A Song of Ice and Fire (Series) - George R.R. Martin

This sprawling, epic, high-fantasy tale begins with A Game of Thrones, blooms into A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, only to falter with the latest installment in the series, A Feast for Crows. There is a forthcoming release of the next installment in July, A Dance With Dragons, which, if the author is to be believed, will be followed by two more installments some time in the distant future. Despite each volume's size (they range from around 800 pages to 1200), they don't easily fit into the category of novels, as they are more book-length chapters in a larger work, akin to the novel-in-three-parts structure of The Lord of the Rings, the progenitor of the modern fantasy story. The reason for this is simple: None of the books contains a true narrative arc, and each one ends with the explicit suggestion of a cliffhanging TV drama's 'to be continued,' which says nothing about the quality of the series but suggests an admirable span of attention and intensity of ardor in those who love the genre.

The story is as simple as it is complex. A kingdom that has known peace for a decade faces both internal and external threats. As the power structure that keeps the kingdom together crumbles, a many-sided war breaks out in the resultant power vacuum, with long-simmering grudges and rivalries coming up to a boil, all while in the background twinned supernatural threats loom large. The complexity is introduced by means of the narrative structure, a first person limited accounting of events from the viewpoints of an ever-increasing cast of characters, and as the larger, world-encompassing events unfold, the reader is given long, uninterrupted views of the denizens of the world in their cups, in bed, in battle, and generally doing their best to survive in an uncertain and cruel world at war.

The quality of the prose in the books seems to suffer with each new installment, which isn't necessarily a barrier to enjoying the extant works as a whole, but by the third book a vicious editor would have been a godsend, and the fourth book could easily be cut in half--it seems like there are whole chapters that can be skipped over with impunity. But the first book is excellent in its economy of pacing of events and exposition, and by the time you've finished it you're either hooked on the plot or your not, so anyone who'd continue on with the series would understandably, much like the author, be more focused on the plot developments than the intricacies of how well a given passage might be written.

One aspect of the books that is extremely well done is the restraint with which Martin uses magic. Magic and the supernatural crop up rarely, but often enough to foster a sense of wonder and speculation, which ultimately buttresses the reader's interest in the characters, their stories, their ultimate fates, and, in some cases, their origins, which is, in the end, the reason why so many have read and now wait for the next installment, and will wait for the next one after that.

Julian by Gore Vidal

In this historical fiction novel, Vidal depicts the life of the Byzantine emperor, Julian. Although, most of the story is told through Julian’s own memoirs, Vidal includes two other points of view.


The novel begins with a correspondence between Priscus, an Athenian intellectual and Libanius, an intellectual at Daphne. What is revealed in this correspondence is a mutual desire to revive the mission Julian tried to accomplish throughout the Roman Empire: bring down Christianity and revive Hellenism. Priscus is in possession of both Julian’s memoirs and his journal and Libanius plans to revive Hellenism by making these public.

Julian’s memoir describes different events in his life, beginning with watching his father being taken for execution while Julian and his brother are sent away for schooling where the present emperor, Constantine (their cousin), can keep a watchful eye on them ensuring they don’t threaten his position on the throne. Julian’s appetite for knowledge and quest for truth was evident at a young age; he always questioned Christianity and eventually found truth in the Greek Gods. Of course he mentions his different relationships with friends, academics and lovers. The relationship that I found to be most interesting was the one he had with his brother, Gallus. The two were complete opposites; Julian admired his brother’s strength (but also shocked and disgusted by how he used it) while Gallus constantly put Julian down. Such a juxtaposition leads to some intense scenes.

The construction of the narrative weaves in the voices of Libanius and Priscus, particularly the latter, throughout Julian’s memoirs. Either through their correspondence or notes scribbled in the margins of Julian’s manuscript, their version of the story is also presented. Vidal also keeps their voices consistent and different from each other’s. At points it felt like reading actual historical documents rather than an historical novel. Furthermore, the different points of view provide a structure to the novel that motivates the reader to continue, even if he is well informed about the history of Julian.

Hypocrisy plays a heavy role in many different aspects, the most obvious one being the role the Orthodox Church played in Byzantine society which is what led to Julian’s rejection of it at a young age. The following quote shows him taking action towards this corrupt bunch as emperor,

“Yet your religion preaches that you should not resist injury or go to law or even hold property, much less steal it! You have been taught to consider nothing your own, except your place in the other and better world. Yet you wear jewels, rich robes, build huge basilicas, all in this world, not the next. You were taught to despise money, yet you amass it,” (pg 336).

