Book Review: The Apprentice Journals

Title: The Apprentice Journals
Author: J Michael Shell
Year Published: 2013

Genre: Science fiction, Fantasy, Romance, Erotica

In the future envisioned by The Apprentice Journals, civilisation as we know it has been destroyed. Why? Because we humans were so caught up in our dead environments that we lost touch with the Elementals – spirit-like embodiments of the classical elements that make up our world. This is turn led to the Elementals forgetting all about our existence, meaning that when they had their giant, world-wide, non-human-friendly, natural-disaster-causing orgies, they sort of decimated mankind. In the new world order that emerges, some humans are born as Apprentices, people who have the power to communicate with Elementals and manipulate the elements. Apprentices to what, you ask? Well, the book never tells us. Those that “finish” their training are just called Finished Apprentices, so I’m guessing they’re Apprentices to Apprentices? Or Elementals? I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. And that, incidentally, pretty much summarises my experience of The Apprentice Journals.

That said, my favourite thing about the book was in fact its magic system. Superhuman powers in science fiction tend to be mental in nature and a result of some sort of mutation. Here, however, we have a post-apocalyptic world with elemental environment-based magic. It’s pretty unique and also intense. From the first page you’re plunged right into it, which can be intimidating given how technical it gets, but after the initial weirdness and learning curve you get to appreciate how intricate it is. The magic stuff plays a major part in the book, so if you hate magic then this is not the post-apocalyptic book for you.

So the main character is a white dude named Spaul. He’s an Apprentice journeying north in what remains of the good ol’ US of A, for no obvious reason, but that’s cool, maybe he’s just like drifting or whatever. Along the way he meets a girl named Pearl, who’s black, hot and mute. That’s pretty much it. Well, a lot of things happen, but it’s hard to explain what the plot is, since all the ‘events’ seem like side quests to the main plotline of this northward yet directionless journey. A lot of time is spent travelling between settlements or chilling at the beach, but there are also occasions where stuff gets really odd – so odd it feels like you’re reading a different book entirely. There are abrupt forays into what feels like different genres or different times, and while this didn’t make for a cohesive world or story, it certainly kept things interesting.

Now, there are a number of issues I had with this book.

Let’s start with race.

So apparently, even in the post-apocalyptic world of the future, we have some old world race issues. Two things in particular almost made me choke when I read them. The first is town of Tara. Taking us right back to Civil War race relations, the town is essentially a black slave ranch run by white dudes, the leader of whom has a (hot) black woman on the side. The second is the portrayal of black people. If the “negra” being slaves weren’t enough, you also have Pearl’s father and the butler guy speaking like blatant stereotypes (“Hear that you l’il sheet-eater, Mistah Kurtz Missuh ‘Prentice gonna fix yo’ feets!” p25), though to be fair, the Irish guy is also stereotyped (“Aye, and yer a fishin’ machine, Spaul! Aye’ve never seen any so fast as ye!” p 54). I mean, you can also tell that the author has an interest in language, but what he does with it is not enough. The overall approach lacks rigour and the quirky bits feel half-baked. This makes the written-in accents – only present in black people and that one Irish guy – stand out even more, which is especially egregious given this story was published just last year. There is a huge focus on race in this book and it’s a problem because the topic is handled with very little sensitivity.

Here’s where I get to the sex.

I’ll be honest: from the blurb and the cover, I’d assumed this would be a young adult novel. How wrong I was! In the very first chapter, Spaul talks about “loving” some Fierae Elementals. Throughout the course of the book, he takes part in Elemental orgies, is offered sex/daughters, causes orgies, and last but not least, has lots and lots of sex with Pearl (or to be more precise, Pearl’s body – a whole other can of worms I won’t even get into). Strangely, it’s never super explicit. There are just orgasms: orgasms everywhere. The entire book was like one big masturbatory fantasy. This wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but hey, if you’re after some white dude/black girl magic sex in natural settings, then take note.

What makes this situation worse is the fact that Pearl is so objectified – she’s the kind of character whom everyone thinks is gorgeous and whose items of clothing are meticulously described. I may be totally off base here, but my overall impression, from the sex, the idolisation of Pearl and the handling of race issues, was that the guy has a fetish. The Spaul character brings to mind those (white) guys who think they’re progressive for being able to appreciate the ‘exotic’ beauty of ‘foreign’ (non-white) women. I don’t know if I’m just being crazy here and reading too much into things, but that was my honest impression. I often felt uncomfortable reading the book and not in a good way.

To sum, reading this novel is like stumbling upon the weird part of the Internet: it’s unlike anything else you’ve seen before, it deals with something weirdly specific (and somehow sex-related), and it’s somewhat but definitely frightening for reasons you can’t quite explain. The Apprentice Journals is undoubtedly unique. While I really liked the “atmosphere” and magic system, the (human) world-building felt lacking and I’m not sure what to make of the strange “plot”, which, by the way, ends with sequel bait. I’m also massively leery of how the author handles race issues: it’s suspect at best and racist at worst. That said, this book is certainly an interesting read if only for its strangeness.

