2012 in Review

I read 136 books in 2012. Not many of them, I must admit, were new releases. Those that were, I discuss in my part of this Strange Horizons yearly sum up article. Not so surprisingly for readers of this blog, my picks of the year (or at least of the limited slice of it I've so far gotten to) are: Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, K.J. Parker's Sharps, and Felix J. Palma's The Map of the Sky.

As for the books I read in 2012 that were either a handful of years or more than a few centuries older, twelve in particular seemed worthy of note...

Beginning this list with a sixteenth century epic poem was not something I expected to be doing. Ariosto, however, writes with such sheer style that the poem’s age becomes irrelevant, that its gargantuan length becomes a blessing that simply promises more lines to love. The knights that we meet here are larger than life. They battle heroically, engage in fantastic (in every sense of the word) quests, and dish out truly stunning amounts of sass. (Many of these strengths are wonderfully brought out by David R. Slavitt’s translation… which also wanders away with barely a nod to the poem’s second half. Goal for the new year: figure out how it ends!)

The Company Man is a novel about lost causes. It has a noir hero navigating a steampunk world that is gradually subsumed by the cosmic. Its gaze is unflinching and far-reaching. And its marvels are manifold. I talk more about Bennett’s powerful novel here.

Like Lovecraft, Blackwood was a writer of Weird tales from the early part of the twentieth century that has now, decades later, received the hallowed status of a classic in the genre, even if he has never received Lovecraft’s wider acclaim. To view Blackwood as simply a contemporary of Lovecraft, however, is to do a great disservice to this venerable practitioner of the cosmic. Blackwood writes with insight and great skill of the shallowness of our world and perceptions, and, amidst his frequently naturalistic settings, he uses a mixture of the subtlest signs and the most powerful and building climaxes to ram home the majesty of what is beyond. I wrote about this particular collection of his at great length here.

Drawing Blood is the story of Zach and Trevor, and those two young men are some of the strongest and most alive characters I’ve ever encountered. Brite binds their every feeling inextricably with the readers', dragging us along as they live their bizarre lives. And, when they hurt, we feel every bit of their pain. I reviewed the novel here.

There has never been an evocation of shame like this. Nor has spite ever come forth like this from the written word. The Underground Man is a genius, and he is a hateful and loathsome beast, and his every utterance stabs deep. He begins: I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man (p.1). When reviewers and writers and instructors yammer on about having a voice, it is this that they are wishing for.

Goodis writes noir of the most downbeat, hard-hitting variety, and The Burglar shows him at its best. The novel has a gripping plot packed with turns, characters struggling with their all, and the world poised to take them down regardless. I talk about the novel, and others, at greater length in my review of the Goodis collection Five Noir Novels of the 1940sand 50s.

In her second Mathew Swift novel, Kate Griffin takes everything that worked about A Madness of Angels and improves it. This is a wildly creative book stuffed with gripping pyrotechnics, writing that forces you to see, and an apocalyptic villain that few can match. I reviewed it here.

Dune vividly demonstrates the heights that Science Fiction can reach. It has a truly epic plot, a world that is both consistent and wondrous, and interacts with the most profound philosophical ideas. The rise of Paul Atreides works on every level, an arc that is half messianic and half simply badass.

This may be one of Haruki Murakami’s early novels, but it is the one of his that has most stuck with me. Here, Murakami is wry, surreal, imaginative, and more than a little brilliant. I reviewed the novel at some length when I reread it at the beginning of this year, to which I will just add that, as it nears its climax, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World also boasts the best evocation of melancholy I’ve ever seen in fiction. Pressed to name a favorite novel, I would quite possibly go with this one.

More than a few moments in Lolita had me holding the book as far away from myself as I could as if trying to avoid contact with some hideous contagion or foul mess. This is a sickening read. It grabs you and shoves you up against the darkest corners of our collective morality. There is no way to not confront its issues when reading it. And there is the little fact that Nabokov’s prose is simply peerless:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta (p. 1).

To call Nabokov’s prose beauty amidst filth is to sell it horribly short. Alas, we would probably need Nabokov’s own skills to devise a suiting panegyric for it, so we shall have to be content with that.

The inclusion of The Lord of the Rings on a list like this probably isn’t so surprising, but I must admit that I actually was rather surprised when I reread the trilogy this year for the first time since my childhood. Tolkien’s work may have been picked at by generations of scavengers by this point, but it still possesses a strength that almost none of them have been able to match.

Each of the three stories in Wrong Things is packed with heart and, as the characters might have it, weird shit (p. 98). Despite the high standards of all, Kiernan’s “Onion” is still the clear winner. It’s the aftermath of a Weird Tale, a painful look at the human suffering left in the wake of the cosmic. I discuss it and the others at more length in my review.

