Norwegian Wood came up on random play as I was writing this, suggesting that either life is not random, or I spent a long time to finish this review

I just finished reading Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami. It is not an easy book to encapsulate, nor to recommend. It is at times depressing, and at other times quite graphic.

The story revolves around Toru Watanabe, whose best friend committed suicide while they were both 17 years old. A deathly pallor hangs over everything, and each character seems to confront reality in his or her own unique way. Just like Kundera's Immortality presents a group of characters struggling with their identity in the face of their own mortality, Norwegian Wood likewise delves into the meaning of self when faced with life in a meaningless void. The novel is gripping in the way it portrays these tortured individuals who are never entirely comfortable in their own realities, and is certainly thought provoking, but it is not an easy read.

Sanity is an issue for several of the characters. Two have been voluntarily admitted to a kind of psychiatric retreat, and they repeatedly say the only difference between the people inside and the people outside is that the people inside know that they are crazy. Indeed, Toru's friends on the outside are just as peculiar and maladjusted to society as his friends inside, maybe even more so. Toru himself feels isolated, and has few companions at his university, and struggles with the direction his life should take. He battles deep bouts of depression, and often retreats into complete solitude. He finds no comfort in the people around him, who are continually exposed as hypocrites. The one friend he regularly spends time with has overcome hypocrisy by living live as selfishly as he can, a kind of Nietzschean superman who feels nothing but contempt for most of the people around him, and in the end is revealed to have a pointless, empty life.

The ending offers little in the way of hope either. Life is lived until death, and their is no magical plan for happiness. The only sanctuary may be to find love, but love is fleeting and tortuous and convuluted and our own need to be wanted and understood too often gets in the way of our ability to return that love.

Gripping the reciever, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the phone box. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place.

It is easy to get lost when we have no idea where we are or what direction we are headed, and when the road map presented to us directs us to keep moving forward but gives us no answer as to why we should go there or what to expect when we arrive. But for Toru, and all the characters in Norwegian Wood, that is the type of journey they are on. They can only hope they have a nice cold cucumber to enjoy along the way.

The Best Example You Will Ever Find Of The Phantom Menace Syndrome Apart From The Phantom Menace Itself

I would like to use this space today to heartily recommend that you begin reading The Wheel Of Time series of books, by Robert Jordan. I would like to say that they are among the greatest books, of any genre, that I have ever read. I would like to tell you that if you enjoyed Harry Potter, than you will be even more enamored by this complex fantasy epic.

I came across the first book of the series, The Eye of the World, while I was in high school. I had always loved reading, loved stories, and more than once had tried my hand at writing a novel of my own. But it was after The Eye of the World that I first seriously entertained thoughts of becoming a writer.

So I would like nothing more than to urge you to toss whatever drivel you are reading right now, whether it be Shakespeare, Joyce, or Hemingway (or this blog), and grab a book that is truly compelling.

Unfortunately I cannot. The first four or five books in this series became a part of my life in the same way your favorite cousins from Pennsylvania who you only see twice a year are a part of your life, the same way your winter boots are a part of your life. You wish you could play with them everyday forever, but you always have to say goodbye and wait until next time. That is how it was with these books. I would savor each new volume. After plowing through the first few hundred pages in two nights, I would force myself to slow down, because I knew it would be at least another year before a new one came out. And once I finished, a long slow wait would begin. Each time, when the next volume was released, I would read through the whole series from the beginning so I was fully primed for the latest one.

But gradually, things began to fall apart. Book five was not quite as good as book four. Book six was undeniably sub-par. By book seven, I approached each new book with an increasing sense of hope mixed with dread. Would this book be better than the last, or would it be even worse? By books nine and ten, the experience of reading these stories had become almost tortuous, all the worse because I could not put them down, just like you could never turn away from a loved one suffering from a debilitating disease.

These characters had become a part of my life, and I had no choice but to see them all the way through no matter what the outcome. It was so maddening. What had gone wrong? What had happened to Robert Jordan, the best fantasy writer since Tolkien? What were his editor's thinking. The last two or three books were so bad, they reminded me of my own nascent attempts to write novels in high school and college. It was nonsense. It was preposterous that someone had thought to publish someone's first draft and package it as a finished novel.

As the years went by, the pace of their release slowed down. I read book eleven probably four years ago. That's right, book eleven! Jordan began releasing several prequels in the meantime, none of which I have read. I was only interested in finishing the main series, and hoped that through some miracle the story would be redeemed before the end. At one time, he had been a masterful writer. And I was not alone in this belief. Anyone I ever encountered who had read these books loved them just as enthusiastically. I had never heard a bad word. At least until book six.

I found out today that Robert Jordan died last year. I had been wondering when to expect the next book, and did a google search, and discovered the bad news. He had apparently been suffering from a terminal form of heart disease for some time.

My immediate response was to wonder if this disease could be part of the reason why the series had so tragically deteriorated. I have no answer, and I am not sure it matters. According to his publisher, another author has been commissioned to finish the series, using the notes and manuscript that Jordan left behind. Book twelve was always intended to be the final book.

I hope that the final book will approach the quality of the first several. But even if it does, it cannot repair the damage caused by the second half of the series. And if the final book is a triumph, it will always be bitter sweet for fans of the series, since the series's rejuvenation could only come about after Jordan's death.

So I would like to be able to recommend that you read The Eye of the World, but I cannot. Because once you start, you will not be able to stop. You will become deeply entranced with a whole new world, a rich epic of marvelous adventure and powerful characters. And then you will become disappointed and frustrated as the story declines, to the point that you will probably wish you never started in the first place.

What a tragedy.

Waiting For The Raven King

Susanna Clarke took over ten years to write her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. So the five years I have been working on mine seem like a pittance.

It was time well spent. You can read any review and find the basic premise: England of the early nineteenth century watches as two magicians battle to revive the lost art of English magic. A cross between Jane Austen and The Lord of the Rings. A Harry Potter for adults.

It is much closer to Austen than to Tolkien. We open on the English countryside, at a meeting of the Yorkshire Society of Magicians. Except these are not practical magicians, but theoretical. The last English Magician who could actually do magic disappeared over 200 years ago. No, these magicians merely debate and squabble over what magic used to be like, back when the Raven King still ruled the north.

That is, until a gentleman from Hurtfew Abbey named Mr. Norrell, shocks all of England by proving himself capable of casting spells. He comes to London as the only practitioner of English magic, but soon gains a rival, the younger and more handsome Jonathan Strange. Together they alternately excite and horrify London society as they battle to return English magic to glory.

The comparisons to Austen are just. Two qualities especially stand out as exemplary. First, is the description. The houses, the clothes, the manners, the social hierarchy, all are explained in rich detail. A delight and a humor gives the entire affair a serious levity. The greatest effort is made to infuse a narrative history into everything. The absence of magic can only be fully appreciated when juxtaposed with all the memories of England's glorious past. An example:

Upon the instant, bells began to toll. Now these were nothing more than the bells of St. Michael-Le-Belfrey telling the half hour, but inside the Cathedral they had an odd, far-away sound like the bells of another country. It was not at all a cheerful sound. The gentleman of the York society knew very well how bells often went with magic and in particular with the magic of those unearthly beings, faeries; they knew how, in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever. Even the Raven King--who was not a fairy, but an Englishman--had a somewhat regrettable habit of abducting men and women and taking them to live with him in his castle in the Other Lands. Now, had you and I the power to seize by magic any human being that took our fancy and the power to keep that person by our side through all eternity, and had we all the world to chuse from, then I dare say our choice might fall on someone a little more captivating than a member of the Learned Society of York Magicians, but this comforting thought did not occur to the gentlemen inside York Cathedral and several of them began to wonder how angry Dr Foxcastle's letter had made Mr Norrell and they began to be seriously frightened.

Second, even more impressively, is the way she uses character to drive the story. These are characters in the fullest sense of the word, each with his or her own idiosyncrasies. The heroes are not trying to save the world. The villains are not out to do evil. An excessive pride afflicts every male character of a certain social standing, almost as an afterthought. Clarke wants us to know that to be a gentleman in the nineteenth century means being elevated to a place of privilege that has nothing to do with your character, and that elevated status makes it impossible to escape a heightened egotism. The main antagonist, the man with thistle down hair, is a fairy, and so his motivations and ideas about right and wrong are quite foreign to us, but nothing in his character is especially malicious. He cannot help his capriciousness any more than Mr. Norrell can help his infuriating pettiness or Strange his melancholy temper.

Casting his shadow over the whole affair is the Raven King, the long departed king of Northern England who was the greatest magician to ever live. Legends of his exploits abound. Clarke has created an entire mythos, a lattice of folk tales and memories and place names and even whole geographies that have been left behind by John Uskglass, and everyone lives in either fear or expectation of his return.

Like Don Quixote and other massive epics of their ilk, the story is filled with digressions, interludes and side stories, not to mention a copious amount of footnotes. Every character has a story to go with him or her, and every story is filled with character. She allows the story to meander over its first two thirds, as we become fully immersed in this world, and then drives it to a furious conclusion.

Every one of you should read this book.