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The Graveyard Book (Harper Collins, 2008) is the newest novel from the acclaimed author of adult and children’s novels, Neil Gaiman. The Graveyard Book follows the story of a boy, Nobody Owens, from infancy to young adulthood after the brutal murder of his parents and older sister and his subsequent “adoption” by the Owenses, two ghostly denizens of a nearby graveyard.
The U.S. Cover
The narrative structure follows the traditional pattern of the modern bildungsroman. The young protagonist, Nobody, is orphaned well before the age at which he can form memories of his parents. His youth is spent with guardians who cannot fundamentally understand him. Each of the people/ beings that he meets within the narrative provides an important tool, skill, or piece of information that will help him in his quest. The climax of the story involves a facing of the fear and anger associated with the events of his early life. The resolution involves separation from the comfort of the old life and the fulfillment of destiny in the new. Most importantly, the child protagonist has some profound and ambiguous destiny of which all others, except he, know and understand. Think for a few moments of Harry Potter and all becomes clear.
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The U.K. Cover (which I prefer)
If these motifs made up the sole substance of this story, I (and several million others) would not be reading, never mind blogging, about this novel, especially as adults reading children’s literature. It would have gone the way of the “Charlie Bone” series, that is into the fifth dimension of abused plots where the interesting, but poorly executed find their rest. What lies at the heart of the appeal and enjoyment of this novel is what I’ve come to term Gaiman-esque details, to borrow the neologistic structure of Kafka-esque for a moment. Gaiman is a master of delightfully eccentric, yet fully-fleshed, characters that inhabit worlds deceptively similar to our own. At times, his cast of characters can become positively Dickensian, as each saunters into the storyline with a charmingly odd name in tow. (I was particularly fond of his habit in this novel of introducing a character with their full name, dates of birth and death, and epitaph.)
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My favorite characters within the book are by far Silas, the ambiguously defined Guardian; Jack, the truly repulsive and disconcerting villain; Mrs. Lupescu, the Romanian nanny of dubious cooking skills; and Nehemiah Trot, the oblivious, showboating poet of little talent, to name just a few. Beyond these largely secondary characters stands Bod, short for Nobody, Owens. Now normally I’m not all that fond of child protagonists, as I find them often one-dimensional and impossibly pretentious or dim-witted. Not so with Bod. Gaiman manages to craft his character out of kindness, empathy, intelligence, innocence, and a true core of honesty while simultaneously making him substantial and accessible, not simply a flattened simulacrum of childhood.
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In addition to the veritable feast of fascinating personae in the book are the sparsely beautiful and profoundly disconcerting illustrations by Dave McKean, Gaiman’s frequent partner-in-crime all the way back to Sandman. I have provided a few here in the margins, but I would urge you not only to discover the remainder within the book, but also to seek out his complete multi-faceted and multi-media body of work. Might I suggest the full-length film featuring almost exclusively his artwork and animation, MirrorMask.
So, if you’re in the mood for a quick, darkly humorous, and truly enjoyable summer read, pick up The Graveyard Book. Trust me, you won’t regret it.
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Overall Rating: A-
T-compatible: Moderately (Dickensian cast of characters and plot details hidden in plain sight can make this a little difficult for the short commutes to work).
Weak Points: Bod’s travel to the land of the ghouls, Ghulheim
Strong Points: The sustained ambiguity of both the guardian, Silas, and the villain, the man Jack. The unexpected peaks of adult humor.
Things to look out for: A ghoul named the 33rd President of the United States (Truman). The names of the various Jack’s that take literally several colloquial expressions.
Further Reading: Coraline and MirrorMask (Neil Gaiman), Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury)
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The Official Neil Gaiman Home Page
Neil and His Magnificent Oracular Journal (Gaiman’s Personal Blog)
Mr. Bobo’s Remarkable Mouse Circus (Official Gaiman Children’s site – Check out The Graveyard Book “Video Tour,” as Gaiman reads the entire book through a series of signings and readings.)
The Dreaming (Excellent fan-site for all Gaiman news and appearances.)
Who Killed Amanda Palmer (Collaboration with Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls.)
