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millennial_dandy's reviews
342 reviews
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
3.0
Now I understand, said the last man.
I picked this up on a whim after it was featured in a series I was watching back during the summer, and I'll admit that this decision had a lot to do with how striking the cover of this edition is coupled with that title.
My verdict: 'Childhood's End' is ...alright.
This is a case of getting two stories in one, one of which I found infinitely more interesting and complex than the other. The story we start with wherein the alien race of 'Overlords' comes to earth and without much effort forces humanity to stop destroying itself and instead live in a sort of coerced peace was compelling. I didn't really agree with Clarke's central thesis of this section, which amounted to: "The world's now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason's obvious. There's nothing left to struggle for." (p.141) The idea that good art or progress can only come from conflict or tragedy has never sat right with me.
In her video essay, 'Protest Music of the Bush Era,' Lindsay Ellis points out the hollowness of taking this view of art and suffering:
She goes on to talk about how not only does this way of thinking feel tone-deaf when taken out of the abstract, but it puts pressure on people living through the badness and the suffering to produce something meaningful when they're likely already mentally taxed, a sentiment The Onion fabulously pokes fun at:
So this idea that suffering results in productivity which results in progress/art is already one I don't like from that side, and I doubly don't like the implication that therefore peace would be the end of art and progress, as though much of our progress and art hasn't come from people who have no conflict or struggle in their lives and are, in fact, privileged enough to live lives where they have nothing stopping them from pondering the apples falling on their heads or tinkering around with new types of music. Like, sure, it's not untrue that struggle can lead to productivity, which can lead to progress/art -- there are plenty of examples of this, and the 'starving artist' stereotype doesn't exist for no reason at all, but it's absolute post-capitalist brain rot to feed poor, struggling people the narrative that they should be grateful, actually, because they're the only ones in the enviable position to live under the necessary conditions to move the world forward. Sure, Jan.
That all being said, the other, more subtle, exploration is of colonialism. I'm not sure that was Clarke's intention, but alien invasion stories by their very nature rub up against and are a comment on colonialism. As with most of these narratives, Clarke lands on the logical side of 'colonialism is bad, actually.'
Now, in many, many alien invasion stories, the attempted subjugation of humanity by the aliens is overtly forceful and often violent, but usually ultimately unsuccessful -- and we cheer for humanity's victory because on some level we recognize that it's, well, it's not very nice to do that. Colonialism historically was very forceful and violent, but the victors don't tend to paint it that way, so the narrative we tend to get is something along the lines of 'well, yes, it was kind of unpleasant, but honestly, those people are better off now because [insert some kind of justification].'
But in this one, the subjugation of humanity is not overtly forceful -- the Overlords just kind of arrive and tell all the Earthlings that they aren't going to have war between nations anymore, and because they have superior technology, they can wave a hand and stop all attempts to disobey with no effort at all, and more importantly, no bloodshed at all. And yet, there is tension among the people around when the Overlords first arrive between those who think the imposition of peace is good and those who think that despite the good, there's something nefarious about the loss of autonomy.
And that tension, though it falls to the background, never really goes away. One of the central POV characters, Jan, rebels against the Overlords by stowing away on one of their ships in defiance of the insistence that 'the stars are not for man.'
In the end, Jan realizes that humans were never really going to be able to reach the heights of the Overlords or their master, the Overmind. This would seem to suggest that the Overlords taking over control of Earth was justifiable because humanity was intellectually inferior. However, by having Jan remain suspicious to the end of the intentions of the Overlords, and having those suspicions justified in the narrative, we still reach the conclusion that colonialism is bad even when done without bloodshed and that it is only ever self-serving and never about helping anyone. And not only that, but that it's bad even if the conquerors are 'superior' in some way to the conquered.
Again, no idea if this was Clarke's intention, but the messaging is nonetheless there.
All of this is rich enough material to bite into, but when it came to the more intensely sci-fi twist involving answers to questions I didn't really find that interesting to begin with (why did the Overlords come to earth? What else is there in the universe beyond the Overlords?) I kind of lost interest.
Apparently, there's a TV miniseries of it from 2015, but I got the sense that it leans most heavily into the second half of the plot rather than the first, so I'm unlikely to follow up with it even though it appears to have pretty good reviews.
I picked this up on a whim after it was featured in a series I was watching back during the summer, and I'll admit that this decision had a lot to do with how striking the cover of this edition is coupled with that title.
My verdict: 'Childhood's End' is ...alright.
This is a case of getting two stories in one, one of which I found infinitely more interesting and complex than the other. The story we start with wherein the alien race of 'Overlords' comes to earth and without much effort forces humanity to stop destroying itself and instead live in a sort of coerced peace was compelling. I didn't really agree with Clarke's central thesis of this section, which amounted to: "The world's now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason's obvious. There's nothing left to struggle for." (p.141) The idea that good art or progress can only come from conflict or tragedy has never sat right with me.
In her video essay, 'Protest Music of the Bush Era,' Lindsay Ellis points out the hollowness of taking this view of art and suffering:
"In times of great cultural stress, there's this sort of impulse to try to give meaning to the badness and the suffering. Like, if you put one suffering unit in, you get one art unit out. And I understand that impulse; you need to give meaning to, you know, the badness, but I think it's kind of misguided to give meaning to suffering by saying 'hey, at least we'll get great art out of it [...] Like, yeah the Holocaust sucked, but we got 'The Producers,' didn't we?'"
She goes on to talk about how not only does this way of thinking feel tone-deaf when taken out of the abstract, but it puts pressure on people living through the badness and the suffering to produce something meaningful when they're likely already mentally taxed, a sentiment The Onion fabulously pokes fun at:
So this idea that suffering results in productivity which results in progress/art is already one I don't like from that side, and I doubly don't like the implication that therefore peace would be the end of art and progress, as though much of our progress and art hasn't come from people who have no conflict or struggle in their lives and are, in fact, privileged enough to live lives where they have nothing stopping them from pondering the apples falling on their heads or tinkering around with new types of music. Like, sure, it's not untrue that struggle can lead to productivity, which can lead to progress/art -- there are plenty of examples of this, and the 'starving artist' stereotype doesn't exist for no reason at all, but it's absolute post-capitalist brain rot to feed poor, struggling people the narrative that they should be grateful, actually, because they're the only ones in the enviable position to live under the necessary conditions to move the world forward. Sure, Jan.
That all being said, the other, more subtle, exploration is of colonialism. I'm not sure that was Clarke's intention, but alien invasion stories by their very nature rub up against and are a comment on colonialism. As with most of these narratives, Clarke lands on the logical side of 'colonialism is bad, actually.'
Now, in many, many alien invasion stories, the attempted subjugation of humanity by the aliens is overtly forceful and often violent, but usually ultimately unsuccessful -- and we cheer for humanity's victory because on some level we recognize that it's, well, it's not very nice to do that. Colonialism historically was very forceful and violent, but the victors don't tend to paint it that way, so the narrative we tend to get is something along the lines of 'well, yes, it was kind of unpleasant, but honestly, those people are better off now because [insert some kind of justification].'
But in this one, the subjugation of humanity is not overtly forceful -- the Overlords just kind of arrive and tell all the Earthlings that they aren't going to have war between nations anymore, and because they have superior technology, they can wave a hand and stop all attempts to disobey with no effort at all, and more importantly, no bloodshed at all. And yet, there is tension among the people around when the Overlords first arrive between those who think the imposition of peace is good and those who think that despite the good, there's something nefarious about the loss of autonomy.
"Can you deny that the Overlords have brought security, peace, and prosperity to the world?" "That is true. But they've taken our liberty." (p.14)
And that tension, though it falls to the background, never really goes away. One of the central POV characters, Jan, rebels against the Overlords by stowing away on one of their ships in defiance of the insistence that 'the stars are not for man.'
In the end, Jan realizes that humans were never really going to be able to reach the heights of the Overlords or their master, the Overmind. This would seem to suggest that the Overlords taking over control of Earth was justifiable because humanity was intellectually inferior. However, by having Jan remain suspicious to the end of the intentions of the Overlords, and having those suspicions justified in the narrative, we still reach the conclusion that colonialism is bad even when done without bloodshed and that it is only ever self-serving and never about helping anyone. And not only that, but that it's bad even if the conquerors are 'superior' in some way to the conquered.
Again, no idea if this was Clarke's intention, but the messaging is nonetheless there.
All of this is rich enough material to bite into, but when it came to the more intensely sci-fi twist involving answers to questions I didn't really find that interesting to begin with (why did the Overlords come to earth? What else is there in the universe beyond the Overlords?) I kind of lost interest.
Apparently, there's a TV miniseries of it from 2015, but I got the sense that it leans most heavily into the second half of the plot rather than the first, so I'm unlikely to follow up with it even though it appears to have pretty good reviews.
Prime Evil by Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Douglas E. Winter, Whitley Strieber, Thomas Tessier, Stephen King, Charles L. Grant, M. John Harrison, Clive Barker, David Morrell, Dennis Etchison, Thomas Ligotti, Paul E. Hazel, Jack Cady
3.0
"Horror is not a genre [...] it is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special shelf in libraries or bookstores. Horror is an emotion. It can be found in all literature."
So spake Douglas E. Winter, editor of the 'Prime Evil' horror anthology.
I'm inclined to agree, which is indeed part of where my love of horror comes from; it is a limitless playground for the imagination since there are an infinite number of things that can scare us, and an infinite number of ways to dress them up.
That being said, because of its inherent lack of limitations when it comes to convention, it's really hard to hand a horror fan just any work falling into that broad categorization and expect them to enjoy it. What type of horror fan are they exactly? Do they gravitate towards monsters and ghosts, do they like gore, blood, decaying Gothic manors, violence, darkness, realism, fantasy? Do they want to battle death, social anxiety, PTSD, grief, existential dread?
This would definitely speak to why it was that reviews of this collection were so mixed. This wasn't a collection with a through line (e.g. 'Vampire anthology', 'Ghost Stories', etc.) -- it's a smorgasbord of all things horrific: ghost stories, body horror, child abuse, insanity, PTSD, vampires, nervous breakdowns, aliens. The gang's all here. But not everyone in the gang is for everyone.
From what I can gather, Winter certainly had the credentials to choose well-executed works from established authors, so I don't question the actual caliber of the stories, but I, like anyone presented with sundry options, liked some more than others; my final rating coming down to, really, how closely my taste aligned with Winter's.
Like any good 'Poe hoe', I like a good bit of cracked sanity in my horror, so I share the seemingly popular opinion that 'Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity' by David Morrell was a standout, though I wish the ending had left a bit more to the imagination (like, did we need to have it spelled out where the madness came from? Did that not just knock some of the terror out of things?)
I also liked Thomas Ligotti's 'Alice's Last Adventure', which was on the more subtle side in terms of offering any sort of explanation for anything, though it also explored a bit of frayed sanity, perhaps a nervous breakdown of an aging writer of children's fiction, now haunted by her own creation.
Many of the others were fine. 'Food' was the expected value of body horror, but written well. 'The Night Flier' was the expected value of Stephen King, complete with the morally bankrupt protagonist pissing himself not once, but twice.
'The Juniper Tree' by Peter Straub was definitely the most polarizing of the bunch. Unsurprising, considering the subject matter of sexual abuse of a child described in pretty graphic detail from the perspective of that child having to reckon with that abuse as an adult. Everyone seems to agree that it was well-written (including me), but stories like that do raise questions about where the line is exactly (and if there should even be one) when it comes to gratuitous depictions of certain things (sexual abuse, violence, torture, sex, etc.). Honestly, that line will likely be in different places for different people. I don't like graphic torture scenes. For this reason, I'd never watch something like 'Martyrs.' But do I think it crosses a line just because I don't like it? Super hard to say.
I tend to be interested in the harm caused by the slant of the messaging of a text more than the degree of graphicness with which a text depicts distasteful things. A lot of the sex scenes in bodice rippers bother me more than, say, that scene in 'Lolita' where Humbert Humbert gets Dolores to unknowingly jerk him off with her foot, and it all comes down to framing. Bodice rippers tend to frame a lack of consent as just part of the ritual of sex--as sexy even, whereas Nabokov is careful to frame the sex in 'Lolita' as disgusting and horrific. And to what end? Bodice rippers aim to be titillating while 'Lolita' is meant (in part) to be an exploration of how easily charismatic people can spin a narrative in their own favor even if their monstrousness is out in the open.
