Fantastic Metropolis

My reading these days is pretty well confined to the lunch hour at work; anything else takes away from writing time. Therefore, this multimedia list of what made a favorable impression on me in the past year:

The Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin

I bought my copy in Grand Central Station and found the locomotive metaphor fit the experience of reading it. A slow rattling ride through a New York so glorious, hideous and baroque I was reminded of Gormenghast. Helprin blithely swapped around time, space and continuity and still managed to keep the train on the tracks until the very end. Unfortunately it derailed there. He’s a hell of a world-builder, though, so it was worth the ride.

Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter and Pink Moon, Nick Drake

Out on CD at last. For those of you unacquainted with Nick Drake, it’s probably enough to explain that Drake was the finest acoustic guitarist of his generation. His early death and lack of commercial success have made him a cult figure among people who assume those things equate with talent, but in his case it holds true. Technical perfection paired with haunting beauty and deceptive simplicity; a rare, rare find. He seemed to stand halfway through a doorway into another world, reporting back on its landscape; he didn’t so much die as walk through at last and close the door behind him.

Grim Fandango, LucasArts Games

Okay, all you writers out there: how many hours of creative time have you wasted on FreeCell? Here’s a far more worthwhile way to make those deadlines advance on you like out-of-control steamrollers. Part Mayan myth, part film noir, part Warner Brothers cartoon… You join Manny Calavera in the mean streets of the Land of the Dead, a place strongly resembling 1940’s Los Angeles, and follow him on his four-year journey to the gates of the Ninth Underworld. Action. Adventure. Weird beauty. Romance, even among skeletons. And unforgettable lines like, “Tremble with fear, you pigeons! It’s Robert Frost!”

Carthage Ascendant, Mary Gentle

The most amazing melange of hidden history, alternate history and hard science fiction, all disguised as a historical novel. Damn good writing, too. The characters are compelling, the military history and technology impressively detailed. The subject matter is grim-we’re dealing with 15th-century warfare, after all-but nothing feels gratuitous or overworked. Another great world-builder. In fact, I suspect there are three worlds building here simultaneously.

A Scattering Of Jades, Alexander C. Irvine

I read an advance copy of this one, praised it, and then re-read it when it came out this year and am even more impressed on the second exposure. In a way, this is magical realism, treating as it does of the magic and spirituality that underpins what we think of as the real world. The outrageous plots of gods and magi are interwoven with actual history and make perfect seamless sense. Again, a born writer here: multifaceted characters, lyrical prose.

Ground Force: Music From The BBC TV Programme, the Black Dyke Mills Band

On the evening of September 11, 2001, I happened to tune into this BBC gardening show. The universe was going up in flames, but in one tiny corner of it, three nice Brits were planting a green garden as a surprise for a total stranger. As an emblem of sanity, civility and kindness in a world that sorely needs these things, it comforted me no end. So did the show’s music by Jim Parker, when I finally tracked down an import CD this year. It evokes long summer afternoons in a lost green country. The Black Dyke Mills Band were founded nearly two centuries ago, and musing over their website one wonders if they weren’t the original model for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Scar, China Miéville

Liked this one better than Perdido Street Station, which was great and astonishing, with depth and complexity of prose, but seemed to me a bit small-boy-fascinated by squashy things, unpleasant fluids and bad smells. Character development only took place in the last four or five pages of the story. The Scar, though, is not a Boy Genius book. The Scar is a mature work examining the human condition, and moreover one of those books that tip you off to the fact that the artist has an entire world in his head, absolutely alive, real and complete in every breathing detail. We want to know more of it. (Disclosure here: I am an avowed slut for anything pirate-related.) Even if he doesn’t set more stories in a floating pirate city, though, I’m going to be buying Mieville’s books in future.

Treasure Planet, Disney

I DON’T GIVE A DAMN WHAT ANYONE ELSE SAYS, I LOVED EVERY FRAME OF IT. I have seen it repeatedly. I bought the soundtrack and the art book. I loved the characters. I loved the visual homage to the Brandywine painters. I want to sail on one of those ships with solar sails. If Robert Louis Stevenson had collaborated with Jules Verne, the result might be this fantasy with its 18th-and 19th-century styling. (See the above Disclosure note.) I hear great things about Spirited Away, which I haven’t seen, but I don’t seem to be able to enjoy Anime as a class; it seems to me cheesy, derivative, incoherent and badly animated, a naked emperor parading down the street of pop culture. Meanwhile, most of the critics of Treasure Planet admit to never having read the book on which it’s based. Trust me on this one: the only reason this tanked was that the Mouse was fool enough to pit it against Harry Potter II.

The Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

Pratchett is a much better writer than you think he is. He’s a much better writer than he thinks he is, too. I have been following his career for some years now in increasing amazement. What started out as fairly lightweight parody of the fantasy genre, with stuff like Eric and The Color of Magic, has deepened, has darkened. His recurring characters—my favorites being Death, his granddaughter, and the three witches of Lancre—are brilliant creations, but his stand-alone efforts like Small Gods are equally impressive. Yeah, okay, he has the Pythonesque humor thing down pat. The Night Watch, though, is about bravery in the face of meaninglessness, lost causes, forgotten heroes and honor. I couldn’t put it down.

Samurai Jack, Genndy Tartakovsky for Cartoon Network

Simply freakin’ brilliant. Visually it reminds me of the old UPA cartoons of the early ’50s. Spare, stylish, elegant, blackly funny, visually gorgeous, and genuinely moral. Across a bizarre multiplanetary wasteland of the future, peopled with robots, animal-alien hybrids and Christ only knows what, a lone warrior pursues Aku, the Shapeshifting Master of Evil, as voiced by Mako with howling, mythic grandeur. Jack, his upright samurai nemesis, is a pillar of stern virtues with an unbreakable code of honor. He doesn’t say much, but damn can that boy slaughter the hordes of evil!

Rewards And Fairies, Rudyard Kipling

As you may have guessed by now, some of my best friends are dead white European males. I grew up on the Kipling classics, but my favorite was Puck of Pook’s Hill, wherein Puck, as the soul of the land, is called up by two English children. He brings them visitors out of England’s past: a Roman soldier who served on Hadrian’s Wall, an old crusading knight, a Jewish merchant from King John’s time, a smuggler. This book was one of the big influences on my life, fascinating me with history. So imagine how you’d feel if, at the age of fifty, you suddenly discovered that a book you loved as a child had a sequel? And that it was just as great? More pagan magic, more stories told by people like Elizabeth I (my favorite politician), by a bronze-age flintworker, by one of Francis Drake’s crew, by a Napoleonic-era adventurer. Good stuff indeed.