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euzie's review against another edition
1.0
The first half is OK, but incredibly racist (of course someone from Kazakhstan would rape some kids what else would they do?)(first chapter - not really a spoiler), - I would be interested to see the response if the character was a US general who committed these crimes. i doubt it would have the praise it seems to get.
But when it switches narrator it just didn't work. The author tries to hard to have two distinct voices and what you have is
person 1 - doesn't really use adjectives
person 2 - uses 50 adjectives a sentence.
But when it switches narrator it just didn't work. The author tries to hard to have two distinct voices and what you have is
person 1 - doesn't really use adjectives
person 2 - uses 50 adjectives a sentence.
arf88's review against another edition
3.0
This is a hard book to rate and review for me because I honestly couldn't tell you if I liked it or not.
From a technical standpoint, it's very well written - probably some of the best sci-fi I've ever read. However, from a plot standpoint, you need to take your brain out and not think about it too hard because otherwise you'll drive yourself mad.
As for the characters... I don't know. I don't think the author did a good enough job in making me understand why
So yeah, well written, but both the plot and the character's actions require you don't think too hard.
From a technical standpoint, it's very well written - probably some of the best sci-fi I've ever read. However, from a plot standpoint, you need to take your brain out and not think about it too hard because otherwise you'll drive yourself mad.
As for the characters... I don't know. I don't think the author did a good enough job in making me understand why
Spoiler
the two POV characters (Franklin Bond and Hunt Morgan) do what they do for Arslan. The idea of a child falling in love with his rapist is an interesting one, but I don't feel that Engh knew herself why a victim would feel that way, and so struggled to tell the story from Hunt Morgan's POV. And towards the end when Franklin Bond and the rest of the town helped and accepted Arsland I was majorly let down. WHY do they let him live in peace? A man who raped and murdered and destroyed their lives? Yes it works out for them when Arslan helps protect the women of the town from gang rape, but one of the first things he did in the book was rape their children in public. And you're telling me not one person decided to kill him when they had the chance? As if.So yeah, well written, but both the plot and the character's actions require you don't think too hard.
mohsints's review against another edition
3.0
Deeply disturbing and gripping, Arslan is one of those novels that manages to cross genre boundaries with fluidity. It's not quite dystopian, nor is it "science-fiction"; rather, it's more Orwellian than anything else with characters who although sometimes implausible, are well sketched out.
metaphorosis's review against another edition
4.0
I read Arslan the first time when I was reasonably young. I was shocked and disturbed and enthralled. The implausible back story aside, the book is about the strange charisma of a brutal and fanatic tyrant and his effect on a small American town.
I found the book less effective this time through. The beginning was just as powerful, even knowing what was coming. But the latter half of the novel was weaker than I remembered. The story is told (in two alternations) from the viewpoints of Franklin Bond, the school principal, and Hunt Morgan, a boy severely affected by the arrival of Arslan and his soldiers. On this re-read, I found that while Bond's sections are still effective, Morgan's portion is not.
Engh tries to get into Hunt's head, and to show his turbulent ambivalence, but it's not as convincing as when I first read it. She gets at Hunt more effectively from Bond's limited viewpoint than she does from within Hunt's head. In part, that's because she never really gets very far into his head. Bond is far more introspective about his, Hunt's, and the town's situations than Hunt is about his own. It's a shame, because I think Hunt is a credible character. Engh never really gives us a chance to see him as he sees himself. Instead, we're given mostly the top level of his thoughts, and not the deeper dive that seems called for.
The book also weakens toward its end. While I thought the plot itself was reasonable, the eventual resolution was less than I had hoped for. In large part, this is because of the role of Arslan's son. He's like a character actor offered a starring role, but only going through the motions. In the end, his role, while offering some nice literary balance, simply doesn't carry the weight that it needs to, leaving the book to trail off into a vague cloud of metaphor. It could be a nice counterpoint to the book's sharp beginning, but in fact it's just a disappointment.
Despite all that, I still think this is a great book. It's surprising and unusual, and it does make you think, which is always good. I downgraded it to a strong 4 stars, but in some ways I still think of it as a star book for its initial and memorable impact.
