When I was very young, I heard a legend about a Chinese muralist who painted the most vivid and lifelike dragons but refused to fill in their eyes, lest the dragons come alive and fly away. I tried to track it down four or five years ago for a fragment I was writing at the time, but on that occasion I never found it. Today it occurred to me to make another attempt, and for reasons of n-grammatic potentia that shall remain mysterious, Google was far more helpful this time around.

As with any old story, mutations abound, but the preponderance of them involve the painter Zhang Seng-You (張僧繇) from the period of the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589 AD). Depending on who’s telling the story, Zhang Seng-You is asked to fill in the eyes by a bystander, the abbot who commissioned the monastery mural, or the Emperor himself (who, in this case, must have been Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty). The ending is always the same: the painter finishes the eyes and the dragons bolt away from the mural in a flash of lightning and thunder.

The wonderful thing about fables is the discordance of what they say—typically a blunt moral lesson, delivered as the payload of a cruise-missile punch line like a Feghoot minus the funny—versus what they do, which is leave innumerable gaps for diverse interpretations to take root and flourish. Stories are not reducible to definite lessons. Fiction is a space for debate, and a fable is an open meadow for all and sundry to frolic. (“I don’t believe in stories with morals,” says the man with the childish fantasy of teaching Lolita in schools.)

So what can we make of the tale of the painted dragons?

Is it a statement of sumi-e aesthetics?

This story embodies the philosophy of Oriental sumi-e. The goal is not simply to reproduce the appearance of the subject, but to capture its soul. To paint a horse, the sumi-e artist must understand its temperament better than its muscles and bones. To paint a flower, there is no need to perfectly match its petals and colors, but it is essential to convey its liveliness and fragrance. Oriental sumi-e may be regarded as an earliest form of impressionistic art that captures the unseen.

Or is it about attention to detail? Here’s one reading of the story and the proverb it spawned:

The idiom 画龙点睛 “draw a dragon, put in pupils” could be translated “finishing touch” in English. In Chinese it describes a key or emphatic phrase to a speech or in writing to drive home a point, giving the work more power.

And here’s another:

Based on this fairy tale [...] the last touch in a masterpiece is the most important part of a drawing, or any other important business.

Here’s a take on the story as it pertains to the tradition of dotting the eyes of dragon boats. It differs from the others in attributing the dragon murals to the fourth-century painter Gu Kai-Zhi (顧愷之), who left them unfinished until Zhang Seng-You was asked to complete them a century later:

[Gu Kai-Zhi] had a strange habit of leaving the eyeballs out for several years after the rest of the painting was finished. When he was asked why, he said, “The most life-like strokes of a subtle portrait come from the eyes.” He was actually implying that even a single stroke should not be done casually.

Nowhere have I read an interpretation that captures the essence of what I always thought the story to mean. Only the last one above comes close to grasping the part of the tale I find most resonant: the artist’s reluctance to finish the eyes until ordered to do so by somebody else.

In English, there’s a motto that art is never finished, only abandoned. It’s attributed to Leonardo da Vinci—who wouldn’t have said it in English, of course—but good luck sourcing it. One imagines that Leonardo, who filled in the most iconic eyes in the history of western art, derived the expression himself from a nugget of wisdom that arrived in the Italian Peninsula by way of Marco Polo’s expeditions to the Orient. But the insight resonates with anxieties of creativity everywhere, no matter which culture you’re in, and I lean towards believing it cropped up in many places independently.

What is perfectionism, really, but the avoidance of declaring something finished? Leaving out the pupils of the dragons, the way I see it, captures like no other parable the reluctance to put the lid on something magnificent. Once you’re done—once you’ve published—you’ve released your monster into the wild where it no longer bows to your command. The desire to create something magnificent conflicts with the compulsion to retain control over every detail. If the dragon flies away, it’s no longer within your power to polish the scales.

This is the perfectionist’s paradox: what if the creative apotheosis is only attainable through the loss of control? Here we’re not too far from the thematic stomping grounds of the most visceral film of 2010:

In the age of digital media we’ve grown accustomed to perpetual self-editing. It’s easy to deceive ourselves into believing that with instantaneous editorial revision at our fingertips, we now have the freedom to publish first and ask questions later. For many, this is true, and it’s why they propel the Internet’s flux of content at a pace that is nothing short of torrential. But in the other direction, there flows a strange inhibitor. Many now fear that substantial blog content is drying up, squashed in the middlebrow sandwich between personal intimations in social networks and the impersonal platform of paid journalism (where long-form is already on life support).

We’ve discussed some of these matters before, but I think they are worth revisiting. The dwindling of journals like this one has nothing to do with the terror of public scrutiny. What the decline really comes from, I believe, is an anxiety of impermanence. Good content—the transcendent stuff that rises above the encroaching tides of what Philip K. Dick called kipple—has a reputation for sticking around. This is a reputation the Internet does not share. It’s not just because online content is liable to be edited or outright wiped: it’s also because the connectivity of hypertext inherently carries a poison pill of long-term decay. Links break with time, and their container vessels get dragged into the undertow regardless of their independent eloquence.

I have before me a draft box overstuffed with nearly painted dragons. Many of them will never take flight. They will die in captivity.

