aletheiafelinea (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aletheiafelinea) wrote2013-06-23 07:01 pm
aletheiafelinea) wrote2013-06-23 07:01 pm
Entry tags:
Blue and other colours
Or Kate Griffin vs the rest of literature.
A two-version entry. Jeśli wolisz czytać po polsku, tędy proszę.
Kate Griffin, A Madness of Angels, The Midnight Mayor, The Neon Court, The Minority Council, Stray Souls
Some time ago Rusty Angel has written (in Polish only, sorry) two things about A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin: that it's NOT paranormal romance and that the content is better than the title and cover. That is, she's written much more, but it was what persuaded me to add the book in a surge of curiosity to the mental reading list, what means I owe Rusty a beer. Or smth. I expected something better than the mass were-vamp stuff and maybe, with a bit of luck, something close in quality to Mike Carey's the Castor series. But it turned out the all Griffin's books are a PIECE OF MORE THAN DECENT LITERATURE.
A novel that has some roughly sensible plot, distinguishable characters with perceptible motivations and at least correct language, is usually considered acceptable reading. The one which characters and plot stay on mind after the last page is deemed a reading being good and worthy to re-read. But when we step on the level where characters have more than two features each one, where motivations are no longer black and white, where Our Boys have no monopoly for being right and feeling emotions one can share, and above all, where the author turns out observant and thoughtful, and skilled enough to present his/her observations and thoughts in a fine style, and some new quality is added to a whole genre at that… what else it needs to be called a good book?
But the matter becomes really interesting when one puts attention just to this: Kate Griffin vs the rest of literature, or rather the rest of urban fantasy. One can draw a quality spectrum on which beginning I’d put the ‘dead’ series of Charlaine Harris, then Mike Carey, and Kate Griffin on the other end. (Obviously, the urban fantasy genre has somewhat more than three authors – and one can argue if Harris is a typical one – but the selection is for clarity’s sake).
I was sure I had read some five parts of Harris’, and when checking, turned out it was nine, what astounded me. It’s like with a week one spends in a cold, contemplating the window curtain’s pattern – later it seems it was two days at the most, cause there was happening only so much. Someone could protest, why! doesn’t Harris’ series consist just of the constant happening? It does, but the thing is that actually her idea for all this action is throwing in another and another characters of new and new species/races/whatever, whose reason of existence is fighting the others JUST CAUSE. Ah right, there’s also “all want Sookie Stackhouse and vice versa, JUST CAUSE”. If someone’s going to ask what, in face of that, pulled me all the way to the ninth part through the eight previous, well, frankly, I count it into the inscrutable mysteries of the universe… Because they were the closest at hand, when looking around for something to read in lunch break? And cause they actually weren’t as bad as many others…
Mike Carey has great ideas (an exorcist enchanting with music; a succubus-demoness in love with a mortal woman), a gift for scenes and atmosphere (a zombie living in an abandoned cinema theatre; a haunted block estate) and last but not least, a style (I took a strong dislike to him right then to save time and effort later. / The groom was up at the altar, looking as cool and collected as a man tied to train tracks and hearing the distant whistle.)
However, if one looks not at the literary class, but at the approach to the genre, Carey is closer to Harris than to Griffin. Both realise more or less the same model of 'old myths in new environment'. Carey's ghosts, demons and zombies same as Harris' vampires, shapeshifters and the rest of menagerie are the same old legends which, willingly or not, moved into the modern times when forests has been cut down and castles full of bats renovated and turned into hotels. Demonesses use lipstick and fairies work in show-business but it's only the adaptation of creatures that has come from outside, like foxes in parks and falcons on skyscrapers' tops. Looking this way, the magic in urban fantasy doesn't differ much from the magic in other subgenres. It's 'ancient, still alive underneath and waiting for awakening' in spite of the old cemetery has been lost under asphalt, and 'lurking in darkness' beyond neon lights' reach. The genre itself is like a city surrounded by the primeval forest of fairy-like fantasy in semi-medieval scenery. Werewolf drives a car and works in office, but after hours he leaves his tie in wardrobe and goes to run in forest, cause his 'true nature' calls him. The magic nowadays 'manages and copes', but it comes from something 'older than civilisation'. For magic & fantasy, city is 'such things' in 'there was no such things in the good old times'; it's a danger which only 'keeping up with times' will survive; at the best case it's 'new possibilities'.
