This is How You Lose the Time War

This is How You Lose the Time War

By Amal El-Motar and Max Gladstone

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right?

Okay, so I kind of hated this book.  Not for any "good" reason - it's not poorly written, or full of plot holes (although how would you even be able to tell) or stupid, or badly characterized or anything simple like that.  It's just way too much High Literature in my Fantasy/Sci Fi. 

You're dropped into a, well, I guess it could be futuristic world, except that all the places the two soldiers visit are clearly historical versions of Earth in some way, and we start with alternating chapters between a person from each faction, called Blue and Red.  

The conversation is initiated in a gloating kind of way, but quickly becomes a real connection between the two and then they turn into, I guess love letters, and then the very last few chapters are basically the two of them trying to evade capture and deprogramming by their respective groups. 

But it never felt to me like we, as readers, were properly introduced or welcomed by the characters. First of all, a bunch of times there's referrals to things that the characters deal with that are just sort of alluded to without ever actually touching on why or how they were important.  Which I guess makes sense for people who are actually writers letters, but for people who are simply fictional characters using letter writing as a way of telling a story, it's annoying and off-putting. It feels like we're watching from a distance rather than being welcomed into this tale.

Plus, they start getting into shenanigans about being together, and it feels like performance art. There's much made there about inscribing stones that are ground up into dirt which is then rubbed onto the side of your car and driven to an junkyard and scrapped for metal which is made into earrings and it just becomes so much dross by the end of it. Maybe it's a complement, but it's like hanging out with a real pair of lovers who are so interested in themselves and their love affair, they can't find anything else to talk about. Eventually, the only people who want to talk to them are each other.

#41 - A Book with a Reflected Image on the Cover or "Mirror" in the Title

Everything I Never Told You

Everything I Never Told You

By Celeste Ng

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet." So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia's body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

I've been reading so much genre fiction, getting into this was a bit of a shock to the system. And I wouldn't say that it was even that enjoyable - Lydia, the sixteen-year-old center of her family, is found drowned in a nearby lake, and the book is basically about the shattering of the family both after she is found and the cracks that led to the event in the first place.  What's weird though, is that for all I didn't want to be drawn into it, I pretty much ended up sobbing through the last fourth of of the book, from when the officer finds Nath (what a horrible nickname, if your name is Nathan, then Nath should sound like the first syllable of that, right? But everytime I read Nath, it sounded like "Nash" in my head with the short "a" and it drove me crazy) passed out in the car and picks him up and takes him home.  Ng basically writes about a family that bottles up every anxiety, and hurt, and microagresssion, and this is the section that releases them, along with the reader, each character having their own catharsis in sync.

This is definitely not an "action-driven" book, once the initial tempest is done with the vanishing and discovery of Lydia's body, we basically spend the rest of book flipping backwards and forwards through time, hitting seminal moments in the family life, although the point Ng drives home (REPEATEDLY) is that oftentimes, what is seminal to one character may make a much different, even fleeting impression on another.  I mean, we're not left wondering what the title "Everything I Never Told You" is supposed to mean - every couple of pages, we hit another memory or incident that carves out the hearts of one or more characters, who then never air their grievances and just let it fester. Apparently this family never talks to each other. "Everything I never told you" is interchangeable for "everything". 

What's somewhat interesting is how my own family mimics or echoes many of the characteristics in this book - in 1977 my grandparents had three children between the ages of 8 and 15, one of whom, ironically (at least in this context, it's not ironic in our family) went on to marry a person from Hong Kong, so that I have several half-Chinese cousins - though there isn't any hullabaloo about blue eyes as they don't run on that side of the family), all of this taking place in small midwestern towns, and yet how little of any of those coincidences struck me as I was reading Everything, perhaps because for all their sins, my family doesn't resemble the Lees in anyway.  Not that we don't have our own problems - as Tolstoy famously wrote, "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." What does that have to do with the book? Nothing much, except to lead me to believe that we (and the characters) have brought our own miseries upon our heads, and that it may not be that life is hard - which it is - but that you become so rubbed raw by your own peculiar sympathies that you become your own worst enemy.  

In my edition of the book, Ng says that she started the book sympathizing with the children, but once she had her own children, felt greater empathy for James and Marilyn.  The book does almost give us a real twist, as we begin to assume, after all these flashbacks, that Lydia committed suicide because of the immense pressure Marilyn put on her to live out those dreams that Marilyn couldn't herself.  Ironically, it's actually James' fault for not teaching her how to swim - but they'll never know that, so Marilyn's erroneous realization that she put too much on Lydia is two wrongs making a right, I guess.  

