27 April, 2002: Gravity's Rainbow
The fact that Gravity's Rainbow is so famously difficult may obscure how funny it is. I had picked GR up and started it several times, but the opening -- and in a 760-page book, that's a hundred pages or so -- is slow, overstuffed with characters, and not particuarly amusing. The hardest part of the entire book for me to read comes early (it features Blicero, also known as Weissman, the brutal, death-fixated S&M afficionado from the Africa sequence of V.; not coincidentally, I found the Africa chapter of V. the hardest to read in that book). But pressing through, the book opens up; the funny parts are as good as those in The Crying of Lot 49, and the serious parts are much richer. (more...)
10:16 am 
26 April, 2002: Lord of Light
Roger Zelazny had was a good writer writing during an extraordinary period for science fiction, when the British New Wave, with its greater attention to prose style, engagement with literary experimentation, and sympathy for the countercultural, was beginning to leak over to America. Zelazny did have two uncommon gifts, though; he could write detailed fight scenes that made sense and he was able to effortlessly shift voice (from Shakespearean to faux-Hammet and back in between sentences). Both of these were, to some extent, a crutch, but the latter trick was never used to better effect than in Lord of Light. (more...)
8:22 pm
25 April, 2002: The Amber Spyglass
Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series has been justly lauded; it's been compared to every major children's fantasy series, and the third volume, The Amber Spyglass, was longlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize. The Amber Spyglass, however, doesn't strike me as a very good children's book. The children seem almost an afterthought; the series as a whole is good, very good, but in the final chapter so much world-shaking is going on that the people and stories we care about are lost in the dust and rubble. (more...)
9:47 pm
23 April, 2002: The Invisible Circus
Jennifer Egan's The Invisible Circus is a novel of the '70s, but it has all the flaws of the worst memoirs of the '60s (the fashion for which has, thankfully, passed). It is the story of two sisters, Beth and Faith. Beth is a high school senior whose entire existence revolves around the memories of her dead father, a failed artist turned computer programmer, and her sister, a wild child hippie who died in Europe ten years before the start of the novel. Beth has decided to go off and follow in Faith's footsteps. Part of the problem is that all the adult characters are left behind in the U.S., and Beth is just too resolutely adolescent to want to stay with on her tedious journey of discovery; her hero worship of her father and sister is believable but doesn't make for compelling reading. Part of it is that the truth about Faith's fateful summer in Europe is heavily foreshadowed and not really very shockng. Part of it is that this reads like a heavily workshopped first novel, with each chapter the smooth cadences, neatly turned phrases, and pat final lines of short stories that don't quite cohere into a whole. But most of it is because Faith, so beloved by Beth and by Faith's former boyfriend, who Faith meets along the way, was from all accounts insufferable. I think this might even be intentional on Egan's part, a little dig at the continuing fascination with the 1960s, but it was hard to sympathize with Beth's investigation into how her sister died when you keep wondering how Faith's friends and relatives kept from choking her.
10:28 pm
22 April, 2002: Diaspora
Greg Egan writes science fiction filled with great wild intellectual leaps. He posits whole universes, introduces his characters to them, and then throws them away for something new. What he doesn't write, in Diaspora, are characters. Even more so than the first Egan book I read, Permutation City, Diaspora relies solely on its ideas to carry it. There are characters, but for reasons related to both Egan's inclinations as a writer and the plot he has chosen, which involving (as did Permutation City) many on earth chosing to live their lives as intelligent self-aware computer programs, none seem to be fully realized to me. The plot itself features cataclysmic stellar events, the discovery of alien intelligences, fundamental questions about the physics of the universe, and travels to higher dimensions, but without some characters that appealed to me (or at least that I could believe in), Diaspora left me cold.
11:39 pm
21 April, 2002: Flashfire
Flashfire is the latest Parker book by Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark, and it echos The Hunter, the first Parker book, neatly. The setup is brilliant; Parker does a job with a crew of younger crooks, serving as the distraction while they rob a small-town bank. The job goes swimmingly, but they want Parker to do another job with them; when Parker says no, they withhold his share of the money, promising and intending to pay him back with interest. Parker, of course, makes his way crosscountry to find them, get his money, and make them pay. (more...)
8:21 pm
20 April, 2002: Eichmann in Jerusalem
Halfway through Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, I came across a fact about World War II that I never would have suspected. Denmark's resistance to anti-Jewish edicts under Nazi rule is well-known, even if the story of King Christian's donning of the yellow star is an urban legend. The Italian government, as an ally of Nazi Germany, was in a position to ignore German edicts about Italian Jews, and seems to have largely done so while making a nominal effort to appear to comply, as when all Jews who were members of Mussolini's Fascist Party or relatives of same were exempted from the anti-Jewish statutes. Arendt notes that since membership in the Fascist Party was a condition of employment by the Italian state, this meant that a vast portion of Italian Jewry was able to escape these laws. But the Nazi-occupied country in outside Scandanavia that offered the most protection and solace to its Jewish population seems to have been, of all places, Bulgaria. (more...)
