Sjón is an Icelandic writer, and I bought an English translation of this novel while I was on holiday in Iceland last month. Sjón is first and foremost a poet, and this is a very slim little volume - barely more than 100 pages. But those pages are so full of magic and beauty and harshness and such a vivid sense of place that I could barely believe the author managed to say so much in so few words. In that sense, and in some of its themes, this book reminds me of Alan Garner's brilliant Thursbitch - and coming from me, that is not a comparison to be taken lightly.
The Blue Fox is the story of a huntsman-priest in 19th century Iceland, Baldur Skuggason, obsessed with hunting the mysterious 'blue fox' or 'skugga-baldur' that roams the snow-covered mountain landscape in the dark days of midwinter. It's also the story of the herbalist Fridrik Fridjonsson and Abba, the horribly abused young Down's Syndrome woman he has taken in and loves like a daughter, helping her to compile a collection of carefully-identified feathers from Iceland's rich and varied bird life as he gradually learns the strange language she has created for herself during her years of neglect. It's the story of life, death, shamanism, landscape and metamorphosis, as the hunter becomes the hunted, human beings become puzzles, and the landscape and language become one and the same.
The Blue Fox could only ever have been written in Iceland, in that unique landscape, that odd mixture of beauty and harshness. Like a Nordic fairytale, it combines magic and brutality, gentleness and violence, the metaphysical and the mundane.
As a young man, studying in Denmark, Fridrik tells his opium-smoking companions: "I have seen the universe; it is made of poems." His Danish friends laugh and tell him he is "a true Icelander" - and they are right. I've been to Iceland, and never before have I ever been so convinced that the universe is, without a doubt, made of poems.
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
Monday, 23 August 2010
Hospitals and Stieg Larsson
So, I find myself at home for a while recovering from surgery.
While I was in hospital, I started The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest, the final book in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. I got through about 350 pages (or half) of it, to the amazement of my anaesthetist, while I was waiting to go down to theatre and while I was lurking in my curtained cubicle and avoiding the annoying chit-chat of the nosy woman opposite during my post-op recovery, but I was way too queasy to read anything at all for a couple of days after that. However, I finished the book this morning.
I've enjoyed the trilogy as a whole. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo can be read in isolation, and The Girl Who Played With Fire does make sense if you haven't read Dragon Tattoo, as Larsson kindly recaps where necessary. However, it ends at a point which leaves a lot of the story untold if you don't go on to read Hornets' Nest, and Hornets' Nest would make no sense at all if you hadn't read Played With Fire.
In many ways, these books remind me of thrillers from the 1950s. They aren't, in many ways, particularly realistic. The hero, Mikael Blomkvist, is apparently irresistible to every woman he meets, regardless of their age. Almost every character has a multitude of quirks and foibles and some of the villains are almost worthy of Ian Fleming. The plots are complicated and crammed with excitement an intrigue - thwarted assassination attempts, last-minute court room revelations which I can't believe would ever be admissible, my lack of knowledge of the Swedish legal system notwithstanding, and some truly gruesome fights. And yet, the trilogy is also ultra-contemporary at the same time. It's almost as if Larsson took classic thrillers of the 50s and dropped them into the socially-liberal, hi-tech world of 21st century Sweden and gave them a social conscience into the bargain. Great stuff, and Lisbeth Salander is a 100 per cent original heroine with a perfect balance of toughness and vulnerability and a whole bucket of flaws.
I've seen some writers claim that there's too much violence against women in Larsson's books. Those people are idiots who are missing the point on such a grand scale that I want to commit some violence of my own. It's blatantly obvious throughout that part of Larsson's objective in writing the books was to openly deplore the inherent misogyny that still lurks in certain sectors of society. Trust me, men who write exploitatively about violence against women really do not create characters like Lisbeth Salander.
