, by Britian’s foremost SFF writer, Neil Gaiman. We all love Neil, and everything you love about him is on display in the more-or-less random selection of his books I read this month. He’s always smart, he’s never obvious. I had a particularly fun moment reading M is for Magic, because it contains ‘Troll Bridge’, a short story I read when I was thirteen which I didn’t realise was by Gaiman at the time. But now I know! It’s very good.

Fair warning, there’s some overlap between these collections, because M is for Magic was a round-up of Gaiman’s work for younger readers (YA, rather than children’s), so you’ll come across the same stories more than once if you buy all three collections. Fans of American Gods should definitely pick up Fragile Things and Trigger Warning (in that order) because they each contain the further adventures of Shadow, the protagonist of Gods.

The Sandman is really great, but you know that already.

The Mahabharata, Books 16 and 17

I’ve been reading The Mahabharata, possibly the longest poem ever written, in translation (of course), one book at a time, for a year and a half. The main plot is now over. At the equivalent stage in The Odyssey, we’re now at the point where Odysseus goes up the hill to find his old dad, Laertes. Now, Yudhishtira and the rest of the Pandavas, having won back their kingdom and done due repentance for all the killing that entailed, are climbing the Himalayas, with their wife Draupadi and a dog, for some reason. The others all fall back in the course of the climb, due to not having enough yoga power, leaving Yudhisthira to forge on alone like George Mallory, to the peak.

‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism‘, by Oscar Wilde

I’ve been meaning to read this one for years. Probably the best of Wilde’s insight is this one:

If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.

Now, if a man writing in 1891 could work this out, one has to wonder how it happened anyway and how people could deny it was turning out so badly, for so long.

Wilde case is that individualism can only truly emerge under socialism, that the whole point of the activity is the flourishing of humanity. This is an insight I feel a lot of people on the left, especially on the environmentalist side of the movement, are badly lacking. If socialism is sold as a matter of belt-tightening, why would anyone buy it? The point has to be more freedom, more happiness, greater luxury for all

For people arguing for ‘capitalist’ individualism, they have to explain the clear attitude of capitalism that all things, including people, are only valuable insofar as they contribute to GDP. You cannot believe in individualism and immigration controls, or individualism and benefit sanctions. It is not coherent.

Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto (trans. Jesse Kirkwood)

This is a book about a murder which is solved by careful examination of train timetables, a summary which is both true and a little unfair. The plot is laid out almost systematically, with nothing wasted. There’s even a note at the end claiming that it was all based on real timetables for the year 1957, so presumably Matsumoto really sat down and checked them all thoroughly, just as his characters do. As a result of this reliance on the cold hard facts, it might is a little cold and hard at times, for all the the heroic detectives’ suspicions are originally aroused by an understanding of human nature. It also does something I really dislike in detective novels, and has the antagonist confess in a suicide note. I know Agatha Christie did it, too, but I still think it’s cheating.

Again Behold the Stars, by Alex Josephy

Rejoice, formalism fans: a book of Pertrarchan (usually) sonnets (mostly)!

I went to an open mic night, so naturally I had to buy some poetry, to make it worth the price of the train ticket for the poet. Josephy’s colleciton is inspired by historical records of a siege in Italy during the Renaissance. Particularly good is ‘Great Grandmother’, where the siege of the city becomes a metaphor for the advance of old age: ‘aches / Bombard her, cares dig trenches, / Starve and ravine her cheeks.’

In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for our Century, trans. Wong May

This has been my daily poem read for the past two hundred days or so. It comes with a book-length afterword by the translator, so I treated that as my contemporary non-fiction read for this cycle. Much more fun than your usual academic reflections on poetry, May’s afterword imagines the whole work laid out as a museum and is helped along by a cartoon rhino who makes helpful comments from the margins, like ‘Don’t bonzai me!’ and, more than once, ‘zzzzzz’.

May’s translations seem good, insofar as I can comment at all (not very much). I especially enjoyed the poems by Bai Juyi and ‘The Garden of Golden Valley’ by Du Mu which ends:

                 Blossoms fall,

        A prodigious drift

Like a girl leaping
Off the porch

Archangel and The Ghost, by Robert Harris

There’s a particular problem you get when you read books by the same author in quick succession. This also happened with Hornby¹ this month. It’s this: you start to notice all their quirks and it gets annoying, probably more annoying than it would be if you hadn’t read them so close together.

