Bryan Murphy's Blog, page 2
June 21, 2020
The Glass Hotel
A very fine example of the story-teller's art. Intriguing plot and sub-plots; interesting characters and character development; prose that flows: in short, a book that is hard to put down. The only black mark, for me, is the descent into the supernatural at the end, which is jarring in an otherwise realistic novel. However, it does allow the author to ghost around the world and tie up loose ends: clever but not convincing. Despite that, Emily St. John Mandel has a new fan.[
book:The Glass Hotel|45754981]
book:The Glass Hotel|45754981]
April 9, 2020
Virus Flash
The Day Before
The Pope was dead. The luminaries of the Christian world´s largest Church gathered in Rome and were sequestered in the heart of the Eternal City until they would succeed in choosing a new leader.
“I’m getting out of here for a day. Want to come?”
It was natural for Cardinal Healy to have struck up a friendship with Cardinal Varela. Not only were they by far the youngest at the Conclave, they were also both from the New World, Healy being an Irish-American from Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Varela hailing from São Paulo in Brazil.
Cardinal Varela coughed a few times, then drew breath and answered, “I am with you. But how we get away? And back?”
“I know some hidden passages. This place is riddled with them.” Healy’s eyes gleamed with more than the slight fever he had picked up.
“They will miss us, no?”
“No. There’s nothing on today. Just the Chamberlain droning on about procedure.”
And so the two young cardinals went out into the city, unobserved.
The Chamberlain, Cardinal Grugliasco, however, did not drone on about procedure. Instead, he came straight to the point.
“I am joyful to announce my conversion to the one true, true faith, to which I submit, and for which I shall be a martyr. Yes. I have infected myself with a virus that will soon kill me. We are taking this rare opportunity to eliminate the foremost members of our main rival, in numerical terms. Most of you already have the virus, and it will kill you, too. All of you. It dies with its host, so the killer disease will spread no further than this sealed environment; we are not mass murderers. My dear Cardinals, I urge you to convert while you can, to turn your pointless deaths into meaningful martyrdoms. If you do, you too will receive the martyrs’ rewards in Paradise.”
Later, while the few Cardinals who still had the strength were slowly beating Grugliasco to death, Healy and Varela were tucking into rich Italian cuisine in a crowded Roman restaurant.
Healey beamed as he dried his pale face with his napkin. “Sure, it’s good to be alive at a time like this, eh?”
“Indeed.” Varela reached for his blood-stained handkerchief yet again. “Life is wonderful!”
The Pope was dead. The luminaries of the Christian world´s largest Church gathered in Rome and were sequestered in the heart of the Eternal City until they would succeed in choosing a new leader.
“I’m getting out of here for a day. Want to come?”
It was natural for Cardinal Healy to have struck up a friendship with Cardinal Varela. Not only were they by far the youngest at the Conclave, they were also both from the New World, Healy being an Irish-American from Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Varela hailing from São Paulo in Brazil.
Cardinal Varela coughed a few times, then drew breath and answered, “I am with you. But how we get away? And back?”
“I know some hidden passages. This place is riddled with them.” Healy’s eyes gleamed with more than the slight fever he had picked up.
“They will miss us, no?”
“No. There’s nothing on today. Just the Chamberlain droning on about procedure.”
And so the two young cardinals went out into the city, unobserved.
The Chamberlain, Cardinal Grugliasco, however, did not drone on about procedure. Instead, he came straight to the point.
“I am joyful to announce my conversion to the one true, true faith, to which I submit, and for which I shall be a martyr. Yes. I have infected myself with a virus that will soon kill me. We are taking this rare opportunity to eliminate the foremost members of our main rival, in numerical terms. Most of you already have the virus, and it will kill you, too. All of you. It dies with its host, so the killer disease will spread no further than this sealed environment; we are not mass murderers. My dear Cardinals, I urge you to convert while you can, to turn your pointless deaths into meaningful martyrdoms. If you do, you too will receive the martyrs’ rewards in Paradise.”
Later, while the few Cardinals who still had the strength were slowly beating Grugliasco to death, Healy and Varela were tucking into rich Italian cuisine in a crowded Roman restaurant.
Healey beamed as he dried his pale face with his napkin. “Sure, it’s good to be alive at a time like this, eh?”
“Indeed.” Varela reached for his blood-stained handkerchief yet again. “Life is wonderful!”
October 28, 2019
The city and the city
Dead Simple
In Franc Roddam's 1979 film “Quadrophenia”, the gang of Mods coming down to Brighton for a weekend of violence stop their scooters on the South Downs when the coast and a shimmering town come into view and say, reverentially, “That's Brighton!”.
