Review: Songs of Earth and Power, by Greg Bear

[Songs of Earth and Power is a combined edition of Greg Bear's two novels, The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage, "substantially rewritten" so that they hang together better as a single story.  Recommended by my music instructor.]

Talented musicians, they say, can reach an elevated state of focus, where extraneous thought turns off and the moment is fully attained.  It's as if they become a conduit for the music itself, channeling some pure entity that exists apart from the instrument, apart from the player, the written notes, the composer, or the audience.  Parts click in place, improvisation becomes inspired, and the notes seem to find themselves.  (So I've heard, anyway.)  My man Switters has written about how the debut of The Rite of Spring all but broke polite society a hundred years ago, a piece clearly intended to convey music's connection to this more primitive source.  It's hard for me to imagine that a tightly written score is really the best way to get across that kind of pagan and improvisational sound, and I don't see how it could be played worth a damn without an orchestra full of crack musicians all deep in the zone.  But even a blues riff is light years beyond any notes you could put on a page. 

What is the zone?  Athletes and writers talk about it sometimes too, as do theoreticians.  Is it (in music) the result of extensive practice, where muscle and ear memory team up to satisfy or confound biological expectations of tone and rhythm?  Is it being good enough to express our intuitions about the modes and patterns we've been conditioned to since birth?  Alert enough to make subtle adjustments--right when our inductive brain functions are going full-fire--to connect nuances of tone to similarly subtle emotions?  Or skilled enough that the hands finally respond at the speed of thought?  Is it a non-language conversation between fluent players who are sharing similar ideas?   Are body resources are being siphoned away from cognitive centers (or are brain chemicals being flooded in) to produce a sensation of euphoria?  Maybe!  Or maybe there's a simpler and more appealing explanation.  Maybe it's magic.

Greg Bear couldn't have come up with a better conceit for Songs than this, where music is not just magic, but the Deep Magic, the stuff that worlds themselves are made from.  (Which, to be fair, has often been a song.)  The mystery is introduced in the story when elderly composer Arno Waltiri befriends unassuming youth Michael Perrin at a suburban Los Angeles party.  Michael aspires to be a poet, and Arno forms a bond with the teen over that, and we learn before long that back in the 40s, the old man had gone full Stravinsky on the LA crowd, not just scandalizing them, but literally transporting listeners away to some other plane.  Before he passes away, Waltiri leaves Michael some instructions on how to make the same trip over the hedge by foot, where he finds a small community of lost listeners and other artsy types who inadvertantly got themselves a little too close to the source.  As it turns out, the native fairy folk haven't been governing them especially well.

The first two thirds of The Infinity Concerto read like a certain 1980s-vintage urban fantasy (kind of like these), which shows a contemporary person reacting somewhat realistically to a strange and unexpected  world, not necessarily with high stakes.  Throughout the book, Michael remains fairly calm given his circumstances, and he's even somewhat genre aware.  (I might argue that his reasoned temperament is the only real constant through the story.)  He is not mean-spirited, but he is not gifted with great empathy either (which may seem strange for a poet, but is not for a 16-year-old).  In fact, one of his magic tricks is to bundle up and discard parts of his essential self, and the first thing he sloughs away is guilt, self-recrimination, or anything else that might make him whine.  As his role morphs from confused interloper, to unwitting tool, to full-on Chosen One, we are spared a young man's agonizing about the sacrifices required to save the world.  There are points where I'd expect the kid to offer up a little more understanding for the people he's hurt, but if this story must turn into another Hero's Journey, then it's nice to make the trip with someone who's a little more rational about getting on with it.

The realm of the Sidhe, where Michael ends up, is an interesting place to visit--its vaguely archetypical geography (decaying manor house, border town, wasteland, forest), sudden boundaries, unclear sense of time and distance, spooky inhabitants, and subjective magic combine to give it a sort of half-baked fantasyland feel.  Intentionally so.  The Realm is a world that's a little less real than ours, richer in possibilities because it was not as well glued together by its creators.  It's worked as a home for the Sidhe since they walked out of Earth a couple dozen millennia ago, but the human settlement is one of the cracks that have recently appeared in its winsome fairy-ness, along with (or maybe because of) a rogue half-human mage named Clarkham, who has been busy annoying both worlds for a couple centuries now.  After a long opening stint in town, Michael finally makes it out into the larger Realm, and eventually confronts Clarkham at a broadly telegraphed replica ("all should cry, Beware! Beware!") of Coleridge's Xanadu, where we are reminded that Michael is a poet.  By the time we get to The Serpent Mage, the tired gods have really let the Realm go, and now the Sidhe are emigrating by any possible means, as the whole construct starts to splinter away into the void.  Michael is now faced with how universes are created anyway, and how anyone is going to deal with merging the two of them, if it can be done at all.  Let's hope he knows some crack musicians back on Earth.

I don't have any reason to think that Bear was getting creatively meta with these novels, but the Realm is not a bad metaphor for the books themselves.  They are occasionally lovely or delightfully bizarre, but the story doesn't hold together well enough for its inhabitants to last in it.  It is really inconsistent in focus and scope.  A full two hundred pages are spent in the human and mixed-race refugee camps, and none of those relationships had a convincing impact on the later plot.  Bear's fabulous premise gets diluted to encompass any creative art (hiding a small world in the taste of a fine wine is cute, and while oenology can be inspired to the level of art, I was not convinced that it creates the same elemental thrill as music), and when it's finally about the music again, as it was at points in the second book, I'd kind of forgotten about it.  Here, after long neglect, are a group of players literally rocking worlds as they perform Waltiri's and (why not) Gustav Mahler's lost concertos (didn't they feel anything all the hours they practiced it?).  And there, at the end of things, comes along Mahler himself, along with the likes of Homer, Mozart, and (why not) Hillel--anyone who was anyone in human history--who were totally not long dead, but had been chilling in elfin purgatory, available at just the moment Michael needs a song of power to be improvised on the spot.  As a series of related episodes, these sorts of things are sometimes fun, but I lost faith in anything like a coherent arc, and when the author would go on about the core mythology that bound all the threads together--something about mages and makers of many different races--I didn't find those parts especially compelling.

But here's for putting the creativity back in Creation.  Songs of Earth and Power maybe didn't amount, in itself, to the grand symphony it sensed behind all things, but it had a few nice tunes, and that's fine with me.

Review: The Windup Girl, by Paulo Bacigalupi

I never realized it before reading this novel, but what the world needs is a dystopia in the style of Graham Greene, where the sadness, secrecy, danger, ubiquity... the altogether oppressiveness of a failed social effort can be written up as the perfect pot to stew the uneasy moral gristle of the characters.  Greene, of course, had a knack for spotting these tired pockets of the real world, but your better science fiction is all about removing constraints like that, and it has a long history of creating sorry futures as a critique of political ideas.  It'd be a great marriage, is what I'm saying.

The Windup Girl is not that novel, for better or worse, but I will admit that I read a good third of it really wanting it to shape up as a new Quiet American.  The setting works: it's in a future southeast Asia, in a region historically resistant to imperialism, yet eternally dealing with the attempt, simmering with potential coups and clogged up with its own webs of loyalty, history, crime and general hardship.  Generations of resource depletion and biological capitalism have left humanity diseased and dependent, and in the Thailand of the story, have put subsistence living toe to toe with modernity.  We are also introduced early on to a character I wanted to read as a reinvented Alden Pyle.  Similarly named, Anderson Lake is likewise more of an interloper than a proper protagonist, who, along with the boozy expats of his acquaintance, doesn't quite jibe with the culture.  He's in truth a powerful political agent, a fact belied by his willingness to risk himself within the intrigues of Thai society.  He takes a possessive interest in a local woman, and, well, even if that's as far as the similarities go, you can at least see why I was rolling with this.

But the cracks start early.  We're in Lake's mind from the beginning of the book, and it doesn't take long for the his schemes to be revealed, in context, as probably malignant.  Nor is there any allegorical love triangle here.  Emiko may be a trophy object but, well, she's not Thai for one thing (not even Japanese, strictly speaking), and more importantly, she is a challenging individual in her own right.  There is overall too much action, too many characters, and not the right kind of internal space to really qualify as a Greene knockoff.  It's not a tenuously drawn inner balance, this novel, it's the usual point-of-view plot mosaic.

Bacigalupi imagines a world where food sources have been monopolized by a handful of "calorie companies," modern-day Monsantos who have long since succeeded in suppressing local agriculture in exchange for imports or rights to grow non-propagating proprietary strains that the companies sell.  (It's the American Midwest extrapolated to a global hellscape.)  It's not spelled out whether the succession of plagues that have further eradicated old species and leveled the human population were intentionally waged by the calorie companies, or whether they were a result of tempting the world's fate with highly engineered monoculture.  In any case, the political arms of the companies actively seek out what biodiversity is left, with an aim to develop it (no doubt with similar results down the line), and keep the business one step ahead of the next pandemic.  Thailand has made it this far by vicious containment measures, and a rumored pet scientist.  The nation has also maintained an old seed vault in the capital that Anderson Lake wants very much to negotiate. 

The detail of this sorry world is very well drawn out, and the author has really done a good job in fleshing out a location for its conflicts, and selecting characters to witness it from different angles.   This Bangkok seethes with people and squirms under the weight of history.  There is a languor to the city that comes from more than the jungle climate, it's heat, fatalism, decay, a struggle that's more necessary than hopeful. The impact of global scourge and dearth of kilowatt-hours is so effectively shown that I kept noticing the times it was told.  (My only mild complaint about this book is that he uses just a hair more neologisms than I felt were necessary.)

Most things are windup in this world.  The earth has been so poorly used that hand-crank power has become the ubiquitous poor-man's alternative to carbon.  However, Emiko (the girl of the title) isn't throwback tech, she's been made to have jerky toy-like motions.  Emiko is an engineered person, a New Person in the book's language, one who has been bred, altered, and conditioned from birth for a role as a high-end courtesan.  Not just with the creepy doll motions, she's genetically predisposed to obey and please, to seek male guidance, and what the hell, that's three novels in a row (not to mention a tv show) now where subservience is governed by sci-fi technicalities, and although it's gotten under my skin, Emiko's arc is quite satisfying in this story, because this is a girl whose mind has a slim chance of conquering her genetic tendencies.  This far from removed the microcosm for which she's been designed, obedience has treated her poorly.  Abandoned by her old patron and forced into a lesser life of prostitution, in an unsuitable physical environment, she wants safety in Anderson Lake, and that is something her world will also probably not allow. 

A spoiler here, but among the many plot whorls, a new disease has been simmering in Lake's business front, an entirely natural one.  It is managed with the scientific tools at hand, but not before it gets Lake.  Emiko (and new people in general) are resistant to it, and, we gradually learn, often have other strengths, provided the bullshit low-status-signifying mods can be weeded out (or gradually bred out, or can somehow provide into an ecological advantage).  It's heavily suggested that these new organisms are the future of the planet, and our true legacy.  The fact that the disease strain evolved from a natural mutation (i.e., not engineered and as a random element to the plot) is significant, and we're offered a question here about the nature of nature.  Is human meddling an affront against nature or is it an aspect of it?  Most of us prefer the anthropocentric answer, that we're the end result of evolution, and that we have some relationship with the biological world.  But the honest answer is that we're part of the process that has no goal, and in the book, all our activity has been the kind of catastrophe that increases speciation (and the earth's had a few).

Review: The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

I remember the buzz in the science fiction groups when The Sparrow first came out. It populated almost everyone's best list for awhile (and the ones who didn't love it felt that the acclaim came at the expense of the genre's roots, which is silly enough to make me wonder if I am not in fact misremembering things), and among that crowd, it's not hard to see what the appeal was. The book is genial, lightly philosophical, hard-ish on the science, and tends to be empowering of women, introverts, and technical people. But as a plotted novel, Russell kind of botches the delivery, and I suspect that anyone's enjoyment of it is going to depend an awful lot on what they are reading for (even more than is usually the case).

The story is set in the near future (that is, 1996's near future, which is getting very close to the present), and it's set in motion when an astronomer at the Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico picks up an unexpected signal. The politics of the times, the brevity and intermittancy of the message itself, and the protagonists' personal and professional networks, all have plausibly coincided in such a way that the is revelation is confined to a very small team at first, long enough that they can begin the project themselves, under the discreet hand of the Roman Catholic church (Jesuits, so, you know, the good discreet Catholics), before the public really gets wind of it.  The team determines that it's in fact a snippet of an extraterrestial broadcast. Music, Hot Hits from the next star over. Could this be investigated further? Well, the church is genuinely interested, and consider it within the Society's historical context of mission and scholarship.  Our primary character, Father Emilio Sandoz, is a preeminent linguist, and makes a compelling case for a cultural and scientific effort.  Could we actually get there and check it out?  Surprisingly yes: 2019 technology sometimes moves asteroids during mining (chucking mass out the back), and a sealed rock could in fact keep up 1g by doing this for a couple decades.  The team already includes a pilot, an astronomer, and a polymath, and holy shit, this is all really happening. 

The discovery aspects of the book are done pleasantly well.  It reads like sf "competence porn" that for once isn't driven by male ego.  Russell makes a lot out of the collaborative process, doesn't discount luck (enough things have come together that the Catholics, and Emilio particularly, can't help but see it as God's plan), and keeps a group dynamic based on open communication.  So much of the planning and travel--it must be at least half the book--takes place over intelligent dinner party conversations, where people laugh a lot, and reveal themselves over that extra glass of wine.  The individuals are diverse, likeable and interesting enough (Anne Edwards, the middle-aged den mother of the group, appears to be a real Mary Sue character here, the writer herself herding them along), and these kinds of scenes continue even through the voyage to the planet eventually known as Rakhat, where contact with the alien species is first made.

And even if it takes a while to get there, the events on the planet are interesting.  Finally, the long-developed situation starts changing, and it's the best part of the book.  The characters misjudge the nature of Rakhat's intelligent species (who are about as responsible with civilization as humans are, even if they're much better stewards of their planet).  There are two of them, nearly indistinguishable, and of course people always overestimate the Eloi at first.  Russell's understanding of ecological relationships drives the plot here, as well as inevitable cultural ignorance, and it's quite cleverly done. 

It's a perfectly cromulent way to develop the story, but these parts are all told in flashback, and it's explicit from page one that something went terribly wrong on Rakhat.  Emilio Sandoz is the only member of the team to return, and he's disfigured, cynical, sick, and with what little knowledge that's revealed, disgraced.  His illness seems alien or supernatural (it's not, although he's been plenty traumatized), and the investigatory committee is hungry for his side of the story (although they have years worth of reports, and the popular conclusions that they have allowed are fairly ridiculous assumptions--I'll try not to spoil it). 

Sending the mission off the rails and breaking Sandoz's faith would have worked fine as a linear progression, but this extended flashback business was not the right way to manage the contrasts.  In effect, Russell has decided to set up two kinds of novels and make them sit awkwardly side by side.  For a mission that has succeeded on a foundation of open communication within a group, the author is keeping information from the reader here only to delay Emilio's big reveal.  Since none of the church officials we meet really do much to move the plot that way, I didn't really care about any of them, and yet they occupy a substantial chunk of the text.  Russell wants The Sparrow to be a voyage of discovery and a tense character drama at the same time, but in the discovery part, the characters aren't behaving dramatically, and in fact, any sustained personal tension would have been inimical to the kind of story that's working itself out.  Most of them don't even change in any meaningful way.  And the one guy who does have an arc--Sandoz--is also the hardest character for the reader to approach.  He starts off a somewhat enigmatic man--withholding his inner self from others as a sort of self-enforced humility--and keeps this level of remove throughout the story, a trait which grows sort of beatific as his faith deepens.  When he's recovered afterwards, he's closed off for less subtle reasons.  We spend the whole novel revisiting him in his broken state, but it doesn't become meaningful until the end, after all of his relationships are established, and we finally understand what caused it.  Probably Emilio's more genuine opening after the trauma is the point of these sections, but even though it feels good to point him in a direction of recovery or redemption, it's still a tremendous anticlimax, and it would have made a better epilogue than ongoing plot.

Review: Fledgling, by Octavia E. Butler

[This morning, I upended a mug of coffee all over my grandfather's old desk, splashing my computer, a small stack of books, and all of the usual office detritus.  I mean, usually I reserve that sort of thing for work, where I can dramatically imperil valuable documents instead of 1950s scholastic-grade oak.  But apparently I've grown weird about books, and maybe this was nature's way of telling me to write a couple of those up and put them away.]

Fledgling, in 2005, was published just a little bit ahead of the modern wave of attractive, socialized fictional vampires.  It's similar on its face to all the Twilight clones, but unlike most of the selections from the Paranormal Romance section, this one still feels like an innovative concept, turning a traditionally supernatural relationship into an evolutionary one.  (And unlike I imagine those selections to be, this one is very well written.)  The Ina, as they're called in the book, have been on the earth for as long as humans have, existing in symbiosis with select human individuals.  They live longer than us (and believe themselves wiser), have very low birth rates, and are gifted with more intense strength, dexterity, and senses (especially scent), with the attendant animal-like compulsions to feed, breed and sleep, which, as with their sister sapients, they arrange their society to accomodate and govern.  They're light-sensitive, they require human blood for nourishment, and with proper care, they can heal like Wolverine.  So standard vampires, more or less, except with a more compelling backstory, and a more interesting relationship to people.  Their venom is intoxicating--it feels gooood for us humans to let blood--and it creates dependency, basically mood-altering people into a state of loyalty, contentment, and (not counting the addiction) physical health.  The Ina maintain long-term partnerships with their symbionts, ranging from something rationalized as mutual benefit, to the relationship of an ant to an enslaved aphid.

And now enter the protagonist Shori, a pubescent Ina (looks 12, but is in fact in her fifties) who possesses some genetic advantages due to experimental interbreeding.  Notably, she has dark skin that protects her in the daylight, but she's also improved in her Ina-ness compared to the rest of them--faster, stronger, more desirable scent, more intoxicating saliva, an objectively better specimen. 

You will have perhaps noticed that in a few strokes, Butler has transformed an overused fantasy trope into a complicated question of race, power, sexism, sexuality, consent, agency, and morality. 

It's a highly accessible read, too.  In the opening pages of the book, Shori wakens from a near-death injury, without her memory, amid corpses, ashes, ruins.  What happened to her?  What's her place among her kind?  It's a fairly linear (if somewhat episodic) path to answer those questions, and the prose doesn't wander too far off into the philosophical depths, even though Butler's given herself every opportunity to do so.  Shori herself is a sympathetic outsider, and her personal stakes are high enough to keep the plot chugging.  Focusing on the better people of either species, and pushing the really incorrigible brand of racism onto the snooty vampire elite, dodges a lot of the challenge for readers.  (Or at least for white readers--I'd be very curious to know how this book reads from an African-American perspective.) 

But the thing is, this story would have failed without a strong and nuanced understanding of those big themes, and they provoked a strong emotional reaction in me.  I left it disappointed how the adult Ina couldn't avoid the same traps of prejudice and patriarchy that have ruined so much of human history.  I liked Shori, but I couldn't let go of how damn patronizing she was toward her harem, or how her first symbiont was not a willing addition to it, how his intellectual antipathy toward obedience and revulsion at sexualizing a child's body had no chance against Shori's vampiric love juice.  I was affronted by the idea of people as pets, either abused or loved.  I was mad at the Ina for not creating a better society, and then angry, yet again, at my own damn species for the same reason.  It seems like a small novel to contain such big currents, but then, that's what makes it good.

Review: Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis

I don't know how I feel that the cover of my copy of Time's Arrow gave the plot away.  Not because it ruins the story so much--we know that this Tod Friendly character's a creep, nursing some nasty past or other--but I wonder how I would have received it if I hadn't known already that the scale of evil reached all the way up to the Nazi death camps, if the escalation would have startled me (more), or if I would have found a different perspective on a re-read.  (Welp, I guess I also just blew the chance for you to go read it and report back to me.  Sorry about that.)

The conceit is that the narrator, whoever that is exactly, is stuck in Tod's body as a traveler, unable to exert his will on it or to see beyond what Tod sees.  He perceives time going in reverse, only able to guess at the demons in his host's past until he actually gets there.  The narrator opens his eyes and gasps in the man's last decrepit breath, as doctors batter him to sensation on the table.  He painfully retraces his backwards way home, slowly getting more vital as he de-ages.  He retains a forward-thinking sense of cause and effect, and Amis wrings comic irony from any number of vignettes told from that point of view.  Beautiful things are lovingly destroyed, food is masticated into form and returned to the store for money, arguments and hurt feelings are suddenly reconciled with insensitivity or violence, and the toilet and the trash are the benevolent wellsprings and motive forces of humanity.  Sometimes the bits are well-written enough that they almost work in either direction, at which point I had to stop and read them again.  Even for a short book, and even with the humor,** it got tiring.

And it's a pretty well-worn shtick by the time we get to the real horrorshow, where Friendly finds himself with a proper German name, working under some fictionalized Mengele.  He relates Auschwitz as the asshole of the world, and can think of no higher praise.  Here, people are nursed from death to health, often with the urgent intervention of the doctor's own hand, and he soars with the good feeling of it.  After the war, his story devolves to anticlimax, as the narrator fades away from consciousness toward the innocence of infancy.  Amis suggests that Tod's a product of his time, that anyone could be corrupted with his empowerment and influences, but I don't buy it--even as a young man before the war, Tod (now Odilo) reads like some kind of sociopath. I don't think people abuse their wives and terrorize their neighbors just because they're allowed to.  Too many of us drift along with the historical tides, but others smile and merrily dig in an oar.

Heavy stuff, and you know what?  Enough already.  I want to say that the problem here is that Time's Arrow either deals with far too weighty a subject for a gimmick book, or it's far too gimmicky and ironic for a Holocaust book. 

Or maybe that's not exactly the right complaint.  This backwards thing** is well-suited to terrifying experience, but, I think, it invites a more existential and universal sort of anxiety, giving us readers a rare alternate angle on these nagging questions of what it means to briefly be thinking meat in an incomprehensibly complex universe.  I mean, you don't need genocide to make that point. 

I found myself fixated on the reality of the narrator.  I don't actually think Amis addresses "the rules" to my satisfaction, but he manages to squirrel away from scrutiny because it's such a short book.  The speaker knows back from forward, and for that matter, he's stuck working in the language and metaphor we know, which is inevitably built on a foundation of causality... so why does he accept the mode of his experience?  (And when he briefly asserts normal time, why doesn't the return to reverse chronology keep bothering him?)  And who the hell is he narrating to?  What is his perception of elapsed time?   Because the continuity of his thought (that is, this short novel) sure makes it seems like he's walking us through a whole backwards life in the space of an hour or two.  I settled in my mind that it was not an alien presence talking to us, but some other projection of Tod/Odilo himself.  That is, another artifact of the same bolted-together biohardware floating there in space-time, one that is merely perceiving things in a different way, because after all, who the fuck knows the hidden depths of how all this works.  And the message here--the holy-shit, make-you-think part that has really kept this novel alive in my mind--is that we can't condemn the widdershins experience for being any more arbitrary and bizarre than this one.  We are only along for the ride on time's forward arrow too.  The best we can really do is comment.




* Speaking of detached humor, and evil, and layers of irony, oh look, Martin Amis wrote the introduction to the copy of Lolita  that I read.  Seems fitting.

** It's not the most common one, but I think it's fair to call it a trope.  I was tearing through my shelves trying to find it, but once again, the internet was the better tool:  the first story I remember reading in this vein was called Divine Madness, by Roger Zelazny (which, I will add, didn't suck).  That one got to the scary and sensitive too, and didn't even require awful people doing unimaginable things. 

Review: Reamde, by Neal Stephenson

When I was reading this book last December, up popped a spookily coincident NPR story about new developments in ransomware, where hackers would only take payments in bitcoin to free up your locked files.  Bitcoin, meanwhile, isn't far removed in either concept or practice from in-world video game currency, and we all remember the karmic hilarity when its largest exchange, Mt. Gox (still hanging on to its original name, when it was made for investing virtual gaming loot), went ass-up a couple of years ago, with hundreds of thousands of electronic Fun Bux still unaccounted for.  In Reamde, Stephenson only got ahead of these stories by a couple of years.  Science fiction?  Maybe just barely.

The story is set in motion when reclusive billionaire Richard Forthrast and his niece Zula inadvertently cross paths with a small-time criminal connected to the Russian mafia.  Chases and movie violence follow, but the nut of it all is that our short-for-this-novel thug had been contracted to deliver some data to the mobsters, but it got locked up in ransomware that infected his computer while he was up the night before playing fictional online RPG, T'Rain.  Zula winds up kidnapped and dragged along with the Russians as they look for these hackers to get the data, and a growing cast of interesting characters scramble to respond.  (It already sounds complicated, right?)  Will the kidnappers realize they've got the niece of the guy who struck it filthy rich inventing the game?

And here's a confession: I played World of Warcraft sporadically for a recent year or two.  I didn't really play it right*--because hey, it's me--but I can certainly attest how compelling is the sheer size of the world and all its official supporting background lore, as well as the organic depth it has grown from all the people wandering around and feeling out the stories.  The fictional T'Rain is fashioned as the next generation of WoW, and Stephenson delivers a pile of backstory on how something so broad could come together. 

We're introduced to many of the fictional game developers, various sorts of geek obsessives who make Richard Forthrast (Vietnam-era draft dodger, erstwhile weed smuggler, with his family of borderline survivalist crackpots) look like a grounded member of normal society.  The game world is built on an inappropriately thorough (and otherwise uselessly fictional) geological model developed by one of its founding geniuses.  One conceit of T'Rain is that it does its world-building from, literally, the ground up--that is, it is a planet which generates its mineral wealth (a big deal when everything in it priced in gold pieces) by some academic-level approximation of natural processes.  The reason it isn't called Terrain is that Richard also brought on a couple of by-the-pound fantasy authors to crank out a world's worth of cultural backstory, one of whom is a prolific hack, unapologetic about chucking apostrophes into every proper noun.  (The other fancies himself a scholar and a linguist, and they drive each other amusingly nuts.)  Sadly, these guys amount to not much more than subplots, but it's a secondary challenge to somehow fold players' rogue behaviors into the proper game.

The other conceit of the game is that it's built to encourage gold farming.  Gps are transferrable to the outside world as currency, and players can fall under one anothers' vassalage.  Low-level users are effectively paid a pittance to mine out T'Rain (often using bots), while players with higher purposes typically pay dues and have better quests.  If WoW once gave economists a small thrill to observe it as a microcosm of a regulated economy, they'd go nuts about T'Rain, which has a permanent labor class and extraction-based wealth baked right into it.  Stephenson is a good enough writer not to make this into a polemic, although I think he wants it seen as more mutually beneficial than fundamentally unequal.  He does wind out a longer picture of the players behind all the exploited toons--the world where the Chinese hackers grew up, but those guys frankly end up okay.

So anyway, the key to some criminal filing cabinet is locked up in T'Rain somewhere, and all the best scenes in the book--mostly because they're so strange--have the characters chasing one another around in the game environment.  Outside, there is a real-world pursuit going on too, and we see these hackers and trolls get to see fleshed out as real people, which is something anyone who's spent time online wonders about.  (It doesn't take long for us to get squarely sympathetic with this guy who basically writes spam emails for a living.)  There's a tightly-plotted novel in those events, and some logical conclusions. 

And instead, we have a thousand-page monster here.  It's an undeniably entertaining one (this is possibly the fastest kilopage I've ever been through--I was up late reading it every night), but there's a great big action movie that grows out of the central plot like an aggressive tumor, complete with spies and terrorist extremists and numerous deaths just off screen, just to show how evil these terrorist assholes are.  It's enjoyable as entertainment, and I'm glad that Stephenson takes moments in all this to point out actual physics of ballistics and human endurance, but there's a sense of just cranking it all out at top speed.  Romances don't really go anywhere, some of those natural conclusions are forgotten about (why didn't Richard take Marlon the hacker under his wing, just like he did his niece?  that would have been perfect) and we kind of forget about all those eccentric game developers too.  And why are the baddies so cartoonishly evil, when there's such rich comedy to be mined by pitting them against the American version of jihadis (Richard's more eccentric relatives) in the final showdown?  Especially considering that getting the whole cast to this improbable point took so much effort.

I won't fail to recommend this one (and Stephenson isn't known for his endings anyway), but I would have enjoyed the carefully tied-together version more.  I like to think he was writing as fast as he could to keep current events from catching up to his speculation.

*I think to get the most of any MMORPG, you really have to go in for the team aspect of it, block off time, and talk out loud to others.  Instead, I mostly played as a means to randomly and quietly get away from people, which is pretty much the opposite thing.  You can play WoW as a solo quest game, but it only goes so far that way.  I still miss wandering around sometimes, though.

Review: 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson

In the story of 2312, the emotional world of a gentle young acolyte explodes open when he discovers an ancient musical instrument in the caves outside Megadon city, under the twin moons of his home planet.  But, deterred by Father Brown and the other Temple priests, he suffers a mental breakd--

Oh shit.  Wait.  No, I'm describing the progressive rock epic, 2112.  The science fiction novel, 2312 is set a couple hundred years later.  Obviously.

It (the novel) primarily serves as a wide-angle view of life in the civilized solar system that takes place on almost all the other planets of the solar federation.  It's conveyed mosaic-like, primarily filled with point-of-view character sections, soaring across diverse geography, liberally broken up with creative lists, encyclopedia entries, interpretations of contemporary art forms, and highlights from historical documents.  (I'd bet that Mr. Robinson has also enjoyed a John Dos Passos phase.)

The year 2312, in Robinson's history, is a pivotal one.  The plot is... well, there is a plot, I guess.  The story begins with an attack on the primary human settlement on Mercury.  Swan Er Hong and Fitz Wahram, our two protagonists, are connected in different ways to one of extended humanity's key independent political and scientific groups, and in that capacity, they chase the whodunit clues around the solar system.  I believe that, plot-wise, the effect is meant to be one of various paths intersecting, showcasing kind of an inflection point between the ages in that titular, and no solid climax is really intended.  That's fine, but it's centered on a mystery and a chase, and that motor doesn't propel things forward worth a damn--seriously, I recall finding myself 200 pages in, trying to catalogue whether any movement toward solving the central mystery had occurred at all--and even by the end of the book, all that's really revealed is that the human sphere is a little bigger than realized, and that there are new factions in it, with different motivations. 

But for all that, it's not an unpleasant traipse.  Robinson's schtick, as I understand things, is environmentally-themed sf.  If we presuppose that human capability could advance so far, then how the heck could it be done?  I believe that 2312 takes place in the same continuity as his more famous Mars trilogy (probably why it's skirted here in favor of everything else), in which Robinson took to task a plausible-within-known-physics approach to making the red planet habitable, complete with planet-scale engineering and challenging political ramifications.  (Or so I understand without having read them--this is a theme of interest to me, but with a new author, I preferred a standalone volume for an introduction.) 

2312 takes place in the century following an established Martian civilization.  Most of the rest of the system has been worked over similarly by that year, and Robinson takes care to describe how, in the case of each sterile alien desert, a stable human environment could conceivably be engineered, trucking nitrogen from Titan, for example, or cooling Venus and whacking it hard enough with celestial objects to give it a day.  And if people lived on that toxic, cataclysmic rock, then what would the transition be like?  Or could a city could thrive by constantly fleeing the blazing hellscape of Mercury's bright side?  How could small bodies could be turned into floating terraria of all varieties?  (Robinson creates a lot of cultural diversity in these outskirts, and he smirks at a lot of classic science fiction societies along the way.)  How could our own earth possibly be un-fucked?  Robinson really enjoys humanizing these landscapes (figuratively and literally), and he shows at least enough scientific grasp of ecology, and paints enough limitations and constraints, for me to suspend my disbelief.  Even in 2312, with the ability to shift matter throughout the system at will, humanity is starting to confront resource shortages.  And so it goes.

My disbelief in human cooperation was a little harder to suspend, though.  One problem for me is that his society me an unfortunate parallel with those John Varley Seven Worlds novels (which I love), which maybe didn't wrangle the angle of geological science in such a detailed way, but understood us hairless apes so very brilliantly, and that society spread hypothetically across the ecliptic plane was dysfunctional enough to accept.  Real governments and populations are so diverse and cloying--and Robinson worked at this, I realize, he was taking a good approach to express exactly this, but the locals were still not shown as stultifying enough or brutal enough to convince me they could overcome themselves.  Maybe it's just my cynicism: I can't convince myself that 20 billion of us would survive indefinitely in a state of high technology, even after extending the odds by moving into every abandoned shack in Sol's neighborhood and squeaking a few minor gods out of the machine.

Not to say Robinson's individual characters are unconvincing.  I liked them well enough, and they kept me reading.  I think he did succeed in creating very exotic and altered people who could, superseding every homer prejudice we would ordinarily have, be easily recognized as not only regular folks, but good, decent, and distinguishable ones.  Of course, if, before I invested in them, I had caught on that impulsive, self-destructive Swan was not only from Mercury but mercurial, and that patient, thoughtful Wahram, from Titan, was literally saturnine, I might have found it a hair too cute.  So I may have just ruined them for you, but it worked out for me.  In all, it was a enjoyable tour.

Review: Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Brosh

It feels a little silly that this review will take me almost as long to write (an hour or two, depending on my level of focus) as it took to read the book, but, you know, someone needs to tell you to go out and buy it.  It's not just that it's funny and insightful (it is), or that the author's primitively drawn dad is so darn compelling and handsome (he is!), or that you want to read the handful of strips of new content written just for the book (you do).  Do it because you'll feel better about finally sending a few nickels Ms. Brosh's way for the comics you enjoyed for free for years. Because, now that I made you think about it, your image of being a Good Person who cares about independent authors is finally coming into conflict with your cheapness and your glee about getting a quality freebie for this long.  Agonizing over whether to pay the writer will give you all the tools you need to love, hate, and become bemused with yourself, all at the same time, which is precisely the correct motivation for reading her strip in the first place.

Oh, and also there's general-purpose life stories and bits about dogs.  Here's a woman who knows how to tell you about the dysfunctional mind of a canine.  Another great reason.

Before buying the book, I hadn't checked the Hyperbole and a Half blog since she'd apparently left the game, ostensibly to assemble the book, but also with a cliffhanger about depression, which is a hell of a place to last see anyone.  (She followed it up two years later, and, reassuringly, there's an unrelated new-ish post up there as well.)  I don't share the manic, imaginative side of Brosh's temperament, which is why I will never create a comedy routine out of it all, but I get all too well the inward-looking side, where self-awareness comes perilously close to self-image, and as another person who perceives himself as just barely smart enough to detect my own delusion, irrationality, and inadequacy, I understand how it can get you down, and farther down.  (The bits about identity got to me most.  As for depression, I sometimes think the only thing that staves off the clinical version is my abject terror of getting trapped in there without the tools to get out.)  You, dear reader, probably know this balance pretty well yourself (introverts of the world, unite! think quietly about this by yourselves), and I commend Brosh for the ability to write poignant (and sometimes silly) jokes about the kinds of things that can go on in the deep places.

Although it's illustrated, the form is not really a comic, and although it's written, it's not really a book or an essay either.  I wish the thought were original with me, but I've read the form of Hyperbole and a Half described as the text equivalent of a standup routine.  To capture the timing of that delivery is very impressive, and it couldn't be done without using the pictures, without an intuition of how long it takes them to convey the content, and without reducing that content to some kind of essence.  They're crude, yeah, but they're brilliantly crude.

So buy it, or, if you're too cheap, go troll the blog.  Laugh mostly, and cry when you need to.

Review: Home, by Marilynne Robinson

Way back in April, I reviewed the novel Gilead by the same author. In a comment, Bright (who as usual was right) recommended the followup Home maybe a month later. I eventually got to reading it a month or two after that, and, finally, I'm just now am writing something about it. I guess that's how things are these days.

The reading part flew by though, a flickering instant in my current slow time. I don't even know how it could have been such a page-turner. It fills in the other half (or the other third--it looks like Robinson has recently followed up with Lila as well) of the story that was told in Gilead, but it does so straightforwardly, without layering in new mysteries or misdirection, or much new plot. Lost is that strange meta element from the last novel with its weighty and unspoken secrets to decode (some of those relationships don't look so meaningful from the other side, sadly), but it kept my interest just the same. It's the story of Jack Boughton (imagined by John Ames of the last novel as some kind of secret-sharer, but now just a man) and his return visit home, now filled out from a closer perspective.

Jack remains irresolute, although he's more likeably so this time, because we see him trying so hard to overcome himself. We get to know his sister Glory as the primary point-of-view character too--the lone sibling who stayed home with their father--and it's satisfying to watch her (inhabited by her own doubts and failures) form an uneasy alliance, and eventually a genuine understanding, with her brother. Neither, in their way, has lived up to their family ideal, but then that perfect family is given to be a bit of a veneer too, and one which has worn through with the passage of time. It's as though the Boughtons were the family that tried a little too hard to express a joyous bond, the one that laid on the Christian middle-American values a little too thickly.  (Their reverend father had no worse motive than practicing what he preached, but his version of the story wasn't quite big enough for the world.)  The edifice itself, even, is a big pile of kitsch, with an unused tire swing and red barn in the view, and choked inside with dusty bric-a-brac, loaded up with tired ideas of family. The Boughtons never solved the inevitable scandals and disappointments in their lives with love, but they used a prescribed kind of love to paper them all over.

(Their house, by the way, reminds me of my grandparents' house, and Mr. Boughton a bit of my grandmother in her late days. It's a little uncomfortable.)

To this Jack returns, a ship at sea, either fleeing or seeking harbor, take your pick. His father is in failing health, and although it's not really why he came back, Jack can't avoid facing him in his decrepitude. It's no stretch to paint the old man as the fading embodiment of home itself, and I feel very guilty about it, but he's irritating. Whenever a real conversation starts to develop between Jack and Glory, in dodders old Boughton to demand attention, always diverting the story into the boring territory of meals, naps, and efforts at comfort. He keeps interjecting these small vanities, and it builds up to a sad climax where he finally judges, finally castigates Jack after all these years.  And thus spent, he's at last free to drift away for good.

I could relate to Jack and Glory's discomfort in their home and with their father, and with their degrees and methods of distancing.  Some ideas of "goodness" are really in contrast here (in terms of worldly matters like equality or American hegemony, Jack is by far the better man; in terms of preserving their father's idea of love, overlooked Glory is by far the more noble of her several siblings).  Jack's difficult to connect to just the same, as his rebellion is a matter of his constitution, and his sins remain big ones, even though a desire to poke a stick at his postcard existence makes sense to me.  Glory's hidden shame (living in sin, OMG!) was easier to relate.  Her descent, such as it is, is more inadvertent, and there's a balance here between accepting her own agency and society's in making her life choices into false dilemmas.  I kind of wish Robinson had removed a few of the pancake breakfast scenes in order to paint these personal vs. social notions of goodness more starkly.

Jack, of course, doesn't stay, and Robinson is unlikely to ever let us know what happened to him next.  But he can't really ever separate from his own life either, and his general disconnection, it's clear, is a lot like homelessness.  The question floats up near the end, is home the soul we can't get away from?  It's an artifice, but is it essential to our humanity just the same?  We are all, after all, written into the world.  How much distance can we really get away from the plot? 

Review: Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman

Maus, as currently published, is a collection of graphic stories that were serialized between 1974 and 1991. (It has been previously released as two volumes--My Father Bleeds History, and Here My Troubles Began, and this edition combines them all.)  I'd heard of it over the years, but finally read it after my daughter was assigned a copy for her history class. (At 17, it was the kid's first experience with the comic book format, which makes me feel as though I've failed as a parent.) It's a family memoir, his father's recollection of the Holocaust, and the author's own reflection of the legacy it left on himself and his family. I've been finding it difficult to review, and obviously it's taken me some time.

I can't do much service describing Spiegelman's significance in the underground comics movement (go to Wikipedia for that), but suffice to say, don't think superheroes and adolescent nerds here: this is a man who advocates cartooning and comics as an intellectual art form (Maus is the first publication in this format to win a Pulitzer), and experiments with the dense quality of the medium for storytelling. He is particularly invested, I think, in working out which sorts of things comic frames are particularly well-suited to convey, and how working concepts out in that medium can add something unique to the storytelling, with a taste for pushing boundaries. (In an explicit example, there's a clever segment discussing how voices and stories can be impositions on memory, but graphic art is unique in that it can communicate wordlessness.)

Although it's told in a visual medium, Maus, as a comic, relies less on the spectacle of those visuals than you might think--it's not a painting, in other words, it's a narrative, and the art serves as an ongoing comment to the plot and character, and often bears the forward motion and rhythm of the story. (The book is entirely in black and white, which I tend to prefer, but it's drawn somewhat roughly and is heavy on the inks.) Speigelman draws humans with animal faces, different ones for different cultures. Jews are mice, rooted out by the Nazi cats. Christian Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs, and there's an occasional French frog or Gypsy cricket in the mix. To me, it called to mind those vintage Donald Duck comics I had in the pile as a kid, and eventually I came to realize that the evocation of Disney was intentional--Maus as the Mouse--a borrowed iconic motif. But the drawings didn't remind me of Mickey and Donald so much as those chimerical dog-faced creatures--whatever the hell species Goofy and Pete are supposed to be--that seemed to populate the entire cast of Disney comic extras, and I found the effect creepily anonymizing. The few times Spiegelman draws the characters with human faces, they get some sudden impact as individuals. 

Sometimes the animal faces are shown as masks. When old Vladek pretends to be a non-Jewish Pole, his piggy face is tied on with a string. And the times when Spiegelman the author gets a little closer to the fourth wall, his mouse mask is revealed too. Is cultural identity something you wear or something you are? I like to think it's the former, but I realize that's a privileged opinion to have. The Polish Jews had no choice in the matter.

Vladek's story is given to his son in a matter-of-fact way (they are based on real-life taped interviews with his father), and even as the world constricts around him, he gets right on with what was happening then and what happened next.  The old man often erupts in incredulity or irritability, and he recalls many people fondly, but the sorrow and the loss are deeper emotions for him, clearly harder to access.  His story is one of luck and uncanny pragmatism as he evades one scrape, buys a bit of time till the next (worse) one, networks within his limits, shaves any tiny advantage, bails when he must.  He and his wife give their first son to an imagined safer haven, and the poor kid and his cousins are poisoned rather than face capture by the Nazis.  One of the scenes that sticks with me is how, at the war's end when prisoners were shipped from the camp, stuffed into railroad cars by the Nazis, Vladek manages to hoist himself up on a hammock made out of a hoarded shirt, while the crowd is jammed in below him.  How can you survive as people suffocate and die in piles below you without shutting off some chunk of your empathy?  And yet it's when his wife--another survivor--commits suicide years after the war, that the old man finally turns into himself, the last moment we see of him before crossing over to inflexible geezerhood. 

It makes it hard for the American son.  Nearly half the story is set in the book's present day, with Art dealing with his relationship with his father, trying to put his own grownup feelings of guilt and inadequacy and irritation in a context he can grapple with.  In some ways, Vladek is everyone's aging parent, caught behind modern sensibilities and too old to care too much about them.  But not much deeper than that, it's been impossible to live up to a dead older brother, or to a dead sainted wife and mother, and given what the old man has been through, it's got to feel incredibly selfish to demand any kind of attention.  So Spiegelman gets him to open up about the experience instead, lets it serve as both therapy and tribute, and the world gets Maus. 

Review: The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

Well, I suppose I should finally get around to reviewing this novel, now that Donna Tartt has gone and let Pulitzer get all over the thing. It's taking up a lot of room in the pile anyway.  I'm embarrassed to find myself riding the critical bandwagon for those these sweet, sweet Google hits (dozens of them!), but I want you all to know that I read it and formed opinions of my own a good month or so before it was Literary.

The goldfinch in the novel isn't a bird, but rather The Goldfinch, the famous painting by Carel Fabritius, reproduced way down below.  In the alternate timeline* of the novel, it goes missing in a terrorist attack on the New York gallery that it's touring. (The attack is an undisguised parallel--and really, all the big metaphors in the novel are out there in the open and enjoyably discussed--to the artist's life, which reached an early end when the gunpowder factory next door to his studio blew up, taking the poor man out, and most of his work too. Tragically so: Fabritius was the most respected pupil of Rembrandt, and to read Tartt describe him, he was innovative almost to the point of anachronism, a rockstar back in his day.) In the mayhem around the museum explosion, the small painting falls into the hands of 13-year-old Theo Decker, and even the actions that lead the boy to keep it are innocent enough at the beginning--he couldn't be more traumatized--but as the novel unfolds, the piece persists through his young life, hidden under beds and in secret lockers, a token of undeniable significance that he feels lends similar significance to his own life struggles.

The Goldfinch is a long one, but it flies right by, even while including its share of heavy thoughts. I find a lot to admire in Tartt's writing style. It's as though every scene washes in and washes out in a heady wave of intelligent free-associative goodness, but it never lingers too long, never bogs down in the details. And if the plot, at times, appears to be tacking back and forth a bit, it doesn't stop moving, and doesn't lose its momentum. It's as if the author has found some interesting new middle area between tightly-mapped literary convention and what the sloppy course of a life is actually like. The dialogue reads like this, too. It's full of the inhibiting awkward pauses and stutter-starts that infuse real conversations, but it doesn't lack the usual storytelling impact that dialogue gives. It just makes it feels a little more natural.

[And since it came up at one point, does Tartt have any tells as a female author? Well, about 40% of the novel discusses Theo's relationship to his mother, and for a bildungsroman, it doesn't focus much on the usual checklist of boys' "firsts."  And as in the last novel, the role of Manic Pixie Dreamgirl is now occupied by a full, complicated female character who could have had a story of her own.]

Or maybe what's telling is more an old-school sort of character development. The book reminded me a great deal of Great Expectations (and if there's a character named Pip in there, then probably this can be taken as intentional), which I admit I haven't read since high school. I find that to be a bizarre connection in some ways, because Tartt really doesn't share anything I could spot of Dickens' voice, and certainly isn't infected very deeply with his morality. Nor is there anything in any of the settings that I would remotely describe as "Dickensian." But on the other hand, our protagonist does, like the original Pip, skirt among the gray spaces between upper-crust society and underworld criminality though he doesn't really belong in either sphere.  It's a schism struck by a random event, and the book takes us readers on a tour through both worlds. He's given a benefactor, given a love interest by dint of authorial placement (damaged, magnetic Pippa), of similar non-chemistry as Pip and Estelle ever had, but with a conscious statement to make about all of that. And if our new cast members fit perfectly modern molds, the characters have that same kind of fullness and extravagance as Dickens', here pulled up short of caricature (at least most of the time**).

As he develops, Theo comes to incorporate both poles, class and corruption, into his character.  After the startling loss of his free-spirited nurturer of a mother, we turn to sad, grand outskirts of Las Vegas and his alcoholic gambler of a father, possessed of a kind of blowsy self-centered charm and lurking viciousness.  (He probably doesn't deserve his fate either.)  Theo develops into a bright underachiever with a self-destructive streak (ha--unlike Pip), and gravitates into the world of antiques and fine art, which is the commercial side of that same morally vague intersection. I don't actually think I like Theo all that much [and I need to mention this somewhere: my mental images of characters are almost never cast as real-world actors, but in this case, he's clearly played in the movie version by this kid], but I do like how he looks at the world. He has a good eye for the flaws in beauty--like the natures mortes style that his mother describes--the chain on the golden bird--but he values the beauty for its own sake too, which is richer and somehow sturdier for the vulnerability it can't escape. 

Life, of course, is infected by death, treachery, decay. And we, artists and observers, look to uncover the universals that make it beautiful. Does the painting make Theo's life significant? I think we, as per the novel's themes, have to concede that in his life, this is a conceit, but we also are left to recognize that if Theo's life can turn over one of those artistic truths, then that is a worthy thing to have done. Theo's infatuation with Pippa is unfounded, and even he knows that it's not real love, but then, blobs of paint (that, as composed, draw attention to themselves as paint) aren't a living bird either.  Nor, of course, is a gigantic stack of words a real life--Theo and Pippa don't exist any more than the bird does.  But on one very important level, it doesn't matter. There is power, truth, (and irony), and permanence in what these fleeting things can make us feel.

Regarding the painting: several prints of it can be found online, but the lighting was apparently different when some of them were photographed.  There is a set that is a weak sea of browns--the print that's supplied on the page of the book is like this too--while others quite nearly glow. I tried to catch one of the latter, which is more how the book describes it.

* It doesn't fit into the flow of the review, but there is something just a little hinky about that timeline, and though it's a small complaint in what I found to be a great read, I can't quite let it go. I read the first 50 pages of the book thinking the whole thing took place 60 years ago, and it wasn't until  people whipped out cell phones and laptops around the museum that it became clear to me that it's a relatively modern setting, though the precise when is even then not quite pinned down.  (I was looking for reference points by then--I believe Theo says he was alive on 9/11, so we have a range.)  Late on, when Theo's 27, the date is revealed as 2012, which puts the bombing in 1998--would people have had ubiquitous cell phone video cameras then?  (She evidently wrote the book over approximately this span.  Did she write it out linearly?)  Tartt lets the characters watch well-loved old campy movies, but she is mostly vague about current ones.  And for some reason, the kids devote time to video games that I am pretty sure don't exist.  I got the feeling that some art doesn't make her radar.

** Okay the other faint damn amid the praise.  I loved Theo's puckish bad seed of a friend, Boris, but that accent did cross the line.

Review: Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

In order for me to get to what I found interesting about Marilynne Robinson's short novel Gilead, I think I need to first describe the basic shape of it, the turns it took, and as such, this review is chock full of spoilers. So you know.

The book is framed as a long, open letter from Congregationalist minister John Ames to his son. Ames is in his seventies, a man who has married (for a second time) late in life to a much younger woman after many years alone. Now he has been diagnosed with heart disease, and he writes in part to fill his time as the living winds down, and more overtly to offer an account, as well as what wisdom he possesses, to the boy whom he realizes will grow up without him. It's a lovely tone in these beginning parts--sweet, slow-paced, and contentedly lonely. Ames is a thoughtful and humble man, and a deeply loving one, who sees fatherhood and family as an expression of Christian grace, and his philosophies feel like wise ones, informed by his theology.* He's an inquisitive soul--well read--but he's also an accepting one, declining the excursions from the obsolete old abolitionist settlement that others in his life had taken. He's at peace in Gilead.

And so it's going to be that kind of book then, just like the cover blurbs would have you believe. Except that it's not.

Returning to town in these days is one Jack Boughton, that is to say John Ames Boughton, the son of his best friend, who was named after the old pastor. Jack's a charming man and an uneasy soul--your better sort of scoundrel--and one who, despite the name connection (or more likely because of it), old John has never felt comfortable around. There is a dynamic between them as if the younger man had always insouciantly challenged the older to solve and save him, but the older one never figured out an access point. Ames' narrative starts concentrating unduly on his godson, who grows from a snag in his thoughts to a full-on obsession. (And it's not even just Jack: Ames' old firebrand grandfather is clearly not as put to rest as he'd hoped either.) The pastor understands and respects reasoned debate, but it comes out that he has an insurmountable difficulty with people who don't accept existence at face value, who are restless and uneasy in it.

It's flat-out unpleasant to read the old man's narrative veering off from his peaceful adages, but it's also fascinating, and I truly didn't anticipate the story going that way. Though he still keeps his unbreakable decency and his calm religious persepectives, the reader can see that these tools are now failing him. Jack is a man of many sins, but his mortal one was to father a child (when he was college age) with a broken-homed, criminally young girl, and then more or less ignore her. His revealed secret at the time of Ames' writing, which comes late in the novel, is that he's returned less to care for his elderly father and more in hopes of finding a home for his new and already troubled mixed-race family, which in the early 1950s might not be an easy fit, even in a town founded for the cause of abolition.

It took the featured biblical story of Hagar, about halfway through this novel, to clue me in that there's some subtext going on as well, that doesn't quite penetrate the consciousness of the kindly old man. He pictures himself in the sermon as dutiful old Abraham, trusting the godly advice that his difficult actions are indeed for the best. But let's not forget that this is also one of the more perverse Old Testament stories (and sure, hello The Handmaid's Tale), which in novelistic terms, must present some kind of meaning. Old man, young slave, creepy inappropriate sex, reluctant but obligatory shunning. The map isn't perfect, but I still jumped from here to the conclusion that Jack and Mrs. Ames surely had some kind of history with one another, and this is in fact confirmed before long. And although it is not made explicit, it didn't take me much longer to suspect that this young woman (thirty years younger than John and ten younger than Jack), this quietly-spoken woman of mean upbringing who chose to walk into a more socially well-adjusted world, is the very same feral girl that Jack knocked up years before and thereby nailed shut the coffin of his own ruin. Is there a better reason that she would be drawn to curiousity about the first John Ames? If it's not the same person, then it's her deliberate analog.

There is some weird goings-on too, I want to add, about names. The young wife is named only once (for all her presence, she's usually "your mother"), and not by the reverend. She's an interesting character, and I wish we could have had her presented her more as herself. The boy (also deeply present as "you") is not named at all, nor is Jack's Folly (if she is someone different from Mrs. Ames), and her tragic child with Jack, it's noted, is further impoverished by never receiving one in the first place, despite living to three years old or so. Meanwhile, John and Jack are connected by name. "John Ames" is the source of their bond, and of their difficulties as such radically different people.

And okay, I guess I'll make a nod after all to the German-style dialectic as I see it here. John breaks out of his unsettling focus on Jack by opening up about the passion he felt for his wife, in a way he had elided before. It's an innocent sort of passion to be sure, but he was still an old man who fell improbably in love with someone, and he had all the usual symptoms. He truly and genuinely doesn't give a calm fuck about his wife's past, whatever it is, and he loves her for precisely who she is. Which is really a pretty awesome thing. And it's over this understanding where he at long last finds a bond with his living antithesis. Old Ames is as decent a man he believes himself to be, but the wisdom of his days delivered him a late-burning fire in his belly that his rootin' tootin' forebears would have understood. His accepting worldview doesn't leave him, but he's now leaving the world as a whole person. It's brilliantly done, the whole thing.



* If there's conflict evident in this stage, it's a philosophical discussion with the likes of Ludwig Feuerbach, the pet philosopher that his late brother had once taken home. And even that ends up as a gentle chide, respecting the atheist's joy of life, but finding it incomplete without the axiomatic divinity that informs his own spiritual views. (Feuerbach evidently took spirituality as a kind of anthropological epiphenomenon. On those grounds, I'd probably like him quite a bit.) Unfortunately, I'm not a good one to tell you how deeply this philosophical argument underpins the novel, but based on Ames' limited name-dropping, there very might well be a sort of dialectical structure to sniff out here.

Review: Replay, by Ken Grimwood

Replay is a book that is well-regarded among science fiction circles, one of those perfect-length novels that doesn't say anything more than it needs to say, that takes a simple speculative concept and spins it out into a meaningful comment about life. You can almost pull the story synopsis right out of the title. On an otherwise uneventful morning in an otherwise dull mid-life, Jeff Winston suffers a massive heart attack. In his own experience, he dies, but then immediately comes to in his 18-year-old body, the whole of history reset to exactly where it was 25 years before, with the exception of Jeff's intact memories. For inexplicable reasons, he's been given his life to start over again. And, as it painfully turns out, again and again and again.

Does the novel deserve the praise it gets? On page one, I thought I was in for something very special indeed. It opens with this guy dropping dead in the middle of a sad, dull, and strangely sweet conversation, and I thought that Grimwood captured something brilliant there, showing us the banality of life and death at once. As the story goes forward, however, the effect becomes rapidly less impressive--the unelaborate evocation is just Grimwood's writing style--but while I think the story succeeds overall in a related way, and is a rewarding read, it didn't blow me away with its genius. Each time Jeff goes back, he tries things a little differently, and the author walks us through his attempts (which we slowly learn are shortening). Jeff is successful in that he sets up his replayed lives with more in less time, and, as almost anyone would, he puts some effort in to change the broad course of things, and to seek out the deep meaning of life, and the point of his unusual experience of it. But it takes him as much work as ever to get better at living, and all he ever really manages to figure out is what's valuable to him, over which he has limited ultimate control. There are no answers, and the only lesson in the end is the one that is offered to any of us.

[A short novel? With a simple, elegant concept? That doesn't rely much on the depth of prose? It would probably make a great movie, and it's too bad that Groundhog Day went and happened in between.]

It's fun to imagine what you'd do if you got your own clock turned back like that. Speaking for myself, I am sure I'd handle Round One differently than Jeff Winston did. Twenty-five years ago today would put me as a junior in high school, which would be awful, but just around the corner was a college experience that I loved. I am not sure I remember world events (and certainly not sporting events) with enough precision to fund me in 1989, but it's nice to imagine that I'd enjoy the whole span a great deal more with some useful people experience and self-understanding under my belt. Moving on, I could see myself obsessing on those points where I wish I chose differently, and on a replay, I'd look forward to being sure I'd zig where last time I regrettably zagged. If I were writing this story, my version would have the character going back, determined to set right a couple of those long-brooded-upon wrongs, only to find that on a second try that he's still the same schmuck he always was. Ah fuck it, I tried.

Wondering what else he may have written, I looked up Ken Grimwood on Wikipedia, and learned that he died of a heart attack ten years ago at the age of 59, a bit before his time. There can be no news on whether he went back. I won't hold it against him if he did; he seemed like a decent enough guy.

Review: The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

It's telling that I can't remember if I read The Hobbit before or after I discovered the Lord of the Rings novels. (I know that I encountered them in unrelated circumstances. One was pulled from the middle school library based on word of mouth, the other discovered like some alluring treasure in a closet in my grandparents' house, the exotic covers teasing me for awhile before I opened them.) I think I read the epic at the later date, aware that it was a sequel, but I read it for its own reason, not because I was so excited about a followup. The Hobbit is a standalone, and it remains so, a pleasant little story that only hints at bigger things (I did love the maps and illustrations as a kid), as befits the audience. Modern readers can pull up all the rest of his fiction for the level of background that suits them, or if you want to import another kind of depth, read it trying to suss out the adult elements that are working beneath the story, which is more or less how I feel like looking at it now.

And make no mistake, this is definitely a young adult book. Tolkien takes on the aspect of a grandfatherly storyteller, occasionally addressing the reader or referring directly to himself (e.g., "I wish I had time to tell you even a few of the tales..."), which is a fairly annoying affectation, however kindly intended. The story escalates in scope, but starts small, and stays light in tone throughout. We're given danger and threats that a child could understand (violent, unpredictable, or manipulative people; scary dark places), and Bilbo's actual struggles are not ones of mastery, but are rather personal efforts of will. He has to work up courage to face the situations he finds himself in, and, on occasion, to do what is evidently the right thing, a moral bravery that he slowly earns. There ends up being plenty of violent death, but the acts are sanitized (sometimes with humor and song), and are mostly outside the immediate point of view. Bilbo basically cringes and hides when it comes to battle and war, and he is only vaguely aware of the political forces that are driving his quest, but we are given that his own actions are worthwhile, even pivotal. Hell, you've read 'em all too: Tolkien puts a unique value and agency on "steadfast."

Also avoiding some of the usual high-fantasy lard, none of the supporting cast of The Hobbit is particularly noble and capable as all that anyway. They all tend to be thinly drawn (sometimes elegantly so--the quick rendering of Smaug's vanity and greedy indignation is great, and so is Gollum's madness--but others are inadequately sketched out--at least four of the dwarves have no distinguishing characteristics at all), but almost all of the outlines contain a serious deficiency of character. There are silly or vain elves, unheroic dwarves, grim men, aloof eagles, and volatile um, bear-dudes. The most intact archetype is Gandalf the wizard, who is indeed wise and great, but only intermittently helpful, and certainly unable to give the quest his full attention, even though he shows up for all the good meals. Next-best is Thorin Oakenshield, the dwarf leader and hereditary ruler of the mountain kingdom, and can I even tell you how much I love Thorin? Tolkien paints him as self-important and serious, but missing some critical element of leadership. (Peter Jackson allows him a brooding noble bearing in the films, and plays him as a tragically flawed figure, which I've been liking even better.*) He plays up the part, but it was less obvious to a kid that he is just not very good at the whole "king" thing.  He is sort of a high-end fuckup, even given just thirteen subjects and the best advisor in Middle Earth. Yes he's an exile with no experience at actual rule, but it comes more down to problems of temperament, really. He's confrontational when he needs to be reasonable. He quits and mopes when he needs to persevere, and with the unexpected success of the effort, he pretty much implodes under the responsibility of it. He gets a heroic sort of redemption at the end, at full cost, but he has to give up on his regal dreams to do it.

What becomes clear on reading is that there's no way his quest should have ever succeeded. Putting yourself in the minds of the dwarves brings out a dark dimension to the whole endeavor. It's as if their itinerant lives had grown so meaningless and futile that grimly throwing themselves on the rocks of an entombed city, if they could even make it that far, seemed like a good idea. Likely to fail, sure, but if they were to die trying, then at least they would die trying something. (And if Gandalf saw how Bilbo could improve the slim odds, it was still pretty rotten of him to send his small friend along.)  Perhaps, at best, they could have hoped to swipe an ancestral artifact or two, but the defeat of the dragon was never in the cards for them. Until, of course, it was.  When the beast does vanish (killed with a lucky shot by Bard down at Lake Town, which character I think Jackson is also justified to fill out), the company bumbles around cautiously for awhile, and then, as the truth finally comes out, they hole up. Thorin is stuck with a number of practical matters beyond the world of questing: he's got an empty city he can't rule, a mountain of cash he can't spend, one fourteenth of which is allegedly Bilbo's, who can't exactly walk away with the stuff, never mind take it back home through the hostile wilderness. When a faction of the townsfolk arrives to quite reasonably point out they made their own share of painful contributions to the dragon's hoard, but they'd be interested in some sensible arrangements for mutual development of all this reclaimed infrastructure, the dwarves' response is funny at first, but the situation gets pretty hostile pretty quickly.

When I read this book as a child, the Battle of Five Armies seemed like the anchor for everything, the titled event that made it significant in the history of that world.  And in a way it was, even though Tolkien shows only the chanciest sequence of action that brought it together.  As competent leaders emerge to dispute big conflicts, Bilbo and the gang look like the underqualified amateurs they are, but more subtly and sweetly than in the grand-sweeping sequels, it shows that small people doing good things can change the world.  As I said, it's a nice enough story all on its own.

*I could keep a long catalogue of Peter Jackson's cinematic rights and wrongs, but suffice to say that some of the things he added did help to fill out the story, and I think in a good way. Another irritating habit of Tolkien's narration is catching up the reader with "oh by the way, all this other stuff also happened while Bilbo was gone" sorts of deliveries.  Sure, it keeps the story in scope, but it also makes it look more episodic and badly planned than it really is. Hovering behind Bilbo's adventure are a few other plots. For example, after Thorin &co. run through the Great Goblin during their escape from the tunnels, they set loose headless legions of bad guys which finally converge at Erebor. Say what you want to about the development of the "pale orc" (which is mostly Jackson's creation--Azog is briefly mentioned in the beginning of the book, and that's all)--and to some extent I'd say it too--it fits the hidden story pretty well to give the disparate goblin and warg forces some power dynamics of their own, and offer some reason they should all arrive angrily at the battlefield together.

Review: The Dragon Griaule, by Lucius Shepard

I first read The Man Who Painted The Dragon Griaule, oh, ten years ago or so. I've occasionally picked up other stuff by the author, hoping to find anything that grabbed me as much as that story did, only to encounter a maddening mix of potential and disappointment. But the additional Griaule stories contained in this collection* only improve and expand the original one, and they're as great as (or better than) I remember. The milieu was established, by all evidence, by a guy who enjoys storytelling, clearly is talented at it, but who despises the trappings of stock fantasy, as if Shepard was grabbed by the idea of a giant dragon in spite of himself, and the beast wouldn't stop tugging at the fringes of his unconscious. As narrative, this conflicted view of the central object plays out brilliantly. Griaule himself is an imposition, a monster as formidable and ubiquitous as the landscape, and as subtle. He's the shape of everything, unnoticed in the way that, when it's all around you, you stop paying attention the lay of the hills and the flavor of the air.

The dragon is a mile or so long, mostly buried, infested and overgrown, built over and (mostly) around, and nearly completely immobilized. His exposed head is roughly the size of a football stadium with (at the opening of the first story) a shantytown crumbling over his eye. But he's not dead, and in more ways than size, the long millennia of stasis have made him something considerably more than a once-flying reptile. When we open in 1853, Griaule has been reduced to (or maybe grown to) a creature of the mind. He occupies the slow years influencing the people of the valley with his silent, malefic will. It's not the sort of pressure one could prove--although one of the shorts centers on a lawyer who builds an improbable case around the idea--but consists of coincidences, inspirations, obsessions, and a generalized sense of oppression, but it's beyond narrative doubt that this is a force which tempts people to the sorts of drama that serves or idly entertains the beast. Whether it's an intelligent malice is left unclear. The animal aspect of dragons isn't ever lost, and Griaule may well scheme and corrupt as a mere part of his nature, which has happened to become as magnificently overgrown as the rest of him. But he's a force beyond the scope of humans, either way.

The stories all play out as an expression of this insidious orchestration, where characters are pulled cleverly to plotted ends. The first of them is by far my favorite riff. The man who painted the dragon steps up before the local council and claims to be able to murder the creature with toxic pigments, by scaffolding his great head and flank and turning him into a mountain-size mural. There's just something brilliant and romantic and doomed about the idea that one of the great forces of the world can be subdued through art, and there's no way that I wasn't going to be pulled in by it myself. (And if it sounds like a potitical allegory, well, it shifts into an explicit one for some of the other stories.) And it's a scam of course, but the proposal nonetheless grows real as it takes over the artist's life, and the region's destiny, and brings Griaule to the conclusion he always desired, with lots of casualties along the way.

And they almost all go down like this. Generally, Griaule draws out callousness, venality, and lust in the men under his influence. Women get to be a little stronger than this (if they're a protagonist) or they get to be a little more fatale than outright nasty (if they're not), possibly less guileless to start with, but given to bursts of openness when the control falters. (God help me, I felt drawn to them too.) As we move through the other novellas, the arc is such that the dragon's mechanisms of control become a bit more overt. In the second one, a young woman is drawn into the guts and veins of the creature, mostly for purposes of housekeeping, to help out a colony of sensitives who take care of the more mundane tasks. (For her, things work out well in the end.) Other stories have Griaule drawing in a smaller, "normal" dragon to help along his seduction, or pushing some people through an alternate timeline to bring along a more spectacular ending than paint. Other broad trends have the main characters growing less sympathetic story by story (by the time we get to 2012, the last guy is a total asshole), and the writing expands a little more nicely and neatens up over time (the plots remain short enough to stay focused, however), with fewer writerly stunts. As well, the geography becomes a little more concrete, and more similar to the present day's. In the opening story, it's set in "a country to the south," and even though it's got some New World flora (banana trees and so on), the proper names and the style of narration seem comfortably European. Frankly, I'd have put it on the other end of the continent as Florin and Guilder. But Shepard has Central America in mind all along, and for the dragon's swan song, his menace becomes part and parcel of the disastrous, violent, meddled-in governance of the area. We are left with the feeling that Griaule, even dead and dispersed, can encompass all of the political evil of the world. I found him a little more palatable in a generic setting, but it's still an engaging read right to the end. Recommended, if you can find it.


*This publication includes the original short, published in the early 1980s, along with five additional novellas that have been written over the succeeding 30 years. I believe that the final one, released last year, is exclusive to this book. For the Googlers, the titles of the stories are, The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter, The Father of Stones, Liar's House, The Taborin Scale, and The Skull. Shepard also includes notes on the various stories, which are interesting (and which comprise most of the evidence about his opinions on fantasy and Griaule).

Review: The Scar, by China Miéville

Since China Miéville doesn't, I'll give you, potential reader, an outline view of what the world of Bas-Lag (the setting of The Scar and a couple other of Miéville's novels, including the more famous Perdido Street Station) is like.  It's a planet as large as this one, probably, but older, or, if it's not older, then it's suffered the rise, fall, and disappearance of so many more advanced civilizations and dread empires than ours has, that it is at least far denser with such things.  The current state of technological progress is dynamic (we get the feeling it is always such), and it is early machine age in feel (call it "steampunk," but that's too limiting a term here).  The civilized sphere consists of networked societies in a constant flux of discovery and rediscovery, infused with magic only to the extent where the author either needs a suitable kludge to expand technical capability beyond what petroleum and gearworks (or physics) can actually do, or wants to add even more dashes of color to the kaleidoscopic world. It's stuffed with an improbable diversity of intelligent species, man-like things of all sorts, living and undead and modified, along with flora and fauna of similarly mundane or exotic provenance, well beyond what any evolutionary social process could ever shovel into competing ecological niches.  And that's only within the limits of the charted world, which the characters in The Scar attempt to expand. 

But it's weirder than that.  The world of Bas-Lag may be flat too, a disk, where densified water is pulled up from weird extradimensional deeps, and presumably spills over the edges into whatever nebulous ether the whole thing floats in (showering the elephants, maybe), and we are gradually given clues that the whole thing is some kind of low-probability-of-existence place, a giant crap-trap in the drain plumbing of the Multiverse, where it collects peoples and artifacts of various sorts.  (I liked to imagine it in the same universe as Neal Stephenson's Anathem.)  It's a brutal effort for people to carve order out of a place like that, and they try.  Against all that, it's full of folks doing their best to get by in a raucous reality.

I can understand the impulse to just throw the reader right into that seething mix (in which the characters are only marginally better informed), and that's what Miéville does, but I wish that he had coughed up some kind of description resembling the above.  Because it's a better-developed universe than it first looks--interesting as hell once you get the feel for it--but for the first 150 pages, you can't tell that it's not just a big sloppy mess instead.  Nor could I tell for awhile if the writing style's deliberate, or if that too is meant to evoke the setting, which in this particular story is primarily a floating, seafaring city of lashed-together boats.  It's an ugly, clumsily-constructed place, and the language onomatopoeiacally follows: ramshackle, Jabber, rickety, slapdash.  The novel opens with prose so purple you could paint with it, and as things move forward there were a few language or scenery elements that affronted me enough to bookmark them, but if he's going to write in that way, then at least he picked the right world for it. 

(What I found less forgivable, is that in a book that doesn't shy away from dirty words, Miéville wasn't usually able to make his characters curse very well.  How fucking hard is that?)

And so it's a sea adventure, and a fantasy, and it's gladly full of all you need for that.  The plot moves right along, and the central characters, while not entirely loveable, are human enough, and imperiled enough, that they earn your concern.  Along with several other people important to the effort, Bellis Coldwine, a translator, is press-ganged to serve in an academic capacity on the boat city of Armada.  Even as an unwilling outsider, constantly plotting escape, she becomes caught up in the bizarre politics of the place, as they coalesce into a grand plan and a great chase.  Armada is an interesting place, and it makes exotic stops (an island of fearsome mosquito people, more compelling creatures than you'd think; a cosmic sinkhole, where with great chains and engines, they angle the depths for some forgotten behemoth), faces pitched naval battles, and gets as bawdy as you like.

Miéville appears to populate the book with character archetypes of his own design.  The city leaders and its champions wax a little larger than life, and even down at the level of the point-of-view characters, Bellis and her friend/antagonist evolve as pictures of growing luck and competence.  You wonder by what complicated path they'll manage escape (or otherwise steer events), but there's little doubt they will.  And I've got to say that this is where I finally found genius in the book, because (SPOILERS follow) these assumptions are dismantled only a little less quickly than they're built up.  Despite the fantastical elements, Occam's razor is paring away at the characters and plot all the time.  Story developments that you imagine are given to you as reader's privilege are dragged out and made public to the whole city.  People who lurk in the margins of events acquire no real power by the end, and the users concede none.  Were such a thing were possible in real life, a quest to drag an already tenuously functional city to some otherworldly power source is a stupid fucking idea, and it's gradually revealed as such.  The greatest of lovers are not of one mind.  The political agent is only acting toward political ends.  Miéville sneakily surprised me by letting his characters revert to people by the end, the people who in fact he said they were all along, and made it feel like a surprise.  And the book is better for that.