My Weekly Book

I’m now within a hundred pages of the end of Don Quixote. And then I will be free. Coming up next (but not necessarily in this order):

53. England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia - Philip Hoare
54. The Corfu Trilogy - Gerald Durrell
55. The Sandman Companion - Hy Bender
56. Dead Reckoning: The new science of catching killers - Dr Michael Baden and Marion Roach

Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

I found this in one of those discount bookshops in Paignton, of all places. We’d just come to the slightly premature end of a walking holiday and we’d read everything we had with us. Paignton does not initially appear to be very promising territory when looking for bookshops, but eventually we found this one – and I’d have taken it over a Waterstones or a Borders any day. It had a brilliant crime and thrillers section and we left with a compilation of the first three of Sue Grafton’s alphabet novels, a book on forensic pathology – and this.

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Of course I read Anne of Green Gables as a child. Of course I did – and all the rest of the Avonlea saga too. Strange, the fascination a story set in such a far-flung corner of the North American continent in the early years of the 20th century can have. But I’m not exactly sure what propelled me into picking it up again. Fond memories, I suppose, reinforced by hearing a lot of very positive references to it in various online/fan communities. And four things struck me about it [major spoilers past this point]:

1. Firstly, I really enjoyed reading it. It was delightfully-written and kept hold of the adult attention. Partly this is the dual point of view that gives you Anne’s take on things but also allows you to see what the adults around her are thinking. And I definitely think more young women should crack slates over impertinent male heads. If I have one slight criticism it is that the narrative is rather episodic - it reads almost like something that was serialised in a periodical. But that didn’t affect my enjoyment very much.
2. Secondly, why this book is so popular with the sort of bookish, clever girls who like reading or writing and grow up to write for themselves. It’s not the pretty or the rich who inherit the earth here. It’s the scrawny, red-haired, extremely clever orphan girl who comes top of her class and wins a college scholarship – and is feted for it by her adoptive family and, to a degree, by wider society. I’m reminded also of Jo March the would-be novellist in Little Women (who I believe also has red hair and a talent for getting into trouble) and, in a true cross-cultural moment, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s very own Willow Rosenberg. No, just stop and think about it. The brainy, socially-awkward redhead with long braids (at the outset, anyway) who is strongly identified with by sections of the audience to the exclusion of the series heroine. Also, while not an orphan she is effectively parentless. Her father never appears on screen and her mother rarely, and then only to cause trouble. She sacrifices a very high-status college place to stay in Sunnydale and care for her ‘family’ of Buffy, Xander, etc. So we’re looking at something of an archetype here, I think. I’m reminded of a quote I read from Linda Barnes, author of the Carlotta Carlyle detective series, a woman described as six foot one and having “hair so red it beggars adjectives like flaming”. I can’t find the exact quote – but it’s something like every woman with the sense to want to be interesting covets red rather than blonde hair. (Myself? A brunette with a good supply of henna.)
3. Thirdly how this book simply doesn’t figure on male radar. Not only in the bare terms of its existence but also in terms of its importance to a certain kind of female reader. The world of the novel is very female too – there is, of course, Matthew Cuthbert but he’s over sixty and nearly invisible by his very character. And Gilbert Blythe (who, irritatingly, is far too keen to ingratiate himself with Anne for the first half of the novel. How many teenage boys are going to react to having an apology flung in their faces by persevering in apologising?) is kept firmly at arms’ length. There are a few fathers, brothers and schoolmates scattered about but they are largely for decoration. No, this is true women’s fiction (as well as having been, perhaps mistakenly, trivialised characterised as a children’s novel in recent years) and I am to be honest a little unsure what male readers would get out of it.
4. Last, and perhaps most important, I got really angry at the ending. Anne, having distinguished herself by winning the Avery scholarship, is persuaded by a sense of duty that her role lies in relinquishing it and becoming a carer for her elderly guardian. And is expected (thanks to guilt and community pressure and the aforementioned sense of duty) to take pleasure in this limiting of her horizons and the throwing away of what must then appear to her as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The author says: “Anne’s horizons had closed in since the night she had sat there after coming home from Queens; but if the path set before her feet was to be narrow she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it. The joy of sincere work and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship were to be hers; nothing could rob her of her birthright of fancy and her ideal world of dreams. And there was alwas the bend in the road! ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world,’ whispered Anne softly.” But conversely this didn’t spoil the book for me. Rather, it gave it the ring of truth and reinforced its proto-feminist message – this is what so many women still face in real life, more than 80 years later. And the biographical parallels are actually rather interesting – see the LM Montgomery link below.

