Tag Archives: Neil Gaiman

Morpheus Strip: Dream Lovers

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This is the first in a roundtable on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. Suat, Tom, Vom Marlowe, and Kinukitty will be along later in the week with their takes on the series as well. (Update: And you can now read the complete roundtable)
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I loved Sandman back when it came out in the late 80s/early 90s, and I’ve probably read the whole thing through at least a couple of times. However, it’s been a while…partially out of nervousness. I strongly suspected that the epic wouldn’t hold up on rereading.

And…yeah. It doesn’t exactly hold up. I reread the entirety of “Fables and Reflections” and skimmed through a couple of the other books (“A Game of You” and “The Kindly Ones” especially, I think.) Part of it is the art, which bounces around inconsistently and is often just not especially good. There are undoubtedly some very nice walk-ons — Bryan Talbot’s creepy take on the giant, cadaverous Persephone was memorable, and, as Suat recently pointed out, the P. Craig Russell “Ramadan” story is pretty spectacular. But then you’ve got atrocious efforts by folks like Kent Williams.

No wonder he looks startled; he appears to be improbably made out of rock. Maybe he’s related to the Thing?

Aside from the inconsistencies in the art, though, the real problem is that my former enthusiasm for Gaiman’s writing has dimmed a lot. I can still appreciate his cleverness and the care of construction…but after a while, both of those virtues are pushed so enthusiastically and unilaterally that they start to feel oppressive. After a while you start to almost want to plead — please, somebody, anybody, could you just once say something that doesn’t come back a panel, or a page, or several issues down the road with an ironically profound or profoundly ironic twist? Could we have a story end without a smug little O’Henry meets dumbed-down Borges twist? Could everybody just for a fucking second stop talking?

The thing that crystallized my irritation with the series was Nuala. She was a fairy with a glamor that made her appear as a beautiful woman, but in actuality she was kind of a dumpy elvish little thing. The fairy gave her as a gift to Dream for some reason or other (maybe to try to get him to give them the key to hell? I can’t remember exactly.) Anyway, she fell in unrequited love with dream, and ends up nervously and apologetically causing his downfall. She’s a sad, sweet character. I liked her.

But as I was sort of skimming over her story again it occurred to me that, while her unrequited love is certainly poignant, it’s also weirdly unmotivated. That is, we certainly do feel her pain and sadness to some extent…but we never really get much of a sense of her love. What about him appeals to her? Does she think he’s beautiful? Is it his (on again off again) kindness to her? His power? There don’t have to be individual or even clear answers to these questions, obviously, but they’re never even asked, much less answered. For Gaiman, Nuala’s love is an almost magical fact; it drops onto her and possesses her, and that’s all we ever really need to know about it.

And that’s how love functions throughout the story. Gaiman almost never, that I can remember, actually bothers to show love as a functional, or even dysfunctional, relationship between two people. Instead, it’s just another plot device, a story element to push the action…or, more accurately, the words. In “A Game of You” the cuckoo casts a love spell by talking; in “Brief Lives” Desire does more or less the same thing.

That seems to be how Gaiman sees love; a verbal whammy that comes out of nowhere to make a clever point or set up a clever scene, rather than as an actual relationship which is maybe worth exploring in its own right. Destruction accuses Orpheus of loving the idea of Eurydice more than the actual person…but is that really Orpheus’ failing? Or is it Gaiman’s? Certainly, Gaiman never shows the couple in a tender moment — Eurydice gets more time with a Satyr in the narrative than she does with her supposed love. And the big love affair of the book, between Dream and Thessally, occurs almost entirely off-screen..ostensibly because doing it that way is clever and surprising, but maybe actually because Gaiman has no idea how to deal with an actual love affair and is scared shitless to try. Certainly, the hints of the romance we get sound deeply unconvincing — when they’re in love they walk about idyllically among the bowers prattling sweet nothings, making some of Dream’s attendants uncomfortable; when theyr’e out of love it rains a lot because Dream is throwing a tantrum. Gaiman is clear that these are cliches, and he’s making fun of them because they’re cliches…but that doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t seem able to deal with love in anything but cliches.

