Monday 25 February 2013

Mogworld and Jam

I don't read a lot myself, I used to love reading but my attention seems to have vastly depleted itself ever since I started focusing more on films and TV as my main hobby, so now I've got a load of unread books* on my shelf that I haven't finished. Another thing that I'm still a fan of however is Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's Zero Punctuation, a video game review show that's greatly influenced my writing style and from whom I've stolen entire lines of monologue from to try and sound more articulate.

*The last three Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, the first three Dune books, and Harlan Ellison's three short story collections 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream', 'The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World' and 'Paingod and Other Delusions' if you're interested.

In the past few years, Yahtzee has taken to writing novels in addition to his other endeavors, the two of which out so far are Mogworld and Jam, the latter of which I've just finished reading. I should stress again that I'm a huge fan of Yahtzee and Zero Punctuation and any negativity expressed in this post should be taken as it is.

Mogworld

First of all let's talk about Mogworld, the plot is about a young lad called Jim, who is a wizarding student, who is killed but resurrected 60 years later by an 'evil' Necromancer. It happens that Jim, along with everybody in his world, is actually a none-player character in an MMORPG of the future in which the AI has gained sapience, his world is then stricken by immortality and player characters, messing up their society. It's a very original story that I'm surprised nobody thought of that goes to a lot of places based on this concept, and when I say that I mean literally for most of the book they hardly stay in the same place for long before moving off to other locations for various reasons.

It got me quite confused for a while and reminded me a lot of Terry Pratchett's The Light Fantastic in that and a few other ways I don't like, namely that the main character Jim, like Rincewind, is a self confessed dirty, self serving scoundrel and coward who considers themselves to be the furthest from heroism that a man can be. And reading Mogworld, Jim's personality seems like an amalgamation of Rincewind and Yahtzee's on-screen persona in Zero Punctuation, and while I find Zero Punctuation funny because his misanthropy is played purely for laughs, it seems a whole lot less funny when there's a story around it because if you can't excuse an amoral character on a count of being funny then they're just plain old unlikable, and it often made me hard to sympathise with Jim and his goals when he's only occasionally spouting Zero Punctuation style overdrawn similes (Though on one occaision, a line of dialogue is identical to one in Zero Punctuation.) and the rest of the time was spent exclaiming how much he hates the ground beneath his own feet.

The other characters are a bit mixed, while some characters such as Slippery John, the cheery amoral thief who speaks in third person, and Meryl, the cheery undead girl who adventures with Jim much to his chagrin are a bit more amusing, even if their dialogue isn't as funny as some of Jim's, they at least don't act miserable all the time, which contrasted nicely. Though back on the bad hand, the character of the Priest who joins Jim occasionally is similarly unlikable on the grounds that, like Jim, he only has one recurring character trait and accompanying joke he drags around that's repeated with every line of dialogue, namely the fact that he's religious, Yahtzee appears to dislike organised religion because he seems to take every opportunity to use the Priest to take shots at them, whether it's relevant to the topic at hand or the pacing or not.

Those are the only real problems I have with Mogworld though, the plot is very tight and interesting and takes several unexpected and exciting turns, even if it is occasionally a bit hard to follow, the characters I didn't mention by name range from harmless to hilarious, and the third act of the book and the ending in particular is one of my favorite book endings I can remember, because the ending is the point Yahtzee remembers he's perfectly capable of writing poignant, thoughful and more importantly, happy moments.

Jam

Now onto Jam. The plot of Jam is thus, in the real world roughly glimpsed at in the ending of Mogworld, a couple of Australian jobless 20-somethings get caught in an unusual apocalypse scenario in which the whole of Brisbane wakes up one morning to find that the city has been covered in a thick layer of carnivorous jam that absorbs all organic material that comes into contact with it. So the aforementioned characters, Travis and Tim, must team up with Angela, a journalism student who suspects government conspiracies, and Don, a game developer who appeared briefly in Mogworld, and must to traverse their new society, try not to touch the jam, and maybe even get to the bottom of the cause of the jam.

Now, I like the characters in Jam a lot more, because the main characters are all more rounded and have much more likable characters and don't exclusively exist to give a Zero Punctuation style snarky comment about the situation at hand. Unless you count Don, who is another character who's literally Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation persona transplanted into the story, but Don is a lot more likable than Jim from the previous book because we're not expected to sympathise with his struggles, just listen to him snarkily comment on the main characters troubles.

Apocalypse stories, like MMORPG's, are obviously a concept to which Yahtzee is very readily accustomed to and makes a load of genuinely funny and insightful snarks into the common tropes of apocalypse stories. Yahtzee claims in a couple of Zero Punctuation episodes that in a zombie apocalypse, the zombies could be entirely interchangeable with something else without altering any aspect of the story, which is exactly what Yahtzee achieved here, change zombies to carnivorous jam and the gun and weapon looting to plastic bag theft and this would merely be a humorous parody/satire of the standard apocalypse scenario.

There are some things I don't like about this story though, firstly that it has the opposite problem to Mogworld in terms of pacing, because rather than spending every chapter in a different location, there are about 4 locations in the whole story, with about three fifths of it spent in the one where Yahtzee gets to use an aspect of modern society as a punching bag for the same joke, except instead of organised religion and religious fanatics it's the hipster subculture, and like the Priest in Mogworld, they're pretty much a repeating one joke for the entire book. I don't need Yahtzee telling me that hipsters look and sound a bit stupid when I'd rather have him elaborate on his more interesting cultural observations.

Like Mogworld, the last third of the book is very tense and a little bit emotional with an unexpected twist regarding the origin of the jam that I absolutely loved and would hate to spoil, not quite as powerful as Mogworld's ending though.

Conclusion

Mogworld was mostly hit and miss but fun for one or two reads, Jam was an improvement but still had massive blank spots where not a lot was going on, Yahtzee clearly knows his stuff about the genres he writes about, which is of course why Zero Punctuation is such a massive hit, but I personally don't think that his rapid fire humour works in novel form because generally when he runs out of jokes he startes repeating himself until the story shifts, and those time are very far and in between.

I look forward to any future book Yahtzee writes though, he's unmistakably a very funny and insightful guy and definitely worth listening to, every artist has their good, their bad and their average after all.