Skip to main content

The Circle Completed

I finished "The Circle" (by Dave Eggers) yesterday, and boy was I impressed. It's a simple story, and for the most part it's told with style but minimal flourish. Although billed as a technothriller by some, it struck me as a coming-of-age story. Maybe Harry Potter and the Search Engine?

I'm going to have a tough time describing what really clicked for me about this story without delving into spoilers but I think I can describe quickly two things that any writer might be interested in.

First off, the use of comedy to sell the horrific is extremely well-done here. Eggers had any number of set-pieces relying on a slow, almost imperceptible drift towards absurdity. The bit with the ever expanding number of screens May (the novel's protagonist) uses was understated but hysterically funny. The novel straddles present and near-future, but the jokes help humanize the situation and ground the story in something approachable and relatable. Although many of the developments of the story are very tense and exciting, the essential satire of the book keeps that part of the story under wraps until it is too urgent and perilous to ignore.

The second thing is the masterful use of foreshadowing. Very little is wasted in May's journey. Even diversions like May's interest in Kayaking and encounters with the scruffy denizens of the Frisco Bay play incredibly important roles in the later sections of the book. Eggers uses imagery such as transparent sharks and circular trips to reinforce the themes of the book, always returning to an element introduced earlier again or even a third time to see how the imagery plays out.

***

Today's episode of "Agent Shield and Spaceman" starts Part Two of the web serial, catching up with three of the Section Starfire agents in the wake of the confrontation at Thulewaite's ranch. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy!



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl
I’m going to take a slightly abbreviated approach to this year’s best-of lists and mostly focus on movies. It’s not that I didn’t read or listen to music but for whatever reason I feel uninspired to talk about either topic. C’est la vie! So in no particular order are five movies I greatly enjoyed watching this year. Firstly, Avengers: Endgame. Well, I guess there is some order to this list because literally the first thing I thought of in terms of movies I’ve seen is this movie. It is inevitable! This is the one MCU flick it’s hard for me to remember as simply a super-hero film. Although I found its predecessor a bit more more compulsively watchable, I really enjoyed this film. First of all it’s tone, which veered from despair, heist hijinx, parental reconciliation, to epic mega-brawl was never boring. Even the gorgeous mess which is that final fight has its own interior logic and sports some of the best looking cinematography this side of Black Panther. With Endgame MCU found a

Stephen King's 2017

Despite the release of a single novel and a few short stories, 2017 has to rank up there as one of the more Stephen King ascendant years. No less than four movies based on his works appeared, including one of the most successful horror films of all time, the first part of IT. 'The Mist' (Stephen King) by Dementall.deviantart.com Of course, with King, for every high, there are plenty of lows and 2017 also provided a number of examples of how to do his works wrong. But let's start with the good stuff. The movie adaptation of IT, directed by Andres Muschietti and starring a number of talented young actors (including Finn Wolfhard of "Stranger Things" fame) really captured, for me, a lot of what I liked about the original novel. Being scary certainly helped, but with King, the horror slice is never really the whole cake. What makes King King, at least for me, is the combination of earthy, believable characters with lurid, "Tales from the Crypt&quo