the Golden Compass

The Golden Compass and its sequels were one of my favorite series when I was young (I think I read them when I was 12-14), and I think they had a profound impact on me. I had loved the Narnia books before then, as well, but the His Dark Materials trilogy (which were Pullman's direct retort to Narnia) affected me much more strongly.

First of all, Lyra is an incredibly strong character. She’s self-driven and self-motivated, clever, curious, brave, and loyal. She’s never forced to fit stereotypes of what girls should be. She lies to get herself out of trouble and is as fierce as any child could possibly be. As with many parents in YA fiction, her parents are not exactly ideal, and as a result of growing up practically as an orphan, she has learned to be self-sufficient. She later gains a positive paternal figure in the armored bear Iorek Byrnison, and perhaps maternal figures in the witch Serafina Pekkala and Mary Malone. They protect and support her, but never keep her from being independent.

Lyra usually has to rely on her cleverness to proceed through the story, and she often does this through trickery, such as when she tricks the bear king into a fight with Iorek for the throne. Ironically, she uses the alethiometer, a “truth measurer,” to aid her. She reads this naturally, by grace, but loses the ability when she becomes an adult.

The daemons were one of my favorite parts of the novels when I first read them. To have your soul manifest in a physical animal companion seemed so cool! It’s interesting, too, that the form the daemons took upon reaching adulthood reflected the nature of the person, and that children’s daemon’s could take any shape because children are malleable, and not yet set in their nature.

The His Dark Materials trilogy speaks pretty strongly against organized, dictatorial religion. It is not anti-spiritual, however, but anti-abuse of authority. And the war against heaven that takes place in the latter novels is not the children’s war, but the war of their parents and other adults. However, as in our world, they still have to deal with the effects of this war.

The Hobbit

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are undoubtedly defining works in the genre of high fantasy. Many of the creatures (such as Orcs and “halflings”) and objects found in his books have entered popular culture and can be found in novels, music, and games. The Hobbit, as a children’s novel, is the more easily read of his books. It’s much more concise and less concerned with the history and stories of every character, place, and object.

It definitely follows the path of the Hero’s Journey. Bilbo, although fully adult, is innocent and childlike compared to the other characters, and he is entirely unwilling to go on a journey. He has to be pushed into it. At the start of his journey, he is not of much use, and relies mostly on the aid of others. However, he grows as a character and finds his own strengths eventually. He proves his quick wittedness against Gollum when they compete with riddles, and it is Bilbo who finds out the secret to the dragon Smaug’s weakness. He also attempts to reconcile the Dwarves, Elves, and Men, although he nearly makes the situation worse. At the end, as with the Hero’s Journey, he returns home, but entirely transformed. He is no longer the same timid hobbit he began as; he is fully matured as a character.

J-Horror

Asian horror is a much more familiar subject for me. I read the excerpts from Kwaidan. Whereas American horror tends to focus on monsters and serial killers, J-horror (and Asian horror in general) is largely composed of ghost stories. Much of it also lacks the highly sexualized themes that are present in American horror. For example, while rape is a fairly common cause for the presence of a vengeful ghost, the rape itself is (thankfully!) not generally intended to be titillating to the audience.

In fact, quite a lot of modern Asian horror films deal with women protagonists and nearly all the ghosts are female. And while the ghosts are dangerous and frightening, the true villains are the ones who caused the ghost’s grievances in the first place, and they are always punished in the end. These stories usually unfold at a much slower pace than American horror, and are almost mystery stories, where the goal is to find out the cause of the ghost’s wrath in order to appease or escape it.

Ghost stories such as the ones found in Kwaidan follow a different theme, however. These stories relate to old Japan, and reflect the culture that Japan was forced to give up. The memories of this time are manifested as ghosts, and conflict with the current times.

Kairo follows yet another theme; the futility of life. The afterlife has filled up with the dead and they have spilled into the realm of the living. What is the reason to continue living? What is the difference between the living and the dead? What is the point? It is not an uplifting movie. It’s not scary in a thriller sense; it’s scary in its hopelessness. There is no one to fight and defeat. There is no escape. There is only increasing loneliness, apathy, and total separation from all other humans. It’s very much a comment on today’s society and the way we interact (or don’t interact) with each other, and the drudgery and meaninglessness of our lives. What is the point of surviving to survive?

Interview With A Vampire

I always think of vampire novels as being a different flavor of romance novels, and since I’m not very interested in romance, I tend to look past them. It’s true that vampires and sexuality are usually very closely linked. There’s just something very intimate about someone’s teeth sinking into your neck.  Having said that, I’m really not very familiar with the genre at all.