Don’t even ask about my offline albatross.

There was an essay in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review about writers who abandoned their novels—beginning, as it should, with Michael Chabon’s Fountain City, which consumed a good five years of his life before he left it for Wonder Boys. And it’s worth remembering that the novelists in the essay—American titans like Chabon, Updike, and Harper Lee—had all already knocked something out of the park. Spare a thought for the failures-to-be who haven’t even made it that far; the roster must be endless.

If you think about it, it’s miraculous that anything of lasting power ever sees the light of day. I wonder sometimes if this is achievable without coercion, or if you really do require an external agent to flick the creative-inhibition switch to off. It takes a special force of will to abandon one’s baby on the river.

So whether it’s helpful or not, it’s worth remembering that even the best things in life aren’t finished. Like the serpents on the temple walls, they just get released.

In brief: Chabon’s sophomore novel is the literary equivalent of a warm bath. A comic contemporary adventure about the existential crises of novelists, it fits snugly in the naturalistic mould of modern literature about the here and now, albeit with a few extra helpings of wackiness. It meanders here and there, and its lightheartedness assures you that none of the characters are ever in much danger; however, Chabon’s lucid style keeps the story at least as fluid as his recent dips into genre, if not more so. It’s not high-concept, but it’s fun.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Wonder Boys, keep reading below.)

So I’ve finally done it: I have now read every novel written by Michael Chabon. His extensive oeuvre of short stories notwithstanding, I’ve assembled a complete picture of Chabon’s fiction portfolio—something I haven’t done for any author in a very long time, apart from the J.K. Rowlings of the world who made their names in a single series designed to be swallowed whole.

It is not my habit to read fiction biographically. I ordinarily consider books as finished products that can speak for themselves, not because I believe it is the only scope of analysis, but because it is the one I prefer. But in the case of Wonder Boys, I would be remiss to overlook the relationship between the author and the text, and I can think of at least three reasons why this is so.

1. For me, reading this book was like clicking the last piece in a jigsaw into place. Much of what enticed me about it was its transitional nature, and its place in the continuum of Chabon’s evolution from an orthodox literary novelist to a crusader for genre and escape.
2. Wonder Boys is Chabon’s most explicitly autobiographical novel, at least in terms of inspiration. The main character, Grady Tripp, is hopelessly lost in the 2611-page manuscript of an increasingly Byzantine family epic (also entitled Wonder Boys) that he has been working on for seven years. Likewise, Chabon wrote his Wonder Boys to rescue himself from the wreck of Fountain City, an unfinished novel that collapsed under its own weight and threatened to erode all the goodwill he had accumulated as a young superstar of American letters.
3. In a self-referential manoeuvre, one of the novel’s central themes is the conflation of writers and their characters; indeed, what the very act of writing fiction does to a person’s sense of self.

If there is one thing that the novel is solidly about, it is the “midnight disease”:

[...] which started as a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to “fit in” by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happened with the midnight disease was that you began to crave this feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief object of your own hostile gaze.

Yes, that sounds about right. But if we wish to be more specific, then we can turn to Chabon’s characterization of what he called “late-century naturalism” in his 2007 essay about Jews with swords—the typically respectable American short story or novel of the late twentieth century:

[...] unarmed Americans undergoing the eternal fates of contemporary short story characters — disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace. Divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and self-deception; love and hate among fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce — I guess that about covers it. Story, more or less, of my life.

And the story, more or less, of Grady Tripp.

The unpublished behemoth of Grady’s Wonder Boys is only one of his immediate worries. There’s the minor problem of his third wife leaving him without knowing that he recently impregnated another woman (the chancellor of the college at which he teaches, whose husband is his department head), which makes for awkward parties at the college’s WordFest conference and an even more awkward Passover with the in-laws. There’s his dependency on Humboldt County’s finest marijuana to an extreme that is clearly a serious problem to any external observer, though Grady revels in it with a sort of ironic glamour. And then there’s James Leer.

James Leer is one of Grady’s writing students, a sexually confused twenty-something kleptomaniac whose talents include reciting a roll call of obscure Hollywood suicides in alphabetical order, composing in sentence fragments, and not telling the truth. In many ways he comes off as a holdover from Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh—only now, the lost young dreamer trapped in middle-class comforts is the observed, not the observer. This is for the better: in several respects, Wonder Boys is Mysteries revisited (from the incessant party-hopping down to the ritual inhumanities inflicted on other people’s pets), but with the coming-of-age character situated at a safe distance from the reader. This lends Wonder Boys a comparatively greater degree of maturity, which is ironic, as its narrator is a midlife crisis case who doesn’t have an inkling of perspective on the outrageous extent of his irresponsibility.

Let’s stop for a moment: by now, I’ve probably made Wonder Boys sound like every other lightweight contemporary novel of self-discovery. The genre, which some erroneously think of as outside genre, is not one that allows for compelling back-cover summaries apart from laundry lists of characters you haven’t met. Character X is a writer with wacky properties A, B, and C; character Y has equally wacky properties D, E, and F (and is, for bonus points, “coming of age”). Together, they struggle their way through Life in a smart, funny, and ultimately heartwarming voyage of personal renewal.

