Sexton Blake starred in thousands of pulp stories published (or produced) in the UK between 1893 and 1978. The World-Shakers dates to 1960, when Blake's main competitor for readers was James Bond.
What did I think?
Sexton Blake is to James Bond as James Bond is to War and Peace.
Recommended for manly men with square jaws and for those whose sense of irony is stronger than their feelings for literature. 10/10 for having a villain who resides in a secret volcano lair.
Why do folks who write "how to" books insist that they have "the one true way" and feel compelled to dismiss every other technique? Do they really think this makes what they have to say more convincing? And are there folks for whom this kind of dismissal makes an argument more compelling?
Also, why do "plotters" hate "pantsers" so much?
For those of you who know something about the writing world, the oversimplified generalization about writers is that they come in two varieties. "Plotters" plan out an entire story scene by scene before they start writing. "Pantsers" fly by the seat of their pants: that is, they start writing and see where the story takes them.
Which technique is better? Well, plotters tend to view 'pansters' as time-wasters, but Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, and Diana Galbadon (author of the Outlander series) have written and sold an awful lot of books. To be fair, plotters J.K. Rowling and John Grisham have too, so I personally think that the only fair conclusion to draw is that whichever technique works for you works for you. (To those in the know, me saying 'what works for you works for you' outs me as a pantser, because no plotter seems capable of admitting that pantsing is a valid way of writing.)
All of this is prelude to saying that Story Genius is a book about how to write a novel, and there are things about it that really really annoy me.
But I'm here to write a book review, so I'll leave behind my irritation. What does Story Genius have to say? Unlike most books about planning a novel that talk about the three act story structure for plot, Story Genius puts character, character arc, and story theme at the heart of writing.
How does that work? Basically Cron argues that it is far more effective to begin planning a novel by asking 'what is my novel going to be about?' rather than 'what's going to happen?' In other words, no matter what genre of novel you write, your book will fundamentally illustrate some universal theme like 'you can't have love without pain' or 'kindness matters most' or 'failure is the best teacher'. So you should start planning your novel by deciding what you want to say about life. Of course, novels are about people, so the next step after that is to decide who your protagonist will be. How will their life will illustrate your theme through their story arc? (Perhaps your protagonist will be someone who is a jerk to everyone because it means that they get what they want?). Once you have those two elements in place, your job as a writer is to think of a backstory for the character that makes their current attitude make sense and be relatable (for example, as a child they were crushed for being too nice). Finally you need to imagine a sequence of emotional events that will force them to confront their misbelief about the world (only jerks get ahead) and change. Only after all of that character work is done do you start to think about the specific events (the plot) that will force your protaganist through this emotional arc.
Why does Lisa Cron suggest this approach to novel development? This is where the 'brain science' part comes in. Recent fMRI studies of the brain show that when we experience fiction, our brain waves mirror those that the protagonist of a story would be going through. In other words, in some sense we experience what a protagonist is experiencing. Why is this important? Cron quotes Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist and author "Fiction is a simulation that runs on the software of our minds. And it is a particularly useful simulation because navigating the social world effectively is extremely tricky."
Story is how humans make sense of the world, especially the social world, where story can educate us about how to act and react to situations we have not yet encountered.
That means story is important. What humans relate to in story is humans. Therefore, all types of novel need to centre character and character arc. The most effective way to do that is to plan your entire novel around character arc.
What do I think of the thesis? Well, I'm only half-way through, but I see a lot of value here. It reinforces my growing understanding that my writing needs more interiority -- that is, I need to share more about how my characters experience the events that happen. What do they think and feel? Interiority makes characters real to readers, and helps readers engage with your story and your writing. There are a lot of other gems thrown in here and there too. For example, at the heart of your story, your character must face a situation where they they face great personal loss if they choose not to act. In other words, there should be compelling reasons for your characters actions, and your readers need to feel those reasons.
But overall? Well, as you might guess, I reject the overall thesis that there is only one 'correct' way to write a novel, let alone plan a novel. Her book also has a couple of big flaws. The first is that the example novel that she plans step-by-step as she explains her technique is as dull as ditchwater. The second is that she keeps claiming that her technique is valid for all types of fiction, but she doesn't include concrete examples of how a character focus for planning would work for plot-driven fiction like mysteries, thrillers, SF, fantasy, or horror (or for more abstract and intellectual genres like literary fiction).