Kate Griffin's approach is essentially different, so much that in my opinion it gives her the status of more than a representative of the genre. I think she's one of authors who create and define the given genre. I know I'm rolling out a big gun, but I'm going to keep it unless someone can show me an author who has done the same earlier and in comparable scale. Because in Griffin's books the magic didn't come to hire a room in city, but the contrary: city is its source. Yeah, there are also mentions about the older magic that nests in forest, but the forest in question is just an alternative environment, left somewhere beyond the event horizon and existing more in theory than on the stage. Just like for an average townee... (There is also the motif of adapted 'old' fairies, used in the Harris-like way, that is 'fairy = glamour', but it's just a small element in the general non-Harris-like background). City is not 'new thing', not 'danger' for the old, it isn't the 'dead' metal and concrete set against the 'alive' trees and birdies. City is old too, and it has its own, very alive life, what is also the base of Griffin's theory of magic: the magic comes from life, and since city's life are rush hours, working engines, spreading concrete fields, and the infrastructure underneath streets and inside walls – water, gas, electricity, sewage – therefore the urban magic gets corresponding forms. Griffin writes an apotheosis of city, creates urban mythology. I must admit one gets an impression that other authors have used the genre's name in advance so far, only superficially making use of urban decorations, when Griffin has really written urban fantasy at last.
In characters and plot department, Griffin follows popular patterns rather than make new ones (tatty hero in an even tattier long coat; crime-like mystery; gang wars; politics up to ears in dirt for financial reasons) though she does it skilfully enough that you get rather new life poured in the old form instead of cliché. But her most original contribution is the background: urban mythology. On this field she indeed creates more than recycles. She happens to pick this or that from the ready arsenal, but vampires, zombies, werewolves and other creatures great and small rather sneak around the stage, and really come into the light not before Stray Souls. Nevertheless, in the all series the most important part is the magic of city – of tarmac, concrete, electricity, pigeons, buses, graffiti and the Underground... Together it makes surprisingly rich world. Griffin every now and often adds some new piece, and does it in the way that usually is relevant to the internal logic of previous ones. The basic rule is simple, but for an imaginative author – and Griffin has the first class fantasy writer's imagination – it gives great possibilities: the logic of her mythology is the logic of real cities. The rest is the matter of observation. What is the city danger? Griffin's monsters rise of scattered litter and have teeth of broken glass; predatory spectres are empty air wearing hoodies and loose trousers; indestructible enemy's body is made of bureaucracy – printed paper. What is the city saving power? We would all be lost if not the city cleaning services which, by the way, don't work for free; there's no place the Night Bus can't reach, but it comes only if you're on the bottom of misery; the Black Cab is the urban flying carpet breaking the physics laws, but you'd better consider thrice if you're able to pay the charge. Urban sorcerer's power comes from electric sockets, regulations of city services are spells, and the tube gate is a mighty barrier – unless you have a ticket. All this is very close to Pratchett's rule of narrativium: magic and mystic power is human belief in fact. If a sufficient quantity of people deems the double yellow line impassable, then the reality yields like the spacetime gravitating around a mental mass. Only what a fantasy author does, it’s extending this power from minds to the objective reality of his/her universe too.
In face of the above, if in twenty years I don't find Kate Griffin in every fantasy canon longer than thirty names, I'll decide something went very wrong in meantime. In spite of that, if someone is rolling eyes now, I won't be surprised... Cause, let's see:
# The covers make one howl in despair to the moon, and what's more, every next one is worse – technically primitive in the my-first-Photoshop-manip way, and screaming "Cheap pulp!", so implying the similar content. Only the Stray Souls's cover is maybe far from exciting, but at least tries to give 'serious' impression. (There’s a reason to the graphic change, cause Stray Souls are something between sequel and spin-off. The next part on the verge of publication, The Glass God, looks technically better and more interesting for an eye, IMHO).
