Up with Updraft

I have been involved in a personal reading challenge for the last 7 years, during which time, my son has aged from being a 10-year-old to a 17-year-old.  He is an avid reader (and a fast reader!) and always enjoys talking about the books he reads.  Except for pausing my reading challenge to read the three Hunger Games books, I have not been able to participate much in what he has been reading, though he has many times asked me to.  This Christmas, just before I finished my long reading list, a friend got my son Fran Wilde’s Updraft.  My son finished in quickly as usual, and being a fan of dystopian novels, he insisted that I read it too so we could talk about it.

Updraft follows many of the tropes of the YA dystopian novel.  The protagonist is a headstrong young woman, Kirit, who doesn’t much question the world she lives in at the opening of the novel.  She knows precisely who she wants to be in this life and is focused on her own immediate future.  The city has rules and laws in place in the name of protecting the city, and the enforcers of those laws are mysterious and threatening.  Kirit accidentally runs afoul of those laws and her entire future (or at least the one she so clearly envisioned) is threatened.  Like her other YA protagonists, Kirit has a few special gifts, and her unsettled place in the world makes her uniquely qualified to change its course.

Wilde handles her tropes expertly and the world she creates is unique, fascinating, and mysterious.  It’s a world in which humans live above the clouds in towers of living bone that are rumored to possible be part of one structure somewhere out of sight below the clouds.  The main external threat to the city are “skymouths,” flying, people-eating, squid-like creatures whose skin renders them invisible, so that the first time you see them is when their gaping maws come to claim you.  The adults of the city move about on human-made wings, and the towers are occasionally joined together by bridges made from the sinews of killed skymouths.  It’s a fascinating world and wonderfully realized throughout the novel.

The politics of the world are of course the heart of the novel, and they are every bit as intriguing as the physical one.  Updraft, like most YA dystopian novels, is about methods of control and the sacrifice people make in the name of safety.  Particularly, Updraft is about secrets and the withholding of information as a means of shaping and maintaining social structures.  But like all weapons, once peace and order is attained, those with access to the information are tempted to misuse it to secure their positions.  Wilde creates well-formed antagonists for Kirit to struggle against.

The novel is touching and fun to read and there are pockets of lovely prose that soar above the utilitarian, which is the default of YA fiction.  I enjoyed reading it, and have greatly enjoyed being able to talk to my son about it.  I will definitely be reading books 2 and 3 to see how the story develops and to learn more about the secrets of the city of bone.

Scott McCloud's Sculptor

Sometimes we like the story that is told, but not the particulars of how it is told, and sometimes we like the way a storyteller tells a story without liking the particulars of the story all that much.  In a great work of art, you are able to have both.  For me, Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor is aesthetically fantastic, but the story itself falls flat for a number of reasons.

Let’s start with the cool things about The Sculptor.  I liked the very format of a graphic novel in the same dimensions of a regular book.  I liked the use of a bluescale instead of a grayscale.  I liked the drawings themselves, the way the characters and the world wer depicted in ink.  Moreover, McCloud does a fantastic job with pacing and composition.  The dialogue is good and McCloud’s preference for visuals over dialogue is wonderful.  Even when the drawings look a little simple, there is great charm in that simplicity. 

Now beyond this point, I am going to be spoiling plot, so don’t read any more of this review if you don’t want the story spoiled.  Whatever I have to say about the story isn’t all that important anyway since your tastes are your own.  Buy or borrow the book and read it for yourself—it’s a quick and satisfying experience—and then you can hear what I have to say and tell me what you have to say.

All good?  Good.

I’m not really a fan of stories about moping and angst-y protagonists to begin with, but that wasn’t my problem here.  I wasn’t annoyed with David because he was moping.  I was annoyed with David, because he was so incredibly self-absorbed, and still more, I was annoyed with McCloud because he seemed equally self-absorbed.  On the surface, The Sculptor is about an artist willing to die for his art.  He would rather have a 200-day life-span in which to make incredible art than a lifetime of regular human existence.  But outside of a few passages about David believing in “absolutes,” McCloud never asks what it means to be willing to die for art.  In fact, David appears to have little to say with his sculptures.  The art that he makes after a feverish three weeks of binge-creating is nothing more than a collection of snapshots from his past, moments from his life.  The only thing David wants to talk about is himself, but he wants to say it loudly and be praised for it with money and accolades.  McCloud did not create an arc for David’s character in which he discovered what it is that he really had to say, discovered what art really was or what about it was worth dying for.  His final creation, the one he literally died to make was yet another snapshot from his past (Meg holding the baby).  The extent to which David grows is to realize that he needs to make every second of life count.  McCloud seems to embrace the David we meet and seems no more critical of David, in the end, than David is.  McClouds’s novel is every bit obsessed with David as David is of himself, which suggests a lack of irony in his portrayal of David’s self-absorption.  There are no subplots, nothing that happens that doesn’t directly affect David, no character relationships that exist beyond its impact on David.

