Ghost Boy by Iain Lawrence
Delacorte, 2000
11/11/11 Category: Young Adult

Ghost Boy is a beautifully written historical fiction about being different, set in a time when old-fashioned circuses were dying out but hadn’t yet completely vanished from the American scene.  The titular character is an albino boy named Harold Kline, mocked and despised by the other kids in his small town for looking different, emotionally isolated from his family after his father and brother’s deaths in World War II and his mother’s remarriage to a man who doesn’t know how to deal with a damaged teenager. When the circus comes to town, Harold encounters the freaks—the diminutive Tina, the ogreish “Fossil Man,” and the enigmatic Gypsy Magda. More importantly, he learns of the Cannibal King, supposedly a barbarian from darkest Africa who happens to be an albino like Harold. Harold leaves home to follow the circus, always hoping to meet the Cannibal King who is always just ahead, scouting for the circus. But he finds his real talent is with the elephants, three sad creatures who are all that is left of the once-great menagerie. His idea to teach the elephants to play baseball as a gambit to draw audiences wins him the affections of Flip, a beautiful young horse trainer who doesn’t seem to care that Harold is different. But when he is torn between the genuine affection of the freaks and the lure of being treated as a normal person, Harold’s life is turned upside down, and he’s forced to grow up fast.

Iain Lawrence writes a beautiful book. You can’t help but be drawn in to the world he depicts, this post-war era in which the economy is recovering, but these little circuses that used to attract huge crowds are disappearing. Lawrence’s characterization is excellent, if a little too obvious. Unlike Harold, we know that Harold’s desperate love for Flip isn’t fully returned; we know that his choice to abandon his real friends when he’s teased about being a freak is going to end badly; we can see that the circus owner cares more about survival than he does about Harold. It all comes across, barely, as dramatic irony, but from a different perspective, it just makes you want to slap Harold so he’ll see the truth. If Lawrence’s skill as a writer weren’t so great, you could pass this book off as just another after-school special about believing in yourself and The True Meaning of Diversity.

That said, there’s still a lot to enjoy about this book. Harold’s sessions with the elephants are funny and intriguing, the more so when you realize that Lawrence based the idea of elephants playing baseball on a true story of English circus elephants who learned to play cricket. The melancholy mood of the story is a perfect fit for the growing despair of everyone in the circus, which will have to be disbanded if they can’t pull off a hit show in Salem, Oregon. Harold’s wild idea is what they all hitch their hopes to, so that the difficulties the elephants have in, for example, learning to throw the ball increase the tension of the story. The ending is tragic in some ways, redemptive in others, and while I knew all along that something really bad had to happen (one of the other sources of tension is the hostility Harold faces from Flip’s large, strong boyfriend), I could never have predicted what finally did happen, despite its being hinted at almost from the beginning.

Ghost Boy is an excellent story, maybe not the most polished young adult novel ever, but definitely worth reading if you’re in the mood for something sad and a little bit terrible.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson
William Morrow, 2008
Category: Books bought new and never read
Time owned without reading: 850 days

See that number there? 850 days where I owned Anathem but didn’t read it? I actually tried to start it twice before forcing myself to read it for this challenge. Both times I got about six or seven pages in before setting it aside. The book opens right in the middle of a conversation between unknown people on an unfamiliar world using weird and undefined terminology. It’s about as welcoming as Virginia Woolf’s book The Waves. When I started reading it, I thought Neal Stephenson had finally become the M. Night Shyamalan of the literary world—overly impressed with his own genius, inconsiderate of his readers, using the popularity and quality of his previous books to publish something no one would ever read.

I am really, really sorry I ever thought that, Mr. Stephenson.

It’s true, Anathem is very difficult to get into. And it’s on purpose. Although Stephenson provides a helpful introduction for readers who don’t like having to figure everything out, the intent is to immerse the reader in the created world of Arbre and the avout, like learning to speak French by moving to Paris and surrounding yourself with only native speakers. It’s also true that this gambit is risky and occasionally means the author is showing off, or believes that impenetrability equals literary excellence. (There are whole university departments devoted to this principle, so maybe it’s not such a stretch.)  But the reader who sticks it out and successfully enters the world of Anathem soon realizes that Stephenson’s strategy isn’t for show; it’s essential to understanding and appreciating the vast, beautiful story he has created.