# The first part's title also doesn't exactly promise a fountain of originality. Unlike the covers, it gets better in the course of series, at least in my opinion. (The whole series' name theoretically is Urban Magic, but the name seems to exist rather virtually, cause first, it doesn't appear on the books, and second, looks like it hasn't stuck for the fandom's name. Perhaps for it’s too little outstanding, not enough identifying).
# The author is twenty seven years old; when writing A Madness of Angels she was twenty-twenty one, and she first published (a novel) being fourteen. In opinion of many, it's disqualifying in itself, and not without reason.
# As usual, I don't write summaries, which are easily available at the nearest corner of the Internet. When summarised, the story will be just an action stuff. (Though I should mention there are elements – motivations, solutions – having definitely more profundity than you expect from a typical action piece, but the thing is one can’t get to know it before actual reading...) The hero has untypically coloured eyes, is a mix of human and (very plural) angels, and with the next parts gains new and new levels of badassery. If you didn’t think ‘bad fic’ yet, it means you hang around saner dens of the Internet than me, and better keep it this way.
And you know what’s the best? That all above in practice turns out one huge appearances-are-deceiving. Griffin proves that everything depends on the realisation. The problem is that this quality is very well hidden... The first line of abatis is everything listed up there, so the possible reader must be an incurable optimist who would seek gold on a dumping ground (the analogy with Pratchett is irresistible again, cause I couldn't count how many people I saw who discovered him after years of avoiding due of the covers, no offence, Mr Kirby's ghost, please). To make matters worse, though the gold is there indeed, to come and stoop is not enough. One needs yet some digging with a pickaxe and shovel, cause Griffin loves her openings as murky as the contemporary art.
Contrary to Pratchett and Carey this time, since they both usually catch a reader immediately or don't at all. At this matter it's rather Gaiman who comes to mind, with this difference that he often happens to stay artistic-like unclear to the end, when Griffin has at least enough decency to set the pieces in order. Usually she does it quite deftly – the gradual emerging of sense from the initial apparent rubbish is one of things I like in her writing. Most often it begins after the first few dozens of pages, what is quite a long start, so it can put off all unwilling to give an author the big credit. Admittedly it's still better than David Eddings, who believed in the theory of the first hundred pages, so I obligingly gave him just such credit... and it didn't help. But this, same for Griffin as Eddings, is the matter of the given author's and given reader's mutual tune. As for me, later I found I have with Griffin quite a lot of shared perception and mentality, so – irrespectively of more or less objective quality – she appeals to me, though she don't have to appeal to other reader. Just like Gaiman, in whose case I'm on the non-appealable side... One of things that do appeal to me at Griffin, is her approach to WHAT she actually wants to write, what she wants to say. She describes the magic of electricity, graffiti, urban legends, but one sort, instead of telling, she presents in working – the magic of word, of story. And she’s aware of it...
…breaking the stereotype of a young ‘genial’ writer, regarded through fingers due of age. Kate Griffin does have something interesting and new to say and for that, as far as I’m concerned, I’m glad she began to tell it early, cause it means she got more time before her.
If someone has endured to this place and isn’t fed up yet, I’m inviting to the second partin the unspecified term. It will be more of the fannish point of view (read: even more badly failing in pretending of objectivity), but non-fans are welcomed too. There will be also fan-rant and fan-grumbling, so in case someone would like to pick at the series, it can be that one needs just wait and save effort…
ETA
Done, the second part is here.
ETA 2
Now you can comment on it also by Disqus, here.
A two-version entry. Jeśli wolisz czytać po polsku, tędy proszę.
Kate Griffin, A Madness of Angels, The Midnight Mayor, The Neon Court, The Minority Council, Stray Souls
Some time ago Rusty Angel has written (in Polish only, sorry) two things about A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin: that it's NOT paranormal romance and that the content is better than the title and cover. That is, she's written much more, but it was what persuaded me to add the book in a surge of curiosity to the mental reading list, what means I owe Rusty a beer. Or smth. I expected something better than the mass were-vamp stuff and maybe, with a bit of luck, something close in quality to Mike Carey's the Castor series. But it turned out the all Griffin's books are a PIECE OF MORE THAN DECENT LITERATURE.
