An Anxious Man Reads

Proud Member of the Cannonball Read IV

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Anxiousman's #CBR4 Review #03: Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

The famous playwright Anton Chekov once wrote, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” After finishing China Miéville’s sci-fi, fantasy epic “Perdido Street Station” I can best describe it as a brilliantly lit and dressed stage littered with unfired rifles. It’s a shame, because the set-pieces that Miéville develops in his fantastic world of ‘Bas-Lag’, and its principal city of ‘New Crobuzon’, are varied, imaginative, and frequently inspired. Unfortunately, and ironically given the 700+ page length of the novel, ‘Perido Street Station’ is stuffed with too many unfulfilled plotlines, half-realized ideas, and under-developed characters to create a satisfying reading experience.

It’s an experience that only hurts because Miéville clearly isn’t lacking for talent or imagination. The story follows a cast of disparate characters through a whimsical and grotesque world where magic, steam-power, and traditional science mesh together in a beautifully organic, tumbling, monstrous city populated by humans, bug-people, frog-men and monsters.  Our troop of protagonists inadvertently release several nigh-unstoppable monsters into the populace and then must attempt to undo their error while dodging the government, the military, the monsters themselves, and several shadowy organizations including a sentient robot-god and a drug cartel led by a frankenstein’s-monster-esque tyrant.

I’d love to give you further analysis of the protagonists, but I’m just as uninterested in them as Miéville was while writing them. This is where the novel falls apart: Miéville succeeds beautifully at nurturing bizarre concepts into engaging plot-hooks (just re-read the synopsis above and try NOT to get excited), and then expends no effort on further detail or character development to advance the hooks into an enjoyable story. The most fully realized characters are side characters that disappear from the novel for hundreds of pages at a time, and whose story arcs are terminated brutally with minimal resolution when the main arc is complete. Meanwhile, main protagonists who follow the majority of the plot’s primary action, such as Derkhan Blueday, receive no backstory and minimal motivation. I frequently forgot that Derkhan was a woman while reading, and did not realize she had a last name until I double-checked my spelling on Wikipedia.

Instead of falling in love with his characters, Miéville fell in love with his city of New Crobuzon and devotes pages and pages of prose to its shambling, polluted, ugly-beautiful bulk. This would be fine, even beneficial, except that there’s too much of it, and its placement destroys any overall flow of action the exciting monster-chase produces. For example, an absolutely nail-biting, action-filled fight in which our heroes strike a deadly blow to the monsters while escaping by the skin of their teeth is followed by ten pages of anonymous, nameless characters laying cable in the painstakingly described streets of New Crobuzon. These streets, and their characters, are never seen again.

This is a hard review to write because I want to recommend the book very badly. Its ideas are great, and there are a dozen exciting stories that could have been crafted out of the raw fabric Miéville has spun. Unfortunately, Miéville just can’t get out of his own way long enough to tell the story that needs to be told. Instead he squanders his gifts on describing a fascinating, but ultimately lifeless city instead of the engaging wonders 

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Anxiousman's #CBR4 Review #02: Bossypants by Tina Fey

The direct flight from JFK Airport, New York to Narita Airport, Japan, is possibly the longest single event I’ve ever experienced. Easily longer (and more productive) than my four-year undergraduate education, or the entirety of my childhood. During the fourteen hours in the air, I finished reading one novel (The Coming of Conan), watched two movies, ate two meals, embarrassed myself several times in front of the Japanese stewardesses by being painfully American, and read the entirety of Tina Fey’s ‘Bossypants’ in a single sitting. 

This compressed consumption of ‘Bossypants’ brings it’s merits and faults into sharp focus. Fey writes as if she’s relating a funny story to you personally over drinks in the comfort of her apartment, and for someone who looks upon storytelling with friends and alcohol (alcohol is also my friend) as one of the high-points of life, it’s a very welcoming and engaging setting.

Writing about everything from childhood to the her experiences impersonating Sarah Palin, ‘Bossypants’ covers a lot of ground, but don’t make the mistake of assuming this is a complete, or even organized, view of Fey’s life. Again, ‘Bossypants’ feels more like a stream-of-consciousness conversation than a measured and paced written work.  Fey describes her sketch-comedy training with the legendary Chicago-based Second City sketch troupe, and improv’s modus operandi of ‘keep going’ and ‘don’t look back’ reflects in her prose. It never devoles into rambling, but there are moments when it pushes the boundary.

This fast and loose style creates the only drawback I had with the book. Throughout the entire work, Fey maintains a recognizable pattern and flow to her setups and punchlines, and because sometimes punchlines are shoe-horned into this prescribed rhythm, they just don’t work. It’s as if Fey feels that each paragraph is a sketch in-and-of itself, and needs to be punctuated with that, ‘gotcha!’ finale to justify its’ existence. Largely it works, but there are enough misses to make their presence felt.