Alex’s Rating: 2/5
(Disclaimer: I received this book for free through Goodreads’ First Reads.)

Book Review: Love in the Time of Cholera

Title: Love in the Time of Cholera
Author: Gabriel García Márquez; English translation by Edith Grossman
Year Published: 1985, translation 1988
Genre: Romance, General and literary fiction, Erotica, Drama, Historical fiction

Florentino Ariza falls in love with the beautiful Fermina Daza, but just as the two are about to marry, Fermina breaks it off. Worse, she marries the prestigious Doctor Juvenal Urbino instead. Florentino lives a dissolute lifestyle as he pines for his true love, while the seemingly perfect Urbinos struggle with their marriage. Some fifty years later, the old paramours reunite, giving Florentino a second chance to declare his feelings.

Put this way, the plot sounds very straightforward, and I suppose it is. And yet, the book is absolutely captivating. Márquez brings his characters to life in a way that is simply masterful. The protagonists are only ever almost likeable (for me, at least), but there is no doubting that they are human in all their flaws and virtues. As you read their stories, you become intimately acquainted with who they are, how they feel and how they think, though at the same time, there is something about each person that is left a mystery. An exquisite depth and breadth of human experience is captured within these pages, from the mundane to the alarming. The book covers events as varied as Fermina’s and Urbino’s greatest argument (there was soap!) to Florentino’s defecation in a carriage and the brutal murder of a woman following infidelity.

Cholera is set in an unnamed city, presumably in Colombia, during the turn of the 20th century. It’s a context with various social, political and yes, medical concerns which all go to shaping the identity of the characters. Though the flavour of the setting suffuses the entire book, it never overwhelms; rather, it forms a natural part of the story, the characters and the writing. On that note, there is something sensual, visceral and almost sweaty about the way this book is written. I admire the English translator for having achieved (or preserved) this atmosphere, but at the same time, I can only at speculate as to how much has been lost in translation.

I will mention now that while romantic love is the focus of the book, sex and sex-related topics feature prominently. It is at this point that I turn to our hero Florentino Ariza. While some may see him as the ultimate romantic, to me, he is, more than anything, one seriously creepy dude. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that he’s the most polarising character of the book. Be ye warned for the spoilery discussion below (though you might want to know about these things if you intend to read the book as a romance) – highlight to read.

<major spoilers>

So, how is Florentino creepy? Well, he “falls in love” with the thirteen year old Fermina at the moment he first he lays eyes on her, transforming into what we nowadays would call a stalker. While we get a great sense of his passion and obsession, there is no real sense of why he “loves” her so fiercely; he just does, or thinks he does. When he is rejected, he swears to stay faithful to her: after all, her husband has to die at some point. Later, after Florentino is sort of raped on a boat, he becomes a sex maniac. He dedicates himself to seeking out women who’ll have sex with him and he documents his encounters in writing. His various affairs (622 apparently) comprise a large portion of his life and of the book. But of course, our hero must stay true to his One True Love, meaning he basically treats these women as (thankfully consensual) sex objects.

As overblown and ridiculous as Florentino’s feelings might seem at times, it’s easy to believe that he believes them. Despite his shifty behaviour, it’s also possible to root for him and wish for his happiness… for most of the book.  For this reader, our hero crosses the moral event horizon when he goes all Humbert Humbert on us near the end, which, as a friend deftly put it, is “totally not cool”. At this point, I found him so morally repugnant that I was all the more amazed at my ability to still kind of sympathise for him. It’s a testament to the author’s skill that he can write a character so vile and so human, whose actions can be seen as both romantic and sociopathic at the same time. I found the ending, with all its romantic airs, to be highly unsettling. The book’s brilliant like that. 

</spoilers>

Love in the Time of Cholera is an exploration of love and lust; it demands its reader to think about love and what it is. You may conclude that this is a story of the deepest love, or alternatively, that none of the characters know love at all. It makes you wonder what you know of love. Additionally, the book touches on themes of time and mortality. The foibles of the human body and the vicissitudes of aging are thrown into the limelight, adding another dimension to our thoughts on love – how it lasts and how it changes. There are no easy answers. These notions are integrated organically within the story, and to read and think about them is thus never a chore (…and that is all I will say about the book’s ~themes, for I am neither doing homework nor writing a set of CliffsNotes).

Beautifully written and startlingly human, I highly recommend Love in the Time of Cholera. While it’s an immersive read, you should know that it’s not a necessarily a comfortable one. It’s primarily a meditation on love, but it also deals with sex, perversion and degenerating bodies, which might not be what everyone is after. For what it’s worth, I personally found it tender, sad and disturbing – and much too ominous to be romantic (seriously, look at Florentino, man). It’s not so much a love story as a story about love. The book can be wonderfully romantic, frighteningly sinister, or something else entirely, depending on your interpretation, and that’s what makes Love in the Time of Cholera such a masterpiece.

Alex’s Rating: 4.5/5

Book Review: The Book Thief

Title: The Book Thief
Author: Markus Zusak
Year Published: 2005
Genre: Historical fiction, Young adult

Set in Nazi Germany, The Book Thief tells the story of Liesel Meminger, a German girl who goes to live in the fictional town of Molching after being fostered to new parents. It’s a Holocaust bildungsroman that’s proven massively popular, so much so that it’s now also a movie, coming soon to a cinema near you.