SOME GENERAL STATISTICS

The above, though, doesn’t say much about my reading for the year as a whole, being the cherry picked highlights of it. As for the rest, well, I’ve kept lists of all books read for a few years now, but this is the first time I’ve sorted them into (childishly simple) piles. The results rather amused me, and I figured they might amuse some longtime readers as well. Needless to say, books can be in more than one category, some were not in any category, and the whole tallying is a tad inexact:

Fantasy: 15 books read

Science Fiction: 27 books read

Horror: 19 books read

Crime: 7 books read

Literature: 31 books read

Nonfiction: 26 books read

History: 16 books read

Not (originally) in English: 27 books read

For class: 45 books read

By female authors: 24 books read

The spread of genres did not wholly surprise me. Ordinarily, I certainly don’t read primarily Science Fiction, but the Warhammer binge over the summer (thirteen books total, read almost straight) pushed it over the edge. Literature’s winning overall was not unexpected, as it not only had the greatest number of reads from classes but also got to suck in many of the non-genre reads that I had no idea what to do with, such as the aforementioned Orlando Furioso.

The other significant figure up there is the last number, that of books by female authors. Twenty-four out of one hundred and thirty-sex is not very impressive there. Actually calculating out the numbers rammed home how unbalanced my reading is, and I would like to swing the total back the other way a bit next year.

"Legwork" in Fantastic Frontiers Magazine

In all the excitement of late, I haven't had a chance to mention (or peruse myself) one other piece of absolutely fantastic news. The debut issue of Fantastic Frontiers Magazine is now available in the Apple marketplace, and, among numerous other worthy tales, is my short story "Legwork." To give you an idea of the story's contents and style, I wrote it fresh off the high of discovering not only VanderMeer's short stories but the writings of Haruki Murakami. I can't claim to have truly captured either of those titans' skill, but I think I did get something worthwhile out of the attempt.

Alma Alexander - 2012: Midnight at Spanish Gardens

Five friends meet at the Spanish Gardens after decades out of touch. There, they drink Irish Coffees and talk about the past. One by one, they leave the table to go to the bathroom, to take a call, or to snap a photo of their Jaguar tattoo for their friends without disrobing in public. But their trip to the restaurant's backrooms ends up accomplishing rather more than that. Each of them is approached by Ariel, and he, the messenger, shows them a different version of their lives, a different path they might have taken. And they must choose.

The idea of getting to tweak your life is not an uncommon one in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Generally, its pleasure comes from examining key choices and contrasting the new reality with the old. 2012: Midnight at Spanish Gardens does not succeed in that regard. The main reason why is that we simply don't know enough for such a comparison. The only scenes we see outside of the novel's five alternate realities are the friends' conversations in the restaurant. Those conversations are for more enjoyable to read than dense biographies of each character would have been, and they do reveal a fair bit about each's past, but they do not cover nearly enough to allow us to spot the differences, let alone the moment of divergence, in the alternative stories. Therefore, save the ones that are so dramatically different as to be impossible not to notice (of which there are a fair few), the reader does not really know what specifically is new and what is not and has still less of an idea of how the two realities compare.

Furthermore, while the idea of a choice between realities is central to the novel, it's rather interesting that the realities themselves seem to have little of choice in them. Admittedly, I did wonder going in how a person, brought back to their pivotal decision but not told that this was not the first time, would not simply make the same choice they had previously. The answer is that Ariel does not give them a chance to repeat their choices – or, really, to make new ones. The first alternative reality is accomplished by a woman surviving a car crash she would otherwise not have; another is made by a parent's revelation or the lack thereof. These are not so much choices as they are events, drastic changes that are not so much wrought by the protagonists as wrought upon them.

Then there's how the novel's central choice, that between the old reality or the new, is fatally undercut because these characters do not live in a vacuum. If they take the new reality, the old will be forever shifted, and the people they love shifted with it. Again and again Ariel makes statement like: "Not your responsibility. […] You are only responsible for your own [choices]." (p. 89) But that is obviously ridiculous, especially in the case of parents, to one of whom Ariel admits that, if she changes her reality, her children "Will never have been born." (p. 177) In those circumstances, choosing anything but the established world would be incredibly selfish, and that's one of the reasons why it's not so surprising that four of the novel's five choose to remain.

As the novel progresses, Ariel and his role do come through more strongly. In each of the last two stories, Ariel steps beyond his proscribed role as impartial messenger and interacts with the characters. In both of them, something more of Ariel is seen and an otherworldly feel is definitely conveyed. The first, Ellen's tale, manages this without sacrificing anything of what makes the others work (more on that in a moment) and somehow manages to make the convoluted structure of scenes within a frame story within a frame story not only workable but engaging. The last piece and the Coda didn't work quite as well for me in terms of character (in part because, by the time we get to them, Olivia has been defined and redefined again and again in different incarnations so many times that it's hard to get any sense of the "real" Olivia) but made up for that with more of that ethereal feel and an excellent ending.

