George Owell- Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays

Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays

Penguin

George Orwell

1950 (Collected)

Other Orwell Reviews- Burmese Days - A Clergyman's Daughter - Homage to Catalonia - Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays

 "The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background. Although the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges."
- The Prevention of Literature (1946)

With my perusal of George Orwell's bibliography of fiction almost finished (well, aside from Burmese Days which I have sitting on the pile), I was really excited to visit my first collection with essays. Orwell is obviously a very well known and appreciated essayist, and besides that much of his appeal to me within his fictions (I'm specifically thinking of A Clergyman's Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying as well as 1984) is his ability to convert the most salient, entertaining and insightful points of a quality, passionate essay into his fiction without too much trouble, seemingly effortlessly both enriching the story and further establishing his sociopolitical viewpoints.

Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays is a very popular compendium of around twenty Orwell essays of differing length and subject. As an aside, it slightly irritates me that I didn't get a hold of a more complete, chronologically accurate collection of the complete Orwell, but I suppose that gives me something to do in the future. Now, to state the absolutely obvious, the variety of subjects, subject length, in-depth analysis and whimsy (or lack of) is sure to effect the reader's enjoyment of each individual essay. Personally, while I'm very glad I read each essay and certainly learned a lot, it was the extended length (and, to a certain extent) subjects of two essays in this collection which left me feeling a little bored and disinterested temporarily, while most of the shorter pieces were utterly fantastic.

Black + White= Cooler

To get the less-interesting (to me) out of the way first, I wasn't particularly interested in the 60-page plus critical analysis of Charles Dickens, entitled simply Dickens. Without meaning to go on a distracting diatribe, I did go on a bit of a Dickens binge in my late teens, but gave up after eight or so books due to the increasing feeling of boredom I felt with each new book. In fairness, Orwell's essay is certainly no fawning fan worship or anything like that, instead seriously studying the social reflections and interpretations of the then one hundred year novels with insight and care. I just didn't find it that interesting, and its length distorted the collection somewhat. The other essay I found uninteresting was Politics vs. Literature- An Examination of Gulliver's Travels, which is probably because I've never read Gulliver's Travels, and can't really be bothered to.

Now, the good stuff; pretty much everything else. The title essay, Shooting an Elephant is an autobiographical snippet about Orwell in Burma working as a policeman, on a day where an elephant went rogue and Orwell had to shoot it. Mostly lacking in political analysis and doom and gloom, it's an enthralling and dramatic piece that's interesting and emotional, and gives a great insight into the mind and ethics of the author. The Decline of the English Murder is another extremely famous essay, which satirises in a very black way the representation of real life crime stories in the English press of the time. How the Poor Die is an extremely bleak autobiographical look at a Parisian hospital Orwell visited in the 20's, and provides another fascinating insight into the mind of Orwell.

I very much enjoyed the numerous essays on literature aside from Dickens and Swift; Bookshop Memories might be my favourite of everything collected here, and is accompanied by Boys Weeklies and Good Bad Books as charming, thoughtful and joyously written essays on popular literature and personal experiences on it. One of the things I love about reading Orwell is that he leaves his heart on each page; you can trace through his bibliography and get a full impression of his personal development and thoughts throughout the years, leading eventually to the epic 1984. Each snippet collected in Shooting an Elephant adds towards that, giving a fuller and fuller picture of one of the most important authors of all time. I would heartily recommend this collection because it offers a variety of moods and themes, but consists of great, great writing from a unique and talented mind.

Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West

Random House

Cormac McCarthy
1985

"And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons."

I really didn't like Blood Meridian.

Apologies to all dedicated Cormac McCarthy loyalists out there. Apologies to the legions of my fellow book reviewers out there, to the hundreds of men and women who have put pen to paper or fingers to keypads to compose a no-doubt sterling and well thought-out and well-received pieces that have all eventually combined through the power of the Internet to pronounce McCarthy's break-out work of fiction as a legitimate classic in twentieth century American fiction. Sorry you guys, but despite all the fawning plaudits I thought it was kind of a bad book; by no means lacking in substance or craftsmanship, but consistent of different factors put together as a package that didn't give me very much enjoyment.

Blood Meridian is only my second exposure to the now very large literary figure of Cormac, with the first naturally being previously reviewed The Road, which (spoiler alert) I really quite liked. Of course The Road remains McCarthy's most recent novel (published 2006), while Blood Meridian is twenty-years older, written back in a section of the author's life where his favoured preoccupation was the genre of the Western (leading towards The Border Trilogy, which sits on a unread pile of mine) , and Blood Meridian is very much a Western. It follows a portion of the life and adventures of a lead character known only as 'The Kid', introduced as a tough-as-nails teenage boy with a murky, escaped history, who has been traveling the wilderness of Texas, surviving with his fists and wit. He soon meets a series of quirky, dangerous, and equally mysterious individuals who cast a shadow over the story, and play a major part in its developments; particularly 'Judge' Holden, charismatic and vicious.

The Kid's ramblings and new friendships lead him through San Antonio, and into Mexico as part of a group of army irregulars hunting for Mexicans. The result is a mass of violence, mayhem and murder, continuing as The Kid travels back over the border, and characters such as the Judge pop in and out of the narrative. McCarthy unexpectedly (to me, anyway) stretches the story over decades to follow The Kid into adulthood suddenly, and into further conflicts and contacts that ultimately lead to his fate, in a somewhat ambiguously downbeat ending. Supposedly, according to others, the many intense trials and tribulations of The Kid's life leads towards the ending being not only climactic, but meaningful and poignant, but unfortunately by this point any real remnants of my interest had crawled into a ball and died.