Unfortunately, it also means it’s hard to give a good synopsis of the story. Arbre is a world similar to Earth, and Stephenson uses words derived from Earth cognates that imply the same meanings while sounding just alien enough for SF: fraa or suur for the members of the quasi-monastic society, for example. The main character and narrator, Fraa Erasmus, is a young man who for the last ten years of his life has been isolated in a community of mathematicians and philosphers, given an excellent scientific education, and trained to look at the world in a certain way. We gradually learn that these communities, called maths, were organized both to allow their members to stay free from the changes of the wider world, but also to keep these brilliant minds from coming up with technologies that in the past have nearly destroyed civilization. The book opens on the eve of Avent, when the math is opened to the public and its members are allowed to leave, visit family if they have any, and basically decide if they want to sign up for another tour of one, ten, or even one hundred years. Erasmus isn’t much more than an average student, and he’s not sure if his future lies within the math, but there isn’t much outside it for him either.

Complicating matters is a mystery surrounding one of the other members of the math, Fraa Orolo, who seems to have discovered something really big—big enough that the community anathemizes him and kicks him out into the world before he can use the information. Erasmus and his close friends don’t understand why someone as brilliant and well-loved as Orolo can just be removed like that, so they begin to follow up on his research. What they discover—and here I’m going to break all the rules of good synopsizing and give the secret away, because it might help some readers want to stick with the book longer—is nothing less than an alien invasion that threatens the whole world, and suddenly the world really, really needs these strange geniuses to find a technology that will save them.

But I’m lying. No, not about what happens in the book; I’m lying that knowing any of this will be the deciding factor in whether a reader likes it or not. There are maybe three groups of readers who will enjoy this book:

1. People who are already interested in abstract discussions of philosophy, mathematical theory, alternate realities, what consciousness and thinking are really about, and the meaning of life. There is an entire section devoted to a series of dinners in which great thinkers discuss all of these things. It is at least 100 pages long.

2. People who enjoy the challenge of decoding complex literature with minimal assistance from the author—puzzle solvers, readers of Gene Wolfe, etc.

3. People who are capable of absorbing and bypassing the abstract philosophical discussions to enjoy the story behind it all—because the story, divorced from the philosophical sections, is exciting, tense, and hard to step away from.

If you know you’ll be put off by what appear to be irrelevant, boring passages in which nothing much happens, you are not the audience for this book. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a “must-read” book; that’s just a way of telling someone that you think they ought to think exactly the way you do. I loved Anathem and consider it one of the best books I’ve read this year, but that doesn’t mean that anyone who dislikes it is wrong. I would love for everyone to experience it the way I did, but that’s not possible.

One last note: if you’ve read Stephenson’s earlier books and were put off by the extremely graphic descriptions of sex and violence, particularly in the Baroque Cycle, don’t let that be what keeps you from reading Anathem. The book is so tame that if it wasn’t chock-full of philosophical theorizing, I wouldn’t have believed Stephenson had written it. It also has one of the sweetest romances in all of science fiction. Anathem is an extraordinary achievement, and if you are the right kind of reader, it will blow you away.

(My son recently had an assignment to spend the day “shadowing” someone at work to learn about their job. His teacher was fine with him shadowing me as a writer, which just goes to show you that the rising generation already knows how to work the system. So he wouldn’t spend the day goofing off, I had him write a review and “submit” it to me for editing and revision. This is what he wrote.)

Beyonders: A World Without Heroes
By Brandon Mull
Aladdin, 2011

A guest post by Rhys

A World Without Heroes is a book about two people from our world falling through to another world in some unlikely circumstances. The first main character that we meet is Jason. Jason is smart, but not a nerd or a geek, and he enjoys playing baseball. He has a fairly snarky personality but tends to like people. When he gets to this new world, at first he thinks that something weird is going on but other than that thinks he’s still on Earth. Rachel is smart, close to the point of being a nerd, and is home schooled. She is even more snarky than Jason, but still has a soft spot for people that are in need. She is very close in personality to Jason, and that helps them get along… most of the time.

