Blogging the BSFA Award Shortlists – Novel – The Restoration Game

I am continuing to blog the BSFA Award shortlists, still focusing on the Novel shortlist. This time around it’s Ken MacLeod’s The Restoration Game.

I’m fairly sure this is the first MacLeod novel I’ve ever read and I can’t honestly say it’s inspired me to read another, if this is typical of his output (though I’m assured it’s not). My most pressing concern throughout the novel was ‘where is the science fiction?’ I’d been told that there was a highly science-fictional coup de thêatre partway through and when I got there it was indeed highly science-fictional and really rather impressive. And had the story been wrapped more closely around it I would have been delighted. However, it was just sitting there, like an artefact in a museum, and once one had admired it, there wasn’t much left to do except to proceed to the end of the novel.

Anatomy of Criticism – First Essay: Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes

The project to read and blog about Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays continues. Today, I'd like to welcome my first guest blogger, Paul Raven, better known to many as head wrangler of Futurismic, who will be introducing us to Frye's first essay, on 'Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes'.

Take it away, Paul ...

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With hindsight, Frye's essay on historical criticism was probably the least suited to my own literary experience; most of the texts and authors to which he refers I know as names and titles only, and my understanding of classical literature in particular is woefully inadequate. Hence many of the modal terms deployed here are known to me only in their (apparently much corrupted) modern vernacular usage. (Though I am at least aware that a certain Ms Morissette's understanding of irony was somewhat off the mark...)

But hey, why let ignorance get in my way? It's never stopped me before, after all. :)

Reading Log – February 2011

A slow reading month, even by my standards, with lots of books left half finished. They will appear in my next Reading Log post.

#12 James Wilson – The Earth Shall Weep (1998)

A general history of Native American experience, very general insofar as there were/are something over 500 tribes and one can only essentialise their experiences so far, but useful for orientation.

#13 James Welch with Paul Stekler – Killing Custer (1994)

This book came out of the research done by Welch and Stekler for the American Experience documentary Last Stand at Little Bighorn. I’d love to see the film. I highly recommend this book which is not only an account of Custer’s attack, paying a lot more attention to Native American testimony than is usual, but also a meditation of the place that the battle still occupies in the American psyche, all parts of it. Plus, it is very readable because Welch was such a damn fine writer.

#14 Tricia Sullivan – Lightborn (2010)

I’ve already posted about this today.

#15 Mary Caponegro –The Complexities of Intimacy (2001)

I read this for the February Big Other book club but am at a loss to understand why people seem to like her writing (though I haven’t yet read through the responses on Big Other). Five stories, first-person narratives told in an identical tone of voice, and utterly impossible to distinguish one narrator from another. There is a unifying theme of family experience but surreal family experience. In the end I felt words were being poured onto the page for effect but not to communicate. Which is not to say that I want vast amounts of plot or exposition but if these were mood pieces, they left me cold. Whatever the Caponegro love is, I do not feel it.

Blogging the BSFA Award shortlists – Novel – Lightborn

My plans to blog my way through the BSFA Award shortlists got off to a bad start, thanks to needing to work and to being a bit under the weather during February. And, given the general feeling of ennui that has assailed me recently, I’m not sure Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan will turn out to have been the best place to start.

It is not that I actively dislike the novel; it is more that I can’t quite seem to make sense of the various facets of the plot and the way in which they hang together. Or, more accurately, the way they don’t quite hang together. And yet, I never felt totally lost or disoriented; it was more that at times I felt as though I had blinked and missed something, but no amount of going back over the previous few pages could reveal what it was I thought I hadn’t quite seen. This might, in some circumstances, be considered a plus rather than a minus. Fiction that disorients the reader intentionally is always interesting, but this didn’t seem to me to be Sullivan’s intention. Perhaps I should see it instead as a fast-moving romp, best read rapidly in order to bridge the crevasses that appear every time a couple of plot pieces don’t quite butt up to one another? When I say that I think of Maul which was, in its way, something of a romp, or more accurately, a siege; but no, that’s not what is going on in Lightborn, and I am anyway not persuaded that novels that have to be read fast in order to accommodate structural flaws are a good thing.

