Reviews

September 2005

2005, Christian Sauvé

Reviewed this month:

 

1945,
Newt Gingrich & William R. Forstchen

Baen, 1995, 382 pages

In the Science Fiction community, heck, in the publishing community, 1945 has an unbeatable reputation as a commercial failure of epic proportions, an albatross that seriously damaged Baen Books' financial statements for years. Published in 1995 and backed by an enormous publicity push, 1945 thundered in bookstores... and stayed there. No one was interested in buying it. Reviews weren't just bad: they were viciously mean. Legend has it that over 80% of the entire print run was eventually returned to the publishers, costing Baen beaucoup dollars and scrapping the plans to conclude the trilogy launched by 1945. It wasn't much later that Gingrich (who was, at the time, the Speaker of the House in the Republican-led US Congress) exited public life in a cloud of public ridicule partially generated by the book's failure.

So. Wow. What a reputation: The Book That Nearly Sank Baen Books, Threw Gingrich Out Of Congress And Whose Legacy Is Still Whispered About. (Even editor Jim Baen himself called it "perhaps the greatest failure of my career") In this episode of publishing history, the book itself has nearly been forgotten. So: bad or not?

Well, certainly not good. Not terrible either, but certainly not good. The main problem is that 1945 was probably conceived in the kind of cool conversation that doesn't deserves to be novelized:

Newt: I've got an idea for an alternate history!

William: What is it?

Newt: Hitler in a coma in 1941! He never declares war on the US! We beat the Japs, the Nazis never attack Russia, they conquer all of Europe except for England! Then in 1945, they start bombing the Oak Ridge facility which is building the Project Manhattan nukes!

William: Cool.

Yeah. Cool. But that type of pure speculation is a bit thin unless you're a really good writer who can take this concept and beef it up with good characters and a compelling storyline. 1945 (which, by the way, takes place mostly in 1946) all too often reads as a deluge of historical facts loosely discussed between cardboard placeholders. We're not reading about characters, but about names and occupations whose moral alignment closely match their nationalities. As for subtle or even entertaining prose, well, reach for another book.

The infamous first three pages star a "pouting sex kitten" Nazi spy (Page 2, third paragraph) and believe me, it never gets more interesting than that. In the time-hallowed tradition of awful military techno-thrillers, half the book is spent putting together a Really Fiendish Attack, which then takes place more or less as expected in the rest of the book.

1945 is not without interest, but it's the kind of interest you get while reading non-fiction accounts of the Reich's grandiose plans and high-tech equipment. There are also a few nifty cameos, which are probably more interesting for historians than lay readers. As I said: Cool stuff, but hardly worth slogging through a novel. The last few pages are a geeky wank-fest of cool ideas taken from WW2 drawing boards, all vigorously pimped as previews for the next novel.

Which, fortunately, will never be written, let alone published. It says much for the quality of the book that this prospect doesn't even offend my sensibilities as a completist: I cared so little for the characters that remembering them will be a challenge, let alone anticipate more of their adventures.

[February 2005: William Forstchen was kind enough to write and point out, with far more tact than I deserved, that his subsequent Civil-War-Era novels co-written with Newt Gingrich have been well-received by critics and readers alike. This raises bigger questions about 1945, up to and including who truly had the "last cut" on the book. Genre historians wishing to investigate this issue in more detail may want to start with a look at a 1995 profile of Forstchen, a contemporary confession by Jim Baen (who "admits to reporter David Streitfeld that these much-snickered-over words were actually his creation"), details about the book's returns and a fascinating blog post telling the rest of the story. Owners of 1945 may also want to take another look at the back cover and realize why Jim Baen is pictured alongside the two co-authors.]

 

From Time to Time,
Jack Finney

Simon & Schuster, 1995, 303 pages, ISBN 0-671-89884-1

Time travel is, by now, one of Science Fiction's most well-worn themes. In steady use since at least H.G.Wells's The Time Machine, is it still possible to do something, anything new with it? Whatever the answer, it won't be found in Jack Finney's From Time to Time, a disappointing novel that illuminates more by its failure than its qualities.

It is perhaps unfair to attack the novel with the cognitive tools of SF criticism. From Time to Time is, after all, primarily a sequel to Finney's own Time and Again (1970), a time-travel fable that mishandled its SF element in much the same fashion, for much the same goals.

Finney, despite non-trivial genre credentials (he was the author of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, mind you) isn't terribly interested in the verisimilitude of time-travel in either novel. In Time and Again, protagonist Si Morley discovers through a government agency that he, alone among perhaps billions, is able to self-hypnotize himself in an earlier time. The hand-waving explanation involves individuals being “bound” to their time-lines by countless details, but immersing themselves so completely in another time that they literally project themselves in the past. No, it doesn't make sense. No, you're not supposed to think about it.

Your not supposed to nit-pick the time travel mechanism because the whole point of both books is to allow a contemporary character the chance to experience another time. Both books are historical novels in disguise, wrapped in some mubo-jumbo science-fantasy and structured along the lines of a thriller. Both books sometime stop for entire chapters as Finney spends his time describing this or that aspect of the period. I suppose that fans of New York in 1882 and 1912 will be delighted at the amount of period detail. For others, it can be all a big bore.

This isn't to say that Finney is unsuccessful. If his goal was to deliver a hidden chronologue, it works: He's got an eye for detail, and there are a number of small culture shocks that are reasonably striking. Unfortunately, Finney's romantic vision of the past is so often selective that it loses its credibility. His rose-tinted nostalgic vision of past New Yorks really grates after a while.

It goes without saying that his protagonist is a healthy white male: One suspects that Si Morley's enchantment with long-gone New York wouldn't last as long had he been part of any oppressed minority, or had he found himself in need of medical treatment. The past may be an interesting place to visit, but one would definitely want to avoid living there. Alas, that's exactly what Morley comes to prefer at the end of Time and Again, taking the opportunity to destroy the government's time-travel project after some unconvincing moustache-twirling from the book's antagonists.

But don't worry: Time appears to be as resilient as the author's thirst for sequel dollars, and so From Time to Time begins with an intriguing coda in which time anomalies are studied. This notion of a “correct” time-line isn't terribly convincing, but at least it's some real SF content. But as Si starts travelling again, as is the case, from time to time, he discovers the unremarkable elasticity of time and finds himself unable to change the past, or the future. As an SF concept, it's not terribly original (nor carefully explored), but it's better than nothing at all.

On the other hand, the lengthy digressions are maybe even more obvious in the sequel, as Finney stops the action for a chapter and takes us to vaudreville, or flying around 1912 New York. Again: history buffs will be taken. Others will skip ahead.

Reading Time After Time, it occurs by contrast that the vast majority of written SF often treats time-travel as an instrument for change, as a way to explore other ideas. Here, time-travel is merely a device to blanket oneself in comfortable nostalgia, a quick way to describe historical details to modern readers. Should you find yourself obliged to explain why Finney's two books aren't science-fiction despite featuring time-travel, begin with this difference in intention.

Obviously, this book -like its prequel- isn't written for the SF audience. The cheap candy-coated nostalgic sentimentality, the eye-rolling time-travel mechanism and the lack of willingness to engage in serious speculation makes it a failure as a genre novel. Given the book's continued longevity in print, mainstream readers obviously had a different reaction.

 

Venus,
Ben Bova

Tor, 2000, 382 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-87216-X

Like the true professional that he is, Bova delivers another entirely ordinary novel with Venus, the result being good enough to make us think that this is entirely acceptable.

Bova, of course, is one of the Grand Old Men of hard Science Fiction. A scientist and engineer, his career in the genre dates back to the late sixties and his bibliography is, by now, as long as some people's entire libraries. Looking through the titles, one finds a good number of solid works, but not one single classic. There's a good reason why.

While Bova can occasionally be funny (Cyberbooks) or meddle in alternate history (Triumph), most of his output is nuts-and-bolts hard-SF with plenty of details and a fascination for the future history of the Solar System. His career is even long enough that his first future history (The “Kinsman” saga) was obsoleted by the end of the Cold War, requiring a new one loosely inaugurated by 1992's Mars. This second series, the “Grand Tour,” is nothing less than an attempt to write a future history of the Solar System, one book and one astronomical feature at a time. As of late 2005, he's up to fifteen books; more are promised.

Despite having been one of the first “Grand Tour” books written, Venus is, in internal chronology, supposed to be one of the last. It doesn't matter much, of course: The story stands well alone and the background information is of the classical future variety: If you're a faithful SF reader, it doesn't take much effort to assume the standard “mine the asteroids, colonize Moon+Mars” stuff.

But Venus isn't your usual kettle of cold fish. Easily one of the most inhospitable places in the Solar System, Venus is almost deliberately hostile to human life. Not only is it devoid of life-bearing features like most of the solar system, but it's also hot enough to melt lead, with an acidic atmosphere that's hungry for man-made material. The usual space-going technologies won't be enough for whoever is bold enough to explore the second planet.

As the novel begins, Venus has already made one victim: Alex Humphries, brother of our protagonist Van and son of Martin, one of the solar system's richest individual. Our protagonist isn't the type of man heroes are made of: sickly, superficial and reluctant to face danger, Van is rapidly forced to made a bold gesture when his allowance is cut off and he's manipulated in retrieving the remains of his long-lost brother. A simple objective with complicated prerequisites, including a vessel capable of diving deep inside Venus' atmosphere. But he's not alone in looking for the prize: His father's worst enemy is also heading for Venus...

As a story, Venus is straight-up classical hard-SF. Define a problem, put the protagonist in danger, reduce the size of their survival box and provide plenty of technical details. There are twists and turns, but nothing terribly surprising. (Even the surprises are seen well in advance: One particular plot twist is shouted nearly a hundred pages before: only the dullest readers will fail to perceive the implications of a successful blood transfusion.)

If I'm being flippant, there's good reason to: You can almost imagine a reader of fine literature grabbing ahold of Venus and singlebookedly confirming his or her worst predictions about genre SF: shoddy characters, by-the-number plotting, featureless prose and a dramatic arc designed to end on a happy note. Whoever is interested in state-of-the-art SF won't find it here: This is comfort food for fans of engineering fiction, with nary an unsettling moment.

But that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. Despite the book's flaws, I was surprised to feel swept along for the ride in the best tradition of classical SF. Venus won't make a splash in the memory pool of genre fiction (five years after publication, it's possible to be definitive about such a statement), but it's adequate reading for fans of the sub-genre. We all need good mid-list books now and then, if only to keep the careful illusion that there is indeed a “genre” out there from which the best books can distinguish themselves. Venus is part of the solid whole of SF, exactly -indeed- the kind of work to confirm whatever prejudices one may have about Science Fiction.

If nothing else, it doesn't take a long time to read.

 

Wish you were here, Nick Webb

Headline, 2003, 370 pages C$24.95 tp, ISBN 0-7553-1166-3

Hitchhiker, M.J. Simpson

Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, 393 pages, C$24.95 tp, ISBN 0-340-82766-1

Douglas Adams, author of the mega-selling Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, died in early 2001. As the publishing industry turns, the arrival of at least one posthumous biography could be expected by 2003. The surprise was that there would be two of them: An official biography written by one of his editors (Nick Webb's Wish You Were Here) and another, unofficial one, written by the ex-president of his fan club. (M.J. Simpson's Hitchhiker) As a critic, the temptation was irresistible to re-read the two book in light of the HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY video release, with a two-year buffer to check the reception of both books.

Unusually enough, even a casual Internet search shows that the appearance of two biographies within months of each other wasn't completely unexpected by the authors. They apparently decided, early on, to focus on different aspects of Adams' life: Webb on Adams' life and Simpson on Adams' work. As you can expect, this doesn't completely remove all duplication, but it means that you can read both books and find something of value in each.

If there's one recommendation to make before delving too deep in either biography, it's that Douglas' work is an essential prerequisite. Don't assume you'll be fine because you've read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ten years ago: Douglas only published nine books, and given his fabled tendency to procrastinate, every one of them is important. The “Dirk Gently” duology is important. The Meaning of Liff is important. Last Chance to See is very important. Heck, The Salmon of Doubt is especially important given the wealth of background material information contained therein. Additionally, you may want to beg, steal or borrow a copy of Neil Gaiman's Don't Panic! (as revised by Simpson) before attempting Simpson's book, as he makes clear in his introduction that he tried to avoid duplicating anecdotes. (Granted, you should also read Douglas' work on its own merit, but I'm trying to be helpful, here.)

Douglas was a complex individual, brilliant and quirky, sometimes genius-level and sometime of an astonishing naiveté. Both biographies do a good job at trying to illustrate what was Douglas' essence and of the two, Wish You Were Here comes perhaps closest, informed as it was by all-access interviews with Douglas' friends and family. Simpson's Hitchhiker, on the other hand, takes a decidedly more sceptical stance toward Douglas' stories given his gift for self-aggrandizement. The whole “I first imagined a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck” story, for instance, is debunked late in Hitchhiker, after several other stories (including the Forbidden Planet “so many people mobbed the store I nearly didn't make it to the signing” story.) are similarly questioned. As per the Webb-Simpson agreement, Hitchhiker is also more satisfying from a critical viewpoint, as Simpson spends more time covering the strengths and weaknesses of Douglas's work, as well as why it's so appealing to so many people.

Writing-wise, Webb sometime makes a valiant attempt at writing a book in the style of Douglas, and if it doesn't always succeeds (some diversions, such as the take-off on left-handedness, are more distracting that helpful), it makes for a more interesting reading experience than Simpson's workmanlike prose. On the other hand, Wish You Were Here sometimes offer too much information, while Hitchhiker is more to the point.

Ultimately, I find myself unwilling to recommend either book at the exclusion of another. As with most people, Douglas Adams is too complex for a single interpretation. While Webb and Simpson don't offer very different views, there are facets covered in one work that aren't covered in the other. Read both in close succession (preferably right after The Salmon of Doubt, which could be called Douglas' own fragmented autobiography) and you'll get the idea.

 

The Men Who Stare at Goats,
Jon Ronson

Simon & Schuster, 2004, 257 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-7432-4192-4

It's a comforting fiction to think that the world is rational. That people take decisions in their own best interest, that the truth will shine, that rationality ultimately prevails. The last few years have certainly been a shock in this matter, as the American government keeps making one stupid mistake after another (with often-fatal results), as so-called “intelligent design” finds popular favour, as evidence of global warming is casually dismissed by oil profiteers and blind followers.

If that's not depressing enough, wait until you read Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats, a book describing, in its own subtitle, “what happened when a small group of men –highly placed within the United States military, the government, and the intelligence services- began believing in very strange things.”

It starts early in the “War on Terror” as Uri Geller tells Ronson that he's been reactivated by elements of the US government. You won't believe where it ends.

As Ronson starts to unravel the Geller/government link, he begins to hear very strange rumours. A psychic unit deep in the US Army. A “goat lab” where soldiers would stare at goats in the hope of remotely stopping their heartbeat. Plans for a US Army “First Earth Battalion” applying new-age concepts to warfare. A covert war for psychic warriors waged between Al Quaeda and the US government.

Then Ronson starts meeting the people who believe in those things.

Albert Stubblebine, for instance, a general who tried to walk through walls (bruising his nose) and led the US Army's secret psychic team. (A team so secret it didn't even have a budget for coffee, and whose lack of success eventually led them to believe they were an expendable front for another even more secret team.) Jim Channon, whose new-age “First Earth Battalion” ideas later led to some curious real-world applications. Guy Savelli, the man who arguably stared a goat to death. Pete Brusso, capable of inflicting extraordinary pain with an ordinary-looking plastic object.

In Ronson's sweetly disbelieving style, this trail of absurd research is deeply amusing and often laugh-out-loud hilarious. But the laughs taper off as we come to realize the uncritical momentum of a government gone out of control in the drive to wage “war on terror”. “You cannot afford to miss something.” argues Stubblebine while justifying his experiments, and while it's hard to counter this type of logic, it doesn't do much to calm down qualms that nuts can be found everywhere, including places of considerable power.

What's worse is Ronson's growing suspicion that some of the “crazy” stuff is deliberate misdirection. Every newscaster became a comedian when reporting that American interrogators were blaring the Barney song to Iraqi prisoners in effort to break them down. Barney and torture: a hilarious combination! But the gut-smile effect of the purple dinosaur quickly takes the sting away from, yes, state-sponsored psychological torture techniques. What if, suggests Ronson, the Abu Ghraib pictures were a completely deliberate way to scare the wits out of Arab audiences already convinced of American decadence? What if ridicule obscured the truth, made it inconsequential?

Despite the laughs and the easy writing style (you can read this book in ninety minutes, easy), The Men Who Stare At Goats is deeply disturbing. It paints the picture of a “war on terror” that justifies just about everything, even things that would be considered insane. While hardly a perfect book (The lack of an index betrays the difficulty in using the book as reference), it's certainly unique and memorable. Despite the obvious difficulties in confirming some of Ronson's reporting (a number of conversations are of the “I will deny everything” category, and whole sections are mere informed speculation from Ronson's part), what can be confirmed is unsettling enough.

The world is not rational. But what's even scarier is that it may be very rational in being irrational.

 

Scatterbrain,
Larry Niven

Tor, 2003, 317 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30137-7

It's impossible, nowadays, to discuss Larry Niven's career without mentioning something about how he's just not as good as he used to be. That would be a gentle use of an understatement, mind you: From being one of Science Fiction's essential authors during the late sixties and early seventies, Niven has declined to a point where most SF critics would be hard-pressed to even like his latest output. 1980 seemed to mark the decline point in his solo work: His collaborations started sucking much later, but it's been years since anyone has been impressed by something with “Larry Niven” on the cover. Scatterbrain is unlikely to change anyone's mind. If nothing else, it's likely to evoke weak puns on being a scatter-shot collection.

Your guess is as good as mine in trying to guess why the Larry Niven of 1965-1975, once so vital and central to the genre, would degenerate in the sort of parody exhibited in latter work. I have among my prized possessions a dedicated copy of N-Space, the 1990 anthology bringing together essential pieces from Niven's early career. This was followed by 1991's Playgrounds of the Mind, a weaker but still interesting collection. Scatterbrain is meant to be a third volume in this best-of anthology series, but the only thing its serves to do is highlight how little there is to keep in Niven's last decade of work.

There are, to be fair, a number of good bits. A piece on “Autograph Etiquette” provides hard-earned advice to both readers and writers, advice which I intend on following to the letter. His “Ice and Mirrors” collaboration with Brenda Cooper is a decent story, though one notes from the email correspondence that follows that Cooper seems to have done most of the work. “The Woman in Del Rey Crater” isn't bad either, but it was first published in Niven's own 1995 Flatlander theme anthology, where it took a back seat to Niven's earlier work about “Gil the ARM”.

Even Niven's non-fiction, once so witty and accessible, is noticeably worse this time around. Scatterbrain contains a number of pieces on space exploration, high technology, SF fandom and Niven's other interests, but don't blame me if you have a hard time getting through them: Nearly all of them exhibit a tendency to fly away in incomprehensible directions, tripping readers through incoherent content and rambling development. They certainly make an impression: that of a writer who doesn't know what to do next.

Novel excerpts (from Destiny's Road and the awful Ringworld Throne) also serve to highlight that Niven hasn't done much better in writing novel these past few years either. The short stories are all similarly uninspiring, the worst of them recycling once-vibrant Niven creations (like the Draco Tavern and Beowulf Shaeffer) in insipid outings. Reading Scatterbrain is an experience best avoided by whoever still has a shred of confidence in Niven's greatness: it just serves to suggest that his decline is irreversible. Everything in this volume is an awful reminder that Niven is simply nowhere as good as he used to be.

What's more, you almost get the sense that Niven and his editors know it. Why else include, in a slim “best of” volume, pages of email correspondence between Niven and his collaborators? Why waste our time with what are essentially scraps and shopping lists culled from Niven's recycling bin?

No doubt about it: Scatterbrain is pure frustration in hardcover format. It's a book that scarcely deserves to be placed next to Playground of the Mind, let alone N-Space. And that should tell you all about Niven's current status as a Science Fiction writer. Sure, if someone has earned the right to coast on an established reputation, it's the early Niven. But why does it have to be such a painful spectacle for the rest of us?

 

Tomahawk,
David Poyer

St. Martin's Press, 1998, 371 pages, C$33.99 hc, ISBN 0-312-17975-8

I remember reading David Poyer's The Gulf a long time ago. I also remember not caring too much for it: not enough action, ambiguous ending, bad plotting and useless subplots. That certainly explains why it took me so long to read another of Poyer's books. This one is better than The Gulf. Not by much, but it's better.

Tomahawk is a novel in the same “modern Navy” series than The Gulf which stars career Navy protagonist Dan Lenson. As this novel begins, sometime during the late eighties, Lenson is recalled to Washington to work on the development of the Tomahawk missile. Confronting Lenson is a career that's not going anywhere, growing doubts about the morality of military force and the last tatters of a painful divorce. As he falls for a peace activist and indications of a spy start swirling around the office, what's Lenson to do? Quit his career or keep working in something with which he doesn't agree?

I certainly wasn't expecting much from Tomahawk. Late eighties setting? Pulse-pounding procurement action? Musings on the nature of force? Give me a break: I read military fiction for other reasons. Heck, I read military techno-thriller for fun. Give me something interesting.

Even the beginning of the novel doesn't inspire confidence, showing a Lenson sinking deeper in self-doubts, stuck in a project attacked from all sides. You can throw as many spies, peace activists and journalists as you want in the mix, there aren't too many ways of making a weapon development process sound sexy. (Although Stephen Coonts came damn close in The Minotaur)

It's almost amusing to see Poyer try everything he can think about in order to juice up his inner-beltway storyline. Sometimes, it works: One of the book's standout sequence show our protagonist surviving a terrible Canadian snowstorm. Another highlight comes later in the book as an espionage sting goes spectacularly wrong. But Poyer isn't perfect, and so other attempts to inject artificial interest in the material don't fare as well. A random death comes as a convenient shock (it's later revealed not to be so random, but still convenient), but the vigilante reaction of the protagonist comes as a dumb idea made even dumber by a secondary character's lack of self-preservation sense. Being a military fiction writer isn't easy when readers expect you to shoot, blow or trash something every hundred pages, and Poyer copes only moderately well with the challenge.

Most of Tomahawk isn't nearly so interesting one way or another. The stale atmosphere of the late eighties isn't overpowering, but it's certainly there. Lenson goes to meetings, briefs people, follows night classes, goes to parties, learns how Washington works, deals with his growing doubts and generally experience a mid-life crisis for the benefit of the book's readers. Yet the novel dares to be something more, something closer to a character study. It is simultaneously more and less ambitious than other military thrillers, almost taking the book in mainstream fiction territory at times.

The surprise is that even with its low-octane content and misguided high-energy spikes, Tomahawk ends up deserving some attention. The various controversies surrounding the testing of cruise missiles in Canada has long since abated (it's hard to argue with a completed, successful project), but Poyer brings them back in the forefront, along with the palpable sense of a genuinely new revolution in weapon-making. We've had fifteen years to get used to the idea that an American president can point at any point on the map and say “destroy this” without endangering any human life in the process, but that is a very new development in warfare, and this book shows a slice of this revolution.

I found myself absorbed in Lenson's adventures and the way Poyer describes the Washington power game almost despite my most sarcastic intentions, regardless of the sometime sketchy plausibility of the book's developments. Military fiction may be about people shooting at each other, but there's a decision-making component in military strategy that ought to be explored more often like Poyer does. Don't be fooled: Tomahawk won't make me rush to grab every single Poyer book in existence. On the other hand, I just became far less averse to the though of picking some of them up at the next second-hand book sale.

 

Foley is Good,
Mick Foley

Harper Torch, 2001, 592 pages, C$10.99 pb, ISBN 0-06-103241-7

I'm not a wrestling fan. And yet, thanks to the pervasive turn-of-the-century pop-culture complex, it's nearly impossible to avoid even a cursory knowledge of sport-entertainment superstars. Vince McMahon? The Rock? Chyna? Yup. I've never seen a single wrestling match, but I've read Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson's autobiography, seen Chyna on “Third Rock From the Sun” and enjoyed the BEYOND THE MAT documentary. Knowledge of the small wrestling pocket universe seems to be spreading by osmosis, without any conscious effort from my part.

I even think that Barry W. Blaustein is right in BEYOND THE MAT when he says that wrestling is real. Yes, the outcome of matches is fixed. But so are movie fights, and that doesn't take away anything from the talents of stunt people. What's more, stunt people aren't usually asked to create characters, and do live fights in character every second evening for weeks at a time. Injuries are real, and so is the talent of the performers, however unusual that talent may seem to you.

So that's how you could find me in September 2005, reading the second autobiography of a wrestler. In one of those “oh, what the heck” second-hand book purchases gone horribly amusing, the book's time in my to-be-read pile was up.

And you know what? I really enjoyed it. Mick Foley's writing skills may or may not be artificially enhanced by a team of copy-editors, but his raw honesty is real. A follow-up to Have a Nice Day!, Foley is Good (a slight deformation on the “Foley is God” fan posters) tells the story of Foley's last few years in the wrestling world. (If “last” is a concept that applies in a universe where one can have a dozen retirement matches.) At a hefty 592 pages, this book aims to tell all and then tell a little bit more. This isn't just an autobiography, but also an answer to media critics decrying wrestling. In enjoyable but overlong segments, Foley takes some pleasure in disproving conservative groups' charges against wrestling (hard task, that...) and doesn't miss an opportunity to point the finger at other sports in the violence department. While his points are often over-articulated (don't be surprised if you start flipping the pages after muttering “enough is enough”), it makes for an interesting position paper. Foley, of course, has been through the media wringer a few times, and he doesn't shy away from claiming that “the real world is faker than wrestling”.

You may or may not want to take that last affirmation with a grain of salt, but what's far less disputable is Mick Foley's joy in being, well, Mick Foley. In spending time with his family, indulging in theme-park rides, talking movies and ragging on his usual gallery of comedy targets. BEYOND THE MAT showed him as a reasonable family guy doing an unusual performance job. This book does little to dispel this impression, crammed as it is with scenes from Foley's home life. It's intended to be very likable, and it is.

What's not as likable, but perhaps more honest, is the description of how wrestlers are just ordinary schmoes with regular jobs. Travelling from hotel to hotel for weeks, away from family, being forced to deal with constant pain and injuries –wow, no thanks. To add fiscal insult to real injury, the wrestlers themselves aren't particularly well-paid, certainly not at the level their fame would suggest. At some point, Foley shrugs off soft-drug consumption by saying essentially –they're bruised, they're alone and they're not even home: what do you want them to do? Ouch.

Non-wrestling fans may feel a lot of this material flying well over their head. The lingo is specialized, the feuds are layered and the basic assumptions are... unusual. Compounding the difficulty is that Foley is Good is a sequel to another book. And yet, despite the lack of background knowledge, this is a very accessible autobiography. Better yet, it's impossible to stop reading once you're into it: Foley's chatty style is enough to make you want to read just one chapter before calling it a day. At the end of the book, I'm still not much of a wrestling fan... but darn if I don't find the whole circus a lot more interesting.