SF Diplomat

REVIEW - The Silence (1963)

April's Videovista also has a review I wrote of Ingmar Bergman's The Silence (also known as Trystnaden) as it's being re-released on DVD along with Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light.

I was quite surprised at how well my review of the film turned out as  I had to take three runs at watching it.  The reason why I had to keep returning to it is because it kept causing me to fall asleep due to the fact that the entire film contains no more than 40 lines of dialogue.

However, it was also the film that converted me to Bergman who I have reviewed (somewhat less charitably) before :

• Prison
• After the Rehearsal

As you can see from the length of the piece I wrote about The Silence, it had quite an effect upon me.  It also made me think a bit about the nature of reviewing and, perhaps, why it is that The Clute so likes the works of Gene Wolfe and why Paul Kincaid also felt the urge to fill his new book What it is We Do When We Read Science Fiction with no less than four essays about the exact same author.

REVIEW - Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon (2007)

Michael Chabon comes to Fantasyland.

Michael Chabon is one of those rare mainstream authors who not only have a real affection for genre writing, but actually partake in it themselves from time to time.  Outside of his mainstream writing, Chabon has penned a YA fantasy novel, some comics and a script for Spiderman 2.  However, what is odd is that if you look past his first couple of novels (Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Wonder Boys) you’ll see that Chabon has spent most of his career picking up different genres and populating them with Jews.  Indeed, aside from The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (which duly received some genre attention thanks to its counterfactual Jewish Alaska), Chabon has also written The Final Solution, which sees Sherlock Holmes investigating the Holocaust and the Pulitzer winning comic strip novel The amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Originally published as an old style serial in the New Yorker, Gentlemen of the Road has been seen by mainstream critics as an homage to “adventure” novels but given the fact that the book is dedicated to Michael Moorcock, it should be pretty clear that Chabon’s target is more precise than this.  Gentlemen of the Road is clearly an homage to the Sword and Sorcery novels of Moorcock, Leiber and Howard.  However, while the book nicely captures some of the genre’s niftier elements, Chabon fails to grasp the simplicity of the source material and the result is an overly clever book with too much world-building, not enough plot and a narrative that is disjointed and jarring to follow.

REVIEW - Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard (2006)

JG Ballard started his writing career in Science Fiction.  His early writings, widely held to be a driving force behind the 1960's New Wave SF movement, shunned outer space and war for a focus on psychological and sociological phenomena that Ballard referred to as Innerspace.  Indeed, over fifty years after his first short stories were published, we can see from Ballard's latest novel Kingdom Come that the same themes and ideas continue to fascinate him.  However, after Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000) and Millennium People (2003), Kingdom Come prompts us to ask whether Ballard has moved beyond a sustained interest and into the realms of outright repetition.

REVIEW - High John the Conqueror by Jim Younger - 12/20

Strange Horizons have just put up my review of Jim Younger's High John The Conqueror.

While I enjoyed the book quite a bit when I first read through it, it's one of those books that loses its appeal the more you think about what you've read.  In an attempt to find an angle from which to discuss the book I went off and read a couple of interviews of Younger and found him to be a man who clearly considers himself above genre and part of mainstream literature.

The thing about genre is that while it's something of a creative crutch, it's also a defensive wall.  If you write an unoriginal fantasy novel you can always turn around and say that you were merely paying homage to the genre greats and giving your readers what they want.  However, when you write a piece of mainstream literature that borrows from Hogarth and poorly apes Joyce then you're in trouble.

Given that the review takes in Hogarth and Joyce, it's one of the more artistically erudite reviews I have written.  My background is as an analytical philosopher rather than in the humanities so what knowledge of literature and literary criticism I have is entirely self-taught.  Writing this review actually reminded me of an old review of Ian McDonald's superb River of Gods I wrote ages ago because that review featured a discussion of Vedantic philosophy and McDonald's use of names.

Anyway, if given a choice, read River of Gods rather than High John the Conqueror, it's far more intelligent and far better researched, even if it is genre.