The third and final part of June’s 11 in 11 by 11/11/11 book reviews.

There were two books I read in June that were truly outstanding, both in different ways.

Geraldine McCaughrean is not a well-known author in the United States, which is a shame, because her young adult fiction stretches the boundaries of any genre she chooses to write in. The White Darkness is a contemporary adventure with elements of the supernatural, a journey to the bottom of the world and back. Sym has always been fascinated by Scott’s doomed expedition to reach the South Pole, and particularly by the romantic young Captain Titus Oates–throughout her childhood and teens, he’s been her imagined companion, the voice inside her head she shares all her problems with. When her uncle takes her on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Antarctica, Sym is so excited that she doesn’t pay attention to the signs that this is not an ordinary trip. When catastrophe strikes and the trip turns into a desperate fight for survival, everything Sym has ever believed is put to the test, and her connection to the imaginary Captain Oates becomes her last link to reality.

The most astonishing thing about this book is that despite the blindingly obvious hints that something is fishy about Uncle Victor, the clues that the reader interprets easily but that Sym totally misses, none of that feels annoying, like so many books where the author has heard of dramatic irony but doesn’t realize that it shouldn’t be wielded like a Louisville Slugger. Sym’s innocence is so plausible that it makes perfect sense that she wouldn’t know that Uncle Victor has been lying to her not just about the trip, but about everything, her whole life. If McCaughrean had gone the other route–of making Victor seem honest to the reader as well as to Sym until some dramatic reveal–it would have been just as much a cheat. The reasons for Victor’s behavior have to be obvious to the reader in order for the story to have an impact. I also like that Sym’s almost-total deafness isn’t revealed until several chapters in; it’s a challenge that doesn’t define her, but isn’t trivial either–and it makes possible one of the most moving events in the entire book. Personally, I like the uncertainty of the supernatural elements: is Oates’s presence in Sym’s head imaginary, or is it something more? The story doesn’t hinge on this question, so it’s possible for it to stay uncertain if the reader doesn’t want to resolve it one way or the other.

The other excellent book, of course, is Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings. I groused about this one publicly through Facebook status updates. I used to love giant fantasy epics, and then I didn’t anymore. And there’s something about Sanderson’s novels (barring the Alcatraz books) that makes me antsy and impatient, something I can’t identify. It’s not like they’re bad books; I’ve read all but Warbreaker and I like them very much. And it’s not the length; I read Anathem in almost one sitting and it’s almost as long as The Way of Kings. I don’t hate the prose, I’m interested in the plot both long- and short-term, and I mostly care about the characters. And every hundred or so pages I just had to put the book down and do something else.

In discussing the book with a friend, I realized that part of my problem was probably that I was only truly interested in one of the three plots, in the sense that it was the one I wanted to come back to. The other two, I cared about while I was reading them, but…it’s a military campaign, I’ve read about dozens of military campaigns, and the girl in the other section was an academic, a researcher, and practically a librarian, so give me a break, where did you expect my attention was going to go? So it’s possible that my impatience is a desire to get back to the story I care about, but it shows up only as low-level mental itchiness because the other two plots are at least worth reading. Usually with books like this (multi-plot stories) I either like all the plots, or I’ve got one I love and I’m bored or annoyed by the others, so my reaction is a lot more extreme. It could also be that the density of the material is just overwhelming. It took me a month to read the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo, because I’d read for a couple of days and then have to put it down before my brain exploded. And I love that book with an unseemly passion. Still, I’m sort of leaning toward the first reason.

But as much as I would have enjoyed a book that only had that one plot, The Way of Kings simply wouldn’t have worked without all three intertwined. The Stormlight Archive, of which this is the first volume, is going to be an extraordinary work of fantasy, and Sanderson is either a genius or completely off his nut to even contemplate it. I’m interested in the world, I’m interested in the mystery of what happened to it, I’m interested in where the characters will go next. I want to know what Dalinar got that was worth losing all memory of his wife. I want to know what Jasnah’s research will turn up about the world’s history. I want to know how many hints Kaladin has to have dropped on his head from a great height before he works out what kind of power he has. I’m interested enough that I will stick with the next book despite putting it down at least a dozen times before I’m done. This is a different kind of achievement than Anathem, but if Sanderson can keep it together, I expect it to be marvelous.

Next up: July’s books. More of them, and a higher number of really good ones.

Summer turned out to be too busy to keep up with the review-writing schedule, and now that summer’s over, I really don’t want to write individual reviews for all those books. (I just noticed that the last review I wrote was in July, for a book I finished end of May.) I broke this into three sections, because I love the sound of my own voice, even if it’s an imaginary sound because I’m, you know, writing it, and the whole thing got too long.

I got behind on my reading schedule in June, partly because I spent six days wading through The Way of Kings and partly because I read a lot of other things in between. Most of what I’ve read so far I’ve really liked, so if you break it down by month there’d be maybe one or two that were okay (or worse) and the rest would be very good. June’s reading was split more evenly between excellent and meh. (I do have a rating system that I keep track of in my database, but I don’t post those with the reviews because for me, the fine gradations between Super-Fabulous and Poke-My-Eye-Out-With-A-Stick are not consistent. I’ll mark a book as Enjoyable and later realize that it was actually better than that. So I don’t like associating those ratings with a public review.)

Two of the books, Death in Florence by George Alec Effinger and Armor by John Steakley, were on the lower end of the ratings spectrum I don’t post. Death in Florence is one of Effinger’s early novels, a story about a utopian experiment that, like all utopian experiments, is rotten at the core. The premise is interesting as long as you read it as absurdism, but it doesn’t feel like it goes any deeper than that.

Armor, on the other hand, is beautifully characterized, has a well-realized fictional world, and is also a kind of philosophical exploration that I think is more successful than Effinger’s. Where it loses points with me is how hard Steakley hammers on the philosophical point he’s making. This science fiction novel focuses on a soldier in a future war whose main weapon is the armored suit that gives him protection, weaponry, and life support. When his entire unit is wiped out by the enemy, a computer glitch keeps sending him on mission after mission, sometimes while he is seriously injured, simply because none of the human personnel believe that sort of thing could happen. Steakley’s point about humanity and needless war is unfortunately obscured by his unrelenting portrayal of all things military as either stupid or evil. It is a pointless war of aggression, and the high leadership is totally ignorant of the situation on the ground, but–not a single officer who shows humility or understanding? Not one leader who, with boots on the ground, can admit that the strategy is doomed to failure? I recommend reading this book in conjunction with Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which uses the same basic premise but with a completely different attitude. (Armor is one of my husband’s favorites, and our disagreement about how good it was made for great tension because he wouldn’t admit I was right.

Next: the mid-range books, ones that were good but not outstanding.

Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
Book 3 of the Border Trilogy
Knopf, 1998
11/11/11 Category: Historical Fiction

The reason I have an abiding passion for Cormac McCarthy’s books is the reason it’s hard for me to review them and also the reason I couldn’t finish reading The Road. It is that the landscape, the environment, is always a vital if silent character in his books. Reading The Road, a postapocalyptic novel, made me psychologically ill because it is obvious that the land is dead, and the characters wander through its corpse. Sound strange? McCarthy is brilliant, but not in a comfortable way. His characters only find themselves by losing, sometimes by dying; his prose style, with its lack of quotation marks for dialogue and frequent omission of apostrophes in contractions (cant for can’t, etc.), is not made to be accessible; and tragedy abounds, the kind of tragedy where you know that if just one thing had gone differently, it could have been averted. Not your typical pleasure reading, certainly.

So if I’m uplifted, cheered, satisfied by McCarthy’s books, it’s not for any reason I can give as a basis for other people reading them. The art of book recommendation requires an understanding of *why* each reader loves the books they do and correctly matching those desires to other, similar books. Matching genres, subgenres, thematic elements, subject matter, all have some objectivity to them, but how can you match a book based on the way it made you feel? Or the sound of the language in your mind’s ear? There’s no good vocabulary for discussing books, outside the shared insider jargon of the literary critic, and saying that you love a particular book carries the implication that there is something intrinsically worthwhile about it that anyone could share. This is totally untrue and leads to recriminations later, when your friend can’t get past the second chapter of The Dollmage and thinks you are crazy to rave about it. (Even though it is one of the best YA fantasies ever written.)

