Jan

20

Journey Ended

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Whenever I expect to get a lot of reading done, I inevitably get virtually no reading done.  Thus, my little trip with a few hours on planes and no baby led to very little reading progress.  Upon my return, however, I did finally finish The Quincunx.  I feel like I should put it in all caps because it is that much of an accomplishment.  Seven-hundred and eighty-one pages!  Not only is it a massive tome, it also requires a great deal of patience.  You don’t even find out what a “quincunx” is until like page 450.  The whole plot, which is far too twisty to be called just plain twisty, basically involves the same thing over and over again.  Young hero, having been betrayed, must fend for himself again, finds new friend, gets betrayed, repeat.  These cycles can last anywhere from 15 to 150 pages, but that’s pretty much it.  The number of characters involved is Tolstoy-esque and Palliser could give Dickens a serious run for his money had he been around back in the day of the serial.  I am still not exactly sure I understand everything that happened, but neither do I feel a serious need to sort it out.  The journey has ended.  Phew.

Obviously I didn’t dislike the book.  I spent over a month reading it.  But once it’s all done it loses a bit of its charm.  It was nice not knowing what was happening for those first several hundred pages.  The denouement is never as good, is it?

For now I am reading The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson.  I don’t know that I ever said anything last year when I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Larsson is perfectly competent, and his plots can be quite good.  His style is just so drab.  If a character stops to pick up groceries, he’ll list every single thing they get, and not in a coy, winking Salinger-type way.  He gives you so much of these details that his books are probably the most “procedural” procedurals I’ve ever read.  Still, I don’t mind it so much.  I’d rather he have those flaws than go overboard in the opposite direction like so many thriller writers do.  Their plots are flimsy and their style tries far too hard to achieve something they never do.

I also realized the other night in bed that I never had my say about the sequel to Hunger Games, Catching Fire.  I was not a big fan.  This says more about me than the book.  The book follows a natural course, I even predicted how it would end when I was 25 pages in.  The problem is that my favorite part of HG was not the buildup, but the games themselves.  And the sequel makes the games mostly an afterthought and does not devote near enough time or energy to following them for me.  What does this mean?  It means I should just go back and read Battle Royale again because that’s what I really wanted out of HG in the first place.


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