Finished

July 15th - 8:43pm

Nothing More Just

"Results are not Guaranteed, but if not perfectly satisfied, your wasted time will be refunded."
                                                            – Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth 

This is a perfect book. Sorry, but that's that and we're all going to have to live with it. This book has Rhyme and Reason, princesses and demons, sounds and silences, and words and numbers. It has soups which make you hungrier and half-baked cakes which disagree with you later. It has the Sea of Knowledge, in which some people can swim all day and without ever getting wet, and the Mountains of Ignorance, which take no time at all to reach. Here, amidst it's mere 256 pages, the Awful DYNNE plays with that utterly average child. And of course you have cars, which go without saying, and words capable of being snuck away with, safely hidden on the tip of your tongue. You even meet, all too briefly, the Everpresent Wordsnatcher, who refuses to return his homeland of Context.

And that's not all.

As if word play were not enough – as if Norton Juster's puns and twisted idioms were not perfectly entertaining by themselves –  he has given this book purpose. I'm not sure if it could be termed a plot. I hesitate to use that word to describe the sequence of events which transpire to run into each other here, even if they never do really crash and the whole thing turns out to have been beautifully orchestrated. It is closer to a moral, but that has all kinds of historical baggage - poor thing. The best I can do is pull out a quote and call it the running theme.*

"It's not just learning things that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters."

 What Norton Juster has done is pick and poke fun at different aspects of knowledge and different faults of the human persona while still, ultimately, preserving a sense of respect for both. He could make chores seem more fun than eating ice cream, without ever denying that ice cream wasn't all that bad to begin with. He laughs at a world where information is shoveled into minds as a dead thing, knowing that dead things usually stay dead unless they fall into the hands of someone who can make them grow and bear fruit. He's . . . He's . . . He's  Douglas Adams' Evil Twin.

Well, Priggish Twin.**

And after saying that, really, what more do I have to say to make you go and read it? If it helps you can replace all instances of the word "tollbooth" with "phone booth."


Also, while we're headed toward Delusions, I want a 1940s-style poster of the Terrible Trivium to hang on my wall.



 __________________________________ Socks Off:

* Exactly like a running stitch, used to bind together events in a piece of literature. A running theme may be the basis of your point, which directly effects the shape and tone of your plot. These themes can be subtle or, like The Phantom Tollbooth, they can be artistically blatant. Themes that are too obvious and large are likely to come undone, leaving your work little more than random, unjoined rags.


** Now that we've mentioned Douglas Adams, doesn't this quote – pulled completely out of context from chapter 14 – sound like it was written just for him?

"'That's absurd,' objected Milo . . .  .
'That may be true,' [the Dodecahedron] acknowledged, 'but it's completely accurate, and as long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong? If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself.'"

Funnier Then Strange

Bevity: Ahg! New blogger format, creepy.

Sixer: It makes it look like our blog title is Socks and SpoQ.

Bevity: We could change it to that. So do you remeber if we had a book in March?

Sixer: Umm... I'm pretty sure I read something in March.

Bevity: Never mind, it's May now (because those two months are right next to each other) and we have a new book.

Sixer: Yes, and it's the kind of book that can make you believe three and five are next to each other.

Bevity: It is..... The Phantom Tollbooth!!! I love this book, I remember when I first heard this book.

Sixer: If you haven't read this book you need to go out and read it now.

Bevity: It's a much better proportioned book than our last one.

Sixer: What last one?

Bevity: Whatever book we were reading before this one, I'm pretty sure there was one.

Sixer: I'm pretty sure I read a book before.

Bevity: Seems pretty strange.

Strange Failure

Sixer: This month the book we're reading is Susanna Clarke's tome Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Bevity: Yes, it's an extremely long novel. Like... never-ending.

Sixer: Luckily, We're both about two or three hundered pages in already.

Bevity: Yeah, lucky, we've only got six hundered pages left, woohoo!

Sixer: On one hand I'm really glad we have so much more to read because it's really well written and very interesting, however in some deep, dark, secret, hidden place in my soul I'm starting to wonder if all books over four-hundered pages were written just to torment busy biblophiles.

Bevity: Oh, most definitely. When I write novels they will all be one thousand pages long! MWahahahaaaaaa!!!!

Strange Ambition

Bevity: this month we have a very "interminable" book.

Sixer: Used hyperbolically, but yes. 14 days in and over 670 pages to go yet. I think, between us, we've yet to reach the two hundred page mark.

