i have 3 or 4 books to gut tonight, in preparation for a class i have on tuesday. so, naturally, i am blogging. it's like the most obvious thing to do in the world when you're rushing your work.
add on top of this to the fact that i spent the whole of yesterday reading a fantasy novel: something like 15 hours ploughing through a 950 page monster. (no, it's not lord of the rings again; i'm not that much of a geek.) i blame yet another fantasy writer of oxford pedigree - susannah clarke (educated at st. hilda's college, oxford, as the biographical note informs me) - for the parlous state of my course reading. and chitra, of course, for lending me the book in the first place. as clarke would write, d--- you!
having said all that, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is an excellent book. it has austenesque and dickensian and trollopist pretensions. it is all so wonderfully overdone that, in short, it pretends to be a 19th century novel, right down to the spelling. it is also an imaginative splicing of the historical novel and the fantasy trilogy (though this one promises to be three times as long as tolkien's, since the first instalment is already as long as the whole of LOTR) which means that it is not only escapist, it is doubly escapist.
which is quite all right for an escapist like myself. it is also good because it sends a thrill down my spine to see king george iii, lord liverpool, the duke of wellington and george canning depicted in a fantasy novel.
all right, i'm a geek.
albeit not of the 'beam me up, scottie!' kind.
which reminds me of a sniffy remark made by philip pullman of tolkien, about how he seemed only interested in boyish stuff - the creation of languages, races, geography, etc. - without grappling with the real issues. while i admire (and very much enjoyed reading) the His Dark Materials trilogy (if anything, they have the potential to irritate the hell out of christian fundamentalists - i wonder why it hasn't raised a bigger media circus yet) i still think the very substance of fantasy is precisely 'boyish stuff' and escapist. or maybe i've been too deeply affected by tolkien. the his dark materials universe does seem to be a little thin at times, the world moulded to fit the didactic purpose of pullman. but at the same time while tolkien's world is rich and teeming and complicated his characterisation is a little weak compared to the morally ambivalent and complex characters found in other fiction. (externalisation of moral choice?)
but!
i certainly agree with the premise of fantasy fiction as imaginative rather than didactic and the fantasy writer as a bard rather than a moralist (as, i think, tolkien does, given his predilection for Beowulf and propensity for epic turns of phrase and song) and his object is to allow people to imagine a different world as vividly as possible. this is, of course, a very personal opinion, founded on nothing but preference.
****
for those of you wondering why it isn't funny any more, it's because term's started for me. even non-humorous blogging about books is likely to be in short supply from now on, unless you want my next review to be on
J. Spence, The Search for Modern China (1976)
do you?
i guessed not.
****
speaking of humours, how can something so wet be dry? coming from latin humere - according to dictionary.com - meaning 'to be wet', it has since come to mean something funny. which is an odd thing, until one considers the case of the word 'enthusiastic', until very recently applied as a word of abuse to religious zealots. (greek etymology: possessed by a god.)
i am glad, therefore, that no one has ever applied that epithet to me.
returning to the cheap attempt at sounding somewhat academic: i have just discovered that 'dry' has 34 meanings.
but then again, who decides which meaning to apply? so dry humour could equally mean "dull, uninteresting humour", "humour freed from moisture", "humour deprived of fruitiness and sweetness", or even "humour expressed in a straight-faced, matter-of-fact way".
it all depends on context - who is to know when it's so rainy nowadays?
****
P.S. nobody knows what is happening to the falklands, and frankly, nobody cares.
add on top of this to the fact that i spent the whole of yesterday reading a fantasy novel: something like 15 hours ploughing through a 950 page monster. (no, it's not lord of the rings again; i'm not that much of a geek.) i blame yet another fantasy writer of oxford pedigree - susannah clarke (educated at st. hilda's college, oxford, as the biographical note informs me) - for the parlous state of my course reading. and chitra, of course, for lending me the book in the first place. as clarke would write, d--- you!
having said all that, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is an excellent book. it has austenesque and dickensian and trollopist pretensions. it is all so wonderfully overdone that, in short, it pretends to be a 19th century novel, right down to the spelling. it is also an imaginative splicing of the historical novel and the fantasy trilogy (though this one promises to be three times as long as tolkien's, since the first instalment is already as long as the whole of LOTR) which means that it is not only escapist, it is doubly escapist.
which is quite all right for an escapist like myself. it is also good because it sends a thrill down my spine to see king george iii, lord liverpool, the duke of wellington and george canning depicted in a fantasy novel.
all right, i'm a geek.
albeit not of the 'beam me up, scottie!' kind.
which reminds me of a sniffy remark made by philip pullman of tolkien, about how he seemed only interested in boyish stuff - the creation of languages, races, geography, etc. - without grappling with the real issues. while i admire (and very much enjoyed reading) the His Dark Materials trilogy (if anything, they have the potential to irritate the hell out of christian fundamentalists - i wonder why it hasn't raised a bigger media circus yet) i still think the very substance of fantasy is precisely 'boyish stuff' and escapist. or maybe i've been too deeply affected by tolkien. the his dark materials universe does seem to be a little thin at times, the world moulded to fit the didactic purpose of pullman. but at the same time while tolkien's world is rich and teeming and complicated his characterisation is a little weak compared to the morally ambivalent and complex characters found in other fiction. (externalisation of moral choice?)
but!
i certainly agree with the premise of fantasy fiction as imaginative rather than didactic and the fantasy writer as a bard rather than a moralist (as, i think, tolkien does, given his predilection for Beowulf and propensity for epic turns of phrase and song) and his object is to allow people to imagine a different world as vividly as possible. this is, of course, a very personal opinion, founded on nothing but preference.
****
for those of you wondering why it isn't funny any more, it's because term's started for me. even non-humorous blogging about books is likely to be in short supply from now on, unless you want my next review to be on
J. Spence, The Search for Modern China (1976)
do you?
i guessed not.
****
speaking of humours, how can something so wet be dry? coming from latin humere - according to dictionary.com - meaning 'to be wet', it has since come to mean something funny. which is an odd thing, until one considers the case of the word 'enthusiastic', until very recently applied as a word of abuse to religious zealots. (greek etymology: possessed by a god.)
i am glad, therefore, that no one has ever applied that epithet to me.
returning to the cheap attempt at sounding somewhat academic: i have just discovered that 'dry' has 34 meanings.
but then again, who decides which meaning to apply? so dry humour could equally mean "dull, uninteresting humour", "humour freed from moisture", "humour deprived of fruitiness and sweetness", or even "humour expressed in a straight-faced, matter-of-fact way".
it all depends on context - who is to know when it's so rainy nowadays?
****
P.S. nobody knows what is happening to the falklands, and frankly, nobody cares.
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