Active Voice

By Brandon Sanderson [LibraryThing — Amazon]

Aside from being an orphan raised in a string of foster homes, and aside from his unnerving tendency to break everything he touched, and aside from his ridiculous name, Alcatraz Smedry was a more-or-less normal kid. At least, until the inheritance his parents left him finally got delivered. It turned out to be a bag of sand, which was weird enough; weirder still, that bag of sand was immediately stolen by an evil librarian, and Alcatraz learned that, if he didn’t get his sand back, the consequences would be dire.

I hated this book. I wish this book were a person so I could wring its neck. It managed to make me angry on a personal level, to irritate me seven ways to Sunday, and to have entire elements completely ripped off from a series I like much better. I only finished this book so I could rant about it properly in this blog, and not throwing it across the room was an act of willpower. So let’s get started!

First off, I bought the book expecting a wacky adventure. The premise is that the world as we know it is all wrong, and that the conspiracy to keep us in the dark is run by a bunch of evil librarians, who control everything. Alcatraz learns about this when his grandfather, a hero in the war against the librarians, comes to help him rescue the sands. It purports to be a real autobiography, being released as fiction in the “Hushlands,” which is where we ignorant, conquered people live. Oh, and all the goodguys are named after prisons. (Alcatraz, Bastille, Sing Sing, Quentin, etc.) And also, the heroes use magic-ish sands to make magic-ish glasses that allow them to do many mysterious things, and so on.

So first I’ll get the big one—the one that made me really angry—out of the way. It was actually a series of things. First off, the introduction of Bastille, a 13-year-old knight who assists Alcatraz and his grandfather in their quest. She belongs to an order called the Crystins. Which, I thought, was interesting, because the word is very close to, well, Christian. But I didn’t pay attention to it. Then about halfway through the book, Alcatraz sees a map of the world, which has three extra continents out in the oceans. He demands to know how that’s possible, and the answer is, “Those other continents make sense, if you think about it. I mean, a planet that is seventy percent water? What would be the point of that much wasted space? I’d never have thought people would buy that lie, had I not studied Huslander cultures.”

Did you catch that? It startled me that I did. But it’s a vague attitude—the idea that the world doesn’t waste space, which must mean it was somehow planned. Okay, that’s a really minor thing I might be reading in to. (But also, there are things in those oceans! It isn’t wasted space! Won’t somebody think of the cephalopods? And, of course, there’s the fact that the ocean is part of an ecosystem, and without it, uh, you know…life wouldn’t exist. Gosh! Wasted space, that!)

But then came the part where Alcatraz wanders into a room full of miniature, talking dinosaurs with British accents. They’re going to be executed by the librarians, because, “Something about enlarging our bones, then putting them inside of rock formations, so they can be dug out by human archaeologists.”

Okay, excuse me, WHAT? We are talking about a series where there is real, true knowledge that only the heroes have, and they’re fighting to liberate the rest of us from a conspiracy of ignorance. Or let me be clearer: the heroes, with their Christian-esque allies and an attitude of consciously-planned Earth, are fighting against a group of people who keep the rest of us ignorant by convincing us of things like the fossil record, and thus….EVOLUTION.

I can not read that as anything other than creationism. And I do not like creationism. I’m all for religion and belief in God, but there is a huge gaping void between believing in God and denying evolution. I find dropping a creationist attitude into the book to be insidious, and it took the book from exceedingly annoying to actually angering me. Your mileage may vary.

As for why the book already irritated me, well, so many reasons. Let’s start with what I referenced as the elements taken from a series I liked better. I won’t tell you what they are yet, see if you can guess just from the set up of the book’s first few chapters: Alcatraz is an odd kid, living with a foster family that doesn’t like him much. Strange things tend to happen when he’s around, things that he can’t explain. Then, on his birthday, he gets a mysterious letter. He can’t quite make sense of it, but it’s definitely linked to his dead family and a world they belonged to, a world he doesn’t know anything about—at least, not until a large, boisterous man who knew him when he was a baby appears and takes him away, telling him all about the world and how he’s expected to be a huge part of it. In fact, he may well be the hero that secret world has been waiting for.

Did you catch that? No? Then look up at the cover image again. Brown hair, kind of messy… oh, and those REALLY THICK GLASSES. Now, the glasses are a plot point, but still. Could the book be trying any harder to yell, “I am a wacky adventure and if you liked Harry Potter, you will love me!”? Because, good lord. I know that HP was, itself, a very archetypal story and not exactly blazing ground or telling a particularly original tale. But the resemblance was so direct, I was kind of amazed it was published.

But what really, really annoyed me about the book was the narration. It’s a first-person book, so Alcatraz is telling the story. And Alcatraz will not shut up. The book is full of asides where he talks about nothing directly relating to the plot or action of the story; usually these are about books and writing. Which sounds interesting until you realize that it’s four to five paragraphs of this for every event that happens in the book. And I don’t mean event like big, dramatic plot point, I mean event as in, every little thing Alcatraz does. Like opening the door. Or getting in the car. Sometimes these asides are a couple pages long. It takes away any dramatic build and wrecks the pacing. The whole book is based around one event—getting the sands back—but it reads very much like the sort of thing which should kick off an adventure in a better-paced book. Instead, it’s the whole book, because the narration gets in the way of letting things happen.

