For Feisty Feminists

Book 3 in Cannonball Read 2

Water for Elephants is the kind of book that has tons of cliched characters, rushes some of the central relationships, and seems completely implausible - but somehow it works. It does not get up to the level of greatness, but it is likeable and readable.

The bulk of the novel is set during the Great Depression, and the main character, Jacob, is about to finish veterinary school when his parents die. The bank forecloses on the house, he can’t finish his exams, so he runs away and joins the circus. No, really, that’s what happens, and I rolled my eyes then, and a few other times - like when Jacob’s roommate, Kinko, goes from hating him to being his friend because Jacob did one nice thing for him; the characterization of August, the circus’ animal trainer, as an abusive asshole who doesn’t care about anything (his abuse is signaled by the way he treats the animals, and there is no way to telegraph a characters evilness that is easier than making him an animal abuser); the way that Marlena, August’s wife, falls for Jacob for no other reason than that he is there, and he is a nice guy; and lots of other details of the plot and characterizations.

The novel does work, despite these cliches. A big part of this for me, was the dual structure - the novel is told in flashback by a 90+ year old Jacob in a nursing home. These scenes take up a small part of the novel, but paint a compelling picture of the loss of autonomy that comes with aging, and the way that memory can be elusive and vague.  I can’t make up my mind about the way the novel reveals what you think is the ending, but then pulls a bit of a bait and switch on what really happened - whether it was clever, or just trying to be clever and ending up too cute.

I mentioned earlier that Marlena falls for Jacob for no apparent reason, and that still stands as the novel’s most perplexing flaw. The other cliches work somehow - you find August scary,  you find Kinko and Jacob’s friendship believable despite its’ shaky basis - but I really could not get my head around Marlena and Jacob’s relationship. SPOILER - although I can understand Marlena initially being drawn to someone who is nicer than her husband, they remain married for many decades until her death, so something had to be there that was just not in the novel; I guess it’s possible that, back in the day, women just married - and stayed married to - any decent guy, rather than expecting any sort of specialness about their relationship.

It’s a decent book. I can’t quite give the glowing recommendation that some friends and family have given, but even the cliches work, so Gruen must be doing something right. In the end, Water for Elephants may be a bit more complex in structure than it needs to be to tell the story, but the story that’s there is good, and deals mostly with fine, upstanding people struggling to do right against evil, mustache-twirling villains - in other words, it’s easy to identify with the protagonists and hate the bad guys. That scheme is a bit too simple to make a great book, but it does make for a good one.

Book 2 in Cannonball Read 2

So many people have recommended Octavia Butler to me, so I finally picked up one of her books at the library. As it turns out, I probably should have asked for specific book recommendations, as Fledgling is pretty mediocre, and none of the folks who recommended Butler had heard of this book, let alone read it.

Fledgling starts with an intriguing premise: a young woman, Shoreh, wakes up wounded and starving in the woods, and cannot remember anything before she woke up. She slowly heals, then explores the woods to find a small community that is burned to the ground - a community that seems familiar to her. When a stranger picks her up by the side of the road - she appears to be only twelve or thirteen years old - she drinks some of his blood, but the act binds them to one another, and the two of them start to piece together what has happened to her through bits of her memory coming back, folklore about vampires, and newspaper accounts.

The book remained interesting while Shoreh was learning the basics of survival (these vampires live in groups, each with a handful of humans who live with them, and they feed off of them and become deeply emotionally bonded to them) and trying to figure out what has happened to her and her community. She has no one to teach her even the most basic survival techniques until she meets her father, and then he is pretty quickly dispatched by the same folks who tried to kill Shoreh. Oops, spoiler. After that, she’s on her own again, with a few humans in tow that can help her out a bit, but also depend on her. Butler does a good job of crafting the narrative in these early scenes, as Shoreh uses her intuition and common sense to figure out how to survive, and is helped or hindered, depending on the situation, by her child-like appearance.

The book really starts to drag in the last third, when some vampire family that is helping Shoreh calls a vampire council. This leads to a lot of descriptions of various vampire families and their alliances to one another, which is not only incredibly boring, but contains many characters who are one-dimensional helpers or villains.

I think the biggest disappointment for me in this book is that I have heard so much about Butler as a storyteller who also engages in social criticism within her fantasy/scifi work, and this book itself proclaims that it is about testing the limits of tolerance and community. But the entire conflict is about really racist vampires who want to destroy Shoreh and call her a ‘mongrel bitch’.  That’s not really the kind of social criticism I enjoy - it’s as subtle as a two-by-four over the head. Having everyone be either completely supportive of Shoreh, or a murderous racist who hates her, is not exactly a nuanced depiction, and does not bear any relation to the world that most of us inhabit where there are shades of gray.

The last criticism I have may seem like a petty gripe, but here goes. This was the worst editing I have ever seen in a book. There were words constantly misspelled (’he’, ’she’, and ‘the’ were interchangeable), quotation marks in the wrong place or completely missing, and sentences that started immediately following the period at the end of the last one, with no space in between. I tend to notice these things a lot, so I let a certain amount go, but this book was ridiculous. It got worse as it went on, like the copy editor started the book with a bottle of whiskey in hand and plowed through both the book and the bottle a little too quickly.

I am still somewhat interested in checking out Butler’s other books, such as Kindred and The Parable of the Sower, but she’s not too high on my list after Fledgling. There are some creative ideas in this book, and it unfolds in an interesting way through the first half of the book, but ultimately it became too much talk and vampire councils.

If you’ve read this book and/or Butler’s other works, please let me know what you think in the comments.

Book 1 in Cannonball Read 2

A Man of the People is decidedly different than the other Achebe books I have read (Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease).  A Man of the People deals explicitly with politics: the main character, Odili, befriends Chief Nanga, a Minister in the government of an unnamed African country, but after having a personal fallout with Nanga, Odili decides to run against him in the upcoming election. Although the book has been described as ‘political satire,’ to me it felt serious, mostly due to the sad implications of the political system it satirizes.

Achebe’s writing is in fine form, but his protagonist is not so easily sympathetic as in No Longer at Ease, and the book is narrated from the viewpoint of the protagonist. The reader is meant to see things from Odili’s point of view, to identify with him as a representative of the younger generation, reforming the corrupt politics of Nanga, who represents the old guard.

Switching from an omniscient narrator to a main character narrator also abandons the almost invisible shaping that Achebe gave to No Longer at Ease. Odili just states facts, including his emotional state and interpretation of events; there is no explanation or attempt to persuade in his direction. The result for me was that I kept brushing up against the main character’s perceptions and biases, a sign, I believe, of a well-written novel in the first person.

However, one of the central arcs of the novel is Odili seeking revenge on Nanga for sleeping with a woman he wanted to sleep with and had been involved with in the past. This revenge takes the form of Odili trying to steal Nanga’s fiancee. Instead of seeing it as Odili taking revenge on a man he sees as corrupt despite being taking in momentarily by his charm, I could not get past the perception that it was basically a dick measuring contest sublimated into the political arena. Thus I could not take A Man of the People to heart, though it is well-crafted.

I keep on butting up against No Longer at Ease as it compares to this book, which is not entirely fair, as it sets the bar unreasonably high, and A Man of the People is an entirely different beast. I admire Achebe’s success with a different style than Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, even if I hold it somewhat at arm’s length due to my lack of identification with the protaganist.