Reading Roundup, November 2024
Dec. 7th, 2024 09:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoThis is likely going to be my last reading roundup of the year. November was a slow month, meaning that I only just finished the second of my November books today-in December! Between the US election, the US Thanksgiving holiday, and the end of the academic term, I’ve been a bit too occupied with other things to keep reading at the top of my to-do list. I look forward to a bit of extra time over the winter break, and I hope to return with a reading roundup in January. :)
There is one item of good news in all of that busyness: I have officially received tenure from my university! I’ve known that I would for a few months now, but it’s great to have that all public and announced—it confirms that I’ll get to take next year off as a sabbatical, and it’s a culminating experience for all of the work I’ve done over the past six years. This is the goal for any academic, and now I’m past it… I’m excited for the new experiences and challenges that come next! (But after my well-earned year off of teaching!)
The Great When by Alan Moore
I purchased this the day after the US election. It felt the right moment for escaping into a bit of fantasy. Alan Moore is an author that I know for his comics work—Watchmen, From Hell, and so on. I was surprised to hear that he’d written a novel (not his first, apparently!), and I was curious to know what a graphic novelist did with a prose novel.
The Great When is a portal fantasy set in London in 1949. Dennis Knuckleyard, 18, works at a used bookshop in the East End and is nobody special. However, an encounter with a used book that should not exist draws him into another world, and the quest to dispose of it, avoid the nasty types who want to steal it from him, and prevent the uninitiated from finding the magical world leads him to a host of new connections and demands that he muster a bit of bravery and competence.
As for what Moore does with the prose, the answer is that he does some strange things! Throughout this book, I felt Moore grasping at concepts that a visual language would more easily convey. He tumbles through eldritch descriptions of a magical world, but his reference points are 10¢ floppies. I’m not sure it’s the most effective prose I’ve read in SFF—I couldn’t begin to picture much of what’s described—but I wasn’t turned off by it, I suppose. It makes sense for Moore, even if it is neither great nor especially readable.
His prose choices aside, he writes an interesting story about stumbling into the magical side of postwar London. Dennis is a transparent response to those other British boys in famous portal fantasies. They are reserved and very middle-class, and their setbacks are circumstantial; they have mostly decent manners. They are the type of boy to emphasize a sentiment with “jolly,” in the right era. Dennis, on the other hand, is introduced through an ineffectual attempt to masturbate; he pisses in a sink at one point (to his credit, this embarrasses him); he is routinely described as unwashed. Born in the East End and orphaned during the war, he is living without documentation by 1949 in an effort to avoid the National Service. He is poor and not noble, and neither is almost any of the other characters. This is a wonderful exploration of class, buried underneath the shock and humor. And Dennis’ inner life is richly examined, if you enjoy the sorts of books which center a white man’s quest for belonging (I do), so the tight narration is very rewarding.
The wider cast includes various magicians and people who are adjacent to Dennis’ brush with magic. Standouts are Grace, a prostitute, who Dennis meets accidentally—their collision puts her at risk, and watching them both navigate that was interesting, especially as the narrative both acknowledges and resists where you think it’s going with that relationship. I also generally liked the magical characters, though fair warning that a number of them are drawn from real life—I’m not a huge fan of that technique in writing. The villains of the story are less compelling to me than Dennis’ character arc, and I think that the plot might have been paced better with respect to those confrontations. It’s not that the component parts were ineffective, but that they were assembled strangely in relation to their position within the page count.
I enjoyed this book. It’s the first in a series but reads well as a standalone, and I might recommend it on that merit. I also like it as another entry into the British Boys Portal Fantasy club, especially one which meaningfully examines class through its choice of protagonist. The prose is strange for sure, and I don’t love it, but I got used to it. It reads like Moore indulging himself—he has so many outlandish descriptions, and even the non-magical sections are studded with references to literature and music and art and film and occult history. This is a man who truly loves Edwardian ghost stories and historical occultists stringing together a plot and some new characters to get to play around with their ideas, their contexts, their lives. In some ways, it has the addictive quality of reading an old pulp novel—which, all told, I think that Moore may have been pleased with.
Bertram Cope’s Year by Henry Blake Fuller
I was browsing Standard EBooks and found in the summary for this novel that it was about a gay character—and Wikipedia backed this up by calling it the first American homosexual novel! Well, that bit of notability meant I had to read it.
Bertram Cope is a young man, originally from Illinois but lately of Wisconsin, who has decided to secure his academic future by writing a thesis in English literature and earning his doctorate. He returns to an Illinois university (in a fictional town named Churchton, most probably based around Northwestern University) to work as an instructor and earn his degree. He’s a charming, remote intellectual: handsome and very fair, he immediately catches the attention of two older characters who drive much of the novel’s plot. Medora Phillips is a 45-year-old widow and prominent hostess who has three marriageable female wards (Amy, Carolyn, Hortense); Basil Randolph is a similarly-aged confirmed bachelor. They’re a fun pair of acquaintance-rivals and I’d describe the dynamic they introduce as “a hot young thing attracts the attention of two old queens.” The final complication is Cope’s relationship with Arthur Lemoyne, who spends the first half of the year as a correspondent before moving in with Cope during the spring term.
The novel is queer in the way that David Blaize is queer. It is all on the page, and I assume that to a queer reader of the era, it would have been transparent that Cope, Lemoyne, and Randolph are gay men. At one point after Cope and Lemoyne have reconciled from a dispute, the novel states:
There are also a shocking number of uses of the word “gay” to describe the characters (it is very winking), and Cope and Lemoyne are very plainly sleeping in the same bed once they live together, and so on. But where the British school novel tradition had, by the time of Blaize, a strong typical plot structure and a framework on which to hang a very episodic sort of story, Bertram Cope’s Year seems to be inventing its own, and it doesn’t quite manage enjoyable pacing.
The novel revolves around Cope, Phillips, and Randolph, as the latter two vie for his attention and attempt to capture him as an ornament for their social engagements. This is a pretty interesting setup, and I really like Phillips and Randolph, especially their friendly rivalry and their sense of humor about being “old”/not the same generation as Cope and friends. But I think that Fuller gets bogged down in a bit too much indulgence of Cope’s specialness, and that hurts the themes of aging and fading relevance.
See, Cope manages to attract not just one but all three of Medora Phillips’ wards. After a slow build, one sets her sights on him and must be dispatched through another suitor. Then, before he can become comfortably unattached, another of the women decides she must have him, and then the third! The second and third courtships are much less compelling, and are somewhat rushed at the end of the book, but they take up time and focus. Cope is actually very self-effacing and doesn’t have a bigger ego than any 25-year-old graduate student, but for all that he’s not too involved in himself, the narrative sure is. It’s sort of a proto-woobie situation. Besides the wards and their engagement plots, his main concern is with his lover Arthur Lemoyne. He wants Arthur to come down to Churchton and make house with him like they had up in Wisconsin, but Arthur has no interests beyond singing and acting—he doesn’t have an interest in work or education, and he’s a jealous and troublesome lover. He causes a scandal with what is essentially a drag performance in the school musical and is both fired from work and expelled, sent back to his family in Wisconsin in disgrace.
I think what I’d have loved to see was the version of this novel which cut the wards and focused on the Medora-Randolph-Cope-Lemoyne tension. Medora and Randolph both want to drag Cope into their (highly overlapping) social circles as a charming, talented young companion for themself, the sort of person who performs on command and woos other established names (university presidents, business owners, and the like). Lemoyne wants to keep Cope to himself, cutting off Cope’s friendships with rivals for his affection. Cope most simply wants to complete his thesis and land a job as an English professor at some respectable university. Watching him balance these challenging relationships, especially as he demonstrates a real fondness for both the newcomers and a genuine affection for his longtime lover, would have been enough. He’s fully capable of embarrassing himself without mixing young women and their marriage fantasies into the mix! Medora Phillips might even still have had the wards, who all chose to dismiss Cope as a hopeless prospect—one could easily believe that!
But my criticisms are of the plot and its pacing, and distinctly not of the novel’s prose or characterization. Fuller writes his characters with nuance, depth, and consideration. As a portrayal of a gay man in the early 20th c. American midwest, I can’t really ask for better than Bertram Cope! He is very regular. He’s affectionate with his confidants and politely reserved with strangers; he is bumbling with young women, who he self-admittedly doesn’t care to understand. His attraction to academic life doesn’t preclude his very American awareness of class and his admiration of nicer things or consciousness of his own dress. He’s very clearly gay but very much not a caricature, and his affection for Arthur Lemoyne is touching. He calls Arthur ‘Art,’ and Arthur (and Cope’s family) call him ‘Bert’—and this plainness offends Medora Phillips and her wards, which is such a deft and compelling contrast! There are so many similar details in the novel that make it worth reading.
Overall, this lives as a great read if one is feeling patient enough to take on character study, historical detail, and subtly-drawn relationships (at least, between Phillips, Randolph, Cope, and Lemoyne). It is not a page-turner, and it is no mystery why this book has lived on primarily in academic circles as a landmark work in the development of the queer novel.
There is one item of good news in all of that busyness: I have officially received tenure from my university! I’ve known that I would for a few months now, but it’s great to have that all public and announced—it confirms that I’ll get to take next year off as a sabbatical, and it’s a culminating experience for all of the work I’ve done over the past six years. This is the goal for any academic, and now I’m past it… I’m excited for the new experiences and challenges that come next! (But after my well-earned year off of teaching!)
The Great When by Alan Moore
I purchased this the day after the US election. It felt the right moment for escaping into a bit of fantasy. Alan Moore is an author that I know for his comics work—Watchmen, From Hell, and so on. I was surprised to hear that he’d written a novel (not his first, apparently!), and I was curious to know what a graphic novelist did with a prose novel.
The Great When is a portal fantasy set in London in 1949. Dennis Knuckleyard, 18, works at a used bookshop in the East End and is nobody special. However, an encounter with a used book that should not exist draws him into another world, and the quest to dispose of it, avoid the nasty types who want to steal it from him, and prevent the uninitiated from finding the magical world leads him to a host of new connections and demands that he muster a bit of bravery and competence.
As for what Moore does with the prose, the answer is that he does some strange things! Throughout this book, I felt Moore grasping at concepts that a visual language would more easily convey. He tumbles through eldritch descriptions of a magical world, but his reference points are 10¢ floppies. I’m not sure it’s the most effective prose I’ve read in SFF—I couldn’t begin to picture much of what’s described—but I wasn’t turned off by it, I suppose. It makes sense for Moore, even if it is neither great nor especially readable.
His prose choices aside, he writes an interesting story about stumbling into the magical side of postwar London. Dennis is a transparent response to those other British boys in famous portal fantasies. They are reserved and very middle-class, and their setbacks are circumstantial; they have mostly decent manners. They are the type of boy to emphasize a sentiment with “jolly,” in the right era. Dennis, on the other hand, is introduced through an ineffectual attempt to masturbate; he pisses in a sink at one point (to his credit, this embarrasses him); he is routinely described as unwashed. Born in the East End and orphaned during the war, he is living without documentation by 1949 in an effort to avoid the National Service. He is poor and not noble, and neither is almost any of the other characters. This is a wonderful exploration of class, buried underneath the shock and humor. And Dennis’ inner life is richly examined, if you enjoy the sorts of books which center a white man’s quest for belonging (I do), so the tight narration is very rewarding.
The wider cast includes various magicians and people who are adjacent to Dennis’ brush with magic. Standouts are Grace, a prostitute, who Dennis meets accidentally—their collision puts her at risk, and watching them both navigate that was interesting, especially as the narrative both acknowledges and resists where you think it’s going with that relationship. I also generally liked the magical characters, though fair warning that a number of them are drawn from real life—I’m not a huge fan of that technique in writing. The villains of the story are less compelling to me than Dennis’ character arc, and I think that the plot might have been paced better with respect to those confrontations. It’s not that the component parts were ineffective, but that they were assembled strangely in relation to their position within the page count.
I enjoyed this book. It’s the first in a series but reads well as a standalone, and I might recommend it on that merit. I also like it as another entry into the British Boys Portal Fantasy club, especially one which meaningfully examines class through its choice of protagonist. The prose is strange for sure, and I don’t love it, but I got used to it. It reads like Moore indulging himself—he has so many outlandish descriptions, and even the non-magical sections are studded with references to literature and music and art and film and occult history. This is a man who truly loves Edwardian ghost stories and historical occultists stringing together a plot and some new characters to get to play around with their ideas, their contexts, their lives. In some ways, it has the addictive quality of reading an old pulp novel—which, all told, I think that Moore may have been pleased with.
Bertram Cope’s Year by Henry Blake Fuller
I was browsing Standard EBooks and found in the summary for this novel that it was about a gay character—and Wikipedia backed this up by calling it the first American homosexual novel! Well, that bit of notability meant I had to read it.
Bertram Cope is a young man, originally from Illinois but lately of Wisconsin, who has decided to secure his academic future by writing a thesis in English literature and earning his doctorate. He returns to an Illinois university (in a fictional town named Churchton, most probably based around Northwestern University) to work as an instructor and earn his degree. He’s a charming, remote intellectual: handsome and very fair, he immediately catches the attention of two older characters who drive much of the novel’s plot. Medora Phillips is a 45-year-old widow and prominent hostess who has three marriageable female wards (Amy, Carolyn, Hortense); Basil Randolph is a similarly-aged confirmed bachelor. They’re a fun pair of acquaintance-rivals and I’d describe the dynamic they introduce as “a hot young thing attracts the attention of two old queens.” The final complication is Cope’s relationship with Arthur Lemoyne, who spends the first half of the year as a correspondent before moving in with Cope during the spring term.
The novel is queer in the way that David Blaize is queer. It is all on the page, and I assume that to a queer reader of the era, it would have been transparent that Cope, Lemoyne, and Randolph are gay men. At one point after Cope and Lemoyne have reconciled from a dispute, the novel states:
“Urania, through the whole width of her starry firmament, looked down kindly upon a happier household.”
There are also a shocking number of uses of the word “gay” to describe the characters (it is very winking), and Cope and Lemoyne are very plainly sleeping in the same bed once they live together, and so on. But where the British school novel tradition had, by the time of Blaize, a strong typical plot structure and a framework on which to hang a very episodic sort of story, Bertram Cope’s Year seems to be inventing its own, and it doesn’t quite manage enjoyable pacing.
The novel revolves around Cope, Phillips, and Randolph, as the latter two vie for his attention and attempt to capture him as an ornament for their social engagements. This is a pretty interesting setup, and I really like Phillips and Randolph, especially their friendly rivalry and their sense of humor about being “old”/not the same generation as Cope and friends. But I think that Fuller gets bogged down in a bit too much indulgence of Cope’s specialness, and that hurts the themes of aging and fading relevance.
See, Cope manages to attract not just one but all three of Medora Phillips’ wards. After a slow build, one sets her sights on him and must be dispatched through another suitor. Then, before he can become comfortably unattached, another of the women decides she must have him, and then the third! The second and third courtships are much less compelling, and are somewhat rushed at the end of the book, but they take up time and focus. Cope is actually very self-effacing and doesn’t have a bigger ego than any 25-year-old graduate student, but for all that he’s not too involved in himself, the narrative sure is. It’s sort of a proto-woobie situation. Besides the wards and their engagement plots, his main concern is with his lover Arthur Lemoyne. He wants Arthur to come down to Churchton and make house with him like they had up in Wisconsin, but Arthur has no interests beyond singing and acting—he doesn’t have an interest in work or education, and he’s a jealous and troublesome lover. He causes a scandal with what is essentially a drag performance in the school musical and is both fired from work and expelled, sent back to his family in Wisconsin in disgrace.
I think what I’d have loved to see was the version of this novel which cut the wards and focused on the Medora-Randolph-Cope-Lemoyne tension. Medora and Randolph both want to drag Cope into their (highly overlapping) social circles as a charming, talented young companion for themself, the sort of person who performs on command and woos other established names (university presidents, business owners, and the like). Lemoyne wants to keep Cope to himself, cutting off Cope’s friendships with rivals for his affection. Cope most simply wants to complete his thesis and land a job as an English professor at some respectable university. Watching him balance these challenging relationships, especially as he demonstrates a real fondness for both the newcomers and a genuine affection for his longtime lover, would have been enough. He’s fully capable of embarrassing himself without mixing young women and their marriage fantasies into the mix! Medora Phillips might even still have had the wards, who all chose to dismiss Cope as a hopeless prospect—one could easily believe that!
But my criticisms are of the plot and its pacing, and distinctly not of the novel’s prose or characterization. Fuller writes his characters with nuance, depth, and consideration. As a portrayal of a gay man in the early 20th c. American midwest, I can’t really ask for better than Bertram Cope! He is very regular. He’s affectionate with his confidants and politely reserved with strangers; he is bumbling with young women, who he self-admittedly doesn’t care to understand. His attraction to academic life doesn’t preclude his very American awareness of class and his admiration of nicer things or consciousness of his own dress. He’s very clearly gay but very much not a caricature, and his affection for Arthur Lemoyne is touching. He calls Arthur ‘Art,’ and Arthur (and Cope’s family) call him ‘Bert’—and this plainness offends Medora Phillips and her wards, which is such a deft and compelling contrast! There are so many similar details in the novel that make it worth reading.
Overall, this lives as a great read if one is feeling patient enough to take on character study, historical detail, and subtly-drawn relationships (at least, between Phillips, Randolph, Cope, and Lemoyne). It is not a page-turner, and it is no mystery why this book has lived on primarily in academic circles as a landmark work in the development of the queer novel.
