Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
A tale of two &s
While on vacation, I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and made a serious dent in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Both novels were bestsellers in their time, both have won awards (S&N won the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award, and others; K&C won a Pulitzer), both were big “airplane novels” — books I saw folks read on the plane, along with Stephen King and Michael Connelly and a host of others. But there the resemblance ends.
It has been less than a week and I’ve already forgotten the ending of Strange & Norrell. Mind you, I always forget the endings, but I think this has been record time. I remember bits of it, I suppose, but the bits I remember won’t last long. I can tell — they’re simply not that memorable. The most remarkable thing about Strange & Norrell is that I spent over 900 pages with a small handful of characters and I feel as though I barely know any of them. That, I would say, takes an odd sort of talent.
In contrast, I’m halfway through Kavalier & Clay, and already I care about the principles and their families so much that I’m reluctant to read further, because Chabon’s foreshadowing makes me fear the worst for them.
I think I understand the difference between the two novels, the failure of one and the success of the other, but I can’t prove my hypothesis. I suspect the difference lies not in the technical abilities of the two authors (though Chabon can write circles around Clarke) but in their own conceptions of their characters. Strange, Norrell, their wives and friends were, I suspect, two-, perhaps three-dimensional in Clarke’s mind, while Chabon’s characters must have lived and breathed inside him during the writing of Kavalier & Clay. Entities with souls. To get a little goofy about it: Clarke created characters while Chabon became a biographer.
I’m also reading George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, the first book (all 3500 pages have been downloaded to my Nook). The TV series (presently airing) follows the book slavishly, but I’m enjoying it nonetheless.
D.
I just had a similar experience with Guy Gavriel Kay’s latest, Under Heaven. I have loved every book he’s ever written, and this one was getting reviewed as his best work ever, so I was very excited when it finally came out in paperback*. But I didn’t love it. It’s a really good book, but it felt flat to me. And I think the big problem is that I never really cared about the characters in this one. It was frighteningly well researched (Tang Dynasty China), and the plot was great, but where I usually empathize deeply with his people, I felt nothing for these folks. And I wonder if maybe the research overwhelmed the soul-creating.
*I refuse to pay hardcover prices for fantasy. Plus they take up too much shelf space.
To be fair to Clarke, she was also imitating a specific style of Regency-period writing. I think that the characters were fully formed – but their representation was constrained by convention (which, come to think of it, mirrors how the characters have to deal with society – constrained by convention).
K&C is on my to-do list, but in the other Chabon works that I’ve read he gets overly-enamored with his characterization and authenticity details, sometimes at the expense of plot and pacing. In general, I’ve liked his stuff better than S&N – but I think in many ways it’s an apples and oranges comparison.
I wondered about the Strange & Norrell – I see so many copies in Goodwill, looking oddly new.
I got the sense Clarke was adopting a form, but I’m ignorant (there! I admit it!) of Regency tropes and didn’t recognize S&N as such. For all I know, S&N is a marvelous example of the Regency form, and it’s the form that I find suckworthy, not Clarke’s novel.
I’m with you, ps, on Chabon’s plot/pacing problems. To the extent that he adheres to genre tropes, he shakes that “serious literature” problem of not worrying about plot and pacing. Yiddish Policeman’s Union (which I loved) did stumble at times and I wonder now whether I could identify the specific problem. Gentlemen of the Road was better plotted & had excellent pacing IMO, and it’s probably the one book of his least likely to be confused with “serious literature.”
@CB – it can be tough to get into. I suspect if you have a high tolerance for, oh, say, early 1980s PBS ala Masterpiece Theatre you shouldn’t have too much trouble with S&N.
@Doug – there was a lot of context-less Yiddish for Yiddish’s sake in Policeman’s Union, which, while unsurprising given the title, felt overly clever. China Mieville can fall prey to the same thing, though he is more likely to be blinded by the meta aspects of his characters and settings, where Chabon goes in for the minutiae.
The Yiddish didn’t bother me, perhaps because I could figure out most of it without resorting to the glossary. I saw it as world-building. But I share your feelings in general, since I have little patience for books that require a glossary. I’m thinking, for example, of Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. It’s a present-day cops and mobsters story set in India which initially I enjoyed, but ultimately tired of. He has an enormous glossary. It got to be a real drag, having to refer to the glossary sometimes twice in one page.
I’m not sure which Mieville novel you’re referring to. I’ve only read a few, and the only one I can think of that was at all meta was The City & The City. That one, I think, lived and died over suspension of disbelief. If a reader couldn’t accept the “unseeing” premise, the novel would fail utterly.
I was thinking of his early books like Perdido Street Station, where there’s a fair amount of “Isn’t this place/person/concept clever?” I really enjoyed those books, but those moments were there…
I know what you mean. Perdido Street Station had a lot elements like that (head scarabs pooping out sculptures, really?) Seemed to me that Mieville was trying too hard to aspire to that “New Weird” moniker. I enjoyed Kraken and The City & The City a great deal more.
Incidentally, I never had a problem with the underlying premise of The City & The City. It made perfect sense to me that people could train themselves not to see or hear things. I recall that when I was a kid and my brother was about 19 (making me 12, I guess), my mother was going on about the horrors of marijuana, and my brother said, “I’ve smoked pot,” and she ignored him. As she railed on, he repeated what he had said. He said it a third time, too, and she never once responded to him. It was a remarkable demonstration of not hearing what you don’t want to hear.