The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

It took me about two and a half days to read this book, and those were days during which I had plenty of other things to do. What I'm saying is, it's a very quick read. It was easy to read, which may explain some of its "astonishing" universal appeal.

It is difficult for me to really latch onto whatever the amazing bestseller list creators of this world latched onto when they ate this book up. I do not have children, nor do I have friends with children. I was fourteen years old just over a decade ago, and I certainly wasn't one in the 1970s with a nice loving family appropriate to that decade. I have not encountered murder, never known anyone who was murdered, or of any friends of friends who were murdered. I have watched a lot of Law & Order.

And that's what this book felt like, in a lot of ways. It trades on its dramatic irony too heavily for my money, as you know the killer and the details of the protagonist's death within the first chapter or two, I was primarily interested in if the man would be caught and how and so forth. Sebold focuses instead on the family dynamics and some intrapersonal dynamics that develop after the protagonist is killed. That is all well and good, but for my money her characterizations are not particularly engaging or thrilling. There are effectively sentimental or insightful moments, but nothing that challenged me to think differently.

Perhaps that is this book's strength, and a source of its popularity - it never really REALLY challenges you in a significant way. Sebold describes things well, if something erring on the side of purple prose, and it can be very powerful to have an unreliable narrator who is also omniscient? But overall, I just couldn't go with this book. Parts of it were really interesting, but there are some spoiler-related plot twists that I did not care for at all, that sustained the feeling that I was watching an episode of Law & Order that was trying to wind everything up in the last 12 minutes of showtime.

I didn't dislike this book, but I also didn't love it. I thought about not finishing it, but I finished it if only because it was so easy to do so, so easy to read and digest. I can see why it would get picked up to be made into a movie, but I also wonder how they will be able to commit it to film without making it REALLY cheesy.

I could see myself encountering someone who loved this book intensely that I already don't like, and getting into an argument about the book's merits. But I have not met that person yet. As it stands, this is mainstream packaged writing, very sentimental, very manipulative, very straight-forward, very traditional but with a "new" narrative twist and some versions of heaven that are palatable to today's am-I-or-am-I-not theist intellectual. I felt somewhat pandered to while reading this book.

There are better things for me to read, but there are also much worse things that the public in general could be reading. After all, you can't really beat up a book whose main themes include love, recovering from pain, learning to live, blah blah. Those things are universally appealing, they apply to all age groups, all social groups. Perhaps that is what stopped the book from engaging me, it was TOO universal in that way.

Also, most of the writing was not particularly impressive. I got the feeling that I was reading something that I could have conceived of and written. Yes, it's true that I did NOT conceive of or write it, and that Sebold did, so who am I to criticize - yes, that's all very true. But I enjoy books the most when they seem to be these messages sent across time and space by a person who artistry is somehow magical to me. How could Frank Herbert write Dune? I couldn't do it. Too much vocabulary, too much planning. I couldn't write even something like Blindness, another book I wasn't crazy about. But I couldn't have written it, or have come up with the idea. So good for them.

As for Sebold, I don't know. I guess this means she is a very accessible writer, and whether that is a good thing or not depends on each individual reader. I like to work a little bit, or have my notions about things twisted around, and so forth. I am not everyone.

I'll admit that amongst the many bits of sentimentality in The Lovely Bones, there were some that struck a cord and remained. I would never begrudge Sebold that. She succeeded wonderfully in a type of writing that I just don't particularly care for.

The end.

Dune by Frank Herbert

You can imagine, already, that my impression of this book is very favorable, as I have read many things between my last entry here and Dune, and although a few have gotten close, none have actually pushed me back into an update.

Several weeks ago, I watched David Lynch's 1984 film adaptation of Dune. I was already on the verge of deciding to try out some fantasy or science fiction novels, I'd pretty much run my course with crime novels and cheeky fiction for the time being, and was feeling a bit bored and frustrated by what was available to read. The book I had read most recently was The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, which is a fantastic if emotionally draining book. I was beginning to worry that if I wanted to keep being impressed by what I read, I would need to suffer along with the characters I was interested in.