Despite the problems in its central conceit, 2012: Midnight at Spanish Gardens is a powerful read. This is chiefly because Alexander is an excellent character writer. The five alternate realities that we witness may not be gripping because they are alternate realities, but they are gripping because they are stories about people that we quickly come to care about. Alexander throws us into each new life in a few words, convincingly builds relationships between characters, and keeps a strong sense of pace and purpose in what are, essentially, life stories without any strong guiding plot to shape them. The fact that there are five of these life stories, and that they are all talking at once when we begin the book, makes for a slightly difficult opening, but that is made up for by how the table grows in the reader's mind, how the reader gradually comes to know each of the speakers until they, too, are at a gathering of old friends.

All of this is certainly not hindered by Alexander's prose. Though never flashy, it is always comprehensible and good at conveying the emotion of the moment, such as the off-beat way in which a character's first reaction to a disaster is conveyed: The information made no sense, as though he had asked what time of day it was and got a response that it was Wednesday (p. 44).

Alexander also possesses quite a bit of skill at encompassing characters and situations in metaphors, such as one of Simon's girlfriends saying he goes through life watching it through the windows of a train […] You never step off the train. Now and again you allow somebody else to step on, share a compartment for a little while, and then they get put off at the next station and you go on – sitting by the window, looking out at the scenery, knowing always and precisely where you are and what lies around you but never staying long enough to get to know any of it, or to truly love it (p. 70). Reading that for the first time, I was positively reminded of Murakami describing a character's lovers as having come and gone, like vividly colored birds perching momentarily on a branch before flying off somewhere (p. 360) in 1Q84, and a comparison to Murakami, needless to say, is not something that I do lightly.

Essentially, 2012: Midnight at Spanish Gardens is five life stories wrapped around a conversation. Its Fantasy element and choices did not wholly work for me, but the characters within its pages most certainly did. The experience of reading it is rather like heading over to the Spanish Gardens, getting an Irish Coffee of your own, and meeting some new best friends.

Haruki Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

There are things that cannot and should not be explained. (p. 85)

As a longtime reader or two might know, this is not the first time that I've read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It was, actually, the first of the Murakami novels I read and, at the time, I knew that I liked it but didn't know what to make of it besides that. Since, and as a result of that first exposure, I've read, reviewed, and loved several of Murakami's novels, and yet, as time went on, it was this one that outlasted them all in my thoughts. About a year after that first read, and several months after the book's in-absentia rise to the position of one of my favorite novels, I reread the book and found it lived up to every one of my expectations. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is Murakami at his best, at his most playful and his most insightful. [A note before we begin: there are SPOILERS aplenty in the following.]

Information is key and king in Hard-Boiled Wonderland's Tokyo, and, from the beginning, the conflict over it is what dominates and threatens the world. Devoted to the preservation of knowledge and its exclusivity we have the system, and the system is the state. (p. 160) Arrayed against them are the factory, dedicated to the breaking of the system's codes and the revealing of its revelations. Our dear protagonist, a member of the system, is drawn into the conflict by a neutral, eccentric and brilliant scientist whose breakthrough discoveries, we're told, could spell the end of the world. (p. 128)

All of this is, as the narrator observes, your classic cops-and-robbers routine, (p. 33) and it's from there that the book's noir comes from for this is as much a crime novel as it is a Science Fiction one, a surreal fantasy, or a work of pure Literature (much as I hate the term applied as a genre) – which is to say, of course, that's it's somehow both not at all and the very exemplar of the form. Of course, Murakami's usual vivid colors are in full force here, as is his floating and flowing surrealism, all of which is obviously antithetical to the orthodox noir of a Hammett or a Goodis. 

That dismissal, though, misses the narrator's endlessly witty and even insightful observations, often, in the very purest tradition of noir, showing the bizarre nature of it all and the narrator's insignificance and even powerlessness before it, albeit always with a special Murakami twist:  I was a leftover wrapped in black plastic and shoved into the cooler. (p. 21) The writing here is a constant toying with intentional absurdity (Walls a toasted off-white, like the muffins I eat for breakfast. (p. 7)) and profundity, blurring and even obliterating the lines between them: There must be as many paths of human fat as there are ways of human death (p. 8) or: Even cast aside, clothes know a permanence that eludes their wearers. (p. 374)

But while the System/Factory conflict drives the first part of the novel, and while it's never really silent, the reader comes to realize that it's the symptom rather than the cause of the problem. Progress is pure, devoid of good or evil intent, but the pursuit of it and the actualization of its fruits are deathly dangerous: It's this pure focus, exclusive of all view to loss or gain, that's seen science achieve such uninterrupted advances. […] [But] the purity of science often hurts many people, just like pure natural phenomena do. (p. 253) Ultimately, the question of its possession by good or evil is irrelevant, for progress and knowledge hold all the potential for our misery and harm: Civilization […] faces serious crises because science is used for evil – or good. (p. 29) 

The promised end of the world does come, or at least the end of a world: Actually speaking, it isn't this world. It's the world in your mind that's going to end. (p. 270) The looming apocalypse does come, but it does so in personal form, the scientifically-caused dissolution of the narrator's mind and soul, leaving him in an inner world of his own consciousness, cut off forever from what we view as reality. 