Some links:

• Wikipedia: Anne of Green Gables
• Wikipedia: LM Montgomery
• Read it online

Castle of the Bat - Jack C Harris and Bo Hampton

Another graphic novel picked up from our excellent local library; an entertainment that you could probably knock off in under half an hour. Its premise is an interesting crossover between the Batman mythos and the Frankenstein legend and, on the whole, it is pulled off well. It descends into outright hamminess in a couple of places – I could quote the lines: “A lab? In mad Ludwig’s old castle?” and also “Run! Run” Everything’s about to collapse…” But perhaps I am being a bit harsh.

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It’s got a gentler, more impressionistic style of art than your run-of-the-mill graphic novel, which does a good job in presenting a different time and place - but which one reviewer found “not visceral enough to contain the story” (see below). The palette is dark and moody, slipping into sepia tones in places, but can come alive with fresh blues or fiery oranges when the story demands. I found myself viewing the story almost as an optional extra: it was obvious where it was going to have to take material from the world of Batman and where the world of Frankenstein would have the plot. Perhaps this is why some people found it a bit obvious and unsatisfying - I just thought it was a product of what the creators were attempting.

And now for the technicalities. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia explaining where all this fits into canon and so on:

Elseworlds is the publication imprint for a group of comic books produced by DC Comics that take place outside the company’s canon. According to its tagline: “In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places - some that have existed, and others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist. The result is stories that make characters who are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow.” Unlike its Marvel Comics counterpart What If…?, which bases its stories on a single point of divergence from the regular continuity, most Elseworlds stories instead take place in entirely self-contained continuities whose only connection to the canon DC continuity are the presence of familiar DC characters. Read on here… ~ List of Elseworlds publications.

• IGN review

Prescription for Murder: The true story of mass murderer Dr Harold Frederick Shipman – Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie

At the outset I felt pretty guilty about reading this, having ferreted it somewhat shamefacedly out of the crime section of the library and smuggled it home with the title turned inwards. It all seems so voyeuristic, somehow. Plus, it plugs into something that’s been troubling me all year. It’s all very well trying to read a set number of books in a particular period – 20, 50, 100, whatever – but where’s the quality control? The only guarantees are the standards that you choose to apply. Lots of people’s are far higher than mine, as the number of mysteries and thrillers on my ‘read this year’ list should testify. This is what I was wondering – was this something I should ever have been reading in the first place? Shouldn’t I have been aiming higher?

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And, as it turned out, I learned a few important lessons in reading it – foremost among them not to be such a bloody literary snob. This isn’t just a trawl through the salacious details of a serial killer’s early life and modus operandi. It’s a serious attempt to try to understand how an event of the magnitude of this one affects a community – where an essential relationship of trust is destroyed and almost everyone knows or is related to a victim. And it’s a tribute to the people who were killed, reminding us that these were not lonely, unregarded old ladies with no-one to mourn them but busy, active people with full lives, at the heart of their community. It also pays tribute to those people – doctors, police officers, undertakers and, most movingly, a taxi driver who was seeing his elderly clientele dying off almost by the week - who were the first to notice what was going on.

