Book Review

  • The New Face of War, Bruce Berkowitz

    The New Face of War, Bruce Berkowitz

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Free Press, 2003, 257 pages, C$41.00 hc, ISBN 0-7432-1249-5

    Released in March 2003, just as Americans were invading Iraq, Bruce Berkowitz’s The New Face of War is already showing a bit of its age.  Seven year later, thanks to two ongoing wars involving the most powerful military force on planet Earth, we’ve seen the new face of war: It’s about IEDs and insurgency and asymmetrical force projection and wireless communication and missile-armed drones.  Then again, age can also mean respectability: How best to evaluate a book dealing with future war than to measure how right it has been years later?

    Perhaps the first thing to do is to ignore the all-encompassing title.  The New Face of War doesn’t present a set of prescriptions and predictions for future warfare as much as it focuses on the changes already imposed by information technology.  It doesn’t get down into the nitty-gritty of what weapons soldiers will be using in the future as much as it charts how military forces have been refining their use of information technology to shorten their decision cycle, read enemy messages, or mount elaborate deceptions.

    For a book dealing rather heavily in abstract strategic concepts of no use to most lay readers, Berkowitz does an impressive job at vulgarizing his subject matter and offering interesting ways to ease into his most esoteric concepts.  In order to explain how information technology is revolutionizing warfare, he starts by drawing an analogy between NASCAR and Formula One, illustrates his point with a lengthy description of the Gulf War’s logistics innovations, touches upon the creation of ARPANET and ends up summarizing his main points about “the new face of war”. [P.75] It takes a special kind of military nerd to jump enthusiastically into a book that draws parallels between the Internet and warfare, but Berkowitz makes it easy with plenty of illuminating links and a helping of wry humour.

    Berkowitz knows his stuff, and the book goes deep in historical examples that are fascinating in their own right.  Perhaps the most interesting parts of The New Face of War are the illustrative digressions taking a quick trip down military history in order to show the evolution of information in warfare.  There’s a fascinating side-note about the development of torpedoes, for instance (including how they relate to The Sound of Music), and a much longer explanation of how accurate positioning systems were developed (from finding a reliable way of determining longitude to the post-Gulf War civilian co-optation of the GPS).

    It probably goes without saying that Berkowitz writes from the paranoid school of military analysis: His view of the world presupposes that America is constantly threatened and that most means are subordinate to the cause of maintaining American superiority.  This can be a bit annoying for foreign readers, or people who don’t have a built-in terrorism persecution complex.  On the other hand, Berkowitz can be reasonable in his analysis: A chapter-long discussion of the ethics of strategic assassination ends up concluding that there is no defensible rationale for it –a far cry from the right-wing pro-torture apologists who seemed to bloom so bloodthirstily during the second half of the Bush administration.

    In evaluating whether The New Face of War had survived the past seven years without losing too much credibility, the conclusion is that the book remains just as interesting and through-provoking now than in 2003.  Events since then have suggested that the information component of warfare remains crucial –US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan vastly out-powered their opponent, but local knowledge allowed insurgents to strike back effectively through very different tactics.  In dealing with a conventionally powerful enemy, insurgents have understood that they must attack in ways designed to take advantage of their strengths and minimize their exposure –a point that Berkowitz explains through the example of terrorist strikes.  Perhaps most striking is what has not happened since the book’s publication.  Berkowitz, despite spending much of his time discussing information warfare, remains sceptical about “cyber-war” and the myth of hackers bringing down modern civilization (or at the very least power plants) through the web –and in fact, there have been no significant incidents of the type since 2003.

    In this light, the years have been kind to Berkowitz’s theses as developed in The New Face of War.  The only disappointment in reading the book is to find out that the author doesn’t seem to have a blog or web site on which we can read about his latest publications.  One wonders what he’s thinking these days…

  • Worth Dying For, Lee Child

    Worth Dying For, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Delacorte, 2010, 384 pages, C$33.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-34431-9

    Lee Child’s fourteenth Jack Reacher novel, 61 Hours, ended in a cliff-hanger of sorts, with the plot resolved but Reacher desperately running for his life.  An epilogue took delight in suggesting that nobody had survived the climactic explosion that ended the novel, worrying fans of the series: Would Reacher be back?

    Of course he is.  As Worth Dying For begins, Reacher is once again travelling through small-town America, this time in the flat wilderness of wintertime Nebraska.  The narrative is obviously taking place after 61 Hours: Reacher is not only bruised and battered; he’s also heading to Virginia in the hope of meeting a character introduced in the previous novel.  Unfortunately, we only get a partial explanation of how Reacher made it out of the dire situation at the end of the last book –if you’re expecting a full answer, you may have to wait until he makes it to Virginia.  The rest of Worth Dying For has nothing to do with 61 Hours.

    In the meantime, Reacher’s got problems to solve in Nebraska.  Outraged by the sight of a beaten-up housewife, Reacher can’t help but investigate the situation and eventually understand how the small community around him has been completely taken over by a family of abusive men.  Add to that a decades-old mystery about a long-missing girl, and Reacher can’t leave such situations alone.  But there’s nowhere to hide in the flat prairies of Nebraska –especially not when multiple teams of enforcers are sent to take care of him.

    Reacher fans won’t be disappointed by this new entry, as routine as it can be at times.  Once you forgive the awkward bridge between 61 Hours and Worth Dying For, it’s another typical adventure for Reacher as an errant knight travelling throughout the US, helping those in distress and dispatching whoever tries to stop him.  He’s a quasi-supernatural protagonist, and it’s sometimes better to consider him as a semi-mythic incarnation of righteous fury than a believable character.

    Still, Child plays the thriller game almost better than anyone.  If Worth Dying For is a bit more stylistically straightforward than the previous clock-ticking 61 Hours, it’s still as good as it can be in describing Reacher’s mixture of brawn and deduction.  In a weakened state, Reacher is more dependent than ever in anticipating his opponents’ actions and the outcome of his duels (one of them pitting him alone against a truck in a field) is highly satisfying.  Anyone worrying about a weakened Reacher just has to wait until he kills a bad guy by punching him in the heart –a medical factoid transformed into a feat of utter machismo that even seems to amaze the protagonist.

    One thing that the novel also does well is exploiting the characteristics of such a desolate location.  There are only two dimensions in late-winter Nebraska, and every single point of human interest within dozens of miles is easily identifiable: When Reacher tries to act, he finds himself limited by a visible lack of options.  Cars are essential to go from anywhere to anywhere, and there are no secrets when human figures and car headlights can be spotted from such great distances.

    Otherwise, there’s not much to report, and that’s part of the novel’s let-down.  For such a grandiose title, Worth Dying For deals in small potatoes: small town, evil family, generic henchmen, desolate settings.  For Child, it’s an achievement to wring that amount of entertainment out of such limited elements, but it comes soon after the small-town drama of 61 Hours, and doesn’t stick in memory like other novels in the series did.

    Still, Worth Dying For is a good standalone entry even despite the disappointing transition between the previous novel and this one.  This being Reacher’s fifteenth adventure, his fans won’t be too disappointed yet, and Child’s continued ability to charm readers is nothing short of admirable.  But 2010 marks the first calendar year in which two Reacher novels were published, and if the results confirm that this is still the best thriller series out there, enough questions have been raised by 61 Hours’ cliff-hanger to suggest a bit of caution.

  • Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold

    Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1997 mass-market paperback reprint of 1996 original, 462 pages, C$9.50 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-671-87845-0

    Given how much I like Lois McMaster Bujold’s Science-Fiction novels, I was recently surprised to realize that I hadn’t read all of them.  I was particularly embarrassed to remember that I hadn’t even read Memory, often considered by fans to be one of the major books in Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan series.  I had read most of what came before and all of what followed, but never that particular novel.

    It’s a mystery as to why I waited this long to finally read it.  Much of Bujold’s SF writing is set in a single universe, revolving around the character of Miles Vorkosigan and his extended family.  Not every Vorkosigan story is told in the same mode or has the same importance: They range from military SF to romance, and they can go from simple entertainment to gut-wrenching drama.  Memory is one of the key texts in the Vorkosigan saga: Deceptively summarized by the publisher as “Miles hits thirty: thirty hits back”, it’s a major novel that marks a definitive transition in Vorkosigan’s life and in the makeup of the series.  There’s definitely a pre- and post-Memory era in the Vorkosigan saga.

    As Memory begins, Miles is still having fun as his alter-ego “Admiral Naismith”, leading his own fleet of mercenaries through dangerous adventures. For him, it’s definitely a more interesting life than being stuck at home as Lord Vorkosigan in a rigid aristocracy.  But things aren’t necessarily going well: Miles is feeling the consequences of a major medical trauma, and is liable to suffer unpredictable debilitating seizures.  This has serious consequences during a hostage rescue mission, and Miles finds himself temporarily grounded as superiors and colleagues review his actions.  Throughout Memory, Miles has to confront the end of his boyhood fantasies, liquidate his invented alter-ego and finally face his future as himself.

    Coming-of-age novels usually feature younger characters breaking out of childhood into something like adult maturity, and the Science Fiction genre certainly has its share of such stories.  But growing up isn’t a binary condition: Kids don’t suddenly turn into adults until the end of their lives: Even adulthood has its stages, and Memory squarely confronts a tricky transition.  It’s a difficult assignment made even more so by the dramatic demands of an action-adventure SF series: Having Miles run around the galaxy blowing stuff up is certainly more exciting than seeing him confront his obligations as part of the aristocracy.  Bujold took huge risks in removing the exciting half of Miles’ identity and definitely scrapping those plotting avenues.

    It also forces Memory to take place largely within Miles’ head.  Oh, there’s a mystery for him to solve in trying to piece together who’s trying to sabotage Imperial Security’s leadership –but that’s thematic underpinning for Miles’ own personal reintegration.  The novel’s most satisfying moments are in seeing Miles come to grip with his life, deciding to get rid of a crutch he had created to fulfill outdated needs, and joining a more challenging society of peers.

    Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Memory is how Bujold is able to create a gripping novel out of self-contemplation.  This isn’t a surprise, of course: Bujold has long been one of SF’s most gifted writers, and the depth of the characterisation she brings to Memory, even through its tangle of subplots, is what fans can expect from her –but the result is satisfying to such a degree that it still feels like a minor achievement.   The self-awareness of the central character is scathing (rare enough in a sixth book in a series) and the process through which he comes to realize how best to live his seemingly diminished life is a crucible that feels just as real to the reader.

    I’m not in a position to suggest how accessible Memory can be to those who haven’t read the rest of the series.  It surely means most to those who care about Miles and his adventures, but my own memories of the series were dated and fuzzy, and the first few chapters of Memory do a fine job at re-establishing the important relationships required to understand the shifting that occurs later in the novel.

    While the mystery aspect of Memory isn’t much of a mystery, the rest of the book’s subplots and central dilemma easily make this one of the important entries in the Vorkosigan series.  Everything clicks, from the plotting to the characters to the prose to the impact of individual scenes.  It ends not with a sense of closing options, but with new opportunities and revitalized characters.  More series should go through this type of premise-defying shakeups.

  • Awake in the Dark, Roger Ebert

    Awake in the Dark, Roger Ebert

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    University of Chicago Press, 2006, 476 pages, $18.00 tp, ISBN 978-0-226-18201-8

    A few months ago, I concluded my review of Roger Ebert’s bad-movies-reviews compendium Your Movie Sucks by promising that I would follow up with a book about his great movies.  Hence Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, a retrospective collection bringing together forty years of interviews, reviews and opinion pieces about cinema.  If nothing else, this collection shows the depth of material available from someone who’s been writing about movies for such a long time.  Even devoting large sections of the book to specific material (such as reprinting his “best movie of the year” reviews), there are enough treats here to surprise and delight.

    The introduction sets the tone, as Ebert describes his first experiences with cinema, and early adventures in the newspaper trade.  A number of interviews follow, most of them from the earlier part of Ebert’s career when he spent more time doing feature pieces.  (An explanation for that is found later in the book, in discussing the stranglehold that press agents now have on serious film journalism.)  Then it’s off to a selection of Ebert’s favourite movies of every year, from 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde to 2005’s Crash.

    I skimmed over the next two sections, about foreign films and documentaries, and didn’t read everything in the overlooked and underrated films segment –but the following “Essays and think pieces” are all interesting, and present a sampling of issues that have infuriated Ebert over the years: the inequality of black actors, colorization of black-and-white films, the lack of a truly-adult film rating in the United States (with consequent infantilization of American cinema), and the appeal of celluloid over digital projection.  The last section, “on film criticism” features a virtual symposium between critics Richard Corliss, Andrews Sarris and Ebert on the future of film criticism.  The coda of the book discusses the early stages of Ebert’s cancer that would eventually rob him of his voice and give him a new one as a top-notch online writer.

    It’s not exactly useful to rate the book on whether you agree with Ebert:  I certainly don’t, especially when he starts feeling nostalgic about the quality of celluloid films over new digital projection technologies.  And I just have to browse the list of his “films of the year” to start rolling my eyes at some choices.  (Crash?  Ergh.)  But the true mark of Ebert’s value as a professional writer is how pleasant to read his pieces remain even when they present disagreeable viewpoints.  It helps that despite decades of experience reviewing films, Ebert still sees them with the eyes of an ordinary filmgoer: It’s not difficult to understand why he still likes the movies, why some of them work better than others, and how much he wants every film to be successful.  Reading a selection of the films he loves is reading about a fulfilled Ebert –quite a different experience than reading one angry pan after another in Your Movie Sucks.

    Trying to fit a forty-year career between two covers is a tough assignment, but the editors responsible for selecting the pieces in Awake in the Dark have done a good job, and while this won’t be the final word on Ebert for a while (especially given the astonishing quality of his current online writing), it’s about as good a career retrospective could be as of 2006.  There’s a lot of fine reading in there –although, since much of the book is made of short reviews or essays, Awake in the Dark is best read in small chunks spread over a long period of time.

    For movie lovers, film reviewers, Ebert fans and anyone interested in critical cinema commentary, Awake in the Dark is an eloquent achievement: An entire life spent watching films, glimpsed throughout hundreds of short essays. It may not be as bitterly amusing as reading six years of awful movie reviews, but it’s far more interesting –and it shows Ebert at his best while discussing the best.

  • Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1, 1907-1948: Learning Curve, William H. Patterson Jr.

    Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1, 1907-1948: Learning Curve, William H. Patterson Jr.

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2010, 622 pages, C$35.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1960-9

    You don’t have to be a Science Fiction historian to understand the massive influence that Robert A. Heinlein had over the genre.  His writing techniques set an example for all writers to emulate (or repudiate), his personality challenged readers to become better human beings and so it’s no exaggeration to state that entire generations of SF enthusiasts have been led by Heinlein’s example.  As a writer, a personality, and a towering figure in the SF community even more than two decades after his death, he is one of the few SF writers of the twentieth century to deserve a massive two-book biography.

    What we get with William H. Patterson Jr.’s Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1, 1907-1948: Learning Curve (count those colons!) is… something impressive, even as the first half of a bigger project.  Alas, it’s not the single best possible account of Heinlein’s life.  Like most authorized biographies, it benefits from generous access to primary sources, but suffers from a lack of critical perspective.  The author has accomplished a herculean task of bringing together a mass of information about Heinlein, but he hasn’t always been able to condense this data into a readable or insightful portrait of the man.

    It may be that the SF community has been spoiled by Julie Phillips’ extraordinary biography of Alice Sheldon, James Tiptree Jr., a fusion of fact and interpretation that remains the gold standard for SF writer biographies.  (Outside the genre, there’s also William McKeen’s biography of Hunter S. Thompson, Outlaw Journalist, to consider.)  Compared to Phillips’ work, this first volume feels flat and bloated, afraid to take a dispassionate stand about its own subject while having a hard time distinguishing between trivia and detail.  Why else spend a page detailing speeches at an Army-Navy game in which Heinlein was only peripherally involved? [P.81]

    We shouldn’t be ungrateful for the sheer amount of detail: This is a “Life and Times of” kind of biography, and if nothing else, readers will come away from the book with a meticulous understanding of 1920s Annapolis, 1930s California Progressive politics and 1940s stateside war efforts.  But if you’re getting the sense that you have to be enthralled by Heinlein before reading the book (rather than let the biography do the convincing), then you’re right.

    Readers without a deep-set case of Heinlein worship are advised to grit their teeth, skip the rah-rah-RAH introduction (in which the death of Heinlein is compared to the assassination of JFK, the Challenger explosion and 9/11) and start reading on Chapter One, which sets the tone for a book that is a great deal more factual that its hagiographical opening would suggest.  Not that the fawning tone entirely disappears later on: Patterson has a tendency to exculpate Heinlein from various errors and lapses of judgement, blaming his wife for a bad signature, not questioning official medical records and generally presuming that Heinlein knew best.  I’m also troubled at how much of the sourcing goes straight back to recollections by Heinlein’s third wife –that is, unchallenged hearsay by a highly biased source.

    This occasional fusion of overwhelming minutia and unquestioning Heinlein fanboyism makes the book feel considerably less accomplished than it actually is.  From various reports on and off-line, I understand that the editing process for the book wasn’t simple (nor, apparently, friendly) and that the result is considerably shorter than the manuscript initially submitted for publication.  The result remains a bit frustrating… about as much so as trying to make sense of the hugely complicated man that was Heinlein.

    Still, having vented my frustrations about the book, here’s why it deserves to be read widely, discussed passionately and nominated for next year’s Hugo Awards: It’s a significant piece of work, it presents new information about Heinlein and it manages to describe the broad strokes of Heinlein’s life during a very badly documented period.

    Even confirmed Heinlein fans will learn quite a few things out of this biography: Heinlein’s first-of-three marriages; the particular nature of his second one; the way he got to Annapolis; his fascination with the occult; the episode in which he nearly became a Rhodes scholar; his unpleasant first Guest of Honour experience at the 1941 Worldcon; the details of his unsuccessful electoral bid; and so many others.  Even dirty gossip gets a bit of space, as we learn of a possible affair between L. Ron Hubbard and Heinlein’s second wife.  (Read the endnotes!)  There is a lot of information here that, to my knowledge, has never received wide publication.  The magnitude of Patterson’s achievement in chronicling the first forty years of Heinlein’s life is magnified by the difficulty of getting this information, by dint of historical distance or by deliberate erasure.  (Heinlein burnt much of his own personal papers in 1947.)  To find so much information unearthed (even via unreliable sources) is a minor miracle and for that reason alone, this biography is a major piece of work that will become a significant starting point to any further Heinlein assessment.

    There’s also quite a bit of merit in how Patterson is able to trace Heinlein’s formative influences, from the rigour of his naval background to his liberal politics within Upton Sinclair’s faction of the California Democratic Party to his post-war reassessment of his political affiliation given the threat of nuclear warfare.  Heinlein’s fiction can argue opposite sides of issues in successive novels, and this biography does a fine job at showing how widely Heinlein’s experience differed from the American norm of the time.   For SF fans, I suspect that the last section of the book, after Heinlein starts selling fiction professionally, is a fascinating look at the development of the SF field at a crucial period.  There are familiar names (Campbell!  Pohl!  Hubbard!  Asimov!) and a strong sense of what the community must have been at the time.

    I also suspect that quite a few early Heinlein devotees will be astounded to read about the genesis of some stories.  One of my first significant SF reads was Heinlein’s Space Cadet, for instance, and I was stunned to learn of the circumstances in which the novel was written –Heinlein practically living as a nomad, in-between marriages, fighting rumours spread by his second wife and desperately trying to make ends meet in difficult circumstances.  Who knew?

    One thing is for sure: This book has created a lot of brisk discussion within the SF field, and will continue to do so for a while.  As with all things Heinlein, the biography is attracting passionate commenters from all persuasions, and some of the best results of the online fur-ball are a good erratum for the biography, and an informed reassessment of Heinlein’s stature within the field.  It’s a significant reminder of Heinlein’s influence still.

    The end result is a complex, meaty, substantive biography that has a number of weaknesses, but still represents the best and most complete look at Heinlein’s early life than we’ve been able to read so far.  It’s not the best Heinlein biography imaginable (I challenge anyone to do better), but it’s assured of a spot on next year’s Hugo Awards short-list, and a long half-life as an significant work of SF scholarship.  Better yet; it prefigures a second volume that will really dig into Heinlein’s fully-matured period.  That one will be a heck of a read, even –especially- if it’s as frustrating as this first volume.

  • The Reversal, Michael Connelly

    The Reversal, Michael Connelly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Little, Brown, 2010, 389 pages, ISBN 978-0-316-06948-9

    The sheer number of Michael Connelly book reviews on this site will confirm that I’m a fan of the author: Connelly writes crisp, efficient crime thrillers, and even average efforts from him feel like top-notch novels compared to the work of other authors.

    For fans, the good news is that The Reversal once again pairs up two of Connelly’s lead characters.  If “Mickey Haller works again with Harry Bosch on a case!” means nothing to you, then go read other Connelly books first (I recommend The Poet).  But if that tagline means everything, then The Reversal is written just for you.