I’m not surprised at the common perception that literary novels are boring: they don’t jump out at you with unique tag-line synopses like “a detective story of messianic prophecy and chess in an alternate-history Jewish homeland set in Alaska”, “a Brooklynite and his escape-artist cousin create a costumed superhero to vicariously fight the Nazis”, or “Jews with swords”. In the hands of a lesser writer, Wonder Boys wouldn’t have much to recommend it in terms of a deep conceptual hypothesis. But lest we forget, this is Michael Chabon we’re talking about: he is an exceptional storyteller with an amusing simile for every occasion. If anything, his writing is more at ease here than it is in the stringently style-conscious genre pieces of recent years, which are increasingly thick with Yiddish loanwords. The prose is lyrical, yet silky smooth: it’s pleasant to the eyes without drawing too much attention to itself and grinding the tale to a halt.

There are seeds of the recurring ideas that would reach full bloom in Chabon’s later novels—chief among them, the adoption of Jewish history as an ur-legend around which his stories are designed. The centrepiece of Wonder Boys is James and Grady’s Passover visit to the family of Grady’s third wife, who had left him the day before. It makes for an interesting Seder:

Dutifully Irv set about answering the Four Questions. He looked around the table, at which sat three native Koreans, a converted Baptist, a badly lapsed Methodist, and a Catholic of questionable but tormented stripe, lifted his Haggadah, and began, unironically, “Once we were slaves in Egypt…”

As with many of Chabon’s best scenes, it’s all very procedural until somebody gets hurt. Metaphorical, too; it’s clear that Grady is thinking about his towering Babel of a novel—and by extension, Life—in the following exchange.

“Hey, Irv?” I said, deciding, after all this time, to ask the Fifth Question, the one that never got asked. “How come old Yahweh let the Jews wander around in the desert like that for forty years, anyway? How come he didn’t, just, like, show them the right way to go? They could have gotten there in a month.”

“They weren’t ready to enter the Holy Land,” said Marie. “It took forty years to get the slavery out of them.”

“That could be,” said Irv, looking over at James, his eyes deep and shadowy. “Or maybe they just got lost.”

Thankfully for the novel’s structural integrity, the ambitions Chabon would later realize don’t pop all the seams of what is a straightforward human comedy. It’s like he had to get Wonder Boys out of his system and then, satisfied with his fictional comment on the personal aspect of novels (as well as the nail on the coffin of Fountain City), aim for a dramatic historical sweep worthy of his imaginative talent.

That isn’t to say that plot architecture falls by the wayside in Wonder Boys, though it certainly seems that way in the novel’s middle stretch. Most of the oddball character conflicts that show up for the apparent purpose of being oddball do become relevant by the end. At times, the warmth that the novel exudes is almost an impediment: rarely is there a convincing sense of danger, even when the characters bludgeon each other with baseball bats and boa constrictors. We know from the tone of the book alone that James Leer isn’t actually going to off himself in the manner of his idols, and that Grady will be relieved of his 2611-page burden in one way or another. All the tension rests on how the sordid details fall into place to make a happy ending possible, if they manage to mesh at all.

For the most part, they do. Wonder Boys is a scattered book, and oftentimes we find Grady treading over the debris of untold stories. Not all of the pocketed absurdities cohere, but they make for an uncanny delight.

As I write this, I’m leafing through the newly released Maps and Legends, the first collection of Chabon’s literary essays in book form. (The bookshop stocked it in a shrinkwrap to protect Jordan Crane’s ornate three-piece jacket design—a boon for people like me who prefer to keep their books in impeccable condition, but perhaps unsuitable for browsing purposes.) Some of it is familiar to me: among the selections are his Eisner Awards keynote about the decline of children’s comics, his reflections on writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and my favourite, an expanded version of his 1997 essay on a bafflingly anachronistic Yiddish phrasebook that not only provided the inspiration for the contemporary Jewish Sitka of TYPU‘s alternate universe, but (hitherto unbeknownst to me) generated a stir of controversy on a Yiddish-language mailing list.

The other selections are quite refreshing; thankfully, they offer a lot more variety than a simple retread of Chabon’s position that serious fiction has dug itself into a hole as a consequence of relegating “entertaining” genres into other holes—though that, too, gets plenty of attention in the opening essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights”. There is an excursion into one of the iconic moments of Chabon’s personal mythos (the abandonment of his would-be second novel, Fountain City), a piece that exalts Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his mastery of nesting lies within lies along Holmes’ pursuit of the truth, and many a word about the storyteller as both Golem-maker and trickster figure (or Coyote, if you will). The connections to Chabon’s fiction should be obvious to those familiar with his works (respectively, in the preceding sentence: Wonder Boys, The Final Solution, Kavalier & Clay, Summerland), though I imagine the essays stand alone quite admirably. I haven’t read the whole collection, mind you: I deliberately skipped the piece on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, as McCarthy’s jaunt into the well-travelled post-apocalypse resides high on my reading list untouched.

