Depending on whether you view religion as the answer to the world’s problems or the cause of a lot of them, you may or may not enjoy Tom Perrotta’s thought-provoking novel The Leftovers.
I liked it. But then, he had me at “leftovers.”
Many of us lucky enough to live in the world’s most obese and privileged nation share a common “problem.” After we’ve finished our dinners, whether we eat out or cook at home, what to do with the leftovers: save them or not?
This question is at the heart of Perrotta’s lightly satirical riff on the idea of The Rapture, the belief that when the end of the world comes, and it’s a’comin’ soon according to some folks, the good people who followed the rules and stuck to the straight and very narrow path will be whisked away to eternal joy, while those who strayed, or didn’t manage to follow the directions on the side of the box will be left behind to scratch their heads and lick their wounds in abject misery.
Or not.
And therein lies the tale. What makes Perrotta’s prose so delicious to me is how easily he weaves the absurd with the seemingly sensible. Thus, as the story reveals how the lives of the leftovers are dramatically changed, we see some characters accept the “Sudden Departure” as a judgement on their own behavior, while others take leave of their senses entirely. The premise mines a rich vein of human folly, but Perrotta always respects his characters. He reveals their weaknesses but never diminishes the effort it takes to stay sane in a world that no longer makes sense.
This message resonates all too clearly in our real world, where the incidence of unbalanced individuals committing mass murder appears to be a trend rather than a rarity.
People in pain can lose their ability to behave rationally. People without hope are like dry leaves in the path of a wildfire. Any little spark can set them off.
As Bob Dylan once wrote: Too much of nothing can make a man ill at ease
One man’s temper might rise, another man’s temper might freeze
In the day of confession we cannot mock a soul
When there’s too much of nothing, no one has control.
We live in dangerous times. Some people turn to religion for answers. Others turn on religion.
And then there’s Tom Perrotta, who offers a fresh perspective on the human need for connection, for love, for hope, with or without religion. In The Leftovers he seems to suggest that, as any good cook knows, even the saddest, homeliest looking leftovers can still make a fine meal. They just need to be carefully warmed up and served with love.
Not me personally. But Avalon Books, the little publishing company which first took a chance on me as a fiction writer, has been absorbed into the Amazon behemoth.
I’m hoping this will turn out to be a good thing. Usually I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to business news, but in this case I have a tiny vested interest in the outcome of this deal.
Founded 62 years ago as a family business by Thomas Bouregy, Avalon made its small but respected mark in the publishing world by limiting its production to wholesome genre works: romance, mystery and westerns.
The accent there is on the wholesome. While some genre publishers concentrate on fiction designed to make the flesh crawl or sweat, or generally heat up, Avalon’s focus since the 1950s was the sort of books you could loan to your grandmother without fear of offending her delicate sensibilities; the kind of books you didn’t have to worry about leaving around where your nine-year-old daughter might happen upon them. Chaste, morally grounded, straight shootin’ yarns.
When they offered to buy my first novel, back in 2003, I was thrilled. I had read their guidelines. I had cleaned up my novel to meet their standards, I thought. Then as the editing process began I got a list of various changes they required in order for the manuscript to meet their expectations. They had no problems with my grammar, my plot, my characters, or my style. But my use of certain terms, my diction, my innuendos, didn’t sit well with them.
At first I chafed at this. I spent a few hours huffing and puffing before I calmed down and reflected on how lucky I was that anyone was willing to offer me a contract for my modest little romance. And once I accepted the challenge of rewording a few phrases and applying a touch of concealer to the more suggestive portions of the book, we got along fine.
The experience of being published at all was thrilling. But, as with so many thrills, after you come down from the top of the ride, you realize that you’re pretty much right back where you started. Avalon was a small company, with no promotional budget to speak of. At least not for me and my Tall Order. And marketing has never been my strong suit. I couldn’t sell Girl Scout cookies.
However, I have always felt grateful for that first success, because it gave me hope, the stuff of dreams. So I’ve kept dreaming. Five years ago I gave up on trying to interest conventional publishers in my works. The agents and editors I met at conferences and interviews were universally encouraging, but they were all looking for blockbusting, or in some cases bustier busting, works, and that’s not what I’m going for. Some people like books that are electrifying or terrifying. Others love novels that aim to be heartbreaking, crushingly realistic, dismally honest and dark. Not I, said the duck.
For me, a great book is funny, thoughtful, and sometimes poetic. A touch of romance adds to it, but isn’t required if the humor is smart enough. That’s the kind of book I’m trying to write.
