Trashy Old Shorts 3

I've subtitled this one "The Ameritrash Review of Books" because for various reasons I've been doing a lot of reading lately and spending very little time watching films or playing video games. Well, I have been playing Fable a lot but I already reviewed that and besides, the weight of critical opinion suggests that I'm the only person in the universe who thinks Fable is worth multiple play-throughs. So books it is.

The first book to consider for this impromptu book club is The Dying Earth by Jack Vance. I've read other books by the same author set in the same milieu but not for a very long time - and this one was new to me. I was excited when I saw it on a friends' shelf and got to borrow it because Vance is, in my opinion, one of a vanishingly small number of fantasy writers who've managed to escape the shadow of Tolkien and create something very original. Vance's style is also very unique: he has a penchant for simply throwing his fantastic creations at the reader, fully formed and with no back story and very little description and simply leaving the reader to accept them as they are. When I first read Vance I found this approach deeply irritating - now, many years later it seems wonderfully refreshing, freeing the imagination from the constraints that Tolkiens' meticulous historical fantasy have imposed on other writers. This book is a collection of allegedly linked short stories, and although the first four to segue together well, the latter two do not and come across more weakly as a result. On the whole I really enjoyed this taken at face value - don't go looking for deeper commentary here, just sit back and appreciate the immense creativity that has clearly gone into the stories.

Having hailed Jack Vance as one fantasy author who has side-stepped Tolkien it seems fitting to move on next to another: Stephen Donaldson and his Thomas Convenant books. Having written two trilogies which comprise, in my opinion, some of the best fantasy writing of the 20th century, Donaldson has chosen to go back to his setting after an appreciable gap for a new quartet of books. The first of these is The Runes of the Earth which is a "Chronicle of Thomas Covenant" in name only: the primary protagonist of the book is Covenants' companion from the preceding trilogy, Linden Avery. The book doesn't suffer from this: Avery is an absorbing and interesting character and Donaldson has lost none of his skill in weaving a deft and mysterious tale. It's an edge-of-the-seat page turner, far more compelling than many books written expressly as thrillers, and contains a lot of the authors' trademark psychological depth and commentary. However what it does suffer from is an overall feeling of there being nothing new here. In stark contrast to the second trilogy, one of the strengths of which was that it explored concepts and environs radically different from the first, this story smacks very heavily of a lack of inspiration and goes over much the same ground as the original books. I can't help wondering if the primary motivation behind resurrecting the franchise was financial more than imaginative. The end result is a book which I enjoyed and which is technically very well written, but which I don't feel has the creative energy to carry me through another four books in the series.

From a book which lacks a sense of innovation to one which abounds with it: Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist. I came to this book after seeing the film: not something I usually do but in this case I had no idea when I saw the movie than an English translation of the novel was available. I had mixed feelings about the film: although it was very clever, it seemed not to know what to do with all that cleverness and ended up seeming a bit flat and lifeless. The book, with all the extra space the author has to explore his subject, suffers from no such problems and is quite the best horror novel I've read in a long, long time. The relationship between an almost-psychotic boy and his vampire soul mate manages the extraordinary feat of being simultaneously sympathetic and horrific as the reader is taken under the skin of these troubled individuals to see what motivates them. There is also a sub plot involving a second vampire and child abuse which is absent from the film, quite possibly because it is truly disturbing without being overly explicit - another impressive literary achievement - it kept making unwelcome incursions into my subcosncious days after I finished the book. But perhaps best of all the relationships between the drunks and the drifters which provide the catalyst of the plot are properly fleshed out here and as a result they evoke real sympathy as victims of the supernatural: something that didn't come across in the film at all. This is top-class horror writing with some real finesse to differentiate it from the pulp shock-horror that so many of the most famous names in the genre have been resorting to for years.

The next switch to consider is one from modern innovation to well-heeled classic. When I reviewed Age of Conan I thought it necessary to get myself a compendium of Conan stories to acquaint myself with the setting of the game: believe it or not I'd never read any of the originals before. So I got myself volume one of The Conan Chronicles by Robert E. Howard. I started off being favourably impressed - the stories have a frenetic energy about them which is amazing compelling, and Conan is skilfully handled as an anti-hero, quite a difficult literary device to accomplish. But I must admit as the stories drew on I became bored: Howards' lexicon of favoured words and phrases is pretty small, and there's only so many times one can read some variation on "steel" or "steel trap" to describe Conan's reflexes before it starts to become irritating. Worse, his story template also seems pretty limited and a lot of the tales simply start to blur into one another: which continent is this particular vine-hung ruin located? In which city is this particular temple of a dark god? What deus-ex-machina device is going to be employed to spring Conan in this particular tale? There are similar problems with characters for whilst Conan himself is brilliantly done, none of his other companions or adversaries are at all memorable. A couple did stand out for me: Queen of the Black Coast has all the proper elements of a great adventure story woven brilliantly together, has a real air of supernatural menace and in the pirate queen Belit presents about the only other noteworthy character aside from Conan in all the stories. I also liked Rogues in the House mainly because it has a number of entirely successful plot twists which are cunningly woven together. But on the whole I was unimpressed by my first exposure to this supposed "classic" of fantasy literature. No wonder well-heeled book critics look down on the genre if this is supposed to be amongst the best it has to offer.

Finally we come to a book that is very dear to my heart and which, really, should  be obligatory reading for any hobby game enthusiast. I'm talking, of course, about The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. I am not, on the whole, a huge fan of Banks' sci-fi which seems to be unnecessarily pseudo-intellectual in style to me but I made the effort with this partly because of the title and partly because it seems very different in character to his other efforts: much more direct and with a comprehensible, linear plot. The book imagines a thoroughly corrupt and decadent alien stellar empire which hangs together on a cultural artefact: a game so complex and demanding that it can accurately model the competition of civilizations (and yet which is, presumably, still more approachable than Campaign for North Africa) and the plot hinges on the introduction into this setup of an unusually gifted human game-player. It's far more compelling than it may sound. A frequent criticism of the book is that in basing itself around a game which the author cannot properly describe (because of its complexity) it lacks realism and substance, and that as a result the ongoing series of games which the novel describes become boring because they can't be properly differentiated. There's some validity to this critique from the standpoint of a general audience but for a game enthusiast the book is fascinating. It spends a decent chunk of time ruminating over why people play games, what makes a good game, and what games can say about the people that play them. One of the interesting things that I took away from it was to notice that at several points in the narrative, hidden information and player interaction are clearly marked as a pre-requisite for a successful game experience - a conclusion I'd readily agree with. It would appear that a lot more Eurogamers seem to read this novel.