That brings us to the second of the book's two threads, that entitled The End of the World and taking place entirely within that unreal world created by the scientist's machinations and growing in prominence as the novel progresses. This is a world made up of a single, isolated town, surrounded by a perfect wall, overlooked by a clock tower that has long forfeited its role as a timepiece. (p. 38) It's a world that's the opposite of the outside, one that remains forever unchanged (p. 14) and where absolute peace can be found in mindlessness, motionless existence, for it's our intellect that leads to all the so-beyond-natural ills of the world. As one character in this inner setting says, lay down your mind and a peace come. A peace deeper than anything you have known. (p. 318) 

Murakami does not just allude to this deeper realm and leave us to draw our own conclusions. No, he shows it to us in chapters that alternate with the jagged coolness of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland and could not be more different. As the narrator is more and more submersed into this peace the tale circles absolute stillness and absolute zero, each chapter resplendent with the fading remnants of true awareness and bursting with a languor so brilliantly evoked that the reader's thoughts, too, drift in ever smaller currents, relaxing and weakening as the heartbeat slows and wonder grows. Here, in this world, there is everything and here there is nothing, (p. 385) and it's a perfect nothing. (p. 86)

Murakami doesn't just raise questions. No, as crushing waves of melancholy and an almost agonizing beauty imbue every word of the novel's ending chapters, Murakami's brief but deep epic of thought reaches two successive peaks. The first is the justification of progress and striving, no matter its cost. For the utopia of absence that the End of the World shows us is not only devoid of loss but also of gain, not only misery but also joy: The absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope. (p. 334) For, as we come to see, Love is a state of mind (p. 334) and cannot exist for those who have no mind. But then comes the so-understandable, so heartbreaking finale to it all. For the narrator, though now fully conscious of the costs, cannot leave behind the peace that he's found. He stays, immersed in the harmony and perfect nothing of that dreamed and conflict-free world.

The level of cool and grandeur, in their corresponding sections, does come at the expense of plot. As the narrator quips at one point, this isn't the kind of thing they show on TV. This drama was a lot more complex and with no discernible plot. (pp. 112-3) While "no discernible plot" really is going a bit too far, it's not far off in terms of effect. Though a lot happens here, none of it is gripping in a roller coaster, plot boiler, gotta find out what happens next kind of way. This is, rather, the kind of book where the narrator can observations and wit power on unhindered through a scene where he may be, say, stabbed in the gut with a knife. While such a distance could certainly leave many a book powerless, though, Murakami effortlessly keeps you engaged with his characters, prose, absurdity, and with the reality of his setting. What's most surprising about the last of those is how real the day to day world of the characters is, no matter how impossible the events within it become. Murakami accomplishes this through a deft weaving of the mundane into the fantastic, having his characters prepare food and live their lives all around the plot and, of course, by utilizing his characteristic barrage of references, which here include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 2011: A Space Odyssey, Turgenev, and Borges, to name just a few.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was written early in Haruki Murakami's career but exemplifies, nonetheless, so many of his strengths. It's true that this is the most out and out genre of the Murakami novels and stories that I've read, but my affinity for it goes deeper than that. The world here is filled with fantastically daring ideas glimpsed from the shadows and approached head on. The writing is filled with, in one section, always dancing wit and, in the other, surreal majesty. The book, throughout, is a entertaining to read, fun from first word to last, and also a work of stunning power and sorrow, a novel that's joyous, poignant, and profound.

Haruki Murakami - 1Q84

"And also," the driver said, facing the mirror, "please remember: things are not what they seem." (p. 9)

1Q84 is the Japanese novelist Haruku Murakami's third novel since 2000, though the word "novel" might be a tad misleading, as it's a trilogy in Japan. Fittingly enough for its three-in-one background, it's a brick of a book. Nonetheless, it's an easy and pleasurable read, Murakami's smooth and sonorous prose floating you through a narrative that, right up until you turn the last page, seems to make perfect sense. When you look back on it, however, all the easy associations you picked up as you read turn out to be rather hollow, the book's meaning something that has to be cobbled together from bits and pieces throughout its massive, lifelike sprawl.

An easy looking thematic starting point seems to be the reference in the title, the contrasts and, of course, similarities between Orwell's so-famous 1984 and this year of 1Q84, this world-with-a-question-mark, as Auomame puts it. But that association's too easy, and Murakami's true intent at once rises above that one-to-one correlation/interpretation and also sidesteps the comparison entirely. As one character says:  Now, in the real year 1984, Big Brother is all too famous, and all too obvious. If Big Brother were to appear before us now, we'd point to him and say, 'Watch out! He's Big Brother!' There's no longer any place for a Big Brother in this real world of ours. Instead, these so-called Little People have come on the scene. Interesting verbal contrast, don't you think? (p. 236) Those Little People are nothing near as concrete as Big Brother and his police force. No, the Little People are something nigh entirely ephemeral, a force of magic and thought that only touches the world, if it does at all, through implication and faith and the most subtle of maneuverings.