Bevity: It's pretty sad. Our predicament – not the book. The book is fascinating.

Sixer: And, as if to give homage to our blog title, it's full of footnotes. We're talking, of course, about Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

Bevity: It's really a book lovers' book. The first few chapters are all about books.  

Sixer: I love the description of all the old men sitting around studying magic and making it boring as, well, history.

Bevity: That was in the first line. I love how you can tell a lot about a book by its first line. Never judge a book by its cover, but always by its first line.

Sixer: So say we all.

Just Jones

Totally Spoiler-Free Review of Dark Lord of Derkholm

To be completely spoiler free I won't even tell you the basic premise. Because I walked past this book for years, refusing to buy it, ashamed that Diana Wynne Jones could turn out a generic evil-overlord-slaying-adventure novel. But I was dead wrong. It is perfectly Jones in every way. The concept is totally original, but based off twisting a familiar concept into something absolutely nobody else could have thought of. The world is detailed, rich, and very real. Every character arc, though perhaps does not run perfectly, ends in the perfect spot. She has wonderful characters in incredible variety, and characters in any creature you can think of. Literally. It started to look a bit spotty near the end when the plot stretched into places it didn't seem necessary to go, but then in the very end, in one large beautifully orchestrated round up, she ties off every storyline and plot line and character arc in a neat little bow, with just a sprinkle of sugar on top.

Conclusion: It was excellent. It seemed a bit clunky in places but ended up making perfect sense in the end. It will probably improve on rereading, and it's definitely worth it.

(After having spent the last seven hours reading Dark Lord of Derkholm, I have realized that there is no way I can write a review that could cover all it's awesomeness in the amount of time I have remaining, so the rest will come tomorrow.)

Jones on Dark Lords

As a disclaimer, you should know that I am already a fan of Diana Wynne Jones. I enjoy clever magic systems and the use of traditional fairy tale elements to construct a quirky and fresh story. I also like comedy, and though that's not always what Diana Wynne Jones writes, it's definitely an apt description of The Dark Lord of Derkholm. 

Imagine that your planet is under the rule of a sinister, dark lord. His troops are moving against the kingdoms of good, pillaging villages and burning fields along the way. Scary, right? Makes you want to take up arms, get a mortgage on your house, join a group of travelers, and start out on an epic, six week quest, doesn't it? But what if the Dark Lord hasn't been selected yet, and you're in between cleaning up from  last year (and all the hundreds of adventurers who paid to have the chance to take him down) and trying to find out how to stop the whole cycle in the first place. That's where The Dark Lord of Derkholm starts. The wizards' counsel is exhausted from repairing the damages of last years pillaging and plundering, and the Kingdoms are broke. The villagers have made reducing their towns to ruins into an art form, and the farmers are wondering if they will ever again see a harvest that didn't have to be helped along by magic after at troop of soldiers trampled it. The genius of this book, like the genius of Jones in general, is in the realness. Realness here is a word that means detail. Small details, details you wouldn't really think of unless you happened to live there. You can tell this is one of Diana Jones' early books because some of these details don't match up. The evil plot revealed at the book's end was, well, evil – but no worse than the forty years of misery that lead up to its discovery. You find yourself wondering why the wizards don't fake casualties for the fake wars, or why they don't just carve out a good stretch of land to be maintained solely for the purpose of the tourists so that the rest of the world can go on uninterrupted. Yeah, the demon-enforced contract probably has something to do with this, but then who signed that thing in the first place?  This is why a lot of fantasy books just use "magic-wagick" to explain things, because once you start making rules everything else has to confirm to them and that takes a lot of work. Jones doesn't play any other was though, which is why we love her, and why I enjoyed reading this book – with it's logical world that really turns – even when the logic was a bit bumpy and forced.

 Most of  Diana Wynne Jones' characters were fun too, but here the inconstancies were worse because they seemed less the snapping of  very tautly drawn boundaries and more the mere requirements of plot. The whole thing with Mrs. Derkholm was barely believable  (luckily she wasn't around enough for us to have to try), and the way the geese were treated seemed outrageously stupid – and that's the kindest way  I can think of putting it. The Benedict Arnold in the group bugged me a little too, because I felt there wasn't enough stuff in the beginning to give the reader a feel for how long he had been betraying everyone. By the end of the book we're given the impression he'd turned coat years ago, but I would have liked some small proof of this imbedded throughout the book instead of the outright cupidity crammed into the last couple of chapters. 

