Review: The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

Over at Strange Horizons, I review Helene Wecker's debut The Golem and the Jinni, in which the titular magical creatures meet in early 20th century New York.  Though there are aspects of the novel that I enjoyed, it ended up making me question its very choice of genre, and my review discusses the way in which magic as a metaphor for mundane realities can end up being used as a crutch to shore up a flawed work.

History, Repeated: Two Views on The Wars of the Roses

We all know that history is written by the victors, but the matter doesn't end there.  History is also written by the powerful, the educated, the privileged.  By people who toe--and sometimes the ones who shape--the party line.  People of the wrong gender, race, class, or nationality not only don't get to write history, they often don't even get to appear in it.  It's one of the tasks of historians to address the gaps and deficits in the official record, but this is also where historical fiction can come in, giving a voice to those who were denied it at the time.  In the last few weeks I've consumed two different works that take on the same historical period with this goal in mind, but from two different perspectives.  The BBC's ten-part miniseries The White Queen tells the story of the Wars of the Roses by stressing the role of women within them, highlighting the fact that in a dispute in which marriage and succession played such an important role, women's bodies were often a field, and a weapon, of battle.  Sharon Kay Penman's 1982 novel The Sunne in Splendour, meanwhile, retells the dynastic struggle between York and Lancaster through the lens of the life of Richard III, whom Penman tries to rehabilitate from centuries of Tudor-instigated character assassination (not the least of which, of course, is the Shakespearean play that bears his name).  For two works with such different goals, the miniseries and the novel are surprisingly prone to employing the same devices.  They also end up evincing some of the same prejudices and preconceptions, and undermining themselves and their projects in very similar ways.

Based on the Cousins' War novels by Philipa Gregory (The White Queen, 2009; The Red Queen, 2010; The Kingmaker's Daughter, 2012), and adapted by Emma Frost and Malcolm Campbell, The White Queen focuses its story on three figures: Elizabeth Woodville (Rebecca Ferguson), a commoner whose impolitic marriage to the first Yorkist king, Edward IV (Max Irons), drives a wedge between Edward and his greatest supporter, the Earl of Warwick (James Frain), which fuels the later stages of the wars; Margaret Beaufort (Amanda Hale), a Lancastrian supporter whose son, Henry Tudor, will take the throne as Henry VII, bringing the wars to an end; and Anne Neville (Faye Marsay), Warwick's younger daughter who is initially a pawn in her father's scheming against Edward, and then marries Edward's younger brother, the future Richard III (Aneurin Barnard).  Other important figures include Elizabeth's mother Jacquetta Woodville (Janet McTeer), who is quick to take advantage of her daughter's meteoric ascent by advancing her family's fortunes through marriage and royal appointments, Isabel Neville (Eleanor Tomlinson), Anne's older sister, who marries Edward and Richard's brother George (David Oakes) in a failed bid by Warwick to secure him the throne, and Marguerite d'Anjou (Veerle Baetens), the French wife of the deposed Lancastrian king Henry VI, who spearheads the fight to restore her husband to the throne and secure her son's inheritance.  Gregory adds her own twist to the story by making the Woodville women witches (as they were accused of being in actual history), who use their powers to advance their goals, thwart their enemies, and divine the future (though not always avoid it).

Equally wide-ranging is The Sunne in Splendour, a 900-page behemoth which follows Richard from early childhood to his death at Bosworth Field.  Though much of the book is written from Richard's perspective, Penman gives nearly every player on both sides of the wars (and some invented, minor figures such as servants and ladies in waiting) a point of view, creating a multifaceted portrait of the dispute and the personal, political, and economic motivations that lay at its heart.  Nevertheless, Penman's ultimate project with the novel is to present a new kind of Richard III, not the usurper of his brother's throne, or the murderer of his nephews, familiar from history.  Her Richard is intelligent, thoughtful, and kind; a fearsome and brave soldier but also an honorable one; a devoted brother, husband, and father whose participation in so much bloody history comes about because of his loyalty to Edward and his belief that he is doing the best for England, rather than personal ambition.  Penman stresses Richard's popularity in the north of England, where he ruled for years on Edward's behalf, suggesting that the hostility that greeted him in London when he took the throne was politically motivated rather than a reflection of his actual performance as a ruler; and she casts Richard and Anne Neville's courtship and marriage as a sweeping love story, in which Richard rescues Anne from the scheming of her father (who marries her off to the son of Marguerite d'Anjou, the Lancastrian heir) and his brother George (who tries to get his hands on Anne's property).

Despite their different goals and apporaches, both miniseries and novel suffer from the same problem, which is endemic to historical fiction (not to mention novel adaptations)--they feel less like a coherent work of fiction, and more like a whole mess of events happening one after another.  The White Queen's project to retell a male-dominated slice of history from the perspective of women is an intriguing one, but beyond achieving it, Gregory and her adapters appear to have had no artistic goal--a fact that seems particularly apparent from The White Queen's ending, in which the story simply stops after Richard's defeat without any attempt to put a cap or any sort of emotional spin on events.  Only a few of the miniseries's characters become interesting as people, rather than as tokens moving the plot along--chiefly, Margaret Beaufort, whom Hale plays with a wounded awkwardness that makes her terrifying, fanatical belief in the divinely ordained triumph of the Lancaster side (and specifically, her son) seem almost endearing.  Though there are a few scenes that try to get at the real, human truth of living through this period--when Warwick's machinations force him to escape to France, his daughter Isabel undergoes a gruesome, bloody childbirth aboard ship, and the series lingers over her and her sister's horror at the visceral, inescapable truth of what it means to be a woman, even a rich and high-born one, in this period--for most of its run The White Queen doesn't seem to be reaching for this kind of humanity.  Its characters act not because it's what the people their authors conceived them as would have done, but because this is what happened at this stage of the story.

The Sunne in Splendour, too, gives the impression of not trying to be a work of art in its own right, but a retelling--with an obvious slant--of a historical story.  This is brought home in particular through Penman's style, which can only be described as artless.  Her characters speak in a cod-medieval argot that consists mainly of using the word "be" instead of any of the verb's conjugations ("There be this I must tell you"; "My lord, the King is here!  They be below in the great hall even now") and a liberal sprinkling of the verb "do" in sentences where it serves no purpose ("In July, he did sign a treaty with Burgundy"; "I'd not be surprised if the deaths do number fully fifteen hundred").  Which may, for all I know, be the way people talked in the fifteenth century, but if so it sits very ill with Penman's liberal use of modern turns of phrase, such as Richard telling George to "stay out of [Anne's] life" or Anne reflecting, of Richard's mother, that "We all have to find our own path and the way she's found be right for her."  The omniscient narrator is similarly confused--some passages are written in modern English, and some replicate the "be" and "do" style.  In some chapters, the narrative voice is contemporary to the characters, sharing their assumptions and worldview, while in others, Penman pauses to explain everything from medieval battle tactics to basic household tasks to her readers. In the book's final chapters, characters repeatedly launch into recitations of the various arguments for why Richard couldn't possibly have murdered his nephews, sounding more like a history lecture than actual human beings--which, among other things, draws an unflattering comparison between The Sunne in Splendour and Josephine Tey's 1951 novel Daughter of Time, which presents the same argument with a great deal more style and wit.

Nevertheless, The Sunne in Splendour is profoundly readable--perhaps more so than The White Queen is watchable.  Artless though her style may be, Penman writes clearly and concisely.  This is particularly noticeable in the novel's battle scenes, in which she effortlessly sets the scene and takes readers through the beats of the battle (these scenes are anyway a point that The Sunne in Splendour has over The White Queen, which has neither the viewpoint nor the budget to stage big battles; one wonders if Elizabeth's magical powers were intended to compensate for this lack of excitement, but if so then either Gregory or her adapters have failed to use them as such).  And, of course, Penman has the benefit of her subject matter--if all she's done with her book is to make a story out of history (no small accomplishment in its own right, it must be said) then that history is fascinating enough to make for an engrossing read.

In fact, both The Sunne in Splendour and The White Queen are at their weakest when their authors step away from the task of storying history and try to inject their own agenda into their rendition.  For Gregory, this is the beatification of Elizabeth Woodville, who is clearly the favored of the miniseries's three heroines.  This is a problem because Elizabeth is, by far, the least interesting character in the miniseries, a fact that has less to do with her role in history, and more with her author's obvious love for her.  Though, as I've noted, very few characters in The White Queen achieve a true complexity, most have some shades of grey--Anne Neville, for example, spends most of the miniseries being frightened yet plucky, but she's surprisingly savvy when she maneuvers her way out of George's control, and later unleashes her inner Lady Macbeth when her husband comes within reach of the throne.

