August 16, 2004
The Pickup Artist
Terry Bisson is a truly fine writer; his short stories "macs" (searingly political) and "Bears Discover Fire" (sweet, ambling, gently weird and aimless) show his range, and he's capable of doing funny quite well, as with his well-distributed short-short, "They're Made of Meat". But I found The Pickup Artist to be a disappointment; the central conceit (an artistic-cum-political movement designed to wipe out the art of the twentieth century and make way for that of the twenty-first gets institutionalized) not terribly interesting; I would have loved a comic riff on a totalitarian society á la Farenheit 451, but this wasn't interested in that. Instead, it was a novel about... art, I guess, and one man's reaction to it, but it didn't really seem to have a core at all. Frankly, science fiction about art is almost universally unsatisfying. Reading rock criticism not by Lester Bangs on a benzedrine kick is usually a poor choice, because criticism of the unwritten generally fails to communicate the interesting things about its subject; the same problem hits almost all science fiction dealing with art (Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration is a notable exception, because it's not clear how good the protagonist is supposed to be, and he's rapidly losing his grip on reality). Bisson sidesteps that problem by simply ignoring it; what's the twenty-first century art that the pickup artists are making room for? Sadly, I didn't really care about the characters (not even the dog, because I have a heart of stone), and the told-in-flashback story of how the world came to be didn't do it for me either. The wackiness was no good; it felt like cut-rate Bradley Denton or, worse, Rudy Rucker by the end (drugs to bring the dead back to life! cryptic wizened babies! cloned Injuns!). Terry Bisson gets marks for making the protagonist's totem a Hank Williams album (I have no doubts about Bisson's taste) but this was just a disappointment all around. Read "Bears Discover Fire" instead.
April 18, 2004
The Great War and Modern Memory
Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory is a survey of literature about World War I and written in reaction to it. That's an incredibly broad topic, so Fussell has narrowed his focus. He's writing almost entirely about British authors (Gravity's Rainbow, a recent phenomenon when Fussell wrote this book in 1975, crops up a few times despite being about the wrong war entirely, and Mailer and Ginsberg are unnecessarily wedged in), and he's concerned almost exclusively with line officers in the British army. The Navy and such air combat as there was in World War I is entirely ignored. Fussell explains this, sensibly enough, as a product of personal interest: he was a line officer in the infantry in World War II, so the literature of his predecessors of a generation earlier was what fascinated him. I can't say that this is a bad decision; the war poets and their novelist and memoirist brethren were largely officers in the infantry. It does mean that the brilliant Isaac Rosenberg -- a working class, enlisted Jew, and thus an outlier from the rest of the war poets -- gets slighted, despite Fussell's entirely defensible claim that Rosenberg was the best poet of the war. Still, that's an incredibly broad topic, so Fussell divides it further; each chapter is devoted to a particular motif that Fussell sees as broadly shared across the British literature of the Great War: satire, irony, and gallows humor; the tunnel-dwelling underground (literally as the trenches and figuratively as the grave); a sense of Germans as both twins and diametric opposites; mythic allusion; self-consciously literary allusion (and shaping of the narrative); theatrical touches (not just in the literature of the war, but in the many contemporaneous references to music hall by the soldiers themselves); homoeroticism; an attention to the pastoral; and the explicit investigation of memory.
(more...)February 21, 2004
The Praxis
I was really excited when I read that Walter Jon Williams was going to be writing a space opera series. I really like Williams' more space-opera-like books. Aristoi is a remarkably solid piece of science fiction (although like most books that are not Camp Concentration, its depiction of artistic genius leaves something to be desired). City on Fire, the sequel to his earlier Metropolitan, is not space opera in the Doc Smith sense (or even in the early Iain Banks sense), but it shares a certain similiarity to the genre; it's the story of a low-level bureaucrat who gets wrapped up in the undertaking of a coup, and her slow transformation into a political power in her own right. It's got its flaws, but it's my probably my favorite science fiction novel that I've read in the last few years. This is a subgenre that Williams can do quite well. Alas, you wouldn't know it from Dread Empires Fall: The Praxis, the first volume in what promises to be a horribly extended series.