I was immediately drawn, as I would be, to Chabon’s essay on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Before I proceed, I should say that the very thought of Chabon writing about Pullman is almost as exciting to me as Watterson writing about Schulz, which, if you’ll remember, I favourably compared to Beethoven writing about Bach. That said, I come not to praise Chabon (I swear!), though I’m not exactly going to bury him, either.

For all his admiration of Pullman’s Miltonian cycle—for the expected reason, too: its position as a “literary house on the borderlands” straddling the modes of understanding that govern childhood and adulthood, refusing to ascribe to modern epic fantasy’s presiding weltanschuuang of Tolkienian imitation—Chabon’s enthusiasm dwindles as the books become progressively transparent in their antitheism:

My heart sank as it began to dawn on me, around the time that the first angels begin to show up in The Subtle Knife, that there was some devil in Pullman, pitchfork-prodding him into adjusting his story to suit both the shape of his anti-Church argument (with which I largely sympathize) and the mounting sense of self-importance evident in the swollen (yet withal sketchy) bulk of the third volume and in the decreasing roundedness of its characters.

[...]

That’s the trouble with Plot, and its gloomy consigliere, Theme. They are, in many ways, the enemies of Character, of “roundedness,” insofar as our humanity and its convincing representation are constituted through contradiction, inconsistency, plurality of desire, absence of abstractable message or moral. It’s telling that the epithet most frequently applied to God by the characters in His Dark Materials is “the Authority.” This fits in well with Pullman’s explicit juxtaposition of control and freedom, repression and rebellion, and with his championing of Sin, insofar as Sin equals Knowledge, over Obedience, insofar as that means the kind of incurious acceptance urged on Adam by Milton’s Raphael. But the epithet also suggests, inevitably, the Author, and by the end of His Dark Materials one can’t help feeling that Will and Lyra, Pullman’s own Adam and Eve—appealing, vibrant, chaotic, disobedient, murderous—have been sacrificed to fulfill the hidden purposes of their creator. Plot is fate, and fate is always, by definition, inhuman.

Like many of Pullman’s critics, I think Chabon may have misdirected himself into conflating the author and the work. Pullman’s position is unambiguous: he excoriates C.S. Lewis’ Narnia for its slavish adherence to the nihilism of Christian allegory (a complaint that Tolkien famously shared, though Tolkien’s problem was more concerned with the allegory than the nihilism). Chabon’s argument here is that Pullman commits the same error as Lewis, and that the fulfilment of Lyra’s quest—read as a sort of grand liberation the world from the clutches of theocracy—robs the text of its depth.

I would venture, however, that a lot of the complexity that Chabon valorizes as “the serpent, [...] the sheer, unstoppable storytelling drive that is independent of plot outlines and thematic schemes, the hidden story that comes snaking in through any ready crack when the Authority’s attention is turned elsewhere” is almost certainly there by Pullman’s design, and not some mistake of a saving grace wriggling its way out of a predatory Message’s gnashing teeth. Not that it matters, of course; I’ve never been one to put much stock in authorial intention.

Far from an instance of “the eternal battle between the forces of idealist fundamentalism and materialist humanism,” where in the end, everything reduces to Dust, the ethic of His Dark Materials is that the true spirit of humanity lies in the free and unfettered search for pattern, meaning and metaphor—in a word, storytelling. There is, I find, little that is crudely materialistic in a story modelled on the notoriously Janus-faced Paradise Lost (in which we are all drawn to reading Satan as the epic hero, as Chabon rightly admits), set in a world of witches and talking bears, where the serpent-figure is a scientist drawn to the I Ching. It’s fantasy, for crying out loud; the triumph of Reason be damned.

The problem with organized religion is its active resistance to metaphor, and its constriction of the activity of reading to the narrow band of theology (or, if you will have it, tautology). As such, I’ve never interpreted Pullman’s politics as a restriction on the trajectory of his plot; it is, instead, a celebration of the liberty of metaphor, an open invitation to see the very nuances that Chabon unveils in his reading of the books as “a lamentation for the loss, which I fear is irrevocable, of the idea of childhood as an adventure, a strange zone of liberty, walled, perhaps, but with plenty of holes for snakes to get in”—which is, if I ever saw one, a Theme.

To longtime Chabon readers such as myself, his position on genre literature is well known, and in large part responsible for his appeal; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is as seminal a defence of escapism as one is likely to find anywhere. I have long been suspicious of the privilege the literary establishment confers on “serious” literature; in the dominant paradigm, there’s a critical undercurrent that believes literature can’t serve its socially transgressive purpose (a broad assertion of a mission statement in its own right) if you are having fun, or if you dare to edge closer to the mythic than the workaday. Oh, sure, they don’t mind the odd sparkle of magic realism, but if swashes and buckles are involved? That’s second-class.

But as he explains in his afterword, Chabon’s attraction to the social project of reimagining a Jewish mythos of Golems and Khazars is perfectly sensible:

In the relation of the Jews to the land of their origin, in the ever-extending, ever-thinning cord, braided from the freedom of the wanderer and the bondage of exile, that binds a Jew to his Home, we can make out the unmistakable signature of adventure. The story of the Jews centers around—one might almost say that it stars—the hazards and accidents, the misfortunes and disasters, the feats of inspiration, the travail and despair, and intermittent moments of glory and grace, that entail upon journeys from home and back again.

Chabon’s writing about writing (metawriting?) is a consistent pleasure to read, and I wish the novel itself lived up to its conceptual promise. Gentlemen isn’t at all bad, mind you—it’s an enjoyable yarn that usually overcomes the odd discontinuity from one episode to the next, full of the narrative legerdemain we have come to expect from a writer known for his glorious singsong prosody. As is the case with his previous novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon’s storytelling acumen tends to waver in clarity when he overindulges in a lexicon of loan-words with no modern English equivalents, but never mind what’s going on when every sentence has such an exquisite rhythm.

Gentlemen of the Road is not among the best works in Chabon’s oeuvre, but it is in many respects his most cinematic piece. His demonstrable interest in board games, in the spirit of Vladimir Nabokov, is of particular interest to me: the novel prominently features shatranj, a Persian ancestor of the game that organizes The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, chess. Finally, there’s something admirable about the story’s relentlessly escapist abandon; if you insist on examining it with the eye of a scholar, you could probably say something about the ubiquitous presence of elephants, but for the most part you won’t even bother. But you can read the first chapter (or listen to it, if you are so inclined) and decide for yourself.

As much of a neat little gimmick as it is to target the release of the film for the weekend of Guy Fawkes Day (“Remember, remember the Fifth of November”), I do wonder if it is really that wise an idea to rush the production schedule to meet it. It has a lineup to dream of, with Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond and James McTeigue in the director’s chair. McTeigue is untried, but given his background as an Assistant Director under both the Wachowskis in The Matrix and George Lucas in the Prequels, I have faith in the guy, so long as he doesn’t let too many Wachowski fingerprints get all over his work. That is appropriate for some dystopian movies about post-apocalyptic fascists that rule over a complacent populace, but it would not necessarily be a good fit here.

My big concern – and the major question mark that hovers over the otherwise perfect casting of Natalie Portman – is that the film may lose some of the Britishness of the original source, which I think needs to be retained. Alan Moore is arguably the best living scriptwriter in the comics business, and his work is long overdue for some cinematic respect, especially after the disaster that was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Hopefully the film captures some of the more ingenious motifs, both visual and poetic, that lie in Moore’s book. The commodification of Fate and Justice as artificial feminine personifications that cheat on society and the powers that be is of particular note, as is the marvelous sequence in the third act when V, the anarchistic Guy Fawkes figure around whom the story revolves, conducts the destruction of the fascist regime’s power structures to the cannon-fire of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. As Robert Rodriguez will hopefully demonstrate with Sin City, which looks incredible, why reinvent the wheel when the original comic has already provided so much in the way of aesthetic guidance?

On the other side of the literary world lies Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is an almost entirely linguistic experience aside from the great Helquist illustrations and the tag that follows every book offering clues as to the next one. I have now finished all eleven published books, and the series is due to conclude in the thirteenth volume. My original impression after reading the first three, if you will recollect, was that this was a series that dropped plot and story in favour of being very clever about the telling thereof. Well, that changes quite significantly as one progresses, and from about the fifth or sixth volume onwards, it becomes masterful episodic fiction in the serial tradition, with each successive adventure posing riddles that are answered with even more baffling oddities in the next one, capitalizing on everything that has come before. Even given how the author continues to unify each book with a set of idioms or literary devices that he deconstructs with scalpel precision, the series has shifted to the point where the unanswered mysteries in the plot are what generate anticipation for the next entry to come.

I must also admit a total agreement with the axis of good and evil that emerges as the series progresses. Every book has a library motif, and one of the characters in The Slippery Slope (whose identity I will not reveal) comes right out and says that well-read individuals are bound to be the good guys. All the decent people in the books respect knowledge, and amidst all the sobering melancholy in the series, one that explicitly deals with terrible things happening to undeserving innocent children, we see the promotion of what I think is a critical, yet oft-ignored value.

The antithesis of the printed page, and the mark of the enemy, is fire. When the villains employ fire, the tragic loss is always not so much material as it is a loss of knowledge. It’s an axis of conflict you don’t see every day, and certainly not in something promoted as children’s fiction.

Fiction is created, marketed and sold in a way that is completely different from the movie business. Book launches, Harry Potter aside, don’t have anything approaching the opening-weekend culture of movies that saw a revival after The Phantom Menace and reached its peak in the summer of 2001. It should really come as no surprise, then, that my most anticipated works of fiction to be published this calendar year are almost entirely sequels. Couple that with the fact that I have enough classic literature from years past to discover, and this list pales in comparison to what I can say about movies.

With that said, I want to make special mention of the four books coming out in 2005 that I intend to buy the moment they hit stores. Book the Twelfth of the Lemony Snicket series is one. Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception, which arrives 3 May, is another; I much enjoyed the first three, and this one promises to build on the dangling threads of the second whilst balancing them with the bittersweet ending of the third. Then there’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and its inclusion here should be obvious.

Not so obvious is the one non-sequel I already have marked down on my calendar, even considering that it does not have a hard release date beyond a vague promise of delivery in October (though its Amazon.co.uk entry now indicates a delay until 6 March, 2006). This would be Michael Chabon’s next novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, his first big piece since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay after having taken a break with the children’s baseball fantasy Summerland and the Sherlock Holmes tribute The Final Solution.

Chabon, as longtime devotees of this journal should be aware, is a literary wunderkind and one of my favourite novelists of all time. Not only does he write prose that can only be described as beautiful, he somehow never manages to let it overpower the stories underneath; and oh, what amazing stories he tells. All I know about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is that it is apparently an alternate-history novel about a Jewish state established in what we know as Alaska, and I’m already dying to see where he goes with this.

I will finish this post with yet another empty promise of a detailed, extended orgasmic reaction to the new footage of Revenge of the Sith, and pop in an unrelated link or two. The first is an excellent Jim Hill feature article on Eric Idle’s new Broadway production, Spamalot. The second is an obscure, but surreal recording that fittingly, you can only order on the Internet; you know the sort. Or do you? I speak, after all, of The Rap Canterbury Tales. Its inclusion in one of my classes today made that particular course (English 300, “Social and Cultural History of the English Language”) all the more fun in a strange, delightful way. It is, after all, the same course where a recommended reading for an upcoming paper is Going Nucular, a book by Geoff Nunberg of Language Log fame.

If The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was at its core a tribute to Jack Kirby, then in The Final Solution, Chabon pays his respects to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Set in 1944 wartime England, it follows an eighty-nine-year-old former sleuth that has retired into beekeeping as his powers of deduction are enlisted for one last case involving a mute Jewish refugee boy from Nazi Germany and his parrot, Bruno. The protagonist is only ever identified metonymically as “the old man,” but he is clearly implied to be Sherlock Holmes in his twilight years. In this respect the premise is similar to Unforgiven, where Clint Eastwood’s William Munny is an obvious throwback to the Man With No Name he played in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, only here in Chabon’s book, the decay explored is intellectual rather than moral.

The mystery itself, on the plot-summary surface, is fairly standard, and befits the complexity of a short story. The twists lie not in the deductive process of revelation, but in the solution at which we finally arrive. Where Chabon excels, as he always does, is in his total mastery of the language.

Today’s literary environment exhibits a widening division between serious art literature that you read for the majesty of the words, and non-serious escapist literature that you read for fun regardless of how it’s written. Michael Chabon bridges the chasm like nobody else (as if that purpose, the celebration of escapism, were not already the explicit theme of Kavalier & Clay). For those who care about good writing, you can bathe in his words and yet derive a sense of dream fulfilment from his romantic fantasy backdrops. For those who dabble in comic books, Baker Street investigations or (in the case of Summerland) a union of Norse mythology, Native American folklore and sandlot baseball, you have the rare privilege of lauding the storyteller not just for the story, but also for the telling.

In The Final Solution, this is very much the case. It’s a simple, perhaps even unremarkable Sherlock Holmes story to begin with, but it’s the telling that makes it all worthwhile. If we recognize that Chabon has already mounted the summit of the fun, artsy novel, here he conquers the fun, artsy novella. He does some remarkable things with his prose; an exquisitely detailed scene of the old man working the hives, his first sight of a war-torn London, a climactic chapter written entirely from the perspective of a parrot – a dazzling feat of animal personification, even by the high standards of someone who has read William Horwood’s Duncton Wood.

But that’s already saying too much. This holiday season, give the gift of a good book.

When the dramatic impact I speak of is possessed of a physicality like the flurry of Wong Fei-Hung’s legendary No-Shadow Kick, you have Yuen Wo-Ping to thank for that. As every martial arts aficionado knows, Yuen is possibly the greatest fight choreographer in cinematic history. Over the past few years he has finally gotten more attention in North America, thanks to his work in The Matrix and Kill Bill as well as the overwhelming success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at the domestic box office. Well, it looks like he’s about to make his English-language directorial debut in the Disney-financed Snow and the Seven, which is reportedly an iteration of Snow White featuring seven Shaolin monks and set in late-nineteenth-century China, a setting that immediately brings the braided hairstyles of the period to mind.

Unfortunately, whenever the best in Asian film come do a stateside project, studio pressures and fundamental misunderstandings of how Hong Kong cinema works the way it does impede their movies from ever being nearly as good as one would expect. Once Upon A Time In China director Tsui Hark has since been damned (or rather, van Dammed) to B-movie hell; Jackie Chan’s career has been limited to buddy-cop culture-clashes and inexplicably, Passepartout; and someone should tell Revolution Studios that Jet Li and DMX aren’t exactly Freddy and Ginger. There’s a lot of talent going to waste here. Hopefully Yuen Wo-Ping is given the directorial freedom he needs, and moreover, a good writer.

But if you read that story to which I linked, you’ll see that the “good writer” part has already been covered. They’ve signed none other than Michael Chabon, whom I never hesitate to identify as the best American novelist this generation. As such, there is plenty of reason to be optimistic about how this will turn out.

Speaking of Chabon, I never ended up ordering my Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #3 and #4. I’ll get on it, unless I spot it at a local retailer first.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have plenty of time to mull over all the facets of Spider-Man 2 in terms of its content, since the ever-shortening summer movie season is effectively over barring a surprise success on the part of I, Robot. Today, I will instead act like a Comic Book Guy poseur and talk about a few of the mice and men behind the movie.

First of all, Apple has a fantastic article featuring Nels Israelson, a professional one-sheet photographer (“poster boy”?) who designed the outstanding promotional material for the movie. A must-read for any photography buffs out there, it covers how he creates and shoots the superhero poses in a digital format. Naturally, he uses a Macintosh.

Those of you who have seen the film will remember the stunning opening credits sequence, which re-created memorable images from the first Spider-Man (such as its most iconic moment, the upside-down kiss) in dynamic comic-book panels. The art in those panels was by award-winning painter Alex Ross, who rose to fame in the mid-nineties with his distinct romantic-yet-realist tapestries of costumed superheroes in two all-star graphic novels. The first was the Marvel project Marvels, written by Kurt Busiek, which re-created select famous events in the Marvel universe in the eyes of an ordinary civilian, which was a pretty decent concept, but was better as an Alex Ross art book than it was a story, especially to this here reader who was only casually acquainted with such calamitous crises as Gwen Stacy being dropped off a bridge after having seen it happen to Mary-Jane Watson in the movie. (I still don’t know what all that hocus-pocus about the Sentinel robots in that X-Men chapter was about.) His second big hit was a project for DC Comics entitled Kingdom Come, which took your Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, Flash, Sandman and a few hundred others, aged them a few decades and made them fight each other. Again, I imagine it would be more fun for seasoned comics fans who actually recognize all the cameos, but the painting was great. All in all, though, while you will never find as detailed and lifelike portrayals of your favourite superheroes as those in the Alex Ross portfolio, I find his art to be much better suited for stand-alone epic imagery than sequential storytelling. In the opening credits to the Spider-Man sequel, however, it is a perfect fit.

Novelist Michael Chabon receives partial credit for the screenplay to Spider-Man 2, which was a significant improvement over Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp’s work on its predecessor. It is hard to discern the extent to which Chabon’s contribution remains in the final cut, but holistically speaking, the impact is noticeable.

Michael Chabon, as I continually inform anyone who will listen, is the guy who got me interested in comic books. (Note that by comic books I don’t mean comic strips – I was weaned on Peanuts from birth – but full-fledged comics, often of the superhero variety, sometimes not; graphic novels and their shorter, monthly kin.) The culprit is that Pulitzer-winner of his, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which is a tremendously enjoyable read and alongside J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, my favourite work of literature published in recent years. It is indeed a rarity to find a writer of his calibre who respects the mythology of comics the way he does. If you turn at the last chapter of Kill Bill, Vol. 2 and examine Bill’s monologue about Superman’s critique of the human condition, you can see just what an impact comics had on Quentin Tarantino, and how he longed to express it to a larger audience in a medium that was more firmly entrenched in the mainstream – in his case, film. With Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon pulls off an equivalent in print, weaving a six-hundred-page adventure full of that same reverence for superhero mythology, that same implicit desire to share it with everyone else.

It so happens that back in 1996, before he really exploded on the scene with the likes of Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon was one of many writers approached to tackle the then-in-development-hell X-Men film. His (rejected) proposal, which can be found on his website, is not just your run-of-the-mill screen story treatment; it begins with a full-blown treatise that delineates the appeal of the X-Men into four elements – I particularly like the last one: “Stuff exploding, wild technology, cool powers, fighting. I have this stuff too.” Now that X-Men has actually been made into a film by which I was generally unimpressed, but spawned a surprisingly exhilirating sequel, one looks back and imagines what might have been – but considering that he went on to give us Kavalier & Clay instead, who am I to complain? Happily, it all worked out in the end, and he got to pen a little bit of Marvel’s other A-list franchise, and with admirable results.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay itself spawned a byproduct in the form of a quarterly eighty-page comic paperback, The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist – a realization of the fictitious comic that our titular heroes Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay create in Chabon’s novel. Those of you with long memories or a predilection for digging around in the archives may recall that one of this weblog’s first posts was about that very announcement. After months of hunting around comic book retailers in Alberta in vain, I ordered the first two issues from Things From Another World a little while ago; they arrived at the end of May, but other circumstances have precluded me from reviewing them in full… until now.

To be honest, after the trials and tribulations of publication delays and the small problem of retailers not stocking the series, all the hype for Escapist #1 culminated in a bit of a letdown, perhaps because it was almost too conventional. The book is an anthology of six stories, with a few written segments of invented history interspersed throughout to continue the masquerade that the Escapist is or ever was a real comic book hero that has now been rediscovered by the “history” recounted in Kavalier & Clay. The first one, “The Passing of the Key”, is an origin story that faithfully visualizes Part I, Chapter 8 of the novel – one of the best parts of the original text, a breathtaking encapsulation of comic book panels in the power of prose written in the present tense, a passage that made one wish the comic was real. Well, now the comic is real, and this may sound harsher than I intend, but the book was better.