Elizabeth, however, is caught in an epic (albeit, to a modern viewer, not entirely convincing) love story with Edward, which leaves her incapable of developing much of a personality.  Her defining trait is that she loves her husband and children, and she seems to want nothing more than to be with them and to protect them.  Though Gregory allows Elizabeth to occasionally be bitchy to Margaret or Anne, she doesn't allow her to acknowledge the political reality in which she's living--the fact that she is a social climber whose family has benefited enormously from her fortunate marriage.  The White Queen seems to have a horror of making Elizabeth seem in any way mercenary or ambitious, and so it paints an entirely unbelievable portrait of a woman who married, for love, a man who just happened to be the King of England, and who is repeatedly shocked, shocked to discover that this marriage has earned her enemies and puts her and her family in danger.  The result, paradoxically, is to make Elizabeth seem monstrously self-absorbed, so focused on her marriage that she appears genuinely not to have noticed that there's a war going on and that her marriage has intensified it.  In one scene, Elizabeth, who is dealing with a crisis of conscience, pensively asks Margaret Beaufort is she has ever experienced loss--when, after decades of civil war, there surely isn't anyone in Edward's court who hasn't experienced it, as Elizabeth should well know.

Gregory's love for Elizabeth Woodville, however, pales next to Penman's love for Richard III, and as much as The White Queen whitewashes Elizabeth, The Sunne in Splendour vilifies her and her family, the better to clear Richard from the charges that history lays at his feet.  The core of the dispute between the two characters and their partisans is the early death of Edward IV, which leaves a boy on the throne of England.  Richard and the Woodvilles immediately scramble to gain control of the young king, which leads to Richard declaring his brother's children illegitimate and claiming the throne for himself, and the disappearance of both of Elizabeth's royal sons, the famous Princes in the Tower.  If you want to make one of the parties in this final stage of the Wars of the Roses look like the good guy (and, just to be clear, I think that this is a dubious project whose result will be bad history as well as bad fiction), you have to make the other into a villain.

This Penman does, and with gusto.  In the early chapters of The Sunne in Splendour, Penman describes Elizabeth as arrogant and power-hungry, but also extends some sympathy towards her--in one chapter in particular, we see Elizabeth musing about the loneliness of her situation, hated by everyone except for her narcissistic husband.  As the story draws on, however, Elizabeth becomes more and more of a caricature of grasping ambition--her dying regret is that she couldn't convince Edward to kill the priest who proves that their marriage is invalid.  She is frequently castigated for behavior that in other characters would be considered entirely justified.  When Edward tells her that he was already married when he met her, the narrative undermines Elizabeth's entirely justified rage at the damage he's done to her and their children by having Edward comment (and Elizabeth silently confirm) that "We both know I've given you what you did want most, that Queen's coronet you take such pleasure in wearing.  Even had I told you about Nell, you'd still have married me.  To be Queen of England, I don't doubt you'd have willingly bedded a leper."  Later in book, after Richard has seized the throne, Elizabeth joins forces with Lancaster to unseat him, and is criticized by her oldest daughter for being willing to plunge the country into civil war in order to reacquire her lost power.  In a novel that spans a quarter century of dynastic disputes, in which at least seven different characters seek to unseat a reigning monarch, and several battles are fought in which tens of thousands of people die, Elizabeth is the only character who is so rebuked.

If Elizabeth has it bad, her family get it even worse.  Penman not only puts the worst possible spin on the Woodvilles' social climbing, describing them as avaricious and unfit for the posts Elizabeth wins them, but she also paints the family, individually and as a whole, as generally worthless people.  Elizabeth's brother Anthony and her son from her first marriage Thomas Grey are depicted as craven, uncouth, and foolish.  They are frequently the target of Richard's, and often also Edward's, disdain, which they accept because they have no sense of honor and care only about money and power.  Much like Elizabeth, they are called to task for behavior that in other characters is treated as par for the course--when Elizabeth objects to Edward pardoning Warwick, who has killed her father and brother, Edward dismisses her anger; later in the same scene, when Anthony makes a somewhat possessive reference to the deaths of Edward's father and brother in the early stages of the war, Edward explodes at this perceived lack of respect for his grief; the narrative treats Edward's outburst with gravity, and makes no reference to his obvious hypocrisy.  Thomas Grey is described as having "a taste ... for intrigue" for being able to place spies in the houses of the Woodvilles' enemies, a generally useful skill that several other characters in the novel employ with no authorial censure.  He is also described as having "the family flair for hating," and later in the novel he rapes an unconscious woman, one of the most innocent and likeable characters in the novel, just so we're clear who the bad guys are.

That Penman needed to make Elizabeth and the Woodvilles into villains is perhaps understandable--though it must be said that Gregory is much more even-handed with Richard than Penman is with Elizabeth; in her version of the events that follow Edward's death, Elizabeth and Richard both start with equal parts distrust and a desire for compromise, but their paranoia, and some helpful prodding from Margaret Beaufort, tip them into all-out war.  The specific terms chosen by Penman to describe that villainy are less understandable, however, and as one progresses in the novel that choice increasingly seems to have less to do with wanting to rehabilitate Richard, and more with the Woodvilles' class.  You see this, for example, in the contrast Penman draws between Richard's honorable good manners, the seriousness with which he takes his role as feudal lord, and the Woodvilles' bungling crassness.  Or in the way that Penman repeatedly paints the Woodvilles as stupid and unsophisticated, but never explains why, despite their general lack of ability, they continue to flourish and present a meaningful threat to Richard and his supporters.  One almost expects her to refer to their "low cunning." 

What I find most interesting about this is how these two very different approaches to their subject matter on Penman and Gregory's parts end up revealing a similar prejudice in both works.  The White Queen and The Sunne in Splendour both seem to have a horror of social climbing.  Penman addresses this issue in the more familiar way, by making her story's social climbers into villains, and attaching to them all the classist stereotypes that such characters are prone to.  Gregory, though she wants Elizabeth to be her heroine, obviously has the same problem with the idea that she might have married primarily, or even just in part, in order advance herself and her family.  And so she pretends otherwise, and makes of Elizabeth a wholly unbelievable, and quite tedious, figure, who somehow manages not to notice that her marriage comes with undreamt-of financial and political perks.

In the documentary produced by the BBC to coincide with The White Queen (which, though interesting, includes too much of the unfounded speculation that eventually crops up in the miniseries), Gregory says that the purpose of the Cousins' War books was to highlight the ways in which, even in a period that accorded them no rights or status, women were actors in their own right, and often the architects of their own, or their families', fate.  For all my problems with The White Queen, it does accomplish this task, not least in the way that it charts the boundaries of that power and the pitfalls of exercising it.  Isabel Neville, for example, does everything that her husband and father tell her to, and ends up as the most tragic figure in the story because of it.  Her death from postpartum infection is an almost too-perfect encapsulation of the inescapable trap of womanhood in the miniseries's period.  Marguerite d'Anjou, on the other hand, repeatedly defies traditional feminine roles.  We're told that she effectively ran the country when her mentally unstable husband wasn't up to the task, and after he's deposed it is Marguerite who leads the Lancaster side, even riding with her son's troops.  For this, she is unsurprisingly reviled.  The Yorkists use Marguerite's influence on Henry VI as their justification for rebelling and eventually claiming the throne in the wars' early stages.  Later on, it is the perception of a similar influence on Elizabeth's part that motivates Warwick to turn on Edward, and which later convinces Richard that she can't be trusted with the young king.

Between these two characters, Gregory perfectly captures the double bind that greets women when they to exercise power in a patriarchal, medieval system.  Women who can't control their destiny end up being used up and spit out like Isabel Neville; women who try to grab as much power as they can, however, end up being branded as Bad Girls, and sometimes, as in Elizabeth Woodville's case, as witches.  The Sunne in Splendour plays into this bind without seeming at all aware of it.  Penman is sympathetic towards both Isabel Neville and Marguerite d'Anjou but doesn't seem to have considered how their fates reflect the system they lived in.  And, as noted, with her version of Elizabeth she is perfectly happy to parrot the view that a woman who is ambitious, who marries for advancement and takes advantage of her position to amass power for herself and her family, is a Bad Girl (though it is interesting to note that she omits the accusations of witchcraft brought against Elizabeth and her mother by, respectively, Richard and Warwick; perhaps she feared that the associations modern readers would draw from a powerful man accusing a troublesome woman of witchcraft would undermine her pro-Richard argument).  But Gregory, who does see this bind, and the system that created it, is nevertheless unable to escape the Bad Girl mentality.  She must strip Elizabeth of her ambition before she can make her into a heroine.

I can't help but be reminded of Anne Boleyn, another English queen who appears quite frequently in historical fiction, and who was also branded--by her contemporaries and, often, by modern authors--as a Bad Girl.  Anne and Elizabeth, in fact, have a great deal in common.  They're both English-born queens of England (Elizabeth was the very first), both women who were expected to settle for being the King's mistress, and instead held out for marriage and crown, and both women who earned themselves a great deal of enmity for doing so.  More importantly, Anne and Elizabeth both amass power in the only way available to women in their period who have no property or connections--by attaching themselves to a powerful man.  Unlike Anne Neville, who is a great heiress even before she marries Richard, or Margaret Beaufort, who is the mother of a Lancastrian claimant to the throne, the only power Anne and Elizabeth have is that there is one man who considers them special, and that he just happens to be the most powerful man around.  (To be clear, this is speaking relatively.  Though Elizabeth is called a commoner, her family were minor aristocracy, and her mother was related to the royal court of Burgundy; the Boleyns, meanwhile, were a branch of the powerful Howard family.  Elizabeth and Anne could both have made very good marriages within their social stratum, but they didn't have the money or connections to aspire to a crown.)

