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| Screen Shot from iPhone Kindle app |
I've
been meaning to blog this novel ever since I proceeded to it directly
out of his Caliphate
last month, but never got around to it. I reserve the right to come
back to it with a more thorough review some time in the future,
because I'm thinking I'll eventually read it again. Get past the
somewhat contrived opening setting up the Texas Rebellion of ca. 2010
(as best I can figure it), as well as the very transparent identity
of the utterly wacko and caricaturishly evil US President “Willie Rottemayer,” and it
settles into what I think is a fair depiction of how such a valiant
but ultimately outnumbered and outgunned attempt at secession from
the rapidly socializing, increasingly morally repugnant and
anti-Christian United States would likely proceed. Although it was
written a decade ago, and in no way foresaw the explosion onto the
political landscape of Barack Obama, just how much cultural,
political, and social developments in the succeeding decade (really,
mostly in the past five years) do
seem to be have been foretold sent chills down my spine as I read.
As much as Caliphate
did [link],
this book struck me as a prophetic wake-up call in the guise of a
very compelling and exciting story. As I titled my Amazon.com review, it seems "Frighteningly Plausible."
Although
I was repulsed by the premier episode of this Green
Arrow
comic-book hero TV series last year and immediately struck it from my
watch-list, I kept hearing via the Internet all kinds of buzz how
good it was. So, over the summer, as news leaked that forensic
criminologist Barry Allen would be introduced and developed via a
“back-door pilot” to launch a second DC Comics live-action series
featuring the Flash, I decided I would give it another try. So I did
a little reading on-line to get the context before watching the
summer repeats of the final two-part story for the first season, and
then had that context elaborated further via a really well-done
season one recap episode prior to the debut of the second season a
few weeks back. And I found that the first episode last year did not
do the series justice at all. Yes, it is considerably different from
any previous version of DC comic-book canon for the character (does
such a thing even exist anymore given how many times DC has blown up
their own continuity in the incessant and increasingly frequent
retcons and reboots?), but on its own terms the series is pretty
good. In fact, the single most objectionable feature of that
long-ago premier episode, Oliver Queen's merciless – murderous –
willingness to kill for no more heroic reason than that “No
one can know who I am!”
has been turned on its head as the basis for real growth in his
character as the death of his best friend (who rejected his methods
as “murder”) has steeled in him a resolve to avoid killing no
matter what the provocation or how easy a solution it might be in a
given situation. It's making for some surprisingly interesting
storytelling beneath the surface veneer of a “comic book TV show.”
One
thing I am enjoying is that there seem to be far more “Easter Eggs”
and incorporation of the vast wealth of DC Comics lore than I
realized, from “Arrowization” (this series' equivalent of
“Smallvillization”) of major villains, many of them not
traditionally assocated with Green Arrow, to the dropping of names
such as “Kirby.” Which latter probably seems more a gratuitous
invoking of one of the big names from comics overall than it really
is, given that during the 1950s Jack Kirby actually did draw Green
Arrow.
And
now the latest rumor hits, seeming to confirm (assuming it is more
than a rumor) what has been suspected and hoped, that the DC
live-action universe currently appearing on the CW is the same as
that depicted in the new DC motion-picture universe – supposedly
Man
of Steel II
(which I still hope will be called World's
Finest,
although it's a name that probably doesn't resonate with non comics
fans) will end with a scene including both (Green) Arrow and the
Flash [link].
A
final thought: What's Ollie doing pining over Laurel when he's got
Felicity close at hand?Felicity is so much hotter, even made up as kind of the nerd-girl super-geek!
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| Felicity |
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| Laurel |
... or ...
So
far at least not pretending to be much more than what it is, a “comic
book TV show,” this perhaps the most anticipated of all new TV
series for this season has unfortunately failed to impress me very
much. It's not bad, don't get me wrong. And I don't see myself
dropping it anytime soon. But the hopes for the distinctive and
offbeat flavor generally brought to the table by Joss Whedon – the
spark
that animated Buffy
the Vampire Slayer,
Angel,
and most especially Firefly
– have just not been fulfilled. I it was in the Avengers
movie itself, and hopefully will come through into the sequel, but
here … not so much. Frankly, of the characters making up the
ensemble, the agents themselves, only Coulson really grabs me.
Sometimes Skye as well. The others? – meh.
And the (so far, at least) overly episodic stories aren't in and of
themselves bringing me back week after week. It's more the hope
that something special is going to develop, and the hope
that we're going to see more glimpses of the wider Marvel Universe
than we have so far, that have kept me. As well as the fear that the
failure of this show, given just how much it was
anticipated and how favorable the climate seems to have been for it
to be well-received riding on the coattails of one of the biggest and
maybe even surprising
motion picture hits in my memory, would poison the well for any
new comic-book themed show in the foreseeable future. But it's a bad
sign that having missed an episode a couple weeks ago, I so far have
not felt any compulsion to go back and view it and at this point
doubt I will. I do not have the feeling
that I missed much.
It
surprises the heck out of me that of the two, Arrow
and SHIELD,
it's the former that I look forward to more even if I am
more a DC fan than a Marvel fan. Green Arrow himself is a character
I can take or leave in the comics, however.
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| Screen Shot from iPhone Kindle app |
Oddly enough, even though this is the
second published and indeed listed as “The Lost Book Two” of the
series, it's a prequel to Noah Primeval. Although I gave
rather – perhaps overly – effusive praise to that first book a
couple of years ago [link], for some reason I could not really get
into this one. In fact, it took me several tries to read through it.
I simply lost interest the first couple of attempts. A large part
of my apathy is the writing style. Most of the time it is quite
straightforward, yes, pretty much like reading the ingredients of a
bottle of water. And maybe the affected, somewhat stilted voice
given to epic fantasy characters set thousands of years in the past
is unrealistic, it seems to me, at least, more appropriate than the
all too faux contemporary, “hip” style Godawa uses in this
series. I understand he's trying to make these distant characters
seem “real” to a modern audience, but it just jarred in this
quasi-historical/Biblical fantasy novel. Maybe it would work better
for a reader with less exposure to the tropes and style of epic
historical fantasy. And the incessant and increasingly cloying
nicknames and endearments thrown back and forth by Enoch's son
Methuselah and his wife Edna became downright cloying.
“Poozelahbunnybunch”?
This book sets the remote background for
Noah Primeval by focussing on Enoch and Methuselah, similarly
bringing in a number of other characters from the primordial,
antediluvian world recounted in the earliest chapters of Genesis.
Like Noah Primeval, it retells and greatly expands on the
sketchy narrative found in Scripture, which it takes at face value as
a literal account, to create what purports to be a Tolkien-esque epic
fantasy tale of high adventure by blending in and reconciling –
rationalizing in terms of that literal, factual reading of Genesis –
a great deal of related Ancient Near Eastern mythology and legend.
To repeat myself from my long-ago review of Noah Primeval, at
least on a certain level this is a book – series – I wish I had
written. I just wish it were written in a style more fitting to the
subject.
Regarding the series as a whole, as well,
I must mention one thing that Godawa conveys very well – the sense
that these long primeval ages described in the early chapters of
Genesis were just as event-filled as later ages. It's
something easy to forget, I think, especially given how sketchy is
the description we have received. If the dates that can be
interpreted and the ages associated with individuals given in this
part of the Bible is meant to be taken literally (as Godawa does,
being part of the very conceit of this series), those extended
lifetimes would have been filled with enough events for several
of what we consider “lifetimes.” And it is truly staggering to
consider (as I never really had – or rather only rarely had, being
aware that a frequent identification is made between Melchizedek the
priest-king of Salem and Shem the son of Noah) that Adam and Eve
would have lived long enough to see countless multitudes born in the
several generations that were born during their lifetimes.
Given
comparably extended periods of childbearing age for women, doing simple math demonstrates that “population explosion” is far too
mild a phrase! Although it would explain the teeming populations
that existed across the face of the Earth so quickly, in only a few
hundred years.
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| http://www.omniology.com/LongevityChart.html |
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| Screen Shot from iPhone Kindle app |
Luckily, Enoch Primordial picked up enough in the latter half to carry me through to the end and beyond, into the third book in the series. Because, for whatever reason, I enjoyed this novel
considerably more than I did Enoch. Perhaps it is the sheer
audacity of turning the focus away from an adapted and expanded
Biblical character to the hero of what is most likely the world's
very first literary epic. The earliest portions of the Bible
were committed to writing only perhaps as early as 1200 to 1000 BC;
fragments of what ultimately became The Epic of Gilgamesh
appeared roughly a thousand years before that. For the most part, of
course, this novel follows the “final” version of the Epic,
from sometime after 1000 BC as found in the Assyrian ruins at Nineveh
in the library of Tiglath-Pileser III in the 8th century,
with the overall narrative thread of the Nephilim series
advanced by the alignment of Ut-Napishtim, the “Mesopotamian Noah,”
with the now quite elderly Noah from Book One, as well as the
Mesopotamian gods with Godawa's own fallen angelic “rebel Sons of
God called Watchers” (p. 2). And, at the very end,
Gilgamesh himself takes the new name by which he purportedly appears
in the Bible – cleverly hinted at in his first appearance in this
novel as a “mighty hunter.”
A
fascinating aspect of this story is how, arrogant though he is in the
beginning, Gilgamesh for most of the tale is a very sympathetic and
extremely likeable character, who even attempts, under the influence
of the once beastly but thoroughly noble Enkidu, to reform his life
and rule with justice – but who in the end defies expected literary
convention to foresake the good and embrace his fundamentally evil
Nephilim heritage. Watching Gilgamesh's transformation in the later
sections of this book, is like watching a train wreck. I was really
pulling for him, but I guess kind of like the Nephilim brothers who
threw in with Enoch and his band of “Giant Killers” and were for
a time the most sympathetically written characters in that prequel
novel, true moral reformation on the part of the Nephilim does not
fit by their very nature into Godawa's theology.
There are actually a couple of other items I had in mind to include here, but
I'm ready to put this blog entry to bed so they will have to wait.
Cheers!,
and Thanks for reading!
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