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-- Craig E. Engler, Editor
Russell and Clute correspond
hat was a honey of a review and I am delighted that Mr. Clute enjoyed my novels, The Sparrow and Children of God. I particularly liked "a miracle of telling" and "imperial sweep," and plan to have both phrases tattooed on my arm. But there are two things in the review that I can't let go.
First, Mr. Clute says that I "never fail to write long." I am guilty as charged. I must report, however, that I reeled around the room laughing for five minutes when I realized that he makes that observation in a sentence that contains, by actual count, 80 words. All I can say is, happens to the best of us...
Second, Mr. Clute asserts that Catholic writers almost always "write long" and finds it significant therefore that I was "raised Catholic." In reality, my Catholic upbringing was spotty at best. It would be difficult to underestimate the impact of infant baptism and four years in a Catholic grammar school on my literary taste. The only thing I can remember reading from 1959 -1963 is Black Beauty. It was about a horse.
I'm afraid that writers like Tolstoy, T.E. Lawrence, and especially the Scottish historical novelist Dorothy Dunnett (nota bene: all non-Catholics who write long) have more to do with my style than anything that happened to me between the ages of nine and 12 at Sacred Heart School. I'm not sure that a test of the relationship between Catholicism and the average number of pages in an author's novels would hold up statistically. Dickens alone would skew the distribution something fierce.
Smiling demurely,
Mary Doria Russell
Mruss44121@aol.com
John Clute responds:
Dear Mary Doria Russell,
Glad you thought the gist of my astonishingly concise review of The Sparrow and Children of God hit at least part of the mark: that it did express some sense of how fine I thought the books were.
The problem with an 80-word sentence is that it's probably a bad sentence. The problem with some Catholic writers is what one might call a tropism towards echolocation: often (not in your books) the childhoods of (suddenly autobiographical) protagonists tend to be minutely recounted in order to position, awfully precisely, their high-cost deviations, in adult life, from compass readings inculcated by nuns, repressed Dads, lonely priests, etc. This sort of writing can, I think, be moving and apt; but it can seem very long in the end, and can slip too easily into dissonance management.
(In SF or fantasy, I'd adduce John Crowley's Love and Death as an extremely high-class example.)
And anthropologists, too, play delicate Heisenberg games with every nuance of the world they observe themselves detecting: so maybe you're doubly fated to want to know too well.
But I was, of course, making a vastly generalized point hyperbolically and should be taken with a small grain of salt. Slightly more seriously, I don't think writing long is necessarily the same as writing a long book. I think, for instance, that Children of God is written long at points; but that is inherently (like, for instance, War and Peace) a long book, and is almost as unputdownable as a book that cannot be read in a single day can be....
Best,
John
More from Mary Doria Russell:
Dear Mr. Clute,
I have it on good authority from a close friend that you are a person who can work a phrase like "complicit haeccity engendered by the instauration into Wrongness" into everyday speech and mean it. By contrast, I am a person whose dictionary doesn't have anything that comes close to a word like haeccity, although I am going to guess that it is a Latinism spelled wrong (see "close friend," above).
Since I am clearly outclassed in the vocabulary contest of literary life, the only honorable response left to me is to thank you very much for your kind words (most of which I understood) and to declare peace in our time. Looking forward to meeting you in 3-D someday, I am sincerely yours,
Mary Doria Russell
John Clute responds:
Dear Mary Doria Russell,
Only word I thought I made unduly obscure was echolocation, which I should have spelled echo-location, or maybe not. The fake (?) sentence of mine you quoted moved me deeply.
Haecceity (note the word has got even more spelling in it than you thought), which means more or less "the thingness of things," and which I think is pronounced "heck SEE ity," is, strangely enough, in English, a word which sounds like what it means: "Heck! See it! Teehee"...
I also think it sounds rather beautiful, just like the immemorially most beautiful word in the language: cellardoor. Which all you have to do with it is take out one O and you've got Elf heaven.
Best,
John
More from Mary Doria Russell:
I shall allow Mr. Clute to have the last word in this discussion, even if it is organon, esemplasy, apothegmatic or bombination.
Now Grinning Broadly,
Mary Doria Russell
Shakespeare lives on!
too enjoyed your review of the classic Forbidden Planet. I have a copy in letterbox (and a big enough TV screen) to really enjoy the grandeur of the piece. It always amazes me when I watch it to think when it was made. It really stands alone in the period.
I appreciated Mr. Gilmore's comments on your review and agree with his opinions on remakes of classics (compare the two Invasion of the Body Snatchers). He compares the plot of Forbidden Planet with the Star Trek episode "Requiem for Methuselah" and accuses the latter of being a rip-off. However, both are re-tellings of an even older classic--Shakespeare's "The Tempest."
This play tells of a shipwreck of "civilized" people who find themselves on a mysterious island (yep, Jules Verne liked the idea too!) where they find an eccentric scientist/magician, his sheltered daughter, a magical sprite--Ariel--to do his bidding (the part handled by Robbie), and even Caliban--an evil alter-ego (the beast from the Id). This is a classic story wherein the characters' interaction is a vehicle for examining "contemporary" society and the nature of personal ethics. Countless films have used the basic formula (and I think I even read somewhere that Shakespeare got the idea from an even older myth). If you get a chance to see a version on film (or better yet, on stage), don't pass it up! The Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) lists over a dozen versions--including Forbidden Planet!
Keith McGee
keith_i_mcgee@amoco.com
Resident Evil was good, but not first
must disagree with your assumption that Resident Evil started the "survival horror" genre. Alone in the Dark was out before Resident Evil, and in fact Resident Evil is in many ways just a copy of Alone in the Dark with better graphics. It is more accurate to say that Resident Evil has made the genre popular. I love both sets of games, but give credit where it's due.
Keith Bailey
LBailey421@aol.com
