A Wind in the Door (a book review post)

Moving on from my review of A Wrinkle in Time, we come to A Wind in the Door.

I never read this one when I was a kid, so I was coming at it completely fresh. And, at first, I thought it was making a difference in my reception of the book, because, at first, I was really enjoying it. The first third of the book was really good. I was impressed and everything.

Yes, there will be spoilers.

This one is two years after Wrinkle; Charles Wallace is in school and is having difficulties fitting in. He also thinks he's found a dragon in his brothers' garden. The first part of the book deals with the search for this dragon, and all of that section is interesting and enthralling. Including finding the "dragon," which turns out to be a cherubim. That spouts fire. I'm still not clear on why the cherubim spouted fire, but it did. We also meet Blajeny, a giant obsidian dude who is some kind of Teacher.

And that's where the book starts to fall apart. The first thing, which could be overlooked if it was the only thing, is that Calvin just happens to show up as Meg sneaks out to go looking for, well, she doesn't know what she's looking for. In fact, there's no clear reason why she sneaks out of the house. Here's the conundrum: It's after bedtime. Meg sneaks out, which is not the issue; the issue is that Calvin just shows up. Sure, he has his own reason for being there but, ostensibly, he should know that it's after the Murry children's bedtime, so why is he coming over to their house when Meg and Charles Wallace are expected to be asleep?

The next real issue is Blajeny. He's supposed to be a "Teacher," a term which is never really explained and, I suppose, shouldn't need to be explained except that he never teaches or does anything like teaching. What he does is announce to Meg that he is there to be her Teacher and that she will have three trials. So this is his method of teaching, to announce that she will have trials but, oh, he can't tell her what they will be or how to overcome them. He will, though, giver her the cherubim, Proginoskes, as a partner but, no, he doesn't know what the trials will be, either. This is another one of those tropes that I am overly tired of. And, well, how would Blajeny even know how many trials there would be if he didn't know what they would be, something he admits later. Basically, this was some ordeal he, some very powerful cosmic being, couldn't fix himself and needed Meg, a teenager, to do it for him.

Most of the rest of the book is torture. As soon as they get to the first trial, which is to determine the real Mr. Jenkins... Okay, hold on a moment. There was this scene in Wrinkle with Mr. Jenkins where he is questioning Meg about the whereabouts of her father. He seems to have an overly intense curiosity about it. Meg even wonders why Mr. Jenkins cares, basically, calls attention to the behavior to the reader, then... nothing. The character doesn't enter the book again, and I was left wondering what the heck that was all about. When he turned up in Wind, I thought, "Oh! We'll get to find out what Jenkins is up to" But no. Jenkins is up to nothing except being lame.

So, okay, Meg has to figure out which is the real Mr. Jenkins because he's been copied by fallen angels called Echthroi who want to X existence. But to start with, they want to X Charles Wallace. Yes, the "X"ing is how it is put in the book. They want to X everything. Why they copied Mr. Jenkins is never explained and has no logic to it other than a contrivance because Meg hates Jenkins but has been put into a position where she has to save him. What we get, then, is two chapters of Meg whining about how she can't do it and Proginoskes telling her she has to or he will X himself. They just kept going around and around that argument:
"I can't do it."
"You have to."
"I can't."
"Then I will fail the trial and will have to X myself."
"No, you can't do that."
"Then you have to choose." (Or, as they said in the book, she had to Name him.)
"I can't do it."
OH MY GOSH! Seriously! I needed two chapters of that! (More than 30 pages in  the edition I read (nearly 1/5 of the book).)

And once they get through that? Well, Jenkins joins their little team and we spend most of the rest of the book bouncing back and forth between him and Meg both going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about how they can't do whatever it is they need to do. Oh, yes, and Jenkins asking to just be sent back to Earth. "I'm no good. Why am I even here? Just send me back." Or something to that effect.

Not to mention that, again, the person (Blajeny in this one) provided who should be able to answer questions and explain what's going on and what to do and all of that fails to answer any questions and leaves them on their own to figure out what to do. Which, you know, sometimes is what you need to do with kids but not when someone's life is in the balance. It would be like coming up on a car accident and the ambulance is there, but the EMT tells you to take care of it instead then refuses to answer any questions about what you should do and, in fact, wanders off when you're focused on the guy bleeding out.