This world is ruled by the last wizard, Maldor. Maldor is a bad person who enjoys torturing people and in the end almost killing them. Most of the time he lets them go with something that makes it so that they will never be a threat to him again. One person from the new world who helps Jason and Rachel is Ferrin, who is a displacer. Displacers have some weird talents; for instance, they can pull bits of them off and if it’s an eye, they can sew it on something else and still use that eye. The other person who helps them is Jasher. Jasher is an Amar Kabal, or “seed person.” The Amal Kabar are people grown from seeds that are pretty much invincible. Well, they still die, but their seed lives and grows another version of them. They only are babies once. Jasher is an outcast who is seeking out Maldor so he can kill him. The reason being, Maldor permanently killed someone he was related to.

One of the things that I enjoyed about this book is how it never leaves you hanging and it’s filled with suspense. Some of my personal favorite characters are the bad guys. Part of what made this book so good was the fact that there were bad guys who had almost, but not quite, turned into good guys just by hanging out with Jason and Rachel.

I didn’t enjoy that no matter what, the enemy pretty much knew what the heroes were doing at any time. And sometimes, the enemy felt like it was just a bit too overpowered. Even in a world where the bad guy was the last wizard, the antagonists shouldn’t have that much power at their disposal. This whole book is basically a starter for a much bigger series and that gives the impression that no matter what, the good guys are almost destined to fail at their goal till the next book.

Despite all this, I think that overall it is a good book for people who enjoy action, fantasy, and adventure. In the end I loved this book a lot and could hardly keep myself from reading it all day at school. I finished it in about 3-4 days, so I can personally say it is an amazing book that can be enjoyed by people about nine and up.

The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod
Ace, 2003
Category: Fantasy

The Light Ages is an alternate-world fantasy, the story of an England where science and technology have stagnated thanks to the development of an extraordinary magical power source called aether. Despite this, the time period roughly corresponds to the early Industrial Age if it had happened near the end of Queen Victoria’s reign (or vice versa) and the milieu of the story, the general worldview of it, centers on the clash between the working class and the elite ruling classes, complete with the advent of socialism and unionization. The main character is Robbie Borrows, a boy from one of the most productive factory towns in England, and follows him from childhood to adulthood (told as an extended flashback/frame story by Robbie as an older man) as he grows to realize that a civilization dependent on such a scarce resource, which maintains such artificial barriers between classes, will eventually collapse—and finds a way to make it happen.

Ian MacLeod is a good writer, as far as that goes; I think his style overwhelms the story at times. Keep in mind that I read this immediately following Doctor Thorne, a novel written during the time period

MacLeod harks back to, so it’s not like I’m not very aware of the stylistic manners of the day. MacLeod isn’t exactly aping that style, but he’s not exactly striking out into new territory either. Still, apart from the complete disregard for the difference between subject and object first-person-singular pronouns, stylistically it’s very enjoyable, particularly since this is only his second novel and I believe he’s much better known as a short story writer.

The real problem is that as well-written as this book is, it doesn’t do anything new for either fantasy or historical fiction. MacLeod’s magical aether is an interesting take on the magical-resource idea, but he gives so much more time to writing about social upheaval and class warfare that he might as well have black-boxed the whole aether thing. He also doesn’t take advantage of his alternate-reality to cast new light on real historical problems; most of the story could just as well have been set in 1870s London. Contact with aether turns humans into changelings, some of them bizarrely warped and others with tremendous magical power, but this more fascinating possibility is used more as background than plot. The story would be little more than progressive/socialist rah-rah-rah (because almost all the good guys are on the side of the poor) if MacLeod wasn’t so good about showing how neither side of the argument is really perfect. For one thing, the Big Bad that Robbie spends most of the book tracking down is revealed to have been well-meaning and good. For another, the poor downtrodden noble workers show themselves to be just as prone to violence and selfish stupidity as their economic superiors; when the crowd gathers to insist on reform, and a government representative comes out to parley, it’s an anonymous part of the rabble that throws the first stone, without provocation. The social situation MacLeod writes about, like its real-world analogue, is untenable and cannot long be maintained, which is why so often the radicals espousing change are shown as the good guys. MacLeod doesn’t allow his sympathy for their cause to blind him to the reality that even people with good intentions can do the most horrible things.

