I warn you: the Master and Commander series once took up the better part of three weeks of my life. If you get past “H.M.S. Surprise” there is no turning back.

How true, Mr. G. If even JW likes Patrick O’Brien (and she has a lot of distaste for the merely fanciful—very down to earth is our JW) there really is no turning back.

G, Michael Sullivan reports almost exactly the same thing. At any rate, I could stand to lose three weeks of my life to something more worthwhile than re-watching episode after episode of the Simpsons. It’s getting to where I can hardly imagine characters in books without yellow skin and funny voices.

Hurrah! I’m so happy someone else has a visceral dislike of Gaiman, and feels bad about it! My current theory it isn’t just that the prose is bad, but that it’s intentionally, wilfully bad, carefully constructed awfulness. Or possibly the, I don’t know, the world weariness? Something. But I’m with you that I’m surprised how much I hate his books. Normally, I just end up not finishing books. With him, I want to tear them up into little pieces and jump on them. My excuse was that he aspires to the mantle of all my favorite humor writers; wodehouse, adams, pratchett. Though you don’t like them either, so that isn’t your problem.

O’Brien, on the other hand, is delightful; adorable in the way only an obsessive rambling on about his hobby can be. Though a bout of reading Jane Austen, Dickens and O’Brien a few years ago made me question why precisely I seem incapable of enjoying books about my own people and times.

Tim,

As a fellow lover of at least two of the authors you mentioned in your last paragraph (Dickens being perhaps the odd man out), I know about that problem of which you speak. While I’m sure that you would grant that the poetry of Austen and O’Brian are not trapped in the historical settings of their novels, it is difficult not to admire the times in which they set their work. As a suggestion for a work of art set in our time that somehow might be enjoyable, to use your standard, I can offer something I recently discovered, even if it is not strictly speaking a book. The Wire both transcends its questionable medium and somehow, in the first season at least, manages to convey the moral weight and variety of well-drawn characters that one normally finds in a novel. It also happens to be telling the often-ignored story of America’s cities, with an authorial voice that never minces words. And even as it surpasses television’s frail boundaries of style and structure, it somehow possesses an excellence unique among film. Anyway, it’s awesome, and I’d be surprised if one couldn’t get as much out of it as, say, Bleak House.

Nate,

Glad to hear of your opinions about Gaiman. I read a short story of his upon the recommendation of a fan, who happens to be a mutual friend, and found it unsatisfying. I’ll have to read more, though, to form a truly informed opinion. I do live with two huge fans, after all.

G,

I agree wholeheartedly with your statement about O’Brian. Though it should not diminish the succeeding 17 books, I still find H.M.S. Surprise to be my favorite, mostly for the events in India. I’m sorry we haven’t had the chance to discuss our admiration of this series (single novel?) before. For whatever it’s worth, Mr. Page had read them at least twice and shares our esteem.

I was surprised, Nate, to see you be apologetic about your opinion here. Be consistent, man. You express strong opinions about art as frequently as you say anything else here, but when you anticipate that your opinions won’t fall in line with what the rest of us think, you usually seem to revel in it. You all but explicitly tell your loyal readers to argue with you. Why should this be any different? Are you running out of gauntlets to throw?

If you think that the strength of your reaction was more tied to your senseless bouts of grumpiness, I understand that.

As someone who likes Gaiman, I completely understand why someone wouldn’t. The token straight man in any of his novels is typically the least interesting character and just serves to keep the plot linear (sometimes with the dual role of bringing out the humanity in others, which is insipid) because other elements would otherwise fall into chaos. This isn’t necessarily the ideal way to write. I can only speak for myself, but I think that it’s the bits threatening to fall into chaos that pique the interest of people who really like Gaiman. He leaves threads hanging in his descriptions of mythologies and characters in a way that not many people other than Tolkien have pulled off so tantalizingly since, and he had a vivid, rough-edged imagination. He appeals to the vanity of fantasy fans by making references they’re proud to get in intelligent and unexpected ways. And he does often find ways of transforming mundane things into fantastic ones. Shadow is never going to carry the book, though. If you have any will left to understand why people whose opinions you generally value might like him, it’s remotely conceivable that you might find Neverwhere less offensive. It’s a much better book.

Neverwhere’s certainly less ambitious and thus more successful. It reminds me quite a bit of ‘Star Wars’ in its purity and simplicity of plot. A straight-up quest, no distractions, no frills. I didn’t care very much for ‘American Gods’ the first time I read it, and interestingly it’s been improving on each re-reading.

If I understand you correctly, Neil Gaiman bothers you at least in part because you want to like the kind of thing he’s setting out to do. There are two reasons I love him. The first is that he’s got a grasp of what fairy tales should do. He’s not embarassed about having a strongly moral universe. The second is not so much mechanical as atmospheric; all his best stories concern the intersection of the ordinary and the fantastical in such a way that the ordinary becomes charged with significance.

