on considering reading George R.R. Martin

[rushthatspeaks]

The thing with being ill for a long time-- and I had the flu for basically the entirety of September and am not completely recovered-- is that as you regain energy you start to want to do something difficult, just because it is so long since you've had the capacity to do anything difficult. Consequently, I find myself very seriously mulling over the idea of reading A Song of Ice and Fire.

Now, for many people this would be a substantial time investment, but not difficult, as such. Just long. But the last time I read anything significant by Martin, Dying of the Light, two hundred and fifty-four pages took me just under seven hours and left me with a splitting and lingering headache. It was entirely worth it, or I wouldn't be considering doing anything of the kind again, but it was one of the more difficult books I read that year. A Song of Ice and Fire is very famous and has gotten to the point where I feel culturally behind in not knowing anything at all about it (except that the TV show sounds as though it has more visual depictions of sexual violence than I am really down with watching), but the main reason I am interested in trying to read it is that I have been thinking on and off for years about why Martin is so difficult for me, and I think I've finally gotten it and can maybe therefore fix it.

It's not, as I initially thought, that Martin thinks perpendicularly to the way I think and that therefore I don't understand why anybody in his work does the things they do. That, as I've known for years, is C.J. Cherryh, whose humans make less sense to me than her aliens, and Martin and Cherryh really aren't all that alike. I have problems parsing sentences in Martin which are simple landscape descriptions and have nothing to do with characters at all.

It is, I think, and this is why I'm writing this up, literally to do with the way in which I sensorily relate to texts. To expand: there are visual readers out there, who picture the events of a text the way that they would watch a film, and there are varying degrees of that; there are auditory readers, for lack of a better term, for whom the cadence and sound of the words encodes something about the way they relate to the story, and there are varying degrees of that. There are probably many other sorts of reader, and if you are one of them I would love to hear about it.

But I, as I have mentioned before, am a kinesthetic and structural reader. I interact most easily with a text when there are lots of touch-words and words which define the extent of spaces and smell-words to give me an internal idea of the book as a chain of connected locations in which characters relate to each other. And also, independently of that, I have a mental image of the structure of the book as an overall thing; I picture it internally as rather like a free-form glass sculpture, swooping in here, curving out there, changing color there; this structure incorporates the plot and the characters and the relationship of the plot to the characters and the themes and the pacing and how well the book holds together as a thing in itself, as well as several other things (and I am not consciously sure what some of them are).


Ninety-five percent of all writers don't include enough touch- and smell- and space-words for me to rely primarily on my kinesthetic sense of a book. They just don't. People don't tend to write for that. Sometimes even people who demonstrably see the world that way don't write for that-- I wrote about this when I was discussing C.S. Lewis's Perelandra, a book which proves to me beyond doubt that he primarily thought about things kinesthetically, but in most of his other works he's trying (very sensibly) to communicate mostly to other kinds of reader, and why not. I myself as a writer am not writing primarily for kinesthetic readers, because no one else would know what the hell was going on.

Consequently, with most books I am dependent on my structural sense. Now, this can cause some weirdnesses with how I think about books versus how other people think about books. The most easily explicable way I can think of to explain this is that Tanith Lee wrote a series of books, the Secret Books of Paradys, which are set in an alternate-universe Paris at various points in its history. Each of them has a title which begins with 'The Book of', so you have The Book of the Mad, The Book of the Damned, etc. Each one is themed around a color, and uses no words related to colors other than the one it's themed around, so that, for instance, the orange book describes a lot of shades of orange but does not contain the word white. Each book develops an emotional and intellectual cathexis around its color, a knot of ideas that summarize what Tanith Lee thinks and feels about that part of the spectrum. I think that's a wonderful conceit, and the principal issue I have with the series is that some of the colors are much more well-written than others. Yellow, now, yellow is great, and red is damn good, and orange is a stone-cold masterpiece because it's not only good on its own but is as it should be a thematic mashup of the red and yellow books. But blue, and this is particularly annoying for me because blue is my favorite color, is too short and really underthought and doesn't have half the cool ideas attached. My personal mental shorthand for Tanith Lee's weaknesses as a writer is 'there are things she doesn't devote enough time to because she doesn't like blue', meaning that she's let her dislike stop her from exploration.

