Yesterday I stopped in the middle of reading an
Iain Banks book and instead read the entirety of
this book (The Boy Detective Fails). I'd picked it up with the Barnes&Noble gift cert my grandmother gave us (took the relatives long enough to give us such sensical gifts), on the recommendation of
Jackson Publick (one of the Venture Brothers guys (Makes
total sense.)).
Iain Banks was pissing me off with his halfassed intrigue (I mean, I enjoy some of the guy's work
an awful lot. Then there's the
rest of it) and endless pointless PROTAGONIST HAS AN ERECTION, LET'S TALK ABOUT IT sequences.
So anyway, The Boy Detective. Very amusing book, probably six hours worth of reading, but pleasant. The comparison that's just hit me is sort of a David Byrne-influenced Chris Ware universe. Like, the deadpan sad-little-people Chris Ware with a core of engaged people-are-amazing-and-interesting David Byrne True-Storieslike attitude, instead of Chris Ware's ambivalence. There are a couple of points where there are some lovely wry humorous protrusions into the story (page 86, the police show theme, f'rinstance) that really made it for me.
The book does sort of gradually slide from downbeat (which I was enjoying) into a happy ending that didn't quite come together properly (I mean, it technically tied up the loose ends, but character-wise I dunno), I thought, but then that could be me. (I realised not too long ago that I generally value story-universes for their possibilities rather than their actual events, which is why I read the Dune series repeatedly and pretty much always when asked why I liked some scifi book will say 'the universe was awesome.' So, anyway, that is maybe why the ending was unsatisfying to me, because I was hoping for some more meaningful occurrence to manifest itself, since I knew it was possible.)
I do also enjoy a good downer. Sometimes it takes more guts to not allow things to come out okay, and sometimes the opposite (the example I always give here is of Baron Munchausen. I maintain that it was more courageous for Gilliam to allow the story to end happily, knowing his tendencies and given the rest of the film. There's the money thing, though, too, which is contrary). I had a big discussion with a school chum of mine a couple of months ago regarding Pan's Labyrinth, which he despised. He mostly had perfectly good reasons (the trailer did not reflect the film well, so he developed erroneous expectations; he dislikes downers; he dislikes unclear motivations; he dislikes lack of attention to mise-en-scene detail (he's a screenwriter)), but, while I agreed that his problems were present, they did not bother me. I'll be an asshole and paste the conversation, since I already said this:
( Cut for thematic spoiler for Pan's Labyrinth )So, in short: I will be reading more of Mr. Meno's work. I also eagerly await season three of Venture Brothers. Iain Banks can go
play Civ for a while though. ('Complicity', incidentally, had a very Civ-like game in it, which gave me the small measure of amusement I derived from the first half.)
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