I found the book less effective this time through. The beginning was just as powerful, even knowing what was coming. But the latter half of the novel was weaker than I remembered. The story is told (in two alternations) from the viewpoints of Franklin Bond, the school principal, and Hunt Morgan, a boy severely affected by the arrival of Arslan and his soldiers. On this re-read, I found that while Bond's sections are still effective, Morgan's portion is not.
Engh tries to get into Hunt's head, and to show his turbulent ambivalence, but it's not as convincing as when I first read it. She gets at Hunt more effectively from Bond's limited viewpoint than she does from within Hunt's head. In part, that's because she never really gets very far into his head. Bond is far more introspective about his, Hunt's, and the town's situations than Hunt is about his own. It's a shame, because I think Hunt is a credible character. Engh never really gives us a chance to see him as he sees himself. Instead, we're given mostly the top level of his thoughts, and not the deeper dive that seems called for.
The book also weakens toward its end. While I thought the plot itself was reasonable, the eventual resolution was less than I had hoped for. In large part, this is because of the role of Arslan's son. He's like a character actor offered a starring role, but only going through the motions. In the end, his role, while offering some nice literary balance, simply doesn't carry the weight that it needs to, leaving the book to trail off into a vague cloud of metaphor. It could be a nice counterpoint to the book's sharp beginning, but in fact it's just a disappointment.
Despite all that, I still think this is a great book. It's surprising and unusual, and it does make you think, which is always good. I downgraded it to a strong 4 stars, but in some ways I still think of it as a star book for its initial and memorable impact.
kateofmind's review
4.0
Man, am I starting off the new year with a brain-bang! I came across M.J. Engh's Arslan via a Google Plus discussion of New Scientist's curated list of "Brilliant SF Books that Got Away".* Arslan was not one of them, but my friend and fellow Wyoming sci-fi aficionado Walter Hawn** suggested that it should have been, and he's yet to steer me wrong, has Walter.
And, well, he still hasn't!
Caveat lector, though: this book should maybe come with a trigger warning, because the first public act of the titular warlord of this tale (I'll get to him in a moment) is the rape of two schoolchildren in the full view of his army and at least one of the children's conquered parents. I would urge those of you who will find this hard to handle to just soldier through it, though, because avoiding or putting this book aside just because of this scene, which is over very quickly and is barely described -- a quick rip off of a band-aid -- would really be a shame, because this is an amazing, amazing, book. And it's vital to the plot, that rape, almost as much, say, as the one that really starts events moving in The Jewel in the Crown (though that one spawns not one but four novels, the famous Raj Quartet). For the act snowballs in unexpected ways.
Arslan himself is a modern day Tamerlane, a Turkic warlord who takes over the world with a single gunshot but then has to travel it, more or less constantly, to consolidate his control and put in motion his plan for the planet, of which conquering it is only step one. What is step two, you might ask? Well, it involves undoing the industrial revolution (the information revolution had not yet taken place when the novel was written in 1976) and bringing the entire human race back to its agrarian village roots. As for step three... no, no, it is neither a question mark nor profit.
The narrative unfolds through Arslan's extended visits to a small farming town in Illinois, and is related by two very different characters: the principle of the primary school Arslan seizes when he and his army first come to town, and one of the two children Arslan publicly rapes his first night in town. The former, Franklin Bond, a humorlessly old-fashioned midwestern hardass whom you can just tell was a church deacon, maybe the Rotary Club president, is the only person in town whose authority Arslan will recognize (we learn he's had ample experience with elected officials), who tells the first half of the story in a stern and angry voice as he describes high school girls rounded up to serve as courtesans, dissenters publicly shot, mechanized farm equipment and electronics and herbicides and pesticides confiscated and destroyed, with Arslan living as a permanent and unwecome guest in the principal's own home. The latter... ah, the latter.
"First the rape, then the seduction," the unrepentant pederast Arslan says, explaining his strategy for molding the 13-year-old Hunt Morgan into his number one companion. He keeps Hunt around as a bed companion, sure, but also presses the boy into service as his reader. Having always sensed that his education was less than adequate, Arslan wants to learn everything. But he doesn't want to read it himself, so Hunt spends most of every evening reading aloud from everything from Greek and Roman classics to engineering texts to Paradise Lost. Which is to say that, in the process, Hunt becomes as autodidactically awesome as Arslan himself, and discovers in his reading that he is changing Arslan as much as Arslan is changing him, which is, in the end, even more seductive than Arslan's campaign to overawe the boy with his power and charisma -- and let him bask in the sheer presence of the guy whose presence overwhelmed world leaders. Watching Hunt's transformation from a bitter and helpless victim into a devotee/henchman who comes to view as a rival the nine-year-old girl Arslan takes up when Hunt gets too old for him is weird and disturbing, but always utterly convincing, as is his narrative voice, a ravishing and very convincing rendering of an autodidact's thought processes and associations that is often surprising in its loveliness, even when it's put to the service of rhapsodizing Hunt's systematized brutalization.
Interestingly and effectively, the book does not reveal how Arslan conquered the world until this second half, after we've spent a good dozen chapters dealing with the fait accompli of his triumph. Franklin Bond, in rural Illinois, is too busy dealing with consequences to spare much thought for how this could possibly be; it is left to Hunt with his agonizingly complex mix of emotions toward the warlord to explain how all this came to pass -- and by that time, the reader is so invested in Franklin's results narrative, in all its ugly, nihilistic glory, that Hunt's cause narrative of Arslan remaking the human world is utterly plausible. "I saw how Arslan with his square-nailed fingers worked at it, stretching and cutting and piecing and smoothing, so that someday, the scraps discarded, the web should fit neatly over every painted continent."
If I'm making this sound like a difficult book to take, well, good. And I'm not even giving away the whole disturbing enchilada. A lot of dystopian fiction is really pleasure-reading escapism; as I've talked about elsewhere, we read that kind of stuff to enjoy vicariously the idea of ourselves as survivors, as plucky rebels, as the lucky few. Arslan is not that kind of book. While its premise sounds a bit preposterous (though, I would argue, less so now than when it was written), it will convince you of its possibility, and then convince you of its inevitability. It might destroy your hope.
But all that, all that is evidence of a job very, very well done. And Engh didn't have to resort to sentence fragment gimmickry to do it either. Cormac McCarthy, I'm looking at you.
*I'm pretty sure I'm going to read all of these this year, or at least all of them that are available as ebooks, because they all sound amazevaries, you guys.
**Who also takes a mean eyeabetes-inducing photograph.
***Curiously, that appalling first rape scene features Arslan taking a girl first and then a boy, but the girl completely disappears from the story. I'm not sure what point Engh was making thereby.
And, well, he still hasn't!
Caveat lector, though: this book should maybe come with a trigger warning, because the first public act of the titular warlord of this tale (I'll get to him in a moment) is the rape of two schoolchildren in the full view of his army and at least one of the children's conquered parents. I would urge those of you who will find this hard to handle to just soldier through it, though, because avoiding or putting this book aside just because of this scene, which is over very quickly and is barely described -- a quick rip off of a band-aid -- would really be a shame, because this is an amazing, amazing, book. And it's vital to the plot, that rape, almost as much, say, as the one that really starts events moving in The Jewel in the Crown (though that one spawns not one but four novels, the famous Raj Quartet). For the act snowballs in unexpected ways.
Arslan himself is a modern day Tamerlane, a Turkic warlord who takes over the world with a single gunshot but then has to travel it, more or less constantly, to consolidate his control and put in motion his plan for the planet, of which conquering it is only step one. What is step two, you might ask? Well, it involves undoing the industrial revolution (the information revolution had not yet taken place when the novel was written in 1976) and bringing the entire human race back to its agrarian village roots. As for step three... no, no, it is neither a question mark nor profit.
The narrative unfolds through Arslan's extended visits to a small farming town in Illinois, and is related by two very different characters: the principle of the primary school Arslan seizes when he and his army first come to town, and one of the two children Arslan publicly rapes his first night in town. The former, Franklin Bond, a humorlessly old-fashioned midwestern hardass whom you can just tell was a church deacon, maybe the Rotary Club president, is the only person in town whose authority Arslan will recognize (we learn he's had ample experience with elected officials), who tells the first half of the story in a stern and angry voice as he describes high school girls rounded up to serve as courtesans, dissenters publicly shot, mechanized farm equipment and electronics and herbicides and pesticides confiscated and destroyed, with Arslan living as a permanent and unwecome guest in the principal's own home. The latter... ah, the latter.
