Review: Matrix, by Lauren Groff

Marie is a royal bastardess, a product of rape no less, and entirely out of place in the court in Westminster, where she landed after being kicked off her mother's farm. She had run the farm since her mother's untimely death, but there was no way that her relatives would let her inherit. In court, Marie is too tall, too ugly, and too strange, raised by women who were said to carry the blood of the fairy Mélusine. Eleanor of Aquitaine's solution to her unwanted house guest is a Papal commission. Marie is to become the prioress of an abbey.

I am occasionally unpleasantly reminded of why I don't read very much literary fiction. It's immensely frustrating to read a book in which the author cares about entirely different things than the reader, and where the story beats all land wrong.

This is literary historical fiction set in the 12th century. Marie is Marie de France, author of the lais about courtly love that are famous primarily due to their position as early sources for the legends of King Arthur. The lais are written on-screen very early in this book, but they disappear without any meaningful impact on the story. Matrix is, instead, about Shaftesbury Abbey and what it becomes during Marie's time as prioress and then abbess, following the theory that Marie de France was Mary of Shaftesbury.

What I thought I was getting in this book, from numerous reviews and recommendations, was a story of unexpected competence: how a wild, unwanted child of seventeen lands at a dilapidated and starving abbey, entirely against her will, and then over the next sixty years transforms it into one of the richest abbeys in England. This does happen in this book, but Groff doesn't seem to care about the details of that transformation at all.

Instead, Matrix takes the mimetic fiction approach of detailed and precise description of a few characters, with all of their flaws and complexities, and with all of the narrative's attention turned to how they are feeling and what they are seeing. It is also deeply, fully committed to a Great Man (or in this case a Great Woman) view of history.

Marie is singular. The narrative follows her alone, she makes all the significant decisions, and the development of the abbey is determined by her apparently mystical visions. (In typical mimetic fashion, these are presented as real to her, and the novel takes no position on whether that reality is objective.) She builds spy networks, maneuvers through local and church politics, and runs the abbey like her personal kingdom. The tiny amount of this that is necessarily done by other people is attributed to Marie's ability to judge character. Other people's motives are simply steamrolled over and have no effect.

Maddeningly, essentially all of this happens off-screen, and Groff is completely uninterested in the details of how any of it is accomplished. Marie decides to do something, the narrative skips forward a year, and it has happened. She decides to build something, and then it's built. She decides to collect the rents she's due, the novel gestures vaguely at how she's intimidating, and then everyone is happily paying up. She builds spy networks; who cares how? She maneuvers through crises of local and church politics that are vaguely alluded to, through techniques that are apparently too uninteresting to bother the reader with.

Instead, the narrative focuses on two things: her deeply dysfunctional, parasocial relationship with Eleanor, and her tyrannical relationship with the other nuns. I suspect that Groff would strongly disagree with my characterization of both of those narratives, and that's the other half of my problem with this book.

Marie is obsessed with and in love with Eleanor, a completely impossible love to even talk about, and therefore turns to courtly love from afar as a model into which she can fit her feelings. While this is the setup for a tragedy, it's a good idea for a story. But what undermined it for me is that Marie's obsession seems to be largely physical (she constantly dwells on Eleanor's beauty), and Eleanor is absolutely horrible to her in every way: condescending, contemptuous, dismissive, and completely uninterested. This does change a bit over the course of the book, but not enough to justify the crush that Marie maintains for this awful person through her entire life.

And Eleanor is the only person in the book who Marie treats like an equal. Everyone else is a subordinate, a daughter, a charge, a servant, or a worker. The nuns of the abbey prosper under her rule, so Marie has ample reason to justify this to herself, but no one else's opinions or beliefs matter to her in any significant way. The closest anyone can come to friendship is to be reliably obedient, perhaps after some initial objections that Marie overrules. Despite some quite good characterization of the other nuns, none of the other characters get to do anything. There is no delight in teamwork, sense of healthy community, or collaborative problem-solving. It's just all Marie, all the time, imposing her vision on the world both living and non-living through sheer force of will.

