-John Flannery, Chaos's evil agent in Jonathan Carroll's Glass Soup.
Sound advice from a creepy antagonist.
I enjoyed Glass Soup
. It's a literate spec fic novel set in Austria. The hints of Europe were a familiar and pleasing flavor for me, and gave Carroll a chance to use his intimate knowledge of his expatriate home to slide interesting facts about Mohr im hemd (chocolate pudding) and flakturm (indestructible antiaircraft towers) into the tale. A colorful and engaging parade of absurdities first delight and distract, then begin to coalesce into an intriguing hierarchy of life after death and dreams. Protagonists Vincent and Isabelle must wade through bizarre events, the death of loved ones, and even their own deaths in order to save their unborn child, Anjo.One of the most interesting scenarios in the book happens before the narrative begins: Vincent dies, and Isabelle jumps after him into the afterlife, successfully bringing him back from death. Vincent has returned to life to raise his still in-utero son. Anjo is (for no specified reason) fated to stop Chaos from destroying the world to preserve its newfound consciousness. So Chaos really has it in for Anjo. Chaos is intent halting the cycle of the godlike mosaic that forms and reforms, creating the pattern of life. Ironically Chaos would like everything to stay just the way it is- it doesn't want the mosaic that brought it to life to break down. Right here is one of strangest things about the book. Chaos when personified in fiction usually thrives on disorder. In Glass Soup, the protagonists are able to defeat Chaos again and again by capitalizing on the very disorder it creates.
Strengths of the book include humor, absurdity, internal logic, and bits of trivia about autographists and Blue Morpho butterflies. The main weakness is characterization. Womanizer Simon Haden is the best developed character in the book and the first introduced. It is through his afterlife that we discover the rules of the game, and get great insight into his personality. We are never present in Vincent or Isabelle's afterlives, and without that device, Carroll is limited in how engaged the reader becomes with his protagonists.
Characterization issues also plagued the bad guys. John Flannery and his dog Luba were introduced as the bowel-loosening henchman of Chaos, but their creepiness wore off as I got to know them, until they just weren't that scary. This left the end of the novel feeling a mite drab- the sense of urgency faded as the antagonist lost its bite, and it seemed only a matter of time before the more competent protagonists worked their way through the loophole inconveniences of the universal laws of life and death.
4 comments:
The whole point of the characterization in this novel is that the people are not cardboard cutouts-- Flannery is terrifying in his ordinariness, not because he's dressed in black and twirling his moustache, as is so often the (lame) case with bad guys in this genre. Vincent and Isabelle are recognizably flawed and thus truly human. You don't necessarily have to like them to empathize with their travails and triumphs. Carroll's genius in this and all his work is that the world he introduces is slightly off kilter and very much recognizable as 3/4 our own. Then when the strange things start happening, we can honestly feel the tectonic shift in realities and the ride becomes that much more frightening and enthralling. You might well see and encounter a man like John Flannery on the street. Charming, likable, insidious and utterly ruthless. I think you're dead wrong in your assessment here. Carroll is one of the great living writers. You seem more concerned in this review with what he isn't rather than what he is. Praising him with faint damns, so to speak.
Ethan
Ethan,
Thanks for adding your perspective to my review. "Tectonic" is a great way to describe the reality shifts Carroll very successfully achieves.
A few clarifications:
I reviewed Glass Soup, not the author's body of work or his place in contemporary fiction. I'd have to read more than one of his books to form those kinds of opinions. I very much enjoyed Glass Soup, and I'm excited about exploring more of Carroll's work.
"Liking" vs. empathy: I very much liked Vincent and Isabelle. If I'm ever in Vienna I'd love to have coffee and some of that delicious cake with them. The problem was that I did not empathize with these characters. I wouldn't call them cardboard cutouts, but they were no where near as round as Simon Haden. Simon, by the way, is not someone I'd like to have lunch with, but he was my favorite character in the book (Simon demonstrated that Carroll can be very adept at characterization).
John Flannery was a fantastic villain for precisely the reasons you mentioned. My enjoyment of the book was proportional to his ruthless charm. That charm faltered after Leni's murder. The confrontation with Vincent was written in such a way that I had no doubt Vincent would triumph- which sapped some of the tension. John Flannery's replacement was significantly less intimidating.
The combined loss of Simon Haden and John Flannery took a little of the air out of the climax of the novel. You're correct that my review included a lot of praise. The first three-fourths of the book were so gripping and fantastic, that the ending, which was good, but not great in my opinion, left me feeling a little flat.
Also the term "genius" is somewhat dubious here. This type of "surreal mainstream" is very commonplace in Europe. He is, however, a competent and literate addition to that existing genre.
Saying Carroll is a "competent and literate addition to that genre" is silly. I'd love to see you cite even two other writers who are doing anything remotely like Carroll today. But please don't mention the likes of Gaiman or Tim Powers who are definitely not. Besides winning literally every prize in the genre (World Fantasy and British Fantasy awards included), Carroll's books have been chosen several times as "books of the year" by the NY Times (and not as genre work, but mainstream fiction), and also been cited by the likes of Haruki Murakami, no slouch himself, as being a "remarkable and sui generis writer like no other."
Ethan K.
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