“I suppose I could claim that I had always suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder an infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already knew the truth.”

And here we are, the penultimate discussion post for the group read of Neil Gaiman’s short story collection, Fragile Things. After this we have just one poem, two short stories, and a novella left. Hard to believe we are almost done. Thankfully, we have some treats in store for us with what remains.

But before that, we have four stories from this past week’s reading to discuss. I find myself in great anticipation every Sunday to see how you dear readers come out on the week’s selections. So let’s get right down to it.

Look out for spoilers!

In The End

I suppose there is some deeper cosmic message hidden here, but it has either been too long and the message no longer impresses or, more likely, it never really worked for me in the first place. It is sort of like the garden of Eden story told in some kind of reverse order. Despite listening to Gaiman read it, I cannot help but hear it as a confused sermon recited by the religious figure in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. You know the one, the guy who reads the scriptures about the holy hand grenade of Antioch.

Oddly I find the explanation in the introduction about this story to be far more compelling than the story itself.

Goliath

While it is interesting knowing this story was written to live its life on the website for the movie, The Matrix, I feel that the story works just as well without that knowledge. Sure, if you’ve seen The Matrix it does help put the occurrences in context, but again I think this works very well as an odd, Twilight Zone-ish tale.

I find the protagonist to generally be a likeable guy and right from the start I find myself rooting for him, even though I have no idea what is going on. Gaiman’s descriptions of the moments when our hero’s virtual world is interrupted are fantastic and the idea that he lives years in what in “real time” turns out to be the space of about 20 minutes at one point is mind boggling if you think about it too much. But in an intriguing way.

The story is fascinating on a number of levels, not the least of which is wondering just who is really attacking the “real world”. The men in suits would have you believe it is aliens, but when I think of The Matrix I have to wonder if it is actually the results of attacks by people who have been unplugged who are trying to fight back. Or are there more than one level of virtual reality and what our protagonist is really doing is simply waking up to inhabit the next virtual world up the chain when that world begins to break down.

Reading this and watching the Matrix films make you wonder, what would you do? Would you want to live in a dead, dreary, post-apocalyptic world in order to fight the beings that have you plugged in to a computer reality, or would you want to go back to that more pleasant, by comparison, fake reality? I think it would be a hard choice. I like that Gaiman’s protagonist is not really given that either/or option. Instead after completing his task for them, he realizes that he is going to be left to die and that he doesn’t have long left. So he asks to be plugged back in and there he lives a fulfilling life. That last line gets me every time:

“I’ll die soon. But the last twenty minutes have been the best years of my life.”

Pages from a Journal Found in a Shoebox left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky.

This is the second Tori Amos LP inspired project and honestly it doesn’t do much more for me than “Strange Little Girls” did. There is some interesting imagery and there is much to puzzle out if you are in the mood to do so, but honestly I never have been with this story. I think Scarlett’s Walk is a great album, I really do. But for some reason these Gaiman story collaborations just don’t work for me.

Gaiman says, “I wanted to write something about identity and travel and America…in which everything, including any kind of resolution, hovered just out of reach”.

Well, he succeeds marvelously in this one, but I just cannot work up the energy to care about it.

How To Talk to Girls at Parties

The first time I read this story I found it to be adequate and moved on. It isn’t that I did not get it, it is that I just didn’t really get it. But then the first time I heard Neil read it after purchasing the audio book I was mesmerized and found the story to be a real delight. More than anything I see this as my own personal example about how timing can really be everything with a story.

I enjoy this story on a couple of levels, one as a male who went through his own coming-of-age experience and can well remember the awkwardness of trying to carry on a conversation with a pretty girl, I can relate so very well to the narrator of this story, Enn. Even as an adult I am loathe to enter into situations where I have to engage in small talk and while Enn laments the fact that he always ends up in the kitchen talking to some girl’s mom, I am still the kind of person who would more than likely head to that oasis. And secondly, I like science fiction stories. Throw in some aliens and you get my attention.

You have to feel for Enn, watching him sputter his way through some initial conversations, especially once he starts making progress. Enn recognizes that the girls he is conversing with are a bit weird, but he doesn’t put two and two together and that doesn’t surprise me at all. Enn’s description of these girls makes it sound like they were all very attractive. It is no wonder the oddness of their conversation never quite registered with him to the point of feeling concern about it. Heck, he was talking to girls!

Only to find out, I suppose eventually thanks to Vic, that these were in fact not girls but aliens, on a field trip of sorts. I imagine Enn’s next awkward social experience with the opposite sex was scary as well, wondering whether these girls were exactly what they seemed.

This is a fun story and a nice one to end the week on, particularly because I found two of the four stories to be real duds.

I’m really excited about our final week. There is some great stuff in store. Our final selections are:

The Day the Saucers Came

Sunbird

Inventing Aladdin

The Monarch of the Glen

Can’t wait to talk about them with you.
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