Flora Segunda: gentle subversions of gender and genre

Flora Segunda, by Ysabeau S. Wilce, is one of the best books I have read in a long time. Flora and Udo are characters as brilliant as Mosca and Saracen the Homicidal Goose of Fly By Night. The overall aesthetic of Flora's fantasy world is reminiscent both of Mosca's universe and of Valente's Fairyland in Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. But Flora Segunda addresses a slightly older audience than the above - the narrator is about to turn 14, which in her society is the age at which she must chose her future career, and cease to be a child. This places the book on the edge of the Young Adult category, where it shares space with various novels trying to capture the experience of transition from childish innocence to the experience of reality (pick any book by John Green, for example) as well as Twilight, The Mortal Instruments, and a variety of other supernatural-themed manuals of how not to live your life if you want to be a balanced and happy adult.

The premise of Flora Segunda is not unusual - Girl of Spirit gets lost in her own vast mansion, meets a Mysterious Character (in this case the house's magical butler, banished by her mother for some unknown reason) and has great adventures as a result. It ticks all the boxes of children's/ young adult literature: the heroine is misunderstood and pressured by her parents; she decides to rebel as a result; her rebellion gets her into all sorts of trouble which could be solved pretty quickly if she would just come clean to her parents; when the situation gets dire enough for her resolve to waver, she no longer can get help from her parents, and has to sort things out herself. In the end, Flora discovers that her parents are flawed and human, but that they still love her dearly, though that doesn't mean they can solve life's problems for her. A typical coming-of-age narrative.

There were two things I absolutely loved about the book.

1) Wilce's sense of humour. 

The characters are all vibrant technicolor extravagazas seen through the eyes of Flora, who is probably an unreliable narrator, given that she is a bit of a teenage drama queen. The use of language was also simply hilarious. The characters speak a sort of dialect of English with some words substituted for others which may sound daft, but actually really works. Flora and Udo, her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, argue often and call each other 'snapperheads'. Flora also spouts the wisdom of Nini Mo, a Ranger (aka secret agent) and heroine of a series of pulp fiction books referred to as 'yellowbacks', who she wants to be like when she grows up - there’s no way out but through and a ranger is made, not born. Udo favours The Dainty Pirate, who is a real pirate but also has a dedicated series of yellowbacks written about him. The names of the books are unfailingly hilarious, as are the names of the rooms in Crackpot Hall and Bilskinir House. For example, Poppy (Flora's dad) spends all his time in his Eyerie, which is reached by the Stairs of Exuberance, and Udo and Flora run from Paimon, the Butler of Bilskinir House ending up in The Cloakroom of the Abyss. Finally, Flora accuses Lord Axacaya of 'being all boo-spooky', which I found hilarious.

2) The negotiation of gender issues is truly great. 

Wilce creates a convincing world in which men and women are equal without being too direct or preachy about it. Flora lives in a very female-dominated world, as her role models are her mother who is the General, her sister who is a soldier, and Nini Mo, the fictionalised Ranger. Her father is an alchoholic for most of the book, so his input is minimal, but her relationship with him is also significant - she cares for him, and it turns out in the end that he has been trying to help her. But Wilce doesn't try to disrupt the patriarchy by replacing it with a matriarchy that operates in the same way - the Warlord, Flora's mother's boss, is a man, as are many of her colleagues. What is significant is that gender is not the first element of a character's identity to be presented - within the military which plays a significant role in the narrative, characters are referred to as 'sir' regardless of gender, while everyone seems to wear kilts. 

Similarly, Flora's relationship with Udo is a relationship of equals. They bicker and pout and call each other names, but also care for each other deeply, and rescue each other on several different occasions. When set against other boy-girl relationships in young adult fiction, this is unusual. In all the Twilight-type novels out there, the girl is rescued by the boy who is in turn saved by her love. Wilce does not fetishize teenage heterosexual attraction and present it as the guiding principle of adult identity. This is a Very Good Thing. Flora's journey of discovery has to do with her relationship with her parents and her understanding of them as independent humans who had lives and experiences before she was born which affect their attitudes towards her, and their behaviour in the present. It also has to do with her gaining the ability to articulate her desires for her own future and place these within the context of her family and the nation she lives in - she learns to ask for what she wants, but to do so with an understanding of what she can realistically have. 