Tall Order was a good first step for me, so I’m glad that if Avalon must vanish, as Avalons are wont to do, Amazon will be taking over (as Amazons are wont to do). I’m hopeful that my first book will be digitalized and available on Kindle and its kin.
The key word there is “available.” Because as a writer, the best reward is to have people read your work and respond to it. Maybe they like it, maybe not, but if it brings a momentary lift to anyone, I’m thankful.
So roll on Amazon, swallowing everything in your path. And me, I’ll keep searching for higher ground.
It’s not as easy as it once was to get lost in this world.
In these technology infested times, the proliferation of gadgets that can tell you where you’re going, how to get there, and what it will cost you has taken some of the zest out of travel. Still, most of us would gladly trade the thrill of the unexpected for the assurance that we’ll get where we want to go without undue bother. And after hearing about the recent mid-air mental snaps of some airline staff, I find myself warming to the idea of a quiet book by the fire.
But, like it or not, sooner or later all of us have to get out of the chair and go places, even if it’s only to the dentist. This is why maps will never go out of style.
I love a good map. I can spend hours perusing Rand McNally, marveling at the curious names of tiny hamlets, the abundance of rivers and streams and mountains between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the sheer expanse of our nation.
Yet part of the magic of maps lies in all that you can’t see in them. The personal, political and social history played out in states and cities, to say nothing of the immense physical changes which take place at a pace too slow for our human eyes to fully appreciate. You can get a sense of it at the Grand Canyon, but if we were able to view the rest of the world through that same staggering perspective we might have a better understanding of how long history is, and how short our share of it.
Of course, we’d rather not think about that. We are the center of the universe, after all. The crown of creation, etc. Uneasy lies the head.
But maps – those flat, two-dimensional renderings of the world as we see it – allow us to feel some measure of control. We know where we’re going. We’ve got a map.
Would that it were so easy. The comforting illusion of control that maps provide allows us to function in a world of restless dark matter.
Much as I love maps, I never fully trust them. Everything changes. Roads close, new roads get built, shorelines change, lakes and rivers dry up. The physical landscape has a life of its own, and while our attempts to keep track of it have improved dramatically since the age of satellites and computers, there’s still a gap.
Perhaps that’s one reason why the maps I enjoy most are of imaginary places. As I child I delighted in the map of The Hundred Acre Wood drawn by E.H. Shepard for the Winnie-the-Pooh books. Since then I’ve always had a fondness for a good imaginary map. I love it when a writer takes the time to fully imagine a world, complete with place names that ring true. Most recently the maps in George R.R. Martin’s brilliant A Song of Fire and Ice have been especially satisfying, and very helpful to a reader embarking on the journey through the epic five-volume (and counting) fantasy.
Of course, in order to create a map of an imaginary place, it helps to have a vivid imagination. To believe in such a map can serve as a coping strategy: “when reality fails and negativity don’t pull you through” (thanks be to Bob) you can always retreat to someplace imaginary until the next election.
Camped out on the far northwest edge of the nation, Seattle sits on a faultline between the real and the imaginary worlds. It’s easy to cross that line here. That’s one reason I included a map of Seattle in my recent fantasy novel, The Goddess of Green Lake. A map of Seattle is a map of an imaginary place. Here people carve out curious niche lives that couldn’t find a toe hold in Kansas, or in New York City, for that matter.
But here, where the moss grows faster than the national debt, crazy ideas can relax and put down roots. There’s a fair amount of live and let loon attitude. As Mal Reynolds, the noble renegade captain in Joss Whedon’s space-western Serenity once put it: “We’re all out here on the edge. Don’t push me and I won’t pull you.”
While the political stew bubbles and spills with daily infusions of invective and innuendo, it’s helpful to step back, squint your eyes, and try to see the bigger picture. All of this has happened before. Apocalypses come and go. Sooner or later we all dance with the stars.
Hardly a week goes by without some magazine article, or blog post, or online article about how people don’t read books anymore – how Nooks and Kindles and iPads and the texting twitterverse are making books obsolete. Some greener-than-thou folks even claim that paperless books are the environmentally responsible thing to do.
I’m not buying it. Also not buying a Nook, Kindle or whatever stocking-stuffer gadget comes next to “replace” books.
For me, nothing replaces books. Books are my Tahiti, my Paris, my refuge from “reality” shows and the continual onslaught of all too real tragedy in the world around us.
