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The Angel's Cut
Jun. 27th, 2009 12:09 pmLast night I finished The Angel's Cut, sequel to The Vintner's Luck.
I loved The Vintner's Luck desperately. My time period, a focus on cadence, a certain brutality of imagery (the three dead wasps in the bowl on the pregnant whore's bedside table will stay with me forever), and a peculiar gnosticism. It was also, of course, about loss, and this appealed not just to my general state of being, but to the circumstances of the moment I read it in. There were many lines, all forgotten now, that seemed, at the time, to be the answer to the conundrums of my heart. The book seemed to say to me keep vigil. And like a clumsy angel I did.
The Angel's Cut is a lesser book, and that's as it should be. Whether this is intentional on the author's part, or a stroke of significant luck, I am uncertain. As I read I thought, it's just that you're no longer broken now, this this affects you less. And of course, I got to the end, and I was wrong.
The book takes place largely between the wars in Los Angeles. Xas, his wings shorn (as Xas is now grounded, so is this book), mans an airship, and later works as a pilot, sometimes a stunt flier and wing walker. He gets embroiled in the movie business, a plot point I note because it gives us both one of the strangest and loveliest motifs of the book as regards deaf children and one of its largest and most frustrating distractions, and that's the one of the movie mogul characters is obviously based on Howard Hughes. What's annoying is the character is awesome and peculiar in his own right, so when the author draws the parallels too closely (the milk), I became annoyed, because it forced me to remember our world, and that that of the book and its fictional films (a source of obsession to me in general).
The author, whose other work I've not read, reveals a number of her preoccupations in this return to Xas's life, among them: scarred women. Perhaps the fixation is merely Xas's, but it is strange, and hard to know, no matter how well and justifiably the author presents us with such characters.
In the end, I wept for the results of these, Xas's much more ordinary adventures: ( Read more... )
In many ways The Angel's Cut, which quite satisfyingly references many key events of The Vintner's Luck, is one very long denoument or intermission (I am not sure). It is the giving up of waiting, and it seems I read this one at the right time too.
Random: temptation to write Torchwood and Xas having a run-in -- very high
I loved The Vintner's Luck desperately. My time period, a focus on cadence, a certain brutality of imagery (the three dead wasps in the bowl on the pregnant whore's bedside table will stay with me forever), and a peculiar gnosticism. It was also, of course, about loss, and this appealed not just to my general state of being, but to the circumstances of the moment I read it in. There were many lines, all forgotten now, that seemed, at the time, to be the answer to the conundrums of my heart. The book seemed to say to me keep vigil. And like a clumsy angel I did.
The Angel's Cut is a lesser book, and that's as it should be. Whether this is intentional on the author's part, or a stroke of significant luck, I am uncertain. As I read I thought, it's just that you're no longer broken now, this this affects you less. And of course, I got to the end, and I was wrong.
The book takes place largely between the wars in Los Angeles. Xas, his wings shorn (as Xas is now grounded, so is this book), mans an airship, and later works as a pilot, sometimes a stunt flier and wing walker. He gets embroiled in the movie business, a plot point I note because it gives us both one of the strangest and loveliest motifs of the book as regards deaf children and one of its largest and most frustrating distractions, and that's the one of the movie mogul characters is obviously based on Howard Hughes. What's annoying is the character is awesome and peculiar in his own right, so when the author draws the parallels too closely (the milk), I became annoyed, because it forced me to remember our world, and that that of the book and its fictional films (a source of obsession to me in general).
The author, whose other work I've not read, reveals a number of her preoccupations in this return to Xas's life, among them: scarred women. Perhaps the fixation is merely Xas's, but it is strange, and hard to know, no matter how well and justifiably the author presents us with such characters.
In the end, I wept for the results of these, Xas's much more ordinary adventures: ( Read more... )
In many ways The Angel's Cut, which quite satisfyingly references many key events of The Vintner's Luck, is one very long denoument or intermission (I am not sure). It is the giving up of waiting, and it seems I read this one at the right time too.
Random: temptation to write Torchwood and Xas having a run-in -- very high
