Author: Christian Sauvé

  • The World Without Us, Alan Weisman

    The World Without Us, Alan Weisman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 2007, 324 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-00-200864-8

    Most environmentally-minded books usually show their eco-credentials by explaining the impact of humanity on nature. But Alan Weisman smartly does exactly the opposite, showing us what happens when humans go away.

    The thought experiment is elegant: “Picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished… How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap upon it and our fellow organisms? Could nature ever obliterate all our traces?” [P.4]

    The first question raised by this thought experiment is how to tackle the subject. There’s no laboratory experiment that will remove humanity and allow the author to see what happens without removing much of the book’s paying audience along the way.

    But there are ways to find out. Humans may be known for their insatiable lust for conquering the globe, but there are places that haven’t been colonized yet. This brings us to the last remaining square kilometers of primeval forest in Poland, a never-domesticated preserve that shows what temperate Europe was before humans transformed it to their liking. Better yet: there are a few places in the world where humanity has retreated, leaving behind traces of their presence. Pripiyat, the city closest to Chernobyl, stands as a particularly imposing monument to humanity’s transience.

    Because, as Weisman quickly demonstrates in the book’s two must-read chapters, few things can hope to survive without human maintenance. Chapter 2, “Unbuilding a home” fast-forwards through what happens to a typical north-American house when abandoned. Within years, water seeps in and weakens the wooden structure until the house collapses upon itself. Degradation of organic material is relatively rapid, but within decades even metal oxidizes, concrete disintegrates and plastics are under assault by water, temperature, sunlight, animals and bacteria. Five hundred years later in temperate climates, only the ceramics tiles in the bathroom will remain recognizable as such. (Home-owner shouldn’t read this chapter after expensive renovations.) Chapter 3 applies the same logic to cities and shows how quickly a city goes away when no one is there to take care of it. Post-apocalyptic SF fans will get quite a kick out of a serious study of what many have been wondering about over the years. (Curiously, Pripiyat gets a chapter and Savannah earns a passage, but Centralia, PA doesn’t even rank a mention.)

    This extrapolation is informed by expert advice, laboratory tests and historical precedent. Latter chapters study specific bits of infrastructure and human activity, and ultimately start wondering which human artifacts may last through the ages. Plastics, alas, may form the bulk of humanity’s few lasting contribution to the universe: very little of it ever degrades (“Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated, every bit of plastics manufactured in the world in the past 50 years or so still remains.” [P.126] is the killer quote in the “Polymers are Forever” chapter) and a surprising amount ends up washed on the shores of every ocean.

    But even as traces of humanity disappear, nature springs back. Not in the same primeval fashion as it did before humanity’s passage, but it does come back. Much of the thick forests in New England are reclaimed farmland, for instance, and the always-instructive example of radioactive Pripyat shows the extend to which wildlife can spring back to prominence if left alone for a while.

    Paradoxically, this is where The World Without Us is at its most optimistic. If some facets of the biosphere are already irremediably beyond repair (the great garbage patch of the Pacific will be there for a looong time), there is still some hope for a better relationship between nature and humanity, and the results could be rapidly seen as long as some action is taken quickly. It’s hope through humility, of course, a sobering realization of humanity’s truer place in the natural scheme. Of, as you may see it, a recognition of our responsibility now that we can alter the planet, and a recognition of the good we can do if we commit to reasonable stewardship.

    But the book would be so interesting if it wasn’t for Weisman’s arresting style, his judicious choice of international set-pieces and his willingness to let his interview subjects speak for themselves. As a piece of scientific journalism, The World Without Us runs deeper than a mere through experiment about humanity’s disappearance: it’s an exceptional documentary crossing oceans and scientific disciplines in order to inform us. There is a lot of absolutely fascinating material here, from a look at the Korean Demilitarized Zone (now such a heavily mined and regulated area that it has become the Korean peninsula’s best natural preserve) to the operation of the Panama Canal (far more than just a ditch through a jungle.)

    The book occasionally errs in numerous digressions that don’t necessarily advance the subject. But it’s hard to separate the chaff from the vital when nearly everything reported by Weisman ends up being so interesting. The style carries even the slower, less relevant passages, and set-pieces such as a quick look at the potential industrial apocalypse of the Texan petrochemical industry may not be strictly necessary, but they certainly leave a vivid impression.

    The book has already become an international bestseller, and is now reaching its second wave of readers intrigued by the glowing reviews and the fascinating subject matter. For once, believe the hype: this has a good chance of turning into a minor pop-science classic, and a reference tome for many post-apocalyptic SF writers. It’s a profoundly environmentalist tome that understands its time, avoiding strident calls for action in favor of a calm, almost appealing rhetoric. There’s a real hunger for disaster in a troubled early twenty-first century punctuated by falling towers, drowned cities and the promise of rising shorelines. The World Without Us plays with this sensibility, most notably with its unstated conclusion that we may be the most fragile, most vulnerable species in the whole ecosystem… and that the world can go on quite peacefully without us.

  • Wild Hogs (2007)

    Wild Hogs (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2008) There’s nothing like being stuck on a guided tour bus for hours with proud redneck drivers and force-fed DVDs to make you appreciate the finer points of movies you wouldn’t pay to see. But the horrible truth about Wild Hogs is that it made me smile. Despite the generic blandness of Tim Allen, the bloated arrogance of John Travolta, the grating awfulness of Martin Lawrence and the pitiful indignity of William H. Macy (who deserves better), Wild Hogs is cookie-cutter lowest-denominator comedy and it still works. There isn’t much to say about the plot (four guys looking for adventure go on a motorcycle trip to the west coast) except for how it’s engineered to frustrate the “road trip” aspect almost from the get-go in order to provide a consistent plot. It’s the grown-up equivalent of Saturday morning cartoons, with the low-brow middle-aged slapstick and the caricatured opponents, although with the teenage attractions of slap-dash romance, dull homophobic jokes and fear of strong adult women. Everyone and everything is wasted here, including Ray Liotta and especially Marisa Tomei. (Peter Fonda’s cameo being the biggest wasted moment.) Yet it’s tough to actually stop watching: it’s far from being as awful as the trailer suggested, and it’s possible to see here the glimmer of a much better film buried under the star prancing and sub-literate plotting: something about middle-aged anxieties, the wasted allure of pretend lifestyles and how it’s never too late to grow up. But growing up isn’t something that particularly interests either the characters or the audiences of this film, and so Wild Hogs remains painfully limited even if it succeeds on purely mechanical craft.

  • Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds

    Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    New Riders, 2008, 229 pages, C$32.99 tpb, ISBN 978-0-321-52565-9

    I started reading Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen blog a few years ago. At the time, I had a professional interest in good presentation techniques (I’ve been known to give day-long PowerPoint seminars to needy colleagues), and if that part of my day job has lain fallow for a while, I’m still a faithful reader: Not only am I still continuing to develop presentation skills for myself, but Reynold’s style is engaging and rich in insights. Presentation Zen, the blog, is structured around the “blog like you’re writing a book” concept championed by such well-known experts as Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki and Avinash Kaushik: Their blogs are dedicated to a specific theme and features fewer-but-longer posts all revolving around the blog’s common theme. Each entry is worth a quick read, and when they’re taken together, these type of blogs feel like a continuing education program in a given field.

    Presentation Zen, the book, is more than a snapshot of Presentation Zen’s first few years. It’s a package. Much as Reynolds will repeat that a presentation isn’t a document, a collection of blog posting isn’t a book. While regular readers will nod at a few common themes and approaches (“Oh, here’s the bento box riff!”), Presentation Zen also happens to be one of the best-designed technical books I’ve read so far.

    Which is more than appropriate for a book that presents “Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery”. As the title suggests and the subtitle makes clear, Reynolds is out to promote the idea that less is better. That presenters should separate the presentation from the document, and should strive to make the slides a part of their speech. An American designer/consultant periodically working and living in Japan, Reynolds is ideally suited to shake up the traditional view of slideware presentations. Presentation Zen seeks to stop people from hammering any type of argument in the dull six-bullets-per-slide PowerPoint format. It argues against repeating the content of a presentation to any living breathing audience. It suggests cleaner graphic design, eye-popping stock photography, flexible unity of design and (shock!) logo-less templates. (The examples of chart re-design on pages 123-125 are worth the price of the book by themselves.) It gives pointers on how to behave in front of an audience, it encourages presenters to think of themselves as creative thinkers and even throws in a detailed method for preparing presentations—away from the computer. A good chunk of the book is pure inspiration, with strong quotes and inspiring passages citing Zen philosophy elements.

    More importantly, it practices what it preaches. The book is fantastically designed: its gorgeous photography, generous white space, full-color layout and copious examples (including Guy Kawasaki’s foreword, which is presented as a slide show) not only give instant credibility to the book, they also enhance the sheer reading pleasure of the book. Yes, I said “sheer reading pleasure” for a business book. Reynolds’ prose is as clean and accessible as the rest of his book, and the book’s cleverly chunked structure is as compelling to read as, yes, a blog. How much fun is it to read? Well, consider that I got the book from my organization’s library (they bought it on my recommendation) and ended up reading it for pleasure at home. I may even buy a copy for myself.

    I also goes without saying that Reynolds’ ideas may not be applicable to all contexts and organizations. Presentation Zen is provocative in how it forces readers to think about why its recommendations may clash with their corporate culture. As far as my industry is concerned, it’s obvious that there are cultural penalties for making attractive presentations: People expect efficiency and speed in drafting presentations, which makes pretty design immediately suspicious. (The irony is that the same “quick and speedy” presentations usually involve lengthy “urgent” revisions by dozen of people that drag on forever and produce eye-straining results.) Other cultural factors make it impossible to even try separating the content from the presentations: Absent managers and meeting coordinators will insist on being provided on copies of the deck for distribution and “study” (Another ironic truth: nobody ever reads presentations once they’re given), and loudly complain if they can’t make sense of the presentation by itself. I could go on, but nobody ever wins in the corporate machine.

    But this isn’t a reason to give up. It’s easy to see how Presentation Zen can be a terrific addition in any preventer’s quiver of design techniques, even in the most rigidly traditional environments. I have already discussed the standout passage on how to simplify and redesign overly-busy charts, but other passages about slide design, presentation storyboarding and stand-up delivery can be stealthily adapted to every corporate template. Plus, hey, no one ever knows when some shock tactics may not be more efficient that the usual routine. (I’m not confessing to any practical implementation of any Presentation Zen ideas in my own presentations. Oh, no, never.)

    Of course, Presentation Zen is only as effective as its readers allow it to be. Let’s face it: presentation geeks like myself, who love designing and delivering presentations, already have a pretty good idea of what to do, and how vital it is to avoid “Death by Powerpoint”. Reynolds’ book has probably already reached a good chunk of its audience. Meanwhile, the truly hopeless PowerPointers bore on blissfully, completely unaware of a different way of doing things and unwilling to learn better. Thus it falls upon the converted masses, the Presentation Zen readers and the game-changers to take this book and shove it somewhere in their corporate culture where it can do some good. Suggest it to your organization’s library. Cite excerpts. Make copies of choice passages and leave them stapled to bulletin boards. Kill your audiences with Presentation Zen techniques and don’t leave them wondering how you did it. The topic may be zen, but this is an all-out war against dull presentations and ugly slideware decks. Read the book, live the book and get your next marching orders from Reynolds’ blog.

  • Read Or Die: OAV (2001)

    Read Or Die: OAV (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2008) I remember seeing the first two episodes of this series a few years ago and being quite amused by the blend of high-concept (“British Library Special Operations” has got to be the coolest division title ever put on a business card), super-powered characters and wild anime action scenes. But a new look at the series reveals the stupefying power of decaying memories: If I’m still generally entertained by the series, it now seems to me that it does little with the possibilities at its disposal. “The Paper” isn’t nearly as proactive as I remember her, and the “British Library operatives” conceit seems to be discarded early on as the series adopts a more conventional superhero structure. It’s still worth a look, but I’ve got plot hamsters running around telling me how unbelievably better this concept could be with just a few tweaks.

  • Man Of The Year (2006)

    Man Of The Year (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2008) Barry Levinson’s career is filled with ambitious misfires, and so this film isn’t much of a surprise. The idea of a comedian being elected President isn’t a bad one, and it certainly powers Robin Williams through a zinger-filled performance that’s entertainingly close to his stand-up personae. But good comedy seldom meshes well with tense dramatic suspense, and that’s the tack that the script chooses to take here, much to the film’s detriment. Once again so that everyone can follow: Comedian using stand-up material to subvert a presidential debate: funny. Whistle-blower being injected with paranoia-inducing drugs so that she behaves in a way that will result in her losing everything? Not funny. Now that we’ve got that squared away, we can see how the wild tonal shifts of Man Of The Year doom it to frustration. Oh, sure, Christopher Walken is fine (if wasted) and there’s some fine-tuned political content here. But the lazy romantic material, the weak technical details (including a “software bug” which makes no sense even assuming rotten quality control) and the increasing heft given to unfunny material pretty much sabotage the film before it gets to a uniquely yielding finale. It should have worked much better, perhaps in the hands of a less ambitious director. In the meantime, it’s an interesting film that’s almost good.

  • Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

    Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2008) It only took twenty years, but I finally got to see this silly SF comedy. The stupidity of the film’s surface hides fairly sophisticated writing: the collision between the sublime nature of the SF devices (Go back in history! Meet historical figures!) and the ridiculousness of the dim characters is a constant laugh generator. It’s not much of a Science-Fiction film, but it does manage a neat twist on the paradoxes of time travel that will leave savvy SF readers grinning for days. The film has generally aged well, though the valley-speak patois of the lead characters has been co-opted later on by the antics of the Wayne’s World movies and such. Still, the movie is great good fun in the silly-SF-comedy vein, there are a few priceless scenes and the quotes are infectious.

  • Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

    Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2008) This sequel to the well-regarded SF comedy expands the scope of the original universe to include scenes from the future and a picture of the afterlife. A lot of it works well: just about anything linked to the evil Bill and Ted robots is hilarious, as is everything about the character of Death. But the film also overreaches and loses its focus with elements that overstay their welcome or simply fall flat: The Hell sequence is far too long despite a promising start, and the “Station” character is a blight on the rest of the film: I can’t believe they didn’t go for something – anything – else. Otherwise, it’s a fairly successful follow-up that keeps the spirit of the original. Don’t see one without the other.

  • The Clan Corporate, Charles Stross

    The Clan Corporate, Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2006, 320 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30930-0

    I won’t claim that Charles Stross can do no wrong: after all, I’ve read his web-published early novel Scratch Monkey and it’s still early in his career (his first novels were more or less published in 2003), but The Clan Corporate, third book in the “Merchant Princes” series, is a superb example of how he’s one of the most reliable, interesting and entertaining genre writers currently working.

    Ignore the “fantasy” label on the book jacket: Stross develops even his “fantasy” novels with the rigor and sheer extrapolative joy that is to be found in the best science-fiction. (This is, after all, the type of parallel-universe fantasy indistinguishable from sufficiently-advanced plot science.) But this third volume furthers bends the genre classification of the series by introducing strong thriller elements that take this novel to the boundaries of the techno-thriller.

    If you remember the end of the previous volume, you’re probably wondering how much mayhem a high-ranking defection has caused for Miriam Beckstein and her family. The answer, as you may guess, is more trouble than anyone can seem to handle: The Clan operations are in disarray, especially now that the US government has taken an interest in world-walking. The defector’s insurance policy, a nuclear device hidden somewhere in an American city, keeps ticking away despite all-out efforts to find the device. New characters make appearances, none more intriguing than Mike Fleming, an ex-boyfriend of Miriam’s, now working for the DEA but drafted in a new deep-secret interdepartmental government effort to find out more about the world-walkers smuggling merchandise just under their noses. In a post-9/11 environment featuring “Daddy Warbucks” as a particularly ruthless vice-president, the US government really isn’t playing nice.

    Oh yes, the “Merchants Princes” series hasn’t yet made its SF underpinning clear, but we’re not in fantasyland any more. Stross’ keen nose for thriller mechanics is familiar to fans of his “Laundry” sequence, but it’s developed to great effect here, placing Miriam against yet another capable enemy. Better yet, this volume’s introduction of real-world thriller elements makes it feel even closer to our reality than ever before.

    Not that she needs the extra complications, in between setting up a new business in third-Earth New London and trying to keep her own family away from her. After the events of the previous volumes, no one is particularly keen on seeing Miriam run around without supervision—she eventually finds out the limits of her freedom after a particularly bad mistake. Poked, prodded and ceremoniously prepared for unwanted nuptials, Miriam comes to realize that it will take the intervention of a third party to free her. Fortunately, third parties aren’t particularly rare in this series so far…

    Plot twists, developments and extended idea riffs continue to abound in this superbly readable entry in the series. The ending is abrupt, but the multi-party power struggle makes the plot deliciously convoluted, and the series’ distinction of featuring an abundance of very smart characters continues to produce unexpected sparks of interest. Miriam’s becoming less of a central character, but the series continues to chug along without any dip in interest. Stross has hit a fertile streak with this series, and his execution so far will be enough to reassure any reader that the series is in good hands.

    Still, one crucial word of warning to the impatient: The Clan Corporate is the first in a tightly-linked sequence of four books: It ends with a flurry of new plot developments and an unpleasant cliff-hanger. People susceptible to hissy fits over incomplete stories may want to stock up and wait until the fourth volume in the sequence comes out in 2009. Yes, that’s a long time. But it’ll be worth it.

     

  • The Bank Job (2008)

    The Bank Job (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2008) This old-school heist drama has everything it takes and a little bit more: A true premise, a capable hero (Jason Statham), a lovely girl (Saffron Burrows), good dialog, several twists, national secrets, at least three sets of villains and a gritty old-fashioned seventies film-making atmosphere. From black nationalists to organized criminals to MI6 officials to kinky royal family members, this slick and efficient crime drama is pure old-fashioned entertainment, down to the occasional nudity and the straight-ahead plotting from beginning to end. It sometimes falters when it tries to keep close to reality (the “informant” thread is a bit of a let-down, for instance), but the rest is as good as this type of film ever gets. I’ll let others pick apart the ratio of truth-to-fiction in this film “based on a true story”, but even those who know nothing about the “Walkie-Talkie Robbery” will get a kick of of it.

  • Appurushîdo [Appleseed] (1988)

    Appurushîdo [Appleseed] (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2008) I’m not sure how I managed not to see this film in two decades, but I’m glad I finally did: While I’m not going to say it’s a classic, it does feel like a historically important anime: It presents big (if sometime naive) SF ideas in the only form that could do it justice at a time where CGI was still a fanciful notion. Politically, it’s a bunch of pretentious nonsense with cardboard world-building, but it still works more than it doesn’t. Some sequences have aged well even despite the primitive animation, but I’m guessing that the brain does a lot of back-filling on behalf of the animators themselves. It amounts to a predecessor to Ghost In The Shell in more ways that one (the conceptual artist is the same, and the sensibility is identical), which automatically makes it interesting to whoever is a fan of SF, anime or animated films for adults.

  • 50 First Dates (2004)

    50 First Dates (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2008) This film never fully resolves the awful situation that powers its laugh generator (a woman without long-term memory), but at least it acknowledges it, by dialog (“She’s got brain damage!”), by a creepy sequence of existential horror in which every day is reset, and by an ending that doesn’t shy away from what’s been set up thus far. It’s a surprising film, and not only thanks to the usual brand of secondary characters that seem to cluster around Adam Sandler in whatever movies he headlines. There’s a steady slide from familiar to unfamiliar territory here, and it’s just as intriguing as it’s not entirely comfortable. There’s some rich material peeking through from time to time, whether it’s about the male protagonist’s chosen inability to form attachment, to the female heroine’s literal inability to do so. That it’s one of Adam Sandler’s least irritating film isn’t saying much, especially since there are a number of substantially grosser (and weaker) moments to act as distraction from the rest of the film. However intriguing 50 First Dates is, it never completely succeeds. There’s a fairly significant problem at the root of it, and like the Caribbean music used to score a film set in Hawaii, it never fits together even if it manages to become harmless.

  • Echo Park, Michael Connelly

    Echo Park, Michael Connelly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Little Brown, 2006, 405 pages, C$34.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-316-73495-0

    When I started my Michael Connelly Reading Project a year ago (“One book per month, every month, until I’m done”), I did so hoping that Connelly would prove to be just as good as his reputation made him out to be. Despite a few uneven novels, this has been proven true so far, and never more so with Echo Park, which goes rummaging once again in Connelly’s favorite bag of trick and puts everything together in an engrossing, page-turning reading experience.

    Not much has changed for Harry Bosch since the last novel: He’s still working with partner Kizmin Rider at the Open-Unsolved unit. Given Bosch’s dubious career-management skills and usual hostility toward authority figures, this already represents a minor miracle. But the comfortable balance is upset by the unexpected capture of a serial killer who confesses to more murders, including an unsolved case in Harry’s past. But what makes it worse this time around is the suggestion that Harry may have ignored a crucial clue –and ignored a suspect who went on to kill more victims. For someone of Harry’s nature, this revelation is almost too much to bear.

    But his problems pile up even higher when a field expedition to a burial site goes wrong and the suspected killer escapes, seriously wounding a recurring character along the way. Paired up once again with FBI agent and ex-paramour Rachel Walling, Bosch has to fight his own worst instincts to unravel the usual web of past crimes, political interference and LAPD quirks. At first glance, there isn’t much to this novel: the tropes are familiar, the characters are familiar (boo, hiss, Irving) and there doesn’t seem to be anything to send the series in a new direction.

    But the pleasure, as always, is in seeing Connelly put everything together with a deft hand. His style is just as compelling as it’s ever been, and his experience in presenting a complex back-story to the reader remains top-notch. It’s an even more impressive achievement considering that in lesser hands, this would have felt like a re-thread of well-worn quasi-clichés. Connelly even avoids tripping my usual distaste for serial-killer stories by neatly wrapping it it up in a bigger and more ruthless framework: Even the familiar political elements seem bigger and more repellent this time around. The conclusion may be as spectacularly nasty as some of Bosch’s previous investigations (along with the usual “Harry, we can never work together again” speeches), but it still feels like the right climax for this kind of story.

    The one sub-plot that never completely works is the same one that never completely works in most of the other Bosch novels: The half-hearted attempts to pair Harry with someone else, this time (once again) with poor bland Rachel Walling, who never gets a chance to shine when she’s paired with Connelly’s best-known character.

    Otherwise, Echo Park is another strong entry in the Connelly canon, made even more remarkable in how it re-uses the same elements and still makes it look fresh and fascinating. Not many authors can do that after seventeen novels (twelve of them featuring Harry), and that shows Connelly’s serious dedication to his craft and his readers. Go ahead, start your own Michael Connelly Reading Project: If you like even one of his novels, you’ll have trouble stopping before you’ve read them all.

  • Passage, Connie Willis

    Passage, Connie Willis

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 2001, 780 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58051-5

    Sometimes, I get the feeling that I’m the only SF fan on the face of the planet who’s not a hundred-and-ten percent fan of Connie Willis’ work. Whenever I admit doubts about her stories, people spit at me, dogs bite my ankles and even babies stare in my direction with disgust.

    Well, okay, maybe not, but part of Willis’ skill is that she makes even the haters hate themselves. After all, isn’t she the smartest, the funniest, the best? Her story certainly have charm to spare: every word, every sentence is carefully put in place to make us dance like puppets to the tune she’s singing. Her stories are often funny on the page, but they’re developed with serious rigor. A major novel like Passage is a superb showcase for those skills.

    Just take a look at the premise: It’s a romantic comedy in which a psychologist studies patients experiencing Near-Death Experiences. Major cognitive dissonance right there, and that’s even before reading a single line of the novel.

    Even a few chapters in, the usual Willis trademarks are obvious: The frazzled protagonist struck in an amusing nightmare of overlapping complications; the copious amount of pop-cultural references; the amusing succession of slapstick comedy, hilarious exasperation and romantic entanglements. The plot takes time to emerge, but it does with increasing darkness, as the protagonist teams up with a researcher who has found a way to safely induce NDEs to volunteers. But something makes the volunteers run away, and soon it’s up to the protagonist to submit herself to her own study… with spectacular results.

    Objectively, it’s far from being a bad book: The compelling nature of Willis’ prose is as sharp as it’s ever been, and the comic complications keep piling up at a frenzied pace. The SF elements of the story are initially slight, but gradually acquire more and more heft. The many characters are leisurely developed and eventually…

    …eventually, we come to realize that the novel’s 780 pages are its own worst problem. There is no economy to the telling, and the repetitive nature of some complications start to take its toll. The story hangs in mid-air for a long time, asking far too much indulgence for missed phone calls, silly character decisions and an obstinate refusal to proceed forward. I often complain that hundreds of pages could be cut from some novels, but it’s not an exaggeration in Passage‘s case: A novel half as long could have done wonders for the story’s impact.

    But perhaps there’s a reason to the lethargy created by this pile of words: Willis seldom shies away from emotional sucker-punches, and there’s a shocking twist a hundred pages from the end that’s both surprising yet foreshadowed by dozens of small hints. It leads to a conclusion that will play really well with some, and remind a self-hating minority of doubters that blatant emotional manipulation remains one of Willis’ most accomplished strength as a writer.

    I have no doubt that my reaction to the novel is idiosyncratic and that it will go over really well with other readers: Willis’ bibliography is crammed with works (Doomsday Book, “Even the Queen” , “All my Darling Daughters”, etc.) that appeal to a certain segment of the readership while leaving others free to cry “emotional manipulation!” between fits of self-doubts. Passage thus fits in an enviable lineage: it’s the typical mixture of farce and tragedy, skillfully put together but not impervious to a cock-eyed “oh, really?” reaction. I suspect that I will appreciate this novel a lot more once I’m past my terrible thirties.

    But even confused haters will recognize that Passage is a powerful piece of work: risky, humane, brilliant and well-researched. The length is a problem, but maybe only to those who already have reservations about the novel as a whole: Others may see it as much more of a good thing. One thing is for sure: Passage doesn’t make it any easier to be critical of Willis’ work.

  • Jumper, Steven Gould

    Jumper, Steven Gould

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1992 (2008 reprint), 344 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-7653-5769-4

    One of the few good things about the big-screen Hollywwod JUMPER movie is how it brought back in wide circulation Steven Gould’s original Jumper, a much-lauded Young-Adult SF novel that long proved elusive to casual buyers.

    Now that the novel is once more widely available in a tie-in edition, the usual games can begin:

    • How much of the novel was faithfully adapted? (Not much.)
    • Do the changes improve upon the original? (Sometimes, maybe.)
    • Do the changes betray the artistic intent of the original story? (Indeed.)
    • Is the book better than the movie? (Yup, but you already knew that.)

    Little surprise here.

    But while it’s fun and haughty for book-lovers to dismiss the movie adaptation and make of the original novel some kind of flawless gem, it’s more interesting to note that if the film is a piece of hard-to-like nonsense, the novel also has a number of significant flaws. Some of the movie’s most intriguing elements do work better than the book, at least in presenting a plot framework that avoids unforgivable coincidences.

    (Also: while it’s unfair to the author to speak of his novel by looking at it through the lenses of the movie, that’s the only way it’s going to be read for a few years. These are the realities of the cultural marketplace, and they’re included in the royalties earned by the tie-in edition.)

    But let’s start at the beginning: Seconds away from being beaten by his abusive father, teenage narrator David Rice discovers that he can teleport to locations he can picture in his mind. His first jump takes him back to the local public library (which is also the case in the film, but never explained as “the protagonist’s first thought of a safe haven”) where he immediately starts plotting his escape from a life that has nothing to offer him. It’s a rough process: Gould puts his protagonist through tough decisions and harrowing situations as he experiments in order to find the limits of his powers.

    A major thematic deviation from the film takes place as David robs a bank to sustain himself: In the film, it’s a largely entertaining act with little moral consequences for the hedonistic protagonist; in the book, it’s an unpleasant but necessary action that causes even more trouble for David.

    This widening ethical gap only grows larger when the main plots are set in motion. In the film, a secret group of anti-jumper “paladins” hunt down David, drawing him in an underworld of battling jumpers and paladins. In the movie, David gets a personal reason to hunt down airplane hijackers and fight terrorists.

    Surprisingly, it’s tough to decide which plot-line is better: The book’s terrorist thread is precipitated by a coincidence so unlikely that it’s initially hard to accept that the author would use it to move forward the second half of the book. The gradual transformation of David into an anti-terrorist vigilante is equally hard to take seriously: at the rate airplane hijacking take place in the novel, few major airlines would be able to operate. Some of the pre-Internet details (such as using the services of a clipping agency) are now quaintly amusing, but there’s no denying that there are other reasons why this 1992 novel hasn’t aged so well in a post-9/11 world. The movie’s clichéd jumpers-versus-paladins storyline at least has the merit of moving the action along with family intrigue and a decent amount of mystery that is, alas, left to be revealed in an increasingly less-desirable sequel.

    But if Gould’s original vision had one undeniable advantage, it’s in the thematic richness and maturity revealed by David’s quest for vengeance. There are some very nice portraits of anger and how it’s transferred over from covert to overt targets. David is not a happy young man and his gift for teleportation only papers over the problem for a time, until it grows so overwhelming that he’s tempted to go much too far. Despite the tortured plot points, the dramatic arc of the novel is completely satisfying, whereas the movie’s protagonist doesn’t even have morals or ethics to guide him. And there’s no comparison between the twin romantic plot threads in book versus movie, not when the protagonist of the film is such a repellent bastard.

    Despite some of the film’s most hair-raising action sequences, the book definitely keeps an edge when comes the time to consider the smaller details of the action. Informed by the merciless standards of genre Science Fiction, the novel goes in intricate detail to describe the mechanics and consequences of teleportation: it helps that David is smart and able to improvise in order to put all chances on his side. Meanwhile, the film operates without consistency or elementary logic, contradicting and breaking its own rules. The two may not be closely related, but there are things in the movie that won’t make sense until you read the book. (And there are things that won’t make sense no matter what.)

    But anyone who’s made it this far in the review without being interested by any book-to-movie comparison can take comfort in the fact that Jumper, even with its plotting flaws, is a truly enjoyable Young-Adult Science Fiction novel. Its heart is at the right place, the writing is instantly compelling from the very first page, and if aspects of it aren’t as credible now, it remains a small gem. Now that it’s not that hard to find a copy, do yourself a favor and have a look.

  • The Princes of the Golden Cage, Nathalie Mallet

    The Princes of the Golden Cage, Nathalie Mallet

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Night Shade, 2007, 298 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-1-59780-090-7

    Here’s my obligatory disclaimer: I really wanted to enjoy this book. I first met Nathalie Mallet at Vancouver’s V-Con convention in October 2007, but really started talking to her at the following month’s World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga. Like me, Mallet is a fluently bilingual French-Canadian living outside Quebec. Quite unlike me, she now has a novel on sale from an American publisher: The Princes of the Golden Cage, free copies of which were available by the boxful to WFC attendees.

    It’s a noteworthy book for several reasons, the most intriguing of which being that this is Night Shade’s first mass-market paperback publication. Traditionally known as a specialty trade paperback house, Night Shade now aims for a bigger market with this new format, and it speaks much of their confidence in the novel to have selected it as their first title in this new audience-friendly format.

    But you can imagine my anxious hope when The Princes of the Golden Cage finally ended in the pole position of my reading stack: What if I didn’t enjoy the book? After all, fantasy isn’t my genre of predilection: a lot of it bores me, when I’m not being quietly infuriated by the clichés of the genre.

    Since I’m more likely to stay silent than to be overly critical of friends and good acquaintances, you can guess by the existence of this review that I found quite a number of things to like about the book.

    The first obvious distinction is that this fantasy is set in a different mold, partly inspired by Arabian mythology and partly shaped by the demands of palace intrigue. The hero of the tale, Prince Amir, is the son of the Sultan, but that’s not much of a distinction given where he lives: an imperial palace where more than a hundred of the Sultan’s sons subtly compete for the title of heir while they await their father’s death. You can imagine the posturing, but Amir has opted out of the race: by focusing on academic pursuits, he hopes to stand aside from the melee and live a quiet life. Alas, events soon run against him: When his brothers start dying in mysterious, perhaps occult circumstances, he is summoned and put in charge of discovering the murderer. So much for keeping a low profile.

    Further complications arise when he befriends another young man who seems to enjoy an unusual amount of freedom. Then there’s princess Eva, already betrothed and yet so irresistible…

    It’s a fantasy, it’s a romance, it’s an adventure, it’s a mystery, it’s a big tangled web of intrigue and it’s almost immediately compelling. Prince Amir is a fine nebbish protagonist and while he’s not much of a hero at first (I wondered at times if the author wasn’t trying to pull off a BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA inversion of sidekick/hero roles), he’s instantly likable and earns his own little triumphs. The twists and counter-twists piles up almost too neatly with the metronome precision of a tight movie script, but the overly-complicated ending ties it all together with a bow and a nice flourish.

    This being said, it’s regrettable that Night Shade goofed up its new paperback production process and let an unacceptable number of copy-editing mistakes in the book: The number of curious word substitutions clearly shows that a spell-checked manuscript isn’t necessarily free of errors. (Yes, I’m deeply aware of the irony in pointing this out on a review site that riddled with such mistakes. I know, I know.)

    I may not be the ideal or most dispassionate reader for this book, but I enjoyed it more than I thought and almost as much as I had hoped for. It may have a few first-novel rough edges (and the imperfect copy-editing makes me wonder if it wasn’t rushed in production), but I rarely enjoy fantasy novels as much as this one. A sequel, The King’s Daughter is already scheduled for mid-2008: does that mean I’ll have to take a chance and look in that “fantasy” section of the bookstore?