'The Juniper Tree' doesn't romanticize what happens to its protagonist, but instead goes out of its way to criticize the culture that allows such disturbing things to happen; the ways in which a lack of sex education leads to children being more easily manipulated by adults with malevolent and predatory intentions. Given the publication date of 1988, this could also be seen as a retrospective critique of the parental neglect of the 'latchkey' generation.
There's stuff going on if you pop the hood is my point.
It's also definitely horror in the emotional sense that Winter describes in the introduction (the introduction, by the by, is definitely worth a read on its own), and so I agree with Winter that it belongs in a collection of 'modern horror' (as proclaimed by the book's subheading).
Definitely not for everyone, though, and one could argue that certain things could have been implied rather than shown without the story losing its sting.
Honestly, my biggest issue with many of the stories wasn't that they weren't to my taste, or explored themes I'm uninterested in, but more so that there was all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to most of them. Explore grief and PTSD and madness, yes, but (and maybe I'm just world-weary after all my years in the horror game) have some finesse, leave some mystery, some ambiguity. These are stories for adults, and I wish more of the authors involved in the project had trusted their readers a bit more.
In any event, 'Prime Evil' does what it sets out to do, I think; presenting horror as not a genre but a feeling that can come from many places, and it's a good introduction to popular and talented late 20th century writers for newer horror fans who may well only have heard of Stephen King. It's also a great collection for a budding horror fan still trying to feel out their taste.
So spake Douglas E. Winter, editor of the 'Prime Evil' horror anthology.
I'm inclined to agree, which is indeed part of where my love of horror comes from; it is a limitless playground for the imagination since there are an infinite number of things that can scare us, and an infinite number of ways to dress them up.
That being said, because of its inherent lack of limitations when it comes to convention, it's really hard to hand a horror fan just any work falling into that broad categorization and expect them to enjoy it. What type of horror fan are they exactly? Do they gravitate towards monsters and ghosts, do they like gore, blood, decaying Gothic manors, violence, darkness, realism, fantasy? Do they want to battle death, social anxiety, PTSD, grief, existential dread?
This would definitely speak to why it was that reviews of this collection were so mixed. This wasn't a collection with a through line (e.g. 'Vampire anthology', 'Ghost Stories', etc.) -- it's a smorgasbord of all things horrific: ghost stories, body horror, child abuse, insanity, PTSD, vampires, nervous breakdowns, aliens. The gang's all here. But not everyone in the gang is for everyone.
From what I can gather, Winter certainly had the credentials to choose well-executed works from established authors, so I don't question the actual caliber of the stories, but I, like anyone presented with sundry options, liked some more than others; my final rating coming down to, really, how closely my taste aligned with Winter's.
Like any good 'Poe hoe', I like a good bit of cracked sanity in my horror, so I share the seemingly popular opinion that 'Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity' by David Morrell was a standout, though I wish the ending had left a bit more to the imagination (like, did we need to have it spelled out where the madness came from? Did that not just knock some of the terror out of things?)
I also liked Thomas Ligotti's 'Alice's Last Adventure', which was on the more subtle side in terms of offering any sort of explanation for anything, though it also explored a bit of frayed sanity, perhaps a nervous breakdown of an aging writer of children's fiction, now haunted by her own creation.
Many of the others were fine. 'Food' was the expected value of body horror, but written well. 'The Night Flier' was the expected value of Stephen King, complete with the morally bankrupt protagonist pissing himself not once, but twice.
'The Juniper Tree' by Peter Straub was definitely the most polarizing of the bunch. Unsurprising, considering the subject matter of sexual abuse of a child described in pretty graphic detail from the perspective of that child having to reckon with that abuse as an adult. Everyone seems to agree that it was well-written (including me), but stories like that do raise questions about where the line is exactly (and if there should even be one) when it comes to gratuitous depictions of certain things (sexual abuse, violence, torture, sex, etc.). Honestly, that line will likely be in different places for different people. I don't like graphic torture scenes. For this reason, I'd never watch something like 'Martyrs.' But do I think it crosses a line just because I don't like it? Super hard to say.
I tend to be interested in the harm caused by the slant of the messaging of a text more than the degree of graphicness with which a text depicts distasteful things. A lot of the sex scenes in bodice rippers bother me more than, say, that scene in 'Lolita' where Humbert Humbert gets Dolores to unknowingly jerk him off with her foot, and it all comes down to framing. Bodice rippers tend to frame a lack of consent as just part of the ritual of sex--as sexy even, whereas Nabokov is careful to frame the sex in 'Lolita' as disgusting and horrific. And to what end? Bodice rippers aim to be titillating while 'Lolita' is meant (in part) to be an exploration of how easily charismatic people can spin a narrative in their own favor even if their monstrousness is out in the open.
'The Juniper Tree' doesn't romanticize what happens to its protagonist, but instead goes out of its way to criticize the culture that allows such disturbing things to happen; the ways in which a lack of sex education leads to children being more easily manipulated by adults with malevolent and predatory intentions. Given the publication date of 1988, this could also be seen as a retrospective critique of the parental neglect of the 'latchkey' generation.
There's stuff going on if you pop the hood is my point.
It's also definitely horror in the emotional sense that Winter describes in the introduction (the introduction, by the by, is definitely worth a read on its own), and so I agree with Winter that it belongs in a collection of 'modern horror' (as proclaimed by the book's subheading).
Definitely not for everyone, though, and one could argue that certain things could have been implied rather than shown without the story losing its sting.
Honestly, my biggest issue with many of the stories wasn't that they weren't to my taste, or explored themes I'm uninterested in, but more so that there was all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to most of them. Explore grief and PTSD and madness, yes, but (and maybe I'm just world-weary after all my years in the horror game) have some finesse, leave some mystery, some ambiguity. These are stories for adults, and I wish more of the authors involved in the project had trusted their readers a bit more.
In any event, 'Prime Evil' does what it sets out to do, I think; presenting horror as not a genre but a feeling that can come from many places, and it's a good introduction to popular and talented late 20th century writers for newer horror fans who may well only have heard of Stephen King. It's also a great collection for a budding horror fan still trying to feel out their taste.
Moriarty the Patriot, Vol. 1 by Ryōsuke Takeuchi
3.0
2.5 rounded up to 3
I had such high hopes for this series. Coming on the heels of the likes of 'Black Butler' and 'Godchild', and the sundry other Victorian noir manga starring morally ambiguous twinks with great fashion sense, I thought, 'well heck, Sherlock Holmes fanfiction starring an anime-boyified Moriarity is the perfect choice for this niche subgenre.'
I was mistaken.
Now listen: as a leftist in my 20s, I am all for the catharsis of seeing the Victorian artistocracy eat crow and maybe even getting murdered a little, but if you're going to give me that wrapped in a T+ rating, then treat me like I'm a T+ reader, not someone just coming into a sense of class consciousness. And frankly, even if I were, I wouldn't need every other page (and I do not exaggerate) to remind me that rich people are leeches lounging about with their feet up while the underclass suffers. I get it. But what about some poor little rich kid? If they picked this up and got the lecture of how much they suck in every third panel, don't you think they'd be a little defensive? It's just words, after all.
But imagine if this were shown. It's not like there are no examples (opression of the working class being a real thing and all) of genuine injustice -- use them. Have young master Moriarity witness these things and come to question the validity of this class stratification, go on a little internal journey, have an existential crisis. Something.
But no, no. From page one, our boy gets it, and from his mansion, I tell you what, he's gonna do something about it. Interpersonally.
Cuz that's the thing, see. The big problem with just having every single aristocrat (except our titular white knight, of course) be a massive jerk is that it makes it a 'bad person' problem rather than a 'bad system' problem. Moriarity and his brothers are good landowners and don't tax the peasants to the point that they starve. Love that for them. Meanwhile, their neighbor is a big meanie who even refused to let a lowely member of the hoi poloi bring her dying child to see his doctor because... because he's just not a nice person ???
The message here being: we're going to break the system by... being nicer aristocrats than the ones who are...not nice.
Why, if I so disliked the execution, did I give this 3 stars then, you might ask.
Two reasons. One, as much as I deeply dislike the execution, the idea of Moriarity being re-imagined as a kind of Robinhood-esque figure is neat, and it could have been quite interesting to see how that would have changed the framing of Sherlock Holmes in a narrative about class warfare.
It's not what we got, but there was a good idea in there somewhere.
Two, the artwork by Hikaru Miyoshi is really, really gorgeous. Granted, many of her characters look frustratingly similar, but the backgrounds: stunning. The aesthetic: sublime.
If only I could say the same about the plot and writing.
Ah, well. I suppose that's what AO3 is for, amirite?
I had such high hopes for this series. Coming on the heels of the likes of 'Black Butler' and 'Godchild', and the sundry other Victorian noir manga starring morally ambiguous twinks with great fashion sense, I thought, 'well heck, Sherlock Holmes fanfiction starring an anime-boyified Moriarity is the perfect choice for this niche subgenre.'
I was mistaken.
Now listen: as a leftist in my 20s, I am all for the catharsis of seeing the Victorian artistocracy eat crow and maybe even getting murdered a little, but if you're going to give me that wrapped in a T+ rating, then treat me like I'm a T+ reader, not someone just coming into a sense of class consciousness. And frankly, even if I were, I wouldn't need every other page (and I do not exaggerate) to remind me that rich people are leeches lounging about with their feet up while the underclass suffers. I get it. But what about some poor little rich kid? If they picked this up and got the lecture of how much they suck in every third panel, don't you think they'd be a little defensive? It's just words, after all.
But imagine if this were shown. It's not like there are no examples (opression of the working class being a real thing and all) of genuine injustice -- use them. Have young master Moriarity witness these things and come to question the validity of this class stratification, go on a little internal journey, have an existential crisis. Something.
But no, no. From page one, our boy gets it, and from his mansion, I tell you what, he's gonna do something about it. Interpersonally.
Cuz that's the thing, see. The big problem with just having every single aristocrat (except our titular white knight, of course) be a massive jerk is that it makes it a 'bad person' problem rather than a 'bad system' problem. Moriarity and his brothers are good landowners and don't tax the peasants to the point that they starve. Love that for them. Meanwhile, their neighbor is a big meanie who even refused to let a lowely member of the hoi poloi bring her dying child to see his doctor because... because he's just not a nice person ???
The message here being: we're going to break the system by... being nicer aristocrats than the ones who are...not nice.
Why, if I so disliked the execution, did I give this 3 stars then, you might ask.
Two reasons. One, as much as I deeply dislike the execution, the idea of Moriarity being re-imagined as a kind of Robinhood-esque figure is neat, and it could have been quite interesting to see how that would have changed the framing of Sherlock Holmes in a narrative about class warfare.
It's not what we got, but there was a good idea in there somewhere.
Two, the artwork by Hikaru Miyoshi is really, really gorgeous. Granted, many of her characters look frustratingly similar, but the backgrounds: stunning. The aesthetic: sublime.
If only I could say the same about the plot and writing.
Ah, well. I suppose that's what AO3 is for, amirite?
Song of the Wanderer by Bruce Coville
3.0
A lovely sequel to Into the Land of the Unicorns.
The poem at its heart, 'The Song of the Wanderer' is beautiful and poignant and perfect for anyone who would define themselves as a wanderer.
The story picks up exactly where the first book left off and while it does a lot to push the overarching narrative forward, Song of the Wanderer is definitely more invested in building up gaps in the lore left over from Into the Land of the Unicorns, and it does so beautifully. The only problem is that it does this job so well, it made me wish that Grandmother Morris (Ivy) was the main character of the series rather than Clara, who in this installment comes across yet again as very much an Alice in Wonderland archetype, to the detriment of my personal enjoyment. Though she does have her moments of heroism, these instances of what should have been character development are often undermined by how little they actually change her and seem to exist to build her up as a hero only when the plot calls for it.