So, is this a useful 'craft' book for writers? Well, I suppose I should have waited to finish reading it before writing this review. I'm only halfway through. :-) But yes, I think it is. I'm never going to create a scene-by-scene breakdown of my entire novel before I start writing, and it makes my heart shrivel when Cron brightly directs me to keep myself in check as I write to keep myself from deviating from that plan. But character truly is at the heart of story -- just as plot is essential to many types of fiction. So I can learn from a craft book that focuses on character even if I'm probably not going to finish reading it.
After finishing the first 100 pages or so of The Hands of the Emperor I mentioned to my partner that I'd just started a book where the private secretary to the God-Mage Emperor convinces the emperor to go on his very first vacation to a beautiful remote location with only his closest staff on hand. "Then everything goes wrong!" my partner said, with a smile, to complete my sentence.
Well, no. Not in this extraordinary book. That's not what happens at all. In fact, you could say that nothing much actually happens in the next 638 pages. And yet I was grabbed by this book in a way that I haven't been grabbed by the three most recent SFF novels that I've read (The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Terraformers by AnnaLee Newitz, The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison). I read for hours every day, stayed up late to finish chapters, kept reading when I should have been doing something else.
What gives? How on earth does that even work?
As a writer, you're told about the three act structure -- the bones of storytelling that apply to screenplays, novels, short stories. It's the basic structure of story that makes a narrative feel satisfying: Act 1 introduces us to our hero and the challenge that launches them into action. Act 2 exposes the true nature of the threat, forces the hero to make choices, and ends at a dark point. Act 3 is where the hero takes charge, makes sacrifices, and then triumphs (or fails). Formulaic? Yes and no. There are lots of templates, analyses, and formulas out there, but the best of them acknowledge that there are many ways to meet these milestones, and many ways to tell a story. Their point is that this basic structure is engrained into how stories are told in Western societies, and that by paying attention to this structure you can make your story better in the same way that getting the balance of salt, sweet, acid, and unami right in a recipe can make the food you cook more appealing.
However, The Hands of the Emperor does not follow three act structure. Neither do Becky Chambers' books. The Goblin Emperor (by Katherine Addison) doesn't so clearly set aside the three act structure, but definitely falls into the category of 'A book where nothing bad happens'.
What on earth gives?
Well, spoiler, it's Character. It comes down to character. Becky Chambers writes characters that people love in a society that people love, and despite the fact that her people live in a complicated ever-changing interstellar space opera universe, the challenges her people face are fundamentally personal. For example, in The Galaxy and the Ground Within, a group of travellers is temporarily stranded at what amounts to an interstellar truck stop, and the book is about discovering what personal challenges these odd assortment of characters are facing (and how they resolve them). The Goblin Emperor has a clearer narrative arc -- our exiled hero is called back to the palace to become emperor when his father and all four of his elder brothers are killed in an airship accident. But that's only the first chapter! The bulk of the book is about Maia overcoming the trauma of his isolated upbringing to become a good emperor by being true to himself (transforming his society in the process).
The Hands of the Emperor is about Cliofer (Kip) Mdang, who begins the novel as private secretary to the all-powerful, magical, and semi-divine emperor and ends as Viceroy to that emperor, just before the emperor leaves on his magical quest to find his successor. This isn't a startling transformation: Cliofer is the emperor's most trusted advisor and head of the imperial bureaucracy at the beginning of the novel, and takes on (vaguely defined) additional responsibilities as the book progresses. The actual events of the book simply explain how Kip has become who he is, explores his relationship with his emperor and with his family, and shows how Kip transforms his society through his steadfast adherence to the fundamentals of the culture of his isolated provincial home province.
Why is the book gripping-ish? Despite being too long, and despite some tedious repetition? In the end, because you care about Kip. He's both immensely competent and immensely modest, so modest that it takes you a long time to see how improbably much he's accomplished. Much like the Goblin Emperor, Kip is decent in every way, always does the right thing, and triumphs over his not-very-threatening adversaries.
I've heard books like this called "competence porn", and "hopecore". I believe they're popular because in this broken world of ours, who can resist a fantasy world where someone decent put things right?