Mostly, I have found these books, so far, to be a place for L'Engle to dangle her ideas and philosophies with not enough story to really make the books worthwhile. Both books have focused on love as major plot device (the climax of the Wrinkle being Meg saving her brother by, basically, saying "I love you"). The message, then, of A Wind in the Door is that love is an action, not a feeling, and that's something I agree with, but I don't need 50 pages of anguish over it. I also don't need half of the book explaining and re-explaining "kything."

So, as I said last time, these books may be great for kids, but I'm just not being able to get into them as an adult. There are too many shortcuts and too many devices without reason and not enough answers both to the questions the characters have and the questions that I have as a reader. If you loved these as a kid, cherish that, but don't try to go back to them now. If you never read them, it's probably better to just not.

"Danger, Will Robinson!" pt 4: Flashing Forward

Part 4: The Flash Forward

"I hate when they do that!" Those are the fateful words that started this blog series. And I do. I hate when they do that. That thing I call the "flash forward." I don't know if the device has an actual name, but this is what I've decided to call it. The other option is that television shows are increasingly told in complete flashback mode. Now that I have you completely confused, let me explain.

Over the last several years, it has become fairly common practice for shows to start with a sequence in which we immediately find the heroes in mortal danger. We're just dropped into the middle of the action with no context whatsoever. After a few minutes to either completely confuse the audience so we're saying, "what's going on?" or to bring the hero(es) to the edge of death so we're saying "oh, crap," we switch to a new scene with a message something along the lines of "24 Hours Earlier." That's where the story actually begins. That bit at the beginning is just a gimmick to generate false interest in  the viewer so that the viewer wants to watch the episode, and I call it a "flash forward." It's a substitute for actual story telling.

I hate it.

Not that I always hated it. The first few times, it was kind of novel. Neat. But it's the kind of thing that should be the exception, the rare exception, not the rule. But I see it all the time.

Now, I will say that I may be more sensitive to this... issue... than the average television viewer due to the way I watch television, which is to say, I don't watch television. As such. First, we don't have cable. Second, we don't have satellite. Third, we don't even have an antenna. This translates into us never watching anything when it's originally aired, since all we get on our television is snow unless we're using the DVD player. We tend to watch shows in bursts due to this, either on DVD or streaming on Netflix. There have been shows where they begin 50-75% of the episodes with these flash forward bits and then drop us back in time to actually start the story up. Because I'm watching them back-to-back, it might be more bothersome to me than if I was watching the show once a week.

However, because it's caught my attention, I can say that it's a cheap trick designed to rope in viewers with the thrill of quick action. And it saves the show a bit of money since they have several minutes of footage they get to use twice (once we catch back to the beginning of the episode and get to see it again in context). Why does everything have to be a gimmick to trick us into watching things? If the show is good, has well written stories and good acting, people will watch it. Theoretically, anyway. Maybe Arrested Development should have employed this technique? No, probably not.

We've been re-watching Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, lately, just to put this whole thing in perspective. In the three seasons we've watched so far, there has not been one of these flash forward bits, and I will be surprised if we come across any in the full run of the show. I don't remember any, at any rate. I do think Firefly had one episode with a flash forward, but I don't remember more than that. Not that this has anything to do with Joss Whedon in particular, because those shows were before the gimmick became so common.

Maybe I'm being harsh. Maybe TV directors just use it because they think it's cool to start the shows that way. At first, it was. Actually, no, I doubt it. Because it's so frequent, I feel fairly confident that it's the producers and the networks advising the directors to start as many episodes as possible with the climax of that episode. Grab the people and make them want to see what's going on. Of course, when the episode turns out to be a piece of trash, you just feel cheated, so it doesn't keep a bad series from getting cancelled.

So, let me just say again, "I hate when they do that!" Yes, those are the fateful words that started this blog series, and I do. I hate when they do that. I'd like to say that those are the words that would end this series, but...

The real issue is that this flash forward thing is just a symptom of a larger problem. However, that's a problem for the next post in this series. Although I'd like to fight this particular symptom, I do think it's time to start looking at the disease.

To Be Continued...

"Danger, Will Robinson!" Part 1 (Or Story Gimmicks We (I) Can Do Without)

 [Disclaimer: I originally posted this just before blogger went down on Thursday. Since I composed it within blogger, when blogger went down, I lost all of it except the couple of paragraphs I'd typed on Tuesday. I didn't get my post back. All of that to say, if you are one of the few that read this before blogger went down (if you were in that half hour window), this is no longer quite the same post. I had to re-write most of it, and it grew a bit differently, this time.]


