Sabriel

Sabriel

By Garth Nix

(edit: As a commenter noted below, Sabriel was published in 1995, predating both Harry Potter and Game of Thrones. My claim of plagerism is both inaccurate and most likely offensive. I don't know how I missed that, but I did. Sorry to Garth Nix and anyone who might take offense. I'll be careful about my research in the future. Anyway, I'm leaving my gaffe up for all to see. I'm not going to edit out my stupidity and gross inaccuracies.}

What is it with fantasy fans?

Mention to a fantasy fan that you don't happen to like fantasy and you're going to get this annoyingly predictable response:

"Oh! Well, you've haven't read the right stuff! Let me lend you..."

And now you're obliged to read a bunch of nonsense about mages and wizards and some sort of underaged Christ/David metaphor wrestling with a Satan/Goliath archetype with elves and dwarves and elementals and other such nonsense because said fantasy fan really believes they can turn you on to their particular brand of nerdism. Fantasy fans possess an almost fundamentalist missionary zeal. They're like the Jehovah's Witnesses of book readers. It's almost Jihadic.

I've blogged on this phenomenon before when I wrote about Game of Thrones, which I happened to enjoy. I knew at the time that I should curb my enthusiasm for the book lest my friends, who know I hate fantasy, interpret my enjoyment of George R. R. Martin's opus as an invitation for recommendations and book lends that will only lead to hurt feelings when I tell them how much I hate their taste in books (you must remember that I will and do read everything that I get due to my lack of English books). I'm all about honesty when it comes to books.

Unfortunately, I raved about Game of Thrones and lo and behold one of my friends leant me a series of books by Garth Nix called The Old Kingdom Trilogy. The first in the series is called Sabriel and so resembles the plots of both Game of Thrones and Harry Potter that I considered filing a plagiarism lawsuit myself (but then I reminded myself that all fantasy is plagiarized Tolkien and let it slide). The story revolves around a young woman named, oddly enough, Sabriel, who is the daughter of something called an Abhorsen, a term that is never fully explained (forgive me if this is common vernacular in the fantasy lexicon. I'm a bit of an innocent). She lives in a place called Anceltierre which sounds and feels suspiciously like England circa 1916 with its fancy new motor cars and biplanes and machine guns and (gasp!) tanks.

Ancelstierre borders something called the Old Kingdom. There is a (surprise, surprise) wall between the two countries, mainly because one country (Ancelstierre) is modern and free of magic and the other (the Old Kingdom) is freaking riddled with the stuff and they seem to want to keep it that way. The Old Kingdom is governed by something called the Charter and Charter marks, neither of which is ever explained (at all) and something else known as Free Magic (another term left suspiciously unexplained). The line between life and death is decidedly fuzzy. There seems to exist several gates after death and a soul must travel through them all before it is well and truly dead (leaving it virtually impossible to actually die in the Old Kingdom... Billy Crystal would be heartened to know that many people can be simply "mostly dead.") Charter mages, necromancers and Abhorsens can move freely between life and death. How and why? I still don't know. I guess the Abhorsen's job is to guide restless souls past the final gates so that they don't disturb the living. If that's the case, a lot of Abhorsens have been slacking on the job. Apparently there is a war brewing between the living and the dead, and the dead have the upper hand.

All of this might sound intriguing, and I suppose it is. early-modern western nation bordering on a fantasy world that is on the brink of a Civil War of biblical proportions. It's just that there is so much nonsense about bells and Charter marks and Mordicants and Charter stones and free magic and the rules of the Old Kingdom that were never once fully explained to me. I know Sabriel is the first in a series of three books (I have all three) and I kept checking and rechecking to see whether I was inadvertently reading the second in the series.

Furthermore, this book read like a really bad second rate Hollywood blockbuster. It had all the trappings of a typical action movie arch. A slow start followed by a seemingly never ending chase that, only at the very end, takes a turn and allows our hero to gain the final advantage and secure the climactic ending.

This last point is a personal pet peeve of mine. In recent years, far too many authors have adopted the story arches used in Hollywood movies and superimposed them onto novels. Novels, like movies, have become little more than flash-quick action sequences followed by a brief lulls to catch the reader/viewer up with the plot advances. Add a romantic sub-plot and a sassy sidekick and the formula is complete.