I commend your instincts, since I really can’t think of a better antidote to fantasy that fails to resonate than O’Brien. There is nothing at all fantastical about him; he makes demands on entirely different (separate?) faculties of the imagination.

I’m pleased to learn that people who I hold in high esteem agree with me on the M&C series. No offense Nate or Michael, but I sometimes find your taste in movies/books (e.g. steadfast support of “Punch Drunk Love”) to cause the same visceral reaction in me as when I see people put ice into red wine. Agreement is a welcome change. As a point of order that you all may or may not be aware of, Patrick O’Brien is a big admirer or Jane Austen so I am not surprised that her name joined his in this conversation.

I would agree that Neverwhere (and maybe even Anansi Boys as well, though the ending is somewhat unsatisfying) is in many ways a better book than American Gods, which even I would say is somewhat on the formulaic side. On the whole, though, I think Katherine nailed what I like about him. As for his writing style - well, all I can say is that I pity anyone who’s cursed with the ability to actually notice mediocre prose. They hate all my favorite books. (Rereading the early Harry Potters over the last week, I found that even I winced occasionally.)

Martin, you’ve summed up well why I never clicked with a lot of nerd culture favorites. No need to pity, though. There’s plenty of reading to be had by those of us who want something more than mediocre prose.

Merry Christmas, all.

G: I would like to compliment you on what a fine and satisfying insult you broke out for M. Sullivan and myself—I repeated it to at least three people over the Christmas holiday. Seldom does one receive a jibe so full of excellent rhetorical flair. That said, I can merely shake my head at the attempt to understand what manner of soul prefers, say, The Sting, a film of mediocre hijinks, to Punch Drunk Love, a film with the courage to stare deep into the modern soul without ever flinching or shying away. Happily, there is much time to attempt to convert you to the good.

Martin: I’m not sure there’s anything I hate purely because of its mediocre prose; too often, though, mediocre prose and mediocre plotting seem to go hand-in-hand. In fact, I can think of far more examples where mediocre plotting sits behind brilliant prose (Susanna Clark, for one). The latter, while tolerable, is no great fare, either.

Katherine:

…All his best stories concern the intersection of the ordinary and the fantastical in such a way that the ordinary becomes charged with significance.

Few sentences could better describe what I want out of a story—what I have received in abundance from such stories as E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle and even, dare I say, Terry Brooks’s Running with the Demon. (I would have previously been embarassed to mention the latter of these, as Brooks definitely has rather poor prose himself, and also falls victim to a fair amount of annoyingly predictable plot devices. But Running With the Demon is less culpable in both these regards than is American Gods.)

That’s why the way Gaiman’s characters interact with the fantastical comes as such a blow to me—they react with the most boring kind of incredulity. Similarly, the fantastic creatures act as if they are as delighted to be merely physics-violating as we would be had we newly discovered the ability. I can’t believe in that kind of fantasy.

Compare this to Daniel Pinkwater, whose characters are misfits who readily accept the fantastical, hardly blinking an eye, already as ready to believe in the crazy things that happen as the reader is. (Anyone who has not read any Pinkwater, by the way, really, really ought to.)

I’ve always really liked Gaiman’s prose style. I’m just saying. I think it’s lovely. I didn’t think it was as great in American Gods particularly when it was focused on Shadow (I quite liked the interludes, and the “Coming to America” bits). I think Stardust is probably my favorite, it is the closest to a fairy tale, and the only main character not raised in the realm of Faerie was raised alongside it and so accepts it in a stride.

I am utterly incredibly picky about prose. JK Rowling’s prose style hurts to read, but I think she has done a good enough job in her world creation that I am able to forgive her, largely. But there are many others who I just can’t get past their prose; I don’t entirely remember what it is that made me unable to read Terry Brooks, but his prose might’ve been part of it. (It could’ve also felt terribly like a “boy” book, which I can almost never sit through. Brianne makes fune of me mercilessly about my inability to read “boy” books or books about animals (I have never read Watership Down because it is about rabbits).)

Anyway. That is all I have to say in defense of Mr. Gaiman. I really like him. I like his prose, and I think he’s a wonderful storyteller, and I think his grasp of mythology and fairy tales is wonderful. I will hold onto this in the face of your hatred far better than I held onto enjoying Love Actually, possibly because I have been reading and enjoying Neil Gaiman since before he was writing novels.

Just to be clear, Neil Gaiman is approximately 3.452E99 times less bad than is Love Actually.

Also: you should read Watership Down. It quotes Aeschylus!

You should go read Watership Down immediately! I’d loan you a copy if mine hadn’t been stolen and also I weren’t going to Singapore in the morning.

I recently re-watched Love Actually and found it just as good this time around. It’s silly in places, but on the whole it’s a great movie.

And as you sit here on this porch and wonder, “How the time flies by…”
Are you more amazed at how things change
Or how they stay the same?

—Cheryl Wheeler, “75 Septembers”

Come on, man! Susannah Clarke’s plotting whups slimy donkey snout!