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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.