Nix does very little with this book other than drive the plot along. As much as I hate fantasy, one of the hallmarks of the genre is the way the best writers establish their character's personalities and idiosyncrasies as well as the beauty and majesty of the setting. Nix does absolutely none of this. Sabriel, her father and Touchstone remain as two-dimensional now as they were when they were introduced and Ancelstierre and the Old Kingdom remain nothing more than cardboard backdrops behind these entirely uninteresting characters. Never mind the realms of death. Here Nix had a wonderful opportunity to describe the corporeal world beyond the grave and failed entirely. By the end I found myself cheering for the bad guy, Voldemo... I mean Kerrigor. He seemed to be the only character of any interest although his descent into evil was (also) never fully explained. Do you notice a pattern with this book yet?

Anyway, Sabriel fails on so many levels that I'm really hesitant to pick up the second in the series. I know I will because they're on my shelf, but I suspect they will wait for a long time. Honestly, fantasy fans... if this is anything close to a good example of modern fantasy writing, you're never going to win converts, even if you hand this book out door to door.

Also reviewed from this series:

Lirael

Peter Pan

Peter Pan

By J.M. Barrie

I've been in the Philippines not using a computer for the past three weeks so I've got a little catching up to do with my reading blog.

Everyone always says that the book is better than the movie and if you play the percentage game "everyone" is right most of the time, but not always. There are more than just a handful of movies that lay the book to waste. Case in point: Peter Pan. But before I get to that, let's look at a few other examples:

Lord of the Rings

I know I will take the ire of a billion hobbit-heads out there but Peter Jackson's three films are infinitely more watchable than J.R.R. Tolkien's books are readable. Lord of the Rings is one of only two books I have never finished (the other being Wuthering Heights, but that's another story). Reading Tolkien is the literary equivalent of flying from New York to Hong Kong economy class without in-flight entertainment. Jackson was able to pare down Gandalf and Frodo's 30 page soliloquies about duty and honor into three fairly exciting movies.

Heart of Darkness

I know that Apocalypse Now is not a literal interpretation of the novel, but it's close enough to merit mention. While Apocalypse Now is an infinitely rewatchable classic with at least three career-defining performances (possibly more), Heart of Darkness is a wooden post-Victorian snooze-fest. Brando's Kurtz was so much more fascinating than Conrad's version. It's hard to even think about the book and the film in the same instance.

Trainspotting

I admit, I'm not a big fan of Irving Welsh. His brand of shock literature appealed to to a younger me (I went through a phase) but it quickly lost appeal once I realized that he was trying so very hard to shock his readers by writing what people assumed you could not write about. I can only assume he'd never heard of Charles Bukowski. Trainspotting is simply 300 pages of terrible people who do terrible things to each other for a while then one of them does something extraordinarily terrible... the end. At some point in a novel the reader needs to have an emotional attachment to at least one character (whether it's good or bad). I didn't have either for any character. If you've seen the movie but not read the book, imagine a book filled with characters as unlikeable as Francis Begbie.

On the other hand, Trainspotting the movie softened the characters just enough to make than at least partly human (well, except Begbie... he alone remains as terrible in the movie as he is in the book. At least one charater had to). It's that humanity that made the movie. In the book one cannot understand how these people came to be friends in the first place. In the movie there is an undercurrent of a past before the drugs and crime . An idea that these guys are bound by filial and familial ties within the community. It's odd that a movie addresses this when a book was unable.

Peter Pan

I can't really put my finger on what, exactly, put me off this book. Perhaps it was the characterization of Peter (who has much more sinister undertones in the book). Peter is characterized as all that is good about childhood (imagination and a sense of the carefree) but more often than not, he represents all that is bad about childhood (a skewed sense of justice and morality, irresponsibility etc...). Since this is ostensibly a children's book I figured that the moral of the story would laud the qualities of childhood over those of adulthood... but I was sorely mistaken.

When I finished I got the feeling that J.M. Barrie was writing a story for kids in which he is preparing them for the cold, callous world of adults and that the carefree days of childhood should be packed away like so much junk never to be revisited again.

Or not. I dunno. I just liked the Disney movie better, which is odd because I usually detest Disney movies.