"First the rape, then the seduction," the unrepentant pederast Arslan says, explaining his strategy for molding the 13-year-old Hunt Morgan into his number one companion. He keeps Hunt around as a bed companion, sure, but also presses the boy into service as his reader. Having always sensed that his education was less than adequate, Arslan wants to learn everything. But he doesn't want to read it himself, so Hunt spends most of every evening reading aloud from everything from Greek and Roman classics to engineering texts to Paradise Lost. Which is to say that, in the process, Hunt becomes as autodidactically awesome as Arslan himself, and discovers in his reading that he is changing Arslan as much as Arslan is changing him, which is, in the end, even more seductive than Arslan's campaign to overawe the boy with his power and charisma -- and let him bask in the sheer presence of the guy whose presence overwhelmed world leaders. Watching Hunt's transformation from a bitter and helpless victim into a devotee/henchman who comes to view as a rival the nine-year-old girl Arslan takes up when Hunt gets too old for him is weird and disturbing, but always utterly convincing, as is his narrative voice, a ravishing and very convincing rendering of an autodidact's thought processes and associations that is often surprising in its loveliness, even when it's put to the service of rhapsodizing Hunt's systematized brutalization.
Interestingly and effectively, the book does not reveal how Arslan conquered the world until this second half, after we've spent a good dozen chapters dealing with the fait accompli of his triumph. Franklin Bond, in rural Illinois, is too busy dealing with consequences to spare much thought for how this could possibly be; it is left to Hunt with his agonizingly complex mix of emotions toward the warlord to explain how all this came to pass -- and by that time, the reader is so invested in Franklin's results narrative, in all its ugly, nihilistic glory, that Hunt's cause narrative of Arslan remaking the human world is utterly plausible. "I saw how Arslan with his square-nailed fingers worked at it, stretching and cutting and piecing and smoothing, so that someday, the scraps discarded, the web should fit neatly over every painted continent."
If I'm making this sound like a difficult book to take, well, good. And I'm not even giving away the whole disturbing enchilada. A lot of dystopian fiction is really pleasure-reading escapism; as I've talked about elsewhere, we read that kind of stuff to enjoy vicariously the idea of ourselves as survivors, as plucky rebels, as the lucky few. Arslan is not that kind of book. While its premise sounds a bit preposterous (though, I would argue, less so now than when it was written), it will convince you of its possibility, and then convince you of its inevitability. It might destroy your hope.
But all that, all that is evidence of a job very, very well done. And Engh didn't have to resort to sentence fragment gimmickry to do it either. Cormac McCarthy, I'm looking at you.
*I'm pretty sure I'm going to read all of these this year, or at least all of them that are available as ebooks, because they all sound amazevaries, you guys.
**Who also takes a mean eyeabetes-inducing photograph.
***Curiously, that appalling first rape scene features Arslan taking a girl first and then a boy, but the girl completely disappears from the story. I'm not sure what point Engh was making thereby.
5wamp_creature's review
4.0
first, a preteen girl and boy are sodomized in front of the cowering townspeople. Goes downhill after that. Disturbing, depressing and without redemption. Unbelievable, sad and beautifully written. Some bombs of Christianity are dropped early on, but thankfully, turn out to be duds. What does the reader do when main character #2 is raped as a child by a warlord, then made to be the warlord's sex slave and adopted son? Everything the opposite of this story is good. Obviously, an allegory of the Old Testament of the bible.
morporum's review
5.0
What can I say? It opens with the brutal rape of two children, and ends with the probable extinction of the human race, and somewhere along the way you forget to hate the man responsible for these and many other crimes. At once a skillful riff on Marlowe's Tamerlane and a meditation on human cruelty and grace, Mary Jane Engh reminds us that those two attributes can be contained in the same human. A dark, ugly, beautiful book.