The Remains of the Day

Mr Stevens is a butler, living and working in Darlington Hall, serving an American, Mr Farraday, who has recently bought the property. Before that, he served Lord Darlington for many years. This story is Stevens' reminiscences of his life as a butler, told as he takes a driving tour across the south of England to visit a former work colleague.

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day is slow, beautiful, and haunting. It is told in the first person by Stevens, and is written as though Stevens is addressing a fellow butler. He ponders the nature of his duties as a butler, his professionalism, and what it is that makes a truly great butler. Stevens is always professional, almost robotic at times, and yet his humanity leaks through the corners of his story, and there is a real sadness to the way his life has unfolded. At the same time, there is much humour in his interactions with others - one thread of the story is his repeated failed attempts at humour, and trying to learn to "banter". It is set in the 1950s, and Stevens is a man struggling against the changing world, a world in which the rigid class hierarchies of pre-war England are falling apart. He felt much more at home serving Lord Darlington before the war, when Lords and servants knew their places. It's a fascinating glimpse into a very different world to our own.

This novel won the 1989 Booker prize, and continues the theme of Booker prize winners being sad stories of people whose lives have gone wrong. Is sadness intrinsically more powerful, more beautiful than happiness? I hope not, and yet I'm still waiting to read a Booker prize winner where people are happy.

Blindsight

Peter Watts' Blindsight was suggested to me by a friend at work, when I was waxing lyrical about Charles Stross's science fiction - he had similar opinions about Watts' work. And I have to agree that Blindsight is an extremely smart novel. In a lot of ways it is more a meditation on the nature of sentience and consciousness than it is a novel. It looks closelt at the latest neuroscience to try to examine what it is to be sentient - why it is we are self-aware, and what that means. It does this by involving the characters in first contact with an alien race - one of the more convincingly alien races I have read about.


It's less convincing as a story than it is as a vehicle for ideas. The characters are unlikeable and emotionally damaged in many ways. I got most of the way through the book before I could tell two of them apart - whenever they were mentioned, I had to stop to try and work out which of the two was being talked about. The descriptions of the various spacecraft were quite confusing as well - the geometry of the main spaceship, the Theseus, was frequently discussed throughout the book, as the characters moved through it, but I still couldn't picture it.

Even so, it's a worthwhile read. I don't think I've been pushed to think about these things quite so hard by any novel before. It's particularly interesting with respect to my studies - these issues are important to understanding the ways that people create knowledge - we have a lot of theories, but we still don't really understand how people learn. To understand how people learn is not only a neuroscientific issue; it is about what makes us who we are, and what the self is.

Redshirts

John Scalzi's Redshirts is a very clever play on the old joke about Star Trek's Redshirts - the security officers who always get killed off when a mission is sent down to a planet from the Enterprise. It's always been another name for "cannon fodder" among nerdfolks that I know. The premise of the novel is that a group of junior staff on the starship Intrepid start to realize that there seems to be an unusual rate of death on away missions, and start to piece together that they are extras in a badly written sci-fi show. It plays out the results of this realization from a number of perspectives, and ends up both clever and touching. It's a nice quick read, and worth picking up.

The Last Ringbearer

The Last Ringbearer is based on the premise that The Lord of the Rings was a history written by the victors, to make them look noble and justified in their actions. It is written as a revisionist history of the events following the War of the Ring.

It's a very different picture. Mordor had been a peaceful civilization, developing technology and on the verge of an industrial revolution. Barad-Dur was a thriving city of poets, writers, and intellectuals. Then the traditionalist forces of the west, spearheaded by Gandalf, pushed Gondor and Mordor into war. It's very well done - the author has an excellent knowledge of Tolkien's world, and the War of the Ring, but paints an entirely new picture.

The main characters are Haladdin, a human Field Medic in the Mordorian army; Tzerlag, an Orcish scout, and Tangorn, a Gondorian noble. They are given a mission to try to stop the Elves from dominating middle-earth, so that humans, orcs, and trolls can live peacefully together and progress towards a technological civilization.

As a novel, it's a bit clunky in places; parts of it are somewhat anachronistic, even given the premise that it a modernistic, revisionist take on the Lord of the Rings. Parts are a bit difficult to follow - when the various secret services are battling it out in Umbar, I found it somewhat difficult to work out who was on which side. But, as a huge Tolkien fan since my early teens, I found it a fascinating take on the story, and I'll find it hard to think about Tolkien's world in the same way again.

