The World is Not Enough Wednesday

[evelyn_b]

What I’ve Finished Reading

No one’s happy by the end of Room at the Top. Joe starts an affair with a likable older woman named Alice, whom he feels comfortable talking to as a friend and whose teeth he doesn’t see as a rebuke to his own teeth. This is by contrast to the teeth of Susan, the rich girl, which are white, even, prosperous, and mocking. Joe plots to lure Susan away from her rich boyfriend and get her to marry him, which will be a stick in the eye of the British class system, which would be all very well except he doesn’t particularly enjoy her company and now he’s stuck with it. Not to mention the “necessity” of throwing over Alice, with attendant grisly tragedy and guilt.

Burgess thinks the message here is “stick with your own kind,” but maybe it’s more that everybody loses when guys treat women as class markers instead of as people? It’s hard for me to tell exactly. Joe is not a lovable character but he is a good narrator: bitter, observant, totally unsentimental, almost heroically unembarrassed.

What I’m Reading Now

Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny. The narrator, Fred Cassidy, has been changing his major for thirteen years because his uncle’s will provides for him as long as he is a student, but once he receives his degree the remaining money will go to the Irish Republican Army. He also likes to climb things, so we meet him on the roof of one of the campus buildings. Thirteen years of higher learning has given Fred a healthy respect for the absurd, which may or may not serve him well once he accidentally gets mixed up in the theft of an alien artifact.

This is a weird book about weird things happening, but the snarky matter-of-fact narration makes it work in a way total seriousness wouldn’t. It’s not exactly a comedy, but sometimes it feels like a plot outlined according to the Rule of Funny, then played straight with a narrator who nevertheless sees the humor in any given situation. Fred gets attacked a lot, winds up unconscious in the Australian outback and is rescued by alien agents dressed up as local fauna. Someone is convinced he’s stolen this valuable stone, and Fred is equally convinced that he has no idea where it is. As if that’s not enough, his new advisor is threatening to graduate him come hell or high water, and the artifact business is so distracting he might actually pull it off. What then?

At one of my local coffeehouses, I found a book called The Book of Jane, a Christian chick-lit novel. It’s not stealth Christian like Can't Help Falling, where the Inspiring Message didn't rear its head until two-thirds of the way through, but it is a “witty, modern” retelling of the Book of Job. Is this wise? Is it possible? Is it to be desired? I guess we’ll find out. Jane is a PR agent living in New York, with a cute boyfriend and a non-explicitly gay best friend and an exciting new client and an unshakable faith in God. But would she be so keen on God if her life weren’t perfect??

What I Might Read Next

I went out of town and bought too many books. These will be discussed soon.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

Joe is not a lovable character but he is a good narrator: bitter, observant, totally unsentimental, almost heroically unembarrassed.

This sounds fair from what I remember of the film and the TV series, too.

but it is a “witty, modern” retelling of the Book of Job. Is this wise? Is it possible? Is it to be desired? I guess we’ll find out.

Well, I suppose it's different, there is that! Doe she have three totally annoying Christian friends with dedicated theories yet?

[evelyn_b]

It's hard to say who is going to take up the burden of having dedicated theories about why Jane's life is falling apart. Her mother does a little, and probably her not-explicitly-gay best friend will do a little, too. But it's not falling apart very spectacularly yet, and I doubt it's going to go full Job at any point. Much easier to deal with bad things happening to good people when the bad things are easily reversible and all to the good anyway (like her boyfriend breaking up with her after she mistook one too many Serious Talk about How We Should Maybe Split Up for a proposal).

I'd be fascinated if The Book of Jane really did go as dark as Job, but given the marketing on this book I doubt the publishers would allow it.

[thisbluespirit]

I avoid Christian fiction like the plague (and I say that as someone who is a Christian), but, yeah, that does sound darker than your average one will go, from what I have seen of them. (Although, mind you, when I was young I had one about a girl who got run over by a bus and then evangelised her whole village successfully while she lay on her couch for a year. I used to love it and hate it (the angst and drama of being RUN OVER BY A BUS! vs the guilt complex of not being capable of ever evangelising anyone, no matter how ill I got. Perhaps it was only buses that conferred these abilities?? I like to think so.)

Maybe Jane has some mild difficulties, moans a lot and her friends just want to talk about their latest Christian paperback crazes? /sounds accurate.

[evelyn_b]

I am the grumpiest atheist in Grumpsville, but there will always be an even grumpier theologian sleeping like a balrog in the hollow of my heart, waiting to rage into life at the slightest hint of Christian media doing Christianity "wrong." Why should I care about cute and fluffy Job AUs missing or not missing the point? I don't care, but I do. It's the curse of a Catholic education, I guess.

Although, mind you, when I was young I had one about a girl who got run over by a bus and then evangelised her whole village successfully while she lay on her couch for a year.

That sounds amazing. How did she do it? Did everybody just go along because they didn't want to hurt her feelings after she was run over by a bus? For a second I thought you were talking about Pollyanna, but there the evangelism was for the Gospel of Glad (iirc). And not a bus (I think).

[thisbluespirit]

That sounds amazing. How did she do it? Did everybody just go along because they didn't want to hurt her feelings after she was run over by a bus?

