Foundation by Mercedes Lackey

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

Let’s get this out of the way: Mercedes Lackey is the comfort food of fantasy novels. I knew this even at thirteen, when the same relative that had turned me on to Anne McCaffrey’s Pern suggested I pick up this similar series about magical horses. I inhaled the first two trilogies, reveling in the rags-to-riches stories about psychic steeds and their sometimes magically-homosexual riders; while I was pretty wrapped up the well-written characters (and the sex–Lackey writes sex quite well), I was pretty certain that this was trashy, fun reading along the lines of LJ Smith. After all, it didn’t even have the thin veneer of soft sci-fi respectability that Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels had. I mean, come on, people: magic horses.

I tried reading the later Valdemar trilogies–novels about Gryphons and giant talking owls–but they really lacked the luster of those first six books. It felt like the mythology of the series was collapsing on itself, burying the brightly rendered characters and feel-good psychic horse love. I wasn’t really interested in the international politics of Velgarth. I was there for the white-clad heralds and their equally sparkly companions.

I was pleased to find that in the unfortunately named Foundation (really, Misty, you should know that this title was used before!), Lackey returns to form. Sure, the plot of the novel feels a little recycled–poor kid is bonded to magic horse, poor kid goes to awesome magic school with said horse, poor kid faces some sort of political intrigue and overcomes humble beginnings. But I’d be damned if I said that I didn’t read this sort of thing for exactly this sort of story, anyway.

Our hero, Mags, is one of Lackey’s better written scamps. His horrible upbringing is particularly horrible, but he’s well-developed and has a very strong (and strongly accented) voice. The novel feels a bit over-populated–this is clearly meant to be the start of a new trilogy, and has enough characters to carry multiple volumes–but most of the supporting cast is likewise well-rendered. Lackey is pretty good at character development.

I wish the same could be said for the prose and plotting. The style here is repetitious and, at times, overly simplistic. The conflict isn’t really introduced until the last thirty pages and the novel ends in a particularly bad spot, with many questions left irritatingly unanswered. Granted, I sort-of-loved the rambling, pointless descriptions of Valdemarian holidays, but I really would have rather had, say, any of the conflicts of the first two hundred and fifty pages (like the fate of Mags’ former masters, or his true identity) tied up instead.

But still, this scratches the very same itch that Lackey’s earlier books did, and I appreciate it for that. No new ground is broken, but at least the old ground offers a solid “foundation.”

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Oh, and this is what my desktop looks like right now. In case you didn’t know, Yoshi is the best Mario character. And if anyone ever tells you otherwise–or kvetches about how GNOME is ugly, you send them to me, okay?

It’s been a productive few weeks.

My thesis is defended, and, shortly, will be submitted. I had my final MFA reading, which went well (sometimes you can feel these things from the eye contact of the audience alone!). I submitted my manuscript to four chapbook contests. And wrote a poem.

But mostly I spent the last week in mushy love-land, as Jordan was visiting. We didn’t do much, except eat, and talk, and bask in one another’s presence. But it was just so nice to have him around, to be able to turn my head and peek over into the other room and talk to him about stuff on metafilter.

The apartment is quite a bit more lonely now. I’m getting work done, slowly, but surely, to fill in the gaps, and I picked up a Mercedes Lackey novel from the library, which has put me in a nice, otherworldly mindset (the type of escapism that good fantasy is for, I think!).

. . . but still, I miss him.

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

The first couple chapters of Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase are beautifully written and very effective–they slowly start to weave a story about a man’s unsuccessful romantic relationships. These initial chapters are told with an intense attention to detail, both physical, visceral details and emotional details.

But then the book gets “weird” and takes a nose-dive.

I say “weird” in quotation marks because nothing in the first two hundred and fifty pages (of a 350-page book) is really that surreal or fantastic. What’s more, the plot–briefly, the story of the narrator searching for a sheep in a photograph taken by a friend–is developed at a snail’s pace. The “wild” in the title seems to me to be a terrific misnomer.

Instead of developing the story naturally, through action, Murakami relies on dialog to hash out the novel’s more surreal elements. The conversations that the characters have are painful, unbelievable, and unnatural. Such as:

“To return to the cyst, what I mean to say is that the period in which the cyst appeared coincided precisely with the period in which he underwent a miraculous self-transformation.”

“In your hypothesis,” I said, “there was no casual relationship between the cyst and the self-transformation; instead, the two were governed in parallel by some mysterious overriding factor.”

“You catch on quickly,” said the man. “Precise and to the point.”

Well, I don’t catch on quickly, apparently, because I just didn’t understand the vast majority of whatever it is they’re talking about. And who talks like this, anyway, even in translation?

Based on the strength of the first chapters, I won’t hesitate to pick up Murakami’s realistic fiction, but I think I’ll stay far away from his overwrought “fantasy.”

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