Reading: All the Birds in the Sky

[white_hart]

There was a lot of buzz about Charlie Jane Anders's All the Birds in the Sky when it was first published, and I bought it after reading several positive reviews and seeing it had won a Nebula Award and was nominated for the Hugos. It sounded charming and fun and rather sweet; a story of two childhood friends, a witch and a scientist, reunited in adulthood and having to work together to save the world.

However, I really didn't enjoy it. I managed to get to the end rather than abandoning it, though at least part of me wishes I hadn't bothered. I didn't like the archly hipsterish narrative. I found the central characters, Patricia and Laurence, unlikeable and self-absorbed and couldn't bring myself to care about their relationship (especially at the point where they were both obsessing over that rather than the deaths of millions of people), while the supporting characters were all paper-thin and completely one-note, with the exception of the assassin from a secret fellowship of assassins, who appeared to have wandered in from a completely different novel, probably by Neil Gaiman, and whose story just tailed off halfway through the book without ever being properly resolved. In the first part of the book, dealing with Patricia and Laurence's childhoods, the supporting characters were also all appallingly abusive and neglectful, which didn't really sit comfortably with the novel's rather whimsical tone; I got the impression that the ghastliness of their childhoods was supposed to be funny in some hyperbolic way, instead of just utterly grim. Similarly, the main plot twist of the second half, when Patricia and Laurence are adults, is a catastrophic weather event caused by climate change, which seemed much too grim for the novel's general tone. (It may of course be that the whole point of the novel was supposed to be to show how awful humanity is, obsessing over small things and personal issues rather than trying to solve the problems we've created for the world. I'm not entirely sure I'd disagree with that assessment, but I have the news to tell me that; I don't need it in a novel that was described as being charming and magical.) I also didn't feel that the plotting was very coherent; the ending didn't really resolve the crisis that had been built up throughout the second half of the book, returning instead to a question from the very beginning. Really, it felt as though Anders had tried to shoehorn two novels into one, and it didn't quite work.

Comments

[hilarita]

Yes. What I wrote about it last year (C&P'd, rather than linked, as it's in a post about a lot of books :
"Nice video, shame about the song." Rather style over substance in some ways. It's shooting for a very big idea, mixing magic and science, but doesn't really pull it off.

CN: emotional abuse of children Collapse
I felt profoundly uncomfortable with how the two main characters were abused by their parents, siblings, teachers, and peers. I'm not usually much attuned to this (it didn't bother me at all about Harry Potter, for example), so other people may find it more disturbing. It left me with a deep sense of up-fuckedness, which translates into how most people in this book act like Bloody Idiots (TM). It was also vague and wafty, and full of the type of irritating West Coaster whose blogs are intensely annoying and who are the reason real people can't live in San Francisco any more. Any emotional connection I felt to wards the characters was overwhelmed by the rising tide of fuckwittery. In brief: Meh.

[white_hart]

I think the thing that really bothered me about the abuse was that even the narrative didn't seem to be recognising it as abuse. I mean, in Harry Potter it's very clear that we're meant to see that the way the Dursleys treat Harry is unacceptable, but I was never quite clear that this books realy thought that, rather than just thinking it was almost normal.

[hilarita]

Yes. It seemed to think that abuse was a sort of sad background to your whimsical magical life, but not that it was wrong and creepy and wrong. It did upset me quite a lot. Didn't stop me being intensely annoyed with the characters as grown-ups, though.

[white_hart]

I think that generally the book just didn't seem to recognise the emotional consequences of its plot - the superstorm was the same, it moved the plot along but didn't really seem to trigger any emotions or behavioural changes in the main characters or the other people around them.

[hilarita]

They just waft through, being above all that sort of thing, or something. I'd contrast it with Diane Duane's Young Wizard series, which is very big on the plot having emotional consequences. It reminded me strongly of when I was on Prozac, when I was completely covered in candy floss. I couldn't think properly - I couldn't do maths, or write - but I was on a vague floaty thing and the world bounced off me in this kind of way. No consequences, no development, no real sense of anything much. (I hated it, and changed drugs.) The entire book is like that: Oh look, the entire collapse of Western Civilisation. Oh no. I'll just drink my coffee and let thoughts about my love life drift by.

[sartorias]

I found it to be a book version of a Wes Andersen movie.

[white_hart]

That's a pretty good description, though I find Wes Andersen movies more charming.

[kaberett]

oh I am SO glad other people I know disliked it too.