Rats & Gargoyles

[mundens]

Well, I have been waiting to post this for some time now.

I started reading Mary Gentle's Rats & Gargoyles well over three weeks ago.
From the start I knew I would want to write down my thoughts about it, but I decided to wait until after I had finished, to see if my initial impressions would be modified by completeing the book.


It turns out my intial impressions weren't modified as such but I did get a few new things to write about it by finishing.

A little background provides some interesting context. I had previously read Mary Gentle's Golden Witchbreed and Grunts. The latter suits the term "lunatic romp" used in it's cover blurb a nd was most enjoyable. The former I read so long ago I can't even remember what it was about I'm now tempted to read it again!

Recently I attended the Wellington City Mission book sale. I attended on the Sunday, and it was a wonderful experience. To attempt to clear the hall of books they began selling books by the foot! Three feet of books woould cost five dollars.

Surprisingly there were few people hanging round the SF/Fantasy section when they started doing this there. I had ample opportunity to carefully select my three feet of SF * FAntasy. I could have taken more, but I had some distance to walk to the car, and I had to carry them all. IN my three feet were seveal almost brand new books that had peviously been being sold at four or five dolllars each. One of those was a hardback copy of Rats & Gargoyles in pefect condition.

Of course, I now feel it was worth the cost of the entire three feet of books, most of which I have yet to read. I thank the City Mission for their subsidy of my reading life!

Then a week or so later the usual suspects were round LARPing at my place, and somene mentioned the book, and jarrat_gray said it was great book, so being in general agreement with his taste I decided to read that book next.

Now, I read primarily while I am on the train, I get about eighty minutes reading a day travelling to and from Wellingon City. This means I finish the average large book in about a week. But this time there were interruptions!
I ended up doing some writing on the train for one week trying to catch up on some LARP prep. Other days I had to leave the large book behind at work because I had to much oter stuff to carry (such as the wonderful Halloween LARP props I won't get a chance to show anyone for a while). That meant I missed reading it on two trips.

But finally I have now finished reading it.

And finishing is one of the issues I have with the book, so let's dis it first and then talk about how good it is afterwards.
Yes. Mary Gentle has the same ending problem here that Tolkien had in LoTR.

The climax occurs many pages prior to the last page, and while the tying up of loose ends is satisfying, it goes on and on and on and on. I thought I had finished the book, because the climax had occcurred, going home on a Friday afternoon. I didn't actually finish it until went to work the next Tuesday!

This leads on to one of the other problems I have with the book. It could have done with some serious editing for two primary reasons.

Firstly, there was a lot of stuff that was unneccessary and could have been cut without affecting the telling of the story, and would have made the story tighter and more focused. FOr instance, the entire blossoming romance between the Candovian ambassador Andaluz and Luk, the Lady of the Birds, was compltely unneccessary to the stiry, and in a book already crammed full of characters and plots was

Much of the description was overdone as well. While there some parts of the descriptuiion that were rally good, and the book woild have been lessened by their removal, in some areas there was just too much of it and it got a little repetitive

Secondly, many of the paragraphs and sentences are really confused, and could have done with being more clearly written. Don;t get me wrog I have nothing against the character voices being cofused and using archaic style, it is the explanatory prose itself that is deficit.

This was one reason it took me so long to finish, because I had to re-read so much of it in order to properly understand what was happening. I normally read a paragraph quite quickly, because most writers write much more clearly.

But on to the good bits!.

The things I liked about this book are :

The sheer quantity of ideas!
Only two other books in the past have ever made me think "There are enough ideas in is book to write several completely different books". One of those books was Garth Nix's Sabriel, and the other was Christopher Rowley's Starhammer. Nix of ccourse, wrote a trilogy, and Rowley expanded on just one of the many idea's in Starhammer, the intellgent virus, the Vang, which led to the books "The Vang: The Military Form" and "The Vang : The Battlemaster". I still wish he had written more about Raphsodical Stardimple and her ilk, insted of focuusing almost exclusively on Basil Broketail .
And now I wish there were more stories of some of the characters and thngs in Rats & Gargolyes

The Wonderful Humor!
The humour was not over done, except perhaps the lisping of the Serpent-Headed Night Council, most of it was the sort of bantering humour you normally get between freinds and it suited the book well. The characters benefited from it as the down-to-earth humour was one of the things that made what might have otherwise been overblown characters real.

The Dirt!
Mary Gentles's characters piss, shit, and fuck prettty much like normal people do
Her evironments are appropriately dirty, flies appear naturally, if inappropriatley.
The heroes do not manage to maintain spotless clothing in the face of adversity, it get's torn and filthy, and remains that wa until a chance occurs for a bath and new clothing.

Even the most lady-like and centred of characters might spill some thing on their dress, and the engineers who don't care, well, the description of Lord Architect Casusobon as he crawls from beneath a machine and pulls some food from his pocket makes him so real.

Memorable Moments
There were far too many to list, and that's the marrk of a good book to me, some books have no memorable moments, some only have one or two, Rats & Gargoyles had many.

Use of Insects
The use of insects, from bloated wasps as active agents of corruption to moths and butterfilies represnting the psyches of dying plague victims, to incidental flies and maggots.

Suffice it to say that I was very pleased with this book, and already miss it's characters and scenes.

I am not looking for a sequel however. I don't believe the book should have a sequel. While other books could be written in the same setting, or even in the past of the setting, they should be other stories and would not be as cosmic is scope.

Comments

Who dat?

[jarratt-gray.livejournal.com]

It can't have been this usual suspect because I haven't read it. In fact I haven't read much recently and never any Mary Gentle. I should read more, I even have three books borrowed on my pile, one of which I have been halfway through for over half a year.

As for the ending thing - it could be worse, have you ever read any Neil Stephensen?