This is, obviously, an incredibly dangerous tactic.  If your man tires of you, as Henry VIII did of Anne, you end up with your head chopped off.  But even if he doesn't, if you're the perfect wife, if you turn a blind eye to his infidelities, if you give him many healthy children, including sons (something that both the novel and the miniseries ignore is how much of the Wars of the Roses are driven by the fact that many of the York and Lancaster claimants didn't have children or outlived them, while the Woodvilles were incredibly fertile; to bring this back to the issue of class, I can't help but think that this is what happens when you don't spend four generations marrying your cousins in an effort to keep your property in the family and the riffraff out)--even then, your position is precarious.  If your only power comes from being special to one man, then all the other men who have power will not only resent you, they will treat you as morally inferior, as a Bad Girl, for using sex to get power, and for wanting power in the first place instead of being born with it. 

In her novel Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel tries to do some of the same things as Gregory and Penman--to rehabilitate a historical figure usually cast as a villain, in her case Thomas Cromwell, and to draw attention to the ways that women used power in periods that officially gave them none, and to the dangers of doing so.  Mantel could have made the choices that Gregory and Penman do.  She could have made Anne Boleyn a blameless woman in love, or Cromwell a saint driven to evil acts by a conniving woman.  Instead, Mantel recognizes what neither of these authors seem to--that to look for good guys and bad guys, and to root for a particular side, in a dispute like the Wars of the Roses is a fool's errand.  Instead, she focuses on her characters' humanity.  Her Anne is not an appealing figure.  There is little romance between her and Henry VIII, and as he grows tired of her and she grows more desperate, she seems to shrivel up until there's nothing left but ambition and arrogance.  Nevertheless, she is still human, and Mantel doesn't judge her for her choices or ambitions.  Her Cromwell, too, is more than a hero or a villain (though in my reviews of Bring Up the Bodies and its prequel Wolf Hall I've taken Mantel to task for going too easy on him and downplaying his less savory actions).  He has many admirable qualities, and though over the course of the book we watch his soul atrophy, and the worst in him emerge as he engineers Anne's death, we never lose sight of the good that is still in him.

It's that humanity that is missing in both The White Queen and The Sunne in Splendour.  As you may have noticed, I've said virtually nothing about Penman's Richard, which is because, like Gregory's Elizabeth, he is interesting more for what happens to him than for who he is.  When given the chance to explore Richard's humanity--to imagine, for example, how despite his inherent goodness he could have been spurred to terrible acts after his brother's death, one small step after another--Penman instead chooses to present apologia, to painstakingly detail how none of the terrible things that happened during Richard's reign were his fault.  The result is a character to whom things happen, far from the magnetic figure that Penman obviously wants him to be.  The White Queen and The Sunne in Splendour both have their pleasures (if I had to rank them, I would say that The Sunne in Splendour is more enjoyable, but also more aggravatingly overt in its attempts to push its take on history, which ultimately mars the novel beyond recovery), and both work well as an introduction to a fascinating bit of history.  But what they mainly made me wish for was that an author of Hilary Mantel's caliber would take hold of this material, and make some real art out of it.

Recent Reading Roundup 34

I'm not sure why, but the floodgates appear to have opened. After more than a year of struggling with my reading, I've found myself doing nothing but. I'm not that interested in examining the situation for fear of scaring my resuscitated bibliophilia away, but I will note that this year's Tournament of Books seems to have done well by me--I've read four of the participating novels (three of which are covered here), and though I have reservations about all of them, it's certainly an eclectic and interesting selection. Onward to the reviews.

• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn - On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne's wife Amy disappears in what appears to be a home invasion.  Nick's chronicle of the days following Amy's disappearance, in which a media circus develops around the case, alternates with Amy's diary entries describing the history of her and Nick's relationship.  As both narratives progress, it becomes clear that Nick has been keeping secrets from both the readers and the police--an affair with a younger woman, financial difficulties, problems in the marriage with Amy--and Amy's diary entries grow less romantic and more fearful as she approaches the day of her disappearance.  Gone Girl is a novel with a twist, which, given that it's probably the most successful and widely-discussed thriller of the last year, was pretty hard to stay ignorant of before I picked the book up (in fact, knowing the twist is the main reason I decided to read Gone Girl, since otherwise a thriller about a man who appears to have murdered his wife would be pretty far outside of my interests).
  
  
  
  To my surprise, however, I found that knowing the twist made the first half of the novel, in which readers are meant to be bamboozled into suspecting Nick, a lot more fun.  Knowing that both of the narratives in this segment of the book are unreliable made it a sort of puzzle, as I tried to work out where the truth lay in the gap between Nick and Amy's increasingly conflicting accounts of their marriage.  The book actually loses a lot of energy in its second half, when the twist is revealed and that sort of active participation in the story fades away, making it easier to notice its flaws: that Flynn's plot only hangs together because the usually intelligent and calculating Amy suddenly becomes stupid and irrational just when the plot needs her to be; that the novel's descriptions of the economic deterioration of Nick's midwestern home town, or of the way the media, led by a Nancy Grace analogue, gleefully spins a narrative of his guilt, don't really connect to the central mystery plot or the examination the breakdown of Nick and Amy's marriage; and that towards the story's end, Amy engages in some stereotypical Bad Girl behavior (false rape accusations, stealing sperm) whose straight-faced, unexamined presentation left me feeling rather uncomfortable.
  
  Despite these flaws, Gone Girl is a tense, involving read, one that I gulped down and enjoyed immensely.  For that reason as well as several others, I was reminded while reading it of another massively successful, much-discussed potboiler, Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin.  Like Gone Girl, Kevin is an epistolary novel that revolves around a heavily publicized crime, and has a twist that everyone probably knows by now.  More importantly, Gone Girl and We Need to Talk About Kevin both seem to be using their propulsive plots to do the same thing--launch a discussion of a social institution (motherhood in Kevin, marriage in Gone Girl) that women are expected to desire and enjoy, and of the ways in which that expectation can warp and damage them.  They both also undermine that discussion in exactly the same way--by making one of their main characters a sociopath.  Gone Girl piles high the reasons for the implosion of Nick and Amy's marriage--Nick's immaturity and self-absorption, Amy's impossibly high expectations, financial difficulties, meddling parents, Nick and Amy's mutual belief that they need to assume a cool, carefree persona to please one another, and their disappointment when the other stops putting in the effort to maintain that facade.  But the more we get to know Amy, the clearer it becomes that she is incapable of love, and that even if none of these problems existed, she and Nick would still have a sham of a marriage.  Where Gone Girl improves on Kevin, however, is in not taking itself nearly as seriously as Shriver's novel, which aspires to a political significance that it can't really achieve.  Gone Girl, in contrast, is consciously shlocky, which not only makes the problems of its plot easier to swallow, but also suggests that the best way to read the novel might be as a very dark satire, in which Nick and Amy become trapped by the narrative that has been spun around them, forced to perform the perfect, effortlessly happy, Hollywood rom-com marriage for the cameras while behind closed doors the only thing keeping them together is mutually assured destruction.  If Gone Girl does have anything to say about the institution of marriage, it is this deeply cynical conclusion, that the only way to achieve this romantic fantasy is to be insane.
  
  
• Seraphina by Rachel Hartman - It's hard to know where to start discussing Hartman's debut, a busy, wide-ranging story with more characters, plot strands, and worldbuilding details than such a relatively short novel should be able to support.  So perhaps I'll start with the dragons.  Hartman's dragons are coolly logical creatures who, when they're not amassing hoards of gold coins or devouring human flesh, enjoy math and philosophy, and neither understand nor approve of emotions.  They can also take human form, which is how the titular heroine came to be conceived.  Considered an abomination by both races--to dragons because she represents her mother's succumbing to the emotion of love, and to humans because despite a peace that has lasted decades, the dominant religion of the novel's world still teaches that dragons are soulless, inferior beings--Seraphina has spent her life hiding what she is and coping with the unpredictable effects of her mixed heritage, such as psychic contact with people she's never met, or inherited memories from her mother that overwhelm her at inconvenient times.  Despite which, and the danger of being discovered and executed, Seraphina, who is also a gifted musician, takes a position as assistant choirmaster to the royal court, where hiding her heritage presents not only practical but emotional difficulties.  Is Seraphina a bad person for lying to her new friends?  Can she ever trust someone completely?  What about the observant captain of the guard Kiggs, whose attraction to Seraphina is repeatedly hamstrung by his conviction that she is lying about something?
  
