The Good Fairies Of New York (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
I finished Martin Millar's The Good Fairies of New York early this afternoon (well, yesterday I guess, since it'll be at least Sunday by the time I post this. Wait. Let's start over.)I finished Martin Millar's The Good Fairies of New York early SATURDAY afternoon, and turned the last page with a huge smile on my face.I can't remember the last time a book gave me as many belly laughs as this one did. Like, the kinds of laughs that would cause my husband to remove his headphones while he's playing Call of Duty at night after all the kids are in bed, to ask me if I was okay.I was more than okay, I was thrilled. I am a huge sucker for well-told faerie stories, and this one hit ALL of my buttons. Every single one of them.It's rare to find a book lately that deals with the fae in the manner I remember reading about them as a child. Lately they're all ethereal and helpful and goodygoody, blahblahblah. I think Jim Butcher might be as close as I can think of to getting it right.But, y'know - the fae aren't where it's at. LET'S WRITE MORE ABOUT SEXYVAMPIRESANGELSDEMONS!I"m getting off track. Sorry.Heather and Morag (the two Scottish faeries we follow in this book) are a couple of fuckups. They like to spend their days drinking whisky and covering Ramones tunes on their fiddles, which has not necessarily endeared them to their respective clans. Well, the whisky is okay, but DON'T YOU DARE PLAY PUNK ROCK ON THAT FIDDLE, KIDS! They're on the run (after being kicked out for wanting to start a radical fairy punk band AND for defiling a neighbouring clan's relic), take up with some English faeries who are ALSO on the run; everyone gets really drunk and they wake up in New York City where Heather and Morag split off from the rest of the group and have their own adventures.This book is only slightly about their adventures, though.It's also about Dinnie, an overweight, sex-line-commercial-watching worthless sack of meat who doesn't have a kind word for anyone and is always just about to get evicted.It's also about Kerry, a kleptomaniac, Crohn's suffering, punk-rock-listening hippy with flowers in her hair and a special project she's hoping to finish...if she can just find and hold onto that last [REDACTED].It's also about Magenta, the homeless woman that believes she's an ancient Greek general and drinks a mixture of herbs, denatured alcohol and boot polish...and Joshua, whose recipe for Fitzroy cocktail Magenta has stolen.It's also about the late Johnny Thunders...who just wants his guitar back.It's even about the perils of industrialization.(Don't worry, this isn't really spoilery - all this stuff happens in the first 10-15 pages.)I've been looking at the reviews for this book since I finished, and mostly they just make me sad. I guess a lot of people were sucked into (or suckered into, if you believe what they say) buying/reading this book because of the Neil Gaiman blurb the recent editions carry. They feel like they were let down by their favourite author.Listen. Don't read this book cos Neil Gaiman says it's worth your time.Read it because it's funny and it doesn't take itself too seriously (except when it does, and then it might just make you feel things).Read it if you're interested in a fairly early example of Urban Fantasy (before everything was done to death [and done poorly in many instances]).Read it if the thought of drunken faeries wandering the streets of Manhattan causing all kinds of faerie turf wars sounds like it might just be your thing.It was totally mine.So much so that the few homophone errors and incorrect tartan colours (yes, I know this shit) didn't even bother me as much as they would have normally.I am so looking forward to Millar's Lonely Werewolf Girl, which I'm told is EVEN BETTER than this. Watch this space for my thoughts on that, I'm hoping to get to it later this month. Originally posted here.
That anyone bothers surfing the internet on their own time is absurd. When you are not at work you could be eating, drinking, writing, playing baseball, taking karate, licking someone’s neck, looking at stars, getting into fights or cutting down cell phone towers. What the hell good is sitting down to a high-jacked internet connection if all you are going to do is read Pitchfork the entire night? Get serious about your time, and use those well-paid, or well, paid company hours at your job like the living economic cancer you are and look for great new writers, music, movies, and games. Start researching New Media Economic theory when you are supposed to be collating those reports and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Then go out there and find books like Martin Millar’s The Good Fairies of New York. It is one of those great rewards for using company time to surf the web and one of the best pieces of punk-styled, hard-drinking, fairy-tale to come out in a long time.“Dinnie, an overweight enemy of humanity, was the worst violinist in New York, but was practicing gamely when two cute little fairies stumbled through his fourth-floor window and vomited on the carpet.” Now as first lines go you will need to accept, or at least acknowledge, how perfect that is, and one day you will realize that to be pure literary gold. And perhaps it is simply nostalgia, perhaps it is just a predilection for allusion, reference, and pop-cultural sensibility, but the book is just fun to read. Really. Peaceful diplomatic missions escalate quickly into brawls and artistically minded individuals do battle over a neighborhood arts competition. If there is one prerequisite to a good story, it’s people being passionate about their life because the last thing anyone wants is some inactive, paragonic Rand-ian slug wandering a mall somewhere when he has no money. People need to be doing things, and in The Good Fairies, they do stuff. Oh how they do stuff. The stuff they do, oh my.Over the course of the book you’ll get a super-powered street-woman well versed in roman warfare, the rise of fae industrialism, fae post-industrialism, and fae communist rebellion. You will witness the exploits of the pair of aforementioned sprites as they incite every hard-luck tramp in New York to heights of fury, revenge, class struggle, and love. The combination of real-world and made up world, those illusions Millar splices to his allusions, are sewn seamlessly into the story, and the flight of fantasy that is armed insurrection against an imperial capitalist model is all more rewarding for his efforts on our behalf. By the end we even get Johnny Thunders, late guitarist for the New York Dolls returning to earth from his place in heaven. Hell, even the nameless tramps who succumb to poverty and shuffle from the mortal coil are passionately lamented in these pages. If that isn’t an upbeat, positive message, well what is? But don’t take my word for it, take Neil Gaiman’s, he wrote the introduction, and then maybe you try reading the book.