Consider the following description:

Someone whose job is more or less ‘writer’ (a journalist, an academic, a ghost writer) stumbles upon a document of some kind that will, if its contents are verified and become known to the world, profoundly change the world. This someone is a British man, roughly in his thirties, certainly no younger than 25 and no older than 45, and currently single, although he’s had some quite stormy long-term relationships with women, who almost all find him attractive, and vice-versa, in the recent past. He just can’t quite settle, you see. He is able to support himself in his career as more-or-less-a-writer despite being fairly dissolute, usually with a liking for whisky (it must be single malt Scotch), in particular. He knows lots of American men and finds them all very irritating.

The problem with the writing of Robert Harris – which I’m not saying I don’t enjoy! – is that description applies not only to both the books I read this month but also to Fatherland and even, with perhaps some small modifications this time, to his non-fiction work, The Hitler Diaries.

So, do read Robert Harris. It’s great, smart pop, but do be aware there’s a formula.

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My back of the envelope maths says I read about a book a day in the second half of May, which is pretty good going. Will I beat that in June? No, because I’m starting with The Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg² Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, which will probably take me the whole damn month, by the end of which I might know what ‘phenomenology’ means. Why am I reading Hegel? To understand the most famous Young Hegelian a little better, of course. Just in case you thought my criticism of the USSR was a dumb kneejerk thing. It’s actually a really very intellectual kneejerk thing.

And another thing

I also watched loads of Star Trek, both old and new. I think it was about time Discovery came to an end, to be honest, though I’ll miss Saru. I hope they do more 31st century Trek, and that Saru’s in it.

I also have another poem shortly coming out with Stanza Cannon, who previously published my poem ‘the trees – the forest – the trees – the forest’, so that’s something to look forward to.

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Review: The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

A nearly great book reduced to a merely good one by a literal-minded editor

I really liked this book, is the first thing to say. It’s original and genuinely horrifying. The premise is, roughly, that an immortal demigod known only as ‘Father’ took a group of American children and trained them to be his successors as rulers of the Universe. Their training took place in the Library of the title, an interdimensional rift containing the sum total of inhuman knowledge. Each of the children was firmly restricted to studying only one area – languages, or medicine, or combat. As you will already have worked out, much of the drama derives from the fact that the children, of course, didn’t stay in their own lanes. The drama progresses with the various children – now adults – battling to succeed Father, while caught in the crossfire are numerous humans from our world, gradually increasing to include virtually everyone.

So, what goes wrong with the book? Not enough to knock it down from a great read. The problem is with the final third or quarter of the book. The plot is basically over. But now we get what amounts to a massive, lengthy info dump, the kind of thing that would’ve been in the manual of a ’90s videogame. The big problem with this info dump, for me, is that it was all exactly what I was expecting.

I don’t know exactly what happened but I will happily bet you any money I make this week that Hawkins wrote the book without that final section. Along came an editor who demanded that the backstory be filled out, lest the reader be permitted to use their imagination. And so, we have a fantastic work of imagination that declines to let you use your own.

A better editor might have allowed this exposition to be more evenly distributed throughout the book, so that we don’t get so much at the end. There’s clearly some attempt to do just this, but it’s not been done enough to fix the overlong final section.

There’s always a balance to be struck between telling the reader things and letting them work it out for themselves, granted. But the weight should always be with the latter. Reading is a work of imagination. Filling in the gaps left by the author – and there are always gaps – is the essence of the activity. The world’s zealous editors would do well to remember that.

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And another thing

A while ago I wrote a general theory of genre fiction, where I argued that genre fiction was the first manifestation of postmodernism. It takes features of fiction and internalises them, so the detective in crime fiction is a version of the narrator, even when they aren’t the narrator themselves. The role of fate in fantasy fiction is to explain how the hero survives to the end when, in most fiction, the hero just does because they have to.

The theory works pretty well, but there were some genres I left out not because I didn’t have anything to say about them but really through absentmindedness. These are Action, Romance, Comedy and Horror. I think all of these have something important in common. Often, they’re blended with some of the types of genre I’ve previously discussed. Action often requires a level of suspension of disbelief and wish fulfilment that frequently verges on the magical, and modern action movies often contain elements of sci-fi and fantasy (the superhero movie mixes and matches from all three). A type of fate plays a prominent role in romance (the (in)famous ‘star-crossed lovers’), linking it to fantasy. Horror, meanwhile finds a natural friend in tales of the supernatural, again giving it a mirror-image relation to fantasy of that found in romance.