But even Julian, whose hypocrisies were not as blatant and reckless, made certain unethical decisions to further his own cause, such as letting his soldiers capture and rape women to keep their morale up or allowing the execution of an innocent man to maintain good relations with the senators (I think). There were even points where he compared his decision making to his hated cousin, Constantius, the emperor before him.

Priscus and Libanius also reveal some hypocrisies of their own. In their correspondence Libanius keeps a cheerful tone, even praising him at times, while he notes in the margin of Julian’s memoir “I hate Priscus”. Furthermore, Priscus presents himself as an honest person, he is even forward about his own hypocrisies. However, he scams Libanius for the documents of Julian! This makes the characters all very real and addresses the issue of everyone’s individual hypocrisies, yet, as an institution the hypocrisies become much more harmful and sickening. Despite some of Julian’s decisions he truly did try to eradicate the hypocrisies of both the palace and the church.

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

"It is only your guest, sir," I called out, desirous to spare him the humiliation of exposing his cowardice further. "I had the misfortune to scream in my sleep, owing to a frightful nightmare. I'm sorry I disturbed you."
-pg 33

An odd book, made odder still by its uncanniness, that unheimlich so well explained by Freud's exegesis of E.T.A. Hoffman's story The Sandman. For it's a familiar story, familiarly told, love unrequited followed by revenge, told through the eyes of a more or less passive observer to a passive listener, describing events that are so beyond the ken of normal life as to seem mythical, taken to such extremes as to be pure fantasy. There is something of fable about it, some Grimm unlogic to the lives, loves, motivations, and hatreds of the characters, that their actions, so far removed from what one would normally expect of the Victorian English, lose their unreality and seem to become etched in stone, like the lives of heroes and villains from some bygone age where, as in the Old Testament or Shakespeare, people know what it is to sin, and know well how to hate.

Mr. Lockwood, the man to whom the story of Heathcliff's revenge is told, seems to sum it up in the quotation above: The story is a nightmare which we, the readers and the listener, have entered into; the strange doublings, the two seemingly isolated estates, the many repetitions of names, and the surly demon around which it all revolves are the product of a sentient but troubled mind, and there is no moral purpose which guides them all, just dreamy developments that compound horror and outrage; to wake up would be a relief, but we're forced to move on by that same sadistic interest that draws people to bullfights, or, more apt, perhaps, car accidents and tragedies, auto-da-fes, perp walks, and other public, if less lethal, yet more lasting humiliations.

But to say it's a nightmare does not quite grasp the horrific fascination that I felt while reading the book. Instead, it might be better to say that it convinces you in some manner beyond belief that these characters are real, and terrible to behold, and if the characters are plagued by ghostly visitations and vengeful lives and loves from beyond the grave, leering up from the moist warm earth, scratching at windows, infiltrating dreams, then the characters themselves are ghosts set loose by Emile Bronte's awful imagination, and sent, as ghosts are, to trouble your waking life, not your dreams.

Bleak House - Charles Dickens

Not only is it a still night on dusty high roads and on hill-summits, whence a wide expanse of country may be seen in repose, quieter and quieter as it spreads away into a fringe of trees against the sky with the grey ghost of a bloom upon them; not only is it a still night in gardens and in woods, and on the river where the water-meadows are fresh and green, and the stream sparkles on among pleasant islands, murmuring weirs, and whispering rushes; not only does the stillness attend it as it flows where the houses cluster thick, where many bridges are reflected in it, where wharves and shipping make it black and awful, where it winds from these disfigurements through marshes whose grim beacons stand like skeletons washed ashore, where it expands through the bolder region of rising grounds, rich in cornfield wind-mill and steeple, and where it mingles with the ever-heaving sea; not only is it a still night on the deep, and on the shore where the watchers stands to see the ship with her spread wings cross the path of light that appears to be presented only to him; but even on this stranger's wilderness of London there is some rest.
pg. 668

The geography of this sentence seems to cover all; we begin on a high hill with a grand view of the surrounding land, behold the river and effortlessly follow its meandering path down to the sea, stop briefly to consider the distant deep, only to be arrested by the vision of a boat coming into a harbor beaconed in by a lighthouse's light, and then come back to rest in the middle of the city of London. At the beginning, it seems the night is the subject; then, the stillness of that night; and by the end of the sentence we discover what we've known all along, that sound is the paragraph's main concern, building up to what will be the crescendo of the passage, where "every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating."