This just isn't entertaining, at least for me. The writing might be beautiful, the descriptions detailed and effective, and the research clearly extensive, but I read books primarily for characters, I read characters primarily for their relationships, and these relationships are deeply, horribly unhealthy. They are not, to be clear, unrealistic (although I do think there's way too much chosen one in Marie and way too many problems that disappear off-camera); there are certainly people in the world with dysfunctional obsessive relationships, and there are charismatic people who overwhelm everyone around them. This is just not what I want to read about.

You might think, with all I've said above, that I'm spoiling a lot of the book, but weirdly I don't think I am. Every pattern I mention above is well-established early in the novel. About the only thing that I'm spoiling is the hope that any of it is somehow going to change, a hope that I clung to for rather too long.

This is a great setup for a book, and I wish it were written by a fantasy author instead of a literary author. Perhaps I'm being too harsh on literary fiction here, but I feel like fantasy authors are more likely to write for readers who want to see the growth sequence. If someone is going to change the world, I want to see how they changed the world. The mode of fantasy writing tends to think that what people do (and how they do it) is as interesting or more interesting than what they feel or what they perceive.

If this idea, with the exact same level of (minor) mysticism and historic realism, without added magic, were written by, say, Guy Gavriel Kay or Nicola Griffith, it would be a far different and, in my opinion, a much better book. In fact, Hild is part of this book written by Nicola Griffith, and it is a much better book.

I have seen enough people rave about this book to know that this is a personal reaction that is not going to be shared by everyone, or possibly even most people. My theory is that this is due to the different reading protocols between literary fiction readers and fantasy readers. I put myself in the latter camp; if you prefer literary fiction, you may like this much better (and also I'm not sure you'll find my book reviews useful). I may be wrong, though; maybe there are fantasy readers who would like this. I will say that the sense of place is very strong and the writing has all the expected literary strengths of descriptiveness and rhythm.

But, sadly, this was not at all my thing, and I'm irritated that I wasted time on it.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Review: Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett

Carpe Jugulum is the 23rd Discworld novel and the 6th witches novel. I would not recommend reading it before Maskerade, which introduces Agnes.

There are some spoilers for Wyrd Sisters, Lords and Ladies, and Maskerade in the setup here and hence in the plot description below. I don't think they matter that much, but if you're avoiding all spoilers for earlier books, you may want to skip over this one. (You're unlikely to want to read it before those books anyway.)

It is time to name the child of the king of Lancre, and in a gesture of good will and modernization, he has invited his neighbors in Uberwald to attend. Given that those neighbors are vampires, an open invitation was perhaps not the wisest choice.

Meanwhile, Granny Weatherwax's invitation has gone missing. On the plus side, that meant she was home to be summoned to the bedside a pregnant woman who was kicked by a cow, where she makes the type of hard decision that Granny has been making throughout the series. On the minus side, the apparent snub seems to send her into a spiral of anger at the lack of appreciation.

Points off right from the start for a plot based on a misunderstanding and a subsequent refusal of people to simply talk to each other. It is partly engineered, but still, it's a cheap and irritating plot.

This is an odd book.

The vampires (or vampyres, as the Count wants to use) think of themselves as modern and sophisticated, making a break from the past by attempting to overcome such traditional problems as burning up in the sunlight and fear of religious symbols and garlic. The Count has put his family through rigorous training and desensitization, deciding such traditional vulnerabilities are outdated things of the past. He has, however, kept the belief that vampires are at the top of a natural chain of being, humans are essentially cattle, and vampires naturally should rule and feed on the population. Lancre is an attractive new food source. Vampires also have mind control powers, control the weather, and can put their minds into magpies.

They are, in short, enemies designed for Granny Weatherwax, the witch expert in headology. A shame that Granny is apparently off sulking. Nanny and Agnes may have to handle the vampires on their own, with the help of Magrat.

