I'm glad Greger recommended Charles de Lint, and I'm glad I've read Someplace to Be Flying. I had many differing reactions to various parts of it, but it didn't turn me into a fan. Let me discuss two general problems and then I'll get into some specifics—both good and problematic.
Several blurbs on the book's cover and back compared de Lint to Stephen King. I'm a big fan of the early King where he would take our normal world and then have the bizarre intrude in realistic ways. 'Salem's Lot and Carrie come to mind. In his later books King has moved into the world itself being weird—for example, the Dark Tower series—and I have been much less impressed. De Lint's work is much closer to the late King, and, like King, de Lint's work is well realized. It's just not my cup of tea.
The second issue I had was with the number of characters. Truthfully, I've read Russian novels with less. I do grant, however, that at least the multitudinous characters in Someplace only go by one name. But I must also admit that by the end of the novel I was only keeping track of three of the various groups of characters, and I really resented the author when on page 285 he introduced yet another new character, a Dominique Couteau. Now references to the Cocteau family had been made, but unless Dominique was part of one of the groups whose stories I was by then skimming, she had not actively been "on stage" before. New character? Page 285? Enough already!
Now for specifics, and there were many things about the book that I enjoyed.
1) A blurb on the back of the book explains—in the briefest and simplest way—the world de Lint creates. In addition to human beings, his world contains "animal people" who "walk among us. Native Americans call them the First People, but they have never left." In Someplace Lily is a normal human being; Jack is one of the animal people. The following occurs early in the book. "The stories he (Jack) related were like the ones she (Lily) and Donna used to tell each other when they were kids, the two of them thrown together because no one else in the neighborhood wanted to play with the fat kid with Coke-bottle glasses or her gimpy friend. They were both voracious readers, as much by circumstance as choice, and the stories they made up were a natural outgrowth of all that reading, born out of the need of two tomboys, trapped in bodies that didn't look or work properly, having to make up a place where they could fit in. Because the real world didn't have such a place for them." (page 29.) There's no way I'm not gonna identify with Lily. Tell me more!
2) "Sean MacManus ran an all-night diner around the corner on Kelly Street. Lately, … he'd taken to serving what he figured you really wanted instead of what you'd ordered, which could make for interesting, if frustrating, meals." (page 79) I love the concept and, looking at the paragraph after I've finished the book, am real sorry Sean MacManus never showed up again.
3) "Everybody's got a true home—maybe not where they're living, but where their heart lives." (page 147) Interesting concept. Maybe Ocean City, MD, or anywhere on the Eastern Shore. Maybe even New York City—but only if my heart has lots and lots of money.
4) A character says, "Just because something seems impossible that doesn't mean it's not real." (page 207) Now there's a thought to keep in mind,
5) supported a few pages later with, "What was happening with the world? Maybe all those years of watching shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and now The X-Files were finally taking their toll. People weren't only accepting that the impossible was possible—if not in their hometown, then somewhere." (italics his, page 215) Hence, I assume, the book's title.
6) Words from a "bird person:" "There's no accounting for what some folks'll do. You take a perfectly good section of land and ooh and ahh over just how untouched and pristine, it is, but then you have to change it all out of recognition before you can be comfortable in it. … You never build just what you need, the way we would a nest. You've got to spread out as far as you can, cut down a whole forest, irrigate a whole desert, just to make sure that you won't accidentally stumble upon a place that's still in its natural state." (page 271) Twentieth and twenty-first American life in a nutshell.
7) A character sums up some recent events in the plot: "… it was all too much like walking into the middle of a particularly convoluted foreign film that had no subtitles and was already half over." (page 324) Yep. Sometimes life feels just like that to me—although I'd have to throw in pinches of black and slapstick comedy.
And there it is. De Lint is, at times, an annoying writer; I often found myself growling at split infinitives and bad pronoun references, but looking at the above list, it's clear his writing touched me many times. Greger, would you mind recommending another one? Preferable a shorter one with less characters? (And Someplace is not the one with the cat sitting on a step's riser. I kept looking for it. :D)