Victoria Goddard is self-published (successfully!). Becky Chambers started self-published, and was so successful that she was picked up by a major and has since won a Hugo. Addison is traditionally published, at perhaps the cost of including more plot in her books.
I think the distinction is important. I don't think that any traditional publisher would take a book without (much) plot, particularly one as long as The Hands of the Emperor (738 pages in paperback, in case you aren't clear on the math). But I wonder if at some point that might change: Becky Chambers has sold a lot of books, and it seems that Victoria Goddard is doing well. If they do, in 10 or 15 years, will all those internet pages on novel structure look different than they do today?
It's been just over 4 years since the WHO declared COVID-19 to be a global heath emergency, but in many ways we seem to have forgotten that the pandemic ever happened. The only people who mention COVID-19 these days are anti-vax crazies and conspiracy theorists who rewrite the history of those years to be a story of unjustified government over-reaction and oppression.
But more than 1,000,000 people are confirmed to have died of COVID-19 in the United States. More than 50,000 Canadians died. More than 1900 died in Saskatchewan.
A healthy future is the story of the COVID-19 pandemic in Saskatchewan, as told by the leader of its official opposition, family doctor and health activist Ryan Meili. The book is an effort to un-erase the history of COVID-19 by following events from beginning to 'end', from month to month, through COVID wave after COVID wave. It serves as a much-needed reminder of those long months and years: I spent the first 4.5 months of the pandemic in Saskatchewan and even I was shocked at what I'd forgotten. Restrictions began with a 250 person gathering limit??? WTF? Oh yeah, that's right -- I remember now. The right-wing Saskatchewan Party's COVID response began with that weird under-reaction of a restriction on March 13, 2020, the day after the province's first confirmed case of COVID.
I left Saskatchewan near the end of July 2020, so I didn't follow events in that province as closely afterwards. But the overall story that Meili tells is familiar -- COVID waves, deaths, restrictions, vaccinations. Government responses that ranged from frustrating (why NOT tell us where in the province cases are happening? It's human nature to feel that something is 'somebody else's problem' without concrete data that tells you otherwise) to well-thought out (drive-in vaccination lineups made perfect sense in Saskatchewan) to heart-breakingly stupid (most of the rest of the Saskatchewan Party's policy decisions).
My one criticism of the book is also one of its strengths: A healthy future keeps the focus squarely on events and policy decisions in a single Canadian province. Readers from other places might not feel as engaged with the book when the specifics of their COVID experience will have been different. But at the same time, sometimes being specific is the best way of approaching the universal. By limiting himself to telling the story of his own province, Meili is not only rescuing Saskatchewan's COVID story from oblivion, he is rooting his observations and recommendations in a very particular set of facts.
I'll close with a quote that Meili includes in his concluding chapter "Lessons for the next wave":
"Among countries with available GDP data, we do not see any evidence of a trade-off between protecting people's health and protecting the economy. The relationship between the health and economic impact of the pandemic go in the opposite direction. As well as saving lives, countries controlling the outbreak effectively may have adopted the best economic strategy too" [1]
I find it puzzling. Why do I struggle to connect with and enjoy certain amazing books?
By any objective standard, I should have loved Children of Time. It has a fascinating premise, a mind-alerting perspective, novel technologies, and a pair of intertwining plot threads that are by their very nature compelling.
And yet...reading it felt like a duty. I had to force myself to complete the book.
Am I just old? Brain ossified? Maybe I've just 'outgrown' SF, where by 'outgrown' I mean 'aged out of'? (For perspective, I'm thinking of "aging out of" in the same sense that gymnasts (at least used to) age out of being competitive before they reached age 20, not in the sense of "leaving childish things behind.")
I don't know. But I do think that with Children of Time there are several things going on, at least for me.
To talk about them, I need to talk about the specifics of the novel. And apologies, there are going to be some spoilers.
The book takes place in the far future and has two main plot threads. In the first, (PT1) a grand star-spanning human civilization crashes, leaving behind a science project running on a distant isolated planet. We then follow the artificially-accelerated evolution of a species of uplifted spiders across thousands of generations as they evolve from simple spiders to intelligent social beings with a planet-spanning civilization. Plot thread two (PT2) begins centuries after PT1 begins, when an Ark ship from the reconstituted human civilization arrives searching for a new home for the last remnants of humanity. Earth (and every other human habitat) is dead.