(more...)January 6, 2004
The Book of Leviathan
The Book of Leviathan seems to be a collection of Sunday newspaper strips from England's The Independent. The author, Peter Blegvad, has a website, is a New Yorker, and has performed with the Golden Palominos. I know these things from the back cover of The Book of Leviathan, and that's pretty much all I know about the strip or its creator, but now I need to find out more. This is really, really good -- the best way I can describe it is Zippy the Pinhead if Zippy the Pinhead were actually funny instead of just odd. Blegvad the same willingness to stretch for a groan-out-loud pun (he makes a "bear arms/arm bears" joke, for instance), but where I think that the Doggie Diner is the best part of Zippy, I find this stuff both sweet and funny. The stories are about little Levi, a faceless baby made of aboout a dozen lines. His cat talks to him, the voice of tolerant adult cynicism. There's a family, Mama and Papa and sister Becky, who show up in some of the strips. (The book opens brilliantly, with the cat serving as Levi's guide to the hunting lodge of the dead to bring Mama and Papa back to him, Orpheus-style; I wasn't at all sure where it was going, what sort of thing to expect. It was a brilliant choice on the editor's part; the strips are generally funnier and less narratively cohesive in the rest of the book, but I was hooked.) Blegvad is an artistic mimic; I caught references to Little Nemo, Pogo, and what seemed to be Gorey and Addams riffs. The strips wobble between Duchampian surrealism and a Krazy Kat air of English gone wonky. In one strip the Godlike hand of the author, straight from a Daffy Duck cartoon, compares Levi to Henry announces that Leviathan is "the FRUIT of an UNHOLY UNION between [Dick Tracy's] "NOTHING YONSON" and J.W. Anglund's larval minx." A number of the strips are available on Blegvad's site; check them out. If this is the sort of thing you like, I guarantee you'll like this.
December 26, 2003
The Quincunx
A quincunx is the arrangement of five items with four forming the corner of a square and the fifth centered between them, as with the pips on a die. Charles Palliser's The Quincunx is a book obsessed with the number five. It is made up of five parts, each composed of five books, each composed of five chapters; it tells the story of five doomed generations of five branches on a family tree. I'm not sure whether Palliser had crazy Oulipo-esque mirrorings, where as you dig further into the structure each whole element reveals itself to be five smaller components, but I wouldn't put it past him; the figure of the quincunx (and quincunxes of quincunxes) is itself a major plot point on at least three occasions. But beyond the formal gameplaying, The Quincunx is mostly an unashamed page-turner. Its hero, John Mellamphy, begins the novel as an upper-class child in the rural England of the early nineteenth century, but he does not stay there for long. His mother (a widow, or so she claims) is vague about her past; she believes that there is some sort of conspiracy against them that revolves around a mysterious document in her possession and her unnamed enemies who would kill to obtain it. Her predictions are, of course, accurate, and the Mellamphy household suffers a number of reversals, slipping into direst penury in the slums of London. From there, it's a whirlwind tour of lost wills, buried family scandals, insane asylums, arguments about the morality of law and man's innate nature, gangs of criminals, murder plots, fallen women, low humor among the servant class, dark doings in the London sewers, stock fraud, mad aunts, thwarted romance, &c. The first thirty pages or so were slow going, and I found myself asking why my friend recommended this so highly. Everything after that was a wonderful blur; it's all of Dickens (of whom I am not fond, but after this I am considering giving Bleak House another try) put through a blender and then cranked up to 11. Yummy good fun, and the perfect beach book for the howling winter months.
October 6, 2003
My Name is Red
I've been purposefully avoiding reading any reviews or discussion of My Name is Red, because reading cold was such a fascinating experience. The book, by Turkish author Orham Pamuk, is set in sixteenth century Istanbul, a time and place I know very little about; its main focus is the art of Turkish miniature illustration, about which I know even less. My Name is Red is a murder mystery of sorts, but the actual facts of the mystery totally fall to the wayside while Pamuk explores his theme, that of the end of the Turkish tradition of illustration painting (in which perspective was not used and human figures were iconic, not mimetic) for a more Western-influenced style. The question of "style" haunts the characters, in fact; for the miniaturists, the more skillful a painter you were, the less individuality your work had and the more it represented the work of past masters. The arrival of Western art is creating a crisis of confidence on the part of the master miniaturists commissioned to do a book of miniatures for the Sultan; in the mounting stress, increased by the deep-seated religious distrust of representational art, one has killed another. A former miniaturist's apprentice, Black, is assigned the duty of finding out who it was before all are tortured; meanwhile, Black woos his childhood sweetheart, the daughter of the man creating the book. The narrator changes from chapter to chapter (and includes some of the illustrations; "I Am a Gold Coin" and "I, Satan" were particularly memorable). While the range gives Pamuk an amazing amount to play with to work his themes of identity, signature, and style, it also prevents most of the characters from developing a distinct voice. (Part of this fault may rest with the translator; the language each character uses was similarly florid and mannered.) My Name is Red rests somewhere in the Invisible Cities continuum of books -- the slow spinning out of multiple variations on a single theme. I enjoyed it and I learned a bit about Turkish art. But it never really gelled as a novel (and certainly not as a mystery; the revelation of the murder's identity is completely haphazard). Invisible City dodges this neatly: Marco Polo and Kubla Khan are mere adjuncts to the real character, that of the city universal. My Name is Red doesn't quite manage the same dodge (at least to someone unfamiliar with the material) and thus reads as a nice piece of armchair philosophising, but just a so-so novel.