The novels that Flora and Udo read have a significant function in the negotiation of their expectations and realities. Flora wants to be a ranger like Nini Mo, and Udo wants to be a pirate like the Dainty Pirate. Flora’s desire to be a ranger is a manifestation of her desire to articulate an identity that is independent of both her parents and her family history. This desire expresses itself within the narrative in the form of Flora trying to live by the wisdom of Nini Mo as expressed in the yellowback novels she has devoured. Flora takes this very seriously, but is critical of Udo’s desire to become a pirate, as his desire is motivated by the Dainty Pirate’s reported dress sense. Flora’s stance is hypocritical, given that her desired career is as based on trashy novels as Udo’s. Her many little hypocrisies are exploited by Valefor, the banished Butler of Crackpot Hall, who manipulates her into trying to help him escape. 

Yet the trashy-novel inspirations for Flora and Udo’s ambitions have another narrative function which contributes to the creation of a sense of gender equality: Flora idolises Nini Mo, and tries to model her life on her books, in which Nini Mo has a sidekick, Boy Hangsen. Udo idolises Boy Hangsen, making the Nini Mo books a sort of doppelgänger of Flora’s narrative in Flora Segunda. At the same time, Udo’s agency is recognised through his fixation with the Dainty Pirate - his obsession with the Dainty Pirate novels, which Flora does not share, suggests that he is the narrator of his own personal story to which the readers of Flora Segunda are not privy. Udo’s agency is also apparent when he argues with Flora and abuses his power in situations where he gets the opportunity. This set in contrast to Flora’s first person narrative presents the two characters as independent individuals with agency who are trying to learn how to communicate with each other and the rest of society in order to achieve the things each of them considers important. Flora's frustration at her inability to control Udo is matched by his frustration when she does things that he considers silly, but ultimately both recognise that friendship, and human relationships in general, are not about asserting dominance. Their friendship is strengthened when they agree on the importance of certain things and work together to achieve them. They do not swoon into each other’s arms while the world around them fades to black, which, frankly, is refreshing. 

The Alchemyst, or how to kill an innocent plot

This review concerns the first hundred or so pages of The Alchemyst, on account of the book being so boring it might kill me if I try to finish it.

The Alchemyst, by Michael Scott, is a fantasy novel in which Nicholas Flamel really did create the Philosopher's Stone and make himself and his wife Perenelle immortal, while John Dee is his evil nemesis. There is also a mystical Elder race, lots of demonic crows, and people have spangly auras, the color of which determines their value. So far so good. For reasons that left me completely mystified, the action takes place in and around San Fransisco, and involves fifteen-year-old fraternal twins Sophie and the other one. That's right, Josh. They have no real distinguishing characteristics, from each other or anyone else. They do have red belts in some martial art or other, so presumably the narrative will at some point call for them to beat someone up, but at the point where I stopped reading they did nothing more than complain about how their cell phones didn't work in magic land.

It is possible that the reason I took a dislike to this book is that the opening action sequence involves the gratuitous trashing of an antiquarian book shop - crimes against literature and pretty things shall not be tolerated. Or maybe it really is just bad. Here are some things that are bad about it:

1. 'Show don't tell': it is obvious by page two that Scott has not been shown or told this basic rule. Although I guess he's not so much guilty of describing characters' reactions as he is of picking uninteresting reactions to describe. For example, Josh and Sophie spend the first hundred pages expressing their surprise that magic is real in different sentence structures. Not only is this repetitive, it is actively disruptive to the genre. I'm not surprised there's magic, it's a bloody fantasy book. By having the characters express unending bafflement without signs of PTSD, the author just makes them look stupid. So the rule should be 'show. And show something interesting, profound or funny.' Not that I'm demanding or anything.

2. The dialogue: omglol. And not in a good way.

3. Balance between action and backstory: basically, there isn't any. They'll be in the middle of a high octane chase where demon crows are about to devour the dopey teenage protagonists' succulent livers when suddenly, and for no discernible reason, the narrative veers away from the action and gives a detailed description of a moment in the eternal Alchemyst's childhood when he discovered his favorite color, and had an epiphany about the sound snails make when you roll on them naked. Narrative tension = down the toilet. It reminds me of myself trying to tell a story after about three glasses of wine, at which point I can no longer distinguish between what is relevant and what is not. And I can only pronounce vowels.

4. The full name thing - every few pages he introduces characters using their full names as if a) that's relevant and b) we might have forgotten. Some sound particularly ridiculous like Perenelle Flamel.

5. The Accent thing - in times of extreme stress, immortal characters display European origins in speech. This suggests that anyone who has traces of a faded French or British accent is weird and probably 500 years old and trying to hide it. Anyone heard of migration?

6. The narrative has no flavor. The good characters are all uniformly nice, the bad characters are all uniformly creepy, so there is no chance of complexity of character or anything as daring as that.

Conclusion: this is a young adult book that really is for young adults. Bizarre. 

Film Adaptations: The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street

This post is a bit of a cheat, because it is about the film adaptations of books rather than the books themselves. However, while the film of The Great Gatsby inspired me to read the original there is no way on earth I'm touching The Wolf of Wall Street, as I feel I wasted quite enough of my life watching the film. (Three hours! Are you f'n kidding me?) So this post is about the films, though it's more about the narrative arc than its visual representation.

Both feature Leonardo DiCaprio playing a disgustingly rich man with the gift of the gab who became wealthy by shady means. The former is a mysterious millionaire who worships women like objects on a pedestal, throws enormous parties he does not attend, and drinks gin like it is going out of fashion. He is based on a fictional character. The latter is a slimy stockbroker with a defective moral compass who treats women like objects for his consumption, defrauds everyone he encounters of their money and hoovers drugs like they’re going out of fashion. He is based on a real person. Neither film, in its depiction of excess, gave me any desire to ever make money, which I suppose is the point. Both create the impression that people, as a species, are awful, and if they make too much money they just acquire the means to become more prolifically awful.

The Great Gatsby is a cross between coming-of-age narrative, (for the narrator) and star-crossed-romance (for the subject, Jay Gatsby). If you’ve read the book, you’ll know the plot anyway, but here’s a summary: a Good Young Man (Nick Carraway) moves into a small cottage next door to the decadent mansion of Jay (The Great) Gatsby, who throws debauched parties featuring cocktails, partial nudity and feathers on a nightly basis. Nick receives an invitation to one such party, where he discovers that most of the guests have never seen Gatsby. It transpires, after much mincing about in evening dress and necking gin, that Gatsby only wants to be reunited with Nick’s cousin Daisy, for whom Gatsby has had a thing since adolescence. It is to gain her favour that he has amassed his ill-gotten fortune, and the endless decadent parties are held in the hope that she will one day wander in to see what the fuss is all about and drink some gin. Daisy is, unfortunately, married to a man with a moustache, a drinking problem and a bad temper. With Nick’s fortuitous intervention, Gatsby and Daisy meet, they have sex, and pledge their eternal love. Daisy’s husband gets jealous despite being constantly unfaithful himself, and finally Daisy’s impossibly bad driving gets Gatsby murdered when she runs over her moustachioed husband’s lover outside a petrol station. Cousin Daisy and her moustachioed husband wiz off into the sunset as if nothing has happened, and nobody wants to come to Gatsby’s funeral because there isn’t any free booze. Nick concludes that they are all rotten bad sports.

The Wolf of Wall Street is a baffling object. One reaches the end of the film feeling that, firstly, it should have come a great deal sooner, and secondly, it is unclear what one is meant to be feeling or thinking about the mind-numbing three hours of footage of Leo-as-Wolf (aka Jordan Belfort) snorting cocaine off various women’s intimate areas, often with no regard for basic hygiene. Some of the drug fueled escapades can be considered funny, but they are by no means harmless, which tinges any laughter or enjoyment with an edge of horror and self-loathing for laughing at something so awful. Belfort hurts everyone around him, including himself in the long run - only he is too fixated on the importance of being rich to realise he is a miserable bastard with no friends. I mean, I like a good champagne as much as the next person, but I’d rather have a happy marriage than neck bottles of it at work while pretending to myself that I’m doing things that are great and clever. Drunk people are never clever. All you need to do to verify this statement is stay sober at one party where everyone else is drunk. Just sayin’. Anyway, the moral of the story seems to be that Brokers are Bad. But also that if you sell bullshit with sufficient fervour you will come out on top every time.

Both films left me with a distinct aversion to the idea of having money. In both films, the main character starts out with a problem and the conviction that its solution is to become extremely rich; in Gatsby’s case, his problem is that he is in love with the idea of a woman who in reality is a dishonest greedy cow who is emotionally as deep as a puddle; in Wolfie’s case, his problem is that he is a complete psychopath. Both narratives demonstrate that the quest to become wealthy solves no problems, and instead erodes the seeker’s integrity, leaving him in the end with nothing but his salesman’s patter. In Gatsby, this represents the end of an imagined golden age in which there was human integrity and the possibility of Great Romance - Gatsby himself is the last gentleman. Similarly, in The Wolf, the narrative arc could be read as a chilling warning against the moral decrepitude of the values of the present day - despite all his devious machinations and morally bankrupt strategies, and despite getting caught, he continues to make money after his release from prison, by, irony of all ironies, becoming a motivational speaker. The main difference is that in the case of The Wolf, there is no imagined golden age - the degeneracy of the human spirit is timeless, making the whole thing more depressingly hopeless.

From the two films, one gets the impression that DiCaprio wants to warn us all against the pursuit of wealth, by showing that all rich people are morally bankrupt, not to mention utterly miserable. This is odd, because one imagines he is rather rich himself, mainly because all the teenage girls of the 1990s fell in love with his floppy blonde hair, and he subsequently made a soppy movie set on the sinking Titanic, in which he played someone poor who fell in love with someone rich. Maybe these films are meant to warn against potential pitfalls of extreme wealth, rather than represent the inevitable outcome of making money. Or maybe DiCaprio is a Miltonian devil-character, degenerate but aware of his own degeneracy, and dashingly romantic as a result. Either way, these films made me worry a whole lot less about the fact that my decision to study literature means I will never make any money. The resulting debauchery just looks too exhausting.

Large Ex-Military Mavericks - Reacher, McEvoy or Strike?

There is a sub-genre of crime fiction where the hero is a rugged, manly person recently discharged from the military, who despite his professed desire to live a simple, blameless life surrounded by kittens, rainbows and ponies, gets drawn inescapably into investigating some bloody civilian crime, which is not a patch on the crimes he investigated when he was in the military, but somehow still takes him 500 pages to solve. Three notable specimens of this type are Jack Reacher, Daniel McEvoy and Cormoran Strike. All three are over 6ft tall, stacked and brooding. But each has his own charm. Here is a summary of each one's first appearance, for the sake of comparison:

Jack Reacher first appears in Lee Child's Killing Floor. Having recently left the Military Police, after a lifetime of army bases man and boy, he decides to become a Hobo, and listens to lots of country music travelling around the USA on public transport and paying for things in cash. He gets off a bus one morning in the middle of nowhere, and walks into a small and inconsequential town in Georgia that happens to be in the throes of a tidal wave of inexplicable crime. In fact, he is immediately arrested for a shooting that happened the previous evening, because he is a stranger, and people in small towns think strangers are bad. This is not a bad development for Reacher, though, because it enables him to meet Finlay, the local detective who will be his slightly dimmer old sidekick, and Roscoe, sexy woman cop who looks good in shirts, jeans and uniforms as well as out of them. She also occasionally says something clever, but is mostly there as an excuse for sex scenes. The plot involves some satisfying twists, but the revelations are so heavily signposted you may well work out what is going to happen a good fifty pages before it actually does. This is annoying. Reacher himself is an interesting character. He is a distillation of all things masculine; tall, strong, martial arts expertise bordering on the supernatural and a love of large guns. Interestingly, he is not that great at driving, but this seems to be a case of ticking the 'character must have at least one weakness' box. He knows everything there is to know about combat and anger and death, and he is never surprised. He has feelings, but they are always secondary to his instincts, his effortless ability to distinguish right from wrong and willingness to act on that distinction by braining people with a blackjack and creating rivers of the blood of his enemies. The book itself is not a particularly traumatic read - horrible things are done by good and bad guys alike, but the characters are cardboard cut-outs that can only elicit so much sympathy in their passing. Overall, it is not a bad read, if you have a large vat of willing suspension of disbelief lying around. And as an unintentional bonus, the fact that it was written in 1997 makes it amusingly dated - Reacher delights in skipping around leaving no trace of his identity which is somewhat harder to do in the age of facebook and ubiquitous CCTV. But I digress.

