An unlikely trio

Another round-up, my friends! I'm looking forward to soon finding the time for writing round-ups of one. Today, three books that in no way belong together form the subject of my early morning musings. (Actually, it's not that early; it's almost 9:30 ayem as I begin writing this. I woke up late. Yesterday, I gymmed for an hour and then later had an hour-long swimming lesson. I feel both very strong and very tired today.)

Last week, I finished reading China Miéville's fat novel Perdido Street Station. I can't give you a plot summary without telling you the whole story, so I won't even try. Some generalities: it's fantasy completely sans swords but not sorcery (but no funny hats or wands are involved), it's sci-fi, it's an excellent example of literary world-building, it's absolutely full of disturbing and bad shit.

Perdido Street Station is almost 700 pages of trouble going down. For a long while, I loved the perpetual climax (crisis!) of the plot but 300+ pages of unremitting tension started to wear on me a little by the end. China Miéville, who is lovely because he looks like a bouncer but has a PhD from the London School of Economics and a vocabulary at least 10 times larger than most people's, is also generally a very good writer. As I noted in my review of The City & The City, I really admire his ability to write compelling fiction in a semi-academic "voice"; I honestly don't know how he manages to make this work, but he does, and that's my third reason for adoring him.

But I didn't adore Perdido Street Station, at least not as a whole. And my biggest complaint about the book is something I'm not sure is, in fact, a problem with the book; it might very well be only a reflection of the limitations of my being a Bear of Very Little Brain. This is the problem: I kind of hate descriptions of the physical context of a story. I like some very basic information to set the stage, and then my own brain takes over and aggressively creates its own set of visuals. This compulsion was set repeatedly in conflict with Mieville's extensive, rich, and unending details about the physical aspects of the world he creates; unfortunately, all his information couldn't silence my own notions of how things looked and so I suffered from a mild but persistent headache the whole time I was reading this book. Also, and this is a much smaller issue but it grated on me more and more as I neared the book's conclusion: the word "architecture" was so over-used it started to make me feel crazy. With a vocabulary bigger than god's boots, I know Mieville needn't have relied so heavily on this one word.

These seem like pretty minor problems, yes. Indeed, much of the book was wonderful, fantastic. But there is one major problem with Perdido Street Station that doesn't seem minor to me at all, but which I can't reveal here as it occurs at the very end of the book and to discuss it in any detail would be to blow the whole plot up in the air. But I will say this: Isaac's reasons are damned stupid, because the moral bind Miéville puts him is a total cop-out. That said, I'm still desperate to read Kraken.

Next up was a collection of short stories edited by Kenzaburo Oe: The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath. In terms of historical, archaeological reflection this is an excellent collection as it covers writers of different ages, experiences, and gender. As a literary collection, it is wildly uneven and the only reason I see this is a problem is that, given how rich Japan's literary history is, I just can't imagine it was actually necessary to choose historical variety over artistic merit.

Indeed, stories by Tamiki Hara and especially Hiroko Takenishi's "The Rite" were literarily amazing which, of course, lent much greater poignancy and pathos to the historical moments they addressed. These two recognized, or at least were able to articulate, that the physical calamity of the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II was only the beginning; that the emotional, familial, social, mental calamities would go deeper and last much, much longer. So, this book was also not all it could have been, but I'm incredibly grateful to have been introduced to two excellent Japanese writers I hadn't before known of.

And to make it three partial disappointments in a row, there's Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, which I finished yesterday. I keep reading Roddy Doyle but the fact is, I think I've actually only really loved one of his novels so far: The Snapper. All his books have great moments, and sometimes those great moments are lengthy. But his writing style is so set, his approach so uniform that even different topics come out looking pretty similar. All his characters speak exactly the same way.

I've concluded that Roddy Doyle is quite good at what he does, but he only does one thing. Or, he sort of does two things: funny books and not funny books, but the writing style and voice issues remain problems, and so it's really just one thing. And that one thing is lower middle class Dubliners screwing shit up and having tough lives. The question is simply whether or not there will be laughs involved.

