Book Review

  • The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett

    The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Signet, 2007 reprint of 1989 original, 983 pages, C$8.99 pb, ISBN 978-0-451-16689-0

    This isn’t quite an application of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (“the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information– often an unfamiliar word or name– and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly.” to quote damninteresting.com), but once I started hearing about Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, I started hearing about it everywhere.  Idle musing on which “big thick paperback” to carry along with me on a two-week trip to Australasia netted me two independent recommendations for the novel.  Then the TV miniseries went on the air, which probably in turn explained why I spotted another airplane passenger reading it in the next row.  For a book I hadn’t noticed until a few weeks ago, that’s quite a series of coincidences.

    Oh, I did know about Ken Follett –but until then, I had him pigeonholed as a writer of not-overly-interesting suspense novels, many of them featuring characters for which I couldn’t feel any sympathy.  But The Pillars of the Earth is something very different: An epic historical novel taking place from 1123 to 1174, featuring a large cast of characters all somehow involved in the building of a massive cathedral.  Not my usual kind of novel either but hey –it was big, thick and looked as if it could keep me interested during no less than eight plane flights in seventeen days.

    The risk, of course, was that the novel would prove to be a dud, and that it would fall from my hands after a few dozen pages.  Then I’d be stuck with it for a seemingly endless time.

    I shouldn’t have worried: From the very first pages, Follett does an exemplary job at establishing his characters and throwing them into difficult situations.  In the first chapter, in fact, one of our characters has his most precious property stolen, kills the thief, loses his wife in childbirth, abandons his child, sleeps with another woman and discovers that his newborn has been rescued by a monastery.  This is hard-core shock plotting, and it works unbelievably well at establishing the tone of the novel: The Pillars of the Earth is epic, harsh and pulls no punches in its depiction of twelfth-century England.  There’s as much violence as there are sex scenes –and a number of those sex scenes are violent as well.

    As with many good historical novels, The Pillars of the Earth is a mixture of modern values and historical attitudes.  The strong female characters clash with the restrictions of the era, the powerful church routinely interferes with the weak kings (it’s not as if there’s just one of them either) and a number of the things we take for granted (say, the rule of law) are still hundreds of years in the future.  Follett gives a good idea of how it must have been to live at the time, and the result is absorbing from beginning to end.

    As far as plotting is concerned, it’s a mixture of dastardly villains, pure-hearted heroes, sins committed for pure reasons and spiteful accidents.  Many characters die (some of them unexpectedly), but pretty much everyone gets what they deserve in the end.  The cathedral around which the plot revolves is built, abandoned and rebuilt more often than you’d think.  There are some coincidence-dependent plot junctions, but they don’t feel as arbitrary as predestined.  The pacing only flags during the last section of the novel, which tends to diffuse itself rather than end on a high note once the plot-lines are resolved.

    But it all amounts to an extraordinary reading experience, indeed one that is only available from big thick books such as this one: The Pillars of the Earth is an epic in the unadulterated sense of the term, and readers will be able to be comfortably absorbed by the novel until it ends.  It lives up to my friends’ hype as an amazing novel… and one that’s well worth taking along on a lengthy trip.

    For Follett, it also represented a radical shift from his more familiar cookie-cutter thrillers, and one that he still seems to enjoy: The Pillars of the Earth was only followed by sort-of-sequel World without End in 2007, but Follett now seems to be in the middle of writing a trilogy of historical novels covering the entire twentieth century.  It’s heartening to see an author taking such a chance and being rewarded for it: Another proof, if any other was needed, that it’s a good idea to write whatever you want and worry about market expectations later.

  • The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson (translated by Reg Keeland)

    The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson (translated by Reg Keeland)

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Viking Canada, 2009 translation of 2007 original, 563 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-670-06903-3

    The story surrounding Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is often as interesting as the trilogy itself: Larsson, a left-wing Swedish journalist known for his anti-fascism investigations, turned to fiction writing late in life and delivered the first three books of a series before dying of a heart attack.  The books became a sensation throughout the world, finally landing in North America in 2009-2010 alongside their own movie adaptations.  While rumours abound that a fourth semi-finished manuscript exists, it does so on a computer belonging to Larsson’s long-time partner, who is now locked in a legal battle with the rest of Larsson’s family for a piece of the author’s estate.

