Reviews

February 2005

2005, Christian Sauvé

Reviewed this month:

 

Thunder in the Deep,
Joe Buff

Bantam, 2001, 465 pages, C$9.99 pb, ISBN 0-553-58240-2

The problem with most military thrillers isn't with the "military" part. Often recruited from active or retired ranks, military fiction writers have the technical details down pat. Given them the slightest excuse for a fictional war and they'll be able to describe in telling detail how men will fight. What's usually missing is the stuff fiction thrives on: Characters. Engaging writing. Adequate pacing. Dramatic build-up. Your typical military thriller can be mesmerizing if it's written with competence, but too many such novels are published without much attention to traditional story-telling skills.

Joe Buff's Deep Sound Channel was a submarine thriller that floated in the deep inversion layer between a good thriller and an unreadable thicket of military details. Saddled with a trite plot, unconvincing characters, overwhelming jargon and spots of awful prose, Buff's debut model nevertheless found an audience thanks to its reasonably engaging depiction of near-future underwater warfare. Bad fiction buoyed by good ideas, in the grand tradition of military techno-thrillers everywhere.

Things haven't changed much in the sequel Thunder in the Deep, but at least they've evolved in the right direction. Once more, we find ourselves aboard the USS Challenger, a new "ceramic-hulled" attack submarine stuck in the midst of a future war opposing the English-speaking bloc versus Germany and South Africa. The reasons behind the war are better explained here than in the first book, but they don't make it any less ludicrous. But, as ever, let's grant the author one big assumption and hop along for the ride.

This time around, protagonist Jeffrey Fuller (ex-SEAL, current submarine captain and all-around good guy) is charged with a desperate mission in two parts: First, rescue the crew of a damaged American submarine. Then (surprise), continue on to the shores of Germany to launch a surprise attack against a research facility building unstoppable cruise missiles. Aboard for the ride is Ilse Reebeck, the renegade South-American oceanographer who doubles as the series' tangential love interest.

Plot-wise, Thunder of the Deep is almost identical to Deep Sound Channel: A mission, a submarine fight getting there, a land-based raid and another submarine battle coming back to base. The end. But don't despair yet: Buff hasn't messed with his formula, but he has learned a few other tricks. Simply put, Thunder of the Deep shows some improvement in the basic art of storytelling: Characters are slightly more complete, the jargon is turned down, the suspense is better-defined, the battles don't seem as interminable as in the first book and novel's overall impact is generally stronger. Small wonder, then, that when French editor Fleuve Noir decided to translate Buff's fiction, they began with this volume rather than the first one.

It also helps that Buff's strengths are carried undiminished in this volume. Once again, Buff (a civilian expert in military submarines; check his web site) portrays underwater warfare as a complex set of interaction between physics, geology, weaponry and plain old human psychology. The impressive climax of the book takes place around an underwater volcano, with both submarine captains making the most out of a desperate stalemate.

This being said, there are still significant problems with Thunder in the Deep, enough to keep this novel strictly for readers with an established interest in submarine warfare. As savvy as Buff may be in military matters, his political sense simply doesn't measure up. The psychology of the book's antagonists is still ridiculously simplistic: All native Germans, we're shown, seem to be partisans of the war despite the tactical nukes flying left and right, cheering whenever their reichkommandant shows them war news footage. Ahem: Countries are not monoliths and enemies are not stupid.

But generally speaking, Thunder in the Deep is an adequate military thriller, one that should slightly expand Buff's readership. Best of all is the sense of improvement in the series, one which bodes well for Crush Depth, the follow-up Jeffery Fuller adventure. I'm not a big fan of military series in general, but since I've got a copy of the next book on my shelves, well...

 

The Well of Lost Plots
Jasper Fforde

NEL, 2003, 360 pages, C$24.95 tp, ISBN 0-340-82592-8

There's never a dull moment in the life of Thursday Next, and that serves both as a plot description for The Well of Lost Plots as well as a plotting technique for Jasper Fforde. In this third volume of his enormously amusing humour/mystery/fantasy hybrid, Fforde continues to throw everything he can imagine at us grateful readers, and if he stretches things perhaps a tad too far in this entry, it easily remains a must-read for everyone who loved Next's first two adventures.

If you haven't read The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book, you may want to start there and come back after. Events in The Well of Lost Plots begin right after those of the previous book, and little time is spent catching up: If you remember the conclusion of the second novel, Thursday Next has decided to retreat from the alternate reality in which her husband has been erased from history and wait out the birth of her child in a novel still under construction. (Hey, don't ask if you haven't read the first two books.) The story picks up weeks later: Thursday is living the quiet life of a secondary character, but trouble is brewing in Text Grand Central, what with the disappearance of several Jurisfiction agents and the imminent introduction of UltraText[TM] technology.

Seemingly proceeding on the principle that you can't have enough of a good thing, Fforde sets the vast majority of The Well of Lost Plots inside the fictional universe of books first glimpsed in the first volume and defined in the second one. At the exception of two chapters set in the real world, all of this third tome is spent shuttling back and forth between novels and the Grand Library linking all of them together. As you would now expect from a Fforde novel, subplots multiply in an attempt to show us as many cool things as possible. We go deep in the “Well of Lost Plots” to find out how stories are constructed, how characters are defined and how unsuccessful fictions are slated for destruction. Amusingly enough, Fforde's mythology reduces authors to mere transcribers, an ironic reversal when you compare it with the hundred of stories portraying authors as the end-all of literary creation, from Misery to Wonder Boys.

But there's a story of sorts behind it all, a twisty maze of double-crossings involving renegade Jurisfiction agents and an attempted takeover of Text Grand Central. Beloved characters die, Next investigates, everyone is a suspect and it all finds a somewhat satisfying deus-ex-libris ending at the 923rd Annual Fiction Awards. Meanwhile, Next herself has to deal with the aftermath of her husband's eradication... or simply forget about it.

As with Fforde's first two books, The Well of Lost Plots is aimed at enthusiastic readers, and works on quantity as much as quality; there's simply so much stuff to enjoy that it's almost impossible to pause and reflect. In fact, this third volume starts to show the limits of Fforde's premise: While all is well and fun, there's a clear sense that this is almost too much; by setting almost all of his story inside the fuzzy boundaries of explicit fiction, Fforde also fudges with rules and limits. Anything can happen and pretty much everything does. Readers may start to yearn for the relative simplicity of Next's native Swindon.

There are also a number of troubling inconsistencies. Whereas Lost in a Good Book played around with the idea that Next was as fictional as the rest of the characters, The Well of Lost Plots makes her an Outlander whose reality is undisputed. The death of one character seems to contradict the epigram at the beginning of the second volume's Chapter 29. But Fforde may have something else down his sleeve for Book Four, so let's not be too quick to judge...

Still, there are small problems compared to what you'll get from the novel. Gems abound, such as the Wuthering Heights rage counselling session; the vision of all the other Grand Libraries; the way Generics are transformed in authentic Characters; the fantastic vyrus-fighting action sequence; the cameo appearance by Gully Foyle (Jurisfiction agent for the SF genre, as it turns out); the hilarious way Jurisfiction decide to deal with a shortage of "u"s. Wonderful.

Of course, this book practically sells itself to Fforde's fans, who probably pre-ordered the book as soon as it was announced. Onward to the fourth volume of the series, Something Rotten.

 

Russian Spring,
Normand Spinrad

Bantam Spectra, 1991, 567 pages, C$27.50 hc, ISBN 0-553-07586-1

Read this:

"The United States... had let the dollar drop like a stone against the ECU in order to try to devaluate its enormous external debt, was reinvesting its capital and excess military capacity in Latin America... and loud voices in the American Congress and elsewhere had started clamoring for debt renunciation and even expropriation of Common European holdings in the States, none of which exactly assured Americans a warm welcome in the metropoles of Common Europe. Besides which, with the dollar so far down against the ECU and all the currency restrictions on American tourists..." [p.86]

Replace ECU with Euro and Latin America with Middle East, and the above sure reads like a news headline, doesn't it? Then how about the fact that it was written sometime in 1990-1991?

Norman Spinrad may have had guessed a number of details wrong, but the future described in his 1991 family epic Russian Spring is a great deal more familiar today than anyone would have guessed at the time. In this novel, America turns its back on the world and on civilian high technology, invades most of Latin America, blocks its borders and indulges in xenophobia. Meanwhile, Europe -led by a post-communistic Russia- takes the lead in space technology and personal freedom.

As I said; creepy foreshadowing, isn't it? Spinrad may not have been aiming for much more than a contrarian reversal of roles, but our reality has a way of being even stranger than we can imagine. It's not a perfect one-to-one correspondence but it's close enough to be unnerving. (In Russian Spring, the ex-Soviet republics haven't yet seceded in independent countries, a fact that plays heavily in its conclusion –even though it also features Ukrainian election heavily influenced by Americans!)

The real protagonist of Russian Spring is Jerry Reed, an engineer courted by Europe to lead an ambitious aerospace project. There's one catch, though; America won't stand for his defection and demands Reed's passport, stranding him outside the US. Things are resolved, somewhat, by the arrival of a Russian girl, Sonya Gargarin, who is in a position to make a complex deal to allow them both to stay in Paris.

But that's not the end of the story. Russian Spring evolves over thirty years, as tensions rise and fall between Europe, America, Russia and the rest of the world. Four main characters over three decades barely qualify for the title of "family epic", but Spinrad's novel has an ambitious sweep that has the feel of a big big story. Jerry Reed's dream is to get into space, but at what cost?

There are many thing to love and admire about Russian Spring, but perhaps the best is the combination of political complexity with good old-fashioned SF spirit. The post-cold-war balance of powers and forces between old allies and enemies is skillfully developed through characters with a lot to lose from even the slightest power shifts. Readers of political fiction ought to find something worthwhile in this novel, especially today.

But at the same time, you have thank Spinrad for using SF's traditional fixation on space exploration as a way to bring all of humanity together and rise above petty squabbles. This is high-grade techno-optimism and Russian Spring, fourteen years later, offers a suitable prism through which we can see a way out of this crazy “war of terrorism”.

I have my own reservations about the book (the rise of a character named Wolwowitz -of all names!- is dicey, and so is the way two gratuitous accidents precipitate the entire conclusion), but there's a lot more good than bad in this unexpected, largely forgotten gem. Read it today, because it's never been more relevant. Still not convinced? Read this:

"President Carson... is a schmuck. If it talks like a schmuck, runs the country like a schmuck, and surrounds itself with other schmucks, it probably is a schmuck, even if it wasn't cruising this poor screwed-up country for another international bruising like the biggest schmuck of all." [P.397].

Hmmm.

 

Hong Kong,
Stephen Coonts

St. Martin's, 1999, 350 pages, C$39.99 hc, ISBN 0-312-25339-7

The imperatives of commercial fiction can be tough, but as much as I feel for the poor authors trying to make a living out of their writing, my natural sympathies lie with the readers who have to slog through the barely adequate stuff produced by a publishing industry fixated on profits.

Stephen Coonts' Hong Kong is a perfect example of what happens when a hard-working writer gets stuck in the machine, churning out one commercial novel per year while trying to stretch a formula way past its expiration date. Taken apart, there are at least three or four good ideas in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, they never should have been put together, nor hammered in an existing series.

Yes, Hong Kong marks yet another adventure for Coonts' favourite protagonist Jake Grafton. After his tour of duty in Cuba, Grafton is back in the game in Hong Kong as a rear admiral sent to investigate a mysterious situation in the ex-British colony. He hasn't been picked by accident: For one thing, man-of-action Grafton is twiddling his thumbs behind a desk at the Pentagon. For another, the man he's set to investigate is consul-general Virgil "Tiger" Cole, making a return appearance after starring alongside Grafton in Coonts' very first novel Flight of the Intruder. (If you've seen the movie, Cole is the character played by Willem Dafoe, which is actually perfect casting for this novel too.) Cole isn't the only returning character: While "Toad" Tarkington is relegated to a cameo role via telephone, a large place is given to thief/agent Tommy Carmellini, introduced in Cuba.

Most of the Hong Kong is spend dawdling around, waiting for the book's set-piece: a revolution against the communist government now ruling Hong Kong. Cole, we learn, has spent his post-Vietnam years fruitfully, become a multi-millionaire with enough technological clout to ferment a popular uprising against the entire Chinese government. It helps, of course, that he can depend on impossible technology like the "sergeant York" killer robots... about which in a moment.

There are, to be sure, interesting ideas here. The idea of having Grafton meet with old acquaintances of troubled loyalties is certainly interesting, and it's exactly the type of story sequels are made of. Similarly, the idea of Hong Kong hosting a revolution with the potential to unseat the entire Chinese government is the type of big, big idea that deserves a novel of its own. There there is the technological showcase of the book, a half-dozen semi-autonomous robots able to outrun linebackers, shoot any hand-held weapon with computerized accuracy and operate without constant supervision from remote tele-operators. This is worth building a novel around.

Unfortunately, this type of killer robots isn't anywhere near reality right now for good reasons: They combine technological capabilities that are far beyond anything possible today. Spend some time reading about the state of automated targeting, computerized image recognition, mechanical locomotion, hand-like articulations and power sources required to do these things and you'll start laughing at the way Coonts introduces a package combining all of these things in Hong Kong. This is a piece of mid-twenty first century technology dropped in a contemporary setting. While I'd pay good money to read a novel about the introduction of such technology on an appropriate future battlefield, this impossible technology just doesn't mesh with the rest of Coonts' novel.

Well, it does meshes in a way, giving life to a few creepy/cool scenes, but that's it. The final man/robot showdown (you know there's got to be one, and you can even guess who's featured in it) seems stolen from a Terminator fan-script. Add to that Callie Grafton's role as the designated kidnapped woman, the annoying suspicion that this is the last we'll ever hear of the Chinese civil war in the Grafton series, and, well, Hong Kong is problematic. Despite the good material here and there (including just about all of the showpiece Chapter Nineteen), the book suffers from a number of annoying contradictions that diminish its impact.

This is a Grafton novel because that's what the publishers demanded, in the false belief that this is what readers want to read. But the selective amnesia required to make long-running thriller series mesh with the ongoing real world gets progressively more exasperating as the series run to compound the difficulties with unbelievable gadgets and indifferent dramatic tension. It's not an unpleasant book, but it could have been much, much better.

 

Freefall,
Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

Pocket Star, 2005, 559 pages, C$11.99 pb, ISBN 0-7434-0607-9

I seldom buy books as soon as they come out, let alone read and review them in the same month they're released. I had to make an exception in the case of Freefall, the third techno-thriller by the Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens writing couple. Their previous Icefire (1998) and Quicksilver (1999) were easily two of the most interesting high-tech suspense novels of the late nineties, and a third one would be cause for celebration no matter what it was about.

Luckily, the premise of their newest effort is a barn-burner: In 2008, the story goes, an automated lunar probe comes back to Earth, bringing back the first lunar samples in more than three decades. But just as the samples are transferred aboard the International Space Station, powerful explosions wreck half the station, kill most of the crew, destroy two space shuttles and strand the few survivors in orbit without hope of rescue. Stuck in a dying space station, geologist Corazon Rey opens up a sample canister and discovers, mixed with lunar rocks, the mummified remnants of two human fingers...

That's how Freefall starts. As for how it ends, well, I'd rather leave you in suspense. For the biggest thrills of Freefall are in reading about conspiracies and secrets, the hidden history of the space race and the surprises of today's military forces. It's a novel that features an entirely different picture of the race to the moon, a frighteningly plausible explanation for the Roswell/Area 51 conspiracies [P.295] and an exciting second race to the moon. Freefall starts with a sequence in which American operatives investigate the Chinese space program underneath a flooded hydro-electrical reservoir, and it never lets up after that. Even more so than in Icefire, the Reeves-Stevens take a malicious pleasure in cramming throwaway mysteries and cool ideas in every available crevice of their novel. The net winners are the readers with a taste for that sort of "wouldn't it be cool if...?" speculation. In this type of fiction, there's a fine balance between far-fetched but still plausible supposition and straight-out wonk-wonk UFO-nuts territory, and Freefall skirts that line as close as possible without falling in X-Files territory. (Though I've got my doubts about P.270)

When thriller mechanics are concerned, the Reeves-Stevens know how to hook their readers like true professionals. Freefall doesn't suffer too much from its twin-mountains structure: The middle lull between two complicated pieces of techno-adventure is exploited for some much-appreciated exposition and to tighten up the tension some more. The climax reaches a beautiful convergence of plot threads and emotional power, especially for those still carrying a torch for the cause of space exploration. This is the best space-based near-future techno-thriller since Homer J. Hickam's Back to the Moon and that's high praise indeed.

Extensively researched and effortlessly convincing, Freefall aims straight at the techno-geek reader and scores a definite hit. Fans of the Reeves-Steven's previous two techno-thrillers won't be disappointed. Readers of Icefire will be specially pleased by the return of the earlier novel's terrific characters, with a much-expanded role for NORAD wizard Wilhemina Bailey. I'm not normally a fan of thriller series, and this one is just a bit too contrived in how it places known characters in exactly the right jobs and places, but it's a pleasure to see Cory Rey and Mitch Webber arguing once again.

This pleasure carries further, of course: In terms of readability, you'll be hard-pressed to find a more compelling techno-thriller this year. There always the temptation to read "just another chapter" to find out what else the Reeves-Stevens will take out of their magic bag of techno-tricks. Suffice to say that after a steady diet of bland books and admirable literary novels, I had a blast delving in Freefall's too-few pages and all-too-wonderful secrets. For techno-nerds, reading this novel is like sipping on Jolt Cola syrup: all the caffeine, with the added advantage of a sugar rush.

If you're up for historical secrets, high-tech conspiracies, going back to the moon, exploding space shuttles and all that fun stuff, you can call Freefall "book of the year" and stop looking for anything better. As for myself, I have seldom been so well served by a "buy-on-sight" decision: Freefall is likely to remain one of my favourite techno-thrillers of the decade.

 

Schild's Ladder,
Greg Egan

Gollancz, 2001, 250 pages, #16.99 hc, ISBN 0-575-07068-4

Sometimes, there is no shame in saying that you've been beaten by a book.

I certainly feel like that after reading Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder. I may think of myself as a savvy hard-SF fan with a good understanding of science and a facility for technical jargon, but Egan has clearly bested me with this extrapolation of thirty-first century physics.

The central plot isn't terribly complicated. First, the prologue describes how a far-future scientific experiment goes wrong and starts eating the very fabric of the cosmos. Schild's Ladder then jump hundreds of years later, on a station perched at the frontier of this novo-vacuum's continuing expansion. Aboard the station, two post-human factions: The Preservationists, trying to fight back against the expanding blight, and the Yielders, who are looking for an accommodation and a way to exploit this new set of circumstances. Stuff happens, discoveries are made, a trip is taken and soon enough, well... oh, there's not much to spoil, but let's still not spoil it.

If the plot is simple enough (and, to be truthful, not that different from a number of classic SF stories in which heroic scientists have to face an alien enigma) it's the details that will make cry in confusion and beg for simpler novels. Open up a page at random, and you're likely to read a line like "Once that was achieved, Tchicaya scribed a series of probes that would spread out laterally as well moving straight in, improving their changes of gaining a comprehensive picture of the Planck worms." [P.187]

Uh-huh. Okay. Not bad, but imagine 250 pages of that and you'll quickly reach for a romance novel in order to speed-read once more. Not content to play around with advanced physics, Schild's Ladder boldly invents post-"Theory of Everything" physics that are to our understanding of the universe what super-string theory is to Newtonian physics. Ambitious, undoubtedly fascinating for the Nobel Prize crowd, but utterly baffling for even smart-ass readers such as myself.

But difficulty of comprehension doesn't necessarily betray lack of enjoyment. Midway though the book, it struck me that even though I couldn't understand half the jargon, I was swimming once more in the comfortable thought-space of hard-SF. Egan's protagonists are scientists for whom the hunger of knowledge is all-powerful, and there's a pleasant vibe to this kind of attitude that I was missing after so many hum-drum thrillers and pedestrian SF novels. What's more, you eventually learn to tune out the most advanced sections of Egan's prose, and simply extract whatever meaning you can from the plot-line surrounding the physics.

Interestingly enough for a writer whose short stories are usually better-rated than his longer fiction, several of Schild's Ladder's best moments come in smaller portions. The opening novella isn't bad, Protagonist Tchicaya's shared childhood experience with Mariama is worth excerpting by itself and the final voyage is -though at the limit of intelligibility- almost worth another story. Even in the nuts-and-bolts linking scenes, Egan goes farther than anyone else, fiddling with acorporeal characters and their psychology as if it was just another thing. Never mind that other novelists (paging Richard K. Morgan) can devote entire novels to the very same throwaway ideas.

Ultimately, it's the sense that Schild's Ladder does things impossible to achieve in any other genre of expression but science-fiction that gives full meaning to the book. For someone to sit down and extrapolate far-future physics in sufficient details for readers to recoil in stunned incomprehension is nothing short of admirable. I have long maintained that science-fiction should first be defined by what it can do better than anything else, and this is the kind of novel, utterly cryptic to anyone not already well-versed in the genre, that best exemplifies that kind of thinking. Is it one of 2001's best SF novels? I don't think so. Is it one of 2001's purest SF novels, though? Ah-ha.

It took me a while to get to this novel, and now that I have, I suddenly find myself at the end of Egan's oeuvre so far: The already-mysterious author has almost completely stopped writing since 2001, devoting himself to the cause of Australian asylum-seekers. For hard-SF, this pause has been deeply felt; Egan continues to show signs of life (His web site is still regularly updated), but it's an open bet as to when he'll be back in bookstores. In the meantime, enjoy this novel as maybe the most advanced piece of diamond-hard SF he's ever penned, and wonder if anything will ever top this. In this light, beating my head against this novel is nothing short of the ultimate compliment.

 

Fugitives and Refugees,
Chuck Palahniuk

Crown, 2003, 176 pages, C$25.00 hc, ISBN 1-4000-4783-8

If you're not a fan of Chuck Palahniuk and you're not in any hurry to learn more about Portland, this is going to be a very short review: Don't bother with this book. It's written by Palahniuk for Palahniuk fans, with an appropriate look at the city of Portland and the weirdness contained within. No, it's not an accident if you haven't seen Fugitives and Refugees in bookstores and may never even have heard about it. Please skip the rest of this review. We'll see each other at the next one

As for the rest of you, I can only assume that you want to learn more about Portland and/or are already die-hard fans of Chuck Palahniuk's fiction from Fight Club to Diary. If you have already read his non-fiction collection Stranger Than Fiction, you're already halfway ready to have a look at Fugitives and Refugees.

Part of the “Crown Journeys” collection, this is, obviously, a look at the city of Portland. But unlike a typical travel guide (and much like a typical Palahniuk book), it focuses on the weird, the cool, the unusual and the perverted. Portland high quotient of quirkiness, explains Palahniuk though an interview with Geek Love's author Katherine Dunn, can be attributed to the theory that "everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city where they can live is Portland. This gives [the city] the most cracked of the crackpots. The misfits among misfits." [P.14] The fugitives and refugees of the entire country, one could say.

And so Palahniuk takes stock of his chosen city and reports back from the field. Half of Fugitives and Refugees is built like a typical travel guide; here's a chapter on restaurants (complete with recipes, to the grand pleasure of all Palahniuk-naggers who maintain that his fans would buy even The Man's grocery lists); here's a chapter on shopping; another on museums. But then the book gets weirder: There's an explicit chapter on the city's sex trade; another on the haunted buildings of Portland; a third one on the underground tunnels under the city...

Palahniuk has done his legwork in tracking down the fugitives and refugees of his city. His guide to the city's landmarks is augmented by mini-interviews with zoo keepers, milling experts, fancy carmakers, drag queens, museum owners and the inventor of a self-cleaning house. Fascinating stuff, regardless of whether you intend to visit Portland or not. It's in this section of the book that you can perhaps most clearly see similarities with Palahniuk's other non-fiction collection Stranger than Fiction.

But much as Stranger than Fiction also found some of its best moments in self-reflective pieces about Palahniuk's life, every chapter of Fugitives and Refugees is interspersed with "Postcards" from the author's personal history, from his starring role in a MTV video to his participation in Portland's SantaCon'96. Palahniuk's fans will be delighted and fascinated by another peek at the author's life, but even regular readers are likley to consider these pieces as the book's highlights. I'm still laughing myself silly about his description of an LSD trip inside a planetarium, and I'm fascinated by his description of the "Portland's semiannual Apocalypse Café", a potluck held in a condemned industrial building, as if it was in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic society. Very Fight Clubish indeed.

Palahniuk's fiction is less distinguishable by its overall plot than its shocking vignettes and affectionately described oddball characters. This holds true with Fugitive and Refugees: while this won't leap on top of anyone's reading list based on the sole distinction of having been written by Palahniuk, it makes for an interesting (and fast) read for his fans. They will find everything they like about the author's fiction on full display here, along with a number of tasty anecdotes from his life. What remains to be established for non-Portlanders is the ratio of impression-to-reality: From Fugitives and Refugees, we get the impression that Portland is a city teething with repressed craziness, but is it truly as special, as weird and as off-the-wall as Palahniuk says? Heck, it almost sounds as if a visit is in order to find out...

 

Why We Buy,
Paco Underhill

Simon & Schuster, 1999, 256 pages, C$37.00 hc, ISBN 0-684-84913-5

The next time you're out shopping, pay attention: someone may be looking at you. No, I'm not talking about security cameras or other shoppers checking you out (though, hey, enjoy the attention if you can get it). I'm talking about people like Paco Underhill, shopping scientists studying the habits and behaviour of ordinary consumers in a retail environment. Perhaps more accurately called "retail naturalists" than "shopping scientists", Underhill and members of his consulting firm Envirosell spend hundreds of hours per year following shoppers, analyzing store layouts, looking at store signs and trying to improve the shopping experience.

Why We Buy is Underhill's first book, and it brings together several of Underhill's painstakingly-developed theories about the modern state of shopping. At a time where North-American shopping has nowhere to go (ie; no fast population growth, no rapidly increasing income levels), the only alternative is to sell more efficiently. That's where consultants like Underhill come in: by studying the way we shop, they can identify problems and fix what's clearly not working.

One easy example: The "landing strip". You can't just walk inside a store and start shopping: You need time and space to adjust, remove your sunglasses or your toque (depending on the season), take stock of the store's layout or pick up a shopping cart. Clever managers won't try to put merchandising inside the "landing strip", but will exploit the area in more subtle ways.

Another easy example: The "butt-brush" aversion. North American simply don't like being touched (even accidentally) when they're bending down. Trying to make them bend in confined spaces, where closely-arranged shelves only allow for a limited amount of space, is an exercise in futility. Solution: more space, and re-arrange merchandise so that people who can't bend (older people, for instance) won't have to.

Both of these things may sound like common sense, but at a time when increasingly chain-driven shopping is being managed from corporate headquarters, retail operations can need a reality-check. The drive to rationalize operations by using fewer clerks, minimal wages, more crowded shelving can actually decrease sales rather than improve operations. In a competitive industry where even tiny adjustments can make the differences between black and red ink, Envirosell's advice clearly finds a market.

This type of information is a boon to retailers (one can imagine a conscientious store manager reading this book and making significant changes to his store), but it's just as interesting to the consumer cattle being studied. It's impossible to read even two pages of Why we Buy without a sigh of acknowledgement as Underhill explains how the retail industry works, or at least ought to work. But be forewarned; Underhill comes to the store to improve it, not to destroy it: His lucrative perspective isn't one of a consumer muckraker, but a merchant optimizer. While the two often coincide (a happier shopper is a bigger spender), you will not find in Why We Buy a critique of consumerism or a scathing exposé of modern marketing techniques. Lavish consumerism is seen as a desirable objective to attain, and Underhill spears nearly all of his time suggesting ways to improve the spending experience.

The other problem with Why We Buy is that Underhill has so much experience in stalking the habits of the wild shoppers in retail environments that his perspective is limited is areas other than his own. His "suggestions" for bookstores will be greeted with aghast stares by book-lovers, while his own open contempt for the "cyberjockeys" driving on-line shopping betrays both ignorance and shortsightedness.

Still, for shoppers both enthusiastic and reluctant, Why We Buy is a compulsively readable, highly informative book. Deliciously written and stuffed with telling examples, it's a way to deconstruct the shopping experience and understand our behaviour. (I thought Underhill was indulging in gratuitous stereotypes as he was describing female shoppers... until he started describing the habits of male shoppers, which are pretty much spot-on identical to mine.) It may be a book solely about how more dollars can be squeezed out of our wallets, but that doesn't make it any less fun.