I realize that reading books alone can’t solve the world’s problems. And, indeed, some books, notably religious texts, seem to stir up as much strife as they inspire goodwill in humankind.
But books are the gateway to understanding. And without a lot more of that, this little planet of ours may go the way of Pluto. Only with more explosions.
So, I’m a book fan. Some might say a book snob. But I’m really not. Taste in books is like taste in food. You can’t argue a person into liking anchovies.
In literary terms, I’m something of an omnivore. While there are a handful of authors to whom I return again and again, there’s always a thrill when you discover an author you missed.
Allegra Goodman has been writing acclaimed novels for a while. She’s won prizes and awards, and her books are simply amazing. I just finished reading The Cookbook Collector and Intuition. Back-to-back. I couldn’t stop. And there’s more. I can hardly wait to dig in to the rest of her stuff. Her writing is deft and thoughtful, her characters utterly convincing, her plotting and scenes brilliant and compelling.
In blurbs about The Cookbook Collector one reviewer described her as “our own Jane Austen,” a phrase which has been bandied about for years, applied to scores of pleasant forgettable romances. I yield to no one in my admiration for Jane Austen, but Allegra Goodman is something else entirely. Her work weaves threads of modern culture with acute observations of human frailty caught in the undertow of mortality. Like Jane Austen? Yes, and no. Goodman’s women characters, for one thing, are modern in every sense, keenly aware of their choices, and alive to the truth that there is a cost for every choice.
So. There you have it. The special on today’s menu. It may not be to your taste. But if food for thought is your dish, may I suggest the work of Allegra Goodman?
In an ideal world, for every throw there is a catch.
Yet we all know that human life is compounded of some successes and countless errors. We treasure the successes. We brood on the errors. And in the brooding a world of trouble breeds.
Readers who casually pick up Chad Harbach’s first novel, The Art of Fielding expecting it to be another baseball story about the struggle for greatness and its cost will not be disappointed. But this remarkable novel portrays a rich and complex emotional terrain that extends far beyond the diamond.
Through his careful, compassionate, and at times comic depiction of five characters whose lives become intimately connected at a small Wisconsin college, Harbach has created a work which transcends the sports novel genre, while at the same time remaining true to the love of the game which resonates throughout the book like the heartbeat of a team.
The story of Henry Skrimshander, a gifted shortstop whose uncanny fielding ability raises expectations in all who encounter him, The Art of Fielding is both an examination of the way we try to become the people we want to be, and how one slip, one bad throw, can change everything.
Set on the shore of Lake Michigan, the novel is enriched by a nautical theme anchored in a bit of Melville worship which works much better than you might think. As the Harpooners go through the long baseball season, we feel their pain, we share their hope, and ultimately, we come to believe in the redemptive power of the struggle itself.
The important thing is not whether you win, or lose, or make a great play or an error. It’s being in the game.
People admire eagles. They respect hawks. They bill and coo over doves.
Coots don’t get a lot of respect.
Generally speaking, when you hear the word coot, it’s preceded by the qualifiers “crazy old.” This seems unfair to me. At least to the birds.
I’ve been thinking a lot about coots lately. Also short-tailed shearwaters, flammulated owls and Himalayan snowcocks.
Coots I see on a regular basis, as they dip and dive in the still waters of Green Lake. Those other birds … nope. Never seen ’em. Highly unlikely to. Those being the kind of hard-to-find fowl that drive a certain kind of old coot nearly insane with a rare form of bird lust known as A Big Year. There’s a movie out now, starring Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson, based on a true story called The Big Year, which follows the obsessive lengths to which three passionate birders went to see the most birds in North America in one calendar year. It hasn’t been causing much of a stir among film critics, though reviews for the book by former journalist Mark Obmascik were unanimous in their praise for the writer’s entertaining style, and his engrossing account of a quirky subject.
I just finished reading it. I could appreciate the brisk writing style and the somewhat self-indulgent comic slant with which Obmascik attempts to keep readers from throwing the book across the room and screaming, “Who cares?”
I do care about birds. And I have always assumed that people who are birders, those who spend hours staring up into the trees in the hope of seeing some brief flash of feathers, or hearing some telling trill of birdsong, were even more passionate about birds than I. But the more I read about these guys who engage in bird watching as a kind of competitive sport – he who sees the most birds gets the glory – the more irritated I became. Well, really it was only two of them that irked me. The two who seemed to have limitless amounts of money and free time to spend, flying all over the country, throwing money around like confetti. It reminded me a little too much of modern political campaigns, where whoever has the deepest pockets can buy the most votes.