The other problem I had with this installment was the sheer number of characters. Immersive fantasy is no stranger to ensemble casts, but the bulk of characters here did nothing but water them all down to the point that I would often forget who a given unicorn was and how they fit into the story.
That all being said, Song of the Wanderer really shined when focusing on its titular character and her mythos as well as the mythos of Beloved and the Hunters and I sincerely hope that future 'chronicles' will put the focus here as well and/or actually allow Clara to develop into someone more interesting than she proved herself to be here.
The poem at its heart, 'The Song of the Wanderer' is beautiful and poignant and perfect for anyone who would define themselves as a wanderer.
The story picks up exactly where the first book left off and while it does a lot to push the overarching narrative forward, Song of the Wanderer is definitely more invested in building up gaps in the lore left over from Into the Land of the Unicorns, and it does so beautifully. The only problem is that it does this job so well, it made me wish that Grandmother Morris (Ivy) was the main character of the series rather than Clara, who in this installment comes across yet again as very much an Alice in Wonderland archetype, to the detriment of my personal enjoyment. Though she does have her moments of heroism, these instances of what should have been character development are often undermined by how little they actually change her and seem to exist to build her up as a hero only when the plot calls for it.
The other problem I had with this installment was the sheer number of characters. Immersive fantasy is no stranger to ensemble casts, but the bulk of characters here did nothing but water them all down to the point that I would often forget who a given unicorn was and how they fit into the story.
That all being said, Song of the Wanderer really shined when focusing on its titular character and her mythos as well as the mythos of Beloved and the Hunters and I sincerely hope that future 'chronicles' will put the focus here as well and/or actually allow Clara to develop into someone more interesting than she proved herself to be here.
Yu-Gi-Oh! R, Volume 1 by Akira Ito
4.0
3.5 rounded up to 4
Yu-Gi-Oh! content I haven't yet consumed? In the year of our Lord 2022?! Love that for me.
Granted, this spin-off series wasn't conceptualized or written by Kazuki Takahashi, but as an active member of the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom on AO3 (and fanfiction.net before it) that's hardly new territory for this fan.
So it wasn't put together by the man himself, but was it good?
Yeah, I'd say so.
I, like many other reviewers starved for content, agree that the premise of this mini-series is its strength. The idea of wrapping an arc around the fallout from Pegasus's disappearance/death (pick your poison) at the end of Duelist Kingdom is a good one that was criminally under-explored in the Duke Devlin/Dungeon Dice Monsters filler arc. Having the 'big bad' be Pegasus's protegee is much more compelling, and such a person is much more likely to have a meaningful grudge and the skills to do something about it. I also like the continuity of Kaiba's 'Solid Vision' technology being at the center of another Pegasus adjacent plot as well as how having it be the center of another in-universe story bolsters the worldbuilding.
Speaking of bolstering world building, author Akira Ito made a couple of neat additions that build off of stuff we already know about the Yu-Gi-Oh! world:
1. Solid Vision, Plus
We know from the main series that as Kaiba continues to tinker with his own Solid Vision VR software it becomes more and more, well, solid, and harder to distinguish from reality, so the idea that Yugi and co. hadn't realized that Tea had already been kidnapped by the time they first encounter Tenma feels reasonable and honestly, pretty creepy.
2. Duel Professors
Given that Ito worked on Yu-Gi-Oh! GX he obviously knew where dueling was going in-universe, so it was a cute little nod to the idea of a duel academy in the future to have Tenma's henchmen be 'Card Professors', and it was also a little bit of retroactive ground laying.
3. Accessible Duel Disks
Maico Kato not only had the most aesthetically interesting deck of anyone in this volume, she was also the most fleshed-out as a character, and one of only a handful of older duelists we meet in the entire series that has an 'on-screen' duel. Moreover, she is (if memory serves) the only duelist we ever meet in DM that isn't able-bodied, and certainly the only duelist in a wheelchair. And she gets her own customized Duel Deck that sits on her lap.
I thought that was nice to include from a visibility standpoint, and also in-universe acknowledgement that you don't have to be able-bodied to be able to access Kaiba Corporation's technology. I like that this by extension means that their research and development department (if not Kaiba himself) cares enough about accessibility to have modified Duel Discs on the market.
However, despite having really good bones, I have to agree with a lot of other reviewers that the execution wasn't always the best. Other reviewers have pointed out the sloppiness of the writing of the duels themselves, which is a big problem if we're meant to read at least thirteen speed duels before returning for the final duel against Tenma.
Additionally, it was a big missed opportunity, since Tenma is supposed to be connected to Pegasus, not to have him feel more like Pegasus. Not necessarily derivative of Pegasus in terms of mannerisms, but give the man some type of theatricality and sense of fun. This guy takes himself way too seriously to be Pegasus's protegee. Hell, I'd buy that filler villain from Battle City, Arcana, being Pegasus's protegee before I'd buy it of hecking Tenma.
Finally, a lot of people seem to dislike that there's a sliding backwards in terms of character development when it comes to the main cast (Joey specifically), and that the Pharaoh feels a bit out of character, but full disclosure: I never cared enough about the Pharaoh as a character to notice anything ooc and given that this entire arc is plot rather than character-driven I don't really care if the character development from Battle City didn't carry over.
I do, however, care a great deal about Kaiba's characterization, so I'm going to need Ito to get that right when Kaiba makes his appearance in the story in volume 2 or else my review shall be nothing short of absolutely scathing.
Yu-Gi-Oh! content I haven't yet consumed? In the year of our Lord 2022?! Love that for me.
Granted, this spin-off series wasn't conceptualized or written by Kazuki Takahashi, but as an active member of the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom on AO3 (and fanfiction.net before it) that's hardly new territory for this fan.
So it wasn't put together by the man himself, but was it good?
Yeah, I'd say so.
I, like many other reviewers starved for content, agree that the premise of this mini-series is its strength. The idea of wrapping an arc around the fallout from Pegasus's disappearance/death (pick your poison) at the end of Duelist Kingdom is a good one that was criminally under-explored in the Duke Devlin/Dungeon Dice Monsters filler arc. Having the 'big bad' be Pegasus's protegee is much more compelling, and such a person is much more likely to have a meaningful grudge and the skills to do something about it. I also like the continuity of Kaiba's 'Solid Vision' technology being at the center of another Pegasus adjacent plot as well as how having it be the center of another in-universe story bolsters the worldbuilding.
Speaking of bolstering world building, author Akira Ito made a couple of neat additions that build off of stuff we already know about the Yu-Gi-Oh! world:
1. Solid Vision, Plus
We know from the main series that as Kaiba continues to tinker with his own Solid Vision VR software it becomes more and more, well, solid, and harder to distinguish from reality, so the idea that Yugi and co. hadn't realized that Tea had already been kidnapped by the time they first encounter Tenma feels reasonable and honestly, pretty creepy.
2. Duel Professors
Given that Ito worked on Yu-Gi-Oh! GX he obviously knew where dueling was going in-universe, so it was a cute little nod to the idea of a duel academy in the future to have Tenma's henchmen be 'Card Professors', and it was also a little bit of retroactive ground laying.
3. Accessible Duel Disks
Maico Kato not only had the most aesthetically interesting deck of anyone in this volume, she was also the most fleshed-out as a character, and one of only a handful of older duelists we meet in the entire series that has an 'on-screen' duel. Moreover, she is (if memory serves) the only duelist we ever meet in DM that isn't able-bodied, and certainly the only duelist in a wheelchair. And she gets her own customized Duel Deck that sits on her lap.
I thought that was nice to include from a visibility standpoint, and also in-universe acknowledgement that you don't have to be able-bodied to be able to access Kaiba Corporation's technology. I like that this by extension means that their research and development department (if not Kaiba himself) cares enough about accessibility to have modified Duel Discs on the market.
However, despite having really good bones, I have to agree with a lot of other reviewers that the execution wasn't always the best. Other reviewers have pointed out the sloppiness of the writing of the duels themselves, which is a big problem if we're meant to read at least thirteen speed duels before returning for the final duel against Tenma.
Additionally, it was a big missed opportunity, since Tenma is supposed to be connected to Pegasus, not to have him feel more like Pegasus. Not necessarily derivative of Pegasus in terms of mannerisms, but give the man some type of theatricality and sense of fun. This guy takes himself way too seriously to be Pegasus's protegee. Hell, I'd buy that filler villain from Battle City, Arcana, being Pegasus's protegee before I'd buy it of hecking Tenma.
Finally, a lot of people seem to dislike that there's a sliding backwards in terms of character development when it comes to the main cast (Joey specifically), and that the Pharaoh feels a bit out of character, but full disclosure: I never cared enough about the Pharaoh as a character to notice anything ooc and given that this entire arc is plot rather than character-driven I don't really care if the character development from Battle City didn't carry over.
I do, however, care a great deal about Kaiba's characterization, so I'm going to need Ito to get that right when Kaiba makes his appearance in the story in volume 2 or else my review shall be nothing short of absolutely scathing.
Dorian by Will Self
3.0
'The Picture of Dorian Gray' but 100 years later, in the 1980s to mid 90s. And like most media from or set in the fin de siecle of the 20th century, the reading experience is heroin chic; sleek and glamorous, but grimy, kind of like running your hand along the edge of a neon sign in Times Square and then immidiately wondering where you can wash your hands. But you're still kind of glad you did it.
After reading over a decade and a half's worth of reviews on Goodreads covering this novel, it's clear that this is one of those 'minefield' works that everyone seems to love or hate, to find over-written or perfectly written, offensively brutish or daring to go where the original couldn't or wouldn't. Some people think it's a poor man’s Oscar Wilde pantomime, some people think this is better than its 1890 counterpart. Some people thought the reframing of the story around the AIDS crisis was brilliant, but there's also the question of the ethics (perhaps) of someone from outside the queer community writing a story like that.
Needless to say: there's a lot to unpack and even more to wade through before that unpacking can even begin. I get the impression, without even knowing much about the author, Will Self, that that's kind of the point. To that end: mission accomplished.
To start off, I think that we have to be very careful when criticizing works about queerness on the grounds of whether or not the author is themself queer. Unlike other marginalized identities (with some exception), queerness isn't something visible. Without getting too in the weeds about 'gay affects' and so on, suffice it to say that coming out is an experience largely unique to queer identity, with the exception of disability (a topic for another time).
I think a lot of times we forget that coming out, even now in the 2020s, can come with some hefty blowback, and that people who do can stand to lose a lot by doing so. So it's not really a surprise that many people choose not to, especially publicly. All this to say that forcing someone to come out for the sake of optics is...not good.
Having authentic representation in media is obviously very important, but it can be a bit of a teeter-totter, and we have to be careful, that's all.
Besides, it's not like something being 'authentic' automatically makes it good. There are plenty of 'pick-mes' out there who are more than willing to lick the boots of anyone who'll offer scraps of social mobility and clout even if it means throwing their community under the bus with their work.
Does it matter to me whether or not 'Dorian' is an authentically queer story from a queer writer? In this case, honestly, not really.
The criticism of 'Dorian' isn't whether or not it's 'authentic' (unlike something like the 'Three Day Road' Joseph Boyden scandal), it's whether or not it's homophobic, and even queer people can manage that on occasion. So let's explore.
Though published in 2002, 'Dorian' takes place between 1981 and the late-ish 1990s. This works well as a parallel to the original, setting both at the turn of their respective centuries, and using the AIDS crisis as an explicit plot point rather than the maybe, blink and you'll miss it implication of venereal disease in Wilde's novel. The heavy drug use implied in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is brought to the forefront in 'Dorian.'
The bare bones of the plot itself faithfully follow the original ... to a point (and we'll get to that), so it's certainly recognizable to anyone familiar with the 1890 version. And really, I think that's who this is for. You don't have to have read 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' to get what Self is doing with this retelling, but I just don't know why a person would pick this up unless they were a fan of Wilde's story.
Let's return to the explicit drug use and sex and the AIDS crisis. These are both the strengths of 'Dorian' and also the things that make it so dicey.
The explicitness of the drugs and sex, and the direct connection of those things to the AIDS crisis are strengths because they allow for clearer stakes than 'The Picture of' had. In 'The Picture of' we're told that Henry Wotton is the poisonous influence that sends Dorian off along the track of a dangerous hedonism, but that Henry doesn't truly engage in this philosophy himself, at least, not in any serious capacity. How could he? Everyone would be able to see if he was indulging in the degree of opioid abuse Dorian is implied to indulge in, and it would at some point become obvious if he contracted one of the pesky STIs making the rounds in Victorian London at the time. And as a society man, that simply wouldn't do -- he'd be outcast.
But in Self's 'Dorian' Wotton does in fact practice what he preaches, and it does show, and in the end, well...let's just say he loses a lot because of it. This was cool, because it gives us this sharp contrast between the reality of heavy drug use and reckless, unprotected sex, and the glamorous fiction we get of such things through media and advertising through the paralleling of the experiences of Wotton and Dorian.
Self very cleverly ties the idea of the glamorization of drugs and sex in the age of television to Dorian's portrait by having the portrait in this version be a video installation. Very fitting, albeit a little bit clunky in practice (in a literal sense, there's something just inherently clunky about the idea of nine tvs stacked on top of each other).
I really liked the video installation angle, both for this aforementioned reason, and also because film lends itself better to the idea of the 'portrait' being alive than an actual portrait does. Here, as the ravages of drugs and disease and immorality take their toll on the installation, the increasingly horrific Dorians on screen cavort about rather than just sitting there getting more repellent looking. The grotesqueness of these moving figures was so much more horrific and disgusting, and allowed the 'portrait' to feel sentient in a way I never got in the original.
Loved that.
Now, to the elephant: the AIDS crisis.
Eep.
This is where we start to get into the territory of 'things that make you go hmmm...'.
I don't think it was a bad choice to set this novel during the AIDS crisis, nor do I even think that Self's decision to turn Dorian into this angel of death figure who spread AIDS on purpose to his sexual partners was bad (it certainly gives us a clear example of what it was that made Dorian such a menace), but combined with the fact that every character we follow (Henry, Basil, The Ferret, Dorian) is a gay man who is a drug addict and engages in what Self goes out of his way to describe as debaucherous sex there are...implications.
I hadn't even been born yet when all of this was going on, but it's still a sore point in the queer community of today. The mismanagement of the crisis at the time, and the flagrant demonization of the (mostly) men suffering from the virus as merely reaping what they'd sown, of recipients of 'god's punishment' for sinful behavior-- something joked about by then press secretary to Ronald Reagan during a press conference where AIDS was referred to as the 'gay plague'-- did a lot to re-enforce already negative attitudes towards the gay community. Attitudes that were still incredibly prevalent when this novel was published in 2002.
But Self is British, writing a story that primarily takes place in London (with a few forays into the NYC art scene of the 80s). Maybe the Brits had a different, more measured, compassionate take?
Well. I think this quote from the then constable of Greater Manchester about covers it. According to
an article published on the BBC History Magazine website, he said of people with AIDS: "[they're] swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making."
Ok, so, comparable.
And Self, having been a heroin addict at the time this was all happening, definitely knew this.
Yet, in 'Dorian' while we get a perfect caricature of the 'human cesspit' (gay men and drug users--or both) that so many people believed spawned a disease that killed thousands and thousands of people, there is pithy little nuance, if any at all.
Henry Wotton is, by all accounts, not a nice guy, so doesn't he... deserve to be punished for that? And what of our 'angel of death', Dorian. Surely he, who knowingly transmits HIV to two innocent women (that we know of), and murders a few of his friends and allies, surely he deserves to be punished, right?
Even if I were a believer in punitive justice, I just can't imagine reading this without wincing a little, not least because Dorian Gray is well known as a cautionary tale, a parable about vice, with a very clear message: even if you could 'get away with it', you can never really get away with it, because the only way to 'get away with it' is to be damned. And staying young forever isn't worth that now, is it?
But Self didn't create a story weighing the pleasures of vice against eternal damnation; certain choices made in the epilogue make that clear by stripping back the 'magic.' So, what are we talking about? If this isn't a quasi-religious parable, then what exactly makes drug use and (gay) sex 'vices' worthy of punishment?
Something in that just feels a little off to me. At the very least it's a nuance that's missing, and it makes the novel weaker for its absence. Because all it leaves us with are: drug addicts and sexual degenerates (*source missing) are icky for...reasons.
Similarly, Self's employment of non-white characters as shorthand for 'slumming it' felt at best, thoughtless, and at worst, well...racist. Again, with a bit of nuance, it could have been fine. It's true that a lot of people of color get and got caught up in the worlds of drug abuse and prostitution, but Self doesn't explore that at all; these characters are just props. And even that could have been a fine choice if it had felt intentional, like that was how the Henry Wottons and Dorian Grays viewed these people--because they were titillated by the idea of 'slumming it', because they came from privileged backgrounds and saw no issue with using people from these marginalized groups as props. But we don't get that.
It's hilarious to me that one reviewer compared this novel to Hollinghurst's 'Line of Beauty' which also deals with the AIDs crisis and its impact on the gay community because while that may well be true, it reminded me of Hollinghurst for a totally different reason: Hollinghurst did this exact same thing in 'The Swimming-Pool Library': he used black and brown characters as props to demonstrate that many of his rich white characters liked to 'slum it.' Now, to be fair to Hollinghurst, I did note in my review of that novel that attempts were made at some kind of commentary, but here in 'Dorian', not even a whisper. And by saying nothing at all...he says a lot.
Well, geez, Ren, if you thought this was so reckless and possibly racist, what the hell are the 3 stars for: lambast it!
The truth is that despite these pretty fatal (at least to me) flaws, I did like a lot of it. As I said, I think some of the ideas are good ones. But we don't have to label heavy drug abuse and addiction as a 'vice' to recognize that it ruins lives, and that the dangers of it are oft at odds with the casual and often glamorized depiction of drug use in a lot of media. And we don't have to label people who enjoy casual sex as degenerates to recognize that that lifestyle comes with risks that a lot of people aren't educated to protect against. Especially queer people, who often aren't included in the already lacking sex education we get in school (if we do at all).
And it's not untrue that gay culture, or at least parts of it, do worship youth and beauty in unhealthy ways (but let's not pretend that the AIDS crisis had zero impact on that when for a lot of people there was an entanglement of youth and beauty equating being healthy). Self goes into this through the mouthpieces of two of his few straight characters, but his analysis lacks empathy, and again, the narrative is weaker for this.
But the writing, ooh, the writing. Self has some writing chops on him when we just look at the language and kind of ignore what it's saying. Apparently, it's typical of Self to juxtapose clever, satirical, and sometimes very beautiful writing with grotesque or otherwise dark subject matter. And boy is 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' the perfect story for that. Indeed, while Wilde used pretty, witty prose to skate over much of the debauchery and grime, Self uses pretty, witty prose to revel in it.
And we do get the witticisms, most of them (true to type) from Henry Wotton, and a lot of them are pretty good.
"Basil: don't they object to you smoking in here?
Henry: they object to just about everything I do in here, Baz. It's peculiar how terminal illness is so constrained; it explains what martyrs mean when they describe death as "liberation", hmm?" (p.92)
"It was amazing that he believed himself enough of a pussycat to affect a purr." (p.123)
"Neither death nor vulgarity is likely to be cured by modern medicine." (p.126)
"It's true that you're the spirit of the age, but it's drunk so much of you it's become cirrhotic." (p.243)
None of this touches on the cynical commentary on art that twines its way through 'Dorian', and which is probably worth a second read. And yes, I do think it's worth a second read, questionable though its intentional or unintentional politics might be, because the bones of a truly great 'Picture of Dorian Gray' redux are right there. If I do come back to this at a later point, I'll follow Henry's advice:
"You tell me how it was, Baz-- I'll listen to how it should have been." (p.92)
After reading over a decade and a half's worth of reviews on Goodreads covering this novel, it's clear that this is one of those 'minefield' works that everyone seems to love or hate, to find over-written or perfectly written, offensively brutish or daring to go where the original couldn't or wouldn't. Some people think it's a poor man’s Oscar Wilde pantomime, some people think this is better than its 1890 counterpart. Some people thought the reframing of the story around the AIDS crisis was brilliant, but there's also the question of the ethics (perhaps) of someone from outside the queer community writing a story like that.
Needless to say: there's a lot to unpack and even more to wade through before that unpacking can even begin. I get the impression, without even knowing much about the author, Will Self, that that's kind of the point. To that end: mission accomplished.
To start off, I think that we have to be very careful when criticizing works about queerness on the grounds of whether or not the author is themself queer. Unlike other marginalized identities (with some exception), queerness isn't something visible. Without getting too in the weeds about 'gay affects' and so on, suffice it to say that coming out is an experience largely unique to queer identity, with the exception of disability (a topic for another time).
I think a lot of times we forget that coming out, even now in the 2020s, can come with some hefty blowback, and that people who do can stand to lose a lot by doing so. So it's not really a surprise that many people choose not to, especially publicly. All this to say that forcing someone to come out for the sake of optics is...not good.
Having authentic representation in media is obviously very important, but it can be a bit of a teeter-totter, and we have to be careful, that's all.
Besides, it's not like something being 'authentic' automatically makes it good. There are plenty of 'pick-mes' out there who are more than willing to lick the boots of anyone who'll offer scraps of social mobility and clout even if it means throwing their community under the bus with their work.
Does it matter to me whether or not 'Dorian' is an authentically queer story from a queer writer? In this case, honestly, not really.
The criticism of 'Dorian' isn't whether or not it's 'authentic' (unlike something like the 'Three Day Road' Joseph Boyden scandal), it's whether or not it's homophobic, and even queer people can manage that on occasion. So let's explore.
Though published in 2002, 'Dorian' takes place between 1981 and the late-ish 1990s. This works well as a parallel to the original, setting both at the turn of their respective centuries, and using the AIDS crisis as an explicit plot point rather than the maybe, blink and you'll miss it implication of venereal disease in Wilde's novel. The heavy drug use implied in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is brought to the forefront in 'Dorian.'
The bare bones of the plot itself faithfully follow the original ... to a point (and we'll get to that), so it's certainly recognizable to anyone familiar with the 1890 version. And really, I think that's who this is for. You don't have to have read 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' to get what Self is doing with this retelling, but I just don't know why a person would pick this up unless they were a fan of Wilde's story.
Let's return to the explicit drug use and sex and the AIDS crisis. These are both the strengths of 'Dorian' and also the things that make it so dicey.
The explicitness of the drugs and sex, and the direct connection of those things to the AIDS crisis are strengths because they allow for clearer stakes than 'The Picture of' had. In 'The Picture of' we're told that Henry Wotton is the poisonous influence that sends Dorian off along the track of a dangerous hedonism, but that Henry doesn't truly engage in this philosophy himself, at least, not in any serious capacity. How could he? Everyone would be able to see if he was indulging in the degree of opioid abuse Dorian is implied to indulge in, and it would at some point become obvious if he contracted one of the pesky STIs making the rounds in Victorian London at the time. And as a society man, that simply wouldn't do -- he'd be outcast.
But in Self's 'Dorian' Wotton does in fact practice what he preaches, and it does show, and in the end, well...let's just say he loses a lot because of it. This was cool, because it gives us this sharp contrast between the reality of heavy drug use and reckless, unprotected sex, and the glamorous fiction we get of such things through media and advertising through the paralleling of the experiences of Wotton and Dorian.
Self very cleverly ties the idea of the glamorization of drugs and sex in the age of television to Dorian's portrait by having the portrait in this version be a video installation. Very fitting, albeit a little bit clunky in practice (in a literal sense, there's something just inherently clunky about the idea of nine tvs stacked on top of each other).
I really liked the video installation angle, both for this aforementioned reason, and also because film lends itself better to the idea of the 'portrait' being alive than an actual portrait does. Here, as the ravages of drugs and disease and immorality take their toll on the installation, the increasingly horrific Dorians on screen cavort about rather than just sitting there getting more repellent looking. The grotesqueness of these moving figures was so much more horrific and disgusting, and allowed the 'portrait' to feel sentient in a way I never got in the original.
