The Elegant Variation: DOG DAYS, DARK MATERIALS

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August 13, 2007

DOG DAYS, DARK MATERIALS

Don't know if you all caught last week's NPR report on the origins of the phrase "dog days of summer," but we're very much feeling them around here. Now, we're not going to take August off. But we can't promise we're always going to have the energy to troll all the breaking literary news of the day, although we'll do our best. We might, however, slip into lower impact, frivolous posts like this one.

As you probably know, it's the first weekend we've had in some time without our revisions hanging over our head. We emerged blinking from our little hole and noticed it was summer at the beach, and a beautiful summer at that. So we resolved to spend the weekend doing as little as possible.

It so happens that one of the first things we did Saturday morning when we awoke was to read Christopher Hitchens's review of the final Harry Potter book. We agree almost entirely with his take on the books, especially this bit:

In this final volume there is a good deal of loose-end gathering to be done. Which side was Snape really on? Can Neville Longbottom rise above himself? Are the Malfoys as black as they have been painted? Unfortunately — and with the solid exception of Neville, whose gallantry is well evoked — these resolutions prove to possess all the excitement of an old-style Perry Mason-type summing-up, prompted by a stock character who says, “There’s just one thing I don’t understand. ...”

We, too, were struck by how utterly unsatisfying these various bits of closure and resolution were. So much slogging, such a sustained effort for so little emotional reward. (And yes, we've read them. Our considered opinion? Only the third book is worth a damn.) But where Hitchens really nailed it, and ended up torpedoing the rest of our weekend - so, really, it's his fault you have no literary news here - was when he added this in closing:

(I recommend that they graduate to Philip Pullman, whose daemon scheme is finer than any patronus.)

Which sent us back to our shelves to pull down The Golden Compass. Now, to be entirely fair to Hitchens, we were planning to re-read the His Dark Materials series in advance of this December's film version of The Golden Compass. But it being said dog days, we pulled the book down and have spent the entire weekend absorbed, re-reading this wonderful, wonderful series.

It's been said too often to bear repeating, but His Dark Materials might aptly be called Harry Potter for Smart Kids or Harry Potter with Good Writing. These books are subtle, smart, deviously rebellious and beautifully written. Here's a bit from very early on when we're given a glimpse of wonders to follow:

Lord Asriel put a new slide in the lantern frame. It showed the same scene. As with the previous pair of pictures, many of the features visible by ordinary light were much dimmer in this one, and so were the curtains of radiance in the sky.

But in the middle of the Aurora, high above the bleak landscape, Lyra could see something more solid. She pressed her face to the crack to see more clearly, and she could see the Scholars near the screen leaning forward too. As she gazed, her wonder grew, because there in the sky was the unmistakable outline of a city: towers, domes, walls ... Building and streets, suspended in the air! She nearly gasped with wonder.

One is hard-pressed to find similarly elegant prose in Rowling. At any rate, those who think we're all veddy, veddy serious around here, and those who have criticized us for what they mistake as our disdain for books for children, well, we hope we've thrown you a curve ball as we spend these dog days in the company of the memorable Lyra Belacqua and her friends. If you haven't read Pullman (ably profiled by Laura Miller in the New Yorker in 2005) , it's not to late - you have a month of summer left.

Posted at 12:01 AM in Worthy Titles | Permalink

Comments

I so agree with you -- I love the Pullman books and a re-read sounds lovely ...

Posted by: Dorothy W. | August 13, 2007 at 05:55 AM

I couldn't agree more. During my tenure as a bookseller I would personally try to browbeat every customer who purchased a Harry Potter book into at least looking at Pullman. But every day I would see Potter after Potter fly out the store, while the vastly superior His Dark Materials languished on the shelf. And the movie looks fantastic.

Posted by: semanticdrifter | August 13, 2007 at 09:48 AM

I feel it important to note that I agree more than the previous commenter, but probably not the way that any of you are thinking. In fact, nobody could agree more than me when it comes to agreeing upon things in general. And with this sashay into the silly, I hope we can all put away the phrase "I couldn't agree more" into the same barren wasteland occupied by your cliche of choice.

