Sequels: The Sending and The Magician King

This month I've been reading long-awaited sequels.

Isobelle Carmody's much-anticipated The Sending was finally released at the end of October. Originally planned as the final book of five in the Obernewtyn Chronicles (the first book is Obernewtyn, first published in 1987), The Sending is actually book number six, with book seven, The Red Queen, due next year. I started reading the Obernewtyn Chronicles at about age 16, and have been awaiting a conclusion to the series ever since.

What can I say about The Sending? If, like me, you read and loved the Obernewtyn Chronicles as a teenager, it's definitely worth reading. Isobelle Carmody's prose doesn't exactly sparkle; the plot is poorly paced and the first-person narrative is at times frustrating. However, the characters are the same characters you read about and loved all those years ago. They are dear friends, and the opportunity to once more glimpse them as they live and breathe and dream is welcome. Carmody has not lost touch with her characters over the 25+ years she has spent writing the Obernewtyn Chronicles. I love these characters so much that I read the book in a single sitting.

However, a few warnings: Elspeth, the narrator, remains somewhat short-sighted and often jumps to conclusions on little evidence. This  becomes a problem because the narrative is intensely focused on Elspeth's introspection, so the reader is often subjected to several pages of soliloquy in which Elspeth bemoans imagined misfortunes. The focus on introspection also means that the plot moves much more slowly than necessary. The rationale for splitting The Sending into two books (The Sending and The Red Queen) was that there is just too much story to fit into one book, but The Sending could easily have been half the length.

The other long-awaited sequel I read this month is The Magician King by Lev Grossman, sequel to his The Magicians. The Magicians is a little-known but brilliant novel about Quentin Coldwater, a Brooklyn teenager who ends up attending Brakebills, a university of magic. One review I read described The Magicians as 'Harry Potter meets Trainspotting'. There is fantasy, there is magic, but these books are definitely for grown-ups. Read Laura Miller's Salon review of The Magicians here.

In stark contrast to The Sending, Grossman's characters are not always likeable (Quentin can be quite a dick at times), but the plot of The Magician King always moves along. As in The Magicians, Grossman continues to draw on both (quite overtly) Rowling's Harry Potter and (more subtly) Lewis's Narnia, exposing fantasy tropes to the cold light of adult life, making magic uncomfortable and real, yet somehow leaving a sense of wonder. Grossman has a rare talent: he is able to write fiction which is unflinching and sometimes cynical, and to write it in a fantasy novel. This is no broody literary novel with magical elements: Grossman never forgets that he is writing genre fiction, and genre fiction demands to be plot-driven. Give his books a go. You won't regret it.

Pratchett's utopian dystopia

"Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. 

It always defeats order, because it is better organized." -Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times 

"Citizens hate living there and, if they have to move away ... can't wait to get back so they can enjoy hating
living there some more." -Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures 

I have been reading a lot of Pratchett this year, and one interesting (and somewhat surprising) theme in the Discworld books keeps sticking out to me. Pratchett's characters are ambitious, they dream of a better world, but whenever a better world comes along they are distinctly uncomfortable with it.

Ankh-Morpork, the biggest city in Discworld, is presented as a kind of utopian dystopia: a place where chaos reigns; where peace is maintained simply because the citizens are used to major political upheaval; you can depend on not being able to trust anyone; you get a receipt for being mugged; the river is so polluted it's deadly and law-enforcement amounts to pitting one criminal against another in a delicate balancing act. And yet Ankh-Morpork is described so lovingly that you'd be forgiven for thinking it's heaven on earth.

This has got me thinking, and I wonder if Pratchett is onto something: perhaps people really are happier with the chaos and the imperfections of everyday life than they would be with peace, prosperity and equality. At any rate, Pratchett is right about one thing: even in dystopian surroundings, life goes on and life is a wonderful, adventurous thing.



Speaking of Ankh-Morpork, a board game based on the loveable fantasy city was released last month, and my copy arrived last week. If you're a Discworld fan, it's worth checking out. The game is unbelievably fun, and loyal to the characters represented. The first time I played it I enjoyed many shared giggles with my fellow players over the depictions of characters we know and love.

Oh, Mr. G!

Not only is Neil Gaiman utterly fabulous, he also affiliates himself with so many fabulous people/shows/projects that I could happily spend weeks watching and listening to his various appearances and interviews in various wonderful settings and with various wonderful people. The latest of these is his appearance in Season 5, Episode 7 of The Guild.

He says in his blog: "Sometimes I wonder what would happen if the version of me I play in The Guild and the version of me I play in The Simpsons and the version of me I played in Arthur teamed up to fight crime and encourage people to read by hiding in their fast food."

When is a character essentially gendered?

Yesterday I finished reading Mary Robinette Kowal's Shades of Milk and Honey. Having read good reviews of the book and hearing it described as "the fantasy novel you wish Jane Austen had written", I had expectations of a historical romantic satire, with an interesting fantasy twist. Unfortunately, the novel didn't quite deliver.

Simply put, the book was far too gendered for my taste. I want to be cautious here, because I think this is an area in which feminists sometimes do more harm than good. They obsess over the representation of women in literature and cinema, and in doing so sometimes turn characters into gendered objects. In my ideal feminist world, female characters aren't considered good representations of women because they aren't considered as representations of gender at all. They are just characters. Fictional people with interesting motivations and complex personalities. Sometimes women are reduced to their biological or social roles by the critical feminist, who insists that a character's worth should be evaluated in terms of how successfully she represents women.

