Installment 229, in which young Thomasina gets all in a tizzy about serialised novels and receives her comeuppance

All of my anachronistic tendencies are running around in their little highnecked blouses and lace-up boots with sheer delight at the news that Penguin is releasing a novel in serial form. G.W. (Gordon) Dahlquist’s Glass Books of the Dream Eaters is going to be turned out in ten paperback installments, one each week, prior to publication of the full novel in January.

The serialised format of this project, hearkening back to the days when Dickens’ Great Expectations outsold daily newspapers, is also mirrored in the project’s form and content. The volumes are bound and the covers designed to resemble Victorian serials, while the story itself, according to reviews in the U.S. where the full book has already been released, is a dark blend of science fiction, thriller, fantasy, and gothic mystery.

The serials’ home is a kind of parallel-universe but unnamed Victorian London, in which our three heroes, Miss Temple, a pretty and upright Victorian young woman, Dr. Svenson, a foreign physician enlisted to be chaperone to the Prince, and Cardinal Chang, an adequately Dickensian lower-class crook hired to kill a man, set out to solve their independent mysteries. The answers are somehow bound up in the three villains (titles leant them upfront by Penguin’s website, lest there be any confusion), the Contessa Laquer-Sforza, the Comte d’Okancz, and Francis Xonck. And, also no doubt, in the Glass Books and the Dream Eaters.

Reviews have been mixed: the Washington Post dismissed it as “hundreds of pages of ornament piled on a rickety piece of storytelling,” but the Cleveland Plain Dealer hailed it as “flat-out fun, engaging and funny as any tale of mystery and imagination I can recall,” saying also that “the dialogue is wry, the descriptions clever and the complicated plot advances as smoothly as a patrician’s pocket watch. …At more than 700 pages, this one ends too quickly.” The Kansas City Star weighed in the middle, praising Dahlquist for creating “a literary character in Miss Temple,” and assessing the book as having “a clever conceit with a foundation of literature as fantasy, though it has its excesses and derivations.” All other things aside, I find charges of verbosity in a serial to be rather beside the point: Dickens, for example, is not exactly concise. For which I love him, being a humble heir to prolixity myself (cf. size of current post).

But here the similarities to Victorian serials (if spiced up with a bit of science fiction and fantasy) end. The serials are not available in stores; you can only purchase a subscription online, with a limited edition of 5,000 copies. The entire series sells for £25, roughly £8 more than the complete edition to be published early next year, and in the U.S., only the full novel is purchasable.

If this is slightly dissapointing, confusion follows. Apparently, Penguin is using the book to “lure readers to their fledgling online site,” (according to Reuters) a goal that many publishers around the globe are trying to acheive in order to eliminate the middleman.coms like Amazon and encourage readers to buy directly from the publishers.

“Publishing is routinely behind in terms of using the Internet,” explained Amelia Fairney, publicity director for Penguin imprint Viking. “We have to start using it the same way the music and film industries have. We’re just moving with the times really.” An admirable goal, certainly, but it seems counter-intuitive to promote a website with a serialised novel. Would the music industry, as indicated by Fairney, promote their website with the release of wax cylinder recordings? Bookhugger that I am, I would never suggest that books are an analogously antiquated medium, but with the information flow tendencies of our society, promoting the serials via the website would make a lot more sense.

And furthermore, the Glass Books website does really seem in the business of promoting the books rather than drawing readers into an online community, as was originally promised. The Reuters article: “Penguin is hoping fans will discuss the book online after reading each installment and delve into the elaborate mythology surrounding the characters in a devoted online space, www.glassbooks.co.uk.” Both elaborate mythology and delving readers appear to be absent. Perhaps the forum for a blogging community has not yet been set up, as the book will not be sent out to its subscribers until next month, but until then, it does beg the question: who is promoting whom?

Embarking on an attempt to solve my own mystery, I discovered that (oddly enough) the U.S. site for the book has a a bit more interactive material—namely, an online game inventively dubbed the Glass Books of the Dream Eaters Online Adventure—but still no forums. And I join a fair amount of other internet readers annoyed that the author on the UK site (GW Dahlquist) is advertised as having “never entertained the idea of being a writer until a chance encounter with film-maker Stanley Kubrick,” while the author on the U.S. site (Gordon Dahlquist) is said to be a playwright and film-maker living in New York. The ever-amusing and ever-informative folks at Booksquare apparently also found somewhere the claim that GW Dahlquist was the “world’s sole remaining practitioner of mesmerism.” By the time I arrived at the website, as far as I could divine, this mention of mesmerism had joined its disappearing brethren.

Maybe both Mr. Dahlquists did, in fact, meet Mr. Kubrick, or maybe neither of them did, but I would at least expect them to keep the marketing fiction consistent. You wouldn’t let this kind of inconsistency go within a fiction story (not that it hasn’t happened before, cf. The Three Musketeers), so why is it acceptable precisely within the realm which is supposed to be non-fiction? Does parallel-universe GW Dahlquist come part and parcel with parallel-universe Victorian London? The idea occured to me briefly that maybe all of this confusion is a kind of carefully orchestrated meta-mystery to draw in people as completely befuddled as myself, but I hardly think anyone involved has demonstrated that they’re quite that clever.

Visit Jurgen Wolff’s blogpost on Penguin’s marketing campaign; Daphoenus - Girl of Destiny’s telling inclusion of the book in ‘Literary Thingies’ rather than ‘Book Recommendations’; and a favourable review at Suburban Peril.

Contrary to the notion that I only post about things so that I can have an excuse to quote Yeats, the next book up for review is Keith Donahue’s The Stolen Child, both because it’s a new and beautiful example of bridging the gap between children and adult literature (albeit not precisely in the way I previously discussed) and also I’ve been looking to inaugurate our new Science Fiction and Fantasy category.

That being said, however, I confess the novel drew my eye because it takes its title from one of Yeats’s most famous lyrics (also called “The Stolen Child”), in which a child is abducted by a band of faeries. In the poem, Yeats mingles joy with sadness, for although the child will “hear no more” the familiar sounds of his life, the description of the faeries’ lives sparkles with beauty and delight. Furthermore, the faeries’ choice to take the child and make him a changeling is one of compassion: “Come away, o human child,” they refrain, “For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

But Donohue’s debut novel is striking because it turns most notions of faeries on their pointy little ears. To wit, the opening line: “Don’t call me a fairy.” The band of changelings are called hobgoblins, but neither do they conform to the popular depictions of faeries or hobgoblins, which are traditionally naughty fairies (like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), or faeries who have been twisted to the Dark Side. They are, instead, battling against an age in which folk legends have lost hold on the mainstream consciousness, and are forced to live secret, desparate lives on the invisible peripheries.

The story begins in the late 1940s, when the seven-year-old Henry Day ran away from home and hid himself in the hollow of a tree. He is discovered by the hobgoblin band, who are also, in this novel’s universe, by definition changeling children once abducted from their homes. They retain the appearance of a child for hundreds of years, growing wiser and more bitter beneath their youthful skin, and can only return to the normal aging process by taking the place of another stolen child. The eldest of the hobgoblins is transformed by appearance into Henry Day, while the former Henry Day is renamed Aniday and takes his place amongst the changelings.

The tragedies of these two chief characters unfold in alternating, parallel chapters that span three decades. Aniday’s existence is both marked by wistfulness at being separated from the world he knew before and held back from the self-actualisation of growing to adulthood, and the hardship of the hobgoblin’s gritty subsistence. They must steal their clothes, live on plants, frogs, and insects, but above all remain hidden from humans. “If they catch you, they will think you a devil and lock you away,” a leader named Igel warns the group’s newest member. “Or worse, they will test to see if they are right by throwing you in a fire.” Meanwhile, Henry wrestles with clouded memories of his life several centuries ago, barely recalling a German piano teacher and the prodigy he had before the latter was abducted. Henry must assimilate himself into modern society, or become the object of suspicion; when he cannot hide his affinity and extraordinary talent for playing the piano, one the previous Henry never displayed, his father becomes suspicious indeed.

The novel is remarkable, however, because the changelings operate as a synecdoche for the story: the book itself is adult literature swaddled inside the husk of children’s myth. Though the topic is that of sprites, the themes are those of lost innocence and search for identity, of modern society’s subjugation of the magic of childhood itself. Comparisons to giants of children’s literature, such as J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and adult-children’s literature, such as J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, are well deserved; however, the book lacks the closure (I think I smell a sequel) that often makes these cross-genre adult/children’s books so satisfying, and is not appropriate for children so much as children stuck inside adults.

Read a review at The Guardian; read a very nice blog post by Ernesto Burden.