Review: The Turn of the Screw

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The success of airport fiction (Lee Child, P.D. James, etc) speaks to the appetite for books that read like movies. I've certainly read more than my fair share of them, and I won't pretend I don't love them.

But great writing can be more than a succession of scenes and dialogue, as is the case in The Turn of the Screw. Henry James tells the story through feeling, thought, intuition, intangible hints of fear and danger that bring out the extraordinary from the ordinary. (Trying to pick up a Linwood Barclay after finishing TOTS, the narrative seemed impossibly thin.)

At times the prose can become, to the occasional bamboozlement of the modern reader, convoluted with clauses and niceties of speech, but that is of the era. In such a short book, it really doesn't hurt to have to slow down. The story itself is simple, and its those clauses and elaborations that lend it weight.

When it comes to spookiness, it was exactly as tame as I suspected it would be. I've read and watched too much modern horror of various genres for this haunting to really get me. But James whips the emotional turmoil into a frenzy for the climactic scene with brilliant artistry, and his literary muscles really flex.

Unrelated: why do so many classics feel the need to bookend their tales with a meta-narrative of old Brits sitting around at the club swapping yarns? But damn, they told good stories, didn't they?

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Review: Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean: The Adventurous Life of Captain Woodes Rogers

Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean: The Adventurous Life of Captain Woodes Rogers by David Cordingly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've read almost nothing about the so-called "Golden Age" of piracy, and this book gave a fascinating and well-documented overview of the era. Ostensibly a biography of Woodes Rogers, a rather tragic figure tasked, in 1717, with defending and building the British colony in the pirate hotbed of the Bahamas, it casts a much wider net.
Cordingly writes like a researcher, and the book is heavy on facts, figures and dates. While it means the pacing bogs down in places, that same attention to detail can bring to vivid life individual sea battles, town raids, and arguments. Where documentation exists, Cordingly has found it.
The world was a bigger place in the 1700s, and despite the fact that the Spanish, English and French are colonizing like crazy, these are the stories of men (and occasionally women) who decide to throw off the yoke of government and society and seize control of their own fate. That being said, most of them are pretty awful people, inured to hardship and violence from their miserable sailor lives, but they're easy figures to romanticize. There are not many happy endings to pirating careers, but they are vigorously alive while they last.
Cordingly relies heavily on Captain Charles Johnson's "A General History of the Pyrates", first published in 1724, when these pirates were in the headlines. (Johnson is generally assumed to be a pen name for Daniel Defoe.) I was thrilled to discover that very book on my wife's bookshelf, so I'm looking that direction next.
On a purely linguistic note, I love how alive the English language feels in Cordingly's primary sources. The wild variations of spelling and punctuation from that time remind me that our so-called rules are nothing more than the societal consensus of an era that is already disappearing. I used to bemoan what I perceived as the degradation of the written word in the age of the internet. But language will evolve whether I endorse it or not, and as long as meaning is communicated, I think I can feel at piece.

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Review: Embassytown

Embassytown by China Miéville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A great read for a sci-fi fan looking for something novel to chew on. Embassytown is science fiction about the distance between a word and its referent. It sounds ridiculous out of context, but Mieville builds from this seed a clash of language and culture that leads to civil war, political intrigue, and the threat of planetary annihilation.

In this world, humans have survived and thrived, spreading across the universe while retaining a polyglot common tongue. There's faster than light travel, alien technology, and a interstellar government, but they all serve the story without bogging it down in mechanics. While I can dig my teeth into interesting world-building - of which there is plenty, don't get me wrong - it's Mieville's lively, character-driven writing that turns that information into plot.

The book can drag at times, when the machinations become as labyrinthine as they are futile in the fact of the larger plot. (The other Mieville I've read, Perdido Street Station, seemed to have the same flab in the middle, while still being a great read overall.) Nonetheless, the spinning of a thrilling story out of a clash of language is an impressive feat.

The way the plot hinges on changing minds, as opposed to shooting all the aliens or blowing up the reactor core or whatever, reminds me of what I liked so much about Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide. Mieville isn't writing about sci-fi Jesus, though, so the book doesn't tap into that Great Myth storytelling power. It's to Embassytown's credit that the story feels like a totally new idea, unlike anything I've ever read.

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