In reality, it was not louche, dirty, pulsating Brighton but the sedate retirement town of Eastbourne. Nevertheless, watching the film in Portugal, the scene was enough set off pangs of nostalgia and longing. Forty years later, back in Portugal, I'm still drawn to anything set in Brighton, which is what led me to Peter James's novel "Dead Simple". It is replete with evocative place-names, though it is a fantasy Brighton, in which a hard rain falls as it might in a post-apocalyptic Seattle, and all the police are jolly good lads and lasses, whereas we used to say that the city had “the best police force money could buy”, and woo works. This last is used by the author to set the story straight. Convenient car crashes also play a role. The characters are static and lacking in subtlety, unlike the real city's denizens, who give the place its true flavour.
In Franc Roddam's 1979 film “Quadrophenia”, the gang of Mods coming down to Brighton for a weekend of violence stop their scooters on the South Downs when the coast and a shimmering town come into view and say, reverentially, “That's Brighton!”.
In reality, it was not louche, dirty, pulsating Brighton but the sedate retirement town of Eastbourne. Nevertheless, watching the film in Portugal, the scene was enough set off pangs of nostalgia and longing. Forty years later, back in Portugal, I'm still drawn to anything set in Brighton, which is what led me to Peter James's novel "Dead Simple". It is replete with evocative place-names, though it is a fantasy Brighton, in which a hard rain falls as it might in a post-apocalyptic Seattle, and all the police are jolly good lads and lasses, whereas we used to say that the city had “the best police force money could buy”, and woo works. This last is used by the author to set the story straight. Convenient car crashes also play a role. The characters are static and lacking in subtlety, unlike the real city's denizens, who give the place its true flavour.
September 27, 2019
September 22, 2019
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
Trust Exercise
The point of a trust exercise is that you know your trust will prove justified. In this case, however, Choi lets us down.
The first part of the book is a fairly interesting story of young people forced to become adults before they are mature enough to handle it; but as we leap into the second part, Choi withdraws her support by going all "meta" on us and leaves us dangling in mid-air. Nor does she bring us gently down to earth in the final part.
To put it another way, Choi is a good writer, but not so good that she can successfully shift the burden of communication from writer to reader.
The point of a trust exercise is that you know your trust will prove justified. In this case, however, Choi lets us down.
The first part of the book is a fairly interesting story of young people forced to become adults before they are mature enough to handle it; but as we leap into the second part, Choi withdraws her support by going all "meta" on us and leaves us dangling in mid-air. Nor does she bring us gently down to earth in the final part.
To put it another way, Choi is a good writer, but not so good that she can successfully shift the burden of communication from writer to reader.
March 8, 2019
Gone Girl
The bad news is that this book is far too long, and it becomes increasingly unbelievable. The good news is that Gillian Flynn writes superb prose, and her social satire and philosophical asides make the whole volume worth wading through. Now that she has, presumably, made enough money to guarantee her artistic freedom, one can only hope she will use it to produce the work(s) of great contemporary literature of which she is undoubtedly capable.
January 5, 2019
The outsider inside
Masks & Other Stories From Colombia by Richard Crosfield
If you study English history of the Renaissance period, one of the most helpful characters you are likely to encounter is the Venetian Ambassador, whose dispatches home contain valuable insights into what was really going on, free of the pride and prejudice of the “official” versions preserved for posterity. To help us understand today's more visceral Colombia, Richard Crosfield gives us another outsider, a British businessman named Printer, whose nose and taste for good stories lead him to intriguing characters and tales by the bucketful. Through Printer, Crosfield coats what he writes about in a velvet glove of detached humour liable to remind the reader of Saki, though like that master's, Crosfield's stories can sometimes pack an iron punch. I think the impact is even greater in the stories in which Crosfield relinquishes his foreign characters and goes straight to the heart of Colombia, where he is clearly at home.
My favourites in the collection are “Guatavita Nueva”, in which a provincial priest puts his faith in the next generation, and “ Landevino's”, in which success makes a peasant painter more equal than others.
5 stars.
If you study English history of the Renaissance period, one of the most helpful characters you are likely to encounter is the Venetian Ambassador, whose dispatches home contain valuable insights into what was really going on, free of the pride and prejudice of the “official” versions preserved for posterity. To help us understand today's more visceral Colombia, Richard Crosfield gives us another outsider, a British businessman named Printer, whose nose and taste for good stories lead him to intriguing characters and tales by the bucketful. Through Printer, Crosfield coats what he writes about in a velvet glove of detached humour liable to remind the reader of Saki, though like that master's, Crosfield's stories can sometimes pack an iron punch. I think the impact is even greater in the stories in which Crosfield relinquishes his foreign characters and goes straight to the heart of Colombia, where he is clearly at home.