Of course, any genre can mash up with any other and frequently does. Outlander contains romance, magical (as opposed to sci-fi) time travel and a fair bit of action, and several of the spin-offs are also crime novels. But there’s no particular necessity to these mash-ups, in the way that the re-internalised narrator-detective is necessary to crime fiction. There’s plenty of horror with no fantasy in it, plenty of action with no sci-fi. And comedy can mash up with anything.

What distinguishes these types of genre is the focus on particular types of emotion. Action focuses on excitement, anger and fear – adrenaline, essentially. Horror is similar but zeroes in on fear in particular. Comedy, obviously focuses on humour. Romance, too is obvious. Of course, none of these genres is just these things. Romance is never just ‘people in love’; in fact, the focus of romance is on the falling in love, the yearning and courtship. That’s why there’s such a strong and familiar arc to the romcom: they meet, there’s an initial attraction but also a reason not to get together (she/he’s my boss or owns the bookshop next door or is going out with my mate or one of us is already in a relationship or I’m a time-traveller from the 20th century and he’s an 18th century highland warrior); then of course they do get together, but then they argue! But then, finally, they commit themselves and bring about the resolution, wherein they do get together.

Notice how this arc is almost exactly the same as an action movie. The initial conflict cannot be immediately resolved (often because the bad guy just… runs away, an option that doesn’t occur to them later), parallelling the initial attraction in a romance. But then they do ‘get together’ but in a big fight rather than a beautiful romance. At this stage, the hero is beaten, of course only temporarily, again a parallel to the sort of refractory period in which the romantic leads mope around wishing things had been different, much as our action hero must do, often with an accompanying montage. Then, the action hero regains his or her composure, goes running back to their destined mirror image in order to fight them, often in the rain, and, this time, they win.

I may, at some point, have to write a whole separate blog on when and why it rains in these types of films.

This is why Point Break is so great and also, famously, super gay: Kathryn Bigelow fully leans into the latent (homo)eroticism of the action movie. Hot Fuzz does the same thing, not only quoting Point Break but having the main characters actually watch the movie in the movie, but adding a massive dose of comedy. It’s telling that a film dedicated to parodying action movies can simultaneously be a subtle parody of the romance film. Of course, there’s no point doing an overt romance parody, because the genre relies so much on familiarity with the tropes that parody, which in most genres relies on drawing attention to those tropes, is as a result always just groanworthy in romcoms. Romcoms often send up the genre conventions, but they don’t parody them: you couldn’t do a romcom Hot Fuzz (at least, I don’t think you could, but I’m sure there’s a screenwriter out there proving me wrong as I write).

The reliance of these genres on a few tropes isn’t a sign of a lack of imagination. It’s part of what I’ve discussed before: the rise of a highly literate audience making new demands of writers

Horror has a similar arc to the above examples. It also resembles comedy, especially in its reliance on timing and on the expected-unexpected: you know the jump scare is coming, but you don’t know exactly when. Similarly, in comedy, we often see a joke coming a mile off and laugh anyway: the timing is everything. Otherwise, we wouldn’t rewatch comedies or horror films.

It would be inaccurate to say that these genres only depict the one set of emotions with which they’re associated. It’s a question of focus, not of exclusion. And, as with other kinds of genre fiction, it’s not that these genres are any worse than one another or than ‘literary fiction’. They rely on literacy in the broader sense, familiarity with the tropes and patterns of the form, to create their effects.

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Lord of the Thrones; or, What if Martin Wrote Tolkien?

George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is, I think, a classic. I don’t think anyone who writes SFF for the next several decades is going to be able to do so without going through him, in some way. I want to get that statement out of the way now, because I’m going to spend the rest of the post explaining why, even though it’s very important, it’s basically a failure as a series. What’s most important about it, though, is that its failings are the very thing that make it improtant.

As someone who got bored of the TV adaptation a long time ago, I experienced a certain amount of schadenfreude when everyone hated the last season and then found House of the Dragon to be mid at best. But I didn’t get bored of it because it was, as one actor memorably put it, ‘just tits and dragons‘. It wasn’t even because of all the sexual violence, nor was it Aiden Gillen’s insane, possibly Irish, accent.

No, instead, it was something more profound to the series. The key problem was George RR Martin’s doomed attempt to break traditional narrative structures. This attempt failed, but it failed in a fascinating way. Narrative structures look the way they do for a good reason. Martin’s noble attempt to do something new with fantasy gave us a series of books which is not suspenseful, but badly plotted. It’s not a deep work that requires thought and interpretation, it’s simply that important information is hidden or just left out. It’s not an example of deep, detailed world-building and character development; it’s just that a great deal of irrelevant information is included and often expounded at great length. There are too many characters and we hear too much about them. This is why people were disappointed in the final season of the show and why it’s taking Martin so long to finish The Winds of Winter: it’s been badly written for so long that it’s probably unfixable.

