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Dec. 14th, 2011 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cblj_backupSo, after reading The Rape Of Europa, I decided to go back to fiction for a bit. (I also, whilst reading The Rape Of Europa, read some PG Wodehouse, but I'll get to that in a week or two.)
I thought that if I was going to be making Cthulu jokes I should probably actually read some HP Lovecraft. I chose At The Mountains Of Madness (possibly on a recc? I don't know why I would pick this on my own) because it had an introduction by China Mieville. I waited to read the introduction until after I'd read the book, because apparently "Introduction" translates to the writer of the introduction as "A good place to put all the spoilers for the story" most of the time. Unlike so many, Mieville's introduction actually comes with a spoiler warning, which is polite, I thought.
So I read At The Mountains Of Madness, which is a story about an antarctic expedition gone terribly wrong. I have some familiarity via![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
twirlynoodle with the concept, but of course if the Scott expedition ever did run afoul of prehistoric monsters they did not record them as such. I'm pretty sure Scott would have said something like "Discovered multi-winged creatures under the ice. Claws, fangs. Spirits were not lifted by their theft of our canned goods."
It is a fact that the wind had wrought dreadful havoc. Whether all could have lived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt. --p. 30
Anyway, the basic story is a great, truly creeptastic idea: narrated by a survivor of the expedition who is desperate to prevent further antarctic exploration, it tells the story of how the expedition group split into two parties, one at base camp and one studying strange fossil records to the northwest, and what became of both groups due to an astounding discovery. Without giving too much away, the ideas in the story are fantastic and build on each other to a horrifying crescendo. In particular, the story of the group dividing up had an eerie quality about it because it's really, these are people who have almost no defences against the elements, and you kind of don't want them to go for that reason alone, and then you realise that's the whole point of the mission, to explore. It brings home human vulnerability in a way that's hard to explain.
The problem is that the book is so stunningly boring I barely survived it.
I wouldn't have, if it had been any longer. I never before thought of shoggoths as a cure for insomnia, but I almost fell asleep over At The Mountains Of Madness twice. Ironically, in the introduction Mieville quotes Lovecraft as saying, essentially, that he writes horror because ordinary reality is boring; Mieville also directly addresses the hyper-descriptive nature of the story as a technique, "the taxonomy of horror", but honestly I don't think Lovecraft put that much thought into it. I think he just liked describing shit.
...vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom. --p. 45
Here's the thing: HP Lovecraft has a genuine way with prose and a genuine understanding of fear, so I give him a lot of props for the story. There's a reason his writing has endured where other writers of the era have fallen by the wayside. The structure of the story is sound, and the themes are consistent and interesting; if you've ever seen a film or television episode where something monstrous is pulled out of the ice at a remote science station in the arctic/antarctic/Alaska, you can thank HP Lovecraft. And his actual prose is admirable -- shambled out of apedom, seriously, such a great phrase. As Mieville points out, his monsters are sui generis, totally original creatures, nothing reimagined about them. But he weighed the story down with so much description and so much technical jargon -- the characters are scientists, but there's a reason we have the expression "artistic license" -- that it's like wading through quicksand to get a banana.
Part of this is personal prejudice; I don't translate prose to visual very well when I don't get to give my own spin on it, so I don't write a lot of descriptive passages in my books and I don't care to read them in other peoples'. I couldn't get my head around what Lovecraft was describing a lot of the time, so it was just pointless verbage to me. For example, he talks about "clusters of cubes on the hillside" and I was picturing like, cubes sticking out of the sheer wall of a cliff, while he was talking about something more like this Roerich painting.
One thing that Mieville inadvertently points up and that merits notice is that in some ways HP Lovecraft is also a herald and proponent of the steampunk aesthetic, because he bases horror and fantasy in science. One of the major elements of the steampunk genre, beneath the visual style, is a respect for science as fantasy, and an understanding that adventure can be derived out of scientifically motivated exploration of the world, particularly the form of clumsy and frequently colonialist exploration going on in the early 20th century.
Final Verdict: Full points for command of the language and some truly scary ideas, though the execution leaves something to be desired. But you don't have to take my word for it...you can read it yourself here.
Also, on recommendation because I was whining about At The Mountains Of Madness, I read The Colour Out Of Space. I found it, again, awfully description-y, but I think it holds together as a story a bit better than Mountains. It seems like there should be a surprise or twist of some kind in it, but there's really not; just creeping, encroaching horror.
