Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Kingdom of Fear, Hunter S. Thompson

    Kingdom of Fear, Hunter S. Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 2003, 354 pages, C$24.00 tp, ISBN 0-684-87324-9

    Given the apocalyptic streak running through Hunter S. Thompson’s life-long work (after all, even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a foreboding meditation on the gone-away sixties), it makes perfect sense that he would have been reinvigorated by the cataclysmic tone of the post-2001 era.  So it is that Kingdom of Fear shows him fully settled in his cranky-sage-from-the-Colorado-mountains role, hurtling invectives at everyone and muttering darkly about the future of the republic.  It doesn’t necessarily make the book any more vital than any of his post-1980 work, but it certainly makes him a bit more interesting to read.

    Not that this is always the case.  True to his tendency to repeat his self-aggrandizing mythology, Hunter spends an awful lot of time repeating known stories.  Kingdom of Fear is a collage of previously-published pieces, reprinted material about Thompson and a fair chunk of original material.  But even the original material tends to run in circles: We get to hear, again, about his experiences running for Sheriff, or his 1990 arrest.  He goes over his own biography at length, sometime illuminating periods of relative silence, but just as often rehashing stories read elsewhere.  His writing tics also take on, more than ever, the appearance of self-indulgence in-between gratuitous substitution of ampersands in place of the common “and”.  Also typical of Thompson’s overall oeuvre is the incoherence of the book, which flits from theme to theme without much use for signposts.

    At other times, disappointments are rife.  Kingdom of Fear is the only book, to my knowledge, in which Thompson writes more than briefly about his experience in San Francisco at the end of the eighties (working as a figurehead “night manager” at a strip club) or his travels to Cuba and Grenada.  But even then, we don’t get much more than a few pages: The Caribbean trips are heavily fictionalized, while most of the San Francisco material seems to have been kept in the still-unpublished, perhaps never-written The Night Manager/Polo is my Life.

    Other bits fare better.  Thompson saw early on the consequences of the national panic that gripped his country in the wake of 9/11, and his savage denunciations of the Bush administration ended up being more accurate than anyone was willing to admit in 2003.  For him, the whole War on Terror era feels familiar; a return to the worst days of the sixties, perhaps even to 1964 Chicago where he, as a reporter, was beaten by police.  Nixon being dead, Thompson found no problems in saying that Bush was worse than Nixon.  As usual, Thompson’s style may be repetitive, but it still carries a certain power at shorter lengths.

    But there are also a few gems here and there, finally reprinted in book form.  The best is almost certainly a 1992 short story called “Fear and Loathing in Elko”, a dark piece mixing violent prose with caricatures of popular figures (including a “Judge” with an uncanny resemblance to Clarence Thomas) to produce a terrific short story.  (So terrific, unfortunately, that a good chunk of its middle third was published as “Death of a Poet” in the tiny Screwjack anthology.)  To give you an idea, it starts with a narrator running over a herd of sheep in the middle of a highway and then goes on to more stomach-churning material.  Late in the book, “Fear and Loathing at the Taco Stand” fictionalizes his Hollywood experience and the way he met his second wife.

    Having struggled against a fat and happy country in the eighties and nineties, Thompson seems to regain some of his relevance in times of crisis.  Kingdom of Fear won’t do much to quieten critics who maintain that Thompson’s golden age was a bubble around 1972: For every good page, there seems to be ten filled with redundant filler or empty outrage.  But this volume, published two years before Thompson’s suicide, also shows that he took to bad times as it was his natural environment: it comes as a validation of his predictions and his belief that most Americans were part of “the new dumb”.  For someone who kept writing “When the Going Gets Weird, the Weird Turn Pro”, the post-9/11 era was practically a homecoming.  It’s not hard to see how he would consider those years to be the final proof of his “death of the American dream” thesis.  Sadly, this would prove to be nearly the end of the road for him: His next book, Hey Rube, would prove to be his last, and consist of collected columns about sports and politics.

  • 2012 (2009)

    2012 (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, November 2009) It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Roland Emmerich’s 2012 tries to ape and one-up much of the disaster-movie genre.  Where else can you find a 10.5 earthquake, a super-volcano and a mega-tsunami in the same movie?  As such, it demands to be considered according to the particular standards of the disaster movie genre, and that’s indeed where it finds most of its qualities.  The L.A. earthquake sequence is a piece of deliriously over-the-top action movie-making (I never loved 2012 more than when the protagonists’ plane had to dodge a falling subway train), the Yellowstone volcano sequence holds its own and those who haven’t seen an aircraft carrier smash the White House now have something more to live for.  The problem, unfortunately, is that those sequences are front-loaded in the first two-third of the film, leaving much smaller set-pieces for the end.  This, in turn places far more emphasis on the characters, dialogue and plot points, none of whom are a known strength of either the genre or 2012 itself. Sure, the cast of characters is either pretty (Thandie Newton!  Amanda Peet!), competent (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Glover) or entertaining (John Cusack, Oliver Platt).  Of course, we want to see them live through it all.  But as a too-late consideration of ethical issues bumps against less-impressive sequences and significant lulls (including a 15-minutes-long prologue), it becomes easier to see that this 158 minutes film is at least 45 minutes too long and suffering from a limp third act.  The defective nature of the roller-coaster also makes it less easy to tolerate the hideous conclusions, screaming contrivances and somewhat distasteful ethics of the screenplay.  While the clean and sweeping cinematography (interestingly replaced by a hand-held video-quality interlude during one of the film’s turning points) shows that 2012’s production budget is entirely visible on-screen and will eventually make this a worthwhile Blu-Ray demo disk, there isn’t much here to respect or even like.  At least special-effects fans will be able to play some destruction sequences over and over again.

  • The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein

    The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Vintage, 2008 reprint of 2007 original, 662 pages, C$22.00 tp, ISBN 978-0-676-97801-8

    Some books want to make you laugh, and others want to make you think.  But Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine really wants to outrage you.  It is, after all, about how some very clever people have figured out how to take advantage of human suffering for profit.  It’s about how a class of entrepreneurs is deliberately taking advantage of crises to further their own agenda at the expense of the common good.  It about geopolitical crises can come to be used like forms of torture.  It’s about a more complete history of the past 35 years of geopolitical changes, one that adds an economic dimension to the various revolutions and catastrophes.  It makes Klein’s previous No Logo (which I finally read in a hurry after finishing this book) look like a checklist of benign corporate shenanigans.

    The irony is that I left The Shock Doctrine alongside No Logo for years on my shelves, confident that I knew what it was about.  Disaster capitalism?  How businesses move in devastated zones to make money?  Tell me something new, Klein.  But it turns out that I didn’t fully understand the thesis of the book, because what Klein is after is really a history of the past 35 years in global politics, as influenced by graduates of the University of Chicago School of Economics.

    If you don’t know about Chicago School Economics and their high guru Milton Friedman, you have a lot of catching up to do on free-market theory concepts.  But what Klein does is connect the dots until we’re looking at 35 years of intervention by Friedman-inspired “Chicago Boys” whenever there’s a traumatic political upheaval in the world.  The list of “shock doctrine” sites is long and terrible, going from Chile to Iraq but hitting destinations such as Bolivia, South Africa and Russia along the way.  Klein’s main thesis is that since voting populations does not like, want or accept right-wing economic policies, it’s best to put them in place during times of crises or panic when everyone is too terrified to protest.  If it sounds familiar, well, it should: As Klein suggests, the reforms implemented in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina were simply the homecoming party of techniques successfully field-tested elsewhere in the world.

    The worst thing is that it doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to support her claims: simply a list of people who think along the same lines, and who feel that it’s a good thing to send public dollars into private pockets.  Greed is a powerful thing, and it makes for excellent friends if ever some of the greedy get in positions of influence.  It all makes up for infuriating reading: by the time Klein ran down the list of links between the Bush administration and the oil industry, I was openly wondering how much more of this I could take before I had to stop reading the book and take a breath.

    For intellectual honesty’s sake, I should probably note that there are a few annoying things about The Shock Doctrine.  The first is a feature of every left-leaning attempt to present another version of history (I’m looking at you, Howard Zinn): They tend to presume that you already know the conventional version of history.  If not, quite a few important details are left off, and trying to fit them in the narrative can take some research.  Second; Klein’s comparisons between economic shock therapy and psychiatric electroshocks is provocative and memorable, but it does sensationalize the issue and leaves it open to criticism of irrelevance.  Finally; it’s a big, big subject and the book does take a number of shortcuts.  This being said, I’m not going to insist on any of those issues as problems: Frankly, I had far too much fun reading a selection of one-star reviews of the book on Amazon (many of them personally offended than anyone would say something against Friedman; others simply reading off the same right-wing talking points) to give any comfort to those who are predisposed to hate the book.

    Naaah; I’m going to assume my own biases and tell you that The Shock Doctrine is an important work.  It suggests a context for many seemingly disparate yet oddly congruent policies.  It shows how deeply anti-popular policies are now rooted in the US and, by influence, global policies.  It doesn’t offer a lot of hope, although the best it can do (“shock wears off”) is still inspiring.  But it also blows in the wind of the past decade, one that has seen obvious displays of policies that, until now, had been kept far away or couched in reassuring rhetoric.  The Shock Doctrine strips bare those excuses and, in doing so, give a bit of its own shock therapy to readers.  Read the book, blow a fuse, have all the outrage you want, then come back and do something about it.

  • Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain

    Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Perennial, updated 2007 edition of 2000 original, 334 pages, $15.95 tp, ISBN 978-0-06-089922-6

    In some ways, a great book is like great food: You can try to break it down to its individual components, but the final result will always be measured by how you sit back and say “Wow, that was good.”

    But in most other ways, great food really isn’t like a great book at all, and that’s where Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential comes in.  Riding high on America’s renewed passion for all things foodish, chef Bourdain’s memoir was published in 2000 to instant acclaim, in part because it offers a refreshingly frank look at what happens in the kitchen of average restaurants.  While Bourdain can (and does, early on) romanticizes the power of great food, much of Kitchen Confidential concerns his own rocky path through the New York restaurant scene, and the hot, frantic, unglamorous reality of a restaurant kitchen when dinnertime starts, patrons rush in and the pressure builds.

    Unlike other celebrity chefs, Bourdain was never renowned as a flashy or particularly meritorious cook: The chronicles of his earliest days includes one particular achievement (graduating from CIA, which should be understood not as the spy agency, but as the “Culinary Institute of America”, a New York school for chefs) and several less-admirable traits: Heavy drug use, fast-burn living, and a generally aimless career path.  His description of what happens in failing restaurants is informed by several personal experiences.  But his flaws are not exceptional in an environment where this type of behaviour is considered normal: It takes a special kind of personality to work in a professional kitchen, and Bourdain’s description of what happens there is one of the book’s most vivid qualities.

    One of the book’s standout chapters, “A day in the life”, chronicles a typical workday for Bourdain, who was then kitchen manager at a middle-class New York restaurant.  It’s a chaotically choreographed ballet of ordering, inventory management, stocking, staffing challenges and, obviously, quite a bit of cooking.  One of Kitchen Confidential’s particular themes is to highlight the distinction between chef and cook: Once the chef (sometimes famous) has determined what the restaurant offers, it’s up to the line cooks to deliver the food to the customers, and that doesn’t take creativity and bonhomie as much as it asks for reliability, consistency and the ability to perform the job in a distraction-rich environment while resisting the pressures to deliver substandard results in the name of efficiency, time, cost or convenience.  Bourdain takes a particular pride in his regular crew of immigrant workers, lauding their work ethics in comparison to born-and-raised-Americans.

    Another of Kitchen Confidential’s big success is in the candid depiction of the atmosphere of a professional kitchen: a multicultural group united by a powerful under-the-fire camaraderie, characterized by vicious put-downs meant to test a comrade’s grace under pressure more than to actually insult the recipient.  Bourdain’s depiction of kitchen language is never less than R-rated, which is part of its authenticity.  But it’s Bourdain’s various portraits of the people he has worked with that round out the look at the very different sub-culture in which he belongs.  Bourdain’s fiction credentials (he had two novels published before Kitchen Confidential) serve him well in characterizing the essential details that spice up his narrative.

    The result is not just a great book, but the kind of gripping narrative that makes one sorry for short commutes and early sleep times.  It’s a tough book to abandon in mid-read, and even non-foodies won’t necessarily be put off by the wealth of culinary knowledge assumed by Bourdain.  At a time where there is a lot of material on the shelves about every single conceivable aspect of food, Kitchen Confidential still holds up a decade later.  This being said, do try to get your hands on the updated edition, which describes some of what happened to Bourdain and his acquaintances since then (he’s become a world-trotting celebrity food commentator with his own TV show) and reports on aspects of the industry since Kitchen Confidential’s original publication.  Fortunately, write Bourdain, things have generally improved: standards are higher, food is more respected, and chefs earn more respect.  Of course, this doesn’t change why you should avoid buffets, fish on Monday or well-done steak… although, as Bourdain suggests, you only live once.  Try a bit of everything.

    [February 2010: Bourdain’s follow-up, A Cook’s Tour, is a different book, although it is clearly prefigured by the closing Japan-based chapters of Kitchen Confidential: As a follow-up, Bourdain decides to live a life of adventure and go eat strange meals in even-stranger places. Alcohol, drugs, adventure and exotic food follow. The book led to a TV series, but it also acts as a commentary to the TV series. It’s all good fun in the tradition of hard-partying travelogues, although people looking for more kitchen-based material won’t find it here.]

  • The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

    The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, November 2009) As someone who read and enjoyed Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book shortly after its initial publication, I’m perhaps a tougher audience for a film “inspired by” The Men Who Stare at Goats.  It’s certainly not easy to adapt: an exploration of the often-strange ideas (including psi powers) that the US Army investigated, Ronson’s work straddles a thin line between goofiness and weightier moments.  To its credit, the film does manage to do justice to a number of moments and ideas: the militarization of peaceful ideals, the way “non-lethal” torture can be dismissed as a joke, the twisted logic that leads to paranormal research, and so on…  Even the book’s most disturbing moment (“…it almost looks as if he’s laughing”) gets a nod.  (There’s also one spectacularly unfunny moment caused by the sheer improbable juxtaposition of the film’s release a day after the worst home-base shootout in US military history.) The film’s structure also manages to weave a coherent history taking place over three decades (at one time nestling a flashback within a flashback) and almost act as an imagined sequel to Ronson’s book, which often stops with characters being “reactivated” for mysterious purposes.  Various odd scenes and progressive concepts also make The Men Who State at Goats richer in ideas than most satirical comedies: It ranks with The Hunting Party and Lord of War as a member of the growing geo-sardonic genre.  But what’s less impressive is the way a very traditional buddy-movie structure (with a heavy dash of “mid-life crisis” and “kids playing tricks on bumbling authority”) has been imposed on the material, leading the film to less and less believable moments.  Ewan McGregor and George Clooney do great things with their roles (much of the Jedi jokes are much funnier when spoken by “Obi-Wan” McGregor, and Clooney has no perceptible shame in an often-unglamorous role) but the film itself goes from the fascinating to the cliché at high speed, and the result feels like a let-down, especially during the second half.  But such are most adaptations, of course.

  • The Book of the Dead, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    The Book of the Dead, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Vision, 2007 mass-market reprint of 2006 original, 619 pages, C$9.50 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-446-61850-2

    After matching wits with his evil-mastermind brother in Brimstone and Dance of Death, Aloysius Pendergast once again has to rise to the occasion in The Book of the Dead, final tome in the so-called “Diogenes” trilogy.  Circumstances looks promisingly hopeless at the start of the book: Pendergast is locked up in a maximum-security prison for murders his brother has meticulously blamed on him, while Diogenes is running free, planning his next horrific crime, interfering with activities of a non-profit institution and seducing Pendergast’s ward.  (He’s probably drinking from the milk carton as well, but Preston & Child have bigger crimes to describe.)

    Fans of Preston & Child’s work will be unsurprised and amused to find out that as The Book of the Dead begins, the much-abused New York Natural History Museum is once again trying to restore its tattered reputation by… staging the exhibition of a cursed Egyptian tomb deep in its basement.  That a mysterious benefactor seems eager to finance this exhibit and only this exhibit alone doesn’t seem to trouble them.  After all, it’s a foolproof plan: What has ever gone wrong with this museum’s special exhibits so far?

    The stage being set for a massive bloodbath, Preston & Child now return to Pendergast and his friends as they try to conceive of a plan good enough to rescue the FBI agent out of a high-security prison, even despite the constant interference of another FBI agent with a huge grudge against the series’ protagonist.  Elli Gunn’s EES is involved, as is a temporarily-suspended Vincent D’Agosta.  The rest of the series’ extended cast of characters pretty much all make an appearance at one point or another, making this volume seems even more familiar.

    And, like clockwork, the expected happens: Pendergast escapes, Diogenes’ plan is revealed, there’s big trouble at the Museum, and the Diogenes issue is settled.  Seen from a high altitude, The Book of the Dead is a bit dull and empty, especially compared to its immediate predecessor.  The museum-exposition crutch seems overly familiar, and the plot seems to unfold in a linear fashion.  It’s far too long at 619 pages: While the pleasure of reading the book remains constant, there are times where it doesn’t advance quickly enough, especially during the extended conclusion that drags out over 75 pages and at least one continent too far. (A change of scenery that seems increasingly forced given Preston & Child’s Italian obsession throughout the entire Diogenes trilogy.  Look, we know you vacation there often, okay?)

    The Book of the Dead (as generic a title as Preston & Child’s last few novels) also fails to impress as the third volume of a trilogy.  While Brimstone promised an apocalyptic fate for New York (if not the whole world), this seems to have been forgotten along the way.  The three books all lead from one to the other, but they fail to cohere in a satisfying whole.  Diogenes may or may not be gone (despite evidence to the contrary, never say never until the corpse has been double-tapped, beheaded, vaporized and even then watch out for the ghost) and it’s about time for Pendergast to go against someone else, but this concluding volume of the trilogy has an air of underachievement about it.

    But where Preston & Child continue to excel is in the construction of small thrilling sequences.  Even if The Book of the Dead is a lesser novel than Dance of Death, it’s got about as many good sequences and set-pieces: The revelation of what Diogenes did with the diamonds he stole in the previous book is inspired, as are the scenes following how Pendergast adapts to prison life.  The Book of the Dead, especially during its latter half, often indulges in pure melodramatic cheese when it goes deep into the Pendergast family secrets: The conclusion is partly driven by the old “scorned woman” plot device, and the final line goes back to over-the-top gothic twists.  Consider the next book nicely set up.

    It goes without saying that The Book of the Dead isn’t particularly accessible to newcomers (too many recurring characters acting out too many ongoing plot threads) but won’t lose any existing Preston & Child fans on their way to the next book.  Despite a few problems stemming primarily from the expectations left by Dance of Death, it’s still an A-list contemporary thriller showing why Preston & Child are the acknowledged master of that market segment.  On to Wheel of Death!

  • Julie & Julia (2009)

    Julie & Julia (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In-flight, November 2009) Nora Ephron’s films are generally amiable and unobjectionable, but after a short absence from the big-screen, it’s good to see her move slightly-away from romantic comedies to tackle a film about cooking, blogging and female empowerment.  The twin true stories of Julia Child (who, in the fifties, popularized French cuisine in America) and Julie Powell (who, nearly fifty years later, took on the project to cook her way through Child’s first book in a year and blog about the experience), Julie & Julia is perhaps most enjoyable as the journey of two foodies.  It’s practically impossible to sit through the film and not be shamed into becoming a better cook.  Food remains the film’s love interest even as various romantic subplots are weaved in the narrative.  The film’s biggest problem is that its two true stories don’t necessarily intersect with grace (although there are a few nice transitions) and that the conclusion feels a bit flat: There are no big dramatic finales built into the true events that inspired Julie & Julia, and some of the most intriguing elements of the story (such as Child’s lack of affection for Julie’s blog) are not necessarily explored.  More happily, it’s striking that the best depiction of a blogger so far in mainstream American cinema (what motivates them, the challenges they face, the thrills of being read) has been in a fluffy food romance.  Who would have thought?  Otherwise, there’s little to dislike in Julie & Julia: maybe a sense of material not being fully exploited, but the funny moments, another great performance by Meryl Streep and food-friendly atmosphere usually compensate for those.

  • Succession, Scott Westerfeld

    Succession, Scott Westerfeld

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    (Also known as The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds)
    SFBC, 2003, 530 pages, ??.?? hc, ISBN 0-7394-3801-8

    By now, Scott Westerfeld is best known as a massively successful author of Young Adult science-fiction.  His “Peeps” trilogy has earned him a large teen following, and most of his books since then have been aimed (by choice, with compelling arguments) to the younger set.  Given this, it’s easy to forget some of Westerfeld’s earlier works, especially those that were aimed at the adult market.  The last of those was the space-opera diptych The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds, known together as Succession.

    Part of why Succession continues to escape notice can be traced back to the Westerfeld’s publisher.  When Succession was first published, Tor felt market pressures to split the complete story into two volumes, severely harming the novel’s shot at awards and even readers’ attention.  It’s no secret that a split novel costs more to buy, but it’s also true that a split novel creates frustration: Here, The Risen Empire ends on a cliffhanger, while The Killing of Worlds makes little sense if you haven’t read the first volume.  (Amazingly, I see that Tor doesn’t seem to consider this a problem, since it’s currently re-publishing Succession in separate volumes.)  This makes the hard-to-find SFBC unified version the only good way to read the story –albeit not the perfect way, as their edition is marred by a sans-serif font choice and the SFBC’s usually unreliable binding.

    Kvetching about the publishing industry aside, the novel itself is worth some attention.  Fully embracing space-opera, Succession delivers a vacillating empire, courageous characters, strong battle sequences (including a bravura space battle that takes place over a quarter of the story), fully developed science-fiction aesthetics and personal stories with galactic implications.  Much of the setting doesn’t make sense except in the rigidly constrained frame of space-operas, but never mind the plausibility aspect: this is a novel that plays around with SF tropes to deliver a reading experience that readers versed in SF protocols will enjoy to the fullest.

    Much of the novel rests on two characters: Opposition politician Nara Oxham and military hero Laurent Zai.  Ironically enough, neither of them actually meet during the story aside from a few flashbacks: Zai is the point man of the Empire’s forces on a small backwater planet during an enemy attack, while Oxham has a privileged outlook on the political fallout of that attack.  Several characters surround them and tell their part of the story, from various men and women under Zai’s command to an enemy agent dropped behind the Empire’s lines.

    It’s a measure of Westerfeld’s contemporary genre-awareness that Empire and its Rix opponents are evenly matched in our affections:  While the ultra-optimized Rix is portrayed as being contrary to everything our protagonists’ Empire stands for, the Empire itself doesn’t seem particularly appealing from the get-go.  This ends up placing our affections with the characters rather than their social structure, a distinction that a number of space-opera writers can’t be bothered to study.  It’s also a good choice given how much emphasis is placed on the characters themselves.  The last line of the story makes it clear that this is, aside its military SF language, a romance.

    But Succession does stand on its own as a hard-tech Science Fiction story:  Westerfeld’s use of contemporary infotech jargon can be as good as his contemporary Charles Stross (high praise indeed) and the showpiece of the story ends up being a meticulously conceived, impeccably presented space battle between two ships that owes practically nothing to naval battles of the past.  It doesn’t make complete sense (there’s a “run silent” scene that evokes bad memories of “stealth in space”), but it’s a lot of fun to read, and the detail in which blows are described will warm the heart of the techno-geeks readers.

    For everyone else (and overlapping sets of readers), Succession is a good story presented in the overblown style of grandiose space-opera.  Numerous gadgets, clean prose (albeit with a sense of humor) and a conclusion that doesn’t quite wrap up all the threads end up making a clear case for Westerfeld’s return to this universe.  If you’ve missed Succession so far, it’s worth a look: It holds up admirably well half a decade later, and it may even drive you to read some of Westerfeld’s novels for the younger generation.

  • Bag of Bones, Stephen King

    Bag of Bones, Stephen King

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1999 mass-market reprint of 1998 original, 732 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-671-02423-9

    Halfway through Bag of Bones, I realized that I had come to take Stephen King for granted.  It’s easy to do so: With a decades-long body of work that makes even so-called prolific authors look like slackers, King has been a fixture of the American publishing scene for decades, and while he’s had both high and low points, his work delivers a dependable reading experience.  Studying my reading history, I see that I tend to read King in big batches every five years or so, running up his back-catalogue until I’m (relatively) caught up once again.

    Now it’s time for another batch, because clearly I had forgotten how much fun a King novel could be.

    Not that Bag of Bones is fun in itself: After all, it begins with the death of our narrator’s wife.  Things don’t necessarily get any better after that: For four years, our scribbling protagonist is physically unable to write even one line of fiction.  It’s only when he returns to their summer home and finds out that she may have been up to a secret project that something changes in him.  This being a King story, our grieving narrator soon finds himself stuck between vengeful ghosts, benevolent spirits, an obsessed billionaire and a cute single mother.

    As a reflection of King’s pet themes, Bag of Bones starts out respectably: Our narrator’s status as a well-selling writer of romantic thrillers allows him to talk about the publishing industry with insider’s knowledge, and King manages to make something as esoteric as writer’s block seems accessible to everyone.  Later on, a few twists end up being referred to as plot devices by an all-too-aware narrator.  What’s less familiar is the theme not just of matrimony, but of domestic intimacy that emerges from Bag of Bones’ description of a widower being reminded of what he shared with his deceased wife.  For some reason, that’s an aspect of life that few writers attempt, let alone pull off convincingly.

    But Bag of Bones was, for me, another opportunity to be immersed all over again in King’s prose style.  He doesn’t have much of a reputation as a stylist because his writing seems so clear, but the way he manages the technical aspects of his prose are still nothing short of amazing: Inner monologue, action, explanations and flashbacks proceed seamlessly, and the voice of the narrator holds it all together.  The only passages that seem atypical are a pair of lengthy dream sequences that eventually prove far more important to the plot than they seem at first.  Still, King’s prose has rarely been as pitch-perfect as it is here, and he is able to highlight various emotional tones from joy to dread to despair.

    Structure-wise, there are a number of sharp turns in the story, some of whom feel gratuitous at first, but all eventually coalesce by the end of the book.  While Bag of Bones is a ghost story, it multiplies the parties involved (both real and occult) to an extent where the usual plot templates don’t readily apply.  The portrayal of small Maine communities has always been one of King’s strengths, and he once again excels at that here.  Add to that the more literary ambitions of a story in which half the battle is a widower getting over his grief and there’s a good chance that non-genre readers pulled away from King’s more bloodthirsty reputation will find much to like in this more nuanced story.  (It’s no accident if the title alone has literal, metaphorical and thematic interpretations.)

    Bag of Bones may not have the conceptual punch of some of King’s other novels, but it all adds up to a big book that’s worth the time to read.  It’s well-crafted, strongly characterized, entirely within King’s pet themes and yet a step beyond into powerful reality-based fiction.  It’s a deft blend of genre horror and character-driven fiction.  It’s also a reminder, even ten years after publication, that I happily still have a lot of King left to read: I ended up drawing a list of his titles that I haven’t read yet, and ended up with enough material for the next two years.  By then, he will have probably published three or four new books.  But that’s OK: The only danger in that much of a good thing is that we come to expect it without a proper amount of gratitude.

  • Good Hair (2009)

    Good Hair (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 2009) Don’t be fooled by writer/director Chris Rock’s comic reputation, the frivolous-sounding subject of “Black Hair” and the constant laughter from audiences watching this film: Good Hair is a serious film tackling real issues with a substantial impacts on a number of us. Hair is not just hair: It’s a political statement, it’s a booming business, it’s a signifier of relationship intimacy, it’ s a measure of how much people with non-straight hair are willing to sacrifice in order to fit in. But as Rock comes to discover in his quest to understand the way black women feel about their hair, the topic quickly expands to touch upon economic servitude, third-world exploitation, dating patterns and appearance alteration. Thanks to Rock’s comic instincts, Good Hair touches upon those issues with a deft touch, sometimes even extracting jaw-dropping ignorant statements from simple showboating. It’s a deft balance, especially given the number of time where the images on-screen call for outrage. What’s also noteworthy are the candid celebrity interviews that dot the film, with a number of black actresses willing to speak frankly about the nature of what’s on their hair. Some of the interview moments are fantastic: Al Sharpton actually makes sense, Ice-T gets to be the voice of reason, Tracie Thoms is both hot and funny, while Maya Angelou manages to one-up one of Rock’s punchlines to earn an even bigger laugh than him. Hilarious, but also eye-opening (Rock does a good job at mirroring white viewers’ “You’ve got to be kidding me” expressions.), Good Hair will make quite a few viewers wonder “ Why didn’t I know that?” and give them a renewed appreciation for women with short hair. See it, if you can, with a big vocal crowd: It’s a movie that demands and benefits from audience participation. It’s an open question as to whether the same subject could or should be treated with self-righteous indignation and rage… and whether such a documentary would be better, or even appropriate. The real tragedy here may not be the unimaginable sacrifices made to the ideal of good hair, but the “eh, what are you going to do?” acceptance that this is what people do.

    (Second viewing, on DVD, April 2011) The documentary holds up to a second viewing: The laughs are still there, the insights are just as sharp, and Rock’s exploration of his subject seems just as revealing. What’s frustrating is the DVD: Aside from a commentary track with Rock and the co-producer of the film, there’s nothing else… even though the commentary repeatedly refers to a number of deleted scenes intended to be included on the DVD. It doesn’t help that the commentary itself is average and perhaps a bit drier than one would expect: While it does a lot to explain how a documentary can evolve into something quite different than envisioned (and how production challenges arise to meet heightened expectations), it doesn’t soar anywhere near the film itself.

  • Superfreakonomics, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

    Superfreakonomics, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 2009, 270 pages, C$36.99 hc, ISBN 978-1-55468-608-7

    Picture this: You go to a party, where your colossal intelligence immediately sets you apart from the crowd. You then meet another guy who seems just as eager to make fun of everyone else who’s there. Both of you are unstoppable put-down machines. In conversations, he’s the kind of wit that enjoys telling people when they’re wrong, and what they don’t know. At the end of the party, you go “I like feeling superior to other people, you like feeling superior to other people, we should totally hang out.”

    You friends keep telling you that he’s not quite as wonderful as you think he is, but you brush it off. In fact, you find that his type of patter is great fun to other parties when you’re making conversation. Then, a while later, you meet the guy again. The magic happens again, except that at the end of the night, he starts going on an incoherent rant about how global warming is all a sham, and he can solve it using twenty dollars worth of duct tape and plastic bags. As you slowly step away from your once-best-friend-forever, you start thinking: what happened?

    What happened, indeed, is the main question after reading Superfreakonomics, the follow up to Levitt & Dubner’s massively successful 2005 pop-economics book. Their conceptual overreach, contrarian shtick and intellectual contradictions all reach an apex during a fifth chapter tackling Global Warming, and they only serve to highlight the problems with the authors’ two books so far.

    After all, most of Freakonomics was based on telling people that what they knew about the world was incomplete, wrong and that even their axioms did not reflect reality as it happened. Posing themselves as cold-eyed intellectual tough-guys led by the dispassionate forces of rationality and economics, Levitt & Dubner deal in trivia, reinforced by a little bit of cynical shock value. Telling people, in the first book, that crime had seldom been so low appealed to hard numbers; telling them that the decline may have been caused by abortion (in reducing the number of disadvantaged children turning to crime) is the classic example of shock-pandering: Pro-life people simply dislike the assertion, while pro-choice activists find something here to reinforce their biases.

    As the prototypical guy who loves to know more than anyone else, I fell for Freakonomics from beginning to end, spouting trivia (“Pools are more dangerous than guns!”) at the slightest opportunity. I even gave a copy as a gift before the mounting amount of scepticism made me calm down. What’s not so great about being a contrarian is that is often leads one to take opposite viewpoints “just because”, and that can become a dogma in itself. Superfreakonomics and its prequel don’t just cater to those people; it flatters them for their bad habits.

    So it is that scepticism is the word of the day in reading Superfreakonomics. The good news, I suppose, is that most of the book is on the level of Freakonomics: Engaging writing, memorable examples, careful use of anecdote to illustrate larger microeconomic points, interesting research and an overarching tendency to link specific examples to a larger theory. We learn about drunk-walking, prostitution economics (using words such as “pimpact”), terrorist profiling, unintended consequences, and monkey prostitutes. (There’s a joke to make here about two pop-economic vulgarizers’ obsession with prostitution that I’ll leave to snarkier commentators.) Along the way, Levitt & Dubner take a crowbar to a number of cherished beliefs, including altruism, substandard doctors, the Kitty Genovese murder, the effectiveness of child seats and, oh yes, global warming. References at the back of the book chew up 36 pages (50 with the index), or about 13% of the book (18.5% with the index), which tells you something both about the reference trail and the ridiculous size of this overpriced $37 book.

    The first four chapters try to establish a framework that tells us two things at once: First, that the world is complicated and that there are unintended consequences to everything we do. But at the same time, Levitt & Dubner also try to sell us the idea that some solutions are simple: Even as they show how difficult it is to get doctors to wash their hands (even today), they also tell us that hand-washing is a simple solution to fatal problems.

    These two ideas are not mutually incompatible, but they don’t go well together (one could say that it’s a simple idea with complex consequences) and this tension is nowhere more obvious than in the much-criticized fifth chapter, which tackles global warming with an “aw, shucks, it’s not as bad as you think and it can be fixed easily anyway.” Surefire way to earn controversy and sales, this viewpoint nonetheless exposes the book to substantial criticism. I’m certainly not qualified to take on issues of large-scale climatology, but the contrarian in me can’t help but notice that most of Chapter 5 is based on a single biased source: a visit to Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, a business that specializes in making money from ideas. Ideas about global warming, for instance. Ideas that the problem isn’t that bad (shock!) and can be solved with simple fixes (relief! –followed by check-writing). Superfreakonomics’ usually fast and far-reaching tone changes completely during this section, turning into a fawning profile of Intellectual Ventures that even had me wondering if they’d consider my résumé. I agree that Nathan Myhrvold is one of the coolest, smartest human beings on planet Earth… but I can’t help but flash back to the rest of the book and its insistence that altruism doesn’t exist, that well-meaning policies have unfortunate impacts and that the real world is, well, really complicated. When Superfreakonomics becomes similar to the kind of article that local papers write about con artists peddling their perpetual-motion machines, it’s time to put on the extra-sceptical goggles.

    Too bad, really, because it’s a classic case of “you should have stopped talking earlier”: Levitt & Dubdner correctly identified global warming (or rather, Global Warming) as the sacrosanct issue of the time, the closest analogue to religious belief that their pool of potential readers may have. The impulse to apply their usual everything-you-know-is-wrong shtick must have been irresistible. Alas, it also carries consequences –such as turning readers against them. What’s the cost/benefit analysis of that scenario? Who wants to reward trolls?

    On the other hand, overreach is a good antidote against uncritical belief about the rest of the book, which isn’t such a bad thing after all. Chapter 5 put aside, Superfreakonomics manages to recreate the electric huh-a-page reading experience of the original, which already isn’t too shabby. Readers may want, however, to wait a while until a “revised and expanded edition” comes out: not only will it fix errors in the main text (much as the original Freakonomics was corrected a year after release) and allow pundits to publish their debunking essays, but chances are that the paperback edition will be a better value for money than this unjustifiably overpriced hardcover. Savvy readers and freakonomists can probably agree on one thing: paying nearly $40 for an airy 220-pages main text makes no economic sense at all.

  • Emergency, Neil Strauss

    Emergency, Neil Strauss

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper, 2009, 418 pages, C$21.99 tp, ISBN 978-0-06-089877-9

    I don’t laugh at survivalists.

    While their threat-assessment algorithms may be out of whack, their basic message of self-reliance isn’t something I’m willing to dismiss easily: Our civilization is far more interdependent that even a generation ago, and I don’t have half the survival skills that my father (skilled wood-worker, outdoorsman, scout leader) or my grandfather (farmer: owned a horse, could slaughter and eat backyard animals) had. Survivalism, correctly applied, is about being prepared and having useful skills. I’m still dead meat on the scale of “who’s most likely to survive the apocalypse”, but I didn’t suffer through the North American ice storm of 1998 and the Northeast Blackout of 2003 without making at least a few contingency plans.

    It helps, I suppose, that I’m a Canadian and that our social security net has historically proven pretty effective in case of disaster. Neil Strauss, sadly, doesn’t have that luxury, and as he details during the first third of Emergency, he has spent most of this century’s first decade convincing himself that the end was nigh. What follows is a decade-long personal immersion in the survivalist subculture, where he comes to learn essential survival skills, reassess his life and eventually develop a surprising philosophy of how to best be prepared to survive emergencies.

    This isn’t the first of Strauss’ personal journalism efforts. His best-known book so far, The Game, detailed his “penetration” of a not-so-secret subculture of pickup artists. A former music critic and ghost-writer to the stars (Emergency is filled with mentions and cameos of people such as Britney Spears, Tom Cruise and Leonard Cohen), Strauss may have emerged from The Game with a less-than-honourable reputation, but he knows how to write engagingly, and his descent in the survivalist mindset is hilarious to read about: Emergency, despite a somewhat depressing subject and a fairly lengthy narrative, is never less than a joy to read, especially when it charts Strauss’ evolution from a somewhat self-centred writer to a full-fledged member of his community… all thanks to his evolving conception of what it takes to survive the unthinkable.

    Emergency may be billed as a book that “will save your life”, but it’s not a how-to manual as much as it’s a reasoned description of the survivalism mindset. It does have a few tips and tricks (many of them entertainingly presented as short comic-book pages illustrated by Bernard Chang, who previously collaborated with Strauss on The Game and the disappointing How to Make Money Like a Porn Star.) It’s a gateway of sorts for those looking into how to tackle survivalism: As Strauss investigates a second citizenship, money transfers outside the US, cache-making, goat-slaughtering and weapons training, it’s enough to make any sane reader consider whether they really have to fortitude to commit to such a lifestyle.

    Because, no mistake about it, Strauss describes a life-altering experience. Without giving anything away about the book’s conclusion, Strauss hints that it’s impossible to be a serious survivalist without making permanent and irrevocable changes to the way one lives. This, I suspect (and testify), is likely to be the biggest stumbling block to most people’s quest for self-sufficiency: few of us have the resources, drive, time or interest (not to mention support from loved ones) to seriously pursue self-reliance. I may admire Strauss a lot for what he did in-between the beginning and the end of his Emergency voyage of discovery, but there’s no way I can do the same. Although… you never know: I ended up deliberately locking myself in the trunk of my car to experience a small chunk of what Strauss describes –can weapon training be far behind?

    In the meantime, Emergency is a pretty solid read: After a shaky, whiny, self-pitying start, the book becomes stronger and stronger to end on a note of sheer admiration for Strauss’ odyssey. Beautifully designed (it even includes a treasure hunt through hidden clues), it’s a fun book to read, and that fun doesn’t preclude a number of gripping observations on the way we respond to unforeseen circumstances. I may be far more optimistic about human nature and the likelihood of widespread social breakdown than Strauss can be, but Emergency earns its right to make a vigorous case otherwise. After all, he suggest, the worst thing than a good survivalism outlook can do is make us a better, more capable human being.

  • Astro Boy (2009)

    Astro Boy (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, October 2009) My familiarity with the original anime series is far and fuzzy enough that I won’t spend a lot of time criticizing Astro Boy for its adherence (or lack thereof) to the canon. Which may be for the best, since there’s enough to criticize in the film considered by itself. Ignoring the fact that kid’s movies don’t necessarily justify lazy screenwriting, the script is crammed with dumb Science Fiction clichés (Good/evil substances? Check. Memories from a cloned hair? Check. No concept of mass/space preservation? Double check.) and just-as-stupid plot shortcuts. Whatever depth there may be to the invented universe of the story is either ignored or trivialized, with what we can assume to be thousands of deaths hidden in the background. It’s a surprisingly violent film as well, with its lead characters being simply vaporized early in the story and numerous battles taking up much of the film’s running time. Ultimately, it’s the unevenness of the script that becomes Astro Boy’s greatest irritant: It panders to kids, serves them intense action sequences, wallows in lame dialogue and unconvincing subplots. A number of the robot gags feel as if they had been done far more skilfully in Robots, Inc. At least things move quickly: the pacing is quick, which is just as well when things drag on on the surface-bound segments. Otherwise, well, it’s the kind of average animated kids’ film that serves to put Pixar’s productions in such flattering light. Even when the result is just average, it makes us with for something better.

  • The Stepfather (2009)

    The Stepfather (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, October 2009) There’s a market for “fill-in movies”: Those utterly average instances of their chosen genre, serving no higher purpose that to keep theatres in business as we wait for the next worthwhile films. So it is that The Stepfather, remake of an eighties film I now have even less interest in, exists: to present a familiar story in an even more familiar way, entertaining compliant audiences in rote fashion. There’s little about the film that can’t be deduced from the trailer: Teenager comes back home after a lengthy absence to find his mom remarried to a mysterious stranger with mood swings and old-fashioned family-first morals. But the titular stepfather is worse than your usual garden-variety Republican: he’s a serial killer who regularly disposes of his step-families, although that isn’t much of a spoiler given how the very first scene of the film leisurely establishes that plot point. There isn’t much left to do than to sit back as the film goes through the expected plot beats (sometimes more than once) and concludes with the final fight between protagonist and villain. There’s a final flourish that, frankly, will make audiences angry at the filmmakers: The Stepfather simply isn’t good enough to deserve its off-kilter ending. This being said, it’s not all bad: Dylan Walsh (looking like about a dozen different other actors) is pretty good in the lead role, the direction is a bit better than you’d expect for a middle-of-the-road thriller and a few modern touches update the story to 2009. But that’s not much than a bit of polish on a deeply unimpressive result. The scares are obvious (including the requisite meowing cat), the antagonist has big overdone flaws (and yet, little motivation), the twists are non-existent and the obviousness of the entire film just makes it seem to last even longer. For those who really want to see a thriller now, The Stepfather is just a bit better than straight-to-DVD releases… but not by much.

  • Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

    Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, October 2009) There’s been a curious lack of straight-up thrillers in theatres recently, but it’s not overcooked, under-thought efforts like this one that are going to revive interest in the genre. Nominally the story of a grieving father whose vengeance efforts against a pragmatic DA become excessive, Law Abiding Citizen never manages to convince us of the superiority of the hero against the villain. Gerald Butler’s scary-smart vigilante is so compelling (especially alongside Jamie Foxx’s dull protagonist) that we never completely stop rooting for whatever he’s doing. The ending feels like a defeat at the hands of an undeserving hero, and a particularly dumb one at that: No one in their right mind would take the chances leading to the final detonation. But then again, much of Law Abiding Citizen is preposterous to begin with, what with an omniscient villain, nick-of-time plans, unbelievable contrivances and more Hollywood conveniences than you’d believe. What’s worse, perhaps, is that Kurt Wimmer’s script is not without a few good moments (the “cell phone scene” is a pure shocker; Philadelphia is fine; the ramifications of the villain’s day-job are worth a film in themselves) while Gary F. Gray’s direction makes a generous use of pans, helicopters, smooth transitions and crane-mounted cameras. There’s a sheer anarchistic glee in seeing a city’s judicial system being taken apart for pure vengeance, so you can imagine the disappointment when it all fails to cohere in anything better than an average pot-boiler thriller. This is one of those films where the trailer is quite a bit better than the actual film, and not just because hero and villains are so obviously mismatched.