Both stories take place over thousands of years: the spider story told as a series of vignettes illustrating key moments in their evolution and in the development of their society; the human story told as the human "sleepers" on the ship wake to deal with one crisis or another as their mostly-automated ship travels the cosmos looking for a home for its sleeping cargo of otherwise doomed people.
Here is the first problem with the story, at least for me -- it takes place over far too long a time span. I couldn't read Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. I simply got too frustrated with the structure of the book, which featured the same characters reincarnated again and again over the course of a long alternate history. The story was interrupted over and over again, you had to figure out which character was which every time (names, of course, varied for each incarnation), and there wasn't a clear story arc for the overall book. I rapidly stopped caring.
The spider story arc (PT1) inherently has these same problems. Strike One.
However, Tchaikovsky does something clever. The protagonists of each episode of PT1 have a consistent set of names, even though the actual players change with almost every episode: "Portia" is always our enterprising heroine, "Bianca" our spider super-scientist, "Viola" a political leader, "Fabian" a genius male spider struggling to advance the interests of males within spiderdom. The consistent set of names gives the episodes a spurious feel of continuity, which was enough to keep me engaged -- at least after the spiders developed a degree of sentience. Strike two: this took almost 100 pages.
The second plot thread (PT2) should be a no-brainer -- lots of drama, a clear plotline, a consistent set of core characters throughout. The problem? Holsten, the viewpoint character in PT2 (I hesitate to call him the 'protaganist') is one of the most passive characters I've encountered in fiction.
Holsten is not one of the leaders of the expedition, involved in making decisions about the expedition, taking dramatic action, inspiring others, or in figuring things out. Instead he is a specialist woken only when he is needed to decipher messages in the languages of the lost civilization. So he is not necessarily involved in the key events and crises that affect the human voyage. Even that might be okay, because after all, this book isn't really about the drama of those events. It's about the <SPOILER, BUT I THINK YOU CAN SEE THIS COMING> events that lead the human ship into conflict with the spiders. So, okay, the events setting up the conflict mostly do involve Holsten, albeit only in a supporting role.
The real barrier? Holseten is personally incredibly passive. When conflict breaks out on the Ark ship, he doesn't take sides: he doesn't even have a clear sense of which side he thinks is correct. When he discovers something earth-shattering, he sleeps on the decision about whether to tell the captain, even though the information is critical and the ship is operating under a time limit. He doesn't speak up when he begins to suspect the true nature of the messages he is receiving from the planet of PT1, even though that revelation is also critical. Over and over again he decides nothing, he says nothing, doesn't act, doesn't have an opinion, doesn't appear to care deeply about anyone -- not even the person who supposedly falls in love with him (I say supposedly because that deep love doesn't seem believable within the context of the book).
Holsten is a very frustrating character to follow through PT2.
Strike 3 against the book.
I have some theories about why Tchaikovsky wrote Holsten this way. One is that it was in the interests of verisimilitude. Who is most likely to survive a centuries-long voyage? Someone who is key to every decision and has to be awakened repeatedly to act (using up their lifespan), or someone less central? Okay, plausible but not definitive. Any author worth their salt could work around that one somehow.
A second reason Tchaikovsky might have made Holsten so passive is that Tchaikovsky felt that a more detached viewpoint gave a more appropriate tone to story that takes place over eons -- Holsten's detachment lends the story a more eternal quality. Sure, but is that worth the potential loss of reader interest?
I think my third theory is the strongest one: Tchaikovsky wanted to balance our interest in both plot threads even though our sympathies are naturally going to skew towards humanity in any contest of "human vs spider". Holsten's detachment was Tchaikovsky's way of lessening our engagement with the humans.
Unfortunately, that third strike against the book meant that even after I started feeling engaged with the fate of the spiders, I kept procrastinating about reading the book. I didn't like the viewpoint character in PT2. In fact, I didn't really like any of the humans.
I mean, I love SF for the way it explores ideas, but fundamentally, stories are about people.