Now, if you've made it this far, I want you to know that I liked the book. I thought it was clever and funny. Clumsier than I've come to expect from Diana Wynne Jones, yes, but definitely worth reading.* In fact, despite the long list of faults I have just rattled off, the only thing that really bothered me (okay, besides the unnecessary deaths) was the way Derk played around with genetics. I'm fine with mythical beasts, but I'm not fine with genetic manipulation. Here's one place where I like my magic to be magic. Griffins: awesome. Griffins made up with your own DNA: wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. I'm sure I have really good, well reasoned, arguments against genetic experimentation. Fairly sure. Probably. Certainly the geese make up one all by themselves, but to be honest, the thing the whole thing mostly just creeps me out. I blame Fullmetal Alchemist.**

But seriously, what if Derk had messed up on one of the griffins (and I love the griffins as a whole), and had made an ugly, deformed thing with a fully functioning mind? Wasn't he ever forced to analyze Frankenstein? It was off setting to have this really sweet, creative guy whose hobby was playing mad scientist wandering around the book wondering whether to do something with bugs next or make a mermaid for a daughter.

So,

Content: Potentially Graphic Fantasy Violence - meaning, things that would only happen in a fantasy novel almost happen, but then they don't. Well, okay, there are a few carnivorous sheep bites, which leads right into the ever so appalling genetic experiments. Baaaaaaaaad move, Derk. 

Plot: Pure mad genius. A little hazy on where its lunch is, but at least its inventions work (it's the bologna).

Characters: Pretty clearly defined as main, secondary, and shadowy, but without having a single person as it's focus. Which means the world itself gets to be a kind of character. Cool huh?

I can't help myself and must add, in an aside to the title of this post, that I think Jones makes a pretty clear point here. Dark Lords you can fight against are a pretty easy to defeat – high casualty count notwithstanding – it's the ones that you don't see as dark, or who seem off limits for fighting, that are really hard to depose. Which, of course, is why we like our fantasy with blacks and whites. Let us flounder against our gray lords in real life and overthrow obsidian kings in our spare time.

------------------------------- Footnotes ------------------------

*The sequel, on the other hand, was excruciating even only two chapters in - I never made it past chapter three.

** Actually, I could probably create a whole list of media that feed into my dislike of the topic (The Midnighters, Animorphs, Aliens 4 . . . . basically not many things I'd recommend or normally admit to consuming– though the first Midnighter book was awesome: maath and magic, together at last).

Introducing February's Fictitious Foe

 Sixer: What was your first DWJ?


Bevity: Howl's Moving Castle . . . . After I saw the Miyazaki movie.


Sixer: Hehe. Nice introduction. I think my first Diana Wynne Jones was Witch Week. But I read The Homeward Bounders while getting my hair micro braided


Bevity: I haven't read that one yet.


Sixer: It's depressing. It's like The Lives of Christopher Chant, only he doesn't have nine lives, get the girl, or discover he's a powerful sorcerer. Instead he ends up being semi-immortal, which he doesn't realize until he meets his grand-niece.


Bevity: Sounds depressing.


Sixer: Unlike our randomly selected work for this month.


Bevity:  Which is brilliantly clever and traditionally Diana Wynne Jones  – by taking something well known and turning it on it's head in an unconventional and original way.


Sixer: Do you want to tell them what it is?


Bevity: Drumroll please . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  The Dark Lord of Derkholm (Exclamation point!)


Sixer: Which we've both already started at this point.


Bevity: We're bloglazy.


Sixer: Shouldn't that be hyphenated?


Bevity: Sure

Visible Prestige

After consuming numerous scones, cherry-cream filled puffs, and cucumber sandwiches - not to mention the large cups of tea - I feel fully authorized to say that The Prestige  is better than  The Prestige. In fact, it was mildly awesome. It's going to be a little hard to review the movie without re-reviewing the book, but I'm going to make an attempt. The Movie review itself should be fairly spoil-free, but I'm afraid that when I follow it with a comparison of book and movie, details will be divulged. With that being said, onward! 