A Cowboy and Indian, yesterday.

Despite being somewhat of a grammar Nazi, I've gotten over the fact that Cormac McCarthy doesn't like quotation marks, or really much punctuation at all. I'm also happy with the fact that McCarthy chooses to go with an established genre feature of not giving his lead character a real name. My real problem with this book as a whole was that, after maybe a hundred pages or so, I was completely sick of the repetitive tone of the narrative. Dedicated stylistic prose is an incredibly tough trick to pull off over a sustained period without becoming a self-parody; not only from a technical standpoint but through running the risk of becoming stale. If your style isn't entertaining or personable, then it can become boring, and the dry, unhelpful tone of McCarthy's narration couldn't sustain my interest. Even the much-vaunted brutality, staining many of the pages red and black with blood and death, gets old and meaningless, unimpressive to me compared to the striking individuality of something like Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho.

So again, I apologies to all those that worship this book, because perhaps it was simply not for me. I greatly enjoy authors who are full of variety and surprise; whom mix reality and the surreal on a whim, and whom make me care about their characters on a personal level. Cormac McCarthy doesn't do that for me, not even in The Road, which I liked. It worries me slightly that I've got four Cormac McCarthy books to read from my pile (Border Trilogy and No Country For Old Men) and it might worry you, dear reader, that I might have four more dismissive, self-righteous rants about why I don't like them. Ah well, can't say I didn't warn anyone. 

Terry Pratchett's Discworld 10- Moving Pictures

Moving Pictures

Corgi

Terry Pratchett
1990  

Other Terry Pratchett Reviews- The Colour of Magic - The Light Fantastic - Equal Rites - Mort - Sourcery - Wyrd Sisters - Pyramids - Guards! Guards! - Eric - Moving Pictures - Reaper Man - Witches Abroad - Small Gods - Lords and Ladies - Men At Arms - Soul Music - Interesting Times - Maskerade - Feet of Clay - Hogfather - Raising Steam - A Blink of the Screen - Sky1 Adaptations- Dodger - The Long Earth (w Stephen Baxter)

"Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleaning, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact."

So it turns out that updating a web blog with a five-hundred word book review once every 3-5 days is actually really difficult, physically and mentally tiring, and a big drain of resources. It's with this in mind that I admit to not updating my blog in about two weeks or something, because the sheer pressure crushed me like a lump of coal. Thankfully only about people ever read this site anyway, including me, so I don't think anyone will mind. To the review!

Amazingly, we've reached double-figures on this odyssey of a series and I haven't given up yet, which is like a lifetime record for me. After creating a bunch of beloved regular characters over the course of the last few books (Guards! Guards! and Wyrd Sisters, for example), Sir Terrence Pratchett attempted to repeat the trick with a brand new set, in a novel where he focuses on very specific satire to make the Disc mimic the Earth. To backtrack, I seem to remember writing a little while ago in a Discworld review that at that point Pratchett was about to embark on a run of about ten or more genuine comic fantasy classics. It's with a sad sigh that I'm going to rescind that statement a bit, because Moving Pictures doesn't quite reach his highest standards. It's still quite good though.

In the story of Moving Pictures, the inherent magic of the Discworld combined with the ingenuity and persistence of its many alchemists has led to alarming discoveries in the field of photography and camera, which itself has led to the foundation of a familiar sounding business in an even-more familiar-sounding place; the 'clickies' are here, promoted and created in a place called Holy Wood, where dreams come wildly true. Naturally people flock to be involved in the clickies, dreaming of stardom on a suspiciously spiritual level, including Victor Tugelbend, lead character and wizard in training. In no time at all, Victor becomes the biggest star in Holy Wood, and then really bad things start to happen regarding the very nature of reality. 

So, to the negatives; Victor Tugelbend isn't a very interesting character. He starts off as the same po-faced, innocent-yet-crafty young person on the verge of adventure as Mort, Esk of Equal Rites and Nijel from Sourcery, but doesn't seem to develop any further than that. Instead, Victor and his love interest exist more as plot devices and bases of satire for the story to progress further, while the actual charisma and funny dialogue comes from other sources. Here that's from series regular (mostly minor parts) Cut-My-Own-Throat Dibbler (Ankh-Morpork wheeler-dealer extraordinaire) and Gaspode the Wonder Dog (sarcastic talking dog). Victor kind of ends up as a situationist hero, who fights the real evil lurking behind Holy Wood almost because it's very similar to his job as a clicky star, but without any of the poise or charisma that's needed to keep the book interesting. Maybe it's kind of the point and theme of the whole book; that ordinary people are magically captivated by the idea of the movies to such an extent that we can't tell when art is imitating life or vice versa. On the Disc, of course, the distinction is utterly irrelevant.

To be more positive, Moving Pictures is pretty funny, and certain to be the Discworld book of choice for film buffs, as Pratchett references and parodies dozens of films, studios and performers from the very early days of Hollywood to more recent efforts. The book is very thematic, and probably fun to study, with an intriguing look at the effects of fame and fortune and its allure. Meanwhile, Gaspode becomes somewhat of a fan favourite character, and is one of the few new characters from this book to turn up in the future. Also, Pratchett's now very familiar style of prose is out in full force, having certainly been very well defined if not completely mastered by its originator.

Pratchett would write a spiritual followup to Moving Pictures in the utterly excellent Soul Music a few years later. This book remains a bit of a poorly-remembered oddity that most should enjoy, but doesn't really represent the author's full capabilities regarding characterisation and sheer sense of fun.

Busy/Lazy

I'll get around to writing something new here at some point, I've just been really busy/lazy recently. I've got the next Discworld book and some Cormac McCarthy to catch up on.