Book Review -- FRANKENSTEIN, or A MODERN PROMETHEUS by Mary Wollenstonecraft Shelley

"These thoughts supported my spirits, while I pursued my undertaking with unremitting ardour. My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of certainty, I failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might realize. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless and almost frantic impulse urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion."

Thus, the modern Prometheus of the title goes about his work, setting himself upon a path that would lead him to commit one of the greatest sins possible--rejection and loathing for one's own child.

Mary Shelley is the daughter of Mary Wollenstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and William Godwin (author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice), and the wife of Percy Bisshe Shelley, the renowned Romantic poet who died at a tragically young age in a shipwreck in the mid-1820s.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein after vacationing in Switzerland with her husband and a few other notables, including the Romantic poet Byron, when they all agreed to attempt to write a ghost story. Only Mary Shelley actually managed to scrawl out an entire novel, the rest were better at poetry than prose, apparently.

Frankenstein is a horror novel, but the horror is personal and internal, not external. It is a very tragic tale, in which the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, is a self-absorbed "Prometheus" who is so engaged in the prospect of creating life from the base material parts that he doesn't consider the reality of what he is creating. Daydreams of being worshiped as the creator of a new species are dashed at the awakening of his "monster," which he perceives as hideous and malformed only once the animating spark is endowed. Frankenstein's great sin, however, is not the creation of his monster, but his sudden and irrational rejection of it. Indeed, the monster is not much of one, at the beginning, but becomes one when he learns only cruelty and hate from the humans that surround him.

This is an incredibly misunderstood book, in my opinion. The horror is not actually of the monster, but of the black depths of the human soul--our fear and revulsion of that which we do not understand. H.P. Lovecraft wrote that the oldest and strongest emotion in humans was fear, and the oldest and strongest fear was that of the unknown. This terror in the face of the ugly and unfamiliar can lead to hate and abuse--the sort of treatment that the monster suffers. It learns, at the hands of humankind, to be a murderer and to avenge its wretched existence against its tormentors, and it focuses its hatred on the man most responsible for his miserable state--Dr. Victor Frankenstein.

There isn't much that I can say after having read Harold Bloom's "Afterword" (from the Signet Classics August 2000 printing). In his words, Frankenstein "is an important book, though it is only a strong, flawed novel with frequent clumsiness in its narrative and characterization," but nevertheless "contains one of the most vivid versions we have of the Romantic mythology of the self, one that resembles Blake's Book of Urizen, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Byron's Manfred... ."

I've not read those works, but Bloom gives enough of a representation for Prometheus Unbound in his "Afterword" that you can get a gist, and I'm familiar with Blake's interesting mythology and prophetic poetry. Indeed, Mary Shelley's work is rife with references to a great many inspirational works--one of which is Milton's Paradise Lost, which plays a vital role in educating the monster and is perhaps the catalyst that sets him in vengeful antagonism against Frankenstein.

I will leave the analysis to others far more suited than I, and the Signet Classics edition has a decent bibliography for further references. Nevertheless, I'll endeavor to assess the work, though I can only doubt my qualifications to undertake so daunting a task.

First, the story itself is deep, but not entirely eventful. Those expecting a tale full of dreadful screams and horrific acts of brutality might find themselves disappointed. In Aeschyline style (can I say that, or must I say Aschylus-esque?), most of the murders take place "offstage" although the details of one are relayed through flashback.

The horror, however, comes forth through how these murders impact the psyche of Victor Frankenstein. Each one drives him further and further from something human and deeper into a sort of animalistic desperation. In this, as the analysts often note, the dichotomy of Frankenstein and his monster crystallizes, and the two are revealed to simply be reflections of one-another. Thus, the horror is created in the mind of Frankenstein himself, as well as the monster, who had suffered at the hands of humanity indescribably during his brief period of innocence.

Second, the prose itself feels a bit forced at times. It is revealed in the Forward that Percy Shelley edited much of the novel, and is responsible for some of its unnecessary verbosity. Although at times, the prose can be exquisite, at other times, it can be wantonly purple. I felt the hand of Percy throughout the novel strongly, simply because there were times when the dialogue and the description of things were stretched. Brevity was ignored in some places, and the forward even pointed out a number of instances where a plain, quick, and simple sentence was made needlessly complex by Percy for the sake of satisfying his poetic taste. While this might work in meter, I don't think it works quite well in prose, which may be one of the reasons many poets don't seem to make good prose writers and vice versa.

At these moments I wept bitterly and wished that peace would revisit my mind only that I might afford them consolation and happiness. But that could not be. Remorse extinguished every hope. I had been the author of unalterable evils, and I lived in daily fear lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness. I had an obscure feeling that all was not over and that he would still commit some signal crime, which by its enormity should almost efface the recollection of the past. There was always scope for fear so long as anything I loved remained behind. My abhorrence of this fiend cannot be conceived. When I thought of him I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly bestowed. When I reflected on his crimes and malice, my hatred and revenge burst all bounds of moderation. I would have made a pilgrimage to the highest peak of the Andes, could I when there have precipitated him to their base.

It's beautiful, it's descriptive, it's poetic, but it slows down the narrative to a snail's crawl at times. I won't say much about it, though, because at least the Shelleys are doing something with the language rather than simply rattling on about the temperatures of tea or going on and on about a certain woman's rich appearance like someone we know. This is, therefore, an extremely minor nitpick, but the Shelleys engage in this sort of poetic rabbit-trail so often it does become tiresome at times.

Nevertheless, aside from that complaint, I must admit the novel, though around 180 pages, seemed awfully short. I read it on the subway over a period of two weeks, while reading other books. This adds up to probably about six or at worst seven hours spent on the novel alone, not including the forward and afterword. Perhaps it is because I had become so accustomed to reading long, meandering history books or epic fantasy novels spanning 400+ pages (at minimum) that Mary Shelley's novel seemed to simply fly past (with small print, in fact!).

Though it feels like the novel has few events within it's brief 26 chapters, it is, nevertheless, quite the page-turner. Though at times the verbosity of the prose caused my mind to drift a few times and I found myself having to re-read whole pages, I still found myself pulled through the book by the plot. Though most of the characters are a bit too archetypal to seem anything more than the two-dimensional models they are, I found the monster and Victor Frankenstein to be quite interesting. His love and hate seem almost arbitrary depending on what he wants at any given time, whereas the monster's desires seem somewhat stable and unchanging. This makes them more interesting than the stock-characters that populate the rest of the novel with their overly predictable behavior. It is difficult to sympathize with Victor Frankenstein, for from the very moment his creation breathes life, he casts the eight-foot-tall infant from him, and the two years that it wanders and sojourns in squalor teaches it to be as cruel as the humans into which it had blundered. The monster should invoke our pity, as should his victims. Nevertheless, I still felt for Victor Frankenstein's losses at the hands of his monster, partially because of the imbalance--Frankenstein gave life and little else, but the monster took away from Frankenstein that which he himself had wanted.

