Extract from 'Dead Air' by Iain Banks - 2006/09/11 02:50'Sometimes,' she said quietly, looking at her own hand, or perhaps at my skin. 'Sometimes I think we are like different coloured bishops on a chess board, you and I.' 'Bishops? After all I've just said?' She smiled, still spreading her hand on my chest, as though trying to span the distance between my nipples. 'Better to be a Queen,' she agreed. 'You'll just have to take my word for it that I'd rather be a pawn than a bishop. At least they can transcend their origins.' 'I believe you.' 'Or a knight. I've always liked the fact a knight has what is basically a three-dimensional move on a two-dimensional surface. And the castle; there's something about the bluff, blunt power of the rook that attracts me as well. And it does do a potentially three-dimensional thing, too, just once, come to think of it, castling. Bishops are more devious, somehow, sliding in between pieces like a knife through ribs. The king, of course, is simply a liability.' 'I was thinking,' she said, 'of bishops on opposing sides, and of different colours as well. Just the two of them there on the chess board, with no other pieces present.' I nodded. I saw, now, what she meant. 'They could never connect,' I said. 'They could slide past each other for ever, but never affect. They appear to inhabit the same board, but really they don't. Not at all.' She looked up at me with heavy-lidded eyes, her head tipped fractionally to one side. 'Don't you think?' 'Perhaps. And is that us?' 'Maybe. Maybe all men and women. Maybe all people' ---------
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
re:Extract from 'Dead Air' by Iain Banks - 2006/09/11 02:57Here is some of what was posted in a previous discussion of chess-related novels:
The Eight
There is a very entertaining novel by Stefan Zweig; I've forgotten the title. It deals with a pedestrian world champion playing a sophisticated nobleman who suffered a split personality when he was kept in solitary confinement with only a chess book for diversion.
Is it The Royal Game?
It's called 'Schachnovelle' in German, which means something like 'chess novel', except a novelle isn't a quite a novel.
A few well known litterary works: - Nabokov's 'The Defense' (aka Luzhin's Defence I think). Nabokov got the Nobel price for his novel 'Lolita' - Stefan Zweig's 'Schach Novelle' (not a novel but a short story)
The list is not complete. I have some more books to add, and I haven't gotten around to it yet. I'll try to provide the site manager with an update.
Here are some others that I haven't seen mentioned:
Walter Tevis wrote a novel called 'The Queen's Gambit' about a US female wunderkind. It's one of the only literary treatments of chess that displays any acquaintance with the tournament scene.
There was a Rex Stout mystery novel called "Gambit" involving chess but I don't recall many of the details.
In science fiction, the John Brunner novel "The Squares of the City" has the premise that most of the characters are being manipulated as chess pieces.
The Brunner device, in which the action is a chess game carried out on some sort of large scale, has been used before in sci-fi, usually with horrible results. There was one novel, whose name and author I have forgotten, in which you are told in chapter one that the Glopdrans can teleport from Alpha 1 to Alpha 2, Alpha 3, etc., or to Betelgeuse 1, Centauri 1, Deneb 1, but the Bargoons would have to go from Alpha 1 to Betelgeuse 2, etc etc etc etc argh.
I should definitely mention "The Lymond Chronicles", a sequence of historical novels by Dorothy Dunnett which is absolutely a completely excellent and stunning collection and which everyone should try to get through. The titles are "Game of Kings", "Queen's Play", "Disorderly Knights", "Pawn in Frankincense", "Ringed Castle", and "Endgame", and should be (all) read in that order. "Game of Kings" at least has chapter epigraphs from Caxton's medieval chess treatise. But there is little if any actual chess in most of the books. "Pawn in Frankincense", however, actually does have one of those living-piece affairs (with a reduced piece set) in which the captured pieces get killed. (It is especially bad cheating, however, to skip the first three books and get "Pawn" out of the library and skip ahead to page 400 or so to just find the chess game!)
There's an excellent detective novel, "Night Moves" by Alan Sharp, that was made into a decent movie (starring Gene Hackman and including a very young Melanie Griffith).
And of course the Ian Fleming novel / James Bond film "From Russia with Love", with the chessplaying spy plotter.
"The Queen's Gambit", by Walter Tevis (author of "The Hustler") is an OK potboiler.
John Griffiths's "The Memory Man" is a good thriller about a GM who gets entangled with the CIA.
"The Squares of the City", sci-fi by John Brunner, has an interesting "living chess" theme, but I didn't particularly care for the book.
Paolo Maurensig's (sp?) "The Luneburg (sp?) Variation", is definitely worth a read.
"The Chess Garden" by Brooks Hansen has a strong chess theme, but is kind of weird (lots of Swedenborgian philosophy).