So I was describing these books to somebody at some point, pretty much as I've just done above, and the person said "Well, are these a series?" and I said of course they are, I just told you, and the person said "No, do they have a plot that runs through all of them? Do they have characters in common? Is there an order in which I should read them?"

And I said, give me three days to track them down and reread them and I'll get back to you about that, because I didn't know.

I've read each of them five times, counting the tracking-down-for-that-person, but that still just isn't how I think about the series. The structure of the series is color-themed, so it's a sphere (like a color wheel, only in three dimensions and with black and white added), and that means I had entirely forgotten whether there is supposed to be an actual order to them because a sphere starts anywhere, and I didn't know whether individual characters are part of the things that blend the edges of the colors together between the books or not. (It turns out that you can, in fact, start anywhere, and that the setting is in common but the characters aren't.) It's not that these books don't have good characters, either-- the characters are great, the heroine of the yellow book is one of the best heroines in fantasy and she now sums up a lot of what I think about the color yellow. If I reason it through from first principles given the ideas that are at play in that book, I assume her name has to be Jehanne because of stuff about Joan of Arc. But I can't actually remember off the top of my head. She is in my memory the person, poor thing, whose life keeps on going so yellow, and who deals with it admirably, and that's the important bit.

Now, the fact that I naturally read structurally this way, that this is how my brain works, has some advantages and some disadvantages. It is very, very difficult to surprise me with a plot twist. I saw it being built in, or at least I saw that there had to be room for a swoopy thing going down here or the whole structure would fall over. Honestly, a lot of the time this is frustrating because it removes a lot of suspense and excitement.

I treasure books that have managed to surprise me with plot. The most recent was Patricia McKillip's The Bards of Bone Plain, which used the fact that a twist was obviously coming, and that I as the reader saw it coming, to make me think I knew what it was. This is more complicated than it sounds, because the real twist had to have exactly the same setup and fit into all the same story-spaces as the fake twist that McKillip was making me expect; she laid out all the clues for everything well ahead of time but successfully made me look at them from entirely the wrong direction, and I remain impressed by that. Again, I assume that the wonderful three-dimensional characters whose journey in that book I recollect very clearly must have had names and hair colors and heights and all that, because most characters do. In another few rereadings, once I'm no longer distracted by watching her build the framework, I may have all that straight. But good structure is so distracting! It is what I will pay attention to first. I'm much better at remembering things like character names in books that aren't doing intentional work on that structural level.

This is why I cannot remember one single name from the entirety of M. John Harrison, who is one of my favorite writers, and whose work I find exhilarating and comforting beyond my ability to tell. He's not just doing interesting things on that structural level. He tells jokes in it. Good jokes. Like, in one of the Viriconium books, there's a chapter which, gradually, over the course of the whole chapter, starts using quotations and the length of the sentences and specific images and rhythms to turn itself into a bastardized version of T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'. It starts out really subtly and it gets more and more blatant, and the story has been a kind of Arthurian-Fisher King pastiche anyhow and you sit there going really? really, we are doing this? Really? And then, just as it's gotten as far as it can go without copy/pasting the text of the poem into the novel, the chapter ends. Now, this is a book in which each chapter has an epigram, and all of the previous epigrams have been made up by M. John Harrison and credited to some fantasy name with an epithet or other, you know, by xyz the Exploding Wizard, that kind of epigram. The epigram for the chapter immediately following the text which devolved into T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'... is from T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'.

This is brilliant-- it's a cribsheet, because if you don't know the Eliot poem, you should at least be able to catch that this is different from all the other epigrams in the book, and if you go look up the poem to find out why this epigram is present you will be given the key to the previous chapter-- but also because, to those of us who were familiar with the Eliot and had already noticed, it's this sly demure you-caught-me yes we were going there textual acknowledgement that the Eliot is entirely intentional, but perhaps just a tad out of place in the environment of this particular high fantasy novel, in which epigrams are usually penned by exploding wizards. The timing of it all is perfectly done. I laughed so hard, both because it was funny and out of sheer delight that somebody would plan and execute something like that. M. John Harrison is full of this sort of thing, it happens multiple times per book, and it is why I insist that he is one of the funniest writers I read and one reason his work is so comforting to me.

