On Maps and Legends
Michael Chabon is clearly as bright as he is talented. To fully reap the benefits of Maps and Legends, it helps if the reader is as well. This is not a light-hearted look at pop literature. It is, instead, a compendium of brilliant insights gleaned from seminal works in genres that have delighted and defined a generation: mysteries, epic fantasies, ghost stories, horror, dystopian science fiction, and comics.
I will endeavor to take you through Chabon’s meanderings, highlighting key insights along the way. Be sure you are wearing your most comfortable walking shoes.
1. The book begins with a journey into the unknown. For which, of course, you will need a map. Maps have the power to fire the imagination. The most seductive maps are the ones with unmarked, unexplored territories at their outer edges. This is where the doubts begin and conjectures are spawned.
2. Victorians had a habit of seeing double. Success was invariably haunted by failure and marital fidelity seemed to always conceal an adulterous love. Sherlock Holmes, like other classic Victorian narratives, is a series of dualities, of “braided pairs”. None more so than the archetypal pair of Holmes and Watson, who have only Quixote and Sancho “as rivals in the hearts of readers and in the annals of imaginary friendship”.
In creating the detective novel genre, Conan Doyle reengineered the process of story telling. Nearly all of Holmes’ stories are “stories of people who tell their stories and, every so often, the stories those people tell feature people telling stories (about what they heard or saw on the night in question)”. All these stories, which enable the reconstruction of the crime, mesh neatly, one folding into and engaging the other. Conan Doyle did not invent the nested story, but he may have perfected it.
Another aspect of Conan Doyle’s genius was his ability to convince Sherlock followers that every word they were about to read was true. In fiction, as in stage magic, the pleasure depends entirely on the audience’s knowing perfectly well that it is being fooled and is, in fact, prepared to participate in creating the illusion. This unwritten contract between magician and audience, between writers of fiction and their readers, is the essential difference between fiction and lies. In fiction, the writer and the reader are in it together.
3. We, as a species, are drawn to the darkness. Doom and decay, crime and folly, sin and punishment…these are things we have brought upon ourselves. In the Bible and in Greek myths, the world had begun with light and been spoiled. The world of Norse gods and men and giants, depicted by Ingri D’Aulaires in a stunning series of lithographs “of whimsical and brutal delicacy”, begins in darkness and ends in darkness. In the context of that darkness, everything that is beautiful in the Norse world is something that glints.
Thor was my favourite Norse god. A close second was the mischievous Loki. Loki, Chabon reminds us, “cooked up schemes and foiled them, fathered monsters and stymied them, helped forestall the end of things and hastened it; he was god of the endlessly complicating nature of plot, of storytelling itself.”
4. The epic fantasy, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, is that “once upon a time” world we knew in our childhood imaginations, a world where animals spoke and magic worked. But all that has disappeared. Epic fantasy is “haunted by a sense of lost purity and grandeur, deep wisdom that has been forgotten, Arcadia spoilt”. Chabon calls it a “thinning”, a diminishing of humankind that invokes in all of us the ache of nostalgia.
5. Plot and its “gloomy consigliere”, Theme, are, in many ways, the enemies of Character. Character brings “roundness”, describes our humanity, our contradictions and desires absent of any abstractable message or moral.
6. Chabon rues the decline of comic books as a diversion. Children, he points out, did not abandon comics; comics in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment (mostly in the form of graphic novels), abandoned children. He then prescribes the cure: do not tell stories that we think kids of today might like; rather, “we should tell stories that we would have liked as kids: twisted endings, nobility and bravery where it’s least expected, and the sudden emergence of a thread of goodness in a wicked nature”. Children are also fully capable of managing an intricate, involved, involving mythology as long as it is also accessible and comprehensible at any point of entry. The “layering of intricate lore and narrative completeness” was a hallmark of the Superman comics and their kin.
7. Ambivalence toward technology is the underlying theme of apocalypse-based fiction like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We are, as such, accustomed to thinking of stories that depict the end of the world and its aftermath as essentially science fiction. These stories typically deal with “the changed nature of society in the wake of cataclysm”: strange new priesthoods, theocracies in which mutants and machinery are taboo, etc. Inevitably these new societies mirror and comment upon our own. “That they can hide behind the fig leaf that a satiric or religious purpose provides, that they portray the conventional realism of a world without supercomputers, starships or eight-foot feline warriors from the planet Kzin, gives them the status of relative legitimacy.”
The underlying model for the post-apocalypse adventure story is Robinson Crusoe… “depicting as heroic, if problematic, a lone attempt to impose a bourgeois social order on an irrational empty wilderness” after the bomb or virus or windstorm strikes.