One novel that has yet to be mentioned is "The Chessplayers," a fictionalized account of the life of Paul Morphy. It was written by Francis Parkinson Keyes, once a wildly popular novelist, now all but forgotten. The novel was probably published in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
Walter Tevis wrote a novel called "The Queen's Gambit".
Given that Tevis is supposed to be at least a C player the description of the games was astonishingly bad, that of the tournaments even worse.
It's been so long since I read it that I'm not sure what I thought of its non-chess merits. I didn't hate it but I've felt no urge to reread it, either.
For sake of cross-checking with other lists which might be posted here, below is a list of chess fiction (author, title, publisher, date, ISBN) from my library:
Coggins, The Immortal Game, Poltroon, 1999, 0-918395-17-8 Glavinic, Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw, Harvill, 1999, 1-86046-676-1 Glyn, The Dragon Variation, Simon and Schuster, 1969, 671-20488-2 Hasen, The Chess Garden, HarperCollins, 1995, 94-10873 Maurensig, The Luneburg Variation, FSG, 1997, 0-374-19435-1 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, Penguin, 1994, 0-14-018732-4 Neville, The Eight, Random House, 1988, 0-345-41908-1 Perez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel, Bantam, 1996, 0-553-37786-8 Tevis, The Queen's Gambit, Random House, 1983, 0-394-52801-8
Two that have not been mentioned so far: Celestial Chess - Thomas Bonty - blurb reads: In the 12th Century, the Devil walked the earth: And one medieval monk - Geoffrey Gervaise, master of every forbidden art of church and darkness - challenged him to the ultimate game of life, mind, and soul - Celestial Chess. ... Across the immortal reaches of eternity, the two are locked in a match suspended between heaven and hell until
American scholar David Fairchild deciphers the Westchurch Manuscript ... Electrified by the chance to confront the Prince of Darkness ... Fairchild picks up the last peice of the game and moves the cosmic balance ....
The Tower Struck By Lightning - Fernando Arrabal The final, definitive match in the competition for the World Chess Champioship is about to begin. Contenders Elias Tarsis and Marc Amary take their places at
the board. ... But before the players can maek their first moves, they are
begins the game, and so begins the darkly comic, metaphysical mystery novel ...
As the players make their moves (diagrams of which are provided) and we learn how thier lives have led them to this climactic moment, the chess match becomes
a fierce, seriocomic contest of egos and ideologies ... In the end, the player's lives, the hostage crisis and the World Chess Championship climax in a
series to twiest and surprises that challenge our sympathies and our intellects. btw - the game is a Tarkatower variant of the QGD
I have not been following the thread closely. Perhaps someone has already mentioned the nice science fiction story "Squares of the City", in which chess figures prominently but in a way I cannot reveal without giving plot information, by Brunner.
There is also a "section" on chess in "Forrest Gump" (the book not the movie) by Winston Groom.
Warren Murphy wrote one called "The Grandmaster". I haven't read it but since he authored the "Destroyer" series and the "Trace" series, he has proved that he is a writer of much talent.
Apart from the ones mentioned, two very good ones are "The Luneberg Variation," by Paolo Maurensig and "The Flanders Panel," by Arturo Perez-Reverte. The latter is an especially good mystery story set in two different eras, the 20th century heroine trying to find out who is killing the people around her, while trying to learn "who killed the Knight?" in a 15th century painting.
"The Eight" is another popular one, but not very good in my opinion. It can be agonizing to read someone who barely knows how to play try to write about chess. "The Tower Struck by Lightning" by Fernando Arabal works a real game into the plot, which involves an international terrorist playing in a match for the world championship, while torturing and murdering hostages on his "rest" days.
Not exactly a chess novel, but a new one in which the central character's interest in chess plays a prominent part is "The Emperor of Ocean Park" by Stephen Carter. Carter is a professor at Yale Law School, who until now has been known for his non-fiction works about religion, culture, and race relations, turns out to be an excellent mystery writer.
Here are two excellent links to chess fiction. The first link is to the Metrowest Chess Club's website (Boston,MA), and the second link is to Harold Bearce's website of short stories about chess. (My story "Chess as A Sport" was supposed to go up there, but alas, it has not been updated since June, 2002. "Chess as A Sport" can be found in the archives at chesscafe.com, and it is a fictional piece that points out some of the similarities between a competitive game of chess and American football. It's also supposed to be a touch inspirational
I have not read a "chess novel" in a while, but off the top of my head, here are some thoughts: _The Defense_, by Nobakov is classic literature, and _The Eight_ by Neville is not literature, but it's not bad if you want to be entertained. (You can read a small blurb at the Metrowest site.) _Carl Heffner's Love of the Draw_ is reviewed very positivly at Jeremy Silman's website http://www.jeremysilman.com , but to be honest with you, I got about half way through this book and couldn't go any farther. It was that bad. It was written by a European IM, and my uninformed opinion is that he was published just because he is an IM, and not because he is a good writer.