What kept me from giving up on the book was the compelling portrait Obmascik drew of the long shot – the guy who maxed his credit cards and worked killer overtime to buy himself the precious time to pursue his passion. And there was more to his story than a mere desire to win bragging rights in the birding world. His was a personal quest, undertaken in a time of personal turmoil and suffering, and for my money, he was the soul of the story.
I don’t usually read this kind of book (okay, I admit, the picture of Owen Wilson on the cover influenced me in the airport bookstore). But I’m glad I read it. Not least because of all the amazing things I learned about the birds of North America.
I might just have to get some binoculars. For the birds. Really.
Berkeley artist Deborah Harris created the cover image for my new book.
You can’t stay dry for long in Seattle.
Even if you somehow manage to avoid the persistent drizzle of fall, winter and spring, and step out into the flawless sunshine of late July, thinking you’ve got a clear shot, you will fall under the spell of the sparkling lakes and rivers, the magnificent Puget Sound, and the vast Pacific beyond the Olympic Mountains. There’s no escape. Even if you never get in a boat or paddle a board, you’ll find yourself entranced by the magical water that nurtures Seattle.
It’s a wet world full of wonders, and it’s home to the heroine of my new book, The Goddess of Green Lake.
The goddess of the title isn’t an actual deity of mythic lore. She has no special powers that she knows of, beyond the ability to mesmerize every male who catches sight of her. But Callie Linden, a 20-year-old marine biology student at the University of Washington, has little interest in boys. Her passion is the sea, protecting it from the worst excesses of modern culture – pollution, over-fishing, and rising sea temperatures caused by global warming. Callie is determined to be a part of the solution.
But, as so often happens in real life, things happen that take you off course, and before you know it you’re careening past boulders in the churning rapids, holding on for dear life. For Callie, the first small step off her carefully charted course begins with the discovery of an orphaned baby sea otter.
When I moved to Seattle six years ago one of the first places I visited was the Seattle Aquarium, a treasure chest of delights. But the most unexpected delight of them all for me was the discovery of the sea otters. I fell in love. And right then the idea for a book began in my head, though it was a few years before I had all the pieces put together. The aquarium in my book is fictional, but I’m indebted to the Seattle Aquarium for introducing me to the magical charms of sea otters.
The baby sea otter in my story captivates another character as well. Eel MacGregor, a struggling musician who first appeared in Alice and The Green Man, has moved to Seattle, for all the usual reasons young musicians do. But he’s not finding it so easy to stand out in the glutted local music scene.
Well, you can probably guess where this is going. But it might surprise you.
When you mix otters, music and magic with a little bit of Seattle mist, anything can happen. You can read all about it in The Goddess of Green Lake.
The original woodblock by Deborah Harris of Fergus the Green Man.
For those of us who enjoy spending a large portion of our lives reading fiction, the borderline between the world of the imagination and the so-called real world is sketched in erasable ink. We whose literary passports bear the stamps of dozens of favorite authors have no trouble packing our willingness to suspend disbelief. We welcome the chance to plunge into whole new worlds, to escape from our own daily anxieties while we visit inside the heads of other characters.
But when I first began to publish my writings I learned that all readers see things through the lens of their own imaginations, and what seems clear in my own head leads some readers only as far as a state of confusion. The first time this happened I was working at a newspaper in the small Virginia town where I lived, and I had written a column about my difficulty accepting the fact that one of the first things my oldest daughter did after she went off to college was to shave half her head.
I was upset by this. She has beautiful, thick, chestnut hair, and I felt the new look didn’t accentuate her best qualities. I wanted to be a supportive, easy-going, liberal mom, and I tried to go along with it. But I couldn’t mask the dismay in my eyes, and my daughter noticed. Words were said. For a time, there was a new awkwardness in our relationship.
The column I wrote about it made light of my maternal distress, the wacky things kids do, all those typical reference points that bind together those of us who raise children. A lot of regular readers responded to the column and seemed amused by it. But after reading that my daughter had shaved half her head, one woman who worked in my office took me aside and offered her sympathies and asked in a quiet undertone, “Which side?”
I had to stop and think. I had no idea. Did it matter? Apparently, this woman had been attempting to visualize my daughter’s new look and had been stymied right out of the gate by this all-important detail.
I’ll be honest. I still couldn’t tell you which side had hair and which didn’t. It wasn’t the hair that bothered me. It was the bare skull.