    This has little relation to what a review of the third volume of the trilogy should be talking about, except for the open-ended question of whether this is truly the final volume of Mikael Blomvkist and Lizbeth Salander’s adventures.  The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest picks up moments after the events of the second volume, as a badly wounded Salander is airlifted to one of Sweden’s best hospitals.  Drama follows when her equally-wounded father/enemy ends up in a room not too far away.  If the previous volume The Girl Who Played with Fire was about revenge, this one is about the consequences of going after one’s enemy with an axe, as the question of whether the Swedish state considers Salander capable of acting on her own comes back to the forefront.  It doesn’t help that she has earned the attention of a powerful faction within Sweden’s own secret services, and that they won’t stop at anything to eliminate the threat…

    Readers who have made it this far in Larsson’s series will be pleased to note that this third volume delivers everything they’ve come to expect from him: A lavishly detailed procedural novel written from an activist point of view, criticizing the underbelly of the Swedish Social-Democratic model –particularly the way it treats women.  Blomvkist once again feels like a Gary-Sue idealized representation of the author (he manages to seduce another female character without doing much more than showing up), and even gets an action scene of his own.  Salander is up to her usual tricks, except for having forgotten her Fermat Theorem Proof in the aftermath of surviving a bullet in the head.  (It’s amusing how insane this sounds once summarized from Larsson’s multi-page explanations.)  It all leads to courtroom drama, and a conclusion that not only provides a happy ending for Salander, but obliterates all of her enemies.  Given the black-and-while nature of the series so far, few will be surprised when it’s revealed that people who oppose her are all violent, stupid, and/or guilty of horrible other offenses.

    The conclusion is curiously satisfying when it shows the Swedish state activating its own self-policing mechanism: the conspiracy is taken down by the proper authorities, and not through some American-style idealized personal vendetta.  It’s one of the challenges of left-leaning writers to portray an effective and compassionate state when the unspoken rule of thrillers is that official corruption always runs deep: Larsson manages quite a deft success in portraying how even the heroes can benefit from some official help.

    Fans of the films will note once again note how much more material is in the book, from a top-level meeting for Blomvkist to an entire subplot taking place at another newspaper.  But that amount of new material also betrays Larsson’s biggest problem: An inability to tell a story efficiently.  There is no need, for instance, to begin the book by spending two pages describing how an American neurosurgeon is asked to assist in Salander’s brain surgery.  At times, the book feels like a lengthy third act to a story that could have been published as a single volume.  It’s exasperating, and the amount of stuff never shown and never missed in the leisurely-paced films adaptations suggests how much fluff there is in the series.

    Alas, we’ll never know for sure if Larsson would have written the other planned volumes in his series in a more economical fashion.  It’s ludicrous to believe that this will remain the final Millennium volume: At a time where napkin premises from long-deceased Robert Ludlum are being expanded in entire trilogies written by other authors, there will be other adventures for Blomvkist and Salander.  They may even be based on Larsson’s actual notes.  But they won’t have the surprise kick that propelled them to such popular attention.

    Considering that Larsson’s books were reportedly the first translated novels to hit the top of the English market’s best-selling list, it’s not as if he has anything left to prove, even posthumously.

  • Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden

    Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Penguin, 2000 revision of 1999 original, 392 pages, ISBN 0-14-028850-3

    Even casual collectors know that the first edition of a book is almost always worth more than any subsequent printing, even more so when the book has enjoyed some success.  The first edition presents the book as it first arrived in the world, without too many expectations or any idea of its true impact.  A nice signed first edition copy of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club or Barack Obama’s Dreams of my Father (to pick two high-profile examples) could have, at their author’s peak popularity, netted you a few thousand dollars.

    But for readers, sometimes it’s better to get a latter, updated edition –especially with nonfiction books: They can include updated information and conclude the narrative arc a bit more firmly.  So it is that a fine first edition of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down will cost you a few dozen dollars, but a far cheaper paperback edition will get you an updated afterword that explains how the book became not only a commercial success, but a classic of military writing and an enduring epitaph of its subjects along the way.  After all, many readers of this review will have heard about Ridley Scott’s 2001 movie adaptation, and associate the city of Mogadishu with what the back cover of the book describes as “the longest sustain firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War”.

