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charameiAs it happened, I finished two books last night: one was delightful, the other was finished through sheer force of will.
A Thousand Ships first. It's the first part of Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze, an historically accurate graphic-novel retelling of the entire Trojan War.
And by historically-accurate, I mean: facial phenotypes are accurate to the geography. Hair, clothing, outfits and other assorted miscellanea are based on real Mycenaean artefacts. Backdrops are based on the real historical sites where appropriate (this is especially noticeable in Troy). And Agamemnon's appearance is based on the Mask of Agamemnoneven though that body almost certainly wasn't really Agamemnon.
So, having whetted my geeky little appetite with maps and the appropriate quote from Doctor Faustus we open with Paris the cowherd waking up on the slops of Ida. As it later transpires, he's just had a dream about three goddesses and an apple...
As usual, I can't really comment on accessibility: I know the varying stories of the Trojan War too well to be able to judge it objectively. However... it looks like it should be accessible to people unfamiliar with the legends. Backstory-myths, such as Herakles' sack of Troy, are well-told without spinning off too much into the greater corpus of myth (in this case, it would have been very easy to accidentally retell the Argonautica in its entirety), and of course the basic themes of the Cycle are fundamental to humanity.
The writing is great, witty and compelling, believable on all levels, making great use of the catalogue of ships - and most importantly, it handles the many transitions between places and characters gracefully and well. The characters are wonderfully extrapolated: Hektor the as-yet-unmarried family man whose sisters all adore him, Troilus who is loudly declaring his immunity to affairs of the heart just as Cressida brushes past him and Eros' arrow strikes true, Achilles, growing ever more restless while stuck pretending to be a girl on Skyros. The only one I really disagreed with was Penelope, who seemed a little too simple (though, of course, she could well have been acting to help Odysseus' insanity plea). There were points where it reminded me of Asterix, of all things: the aforementioned moment with Troilus, and a hilarious moment where Agamemnon is trying to get to the front of the crowd of soldiers greeting Achilles and can't. Shades of Vitalstatistix...
The artwork is also wonderful, although I would have liked a little more variation in some of the faces: most notably, I found it almost impossible to distinguish between the sons of Priam (except Troilus, the blond one, and Hektor, the square-jawed one). Being unable to pick Paris out of a line-up is a problem, though I guess it explains how he survives until the tenth year of the war...
We end, of course, with the ships launching, and presumably will open Book 2 with the sacrifice of Iphigenia, seeing as it's called Sacrifice.
Excellent stuff.
And then... there's that other book.
Like The Book of Lost Things, The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart comes equipped with an 'interview with the author' at the end. (Fortunately it does not also contain a hundred pages of commonly-known fairy tales.) One of the questions is reproduced below, underlining mine:
Well, firstly, my answer to that question is no. This book is not controversial in any way. Subverting a genre trope is not controversial, it's just being creative. In addition, I resent Jesse Bullington's carefully-placed implication that anyone who dislikes the book doesn't understand it, is too mired in the tropes of the genre, or is just jealous. I did not like this book because it is badly written.
But we'll get to that. For now, what tropes does this novel subvert?
Now, here's where I offer up some actual praise for Bullington: his ideas are really very good. His monsters, witches and demons are all wonderfully imagined: the Black Death Demons were a particularly gruesome and promising creation. And his historical research was excellent: by and large, I had no problems believing that this was really the historical Middle Ages. He even remembered to feed the horses!
The thing is, he can't write.
Let's begin with my favourite bugbear: flat characters. Bullington has two protagonists, of course: Hegel and Manfried Grossbart. And you know what? I finished reading this book last night, and already I'm having to stop and think what Manfried's name is.
The brothers are interchangeable. Hegel has witch-sight (a deus ex machina of only slightly lesser proportions than Alice Cullen's full-blown prophetic powers) and hates four-legged animals for reasons that seem to come down to comic relief, while Manfried is slightly more intelligent and spends a swathe of the novel following a mermaid/Siren around. Neither has any redeeming features. Neither inspired much sympathy - and while I know they're meant to be reprehensible characters, if they're so disgusting that I can't sympathise with them in the slightest, if I utterly dislike them and don't care what happens to them, then I have no incentive to keep reading.