Okay, okay. Counter examples: Foundation and anything else Asimov ever wrote. In fact, almost any SF that predates the "New Wave" of the 1960s, and a good chunk of that too. I mean, how long was it until anyone other than Ursula K. LeGuin focused on humans as humans?
Which brings me back to the "aging out" comment. Maybe my brain has degenerated to the point where I need a human story line in order to really engage with SF. Or, hopefully, it's just a phase I'm going through. :-) Because I don't think SF is ever going to be only human-centred, and I probably wouldn't want it to be.
The Northwest is Our Mother by Jean Teillet: an activist political and social history of the Metis people
The One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin: an extensively researched political biography of two Metis activists active from the 1930s through the 1960s
Half-Breed by Maria Campbell: a personal memoir showing the impact of Metis social and political history through the story of one Metis woman
OR, in reverse order....zooming out from the story of a few decades of a single life (Campbell), to one thread through political and social life of the Metis people over the course of two men's entire lives (Norris and Brady), to the story of a people (Teillet).
One book leads to another: Half Breed by Maria Campbell leads to The One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin leads to The Northwest is our Mother by Jean Teillet
First I re-read Half Breed.
I read Maria Campbell's book many years ago, when I lived in Saskatoon. Even then, before she was perhaps technically an elder, she was an honoured elder Metis, a noted indigenous activist, and a legend. Our circles didn't touch, but that was because I was an unremarkable white juvenile activist who wouldn't have rated an introduction even if we had happened to be in the same place at the same time. Maria was a celebrity, someone who people would name-drop if she'd been at their baby shower or potluck, or especially if they'd rated an invitation to her place at Gabriel's crossing at Batoche.
What did I think of Half Breed on re-reading it more than a half-century after publication? First, how the book still resonates in so many ways. The vividness of Campbell's stories leap from the page, especially as she tells the stories of her childhood living as one of the 'road allowance people' in North-Central Saskatchewan in the 1940s and 50s. Those are stories of poverty and struggle, discrimination and official abuse -- but also of happiness and family and connection, at least until her mother dies and her father falls apart, leaving her and her younger siblings to struggle and ultimately be separated for many many years. Broken families are nothing new for indigenous peoples in Canada. Neither are the tough choices and unhappy circumstances that lead to sex work, addiction and often despair, as they did for Campbell in the 1960s.
Campbell overcame. She reclaimed her life and her heritage, became politically active, and wrote the story of her life in the early 1970s. In the process, she became one of the first indigenous voices to be published in Canada, and the fore-mother of a new literature.
So, how did this book lead me to One and a Half Men? When Campbell talks about the forces that destroyed her father's life, she talks about his deep disappointment with the failure of political organizing by the Metis people in Saskatchewan in the 1940s, and his disappointment with the noted Metis organizers Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris. She also talks of the many betrayals of the Metis by the CCF government (who are otherwise heroes of mine). It made me curious. I googled Brady and Norris, and discovered One and a Half Men, a political biography written by someone I had actually known in my long-ago Saskatoon days -- Murray Dobbin.
Murray wasn't someone I knew well -- he was of the notable political generation just ahead of mine. But the combination of a book by someone I knew and a history I did not made finding and reading this book irresistible.
One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin
My initial reaction: Wow. What an amazing book.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that everyone should drop everything right now to read One and a Half Men. It's an extensively researched and competently written political biography, but it's probably not a book that will change how you see the world. It isn't written with ground-breaking literary quality. It isn't the self-expression of an oppressed people and it doesn't tell a universal story of interest to people everywhere in the world.
But writing One and a Half Men was an extraordinary act of respect and service to the Indigenous communities of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Murray Dobbin spent years diving into archives and interviewing friends, families, and political allies and foes of the legendary Metis political organizers and activists Malcolm Norris and James Brady. Because he did so, a detailed record exists of their decades-long political struggle from the 1920s and 1930s in Alberta (where they were responsible for the grudging creation of the Metis Settlements by the Alberta government) through the late 40s, 50s, and 60s in Saskatchewan where they nurtured the spark of Metis Nationalism through dark times while mentoring and inspiring future generations of Metis activists and leaders.