And what is that sound? The noise of life? And why not, after all, characterize it that way? Dickens ranges both high and low to give a full portrait of London society, from street sweepers to Baronets, and weaves together every character's fate in a way that suggests that despite their differences, they all are part of the same entity, this vast vibrating glass, the consciousness contained within the muddy, foggy, wet, dispiriting city of London.

The novel is anchored by an ongoing case in the English courts of equity, Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, which has gone on for so long with so little progress that the original claimants are long dead and it is their various descendants who stand to reap a reward from its successful resolution, despite the fact that the case is nowhere near its conclusion. In the end, the case is a joke, Dickens's damnation of the entire court, but it serves to draw all the main characters into a common orbit, just as the city does, and there might be a statement inherent in their juxtaposition, where both are foggy, muddy entities around which the huddled masses gather to look for some meaning, the courts seem populated with dust, decay, and a grinding forth of the lowest form of existence--there are no people there, just lawyers, judges, claimants, and cases--whereas the city in contrast seems to sing with sympathetic life, for all the mean tragedies and awful loves won and lost, it is still a wondrously alive thing.

Another Country by James Baldwin

"The silence of the listeners became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared. They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?"

The title of Baldwin's book unintentionally captures what it is like to read it in 2011, so many decades after its first publication. Set in the years following World War II, the New York presented here feels like another universe. It is a place where a black man lives in fear of the cop on the corner, making every street a terrifying gauntlet. Mixed-race couples are confronted with scorn and revulsion in the faces they pass in Washington Square Park. A corned beef sandwich and a beer can buy you a young homeless man for the night, if you're lonely. After last call, in the city's shadowy spaces, patrons from the gay bar and the longshoreman bar meet in violent embrace, even though they would never acknowledge each other in the harsh light of day. Young couples live in cramped apartments, nothing more than cages where they claw at each other. Aging bohemians haunt the same haunts of their youth, clinging to the same stale dreams, and endlessly repeating the same stale ideas on how to live.

Above all it is a place where everyone, everywhere, is searching for love. And yet they hate themselves so much that all they can do is unleash their hate on those closest to them. This self-hate, which perpetuates a destructive Oresteia-like cycle, stems from the mere fact that they're black, or gay, or white even, a reminder that racism and prejudice poison both the oppressed and the oppressor.

Of course, some of these aspects of New York life are eternal; others, particularly those concerning the lives of blacks, I'm not in a position to say, and the news gives reasons for equal measures of optimism and pessimism. It would be comforting to think that things have changed, that we hate ourselves less, or at least for reasons that are less arbitrary. Yet Baldwin's vision of New York is so convincingly miserable, and at times so depressingly familiar, that I often wondered what I was doing here myself.

Another Country, as you can probably tell, is a brutal book, and brutally told, with the blunt force of the saxophonist described above, thrusting all his rage, all that is terrible and real, on an awestruck and uncomfortable audience. I suppose the question is whether that brutality serves some purpose in the end, whether in some twisted way such trials make for a better person, or a better nation as a whole. Perhaps by recounting the effects of society's sins, Baldwin is suggesting that some sacrifice has been made by his suffering characters, offering those who survive a chance to redeem all of history. It is an open-ended question whether redemption is possible for the characters in the book, who only rarely, if ever, rise above the maelstrom of their time and see a way to move forward. More worryingly, it remains an open-ended question for the contemporary reader too.

Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

"The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air (flies through the air with the greatest of ease!), and indeed he can feel his limbs go obediently slack. Like a cat he tells himself: roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next. The unusual word limber or limbre is on the horizon too.

"That is not quite as it turns out, however. Whether because his legs disobey or because he is for a moment stunned (he hears rather than feels the impact of his skull on the bitumen, distant, wooden, like a mallet-blow), he does not spring to his feet at all, but on the contrary slides metre after metre, on and on, until he is quite lulled by the sliding.

