Sweet Confusion on the Princes' Islands: Yet another passive friggin' protagonist (#13)

When in Rome, do as the Romans do, goes the old adage -- and when in Rome, read their books. While I am still deep in the throes of Game of Thrones -- I've just started Dance with Dragons -- I've also realized that while I am spending time in Turkey, I should explore some of their literature and expand my horizons a little bit further.

And so I began with Sweet Confusion on the Princes' Islands, a novel by expatriate Lawrence Goodman that was published in Turkey, which accounts for its scarcity of Amazon.com. (Okay, so it's not exactly "Turkish" literature, but it is set in Turkey, on an island in the Sea of Marmara, just off Istanbul.) I didn't expect much from it, though I hoped it would be a sweet read in the vein of My Father's Glory & My Mother's Castle by Marcel Pagnol or Rosamunde Pilcher's Sleeping Tiger. But it wasn't to be, mostly because Sweet Confusion on the Princes' Islands features one of fiction's most passive protagonists -- something that any casual reader of this blog knows I hate. And most interestingly, for once that boring protagonist is a man!

The novel revolves around Ed Wilkie, a Californian in his early 30s who has impulsively decided to take a job teaching English at a boys' school on one of the Princes' Islands. It begins with his arrival in Istanbul -- he's a single man, accompanied only by his dog, Starleen -- and though things seem to be a bit odd, merely a sign of things to come, Ed takes it all in stride. It turns out that Ed never questions a thing -- despite all the bizarre incidents that happen over the course of Sweet Confusion, the man never shows the slightest bit of curiousity about anything. He doesn't even know the first name, nationality or specific line of business of his closest friend on the island. The book blurb calls him naive, but he struck me as sort of a dimwit.

Superficially, Sweet Confusion is a tale about the minor but zany adventures surrounding a naive young man thrust into a new world. But the adventures aren't always minor -- there is murder and drug trafficking, after all -- and they aren't particularly zany. And that's because the story is from Ed's point of view, and again, Ed never has a reaction to anything or asks any questions. As a result, nothing in the plot is well-developed; weird things happen, but it's generally without significant or emotional comment from any of the characters, making for a very flat book. Not surprisingly, the end was completely contrived and ridiculous.

A Feast for Crows: Weakest of the group, SPOILERS AHEAD (#12)

By the end of a Storm of Swords, the third book in George R.R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, I felt like I'd gone through a war (and barely survived). At that point, nearly all of the main characters have died, usually in the most brutal of ways, and those that are left have escaped off into the world, their status and location generally unknown. PLEASE STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO'S ALIVE AND WHO'S DEAD AT THE BEGINNING OF BOOK FOUR.

As I said in my last post on the series, Storm of Swords contains somewhat of an ending. There's a definite lull in the action -- the war for the throne seems to have mostly abated with the deaths of Robb Stark, Joffrey and Renly, and Stannis' choice to instead fight at the Wall, so there is somewhat of a peace in the realm. Almost everyone else of major importance to the story -- Arya, Sansa, Tyrion, Bran and Rickon -- has skipped off to locations unknown, almost all outside of the kingdom.

It's a definite and necessary lull in the action, and I expected that A Feast for Crows, book four, would pick up that thread, following the far-flung characters. They are the major characters left, after all. But that's not what happens at all, and it's very perplexing. Martin chose to dedicate the bulk of A Feast for Crows to the activities of minor characters, and the result is a pretty boring 800-page tome. Tyrion, Bran and Rickon, and Daenerys Targaryen are not in A Feast for Crows at all; Jon Snow only makes a brief appearance in Sam's narration. Instead, the book focuses heavily on Brienne of Tarth's fruitless search for the Stark sisters, family intrigue in Dorne and power struggles on the Iron Islands; the most interesting segment of the book is Cersei's, where she finally, at the end, gets what she deserves. Samwell Tarly, Arya and Sansa do make appearances, but not a lot happens with them.

Ultimately, A Feast for Crows spent too much time on the details. The book ends in a really interesting place -- it just didn't need all the minutae to get there. Apparently when George R.R. Martin was writing the book, he couldn't stop, and when he realized he had too much material, he split the story (and characters) into two books -- A Feast for Crows and book five, A Dance with Dragons. But I feel like he would have been much better served to cut the minor characters from this book (or at least limit them to a chapter), creating a tighter, more exciting read. Having said that, I know expect A Dance with Dragons to be a fireworks show...maybe it will be worth it?

Death Comes to Pemberly: So, apparently, does boredom (#11)

I don't generally read mysteries or crime novels. There's so much death, destruction and terror in the world that I generally avoid these genres in my reading choices -- and frankly, I've never really understood it as a form of entertainment. So, not surprisingly, I haven't read much by P.D. James, just one book whose name I can't remember. But I was pretty excited when I heard she'd written a mystery incorporating the characters from Pride and Prejudice -- I'm not a raving Jane Austen fan, but there's a reason that book's a classic.

Unfortunately, P.D. James' attempt to recapture the magic of Pride and Prejudice in her mystery Death Comes to Pemberly falls short. While all of the main Pride and Prejudice characters appear -- Darcy and Elizabeth, Georgiana, Wickham and Lydia, Jane and Bingley -- the relationships between them are very wooden. It appears that James was attempting to imitate Austen's style, and in that, I suppose, she succeed -- it's just that she succeeed at imitating the aloof style of Persuasion rather than the sparkling wit of Pride and Prejudice. The tone of Death Comes to Pemberly is pretty lifeless, and there's almost no development of the characters' inner lives -- Darcy and Elizabeth, for example, are happy because the text says so, not because you see any true warmth between them on the page.

Six years after the close of Pride and Prejudice, Dary and Elizabeth are living happily on their estate, Pemberly, with their two young sons. Life is apparently perfect. Elizabeth is preparing to throw a huge ball the next evening when her headstrong younger sister Lydia unexpectedly arrives, absolutely hysterical. She had been traveling with her husband, the ever-disgraced Wickham, and his friend, Captain Denny, preparing to crash the ball. But Wickham and Denny had gotten into an argument, and Denny had exited the carriage and headed into the dark woods. Wickham followed and then...gunshots. When Darcy and the members of his search party locate them, Wickham is standing over his friend's lifeless body, seemingly confessing to the murder. But, of course, it's never that simple in a mystery, and Darcy spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out who the real culprit is.

This quest involves a number of people that weren't in Pride and Prejudice, but James doesn't develop them enough for the reader to care, which makes the mystery pretty dull. We don't learn anything about Captain Denny so there's no emotional attachment to the crime; at the same time, Wickham (along with everyone else) has apparently not changed in the slightest in six years, so it's hard to care all that much about whether an unreformed scoundrel gets saved from the hangman's noose.

If you don't care about a novel's characters or plot, there's really not a lot to hang your hat on. In this case, you're probably just better off re-reading Pride and Prejudice. And then making up your own fan-fiction version about what happened after the happily-ever-after.