and then I read J,GaR several times hoping it would cohere for me and it just...didn't. I don't even know.
Tam Lin has some of the same problem for me, honestly: a mostly naturalistic story with eddies of the unheimlich that might link up or might only be the lines people draw to make a pattern of coincidence that suddenly slingshots into the full-blown fantastic in the last chapter. I understand the virtues of a slow build, and some of my favorite novels take the same half-seen, shifting-focus approach to their fantasy or science fiction, but this one builds too slowly for me and introduces too much at the last second. The difference is that it doesn't work for me at all in Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, while I can find things to re-read for in Tam Lin. I keep thinking it might have worked fine as a short story or a novella, where the tightness of the structure could have made the ballad more evident from the beginning, or at least more plausible when it suddenly surfaced and turned out to be the text. As a novel, I can't figure out to fix it, but no one I know thinks it works as it stands.
I was wondering afterward why Safety Not Guaranteed didn't give me whiplash with its final scene, when it was exactly the kind of full daylight reveal that in most movies I feel is saying too much. (I loved Dimensions more than any other genre film I saw last year, but I'd still have excised two lines from its last scene because the audience can guess them already; it is unnecessary to have the information stated, especially by the characters who do so.) Partly I think it's because the story that leads up to it, although it opens with the question of whether a personal ad for a fellow time traveler is real or a prank or delusion, doesn't really depend on the resolution of this ambiguity. Everyone in the movie is concerned with time already, especially the lost kind. It's resonant when it's subtext, working within a larger framework of obsessions and regrets; it's just that much more powerful when turns out to be more. And it's nice to see a homebuilt time machine realized onscreen, especially when it looks both plausibly cobbled and as otherworldly as anything out of another person's mind. But there's also the fact that if the film had kept its distance in those last few minutes, I really think it would have been playing it safe—if the characters have the courage to fling themselves at something absolutely crazy, hand tight in hand as the world flares white around them, then their story needs to be as fearless, even if it runs the risk of alienating viewers like me in most modes. It paid off. I wasn't alienated. It was pretty awesome.
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Tam Lin has some of the same problem for me, honestly: a mostly naturalistic story with eddies of the unheimlich that might link up or might only be the lines people draw to make a pattern of coincidence that suddenly slingshots into the full-blown fantastic in the last chapter. I understand the virtues of a slow build, and some of my favorite novels take the same half-seen, shifting-focus approach to their fantasy or science fiction, but this one builds too slowly for me and introduces too much at the last second. The difference is that it doesn't work for me at all in Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, while I can find things to re-read for in Tam Lin. I keep thinking it might have worked fine as a short story or a novella, where the tightness of the structure could have made the ballad more evident from the beginning, or at least more plausible when it suddenly surfaced and turned out to be the text. As a novel, I can't figure out to fix it, but no one I know thinks it works as it stands.
I was wondering afterward why Safety Not Guaranteed didn't give me whiplash with its final scene, when it was exactly the kind of full daylight reveal that in most movies I feel is saying too much. (I loved Dimensions more than any other genre film I saw last year, but I'd still have excised two lines from its last scene because the audience can guess them already; it is unnecessary to have the information stated, especially by the characters who do so.) Partly I think it's because the story that leads up to it, although it opens with the question of whether a personal ad for a fellow time traveler is real or a prank or delusion, doesn't really depend on the resolution of this ambiguity. Everyone in the movie is concerned with time already, especially the lost kind. It's resonant when it's subtext, working within a larger framework of obsessions and regrets; it's just that much more powerful when turns out to be more. And it's nice to see a homebuilt time machine realized onscreen, especially when it looks both plausibly cobbled and as otherworldly as anything out of another person's mind. But there's also the fact that if the film had kept its distance in those last few minutes, I really think it would have been playing it safe—if the characters have the courage to fling themselves at something absolutely crazy, hand tight in hand as the world flares white around them, then their story needs to be as fearless, even if it runs the risk of alienating viewers like me in most modes. It paid off. I wasn't alienated. It was pretty awesome.