In the end, the comparison does, of course, seem valid to some extent, but the despotism shown here is not one of force or even of nation, but rather a despotism of thought and will, of past and intent and even of love. The Sakigake Cult is the clearest example of this. It takes the circuits out of [its member's] brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. […] It makes life a lot easier. You don't have to think about different things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do. You never have to starve. (pp. 120-1) but while it might be the most obvious example of the intellectual and individual atrophy at the novel's core, it’s the least focused on. Sakigake is mostly a specter in the shadows, an example of how dominating the Little People's manipulations can become so that we may better see and fear them in the rest of the text.

[People] have to move with a purpose, (p. 29) we hear towards the novel's beginning, and it could be said that attempts to find that purpose and carry it through, no matter the circumstances or obstacles, dominate. And the greatest of all barriers seems to be one's birth. Both Auomame and Tengo had parents locked in narrow roles, and each had to escape those roles to try and become who they needed to be. More important than just escape, though, is reconciliation, or at least understanding, of the past. Much of Tengo's storyline is in fact his desire and need to understand his origins and father, to comprehend how half of the genes that made his existence possible could come from this narrow, uneducated man. (p. 176) But while Murakami's adept at Tengo's personal conflict, the ramifications of it do not, of course, end there. No, in 1Q84 the world seems made wholly of an endless battle of contrasting memories, (p. 293) and it seems that the effects and maybe even purpose of life might be the rewriting of those memories and the past.

Love is another thing central to 1Q84, but that's not to say that it's pure. No, the characters need love, but it's often what destroys them, a cruel jailor and torturer that feeds on their flaws and often leaves them destroyed. It's through love, here, or at least love's approximation, that true loneliness is reached, and Murakami proves devastatingly able to hammer those moments home: Ayumi had a great emptiness inside her, like a desert at the edge of the earth. You could try watering it all you wanted, but everything would be sucked down to the bottom of the world, leaving no trace of moisture. No life could take root there. Not even birds would fly over it. […]Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically – on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone. (pp. 368-9) That's where Auomame comes into her role as assassin. She, with few friends and fewer emotional attachments, has become an avenger of sorts, a slayer of those who abuse and destroy the object of their desires.

The one exception to the novel's two categories of emotionless and damaging is the idealized and intangible relationship between Tengo and Auomame, forged from just one moment of true contact many years ago and distinct by virtue of its improbability. Neither character will pollute it with their actions, will actively go out and find the other. If they are too meet again it must be by chance one day, like passing on the street, or getting on the same bus, (p. 190) for only flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken. (p. 374)

1Q84 is anything but a realist novel. Its flow is a surreal drift. Strict analysis flounders here, the orderly march of cause and effect left behind for a tale as humanly logical as it is absurd. Like After Dard, 1Q84 is not constructed from the oft-contemplated yet depthless impossible but instead from the subtly unthinkable. Murakami's otherworldly agents – his Little People – do not replace our reality but rather alter it. Murakami's is a Tokyo-born Middle Earth made of nothing but an empty sandbox and swings, a mercury-vapor lamp, emitting its sterile light, the spreading branches of a zelkova tree, a locked public toilet, a new six-story condo (only four units of which had lighted windows), a war notice board, a red vending machine with a Coca-Cola logo, an illegally parked old-model green Volkswagen golf, telephone poles and electric lines, and primary-color neon signs in the distance. The usual city noise, the usual lights. (p. 548)

One of the text's key fantastical components is that of dohta and maza (p. 685) and the relationship between them, object and shadow, reality and afterimage, character and alter ego. It's a relationship that characterizes much of the text, for 1Q84 is a story of layers and careful shading, numerous perspectives and recurrences, images and events appearing again and again in slightly altered forms and viewed through drastically different eyes. Even the language comes to play the game, with Murakami often using one word, such as aroused (p. 43/4), twice in the same scene, but in vastly different connotations, with the first nonetheless impacting how we view the second.