Part One: The Big Reveal


I was watching a show a few weeks ago and became annoyed at a particular plot device that was used. It's become an increasingly popular plot device that my wife and I had commented on previously. A few days later, I was watching a different show (this time, with my wife), and it used the same plot device. It's a show I like, but the words, "I hate when they do that" came right out of my mouth. This post is not about that plot device (that one will come later). It did make me start thinking, though, about story gimmicks that I've grown increasingly tired of seeing. I've made a list!


Because I've previously mentioned "the big reveal," I thought I'd start with that.


The big reveal is not always a bad thing. In fact, often, it's quite necessary. Here's where I, again, realize that I need to read some of these Agatha Christie novels I have laying around. Mystery is the genre that relies on the big reveal the most. If the mystery writer has done a good job, the big reveal is the time when the author reveals how the protagonist fit together all the clues that the reader missed to figure out "who done it." This goes back at least as far as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes and is used to great effect in TV shows like Monk and Castle. (And Psych. My kids love that show (so do I).)


The problem with the big reveal is that it's so easy to screw it up. The easiest way is to just make it redundant. I was reading an urban fantasy detective thing somewhat recently, and the author had done just this. I was on, like, page 88 or something insane like that, and, in an attempt to lay a clue, the author gave away the whole plot. I could have (should have) put the book down right then, because it was torture reading the rest of the book. I couldn't take the protagonist seriously, because all I could think about was how stupid she was. I wanted to shake her and point to page 88, but I kept reading. I mean, I kept thinking "maybe, I'm wrong" although I knew I wasn't. And I wasn't. And the big reveal at the end of the book caught the protagonist by surprise but not me. I didn't read anymore books in that series.


Here's the thing: the reader wants to have an “ah-ha!” moment. That's why s/he's reading a mystery to begin with. The trick is to take the reader right to the edge of that moment, but not let them have it until the big reveal. The mystery writer wants the reader to say, “Oh! I should have known! I should have seen that!” It's difficult. Possibly the most difficult kind of writing there is. The author has to balance readers of vastly different intelligence and reading experience and lead them all to the same place at the same time. I have no plans to write any mysteries.


Of course, the big reveal is not only used in mysteries. Authors like to keep readers in the dark. It's part of the job. It builds suspense. And it leads to the issue which is the one that I probably dislike the most. The author leaves out necessary details (clues) on purpose, details that should be being included, for the purpose of keeping the reader from figuring out what's going on. Like in The Illusionist, as I mentioned in a previous post. I always fill ripped off when an author falls back on this tactic. It's clumsy and cheap. If the author can't lace the clues through the story so that the reader (viewer) has the chance to figure it out on his own, the author shouldn't write that story. Or, at least, shouldn't make that story public. Work on it till you get it right.


Of course, then there's when the author has decided that the reader just isn't smart enough to figure it out on his/her own and uses the big reveal in an arrogant manner in which to say “you're not smart enough to figure this out, so, here, let me just tell you.” That's just insulting. Even to readers who weren't going to figure it out. This is why Holmes had Watson, to have someone to filter clues to so that the reader had a chance. Can you imagine Sherlock Holmes with no Watson. Holmes just going about his business of being more clever than everyone (including the reader) and, then, just announcing at the end the who and why. And, yet, some authors are completely content to do, basically, just that.


The last one I see commonly is where the author just doesn't know how to reveal things little by little so has some character or other come in and just lay things out for everyone. Sometimes, it's in an effort to make the story more concise (because it's going to take 200 pages to reveal the details in a more organic way), but, mostly, it's that the author has a story that's more complicated than s/he knows how to deal with, so uses the big reveal as an info dump so that the reader has all the info s/he needs. I can be sympathetic to this one, but, really, go back and work that stuff into the story. Or leave it out.


I'm sure there are other misuses of the big reveal, but these are the ones that I see regularly. The ones that bother me. Well, there's also the “little reveal.” Basically, where the big reveal is broken up and spread through the whole book. I'm reading The Lightning Thief, right now, and I'm really not enjoying it. It's too bad, too, because I wanted to enjoy it. Both of my boys liked the Percy Jackson books. My oldest son really liked them. I enjoyed the movie. But, man, Riordan has Percy just break character, basically, to info dump on me so that he can do in a sentence or two what would take paragraphs (or pages) to do otherwise. It's so annoying! And feels to me like he was trying to cut his word count down.


I suppose what I'm trying to say here is that you have to be careful with the big reveal. To put it in other terms, the big reveal is a way of telling, not showing, and we all know that we should show, right? If you're going to use the big reveal, be sure it's at a place where it's necessary to tell. Don't use it just because it's easier or more convenient.