The Silmarillion

The Silmarillion
by J.R.R. Tolkien
read: 2014

I would have had a lot of trouble getting through The Silmarillion if not for Professor Corey Olsen's course on J.R.R. Tolkien's works. Tolkien's fascination with names is distracting - he will often give three or four names for something and few other distinguishing details. The prose style is often lifeless, akin to a textbook. But Professor Olsen introduces a concept at the beginning of his lecture series on the book: events in The Silmarillion echo other events in the book, in other works of Tolkien, and other mythological and religious stories. These echoes paint a fascinating, almost fractal pattern reverberating through the world - we see the same behaviors, flaws, tragedies, and triumphs repeated, but writ smaller and smaller as time goes on. We start out with the Valar opposing Morgoth and end with Elves and men against Sauron (and in The Lord of the Rings, men and hobbits against an even weaker version of Sauron). The inhabitants of the world become more and more distant from Iluvitar, the creator of all - in a way that it's not hard to imagine Tolkien (a devout Catholic) finds mirrors our society's relationship with God.

Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice
by William Styron
read: 2014
Modern Library #96, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award

I was going to write this post on the parallels between slavery and the Holocaust, but the Wiki page covers this pretty well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie's_Choice_(novel)

One thing that stood out to me on reading Sophie's Choice was the attention narrator Stingo pays to names. Early on he describes how he got the nickname "Stingo" (a corruption of "Stinky" for less-than-stellar hygiene habits). An early benefactor "bore the jaunty name of Artiste." He describes Gundar Firkin as a name that "sound[s] odd or made-up." He loves the names of his fellow flatmates "for nothing other than their marvelous variety" before he even meets them. He notes that love interest Leslie Lapidus' name rhymes with "Ah, feed us."

There's something meta-fictional going on here, and I don't know that I've entirely pieced it together, but I think a lot of it is set up for the character who presents Sophie with the titular "choice": Fritz Jemand von Niemand. As a work of fiction, presumably all the characters names are fabricated, but von Niemand's is invented even within the context of the novel, chosen by Stingo "because it seems as good a name as any for an SS doctor." Stingo takes similar liberties inventing an elaborate backstory for von Niemand, and this backstory is integral to explaining how a human could do some of the things the Nazis did in the Holocaust. Ultimately, this story rings false to me, and I think it's supposed to ring false - but the alternative is an incomprehensible evil.

Octopussy and The Living Daylights

Octopussy and The Living Daylights
by Ian Fleming
read: 2014

In "Octopussy," the title story to this collection, Ian Felming describes a character Major Smythe, who becomes rich through a combination of luck, murder, and deviousness. His wealth doesn't bring him happiness, however; he becomes an alcoholic, has a couple heart attacks, his wife commits suicide, and he's socially ostracized and basically drinking himself to death when James Bond arrives on the scene. It's similar to some of the studies in books like Stumbling on Happiness where researchers find lottery winners and those who lose a limb are equally happy a year after their respective events. I don't think that data was present in Fleming's day, but he had an intuitive understanding of the phenomenon.

The Man with the Golden Gun

The Man with the Golden Gun
by Ian Fleming
read: 2014

It's become a cliche that Bond villains, when they finally have Bond captured and at their mercy, always deliver monologues rather than the coup de grace, but in The Man with the Golden Gun we see Bond similarly self-impaired:

Jmaes Bond got into the car behind Scaramanga and wondered whether to shoot the man now, in the back of the head - the old Gestapo-K.G.B. point of puncture. A mixture of reasons prevented him - the itch of curiosity, an inbuilt dislike of cold murder, the feeling that this was not the predestined moment ...

James Bond knew he was not only disobeying orders, or at best dodging them, he was also being a bloody fool.

This sets up an interesting scenario - Scaramanga is a faster draw than Bond, so Bond can't take him in a fair gunfight, but he is reluctant to ambush him unawares. Fleming has to jump through some hoops to set up a scenario where Bond can win and keep the moral high ground.

You Only Live Twice

You Only Live Twice
by Ian Fleming
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

In You Only Live Twice, Ian Fleming paints an incredible picture of Japan. Bond's mission is to work himself into the good graces of Tiger Tanaka, head of Japanese intelligence, and this involves everything from eating sashimi to getting ninjitsu training to reading haiku poetry. Tanaka and Bond frequently verbally spar about the differences between their societies, and I'm not sure anyone really gets the upper hand. I wonder if Japanese readers would find it as even-handed, or think it slightly racist.

The novel begins with the conceit that Bond is, understandably, emotionally disturbed after Tracy's death at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but we're mostly told this through an expository discussion between M and Bond's psychologist. Fleming doesn't really have the heart to take us inside Bond's trouble mind, and once the story moves to Japan it's barely mentioned.

One of Ours

One of Ours
by Willa Cather
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

Death Comes to the Archbishop took me by surprise because it wasn't a novel I expected a female author to write. The main characters were pretty much all men, and the setting was in the American West.  As I started One of Ours, another Cather book, I was a little disappointed to see it as kind of a conventional coming-of-age story, of dreamer Claude trying to find meaning in his life in a farming community in Nebraska. It was almost like a D.H. Lawrence novel.

Then Claude gets sent off to World War I, and everything changes. I understand the criticism that Cather glorified the war, but I don't think that's entirely fair. Soldiers die, or are injured, even in just the journey by boat across the sea. We see the war destroy towns and destroy culture; this is especially epitomized by David abandoning the violin to join the infantry. But for Claude, the war is a way for him to escape the tedium of farm life, and it exposes him to worlds and people he could not have encountered otherwise. His connection to David is probably more important than his connection to his wife (who is barely mentioned in the second half of the novel); he's a person that Claude would not have met in peacetime. The dichotomy between the horror of war and the perverse freedom it affords the small-town solider is brought out well in this passage:

All the garden flowers and bead wreaths in Beaufort had been carried out and put on the American graves. When the squad fired over them and the bugle sounded, the girls and their mothers wept. Poor Willy Katz, for instance, could never have had such a funeral in South Omaha.

It's true - poor Willy wouldn't have had this elaborate funeral in Omaha, but he probably wouldn't have needed a funeral at all if he had stayed. Maybe I'm giving Cather too much credit for that unstated part of things, but I don't think so.

Lucky Jim

Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
read: 2014
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

Humor has a hard time holding up over even a decade or two, much less the 60 years since Lucky Jim was written, but it's easy to imagine the events of the novel in a half-hour sitcom. In one scene, Jim wakes up at his boss' house, hung over, to find that in his sleep he has damaged the sheet, blanket, bedside table, and rug with a lit cigarette. But in classic sitcom fashion, he tries to cover up the damage rather than fess up to what he's done. It's the sort of madcap situation that's just as funny today as it was in the 1950's.

Amis' prose adds to the humor. When a paper Jim writes is accepted by an academic magazine, he concludes, "Perhaps the article had had some merit after all. No, that was going too far." This dry British wit and deep cynicism pervades the novel. The humor also helps the reader understand the class struggles that undercut the novel. It's not always easy to relate to British social politics, but it's easy to side with Jim against the rich, pompous, useless blowhards that make up his world, and to take joy in him undermining them with pranks and other small measures of revenge.