Murakami's prose is brilliant and engaging without ever being flashy or openly attention seeking. It's the little things that make it what it is and often the descriptions of the smallest things that stick in your mind the longest. Murakami is an absolute master of similes and metaphors, twisting mundane images into wonderful new configurations, like when a character must fasten [their] feelings to the earth – firmly, like attaching an anchor to a balloon. (p. 185) or like when we're told how Tengo's past lovers had come and gone, like vividly colored birds perching momentarily on a branch before flying off somewhere. (p. 360) Furthermore, Murakami's a supremely playful author, often mercilessly poking fun of his own creations with a wray wit: The large crown of his head formed and abnormally flat bald area with lopsided edges. It was reminiscent of a military heliport that had been made by cutting away the peak of a small, strategically important hill. (p. 330) Not even revelation and life changing events are above such jibes:  At least once in his life [Tengo] had had the perfect erection, and the perfect orgasm. It was like the author of Gone With the Wind. Once you have achieved something so magnificent, you have to be content with it. (p. 727)

Despite all that, 1Q84 is a flawed novel, and a reviewer ever so slightly more concerned with snappy phrasing than accuracy might even say that those problems are half from excess and half from restraint. The first of those can, for the most part, be pinned down to the novel's aforementioned repetition. It's a technique that is, for the most part, effective, but, when used to the extent it is here, serves to further slow down and clog up the works. The repetition does give added insight, but it also serves to stifle any forward momentum the novel might otherwise have accumulated. This, and the novel's length, would both not be an issue if not for the fact that, put plainly, the book simply doesn't have enough significant events, at least not when one compares the number of those to the weight of its minutia and the sum of its page count. Though 1Q84 is more than twice the length of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, it doesn't feel like it has any more content or depth, just like it's playing its melodies at half speed.

That's not to say, admittedly, that 1Q84 is never a tightly paced, gripping work, just that it almost never is. One of the novel's key set pieces is a long, long time building, but, when it comes in the midst of the second book, is composed of chapter after chapter of almost unbreakable tension, each word exquisitely backed by the weight of our expectations and by the omnipresent feel of imminent revelation. Alas, the novel never again reaches the magic of those chapters, and some of the later significant events actually serve to simply underscore the weightlessness of much of the narrative. The third book introduces a new viewpoint character, a private detective in the employ of Sakigake. His chapters are generally enjoyable, but the moment when he pieces together the connections between Tengo and Auomame is one of the novel's weakest. In the main thrust of the narrative, enraptured by Murakami's prose, the link between the two is delightful and even magical because of its slightness. When uncovered and explained in terms of the detective's supposed logic, however, the connection ends up viewed by the reader's regular, discerning gaze and the link is, when considered in that light, of course ridiculous.

The other contender for the much-coveted prize for the novel's weakest section comes when the reader is finally allowed to glimpse some of the text of Air Chrysalis, the book-within-a-book that first exposes the Little People and that, when rewritten by Tengo, goes on to win prizes and top bestseller lists. Everything from cap-i-tal-izum to peese and for-tress (p. 532) is rendered in the grating, garish, and juvenile manner of an adult doing his ham-handed best to cram a child's perspective down our throats. The main effect, besides conveying boundless immaturity, was making me wonder about the sanity of the judges and reading populace of this alternate reality Tokyo.

I would say that most of my criticisms of logic and pacing, though, wouldn't come as any surprise at all to Murakami. After the publication of Air Chrysalis, Tengo reads several of its reviews, one of which says that: As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks. This may well be the author's intention, but many readers are likely to this lack of clarification as a sign of 'authorial laziness.' (p. 380) This confuses Tengo. He knows that, as a story, Air Chrysalis was fascinating to many people […]. What more did it have to do? (p. 381)

That, really, seems to sum up much of Murakami's philosophy in reading this work and the mindset that must be used to read it. Speaking of life, a character at one point thinks: The warmth and the pain came as a pair, and unless he accepted the pain, he wouldn't feel the warmth. It was a kind of trade-off. (p. 803) 1Q84 is a magical and sprawling work, one resplendent with depth, and also one loaded down with a number of flaws. It's a tapestry of dreams that might just be too delicate to be perfect without being ruined.

Reading in April

Yes, I'm aware that this is a tad late. As is probably fairly obvious, I've been quite busy lately, but, on the upside, my summer's shaping up to be filled with nothing but hot air and writing, redundant as the combo might prove to be. Future articles might - might - be a shade more on the timely side. In the meantime, let's bust out a time machine and figure out what I was reading two months ago.

Tau Zero boasts shallow characters, lax pacing, and a hard Science Fiction core so incredible that I'm still shaken a week after reading it. For the first time, I understand Hard Science Fiction. As it happens, there really are ideas strong enough to carry novels entirely on their own.

There's no denying that Aickman is a masterful writer. His prose is elegant, his atmospheres pervasive, his ideas fascinating. And yet I'm not sure that we're always on the same wavelength, to speak (as Robert Aickman certainly would not) in clichés. The Model felt like one of the lesser stories in Cold Hand in Mine. Masterfully done and subtle, certainly, but composed of a subtlety too urbane to bother with meaning or gratification.

Classics are always an odd experience. The light jokes of the time are, when looked at from six decades' distance and through a classic's deific airs, bizarre. The Martian Chronicles feels dated in parts, and some of the stories felt too reliant on unbelievable actions to me. That being said, there's no denying the brilliance of several of Bradbury's pieces here, including There Will Come Soft Rains, Usher II, and The Million-Year Picnic. This was my first Bradbury, but I'll be reading more for sure.

