Game Of Consequences

I know I said no more brain draining dark books...but I just finished this book and I need to work through how I feel about it, and this is usually the best way to do it.  The book is called Black Chalk by Christopher J. Yates and I got it 'cause Hubbin had heard about it and told me about it and it sounded interesting.  After finishing it I'm still not sure how I feel about it, so I apologize ahead of time for the potential lack of coherency that may ensue.  But first, as always SPOILERS AHEAD!

The book is written in two ways, a first person, diary style coupled with a traditional third person narrative telling the story.  The diary portions are set in the present, with the narrative telling us the past history...It makes sense I promise.  The bare bones of the story is that 6 people with varying degrees of friendship get together to play a complicated game of consequences overseen by a shadowy organization known as the Game Society.  We meet Chad, a shy American who is at Pitt University in Oxford on a scholarship. He befriends the outgoing Jolyon who seems to attract every person he meets.  Mark is the sleepy scientist, Jack is the jokester.  Emilia is the principled conservative who tries to fix everything.  Cassandra, known as Dee is the free spirit with a hint of macabre.  The six of them interact in different ways with each other, the dynamics causing most of the humaness of the story.  The game, which is the focal point of the story is never fully explained, but is a mix of cards, dice, chance and skill.  It is the consequences of losing this game that are of interest to us.  The premise is depending on how bad you lose you have to draw any number of tasks of varying degrees of difficulty and the loser must perform all of them with the intent of essentially embarrassing the performer of the task. The tasks are all thought up by the members of the group and are specific to each player of the game.  As the game progresses the tasks get harder and harder.  The point is to get people to quit the game and the winner gets a prize of 10,000 pounds, funded by the mysterious Game Society.  Each member must also put in 1,000 pounds of their own money as a deposit with each player getting it back as long as they quit before they are given a task.  If a player earns a task and refuses to perform it they forfeit the deposit.  The game is played, tasks are performed, simple and silly and first with worse and worse tasks being assigned.  As the friendships start to deteriorate and the impacts of the players life start to get worse and worse more people start to drop out.  We end up with Chad and Jolyon as the final two players.  The characters seemed to have switched personalities with Chad becoming braver and more outgoing, and Jolyon starting to succumb to his mental

disorder.  Jolyon wants to quit, but is informed by the Game Society that whoever loses will then have to continue to play another game of their choosing.  Neither player wants to have to deal with the horrors of another twisted game and decide to have the final round 13 years in the future.  The diary portions of the book deal with the present.  Here we see a hermit Jolyon who has resorted to the use of mnemonic devices just to survive.  For example he sets out 6 glasses of water above 3 plates in his hallway so that when he is blocked by them, he remembers to eat and drink water.  He has many of these types of devices, some making more sense then others.  The other thing he is doing is trying to "train" for the final round of the game.  He is assisted in this by the reappearance of Dee, who gives Jolyon some tidbits about the surviving former players of the game (Mark died in an unfortunate accident that involved Jolyon and is part of the reason for Jolyon's mental lapse).  As the reader we get the sense that some of Jolyon's mnemonic's are not exactly the way they should be, taking his well ordered life and making it a mess.  Chad shows up, looking pretty good and the game is played. Chad informs Jolyon that he has actually been in town for a while, and that he and Dee (who he is now married to) have been messing with Jolyon's stuff, adding one more layer to his madness.  Jolyon loses very badly, getting several consequences that he must perform.  Chad however only ends up with one consequence, on that he must do before Jolyon does his.  Jolyon tells Chad to go visit his parents as his consequence, something he vowed to never do.  This is the one thing Chad will not do and he disappears leaving Jolyon as the winner.

Obviously there is a lot more to this story then I can get in a simple synopsis, but at the end I feel like this is the gist of it.  I mentioned before I have mixed feelings about this book and I am trying to figure out why.  In some ways I really liked it.  After I got into it, it turned into a very page turning book.  I wanted to find out what the game was, who the Game Society was, what were everybody's deep dark secrets, all things that the book kept eluding to.  Unfortunately most of this stuff was never really given to us in the book.  The book was mostly about bits and pieces and stuff strung together to make a semblance of a story.  I am not being very coherent here, but I did warn you :-)  Um hmm.  So the appeal of this book is that some of the ideas and execution are very original and the writing kept me interested.  On the other hand, there was not actually a lot of story in this book.  There were lots of little moments, a TON of interactions between the various group members...but not a lot of forward motion on the story.   In fact by the time I was done with the book, I wasn't really clear on what the actual story was at all.  I wanted to know more about the actual game itself, which was supposed to be the center piece of the book.  There were a couple examples of consequences, mostly the ones that had an impact on the group, but I felt that we never got the full flavor of the game.  As far as the characters went they were ok.  I liked Dee the best as she seemed to have the most depth to her, but in general the characters felt like stock representations of a college group.  Which would have been fine if the interactions between the characters had been a bit more original.  I liked Jolyon's mnemonic system, it's something I have never seen before, but again I felt it would have had more of an impact if we had known the history of it.  Chad should have been a cooler character, but again his transformation from shy awkward dude, to super confident game player was never really believable.  Over all I liked the idea of the book and what it could have been better then the actual execution.  This book was written by a first time author, and I will be interested in reading any other books he writes to see if his writing can live up to his fantastic idea's with a little more experience.  I give it 6 out of 10 death poems.  Happy Reading Everybody!

College, Classics, and Quotes

In my perusing used book stores lately, I have been lucky to come across some older books that are much harder to find in the traditional book store.  One of these books was Tam Lin by Pamela Dean one of the Fairy Tale series edited by Terri Windling (whom I ADORE).  The story is based on the Scottish poem The Ballad of Tam Lin, which being one of my favorites mad this a very intriguing book.  What did I think of this ambitious work?  Well first, as always SPOILERS AHEAD!

Janet Carter is starting college at Blackstock College, a fictional school in Minnesota.  She has wanted to go there since she was young as her father is a professor there.  She meets her roommates, Molly, a fellow book lover and Biology major, and Tina, a more pedestrian type who is also a Biology major.  Janet herself is an English Major.  The book follows Janet through out all four years of her college career and focuses on her classes and her and her roommates relationship's with a group of beautiful, yet odd students.  The girls all end up in relationships with various members of the group and all endure various problems while in them.  A lot of the book is just about Janet's classes, her love of books, and her various strange interactions with various people on campus.  There is also an allusion to a ghost of a girl who discovered she was pregnant and killed herself, an act which was duplicated years later by a second student upon learning she herself was pregnant. We also see various professor's and advisers who have a weird sort of control over various staff members and students.  Eventually Janet breaks up with her distant, yet smart and funny boyfriend Nick and ends up with his much more human seeming friend Thomas and after a single night with him, despite precautions, ends up pregnant.  After much convelutedness we finally get the story of what is going on with this mysterious group.  The Faerie Queen and her cohorts have gotten bored with living in their realm and have come out, along with some of the humans who live with them, yet never age.  They have decided for some reason that this little Midwestern college is a good place to hang out.  We learn that almost every student the three girls have encountered is one of the ageless humans and that they have been around so long that some of them even knew Shakespeare!  The exception to all of this is Thomas.  Thomas is a normal human, who stole one of the Faerie Queens horses and became her tithe to Hell, something the faeries have to pay every seven years.  According to Thomas this has played out many times over the years, and the only way to be saved is to have a pregnant lover hold on to him as he changes forms.  Janet is at first incredulous, and then accepting as it actually explains several odd occurrences.  She agrees to keep the baby and saves Thomas in the traditional manner.  The story ends with the Faerie Queen stating that since their was no tithe, the next time they will take two.

This is one of those types of books that grows on you the more you think on it...or at least it did for me.  Originally I did not like it very much at all.  It is very convoluted, slow and the author comes across very pretentious with all of her babble about the classic literature.  She has a tendency for her characters to speak whole paragraphs to each other in obscure quotes from books that only a professor of classic literature, or somebody who is obsessed with them would ever be able to recognize.  This makes the story very difficult to follow on occasion.  The author for some reason felt the need to describe every building and layout of the campus multiple times, even ones that had nothing to do with the plot.  A lot of what the characters did and said was vague at best, and confusing at worst.  All of this leads to a long, slow read, that leaves the reader frustrated.  The other problem was I am very familiar with the story of Tam Lin, and I still could not figure out where the story was going, I can't imagine somebody not familiar with the ballad trying to follow the plot.  On the other hand, the story of Janet and her roommates and their college experience was fairly accurate, especially for the era (the early 1970's).  The uncertainty, the finding oneself, the exhausting course load, the trying to get along with all the various personality types, all very familiar to the college crowd.  In that sense it was a very simple, girl goes to college and survives the experience type of story.  When you put the two together, you get a story about a girl and her roommates and mysterious friends, (most of whom speak in forms and ways that would never happen in the real world) trying to survive college, with the occasional fae experience.  The action only really picks up near the end of the book, culminating in essentially the whole ballad being played out literally for us at the very end. I felt like this book would have been much better if it had been shorter and a bit more to the point. After all of that you may ask why I feel the book grows on the reader.  Well now that I have finished the book, and it has been several days, I still feel it is pretentious and slow and a bit confusing...but it also has a way of staying in your brain.  All the mentions of various books and the character obvious passion for them have me ready to quit work and just stay home and read Chaucer, Dante, Austen and of course Shakespeare.  The idea of the fae running around, living everyday life is always and intriguing idea and has me day dreaming about meeting up with my own personal otherworlder in various situations.  I'm not doing a very good job explaining what I mean, but...yeah...so overall this book was frustrating, but I am glad I read it.  I would recommend it to anybody who has a degree in classic literature, has a bit of patience, and understands that a person can like a book much more after they have put it down for a while.  I give it 6 out of 10 thundering steeds.

Have you ever liked a book better a couple days after you have finished it?  Is it possible to not really enjoy the reading of the book, but still enjoy it living in your head?  Is it possible for me to ever really get what I mean from my head to the page?