Daniel McEvoy appears in Eoin Colfer's 2011 Plugged. The title refers to his recently acquired hair implants, carried out by his friend, dodgy doctor Zeb. McEvoy has recently left the Irish army, where he worked on various UN peacekeeping missions, and acquired some serious mental scars which he does not discuss in detail. The main advantage McE has over Reacher is that he has a sense of humour, which runs through his first-person narrative like a seam of gold, making it very easy to ignore whether or not things are believable. The plot is as tightly constructed and gloriously twisted as Killing Floor's, but the characters are far more believable, despite their stereotypic qualities. In fact, they are constantly pushing against the boundaries of their own stereotypes, and constructing images and identities for themselves which are fictional but they are willing to defend quite viciously. The driving force of the novel is itself wonderfully quirky: McEvoy discovers that Zeb has gone missing, and the same day his occasional girlfriend Connie is found murdered outside the nightclub where they work. While trying to find out what happened to Connie, McEvoy has the constant nagging voice of Zeb in his head, complaining about how McEvoy is not looking for him. McEvoy has picked up some skills in the army, both physical and strategic, but he is reluctant to use them, and though he engages in violence he does not exactly revel in it. In fact, more often than not the sage advice he follows was given to him by his boozy psychoanalyst, to whom he was assigned after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. That combined with his concern about the hair plugs gives the impression that McEvoy is trying to better himself, that he would like to have friends and fit into society rather than being a tough loner, and that makes him sympathetic. At the same time, he is not shy of a bit of sarcasm, and never soppy.

Cormoran Strike is a different breed to the previous two creatures. First appearing in Robert Galbraith's (aka. J.K. Rowling's) The Cuckoo's Calling, he is an x-soldier, discharged because he lost part of his leg in an explosion in Afghanistan. This is a recurring theme in the plot, as he has to do all the daring things a private investigator has to do with the added challenge of his prosthesis, which often causes him trouble. Like McEvoy, Strike is not one to romanticise the military. But although the book has many humorous moments, Cormoran is a brooding Heathcliff character who takes himself exceptionally seriously. He is the son of a rockstar and deceased groupie, which both helps and hinders his investigative career. It is unclear what made him decide to become a detective, but he is reminiscent of the BBC's rendering of Dr Watson in Sherlock. And what is most interesting about The Cuckoo's Calling is really the way the character of the deceased victim, Lula Landry, emerges and is modified by each revelation in Strike's investigation of her death. Strike is of less central importance than McEvoy or Reacher, because this is a third-person narrative, and he shares point-of-view character status with his assistant, Robin. Nevertheless, an engaging hero is useful for a successful detective novel, and Strike is engaging. The mystery of his past, which he is not too keen on discussing, unfolds beside the murder investigation, and the fact that his detective agency is almost bankrupt and he has personally hit rock bottom gives him all the more motivation to pursue this case. The prose may get a little Rowling-esque at times, but it is still certainly better written than Killing Floor, and somewhat more substantial than Plugged, though it lacks the easy humour of the latter.

All in all, Daniel McEvoy is a bit too unbelievably calm, not to mention glib in times of stress, Cormoran Strike is a big brooding baby, but Jack Reacher tops the lot by being a murderous psychopath who coats his killing sprees with a veneer of justice.