→ January 11, 2019
→ By

All the Birds in the Sky.

Charlie Jane Anders was a founding editor of io9, the Gawker subsite dedicated to science fiction and fantasy, so it’s no surprise that her debut novel All The Birds in the Sky combines those genres and works in many tropes common in those areas, especially coming-of-age novels from the fantasy realm. Despite a slow ramp-up that doesn’t hint at the novel’s greater ambitions, the story builds to a bold climax that recalls many pioneering novels in these fields without ever coming off as derivative or unoriginal.

Anders’ gambit in All the Birds in the Sky is to create two synchronous, intertwined stories, one of which draws from straight fantasy and one from realistic, hard science fiction, with one character at the head of each, and contrast the complicated personal relationship between the two of them with the growing and apparently inevitable conflict that will occur between their two forces. Set in the near future where climate change and runaway capitalism have led to catastrophic weather patterns and rapid societal breakdown, the novel keeps raising the stakes between its two protagonists and pushes them into difficult, sometimes dangerous choices that only might help save the world.

Patricia and Lawrence are those two central characters, both misfits in their junior high school, albeit for different reasons. Patricia lives with her overbearing, judgmental parents, and a too-perfect older sister whose bullying of Patricia borders on the sociopathic. Lawrence lives on the other side of town, with warmer parents who don’t quite understand him, both of whom gave up ambitions of bigger careers to settle into working-class malaise. Patricia discovers one day that she can talk to animals, if only briefly, and ends up following a chatty bird to a giant tree in the middle of their forest where the birds are holding their Parliament (which is not restricted to owls). Lawrence is a gifted hacker who scavenges parts and builds a supercomputer in his closet, giving it a machine-learning algorithm that allows it to grow by talking to real people online, one of whom is Patricia. Of course, both kids are badly bullied – to such a cruel extent that reading the first few chapters was painful – which pushes them together but later pulls them apart, something exacerbated by a guidance counselor who isn’t what he seems to be, and is acting on a vision of the future where the two lead opposite sides of a global conflict between science and magic that threatens to end the planet as we know it.

The prologue was tough sledding, but once Anders gets her characters out of school, thanks to a dramatic flourish where Patricia rescues Lawrence from misery and possible death at a military academy of dubious merit, the pace picks up and the nonrealistic elements, both magic and fictional science, contribute more to the development of both the story and the two characters. Both Patricia and Lawrence are flawed, due to immaturity and the challenges of each of their upbringings, and then are pushed into situations, Patricia by her classmates at magic school and Lawrence by colleagues at a Boring Company-like startup, for which they aren’t well-prepared. Anders’ greatest achievement in the novel is showing those characters’ growth even through failures, one of which would be particularly traumatic, so that they are better prepared when the climax of the story arrives and the decisions they must make have the largest consequences yet.

All the Birds in the Sky will remind you of many great novels in these genres without ever drawing too heavily on any one source. The entire tenor of the book brought the great Magicians trilogy to mind, including the emphasis on the flaws in the two characters and how events in our youth can have long-lasting effects on our personalities and life choices well into adulthood. The influence of the major YA fantasy series like Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia is evident in the background, but never overt, and any similarities are muted by the presence of the parallel sci-fi strand around Lawrence. He’s something out of a Heinlein novel, but better, more well-rounded and a lot more aware of the existence of women as actual people than anything Heinlein ever dreamed up.

I expected the ultimate battle between science and magic in this novel to play out differently, perhaps as some sort of faith/reason allegory, but it doesn’t, and that’s just how Anders rolls – so much of this novel sets you up in a comfortable, familiar way, and then resolves matters in a way that defies expectations without cheap surprises. All the Birds in the Sky won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2017, beating The Obelisk Gate (a result that was flipped for the Hugo), and I certainly agree with that result. It’s a fun, smart, compelling read, appropriate for young and full-grown adults alike.

Next up: Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ January 8, 2019
→ By

The Black Angel.

Cornell Woolrich’s name is scarcely heard today, although in his era he was one of the most important writers of pulp fiction, with his stories and novels adapted into acclaimed movies like Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, and The Black Angel, the last of which is loosely based on his novel of the same name. The book isn’t easy to find in dead-tree versions, but it’s $1.99 right now for the Kindle and is also available on iBooks. First written in 1943 and adapted for film three years later, The Black Angel is classic noir as it follows a young woman on a desperate quest to exonerate her husband, convicted of capital murder, by finding out who really killed his mistress.

Alberta French is just 22 as the novel opens, and, as the narrator, tells of her wonderful love affair with the man she has now married, but whom she knows has been cheating on her because he’s stopped calling her by the nickname “Angel Face.” She figures out who his paramour is – a chorus girl named Mia Mercer – and goes to Mia’s apartment, but finds the woman’s corpse instead. Within hours, her husband, Kirk has been arrested, and the story skips through his trial and sentencing (to death) to get Alberta on the move, following just a few scant clues she swiped from Mia’s apartment to try to find her murderer. Woolrich then sends her on four missions, one to each of the names she found in Mia’s address book who might fit, each of which puts her in dangerous situations until she finally finds the real killer and nearly dies for it.

I’m a sucker for noir fiction, whether novels or films, and The Black Angel delivers that while avoiding at least a few of the worst clichés of the genre. Noir fiction was viewed as pulp in its own time, a style with commercial appeal but minimal literary or critical merit, and as a result much of what was published was hackneyed and predictable – material written to meet the low expectations of the market. The Black Angel has a female protagonist, which is rare enough, and then has her develop from a meek but determined woman into a clever if overconfident one by the end of the novel, someone who perseveres through failures (obviously, or the book would end rather early) and whose character changes as she learns from them. Woolrich also ditches much of the egg salad you’ll see in pulp short stories or radio programs of the era – the easy violence to jump the plot forward, the women all called up from central casting – to focus just on Alberta’s story and her increasingly involved attempts to deceive each of the suspects to try to figure out who killed Mia. It’s unsurprising given his own background as a failed writer of more serious fiction, but it makes Black Angel a good follow-up for folks who, like me, loved the work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but have already read their limited output.

I mentioned the film adaptation of The Black Angel above, but haven’t seen it yet; the story changes so that Alberta’s character, now named Catherine, has to pair up with a man to hunt down the murderer, with other substantial changes to the plot. Alberta’s character as the protagonist and de facto detective was one of the most interesting aspects of the book, so demoting her to half of a team with a big strong man to help her along seems like a downgrade.

Next up: Anna Burns’ Milkman, winner of the 2018 Man Booker Brize.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ November 23, 2018
→ By

Terra Incognita.

I’m a huge Connie Willis fan, and have been since I first encountered To Say Nothing of The Dog a few years ago, enough so that I chose that book for my guest appearance on the Hugos There podcast a couple of months back. I’ve read all of her Hugo-winning novels (four books for three awards) and two more of her novels, but hadn’t tried any of her short(er) fiction until I stumbled on Terra Incognita, a collection of three of her novellas, in the Strand back in August. The collection includes “Remake,” which was sold as a standalone novel when it was published and sits on the blurry line between short novel and novella, as well as “D.A.” and “Uncharted Territory.” Two of them are great, and the third feels like filler.

“Remake” is the star of the show, so to speak, and features some of the imagination and prescience found in much great science fiction back to Jules Verne. Willis envisions a world where studios no longer make movies; they use computer algorithms to digitally update old movies, inserting different actors into others’ roles, and then fighting over the legal rights to every actor’s likeness on celluloid. They can change plots and endings, all automagically, and even go back and erase all traces of alcohol or tobacco to satisfy the Temperance League. Into this world comes a young woman who just wants to dance in the pictures, and who captures the attention of a programmer responsible for those digital edits, including the aforementioned temperance nonsense. He tries to talk her out of it, saying she won’t even find a dance teacher let alone movie roles, but then something strange happens and he’s convinced he’s found her likeness in the background of some classic films. Did she find another way in? Was it time travel?

That story was worth the price of the book, even though it’s a bit more ridiculous than even Willis’ lighter fare (Crosstalk and Bellwether), as the central mystery of the story is so clever and there’s no way you won’t start rooting for the girl to make it. The half-hearted romantic tension between those two is sort of a red herring, and there’s some frippery involving the third character, Hedda (also spelled Heada), that takes us away from the main story, but the central plot is strong and I loved dancing along with Willis through the golden age of musicals. She got the CGI part of her future right, but she shouldn’t have bet against musicals coming back into vogue – everything comes back into fashion eventually.

“D.A.” is the shortest of the three entries in this volume, and felt to me like a taunt directed against Ender’s Game, which is much beloved and very male-centric, even though author Orson Scott Card tries to walk back the toxic masculinity with the short story that is tacked on to the novel’s end. (The story came before the novel, but that’s a discussion for another day.) A young woman in cadet school finds herself drafted for duty on the space station … but she didn’t even apply for the spot. She’s brought to the base against her wishes, albeit not quite against her will, and spends all her available time trying to find out what went wrong in the selection process, with the help of an earthside friend with some convenient hacking skills. I could see the vague outlines of the ending coming, but I still enjoyed the journey.

“Uncharted Territory” was the one story that never clicked with me, although there’s one comic element that is funny in a very Connie Willis sort of way. Three humans and one non-human are charting the terrain on an unpopulated planet that likely holds some substantial mineral resources, and must deal with harsh conditions while also coping with the interpersonal relations of that sort of mission … including some strange attractions among them. The characters just don’t gel here at all; Willis rarely has trouble giving her characters unique profiles and three-dimensional personas even in just a handful of pages, but these characters, human and otherwise, just don’t come together. The one non-human’s habit is a good running gag, and there’s a little comic material in the fact that the two species can’t seem to distinguish biological sex in the other species, just not enough of that to salvage the story.

Next up: Still Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders, winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ October 22, 2018
→ By

A Deepness in the Sky.

Vernor Vinge has won three Hugo Awards for Best Novel, including A Fire Upon the Deep, the first book in his so-called “Zones of Thought” series, as well as the cyberpunk-lite Rainbow’s End, but in both cases Vinge focused more on the hows of the science in his science fiction than on the story or characters. The third winner was his longest, A Deepness in the Sky, the second book in the Zones of Thought series but taking place hundreds of years before the preceding book, and despite its length and Vinge’s usual prolixity, for once he gives the reader a plot with some teeth and a few truly intriguing, three-dimensional characters. At a girthy 775 pages, it’s not for everyone and perhaps not worth the time investment, but compared at least to the other two Vinge novels I’ve read, it was the best and most enjoyable read.

The long and often confusing setup to the A Deepness in the Sky boils down to two storylines. Two human forces have both reached a new star system, with the star referred to as OnOff for its bizarre cycle of going dark every hundred years* or so, and with one planet occupied by a sentient non-human race known colloquially as Spiders. One force is the Qeng Ho band of interstellar traders, who also appear in A Fire Upon the Deep, while the other are the Emergents, a belligerent group unafraid to use violence or coercion and, as becomes clear a bit later in the book, willing to use humans as high-tech slaves by reprogramming their minds to Focus on specific tasks. The two sides agree to work together and almost immediately betray each other, with the Emergents coming out on top, leaving just a handful of Qeng Ho characters, including the mysterious old man Pham Trinli, the younger leader Ezr Vinh, and the precocious young Qiwi Lin Lisolet, who grows from annoying child to central character over the course of the novel, to try to free their side from the Emergents’ grip.

* Vinge is too clever by half with his way of telling time in the book, referring to everything in terms of seconds, so thus using Ksec (kiloseconds) or Msec (megaseconds) rather than weeks, months, or years. It may have some veneer of accuracy, since our definition of a year is tied specifically to this planet, but it is annoying as hell to read, and it’s not as if Vinge adheres to this idea of planet-independent language throughout the book.

Meanwhile, on the planet in question, the Spiders themselves are growing into a high-tech civilization, led by the eccentric polymath Sherkaner Underhill, who develops technologies that allow his specific country to survive the Dark years when their sun goes dim and the planet experiences a deadly deep freeze. Unaware that they’re being observed by aliens, Underhill and his colleagues are also pushing a cultural change that threatens the ‘natural’ order of things, defended by a right-wing religious group called the Kindred. The Emergents view the Spiders as a culture to be exploited, even more so when the Spiders discover a mineral that contains anti-gravity properties, while the remnants of the Qeng Ho hope to save themselves and the Spiders from that and the massacres that would precede the Emergents’ invasion.

Vinge’s specialty has always been his ability to conceive futuristic technologies and incorporate them thoroughly into his plots – although, again, that can work to the detriment of the story – and that’s especially true here of the “localizers,” a sort of smartdust tech that Pham Trinli trades to the Emergents, with an ulterior motive, and that allows the Emergent leader Tomas Nau to create a police state aboard their ships as they orbit the Spiders’ planet. These nanodevices, some floating and some embedded on people or objects, allow Nau and his sadistic enforcer Ritser Brughel to monitor everyone under their command and even to sense changes in mood or sentiment, including whether someone is lying to them. While slightly farfetched, the technology allows Vinge to ratchet up the tension within the story by creating a razor-thin margin for Trinli and Vinh to overthrow their leaders. The Focus technology is probably even less realistic, but introduces an advanced sort of slavery, one where the enslaved become obsessed with their specific task, losing their free will and their emotional selves but allowing the Emergents to solve bigger problems faster and thus push their civilization forward, creating philosophical conflicts within the story about the morality of such practices (although for the reader it’s hardly much of a debate).

There’s still no reason for Vinge to drone on as long as he does in A Deepness in the Sky, with maybe 500 pages of real story in a 775-page book, bloated again by descriptions of future tech and irrelevant asides, along with some subplots that just aren’t very interesting (Ezr’s attempts to save his former lover Trixia Bonsol from Focus are particularly weak). Vinge also isn’t great at creating female characters; the most prominent woman in the story, Qiwi, starts as a child, is manipulated by Nau into a not-really-consensual relationship, and only regains true agency in the last few pages of the book. It’s a sort of hard science fiction that has fallen somewhat out of favor today, with good reason, as we have more diverse voices writing in the space and an increased awareness that better prose and character development can work in genre fiction. If you’re looking to pick up a Vinge novel, this would be my pick of the three I’ve read, but I think sci-fi still has much more to offer than A Deepness in the Sky provides.

Next up: Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ October 10, 2018
→ By

Sabrina.

I’ve said a few times that I’ve never been a fan of comic books, neither as a kid even when I had friends who liked them nor as an adult when longer versions of these, often called graphic novels, have crossed over somewhat into the mainstream and even earned critical acclaim. Alan Moore’s Watchmen is often cited as the greatest or one of the greatest graphic novels ever published, but I found it thin, clichéd, and very short on plot. The form itself isn’t conducive to great storytelling because so much real estate is dedicated to the images that pushing a narrative forward becomes secondary to the artwork, and creating a plot worthy of the term “novel” would require several hundred more pages and, I imagine, a substantial amount of additional work for the artist.

So when Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina showed up on the longlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize, becoming the first graphic novel to earn the honor, my immediate question was whether the work was worthy as a novel, or simply there because of the novelty of the format. (It didn’t make the six-title shortlist, announced a few weeks ago; this year’s winner will be announced next Tuesday.) I can at least say, however, that Sabrina uses the graphic novel’s form to enhance the underlying story, adding to the senses of dread, suspense, and isolation that affect its central characters, while also creating a jarring sensation of unease as Drnaso switches settings without visual or textual warnings. The story itself is also different, with three interlocking narratives stemming from a single source, telling a contemporary tale of our disastrous modern media environment and how it affects the psyches of vulnerable people.

Sabrina herself only appears in a few panels at the start of the book; her disappearance and the discovery of her murder at the hands of a stranger set off the three main threads of the plot. Her boyfriend Teddy, devastated and unmoored by these events, goes to stay with his friend Calvin, an Air Force serviceman stationed in Colorado who works a job that is socially and emotionally isolating, while Sabrina’s sister Sandra is left to try to cope with her loss and the detritus of Teddy’s life with her sister. After Sabrina’s death is discovered and someone leaks video the killer recorded of her murder (never shown or described in much detail, but implied to be highly graphic), the story becomes the focus of American news outlets for several days, after which the mainstream media moves on to the next murder, allowing conspiracy theorists to step in, claiming the murder was staged as a false flag event and that the three protagonists of the book are actually crisis actors. Teddy ends up listening to an Alex Jones clone on the radio while he’s holed up in Calvin’s house, refusing to leave, even though doing so furthers his isolation and essentially claims his grief is fraudulent, while Calvin and Sandra are doxxed and harassed by delusional randos (including a stand-in for the fired FAU professor James Tracy, himself a Sandy Hook hoaxer).

There’s more narrative depth here than you’d find in a short story, albeit probably less than you’d get even in a 200-page novel; there is only so much a writer-artist can do with the aforementioned problem of visual real estate. Drnaso compensates brilliantly by packing subtext into many panels, with or without dialogue, that support that ongoing sense of unease or psychological imbalance. When the characters don’t feel ‘right,’ it’s immediately apparent in the panels – with their facial expressions or posture, with the angles from which Drnaso depicts them, and even sometimes with his use of lighter or darker shading in specific panels.

Sabrina probably also benefits in the minds of critics and readers for how of the moment the story is. We are inundated with fake or slanted news reports from sources outside the mainstream who have gamed various algorithms to appear higher on social media feeds or search engine results – I’ve seen links to Daily Caller and Gateway Pundit, both alt-right blogs with minimal editorial controls or regard for veracity in their stories, appear in the first ten results of Google searches – and conspiracy theories follow every tragedy that hits the news. The effects of this, itself an extension of our increased alienation from each other as we spend more time online and less in the real world, on something as difficult and fundamental as grief, especially when processing the horrible and sudden death of a loved one, are enough fodder for a book this length and then some. Drnaso has taken a critical, timely subject, and presented it in a new way, both with his art and with his storycraft, to produce a work that is worthy of the praise it’s received.

Next up: I’m reading an Agatha Christie novel before diving into Vernor Vinge’s mammoth Hugo-winning novel A Deepness in the Sky.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 20, 2018
→ By

Florida.

The National Book Award announced its longlist for its 2018 fiction prize last week, and among the ten titles was Florida, the new short story collection from Lauren Groff. She was previously nominated for the same honor for her 2015 novel Fates and Furies, which earned widespread critical acclaim and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Florida is a good bit shorter and showcases Groff’s ability to craft a compelling narrative in just a handful of pages, with the typical inconsistency of most short story collections but some standouts that rank among the best things I’ve read all year.

The stories in Florida are connected only by that state, which is the setting for most of them and the place of origin for central characters in the others, with recurring themes across stories like the pernicious effects of climate change (including the existential fears it causes for various characters), physical or metaphorical sinkholes, or growing income disparity in a state often associated with ostentatious wealth. Groff paints a grim portrait of the state’s present and its future in stories that range from psychological horror to pleas for empathy, turning the so-called “Sunshine State” into a vaguely menacing and often depressing backdrop for stories of lives gone awry.

The best story in the book – and quite possibly the best story of any length I’ll read in 2018 – is “Above and Below,” which tells of an adjunct professor who slides far too easily into homelessness and follows her over several weeks and months of living in her car, in a homeless encampment, in a flophouse hotel, and more, documenting her own feelings through the process of simply trying to stay alive and safe. The story, about 30 pages long, manages to touch on so many aspects of the protagonist’s life, including her broken relationship with her mother and stepfather, as well as the way superficial factors affect our sense of self and how people within our lives can quickly become invisible to us. There’s so much heartbreak in this brief work that I found it easy to understand and empathize with the main character, even though I’ve never experienced any of this; nothing hit me harder than the moment when she thinks she’s been recognized by a former coworker and is mortified by the thought of him seeing her in her current state, only to realize he’s seen right through her and is looking at someone else.

The other true standout in the collection is “Dogs Go Wolf,” which reads like a horror story, with two young girls left alone in an island cabin by their mother who may be off partying (although as with most off-screen details in Florida, Groff leaves much of this ambiguous) while a storm approaches and the girls’ supplies start to dwindle. They’re young enough to be scared of imminent threats but probably should be more scared about who’s going to rescue them, and manage to keep themselves feeling somewhat safe by telling each other stories – a theme, that stories can nourish and comfort us, that recurs throughout the novel in all manner of settings.

One maddening aspect of Florida is Groff’s insistence on leaving characters without names. Once in a while, it can be a clever rhetorical device, something that helps make a story seem more universal, or that can emphasize the dehumanizing experiences a character undergoes, but when every story has the same feature, it begins to feel like affect rather than a purposeful decision on the part of the author. The opening and closing stories appear to include the same central character, a woman who in the first part is trying to avoid making a scene at home after dinner and in the second has her two young sons with her on a quixotic working vacation to research Guy de Maupassant in France, but she’s also one of the least sympathetic figures in the entire collection, someone who hamstrings herself with questionable choices and rash decisions, and even in 70-plus pages featuring her, the reasons for her odd behavior are never made clear.

I haven’t read any other nominees for the National Book Award yet, so I have no idea where Florida might rank, but I do expect to see it come up frequently in best-of-2018 lists given its quality and Groff’s history. It’s certainly miles ahead of the latest Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, the forgettable novel Less, with stories here that will stay with me for months, and a hazy, sluggish atmosphere throughout the collection that left me feeling dazed the way a humid summer day in Florida itself would.

Next up: Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 18, 2018
→ By

Unquiet Spirits.

The character of Sherlock Holmes, like all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings, is now in the public domain, which has the rather unfortunate effect of letting anybody who wants to write something involving him do so without restriction. If someone wanted to write a story involving Holmes with the supernatural, which would be entirely antithetical to the character and to the author’s beliefs during the period when he was writing Sherlock Holmes stories, they could do so. That’s why I tend to avoid these ‘continuations,’ whether it’s completing an unfinished story or crafting something out of whole cloth – it’s too much to ask most authors to write a compelling story with someone else’s characters while also capturing the prose and dialogue unique to the original author.

Bonnie MacBird is one of many authors who’ve attempted to write something new involving the famous fictional detective, with two novels to date, including 2017’s Unquiet Spirits. She hadn’t published any novels prior to her first Holmes story, with the screenplay to the original Tron film her best-known work, but there’s no evidence here to indicate her inexperience with the form. Her prose is light but mimics the style of Conan Doyle’s late 19th century British vocabulary and syntax, and the story itself moves along quite well until the resolution. The problem here, however, is that she’s managed to turn Holmes dull, and Watson along with him, while also whiffing on the form and structure of the standard Sherlock Holmes mystery – not least by writing a novel of nearly 500 pages, twice as long as the longest of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Unquiet Spirits is set mostly in a Scottish distillery and the castle of the family that owns the firm, the Maclarens, some of whom believe their castle is haunted by various specters, giving the title its wordplay and creating too many puns on the word ‘spirit’ within the text. A chance encounter takes Holmes and Watson to the south of France, where the central murder is revealed in gruesome fashion, after which they repair to the glens outside Aberdeen and investigate the crime. Aside from perhaps putting Holmes in more mortal danger than Conan Doyle did in most of his works, save “The Final Problem,” MacBird does a credible job unfurling the mystery at the book’s heart through the eyes of Watson watching Holmes investigate it, using observation, knowledge, and ability to extract truth from unwilling interviewees.

There’s a cadence to Holmes’ dialogue and a bent to his character that MacBird simply fails to capture, however, so in the process of writing this overlong story she manages to denude him of most of why his character remains so beloved. His discoveries and revelations are less wondrous than in the original stories, and his speech less sparkling, so he becomes tedious rather than charming. The mystery itself involves something from Holmes’ past, which is the same mistake many other Holmes adapters have made, including the creators of the BBC series – who seem obsessed with Holmes’ history, to the point that it’s truly taken away from the show more than once in the last two seasons – with MacBird going way too far in creating a failed romance, a lengthy back story involving prep school rivalries, and an emotional side to Holmes that simply did not exist in the originals.

The sheer length of the book makes the inventions and extrapolations all the harder to overlook. Unquiet Spirits needed an editor, badly, to trim much of the fat and perhaps simplify the resolution to the central mystery, which is both convoluted (not necessarily a problem) and far too personal to Holmes (almost always a problem) to be true to the spirit, no pun intended, of the character. Holmes is beloved because of how Conan Doyle wrote him – rational to a fault, observant of everything except how his demeanor and speech affected others, and exhaustingly brilliant. He’s still brilliant in Unquiet Spirits, but the rest of him seems to have been left somewhere in the Scottish highlands.

Next up: I’m nearly through Lauren Groff’s Florida.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 2, 2018
→ By

The Song of Achilles.

Madeline Miller is a scholar of Ancient Greek and Latin and of Greek mythology, so her Orange Prize-winning novel The Song of Achilles seems very on brand for her – she has taken one of the classic myths of antiquity, featuring one of the most famous names to be found in Bullfinch’s guide, and created a stirring novel around it. She mostly hews to the standard myths of the time, adding some notes at the end to explain why, for example, she didn’t use the part of the myth where Achilles’ mother dips him in the water to make him invulnerable, but leaves his heel dry and thus the one place where he can be slain. (It turns out that part of the story came very late to the Greeks and isn’t canon.) Where she does take a liberty is in turning the friendship between Achilles and the exiled prince Patroclus into a romance, one that probably isn’t inaccurate to the norms of Greek society but absolutely changes the very nature of the two characters and why Achilles died the way he did in the original myth.

Achilles was a half-god, half-mortal, conceived during the rape of the sea goddess Thetis, and the godhead within him made him into a fearsome warrior who appeared to be immortal on the battlefield and capable of feats of strength and quickness that were beyond the capacity of any other mortals. In the original myth, he befriends Patroclus, exiled from his own nation after he accidentally kills another boy (who, in Miller’s telling, was attempting to bully him). In this book, Patroclus, the narrator, is quickly smitten with Achilles, and their friendship turns first into an awkward teenage romance between the two boys – one that Miller’s Odysseus remarks isn’t uncommon for the time – but then into a full-fledged relationship not that far from the state of marriage. Miller uses this to put Patroclus right at the center of all of the action, and adds depth to the story of Achilles’ death at the end of a sequence of killings that leave Patroclus and Hector of Troy dead as well.

Miller truly does hew to the story she was given by the gods, and spends more time filling in the details than in trying retell or in any way alter the core myth of Achilles – but that’s part of this book’s problem. It’s a stirring read and moves extremely quickly – I’d guess I knocked this out in under five hours, very fast for a 360 page book, and the last half of it took me two hours on a flight – and yet in some ways felt insubstantial, especially the bulk of the material that comes before the Greeks head to Troy to fight for the return of Helen, the beautiful wife of Menelaus who was kidnapped by Paris (Hector’s brother … seriously, not the best of families there, Mr. Priam). When Miller takes us to war, even though some of the drama there, again drawn from the source myth, has little to do with battle and more to do with grown-ass men (and one demi-mortal) acting like teenagers, the material moves away from dialogue and idyllic scenes in the forest to acquire some actual weight. Of course, by that point, the reader realizes we’re in the place where Achilles and Patroclus will die, so the narrative greed picks up, but there’s also a marked difference in the intensity and realism of the prose between the two halves of the book. So much of the description of the puppy love between the two boys reads more like a bad YA novel with better vocabulary; the interactions among the soldiers and their leaders ring far more true.

There’s also a weird disconnect between how Patroclus perceives Achilles, since the reader sees his inner thoughts, and how Achilles treats Patroclus, which always, even in moments that are supposed to read as tender, come across as distant. It is as if Patroclus idolizes Achilles – which is kind of understandable, since Achilles is a handsome, athletically gifted half-god, sort of a Greek Kris Bryant I suppose – but Achilles is just dabbling in the love that dare not speak its name. Perhaps he is just playing around; perhaps Miller’s Achilles is bisexual, and his brief infidelity is a reflection of a conflict within him that Patroclus faces. By making Patroclus the star-struck gay kid within the story, Miller put the less interesting character of the two in front of the microphone. Had she told the story in another way, and spent a little less time on Achilles’ youth, perhaps she wouldn’t have needed the crutch of war to power the novel through to its conclusion – a conclusion that, by the way, is very sweet and befitting a myth of this magnitude. If only the rest of the book lived up to its ending.

Next up: Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ August 23, 2018
→ By

The Ninth Hour.

Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour earned her a spot on the shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle award last year, which went to Joan Silber’s Improvement, and as far as I can remember that’s the only reason I put in a hold request for it at my library – that and the fact that it was barely over 200 pages, meaning I could knock it out in a few days. It was certainly fast, taking me less than 48 hours to finish, but it’s a literary anachronism, a facsimile of the types of novels that used to win these awards 50 years ago – perhaps the type of book people think they’re supposed to like rather than one that they should.

The Ninth Hour begins with a suicide, significant in a book drenched with Catholic dogma and practices, as Jim decides to exercise some agency in his own life by ending it, leaving behind his pregnant wife, Anne, who in turn is taken in by a local cloister of charity-minded nuns. Anne gives birth to Sally, who spends her formative years with her mother as the latter works in the laundry of the convent, soaking up the secular aspects of the nuns’ faith and eventually toying with the idea of entering a convent herself. Anne, meanwhile, is left a young widow when barely out of her girlhood, and is, unsurprisingly, neither satisfied with her lot in life nor willing to sit back and accept it, eventually taking up with a man who is married to an invalid who is in turn tended by the nuns on their daily rounds.

McDermott’s one trick in this novel is setting up the eventual intersection of these different threads in sufficiently organic fashion to make it credible, at least up until what I’ll call Sally’s last decision, the one truly inexplicable detail (and one I feel like I’ve seen in other works as well). The affair between Anne and her paramour feels natural, as does Sally’s attraction to the vocation of the women who have all helped to raise and educate her. The discovery of the affair itself is faintly comic but, again, entirely fits within the structures of these characters’ lives, and if anything McDermott undersells any scandalous aspects to it, perhaps because her order of nuns is, on the whole, far more progressive than the Catholic Church was at any point in the 20th century.

Those nuns, however, are almost ciphers on the page; McDermott’s attempts to give them distinct characters fall flat, as their defining attributes are neither significant nor strong enough to sear their identities on the reader. By the end of the book, I sort of knew the differences between Sister Jeanne and Sister Lucy, but not enough to keep any of the sisters in my memory once I’d hit the final page. Anne is the most interesting and well-rounded character while she’s at the novel’s center, but once Sally grows up and decides she’s interested in becoming a nun, she takes over as the protagonist, and she’s quite a bit less interesting than her mother is. The longest chapter, describing Sally’s train ride from New York to Chicago to join a convent there on a trial basis, would have worked very well as a standalone short story, where Sally is the observer and pivot point but her personality, which appears just in flashes, is secondary to the cast of eccentrics around her, notably the crass woman who sits next to her (and has a vocabulary inapposite to the time period). It even ends on the right note for the conclusion of a short story about a woman on her first journey out of her birth city, considering embarking on a new and permanent direction in her life. It’s too bad the rest of the novel couldn’t live up to that chapter; so little happens and the characters are so bland that many of the chapters in The Ninth Hour are just plain boring.

I’ve read all five of those NBCC fiction finalists, and this was clearly at the bottom. I would have given the prize to Exit West rather than Improvement, with The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness third and Sing, Unburied, Sing (which won the National Book Award) fourth. The Ninth Hour is the only one of the five I’d say is below the recommendation threshold, however; it’s such an inconsequential story that illuminates nothing about us, its characters, our society, or even questions about faith, the meaning of life, or dealing with death. I’m not sure what the critics in the NBCC saw in the book to give it a nod over the vastly superior Lincoln in the Bardo for the shortlist.

Next up: Kory Stamper’s Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ August 20, 2018
→ By

Pachinko.

Min Jin Lee’s second novel, Pachinko, earned broad acclaim last year, including a spot on the shortlist for the National Book Award (which it lost to Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing) and on the New York Times‘ list of the ten best books of last year, all of which brought it to my attention in the spring when I was looking at potential winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which went to the markedly inferior Less. Lee’s novel manages to combine a totally unfamiliar aspect of world history and culture – the outsider status of Koreans living in Japan during and after the latter’s colonization of the Korean peninsula – with the familiar epic structure of classic novels of the British tradition. If Dickens or Eliot had written a novel about Koreans living as part of the underclass in Japan, it would probably look a lot like Pachinko.

Pachinko is a type of arcade game very popular in Japan, similar to pinball, and often used for gambling. Pachinko parlors are mostly owned by Koreans, and it was one of the few industries open to ethnic Koreans in Japan in the wake of colonization, which Lee uses as the backdrop for her novel. The book covers four generations of a Korean family from their beginnings in Busan, a city at the southern tip of the peninsula, through their settlement in Yokohama, Japan, and multiple tragedies borne largely of the disadvantages and obstacles they face as permanent outsiders in their adopted homeland.

The novel moves quickly to get us to Sunja, a teenaged Korean daughter of a widowed innkeeper, when she becomes pregnant by a Korean man, Honsu, who lives in Japan and only later reveals that he has a wife and children in Osaka whom he won’t leave or divorce. Sunja marries a Korean Presbyterian missionary, who moves her to Japan, where the family faces ongoing discrimination that moves from the overt to the subtle over the course of the novel’s fifty-odd years, where even educational achievement isn’t enough to push her descendants past the invisible barriers of anti-Korean prejudice in Japanese society. The source of Hansu’s wealth and power isn’t revealed until later in the book, but even his influence can’t break down all of these walls, and the pachinko industry becomes the source of refuge and only path to wealth or success for several members of the family. Through the narrative, Lee works in the mistreatment of Koreans prior to and during World War II, including political prisoners and forced laborers as well as off-screen references to “comfort women,” before the tone shifts to one of superficial acceptance and tacit discrimination in the wake of the war.

The overarching theme of Pachinko is one of displacement, as some of the core characters still yearn to return to Korea, thinking of it as home, while others want to think of Japan as home – especially Sunja’s younger son and grandson, both born in the archipelago – but aren’t fully accepted by Japanese society. Koreans in the novel form a cultural enclave, surrounded by Japanese people and their economic and social hierarchies, unable to fully assimilate even if they learn the language fluently and attend Japanese schools. Any upward mobility is stunted by formal and informal obstacles, like a plant trying to grow into ground that is too hard for its roots to penetrate. This leads to a sense of anomie in some characters, like Sunja’s younger son Mozasu, who ends up in the pachinko business primarily because it’s that or jail, while others, like her son with Hansu, Noa, can never reconcile their two identities and come to awful ends.

Although female agency is another theme that looms large throughout the novel, Noa seems to best encapsulate Lee’s points about identity and isolation. He’s an ethnic Korean, but grows up believing his adoptive father, the Presbyterian missionary, is his biological father, and finds out far later that his real father is the businessman of dubious methods, Hansu, destroying any sense of self he’d built up through his own hard work in school and in jobs where he’s underpaid because he’s Korean. Lee writes more from the perspectives of the women in the novel, mostly Sunja, but Noa’s story after the revelation about his parentage could have used even more elucidation, as he disappears from the novel for many years of book time, leaving me with questions about the continued effects of his mixed-up identity.

I ended up getting Pachinko as a digital loan from my library after putting in a hold back in February, and when the book showed up, I was in the middle of something else, and had just eight days to finish it before the loan expired, which would be aggressive for a book of over 450 pages … but it reads so quickly that I finished it in four days. Lee’s prose absolutely flies, even with plenty of descriptive, scene-setting language, and the book is largely driven by dialogue, so the pace rarely slows. I have other, minor quibbles, such as wishing for more depth on certain characters, but Pachinko is so ambitious and exposes a world that was totally opaque or outright unknown to me beforehand that it seems petty to dwell on them. I would still rank it below Lincoln in the Bardo among 2017 novels, but it was more than worthy of any of the annual fiction awards for which it was considered.

Next up: Another 2017 novel, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,