Eleven: A Novel by Mark Watson


[rating=3] It takes a certain kind of person to laugh at the world, professionally. I have never met a truly happy, or even upbeat comedian; they’re all clowns, crying on the inside. ‘Eleven’ is definitely a book that is crying on the inside, despite its cartoony, Dilbert-esque cover.

Ignore the back-cover précis that suggests you’ll be “humorously” exploring life. The plot touches on bullying, theft, obesity, stammering, halitosis, drugs, ill-temper, anger, infidelity, divorce… it’s a cornucopia of awkward situations and mortification of the flesh. It’s NOT funny. Or, perhaps it IS funny, since modern humour seems to have an insatiable thirst for casual cruelty.

As television sitcoms devolved from ‘Seinfeld‘s astonished disbelief at human folly to the gleeful exploitation of misery in ‘The Office‘, ‘Arrested Development‘ and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm‘; so this book takes the admixture of joys and disappointments found in ‘Love, Actually‘ and decides that the moral of the story is NOT “love is all around”, but rather, “life’s a bitch and then you die”.

I did not love this, but it was a quick, smooth read. By the end I felt respect for the author’s ambition and technical proficiency. The emotions it provoked were not uplifting; mostly dread and embarrassment on behalf of the losers and loners populating the text. Still, it drew me in, and that speaks to skilled writing. Also, it contained Scrabble, which I love.

I suspect Watson is aiming at a sobering “Shakespeare’s Fool” angle: raw, caddish, exposing faults and proposing societal corrections. But who plays the fool? While Xavier doles out advice on his late-night radio talk show, he fails to embrace his own teachings, and is mocked and sorted out in turn by Pippa, who has problems of her own.

The third-person omniscient narrator takes omniscience seriously, delivering random Cassandra-like prognostications about the future of various minor players. Playing God, telling us that a man on the periphery of the plot will be dead in three years, or that a child will grow up to do something special decades from now, leeched away significance from their actions in the present. The loss of sequence lead me to feel a lack of consequence, left me unable to connect to characters whose fates had already been revealed / sealed by the author.

Tackling eleven story lines in 300 pages is also extremely ambitious; if you do the math, 11 divided by 300 works out to about 27 pages each, and actually it’s less than that, since the lion’s share focuses on Xavier.

(I never grasped the “significance” of the number eleven, as the author clearly hoped I would do, according to his self-penned reading group discussion questions. It’s a number, dude, not a “concept”.)

Following the threads of multiple characters with interweaving story lines is a harder sell in writing than in film. Without faces or other visual clues to help identify characters, it’s easy to get confused by the onslaught of names. I found myself flipping back and forth between chapters, struggling to keep track of “who’s who”, wishing I’d taken notes. I imagine reading this as an e-book would be a nightmare, unless you do it all in one sitting or have an exceptionally good memory.

Watson complicates things by tossing multiple nationalities and locales into the mix: the book takes place in London, England but the main narrator has flashbacks to life in Australia, and meets a girl with Geordie speech patterns. My brain had trouble switching accents.

I will conclude on a positive note: Mark Watson has a knack for writing good similes. He doesn’t overuse “like” or “as”, but when he provides comparisons, they are expressive and evocative.

Here’s a sample about a recently cleaned flat, with a string of similes that I enjoyed:

“The kitchen boasts an almost pained sheen as if it were a patient still weak from an operation: the surfaces look, superficially at least, like the untouched worktops seen on display in IKEA. The bathroom too is like a scruffy boy scrubbed up for a school photograph, grimacing sheepishly in new clothes. The overall atmosphere in the flat is healthy, glossy, but there is a sense of exhaustion, as if the inanimate objects are in a kind of shock at their treatment.” (p. 62)

Note: DO NOT read this if you are about to do any solo babysitting for a friend’s precious infant. (Which is what I’m about to do next weekend, naturally.)

3 of 5 stars / bookshelves: read, 320 pages, Publisher: Scribner (2010)
Read from September 29 to October 04, 2012

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch


[rating=3] Do you enjoy anti-heroes, scoundrels, vengeance and blood?
If so, huzzah! ‘The Lies of Locke Lamora’ is for you.

It’s a boys-own adventure, the stuff of campfire legends. Tintin and Ocean’s Eleven and James Bond rolled into one. A Big Fish story, figuratively and literally, in that it is both crammed full of large sea creatures and also home to whopping great bald-faced lies. It’s the Three Musketeers, only there are five of them, and they’re pretty much just thieves. It’s a tale of piracy and plunder, with flashing blades, brash promises, and flying crossbow bolts. Pow! Zing! Bam!

