Ed in Stockholm dicusses some recent fiction
Quicksilver, The Savage Detectives, Hodd, Ilium/Olympos and Oscar Wao
Neal Stephenson – Quicksilver
The first book of Stephenson’s colossal Baroque Cycle is a rowdy, complex tour of late 17th-century Britain and Europe as they stand on the verge of Enlightenment. With its characters moving through the worlds of science, politics and commerce, mingling with the convincingly depicted figures of the Royal Society and the French and Dutch courts, and finding the time to adventure through the forests of Germany and alleyways of London, Stephenson’s work is hugely ambitious and itself remarkably enlightening as through its own detailed, wry alchemy it envelops the reader; despite its packed 900 pages, it seems to rush past and the next volume becomes a tempting proposition.Roberto Bolaño – The Savage Detectives
The late Bolaño’s books, posthumously translated to English, have been heavily hyped and with good reason. This semi-autobiographical tale traces two quixotic young poets through the eyes of those they encounter as they travel around Mexico and Europe, more a character study or series of vignettes than a real story, but with a remarkable atmosphere; it not only provokes thought on the nature of the different relationships we form in life, but also on what literature means and can mean to people: more than anything else, the novel is about reading itself.
Adam Thorpe – Hodd
Thorpe’s take on the origins of the Robin Hood legend is a beautifully-written evocation of Britain in the Middle Ages: dirty and chaotic as can be expected, but with a strange spirituality and beauty, heightened by the symbolism and metaphor of the plot. A fascinating and memorable novel from one of Britain’s finest contemporary authors.
Dan Simmons – Ilium/Olympos
Simmons found fame with his novel Hyperion, a science-fiction take on the Canterbury Tales which referenced numerous other literary classics, and its sequel, which featured an android reincarnation of John Keats as its central character. Here, he not only restages Homer’s Iliad on a far future Mars, but involves the cast of The Tempest as protagonists and two Shakespeare- and Proust-obsessed evolved robots as central characters, while back on earth it’s centuries since anyone has even been able to read. Simmons’ writing has many of the traditional flaws of science fiction, such as characters lacking complexity, but is clever and entertaining enough to work as genre pieces while also appealing to any literature student or enthusiast.
Junot Diaz – The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Diaz won the Pulitzer for his novel, the tale of a geeky Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey, but unfortunately this one fails to live up to the hype: its smug tone and hipper-than-thou prose, peppered overliberally with slang and in-jokes, is glib, gimmicky and off-putting and the characters, when Diaz bothers to steer them off the subject of sex, are one-dimensional and uninteresting. The footnotes, concerning the troubled recent history of the Dominican Republic, are often more interesting than the story itself, but are at the same time unwieldy and distracting, preventing the already rather hackneyed story from ever developing. A letdown.
….and a great novel from 1980
William Golding – Rites of Passage
This, the first part of Golding’s Ends of the Earth trilogy, won the Booker Prize a year before Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children [see BFTV blog] and is, to my mind, a much more deserving winner. Ostensibly the diary of a naïve young man in the early 19th century travelling to a posting in Australia, recording his thoughts on an ocean voyage during which he comes of age, it deals not only with class division and social mores but with the cruelty people are capable of, a familiar theme to readers of Golding’s other books. It’s a superbly thoughtful and beautifully written book, and the later novels of the trilogy match this high standard.