8. A great ghost story, like M.R. James’ Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad!, is all psychology. There is a perception that the impossible is vying with the clear and undeniable evidence of the senses; and there is the range of emotions brought on by that perception.
The protagonists are often innocents who brush up against “the omnipresent malevolence of the world”. The sins for which they are punished are more than likely to be virtues – curiosity, honesty, a sympathy for bygone eras and long-gone ancestors. And, often, their punishment is grim.
Ghost story writers, like James and H.P. Lovecraft, share a hyper-acute sense of the past, with “a taste for old books and arcane manuscripts, for neglected museums and the libraries of obscure historical societies, and for ancient buildings, in particular those equipped with attics and crypts”.
9. The comic strip is and has always been a literary form that “braids words and pictures inextricably into a story”. Chabon decries the fact that, today, “the pictures have dwindled to a bare series of thumbnail sketches…while the notion of story has atrophied almost to nonexistence”.
10. Here’s the final leg of the journey through Chabon’s fertile and somewhat foreboding literary mind. Evoking the spirit of the golem (the concept and conception of which has fascinated him since childhood), Chabon removes from the author the cloak of anonymity and the protection of any and all disclaimers. “If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family or party apparatchniks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.”
Puzzling
Back in January, 2009, I wrote a piece on GAMES magazine and honed in on my favourite puzzle format, cryptic crosswords.
As explained then, these are crosswords constructed on word plays. Each entry has two clues, one straightforward, another not so straight.
There are anagrams (things for changing times: ITEMS), homophones indicated by phrases like “we hear” and “so to speak” (relative from French seaport, reportedly: NIECE); containers, in which answers are embedded in phrases (unauthorized offering from Louisville gallery); and reversals (Will turned to vegetable: SHALLOT). There are the double definitions (former monk: PRIOR). And watch for abbreviations like FE (iron) and parts of words like YE (a couple of years). It is an intoxicating drink with a twist of lemon. The 10 sample clues below should give you a taste.
Clues:
1. Bird burning on the third element of stove (8 letters)
2. Veteran’s Administration endowment to drifter (7 ketters)
3. Celebrate around beginning of Lent, to some extent (6 letters)
4. More than one weaving machine appears (5 letters)
5. Outfit switched in forum (7 letters)
6. A name is lost to forgetfulness (7 letters)
7. Hear unconfirmed reports from lodgers (7 letters)
8. Retaliates for some craven gesture (7 letters)
9. Actor in complex tragedy (5 letters)
10. Al Capone shows muffler to pilot (8 letters)
Answers:
1. Flamingo (Flaming + O)
2. Vagrant (V.A. + grant)
3. Partly (Party + L)
4. Looms (two meanings)
5. Uniform (anagram: in forum)
6. Amnesia (anagram: a name is)
7. Roomers (rumors)
8. Avenges (crAVEN GEStures)
9. Extra (complEX TRAgedy)
10. Scarface (scarf + ace)
Sweetness and Apropos: A Peach of a Pair
The two novels are completely different. At the same time, they have enough similarities that it would be impossible not to take notice.
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley is the story of a perky and prodigious 11-year old who, to save her father, insinuates herself into a murder investigation. Sir Apropos of Nothing by Peter David relates the adventures of a young and very cynical squire who finds himself charged with the rescue of the Princess of Isteria.
Sweetness takes place in a Georgian English countryside. Apropos takes place in The Middle Lands.
Sweetness is a first novel by a Canadian mystery buff. Sir Apropos is the fifty somethingth novel by a New York-based sci fi icon.
Alan Bradley was a founding member of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild and Director of Television Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan for 25 years until his early retirement in 1994. His interest in things mysterious took a sharp left turn when, in 1989, in collaboration with William Sarjeant, he published the classic Ms Holmes of Baker Street. The premise of the book, which engendered a firestorm of controversy upon publication, is that Holmes was, in fact, a woman…one twice pregnant to boot.
David is another matter. His list of credits is a mile long and he is not completely inaccurate when he refers to himself as “a writer of stuff”. Lots of cool stuff, mind you. He got his start in comics, penning stories for The Incredible Hulk at Marvel and Aquaman at DC. He also did work for the Dark Horse Comics miniseries, The Scream, among others. Back at Marvel, he wrote the comic book spin-off of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. A prolific writer, David is best known for his Star Trek and Babylon 5 novels. Sir Apropos of Nothing began a new phase and a new genre for David: fantasy.