There’s actually an analogy here with another, more recent tween phenomena: Twilight. In both, there’s a lot of darkness and angst, which gives an exciting frisson of danger even as it distracts from the things that an actual adolescent might really find dangerous or threatening. In Twilight, the danger of vampires and blood and werewolves and melodrama all stands in for, and obscures, the looming, oncoming reality of adult relationships and sexuality. In Sandman, similarly, the pretension and the cleverness and the angsty melodrama seems, at some points, like a magician’s trick; the left hand is bobbing and weaving and throwing out fireworks so that you don’t notice (except with a kind of unacknowledged satisfaction perhaps) that there’s not much at stake in the right.

Though that all sounds kind of harsh, I’m actually not against this kind of tween repression categorically; in the Twilight series ( which I’ve mentioned liking before) I think the sustained effort to avoid looking at the obvious ends up energizing the series; it’s both winning and squicky, a kind of pop sublime. In Sandman I’m not sure it works so well. On the one hand, Gaiman is in some sense obviously a better writer than Stephanie Meyer. Though, as I said, the cleverness is irritating, it is, nonetheless, often actually clever, and he does manage to come up with some genuinely creepy twists (the treacherous stuffed toys in “A Game of You”) as well as some moving ones (Nuala’s story for example, as I mentioned above.) Meyer is not as bad as she’s sometimes claimed to be, but I doubt she could have pulled off either of those things.

On the other hand…Sandman is way more pretentious than Twilight…and the distance between the pretensions and the delivery is sometimes painful. For instance, there’s this panel:

Ah, those harem maidens…so exotic! So poetic! So unaccountably possessed of the sweaty metaphorical unease of a randy 13-year old trying to look impressively sophisticated!

It’s significant too, I think, that the so-thoughtfully entreated king declines the request. In Twilight, the heroine and hero eventually do, in fact, after much deferral (and marriage) have sex. This is in itself problematic; the whole tension of the series rests on the balance between safety and desire which is more or less vitiated when everybody gets what they desire and ends up safe. Gaiman is more canny; Dream, elaborately and with much fanfare, refuses to alter the structure of the series. Rather than change he decides to kill himself. Gaiman makes the “change” in question specifically about responsibility; Dream is not willing to give up his duties as ruler of dream, and so his only way out is death. But one has to wonder — is it really his (quite amorphous) duties that are at stake? Or is it something else? His ex-lover and Nuala more or less engineer his final downfall, his realm is torn apart by the furies, a rampaging feminine archetype — and the way they taunt him at the end is borderline sensual. “We are destroying the dreaming. Can you not feel it?” “Yes I can.” But then interrupts the foreplay, and Dream scurries off into oblivion, leaving one more fraught relationship we don’t get to really explore. Like a cadaverous Peter Pan, he never grows up, never has to stay with Wendy, and never gets out of the dream.

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Update: Suat’s post is now up.

Update: Vom Marlowe and Tom weigh in.

Update: And Kinukitty finishes up.

“Snow, Glass, Apples”

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Just finished Smoke and Mirrors today, first “Snow, Glass, Apples” and then “The Wedding Present.”
The “Snow, Glass, Apples” story demonstrates pretty conclusively that the story of Snow White would have been different if she had been a vampire. Kind of a party trick, like a lot of the stories in Smoke & Mirrors. In this case the trick is the same sort that Alan Moore made popular in comic books during the late 1980s. Became a cliche in that arena, but in another it’s good for a spark if done well. So a grim-and-gritty retelling of a fairy tale character, with a lot of period detail, including pre-Grimm brutality.
As usual w/ Gaiman, heterosexual men don’t come off well. There’s a big, bearlike lump of masculinity who wants to get it on w/ a 12-year-old, and since she’s the vampire she kills him. Prince Charming is a necrophiliac.
Story has nice touch when rounding off, a chime. The chime is with the story’s unspoken starting point, the classic Snow White tale, which is always present but never gets a hat tip till the very end, literally the last words of Gaiman’s story. All thru the story, the narrator is talking about snow and whiteness, including the vampire girl’s whiteness. Then the narrator finally brings the two words together as she’s dying and describes the sight of the vampire girl looking down at her in triumph: her eyes this, her lips that, her skin “snow-white.” Kismet.
Nothing much to say about “The Wedding Present,” at least for now. I do think it’s a bit trying that he should show off about how he’s writing a story right there on the spot, spur of the moment — “Wedding Present” pops up in the intro to his book, and in presenting it Gaiman explains to us it tumbled onto his computer screen even as he finished writing one paragraph of the intro and considered another. For heaven’s sake.

