Piers Anthony - Being A Green Mother

I've never liked juggling books because it takes the longest time to finish a single text, especially when you are an an idiosyncratic reader like me who scans well-written sentences over and over again to relish their glorious syntax. At the same time I can't help it, I am overcome with an insuppressible desire to know what the other book contains. There are problems for book jugglers, though. Having to remember where we left off, recapping the chronology of events, and sometimes even flipping back to check which character is which (if you've been on a hiatus long enough to warrant this) completely ruins the continuity and sometimes makes reading difficult to enjoy. It is unavoidable, I suppose. Some books we leave on the shelf after the first chapter and completely forget about them. Some books we find an extraordinary power to complete if it's the last thing we do - but it's not always worth the trouble.

Such as this. The last couple of days, I've been reading Piers Anthony's Being A Green Mother. I've got the whole series on loan from my friend and thought what a great idea it would be to complete another fantasy series after years. That's a great sense of accomplishment right there. But it struck me as odd that the book didn't seem to want to finish. Could it be - supernatural? Even when I was 80 pages from the end, it kept going on and on and on. That's when I realized I was reading at a snail's pace, purely for the sake of finishing it, because it was quite terrible compared to his other novels in the series. This one was pure lackluster - and it wasn't because of the idea, which was good, but rather the way Anthony chose to flesh it out that didn't resound with me.

Being A Green Mother is the story of the human who takes over the office of the Nature. Orb, our Irish protagonist, dances and sings in her search for the most powerful but elusive song, the Llano. She first joins a gypsy carnival group in India, and later travels the world with her band, made up of 3 junkies, one black girl and one succubus, inside a giant flying fish.

Dear Mr. Anthony (I want to ask him),

Where did the genius of On A Pale Horse and Bearing An Hourglass go to? In the former, you deftly tackled the morbidity of death with an admirable clear-headedness. You crafted the mysterious, intelligent, compassionate Thanatos from an irritating, self-destructive Zane. The ideas were crisp and sharp, you gave insightful, sensitive answers to the question of mortality. However, that character development and insight is completely lost in Green Mother: Orb remains the same, hesitating woman with a determined, uncompromising goal: to find the Llano, wherever it is. Her magic grows, no doubt, but she doesn't. Her righteous morality keeps getting into the way when she meets new characters, and she resolves her issues by choosing not confront them. With Bearing An Hourglass, you demonstrated your power over the language - which I fail to see in Green Mother. Orb's personality is strictly limited to dancing the tanana (the provocative gypsy dance meant to incite erotic response - great idea, by the way) or singing on her harp. When reading this, one gets the feeling that you wrote purely for the sake of it. The adjectives got overused after a while; the idea of affecting nature with song - at first interesting - soon lost its novelty. As did the entire book.

Best,
Preet

I wrote a few thoughts last month on another book in Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series, which you can read here.

Notes on Tharoor, Huxley and Anthony

And no, the Anthony mentioned above is not the same Anthony whose book I've been reading for the past two months. _Transgressions in Art_ gets a bit tedious after a while; it's one of those books that is necessary to take slow, something like dating a really beautiful woman - you don't want to fuck it up by rushing through the main course.

Anyway, I started on Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel with glee, especially after reading so much about it on lit blogs and other online reviews. Suffice to say I raced through the beginning, laughing my way through, reminded very much of Rushdie's style in _Midnight's Children_, the writer and his audience, the run-on sentences, rhetoric questions, hyperbole, the ever-running thrope of inseparability between country and self, history and self, etc. I thought it was a particularly clever idea to use the Mahabharata in re-writing the history of independent India, to go back to a mythical past in order to re-tell a country's politics: fantasy versus politic, phantasmagoria against realism, past/present and the tragedy and unites them. Even though I cannot claim to have read the epic in its entirety, Tharoor's integration is quite seamless. You really don't need to know the original to read his version. I'm losing steam towards the end though, and while I admit this probably has more to do with juggling several books at once, I cannot deny that Tharoor's version of post-independence is a lot less exciting - fictionally speaking, of course - than the pre-independence period. Needless to say, he speeds up his plot by cleverly injecting poems where he knows, I think he surely does, his narrative is threatening to sedate readers. Overall, it's a sharp text, witty and undoubtedly patriotic and slightly anti-Gandhi - but it's fiction, so it's not like you can point a finger at him and say "But you have a moral responsibility to this text!" Be prepared for an entire barrage of alliterations, though.

A few weeks ago, a good friend introduced me to Piers Anthony, who has turned out to be one of the most readable fantasy writers I've come across. Each book in his 'Incarnations of Immortality' series stands by itself and does not require one to read everything to get an idea of the continuity, unlike a lot of fantasy literature. The basic premise is thus: Death, Fate, Time, Nature, War, Evil (Satan), and Good (God) are made of a group of humans who occupy the bodies of the immortals for a certain time until they have to hand their office over to the next in-charge. Thus, the order of the universe prevails. I've read Bearing An Hourglass and completed With A Tangled Skein last night. On the whole, the latter, which focused on the trials of the three aspects of Fate - Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos - I found to be lacking when compared to Hourglass which felt like it was a greater challenge to write, and hence a greater pleasure to read, due to the complexities I assume were involved in talking about the idea of time and time travel without slipping into heavy scientific jargon. Keeping in mind that I am not a feminist, I think with Tangled Skein, Piers Anthony was attempting to presume too much about the female psychology. There's a scene where a thiry-two year old grandmother strips with her twelve-year-old daughter and grand-daughter: "We're all women, there's nothing to be ashamed of". True, but still a disconcerting image. At one point, the aspect of Atropos was given over to the care of an old black woman, which made Anthony feel, for some reason, that his character should communicate in ghetto talk. For obvious reasons, this made her entire character highly laughable and two-dimensional, especially in the scene where she bursts into a teenager's room to find her with two teenage boys. After shooing them out, Atropos lectures this (presumably) black kid in some strange mix of grandmother-ghetto talk that proceeded to throw off the entire scene for me. Would it have been too much to assume that a black woman was capable of communicating without falling into a stereotype? In trying to make his character more authentic, Anthony misjudged the situation and turned the tables on himself, instead. Moral of the story: white men should never try to talk like anything other than white men. All this aside, Tangled Skein still retains a characteristically readable quality. Actions and events are packed tightly together, forming a constantly interesting, unputdownable narrative. Heck, I'll still recommend it.

And even though I haven't finished it yet, I should admit that I'm finally reading Huxley's A Brave New World. I know someone who read this at twelve. Wow, right? At twelve I was too busy getting through Sidney Sheldon.