New in bookstores: bite-sized epics

The curse of contemporary life: Not enough time.

It is a real challenge to find a few moments for yourself just to be still, to meditate, to inhale deeply.  But what if you're a reader of epic fantasy? How do you fit a thousand-pager into your week? (I remember managing to do it with George R.R. Martin's "Storm of Swords," but it nearly killed me.)

You can't simply give them up, can you?  They're a necessity to life: The worlds constructed by Martin, or Patrick Rothfuss, or Jay Lake, or Neil Gaiman, or Carrie Vaughn, or Kelly Link are wonderfully interesting when our own lives aren't. But they also require big, fat commitments of time. So what do you do?

Editor John Joseph Adams has hit on the solution in his latest anthology, "Epic: Legends of Fantasy," published by Bay Area-based Tachyon Publications. If you haven't heard of Tachyon, you need to check them out. They're a great publishing unit doing an invaluable service -- like Link and husband Gavin Grant's Small Beer Press -- to keep the work of some very fine writers in circulation.

In "Epic," Adams gives us tales from contemporary practitioners of epic fantasy. Some of the names mentioned above are included -- like Martin (his contribution, "The Mystery Knight," is a story of Westeros that's a good supporting piece to "A Song of Ice and Fire"); and Rothfuss ("The Road to Levinshir" plunges its narrator down in an uneasy, murky landscape).  But there are others here are well -- like Robin Hobb (whose dragon series is worth picking up) and Ursula Le Guin and Vaughn and Brian Sanderson (who took on the project of finishing the late Robert Jordan's "Wheels" saga).

It's an excellent selection that gets us back to the point mentioned at the top of this post. How do you manage to squeeze in epic tales when you don't have enough time in your life?  The answer is, you do the best that you can when you can. Or else you can turn to this anthology by Adams which, in a phrase I've used before, gives readers evocative stories delivering the full caloric load of a novel in half the time. You'll come away from this fine edition feeling very satisfied.

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New this month: John Banville's "Ancient Light" and the fantasies of young men

In his new novel, "Ancient Light" (Alfred A. Knopf), John Banville does what he's always done best: Gives us a brooding narrator with an evocative, meaning-laden name and a past in need of unraveling. And don't forget the lyricism. Always there's lyricism. There must be lyricism. We meet Alexander Cleave (there's the name, suggesting some inner turmoil, division), his troubled daughter, and his memories of his youth. Those memories include his teen affair with an older woman, and that's all I want to center on now. When you're caught in the middle of countless distractions, when your mind is cluttered, a little dose of Banville clears the mind. Restores focus. Reminds you of the possibilities of language again.

As in the following lyrical reflection about Cleave's desires as a young man, and his youthful inexperience:

I knew precious little about girls--and consequently the little I knew was precious indeed--and next to nothing about grown women. At the seaside for a summer when I was ten or eleven there had been an auburn beauty of my own age whom I had adored at a distance--but then, who in the honeyed haze of childhood has not adored an auburn beauty by the seaside?--and a redhead in town one winter, called Hettie Hickey, who despite her less than lovely name was as delicate as a Meissen figurine, who wore multiple layers of lace petticoats and showed off her legs when she danced the jive, and who on three consecutive and never to be forgotten Saturday nights consented to sit with me in the back row of the Alhambra cinema and let me put a hand down the front of her dress and cup in my palm one of her surprisingly chilly but excitingly pliable, soft little breasts.

Banville captures an entire kind of experience in a single paragraph: an incredibly difficult feat he makes seem effortless. A memory of youth that acquires a mythic aura in the adult narrator's mind. And for me it was that phrase "honeyed haze of childhood" that refreshed me, just when I needed it.

Waiting for the hump

So, skeletal remains found under a parking lot in Leicester may belong to crookback Richard III, darker and more sinister-looking in Shakespeare's play than Darth Vader was the first time you saw him stalking down  the blockade runner corridor in "A New Hope."

But a bit of personal interaction with Philippa Gregory in my previous newspaper career (see About Call of the Siren for more on that), and with Desmond Seward's book "Richard III," changed all that for me. I still love Shakespeare's lines, and love reciting them, from his play --  "cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,/Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time/Into this breathing world..." That's what Richard declares about himself. But I can't be sure the words are entirely true.