First of his generation

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update, Matthew reports on a Gaiman press conference here and wraps up his thoughts about Worldcon here. (I should mention that the news conference also features Elisabeth Vonarburg, a Quebecois translator of s.f. who was being honored, though my interest is straight Gaiman.)
If you like podcasts, here are Matthew’s talks with the fantasy writers Lev Grossman, George R. R. Martin, and Felix Gilman. They get into some interesting stuff.
Martin is a lot more affable and down to earth than I expected. Without knowing much about him, for some reason I expected somebody prickly.
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Matthew talked to Gaiman here (which I already posted about) and also here. At the second link Gaiman talks about where he is in his worklife and career, and he says this:

 I’m essentially the first member of my generation to be a Guest of Honour at Worldcon. … It definitely has significance for some people that I’m doing this. And it has significance for me, I think.

I hadn’t known about the generational first, mainly because I don’t follow s.f. fandom. But this same year we have a president born in 1961 and a Worldcon guest of honor born in 1960, and in each case that’s something new. (For the presidency it’s very new: Clinton and George W. were born in 1946, which makes for a big jump to 1961. I can’t find a rundown on Worldcon g-of-h ages.)  
So, whatever. As a side note, Gaiman and Obama have some similarities. They both appear a bit slim and wandlike to be so imposing, etc. Gaiman gets called “emo,” and James Carville and others tried to girlify Obama during the ’08 primaries.

More Gaiman stories: “Daughter of Owls” and “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar”

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These are from his Smoke and Mirrors collection, which I’ve been reading. They’re slight, and to my mind the shorter one works and the longer one doesn’t. But they illustrate a storytelling device that for some reason hadn’t quite made it into my head.

The device is this: a story will feel more like a story, a complete narrative, if its ending features some element that was also featured by its beginning. The echo or chime makes the reader feel like something complete has been told.
Humorists do something like that too. At least Calvin Trillin did: his last paragraph would always bring back some joke featured earlier in the column. Stand-up comedians pull the same trick. So it’s not like the full-circle device is a new discovery — we’re just talking about closure, right? But I don’t read a lot of stories, and for me it was an experience to catch the device at work. 
The better of the two stories, “Daughter of Owls,” was just a couple of pages and was written in the style of John Aubrey, which helped; not that I claim to have read Aubrey, but the style was fun and novel enough to give the piece some float, and then the full-circle device came along and buckled everything into being a story. Without the device, we would have this: way back in olden times, a mysterious girl is left by owls in a small town, and when she gets old enough the men of the town rape and kill her, and then the owls come and kill the men. With the device we have this: the owls who left the girl also left typical owl dung consisting of pellets that held small animals’ bones and skin, and then the owls who killed the men left dung pellets that contained the men’s bones. Story! (Pretty much; Gaiman’s telling helped a lot.)
The longer story, “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar,” is buckled this way: an American boy having a dismal time hiking in Britain is fed up with his travel guide, which keeps promising decent inns, friendly people, etc.; he stumbles into an especially unpleasant village, where he has a mysterious encounter with the supernatural; he wakes up, the village is gone, no one has heard of it, and the relevant page has somehow gone missing from his guidebook; back home in America, he writes a letter to the guidebook author, not only to give her a piece of his mind about the book but also to ask about the mysterious town; he’s relieved when he never hears back.
The buckle is the guidebook, which is entirely ancillary to the story’s action. Nothing happens because of the book, its author doesn’t play any role in events, but hauling the book back in again still works well enough when it comes to holding the story together. The chime is still enough.
I find it Gaimanesque that mentions of the book should all be funny until the story’s very end, when the book has a final mention that’s played for quiet unease. To turn one feeling into another, amusement into fear, for example, is the sort of device Gaiman likes to work (or the  sort of whatever — I mean that it’s something he does). I think it adds to the, oh dear, silvery quality his work can have, the sense that various tiny givens of reality are too uneasy to stay put and that reality is always shifting at the corner of your vision. Why that adds up to “silvery” is another question, of course.
So, to recap, the buckle in “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar” works even though the item used to make the circle isn’t at the heart of the story’s action. So the problem with the story is elsewhere. Basically, “Shoggoth’s” is meant to be Pete and Dud meet Cthulhu. That is, Gaiman imagines Peter Cook and Dudley Moore doing one of their addled-old-duffers crosstalk dialogues but sitting in an English counterpart to Innsmouth and using Lovecraft’s stuff as their subject. That’s all right as an idea, but what he comes up with isn’t much, just a color-by-numbers pastiche of Pete and Dud and a couple of commonplace observations about Lovecraft (yeah, he used big words). 
Also, I didn’t go for the story’s opening about what a bad time the fellow was having in England and how he hated his guidebook. High-spirited, comic Gaiman doesn’t add up to funny Gaiman, in my experience. 

