Book review (sort-of): Ender's Game

I didn't like it as much on the re-read. I gave it another go-round for several reasons: 1) It seems to come up oddly frequently in conversation; 2) I wanted to do an in-depth analysis for the blog; 3) Since I'd already read it once, it wouldn't need that initial warm-up phase. 

Well, (2)'s out the window, because I've now read three books between then and now. So why didn't I get around to writing that long post I'd intended to? Probably mostly because of laziness, but also...I just didn't like Game as much the second time around. 

Why?

Maybe because I already knew the big reveal - and boy howdy, what a reveal.
Maybe because I'm older. 
Maybe because I'd forgotten how truly awful Peter is. 
Maybe because dream sequences get on my nerves more. (And the Giant's Game is naught but an extended dream sequence, don't try to convince me otherwise.)

All of these reasons summed together remind me of a line from Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent: "[T]here are three things you can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again." I had high hopes for this re-read, and high nostalgia. But I'm different, and Ender cannot bring the same emotions it once did. You can't recreate the feelings of the past; you can't go home again. 

xo, 

Devo

Enchantment by Orson Scott Card

To prove to my friend K--- that yes, I do actually like some books. 

Spoilers ahead

There's something magical about fairy tales. It's more than just magical elements - though they certainly have those - but that they are a kind of magic, the way they seep into our consciousness, wind themselves around the thread of our thoughts, situate themselves so deeply in our collective cultural soul that we can hardly tell where they end and we begin. The stories we collectively tell have power: they shape us, make, create, and recreate us. In a sense, they are us - as has been said, what are we other than the stories we tell ourselves? 

Anyway. 

That's a long, somewhat pretentious intro to say that I really, really like OSC's Sleeping Beauty retelling, Enchantment. Like Princess Bride before it, it has a little bit of everything: bears, witches, true love, time travel, medieval[1] Russia, linguistics. 

Linguistics is not a terribly sexy major; it doesn't surface in pop-culture all that often. So to have a main character (Ivan) who is not only a linguistics grad student but then uses his snazzy and seemingly-useless-other-than-to-write-a-dissertation knowledge of Old Church Slavonic to alleviate the trials of time-travel to and from the medieval[2] Russian peasant village? Incredible. (As a side note, the most recent linguistics-in-pop-culture came from the late-great-regenerate Agent Coulson in Thor: "Get somebody from linguistics down here.")

There is more than just linguistics to like, not to fret. Retold fairy tales are my jam, one of my favorite jams, in fact. As above, the stories one grows up with are powerful things; so while Sleeping Beauty was never my favorite, it is still part of me, part of my storysoul. Enchantment is so much beyond the original (which includes neither time travel nor linguists; a failing that, while tragic, we can't really fault them[3] for), but the magic remains - the essentials are still there: Gods and witches, terrifying bears, sleeping princesses (Katerina), noble men, powerful women, kingdoms that hang in the balance...

A story's not much without a most excellent villain, and Baba Yaga is superb. Here's what she has to say about truth: "Since the truth can never be known, a wise woman learns to become a connoisseur of lies, choosing only the best and most satisfying to surround herself with. I sink into my  lies like featherbeds, and they keep me safe and warm." That twisty troll logic, so masterfully crafted; I live for terrifying villains who wield magic and words as two edges of the same slicing sword. 

The secondary characters (though it's difficult to call any character in OSC novels "secondary," as they are all written so compellingly that you feel like they exist fully and completely, right down to the color of their socks and their outlook on global warming) are full of sass, which makes me cackle gleefully. Breaks up those nights of death and mayhem, y'know. Exhibit A: The priest in the medieval peasant village, who is called upon to read Ivan's war commands during the final battle with Yaga, says the following in response to concerns that it might not be quite right for a man of the cloth to participate in war[4]: "...I carry no weapons. I harm no man. I will do nothing more than read in a very loud voice, which is what I do in church." Exhibit B: Ivan's mother, who turns out to be a sort of good witch/nature magic sort of woman, says this to her husband when he thinks she's charmed Ivan and Katerina into finally taking a shine to one another: "I don't do love potions. Those are never about love, they're about coercion. And besides, they already loved each other, they were just too stupid to know it." So much glorious, snarky sass. 

Enchantment also deals with shame and what produces it, culture shock (and time shock), how free will and fate work together (or not), how love buds and grows and changes, what makes a man, how to accept your weakness and strengths, and the relevancy of gods. 

If the preceding hasn't convinced you (bears/witches/Russia/linguistics/princesses/sass), there's still hang-gliding: "…and while neither of them became brilliant at it [hang-gliding], they also didn't die, which was how you graduated from do-it-yourself hang-gliding school, Ivan figured."

