78 REASONS WHY YOUR BOOK MAY NEVER BE PUBLISHED & 14 REASONS WHY IT JUST MIGHT

by Pat Walsh
192 pages, Penguin

Review by Melissa Conway

78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never be Published & 14 Reasons Why it Just Might (let’s prune that from now on to 78/14, shall we?) is a slim-ish volume, but it’s not an easy read. The first time I read it, it took me weeks to plow through those first ruthless 78 to get to the promised nougatty center of the 14. I’d make it through a chapter, barely conscious after being bludgeoned over the head repeatedly with the cold hard reality of my chances at ever getting published, then after each slow, painful recovery of my psyche, I’d pick 78/14 back up and tell myself, “Keep your eye on the prize, Missy. It WILL get better.”

It didn’t.

As a writer struggling for the last ten years to become a card-carrying member of the “legitimate” publishing world (that is: *not* self-publishing, which Walsh refers to as “the red-headed step-child of publishing”), I took every word he wrote seriously. I weighed each chapter, each whipped-into-your-backside-with-a-switch lesson (the chapters are blessedly short, so the agony only lasts until the next chapter is begun—ha). By the time I got to the last section of the book, the part where Walsh imparts (in 23 measly pages) his wisdom on how I might actually get published, I was hotly anticipating some good news.  Unfortunately, the good stuff was mostly regurgitated bad stuff with a positive spin on it, for example, where before he wrote about how a BAD writer doesn't research before querying; now he encourages you, as a GOOD writer, to research those queries.

You might think I’m leveling criticism at Walsh, who, as a founding editor of MacAdam/Cage, should know of what he speaks. The truth is: I adore this book. What I wouldn’t have given to have read it ten years ago. (Well, okay, in all honesty, if I’d read it soon after finishing my first novel, when my skin was thin as the recycled paper my book was written on, I might have plunged my head into a sandbank and never pulled it out again.) There is repetition in this book, but it’s necessary. Walsh is giving new writers the kind of insight ten years of bumbling around never gave me.

Yes, he back-hands you across the face with the truth, but he does it with such sly humor you don’t even mind when he brings his hand back around to box your ear from the other side. Once he’s gotten you thoroughly tenderized by pointing out the many, many ways in which you can screw up by simply writing the damned thing, he fills you in—in gruesome detail—on the multitude of ways in which the publishing industry can choose to ignore your novel. What’s really great is that he sheds light on why they do what they do, so by the time you get to the end, you’re almost rooting for the very faceless, heartless business machine that forces you to grovel for the privilege of making them money with your writing in the first place. (And by virtue of being who he is, he gives the faceless a face.)

What you must take away from this book is that if you are not prepared to be brutally honest with yourself (about the quality of your own work), meticulously careful (with how you comport yourself) and hold to a firm belief that luck will find you eventually, you won’t succeed. Have “high hopes and reasonable expectations.” And patience. Walsh encourages patience and persistence, especially as it pertains to editing your novel to a high-gloss shine and continuing to perfect your craft.

You're probably wondering why I wouldn't rather avoid a book that points out many of the mistakes (crimes against the industry) I’ve already humiliated myself with, but this last decade has thickened my skin. 78/14 is now one of my “go to” books whenever insecurity rears its butt-ugly. I may have finally gotten over the hurdle of getting an agent, but waiting to hear from her as my baby makes the round of editors (Oh, dear Lord, these are men and women JUST LIKE WALSH, aren’t they?!) makes me reach for the one book that, beneath a sarcasm directed at writers and industry alike, offers me hope. Yes, it’s a perverse hope based on the concept that knowledge is power, but it soothes me nonetheless.

UNDER THE DOME (Review part 1)

by Stephen King
877 pages, Hodder & Stoughton, 2009

Review by Paul Fenton

Under the Dome, Day One:

I pick up my copy of Under the Dome (henceforth referred to as UTD) from the Waterstones branch near my office, having ordered it online for delivery to the store for a healthy fifty-percent discount.

Fenton 1, King 0.

It is heavy and it is big. I remove the cardboard packaging in the hope that it will be smaller and lighter. It is not; if anything it seems to have gained mass, as though the cardboard packaging housed many small pockets of helium and was keeping it subtly afloat. I jam it into my man-bag and proceed to distribute minor contusions amongst my fellow Underground commuters on the hour-ish journey home (no, that was not a misspelling of whorish, though obviously it did cross my mind).

Bed-time rolls around and the reading begins:

UTD is set in a small town in Maine. I know, can you believe it? Maine, of all places. This Stephen King fellow is clearly free of the geographical constraints other writers are bound by. (Mental note: avoid sarcasm from here on in – Stephen King is a god among writers and you are merely a foot-servant, or on a good day an altar boy) A seemingly normal day starts to slip off-kilter when a woodchuck is sliced in half by the sudden appearance of an invisible barrier around the town of Chester’s Mill. Then a light plane smacks into it. Birds in Maine are either considerably less intuitive than their cousins in other states, or are as unable to detect the barrier as the unfortunate plane, and pretty soon there are widespread feathery markers to map out the dome’s boundary.

As this is all happening we are introduced to the cast of UTD chapter-by-chapter. We’re forewarned of the likelihood of extended periods of character development by both the book’s size and by the cast list at the beginning. No problem at all, I’m cool with that. Does rankle me a smidge when some of the characters die just as I’m developing a mental picture (This is Jill, she likes watercolours and musicals and driving really fast on country roads and … Jill, watch out for the dome!), it’s like making friends with pound puppies a week after Christmas, but I remember I shouldn’t expect rainbows and unicorns from Stephen King. Well, maybe unicorns – tell me you wouldn’t shit yourself if you saw Black Beauty charging at you with a metre-long blood-crusted bony ice-pick jutting out of her forehead.

One of the main characters seems to be shaping up in the form of Dale Barbara, an Iraq war veteran who moved to Chester’s Mill to work as a fry cook and who has not yet been killed by his author. I glance back to the dustcover summary and see him mentioned there, so I think I’ll be seeing him for at least another seven hundred pages. Why King decided to nickname him ‘Barbie’ I’ve yet to learn, though I hope it wasn’t based on a weak Ken/Barbie gag early on. The role of Chief Antagonist looks to be taken by Big Jim Rennie, a corrupt old-boy bully who keeps bringing to mind Boss Hog from the old Dukes of Hazzard TV series, though meaner. With the lengthy cast list and the initial good-evil dichotomy being established rather openly, this feels like it might be treading a similar thematic path as ‘The Stand’.

It gets late. My arms grow tired, and my wife makes her point by asking me where her eye-mask is, knowing full well she doesn’t own one. There ends Day 1.

Under the Dome, Day 2:

Crikey, this thing seems to have put on weight overnight. I consider my options for commute-friendly reading material, and go for something much slimmer and lighter than UTD; and coupled with a late finish at work, there ends Day 2.

You can see my dilemma, it’s not a new one: big book + rush-hour commuting = unproductive pain. You try reading a phonebook in one hand, holding it at shoulder height to keep it in a clear space – if not your own personal space then at least some kind of neutral zone – while trying to maintain your grip on an overhead handhold, as vicious scrums of city workers assemble and disassemble in random mercenary patterns to such a degree where the motion of your legs is no longer something you control. Then try to turn the page with the edge of your thumb, only to drop the thing on the foot of the only person in the country wearing sandals in December.

For a minute I thought about buying a Kindle, or the Sony equivalent. Just a moment, before I realised I was one more gadget-purchase away from Trouble. It’s all the cords and chargers, my wife hates them. She believes electronic appliances, in this day and age, should draw their energy from the air. Great idea, as long as you don’t sweat too much.

About 95% of all my reading is done to and from work, so this is going to be a review in instalments. Part two coming soon. And if you’re wondering, so far I haven’t seen anything to connect this story with The Simpsons Movie. Yes, there’s a dome, but so far I’ve not seen a single mention of Dome Depot (amazing that I instantly know the jingle for that, yet I’ve never lived in a country where Home Depot had an operation or advertised itself) or the EPA, so I think we can assume Mr King probably started UTD well before
Springfield was endomed.

This ‘kind-of’ review was brought to you by Asus Eee PC netbooks, Apple iPod 5G, AKG headphones, Homedics shiatsu massage cushions, and too much coffee after 3pm.

SPECIAL ASSIGNMENTS

by Boris Akunin
352 pages, Random House

Review by Kate Kasserman

Confession: I miss those nineteenth-century Russian writers. I wish they hadn’t all gone and died. Is it worth loving anything in the world when I know that my love lacks the strength to yank a single small Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Nikolai Gogol out of the moldering grave and plop him back to work at his desk? I wonder sometimes.

Be that as it may, I have kept half a wounded eye on Russia’s popular literature, hoping that one day lightning might strike again (literature, not my eye). Years of waiting didn’t seem to be paying off; the dismal Sergei Lukyanenko almost made me give up in despair. I started to fear that delicious hot/cold/grotesque/romantic/brutal philosopho-psycho élan might have – well, not vanished, but perhaps been sublimated into tweets (that I cannot read, as I have no Russian). Ah well; I took a long swallow of icy vodka for sustenance and endured my disappointment.

And then came Boris Akunin. (This is the pseudonym for a certain Grigory Chkhartishvili – and now you know why he needs a pseudonym.)

Akunin writes genre fiction. He does not write literature, except in the meta-meta sense that he is, by his assertion, trying to cover in the course of his project (may it never end!) every subtype of crime/mystery story. (Anybody who takes on the name B. Akunin obviously has some meta-meta leanings, but these are largely absent from his novels.) His books are set in late nineteenth-century Russia, and, despite quite a few clearly modern elements, almost feel as if they could have been written then. Special Assignments is the sixth book in the Erast Fandorin series, and it comprises two long novellas linked loosely by Jack-themed antagonists (of Spades and the Ripper) and the introduction of Anisii Tulipov, a painfully sincere, down-on-his-luck naïf whom Fandorin takes under his wing as an assistant.

Anyone who has followed the series is well aware that Fandorin himself started out as just such a naïf (although a considerably better-looking one than Tulipov). He is certainly one no longer: fame, respect, well-honed skills, the confidence born of a long string of successes, money, wicked Japanese martial arts ability, other people’s hot wives – he’s seriously set.

This could make my dear Fandorin a little dull, for all that one would always want him on one’s side. Overwhelming superiority lacketh a certain narrative tension. And in fact now that Fandorin has come into his own, Akunin spends considerably less time following the thoughts of our protagonist and considerably more in the minds of secondary and even tertiary characters as each story unfolds. The vivid detail with which he renders the supporting cast and the red-blooded thumping pace of the plots prevent this technique from feeling disjointed or distracting. When Fandorin does move to center stage, it is either because he is struggling (he is not the only cleverkins in the world, after all, and he still has a heart) or because he is about to do or say something that we REALLY want to see.

The first novella in Special Assignments, The Jack of Spades, is a twisty, light-hearted caper in which the bulk of the ingenuity is demonstrated by the not-so-villainous conman Momos in his various mercantile-cum-fun-generating endeavors. Momos probably could have carried on indefinitely with his cheerful peripatetic grifting lifestyle in unmolested peace if he hadn’t been so delighted with himself that he decided to scam the governor (and Fandorin’s protector) Prince Dolgorukoi to see whether he could get away with it (yes, Momos can get away with it – except insofar as his spoils come with the free bonus of putting Fandorin on his tail). The fun here is watching the characters writhe and scheme, and seeing just how nervy Momos will get (quite) – you never really doubt how the story is going to end, but the scenery along the way is fantastic, and filled with plenty of unexpected turns. The pimply, big-eared Tulipov even gets some smokin’ con-girl action!

In contrast – heavy contrast – the second novella, The Decorator, starts out right nasty and grows only darker. A deeply unpleasant murder reminds Fandorin (fresh from a recent stay in London) of Jack the Ripper – and as he investigates, he learns that the Moscow murder he’s trying to solve is not the first of its kind in the city. It’s unquestionably the work of a serial killer who Fandorin thinks is Jack himself.

It’s hard to find much new territory to mine in serial killers and JTR in particular, and while the killings and the murderer’s internal ruminations are appropriately vile, the interest lies not so much in the how of it all (as with the prior novella) but rather the effect that the investigation has on Fandorin and everyone else involved – and also, the who. We are presented with a number of viable prospects for that honor – failed doctors, revolutionaries, butchers, grave-diggers, and so on, all with their own stories – as well as plenty of red herrings, some subtle and some slap-you-in-the-face.

I am not spoiling anything by saying that Fandorin comes out on top in the end. Fandorin always does come out on top, at least reasonably so – you can trust him to figure out what happened and either to fix it or keep it from happening again (at least in his neck of the woods). But his wins are never perfect. The law of Akunin-world goes thusly: when you succeed, you still fail. But the converse doesn’t hold: when you fail, you don’t succeed, darling. Organize your efforts accordingly – and live with the amusement, or the undying pain, as the situation dictates.

The price paid in The Decorator is sickening in many levels – and I will not say more than that on the topic, because it is best to go into it blind. So that you can feel like you’ve been smacked on the head with a hammer! And drained of blood! In America, for these circumstances, we generally “smile when we say that.” Akunin makes it beautiful.

THE ANNIVERSARY MAN

by R. J. Ellory
Orion, London, 2008

Review by Bill Kirton

I don’t like the idea of authors being typecast or, if their works belong identifiably to a genre, of those works being denied the respect accorded to ‘literary’ novels. R. J. Ellory is a case in point. He’s a terrific writer and he himself resists the notion that his books can be pigeonholed into a genre. The first book of his I read was A Quiet Belief in Angels, which has an extraordinary chronological and geographical spread and holds you through to the end. Then I read A Simple Act of Violence and found I was held in the same way but in totally different settings and with a meticulously researched and persuasive covert political dimension which made it even scarier. On the basis of those two books, I knew that Ellory was much, much more than a writer of genre fiction.

When I read The Anniversary Man, the same page-turning frenzy took hold. It’s a serial killer story with a difference. Yes there are several murders, yes they’re all perpetrated by the same individual, but the modus operandi changes with each one. They seem random and yet there’s a terrible logic binding them together. So where A Quiet Belief in Angels strolled through many periods and A Simple Act of Violence was layered with the intrigues of politicians, security forces and south American drug cartels, The Anniversary Man depends on the classic crime/mystery/thriller convention of the puzzle. Which makes it difficult to say too much about it for fear of spoiling it for the reader.

But …

While the process of reading was as satisfying and gripping as it had been with the others, and I was in that lovely but paradoxical state of being desperate to know what happened and yet not in a hurry to finish a book I was enjoying so much, little niggles crept in about a central relationship and, ultimately, about the dénouement. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a great read, but I think Ellory’s previous novels have set the standards very high. He didn’t disappoint or fall from the level of excellence which characterises his writing, but there wasn’t quite the same homogeneity about the overall work. The relationship I mentioned seemed now and then to be artificial, as if it were external to the actual story (although it wasn’t) and, when I’d made up my mind that Ellory had to be counted with the very best, the eventual revelation of the identity of the killer and the manner of it were slightly (only slightly) unsatisfactory. The plot and the overall concept are so good that I perhaps expected something which had been bound more tightly into the story earlier. Just as the relationship seemed slightly discordant, so too did the dénouement.

So I’d certainly recommend it but it suffers very, very slightly from a phenomenon which is often evident even in the best thrillers. They frequently have convoluted, intriguing plots whose resolution belies their complexity. It’s a ‘flaw’ (except that’s not the right word) which is seen in Stendhal’s two great novels Scarlet and Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Each is a wonderful book, packed with minute details of the workings of the hero’s mind but they end as if Stendhal had suddenly thought ‘Bugger this. I’m getting tired of these people’ and wrapped the whole thing up in a few paragraphs. That’s certainly not what Ellory does, but there is a décalage between the complexity of the first 382 pages and, in the final 7, the (relatively) downbeat revelation of the killer’s identity. On the other hand, the parallels between the killer and another of the novel’s central characters set up reverberations which keep you thinking about it afterwards. It’s a disturbing story.

But please don’t NOT read it because of these quibbles. I suspect I may be being a bit fussy because Ellory really is so good. His prose is immaculate, wasting nothing and drawing you on with its rhythms and balance. His characters are real, his research extensive and yet unobtrusive. He’s a Brit and yet this novel (and his others) have an authenticity in their American settings and vernacular that it seems could only come from an American.

So read it. You’ll enjoy it. And ignore the fact that this review was written by someone who thinks it’s clever to refer to Stendhal and use a word such as décalage.

FINGER LICKIN’ FIFTEEN

by Janet Evanovich
308 pages, St. Martin’s Press

Review by Kwana Jackson

Once again reluctant bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is back, in Janet Evanovich’s newest novel Finger Lickin’ Fifteen. I’ve been a fan of the Stephanie Plum series since her first: One for the Money, but I will admit to being Tardy for the Party with jumping on the Stephanie Plum bandwagon, having only come on the scene a few years ago.

I found Stephanie through a want of some fun “reading” material that I could walk to. See I was tired of the music on my iPod and my TBR (to be read) pile was out of control, so I thought I’d give audio books a try. Well, I was hooked on Stephanie from when I first hit play. These are just the types of books a person could lose themselves in while doing a not so fun chore like cleaning or exercising, since they’re so laugh-out-loud funny.

Here is the blurb for Finger Lickin’ Fifteen:

UNBUCKLE YOUR BELT AND PULL UP A CHAIR. IT'S THE SPICIEST, SAUCIEST, MOST RIB-STICKING PLUM YET.

Recipe for disaster:
Celebrity chef Stanley Chipotle comes to Trenton to participate in a barbecue cook-off and loses his head --literally.

Throw in some spice:
Bail bonds office worker Lula is witness to the crime, and the only one she’ll talk to is Trenton cop, Joe Morelli.

Pump up the heat:
Chipotle’s sponsor is offering a million dollar reward to anyone who can provide information leading to the capture of the killers.

Stir the pot:
Lula recruits bounty hunter Stephanie Plum to help her find the killers and collect the moolah.

Add a secret ingredient:
Stephanie Plum’s Grandma Mazur. Enough said.

Bring to a boil:
Stephanie Plum is working overtime tracking felons for the bonds office at night and snooping for security expert Carlos Manoso, A.K.A. Ranger, during the day. Can Stephanie hunt down two killers, a traitor, five skips, keep her grandmother out of the sauce, solve Ranger’s problems and not jump his bones?

Warning:
Habanero hot. So good you’ll want seconds.

I have to say, it must be hard for Ms. Evanovich to come up with a new plot for yet another Plum novel (we are up to 15), but once again she did. I was pleasantly surprised to see Lula, her ex-prostitute sidekick, get a starring role in this one. She gives it a funny and fresh new twist. Stephanie and Lula together are the Lucy and Ethel of hapless bounty hunters. If there’s a mishap to be found, they’ll find it. I also really enjoyed seeing how their friendship has grown over the series, and in this installment it’s clear.

It was the scenes with Lula that had me laughing out loud on my walks with the dog and while driving in my car (remember this is the audio book). In this book Lula clearly stole the show from the first moment she bursts into the bail bond’s office yelling for food to calm her nerves after witnessing a guy getting his head cut off. Literally cut off. Yes, Lula runs for food even before calling the cops.

Add to that mix the never-aging Grandma Mazur, some hilarious scenes with the neighborhood flasher and lots of bad barbeque, and you’ve got a real good time.

Then there is the ongoing love triangle between Stephanie, her on-again off-again cop boyfriend, Joe Morelli and the bad boy in black, Ranger. There are some steamy scenes which are full of frustration with Ranger and Stephanie that I would have loved to see go further. I would have also loved to see more confrontation between Stephanie, Joe and Ranger. Of course Stephanie can’t make an ultimate choice because I fear the series will go the way of Moonlighting if a final decision is made but I’d still like to see some more tension there.

But what it didn’t have in tension, it did have in fun. No one can turn a phrase like Evanovich, or blow up a car or set fire to something and make it all seem like just another day, but she does. No one gets whacked that doesn’t really deserve it and in the end you’re left with a satisfying read that feels like time spent visiting old friends or better yet, wacky dysfunctional relatives.

THE PIRATE LAFITTE

And the Battle of New Orleans

By Robert Tallant
Illustrated.
196 pages, Pelican Publishing.

Review by Kate Kasserman

In the course of researching my next book, I realized that all I really knew of Jean Lafitte and his band of pirates, who preyed with remarkable success from their little Baratarian stronghold outside New Orleans in the early nineteenth century, was pretty much legend, and I needed to fill in those broad sketch-strokes (at least for my own peace of mind; when I make misstatements or alter facts, which I do, I like to be conscious of it).

Lafitte unfortunately, if understandably, exerted himself during his lifetime to muddy his trail and wreathe himself in a fog of shadows and implication, leaving precious little that is solid for historians to go on. We do know where he operated from (because we flattened it to matchsticks); we know that he stole ships and their cargoes and sold them brazenly, even opening his own market; we know that he liked to cut a figure in “good” society; we know that in the War of 1812, the British fully expected him to come to their aid, but Lafitte refused and placed himself, his men, and his sizable stores at the service of Gen. Andrew Jackson; we know that in the wake of the Battle of New Orleans, after Lafitte was briefly feted (deservedly, given his contributions) as a hero, the people then grew chilly to him and he took off for…somewhere else.

Everything else is pretty much a blank. We don’t even know where he came from. (One modern scholar has done yeoman’s service in tracing the fine, fine threads even the wily Lafitte trailed, and I will probably review that book later.)

So to get a basic initial grounding in what little is known, I found myself thrown upon the resources of fifties-era “Read this, it’s good for you! Like brussel sprouts! And Pall Malls!” kid-lit. The Pirate Lafitte makes a small concession to entertaining the reader early on, by semi-dramatizing the events of one of the few first-person accounts surviving of Jean Lafitte: a letter written by a visiting Virginian boy Esau Glasscock whose father had skedaddled down to the Big Easy to pick up some slaves. Slaves, by the bye, were Lafitte’s main stock in trade (a bubble of romanticism just went pop and died) – it was illegal to import them but not to sell them internally, a peculiar American legal loophole that made JL a mint. (And very likely a key reason he was so keen to make sure New Orleans remained in American hands rather than English. Pop, there goes another romanticism-bubble!)

The rest of the book commits what is regarded (along with the passive voice) as one of the cardinal sins of modern writing – it tells rather than shows. I think the style works just fine. It takes the reader with commendable care (Tallant has made a few small assertions that researchers after him have discredited, but he is pretty painstaking about differentiating between what was known and what was guessed, and he does not fear the subjunctive) through the few events of Lafitte’s career in the public eye, giving even-handed context and some local color, all in the style of your pipe-smoking uncle sitting you down to explain Jean Lafitte one evening (no, I don’t have a pipe-smoking uncle either, but I still think they’re cool). It is not wildly immediate or dramatic, and it definitely chooses not to engage with Lafitte’s less savory characteristics, but the text is accessible and fast-moving and covers a surprising amount of ground.

I wonder what the market for this is precisely these days (other than, I would imagine, grade-school libraries). American History seems to have become a battleground for partisans, where one unit of fact (at best) has to be mixed with twelve units of pissy censoriousness and/or smug approval – particularly when it comes to what we give our children. And this is a book quite devoid of overt moralizing; the tone is controlled and upbeat and cheerfully factual. The Pirate Lafitte is a window into other times – both Lafitte’s and Tallant’s – just as imperfect as our own, but with their own lovely gifts to offer nevertheless.

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO

by Junot Díaz
335 pages, Riverhead Books, 2007

Review by Maria Bustillos

A weirdly beautiful, sad, funny book. I am a bit gutted to think that everyone everywhere did not grow up (a) speaking the Caribbean-inflected Spanish patois that I am fortunate in sharing with the author, Junot Díaz, because about 30% of this novel's ineffable humor springs from that very pure, very concentrated source, which Mr. Díaz manages with total facility and perfect pitch, and (b) exact same thing goes for a really absurd degree of familiarity with The Lord of the Rings, Dune and so on. The Tolkien banter here is especially rarefied. A Dominican thug, compared to the Witch-King of Angmar! That may have been my favorite bit, so recherché and yet, so apt. It takes a real Tolkien nerd to appreciate the choice of the Witch-King of Angmar in this particular instance, because he was the Lord of the Nazgûl, just like this guy was for Trujillo, so it's just perfect. Unfortunately, I can't tell you my favorite of the many Tolkien-derived jokes, because it would be a terrible spoiler. Made me bawl, though. But for reals, it would not be a bad idea to bone up on your Tolkien before tackling this wonderful novel, or at least to have it by your side as you go.

What I'm getting at here is that I am practically Oscar Wao myself. I'm Cuban, not Dominican, and I'm not hugely fat, of course, and I'm a girl. But I'm Caribbean through and through, and also a terrific nerd (or dork.) So in case you need to know just exactly what it means to be a "bailarina cubana from one of the shows" (of the 1950s, as in fact my own mother was,) the precise nuance of the exclamation, "Jodido!", or what it means to have 18 Charisma at Dungeons and Dragons, I invite you to email me for the details. Mr. Díaz has created a world of spectacular richness and texture in this book, but it’s the real world, too, so like the one I inhabit that I caught myself gasping with the delight of recognition, over and over, as I read. But please, don't call this Spanglish, as so many reviewers have done! There's no half-measures or sloppiness about this newly synthesized language, which is like a whole new wing of English; plus, it's the way we actually talk; freaky and mixed-up, but brimming with feeling and nuance, with precision. But here's the thing. This is the greatest immigrant novel I've ever read, and I could go on and on about its authority, humor, sadness and truthfulness, the loopy power of its unique voice. The brilliant meshing of his harrowing, horrible story of personal betrayal and corruption with the fate of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo; the symbolic tragedy of the whole Dominican Republic is not here confined to rape and brutality, but to forced abortion and boiling in oil. But wait! There's more ...

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is constructed with dazzling subtlety and artistry. This is a writer's book if there ever was one, and that's its main strength, its real genius. Those among us who have attempted to write novels ourselves, and are in the habit of analyzing the craft that goes into their making, will have their breath simply stolen away by this thing. The narrator is 3rd-person omniscient, but no, not really, but well, yes ... no. He breaks for a moment right out of frame, and slides imperceptibly back in again. The author and the narrator are ... well!! How did he do that? I started rereading right away, in hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of the dextrous, tightrope-walker control Díaz has over this wild and crazy material. No soap, though. You can't just unlock the magic so easily ... really, you'd have about the same luck trying to figure out how a palantír works by staring into it.

JONNY BOWDEN DOUBLE FEATURE

The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth
by Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
360 pages, Fair Winds Press

The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth
by Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
358 pages, Fair Winds Press

Reviews by Melissa Conway

Right off the bat I’m going to recommend that everyone reading this review go straight out (or click on the title link above) to purchase The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth. It’s one of the nutritional “bibles” in my household, and I’ve even given it out to several members of my family as gifts. I hope they read it.

Jonny Bowden describes himself in his books as a nationally known expert on nutrition and health, and it becomes clear soon after beginning 150 that he does seem to know his stuff. As a culinary layperson, it was nice to have a nutritional authority spell out in succinct terms what I should eat and why. The only blip in an otherwise trusting relationship between author and reader is the nagging question of how long Jonny’s advice will be valid. I say this because, as Michael Pollan points out in his book In Defense of Food, “…the constantly shifting ground of nutrition science…is steadily advancing the frontiers of our knowledge about diet and health…or just changing its mind a lot because it is a flawed science that knows much less than it cares to admit.”

Still, the overwhelming evidence that whole, natural foods are superior on a number of levels is good enough for me. Flush with Bowden’s advice and hoping to reverse 40 years of junk-food-induced DNA damage, I rushed out and bought a whole grocery cart full of foods I’d never tried…and almost immediately regretted it. First of all, organic fresh fruits and vegetables cost a lot and spoil quickly. Secondly, a gut accustomed to highly-refined grain products can quite vigorously rebel against a sudden overload of fiber. Finally, taste is a factor. Watercress may be a “pungent, stimulating herb,” but it’s virtually inedible. Quinoa may be “the mother of all grains,” but it has a weird and unfamiliar consistency. Coconut oil may be full of healthy medium-chain fatty-acids, but it imbues everything you cook with a tongue-numbing aftertaste. Dates are “natures candy,” but…blech! And natto, or fermented Japanese soybeans (also called “vegetable cheese”), is quite simply the most disgusting substance on earth. Eat with caution unless you need an emetic.

The good news is: a lot of the foods we already like are good for us! We just need to eat more of them and try to buy fruits and veggies grown in soil that hasn’t been stripped of essential minerals and polluted with pesticides. Easier said than done, but a lot of big name grocery stores are now stocking better-for-you foods (although the term “fresh” doesn’t always apply. If given a choice between a wrinkled old organic apple and a crisp, waxed-shiny conventionally-grown one, it’s a close call which one will end up in my basket). The bad news is: a lot of the foods we grew up thinking were good for us—aren’t! Take soy. Bowden has it on good authority that, among other nasty properties, soy is chock full of “anti-nutrients” that block the action of essential enzymes. So unless it’s fermented to within an inch of its life (like miso, tempeh and the foul natto), it creates subtle havoc in our bodies. More good news though: some of the foods we grew up thinking were bad for us really aren’t (ohhh, butter…I love you so)! Instead, it was all a political conspiracy, using poorly designed studies, to get us to buy what They wanted us to buy! (I sound sarcastic, but in truth, that’s one conspiracy-theory that makes sense to me.)

In addition to teaching a ton about the current state of nutrition sciences as it applies to whole foods, The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth is written first-person in Bowden’s everyman’s voice, so the reader is treated to his amusing musings. The text is large, the pictures attractive, and the layout logical. Go. Buy.

The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth is a somewhat different story. It is one of the companion books to 150, but the scope of what Bowden is attempting to do with the book over-reaches. I say this not because I’m any kind of expert in things medical, either from conventional Western standards or the more untraditional homeopathic methods used in this book, but because he comes right out and uses the word “Cures” in the title.

Most of the therapies offered between the cover don’t seem to cure much of anything. Take Bowden’s advice to increase iodine intake for hypothyroidism, for example. If we were talking about prevention of the consequences for someone who is already aware of an existing iodine deficiency, then sure. But according to Theodore C. Friedman, M.D., Ph.D. in his book The Everything Health Guide to Thyroid Disease, the most common cause of hypothyroidism in the United States is Hashimoto’s Disease, an autoimmune condition where antibodies attack and destroy either thyroid peroxidase inside the thyroid cells or thyroglobulin, the protein that stores thyroid hormone. No one knows what causes the body to freak out and send autoantibodies against its own tissues, but there certainly isn’t any proof it’s caused by a shortage of any one nutrient. Dr. Friedman even points out that over-ingestion of iodine can cause a goiter (enlargement of the thyroid gland), so use prudence if you intend to proceed.

Don’t get me wrong, Bowden is careful to plant sidebars all throughout the book advising his readers not to self-medicate and to seek medical advice blah blah blah. However, I’m guessing the average reader of alternative health books has a long history of unsatisfactory appointments with their family physician (and an entire cupboard dedicated to housing their supplement bottles). These folks are the ones most likely to ignore Bowden’s weak warnings (that everyone knows he puts in there to protect himself against litigation) and rush out to dump a fortune on the products he recommends. If they happen to purchase said products from Bowden’s website at www.jonnybowden.com, well, can we say “conflict of interest?”

I’m not advising against getting this book. I own it and I thumb through it on occasion (not nearly as often as 150, though) to see what Bowden has to say about certain afflictions that may or may not be affecting members of my family. Just--be aware that “folic acid might help your hearing” and “people who take L-carnitine soon after suffering a heart attack may be less likely to suffer a subsequent heart attack” and “When you give D-ribose to patients with ischemia, energy recovery and function can return to normal in an average of one to two days.” If you place realistic emphasis on “might” and “may” and “can” in the preceding sentences, and understand that Bowden has been a little fast and loose in his use of the word “cure,” then you might benefit from this book, you may enjoy it and you can take or leave its advice.

BURN ME DEADLY

by Alex Bledsoe
320 pages, Tor

Review by Melissa Conway

Eddie LaCrosse, everybody’s favorite private-eye slash sword-jockey (okay, sure, he’s the only private-eye slash sword-jockey), is back, and he’s had another run-in with a blonde. Literally—he ran into her on his horse while traversing a lonely road in the middle of the night. This particular damsel-in-distress has just escaped from some nasty characters who tried to torture a deadly secret out of her, and now Eddie’s unintentionally gotten himself entangled in another mystery.

Burn Me Deadly is the second installment in author Alex Bledsoe’s Eddie LaCrosse series, and this reader was pleased to find that it held its own against Bledsoe’s excellent debut, The Sword-edged Blonde (my review here).

I’m going to toss a bit of a spoiler out here, so stop reading now if you plan on picking up a copy (you should!) (pick up a copy, that is) and don’t want even the smallest clue how it ends. I just wanted to say how happy I was that Eddie’s love interest, the sexy red-headed Cathy—no slouch with a sword herself—doesn’t die. She gets herself into some gnarly trouble that involves major hate-and-discontent visited upon her body by the above nasty characters, but she lives. The reason I’m so tickled about this is because I HATE becoming immersed in a story and falling in love along with the characters (Bledsoe has rounded Eddie out nicely with a bit of a soft side), and then reading the next installment where our hero’s love interest has been bumped off because the plot demands it.

I’ve hurled books across the room for less, and you can bet I won’t seek out the next in the series. Who wants to read the next two or three books, suffering along with the (let’s say it’s a heroine) as she bemoans the loss of her one true love for page after page (while glumly solving the mystery of who dunnit)? —then we start all over again in the sixth or seventh book, as our heroine falls for some other schmuck that I don’t like as much as the first guy? No. It’s a tired plot device and I’m glad it wasn’t Cathy’s fate. Eddie is tormented by plenty of garbage from his past and doesn’t need to get any deeper as a character. Let their love get deeper instead.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, Burn Me Deadly’s plot is pretty straightforward. The real fun is Bledsoe’s voice when he injects his almost pun-like sense of humor, and his characters, both the likeable and the loathed. He seeds the storyline with just enough hints that the reader isn’t *quite* sure how it’s going to end; and the ending itself satisfies beyond the rescue of Eddie’s beloved Cathy.

I tried to find fault with the story in order to keep this review from straying into rave territory and wasn’t terribly successful. The worst thing I could think of has little to do with the story itself, really. You see, I’m not terribly fond of the word “sport,” as in “he sported a blue necktie.” I don’t know why. It’s just one of those words that bothers me, and the durned thing appears throughout the narrative pop! pop! pop! enough times for me to have noticed (my pesky inner editor won’t shut up even when I’m reading for pleasure).

In case you hadn’t picked up on it, I’m heartily recommending this new series—I think we just need to give the sub-genre a name, since fantasy/hard-boiled detective fiction is a bit of a mouthful. How about fantasy/private eye or fantasy/pri-eye for short?

HARBOUR

by Paul House
Dragon International Independent Arts

Review by Bill Kirton

It’s going to be difficult to avoid critical clichés here because Harbour really does take place at a pivotal moment in history and follow the broad sweep of cataclysmic events (see what I mean?). It conveys not just the facts of a specific era and location but also the moods which derive from and inform it. It’s a huge novel about war, culture, civilisations and yet at the same time, manages to be about the intricate daily lives of a handful of individuals, some of them representative of elements of the social, military and political context and yet still finely detailed characters in their own right with their own human stories.

The place is Hong Kong immediately before the start of World War II. The Japanese are prevailing in their war with China and their advance on the colony is as inexorable as the clichés I’m using to describe it. But the poise and rhythms of Paul House’s prose move between the various interested factions, characters and cultures in a calm, always focused manner, reflecting the coarseness of some, the elegance of others, and treating the impostors of joy, pain, sadness, disgust, horror, peace, cruelty, tenderness, gentleness, compassion and many others all the same. He conveys the corrosion of values, the mutual contempt between Japanese, Europeans and Chinese, the shifting of allegiances as the situation worsens, and he records without fuss or hyperbole the decline and death of colonialism.

On top of all that, in the foreground of the narrative he places a poignant, inter-racial love story, its consummation, inspirational highs and tragic lows. And its impossibility. Despite the major forces at work and the historical inevitability that we know will be the outcome of the Japanese advance, this intimate, personal story at its centre is a powerful, moving proof that all these things are not about abstractions, but about people.

The research behind the work is hugely impressive and yet it’s never intrusive. Everything is subordinated to the narrative. It may sound strange, tautologous even to say this but this narrative has the same quiet inevitability and sense of loss as the historical events which comprise it. Its pace is measured, carrying hints of menace but barely troubled until the invasion begins but then it quickens and the prose itself reflects the fragmentation of society as well as that of the individuals trapped within it. Relationships crumble through betrayals, people change sides and a way of life vanishes.

And yet, some of the individuals (or perhaps individuality itself) survive(s). As we get to know the characters, we feel their irritations, resentments, jealousies, contempts and all the other emotions that arise naturally from living in a protected, claustrophobic society. Some are destroyed but others live on, and I couldn’t help feeling that somehow these survivors simultaneously affirmed and yet hinted at the emptiness of human aspirations.

But this is all making the book sound like some academic history sprinkled with anecdotes and it’s far from that. It’s a great story, or rather a series of linked themes and stories, none separate from the others, all interpenetrating one another. We identify with people, share their hopes and despairs, care about them. We feel the heat, smell the spices and less savoury aromas of people and their activities, see the lights of the islands, feel the swaying of the sampans of the floating city and breathe air which is often thick with the sticky smell and taste of opium. We’re exposed to some stark images – personal and public – which linger and still disturb after the book has been closed. I don’t know how long it took Paul House to research and write Harbour but the result is a book of real substance which deserves a wide exposure.

DOCTOR NO

(James Bond Novels)
by Ian Fleming
240 pages, Penguin

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

By the time Ian Fleming came to write 1957’s From Russia with Love he was beginning to tire of the fictional secret agent James Bond and attempted to kill him off at the novel’s conclusion. Thankfully, he brought the super-spy back for another outing in 1958’s Dr. No and it was here that he hit upon the winning formula that was repeated for many of the subsequent books and films. The glamorous locations; the sultry, damaged beauty; the cruel, intelligent megalomaniac with a fiendish scheme – whilst Fleming had dabbled in these aspects before within his novels, he had never allowed the plot to stray beyond the realms of plausibility. It is clear that for Dr. No, the sixth book in the series, Fleming allowed his imagination to run wild and the end result is not just the most enjoyable of all the James Bond novels, but quite possibly one of the greatest thrillers ever written.

Writing convincing action is one of the toughest challenges facing an author of thrillers. Just look at Sebastian Faulks’ recent effort at a Bond novel, Devil May Care (I certainly didn’t). The man may be able to write thoughtful, reflective, even beautiful prose but when he comes to writing a fist-fight or a car-chase, he seems out of his depth. There is something about Fleming’s terse, sharp prose that crackles with energy and this lends itself to effective action sequences. There’s a distinct lack of floweriness to his writing – a no-frills approach to descriptive passages that enables the reader to never lose track of what is going on.

Fleming himself wrote that his books were aimed “somewhere between the solar plexus and the upper thigh” and he wasn’t kidding. The Bond books are charged with a raw sexuality that is often brazen but never gratuitous. Those searching for evidence of Fleming’s misogyny will find plenty of evidence within their pages. Fleming’s women, though often independent and strong-willed, are mere conquests for the sexually voracious Bond. Honeychile Ryder, the love interest in this book is a feisty, almost feral beauty whose love of nature matches her staggering naivety. Her purpose in the novel is to be rescued by Bond, to be “mended” both physically and emotionally. However valid a criticism, it is worth bearing in mind that Fleming was a writer who didn’t care about the sensibilities of his readers – his job was to entertain, not educate. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning the man’s portrayal of women, but it must be remembered that the Bond novels are a product of the time in which they were written and so should be taken with a generous pinch of salt. To criticise them for their misogyny is like pointing to the Mona Lisa and moaning about her wonky smile.

The plot of Dr. No is wonderfully simple. James Bond is sent to Jamaica to investigate the disappearance of another secret service operative. His line of questioning leads to the mysterious island of Crab Key and the secret lair of the reclusive Doctor No. Once there, he is pushed to the limits of his endurance in order to thwart the Doctor’s diabolical scheme to redirect missiles at targets in the United States, essentially using their own weapons against them. Okay, so it’s not exactly Shakespeare but it packs a far weightier punch than most modern thrillers and is so expertly paced that there is not a dull moment to be found within its pages. Fleming punctuates the moments of action by gradually cranking up the tension. Drip-feeding the reader clues about the mysterious Doctor, Fleming grabs our interest and keeps us reading the villain is revealed in all his wicked, repellent glory.

The Doctor is a great adversary. Based on Fleming’s love of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, No is both highly intelligent and dangerously mad. His bizarre physical appearance (the movie adaptation didn’t even come close to capturing his otherworldy freakishness) helps to make him all the more strange and terrifying. The chapter where Bond and No verbally spar over dinner in the Doctor’s lavishly decorated underground lair manages to be both fantastically over-the-top and utterly gripping.

As I’ve already mentioned, Fleming’s novels aren’t for everyone. Some will find Bond a hard character to sympathise with. He is cold and cruel, ruthless in his determination and a million miles away from his celluloid persona. By all accounts Ian Fleming was not the nicest of people but he certainly could write a cracking adventure romp. This is what has kept people coming back to Dr. No for over fifty years. Whilst many will be familiar with the movie starring Sean Connery there are aspects of the novel that were left out of the cinematic adaptation. Flights of fancy such as 007’s battle with a giant squid (!?) would not translate well onto the silver screen but we don’t question them in the book. Though outlandish and totally unrealistic, by the time Fleming slips them into his narrative we’re having way too much fun to care.

THE FLAME AND THE FLOWER

by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss
484 pages, Avon Historical Romance

This year my local New York Romance Writers of America chapter gave their Lifetime Achievement Award to the late Kathleen Woodiwiss and all the talk that night was about The Flame and The Flower, which is considered the genre’s first historical romance novel. Well, wasn’t my face flaming, being a huge historical romance lover and having to admit that I had never read The Flame and The Flower or any Kathleen Woodiwiss novels. I made a vow to do something about it.

So time goes by and finally I picked it up. Now I had been warned by a friend who had not read it that I may have an issue with a rapist hero and that I may not like the book for that reason, but I was determined to read it anyway. Hey, it’s a classic and I couldn’t have all this Flaming and Flowering talk going on around me and me not know what all the fuss was about.

Let’s start with the blurb from Amazon:

The Flower

Doomed to a life of unending toil, Heather Simmons fears for her innocence--until a shocking, desperate act forces her to flee. . . and to seek refuge in the arms of a virile and dangerous stranger.

The Flame

A lusty adventurer married to the sea, Captain Brandon Birmingham courts scorn and peril when he abducts the beautiful fugitive from the tumultuous London dockside. But no power on Earth can compel him to relinquish his exquisite prize. For he is determined to make the sapphire-eyed prize. For he is determined to make the sapphire-eyed lovely his woman. . .and to carry her off to far, uncharted realms of sensuous, passionate love.

Well now. There is a sweeping story for you. A big fat story the likes of which you don’t see much of lately. It was first published in 1972, so I tried to take myself out of my 2009 ‘I’m Every Woman’ mind set and put myself in the head of a 1972 housewife or maybe a hip Charlie girl as I read this story. It was not easy.

The story opens with Heather, a beautiful, gentle girl who was once high and is now low. She is an orphan living with her brutal aunt and hapless uncle. Heather is like a sad Cinderella until she is taken away, supposedly to a better life, by her aunt’s brother. Of course not. Life can’t be that good for Heather. But that doesn’t stop her from hoping or being naive.

When she’s attacked (sure, we all saw that one coming) she’s forced to flee for her life and ends up on the docks where she is mistaken for a prostitute and taken back to Captain Brandon Birmingham, our hero.

Now here is where things get dicey. The Captain is slightly drunk, and thinking she’s his evening delight, and Heather is, well, Heather, and thinking he’s the law out to arrest her. On a ship? I know, she doesn’t get out much. Long story short, Brandon mistakenly rapes Heather (um, how’d that happen?) and now has to hold her captive.

I mean, I like my heroes to be alpha, but Brandon went over the top. Once the hero rapes the heroine, it brings the teeth-gnashing term “bodice ripper” to another level. But this is what the book was, a bodice ripper through and through. (All I could think of was the amount of money wasted on fabric. Yeesh.) And Brandon ripped and ripped and was not all that ashamed of it. But Brandon has an excuse in his own mind for each rip. Made me want to throw the book, or better yet him across the room, but I didn’t, I kept reading.

Then there was Heather. Long-suffering Heather. So many times I wanted to shake her or follow her around yelling in her ear like at a bad horror movie actress from the 70’s. “Don’t go there!” “He’s in the closet!” “Stay away from the light!”

Heather had the ability to make me a little bit crazy, but still I ending up rooting for her. And I was thrilled when she would show a glimmer of gumption. Small rebellions and standing up when it counted. I kept turning the pages to see how she would triumph over all her adversities. I also knew I had to get past my own want for her to stand up and fight in certain ways that she could not for that time (both the story time and the time the book was written), and hope it would all work out in the end.

And how did I really want it to work out? Did I really want Heather with Brandon, this ultra alpha who seemed to not have any remorse and was only hell-bent on making her his? I kind of did. Somehow Ms. Woodiwiss wrote a story in such a well-crafted way that I was hooked from the beginning. Flipping the pages faster and faster to try and see how she would get these two together in the end.

How could she redeem Brandon enough to make me want anyone with him, let alone poor Heather? And how could I even like Heather when she did all the things that I or any woman I’ve ever known would never do? Well, she did pull it off.

Somehow, from England to South Carolina, one baby, two years, a few murders and some wild accents later, it all worked out for me and I was left with a story that really touched me. A real classic Bodice Ripper.

Best,

Kwana

http://www.kwanawrites.blogspot.com/

Sidebar: Just because the term Bodice Ripper was used here. Please don’t feel free to banter it around with any newer romances that don’t apply. Really folks. That’s plain lazy. Just my opinion.

HECK: WHERE THE BAD KIDS GO

by Dale E. Basye
288 pages, Yearling

Review by Melissa Conway

What PUN!

“Having a sister was weird. It was like having a heart-shaped bruise.” So says just-turned-eleven year-old Milton Fauster about his “thirteen going on thirty-year-old” sister Marlo, a bad seed who drags her hapless little bro down with her into Heck after an unfortunate marshmallow-bear explosion.

“Heck is where the souls of the darned toil for all eternity—or until they turn eighteen, whichever comes first,” says Principal Bea “Elsa” Bubb. In Heck, Demons wield pitchsporks, the cafeterium serves over-cooked Brussels Sprouts, and even toddlers have been judged and assigned to a KinderScare facility. Richard Nixon teaches Ethics and Lizzie Borden Home Economics.

In this, his first novel, author Dale E. Basye was apparently determined to pack as many puns as possible into the narrative, with a plethora of descriptive phrases so adjective and adverb-intense I sometimes lost the gist of the sentence and had to re-read to get the full effect. For instance, it could just be me, but try to read the following straight through just once with full comprehension: “A terrible grating metal squeak sliced through the cavern as an ornate iron decorated gate with sugared spikes, candied skulls, and barbed licorice labored open roughly forty feet behind the stage.” I don’t know about you, but I had to go back and wrap my mind around that gate.

And yeesh, the double-entendres and triple-entendres just wouldn’t stop coming. Take this almost overbearingly puntastic sentence, “Warped hula-hoops, two-wheeled tricycles, deflated basketballs, not-so-Hot Wheels, well-mannered Bratz, ex-Xboxes, and an astounding collection of Russian poetry lay scattered across the dingy grey carpet.”

In adult literature, clichés are frowned upon, but here in Juvenile Fictionland, the more warped but still-recognizable the clichés, the better. And this book is “juvenile” fiction in the true spirit of the word, as author Basye doesn’t hesitate to cross the gross line into disgusting territory. From the sulfur water that’s “like drinking a fart,” to phrases like “…mind over fecal matter,” and, (dear Lord, yes,) a VILE description of our hero narrowly avoiding getting shat upon by none other than Principal Bubb herself as he is attempting to escape Heck through the sewer system.

I have to comment on some editing issues that fully distracted me (being as how I’m a writer who learned the rules the hard way: by committing each and every sin Pat Holt so succinctly lays out in his “Ten Mistakes” article here). Basye is fond of heavy use of his characters’ names instead of going with a personal pronoun where applicable. So, Marlo did this, Marlo did that, and Marlo did the other thing; where I would have been comfortable reading how Marlo did this, she did that and she did the other thing. And there was a lot of head-hopping going on; where instead of sticking to one person’s point of view, the author slipped between characters’ thoughts within the same chapter. This is a sin strictly forbidden to first-time novelists, but Basye’s editor seems to have forgiven it, maybe because the writing is bursting with those relentless (and sometimes quite clever) puns, and some people do love to groan.

Heck is a foul, vulgar place, despite the humor Basye uses to describe it, and maybe some of his young readers will come away from the mild underlying moral of the story (Be Good or Else), with a renewed appreciation for…well…the possibility of eternal consequences. I sincerely doubt the real Heck is as much pun.

OH, PLAY THAT THING

by Roddy Doyle
Vintage; 2005

Review by Bill Kirton

So far, there are two books in Roddy Doyle’s The Last Roundup. The first, A Star Called Henry, was (apparently, because I haven’t read it) brilliant; the second, Oh, Play That Thing! (which I have read), seems to have disappointed his fans because they felt let down by it. Its opening and some of the themes which thread through it make it clear that it’s part of a continuum and its ending sets up a return to Dublin in a novel which has yet to appear. This creates tiny problems when treating it as a self-contained work but maybe also explains some of my reservations as I read it.

First, I need to state my respect and admiration for Doyle. His Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is the only Booker Prize winner I’ve enjoyed without reservation and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is terrible and superb. (‘Terrible’ here doesn’t mean bad. I remember little of most books I read but one kiss in this one has stayed with me because it defines a relationship in a way which denies love, sexuality, affection and all the normal associations of kissing. It’s a powerful book.)

So I had high-ish hopes of Oh, Play That Thing! and, sure enough, it gallops into its picaresque stride right away with the hero, Henry Smart, leaving Liverpool and arriving on Ellis Island, ready to take on America and evade his IRA pursuers. Characters, actions, gags as well as social observations pile on top of one another and Henry has little time to worry about the killers who are after him or even to give much thought to the woman and child he’s left behind. His wits, humour and way with words help him to start making a good living, get laid and become a noticeable presence, first in New York then, when his unwise choices set more big hitters against him, in Chicago.

So far, so entertaining. As well as following his fortunes, we’ve seen how immigration works and what sort of things went on to beat Prohibition. We’ve met larger than life characters who’ll return later and who fit easily into and contribute to the novel’s dynamics. But I have to admit that, even as I was enjoying reading it, I found myself asking ‘So what?’, ‘What point’s being made?’, ‘What’s it all for?’ I know, I know, novels don’t have to be ‘for’ anything as long as they’re pleasurable to read. But here there was a sense of an underlying purpose which was refusing to emerge.

Then, in Chicago, enter another character, one who takes over the narrative drive and draws Henry along with him. OK, fine. It’s still Henry who’s the narrator and it’s still his story. But this other character is Louis Armstrong – not just any old Louis Armstrong but THE LOUIS ARMSTRONG. Again, that’s fine if he just appears in order to add authenticity and a sense of the period Henry’s living through, but no, he’s closely woven into events. And so I stop believing in any of it. He chooses Henry as ‘his white man’ to help keep other white men away, he helps Henry to escape from some pursuers, in fact, he becomes part of Henry’s story. And yet simultaneously this is Louis Armstrong, who’s living his own story.

And, in the end, that helped me to explain my unease about this book. Maybe Doyle is deliberately breaking the conventions; he’s earned the right to do so and has the talent to pull it off. But when he punctures the illusion of his fictive reality in that way, he’s asking too much (of this reader at least). So later – after many, many more adventures, near misses, shootings, the discovery and subsequent loss of his wife and children (he adds a son to his family in the midst of his other adventures), encounters with the IRA and the New York people who are looking for him, etc., etc. – when we get to the Great Depression and the trek westwards, riding box cars through the American Dustbowl, the sense of a fractured fictional experience takes over. The descriptions of the poverty and hardships of those years are powerful, relentless. There’s no doubting how much Doyle was moved by what those who lived through it experienced, but it feels as if it’s been grafted on to a different story – that of Henry – and Henry’s woes (the loss of his family and a leg) are irrelevant because, after all, they’re not ‘real’. Doyle’s lost the balance between his central narrative and its backgrounds and settings. I know they inform each other but there’s such a stylistic difference between them, such a tension between what one feels about the realities of life for the underclasses in the USA at that time and what one feels for the not always attractive central character that one can’t commit fully to the reading experience.

By the time I got near the end, when Henry’s wandered into the desert, felt himself to be dying and then is found by Henry Fonda, who’s filming nearby, Doyle had lost me. I’d still enjoyed reading it all, I had the feel of things such as Prohibition, bootlegging, the impact of jazz, the Irish diaspora and the Depression, but it felt episodic and I’d lost my belief in the reality of the central character. So much so that I don’t think I’ll bother to read A Star Called Henry, even though, according to fans, it’s a much better book. However, if and when the next in the series appears, I may well give it a try. Doyle’s too good a writer to dismiss so easily.

CATCHING FIRE

How Cooking Made Us Human

By Richard Wrangham
320 pages. Basic Books.

Review by Kate Kasserman

Hypotheses about the development of (very) prehistoric hominids, including mankind itself, give me a queasy thrill. It’s intriguing terrain for speculation, but even the most appealing, plausible, uncontradicted-by-what-little-physical-evidence-we-have notions are of course utterly untestable. Researchers frequently apply to the modern-day reference supplied by chimpanzees, bonobos, and other apes (as Wrangham in fact does here); and that’s really the best we can do, at least right now, but it is always worth remembering that several MILLION years of evolution separate us from chimps – we’ve been going down divergent paths for QUITE SOME TIME, and the level of applicability of modern apes to humanity’s past is, well, simply unknown.

The basic premise Wrangham proposes in Catching Fire is that cooking reduces the physical cost of feeding oneself at the same time as it increases the social risk – both of which had massive implications once our precursors stumbled onto this interesting discovery. Cooking makes things squishy and easy to digest, and consequently saves a lot of digestive energy on two fronts: you don’t have to spend bloody hours a day MASTICATING (yay, time-bonus!), and your guts don’t have to spend a third of your metabolic energy grind, grind, grinding through the mass that your jaws present to your innards once your teeth have done whatever they can do.

Wrangham asserts that this physical energy savings gave our ancestors capital to spend on what would otherwise be a luxury (particularly insofar as, like the digestive tract, it is also a major energy-hog): our brains. We took our digestion-bonus and turned it into what was next highest on our priority list, intelligence. And thus, he says, the technological/cultural innovation of cooking is literally and directly responsible for making us us, rather than some feeb gorilla wanna-be. (He discusses other major implications that he lays at the feet of the domestication of fire/cooking, such as the loss of our pretty, strokable pelts and the sexual division of labor, but I can’t go into everything in this short review.)

The book takes the basic approach of an excitable professor giving his intro-level undergrads a break by devoting one day’s lecture to his pet hypothesis. This makes Catching Fire accessible and fun, but also makes it prone to some overstatements and oversimplifications that can be a little vexing at times; I’ll deal with the mild annoyance factor first. One example:

Wrangham discusses modern raw-foodists (people who try to eat all, or as much as possible, of their food uncooked) with considerable respect and interest – and gives all due allowance to that in modern society, it is possible for a dedicated human being who REALLY puts his or her back into it to manage to derive adequate sustenance from raw food. The difficulties of doing so do provide a vivid lesson in just how much harder it is to suck energy out of minimally processed food, and in that sense it is on-point.

However, while some raw-foodists seem to think that they’re adhering to a more natural lifestyle and one to which we were adapted, Wrangham sets up a bit of a straw man when discussing (for those of us who are not ideologues on the issue) how what they’re doing just wouldn’t work in the wild – as in the remarkable reduction of the fertility of raw-foodist women. Yes, a huge drop in fertility would be a MAJOR deal-killer as a lifestyle choice for a small group of up-and-coming hominids; but a cornerstone of Wrangham’s whole argument is that we have developed itsy-bitsy (in the animal scheme of things) digestive tracts that aren’t up to the task of low-quality food inputs, and that it is more or less inconceivable that any creature with our gut would be subsisting on anything but very easy-to-digest, high-energy-return food. In short: a hominid group wouldn’t even HAVE the abbreviated digestive tract that drops the ball and sacrifices fertility with hard-to-digest food IF it were on a hard-to-digest-food diet. So saying that its fertility rate would be dismal and deadly, while certainly eye-catching, is also a bit disingenuous, except as a gentle suggestion to the very, very, very few people who think that a raw-food diet is the one for which we are specifically adapted (rather than one we can arguably tolerate) that perhaps they might want to reconsider that particular plank of their platform.

It’s like a tabloid headline from 100,000 BC: RAW FOOD DIET FAD DOOMS HUMANITY TO EXTINCTION – CHIMPS LAUGH, EAT FRUIT. It’s sensationalist when Wrangham doesn’t need to be, as if he either got carried away (which I bet he does, often, and I do love him for it) and wasn’t edited or else he simply didn’t trust the implicit coolness of his idea (HUMANITY OUTSOURCES “BORING” PART OF DIGESTION, GETS RICH, CONQUERS WORLD WITH SPARE TIME) and the breadth of support he has mustered in its defense to hold the reader’s interest. Cf. previous remark about intro-level undergrads.

For such a short book, Wrangham does an admirable job of hinting at the wide range of research and disciplines (and experience, as when he and his chimp-watching buddies tried out the chimpanzee technique of chewing raw meat wrapped in a tough leaf to test whether this improves the speed and quality of mastication – EWWWW, but good on you, Dr. W!) factoring in to his conclusions. Okay, I will admit that I side with the undergrad-tickling approach here, because it is just pure fun to have a bright and intellectually curious guide cherry-picking amusing tidbits from a vast field for my delectation. Freaky nineteenth-century gut wounds! Instinctotherapists sniffing spoonfuls of marrow! Edible poop! Gorilla sex! Skeletons! Baby fat! Wilbur Atwater’s plan to SAVE THE WORKING MAN by telling him how to get the most food bang for his buck!

The effect that humanity has had on humanity itself is both a fascinating and productive line of inquiry. Whether or not you’re convinced by Wrangham’s arguments (and I’ll come clean: I didn’t wholly buy into all of them, mostly because of the overstatement problem where I think he is undervaluing other factors for the purpose of dramatic emphasis, but I found most of ’em compelling), they’re worth thinking about – and, in Catching Fire, they’re entertaining too. If so many of his stories weren’t so GROSS, he’d make a great dinner-party guest. Maybe just tell him kindly to shut up until it’s time for brandy!

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

by Arthur C Clarke
266 pages, Orbit (2007)

Spaced and Time by Pat Black

Do you remember when 2001 seemed like an impossibly distant date? I’m trying not to think too hard about it. “Gee whiz, I’ll be like, in my mid-twenties!”

Arthur C Clarke might well think about this, too, if he wasn’t dead. The late elder statesman of the science fiction community enjoys a unique place in my psyche. He presented a TV show in the early 1980s called “Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious Worlds”. It had a weird parpy keyboard theme tune, something Vangelis would have produced had he spent an afternoon having a coffee with Doctor Who. It featured one of the South American crystal skulls as the main focus of the title cards, and it followed the paranormal, the supernatural and cryptozoology. There were poltergeists, ghosts, demons and sea serpents, spontaneous human combustion and telekinesis (drawing the line just short of werewolves and vampires, though it’s possible they covered zombies in Haiti one week).

I used to sit there and watch it on a Sunday afternoon with pens, crayons and paper, drawing pictures of whatever weirdy mcgeirdy stuff he would talk us through that particular week. UFOs, of course, featured heavily. One show had an artist’s impression of black-eyed, blank-faced aliens breaking into some guy’s house, a depiction of an alien abduction. I remember this image quite frightened me – and I didn’t even know about bum probes at the time.

But Arthur was always the most composed and reassuring of narrators, a somewhat cranky-sounding bald old buffer with glasses, sitting in his garden in Sri Lanka. I can hear this voice as I read through the foreword to this edition of 2001 – incredibly, the first time I’ve ever read Clarke’s work. In a way it’s a shame his TV show pandered to the sort of religion-substitute stuff that would make the X-Files so popular in the next decade, as we don’t quite get a feeling for what Clarke was really into - the science of speculation, taking into account what was cutting edge at the time and applying it to what may come in the future. He liked the hard stuff of sci-fi, but was never afraid to let his imagination have free rein. He was quite correct about a great deal of things.

Clarke begins the book by taking us on his own space odyssey in a foreword, his reflections on humanity’s first tentative steps into the cosmos. He begins with the astonishing statistic that for every human being who has ever lived on earth, there is a star shining for them somewhere in the universe. With every star comes a different possibility, any number of worlds in orbit around them, and Clarke almost has a sense of glee over these mind-blowing concepts of time, space, numbers and probability. Vast areas of space, eternity stretching out ahead of us. Keep the phrase “mind-blowing” to hand – we’re coming back to that.

He almost casually throws in his collaborations with Stanley Kubrick in the conception and writing of 2001 and its transition onto the big screen. If you’ve seen that movie, then you don’t need to know much more about the plot of the book; it’s the same, save for two lovely short stories at the end, including The Sentinel. It’s bitty and seems somewhat tacked together, like a collection of short stories with a shared theme – until you’ve read it all, and it makes perfect sense.

The novel starts with prehistoric apes getting some insight into how to master their environment and resources from a mysterious, geometrically-perfect obelisk which suddenly appears in their midst. Clarke’s prose style is superb, given the concepts he’s working with and the level of detail needed. Such a calm and economical sense of description, with very simple figures and uncomplicated sentence structure. You get a sense he could quite easily baffle you with physics and biology, but there’s nothing to fear in his writing, even for someone as scientifically silly as me.

This literary restraint works best when Clarke is straining against it in the second section, detailing a scientist’s journey from Earth to the moon to investigate a mysterious, geometrically-perfect obelisk which has been dug up from the crust of our closest celestial relative, pre-dating humanity by three million years. It’s a bit like when you speak to an academic in a specialised field, and they get excited, even giddy, at the possibilities of science and their own studies. Clarke takes us through Dr Heywood Floyd’s journey from Earth into the firmament and no detail is spared, from the Velcro soles of the shoes of zero-gravity space air hostesses to the centrifugal forces necessary to make sure we can visit the bathroom in outer space without mishap. There’s a delicious section where Dr Floyd opens up a “newspad” to click on “postage-stamp-sized rectangles” on-screen to get the newspaper headlines electronically; Clarke has basically envisaged not only the Internet, but Windows too.

To someone like me who automatically calls to mind disco laser guns and invaders from Mars when they think about sci-fi, this was a revelation. It might seem dull to some – essentially Clarke is talking about taking a journey by aeroplane and transplanting the situation to outer space – but every page is almost quivering with genuine possibilities. It’s the joy of travel, Jim, but not as we know it. What a tragedy it is that the man wasn’t born in an enlightened, advanced age where such journeys are possible, even commonplace. But then again, his writings are there to inspire the people who get to do such things; indeed, they already have. Clarke can’t restrain himself from a burst of pride in the foreword when the astronaut Joe Allen tells him that the author gave the space traveller the “writing bug - and the space bug” when he was a boy.

We go from the alien artefact TMA-1’s piercing car alarm-shriek on the moon to astronaut Dave Bowman’s mission to Saturn aboard Discovery, under the tight control of our old friend, Hal 9000. (Dave Bowman, in real life, is a former Scottish footballer who was notoriously tough on the field; it tickles me to think of this Dave Bowman attempting to unlock the mysteries of space and time.) Again, Clarke grapples with the realities and logistics of undertaking a mission into the far reaches of the solar system. One part in particular had me spitting out my coffee; Clarke notes that sea-faring men were “notorious” for getting their kicks from ladies of the night when they made port. Being so far away from home and separated from possible sexual partners on Earth, Clarke tells us that the crew of the Discovery were of course prone to the same urges, but bereft of the same opportunities for satisfying them. He informs us that technicians had “worked on this”... and then he leaves it at that.

Eh? Worked on it how? Were the spacemen given the same stuff Catholic priests and sailors stick in their tea? Did boffins provide outer space blow-up dolls, with special pneumatic conditions for zero-G shagging? Is there a centrifugal orgasm-chamber providing just enough of a gravitational field to stop any awkward substances floating around the spacecraft? Come on, mate! Don’t leave us hanging like that! Sometimes more is more.

And that’s as far as I’m going to explore the mysterious worlds of sex and Arthur C Clarke.

Just as I can hear Clarke’s voice in the foreword, we can hear Hal’s too in his calm intonations, his earnest familiarity with the crew. Hal’s like a touchy-feely team-buildery boss; he wants to be your mate but there’s something fundamentally wrong with that idea, a corruption of a normal power-relationship, something grinding the gears. But while we ultimately feel the same sense of pathos over the murderous Hal’s demise as we do in the movie (the disconnection scene is present and correct), there’s an added dimension in the book. Dave discovers that Hal has tried to kill everyone off for one astonishing reason; as a super-advanced artificial intelligence, Hal acts not out of some cold, remote and ultimately alien loss of sensitivity to the human condition, but precisely because he suffers from it himself. Hal makes a mistake, gets confused by a strange situation and contradictory instructions, and panics. We’ve all done that.

Clarke’s speculative side really takes off in this part of the book, as Bowman first deals with the threat of Hal then makes contact with another obelisk on the surface of a moon of Saturn. When he describes the possibilities of encountering alien life it’s something of a digression from the main storyline, but the speculation is so delicious we can forgive Clarke his indulgences. The idea that alien life can take any amount of forms comes from the fact that evolutionary progress can be something of an accident depending on the environment, the accidents and tragedies no-one can foresee or halt. Even the notion of human form being genetically perfect in some respects is rubbished – the “inconvenience” of unnecessary body parts such as the appendix is the example provided. What possibilities in terms of life are afforded by unknowable environments and conditions on strange planets? Do the differences perhaps even transcend physical attributes?

Clarke hints at the notion of humanity being one day free of its fleshy bonds; with minds being first of all downloadable (my phrasing) onto machines, and then finally unshackled from any physical constraints at all; at last, able to master time and space, completely free. Much as I’m way too attached to the physical realities of the world – sorry Arthur, there can be no joy without love - this is still a beautiful notion; utter freedom, untethered from physical requirements, entropy and death completely banished. In considering this idea, I think of Yoda: “Luminous beings, we are - not this crude matter.”

The secret of the obelisks is finally revealed; they’re a manifestation of super-advanced beings who prompt progress, intelligence and evolution on other worlds as they travel at will through the gulfs of space. The obelisks themselves are gateways to distant, alien parts of the universe; Dave heads through one of these gates, with that unforgettable last line to mission control back on Earth: “My God, it’s full of stars!”

And so we begin a trip of sorts. I don’t use that term flippantly. There’s one part of the book where Dave Bowman feels a peculiar euphoria as the ship passes close to Jupiter’s vast expanses, which he likens to an experiment where he was given hallucinogenic drugs. The dizzying journey through the star gate, where Dave transcends the known universe in an explosion of colours and lights, stripped of his adulthood and reduced to a state of perfect innocence in the physical form of a newborn baby, is familiar to us all from the movie. Here we get the same journey but in greater detail and arguably even more breathtaking. It’s a way of crystallising what seemed ineffable in Kubrick’s movie; and it is almost certainly made of the same stardust as a hallucinogenic drug experience.

I note that Dave views this spectacular display from the comfort of his chair in the space pod, and I can’t help but engage in a bit of speculation of my own: was Arthur C Clarke binned when he conceived this amazing voyage? Did he see much the same thing as Dave as he sat there in his armchair? It’s so, so tempting to think of Clarke and Kubrick, locked away in their hotel suite for days and days on end as they thrashed out the storyline, both deciding to drop acid and go to space in their own way as a means of exploring all the possibilities of the heavens. Could it have happened? Even such creative colossi as these two must have got a bit bored in that hotel room... you can’t help but wonder. Hey, it was the sixties.

It makes me smile to imagine this asteroid-collision meeting of minds and mind-bending substances, but it also seems proper, and even scientific, to assume that Clarke wanted to go one step beyond. He wanted to see and know things that no-one else did; he had to understand. We all have this curiosity, ingrained in our genes; it’s what got us out of trees in the first place (as the author points out) and got us wondering about those strange sparkling things that bewitch us from the night skies.

And who knows... we have to be alert to every possibility... what seems fantastic to us may be a matter of tedium to human life in the future... (Would a caveman be bored at an airport departure lounge?)... Arthur C Clarke might still exist, somewhere. He might be watching me typing this, now; he might be aware of you reading these words. He might exist in the future, living again through machines, and then transcending that physical reality again. We’ve got to be open to ideas, forever questing.

So, I’ve asked Santa for the 2001 DVD this Christmas; it’s going to be so much more beautiful now that I’ve read this extraordinary book. A couple more of Arthur C Clarke’s novels would be great, too, Santa. If you’re out there, listening to me.

THE WAR AFTER ARMAGEDDON

by Ralph Peters
Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
New York, 2009

Review by A. J. Barker

It is surprising that those of us who survived the 20th century should still read apocalyptic literature, much less for fun and relaxation. But then, ‘The End of the World as We Know It’ has amused and delighted people since Ur of the Chaldees, and perhaps it was because early monastic life was so boring and austere that the Fathers of the Church tossed Revelations in among the canonical books. (“And now for something completely different…”)

There is nothing so satisfying as visiting imagined havoc, chaos and destruction upon one’s imagined enemies. But it’s best if they are not too imaginary, for as Tolkien demonstrated in Lord of the Rings, the slaying of Orcs is a dreary business (and the same ‘ho hum’ applies to zapping George Lucas’s action figures in white plastic suits.)

No, there’s nothing like whacking the traditional enemy. And what enemy could be more traditional than the one ‘the West’ has been fighting, off and on, for 600 years? The War After Armageddon describes the final battle between Christians and Moslems.

The book begins with U. S. Lt. General ‘Flintlock’ Harris pondering a battle just beyond his horizon. He can’t see what is happening because (as he had so often, and so presciently, predicted) the excessively high tech equipment sold to the U. S. Army by the military-industrial complex, has been rendered useless by electronic jamming. General Harris is a ‘straight-up’ guy, not very imaginative, conservative in his military opinions (hence the nickname) but a thoughtful and competent commander, loyal to the Constitution, and to the Army. Unfortunately, he’s not in charge.

For reasons that may have been made clearer in an earlier book, the world lies bleeding and exhausted. Dozens of major cities, including Teheran, Jerusalem, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, are uninhabitable radioactive sites. The U. S. Army has been also been destroyed, not so much by the enemy as by politicians. A supine Congress, afraid of the evangelical right, has turned most of the military over to an independent entity, The Military Order of Brothers in Christ (MOBIC) under the control of charismatic General Sim Montfort, Harris’s long-time career rival.

Harris’s much smaller command is one of the few remaining constitutional units. He is fighting two wars, an unskillful effort against the politicians and evangelical conspirators who are continually directing him to turn over additional units to Montfort, and a measured and competent fight against the jihadists.

He can see that the remaining Army and Marine forces are being wasted (as are the MOBIC forces) in an effort to seize ‘culturally important’ sites (Megiddo, Damascus, etc.) with no strategic value. He knows that the weak President is under the control of an evangelically tetched Vice-President, but he is a ‘good soldier’. He accepts the validity of orders that come through the chain of command.

The reader aches to see him rebel—to have him ‘take out’ Montfort and restore some common sense and decency—but it’s too late for that, and Harris is no conspirator. He’s inculcated with traditional West Point values (although a graduate of Virginia Military Institute) unwilling to substitute his own judgment for that of his lawful superiors. Besides, no matter that Harris and his men think of the MOBIC forces as ‘pukes’—they remain ‘our own’—better our pukes than the jihadist alternative.

Perhaps not so oddly, the command structure on the ‘jihadi’ side is quite similar—an apocalyptic, end-of-the-worlder, Emir-General Suleiman al-Mahdi is in overall control, and has a more thoughtful professional soldier, Colonel al-Ghazi, as his principal subordinate. Like Harris, al-Ghazi can see where events are trending—but just as loyally, continues to follow orders. And, just as on the ‘Western’ side—the treacherous and hypocritical rule, while the honorable suffer from resignation and apathy, but remain determined to do their best for their own side, if only as a parting gesture.

Perhaps I have already said too much—the reader can guess where this is headed, even before Harris realizes that the MOBIC forces are being drawn into a trap—a trap that only a military historian like Harris might recognize. Beyond Megiddo (the historical Armageddon) lies ‘Kefar Hittim’, anciently known as ‘Hattim’. It was at the ‘Horns of Hattim’ that Saladin scored his greatest victory against the Crusaders.

As overwrought as it is, there is much to be pondered in this book. Peters is a retired intelligence officer, formerly an enlisted man. He has apparently distressed his former military superiors with unsettling strategic opinions, has worked as a journalist, and has written numerous other books. The military ambience, the relationships among enlisted personnel, non-coms and officers, the language, the sense of what has to be done in a given circumstance, etc. will seem strikingly familiar, and totally convincing to anyone who has ever been there—and the mix of admirable, mundane and despicable motivations seems quite plausible.

Since we are determined to read apocalyptic literature—why not go with the good stuff.

I recommend The War After Armageddon.

THE LAST BREATH

by Denise Mina
Bantam press 2007. (In the USA, the title is A Slip of the Knife.)

Review by Bill Kirton

Crime fiction is a strange genre. Its popularity ensures that it’s well represented in the bestseller lists and yet, once you get past the Ian Rankins, Val McDermids, Jeffrey Deavers, Elmore Leonards and all the rest, there are dozens of excellent writers whose books are just as gripping, compulsive and skilfully written. Denise Mina is successful, has a good following and yet her name isn’t heard as often as it should be. She deserves to be in the very top rank of crime writers.

She studied law at Glasgow University, did research for a PhD on mental illness in female offenders and, simultaneously, taught criminology and criminal law. Her first novel Garnethill won the John Creasey Dagger for the best first novel. It was published in 1998 and followed by Exile and Resolution to make up the Garnethill trilogy. These novels, like the series featuring Paddy Meehan, the central character of The Last Breath, are set in Glasgow. It’s the Glasgow of the 1980s, 1990s, and the present day. Mina knows it intimately, its architecture, politics, corruptions, inequalities, speech patterns, the special humour and resilience of its citizens. But she also knows and has great compassion for people, and her Glaswegians have the impulses, desires, foibles and idosyncrasies of people everywhere.

Paddy Meehan first appeared in The Field of Blood, working as a dogsbody in the offices of the Scottish Daily News but dreaming of being a real journalist. That was followed by The Dead Hour, in which she’s moved a little way up the hierarchy, and the Edgar-nominated The Last Breath sees her higher still. From the start, we follow her anxieties, misfortunes, successes and battles with colleagues, police and family members. She’s a very real, funny and determined woman, a match for all the men she has to deal with and if only there were a better word than feistiness (which always seems to me to sound wrong for what it means), she would be the epitome of it. (An aside to explain what I mean about feisty: first, it’s too close to ‘fusty’ – or the even better Scots version of that, ‘foostie’; second, it seems to be used almost exclusively when referring to women and implies that being feisty isn’t customary for them; and third, its derivation is downright unpleasant, the noun from which it arises being defined in a slang dictionary of 1811 as ‘a small windy escape backwards, more obvious to the nose than ears; frequently by old ladies charged on their lap-dogs’. I rest my case.)

The point is that Paddy Meehan is a terrific creation and, as a reader, I’m grateful to Mina for letting us follow her progress, psychologically as well as practically, in such careful detail. It’s great to spend time in her company.

In this novel, her sister, an ex-nun, reveals her love affair with a priest, and that’s the least interesting of the various plots which Mina interweaves so skilfully. They include the release from prison of a young man who killed a child when he (the killer) was a child himself, police corruption, the murder of Paddy’s ex-lover by the IRA (or not, since they deny any involvement), threats to her wee son, and the demands of her editor to give her inside line on these major news events.

Mina’s skill lies not only in creating these utterly plausible strands, but also in weaving them together in a way which makes them all part of a single fabric. They aren’t sub-plots which coincide; they’re events and people which/who interact, send ripples through each other, and draw Paddy to a tense, brilliant conclusion which resolves them all in a very disturbing finale.

I really feel it’s impossible to do justice to Mina’s intelligence, her observational skills and the rhythms and flow of her writing. It’s all informed by her understanding of the politics of Northern Ireland and their manifestations in Glasgow, her perceptions of the impulses and motives of the child-killing child, her enormous sympathy for society’s undervalued members, her sheer humanity – sorry, I could prolong this list much further. And she creates it all with such mastery of the novelist’s art. Her prose crackles (apology for yet another cliché), her dialogue is perfect, her one-liners are pinpoint accurate, her manipulation of plots and effects never falters. Threats and menace lace through the ordinariness and realness of all these lives. There’s a really gripping death scene which is violent but never gratuitous. Every aspect of the writing is so assured. In fact, to prove it, just go to her website and read the gripping opening chapter of The Last Breath. You’ll find here:

The Last Breath

TWO CARAVANS

by Monica Lewycka
309 pages. Fig Tree Press.

Review by Sharon Gunason Pottinger

Confessions of a Narrative Junkie: Review of Two Caravans

If I hadn’t arrived at my friend’s house an hour early and the only thing to read was Two Caravans, I probably would not have picked it up even though I enjoyed Monica Lewycka’s first book (A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian). I am a narrative junkie—once I start a story I have to see how it ends.

By the time my friend showed up and I set the book aside, I had read 20 pages and that was enough to make me wonder how the story would end. I was hooked. Now the fact that I looked for it in my local library rather than having Amazon zap it to me suggests I was equivocal about it from the get go. Even so, when I the librarian plopped it triumphantly down in front of me, I was happy to see it and read it that same day.

The dedication to Morecambe Bay cockle pickers and the excerpt from the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale (in older English) suggested it was going to be a more serious book, or at least touch lightly on serious subjects, which she did in Short History. Most of the seriousness in Two Caravans, however, gets lost in slapstick and the fact that the characters describing what they see are limited in the perspective they can offer. The wise fool character types represented in the naïve immigrants and, yes, a dog with more humanity than some of the humans, offer some very funny insights into the chaos that typify too much of contemporary life, but the characters who might provide fuller insights are left on the cutting room floor. That seems to me a great loss, and a disservice to Chaucer whose spirit she evoked.

I like to think I would have recognized the traveller’s tales genre without the excerpt, but it might have eluded me—I leave to your discretion to decide whether that is because it has been too long since I studied literature or Ms. Lewycka needed to signpost her design.

In addition to losing the older, wiser characters, which meant the end of the novel was more of a romance than true traveller’s tales, the bad guys were not well defined. The stage was set for seeing the good and bad characters alike as faced with impossible choices through brief back stories, at least for Vitaly. The young prostitute with dead eyes is a good foil for Irina. Arguably Vulk and Vitaly are the antithesis of Andriy. But we do not get a chance to see how fate shaped Vulk into the complete villain that he is and so we cannot understand the passion he has for Irina, which is a compelling force for much of the plot. What makes one person choose to be “a man” as Andriy decides and another to look at the world with dead eyes? This is an important question that even in a picaresque, light-hearted novel, needs a bit more answering. After all, the book is dedicated to the Morecambe cockle pickers—those poor souls who were left to drown in the incoming tide because their agents didn’t understand or know or care that they were drowning. Other than the dedication, the cockle pickers are mentioned only in passing and we are left to wonder as well about the Chinese girls whose lives have already been so desperately compromised.

When Ms. Lewycka chooses to research and to present a graphic scene of gross exploitation, she can do it ably. The description of the dehumanising events in the chicken factory are a testament to the fact that she can write powerfully within her chosen genre when she chooses to do so. Even more startling than the graphic story in the chicken factory is the stark description of the exploitation of trained medical people subjected to “retraining” at minimal wages, including much the same kinds of deductions as the agricultural workers. Exploitation by the mobilfonmen cuts across classes and continents.

One reviewer described Two Caravans as struggling with second book phenomenon, which, in this case, seems to be a struggle to repeat her initial success and bring out another book fast enough to capitalize on the success of the first one while trying to look serious. I like to think that if she had taken a bit more time and made it a bit more balanced, it would have been a much stronger story. Perhaps there is an editor or a sales and marketing department that leaned a bit too heavily on the author.

Although another reviewer commented that they liked seeing Mr. Mayevskyj, a central figure from her first novel, this cameo appearance seemed to me like a nod to Hollywood type name-dropping. It did not add to the narrative. Many men (and some women, I daresay) have a fondness for things mechanical. The gearbox might have belonged to any number of people, and the plot could have worked well without any more coincidences.

Most puzzling to me was Emmanuel. His story was perhaps one of the most interesting and it is given to us in small doses almost as a subplot, but one that does not quite come to a satisfactory end. Is Emmanuel’s strict faith and love of God the antidote for Britain’s overblown consumerism or is he just one lucky AIDS orphan whose life has come right? Although he has the last word in the novel, his story, sadly, seems to remain a sideshow to the romantic happy ending.

Perhaps I have been so critical of Two Caravans because I did read it—like eating a second piece of chocolate or getting caught with one’s hand in the cookie jar—yes, yes, I read it, but you see I can find all these flaws in it so I am morally and intellectually superior to a book others call a book with “a big heart”. Despite all its limitations, I read it and I enjoyed it. November is the season for Nouveau Beaujolais, wine that is pleasing to the palate but not well aged nor long lived on the shelf. Read Two Caravans quickly and do not expect it to linger on the bookshelf for a re-read and you can enjoy the occasional flashes of insight into a world most of us, thank God, will never experience directly.

Sharon Gunason Pottinger

WORMWOOD

by G. P. Taylor 288 pages, Putnam

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

I’m a huge fan of fantasy, particularly fantasy that tries to be a little bit different. All too often, writers in the genre stick to the tried and tested formula of wizards and goblins; enchanted swords and fearsome dragons. Unfortunately, it is the prevalence of such books that serves to narrow the scope of the genre. Publishers are only interested in what sells. If they have a success with Thrabnir and the Quest for the Golden Grape of Garangol then they’ll fix their beady little eyes on a whole series of Thrabnir novels and the inevitable imitators.

This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy a bit of sword and sorcery, it’s just that I’d rather delve into something more original, something that pushes the genre a little further into the mainstream. My favourite fantasy novel of recent years has to be Susanna Clarke’s masterful Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell, a book whose real magic lay in the fact that it tricked many so-called “highbrow” readers into enjoying a tale of duelling wizards in the nineteenth century. If you haven’t yet read Clarke’s mighty tome, stop reading this review right now and go out and buy yourself a copy. You can thank me later.

At first glance, Wormwood appears to share the same ambitions as the aforementioned masterpiece. It’s setting of London in the eighteenth century seems rooted in the real world and the mix of supernatural fantasy with such a rich historical backdrop helped to secure my purchase of it. Like many books, this one adorned my shelves for some time (the best part of a year) before I finally got round to reading it. I wanted so much to enjoy this book – it promised everything that I look for in a fantasy novel. Much to my disappointment, rather than a sense of wonder and enjoyment, all I was left with at the end of this novel was a rather bitter taste in my mouth.

Let’s start with the positives – the book is undoubtedly well written. Taylor creates a marvellously grimy, earthy picture of London. He doesn’t skimp on the details and his lavish descriptions help to immerse the reader in the setting. The characters are well drawn out, for the most part. There are some great names on display too (Dagda Sarapuk being a personal favourite of mine). The author keeps the reader guessing as to the characters’ motivations right up to the great revelations of the final few chapters. All good so far you might say, what could possibly be wrong?

Well, my first criticism is a minor one, based on personal preferences more than anything else. There are a lot of supernatural and magical elements in the novel. A lot. Some may lap up this kind of fantasy but for me, Taylor’s use of the fantastic – nay, his reliance on it to drive the plot along – wears thin very quickly. The reader becomes so accustomed to fantastical creatures and dazzling spells that the climactic battle, so full of such spectacle, seems strangely flaccid and leaves one feeling somewhat cheated. This, as I have already mentioned, is my own personal opinion. I’m sure that there are many readers out there who might revel in such overblown high fantasy. Once again, I will direct those readers to Susanna Clarke’s truly excellent Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell should they wish to experience some great magical goings-on set against a believable historic background. Unlike Wormwood, Clarke’s novel gradually unfolds as opposed to quickly unravelling and proves a far more satisfying experience.

Regardless of how well Wormwood is written, my main criticism of the book is of such magnitude that I cannot in good faith recommend it to anyone. The opening premise (a giant comet hurtles towards earth and can only be stopped by the Cabalist Doctor Sabian Blake) is intriguing but one soon becomes uncomfortably aware of being preached at. A little research on Wikipedia soon explained everything. G.P. Taylor, you see, used to be a Reverend and began writing fantasy in response to the overwhelming success of the Harry Potter novels and His Dark Materials. Believing that Pullman, Rowling and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were leading the youth of today to develop an unhealthy interest in the occult, Taylor wrote his own series of fantasy novels based on his own Church of England beliefs. Fair enough, after the rampant atheism of Philip Pullman a response from a writer of faith was inevitable. Approaching a fantasy novel with a Christian bias is nothing new, after all CS Lewis’ Narnia series is steeped in Biblical allegory and none the worse for it. However, the real problem I have with this book is its inherent hypocrisy.

From what I can gather, Taylor has been less than impressed with the liberalisation of the Church of England and his faith manifests itself within the novel with an aggressiveness and lack of forgiveness which seems distinctly Old Testament. Taylor’s own fear of fiction corrupting the young is reflected by Nemorensis, a wicked book that warps the minds of those who read it. The ham-fisted symbolism goes further with a bookshop haunted by the spirits of children robbed of their innocence. The novel’s portrayal of witchcraft and magic is almost entirely negative. Dabbling with such forces, Taylor believes, is a one-way ticket to damnation. Sabian Blake’s experimentation with science and the Cabala (read Kabbalah) steers him away from his spiritual beliefs and it is this that leads him to become vulnerable to the dark powers of the book.

The real heroes of the novel are the angels. Harp-playing celestial hippies they are not. Taylor’s angels may have wings but that’s as far as the similarities go. They’re sombre, brooding killing machines who, when not spouting transparent attacks on the battle between science and religion in the real world, commit some of the novel’s most shocking acts of violence. It is this aspect of the book which I found the most distasteful. Taylor set out to entertain youngsters attracted to the occult and to warn them of its “dangers”. I’m no great fan of J.K. Rowling’s writing but I fail to see how they could be harmful to the inquisitive minds of children and young adults. There are a number of acts of violence within Wormwood which far surpass those in the Harry Potter books. To name but a few, the novel features attempted rape, grave-robbing, fingernails being pulled out, exploding dogs, people crushed beneath the feet of a stampeding mob, kidnap and torture. In one chapter, an angel fists an explosive crystal into a demon’s “stink-hole”. Don’t get me wrong, violence in fiction doesn’t shock or repel me in any way. What upsets me about it is the way in which Taylor has labelled the work of others as harmful but then comes out with this kind of stuff.

Taylor has assumed a holier-than-thou attitude in his approach to writing whilst simultaneously creating a piece of fiction that is the antithesis of Christian beliefs. In my eyes, that is hypocrisy of the highest order. Fantasy is all about escapism and the reason this book fails as a fantasy novel is that it is constrained by a rigid, unforgiving religious doctrine which is, unfortunately, all too real.

Hereward L.M. Proops

THE TAILOR OF GLOUCESTER

by Beatrix Potter
F. Warne & Co., 1903, 59pp

Review by Paul Fenton

When people think of Beatrix Potter they tend to visualise, I suspect, the quaint watercolours of little fluffy cute Peter Rabbit frolicking around the woods and getting into all manner of tame mischief. Or maybe they mistakenly think of the Bunnykins range of Wedgewood ceramics.

I experience a sharp and dramatic drop in serotonin when I think of Beatrix Potter.

Someone, I don’t know who (but when I find out, they are getting such a rubbish Christmas present from me this year), bought my daughter, Kid A, the complete works of Beatrix Potter. If you only look at the artwork you’d be likely to award it five stars on Amazon, but have you ever tried reading one of them? Can you recall any of the stories? Some might remember the story of Peter Rabbit, in many cases because they’ve seen the animated version, but what about Two Bad Mice? The Tailor of Gloucester? Squirrel Nutkin?

You’ll be forgiven if you can’t recall these stories, and pitied if you can.

I used to harbour a vague malaise towards Dr Seuss. I’d come home from a loooong day at work where conversations consisted of bespoke nonsense and empty-calorie cliché, whereupon I’d be handed a pyjama-clad toddler and a book selection. If I caught a glimpse of green eggs and/or ham, or a large red-and-white striped hat, I’d feel my tongue immediately begin to thicken in my mouth. After trading nonsense terms all day concerning showstoppers and red flags and blue skies and straw-men, I’d be forced to juggle bricks in blocks and ticks and tocks and nicks and nocks and cocks in socks and chicks with rocks and tongues did lock sir! I’d had enough … or so I thought. Gradually the rhymes became familiar and I could trot them out as effortlessly as a six-beer wee.

Unimpressed by my oral dexterity, Kid A grew bored and demanded change. Enter the Matrix. I mean, the Beatrix.

If you’re familiar with the average children’s picture book produced today, you’ll likely understand that story comes first, pictures come second. With the Beatrix books, I strongly suspect Beatrix created a folio of watercolours and then simply tried to kludge them into stories on the fly. Okay, Peter Rabbit might have had some redeeming qualities story-wise, but my on-the-record gripe is with The Tailor of Gloucester, so I’ll focus on that.

Here are the opening lines:

In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets – when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta – there lived a tailor in Gloucester.

I know, I know: this was written, like, a thousand years ago. But were children of that time so prattish as to know a periwig from a flowered lappet? And paduasoy? What the hell is paduasoy? It sounds like a bad joke about a George Lucas movie. And so begins the seemingly endless ordeal of me trying to read this story to Kid A, the last of the day’s caffeine having long since dwindled from my bloodstream and my ability to comprehend surreal Victorian narrative at its lowest ebb.

The rest of the story goes like this: Poor old Tailor has to create a waistcoat for the Mayor of Gloucester’s wedding, but he is out of twist! (References to twist are many, and if you didn’t piece together exactly what twist is at the start of the story, you might find your mind wandering some strange back roads). He sends Simpkin out to buy him some more twist, and a few other odds and ends. Simpkin is the Tailor’s cat, which provides the first clue as to why the Tailor is so poor. Also, he makes mouse-sized outfits with any material off-cuts. Why not? If you’re going to send your cat on shopping trips, you might as well dress his food for him. Tailor moans some more about his twist shortage. My eyes take on a glazed appearance, like I’m watching television in a parallel dimension, or sleeping with my eyes open. Mice come out to assess the twist dilemma. Simpkin returns with the groceries but has forgotten the bloody twist, and is heavily distracted by his genetic imperative to go medieval on many a mouse-arse.

Blah blah mice, blah blah Simpkin, Mayor of Gloucester, no more twist … and so on, until Simpkin pulls through with the twist, the mice make the Mayor’s waistcoat with the natural advantage of microscopic attention to detail, and the Tailor grows rich and famous in recognition of this fine work.

So, to recap: ordinary old Tailor, possibly delusional, exploits the talents of a minority workforce, rewards them with token compensation, and holds them in check using extreme stand-over tactics. Kid A didn’t pick up on those themes the first time I read Gloucester, but after I explained it to her the fourth or fifth time, I think it started to sink in. She moved all her toy cats to the bottom of her deepest toy basket.

Can someone not update these stories? And by update I mean rewrite. And by rewrite I mean throw away everything but the pictures and start again. Perhaps create one single mega-story. A Beatrix Matrix? A Potterverse? How about a posthumous collaboration with Dr Seuss?

No twist sir?
Why pissed sir?
I think I get the gist of that,
And the problem clearly is your cat.
For though he’s dressed up to the nines,
To secure the twist you need, you’ll find,
He’ll also need a special hat …

BRIAN ENO’S ANOTHER GREEN WORLD

(33-1/3 series) by Geeta Dayal
136 pages, Continuum

Review by Marie Mundaca

The Discreet Charm of Brian Eno

I attended a David Byrne concert at Radio City Music Hall in New York City earlier this year. I hate David Byrne for personal reasons—I was deeply asleep at CBGB’s Theater in January 1979 when he rudely awoke me with “Psycho Killer”—so I didn’t really want to go. But there are seats at Radio City, which made the show more enticing for me—it’s hard to stand in a crowd for two hours! But what made this show interesting to me was that the focus of the show was to be the music Byrne made with producer and songwriter Brian Eno.

I was first introduced to Eno’s music when I was a punk rock teenager. My older friends’ musical taste went beyond The Adverts and Richard Hell. They all tried to educate me by subjecting me to music by The Residents, Stockhausen, and Brian Eno. Eno’s Music for Airports, Discreet Music, and Another Green World were the perfect soundtracks for late night conversations about nothing. Well, they were about something, usually creating Great Art, or starting a Great Band. Regardless, these talks never got beyond the conceptual stage.

But it was at the David Byrne concert, as Byrne performed hit songs like “Once In A Lifetime” and “Burning Down The House” that I realized that most of the late 20th century musical catalog would not exist without Brian Eno. His work with the Talking Heads and U2 had a tremendous influence on pop music. I used to think that Eno had sold out; after all he curated the great No New York album;, and now he was hanging out with Bono? No New York was probably single-handedly responsible for Sonic Youth, the Pixies, and Nirvana. His work in ambient soundscapes led the way for trance and techno. Not to mention that he created “The Microsoft Sound,” the startup music for Windows 95, called by one youtube commenter, “the sound that marked… the digital age.”

I’ve forgiven Eno for his work with Byrne and Bono. After all, without his influence, both bands probably would have been a lot more boring, and popular music a lot mundane.

In the recently released “33-1/3 series” monograph, Another Green World, music and science writer Geeta Dayal explores how this album cemented Eno’s theories about “the recording studio as musical instrument,” and all that entailed. The development and recording of Another Green World took place over a few months in 1975, and throughout the book Eno and other musicians remark on how expensive that was. Eno would gather musicians into the studio with only vague ideas, but an outstanding group of musicians, like Robert Fripp, John Cale, Phil Collins (To be fair to Eno, this was ten years before abominations like "Sussudio"). According to Dayal, Eno encouraged creativity among the musicians utilizing a deck of cards with suggestions that he created, called “Oblique Strategies,” rather than dictating exactly what they should play. Eno said in an interview, “(T)he musicians I work with play a very creative role—they’re not there as executives of my ideas.”

Dayal takes her time exploring all the personalities and backgrounds that Eno brought together for this project. Describing production and creative processes and how they produced the warm evocative songs on Another Green World would be difficult for anyone not versed in electronic music. But Dayal writes about the production of this album in an accessible and interesting way. The story of this album not just the story of how an album was made, but a story about the creative process and having faith in one’s ideas. Dayal doesn’t waste readers’ time reviewing the album, knowing that everyone can easily listen to tracks like “St. Elmo’s Fire” (no, not that one) and “Over Fire Island” on their own.

The album Another Green World can get a bit wonky and weird, which is not surprising upon finding out how it was made. The amazing thing about the album is how successful it is on many levels. There are experimental pieces and gorgeous pop songs that sit side-by-side. Dayal makes it clear how important this album was both to Eno’s development and to the development of late 20th century music in general.

Readers interested in Eno will love this book, as will any creative types struggling with how to make something from only vague ideas. Beware, though, there are no ribald stories about Bono or Byrne. Perhaps my friends and I should have listened to Eno more closely during those late nights—we might all be famous now.

GOING POSTAL

by Terry Pratchett
416 pages, HarperTorch

Review by Kate Kasserman

It isn’t that I get tetchy and obstructionist, although I do. I don’t really know, actually, why it’s taken me so long to read Terry Pratchett, despite the frequent pokes (sometimes presented as a cheerful recommendation, sometimes intoned with the Glazed Eyes of the Saved) I’ve had insisting that I really, really ought to do so.

Anyway, I finally remembered my many-years-delayed duty while wandering through the bookstore, and looked him up. YE GODS, there were about seven trillion books under Pratchett. I almost gave up right there. I am easily confused! But I flipped over a few random samples, and upon discovering the comforting phrase “AN ESPECIALLY FINE ENTRY POINT TO THE SERIES” on the back cover of Going Postal, I grabbed it. And I must admit – having finally made up my mind to act, I was very, very curious. Seriously, a LOT of people love this guy. They say he is fun. And I like fun!

I have now determined: yes, it is fun. There, settled!

So anyway, to get a bit ahead of myself, I am going to read more of his work – and when I do so, I will come up with and tell y’all what I suspect will be a better recommendation for AN ESPECIALLY FINE ENTRY POINT TO THE SERIES; Going Postal is plenty entertaining (and obviously sold me on Pratchett as an author) – but I couldn’t help shaking the sense that this is nevertheless not necessarily the book where he was at the top of his form.

The rough outline of the story is thus. Moist von Lipwig, charming peripatetic con-man, has finally been caught – well, and he gets hanged, too, but not quite to death – and is given one last chance to make good: Lord Vetinari, the absolutist ruler of the city of Ankh-Morpork, needs a postmaster, and has decided that von Lipwig is the man for the job. Vetinari can’t get someone respectable for the task…nor really someone non-disposable, because the post office has been out of operation for several decades, is hopelessly superseded by the technology of “clacks” (a sort of semaphore system), and also somehow manages to kill everyone who’s assigned to run it.

Of course von Lipwig tries to get away instanter, but a golem watchdog straightens him out right quick on that score (I am loving the golems massively in this book, BTW); and then the questions become: can our poor thoroughly trapped von Lipwig make the post office work; why does Vetinari want this very extra dead institution to come back; and will von Lipwig, along the way, redeem himself and go straight.

But, you see, the plot isn’t really the interesting part. It doesn’t hold any meaningful surprises – not in its main thrust, anyway. What is deliciously fun here is the sheer amount of raw invention and the tangents (pin collecting – secret societies – academia-style jostlings with our wonkish magic-masters – I could go on pretty much FOREVER on this score!), and the loving attention paid to both – and particularly the wry outlook. Sometimes it is funny (although not really the apoplexy-and-incontinence-inducing sort of hilarity that I’d been led to expect – maybe that’s the case in other books in the series – but consistently dry chuckle-worthy), and often it is rather melancholic.

The reason I suspect that this is not Pratchett’s best work is that he can be so very deft with the amusing and pointed characterizations (even within the scope of caricature, which is NOT an easy trick) – and yet the villain of the piece doesn’t add up to being more than a “profits über alles” corporate robber baron type (who runs the clacks operation, having pulled some sharp tricks to steal it from its techno-geek inventor). Sure, there are some funny lines about and from Reacher Gilt. Here’s an example where Gilt makes a wee request of his management team, the first time said lesser monsters realize that they may be in a smidge over their heads:

He surveyed the faces of men who now knew that they were riding a tiger. It had been a good ride up until a week ago. It wasn’t a case of not being able to get off. They could get off. That was not the problem. The problem was that the tiger knew where they lived.

And yet – the “predatory corporate criminal” bad guy is a stock type, and while Gilt is useful as someone for von Lipwig to compare himself against (von Lipwig is naughty, but he is not really bad, and it is *thisclose* to past time for him to recognize and deal with the difference), there is something a little flat about Gilt being quite so thoroughly evil in quite such familiar ways.

If I were forced to choose between a good ride and a memorable destination, I’d take the good ride. Going Postal certainly delivers that – and it does it well enough that I think Pratchett is probably capable of serving up both ride and destination in some of his other books. This one’s still well worth the time.

WINTERWOOD

by Patrick McCabe
256 pages, Bloomsbury USA (January 22, 2008)

Review by S. P. Miskowski

Novelist Patrick McCabe (The Butcher Boy; Breakfast on Pluto) examines the social and political arc of the past twenty-five years in Ireland as a parallel to the shifting fortunes and inexorable decline of his protagonist in Winterwood. The protagonist/narrator's attempts to leap into the competitive modern world exemplify the efforts of his country to do the same. At this and at a more personal level Winterwood is about the difficulty of extricating oneself from the ghosts of the past, and the pernicious nature of deeply imprinted, horrific childhood experiences.

When journalist Redmond Hatch returns to his former home in the rural town of Slievenageeha to write a colorful article about the folk traditions there, he meets a native named Ned Strange and immediately falls under his spell. Strange is a local favorite, with his country dialect, fanciful anecdotes and old Irish songs. His quaintness buys his way into the company of people who see him as a relic, a human time capsule conveniently preserving the history that they view as a novelty. But Redmond sees a different side of Ned when they are alone together, drinking. Ned reveals his belligerence, rage and cruelty--and a good deal of knowledge about Redmond's family life before he left Slievenageeha. Ned is one of several characters who impose themselves, physically and psychically, on children. Throughout the book Ned functions as a catalyst, a plausible character, a composite, a phantom, and a cipher. That McCabe is able to make all of this work indicates the virtuosity of his prose.

Redmond is a man who dearly wants to believe the things he tells us about himself. Like Ned, he has adopted a face that will allow him into polite company while keeping secret the nature he knows he cannot share. To speak the whole truth would tear him apart, and so he denies what he knows and keeps up the relentless patter of our age: the over-energized pep talk and TV-trained self-analysis that pass for conversation in the 21st century. He is a man who must pretend to be ever on the verge of turning over a new leaf. As he persists in his struggle to overcome what is insurmountable, he tries to convince us, and himself, that everything is fine, or nearly fine, or about to be fine.

This masterful study of a damaged mind fragmenting beyond repair comes from one of our most respected contemporary authors. Complex in tone and point of view, the book is both a social chronicle and a record of personal catastrophe.

McCabe takes the quaint veneer of a misrepresented and sentimentalized way of life and shows how nostalgia itself can mask and thereby allow a persistent evil. Redmond refuses to relinquish his gruesome optimism, and it gradually engulfs him. Mocked because of his background and family, he realizes that this is a repudiation of his deepest nature, but cannot offer an articulate, non-violent response. His wife calls his relatives hillbillies, and he laughs along with her, secretly mortified by the pathetic and brutal details of his impoverished youth. His tragedy, if we allow him so grand a conceit, is to be caught between what is expected of him in the world where he tries to live, and what has happened to him in the world he has tried to leave behind.

--S.P. Miskowski

THE IMAGO SEQUENCE AND OTHER STORIES

by Laird Barron
256 pages, Night Shade Books (publisher)

Review by S.P. Miskowski

Laird Barron is well known to readers of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Five of the nine stories in this collection were first published there. His work also appears in about two-dozen anthologies and numerous magazines online and in print. He's the winner of a Shirley Jackson Award for The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, and has received seven International Horror Guild Award nominations and five nominations for a Locus Award. If you haven't read much fantasy fiction lately and you're under the impression that speculative writing is dreamlike or disconnected from every day experience, Barron's fiction will change your mind.

The tales in this collection fuse the supernatural and the quotidian with disturbing results. Barron creates a world that looks, feels and smells like reality. Yet just outside this world, touching the edge of the picture and threatening to cross over into it, are the shadows and shapes of something dreadful. Like the conjured images of a Rorschach test, the longer you look at these shapes, the more ominous they appear.

I was amused but not really surprised to read that the author of these psychologically piercing stories used to raise huskies in Alaska, and that he had extensive martial arts training. The lower echelon political figures, cynical real estate tycoons, broken soldiers of fortune and former athletes and beauty queens who populate his stories resonate with a graphic sensibility writers can only gain from experiences unrelated to the literary arts. When these characters speak, it is with a weariness born of too much knowledge about the human condition. When they finally decide to act--and they seldom do so on a whim--it is with a grim understanding that the future may easily hold greater pain and horror than the present, for there is no end to horror in the history of our race.

From the aging paramilitary protagonist of "Old Virginia" to the guilt-ridden mogul in "Hallucigenia" there is a deep and adult sense of mortality that darkens even the most casual exchange. "Shiva, Open Your Eye" follows the spiritual journey of a serial killer whose self-justification is profound and global in its proportions. The compromised characters of The Imago Sequence and Other Stories search for lost works of art and hidden records in attempts to explain the inexplicable. Like a Werner Herzog film, their dangerous yet well documented adventures lapse into obsessive, nightmarish enterprises that lure them ever onward to their doom.

This is the only collection of stories I have ever read that actually entered my consciousness to the degree that I dreamed about its landscapes and characters. Chalk that up to the author's extraordinary prose style, which is densely descriptive; and his ability to weave hardboiled action reminiscent of Lawrence Block together with allusions to another dimension that would make H.P. Lovecraft shiver. Barron's universe walks and talks like this one, but it is haunted by a greater darkness just beyond our influence, and making its way toward us with an alarming determination.

THE BELIEVERS

by Zoe Heller
352 pages, Harper

Review by Kwana Jackson

In THE BELIEVERS, author Zoe Heller of WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?: NOTES ON A SCANDAL successfully blends family saga with political commentary.

I chose THE BELIEVERS to read because it was a Twitter Book Club pick and seemed interesting for my own book group. I was all ready to get it from the library when I made a twitter comment and won a copy of the book. Lucky me, and loving the Twitter Book Club at The Book Studio http://www.thebookstudio.com/twitterbookclub .

The novel opens with 18-year-old Audrey, a typist at a cocktail party in 1962. Glimpses of her character are instantly shown as she caustically assesses the party-goers from a distance. A young American lawyer named Joel Litvinoff catches her eye as he brags about doing legal work for Dr. Martin Luther King. And Audrey catches him right back, showing that she’s not a girl to be hidden in the background.

Fast forward forty years and the couple are living in their Greenwich Village Brownstone and are now the parents of three grown children.

Joel, 72, is now a famous civil rights attorney and big defender of leftists. He’s about to embark on a case where he’s defending a suspected terrorist when he suffers a stroke. As he lies in a coma Audrey, the family matriarch with a quick temper and a foul mouth to match, has to now deal with everyday life without Joel, when he was the center of her life for so many years. As Joel clings to life, Audrey has to come to terms with the dysfunction in her family and Joel’s past infidelities.

So much has been said about THE BELIEVERS being a book with unlikeable characters, but I found it just the opposite. The fact that the characters are so flawed made me like them even more. Heller didn’t go for the “make your character sympathetic” in order to give the readers something to relate to. At least not in any obvious way. But there was something to sympathize about with each main character.

There is Audrey, who has been called one of the most unlikeable characters in recent history, and she was, but in the most delicious and likable way. I couldn’t wait to turn the next page to see what zinger she’d ding out next. It was as if she had no PC filter and you were cringing in the best of the worst kinds of ways. Everything Audrey says she states as fact because she believes that she is somehow smarter than the rest of the world. Her and Joel’s entire existence has been to the betterment of the less fortunate i.e. less educated. It’s all about the enlightenment y’all.

Next is Rosa, the oldest daughter who was brought up an atheist, but longs to learn about her Jewish heritage—or is she just rebelling against everything she was taught by her parents? She and her mother seem the most alike and can’t share two sentences without it turning into an argument. She works with underprivileged girls that she can help but judge more than she cares for them.

Then there’s Karla, the downtrodden middle child. An overweight social worker, she’s married to a controlling union organizer who treats her with little respect, pretty much the same way everyone in her family always has. But Karla is the peacemaker, and instead of lashing out she eats her feelings away. That is until she meets Khaled, an Egyptian immigrant who runs the newsstand in the hospitals when she works, and once he lavishes her with the attention that she gets nowhere else Karla sees her chance at happiness.

The last child is Lenny. He’s the most frustrating character. The adopted son of Audrey and Joel and clearly the most loved by Audrey, Lenny is a do-nothing, drug addicted free-loader who is the only one able to find a way into the cold heart of Audrey. It’s interesting the way Heller proposes it. In Lenny, it’s like Audrey has no real responsibility for his faults because she didn’t birth him. Something to give pause. Maybe that’s why it is so easy for her to always forgive Lenny and keep taking him back, and why she constantly finds fault with her own birth children. In them she finds fault with herself.

The book follows Audrey, Rosa, Karla and Lenny as they deal with Joel’s coma and deteriorating health. Audrey also has to deal with the possibility of life without Joel and the realization that he may have been unfaithful. Rosa has to answer her questions of faith. Karla has to figure out her ailing marriage while trying to be the peacemaker in the family. And Lenny is dealing with his drug addiction and the idea of staying with what’s easy and comfortable or growing up and striking out on his own.

Through all this Heller takes a sharp look at religion, politics, the class struggle and the idea of elitism while mixing it with passion and family drama. THE BELIEVERS is one of the top books I’ve read this year. Will you be a Believer?

Best,

Kwana

http://www.kwanawrites.blogspot.com/

FUNGUS THE BOGEYMAN

by Raymond Briggs
Hamish Hamilton, London, 1977

Review by Bill Kirton

In the UK, one of the Christmas fixtures is a TV showing of the cartoon, The Snowman. In case you don’t know it, it’s based on the book of the same name written and illustrated by Raymond Briggs. Among his many other cartoon books (or graphic novels) are Father Christmas (who hates snow, by the way); Father Christmas Goes on Holiday; When the Wind Blows, which is a bleak but funny account of what happens to a late middle-aged, working class couple before, during and after the dropping of a nuclear bomb; The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman – a savage indictment of the Falklands War; Gentleman Jim, a toilet attendant with ideas above his station; and Ethel and Ernest, a sad, poignant ‘biography’ of Briggs’ mother and father. They’re all variously charming, chilling, funny and desolate.

You should read all of them. But the one you MUST read is Fungus the Bogeyman. It’s a hilarious, wonderful example of existentialism in action. (Don’t let the word frighten you. In a booklet called Bluff your way through Literature – invaluable for students – existentialism is defined as ‘anything that’s French, dirty or incomprehensible’.)

A bogeyman is to the British what a Boogieman is to the Americans. (An aside: why should a boogieman seem scary? When Michael Jackson sang Blame it on the boogie, it was the dance with its enthusiasm, energy, life and all that he was referring to. On the other hand, a ‘bogey’ is the thing you pick from your nose which, in my book, makes the bogeyman a much nastier entity.)

Fungus lives in Bogeydom – a damp, fetid, rank kingdom underground. Briggs is careful to give us a highly detailed picture of his habitat, family, anatomy, customs, hobbies, eating habits, clothes and, as well as creating very funny visual gags and inversions of our own values, he indulges in brilliant linguistic inventions and distortions. A breakfast cereal is Flaked Corns and two of the lotions on the shelf in the barathrum (a pit, chasm, abyss of muck according to Briggs’ helpful glossary) are the aftershave Old Mice and a bottle of Eau de Colon. In the house he wears wet, slimy sabots, a form of slipper cut from rotting wood (a process known as sabotage). His cat is called Pus, his dog Mucus, his friend Fester, the barmaid Salivia and the innkeeper in bogeydom is called an aubergine. These and many, many more inventions fill every page as Briggs details the day to day (or rather, night to night) thoughts and actions of Fungus, his drear (sic) wife, Mildew, and his son, Mould.

At dusk, Fungus gets out of his damp bed to go to work on the surface, where his jobs include slowly turning the door knobs of bedrooms, touching the back of sleeping people’s necks to create boils, making bumps in the night, causing stairs to creak, babies to wake and perpetrating all sorts of other refined torments that fill the night with terrors.

BUT (and this is where the existentialism comes in) …

As he cycles up towards the darkening world, past a man with a sandwich board bearing the words ‘Nothing is permanent but woe’, we share his thoughts, which mingle questions about the purpose of existence with a strange poetry – ‘The brimming dykes are not so full / As my heart’s swell’, ‘I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips’, ‘this seat of desolation void of light’.

He asks the meaning of life, wonders why he’s doing all this, why he’s a bogeyman. He confesses ‘I am, yet what I am, who knows? / I am the self-consumer of my woes’, and, as he prepares for bed yet again, with Mildew, he asks ‘What’s it all for?’ and ‘Does it do any ultimate good? Or even ultimate bad?’

It’s a direct, very funny exposition of the whole question of the absurd. The drawings are wonderful, the colours perfect for the subject and the word-play delightful and full of surprises and sudden depths. Briggs is renowned for his apparent pessimism, but this is a book which leaves you both reflective and smiling. I’ve been going back to it again and again for years.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by JD Salinger
224 pages, Penguin Books ltd.

Review by Pat Black

Only The Lonely

It’s a strange thing watching Goths congregate in a train station.

They have a flocking instinct, getting together in large groups seemingly without incident. In terms of appearance they seem to be much the same kind of kid I remember when I flirted with the idea of being one, a long time ago; the band T-shirts and the black clothes, the long hair on the boys and the piercings and tattoos on the girls.

I call them Goths, but of course they’ll give themselves different appellations, attached to different sects, going by the fashion of the time. Maybe they’re Emos, moshers or metallers, rather than Goths. I’m at least twice as old as some of them and as hopelessly adrift on the sea of youth culture as I ever was, so I wouldn’t dare to break them down into their constituent parts.

Whatever the factions and allegiances, a lot of these people will call themselves outsiders. And sure, they may feel alone in their classrooms or in their homes, buffeted by the disapproval of their parents, teachers, siblings and peers with each fresh tatt or a new puncture in a strange place.

But I don’t think Holden Caulfield would be a part of those flocks at the train stations.

Reading Catcher in the Rye for the first time is a long-overdue introduction to a character who is recognisably teenaged and angsty, a true anti-hero, but in a genuine and occasionally sweet way. No-one in Catcher In The Rye is painted in the washed-out hues of an old Iron Maiden T-shirt; there’s not one character who feels forced or untrue, from the gout-suffering teacher to Holden’s grotty room-mates, and especially not his adoring kid sister. The book is dominated, of course, by our somewhat untrustworthy guide, poor 17-year-old Holden. He’s a misfit, an effortless nonconformist snarling at his middle-class predicament in a posh private school in the dark days before the Christmas holidays. Holden’s been through a few schools, we hear, but none of his expulsions are for any big Hollywood reasons. There are no punched teachers, no drink or drugs taken to excess, no pregnant cheerleaders... just about anything that might slither its way into any kind of teenage drama on offer today. The boy is just a bit of a mess; the book tries to let us know why.

Holden is troubled, but not feral; we’re so used to seeing and hearing about disaffected teens getting themselves into trouble in so many ways, but Salinger dares to make his hero rather dull. With his hunting cap turned back to front, he might think he’s being different, but this image of him seems lame, if not nerdy, these days. Turning your baseball cap back to front is most likely the actions of a drunken uncle posing for a holiday photograph; certainly no teenager would be seen dead doing this now.

While the hipster late 1940s dialogue is similarly dated, it grounds the book to the time it was created – dated, perhaps, but never jarringly so. And Holden’s voice is one of the strongest things about the book; the little riffs, the fingerprints of language, help us get into that wonderful state of telepathy with the author which only the truly great novels can. As I’ve said recently about David Peace’s The Damned Utd, it changes the very rhythm of your own thinking, writing as a powerful form of suggestion. The narrative has the sort of mesmerism that’s the mark of any great novel; a contract between author and reader that holds good from the first page to the last.

Holden has slang terms of his own which seem almost quaint to modern ears (though there are one or two “fucks” thrown around the narrative, plenty of “asses” and a few “shits”, but it rang true in the sense that these colloquialisms do tend to spring up around teenagers and their peer groups, some holding fast through the generations, some dying tragically young (I knew a guy who thought everything was “mega”; try as he might, he could not make this stuck in the vernacular among the rest of the guys). But it draws you in, and it appears that the dialogue is an authentic rendering of the type of things teenagers would say at this time. Hey, just think, if Catcher in the Rye was written today, it’d be in faux-gangsta schtick and textspear... no, forget I said that. Don’t think it.

But what of our narrator? Holden’s up front about many things; first of all, he tells us he’s a terrific liar. It forms the basis of most of the comic scenes in the book; he mercilessly dupes a mother of one of the boys at Pensey on the train, then, even when he’s giving alms to some nuns later on, he still can’t help pulling out whopper after whopper. A curious thing, as to be phony is something that Holden just can’t bear.

He’s no fighter, although we do get a fight scene; no bared-teeth Hollywood swinging and punching here, just one beating - and not a very severe one at that – and a humiliation from a nasty little pimp at a seedy hotel. It would disappoint us if Holden were to be a sweeping tiger’s claw of rage, brawling his way through all these little confrontations, allowing some inner rage to titillate the reader. In his feebleness and passivity, we can recognise some of our own naivety from when we were that age, the lessons we’ve learned in life and the reversals that shape our character. As I once heard a boxing trainer say, any beating you take is an important lesson for you, something to be profited from later. Holden learns a few on his journey.

And it takes our hero a little longer to admit that he’s not been much of a lover, either; there’s some prevarication around the subject, but we finally get the confirmation that he’s a virgin. Isn’t that one that rings true throughout the ages? What teenage boy doesn’t talk himself up in this respect? You can only smile to yourself when the long-suspected truth emerges. Holden’s views on sex were frank, and even shocking, at the time. But they have such a truth to them, a verisimilitude in the awkwardness and confusion and even the going-a-stage-too-far moment when Holden describes Stradlater’s successes with girls in a parked car. A memorable phrase from the lips of no less a charmer than Hannibal Lecter springs to mind here: “Tedious sticking fumblings.”And I was glad that this aspect of that awkward time between high school and university – or adolescence and manhood - is addressed by Salinger. There’s no Dawson’s Creek-style “big romantic moment” at this point in Holden’s life. And possibly not ever.

Holden’s not even particularly clever; wordy and given to philosophising, but he’s no cum laude student. We might discern some irony in the hilariously inept and unlearned essay Holden submits on ancient Egypt... but it’s more the intention of Salinger, and not the essay’s author, I feel. One suspects that while Holden didn’t give a monkey’s about the essay however it turned out, this was nonetheless the best Holden could do, the sum of his knowledge.

Catcher is set in an America we might think we recognise, during the 1950s where the template for classic Americana was set, an America of movie stars and cocktails and hipster dialogue. Except, it’s... that word again, one we see again and again... all phony to Holden. And this is where Salinger begins to hit his targets, one after the other.

We realise early on that this is a book which has no plot, characters who are going to drop out of the narrative without returning, that there’s no big victory or happy ending in the offing. It starts with a parting of the ways at Holden’s latest school, and a fight between Holden and his smarter, better-looking room-mate, the aforementioned Stradlater. Holden part-idolises, part-hates this kid. In one part, Holden talks about how awkward he feels when a fellow classmate intrudes upon his ablutions in the toilet block; in the next he finds himself doing exactly the same thing with square-jawed, lady-killing Stradlater. Whether this was a nod to some latent homosexuality on Holden’s part, or just a mild form of hero-worship mixed with good old jealousy over his friend’s seemingly effortless successes in life, we’re never sure. (There’s one other reference that must have raised eyebrows at the time – the moment when Holden stops over at an old teacher’s house, only for the man to stroke Holden’s hair while he’s sleeping. Holden’s horror at the “flittiness” of this gesture is the pure undistilled homophobia of most straight, horribly insecure teenage males. But the man’s real intent, as Holden later acknowledges, is ineffable. Gaaah, it’s just so goddam confusing, Holden!)

Holden’s lashing-out at Stradlater – there’s a girl involved, naturally, invoking a striking appearance by the old green-eyed monster – ends bloodily, and Holden is left with a sore face and a desire to simply escape his school. This is juxtaposed with the story of another escape by another pupil in the form of a suicide, a shocking moment where an unusual child ends his misery at the boarding school by leaping from a window. Is Holden sad like this child? Why’s he so ornery anyway? Layer by layer, Holden’s facade is stripped away from us; it’s a psychological journey as much as a physical one.

That peculiar desperation among the young to be older, an impatience with the slow passage of time (a hastiness we all live to regret) is rendered here in several sunburnt-red moments of embarrassment. This is most acute where Holden visits bars and is asked for ID when he tries to get served. There can’t be a teenage drinker in the world unfamiliar with this. It runs right the way through his encounter with the women in the nightclub (“Look – there’s Alan Ladd!”) and his disastrous date with Sally – you can almost picture the raised eyebrows and amusement of the waitresses and barmen Holden tries his sophisticate’s act on.

So much for the sweet; now for the sour. For all the embarrassments, set-backs and beatings, Holden’s nihilist edge is apparent. One that has led to the book being linked obliquely to some nasty real-life incidents. He has the simmering rage of the downtrodden – there are some caustic passages, including this one when he considers possible rivals: “These handsome guys are all the same. When they’re finished combing their goddam hair, they beat it on you.” And there is an almost apocalyptic edge to his disgust with society – “I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.” In this we might just glimpse some of the real JD Salinger, a man who saw action in the Second World War and who has been quoted as saying: “The smell of burning flesh is something you never quite get out of your nostrils.” I wonder if this depiction of Holden’s teenage wastelands were Salinger’s way of communicating his feelings on warfare – what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder – his anger at the futilities, the phonyness of life once you’ve seen... well, you can imagine.

And we have the Phony. That word we keep coming back to. Relating to Holden’s hatred of falseness, emotional and intellectual dishonesty. This is the normal stuff of teenage rebellion, young people challenging the environment been brought up in, testing the values and morality that’s been held to be true for their childhood. There’s one section that suckerpunched me in particular, where Holden rages against people who cry easily at the movies. In the cinema, Holden describes one mother who ignores her child’s pleadings to be taken to the bathroom so that she can enjoy a film, and Holden seethes: “You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff at the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart.”

But there’s such sweetness in this book; at first I thought the “Catcher” in the title referred to his tragic little brother Allie’s baseball mitt, rather than a misquoting of Robert Burns. I suspect the death of his sibling is what’s really bothering Holden, and his return back home, and all the wonderful moments he shares with little sister Phoebe at the funfair, is his true redemption. This is a simple story, after all – almost a non-story, if you were being unkind – but Salinger’s conclusions and solutions are simple. The best ones always are.

And Holden’s golden reunion with his beloved sister makes me return to those children at the train station – I’m probably going to see a few of these less than half an hour at Central Station. And having considered the matter, I think that that perhaps I was wrong at the start; perhaps Holden’s not unique after all. He is certainly not alone in his life. So instead of seeing the black-clothed flock, I might keep an eye out those odd ones at the edges of the groups, the awkward ones, the ones not so quick to smile – those catchers in the rye.

MY WORD IS MY BOND

By Roger Moore
336 pages, It Books (publisher)

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

When Daniel Craig debuted in 2006’s Casino Royale, critics and moviegoers were in agreement that he made a great James Bond. With his chiselled features and raw physicality, he brought an icy, aggressive edge to the film series that has, amazingly, been going for over 40 years.

James Bond has undergone a number of transformations in those four decades. Before Craig’s thuggish assassin, Pierce Brosnan played the secret agent with a level of smugness that was almost unbearable. Timothy Dalton and George Lazenby both had brief spells in the role but neither seemed to fit in the tuxedo made famous by Sean Connery. Interestingly, the longest-serving Bond is also the most commonly derided by critics.

Roger Moore, the English actor and consummate “luvvie”, played a suave and charismatic Bond with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek and is for this reason often dismissed as the lightweight of the series.

This, in my opinion, is tantamount to blasphemy. Whilst Moore’s Bond strayed very far from Ian Fleming’s original creation, he brought some much-needed humour to the films and remains, for many, the quintessential Bond. I’m a huge fan of the Bond films and the 007 I grew up with was Roger Moore. From Live and Let Die to A View to a Kill, the movies starring Moore were jaunty, overblown and, most importantly, bloody good fun. Who can forget the amazing stunt at the start of The Spy Who Loved Me when Bond skis off a mountain only to deploy a parachute emblazoned with the Union Jack? Okay, so it’s easy to sneer at the fashion nightmares on display (safari suits, double-breasted blazers and -gasp- loafers?!) but it is hard to resist that arched eye-brow and the corny one-liners. A 2008 poll (on the moviefans.com website) found Roger Moore to be the “best Bond” with a whopping 56% of the vote. With such a loyal fan-base, it is understandable why Moore finally relented and penned his autobiography after years of refusing to commit pen to paper.

Starting, in typical biographical style, with his impoverished-but-happy childhood in East London, Moore takes us on an alarmingly frank and honest journey through his eventful life. Covering his years in repertory theatre and career in Hollywood as a fledgling television actor, he doesn’t pull any punches and is able to reflect on his experiences with the same pleasantly self-deprecating tone that has endeared him to so many. Happily aware of his own shortcomings as an actor, he frequently reflects on his good fortune to have achieved such a level of success. His casting as Simon Templar in the hugely popular 60s series The Saint made him a household name and a subsequent role in the equally lauded The Persuaders cemented his reputation as a global star.

Moore seems equally happy sharing tales of rubbing shoulders with Hollywood’s A-listers as he is in relating the numerous medical problems that (as a self-confessed hypochondriac) have plagued him since an early age. He is unswervingly honest and unapologetic when detailing his reasons for leaving the UK and living abroad as a tax-exile. Approaching his critics and detractors in a similar manner, Moore makes no effort to hide from his failures. He acknowledges when movies have been received poorly or performed badly at the box office but does not dwell on such criticism. Similarly honest about his failed marriages, Moore is able to reflect on his own foibles with humility.

The real charm of Moore’s autobiography is the way in which his natural charm comes across to the reader. His writing is uncomplicated and this simplicity lends itself to the largely anecdotal structure of the book. Reading it is akin to having a conversation with the great man himself, complete with digressions and lengthy, rambling reminiscences.

Whilst this loquacious style is certainly personable, it does not lend itself to the smoothest narrative as Moore doesn’t hesitate to skip forwards or backwards in time to relate another witty, yet ultimately inconsequential, incident. However, when measured against how entertaining the book is to read, this is a minor complaint. Moore is not a writer and has no pretences of trying to be one. This is not a work of literature and one would be mistaken for approaching it as such. This is a light-hearted trip down memory lane with an elderly thespian who is understandably proud of his life’s achievements. Expect lots of name-dropping; in his sixty-odd years in showbusiness, Moore appears to have met virtually everyone worth meeting on both sides of the Atlantic. Expect a large number of “colourful” stories; he’s the first to admit that he has a rather youthful sense of humour and Moore seems to take great pleasure in relating some of the more risqué incidents. That’s not to say that they aren’t funny, but those anticipating the sober memoirs of a mature actor are likely to find themselves picking their jaws off the floor.

Having led us through his acting career and his three marriages, the final chapters detail his philanthropic work with UNICEF. Above all his other laurels, Moore seems most proud of this charitable work. Indeed, it was his tireless efforts for UNICEF that led him to be knighted in 2003. He is not conceited or boastful about his labours, but humble about the opportunity he has been given to make a real difference to the lives of many in developing nations. This is the side of Roger Moore that I came to the book knowing least about but it is his passion and zeal for this work that will remain with me the longest. Clearly tired of pretending to save the world on the silver screen, Moore now does it for real and is loving it.

The greatest Bond? Undoubtedly. Greatest living Englishman? Quite probably.

Hereward L. M. Proops

THE SWORD-EDGED BLONDE

by Alex Bledsoe
320 pages, Tor Fantasy

Review by Melissa Conway

I liked this book. A lot. But I’m not going to start this review by squawking about plot, characterization or dialog.

Let’s talk titles.

I’m not sure if the average reader knows this, but most authors, especially the newbies, have little control over what ends up on the cover of his/her book. Even though the author most likely submitted the manuscript with a title s/he may be highly attached to, it’s the publisher’s prerogative to assert control over both the title and the cover art. The artist commissioned to do the cover may not even have read the book. This is why a reader may spot an inconsistency between a description of a character inside and his appearance on the outside cover. For instance, say, one of the bad guys has “military-short” hair, but the cover artist portrayed him with long red locks. While the author might stress over such a discrepancy, the reader trolling for a good novel at the bookstore won’t notice until they’ve already bought the book, if at all. Cover art accuracy isn’t a priority as long as the artwork conveys to the reader—immediately, viscerally—what the book is about, but the title…that can be another thing altogether.

Non-fiction notwithstanding, titles don’t always tell us much. The goal of most titles, I think, is to employ a word or phrase that doesn’t necessarily make sense in and of itself, but turns out to be a clever play on words based on the book’s content.

I’m a woman who’s read a lot of fantasy novels, but I’ve also been exposed to hard-boiled private eye fiction (admittedly, it was mostly through reading my dog-eared Calvin and Hobbes comic books, but nevertheless, I recognize the genre when I see it). I did not “get” the title of Alex Bledsoe’s excellent novel until I’d gotten sucked quite inextricably into the story. If I hadn’t had an ulterior motive in choosing this book (I do not know Mr. Bledsoe, but we share the same agent and, given that I’ve got some Bledsoe genes from way back to Abe Lincoln’s time, may even be distantly related), I might not have picked it up based on the “Who what now..?” title.

It’s not that “The Sword-Edged Blonde” doesn’t roll properly off the tongue. It even passes the “say it three times fast” test with flying colors. It just brings to mind—my mind—mind you, an unusual combination of mental images. “Sword-edged” makes me think of something sharp, dangerous and medieval. Toss in “Blonde,” however, and my mind’s eye jumps to a whole different place. I see a buxom Marilyn-Monroe-esque lady-in-distress pouting her blood-red lips. Cigarette smoke optional.

After giving it some thought, I’m pretty sure Bledsoe’s title is meant to convey to the reader that this book offers something outside the box, a clever cross-genre that, and don’t quote me on this because I really don’t know, Bledsoe may very well have invented. If you substitute the word “hard” for “sword,” the title makes sense from a strictly hard-boiled mystery stance, as in “The Hard-Edged Blonde.” “Sword-Edged” therefore, is intended to clue the potential reader in that the genre is a blend of fantasy with private-eye mystery. Or not.

Either way, the title threw me, but not for a big enough loop to prevent me from devouring the contents.

Bledsoe’s hero, Eddie LaCrosse, is every bit Raymond Chandler’s “moral and intellectual force [who] gets nothing but his fee, for which he will, if he can, protect the innocent, guard the helpless, and destroy the wicked.” All accomplished without the help of a snub-nosed metal friend, because Eddie inhabits a world of kings and queens, sword-wielding thugs and the occasional life-altering magical being. As the mystery sweeps you along through castles, forests, tombs and ruins, little details, like names you’d find in a modern-day phone book, constantly remind you this isn’t your average fantasy.

I don’t know whether Bledsoe or his editor chose the title, or if the intention all along was to make the reader go, “Hm, what’s that all about?” I do know I’m looking very much forward to reading the second novel in the Eddie LaCrosse series, “Burn Me Deadly.”

Wait a minute. Burn Me what now?