Cities of the Plain is the third volume in the very loosely connected Border Trilogy, set in the 1940s and ‘50s (I think) in the Southwest and northern Mexico. The book brings together for the first time the protagonists of the first two books, John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham from The Crossing. Both men are cowboys in the old sense, in a time when ranching is changing dramatically and their way of life, while not gone, is coming to an end. John Grady is a savant when it comes to horse training, young and stubborn and not like the others. When he falls in love with a prostitute, his older friend Billy tries to make him see sense. Billy can tell that John Grady is different, knows that it’s a mistake for him to go up against the pimp who owns the girl and is in love with her, but the story still ends in tragedy. McCarthy is the sort of writer who will use the phrase “The last time John Grady saw her alive” and yet give us a heartrending scene of two people in love who can’t hear the authorial narrator’s voice, so add that to the list of reasons his books aren’t your typical pleasure reading. In Cities of the Plain, the tragic ending is more overtly foreshadowed than in the first two books, which makes for a different experience; bad things are coming, and the only question is how will they play out?

Still—it’s beautiful. It hurts because you know these men, you know their lives and their perspective so well that it’s you who’s hurting with them. The Border Trilogy, as the name implies, deals with liminality—the concept of crossing a line or a doorway from one reality into another. The border to Mexico is more than geographical, it’s almost mystical, a line that marks the place where the rules no longer apply. It could not be more different from the border we in the US are so concerned about these days, the invisible line that fails to make a difference in our immigration policy. Though that border isn’t tangible, it’s liminal both to McCarthy’s characters of 60 years ago and to the people who cross it looking for a better life, or wealth through drug smuggling, or who knows what else.

For me the series has been about mysticism rather than politics. So Cities of the Plain was in that sense a disappointment, lacking either the stepping-out-of-the-world quality All the Pretty Horses has or the quasi-fantasy quest motif of The Crossing. But in every other respect it delivers exactly what one expects of a Cormac McCarthy novel. I thought it was beautiful.

Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
Third in the Chronicles of Barchester series
Originally published 1858
Category: Classics

You know what’s a downright crime? That Anthony Trollope isn’t a part of the typical English lit degree canon anymore (if he ever was, which honestly I don’t know and don’t feel like looking up). Forget the argument over whether canon is important or not; the point is that making the English degree even remotely universal and relevant from one university to another means having a list of books that you can point to and say “knowing about these texts makes you qualified to ask ‘Would you like fries with that?’” And Anthony Trollope just isn’t on that list. You’ll have to read books by at least two Bronte sisters, you’ll certainly have to read a handful of Dickens, but no general education literature class will put Trollope on the syllabus. Like I said, this is a crime, because Trollope is one of the most genuinely readable authors of the latter half of the 19th century, and for my money a whole lot more interesting than Dickens, who was paid by the word and had a thing for hard allegory. (I may be biased because I was assigned to read Dickens before I was mentally mature enough to appreciate his books. We’ll see what happens when the Rand-O-Matic churns out Hard Times later this year.)  In his own time, Trollope was even more prolific a writer than Dickens *and* had a full-time career with the postal service. He also invented the pillar box (for Americans, the equivalent of the blue public drop boxes we put mail in) and made a pile of money from his writing. Not bad for a guy who was, in his youth, a total slacker.

Trollope was also the first English novelist to write books that were serially related to each other. If you hate the proliferation of 12-volume-mega-novel-series, you can blame Anthony Trollope.  His two most popular series were the Palliser novels, which had a political bent, and the Barchester novels, which are closer to being novels of manners. I’ve enjoyed the first two books in the latter series, The Warden and Barchester Towers. Trollope is good with characterization and description, he understands the issues of the day, and he explains the workings of the Church of England in the mid-19th century well enough for a reader of the early 21st century to keep up with him. It’s not hard to get involved in the lives of his characters.

As good as they were, Doctor Thorne is even better. This is primarily because it’s the first book with a strong female protagonist. In the first two books, Trollope creates a number of strong women, but the protagonists are more retiring and sweet. Mary Thorne, niece of the title character, is intelligent, well-spoken, self-assured and progressive in her opinions about class and individual worth. Her uncle has a similar personality, and despite his being only a country doctor (and one who *gasp* mixes his own doses like a common apothecary!) he’s the close confidant of the local squire Franklin Gresham and far more popular among all the classes than his more arrogant medical peers. At the start of the novel, Mary has shared tutors with the Gresham daughters and feels no artificial inferiority to them or anyone else, including their snooty noble relatives the DeCourcys. In fact, her friendship for Frank Gresham the younger, only son and heir to Greshamville, has started to turn into something warmer. But Mary, despite all her certainties about her personal worth, has to keep Frank at a distance. She knows she is the daughter of Doctor Thorne’s dead brother, but she doesn’t know who her mother was or what her relations are. In that uncertainty, she can’t bring herself to fall in love with Frank—and Frank certainly shouldn’t fall in love with the penniless Mary, because it’s his duty to marry money and restore the family fortunes.