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is about one Paula Spenser, a woman with an abusive husband and a problem with the bottle. There are some truly powerful moments in this novel; indeed, I found myself tearing up on the subway train yesterday. But I already can't remember why; Doyle's style just isn't strong enough, on the whole, to find any purchase in either my short- or long-term memories. I'll still read the sequel, Paula Spenser, just to find out what happens though; if Doyle's writing isn't memorable, it's easy and sometimes that's what's required.

Being such a negative Nelly isn't enjoyable for me either, by the way. But it's mid-morning and it's as dark outside as midnight during the apocalypse; sprightly blog writing simply can't occur under such conditions.

The author for whom we dance

I'd been planning to dig into David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet when I ventured down east for a family visit in December. I'd been waiting because I like to ration Mitchell's new stuff out, though I'm rarely able to do so for long; also, I kept hearing that it wasn't as good as his previous novels and that frightened me a little.

Last week, I became entirely unable to wait any longer, partly because I suddenly dismissed all the doubters' warnings, wondering to myself how many who were disappointed with this new novel have read only Cloud Atlas? The narrative and structural pyrotechnics of Cloud Atlas make it stand apart from almost everything else going, and rightly so. But one of the many things that makes Mitchell a genius, and probably the English-speaking world's greatest living author, is that not only does it make no sense to compare him to other writers - he can't even be compared to himself! Every book is too radically different from the last for such comparisons to make sense. The only thing one can really say is, as my friend Vee did the other day: Even if a David Mitchell book isn't the best David Mitchell book, it's still better than everything else.

Cloud Atlas is the high literary equivalent of explosions and jazz hands; The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a quiet, subtle study of longing and desire with some spooky fantasy thrown in for good measure. It's a romance that defies everything that romance does, while still containing echoes of Romeo and Juliet, of all things! Well, perhaps I shouldn't use that surprised exclamation point - Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy in large part because its lovers are so stupidly, adolescently naive. Jacob is similarly afflicted with the great heaving sighs of the young at the beginning of his tale but experience quickly teaches him that there are boundaries between individuals that really cannot be crossed. Not just that the price to be paid trying to do so will be death; but that there is really no way over.

I don't claim that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is perfect; it probably isn't, but I personally can't say how. I know that there are sections of it that I liked better than others; I am not as fond of the space devoted to Captain Penhaligon as I am of the rest of the novel. Cloud Atlas, I believe to be perfect - not perfect in the fun but ultimately rather sterile way Tom Jones is, but in that way literature should be - it exceeds and defies all expectations and is ridiculously gorgeously written to boot. In this way, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is also perfect, or very close, in my opinion. Every move Mitchell made in this novel surprised me, but it always worked. And I have an extremely annoying inability to be surprised by books much anymore, so this is saying something. And the writing...if I were given to keeping a commonplace book of beautiful quotations, which I am not, because that is much too Victorian, it would be half-filled just with lines from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Yes, this post was the bloggish equivalent of a shrieking fangirl shrieking a lot. I never claimed to be impartial about David Mitchell. Which author(s) are you unable to be impartial about?

More reviewlets, ten words or less

Yes, I've had to up the word limit to ten for this one as my brainkin is still broken. Also, I'm listening to Lady Gaga real loud so as to block out the mouth-breathers having a shouting party upstairs; while Lady Gaga inspires me to do many things (like stay on the treadmill and happily run real fast), thinking isn't one of them.

Here we go.

1) Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle.

Too much personal resonance to be enjoyable, but damned good.








2) Little Novels by Wilkie Collins.

All sort of similar, all similarly enjoyable.

3) The Pilgrim of Hate, Ellis Peters.

I wish Brother Cadfael was my dad.








4) The Giant, O'Brien by Hilary Mantel.

