BOOK REVIEWS

2000, Part I: September 2000

2000, Christian Sauvé

Featured this month:

 

 

Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury

Del Rey, 1953, 179 pages

The true measure of a classic is how well it withstands the test of time. Whether or not it's firmly grounded in a contemporary setting, a classic will carry through universal themes that will resonate decades, even centuries after the work is done. You can watch CASABLANCA today and still marvel at how good the dialogues are, and how well the film is constructed. Even if some details are lost or seem antiquated, the main message still comes through. So it is with Fahrenheit 451.

Everyone's got their blind spots. In my case, even though I'm a card-carrying SF geek, I had never read one of the most important works of the genre, Ray Bradbury's 1954 classic Fahrenheit 451. Nor seen the Francois Truffault film. Of course I knew the story, from multiple comments about the work, family members who vividly remembered the film and other various sources. But as for the original work itself; no I hadn't read it.

Fortunately, cultural deficiencies are easy to correct, and it took barely a day to breeze through Bradbury's book. Fahrenheit 451 is, like most SF novels of that time, a short novel that doesn't stray far from its central idea, nor burden the narrative with useless subplots. The story here stays firmly with the character of Guy Montague, a fireman in a future state where firemen are not public guardians, but instruments of state-controlled censorship; they burn books. ("Houses have always been fireproof!" states a character, as if this fantasy needed rationalizing.)

Montague, as is the norm in novels of this type, discovers the forbidden knowledge, rebels, is discovered and tries to escape. Put this book alongside 1984, Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale and not only do you have four variations on the same plot, but you also have an unimaginative High School English course.

But that would be belittling Fahrenheit 451's impact, which is even more important today than ever before. No, you'll say, the first amendment (or local equivalent) has always withstood all attempts at censorship, but the truth is that censorship is now far more devious than ever before... and is now practiced not exclusively by the government, but by seemingly righteous groups and -most ominously- giant corporations trying their damnedest to co-opt the government in doing the dirty work.

Don't believe me? As of this writing (September 2000),

All of which corral the consumer/citizen in a world when everything is owned by someone, and that someone can dictate what you can say about it. No book-burning, no, but do you seriously think that, if the concept of libraries would be invented today, it wouldn't be sued in oblivion?

Thank you, Ray Bradbury, for writing something like this, with the power of making me hyperventilate nearly fifty years after. Thank you for such a great book. Thank you for the chief fireman's speech, which encapsulate all censorship nightmares in one chapter. Thank you for that manhunt which is ever-closer to reality TV. Thank you for a book where the tune is more important than the words, but where no one would dare change any of your words. Thank you for Fahrenheit 451; if you're remembered only for that, it'll be a life well-spent.

 

 

Carrion Comfort
Dan Simmons

Warner, 1989, 884 pages

One of Carrion Comfort's main characters is a Hollywood movie producer of the shlocky kind. It's not hard to imagine someone like him taking a look an an early version of this novel and berating the author: "I want more sex! I want more violence! I want more action scenes! Give me helicopters, Nazis, explosions, gay sex, conspiracies, religion, chases, nuclear submarines and destroyers! Give me more! I want more! More! More!"

Because Dan Simmons' Carrion Comfort has it all; it's the epitome of the blockbuster horror novel, the type of book designed to be so over the top that you can't but admire its audaciousness. You'll cheer as you cringe, and laugh while you're disgusted.

The premise itself is endlessly rich in sadistic possibilities: Simmons postulates the existence of a group of "psychic vampires" (so to speak) that have the Ability (or Power, or Talent) to take control of other people's minds, effectively controlling them for as long as they want. From that point, it's ridiculously easy to imagine these Mind-vampires indulging themselves in gory violence, simply because they can. Lack of accountability has its privileges.

Expanded from the novella of the same name, Carrion Comfort tacks on 850 pages to the original story, taking it much farther than Simmons' initial effort. What gradually emerges isn't an expansion of three Mind-vampires' game of remote killing, but a power struggle between highly-placed forces of evil. The French Translation of the novel is aptly titled Evil's Checkerboard (L'échiquier du mal, actually)

In theory, it sounds impressive. In practice, it has numerous great moments but suffers too much from unequal pacing to be epic horror. At 880-odd pages, it's inevitable that there are long stretches in the book, but the second quarter seems to serve no other purpose than to kill off a main character. The third is dedicated to preparations for the fourth quarter. (It doesn't really help that by mid-book, we have a pretty good idea of where the book's going to end, and with whom.)

To be fair, some of the action set-pieces are so good that they elevate the book to "should-read" status anyway. There's a spectacular helicopter explosion. A few great confrontations between the Mind-vampires and our dedicated protagonists. A momentous final chess game. A great set-piece inside a semitransparent airplane where the ultimate villain reveals himself to be far more powerful than anyone suspected.

And to be frank, the characters are developed with a lot of skill. Despite the large cast of characters and the multiple double-crossing parties, the plot remains easy to follow and to enjoy.

Did I say "enjoy"? Truth is, Carrion Comfort isn't for the weak-stomached among us. It's filled with gratuitously grisly material, pushing violence and exploitative sex to levels which might be unbearable for some. But then again, why would these people read horror?

In any case, this big bad horror package is exactly what you should read if ever you start wondering what Hollywood could do with an unlimited budget and none of those pesky parental ratings problems. Granted, Carrion Comfort isn't subtle, particularly original, or even better than competent in its execution (making it a great horror novel would require editing out maybe three hundred pages) but it's a whole lot of fun.

Nazis, Vampires, explosions, sex, violence, religion, money, power... wrapped in carefully-chosen psychobabble to give it a sheen of respectability. I tell you; this book's got it all. Don't feel too guilty for enjoying it; after all, mom told you to eat properly, but that never stopped you from enjoying that occasional burger, right?

 

 

Detective
Arthur Hailey

Berkley, 1997, 595 pages, $10.99 Can., ISBN 0-425-16386-5

Arthur Hailey is best known for novels that peeked under the surface of familiar institutions to reveal their inner mechanics. Hotel and Airport became blockbuster movies that did much to ensure Hailey's continuing bestsellerdom. The Moneychangers dealt with banks. Wheels talked about the Detroit auto industry. Overload took on the power-generating industry. The Evening News... well, you get the picture.

In all cases, Hailey delivered intricately researched novels, seemingly taking more delight in showing us fascinating facts than in building a satisfying plot. You could say that Hailey practiced the technothriller years before the genre was formally defined by Tom Clancy. In almost all cases, the first half of his books -"the guided tour"- was far more interesting than the eventual plot of said novels. But as long as the guided tour was interesting, no one really minded.

In his latest novel, Detective, Hailey takes us behind the scenes at the Miami Police Department. In doing so, he faces perhaps the greatest creative challenge of his career: If there's a social institution that's been explored over the years, it's police departments. The whole sub-genre of police procedurals, for instance, is based upon describing details of police work. Seasoned veterans of this sub-genre -and, given the popularity of crime-fiction, most general readers- already know most of the essential details; what could Hailey teach us?

The only way to avoid major problems would be for Hailey to abandon his usual reliance on "the Guided Tour" and, for once, give us a good plot sustained during the whole book.

Fortunately, he (mostly) manages to do that. Detective plunges in the story in an admirably efficient fashion, as a Miami police detective is summoned at the side of a death-row inmate. In a few deft pages, we're in flashback city as previous events unfold (sometime in nestled flashbacks) and bring us up to speed in short order. The rest of the novel is smooth going, as elements of the plot are developed effectively and the writing is as compulsively readable as anything else written in the sub-genre.

I added the (mostly) qualifier because even though Detective is written with professionalism and skill, it suffers from major structural problems by the end of the book. As a crucial element of proof is uncovered, a hundred pages before the end, it essentially concludes any suspense as to the whodunit part of the plot. Everything else is redundant explanation or mechanical conclusion. The final climax seems as contrived as perfunctory.

Hailey might, in fact, be too professional in his approach; everything wraps up so neatly that it approaches ludicrousness. A minor criminal cannot simply be a minor criminal, but somehow be related in an exotic fashion to one of the book's character to illustrate some kind or ironic counterpoint. The identity of the murderer can be deduced from a presence at an unlikely point. The fantastically gifted protagonist isn't "just" a top-notch detective, but also an adulterous ex-priest... convenient...

It doesn't matter much, though. Detective remains a good read and a good story. Worth a look, not only for Hailey fans, but also for anyone looking for some effortless entertainment.

 

 

Forever Free
Joe Haldeman

Ace, 1999, 277 pages, $30.99 Can., hc, ISBN 0-441-00697-3

WARNING: Contains necessary spoilers in discussing the book's failures.

Fame can do strange things to both performer and audience. An artist whose reputation comes chiefly from hard work and constant professionalism can suddenly find himself able to turn out mediocre work with impunity, as the audience uses earlier works as an excuse to be lenient on newer material. Both sides lose out, because the the artist doesn't perfect the work, and the audience gets results of inferior quality. In the book industry, best-selling authors can become "editor-proof", when no one will take take them to task for overwritten books, weak prose or ordinary execution.

For instance, Haldeman's thematically-linked Forever Peace won raves and a Hugo despite being a novel that read more like a moderately-competent first-time author's work than a novel by a veteran of the genre.

Similarly, It's easy to pinpoint Forever Free's problems, but it gets difficult to ponder why Joe Haldeman wrote the book that way. Especially when it's the sequel to one of the most famous SF novels ever.

You may remember The Forever War: Published in 1974 as a Vietnam veteran's answer to Robert A. Heinlein's militaristic Starship Troopers (itself a classic), it went on to sell thousands of copies, win both the Hugo and the Nebula awards as well as gain a central position in the genre's collective memory. The Forever War described the military experience of William Mandella, a physicist-cum-soldier in a war waged during millennia, thanks to light-speed delays. At the end of the first volume, Mandella found himself home with his girlfriend, ready to settle down as Humanity allied itself mentally with the once-enemy alien race.

As Forever Free begins, Mandella is restless: His two children are grown-up and he's trying to find a way to prove that his type of human is better than Man, the collective entity now representing most of humanity. His best plan? Hijack a starship and make a one-way trip far in the future to see how it all turns out. Stuff happens and things don't go as planned.

More specifically; they limp home twenty-five years later to find out that everyone has disappeared. They investigate and get weird results.

"How weird" is exactly the problem with Forever Free. While The Forever War (and the first half of Forever Free) is strictly enjoyable hard-SF of the most rigid order (the whole premise of both depends on the absence of Faster-than-light travel), the last pages of Forever Free lazily throw up a completely useless race of shapeshifters ("We've been around on Earth for hundred of thousands of your years," they say offhandedly) and an apparition by God that would be more at home in a Monty Python sketch than in here. ("Oh, you were an experiment, and it's now time to put away my stuff. Since you insist, I won't delete you. Oh, I've changed to laws of physics while I was at it. Toodles. ") The central mystery of the book isn't as much solved as it is basically declared irrelevant.

Needless to say, the result is so outlandish that some readers are likely to give up in disgust a novel that that been perfectly good up to that point.

Which naturally raises the question; why was it written this way? I offer a few explanations, none of them really satisfying:

Pick one... but don't pick this book in bookstores, and wait for your library copy if you really insist to see what the fuss is about.

 

 

The Trigger
Arthur C. Clarke & Michael Kube-McDowell

Bantam Spectra, 1999, 447 pages, $35.95 Can. hc, ISBN 0-553-10458-6

According to some SF commentators, your reviewer included, science-fiction is about the effects of change on human behavior. That change is usually linked to scientific and technological innovation is unavoidable, but not essential. This definition of SF isn't perfect (nor accepted by all), but it allows to define an idea-space in which SF can distinguish itself from all other types of fiction.

At the same time, it allows "pure-SF" fans to distance themselves from the unimaginative drivel that passes itself as SF in the media and in the general population's worst stereotypes about the genre. In media terms, STAR WARS isn't SF (it's fantasy in futuristic trappings) and most of STAR TREK isn't SF (it's adventure/soap opera in space) while GATTACA is SF (studying biotechnology-induced changes in humanity) and DARK CITY is SF (musing on artificial manipulation of memory on a society). Science-Fiction should be conceptually solid, imaginative, preferably controversial.

Needless to say, unimaginative adventures-with-laser-guns are far more common than "true SF", nowadays as yesterday. But fans of the pure stuff can now run to their bookstores, because a new must-read is in town.

The Trigger is a "What if?" novel of the first order: What if someone came up with a foolproof way to remotely detonate all nitrate-based explosives? Practically speaking, this would blow up -at a distance- most munitions and explosives in common usage. The perfect gun control tool.

Had The Trigger been written in any other civilized country in the world, the results would have been interesting, but not much more. Of course, this being published in the United States (let's not fool ourselves in thinking that English-born Sri Lanka resident Arthur C. Clarke has anything more to do with the book than collaborating to the outline), The Trigger has to face America's centuries-old fascination with guns, conspiracies and government.

The results are fascinating. The impacts of The Trigger are examined and explained in great detail, as the discovery is handed from the scientific to the political and military community. Everyone who comes in contact with The Trigger immediately wish it would disappear, but everyone has to face the fact that it's here to stay, and accommodations must be made in order to ensure its rational use. Gun Lobbies inevitably get into the act, lawsuits fly, private corporations rush Triggers to the market and private citizen watch it all happen with increasing discomfort. Top-notch extrapolation all around, along with some preachiness. Certainly not subtle, but nevertheless compulsively readable.

There are a few problems, though. The characters of the first half essentially disappear in the latter part of the book. Then the ending falls apart as one character is killed in a rather useless fashion, and another has to face enemies closer to caricature. A shame, because up to that point, The Trigger had labored hard to present "the opposing side" as basically decent people. After the intellectual complexity of the first 400 pages, it's a let-down to see the climax being nothing but an action-adventure bit facing stock villains. A chilling afterword kind of makes up for it. (Though, given the conceptual breakthrough at mid-novel, one would expect this type of discovery -not to mention bigger, better innovations- to be made much earlier than twenty years later!)

But it doesn't really matter. With The Trigger, Kube-McDowell has achieved something quite remarkable: Break the "Clark Collaboration Rule" (which used to state that every novel written in collaboration with Clarke does suck.) and produce a novel that stands alone in its own right. The Trigger is, in general, everything that SF should be: It postulates a radical technological change, follows its controversial social implications and does so in an magnificently entertaining fashion. Don't miss it.