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May. 7th, 2012 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stakebaitI really wanted to love The Magicians, because I saw Lev Grossman speak at the Center for Fiction and I thought he was way cool. Plus it came highly recommended. Unfortunately my basic take on it was, Harry Potter as written by Jonathan Franzen.
The main character was everything that makes me avoid mainstream fiction like the plague: soaking in privilege yet never happy; self-preoccupied to the point of hardly seeing anyone else, yet lacking in self awareness; screwing up what few real relationships he has; largely passive and reactive, and not taking responsibility for the things he does do. The fact that he was surrounded by other, more appealing people whose stories I only got to see glimpses of just made it worse. Cannot decide if I am willing to try the sequel.
On the other hand, I adored Patricia Wrede’s The Thirteenth Child and highly recommend it.
As, among other things, a counterpoint to OSC’s Alvin Maker. The only thing that bugged me a little is that this is an alternative US frontier with no mention of Native Americans whatsoever. Of course, given the “alternative”, it’s entirely possible that in this world there never were any, but never finding a way to slip that detail in somewhere still feels a little too much like erasure to me.
I also read the Hunger Games books. I really liked them.
I did feel that Gale’s character was more told than shown, which made the resolution of the love triangle not much of a surprise. As a poly person, I was a little annoyed, though not surprised, to find that the idea of not having to choose occurred to no one. I was also bothered that there don’t seem to be any gay people in Panem. Katniss’ lack of much of any sexual feelings of her own did not ring very true to me – of course, I’ve not been in anything like that situation, so I can hardly say, but I think history suggests that neither hunger nor war prevent most teenagers from wanting sex, even if they don’t have it.
I found Katniss’ explanation of her prep team – the idea that people from the capital have no empathy or moral horror because they are so sheltered -- kind of unrealistic too. After all they must still suffer and die from other things. I know studies have shown that rich people have less empathy, but less is not none, and while the people in the capital are certainly rich compared to District 12 they are not the kind of super-rich that can control everything about their own existence and be surrounded by syncophants. Then again, that’s Katniss’ perspective, not necessarily the truth, and Cinna suggests things are more complicated.
I liked the last book slightly less than the other two – Katniss is more reactive and less active in it, and while it makes sense, it is less satisfying. And I found her comment about her being a child that no one cared about hurting did not ring true – she’s 17, and while that’s a child in the sense that she’s still eligible for the Hunger Games and not allowed to go down into the mines, it really doesn’t strike me that Katniss has seen herself as a child in a long time, nor has she functioned as one in the eyes of others. Nor do the people of District 13, who she is talking about, consider 17 year olds children in general, since they’ve already joined the army. It seemed like an interjection from planet 21st Century North America.
But all of those are minor quibbles to an extremely compelling story. I particularly liked that Collins was not afraid to make Katniss make some unlikeable choices and have some selfish thoughts. She was still, to me, a very sympathetic character, but also a realistic one, not one where the deck is stacked so a she never has to make a hard call. And I loved the way the cameras, and her awareness of them, infiltrated her awareness and even made it hard to figure out what her own feelings would be if they weren’t there. It’s a very nuanced worldview that I think a lot of adults would not realize a teenager could maintain, as well as a very postmodern dilemma. I kind of want to write a paper on The Truman Show, The Hunger Games, and as many other Panopticon surveillance SF conceits as I can think of, and how they influence character and relationship development.
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Date: 2012-05-08 06:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-07 07:43 pm (UTC)The way she found to slip the detail in was entirely too subtle, I think. The Hijeiro-Cathayan (spelling?) culture was meant to indicate that it was a blend of what in our world separated out to become East Asian and Native Americans when the Native Americans came across the land bridge. So in the world of Thirteenth Child those peoples are meant to have stayed in Asia and blended with the Asian cultures, changing them instead, rather than never having existed.
I agree that this is such a small point that it's very hard to spot. I'm not sure I would have seen it myself if I hadn't heard Pat talking about it at a reading before the book came out.
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Date: 2012-05-07 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-08 12:22 am (UTC)Though as some critics have pointed out, many of the crops that European settlers took for granted were the product of millennia of selective breeding, and wouldn't have been there without earlier human occupation of the hemisphere.
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Date: 2012-05-08 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-07 07:46 pm (UTC)(The shorthand name for it was Mammothfail, if that rings a bell.)
(I should not start writing comments about this while trying to multitask. I'm done now, honest.)
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Date: 2012-05-07 07:59 pm (UTC)That's actually vaguely reassuring to me, that I can spot fail without having heard about it from others -- sometimes, at least.
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Date: 2012-05-07 10:01 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2012-05-07 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-07 10:37 pm (UTC)I am hoping that by the end of the trilogy Quentin has actually figured out enough about who he is to be halfway to sympathetic.
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Date: 2012-05-07 10:57 pm (UTC)I originally wrote "growth ark", but that's an inflatable boat.
