I've got two more quickies to share. Again, both are deserving more than I'm going write today but I'm fizzling out a little with these last books of the year.
When I started reading Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I was a little surprised by how much I was enjoying it, which is not to say I was expecting something poorly done, but I don't read much science fiction so tend to think it's not really my thing. That said, I think it became the victim of pre-holiday stress. The first half of the book was a pleasure, but the last half was a bit of a slog (and note, it is a fairly short book). It became hard to concentrate on Earth ca. 2021 when Christmas 2010 was bearing down and last minute holiday details had to be attended to, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt. Somehow the story all of a sudden felt slightly thin and the message a little too forceful. I'm not sure if it was the writing style or the way the characters were developed, but I lost the thread halfway through. I'm usually good about setting aside books that just aren't quite working, and this is a lesson in not pushing something that feels like its being forced (but I was so close to finishing...).
I have this idea that science fiction is going to be edge of your seat, heart-stopping action but with a scientific twist to it. Dick's story is much more about ideas than heart-pounding action. Writing about androids amidst a sea of humans is just the right sort of vehicle where he can explore just what it means to be human. By 2021 the world is a ramshackle place, nearly uninhabitable thanks to the radioactive fallout after the last world war. It's not so much the weapons that killed everything but the dust that followed. First the birds fell from the sky and then slowly all living animals started becoming extinct. The Earth's populace is advised to emigrate to off-planet colonies or Mars. As an incentive they're given sophisticated robots, androids, to help serve their needs. But not everyone wants to leave, and there are those who have limited mental capacities who are not allowed to go. When the androids turn rogue and begin infiltrating Earth's remaining communities, the unspeakable is not only allowed but necessary. The androids must be hunted down and killed before they turn killer--in a society that now values human life so much that even an insect is revered.
Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter and it is his job to root out and kill "andys". The only way to tell the difference between an andy and a human is by administering an empathy test. The andys are sharp, but their hesitation in their empathic answers marks them as nonhuman. Deckard finds that in the process of killing these robots he is losing his own humanity. These androids are so lifelike and seemingly human, is it right to be killing them remorselessly? Every human now desires to have some sort of animal--a living creature. But there are too few to go around and those that are for sale are so expensive that "ersatz", fake/electric animals are manufactured, though they're not the same thing as real animals. Deckard has an electric sheep, but he covets a real animal, and ironically it is the money he receives through his bounty hunting that will enable him to buy one. Dick raises lots of questions, but doesn't really give you tidy answers and leaves it up to the reader to interpret. Maybe that was part of the problem--I had too many other things on my mind to contemplate the sorts of questions his book was raising. Although this felt like an all uphill sort of read, when I got there I wasn't sure what I thought. Still, I'm glad I read it though perhaps didn't get as much out of it as I could have. I'd like to try more of his work, and more science fiction in general, but I think I'll wait for the right moment.
I've decided that Patrick Leigh Fermor is a very formidable writer. What I think I like about him is he is unconsciously so. He is an extremely learned and erudite man and reading his works isn't always easy, though it is a pleasure to work my way through his writings. What comes through is his passion for whatever it is he is doing and writing about. He looks at all aspects of a subject and that's true as well for A Time to Keep Silence, a book about Europe's monasteries--keeping in mind the book was published in 1957. He initially visited a French monastery in order to find a quiet place to work and write, and this book grew out of descriptions he shared in letters with the woman who would become his wife. So the book is part travelogue, part history, part meditation but all eloquently descriptive. How he manages to pack so much into less than one hundred pages amazes me.
Leigh Fermor notes that his monastic sojourns are as an outsider looking in and not as one looking for a religious experience per se, though he was profoundly affected by his experiences. Both going in and coming out was a complete shock, so completely different were these religious and secular worlds. The book begins with his stay at The Abbey of St. Wandrille de Fontenelle, a French Benedictine monastery where he was welcomed to stay and write. He goes into great detail about its history and the work of the then present day monks.
After St. Wandrille, Solesmes proved to be similar in routine, but La Grande Trappe, a Cistercian Order, was something altogether different. I found this section the most fascinating as this order put a new spin on the idea of just what 'strict' means. Leigh Fermor had met an Englishman who had once spent a year as a Trappist monk, but gave up the life in favor of the Benedictines who allow more time for study and contemplation. Trappists take a vow of silence and Leigh Fermor had no interaction with them, so it was through his encounter with the Englishman that he learned so much about the order. Trappists get little sleep, do hard labor, eat very little and live extremely regimented lives. The idea being that they are suffering here and now for our sins. This amazes me and I wonder if there are still many Trappist monks, what their lives are like today and whether many enter their order.
In the last section Leigh Fermor touches briefly on the long abandoned rock monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey, which I knew nothing about. There are a number of them in the region and they contain frescoes and shrines, which are rare and important examples of Byzantine art. The churches/monasteries are strange protuberances that are cut out of the rocks in cone and honeycomb shapes. The cover illustration on the book depicts these monasteries. Very little is known about the monks, how they lived, where they came from or what happened to them, which of course now piques my own curiosity about them.
My only small quibble with A Time to Keep Silence were the untranslated words and phrases, and there is more than a smattering, which continually caught me up. I know no Latin and my French is practically nonexistent. There is the occasional helpful footnote, but rarely to translate foreign words or phrases. Perhaps when this was written readers were better versed in foreign languages and more esoteric references, but I admit he stumped me more than one. As I said, Leigh Fermor is formidable, but well worth the work of muddling through the harder parts. I plan on reading Between the Woods and the Water next year, which is the second instalment in his journey from Holland to Constantinople. PLF was another of my great finds this year!