Meg, while she insists she is not, is really just a thing in David’s world.  While searching the internet this afternoon to determine what didn’t sit well with me about Meg, I discovered the trope “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” a phrase coined by film critic Nathan Rabin describing Kirsten Dunst’s character in his review of Elizabethtown: “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”  That is literally what Meg is in the novel.  She is fun and quirky and there for the sole reason to teach David his lessons about how to live life.  McCloud half-heartedly attempts to complicate that image by giving Meg a few fiery and feisty explosions and chronic bouts of depression, possibly suggesting she is bi-polar or suffering from some similar condition.  The treatment of mental disorders seems painfully simplistic and without genuine insight.  I would be very interested to hear what activists in the mental health community would say about McCloud’s portrayal of Meg.  Of that chronic condition, we only ever witness one bout; her moods, whenever they surface, quickly fade and she returns to her plucky optimistic self.

McCloud gave himself nearly 500 pages to explore the themes of his novel, but there appears to be very little exploration at all.  He is of course, perfectly in his rights to do that—he should tell the story he wants to tell, not the one I want to hear.  My disappointment with the way he treated his own subjects is on me.  He’s a very talented storyteller, and if he ever really delves into the depths of a story he is telling, I would eagerly read it.

Days of Fantastic Nonfiction

In Days of Destruction Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco illuminate what they call “sacrifice zones,” “those areas in the country that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement.”  As they say in their excellent introduction, 

We wanted to show in words and drawings what life looks like when the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit.  We wanted to look at what the ideology of unfettered capitalism means for families, communities, workers, and the ecosystem.

The result of this investigation is a one-of-a-kind non-fiction book that is insightful, moving, and illuminating.

The book is cut into 5 relatively equal sections that look at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; the destitute city of Camden, New Jersey; the remains of the coal town of Welch, West Virginia; the state of migrant and immigrant farmers in Immokalee, Florida; and the gathering at Liberty Square by the Occupy movement from September 2011 to January 2012.  The politics of the book are clear (as you can tell from the introductory passage I already quoted), but what makes the book more than a political diatribe is how they present the lives of those affected by the forces of institutionalized corruption and greed.

The sections play out like a documentary in writing.  Every aspect about a subject—and Hedges and Sacco do a fantastic job of looking at a wide variety of these aspects in each and every section—is anchored by the tales of individuals living in the specific sacrifice zone.  There are no abstractions, because every effect is seen and heard in the lives of those interviewed.  Hedges gives extensive quotations from the various people he features, letting them speak for themselves, often capturing the speakers’ dialects to bring the spoken nature of their speeches to the fore.  The result is like having a voice-over in a documentary.  To add the visual element, Sacco provides drawings of the various speakers and landscapes instead of photographs.  In each section (except for the final one) at least one person tells his or her life story, and Sacco turns that into a 10-or-so-page graphic novel.  The result is a unique combination of essay and graphic novel that creates a world all its own.

The first four sections of the book are unassailable.  Hedges and Sacco bring the sacrifice zones to life and bring the reader face to face with the cost of capitalism in America.  The weakest section is the final section, mainly because it is the least grounded in the tales of those who were there.  As Hedges and Sacco say in their introduction, the Occupy Wall Street event happened as they were concluding their travels and their book, and they saw it as “the nationwide revolt” that had so far been “absent”: 

This revolt rooted our conclusion [that a revolution was the inevitable result of the sacrifice zones left in capitalism’s wake] in the real rather than the speculative.  It permitted us to finish with a look at a rebellion that was as concrete as the destruction that led to it.  And permitted us to end our work with the capacity for hope.

