On reading big books.

I have loved reading long novels ever since I was a kid.  Stephen King's The Stand is the first one that I ever read that was over 1,000 pages and I remember the conflicting joys of finishing it.  The book was such a trek to accomplish that I was at once proud of having gotten through it and a little sad at it being over.  This was also one of the first books that I spent a lot of time thinking about after I had finished it.  I haven't ever made my way back to re-read it, but I still might.
My later reading habits also followed this pattern.  I enjoyed the implicit challenge of a thick book.  They were almost daring me not to finish them, to pack them in after a few hundred pages.  And there have been a lot of times when, after a few weeks of reading, I realized that my bookmark was still in the first third or quarter of its thickness and was tempted to let them go.  But most times I kept going and there is generally reward in the experience beyond just the narrative itself.  Long books are journeys (he writes, tritely), and they do require a certain perspective to approach them.  One of my favorite critics, Northrop Frye, writes that reading is actually a two-part act; there is first the act of reading and then the thought about what one has read.  Some long books extend this and force us to rethink attitudes toward the book as we go.  The Stand challenged me because there were parts that I disliked and found boring.  The same was true when I read The Lord of the Rings books and ran across pages of elvish song.  There is a certain amount of boredom and drudgery that accompanies reading many large books that is a part of the pleasure of reading them because it becomes possible to inhabit the book in that time.  I can assign whole tracts of my life to the time I was reading one book or another.  The first time I read Infinite Jest, it took me nearly a year to get through it, but I always remember that I picked it up the summer after I completed my MA and moved back to Ohio and spent a good chunk of the time I was in Daytona grading AP lit exams for the first time reading it.  Likewise, the first time I attempted to read Gravity's Rainbow was when I was n undergrad and a professor happened to mention it.  I bought a copy at a second hand store that defeated me that first time.  I read Pynchon's Slow Learner collection instead because it was more digestible.
Long novels leave room for imperfection that is important to the make up of the narrative.  They seem to become less controlled as they go, which puts the reader back into the position of renegotiating their relationship to the narrative.   I like this, too, because the difficulty of a text, whether it be due to length or imperfections in the novel, is engaging.  Most long novels are necessarily complex and these complexities can reveal contradiction in a perceived world that make it more real.  Many of these novels leave loose threads or may lack resolution, but this makes them all the more reflective of our own lives.  We live each day in a mire of incomplete narrative threads.

Who Fears Death

*I wrote this post a few months back after reading this novel with my sci-fi book club.  I haven't really read it over since then.

Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor’s novel, Who Fears Death, reminds me of a few other books that I have read in my life, and it puts the author in good company.  It reminded me of China Achebe’s matter-of-fact narrative style, particularly in the way that Okorafor describes violence and pain as things that are normal, natural, and to be expected in life.  This treatment actually underscores the impact that violence has on those involved: both on the perpetrator and the victim in different dimensions.  This book also reminds me of Ngugi wa Thi’ongo’s work Wizard of the Crow.  Magic exists in a realistic landscape, but not the magic of wizards and witches.  This is real magic made from human experience and connections to nature.  In this light, it also reminds of of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  But for as much as Okorafor’s novel reminds me of these others, hers is something apart and is uniquely her own.

I read this novel in the context of a science fiction reading group that I host in Cleveland and I think that the context led me to expect a different book. I had been wanting to read this novel for some time, and suggesting it to the group seemed like a good way to make the time for it.  I had been hearing about this novel as a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic novel.  I didn’t find it worked as well with that expectation.  My group tended to agree; they seemed to like it, but not as a sci-fi novel.   There is a sci-fi element, I would add for the sake of full disclosure.  The characters use some futuristic technology that resemble GPS systems and smart phones, but these are outclassed by Onyesonwu’s intuition and magic.  Mostly, the use of technology is glossed over in a society that uses older technology.  There is one passage that sticks out to me and seems to be the main connection to the post-apocalypse:

The Lost Papers go into detail about how the Okeke, during their centuries festering in the darkness, were mad scientists.  The Lost Papers discuss how they invented the old technologies like computers, capture stations, and portables.  They invented ways to duplicate themselves and keep themselves young until they died.  They made food grow on dead land, they cured all diseases.  In the darkness, the amazing Okeke brimmed with wild creativity.

