Post 26

So! Book reviews! Yeehaw!
Not really book reviews, though, because because I've read a lot of short stories lately, so we shall call this Quazi-literary Rantings. Again, yeehaw!

Today's agenda: "The Quiet Man," 1984, Of Mice and Men, Ishmael, To Kill a Mockingbird, "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," "The Birthmark," "Young Goodman Brown," "The Minister's Black Veil," and "Euthyphro."
Wow! I better get going on this.
This post may become serial....

The Quiet Man by Maurice Walsh (v1.0)

The reason this review come first is because of something I want to say regarding the writing of fiction that may be good to keep in mind. As an aspiring author--which I am, more or less, off and on--I have often encountered this ridiculous idea of the existence of "rules of fiction."
In my last post, I mentioned that I am not a fan of unstructured poetry. I want you to understand that this does not mean that I am a fanatical purist who loves only sonnets and limericks and other such formally structured things (which you surely gathered from the rest of that post). I think the important thing is that a poem set its own structure from the beginning and then adhere to it ever afterward. I'm okay with a few detractions from the pattern ("The Raven" has a few extra syllables here and there; "Annabel Lee" has an extra line at one point), but any such detractions must be for the good of the poem as a whole.
That said, I think that each individual work of fiction must, like poetry, set its own rules and then adhere to them, and I think that this must be done not only in the story itself but also in the style of the storytelling.
"The Quiet Man" employs an omniscient point of view, which I imagine is generally considered a sloppy sort of way to tell a story, but I kinda liked its effect. Overall, the story was enjoyable to read, and the omniscient POV did not in anyway detract me from the story.
That said, I'll save an actual review till later.
Moving on.

1984 by George Orwell

I consider myself at least fairly adept at recognizing my biases, but I'm usually not very good at setting them aside because I don't feel that to do so is entirely possible; generally, I just try to state them clearly so whomever I'm addressing can use them as a reference point. So, just for fairness sake, I wish to impress upon your mind the fact that I hate this book! Got it? Okay, let's move on.
This is the only Orwell story I've read, I believe, though I did watch the animated version of "Animal Farm" in a high school history class, so I can't say much about him as an author except that, if this book is any indication, the man was certainly a genius. Even hating the story as I read, I couldn't help but admire its quality. Near as I can tell (having only read it once), the story progresses naturally and maintains consistency within itself--it certainly follows its own rules.
That said, it also helped me to understand why I think long fiction generally fails in its aims. Noting the quote from Poe on my last post, 1984 is prime example of the grave danger of longer works. Orwell's focus in the story is extremely tight; he digresses very little, every event moving us closer to his ultimate effect, but it's just too long! Right around 50 pages before the book concluded, I remember thinking, "If [such and such happens] in the end, I will throw this book through the wall!" As it turns out, [such and such] did happen in the end, but, by the time I got there, I was too exhausted to care very much, mostly just happy to be done with the wretched ordeal of suffering through it. If all the horror of that semi-lengthy volume could somehow be distilled into short-story form--uh--well--that would probably be a little potent, maybe to the point of being physically lethal to readers, but if 1984 were more the length of Of Mice and Men, I probably would have thrown the book through the wall and gone on some sort of crusading tirade to save the world from itself; as it was, I was just lethargic and vaguely disturbed for several days afterward--still am a bit disturbed at times, in fact, whenever those scenes come back into my mind.
So, as far as impact goes, 1984 is about the most powerful fiction I've yet encountered. My only qualm with it, really, so far as quality is concerned, is the title (which is probably a little hypocritical), but as it turns out, the author initially entitled it The Last Man in Europe, but the publisher felt that that wasn't a very marketable title and convinced him to change it. Pity, I think, but I don't suppose we can very well hold it against Mr. Orwell (is it wrong to call him that? It is a pseudonym, after all).

Hmm....
I suppose I should come up with some complicated system of rating these works if I'm going to go to the trouble of reviewing them--may as well, anyway.
I don't want it to be too subjective, though, so howabout

100(((2(quality)+likability)/2)/15)
Quality and likability being rated 1-10

Seems sufficiently random....
Okay, so 1984 gets a 9 on quality and a 2 on likability, which gives it a 67 (rounding up) out of 100.
Hm. Yeah, I can see that.
For a formula I just randomly invented, that isn't too bad; I may modify it later, though, if I feel the need.

