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This is how life goes – we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord’s. I need to bear this in mind.

From “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson.

…it would be better merely to suffer as I had in the past, when other people I loved had left me. I would be better just to lick my wounds, as I had also done in the past. For a while, I’ll think obsessively about her, I’ll become embittered … I’ll try to justify what happened, spend days and night reviewing every moment spent by her side … When I walk down the street, I’ll keep seeing women who could be her. I’ll suffer day and night, night and day. This could take weeks, months, possibly a year or more.

Until one morning, I’ll wake up and find I’m thinking about someone else, and then I’ll know the worst is over. My heart might be bruised, but it will recover and become capable of seeing the beauty of life once more. It’s happened before, it will happen again, I’m sure. When someone leaves, it’s because someone else is about to arrive …

I want to believe that it is wonderful to be free. Free again. Ready to find my one true love, who is waiting for me and who will never allow me to experience such humiliation again.

Masterful. The quote is from Paulo Coelho’s latest book, The Zahir. It is also complete bullshit.

There must be something in the water here in Canada, seeing how so many great High Fantasy novelists come from this country. See, High Fantasy isn’t a terribly over-populated genre, as it appeals to a select few. But it seems as if – along with female pop vocalists – Canadians are over-represented. I present for your consideration just three High Fantasy novelists who are not only Canadian, but are also in posession of enviable skill.

• Guy Gavriel Kay and his series, The Fionavar Tapestry. Although that series isn’t my favorite, another of his books, Tigana, is in my top 20 fantasy novels ever.
• Steven Erikson with the Malazan Book of the Fallen (a ten-book sequence, some still unwritten). Almost every book in the series is gold. Read it.
• R. Scott Bakker and The Prince of Nothing, a trilogy completed just this year. Four more books are – possibly – in the planning stages. I personally can’t wait.

Seriously, folks. If you do nothing else in literature this year, read The Darkness That Comes Before, Gardens of the Moon, and Tigana. I’ll bet the pork barrel you’re glad you did.

I am going to weigh in – like every other blogger in the world, and his cat – on the Da Vinci Code. But I’m not critiquing content or combatting conclusions. I’m looking at the violence of encounter, or the clash of worldviews, or the soft words of tolerance as their own encryption.

The book itself is for idiots to believe. A work of fiction, yes; also, a bad work of fiction (that is, insult to injury, being fleeced with a cheesegrater). No need to argue that point.

Rather, what underpins the argument? I think this determines what terrain you choose. My personal leaning is the conflict between objective and subjective historicity or its sythesis, but even that is too far from centre.

Deeper: how do I confront the book’s assertions and its rails? This is essential, to know what to do. I can do several things, not all of which I’ll spell out, but one of which is ignore it and go my own way. Some would see this as ceding ground, and others would see it a being tolerant. Others would fight a surface battle of assertion/counter-assertion while making history object/subject or trying to do both at the same time.

But let me ask you: are you afraid of what will happen at the collision of these two opposed visions? Will you try to squeak them by eachother or try to throw each a bone? You know in the heart of you each encounter is a thing of violence. Either I am right or you are right. In this place there cannot be both. But there’s a third dimension of the casual nihilist trying to just get along with a fake smile and such.

That’s the guy you want to kick in the ribs. While the screaming Dan Brown army is obvious, the snake-oil tolerance salesman is not, though he should be. You can ignore the crowd with pitchforks and torches trying to loot the gold between the bricks of the church; Jesus Christ has bee victorious over Nero. Dan Brown is the poppy seed inbetween God’s teeth.

Tolerance, on the other hand, is like mainlining those poppies: easy to fall asleep. But it breeds its own problems. (Aside: I am not speaking of grace, and peace, and longsuffering, and humility; I am speaking of that sort of slimey you-have-you I-have-me that won’t stand for anything except when it inexplicably stands for something.) The idea is an excersize in futility. The world wasn’t designed so that all poles of a magnet are equal forces. Tolerance – obviously – can’t tolerate intolerance, for instance. But more to the point, tolerance won’t tolerate land mines, genocide, female circumcision, or neon pink leg-warmers.

And in this age where tolerance – a concept lost on our father’s fathers – is the catchphrase on every goody-two-shoes lips, one has to wonder if the concurrent rise of rigid fundimentalism isn’t at all exacerbated by the inherent internal conflict of tolerance as a culture watchword. Or more to the point, does the internal violence of the postmodern lack of metanarrative breed the sort of insane fundimentality we see both in our cultures and others? Can we even imagine an age where men had grand passions?

This is the Da Vinci Code to me. It’s a cultural polarising agent. It will breed five types of people: followers, detractors, rabid detractors, the supposedly tolerant, and those who just don’t care. And there will be an inherent violence to the confrontations between those groups: when they encounter, people retreat licking wounds. Even the tolerance brigade will at some point have to oppose something.

Finally, The Prince of Nothing Book 3 is out in all its glory… and I bought it today. Blows my food budget for this week, but frankly, I’ve been waiting for this for a very, very long year and a half. So if you wonder what I’m doing this evening, I’m reading “The Thousandfold Thought”. And thus far, loving it.

dan

I just finished reading one of Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” novels, Excession, and I have to say it was profoundly unsatisfactory. Rather boring. Self-involved, as if he was so fascinated with the space opera he was creating that he forgot to actually make it interesting. When you get to the end, you’ll understand that the book wasn’t about the Excession itself, but rather about the drama that surrounds it. The problem, of course, is that the drama surrounding it is rather boring. I can relate to a ship mind, or at least revel in imagining it, but the minds have to, you know, do things and stuff.

The Algebraist on the other hand has the same sort of ending with a semblance of a climactic sequence, but is much, much more involving. It is, in fact, quite a good scifi novel.

Even Consider Phlebas was better than Excession, and that’s not saying much.

The problem, I think, is that while the Culture and its foes are a great backdrop to what could be a great space drama, Iain M. Banks just can’t follow through with very much story. This is in direct opposition to Kevin J. Anderson’s Saga of Seven Suns which has, if anything, way too much story. Or to put it another way, Iain needs a little bit of Kevin, and vice versa.

Also, on a book-related note, I’m still waiting for the next Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen (very cumbersome tagline, that, but I like it). The preceeding novels were simply too dreadfully marvelous to not have a proper sequel.

dan (has written much about books)