A novel that has some roughly sensible plot, distinguishable characters with perceptible motivations and at least correct language, is usually considered acceptable reading. The one which characters and plot stay on mind after the last page is deemed a reading being good and worthy to re-read. But when we step on the level where characters have more than two features each one, where motivations are no longer black and white, where Our Boys have no monopoly for being right and feeling emotions one can share, and above all, where the author turns out observant and thoughtful, and skilled enough to present his/her observations and thoughts in a fine style, and some new quality is added to a whole genre at that… what else it needs to be called a good book?
They did the assault/SWAT thing. Rifles, corners, kneeling, standing, running, climbing, gestures - fist, two fingers, flap, twiddle - the whole lot. We tried not to laugh as we trailed along behind. … You have to have a lot of training to be a storm trooper, we concluded. It wasn’t just about learning when to duck and when to fire; it was about learning to take yourself seriously as you did it.
I know that mystics tend to be obscure; it’s the only way they can stay in business in this litigious age.
Mr Earle gave me the kind of smile I imagined he reserved for that special category of employee who came to his office at 1 p.m. on a Friday afternoon to announce there was nothing else to do so could they, like, go home, yeah? It was the kind of smile that guaranteed you a plywood coffin.
Certainly, London, the real London, the majority experience of London, envied the grand streets laid out around the palace, and even felt a quaint protective streak towards it, as if to say ‘We may think that St James’s is full of rich tossers, but they’re our rich tossers and if we could be rich tossers too, we would be. So just because we’re rude about it doesn’t mean you can be.’
Great thing about not being a chosen one, is you get to do your own choosing.
…haircuts that in previous times would have been used to indicate rank in warrior tribes and were now worn to cause distress to difficult mothers...
We were in a chain coffee shop, drinking mass-produced coffee on a mass-produced sofa beneath some mass-produced art in a mass-produced frame proclaiming that Originality Can’t Be Bought.
What effect, for example, did invisibility have on blood pressure?
…stared skywards at these shining glass walls and watched the tiny people move about, each in their office, unseen by their colleagues but on display to the world, like a life lived in a computer game.
But the matter becomes really interesting when one puts attention just to this: Kate Griffin vs the rest of literature, or rather the rest of urban fantasy. One can draw a quality spectrum on which beginning I’d put the ‘dead’ series of Charlaine Harris, then Mike Carey, and Kate Griffin on the other end. (Obviously, the urban fantasy genre has somewhat more than three authors – and one can argue if Harris is a typical one – but the selection is for clarity’s sake).
I was sure I had read some five parts of Harris’, and when checking, turned out it was nine, what astounded me. It’s like with a week one spends in a cold, contemplating the window curtain’s pattern – later it seems it was two days at the most, cause there was happening only so much. Someone could protest, why! doesn’t Harris’ series consist just of the constant happening? It does, but the thing is that actually her idea for all this action is throwing in another and another characters of new and new species/races/whatever, whose reason of existence is fighting the others JUST CAUSE. Ah right, there’s also “all want Sookie Stackhouse and vice versa, JUST CAUSE”. If someone’s going to ask what, in face of that, pulled me all the way to the ninth part through the eight previous, well, frankly, I count it into the inscrutable mysteries of the universe… Because they were the closest at hand, when looking around for something to read in lunch break? And cause they actually weren’t as bad as many others…
Mike Carey has great ideas (an exorcist enchanting with music; a succubus-demoness in love with a mortal woman), a gift for scenes and atmosphere (a zombie living in an abandoned cinema theatre; a haunted block estate) and last but not least, a style (I took a strong dislike to him right then to save time and effort later. / The groom was up at the altar, looking as cool and collected as a man tied to train tracks and hearing the distant whistle.)