But M. John Harrison has also taught me something, namely that while I love it beyond reason when people write things aimed at a primarily structural reader such as myself, it's just as possible to lose your audience of other kinds of readers when you're doing that as it is if you're writing primarily for, say, kinesthetics. I know this because when I talk about M. John Harrison, and when I read essays that other critics write about his stuff, those critics, and the people I talk with on panels, and the friends I talk to about books over lunch (except a couple who are also structural readers), well, we are pretty much literally not talking about the same books. And when I say we aren't talking about the same books, I mean that the plots are not the same. Characters do not act for the same reasons. Different stuff mattered. We both read the same text, but. It's that big a gap. I feel a little weird about which side of that gap I'm on, too, because I'm the lucky one: I have never read an M. John Harrison novel which did not have an ecstatically happy ending. Granted I haven't read all of them. But, for me, he is one of the great masters of the eucatastrophe, and when I say that to people, they say well what about xyz event which happened which was really bleak, and I'll say yes, that happened, certainly, but it doesn't matter because the weight of the book comes down on this other thing over here which invalidates that because of the thread leading back to... and by this time I am gesturing with my hands in midair trying to show the shape of an imaginary glass object which represents my visualization of the book, and saying helplessly that I know it has to be intentional on his part or he wouldn't have used the metaphor about waves and wings on p. 217.

BEGINNING OF A RATHER LENGTHY DIGRESSION

There is one of his books I can explain in a way which I can get to make sense outside my own head, and I am going to, just because it bothers me so much that there is this gap. I think this book deserves to be far better known for the cool thing it does in the deep structure, and I only know one other person who read it the way I did, which was sovay, and reading it this way was the reason she handed it to me in the first place, so.

M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart is, on the surface, a novel in which a first-person narrator describes the fortunes and misfortunes of a man and a woman, Lucas and Pam, who were caught up in some kind of magical event while they were at university, and the mysterious things that happened to them because of it. There's a hidden history of Europe involved; there's the question of whether magic is real at all; there are romantic gestures and breakups and makeups and marriages and cancer and allusions to alchemy. On the surface, it's a kind of novel you get every so often, along the lines of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 or some of John Crowley, where the history of the occult illuminates the character relationships and occasionally comes boiling out of the subliminal to maaaaaaybe affect larger events but, until endgame, not in anything other than a plausibly deniable way. And then there is an instance that is not plausibly deniable, and then the book is over. A lot of the reviews expressed that they thought it was a pretty bleak ending, because there's a death of cancer and there's a sudden death in a car crash and the narrator's life looks as though it suddenly accumulates a lot of awful stuff happening right at the end for no apparent reason.

The thing is, in actuality, every single relationship between a man and a woman described in the book is a metaphor for what is going on between Lucas and Pam*. That is what the magical event did to them. Literally every other two people in a male-female pair, even people who walk by the narrator on the street when he is wandering around by himself ruminating. They are signs for Pam and Lucas, symbols of the emotional exchanges between the two of them. It's amazing how thoroughly Harrison packs this in without it being obtrusive and distracting. It's just there, and so, when the narrator says that he does not understand what's going on in Lucas's head, you can figure it out by checking on what's going on in the head of literally any male character interacting with any female character nearby. The entire novel is the single psychodrama, repeated in miniature again and again. That's the supernatural thing, that these two are more than real, so they echo everywhere over and over, echoes changing somewhat, but not blurring or diminishing.

So I noticed that, and the act of noticing it, because it is a feat and a half of writing, caused me to ask the central, necessary question: if every single relationship in this novel is the central one, and the narrator is married, i.e. in a relationship with a woman, then that must mean...? And we're shown that the first-person narrator knows every thought that went through Lucas's head during the initial invocation, and that must mean...? But the narrator is demonstrably not Lucas because they have scenes together later, and yet, we are never told the narrator's name, which means...? Just what is the narrator's relationship to all of this? How does he know what he knows? Who is he? What is he, more pertinently?