Loved that.
Now, to the elephant: the AIDS crisis.
Eep.
This is where we start to get into the territory of 'things that make you go hmmm...'.
I don't think it was a bad choice to set this novel during the AIDS crisis, nor do I even think that Self's decision to turn Dorian into this angel of death figure who spread AIDS on purpose to his sexual partners was bad (it certainly gives us a clear example of what it was that made Dorian such a menace), but combined with the fact that every character we follow (Henry, Basil, The Ferret, Dorian) is a gay man who is a drug addict and engages in what Self goes out of his way to describe as debaucherous sex there are...implications.
I hadn't even been born yet when all of this was going on, but it's still a sore point in the queer community of today. The mismanagement of the crisis at the time, and the flagrant demonization of the (mostly) men suffering from the virus as merely reaping what they'd sown, of recipients of 'god's punishment' for sinful behavior-- something joked about by then press secretary to Ronald Reagan during a press conference where AIDS was referred to as the 'gay plague'-- did a lot to re-enforce already negative attitudes towards the gay community. Attitudes that were still incredibly prevalent when this novel was published in 2002.
But Self is British, writing a story that primarily takes place in London (with a few forays into the NYC art scene of the 80s). Maybe the Brits had a different, more measured, compassionate take?
Well. I think this quote from the then constable of Greater Manchester about covers it. According to
an article published on the BBC History Magazine website, he said of people with AIDS: "[they're] swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making."
Ok, so, comparable.
And Self, having been a heroin addict at the time this was all happening, definitely knew this.
Yet, in 'Dorian' while we get a perfect caricature of the 'human cesspit' (gay men and drug users--or both) that so many people believed spawned a disease that killed thousands and thousands of people, there is pithy little nuance, if any at all.
Henry Wotton is, by all accounts, not a nice guy, so doesn't he... deserve to be punished for that? And what of our 'angel of death', Dorian. Surely he, who knowingly transmits HIV to two innocent women (that we know of), and murders a few of his friends and allies, surely he deserves to be punished, right?
Even if I were a believer in punitive justice, I just can't imagine reading this without wincing a little, not least because Dorian Gray is well known as a cautionary tale, a parable about vice, with a very clear message: even if you could 'get away with it', you can never really get away with it, because the only way to 'get away with it' is to be damned. And staying young forever isn't worth that now, is it?
But Self didn't create a story weighing the pleasures of vice against eternal damnation; certain choices made in the epilogue make that clear by stripping back the 'magic.' So, what are we talking about? If this isn't a quasi-religious parable, then what exactly makes drug use and (gay) sex 'vices' worthy of punishment?
Something in that just feels a little off to me. At the very least it's a nuance that's missing, and it makes the novel weaker for its absence. Because all it leaves us with are: drug addicts and sexual degenerates (*source missing) are icky for...reasons.
Similarly, Self's employment of non-white characters as shorthand for 'slumming it' felt at best, thoughtless, and at worst, well...racist. Again, with a bit of nuance, it could have been fine. It's true that a lot of people of color get and got caught up in the worlds of drug abuse and prostitution, but Self doesn't explore that at all; these characters are just props. And even that could have been a fine choice if it had felt intentional, like that was how the Henry Wottons and Dorian Grays viewed these people--because they were titillated by the idea of 'slumming it', because they came from privileged backgrounds and saw no issue with using people from these marginalized groups as props. But we don't get that.
It's hilarious to me that one reviewer compared this novel to Hollinghurst's 'Line of Beauty' which also deals with the AIDs crisis and its impact on the gay community because while that may well be true, it reminded me of Hollinghurst for a totally different reason: Hollinghurst did this exact same thing in 'The Swimming-Pool Library': he used black and brown characters as props to demonstrate that many of his rich white characters liked to 'slum it.' Now, to be fair to Hollinghurst, I did note in my review of that novel that attempts were made at some kind of commentary, but here in 'Dorian', not even a whisper. And by saying nothing at all...he says a lot.
Well, geez, Ren, if you thought this was so reckless and possibly racist, what the hell are the 3 stars for: lambast it!
The truth is that despite these pretty fatal (at least to me) flaws, I did like a lot of it. As I said, I think some of the ideas are good ones. But we don't have to label heavy drug abuse and addiction as a 'vice' to recognize that it ruins lives, and that the dangers of it are oft at odds with the casual and often glamorized depiction of drug use in a lot of media. And we don't have to label people who enjoy casual sex as degenerates to recognize that that lifestyle comes with risks that a lot of people aren't educated to protect against. Especially queer people, who often aren't included in the already lacking sex education we get in school (if we do at all).
And it's not untrue that gay culture, or at least parts of it, do worship youth and beauty in unhealthy ways (but let's not pretend that the AIDS crisis had zero impact on that when for a lot of people there was an entanglement of youth and beauty equating being healthy). Self goes into this through the mouthpieces of two of his few straight characters, but his analysis lacks empathy, and again, the narrative is weaker for this.
But the writing, ooh, the writing. Self has some writing chops on him when we just look at the language and kind of ignore what it's saying. Apparently, it's typical of Self to juxtapose clever, satirical, and sometimes very beautiful writing with grotesque or otherwise dark subject matter. And boy is 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' the perfect story for that. Indeed, while Wilde used pretty, witty prose to skate over much of the debauchery and grime, Self uses pretty, witty prose to revel in it.
On the windowsill the con-air unit gurgled and spat out tuberculosis air, while the roaches looked up quizzically from their lunch. They always do that, New York City roaches--look up quizzically from their lunch. It's as if they're constantly being reminded by each human arrival of the injustice of their position, caught with their mandibles rasping the cardboard trash instead of ordering their own fucking pizza on the phone." (p.85)
And we do get the witticisms, most of them (true to type) from Henry Wotton, and a lot of them are pretty good.
"Basil: don't they object to you smoking in here?
Henry: they object to just about everything I do in here, Baz. It's peculiar how terminal illness is so constrained; it explains what martyrs mean when they describe death as "liberation", hmm?" (p.92)
"It was amazing that he believed himself enough of a pussycat to affect a purr." (p.123)
"Neither death nor vulgarity is likely to be cured by modern medicine." (p.126)
"It's true that you're the spirit of the age, but it's drunk so much of you it's become cirrhotic." (p.243)
None of this touches on the cynical commentary on art that twines its way through 'Dorian', and which is probably worth a second read. And yes, I do think it's worth a second read, questionable though its intentional or unintentional politics might be, because the bones of a truly great 'Picture of Dorian Gray' redux are right there. If I do come back to this at a later point, I'll follow Henry's advice:
"You tell me how it was, Baz-- I'll listen to how it should have been." (p.92)
Yu-Gi-Oh! R, Volume 2 by Akira Ito
4.0
"Bring it on, you filthy, carrion-eating dueling hyena"
Picking up directly where volume 1 left off, volume two begins with the continuation of the duel between Yugi and our season antagonist, Tenma. Except, wait, we still have 3 volumes to go, so there must be something afoot... Is this guy the real 'big bad' of Yu-Gi-Oh! R, or are we in for a twist?
Meanwhile, Kaiba and Mokuba arrive at their Domino headquarters after Tenma shuts down their computer mainframe and puts a tragic end to a tournament the brothers were attending in America. Although, based on Kaiba's commentary, maybe it's just as well. "The skill level of these duelists is lower than I expected...we may have to consider creating a facility to train duelists."
Ah, Kaiba. Always the pragmatist.
And speaking of Kaiba, we can always count on him to bring things back down to earth when the plot comes a tad untethered.
After his arrival at headquarters, Kaiba pulls a massive flex by trouncing one of Tenma's duel professors for no reason since he and Mokuba didn't need one of the keys to get into the building (hello, it's their building), and giving us the scathing burn of the volume by calling the guy a filthy, carrion-eating dueling hyena.
In a conversation in which he lacks all semblance of self-awareness, Tenma explains to Kaiba that they're on the same side, actually, practically brothers, what with their orphanage upbringings and rags to riches tales of being adopted by billionaires, with the one 'blot' on their respective rises to power being Yugi Mouto.
"As one in the same situation as I," Tenma says with all the conviction of a man who doesn't realize how very in the wrong he is, "I would like you to help me."
Seto -- I drove my adopted father to suicide after forcibly taking his company out from under him; yours was murdered/disappeared by a guy who won't even be relevant for another two seasons, and by the way I already had a successful rise to power, how dare you compare me to you, loser-- Kaiba is just like:
'Bruh, you do realize you should have asked for me to team up with you before you invaded my building and took over my computer mainframe, right? Like, why the heck would I help you?'
And Tenma's like:
'Dang. You're right. Well, this is awkward...' before dissolving dramatically into a mass of pixels.
Elsewhere, Yugi has the plot more fully revealed to him as not-Tenma explains that freaking Bandit Keith of all people, made up a story about seeing Yugi steal Pegasus's Millennium Eye and murder him (no one in this evil organization seems to be able to decide if Pegasus is dead or missing).
Not-Tenma goes on to explain that, like Pegasus, Tenma wants to use Kaiba's technology to bring back Pegasus's mind from... the afterlife? The same cyber-space the Big 5 were trapped in? Who knows. Somewhere. And then, he wants to transplant Pegasus's mind into Tea's body.
After the Noah arc in season 3, the idea of people using Kaiba's technology to play musical chairs with people's souls and bodies shouldn't be that big of a surprise, but it is weird that Tea was at the center of a bizarre, forced transgenderism plot twice, first with that penguin-obsessed dude who was really keen on having his mind uploaded into the body of a teen girl, and now Tenma being like: 'surely, this is what Pegasus would've wanted!' It's like Matt Walsh won a contest to choose one of the series plot points.
Poor Tea. Poor Pegasus.
According to Tenma, though, there were super legit reasons to pick Tea, actually.
1. The soul vessel must be physically and mentally fit (I guess soul-switching is hard on a person?)
2. The soul vessel can't be a duelist because it's too difficult to detach the soul of a duelist from their body (source: trust me, bro. Also, it would have saved everyone a heck-ton of trouble if someone would have mentioned this little crumb to Gozaburo and Noah. Ah, well, you live and you learn).
3. The soul vessel has to be someone whose loss would inflict pain on Yugi.
Imagine being Tristan and realizing you got skipped over for the whole 'soul vessel' plot because no one believed your loss would upset Yugi that much. Ouch.
That's the only reasonable explanation for not going with Tristan...one hopes.
We get a great cameo by Bandit Keith, where he dude-bros his way through his dialogue, half of which is him swearing in asterisks and dollar signs. Glorious. 10/10.
Can't wait to see what crazy antics we get in volume 3!
Picking up directly where volume 1 left off, volume two begins with the continuation of the duel between Yugi and our season antagonist, Tenma. Except, wait, we still have 3 volumes to go, so there must be something afoot... Is this guy the real 'big bad' of Yu-Gi-Oh! R, or are we in for a twist?
Meanwhile, Kaiba and Mokuba arrive at their Domino headquarters after Tenma shuts down their computer mainframe and puts a tragic end to a tournament the brothers were attending in America. Although, based on Kaiba's commentary, maybe it's just as well. "The skill level of these duelists is lower than I expected...we may have to consider creating a facility to train duelists."
Ah, Kaiba. Always the pragmatist.
And speaking of Kaiba, we can always count on him to bring things back down to earth when the plot comes a tad untethered.
After his arrival at headquarters, Kaiba pulls a massive flex by trouncing one of Tenma's duel professors for no reason since he and Mokuba didn't need one of the keys to get into the building (hello, it's their building), and giving us the scathing burn of the volume by calling the guy a filthy, carrion-eating dueling hyena.
In a conversation in which he lacks all semblance of self-awareness, Tenma explains to Kaiba that they're on the same side, actually, practically brothers, what with their orphanage upbringings and rags to riches tales of being adopted by billionaires, with the one 'blot' on their respective rises to power being Yugi Mouto.