While I was in hospital, I started The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest, the final book in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. I got through about 350 pages (or half) of it, to the amazement of my anaesthetist, while I was waiting to go down to theatre and while I was lurking in my curtained cubicle and avoiding the annoying chit-chat of the nosy woman opposite during my post-op recovery, but I was way too queasy to read anything at all for a couple of days after that. However, I finished the book this morning.
I've enjoyed the trilogy as a whole. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo can be read in isolation, and The Girl Who Played With Fire does make sense if you haven't read Dragon Tattoo, as Larsson kindly recaps where necessary. However, it ends at a point which leaves a lot of the story untold if you don't go on to read Hornets' Nest, and Hornets' Nest would make no sense at all if you hadn't read Played With Fire.
In many ways, these books remind me of thrillers from the 1950s. They aren't, in many ways, particularly realistic. The hero, Mikael Blomkvist, is apparently irresistible to every woman he meets, regardless of their age. Almost every character has a multitude of quirks and foibles and some of the villains are almost worthy of Ian Fleming. The plots are complicated and crammed with excitement an intrigue - thwarted assassination attempts, last-minute court room revelations which I can't believe would ever be admissible, my lack of knowledge of the Swedish legal system notwithstanding, and some truly gruesome fights. And yet, the trilogy is also ultra-contemporary at the same time. It's almost as if Larsson took classic thrillers of the 50s and dropped them into the socially-liberal, hi-tech world of 21st century Sweden and gave them a social conscience into the bargain. Great stuff, and Lisbeth Salander is a 100 per cent original heroine with a perfect balance of toughness and vulnerability and a whole bucket of flaws.
I've seen some writers claim that there's too much violence against women in Larsson's books. Those people are idiots who are missing the point on such a grand scale that I want to commit some violence of my own. It's blatantly obvious throughout that part of Larsson's objective in writing the books was to openly deplore the inherent misogyny that still lurks in certain sectors of society. Trust me, men who write exploitatively about violence against women really do not create characters like Lisbeth Salander.
Saturday, 7 August 2010
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
After what seems like about four years, I have finally finished Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon.
To be fair to Mr Stephenson, the fact that the book dragged wasn't because it wasn't an engaging read, but simply because it was over 900 pages long. By anyone's standards, that's a long old read. The fact that I was even prepared to invest so many hours in reading the book at all is, in itself, quite a compliment, particularly given that I usually value precise and concise writing above all else.
Cryptonomicon is not, as many people seem to think it is, a sci-fi novel. It's actually a partly historical adventure story involving several plot threads, some set in the Second World War and some in the late 1990s, which are intertwined by various family connections - the grandparents of the present day characters are the principal characters in the WWII storylines - and by the single unifying theme of cryptology. In the 1940s, socially-awkward American mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse works for the Allies as a code-breaker, and in the 1990s, his hacker-geek grandson Randy is one of the founders of a company that seeks to create a 'data haven' for encrypted information in a fictional sultanate near the Phillipines. In the other 40s thread, gung-ho young Marine Bobby Shaftoe, fuelled by morphine and benzedrine, strives to be reunited with Glory, the Filipina mother of his son, while the war against the Japanese rages around him. In the present day, Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe and his daughter Amy become involved with Randy Waterhouse through -
Nope, sorry. It's all just too complicated to explain. But rest assured that this is one of those novels where everyone and everything are interlinked, and the connections just keep suddenly revealing themselves, with more and more parts of the puzzle clicking into place as the novel progresses - rather like the Axis codes being gradually cracked piece by piece by the Bletchley Park code-breakers. This is a novel in which many, many things happen, some of them small, some of them monumentally huge, and only some of them prove to have any significance. Such is Stephenson's writing style that often, the things of no significance are allotted several pages of description. Is this frustrating? Well, yes, sometimes. But I think that the many people who have reviewed this novel on Amazon and complained about the fact that Stephenson devotes pages and pages of this novel to events which prove to have no relevance to the plot are entirely missing the point. This is a book all about information, about cyphers, about the long and painstaking fight to pick out what matters and what doesn't to decipher codes and decrypt data and to crack randomly-generated algorithms. This theme is expressed not just through the story itself, but in the way that Stephenson has chosen to relate it.