The first thing you notice about the book is the writing style. Death serves as the narrator, and in addition to the story proper, we occasionally get Death’s commentary, which comes in the form of asides.

~* An Illustration of what I mean *~

This is what Death’s commentary looks like in the book.
Passages like this interrupt everything and they’re everywhere.

Just everywhere.
Is ‘commentary’ even the right word?

Extensive use of imagery pervades the novel and the prose itself can be rather stylised. For the most part, it’s very readable, but now and then you get the feeling that words and phrases were carefully chosen and polished for maximum poetic effect.

~* A Sample of Mr Zusak’s Writing, taken from Page Fourteen *~

“For hours, the sky remained a devastating, home-cooked red. The small German town had been flung apart one more time. Snowflakes of ash fell so lovelily you were tempted to stretch out your tongue to catch them, taste them. Only, they would have scorched your lips. They would have cooked your mouth.”

It’s a very quirky style and it demands to be noticed. Its popularity with readers is understandable: it’s unique, it’s lyrical and it has that lush quality about it. However, I personally was put off by the self-consciousness of it all; it just wasn’t to my taste.

~* Heck, here’s another, this time from Page Three Hundred and Eighty-two *~

“At times, in the basement, she woke up tasting the sound of the accordion in her ears.”
There are more like this, but I can’t be bothered finding them.

You get the gist.

Most of the time, the style is relatively simple and neutral, but every so often some particularly ~poetic phrase comes along and takes you out of the story and into the mechanics of the writing. In these cases, the language and format feel particularly clumsy and childish, kind of like something a teenager would write (no offence to the Rimbauds out there). For these reasons, I also wasn’t entirely convinced by Zusak’s portrayal of Death as an entity. Having Death narrate your story is a brave choice, but I’m not sure it’s one the author pulled off.

~* Oh, and the German *~

Another minor problem I had was with the use of German words. They were sometimes translated into English and sometimes not. This just left me confused as to whether I was supposed to know the meanings of all the German words to properly read this book.

For a novel entitled The Book Thief, I expected more books and more thievery than what there actually is. Instead, the main concern of the book is Liesel’s day-to-day life, full of childhood adventure, schoolyard fights and nostalgia. We have the kind father, the shouty but loving mother, the boy who loves you and the enemy neighbour. They’re the ingredients for a slice-of-life sort of tale, and while there is nothing wrong with this – indeed, I liked it  – I believe that the title and blurb of The Book Thief give the impression that the story is a lot more epic than it actually is. So if you’re after an ‘exciting’ Holocaust novel, this probably isn’t the book for you.

On that note, one thing that irked me was the somewhat facile treatment of the historical context. Now, perhaps it’s because the first pieces of Holocaust fiction I read were The Reader and Maus, but I found this book to be almost insultingly simple. While this may all be very well for a middle grade or (young) young adult reader (a story where Germans are the good guys? woah!), I would have liked more complexity all around. The characters are all pretty much either good or evil and what little exploration of moral issues there is seems rather shallow. For example, consider ‘The World Shaker’ (which, bizarrely, is printed in tiny, hard-to-read font), a book that features within The Book Thief. Written and illustrated by the persecuted Max, it includes an illustration of a man in The Führer Shop (page 475) selling containers of “FEAR”, “HATRED” and “small moustaches ½ price”. Now, if this isn’t the stuff of Year 8 Art projects, then I don’t know what is. I know this is classed as a young adult novel, and perhaps I’m being unfair, but I expected, well, more. Like an emo teen’s poetry on the livejournal of yore, The Book Thief isn’t nearly as deep as it wants to be.

~* The Reader and Maus *~

are both excellent books, by the way

(or at least, they were when I read them some ten years ago, wow, crap I’m old.

They’re by Bernhard Schlink and Art Spiegelman respectively.

I’d recommend The Reader if you want a bit more of an exploration into the ‘German side’ of things and I’d recommend Maus (which is a comic) generally, but also as an introduction for those just starting to learn about the Holocaust).

In addition to the pretentious style and the simplification of the context, another thing that irritated me was the ending. Now, we all know that this tale won’t end with flowers and sunshine, but still, it was so sudden and abrupt to the point where it felt almost like laziness. It’s as if the author thought, hmm, crap, how do I end this? Oh, I know! And yet I found myself getting teary-eyed even in my annoyance.

I know this review reads like a litany of complaints, but I did enjoy this novel overall. It’s hard not to feel for – or at least like – Liesel and her family and the other ‘good’ characters. Her coming-of-age in a small town was, as odd as it sounds, a pleasure to read. It’s warm and bittersweet, with a healthy dose of charm. Her relationships, and especially that with her father, shine with a real humanity and sense of love. All in all, there’s such a bright-eyed earnestness about The Book Thief that I couldn’t help but be moved despite all my problems with it.

~* One Last Thing *~

Happy New Year!

Alex’s Rating: 3/5