The track that suits today is the wonderfully panicked concoction, “I’m Confused,” off the latest release (Face Control) from the Montreal-based Handsome Furs. This husband and wife duo, previously of the hugely successful Wolf Parade, are made up of Dan Boeckner on guitars and Alexei Perry on percussion/synthesizer. Their previous 2007 release from SubPop Records, Plague Park, is described as “Scandinavia as the couple experienced and envisioned it, jagged and pure landscapes, the melancholy yet hopeful air of April skies shining over frozen tundra, massive pine forests and an always looming Lutheran work ethic.”
The new LP, however, is a creature of a different stripe altogether. Where Plague Park is slow, brooding, and often nostalgic, Face Control is fast, grasping, and spare with fewer layers of sound. There are swift, crunching guitars and often rough, droning percussion. Boeckner and Perry describe the impetus for this latest album as the need to capture the desperation and isolation of living in a modern, technologically driven, and atomized society fuelled by efficiency and often devoid of true aesthetic beauty. This interpretation is best seen in three of the tracks, “Legal Tender,” “Evangeline,” and “I’m Confused.”
Today’s track suits so well a day that most full-time employed people will understand immediately. According to the law of averages, everyone at one time or another will find his or herself working with someone truly dim. Simple directions will be incomprehensible to them; intuitive leaps of judgment, impossible; complex reasoning to provoke future action, highly unlikely. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find that this elicits a response made up of equal parts frustration and incredulous confusion. You will find yourself asking yourself how some people manage to make their way in life at all. At times like these, there’s a song for you.
I’m confused opens with a barely audible, highly distorted guitar operating somewhere between an actual riff and white noise, and by the time you’ve noticed it, the screaming, pleading guitars kicks in alongside a percussion that sounds like a woman running down the street in high heels coming to a sudden stop. Shortly thereafter, Boeckner kicks in with vocals, strained and begging, admitting that it’s just too easy to confuse him. There’s no doubt about it, this song was meant to be an aural assault on your calm sanity, just like your co-workers. So strap on your iPod with those noise-cancelling headphones, tune out your inane colleagues, and dance along to guitar-fuelled catharsis.
P.S. Many thanks go out to Pulp & Circumstance for turning me on to the synthy deliciousness of this album.
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Aural Edibles:
I’m Confused (video) – Black goo zombie goodness right here! Random.
One thing that has become readily apparent while living with The Archivist these last two years, is that librarians (properly trained librarians, that is) can find just about anything, and do, on a daily basis. Thus, my life has become replete with forwarded emails of alternately interesting, bizzare, disturbing, or hilarious results of these fact-finding missions into the land of the internets. I’m not complaining, though. Sometimes taking a break from running the 25th protein gel of the month to watch a baby squirrel emerge from a woman’s cleavage during a police interview is all I need to keep me in the right frame of mind, namely not taking life too seriously.
However, startingly sober is the only way to describe the article sent to me Thursday last by The Archivist from the July 1st New York Times:
U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny
Mother Mary Clare Millea has been appointed by the Vatican to study the activities of some orders of nuns in the United States.
The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, a development that has startled and dismayed nuns who fear they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition. [...] The more extensive of the two investigations is called an “Apostolic Visitation,” and the Vatican has provided only a vague rationale for it: to “look into the quality of the life” of women’s religious institutes. [...] The investigation was ordered by Cardinal Franc Rodé, head of the Vatican office that deals with religious orders. In a speech in Massachusetts last year, Cardinal Rodé offered barbed criticism of some American nuns “who have opted for ways that take them outside” the church.
The second investigation of nuns is a doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization that claims 1,500 members from about 95 percent of women’s religious orders. This investigation was ordered by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is headed by an American, Cardinal William Levada [...] saying an investigation was warranted because it appeared that the organization had done little since it was warned eight years ago that it had failed to “promote” the church’s teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation.
Besides these two investigations, another decree that affected some nuns was issued in March by the Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The bishops said that Catholics should stop practicing Reiki, a healing therapy that is used in some Catholic hospitals and retreat centers, and which was enthusiastically adopted by many nuns. The bishops said Reiki is both unscientific and non-Christian. (Actually several scientific studies have demonstrated quantifiable improvements in physiological factors as a result of Reiki administration.)
The article goes on to parallel these investigations with another “apostolic visitation” being conducted of the Legionaries of Christ whose founder has been accused of sexually assaulting seminarians and fathering an illegitimate child. The wild divergence in the nature of the acts spurring these investigations suggests a reaction to the roles of modern, women religious in the church that is woefully overwrought. I find it telling that among the complaints of doctrinal laxity, the male-only priesthood is listed first. This issue of gendered power within church hierarchy is what I believe lies at the heart of these investigations and decrees.
