monoceros blogsI actually did some re-reading (not that I don't already have six dozen and one unread books I need to get to) over the past few weeks. Seeing as how I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time halfway two summers ago and had to leave it behind in Singapore to go back to school, I thought I would start over and enjoy it thorougly. And I did. Perhaps my present emotions are making it incredibly easy to slip into the book, imagining what it's like to be autistic Christopher and then each of his torn-up parents. I love the logic puzzles and the explanations about the human mind, but some of my most favorite ones are the passages about the Milky Way and the Blue Planet videos. Despite a love - or obsession - for his immediate world to be orderly and unsurprising, Christopher has a vast imagination of the universe and the earth as a planet.
He reminds me very much of another protagonist but I'll get to him later. The other book I re-read is The Instance of the Fingerpost. A friend brought it up and I decided it'd been too long since I last read it. It's certainly one to experience. A real classic. It deserves every comparison to Umberto Eco's In the Name of the Rose that it receives, but is also a splendid book in its own right. I felt inspired, comforted, refreshed by the end of the book. The novel has an unexpected ending, but more unexpected (and even on the second read, I'm taken by surprise) is how moved you are by the protagonist's epiphany. Sure it's just a book - or a book using historical characters in a plot that has politics, science, philosophy, betrayal, murder, and lust - but still, it has such a profound revelation at the end that you can't help but wonder at the miracles that have happened, that do happen, and will again one day.
Another book that got me all emotional at the end is The Highest Tide, the very one with the observant protagonist who would have liked Christopher Boone of Night-time. The writing is...well, I'm still reeling from the glorious images of the ocean that Jim Lynch put in my head with his prose. It made the ocean come alive for me, filled me with more wonder than I've had in a long time.
Miles O'Malley, the protagonist, lives right by the mudflats of Puget Sound, and because he cares enough to pay attention, he finds wonderful things like a dying giant squid, a ragfish, geoducks, sea cucumbers, and glowing, mating worms. And because he reads plenty, he knows these creatures well enough to perform the cheeky but harmless art of revenge of placing a sea cucumber in his friend's arms so that it vomits its internal organs onto the poor fellow's head. Change is rife in Miles' life. He's on the brink of a growth spurt, he's in love with his former babysitter and wonders if she'll ever feel the same way, and he's witnessing the crumbling of his parents' marriage. How do you know he wants his parents to stay together? After his parents realize how gifted he is, they want to reward him, but Miles asks only for them to stay together, even though in his boyish heart, he's always longed for a dog.
Miles is a huge fan of Rachel Carson, and after reading the passages that he quotes, I've become one too. Carson describes the oceans and its life in the language of a poet's dream. And as Miles says, she sums up "the entire history and role of the ocean in two sentences: 'In its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea - to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.' "
More bodies of water, this time a lagoon and many, many canals. Venice in a strange mythical setting. The Water Mirror is targeted at teenagers, but like other successful trilogies such as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, many adults are increasingly attracted to Kai Meyer's work. The Water Mirror is the first book, a slim one, in a trilogy. Nothing is revealed or explained yet, you have to wait for the next two books (the second arrives in October this year). I read it in one sitting, thrilled to the bone by what I read and imagined. It's nothing like what I've read before. It's evocative, it's mysterious, it's deliciously dark, it doesn't shy away from the grotesque (reminding me vaguely of the the computer game, "American McGee's Alice", in which a children's story becomes warped and sinister and extremely enticing).
And now, I've just begun reading Vengeance, the book on which Steven Spielberg's Munich is based. Sometimes you wonder at the violence in the world, how it's so easily sparked by comments or cartoons, how the violence harkens to the story of two half-brothers who were divided and how their descendants are still raging against each other centuries later. It sure makes your problems stand around like miniscule stick figures twiddling their even more miniscule stick thumbs nervously. But every story and every conflict is vast to the one who writes and experiences it. To anyone else, taking the train from a small town to London may be a piece of cake, but for autistic Christopher Boone who makes that journey to find the mother he thought dead, it's as epic and life-changing as an odyssey to Ithaca. I'm just glad I get to follow them all and see these other worlds and maybe learn a thing or two along the way.
Posted by Monoceros at February 18, 2006 11:51 AM