Crass, rude, and absurd, Exponential Apocalypse is a hilarious read. Review here.

Daniel Kraus's YA horror novel is equal parts grave robbing and coming of age, and both are pulled off with skill and wit. There are a few discolorations here and there, but they do little to damage the whole. Review here.

Death Poems is one of Ligotti's rarest works and getting it probably serves as a good road sign of the purchaser's loss of sanity. So, is Death Poems worth the exorbitant price (while I won't quote what I paid, I will say that most editions go for over a dollar a page)? In an objective sense, no, it's probably not. Death Poems is interesting and often highly amusing, but it is not Teatro Grottesco. This is the kind of work that's enjoyable, perhaps even thought provoking, but is certainly not life changing. And, for that price, life changing would be a fair expectation. Then again, if you're at the point where you're even considering such an insane purchase, I can almost guarantee that you'll find yourself sliding into it, wise decision or not. Ligotti becomes a bit of an obsession like that.

Like most Ligotti, I read Death Poems twice.

Kafka on the Shore has talking cats, jobs in the library, murderous corporate icons, teen runaways, and gateways to isolated dimensions, and it’s all painted in Murakami’s beautiful but understated prose. This book feels like the fulfillment of much of the man’s style, complete with the bizarre ordinary world of After Dark and the questions of identity and humanity filling Hard Boiled Wonderland. If I can ever wrap my mind around this properly, there will be a review. In the meantime: highly, highly recommended.

Black Halo improved on many of Tome of the Undergates’ flaws and proves a damn entertaining read. Review here.

Valente writes with imagery so thick it would be suffocating if it weren’t so deftly handled. Almost every paragraph here is filled with wonders, but Deathless is not just great prose. Valente manages to create a gripping plot of bizarre creatures and circumstances out of folklore and dreams. This is the rare book than can – and should – be called magical in every sense of that word.

Simply written but awesomely imaginative, Scott Westerfeld's YA steampunk novel is an engrossing read. The ending is rather abrupt, but Westerfeld twists world war one into a shape both amusing and fascinating. Recommended.

The Picture of Dorian Gray’s an interesting horror-style concept wrapped around a book of witty dialogue and fascinating ideas. There’s the occasional moment that drags – such as the seemingly endless chapter describing the minutia of our dubious protagonist’s life – but Wilde proves equally adept at making the reader laugh and think.

I won't be reviewing Historical Lovecraft due to the whole being in it thing, but I will say that it's filled with excellent stories, including Tobler's If Only to Taste Her Again, Meikle's Inquisitor, Reiss's The Chronicle of Aliyat Son of Aliyat, Joshua Reynolds' the Far Deep, and Tanzer's The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins among others. You know you're interested...

Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

A well without water. A bird that can't fly. An alley with no exit. (p. 66)

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the seventh novel of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, and it is, from what I've read, often considered his best work. The book is filled with the exciting, the visceral, and the bizarre – but all of those elements are so loosely joined together that the overall work lacks the power of its components. If it was a song, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle would be a dynamic one, filled with different instruments, melodies and passages, but it would be played so quietly that you’d only be able to hear its power if you leaned close and listened hard.

Trying to sum up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in a few words is an impossibility. It's easy to latch onto causes, but the effects soon spiral out of control and comprehension. In the beginning, main character Toru Okada takes brief breaks from his life to listen to the call of the Wind-Up Bird, a never glimpsed creature that makes a sound like a creaking spring. In his innocuous home, with the Wind-Up Bird’s call reverberating in his mind and with an unclaimed bird statue lording over the entryless and exitless alley, Toru Okada’s life falls apart. In Murakami’s world, the smallest of things can be momentous, and Kumiko – Toru’s wife – worries that their cat’s escape might herald the end of their marriage. Trying to placate her, Toru agrees to search for the cat, but, even once psychics are called in to aid in the hunt, the step is too little too late. The cat is not found, and Kumiko soon vanishes from Toru’s life, asking him to never try and contact her.

Throughout the book, Toru is the epitome of passivity. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a book filled with interesting characters, and that’s a good thing, because Toru has damn little will of his own. For most of the book, our narrator is simply a pinball knocked from one dominating presence to another. When Toru says that he will search for the cat, his conviction lasts just long enough for him to walk outside and get roped into a conversation with his sixteen year old neighbor, May Kasahara. When Toru says that he will search for Kumiko, what he means by that is that he will set at home and hope that she contacts him. When Toru first meets Kumiko’s brother, Noboru Wataya, Toru is disgusted by the man’s glitzy but empty persona and insists that he, too, is a worthwhile individual, even if his life is in every respect the opposite of Wataya’s. But, for the vast majority of the novel, he never does anything to even express his dislike of the man, let alone to actually harm him. Toru thinks by sitting in his house and listening to music, and he spends his free time staring at passersby and zoning out. The one active decision he makes in the first chunk of the novel (or, more accurately, just before the novel’s beginning) is his decision to quit his job, but that hardly leads to a series of self motivated actions.