However, if one looks not at the literary class, but at the approach to the genre, Carey is closer to Harris than to Griffin. Both realise more or less the same model of 'old myths in new environment'. Carey's ghosts, demons and zombies same as Harris' vampires, shapeshifters and the rest of menagerie are the same old legends which, willingly or not, moved into the modern times when forests has been cut down and castles full of bats renovated and turned into hotels. Demonesses use lipstick and fairies work in show-business but it's only the adaptation of creatures that has come from outside, like foxes in parks and falcons on skyscrapers' tops. Looking this way, the magic in urban fantasy doesn't differ much from the magic in other subgenres. It's 'ancient, still alive underneath and waiting for awakening' in spite of the old cemetery has been lost under asphalt, and 'lurking in darkness' beyond neon lights' reach. The genre itself is like a city surrounded by the primeval forest of fairy-like fantasy in semi-medieval scenery. Werewolf drives a car and works in office, but after hours he leaves his tie in wardrobe and goes to run in forest, cause his 'true nature' calls him. The magic nowadays 'manages and copes', but it comes from something 'older than civilisation'. For magic & fantasy, city is 'such things' in 'there was no such things in the good old times'; it's a danger which only 'keeping up with times' will survive; at the best case it's 'new possibilities'.
Kate Griffin's approach is essentially different, so much that in my opinion it gives her the status of more than a representative of the genre. I think she's one of authors who create and define the given genre. I know I'm rolling out a big gun, but I'm going to keep it unless someone can show me an author who has done the same earlier and in comparable scale. Because in Griffin's books the magic didn't come to hire a room in city, but the contrary: city is its source. Yeah, there are also mentions about the older magic that nests in forest, but the forest in question is just an alternative environment, left somewhere beyond the event horizon and existing more in theory than on the stage. Just like for an average townee... (There is also the motif of adapted 'old' fairies, used in the Harris-like way, that is 'fairy = glamour', but it's just a small element in the general non-Harris-like background). City is not 'new thing', not 'danger' for the old, it isn't the 'dead' metal and concrete set against the 'alive' trees and birdies. City is old too, and it has its own, very alive life, what is also the base of Griffin's theory of magic: the magic comes from life, and since city's life are rush hours, working engines, spreading concrete fields, and the infrastructure underneath streets and inside walls – water, gas, electricity, sewage – therefore the urban magic gets corresponding forms. Griffin writes an apotheosis of city, creates urban mythology. I must admit one gets an impression that other authors have used the genre's name in advance so far, only superficially making use of urban decorations, when Griffin has really written urban fantasy at last.
You can always tell you’re being sold a bad product if it comes attached to a pentangle star. New times - new magics.
I am born in this city and it makes me who I am. The streets, the stones, the strangers, everything, whether I meant it or not, made me me.
For chirruping country insects the city made human voices constant in the night; for the rustle of leaves and wind there were air vents in the sides of buildings; for the sound of mud underfoot, the clip clip clip of hard soles on tarmac.
I drew ancient runes, of some thirty years’ provenance…
…most people who talk about the magic shit on the internet are just losers with candles and stuff, because you know, magicians are so fifteenth century about technology…
Because if there is a conservation of mass and energy in physics then likewise there must be a conservation of life in magic.
In characters and plot department, Griffin follows popular patterns rather than make new ones (tatty hero in an even tattier long coat; crime-like mystery; gang wars; politics up to ears in dirt for financial reasons) though she does it skilfully enough that you get rather new life poured in the old form instead of cliché. But her most original contribution is the background: urban mythology. On this field she indeed creates more than recycles. She happens to pick this or that from the ready arsenal, but vampires, zombies, werewolves and other creatures great and small rather sneak around the stage, and really come into the light not before Stray Souls. Nevertheless, in the all series the most important part is the magic of city – of tarmac, concrete, electricity, pigeons, buses, graffiti and the Underground... Together it makes surprisingly rich world. Griffin every now and often adds some new piece, and does it in the way that usually is relevant to the internal logic of previous ones. The basic rule is simple, but for an imaginative author – and Griffin has the first class fantasy writer's imagination – it gives great possibilities: the logic of her mythology is the logic of real cities. The rest is the matter of observation. What is the city danger? Griffin's monsters rise of scattered litter and have teeth of broken glass; predatory spectres are empty air wearing hoodies and loose trousers; indestructible enemy's body is made of bureaucracy – printed paper. What is the city saving power? We would all be lost if not the city cleaning services which, by the way, don't work for free; there's no place the Night Bus can't reach, but it comes only if you're on the bottom of misery; the Black Cab is the urban flying carpet breaking the physics laws, but you'd better consider thrice if you're able to pay the charge. Urban sorcerer's power comes from electric sockets, regulations of city services are spells, and the tube gate is a mighty barrier – unless you have a ticket. All this is very close to Pratchett's rule of narrativium: magic and mystic power is human belief in fact. If a sufficient quantity of people deems the double yellow line impassable, then the reality yields like the spacetime gravitating around a mental mass. Only what a fantasy author does, it’s extending this power from minds to the objective reality of his/her universe too.
