The House of Sight and Shadow

Thoughts on Nicholas Griffin's The House of Sight and Shadow

Having greatly enjoyed Nicholas Griffin’s first novel, The Requiem Shark, I was excited to discover this second novel bearing his name in my local bookshop.  The House of Sight and Shadow (the full equivocal nature of the title is revealed slowly throughout the book) begins as young Joseph Bendix arrives in eighteenth century London hoping to become the apprentice to the talented and notorious anatomist, Sir Edmund Calcraft. Upon their initial meeting, Bendix admits to Calcraft that what compelled him to seek the doctor was his reputation. Bendix relays, “They say that your house is built upon bones, curtains stitched of women’s hair, and pillows sewn of eyelids. They say that you are monster.” This stirred within me an excitement that perhaps this Dr. Calcraft was of a similar moral character as other doctors of literature, such as Victor Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll.

During the first half of the novel, the plot progresses at a deliberate pace, with Griffin teasing the reader with tantalizing morsels of information, introducing foreboding characters such as Mister Sixes, and putting the main character into unusual situations that caused me to question what was really going on and wish for more facts. Unfortunately, the great first half was tarnished by the final third of the story which seemed rushed, with events happening so rapidly that I was left wondering if it was the author’s intent to zip through them, thinking he was bringing the story to an exciting crescendo, or if he had simply run out of time to meet his delivery deadline and was not able to flesh out portions of the story as he may have liked. Especially as the story draws to a close, it seemed the events taking place deserved to spend more time on the page than Griffin allowed. One particular event, similar to another that had consumed an entire chapter earlier, was over in just a couple of pages but was of such monumental importance to the main character that I felt cheated. The event was handled so rapidly, almost thrown away, that it landed with no weight at all when it should have been a huge moment in the story. This seemed to happen several times during the final third of the book, which hampered my enjoyment of the overall experience and brought a novel I was really enjoying to an unsatisfactory conclusion.

Blood River

Thoughts on Tim Butcher's Blood River

I suppose my imagination wrote the adventure I thought I was going to read as I stood in line at my bookstore with Blood River tucked under my arm. When I had read the description printed on the leaf of the front cover, I imagined the author battling his way through the African landscape with a rucksack on his back, a machete in his hand and a mixture of excitement and fear in his heart.

While Blood River, being a story of a man largely using modern transportation methods instead of hoofing it the way the explorer Stanley did, was not what I was expecting, it was still an interesting tale of a man's journey across a country in decline juxtaposed with historical excerpts either discovered through the author's own research or gleaned from the stories told by the locals he met along the way.

I was fascinated by the descriptions of the ruined cities he passed through as once-thriving boom towns of a promising time. I was disappointed, as was the author, to discover that towns that had once been the home of many thousands of people, with paved roads, running water, electricity and the rule of law had degraded into derelict ruins of miserable poverty and hardship. Butcher does a nice job of painting a mental picture of former modern buildings reclaimed by the Congolese wilderness, of a nation with great potential regressing to despotic ways and largely rejected the influences of the modern world.

What struck me as I read through the book was how provisionally unprepared the author seemed to be for his adventure. Surely, he did not expect it to be easy, as his years of pre-journey preparations revealed to him a country at war with itself, with lawless armies of rebels ravaging the countryside, murdering the Congolese and corrupt politicians extorting money from everyone they could intimidate. Even as he set out on the first leg of his trip from the town of Kalemie on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, he had only a few bottles of water and no food save for a handful of energy sweets. I found it staggering that someone intending to cross a country lacking in modern comforts and amenities would decide not to bring any food at all. By his own admission, he intended to rely on the villages he passed along the way for his meals. These are villages whose people are already starving, "skeletal" victims of murderous rampages of the rebels who sweep through an area to kill, rape and plunder and the author thought it would be a good idea to just take his meals from them? One of the frustrations he shares when discussing the history of the explorer Stanley's initial journey in the 1870s was that it jump-started a European policy of white men taking complete advantage of the Congolese people, the Congolese land and all the raw resources it had to offer. For someone who regretted the fact that the white man profited from and savagely mistreated the people of the Congo, it is ridiculous and thoughtless of him to decide he was going to leech his own travel resources from the impoverished people unlucky enough to be in his way.  He also seemed mentally unprepared for what lay before him. Only a day and a half into his journey and already "I no longer had the wits to deal with anything".