But it was a big hit! Yes, it was well-cast and had an unusually big budget for a TV show, so that it didn’t look like anything else on TV. People tuned into a big, dramatic show with Sean Bean in it, and were quickly introduced to a world of political intrigue and ice zombies. What’s not to like? Then, there were some big plot twists: again, gripping stuff. The problem is that the twists broke the show. There was, essentially, a pretence that this wasn’t your normal fantasy fiction. We’re told that magic has gone out of the world but it plainly hasn’t. We’re told that just because you seem like destiny’s appointed hero doesn’t mean you’ll survive but then Daenaerys reveals that she can walk through fire and Jon Snow, made up as the crucified Christ, literally comes back from the dead. So, it turns out, it is your standard fantasy fiction. There’s magic. The hero lives. We just came to the same conclusions we always do by a circuitous route, much like the heroes of the show.

To further illustrate the narrative problems, let’s imagine that Lord of the Rings, the ur-fantasy novel, was structured like ASOIAF.

The book begins as we remember. Bilbo has his party, attended by Frodo and lots of characters who are introduced and discussed at some length, but never referred to again. Bilbo does his speech and vanishes, Gandalf explains the plot to Frodo, then Frodo waits years before setting off on his journey (note that this particular bit of strange and mostly unnecessary plot detail is in the original but was sensibly adapted out in Peter Jackson’s film version).

So far so good. But! Imagine if, additionally, from very nearly the start, we follow not just Frodo and friends, but everyone who eventually becomes a member of the Fellowship. We spend hundreds of pages with Boromir as he treks to Rivendell, alone. Ditto with Legolas and (separately) Gimli, who at least bring some buddies to talk to as they trudge along to they know not what, yet. There’s some talk of an evil ring, but what with spending so long with Gimli and co., it seems quite possible that the book is not about a magic evil ring at all, but in fact about mining rights or something. Because we spend so long with Boromir, we most likely hear about his relationship with his father and brother at this point. These random threads of character building will then be ignored for thousands of pages until we actually meet the rest of Boromir’s family, by which point we’ve forgotten who they are.

When Frodo eventually does start off on his quest, he and the Hobbits do all the already-excessive stuff with Tom Bombadil, then they get to Bree, but only after several hundred additional pages featuring Aragorn just killing time at the Prancing Pony, getting to know the horrible locals. Once the Hobbits get away from the barrow wight, they and Aragorn run around for a bit and Frodo gets stabbed by a Ringwraith. All of this is interspersed with more stuff about Legolas, Gimli and Boromir, slowly arriving at Rivendell and hanging out with elves, while also listening to even more songs than you remember.

We also, at this stage, read the whole narrative with Gandalf being held prisoner by Saruman, so that we know exactly why he didn’t show up in Bree as scheduled. We probably also follow Bilbo to Rivendell, where he sits around and gets old, much like us, the readers.

At last, the Hobbits, with Aragorn, also get to Rivendell. But! Instead of Frodo just waking up there and Gandalf telling him what’s been going on, everyone waits a week for Frodo to wake up and we read about the whole week. There are more songs.

After Rivendell, several secondary characters who we’ve spent hundred of pages with (i.e., the various elves and dwarves who accompanied Legolas and Gimli to Rivendell) vanish forever. Before we actually go on the quest, the story is interrupted by Frodo spending a great deal of time telling a heavyhanded story about his childhood which reveals something we already know about his character, because, as we know, real people are both willing and able to explain all of their character traits with trite just-so stories about their childhood.

At this point, we are one thousand pages into the novel. Inexplicably, a new major character is introduced: Galadriel, yet another elf queen, not obviously related to any of the other elves at this stage, is hanging out in her cool tree house. We spend 200 pages reading her thoughts about her cool tree house.

The Fellowship, though, are finally together and questing. This part of the book proceeds more or less as you remember, albeit interspersed with Galadriel looking in her cool mirror: the gang’s altogether! Quests are very stressful and feature setbacks! There’s a big battle! Gandalf dies!

After this, the eight remaining members of the Fellowship arrive in Lothlorien. Finally, the audience sort of understands why we spent two hundred pages with Galadriel: she’s very important! Okay, she’s gone now, forget about her.