In face of the above, if in twenty years I don't find Kate Griffin in every fantasy canon longer than thirty names, I'll decide something went very wrong in meantime. In spite of that, if someone is rolling eyes now, I won't be surprised... Cause, let's see:
# The covers make one howl in despair to the moon, and what's more, every next one is worse – technically primitive in the my-first-Photoshop-manip way, and screaming "Cheap pulp!", so implying the similar content. Only the Stray Souls's cover is maybe far from exciting, but at least tries to give 'serious' impression. (There’s a reason to the graphic change, cause Stray Souls are something between sequel and spin-off. The next part on the verge of publication, The Glass God, looks technically better and more interesting for an eye, IMHO).
# The first part's title also doesn't exactly promise a fountain of originality. Unlike the covers, it gets better in the course of series, at least in my opinion. (The whole series' name theoretically is Urban Magic, but the name seems to exist rather virtually, cause first, it doesn't appear on the books, and second, looks like it hasn't stuck for the fandom's name. Perhaps for it’s too little outstanding, not enough identifying).
# The author is twenty seven years old; when writing A Madness of Angels she was twenty-twenty one, and she first published (a novel) being fourteen. In opinion of many, it's disqualifying in itself, and not without reason.
# As usual, I don't write summaries, which are easily available at the nearest corner of the Internet. When summarised, the story will be just an action stuff. (Though I should mention there are elements – motivations, solutions – having definitely more profundity than you expect from a typical action piece, but the thing is one can’t get to know it before actual reading...) The hero has untypically coloured eyes, is a mix of human and (very plural) angels, and with the next parts gains new and new levels of badassery. If you didn’t think ‘bad fic’ yet, it means you hang around saner dens of the Internet than me, and better keep it this way.
…as anyone who’s read my books will know, I tend to just say, screw the exposition and start with a bang, and hope that everyone will pick up the theme as they go along…
Contrary to Pratchett and Carey this time, since they both usually catch a reader immediately or don't at all. At this matter it's rather Gaiman who comes to mind, with this difference that he often happens to stay artistic-like unclear to the end, when Griffin has at least enough decency to set the pieces in order. Usually she does it quite deftly – the gradual emerging of sense from the initial apparent rubbish is one of things I like in her writing. Most often it begins after the first few dozens of pages, what is quite a long start, so it can put off all unwilling to give an author the big credit. Admittedly it's still better than David Eddings, who believed in the theory of the first hundred pages, so I obligingly gave him just such credit... and it didn't help. But this, same for Griffin as Eddings, is the matter of the given author's and given reader's mutual tune. As for me, later I found I have with Griffin quite a lot of shared perception and mentality, so – irrespectively of more or less objective quality – she appeals to me, though she don't have to appeal to other reader. Just like Gaiman, in whose case I'm on the non-appealable side... One of things that do appeal to me at Griffin, is her approach to WHAT she actually wants to write, what she wants to say. She describes the magic of electricity, graffiti, urban legends, but one sort, instead of telling, she presents in working – the magic of word, of story. And she’s aware of it...
… what urban magic really should be – mundane, boring city things becoming rich, exciting and full of power…
…breaking the stereotype of a young ‘genial’ writer, regarded through fingers due of age. Kate Griffin does have something interesting and new to say and for that, as far as I’m concerned, I’m glad she began to tell it early, cause it means she got more time before her.
If someone has endured to this place and isn’t fed up yet, I’m inviting to the second part
ETA
Done, the second part is here.
ETA 2
Now you can comment on it also by Disqus, here.