  You would think that all this would be quite enough for any author to be getting on with, but the difficulties and emotional toll of passing for human make up only one of the novel's plot strands.  In others, Seraphina helps to prepare for a visit of the dragon king marking the anniversary of peace treaty between dragons and humans, and to investigate an assassination plot spearheaded by warmongers on both side; she discovers the existence of other dragon/human hybrids, and learns more about her dragon powers and ancestry; she deepens and repairs her relationships with her human father and dragon uncle, both of whom still carry the wounds left by her mother's transgression and death; and she gives us a guided tour of her world, its politics, history, religion, geography, and culture.  The ease with which Hartman weaves together these plot strands and subplots into a narrative that never feels overstuffed, and whose pace never slackens, reminded me of the early Harry Potter books (though Seraphina is pitched at an older audience).  And like those books, the result is a world that feels fully lived in and real, and some ways more interesting in its own right than the story used to illustrate it.
  
  Just as interesting as what Hartman does with her premise is what she doesn't do with it, the YA clichés she doesn't indulge in.  Seraphina is special, but not precocious; burdened, but not angsty.  Being skilled or special, in this novel, isn't an excuse for the narrative (or the other characters) to treat you like a special snowflake, but for the people in charge to give you more work--though her musical talent is frequently commented upon, most of Serpahina's work as assistant choirmaster is logistical, and involves wrangling musicians, arranging performances, and placating her ornery boss; when her hybrid superpowers are discovered, they too are wondered at only briefly before Seraphina is conscripted to help keep the peace.  Seraphina's matter-of-factness reflects both her and the narrative's recognition that though her experiences are transformative, and will affect the rest of her life, neither they nor she are the most important part of the story she's living through.  It's a recognition that is also reflected in the refreshingly undramatic resolution of the novel's romance, in which Seraphina and Kiggs recognize that they can't be together because what's going on around them is more important, but also promise not to give up on each other.  Even the novel's most resonant theme, Seraphina's passing and the self-doubt it breeds in her, are treated with a bracing practicality that doesn't obscure how difficult it has been for her to live with the constant threat of exposure.  Though I found the resolution of this strand a little too neat--Seraphina's friends are perhaps too quickly and uniformly willing to accept that she is something they've been taught to hate and fear--that resolution doesn't undermine the work Hartman does throughout the novel to put us in Seraphina's headspace, and I suspect that the novel's sequels will complicate the seeming ease with which Seraphina's secret has been accepted.  For that reason, as well as the chance to spend more time in this wonderfully detailed and realized world, I'm looking forward to what Hartman does next.
  
  
• Zero History by William Gibson - I had made up my mind to pass on the third volume in Gibson's Bigend trilogy, but coming across a copy of it in a used bookstore convinced me to give it a try.  I wish I could say that it turned out to be a fortuitous find, but my suspicions about Zero History proved correct.  Despite some cosmetic alterations, it is more or less a retread of the previous books in the trilogy, full of meditations about consumer culture in the post-9/11 world delivered by disaffected jet-setters who always know the exact brand name of all the objects they use, own, and see (a car isn't simply a Toyota, it's a Toyota Hilux, and always referred to by that full name).  This was new and unusual in Pattern Recognition, and overdone in Spook Country.  In Zero History it's pretty much unbearable--not to mention that the trilogy's "the future is now" slant on technology, which felt like a revelation in 2003, is practically old hat in 2013.
  
  
  
  Gibson's focus this time around is on clothing, as Spook Country heroine Hollis Henry is dispatched by PR wunderkind Hubertus Bigend to find the maker of a super-exclusive, highly secretive, high-end brand of jeans, so that Bigend can commercialize and market it.  Meanwhile, former drug addict Milgrim, another Spook Country character who is now working for Bigend, is sent to do a little industrial espionage on designers of military clothing, on the grounds that these styles influence commercial streetwear.  There are some interesting ideas here--though Gibson loses me on the connection between military and street fashion when he illustrates it through a character who wears a particularly utilitarian bra and claims that it was designed by the IDF; we are now at least two decades past the point where any reasonable person could still believe that all Israeli women are Mossad commandos who can strip an Uzi in their sleep, and as a former woman in the IDF I can assure you that I, and all my fellow female soldiers, bought our bras in the lingerie store like normal people--but they end up drowned out by an action plot that reiterates the previous two books even more than Gibson's fondness for dropping brand names.
  
  Where Zero History deviates from its two predecessors is in finally coming out against Bigend, who here is presented as almost a devil, and his attempts to monetize the jeans that Hollis is looking for an act of corruption that she must protect their designer from.  Which ends up rubbing me the wrong way.  Pattern Recognition and Spook Country were filled with an appreciation for objects that transcended their love of brands, an appreciation rooted in how well those objects had been designed and made, how perfectly they fit their purpose.  When Zero History fetishizes Hollis's mysterious jeans, it does so not simply because they're well made, but because they're exclusive, and it treats Hollis's efforts to keep them that way as almost a holy quest.  There are a lot of things wrong with the global fashion industry--its reliance on cheap, near-captive labor and poor working conditions, its perpetuation of distorted body images, the damage it does to the environment--but I don't think that the near-universal availability of cheap clothing is one of them.  To valorize an object because it is exclusive, and available only to those in the know (and, implicitly, those who are rich enough to drop everything and fly to Australia on a moment's notice when the designer announces a release there) doesn't strike me as the blow against evil that Gibson clearly intends me to see it as, no matter how problematic the commercialized, homogenized alternative is.
  
  
• This is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz - Díaz's second collection, and his follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, doesn't break new ground.  Once again, the focus is on the lives of first and second-generation Dominican immigrants to the US, and once again, the narrator is Díaz's alter-ego Yunior, a smartass with good grades and a bad attitude who can never get far enough away from the country he was born in or the neighborhood he grew up in.  As the title suggests, the topic of most of the stories here, as it was in Yunior's strand in Oscar Wao, is his inability to remain faithful, and the way that his infidelity destroys one relationship after another.
  
  Though Yunior's Dominican background and his family history play a role, as they did in Oscar Wao, in his behavior, Díaz isn't interested in making excuses, and indeed the point of the stories isn't to assign blame--Yunior is always willing to admit to being a fuckup.  What the stories in This is How You Lose Her try to do instead is get at Yunior's humanity, painting a portrait of a man who knows that he's the one destroying his own happiness, but still wants to be loved and forgiven, and is still heartbroken when the relationships he betrays actually do break down.  (Reading between the lines, Yunior comes off like the male equivalent of the romance heroine who doesn't know who she is without a man; he can't stop himself from cheating, but he doesn't know what to do without a woman in his life.)  Keeping all this running is, of coure, Díaz's narrative voice, a sing-song, fast-flowing blend of English, Spanish, and slang that is still, after two collection and a novel, stunning in its immediacy and vitality.  It makes the slight repetitiveness of the ideas in This is How You Lose Her--and in Díaz's career--seem worthwhile, but still I wish that Díaz would do something different--that, as promised, he'll expand his apocalypse-in-the-DR story "Monstro," from the New Yorker's science fiction issue a few years back, into a novel, and use that remarkable voice to tell us stories we haven't yet heard.
  
  
• Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple - Told through email exchanges, newsletters, magazine articles, and the connective tissue of its teenage narrator's reminiscences, Where'd You Go, Bernadette describes the events leading up to the disappearance of Seattle housewife Bernadette Fox.  A pioneer of green architecture and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Bernadette built only two houses before flaming out spectacularly and retreating to the suburbs of Seattle.  As the book opens fifteen years later, Bernadette is a shut-in, living in a dilapidated mansion she'd intended but never got around to renovating with her Microsoft genius husband and their precocious daughter Bee, who is just on the cusp of working out how abnormal her life and parents are.  Most of the comedy in the novel's early chapters comes from Bernadette's snobbish disdain for her mundane neighbors, and their part-curious, part-scandalized fascination with her, a madwoman who lives on the hill and never participates in the school bake sales.  These chapters, with their skewering of suburban small-mindedness and groupthink, have a whiff of Nicola Barker about them, but there's a dark undertone to them that Semple won't quite acknowledge.
  
  
  
  As Dan Hartland writes in his review, the narrative castigates Bernadette for her misanthropy, and her neighbors for being judgmental (and, since this is ultimately a benevolent comic novel rather than a satirical one, allows them to outgrow it) but it has nothing to say about her privilege.  One of Bernadette's methods for avoiding the world is to hire a personal assistant in India who handles shopping, household repair, travel arrangements, and even doctor's prescriptions for $30 a week.  This assistant is later revealed to be an identity thief who nearly clears out Bernadette's bank accounts, which absolves both her and us from having to wonder about the kind of person who sees nothing wrong with paying so little for so much work while sprinkling her emails with thoughtlessly privileged proclamations about her and her assistant's relative quality of life.  Instead, the only criticism that is expressed towards Bernadette is over her choice to give up her creative work--if you do not create, a former teacher tells her, you will become a menace to society--and if Where'd You Go, Bernadette has a message underpinning its social humor it is this examination of how to be a brilliant, creative person while dealing with the frustrating realities of a world that won't always let you do the work you were meant to do (one of the book's more interesting and subtle touches is that as she discovers her own genius--for investigating her parents' lives--the previously happy-go-lucky Bee starts to exhibit some of her mother's impatience and misanthropy).  The fact that some geniuses are never given the opportunity to exercise their creativity because they lack Bernadette's privilege is never discussed, and that, along with the slight sentimentality of the novel's resolution, undercuts what is otherwise a sharp, witty story about what it means to be special, and the obligations--to yourself and to others--that come with it.
  