Lights and liver

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I’m reading Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors, a story collection, and wondering how often that phrase turns up in the slush pile if you’re Ellen Datlow or Weird Tales and wading thru the output of would-be writers of wistful, old-England-inflected, Gaimanesque fantasy. 

It’s a great phrase, catchy (what with the alliteration and the long “i”) but grim, with a brief mental tickle as the brain fills in what “lights” must mean. 
I remember Gaiman said somewhere that kids at conventions who were inspired by Dave McKean tended to show him works that used only McKean’s most obvious devices, such as little watch gears glued direct to the page. I imagine it’s the same for people imitating Gaiman, since he’s a man of many flourishes and catchy effects, stuff that it’s easy to fall in love with if you’re so inclined. “Lights and liver” calls out to be planted in narrations of supernatural errands, in sly dialogues between elves and ladies, in warnings to errant children from wise crones. Okay, I’ll stop. The point is that maybe the phrase pops up like a gnat when monitoring amateur fantasy output is part of your daily business.
Anyway, Smoke and Mirrors is going down pretty smooth with me, so I guess he knows what he’s doing. I even like the story-poems, which are done in freeform verse. I never would have thought I’d like them, but that’s the case. 
I do think a lot of the stories, poem or otherwise, come down to a few oddments wrapped in a shifting, glimmering, translucent, etc., silk handkerchief of verbal atmosphere that itself depends on a small collection of devices that Gaiman uses from story to story. But if I like reading the book, then okay. 

“The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories”

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Seeing Gaiman at Worldcon caused me to buy his big short story collection, Smoke and Mirrors. My favorite story so far is “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories,” which I happened to read years back while sitting in the book store. It’s kind of a sideways rendering of Gaiman’s first time out in Hollywood, when Good Omens had been optioned and he and Terry Pratchett were doing the script. I love Hollywood stuff, especially modern Hollywood and the nonacting side, the agents and studio people, so it’s no wonder I like the story. But it’s a good job, too. He captures odd little moments that bring out the disjunction and strangeness in the way these people approach life (or the way that one hears they approach life), and he manages the tricky job of creating a long series of quick but distinct glimpses of producers, execs, flunkies, etc., each person different enough from the others and yet cognitively deformed in the same way.

The inside-Hollywood, studio-idiocy business stays funny but also becomes unsettling. The speed with which it moves, a pace that at first seems wide awake and brisk, becomes creepy; this is the only case I can think of where narrative speed is turned into something like a horror element. (Not a suspense element, which, as I understand it, would involve plot: how soon will that train hit that girl?) You start out by enjoying the contrast between the brisk Hollywood material and the story’s otherwise Gaiman-like air of menacing dreaminess; then the Hollywood material becomes the atmosphere’s key ingredient. Not bad.  

