Re-read review: Fragile Things, by Neil Gaiman
This collection is more diverse in tone than ‘Smoke and Mirrors’, still leaning toward the creepy but with more humorous tales and poems included.
My favorite story in this collection is ‘A Study in Emerald’, which seamlessly blends the Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft universes. In this version, the Great Old Ones have made themselves the rulers of humanity:
She was called Victoria because she had beaten us in battle, several hundred year before, and she was called Gloriana, because she was glorious, and she was called Queen, because the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name.”
But one of them was just mysteriously killed, his emerald ichor splashed across an abandoned room. The detective and his chronicler meet much in the same way as ‘A Study in Scarlet’:
“You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” that was what he said to me, and my mouth fell open and my eyes opened very wide. “Astonishing,” I said. “Not really,” said the stranger in the white lab coat who was to become my friend. “From the way you hold your arm I see you have been wounded, and in a particular way. You have a deep tan. You also have a military bearing…”
but the way the narrator was wounded is quite distinct! The main downside of this entry is that you have to know the original Sherlock Holmes stories quite well to understand the twist. So here are a few facts that will make it easier if you haven’t read them:
- The original Sherlock Holmes claims to be related to an artist named Vernet.
- Various people, including Watson and Holmes himself, comment periodically on how terrifying Holmes would be as a criminal.
- Professor Moriarty has a right-hand-man named Sebastian Moran, who is a crack shot.
I love a lot of the other stories as well. ‘Other People’ is an interesting vision of hell as a loop of self-examination. A goofier but quite enjoyable tale is ‘Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire’, which asks: “What is ‘fantasy writing’ and what is ‘serious literature’ if the world you live in is a gothic horror story?” In ‘The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch’, a visit to an odd sort of circus leads a very buttoned-up female “bio-geologist1” to follow her dreams in an unexpected way. ‘Instructions’ gathers together good advice for surviving a fairytale in poem format. ‘My life’ is a humorous litany of absurdly dramatic life events reeled off by a man who will just keep going as long as you buy him another drink. ‘Fifteen painted cards from a vampire tarot’ are stories of a paragraph or two each; I particularly liked ‘The Chariot’, in which vampires were created as astronauts with impeccable logic and “The homeworld wished the colonist well and sent them on their way. They removed all traces of their location from the ships’ computers first, however. To be on the safe side.” ‘Judgement’ really sums up why we are so enamored with vampire tales:
“It’s a way of talking about lust without talking about lust, he told them. It is a way of talking about sex, and fear of sex, and death, and fear of death, and what else is there to talk about?”
‘Feeders and Eaters’ isn’t a vampire story, but it has certain similarities and is good and creepy. ‘Goliath’ is set in the Matrix universe, in a timeline in which the machines are fighting aliens and one particular human is drawn in to help, re-living his life several ways in the process. ‘Sunbird’ is a story of an Epicurean club planning to eat a phoenix, and not really listening to the exact words spoken by the man who is guiding this endeavor.
1. I think Gaiman means she studies bio-GEOGRAPHY, as she’s interested in things like why Komodo dragons became huge while other island creatures became small. There is a field called “biogeology” but it is something quite different and not a lot of scientists label their work with that term. Love the saber-tooth cats, though!
On the downside, I feel more grossed out by ‘Keepsakes and Treasures’ every time I read it. While you initially hope the narrator is on some quest of revenge against the people who abused his mother and himself – and he is, for a while – he’s not even the sort of antihero that would imply. In fact, everyone in this story seems to be a victim, perpetrator, or enabler of sexual abuse. Sometimes all three. That’s part of what makes the story creepy, of course, but I would not blame anyone who wanted to skip it!
This book was published in 2006 and most of the stories are older, which may be why I didn’t think about certain accidental patterns in the way women are written on my earlier reads2. The female characters are often viewed through the eyes of a man who is trying and failing to understand them. This means it is hard for the reader not to them as cruel, dangerously seductive, or helpless just as the main character does. There’s even a re-telling of the Bluebeard story (‘The Hidden Chamber’) from Bluebeard’s perspective – If you are wise you’ll run into the night/Fluttering away into the cold/Wearing perhaps the laciest of shifts./The lane’s hard flints/will cut your feet all bloody as you run/so, if I wished, I could just follow you - which is certainly novel. But, unlike ‘Snow, glass, apples,’ (in ‘Smoke and Mirrors’) which makes us sympathize with the “wicked queen” and centers her conflict with Snow White, this takes a story in which a woman’s inquisitiveness saves her and makes it about the monster that is tempted to kill her! However, I think a lot of these stories are trying to comment on men’s obliviousness to women and their inner lives, just with mixed success. The most obvious case is ‘Talking to Girls at Parties,’ where the narrator is a teenage boy so used to thinking of girls as an alien species that he doesn’t notice that “It is not permitted; I can do nothing that might cause damage to property,” is not a normal response to “do you want to dance?” But many of the others you have to charitably “left read” to get that impression.
For instance, the main character in ‘Bitter Grounds’ is kind of terrible, or at least so numbed by the breakup he’s running from that he goes along with other people’s terrible ideas. He effectively steals someone’s identity to go to a conference to present a paper on the Haitian story of “coffee girls”. He starts a rumor that Zora Neale Hurston wrote ‘The Great Gatsby’ because he didn’t know who she OR Zelda Fitzgerald were; he goes along with a “colleague” who wants to pick up girls by lying about being record producers; he sleeps with another “colleague” even though she’s told him she has a wife; and ends up possibly getting zombified by a woman who says she’s a priestess of Santeria. See what I mean? There are a bunch of different ways to interpret that, especially since he seems grateful to be a zombie for real. Likewise, in ‘How do you think it feels?’ another jilted man locks away his heart, but in this case it hurts the woman in question. Yet, when it came to their affair, he was older and already married and should have been the responsible party. ‘Monarch of the Glen’ is a novella-length follow-up to ‘American Gods.’ It’s OK overall, playing off the story of Beowulf, as well as the concept of a hulder. I don’t love the latter – a female forest spirit with a cow tail who is crazy strong, but seems to have the choice to be lonely forever, or pretend to be human to love a man and be doomed to homesickness – but that is how the original myth goes. I just wish Gaiman had subverted it a bit more, as he did the Grendel vs. Beowulf conflict. In the series ‘Strange Little Girls’, some 1-2 paragraph stories trouble me: the ghost of a mother who didn’t run from her abusive husband (is it sympathetic or blaming?); the woman who is jilted by her lover and calls his wife to ask if they could send her underwear back, which feels good until you hit “One day she won’t love you, too. It will break your heart.”( Umm, yeah, if you’re an ass to her!); the one who doesn’t want to kiss anyone (which you might assume was asexual rep until it implies that she can’t feel anything).
However, I did like the last two sub-stories in ‘Strange Little Girls’ a lot. In ‘Raining Blood’ there are two mutually exclusive timelines – a woman either was or was not shot by the Gestapo in 1943 – or are there?:
“There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow. There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter’s wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.”
‘Real Men’ just says:
“Some of the girls were boys. The view changes from where you are standing. Words can wound, and wounds can heal. All of these things are true3.”
In ‘The Problem of Susan,’ Gaiman imagines the life of Susan Pevensie, the sibling the ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ wrote off for liking makeup and nice stockings. I like that idea, though the execution is a bit odd. ‘Inventing Aladdin’ is told from Sheherazade’s perspective, and is done well:
“She does not know where any tale waits before it’s told. (No more do I.)…She prays she’s bought another clutch of days. We save our lives in such unlikely ways.”
And, in ‘Harlequin Valentine,’ the woman the spirit of Harlequin pines after, thinking to make her his Columbine, turns the tables on him in a surprising but appropriate way (since Harlequin when not in love is a trickster). So I guess what I’m saying is NOT that I hate how Gaiman writes women in general, just that given the genre conventions and the biases that tend to come with being raised male, he can slip into that “women as inscrutable otherworldly beings” thing a little more often than I prefer.
2. I say “accidental,” because the way Gaiman writes women when they are the focus (eg. ‘Coraline’, ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’, etc.) is much better.
3. Neil Gaiman says “trans rights”!…as we might already guess from the ‘Sandman’ comics and ‘Good Omens’ (particularly his recent adaptation of the latter).
Overall recommendation: Absolutely worth picking up if you like Gaiman’s other work or creepy stories and fairytales in general. The excellent stories outweigh the few weaker ones.
