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(Part 2: I’m on holiday, I’ve been saving them up)
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction was an odd read. As amusing and unrealistic as ever, even so there’s a growing sense that horror and tragedy will overcome the comedy by the end of the book, and while it’s averted somewhat, couple that with a narrator hemmed in by personal debt, disillusion and inappropriate relationships, it’s an uncomfortable, strained read. Resonant too. Quite interesting, I suppose, that Townsend uses her self-deluded chronicler to look at current living and, bypassing easier targets, picks out the basic idea of stress, and of being out of place and out of one’s depth, as the basic makeup of how people are living now. I don’t know though, it’s obviously quite an effective technique bringing back Moley to see where we’re all at now, but it’s a bit like an old favourite you’ve had one too many times, there’s a strain on the narrative trying to keep all the old characters together and find out how they’re doing as well. Part of me, I confess, would have been happier if we’d left observing Mole a couple of books ago, when he finally seemed to growing up and out of his self-delusions, rather than watching him fall back into them. I know life’s not always like that but…
I’ve also been reading Jennifer Toth’s The Mole People, about the denizens, the people, who live or lived in the tunnels beneath New York City. Not much point in commenting about the writing style here, it’s serviceable enough, fairly detached an unemotional until the writer has to tell us how she fled New York under threat from one of her guides. Really it’s just a fascinating look at the lives of people who whether from choice or under the influence of drugs or alcohol or mental illness went to live wholly or partially in these tunnels. And the details of the mini-societies they formed there aren’t that surprising or engrossing, Toth’s quite clear that for all their talk of a rejection of aboveground society these groups are often comprised of those with the least number of choices in society – but the fact that one of those choices is to live in relative safety and comfort underground, sometimes several levels underground, is fantastic and fascinating, even at the same time as the stories of those individuals brought to make that choice can be quite moving. There’s been some discussion of the reliability of Toth’s account, as can be followed here and here, and the book’s about fifteen years old now, so buyer beware basically. Anyone who knows offhand more up to date info on the current situation feel free to let me know, if even half of it’s true it’s still a fascinating situation, and the book’s worth a read if you likes your urban legends, or, y’know, heavily into The Fantastic Four or something.
And then there’s the long-awaited Resplendent, the fourth part of Stephen Baxter’s Destiny’s Children series. And it’s great. I think Baxter’s a fantastic writer that manages to combine speculation about future scientific usage with a strong set of central themes. Resplendent is actually a series of linked short stories, each set in different periods of the other books in the series, and about the only criticism is that it’s quite easy to lose track of where the stories fall in the timeline/universe that he’s set up in previous novels and shorts. It did make me ponder the idea of digging them all out and reading them in one go, which can’t be a bad thing. These stories, the whole series in fact, can be read as filling in some of the detail of Baxter’s earlier Xeelee sequence from humanity’s perspective, and it’s to his credit that they don’t detract from the majestic imponderability of the greater story, we never really learn more about the Xeelee, just more about human society as Baxter imagines it moving. I think where Baxter excels, here and in other books, is in his writing when he draws on the basic belief in life’s ability to prevail, and adapt to its environment, and thrive, and matching that with an up close awareness of both the strengths of life, particularly human life’s malleability, and the horrors that can persist when ideas shape life towards a single purpose like war, and a detached appreciation of scale that surrounds the whole thing. I suppose read one way it’s quite a grim collection: individual lives subject to history and pessimism about the luxury of human values, mankind is enslaved, made free, and expands, breeding like vermin until it can confront an unbeatable enemy simply because it’s there and because expansion and conflict are the only things holding a galactic society together. But within that, again there’s that hope, that willingness to see the individual’s desires and actions within the greater scheme of history, and a celebration even of malformed societies and individuals because it’s a demonstration of life finding its way and constantly being subject to pressure to change. That’s what I got out of it anyway. That and the big spaceships.
About halfway through the Mortal Engines series, the enthusiastic invention of the first book has sort of given way to a quite grim sequence of events by the second, fleeing the mass obliteration of a city, our young heroes facing death, adultery, betrayal, kidnap, more betrayal, self-loathing, more death, blackmail. I’m sort of hoping my light reading gets a bit, well, lighter soon…
The Book Thief next.
Um, that’ll be Death and Nazi Germany then won’t it? Sigh. |
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