Onyesonwu later thinks of the Okeke as “a sad miserable unthinking lot,” for the embarrassment that they feel about their own past.  This hint of lost technology does fit in with a lot of modern sci-fi that speculates on a world that turns its back on the high technological past in order to regain something human about itself.  But this is also theme that Asimov dealt with, along with many other authors.  

What I like about the novel is that it presents magic as a hard-earned skill.  I tend not to enjoy more traditional fantasy, but I wouldn’t lump this book into that genre, either.  To me, this book picks up on the best traditions it draws from.  The sci-fi/post-apocalyptic tones are there but they are minor.  What they add to the novel is a fresh conflict between modernity and tradition, between the mythic and the realistic.  Characterization is strong and the revenge plot works well to drive the narrative.

Frank Herbert

I am amazed that I had not read this book sooner.  I suppose it is because I was always aware of the story, had seen the movie and the TV mini-series, and it seemed so familiar that I had never felt the need to actually sit down and read it.  

The story is about what I had thought it would be, which is to say that I had thought my memory of it was spotty and that there were things that I didn’t really know about the narrative, but I discovered that this is actually pretty close to the reality of the book.  For all of Herbert’s creativity and for the massive scope of the novel, there are a lot of holes in it.  I have inklings of the connections between the Houses and why they mimic feudal systems and I have a sense of the political intrigue backing it up, but Herbert does not like to explicitly state much of what is going on.

The narrative itself jumps in time and place without a lot of exposition, which makes the book seem jumpy.  More than once I had to backtrack to a previous section or page, only to realize that the narrative had completely shifted focus, or had jumped forward by 10 of more years in time. 

Beyond the narrative, I found the novel to be more interesting in the ideas that Herbert develops.  One that stands out is the competition Herbert sets up between new and old weapons technology.  At first, the reliance on knives for hand-to-hand combat seems an odd choice in a highly technologically developed world.  But over the course of the novel, the reader finds out that knives must be used to counteract the use of personal energy shields that deflect more advanced weaponry.  Because the energy shields block certain levels of force, the effective knife fighter is not the fastest, but the one who can modulate speed and angles to actually penetrate the shield.  The slower, more subtle energy of a blade can move under the threshold of blocked energy.

The interaction between characters that Herbert creates also helps to develop the narrative where exposition does not.  I had always assumed that Paul Atreides would be a heroic figure in the novel, based upon the David Lynch movie I had seen.  However, Paul is a more conflicted character.  He is something of an embattled figure on Arrakis.  The novel develops his quasi-magical/religious background more than the movie does and it throws a lot more of a pall across the character.  While Paul is always brooding, he is more dangerous in the novel.  Less is revealed about his true motivations and the narrative seems to distrust Paul’s adopted mantle of Muad’dib a lot more than the movie does.  Paul’s place in the middle of the struggle involving House Atreides, House Harkonnen and the Fremen of planet Arrakis is more that of an instigator than the champion of the people I had assumed it to be.

A final point that I had not expected was Herbert’s use of Jewish and Islamic religion in the work.  The novel relies heavily on Abrahamic mysticism, which should not be surprising given Paul’s role as the Prophet. But the nature of prophecy differs from the presented in a more religious context.  

There is a lot more going on in this novel than I care to address at the moment.  I wanted to get some of this down because it has been about three months since I finished the book and I wanted to capture some of my thoughts before they became too hazy.  Don’t be too harsh about those mistakes that I have made.  I wrote this without the book in front of me and with no other preparation than having thought about it for a while.  

I have some of the follow-up Dune books in my to-read pile, so expect to see more on Frank Herbert some time in the future.