As more and more women religious gain higher education and increased opportunity for advancement (in many areas, not just intellectual), as a direct result of the reforms instituted by VaticanII, their roles within the church must necessarily change. Their skills and expectations of what they can achieve are greater. Their conception of the role of the church in the smaller world of its followers and the larger global world is inevitably more complex. And most of all, the merging of these attributes with the fundamental Christian belief in the care of those who are in need results in a more active and vocal religious community. The crux of the matter here is that active and vocal lay within what is perceived as a male-only religious adjectival domain.
I have long thought that a further split within the Catholic church was on the horizon, but I had always imagined it would come from a different direction. The outrage of both men and women religious over the church’s stance on safe-sex in the midst of a continuing AIDS pandemic and a global overpopulation problem always seemed like the sure bet for schism. The compassionless moral high ground of the ban on condoms in areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa smacks against the spirit of Christianity and not to mention one of the ten commandments. Thus, I believed the clash between those who wished to recapture a faith of Christ’s compassion and those who wished to ensconce themselves in greater power would be inevitable. However, perhaps something as fundamental as human biology will provide the catalyst for change. One’s sex is irrespective of virtue or vice, and therefore ill-suited to defining who is more capable of religious leadership.
I’ll close with a quote from God Emperor of Dune which I’m often reminded of when issues of gender and the Catholic church arise.
The female sense of sharing originated as familial sharing — care of the young, the gathering and preparation of food, sharing joys, love and sorrows. Funeral lamentation originated with women. Religion began as a female monopoly, wrested from them only after its social power became too dominant. Women were the first medical researchers and practitioners. There has never been any clear balance between the sexes because power goes with certain roles as it certainly goes with knowledge.
The Stolen Journals
Peter, Michael, and Mike in their serious faces.
This beauty hails from the relatively recent release from R.E.M., Accelerate. After a self-proclaimed dismal showing with the previous three LPs – Up, Reveal, Around The Sun – Accelerate does just that, pick up some serious speed straight to your gut. It’s songs are short, raw, and charged with a youthful, punky energy that finds its anthem in the final track’s stubbornly simple lyrics – “Death is pretty final. I’m collecting vinyl. I’m gonna DJ at the end of the world.”
I have, in my usual way, chosen one of the more mature, maybe even morose, pieces on this album to provide my soundtrack landscape of the day. “Hollow Man” is a genius blend of the more introspective, awkwardly personal Michael Stipe of the previous three albums and the brash, in-your-face Stipe of late. The track begins with my favorite lyric in the piece, “I took the prize last night for complicated mess, for saying things I didn’t mean and don’t believe.”
Although I could easily imagine a particularly angsty and acne-ridden teenager spouting this phrase, it’s Michael’s particular intonation that drives this admission out of the range of most below the legal drinking age. He throws this line out like a lodestone, reaching into the lower edge of his range, filling it with the memory of every last instance where he felt the tediousness of his own company more acutely than those on whom he had inflicted himself. Next time you have the pleasure, listen to some wide-eyed hipster kid on public transport sing along to this gem. Place that in your memory for future reference. Then at some other completely random moment, listen intently to the middle-aged man walking home from his desk job sing it. There’s a quality to the delivery.
Now, if all this self-deprecating navel gazing continued in the same key for the remaining two minutes of the song, we’d be living three years ago listening to “Boy In The Well,” but we’re not. So cue Peter Buck with his “take this and shove it” riffs, and we’re off into the desperate refrain, “Believe in me. Believe in nothing. Corner me and make me something. I’ve become the hollow man I see.” Despite the obviously depressing tone of the lyrics, there’s something in the way of a psychological deus ex machina evoked. It’s really only youth that believes other people are the solution to one’s problems. I cannot make myself into a whole person, but you can make me whole. Far from scorning all such ideas, I find their balance with fatigued pessimism necessary. Hence the brilliance of this bite-sized aural morsel. Stipe, a seasoned artist navigating his own neuroses, comes up for air asking his friend/lover, “Was this all I wanted to be? Do you remember? Help me remember.”
Links:
R.E.M. HQ – The Official Website
R.E.M. Rock – Nifty fansite for the obsessively inclined
… this is how he’d do it.