And then it all clicked and it was so cool. The narrator is Lucas's principal, original reflection, the one who split off first, who was separated from Lucas by the initial magical incident. The narrator's life has been everything Lucas wishes his life could have been, has been Lucas's idea of the perfect life, but they remain two people on either side of a barrier, the barrier of reality, and the only thing the narrator has ever wanted is to cross that line. At the end of the book, when the magic shows itself in full, the two of them switch places. Of course a lot of bad stuff immediately happens to the narrator. That's what he wanted and expected. It shows he's human for the first time. Also, of course his wife instantly dies-- she wasn't ever real, because Pam, well, her ideal of the perfect life wasn't actually based around being married to Lucas, so her principal reflection skipped town and did something else (to be specific, she turned herself into the Gnostic Sophia and is pretty much running the cosmos). The narrator was married to a reflection of a reflection, which disappears in a puff of logic...

It's not just a happy ending, it's a transcendent one, in which the realms of fantasy and reality cross and mingle, everyone gets what they deserve and desire, and the world is shaped anew by compassion and love. But to read the ending this way, it has to be clear to you fairly early in the book that all of the relationships are one relationship and that the real plotline is taking place in a series of metaphorical scenes which appear to be about entirely unrelated people. Because I have these imaginary glass objects in my head, and I saw without really thinking much about it that there was a short curving line in that glass shape that repeated with variations, and that the real curve of the piece was made up of the variations at the ends of the lines... I don't know. He plays entirely fair, this is all things you can put together out of the text without having to have shapes in your head the way I do, it's just that if it were me I'm not sure I'd so consistently make the inner and outer layers of my books one hundred and eighty degrees apart from one another in the emotions they express.

The Course of the Heart, in case it wasn't obvious, is one of the best novels I have ever read.

* Yes, I had to look those names up.

END OF A RATHER LENGTHY DIGRESSION

Anyway, so the point I'm trying to make here is that if you write very much in one mode you can lose people who read in other modes, and I believe that my problem with George R.R. Martin is that he is so strongly visual/cinematic a writer that my sense of how structure works can't find anything to grab onto. All of the tiny subliminal cues which somehow enable me to build my mental glass shape in Martin just, well, don't. I don't know if it's that he doesn't include those cues, or that they've somehow been sublimated into the visuals. I could see the structure of Dying of the Light well enough after I finished it, but it was way more like dissecting a movie I'd seen than like thinking about a book, building patterns out of a visual experience. The problem is that not being able to find those cues, whatever they are, doesn't mean I stop looking for them. It means I start hyperanalyzing every sentence, because they have to be in there somewhere, right, and also I get very twitchy, because what even is this, how, this is not behaving like a book, where is the shape of it, what.

I considered that Martin might have been building the structure of A Song of Ice and Fire at a level too large and lengthy for me to really grasp it on first attempted read, but a) I would not then have had the same exact sort of comprehension issue with Dying of the Light, since it is so much shorter, and b) I have had the experience of someone working at a macro scale like that. The first time I read Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun it was like reading a brick until somewhere in book five, at which point suddenly the whole thing made more sense and I realized I'd been trying to think of it as far too small a structure and now I can read it. I really think that with Martin for whatever reason I just cannot use whatever linguistic cues my subconscious normally grabs about structure.

So, if I do try ASoiaF again, which is a definite maybe, I'm going to try to deliberately and consciously read it as visually as I can. Attempt to build a visual image with each sentence and move on. Try to let go of looking for those cues. Actively practice not having a glass shape in my head.

And if I can manage that and still can't read it, well, it'll probably be because I turn out not to like the content, but at least I'll have gotten far enough to check, which certainly isn't what happened the last time I tried.

Comments

[rosefox]

the heroine of the yellow book is one of the best heroines in fantasy and she now sums up a lot of what I think about the color yellow. If I reason it through from first principles given the ideas that are at play in that book, I assume her name has to be Jehanne because of stuff about Joan of Arc.

And also perhaps because "jaune" is French for "yellow". (cf jaundice)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I agree, and I hadn't thought of that. Thanks!