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Date: 2012-05-07 10:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-07 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-08 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-08 12:54 am (UTC)Also:
"After all they must still suffer and die from other things." True, but how often do they see it happen? I find it entirely plausible that the suffering and death of others is something a Capital citizen tends to be sheltered from in real life and exposed to only as a form of entertainment -- with the exception of those for whom the suffering and death of others is a professional matter, i.e., medical personnel. Granted, though, that's pure speculation.
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Date: 2012-05-08 02:35 pm (UTC)But we do see our own grandparents and parents and parents friends die of old age, and the occasional childhood illness or horrible accident take somebody before their time, and even if it happens in a hospital behind a sanitary curtain, we still grieve. And we still have empathy.
I absolutely do not believe that if the Hunger Games appeared on our TVs, as staged between, say, the children of Afghanistan and the children of Iran, that there would not be an instant nationwide outcry. Partly because we WOULD be seeing them suffer, and seeing them as individuals, whereas we know humans have an easier time ignoring big numbers and things they only know about second hand. Partly because our government would be doing it on purpose, so we would know we COULD stop it and nothing worse would inevitably take its place, as we often fear when intervening. And partly because we have a much easier time empathizing with children than we do grownups. There might be some bigots who would say they were okay with it, or that it was necessary to prevent something worse, but I suspect even they would have a hard time watching it. And even if we couldn't do anything about it, or thought we couldn't, we certainly wouldn't be chattering about where we were during the deaths.
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Date: 2012-05-08 11:01 pm (UTC)And I think it would be possible, given the right cultural conditions, to distance people even more from suffering and death in their own lives. It wouldn't be hard at all to make dying people disappear -- relatives could be denied access to hospitals, and the death of a loved one could appear only in the form of a phone call.
I wonder what the violent crime rate is like in the Capitol.
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Date: 2012-05-09 01:19 am (UTC)I find it very easy to believe that they might not understand the kind of economic privation that is normal life for Katniss at home, but I don't think that would make people not identify with what they are seeing up close and personal on their screens every year -- all the more so if it's the only, or one of the few, truly vivid experiences they ever have. It's not like you need to understand life in the districts to understand what's going on in the arena.
I don't think making the death of a loved one disappear would make that much difference either -- they might be more shocked and alienated about blood and guts, but I doubt that would make a watcher more indifferent to it -- less so, if anything, as it doesn't seem like an inescapable human condition -- at least, that's what's happened in our society, that as mortality rates go down, death seems more an outrage and less a fact of life, and toleration of deaths in everything from war to major construction projects goes way down.
And loss they cannot take away.
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Date: 2012-05-08 02:54 am (UTC)I liked the book because it was "Harry Potter with Real Actual Teenagers." The very fact that Quentin was so self-centered and so myopic was part of the cringe factor that did it for me, because I believe and understand that character. He's a self-obsessed hormonal sullen self-centered dweeb who can control Great Cosmic Powers. Which is to say, he's a nerdy poorly-socialized teenager who can control Great Cosmic Powers.
Quentin can apply his intellect, but has no moral constructs around it, because he never had to grow them. To me the first book is seeing him get hit with the GCP stick enough that he wakes up. I've only started on the second book, but I look forward to see if the beatings (with the GCP stick) continue until (Quentin's) morale improves.
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Date: 2012-05-08 02:24 pm (UTC)And that was true even when I was a teenager -- the teenagers I was and knew were always hormonal, frequently dweebs and often poorly socialized, but it didn't mean they had no empathy, it just meant they were awkward as hell and sometimes counter productive in how they expressed it. But they cared passionately about the world around them, often to the point of obsession.
It was not exactly NOT self-centered, because a lot of that caring was about how and where they fit and what other people thought of them, but it included close, if sometimes tempestuous, bonds, and quite as many surprising acts of charity as of malice. And while there was some obliviousness, it was mostly of the "I didn't realize other people were as vulnerable to me as I am to them" or the "I didn't realize I could change these social rules or ignore them" varieties.
(I do have several friends now who say their experience was different, and I believe them, but I didn't know them or anyone like them as teenagers, so it's hard for me to envision. Except for their weirdly delayed puberty, I found the Harry Potter teenagers considerably closer to my experience than these, though neither exactly hits the mark.)
I also find it all but impossible to believe that someone could attend school for 12 years, not to mention living in a nuclear family, and never have occasion to grow moral constructs. Most of us have morals without needing Great Cosmic Powers to trigger them. It is enough to see what helps and hurts us and others. If Quentin does not see that, as far as I'm concerned that's either a flaw in Quentin (and possibly also his parents), or in the believability of Grossman's worldbuilding.
I think it's the former -- I think it's intended to be the former, a flaw in the main character. I'm not saying it's bad writing for a main character to have a serious flaw, just that this particular flaw makes me dislike Quentin to the point that hearing about him is more unpleasant than any amount of good writing can redeem.
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Date: 2012-05-09 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-09 09:14 pm (UTC)GREAT BIG SPOILERS
Date: 2012-05-15 06:56 am (UTC)