The impact of the book is incredible, and has spawned a great many adaptations, some of which are more faithful than others. There is, of course, the classic 1931 James Wale film starring Boris Karloff as the monster (often mistakenly named for the doctor) and Colin Clive as Henry (note the name change) Frankenstein. The film has become the most iconic representation of the story, recognizable to everyone, and reflects the technological advances of the century between the novel's publication and the movie release by adding an electrical element in the re-animation of the dead matter. As a pop culture touchstone, it's weight is everywhere, and Colin Clive's ecstatic cries of "It's alive, it's alive!" express heartfelt jubilation to present a perfect counterpoint to the terror that will be unleashed.

The irony is that the film did irreparable damage to people's understanding of the book. The focus went from Victor Frankenstein's heartless rejection of the monster and the fruits of his own cruelty to Henry Frankenstein's desire to "play God" and the repercussions of his hubris. The most humorous treatment to come out of the pop culture cauldron is probably Mel Brooks' The Young Frankenstein (ahem, FrankenSTIEN), where the doctor and the monster forge a loving bond with one-another, reversing the tragedy of the novel for comedic purpose.

All-in-all, the book is far more important for the ideas it conveys than for the style in which it was written, or the complexity of the plot itself. The ideas are incredibly powerful, and lace the narrative with a great deal of meaning that goes far beyond the simple passage of events. Mary Shelley's invocation of such works as Paradise Lost and the monster's "education" should make the importance of the ideas themselves abundantly clear to the reader. Therefore, this book has earned quite high marks. It shouldn't just serve as a cautionary tale to scientists, but also as a source of moral challenge to the reader, who will find the both Frankenstein and his monster simultaneously abhorrent and pitiable.

Frankenstein, or A Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollenstonecraft Shelley
Style A-
Substance A
Overall A-

My Short-Lived Conan Campaign

Back in graduate school, I had barely enough time to run a very short-lived Hyborian campaign, using the D20 Conan the Roleplaying Game rules from Mongoose Publishing. Conan is not the kind of setting that an OD&D game would really fit well with, I'd think. Why? Well, simply because OD&D seems more at home with a mega-dungeon. Reading through James' Dwimmermount posts at Grognardia, Justin A.'s reactions to OD&D at The Alexandrian, and reading through the White Box rules myself, I've come to the conclusion that OD&D is more at home in the mega-dungeon than anyplace else.

Yeah, Robert E. Howard is a huge influence on OD&D, and the pulpy stories that he and others (like Fritz Leiber) wrote, with scoundrels and ne'er-do-wells adventuring for quickly-spent fortunes being at the heart of the game's flavor--but that flavor is also very much effected by the mega-dungeon, something that Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber do NOT dwell on. Dungeon settings pop up in their stories, but never one huge, oft-revisited, re-delved, evolving labyrinth.

A Hyborian adventure lends itself to two types of games, in my opinion--the city game or the wilderness game--exact opposites of what the mega-dungeon game involves. In the mega-dungeon game, the sandbox approach works incredibly well. The players and DM together, through play, create the world. There are maybe one or two bases of operation, and one big, bad dungeon that is repeatedly delved, deeper and deeper each time. But the city and wilderness games require a more definite approach.

I ran my game in Shadizar, capital of Zamora and City of Wickedness. The city game needs a pretty detailed setting, so I went to mine ideas from the Shadizar--City of Wickedness boxed set by Vincent Darlage. Yeah, I don't recommend it. The original map for the book was a joke, and the setting details were completely culled from pastiche sources, like the cheesy Conan books by Robert Jordan and the comic books. Now, I'm not knocking the pastiche, but it's not Howard, and honestly, if it's not going to be Howard, it may as well be cooked up in Darlage's own head. All of the locations were all taken from the pastiche books, all the gods from the comics, and none of it was Darlage's. There was a single adventure in there, entitled "Dark Dens of Iniquity." At its core, there could be a decent adventure. You have some interesting characters with neat motivations, but the adventure itself is basically the PCs being railroaded from one encounter to the next with really very little coherent plot development--as a railroad adventure "Dark Dens of Iniquity" even failed! But there were some really good feats (like "Eyes of the Magpie") and a few decent prestige classes in the books to make it worthwhile, plus a few tables on slaves, kidnapping, and prostitution that could be useful. And Mongoose had the good graces to produce a better map of the city for download on their website.

So, I decided to bust out my trusty pen and pencil and completely rework the adventure and city from the ground up. I spent money on the boxed set, and thankfully, a second map was released online for me to download and use. I mined some other sources for ideas, namely the Scarred Land's Shelzar--City of Sins (the similarity in names is NOT a coincidence), Planescape's In the Cage--A Guide to Sigil (for general weirdness), Dark Sun's The City-State of Tyr (for the harshness of setting), and the Forgotten Realms' City of Splendors boxed set (the 2nd edition masterpiece, not that 3rd edition abortion of a crunch catalog). I went through some of Robert Jordan's pastiche books for some locations and characters that Darlage didn't include. And I wrote up pages of notes on the pantheon, factions, politics, people, and locations throughout the city--notes that I can still pick up anytime I want to try and run a Shadizar game again (and I fully intend to do so when I return to the States from Korea). I had neighborhoods mapped, a few inns, merchants' homes, noble houses, and caravanserais.

My kind of sandbox is a bit different from many of the grognards' sandboxes--the sand isn't the world, but the actions and deeds of the players. The shovels, molds, and other tools/toys for shaping the sand are the rules-set and the setting design. The more thorough, the more it gives the players to work with.

Despite how short-lived it was, it was pretty successful with the two who played it, Jason and Kyle. It lasted about four sessions and went halfway through a story-arc. Given the characters in Vincent Darlage's "Dark Dens of Iniquity" I managed to create a pretty compelling adventure that would make a decent pulp novella had it run its course.

My GMing philosophy ran like this:

1. Don't prep plots, prep situations. Now, I didn't actually put it like that at the time--I instead said "don't railroad, make it free-form." Justin Alexander said, "Don't prep plots, prep situations" first, and he honestly says it better than I can.

2. Prepping the situation required characters and motivations. I took the characters Darlage provided me, adjusted names, occupations, and personalities to fit what I wanted better.

3. Take Raymond Chandler's advice: Whenever things start to slow down, have someone kick in the door with a gun. Robert E. Howard wasn't the only pulp writer out there, and he wrote a lot more than just Conan stories. Mine them for ideas and principles. Run your game like its a pulp story. Therefore, if the characters are stumped, stuck, or not sure what to do next, throw them something to make them start moving again. I had a gang of thieves and cutthroats who's leader wanted the PCs dead (they humiliated him almost immediately) and owed the badguys money for just this purpose. He and his gang were just the sort of characters the players loved to hate.

4. Use a MacGuffin. And what better MacGuffin than the Heart of the Elephant! At first, they didn't even know what it was, but when they finally realized what they had stolen, they were terrified. No wonder the King and this crazy evil sorceress are after us! They have no idea how to use such a powerful magical item (which limits their ability to break the game), but there's the possibility that, over time, they could unlock its secrets. But its a dangerous artifact, and a lot of people are going to be after them to get it! MacGuffins can get overused, yeah, but they're a staple of hardboiled stories and pulp ever since The Maltese Falcon.