Those criticisms aside, Tim Butcher was massively appreciative of the people who helped him along his way. The pygmy Georges Mbuyu, Care International operatives Benoit and Odimba and several others all received their due appreciation and respect from the author.

By the end of the book, I was left feeling sad for the people of the Congo. During the Belgian colonial period, the Congo showed promise. It is a country rich in economic potential with large quantities of diamonds, cobalt, tin and rubber available, if only someone would get organized and responsibly harvest them. Instead, as one UN officer told the author, "[T]he Congo people. They don't want to make money for themselves. They just wait to take money from others." The author's own concern was similarly grim: "The world seems to view the Congo as a lost cause without hope of ever being put right."

While offering a good look at the situation the country is in now, Blood River did not leave me optimistic about its future. I knew little about the Congo before I read this book and while I know I can't take one author's word as law, I at least feel I have a better understanding of a country that I knew only by name a few days ago.

Dan Simmons

I've started reading Dan Simmons' The Terror, a 784-page behemoth about a doomed arctic expedition in the mid-1800s. I've only just begun but I suspect Simmons has penned another amazing novel. Years ago, I read Hyperion, a Simmons science-fiction novel which I'm pretty sure my mother bought for me, and absolutely loved it. After starting The Terror a few days ago, I decided to do a bit of research on the author.

For starters, he is a prolific author, having written novels in science fiction, horror, and pulp crime genres (I just won a signed first edition copy of Hardcase on eBay). Apparently, the man was a successful teacher of gifted sixth-graders in Colorado, having been considered for the Colorado Teacher of the Year Award. His English students were writing at a 12th grade level by the time he was through with them! The curriculum he created for his writing students has been published on his website as a series of articles called "Writing Well", of which I have read the first two installments. The man doesn't mess around. He immediately blasts the empty self-help writing guides that encourage amateurs to dig deep and find that latent creativity that's aching to burst forth. "[Writing] is hard," he cautions, "damned hard. God-damned hard." He then goes on to discuss all the qualities a writer must have before they should even begin to consider putting pen to paper. As I read the list of things I should be, some of which I am not but can still strive for, I began to feel discouraged. It almost seemed insurmountable, hopeless. As I continued reading, however, discouragement became motivation. I found myself wanting to achieve all the things he said a writer had to be:

"Being a writer requires many subsets of skills – including the ability to observe closely and objectively, having a keen ear for language, understanding the structures and protocols of fiction, being a powerfully analytical reader, having the ability to bring fictional structure out of the near-infinite chaos that is reality, being intelligent and well-read, having the courage to be honest about things most of us would prefer to avoid discussing, and, for most writers, receiving a broad formal education even before you begin educating yourself to your own style as a writer."

Being a "powerful analytical reader" is the one that hit me hardest. I am not an analytical reader. At all. When I read a book, I read it for the pure entertainment of it. I never, not since college, deconstruct every sentence, dissect every scene or profile every character. Usually, my thoughts upon the conclusion of a book fall in the range of "I liked it" or "I didn't' like it". Clearly, that has to change if I'm going to pay any attention to what Simmons says in his first lesson. The problem is, I have no idea how to read analytically. In fact, I nearly actively rejected the idea in high school because I felt that, by asking us to analyze the use of every single word, my teachers were sterilizing everything I was reading, taking all the fun out of it. That opinion has changed 180 degrees since then and I now understand what they were trying to show me. I only wish I had been wise enough at that young age to understand it then. Goodness, I came extremely close to saying "if I only knew then...".

I think I've got a decent leg up on the broad education. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a very good school system with talented and patient teachers. My parents, however, gave me an even more valuable education than that. From an early age, I was exposed to a wide array of cultural educational opportunities: live theater, symphonies, opera, ballet, films, a variety of classes including art, music, zoology and oceanography. They encouraged me to read constantly. Every night, thirty minutes before lights out, one of my parents would say, in the same cadence every time, "Time... to go to beeeeeeeeed... and READ!" We took family vacations, during which I pouted much of the time because I thought my whole summer vacation was being lost (in reality, we were never gone for more than a couple weeks, poor baby). We took tours of the American Southwest and American Pacific Coast, during which I got to see Native American cave dwellings, Montezuma's fortress, the majestic redwood forests, miles of lava caves, whitewater river rafting, too many American landmarks to count. I look back on these travels fondly and they instilled in me an interest in seeing new places; I've recently visited Italy, Ireland and England.

I'll have to work on the other stuff. Like any good teacher, Simmons' lessons have excited me and made me want more.