Tropes abound as the second trio from season four of my writing group’s monthly book corner takes in feminist speculative fiction, a classic of SF satire and a contemporary fairy tale:
What is the book corner?
Each month, our writing group takes a break from critiquing WIPs to examine a complete, published novel. Everyone picks a book, based on a loose theme connected to making us better writers. If nothing else, it’s a great way to broaden my reading beyond the SF I’d probably choose.
In season three, we looked at award-winning genre fiction to find out what literary awards can teach writers. For the book corner season 4, we took a more relaxed approach.
Catch up on The Murdstone Trilogy, The Power and Invisible Monsters: book corner roundup, season 4.1.
The Shore by Sara Taylor
I didn’t finish The Shore in time for our group discussion, but I was sufficiently intrigued by the discussion to keep going.
The poverty porn in Shit Creek USA forms opening chapters that felt like a grab bag of modern lit-fic tropes. It’s true that racism, misogyny, domestic violence, drug addiction and systemic poverty in isolated rural communities are what makes America great today [irony warning]. Still, it’s a well-trodden road and I need more to lift a novel out of the broken kitchen sink.
Eventually, the time-jumping story reveals magical realism and an SF flavour that’s seen it likened to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The disjointed narrative is both a help and a hindrance, jumping through time and around the islands of the Shore. You get a different flavour of grimness but it takes time for the threads to pick up pace. Persistence is rewarded as the connections emerge, which is where the magic of this story lies.
The time jumps also presented problems for the group as a whole. Several readers questioned the longevity of objects and locations which return to enable later storylines. As a Kindle reader, I couldn’t make much use of the family tree at the opening of the novel because it’s too small to read.
Taylor’s dystopian future is closer Atwood’s dark realism than Mitchell’s soaring imagination, and occasionally too accurate. After all, a future without Roe vs Wade is something Americans no longer have to fear; it’s here today.
An imaginative final third elevates The Shore. The sexually transmitted plague and its apocalyptic social consequences are startling, original and betray a dark wit that I would have welcomed earlier, but maybe her target audience wouldn’t have followed that journey.
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle escaped my youthful Vonnegut phase, so I was delighted to find this on the list. It’s a typically concise, dark, absurd and witty example, playfully skewering political and social themes of his time.
In this apocalypse, a banana republic in the Caribbean gains control of ice-nine, a chemical which makes water freeze at room temperature. It’s a ‘good’ banana republic, though, with an anti-communist dictator friendly to the US and an absurd religion. Bokonism was created specifically to offer purpose and community in the face of the island’s insoluble poverty and squalor. Vonnegut leaves no doubt that Cat’s Cradle is a satire of the scientific and military cultures behind the nuclear arms race: the story opens with his narrator collecting stories of what people were doing when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
It’s also very enjoyable: the story moves fast and each of the 127 chapters is a joke with a punchline. Meanwhile, the narrator is led to his fate by an inevitable comedic clockwork, despite his attempts to escape or control it. Tropes are harder to judge when you’re reading a 50-year-old novel. Even when characters seem like dated stereotypes, it’s easy to assume that Vonnegut was satirising something that’s been lost to time and a Transatlantic perspective.
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
I read a lot of fantasy in my teens but this is very different to those D&D-style stories. Presenting as a fantasy romance based on Polish fairy tales, Uprooted makes clever use of its influences and genre tropes to craft an original, surprising and emotionally satisfying story.
On the surface, it’s the story of a young woman who unexpectedly becomes the servant and then apprentice to a powerful wizard who’s much older than he seems. They form an unlikely bond as they’re pitched against an insidious, inhuman evil and court politics. It would be easy to mistake Uprooted for a coming-of-age magician’s tale with a strong romance subplot and file it under YA fantasy romance.
It’s definitely not YA, though. Novik plays with expectations along the magic and romance axes as the heroine’s adventures expand our knowledge of this world. A final act twist overturns the assumptions you’ve been fed, in a way that’s both narratively and thematically satisfying.
The court scenes are sometimes run with the tropes rather than against them, but they’re more than made up for by the emotional intimacy of Novik’s magic system, observations on class and gender politics, effective action pacing and vivid world building.
Buy the books
More reviews coming soon
Coming up in the final part of season four, my opinions on:
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams,
- Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake,
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
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2 replies on “The Shore, Cat’s Cradle and Uprooted: Book Corner 4.2”
The world ends at least five times in season four of my writing group’s monthly book corner. Either it was accidentally about apocalypses, or we’re a very dark group. The season concludes with:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams,
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake,
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
What is the book corner?
Each month the group takes a break from critiquing our WIPs to examine a complete, published novel. Everyone picks a book, based on a loose theme connected to making us better writers. If nothing else, it’s a great way to broaden my reading beyond the SF I’d probably choose. In season three, we looked at award-winning genre fiction to find out what literary awards can teach writers
Season four began with The Murdstone Trilogy, The Power and Invisible Monsters. We continued with reviews of The Shore, Cat’s Cradle and Uprooted.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
HH2G, as it’s known to people who don’t like writing long titles, was my choice for this season. I first read it in my early teens, maybe even my pre-teens, or did I see the HH2G BBC TV adaptation? At that age, I enjoyed it as a simple comic romp full of absurd digressions and wonderful characters. I know that I heard the HH2G radio series later and the less said about the 2005 film of HH2G, the better.
