Preemptive Retaliation

So I’ve been thinking a lot about writing again, which is very different from actually writing but enough to satisfy me for now. This has been brought on by a sudden upsurge of reading which I’ve undertaken. Earlier in the month I was focused on getting a Nintendo Switch in order to occupy me on the long train rides that my job requires of me. The system would be perfect to entertain and enthral me on my many hour journeys as I burned through lovely indies and sampled all that Nintendo had to offer. Then I was reminded that I was going to have a baby soon and frivolous purchases weren’t necessary the best course of action.

I tried to reason with myself that I was buying a family system to play with my yet unborn child. Even I could see that thought process was far from flawless.

So instead I moved back into reading. Turns out long train rides were almost perfectly designed to facilitate the reading of books.

I had already abandoned Zone One by the turn of the month. It still sits on my bedside table, but its bookmark has been unmoved since I last tried to sleepily read it. Instead I opened Caliban’s War by James S Corey – a Christmas present from my brother – and read that instead. That isn’t right though. I didn’t really read it; I would say that I binged on it. For two weeks I gorged myself on the book. I started slowly to begin with, but by the end of it I was slipping into bed over an hour earlier than usual so I could have more time consuming its pages. On a six-hour train ride from Cardiff I read so many pages that my eyes ached afterward, like watching too many episodes of The Office.

I can’t remember when I read the first in the series, but I instantly connected with the characters again. It was so easy to just sink right back in with Holden and his crew of charming misfits. I was pleased that my mental image of them remained the same as when I read it before and hadn’t been changed (much) by watching the tv show. On top of that I enjoyed the new characters and each of them were individual enough to add flavour without overstaying their welcome.  The world was rich and full of adventure.

There’s a but coming here. It’s almost tangible. But, but, it all felt a bit… flat. Aside from the background politics it felt as though the characters were further along than they were at the end of the last book. In fact, a number of things felt like a rehash on the first story. The crew investigating and surviving on a hostile station whose infrastructure was crumbling around them. The interplanetary politics of Mars and Earth flaming up and quieting down again. Storming a secret hidden base which was being used for biological experiments. A horrifying threat to earth avoided due to the actions of our hero. It was all a bit cyclical and in the end I felt that nothing had really been gained apart form a new crew member.

I enjoyed it though! I don’t want to be a downer on it. It expanded on the universe beautifully, it made me think of the care and detail that went into imagining the lives of the people in the world, and there is real talent in explaining those details and helping me think of them. It just felt a little hollow. It was like watching The Force Awakens a little too soon after A New Hope. Sure they’re different films with different characters and different stakes, but the tune sounds a little too similar. I’m looking forward to reading the next one in six months to a year and seeing how I react to it then.

I went from Caliban’s War – something new but familiar – to His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman – something old and familiar. I first read Northern Lights when I was twelve, and I still remember my friends teasing me with spoilers, telling me that Lyra gained the second name Silverlange like it was some sort of life changing plot twist (he changed the name to some bastardised French, and I still remember his face as he said it, the smug git). Reading it again was the strangest feeling for me, because it actually brought me back to being twelve years old when I was just starting to write and planning my seven-part fantasy epic where I meticulously designed the world and even a detailed map but never wrote a single word. When I’m reading the scenes I’m not imagining them as they come, instead I’m imagining them the way I did when I first read it. The rooftops of Jordan College haven’t changed in the fifteen years between readings. Ma Costa’s caring frown is the same degree of imposing and maternal. Mrs Coulter is still seductive in a way I couldn’t understand when I was younger. Reading the book is like opening a photo album for me. The memories are there, just where I left them.

It’s given me a grander appreciation of my imagination when I was younger too. I think as I grew older and became more focused on realism and (gasp) post modernism, I felt that I had to have more things spelled out for me. Pullman’s writing is so sparse that it’s almost lacking. Now that I’m older I can see the tricks he’s using; the plot written by the seat of his trousers, the way some characters just happen to end up where they should be and how technology seems to be created suddenly and then forgotten about for plot reasons. Reading it as an adult, I have a lot of grievances with the sparseness of the writing and the way he just breezes over logic. It’s not all bad though. The space he’s given the writing lets me fill it in with my own details and thoughts. When I was younger I felt that the world was so incredibly rich and detailed and that was only down to the fact that I populated it with my own mind. Rereading it now makes me feel like there’s less to wrap my mind around, but it’s help me solidify some details in my own mind. Like, when I was younger I saw Will as some self-insert for me to imagine, with Lyra being my friend and companion from the first book. Now I realise he’s a fierce, cold little warrior, and I can’t believe I ever thought my shoes were the same size as his.

The book has kept me reading and thinking. I’m looking forward to finishing the whole thing off and having some final thoughts about it. I remember segments of the final book, and I wonder how much my memory has rose tinted some of the more bizarre aspects of the books.

This month I finished off Prey too, which I’m not going to talk about too much. I think I’m heading towards a videogame slump again. The game was good – good storyline, great tension, good sneaky horror – but ran a little too long. In the end I found myself bunny-hopping through the station, chasing quest markers and not really paying attention to anything, just hoping to finish. If they had cut out some of the fluff then I think it would have been really great, but after a while it became a chore.

Still, this is as good a time as any to not play games. I’ve been thinking of writing, and writing a little about writing, but maybe I’ll give myself time to actually write something instead.

Maybe I’ll stop saying that one day.