LOL, I don't remember the details, although I think I may still have it somewhere. (It was a Sunday School prize, and also I consider it an important historical curiosity.) As I recall, she was run over by a bus and had to lie flat for a year so she could get well. She was angry about this for a while, but they put her downstairs and left the door open so everyone in the village could waltz in whenever they choose and she found she cheered them up/converted them over time, so it was all obviously worth while. I am pretty sure she converted the bus driver, who was very sorry about it all, as well as the village bad boy, Brian. (They only had one.) Possibly a lot of the village was already at least nominally Christian.

It is terrible on so many levels from a modern pov and I think I kind of knew that even when I was ten (but I first had it when I was seven). I don't think the adults read these books; I think it was just a matter of grabbing one from the tiny selection at the Christian bookshop that was aimed at the right age and being thankful. (Unlike the US, our Christian publishing industry is tiny, and is mostly either NF or imported with the odd thing down by Hodder or Scripture Union.)

I also had a truly terrible Narnia-esque fantasy one as well. Or at least, it was enjoyably duff (I used to take it as encouraging, because I felt sure at about ten that I could write as well as the author, if possibly not correctly, unlike all the other books I read). However, it was a series of four books, and I had 2 and 3, but when you put them together with 1 and 4, the religious analogy fell apart disastrously. (If you have a Jesus-figure, you don't marry him off to somebody later!) The fourth, however, did have an army of evil penguins, which almost made up for the fact that it seemed to have entirely forgotten everything in books 1-3.

(I should say, to be fair, that there were some quite nice and thoughtful ones, but it's the terrible ones that always stand out!)

Pollyanna is great, though. I loved it. I tried to play the Glad Game - but you can see the other literature I had access to... ;-)

[evelyn_b]

Even as I child, I felt like maybe I shouldn't like Pollyanna, but I liked it anyway - I don't quite remember why it sold me as thoroughly as it did in spite of myself.

the religious analogy fell apart disastrously. (If you have a Jesus-figure, you don't marry him off to somebody later!)

But what if they love each other?? Also, kids love romance subplots, right?

Do you remember the title of this evil-penguin-army-including masterpiece? It sounds magical.

[thisbluespirit]

Do you remember the title of this evil-penguin-army-including masterpiece? It sounds magical.

It really really wasn't at all, and I'm pretty sure as a British Christian children's series, it'd be unavailable where you are (hopefully), but I think it was called Tergan's Lair.

[evelyn_b]

Don't worry, I probably won't seek it out. I need to curb my tendency to read things I know perfectly well I'm not going to like. But still! Evil penguins! An army of them!

[thisbluespirit]

Disappointing evil penguins! ;-p I think you're probably safe anyway. I have no idea whether they ever made it over the pond.

[liadt]

Depends if Burgess regards women as counting as people!

Can't Fred transfer to a different university?

[evelyn_b]

Probably Fred could transfer and remain within the terms of the will, but he likes where he is - he's also a fan of rooftops, and there are plenty of accessible roofs around campus. Plus he enjoys his adversarial relationship with the academic counselors.

Burgess is pretty good on women counting as people, I think? His selection is dude-heavy, but nearly always good, and when it's bad it's not usually because the female characters are poorly handled. The big major exception (imo) is For Whom the Bell Tolls where the love interest is awful (imo) but not necessarily worse than many of the male characters. Braine's women characters are viewed through a heavy lens of cynicism, but they do about as well as anyone can hope to under those conditions.

[liadt]

Doesn't Fred want different rooftops? Tangling with disguised Aussie aliens might broaden his horizons!

[evelyn_b]

He's going to get new rooftops whether he wants them or not!

[osprey_archer]

Doorways in the Sand sounds delightful. Will the aliens dressed up as kangaroos help Fred save himself from the grim fate of being graduated??? One can only hope!

I am not sure that a retelling of the Book of Job was ever a good idea, especially not in a witty modern version, but I'm nonetheless fascinated to hear how it turns out. It seems like it would be cheating to do it without killing off at least one person who is important to Jane, though.

[evelyn_b]

It's magically delicious! The aliens dressed as kangaroos are doing their best, but they have bigger shrimp to throw on the intergalactic barbie, so things get complicated. Zelazny has clearly read a bunch of Raymond Chandler and thought, "This confusion could be a lot more lucid." Fred's kind of a would-be hard-boiled dork who gets hit on the head a lot. I love it.

I love the idea of a perky chick-lit romance that turns into the Book of Job, with all its horror and loss and total lack of reasonable answers intact, but the publishers of Christian chick-lit and I don't necessarily have a lot of interests in common. Probably someone's done it, or something like it, but not for the inspie market.

Jane, though? Jane's dog doesn't even die.

[osprey_archer]

Usually I'm not in favor of the dog dying, but COME ON. It's an adaptation of the Book of Job! The dog ought to die! Everyone ought to die except the irritating friends who are all "you must have done something to deserve it" or "this is just a test to make you stronger" or whatever they say.

Does her dog even meet with a minor misfortune or some variety? Or does it just hang around being cute and resting its head on Jane's knee so she can stroke its velvety ears as it gazes lovingly up at her in her time of troubles?

[evelyn_b]

The dog gets seriously ill and has to stay overnight in the dog hospital! But then he comes back good as new, not even disabled. I've got no death wish against fictional dogs, but for someone having a run of bad luck, Jane's still pretty lucky. She does have to deal with her best friend's mother dying, which makes him less able to help her out when she gets her run of bad luck. But her own family is alive and well from beginning to end.

There's also a very unappealing love interest! But that's more a trial for me than for Jane.