The idea of responsibility runs through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the uncontrollable past a subtle and inexorable influence on the present, the grind of history coming forth with the spring-like call of the Wind-Up Bird. Kumiko is driven away from Toru because of what she did behind his back and because of what she did not tell him. Creta Kano spent much of her life simply drifting through, immune to all concepts of pleasure and pain, and she’s only now trying to build something from her past. Lieutenant Mamiya and Mr. Honda are both still coming to terms with Japan’s Manchurian war, and May Kasahara and her deceased boyfriend both lived on the edge to try and exert control over their fate, and it’s that need for power that drives her to do increasingly reckless things.

And yet, of all the characters, Toru Okada, our first person narrator, exhibits this theme the least. He simply drifts from one side character’s causal chain to another’s, barely affected by his own past for the simple reason that he’s done precious little to set anything in motion. May Kasahara might nickname him Mr. Wind-Up Bird, but our viewpoint character is, truth be told, more voyeur than participant in the vast majority of the novel’s events.

At the very end, Toru takes control of his own destiny for the first time. One could argue, then, that the novel’s central struggle was his attempt to overcome his own passivity – but such a claim simply does not hold up. For the first five hundred off pages of the book, Toru makes no attempt to overcome his personality, and, if the ending’s transition to motion is supposed to be our climax, the overall book would be built around a narrative conflict so underdeveloped as to be effectively nonexistent.

In lieu of our protagonist making decisions, the story is moved forward by the secondary characters. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a large, scattershot narrative with enough plot threads to easily strangle oneself in. On the surface, it would be easy to see the book as not merely messy but as a mess, as it seems to struggle against itself at every opportunity. Characters come in, dominate the story, and then depart forever without a backwards glance, the questions that they posed looking confused and lost in their wake.

And yet, as you read on, the threads begin to weave back upon one another. I don’t mean that there are nicely wrapped up climaxes and a careful laying out of cause and effect. Instead, Murakami builds a collage-like narratives out of similarities in theme and place, of faces that appear in two otherwise unconnected stories, and out of ideas that can be taken out of one life and applied to another.

Toru goes searching for his cat. He doesn’t find it, but he does meet May Kasahara. As a condition of their marrying, Toru and Kumiko are forced to see the clairvoyant Mr. Honda by Kumiko’s parents. He never ends up helping them with their marriage, but he does, after his death, send Lieutenant Mamiya to deliver a keepsake to Toru. Upon delivery, Toru asks Mamiya to tell him how Mamiya and Honda met. The story begins with that, but, by the time Mamiya and Toru’s acquaintance is through, it’s moved far beyond a simple meeting story and has left Honda behind in all senses but as a catalyst. The keepsake itself turns out to be empty. And so on. As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the lack of resolution is at its core, and so it’s fitting that the climax gives us a measure of understanding, but does not give us what we were seeking, leaving Toru’s ultimate goals unfulfilled even while salving a small portion of his need for knowledge.

Of course, there’s a vast difference between admiring and enjoying something, and Murakami’s narrative is in many ways the ultimate tease. Question after question is posed, but the board is never cleared, the answers never provided. Simulating all of life’s digressive messiness on the page is an impressive undertaking, but it’s not necessarily a satisfying one. All of which isn’t to imply that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a hollow read. In lesser hands, a game of unresolved tension would simply result in the reader putting down their chips and walking home. Murakami, however, is too gifted to allow one to disassociate oneself that easily.

Murakami’s writing provides an easy intimacy with his character’s and his world. His prose is descriptive and evocative, his characters as sympathetic as they are incomprehensible. Murakami has the rare gift of making the mundane feel bizarre, of making the little inconsistencies in life seem like the keys to comprehending our entire existence. For him, it's not even the question that matters but the possibility of questions. As our narrator learns towards the end of the novel : Fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. […] The important question for Cinnamon was not what his grandfather did but what his grandfather might have done. He learned the answer to this question as soon as he succeeded in telling the story. (p. 525)

All of which isn’t to demean the big events of the novel. When Murakami does decide to bring one of his various threads to a climax, the results are simply breathtaking. There are moments in this novel that are almost unbearably rich. In his tale to Toru, Lieutenant Mamiya recounts how he was trapped at the bottom of a well. For almost the entire day, everything was utterly dark. And then, for a few precious moments, the sun shone down. In the end, those rays of sun may represent everything or nothing, but while the light is illuminating Mamiya’s leg it is easy to feel that we are as close as the character to suddenly knowing and understanding everything that we’ve ever wanted to know.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a novel as powerful as it is messy. This is one of the best articulations of our search for meaning that I’ve ever read, but it’s also one of the most difficult, in large part due to Murakami’s refusal to ever step beyond his parameters and bring things to a conclusion that is deeply craved, if not necessarily fitting. There is no denying that this is an interesting work, but I’m not sure that it’s necessarily an enjoyable one.