Scribblings and Dribblings

I picked up a copy of And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer in the hopes that the old Douglas Adams magic would strike again. I am happy to report that it does… and it doesn’t.

The book, the sixth in the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy is a fine read. Colfer does a terrific job of bottling that Adams absurdist voice. The adventure is fun, and he has the reader guessing throughout. Ford and Arthur are back again, as well as Zaphod, Triillian, and Random (Arthur  and Trillian’s goth daughter). The Vogons are also back to try to destroy Arthur yet again, but Colfer finds a very nice explanation as to why Arthur seems to attract planetary destruction wherever he goes.

Rounding out the cast of characters are Bowerick Wowbagger (a formerly minor character — an immortal who spent his time going around the galaxy insulting people in alphabetical order), Hillman Hunter (an Earth-destruction escapee from the current parallel universe who has purchased a planet for the diaspora), and Thor (yes, the Norse Thunder God.) I won’t go into details about how these all tie together, but needless to say, they make a fun jaunt of a book, with the obligatory philosophical questions of existence thrown in as the red herrings they are.

Colfer’s voice is unique, even though he does manage to capture the Adams magic. One especially notable difference is that there are some expletives-not-deleted in the text. Adams had a habit of using “zarking” and other in-context nonsense words to stand in for the characters’ cursing. With And Another Thing… some of the “zarking” is back, but some very Third Millennium English euphemisms are peppered in the dialogue. This is curious to me since Colfer’s previous work (the Artemis Fowl series) are books essentially for young adults.

Another area where Colfer drifts from the Adams format is the manner of his guide entries. They are written a bit more tongue-in cheek, and pepper the book more thoroughly than in the past. Even the format of the entries is different. This is alright in the context of this book, however, as the HHGG in And Another Thing… is actually the Second Edition, something expounded on very early. In fact, the very nature of the Second Edition plays a large part in explaining why the events in the novel transpire as they do. I won’t say any more on this, since I don’t want to spoil it for everyone.

Even though we have lost Adams, and there will be no more books attributed to him, this sixth book delivers the fun, escapism, and absurdity of the previous five. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and neither should we. Although Colfer’s not Adams, And Another Thing… is a good read, and will resurrect some favorite characters, and impart a few chuckles along the way.

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, by Bill Bryson, is one of those books that you might think would be a slog — but you’d be mistaken. It is a jaunt through the history of English as a language: accents; spelling; sentence structure; regionalisms; the essence of language evolution. Bryson guides the reader through understanding etymologies, how sound effects spelling (and vice-versa), how people’s names came to be.

So many topics are covered in this volume, it’s hard to know where the strong point of the book is. The weak point of the text is that it was published in 1990 (my copy is of the 41st printing!), and so all of the studies and reference works are a couple of decades out of date. This does not make the material presented any less valid, however.

• Have you ever wondered why sticking your tongue out and blowing is called a raspberry? You can thank the Cockneys for that. (Hint: it rhymes with “raspberry tart.”)
• How about why the British use the word “autumn,” while Americans use the word “fall?” (It turns out that the British used to use the word “fall,” but it fell out of fashion…)
• Did you realize that the Bard of Stratford-Upon-Avon was personally responsible for providing the English language with countless words, including the word “countless” itself?

All these questions, and hundreds more you never thought to ask, are answered within the book’s pages.  Get hold of a copy of The Mother Tongue. Your efforts will be rewarded.

I just read Gaiman’s A Game of You Sandman graphic novel from Vertigo (Volume 5). Aside from the story telling being completely off the charts, there is a marvelous must-read introduction by Samuel R. Delany.

The thing Gaiman is most brilliant at is creating new mythology from bits and pieces of old myth, psychology, and urban fantasy. What stands out in this story is that it appears to be a leaping off-point for Mirrormask. Having just viewed the film again, there are structural parallels between it and A Game of You, not the least of which is the displaced princess bringing destruction down on the alternate world. While in Mirrormask the alternate world is the fantasy illustration world of the main character, in A Game of You the alternate world is, necessarily, the dreamscape.

I recently finished reading Breakfast of Champions for the first time. I don’t know what took me so long to get to it. A couple of things became apparent while I read it. The first was that Vonnegut’s biting sarcasm — in this case disguised as a primer on modern (1970’s) American and Earth culture — was disarmed cleverly by the insertion of his line drawings. It made me question the validity and truthfulness of the narrator.

As far as who the narrator is, that’s one of the central questions of the book. As such, when the plot and characters seem a bit scattered and difficult to follow (which is not often) the question of the narrator’s identity pops up. When the narrator’s identity is finally revealed as Vonnegut himself (even though he never expressly states his name within the text, he identifies himself as the author)the narrative validity issue transcends this particular book to encompass all of his works.

Another interesting feature of the book is how he creates a light-hearted narrative style, even when dealing with heavy issues of racism. It’s no wonder that this novel ends up on so many banned book lists. The “N”-bomb is dropped so frequently that I was waiting for the NAACP to sneak up behind me and snatch the book from my hands. The racist and inflammatory language is used by the narrator to explain to an audience outside of 1973 America exactly what the characters mean by their in-character dialogue. He also uses it to level the playing field — no one escapes the criticism of the author’s eye, not even Vonnegut himself. It is a style that has only recently been duplicated in the cinema with films like Borat and Brüno. But Vonnegut uses this, and other incendiary stereotypes, to create something that’s beyond the humor of Sacha Baron Cohen, to achieve a satire of early 1970’s societal flaws, some of which, it might be noted, continue to propagate today.

The humor of the work is very cleverly created by using self-referencing. Each section starts with a hook that continues the previous section, yet creates a parallel story thought that symbolically reflects on the first in a poetic manner. Then, a term which had previously been introduced to the reader is woven in for a building effect. This allows Vonnegut to lead up to sections later in the text which are literally one-liners — sections with a single one-sentence paragraph.

And so forth.