Loveable grump Marvin the Paranoid Android, ebullient asshole Zaphod Beeblebrox, hoopy frood Ford Prefect and homesick everyman Arthur Dent are all characters that a young man can identify with at different times. Trillian doesn’t get her own story or punchlines, but a female astrophysicist was remarkable for a reader used to a lot of Boy’s Own-style adventures. The absurdity made me question a lot of my world, too, putting into perspective my as-yet-unquestioned Church of England upbringing in 1980s Britain.
I grew into the satire, forewarned and forearmed as my world expanded and I encountered more of Adams’s social, political and cultural targets. I’m happy to be among the generation of nerdy readers who can sum up a situation by quoting lines from Hitchhiker’s. HH2G ends abruptly, so I also re-read Restaurant At The End Of The Universe and it’s arguably a sharper, funnier story. Everyone remembers Arthur and Ford’s apprehension of Earth’s tragic fate, but Zaphod’s encounter with the man who rules the universe is a timeless scene, and no less important.
As a teen, my favourite part of the quadrilogy was Life, The Universe And Everything, probably because it’s got more swearing. Together, these novels had a huge influence on my life and my writing. It’s wonderful to see how much of Adams’s satire and philosophy remains relevant. And Marvin will never not be funny.
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Even by the standards of its time, Titus Groan is a slow starter. Peake makes no attempt to draw in his reader: you must be determined to vanquish this beast of literary fantasy. He always finds time for another digression to describe the sprawling, crumbling edifice of Gormenghast Castle, the landscape surrounding it, or one of the many grotesques who rely on the castle and its owners for their existence.
Reading Titus Groan is an epic undertaking of its own and not one I completed in time to discuss it, but I had spelunked deeply enough to have been drawn into servant/slave Steerpike’s ruthless ascent of Gormenghast’s hierarchy. The Groans are a classic aristocratic family, almost certainly inbred, who believe that they have an innate right to rule, though their only duty is to produce an heir to continue their line. Even raising the heir is outsourced. Everyone else within the castle’s influence exists to serve that goal, including the Bright Carvers, a community of peasant savants who live in a romanticised squalor.
The standard reading of Titus Groan casts Steerpike as a Machiavellian villain. I found an antihero who revolutionises a world mired in futile and incomprehensible traditions, and his story compelled me to complete this epic reading. For my taste, the florid descriptions and convoluted sentence structures are crafted to flatter the reader into thinking they’re clever for wading through them.
The BBC adapted the first two novels of the Gormenghast trilogy in 2000. (In classic BBC fashion, they baulked at completing the story when it developed a whiff of SF). The series is without doubt a more accessible way to discover the story, but Gormenghast without Peake’s prose misses the point. Pull on your gumboots and trudge through the magniloquent mire; a remarkable story lurks beneath.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The canon of literature is a big place, and somehow I’d bypassed The Grapes Of Wrath. I almost did it a second time when Kindle sold me a misattributed copy of Grapes Of Wrath by Boyd Cable. That novel is an account of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 (both take their titles from Julia Ward Howe’s 1862 “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”).
Nor did I know that the dustbowl that transformed the American Midwest in the 1930s was a failure of unregulated capitalism and a triumph of greed over compassion, as was the subsequent refugee crisis in California. I was also unaware of Steinbeck’s apparent plagiarism of Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown, which lead to her novel being dropped by its publisher. I’m fundamentally ignorance with a keyboard, so this was a long-overdue reading.
Structurally, The Grapes Of Wrath is a fascinating combination of reportage and drama. It enables Steinbeck to communicate the economic and political scope of the ongoing disaster, equipping us to understand its personal impact on the displaced Joad family. Their powerlessness is magnified by the forces working continually to deny them the dignity of self-reliance that they crave. Contemporary writing often clings so close to intimate perspectives that it struggles to communicate external forces realistically. Instead, authors anthropomorphise social failures into a single villain, insert themselves into the story as a heroic reporter, or introduce a Basil Exposition character to explain the world.
Steinbeck leaves no doubt that the villains of his story are neither impersonal forces nor a single person. It is a campaign of the privileged against the vulnerable. Bankers lend money to smallholders at usurious rates, large farmers treat migrant workers as a disposable asset worth less than livestock and force smallholders to do the same, law enforcement wilfully victimises the weakest members of society, and politicians court the votes and wealth of those in power.
Perhaps the most depressing lesson The Grapes Of Wrath sends to authors is how little power literature has to transform society. The dustbowl and the refugee crisis should be a source of American shame, embedded in the minds of millions of students who continue to read this novel. It is impossible to read without seeing parallels in contemporary recessions, the climate crisis, the treatment of refugees and migrants, and the behaviour of those who have capital towards those who do not. Yet we continue to make the same mistakes and behave inhumanely to those most in need of human dignity.
Still, Steinbeck ends his novel with new life and a family that refuses to give up despite the world doing its best to destroy them. Maybe that’s a lesson, too.