So what are the aforementioned similarities between Sweetness and Apropos?
To begin with, both are about young adults. In the case of Flavia, very young, but she had what my mother would call an old head. Apropos simply grew up too quickly, starting with a misbegotten birth and ending with a narrow escape from an unwanted betrothal.
Both strain credulity. But let’s face it, if you are prepared to be swept away by a pre-teen as she unravels a murder mystery that spans decades, you are obviously in for the game. And Apropos is, after all, a fantasy, so you must take the fantastic in stride.
When her taciturn father becomes a suspect in the slaying of a certain Horace Bonepenny, Flavia sets out to find the real murderer. Naturally, our little Miss Marple manages to outthink and outflank Scotland Yard. The resourceful Flavia begins her sleuthing by going through old newspapers in the village library; she ferrets out the connection with old crimes committed at Greyminster prep school by Bonepenny and the nefarious “third man”. It is the latter who snatches up Flavia and comes this close to doing her in. In the end, our irrepressible little heroine returns the object of everyone’s affection, a rare Black Penny stamp that nearly brought down the Empire around Queen Victoria over a hundred years earlier, to a grateful King George VI. Peace and prosperity are restored to the Buckshaw Estate.
As for Apropos, well, he manages by hook and mostly by crook to survive the fates and his own flawed character. He serves as squire to the enigmatic Sir Umbrage of the Flaming Nether Regions, does in the fallen hero, Tacit One-Eye, outfoxes the dreaded Warlord Shank, escapes the grotesque Harpers Bizarre to say nothing of a herd of outraged unicorns, manouevers around Meander, the mad Vagabond King of the Frozen North, all to return the feisty princess Entipy, banished by Runcible to the Faith Women’s Retreat, to her proper station.
Obviously, both books are fun reads. The yarns are neatly spun. The humor, running from the subtle to the sardonic, is always present.
It is also no surprise that each was to become the first of a series. You could see it coming. The giveaway is the depth of the main character. We love little Flavia, despite her peculiar predilection for poison. We enjoy Apropos, despite his caustic nature and obsessive need for self-preservation. She is a scamp, he a scoundrel. It is fun to see how each, in his or her own way, manages to get from here to there.
Bradley’s Buckshaw Chronicles follow up Sweetness with The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag (released by Random House this past March) and the upcoming Hang, Gypsy! Dance, Gypsy!, slated to appear in 2011.
The Apropos trilogy also includes The Woad to Wuin and Tong Lashing. Darkness of the Light, is the first in a new trilogy of fantasy novels titled The Hidden Earth.
I am not usually drawn to the mystery or fantasy genre. I seldom read novels centered on the adventures of young adults, even ones as precocious as Flavia or Apropos. But my daughter, the librarian, knew I would like these books. In an upcoming post, I will tell you why.
The Blue Met: A Celebration of Reading
“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.” (Rainer Maria Rilke)
It’s my favourite time of year. Skies are (generally) blue. The snow is a memory and our oversized magnolia tree is blossoming (admittedly early). The 12th iteration of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, which this year runs from April 21 to 25, is just over the horizon.
The Blue Metropolis Foundation, based in Montreal, is a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing together the finest writers from around the globe, exposing their work and the issues they confront in a diverse and challenging world. The Blue Met is also active in developing important educational and literacy programs.
Among the international stars you can meet at this year’s festival will be the Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet, Paul Muldoon, considered by some “the most significant English language poet born since the second World War”. Also on the stage for readings and discussions will be the distinguished Indian poet Koyamparambath Satchidanandan, the award-winning Israeli novelist Amir Gutfreund, and a couple of the best contemporary fiction writers from Latin America, Salvadoran Horacio Castellanos Moya and Mexican Christina Rivera Garza.
Festival highlights include:
Writers in Peril – The OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor expose the steps being taken by authoritarian regimes to limit access to information in cyberspace.
The Human Face of Genocide – How do writers handle the delicate and gut-wrenching task of capturing and making some sense of the annihilation of whole peoples?
Cartography of Cartooning – Two of Montreal’s most popular cartoonists, Aislin (Terry Mosher) and Serge Chapleau, talk about what they do and how they do it.
Breaking Into the Kidlit Market – Get the skinny on what it takes to succeed in this red-hot publishing segment, from preparing the manuscript to dealing with agents and publishers.
There will be the usual spate of book launches, panel discussions and award ceremonies, as well as workshops for established and emerging writers.
American author Hal Borland once wrote that “April is a promise”. For book lovers, it is one the Blue Met is bound to keep.
