This may come as a shock to you, Harry, but I don't have an ax with me

[sovay]

Today has been marked mostly by hours of pre-holiday errands and a vision-troubling level of headache, which may somewhat foreshorten this post. The evening has been marked by reading four books starring Harry Dresden. I believe I have hurt myself.

Between the weird casual chauvinism and the general air of having been written by a yak that wanted to be Raymond Chandler (I am insulting either Chandler or yaks), I was not impressed with Storm Front (2000). There was a reason I didn't read these books at the time. rushthatspeaks had promised me a character I would love, however, and so I persevered. Fortunately, the library was missing the next three volumes and by the time of Death Masks (2003), Butcher's style had improved to the point where it was no longer actively contributing to my headache and Rush was quite right about the character; I warmed to him instantly, even though he was more of a cameo. And then there was a lot of confused vampirism and I got to Dead Beat (2005). Rush—

"If I tell you this," I said quietly, "it could be bad for you."

"Bad how?"

"It could force you to keep secrets that people would kill you for knowing. It could change the way you think and feel. It could really screw up your life."

"Screw up my life?" He stared at me for a second and then said, deadpan, "I'm a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow." He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms and said, "Do your worst."

Waldo Butters is also brilliant enough that he thinks of forensic science as something anyone can pick up if they don't mind the technical terms, geeky enough to forget how terrified he is of zombies when given the chance to research them, and he has mildly mad science hair ("[it] gave him a perpetual look of surprise that stopped just short of being a perpetual look of recent electrocution"). Apparently I have some kind of type.

I don't think I will be eagerly scouring the bookstores for the rest of this series, but someone should tell me whether they're the sort of thing worth persisting with just for love of supporting characters. It is quite likely that I will keep an eye out for a secondhand copy of Dead Beat, even if the Latin is consistently ungrammatical and the mysterious book should really have been called Das Lied des Erlkönigs. The Tyrannosaur was pretty crowningly awesome.

And now I am going to shower, because I don't feel well at all.

Comments

[sovay]

I can, with a bit of squinting, read them as a pretty heavy critique of the problems inherent in identifying oneself with a noir detective model of how to be a force for good, both in the consequences that accrue to Harry from such things as his persistent focus on the immediate problem to the exclusion of longer-term larger-scale consequences (particularly his degree of responsibility for collateral damage), and the way in which the strength of some of the female characters comes across despite his infuriating sexism; I find it hard to believe those can be things Butcher is entirely unaware of, and it seems reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt on doing them deliberately.

I agree on the textual evidence that Harry is an unreliable narrator, especially as regards his self-image (it's a relatively foregrounded thread in Dead Beat), and that he has a great many unexamined questions floating around his life, such as why he set himself up as a magical private eye in the first place (and what's so important about it that he has to keep casting himself as a marginalized, Marlowe-style loner when he has a demonstrable network of allies/family-of-choice and an increasingly center-stage status in the supernatural world), and I will wait until I've read up through Ghost Story before I attempt to make a serious argument. All of that said. Given the many, many, not just stylistic problems of the establishing book of the series, I find it much less likely that Butcher is deliberately deconstructing the assumptions of noir through the character of Harry Dresden than that the process of becoming a less awful writer has required him to work through, or at least begin to recognize, the real-world implications of the tropes he stuck Harry with when he wrote Storm Front. The Discworld developed into a brilliant ground for whatever satirical examinations Terry Pratchett felt like holding to contemporary life, but it started as a one-shot sword-and-sorcery parody. (If he hadn't gone and committed novels like Jingo or The Last Continent, The Colour of Magic would be easily the least of the series.) I don't count that as fiendish sneakiness, which implies longer-term planning; it's just literary evolution which the reader gets to watch.

Given what you've read and the potential that you might read more, I am finding it hard to come up with a really convincing example of this that would not strike me as excessively spoilery

I don't actually care about spoilers.

I can read books for a number of things. Interesting characters are definitely a component, but an awful lot of people seem to need more sympathetic in their interesting than I do;

Don't assume anything about my definitions of sympathetic for a character.

use of language is at least as important, world-building is important, and I have sufficient OCDish tendencies that a well-oiled plot (which Butcher is definitely good at) can go a long way for books that do not have so much to recommend them from other directions.

Interesting. As of Dead Beat, I think Butcher's use of language is clunky-to-effective and his worldbuilding is an internally inconsistent kitchen sink (although I like the way the different vampire courts are different literary tropes: the Nosferatu of the Black Court, the Buffy-style Red Court who appear human until they explode into demonic form, the inhumanly beautiful seducers of the White Court and the as yet unseen Jade Court of East Asia) and his characters are better in the mind than on the page, see previous comment about style. I think I am enjoying them most as an exercise in storytelling, which is not my primary criterion in fiction. I do care about what I think of as the patterns of a book, which I've been informed is structure. So far they read like a lot of plot happening all at once, but I'm waiting to see if a pattern will become apparent across books, in which case I will respect him much more as a writer.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I find it much less likely that Butcher is deliberately deconstructing the assumptions of noir through the character of Harry Dresden than that the process of becoming a less awful writer has required him to work through, or at least begin to recognize, the real-world implications of the tropes he stuck Harry with when he wrote Storm Front. The Discworld developed into a brilliant ground for whatever satirical examinations Terry Pratchett felt like holding to contemporary life, but it started as a one-shot sword-and-sorcery parody.

My understanding is that Butcher had an overall plan for the series before starting the first book, which he is currently about halfway through, though it may well have evolved significantly since then.

I don't actually care about spoilers.

One example that I do find pretty convincing through the series as a whole is that while it is tending to foreground the Christian-mythos elements and philosophical implications for the world, in ways that can be mildly irritating to me, it appears to be maintaining an entirely plausible set of events around the Northern Thing mythos elements in that universe in ways that follow the logic of that, which nobody in the text comes anywhere near recognising; I don't think that can be accidental.

Don't assume anything about my definitions of sympathetic for a character.

Sorry if I gave the impression of so doing, it was not intended; that was meant as an acknowledgement of awareness that my own take on interesting is not often a useful thing for me to generalise from.

So far they read like a lot of plot happening all at once, but I'm waiting to see if a pattern will become apparent across books, in which case I will respect him much more as a writer.

The later ones in particular tend somewhat in the "everything of significance this year will happen in this couple of days" direction.

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

One thing that I found impressive in Changes--which is the first single-word title, and definitely a Point of No Return, is that there are important plot elements in it derived from every. single. previous. book. That is some quality setup.

[sovay]

there are important plot elements in it derived from every. single. previous. book. That is some quality setup.

I got Changes out from the library this afternoon. Will let you know what I think.