Both the bliss and the blood did me great good.








5) The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Emma Donoghue.

Emma Donoghue is the homeless man's Hilary Mantel.

Eagleton and Pullman

I have a theory which may explain why Philip Pullman’s latest offering, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, is so disappointing – it was written in defensive response to a short (but incredibly damning) section of Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.

The passage in question begins with Eagleton’s thoughts on Thomas Aquinas’s view of God’s relationship with humans, refers briefly to D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and then drops this bomb:

God “has created us in his own image and likeness, since he himself is pure liberty. It follows that he is also the ground of our ability to reject him – which is to say that in a splendidly big-hearted gesture, he is the source of atheism as well as faith. He is not a censorious power which prevents us from being good middle-class liberals and thinking for ourselves. This is simply the primitive, Philip Pullman-like view of those who cannot wean themselves off the idea of God as Big Daddy. The poet William Blake would have had nothing but scorn for this naïve misconception. What writers like Pullman do not see is that the liberal doctrine of freedom derives among other sources from the Christian notion of free will, rather as the liberal belief in progress has a distant resonance of Christian ideas of Providence.” (p. 17)

I find it frankly shocking that someone as capable of very close reading as Eagleton clearly is would make such a shocking interpretive mis-step about Pullman’s views on religion, which are generally understood to be laid out in His Dark Materials trilogy. In fact, if Pullman attacks anything in these books, it’s most certainly and, I think, obviously organized religion, not God, he’s after. After all, God figures in the third novel only, and only very briefly at that – as a very frail and tired old man kept caged for the horrid purposes of ruthless bureaucrats like Metatron.  The countless threats of death and damnation over the years, not to mention, of course, his excommunication from the Catholic church, don’t arise from Pullman’s take on God so much as on his apparent evisceration of religion.

Eagleton certainly defends religion but he does so in a balanced way, being as willing to acknowledge both its current and historical failings as he is to insist upon how it may be used differently, and to better purpose. Given that His Dark Materials is a reworking of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a poem to which Eagleton several times makes approving reference in Reason, Faith, and Revolution, this misunderstanding is doubly surprising. I can only conclude that it’s neither Pullman’s notion of God, nor his virulent rejection of a thinly veiled Christianity that really get Eagleton’s goat here. Rather, I would suggest that it’s Pullman’s creation of a world in which neither are necessary which offends him. Hitchens and Dawkins also claim that neither are necessary but as Eagleton has shown, and which I discuss in my previous post, they do so without a clear enough understanding of the things against which they inveigh.

Pullman is a different beast all together. Pullman not only has a very solid grounding in Christian theology but also in its most famous literary critique, Paradise Lost. Pullman doesn’t offer pat liberal-intellectual credos in opposition to being set spiritually adrift; his novels insist throughout, but particularly at the climax, that humans are so inherently spiritual as to require no guidance whatsoever. This is a radical notion that goes well beyond Eagleton’s claim that Jesus loves us just as we are; it insists this isn’t actually required, for we are sufficient, entirely, in both our beauties and our imperfections.

Eagleton appears to want his opponents to be formidable but when one is, he fails to engage in much the same way he takes the “Ditchkins” to task for. Eagleton may find such an accusation intellectually discomfiting, and he should. What I find most shocking is Pullman even bothering to respond to such scathe. Again, I’m just speculating that Pullman has read and responded to Eagleton’s book (2009) with his own (2010); I’m comfortable suggesting, however, that if Pullman has not read Eagleton’s book specifically, he has read something similar and apparently too galling to bear. The question is, why, after all this time, is the pressure finally getting to Pullman? His Dark Materials are some of the finest literary fantasy ever produced; that they rankled so widely and deeply is evidence, to me, of just how radical and I think compelling, his alternative view of our inner lives really is.

