So I took Paul and the outlaws to the ballet for the first time in their lives last night, to see Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. Arguably not the best choice for a first ballet, but hey, you win some, you lose some. And to be fair, they all said they really liked it.
I am torn. It was moving. For much of today, I found it haunting. I couldn’t get it out of my head – not the good bits and not the bad bits.
Let’s start with the good bits. The promotional poster said it would change the way I saw ballet forever, and the more I think about that the more I realise that it’s true. In some ways this was a lot closer to, say, Zen Zen Zo than the State Opera House in Vienna. And in those ways is was damn good. The choreography was spectacular. The men – let’s admit to this up front – were beautiful. It did in no way suffer from the absence of swan maidens, and I suspect I might find it an interesting and in some ways difficult experience to watch a more traditional production again – though I plan to.
My biggest problem comes from the story-telling. The plot is far from tight. Superfulous elements already start in Act 1 with the silly ballet within a ballet, and the seedy club. Act 2, beautiful and full of hot swan-men though it is, dragged on just a touch too long. When I’m being distracted from the characters and the amazing dancing by looking at my watch, thinking “When does the story move on?” something’s wrong. Act 3 similarly rather overstated the point. The only act that was really and truly tight in terms of story-telling was the last one.
What’s worse is that the plot doesn’t make sense. In the original, a lot of the tragedy comes from the fact that there is a connection between Odette and Odile, and a driving force/villain in the form of Odile father the mage. In Matthew Bourne’s version there is no obvious connection between the Swan and the Stranger. The latter is just some guy who gate-crashes a party.
Even a more charitable interpretation of the Stranger being the Swan but rejecting the Prince in public as he is not comfortable with his sexuality is problematic. The first interpretation leaves us with the Prince falling for some random straight guy who happens to look like his lover (cliché anyone?), while the latter is an even bigger cliché of the gay guy in the closet beating up his boyfriend to show off how not-gay he is. All three of the gay couples currently on German soap operas started out that way (don’t ask). Add to this the Prince’s absent (dead?) father and domineering, distant and slightly slutty mother (you keeping count of the clichés?) and you end up with something that may have been striking and original in terms of plot in 1995 but really doesn’t quite cut it in 2010.
Having said that, the choreography and basic idea do remain striking and original, and my problems are of an implementational nature only. I do not regret having seen the production, and probably wouldn’t require much talking-into seeing it again.

Guy Gavriel Kay is the author of one of my three favourite books ever (Lions of Al-Rassan), and another seven of his books make up the rest of my top 10 most days.
He is a man who writes for and with the heart. So while the part of me that is my brain read Under Heaven and quite enjoyed pointing out minor things that were wrong with the book (I’ll come back to them), the part of me that is my heart found itself laughing and crying and, most importantly, deeply caring about the characters and what happened to them. And surely, that is what counts as success in a novel!
Under Heaven is set in a fictionalised 8th century (Tang Dynasty) China (though interestingly not in Kay’s “usual” universe under the two moons – this world only has one). After Last Light of the Sun and Ysabel, Under Heaven is also a return to the more familiar style and subject matter of sophisticated medieval courts and civilisations, the interplay of politics and art, the effect of world-shattering events on ordinary individuals.
When Shen Tai, second son of the great General Shen Gao, concludes the mourning period for his father, during which he has been burying the dead of battles past between his own native Kitai and their age-old enemy the Taguran Empire, a Kitan princess given as wife to the Taguran Emperor 20 years ago makes him a gift. It is a gift which catapults Tai from two years of solitude at the edge of civilisation straight into the intrigues and machinations of the dangerous, sophisticated imperial court at Xinan in what are… interesting times, much in the sense of the old Chinese curse.
Along the way Tai meets a poet and a Kanlin warrior sent to guard his life by a former lover, he encounters generals, prefects, princes, the Emperor’s powerful concubine and the Emperor himself. He makes friends and enemies and in the end does something which two years of solitude were not enough to help him do – he finds himself and what he wants.
