Entry tags:

books, reviews

Padre Padrone, The Android's Dream, Mélusine
A couple long ones this time. I also read The Saint in New York which was perfectly fine; the Saint is basically the point equidistant from James Bond, The Shadow, and Raffles.


Padre Padrone (Gavino Ledda): ghira recommends three kinds of books: sf, popular math & science, and Italian culture. The last is not really my thing in general, but since his recommendations in the other categories have worked out pretty well, I figured I'd give this one a try. It's the autobiography of this kid whose dad takes him out of school to work the family sheep-raising business. And I use "kid" advisedly -- he's five years old.

If you're wondering what kind of relationship he and his dad have, well, the title translates as "Father and Master". Ledda's dad beats him brutally multiple times during the book: for forgetting to do a chore, for doing a chore wrong, or for oversleeping because he's been working eighteen hours a day and is exhausted. For the first two-thirds of the book, his father drives the narrative just like he drives Ledda.

It's not all about his dad, though. There are plenty of side-stories: about Ledda's ancestors, about the neighbors, and about the shepherd community in general. There is also a lot about living on your own. Ledda chronicles how isolating the shepherd's life is -- there's constant worry about your neighbors sneaking their sheep onto your pasture, and even if you trust them, there are foxes and bandits and other predators. He talks about how uncivilizing it is for a young kid to be isolated. Ledda goes days barely talking to or seeing other humans, and after months of this, he starts to forget how to talk -- when hunters come by through the woods, he hides because he can't remember how to interact normally.

Things get a little better as he gets older, especially when his father brings the rest of the family out to the sheep pastures (though this is hardly a net win for the family -- it means none of the other kids can go to school anymore either). But not nearly better enough, and it's inevitable that Ledda will leave when he's old enough to set out on his own. The last part of the book is what happens then, and as Ledda breaks away from his father's dominion he manages to grow into something new and unexpected.

The book isn't all grimness and tragedy, I should add. There are plenty of entertaining anecdotes, traditional songs, and funny bits (when he finally makes it to a big city, the first thing he does is go to a whorehouse and tries out a "tailless sheep"); and lots of detail about traditional Sardinian farming life in the 1950s.

The other thing to consider about the book is that the real dictator here isn't Ledda's dad, it's poverty and the dying lifestyle he and his family live in. He never says this explicitly, except for some brief Marxist paragraphs stuck in kind of randomly midway through, but clearly everyone is trapped by circumstance. Yeah, his dad's an asshole who does terrible things to his kid, but the fact is that the other farmers, who presumably don't make their kids start working at age 6, go broke and starve when there's a harsh winter, or when the land is hit by a plague of locusts (no kiddin'). Making matters worse, most of them are on some crazy sharecropping system where the land is owned by the rich and the vagaries of nature are paid for by the poor just having to work twice as hard.

Maybe the reason Ledda's dad is so mad is because his lifestyle is crumbling away, and he's trying to hold back time by sheer will. It doesn't work, of course (just ask King Canute), but I can empathize some even if I can't excuse.


The Android's Dream (John Scalzi): Reading this book is like going to Thanksgiving dinner at your parents' house*. You're not going to be surprised by any of the general details, and you'll have to sit through Uncle Mike doing his Rodney Dangerfield impression; but there's also food and friends you love from way back, and the whole experience is provided with such a cheerful attitude that odds are you will have a good time.

So the characters are all out of central casting ("I'll take one rugged braniac-but-slumming-it hero and one cute and sassy red-headed heroine, Dave") and everyone talks witty at all times. But that is fine by me, because I like to hear that kind of character talking like that! The plot is similarly pretty standard but fun. I don't mean that it's predictable, since part of the standard for this kind of plot is to have some surprising twists in it, but that you'll recognize all the events once they show up.

Another example of this is the computer hacking bits (which this book has a lot of). It's definitely Hollywood-style hacking, with lots of "computer, execute the worm program" type dialogue; but at the same time it feels like it's written by somebody who knows what he's talking about**, and there are plenty of correct details (terminal windows, hacker culture, proper use of buzzwords) that are included even though they're not required.

Scalzi gets the most original when it comes to the description and the background detail. He is very much of the "toss in a whole bunch of stuff and see what works" school, and most of it does in fact work for me. To put it another way, if you don't think the title is funny, you might dig that there's a tribe of hunters in the future called the Nugentians. If you don't laugh at "Jesus, forgive me, he thought. I really shouldn't have eaten that panda," perhaps you will at "But imagine you're a tapeworm, and then suddenly you're Goethe. It's like that." There's something for everyone!

So, yeah, overall this is good. Not ground-breaking, but absolutely fun and worth checking out. Incidentally, if you want to read the first chapter of this, it's up on Scalzi's site.

*Assume for the purpose of this review that you have a lovably zany sitcom-style family, rather than a Squid-and-the-Whale-style family.

**Or at least read In the Beginning was the Command Line.


Mélusine (Sarah Monette): This is a mess, but it's an interesting mess. It's like someone took a bunch of iron girders, windows, and wires, tossed them into a big box with some concrete, waited for it to harden, and said "ta-da! a skyscraper!".

The author's clearly worked out a lot of backstory for the city, many characters, various magical sects, the nations and their history and politics, and so on. But what we actually get of this backstory is frustratingly sparse, only barely enough to make sense of what's going on. And when it comes to the characters, we really don't get enough to make sense of what's going on and we're forced to guess based on their reactions.

Like, early in the book, one character is accused of having done something which doesn't seem that bad. And he completely flips the fuck out. So there are a couple possibilities: the thing could be more severe in this society than it seems, the guy could have some secret reason for reacting badly to this particular accusation, or the guy could be totally nuts. It takes a long time before we're able to sort it out, and the uncertainty leaves the reader's feelings about a major character in limbo (it's not generally a problem if a character does something and you don't know whether you sympathize or not; but it is a problem if you don't know what they did and have to decide whether you sympathize).

The character issues are exacerbated by the plot issues. Like, I'm willing to admit some coincidence, and I'm ok with characters using divination to find out what they should do, and characters who get messages in their dreams are fine in moderation, and I'm even fine with characters that just feel a inexplainable urge to head out east. But when you put all of those in the same book, it starts to feel like the plot is being driven primarily by the author standing behind it and pushing. I didn't even mention the madness that comes onto one character, fades at precisely convenient times to let him overhear important conversations, and is removed entirely in two pages at the end of the book, leaving you wondering what the hell they were doing for the previous three hundred pages. Seriously, it's a mess.

The writing, by comparison, is only a tiny bit of a mess, and has lots of cool stuff. I mean, it's worth something just to say there are two protagonists and it is easy to look at a passage and work out which one's talking. The mess part is, well. One of the guys has a good bit like this:

I felt like an old bone being worried by three dogs, like sooner or later one of them was going to pull too hard, and I was just going to snap in half. The Money Dog, the Fever Dog, and Dreams Dog I called them, and I didn't know which one of them I should be scared of most. They all three had teeth like alligators.

Awesome, right? But then the same guy elsewhere says

I gave 'em the finger, like I'd been itching to do for, I don't know, a good half hour -- ever since they gave me that snarky applause for not turning myself into pâté on the pavement.

..., I don't know,...? pâté? snarky? Are you kidding me? And yet it's supposed to be the same guy talking.

Like I said, it's not that you mix up which of the two protagonists is narrating -- but the strong voices they have just emphasize the slip-ups.

I guess for fantasy novels I traditionally conclude by mentioning various awesome setting elements, and this certainly has some of that kind of thing. I appreciate the creepy monsters that show up -- they're not frequent enough to be commonplace, but they definitely feel like part of the world and not just tacked-on. There is some excellent weird magical shit going on, intriguing and freaky and incomprehensible at the right times. And if this were The Lies of Locke Lamora or something that would be good enough. But this isn't that kind of book: it's a character study of these two guys, and as such, it's basically four hundred pages of getting the characters where they need to be to have the real narrative start. Which is three hundred pages too many in my book.

I understand there's a sequel out, The Virtu, which picks up where this leaves off. Maybe as a set they're more satisfying, but as a standalone, I'm afraid Mélusine never really gets its act together.

(Incidentally, this was a good test to see how the various systems at the library handle non-ASCII characters. The web catalog is fine, the email notification is fine, but the actual due-date receipt printer is not fine.)


I have no idea what is coming up next time, but it will probably involve, as ghira put it, less graphs and sheepfucking.