Reading Wednesday 30/8
Aug. 30th, 2023 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livRecently read The golden torc by Julian May. (c) Julian May 1981; Pub Pan Books Ltd 1983; ISBN 0 330 26719 1
This is the sequel to The many-colored land;simont gifted me the rest of the series after I read the first one. It feels very sequelly. If I wanted more of the same after the first one, ok, that's what I got.
What stood out to me in The many-colored land was really original world-building. The characters time-travel to Pliocene Europe (specifically, no other time travel is possible) and encounter aliens with mind-control powers. That's just a massively original premise and is explored really interestingly. In The golden torc they mostly just have further adventures in this setting, and it's very similar to a lot of other late 20th century SF. There's a war between the humans and the aliens, there are lots of plot twists and a fair amount of sex and torture.
It's ok? There are still a lot of May's quirks of characterization, but the characters were already established in tMCL and I didn't learn much new about them. At least it leans a bit less on national / ethnic stereotypes. It's mostly well-paced and it portrays war as messy and complicated, not just a clash between the armies of light and darkness. I could have done without the very detailed descriptions of torture, particularly punitive rape of the lesbian character. The narrative seems to have a weird idea about intense suffering unlocking mental powers, which is a trope I've come across before in other spec fic of the same era.
NW by Zadie Smith. (c) Zadie Smith 2012; Pub Penguin Books 2013; ISBN 978-0-141-03659-5.
I took NW on holiday because I'm about to move to north-west London so it seemed apt. And I generally like Smith. The book did meet my expectations, it's very well-written and well-observed litfic, but in the end I didn't find it totally satisfying.
I wonder if I've slightly outgrown Smith. I really loved White teeth back in the day, and NW has many of the same strengths. Or perhaps it's that 2012 is just too long ago now for this book to feel cutting-edge. I haven't read any of Smith's more recent novels and maybe I'd like them better. NW is very much a novel about the English class system and how it's different for Black people, with a particular focus on second generation Caribbean folk. 2012 was such a different time from now. It was necessary to point out that liberal optimism about multicultural society and social mobility could miss some of the nuances. Whereas a decade later, that optimism isn't there any more for a strong observer to skewer.
The characters, like Smith herself, are almost exactly my age, there's a lovely depiction of going to university and discovering the internet. So I think I would have liked this more if I'd read it when it was published, when I could enjoy the parallels between the characters' lives and mine. In litfic tradition, everybody's having a midlife crisis in their mid 30s. Although I cared about them a lot and really got drawn into the book, the plot felt rather unsatisfying. It's almost just a bunch of observations about people's lives, and things go wrong (terribly wrong, for some of them), but that's it. It's not a tragedy exactly, though parts are tragic. There just doesn't seem to be any reason for the direction the story takes, and I suppose that's true to life, sometimes things just happen for no reason, a mugging victim is fatally stabbed, a happily married person cheats on their spouse (but in a really weird way, not having an affair in the obvious sense), people second-guess their reproductive decisions. Perhaps what felt unsatisfying is not just the lack of reason or meaning, but just that the book ends abruptly. There's no resolution, there's no portrayal of the consequences of the murder or the relationship fractures, the book just tells us that these things happened and then ends.
This is the sequel to The many-colored land;
simont gifted me the rest of the series after I read the first one. It feels very sequelly. If I wanted more of the same after the first one, ok, that's what I got. What stood out to me in The many-colored land was really original world-building. The characters time-travel to Pliocene Europe (specifically, no other time travel is possible) and encounter aliens with mind-control powers. That's just a massively original premise and is explored really interestingly. In The golden torc they mostly just have further adventures in this setting, and it's very similar to a lot of other late 20th century SF. There's a war between the humans and the aliens, there are lots of plot twists and a fair amount of sex and torture.
It's ok? There are still a lot of May's quirks of characterization, but the characters were already established in tMCL and I didn't learn much new about them. At least it leans a bit less on national / ethnic stereotypes. It's mostly well-paced and it portrays war as messy and complicated, not just a clash between the armies of light and darkness. I could have done without the very detailed descriptions of torture, particularly punitive rape of the lesbian character. The narrative seems to have a weird idea about intense suffering unlocking mental powers, which is a trope I've come across before in other spec fic of the same era.
I took NW on holiday because I'm about to move to north-west London so it seemed apt. And I generally like Smith. The book did meet my expectations, it's very well-written and well-observed litfic, but in the end I didn't find it totally satisfying.
I wonder if I've slightly outgrown Smith. I really loved White teeth back in the day, and NW has many of the same strengths. Or perhaps it's that 2012 is just too long ago now for this book to feel cutting-edge. I haven't read any of Smith's more recent novels and maybe I'd like them better. NW is very much a novel about the English class system and how it's different for Black people, with a particular focus on second generation Caribbean folk. 2012 was such a different time from now. It was necessary to point out that liberal optimism about multicultural society and social mobility could miss some of the nuances. Whereas a decade later, that optimism isn't there any more for a strong observer to skewer.
The characters, like Smith herself, are almost exactly my age, there's a lovely depiction of going to university and discovering the internet. So I think I would have liked this more if I'd read it when it was published, when I could enjoy the parallels between the characters' lives and mine. In litfic tradition, everybody's having a midlife crisis in their mid 30s. Although I cared about them a lot and really got drawn into the book, the plot felt rather unsatisfying. It's almost just a bunch of observations about people's lives, and things go wrong (terribly wrong, for some of them), but that's it. It's not a tragedy exactly, though parts are tragic. There just doesn't seem to be any reason for the direction the story takes, and I suppose that's true to life, sometimes things just happen for no reason, a mugging victim is fatally stabbed, a happily married person cheats on their spouse (but in a really weird way, not having an affair in the obvious sense), people second-guess their reproductive decisions. Perhaps what felt unsatisfying is not just the lack of reason or meaning, but just that the book ends abruptly. There's no resolution, there's no portrayal of the consequences of the murder or the relationship fractures, the book just tells us that these things happened and then ends.
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Many-Colored Land
Date: 2023-08-30 07:01 pm (UTC)I added MCL to my 'to read' list after your last review, as it sounded intriguing, but I've no desire to read detailed descriptions of torture. (If it's relevant, the only other May I've read are the Trillium books, and they are only 1/3 May).
Re: Many-Colored Land
Date: 2023-08-30 07:15 pm (UTC)Re: Many-Colored Land
Date: 2023-08-31 06:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-01 09:23 pm (UTC)Edit: However, I should note that I haven't read them in 20 years, and I apologise for all of the things I've undoubtedly forgotten which have not passed the test of time.