8:47 pm
18 April, 2002: A Tale of Time City
A Tale of Time City is yet another Diana Wynne Jones book. It's the story of Vivian, a young British girl snatched from Blitz-era London by two boys from the far future. There's been a case of mistaken identity; they're looking for an entirely different Vivian Lee, a fellow time-traveller who is after the items that keep Time City from breaking up. Jones gets in some nice details about Time City itself, Vivian's bewilderment is nicely rendered, and (as per usual in one of her books) the children are both sympathetic and vaguely horrible. But the sense of disorientation doesn't help the book much in the middle third, when it's essentially a treasure hunt, nor does Jones do much with the time travel possibilities; instead, unsurprisingly, she treats Time City more as a parallel world. This was a breeze to read but when it ended (all too neatly) I felt vaguely let down.
12:31 am
12 April, 2002: The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring
I have very fond memories of John Bellairs' books: The House with a Clock in Its Walls, The Dark Secret of Weatherend, The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn. But if The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring is representative, I'm best off not revisiting Bellairs and leaving the memories unsullied. Bellairs wrote old-fashioned ghost stories in the Jamesian tradition: creepy stuff, but nothing too violent or gory (or even terribly scary, really). But The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring, featuring a trip to rural Michigan, a defrocked witch, a magic ring, and some bad happenings, just moves terribly slowly and it telegraphs all its moves far too early. Genre books should usually not have dull characters -- evil, perhaps, certainly wicked or selfish or irritating -- and their plots should not rest on characters' slow-wittedness. Dare I read The House with a Clock in Its Walls and find out if the appearance of the Hand of Glory, the one scene that I remember with clarity, lives up to how I experienced it as an eight-year-old? I don't think I do.
11:47 pm
10 April, 2002: Healer
I had no idea that Peter Dickinson, of Sleep and His Brother, The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest, and other fascinating mystery novels, wrote childrens books! Healer wasn't great, but it was good enough that I'd be willing to give other Dickinson kidlit a try. Healer suffers from trying to cover a little too much ground; it's the story of Barry, an English high school dropout, and his investigations into a cult that has sprung up around a younger neighbor of his whom he had formerly looked after. The neighbor's grandfather is concerned about her and has offered Barry money to try to spirit her away from the cult, her mother, and her stepfather (the cult's leader). All that would be enough; you'd get a quite decent plot combined with the dual questions of whether her powers are real and whether Barry is doing the right thing, but there's some additional, not terribly credible material about Barry's is-it-or-isn't-it split personality. Too much spice spoils the soup, but it did hit my personal trifecta for a children's book: a morally ambiguous setup; a grouchy, selfish, flawed protagonist; a failure to condescend to the reader. To some extent, in fact, it read like one of Dickinson's books for adults, and that's a good thing.
11:08 pm
7 April, 2002: Dark Castle, White Horse
Tanith Lee's Dark Castle, White Horse collects two short novels, Prince on a White Horse and The Castle of Dark. I own it primarily for the first; Prince on a White Horse is a terrifically funny book about a nameless prince, his shapeshifting talking horse, the Enchantress in Red, the Dragon of Brass, and a walk through a lunatic parody of bad fantasy novels. It's a book designed to be read aloud. I spent a few evenings reading it to V., and it was great fun. The backup feature, The Castle of the Dark, is more what I think of when I think of Lee: gothic, gloomy fairytale-influenced fantasy, with prose hovering between "rich" and "purple". It's lightened somewhat by a nicely written female protagonist/mystery object, raised in isolation in the titular castle and brought forth (with an ancient curse) to the world by the male protagonist, a wandering minstrel. Well enough done, but nothing special if weird, shadowy maidens raised under moonlight in forbidden towers doesn't float your boat. Prince on a White Horse sure is a hoot, though.
2:51 pm
3 April, 2002: Corsairville
In the '20s and '30s, when air travel was still a luxury, no airline in the world was more luxurious than Imperial Airways. Imperial's flying boats -- large planes equipped with floats, to land on rivers and lakes before airstips were common -- had pilots who were saluted aboard by a crew in dress whites and presented passengers making their first equatorial crossings with personalized certificates; each had its plane had its own name and stationary, and Imperial's pilots set distance and speed records. In 1939, the flying boat Corsair crashed in the Belgian Congo; foreseeing war and a shortage of new planes, Imperial sent a team in to recover the Corsair; it took nine months, and a shantytown, Corsairville, sprung up around the crash site. Graham Coster's Corsairville is not really the story of that salvage effort, however. (more...)
11:48 pm