The Movie:

              The opening scene (which, due to technical difficulties, I got to see three or four times) sets the slightly dark, tension-charged mood. It defines the three parts of a magic trick – the pledge, the turn, and the prestige – while letting you know that the story, in and of itself, is a trick. And not necessarily a nice one, we feel, as the voice over fades and we see Alfred Borden being framed and then charged with the murder of Robert Angier. Let me take this moment to mention actors: up until, oh, a few years ago I knew nothing about actors. I knew Harrison Ford, Richard Dean Anderson, and Patrick Stewart by name and could recognize a handful of other people but had no idea who they were. I have slowly been fixing this problem. My point is, though, that the actors that they picked for this movie were known even to me, and I think if someone had told me these two actors were going to be in one movie together I would have saw it in theaters when it first came out. After all, who wouldn't pay serious money to see Batman and Wolverine at the same time. 

As enemies. 

          Exactly. But back to the actual review, the movie starts us off at the "end" of the story and then uses Angier's journal to bring us back to the beginning. Now, I'm going to have to have Bevity confirm this, because I was too busy going "wait, that's not what happened in the book" to really pay attention, but even though the movie continually cuts back and forth between Angier and Borden reading each other's journals, they are not, in fact, reading them at the same time. That is, Borden is, for our purposes, reading Angier's journal in the present, while Angier is reading in the past.  The movie does a beautiful job of blending these narratives together, taking us back to the when their enmity started and following them both as they struggle for resolution. I was pleasantly surprised by how much acting the women in the movie got to do too, since the book really only made Angier's wife seem like a living person. Though, admittedly, the girls spent most of the movie in the victorian equivalent to a bikini. (excuse: stage clothes. In fact, in a hilarious juxtaposition of impressions, they often looked more dressed at home in their  . . . . chemises, then on the stage in costume. Weird, huh?).

         I was most delighted by the way the movie was able to keep the hate between Angier and Borden alive. You never really wondered why two grown men were still harping at each other like children, and when you grew a little aghast at what they were willing to do to each other (and themselves), you had a whole little pile of seriously nasty precedents as an explanation. That was what shocked me the most about this movie - aside from the major plot changes of course - it was not afraid to get its hands dirty and, because of it's very nature of grit and suspense, none of the violence was pretty. This isn't gladiator, with death choreographed and blood painted on after to make the action pop a little. This movie has birds being crushed, hands being mangled (three of them), suicide, and more drownings than  it cared to show (but it does show two). I don't mind goblins being beheaded, but this kind of "real life accident" turns my blood a little green, and if you are anything like that you might want to watch this movie with a friend who will tell you when you can open your eyes again (and then laugh at you loudly. Because that's what friends are for). That won't help you get over the main point of the movie, though, which is to horrify you. This isn't The Ring, but the build up at the beginning, and the revelation at the end, is engineered to make your hair stand on end - even if you already know what's coming.

So, scoring:

Plot: After a miraculous surgery, the crash victim walks once more across the stage of her beauty pageant. Her gait is unhampered and graceful, her dress is gorgeous without being distracting to the event, and her words are delivered with such confident, casual poise that you know she's practiced them for hours in order to get them just right. Everything just flows really well, and no one can doubt her motivation. Logic with legato - it works if you like beauty pageants. 

Content: Death, gunshot wound, knife wound (which we get to see), corsets, yadayadayada. The content moves this out of the kids section, but the plot would have done that even if all the violence was taken off stage. Obviously, being a prude, I think there was a (non-gruesome) scene or two that was unnecessary, but I can also admit that the story was so fast, and so focused on the men, using more screen time to show affection in a less invasive way would have thrown off the pacing.   

In summary, I could probably watch this movie again with someone who had never seen it before, but the characters weren't likable enough to merit any kind of emotional attachment, and in the end the little birds still die.  

The Book and the Movie (Spoiler Version):

Angier's wife is dead. Okay, yes, Borden never goes to prison in the book either. But Angier's wife is dead. In the book the enmity between Angier and Borden is started when Borden, in a fit of stupidity  conscientiousness, disrupts Angier's seance. Borden later feels sorry and tries to apologize ("later," as in, like, six months after the event) but Angier's reply is filled with bitter rage. This is understandable, since what Borden doesn't know, and actually never knows, is that when he disrupted Angeir's play he caused Mrs. Angier to miscarry. The pain Angier feels from this is palatable but . . . . . it goes no where. The book allows him to be more concerned about his wife than revenge, and then before you know it a year or two has passed, and then five, and then he suddenly has three happy kids and - hey, Borden's getting famous? Well, we can't have that - lets tune up the enmity again. 

               The movie changes this, not so much by giving us a "worse" death, but by radically revising Angier's reaction to it, and reducing the amount of time he has to react in. When Borden causes Angier's wife to drown ( accidentally, but with a lot more premeditation than was in the book), Angier responds by shooting him in the hand. Yeah. Not good for a magician. So Borden's successful counter-attempts to sabotage Angier's own performances are understandable, if no less admirable. Getting Angier's wife out of the picture changes his character in other ways too. Besides making his war with Borden a kind of continued declaration of his love, it brings Angier's relationship with Olivia to a place I can understand. In the book Angier meets Olivia when he is at the height of his success and is happily married with kids. In the movie neither of the magicians reach anything like real fame and Angier is consumed, not with bliss, but with revenge. He's attracted to Olivia, but he's married to Borden's complete destruction and will not be found unfaithful. Argh! The more I look at the movie Angier and the book Angier the more obvious it becomes that they are two completely different people. Neither of them are good at seeing the prestige of a trick, but one is intelligent in other ways, and has a dark side to his character that makes sense. When the Big Reveal happens in the book you're kind of like "Angier did that? No, not quiet little Angier." But movie Angier: we see the corrosion of his soul. When his Big Reveal comes it fits right in with his other acts - more horrifying only as the last act of a show is more spectacular than the first. And the fact that Angier's prestige in the movie is more whole, and therefore requires more blackness of soul to preform, makes more sense to the modern reader than the book's half prestige, which comes across as disney magic for being so stringless. 

                So what about Borden? I still think he's a megalomanic. He's willing to maim himself in order to protect his secret, and he watches his wife drink herself into suicide, which is unforgivable. But the movie does a much better job of splitting his character, and, once split, we find we are able to define him. Once defined then understood, and we can feel for the man who apologizes to Angier for his wife's death, even while wanting to shake the man who caused it in the first place with his pride. A lot of his attacks from the book become counter-attacks in the movie, which helps him look like the misunderstood protagonist that he sort of becomes. Why he wouldn't just tell his own wife the secret, when it was obvious even half way through the movie that,  though she didn't know, she knew, neither of the Christophers can answer, and I will always think of it as this story's Achilles' heel. 

                   I'm not sure how I feel about him walking free at the end. Yes, he's half the man he was, but he's still alive while Angier is very, very dead. However the fact that a) Borden never tried to kill Angier (before), even when not his most moral self; and b) he has a daughter to take care of - a symbol of a bright and simple future - while Angier never had anything but revenge, not even Olivia, makes me willing to call it a redemption story and back away.  I still feel Borden "deserved" to die, but seeing that he did – and seeing his reaction to Angier's prestige –  I'll concede he was no worse than a dozen other movie heros who I have cheered on. As the story proclaims: presentation is everything.  

The Prestigious Pantomime

I bought The Prestige on a whim during The Great Borders Purge. I had seen the movie and liked it. However it sat for months on my shelf untouched, so I suggested it for the Book Brigade to force myself to read it. This review is mostly spoiler free. As I said, I saw the movie first so my expectations were high. The book begins with a dull character in modern times, he was pointless and vague. I waved him away as necessary to the introducing the epistolary part of the novel. Then the real story started.

The first section of the story is told through the autobiography of one of the main characters, Borden. After a dry, lengthy depiction of his childhood the Feud is introduced. It is started accidentally by Borden who does something well meaning and seemingly harmless, and after Angier retaliates with a few small pranks it feels like it should be over. The bulk of this narrative is concerned with Borden giving you his theory on magic and not revealing to his secret which he has oh so cleverly kept for all these years. The most interesting bits of this section were when Borden explains the pact between audience and magician, and then goes on to tell you that this pact is in play in his memoirs, because he is lying to support an illusion. The parts where the illusion cracks and the lie shines through are marvelous, and if you don’t know the answer to the riddle you probably will think Borden quite mad. But then for absolutely no reason they return to the feud, a feud devoid of any cause for malice or anger. And their feud is mild, apathetic almost, they play a few tricks on each other. Borden is petty and obsessive, but seems too self-interested to plausibly continue antagonizing Angier without personal gain. They seem to be feuding merely to entertain themselves rather than out of the voracious spite they both claim.

When we hear Angier’s side of the story we are given a little justification for the feud, but he responds un-viciously, as if he does not really want to cause trouble. Angier at first seems to be a nicer person. He is gullible and earnest and a little weak minded, this sometimes masquerades as innocence and sometimes as pure idiocy. He is not particularly angered by Borden’s continued attacks and at one point attempts to abandon the feud. I suppose the real problem is that the characters never drive the feud and so it doesn’t really feel like a feud at all. When it finally ends, it is merely by accident. The characters simply go along with the events of the story instead of being the ones moving it.

Then there’s Olive Wenscombe/Olivia Svenson. She manages to completely ruin the small amount of respectability remaining to both of the main characters. While both of the main characters are built mostly on flaws, they share the good quality of being lovingly devoted to their respective wives, and you hope for happy redemption or reconciliation of some kind. But then Olive Wenscombe/Olivia Svenson comes along and deprives them, one after the other, of their only admirable quality. I don’t mind flawed characters as long as their flaws are there to shape them into something interesting and propel their story, I don’t even mind entirely rotten characters who are only self serving, but I do mind characters who are just pathetic and despicable out of a lack of concern or purpose. They are just following the story, they have no real motivations. It is the same problem with the feud, the characters are not weakly written, but they are weak, weak in will, weak in action. They do not stand for anything, they are not trying to accomplish anything they merely exist.

In between all this we are taken back to the perspective of the characters in modern times from the introduction. It seems like a completely irrelevant interruption until something truly horrific and shocking springs out of the middle. It is so sudden, so jarring, and so pointless, and so utterly awful. This thing is made doubly horrifying and by the fact that it has no discernable purpose. When we are taken to the modern characters at the very end of the novel, we continue in this extremely disturbing vein, slowly piling on the creepiness until at last the Author leaves on the last page with nothing but sheer terror.

Conclusion: While there are many things that irritate me about this novel: the fact that (spoilers) Angier’s mustache is never mentioned until we are introduced to a roomful of his frozen corpses, the Author giving long-winded accounts of each characters’ childhood as part of their introduction, and the failure by the Author to piece together any of the themes he laid out; the two mysteries are very masterfully and elegantly handled*, even through the difficult epistolary medium, which sometimes strains the narrative. But this novel loses out of sheer disturbing creepiness.

*Another high point is Hesketh Unwin. A background character if ever I saw one, but he wins the Most Awesome Name Ever award.

The Illusion of Prestige

                 I started The Prestige thinking it would be pure fiction. That is,  I thought it would describe the life and actions of made up people doing made-up, but presumably plausible, things. Halfway through the book I had established it in my mind as the tale of the two squabbling magicians: a drama mixed with a little mystery and carrying the possibility of romance in the inevitable reconciliation of the two families. Instead The Prestige is a science fiction novel in the early strain – more the horror of Frankenstein* than the sociology of the Foundation series – but this isn't revealed to the unsuspecting reader until they are more than halfway through the book. Before that they have to meet the main characters, which takes longer than normal since the book is made up of five acts with each character in charge of introducing themselves. This was slightly different than normal and, as a stylistic choice, handled perfectly. In the average book we are given only one point of view, and though this limits us a little if we are reading a political novel, we can still tell what's happening because, though the characters color things a bit, they do not lie about actual events. But here the  characters with the largest presence, the magicians Alfred Bolden and Rupert Angier, twist facts and events to suit themselves. It's the perfect format for deception.

The widely different ways in which events are revealed does little to instill confidence in the narrators' sanity, but Bolden and Angier would be candidates for institutionalization anyway in my book. Only a dozen pages into Bolden's account I had already committed him to the loony bin due to his bizarre use of grammar and habit of, shall I say, talking to himself. Then I guessed his secret and had to grudgingly admit he was awful clever. In the end, however, it is  his precious secret which condemns him. He makes quite a lot of it in his own account – now I show you my hands, and all that – which give you a hint of his megalomania (I don't use this word lightly here, he really has a disturbing need to be superior, and his secret is how he satisfies this need). Bolden says he had thought of his marvelous act, and therefore his deception,  while still at home. But for a man to continue the joke of a sixteen year old boy? It's not funny Bolden, just ask your wife. His wife. Oh, wait.

Not that Angier is any better. From the start he only seems slow and a little Monkish – the New York variety, not the kind that meditates. I actually felt for him great sympathy at first, because of the consequences of Bolden's actions against him and because, naturally, of his great happiness. What can I say, I find happily married men attractive. But there's nothing more pathetic than a happiness that ends, and Angier proves that to really mess up a life you have to be the one living it. Questions of morality aside – neither of these men are particularly admirable in regards to their wives, but you feel it more with Angier because Bolden is so deucedly distant –  I can not shake the feeling that Angier is a small man who really would have been better at home collecting orchids, or whatever it is harmless members of the British aristocracy do. He proves me wrong not when he comes up with the (ludicrous) idea of In a Flash - the idea which completely dissolves the solid base of an interesting, if not endearing, fiction –  but with how he handles the prestige. It makes my skin crawl with his callousness. You see, the word "prestige" in the title is actually used as a noun by Priest.  It's where he reveals that his drama is actually a thriller. Prestige is a horrid euphemism which my dictionary tells me is perfectly fitting. Prestige: a feeling based on the favorable perception of another's achievement. A word deriving most recently from the French word for illusion, but ultimately from the Latin praestgiae, conjuring trick. It is through his prestige(s) that Angier gains his prestige, and then, through fate's justice, losses all ability to enjoy it.

                      This brings me to a point where I must confess my own short comings: I like happy endings. Not only do I like them, but I feel that 99% of all books, movies, or TV shows that end tragically could have been saved with some unicorns and pixie dust. I would rather have a deus ex machina than that strange feeling of the unresolved. To me, a story that does not end happily – or, in the case of science fiction, in some state of contentment – can have no real resolution. A book without resolution is a book without end, and a book without end is like a hang nail that's long enough to catch painfully on your clothes and hair but too short to easily cut. Without completely spoiling the book, for the greatest pleasure you'll get from it is in discovering its secrets,  I can tell you that, though both Angier and Bolden die, there is no reason to conclude that any of them are actually dead.** They are both, however, perfectly wretched and twisted by their bitterness. Sunshine? The book ends at night. Rainbows? At night, in the snow. Warm fuzzys? We leave Kate and Andrew standing in the door way with the physical equivalent of a corpse. Sorry Priest. I enjoyed reading about magic and the world of magicians, and I'm really looking forward to seeing your illusions on screen, but your characters weren't very nice chaps and Kate, easily my favorite character, makes no sense unless she knows far more than she is telling. Did you mean to end the book there, or did you just run out of twists? 

Originality: Pretty good. 

Characters: They seem nice and normal, but it's all smoke and mirrors. 

Plot: Slow to start, fast to end. Tied up with a bow and then ripped to shreds in the blender and used as wet confetti.

Content: I'm citing this book for non-descriptive nudity and inducing horror without warning***

* Okay, this really isn't fair to Frankenstein, which is a legitimate look at society in its own right, but the parallels between Frankenstein and The Prestige are overwhelming.  Even the monster's mournful "He is dead who brought me into being" and the following attempt at suicide is mirrored in Preist's books - only, Shelly was content to have made her point while I'm not quite sure what Preist's point even was.  

** Okay, I admit, this is my favorite thing from the book:  "Now I show you my hands . . . . I roll up my sleeves . . . ."  

*** Sudden genre switching is one of the cardinal sins of writing, right up there with having characters act out of character. 

Welcome Internet!

Sixer: Hello World, and welcome to Sock and Spoons.

Bevity: The.

Sixer: Yes, the Socks and Spoons.

Bevity: Brigade.

Sixer: Whatever. Anyway, welcome to our humble outpouring of . . .

Bevity: Geniusness. And, can we explain that this is a book blog?

Sixer: Yes, I was just getting to that. Our plan is to read a book a month - and watch a gazilion movies - and then review them.

Bevity: Here's a real introduction: Welcome Internet! These are the fabulous and spectacularly intelligent musings of Bevity and Sixer on various novels and films of interest. We will be reading and reviewing monthly for at least until we get bored.

Sixer: Or realize we're boring. So, do you want to intorduce our first victim, or shall I?

Bevity: You've already read it, so you do it.

Sixer: Oh, I wasn't really going to admit to that. But oh well, fine. We chose January's book based on Bevity's recommendation, since the movie is - apparently - briliant.

Bevity: Chritopher Nolan never fails to amaze. Christopher Nolan is Pixar for grownups. He's the writer-director of Inception, Batman Begins, Dark Knight . . . .

Sixer: Geek. Moving on. After years of ripping apart movies which failed to live up to the books they were based on, we might have actually found one that improves upon its source material. I don't know, I've only just read the book and haven't actually watched the movie yet. But I'm really hoping the movie is better. Really, really, really, hoping.

Bevity: I guess we'll just have to see. I just want to clarify that not all the movies we review will be based on the book of the month. Also not all posts will be based in logic or have anything to do with what we've just said.