Your Humble Blogger liked the cover of John Clute’s Appleseed (NY Tor 2001), which just goes to show.
—It is one of eleven similar roots, which twine around one another to form the walls of an abyssal central shaft � which resembles, therefore, from within, the bore of a rifle, though we must not carry that image too far: because this shaft is no straighter than the eleven roots of yew which shape it, taking the shape, rather, of a tight coil, like the tautened mainspring of a watch from below the well of the past on Human Earth, though you must visualize this mainspring as coiling spirally around the central axis of the core, so that from a distance � I now move your mind’s eye to a point sufficiently distant � it has the appearance of a ball of string or, as you murmured in your mind’s eye several Hundred Heartbeats ago, tumbleweed.
-pp. 211-212
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
Having not read the book myself, I’d be curious as to your reactions to two rather different reviews of it:
Strange Horizons review
Emerald City review
Other than that both reviews are, for the most part, evenhanded, and I loathed the book, you mean? It’s hard to be at all objective about reviews of a book you feel strongly about, but here goes.
SH review:
Sadly, the first sentence is both a spoiler and false. Other than that, it’s an excellent review. It gives a sense both of the difficulty of reading the book, and the (rather vague) reasons why a reader might want to. The passage the review finds beautiful I find nearly unreadable, and certainly that passage is less plain awful than most of the rest of the book.
The reviewer does seem to understand what the author intended, which is a plus. Because the author’s intent was (if the reviewer and I are right) quite complicated, there isn’t really room in a short review to (a) explain what that intent is, (b) discuss whether the author succeeds at it, (c) discuss other strengths or flaws in the book that might also affect the reader’s enjoyment, and (d) decide whether the whole thing is worth it. The review, then, reads like an outline for a review, rather than a full review. As a result (I think) it’s less persuasive than it ought to be.
EC review:
The reviewer praises “the glory of words well used”? Well, if by words well-used, you mean uncommon words used bizarrely out of context, sure. I found the jokes leaden and unfunny, particularly after having to cut a path to the meaning through the words, but the reviewer found them funny, so she says so. I suppose it’s a fine review, from her own point of view. I’ve never read her reviews before, so the final sentence—wait, I’ll quote it: “Yes, it is a hard read for those of you who are not used to such literary gymnastics, but for those of us with a love of the art it is like watching dolphins cavort in the waves and wishing desperately that we might only learn to swim.”—rather leads me to believe that the reviewer likes to believe herself part of the Smart Elite who can enjoy Things Like This, rather than actually thinking the book is good.
She does pick up on the fact that the book has a Big Theme, and that the Big Theme is for crap. You get to the end, if you do, and I’d guess most people don’t, and discover that not only is everything not what you thought it was, which you’d guessed since it was never very convincingly what you thought it was, but that what it is is in fact a theological disaster, meant to have shock value but in fact having only the vaguest actual meaning, and what there is of that, is bad.
Neither review can see past the unusual words and referential bits (and it’s difficult to see anything—plot, character, setting, theme, atmosphere, consistency, sentence structure, story arc—past the unusual words and referential bits) to decide whether the actual writing is any good or not.
It isn’t.
R.I.,
-V.