16

Dec

~koushun takami~ battle royale

brRead it in: two days (it’s holidays again)

If this post was to have a subtitle, it would probably be ‘The Most Inventive Ways to Kill Characters’, except that I think that award would probably have to go to Stephen King, who once had a character run over a person’s head with a lawnmower (Misery – very gory, read it if you like suspense and, well, pain).  Needless to say, Mr. Takami does an excellent job of finding many different and highly original ways to kill people, ranging from large swords stuck in people’s heads to jumping off the tops of lighthouses to giant home-made explosions.  What can you expect, after all, this is Battle Royale, the hit cult movie that was met in Japan (yes, that supposedly conservative society) with criticism and, best of all, immense popularity.

The game is this: 42 schoolchildren are taken to an island and told that they have to kill one another until there’s only one survivor.  They each get a different weapon, there are danger zones (which you will die if you enter) and there is no way out.  Or so we think.  It’s the Hunger Games of crack.  It’s a cross between 1984 and Lord of the Flies.  It incorporates all your favourite teenage stereotypes and all the best weapons into a raging 600 page thriller that keeps you both on edge and very, very cynical.

You’ve probably noticed a pattern in the books that I read, and that is that I tend to read things involving teenagers and usually involving killing.  I’m actually attempting to write a novel about a whole school that decides to shut itself off from the world and commit massacres, French Revolution style.  Accordingly, I’m trying to read every great high-school-student killing novel around.  If you have any suggestions of books I’ve missed, please let me know.  But Battle Royale doesn’t disappoint in this respect.

The only thing wrong with big-game-show-style-killing-spree-books (that’s a genre now) is that characterisation becomes a difficulty.  Which means that death doesn’t really mean anything to the reader.  Which means that the reader is simply reading death after death and it sort of numbs you, which is not the point of a book like this, I suppose.  Or maybe it is…?  Anyway, Takami’s idea of having 42 school students in a battle game is ingenious, but incredibly numbing to death.  Within the first thirty pages we’re seeing fifteen year old kids die.  The worst part is that we don’t know these fifteen year olds.  It’s just a name to us, and a morbid death sequence.  The characterisation actually comes later.  We see flashbacks of the schoolchildren having fun at school, doing things together, and then we realise we might miss them, maybe.  It humanises them, yes, but for the most part only after they’ve already died.

To compare this with the Hunger Games – it sort of does the same thing.  Admittedly, Ms. Collins had it easier because she had less competitors.  Takami had 41 students to get rid of before a winner could be declared.  Collins could give us some time, let us get to know some characters – with Takami, it was all about the death count.  Having said that, as the book goes on we do get to know some characters whose eventual deaths do make us upset.

I suppose, however, it could be all about the numbness factor.  This book is 1984-esque after all, so our numbness to death as readers, our apathy, tends to reflect the attitude of many characters we see in the book – some of the major killers in the game, definitely the adults running the game.  It teaches us apathy, which is clever.  So, although I think that a lot of characterisation was missed (it would have been a lot more heartwrenching if we’d read, say, 200 pages beforehand of the exploits of the students, if we’d gotten to know them, and then found out they would have to kill each other), this book was able to portray death almost callously, disrespectfully, in a way that the Hunger Games and other books simply don’t do.  It’s no wonder it was the subject of a lot of controversy when it first came out.

Read it if you: have read the Hunger Games and think it’s the best thing out there, want something fast-paced and exciting, don’t mind seeing kids die… in awful ways.

While reading, listen to: Kid Cudi Pursuit of Happiness, Europe Final Countdown

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Last Name T/Thriller

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04

Nov

~david mitchell~ ghostwritten

gwRead it in: around two weeks

This was my second David Mitchell, the first being Cloud Atlas, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  The main thing that drew me to this one was that it was partially set in Japan.  I am leaving in just under two months for my six month trip to the country and thought I should get some background reading done.  And I thought, because Cloud Atlas was so good, that this would be equally as good.

I must say, Ghostwritten reads almost as the prequel to Cloud Atlas.  If I remember correctly, it was his first novel, so Cloud Atlas definitely came after it.  But having read CA first, I could pick up little hints as to where some of the ideas came from.  I love seeing how authors play with ideas in one book that then go on to completely shape another work later on.

