2010 Reading #20: The Hollowing by Robert Holdstock

Books 1-10.
11. The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein.
12. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow.
13. The Bone Forest by Robert Holdstock.
14. Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld by Lucy Moore.
15. Fredrick L. McGhee: A Life on the Color Line, 1861-1912 by Paul D. Nelson.
16. Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley.
17. East by Edith Pattou.
18. Early Candlelight by Maud Hart Lovelace.
19. A Dark Matter by Peter Straub.

20. The Hollowing by Robert Holdstock (Re-read). During my first go-round with Holdstock it was this book that more or less derailed me, by which I mean that after reading it much of the urgency I'd felt to read every other book about Ryhope Wood faded. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a bad book, but it's not quite as fresh as Mythago Wood or as transcendent as Lavondyss, and it's the first book that feels dependent on those earlier books to make sense. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the structure and themes feel too familiar. Characters find their way into the wood and become ensnared; the evocation of the primitive in the environment echoes an at least temporary reversion to same in the mindset of the characters; familiar legends are re-interpreted in frightening ways. These are all compelling things, at least to me, but I guess it doesn't feel like Holdstock is doing much here he didn't do in the earlier books. There is the collision of science and technology with the myth-engine, in a more overt way than in Mythago Wood, and perhaps I should appreciate that more than I do; instead I dislike it, possibly because it punctures the sense of mythic resonance which is so much of what I enjoy about these books, even de-mystified and grubbed up as Holdstock presents it. There are other things which bother me about The Hollowing, notably the story and depiction of the Lakota woman Helen Silverlock; the fact that the first time Holdstock introduces mythical/magical workings independent of the wood is in relation to Native American characters strikes me as problematic. And after Lavondyss, which featured perhaps Holdstock's best character work in the person of Tallis Keeton, it's a disappointment that Richard and Alex both feel so under-realized. There are things I do like about this book, though, most especially Holdstock's portrait of Jason and the Argonauts as brutal, greedy, and terrifying. It's interesting (to me, anyway) that I must have been feeling some of this when I first read this fifteen years ago, when I would have been unable to articulate most of it. I don't do that much re-reading, but re-visiting these books has been a valuable exercise.

2010 Reading #21: And Now We are Going to Have a Party

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.

21. And Now We are Going to Have a Party by Nicola Griffith. Memoirs tend to make me uncomfortable; there, I said it. Some memoirs are like a person who overshares in a crowded bar, a person at the next table whom you don't know, have no desire to know, and yet by the end of the evening you know more about their personal life than you do about your own. Some memoirs are about lives so adventurous that they make me feel like the most boring person alive; and some of those, of course, are full of lies. When I read a memoir I inevitably start to wonder if I could write one, and the answer--so far, anyway--is always no. But I digress. It's perhaps trickiest to read a memoir like this, written by someone you vaguely know and are somewhat in awe of, as I am of Nicola Griffith. Here she paints--sometimes in broad strokes, sometimes in splashes of raw color--her development as a person and a writer, from her earliest memories to her move from England to the U.S. in 1989. It's a compelling narrative, and a very personal and vulnerable one, presented in a box-of-memories format, with five chapbooks containing the book, a CD, postcards, and a box of childhood writings and drawings. It's also made me think that perhaps one of the reasons that memoirs make me uncomfortable is that they can offer simultaneous flashes of recognition and alienation; there are parts of Griffith's story that are like mine, and then there are other parts that are very unlike. It's the push-and-pull of intimacy and difference that we always get when we are close to someone, so dissonant and yet so necessary; in that sense in particular, writing a book like this is an act of bravery. Not uncomfortable or dubious, but like a friendly conversation over a couple of drinks sitting at a booth in a half-filled pub, it's just right.