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Feb. 16th, 2010 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksUnclean Spirits, M.L.N. Hanover. I picked this up because I know Hanover to be a pseudonym for an author of whom I am very, very fond. The dedication gave me a big silly grin-- this is an urban fantasy novel dedicated to John Constantine; I have been waiting for that without knowing it for fifteen years now-- and the rest of the book-- well. This writer is better than this content, is what I want to say about this. Absolutely bog-standard plot, characters, etc. done so very well that I noticed entire schools of defects I'd never noticed before in the way the standard plots go.
Example: I've been thinking nebulously for some time that a lot of urban fantasy has what I mentally tag as 'the Lovecraft problem'. I tag it this way because Lovecraft didn't have it, and the way in which he didn't is instructive. So one reads Lovecraft, and there are all these powerful incomprehensible entities who work in Ways We Wot Not Of etc. etc., and they range from things that will damage you if you are in their way to things that are indeed incredibly malevolent. His corpus contains one thousand and one ways you can get eaten for breakfast, and then you hit The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. (For which, I suppose, spoiler warning.) There is an entity in that book which the main character summons by mistake, from Realms We Wot Not etc., and which takes on powers of its own and comes back of its own volition. It has agency in the plot, although you never get to find out what the thing is or what laws it operates by (there are hints, none conclusive), and in the end it returns to its own place. It saves everybody. It is profoundly and entirely benevolent. Just once, in the entirety of Lovecraft, someone tries summoning something he does not understand and gets lucky. There is a blink of light in that cosmos, this one tiny moment. (Redacted: entire rant on how people miss this when reading and discussing Lovecraft I am looking at you Michel Houellebecq.)
Anyway, Jim Butcher has the Lovecraft problem, and so does Laurell K. Hamilton, and so does Mike Carey, and so as far as I can tell as of book one does M.L.N. Hanover, and the problem is that you get Nasty Things and demons (sometimes literally explicitly Christian demons) and, as in the title of this novel, unclean spirits. And you don't get angels, or if you do they're nasty, and you don't get clean spirits, and you don't get unequivocal good, or if you do it is extremely limited and tends to work through people and cause holy weapons and things like that: but you get ludicrously, often unequivocally evil and extremely powerful supernatural beings.
Enough of this and I start to wonder whether it's badly planned metaphysics, an inability to write about goodness, a belief that supernatural good cannot be very interesting, or simple nihilism that's worked its way into being a trope. (There is also the possibility with many authors who do this for a while that one simply hasn't gotten far enough in the series, although I am not generally optimistic about it.) It just seems to be an assumption: demons okay, angels who turn out to be assholes fine, angels in the numinous goodness sense? not at this address. And it goes unexplained; there are very few series in which I see this in which there is an actual statement as to why things work this way, and the attempts at explanation I have seen tend to boil down to 'the God of this universe is very mysterious', which is an aphorism, not a philosophical argument.
This annoys me, because I think it is an unexamined trope, because it would take two sentences in most books where I see it to convince me that the author has thought about this and that there is a reason even if the characters are never going to know it, because I think it is bad worldbuilding that wants to use the cachet of demons and nasties that the reader will recognize. Because there is no reason to assume you can't have angels and I'd love to see a book where you can (besides the one I'm writing). Because even in Lovecraft's universe you get lucky once, and it was plausible.
And the M.L.N. Hanover book precipitated me from a mild sense of annoyance about this into however many words that is of ranting, because it is totally possible that this series could duck that issue-- the setup is there for it to duck that issue, if indeed the unclean spirits turn out to be entirely fake-scientific in nature, if the whole thing is framed as paranormal organisms which do not make reference to a larger theological substrate-- but, given how absolutely typical the content is of its subgenre in every single direction possible, I really don't expect it to. There are about six other things I could go on about like this sparked by this book if I wanted to do that, for exactly the same set of reasons.
The prose, of course, is lovely.