Science fiction is a genre that many people have told me I would love, and I have resisted reading it (with the exception of some Star Trek novelizations when I was in middle school, yes, there, I said it), for a couple of reasons. One is that it seemed intimidating - there'd be a whole slew of new vocabulary to learn and it was possible I'd have to actually know a little science, or be used to thinking in scientific terms, in order to follow the action of the book. I was hesitant despite the recommendations of my most trusted literary friends. I figured I'd put it on the back burner and it would be one of those genres that I'd get into when I was much much older. As it turns out, that honor will probably be reserved for extremely long tomes of classic fiction and/or biographies, because, hey, Dune.

As I was saying, I watched Lynch's film adaptation recently and, in addition to being thoroughly confusing, was very taken in by the basic ideas and aesthetic of the film. The dialogue, though cheesy, was very appealing to me for some reason, and the trick of having the audience hear the characters' thoughts via voiceover was one of my favorite narrative tricks. But this isn't about praising the movie. It is merely worth mentioning that the movie was intriguing enough for me to decide, yes, it is time to read a science fiction book and, yes, Dune is going to be it.

After a little searching (the library did not have a copy), I obtained a beat-up paperback of the novel (my favorite kind of book to read), and set to work. Almost immediately, I fell in love with this book. The dialogue remained cheesy, the effect of knowing the characters' thoughts in addition to their dialogue is achieved with the use of italics, and so forth.

Every section begins with a quotation from a number of documents regarding the protagonist that were written after the events of the book take place by a Princess Irulan, who does not appear until the end of the novel and even then has very little character. She gives us little snippets of legend and lore to carry us along, but the little attention she gets at the end of the book goes a long way, and you can see an actual personality poking out behind those quotes, stopping it from feeling like a cheap narrative trick.

A friend of mine made the mistake of asking me, "What is Dune about?" This proved to be a very difficult question to answer and I'm not sure I can do it here, either. It's about planetary evolution and preservation, it's about the politics of environmental resources, it's about gender, it's about the frightening power of religion and how easy it is to manipulate both religious text and practice for better or worse. It's about expanding consciousness, attempting to avoid war, it's about love versus duty, it's about the nature of friendship and the method by which one can negate potentially long hours of political negotiations. Oh, and gigantic worms that live in the sand, did I mention that?

Most of the action takes place on a desert planet, Arrakis, and the largest framework involves the struggle for control of this planet between the Emperor and two major Houses - one led by a Harkonnen Baron and one led by an Atreides Duke, Leto. Leto leaves his home planet, the water rich, earth-like Caladan, to assume control over Arrakis, which is currently ruled by the Harkonnens.

Arrakis is inhabited by a native population called Fremen, who have adapted to living on a desert planet in surprisingly and somewhat disgusting ways. Arrakis is the only location in the universe where spice melange exists, which is what makes space travel possible. The spice melange also functions as a drug in various forms, which is used by all sorts of people.

Paul is Duke Leto's only son, born to him of his concubine Jessica, and the protagonist of the story. The majority of the action involves Paul being stranded on Arrakis with his mother, adapting to the Fremen ways, and essentially becoming their prophet.

One more interesting thing is that, in this universe, computers and other "thinking machines" have been outright banned, and in their place, human beings are trained to use their full mental potential. Different sects are trained in different ways for different purposes - the Mentats are human computers frequently employed as assistants to those in power and are male, but there is also the clan of the Bene Gesserit, all trained in somewhat more passive ways, all women, their goal to recreate a kind of genetic engineering by strategically copulating and procreating with particular bloodlines. And by passive, I do not mean these women are powerless - they are called witches with some regularity, and are capable of extreme manipulations due to their ability to observe minutiae about those around them and the training they receive to control their own bodies and minds down to the slightest muscle, down to the ability to reconfigure the chemical structure of a poison so that it can be metabolized by their body without harming them.

Phew, there is just so much that I could continue on explaining without ever getting to an actual review of the book.