The Light Ages was enjoyable, but I can think of other books, both steampunk and alternate reality, that do more for their respective genres…come to think of it, if you read Martha Wells’s novels The Element of Fire, The Death of the Necromancer, and the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy (starting with The Wizard Hunters) you’ll get the very best of both.

Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
Third in the Chronicles of Barchester series
Originally published 1858
Category: Classics

You know what’s a downright crime? That Anthony Trollope isn’t a part of the typical English lit degree canon anymore (if he ever was, which honestly I don’t know and don’t feel like looking up). Forget the argument over whether canon is important or not; the point is that making the English degree even remotely universal and relevant from one university to another means having a list of books that you can point to and say “knowing about these texts makes you qualified to ask ‘Would you like fries with that?’” And Anthony Trollope just isn’t on that list. You’ll have to read books by at least two Bronte sisters, you’ll certainly have to read a handful of Dickens, but no general education literature class will put Trollope on the syllabus. Like I said, this is a crime, because Trollope is one of the most genuinely readable authors of the latter half of the 19th century, and for my money a whole lot more interesting than Dickens, who was paid by the word and had a thing for hard allegory. (I may be biased because I was assigned to read Dickens before I was mentally mature enough to appreciate his books. We’ll see what happens when the Rand-O-Matic churns out Hard Times later this year.)  In his own time, Trollope was even more prolific a writer than Dickens *and* had a full-time career with the postal service. He also invented the pillar box (for Americans, the equivalent of the blue public drop boxes we put mail in) and made a pile of money from his writing. Not bad for a guy who was, in his youth, a total slacker.

Trollope was also the first English novelist to write books that were serially related to each other. If you hate the proliferation of 12-volume-mega-novel-series, you can blame Anthony Trollope.  His two most popular series were the Palliser novels, which had a political bent, and the Barchester novels, which are closer to being novels of manners. I’ve enjoyed the first two books in the latter series, The Warden and Barchester Towers. Trollope is good with characterization and description, he understands the issues of the day, and he explains the workings of the Church of England in the mid-19th century well enough for a reader of the early 21st century to keep up with him. It’s not hard to get involved in the lives of his characters.

As good as they were, Doctor Thorne is even better. This is primarily because it’s the first book with a strong female protagonist. In the first two books, Trollope creates a number of strong women, but the protagonists are more retiring and sweet. Mary Thorne, niece of the title character, is intelligent, well-spoken, self-assured and progressive in her opinions about class and individual worth. Her uncle has a similar personality, and despite his being only a country doctor (and one who *gasp* mixes his own doses like a common apothecary!) he’s the close confidant of the local squire Franklin Gresham and far more popular among all the classes than his more arrogant medical peers. At the start of the novel, Mary has shared tutors with the Gresham daughters and feels no artificial inferiority to them or anyone else, including their snooty noble relatives the DeCourcys. In fact, her friendship for Frank Gresham the younger, only son and heir to Greshamville, has started to turn into something warmer. But Mary, despite all her certainties about her personal worth, has to keep Frank at a distance. She knows she is the daughter of Doctor Thorne’s dead brother, but she doesn’t know who her mother was or what her relations are. In that uncertainty, she can’t bring herself to fall in love with Frank—and Frank certainly shouldn’t fall in love with the penniless Mary, because it’s his duty to marry money and restore the family fortunes.

In writing this novel, Trollope reveals that he’s the true heir to Jane Austen in characterization, plot, and style. Trollope’s wit is a little broader, and he uses the technique of addressing the reader directly and commenting on his own words, which I think is fun. But he’s also got the social advantage of writing fifty years after Austen. You see, Mary is a bastard. And everyone knows it, or suspects it. But in the end, she isn’t ostracized by society, and her potential isn’t limited the way, for example, Harriet Smith’s is in Emma. For all the talk another fifty years on about how shocking Thomas Hardy was with Jude the Obscure, I really wonder what the Victorians thought about cheering for a penniless, “nameless” (that’s the polite way of saying “bastard”) heroine?

I’m a fan of Anthony Trollope now. And it’s exciting to know that there are so many more of his novels left for me to discover.