Bonus points to those who spot the copious pop-culture references scattered throughout

xo, 
Devo



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[1] I cannot for the life of me spell this word. I try a new way every time, and it's always wrong. In what universe does medieval make sense? According to the OED, it's medi+ev+al: medi- as in medium, ev- as in aevum (Latin for 'age, epoch'), and -al the adjective-making suffix. Sure, fine; it's still a ridiculous spelling.

[2] Typed this word ~30 seconds ago, still have to rely on Chrome's spell check to figure it out.

[3] That is, the mists of time or where/whoever it was these stories originally came from

[4] The good book is  quite fuzzy on the subject of kneecaps, after all

The Sudden-Baby Plot Device

[I’m going to mention Breaking Dawn, Shadow Puppets, and The Parasol Protectorate, spoilers ahead. Lightly inspired by this blogger’s rage at feelings, one of my favorite blog posts ever.]

There are lots of things I love about books, elements of craft and form and plotting that make me gasp or cackle or cheer. I recognize things that I love might drive other people crazy: metered, epic poetry; the non-ending of The Lady or the Tiger ; Jasper Fforde’s punny names and craysauce alterna-history.

I do not love the Sudden-Baby plot device.

I dis-love it so much, in fact, that I have to remind myself that not all babies that show up in media (print or otherwise[1]) are an example of this device. Babies that make sense as part of the story, great. Babies that are seamlessly integrated into the overarching theme, fab. Babies that come about through careful foreshadowing and relevant circumstances, awesome. But pregnancies and the subsequent children that arise simply to heighten the drama? No thank you.

Two of the most egregious examples are Breaking Dawn, the last book in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series[2], and Shadow Puppets, the seventh book in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series[3]. Neither series is centered around families and babies. Until their respective Sudden-Baby books, there is little indication that babies and related dramz are the narrative concerns. These series do not deal with the emotional outcomes of having children, or the intricacies of family life.

I’m rather disinclined to get into the whole Twilight debate, so let’s stick with Ender: The Ender series (specifically, the Bean extension) deals with child soldiers, political scheming, and saving the world.

For the first two books of Bean’s chronicle, he and his peers are children – prepubescent children trained to save the world and exterminate the bad guys. Then suddenly in Shadow Puppets, he and Petra are wedded and having children – and Bean has a massive about-face, a little boy who was mostly only concerned for his own survival is now a man, whose mission it is to protect his wife and unborn children at any costs. While this is an admirable goal, the coming-about of is was not well done. I didn’t see a natural relationship evolving, whose flutters and trials would eventually lead to domestic feels and progeny, but a Baby (actually, something more like 9 babies) deployed for the purposes of upping the dramz.

Yes, books need drama. Characters need conflict and something to fight for. Maybe OSC could see that his child-saving-the-world device had played out, and needed somewhere to go: fine. But the Sudden-Baby plot device is not the way. Subtle-Baby is what we need more of: while the announcement itself may be unexpected, one can think back over the preceding pages and say, “Yes, okay. This baby makes sense.” 

But I didn’t feel anything for Bean and Petra’s babies. Their feelings didn’t seem warranted, narratively. I saw what OSC was going for – that this formerly self-involved (in the nicest way possible) child grows into a loving and protective husband and father; that it’s well and good to save the world, but if you don’t have anything to connect to on a minute, human level, what’s the point?; that children grow up and move on, even from the world-saving business. I saw all those things, but I didn’t feel them, because the relationship was too abrupt, the change of feelings was too heavy-handed, and the babies too sudden.

The Sudden-Baby plot device, like books-with-maps[4], is really just a flip name for  larger issues – the issue of good foreshadowing, the issue of connecting to characters, and the issue of how to slip in ideology subtly enough that I[5] don’t notice, rather than have it hit me in the face like an out-of-control Frisbee.

A successful narrative baby deployment? The Parasol Protectorate series by Gail Garriger.

xo,

Devo

---

[1] Just finished season 1 of Battlestar Galactica and it is currently up in the air whether my investment in the series or my dislike of the Sudden-Baby (or Sudden-Savior) will win. Sudden-Savior is a rant for another time, though.

[2] Yes, I read all the Twilight books. I have nothing more to say on the matter.

[3] (dis?)Honorable mentions go to The Story of Beautiful Girl and some novel that I can’t remember the name of, but whatever it was, the Suddenness of the Baby made me throw the book across the room in frustration and stop reading.

[4]  “Books-with-maps” is how I’ve taken to fending off the numerous high-fantasy recommendations that come my way. More on that later.

[5] It is “I” here, because YMMV on how appropriate or sudden a Baby plot twist feels.