There's also quite a bit of discussion on how things have or haven't changed since the setting of the book, i.e., would James' great regret of being Chinese and Marilyn's great regret of being a woman, which regrets they basically put onto their children, thus messing them up for life, still be the kiss of death today? Honestly, I would say...not. I mean, I'm not an expert by any means, but Marilyn and James are two people who see the world only from the prism of their failures, not their successes, and they didn't have to be that way.  Wouldn't be much of a story if they weren't, though, I guess!

Perhaps it's all just hubris, to think that we won't repeat the mistakes of our own parents, but hopefully I won't have to cope through an accidental drowning in order to ensure that I don't get so far up my own butt that I never realize my own progeny are just that - separate and individual beings who will develop their own traumas, no need to pile mine on them. 

Disappearing Earth

Disappearing Earth

By Julia Phillips

One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls--sisters, eight and eleven--go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.

Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty--densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska--and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused.

This one I liked, but it was so slow in the middle sections that I kept peeking at the end, so I could get an idea of whether we were actually headed somewhere, or just going in circles on this kidnapping thing. And for the record, we are going somewhere.  But it sure didn't feel like that for most of the (honestly, relatively short) book.

And the payoff is pretty good, actually!  As we follow a bunch of Kamchatka Penninsula residents for a year after the disappearance of two young girls, we wrap up a bunch of semi-disparate storylines in the last big section, "June".  What was interesting to me was that it looked like a lot of the chapters had been published in advance (some years and years before the book was published), so I wasn't sure if the author had taken a bunch of semi-random stories about Kamchatka women and re-worked them into a kidnapping mystery.

An interesting tidbit is that Julia Phillips isn't from Kamchatka; she's from the U.S., but she spent a few years on the penninsula (or maybe less, it's not quite clear, and she went at different times) and this does read very much more like a U.S. novel than a Russian book (from my admittedly low experience).  In fact, more than anything else, it reminds me of the movie, Wind River, which is about the discovery of a young native woman in the snow on an isolated Wyoming reservation.   The cold, isolation, uneasy and troubled relationship between native and non-native, the role of women in that environment. I didn't even realize till I was reading a description halfway through that all the viewpoints are women, but I did like it - it feels safer, somehow, in a world which can be very harsh, and particularly so here.

Since Phillips isn't writing a mystery, more of a character study, she leaves the ending a bit more optimistic than I think is warranted. Someone who steals an eighteen year old and four years later kidnaps two young girls and the first woman is still there (and alive) a year after the girls arrive? It strains belief.  But it feels  more satisfying this way, I suppose - and you get to go back and kind of track hints and appearances by various characters briefly in others' stories.

The setting is also semi-different. Honestly, considering it's set on the Kamchatka peninsula, I feel like the author tells us that it's isolated and cold and special more than we maybe see it in the narrative - maybe because the viewpoint characters are all in town (even if they're native), we don't get as much a sense of the "interior" as much.  Town is town, after all, and towns everywhere are kind of the same. 

Ten Second Reviews

The Tiger's Wife

By Tea Obreht

In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.

I liked this one alright when I thought it was going somewhere, i.e., all the stories would somehow relate to one another, but it ended up not really doing that, so for me, it kind of petered out.  It did manage to elicit heavy sadness at the end of the Tiger's Wife portion, so kudos, I suppose, but nothing else really gelled for me.  Did we ever really find out why her grandfather was tramping all over the (other) country?  He was looking for the Deathless Man (in all the right places), and couldn't just wait for like, his patients to die? Was he actually trying to meet up Natalie, also for reasons unknown? Unclear.  This made me look up like, reading guides to The Tiger's Wife, trying to figure out what the point was. It was interesting how the setting of The Tiger's Wife feels more fairy-tale like than many actual fantasy books, despite (or because of?) being based in war-torn eastern Europe. There's definitely you know, motifs and shit, about animals, and war, and medicine, and society, the kind of book you teach a class about in high school.  It was well written, but wandered too much, without sufficient payoff, to be truly great.

Magic for Liars

By Sarah Gailey

When a gruesome murder is discovered at The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, where her estranged twin sister teaches Theoretical Magic, reluctant detective Ivy Gamble is pulled into the world of untold power and dangerous secrets. She will have to find a murderer and reclaim her sister—without losing herself. 

I liked the beginning of Magic for Liars, before you realize what a terrible PI Ivy is (although of course she still manages to solve multiple mysteries, so she's somewhat of an idiot savant, I guess), but then Ivy started doing that fashionable PI thing of drinking too much and sleeping with possible suspects, and also (not a small thing) telling like, everyone who asks, all about the murder case she is working on.  Even though, as she stresses at one point, the murderer is definitely someone in the school.  And yes, in case you were wondering, she does tell her sister (who by the way, committed the crime) like, every minute detail about the case, including showing her the love notes these students were passing which prove one of them got pregnant.   With almost no prompting whatsoever!  Even if her sister hadn't killed a fellow teacher, that's a huge invasion of privacy.  I liked the premise, but was disappointed by the almost deus ex machina way that Ivy ignored everything about her sister which would have pointed her in the right direction.  For someone who was a PI for fourteen years, it just seemed really sloppy and not clever.  Also, after all that, she still covered up for her sister not only accidentally murdering her lover, but also botching an abortion on a student.  Their whole relationship did not make sense to me.  It's an okay read, but sort of felt frustrating, like the plot and character actions and decisions felt less organic than it should have. 

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451

By Ray Bradbury

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.

This is a tough one to review, because this book has been exhaustively picked over - the edition I read came with like, ten mini-essays in the back, PLUS a foreword PLUS like, Ray Bradbury's notes on everything.  Let me start by saying that I was already very familiar with the story (who isn't, at this point) but not like, the "plot".  I put that in quotation marks because the plot is definitely not the main attraction for Bradbury.  Neil Gaiman wrote the intro on my copy, and he basically said, readers today have to recreate a past that created a future, which was good warning, because they are super casual about atom bombs in Fahrenheit 451 and that is because they didn't really know that they were making radioactive hellscapes and so being like, hey, let's walk back to the city makes a lot more sense.

I was... not super impressed? It's that weird hurky jerky style where people can only speak in deeply meaningful abrupt phrases, which resembles actual human conversation not at all, and Bradbury can be super flowery it at points, especially in the beginning.  This is page 3:

"The autumn leaves blew over the pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and leaves carry her forward.  Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves.  Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked, and the infinitely small sound now, the white stir of her face turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting."

He also has a white fixation that was distracting, honestly: Clarisse was white, his wife was white, the books were white, stones were white, if there's any color described ever, it's white. Snow white, milk white, moon white, pale white, on and on and on.

It's interesting that part of the underlying premise of Fahrenheit is that the onset of special interest groups leads to the destruction of books, because each group finds something objectionable and censors it until eventually there is nothing left.  Interesting, because I feel like that has become such a popular position to take nowadays, that "political correctness is ruining free speech" and yet no one has brought Bradbury in on their side.  Probably because the people arguing it are not really here for fine literature.  And ironic because the people arguing it are those most likely to advocate for a prison society. 

I thought of a great way to end this review, but it was late at night and I was going to bed and didn't write it down.  You'll just have to imagine it.  Also, and not to sidetrack the issue, I just realized I've been imagining the world of Fahrenheit 451 as completely pastel colored, and I have no idea why.  Maybe because the whole thing strikes me as suburbia gone wild, and I have this weird association of suburbia and pastel colors since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  Gosh, I wish I knew how brains worked. Aaand we've come full circle for discussion of nuclear bombs!  Excellent! (let's ignore the fact that I just re-watched that scene and it is not pastel at all.  What the hell am I thinking of, then? Gosh darn it, it should be pastel! And I just looked up Stromae's music video for Papaoutai, which I ALSO thought was pastel, and it...only sort of is, and I'm out of ideas, so who knows where I came up with that, but it sure makes Fahrenheit 451 less spooky.  I'd love living in a pastel neighborhood.  It would almost make up for living in a dystopic version of the future.)

*No, I am not thinking of Edward Scissorhands, I've only seen parts of that movie, and that had to have been at least twenty years ago. Or am I? Isn't that a horrible thought, that something I saw only a glimpse of a lifetime ago would continue to distort every recollection I have?  Now, let's write a book based on that nightmare.

05 - A Book With At Least One Million Ratings On Goodreads

Cassandra at the Wedding

Cassandra at the Wedding

By Dorothy Baker

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.

This was not at all what I would have picked out for this prompt (although I suppose wedding planning books don't really "include" weddings, just every other goddamn detail about them) but it was an easy enough read.  I was initially surprised to see it had originally been published back in 1962, since everyone's attitude seemed so modern, but it did devolve into that breezy, California-dreamin' sixties-period Didion flavor.  I feel fully qualified to speak on it, since I read one whole chapter of Play It As It Lays.

I don't think the blurb is exactly right either, since Cassandra is more bent on sabotaging her own life than the wedding.  Not to spoil anything but she takes a bunch of pills when she finds out her sister Judith won't let Cassandra break up with Judith's fiance (on Judith's behalf, this isn't that modern). I'm catching up on reviews, so I've already read Fangirl and I've been going on about co-dependency there too (I only just realized both books involve co-dependent twin sisters, although Judith is considerably more stable than Wren, and Cassandra considerably less so than Cath) but talk about co-dependency!  You try to commit suicide because your sister plans to get married?! Whoa!  So I guess, yes, that is the ultimate sabotage, but in the end (more spoilers!) once Cassandra wakes up again, she seems more or less like a new person: pleasant, accommodating, and not at all displeased to be a bridesmaid (even though Judith's already married, and do you think that's ever going to come up again: "Oh right, when you were committing your very dramatic tantrum, we just up and got married because we thought you might cause a scene. How right we were!").

This is much more of a character study than a plot-heavy book - people are heavily described, and most of the action takes place around the pool.  So for all that it was published almost 60 years ago, it does feel relatively fresh since there's not much that would be different nowadays, except that they would have used a cell phone to call the therapist.  And apparently, weird twin sister relationships are still causing drama even now, so it's very prescient.  I (more spoilers, but only for my thoughts, not anything really important) didn't really like Cath in Fangirl - I feel like she just replaced one co-dependent relationship with another, and while Cassandra clearly has more trouble managing herself, I wasn't as frustrated with her, maybe because while, yes, as melodramatic and "extra" as her suicide attempt was, she seems less helpless.  I mean, she did plan out her potential death (and I'm not sure if we're supposed to be reading into it this way, but I always figured she wasn't planning to die based on her calculating the pills to take) but by golly, at least she had a plan.  Cath seems content to simply wait for things to happen to her - and occasionally bewail the happening.

Anyway, Cassandra is a nice little trip through the California countryside for a June weekend.  It's a good length - any longer and I think you'd start disliking the characters again. Anyway, aside from the abrupt right turn at the end wherein everyone seems to be capable of living happily ever after, even though nothing to that point would indicate that as a possibility, it was still a nice palate cleanser.  A sort of lemony-sharp cocktail.

34: A Book That Includes A Wedding

Possession

Possession, by A.S. Byatt

An exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist seances to the fairy haunted far west of Brittany - what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.

I don't know if you all were present for my hissy fit a few entries back. Let me assure you, that was only a very very small taste of the complaining and bitching I performed on behalf of Possession. This book was like my albatross, hanging around my neck. Here are some words of advice: don't be like me! Don't get suckered in by an interesting description like I did. JUST SAY NO (to Possession).

See, I thought this was going to be exciting, like, a mystery! But with books, and letters for clues, and nobody shoots each other, and everybody involved is long dead, so it's more peaceful-like, which I like, because I enjoy thrillers without action, is that a crime? Because if that's wrong, then I don't want to be right. So I started Possession, thinking, you know, 'Millions of satisfied readers can't be wrong.' WRONG. I hated Possession. I loathed it. I got about 1/4 of the way in, and conveniently "lost" it, so I could take a break from it. This was just not my book. And it's not a bad book! It's not, I swear. It's just, like, the opposite of anything I ever want to read. And I had a clue, right there on the back of the book:

It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.

...two Victorian poets.

...two Victorian poets.

...two Victorian poets.

...two Victorian poets.

I hate Victorian poetry. This wasn't like, a surprise to me. I mean, I kinda was aware that I wasn't, you know, as they say, "a fan of the Dickinson" (they don't say that), but I can tell you I certainly didn't expect that reading it would feel like torture. Victorian torture. I like poetry that one could read aloud with some measure of rhythm. I do not like ellipses, and dash marks all over my poetry, with like, crap pauses everywhere and nothing rhymes. I'm getting angry just thinking about it. [NB: Actually, if you want a really hilarious take on this type of poetry, you should read Connie Willis' short story, 'The Soul Selects Her Own Society' which is a satirical "essay" on how Dickinson fought off an alien invasion by her 'near-rhymes,' bizarre meter, and 'profligate use of dashes and random capitalizing of letters.' Basically, it takes everything I hate about Victorian poetry and makes fun of it, in a much nicer and smarter way than I myself am about to.]

Like, okay, read this snippet:

I ask myself, did Galileo know
Fear, when he saw the gleaming globes in space,
Like unto mine, whose lens revealed to me --
Not the chill glory of Heaven's Infinite --
But all the swarming, all the seething motes
The basilisks, the armoured cockatrice,
We cannot see, but are in their degrees
Why not? -- to their own apprehension --
I dare not speak it -- why not microcosms
As much as Man, poor man, whose ruffled pride
Carnot abide the Infinite's questioning
From smallest as from greatest?

If you read that and immediately feel like you're breaking out in hives: congratulations! You're allergic to Victorian poetry. I advise that you put Possession down immediately and never think of it again. If you read that and go, "Hey! What fantastic imagery! I want more!": Congratulations, you're an English teacher! Go make some kids miserable with allegories and metaphors and allusions.


So Possession is a book's book. It uses a lot of literary devices in fancy ways, and wraps everything up in layers of, you know, allegories and metaphors and allusions. The Victorian story is told through poems, letters, suicide notes, diaries, and dug-up graves. I'm about to unwrap some SPOILERS, so beware, although honestly, if you read this review and still want to read Possession, it's not like you care what I'm saying anyway.

The Victorian story is an somewhat interesting one (although not my cup of tea) if only it weren't obscured by all the. . . Victorian-ness of the medium. For instance, there is an entirely too-long section which comprises the bulk of letters between the poets, and it's stuff like this:

Have you truly Weighed --what you ask of me? Not the Gracile Accommodation of my Muse to your promptings -- for that wd be resisted to the Death of the Immortal -- which cannot Be -- only Dissipation in Air.

and this:

How shall I answer you? I have been abrupt and ungracious-- from fear of Infirmity of Purpose, and because I am a voice -- a voice that would be still and small - -crying plaintively out of a Whirlwind-- which I may not in Honesty describe to you. I owe you an Explanation -- and yet I Must Not -- and yet I must-- or stand convicted of hideous Ingratitude as well as lesser vices.

But Truly Sir it will not do. The --precious-- letters -- are too much and too little -- and above all and first, I should say, compromising.

What a cold sad word. It is His word -- the World's word -- and her word too, that prude, his Wife. But it entails freedom.

I will expatiate -- on freedom and injustice.

Ugh. Anyway, so that's a problem for me. I can't argue with the effectiveness of it, or with the accuracy of it, because it's well done. Here's the thing: Possession is well written, very well written. Byatt has a lot of balls to keep up in the air, and she does keep them up with a good deal of success. Not only does Byatt write the whole Victorian thing to a T, she also has to deal with the modern (or, well, 1980s) world, which has scholars picking everything apart, which can't have been too much easy to plot and pace and do properly. Everything is like a big spiderweb - pull one thread and you've got connections to five other things going on at once. I didn't pick up on half of them, mostly because I was just trying to keep my head down and get through it without dying, but I did notice that they were there.


Another of my difficulties with the book was caused by the characters. I didn't like any of them. I found no one sympathetic. The Victorian cast is two poets, Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte, who have an affair and break it off, but not before somehow causing LaMotte's roommate to commit suicide, and LaMotte to have a baby in tawdry fashion. I didn't like them. I hate it when people in books have affairs, it always makes me hate the couple. And here, there's this weird thing where apparently Ash's wife refused to have sex with him, ever, and I guess maybe it's supposed to make us more sympathetic to his position? I dunno, man, I still think he's a bit of a shit for cheating on her. The whole thing rubbed me wrong.

Then there's the modern parts, which has two main scholars, Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey (and jeez, Byatt, could you have made your two male characters any harder for me to distinguish between than Roland and Randolph? I could not for the life of me remember which one was which) who mimic, in some ways, the Victorian couple. That is, Randolph leaves his mopey girlfriend to trek off with this other chick. Everyone is sort of slimey and unlikeable in the modern era too, at least for the first, eh . . . 7/8ths of the book. They're all weird and awkward and grating and gross until everyone comes together to rob graves in an odd tonal shift to madcap caper, when everyone suddenly turns fun and amusing and quirky instead. Oh well, at least it leavened the loaf.

I can't speak much on the moods of the book, or its artistry. Unfortunately, as I said above, I was struggling too much just to get through it to be able to appreciate any subtleties. I know that Byatt intended at least some of it to be satirical, and not serious, but for my part, I found the humor to be very dour. I saw the ridiculousness, but I wasn't amused, merely tired. It takes a different person than me to really relish this kind of humor. And possibly, I'm still upset at how difficult it was - like trying to save some kid from drowning only to find out they'd been faking it the whole time. I mean, it's almost enough to make you want to drown them for real, isn't it?

"My friend attacks my friend!
Oh Battle picturesque!
Then I turn Soldier too,
And he turns Satirist!
How martial is this place!
Had I a mighty gun
I think I'd shoot the human race
And then to glory run!"

-E.Dick.

ARRRGH