"As one in the same situation as I," Tenma says with all the conviction of a man who doesn't realize how very in the wrong he is, "I would like you to help me."
Seto -- I drove my adopted father to suicide after forcibly taking his company out from under him; yours was murdered/disappeared by a guy who won't even be relevant for another two seasons, and by the way I already had a successful rise to power, how dare you compare me to you, loser-- Kaiba is just like:
'Bruh, you do realize you should have asked for me to team up with you before you invaded my building and took over my computer mainframe, right? Like, why the heck would I help you?'
And Tenma's like:
'Dang. You're right. Well, this is awkward...' before dissolving dramatically into a mass of pixels.
Elsewhere, Yugi has the plot more fully revealed to him as not-Tenma explains that freaking Bandit Keith of all people, made up a story about seeing Yugi steal Pegasus's Millennium Eye and murder him (no one in this evil organization seems to be able to decide if Pegasus is dead or missing).
Not-Tenma goes on to explain that, like Pegasus, Tenma wants to use Kaiba's technology to bring back Pegasus's mind from... the afterlife? The same cyber-space the Big 5 were trapped in? Who knows. Somewhere. And then, he wants to transplant Pegasus's mind into Tea's body.
After the Noah arc in season 3, the idea of people using Kaiba's technology to play musical chairs with people's souls and bodies shouldn't be that big of a surprise, but it is weird that Tea was at the center of a bizarre, forced transgenderism plot twice, first with that penguin-obsessed dude who was really keen on having his mind uploaded into the body of a teen girl, and now Tenma being like: 'surely, this is what Pegasus would've wanted!' It's like Matt Walsh won a contest to choose one of the series plot points.
Poor Tea. Poor Pegasus.
According to Tenma, though, there were super legit reasons to pick Tea, actually.
1. The soul vessel must be physically and mentally fit (I guess soul-switching is hard on a person?)
2. The soul vessel can't be a duelist because it's too difficult to detach the soul of a duelist from their body (source: trust me, bro. Also, it would have saved everyone a heck-ton of trouble if someone would have mentioned this little crumb to Gozaburo and Noah. Ah, well, you live and you learn).
3. The soul vessel has to be someone whose loss would inflict pain on Yugi.
Imagine being Tristan and realizing you got skipped over for the whole 'soul vessel' plot because no one believed your loss would upset Yugi that much. Ouch.
That's the only reasonable explanation for not going with Tristan...one hopes.
We get a great cameo by Bandit Keith, where he dude-bros his way through his dialogue, half of which is him swearing in asterisks and dollar signs. Glorious. 10/10.
Can't wait to see what crazy antics we get in volume 3!
The Persian Boy by Mary Renault
5.0
Even within reviews of 'The Persian Boy' there seems to be no consensus of just what it is. Ostensibly, this is queer historical fiction, but it's not really 'our voices' (despite Mary Renault herself being a queer woman who was an active albeit controversial member of the South African queer community), so does it really belong in the queer literary canon? Those that think not have dismissed it as prototypical slash-fiction despite the acknowledgement that she was a respected amateur classicist and, by their admission, a talented writer (this of course raises the question of just where the line is between 'slash' and 'literature' when it comes to women writing mlm stories).
The 'slash' accusation seems to stem from the fact that our protagonist, Bagoas, was first a sex slave of King Darius and then a lover of Alexander's, whom he obviously idolizes in Renault's telling of his story. Personally, I don't feel that this interpretation can come of a good faith reading of the text, nor am I comfortable dismissing something as a lonely woman's sexy fantasy on the grounds that the protagonist is a sex worker; that interpretation rather misses the point.
Indeed, I think Renault handles Bagoas's story with an immense amount of care. She did not gloss over how he came to be gelded and sold into sex slavery as a child or any of the abuses he suffered as he was passed around, but she didn't dwell on it either, letting it form the background of the tapestry of his character. His entire outlook and sense of self is shaped by that abuse in a way we the reader can easily understand and which he lacks the introspection to see in himself.
"I offered him no art that night, or no more than had become my nature," (375) he says of one of his last nights with Alexander.
This inability for Bagoas to separate himself from the training he was subjected to is in and of itself, tragic. He is taught that he's only a 'sexy lampshade'--able to observe the goings on of the men he serves, to recognize their subtle wants, reduced to living through them because he has been robbed of agency and even, to a degree, the ability to have an inner world of his own that extends beyond thoughts of those he belongs to. Even his jealousy of Hephaestion is an extension of this.*
(*Side Note: let it not be said that Bagoas coming up with an elaborate scheme to poison Hephaestion and then realizing that's stupid on the very next page isn't the most accurate portrayal of the teenage thought process ever penned.)
Bagoas comments throughout the novel that Alexander could never turn away from love, but one has to wonder if that isn't projection. And that leads to one of the elements of the novel that makes it so interesting to think about: 'am I supposed to believe this?'
Bagoas presents himself as a reliable narrator simply documenting Alexander 'as he really was.' But even by his own admission, his recollections differ from other scholars'. He dismisses those other accounts as 'unfair' and 'incorrect', but it's enough to make one wonder. He also often qualifies many of his memories with 'I think' and 'I'm sure'; another clever way for Renault to cast reasonable doubt on his objectivity.
The real question is: does it matter? Some of Renault's contemporary critics accused her of romanticizing Alexander the Great in both 'The Persian Boy' and her non-fiction biography of him. I can't speak to the biography, but by making Bagoas our POV character in 'The Persian Boy' and making him and not Alexander the titular character, it seems safe to assume that it isn't meant to be objective. I have no doubt that the historical trappings were accurate of the cultures she describes and that the timeline of Alexander the Great's exploits as a leader and a warrior were accurate to knowledge of them at the time, but I didn't feel like I was meant to walk away with a clear or accurate understanding of who he was as a person or even how those he conquered felt about him; just who Bagoas (and by extension Renault) needed him to be.
This, naturally, raises the question: why did Renault need Alexander to be, essentially, a superhero?
'The Persian Boy's' Alexander the Great is indeed 'great' in every sense of the word; he's an unmatched soldier and military commander who wins over everyone in his path. Everyone, according to Bagoas, loves him, and those that don't are immediately revealed to be jealous or in some other way, wicked. Alexander is a generous friend and fair ruler who wants to be accepted by those he has conquered. He's curious about the world and wages war not because he enjoys being king of a sprawling empire (this being just a biproduct), but due to his own wanderlust. And of course, he's incredibly hot.
His singular flaw is that he's short. Alright, and I suppose his naivety and inevitable heartbreak when those he trusts betray him.
Why Bagoas needs a hero is obvious: after experiencing so much of the wickedness of men, getting one chance at freedom and finding himself incapable of surviving on his own, he needs Alexander to be a good person to reconcile choosing servitude. And by all accounts, Alexander is not cruel to him, and does on occasion confide in him. But they aren't really lovers and never will be. This, of course, not being Alexander's fault, but Hephaestion's for having gotten to him first (as Bagoas sees it).
In other words: this is more an exploration of the parasocial fan/celebrity relationship than it is anything else, and Renault does an excellent job humanizing those (especially teenagers) who use idolatry as a coping mechanism; something that is often brushed aside as silly. But is it really so silly to pretend that there are heroes in a world where we're seemingly so often bombarded with villains? I'll leave that to the book clubs to parse out.
As to Renault herself, we can't really know what prompted her to slant the story this way as we were in Bagoas's head, not hers. However, if we allow ourselves to enter the realm of indulgent speculation, and we consider the state of queer rights at the time Renault was writing, it's not so hard to imagine that she and the community at large were hungry for a hero.
The gay rights movement was just kicking off when 'The Persian Boy' was published in 1972 and prior to that, and certainly during the span of her writing career (1930s- 1970s), being queer was very, very often vilified both in fiction and in reality. There were no publicly queer people in positions of power, and even in the few positive fictional portrayals, queerness was always framed as a tragedy, something isolating, something that dominated a person's life, became their defining feature.
And so, I can imagine the catharsis of reaching back in time to (to my knowledge) an undisputedly queer historical figure who was everything society said a queer person could not be: a warrior, a military leader, someone at the center of history rather than its periphery. Here was someone who could go toe-to-toe with every bully, every gay basher, every homophobic Bible thumper. Someone whose army could break the chains of oppression. Someone who didn't have to be relegated to 'Alexander the Queer.'
Now, in the year of our lord 2021, a lot of us in the vaguely defined 'West' are lucky. Perhaps we're even moving beyond the need for superheroes. But a lot of people in 1972 probably did need that. Hell, a lot of people still need that now.
Facts are important when we talk about history. So is nuance. And morally grey characters and all their complexities can reflect a more 'real' and arguably more interesting image of humanness than perfection can--even the Greeks understood that. But if you've only ever seen yourself portrayed as a villain, I reckon it's fair to at least get to see yourself as a hero.
So what is 'The Persian Boy' and who is it for? It's certainly not slash-fiction; as a connoisseur of that sub-genre I can assure you Renault's 'fade out as the bedroom door swings shut' method of writing sex scenes utterly precludes it. Is it part of the queer literary canon? Sure, why not. Mary Renault was a queer woman writing queer stories that were/are beloved by queer people. And for what it's worth, people at the time thought she was actually a gay man writing under a pseudonym.
Is it good historical fiction? The research is there, the attention to detail is there, the nuanced discussion of intercultural conflict and religion is there, there are language barriers that have to be overcome, everything appears to be in its geographical place, and people die left and right of fevers and exposure. There are one or two points that could be called 'mystical,' but considering the cultures we're talking about it all pretty well tracks to my lay-satisfaction.
If any of that interests you, if you, like Bonnie Tyler, find yourself holding out for a hero who's strong and fast and larger than life, give 'The Persian Boy' a read.
The 'slash' accusation seems to stem from the fact that our protagonist, Bagoas, was first a sex slave of King Darius and then a lover of Alexander's, whom he obviously idolizes in Renault's telling of his story. Personally, I don't feel that this interpretation can come of a good faith reading of the text, nor am I comfortable dismissing something as a lonely woman's sexy fantasy on the grounds that the protagonist is a sex worker; that interpretation rather misses the point.
Indeed, I think Renault handles Bagoas's story with an immense amount of care. She did not gloss over how he came to be gelded and sold into sex slavery as a child or any of the abuses he suffered as he was passed around, but she didn't dwell on it either, letting it form the background of the tapestry of his character. His entire outlook and sense of self is shaped by that abuse in a way we the reader can easily understand and which he lacks the introspection to see in himself.
"I offered him no art that night, or no more than had become my nature," (375) he says of one of his last nights with Alexander.
This inability for Bagoas to separate himself from the training he was subjected to is in and of itself, tragic. He is taught that he's only a 'sexy lampshade'--able to observe the goings on of the men he serves, to recognize their subtle wants, reduced to living through them because he has been robbed of agency and even, to a degree, the ability to have an inner world of his own that extends beyond thoughts of those he belongs to. Even his jealousy of Hephaestion is an extension of this.*
(*Side Note: let it not be said that Bagoas coming up with an elaborate scheme to poison Hephaestion and then realizing that's stupid on the very next page isn't the most accurate portrayal of the teenage thought process ever penned.)
Bagoas comments throughout the novel that Alexander could never turn away from love, but one has to wonder if that isn't projection. And that leads to one of the elements of the novel that makes it so interesting to think about: 'am I supposed to believe this?'
Bagoas presents himself as a reliable narrator simply documenting Alexander 'as he really was.' But even by his own admission, his recollections differ from other scholars'. He dismisses those other accounts as 'unfair' and 'incorrect', but it's enough to make one wonder. He also often qualifies many of his memories with 'I think' and 'I'm sure'; another clever way for Renault to cast reasonable doubt on his objectivity.
The real question is: does it matter? Some of Renault's contemporary critics accused her of romanticizing Alexander the Great in both 'The Persian Boy' and her non-fiction biography of him. I can't speak to the biography, but by making Bagoas our POV character in 'The Persian Boy' and making him and not Alexander the titular character, it seems safe to assume that it isn't meant to be objective. I have no doubt that the historical trappings were accurate of the cultures she describes and that the timeline of Alexander the Great's exploits as a leader and a warrior were accurate to knowledge of them at the time, but I didn't feel like I was meant to walk away with a clear or accurate understanding of who he was as a person or even how those he conquered felt about him; just who Bagoas (and by extension Renault) needed him to be.
