So my first review. First of all, I will not give star ratings, but I find it just too hokey to impose such a simplistic system on something as complicated as a novel. Also, I'm not so interested in writing a review as opening a discussion with some of my FB friends. This has turned out a bit longer than expected so I am putting up on my blog instead.
Let's start with this: for the last six months I have had reader's block. Besides reading the news, I have been unable/unwilling to sink my mind into a good novel. This is something which normally comes quite naturally to me. I began quite late. I didn't much like reading until I was about 11. But since I discovered the Chronicles of Narnia (which I recently reread and found rather awful) in 6th grade I have become a voracious reader.
My main source of pulp as an adolescent was SciFi and Fantasy. So I have at the same time a weakness and a highly critical eye of Literature parading as either. Dorris Lessing and Margaret Atwood have been doing this for years and they do it oh so well. One could argue that Pynchon's novels are a form of fantasy. But there are others who seem to have no grasp of the idea of creating a world apart. Philip K Dick once defined Science Fiction as any story based on some precept which is not true in our world. I like that definition. It gives a great amount of leeway, but I would add that writing good SF&F requires being consistent with those precepts which you have changed. If you are talking about some post-apocalyptic world two thousands years in the future, there should not be any working guns and cans of food just lying around (I'm thinking of Houellebecq). Or if there are, there had better damn well be a reason for it. Of course this is not just true of SF&F, it is true of any story. But for me, these inconsistencies become even more jarring in the context of SF&F. When you are writing about so called reality, there is already a certain cadre which you are constrained to write within. Outside that cadre where anything is possible, those aspects different from reality will stick out. If one then contradicts that change on the next page or chapter, the reader will be more conscious of that change. That makes for unpleasant reading. Also, it doesn't take much craft to change the rules whenever it pleases the author, s/he might as well be one of Borges' monkeys whacking randomly at a typewriter.
A good SFF author has craft. S/he creates a world where there are rules which define how things happen. The rules do not have to be stated obviously (often the case in mediocre SFF); they simply become apparent as the story unfolds. I think that craft is the right word, because on top of any beautiful language (which we can argue is another kind of craft) or great ideas, the craft of story telling is what get to us. The story may be long or short, fragmented or convoluted, new or riffed; but without the story there is no story. That's just my opinion. I love everything post-modern, contemporary, or just plain whacked. But when I put a book down without finishing it, which does not happen often, its usually because I can't find any story worth following.
Many SciFi/Fantasy writers have taken the opposite path going from Pulp to Lit. This is what took me in that direction. There is no artificial line and it's exact location can be difficult to define but the passage does exist. If you look at Moorcock's early books, some them really are crap. I mean crap in terms of writing style. They are Heroic Fantasy novels, and as Heroic Fantasy they are excellent if you're an adolescent who wants to escape from the world of concrete and shopping malls. They are not badly written (like the ultra lame Da Vinci Code which continuously made me want to vomit all over it), but there is nothing in the writing which makes you sit back and take a deep breath and say oh wow to yourself. But as his career continued, there is more and more construction in his writing, until you get to something like Byzantium Endures which just blew me away.
Ok so, enough of all of that. What about The Cloud Atlas? Well I think I'll have to get to that in the next installment. If anyone has any comments about what I said as related to Cloud Atlas or as related to anything else, please feel free ...
