Summer Reading #3: A Long Way Down
Great book, terribly banal title.
Overview
Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down begins with a simple, almost high concept, premise – four radically different people meet on the roof of Topper’s House, a popular London suicide spot, on New Year’s Eve. Shenanigans ensue. It’s a ridiculously neat concept that is almost screaming out to be slapped onto the back of a yellowing paperback, along with a handful of superlative quotes on Horby’s finesse as a writer and a pricetag that’s too small to turn down. You’d never guess that inside is a novel of incredible weight, humour, depth, wit and magnitude, which only adds to its charm.
The book is divided into three parts, and is narrated in first person alternatively by all four protagonists. The beginning of the book reads like a pre-title sequence of an indie film. We open scenically (and ironically so) on the roof of Topper’s House with Martin, a wise-cracking middle-aged British man who is loaded with shameful past. There he meets Maureen, a soft-spoken old woman who sounds like she’s never been outside her parish. Next up is Jess, a sweary and petulant teenager to whom nothing is ever serious. And to round up the four we have JJ, a disgruntled American in London, filled with righteous anger at his lot in life.
Elements of each protagonist are drawn from stock characters, which at first helps the reader to acclimate to these not-entirely-likable bunch. But before they can get boring, Hornby quickly combines usually disparate character traits, and then adds in dashes of flavour to each personality. The genius in his writing, though, is in how well he embodies each character. From the simple and funny (Maureen puts in dashses to bleep out swear words) to almost unnoticeable (at one point about two-thirds in, I realised that Jess’s bits read faster and snappier simply because of Hornby’s deft use of punctuation), his writing adapts to each character seamlessly. It’s as if we are being told this story by four actors rather than one writer. It’s a simple technique, but it works brilliantly. It also guarantees that any insight we as readers receive is insight that one of the characters has gained, which adds a great deal to both the realism and weight of the novel.
But this is no mopey book about suicide, filled with dark brooding and essential life lessons. It often plays out as a comedy of errors, and Hornby doesn’t hesitate to play with clichés and expectations for laughs, shocks, or both. From page one, there is a refreshing frankness to how these characters speak, reflecting their desperation and sense of loss.
There’s a lot more to be said about this book, but I don’t think I could do it justice without talking about the way it ends, so I’ll have to put in a spoiler section for this one.
Arbitrarily Decided Grade: A-
Spoiler-filled discussion
Summer Reading #2: Essays in Love
Also published as On Love: A Novel.
The back of this book categorizes its genre as “Philosophy/Novel”, and strange as it may sound, there’s really no other way of putting it. In Essays in Love, our unnamed protagonist examines the various aspects of being in love through tracking his relationship with a woman named Chloe.
Chapter titles range from “The subtext of seduction” through “Marxism” to “Intermittences of the Heart” and “Psycho-fatalism”. Each chapter is divided into point, each point being numbered and generally consisting of a paragraph. The whole affair has the air of philosophy, but at the same time we are still following what is essentially a standard love story. And this is Botton’s brilliance – using a simple man-and-woman-fall-in-love scenario to dig into how we think and feel about love, from the perspective of a philosopher (in the very traditional sense of the word).
Most people, assuming you’ve been in love, will find something that they can relate to here. This book had been making the rounds with most of my friends before it fell in my hands, and to be honest, it didn’t strike anywhere near as personal a chord with me as it had with them. But this is not a criticism; Essays in Love is not the kind of work that requires you to have experienced what it is talking about to enjoy it or find it enlightening. The last chapter is entitled “Love Lessons”, and really, the whole book could have been called that. Although Botton speaks of love in broad terms and often takes the protagonist’s experiences with Chloe to create generalizations, his discourse on love is still rooted in this one relationship. You can still learn a lot from it and sympathize with the emotions Botton explores, even if you’ve never experienced them yourself. This level of engagement is both a credit to Botton’s way of structuring the book and a result of his incredibly skillful and witty writing.