That was the first time I came face to face with the reality that no matter how well a writer sees his characters and their world in his own mind, unless readers can enter into it, they aren’t going to be able to care much about what happens there.
When I was first trying to get an agent or editor to take a chance on Alice and the Green Man, the rejections I got tended to be all the same. They all liked the idea, they thought it was original, they enjoyed my writing, but they balked at the basic concept of a woman fighting for a garden. That notion didn’t grab them. Not enough blockbuster potential. I was told by several agents that the market was hot for hotter stories – more sex, more violence, more dark creepiness. Well, for a thousand reasons I won’t go into, I am so not going to write that kind of stuff. It’s not what I want to read.
Eventually, on the advice of a successful published author I met by chance while waiting for a train, I entered Alice and The Green Man in a bunch of Romance Writers’ contests. Generally they request the first three chapters, and the preliminary judging is done by other aspiring romance writers, some of whom have been published. I got a lot of interesting feedback from those contests, and scored well in several, though none led to a contract. But one curious aspect of the comments made me question whether I should continue trying to pass myself off as a romance writer.
I am, of course, a romantic. I long for a world in which happy endings are the norm. That’s why I write fiction. But many of the women who judged these contests seemed troubled by their inability to see the world of my imagination. Actually, that isn’t entirely true. Some of them seemed to enjoy their visit to my garden. Others thought there was entirely too much floral description and not nearly enough bodily contact.
And there we come to the green heart of the matter. From the first moment he came into my mind, Fergus, the Green Man, was a vivid, sexy, intelligent, fascinating man who cared about plants. Wow! My dream man. But not, it seems, quite so enthralling to a lot of the women who read my contest entries. On one point in particular they were united. They wanted to know the exact shade of green he was. And was it just his thumb? Or, umm, all parts of him?
Well, of course, I thought I had spelled this out in the text – that his skin was a delicious olive tone, that it seemed to get greener after he sat in the sun for a while, that the leaves and vines were drawn to him by his aura of fertility. As is Alice. ‘Nuff said.
But not, apparently, for the judges. In the margins of my entries they wrote their concerns. They seemed to see my Green Man as some sort of amalgam of the Hulk, the Jolly Green Giant and Shrek.
Not even close to my vision.
The idea to take the ancient archetype of the Green Man, a figure so shrouded in mystery that no one knows who first produced an image of a man with leaves sprouting out of his head, and make him a hero in a modern setting appealed to me on many levels. While many of the early depictions of the Green Man carved in stone on medieval cathedrals in Europe show a monstrous untameable creature, these illustrations grew out of the earliest struggles of humankind, when nature itself was a thing to be feared, conquered and placated. Now, as modern civilization has reached the brink of nearly destroying the tree of nature on which our very existence depends, society has a different view of nature as something to be cherished, and a new passion for connecting with the natural world. In my interpretation of the mythic Green Man, I simply took this new passion to its logical extreme.
So, when in the course of time I finally decided to self-publish the book because I was, and still am, hopelessly in love with my Green Man and want to share him with anyone who might appreciate his charms, one of the most important parts of the process for me was making sure that the cover image gave readers an evocative suggestion of how to ‘see’ my Green Man.
Luckily, my artist friend Deborah Harris has been a longtime supporter of my work, and when I asked her if she would be willing to create a portrait of Fergus, she embraced the idea wholeheartedly. Deborah is a marvelous painter, but I wanted a woodcut, because for years I have admired her floral woodcut designs, and I felt sure that she could create an image that would straddle the border between the imaginary and the ordinary.
At first we had some discussions about what Fergus looked like. She sent me a few trial sketches that had elements I wanted – the twining leaves, the sensual eyes. But the cheeks were too cherubic, too innocent. I wrote her back and told her to take a look at some photos of the character of Spike, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At the time, I was at the height of my obsession with that show, when it was in its witty, genre-breaking prime. A few weeks later Deborah sent me an image and asked, “Will this do?”
“Yes,” I said, “yes, it will, yes.”
Since then, of course, the book has not exactly blazed a trail through the publishing world. But it has been read and enjoyed by a few people, and this brings me great satisfaction. I know I don’t personally have the strength or courage or vision to save the natural world from the forces of destruction bearing down upon it. But if enough men and women unite in not only seeing, but being green, maybe there’s hope for us all.
There is a Blue Ridge of the mind, where the shadows beckon, full of secrets and music, especially when autumn comes clad in russet and gold.
It’s a place where people mind their own business, but still look out for one another. Where sharing comes naturally and harmony breeds in the red clay.