Interview With A Vampire surprised me. While there was a certain amount of eroticism to the vampires, it was more about dealing with their immortality and the unusual problems of ethics they faced. Each of the vampires breaks down in their own way in time. Lestat is childlike in attitude and concerned primarily with self-gratification. He’s entirely selfish and self-serving. However, he’s lonely and needy, and gradually devolves from a powerful, frightening character in the beginning, to a pathetic figure by the end. Claudia, meanwhile, is childlike in appearance even as she matures mentally, and therein lies her problem. Although she takes advantage of her appearance, she becomes increasingly frustrated with her inability to age, and with the way the others continue to treat her as the young girl she appears to be instead of the woman she is.

Louis, meanwhile, is an idealist. He enjoys the heightened senses of being a vampire, but finds killing to be distasteful. He can never enjoy it the way Lestat and Claudia do. He still holds onto his morals. The only reason he stays in Lestat’s company is to protect Claudia. While lonely and unhappy, he has not lost all remnants of his humanity, which is what attracts the vampire Armand, who wishes to have an anchor to this age.

In the end, of course, Louis is broken by the deaths of Claudia and the vampire he created to be her caretaker. He becomes apathetic and loses the passion that attracted Armand to him. The whole story is narrated by Louis to a young reporter, who completely misses the point. Louis is tired of his long life and all the suffering he’s endured, but the reporter believes the life of vampires to be ideal.

Monster Island

I’ll be honest and admit that Monster Island wasn’t the most enjoyable read for me. Part of it was simply because of the unedited nature of the prose. I did find a lot of it interesting; I liked a lot of the concepts behind Gary, such as the way he preserved his intelligence into death and the “network” of the dead. However, other aspects felt poorly thought out and not very believable, such as the character of Mael Mag Och and the mummies. I understand that they were preserved corpses, but how did Mael Mag Och retain his intelligence? After going through the trouble to explain how Gary could preserve his brain, the druid didn’t make any sense. His brain would have ceased functioning, right? And why were the mummies so strong? I wouldn’t nitpick if it was meant to be an unbelievable fantasy, but the attempts to add scientific explanations seemed half hearted.

I was also put off by the constant use of the term “Western,” especially the way it was mostly used to mean “civilized.” Here are some excerpts;

“The civilized countries, the ones with bicameral governments and honest police forces and good infrastructure and the rule of law and wealth and privilege, the entire West…”

“It was understandable, of course—Ayaan had probably never seen real women’s fashions before. She had spent most of her life in a uniform and the lure of Western dress must—“

"I didn’t think I really wanted that kind of responsibility though as a Westerner it was a relief to not have anyone else barking orders at me."

The last one especially confuses me. As a “Westerner?” Would an “Easterner” not be relieved to not be ordered around? It could have simply been “it was a relief,” or “as a non-soldier”. What does being Western have to do with it? I am still unsure as to whether the author intended Dekalb to come off as a culturalist asshole or if the author really thinks that way himself.

This brings me to what I consider to be the overall theme of the novel; Otherism, or rather, a sense of “us” versus “them.”  There’s the living vs. the non-living, West vs. East (a divide made more pronounced by the “western” characters being mostly adult males while most of the others are young females) and so on. It ends up being a culture war with cannibalistic genocide.

Frankenstein

I find it really interesting how the story of Frankenstein evolved into the almost mythic representation of his monster that we think of today. Most of this imagery derives from the many Frankenstein movies. There are no dramatic switches, or lightning strikes, or assistant Igors in the novel. Frankenstein is driven, but he’s not the cackling mad scientist many imagine. And far from being a mindless, animated corpse, Frankenstein’s monster was intelligent and full of very human emotions and desires.  It was the constant denial of these desires, and the lack of loving companionship, that led to his murderous nature.

Frankenstein seems to focus largely on the consequences for not taking personal responsibility, as well as the nature of good and evil. Instead of dealing with his mistakes, Frankenstein continually runs away from them. But in running away, he only makes his problems worse; the stress of not knowing what the monster is doing or where he is gives him nervous breakdowns, and the monster grows more vengeful as time passes.

The monster himself is a tragic figure. He starts off childlike. He wants to be accepted, loved, and cared for, and he wants to care for others in turn. He becomes deeply attached to the family he watches, and our hopes rise with his that they might even accept him. Of course, it isn’t to be; they drive him away and he is left rejected and bitter. Shelley seems to be commenting here on the way society usually equates goodness with beauty and evil with ugliness. After this, the monster passes from childhood to adulthood, and seeks a female partner instead of a family.

Women seem to be held up on pedestals in this novel, not so much as strong figures but more as beautiful ideals that men admire as sisters, mothers, and wives. This makes sense knowing the context of the times it was written in. Women become a sort of prized possession or cherished pet.