Category Archives: Fiction

February 22, 2010 · 11:59 pm

Her Fearful Symmetry: Premature Climax

I really loved A Time Traveller’s Wife. I really want to love Her Fearful Symmetry. And for most of the first half I was completely on board. I enjoy a good mystery, I appreciate a London setting and a fancy flat with loads of expendable income. As always, I appreciate good characterization – and the twins, Robert, and particularly Martin, are likable. Likable but not quite fully realized. The characteristics of each – Valentina as “mouse,” Julia as “bossy,” Martin as “OCD-ey” evolve, but without any justification for why such changes take place except that it is expedient for the plot.

In fact, all of the novel works towards advancing the plot and reaching the climax, at the expense of character development, consistency and motivation. While I appreciate that Neiffenegger takes bold and creative ideas and puts them to work in ways that allow the reader to suspend belief, unlike TTW, here the suspension of belief is only temporary, and the “magical” elements quickly become tedious and without logic, which is all the more disappointing given the success of TTW in sustaining believable unbelievability. Which is to say, the plot is engaging for the first 2/3rds of the text, and then becomes something to be completed if only to find out how the wildly loose ends might come together.

So a novel to be enjoyed for the fast-paced plot and the intensely readable early sections; a novel to be avoided if one values character development or consistency.

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February 19, 2010 · 11:36 pm

Salt Fish Girl: Borderline

Larissa Lai’s second novel, Salt Fish Girl, combines history and fantasy in an involving speculative fiction. Without revealing too much about the plot, the perspectives of the two protagonists, the 2040s Miranda and 1800s Nu Wa, are interwoven in an exploration of sexual desire, genetic modification, immigration and family responsibility.

The strength of the novel comes from its richly imagined future scenes. So much so that the speculative future reads as a much more compelling and realized time than the historical one (when one might expect depth in detail through research). The future protagonist, Miranda, also controls a stronger narrative voice and sense of character motivation and development.

The chapters set in the past are not disappointing, but rely too heavily on magic realism, without sufficient grounding in either time or place (something the future chapters do quite well). Further, these sections lack – with the exception of the meeting of Salt Fish Girl – concrete plot experiences, and so ‘float’ in a wishy-washy space of over-stated symbolism.

The symbolism is my chief complaint. Lai needs to trust her reader to interpret and analyze the text. As it is, the combination of an abundance of heavy handed symbolic references and (purposefully?) ambiguous mythic references  leave the reader at one and the same time frustrated with the emphatic symbolism and confused by the seemingly inexplicable plot events.

That said, the time changes and the Miranda plot are engaging and as a consequence the book reads quickly and for the most part, enjoyably – if you can get past the symbol saturation and occasionally disorienting plot elements.

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February 19, 2010 · 11:20 pm

Gorgeous Lies: Neither gorgeous, nor mysterious

Martha McPhee’s Gorgeous Lies served as my “bus book” for the last month. It is terrible. Really, really, bad awful. I would have stopped reading it, but it fit so well in my backpack and I only had to stomach a few pages at a time.

The novel follow the “wacky” Fury family – a new age blended family – as the patriarch Anton dies of pancreatic cancer. There’s the suggestion that there is some big secret lingering at the heart of his life that will either be revealed on his death-bed or in the book he’d been working on before his death. Turns out it’s no secret at all, the narrator lets us know early on that he’s been having sex with his stepdaughter(s).

The plot is terrible, but more frustrating and impossibly distracting is the writing. Awkward transitions, incredibly banal metaphors, clumsy dialogue, weak attempts at poetic description.

Turns out the book is a sequel – something the back cover does a good job of avoiding – which might explain some of the plot failings, but certainly does not account for the formulaic writing. Future bus books will be chosen based on more than size.

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February 10, 2010 · 7:45 pm

Kanata: the lisping Nobel bow-tie nancy

Don Gillmor presents Kanata as something of an epic; scratch that, he presents it as the Canadian epic, noting in his author’s remarks that “chief among the many challenges of historical fiction is finding a way to condense a huge volume of material into a coherent narrative” (447).

It isn’t a coherent narrative; he hasn’t condensed a huge volume of material. Instead the novel picks and chooses choice moments and figures from Canadian history (all men, all either politicians or military heroes) and goes about narrating these moments – the narrator is a history teacher speaking to a boy in a coma (because of course the only way someone would listen to this kind of rambling history lesson is if they were comatose and unable to flee the room).

The patchwork “map” – the novel is overly fixated on the metaphor of the map in forming the nation. I say overly fixated because every second page references a map, even if it’s only “the lines on her face form a rough map – of historical events and characters might be tolerable if not for the heavy-handed exploitation of the protagonist as the Metis hero – the man who brings together the divided nation (at last!) and understands the complexities and compromises necessary to do so. What Gilmor fails to realizes is that the compromises he has made to “condense” the history and find some kind of politically correct indigenous inclusion is to cast all indigenous peoples as either drunk or complicit in their own subjugation. Indeed a triumph of Canadian nationalism.

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