    Which isn’t all that bad considering that when Bowden set out to write the book, the events were on their way to collective oblivion: Americans don’t like to think about their military defeats, and their intervention in Somalia practically qualified as such. As one of the more acute manifestations of the US’s self-image as the world’s policeman following the end of the Cold War, Somalia interrupted the triumphalism of the Gulf War and pushed Americans toward a more cautious foreign policy… at least until 2001.  The turning point of that Somalian adventure was the battle that Bowden describes in Black Hawk Down: a routine capture mission that turned spectacularly wrong when two helicopters were downed and American forces had to fight their way into the city to rescue their own.  The engagement lasted for hours and by the end of it, Americans had suffered nearly a hundred casualties –and left ten times as many Somali dead or wounded.

    Black Hawk Down tells the story of that engagement as a narrative: Based on personal recollections, recordings of the events, contemporary documentation and other sources familiar to investigative journalists, Bowden meticulously reconstructs the battle from as many perspectives as he can, then attempts to present the events as a story with recognizable characters.  The result isn’t just an exceptional piece of reporting: it’s a suspenseful, compulsively readable account of what it feels like to be under fire.  Bowden is able to get in the soldiers’ heads and portray the strange mixture of excitement and terror that comes from mortal danger.  Such credible portrayals are rare, and it’s no wonder if Black Hawk Down became mandatory reading for a generation of American military officers.  The decade since its publication may have been tumultuous in terms of geopolitics, but its impact remains: The images that we get from reading the book aren’t that different from the ones broadcast during the American invasion of Iraq.

    When Bowden started working on Black Hawk Down in the mid-nineties, he wasn’t the most likely writer to attempt such a project: An investigative reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, he had none of the military knowledge or unofficial connections one would presume from the final result.  But as he explains in the revised edition’s afterword, he attacked the subject like the reporter he was, and it may be this outsiders’ perspective that makes the book so accessible to various kinds of audiences.

    What’s more, Black Hawk Down has found another niche as an enduring remembrance of everyone who was involved in the events.  For a military engagement that seemed destined to be forgotten, the “Battle of the Black Sea” has, thanks to Bowden and the film adaptation of his work, now been given it due.  And the book remains as an acknowledgement of what soldiers go through in modern military engagement, portraying them at their best when confronted by the worst.  More directly, though, Black Hawk Down is a perfectly-mastered book that will continue to astonish readers for a long time, no matter which edition they can get.

  • The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

    The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Back Bay, 2002 revision of 2000 original, 301 pages, C$21.95 pb, ISBN 0-316-34662-4

    Ten years after publication, I come to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point like a teenager trying to get to a wild party the morning after: The event is over, everyone has gone home, every scrap of nourishment or entertainment has been picked clean and even those who were arrested for disorderly conduct are now home after making bail.

    OK, that metaphor overextended itself, but my point is that there’s really nothing new to say about Gladwell’s book debut that hasn’t already been said by other smarter reviewers.

    By now, for instance, Gladwell’s modus operandi is well-known: He will consider an off-beat idea, bolster it with anecdotes, refer to some real academic work on the subject, link it thematically to other known examples and wrap up everything in accessible, even compelling prose.  Gladwell wasn’t the first socioeconomic vulgarizer, but it’s worth wondering if his popularity hasn’t been largely responsible for Freakonomics and its endless cohorts.  You do feel smarter after reading Gladwell and his colleagues, but it’s never too clear if it’s just an impression.

    Most of those overall qualities are obvious from his book-length debut The Tipping Point, a book that studies how an accumulation of small changes can abruptly produce a dramatic effect.  Despite Gladwell’s assertions that this is a counterintuitive idea, it really isn’t new –having been enshrined in popular culture through expressions as common as “the straw that broke the camel’s back” and, indeed, the “tipping point” of the title.  It’s a bit of an achievement that Gladwell never once mentions catastrophe theory (“sudden shifts in behavior arising from small changes in circumstances”), despite decades of mathematical research in such matters.  But that’s OK: Gladwell is in the business of selling books (many of them to so-called serious decision-makers), so it’s in his interest to pretend that this is all new stuff.