At one point towards the end of Essays in Love, we read an emotionally-loaded letter written by Chloe to the protagonist. This is a stark removal from the course of the novel, reminding us just how detached the reader has been kept from the dynamic of the novel’s key relationship. And yet the story remains compelling, not because we are necessarily have any investment in the characters, but rather because we are engaged in Botton’s philosophical inquest into love. There’s a certain magic to the wit, insight and humility with which he approaches the topic. He takes a down-to-earth approach in his analyses, freely and deftly using metaphors, diagrams, folk wisdom and a vast philosophical heritage alike to illustrate his points.
Arbitrarily Decided Grade: B+
Summer Reading #1: Looking for Alaska
Looking For Alaska by John Green (2005)
Overview
I can’t think of a better book to have started my summer reading spree with. John Green’s Looking For Alaska is packaged as a categorically “young adult novel”, but as any good book about teenagers and for teenagers, it has no place within those strict boundaries. The novel follows Miles Hunter, who goes to boarding school for junior year in search of “the Great Perhaps”, and finds much more than he could have imagined.
Miles narrates the story in first person, and his character is fascinating enough to justify this. In his home in Florida, he lives in voluntary isolation from the world, absorbed in reading biographies and learning famous dead people’s last words. He is searching for something without knowing what it is, and in the course of the book he finds it in Culver Creek Preparatory School in the most unexpected ways. The book is divided into two halves, “Before” and “After”, pivoted around an experience that is as traumatic to the reader as it is to the characters. I’ll leave the discussion of that to the spoiler section.
John Green has an uncanny ability to get into the head of a loner teenager who experiences life for the first time. On a superficial level, Green adopts many of the clichés of coming-of-age stories – first cigarette, being hazed by seniors, getting caught up in petty high school feuds, being attracted to a girl for the first time, etc etc etc. But there’s a reason these clichés exist; they’re an integral part of teenage life in a context like this one. But Green takes those tropes and makes them an honest part of Miles’ life. He avoids the easy trap of trying to create characters and a context that are vague enough for anyone to project themselves into. He captures the feeling of being in a consciously formative stage in life; wrestling with the invincibility and vulnerability of adolescence with startling sincerity.
So give this book a go, especially if you went to boarding school or are going to boarding school. It is a powerful and honest coming-of-age tale, the likes of which I haven’t encountered since I read The Perks of Being A Wallflower, and it has instantly become one of my favourite books. I will most definitely be revisiting this one many, many times in the years to come.
Arbitrarily Decided Grade: A
Spoiler-filled discussion (MAJOR spoilers) Read more…
This piece contains mild spoilers.
Kenneth Branagh’s Thor is a film that doesn’t have very much going for it. Its plot developments are so predictable that the film skirts the line of being dry and businesslike. It replaces subtlety with exposition that would be laborious if it weren’t so damned simple. And yet Thor manages to be Marvel’s best Avengers film to date and the most effective, straight-up morality tale found in superhero movies since Spider-Man.
The film’s shifting between two locations – Marvel’s version of Asgard and a middle-of-nowhere town in New Mexico – reveals its greatest strength. In Asgard, Thor and his friends are the picture of moral simplicity. The entire machinations of the politics and power-play of Asgard are so simple that they are laughable on paper. Characters frequently waltz around declaring what they’ve just done, or what it is they are about to do. Every now and then, the grandfatherly but commanding Odin will explain the difference between right and wrong and how people should generally behave. The conflict is simple and in-your-face – Thor is too immature to take the crown and Loki is jealous that he’s not even considered. Done. Insert plot here.
But not so fast. When Thor finds himself in New Mexico, the film becomes more than just eye candy. On Earth, Thor acts as if he is still a god – why wouldn’t he? His basal charm and simplicity both dumbfound and appeal to Jane Foster, the film’s Obligatory Romantic Interest™. We know exactly why Thor is on Earth; Odin explicitly told us two scenes ago that he would have to learn his lessons in maturity as a ruler by being banished to this godforsaken, CGI-lacking world. The fish-out-of-water scenario is classically executed well as Thor begins to pick up pace, but it is also here that the film begins to set itself apart.