The last Plantagenet was a ruthless ruler, undeniably so, but so were many rulers of the eras before, during and after -- a fact Seward includes not to defend Richard, but to keep things in balance. Gregory is a passionate Yorkist, arguing that Richard and his clan were the victims of a Tudor smear campaign. Check out her "Cousins' War" series of novels and you'll see for yourself.

Which gets me back to the parking lot discovery of last month.  If the skeleton can be assembled, what will we see? Evidence of a dramatic hump or just an uneven shoulder blade, transformed by Elizabeth I's playwright into something monstrous?

Over and over and over again

Next time you feel that you're not being productive, that your day amounts to nothing more than an exercise in wheel-spinning, take heed from some lovely words in Chris Arthur's recently published essay collection, "On the Shoreline of Knowledge: Irish Wanderings" (Sightline Books/University of Iowa Press).

Success is measured in linear terms in our society. If you're not moving from point A to point B, you're not succeeding, right? It's an unfortunate situations.  And it makes Arthur, whose home is Fife, Scotland (lucky guy), start thinking of his stoop-shouldered mother. At trying moments in her life, she mutters "I'm just going round in circles," despairing that:

"...her energy has been frittered away on a treadmill of trivial distractions that have claimed more time than they warrant. She's annoyed at her own lack of focus, the way she's allowed herself to become mired in unimportant chores."

Sound familiar?  (An old professor of mine, British poet Geoffrey Hill, had a really grandiose way of referring to this situation: He'd say "we're all trapped on a carnal treadmill." Pretty fancy, but then again, he's a poet.)

But Arthur's book of ruminative essays is an effort to recall the virtues of repetition and aims at restoring the dignity of that much-maligned geometric figure, the circle:

"The circle is variously taken to represent enlightenment, clear seeing, the absolute, one-pointedness of concentration, the universe.... Instead of impatience with some treadmill of time-wasting chores, instead of any kind of frustrated vacuity, a sense of pointless repetition and being stalled, think rather of the great wheel of the seasons, the orbits of electrons and planets; think of life cycles, the circulation of our blood and breath and the water that sustains us. We are cradled in a myriad of circles."

He then offers up the Zen practice of enso, the practice of painting circles of black ink. Beautiful.

Try not to be frustrated (though it's difficult - take it from me). You're exactly where you're supposed to be. Maybe the wheel-spinning is trying to tell you something?

Gimme some Mo

If you follow book news, you may already realize that the Nobel Prize in Literature has acted a little like a talent scout in recent years. The prize has been used to throw light on writers more of us should probably know about (Jelinek, Le Clezio) than recognize undeniable masters (Murakami, Lessing, McCarthy).

Or else the Prize has been a tool for making a political statement by picking dissident artists (in the Eastern bloc, for instance) who've long suffered in opposition to totalitarian regimes in their homelands.

Which made the selection of 56-year-old Chinese novelist Mo Yan for this year's Nobel a bit of surprise.  The guy's not an outcast. He's successful. He's had at least one book made into a film. He's an active participant in the government's official writers' groups.

So what happened? Well, maybe the Nobel hit this year closer to the mark of what most people think about when they think of what a prize should be.  It's about talent, brilliance, and less about political factors (though I'm sure that's a part of this one too - I read one pundit who sees the choice of Mo as another gesture, like the Beijing Olympics, of inviting China to belong to the world community).

I only know Mo's work in passing - but this time around with the Nobel, everything that's been said about his artistic powers makes me more interested in reading him. It's the same curiosity I felt when Kertesz got it - and, after reading Kertesz, I knew the Nobel committee had been right.

Still, it feels pretty lame that a major prize needs to be parsed in order to make sense of its recipient. I definitely feel the same frustration as Cristian Mihai noted on his blog soon after the Nobel was announced.   To cope with the aggravation, I just remind myself that Conrad didn't get the Nobel; Joyce didn't; Proust didn't; Pound didn't (well, ok, maybe his whole fascism thing made him ineligible). In the end, this prize is at the mercy of the people on the committee. (That's partly the reason why I prefer to dwell in the lands of fantasy these days: Shoot, if I had been on the committee, I'd have recommended George R.R. Martin for the Nobel.)

Guess fans of Murakami (in the days leading up to this year's Nobel, some betting firms gave him great odds) will have to wait another year. Hope we don't have to wait much longer than that.