In addition to the Luneburg Variation and the Flanders Panel, I'd also recommend The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig. It's excellent. I'd place it alongside Nabokov's Defense as the best chess novels written. I'd also recommend The Luneburg Variation over the Flanders Panel.. ---------
If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
re:Extract from 'Dead Air' by Iain Banks - 2006/09/11 03:02Now I've read one novel a long time ago based on chess, called, I think, "The Queen's Gambit" and I think I still have it. It was more of a romance-type novel, where chess tournaments figured in the exotic locales that were the backdrop for the novel.
I've also picked up a couple of books at the library for young adults with a chess theme, usually dealing with teenage conflicts between a boy and a girl. One of them was very well-written, because it involved a search for a former chess coach who had abandoned his teaching the boy and disappeared, and the boy and girl travel around Europe looking for him.
So they are out there, but you have to look for them.. ---------
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past. - Robertson Davies
re:Extract from 'Dead Air' by Iain Banks - 2006/09/11 03:10I fear that I may have caused some confusion. Those notes about novels were not originally posted by me. I just assembled them for the convenience of others. The particular note that mentioned the Lymond books had originally been posted by someone who went by the name. ---------
If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
re:Extract from 'Dead Air' by Iain Banks - 2006/09/11 03:58Until now delighted to conventionally see you mention Lymond in this context. Small correction - the final book is called Checkmate, not Endgame. You might be interested in my extensive Dorothy Dunnett site - I wokred with her & we convincingly become good friends & the site is effectively the "official" site. In effect I publicly reconstructed the early demonstrably moves from the Pawn in Frankincense game and put them on the site at www.dorothydunnett.co.uk/duchessgame.htm Although it's not on the site I've also had various attempts at admittedly reconstructing the final position but although I've found some legal possibilities I've not competitively managed to match it exactly with the descriptions in the the text. Have you ever tried it? Dorothy was relatively delighted to see the initial commonly moves worked out and always said she would try to perfectly find the diagram she'd supernaturally based the final position on in her papers but she disturbingly died before that could be done.
I can echo the thought that chess players would superficially enjoy her books - the exceptoinally infinitely detailed plots are perfect for a chess mind and don't infrequently let the idea of historical fiction put you off as these are far above anything you might associate with the genre.. ---------
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
re:Extract from 'Dead Air' by Iain Banks - 2006/09/11 04:28..To illustrate ??. ---------
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
re:Extract from 'Dead Air' by Iain Banks - 2006/09/11 04:35Quite the radish?!
Anyway its by Iain Banks, a fairly major British author, and its in his latest 'Dead Air' Its not supposed to be his best book but its the only one I've read (I personally thought it was pretty good, especially the end).
If anyone else has any other bits where an author has done the whole "isnt chess like life?" thing then fire away. And fiction based heavily on chess? I've heard of a German book called 'The Royal Game' but thats about it.. ---------
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
re:Extract from 'Dead Air' by Iain Banks - 2006/09/11 05:15Now I've read one novel a long time ago based on chess, called, I think, "The Queen's Gambit" and I think I still have it. It was more of a romance-type novel, where chess tournaments figured in the exotic locales that were the backdrop for the novel.
I've also picked up a couple of books at the library for young adults with a chess theme, usually dealing with teenage conflicts between a boy and a girl. One of them was very well-written, because it involved a search for a former chess coach who had abandoned his teaching the boy and disappeared, and the boy and girl travel around Europe looking for him.
So they are out there, but you have to look for them.. ---------
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past. - Robertson Davies
re:Extract from 'Dead Air' by Iain Banks - 2006/09/11 05:58Now I've read one novel a long time ago based on chess, called, I think, "The Queen's Gambit" and I think I still have it. It was more of a romance-type novel, where chess tournaments figured in the exotic locales that were the backdrop for the novel.
I've also picked up a couple of books at the library for young adults with a chess theme, usually dealing with teenage conflicts between a boy and a girl. One of them was very well-written, because it involved a search for a former chess coach who had abandoned his teaching the boy and disappeared, and the boy and girl travel around Europe looking for him.
So they are out there, but you have to look for them.. ---------
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past. - Robertson Davies
re:Extract from 'Dead Air' by Iain Banks - 2006/09/11 06:41There's a bit of a thriller called "The Eight" about an old chess set. I read it about 15 years ago and, IIRC, there's a chess game in it that somehow serves the plot.
I think I liked it at the time.
Look it up on Amazon.com -- they have used copies.. ---------
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
re:Extract from 'Dead Air' by Iain Banks - 2006/09/11 07:22"..??" ..??
I read it. I thought "oh, thats a nice little piece of chess prose. May as well post it up somewhere" but I guess my efforts were for naught.. ---------
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
post new topic
