In Cahoots with the Madding Crowd

Some people make a point of avoiding megabestsellers, taking the automatic position that they must be badly written to have such broad appeal. Personally, I don’t see why you can’t enjoy the communal tales shared around a campfire and then go lock yourself away in a library with a delightfully obscure tome that only you and three other people on the planet like. One does not preclude the other. Anyway, whenever a spec-fic series becomes a massive hit, I like to check it out to see what the fuss is all about. Sometimes it takes me a few years to catch up, but when I finally do, it’s never a waste of time. I’m either transported along with the crowds, or I end up viewing it as an assignment, noting what the author is doing and trying to figure out why it appeals to others but not to me.

Harry Potter was, unexpectedly for me at the time, an example of the first. Three books had already been published by the time I got around to it, and I thought it would be a charming children’s tale that I’d dip in and out of and observe from a mature distance. I cracked opened Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Then, all of a sudden, I couldn’t read the words. The room was too dark. Hours had passed without me moving. I got up, turned on the light, sat down and finished it in that second sitting. Okay, it’s an amazingly small book compared with the bricks that followed later, but it was quite and authorial feat for JK to hook an old person like me along with the kids. It was a good thing I didn’t have HP and the Chamber of Secrets then, because I would have dived right into it and probably taken the next day off from whatever job I had back then.

The tween targeted Twilight series was, unexpectedly, an example of the second. Hearing that it used Jane Austen as a touchstone, and having enjoyed Anne Rice’s Lestat books, I thought that a rampaging-with-hormones teenager version of exploring all the sexual subtexts surrounding vampires would make for riveting reading. Wrong. I slowly forced my way through it, irritated by the heroine, offended by the hero, and put off by all the gag-worthy “relationship advice”, feeling like a generational trespasser, but conceding that I might have liked it better many decades ago when I was going through my own adolescent romantic period. However, any residual clemency towards the series was withdrawn about a third of the way into New Moon. The whole werewolf baby-bride scenario, to put it in exceedingly polite terms, stopped me cold. I was too furious to go on. Funny thing is, the most imminently mockable thing – the sparkling vampires – was the one concept I found vaguely interesting. Depicting life-siphoning vamps as mineral creatures that seem to turn slowly into stone as the millennia pass is evocative. But “sparkly” is not a work that engenders respect, and though I haven’t seen the movies, I suspect that glittering guys work even worse as a visual.

Reading the first book of the Hunger Games series was a cross between the two above. I got sucked in and lost track of time, and finished it in three readings, but even as I was enjoying it, a part of me was cheering from the sidelines at the issues that the author was deftly raising along the way, as the best SF always does. In this book politics matters, food is not something that magically appears in supermarkets, water is acknowledged as a fundamental of life, and the economics of state-sanctioned cruelty are explained. I was initially wary about the book’s first person POV, but quickly realised it was absolutely necessary to hear the thoughts of a main character who has grown up with “reality TV” of the most gruesome sort and has therefore thoroughly internalized the strategies of the Hunger Games and how to woo to the audience. She knows that popularity can mean the difference between life and death. I can see the character still has far to go, and can’t wait to get hold of the second book in the series.

Good thing I haven’t got it or I’d have spent all of today (which, by the way, is part of a long weekend here in Australia, hence this long post) reading as well.