HSU IT Department

Obviously the script has some major issues:

Twenty biggest world history plot holes

I like this one particularly: "13. A plague wipes out vast quantities of Europeans, and then shows up randomly later? Obvious sequel bait." XD

I liked Her Fearful Symmetry quite a bit. It was unexpected in a lot of ways, constantly surprising me by going in directions I did not anticipate, and presenting me with complicated situations and emotions that challenged me to think about things differently. The turn towards darkness was so gradual that I didn't even notice it until all of a sudden I found myself in the midst of the horrifying stuff -- like when the sun starts to go down and it's late afternoon for what seems like hours, and then suddenly it's night.

Written in 1912, The Favor of Kings is possibly the earliest novelization of the life of Anne Boleyn, ill-fated second wife of Henry VIII. Bradley's Anne is passionate and lively but also young and headstrong and proud. She initially enters into her relationship with Henry partly out of awe for THE KING! and partly out of a hot desire to revenge herself on those who have insulted and hurt her, seeing him as her path to power at court. She does so with a certain innocence about his character, without fully understanding the consequences, and once in she has no idea how to extricate herself. Once she has begun, she has no choice but to see it through. In this she is probably closer to the real Anne than many later incarnations, which attempt to turn her into either a scheming witch or a religious reformer. (As a side note, the author is the mother of noted science fiction author James Tiptree / Alice Sheldon.)

I think I liked Tours of the Black Clock, but I'm not at all sure that I understood it. The writing is compelling, almost hypnotic -- I found it difficult to put down -- but I always felt as if the actual meaning was hidden just around the next corner. Or as if the true meaning had trickled out of the sentences just before I got there, leaving only enough shape to hint (or misdirect?) as to what was going on. Mulholland Drive meets Jorge Luis Borges meets The Guns of the South?

This is a story about...well, I'm not just sure. It's about Geli Raubal (but not the real one). It's about Dania, a woman who isn't Geli Raubal (except sort of, in someone else's head). It's about Banning Jainlight, who is in love with Dania (or maybe he just invents her). It's about Jainlight's pornographic stories about Dania (or maybe they're true stories of his love affair with her). It's about "the most evil man in the world," i.e. Hitler, who is obsessed with Jainlight's porn about Dania because in his head it's about Geli Raubal, (and who ends up a sad, pathetic, senile old man). It's about Marc, the son of Hitler and Dania, or maybe Jainlight and Dania, or maybe just Dania herself (or maybe he's fictional too).

All these people cross back and forth between realities, or maybe between reality and unreality, in a weird braiding of time and space. Some of them seem to have doppelgangers, or alternate versions of themselves, like Jainlight/Blaine, or Dania/Geli; sometimes their worlds intersect or bleed into one another; sometimes one is the other's dream. It's never clear what's real and what isn't. The most extreme example may be the silver buffalo, which you'd think pretty much have to be a metaphor since they come perpetually pouring out of a black cave and some people can't even see them, but yet they're substantial enough to trample Dania's mother to death in Africa and rampage through the streets of Davenhall Island off the coast of Washington state. Are they the hours and minutes of one reality pouring out into another?

But the book is also about love and hate and cruelty and pity and obsession and fear and loneliness and forgiveness and good and evil. The main character, Jainlight, refers to Hitler as the most evil man in the world, and about himself and occasionally the entire twentieth century as irredeemably evil, but I ended up thinking that this book is much more about the redemptive power of love/forgiveness, although it's sort of tucked into the corners of the story as it were. I don't know what Erickson's intent was, but I ended up feeling desperately sad for every single person in this story, even crazy senile pathetic old man Hitler.

If all of this makes it sound like the book is strange and puzzling and perhaps unsettling, that's good because it is. Don't let that stop you from reading it. But don't expect a straightforward narrative: it's more like a spiral or a double helix or one of those complicated Spirograph patterns.

(NB: I have to admit the metaphor of the "black clock" was entirely lost on me -- no idea what that was meant to be about. Why black? Why a clock? What is this about numbers falling? Why is Marc listening for ticking icebergs at the end??)

The New York Times said, "Some novels are almost impossible to review, either because they’re deeply ambiguous or because they contain big surprises the reviewer doesn’t wish to give away."

I'm not so sure about the surprises -- other than one particular thing near the end, it wasn't too difficult to see what was coming, although some of the events were decorated with surprising details. However, there's no question about the ambiguity. (Which strikes me as a rather oxymoronic thing to say, but there you go.) Even after the last page, one still isn't quite sure what happened and what only seemed to have happened.

I have a love/hate relationship with Oates. I've read very few of her books -- more of her short stories -- because almost every one I've read has left me deeply uneasy. I read "Where are you going, where have you been" five years ago, and just remembering it still creeps me out to this day. Obviously this is the mark of a skilled writer, but I don't generally choose my books for the purpose of psychically scarring myself. In addition, she has a tendency to focus on the dark side, and as a result it's often difficult to like any of the characters in her novels. They're just not very nice people, many of them.