One of the things that makes this book odd is that it seemed like Pratchett was setting up some character growth, giving Agnes a chance to shine, and giving Nanny Ogg a challenge that she didn't want. This sort of happens, but then nothing much comes of it. Most of the book is the vampires preening about how powerful they are and easily conquering Lancre, while everyone else flails ineffectively. Pratchett does pull together an ending with some nice set pieces, but that ending doesn't deliver on any of the changes or developments it felt like the story was setting up.

We do get a lot of Granny, along with an amusingly earnest priest of Om (lots of references to Small Gods here, while firmly establishing it as long-ago history). Granny is one of my favorite Discworld characters, so I don't mind that, but we've seen Granny solve a lot of problems before. I wanted to see more of Agnes, who is the interesting new character and whose dynamic with her inner voice feels like it has a great deal of unrealized potential.

There is a sharp and condensed version of comparative religion from Granny, which is probably the strongest part of the book and includes one of those Discworld quotes that has been widely repeated out of context:

"And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."

"It's a lot more complicated than that—"

"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."

This loses a bit in context because this book is literally about treating people as things, and thus the observation feels more obvious when it arrives in this book than when you encounter it on its own, but it's still a great quote.

Sadly, I found a lot of this book annoying. One of those annoyances is a pet peeve that others may or may not share: I have very little patience for dialogue in phonetically-spelled dialect, and there are two substantial cases of that here. One is a servant named Igor who speaks with an affected lisp represented by replacing every ess sound with th, resulting in lots of this:

"No, my Uncle Igor thtill workth for him. Been thtruck by lightning three hundred timeth and thtill putth in a full night'th work."

I like Igor as a character (he's essentially a refugee from The Addams Family, which adds a good counterpoint to the malicious and arrogant evil of the vampires), but my brain stumbles over words like "thtill" every time. It's not that I can't decipher it; it's that the deciphering breaks the flow of reading in a way that I found not at all fun. It bugged me enough that I started skipping his lines if I couldn't work them out right away.

The other example are the Nac Mac Feegles, who are... well, in the book, they're Pictsies and a type of fairy, but they're Scottish Smurfs, right down to only having one female (at least in this book). They're entertainingly homicidal, but they all talk like this:

"Ach, hins tak yar scaggie, yer dank yowl callyake!"

I'm from the US and bad with accents and even worse with accents reproduced in weird spellings, and I'm afraid that I found 95% of everything said by Nac Mac Feegles completely incomprehensible to the point where I gave up even trying to read it. (I'm now rather worried about the Tiffany Aching books and am hoping Pratchett toned the dialect down a lot, because I'm not sure I can deal with more of this.)

But even apart from the dialect, I thought something was off about the plot structure of this book. There's a lot of focus on characters who don't seem to contribute much to the plot resolution. I wanted more of the varied strengths of Lancre coming together, rather than the focus on Granny. And the vampires are absurdly powerful, unflappable, smarmy, and contemptuous of everyone, which makes for threatening villains but also means spending a lot of narrative time with a Discworld version of Jacob Rees-Mogg. I feel like there's enough of that in the news already.

Also, while I will avoid saying too much about the plot, I get very suspicious when older forms of oppression are presented as a good alternatives to modernizing, rationalist spins on exploitation. I see what Pratchett was trying to do, and there is an interesting point here about everyone having personal relationships and knowing their roles (a long-standing theme of the Lancre Discworld stories). But I think the reason why there is some nostalgia for older autocracy is that we only hear about it from stories, and the process of storytelling often creates emotional distance and a patina of adventure and happy outcomes. Maybe you can make an argument that classic British imperialism is superior to smug neoliberalism, but both of them are quite bad and I don't want either of them.

On a similar note, Nanny Ogg's tyranny over her entire extended clan continues to be played for laughs, but it's rather unappealing and seems more abusive the more one thinks about it. I realize the witches are not intended to be wholly good or uncomplicated moral figures, but I want to like Nanny, and Pratchett seems to be writing her as likable, even though she has an astonishing lack of respect for all the people she's related to. One might even say that she treats them like things.