  
• The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson - The premise of Johnson's novel--a bildungsroman set in North Korea--put me off as soon as I heard it, and its winning the Pulitzer prize (an award whose previous winners include Memories of a Geisha) wasn't an enticement either.  It was the repeated and consistent praise from the judges of this year's Tournament of Books (which Johnson went on to win) that finally persuaded me to give the book a try, and though what I found certainly justifies the tournament judges' praise, it also confirms my doubts about the novel's project.  Beautifully written and expertly plotted, the novel follows Jun Do, the titular orphan master's son, as he alternately rises and falls through the strata of North Korean society, going from lowly army grunt to professional kidnapper to spy to envoy the US to prisoner to the inner circle of Kim Jong Il.  What he's searching for is an identity he can bear to call his own in a nation that doesn't give its citizens the option of living a righteous life.  At the same time, his story is repeatedly being appropriated--as propaganda, as patriotic, anti-American lies to keep himself and his colleagues out of prison, as a cover to fool his American hosts into taking him seriously, and as a means of rescuing the people he cares about from Kim's clutches.  The malleability of story and identity lie at the heart of the novel, as do their twin uses as instruments of both oppression and liberation (by the end of the novel, Jun Do is modeling himself on Rick from Casablanca, and like him, sacrificing himself so that the woman he loves can escape oppression).  So it could be said that Johnson's use of North Korea is purely symbolic (as indicated by protagonist's punning name), a backdrop of oppression against which to set his story of an individual finding freedom through reinvention.  But The Orphan Master's Son is also painstakingly researched and detailed.  Though I can't speak to its accuracy, there is an obvious sense that Johnson isn't merely writing a parable, but trying to give his readers as complete a picture of life in North Korea as he can.
  
  Which, paradoxically, is why I finished the novel feeling uncomfortable at the fact that Johnson is speaking for people who have been denied their own voices, and has been rewarded for it.  As a corrective, I followed the book up with Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, an oral history based on Demick's interviews with North Korean defectors.  Nic Clarke, who called my attention to the book, has already written eloquently about its power, so I'll just add that as a counterpoint to Johnson's novel, the testimonies of Demick's interviewees make for powerful reading, and helped to crystallize some of my problems with the novel.  Even taking into account the selection bias that affects the book's subjects--these are the people who had the courage, the strength of will, and sometimes though not always the resources to leave their home--I was struck, while reading their accounts, by a vitality and a will to better their lives that is missing from almost all the characters--including, sometimes, the lead--in Johnson's novel.  Even before they gave up on North Korea, Demick's interviewees were working hard to survive, even if doing so meant rejecting, in action if not in word, the dogma they'd grown up with.  They start businesses, read illicit literature, and try to contact their relatives in the South.  Their minds are free, even if their lives aren't.
  
  In contrast, the prevailing tone among most of the North Koreans Jun Do meets is one of fatalism.  They survive by not acting, and by parroting the newspeak of the day, agreeing that up is down and black is white in order to survive--as when Jun Do steals the uniform of a high ranking official who visits his prison and escapes despite looking nothing like the man, because everyone he meets is too afraid to challenge him.  This is obviously in service of Johnson's project, which mimics the absurdist fiction of Soviet writers, who tried to put the insanity of living under a totalitarian regime into words by taking it to its illogical extremes.  But unlike those writers, Johnson isn't writing about his own country; whether or not he intended it, one of the results of his choice to write a North Korea in which everyone but the hero simply accepts things as they are is that it echoes a tendency of Western writers to treat foreigners as if their strange culture makes them less human, less likely to strive for better things and to use all their intelligence and ingenuity to achieve that goal.  The Orphan Master's Son is an excellent piece of literature, but I can't be entirely happy at its success.
  
  
• Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi - Oyeyemi's most recent novel (which is the first of her works that I've read) is possibly a novel in stories, and definitely a novel about stories, and about the way that they both shape and are shaped by reality.  Mr. Fox, an author in the pre-war US, is visited by his muse Mary Foxe--who may or may not be a figment of his imagination--who complains about his penchant for killing women in his fiction.  The two--or rather versions of them--then star in a sequence of stories, in which Mary tries to show Mr. Fox the error of his ways (or just to punish him for them) while he tries to get his wayward muse under control.  Meanwhile, in the framing story, Mr. Fox's wife Daphne believes that her husband is having an affair, but is Mary Daphne's competition, or an inspiration to take up her own creative work?
  
  
  
  Most of the stories in Mr. Fox take fairy tales as their starting point, in particular the title work, a variant on Bluebeard in which the storyteller is the intended wife and victim, who is able to turn the tables on her future husband and murderer by telling his story and revealing him for what he is.  One of Oyeyemi's focal points is the prevalence of wife murder in fiction (and in real life), the way that the husband, so often the hero in the traditional romantic narrative, can become its monster; but she is also treating that murder as something more symbolic, the murder of ambitions and talent, as one partner (usually the wife) sublimates their creative drive to please the other, sometimes without even realizing that they've done so.  That slipperiness, the shift between symbolic and actual murder, between good husband and bad, between fairy tale and modern fiction, is reflected in the stories that make up Mr. Fox, as Oyeyemi and her two storytellers/protagonists riff and extemporize on the title fairy tale in a way that makes shifting roles the central idea of the novel.  Authors become characters, animals become human, loving husbands become murderers,  supportive wives become consumed with their own work--and vice versa.  The result is a rich stew of allusions, references and parallels that chime against each other and come down not to an answer but a set of questions: can Mr. Fox be a good husband and stop killing women, both as an author and in real life?  Can Mary Foxe trust him instead of seeing him only as a monster?  Can Daphne Fox be a wife who is the equal of her husband, and an author in her own right?  What they also come down to, however, is a love story--with a particular screwball tone that suits the framing story's 30s setting very well--between three people who despite their shifting roles in it still emerge from the novel as vivid characters.  Both thought-provoking and delightful, I'm sure that Mr. Fox won't be the last of Oyeyemi's books that I will read.

Review: Big Mama Stories by Eleanor Arnason

My review of Eleanor Arnason's new collection Big Mama Stories appears today at Strange Horizons.  I've been a fan of Arnason's short fiction for more than a decade, since reading "Knapsack Poems"--still, to my mind, one of the finest short stories in the field--so a chance to review more of her stories seemed too good to pass up.  In Big Mama Stories, Arnason tries to invent a folk figure for the technological age, and the result, as I write in the review, feels like a cross between Brer Rabbit and Doctor Who--which is to say, utterly delightful.

Surface Tension: Thoughts on Hannibal's First Season

The first time I read Thomas Harris's Red Dragon was more than fifteen years ago, in the white heat of having discovered and been wowed by its more famous sequel, The Silence of the Lambs.  Standing in such stark comparison to the later book, which takes the elements that Red Dragon innovates--cutting between the points of view of the killer and the FBI agent pursuing him, focusing on the psychology of, and extending compassion to, both of them, featuring competent, multifaceted female characters at every turn of the plot--and does them better, Red Dragon couldn't help but come off badly, and for years I've thought of it as a disappointing work (it probably didn't help that my favorite character in the Lecter sequence, Clarice Starling, does not appear in this book).

Coming back to Red Dragon this week in preparation for writing this piece, I discovered a much stronger book than I had remembered, a smart, engaging thriller with an undertone of melancholy that only seems to make its moments of tension and excitement more effective.  It's also a more conventional work than I was expecting, or perhaps a more accurate way to put it would be that what was unconventional about Red Dragon when it was first published in 1981 is now commonplace.  Harris focuses, in great detail, on the investigative and forensic procedures which enable the FBI to catch serial killers, and clearly takes a great deal of pleasure in showing off his research in these areas (he also seems to enjoy wowing readers with the space-age technology and resources at the FBI's fingertips: "Wired to a Gateway telephone, in minutes the Datafax was transmitting the employment roll simultaneously to the FBI identification section in Washington and the Missouri Department of Motor Vehicles."  In minutes!).  Nowadays, that's the stuff of every cut-rate procedural, so it's probably not surprising that, when given the reins of a franchise that has never quite managed to live up to the iconic status of its most famous character (some might say, that has been dragged down by that character's popularity) Bryan Fuller, TV's most idiosyncratic creator, has taken another path.  His Hannibal draws its power less from the taut storytelling that makes Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs (and the films based on them) such a thrill, and more from visuals, and an atmosphere of dread and looming disaster.  The result is one of the most intriguing and unusual television series of the last few years, but also one of its most frustrating.  It's a series whose moments are frequently brilliant, but whose whole often feels empty.