Moving on:

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Here's another quality work of fiction that I did not enjoy, but I hate this one far less than I hated 1984 and actually even appreciated it a bit.
This is another example of a very focused storyteller at work: the opening scene is important to the closing scene; the story is brief and gets directly to the point; every character serves a purpose to the plot--even Candy's old, smelly, blind sheep dog. All in all, very well done.
As far as titles go, this may be the most poignantly titled work in history--if you get the allusion to Robbie Burns. In fact, it was as I closed the book after the story's conclusion and saw the title that I was filled with sadness, not at the final depressing scene. The best laid plans... yes indeed....
I have one major complaint against the quality of this classic, though: the closing sentence. The back cover of my copy of 1984 told me that Mr. Orwell would keep me riveted from the opening sentence to "the last four words," or something like that. Often, my intense curiosity regarding those last four words was the only thing that compelled me onward, urging me to finish the story to see what they were, and I was not disappointed.
(Well, strictly speaking, that isn't true: I was extremely disappointed, but not in the impact of those words, just their meaning, which was the point; they are perfectly engineered to infect you with a debilitating sort of disappointment in humanity--all in just four simple words!)
The last sentence of Of Mice and Men had a similar design, I believe, but rather than making me think "AH! WE'RE ALL GOING TO HELL!" they made me think "Stinkin' retard! Haven't you paid attention to anything?"
Steinbeck missed his mark on that one--at least as far as I'm concerned--and probably would've been better off to have the story end with Slim and George walking sadly toward the highway.
A lot of Mr. Steinbeck's style struck me as kind of clunky, too; sometimes he would describe something at length and I wouldn't be able to visualize what he was saying. Most notably, Curly's introduction didn't make a bit of sense to me; I realize the intent was to show him as a fiery sort a fellow--a cowboy equivalent of Hotspur, I guess--but he struck me as unreasonably volatile and not very believable. Also, Lennie's hallucination's at the end struck me as irrelevant or, at the very least, out of place.
Overall, though, not a bad execution of the story; I'll certainly be far more likely to reread this book in 5 or 10 years than 1984.
Quality: 5
Likability: 7
Total out of 100: 57 (rounding up)

Hm. Yeah. This formula is garbage.
Moving on....

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

This is an amazing work of fiction!
That said, I'm not sure how much I'd recommend it....
The thought that went into this novel is very impressive; anyone else thinking "I want to write a story about a revolutionary philosophical view of humanity" would have written an elaborate story of a man seeking wisdom, and when he found the greatest and wisest philosopher in the world's history (who naturally would have been an old man with a weird name like Stanzlby), the story would have concluded, "And then he told me all his secrets, and now I am happy," leaving us, as readers, to wonder what those secrets were. But generally such secrets are left a mystery because the author doesn't have them to tell.
Not so with Ishmael. In Ishmael, any elaborate quest by the narrator to find a vernerable Stanzlby (and he does mention that such a quest was made and abandoned) happened before the story in the book begins; the bulk of the novel is the unfolding of this revolutionary philosophical view of humanity--which, as I said, is very impressive.
Ishmael is not like most fiction, and I think that's why I like it so much. Rather than having an enthralling plot and interesting characters with rich and insightful undertones, Ishmael is mostly about this philosophy. There is a simple plot and two principle characters with 3 or 4 very minor supporting roles, but most of the story is found in the character progression of the narrator, which ultimately becomes the character progression of the reader as we learn and change along with him.
And therein lies the danger of this book. My worry is that if everyone in the world read this book, a huge chunk of humanity would accept it as gospel truth and form religions that center around its teachings--and my understanding is that that has actually occurred to some extent. I feel I greatly benefited by reading this book; I found it insightful, and it opened my eyes to ideas that I had never imagined. All in all, I think I'm a better person because I have read this book, but I only think that that is true because I am well founded in my faith and have a pretty clearly defined view of the universe and my relationship to it--furthermore, I'm confident that the things I believe are true. Therefore, as I read this book, I was able to bounce its philosophies off of the sounding board of truth and easily determine which were worth believing and which were merely interesting from an intellectual stance; had I not been able to do so, I may have been converted to its teachings, and who knows where I'd be now!
I love this book, but I do not give the general population the recommendation to read it (my rating formula having been abandoned, we'll call that good enough).

Well, that's all the time I have for now. I'll be back later.