Moreover, there is probably no point whatsoever in reading this book if you have no interest at all in maths. Oddly, I do have an interest in maths, despite having little aptitude for it. I got a B in my maths GCSE, which was my worst exam result, and I never studied another page of maths again. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't fascinate me. I like maths in the same way that I like music - I appreciate its brilliance, but am well aware that fundamentally, I lack any innate ability to create it or even to understand why it produces the results it does. Consequently, I was quite happy to read many, many pages of Stuff About Maths and Stuff About Codes. Plenty of readers wouldn't be, though, and it was a bold move to include that amount of detail in the novel.
Other flaws... well, for me, I spent a large part of the book not giving a damn about Randy and his colleagues and their business venture, even when their situation became life-threatening. I don't like techno-thrillers, and I didn't like Randy much, either. Moreover, Randy's romance with Amy Shaftoe, a marine technician whose family business is employed to lay submarine cables for Randy's employer, is possibly the least convincing love story I've ever read in my life, albeit a charitable piece of wish-fulfilment fantasy for every male reader who is a fat geek (and my guess is fat male geeks make up a large percentage of this novel's readership. By reading this book, I probably cranked up its female readership to, oh, about eight? And of those eight, I'd be willing to bet that I'm the only one who wears make-up, likes clothes and has a decent haircut).
However, both the WWII plot threads were extremely gripping and full of all the warmth and humanity that was lacking for much of the 1990s thread - particularly the Lawrence Waterhouse storyline, which was by far my favourite of the three.. Waterhouse, a gentle, kind but close-to-autistic genius, is a brilliant creation and his was the story that interested me the most (although possibly, I'm biased, because Waterhouse's story thread features the real-life character of Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who cracked the Enigma code at Bletchley, without which we'd never have won the war, and was one of the fathers of modern computing. Turing is a huge hero of mine. Huge. One day I will post an entry here expounding his brilliance and lamenting the tragedy of his death by suicide at great length, but not today).
Overall, Cryptonomicon was packed with adventure, humour (I laughed out loud in several places - there's a Catch-22 feel to a lot of the war-time aspects of the story), tension, dizzying mathematical theory, fascinating insights, rambling digressions, oddball characters and occasionally, harrowing horrors. There was still a lot wrong with it, and yes, even taking into account my defence of the red herrings, it's undoubtedly too long and the modern-day plot dragged considerably at the start. But I don't feel that I wasted my time, and, while the chances of me reading Stephenson's sci-fi novels are slim, I will definitely be starting Quicksilver, the first novel in his historical Baroque trilogy*, which is apparently a prequel in some ways to Cryptonomicon.
*According to Wikipedia, the Baroque trilogy has now been published in the US as eight separate books instead of three. Here in the UK, though, it still appears to be three. I don't see why British readers would be any more willing to read three 900 page novels than American ones, but never mind.
To be fair to Mr Stephenson, the fact that the book dragged wasn't because it wasn't an engaging read, but simply because it was over 900 pages long. By anyone's standards, that's a long old read. The fact that I was even prepared to invest so many hours in reading the book at all is, in itself, quite a compliment, particularly given that I usually value precise and concise writing above all else.
