Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell · 8 August 2007
Crystal Rain is Tobias Buckell's first novel and also the first in a series of novels set in the same world. The second, Ragamuffin is already available, and the author is currently working on the third, Sly Mongoose.
I ended up liking this book far more by the end than I thought I would at the beginning (a pleasant change as the last handful of novels I've read have started out strong and finished less so).
One of the things that really tripped me up in the beginning was Buckell's inconsistent use of grammar. He has set his story in a planet colonized by people of Earth, and many of the people are descendents of the modern Caribbean cultures.
There are two major factions, the Aztecas (based on the Aztec culture) and the Nanagadans (everyone else). The Nanagadans are further divided into several villages, often grouped together by common ancestry. The capital city meanwhile, is a cosmopolitan melting-pot of all the cultures. Sounds fine, right? It is, and the world building that Buckell develops over the course of the novel really pans out.
The barrier to entry for me though was the language. After taking a linguistics course this Spring, language has been heavily on my mind. There are a few terms that Buckell consistently threw around that grated on me. The first was “accent.” An accent is a way of pronouncing the words. I say “tahmaytoe” and you say “tomahtoe.” It's the difference you hear when people are “pahking” the “caw” and saluting the “flague.”
A dialect is a different version of the language, one that's understandable by native speakers, but uses a slightly different grammatical structure. When Buckell said accent, most times he meant dialect. He didn't change the way the words sounded so much as he changed the way they were put together. This misnomer of terms wouldn't have bothered me much, except it was accompanied by Buckell voicing characters with an unsettling mix of standard and non-standard grammar.
I don't envy Buckell his task of trying to create a dialect. It's hard to write in English and use a consistently different grammar than the one you speak. Buckell does manage to capture the feeling that people are speaking a different dialect than the Standard English dialect, and he does highlight the power dialect of the government as drastically different from the village and bush dialects. There were moments in which I felt the dialogue flowed and I could hear the sound of the islands in the voices of the characters. There were also moments that made me stop in my tracks due to inconsistencies.
For example in one sentence the prepositional phrase is intact, so you'd read “coming down the mountain” and in another sentence the prepositional phrase has been truncated to “pull you up out the water” (instead of up out of the water). In the one sentence, the verb would be included, “They have no supplies with them.” In the next, it would be deleted “They moving light, moving quick.”
At this point you may be doubting that I liked the book. Don't. After about page 50, I abandoned my detail driven analysis of the language and just started enjoying the plot. It also helped that the story began to be narrated by the main character, John deBrun, the prime minister of the capital city (appropriately named Capitol City), Dihana and one of the Aztecas, Oaxyctl. These people all used a dialect similar to the standard dialect of English, and so the inconsistencies melted into the background.
Left to enjoy the plot, I found myself immersed in the story that had been set up during the first part of the book. The Aztecas have breached the Wicked High Mountains and centuries of successful defense to invade the Nanagadan territory. Driven by their gods, the Teotls, they have honed their warrior skills and the art of human sacrifice, and now they march on Capitol City to subdue it. A simple enough plot so far, and one that fares well under Buckell's decision to tell the story of the advancing army through a few key sets of eyes of those on the side being invaded.
Complicating the story is the character of John deBrun, a man who can't remember his past. John washed up on the shore of Brungstun almost three decades ago. He built a family there and there he searches for fragments of his missing memory.
I found the setting intriguing. The level of technology is a cross between that of the early Industrial Revolution period and of a future period we have yet to achieve. Semi-automatic weapons are readily available, yet electricity is not. This seeming contradiction in technological development is explained by the history of the planet, in which a great war was fought by the All Fathers (ancestors). During the war their great machines and technology were mostly destroyed. It seems plausible, and reminds me of the later books in the Pern series by Anne McCaffrey. People are aware that high technology existed, but they've lost the ability to produce and use much of it.
What interests me about such a setting is that it bypasses much of the grimier sections of Earth's own technological advancement. For example, even though the prime minister is advocating investigation of lost technology and has just completed a railroad project, the worker exploitation and degradation in quality of life that accompanied the Industrial Revolution are not present on this planet. Instead, the common people are represented as generally agrarian, living quiet and local lives with some slight comforts afforded to them by technology. Buckell touches on a biologically-based technology movement that’s advocated by the “friendly” gods the Loa, but doesn't comment on it much. Although the story in no way suffers from the brief treatment of this topic, I'd be interested in reading more about it in a future installment of the series.
After the Aztecas invade, one of their spies encounters a Teotl who charges him with finding John deBrun. Although we've had reason to expect that John is special before, this confirms it. Soon John is swept up in the chaos of the invasion. In the course of his adventures, he runs into an old friend and is recruited as part of a last-ditch effort to save Capitol City from the invading hordes.
As the book progresses, Buckell slowly changes its nature from that of a technologically-rooted epic-fantasy to a full-on punk style science-fiction. The transition is smooth, mainly because as Buckell reveals more of the world, the reader comes to realize that both visions of Nanagada exist in concert. Part of the craft of this book is illustrating to the reader how Nanagada is at once ruled by its people and at the same time by its history.