What do You think about The Good Fairies Of New York (2006)?
Boy. Did i have to force myself through this one. I have to wonder if Neil Gaiman and I were reading the same book. The storyline was completely all over the place. Within a chapter the author bounces from one group of characters to the next, leading me to wonder why he had numbered chapters at all..The book goes something like this:Two scottish fairies land in NYC, get drunk, play the fiddle, fight amongst each other and wreak havoc among the lives of Dinnie (A fat cranky man who has no money and cannot play the violin) and Kerry (a hippy chick suffering from chrons disease and who is desperately trying to create a flower alphabet). Other fairies keep popping up, of whom the two Scottish ones frequently upset, one of Kerrys flowers pass through almost every fairy or homeless persons hands, and an all out war between the fairies break out. ta-da. No need to read the novel.Save yourself the money and time. I've wasted enough for the both of us.
—Lori
This book is a farce or a great graphic novel, but as a book it is kind of confusing. It flips between many characters in a chaotic manner- sometimes starting in the middle of the activity leaving you to wonder if you missed something, but, no, the author is just informing you of stuff in that style. This buged me more than I expected-in part because the fairies didn't have much in the way of individual personalities so it was easy to get confused about who was speaking and where you were.I was also a little disturbed by the racial stereotyping in the book...I guess I just expected more from a book so highly recommended by Neil Gaiman, but I was overall disappointed in it. None of it felt genuine- you could tell it was not written by an American and it just didn't feel quite right to me.I felt like the book was trying to be funny in the way that Good Omens is but it wasn't witty or thoughtprovoking enough to do so. It was a kind of fun, silly read, but I didn't really care about anyof the characters that much and so I just plunged through it to be done with it. The last couple chapters were probably the best, but overall I wouldn't recommend it,but clearly by the number of stars it has on this site my opinion of it is in the minority.
—April
I'll try to keep this one spoiler-free. ;)Here's the amazon blurb, which sums up the plot quite nicely without giving away too much:Morag and Heather, two eighteen-inch fairies with swords, green kilts and badly dyed hair fly through the window of the worst violinist in New York, an overweight and antisocial type named Dinnie, and vomit on his carpet. Who they are, how they came to New York and what this has to do with the lovely Kerry - who lives across the street, and has Crohn's Disease, and is making a flower alphabet - and what this has to do with the other fairies (of all nationalities) of New York, not to mention the poor repressed fairies of Britain, is the subject of this book. It has a war in it, and a most unusual production of Shakespeare's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and Johnny Thunders' New York Dolls guitar solos. What more could anyone desire from a book?I've been looking for books with fairies who aren't sweet and Disneyfied lately, and this one fit right in.The fairies like booze, magic mushrooms, boinking, fiddling, stealing, swearing, fighting and bending the truth into something pretzel-shaped (they're not allowed to lie, otherwise they get hit by a Karma-brick). In this they reminded me a lot of Pratchett's Nac Mac Feegle, for which they might have been an inspiration, as I think this book was published before the Pictsies first appeared.In spite of all this, they're not actually bad people, as they care a lot more about all facets of life than most of the Americans they meet, they just tend to have a certain lack of foresight about what they do.The plot unfolds in about 5 or 6 interweaving strands, and develops rapidly in complex and utterly insane directions. The book is written in short chapters divided into subchapters, which makes it an easy and fast read. The style is generally light and funny, although the contents sometimes are not, and the laughter sometimes sticks in your throat. Although some of the characters are nature-loving flower children of some sort, the message take we should care more is quite subtle, and diluted by the antics of the fairies.One minor nitpick is the ending, which is a bit overly sweet, but in keeping with the style, probably the only possible one.I fully recommend this one to everybody who likes fairies, and writing styles like Terry Pratchett's :)
—Alytha
