Not Games

It’s time for a reading challenge entry again! It is amazing how much faster I am going through these when I actually enjoy the books. Today I’m discussing Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, first published in 1962.  This one definitely caught me off guard, but in a good way.

I was not prepared for this book.

I had some vague recollections of the plot from the movie, which I hadn’t seen in decades. I remember liking it as a kid but I don’t know how well it would hold up now. Especially after reading the source material. I’ve read my share of creepy and horror novels, from classics like Lovecraft, staples like King, to more current offerings. I’m by no means an expert, or even an enthusiast, really, but I figured I’d seen enough to know how I feel about them, and how they make me feel. But while zombies still give me nightmares and clowns are freaky no matter what the context, nothing I had read before really prepared me for the unsettling creepiness of this book. I think it is largely because it reads like a poem that reads like a story. Bradbury isn’t just telling a tale, he’s excavating it out of some dark secret place in the earth and weaving it with the nightmare dust from your subconscious. It is on an entirely different level from his work in The Illustrated Man. Regardless of the plot or the characters, the feeling evoked by reading this book was a strong enough experience for me that it justified its placement on this “Top 100″ list.

The story follows two kids, Jim and Will, as a creepy carnival rolls into their mid-western town in the middle of the night. They eventually discover that there’s something rotten with the hall of mirrors and the carousel and the freak show. As they start to uncover what is going on, the carnival becomes aware of them, and starts trying to distract them, entice them, and eventually stop them from disrupting their plans. If that sounds slightly cliched it’s probably because so many other authors have paid tribute to this book over the years.

I’m going to avoid more details because I would honestly suggest you just read it if you are interested at all. This book is about the nature of friendship and fear and age and death. It is about why we believe some things and not others. And it is about how there’s no better response to the inevitability of time and death than to get on with life, laugh and keep laughing and steal joy where you can. I fully recognize that this book might not resonate with everyone the way it did with me, but I still highly recommend it.

TL;DR: A fantastic tale of good and evil and a creepy carnival, that shines because of the writing and the mood at least as much as the story.

If you have somehow avoided the presence of this work in popular culture, it can be summed up as a retelling of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. Like the source material, this work is  political. Unlike the source material, Wicked is not a children’s story.
Spoilers Ahoy!

The book starts far removed from the events of the original, before even the Wicked Witch of the West is born. We get to see her parents, their passions and faults, and how that shaped her childhood. The Witch Elphaba’s skin was green from birth, not some attribute of her witchiness. In fact we learn later that it is probably the result of having parents from two different worlds, even though neither her mother nor biological father was green. That green otherness influenced the whole path of her life. We see that in her childhood her father used it to try to win religious converts.

By the time she was off to school she is ill-equipped to navigate the social structure among the other young girls. Her relationship with her roommate, Galinda, starts of fairly antagonistic but does eventually become something warmer. During their time at school, Elphaba becomes interested in Animal rights. In Oz, animals are normal beasts, but Animals have consciousness and sentience. This has social and political implications since the Wizard has started slowly stripping Animals of their rights and displacing them out of society. We start to see the direct impacts of the Wizard’s rule. Elphaba and several friends from the boys’ section of the school work together to help Dr. Dillamond, a Goat, try to show that there is no inherent difference between Animals and humans. Their hope is that if they can show this to the Wizard he will stop treating them so poorly. Sadly the Goat professor is murdered before he can complete his work.

At this point Elphaba, her sister Nessarose, and Glinda are summoned to a meeting with their school headmistress, Madame Morrible. She attempts to conscript them into sorcerous service in the name of the Wizard. She also was the one who had Dr. Dillamond killed. They try to take Dr. Dillamond’s evidence directly to the Wizard, but fail to make any impact. Elphaba becomes radicalized at this point and leaves to join a resistance movement against him, while her sister and friend seemingly fall into the roles Morrible set out for them.

While she is working for the resistance, Elphaba has an affair with Fiyero, who she knew from school. He ends up murdered at the hands of the Wizard’s enforcers because of it. Much of the rest of the book is Elphaba’s journey seeking forgiveness from Fiyero’s family, and slow acceptance of what happened and what the consequences were. For me that is where the heart of this story lies. Why do we have such a need for absolution? How can we give it to others when we can’t for ourselves? Why does it drive us to hope for impossible things?

