Maria McCann: “As Meat Loves Salt”
A long and uncomfortable read. It asks you to place yourself in the shoes of a truly despicable protagonist – to sympathise with him, even, as he commits innumerable crimes against those he purports to love. I’ve not read a novel that so successfully manages to get you to embrace the mind of a piece of shit like this since Nabokov’s Lolita, and that’s high praise from me indeed.
The prose is engaging, the perspective voice is strong, the setting is visceral, the unreliable narration is just enough to peer through the veil, and the protagonist toes the line between self-absorbed and self-punishing in a way that makes his repetitive violations compelling. His inability to learn from his own mistakes, as well as the duality of his moral failings vs his moral qualms, played as very well-realised internal conflict.
I will say that the depiction of schizophrenia felt quite textbook in a way that made me feel like the author treated the diagnostic criteria like a checklist, but I also don’t think it intruded on the story in any significant way, so…
Recommended.
Christopher Buehlman: “Between Two Fires”
This book was initially missold to me as a dark fantasy about morally complicated people seeking redemption for past crimes, both by other readers and by the blurb. Having this expectation as I read, I got annoyed at how badly the book was exploring that idea, and was all set to drop it.
However, something about the book kept me hanging on, until I realised that this isn’t a book about redemption at all: it’s a religious fable about a disillusioned, self-hating, suicidal knight who wants to do good deeds but feels like it’s pointless in an evil world, and who, over the course of the novel, learns to find hope again. And, if you look at it though that lens, it’s very neat!
I won’t say it’s subtle. It’s not. The characters, Matthieu aside, were thuddingly basic. There were several moments where I thought the writing was hamfisted and the themes a bit too obvious. The horror wasn’t very horrifying to me, although I did enjoy some isolated visuals – the malformed, corrupted icons in Paris were a great aesthetic.
But, well, it’s a religious fable, and it reads like one, so I can’t hold it any of this against the book too much. It’s what it is, and I think it’s worth reading with that in mind.
…Seriously, though – bring back Matthieu.
Recommended.
Stephen R. Donaldson: “Lord Foul’s Bane”
I went into this unaware of the controversy surrounding it. When I reached That Scene, I, knowing when this book was published, wondered how it was received… And found myself baffled by the sheer virulence of the hatred towards it.
I thought it was tastefully written, in fact: it was brief, respectfully described in vague terms, and makes perfect sense for the mental and emotional space the protagonist–Thomas Covenant–occupies. He carries the guilt with him throughout, and it’s treated with the gravitas it deserves. It seemed, to me, to be an appropriate way to confront Thomas’s struggle with the “realness” of the Land, as well as with his own self-image following his diagnosis of leprosy.
Which brings me to Thomas’s writing more widely. To be honest, I loved him. He’s wracked with a fascinating blend of insecurity, shame, and ego, and following along with him as he tries to grapple with what initially appears to be a morally simplistic world that he’s struggling to believe is real despite himself is great fun.
I also liked how his leprosy fed into his struggles, too. His conception of himself as a leper, tied into how alienated from society he is in our world, and how that ties into his wilful denial of the Land’s reality is great. So much of his life had been ruined by his diagnosis, and having it be negated so easily in the Land takes away so much of what’s defined his life. Who is he, if not a leper? What does it say about him that his liberation from leprosy manifests as violence against an innocent?
In contrast to Jacob from As Meat Loves Salt, Thomas feels like a good person at his core – a good person who, in his confusion at whether or not the Land was real, committed a heinous crime, was then beset by conflicts: his sense of morality vs realism, his crumbling undernearth the prophetic demands of the Land, his insecurities brought from our Earth, his retrospective on his crimes, his struggles with pacifism against Drool’s minions…
As for the rest of the book, I loved that, too. I wasn’t too keen on the prose at first, and felt it was a bit shaky in the beginning, but it started to come into its own a third of the way through the book. Donaldson describes the Land with a sincere earnestness that compelled me; the way he talks about the Fire Lions and the Blood Moon and the way Drool senses him through his shadows in particular are all captivating.
Recommended.