Mark over at the Elegant Variation went out on a limb and bared his TBR pile and his bookshelves to the world. He challenged others to follow suit. In that spirit here is a picture of just the books that have been sent to me in the last few weeks:
Snark redux
Well, I’ve become a bug on the windscreen of the publishing mobile. Kevin’s posting about snark from Maud and Emma Garman by way of Maud..from CAAF…wait a minute this is Genesis.
Yesterday I posted a review of Ian Rankin’s Witch Hunt. That was before I read the aforementioned post about snark. It was also before I realized that the novel I’d reviewed was released in the UK in 1993. Ian Rankin used a nomme de plume and the ARC arrived without a press kit to alert me to the novel’s prior release.
Back to Emma Garman. Her thesis is that “the boldly negative critique may be the only weapon available for stemming the tide of mediocre writing offered by the corrupt book publishing industry and its shadowy ally, the creative writing program.” Wow. It never occurred to me that this was in fact a work created much earliaer in Ian Rankin’s career. If I had known that, my tke on this novel would have been different.
We all know what a training novel is. Only loved ones are exposed to them, a brutal irony if ever there was one. Why Little Brown decided to publish this particular novel without the author applying his current skills to the manuscript is a puzzle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Could it have been rushed to press to capitalize on Mr. Rankin’s popularity? Could the watchers on the beach have spotted the alien periscope and rushed to ring the church bell? Sure. Instead, we baked cookies.
When Spiro Agnew was indicted for using his office as governor of Maryland to collect kickbacks on road construction, his defense was basically this: why else would we build a road no one wants? Perhaps in the sweep of history Spiro’s Law now applies to just about everything.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
I have a confession to make: I didn’t enjoy Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Given my posing here as a lit blogger I thought it high time I read something by the man so often spoken of in hushed tones of reverence. Given Lolita’s prominence and its controversial but classic status, I thought it a good place to start. This won’t win me any points with CAAF or The Rake (who are Nabokov fans I believe), but I found it heavy sledding and rather ponderous. Sure, at times I recognized the brilliant word play and the creative skill involved, but in general I felt I was wading through a deep river of words and ideas that never quite took off for me. In fact I was reminded of this post and its comment section while reading. Despite my pretence to intellectualism on occasion, I really don’t enjoy novels that require frequent trips to the dictionary (in this case French as well as English) or a chart to understand all the inside references and ironic motifs.
Author Mark Conard
Mark Conard is a professor of philosophy at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. Mark’s noir novel, Dark as Night, was published by Uglytown in 2003.
Mark, welcome to Collected Miscellany.
Thanks!
How does a nice guy like you wind up as a hard-boiled novelist?
Actually, I’m not that nice. As B.B. King says, nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jiving too. Anyway, I got into writing crime fiction by accident, really. I sat down with a friend in grad school to work out a story, originally intended to be a screenplay. We didn’t have any set genre in mind, but what we came up with was a noirish mystery/thriller. I let the notes for that sit in my desk for a couple of years, and then one summer decided to turn it into a novel. Whatever the merits of the final product, I enjoyed the process of writing so much that I started a second one right away and haven’t stopped writing since.
Who do you enjoy reading?
In the crime/suspense genre? My favorites are Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, Jim Thompson, James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard. They’re my heroes.
Ian Rankin's Witch Hunt
There’s a wonderful scene in Ian Rankin’s new novel on the Autobahn near Hanover Germany. Two intelligence agents en route to meeting a terrorist have broken down in a 2CV. A German motorist stops to relieve himself. The British agent asks if he has an extra quart of motoroil. “Ja, naturlich,” the German says and zips up his pants. So goes the war on terror.
For those of you unfamiliar with Ian Rankin, here are a few facts. He’s Scottish. His Inspector Rebus novels are set in Edinburgh. Resurrection Men and The Falls are two of my favorites. Rebus is prickly guy and Rankin has a huge series on his hands.
Witch Hunt is a standalone thriller set primarily in southern England. It’s got an intricate plot revolving around a female assassin called The Witch. The protagonist, Dominick Elder, is a retired agent of Britain’s MI5 counter-intelligence service. Elder has tangled with Witch before and not successfully.
In the opening scene Witch slips into the UK aboard a fishing boat. Once ashore, she presses a button and the boat explodes, killing the crew. That same evening a French fishing vessel out of Calais also sinks in the Channel. Young Michael Barclay, Intelligence tech, notices this anomaly and reports it to his boss.
It is often from such humble beginnings that great stories evolve. This one does despite rough seas at the beginning of the novel. Everyone who’s anyone in this story is given a full name. Our small craft pitches in the wild waves created by Info dumps; MI5, Special Branch, lords and betters, worker bees, incidental witnesses all have names. This coupled with fairly precise driving directions in and around Brighton nearly swamped your reviewer whose short term memory is already clogged with directions to places he might actually soon visit. It’s as though Mr. Rankin promised his graduating class that he’d mention them all in a novel and decided to do it in one fell swoop.
The writing smooths out when Rankin sends young Barclay over to France. There he meets DSG agent Dominique Herault. The novel’s most vibrant character, Dominique launches Barclay on a series of escapades that bear greatly on the hunt for Witch.
With this extended set-up, Witch Hunt is an exhilarating battle of wits between Dominick Elder and Witch; Rankin has a nice deft eye for the vagaries of British bureaucracy. The major characters emerge from the scrum like actors who’ve been rehearsing and know their lines. There is a plot twist involving the Witch and her true purpose for being in England.
Ian Rankin hasn’t quite hit his stride in the realm of espionage thrillers. The Ludlumesque point of view shifts add length to the story without adding any depth. The writing is uneven and overall Witch Hunt might have benefited from some strategic cuts. We have a side trip to Scotland that’s well-written, but doesn’t pay off sufficiently. Those first fifty pages needed some tough love. There’s a lack of confidence on the author’s part as he feels his way into the novel’s main story. When he’s with Elder, Rankin is on safer ground. The focus on multiple protagonists reduces tension and diffuses the novel’s climax.
Perhaps the author is setting up series characters. That could explain the decision to devote pages to secondary good guys from Special Branch. I’ll look for a sequel.
In Defense of Snark
You’re gonna want to read this Maud Newton post on snark because soon all the cool kids will be linking it (if they haven’t already).
Seriously though, Maud may coast along posting links and quiet comments but then all of a sudden she’s like POW – serious commentary! Here is a particularly strong snippet:
So, while I think that entertainingly informing readers is snark’s raison d’etre, I also believe that the boldly negative critique may be the only weapon available for stemming the tide of mediocre writing offered by the corrupt book publishing industry and its shadowy ally, the creative writing program. And the only supposed threat it poses, according to Julavits, is that of dampening ambition through fear, resulting in less exciting work. To this I can only say that if “ambition†serves as euphemism for hyper-intellectual, emotionally unengaging, contrivedly inventive or experimental narratives, such as those James Wood has termed hysterical realism, then this wouldn’t be to our culture’s detriment.
Thought provoking, no? I hope to post some ideas about what I look for in a book review (remember this question?) soon.
UPDATE: Ok, as CAAF so graciously points out in the comments, the post in question was written by Emma Garman – my appologies Emma. But that in no way negates what I said about Maud herself whose vision and wisdom permeates her eponymous blog.