But of course, the Occupy movement did not lead to a lasting nationwide revolt, or at least not yet, and it’s hard to picture America, with its vastness and complicated government and economic design, yielding to  revolution in any way similar to the Eastern European examples given in the book.  In fact, living in a Post-Trump age, it’s hard to read this call to action the same in 2017 as I would have in 2012: 

We must stop being afraid.  We have to turn our backs for good on the Democrats, no matter what ghoulish candidate the Republicans offer up for president.  All the public disputes between candidates in the election cycle are a carnival act.  On the issues that matter, there is no disagreement among the Republicans and the Democrats.

Even with those final bits sitting at odds with my own experiences, the book is entirely worth reading and experiencing.  Even as a relatively educated and liberal man, there was a lot here for me not only to learn but to think about and consider.  Hedges is a fantastic writer who makes his political insights clear and compelling, and I will eagerly read more of his work, both his short- and long-form journalism.

100 Novels in 7 Years

In February of 2010, we began this project by reading A Passage to India, and now, just under 7 years later, we bring it to a close with Never Let Me Go.  I say "we" because Ann and I started this together, but at this point it is really just me.

I could make lists of favorites and all that, but I don't think anyone is really interested, so I'll leave that for some other time if someone prompts me. 

As it is, I think I'll keep this blog open and continue to post reviews and thoughts of the books I read from here on out.  There is something very beneficial about having to write about a book after you read it.  It forces you to get your thoughts in order, and it forces you to think about what you have read.  Many times I was angry at a book while I read it, but in reflecting about it for this writing project, I had to admit to myself all the things the book did well. 

So onward and upward.  I have gotten involved in the world of RPGs over the last year, so a number of the books I plan on reading this year are RPG manuals.  I probably won't post about those here, but everything else, I will.

Thanks for being here with me on this project! 

Jason

The Quiet Dystopian Horror of Never Let Me Go

*Big spoilers ahead, so venture forth at your own peril*

There is always something of a journey when reading a novel, as your enjoyment rises and falls, your appreciation for the writing or construction of plot waxes and wanes, and your realization of what the writer is doing sharpens and blurs.  If charted on a graph, my experience reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go would show several turns as my expectations were met and subverted and my understanding of how the novel fit into and broke out of its generic conventions came into focus.

I had never read anything by Ishiguro, but whenever I mentioned that Never Let Me Go was on my reading list I only ever heard good things, little gasps of excitement for me to read the book, so I entered the novel with raised expectations.  It quickly became clear to me with talk of donations and Hailsham that there was a bit of science fiction at the root of the novel, and I was intrigued further.  The writing, while not breathtaking, was strong and compelling.  I liked the tone and the pacing and was excited to learn more about where this was going.  The line on the graph was moving up.  Early on I began to suspect that Kathy and her friends were clones who were created for the sake of providing body parts to other citizens, and this suspicion was confirmed 80 pages or so into the novel.  Great, now the book looked to belong more to dystopian fiction than to the larger genre of science fiction.  At some point in the second part of the book, while the kids were at the Cottages and chasing down Ruth’s possible, it became clear to me that the casual pacing of the first section was going to remain throughout the novel, that Ishiguro was not going to be turning this into a tale of adventure at any point.  At first I was disappointed, pointing that line on the graph down, not because I don’t enjoy introspective literature, but because the tropes and conventions of science fiction and dystopian fiction that I was expecting were not present.  It seemed that the setting was merely a backdrop to tell the story of these three friends.  I did not expect any revelations to come at the end to surprise the reader, to make the reader reconsider what had come before—it was what it was.  I felt us building at some point to a meeting with Madame, but I didn’t know what we could possibly gain from the encounter.

I was of course foolish.  That encounter took a thought and a feeling that had been growing for 200-some pages, brought them into sharp focus, and illuminated them with horror.  Before that, I was aware that we were watching the movements of a friendship under impossible conditions, as all three knew their fate was to eventually donate up to four donations and then die.  How does friendship and human interaction mean anything with certain death sitting on the horizon?  You will be separated from your friends.  You will be isolated in either your work as a carer or your role as a donor.  You will not have meaningful dreams about what life might be like.  Kathy makes for an amazing lens to experience this story, and like hers, our understanding of their future is never really clear.  We know what’s going to happen, but we don’t really know how it will come about, what the system will be, why it will happen and in what way.  Like the kids at Hailsham we are both told and not told, and like the kids in Hailsham, we accept it without fighting back. 