5. "The only way out is to go deeper." Halfway through session 3, when Kyle's character turned to Jason's and said, "This is too big for us. How do we get out of this mess," Jason's responded with this line. (And he was very happy that he actually had an opportunity to say something like this in a game.) This sums up a lot of hardboiled pulp stories. Granted, they're different from sword-&-sorcery tales, but a lot of themes, pacing, and action are the same, so there's no reason not to mine the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Mickey Spillane for storytelling techniques. Create a conspiracy or two, devise factions, and throw the PCs in the middle of the whole mess.

6. They're writing the story, not you. You just set the pins up. Let them knock them down (or get knocked down by the pins themselves). Let your world react to the PCs. They're the ones the story's about. If they do nothing, the world moves on. If they act, react in a logical manner. Throw them challenges, see if they have the wits to survive. Remember, Conan wasn't stupid, and he lived by his wits just as much as he did by his sword.

The end result was a lot of fun. The game didn't end due to lack of enthusiasm, but because work on my MA thesis was ramping up big-time and Jason and Kyle were writing papers and preparing for exams themselves. After my MA thesis was done, I graduated and came to Korea, so we never did manage to pick the game back up. There are a number of story-arcs I'd wanted to explore--one or two were spawned simply by decisions the PCs made during their game (such as the debt to the mysterious information broker). But when I return from Korea, I definitely want to resurrect the game and see what I can do with the twisted webs, dark conspiracies, weird sorcery, and deadly secrets that await in Shadizar, the City of Wickedness.

Book Review -- THE SIGN OF THE LABRYS by Margaret St. Clair

I saw this review over at the Alexandrian for Margaret St. Clair's The Sign of the Labrys. What is noteworthy about this novel is that it is one of two by the author listed in Gary Gygax's Appendix N, a list of works that inspired the Dungeons & Dragons game. James Maliszewski over at Grognardia posted a review of her other novel, The Shadow People.

Interest piqued, I ordered Sign of the Labrys used over amazon, had it mailed with my seasonal care package from home to Korea, and put it on the shelf. It took me two days to read it (and the only reason it took so long is because I am so busy). The book barely makes it to its 139th page, which is actually quite short, even as may mid-20th-century pulps seem to go.

The first thing I would like to point out about this book is the back cover blurb:


It claims that this work is "ORIGINAL!BRILLIANT!!DAZZLING!!!...FRESH!IMAGINATIVE!!INVENTIVE!!!" Aside from my amusement at the multiplying exclamation points, I have to say that, while Margaret St. Clair's The Sign of the Labrys was entertaining, I can't say that there is any great deal of originality or all of that.

The story starts out with a pretty compelling setting--it is a post-apocalyptic future brought about by plague in which 1 out of every 10 people survived. Society breaks down, but there are vast stores of food that prevent starvation, so people don't really need to work. A main feature of the setting is a vast underground refuge complex, built in case of nuclear holocaust. Much of the population has become very agoraphobic, and they live spread out from one-another both in the emptied cities and in these large underground labyrinths.

The setting is actually the most interesting aspect of the book. St. Clair combines the post-apocalyptic settings of nuclear holocaust literature with fantasy and gives the collapse of society a totally non-nuclear cause. In addition, St. Clair's humanity learns to survive not by being murderous or barbaric, but completely isolationist. Essentially, most of the characters are hermits that fear other people (mostly because of contagion).

The primary reason to read this book, honestly, is to see where Gygax (and perhaps his players) came up with some of the ideas for Dungeons & Dragons. In this case, perhaps, utility spell use during dungeon exploration and problem-solving techniques. The main characters almost never confront their opponents in hand-to-hand combat, but instead utilize trickery, stealth, and strategy to defeat their antagonists. This reminds me of a story I read on the RPG.net forums:

I played a Magic User in Greyhawk .. THE Greyhawk... for a while. Up to 6th or 7th level when I retired him because I was tired of him and went back to my 8th level fighter.

My favorite adventure was as a 1st level MU. I had heard about an entrance to the 3rd level of Greyhawk and went down. Alone. With 3 HP and a Charm Person spell. Just me. A 1st level MU. In Greyhawk Castle. With Gary Gygax reffing.

I hit 2nd level at the end of the night with enough XP to be one shy of 3rd. I ran, I snuck, I threw lanterns (fire, oil, and a handle in one convenient package!), I ran, and I ran some more. It was still one of the best single evenings of gaming I've ever had.

Attitudes aside, this is what struck me about the characters in The Sign of the Labrys. It was as if they were wandering through Castle Greyhawk with only their wits, a single charm person spell, and a couple of lanterns to throw. The labyrinth in the novel is, in many ways, an archetypal megadungeon. It is laced with secret doors, special rooms, various servitors and defenders, and all sorts of interesting tricks and mechanisms. It is huge and fathomless and full of mysteries.

Unfortunately, the labyrinth is the most interesting part of the entire book. Once you are past the novelty of reading a book that perhaps inspired some of the gameplay and dungeon design of Gary Gygax and his original Castle Greyhawk crew, the book loses a great deal of its charm. Its strengths are in the speed and handling of its pacing and the brevity of its descriptions. However, those strengths quickly become weaknesses as the novel progresses and St. Clair fails to successfully develop the characters or any setting elements beyond the labyrinth itself.

The prose style is rather flat. The book reads a great deal like a lot of mid-20th century science fiction, especially Asimov. The characters are disappointingly flat, and they seem to be somewhat detached from reality. It is almost as if they are simply vehicles to advance the story along.

I turned toward the noise. She wasn't there.

I hadn't heard her go toward the door. I hadn't felt it open. I said, "Where are you?"

"Right here." Her voice was perfectly clear, and it came from the same spot where she had been standing when she had had me turn my eyes away.

"But--I don't see you."

"Look closely."

"I--there's a sort of blur there. But I don't see you, Kyra. You're not there at all."

"That's fine. I haven't done this much recently." Suddenly she was visible, standing just where the blur had been.

This passage is pretty typical for St. Clair. Something happens, but it is described in the bleakest, briefest manner possible. The two characters are completely static. They don't move. Sam (the protagonist) doesn't reach or attempt to touch the blur. Indeed, the blur isn't even described beyond just being called "a blur." The dialogue doesn't feel natural, and is pretty emotionless and almost clinical.

The way St. Clair handles major revelations, romance, and plot points is ineffectually. Below is an example where all three are combined and it is pretty disappointing to read. Be aware, there are spoilers here.

I rolled toward her and took her in my arms. "Kyra," I said, "let me go back with you when you go. Let me stay on F with you. If you have to stay there, I'll stay. We're close to each other already, darling. Already we're half in love. We could be happy together, even on F. It's an unpleasant place, but we'd be lovers, dear."

She had not resisted my embrace, but she had not yielded to it. "No," she said softly. "I'm sorry, Sam."

I did not let her go. "Why not?" I said. "Don't you feel close to me, too?"

"Oh, yes. But there's a reason why we can't be lovers, Sam."

"What is it? Some sort of prohibition, like the one that makes you stay on F?"

"No, not that. . . . I'll have to tell you. I'm your sister, Sam."