Make no mistake – the story as it unfolds in twenty pages of full colour is still a fun read – but the scene that stood as originally written in words and words alone made you believe that the art, the story, and the sheer thrill of escapism in that twenty pages were revolutionary. Perhaps this is a consequence of being desensitized to the present-day quality of comic book art now that every budding penciller has had ample time to idolize the visionary Jack Kirby, but the one thing the Escapist cannot escape here is the feeling of being a little ordinary. Part of it is that outside the context of the novel, the thematic significance of various elements are lost – Tom Mayflower’s crutch an expression of Sammy’s battle with polio, the entire concept of the character founded on Joe’s escape artistry and flight from the Nazis, the very idea of escapism as a human necessity.

See, this is what happens when the first two comic books you ever read are Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which are generally agreed to be the two greatest works of comic art of all time and all time yet to come (a claim that, in my brief experience with comics, remains to my knowledge entirely true): you set your standards too high.

Also in Escapist #1 are “Reckonings”, a very contemporary-style and almost dialogue-free retelling of Luna Moth’s own origin story; “Sequestered”, a lighthearted read where the Escapist fights for justice in the form of jury duty, and the best entry in the volume; “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been…”, a mediocre allegory of Joseph McCarthy that never quite connects; “The Escapegoat”, an interesting two-page foray into kids’ comics by way of animal personification; and “Prison Break”, a darker sort of story where the Escapist goes undercover in a maximum-security prison, which features the Saboteur, another character from the novel. The entire project is an enjoyable adaptation, but is unlikely to entice anyone who has not read Chabon’s magnum opus. Of course, in my humble opinion, anyone who has not read Chabon’s magnum opus should remedy that with the utmost immediacy.

The big payoff, however, is in Escapist #2. Part of the original concept of the Escapist comic anthologies was to parallel the evolution of the comic as depicted in Kavalier & Clay, and thus capture a stylistic history of comic books in general. While the first volume hints at this – “The Passing of the Key” has the angular simplicity of the 1930s, the cornball atmosphere in “Sequestered” is reminiscent of the ’60s Batman television series starring Adam West, and “The Escapegoat” is a conceptual children’s work – it is in Escapist #2 that we really see the art branch out into wildly divergent aesthetics, a postmodern collage that finally distinguishes this series from the other comics on the market. The quality of the stories also shows improvement, some of them tackling the motives of heroes and villains in the same abstract, conceptual fashion as the symbolic conflicts in the book.

This collection begins with a Luna Moth story, “The Mechanist!”, the highlight of which is the chaotic pencil work by Bill Sienkiewicz, partially sprayed with colours that run all over the place. The approach is fresh, unconventional, and welcome. But what follows it is the best story in either Escapist volume, “The Lady or the Tiger”, by Glen David Gold (who authored the immensely entertaining novel Carter Beats The Devil). With fine pencilling by Gene Colan underlining a dark and solemn colour palette, it is a moody superhero love story that touches on many of the same ideas of personal desires and responsibility that we see in the two Spider-Man films. The writing is characteristic of an established and respected author, whose one novel to date has very similar appeal to Chabon’s own work.

Then comes “Divine Wind”, a story done in Japanese manga, which is by itself fairly standard but a decent take on the cultural cross-pollination we have already seen with Japanese comics, and which is still quite relevant considering projects such as the Indian Spider-Man. “300 Fathoms Down”, in the style of the Modern Era, brings an aging Escapist out of retirement for a Cold War mission; it is the most conventional of the lot. Escapist #2 concludes with “Old Flame”, a Luna Moth story that does the most we have yet seen with her out-of-costume alter-ego, the librarian Judy Dark.

On the strength of the second volume, I will very likely order The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #3 when it is released next week. This one features the cover art that is a source of controversy and a key element in the novel, the Joe Kavalier drawing of the Escapist decking Adolf Hitler – only drawn by Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy. Hopefully it exhibits the same kind of creative daring that made Escapist #2 worthwhile; of all the styles of sequential art out there, many have yet to be explored.

Oh, right… Spider-Man 2. Next post, I promise.

Pulitzer-prize winning author Michael Chabon has signed on with Dark Horse Comics to publish Michael Chabon Presents…The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist. The quarterly comic anthology will feature characters created by Chabon in his critically acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Set primarily in the late ’30’-s and early ’40’-s at the birth of the comic book industry, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay tells the story of two young men who create a popular comic-book character known as “The Escapist.” The Dark Horse anthology will present tales of the Escapist and his cohorts set in the style of various comic book eras from the 40’s through today. Chabon will guide the direction of the series as well as contribute to writing original stories. Other artists and writers will be announced in coming months.

Read all about it here – there is a nice piece of promotional art there as well.

I am nothing even remotely close to a comic book aficionado, but this announcement has me wetting my pants with anticipation. Why? Well, for starters, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is arguably the best piece of contemporary literature I have ever read, for reasons that would fill several essays. Among the most vividly-written scenes in the piece are the respective origin stories of The Escapist and Luna Moth, comic book sequences inked with words alone; the panels leap off the page, and if they evoke one reaction, it’s exactly what Sammy Clay said upon the genesis of his creation: “I wish he were real.”

Suffice to say, an actual comic book of The Escapist is a dream come true – that is, if handled properly. Considering the extent of Chabon’s direct involvement, it is reasonable to expect it to live up to his grand vision.

And if you haven’t read Kavalier & Clay, then what are you waiting for? Go get it!