I thought that if I was going to be making Cthulu jokes I should probably actually read some HP Lovecraft. I chose At The Mountains Of Madness (possibly on a recc? I don't know why I would pick this on my own) because it had an introduction by China Mieville. I waited to read the introduction until after I'd read the book, because apparently "Introduction" translates to the writer of the introduction as "A good place to put all the spoilers for the story" most of the time. Unlike so many, Mieville's introduction actually comes with a spoiler warning, which is polite, I thought.
So I read At The Mountains Of Madness, which is a story about an antarctic expedition gone terribly wrong. I have some familiarity via
twirlynoodle with the concept, but of course if the Scott expedition ever did run afoul of prehistoric monsters they did not record them as such. I'm pretty sure Scott would have said something like "Discovered multi-winged creatures under the ice. Claws, fangs. Spirits were not lifted by their theft of our canned goods."It is a fact that the wind had wrought dreadful havoc. Whether all could have lived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt. --p. 30
Anyway, the basic story is a great, truly creeptastic idea: narrated by a survivor of the expedition who is desperate to prevent further antarctic exploration, it tells the story of how the expedition group split into two parties, one at base camp and one studying strange fossil records to the northwest, and what became of both groups due to an astounding discovery. Without giving too much away, the ideas in the story are fantastic and build on each other to a horrifying crescendo. In particular, the story of the group dividing up had an eerie quality about it because it's really, these are people who have almost no defences against the elements, and you kind of don't want them to go for that reason alone, and then you realise that's the whole point of the mission, to explore. It brings home human vulnerability in a way that's hard to explain.
The problem is that the book is so stunningly boring I barely survived it.
I wouldn't have, if it had been any longer. I never before thought of shoggoths as a cure for insomnia, but I almost fell asleep over At The Mountains Of Madness twice. Ironically, in the introduction Mieville quotes Lovecraft as saying, essentially, that he writes horror because ordinary reality is boring; Mieville also directly addresses the hyper-descriptive nature of the story as a technique, "the taxonomy of horror", but honestly I don't think Lovecraft put that much thought into it. I think he just liked describing shit.
...vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom. --p. 45
Here's the thing: HP Lovecraft has a genuine way with prose and a genuine understanding of fear, so I give him a lot of props for the story. There's a reason his writing has endured where other writers of the era have fallen by the wayside. The structure of the story is sound, and the themes are consistent and interesting; if you've ever seen a film or television episode where something monstrous is pulled out of the ice at a remote science station in the arctic/antarctic/Alaska, you can thank HP Lovecraft. And his actual prose is admirable -- shambled out of apedom, seriously, such a great phrase. As Mieville points out, his monsters are sui generis, totally original creatures, nothing reimagined about them. But he weighed the story down with so much description and so much technical jargon -- the characters are scientists, but there's a reason we have the expression "artistic license" -- that it's like wading through quicksand to get a banana.
Part of this is personal prejudice; I don't translate prose to visual very well when I don't get to give my own spin on it, so I don't write a lot of descriptive passages in my books and I don't care to read them in other peoples'. I couldn't get my head around what Lovecraft was describing a lot of the time, so it was just pointless verbage to me. For example, he talks about "clusters of cubes on the hillside" and I was picturing like, cubes sticking out of the sheer wall of a cliff, while he was talking about something more like this Roerich painting.
One thing that Mieville inadvertently points up and that merits notice is that in some ways HP Lovecraft is also a herald and proponent of the steampunk aesthetic, because he bases horror and fantasy in science. One of the major elements of the steampunk genre, beneath the visual style, is a respect for science as fantasy, and an understanding that adventure can be derived out of scientifically motivated exploration of the world, particularly the form of clumsy and frequently colonialist exploration going on in the early 20th century.
Final Verdict: Full points for command of the language and some truly scary ideas, though the execution leaves something to be desired. But you don't have to take my word for it...you can read it yourself here.
Also, on recommendation because I was whining about At The Mountains Of Madness, I read The Colour Out Of Space. I found it, again, awfully description-y, but I think it holds together as a story a bit better than Mountains. It seems like there should be a surprise or twist of some kind in it, but there's really not; just creeping, encroaching horror.