Pullman’s work iterates Teilhard de Chardin’s (1881-1955) observation that “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Eagleton, in spite of all his apparently comfortable truck with the mystical, clearly believes that humans must be induced in some way to have spiritual experiences; Pullman’s His Dark Materials, on the other hand, sits firmly within the tradition of Blake’s mystical poetry, in which the spiritual is as inescapable as the air itself.

I can only conclude that central to Eagleton’s misconceptions about Pullman’s trilogy is that he hasn’t considered just how much genre matters. His Dark Materials is a capital-F Fantasy trilogy. It prominently features witches on broomsticks, talking bears who fashion their own armour, and a number of other elements which more than clearly enough indicate that whatever ideologies may lie beneath the story, it is still in fact a STORY and is meant to be read first and foremost as such. No wonder Pullman felt the need to paste this message so loudly on the back cover of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ; he doesn’t fear religion backlash per se, he fears militant, readerly incomprehension.

Fiction is not the same as polemic, essay, or dissertation, even if some of its ideas are polemical, etc. Fiction, it seems to me, generally ought to allow its authors some distance from what they write and indeed, it generally does. No one tends to believe that all of an author’s characters are damningly autobiographical – unless, of course, religion plays a central role. Then, somehow, this distance is allowed – or made – to disappear and authors are called to task for beliefs they may not actually hold.

People shouldn’t be getting worked up because His Dark Materials presents a fictional re-imagining of a 17th-century poem that fictionally re-imagines Christian history. People should be getting worked up because Pullman’s latest fictional outing is too polemical and worried about what such paranoid, nervous Nellies – including, sadly, Terry Eagleton – are getting worked up about.

Keeping your friends close and your enemies closer

Early on in Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, author Terry Eagleton writes this pithy and extremely quotable snippet:

There is a document that records God’s endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it. (p. 8)

Both in and out of context, this passage seems unforgivably unoriginal or embarrassingly Pollyanna; at the very least, it would initially seem to mark Eagleton’s book as a mystical rather than an intellectual document, and therefore geared towards directly contradicting the works of the most famous of those writers known as the New Atheists, Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great) and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion). It would seem that Eagleton has seen these authors’ dichotomization of science and religion and is confirming it, but from the other side of the divide.

In fact, I believe this passage, is actually a rather cagey example of what is known as a straw man. It may be that Eagleton believes that God’s creations are lovingly created works of art, but that’s beside the point. Appearing to set up a clear distinction between reason and faith, it is reason and its formal applications (particularly in academic and/or highly specialized scientific arenas) that are apparently being disparaged. Yet, Eagleton also slyly ridicule formal religion, leaving only a God who strikes one as surprisingly sensitive and decidedly New Age.

What remains, in other words, is a confident pseudo-mystical assertion that follows claims about the inadmissibility of all assertions made with any sort of confidence. Why do this? First and foremost, I suspect, in order to set up the focus of his prolonged critique of the methods of the New Atheists; he is engaging, for a brief and maddening moment, in the sort of self-satisfied but half-formed sort of argumentation for which he takes Hitchens and Dawkins so thoroughly to task in the remainder of the book. He is showing just how sloppy their unfinished and unreflective rejections of religion look like from the other side; based on the quotations from their books he provides here, however, Eagleton does so with a great deal more rhetorical finesse. This is not a book which focuses primarily on addressing yes or no questions in relation to religion versus science; it is a book about raising the stakes and modes of this debate.

(I should note here that not only have I not read either Hitchens’s or Dawkins’s books, but also that I will likely never do so. This is not a topic in which I am, in fact, at all interested. I’ve read Eagleton’s book for two reasons completely removed from either its perspective or the perspectives of Eagleton’s opponents: 1) It was gifted to me from my brother, who is extremely interested in this topic; and 2) In spite of my the reader’s block I was suffering from when the book arrived in the mail, a glance at the first two pages hooked and cured me simultaneously, and solely because Eagleton is so clearly as hilarious as he is erudite and linguistically gifted.)