In writing this novel, Trollope reveals that he’s the true heir to Jane Austen in characterization, plot, and style. Trollope’s wit is a little broader, and he uses the technique of addressing the reader directly and commenting on his own words, which I think is fun. But he’s also got the social advantage of writing fifty years after Austen. You see, Mary is a bastard. And everyone knows it, or suspects it. But in the end, she isn’t ostracized by society, and her potential isn’t limited the way, for example, Harriet Smith’s is in Emma. For all the talk another fifty years on about how shocking Thomas Hardy was with Jude the Obscure, I really wonder what the Victorians thought about cheering for a penniless, “nameless” (that’s the polite way of saying “bastard”) heroine?

I’m a fan of Anthony Trollope now. And it’s exciting to know that there are so many more of his novels left for me to discover.

Howards End by E. M. Forster
First published 1910
Category: Modern Classics

This was probably the wrong book to read at the tail end of an exhausting week. I might have appreciated E. M. Forster’s prose better if I had been less weary. Then again, maybe not. Forster really is a brilliant writer, particularly in his portrayal of his characters, but he also has this habit of addressing the reader directly to explain some social issue or interpersonal relationship. Despite the many times I had to go back to re-read a passage my eyes had skimmed past, I didn’t feel like I was missing much from those sections. And then I’d get into a section of dialogue I couldn’t stop reading. Overall, I think Howards End is more successful as social commentary than as novel.

Howards End is a story about rich and poor, upper and lower classes, and the intersections between them as English society moves from the Victorian to the Edwardian era. The upper classes are represented by the Wilcox family: wealthy, successful, politically conservative, unashamedly not intellectual. The lower classes are represented by Leonard Bast, a dreamer and poet who wants to be well-read and genteel, but continually falls short for reasons even he doesn’t understand. The two classes are bridged by Margaret and Helen Schlegel, genteel women with some financial independence who represent the intellectual liberals of society. The Schlegels meet the Wilcoxes on holiday and hit it off; they meet Bast at a music recital when Helen accidentally takes his umbrella; Bast and Mr. Wilcox become connected when Mr. Wilcox advises the Schlegels to tell Bast to leave his job at a supposedly unstable company.

At its heart, the book is about the duty the haves bear toward the have-nots of society. Because of Mr. Wilcox’s advice, Bast quits for a less-well-paying job with the potential for advancement, only to be fired six months later when the new company downsizes—while meanwhile the first company never fails, and even becomes stronger. Helen Schlegel’s position is that Mr. Wilcox bears a financial and moral responsibility to Bast because the upper classes have a duty not to make the lot of the lower classes worse. Mr. Wilcox argues that Bast took his chances just the same as anyone and that treating the poor with more generosity than he would a peer is unthinkable. While I sympathize more with Mr. Wilcox’s position—Bast’s situation stems from far more than his loss of employment—his callousness toward Bast’s fate is something the Schlegels are in the right to challenge. The question “How can we help the poor?” is central to the novel, but neither the Schlegels nor the Wilcoxes truly understand that the first step in the process is to stop thinking of them as a class separate from their own. As an snapshot of England’s divisive class system, Howards End is exceptional and sad, though I question whether Forster intended it that way.

I enjoyed the book, but it’s definitely not pleasure reading for me. Something that surprises me as I make my way through the 121 book list is how much variety there is among books written in a particular time period. Students of English literature in particular get in the habit of tossing around labels like “Victorian literature” or “post-industrial fiction” as if the time period is a mold that turns each book into an identical block of fiction. Yet the differences of style and content between, say, Dracula, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and King Solomon’s Mines, written within a single ten-year period, is dramatic. Howards End was published only five years after The Scarlet Pimpernel, if you want an even starker difference. As good a writer as Forster is, Howards End shows how the concerns of a particular era may not stay relevant to later generations.