Snake agent

[jack]

Snake Agent by Liz Williams is about Inspector Chen, officer in Singapore Three police force, and Chinese Hell. Unsurprisingly, this is a marvellous, original world; I'm always a sucker for modern stories about people who visit afterlives, and the descriptions of Chen's life, and demon and human friends, are vivid.

Unfortunately, I really want it to read like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel, an academic tone with occasional dry wit that fits Chen's intellectual style and ominousness of hell, and am always disappointed when it adopts a more cartoony style, struggling to humorously juxtapose demons as treating evil things as virtuous, yet still working as characters. I'm not sure to what extent it disappoints me by not being the book I wanted it to be, and to what extent it's a wonderful idea that works in non-unified ways.

(Thanks muchly to despotliz for introducing it though.)

Come to think of it, did I mention before (humorously?) the possibility of making a standard template for reviews? Possibly a good way to do it would be to list the aspects which I later feel are engraved positively on my memory: afterwards that often seems like a good barometer for how I saw a book.

Consider for instance Startrek. I've almost no desire to watch any episodes again. And yet, I've a great fondness for all of the characters; in memories and films and tie-ins, they've acquired an epic quality possibly out of proportion to how they were originally shown. I can remember few episodes, and yet one could (and people do) go on writing stories about those characters forever.

In Snake Agent, I feel Chen, and Inari, and Zhu Irzh, and Ma and Tso will always stick with me, as will the world of night harbour, and the hell mirroring Singapore Three, and the lower levels hunted by Wu'ei of the court of hell. Many scenes are also quite effective. On the other hand, I don't particularly remember the eventual plot; any other similar excuse to have those characters in those settings would have worked as well for me. And as I say, in many ways it was wonderful, but something about the tone seemed to fall between two stools for me.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The second one works a lot better, largely through having much less actual Chen. I've not got hold of subsequent ones yet.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh, then I'll have to try it. If it's similar to the first one, it's probably well worth reading anyway. The first had an excerpt of the beginning of the second at the end, and it didn't grab me enough to make me need to try it, but I'll probably add to the list of things to borrow at some point.

less actual Chen.

Oh? I liked him; do you mean that helped?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

It helped in that to my mind the setting is odd enough that getting a lot more Zhu Irzh, to whom it is also odd, held it together better than getting so much Chen to whom it is familiar.

Mind you, I also find Zhu Irzh both more interesting and more sympathetic than Chen.