adrian_turtle

My school had two 9th grade English teachers that seemed to form a set. They were both short men named Bob. They both had mustaches, but not beards. They both wore suits, rather than dressing like teachers. They both had a fondness for elaborate diagrams with colored chalk. They swapped classes for a couple of months every spring, so twice as many students could have the dark Bob teach us grammar (with sentence diagrams in colored chalk) and also have the blond Bob teach us Dickens (with plot diagrams in colored chalk). It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

I remain indifferent to diagrams in colored chalk, however elaborate. That's not quite right. I'm indifferent now. I was actively hostile, then. I spent weeks of remarkably intense effort at the stage of "You say these colored lines are supposed to convey some kind of meaning, some meaning beyond having the words themselves in a particular order. I'd like to believe you, but I can't find any evidence for it."

The blond Bob read to us from the detective story he was writing. It's been more than 20 years, but I can still remember most of it. Not because I liked it; just because it was my introduction to a certain style of first-person-smartass narration.
"My tongue felt like a fuzzy blanket. I reached for my fuzzy blanket. It felt like a tongue. Good. I like to know the world is balanced and sensible." (*)

Why do I think of this now? Last week, I read _Only Forward_, Michael Marshall Smith's first novel. Rysmiel told me this was the same Michael Marshall who later wrote _The Straw Men_. For the first hundred pages or so, I still found myself wondering if it could be my old English teacher writing under another name. The echo of the voice was too familiar.

The first part of the plot is "on crack" in the LJ sense. I realized it also applied a step closer to literally, when I saw it shift from crack to ecstacy (a case could also be made for meth.) That was what convinced me it hadn't been written by the blond Bob -- while I wouldn't have been surprised to find someone of his age and obligate apparent sobriety writing a novel in the tone of a drug-influenced haze, but I'd have strong expectations of different drugs.

It was hard for me to accept the video game structure of the book. For the first hundred pages or so, it was just distancing. Some books don't have much emotional reality, and that's ok, it's not what they're about. With the mood shift around Chicken Soup for Stark's Jeamland Soul, I started to feel cheated, not just distant. There was no anchor to reality, either physical or emotional. Stark didn't feel real enough for me to take seriously, even with the psychobabble. I can be remarkably tolerant of transitions between real logic and nightmare logic (I fall for Mary Doria Russell's, hook, line, sinker, and going for the pole), but the ones here just made me roll my eyes. Maybe the problem is not having any foundation of real logic to build the plot.

I was paying unusual amounts of attention to word choice, as neither plot nor character were distracting me. I noticed the lack of regional "accent" for most of the book. It only crept in towards the end, making me think "Aha! Definately not a midwesterner writing this." I wonder if Smith was just getting a little sloppy, or if the slight shift in voice was supposed to suggest a slight shift in Stark's anchorage to reality.

_The Straw Men_ was much better. I'm not sure if it's darker. I tend to be a lot more comfortable with straightforward treatments of appalling situations than with attempts to play them for laughs.

(*) Now, one would almost certainly write "fair and balanced," but of course he didn't.