On Steampunk, French Revolution, and Romantic Heroes
Why yes, I spent most of Christmas reading. Finished three books, as a matter of fact. Well, technically finished two of the books I’m going to review today and one I may review tomorrow. In between the eating and drinking and making pie and opening presents (best gift so far? Bed socks from New Zealand. I’m not kidding.), that is.
But before I do that…head over to PN Elrod’s LJ, where she’s celebrating the release of My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon with a contest. You can get an awesome Jack Fleming mug just for commenting. *jaw drops* Wish I qualified for that prize.
Now, on to the books!
First up is Alan Campbell’s Scar Night. Now, I really liked this book and read it in less than a day on Monday, which says something.
I’m just not sure what.
Basic story: The city of Deepgate is built on chains over the Abyss. Their god, Ulcis, lives in the bottom of the abyss, and they have to send the dead to him full of blood so he can build his army to storm Heaven. There’s other gods–the goddess of the sun, who the desert warriors worship and who kicked Ulcis and everyone else out of heaven, and Iril, the goddess of Hell and the Maze.
Then you add angels, political intrigue, poison, a Hannibal-smart serial killer, and assassins. All done in very blowsy prose. The only thing piled higher than the adjectives in this book is the body count. (I hear the author was a video-game designer, and the book really reads like that–lots of atmosphere, lots of “quests”, lots of redshirts.) The most engaging characters are a female assassin and a blood-drunk, self-mutilating female angel, who (just in case you don’t get that they’re Supposed To Be Reflections Of Each Other) spend the last half of the book chained together at the ankles.
My reaction to this book was mixed. It is a Dickensian wallop of steampunk, full of atmosphere and creepy things, and the writing isn’t new-writer-bad, it’s only sometimes almost-journeyman-bad. It’s just…with a setting this good, a weakish-in-places plot gets lost, especially a plot driven by a Luke Skywalker-esque male angel (the last angel except for the self-mutilating one) who is so passive he can even die and be resurrected without any sign of discomfort at all to the aforesaid plot. *sigh*
It was good, don’t get me wrong, and I’m recommending it to those readers who like: steampunk; video games; overblown scene-setting, moralising prose a la Dickens; or a high body count as well as interesting visuals. So it’s a solid six out of ten. I just…part of the problem in being a professional writer is being largely unable to read for pleasure. You’re always looking under the hood at the technical stuff, and technically the book was messy as only a first book can be. I kept seeing how it had a chance to be not just good, but mindblowingly great.
I’m sure Campbell will mature into being stunning, if he keeps growing. But this book really felt like a watering-down of Perdido Street Station. Which reminds me, I need to read more Mieville, if I can pry it out of the UnSullen One’s sticky little fingers.
Next up was Peter McPhee’s The French Revolution, 1789-1799. Which was okay as an Oxford Introduction, but some of his anti-Schama bias and camouflaged anti-Marxist theorizing got on my nerves. The author bias was more stunning than in most books on the French Revolution. Then again, if one wants an education in author bias, the Revolution is one of those subjects guaranteed to illustrate. I give the book three out of ten for some small utility, especially in the bibliography and notes. Otherwise, yawn.
Right after finishing that I dove back into Allan Pasco’s Sick Heroes: French Society and Literature in the Romantic Age, 1750-1850. Every muscle in my head that wasn’t exercised by the other two books got a workout with this one, which was written in true academic style. (And when I say “true” I mean erudite, concise, and with the occasional gentle humor, instead of the “academic” style that hedges its bets with wordy windiness and not much meaning.)
The only trouble I had with this book were the Freudian overtones. Blaming the Romantic hero mostly on early-childhood trauma from the widespread French practice of wet-nursing seems to me tenuous, even after all the explanation. These are still the generations that saw war, Revolution, the fall of the monarchy, the Directorate, and Napoleon’s rise and fall–or if they didn’t see it, they grew up in the aftermath. Those sorts of traumas do take generations to sort out.
I also didn’t agree with the theory that lack of patriarchal “authority” in post-Revolution French society somehow caused the trauma. I think “authority” in the ancien regime had become unworkable long before it fell, and the deepest trauma came not from the lack of patriarchal or hierarchal “authority” but from the later attempts to centralize and continue repression by the same men who mouthed the high-flown platitudes of the Revolution. The point at which the Revolution started having problems was when the National Assembly stopped listening to the process of direct democracy (and, let’s face it, proto-anarcho-syndicalism in plenty of the departements) and swung back toward centralized authoritarian rule. One can’t blame them much–it was, after all, an experiment in a new type of governance, and they had entire upbringings full of authoritarian bureaucracy to deal with.
But I’m not an academe. Your mileage may vary.
Anyway, the constant harping on wet-nursing and the lack of patriarchal authority leaving Big Wounds kind of put me off, but the other parts of the book–the examination of profound depression, incest, and death-worship as Romantic themes, the dissection of Julian Sorel (of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black) as a quintessential Romantic hero, and the startling evidence that novelists and artist were seeking new ways to express the new doors that had opened for them culturally and artistically as a result of changing social mores in the wake of the Revolution and Directorate was fascinating. Sick Heroes was a good time wrapped up in brainfood, and I delighted in sharpening my critical reading skills on it. In particular, this passage:
Still, literature and the arts are particularly rich in all kinds of information that did not draw contemporary disparagement because of its lack of verisimilitude and that is endorsed by the existence of a large, accepting, reading public. When they accepted descriptions of their world without complaint we are doubtless on firm ground to accept them as true or potentially true. It consequently strikes me as unsound to leave such literary passages aside because they cannot be quantified, in preference for unreliable, incomplete data or for assumptions made on the basis of experience gained in foreign lands and different periods, where the social forces are very dissimilar. In fact, I would say that literature and the arts, tempered by what data we have, give us the only means of penetrating many aspects of the pre-Romantic and Romantic period. Used with care, and understanding that reality is never pure, simple, or linear, literature and the arts can be illuminating. (Sick Heroes, p. 146)
BOOYEAH! I tell you, that passage RIGHT THERE was worth the price of admission. If one can mentally dance around a mental room, hooting with glee, then I certainly did do upon encountering just that one half-paragraph. All in all, nine out of ten, a good time and a book I felt actively sharpened my brain.
It just doesn’t get any better than that.
I hope your Christmas day was as wonderful. We ate midafternoon (roast, mashed potatoes, green beans) and I baked a pie. Much snacking was done all day. All in all, it’s how Christmas should be, instead of a pile of stress and hatefulness. I hope yours was as restful and merry, dear Reader.