There’s one more reason why this book was a good and interesting read – it’s by a local journalist whose agency was the first on the case with staff in court during the trial. That gave it an extra level of authenticity and appeal. I like books that are ‘the first draft of history’ – I certainly came away from the contemporaneous press coverage, before anyone had really worked out the full extent of what was going on, feeling pretty confused. Now I understand much better, and I feel that is a perfectly worthwhile aim.

Surrogates - Christopher Golden, Christian Zanier et al
Strange Bedfellows - Christopher Golden, Tom Sniegoski et al

I’m really enjoying this series of Angel stories published by Dark Horse Comics. So far I’ve read the two above plus Earthly Possessions which is the next in the series (but which I haven’t bought yet). I’m always impressed with the way that the television show translates so well to the comic book medium and I like the way the stories in these two volumes pick up on similar themes to the series - despite the writers and artists having seen very little of it before the comics went into production. There is a lovely consistency about the colouring - purples, greys, blacks and browns that give a nice noir feel to the proceedings. Here we see various artists’ interpretations of Cordelia, Wesley, Angel and Doyle. Cordelia is, for my money, the one that translates best to the comic book medium despite often having little or no resemblance to Charisma Carpenter. Like the Buffy comics, so much depends on the dialogue making the jump to the page - in everything I have read so far, including these stories, that seems to have happened.

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The choice of subject matter is good too - fairly classic PI stuff given that little cross-genre twist (horror, of course, in this case) that distingishes all of Joss Whedon’s work. Here we have a fertility clinic with its own demonic agenda, some vampire hookers trying to stay undercover despite the best efforts of one of their number, a tryst with Dennis, Cordelia’s ghostly room-mate and Angel’s quest to help a woman in an abusive marriage - where everything is not as it seems. Not requiring enough involvement from me to count towards the 50 Book Challenge but still a thoroughly enjoyable read. Recommended.

It’s an unexpected thing when you find a shelf in your small local branch library stuffed with really excellent graphic novels. They have the lot – Swamp Thing, Hellraiser, Batman, stuff by Warren Ellis, Watchmen, Tomorrow Stories, stuff by Neil Gaiman – all sorts. And I’ve been working my way through it.

They’ve also got a surprisingly good selection of Buffy and Angel comics. Now, however much I might wax lyrical about the graphic novel as an art form, since each of these takes about 20 minutes to read I can’t in all conscience count them towards the 50 Book Challenge. Especially since I’ve been trying hard not to artificially inflate the total so that the bar’s set at some impossibly high level for next year.

And, to be honest, I’ve lined myself up a bit of a heavy month in July. I was only supposed to be reading the one book - the 1,000-page Don Quixote - but had a fantasy novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, left over from June. It’s a good read, but not a particularly easy one. So none of these detective novels you can polish off in 48 hours and feel smug about for me this month. That means that a few comics came as welcome light relief.

[Buy Ring of Fire from Amazon] [Buy False Memories from Amazon] [Buy Oz from Amazon] [Buy Angel: Earthly Possessions from Amazon] [Search for all these titles on eBay]

The first, Ring of Fire, was my least favourite of the three, although that shouldn’t be taken to mean that I didn’t like it. The story was set firmly in season two where Spike, happily esconced in his wheelchair, is variously described by Angel as “Hot Wheels,” “Hell on Wheels” and someone who’ll soon be “jumping - sorry, spinning - for joy.” Spike is less original but more forthright: “Come on then, you wanker, let’s make it a party.” From this you can probably work out that I thought the vampires were by far the best-drawn and best-realised of the regular characters. There is, for instance, a wonderful rough sketch reproduced in the back of Drusilla drawn in the style of Gustav Klimt. I felt it was true to the world and the dialogue was right on the nail - but the story was a little confusing and I didn’t feel the Scooby Gang came across as well as they could have - quite apart from Kendra’s character being well-nigh unrecognisable. So, one down, and the verdict is a good half an hour’s escapism.

