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Rough Magic and Dentistry
Apr. 13th, 2006 08:22 amI lost a piece of a tooth on Sunday. I went into the dentist on Monday, and they gave me a temporary onlay then -- I'll get a permenant quarter-crown onlay a couple of weeks from then. My first bit of dentistry beyond fillings and wisdom tooth extractions.
I'm reading Rough Magicke, by John William Houghton. It's pretty bad (I've switched to skimming, for the most part), but it's bad in interesting ways -- namely, that the author doesn't bother to introduce you to his cast -- instead, he assumes accquaintence and presumes apon it. The fact that the style is very unfiltered -- with very few descriptions and little to no internal narrative, instead attempting to communicate almost everything through dialogue and action depiction -- really doesn't help it here; we only get to know the character via what he says and does (since we don't get to find out what he thinks or see people through the lens of his perception), and since this neither supports the narrative (unlike, say, the Amber novels, where our initial ignorance reflects Corwin's amnesia, and is somewhat countered as that amnesia is torn away) and the lack of substantial differentiation between the speech patterns of the narrator and any of the other friendly characters fails to make the "near constant dialogue" style much better.
Of course, the fact that the narrator, as he develops, is something of a Mary Sue, isn't either that surprising nor a great addition to the overall effect.
I'm reading Rough Magicke, by John William Houghton. It's pretty bad (I've switched to skimming, for the most part), but it's bad in interesting ways -- namely, that the author doesn't bother to introduce you to his cast -- instead, he assumes accquaintence and presumes apon it. The fact that the style is very unfiltered -- with very few descriptions and little to no internal narrative, instead attempting to communicate almost everything through dialogue and action depiction -- really doesn't help it here; we only get to know the character via what he says and does (since we don't get to find out what he thinks or see people through the lens of his perception), and since this neither supports the narrative (unlike, say, the Amber novels, where our initial ignorance reflects Corwin's amnesia, and is somewhat countered as that amnesia is torn away) and the lack of substantial differentiation between the speech patterns of the narrator and any of the other friendly characters fails to make the "near constant dialogue" style much better.
Of course, the fact that the narrator, as he develops, is something of a Mary Sue, isn't either that surprising nor a great addition to the overall effect.
