Month: February 2010

The Caryatids, Bruce Sterling

ByChristian Sauvé 2010-02-042020-08-13 Book Review

Del Rey, 2009, 295 pages, C$28.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-345-46062-2

My latest yearly reading statistics confirmed suspicions left by a look at my 2009 reviews: During the past year, I have read less Science Fiction than usual, and practically ignored the latest SF published in 2009 to the profit of current non-fiction. I do not disown SF, but today’s real world seems so much more interesting than even richly imagined futures.

So if anyone could bring me back to SF in a big way, it’s Chairman Bruce: Sterling has, over the past two decades, successfully built his reputation as a global-head, an elder statesman of the genre with his finger on the pulse of what happening now. His annual WELL “State of the World” addresses are condensed wisdom, and few other writers can switch as effortlessly from fiction to futurism and back.

Why is The Caryatids such a boring mess, then?

I may have been expecting too much. Indeed, looking at Sterling’s past decade, it’s easy to start thinking that his novel-length work has been a case of hype over substance. Distraction (1998) was the last unarguably enjoyable Sterling novel. Present-day techno-fantasy Zeitgeist (2000) was weird for its own sake: not a bad reading experience, but not exactly a fully satisfying SF novel either. The Zenith Angle (2004) mused about techno-thrillers and post-9/11 American paranoia in amusing ways, but was also perceived as a contemporary sideshow more than a real meaty Sterling novel. Now, with The Caryatids (his third novel in ten years, if anyone’s counting), Sterling returns to real-future speculation.

Alas, it’s speculation of the catastrophic degree. The seas have risen, political power blocks have shifted in entertaining fashions and it’s up to a group of cloned sisters to cope with the aftermath of even worse things. The Caryatids is more hopeful than most in that even the novel’s future has a future, but readers who, like me, are getting fed up with catastrophic thinking may not find the book entirely to their liking.

It really doesn’t help that the book is both a schematic mess. Three of the cloned sisters are operating in the three super-power blocks left on Earth, and much of the novel is about one man meeting all three of them in turn. There are worse ways to set up a travelogue to show us the future, but I’m not sure that there are duller ways. Because the book is rife in self-conscious dialogue, jumping from one idea to another without much of a care for the ideal “entertainment experience” that readers should expect. There are plenty of good concepts throughout The Caryatids, but the attitude in which they’re delivered seems to exasperate more than illuminate. The most interesting parts of the book, which is to say the dialogues, are also its most ridiculous moments: They seem cut-and-pasted from smart-ass web forums in which every interlocutor is sure that they hold the key to how the world works. Do these self-satisfied snippets of future dialogue support a plot? Isn’t it enough of a burn to ask the question?

That The Caryatids would be so dull and forgettable is a surprise. I normally live for this kind of mid-future social extrapolation, and have no basic objections to cleverer-than-thou characters. But this novel simply doesn’t work no matter how generous I try to be. While I could be wrong, cranky, over-sugared or simply out to lunch on this novel, a quick look at The Caryatid’s online reviews reassures me with social proof that I’m hardly the only one to be disappointed: the Amazon reviews of The Caryatids alone are about as bad as I’ve seen them on a top-tier SF novel. In novel-length fiction, Sterling has spent the last decade becoming an acquired taste, and it may be that he has overreached himself here. I don’t have any good explanations: I’m just staring at the novel with dashed expectations, scratching it off my list of potential Hugo nominees. Now let me go read another non-fiction book and see if it’s any better.

Movie Review

Nine (2009)

ByChristian Sauvé 2010-02-032010-03-23 Movie Review

(In theatres, February 2010) I’m favourably disposed towards musicals, but my indulgence felt its limits with Nine, a somewhat limp take on Fellini and his approach to cinema. Some things work really well: the atmosphere of bygone Italy, the portrait of the director as a hedonistic monomaniac, the flashy cinematography, the eye-popping line-up of female stars… it adds up to a project with potential. Seeing Fergie deliver the film’s best musical number won’t leave anyone indifferent, but it’s more fun to see Kate Hudson pop her way through “Cinema Italiano”, the film’s bounciest number, and Penelope Cruz vamp it up in fancy lingerie. Lucky Daniel Day-Lewis, playing a director stuck in the middle of so much female attention. But in most of its musical numbers, the film has trouble distinguishing itself through a series of mopey ballads. The plot troubles multiply, but they all lead to a narrative crash from which the film never recovers: there’s only an epilogue to suggest that our protagonist is on his way back. There is, in other words, little pay-off for all that came before, and a surprising amount of boredom on the way there. Nine is not a film that involves; it prefers to be looked at and occasionally admired for its art direction. Which is really too bad, since its first half promises a lot more than it delivers in the second.

Book Review

Up in the Air, Walter Kirn

ByChristian Sauvé 2010-02-022019-11-13 Book Review

Anchor, 2009 movie tie-in reprint of 2001 original, 362 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-307-47629-6

How unfair it is to base a book review on comparisons between the novel and its movie adaptation.

But since I do it all the time, I might as well defend the practice. Once the movie exists, it’s almost a sure bet that more people will see the film during its theatrical run alone than the book has had readers.^* So it’s likely that anyone reading the review of the book will be reasonably familiar with the film. But numbers aside, comparisons between original and adaption is usually a good way to get to the essence of a book: By looking at what was kept and what was left off, we can slice thinner in terms of what was at the essence of the story.

At least that what I keep telling myself when furious authors do drive-by bookings of my house.

In the case of Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air, the 2009 movie adaptation amounted to nothing short of a resurrection. First published in 2001 to fair reviews and reportedly low sales, Up in the Air had long faded away by the time Jason Reitman adapted and directed the Oscar-nominated big-screen adaptation. Now available in two varieties of paperbacks as well as audio and electronic versions, Up in the Air is back to be appreciated by a brand-new public. Kirn may have had a bit of trouble getting tickets to the Oscars, but let’s hope his agent was able to negotiate some nice royalties for the movie tie-in re-editions.

The bare bones of the book’s premise remain more or less intact in the movie: Ryan Bingham is an executive with a lifestyle optimized for constant air travel. Taking planes more often than other people take the bus, Bingham is collecting air-miles and shunning meaningful human contact. While the movie insists on making Bingham an active professional downsizer, that’s only one of the many jobs the book’s Bingham has accumulated in his nebulous career as an all-purpose business executive. But what the book has that the film doesn’t is a mysterious employer who may or may not be trying to recruit Bingham, threatening packages that may or may not be from Bingham’s enemies, strange transactions that may or may not mean ongoing identity theft, and a heavier emphasis on the fact that Bingham is stone-cold crazy.

This last aspect is particularly fascinating, because while from the outside Bingham is a successful man (even describing his high-flying always-on-the-go jet-setter lifestyle sounds synonymous with success), his narration reveals that he is addicted to all sorts of cheap business therapy gimmicks. He increases his vocabulary artificially; he wants to market the advice of a guru with cheap promotional products; he has high hopes for the business inspiration book he’s writing, but even that may not be wholly sane. Underneath the suit, Kirn’s Bingham is a massive void of insecurity. (The film’s Bingham, played by George Clooney, has massive issues of his own, but he owns up to his faults and can only be criticized for following his obsessions too single-mindedly.) Plane novels inevitably end up featuring a crash, but the one that awaits the reader at the very end of Up in the Air does not involve machinery.

Spending a few hundred pages in a universe narrated and explained by such a mind is an experience that’s worth a read by itself. Seeing everything in terms of efficiency, air miles, commuter routes and a mild loathing for his fellow human beings, Bingham tells the story in a way that will please fans of Chuck Palahniuk and other hip big-boy writers. Clipped present-tense narration: Go up in Tulsa; land in Denver. Negotiate a car rental deal thanks to a privileged customer account. Find a chain restaurant that serves the same meal across America. Do the job. Move on.

What’s less enjoyable is that Kirn would rather leave things unresolved than hand a victory of sorts to his narrator. Up in the Air is an exercise in deliberate futility as the leads pursued by Bingham nearly all dissolve in smoke. The accumulation of shaggy-dog endings at the end, coupled with one last revelation about Bingham that leaves readers, well, up in the air, doesn’t do much to close the deal set up by the book’s first two-third.

But as a take on modern life as seen by a businessman, Up in the Air has a number of strong moments. It’s a different, far less sentimental work than the movie. As a ten-year-old novel then set at the cutting edge of modernity, it hasn’t aged all that much, even though one suspects that 2010’s Bingham would make a bit more use of portable electronic devices. And while not entirely successful thanks to its last-minute lack of narrative closure, it nonetheless offers a memorable portrait of a unique character. It’s probably best not to read Up in the Air for its plot, but for the voice of its narration, and the plethora of small details and quips that Bingham is so generous in sharing. For viewers of the film, it will be as good an experience; they will be amazed at how lines in one context of the film will appear in an entirely different context in the book. But what’s more, they will be reminded that all novels are their own creation.

^*: Let’s crunch a few numbers to bolster that common assertion: Movie studios always report box-office results in dollars, never in tickets sold. Nonetheless, we know that the average movie ticket price in 2009 was $7.50. We also know that the hundredth top-grossing film of 2009 (which I’m using as median for “people only hear about 200 movies per year, or four new films per week”) made $25,450,527: This translates into roughly 3.4 million viewers, and that’s only for the theatrical run, without including DVD rentals and various TV viewings that accumulate over the life of the film –and in today’s audiovisual universe, DVD sales are big money! (The 150th movie on the list of 2009 theatrical top-grossers, The Road, made $8,104,518 or a “mere” 1.1 million entries. At the upper end of the scale, #2 film Transformers 2 made 400 million dollars and sold 53 million tickets, or roughly one ticket for every six humans in North America.) Book data is a lot harder to obtain, but news reports told us that Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol had shattered all sales records for adult fiction by selling a whopping two million copies in two weeks, with a total first printing of five million copies. That too doesn’t include backlist, library and second-hand sales for the duration of the book’s life. Nonetheless… the math clearly shows that when it comes to books versus movies, most people familiar with the story have seen the movie rather than read the book. Now you know why authors will grab the film option money and hope for the best.)