Like a lot of prequels (the series begins some time before the events of Red Dragon), Hannibal draws its power from the irony of the audience knowing things that the characters don't, and like shows such as Smallville, or films such as X-Men: First Class, it roots that irony in a friendship between people who will one day become enemies--FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), the protagonist of Red Dragon, and cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen, in a performance whose reserve and undertone of dry bemusement put it in stark, clearly deliberate contrast to Anthony Hopkins's famously hammy turn in the role).  The crucial difference here is that unlike Lex Luthor or Magneto, Hannibal has no illusions about who he is and what role he plays in the story.  At the time the series starts, he has for several years been an active serial killer, dubbed the Chesapeake Ripper by the FBI.  His friendship with Will, for whom he functions as a therapist and a sounding board while growing more involved with FBI investigations over the course of the season, is thus both a means to track and obfuscate the investigation of his own crimes, and an opportunity to indulge his psycopathic impulses.  As they grow closer, Hannibal manipulates Will--who is described as suffering from an "empathy disorder" which allows him to get into anyone's head, including killers--undermining his sense of reality and of self, concealing the fact that he is suffering from a neurological illness, convincing him and his colleagues at the FBI that he's losing his mind, and framing him for several murders.

Despite telling a very different story, Hannibal draws heavily from Red Dragon (and, to a lesser extent, from The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal the book; for all I know the show also cribs elements from the fourth Lecter novel, Hannibal Rising, but I haven't read it), borrowing lines of dialogue, images, and even whole scenes, so that one wonders what the show will be left with when it does the Red Dragon story (Fuller has laid out a multi-season plan for the show in which Red Dragon will be covered in season 3).  This can sometimes be awkward, as when Will, quoting directly from the book, says that he sees the Chesapeake Ripper as "one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time.  They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don't put it on the machines and it dies."  It's an uncomfortable turn of phrase in the book, which is clearly of its time, but it's almost impossible to imagine someone in 2013 expressing themselves that way. 

For the most part, however, Fuller's extensive drawing on his source material is playful, often deliberately contravening the expectations of viewers who are familiar with it.  He recreates several iconic scenes from the books, but in a way that reverses their meaning.  In one scene, a patient at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where Lecter will eventually be incarcerated, fakes a heart attack and attacks the nurse who tries to treat him.  In the books, this is Lecter, as described by Dr. Chilton to Will Graham in Red Dragon the book, and to Clarice Starling in the film of The Silence of the Lambs, as a way of illustrating the danger posed by Lecter.  In Hannibal, the patient is a murderer played by Eddie Izzard who has been manipulated by Chilton into believing that he is the Chesapeake Ripper--so the danger becomes, as it will be for Will, not the psychotic murderer but the seemingly benign psychiatrist offering to help.  Another episode opens with Laurence Fishburne's Jack Crawford flashing back to a time when he recruited an FBI trainee, played by Anna Chlumsky, to help him pursue a killer, but the trainee isn't Starling but a new character called Miriam Lass, who preceded her.  Her existence makes Crawford, and the quasi-paternal relationship he forges with Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, seem seedy, as if Starling were just the latest in a string of trainees that Crawford uses and discards--or has discarded for him, as Miriam stumbles onto Lecter (in exactly the way that Will describes in Red Dragon) and is killed by him.

Perhaps the most intriguing play on the Lecter canon in the series is the character of Hannibal's psychiatrist, the improbably named Bedelia du Maurier.  Played by Gillian Anderson, whose most famous character was modeled on Jodie Foster's turn as Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, and who was widely discussed as a frontrunner for the role when Foster declined to reprise it in the film version of Hannibal, du Maurier is semi-retired after having been attacked by a patient referred to her by Hannibal.  We don't learn the exact details of the attack in the first season, but du Maurier does tell Jack that the patient died during the attack when he swallowed his tongue, and later implies to Hannibal that there is more to how he died than she has told--swallowing his tongue being the way that Lecter persuaded a fellow prisoner who had insulted Starling to kill himself in The Silence of the Lambs.  In one of the season's final scenes, Hannibal visits du Maurier in her home with a prepared dinner, which may or may not be the flesh of his most recent victim (one of the show's more interesting choices is that it rarely confirms whether Hannibal is feeding his guests human flesh or not).  du Maurier's hesitation before she takes a bite--as well as the oblique hints she drops that she's aware of Hannibal's nocturnal activities--are a reminder that eating a cannibalistic meal prepared by Lecter is how Hannibal the book signals that Lecter has succeeded in breaking Starling down, stripping her of her pesky conscience, and making her the companion he desires.  With that in mind, it's hard not to wonder if the season's end, in which Will is committed to the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane and visited by Hannibal, is less a Homeland-style downfall for the sake of a triumphant resurgence in the second season, and more an indication that in Fuller's upside down version of the story, the role of Dr. Lecter, psychopathic consultant to the FBI, will be played by Will Graham.

As fun as these riffs on the canon are, I can't help but wonder if Hannibal wouldn't have been better off without them, because veering into recreations of Harris's tight, purposeful plotting only throws into sharper relief the fact that Hannibal's own original plotting is nothing of the sort, often driven by a combination of coincidence and the characters' stupidity.  The entire premise of the series is rooted in the coincidence that the psychiatrist referred to treat the FBI's top profiler (Hannibal gets the job because his former student Alana Bloom, a gender-swapped character from the books played by Caroline Dhavernas, refers Will to him) just happens to be the FBI's most wanted serial killer, and the first season only shakes out the way it does because Will just happens to develop a rare, virtually undetectable form of auto-immune encephalitis at precisely the same time (Will's health issues are quite obviously drawn from the experiences of New York Post journalist Susannah Cahalan, whose article on her experiences is terrifyingly informative but also drives home just what an unlikely confluence of events this is).  As if that were not enough, Hannibal needs to throw random sociopaths into its characters' path just to make its season-long plot work--when Will insists that his symptoms could have a neurological origin, Hannibal, who has been trying to convince him that he is mentally ill, takes him to a neurologist friend who diagnoses Will's illness, and is then persuaded by Hannibal to conceal it so that they can "observe" Will's deterioration.  And then there is the simple fact that Hannibal spends the entire season surrounded by FBI agents who have made it their life's mission to catch him, and never arouses even a hint of suspicion in any of them--even Will, who is defined by his intuitive powers of observation, only sees Hannibal for what he is when the plot needs him to, and no sooner.

Writing in The Vulture, reviewer Matt Zoller Seitz acknowledges the ridiculousness of the show's plotting, but suggests that to get hung up on it is to miss the point.  Hannibal, he argues, proceeds with the logic of a dream, or rather a nightmare.  The excesses of its one-off killers (almost all of whom arrange the bodies of their victims into grisly environmental art, and frequently consume parts of them in a seeming homage to the series's title character), the apparent indifference of the FBI to anything resembling proper investigative procedure, the failure of any of the characters to acknowledge just how absurdly and improbably weird their lives have become, these are all, Seitz argues, in service of the show's project to put its viewers in a certain, deranged headspace.

I can't think of a better example on TV of Roger Ebert's famous dictum that what matters isn't what a movie's about, but how it's about it. Simply by showing us things in a particular way, Hannibal communicates (subtly, almost imperceptibly at times) that it's dealing in metaphor, and that the only thing we're meant to take at face value are the feelings expressed by the show's characters, in much the same way that the only thing we take at face value when dreaming are the emotions we experience as we toss and turn in our sleep. That doorway, that pit, that castle, that naked body writhing beneath us: none are real. But the fear, lust, and curiosity we experience as we encounter them is as real as the air you're breathing now.

To a certain degree, Seitz is obviously right, especially when he stresses Hannibal's execution of this effect.  The show's plotting may be lackluster, but its visuals and atmospherics are some of the most stunning and effective that I have ever seen.  They suggest, as I wrote about a very different show earlier this year, that television may be moving away from the primacy of plot, or even psychological realism, and dipping its toes into more experimental, less linear storytelling.  Hannibal draws its visual power from carefully composed interiors--Hannibal's cavernous, book-lined office, Will's homey, slightly rustic house, full of DIY and fishing paraphernalia, Jack's neat office with its ugly institutional furniture--and by situating characters within them in what almost seem like tableaux--when Hannibal has sessions with his patients, or with Dr. du Maurier, the camera frequently catches them sitting opposite one another, perfectly still while they converse.  It's a show that demands (and rewards) attention to detail, as the camera is focused on such seemingly impossibly wrought creations as Hannibal's dishes, or the grotesquely arranged bodies left behind by Hannibal and his fellow killers.  (That demand for attention is auditory as much as it is visual; unlike most network shows, where characters repeat themselves and spell out their conclusions and motivations to keep the viewers up to speed, Hannibal's dialogue is opaque.  Characters frequently make leaps in conversation that are rooted in professional knowledge or their own personal experience, leaving viewers who weren't listening carefully scrambling to catch up.)

From the season's first episodes, the show trades in dream imagery as well as its nightmarish reality.  As Will's grasp on sanity deteriorates, these interludes--they quickly come to comprise hallucinations and waking dreams as well as sleeping ones--become more elaborate, and more difficult to distinguish from the show's reality.  Recurring elements start to appear, and are left to the viewers to decode--who, for example, is the stag that Will keeps following in his dreams and hallucinations?  By the season's end the show has, as Seitz argues, taken on the tone of a nightmare, with viewers never entirely certain about the narrative's solidity, always ready for yet another scene to devolve into horror and be revealed as a dream.  

