From the Bookshelf: Eaters of the Dead
Nov. 1st, 2018 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAll too often these days I think "I should read more prose fiction" only to seize up between the likely-false dichotomy of supposing anything that would qualify as "respectable literature" would just go over my head even as I sweat and struggle to get through it and then thinking many other things "beneath my talents." Not that long ago, though, in the closest used book store (but just about the only one left open in my city) I saw a slim volume lying on the tile floor next to a full-up bookshelf and picked it up. Books by Michael Crichton do seem to fall into the second category I've just alluded to, such that I've long just slid by them. I did read Jurassic Park back in high school before the movie arrived, but I seemed to find the way he'd presented chaos theory "bleak" and wound up somewhat unenthused (and then liked the movie at the time better in part for brushing past the subject). With the novels he wrote afterwards, I was a bit ready to believe certain critical comments about their spins on controversial subjects comforting the already comfortable without actually reading them myself. Eaters of the Dead had been written years before any of that, though, and I suppose a story purporting to be a translated manuscript from an Arab courtier who just happens to be pulled into a band of Vikings travelling back north to ultimately face "a terror that comes under cover of night" was at least amusing to consider. I wound up buying the book.
The "editor's introduction" explains that Ahmad Ibn Fadlan was writing a report rather than spinning a yarn, and it was sort of tempting to consider this might have had allowed for "it doesn't have to be flashy; it just has to follow a certain pattern." I was cruising along through the narrative, though, until the party of Vikings passed through ominous territory and got to a hall called "Hurot." All of a sudden, I was telling myself "oh wait; it's a take on Beowulf." I could now remember how I'd accepted in a casual way that the Vikings were led by someone named "Buliwyf." Perhaps his introduction contrasting him to someone named Thorkel (who hadn't been included in the party) had got me thinking of the Viking manga Vinland Saga and distracted me.
Able to sort out the non-"fantasy" (yet still to some extent "fantastic") take on things I'm at least familiar with from hearsay a bit in advance of the "editor's afterword," I suppose I got past "so it's not as original as I'd thought it would be" to stay caught up by the matter-of-fact narration, and getting through another work of prose fiction for the first time ought to count for something small. I did, though, get to remembering the book had been written in the mid-1970s when I got to wondering about all the casual sex with slave girls being described. Of course, I do have to admit I haven't done the research myself to know just what things were like in the period of history the book is set in (and the first three sections, where that was already starting to crop up, were said to be based on actual material), and whether it was just then possible when the book was being written to go ahead and casually present that.
The "editor's introduction" explains that Ahmad Ibn Fadlan was writing a report rather than spinning a yarn, and it was sort of tempting to consider this might have had allowed for "it doesn't have to be flashy; it just has to follow a certain pattern." I was cruising along through the narrative, though, until the party of Vikings passed through ominous territory and got to a hall called "Hurot." All of a sudden, I was telling myself "oh wait; it's a take on Beowulf." I could now remember how I'd accepted in a casual way that the Vikings were led by someone named "Buliwyf." Perhaps his introduction contrasting him to someone named Thorkel (who hadn't been included in the party) had got me thinking of the Viking manga Vinland Saga and distracted me.
Able to sort out the non-"fantasy" (yet still to some extent "fantastic") take on things I'm at least familiar with from hearsay a bit in advance of the "editor's afterword," I suppose I got past "so it's not as original as I'd thought it would be" to stay caught up by the matter-of-fact narration, and getting through another work of prose fiction for the first time ought to count for something small. I did, though, get to remembering the book had been written in the mid-1970s when I got to wondering about all the casual sex with slave girls being described. Of course, I do have to admit I haven't done the research myself to know just what things were like in the period of history the book is set in (and the first three sections, where that was already starting to crop up, were said to be based on actual material), and whether it was just then possible when the book was being written to go ahead and casually present that.