Please would someone let me know if the later books, as I know full well M.L.N. Hanover is capable of doing, take the genre conventions involved in current urban fantasy and tear them into itty bitty pieces. Thank you.
Thunderer, Felix Gilman. B. wanted me to read this and lent me his, so it is the first book I have ever read on a Kindle. Not half bad as an experience, though I did hit the wrong button once, lose my place, and spend fifteen minutes trying to find it again. I miss cover art, and the whole thing does seem a little grey, though not unbearably. I do not see myself buying an e-book reader of any sort anytime soon, but I can understand why B. loves his so. (While I was reading Thunderer he was sitting next to me complaining about there not being Next Page buttons on my hardcopy edition of Flora Segunda. One reason I keep B. around is that I could hear both earnestness and irony in the complaining, but damned if I know which was which.)
Anyway. Gears of the City has gotten a lot more press, I think, but Thunderer is a very fine book and one that made me happy. It is also one to which I personally would never under any circumstances have written a sequel, so I am somewhat worried about Gears of the City, especially as B. did not like it at all. But we shall see.
Thunderer is set in a fantastical city, and there are clear echoes of Mieville and an undertaste of Hodgell's Tai-tastigon (from God Stalk). But he's also read Iain Sinclair, and I've been waiting for a fantastical-city writer to do that. In scale, in breadth, in ambition, Gilman's Ararat is very impressive, and succeeds for me on every level, because the structure of this book is a perfectly counterweighted clockwork, balanced and organic in a way that I found sheerly delightful. It falls into place like a theorem but never quite seems forced. Every power in the city has an equal and opposite reaction, but it's nothing so crude as a doubling. Ararat really does feel as vast as it should, and as dangerous.
The characters were a little less successful, for me, but did what they had to. This is the sort of book in which while individuality of characters is important, it is important at least partly because the characters are all tied up with larger forces, and those aspects work. Attempts of characters to have lives outside the greater forces are unconvincing, but that is, explicitly, part of the point.
Very highly recommended, especially if you are, like me, enchanted by authors whose gifts are for architecture.
Example: I've been thinking nebulously for some time that a lot of urban fantasy has what I mentally tag as 'the Lovecraft problem'. I tag it this way because Lovecraft didn't have it, and the way in which he didn't is instructive. So one reads Lovecraft, and there are all these powerful incomprehensible entities who work in Ways We Wot Not Of etc. etc., and they range from things that will damage you if you are in their way to things that are indeed incredibly malevolent. His corpus contains one thousand and one ways you can get eaten for breakfast, and then you hit The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. (For which, I suppose, spoiler warning.) There is an entity in that book which the main character summons by mistake, from Realms We Wot Not etc., and which takes on powers of its own and comes back of its own volition. It has agency in the plot, although you never get to find out what the thing is or what laws it operates by (there are hints, none conclusive), and in the end it returns to its own place. It saves everybody. It is profoundly and entirely benevolent. Just once, in the entirety of Lovecraft, someone tries summoning something he does not understand and gets lucky. There is a blink of light in that cosmos, this one tiny moment. (Redacted: entire rant on how people miss this when reading and discussing Lovecraft I am looking at you Michel Houellebecq.)
Anyway, Jim Butcher has the Lovecraft problem, and so does Laurell K. Hamilton, and so does Mike Carey, and so as far as I can tell as of book one does M.L.N. Hanover, and the problem is that you get Nasty Things and demons (sometimes literally explicitly Christian demons) and, as in the title of this novel, unclean spirits. And you don't get angels, or if you do they're nasty, and you don't get clean spirits, and you don't get unequivocal good, or if you do it is extremely limited and tends to work through people and cause holy weapons and things like that: but you get ludicrously, often unequivocally evil and extremely powerful supernatural beings.