Rhetorical ectoplasm

The title of this post comes from a comment that Northrop Frye makes in the 'Polemical Introduction' to his collection of essays, Anatomy of Criticism (1957) when he talks about criticism trying to find a personality behind an author's work. I wondered then if this whole enterprise might not be about wrestling with rhetorical ectoplasm.

I also noticed, as I began to write this commentary on the 'Polemical Introduction' that the book’s title has no preceding article, definite or indefinite. I am not sure whether this is significant or not, but it seems to be of a piece with an uncertainty that pervades the entire introduction, and possibly the four essays, the uncertainty of the critic trying to work out where he belongs. ‘Anatomy’ points us towards the idea of the dissection of an existing body and to a desire to find out what is going on underneath the skin. The body lies on the dissecting table, anonymous, bereft of articles. I have the sense that we may already be in trouble. We do not dissect the living. Has criticism already died, or will it be granted a reprieve?

Polemical Introduction

It is perhaps also worth pausing for a moment to think about what ‘polemical’ suggests. Frye is clearly inviting controversy, debate, dispute. He implies that he is looking for an argument; it is up to us as readers to offer that argument if we can.

And yet, even as he challenges us with the title, in the very first paragraph of the introduction, when he lays out his vision of the ‘Anatomy’, Frye immediately offers caveats: ‘[t]he gaps in the subject as treated here are too enormous for the book ever to be regarded as presenting my system, or even my theory’ before inviting us to consider the essays as ‘an interconnected group of suggestions’. There also seems to be a certain amount of foot-shuffling and throat-clearing going on as he lays out his intentions. We should view these essays, he says, in the original sense of the word’s meaning, as ‘a trial or an incomplete attempt’. He is offering possibilities, and offering them tentatively.

Blogging Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

We were having lunch when I happened to mention I had started reading Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. ‘Are you going to blog it?’ asked Niall Harrison. I hadn’t given the idea any thought, but it turned out that while all of us had either read bits of the Anatomy or had always meant to read it, we couldn’t actually muster a complete reading between us. Thus was born the idea of reading and blogging our way through the entire Anatomy of Criticism.

‘We’ are Niall Harrison, Paul Kincaid, Jonathan McCalmont, Paul Graham Raven and me, Maureen Kincaid Speller. The book comprises a ‘Polemical Introduction’, and four Essays, plus a Tentative Conclusion, so we have shared out the Introduction and Essays, and each of us will introduce one of them and open discussion. We will all respond to the Tentative Conclusion.

The project begins today with my comments on the Polemical Introduction, in the next post, and the rest of the blogging timetable should look like this (with the caveat that life happens so there may be some slippage).

7/3 Polemical Introduction (MKS)

14/3 Theory of Modes (Paul R)

28/3 Theory of Symbols (Niall)

11/4 Theory of Myths (Jonathan)

25/4 Theory of Genres (Paul K)

It remains only to begin the discussion.

Once more unto the fray ...

I normally avoid the bear pit of readers’ comments on Guardian articles, because I am a delicate, wilting flower who dislikes unstructured conflict, but Hal Duncan’s comment on my previous post, ‘Twelve of the Best’ prompted me to go back to John Mullan’s article and read the comments it has accrued, including Hal’s own trenchant observations on genre and literary fiction. I suggest you do the same, not least to read Hal’s arguments.  There are two pages of comments: here and here – Hal’s are in the second page. Alternatively, you might just want to go straight to Hal's own Notes from the Geekshow and read his comments there.

The comments are generally interesting, though a lot of the usual issues are raised once again, from the now perennial claim that all authors will be better off publishing themselves, through various complaints that publishers don’t want to publish what a particular author is offering (which is unfortunate but not immediately germane to the discussion, I feel), through a little light sf-bashing, complaints that seeking ethnic diversity is tantamount to racism, and to more thoughtful discussions of the issues that have been raised lately. 

Mullan and Alex Clark, two of the judges, contribute (though not as usefully as I would have liked), and I am still looking in vain for any clear indication of the protocols under which this exercise was operated in the first place.

(It was also interesting to read the comments in the light of a number of conversations I had yesterday about how we discuss things on the internet and to think about how, as an individual commenter, I can make my contribution to the process more helpful.)