This is the world of Duggie Moon, affable slacker entrepreneur, former Latin scholar, and music lover. Duggie gets along with most people, but every now and then even a peaceable stoner like Douglas C. Moon finds himself in a tight spot, because not everyone on the planet is pure of heart.
This year, as another breathtakingly beautiful autumn burnishes the Blue Ridge, Duggie has embarked on a new scheme to get rich, or at least solvent, by managing one of the local up and coming rock bands. Duggie is counting on their success to impress Jenny Carson, the love of his life, who is considering a move to Paris, France.
But the chemistry of rock and roll, as everyone knows, is one part talent to nine parts crazy, and Duggie’s best-laid plans may blow up in his face. It would be enough to make a lesser man turn to drink. But that’s not the Moon way.
Will Duggie succeed in leading his rock and roll band to acclaim before they turn on each other and burn out like a sun going nova?
Some readers don’t. Some prefer slender paperbacks, which tuck tidily into a suitcase, books which promise not to weigh the reader down with sorrow or reality, even when the plots involve serial murders or child molesters. In fiction, we can expect to enjoy the satisfactions of justice, or, failing that, at least the comfort of revenge.
I’m a fan of Dickens and Melville. I like sagas which go long, take detours, ramble through the wayside and offer disparate views of the action. But, in all my years of reading I’d never met a fantasy saga that got under my skin until I took a chance on George. That’s George R.R. Martin, for those of you who, like me, pay little attention to The New York Times bestseller lists. Had I been taking notice in the past decade I would have been aware of this colossus of invention.
But, wait, you may say, what about Tolkien? Yeah. About that. Back in the day (that would be the late 60s for those of you born too late to enjoy the peculiar blend of insanity and merriment that flourished under the reign of King Richard) the legions of Lord of the Ring worshippers were recruiting heavily, and I tried to like the books. But seriously, I could barely stomach The Hobbit, with its almost complete lack of female characters, its tiresome pacing, its creaky attempts at humor and its general tedium. For years I refused to even pick up the actual trilogy, until the looming film version inspired me to see what all the fuss was about. I dutifully plowed through all three books. And I repeat: almost complete lack of female characters, tiresome pacing, creaky humor, and OMG the tedium.
I realize there are those who hold LoTR as a sacred text, and I mean no disrespect to Tolkien, or the thousands of wannabes who have been trying to follow in his literary footsteps ever since. But really, I think literature grows through innovation that draws not only from the past, but from the gritty present and the vast and unknowable future. And, if that’s the criterion on which we judge the merits of fantasy epics, then the contest is over and George R.R. Martin is the clear winner.
I started A Game of Thrones after reading a funny piece in The New Yorker about Martin’s difficulties with his immense fan base, a vocal minority of whom were irritated because they thought he was taking too long writing the final book of the five-part epic fantasy A Song of Ice and Fire. Within the first hundred pages I was trapped. There was no way I could stop reading this thing.
Some critics have described the work as a blend of Lord of the Rings and The Sopranos, and I can see why they’d make that connection. The story contains some of the classic elements of fantasy – the sword fights, knights, castles, magic, etc., combined with the cold-blooded violence and misogynistic male bonding of the Mafioso genre. Fundamentally it’s about power struggles, and how they warp and wound everyone who gets in the way. But Martin’s epic offers much more in the way of characterization, plot development, and stunning action.
For me one of the most striking aspects is Martin’s credible use of children in central roles. Harking to the grim realities of our own medieval times, when children had to grow up quickly and education was only for the nobility, Martin tells much of the story through the eyes of the five Stark children, most of whom are under 10 years of age at the start of the saga. It’s a measure of his gifts as a writer that we soon forget about age entirely, the way children themselves do, living in the now, believing themselves capable of almost anything, and in many cases suffering terrible consequences.
Another strong point in Martin’s favor is that he has fitted out his saga with more than one strong female character, some of them noble and good, some of them not so much.
And then there’s Tyrion, the dwarf. Brave, cunning, far more decent and kind than he lets on, and supremely likable, for this character alone Martin deserves some sort of merit badge. He’s added to the literary lexicon of unforgettable characters. I don’t get HBO, but I’m already looking forward to seeing the new series based on the saga, especially after I learned that the estimable Peter Dinklage is playing Tyrion. And Jason Momoa is Khal Drogo. OMG.
I’m up to page 700 in Book Two, with miles to go before I’m through. Just how I like it. So that’s what I’m taking to the beach this summer.