For the 13-year-old boys in the crowd, there is no -mark me- NO romance. Nada. Zilch. Not even boy-girl kissing on the lips. There’s a very short scene with a prostitute that goes nowhere, and a marriage proposal that goes nowhere, and a long-lost girlfriend who never appears. Otherwise it’s 100% BROmance. All dudes bumping fists and comparing dagger lengths and pounding back brandy while watching gladiator sports, all the time.

It took a while for ‘The Lies of Locke Lamora’ to sink its hooks into me, possibly due to my deep-seated fear of sharks, giant squid and of course, sharktopuses (sharktopii?). Sets in this book are vivid, but wet. The City of Camorra, where we lay our scene, is a cross between medieval Venice and Amsterdam, full of canals and bays and harbours and floods, with fantastic glowing alien glass towers thrown in for flavour. It’s also got a teensy problem with gang violence and organized crime.

(No, really: Batman himself would roll up his bat-windows, lock his bat-doors, and run red lights to get out of Camorra before anyone stole his bat-rims. Makes Gotham look like Disneyland.)

Rarely have I seen such meticulously constructed sets, detailed with sights, sounds, and perfumes; painstakingly crafted to feel foreign and familiar at the same time. From the pantheon of the Thirteen Gods, drawing on our Greek and Roman myths, to details of the ascension of powerful Dukes and Dons, Capas and cutthroats: Camorra, Emberlain, and the Marrows are a great place to send your brain on vacation.

If I had to compare Lynch’s stuff to the work of another author, I’d say China Mieville’s ‘Perdido Street Station’ was the last book I read that was as juicy and stinky and lush and vicious. This book is oozing with blood and gore, wine and brandy, alchemy and other dark arts. Steampunk elements abound, including hand-crank chain elevators and obscure locking mechanisms.

So, I obviously enjoyed the setting. What didn’t I like? Well… two things.

First. The dialogue frequently irritated me. It was a little too cocksure, too sarcastic, too twee, too modern for the archaic setting. The first few pages of egotistical blather between the Thiefmaker and the Eyeless Priest were such a pissing contest that I struggled through them with some difficulty. And the jarring use of expletives felt more like Tourette’s than tough guy talk.

I’m not against the word “shit” – I use it myself, when I’m feeling verbally lazy. Note the “lazy” – shit is a shortcut, an abbreviation for a lengthier expression of amazement or anger or remorse. I want more eloquence from an author like Lynch, who delights on one page with the vulgar little gems he’s capable of writing, then throws a bucket of cold colloquialism over me. The brevity of “No shit?” is so inconsistent with the rest of Chains’s scripted, convoluted wordplay it made me flinch.

Second. I plead, I cry, I howl the feminist lament of gender inequality. Where are all the women? Others may disagree, but I feel that there are no significant female characters in the book. Yes, there are the bloodthirsty Berangias sisters, presented with no womanly characteristics whatsoever: They’re essentially dudes with boobs, and their dialogue mostly paraphrases “I’m gonna git you sucka!”. There’s Nazca Barsavi… Nope, I don’t even want to discuss Nazca.

There’s Lady Salvara the alchemical botanist, who has only one scene apart from her husband. Never explored in depth or given a backstory, she sticks to proper wifely tasks like seducing likely investors, pruning the topiary, and breeding alcoholic fruit. Zzzz. Boring.

I’ll avoid spoilers, but there’s one “powerful” hidden female character, whose entire power stems from the conceit that “NOBODY would expect a WOMAN to have power!” *gasp* And who incidentally is proven both physically and mentally inferior to men on three separate, important occasions in the book. She’s ensorceled, mocked, beaten and duped. Sigh.

Then there’s Sabetha – or at least, the promise of Sabetha, also known as “the character who wasn’t”. This was the deepest cut of all.

Author! I implore you, do NOT dangle the promise of a sassy female counterpart to ease up the testosterone-soaked atmosphere of your sausage-party, if she never fucking materializes. Ever. Why name her at all, if she doesn’t appear in the text? She’s a complete red-herring, a convenient door-stop to prevent Locke from expending his energy on a romantic subplot.

Several prostitutes whose actions were sketched out as bare footnotes to history saw more development than the mystery member of the team of (aptly named) GentleMEN Bastards. I’m sure this is all an elaborate set-up for the next books in the series, but it was poorly done to give no hint of her at all in 500 pages of sprawling narrative, where more than half the text is backstory.

[N.B. I looked up the not-yet-published books in the series – apparently the mythic Sabetha doesn’t make an appearance until BOOK THREE. Don’t hold your breath, people.]

A good work, a fun world, a thrilling conclusion. Terrific job interlacing Locke Lamora’s childhood backstory with his current day machinations. Could have used a firmer hand holding the editor’s pen.

3 of 5 stars / bookshelves: read, sci-fi/fantasy, 499 pages, Publisher: Bantam (2006)
Read from September 02 to 26, 2012