This, naturally, raises the question: why did Renault need Alexander to be, essentially, a superhero?
'The Persian Boy's' Alexander the Great is indeed 'great' in every sense of the word; he's an unmatched soldier and military commander who wins over everyone in his path. Everyone, according to Bagoas, loves him, and those that don't are immediately revealed to be jealous or in some other way, wicked. Alexander is a generous friend and fair ruler who wants to be accepted by those he has conquered. He's curious about the world and wages war not because he enjoys being king of a sprawling empire (this being just a biproduct), but due to his own wanderlust. And of course, he's incredibly hot.
His singular flaw is that he's short. Alright, and I suppose his naivety and inevitable heartbreak when those he trusts betray him.
Why Bagoas needs a hero is obvious: after experiencing so much of the wickedness of men, getting one chance at freedom and finding himself incapable of surviving on his own, he needs Alexander to be a good person to reconcile choosing servitude. And by all accounts, Alexander is not cruel to him, and does on occasion confide in him. But they aren't really lovers and never will be. This, of course, not being Alexander's fault, but Hephaestion's for having gotten to him first (as Bagoas sees it).
In other words: this is more an exploration of the parasocial fan/celebrity relationship than it is anything else, and Renault does an excellent job humanizing those (especially teenagers) who use idolatry as a coping mechanism; something that is often brushed aside as silly. But is it really so silly to pretend that there are heroes in a world where we're seemingly so often bombarded with villains? I'll leave that to the book clubs to parse out.
As to Renault herself, we can't really know what prompted her to slant the story this way as we were in Bagoas's head, not hers. However, if we allow ourselves to enter the realm of indulgent speculation, and we consider the state of queer rights at the time Renault was writing, it's not so hard to imagine that she and the community at large were hungry for a hero.
The gay rights movement was just kicking off when 'The Persian Boy' was published in 1972 and prior to that, and certainly during the span of her writing career (1930s- 1970s), being queer was very, very often vilified both in fiction and in reality. There were no publicly queer people in positions of power, and even in the few positive fictional portrayals, queerness was always framed as a tragedy, something isolating, something that dominated a person's life, became their defining feature.
And so, I can imagine the catharsis of reaching back in time to (to my knowledge) an undisputedly queer historical figure who was everything society said a queer person could not be: a warrior, a military leader, someone at the center of history rather than its periphery. Here was someone who could go toe-to-toe with every bully, every gay basher, every homophobic Bible thumper. Someone whose army could break the chains of oppression. Someone who didn't have to be relegated to 'Alexander the Queer.'
Now, in the year of our lord 2021, a lot of us in the vaguely defined 'West' are lucky. Perhaps we're even moving beyond the need for superheroes. But a lot of people in 1972 probably did need that. Hell, a lot of people still need that now.
Facts are important when we talk about history. So is nuance. And morally grey characters and all their complexities can reflect a more 'real' and arguably more interesting image of humanness than perfection can--even the Greeks understood that. But if you've only ever seen yourself portrayed as a villain, I reckon it's fair to at least get to see yourself as a hero.
So what is 'The Persian Boy' and who is it for? It's certainly not slash-fiction; as a connoisseur of that sub-genre I can assure you Renault's 'fade out as the bedroom door swings shut' method of writing sex scenes utterly precludes it. Is it part of the queer literary canon? Sure, why not. Mary Renault was a queer woman writing queer stories that were/are beloved by queer people. And for what it's worth, people at the time thought she was actually a gay man writing under a pseudonym.
Is it good historical fiction? The research is there, the attention to detail is there, the nuanced discussion of intercultural conflict and religion is there, there are language barriers that have to be overcome, everything appears to be in its geographical place, and people die left and right of fevers and exposure. There are one or two points that could be called 'mystical,' but considering the cultures we're talking about it all pretty well tracks to my lay-satisfaction.
If any of that interests you, if you, like Bonnie Tyler, find yourself holding out for a hero who's strong and fast and larger than life, give 'The Persian Boy' a read.
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
3.0
This being my second McCarthy I think I've finally got a pretty good sense of what the man's about as an author. And I can say with definitive certainty that the lack of punctuation and in particular the lack of quotation marks just isn't for me.
"If you write properly, you shouldn't have to punctuate," he once said.
Yeah, ok, McCarthy.
Don't get me wrong; I'm no language purist, so by all means play with the language, shape it as you will, but for god's sake don't forget utility. If your only reason for dropping punctuation is 'cuz I felt like it' then don't be surprised if a lot of people find it irritating.
In the same vein, I really didn't understand why neither McCarthy nor the publisher of this edition saw fit to provide a translation for the not infrequent conversations held in Spanish. Much like his cavalier feelings about punctuation, I can only assume that McCarthy thought "if you write properly, you don't have to translate." Or something.
At first I thought this would just be an occasional thing, but once they get into Mexico and are (reasonably) having to use Spanish to communicate most of the time, it got incredibly frustrating to have to skim sometimes an entire page and have no idea what just happened. This could have been kind of fine if it felt like this was meant to be disorienting on purpose/in service to the love letter to northern Mexico that 'All the Pretty Horses' so clearly is. But it didn't always feel like that, especially since our POV character speaks the language fluently, so it doesn't give readers a second-hand version of the experience he has of being isolated linguistically, nor does it really add to the love letter vibe because most of the time the conversations recorded in Spanish could have been skipped by just including the information in the descriptive prose sections.
I dunno, it just, once again, felt like a thoughtless stylistic choice.
As far as my feelings about the actual story are concerned, I'll be upfront in saying that books that fall into what I call the 'yeehaw' genre just aren't really my thing. I've never been a big fan of American literature in general for this reason (Faulkner, my guy, I'm looking hard at you, and Mark Twain too while we're at it).
However, all that about the technical aspects of the writing being said, I was pleasantly surprised by 'No Country for Old Men' and so I tried to keep an open mind when I was reading this one.
The verdict? It was a'ight.
The pacing was a bit all over the place in large part because McCarthy seemed unable to write anything that wasn't a plodding along of characters through the desert or a fast-paced (somewhat improbable) action scene. Like, there was nothing in between. Certain things, like the 'love story' fitted in to create drama while the plot caught up with the characters went by with so little detail and fanfare that I couldn't feel anything about it. Were those two people supposed to be in love? I guess.
The best characters were easily the side characters. Rawlins and Blevins and the aunt Matriarch of the family our two protagonists worked for were really well fleshed out and distinct and I enjoyed the sections with them in it.
John Grady on the other hand not only didn't feel like a teenager, he didn't even feel like the protagonist since he did absolutely nothing to drive the plot until the very, very end, and even that only came about because of action taken earlier in the story by Blevins.
Justice for Blevins, by the way, because this was arguably his story, or at least, he was the emotional core of it, and the only scenes that really made me feel something revolved around his character.
Having already read 'No Country for Old Men' I came ready for the over-the-top, no-way-do-physics-work-like-this action scenes and shootouts and he didn't disappoint. Maybe this style of writing action bothers some people (I seem to recall a number of enraged gun enthusiasts in the reviews for 'No Country' seething and foaming at the mouth because I guess McCarthy name-dropped the wrong gun a few times???) but frankly, McCarthy isn't trying to capture realism in these novels.
These are yeehaw romances, meaning that guns get to do whatever he wants them to do as long as it's cool, and the hero only gets injured so that he can shrug it off with cool and masculine nonchalance while smoking a cigarette (seriously, there's so much smoking in this. Everyone either has a cigarette dangling from their lips at all times or is thinking about how they wish they had a cigarette dangling from their lips).
Pointing out inaccuracies about physics and gun use and injury in yeehaw romances is the equivalent of asking 'where was the lube?' in bodice rippers -- these are fantasies, guys. Sheesh.
Not a fantasy that is really for me, though, in this case. Like, yeah, I get why some people like books like this, and I did genuinely enjoy some of his descriptions of the land as they plodded across it, and there were some kernels of thought behind certain scenes, but overall, I really don't think that 'All the Pretty Horses' was meant to be taken all that seriously.
A note of caution: if you go into this expecting it to be about horses then you will be disappointed. We are told three ways from Sunday that John Grady loves horses. Loves them, lives for them, breathes for them. But aside from the bit where they're working at the horse ranch in Mexico, they are shockingly absent aside from providing a sort of background aesthetic. Didn't bother me because I, again, am not a 'yeehaw' kind of person, but worth noting.
Overall, I think 'All the Pretty Horses' is worth reading for this quote alone:
"The French have come into my house to mutilate my billiard game. No evil is beyond them." p.146
And no, I won't add context. Read and find out.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Other quotes worth reading:
"He said that no creature can learn that which his heart has not shape to hold." p.111
"Americans have ideas sometimes that are not very practical. They think that there are good things and bad things. They are very superstitious, you know. [...] It is the superstition of a godless people. [...] I see them attack their own property. I saw a man one time destroy his car. With a big martillo [...] because it would not start." p.194
"We know there are qualities to a thing. This car is green. Or it has a certain motor inside. But it cannot be tainted, you see. Or a man. Even a man. There can be in a man some evil. But we don't think it is his own evil. Where did he get it? How did he come to claim it? No. Evil is a true thing in Mexico. It goes about on its own legs. Maybe some day it will come to visit you. Maybe it already has." p.194-195
"The country rolled away to the west through broken light and shadow and the distant summer storms a hundred miles downcountry to where the cordilleras rose and sank in the haze in a frail last shimmering restraint alike of the earth and the eye beholding it." p.225
"If you write properly, you shouldn't have to punctuate," he once said.
Yeah, ok, McCarthy.
Don't get me wrong; I'm no language purist, so by all means play with the language, shape it as you will, but for god's sake don't forget utility. If your only reason for dropping punctuation is 'cuz I felt like it' then don't be surprised if a lot of people find it irritating.
In the same vein, I really didn't understand why neither McCarthy nor the publisher of this edition saw fit to provide a translation for the not infrequent conversations held in Spanish. Much like his cavalier feelings about punctuation, I can only assume that McCarthy thought "if you write properly, you don't have to translate." Or something.
At first I thought this would just be an occasional thing, but once they get into Mexico and are (reasonably) having to use Spanish to communicate most of the time, it got incredibly frustrating to have to skim sometimes an entire page and have no idea what just happened. This could have been kind of fine if it felt like this was meant to be disorienting on purpose/in service to the love letter to northern Mexico that 'All the Pretty Horses' so clearly is. But it didn't always feel like that, especially since our POV character speaks the language fluently, so it doesn't give readers a second-hand version of the experience he has of being isolated linguistically, nor does it really add to the love letter vibe because most of the time the conversations recorded in Spanish could have been skipped by just including the information in the descriptive prose sections.
I dunno, it just, once again, felt like a thoughtless stylistic choice.
As far as my feelings about the actual story are concerned, I'll be upfront in saying that books that fall into what I call the 'yeehaw' genre just aren't really my thing. I've never been a big fan of American literature in general for this reason (Faulkner, my guy, I'm looking hard at you, and Mark Twain too while we're at it).
However, all that about the technical aspects of the writing being said, I was pleasantly surprised by 'No Country for Old Men' and so I tried to keep an open mind when I was reading this one.
The verdict? It was a'ight.
The pacing was a bit all over the place in large part because McCarthy seemed unable to write anything that wasn't a plodding along of characters through the desert or a fast-paced (somewhat improbable) action scene. Like, there was nothing in between. Certain things, like the 'love story' fitted in to create drama while the plot caught up with the characters went by with so little detail and fanfare that I couldn't feel anything about it. Were those two people supposed to be in love? I guess.
The best characters were easily the side characters. Rawlins and Blevins and the aunt Matriarch of the family our two protagonists worked for were really well fleshed out and distinct and I enjoyed the sections with them in it.
John Grady on the other hand not only didn't feel like a teenager, he didn't even feel like the protagonist since he did absolutely nothing to drive the plot until the very, very end, and even that only came about because of action taken earlier in the story by Blevins.