I let her go and she rolled out of my arms. I half sat up, leaning on one elbow, and looked down at her. She looked up at me unwinkingly.

"My sister? Are you sure? How long have you known?"

"Yes, I'm sure. I've known since you first told me your name."

I sat up on the edge of the bunk, my head between my hands. Her tone had brought conviction to me. There would be explanations; she would tell me how this extraordinary thing could be possible.

I did not doubt she had told me the truth. But now my future opened blankly ahead of me.

Casanova Sam is not and he is either gullible as hell or strange things are afoot (as it happens, strange things have been for some time in the novel). Nevertheless, this pivot-point is handled extremely poorly. The dialogue doesn't flow naturally at all. This segment is a great example of how characters end up "just knowing" things without explanation. And St. Clair's coining of terms is lackluster at best. "Unwinkingly?"

Overall, the novel comes off as a kind of cheap, lackluster New Age morality tale. The feminine is accentuated, but in a clumsy, haphazard manner. The main characters are all "witches," although they don't always know it at first. As the story progresses, through experimentation and training, they "discover" their abilities, but the dreary banality of day-to-day existence would normally have prevented them from ever noticing that they were different from anyone else. This whole "I'm special" business is coupled with repeated references to the moon, bronze-age Cretan imagery (such as the labrys--the double-headed axe--and the existence of the labyrinth itself), and dualism (male-female, science-magic, etc.) The "witches" are extremely intuitive and often just "know" things even though they don't know how, weakening the plot, destroying tension and just making the whole thing feel uninspired and lazy.

While some of this might sound interesting, it is executed rapidly and with very little explanation. It comes off as haphazard. When characters just seem to "know" things, it feels as though it is because the author simply needed them to in order to move the plot forward. The dialogue is rather stilted, and the characters personalities are all very flat and uninteresting. The emotional ties between them seem tenuous and ill-developed. The female protagonist-cum-potential-love-interest is thoroughly uninspiring. Everyone comes off as wooden and predictable, like cardboard cutouts instead of actual people--they are simply what St. Clair needs them to be in order to tell her little morality tale. A great deal is left unexplained, partially because the characters constantly end up just "knowing" things. One example is the eponymous labrys sign that is found scratched into walls once or twice through the novel. What the heck does it mean? Who put it there? It inspires the protagonist at two points to take interesting actions, but beyond that, it serves no purpose and is never explained. For some, this might not be noticeable, but for me, especially since it is the title of the book, it becomes a debilitating plot hole. St. Clair never develops it, never explains it. She just drops it in twice and then forgets about it.

All together, it's not a terrible book. It's definitely worth a read, especially if you've nothing going on for a few hours and are interested in seeing where some of Gygax & Co.'s ideas originated. Personally, I found Jack Vance and Fritz Lieber to be far more interesting.

The Sign of the Labrys by Margaret St. Clair
Style D+
Substance C-
Overall C-

The Right (and Wrong) Way to Write a Movie or Book Review

Now, I will freely admit that I am an amateur reviewer. I am not a professional. I am not a highly trained film or book critic with an English degree and extensive schooling in literary criticism. I have some background in it, however, as textual analysis is often an extremely important part of historical and cultural research.

Nevertheless, I write my reviews in order to achieve two things: 1) to keep my mind sharp while I'm in Korea, and 2) to practice and improve my ability to write good reviews. I enjoy reading books, and I also enjoy cinema. I read fiction and watch cinema for the same reasons as I read philosophy, history, and political science books--to keep in practice with textual analysis and criticism, to think (I enjoy thinking), and to learn something.

Now the bulk of the books I've reviewed here I give generally positive reviews. The reason for that is many of the books have been preselected due to their reputations or the reputations of their authors. I could write a number of reviews on books that are not very good, but I honestly don't want to waste my time with dreck. I did enough of that in high school and college.

Anyway, in the past year, I'd come across two amateur internet film reviewers. These reviewers are Confused Matthew (pictured below) and Mr. Plinkett (pictured left) at Red Letter Media. Of the two, Mr. Plinkett is the superior reviewer. He not only analyzes the plot and pacing, but also costume design, set design, cinematography, and overall effectiveness of the film.

Confused Matthew is an extremely flawed, although quite talented, amateur film critic. Matthew's strength is the ability to analyze the plot of a film and zero in on inconsistencies, sloppy scriptwriting, and poor characterization. As an example of some of his better reviews, I'd like to indicate his critique of the Matrix sequels. Matthew is very good at exposing plot holes and characterization inconsistency, as well as pointing out how the Wachowski Bros. clumsily attempted to deepen their story's metaphysical and philosophical meaning by shoehorning Baudrillard into their dialogue and plot points. Matthew is the sort of reviewer who can tell when a character has been handed the idiot ball, or when lazy scriptwriting and poor plotting choices lead to wall bangers. These strengths are also possessed by Plinkett, but Plinkett doesn't demonstrate any of Matthew's flaws.

Confused Matthew's weaknesses all stem from his own subjectivity. As Quantumjoker has indicated, Confused Matthew is an extremely subjective reviewer. Now, all of us are very subjective. It's almost unavoidable. However, Confused Matthew's failing is his inability to approach something he dislikes from a coldly rational standpoint. This has led to his extremely flawed 2001: A Space Odyssey review. As I mentioned before, Chase Melendez responded to Confused Matthew, in my opinion demolishing his entire review. Matthew's rebuttal failed to address Chase's criticisms effectively, and ultimately, Chase's absence from the Internet world has led Matthew to discontinue his self-defense. Chase hasn't been the only person to respond critically to Confused Matthew's inexplicable review--Poparena and Quantumjoker collaborated on a multi-part response as well.

Matthew's bias against 2001: A Space Odyssey effectively invalidated his entire review because anyone who has seen 2001 and watches Matthew's review should see how Matthew effectively turned his brain off during the entire feature. His premise that 2001 fails as a film--indeed, for Matthew, is not a film--because of the absence of narrative is demonstrably false. Indeed, it is self-evident during other reviews of other movies that Matthew simply stopped paying attention to what was happening on the screen and instead focused on his own initial impressions and frustrations. A good example of this is his review of Spirited Away--there are parts where a viewer who watches Matthew's review, then views the film, can demonstrate scene-by-scene how Matthew is simply wrong in his assessment.

Personal biases are capable of being overcome if one chooses to do so. A great example of that is a friend of mine who viewed Darren Aronofsky's art film, π. This friend said that he despised the film. When asked why, he said that it was the grinding pacing and the overall bleakness of the experience that generated a visceral, negative reaction. He did not say that this was a flaw, however. He stated that this aspect of the film was actually an integral part of it. The film was incredibly effective at what it was designed to do. The film was not a failure for him. He was capable of moving beyond his own biases and appreciate the movie.