    It starts with, well, an unusual reversal of roles, as defense attorney Haller is offered a temporary prosecution job: An old case involving the kidnapping and murder of a child is being re-opened decades later due to new evidence, and Haller is the best chance to try the case from a fresh perspective.  This soon turns into an extended family affair as Haller gets to collaborate with his ex-wife and gets his half-brother Bosch as lead investigator.  As usual in Connelly thrillers, complications soon pile up.  Haller realizes that his case is tainted and that he’s being set up for a failure.  Meanwhile, Bosch keeps a close track on the newly-freed suspect given the troubling nature of his night-time habits.  It all leads up to a courthouse drama, but one that won’t go according to accepted procedures…

    As with other Connelly thrillers, The Reversal features a mesmerizing mixture of solid plot mechanics, credible procedural details, well-sketched characters and clean prose.  As would suggest the hybrid nature of a novel starring a lawyer and a policeman, The Reversal is somewhere between a courtroom drama and a police thriller, drawing upon each subgenre to complicate the action.  The interaction between both half-brothers seems a bit more hopeful than most of Bosch’s previous collaborations–which inevitably ended with enough bad sentiments against Bosch to make further collaborations unthinkable.  This time, both step-brothers get along reasonably well and even discuss how their daughters could play together.  Other characters such as Rachel Walling briefly show up as reminders of the expansive nature of the Connellyverse.  Meanwhile, Haller’s musings about being on the other side of the courtroom are fresh enough to bring another angle to the usual police-driven Connelly perspective.

    Where The Reversal falters is in its final fifty pages, when the meticulously constructed courtroom drama abruptly goes down in flames as the suspect does something unpredictable.  Abruptly, the novel switches gears to a disappointing ending in which gunplay takes precedence over procedure, and enough action happens off-screen to make us feel as if the novel was concluded in a rush.  A number of threads are left untied, adding to the unfinished impression.  This disappointing finale, added to a novel that doesn’t really attempt anything new, is enough to make even enthusiastic readers conclude that this isn’t one of Connelly’s best efforts.

    Fortunately, it’s still good enough to keep most readers happy and satisfied.  Connelly’s latest few books, however, have generally been underwhelming as well: There’s a limit to what he can do with Bosch (Nine Dragons showed how far he could push it) and few of Connelly’s experiments with other protagonists, including a return engagement for Jack McEvoy in The Scarecrow, have been particularly successful.  While there’s no cause for alarm yet, it’s probably best to put Connelly on some kind of advance-warning watch-list for authors stuck in their own formula.  Sure, he’s doing well with routine entries… but how long can he maintain this streak?

  • 61 Hours, Lee Child

    61 Hours, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Delacorte, 2010, 383 pages, $34.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-34058-8

    Lee Child’s eminently capable hero Jack Reacher has been in a number of desperate situations before, but I don’t think he’s ever been as cold as in 61 Hours.  Taking place in wintry South Dakota, this fourteenth Reacher novel does for sub-zero temperatures what Echo Burning did for the Texan heat.

    The set-up is ingenious: A lawyer is instructed by his incarcerated client to set up a series of events that will end up shaking a small community.  But in his driving haste, the lawyer causes an accident that strands a busload of passengers in the nearby town of Bolton.  Among the passengers is Jack Reacher… and he quickly concludes that the local police force is no match for what’s about to happen.  Asked to protect a crucial witness, Reacher realizes that there’s a lot more going on in this community than anyone could expect… and that many of the answers lie underneath a mysterious military installation not too far away.

    As with previous Reacher thrillers, the chief attraction of 61 Hours is in seeing the hero react to his environment, understand the situation, call upon new friends, use his prodigious powers of deduction, and being slowly led to confront the real threat.  It takes a while for the true plot to reveal itself, and the masterful way in which it takes shape is one of the reasons why Child remains one of the best thriller writers currently in the business.  Lesser authors will envy the skill in which the first chapter is set up, with enough procedural detail, purposeful mystery, powerful narrative hooks and ticking clock.  It’s all there in the first few pages, and Reacher fans will just want to let themselves sink in a good chair and enjoy the rest of the book.

    Most of what follows is just as good as other novels in the series.  After the frantic urban frenzy of Gone Tomorrow, Child is back to heartland America with his depiction of a cold small Dakotan community.  The presence of a supermax prison not too far away sets up a few delightful complications, whereas the nearby abandoned military base is also a rich magnet for revelations.  It climaxes in a fight in which Reacher’s usual advantages are negated, further proof that Child is still interested in mining all sorts of possibilities from his series.

    Barely worth noting is a brief reference to Reacher being identified by the Army as an aggression child prodigy; that, like his freakish gift for numbers in Bad Luck and Trouble, probably won’t ever be referred to again.   Also worth forgetting is the revelation of a criminal informer within friendly ranks: Either Child is getting predictable or he tips his hands way too early, because the mole is far, far too easy to identify even as events are occurring.

    Stylistically, 61 Hours is notable for the dramatic countdown announced by its title: All chapters end up with a reminder of the current time, and how many hours/minutes are left before… something.  That something, alas, ends up being a cliff-hanger ending.  And if you don’t want to hear more about the biggest misstep in the Reacher series since the hypnosis nonsense in Running Blind, skip the next two paragraphs:

    It’s not entirely a cliff-hanging ending: The main plot is wrapped up, the antagonist is punished and the revelations are exhausted.  The only thing left hanging, in fact, is Reacher’s fate: The story concludes with him desperately racing toward an exit, whereas the epilogue describes in rich and meticulous detail why no one could have survived his predicament.  The novel ends without Reacher in sight, most surviving characters concluding that he’s definitely dead.

    But is he?  Peeking ahead to the next Reacher novel, Worth Dying For, reveals an infuriating answer: Reacher is alive (no surprise here), but the explanation of his survival is so vague as to be useless: the various obstacles described in 61 Hours’ epilogue are not acknowledged, and so we’re left with an unfulfilled mystery.  A latter book may fill in the blanks (there are indications that Reacher sets out to meet a character introduced in 61 Hours) but who knows?  Why conclude the book in this way if it’s not going to mean anything?

    If readers can stomach its meaningless cliff-hanger, 61 Hours is another decent entry in the Reacher canon, and further proof of Child’s ability to wring thrills out of small American towns.  The chills felt by readers won’t necessarily be caused by the novel’s glacial setting.

  • Zero History, William Gibson

    Zero History, William Gibson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Putnam, 2010, 404 pages, C$31.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-399-15682-3

    I can just imagine a conversation between myself and a time-traveling SF fan from the late eighties.

    Fan: Is William Gibson still writing?
    Me: He sure is.  In fact, he’s famous; people pay to go see interviews with him, and his latest novel Zero History just came out.
    Fan: Oh wow!  That sounds interesting!
    Me: Actually, it’s a novel set two years ago in which a recovering addict and an ex-rock star go investigate the makers of a mysterious brand of jeans.
    (Lengthy pause)
    Fan: You’ve got to be kidding me.
    Me: No, that’s actually the truth.
    Fan: Your future sucks; I’m off to play D&D with my buddies.
    (poof)
    Me: Aw, and I didn’t even have time to tell him about the iPad.

    The point being that Gibson, perhaps more clearly than any of his Hugo-winning mid-eighties contemporaries, isn’t writing the same kind of fiction than he did.  Why should he?  People grow old, change, become interested in different things and that’s perfectly fine.

    The problem may come when we insist on reading Gibson in the same way we did at first.  It’s not exactly a revelation to say that Gibson is still writing about the same things he did in Neuromancer, except that they are now all around us rather than in some unspecified future.  In many ways, his writing style hasn’t changed: It’s still heavy in visual descriptions, brand names, fashions and attitude.  Behold this sentence:

    After Clammy had decided to go back to the studio, her white plastic bottle of Cold-FX wedged precariously into a back pocket of his Hounds, departing the Golden Square Starbucks during an unexpected burst of weak but thoroughly welcome sunlight, Hollis had gone out to stand for a few moments amid the puddles in Golden Square, before walking (aimlessly, she’d pretended to herself) back up Upper James to Beak Street. [P.47, with reluctant thanks to the Russian hackers who put the entire text of Zero History on-line where it was indexed by Google, so that I could copy-and-paste the passage rather than re-type it in.]

    I went to a live Gibson interview at an Ottawa writer’s festival shortly after reading Zero History, and it’s clear that he hasn’t been interested in being perceived as a Science Fiction writer for a while.  Maybe it’s time to do both the author and the genre a favour and start distancing Gibson from SF: If he still sees the world through a prism shaped by SF, that makes him a genre-friendly mainstream author… but a mainstream author nonetheless.  Gibson would rather write the kind of fiction that Gibson finds interesting than being stuck in genre conventions.  If you squint, you can almost see Zero History as a thriller, but an unusually limp one: Like Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, this novel isn’t really interested in trifles such as narrative tension, plotting, suspense or action sequences.  It may have a laboriously set-up climax in which a hacked Festo floating penguin zaps a villain through a Taser activated by iPhone, but that duct-tape cyberpunk is all of the techno-excitement that Zero History has to offer.

    In fact, the “Bigend trilogy” he’s been working on since Pattern Recognition shows to what extent he is now recasting in fictional form what catches his attention as he surfs the web.  His novels have become inseparable from the Internet in that we’re practically asked to Google his references in describing the world of his novels.  That’s a particular form of reading pleasure, I suppose, but one that’s quite distinct from his eighties fiction.  Let’s appreciate it for what it is.

  • The Accidental Billionaires, Ben Mezrich

    The Accidental Billionaires, Ben Mezrich

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 2009, 260 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-52937-2

    I suppose that The Accidental Billionaires was inevitable: In his previous non-fiction work, Ben Mezrich has shown how much he loves to write about Boston-area young men who go on to make a lot of money, and so one could only count down the minutes until he turned to the Harvard-educated founders of Facebook.  As the book’s sub-title proudly announces, what’s not to like about “A tale of sex, money, genius and betrayal”?  That’s as good a shorthand as any to describe Mezrich’s chosen specialization.

    As usual, it’s best to approach Mezrich’s non-fiction novels without any expectations of journalistic rigor.  Even though The Accidental Billionaires may be better-documented than any of Mezrich’s non-fiction so far, it’s still largely told from the perspective of a single primary source, that is Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who was shut out of the company as it grew to become today’s behemoth.  Mezrich acknowledges this connection up-front, as well as the fact that the better-known Mark Zuckerberg “declined to speak with me for this book despite numerous requests.” [P.2] The Accidental Billionaires may rely on court documents, newspapers articles and public records, but it remains Saverin’s story –the truth, if ever it comes out, will no doubt be considerably less colourful than what’s presented here.

    If this story sounds very familiar, you may have seen David Fincher’s The Social Network, a 2010 movie reviewer’s darling partly due to a snappy screenplay penned by Aaron Sorkin.  While the film is officially adapted from the book, a number of clues suggest that Sorkin used Mezrich’s sources and storyline, then went in his own direction –indeed, even a cursory read of the book after seeing the film will reveal a number of differences: The film is tighter, uses a convenient framing device, and is filled with symbolism that reality (or even the book’s version thereof) would be hard-pressed to provide.  For instance, the book suggests that Saverin’s then-girlfriend did set one of his gifts on fire… although not quite in the way the film presents it: Saverin wasn’t there speaking on the phone as his room nearly went up in flames.

    If nothing else, The Accidental Billionaires is quite a bit more up-front than Mezrich’s other books in acknowledging its loose connection with reality, beginning with an author’s note that admits up-front that a portion of what we’re about to read is fantasy.  But questions of veracity eventually take a back seat to pure entertainment.  Anyone who has read Mezrich’s other works of docu-fiction can assume that he spiced things up in rewriting the story.  He recasts the events in the form of a quasi-novelistic narrative, providing us with scene-setting, dialogue, inner monologue and poignant scene endings.  The only question becomes… is the story interesting to read about?

    It does works well in building a compelling narrative: The Accidental Billionaires is readable in a blink.  Saverin’s betrayal as his former friend Zuckerberg allows him to be replaced at the core of Facebook is well-portrayed even though more sceptical readers will want to consider the source and Mezrich’s tendency to favour drama rather than reality.

    There’s a debate to be had, I suppose, about what standards of dramatization we’re ready to accept, and whether readers are complicit in accepting fanciful tales if they find their presentation enjoyable.  One of the biggest lies told by fiction is that there are such things as narrative arcs, momentous decisions, good or evil motivations, sharp dialogue and consistent personalities.  The Accidental Billionaires is enhanced reality, not a faithful portrait of history.

    Doubts about Mezrich’s work are complicated by a fog of legally binding settlements and greedy motivations: at this time, even solid journalistic work may be unable to reveal the real story.  Considering that Facebook isn’t even ten years old and that all of the principals are still alive, this is both troubling and temporary: Troubling in that we can’t even get a straight answer at this time; temporary because sooner or later, tempers will cool down and we may then finally understand the complex web of motivations behind Facebook’s foundation.  In the meantime, there’s at least an entertaining book to attempt making sense of it.

  • The Last Train from Hiroshima, Charles Pellegrino

    The Last Train from Hiroshima, Charles Pellegrino

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Henry Holt, 2010, 367 pages, C$33.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-8050-8796-3

    When I ordered The Last Train from Hiroshima from amazon.ca in February 2010, the media frenzy around the book had just started: Allegations about the book’s dubious veracity had started to flare up, with numerous experts identifying many mistakes in the narrative.  By the time the book arrived at my house, Pellegrino’s academic credentials had been debunked and the publisher had announced that it was pulling all copies of the book from shelves.  In some sense, my copy of the book had ridden its own Last Train from Amazon: Even today, Pellegrino’s latest remains unavailable from either amazon.com or amazon.ca, being sold by other vendors at premiums making my purchase look like a savvy investment.

    But I’m not the smart one in this story.  Frankly, I ordered the book not because of the controversy, but because I’ve been a Pellegrino fan ever since his 1998 Science Fiction novel Dust.  This had led me, through the years, to most of his bibliography, including a number of very enjoyable non-fiction books.  I won’t try to re-write my reviews: You can go explore my “Charles Pellegrino” tag to point and laugh at my credulity regarding Pellegrino’s so-called non-fiction.

    As I microwave a platter of crow for public delectation, I will at least acknowledge having had some doubts as to whether Pellegrino’s brand of emotionally-driven scientific non-fiction was entirely truthful.  There were so many uncanny anecdotes buried in the text, so many dramatic moments, so many convenient coincidences that I asked knowledgeable people at SF conventions whether Pellegrino was entirely legit, and wasn’t entirely reassured by the answers.

    When the Last Train from Hiroshima story exploded, a lot of people started scrutinizing Pellegrino’s grandiose claims.  Did he really provide inspiration to Michael Crichton’s dinosaur-cloning technique in Jurassic Park?  Is he really a renegade Ph.D. from New Zealand?  Tall tales are tall tales –but when they’re supposed to establish credibility for someone writing scientific non-fiction, they upset the presumption of expertise that readers tacitly bestow upon writers of works informing us about the world.  And once the first domino falls…

    I was frankly reluctant to read Last Train from Hiroshima for the same reasons I don’t usually read older scientific non-fiction: So many things have changed since then that I would be putting bad information in my head.  Would reading Last Train from Hiroshima skew what I thought I knew about the American nuclear bombardments of Japan?

    There’s no good way to read a book about nuclear holocaust when it comes with a constant mental warning saying “All of this may be made-up”.  True to his previous books, Pellegrino milks science and history to their most dramatic extent, putting as much feeling in the narrative as technical details.  Readers approaching the book without prior knowledge of the controversy may feel a twinge or two of pure empathy for those who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to say nothing of the survivors fated to lives cut short by radioactive fallout.  For those who suspect that a good chunk of the book is made up, though, it’s a harder sell.

    Much of The Last Train from Hiroshima controversy surrounds the testimony of Joseph Fuoco, whose surprising claims about the delivery of the American bombs have been cast in doubt by just about every knowledgeable military expert.  Alas –and this really hurts—readers eventually notice that most of the American material in Pellegrino’s book is sole-sourced to Fuoco.  Cut that out and you may as well have half a book.  The scant sourcing of The Last Train from Hiroshima through a thin bibliography might as well douse the flames of doubt.  Add to the that the other questions regarding the content of the book (including Japanese testimony we might as well know nothing about), and the only thing to do is to wrap the book in heavy opaque “Memetic Hazard” tape and shelve it alongside other potentially harmful material as occult woo-woo.  It’s the only sane response.

    And if you think that the damage is limited to just Last Train from Hiroshima, you’re fooling yourself: the doubts extend retroactively to every other non-fiction book that Pellegrino has even touched.  The Jesus Family Tomb had already raked up its share of controversies along with the 9/11 section of Ghosts of Vesuvius, but the one that really rankles is Chariots for Apollo, which I had taken to be a pretty good history of the Apollo program; what’s the quotient of crap-to-fact in that one?

    And that’s the true price to pay for even a few mistakes in non-fiction books: It casts the entirety of Pellegrino’s work in question, no matter how meritorious it can otherwise be.  On the other hand, I’m still allowed to like Pellegrino’s Science Fiction.  Now there’s an irony here that I may savour for a while.

  • The Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi

    The Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Grand Central, 2008, 322 pages, C$28.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-446-58119-6

    Douglas Preston is best known as an author of contemporary thrillers.  Either by himself (Tyrannosaur Canyon, Blasphemy) or collaborating with Lincoln Child (the Pendergast series), he has earned a sizable following as one of the most popular fiction writers.  In The Monster of Florence, however, he switches to non-fiction; first, with a historical description of the serial killer known as “The Monster of Florence” (“Between 1974 and 1985, seven couples –fourteen people in all—were murdered…” [P.5]) and then what happened to him when he got too close to the story (“I was accused of being an accessory to murder, planting false evidence, perjury and obstruction of justice, and threatened with arrest if I ever set foot on Italian soil again” [P.5]). It’s the story of a writer as character, and it’s as good as his novels.

    The Monster of Florence starts innocently enough in 2000, as Preston contemplates a major lifestyle change: having earned a comfortable living as an author, it’s now possible to him to envision living the life he has always imagined for himself.  Why not move to Italy’s bucolic countryside, not too far from Florence, and research a long-gestating murder mystery novel?

    But a chance encounter with a journalist and a mention of his current residence dredges up the sordid story of a serial killer preying on couples.  The first half of the book is a historical account of the crimes.  The second one is far more personal and tells of what happens when a visiting American inadvertently starts making local authorities look bad.  In-between, we get a good look at Florence, a city that has shaped Italy (Florentine upper-class dialect largely defined the Italian language after the unification of the country) and yet, even today, stands apart from the rest of the country due to its self-image as a cradle of fine culture.

    But first, the true-crime aspect: Essentially unknown to American audiences, the story of the Monster of Florence spans roughly sixteen years from 1968 to 1985.  During that time, eight couples were murdered in the hills around Florence where they had sought a bit of intimacy.  Three men have been arrested and convicted for those murders, but many still suspect that the real killer has not been caught; among them is Mario Spezi, a Florentine journalist who has covered much of the case for a local newspaper.  When Preston meets Spezi, he is quickly fascinated by the case, and the suggestion that justice has never been served upon the true killer.

    That’s when The Monster of Florence takes an unexpected turn: As Preston comes closer to the case and forms a team with Spezi, their investigative efforts start annoying the Florinese police forces, who eventually accuse Spezi and Preston with obstructing justice… and more.

    Worth keeping in mind throughout the narrative is Preston’s description of the Italian way of life, fregatura, littered with casual corruption: “doing something in a way that is not exactly legal, no exactly honest, but just this side of egregious.” [P.171]. When you’re a member of the community, fregatura works.  When you’re out, well… bad things happen.  Preston is grilled by the Florinese police forces, then told to get out of the country and stay out.  If you ever want to understand the experience of being intimidated by police authorities while visiting a foreign country, then this is the book for you.  What’s a bit of xenophobic colour compared to permanent exile?  Preston can leave (and does so), but Spezi is in a very different situation, and eventually Preston has to use every bit of influence he has in the media world to try to get his friend out of trouble.

    The first half of The Monster of Florence is ordinary: straight-ahead material, well-fleshed but dealing in criminal mysteries without a satisfactory answer.  It’s the second half of the book that raises it above the background din of similar true-crime stories.  We’re used to see thriller writers as bookish personalities in every way detached from what they write about… so it’s a bit of a shock to see a familiar author dragged into the madness of a criminal case, and the way authorities react to his efforts.  Numerous nods to other thriller figures (chief among them Thomas Harris, who was the first to write about the Monster of Florence in Hannibal) make this book of particular interest to genre readers despite its billing as non-fiction.  Ironically, it’s Preston’s personal story rather than Spezi’s descriptions of the murders that may put you off from visiting Florence.  But that’s what you can expect when a stranger-than-fiction story lands upon a novelist: a crackling good book.

  • Time Odyssey 2: Sunstorm, Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter

    Time Odyssey 2: Sunstorm, Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2006 reprint of 2005 original, 356 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-45251-8

    Freakishly obsessive readers of these reviews have probably noticed a shift in my attitude toward Science Fiction over the past few years.  I read less of it (non-fiction seems more interesting to me these days), I don’t look at it so uncritically and I get less and less patient with its self-indulgences.  Anyone would be forgiven to conclude that I’m slowly moving away from the genre.

    But that’s not true: SF is still my favourite genre, and I’m going to use Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter’s Sunstorm as my proof.  Because the real test of a fan is whether they can still find something worthwhile in an otherwise average genre novel.  Sunstorm won’t go down as any kind of classic (in fact, barely five years after its publication, it has already faded away) and yet I was able to sink into it like a warm comforter.  It’s a book that I can read on auto-pilot, almost without any effort given how close the novel’s assumptions are to my own.  From the moment the dumb premise is explained and the real meat of the novel is exposed, it’s pure classic old-school SF, and it made me smile even though I can acknowledge that I have already forgotten/forgiven most of its dull or ridiculous parts.

    As the second entry in the as-of-yet-unfinished “Time’s Odyssey” series, Sunstorm is supposed to be a follow-up to Clarke/Baxter’s Time’s Eye (2004), but save for a very loose tying of both novels together by common antagonists and a viewpoint character, there’s little link between the two stories.  While Time’s Eye imagined a showdown between Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan on an Earth littered with slivers of its own past for no greater rationale than alien amusement (talk about a fanboy premise run amok), Sunstorm features the same plot-justifying aliens destabilizing the sun.  After an initial catastrophe early in the novel during while the sun pulses once with devastating results, scientists discover that within five years another building pulse of energy will essentially fry all of Earth.

    That’s when the fun begins.  Because while nearly every other non-genre writer would jump on an opportunity to write about a world coming to grip with its imminent destruction, both Clarke and Baxter hail from the old can-do school of SF as an hymn to human ingenuity.  Rather than roll over and wait for the ultimate sunburn, much of humanity unites behind a grandiose project to build a planet-sized shade that will deflect enough of the radiation.

    I have always been very susceptible to engineering-fiction, and so within pages of the project’s inception, Sunstorm was making me purr with details of how such a shield could be launched, built, assembled and steered.  Scientists come up with a series of solutions to bewildering technical problems, religious fundamentalists mount attacks on the project, hardy blue-collar workers assemble everything in orbit, governments mount last-ditch defenses to further alleviate the effect of the impending sun-storm and readers gets to enjoy a classic SF novel.  The prose is direct, the conflicts aren’t complex, the resourcefulness of the characters is considerable and the enemies are clearly identified (so are the fools, who deservedly burn after disregarding helpful scientific advice): Sunstorm can’t claim to sophistication, and that’s part of its charm.  As comfort reading for people having grown up on a certain type of Science Fiction, it’s hard to beat.

    As a follow-up to Time’s Eye, it’s too disconnected to be of much use: It solves no questions and just uses the alien threat as another plot driver.  But as a reminder of how much fun SF can be when it gets down to the essentials of why it exists as a genre, it’s a highly enjoyable read even though it’s not much of an elegant piece of fiction.  SF fans will love it, non-SF fans will dismiss it, and sometimes that’s exactly how genre novels should be.

  • The Town aka Prince of Thieves, Chuck Hogan

    The Town aka Prince of Thieves, Chuck Hogan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Scribner, 2010 movie tie-in re-edition of 2004 original, 364 pages, C$18.99 tp, ISBN 978-1-4391-9650-2

    Sometimes, I wonder if movie adaptations somehow ennoble their source material.  Having been made subject to multi-million dollars films and subsequent marketing campaigns, source novels may be given a patina of respectability that would have completely escaped them had they stayed un-adapted.  Even unconsciously, readers may be tempted to approach them in a better frame of mind.  The movie provides images and sound to the novel’s prose, and so readers may feel as if they’re reading with a subtle wind at their back: they can easily picture characters, read through scenes knowing the overall shape of the plot and enjoy the extra richness of detail that comes from having access to non-spoken exposition, inner monologue and evocative prose.  Reader who, like me, have a habit of holding off on books until they’ve seen the movie always benefit by getting more out of the novel after the movie rather than being disappointed by film after the novel.

    Those screen-to-page comparisons usually work best when the adaptation is reasonably faithful and when both film and book are worth a look.  Pairs like Chuck Hogan’s Prince of Thieves and Ben Affleck’s The Town, for instance.  Renamed on-screen, most likely to avoid any confusion with memories of Kevin Costner’s 1992 Robin Hood film, Hogan’s novel is decently adapted, with enough differences to make happy viewers out of happy readers and vice-versa.

    Set in 1996 Boston, Prince of Thieves studies a professional bank robber named Doug MacRay, a once-promising hockey player who has since recycled himself in the criminal underground as the planner of elaborate bank robberies and armoured-car assaults.  Hailing from the North-shore neighbourhood of Charlestown, Doug and friends are the kind of robbers who do a job every few months, supplementing their cover jobs with extra cash.  But as the novel begins, one member of the group decides during a heist to take hostage a young manager named Claire, a decision that puts extra pressure on the FBI’s robbery unit to track them down and leads Doug to check up on the freed Claire days after the robbery.  Romantic complications soon ensue.  Doug, as it turns out, really wants to escape the criminal lifestyle… but first he will have to come clean to Claire, and find a way to leave his friends behind.

    Criminal thrillers are a dime a dozen, but Prince of Thieves is better than most.  Its most obvious advantage would be the satisfyingly complex plot, which mixes friendships, romance, drama, thrills and procedural details about bank robberies.  Hogan can rely on a plot that allows him to touch upon a number of sub-themes, and the novel is compelling for the way the characters are stuck between mutually contradictory emotions as they try to manoeuver between their loyalties and their true desires.  It’s a rich, old-fashioned narrative, occasionally peppered with a few action scenes.  The criminals moving the novel forward are experts at what they do, and so are the FBI agents tracking them: the result is a detailed look at the state of bank robberies as of 1996, perhaps the last great era for grabbing physical money.

    Hogan can write as well as he plots, and there are a number of turns of phrase in Prince of Thieves that are good enough to appreciate on their own.  His writing isn’t pared-down, but it’s straightforward and evocative.  Needless to say, the novel has a strong lower-class Boston-based atmosphere that ties the characters and plotting together.  It’s the written equivalent to a well-edited film: it just flows forward, rewarding the audience along the way.

    Comparisons between both forms of Hogan’s story will note that the film is lighter on technical explanations, and for some mysterious reason avoids replicating the movie theatre robbery that is one of the book’s standout sequences.  Much of the structure of the book is otherwise kept intact, save for a greatly reduced subplot involving the FBI agent character.  Both versions of the story end up with a daring robbery at Fenway Park and a thrilling chase down nearby streets.  The one significant difference that audiences are likely to remember, however, is that the film has a vastly more optimistic ending –one that delivers full satisfaction on the story’s central emotional conflict.  Seeing the film will allow readers to select their own favourite ending, which is another unfair advantage for adapted works: It’s easy to blend both takes in memory and think about a hybrid version that incorporates the best dialogue, the most striking moments and the most satisfying ending.  When a good novel begets a good film, it’s like getting the best of both medium… and there’s no artificial ennobling involved.

  • Tell-All, Chuck Palahniuk

    Tell-All, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday Canada, 2010, 179 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-66631-2

    Sometimes I wonder how many books it takes for an author to get scratched off from my “buy on sight” list.  I don’t have a definitive answer yet, but I will soon going to have another data point to consider if Palahniuk keeps going like that.  I’m not sure what happened after Rant, but everything he’s done since then has been underwhelming: Snuff couldn’t out-weird its own porn-star inspiration and Pygmy was an unreadable mess.  Tell-All manages to be a bit better than Pygmy, but not by much… and not enough to escape the feeling that Palahniuk may be due for an extended holiday.

    The novel is written as a tell-all from a woman who has spent her life caring for one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.  The stylistic devices that accompany this conceit are a deliberate appeal to movie-script lingo (“Act II, Scene One: For this next scene, we open with a booming, thundering chord from a pipe organ” [P.149]), direct addressing of the reader, repetition of a few barnyard noises, as well as the gossip-column-inspired boldfaced name-dropping of every new person, title, brand or group.

    It’s a measure of how disappointing Tell-All can be that none of the devices seem all that original; that the story itself seems familiar; and that it all feels like a faded black-and-white copy of earlier Palahniuk novels.  The opening sting of the book is “Boy meets girl.  Boy gets girl. Boy kills girl?” and even then you can hear the weary sigh of fans realizing that Palahniuk hasn’t reached any deeper in the bag of plots that the one that drives nearly any romantic suspense ever made.  A quick read through the book only confirms the impression: this is weak stuff and no amount of tepid stylistic tricks can masquerade that lack of interest.

    The execution isn’t entirely dull, but that’s not really high praise coming so soon after the unreadable Pygmy.  It’s not that Palahniuk has been lazy: The novel, taking place around 1960, is peppered by references to long-faded fifties stars.  That does have its own educational value (it reflects badly on me that I had to look up Lillian Hellman to realize that she wasn’t a fictional character), but Tell-All’s historicity offers little other than plenty of whooshing references, wasted winks and further distancing from the novel.  The appeal to nostalgia is undermined from the very first few pages by Palahniuk’s Gen-X sarcasm: I suppose that it makes sense to go back to pre-Technicolor days for a well-mannered story of fatal screen glamour, but he displays too little affection for the time and too much mean-spirited sniping to qualify for the nostalgia bonus.

    For better or for worse, Palahniuk has conditioned his fans to expect more.  Clocking in at a bit less than 200 pages, Tell-All feels both insubstantial and overblown. There isn’t much to gnaw upon, and at the same time it feels too long even midway through.  It’s a short story that has been padded to (barely) novel-length… for which we’re supposed to pay thirty dollars.  Clearly, Palahniuk’s entertainment-for-money ratio has declined precipitously in the past few years.  A quick curious look at the novel’s Amazon rating shows three-stars-out-of-five (with a histogram that peaks at two-stars-out-of-five), which is really scraping the barrel as far as Amazon rankings go.

    At some point, maybe now or maybe next book, it will be useful to start thinking about whether Palahniuk himself is in irreversible decline.  His shock-shtick has peaked in Haunted, and one wonders if the young post-adolescent males most likely to go nuts for his books aren’t turning to uncensored online forums for savage satisfaction.  Sometimes, a writer runs out of things to say and starts coasting on his reputation, and soon it will be appropriate to start wondering if Palahniuk is at that point.

    But now, though, it’s enough that Tell-All is better than Pygmy, in much the same way that a clearly suicidal person has at least taken a step away from the ledge.

  • Divine Misfortune, A. Lee Martinez

    Divine Misfortune, A. Lee Martinez

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Orbit, 2010, 307 pages, C$24.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-316-04127-0

    I have read practically everything by A. Lee Martinez, but only reviewed a few of his books: While his premises are almost always interesting, what he does with them isn’t always worth talking about.  He seems to have one favourite plot structure in his bag of tricks: show a few ordinary oddball characters in amusing genre situations and reveal one of them to be a hidden god fit to do battle against a terrible enemy beyond space and time in a bid to control all of the multiverses.  It’s not a bad plot per se –but like so many other overused things, it really starts grating when it happens over and over again.  A Nameless Witch particularly suffered from this plot device overuse, as did Monster.  Adding to the problem is that Martinez is never as enjoyable as when he’s writing about ordinary people stuck in extraordinary situations: the moment he reaches for the overblown, the metaphysical or the multiversal, I could hear my interest in his books falling to the floor… to remain there.

    With Divine Misfortune, he revisits this familiar plot, as our lead characters are once again stuck in-between warring gods.  But wait!  The premise is, for once, used effectively.  There are fewer surprises on the way from mundane strangeness to all-out divine combat.  Our ordinary character courts divine intervention from the get-go and the framework of the novel’s universe is suitable to such things.  After all, Divine Misfortune takes place in an alternate dimension in which gods are real and can be courted by mortals.  Their influence comes directly from the number of worshipers they have and if everyone wants a piece of Zeus or Yahweh, there are thousands of other gods willing to pay just a bit more personal attention to you if you can prove to be an effective worshiper.  There aren’t many differences between our contemporary North America and theirs, except for video-matching services for suburban go-getters looking for an extra advantage in life.

    People like Teri and Phil, for instance: ordinary white-collar workers looking for a bit of help for their commute and mortgage.  Teri’s never been one to worship a domestic god, but Phil thinks it’s a splendid idea, and before long the couple has settled upon Raccoon-shaped Luka, a minor god of prosperity who will make things go their way… as long as he can crash on their couch for a few days.  The welcome-in party, at least, gets epic as soon as Luka invites his friends…  and some of them start hanging around.  Divine Misfortune may be the only novel so far in which we get a laugh out of Hades being beaten at Death Ninja 3, and at Quetzalcoatl lounging on the couch, “watching telenovellas”.

    In between divine domesticity, we get glimpses at other gods, some of them definitely nastier than others.  So when Phil starts fighting off unusually violent squirrels and being used as a Job-like figure between warring gods, we’re ready for the escalation and the result feels like a logical plot development rather than something thrown in there to lead the story somewhere.  The big finale uses so many gods that it starts feeling like a comic-book cross-over event, but Divine Misfortune never quite completely loses its connection with its ordinary characters, and that’s one of the reasons why it succeeds at the exact point when some of Martinez’ other novels became less and less interesting.

    It goes without saying that the novel is joy to read, in-between the light-hearted details of a universe in which gods can directly influence human destiny.  It’s not a laugh-riot, but it’s good enough to keep up a smile during most of its duration.  While Divine Misfortune doesn’t have the mythological weight of more ambitious fantasy such as Gaiman’s American Gods, it’s after a different kind of impact and it succeeds quite a bit better than many of Martinez’ other books.  It’s probably still a bit too scattered (some of the scenes involving the antagonist felt too long and laugh-free compared to the rest) and the last act gets a bit too dark, but it’s better-handled than most of the author’s other novels –and there’s more basis for comparison there than the usual.  This is Martinez’s best since The Automatic Detective and Gil’s All-Fright Diner; I just hope that he’s got the sense to realize that he’s done the “fights between gods” shtick as well as he possibly can, and that he can now move on to something else.