This book is an important historical record of one part of the long struggle of Indigenous peoples against colonial settler society. You can read it to learn more about the racism, neglect, hostility, and extraordinary vindictiveness* of mid-20th century government officials towards Metis and Indigenous peoples, particularly those who dared to advocate for themselves. More importantly, it allows people today to see and honour the strength and dedication of two extraordinary men who spent their lives in service to their people.
Metis people would undoubtedly themselves tell this story differently -- and next I should seek out The Northwest is our Mother by Jean Teillet to see how. But because Dobbin did the research, asked the hard questions, and donated his records to the Saskatchewan archives, researchers have much more detailed source information than they otherwise would.
* The supremely competent but politically outspoken Norris was fired from his Saskatchewan government job mere months before he qualified for a pension by the Liberal Ross Thatcher government -- who then went on to make sure that he was fired from his replacement job at the Prince Albert Friendship Centre. Norris died of a stroke soon afterwards.
The Northwest is Our Mother by Jean Teillet
In her introduction to One and a Half Men Maria Campbell explains that her immediate and visceral reaction to the book was that she did not want Murray Dobbin to write about her heroes -- even though Murray was a friend and the book was excellent. She did not want a white historian to tell Brady and Norris's story.
After reading Jean Teillet's history of the Metis People, I completely understand Campbell's reaction.
Teillet's book is the story of the Metis people, told from the perspective of the Metis people.
What does this mean?
The Northwest is our Mother is comprehensive and extensively researched, and tells the stories that are important to the Metis. One example: the book includes a few pages explaining the brief visit of a white grifter to the Forks in the early 19th century. Why? This is not a particularly notable event! But there is a traditional Metis song mocking this man and his pretensions, so of course it is of interest to the Metis to understand the song's origins. Another example: Teillet describes in detail the Metis perspective on what she calls "the Northwest Resistance" -- when the Metis' heart-breakingly reasonable requests of the Canadian government were met by Gatling guns at Batoche. She doesn't describe events during the Resistance that involved only First Nations peoples, even though those are important to understanding the overall arc of events. Teillet is telling the story of the Metis, not an objective history of Western Canada. A final example: Teillet focuses on a single decade of Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady's lives, the decade of activism and struggle that led to the creation of the Metis Settlements in Alberta. In doing so she gives a much better perspective on the importance of those settlements -- because despite the profound disappointment Norris and Brady felt at their limited land and their limited autonomy, the settlements remain to this day the Metis' only secured land base and so remain profoundly important to the Metis people.
But it's not only the content of Teillet's book that is striking. She speaks in a Metis voice. Her language is sometimes non-academic. She focuses on the perspective and experiences of the Metis in all situations. She includes stories about how these historical events impacted members of her family, and how those events are remembered today. In telling the story of the Metis she not only explains the origins and history of her people, she tells us what the Metis remember, what they valued and who they are.
Dobbin is alway sympathetic to his subjects, but he writes about Metis lives, Metis politics, and Metis history. He is always at at least one remove, the objective observer. Not to mention that the very title of his book is offensive: it is based on a historical story that positions the Metis people as 'other' and not entirely human:
"...in the early 1850s...he asked a Catholic priest about a nearby group of boisterous men. They were dark skinned but obviously not Indians. 'They are the one-and-a-half men,' the priest replied, 'half Indian, half white and half devil.'"
And while Dobbin researched and wrote within 10 years of Norris and Brady's deaths, and so had access to people who knew them and remembered events described in his book-- reading Teillet's book reminds me that the stories important to the Metis would not have been lost. Those men's families, their compatriots, their communities: they remember. They told and continue to tell their own stories, both as inheritors of the oral culture of their indigenous ancestors and as descendants of highly educated and literate French Canadians and Hudson's Bay traders.
The Metis did not need Murray Dobbin to tell Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady's story, any more than the Woman's Movement of the 1970s needed Murray to create a 'Men's Auxilliary' and hold bakesales to raise money for them (which he apparently did in his youth).
So, in the end, the most amazing and impressive of the three books is undoubtedly Teillet's. Not only does she tell the Metis stories about themselves that they need to know and remember, her book clearly explains to white Canadians just who the Metis are. Which makes it clear just how insulting it is when pretendians with some tiny random fraction of indigenous ancestry call themselves Metis.
I pretty much hated this book, and I am struggling to understand why.