June 25, 2003
Artemis Fowl
In the downtime before the appearance of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, after Red and I had picked through all the Diana Wynne Jones in the library, we picked up Artemis Fowl. Red had heard of it; it's the first book in a popular children's series. The author, Eoin Colfer, has apparently described it as his attempt to do "Die Hard with fairies". Alas, it's more like Die Hard II: a deeply cynical, deeply lazy effort that demonstrates a withering contempt for the intelligence of its readers. Artemis Fowl is a child genius, a master criminal. His father has been lost; his mother is mad; he, with his faithful butler, Butler (in a sign of bad things to come, Colfer tells us that the word "butler" derives from the name of Butler's family; the opposite explanation -- that Butler's family had been serving the Fowls since before surnames -- would have made it a clever touch rather than simply dumb), is bent on looting fairy gold. And therein lies a problem. I am happy to read a book about a Moriartyish or Luthorian twelve-year-old supervillain. I am less happy to read a book about said twelve-year-old doing battle with the Little Folk. A rule of thumb for genre literature is that you get one major suspension of belief per novel. Young genius Fowl plus highly technologically developed fairy society is two, possibly three. Given a well-plotted novel full of fascinating characters and shimmering prose, I might not kick, but Artemis Fowl struck me, as I said, as deeply lazy. A good chunk of the early book is devoted to Fowl's decoding of the mysterious book that all fairies must keep hidden from mortals. We are told that the language it's in resembles Egyptian. (Which Egyptian? That of "Tutankhamen's inner-chamber hieroglyphics." Uh-huh.) But the script as depicted in the book looks absolutely nothing like hieroglyphics, and it's not a language. It's a simple substitution cipher. Did Colfer assume that nobody would notice? Or did he think that kids would have a good enough time drawing up the chart of which symbol replaces which letter that he didn't need to come up with a better explanation? Similarly, the ending -- the ending towards which Fowl has been driving all the other characters, safe in his knowledge that he has one great trick up his sleeve which will turn the tables on his opponents -- feels dropped in out of nowhere (and from a great height, possibly from orbit). If Die Hard's climax had featured Bruce Willis calling in a SWAT team that hadn't appeared in the movie previously, I'd've resented that, too. J.K. Rowling has her problems as a writer, and I sometimes feel as if she's just going through the motions or hasn't bothered thinking through her plot, but I never feel as though she cheats. Good villains cheat; good books don't. I'll take a cartoonish Voldemort over a deux ex machine-wielding Fowl any day, thank you.
May 14, 2003
Positively Fifth Street
I didn't read the Harper's article that was the basis for this book, but my friends Chas and Greg did. They immediately decided that what they needed in their lives was a regular poker night, and I can see why. Jim McManus, a freelance writer and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was given the assignment of going to the 2000 World Series of Poker at Binion's Horseshow in Las Vegas and writing about the rise of top-tier professional women players. He accepted the job, then convinced his wife that it was a good idea to take the $4000 advance -- money, it becomes clear, that his wife and children could really use -- and use it to enter the WSOP himself. McManus, a pretty good player and afficianado of the game since childhood, said that he wanted to be able to give his story color, but he really just wanted to see how good a poker player he was. It turns out that he's pretty good, as he wins entry into the game itself (with its $10,000 entry fee) from a feeder game, and then keeps on winning.
(more...)March 12, 2003
Eye in the Sky
Eye in the Sky, Philip K. Dick.
Eye in the Sky is not one of Philip K. Dick's best books; it lacks the sheer headtwisting power of some of his later works such as VALIS, and it doesn't have the polish of The Man in the High Castle, which I think is Dick's most readable novel, if not quite his best. The conceit of protagonists trapped in an amorphous reality has been done better by other authors before and since; Dick himself did it better in the fine, jarring, and creepy Ubik. But there's one wonderful moment when our hero and his stalwart companions -- loonies and neurotics, the lot of them -- are living in a paranoid schizophrenic's fantasy world. She's convinced that everything, cats, spiders, houses, canned food and chopping knives, is out to get her. In the end, of course, she decides that the main characters are all out to get her as well, and since her delusions guide reality, suddenly they are. They are transformed into horrible malevolent bug things, except for the hero, who watches in horror. And it's a memorable scene, one of the few really good ones in the book (another is the hero's umbrella ride up to Heaven, where he sees the face of God), but how much more wonderful and unheimlich would it have been if the hero and his third-person singular voice had been transformed as well? I'm not sure which would have been worse -- a slow transition from two-fisted engineer to bloodsucking entity, or an abrubt shift, like PKD stepped away from the typewriter and let someone with an even shakier grasp on a much less pleasant reality take over for a page. I suspect the latter would have given me a case of the whim-whams for a week.