    On his way to a demonstration of his topic, Gladwell takes many roads, many of them eloquent in the narrative power of anecdotes rather than convincing research supporting his assertions.  Some scepticism, obviously, is warranted… especially in soft-science fields in which conclusive proof is so difficult to obtain.  For Gladwell, data seems to be the plural of anecdotes, and the stories he chooses to illustrate his sub-theories are often so much fun to read that readers can be expected to overlook that they are merely a few successful instances of his book’s thesis.  Tales in The Tipping Point include a look at the success of the novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, the resurgence in Hush Puppies, the Sesame Street / Blue’s Clues model of television shows and Airwalk’s destructive flirtation with mainstream success.  It’s wrapped up in enough psycho-babble to convince anyone that these are examples to emulate.  You can almost picture businessmen studying the book, stroking their chins and thinking Yes, this book will lead to increased sales!

    But this cynical take on Gladwell’s narrative strategies minimizes the reading pleasure of his prose.  His writing skills, honed after years in the newsroom, are able to grab readers’ attention quickly and guide them through a series of complex arguments.  Among other successes, The Tipping Point features a crystal-clear explanation of the Broken Windows theory of social decay, and the wide variety of sub-themes is enough to make intellectually-curious readers race through the book in search of the next big memetic discovery.

    I’m certainly not immune to the springboards that Gladwell builds in his book.  A brief explanation of how ethics are often largely circumstantial had me thinking out loud about making a moral argument for proper planning and preparation: Someone in a hurry or without alternatives is often forced to make choices that run counter to ethics, thrift or good social graces.  In this context, being prepared is one way to ensure virtuousness.  (But I say this as a former Boy Scout…)  Anyone reading The Tipping Point next to friends and loved one should be aware that they’re liable to keep up a stream of quotes, paraphrased ideas and grunted hunhs fit to annoy anyone within earshot.

    Fortunately, it’s this quality that makes The Tipping Point such an essential read even after ten years of being picked apart by various people.  It’s a fascinating launching pad for ideas of your own, it connects together different fields in fascinating ways and it remains a highly readable work of pop sociology.  It’s also a great introduction to the rest of Gladwell’s work: given his pre-eminence as a public intellectual, you might as well start somewhere in reading everything he’s done, right?

  • For the Win, Cory Doctorow

    For the Win, Cory Doctorow

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2010, 475 pages, C$19.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-2216-6

    Trying to summarize Cory Doctorow’s latest novel For the Win in a few words is an exercise in frustration, because with every “didactic” comes along a “fascinating”.  It’s a logical extension to Doctorow’s bibliography so far… except that it sometimes appears to flip over the libertarian ideology of Makers.  It’s perhaps Doctorow’s least pleasant reading experience so far… except that when it stops telling a story, it can be really good.

    For the Win is Doctorow’s second novel for the Young Adult market, and like Little Brother it’s using that readership to indulge in some blatant speech-making.  It can’t help but try to explain how the world works, and those interludes are often far more interesting than the plotting surrounding them.

    Briefly summarized, For the Win is about online multiplayer games and the strange economic phenomenon surrounding them.  The uninitiated may find this a trivial subject for discussion, but there’s a lot more under the surface that it may appear at first.  Consider that the target audience for those games are often first-world gamers with more money than time.  Combine that with gaming mechanics that are designed to keep players coming back to “grind” their way up in search of infrequent payoffs and you already have the raw elements for global exploitation, via the use of third-world workers (often children) who have a lot more time than money… and none of the protections afforded to employees in developed countries.  Could it be time to unionize?  Mix well, and you’ve got the elements of Doctorow’s uniquely contemporary thriller.

    Does it work?  In many ways, For the Win is so admirable that it doesn’t really matter if it does.  Take, for instance, that none of the main teenage characters in the novel are purely American –the only one who hails from California is such a Sinophile that he adopts a Chinese name throughout.  The rest of the characters are largely from developing countries, lending a pleasantly globalized feeling to the entire novel.  Not that it could have been otherwise, given the networked nature of its plot devices and the globetrotting scope of the narrative.  For the Win inhabits the world of the present, not some fading refraction of yesterday’s futures.

    It gets even better once Doctorow starts making links between the nature of gaming, the illusion of modern economic derivatives, the inadvertent exploitation of third-world teens by clueless first-world gamers, and the opportunities that well-connected youth have in bettering their lot in life.  Politically, I couldn’t help but be struck by the way For the Win espouses a leftish drive for unionization and tries really hard to make it fit with the increasingly swim-or-sink nature of Doctorow’s latest Makers.  There may not necessarily be a conflict once you can reconcile information-network libertarianism with worker’s right regulation, but it amounts to a complex multi-book political exploration for Doctorow, one that recalls (gasp) Heinlein’s ability to argue several points of views in successive novels –and one that also follows in Heinlein’s didactic footsteps.

