Gwyneth Jones is Brilliant, Part II
Nov. 18th, 2003 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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greythistle, and the rest of the world.
Gwyneth Jones is a good writer, but she can be artsy to the point of completely obscuring her plots. I've read all her adult novels you can get in the States, I think, and some that you can't always; I haven't read the YA Ann Hallam stuff, though I've thought about it once or twice.
Divine Endurance is among my favorites. It's set in a post-apocalyptic Indonesia, and is in some sense a fable about the dangers of gaining one's heart's desire.
Flowerdust is a sequel to Divine Endurance; it takes place simultaneously with the action of Divine Endurance, and though in some ways it's easier to follow (it's about a drug scandal, and a rebellious love between two young people of different sexes), I don't think it would stand on its own.
The White Queen series has as general theme, "Aliens show up and civilization degenerates." I read these as they came out, which means early high school for the earlier books, and found them very confusing; a more sophisticated reader might enjoy them more, but I suspect they still function best as essays, rather than as novels. In particular, the last book revolves around a character who is an alien reborn in a human body, who therefore doesn't understand either humans *or* aliens, and the grand denouement comes as an utter surprise to her, and thus to the reader, which I found frustrating.
Bold as Love and its sequel are difficult to find in the US, though Bold as Love won the Arthur C. Clarke award a while back (ironic, given my feelings about Clarke); apparently the publisher is causing problems. These are about rock stars taking over Britain, and are near-enough future to be accessible. I don't know why these aren't stunningly popular: they're simultaneously beautiful and grim, and also darkly funny, in a way that puts Gibson to shame. Babbling about the second book is in a previous entry.
greythistle, and the rest of the world.Gwyneth Jones is a good writer, but she can be artsy to the point of completely obscuring her plots. I've read all her adult novels you can get in the States, I think, and some that you can't always; I haven't read the YA Ann Hallam stuff, though I've thought about it once or twice.
Divine Endurance is among my favorites. It's set in a post-apocalyptic Indonesia, and is in some sense a fable about the dangers of gaining one's heart's desire.
Flowerdust is a sequel to Divine Endurance; it takes place simultaneously with the action of Divine Endurance, and though in some ways it's easier to follow (it's about a drug scandal, and a rebellious love between two young people of different sexes), I don't think it would stand on its own.
The White Queen series has as general theme, "Aliens show up and civilization degenerates." I read these as they came out, which means early high school for the earlier books, and found them very confusing; a more sophisticated reader might enjoy them more, but I suspect they still function best as essays, rather than as novels. In particular, the last book revolves around a character who is an alien reborn in a human body, who therefore doesn't understand either humans *or* aliens, and the grand denouement comes as an utter surprise to her, and thus to the reader, which I found frustrating.
Bold as Love and its sequel are difficult to find in the US, though Bold as Love won the Arthur C. Clarke award a while back (ironic, given my feelings about Clarke); apparently the publisher is causing problems. These are about rock stars taking over Britain, and are near-enough future to be accessible. I don't know why these aren't stunningly popular: they're simultaneously beautiful and grim, and also darkly funny, in a way that puts Gibson to shame. Babbling about the second book is in a previous entry.
Re: Gwyneth Jones
Date: 2004-03-04 08:31 pm (UTC)The problem of succession has not been solved. I think Jones realizes that.
Mind you, I also think Jones is funny, in the way that Gibson and Neal Stephenson are funny: the twists and turns of technological and social and magical innovation, the evil Ancient Celts, the half-melted refrigerator, Gibson's half-sentient creatures eating graffiti.
Re: Gwyneth Jones
Date: 2004-03-06 12:45 pm (UTC)But the average person's reaction to all of this upheaval is never described, which is again why it seems so fake. At least in P.D. James's THE CHILDREN OF MEN we got a good idea of how people were reacting to upheavals (the hook for her tale being that reproduction had stopped dead in the world); we got insanity manifesting itself in delusions of motherhood, and mass euthanasia of the elderly. We never see the people of Great Britain in Jones's world, just the rock artists and their entourage. This is because it's a dictatorship, and the people don't matter. So why should having rock stars in power make the populace of Great Britain care if the populace of Great Britain's opinion doesn't matter anyway?
As I keep saying, Jones seems to have tailored her situation to make these three look like saviours of the nation. And... they're rock stars. It's all ludicrous.
I also admit that Jones has a lot of savvy and it's recognizable in the prose she writes. Humour? Maybe. But if she had more humour she'd have found the idea of rock stars running the country so laughable she probably wouldn't have written it in the form in which it currently exists. Either that, or the "ludicrous idea taken seriously" is a solid genre in fantasy fiction, and I'm laughing at something which has already established itself firmly enough to need no explanation (not unlike the slash genre in HP fanfiction).
Re: Gwyneth Jones
Date: 2004-03-19 09:17 pm (UTC)