Next up was False Memories which I was expecting not to enjoy at all since the whole Dawn gig in season five is not, in my opinion, one of the series’ finest moments. But, do you know what? This was easily my favourite of the three. Once again, really cracking dialogue, which got the relationships between the characters just right. A lovely, impressionistic drawing style which doesn’t seek to tie down every last detail of their features and therefore is far more successful in capturing them than more literal artistry. A story which is an ensemble piece showcasing all the characters and which has a satisfying beginning, middle and end. In short - highly recommended. Particularly for the picture of Buffy brutalising Spike at the front of the comic.

And the last was somewhere in between. Daniel Osbourne has never been one of my favourite Buffyverse characters - smug little git. He seems to me to be strangely one-dimensional for one of Joss Whedon’s characters and maybe the Oz comic is an attempt to redress that. It follows him to Tibet on his quest to learn how to control his werewolf nature and is easily the most ‘mainstream’ of these comics, both in terms of its art, its storyline and the long procession of monsters that turn up in the narrative. Again, a good read, half an hour well-spent, nothing really special.

I think the Angel comic Earthly Possessions, which I read quite a while ago, was easily the best of this bunch. I always preferred the early seasons of that show to Buffy; the whole noir detective-story thing is far more my cup of tea than high-school horror and always will be. I loved the way the world translated to the new format and the way the characters worked as *comic* characters - the Buffy lot, with the possible exception of Oz, seem much more like reproductions of their TV-series selves. If I was going to start buying and collecting, I would definitely start here.

Comics I read:

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Oz (Christopher Golden, Logan Lubera et al, Titan Books)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Ring of Fire (Doug Petrie, Ryan Sook et al, Titan Books)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: False Memories (Tom Fassbender, Jim Pascoe, Cliff Richards et al, Titan Books)
• Angel: Earthly Possessions (Christopher Golden, Tom Sniegoski et al, IDW Publishing)

Links:

• Angel comics on Wikipedia
• Dark Horse Comics on Wikipedia
• Buffy comics on Wikipedia

“I didn’t like parties. I liked the ice cream, I admitted. And, I liked the crisps. But I didn’t like the man with the bald head. And anyway, they weren’t my friends… The bald man, I explained, came on - and made things come out of his mouth. And he said ‘Abra-ca-dabra-dish!’ And there were loud bangs. And the other boys and girls weren’t my friends. But their mummies and daddies were my Mummy and Daddy’s friends, so I had to go to their parties. And did he know, I added venomously, what I had to say when it was all over? He shook his head. ‘Thank you for having me,’ I told him. ‘Thank you for having me!’ I shook my head in horror.”

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Today I read this fantastic short story - in the form of a graphic novel (or possibly a graphic novella, thinking about it). Because I wouldn’t try to pass off a regular short story in terms of a whole book in 50 Book Challenge terms then I can’t pull the same stunt here. Written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Dave McKean in 1986, one of the first projects they collaborated on, it has been through countless different editions (details below) but has always remained in print. Originally it boasted an introduction by Alan Moore, now mislaid, in my edition anyway.

The layout is spare and economical with few words used and none wasted. The art is dense, referential, multi-layered and muted, using shades of blue, grey and brown. The story raises questions from the outset. The narrator is, seemingly, a young Mr Neil Gaiman. He assures us that he only wants to give us the facts. Is this truth, half-truth or fantasy? We are seeing a very adult world through the eyes of a child and we must bring our adult understanding to bear if we are to work out what is going on. And, if this is not enough to be getting on with, there’s questions about the nature of memory. What’s imagined and what’s remembered? How far can other people’s equally subjective memories of events validate our own recollections? I found this by accident on the shelf in the local library and it took me about half an hour to read. Truly serendipitous.

Links:

• Silver Bullet Comics review
• Amazon reviews
• Cover art and details at Dark Horse Comics
• Neil Gaiman’s website
• The Art of Dave McKean
• The Neil Gaiman Visual Bibliography