Posted by: ed | August 13, 2007 at 01:42 PM

"I hope we can all put away the phrase "I couldn't agree more" into the same barren wasteland occupied by your cliche of choice."

You mean, cliches like "barren wasteland"?

Not one of your most constructive comments, amigo.

Posted by: TEV | August 13, 2007 at 01:46 PM

Just to be a needler, I went to Return of the Reluctant and did a search for "i couldn't agree more". Ed is guilty of five uses, the most recent happening last month. But hey, people change.

Posted by: Josh | August 13, 2007 at 07:51 PM

A cliche? I suppose I'm guilty. While recognizing that it is an exercise in futility to defend my use of the tired phrase, I meant that the post had so perfectly articulated my feelings with regard to the case of Rowling v. Pullman that it would not be possible for me to feel any greater sense of personal agreement. I did not mean that someone else was incapable of agreeing with a greater intensity or higher ability to agree with things in general. Far be it from me to impugn your agreeing ability, sir. And I have the utmost respect for your sashaying as well. :)

Posted by: semanticdrfiter | August 13, 2007 at 07:56 PM

The Golden Compass is one of the most enjoyable and best-written books I've ever read. Lyra is a wonderful character, as are Lord Asriel, Mrs Coulter, and the armored bear. The second book in the series is somewhat darker. And then in the third book, as with many trilogies, it all falls apart in noise, haste and confusion. The destination is less enchanting than the journey.

Posted by: zachary ash | August 14, 2007 at 02:25 AM

I too found a great deal of noise, haste, and confusion in the third book but it held together well enough. For me, the series really didn't take off until The Subtle Knife. I loved the first one, but the story didn't come together for me until Lyra met Will because their relationship is the core of the overall story.

Posted by: semanticdrifter | August 14, 2007 at 08:51 AM

Mark: Your irony meter is off. Please get it checked or replaced.

Josh: As for my use of "I couldn't agree more," you are quite right to point out to my five uses. I had hoped that my above admonition would prevent minds as excitable as semanticdrfiter from making the same mistake. It often takes an unfortunate addict to prevent people from straying down the same path.

Posted by: ed | August 15, 2007 at 06:06 PM

Ed: Just had my irony meter serviced. It's fine on all fronts.

Posted by: TEV | August 16, 2007 at 10:16 AM

I like Harry Potter.

Posted by: Patrick Stephenson | August 16, 2007 at 11:16 AM

Know any good 12 step programs? Clich-anon, maybe?

Posted by: semanticdrifter | August 16, 2007 at 01:14 PM

I thought the New York Magazine was a truer review. http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/35534/

Posted by: swhank | August 18, 2007 at 05:53 AM

At the risk of being called a philistine, I must say that the audiobook versions, read by Pullman himself (together with a cast of very capable voice actors), are quite extraordinary. As for the third volume, for all its slackness there are some wonderful things in it. And come on, how many children's books feature gay archangels who just happen to be lovers? Atheism and gay archangels will always win me over.

Posted by: Charlus | August 24, 2007 at 02:33 PM

His Dark Materials is Harry Potter for snobs. The writing may be more flowery, but at the expense of humour, interesting characters and a story to really care about.

If someone could combine Pullman's skill with words with JKR's storytelling ability, that would really be something. In the meantime...

I pick Harry.

Posted by: Celia | September 05, 2007 at 01:51 PM

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen

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Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

With rave reviews from James Wood, Michiko Kakutani and Dwight Garner, it might not seem like we need to tell you to drop everything and go read Netherland, but we are telling you, and here's why: The way book coverage works these days, everyone talks about the same book for about two or three weeks, and then they move on and the book is more or less forgotten. Whereas a berth here in the Recommended sidebar keeps noteworthy titles in view for a good, long time, which is the sort of sustained attention this marvelous novel deserves. A Gatsby-like meditation on exclusion and otherness, it's an unforgettable New York story in which the post 9/11 lives of Hans, a Dutch banker estranged from his English wife, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a mysterious cricket entrepreneur, intertwine. The New York City of the immigrant margins is unforgettably invoked in gorgeous, precise prose, and the novel's luminous conclusion is a radiant beacon illuminating one of our essential questions, the question of belonging. Our strongest possible recommendation.
Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages which separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent. Read the entire review here
Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee

Now, on the one hand, you scarcely need us to alert you to the existence of a new J.M. Coetzee novel, or even to have us tell you it's worth reading. But we can tell you - we insist on telling you that Diary of a Bad Year is a triumph, easily Coetzee's most affecting and fully wrought work since Disgrace. Formally inventive, the book intertwines two narratives with the author's own Strong Opinions, a series of seemingly discrete philosophical and political essays. The cumulative effect of this strange trio is deeply moving and thought provoking. It's increasingly rare in this thoroughly post-post-modern age to raise the kind of questions in fiction Coetzee handles so masterfully - right down to what is it, exactly, that we expect (or need) from our novels. It's telling that, for all of his serious pronouncements on subjects ranging from censorship to pedophilia to the use of torture, it's finally a few pages from The Brothers Karamazov that brings him to tears. Moving, wise and - how's this for a surprise - funny and lightly self-mocking, Diary of a Bad Year might well be the book of the year and Coetzee is surely our essential novelist. We haven't stopped thinking about it since we set it down.
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David Leavitt's magnificent new novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, mathematical autodidact and prodigy who had been working as a clerk in Madras, and who would turn out to be one of the great mathematical minds of the century. Ramanujan reluctantly joined Hardy in England - a move that would ultimately prove to his detriment - and the men set to work on proving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of mathematics' great unsolved problems. The Indian Clerk, an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, encompasses a World War, and boasts a cast of characters that includes Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lytton Strachey. Leavitt renders the complex mathematics in a manner that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, and writes with crystalline elegance. The metaphor of the prime number – divisible only by one and itself – is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn't resemble most so-called "historical fiction." Rather, it's an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self – and how frequently the two are intertwined – that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes. (View our full week of coverage here.)
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*Now in Paperback*

What would you do if the woman who’d left you high and dry ten years ago called out of the blue to invite you to a party without any further explanation? If you’re French, you’d probably spend a lot of time pondering the Deeper Significance Of It All, which is exactly what Grégoire Bouillier does for the 120 hilarious pages of The Mystery Guest. This slim, witty memoir follows Bouillier through the party from hell, and is a case study in Gallic self-abasement. Before it’s all done, you’ll set fire to any turtleneck hanging in your closet and think twice before buying an expensive Bordeaux as a gift. But fear not – just when it seems that all is, indeed, random and pointless and there is no Deeper Significance, salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf, and the tale ends on a note of unforced optimism. Parfait.
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Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

We've been fans of Booker Prize winner John Berger for ages, and we're delighted to have received an early copy of his latest work, Here is Where We Meet. In this lovely, elliptical, melancholy "fictional memoir," Berger traverses European cities from Libson to Geneva to Islington, conversing with shades from his past – He encounters his dead mother on a Lisbon tram, a beloved mentor in a Krakow market. Along the way, we're treated to marvelous and occasionally heart-rending glimpses of an extraordinary life, a lyrical elegy to the 20th century from a man who - in his eighth decade - remains committed to his political beliefs and almost childlike in his openness to people, places and experiences. There's no conventional narrative here, and those seeking plot are advised to look elsewhere. But Here is Where We Meet offers a wise, moving and poetic look at the life of an artist traversing the European century from a novelist whose talent remains undimmed in his twilight years.
Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.

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SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
The Rider by Tim Krabbe

Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

August 13, 2007

DOG DAYS, DARK MATERIALS

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

August 13, 2007

DOG DAYS, DARK MATERIALS

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism