octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

My goodness, but he does talk a lot of rubbish. The four essays in here, all dealing with Art in some fashion (and I use the capital letter deliberately, seeing as dear old Oscar gives the impression of utter disdain for anything else) are mildly clever but mostly interminable.

Reading them, I was struck mostly by the sense of incipient dread that any hostess must have felt when Oscar turned up for a dinner party. If she were lucky, she'd get the Wilde who wrote The Importance of Being Ernest, and he would make terribly witty, terribly well-constructed observations and be a delight to the whole table. If she were very unlucky, she'd get the Oscar of Intentions, a gaseous windbag pontificating at endless length about the proper understanding of Art until people drowned themselves in the soup, just to get it to stop. 

You'd never get a mystery like this written today, I think - the kids are sent away to do up a library, and they live by themselves for a week in an empty house while they do it. The "about the author" section at the back of the book notes that this series was popular with kids because of the frequent lack of adult supervision, and this book's living up to that. I don't think my parents would ever have allowed this, back when I was a kid, but me and my sister and our friends would take our bikes out for the day and spend it at the river, swimming, when we were about the same age as Jessie and Henry, so it's not entirely foreign. It's nice to read about, though, and indicative of more trusting times, I think.

Anyway, the kids are doing up a rundown library in order to save it, which in practice means they spend the week dusting and shelving books, which is not greatly exciting, but the library has a sword passed down from the time of the civil war, and a local thief is after it. They also make friends with a young boy whose father has recently been lost at sea. It's obvious a happy ending is coming to that particular storyline, and it does, but mostly the whole thing is a sort of extended camping trip with books: pleasant, undemanding fun. 

This is... not good, and it's entirely down to the main character of this one-act play. Salome lacks the remotest sense of credibility, and when I say she lacks it, I mean that she lacks it entirely. Consider my paraphrasing of some of the events in this play:

Salome: I love your body, it's so perfect, let me touch it!
John the Baptist: Hell no.
Salome: I hate your body! But your hair, it's so perfect, let me touch it.
John the Baptist: Hell. No.
Salome: I hate your hair! But your mouth, it's so perfect, let me touch it.
John the Baptist: Are you fucking deaf?
Salome: Well die then. I can snog your decapitated head instead.

You see what I mean? Unless the point of Salome is to present the main character as absolutely off her rocker, completely erratic in her incel behaviour, this makes no sense. Keep in mind that the above takes place over, oh, fifteen minutes or so, as she meets a man, falls in immediate lust, and then sulks off to murder in less time than it takes most of us to eat breakfast. Salome's mother Herodias comes off as credible, and Herod as well - both are unpleasant, but they're believable enough. Salome, however... it's like Wilde wrote her while very, very drunk and she never made it past a first draft version of herself. She doesn't need a creepy incestuous stepdad and his bribery promises, she needs a padded room and medication. 

I want to say that this is a nastily funny romance, but that's not really true. (It's only almost true.) In many ways it's a sweet, funny romance between a neurodiverse man called Don and a woman called Rosie. Don, hopeless with women, has put together a lengthy questionnaire by which he is trying to narrow down, with scientific accuracy and objectivity, a partner who will be perfect for him. Every reader can tell you where this is going - Rosie fulfills none of the criteria, and he falls for her anyway. His efforts are touching, and amusing, but the thing is they're only amusing because Don's brain doesn't work the same way as most people's. He doesn't understand social interactions, and a lot of the humour comes from the problems that occur when he routinely gets those basic interactions wrong. The thing is - and this is where I was tempted to call it nastily amusing - it's funny because I'm laughing at Don, not with him. And he's a decent person, trying his best. He doesn't really deserve to be the constant butt of the joke here, but he is. And all the sweet sugarcoating in the world doesn't really make up for that. 

I always enjoy books about treasure hunts, and that's basically what this book is about. Oh, it's tech-based and there's a lot of not very interesting guff about alternate dimensions, but it's a treasure hunt. Follow the clues, get the prize. And because I enjoy books about treasure hunts, I enjoyed this, but even so it's quite long, quite unfocused, and has a lot of handwavium about dimensions that I suspect is supposed to be compelling but just comes off as a bit annoying, really. 

The thing is, I really do like the core idea: a treasure hunt, increasingly dangerous, that's based on connections and conspiracies, and where it's difficult to tell if the protagonists are on the right track, or if it's just gullibility and mental dysfunction that's causing them to see connections, see coincidences, where there are none. That's such an ambiguous adventure, one that's entertainingly destabilising and verges on the horrific. But, as I said... there's all this other extraneous stuff leeched onto it, and as much as I like treasure hunts, I really don't care for the cosmic threats and merging universes and so forth. It doesn't make me see the story as mysterious, it makes me see it as cluttered, and not in an appealing way.

I do love that cover, though. 

I enjoyed this, though I did think it was far too long, and a little unfocused for what it was. I feel like it could have been pared down to more effective essentials, but the focus on generational trauma was done well. I wish I could say that I found fifteen year old Oliver convincing, but I didn't really - he was enormously sympathetic, but he wasn't convincing, and the similarly-aged Jake was neither. The adults, however... Oliver's parents Nate and Maddie, the other two tent-poles of this three-protagonist book, I did warm to more. They were both sympathetic and convincing, especially Nate, and I liked their relationship. 

It's always good, in a horror that features a teen protagonist, to see a strong family unit. So often there's a temptation to make the horror family dysfunctional in some way, or have the kid either partially or completely orphaned by the ever-popular dead parent trope, but even with the terrible family history that Nate's saddled with, he and Maddie have managed to create, for Oliver, a haven of love, sanity, and solid relationship skills. That was what I most enjoyed about this, I think. And not only did Nate and Maddie work together when it came to their family, when weird shit started happening they talked to each other and believed each other and it's actually really refreshing to see. I had no interest at all in the cosmic demon thing, but the central family kept my attention, so more horror families like this, please! 

I'm currently slogging my way through the works of Oscar Wilde, and as much as I enjoy his fiction, his essays leave me cold. This is no different. I find them unfocused and poorly reasoned. His prose is always good, of course, but prose is not enough to be convincing. The thing is, the basic idea is sympathetic: Wilde thinks that with a more enlightened political reality, individuals will have more freedom and more happiness; he is especially concerned with the freedom and happiness of artists. He thinks that socialism will do this, but it seems like what he's really describing is a libertarianism shaded with socialism, and with the best will in the world, I don't have a lot of time for libertarianism.

Even if I did, the reasoning here is often, well, inconsistent, and I should note here that I read Wilde's De Profundis yesterday, and that it was written some time after The Soul of Man. It's notable that in the latter he rails against the effects of private property and charity, on the grounds that one leads to an obsession with material things, and the other is variously degrading, and uses private wealth to prop up an immoral system, instead of remaking the system so that charity isn't needed. Come the time of De Profundis, however, when Wilde has been made bankrupt and all his own private property sold off, he is lamenting the losses dreadfully, and reproaching his ex-lover for not using his own funds to save some of Wilde's property for him; charity is clearly less "immoral and unfair" then. This isn't even getting into Wilde's arguing on one page that the Renaissance was great because artists didn't have to bother solving social problems and this allowed them to develop into individuals that made art in their own different ways, and then follows it up, not two pages latter, on the monotony of subjects in Renaissance art. Or the deeply ignorant assertion that African American slaves in America weren't actually much concerned with getting themselves freedom because they'd become used to slavery, which is apparently meant to support the argument that poor people don't revolt against poverty because they're used to it, rather than, say, the fact that all their energy is bent on trying to survive.

So yeah, unsympathetic reading here. It's idealism written by someone who's experienced none of what he's pontificating about, and when he does experience poverty and degradation, some time down the road, it seems he finds a lot of it doesn't hold up. 

"I have no desire to complain," says Wilde, as he complains for ninety pages. Admittedly, his complaints do seem to have serious justification. If everything happened as De Profundis indicates, then Alfred "Bosie" Douglas was a leech, a coward, and someone absolutely lacking in gratitude or sympathy for anyone in his life. He also appeared to have quite the temper, and frequent tantrums. Mostly he seems extraordinarily childish. If Wilde is to be believed (and I've got no reason to disbelieve him, but there are two sides to every story and we're only getting one here) then Douglas dropped him in the shit and then ran off and left Wilde to suffer conviction, prison, and bankruptcy alone.

He sounds absolutely nasty, a right little tosser, and I don't blame Wilde for being so bitter. Yet I've got to admit, I spent a lot of time thinking "You had plenty of chances to get shot of this brat, don't blame him for driving you to penury when you kept buying him expensive presents, knowing he was an ungrateful wastrel. And if he's bothering you when you're writing, lock the bloody door and tell him to sod off!" Wilde does, to marginal credit, take on some of the blame for this, but not very much. A great deal more is complaint.

Where Wilde does deserve credit, and lots of it, is his extremely compelling emotional journey, as he tries to come to terms with what his prison experiences mean for his life and for his faith. In many ways this is a profoundly religious text, one that takes Christ as an inspiration for not just surviving suffering and sorrow, but for transforming them into something redemptive. It's clear that Wilde is struggling to do this - the loss of his children is particularly devastating - but he is trying, and the glimmers of his success are enormously affecting.

This particular edition has very little background added to it. I'd have liked to have seen an afterword, something that explores contemporary reaction to the book (I believe it was published after Wilde's death?) And of course I'd love to know Douglas' reaction to this lengthy letter... though I can't help but believe that, if his character is painted here accurately, that reaction will be both temporary and superficial. 

This is outstanding, and I love everything about it. Unfortunately my borrowed copy is due back today, but I'll definitely be getting a hard copy of my own to go on my shelves, because I know I'll want to read this again and again. (And not just because I love cicadas and was therefore tempted by the title!) There's a lot of body horror here, and there's a lot of things that are worse - the hate crime murder of one of the central characters is excruciating to read, but the appealing thing about horror is that victims can come back from the dead to exact terrible vengeance on everyone who deserves it. There's something very comforting in that. For all that horror can be a confronting genre in many other ways, it can also be deeply, profoundly interested in justice, and that's what happens here.

If it were just vengeance, though, I'd still enjoy it, but there's hope here as well, the idea that justice is in service to a better future, and that entities that appear monstrous can be monstrous and still be necessary, substantial forces for good in the world. And this book does it all against a background of modern-day migrant workers and Aztec mythology, primarily the goddess of the dead Mictecacihuatl. I freely admit that I'd never even heard of her before this, but then my knowledge of Aztec history and culture is spotty at best - something I clearly need to remedy. Oh well, more books for me! 

A quick, fun novella about a romance between two elderly women back in the late 1800s. Refreshingly, the drama in here isn't about the bigotry they receive due to their sexuality (an important topic, but one I've come across a lot in my reading lately, so it's nice to have a bit of a change), but is instead down to the Terrible Nephew, a middle-aged lout who is hanging on for an inheritance he doesn't deserve, and who is prepared to have his aunt committed if she doesn't keep bailing him out and turning a blind eye. There's actually some danger of him doing so, as the women in Incomparable Adventure are still women, and elderly women at that - one of them even has the temerity to be a poor elderly woman, and so is ignored by most people for multiple reasons - and sexism is alive and well in Victorian London. Nevertheless, justice prevails, and a happy ending is assured (for everyone but the Terrible Nephew). It's just the thing for when you've got a spare hour and want something fast-paced and full of cheese toast.