Another good example may be my own reactions to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. When I read this book at 15 or 16, I despised every moment of it. I thought Holden Caulfield was an indescribable moron, irrational to an extreme, and thoroughly reprehensible a character. I believed the book failed as a novel because Holden Caulfield, for me, failed as a character. When I was 26 and reread the novel, my opinion of Holden hadn't changed. I still disliked the book. However, being older, wiser, more well-read, and more experienced, I was able to understand what Salinger was trying to accomplish through Holden. That understanding completely altered my assessment of the book's merits. My own personal opinion is that I still dislike the book, mostly for Holden's character. However, my assessment is that the book is an extremely deep meditation on the loss of innocence and teenage anxieties. Holden isn't a character, he's a stand-in for all pre-teens his age, and his actions aren't meant to reflect the actual actions of a boy so much as express the paradoxes and contradictions warring within the pubescent psyche of a male youth. The book is actually extremely worthwhile and is an important piece of American literature, and though I don't really enjoy it, I cannot recommend anyone not read it.

Confused Matthew is an extremely smart and astute guy--he is capable of giving his opinions on films and backing them up. However, what he does not understand is that the role of a critic is not to simply give your opinions. Your role is to assess the merits and flaws of a film or novel as objectively as possible. In order to do that, you are obligated by intellectual honesty to divorce yourself from your own opinion as much as you can. In that regard, I'd like to hold Confused Matthew up as an example of how not to write a review.

But how can one divorce oneself from one's own opinion? Well, it's really impossible to do so totally, but it is possible to mitigate one's emotional response. There's no accounting for taste, and that includes your own. So the critic has to develop a rubric or a set of guidelines that they follow in order to limit the intrusion of his/her personal taste regarding the subject of his/her criticism.

For these guidelines, I turn to the advice of novelist and renowned literary critic John Updike.

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give enough direct quotation — at least one extended passage — of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never... try to put the author "in his place," making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

--"Remembering Updike," The New Yorker Online

Let's tackle each of these points in turn, shall we?

Rule #1 is perhaps the most important rule we should remember (hence its prime position). Do not criticize the film or novel for failing to do what it wasn't attempting to do in the first place. Only critique whether it succeeds at doing something the director/scriptwriter/author intended, or if it fails. If it fails, provide an explanation as to how and why, and provide suggestions on how it could have been successfully attempted.

Rules #2 and #3 are somewhat connected. Quoting (or playing segments, if your subject is a film) is incredibly important, especially when you are trying to illustrate your point. It can provide direct evidence for your criticism or your praise. It also helps you hone your criticisms--you are providing both your audience and yourself with something tangible that can help to focus and clarify your analysis.

Rule #4 is difficult to achieve, especially when you must give concrete reasons why a film or novel fails or succeeds. This is up to the individual critic's taste, and both Plinkett and Confused Matthew essentially unravel large swathes of the narratives they analyze, often out of necessity. Fortunately for them, these are often films that have already been watched and therefore, aimed at audiences for whom the plot won't be spoiled.

Rule #5 is, like Rule #1, something Confused Matthew needs to consider very closely. Matthew's review of 2001 leaves him open to attack (an opening Chase justifiably exploited) when he compared it to Jurassic Park as an example of a film that was successful. Both films were attempting to achieve radically different goals--indeed, Jurassic Park's goal is nowhere near as deep or complex as 2001's, and the former far more simplistically didactic than the latter, which is more open-ended and compelling.

But the most important part of Rule #5 for Confused Matthew is perhaps this little line:
"Sure [the failure]'s his and not yours?"

In the case of 2001, I believe the failure is not of the film, but of the critic.

Finally, the fuzzy, vaguer Rule #6, firmly states that the critic should not review a piece that he/she is predisposed to dislike. This single comment completely and utterly invalidates a great many amateur film reviewers online.

Updike's advice is the key to writing a good review, and it is advice that I struggle to follow in every book or film review that I write. I believe that more reviewers should take John Updike's advice--it will improve your ability to really, truly perform critical analysis on a text such as film or fiction.

I'd also like to say that, though I believe Confused Matthew is a flawed film reviewer, that doesn't make him bad or stupid. Indeed, I think he's actually one of the better amateur film critics out there, and especially enjoy his reviews of the Matrix sequels and The Lion King. I believe, however, that he has no desire to improve as a reviewer, and that his internet celebrity status has, perhaps, had an unfortunate impact on the tenor of his reviews lately.

Book Review -- THE BIG NOWHERE by James Ellroy

James Ellroy, the self-proclaimed "Demon Dog of Crime Fiction," is the culmination of everything that began with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, writers whom he read heavily in his youth, accompanied by drug and alcohol abuse. The darkness of his own life experiences would come to be channeled into his fiction, producing works that are the ultimate realization and perfection of the hardboiled noir genre.

The Big Nowhere is no exception, and perhaps my favorite book by Ellroy that I've yet read (and, ironically, the only book in his LA Quartet that hasn't been made into a film). Sandwiched between The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential, The Big Nowhere plumbs the darkest depths of the human soul and dredges up the blackest ichor that we spend immense amounts of energy trying to ignore or escape. It is a dark, pessimistic tragedy, and yet simultaneously a triumph for the hardboiled noir genre as a whole. The book is a wrecking ball written in a terse, staccato, laconic style, laced with jive-talk and bebop rhythms.

This is one of the books that forever changed me. The list of books is pretty short: Dune, The Lord of the Rings, Blood Meridian, and Fight Club are pretty much at the top. James Ellroy's The Big Nowhere is among them as a book that has had a tremendous impact upon me.

This is the tale of three very different cops that are drawn together for a grand jury investigation into communist influence on labor union strikes in Los Angeles of 1950. Mal Considine is an up-and-coming DA's Bureau detective with a very dubious act of "heroism" on his war record, and a resentful Czech wife and her son as spoils taken from Germany. Danny Upshaw is a homicide detective with the LA County Sheriff's Department, arch-rivals of LAPD, who is on the trail of a twisted killer. Turner "Buzz" Meeks is an Okie ex-cop, moonlighting as an enforcer and occasional pimp for Howard Hughes that is drawn into the grand jury investigations through his connections to Mickey Cohen, local mobster kingpin.

Ellroy rushes in where Hammett and Chandler feared to tread. Drugs, prostitution, corruption, racism, and homosexuality are openly and brutally exposed. Ellroy is not afraid to illustrate the darkest pits of mid-century Los Angeles. As with most of his novels, the city of LA is, itself, a character, and not a very nice one, either. The city that is the 1950s embodiment of the American dream is little more than a thin veneer of fantasy over a seething pit of vice and iniquity. Ellroy is a brilliant talent at crafting real, believable characters, and is a genius at creating tragic heroes out of noir protagonists.

To truly understand Ellroy's writing, one must understand the conventions of the hardboiled noir genre. The noir protagonist is a sort of antihero. He is often a world-weary individual, disillusioned and cynical. He sees the world as corrupt, a place where no good deed goes unpunished and lives to get his kicks. At heart he may be a sentimental romantic deep at heart, but he keeps it hidden and repressed, because whenever he allows himself to be vulnerable and truly care about someone, it always backfires. He lives by a code of honor that is his own, and strictly defines himself according to it. In a world of predators, prey, and scavengers, the hardboiled hero struggles to be his own man and not to fall into any of those categories. Typically, a noir hero will come up against some sort of challenge to his code, and will either compromise it and fail, or he will succeed and triumph, only to find the reward to be not worth the cost and the victory Pyrrhic at best, empty and meaningless more often than not.