Ghostwritten is also really similar to Cloud Atlas in structure, as if Mitchell was experimenting with that sort of thing for the first time here.  It takes the form of nine different parts, all about completely different people on different corners of the earth, whose destinies go on to intertwine as the story develops.  In Cloud Atlas, Mitchell does this starting out with halves of the story that go in order… Look, I’m going to have to draw a diagram because words fail me:

CW: The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing –> Letters from Zedelghem –> Half Lives: the first Luisa Rey mystery –> The Ghastly Ordeal of Timoth Cavendish –>An Orison of Sonmi 451 –> Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After –> An Orison of Sonmi 451 –> The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish –> The First Luisa Rey Mystery –> Letters from Zedelghem –> The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing

GW: Okinawa –> Tokyo –> Hong Kong –> Holy Mountain –> Mongolia –> Petersburg –> London –> Clear Island –> Night Train

So as you can see, the format of CW starts off by introducing the characters and then going back to them again at the end.  I sort of expected this as I read Ghostwritten, but as you can see, it doesn’t happen there.  I was a little disappointed because I wanted so much to learn about the characters more!  So things were left unanswered, but I don’t think that’s too much of a big issue when it comes to David Mitchell.

And it all ties together in the end, but in unexpected ways.  Most of the time the protagonists of sections never actually meet each other, at least not in person.  They hear of one another, they sometimes see one another from a distance and usually they suffer the full extent of the consequences of the actions of another person.  Mitchell ties this story into one particular theme that isn’t really noticeable until the end.  It becomes more and more relevant until finally we realise why things that seemed utterly strange in the first part of the book are actually conceivable in the second part.

If you’re asking what it’s about, it’s about lots of things.  It’s about a frightened terrorist in Okinawa, a couple falling in love in Tokyo, a middle-aged and troubled man in Hong Kong, an old woman living an unchanging life on a changing mountain in China, a non-corporeal species living in the minds of different people in Mongolia, an art thief in Petersburg, a young man living in chaotic London, a leading physicist seeking refuge in a remote island off the British isles, a late night radio show in Brooklyn, NY.  It encompasses just about every corner of the globe and every walk of life that there is.  It’s about life, and non-life as well.  Reading it is like taking a voyage.  You step off and you think ‘where have I just been?’, or ‘where have I NOT just been?’.

It’s one of those books that you digest for a while after you read.

Read it if you: are interested in travel and different places and different people, if you’re interested in China or Japan, or Mongolia, or I suppose in Russia or America or England or Ireland, if you would have ever liked to see ‘The Host’ by Stephenie Meyer rewritten by someone who is actually competent, if you read Cloud Atlas.

While reading listen to: Low Roar The Painter, Bon Iver Calgary (this version in particular), The Irrepressibles In This Shirt

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Fantasy/Last Name M/Literature

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30

Apr

~william golding~ lord of the flies

LOTFRead it in: probably around three weeks

Yes, yes, more old books, I’m sorry, new ones will come once I finish the 800+ pages (though highly enjoyable) tome that is Anna Karenina.

Anyway, I’ve been wanting to do this one for a while.

This one is a must-read for everyone.  Well-written, unforgettable, full of allusions, questions of morality and courage, questions of sanity and insanity.  And the best part is that the entire cast (apart from one adult and a pig’s head) is made up of children.

There’s something alluring about having a character cast of all children, especially in a novel such as this one.  Children tend to be one of those avoided subjects in literature and film – if you’re going to do something bad to someone, let it not be a child.  They aren’t killed in many murder mysteries (only the pluckier ones) or are always portrayed as the victims.  Children are always the ones saved by Superman and not the unfortunate ones who die along the way.

But in this book, children are both the victims and the perpetrators of crimes.  Not only this, but these crimes cannot be blamed on much else but their violent nature, as they are stuck on an island with nobody else to influence them.  As the events of the story unfold, the once innocent group splits into factions, fantastical rumours spread around the island, a killing spree is begun and a lonely boy begins to hear a voice from a pig’s head mounted on a stick, referring to itself as the ‘Lord of the Flies’.

This novel is both childish and startlingly mature at the same time.  While the characters are young and subject to childish beliefs, fears and fits of rage, the way in which these emotions translate into actions is frightening.  The killing of others is something we usually attribute to adults and not to children under a certain age.  Despite this, numerous characters are killed as a result of petty fights and splits within the group.  Perhaps, then, killing is not an action that should be attributed to adults, but to any person at any time within a desperate situation.  We cannot say that such violent actions are beyond children, as Golding reveals in a frightening manner in this book.

No wonder this book won the Nobel Prize.  It was a novel idea for its time.  Casting children as the perpetrators of violence was a shocking thing.  Not only that, but this book is set during the war.  While the adults are killing one another over petty things, the children too begin doing the same thing.  In the end, the children are rescued but, as Stephen King said in an introduction to ‘Lord of the Flies’ I once read, ‘who will save the adults?’

Read it if you: are a person who is literate, I think this book is necessary reading for everyone.

While you read it listen to: O Children Nick Cave, Liar Liar Taking Back Sunday (alludes to this book in the lyrics), Escape 30 Seconds to Mars, Beleriand The Middle East

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Classics/Last Name G

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