A second plot thread is that of Tai’s sister Shen Li-Mei, elevated to Imperial Princess by the intrigues of their older brother Liu and sent away as bride to the heir to the kaghan of the Bogü people beyond the Long Wall, her life changed forever in ways that no one could have anticipated.
Here is what my brain says is wrong with this book:
The protagonist spends the entire first part (164 pages) trying to get laid. And yes, a lot of that is a metaphor for emerging from isolation and heading back towards civilisation, but my brain still sniggered on page 164.
Writing the Other: This is the first real excursion Kay makes into writing about cultures that are significantly different from our own, rather than precursors of our own. All his previous books have had, more or less, European medieval settings. With the shift to medieval Asia there is a very significant challenge of writing about a culture that is deeply alien. Some parts of the book are successful in this respect, but others are not. The passage which grates the most is the one where the family of our main character is shown explicitly to have morals closer to those of the modern reader than the rest of the culture they live in. In all fairness, in this I am comparing Kay to someone like Chinua Achebe who manages effortlessly to immerse us in an alien culture to the point where, when the white invaders come we take sides against them. I do, however, believe that Kay is a sufficiently accomplished writer that he should be able to do this, if he consciously tried.
Bechdel: This is partially related to the point above, but only partially. The book passes the Bechdel Test – barely, if you squint at it the right way, and if you, like me, are a huge Kay fan and really really want him to pass the Bechdel Test. Kay is very good at writing strong female characters, and a number of them will stay in my mind and heart forever: Jehanne, Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda, Lisseult, Ariane de Carenzu, Dianora, Alixana, and a few others. But I would have to go back and re-read those books to check whether they actually pass the Bechdel test, because I’m really not sure. Under Heaven is in a similar situation, in that we don’t lack for strong female characters – from the Kanlin Warrior protecting Tai, to his sister, his former lover and the Emperor’s concubine – but they hardly ever meet, and they almost never actually talk to each other. This is not something that can’t be fixed with a little conscious effort, which is why it grates quite so much when it happens, especially in a book I otherwise love.
Finally, potatoes: Yes, this is extremely minor, and mostly me being a pedant, but at one point Tai passes farms which grow potatoes. In China. In the 8th century. Now, I’ll admit that I had to check. My knowledge of food history is European-centric (I have possibly spent too much time thinking about what Europeans ate before they started trading with Asia and discovered America, and have reached the conclusion that it was a very sad time indeed), but as far as I knew potatoes hadn’t come to Europe until the Renaissance. A little bit of research reveals that potatoes weren’t introduced to China until the end of the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century.
So far about my brain. This is what my heart said:
My heart let my brain write sarcastic notes in the margin until about page 200. It was a slow start to the book, particularly those first 164 pages until Tai gets laid. It’s entirely possible that I didn’t find it terribly engaging at that point because we spent so much time looking at things from an exclusively male point of view. There is, of course, a point to the slow start. The protagonist has spent two years in almost complete isolation when the world begins catching up with him. The pace of the writing in this section reflects Tai’s state of mind, something that Kay is very good at doing.
After about page 200, I found the book a lot more engaging, and around the end of the second part, Under Heaven became almost impossible to put down. I had some late nights this week, because I wanted to know what happened. What is perhaps most surprising is the bond I developed with the main characters without noticing. When Tai, Spring Rain, Li-Mei and Wei Song make their respective decisions at the end, they are all described as having reached those conclusions a long time ago but not having fully realised it. This is a little bit how I felt when, reading certain passages in the last few chapters, I started to cry. I didn’t know I cared that much.
At this point, I would quite like to quote a couple of sentences from the final chapter – Kay is good with endings – but I am not allowed until the book is published so I shan’t. Overall though, I thoroughly enjoyed Under Heaven, though it’s not quite as sublime as Lions of Al-Rassan and The Sarantine Mosaic. I do suspect that, like the Mosaic, it will grow on me further on a second reading, too.
Under Heaven is published in hardback at the end of April, and my Amazon pre-order for a non-ARC copy still stands.