Yes, some of their views need to be the same for the sake of plot, and yes, they're fraternal twins, and the literary convention is for twins to have very similar personalities (though my mother and aunt are fraternal twins, and let me tell you, that trope is crock). That is no excuse for making them completely interchangeable. Worse still, this is more or less the case for every other character: ideologies, demeanours and forms of speech changed, but all of them were bland. Given that one of the themes of the book is corruption, and how the Grossbarts do it to everyone they meet, the complete lack of any visible, believable character development was a big problem for me.
This is largely the fault of Bullington's prose, which is simply atrocious. He tells everything, showing little: he creates non-sequiturs, and in action scenes jumps about in such a confusing manner that it's impossible to follow what's going on; and while he's far from the worst thesaurus-basher I've ever come across, he does tend to use the right word's second cousin. Some examples:
Aaaanyway. In addition, the plotting isn't great either. Oh, everything ties up well enough, but the novel is terribly episodic and never really achieves a sense of being one unified story. And the end is dire, anticlimactic and, well, dull. Not to mention, having brought two giant demon-monsters to the final battle, Bullington removes one of them with a literal deus ex machina (well, possibly a satanus ex machina, but still: if your characters can't deal with two demons, don't put two demons on the battlefield for them to deal with. DMing 101).
I could go on. I won't. The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart has the potential to be a great book, but is let down by poor prose and lack of visible character development. A terrible waste of some brilliant ideas.
A Thousand Ships first. It's the first part of Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze, an historically accurate graphic-novel retelling of the entire Trojan War.
And by historically-accurate, I mean: facial phenotypes are accurate to the geography. Hair, clothing, outfits and other assorted miscellanea are based on real Mycenaean artefacts. Backdrops are based on the real historical sites where appropriate (this is especially noticeable in Troy). And Agamemnon's appearance is based on the Mask of Agamemnon
So, having whetted my geeky little appetite with maps and the appropriate quote from Doctor Faustus we open with Paris the cowherd waking up on the slops of Ida. As it later transpires, he's just had a dream about three goddesses and an apple...
As usual, I can't really comment on accessibility: I know the varying stories of the Trojan War too well to be able to judge it objectively. However... it looks like it should be accessible to people unfamiliar with the legends. Backstory-myths, such as Herakles' sack of Troy, are well-told without spinning off too much into the greater corpus of myth (in this case, it would have been very easy to accidentally retell the Argonautica in its entirety), and of course the basic themes of the Cycle are fundamental to humanity.
The writing is great, witty and compelling, believable on all levels, making great use of the catalogue of ships - and most importantly, it handles the many transitions between places and characters gracefully and well. The characters are wonderfully extrapolated: Hektor the as-yet-unmarried family man whose sisters all adore him, Troilus who is loudly declaring his immunity to affairs of the heart just as Cressida brushes past him and Eros' arrow strikes true, Achilles, growing ever more restless while stuck pretending to be a girl on Skyros. The only one I really disagreed with was Penelope, who seemed a little too simple (though, of course, she could well have been acting to help Odysseus' insanity plea). There were points where it reminded me of Asterix, of all things: the aforementioned moment with Troilus, and a hilarious moment where Agamemnon is trying to get to the front of the crowd of soldiers greeting Achilles and can't. Shades of Vitalstatistix...
The artwork is also wonderful, although I would have liked a little more variation in some of the faces: most notably, I found it almost impossible to distinguish between the sons of Priam (except Troilus, the blond one, and Hektor, the square-jawed one). Being unable to pick Paris out of a line-up is a problem, though I guess it explains how he survives until the tenth year of the war...
We end, of course, with the ships launching, and presumably will open Book 2 with the sacrifice of Iphigenia, seeing as it's called Sacrifice.
Excellent stuff.
And then... there's that other book.
Like The Book of Lost Things, The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart comes equipped with an 'interview with the author' at the end. (Fortunately it does not also contain a hundred pages of commonly-known fairy tales.) One of the questions is reproduced below, underlining mine:
Do you think the novel is controversial? If so, why?
I think most things worth talking about are controversial if one asks around enough, but I didn't give much thought as to whether or not my novel would qualify as such when I was writing it. I did intend to subvert some of the conventions of mainstream fantasy fiction, so it may well end up being divisive anyway. [...]