Straw men comprise a large part of what Eagleton writes against in Reason, Faith, and Revolution. While he does in many instances take on specific aspects of Dawkins’s and Hitchens’s arguments, his concern is primarily with what he perceives as a dangerously pervasive laziness with regards to research, argumentation, and self-reflection underpinning their now famous works:

This straw-targeting of Christianity is now drearily commonplace among academics and intellectuals – that is to say, among those who would not allow a first-year student to get away with the vulgar criticisms in which they themselves indulge with such insouciance. Ditchkins on theology is rather like someone who lays claim to the title of literary criticism by commenting that there are some nice bits in the novel and some scary bits as well, and it’s all very sad at the end. He thinks, for example, that all Christians are fideists, holding that reason is irrelevant to faith, which is rather like believing that all Scots are stingy. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, incidentally, had the rare distinction of being a fideist without being a believer.) Hitchens’s God Is Not Great is littered with elementary theological howlers. We learn that the God of the Old Testament never speaks of solidarity and compassion; that Christ has no human nature; and that the doctrine of the resurrection means that he did not die. In a passage of surreally potted history, Hitchens seems to hold the obscure Jewish sect of the second-century BC known as the Maccabees responsible not only for the emergence of Christianity but also for the advent of Islam. It is surprising that he does not pin Stalinism on them as well. For his part, Dawkins seems to believe that Paul was the author of the epistle to the Hebrews, and that to say that Jesus was the son of God means that he was omniscient. The sagacious advice to know your enemy is cavalierly set aside. (pp. 52-53)

Here is the key both to Eagleton’s approach and to his arguments: “The sagacious advice to know your enemy is cavalierly set aside.” Reason, Faith, and Revolution both displays Eagleton’s clear knowledge of his enemies, Dawkins and Hitchens, who both appear to lack a clear lack of such understanding of their enemies – their enemies including both religion itself, as well as those who come out in favour of it. (And lumping all who come out in favour of it, from murderous fundamentalists to highly educated theologians and everyone in between, appears to be only one aspect of this failure to look closely at what they rail so virulently against.)

Eagleton’s rhetorical advantage is thus threefold. Not only does his book reveal how well he knows his “enemies” by highlighting the outrageous extent to which they do not know theirs, but it does so in part by showing where Dawkins and Hitchens actually get things right – a generosity of fight and rhetoric neither of them appear to offer at all. If Eagleton “wins” (a term I don’t think he would feel comfortable with, even though he does invoke, albeit somewhat ironically, that very primal notion of “enemy”), it’s not simply because he is a better writer and thinker than they are, but also because he enacts some of the generosity he insists lies at the heart of any meaningful manifestation of Christianity, which is really, even if only in its ideal rather than actual state, all about how people interact with one another.*

For the most part**, Eagleton focuses on being, if not polite to his opponents, at least respectful enough of their projects and claims to address rather than simply dismiss them out of hand, with a scornful flick of the rhetorical wrist. Indeed, what is both most laudable about Eagleton’s critique of New Atheism is that unlike Dawkins, he is more than happy to admit that it’s precisely because of his enemies that he has this work to do in the first place: “Without God, Dawkins would be out of a job. It is thus particularly churlish of him to call the existence of his employer into question” (p. 9).

Of course, Eagleton is being somewhat flip here but he also, quite seriously, never lets go his rhetorical advantage. At the very point at which he acknowledges his indebtedness to Dawkins and Hitchens he reminds us, once again, of exactly the sorts of blunders they repeatedly make – that is, to fail to engage fully with those against whom they inveigh:

One of the more agreeable aspects of Christopher Hitchens’s polemic against religion is that he is properly unafraid to declare that he thinks it poisonous and disgusting. Perhaps he finds it mildly embarrassing in his new post-Marxist persona that “Religion is poison” was the slogan under which Mao launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet. But he is right to stick to his guns even so. Beliefs are not to be rejected just because they are beliefs. Societies in which any kind of abrasive criticism constitutes “abuse” clearly have a problem. “Abuse” is one of the latest American buzzwords, including as it does such unpardonable offenses as conducting a heated argument with someone, or recounting unpalatable political facts which another person would prefer not to hear. (pp. 147-48)

