The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus was disappointing. It was not as deliciously atrocious as I had hoped it would be. Even worse, after the awkward first quarter it was an interesting read.

IKR??

I assumed this book would be like A Discovery of Witches, but with magicians thanks to the back-cover blurb. By ‘like A Discovery of Witches’ I meant populated with Mary Sues and Marty Stus who are never wrong and are always so full of fantastical brilliant potential despite doing stupid things and being, in general, quite stupid. The blurb was all ‘fierce competition’ and ‘the feats of magic gain fantastical new heights’ and ‘tumbling headfirst into love’ and the Night Circus was shopped out as ‘a mesmerising love story’.

Boy was that blurb wrong. Don’t even bother with the blurb with this book. Going in with no expectations is the best way to not hate it. Expectations spoil a lot of things, like books, marriage and porridge.

The Good: Many reviewers sang praises about Morgenstern’s (M) descriptive prose, but the strength of the book is really the entire cast of characters. While you are led to believe that Marco and Celia are the main characters, by no means are they the most important or the most interesting. Like a good circus, extraordinary people populate it: Tsukiko the mysterious contortionist, the oracular ginger twins, the billionaire circus owner who is slowly losing his mind.

What Tsukiko looks like in my mind

The Night Circus is a central presence around which these characters weave their stories, and it’s a pretty good backdrop once M stops hardselling it (and as long as you skip the weird one-page chapters that describe different parts of the circus in the most pretentious way possible). Eventually it’s revealed how important the circus actually is, which was a lot better excuse than ‘it’s just so awesome’ to dedicate so much prose to it.

Another nice thing is how people’s actions impact other people. Unlike a lot of books where the main character/s seem to live in a vacuum devoid of repercussions or common sense, TNC is pretty mellow about painting some of their characters as arses or pitiful without getting all soap opera about it. If anything, some of the book was a little too subtle. And by subtle I mean boring.

The Bad: 1. The Descriptions. I know that M aims to be the most descriptive descriptor around, but she just goes on and on and on. And I feel like the pages don’t actually explain anything, because at the end of it I can’t even describe a single tent in the night circus, and I assure you it’s not from lack of her trying to describe it to me. It’s a talent to explain a lot without giving any actual information. This would normally not be a big deal, but this book is something like 75 % descriptions. I want you to go into your corner and think about that before you pick up TNC.

2. The vagueness. I still have no idea why anything happened. I have no idea why some characters died, I have no idea what was going on. It all just happened at such a measured (read: slow) pace that I couldn’t even be bothered to try and find out why. Yeah, it happened. Okay. And then? Okay. Things happened again. Not sure why. Okay? I was okay with it I guess. But thinking about it now makes my brain itch. I mean why did certain characters die? Was it the magic? Was it Marco and Celia’s mentors? Was it the circus? Was it Fate? What? WHAT??

3. Isobel. While I don’t have a problem with Marco being an asshole, since assholes are a type of people that actually exist, I still think that Isobel should have snapped and stabbed him in the face. Not relevant but I needed to say it. Not that I advocate stabbing. It would just have been about the most dramatic thing that happened in the book. SO exciting. I’m going to pretend it happened. The book just got marginally better!

The Ugly: What is up with the timeline? WHAT IS THAT ABOUT??? Is it 1902 or 1903? 1185 or 1886? September or October? I am not a fan of mixing up timelines, mostly because I am easily confused and partly because I couldn’t be bothered to flip back a chapter and check. Also I only realised there even were dates after I was halfway through the book. I can’t say it made much of a difference anyway. The writing is clear enough that I could follow it without memorising a bunch of useless numbers.

I ask myself, is this confusion really necessary?

I neither hated nor loved TNC. Most of the book was pretty decent, and I’m pretty sure that M’s next book will clear up the issue of descriptive mess that just gets in the way of storytelling. If she does, then there is hope for all of us.

Cheerful recommendation: Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel. More dense though, and if you’re the LOTR indices-reading type you’ll enjoy it.

Beneath My Hands – Leonard Cohen

 

Beneath my hands
your small breasts
are the upturned bellies
of breathing fallen sparrows.

Wherever you move
I hear the sounds of closing wings
of falling wings.

I am speechless
because you have fallen beside me
because your eyelashes
are the spines of tiny fragile animals.

I dread the time
when your mouth
begins to call me hunter.

When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you.

I want them
to surrender before you
the trembling rhyme of your face
from their deep caskets.

When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want my body and my hands
to be pools
for your looking and laughing.

Birthgrave – Tanith Lee

I have read 50+ pages of The Night Circus, and you know what happened? Nothing. Nothing is what happened. The 50 pages were dedicated solely to describing what I assume will be the two main characters, Marco and Celia, who will eventually (I hope) have an epic duel and fall epically in love. In great detail. Lots of detail. At one point she describes how fashionable one random female character is for almost an entire page. Like. I get that the lady is fashionable. I got it when you said she had an impeccable sense of style. There was no need to say ‘sense of style’ again, or ‘fiend for aesthetics’ or ‘eye for fashion’ or ‘magician with clothing’ all within 200 words because I absolutely got it the first time. And, on an unrelated note, the image of her wearing rubies around her throat evoking the impression of a slit throat sounds really familiar. I’m sure I read it somewhere, except in that case the woman actually did get her throat slit or something. Hopefully the same fate does not befall Super Fashionable Madame.

Morgenstern so loves detail that she breaks up the narrative into small chapter-things just to describe the amazingness of the Night Circus or Marco or Celia. EVERYTHING ASSOCIATED WITH THE NIGHT CIRCUS IS AMAZING OKAY?? IT’S GOSHDARNED MAGICAL AND MYSTERIOUS AND MAGICAL AND SHIT. And Celia and Marco are, like, lonely, tortured souls. SO lonely. Life is SO HARD. Okay? Okay. I can’t wait to continue reading about these special snowflakes (but then, if writers did not write about special snowflakes, what would they write about, right? I am being unfair to Morgenstern, and not just because her surname is cooler than mine).

OH GOD!! I’m so sorry, adorable kitty! Snowflakes are the best in the world!

I read Birthgrave after Sabina Kane. I read somewhere that Tanith Lee was considered groundbreaking and also feminist. As in, her books had feminist elements in it. So I was like, WELL, how bad can a book that is actually concerned about its female lead character be, right? Finally I can read a book by an intelligent writer and the main character won’t be a total custard pudding (I couldn’t find a satisfactory synonym for disappointing in the thesaurus, so custard pudding it is). Right?

So. Wrong. I cannot even begin because it was the most awkward book I have ever read. The main character is a nameless woman from a race of gods or superhumans or something that has been killed of by another god. Or superhuman. She is allowed to live for some reason, she’s marked by this person/god/whatever and it seems she has some sort of superpowers. I forgot what they were because I didn’t really want to remember anything about this book. So she goes off into the world all by her lonesome and proceeds to hook up with every single abusive victimiser that crosses her path. Every single one. Even though I’m pretty sure she could have used her superpowers to get rid of them. Or she could have used her common sense and just avoided them. So basically I was reading a book about a mysterious, powerful woman who gave in to cruel, crude men (usually after they rape her/attempt to rape her/attempt to kill her) over and over again. It was sick.

I didn’t at all see how this was feminist. Was the point supposed to be that even a powerful woman has to operate within the system of male patriarchy, and so must submit? Or was it more like Sucker Punch ‘feminism’, which was not empowering at all, but instead left a bitter aftertaste when you thought about sexual exploitation being sold as empowerment? Birthgrave felt more Sucker Punch than Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

This poster by Alex Pardee is the only representation of Sucker Punch that doesn’t make me want to punch the screen. 

According to some reviews, Birthgrave is a feminist work because the woman survives all of these men to become some kind of awesome sorceress type. I don’t know if that actually happened because I didn’t finish the book. I don’t actually care if she became the most amazing sorceress ever in the entire world, I felt the constant abuse of her vulnerability (which I can only see as something she allowed happen) was unnecessary and it didn’t do anything for the character except to make me think that even in the fantasy world you have women like Rihanna. Spoiler: Anyway, it seems it was a good call for me not to have read the ending because apparently UFOs show up and save the day. Yes ladies out there, get yourself into as many abusive relationships that are never your fault at all for enabling them, and right at the end you’ll get saved by aliens. Isn’t that what we’ve always wanted?

Cheerful recommendation: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but after reading Birthgrave I would actually recommend Polgara by David Eddings. Or Sabriel by Garth Nix. A book with a proper heroine and less horrific circumstances. 

ps. I am aware of how flippant and sexist Eddings is with his female characters. I recommended Polgara because I am trying to say that I think Birthgrave is even worse than that.

Circuses and Quokkas

 I have spotted my next victim: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I picked it up at the university library where it was situated beside the books of the Twilight series (foreshadowing?). When I saw it, and read the words ‘epic romance’ I knew it had to be the next horrible fantasy book I read. And the first four pages didn’t disappoint. While not horrible (A Discovery of Witches started out awesomely, btw), it was uneven and there was a smattering of trying-too-hard and Mary Sueness already visible (I am afraid that if I ever do write a book, those will be some of the failings). 

I will be very perversely disappointed if this book turns out to be a good read. Meanwhile, I am as happy as a quokka.

 

Quokkas are really happy

The Sabina Kane Series

Writing about good authors is so boring. Re-reading my post about Eugenides is so boring. Of course Eugenides is a good writer. Nobody cares if I think he’s a good writer. There’s actually nothing to discuss, unless we get into it academically. Complaining about shitty writers who disappoint me at every turn is way more fun.

Now, my choice to torture myself by reading the second part of Deborah Harkness’ witch thing series turned out to be a bust. I was unable to read past the part where Matthew’s brain takes leave of his body, and he becomes stupider than usual. You must admit that as heroes go, he is a dumbass. He has no idea what’s going on and why he does things, and then he tells the whole, still-burn-people-at-the-stake world that his wife is a witch. Matthew has special snowflake syndrome. He thinks he’s special because he married a witch and nothing can hurt them because of their specialness. And that is exactly how Harkness intends for it to be. If you have read the book, TELL ME THAT’S NOT TRUE EH? EHHH?

Noooo! I’m too special for this!!!

Reading Shadow of whatever left me positively devastated at the state of urban fantasy. Like. How come everything sucked? Why is stupidity celebrated? Lack of plot encouraged? Personalitiless characters glorified? Surely there is a writer out there who can write DECENT urban fantasy without pissing me off. With this goal in mind, off I went to goodreads.com to check out the highest rated urban fantasy whose synopsis didn’t sound like rubbish.

Which brought  me to Jaye Wells and the Sabina Kane series. Now, all of the books in this series have a 4-star or higher rating on goodreads (but then the 50 shades books also have a 4-star rating, so I don’t think goodreads is reliable. And after reading Wells, I can assure you that it is not reliable at all. At. All.). I happily downloaded ALL OF THE BOOKS. ALL OF THEM. And I read ALL OF THEM. Now that I think about it, I must have been infected with some compulsive disease that wears off after you have completed a herculean task that accomplishes nothing.

ALL OF THEM.

One of the things I hate about urban fantasy heroines is that many of them evolve. Evolution is fine, mutants did it and so should magical heroines. But every single one of the heroines so far have gone from Toad-level powers to Scarlet Witch reality-obliterating abilities (if they don’t start out with Scarlet Witch powers on the reveal). It’s disgusting. What’s the point of reading about a heroine who can just wipe dangers out with the snap of her fingers – but the whole book is about how she doesn’t because she’s so goddamned stupid (CASE IN POINT – Harkness’ Diana).

So. Sabina Kane. It started out pretty interesting. There’s the setup of duality in Kane: witch/vampire, killer/friend, right/wrong. The potential for an interesting character is there. Basically Kane is a half witch half vampire (with purple eyes? right? because this is the sort of character you came up with when you were 15 and watched too much Buffy and Fushigi Yuugi) who works as an assassin for the vampire queens. She’s actually related to one of them, but because she’s tainted with witch blood, she is unworthy of a noble education, thus killing people is her job. There’s a dynamic between Kane’s feelings of inferiority, her desire to be accepted and the way she’s treated by the other vampires. Or at least there could be, if anyone other than her grandmother (one of the queens) treated her shittily.

Like this.

Or this. 

She finds out things are not as they seem with the vampires, discovers she has a twin sister and then goes on some godawful pointless quest to save the world. There are two main things I didn’t understand at all about this series. Spoilers ahead. Not that it would reduce the enjoyment of these confused books if you read them.

1. THE TONE. I believe the tone of these books got hit by a bus and then run over by Optimus Prime. Because it starts out serious and dark, with Kane killing someone she claims is her friend, and the whole muddy relationship with the vampires, parental issues etc. And then Giggles the demon makes an appearance, and the whole tone is shot. Everything becomes a joke. You don’t know whether to take this series seriously or not. And it goes on like this the whole time. People die, Kane is sad, some slapstick humour is introduced. The absolute worst was the final story arc, where some fellow who is supposed to destroy the world pretty much ruins Kane’s life and kills her father (and sister I think. Not sure) is revealed to  be some pathetic jilted lover to be made fun of. LOL. He’s so lame and stalker-y, like that guy you went out with once and then wasn’t interested in, but then he kept emailing and calling you and sending you poetry?? LOLOL. Guess what? It’s not funny!! Fuck you Jaye Wells. Fuck you for raising my hopes and then shitting on them with your lousily-paced slapstick humour.

2. THE MARY SUES. Yes, there is more than one Mary Sue. Can you believe that? Kane and her twinnny twin twin. They turn into goddesses at the end. You can’t get more Mary Sue than that. But in true uneven Wells fashion, she can’t decide that after they defeat the big bad (who was more like lame and snivelly) whether they are still as powerful, so Kane is happy just taking some title on the vampire council or whatever. Gimme a break. You use goddesshood as a Deus Ex Machina, and you can’t even  be bothered to follow through with the implications of having a goddess among the unwashed supernatural masses? Like hell she would just sit on some damned council and let people continue to disrespect and ignore her like before. Like hell the other, less powerful characters would allow that.

Oh, and I just thought of 3. DISTURBING UNDERTONES OF SEXUAL IMPRISONMENT. That’s just a dramatic heading because I didn’t want to outright type HOMOPHOBIA. Basically there’s this lesbian werewolf who has hooked up with a vampire girl. Her father is the leader of some pack and keeps insisting that she get married off to some other pack dude. I actually thought that Kane would do something about it, or it wouldn’t be a serious issue (considering the tone of the book) but what happens is the werewolf girl gets married off and Kane gets invited to the public mating/marriage ceremony. Where they turn into wolves and mate onstage. And Kane actually sees the werewolf girl try to run away from her mate, and then she turns away and all she can hear is her despairing howls. Basically the girl is forced into marriage and then raped by her husband. Onstage. And Kane’s reaction? OH, TOO BAD. Can’t do nothing about it. And later on in the last book (I think), she finds out that the werewolf girl and her mate have a child, and she’s like, AW SHUCKS, I GUESS EVERYTHING TURNED OUT FINE.

Unless you’re, like, gay. Or a werewolf. Or both. 

Now do you see the problem with the tone of this series? What am I supposed to take seriously? What do I not? Why is she so flippant about rape and sexuality? She builds up to deaths, and then they become meaningless because the villain is a joke. In fact, if I could describe Wells’ writing in one word, it would be flippant.

I think I have made myself upset thinking about point no 3, so I will stop here. I think Wells has other series’, and I hope that she has fixed the flaws that made Kane so uneven. I’ll probably read them when I’m desperate again.

Cheerful recommendation: Naomi Novik’s addictive Temeraire series.

Awesome Temeraire pic from fuckyeahtemeraire.tumblr.com.