My favourites in the collection are “Guatavita Nueva”, in which a provincial priest puts his faith in the next generation, and “ Landevino's”, in which success makes a peasant painter more equal than others.
5 stars.
December 18, 2018
Marxism for the genteel
Penelope Fitzgerald sets her demolition of provincial life, The Bookshop, in Little England. However, I know from experience that it holds good as far afield as provincial China, and I'd guess almost everywhere in between, too.
Although her focus is on the personal, in her understated way Fitzgerald offers a devastating critique of a worn-out society that embraces change only to keep things the way they were. Marxism for the genteel.
Although her focus is on the personal, in her understated way Fitzgerald offers a devastating critique of a worn-out society that embraces change only to keep things the way they were. Marxism for the genteel.
October 17, 2018
A lesson for Yuval
One thing that strikes me about the last 50 years is how little life has changed. Technology has advanced, but it has not inverted people's hierarchy of needs. There has been no revolution in needs and hopes. The “ revolution of rising aspirations” was already under way, and has spread more widely; that, however, is a psychological phenomenon which owes more to economic than to technological development. So when someone claims that technology is about to transform our lives in short order, I smell a rat. Nevertheless, Harari makes a good case that massive change is gonna come, and we have to hope his warnings do not fall on deaf ears. He does offer us a silver bullet with which to tame the tiger: a form of yogic meditation in which he has invested an enormous amount of his time. Let us hope that it delivers more on its promises than dear old Transcendental Meditation™ ever did. In any case, if you fancy some entertaining and challenging mental exercise, read this book.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
February 9, 2018
4 3 2 1
You’re a writer. Your novel has a protagonist. Let’s call him or her “Chris”. You can’t let Chris die before the end, or your novel ends prematurely. If you write genre fiction, you may not even be able to allow Chris a cosy or bitter retirement. I’ve had fun with this trope here: http://www.thewriteroomblog.com/the-o...
The traditional answer is to invent ghosts, haunting and other flights of fancy. In his latest novel, “4 3 2 1”, Paul Auster, who rejects supernatural slight-of-hand, hits on an effective writerly solution. He has four chronological sections, and one chapter in each section is devoted to a specific protagonist,, in the same order. When Auster bumps off one of his protagonists, he nevertheless keeps his place in the next section, but his chapter consists only of the heading and a blank text – a stark reminder of the character’s death and all the unfulfilled potential that has died with it.
It is a masterful ploy, even when Auster repeats it, though it has less impact the second time. When he kills his third protagonist, he uses a contrasting strategy, letting you imagine him merely falling asleep, until, in the final pages of the novel, the authorial voice tells you the character had died in his sleep. This leaves you just with the fourth, most Austerial protagonist, who is, to me, the stodgiest and least interesting of the quartet.
You can see a brilliant visual way of refusing to forget the dead in Richard Lester’s satirical film “How I Won The War”. You may remember it for featuring John Lennon as a non-singing actor. It shows a bedraggled band of British soldiers on a mission toward the end of WWII. Every time one of them is killed, a wraith-like version of him, not intended as a ghost and not haunting anyone, still appears in the line-up, reminding us of his premature death and its enduring importance.
The traditional answer is to invent ghosts, haunting and other flights of fancy. In his latest novel, “4 3 2 1”, Paul Auster, who rejects supernatural slight-of-hand, hits on an effective writerly solution. He has four chronological sections, and one chapter in each section is devoted to a specific protagonist,, in the same order. When Auster bumps off one of his protagonists, he nevertheless keeps his place in the next section, but his chapter consists only of the heading and a blank text – a stark reminder of the character’s death and all the unfulfilled potential that has died with it.
It is a masterful ploy, even when Auster repeats it, though it has less impact the second time. When he kills his third protagonist, he uses a contrasting strategy, letting you imagine him merely falling asleep, until, in the final pages of the novel, the authorial voice tells you the character had died in his sleep. This leaves you just with the fourth, most Austerial protagonist, who is, to me, the stodgiest and least interesting of the quartet.
You can see a brilliant visual way of refusing to forget the dead in Richard Lester’s satirical film “How I Won The War”. You may remember it for featuring John Lennon as a non-singing actor. It shows a bedraggled band of British soldiers on a mission toward the end of WWII. Every time one of them is killed, a wraith-like version of him, not intended as a ghost and not haunting anyone, still appears in the line-up, reminding us of his premature death and its enduring importance.