What is so amazing about the encounter with Madame and Miss Emily is that it is our first extended interaction with a non-clone.  The chilliness of their perspective is full of quiet horror.  They wanted to prove that clones were human, that they had souls.  They wanted to prove that you could give clones a quality of life even as they fulfilled their duty.  There is simultaneously a tenderness and a coldness in their attitude.  Never did they challenge the assumption that this swath of humanity had to be sacrificed so that other could get a kidney transplant or a new liver.  They accepted the premise of a clone’s function.  They were merely more humanitarian murderers.  The difference, never stated outright in the book, is like having humanely treated free-range chickens instead of piling them all on top of each other in an industrial chicken farm—only we’re doing that with humans instead of chickens.

You can feel the line on my graph swooping up and up.  Never Let Me Go is unlike any other dystopian novel I’ve read in terms of its focus.  In most dystopian fiction, the author is concerned with the system of oppression, the way the state exerts its power and makes the populace comply, willingly or otherwise.  There are no slogans in Never Let Me Go.  The schooling is not a time of convincing the kids that they make the noblest sacrifice for the good of society.  Similarly, there is no point in which our protagonists buck against the system or call its existence into question.  There is always an acceptance that this is how it is, even as Ruth dreams of working in an office.  There is talk of how instruction worked at Hailsham so that the kids both knew and didn’t know what lay ahead, but as becomes clear from the final conversation with Miss Emily, that was not a deviant plot, but just the way it worked out.  Perhaps the scientists who invented cloning found a way to breed docility into the clones in the same way it bred sterility, but that is never discussed. Ishiguro is not interested in those details, and in some ways to focus on that stuff would actively distract from the story he’s telling, a story about friends with no future.

The clones, or students as they are called at Hailsham, are representative of every class of people that are necessary to the functioning of society but whose contributions are always downplayed or ignored.  Unwelcome immigrants, the working poor who fuel the machine of industry with their life’s blood, the slaves on whose back a country’s prosperity was built—all of these people have been viewed by those who benefit from, nay rely upon, their labor as less than human.   We cannot justify the horrid conditions of their lives if they are human, and the clones are the same way.  No one would sign their own son or daughter up for the life of a clone, a mere vessel to hold organs until they are needed by someone else.  They must be considered sub-human for the system to work.  But we, the readers, only find out about the sub-human status of clones in that final conversation with Miss Emily, because we have been in Kathy’s mind the whole time, and Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are of course entirely human.  One of Ishiguro’s strengths is breaking down the emotion and motives of characters within a scene.  Kathy gets irritated and mad, but she always comes round to seeing things from different perspectives.  Ruth is certainly a bully to Kathy, but Kathy always understands in the end the impulses for Ruth’s bullying and even seeks to protect Ruth.  Kathy’s sympathy and empathy are near superhuman, not sub-human.  The novel makes a big deal about what is said and not said, made explicit or left implicit, and Kathy is an observer of signs and meaning.  It is the very trait that undoubtedly makes her a good carer.  And it is this very trait that makes the novel a bittersweet tale.  The only explosions of anger come from Tommy, and Kathy hypothesizes that perhaps he had those tantrums because he knew the truth in a way that everyone else didn’t.  In that hypothesis, Kathy and Ishiguro point out that the reasonable response to this system is one of violence and outrage, but that is not a response we ever see.  There is only acceptance.  As a reader, I found myself understanding that acceptance and contemplating . . .  well, contemplating everything I have written here.

How did you accept that acceptance?  I feel like Ishiguro wanted to put his reader into a contemplative mindset, to think about these things without anger and outrage.  There is not call to burn down a broken system.  There is a push to consider the humanity of those at the bottom of the social power structure.  Because of course, the world of Never Let Me Go is a world of fiction, but it is also an analogue for our world.

In the end I have incredible respect for what Ishiguro has created here, and I find there is a lot to chew on, which is how I like my novels.  And it is, I believe, a brave and risky novel.  Watching kids grow up who are destined to die is in the end every bit as dark as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I think is a good novel of comparison, but I will not elaborate further here.   

Never Let Me Go is the final book on my list of 100, and it is a great way to sign off the project.