Okay, content. A small-time British writer of quiet horror stories hits it big with a novel and is brought out to Hollywood to do the script. Nobody at the studio or the production company knows what they’re doing, and they keep being fired and replaced and no one remembers that the previous batch was there. Neither do they remember the old stars of the past, and the memory shortage gets more marked as the narrator approaches the end of his string of executives and they get younger.
Meanwhile, there’s a goldfish pool at the narrator’s hotel, and he learns from the pool’s caretaker that the fish have no memory and so they swim about forever and get nowhere and every 20 seconds it’s a brand-new world to them. Which is the Hollywood situation as the narrator finds it.
The narrator starts sketching out a story set back home in England and involving a stage magician in a sad little seaside theater. So he wants to be creative again and get out of this Hollywood bullshit. He writes a poem about the seaside theater, and that’s his creativity giving a sign of life.
In reading up for his story, the narrator comes across two 19th-century stage-magic tricks, both of which involve frames (I think) and thereby prefigure 20th-century show biz and its screen-based entertainment. Okay, but why? To me it just seems like a flourish — here’s a fancy idea! One of the tricks does involve a lady who descends from a painting and tells an artist to buck up, he’s got the stuff, and that is obviously apropos to the narrator’s situation.
To tell the truth, the story doesn’t seem too hard to decipher (except for that business about 19th century/20th century show biz, which may not be just a flourish after all). But it works better if you don’t. 
Still, if anyone has further thoughts on meanings, or whatever, go ahead.  

What a great name

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I suppose the scam artist got carried away by inspiration at the end. He thought, “Screw the payoff, I just want to do that name.”

You have been approved for a lump sum payment of  £750.000.00 GBP,  in this Year Toyota Global Award. Send us the required information as stated below to file for claims.

1.Full Name:…………..
2.Full Address:……….
3.Occupation:……….
4.Country……………

Regards
Mr Adelheid Fankhauser

It isn’t taken out of some cult sci-fi comedy novel. I googled and there’s at least one person in Europe going about with this name and he’s done well at the study of maltherapeutin, which sounds to me like the science of providing bad therapy with a folksy accent, though probably there’s more to it than that.
In other news, I spent two hours in large, crowded rooms with Neil Gaiman today and can report that he is charming beyond smooth. This was at Worldcon, where the Hugo is awarded and which is being held here in Montreal this year. I also met Lev Grossman, though I had no idea who he was. He gave me a chapbook with the first chapter of his novel, which I liked, and at the end there was an author’s bio. It revealed he is by far the most literarily connected person I’ve ever spoken to. Seemed like a nice guy! He had wandered into the back of the room during a misbegotten shambles of a panel whose scheduled participants had bailed and been replaced at the last minute. The subject was fantasy novels and how much politics and economics they should contain. Grossman offered that he was a fantasy novelist — heads turned — and that he had just finished a novel about a world much like the Narnia world but with some revisionism as to adult realities, including socioeconomic realities. For instance, how come Mrs. Hedgehog or whoever has a sewing machine when there are no factories in Narnia? That sounded good to me, so after the panel I asked for his name, he gave me the chapbook, etc. Hence the revelation that followed.
Back to the panel discussion. A very odd, even semi-deranged, lout also wandered into the room, but he sat up front and soon planted himself in the middle of the conversation, such as it was. Otherwise the place was full of whispery fans who deferred to each other; we didn’t even raise our hands properly, just bent our elbows and parked a hand by our ear, fingers curled over. So the strange lout began talking loudly and soon offered an idea that I liked: how do we  know that the whatever kids, Peter and Lucy and Susan and that other one, how do we know they were the first bunch to be sent along from our world to wake the sleeping king (or whatever their mission was). The fellow reasoned that getting the job done first crack out of the box was kind of a long shot. So maybe others had come along, failed, and died, and all over Narnia there were discreet little plots of land dedicated to the graves of the Wilkins children, the Anderson children, the Smith children, etc., but the talking animals didn’t want Peter and Lucy and the rest to know, so they covered it up. I liked that he remembered they would all be Anglo-Saxon family names.  
All right, so maybe it isn’t the greatest single pop-culture revisionist geek goof you ever heard, but it sure livelied up the occasion. That panel sucked so bad. And the idea would come in handy if you were doing a parody about it being the late ’80s and DC somehow acquiring the rights to Narnia and hiring some schmuck writer who had just read Watchmen.