First of all, why would I expect to love this book? Well, what's not to love?
All good, right?
Alas, in practise I stopped reading Kuang's first novel, The Poppy War, half-way through and I had the same impulse half-way through Babel.
This time pushed to the end, trying to understand what wasn't working for me.
It's not that Kuang is a young academic, and that her books show it. The protagonists of both the The Poppy War and Babel are brilliant, penniless young students, but the struggle of the heroine of The Poppy War to triumph in the imperial entrance exams kept my attention. So did the beginnings of the academic journey of the hero of Babel, who is scooped out of China as a young boy, and set to intensive study of Latin and Greek to prepare him for Oxford and his future at the Institute of Translation. Babel continued to hold my attention as 'Robin Swift' enters Oxford and encounters his first real friend -- fellow student Ramy-- and as together they build their academic careers through their first years of university.
But about half-way through Babel my interest really began to flag. There were lots of events -- so many events! So much drama! -- as Swift and his classmates struggle with various challenges at Oxford, year by year, and as Swift encounters his mysterious brother Griffen and the even more mysterious Hermes Society.
But at some point I stopped caring. Maybe there were simply too many events? It felt as if this story could have been several books. Or perhaps the problem is that Kuang should have pruned this story to create a more satisfying overall story arc. As it is now there were too many challenges, too many mini-crises and resolutions, with no clear emotional direction for the overall story.
It didn't help that I felt a limited emotional connection with the characters.
Only Robin our hero was fully-drawn. To a lesser extent Ramy also comes alive on the page. But we don't see enough of Griffen to understand him, or care about him and his passions. (When we finally do begin to understand Griffen, it's because Robin tells us about him, not because Kuang shows him to us.) Dr. Lovell is an evil colonialist. Letty is a caricature, and annoyingly, one whose character and life story don't feel true to 1830s England. Victoire hardly existed at all until the very last pages of the book.
Then there are the plot problems that start coming thick and fast from the midpoint onwards. Why would Babel overlook what seems to them to be Robin's treachery? Why do they also send the other 4th year students to China alongside Robin, when those student's skills are irrelevant to the project at hand? And how does it happen that four of the most brilliant scholars at Oxford are so beef-witted about covering up a crime?
And then Kuang suddenly kills off most of the characters to create a crisis point.
I 'm so old I remember when it was considered edgy to kill off central characters! But instead of it being a shock that enlivens the story, here killing off central characters feels like a contrivance -- one that makes it hard to feel invested in the story's ultimate outcome. It doesn't help that our hero claims to be devastated but we don't feel that devastation. Or that our Hero and his remaining brilliant colleagues (and their revolutionary working class allies) seem so naive about strategy.
Am I a curmudgeon? Undoubtedly. Can I write a book as good as R. F. Kuang's? Of course not. Will her writing improve as she matures and gains both more life experience and more writing experience? I hope so. Or maybe I am just being far too curmudgeonly in even saying that! She's writing relevant books that appeal to a best-selling-sized audience, an audience that cares more about her passion, her perspective, and her world-view than the flaws that I see.
Good for her. May she write many more. I just doubt that I'll read them.
----------------Addendum--------------------------------
I attended the Surrey Writer's Conference this past November, and a comment that Mary Robinette Kowal made there stuck with me. Roughly "Readers will love your work for what you do well."
Readers love R.F. Kuang for what she does well -- write stories from a uniquely Asian perspective, foregrounding the experience of People of Colour from non-Western cultures.
Babel does this extremely well -- it makes Imperial Victorian England an entirely new place to a Western reader situated in a culture that mostly sees this era through the eyes of contemporary authors like Dickens (where the Empire that makes his society possible is invisible) or modern authors like Neal Stephenson (who use the era to create a romanticized steampunk past).
Even the annoying ahistorical Lety serves a purpose in this perspective: she exists to allow Kuang to vividly illustrate the idea of 'white women's tears' and the impact on POC of supposed white allies who don't see their own privilege and whose words and actions centre their own experience instead of supporting those of POC.
I can see and appreciate those values. I took them too much for granted in my previous review, perhaps because there remains something about how Kuang paces her stories that really doesn't work for me, making me focus on all of the elements of her books that annoy me, instead of all of the things that she does really well.