How well this book refutes Dawkins’s and Hitchens’s arguments I can’t truly assess for as I’ve noted, I haven’t read their books; further, if Eagleton’s assessments of their research is correct, I have a better understanding of Christian history than they do (a terrifying notion, for I haven’t read the Bible in its entirety, much less studied the religion in any depth whatsoever)! This, however, doesn’t mean that I know enough to be sure that Eagleton himself isn’t making any theological blunders. I can say, that as a model of argumentative vigor and integrity, as well as surprisingly enjoyable read which manages, quite unusually I think, to convey complex ideas in readily comprehensible language, it is a fine specimen.

*“The non-God or anti-God of Scripture, who hates burnt offerings and acts of smug self-righteousness, is the enemy of idols, fetishes, and graven images of all kinds – gods, churches, ritual sacrifice, the Stars and Stripes, nations, sex, success, ideologies, and the like. You shall know him for who he is when you see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. Salvation, rather bathetically, turns out to be not a matter of cult, law, and ritual, of special observances and conformity to a moral code, of slaughtering animals for sacrifice or even of being splendidly virtuous. It is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich. Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another. It was Christianity, not the French intelligentsia, which invented the concept of everyday life.” (pp. 18-19)

**The only point at which I feel Eagleton fails in this regard is in his constant referral to Dawkins and Hitchens as the hideous, double-headed Hydra he terms the “Ditchkins”. This is amusing, yes, but not only does it not add anything to his argument but to me it also shows that Eagleton is not as immune to the temptation to taunt his subjects as he ought to be, if he wants to ensure that his narrative transcends theirs in terms of both moral tone and maturity.

Date night!

Hubby took me on a date tonight which included attending a reading by and a discussion with Irish author Roddy Doyle at a local arts centre. Doyle has a new book out, The Dead Republic, which I did not buy; it's the third book in The Last Roundup trilogy, the first of which (A Star Called Henry) I just laid my hands on (and got your man to sign tonight).

So, a reading and a signing. I'm generally rather hesitant to attend such events for fear of finding out a favourite author is a wanker, or a believer of his or her own hype, or not a good reader, or just not engaging. Without qualification, I'm happy to report that Roddy Doyle is incredibly entertaining. And he swears a lot, which I find extra endearing. His reading was pretty good; in any case, his slight rushing through it-ness in no way made the section he read seem uninteresting. On the contrary, assuming I like A Star Called Henry, I will certainly read the whole trilogy.

Two important things learned at the event: 1) He's begun a new novel which may just see what the Rabbittes from The Barrytown Trilogy are up to these days ("Squeee!", as the kidz say); and 2) He told this great story which he admitted he's probably told everyone in the world already but which I, obviously, hadn't heard before. He was meeting a friend for drinks on a Friday night in Dublin and was early, and so waiting for him outside the Tara St. (Rd.?) station when a frap of teen-aged boys walked by. One came back, and got all up in his face and asked "Are you Roddy Doyle?". He answered in the affirmative, and then the kid yelled "So what!" and walked away laughing, but then gave him the thumbs up just as he was almost out of sight. I think I should try this the next time I see either Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje about town and see how likely it is that they turn it into a story with which to amuse adoring fans. I'd say less than zero.

As for the signing, it was an assembly line and in no way designed to allow for any chatting with Doyle, which I always find kind of disappointing. I saw how many people were in line, I get it; but it's still a bit of a let down. What I thought was funny about it was that someone from the theatre made her way through the line asking us if we wanted him to personalize it with our names, and if so, she'd write our name in block letters on a little post-it note for him and put it on the page we wanted signed. I told her he'd likely know how to spell my name (contender as I am for having the Most Irishest of Uber-Irish names), but she didn't believe me.

Avoidance
I likely would have blogged at some point about seeing Roddy Doyle tonight, but I'm doing so immediately after returning home because I feel a little blog panicky. I'm having a really hard time writing anything about the second volume of Phineas Finn, which I finished last week. I know basically what I want to say about it but I just can't find the mental energy to sit down and go over my admittedly not very accessible notes (because my notes comprise only page numbers references).

I'm actually having a difficult book time generally. I excitedly joined an online summer reading group for the entire, unabridged Tale of Genji (put on by The Quarterly Conversation and Open Letters Monthly) and I've read the first three chapters. But I'm struggling to focus on it already...so much so, that I might abandon it and flee with my tail between my legs. I've just begun reading Ellis Peters' eighth Brother Cadfael mystery in the hopes that a book with a set of familiar characters will help the cobwebs clear.

Bram Stoker is henceforth banished from my reading list

Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm is not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it’s pretty damned close. If I had to quickly come up with ten bitter adjectives to describe this book, I could. Don't believe me? Here you go:

• Atrocious
• Absurd
• Disorganized
• Ridiculous
• Incomplete
• Overlong
• Boring
• Laughable
• Enraging
• Pathetic

There. That took me 10 seconds.

I enjoyed Dracula, and so thought another novel of Stoker’s would be a safe bet. Wrong. Wrong. This novel is a total failure, both as a novel generally and as a horror tale specifically.

Structurally, it is a total mess, with more threads than I can count having been dropped. The characters are flat and uninteresting, and their motives, when revealed, make no sense in the context of what’s happening. And almost every opportunity for convincing horror is annihilated because of Stoker’s frequent decision to present scary happenings not directly but through dry and interminable conversations between Adam and Sir Nathanial.

When we are presented directly with supposedly terrifying moments, they’re too stupid to be borne, with people dying from staring contests and villains being defeated by young ladies who know how to vogue. Also, there is the destruction of primeval white worms through…the purchasing of real estate, which is also a very sound business investment for a young man.

My god, I can’t believe how awful this novel is! I stopped after every chapter and banged my head. Well, not every chapter, because if it’s unremitting awfulness had been apparent before I was a third to halfway through, I would have dropped this bitch like it was a plague-ridden baby-child with an ugly mug and a squall emanating from it like a Siamese cat in heat.

The novel did begin badly, but in a truly awesome and kind of hilarious way. For example, here is Stoker engaging in some subtle foreshadowing:

She was clad in some kind of soft white stuff, which clung close to her form, showing to the full every movement of her sinuous figure. She was tall and exceedingly thin. Her eyes appeared to be weak, for she wore large spectacles which seemed to be of green glass. Certainly in the centre they had the effect of making her naturally piercing eyes of a vivid green. She wore a close-fitting cap of some fine fur of dazzling white. Coiled round her white throat was a large necklace of emeralds, whose profusion of colour quite outshone the green of her spectacles – even when the sun shone on them. Her voice was very peculiar, very low and sweet, and so soft that the dominant note was of sibilation. Her hands, too, were peculiar – long, flexible, white, with a strange movement as of waving gently to and fro. (pp. 22-23)

But this sort of deliciously kitchy moment turned out to be very rare and the shiteous aspects described above represent the true order of things. Also, there were so many horribly racist comments dropped that this novel makes Kipling look like an equal rights advocate, there was enough fear and disgust at female sexuality to fuel a Freudian’s entire career, and then there was the gigantic kite flying from Castor Regis – because, you know, madmen with mesmeric skills like also to fly gigantic kites from the tops of their castle for no good reason.

In answer to your unspoken question: yes, I did, in fact punch this book hard, several times in succession, after finishing reading it.

I am now on to Yukio Mishima's Forbidden Colors which, if it turns out to be terrible as well, will at least do so in grand, ambitious, and raging style!