Re: Space Opry

On May 31, 10:26 pm, wdst...@xxxxxxxxx (William December Starr) wrote:
In article <1180624261.554109.23...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Richard R. Hershberger" <rrhe...@xxxxxxxx> said:

[ re Brust's TO REIGN IN HELL ]

In fairness, he was re-interpreting an existing story, telling it
not as a black-and-white story of good guys and bad guys, but as a
series of mostly well-intentioned beings having a failure to
communicate, leading to whackiness. It's not so much that the
failure to communicate is a cheap devise to move the plot along as
it is the entire point of the re-telling.

Which sort of leads one to ask whether the retelling was needed.


I've been thinking about this the past few days, because I have such a
different reaction. I think I have figured it out. I grew up (and
still am) churched. There is a long tradition of taking various
religious stories and reinterpreting them using contemporary literary
forms. Milton's Paradise Lost is a good example of this. This
tradition continues today, such as The Last Temptation of Christ--
either the book or the movie.

I take To Reign in Hell as fitting right into this tradition. Brust
took the idea of replacing malice with a failure to communicate, and
applied it to the archetypal story of malice. A few centuries ago
this would have been done as an epic poem. It being the 20th century,
Brust did it as a novel.

I can see how if you approach it from the expectations of a modern
novel alone, the reaction would be different. A reliance upon
miscommunication is often the sign of lazy plotting. I don't think it
is the case here, but if one is not interested in the book as a
reinterpretation of an old story, I suppose the miscommunication would
have the same effect as if it were simple sloppiness.

Richard R. Hershberger

.

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