Although the characters may not be very complex, the contrast between how they function in Asgard and on Earth demonstrate the key themes of the film. In Asgard, everything is cut and dry. Often the bland and outward motivations of the characters go so far as to make them seem stupid. On Earth, Thor finds a world where the good guys squabble with each other, and where power doesn’t seem to be organised as logically as it was in Asgard under Odin’s watchful eye. He doesn’t exactly learn subtlety, but Thor learns to see the world as more than just right and wrong, good and bad. Meanwhile, as Loki learns of his origins as a Frost Giant child; the deceit and lies he finds in his own past make themselves manifest in his selfish actions of the future. He manages to deceive even himself, while Thor learns to see beyond the mask of Asgard’s blunt warrior morality.
The central moment in the film occurs when Loki and Thor battle upon the latter’s return to Asgard. Loki mocks Thor for his admittedly clichéd changes during his experience on Earth, demanding whether “the girl” was responsible for his newfound kindheartedness. Loki mistakes his silence for affirmation, but the audience is aware of how untrue this assertion is. It isn’t Jane Foster who creates the fundamental change in Thor, although she is a symbol of how he finds that change. His transformation begins when Thor is unable to pull Mjolnir, his hammer, out from the rock Odin has lodged it into. In this moment, Thor loses the only thing which gave him his clear sense of moral judgment – his power. To fill this void, Thor finds, silly as it may sound, love. But not through Jane Foster or his friends, but through himself. When Loki (literally) sends giant hulking fire-breathing armour to find and kill Thor, his powerlessness becomes a problem. As his friends, both new and old, stand ready to retreat, Thor finds a solution by sending them off and marching towards the monster, ready to make the ritual sacrifice we’ve all been expecting. But what is important here is not necessarily the fact that he is willing to die for his friends, but rather that he has managed to find a solution that does not require power. He is left with only one option to save the world around him from further destruction and suffering; his life is the only bargaining chip he has left. And so he offers it – because losing power has shown him that being good doesn’t just mean deciding where and how to exert power for a good cause, but to do what is right when it is demanded of you. And when he learns that lesson, his power is returned to him.
Amidst all of the pomp, that lesson is what Thor is all about. The rift between father and sons, the political maneuverings of Asgardians, and the conflict between Jane and SHIELD all underline the same messages. In essence, Thor boils down to a simple story about simple people and simple gods. It demonstrates an idea that permeates mythology and modern fantasy – the gods are just as fallible as us humans, which means that what is important about power is not having it, but knowing how to use it. In telling us this story in a manner so straightforward it could almost be called a fable, Thor does not mark itself as a particularly sophisticated or innovative film. What it does exceedingly well, however, is using its imagination, rooted in ancient tropes, and its unashamed simplicity to create a powerful and entertaining modern morality tale.
More Thoughts on Inception
See my first thoughts on Inception here.
I don’t remember the last time I kept wanting to go back to see a film at the cinema this many times. Every ticket I buy for Inception is worth the price, though. And the box office returns, while they’re not as high as I would hope, are very encouraging. As Inception ticks closer and closer to a worldwide gross of US$400 million, it’s clear that there is a significant portion of the mainstream cinema-going audience that enjoy intelligent cinema. I highly doubt that films like Synecdoche, New York or A Serious Man will ever be mainstream. Yes, there is a place for independent cinema, but that doesn’t mean that mainstream cinema has to be patronising. In a year of shoddy remakes, poor sequels, and story-less effects-driven extravaganzas, Inception stands as an all-too-rare reminder that films don’t need to insult the intelligence of their audience to be successful. Let’s remind studios of that. Go see Inception at the cinema, and then go see it again. Take this from someone who has seen it three times and counting – it’s worth it.
[Once again, SPOILERS for Inception follow]