"He lies stretched out, at peace. It is a glorious morning. The sun's touch is kind. There are worse things than letting oneself go slack, waiting for one's strength to return. In fact there might be worse things than having a quick nap. He closes his eyes; the world tilts beneath him, rotates; he goes absent."

So begins Slow Man, a book that I will press on everyone I know. These first three paragraphs are a good representation of the book's style. It is formal yet playful, austere yet warm. Each word pulls its own weight, and it's as if they are being used for the first time, presented afresh in all their wondrous glory.

The man in the accident is Paul Rayment, an elderly, bookish, solitary type. He finds himself in the hospital, at the mercy of a young, efficient surgeon who amputates his leg. He is discharged, and left to fend for himself in his lonely apartment. He goes to physical therapy sessions, hires a nurse, but it doesn't stop the gloom from settling in. He is a cripple; his life as he knew it is over.

A new nurse comes into his life, an immigrant from Croatia. He discovers that he is falling in love with her, and the gloom begins to lift. This part of the book is heart-wrenching -- I must have been quite a sight on the subway, literally wincing with pain, and every so often slamming the covers shut. There were many sharp intakes of breath and whispered pleas to the main character. I also found myself laughing out loud (which never fails to irritate me when other people on the subway do it), a welcome novelty for a Coetzee book.

And then, about one-third of the way through, someone new appears on Paul's doorstep: Elizabeth Costello. Yes, Elizabeth Costello, the titular character of another Coetzee book, who, if the rumors swirling among Coetzee watchers are to be believed, could possibly be the alter ego of the great man himself. Costello, a renowned writer, impishly inserts herself into Paul's affairs. It turns out that she may or may not be the author of all that is happening, and may or may not be in total control of her characters, a la At Swim-Two-Birds.

My reaction to this development was swift and unequivocal: What have you done? No one wants to play your stupid postmodern games! Give me back the touching story of the crippled, solitary man who finds love in the autumn of his life! We hates Elizabeth Costello, we wants our precious!

Etc. But it turns out that the games are a great deal of fun. And the book remains, to the end, utterly gripping.

Howards End by E.M. Forster

"'Somehow, when that kind of man looks frightened it is too awful. It is all right for us to be frightened, or for men of another sort--Father, for instance; but men like that! When I saw all the others so placid, and Paul mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing, I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.'"

At first glance, it would seem that Forster's Howards End, the story of two English families at the turn of the twentieth century, bears little resemblance to A Passage to India, a later work set in India during the height of Britain's colonial supremacy. The latter, while tenderly exploring the lives of its characters, is set against a backdrop of epochal events, and the entanglements that arise between Englishman and Indian are the ripple-like repercussions of a broader clash of civilizations. Howards End, on the other hand, describes a clash of a much smaller scale: that between the upper-middle class and the middle-middle class.

Typically English! you might cry. So inexplicably obsessed with the fine gradations of class! But while Howards End is concerned with quintessentially English dilemmas, and is more humble in historical and geographic scope, it bears similarities to its worldly successor. It is perhaps even more disturbing, suggesting that the fathomless mystery of the other can reveal itself not only in far-flung places, but right next door, amongst one's countrymen.

Howards End is the name of a house, and serves as a symbol of England as a whole. The claim to this property becomes a contest between the practical-minded and business-sound Wilcoxes and the idealistic and art-obsessed Schlegels. The Wilcoxes have their hands on "all the ropes" of the material world; the Schlegels a deep dedication to the more nebulous world of human relationships. In their dealings with each other, as well as with the pitiable clerk Leonard Bast (a representative of the lower-middle class), we see the hypocrisies and strengths of the warring clans. As Virgina Woolf puts it, the story is a "struggle between the things that matter and the things that do not matter, between reality and sham, between the truth and the lie." Forster accomplishes this all with humor, keen observation and great feeling.

Beneath it all is the terror that comes from gaining a glimpse of another's life. It is a threat to the fortresses we make of our beliefs; it is the shaking of the earth under one's feet. The most famous scene in Passage to India occurs at the Marabar Caves, where Mrs. Moore, new to the country, hears a disconcerting echo in one of the caves. It is a sound that is beyond language, beyond understanding; to her it sounds like "boum." What this "boum" means remains vague, but we know it shatters the foundation upon which she has built her life, a foundation that began to crack when she came into contact with an alien culture. Reading Howards End, perhaps we can put words to that sound: panic and emptiness, panic and emptiness.