Again, the narrative proceeds approximately as before: they get to the Falls, where Boromir falls, redeems himself, then falls again, only this time in a dead way. Thus ends the Fellowship of the Ring, both the book and the gang. You are 3,000 pages into this series of books.

The Two Towers begins! We start off following a previously unknown character, Theodred, who is the son of a king you’ve never heard of with the frustratingly similar name of Theoden. Also, the king is mad. After spending three hundred pages riding around with his cousin, Eomer, in a place you might vaguely recall if you spent a long time looking at the map glued to the inside cover, Theodred dies without at any point interacting with or even hearing about any of the main characters. His lingering death is described in lingering detail for fifty pages. He says ‘AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHH [sic]’ several times.

Finally, you return to some of what’s left of the Fellowship: Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas are in Rohan, the kingdom of Theodred’s dad! Perhaps they’re going to meet Theodred and that’s why we spent so long with him? No, don’t be silly, he’s dead. We instead also spend a hundred pages with Eowyn, who is obliquely implied to be the sister of Eomer, Theodred’s buddy who you’ve probably forgotten about. The book does not come with a family tree attached, so you cannot remember any of this or understand why she’s nursing the old king. An old man turns up, shouts at Theoden for a bit, then steals a horse. We don’t see this bit, we just hear Eowyn half overhearing some of a description of it given by a washerwoman, with a lisp, which ith typed out in the tekth- the tektht- the thing you’re reading, to a blacksmith, who is hard of hearing.

We spend five hundred pages with Treebeard, who is just so boring, wandering around a forest and complaining.

We finally get to see Frodo and Sam, who are lost in a swamp with Gollum. It takes an incredible amount of time to cross the swamp, because George RR Martin is the kind of person who complains that characters in TV shows never have to look for parking. He would prefer if every sitcom featured long sequences of people going, ‘Oh, there’s a — oh, wait. No, I thought there was a space, but actually there’s a Mini in it. Oh! There? No, that’s a disabled spot. Ah!’ It took a really long time to travel in pre-modern times, and George RRR Martin is damned if it shouldn’t also take a really long time to read about.

Meanwhile, Merry and Pippin do their thing and meet Treebeard. We’ve already spent five hundred pages being bored by Treebeard, so it’s incredibly frustrating to spend another five hundred pages watching Merry and Pippin slowly get to know him, too, only to also discover that he’s boring, but, tough: that is exactly what you are going to have to read in this, The Lord of the Rings, as told by George RRRR Martin.

Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli look for Merry and Pippin in the same boring forest. Instead of taking about three pages, like in Tolkien’s LOTR, this takes five hundred pages. They eventually meet Gandalf, who did not die! A-and, remember the old man, who stole a horse, who we overheard about? It was actually Gan- sorry, you’re saying you don’t remember an annoying and apparently irrelevant conversation overheard by a secondary character two thousand pages ago? Oh, that’s… frustrating. Well, the old man was Gandalf. Honestly can’t believe you missed that whole setup. Never mind, it was in no way an interesting way of explaining where Gandalf got his cool horse from, and it’s also the only explanation you’re ever going to get, so it really is a damn shame you don’t remember it.

Anyway, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Gandalf go to Theoden’s place and save him from his grimy adviser. They head, together, to Helm’s Deep. A big battle looms.

But instead of reading about the big battle, we now, for some reason, meet Faramir, Boromir’s brother, who is hanging out near Mordor with various guys. He comes tantalisingly close to meeting Frodo and Sam. Good god, are some major characters going to meet? Yes, yes they are. In another 1,000 pages. While we are waiting for this to happen, there are some quite good bits of character development involving Frodo and Gollum, but they’re all a long, long way apart.

We also spend hundreds of pages slowly following Erkenbrand, and also slowly following Gandalf running after him on Shadowfax, who is a lot slower than you remember. Gandalf eventually catches up with Erkenbrand and the lads, and together they slowly ride across Rohan for two hundred pages. They arrive at Helm’s Deep just in time, but this isn’t surprising at all because you just spent hundreds of pages reading about them riding their horses towards Helm’s Deep. Slowly.

After ten thousand pages, The Two Towers draws painfully to a close.

