TWIB-II 42
Jul. 27th, 2008 06:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanI only read two books this week, so I did some pretty involved writeups.
1) The Gargoyle - Andrew Davidson
The Gargoyle is Andrew Davidson's first novel, and it is a good first effort, but not without flaws.
First the bad: The Gargoyle is 465 pages long, and far too many of those pages are extraneous narration that adds little to the plot. This wouldn't be so bad were it not for the fact that interesting things are afoot in this novel, and it was annoying to have to wade through so much bloat (e.g. the (rather outdated) info dump on Japanese gender relations) to get to the good stuff.
Speaking of Japan, while the Japanese in The Gargoyle is grammatically correct, it isn't always natural given the situations in which the speakers find themselves and thus rather jarring. (That said, I liked Davidson's inclusion of multiple languages in the book, as it lends much to the atmosphere.) On a similar note, some of the historical flashbacks contain several minor anachronisms. Nitpicks, to be sure, but ones that niggle.
The worst problem, however, is the lead love interest: a stunningly beautiful woman with divine talents, a bottomless bank account, mounds of long curling hair that can't be tamed but never looks bad and eyes that change colors (I'm not making this up!), who is crazy but still totally alluring despite that fact. She's generous and a force of nature and powerful and frightening but people can't help but be drawn to her. In other words, she's every Mary Sue from every Harry Potter fanfic written by teenage girls. Although I realise her primary role in this novel is to enable the main character's redemption, The Gargoyle could have been ten times better if her character had been slightly less fantastic on so many fronts.
Now for the good: Davidson has an excellent eye for the dramatic and knows how to narrate action. The novel's opening chapters make for one of the most visceral oh-this-is-terrible-I-can't-tear-my-eyes-away reading experiences I've had in quite some time. Davidson's descriptions of the main character's injuries and medical treatments, although exposition, were fascinating reading in and of themselves. The author obviously did his research.
The narrator has a lot to struggle with during his recovery, and his physical and psychological journeys as he comes to terms with what has happened to him and what he can expect out of life are portrayed nicely. Furthermore, despite the heavy overtones of fantasy and the supernatural, there are no unrealistic recoveries or journeys back in time to "get it right" in store for the narrator, which makes him much more sympathetic.
And finally, Davidson was attempting something quite ambitious with The Gargoyle. Although his attempts to pull it off failed more than they succeeded, I think he's got a lot of potential and will probably improve pretty quickly.
2) Legerdemain - James J. Heaphey
"If you do well, nothing you do will be recorded anyplace. ... That's about as good as it gets for people like you." So speaks James Heaphey's tutor in espionage in the opening of Legerdemain. Ostensibly about Heaphey's role in U.S. efforts maintain Air Force basing rights in Morocco following the demise of the French Protectorate, this quasi-biography, quasi-novel focuses much more on his day-to-day routines and relationships: life on the base, flirtations with female coworkers and contacts, experiences of the Moroccan Medina, travels to exotic locations like Egypt, Cyprus, and the Atlas Mountains. Sure it's not non-stop cloak and dagger, but the foreign locales are intriguing enough that Heaphey's very descriptions of them make for page-turning reading.
Although Heaphey's life was never as constantly exciting as a Tom Clancy novel (real espionage rarely is), there are plenty of moments of high tension: French massacres in the medinas, narrow escapes from angry Berbers, the smuggling of political targets out of Egypt, tense meetings with Greek and Cypriot freedom fighters, firefights on the base, and the exposure of moles in the Americans' midst. It's good stuff.
Unfortunately, Heaphey's rollicking story is marred by extremely unprofessional editing, to an average of one typographical error per page, plus subject verb disagreements, awkward or incorrect phrasing, and frequent verb tense changes within sentences, to say nothing of between paragraphs or the narrative on the whole. These aren't obscure errors, either--from neglecting to close quotation marks to failing to capitalize the first word of a sentence--Heaphey frequently fails to observe the most basic rules of composition. He also fails to standardize transliterations of foreign names and words, and the names of institutions, machinery and vehicles, and publications. Then there's the truly bizarre, such as when a certain (Western, no less!) individual's name is misspelled two different ways during the dozen or so pages in which he appears, with all three variants frequently occurring within mere words of each other.
This is all simple stuff that should have been caught by the spell- and grammar-check functions of any word processing software from the last decade; that it was allowed to permeate the finished manuscript to such a degree is both unprofessional and disappointing.
It really is a great shame, because Legerdemain is an otherwise fascinating account of some near-forgotten Cold War history that will certainly be a big hit with history buffs and fans of espionage thrillers, and Heaphey's narrative has just the right balance of action, travelogue, and relationship drama to appeal to a much wider audience. Hopefully the poor editing will be dealt with in a later edition/printing so readers can enjoy Heaphley's story without the distractions.
That will be all.
1) The Gargoyle - Andrew Davidson
The Gargoyle is Andrew Davidson's first novel, and it is a good first effort, but not without flaws.
First the bad: The Gargoyle is 465 pages long, and far too many of those pages are extraneous narration that adds little to the plot. This wouldn't be so bad were it not for the fact that interesting things are afoot in this novel, and it was annoying to have to wade through so much bloat (e.g. the (rather outdated) info dump on Japanese gender relations) to get to the good stuff.
Speaking of Japan, while the Japanese in The Gargoyle is grammatically correct, it isn't always natural given the situations in which the speakers find themselves and thus rather jarring. (That said, I liked Davidson's inclusion of multiple languages in the book, as it lends much to the atmosphere.) On a similar note, some of the historical flashbacks contain several minor anachronisms. Nitpicks, to be sure, but ones that niggle.
The worst problem, however, is the lead love interest: a stunningly beautiful woman with divine talents, a bottomless bank account, mounds of long curling hair that can't be tamed but never looks bad and eyes that change colors (I'm not making this up!), who is crazy but still totally alluring despite that fact. She's generous and a force of nature and powerful and frightening but people can't help but be drawn to her. In other words, she's every Mary Sue from every Harry Potter fanfic written by teenage girls. Although I realise her primary role in this novel is to enable the main character's redemption, The Gargoyle could have been ten times better if her character had been slightly less fantastic on so many fronts.
Now for the good: Davidson has an excellent eye for the dramatic and knows how to narrate action. The novel's opening chapters make for one of the most visceral oh-this-is-terrible-I-can't-tear-my-eyes-away reading experiences I've had in quite some time. Davidson's descriptions of the main character's injuries and medical treatments, although exposition, were fascinating reading in and of themselves. The author obviously did his research.
The narrator has a lot to struggle with during his recovery, and his physical and psychological journeys as he comes to terms with what has happened to him and what he can expect out of life are portrayed nicely. Furthermore, despite the heavy overtones of fantasy and the supernatural, there are no unrealistic recoveries or journeys back in time to "get it right" in store for the narrator, which makes him much more sympathetic.
And finally, Davidson was attempting something quite ambitious with The Gargoyle. Although his attempts to pull it off failed more than they succeeded, I think he's got a lot of potential and will probably improve pretty quickly.
2) Legerdemain - James J. Heaphey
"If you do well, nothing you do will be recorded anyplace. ... That's about as good as it gets for people like you." So speaks James Heaphey's tutor in espionage in the opening of Legerdemain. Ostensibly about Heaphey's role in U.S. efforts maintain Air Force basing rights in Morocco following the demise of the French Protectorate, this quasi-biography, quasi-novel focuses much more on his day-to-day routines and relationships: life on the base, flirtations with female coworkers and contacts, experiences of the Moroccan Medina, travels to exotic locations like Egypt, Cyprus, and the Atlas Mountains. Sure it's not non-stop cloak and dagger, but the foreign locales are intriguing enough that Heaphey's very descriptions of them make for page-turning reading.
Although Heaphey's life was never as constantly exciting as a Tom Clancy novel (real espionage rarely is), there are plenty of moments of high tension: French massacres in the medinas, narrow escapes from angry Berbers, the smuggling of political targets out of Egypt, tense meetings with Greek and Cypriot freedom fighters, firefights on the base, and the exposure of moles in the Americans' midst. It's good stuff.
Unfortunately, Heaphey's rollicking story is marred by extremely unprofessional editing, to an average of one typographical error per page, plus subject verb disagreements, awkward or incorrect phrasing, and frequent verb tense changes within sentences, to say nothing of between paragraphs or the narrative on the whole. These aren't obscure errors, either--from neglecting to close quotation marks to failing to capitalize the first word of a sentence--Heaphey frequently fails to observe the most basic rules of composition. He also fails to standardize transliterations of foreign names and words, and the names of institutions, machinery and vehicles, and publications. Then there's the truly bizarre, such as when a certain (Western, no less!) individual's name is misspelled two different ways during the dozen or so pages in which he appears, with all three variants frequently occurring within mere words of each other.
This is all simple stuff that should have been caught by the spell- and grammar-check functions of any word processing software from the last decade; that it was allowed to permeate the finished manuscript to such a degree is both unprofessional and disappointing.
It really is a great shame, because Legerdemain is an otherwise fascinating account of some near-forgotten Cold War history that will certainly be a big hit with history buffs and fans of espionage thrillers, and Heaphey's narrative has just the right balance of action, travelogue, and relationship drama to appeal to a much wider audience. Hopefully the poor editing will be dealt with in a later edition/printing so readers can enjoy Heaphley's story without the distractions.
That will be all.