There are some great bits in this book, and I suspect there are many people who liked it more than I did. I wouldn't be surprised if it was someone's favorite Discworld novel. But there were enough bits that didn't work for me that I thought it averaged out to a middle-of-the-road entry.

Followed by The Fifth Elephant in publication order. This is the last regular witches novel, but some of the thematic thread is picked up by The Wee Free Men, the first Tiffany Aching novel.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: What Makes This Book So Great, by Jo Walton

Jo Walton, in addition to being an excellent science fiction and fantasy writer, is a prodigious reader and frequent participant in on-line SFF book discussion going back to the Usenet days. This book is a collection of short essays previously published on Tor.com between July 2008 and February 2011. The unifying theme is that Walton regularly re-reads her favorite books, and each essay (apart from some general essays on related topics) is about why this specific book is one that she re-reads, and (as the title says) what makes it so great.

Searching for the title of one of the essays turns it up on Tor.com still, so this is one of those collections that you don't have to buy since you can read its contents on-line for free. That said, it looks like these essays were from before Tor.com started classifying posts into series, so it's going to be challenging to track them down in the huge number of other articles Walton has written for the site. (That said, you can't go far wrong by reading any of her essays at random.)

I read these essays as they were originally published, so this was also a re-read for me, but it had been a while. I'm happy to report that they were just as much fun the second time.

In the introduction and in the final essay of this collection, Walton draws a distinction between what she's doing, criticism, and reviewing. As someone else who writes about books (in a far more amateur fashion), I liked this distinction.

The way I'd characterize it is that criticism is primarily about the work: taking it apart to see what makes it tick, looking for symbolism and hidden meanings, and comparing and contrasting other works that are tackling similar themes. I've often finished a work of criticism and still had no idea if the author enjoyed reading the work being criticized or not, since that isn't the point.

Reviewing is assistance to consumers and focuses more on the reader: would you enjoy this book? Is it enjoyable to read? Does it say something new? What genre and style is it in, so that you can match that to your tastes?

Talking about books is neither of those things, although it's a bit closer to reviewing. But the emphasis is on one's personal enjoyment instead of attempting to review a product for others. When I talk about books with friends, I talk primarily about what bits I liked, what bits I didn't like, where the emotional beats were for me, and what interesting things the book did that surprised me or caught my attention. One can find a review in there, and sometimes even criticism, but the focus and the formality is different. (And, to be honest, my reviews are more on the "talking about the book" side than fully proper reviews.)

These essays are indeed talking about books. They're all re-reads; in some cases the first re-read, but more frequently the latest of many re-reads. There are lots of spoilers, which makes for bad reviews (the target audience of a review hasn't read the book yet) but good fodder for conversations about books. (The spoilers are mostly marked, but if you're particularly averse to spoilers, you'll need to read carefully.) Most of the essays are about a single book, but there are a few on more general topics, such as Walton's bafflement that anyone would skim a novel.

Since these are re-reads, and the essays collected here are more than a decade old, the focus is on older books. Some of them are famous: Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, early Le Guin, Samuel Delaney's SF novels, Salmon Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Some of them are more obscure. C.J. Cherryh, for example, is a writer who never seems to get much on-line attention, but who is one of Walton's favorites.

Most of the essays stand alone or come in small clusters about a writer, often sprinkled through the book instead of clumped together. (The book publishes the essays in the same order they originally appeared on Tor.com.) The two largest groups of essays are re-readings of every book in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos universe (including Brokedown Palace and the Paarfi books) up to Jhegaala, and every book in Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series up to Diplomatic Immunity. This is fitting: those are two of the great series of science fiction, but don't seem to be written about nearly as much as I would expect.

There are over 130 essays in a 447 page book, so there's a lot of material here and none of them outlive their welcome. Walton has a comfortable, approachable style that bubbles with delight and appreciation for books. I think it's impossible to read this collection without wanting to read more, and without adding several more books to the ever-teetering to-read pile.