    Snappy exposition aside, For the Win‘s highlights also includes a number of showcase sequences that stick in mind not for their narrative content, but for their geek wish-fulfillment power.  For instance, Doctorow lavishly imagines what it would be like to engineer your own transpacific trip via a shipping container custom-modified to act as a long-haul dwelling… complete with high-speed Internet access.  It’s the kind of bravura sequence that doesn’t really need a story, which is just as well given the lessened interest that much of the book’s plot can hold for some readers.  For the Win is full of fascinating bits, but the structure holding them together is more interesting for what it allows than the way it bolts it all together.

    But does it matter?  Doctorow’s fans are unlikely to be put off given how closely For the Win follows on the footsteps of his previous works.  Reviewers are unlikely to give the novel less than good notices for everything it does right, even though much of the story itself may lack narrative excitement.  Meanwhile, critics will jump on it and delight at whatever meaning they can tease from its chapters and links with other up-to-the-moment fiction like William Gibson’s Zero History.  Oh, and teenagers will love it.  Given all of those wins, why hold on to old-fashioned narrative values?

  • Playing for Pizza, John Grisham

    Playing for Pizza, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 2007, 262 pages, C$26.95hc, ISBN 978-0-385-52500-8

    Something very strange happens to best-selling authors once it becomes clear that they can write anything and still get it published.  In some cases, their editors become powerless to stop them from ranting about their wacky pet theories, and the result is a body of work that becomes crazier and more insular as it goes on.  John Grisham’s case is a bit more complicated, as he’s been taking more and more chances writing outside the type of novel that have made his reputation.  Skipping Christmas was a first attempt, and Playing for Pizza is just as complete a departure from Grisham’s legal-thriller roots.  It’s an Italian travelogue like The Broker, except without the serious thriller angle.  And while it’s one of the least consequential pieces that Grisham ever wrote, it’s still as enjoyable to read as anything else from him… even though you may not remember much of it a day later.

    The premise is a joke in itself, as a football player wakes up to find that he’s just fumbled a crucial game in the most enraging way possible.  Unable to find a job anywhere in North America after his very public humiliation, he accepts one of his agent’s most desperate suggestion and leaves for Italy, where he ends up on a quasi-amateur football team while waiting for the storm to settle back home.  Once settled in Parma, however, our protagonist comes to enjoy the scenery, make friends, settle scores with a mean American sports journalist (by punching him in the face, as football jocks are wont to do in settling their issues with impunity) and rediscover himself.  He also –spoiler- wins a few games along the way.

    If you’re looking for more plot, grab another Grisham book.  There isn’t much more here to Playing for Pizza than detailed description of la dolce vita as our protagonist plays tourist, then becomes an apprentice-citizen in Parma.  The football games are always followed by pizza among friends, and it’s this kind of relaxed atmosphere that ends up being the novel’s main preoccupation.  If you’re a North American having traveled to Europe, this kind of narrative will feel intensely familiar.  Strange customs!  Language issues!  Non-American lifestyles!  No parking anywhere!  Influent friends fixing problems with the law!  (For the dark side of this charmingly corrupt Italian lifestyle, read Douglas Preston’s more harrowing experience in The Monster of Florence.)  It’s a novel where you sit back and enjoy, and maybe make a note to head for the closest Italian restaurant in order to enjoy some of the food lusciously described every few pages.

    It often reads a lot like The Broker, a previous novel in which the author used his holidays as an excuse to set a novel in Italy.  This time, however, Grisham has dispensed entirely with the burden of suspense and just freed himself to write about food, tourism, football and romance, with a tone that’s all smiles.  It’s likely to appeal to a number of possible readers, but is it enough?