In moving through the different layers of the culture, Buckell covers a lot of ground. The relationship between the Teotls and the Aztecas, the Teotls and the Loa, the Nanagadans and the Loa, and even the Nanagadans and the Teotl are explored. John deBrun must wrestle with the life he has lived since being pulled out of the ocean and the life that he lived before. Dreams are discovered - and shattered. Leaders are tested and judged according to their mettle. Buckell sprinkles the plot with concepts that could easily fill novels, and while he doesn't stray from the conflicts in the main plot, he doesn't gloss over the depth and complexity of this truly multi-cultural planet.
And once I realized the depth of the genesis of this series, and where this book could lead, I was willing to forgive Buckell his linguistic mish-mash.
Adventure
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Aliens,
Caribbean Culture
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Science Fiction,
Steampunk,
Tobias Buckell
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Nymeth · 9 August 2007, 13:43
I’m crazy about linguistics. That would probably have irked me as well, but you’re right, trying to create a dialect can’t be easy.
The book sounds really interesting. The setting does sound intriguing. On to the wishlist it goes.
tobias s. buckell · 9 August 2007, 23:08
Um, well, it’s not a created dialect, it’s Caribbean creole from St. Thomas that I mainly used, with a few Trinidadian and Grenadian quirks. I didn’t invent it, I grew up speaking it to such an extent that family friends didn’t understand what I was saying if they caught me out with friends who were speaking it.
You call it non standard but it’s actually africanate in background with English words overlaid, not uncommon in the creation of creoles.
There’s more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaican_Creole
St. Thomas is not as strict as the Jamaican creole or Grenadian that I grew up with, which is why I chose if for my books.
Now as for dialect, many people in the Caribbean call it dialect, patois, or creole. Accents vary wildly, most people can understand Jamaicans in Kingston, my friends from the country in Jamaica, up in the hills, I could barely keep up with and I grew up with it. My attempt was to communicate both that accents, dialects and forms of speaking varied depending on who spoke, who spoke to whom, and for varying reasons, which is how I would use it if I were back in the islands today.
That defense of my mother tongue choices done, I’m so glad you liked the book! LOL.
Kim · 9 August 2007, 23:53
Tobias – Thanks for responding so thoroughly and providing some more insight into your vision for the use of language in the book!
I almost hate to use the term “Standard English” because it makes it sound like I’m endorsing some superior version of the language, which is the furthest thing from my intention. When I used the term non-standard, I meant it in the sense of the English propagated in modern print and media. There could be an entire debate on the meaning and the relevancy of the term “Standard English”, but it’s a bit off the point for what I was trying to communicate here.
You wrote – “My attempt was to communicate both that accents, dialects and forms of speaking varied depending on who spoke, who spoke to whom, and for varying reasons, which is how I would use it if I were back in the islands today.”
I think the use of the different dialects, and social nuances contributed to the overall story, especially as different groups were introduced and identified in part by their language. And yes, it was communicated that people would choose to speak in a certain manner depending on the circumstances of the conversation.
It was just that the dialects seemed inconsistent within themselves, and, over-analyzer that I am, I worried the issue like a bone.
I don’t have any immersion experience with creole languages. The closest I come to that is in speaking Spanglish and growing up with a parent that spoke a mixture of Serbian and English at family gatherings.
My academic and personal experience is that people tend to use the same grammar within a specific speaking context, but it sounds like that might not be true in an environment in which people encounter and use multiple dialects on a regular basis.
For example, on pg. 10 you wrote “We could choose to run down the mountain to warn people, or we can slow down Azteca supply.” To me it seems odd that the determiner (the) is present in the first prepositional phrase and absent in the second but I can see how it could be commonplace in the environment you’re describing.
Either way, it just took me awhile to acclimate myself to the speaking, since it was at the beginning of the book and I wasn’t familiar with the players in the world.
If the St. Thomas Creole is as different from American English as the Jamacian Creola is, I’m glad you elected not to match the dialog in the book exactly to your mother tongue, I would have needed a translator to get through some of the examples they listed!
(Like – Those boys are hungry, you should give them something to eat = Dem de bwoy, dem belly a yawn, yu a fi gi dem sintin fi heat. )
tobias s. buckell · 10 August 2007, 00:25
“If the St. Thomas Creole is as different from American English as the Jamacian Creola is, I’m glad you elected not to match the dialog in the book exactly to your mother tongue, I would have needed a translator to get through some of the examples they listed!”
Heh, I have a first draft where things are much denser in that manner, I did have to go back through and change it back up, so there may be some spots where I messed things up, to be honest, but yeah, I tried to make it so that a Caribbean reader would see what I was doing and nod, and an non-Caribbean would slip into it without too much trouble.
I did read a lot of James Herriot, and Mark Twain, however, growing up, but I can’t do the literal spellings.
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