This book has many of the elements I love, though, so I thought I'd give it a shot. First and foremost, it's a purported history, replete with excerpts from letters, diaries (including coded ones!), newspaper articles, transcribed eyewitness accounts, and a boatload of historical detail intermixed with straight narrative. Oates does an excellent job creating the very different voices of the writers of these various "primary sources" -- I particularly enjoyed the semi-coherent ramblings of the neurotic Adelaide Burr, who refers to herself as "Puss," reads Madame Blavatsky in secret, and has some serious issues with sex. The narrator himself, one M. W. van Dyck, is great fun, an unreliable raconteur prone to digress into irrelevancies (the history of corsets, the minutiae of Princeton politics) at the drop of a hat. Like all too many writers, he clearly wanted to jam every single bit of his research into his book; in fact, he spends several paragraphs listing all the things he had to leave out.

Second, the story is intricately woven into actual history through the use of real people (Upton Sinclair, Woodrow Wilson, Grover Cleveland, Jack London, various faculty at Princeton University), places (Princeton University, New York City) and events of the times (Socialists, anarchists, etc.). None of them are particularly pleasant people, but they are real.

Third, it's got solid Victorian gothic chops: a demon bridegroom, huge grand homes, a beautiful innocent young girl, a vicar with a secret, a competition with the devil (or possibly just a minor demon, it's hard to say), an exotic and mysterious European nobleman, murder, suicide, madness and more. All that and a surprisingly high body count. (Like the House of Usher, the doomed Slades don't seem to have much of a future, although that too is ambiguous.)

On the down side, most of the characters aren't very likable and the supernatural parts end up playing second fiddle to the real villains: the upper classes, who can't be bothered to speak out against racism, prejudice, poverty, hideous working conditions, the second-class treatment of women, and other societal ills (although the narrator himself doesn't seem to even notice this, which is kind of amusing).

And it's very, very long.

So be patient, Constant Reader, and expect to enjoy the journey as much as -- perhaps more than -- the destination.

Wow, talk about decadence. Just finished Anthony Burgess' Kingdom of the Wicked, about the Roman Empire during the first years of Christianity. (To give myself extra immersion, I also watched the old Masterpiece Theatre series I, Claudius in my spare time -- Patrick Stewart as a Very Sexy Evil Guy with hair!! Mr Ollivander as mad emperor Caligula!! Squee!! -- and tried to think in Latin. I am apparently a method reader.)

Anyhoo, the book was great fun. The history of Christianity as told by...perhaps P. J. O'Rourke? Or Bill Bryson? Here's a sample, about Paul and his efforts to convert the men of Ephesus, a hotbed of goddess worship. The craftsmen who make the little icons of Diana/Artemis are none too pleased with this idea:

So Demetrius and some of his fellow craftsmen held a meeting in Demetrius' workshop the following morning. This was a large shed full of fires, where some men poured molten metal into moulds and others cracked cold moulds open to reveal the smirking godlingess. Demetrius said:

"Look, friends, this is our trade. This is how we make our money."

"In your instance, a lot of money."

Demetrius ignored that. "We're all involved in the worship of the goddess, blessed be her holy name and sacred influence. This man Paul is telling everybody that there's no such thing as gods made by hand. Before we know where we are he'll have the damned temple pulled down and the traffic stopped."

"Traffic?"

"You know what I mean. The holy pilgrimages from all over Greece and Asia. This is our bread, friends."

"He's blaspheming against precious metal. So we --?"

"Stop him."

Thus it was that Paul and some of his fellow Christians were dragged to the Ephesian temple by the militant guild of silversmiths, aided by a rabble that did not need to be hired, for the gratuitous manhandling of foreigners is always both a virtue and a pleasure in provincial towns where, anyway, there is little to do in the evenings. Silas, fearful in the ruddy flare of the torches, seeing the mound of the goddess' huge belly threatening twenty feet above his eyes, panicked in the belief that they were to be sacrificed to her, Christian blood to be smeared laboriously over her polymastic or multimammial rotundity. He began to hit out...The mob, always suggestible, hit out too in the same directions, and one brawny lad shouted to Paul, "That's right, give to these impious Cretans or whatever they do be called!"

Heeeee. It's all (so far as I can tell) accurate historically in terms of events, but the dialog and attitudes were great fun. Not that Paul and the rest of the apostles aren't sincere, just that they're a bit muddle-headed; for example, everyone's puzzled when Paul starts to get suspicious of women (heh, go figure).

So next I'm going to tackle Gore Vidal's Julian, a historical novel about the Emperor Julian's changes to Christianity some 300 years later. With all this Roman stuff I feel I should be nibbling grape leaves. I have drunk a lot of wine lately, does that count?