Aside from which, the narration is also incredibly smug and self-satisfied. Most of the asides, rather than amusing, are about how truly wonderful and amazing of a book it is…which it isn’t. There are a lot of bits about how evil librarians would like you to read real literature, but real literature is boring and about dead dogs and dead mothers and is all stupid, and people should read good books (like his) instead:

Actually, my experience has been that people generally don’t recommend this kind of book at all. It is far too interesting. Perhaps you have had other kinds of books recommended to you. Perhaps, even, you have been given books by friends, parents, or teachers, then told that these books are the type you “have to read.” Those books are invariably described as “important” –which, in my experience, means that they’re boring. (Words like meaningful or thoughtful are other good clues.)

Right, because god forbid anyone read literary fiction, or enjoy being challenged or thoughtful. I am usually the first person to defend genre fiction from people who claim it isn’t worthwhile, but it turns out, I can’t stand the opposite, either. There is a place for all kinds of books and stories, and it isn’t anyone’s job to talk about how terrible the other kind are. Reading that passage (and, in fact, the rest of the book), I didn’t feel like a kindred spirit who enjoys good, non-tragic stories about magic and adventure, I felt annoyed and wanted to know where the hell Alcatraz/Sanderson got off trying to tell me what kinds of stories are objectively good or bad, and what was right or wrong to enjoy.

The even more irritating thing was that it read like someone might have, at some point, told Sanderson that he had a bad habit of talking too much for no reason and instead of taking the criticism to heart—or even just blowing it off—he worked hard at making fun of whomever had dared. Because you get passages like the following, lengthy bit of stupidity at the beginning of chapter 10:

Are you annoyed with me yet?

Good. I’ve worked very hard – perhaps I will explain why later – to frustrate you. One of the ways I do this is by leaving cliff-hangers at the ends of chapters. These sorts of things force you, the reader, to keep on plunging through my story.

This time, at least, I plan to make good on the cliff-hanger. The one at the end of the previous chapter is entirely different from the hook I used at the beginning of the book. You remember that one, don’t you? Just in case you’ve forgotten, I believe it said:

“So, there I was, tied to an altar made from outdated encyclopedias, about to get sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil Librarians.”

This sort of behavior – using hooks to start books – is inexcusable. In fact, when you read a sentence like the one at the beginning of a book, you should know not to continue reading. I have it on good authority that when an author gives a hook like this, he isn’t ever likely to explain why the poor hero is tied to an altar – and, if the explanation does come, it won’t arrive until the end of the story. You’ll have to sit through long, laborious essays, wandering narratives, and endless ponderings before you reach the small bit of story that you wanted to read in the first place.

Hooks and cliff-hangers belong only at the ends of chapters. That way, the reader moves on directly to the next page – where, thankfully, they can read more of the story without having to suffer some sort of mindless interruption.

Honestly, authors can be so self-indulgent.

Talk about self-indulgent. That whole passage adds nothing at all to the book. It interrupts what was, indeed, a decent cliffhanger at the end of the previous chapter. By the time I finished it, I was annoyed; not at the cliffhanger, but at the narration. It gets in its own way. It destroys the suspense by taking you out of the moment, out of the story as a whole. It reads as if someone told Sanderson, “You know, the narration can be kind of clever, but don’t you think you should tone it down?” and instead of doing that, he decided to hang a lamp on it, spending more of the book talking about the book than actually telling the story. And most of it is so very smug, so very disdainful of the idea that someone might not enjoy it, and so caught on how totally awesome and great it is, that it induces the need to strangle.

On top of all that, the book tries so desperately hard to be wacky that it’s merely annoyingly random. Like, for example, I really like some of the basic concepts, like that it’s a magic talent that causes Alcatraz to break everything he touches, but when you look at other people’s talents (being late! falling down! spouting gibberish!), plus things like talking dinosaurs and references to giant penguins and the repetition of the word “rutabaga” it reads as, “Look at me! I’m silly! Aren’t I wacky? Aren’t you entertained?! This is so fun and wacky!!!!!!!”

Which… No. Wackiness and randomness can be fun and hilarious and entertaining, but if you have to yell about how fun and wacky they are, you’re failing at it. But then, if you have to devote pages and pages and pages to talking about how awesome the literary techniques you’re using are instead of just using them well… Nope. “Show, don’t tell,” applies there. Show me you’re a good writer by using literary techniques; show me you’re funny by making me laugh.

This book failed to entertain and amuse me. It failed to engage me in its story. It made me actively dislike the protagonist, and failed to interest me even a little in any of the other characters. There were, at its core, a couple of decent ideas, but the writer seems to have gone out of his way to bury them under a giant pile of stupid. And that’s without the whole creationism thing I ranted about at the beginning of this review. But on the plus side… Uh… It was written in complete sentences?

But, hell. Okay, so you want to know about that hook at the beginning? It was never explained; presumably, the writer will get around to it somewhere in the sequel. Which I will not be reading, because a hook isn’t enough to make me ever want to go near this series—or the writer—again. This book is epic fail. It is the first book in Active Voice history to get zero cupcakes, because while I was going to give it half a cupcake because I did finish it, I am of the opinion that no one else should read it, ever.