The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker

The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker.  ISBN: 9780062110831

Read July 23

 

Magical Realism?  Adult Fairy Tale?

First things first - this book is ATTRACTIVE.  The publishers really deserve mad credit for this gorgeous presentation, and I honestly think I give the insides of the book itself a bit more slack because it is so damn pretty.  The cover is lovely, a moody blue-tone image of a massive arch, with the title in a vaguely Art-Deco style in metallic gold, and more gold filigree around the corners and edges, and a rich hot sliver of a burnt-orange border underneath.  Then, if that wasn't lovely enough on it's own, the page edges themselves are dyed deep midnight blue, with a lovely barely-there bleed into the pages, so each one is trimmed in a rich dark edge.

 

That's presentation for you.  Utterly stunning.

 

Now, on to the book.  I started this book about two weeks ago, put it down for over a good while, then picked it up and finished it Tuesday night.  That is ... fairly uncommon for me, with a new book.  In fact, the last book it happened with (Gail Tsukiyama's Women of the Silk) I actually DIDN'T like that much, and found to be pedestrian, plodding, and frankly boring. 

 

This book was odd.  I was hooked right at the start because I had never considered a female Golem before.  I suppose I'm just not the imaginative type, but that created a nice solid spark of interest, because I was in totally unknown territory.  Then the interest value of an unMastered Golem (another novel idea) and the mental anguish of her wanting to meet everyone's mental needs - how amazing! 

 

Then we get the Jinn, and he was... somehow flat.  I felt for him, and I was curious, but since Jinni are so flighty and unmoored, it was hard to get a sense of the life he lost, especially since he didn't remember how he lost it.  Not even a hint of memory, and that made it really hard for me to develop an interest in him.  I think if he had perhaps remembered just a bit more - expansions like that much later twinge of recognition he had with the prostitute in the Bowery pushing her hair aside - then I would have felt more attuned to him from the start.  He grew on me, but I didn't experience anything like the frisson I had with the Golem, and that was a major disappointment to get past. 

 

Then, it was just slow rolling through local community and history of the community members, and community politics, and the histories of those politics, and while the characters were interesting, here was where I really felt the dispassion of that distant narrator - everything is he said she said they did he thought she wanted...   I would have killed for an I AM or an I WILL in there somewhere.  By the Syrian wedding, I had had it.  That's where I stopped for a good while.  After slogging through all that, I really wasn't interested in picking back up.

 

Of course I had stopped right before the Sophia plotline, and that made the Jinn much more interesting.  Starting from there on Tuesday, the remainder kept my attention much better, and I read through at more my usual pace. 

 

On to specific points:

 

The Sophia and Saleh subplots somehow felt like they were missing something.  Between poor Sophia and poor Saleh (let's not even talk about Fadwa), Jinn interactions are dangerous for people, and I really do wonder if the Jinn never actually learned to care about that.  He didn't seem to.  The Golem would have cared, but I don't think she ever realized what was going on, and she didn't ask (which is odd, given her specifically-created curiousity).

 

And that leads to another point.  The thrust of the novel seems to be that each of these creatures is bound by their natures, created to be a certain way, and it's foolish and naive of them to expect that they'll do anything differently, regardless of their opinions on the matter and their own intellectual desires.  BUT - they do spend the whole novel taking little steps outside their natures, and those are celebrated, until the end where their natures constrain them totally again and they have to be rescued by a "real" person (who, incidentally, was able to be that rescuer by the actions of the very man he then destroyed... natures in conflict again).

 

It's interesting.  The question of the book as I read it is whether to accept as much of your nature as possible, and fight only against the bad parts (the Golem's approach) or to rage against your restrictions and refuse to be placated by your current state in the interests of maintaining your passion to fight for your ideal state (the Jinn's approach).  The funny thing is, with the peculiar "solution" of the climax, neither approach produces the desired results for the characters.

 

Very odd.  Between the slow pacing in the mid-section, and the oddness of the plot culmination, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it.  A sort of distant fairy-tale or mythological sensibility that I wasn't expecting.