Some Thoughts On Some Books
Dec. 11th, 2009 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexsarllNot a Books of the Year post (though if you're asking, probably Charlie Stross' Wireless, Glen David Gold's Sunnyside and the Luke Haines memoir). Just some recent reads, for my own benefit as much as anything:
The Wire - Truth Be Told is exactly the sort of book which is described as 'essential' while being nothing of the sort. For all its supposed difficulty, The Wire is not The Invisibles; everything you need to know is there on the screen. But that a book like this, a programme guide-cum-companion, can now be a respectable hardback says so much about how geek culture is now mainstream - it's not just that our shows are now prime time TV, it's that even other shows are now appreciated in the way our shows used to be. The quality varies; David Simon's introduction, predictably, is amazing, while some of the other contributions are pedestrian but not unpleasant, magazine-standard stuff. One detail which irritated me was the parochialism; in that intro, Simon talks about the venality of network TV, how the shows service the advertising and not vice versa, and holds up HBO as a rare exception to the model, without ever hinting that over here, we've had something like the subscription cable model for decades - it's called the license fee, and it powers the only TV empire comparable to HBO in the quality of its output. Come to think of it, why don't the BBC make more of that too?
Elsewhere, Simon and Ed Burns interview Melvin Williams, who played the Deacon in the show, and in real life was something of a Stringer Bell figure, a legendarily smart drug kingpin. Williams appears to be under the impression that in 'England' smack is legal, and junkies can get it for less than a dollar, so drug gangs have no margin. I can only assume this to be a confused understanding of methadone prescriptions, but still, what the Hell? And neither Simon nor Burns picks him up on it.
I've never read any Ian Rankin before, though I enjoyed BBC4's Reichenbach Falls which was based on a story of his. So when I heard he was going to be writing some Hellblazer, I was moderately excited. Except in the event the story in question, Dark Entries, wasn't published in the comic, instead being used to launch the new Vertigo Crime series of compact hardback gra phic novels. Which was a questionable decision because it's considerably less 'crime' than a lot of Constantine stories, being instead a reality TV satire which then becomes outright supernatural - there's none of the grimy backstreet dealing one expects from Constantine, the overlap between the mob and infernal underworlds. Clearly the branding was just because Rankin is known to crime fans. Although if they're aiming mainly at Rankin fans, why in the back is there an ad claiming "Before John Constantine, There Was John Rebus", even though Constantine made his debut two years before Rebus?
But, that's all a matter of format and editorial. It's not Rankin's fault. Judge him on the story, considered as a Hellblazer run. Any good?
No. About on a par with Paul Jenkins, the worst extended run in the comic's history. The satire on reality TV (essentially the set-up is Big Brother in a fake haunted house) would be clunking even if it weren't so dated. The twist is crashingly obvious. The characterisation is unremarkable. Any urge I had to read Rankin's fiction just vanished, particularly since I already have two unread books by another Scottish crime writer, Denise Mina, who did a much better run on Constantine a couple of years back.
I read Alan Campbell's Scar Night a while back, and was impressed; I think I characterised it as China Mieville meets His Dark Materials albeit not quite *that* good. Since then, I have only really thought of Alan Campbell when I'm trying to add an Alan Moore tag to an entry and always get Campbell suggested first, but I finally got around to the sequel, Iron Angel. And it's not dire, but...one of the main things reviews of Scar Night said was, this is too good to be anyone's first book. Reading Iron Angel, with its clumsinesses of pacing, its occasional lapses of characterisation and its baffling lapses into clumsy moralising, makes me wonder if he actually wrote this first and then went back and filled in the backstory. The biggest problem, though, is that the first book's greatest strength was the city of Deepgate itself - a crumbling theocracy suspended by immense chains over a vast abyss. Without spoiling too much, Deepgate is barely in this book, and the other locations - the desert, a poison forest, even Hell itself - just don't feel quite so richly realised. I'll still read the third and final volume sometime (the cliffhanger on which the second part ends is rather impressive), but I can wait.
The Wire - Truth Be Told is exactly the sort of book which is described as 'essential' while being nothing of the sort. For all its supposed difficulty, The Wire is not The Invisibles; everything you need to know is there on the screen. But that a book like this, a programme guide-cum-companion, can now be a respectable hardback says so much about how geek culture is now mainstream - it's not just that our shows are now prime time TV, it's that even other shows are now appreciated in the way our shows used to be. The quality varies; David Simon's introduction, predictably, is amazing, while some of the other contributions are pedestrian but not unpleasant, magazine-standard stuff. One detail which irritated me was the parochialism; in that intro, Simon talks about the venality of network TV, how the shows service the advertising and not vice versa, and holds up HBO as a rare exception to the model, without ever hinting that over here, we've had something like the subscription cable model for decades - it's called the license fee, and it powers the only TV empire comparable to HBO in the quality of its output. Come to think of it, why don't the BBC make more of that too?
Elsewhere, Simon and Ed Burns interview Melvin Williams, who played the Deacon in the show, and in real life was something of a Stringer Bell figure, a legendarily smart drug kingpin. Williams appears to be under the impression that in 'England' smack is legal, and junkies can get it for less than a dollar, so drug gangs have no margin. I can only assume this to be a confused understanding of methadone prescriptions, but still, what the Hell? And neither Simon nor Burns picks him up on it.
I've never read any Ian Rankin before, though I enjoyed BBC4's Reichenbach Falls which was based on a story of his. So when I heard he was going to be writing some Hellblazer, I was moderately excited. Except in the event the story in question, Dark Entries, wasn't published in the comic, instead being used to launch the new Vertigo Crime series of compact hardback gra phic novels. Which was a questionable decision because it's considerably less 'crime' than a lot of Constantine stories, being instead a reality TV satire which then becomes outright supernatural - there's none of the grimy backstreet dealing one expects from Constantine, the overlap between the mob and infernal underworlds. Clearly the branding was just because Rankin is known to crime fans. Although if they're aiming mainly at Rankin fans, why in the back is there an ad claiming "Before John Constantine, There Was John Rebus", even though Constantine made his debut two years before Rebus?
But, that's all a matter of format and editorial. It's not Rankin's fault. Judge him on the story, considered as a Hellblazer run. Any good?
No. About on a par with Paul Jenkins, the worst extended run in the comic's history. The satire on reality TV (essentially the set-up is Big Brother in a fake haunted house) would be clunking even if it weren't so dated. The twist is crashingly obvious. The characterisation is unremarkable. Any urge I had to read Rankin's fiction just vanished, particularly since I already have two unread books by another Scottish crime writer, Denise Mina, who did a much better run on Constantine a couple of years back.
I read Alan Campbell's Scar Night a while back, and was impressed; I think I characterised it as China Mieville meets His Dark Materials albeit not quite *that* good. Since then, I have only really thought of Alan Campbell when I'm trying to add an Alan Moore tag to an entry and always get Campbell suggested first, but I finally got around to the sequel, Iron Angel. And it's not dire, but...one of the main things reviews of Scar Night said was, this is too good to be anyone's first book. Reading Iron Angel, with its clumsinesses of pacing, its occasional lapses of characterisation and its baffling lapses into clumsy moralising, makes me wonder if he actually wrote this first and then went back and filled in the backstory. The biggest problem, though, is that the first book's greatest strength was the city of Deepgate itself - a crumbling theocracy suspended by immense chains over a vast abyss. Without spoiling too much, Deepgate is barely in this book, and the other locations - the desert, a poison forest, even Hell itself - just don't feel quite so richly realised. I'll still read the third and final volume sometime (the cliffhanger on which the second part ends is rather impressive), but I can wait.