The Return of the King begins in the time-honoured fashion: we spend 500 hundred horrible pages reading about a character we’ve never heard of in a place we’ve never been to. The place is Gondor. The guy is the guard who wasn’t in the film. You remember Beregond, right? He saves Faramir’s life but Aragorn exiles him anyway, but, you know, justly. That hasn’t happened yet and won’t for another ten thousand pages. You still have to read about Beregond for a long, long time, in case he mentions something that becomes important later, like the old man and the horse, remember? No? Oh. Anyway, he never does mention anything important.

We get back to the main characters. Sort of. For some reason, we’re mainly reading about it from the point of view of Gamling, Theoden’s batman, so the long-put-off reunion between Merry and Pippin, and Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Gandalf, doesn’t really feel very emotional and is basically a bit of an anticlimax. We also spend two hundred pages reading about how Wormtongue feels about Saruman, a character we know is a bad guy who no one likes. Wormtongue also does not like him.

Frodo, who, you may remember, is theoretically the main character, is still heading towards Mordor. A new character, an orc, is introduced. He’s a lookout at Minas Morgul. He has seen something interesting, and is on his way to tell the Witch King, who briefly played a major role under a different name, as the leader of the Ringwraiths, twenty thousand pages ago. The fact that these two characters are the same character will never be made explicit. Who the fuck is the Witch King? you wonder, Shouldn’t it be King Witch? as the orc very slowly walks towards the throne room or whatever, to tell the King about the thing he’s just seen, which you can just about work out, with the help of an old thread on Reddit full of people asking the same question, is probably Frodo and Sam and Gollum. This chapter ends as the orc is about to tell the Witch King about the thing he’s seen, whatever that is.

Frodo and Sam fight Shelob. Sam gets to be a badass, at last, and it’s quite cool. Frodo gets stung or bitten, though, and taken to a tower. Sam goes off to rescue him.

Instead of it being surprising when we find out Gollum is still alive towards the end at Mount Doom, we also now see Gollum following Sam and Frodo. He hisses the whole time. It’sssss incredibly annoying to read. Nothing actually happens in these chapters, he just sees Frodo and Sam doing what we’ve already seen them do, but from a dissssstance.

Meanwhile, we follow the various characters to Gondor. All of them. Individually. As at Helm’s Deep, it’s not interesting and fun when the riders of Rohan show up, because we’ve been explicitly told they’re going to, in great detail. Denethor, who we’ve also followed in great detail for a very long time, but who I haven’t mentioned because absolutely none of it was relevant to the plot, dies.

We also occasionally spend a lot of time with people we’d previously forgotten about or never heard of: Legolas’ dad, Galadriel again, maybe Arwen. These characters very slowly expound all the information currently included in the appendices and the Silmarillion. At some point, someone in passing mentions an orc who suddenly died of a congenital heart defect. This is meant to be the orc that was about to tell the Witch King something, but it’s never at all clear that this is the case, nor do we ever find out for sure that the thing he saw was Frodo and Sam and Gollum, but it probably was, because that was the consensus of the guys in that six year-old Reddit-thread. Right?

Frodo and Sam arrive at Mount Doom. Frodo fucks up at this point, and gets his finger bit off by Gollum, who falls into the volcano. The heroes have won. The end. Oh Christ, there are still four thousand pages to go. What now? What the fuck now?

Inexplicably, a new character, Sharky, is introduced. He apparently lives in the Shire and is attempting to introduce early modern farming techniques into Hobbiton. Elsewhere, Aragorn is crowned king and dispenses merciful justice. The end. The Hobbits head back to the Shire. This takes just so fucking long, you’re not going to believe it. It’s interspersed with all the other characters also slowly going back home. The end?

At last, the Hobbits get back to the Shire and are upset to learn about the early modern farming techniques that have been introduced into Hobbiton. They kill Sharky, more or less, who it turns out is… Saruman! Anyway, he’s dead, Grima’s dead, the novel’s over, surely? The end.

Bilbo heads to the Grey Havens. The… end. He gets on a boat. (The End?) This takes two hundred pages to happen. Frodo also gets on the boat and everyone cries, including the reader, but with frustration. End? Sam goes back home with Merry and Pippin which also takes one hundred pages. Nothing at all happens because the plot is over, but plebeian ideas like ‘Something should happen in books’ are of no concern to God King GRRRRR Martin. The end.

Sam gets back home. (The…?) He opens the door. He goes inside. He takes his coat off. He sits down. (…End?) He remembers he did not close the door. He goes to close the door. He goes to sit down again. He remembers he did not close the garden gate. He gets up again. He opens the door. He closes the gate. He opens the door. He steps through. He closes the door. Well, he says, I’m back, he says.

THE.

END.