Well, firstly, my answer to that question is no. This book is not controversial in any way. Subverting a genre trope is not controversial, it's just being creative. In addition, I resent Jesse Bullington's carefully-placed implication that anyone who dislikes the book doesn't understand it, is too mired in the tropes of the genre, or is just jealous. I did not like this book because it is badly written.
But we'll get to that. For now, what tropes does this novel subvert?
- Novel is set in the historical Holy Roman Empire, with a relatively low-fantasy setting that is more or less equivalent to what fourteenth-century people would have imagined if told that magic was definitely real - demons and witches are rife.
- Protagonists are violent, grave-robbing psychopaths with not much in the way of redeeming features.
- Er...
- ...that's it.
Now, here's where I offer up some actual praise for Bullington: his ideas are really very good. His monsters, witches and demons are all wonderfully imagined: the Black Death Demons were a particularly gruesome and promising creation. And his historical research was excellent: by and large, I had no problems believing that this was really the historical Middle Ages. He even remembered to feed the horses!
The thing is, he can't write.
Let's begin with my favourite bugbear: flat characters. Bullington has two protagonists, of course: Hegel and Manfried Grossbart. And you know what? I finished reading this book last night, and already I'm having to stop and think what Manfried's name is.
The brothers are interchangeable. Hegel has witch-sight (a deus ex machina of only slightly lesser proportions than Alice Cullen's full-blown prophetic powers) and hates four-legged animals for reasons that seem to come down to comic relief, while Manfried is slightly more intelligent and spends a swathe of the novel following a mermaid/Siren around. Neither has any redeeming features. Neither inspired much sympathy - and while I know they're meant to be reprehensible characters, if they're so disgusting that I can't sympathise with them in the slightest, if I utterly dislike them and don't care what happens to them, then I have no incentive to keep reading.
Yes, some of their views need to be the same for the sake of plot, and yes, they're fraternal twins, and the literary convention is for twins to have very similar personalities (though my mother and aunt are fraternal twins, and let me tell you, that trope is crock). That is no excuse for making them completely interchangeable. Worse still, this is more or less the case for every other character: ideologies, demeanours and forms of speech changed, but all of them were bland. Given that one of the themes of the book is corruption, and how the Grossbarts do it to everyone they meet, the complete lack of any visible, believable character development was a big problem for me.
This is largely the fault of Bullington's prose, which is simply atrocious. He tells everything, showing little: he creates non-sequiturs, and in action scenes jumps about in such a confusing manner that it's impossible to follow what's going on; and while he's far from the worst thesaurus-basher I've ever come across, he does tend to use the right word's second cousin. Some examples:
- Martyn leaves, is tortured by the Inquisition offscreen, and returns in a rather more demented frame of mind. Fine. But none of this character development is shown, and we never see him having any actual reaction to the torture (the stereotypical nightmares, PTSD attacks, fear of bunnies, anything), and as a result, it's unbelievable and faintly bizarre.
- I still have no idea what Raphael was doing, well, anywhere.
- Nor why Sir Jean threw everything overboard.
- Or really why the crew tried to execute the Grossbarts. Not that there aren't reasons to, but the characterisation is so poor that there's no indication of things being about to come to a head. They just do, and then the incident's never mentioned again.
- And while I'm at it, was Manfried trying to do CPR on Hegel, or did he accidentally do it while trying to do something else?
- Page 302. ASEXUALITY IS NOT SYNONYMOUS WITH CELIBACY. They are not even included as synonyms in the Oxford English Thesaurus! If he's celibate, fine, the Siren makes him horny. If he's asexual, HE DOES NOT HAVE REPRESSED FEELINGS FOR HER TO BRING TO THE SURFACE. IF ANY CHARACTER IN THIS IS ASEXUAL IT IS HEGEL, NOT AL-GASSUR. JESUS CHRIST.
Aaaanyway. In addition, the plotting isn't great either. Oh, everything ties up well enough, but the novel is terribly episodic and never really achieves a sense of being one unified story. And the end is dire, anticlimactic and, well, dull. Not to mention, having brought two giant demon-monsters to the final battle, Bullington removes one of them with a literal deus ex machina (well, possibly a satanus ex machina, but still: if your characters can't deal with two demons, don't put two demons on the battlefield for them to deal with. DMing 101).
I could go on. I won't. The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart has the potential to be a great book, but is let down by poor prose and lack of visible character development. A terrible waste of some brilliant ideas.