Considine, Upshaw, and Meeks don't perfectly fit the archetypal noir hero, but that is because Ellroy creates unique and multidimensional characters. They're not a riff off of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, or J.J. Giddes. They're each deeply driven by believable motives, possess compelling personalities and worldviews.

Considine is haunted by his cowardly slaying of a Nazi officer--an action he took in order to avenge his Czech girlfriend's tarnished honor. The victory became hollow when, after years of marriage, she began to resent her life in America and yearned for the Czechoslovakia of her youth, before the occupation. Her son, who had suffered horrific sexual abuse during the occupation, associates the Czech language with his traumatic experiences--something his mother disregards in her desire to de-Americanize her son and make him into a good Czech boy. Considine, sees the grand jury investigation as a way to propel himself to the highest pinnacle of DA Bureau brass and make an inviolable name for himself in order to secure custody of his adopted son in the divorce proceedings.

Upshaw is far more complex and troubled. He is a young crusader cop that is tormented by his latent homosexuality and plagued by his own revulsion of female sexuality. Throughout most of the novel, he keeps it deeply buried and subdued, denying it to himself. However, the clues are there--with every stomach churn he feels when a woman winks at him, or his fascination with certain young men's appearances. A brutal murder with homosexual underpinnings begins to absorb Upshaw, who has been obsessed with the darkness in the human soul since he witnessed the barbaric slaying of a young woman as a youth. This obsession seems to be a sublimation of his own sexuality. However, the trail of this killer, who stalks and murders homosexuals, begins to drag his own buried demons out of his subconscious and into the light.

Meeks is the most straightforward character in the book--but that does not mean that he is shallow or two-dimensional. Meeks doesn't have any deep dilemmas or skeletons in his closet. At heart, he is a gambler, and the thrill of risk gets him into trouble. Knowing full-well the stupidity of his actions, he falls in love with Mickey Cohen's squeeze, and plays a huge gamble to keep his association with her secret.

These three seemingly unrelated characters are pulled together by the labyrinthine nature of LA intrigue. Ellroy writes like a spider, weaving a silk web of murder, politics, conspiracy, and betrayal. The heroes' flaws prove their undoing, but not in very predictable manners, and only the most tarnished of the characters really manages to make it through (although his ultimate fate is not revealed in this volume, but in the prologue of the next--LA Confidential). Their flaws, however, make them so real, it is difficult not to like the characters. Indeed, despite past rivalries and bad blood, they find it difficult not to like one another, resulting in a friendship between the three that, unfortunately, gets them all into more trouble.

Most compelling, however, is Lieutenant Dudley Smith.

Mal shook the man's hand, recognizing his name, his style, his often imitated tenor brogue. Lieutenant Dudley Smith, LAPD Homicide. Tall, beefside broad and red-faced; Dublin-born, LA raised, Jesuit college trained. Priority case hatchet man for every LA chief of police dating back to Strongarm Dick Steckel. Killed seven men in the line of duty, wore custom-made club-figured ties: 7's, handcuff ratchets and LAPD shields stitched in concentric circles. Rumored to carry an Army .45 loaded with garlic-coated dumdums and a spring-loaded toad-stabber.

An astute reader who has seen LA Confidental or read Clandestine will recognize Dudley Smith. Of all Ellroy's characters, he is the most persistent--and perhaps the most evil and villainous. Dudley is a master-manipulator, kingmaker and breaker, vindictive to the extreme, with a small cadre of loyal underlings and enough bureau clout to make or break any man's career. The man is far, far more than he appears, and if I was a bit more of a literary romantic I'd suggest that the character was actually the Devil himself. Smith is generally soft-spoken and not given to great displays of emotion, but just as still waters run deep, Smith's appearance as a mid-level policeman is remarkably deceptive--Smith is perhaps one of the most powerful men in the entire city. He resurfaces in many of Ellroy's books, and indeed is often somehow or some way at the root of many of the mysteries and intrigues that take place. Dudley Smith is almost always the ultimate victor--true to hardboiled noir form, the smart, subtle, and remorselessly ruthless are the ones who win.

The style of prose is terse, direct, and laden with vernacular, giving a lot of spice to the tale. Ellroy writes how his characters think and unabashedly drops racist epithets and slang that were commonplace in the mid-twentieth century American parlance.

Buzz checked his watch. 4:45; Howard Hughes was forty-five minutes late. It was a cool January day, light blue sky mixed with rain clouds over the Hollywood Hills. Howard got sex crazy in the winter and probably wanted to send him out on a poontang prowl: Schwab's Drugstore, the extra huts at Fox and Universal, Brownie snapshots of well-lunged girls naked from the waist up. His Majesty's yes or no, then standard gash contracts to the yes's--one-liners in RKO turkeys in exchange for room and board at Hughes Enterprises' fuck pads and frequent nighttime visits from The Man himself. Hopefully, bonus money was involved: he was still in hock to a bookie named Leotis Dineen, a six-foot-six jungle bunny who hated people of the Oklahoma persuasion worse than poison.

Raw, visceral, staccato, jazzy, and unapologetic. Ellroy often writes in dangling clauses, creating a conversational, matter-of-fact tempo that lends his prose the texture of concrete and asphalt. The end result is a masterpiece of crime-fiction. Ellroy's world is not a happy one--it is very much the hardboiled noir setting where no good deed goes unpunished, good folks are just saps waiting to be suckered, and the bad guys can (and do) win. When such a world is populated with characters like Meeks, Considine, Upshaw, and Smith, and described with streetwise prose in jazzy rhythms, the combined result is a masterpiece of American literature. Ellroy describes a bleak but essential facet of the American reality using an urban American cant. With The Big Nowhere Ellroy's song is a lament for the heroic, a funeral dirge played in saxophone jazz, much like the eponymous tune that a certain Coleman Healy would compose within the novel's pages. Ellroy has crystallized hardboiled noir into one single, perfect narrative that carries forth every theme of the genre to true fruition. It is not an archetypal noir tale--the archetypes are books like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, or movies like Chinatown. Rather, The Big Sleep approaches the Platonic ideal. Ellroy has broken his chains and left the cave where Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett create shadows of noir upon the cavern wall, and realized the heights--or depths--which the genre can achieve.

The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy
Style A+
Substance A+
Overall A+

Book Review -- THE ELEPHANT VANISHES by Haruki Murakami

Reviewing short story collections is much more difficult than simply reviewing a novel because you have to assess each individual piece and then somehow analyze the entire collection as a whole. Yesterday's review of Dunsany's The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories went well enough, I guess, for me to take another stab at it, this time with 象の消滅 by 村上 春樹.

I've reviewed a novel by 村上 春樹 (Murakami Haruki) before, my first review for this blog: Wild Sheep Chase. This particular volume, 象の消滅 (Zou no Shoumetsu -- translated as "the/an elephant's disappearance") is a collection of short stories that showcase the author's Kafkaesque style.

