BOOK REVIEWS

2000, Part K: November 2000

2000, Christian Sauvé

Featured this month:

 

 

The Bear and the Dragon
Tom Clancy

Putnam, 2000, 1028 pages, $39.99 Can., ISBN 0-399-14563-X

Well, America's master techno-thriller writer is back with a new book, and the overall feeling is one of... déjà-vu.

Tom Clancy fans will remember that the last "Jack Ryan" novel, Executive Orders starred Ryan as the President of the United States, confronted with multiple crises, both internal and external. It all got solved neatly by huge military battles and other assorted action scenes. America was safe once again, and everyone went to sleep satisfied until the next Clancy novel.

This time around, we get more of the same. Except much more of the same. Ryan is still president, except he's been legitimately elected and now has a mandate to preserve American hegemony. The evil bastards threatening said hegemony are still these cackling Chinese baddies, given that the cackling Russian baddies have retired and are now America's partners. All of these alliances will come into play as huge resources are discovered in Siberia and China is forced to choose between bankruptcy and invasion.

A big China/Russia war has often been mentioned as a potential threat in military techno-thrillers, but rarely represented (only Slater's WWIII series has done so, if I remember correctly) because it raises so many random factor (such as historical rivalries, alien mindsets and, oh, nuclear weapons on both sides) that any lesser writer can only feel daunted at the prospect.

Not Tom Clancy, obviously. With The Bear and the Dragon, he tests the patience of readers across the world as he clocks it at 1028 pages, his biggest novel ever and a serious contender for heftiest non-fantasy bestseller of the year. Filled with extravagantly presented plotting, multi-page technical details, chapters of back-story and a surprising grasp of political complexity, The Bear and the Dragon exasperates as it fascinates. Half the novel is figuring out when all these interlocking plotlines will intersect, and the other half is spent admiring how neatly everything fits together. Like it or not, the depth of The Bear and the Dragon makes any other political technothriller seem naive and superficial. If anything, the description of the presidency even feels more accurate here than in Executive Orders. There's even a stronger conclusion, though it's considerably diluted by the sheer number of pages setting it up.

A large number of Clancy's surviving characters from previous novels come back in this one. Fine if you remember all these people; less if you don't. At this point in time, the Clancyverse is so cumbersome that novices are advised not to apply.

It's a bit irrelevant whether the novel is good or bad: Fans will love it, and non-fans won't. As a Clancy devotee, I liked it, but as a base reader, I'm pining for the moment where Clancy's current editor will explode from overwork and his replacement will force the author to write shorter, tighter novels. It's common wisdom that Clancy's earlier novels (The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games) are his best, and that's in no small part due to the better action/pages ratio. Heck, with Red Storm Rising, he did World War Three in fewer pages than the skirmish in The Bear and the Dragon!

But such a radical shift is unlikely to happen. If anything, I don't even think that Clancy has an editor any more. (One particularly annoying tic in The Bear and the Dragon is a tendency to repeat every good line at least twice during the novel. They probably hired multiple copy editors to bring in the book under deadline, and they didn't consult.)

In the meantime, you can get The Bear and the Dragon in hardcover for not even 4c a page. If nothing else, you'll gain in volume what you don't in page-per-page quality.

 

 

Beyond Recall
Stephen Kyle

Warner Vision, 2000, 438 pages, $9.99 Can., ISBN 0-446-60809-2

Thriller readers are most often presented with grotesquely non-negotiable alternatives. Evil terrorists versus pure peacekeepers. Democracy versus dictatorship. Blood-giving heroes versus puppy-kicking villains. Some will say that it's typical of the American binary mindset: It's much easier to make choices when you demonize the alternative, as it all too often happens during American elections.

On the other hand, such easy choices usually mean more straightforward entertainment. What would QUAKE be if you could choose to negotiate with your opponents? What if the terrorists in the latest Hollywood blockbusters were working toward a laudable goal? (To be fair, THE ROCK did this... only to turn around at a critical moment and have some terrorists "go renegade" on their leader, thereby re-establishing comfortable polarity) What if, instead of simple entertainment, we had flawed heroes and virtuous villains, setting up true drama in the process? With Beyond Recall, "simple thriller" readers get the chance to find out if such departures from the norm offer something more than the usual black-versus-white mentality of genre entertainment.

The premise is apparently simple: terrorists threaten to unleash a biologically-engineered plague on the United States if their demand are not meant. But the complications begin as soon as you look into it a bit further: The plague will target only women. The demands are to set up a multi-billion fund for the education of third-world women. The terrorists' ultimate goal? To halt ecological damage through population control, one way of the other: Educate the women (a proven way to lower population growth and raise standards of living) or sharply reduce the reproductive capacity of the consuming nations.

Already, we're presented with a moral dilemma: Though the ends are good, the method isn't. And as the United States do not negotiate with terrorists, there's a significant potential for mutually assured incomprehension.

Beyond Recall's basic premise is fascinating. Things don't go as well as the various characters are introduced. To heighten drama, author Stephen Kyle basically interrelates everyone involved: The chief terrorist is the White House advisor on bio-terrorist matter but also the mother of a lobbyist who's married to the FBI's main man of the affair. Meanwhile, the chief terrorist is the ex-lover of the only doctor able to build an antidotes except that the doctor's wife was one of the first victims of the virus' test run... I'm not making any of this up.

The melodramatic (and somewhat ridiculous) interrelation between characters easily destroys most of the novel's power though soap-operatic plot dynamics and god-awful resolutions. By the epilogue of the novel, the good doctor is doing the wild thang(s) with the lobbyist, which practically smacks of incest or, at the very least, of Hollywood-style old-man/young-girl power fantasies. Creepy, and maybe more than the premise.

When the novel fails at that level, it doesn't take much to make it fail at other levels too. The pacing is deficient in the second half of the book. Kyle also blurs the distinction so much between good guys and bad guys (the President is painted as an angry idiot, the FBI agent as a bad guy for no real reason than he's opposed to the chief terrorist which is set up as the protagonist, etc...) that readers might just give trying to find someone to cheer for. It's all quite unbelievable, and that's ultimately the impression left by the book.

If you're going to blur good and evil, it takes a lot of skill to keep the reader going without clear reasons to cheer or jeer, and I frankly don't think that Kyle is experienced enough. No reason to condemn the author in perpetuity; it's still his first novel, after all. (And, heck, he's a fellow Ontarian writer, so he deserves a little home-grown respect) But he still fails to deliver on an intriguing premise for reasons not entirely related to the premise itself. Veteran thriller readers might find Beyond Recall an intriguing experiment because of its failing, but readers looking for some comfortable summer beach reading are advised to skip this one.

 

 

The Light of Other Days
Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter

Tor, 2000, 316 pages, $35.95 Can., ISBN 0-312-87199-6

I sense a trend. And, for once, it's a good one.

Over the years, Arthur C. Clarke has collaborated with quite a few authors. Gregory Benford wrote a "sequel" to Clarke's The City and the Stars (a classic that shouldn't be "improved" by any means!) and it stank deeply. Clarke and Gentry Lee collaborated on a novel, Cradle, that left most indifferent. Lee then wrote a "sequel" to Clarke's Rendez-vous with Rama (a classic that could use some work, but not by hacks like Lee) and the result was a bloated trilogy that wasn't very good either. Mike McQuay expanded a Clarke outline in the novel Richter 10 and the result, while better, wasn't all that good.

At that point in time, most SF critics individually came up with the "Clarke Collaboration Theorem", which in simple term stated "all Clarke collaborations suck".

But then came along The Trigger, written in collaboration with Michael Kube-McDowell (ie; Clarke wrote a two-thousand word outline which was expanded to novel length by Kube-McDowell) and the result was surprisingly good if you weren't a gun nut.

SF critics put the Clarke Collaboration Theorem on hold.

Now they're ready to retire it for good as The Light of Other Days arrives in bookstores. While it doesn't have a very different plot outline that the one already seen in The Trigger (indeed, the structure of both novels almost seem carbon-copied from one another) and is rather pathetic in terms of literary value, it's a great read filled with ingenious ideas, a breathtaking conclusion and pure fun from cover to cover.

In other words, it does not suck.

The Light of Other Days's premise is not particularly original: Isaac Asimov's classic story The Dead Past also posited the existence of a "remote viewer", a machine that allowed you to see any scene from history from any point of view. (Indeed, Clarke and Baxter cite a few examples in the afterword without citing the Asimov text, which is rather unsettling given the popularity of the story and Clarke's friendship with Asimov)

But, as always, it's all in the treatment. Whereas Asimov's story ended on the predicted doom of humanity through the end of privacy, Clarke/Baxter use this as a stepping-stone to more interesting things. As the capacity to see anywhere in history through the "WormCam" spreads through the population, investigative exploration of history takes off, religions are destroyed (hey, it's a Clarke novel), historical figures are demolished or enhanced. Of course, there's the end of privacy, last dying gasps of governments, general paranoia, new and exotic forms of perversions but guess what? Humanity endures, and how well it endures forms the strong conclusion of the novel, which manages to bring in the Eschaton without looking too silly doing it. Impressive stuff, any way you look at it.

As with The Trigger, the fun of this collaboration lies in the intellectual debate surrounding the WormCam. Ideas, concepts, extrapolations are described, sometime sketchily, but in such numbers that the ultimate effect on the reader is quite impressive. As in The Trigger, the novel loses strength whenever it tries to insert more classical plot conflicts in-between all the fascinating ideas. A gunshot-and-traitors conclusion is there to tie up some loose ends, but not to knock the socks off the readers; that's the following chapter.

The overall result, again like The Trigger, is a compulsively readable (can be finished in less than a day) novel of ideas that faithfully follows the SF ethos of unflinching extrapolation. Due to the large historical component of the book, this might even be a good crossover novel for people not overly familiar with Science-Fiction.

And it destroys the Clarke Collaboration Theorem, which is a welcome piece of news indeed.

 

 

01-01-00®
R.J. Pineiro

Tor, 1999, 406 pages, $8.99 Can., ISBN 0-812-56871-0

Being a book reviewer is best left to the intrepid. While the best part of the job is being able to rave about an under-appreciated gem, there are other, less pleasant aspects to the profession. Horrors lurk in libraries, unimaginable atrocities waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting readers. It's my job, as a reviewing-kind-of-guy, to warn you against these... things. Make no mistake, the life of a reviewer is always intense!

So today, I have to warn you against 01-01-00®. To be fair, any sufficiently attentive buyer won't need the advice of book reviewers to put down the book and run away. The title alone contains two serious danger signals.

The first one is, of course, the reference to Y2K. (Pineiro's previous book, unimaginatively enough, was also called Y2K.) It's already hard to recall, but the late nineties were filled with schlocko thrillers built on the semi-mystical century switch, with almost uniformly atrocious results. I suppose we should be grateful for that opportunity to come up with a technological rationalization for the end-of-the-world boogieman, but somehow I can't bring myself to it. At least we've had the opportunity to knock down (with a mallet) every seal-cub-like author who hasn't resisted the lure of the buzzword. Like Mr. Pineiro. Onward.

The second warning signal contained in the title is the ® so thoughtfully appended to 01-01-00®. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that artistic endeavors should be as far apart from marketing as possible. By the time a title is registered, it's time to pack it up and go home. (Are you listening, Clive "Dirk Pitt®" Cussler?) Digging deeper in the novel's foreword, it turns out that 01-01-00® is a registered trademark to another guy, who ended up licensing it to Pineiro. Or the reverse. Or the inverse. Whatever. If you think that ®egiste®ing an a®®angement of bina®y symbols and dashes is a good idea, then 01-01-00® and you dese®ve each othe®.

It gets worse as the novel opens. A hacker brings down Washington's traffic system, causing (very indirectly) a speeding mother to have an car accident, fall down a cliff and kill the rest of her family. Bad driving? Yep. Bad luck? Sure, but when said mother becomes a super-computer-cop for the express single purpose to catch the hacker who did that to her, well, that's got to rank fairly high in the top-ten misguided character motivation list.

Such psychological howlers are common throughout the book, with perhaps the best one left for the end: The protagonist gets a moment of "total empathy" with the world, and sees "how a vagrant killed himself following [her] stoplight speech about getting a job and not being a bum." [P.397] Obviously, Pineiro doesn't have much of a clue about the psychology of the homeless, or vastly overestimates the persuasive powers of his heroine.

I'll leave out the technological funnies inserted here and there; that's too much of an easy target. I'll just point out that in 01-01-00® Pineiro mixes aliens, Y2K bug, emasculated terrorists, new-age feel-good philosophy, all-powerful computer viruses, perfunctory romance and the Mayan calendar with barely an self-critical eye toward all of it, or even a cursory nod toward Pope Gregor's calendar reforms.

Bad doesn't begin to cover it, but "boring when not funny" will do the job. As a book critic, I have to slog through all of this crap so that you don't have to, so if ever I am to do a single good action with these reviews, please don't read 01-01-00®. Ever. Trash it if it's in your to-read pile and don't ever buy it if it's not.

Chances are that most copies have been pulped anyway. Who the hell wants to read a Y2K book now?

 

 

The Armageddon Rag
George R.R. Martin

Pocket, 1983, 399 pages

To youngsters like myself, born in the latter quarter of this century, the mindset and attitudes of the "sixties" are either ridiculous or alien. Granted, an impressive fraction of the values pioneered in that decade has endured and even entered mainstream society (often through unusual means, such as the philosophies underlying the Internet as we know it), but digging back through the easy clichés of the period, we find a movement that simply appears too strange to have been real. Free sex, communes, political riots, anticipation of a revolution, drug advocacy... no wonder the United States were so screwed up during these years.

Those were excessive years, and the return to the norm has been harder on some than most. Still, unless someone explains those years to us, the younger generation will miss out on a decade of experiences that could be useful to learn.

That's what George R.R. Martin does in The Armageddon Rag, cleverly disguising it as a crime thriller with supernatural overtones. You may be fooled into thinking that it's just a very good novel set in the early-eighties music industry, but it's really a recapitulation of a generation, with some nostalgia and a lot of style.

The Armageddon Rag begins by hooking us as a good crime thriller: Sandy Blair, novelist in creative crisis, receives a phone call about the death of a rock promoter. But not just any promoter; the ex-manager of the Nazgûl, the best rock band of the sixties. And not just any death, but a gruesome murder with plenty of evidence to suggest that it was done by someone with a thorough knowledge of the band...

Before long, Sandy has chucked it all: The expensive Manhattannite girlfriend, the assorted apartment and the creative crisis, all for an article on the murder. But as he progresses further, not only does the events surrounding the murder get stranger and stranger, but Sandy is drawn further back in his own past sixties, filled as they were by rebellion, violence and barely suppressed pain.

All and all, the plot is a rather good excuse to systematically revisit the sixties through various archetypical characters. Sandy himself is the observer turned pro, the ex-journalist now novelist. Other friends haven't fared so well: One revolutionary turned ad executive, another still living in an increasingly silly commune, another stuck in mental constructs far more restrictive, another turned college teacher, another (draft dodger) now claimed mentally ill by his domineering father... All facets of the children of the sixties, morphed by latter events.

Before long, we're (maybe) deep in a supernatural plot to unleash demonic forces on the world. Or maybe not; it's that type of novel. But the ambiguity isn't too terribly frustrating.

It's all quite fascinating, and unusually readable too. Martin is, after all, a Nebula and Hugo-winning pro, and The Armageddon Rag sucks you right in, holds you tightly thanks to some good plotting and doesn't disappoint through the ending. Characters are sharply defined, the style is brisk and the details are telling. The music-related details are well done, bringing in evocative rock concert descriptions, believable lyrics and an overall feeling of authenticity.

Best of all, The Armageddon Rag doesn't really show its age, whether it's thirteen years after initial publication or thirty years after the main period of interest. Musically, it's easy for a modern reader to imagine Nazgûl as sounding more or less like Rage Against the Machine on a good day. As far as the "spirit of the sixties" is concerned, it works rather well at presenting a particular point in time and the mindset associated with it, even though the concept of a "revolution" nowadays will be cause for more giggles than nods of approval.

It's hard not to like this novel, both for what's it's saying and how it's saying it. It's a gripping read, and should appeal to a wide readership, whether or not the individuals were there during the sixties or not. Rock and roll will never die!

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