Enough of this and I start to wonder whether it's badly planned metaphysics, an inability to write about goodness, a belief that supernatural good cannot be very interesting, or simple nihilism that's worked its way into being a trope. (There is also the possibility with many authors who do this for a while that one simply hasn't gotten far enough in the series, although I am not generally optimistic about it.) It just seems to be an assumption: demons okay, angels who turn out to be assholes fine, angels in the numinous goodness sense? not at this address. And it goes unexplained; there are very few series in which I see this in which there is an actual statement as to why things work this way, and the attempts at explanation I have seen tend to boil down to 'the God of this universe is very mysterious', which is an aphorism, not a philosophical argument.
This annoys me, because I think it is an unexamined trope, because it would take two sentences in most books where I see it to convince me that the author has thought about this and that there is a reason even if the characters are never going to know it, because I think it is bad worldbuilding that wants to use the cachet of demons and nasties that the reader will recognize. Because there is no reason to assume you can't have angels and I'd love to see a book where you can (besides the one I'm writing). Because even in Lovecraft's universe you get lucky once, and it was plausible.
And the M.L.N. Hanover book precipitated me from a mild sense of annoyance about this into however many words that is of ranting, because it is totally possible that this series could duck that issue-- the setup is there for it to duck that issue, if indeed the unclean spirits turn out to be entirely fake-scientific in nature, if the whole thing is framed as paranormal organisms which do not make reference to a larger theological substrate-- but, given how absolutely typical the content is of its subgenre in every single direction possible, I really don't expect it to. There are about six other things I could go on about like this sparked by this book if I wanted to do that, for exactly the same set of reasons.
The prose, of course, is lovely.
Please would someone let me know if the later books, as I know full well M.L.N. Hanover is capable of doing, take the genre conventions involved in current urban fantasy and tear them into itty bitty pieces. Thank you.
Thunderer, Felix Gilman. B. wanted me to read this and lent me his, so it is the first book I have ever read on a Kindle. Not half bad as an experience, though I did hit the wrong button once, lose my place, and spend fifteen minutes trying to find it again. I miss cover art, and the whole thing does seem a little grey, though not unbearably. I do not see myself buying an e-book reader of any sort anytime soon, but I can understand why B. loves his so. (While I was reading Thunderer he was sitting next to me complaining about there not being Next Page buttons on my hardcopy edition of Flora Segunda. One reason I keep B. around is that I could hear both earnestness and irony in the complaining, but damned if I know which was which.)
Anyway. Gears of the City has gotten a lot more press, I think, but Thunderer is a very fine book and one that made me happy. It is also one to which I personally would never under any circumstances have written a sequel, so I am somewhat worried about Gears of the City, especially as B. did not like it at all. But we shall see.
Thunderer is set in a fantastical city, and there are clear echoes of Mieville and an undertaste of Hodgell's Tai-tastigon (from God Stalk). But he's also read Iain Sinclair, and I've been waiting for a fantastical-city writer to do that. In scale, in breadth, in ambition, Gilman's Ararat is very impressive, and succeeds for me on every level, because the structure of this book is a perfectly counterweighted clockwork, balanced and organic in a way that I found sheerly delightful. It falls into place like a theorem but never quite seems forced. Every power in the city has an equal and opposite reaction, but it's nothing so crude as a doubling. Ararat really does feel as vast as it should, and as dangerous.
The characters were a little less successful, for me, but did what they had to. This is the sort of book in which while individuality of characters is important, it is important at least partly because the characters are all tied up with larger forces, and those aspects work. Attempts of characters to have lives outside the greater forces are unconvincing, but that is, explicitly, part of the point.
Very highly recommended, especially if you are, like me, enchanted by authors whose gifts are for architecture.