A perfect contrast to highlight Fey’s approach to storytelling is to pair David Foster Wallace’s essay about his cruise-ship experience: “A Supposedly Fun Thing Which I’ll Never Do Again” with Fey’s chapter about her own disastrous cruise experience (which she titles ‘My Honeymoon, or a Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again Either’  in salute to DFW). DFW brings a measured pace to his narrative, highlighting not only the openly hilarious aspects (such as his participation in a beautiful-legs contest), but also the quietly humorous pathos of his agoraphobia shoved into the floating, claustrophobic, food-based funhouse of cruise line life, and litters the A-to-B ride with poignant, sometimes touching, sometimes disturbing, vignettes of his interactions with everything from a child-chess prodigy being whipped along by an iron-handed matriarch to the overtly jubilant, but secretly terrified, crew members surviving in a military-esque, naval regime.

Fey, on the other hand, tells a hilarious, comedy-of-errors account of her honeymoon with a cruise ship that nearly bursts aflame at sea, forcing a husband terrified to fly onto a plane after said disaster, and fellow cruisers returning cans of soda to ask for diet in the middle of genuine crisis. It’s great fun, and it’s a quick easy read, but it never develops a gentle rhythm or flow, and the closest we get to poignant vignettes are descriptions of towels folded to look like animals in their cabin room . Each paragraph ends with a punchline, and therefore it feels like the story could stop on any line, robbing itself of a genuine buildup and payoff. Another way to put it: if one were making filmed adaptations of these two works, DFW’s essay would be a short film. Fey’s would be a series of SNL sketches.

This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a different ride, and it doesn’t change the fact that ‘Bossypants’ is FUCKING HILARIOUS. You can’t fault the book for not being what it was never intended to be. It’s not a deep retrospective memoir marked with streaks of humor. It’s a laugh-a-minute thrill ride where punchline were thrown at the wall and we laugh at what sticks. Thankfully, Fey is a pretty good shot when it comes to hurling punchlines. My Kindle marks nine separate passages that made me laugh hard enough to wake up fellow passengers. Just picture a single guy, in the bowels of a 747, sitting on an entirely dark plane except for a sole reading light, shoving his complimentary airlines-blanket into his mouth to avoid ruining the sleep of everyone around him. That’s the effect of ‘Bossypants’. If that’s not an endorsement for a humor book, I don’t know what is.

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Anxiousman's #CBR4 Review #01: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus doesn't need another Cannonball Read review, as I picked up the novel after seeing the slew of recommendations on the 2011 Cannonball Read Wrap-up, but I’ll add my voice to the chorus praising Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel.

Set in late 19th century Europe, ‘The Night Circus’ follows two apprentice magicians, Celia and Marco, who’ve been selected and magically compelled from childhood by two master magicians to compete against one another in an undefined competition. After much deliberation and machinations from the master magicians involving many parties, both knowing and unknowing, a genuinely supernatural traveling circus, ‘The Circus of Dreams’, becomes the arena for a still-undefined competition between apprentices. As they reach adulthood and perfect their opposing styles of magic, Celia and Marco enter a game of one-ups-manship producing otherworldly circus attractions while endeavoring to identify their opponent and the very rules of their competition.

Morgenstern does an excellent job producing an exciting plot line, but it’s her use of story structure and rich character interactions that push the narrative into a compelling read. A desire to see how Celia’s and Marco’s competition resolves keeps the reader turning pages, but it’s the fanciful descriptions of the beautiful, ethereal circus and the men, women, and children that populate it which bring the novel to life.

Oftentimes, Celia and Marco take a backseat to an entirely unique cast of characters, from the mysterious Japanese contortionist Tsukiko to the magically gifted twins Widget and Poppet, as they struggle to bring a sense of sanity and resolution to an increasingly unsustainable event. As the circus and the intense competition it contains veers more and more out of control, it’s the unexpected actions of the supporting characters and their diverse motivations that provide the satisfying meat of the tale.

These characters and their storylines are built around a consciously structured and time-lined backbone emphasizing not only the passage of time, but the growth and importance of the circus itself. Interrupting the normal flow of chapters, the novel often switches to a first person perspective as a typical circus-goer would experience the impossible ‘Circus of Dreams’. While a serious gamble on the part of the author, potentially steering the story into the childish or banal, these glimpses build a genuine sense of wonder, making the circus not only truly magical, but a destination I’d want to experience in the real world.

My only negative statements of the novel fall into two categories, the first simply being that it’s largely a romance tale, which typically isn’t my cup of tea. It never veers off into bodice-ripping territory; glistening bodies in the moonlight and lovingly whispered sonnets over balconies, but there were moments when the line was pushed. Secondly, the resolution of the story was paced too quickly, leaving too many characters and details unresolved for my liking. I’m not suggesting that the ending is incomplete, but when Morgenstern has done such fantastic job producing interesting, intriguing, and often mysterious characters, I was disappointed not to receive more complete disclosures of their lives. But perhaps, for a story about a fantastic circus where not all is what it seems, that is the point.

In any case, I firmly recommend this novel to just about anybody. Erin Morgenstern succeeds in producing an excellent, engaging, well-crafted novel interlaced with a truly inspired tone of wonder. For any author, ‘The Night Circus’ would be a superb accomplishment, but for a first time novelist it’s stellar.