I got my grubby paws on an advance reading copy of this by virtue of, as Granny Gertrude put it, being a web whore. 😉 Thank you, Harper Voyager (@_TheVoyager_ on Twitter)!
For the Win is a young adult novel in true Doctorow style. Readers of Little Brother will be familiar with it: action-packed, gritty, polemical, sickening and empowering all at the same time.
For the Win is set in the not-too-distant future, all around the “real” world and in virtual reality. It features a set of diverse teenage protagonists from all sorts of different backgrounds: from the Jewish-American Wei-Dong Goldberg (smitten with the idea of China), to the Mumbai slum children Mala and Yasmin, the Chinese gold farmers Matthew and Lu, to the Indonesian union leader Big Sister Nor and her gang.
In a world where some of the largest economies are MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-PLaying Games – think World of Warcraft or Second Life next generation) run by multinational corporations like Coca Cola and Nintendo, playing for money – extracting “gold” and valuable items from the game to sell to lazy rich Western players – is big business. It’s the kind of big business conducted in sweatshops in China, India, Singapore, HK, KL, Russia, Africa and South America, run by corrupt and criminal “bosses” exploiting gaming kids. It’s also the kind of business that the corporations running the games really don’t like as it cuts into their bottom line – leaving the “gold farmers” very much between the frying pan and the fire.
(And if you think this stuff is made up, have a look at this hilarious way of advertising your farmed gold in WoW and Second Life’s US$64 million GDP in 2006. This is only the start of it.)
Into this toxic mix step two leaders: Big Sister Nor, the union organiser who has moved from real-world factories and unions into the online gaming space, and Jie/Jiandi, the Chinese underground reporter who re-establishes the links between the gold farmers and Chinese factory workers through her online radio show. As strikes break out in online space, they are joined by striking union workers in Chinese and Indian industry. We witness epic battles online and off, and as some are lost and some are won, at least a small part of the world is changed forever, with hope that others will follow soon.
The polemical passages in this book are more focused than those in Little Brother, which ranged from computer security to city planning. In For the Win, the focus is strictly economics. In some ways, this is very much a book of the credit crunch. Cory Doctorow does have one of the best explanations of credit default swaps (using game gold to add to the irony) that I have ever read. And again, where Little Brother was unashamedly left-wing in its politics, this book is refreshingly and unashamedly left-wing in its economics, unfashionable though left-wing economics has become since the end of the Cold War and especially since New Labour. It bites the bullet that I’ve been struggling with recently – namely that while sweatshops are horrible, for the people working in them they’re the best option available – and offers a way out. We don’t come out with a socialist utopia, but we come out, to quote an obscure 1980s rock band, a little better than before, and that’s a start.
Something else I like about this book is its spectacularly socialist take on diversity: the only difference that matters is class. We have characters from different nations, different races, different religious backgrounds, different genders and abilities – and they all work together. And (admittedly from my white middle-class European perspective), Cory Doctorow does a damn good job of writing the Other. One of the most passionate passages in the book is Ashok addressing a group of traditional national trade unionists, explaining to them how the national borders they operate in work against them, how the only way to truly achieve something is to work across borders – a statement as true now as it was 160 years ago when Marx published the Communist Manifesto, and a goal a lot more achievable now than then.
And finally on the diversity note, does this book pass the Bechdel test? (Recap for non-feminists: Bechdel Test: 1. Does a movie/book/other work of fiction have more than one female character in it? 2. Do these female characters at any point in the plot meet and have a conversation? 3. Is that conversation about something other than a man?) For the Win blows the Bechdel test out of the water. We have pretty much a 50/50 gender split in main characters. The women in the book are at least as much part of the action as the men, and often more so. They are competent and passionate, they drive the plot forward, lead real world trade unions and gamespace armies, they talk to each other about politics and economics, justice, work, life. They are characters in their own right. It’s sad that 10 years into the 21st century this should be a notable thing, but barely half the books I read last year came even close to passing Bechdel, and this book is completely in a league of its own. Thank you Cory Doctorow!