Justice for Blevins, by the way, because this was arguably his story, or at least, he was the emotional core of it, and the only scenes that really made me feel something revolved around his character.
Having already read 'No Country for Old Men' I came ready for the over-the-top, no-way-do-physics-work-like-this action scenes and shootouts and he didn't disappoint. Maybe this style of writing action bothers some people (I seem to recall a number of enraged gun enthusiasts in the reviews for 'No Country' seething and foaming at the mouth because I guess McCarthy name-dropped the wrong gun a few times???) but frankly, McCarthy isn't trying to capture realism in these novels.
These are yeehaw romances, meaning that guns get to do whatever he wants them to do as long as it's cool, and the hero only gets injured so that he can shrug it off with cool and masculine nonchalance while smoking a cigarette (seriously, there's so much smoking in this. Everyone either has a cigarette dangling from their lips at all times or is thinking about how they wish they had a cigarette dangling from their lips).
Pointing out inaccuracies about physics and gun use and injury in yeehaw romances is the equivalent of asking 'where was the lube?' in bodice rippers -- these are fantasies, guys. Sheesh.
Not a fantasy that is really for me, though, in this case. Like, yeah, I get why some people like books like this, and I did genuinely enjoy some of his descriptions of the land as they plodded across it, and there were some kernels of thought behind certain scenes, but overall, I really don't think that 'All the Pretty Horses' was meant to be taken all that seriously.
A note of caution: if you go into this expecting it to be about horses then you will be disappointed. We are told three ways from Sunday that John Grady loves horses. Loves them, lives for them, breathes for them. But aside from the bit where they're working at the horse ranch in Mexico, they are shockingly absent aside from providing a sort of background aesthetic. Didn't bother me because I, again, am not a 'yeehaw' kind of person, but worth noting.
Overall, I think 'All the Pretty Horses' is worth reading for this quote alone:
"The French have come into my house to mutilate my billiard game. No evil is beyond them." p.146
And no, I won't add context. Read and find out.
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Other quotes worth reading:
"He said that no creature can learn that which his heart has not shape to hold." p.111
"Americans have ideas sometimes that are not very practical. They think that there are good things and bad things. They are very superstitious, you know. [...] It is the superstition of a godless people. [...] I see them attack their own property. I saw a man one time destroy his car. With a big martillo [...] because it would not start." p.194
"We know there are qualities to a thing. This car is green. Or it has a certain motor inside. But it cannot be tainted, you see. Or a man. Even a man. There can be in a man some evil. But we don't think it is his own evil. Where did he get it? How did he come to claim it? No. Evil is a true thing in Mexico. It goes about on its own legs. Maybe some day it will come to visit you. Maybe it already has." p.194-195
"The country rolled away to the west through broken light and shadow and the distant summer storms a hundred miles downcountry to where the cordilleras rose and sank in the haze in a frail last shimmering restraint alike of the earth and the eye beholding it." p.225
Maurice by E.M. Forster
4.0
'Bury Your Gays' is by now a well-known and deeply overplayed trope in which queer characters are disproporionately killed off in fiction and film. But that 'killing off' isn't always literal, and it isn't always perpetuated by straight writers. Tragedy and queerness have oft been intertwined even in 'own voices' fiction.
None of that to say that any queer writer drawing from their own experiences is obligated to write inauthetically just for the sake of a happy ending, but it is sad that even in fiction so many queer writers can only imagine our stories ending tragically, particularly those writing at the time of Forster.
Enter: 'Maurice.'
Is it really a spoiler to say that this ends happily when that was Forster's stated intention behind writing the novel in the first place? I'd say not, if for no other reason than that readers wanting something uplifting will know this is a safe bet.
Not to say there isn't struggle in 'Maurice.' Our titular character and his initial love interest struggle terribly, feeling the full weight of societal expectation.
Maurice repeatedly uses the word 'muddle' of the roller coaster of his feelings as he's trying to understand himself as a queer person in a world without the language to describe it.
He's at once confused, exhilerated, anxious, angry...and in love. And the only way he knows how to explain these feelings is: 'degeneracy of the Oscar Wilde sort.' It's no wonder the poor fellow was in a muddle.
It's only when he has his first sexual and romantic experiences while at university that the pieces start to fall into place, and he clings to his first lover, even as it becomes increasingly clear that this person, for a range of reasons, isn't going to give him what he wants in the end.
The section dedicated to Maurice's time at and just after university is a great exploration of the fluidity of sexuality, and how that differs from sexual identity. I.e. having same or opposite sex attraction has only a small bearing on how a person identifies.
And, ultimately, this is what causes the break in Maurice's first relationship; his boyfriend decides he no longer wants to identify as a gay man (though they don't use this word). He expresses that after a lifetime of thinking that he could only love men, he has discovered an attraction to women, and wants to live as a straight man (again, this isn't the language that is used in the novel as this categorization didn't exist when Forster wrote it). This decision isn't presented by Forster as repression or even what we may now call 'internalized homophobia,' but rather as an honest decision. The boyfriend, Clive, explains succinctly that he's simply not in love with Maurice anymore. Shortly thereafter he marries a woman, and in the sections written from his perspective, we see that he honestly loves her and is happy as her husband. This kind of nuanced take on sexuality and identity would be pretty unusual even now in 2021, so it's astonishing how well Forster was able to capture it in the 1910s.
Interestingly, in the afterward in this particular edition, which includes a short essay by Forster, he expresses his dismay that in the time between him writing 'Maurice' and writing that essay society had, in his estimation, become more hostile to queer people, not less. He postulates that this is because people were starting to understand in the post-Kinsey world that acts of 'homosexuality' were more common than most people at the time wanted to know or think about. Bringing that knowledge out into the open, Forster thought, was more than the British could handle, and the notion that some people didn't just dabble, but fell in love, was a bridge too far.
Returning to the novel, we find Maurice, post-breakup. Heartbroken, he falls into a deep depression, convinced, as so many of us are, that his first love was his only chance at happiness.
But, of course, it isn't.
After a half-cocked effort at conversion therapy fails to lesson his attraction to other men, Maurice is convinced he is doomed to a life of lonliness and isolation.
All is not lost, however, and in the end he does get to ride off into the sunset for his happily ever after.
'Maurice' is rich with angles to be tackled from. The exploration of sexuality is the most patent, and it bears mentioning that much of Maurice's 'muddle' is the result of an utter lack of representation. His lonliness, the result of his certainty that Clive was the only other person like him, and that even he would never have offered a real relationship. For Maurice to learn otherwise, he has to meet someone else like himself, who feels very differently to Clive, and who wants that well-rounded relationship too.
Queerness, like any other identity, isn't a monolith, and Forster highlights this beautifully.
Class is the other major theme in the novel, though the weaker of the two. Forster definitely seemed to want to say something about how it constrains people, and about how the upper classes, even when their own estates are in decline, look down on the hoi polloi. There was something there, but it felt at times a bit ham-fisted and slightly inconsistant, and the 'Lady and the Tramp' sort of vibe at the end verged on caricature. Unfortunate, considering how delicately Forster handles so much of the front half of the novel. Perhaps with 100 or so more pages it would have had enough room to breathe, but as it stands, the climax feels rushed and a bit unearned.
Still, despite the thematic and pacing issues at the finish line, the front half and even the novelty of a happy ending earns 'Maurice' a solid place in the queer literary canon. I would definitely sooner hand this to young queer people than something like 'Giovanni's Room' or films like 'Brokeback Mountain.' A great and important novel in its own right, and a well-regarded film, but just like straight kids first get introduced to romance with fairytale endings, queer youth deserve to know that in fiction, as in real life, they too can have happily ever afters.
None of that to say that any queer writer drawing from their own experiences is obligated to write inauthetically just for the sake of a happy ending, but it is sad that even in fiction so many queer writers can only imagine our stories ending tragically, particularly those writing at the time of Forster.
Enter: 'Maurice.'
Is it really a spoiler to say that this ends happily when that was Forster's stated intention behind writing the novel in the first place? I'd say not, if for no other reason than that readers wanting something uplifting will know this is a safe bet.
Not to say there isn't struggle in 'Maurice.' Our titular character and his initial love interest struggle terribly, feeling the full weight of societal expectation.
Maurice repeatedly uses the word 'muddle' of the roller coaster of his feelings as he's trying to understand himself as a queer person in a world without the language to describe it.
He's at once confused, exhilerated, anxious, angry...and in love. And the only way he knows how to explain these feelings is: 'degeneracy of the Oscar Wilde sort.' It's no wonder the poor fellow was in a muddle.
It's only when he has his first sexual and romantic experiences while at university that the pieces start to fall into place, and he clings to his first lover, even as it becomes increasingly clear that this person, for a range of reasons, isn't going to give him what he wants in the end.
The section dedicated to Maurice's time at and just after university is a great exploration of the fluidity of sexuality, and how that differs from sexual identity. I.e. having same or opposite sex attraction has only a small bearing on how a person identifies.
And, ultimately, this is what causes the break in Maurice's first relationship; his boyfriend decides he no longer wants to identify as a gay man (though they don't use this word). He expresses that after a lifetime of thinking that he could only love men, he has discovered an attraction to women, and wants to live as a straight man (again, this isn't the language that is used in the novel as this categorization didn't exist when Forster wrote it). This decision isn't presented by Forster as repression or even what we may now call 'internalized homophobia,' but rather as an honest decision. The boyfriend, Clive, explains succinctly that he's simply not in love with Maurice anymore. Shortly thereafter he marries a woman, and in the sections written from his perspective, we see that he honestly loves her and is happy as her husband. This kind of nuanced take on sexuality and identity would be pretty unusual even now in 2021, so it's astonishing how well Forster was able to capture it in the 1910s.
Interestingly, in the afterward in this particular edition, which includes a short essay by Forster, he expresses his dismay that in the time between him writing 'Maurice' and writing that essay society had, in his estimation, become more hostile to queer people, not less. He postulates that this is because people were starting to understand in the post-Kinsey world that acts of 'homosexuality' were more common than most people at the time wanted to know or think about. Bringing that knowledge out into the open, Forster thought, was more than the British could handle, and the notion that some people didn't just dabble, but fell in love, was a bridge too far.
Returning to the novel, we find Maurice, post-breakup. Heartbroken, he falls into a deep depression, convinced, as so many of us are, that his first love was his only chance at happiness.
But, of course, it isn't.
After a half-cocked effort at conversion therapy fails to lesson his attraction to other men, Maurice is convinced he is doomed to a life of lonliness and isolation.
All is not lost, however, and in the end he does get to ride off into the sunset for his happily ever after.
'Maurice' is rich with angles to be tackled from. The exploration of sexuality is the most patent, and it bears mentioning that much of Maurice's 'muddle' is the result of an utter lack of representation. His lonliness, the result of his certainty that Clive was the only other person like him, and that even he would never have offered a real relationship. For Maurice to learn otherwise, he has to meet someone else like himself, who feels very differently to Clive, and who wants that well-rounded relationship too.
Queerness, like any other identity, isn't a monolith, and Forster highlights this beautifully.
Class is the other major theme in the novel, though the weaker of the two. Forster definitely seemed to want to say something about how it constrains people, and about how the upper classes, even when their own estates are in decline, look down on the hoi polloi. There was something there, but it felt at times a bit ham-fisted and slightly inconsistant, and the 'Lady and the Tramp' sort of vibe at the end verged on caricature. Unfortunate, considering how delicately Forster handles so much of the front half of the novel. Perhaps with 100 or so more pages it would have had enough room to breathe, but as it stands, the climax feels rushed and a bit unearned.
Still, despite the thematic and pacing issues at the finish line, the front half and even the novelty of a happy ending earns 'Maurice' a solid place in the queer literary canon. I would definitely sooner hand this to young queer people than something like 'Giovanni's Room' or films like 'Brokeback Mountain.' A great and important novel in its own right, and a well-regarded film, but just like straight kids first get introduced to romance with fairytale endings, queer youth deserve to know that in fiction, as in real life, they too can have happily ever afters.