Cryptonomicon is not, as many people seem to think it is, a sci-fi novel. It's actually a partly historical adventure story involving several plot threads, some set in the Second World War and some in the late 1990s, which are intertwined by various family connections - the grandparents of the present day characters are the principal characters in the WWII storylines - and by the single unifying theme of cryptology. In the 1940s, socially-awkward American mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse works for the Allies as a code-breaker, and in the 1990s, his hacker-geek grandson Randy is one of the founders of a company that seeks to create a 'data haven' for encrypted information in a fictional sultanate near the Phillipines. In the other 40s thread, gung-ho young Marine Bobby Shaftoe, fuelled by morphine and benzedrine, strives to be reunited with Glory, the Filipina mother of his son, while the war against the Japanese rages around him. In the present day, Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe and his daughter Amy become involved with Randy Waterhouse through -
Nope, sorry. It's all just too complicated to explain. But rest assured that this is one of those novels where everyone and everything are interlinked, and the connections just keep suddenly revealing themselves, with more and more parts of the puzzle clicking into place as the novel progresses - rather like the Axis codes being gradually cracked piece by piece by the Bletchley Park code-breakers. This is a novel in which many, many things happen, some of them small, some of them monumentally huge, and only some of them prove to have any significance. Such is Stephenson's writing style that often, the things of no significance are allotted several pages of description. Is this frustrating? Well, yes, sometimes. But I think that the many people who have reviewed this novel on Amazon and complained about the fact that Stephenson devotes pages and pages of this novel to events which prove to have no relevance to the plot are entirely missing the point. This is a book all about information, about cyphers, about the long and painstaking fight to pick out what matters and what doesn't to decipher codes and decrypt data and to crack randomly-generated algorithms. This theme is expressed not just through the story itself, but in the way that Stephenson has chosen to relate it.
Moreover, there is probably no point whatsoever in reading this book if you have no interest at all in maths. Oddly, I do have an interest in maths, despite having little aptitude for it. I got a B in my maths GCSE, which was my worst exam result, and I never studied another page of maths again. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't fascinate me. I like maths in the same way that I like music - I appreciate its brilliance, but am well aware that fundamentally, I lack any innate ability to create it or even to understand why it produces the results it does. Consequently, I was quite happy to read many, many pages of Stuff About Maths and Stuff About Codes. Plenty of readers wouldn't be, though, and it was a bold move to include that amount of detail in the novel.
Other flaws... well, for me, I spent a large part of the book not giving a damn about Randy and his colleagues and their business venture, even when their situation became life-threatening. I don't like techno-thrillers, and I didn't like Randy much, either. Moreover, Randy's romance with Amy Shaftoe, a marine technician whose family business is employed to lay submarine cables for Randy's employer, is possibly the least convincing love story I've ever read in my life, albeit a charitable piece of wish-fulfilment fantasy for every male reader who is a fat geek (and my guess is fat male geeks make up a large percentage of this novel's readership. By reading this book, I probably cranked up its female readership to, oh, about eight? And of those eight, I'd be willing to bet that I'm the only one who wears make-up, likes clothes and has a decent haircut).
However, both the WWII plot threads were extremely gripping and full of all the warmth and humanity that was lacking for much of the 1990s thread - particularly the Lawrence Waterhouse storyline, which was by far my favourite of the three.. Waterhouse, a gentle, kind but close-to-autistic genius, is a brilliant creation and his was the story that interested me the most (although possibly, I'm biased, because Waterhouse's story thread features the real-life character of Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who cracked the Enigma code at Bletchley, without which we'd never have won the war, and was one of the fathers of modern computing. Turing is a huge hero of mine. Huge. One day I will post an entry here expounding his brilliance and lamenting the tragedy of his death by suicide at great length, but not today).
Overall, Cryptonomicon was packed with adventure, humour (I laughed out loud in several places - there's a Catch-22 feel to a lot of the war-time aspects of the story), tension, dizzying mathematical theory, fascinating insights, rambling digressions, oddball characters and occasionally, harrowing horrors. There was still a lot wrong with it, and yes, even taking into account my defence of the red herrings, it's undoubtedly too long and the modern-day plot dragged considerably at the start. But I don't feel that I wasted my time, and, while the chances of me reading Stephenson's sci-fi novels are slim, I will definitely be starting Quicksilver, the first novel in his historical Baroque trilogy*, which is apparently a prequel in some ways to Cryptonomicon.
*According to Wikipedia, the Baroque trilogy has now been published in the US as eight separate books instead of three. Here in the UK, though, it still appears to be three. I don't see why British readers would be any more willing to read three 900 page novels than American ones, but never mind.
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