This is perhaps not the best source of reading recommendations if you dislike spoilers, although it can be used for that if you read carefully. But if you love listening to conversations about the genre and talking about how books bounce off each other, and particularly if you have read most of these books already or don't mind spoilers, this collection is a delight. If you're the type of SFF reader who likes reading the reviews in Locus or is already reading Tor.com, highly recommended.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett

This is the 22nd Discworld novel and follows Interesting Times in internal continuity. Like some of the other Rincewind novels, it stands alone well enough that you could arguably start reading here, but I have no idea why you'd want to.

When we last saw Rincewind, he was being magically yanked out of the Agatean Empire. The intent was to swap him with a cannon and land him back in Ankh-Morpork, but an unfortunate expansion of the spell to three targets instead of two meant that a kangaroo had a very bad day. Ever since then, Rincewind has been trying to survive the highly inhospitable land of FourEcks (XXXX), so called because no one in Ankh-Morpork knows where it is.

The faculty at the Unseen University didn't care enough about Rincewind to bother finding him until the Librarian fell sick. He's feverish and miserable, but worse, he's lost control of his morphic function, which means that he's randomly turning into other things and is unable to take care of the books. When those books are magical, this is dangerous. One possible solution is to stabilize the Librarian's form with a spell, but to do that they need his real name. The only person who might know it is the former assistant librarian: Rincewind.

I am increasingly convinced that one of the difficulties in getting people hooked on Discworld is that the series starts with two Rincewind books, and the Rincewind books just aren't very good.

The fundamental problem is that Rincewind isn't a character, he's a gag. Discworld starts out as mostly gags, but then the characterization elsewhere gets deeper, the character interactions become more complex, and Pratchett adds more and more philosophy. That, not the humor, is what I think makes these books worth reading. But none of this applies to Rincewind. By this point, he's been the protagonist of six novels, and still the only thing I know about him is that he runs away from everything. Other than that, he's just sort of... there.

In the better Rincewind novels, some of the gap is filled by Twoflower, the Luggage, Cohen the barbarian, the Librarian (who sadly is out of commission for most of this book), or the Unseen University faculty. But they're all supporting characters. Most of them are also built around a single (if better) gag. As a result, the Rincewind books tend more towards joke collections than the rest of Discworld. There isn't a philosophical or characterization through line to hold them together.

The Last Continent is, as you might have guessed, a parody of Australia. And by that I mean it's a mash-up of Crocodile Dundee, Mad Max, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and every dad joke about Australia that you've heard. Pratchett loves movie references and I do not love movie references, so there's always part of his books that doesn't click for me, but this one was just Too Much. Yes, everything in Australia is poisonous. Yes, Australians talk funny. Oh look, there's another twist on a Crocodile Dundee quote. Yes, yes, that's a knife. Gah. The Rincewind sections were either confusing (there's some sort of drug-trip kangaroo god because reasons) or cliched and boring. Sometimes both.

The second plot, following the Unseen University faculty in their inept attempts to locate Rincewind, is better. Their bickering is still a bit one-trick and works better in the background of stronger characters (such as Death and Susan), but Pratchett does make their oblivious overconfidence entertaining. It's enough to sustain half of the book, but not enough to make up for the annoyances of the Rincewind plot.

To his credit, I think Pratchett was really trying to say something interesting in this novel about Discworld metaphysics. There are bits in the Australian plot that clearly are references to Aboriginal beliefs, which I didn't entirely follow but which I'm glad were in there. The Unseen University faculty showing up in the middle of a creation myth and completely misunderstanding it was a good scene. But the overall story annoyed me and failed to hold my interest.

I don't feel qualified to comment on the Priscilla scenes, since I've never seen the movie and have only a vague understanding of its role in trans history. I'm not sure his twists on the story quite worked, but I'm glad that Pratchett is exploring gender; that wasn't as common when these books were written.

Overall, though, this was forgettable and often annoying. There are a few great lines and a few memorable bits in any Pratchett book, including this one, but the Rincewind books just aren't... good. Not like the rest of the series, at least. I will be very happy to get back to the witches in the next book.

Followed in publication order by Carpe Jugulum, and later thematically by The Last Hero.

Rating: 5 out of 10