(Except for all the pointless spin-offs!)

What I’ve described here basically is the plot of LotR: I didn’t add much at all, just the bit about the washerwoman, blacksmith and orc later on, to illustrate one of Martin’s annoying tics: hiding important information in irrelevant conversations. ‘Oh-ho, the monk with a limp is actually the Hound!’ Is he? Great. So? If he is, just tell us. Why does it have to be a fucking puzzle?

In LoTR, we know that Boromir went from Gondor to Rivendell, because he tells us in a few words. Martin cannot do this: we have to follow characters journeying for thousands of miles. We know Theodred and Eomer were friends and rode around fighting orcs, and that Theodred died, without having to see any of that at all actually on the page. By contrast, Martin really can’t tell us anything at all without showing it: he’s taken the dreaded ‘show, don’t tell’, maxim to a thoroughly illogical conclusion.

Martin’s supposed justification for his many Theodreds – apparently major characters who abruptly die without doing anything plotworthy – does not stack up. The futility of war, the fact that lots of people die horrible, pointless deaths, is present in LotR, too, and in countless other stories, going as far back as The Iliad and probably beyond. Theoden’s mourning of his son, in LOTR, is thus actually moving, precisely because it doesn’t happen over and over again in the novel. Equally, the ‘no one is safe’ message is present in LotR, too: Gandalf dies (temporarily, but then so does Jon Snow) and so do Boromir, Theodred, Theoden and Denethor, as well as (offscreen) Balin, a major character from The Hobbit. Frodo is maimed and traumatised, and Eowyn, Faramir and Merry all come close to death and are only saved by quasi-divine intervention. By including these deaths and injuries, the fact that adventures aren’t at all fun for the people having them is made clear, too. And this message is reinforced in other, more subtle ways, too, ones that don’t require repeated heavyhanded bloodshed, torture and rape to make their point.

Equally, Middle Earth’s world is famously deep. You don’t have to read the appendices to LotR, The Silmarillion or the Unfinished Tales to appreciate it. Again, though, this is done in large part by implication: all the places on the maps they don’t visit; the brief mentions of the other wizards, like Radagast; Gandalf’s dark hint about Morgoth’s eventual return. All this stuff works as worldbuilding because we don’t hear too much about it: our imaginations do the work of building a world on these hints. The bad film trilogy of The Hobbit, which features characters like Radagast and the Necromancer at length, show exactly why these things were best left as hints.

Martin, by contrast, cannot help but tell us just how big his world is, but in a way that leaves nothing to the imagination. We wind up with an endless glut of locations we can’t remember, and characters whose motivations we can’t possibly recall and whose stories are not interesting. In place of worldbuilding detail, we get weird hints that are sometimes followed up on (like the limping monk) and sometimes not. Because there’s so much of this stuff, there’s no way of telling what will end up being relevant and what won’t. Characters endlessly wander back and forth, while violence, especially sexual violence, is used to fill space while the characters do nothing. Because there are too many characters, Martin struggles to remind us of who they are and, reaching again for his limited repertoire of character development techniques, again uses sex, violence and sexual violence so that everyone can be memorably traumatised. Except, it isn’t that memorable, because so much of it is the same.

Martin’s verbal tics are also very annoying and distracting, and the books’ great length forces us to put up with far too many of them. What was he thinking when he decided the typical word for ‘breasts’ in Westeros was ‘teats’? It reads as though all the women have udders on their chests. Absolutely unbearable.

The TV adaptation has borne the brunt of the criticisms, partly because it finished first, partly because having to present all the violence on screen made it more obvious how gratuitous so much of it is, and partly because the producers, presumably out of boredom, made some of the stuff even more gratuitous. But the flaws are all present in the books themselves.

Well, if you enjoyed ASOIAF, I assume you also enjoy people making their points at great and unnecessary length, so this was hopefully fun for you. Here is the point: plots have a structure for a reason. That structure was not divinely ordained, much like the sturctures of language are not divinely ordained. But, to continue the analogy, if I suddenly started writing this in a made-up language, you’d probably stop reading. Equally, if you suddenly decide plots don’t have to have a recognisable structure, you’re going to find it very difficult to get to the end of your book or your TV show with anything like a satisfying conclusion.

An extract from Every Novel by a White American Dude, by Jackson Johnson

In a break from the irregular content of this blog, we’re delighted to bring you an extract from the first chapter of Every Novel by an American White Dude, the upcoming debut of Jackson Johnson.