(This here is a guest post from my erudite and droll roommate, The Archivist.)
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When my roommate arrived home with two bottles of wine and a bottle of vodka, vermouth and olives, it was clear what needed to be done.
Getreadyhereitis:
Step 1: Use the internets to find dirty martini recipe, since you usually only order, you don’t cook. Or mix, as it were.
Step 2: Assemble utensils and ingredients. Note: When one lacks proper acoutrements, such as martini glasses, cocktail shaker, and umm, ice, certain provisions must be made. Like Macgyver, you use what you have. In this case, we used plastic cups and shooters from our own New England Aquarium, along with the wine glasses gifted by my mother.
Step 3: Choose your vodka carefully. We like the russian “blend” known as Hammer & Sickle while listening to “Rasputin” by Boney M.
Some lyrics:
“RA RA RASPUTIN
Lover of the Russian queen
They put some poison into his wine
RA RA RASPUTIN
Russia’s greatest love machine
He drank it all and he said “I feel fine””
Step 4: Combine 3 parts vodka to one part vermouth and one part olive brine. Perchaps add more vodka if you are so inclined.
Step 5: When you realize you have no ice, do what Macgyver would do, and put it in a plastic cup in your freezer.
INTERLUDE: Moment of genius. You realize you have a pre-iced Red Sox freezie mug. Transfer contents of cup to mug without spilling. Replace in freezer. Wait.
Step 5: I mean, step 6.
Step 6: Place olives in wine glasses. We like 5, but you can add as as many as you desire. Let your creativity flow.
Step 7: When properly chilled, tranfer dirty martini mix to ziplock tupperware.
As it has a screw top, it is optimal for the “shaking”aspect. Of course, if truly desparate, we envision one could even use a ziploc bag. If you prefer stirred martinis, your task is much simpler. But we don’t skimp. Every step is needed.
Step 8: Final assembly. Try not to spill.
Enjoy responsibly.
That means no drunk dialing or texting.
Nine Inch Nails. Just saying the name in mixed company leads to a series of groans and strained facial expressions. When prompted, most tend to think of NIN through the lens of the Closer video with its grotesque biological curiosities and heroin-chic frontman Trent Reznor, or the time they caught Head Like a Hole on the radio. All the mechanized chaos of sound, distorted screams, and disturbing lyrics keep many away.
But sobriety has been good to Trent Reznor of late. In the last three years alone, he has put out three new albums (Year Zero, Ghosts I-IV, The Slip) which display a maturity and talent that his most ardent fans knew was there all along. Year Zero is a concept album set 10 years in the future. Its potently pointed assessment of eventualities given the current geo-political climate is outstanding. The Slip recently released on CD after 4 months of free download from the website sees Reznor back at the bit of focused anger, but with a refreshing divergence from negative solipsism.
Considering that I am an avid fan electronic ambient music (i.e. Brian Eno), I’d have to say my favorite of the three is Ghosts I-IV, a double disc of instrumental goodness. Trent describes this two-hour long aural playground as an attempt at “dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture,” a sound-photograph if you will. In ten short weeks he produced this gem – “a soundtrack for daydreams.”
The Track that suits today for me is the sixth off the first disc, Ghost I:6. It’s far more subtle than one would expect from NIN, employing only five layers of sound. Today Ghost I:6 forms the perfect expression of my metropolitan acedia.
From start to finish the track is driven forward by an incessant, hollow, ice-cream truck like phrase on the xylophone. It’s maddeningly facile, and if it went on for much longer it would be the aural equivalent of water torture. It seems to say that each day will take the same shape as the previous – waking, working, eating, sleeping, and repeating over and over again in a parody of life. A mournful cello and ominous synthesized grumble fill out the voices in the dialogue of the song. The cello comes in first, moaning, trying to overtake the infuriating sing-song. Listen to it, can you put words to that cello wail? I can. It gives voice to loneliness and exhaustion. It’s modern man lamenting the loss of meaning.
About halfway through the track comes the synthetic grumble, the world with reminder-daggers of money, reputation, desire, and fear. The two voices follow in a call and response style until suddenly the cello has grown faint, almost as if heard under water, drowning. The grumbling world has the last word, more strident in its volume. But nothing can overtake the indefatigable, monotonous xylophone which fades into the background in the final seconds.
A song of modern metropolitan life. Loneliness and seemingly meaningless repetition under dark grey skies.
Links:
