The Gratitude of Kings (1997)

     I had some knowledge of Thieves' World as early as the mid-1980s.  Probably had something to do with the fact that Chaosium did the RPG for the setting and I was purchasing – more properly, my parents were purchasing at my insistence – ElfQuest RPG materials from the same company at the time.  I don't think I read much more than a couple of excerpts from stories from the world, though.  But it didn't stick enough in my memory for me to be searching out Thieves' World material now.  No, I came to read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Gratitude of Kings (1997) because it was at the library, looked short, and I found out who Bradley was in reading How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction (1987).  Clearly, I should have known who she was as I was familiar with some of her works (that they exist, not that I read them), but it is never to late to get started.
     While The Gratitude of Kings is officially listed as a short story, I have chosen to treat it as a novella.  First, it has its own stand alone hardcover book.  Second, and more importantly, it would still be close to sixty pages as a trade paperback, which I am willing to accept as being just past my comfort zone for a short story.  This information really only means something to me and how I'm counting what I've read this year, but now you know that there are some internal debates when the material can be judged two different ways.
     Jumping into an established setting with established characters isn't always a pleasant experience, but Bradley has an easy writing style and a comforting sense of humor.  It doesn't feel like she is working at explaining what has gone before while allowing the new reader to know that, yes, much has already happened.  If I have a complaint – and I always do – it would be that Bradley has a fondness of fantasy names that are confounding to pronounce and keep happily in one's mind.  I was thankful when she introduced characters like Princess Velvet and the weredragon, Beauty.  Those are names with which I don't have to struggle, but they still keep the illusion of a functioning fantasy world.
     This story is a rather small one, with a spellcaster answering a King's request to be present at a Royal wedding.  There is a cursed magical instrument, a contest of magical arts, a murder, and the general message that a woman can usually count on a man to get the big picture wrong.  That last part doesn't come across as angry or painting with a broad brush, but specific to the situation and in keeping with the humor of the tale.
     Bradley has much more famous and successful work, but I would suspect that I would be happier with her lighter Thieves' World material.  I could be wrong; that wouldn't be the end of the world.  But at least I do know that I need to make an effort to seek out some more Bradley for next year's Reading Project.

Muse of Fire (2007)

     There are some dangers in choosing a book off the shelf (in this case, the shelf of the Forest Park Public Library) largely because it looks like it could be read in a single day.  I did finish it before I made it home on the return trip, so I can find some level of comfort that I didn't need to spend multiple days with this Dan Simmons novella.
     Muse of Fire (2007) is over populated with underdeveloped characters, and even underdeveloped alien beings. Much of the supposed description of the characters is really a chance for Simmons to give some (universally positive) opinions on Shakespeare and Shakespearean actors. Never mind that there is an Earth with no oceans but constant rain and overcast skies (which offends my limited knowledge of functional climates and meteorology), Simmons truly tries the reader's patience with his weak, often off-to-the-side narrator, Wilbr.  Seriously, the story is told by an actor who wants to spend his time telling the reader how much better most of the other actors are.  And those are characters that have little or no other traits.
     This novella felt preachy and uninformed. The only good thing I have to say is that it didn't take long to read, but if an aggressive editor had been able to get his or her hands on it, Muse of Fire easily could have been 50 pages shorter (and thus a possibly compelling short story).  I wish that there was more to say, but there really isn't.  While I am appreciative that Simmons can write in a shorter format than most of his novels (which can run over 900 pages, and average 500+), I think that he has not mastered the format to any degree.  Also, given the listed price of the book ($30, $60 if it was a signed copy), I have to think that Muse of Fire saw most of its sales from the remainder table.

The Pearl (1945)

     John Steinbeck's novella The Pearl (1945) was one of those books assigned in 6th or 7th grade (please excuse my memory; it is scarily specific on things that absolutely don't matter but failing on anything that pertains to my earlier education).  I may have read it completely back then.  I have an odd feeling that I read both The Pearl and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952) in the same year for the same class – and finished both – but I more clearly remember almost finishing The Grapes of Wrath (1939) in 7th grade and considering that an accomplishment at the time.  Anyway, I had some familiarity with The Pearl.
     There is nothing subtle or nuanced in Steinbeck's novella.  In that regard, it is proper fare to be assigned to 12-13 year olds – especially if the teacher giving the assignment is hellbent on the students finding and analyzing the symbols and tone of the piece.  However, for an adult – and one who doesn't have to give a detailed report proving that he gets what the author is saying – it is somewhat frustrating.   
     The Pearl presents Mexico, or at least its localized region, less critically than Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory did.  Sure, Steinbeck gets points for expressing the type of internalized colonialism that sets the elites against the natives, but that point seems lost in his greater picture of self-destructive greed.  Indeed, it is lost completely when the elites lose only hired hands and potential immediate profit – nothing real to them; there will always be more money to be made and people to be hired to do the dirty work that passes for business.  Steinbeck doesn't need a proto-Communist Revolution to place the well being of his characters in danger.  The danger is as real and as present as the human condition, but it is revealed along the way in such heavy handed prose that it doesn't read as those it was intended for a sophisticated audience.
     While making that criticism, I will fully own the fact that the least of Steinbeck's fiction is undoubtedly better crafted than the best of mine.  In this instance, however, too much of his is awkward.  The description of the action scenes seems to take the reader away from the story and its meaning.  The lack of familiarity between the pearl divers and the villagers, while plausible, doesn't paint the picture of two sets of beings inhabiting the same space.  Worst, the most important scene in the book is glossed over with no reasonable explanation for how it actually happened given that the description of where characters were before the event would render it impossible. 
     The Pearl presents an insanely simple story, but it takes a long time to tell it (for it being so simple).  Yes, greed is bad; it can corrupt a person if all he or she does is want for more.  But Steinbeck tries to play some false nobility into being so poor and ignorant as to not know that one is being exploited, that surviving and being happy with squalor is better than aspiring for something more if it means that there are moments of unhappiness and it restricts the gain of others. 
     Still, it is an easy and quick read.  I started it on my train ride into the city and finished it on the train ride home, with about 15 minutes to spare.  I would recommend The Power and the Glory over The Pearl, because it is a much better book and has more mature points to be made.  I prefer my tales not be structured so black and white, but I understand why Steinbeck wrote this that way.

Heart of Darkness (1899)

     For some reason, I cannot seem to warm up to the writing style of Joseph Conrad.  It isn't just that he is obviously in love with the relationship between man and ship (or boat, if the waterway is too small to accommodate a ship), though having not been raised in the Victorian Age of the British Empire – or a contemporary witness to it – the Sea and its ways holds little mythic power over me.  It seems to be more in relation to his needing to spend too much time to make too subtle an allusion to the point he is desperately trying to make.  And like with "The Secret Sharer" (1910) – the short story that was bundled with Heart of Darkness (1899) in the Signet Classics book I purchased half a decade ago – Heart of Darkness spends too much time being about man and ship instead of the nature of man.
     That is not to say that Heart of Darkness is without point.  There is something pure in Conrad's exploration of the nature of colonialism, especially in Africa.  However, he wrote the story at the tail end of the 19th Century, before the machinery of real destruction could be brought to bear on the Dark Continent.  I read it in the 21st Century, after having taken a post-Colonial period Africa history class (taught by an honest-to-God African who was wounded in a civil war largely created by the actions of the English while lording over the locals).  The book is not going to mean the same thing to me that it would before the Colonial Period came to an end.  Add to that the fact that I have Apocalypse Now (1979) as a competing format of exploring the same concepts.
     Lets face it – the absurdity of a benevolent war is a far riper target than the criticism of treating Africans as property at the beginning of the 20th Century; I would wager most Europeans didn't regard the Africans as people, per se.  Having Colonel Kilgore herding scared villagers into an amphibious APC – a metal monster of sorts – while the announcement, in English, repeats that the US Army is there to return the people to the bosom of the government of South Vietnam.  For good measure, the Army is going to burn the village to the ground just to show how serious they are about saving the people.  That scene captures the madness of what is going on (for Apocalypse Now) better than anything Conrad could craft for Heart of Darkness.  Yes, he has Marlow describe disparate scenes that show how enterprise is not directed in a proper European fashion, but he seems to walk away from the underlying point so that he can ruminate more on boats.
     Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness, isn't even really a character.  He is an objective.  There is no reason why Marlow comes to imagine him as a voice dwelling at a native temple upriver (but it is good imagery).  What is much worse, Kurtz's famous last lines – "The horror!  The horror!" – don't have nearly the depth of meaning that they should, and that is because there is no real interaction with the man.  Kurtz's story becomes lost in the fretting over a new breed of morality that may have taken root back in Europe and Marlow is seen in country as a threat of things to come.  But nothing is ever to come.
     There is something profound in the grave concern over the letters and such of Kurtz being tied directly to gaining access to his strategy to better exploit the region.  Conrad hints at what Kurtz had been up to – certainly it would not be an easy topic of conversation amongst the men who thought of themselves as civilized – but he doesn't let the terribleness of it sink in, immediately shifting focus to the effort to leave the area, and for Marlow to get back to London.
     Oftentimes I complain about how a movie will take excellent source material and ruin it because the writer(s) and director are sure that they (or he or she) can do better.  In the case of Apocalypse Now, I think John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola exceeded the source material.  That is not to ignore some of the indulgences of the film, or how it is essentially tied to the war instead of a prevailing view towards others who live on the land you want to despoil; Heart of Darkness is more timeless, but its understanding of its own underlying economy seems wanting.  Where Conrad does not give his Kurtz his due in explaining how he fosters a cult of personality, Apocalypse Now sets the stage so that there could be no other conclusion of Kurtz being cut-off from command.
     Okay, I'm aware that I am being a special kind of ass when I purposely conflate the novella and the film.  I would prefer the reason be that Conrad simply was unable to convey the true depredations and inhumanity of European colonialism (especially in the Congo), but it is much more likely that the imprint the film had on a much younger me predisposes me toward favoring it.  The Colonel sending soldier out to surf during combat speaks more of madness to me than the aimless blasting away at the cliff face or recklessness with material supplies of the novella.  Then again, the movie is from my culture.  It should speak directly to me.
     Of the literature I've read in the year and a half of the Reading Projects, Heart of Darkness was probably my least favorite (though it is nowhere near as difficult a read as Beowulf was).  I am certainly in no hurry to read any Conrad in the near future.  Still, I have heard good things about both The Inheritors (1901) and Nostromo (1904) – the former a collaboration with Ford Madox Ford, whose The Good Soldier () is currently on the to read list – so I cannot rule out more Conrad altogether.  But I do know that there is something in the style that doesn't sit right with me.  Maybe I have been spoiled by the short, strong, masculine sentences that Hemingway helped usher into fashion.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

     Should I admit that I have seen Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde (1995) with Tim Daly and Sean Young multiple times?  Or that my enduring image of Edward Hyde comes from The Impatient Patient (1942), a Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon?  I guess that is my way of saying that while I have been immensely familiar with the idea behind The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) – and I knew the title well enough to have thrown a fit when a contestant on Jeopardy! (1984-present) was credited with a correct answer while leaving "The Strange Case of" off the title – I had never gotten around to reading it.
     Robert Louis Stevenson's novella is rather brief, and it does not disclose much of the activity of Edward Hyde.  Instead, it functions as a precursor to the modern investigative thriller with a lawyer as the protagonist (see the works of John Grisham or Scott Turow).  Stevenson does not escape the device of having a character recount a lengthy story – the final two chapters function in this manner – but he doesn't lean on it like a crutch or drain the suspense away from the tale when using the device.  For the most part (and maybe this isn't surprising to those who have read Stevenson), he writes in something very similar to a modern style.
     However, I did learn that Hyde is almost always misrepresented in film.  Stevenson represents him as a hirsute man of diminished stature and bearing, and younger in appearance as Jekyll had not fed his selfish, malignant character as he had filled his nominally good self with a life well lived.  Movies tend to make Hyde into a gigantic mass of muscle and rampaging destruction.  Stevenson seemed to picture him as a slight, though powerful man with animalistic gait and savagery.  Hyde represented the seed of evil given form, and as such it was necessarily smaller than the whole from which it sprung. 
     I liked this story.  It was far better than the film versions I have seen, though I will freely admit that adapting this faithfully would result in a slow moving, cerebral movie.  Stevenson doesn't quite invest it in the investigation of morality or self-control to which I became accustomed in my philosophy or psychology classes, but I would be wrong to expect it from him.  There is a compelling investigation here, and the threat of what madness (of a sort) can inflict on both the self and others.  Ultimately, I feel stupid for not having read it before now.

Blockade Billy (2010)

     Impressed with Steven King's ability to inject an interesting character study into his zombie story "Home Delivery", I decided to give him another chance.  However, Blockade Billy (2010) was probably the wrong choice if I wanted to be impressed.  It is unbelievably short – a short story claiming novella status by virtue of font size and spacing – and the version I checked out from the library did not have the bonus story "Morality". 
     King relates the improbable story of a baseball player removed from the game and record books after one month in the 1957 season.  The player, the titular Blockade Billy Blakely, is called up to play for the fictional Newark Titans (there are Newark Titans at the Ohio State University and the New Jersey Titans are a Women's Spring Football team).  He is an odd duck but one hell of a baseball player.  The entirety of the tale is told as though it is being related to King by the retired Third Base Coach from that team.
     There isn't much in the story.  It is breezy, maybe a little too much so.  King doesn't quite know what kind of story he wants to tell and is quick to go back to peppering in plenty of curse words to fill out the dialogue (something I first noticed when reading his short stories over 20 years ago).  It appears as though King had an idea for a story – and didn't want it to be any kind of horror – but couldn't quite find the human angle.  The reflective observations about what may have been the motivation for Blockade Billy to do what he did felt forced, as though King wanted to have a moral to the story.  I don't think it needed one, not if he had committed to developing it in a manner that would have engaged the reader in the strange month long odyssey of the team.
     I am glad I didn't invest 1,000 pages in a King book to get something like this, but as it was an insanely quick read I am not complaining.  I do think that this story could have been left to sit and be revisited when King had a better idea of what he wanted to do with it; he certainly doesn't need to put out books to put food on the table these days.  There are a couple of King stories I do want to read, and I hope they are betting than Blockade Billy, but I have read worse from established authors.  And much worse from people like myself who can only aspire to be authors.