flemmings | (no subject)

Happy Beaver is good hot weather reading. It passes the time, keeps the attention focussed, and leads nowhere in particular. For a London-set series, it reads unnervingly unEnglish. Aaronovitch and Griffin present me with what feels like Londoners, however urban magical they may be; but Carey's people seem to belong to some generic and semi-American series. The way they talk, the things they feel, the amount of time they spend in cars, all negate the place names that were so grittily and grottily London in Griffin's books. Nor is there any of that half-feyness or slight battiness that Aaronovitch's Peter doesn't even know he possesses. (True, Felix is supposed to come from Liverpool. That only makes it worse. Am trying to hear his lines in a northern accent and not quite succeeding.)

I'm not sure, going by the foreword, if something happened to the American edition (which I evidently have) on the lines of heavy rewriting or editing or whatever. Or if the influence of Carey's sources is umm being influential: noir detectives or possibly Jim Butcher whom I have not read. But at the moment Felix reminds me of no one so much as Vlad Taltos: wise-ass, aggressive, reflex big-mouth, wielding the big stick even if he's about to whack himself in the eye with it, and never even *considering* the option of speaking softly. Yes, I know there's some of that in Griffin too, but the magic overwhelms the noirish tropes, and enough older women cut Matthew down to size that one can see his author doesn't admire him whole-heartedly. Am not so sure about Carey and Fix. But maybe Vlad and Fix and Matthew are just doing the riffs on some stock male character of the hardboiled detective story, just as the feisty heroine inhabits Regencies?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I've always thought Vlad was like that because it made things more interesting for Brust, rather than because Brust thought he was right. The tabletop gaming influence on those books always struck me as high, and one can usually adopt the strategy of talking one's way out of everything in tabletop, but often it's not as interesting as the "whack it with a stick and see what happens" approach... Put another way, Brust is the sort of writer who could come up with a clever and non-confrontational way of solving all the problems in his own books, at which point he would no longer have a plot to speak of.

If hardboiled noir detective is Hammett and Chandler and such, then those guys strike me as less aggressive than Vlad. But Vlad has more and weirder options for hitting back.

I also keep thinking of Lady Teldra's observation that Vlad (and thus Vlad's POV narrative) is invested in an ideal of himself as this macho big-mouth spoiler, when the truth is that he's a chameleon who slips between varied social strata and has enough points in diplomacy to know exactly how far he can push it (unconsciously to himself, usually).

That passage rubbed me very much the wrong way, I must say. 'Politeness consists of knowing just how far you can push it without going too far'? How about not pushing it in the first? I mean, thank god for Aerith, or else I'd have thought Brust really did love his Marty Stu's macho unmannerly way of dealing with others.