This style is heavily influenced by a great deal of irreverent American fiction from the early 20th century. Murakami's written translations Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and My Lost City, everything by Raymond Carver, several works by Truman Capote, and most notably Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye. The Chandler connection is something I'm quite familiar with, being a fan of hardboiled noir, and his influence on Murakami's style comes through the story translations by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum. Almost all of Murakami's characters are cut from the same cloth--they smoke Hope regular cigarettes, drink, listen to vinyl records, possess a wide knowledge of music and haute cuisine, and live on the fringes of decent, acceptable Japanese society. However, this doesn't mean that they are all uniform--many of them are extremely unique and outstanding. However, a number of them seem to be little more than stand-ins for Murakami himself, or perhaps projections of Murakami's ideal character--a little bit Philip Marlowe, a little bit Nick Carraway, some Holly Golightly and Fred, and a dash of Holden Caufield, mixed in a uniquely Japanese environment.

Indeed, it is probably easier for an American to identify with Murakami's protagonists than it is for a Japanese person.

Nevertheless, they do suffer from the overwhelming regularity of their personalities--between novels and stories, there isn't a huge amount of difference between Murakami's protagonists. I have a difficult time believing that, if one would switch them between stories, they'd react any differently to their situations. As time grows on, this weakness becomes more and more apparent. In his novels, Murakami's heroes are somewhat better defined, but that is because it is much easier to develop a character's personality in a novel-length work than in a story of 25-30 pages. It isn't helped that Murakami almost universally utilizes first-person narration throughout his stories, but only further manages to make the protagonists appear identical to one-another.

The stories themselves are all infused with a sense of weirdness, often to the point of surrealism. The most outstanding ones are "The Second Bakery Attack," "Sleep," "The Little Green Monster," "TV People," "The Dancing Dwarf," and "The Elephant Vanishes." The more subtle ones are actually somewhat more powerful because of their subtlety-- "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning," "Lederhosen," "Barn Burning," "A Family Affair," "The Last Lawn of the Afternoon," and especially "The Silence."

I feel compelled to talk about all of these stories, and indeed I could go on at length, but I'll limit my analysis to just a few.

First, I will discuss the subtle stories, starting with "The Silence," my personal favorite. It describes a student, a boxing champion who almost never raised his hand against anyone, encountering a nemesis in middle school and developing an enmity which would last until high school graduation. This nemesis would avenge himself against the protagonist by indirectly framing the hero of tormenting and bullying another student until they committed suicide. The resulting silence, reflected in the title (沈黙 -- "Chinmoku"), is the silence of complete and total social ostracism. The protagonist effectively becomes an untouchable, invisible, inaudible person--his teachers and fellow students ignore him. This begins to effect him very negatively, especially since ostracism is an incredibly painful experience to a Japanese person. The Japanese value socialization far more deeply than Americans do, and membership in peer groups gives them a great deal of self-worth. Although Americans more-often-than-not are weak and willing to succumb to peer pressure, we have a deep (and sometimes grudging) respect for rebels and renegades who are strong enough to march to the beat of their own drummers and persist, even through friendlessness. Nevertheless, the protagonist manages to get through this experience, but it exacted a powerful spiritual price on his soul. He emerged stronger, but also much less trusting and faithful of his fellow humans, even his own wife and progeny.

This story is incredible, because it is a naked criticism of the herd mentality in Japanese society, the cowardice of individuals unable to break away from collective opinion to do what is right and just, and the use of ostracism as a social punishment. It did a lot to remind me of my own experiences in middle school, a very painful and difficult time for me. It has also comforted me a great deal during my time in Korea.

"No, what really scares me is how easily, how uncritically, people will believe the crap that slime like Aoki deal out. How these Aoki types produce nothing themselves, don't have an idea in the world, and talk so nice, how this slime can sway gullible types to any opinion and get them to perform on cue, as a group. And this group never entertains even a sliver of doubt that they could be wrong. They think nothing of hurting someone, senselessly, permanently. They don't take any responsibility for their actions. Them. They're the real monsters. They're the ones I have nightmares about. In those dreams, there's only the silence. And these faceless people. And then it all goes murky. And I'm dissolving and I'm screaming and no one hears."

That's some pretty powerful stuff, even in translation, and it is Murakami's finger wagging in the face of Japanese society as a whole. What is subtle here is the strangeness that is at work; the sense of the surreal is very subdued. However, Murakami's "j'accuse" is loud and unmistakable.

I think it is reasonable that I approach perhaps one more story, although there is something I'd like to say about almost all of them, but that would stretch the length of this review to absurd lengths. "The Little Green Monster" is about an eponymous creature that crawls from the ground and asks the protagonist to marry him. Her reaction is abject revulsion and disgust. This creature, despite its appearance, is actually a very gentle and empathic being, capable of feeling emotions and thoughts. When she realizes this, the heroine focuses her disgust and hate against the creature, effectively killing and dissolving it until not a trace of it is left.

Although there's a lot I want to say about this story, I'll try to keep things brief. This story is about hate, specifically the hatred of anything that is different or unfamiliar. The creature is weird and terrifying at first, but it means no harm and its distinctly human eyes should convey vulnerability and honesty. However, to the "heroine," they convey wrongness and are part of the overall discomfort that this creature's strangeness causes her to react with fear and revulsion. This revulsion is turned into pure hate and destroys the creature, a creature who came with peaceful intentions and love on his mind. Whether this story is about women in particular or humans in general, I can't really answer, but Murakami rarely chooses women as his protagonists, so that may say something. In almost every surrealist story that Murakami writes, things are symbols and metaphors for something else, and in this case, the creature is just that--the strange and unfamiliar. This is a meditation on fear, disgust, and hatred, and the darkness that hides in the human heart--darkness and hatred that can easily lead to murder if the conditions are correct.

Murakami's work is a rebellion against the ordinary. Indeed, he contentiously injects weirdness and absurdity into the immensely average lives of so many Japanese characters in order to shake them up. Through his stories, he aggressively critiques the everyday life of Japanese society--the uniformity and homogeneity, the disingenuousness of Japanese politeness, and the herd mentality that permeates Japanese social relations. Murakami wants to shake up the reader by shaking up the characters.

Murakami also wants to explore other themes that go beyond simple social criticism. He contemplates existentialism and the regularity of life--indeed even the meaningless of it and detachment from love and human contact (in such stories like "Sleep") or pondering what could or perhaps should have been but never was nor will be ("On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning"). Loss and nostalgia play definite roles in many of his tales, including the changes in relationships brought about by age, maturity, and marriage ("A Family Affair").

By-and-large, Murakami's stories hold up. They're not as profound as his novels, but they are much more immediate in their impact, and more visceral in the reactions they elicit. Despite his tendency toward repetitive protagonists, the secondary characters throughout his tales are often unique and interesting. The stories themselves are well-crafted. Murakami paces things well, narrating his tales and injecting elements of the strange or surreal at proper intervals to hook the reader and continue to draw them in. Curiosity is a major motivator in reading a Murakami story, and the author channels our curiosity extremely well. He's a master storyteller, and this collection stands as evidence of his ability to spin an effective yarn that not only keeps our attention, but challenges our assumptions and demands that we think a little bit deeper about ourselves and about our world and society.