Told in taut, gripping prose, Johnson’s novel tautly weaves together the disparate elements of one white dude’s gripping life with the greater American themes of American greatness –– The New York Book of Reviews

This year’s entry for Great American Novel of the Year, Johnson’s Every Novel by an American White Dude, reexamines the exigencies and crises of life in 21st century America with an unrelenting eye for detail that nonetheless relentlessly connects those dots into a bigger picture, taking in our shared obsession with cars, TV, baseball, casual racism and baseball –– Baseball Quarterly

Chapter I, A Formative Experience I Had Involving Baseball

Sunlight beat down hard on the baseball pitch or field, whatever it’s called. It touched the spectators in the stands, reddening the skin of the middle aged men shifting uneasily in plastic seats, trying to avoid dripping ketchup drips on to their pants. It shone, too, on the players, reflecting from helmets of the guys who wear helmets, the throwing guy, I guess, or maybe it’s the hitter, and also from the sweat-lined faces of the other guys. The sun reached also casual fingers between the bleachers, lighting random patches of decades of baseball-related crud, mainly ticket stubs and peanut shells. The sun touched it all, except the stuff in the shade, lighting the whole arena or stadium with a light that was familiar for all that it was unearthly, literally.

The Dodgems were playing the Stickers in the final playoff before the series started for good, reigniting an ancient rivalry that dated back to when both teams had been minor players in the major leagues. Both hailing from New Providential, Short Peninsular, an homestead of tall pine trees and hazy mountains, they’d within a year both moved to new cities, but without relinquising their smalltown sensibilities and ancient rivalries.

Sat high up in the stands, Jonson Jackson, who is this totally different guy from the guy that I am, supped flat, plastic-flavored beer from a small cup. He’d long since lost track of whatever was happening on the court, letting the atmosphere wash over him instead: the hot dog smells, the bad beer, the sun again, the whelming dudeness of it all. As a smaller dude, he’d been a dedicated fan of the Dodgems, diligently listening to every game on a small portable television with a smashed screen that he’d traded for a toothpick with Dale McSchmidt, a friend of his from kindergarten who will never be mentioned again.

He was nudged out of his reverie by longtime colleague, sometime friend, Chad ‘Chip’ O’Chet, a seventeen-time divorcé now on to the twelfth Mrs O’Chet for the third time, although it was in fact Ms, she being a feminist scholar focusing on Mexican tapioca, or something, a stunning, 5’14” brunette whose one unappealling feature – the fact that she was extravagantly cross-eyed – made her only more attractive, the obvious flaw serving merely to highlight her beautiful figure, skin and hair, and personality, I guess. Chad, holding three hotdogs in each fist and a beer cup half full of beer in his mouth, gestured loosely in a way that clearly meant, Would you like one of my six hotdogs? I’d say something but my mouth’s full of pig meat, a gesture that Jackson appreciated all the more, coming as it did from a fellow dude, a rare breaking down of the masculine walls every American man builds around ourselves, rising in serried rows, like a baseball track.

Despite a self-imposed ban on eating pig anus, imposed by my then-wife, Midge, I relented and accepted a sweaty hot dog from Chip’s massive, bearlike paw as he settled into the seat next to mine. He looked up at the scoreboard.

‘Whoo-ee, twelve strikes up in the seventh down, looks like your boys are going home, JJ’, he said, pleasantly, but with a looming threat of sudden inexplicable death, using the nickname Jackson has on account of the fact that his initials are JJ.

‘They could still turn it around’, remarked the third man in our party, a quiet, bookish man whose name I couldn’t remember, although he was one of my oldest friends. Unlike the massive Chep, this other guy, let’s call him Florence, made me uneasy for a reasons I could never quite articulate, yet with a curious sense of protectiveness, as though he were a small female houseplant entrusted into my care by an elderly neighbor.

‘Remember the 1959 off-season quarterfinals?’ Florence went on, ‘Sticks came back from eight batters down in the twenty-first inning, when Sugar Jon Sporman hit a homerun off the batstop. Greatest game I ever heard’, he added, leaning back dreamingly in his chair and slopping beer down his paisley shirt.

Remember? How could I forget? That was the question. I closed my eyes and breathed evenly, preparing myself for what would inevitably come next.

‘You heard it’, said Chat, who’s black, by the way, leaning around me to look Florence in the eye and pointing at me with a slightly crushed hotdog, something I somehow knew even with my eyes closed, ‘He was there, man!’

Florence turned wide-eyed to me, ‘You were there?’

There I was.