Where Seitz and I disagree is on the effectiveness of this approach.  To me it eventually collapses under its own weight, and is undermined, rather than bolstered, by "the feelings expressed by the show's characters," whom I find less well-constructed than Seitz obviously does.  Seitz classes Hannibal as a horror show (which is to say, a slightly different genre than Harris's books or the films based on them, which were mostly horror-tinged thrillers) whose power is in its affect.  But unlike, say, American Horror Story, Hannibal doesn't reach for feelings of disgust or outrage at the grand guignol that its characters witness (and, sometimes, perform).  Nor is the series's sense of horror achieved through the murders that Will investigates--which though initially grotesque quickly become too absurd to have any meaningful effect (by the end of the season, a killer of the week is digging decades' worth of murder victims up, chopping them up, and arranging their body parts on a totem pole)--or through our fear that Hannibal will kill the main characters--between the timeline laid out by the books and the series's relatively simple plotting, it's easy to guess which characters are safe for the time being and which are likely to be killed sooner rather than later (there are, incidentally, more women in the second group than the first).  

The horror effect in Hannibal is achieved through tension--the tension of knowing what Hannibal is while the rest of the cast remains oblivious, the tension of watching our heroes wander trustingly into Hannibal's orbit like sheep playing with a wolf, the tension of watching Hannibal tighten the screw on Will's sanity one more notch as we wait to see whether Will will snap or finally realize what's being done to him, the tension we feel every time Hannibal serves a meal as we wonder what the characters are putting in their mouths.  But humor is the mortal enemy of horror, and whenever Hannibal makes itself ridiculous--when Hannibal's ability to hide in plain sight is rooted not in his own cleverness but in the other characters' stupidity, or in a nonsensical turn of plot--that tension is dispelled, and the show's affect is nullified.  Hannibal may not care about plot, but it needs plot to justify the emotions it asks us to feel on behalf of its endangered, clueless characters.  Otherwise, the fact that these characters are endangered and clueless seems like nothing more than a consequence of their own stupidity, or worse, writerly fiat, and being asked to feel tension under those circumstances is like being asked to do the writers' work for them.

One of the surprises of Red Dragon is how little Lecter actually appears in it--only two scenes, and a few letters to Will--but nevertheless his one shared scene with Will has struck me, since I first read it more than fifteen years ago, as getting at the heart of the character in a way that none of the subsequent books or movies have managed to do, precisely because they're too enamored with him.  Trying to goad Lecter into helping him with his current case, Will tells him that "I thought you might be curious to find out if you're smarter than the person I'm looking for."

"Then, by implication, you think you are smarter than I am, since you caught me."
"No.  I know I'm not smarter than you are.
"Then how did you catch me, Will?"
"You had disadvantages."
"What disadvantages?"
"Passion.  And you're insane."

It is precisely that insanity, or indeed any sense of interiority, that is missing from Hannibal's depiction of the character, and that makes it impossible for me to accept Seitz's argument that the shortcomings of the show's plotting are acceptable because the characters remain real.  Hannibal's Hannibal is not real.  He's a collection of amusing, slightly exotic affectations, mannerisms and hobbies that amount to, as Dr. du Maurier puts it in her first appearance "a very well-tailored person suit."  This would not be a problem given what Hannibal is, but what is a problem is the fact that throughout the show's first season the audience is never given a glimpse of what lies under that person suit (or, indeed, if there is anything under it).  Even when we're privy to Hannibal's crimes, we never understand why he's committing them (or, for that matter, their purpose--at various points over the course of the season Hannibal appears to be trying to kill Will, kill Jack, drive one or the other of them crazy, frame them for murders, help them, or become their friend; it's finally most useful to conclude that he just does whatever seems most interesting at the moment).  Unlike Dexter, Hannibal doesn't give us an inside track on what's going on its title character's head, a view on his humanity or his monstrousness.  Given that almost every other character on the show is clueless and, in the case of Will, completely reactive--he doesn't work out what's being done to him until the season's final twenty minutes, at which point he quite accurately pronounces himself "self-aware"--the result is a little like what I imagine Dexter would be if its focus were solely on Deb and the other secondary characters as they wander around obliviously, unsure why their lives have become so weird and full of horror.  

While this is obviously something the show could address in later seasons, I can't help but believe that the reason Hannibal doesn't let us see inside its title character's head is that it can't find a way to make what's going on in there look cool.  This is, after all, a man who likes to kill people, chop them up, make meals out of their flesh and organs and serve them to his guests.  You don't do something like that unless you really get off on it, and the image that Harris, the movies, and now the TV show have created of Lecter, as someone urbane and sophisticated who likes good food and just happens to murder people he finds rude, can't accommodate something so ugly and perverse.  Like a lot of fans, I didn't care for Hannibal the novel, but looking back I can at least respect its attempt to give Lecter an origin story that stresses that something very bad had to have happened to him, and twisted him up in a truly horrible way, for him to do the things he does (though even then, it feels as if Harris wants us to feel sorry for Lecter--and thus to desire the ending in which Starling is destroyed so that she can become his keeper as well as his accomplice).  Hannibal does not even hint at this sort of damage, and treats Lecter as an inhuman devil--which, again, given that he is the only character in the first season with agency, leaves the show emotionally hollow.

If Hannibal works despite the problems with its handling of its characters--despite suffering from the same problem as too many other Lecter adaptations, and eventually the books themselves, of not being quite sure who its main character is--it is because of its actors.  Dancy and Mikkelsen's jobs are seemingly impossible, asked to portray, respectively, a man who loses himself in other people for a living and spends the season losing what little sense of self that occupation leaves him, and a monster hiding behind good manners and better suits.  If Mikkelsen can't quite find the humanity (or the true, ugly monstrosity) in Hannibal, he at least leaves us perpetually guessing about where it lies--is Hannibal crying crocodile tears over Will at the end of the season, or does he feel genuine affection for him?  Is his facade of detachment a true expression of his sociopathic nature, or does he feel genuine hate for Jack Crawford, and joy at his suffering?--in a way that promises that, if the series ever raises its game where the character is concerned, Mikkelsen will be able to take it there.  Dancy, meanwhile, cuts a more heroic, more compelling figure that is perhaps less complicated than the show needs him to be (unlike Claire Danes's turn in a very similar story in Homeland, he doesn't manage to make Will offputting as well as heroic, though the writing isn't really there to support that--much like Red Dragon, Hannibal tries to but can't convincingly argue that Will carries a similar darkness to the murderers he hunts).  But the vulnerability he brings to the role is heartbreaking, especially when Hannibal begins to take advantage of it, and makes it all the more heartening when Will finally discovers his core of self at the end of the season and manages to resist Hannibal's manipulation.  (Fishburne, meanwhile, is excellent in a role that is arguably the most successfully constructed and morally complex in the season, while Dhavernas is sadly wasted as a character who should have been the show's moral center but ends up being shunted into Will's romantic orbit too often.)

If there's a conclusion that I come to after watching the first season of Hannibal, it's that perhaps creators (and I include Thomas Harris in this group) shouldn't take a crack at Hannibal Lecter until they understand what he is and what kind of story they want to tell about him.  Is he a monster?  Then make him your villain, or commit to the fact that you are telling a story about a monster (something that could have been very interesting, especially in light of Dexter's increasing unwillingness to face up to that fact in its most recent seasons).  Is he a damaged man?  Then show that damage, and be willing to acknowledge how ugly and unappealing it should be.  Going by the first season they've produced, Bryan Fuller and his writers don't know the answer to this question, which is why Hannibal often feels as if it has no center, and as if it amounts to little more than its horrific, nightmarish affect.  That doesn't mean that there isn't anything here to watch for--the visuals are stunning, the actors breathe life into the characters no matter how flawed their construction, and that affect is impeccably achieved even if, to my mind, it often falters.  But the result is that I enjoy Hannibal while I'm watching it and then feel as if there was no substance to it when the episode or season have wrapped up.  It's a rich meal, but it leaves you feeling curiously unsated.

Star Trek Into Darkness

It's only the middle of June, but if there is, this year, another moment of unintentional comedy as richly hilarious as the putative climax of J.J. Abrams's Star Trek Into Darkness, I will be very surprised.  Going into the movie, I didn't expect that I'd find it funny.  Abrams's 2009 reboot of the Star Trek franchise left me genuinely outraged, and its sequel seemed to promise more of the same.  Perhaps because the film has opened so late in Israel, however, I've had the time to realize that more of the same isn't so bad.  It means that I knew what to expect (and what to steel myself against): a barely coherent plot, some fun but ridiculous action scenes, an approach to the original series and its appeal that runs the gamut from incomprehension to outright contempt, a vehement need to undermine and dismantle Vulcans despite the fact that the two films' best character, Zachary Quinto's Spock, is one, a borderline erotic fixation with Chris Pine's Kirk despite the writers' (and, I am beginning to suspect, the actor's) inability to imbue him with anything resembling gravitas, authority, or indeed a basic competence at his job, and a lot of lens flares.  Going in so forewarned, it was easier to appreciate the humor in a film that bills itself as a reinvention and modernization of a venerable but antiquated franchise, but turns out to have so little of its own to say that it resorts to slavish recreations of its source material's high points.

My ability to take Into Darkness a lot less seriously than I did its predecessor (which might still be a little more seriously than it deserves) is bolstered by the difference in the two film's reception.  Where Star Trek's success was taken as an indication that Abrams had restored the franchise to relevance (by, it was grumbled by me and people like me, stripping it of everything that made it what it was) four years later we can see that that hasn't been the case.  As successful as the reboot was, it did not confer upon Star Trek the kind of cultural currency that Christopher Nolan's Batman films, or the Marvel superhero movies, have delivered for their source material, and at least from where I'm standing, the film doesn't seem to have amassed the kind of fandom that those franchises have developed, made up of people who only know their world and characters from the movies.  Four years ago we were all so stunned by a film with Star Trek in its title opening at the top of the box office chart that we seemed to come to a collective agreement not to say what was plainly obvious--that far from revitalizing the franchise, Abrams was merely writing Star Wars fanfic in another show's universe because he didn't think he'd ever get hold of the real thing.  Now that he has, Into Darkness feels like an afterthought--a fact that is reflected in the film's lukewarm critical and financial reception.  Whatever the future holds for Star Trek, J.J. Abrams and his "vision" are probably not going to be a part of it, which makes it easier to view Into Darkness dispassionately, and makes its blunders--and nowhere does the film blunder more heavily than when it tries to pay homage to its source material--seem more funny than outrageous. 

Into Darkness is a remake--sometimes a straight one, and sometimes a mirror image--of Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.  If you have any familiarity with that movie, you'll know right away what a dubious proposition that is.  Though arguably the best of the original series films, The Wrath of Khan is, fundamentally and unalterably, a film about old men--Kirk, who after a lifetime of joyously breaking the rules is finally realizing that even when you get away with it, you don't really get away with it, and that no matter who many times you cheat death it'll always be waiting for you just where you least expect it; Spock, who has spent his life in the shadow of a perpetual child; and Khan, so incapable of accepting that his superior nature did not guarantee him the bright future he set out on at the end of "Space Seed" that he chooses to blame, and take revenge on, the whole universe.  It's a film about old soldiers, who have nothing in their lives except revenge and duty, perhaps because they've never been able to truly love anything else, and perhaps because age, and time, and death, have taken everything else away.

If Abrams's Star Trek films were the best they could possibly be, they wouldn't have been able to tackle this story, not with their cast of fresh-faced youngsters who never miss an opportunity to mention that their adventures are just beginning.  But of course, Abrams's films are not the best they could be, and instead of trying to make the story of The Wrath of Khan its own and suit it to its setting, Into Darkness veers between slavish, lifeless fan-service--the predictable "Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!" is intended as a crowning moment of pathos but comes off, as I wrote at the beginning of this review, as simply ridiculous--and, when it tries to strike out on its own, utter thematic incoherence.  Kirk starts the film being told that he needs to learn humility, as the older Kirk did in The Wrath of Khan.  But in fact there is no such lesson in Into Darkness.  Instead, and just as in Star Trek, it's everyone around Kirk who has to learn that, despite his lack of experience, his self-confessed incompetence, his complete lack of interest in showing leadership or encouraging teamwork, his conviction that being a captain means running off on your own and expecting everyone under your command to back your play--despite, in short, being utterly unsuited for the job, Kirk is not only the stuff that great captains are made of, but has an inalienable right to the captain's chair.  In The Wrath of Khan, Kirk learns humility when he puts his ship into a situation that can only be gotten out of by his best friend laying down his life; in Into Darkness, it's Kirk who lays down his life, thus proving that he has no need for humility, and that his flaws as a captain don't matter because he Really Cares.  (Not to worry: the next film won't be The Search for Kirk.  His death is rolled back in a way that is so heavily signposted that it's only through Quinto's best efforts that Kirk's self-sacrifice has even the slightest bit of emotional effect.)

Into Darkness's broader themes are equally muddled.  At different points, it has Kirk express disdain for Federation values (as he did in Star Trek), defend them against those who would militarize Starfleet and foment war with the Klingons (something that Kirk, as established until that point, might reasonably have been expected to be in favor of), and lecture others about how it's important not to relinquish our cherished beliefs in the face of evil, with little in the way of an arc to support these shifts except for a 9/11 allegory that would have seemed trite and over-obvious in 2004.  (Not helping matters is the fact that the film seems rather vague on what Federation values actually are--this is a movie that very forcefully informs us that killing a suspected terrorist without trial is wrong, but doesn't expect us to have any problem with Kirk or Spock beating that suspected terrorist after he's surrendered or been incapacitated.)  Similarly confusing is the film's choice to draw a parallel between Kirk and Khan by giving them the same motivation--protecting the people under their command--since it appears completely ignorant of how deep that parallel runs, and what its implications are.  The way that Khan sees himself, as a superior being who by rights shouldn't be bound by conventions and the laws of other people, is exactly the way that Abrams's Star Trek films want us to see Kirk, so if Khan and Kirk have the same motivation, why is one of them the bad guy and the other the hero? 

For a while it seems as if the film itself is reaching for the same conclusion, since in its middle segments Khan is actually a sympathetic figure.  His terrorist attacks on Earth turn out to have been at the behest of the film's other villain, who was holding Khan's people hostage.  He helps Kirk save the Enterprise, and it's Kirk who betrays Khan once that goal is achieved, not the other way around (though Khan turns out to have been ready for betrayal and responds to it ruthlessly).  The reboot format has given Abrams the opportunity to play with some of the franchise's holy cows; just as the first act of Star Trek seemed to suggest that the film might end with Spock as captain of the Enterprise and Kirk as his first officer, during the middle segments of Into Darkness it seems likely that Khan will end the film as Kirk's ally or at least a chaotic neutral, allowed to make his own future as he was at the end of "Space Seed."  But just like Star Trek, Into Darkness views the letter of the franchise as far more important than its spirit.  The canonical order is restored precisely because the representative of canon, Leonard Nimoy's old Spock, demands it.  No sooner has he told his young counterpart that Khan is evil than Khan obliges, suddenly announcing an intent to eradicate all "inferior" life that had gone completely unmentioned until fifteen minutes from the film's end.  (Aside from the opportunity to play with the canon, making Khan an ally might have gone some way towards explaining the unconvincing prevarications, and finally outright lies, about who the film's villain would be.  As it stands, I'm somewhat persuaded by this argument, that the filmmakers declared Khan's identity a spoiler--despite having released trailer upon trailer that virtually crowed it--because they wanted to forestall the outrage over having cast the lily-white Benedict Cumberbatch as a character called Khan Noonien Singh.)

Even the things that work about Into Darkness--as in Star Trek, the actors, the characters, and their relationships--are warped by its hagiographic take on Kirk.  It's fun to watch Pine, Quinto, and Zoe Saldana's Uhura snipe at each other and emerge as the rebooted franchise's equivalent of the Kirk-Spock-McCoy trio (though again, their college kid antics only reinforce the sense that these characters would be much more believable as junior officers on their first assignment out of the Academy than they are as the senior staff of Starfleet's flagship).  But the emphasis the film places on Kirk's need for Spock to admit that they are friends--a motivation so powerful that there's a compelling reading of the film in which he steps into the irradiated reactor chamber merely in order to secure a declaration of emotional attachment, which is in fact what he gets--finally has the effect of making the trio seem like they're in a three-way relationship in which Uhura is by far the least important member.  More successful are the film's attempt to give Uhura a more prominent role in the plot, and along with her, Simon Pegg's Scotty and John Cho's Sulu.  (Anton Yelchin's Chekov remains a bad accent in search of a personality.)  There's never been anything to say against the casting of the reboot's main crew, but this only serves to make Into Darkness's fascination with Kirk seems less plausible--why are we paying attention to this whiny, daddy-issues-riddled man-child when there are all these more interesting characters (who are played by better actors) in the background?

Into Darkness ends with the Enterprise embarking on the five year mission that gave the original series its impetus.  The sudden shift to exploration feels unearned in a series that has had so little time for the concept in its first two installments, but nevertheless it's hard not to feel a little hopeful at its even being mentioned.  With Abrams gone over to Star Wars (and possibly, hopefully, taking Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman with him), is it possible that the next film in the rebooted franchise will be Star Trek in more than just name?  That it will try to capture the essence of the series, and not just deliver hollow recreations of its greatest hits?  That it will finally allow its lead character to start growing towards the man we know Kirk to be?  I know, it's not very likely--as much as I like to blame Abrams for everything, the fact is that his version of Star Trek is merely a particularly ham-fisted expression of preoccupations that can be found all over Hollywood's blockbuster movies--a craving for Great Men, a disdain for intellect, vulnerability, and empathy, a need for lead characters to be cool that is so powerful that it drowns out any trait that might actually earn these characters that epithet.  And the truth is, I can live with the Star Trek films being little more than unintentional comedy.  But deep down, I am still a Star Trek fan, and I would dearly love for that series to once again be about boldly going where no one has gone before.