The Book Corner season 5: ungainly adaptations
I hope you’ve enjoyed my impressions of these novels. I’d love to read your comments.
The writing group has now embarked on a new season of monthly diversions: book-to-film adaptations which haven’t worked as well as they should. We’ll start with Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion and conclude in 2024 with Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones. I’ll try to compile my reviews as we go this time.
It’s time for The Book Corner season 4, part 1, a list loosely themed around books that had shaped our writing journeys. With nine very different books, I’ll give my tuppence-worths in three instalments, starting with:
The Murdstone Trilogy by Mal Peet
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk.
What is the book corner?
Each month, our writing group takes a break from critiquing WIPs to examine a complete, published novel. Everyone picks a book, based on a loose theme connected to making us better writers. If nothing else, it’s a great way to broaden my reading beyond the SF I’d probably choose.
In season three, we looked at award-winning genre fiction to find out what literary awards can teach writers. For the book corner season 4, we took a more relaxed approach.
The Murdstone Trilogy by Mal Peet
My notes for The Murdstone Trilogy begin with three words: “MEAN MEAN MEAN.”
It’s a very clever but horribly mean-spirited dark satire on creativity, publishing, genre fiction, social media and even Peet’s own novels. Yet this satirical take on fantasy isn’t simply mean, it’s outdated and narrow. It’s no surprise that The Murdstone Trilogy was lauded by literary critics who sit outside genre fiction. It’s a poor take compared to the joyful genre satires created by authors like Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams.
The bitterness is less surprising when you look at Peet’s career. He was a decorated children’s author whose success dried up after several books. The Murdstone Trilogy was completed and published not long before he died from cancer, aged 67. The protagonist is an author insert, settling scores with people and places, even denigrating his own work. With death on the doorstep, Peet was apparently unafraid of being attacked for racist, transphobic and ableist characters. It’s another question how critics in 2014 ignored tropes that would have been unpleasant in the 1980s.
Read without context, The Murdstone Trilogy is often wonderful, with landscapes that reminded me of Alan Garner. There’s an extremely effective conceit that shows the protagonist receiving entire books from one of his characters, used to great effect as the plot develops. Vivid characters and unique voices populate a Faustian tale of authorial desperation, which twists ever darker towards a nihilistic ending that allows no redemption.
My fellow readers described The Murdstone Trilogy as a “bile dump” and “writing to spite the reader”. I can’t help feeling sorry that Peet’s life led a talented writer to pen a final novel that’s so embittered. Neither can I imagine Pratchett leaving such an tragic legacy.
If you liked The Murdstone Trilogy, I’d love to know why.
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Disclosure notice: I have a soft spot for Naomi Alderman. She’s the lead writer on Zombies, Run, a story-running app which has kept me going for well over a thousand kilometres since 2013.
The Power is a dystopian SF tale, a feminist take on superpowers which might be pitched as The Handmaid’s Tale meets A Canticle For Leibowitz via World War Z. It’s the story of young women around the world who gain the power to shoot electricity from their bodies, told retrospectively by a male historian in a matriarchal future.
The framing narrative is essential to understanding the story, and in itself critiques both the story and the act of writing. Alderman’s narrators and protagonists of both genders are unreliable, broken and betrayed. Their actions and choices are consistent to her world, and she’s not afraid to show that power corrupts women as much as men.
On this second reading of The Power, I was struck by its prescience. She describes too well a Qanon-style conspiracy group that inspires terrorism, while both states and organisations undermine peace for their own aims. As for a nuclear apocalypse beginning in the Caucuses, I hope that’s not too accurate.
It’s not a perfect novel, but it is bold, unflinching and original. Did The Power electrify you? Let me know in the comments.
Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk is one of those authors who manages to be Marmite on a book-by-book basis. I started Invisible Monsters in a good mood, thanks to a dedication which every writer will recognise: ‘…my editor, Patricia, who kept saying, “This is not good enough.”’
Invisible Monsters is difficult to review without spoilers. It’s a story about identity and deception in which everyone is telling lies or withholding information. I can reveal that it’s shocking, funny, sad, sharply satirical and thoroughly non-linear. If you find it too straightforward, there’s now a Remix that’s so non-linear it comes with instructions.
The cast is small, but it’s often hard to keep track of because everyone has at least two identities, so it rewards at least one re-reading to see how the story emerges and how it’s disguised. I enjoyed the ride, although I sometimes feel like Chuck Palahniuk is a small child, telling very rude jokes in the middle of a crowded room to make sure everyone knows how naughty and clever he is.
But he is both very clever and very naughty. I’d love to come up with a basic story as sick and brilliant as the linear narrative of Invisible Monsters. I get a headache imagining how he chopped it up and nested the pieces into a Russian doll of reveals, each of which tells you the previous layer was an illusion yet maintains the wit of the characters, dialogue and situations.
How did you feel about Invisible Monsters? Too shocking? Too confusing? Let me know, below the line.
More reviews coming soon
The Book Corner season 4 continues with:
The Shore by Sara Taylor
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Uprooted by Naomi Novik.