The original is in Russian, by Kirill Eskov. It has been translated into English, and is downloadable here: http://ymarkov.livejournal.com/280578.html. It's a fan translation - the author apparently has no intention to publish an official english translation, due to the litigious nature of the Tolkien estate. It's a sad indictment of modern copyright law that a work like this can't be published - LOTR has become a part of our culture's shared imagination, and these laws prevent us building freely on these shared ideas.

The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood is a writer who rarely fails to amaze. The Blind Assassin is a very cleverly put together story. Or rather, set of stories. It's like a russian doll, with stories nested within stories, narrators of varying degrees of reliability. It comes across as fairly straightforward initially, but the more you think about it, the more complexity you realize there is. It seemed like a rather dull book until about half way through, when I started to realize there was something tricky going on.

It's the story of the Chases, a well to do family in the fictional Port Ticonderoga, Canada. Iris Chase, now 83, is writing the story of her family, addressing it to her granddaughter. There are several dark secrets that lurk in this family, the reasons behind the various tragedies that have unfolded over the last sixty years. But it's not quite clear until right at the end who is responsible, and why these things happened.

It's also the story of Iris's dying days, as she writes this memoir; and interspersed through Iris's recollections is another story, the story of a torrid affair, of secret meetings and stolen moments of passion; and within that the tale of the blind assassin and the mute girl he loves is told, negotiated between the two lovers. All these weave together in a complicated fashion, and nothing is revealed before its time.

I've made sure that the next book I'll be reading isn't anywhere near as intimidatingly clever as this one - I need a bit of a rest after this. But I'll definitely be reading more Atwood in the future.

Tales of Dunk and Egg

Now I've officially run out of A Song of Ice and Fire reading - George R. R. Martin's Tales of Dunk and Egg is a series of three novellas set in the same world as A Game of Thrones, 90 years earlier (three novellas counts as a novel, right?).

It's the Tale of Ser Duncan the Tall (Dunk), a Hedge Knight who grew up as a street urchin in the city of Kings Landing; and Aegon Targaryen (Egg), 5th or so in line to the throne of Westeros, who decides to become Dunk's squire. It's a nice little series of tales, much less dark and gritty than than A Game of Thrones and the other novels in the main series.

These novellas shows the depth of Martin's world building - many lords, knights, commoners, and other folk are mentioned, and many are related to people in ASoIaF. But it's not done in a shonky Star Wars style "everyone from the original trilogy who might have been alive 20 years earlier has an important part to play"; it's just that people have ancestors, and if you're a noble, chances are 90 years earlier that your family were nobles. These stories flesh out the history, and show another side to the Targaryens and many other families who appear in the novels.

I'm glad to read that Martin is planning to write more of these novellas - the series will either be six or twelve novellas, apparently.

Roma Eterna

I do like a good alternative history book. Especially when it's do do with Roman history. Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna is more a series of short stories in a single alternate history than a novel, and it traces a parallel history where the Roman Empire never fell. The point of divergence is the Exodus - in this world, the Exodus failed, and Pharaoh recaptured the Israelites and kept them in slavery. The rest of european history stayed mostly the same, but Christianity didn't happen. The knock-on effects meant that the Western Roman Empire didn't collapse.

The divergence is explained by two scholars in the opening story, and then the book moves on. Each story is related to a key event in the history of this alternate Rome, moving forward over the centuries, to the final story, set in 1970.

If you like Roman history, you'll enjoy this book. I certainly had a hard time putting it down - I read it over the course of a few days. It feels reasonably true to Roman culture, though I took issue with a number of things, including: the strange coincidence between the dates of particular events in our timeline and the timeline of the book; the stasis of Roman culture and religion over the centuries (implying that the author felt that Christianity, for example was a unique phenomenon, rather than just the best contender at that time for a societal niche that was sitting empty); the emergence of Islam (which is really a syncretion of Judaism, Christianity, and local Arabian superstitions, and so wouldn't have emerged in any similar way in this timeline).

Many of the episodes in the book are very entertaining, and it is an interesting alternate history. However, it feels a little distopian; I'm not sure I'd want to live in that world, dominated by that Roman Empire. Surely over the centuries a little of the democratic theory developed by the Greeks would have taken effect, and Rome's semi-democratic republican past would have resurfaced, particularly once an industrial revolution happened. I've seen it argued (Hobsbawm, maybe?) that the conditions of relative economic and intellectual freedom that existed in Britain were a necessary catalyst for an industrial revolution - that despite the relevant technological preconditions existing in other places earlier, the lack of sufficient economic incentives for innovation meant that revolutions just didn't happen. A fun read, regardless. I should probably read more of Silverberg's books; I've enjoyed both of those I've read.