The Bene Gesserit are, for my money, the most interesting part of the book. Not all, but most of what they do, is conceivably within human reach, and so their existence serves as a reminder to the reader of what a human being is truly capable of. If we didn't keep all of our information inside glowing boxes and never actively think about it, we could be unstoppable. A test administered by the Bene Gesserit is that of the gom jabbar. The testee places their hand inside a mysterious box while the test administrator places a poisoned needle (that's the gom jabbar) at the test taker's neck. The administrator then applies psychological tricks and influence to convince the taker that the hand inside the box is undergoing extreme pain. The taker believes this to be reality, they can feel their flesh burning in agonizing horror. However, if they remove their hand from the box, they will be stabbed in the neck with the poisoned needle and die. This is a test used to determine whether a person is an animal, or a human. The distinction is, if you can act against your own self interest, which implies a sense of reason that is stronger than that of instinctual self=preservation, then you are human.

The book is full of things like this - statements about humanity, the nature of fear, the notions of future and past, etc., that are coached inside silly vocabulary and outlandish situations, yet retain a kernel of almost universal truth, or otherwise intriguing, broadly sketched out notions. Almost all of those notions resonated strongly with me, and I found myself easily accepting the ridiculous vocabulary that was an initial reason for me to reject this genre straight out. Fine, I feel a little silly when I go on a rant about the Water of Life and the gom jabbar, and the differences between when Paul is referred to as Paul, or Usul, or Muad'Dib, but WHATEVER.

This novel, though hefty, was a quick read. It's simply written, the sentence structure is very basic, Herbert does a great job of being accessible to his audience. The italics that mark different characters' individual thoughts work to add a fantastic layer of tension to a scene - each character seems more alive as you can read their exact thoughts and not an approximation (such as, "Jessica felt sad, or Jessica knew that her son was unprepared for the fight"). The difference is subtle and ingenuous. His breakdown of the book into sections using Irulan's quotes is also very helpful, as it means you can take a break every three or four pages, and yet he still has the book organized into three large sections. The vocabulary may be intimidating (even screenings of the movie involved glossaries, and the book has a few appendices in addition to a glossary), but if you are the same kind of reader I am, you'll never need to use those. Almost all of the words are easy to define for yourself using context, as they are repeated or explained within the text. It's not exactly A Clockwork Orange in terms of expecting you to adapt to an entirely new way of thinking.

To go back to its film adaptations - I know there is another one in the works, and that a Sci-Fi miniseries was done in 2000, and I am intrigued by both of these projects. However, I feel as though the best aspects of Dune are unfilmable. The action could be fantastic (Paul kicks one of his captors between the ribs and shatters his heart's right ventricle, and so forth), but the layers of tension within those fights (knowing the characters' thoughts, having the subtle meanings of each fighting gesture explained and contextualized in an abstract way) will never get across.

For example: a character named Feyd fights a gladiator-slave at one point in the book. Feyd is the Baron-to-be and wants to start taking control from the current Baron as soon as possible. Slaves in these fights are normally drugged (although this is the only fight we see in the narrative, so this fact is told to us directly). The drug would turn their skin green and put them in the grips of terror, making them easy to defeat. Feyd wields two blades - one long, one short, the longer one usually tinged with poison along the blade. The tradition would be to slay the slave with the poisoned blade, if possible, and then point out the effects of the poison on the slave as it takes him over to the cheering crowd. In this instance, Feyd has struck up a plan to fight an undrugged slave (skin painted green) so that he can accuse the Baron's slavemaster of incompetence and place a main of his own in that station. As a precaution, however, Feyd has had the slave hypnotized, so that if he utters a word ("Scum"), it will cause the slave's muscles to all suddenly constrict and freeze up, making slaying him very easy. Also, as Feyd does not trust anyone, he has tinged his short blade with poison instead of the long one, so as to confuse the gladiator slave (who will have his wits about him). THAT IS A LOT OF INFORMATION TO COMMUNICATE IN A FILM. It is all important for the tension of the scene, yet it's much easier and faster to read than it would be to watch.

Although a flop, it's worth noting that Lynch's Dune nailed its production design right on the head. The world Herbert describes is strange, its aesthetic is very specific, and the makers of 1984's Dune really did an amazing, amazing job. I know it received Herbert's seal of approval in that regard.

I have another science fiction book or two lined up, but it is not time yet. I am still stuck on Dune, very impressed by it, etc. It is worth reading the Wikipedia entry on it, as its historical significance (particularly being the first "ecological" science fiction novel) is extremely interesting in its own right.

This entry is messy and overly long, but its whole point is to get me back into writing here, so forgive me and it may pay off in the end.