象の消滅 (The Elephant Vanishes) by 村上 春樹 (Murakami Haruki)
Style B+
Substance A
Overall A-

Book Review -- THE SWORD OF WELLERAN and Other Stories by Lord Dunsany

It's been almost a month since my last review, but I've not been idle. I simply haven't been in the proper position to give a well-thought-out review of any of the material I've read in the past two months. I've had a lot of personal issues through which I've had to work and a lot of difficult choices I've had to make. However, I've the next two weeks off for winter vacation and intend to use those two weeks to get some more reading done and to bring my blog up-to-date on my reviews. Thus, I'd like to inaugurate this new year (belatedly) with a review of Lord Dunsany's The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories.

Edward J.M.D. Plunkett, the 18th Lord Dunsany, was an Irish fantasist who, in 1905, published The Gods of Pegāna, a collection of short stories set in a fantasy world. This collection would come to heavily influence J.R.R. Tolkien, among other authors. I should also comment that Dunsany was one of those authors cited by E. Gary Gygax as an inspiration for Dungeons & Dragons in the oft-cited "Appendix N" of the 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide.

It's not difficult to see why Dunsany is such a heavy influence. His stories alternate between the mythic, the idyllic, and the nostalgically romantic. I've not read his earlier writings, such as The Gods of Pegāna, or any of his later works, such as 1912's The Book of Wonder, though it's reported to be far more nostalgically wistful.

The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories is infused with a sense of bittersweetness, a sort of pathos that the Japanese call 物の哀れ (mono no aware), a kind of empathy for things passing and ephemeral. It is this sense of passing that permeates all of the stories in this collection, and resurfaces in Tolkien's writings as the passing of all things fantastic and elven from Middle-Earth.

A great example can be found within the first, eponymous story in the volume, "The Sword of Welleran."

And now that the ardour of battle had passed away, the spirits of Merimna's people began to gloom a little, like their leader's, with their fatigue and with the cold of the morning; and they looked at the sword of Welleran in Rold's hand and said: "Not anymore, not any more for ever will Welleran now return, for his sword is in the hand of another. Now we know indeed that he is dead. O Welleran, thou wast our sun and moon and all our stars. Now is the sun fallen down and the moon broken, and all the stars are scattered as the diamonds of a necklace that is snapped off one who is slain by violence."

Thus wept the people of Merimna in the hour of their great victory, for men have strange moods, while beside them their old inviolate city slumbered safe. But back from the ramparts and beyond the mountains and over the lands that they had conquered of old, beyond the world and back again to Paradise went the souls of Welleran, Soorenard, Mommolek, Rollory, Akanax, and young Iraine.

These final paragraphs of the eponymous tale illustrate some of that lacrimae rerum that infuses nearly ever tale in this collection. In the moment of their victory, the citizens of Merimna have saved their city from destruction, but at the cost of their legendary heroes. They knew that those heroes would now never return to them, and though they had a new hero among them, Rold, they still wept for those heroes that they knew were forever gone.

Dunsany's pacing and the rhythm of his prose evoke the same archaic or mythic nostalgia as Tolkien would later do. When coupled with S.H. Sime's illustrations, the overall effect is incredibly powerful. The collaboration between the author and the illustrator, in this case, was incredible. Sime gives a form as mythical to Dunsany's words as the words themselves, especially for such stories as "The Fall of Babbulkund," "The Ghosts," and "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth."

The kinds of stories that Dunsany wrote varied throughout the volume. There are elements of fantasy that permeate all of the tales, and indeed, some of these tales are likely to be set in Pegāna, although many take place in the England and Ireland of our world. Specifically, the fantastic, mythic tales are "The Sword of Welleran," "The Fall of Babbulkund," and "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth." These are, generally, the most straightforward of the stories. "The Sword of Welleran" and "The Fortress Unvanquishable" are both tales of mythic heroism against overwhelming opposition with the aid of talismanic swords. "The Fall of Babbulkund," however, tells of an impossible city of incredible glory that is the jewel of all the world, and the travelers who seek to find it, only to discover its ruins. The description of the city that the travelers hear only whets their appetite further as they journey toward it, and each time it is described by someone fleeing the doom that will inevitably fall upon it for its decadence and excess.

"The Kith of the Elf-Folk" is the third story in the collection, and perhaps the saddest. It concerns an elf who desires to sing in a church and worship God, but to do so it would have to become mortal and acquire a soul. However, human life is one of pain and suffering, and the elf soon comes to regret its decision, and desires to rid itself of its soul so that it might return to its idyllic state. This story is laden with social commentary, especially regarding industrialism and wealth. Yet it is always viewed through the eyes of the elf who only partially understands its experience in the modern mortal world.

"The Ghosts" is another extremely interesting tale to consider. Modern rationality is pitted against the supernatural. Dunsany places a skeptical gentleman of learning in a haunted place with only his logic and reason to protect him against the malevolence of the spirits there. The conflict is resolved in favor of reason and cold, unfaltering logic--the province of mortal, living men. But the victory is as soulless and discomfiting as the haunt of the poltergeists.

The remaining pieces are also quite interesting, but easier to assess (often due to their shortness of length). "The Highwaymen" is a meditation on honor among thieves and the bonds of friendship and loyalty, even among reprehensible miscreants. "In the Twilight" describes a near-death experience and the revelation of the passage of time and distance when compared to the smallness of the human experience. "The Whirlpool" is an extended boast and warning by a powerful water-spirit and maelstrom, with a rather profound concluding sentence that demands deep consideration. Likewise, "The Hurricane" is a brief, two-page discussion between natural forces that ends with the heartbreak of one. "The Lord of Cities" regards the debate between different natural features in a sort of Aesopian tale, ending with the spider's triumph. "The Doom of La Traviata" illustrates the afterlife of a licentious courtesan. Finally, "On the Dry Land" is a very unhappy allegory of the kindness of death and the cruelty of love.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough the sense of lacrimae rerum that flows through all of these stories--some far more strongly than others. This entire volume seems to be one great meditation by Dunsany on the themes of loss and the bittersweet. He approaches this sense of loss from a much more natural standpoint than someone like Hemingway. Indeed, Hemingway's sense of loss was always personal, but Dunsany's loss is something else. He seems to view the world as growing less magical and more mundane--a theme that, as I wrote earlier, would resurface in Tolkien's work in force.

I can't really do this work much justice in the space that I have here on this blog. But there is a great deal among all of these stories to analyze. Each one is a different meditation that shares many of the same themes as the others, but is unique in its specific subject matter. And when I say unique, I certainly mean so. The subjects are all very different--ghosts and the rational, mythical cities being toppled, an allegory about love and death, an elf desirous of mortality so it can worship God, an unconquerable fortress, etc. To each, Dunsany applies similar themes, and this gives the stories far greater meaning. Man is mortal and temporary, but that mortality is juxtaposed against the passage of myth and magic with the advance of the modern, the industrial, and the coldly rational--all things that are within the domain of Man. Dunsany wrestles with this dichotomy as a good romanticist should.

The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories
Style A+
Substance A+
Overall A+