REVIEWS

2002, Part G: July

2002, Christian Sauvé

Featured this month:

 

The Angel of Darkness
Caleb Carr

Ballantine Books, 1997, 752 pages, $9.99 Can., ISBN 0-345-42763-7

For an author, one danger in writing a distinctive best-seller is to try to do the same thing again without innovation. Caleb Carr's first novel, The Alienist, was a crime thriller set in late nineteenth century New York, featuring a bunch of characters doing their damnedest to catch a serial killer using revolutionary methods who just happen to be similar to the ones used today. In The Angel of Darkness, the surviving characters of the first novel are back once more to track down another killer using quasi-anachronistic methods.

But don't be scared away; not only are there significant differences between this novel and the first one, The Angel of Darkness is so much fun that everyone who liked The Alienist will want to take a look at the sequel.

The biggest change in tone is that the narrator of this follow-up isn't the cultivated journalist John Moore, but the reformed street urchin Stevie Taggert. It's an odd choice, but a logical one given Stevie's role is the follow-up. Stevie might not be as cynical or polished, but he's in the middle of the story, which isn't the case with Moore this time.

Here, the team is hot on the trail of a child kidnapper who is eventually revealed to be a far more sinister figure. The quest takes our heroes upstate, away from Manhattan and deep in rural country where the rules are completely different. Along the way, they will also have to face some courtroom drama, some late large-scale brawling and a few new characters.

What remains is Carr's impeccable flair for recreating the atmosphere of the time and presumably exact historical references. The prose style is polished but unusually readable; even though the book clocks in at an impressive 750+ pages, it's good enough that you won't mind the occasional lengths and the lopsided drama which peaks well before the conclusion. The constant references (by way of narrator's hindsight) to terrible events about to happen are simultaneously annoying, ominous and charming.

The genius of The Alienist was to bring modern procedural police methods to one of the earliest possible times when it was possible to conceive and use such things, making it both a genre novel and a genre commentary. The same also applies to the second novel, as our protagonists use controversial profiling techniques and new detection techniques. Even The Alienist's occasional usage of historical cameos is also repeated, most notably with the inspired presence of a famous historical character as a courtroom antagonist. There's a lot of intellectual material to digest, from sexual roles a century ago to a bit of international politics.

The villain alone is a piece of work, a complex character whose multiple facets are fiendishly effective against our protagonists. Though one feels as if a touch too much life-history has been packed in only a few years, there's no denying that the antagonist is more interesting than the garden-variety serial killer who starred in The Alienist.

There's too much familiarity with the characters exhibited here to suggest that The Angel of Darkness is a book that stands alone without the benefits of having read the prequel. But as much as The Alienist is a recommended read, The Angel of Darkness also ranks as more than a worthwhile follow-up. It's difficult to think of a satisfied fan of the first volume who'd dislike this one.

 

Stranger Than Fiction: A book of literary lists
Aubrey Dillon Malone

Contemporary Books, 2000, 314 pages, $23.95 Can., ISBN 0-8092-9904-6

Writers are a strange breed.

Even accounting for the usual diversity of characters, temperaments and manias distributed more-or-less evenly across the human bell curve, writers have long been considered among the most eccentric specimen of our species. Part of this reputation is due to the demands of the job: not many entirely sane people can sit down and string words together for months in order to produce a text of respectable length. Most authors are not mad, but most of them are abnormal.

But then again, like modern-day bloggers, writers have long been in a privileged position to chronicle their own eccentricities and those of their other writer acquaintances. Other professions such as, say, tailors, might have been collectively just as bizarre, but haven't had the chance to accumulate a written pedigree for hundreds of years.

In any case, Aubrey Dillon Malone's Stranger Than Fiction will quickly convince you, if that remained to be done, that writers are indeed a strange caste. This little-known quasi-novelty book is a collection of thematic lists about writers and their habits, from "Five writers involved in tragic accidents" to "Five writers who were vegetarians". It doesn't stop there, of course: "Fifteen writers who were spies", "Thirty authors' famous last words", "Ten writers put to death by the state", "Five writers' phobias", "Ten Shakespearian insults", the all-time classic "Ten writers who went insane" and much, much more...

Writer/journalist Malone has done an admirable, often hilarious job at compiling some of these lists. Often ribald -if not downright obscene-, Stranger Than Fiction pulls no punches and digs deep in literature's dirty closets. There is trivia here for everyone, and enough quotable material to make you a certifiable bore at your next office party. It's not a unique book (as I write this, I'm midway through Robert Hendrickson's similar collection The Woodsworth Book of Literary Anecdotes, though Stranger Than Fiction was far more entertaining than Hendrickson's uneven collection.) but it's a good one, with something like 300 lists in one handy paperback-sized hardcover.

My main quibble stems from ignorance: I'm a child of the sci-fi ghetto and so my grasp of classical literature isn't as good as it should be. I was rather embarrassed to learn things I should have known about a few very-well-known writers. Still, it's a fair criticism to remark that Stranger Than Fiction is concentrated mostly on the "respectable" English canon, with often perfunctory attention to other literatures. As a confirmed SF buff, I can proudly claim that our writers are as interesting as the mainstream ones. Yet Robert A. Heinlein and Philip K. Dick are conspicuously absent, while Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke share a paltry three mentions. (On the other hand, have I mentioned the great index-by-authors? Yep; you can use this book as reference!)

Stranger Than Fiction is, in many ways, a tribute to the quirkiness of writers, those magnificent madmen (and madwomen too!) without whom our shelves would be so much poorer. It's a crash-course in English literature, an amusing entertainment, a great source of anecdotes and a pretty nifty discussion piece by itself. It would make a great gift for any avid reader in your neighborhood.

 

The Hook
Donald E. Westlake

Mysterious Press, 2000, 280 pages, 32.95 Can., ISBN 0-89296-588-6

If there's one field that writers know pretty well, it's publishing. No surprise there: It's their job, really. But knowing it well doesn't mean liking it... From time to time, it's not uncommon to see a few authors turn their vengeful pens toward New York and have a little fun. Like screenwriters scorned by Hollywood, bitter authors can be quite mean when they allow themselves to be (pure passive-aggressive build-up, methinks) and the results can be spectacular.

Okay, okay, so "spectacular" isn't the first word to come to mind whenever one thinks about Donald E. Westlake's quiet and nasty tale The Hook. But in its own way, it's a savage parody-through-extremes of problems facing authors today and how two sufficiently desperate writers might be pushed to wholly unsuitable acts in order to escape them.

The hook -or initial appeal of this novel- is in telling how a chance encounter between two old friends results in a curious bargain. One is a best-selling writer with an impregnable writer's block. The other is an inspired writer who doesn't sell. Their mutual problems naturally suggest an acceptable solution. But there's only one detail; the soon-to-be-ghostwriter must murder the bestselling author's soon-to-be-ex-wife.

I know, I know; I didn't find it any more credible than you do. But I believe that every writer must be given some indulgence when it comes to an initial setup and so I let it go. This being said, it didn't help that the wife of the would-be murdered essentially says "oh, that's nice" and agrees with her husband's intentions.

The actual crime, when it happens, is brutal and swift, as unexpected as it is fatal. Maybe the most shocking thing, though, is how well the murderer recovers afterward, easily rationalizing it and pocketing the check.

Indeed, the whole novel does seem to whistle back from the abyss and settle down in a far more pedestrian narrative about publishing, ghostwriting and life in New York. The most affected character comes to be the best-selling writer, who has more and more difficulty dealing with his false new success even as his writer's block worsens. The Hook is blackly comic in its insider's view of late-nineties publishing, where the computers can kill an author's career through simple pre-order calculations and where pseudonyms are the only way out of a vicious circle.

You might be forgiven for almost forgetting about the crime; but at least one of our characters doesn't, and that leads us directly to a conclusion that doesn't reveal its true viciousness until the very last line.

At first, I had serious misgivings about that ending: "Aww, that sucks, that's mean, that's just not right, why'd you do that", etc. But the more I thought about it, the more I found myself accepting, and then grinning at the appropriateness of it. The Hook isn't, as much as we might be lulled into it, a fun little inside joke on writers. At heart (at its dark, beating, diseased heart...), The Hook remains a dark crime story, and you might even argue that the entire second half is meant to lull you into a false sense of security. It actually works better as, um, a hooking conclusion than if the entire novel had been a parade of ever-gruesome serial murders.

It's a short book, too short to be worthwhile in hardcover but well worth the (short) reading time on the beach. The Hook's take on the realities of modern writing and publishing is depressing, but darkly amusing and pretext to some really good insider's dirt on the mechanics of the industry. Avid readers (is there a mystery genre fan who isn't an avid reader?) will gobble it up.

If all else fails, consider the cover illustration of the book, a stack of books by Donald E. Westlake all titled The Hook. It gets funnier, of course, when you know that Donald E. Westlake is no stranger to multiple pseudonyms himself...

 

Falling Stars
Michael J. Flynn

Tor, 2001, 492 pages, $9.99 Can., ISBN 0-812-56184-8

It took four volumes, more than two thousand pages and five years of waiting, but Flynn's Firestar saga is finally complete. A long, often boring but ultimately satisfying saga, Flynn's series now forms the unified whole it's supposed to be. It was about time he completed it too, given the slide of the first volume's 1999-2000 segment in alternate history.

I wasn't personally too fond of Flynn's series of book. I thought the first volume, Firestar (1996), was a long, depressing and ultimately meaningless near-future piece. I was much kinder on the second book, 1998's Rogue Star, which finally started using all the pieces set up in the first volume to build something interesting. The fact that the story started diverging from its hard-SF all-cards-on-table origins to something affected by an unpredictable curveball was also quite intriguing (though in retrospect it makes perfect sense.) Things were back to full disappointment with Lodestar (2000), a slimmer volume that nevertheless felt interminable given its irrelevant nature. Much time and reader goodwill was wasted by the useless side-trip of the third volume, which eventually proves to be useless as the fourth volume concludes.

A large part of Falling Stars's appeal is that this is sold as the final volume of the series. At last, the complex relationships between the hundred-odd characters of the series come to fruition, with heroic sacrifices, long-awaited reunions and the passing of the torch to a new generation. Several of the unpleasant characters introduced in previous volumes finally turn out to be not so bad after all, earning a redemption of sort. After sitting though endless hundred pages of setups, we finally get the pay-offs.

I may be slightly more sarcastic than I deserve to be; the Firestar series' tone is firmly realistic, with a careful attention given to the nuts and bolts of complex space endeavors. Describing the intricate details and weaving the character's evolving relationships takes time, but the overall impression is vastly more believable than the usual SF tale. It's sad, then, to find out that some shortcuts used by Flynn in the first volume (such as having a good bunch of his important characters attend the same high school) come back to haunt and dog his realism. Why spend pages describing financial back-room dealings if the oh-so-diversely-exceptional protagonists can just kick back and chat about high-school while saving the world?

Even then, I think that the Firestar series represents a significant step forward for Michael Flynn as a writer. He's no literary superstar, and indeed the stop-and-go-and-stop pacing of his series proves that he has a lot to learn about structure, but it's a fair assessment that thanks to this saga, his stature as a hard-SF writer has grown enormously. Now that he's gotten this didactic 2000+ pages story out there, maybe he'll feel more comfortable in attempting something snappier as his next effort. (Naturally, the dangling ends left at the end of the fourth volume -yes, there are more than a few-, imply that Flynn might discreetly slip in a fifth volume while we're not looking.)

Alas, we now come to the essential question any reviewer has to answer at the end of a series; is it worth reading? Clearly, I'm happy to be done with the series myself. I'd still hesitate, however, to recommend the four books to a neophyte reader. There's simply too much dead time in the first and third volume to be fully worth it. The series does work as sort of a multi-decade "family" saga, so if you like that particular genre, you might get more enjoyment out of the series than I did. If you're pressed for time, you might start reading the second book, the epilogue of the third, the last and still get most of what you need to know. Maybe, one day, a competent editor will cut whatever needs to be cut and produce a satisfying duology. Until then, you'll have to be a Flynn aficionado, a near-future hard-SF nut or an unusually indulgent reader to plunge head-first in this series.

 

Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content From Presentation
Owen Briggs, Steven Champeon, Eric Costello & Matt Patterson

Glasshaus, 2002, 289 pages, $54.99 Can., ISBN 1-904151-04-3

Friends and family have known for a long time that I'm not a completely normal person, but even they started to worry when I started raving about how much fun it was to read a technical CSS manual. Granted, in the past few weeks I've become more and more prone to irrational bursts of excitement for highly technical books in the field of web design, but even I have to admit at being disturbed by realizing that I was actually curling up with a CSS handbook as "fun reading."

The CSS handbook in question was Glasshaus's Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content From Presentation, a sober-looking reference book about the emerging standard of, yes, Cascading Style Sheets.

From the onset, any web reference book must justify its existence, moreso than any other type of technical book; given the web, wouldn't it be more responsible to publish the stuff in HTML rather than kill trees for it? Don't we already have far too much paper in our offices?

The first and foremost reason justifying paper web books is that people do expect to buy books, even as they have come to regard HTML content as something that should be free. For authors, that alone makes it worthwhile to write a book or two; the thought that some faithful web readers (such as myself, I suppose) might plunk down a few bucks to read real physical words must be very tempting. I suppose that posterity might have something to do with it too.

But beyond these considerations, one must admit that there is indeed a place for paper documentation even in the most cyber-connected of fields. It's still not a terribly pleasant thing to read long narratives on screen, it can be a pain to switch between multiple windows on-screen and it's simply not practical to bring a computer to read, say, on the bus. Or on the couch. Or in the bathroom.

So CSS: SCFP is optimized in function of what would best fit on paper. It provides ample contextual information to instruct us in the not-so-subtle reasons why web content should be separated from its presentation as well as the historical and technological reasons driving this innovation. As narrative, it's a joy to read in paper format, at our leisure. The author make a reasonable case for re-thinking the way we conceive web pages, and this change of perspective alone -stemming from the proper use of CSS- will enrich and enhance any web developer's subsequent projects.

This is followed by a series of entertaining and informative tutorials that you can either read along, or practice at your computer. This is an efficient way to train, as there is a clear difference between paper-theory and electronic-practice. The "Boxes, boxes, boxes" chapter itself might actually be worth the price of the book for all CSS-developers that are serious about doing table-less design.

The third section might also prove to be invaluable, as it gives some hard-won advice on how to deal with outdated browsers. This section might be the most immediately useful, but I think that it will also be the one that will be most quickly made obsolete. Web-things changing so quickly, it's also the least relevant part of the book even as it hits the streets. One can even feel the size restrictions imposed by the editor as the authors refer us to web sites for more updated information.

Still, CSS: SCFP is a great book for web design professionals looking for more in-depth information. I don't think there's anything in here that can't be found on-line somewhere, but the tutorials are unusually clear and grouped together in one handy package. The first contextual part of the book is inspirational enough to warrant frequent re-reads. As a tree-killing object, this book makes its existence worthwhile.

In fact, I'd be so bold as to suggest that so far, CSS: SCFP is the only essential paper CSS reference you need. It's a book designed with some thought, containing all the information that deserves to be printed on paper. Sure, fine, it doesn't contain a complete listing of all CSS-2 properties, but frankly you might as well bookmark the W3C specs and use that as a reference tool. This book contains context, invaluable tutorials and enough handy hints to deserve a place on your physical bookmarks shelf.

Now, if you'll excuse me, writing about this book has made me want to read all over again.

 

Cold Fear
Rick Mofina

Pinnacle, 2001, 476 pages, $8.99 Can., ISBN 0-7860-1266-8

(Necessary disclaimer: Please adjust review according to my known bias toward A> Authors I have met and B> Authors who live in the Ottawa area.)

In his first novel, If Angels Fall, Rick Mofina proved he could take a familiar story and tell it well enough to warrant compulsive reading. In Cold Fear, he tries something more original and succeeds despite a plot that takes a while before truly beginning.

It starts, trivially enough, with a family quarrel deep in Glacier National Park. The little girl of the family is frightened enough to run away from the camp site and gets lost. Her disappearance is signaled to authorities, park-wide searching begins and the police is called in to investigate the parent. It seems that in situations like these, it's not impossible that the parents of the "lost" children are, in fact, responsible for their disappearances.

Already, we can see two recurring themes from Mofina's first book; children in danger and perfectly comprehensible misunderstandings between parties involved. If Angels Fall depicted the hunt for a child kidnapper and honestly highlighted tensions between the police and the media. This time around, there the third party represented by the parents, and of course the little girl. As the omniscient reader, we're privy to the truth, but our characters are not, and Mofina milks a lot of tension between the inevitable clashes between these naturally opposed parties.

It gets worse (or better, for us readers) when the true plot of the novel emerges in the latter half, introducing yet another party, a criminal presence whose shadow looms large on the proceedings even more than a quarter-century after an horrific event. Stuff happens in a delightfully chaotic way and very soon everyone converges toward a dramatic climax that feels quite contrived, but satisfying nonetheless.

For fans of If Angels Fall, Cold Fear does stand alone given that the two protagonists of the first book are here reduced to glorified cameos. Even then, alas, there are quite a few spoilers for the previous novel in the brief time both characters are present... so you might avoid this book anyway if you plan on reading Mofina's first novel anytime soon. One returning protagonist at least has the glamorous role of setting in motion the media circus that comes to dominate the last third of the novel. I was particularly impressed by Chapter Fifty-Seven, which succinctly describes how an exclusive scoop can dominate a nation's thoughtspace in a few hours. It's a great piece of writing by an author who knows these things.

While the rest of the novel is not as spectacular, the prose is no slouch as far as interest is concerned; you can easily zip through Mofina's book, compelled by the steadily engrossing plotting, good characters and the easy prose. This is crime fiction in its most readable state.

In short, there isn't much to complain about Rick Mofina's Cold Fear. The child-in-peril is a good hook to interest readers, and the rest of the novel propels itself forward with great ease. It's a assured piece of fiction by a writer who seems more than capable of holding his own in the crowded crime fiction category. I'm not an entirely unbiased reader when in comes to Rick Mofina, but why don't you check out one of his books at the local library?

 

Flavor or the Month
Olivia Goldsmith

Pocket Books, 1993, 880 pages, $8.50 Can., ISBN 0-671-79450-7

One of my favorite new words these days is "bonkbuster", a term used to describe a novel consciously written to have wide commercial appeal and/through a lot of sex in it. As "blockbusters with a lot of bonking in them" go, I don't think you can go wrong with Olivia Goldsmith's Flavor of the Month. It's pure titillating trash from a clever writer, and it makes no apologies for what it is. And, goodness, sometime it's just so much fun to read novels like that.

Consciously eschewing literary respectability, Goldsmith focuses her novel on a trio of actresses who will eventually come together in America's #1 television show. The narrative is told "as if" from one of the nation's foremost scandal-peddler (think Kitty Kelly, herself referenced on the novel's first page) in some alternate version of 1993's America. (Naturally, all characters, executives, studios and movies are fictive and should not be meant to represent real-life equivalents, mostly because their fictional equivalents are so much more interesting.)

In short order, we're introduced to three very different lead actresses: Sweet dumb Texas blonde Sharleen, bitchy rich L.A. brunette Lila and poor homely red-headed New Yorker Mary Jane. Of the three, it is Mary Jane who emerges as our lead protagonist and the moral center around which the rest of the novel will revolve. She is also the one who -initially, anyway- has to change herself the most in order to attain the pinnacle of fame; thanks to an unexpected influx of money, a bad break-up and some old-fashioned determination, Mary Jane undergoes extensive cosmetic surgery, learns some independence and loses a significant fraction of her body weight. When she emerges from the whole process, she's beautiful, younger and is known by another name. Loosened in L.A. with more than thirty years' worth of bitterness in an identity ten officially years younger, she quickly becomes the flavor of the month of the town... but will it last?

I won't spoil it, but Goldsmith certainly appears to be an extremely moralist novelist. Not that there's anything wrong with that; after countless so-called "sophisticated" novels in which everything is painted in various shades of ethical grays, it's refreshing to read a novel in which characters get what they so richly deserve, whatever their moral alignment. Several members of this novel's cast go from pleasant to unpleasant and blow their last chance at redemption; Goldsmith's justice is terrible and often none too swift.

Flavor of the Month takes on the whole celebrity/beauty industry with acceptable gusto. Don't expect a profound statement on the superficiality of today's entertainment culture, but do be prepared for a few insightful observations here and there. Goldmsith is a professional at her craft, and she know which levers to use in order to get a rise from her readers and when enough's enough.

Speaking of arousing readers' interest, there are certainly enough titillating sex scenes, scandalous behavior and lurid details to satisfy even the most sun-burnt beach reader. Above all, Flavor of the Month is a fun novel, and the speed at which anyone will be able to read this hefty tome speaks for itself. It's delicious, hypnotic, compelling, often hilarious and wildly catty. Though the 1993 details are starting to be dated (some of the celebrity references almost require a companion guide to understand nowadays, so transient is celebrity pop culture), there's no denying that Flavor of the Month is exactly what you want if ever you need a big thick diversion.

I don't think I'm the target readership of Goldmisth's oeuvre, but after The Bestseller and this, I'm more than ready to become a regular reader of hers. It's fluff, but it's smooth fluff with a pleasant degree of cleverness. Perfect summer reading!

[January 2004: In an absolutely mind-boggling ironic twist that wouldn't be out of place in her novels, Olivia Goldsmith died of complications following... plastic surgery. Strange but true; the type of anecdotes in which the death of an author acts as a cornerstone for an entire career. Her first novel, after all, was The First Wives' Club...]