In the end it is the audacity of innocent Dorothy, asking for forgiveness for the death of Nessarose, that leads to the death of the Witch of the West. Now Dorothy has killed both sisters, and must go out into the world with no one left to offer forgiveness for it. Elphaba saw herself in Dorothy, and it makes you wonder what will become of her now.

I greatly enjoyed this book. My biggest complaint has to do with timing. We have a long time to see the life that led Elphaba to become the Wicked Witch. However that final transition into the part of the story that lines up with the original feels a bit jagged. Perhaps the author has made her too sympathetic, so that by the end I had a hard time reconciling the relatively quick shift to her full Witchdom. Even though you know how this story ends before it even begins, you end up exhausted and heartbroken when you get there.

As you may know by now, and will surely know if you keep reading these reviews until I finish my challenge, I have a bias against sprawling epic fantasy novels. It’s not that I don’t like them at all, but given the choice between fantasy war and political intrigue, and the exact same story but in space with lasers and spaceships, I’ll choose the spaceships every time. I also put off writing this review for a little while after I finished reading, so my recollection will be slightly fuzzier than usual.

Even with all that said, this book was a solid read. This book follows the expansion of an empire, through the eyes of the people on the ground on several sides. There are more than two sides, because in addition to the loyal imperial forces and those of the territories they seek to annex, there are also outside forces with treaties or vested interest in slowing the expansion, and forces within the empire working against it for their own reasons.

Oh and did I mention the gods? They keep getting involved too. This book has a theme of people losing themselves in service to something bigger, whether by their own choice or not. The loyal hand of the empress has given up her own identity to act as a more pure proxy for the empress. A young fisherman’s daughter is possessed by a god of assassins and also the spirit of a murdered witch. Several different characters are possessed or influenced by the god(s) of luck. It began to feel like nobody in the world was acting under their own volition. Maybe that was the point.

There were a few things that helped me get over my dislike of this style of novel and actually enjoy it. For one thing, unlike many fantasy novels that focus on war and politics, there was still plenty of magic in this world. Not just gods walking on earth like legends, but actual battles with wizards flinging spells at each other. I approve. The other thing that made this novel stand out was the characters. Although one was a bit more of a trope than I could take, on the whole the characters in this book were well-written and well motivated. This was good because there were a lot of characters, and the plot occasionally bounced around between them.

Much of the style and characters seem to build directly off of themes from the Elric stories. It made me very glad I had read those before this one. There are a range of characters here, but they all have their personal baggage that defines their personalities and their actions. This book ends with a few crises averted, and more still looming on the horizon. Overall I enjoyed it but probably not enough to keep reading the series.

This book was charmingly odd. It has a bit of everything from time travel to alternate history, with a dash of steampunk thrown in for fun. The plot follows Thursday Next, a literary detective and veteran of the alternative history Crimean War. She gets recruited to a higher-ranked agency to help catch Acheron Hades, a wanted terrorist who Thursday had as a professor in college. If you think the name is silly and a little on the nose, it is. The names, and the general worldbuilding in this novel, make the whole thing feel off-kilter. It takes some getting used to but the effect serves the story. This is a world where some very strange things can and will happen.

Thursday confronts Hades, but he escapes through the use of his magical powers. She is left injured and reeling from the loss of several of her team members from the mission. While in the hospital she encounters herself, from the near future, who tells her to transfer back to her home town. When she does, she gets sent on a path that eventually leads her back to Hades. But first, we’re introduced to some of her family. Most importantly for the plot, her uncle is an inventor who has devised a way to let people enter into books.

Hades, being a villain of the mustache-twirling variety, steals the device and murders a minor character from a Dickens novel because he can. Since he had stolen the first edition, the effects of the murder are rewritten in every copy of the book around the world. He makes his demands, and holds as hostage the titular character from Jane Eyre. Thursday must confront him again, rescue Jane, and return her to the novel. She also has to do all this while evading and thwarting the government-driving megacorp that wants to steal the Prose Portal for their weapons division.