The Sending

For those who haven't already heard, The Sending, book 6 of Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn Chronicles, is due at the end of October. However, as with book 5 (The Stone Key), this will no longer be the final book of the Obernewtyn Chronicles, with one more to come. At the moment, the expected release date of the final book is early next year, but I'll believe it when I see it.

If you're not familiar with the Obernewtyn Chronicles, they are a teen fantasy series by Australian author Isobelle Carmody. The first book was published in 1987. I don't yet know whether I ought to recommend them - I'm sure I will write about it once I have read the final book.

A librarian can bring you back the right one

This is the carpet in Canberra's Gunghalin Public Library. Awesome.

The Princess Bride - A Hot Fairy Tale

I collect editions of The Princess Bride, and have decided to start providing descriptions and details of my editions on this blog. You can find an explanation about this and a list of editions here. I will most probably backdate posts which contain further editions, so that my blog doesn't become unreadable to passers-by, so if you're interested in the list, make sure you click on the link.

I'm going to start with an edition with the original, 1973 text. It's a reasonably ordinary edition, printed on cheap paper for a mass market audience. The most exciting thing about it is that it has a glossy, colour map insert in the middle of the book.

Title on cover: William Goldman's The Princess Bride
ISBN: 0345315324
Format: paperback
Measurements: 108 x 174mm


Front cover, spine, and back cover:

Adventures in Fabletown

 

Recently I've been reading Bill Willingham's comic book series, Fables. The series started out as a set of cute stories with fairytale characters in them, I suspect in an attempt from Vertigo to retain their Sandman audience after Sandman ended. Over time, however, (I'm up to volume 7) this series has become a serious literary contender. Every time I start reading  a volume, I can't put it down. There's all the things that fairytales should have - blood, sex, revenge, murder, magic - and there's also modern sarcasm and wit, beautiful art, and just the right amount of subversion (the picture top left depicts an impoverished Prince Charming seducing a hapless New Yorker).

The characters, over time, have become characters I care about, and I was astonished to discover how pleased I was to find rounded, interesting male fairytale characters. We're so used to worrying about how female characters are represented that I had never noticed before how rare it is to find well-represented male fairytale characters, characters with more than one motive and who blur the lines between protagonist and antagonist. But here we have Prince Charming, B.B. Wolf, Jack of the Tales, Beast, Bluebeard (to name a few) and they display charm, ruthlessness, internal struggles and depth of character. They stand alongside (or head to head with) Snow White, Rose Red, Beauty, Cinderella, characters we already knew were intelligent, resourceful, stronger than they look, forces to be reckoned with.

The series is about a group of Fables (fairytale characters) who live as refugees in our world after a powerful Adversary took the fairytale lands by military conquest. I highly recommend it. Currently I'm reading the prequel, 1001 Nights of Snowfall, which, to top everything off, has art by Charles Vess.

Round and round and round she goes

Since I abandoned this blog last year, the Australian book market has undergone a dramatic change. At this moment, the entire market is in a state of flux and nobody really knows what's going to happen.

The collapse of REDgroup Retail led to the close of 139 Angus & Robertson and Borders stores, with many suburban areas left without a local bookshop. Crikey provides a rundown here. For people like me, who no longer live within reasonable distance from a bookstore, this means relying on online purchasing. But the online market has gone bizarro, too. Here's what's happened in online bookselling this year:

• Austalia's largest online bookstore, fishpond, has started outsourcing many purchases to warehouses overseas. While this means that a larger range of books is available, it also means that the customer has to wait much longer while the item is first shipped from the USA or the UK, and then shipped from fishpond's Sydney warehouse. This means it's just as cheap and much faster to order from overseas.

• Ferrier Hodgson, the administrator for REDgroup Retail, has sold the A&R and Borders online stores to Pearson Education. Pearson Education is a publisher, so this signals and unprecedented level of direct involvement in the book market by an Australian publisher.

• The Book Despository, the best option for buying books from overseas, has been bought by Amazon. This concerns me, because I think Amazon just might be the devil.

So where is one to buy a book? And what is going to happen to the book market? I suspect something big and different is going to happen over the next few years, but what it is I can't guess. Bookselling is a centuries old industry and things just haven't changed that fast until now.

In the meantime, these are the things I want to know:

• I want a local independent bookstore. Where's my local independent bookstore?
• Am I still going to get free shipping and my choice of non-Kindle ebooks on The Book Depository?

For those interested, by the way, I think I might start posting here again, though somewhat less regularly than I used to.

A quick note regarding fishpond links

While I'm not maintaining this blog anymore, I am aware that it may occasionally be visited and that I offer advice about purchasing books. For these reasons, I thought it might be worth noting that while I have previously linked several times to fishpond, an Australin online bookstore, I can no longer in good conscience provide a personal recommendation for their store. I have noticed a decline in their customer service standards of late, and I feel that product quality, reliability and delivery lead times have suffered.

It might well be that I have simply had a run of bad luck with my last few orders. Things do go wrong from time to time in the world of retail (I should know!) and often nobody is really to blame. If you still feel inclined to purchase from fishpond, by all means go ahead. In the meantime, I have removed the link on my "Where to buy books" page, but (because it would be much too time-consuming) I have not removed any links in previous posts.

The Princess Bride - 30th Anniversary Edition

The 30th Anniversary Edition of The Princess Bride is little-known. It contains all of the original 1973 text (with the original Goldman introduction appearing after the title page which simply reads ' The Princess Bride'), as well as the 25th anniversary introduction and a further introduction (both of which precede the title page of the book). There is also a map which comes immediately after the title page.


Title on cover: The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure
ISBN: 9780151015443
Format: hardcover
Measurements: 156 x 233mm


Front cover, spine, and back cover: