The text I selected to serve as my contemporary example of British Literature, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, is not only a fantastic example of compelling storytelling but also one of the better books I've read recently. I chose the book because I'd heard that Atwood's fiction in particular does a good job of addressing feminism, a subject that dovetails nicely with some of the more esoteric authors--read mostly incomprehensible postmodernists--that I occasionally gravitate towards. The Handmaid's Tale managed to live up to the hype, weaving together cutting social insight and a refreshingly self-aware first person narrative.
Perhaps the greatest strength of The Handmaid's Tale's is the way it manages to seamlessly convey profound messages about humanity without interrupting Offred's chillingly clinical and analytic description of events. While the argument that the entire novel functions as a sort of meta-narrative about human nature is certainly valid, there are a few specific examples of Atwood's talent that stand out. First is Atwood's introduction of the character of Moira as a foil to Offred. Where the latter accepts her training as a handmaid as something that is inexorable, Moira holds an Aunt hostage and escapes to freedom. Even when recaptured and sent to Jezebel's--little more than a glorified brothel--Moira represents the capacity of the human spirit for agency even in a situation where it seems as if she has little control over her surroundings. Instead of allowing herself to break in such a bleak situation, Moira uses her body and the power she has over the men who ironically sought to suppress that power in order to maintain her identity and individual agency. This is not the only section of the book where Atwood uses the act of sex as a metaphor for freedom and rebellion--Offred's later physical relationship with Nick is very much characterized as her reclaiming a bit of her past self. Equally important is the Commander's reference to the reasoning behind elevating men as superior during the construction of the Republic of Gilead--apparently many men felt as if they no longer had a distinct role to play in society after having to share their traditional societal roles. After the new regime takes over and creates a society where men are ascendant, however, control over their bodies becomes one of the suppressed women's only forms of emancipatory action. The text's strength lies in discussing such things while at the same time telling an entertaining, horrifying, and insightful story.
While The Handmaid's Tale is strong in almost all of its aspects, its greatest weakness lies in the scope, rather than the detail, of its narrative. Because the story is told entirely from Offred's perspective, much of the nature of the world is left for the reader to interpret from snatches of information Offred manages to glean from the Commander and her fellow handmaids. Readers are granted information about a specific portion of the Republic of Gilead, but the state of the rest of the world is left very much untouched. While the United States has been taken over by religious fundamentalists, Atwood does not discuss events happening in other countries beyond the very limited scope of Offred's experience. While the narrative is perhaps more powerful for being limited and focusing on the experience of a single person, Atwood could aspire to grander implications by describing the state of the entire world a la 1984. Ultimately, scope is a very minor complaint when compared to the significance of The Handmaid's Tale's message--even in the face of the blackest adversity, humans still have control over their fate.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
My Top Books
1. Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien--Nuanced setting, an incredibly beautiful cosmology, characters that run the gamut of tropes--some created by Tolkien himself--from aloof elves to proud warrior-race.
2. Perdido Street Station, China Mieville--An exemplar of the emerging "strange fiction" genre, Mieville flipped every expectation I had for fantasy novels on its head. A fantastic deconstruction of gender, the Other, Marxism, and interpersonal relationships.
3. History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell--The book that opened my eyes to the entire realm of thought that is philosophy and analytic reasoning. From Aristotle to Nietzsche to Kant, a fascinating exploration of human thought.
4. Postmodern Theory, Best and Kellner--Dovetailing nicely with Russell's seminal work, postmodern theory took what I knew about traditional philosophy and let me apply it to a plurality--fittingly--of topics in new and varied ways. Foucault changed the way I looked at the world.
5. The Uplift War, Dan Brin--A book in which humanity has lifted chimps and dolphins to sentience and had them join society as equals. A fascinating look at the potential social implications of the emergence of sentient life other than humans.
6. Storm Front, Jim Butcher--A modern fantasy novel also about a Harry that is much much better than the alternative. A blend of detective noir, wizardry, and wisecracking protagonist. The rest of the series is equally good.
7. Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula LeGuin--My first introduction to fantasy as a genre, and it did interesting things with its magic system.
8. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace--A book about tennis, drug addiction, everything, and nothing. A thousand pages with seventy-five of endnotes. Mind-blowing.
2. Perdido Street Station, China Mieville--An exemplar of the emerging "strange fiction" genre, Mieville flipped every expectation I had for fantasy novels on its head. A fantastic deconstruction of gender, the Other, Marxism, and interpersonal relationships.
3. History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell--The book that opened my eyes to the entire realm of thought that is philosophy and analytic reasoning. From Aristotle to Nietzsche to Kant, a fascinating exploration of human thought.
4. Postmodern Theory, Best and Kellner--Dovetailing nicely with Russell's seminal work, postmodern theory took what I knew about traditional philosophy and let me apply it to a plurality--fittingly--of topics in new and varied ways. Foucault changed the way I looked at the world.
5. The Uplift War, Dan Brin--A book in which humanity has lifted chimps and dolphins to sentience and had them join society as equals. A fascinating look at the potential social implications of the emergence of sentient life other than humans.
6. Storm Front, Jim Butcher--A modern fantasy novel also about a Harry that is much much better than the alternative. A blend of detective noir, wizardry, and wisecracking protagonist. The rest of the series is equally good.
7. Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula LeGuin--My first introduction to fantasy as a genre, and it did interesting things with its magic system.
8. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace--A book about tennis, drug addiction, everything, and nothing. A thousand pages with seventy-five of endnotes. Mind-blowing.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Alien Referents--Embassytown and Storytelling
China Mieville's Embassytown draws together an impressive variation of ideas, even for an author so accomplished at exploring the interstices of esoteric theory, fantasy, science fiction, political thought, and the sometimes shockingly bizarre. In the space of a bare 350 pages, Embassytown creates a setting at first very familiar to readers of science fiction--humans have set up a colony engaged in a power struggle with its sovereign on an alien world and established contact with the local extraterrestrials, the Ariekei. Mieville then may as well have drawn a box around mainstream science fiction and scrawled "here there be dragons" in the margins he so boldly inhabits before unveiling the mind-bendingly fascinating linguistic implications of the dialogue between his humans and their not-so-relatable alien counterparts. One particularly interesting facet of Mieville's writing style is that he reveals the inner workings of his worlds as the book progresses rather than frontloading all the information at the same time, as can be seen in the following passage:
All those structures in place, for all those thousands of hours, years. Embassytown years, the years I grew up with, long months named in silly nostalgia for an antique calendar, each many dozen-day weeks long. For almost an Embassytown century, since Embassytown was born, structures had been in place. Clone farms had been run, careful and unique child rearing had raised doppels into Ambassadors, with the skills of governance they would need. It was all under Bremen's aegis of course: they were our home power; our public buildings all displayed clocks and calendars in Charo City time. But so far out here in the immer, everything should have been under Staff control.
CalVin once told me that Bremen's original expectations of Arieka's reserves, of luxuries and oddities and local gold, had been overoptimistic. Ariekene bioriggery was valuable, though, certainly. More elegant and functional than any of the crude chimeras of particle-spliced jiggery-pokery any Terre I knew of had ever managed, these Ariekene things were moulded from fecund plasms by the Hosts with techniques we could not merely not mimic, but that were impossible according to our sciences. Was that enough? In any case, no colony is ever wound down.
Mieville does a number of things in the above passage which qualify it as great storytelling. First, in keeping with his penchant for revealing things as if the character assumed the reader were already familiar with them, a description of what exactly "immer" is or the exact relationship of Embassytown with Bremen--the sovereign in control of the colony--are lacking, and yet the context of the passage makes it very easy to intuit without making it necessary for Mieville to arbitrarily have his characters break into explanation of what are, to them, facile topics. Equally impressive are both the character's voice, which by its syntax alone helps to solidify an idea of the character in the mind of the reader, and the almost stream-of-consciousness structure of the passage that manages to convey the impression of a thought process without abandoning clarity.
All those structures in place, for all those thousands of hours, years. Embassytown years, the years I grew up with, long months named in silly nostalgia for an antique calendar, each many dozen-day weeks long. For almost an Embassytown century, since Embassytown was born, structures had been in place. Clone farms had been run, careful and unique child rearing had raised doppels into Ambassadors, with the skills of governance they would need. It was all under Bremen's aegis of course: they were our home power; our public buildings all displayed clocks and calendars in Charo City time. But so far out here in the immer, everything should have been under Staff control.
CalVin once told me that Bremen's original expectations of Arieka's reserves, of luxuries and oddities and local gold, had been overoptimistic. Ariekene bioriggery was valuable, though, certainly. More elegant and functional than any of the crude chimeras of particle-spliced jiggery-pokery any Terre I knew of had ever managed, these Ariekene things were moulded from fecund plasms by the Hosts with techniques we could not merely not mimic, but that were impossible according to our sciences. Was that enough? In any case, no colony is ever wound down.
Mieville does a number of things in the above passage which qualify it as great storytelling. First, in keeping with his penchant for revealing things as if the character assumed the reader were already familiar with them, a description of what exactly "immer" is or the exact relationship of Embassytown with Bremen--the sovereign in control of the colony--are lacking, and yet the context of the passage makes it very easy to intuit without making it necessary for Mieville to arbitrarily have his characters break into explanation of what are, to them, facile topics. Equally impressive are both the character's voice, which by its syntax alone helps to solidify an idea of the character in the mind of the reader, and the almost stream-of-consciousness structure of the passage that manages to convey the impression of a thought process without abandoning clarity.
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