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 05:54 pm (UTC)I think it's also the feeling that if there's provable supernatural good, either it will rescue the characters in an annoying deus ex machina, or else the readers will wonder why it doesn't.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 06:04 pm (UTC)There does need to be some mechanism for the fantasies of political agency to be reasonably plausible, absolutely.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 10:59 pm (UTC)I think I blame that particular allergy not on Tolkien but on his imitators, because one of the primary failure modes of eucatastrophe is deus ex machina.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 11:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 03:35 pm (UTC)As a reader/viewer who feels strongly about plot and patterns, I find that breaks in the implied ("deep grammar") universe (or conflicts between implied and overt universe) will not only toss me out of the story, they'll often make me feel betrayed, as if the story had a "natural" (logical, genre-bound, I-don't-know) outcome and that outcome has been avoided by authorial fiat.
(It's not only good/evil or orderly/chaotic parameters which end up conflicting in the universe's grammar; and I think that grammar is strongly affected by generic positioning; but wow, once you've watched a couple of TV series where Evil has an army and Good has a frightened guy with a rock, it becomes pretty obvious and ridiculous.)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 11:12 pm (UTC)It feels to me as though in a lot of things with this problem, the worldbuilding started from the top down, and doesn't think as much about consequences and second-order effects as one would like.
Of course, when people get the grammar right, that's when you can manage amazing dramatic effects made possible because of how the universe works, which is one of my very favorite kinds of amazing dramatic effect.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-17 03:14 am (UTC)The metaphysics of MLN Hanover
Date: 2010-02-16 05:08 pm (UTC)Which isn't to say that the series isn't interested in a battle of good v. evil. Just not in those terms. And yes, with any luck, the standard tropes will end, if not in little bitty bits, at least from an angle that makes them look very different.
The first book was the pilot episode, and part of the problem with a pilot episode is that you have to load it with things that don't pay off yet -- there's a whole series that needs to grow out of it. Almost nothing in it was what it looked like, and there's a metric assload of clues that don't make sense yet, but will. I wish Vicious Grace was out. By the end of that book, you see where we're going.
Try the next two. If you don't like where it's going after that, I give you my blessing and permission to jump ship. Fair?
Re: The metaphysics of MLN Hanover
Date: 2010-02-16 06:00 pm (UTC)That is so good to hear. I was hoping it was. It seemed likely.
This is the bit where I blink and say, oh dear, the author has come across a bad review much more quickly than I had imagined possible: and would like to assure you that while this review says what I mean, I will take your advice concerning the next two. I do know that series take a while to get moving.
Re: The metaphysics of MLN Hanover
Date: 2010-02-16 06:07 pm (UTC)If you get a chance, consider picking up Scott Westerfeld's Peeps. It was the book that convinced me that parasitology was rich and nifty enough to build a magic system on. It's the best YA science fiction I've ever read, because it actually teaches a bunch of science without being obvious about it.
But seriously, send me your address.
Re: The metaphysics of MLN Hanover
Date: 2010-02-16 07:01 pm (UTC)I love Peeps! I was wondering whether you'd read it, because parasitology is not exactly a common thing for a book to mention.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 02:34 am (UTC)One of the things I like, of which there are many, about Liz Williams' Inspector Chen series is that the protagonist's patron goddess is Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy--and while not overly hands-on, she has proved, when given the opportunity, to be merciful. When she's asked. (A role sie takes on, in even more hands-off fashion, in Minekura's Saiyuki.)
no subject
Date: 2010-03-08 09:47 pm (UTC)I have pottered with the notion of a world where what matters in this case is the vampire's faith or lack thereof, but not enough to generalise and systematise it.
See also the film version of Flight of Dragons in which a highly magical villain is defeated entirely by the hero's expressed Faith in scientific rationality.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-09 06:58 pm (UTC)I think the game Vampire: The Masquerade had crosses work both ways. Most vampires didn't believe that they worked, and most people had no true faith, so they were no more useful than anything else of equivalent mass for whomping on vampires.
However, there was a very small chance that some beings, mostly very virtuous humans, did actually believe that something would save them if they held up a cross, and for them, it would work.
Similarly, some vampires have flaws where they, essentially, had watched too many vampire movies and all the stories were true for them. They couldn't enter homes without being invited, cross running water except under certain conditions, and were repelled by devotional objects and garlic.