    Part of the problem with Playing for Pizza is that the protagonist isn’t much of anything.  A failed football player who finds that it’s better to be a big fish in a small bowl; who gets the girl for no other reason that he’s the hero of the novel; who punches people in the face when they displease him and gets away with it.  You can see how that kind of character appeals to a strong streak of wish-fulfillment, but the danger of such indulgences is that they can reach a narrow public and feel obnoxious to anyone who doesn’t identify with it.  This limits the novel’s appeal and contributes to its inconsequentiality: It’s not a hard novel to read, but try to remember something from it more than a few hours later and you’re liable to picture Northern Italy, food, small cars and maybe a few football scenes.

    This, obviously, is what Grisham intended, and a chunk of the novel’s charm is seeing the author indulge himself in a bit of meaningless fun.  Not everything has to be about southern lawyers tempted by corruption, or even about serious plot mechanics.  If Grisham is willing to use his bestselling credentials to write this kind of book –turning holiday memories in another crop of royalties–, then who are we to begrudge him his fun?  At least he’s not jumping on a soapbox and telling us about a shape-shifting lizard conspiracy threatening the world.

  • Scott Pilgrim, Bryan Lee O’Malley

    Scott Pilgrim, Bryan Lee O’Malley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Six-book series made of…

    • Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, 2004, Oni Press, ISBN 978-1-932664-08-9
    • Scott Pilgrim vs the World, 2005, Oni Press, ISBN 978-1-932664-12-6
    • Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness, 2006, Oni Press, ISBN 978-1-932664-22-5
    • Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together, 2007, Oni Press, ISBN 978-1-932664-49-2
    • Scott Pilgrim vs the Universe, 2009, Oni Press, ISBN 978-1-934964-10-1
    • Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour, 2010, Oni Press, ISBN 978-1-934964-38-5

    Publishing success doesn’t often correlate with anything resembling quality, so it’s satisfying to see that one of the biggest comic series of the past few years has been Bryan Lee O’Malley’s idiosyncratic Scott Pilgrim.  Now ending its run with a sixth volume and the near-simultaneous arrival of its movie adaptation, O’Malley’s unlikely success blends a look at post-teenage male romance, videogame-inspired personal mythmaking, a deeply Torontonian setting, sharp writing, great characters and hilarious moments.  I first climbed on board the series when the fifth volume was released, but the movie adaptation gave me a great excuse to re-read the entire story in a single gulp, and revisit what makes it click.

    I am, I’ll admit, too old and too square to truly empathize with much of the series: I’m now a good decade older than the series’ cast of characters, and my own path through life has been the university-to-cubicle professional fast-track rather than the kind of erratic McJobs-and-clubs slacker universe in which Pilgrim and friends live.  But Scott Pilgrim nails that post-teenage lifestyle in stunning detail: that slice of time not quite shackled by the demands and disillusions of full adulthood, in which people come to define themselves now that they don’t have to attend classes.  Pilgrim and friends are free to exist away from their parents, live in tiny apartments, hang out at hip venues, play in garage bands, work occasionally, and get mixed-up in complex romantic entanglements.  Their universe is one of pop-culture references inspired (unlike previous generations) by videogames, their personal mythologies defined by gaming heroism as much as anything else.

    So it is that the series begins with “Scott Pilgrim is dating a high-schooler!” and ends with “So… we try again.”  In-between, it’s pure Canadian magical realism as Pilgrim falls for a mysterious girl named Ramona and must fight her seven evil exes in order to earn her affections.  That’s the plan, at least: the actual path to romantic bliss isn’t quite as clear-cut, especially when Pilgrim realises how much of “a crummy boyfriend” he’s been.  The last volume of the series is particularly unkind to its hero –and surprising to readers not expecting Scott to grow up in a hurry.

    But as with many other graphic novels, Scott Pilgrim is more memorable for its page-per-page execution than its narrative satisfaction.  O’Malley peppers his series with a near-constant stream of small delights, whether it’s a number of Torontonian references, self-aware patter, absurdly fantastical plot devices and musical moments.  The series breaks the fourth wall frequently, but doesn’t cheapen its characters’ problems.  It’s such a compelling reading experience that every time I reached in my stack of volumes to check details, I ended up re-reading dozens of pages.

    As a hip must-read reference for the younger set, it’s something that even the older ones among us are nearly certain to enjoy.  The cutting-edge references exist alongside gaming metaphors that will be familiar to anyone who has stepped in an arcade back in the eighties, and they all serve to pump up a universally appealing male romance to sustained reading enjoyment.  Don’t miss it (especially if you live in or near Toronto) and let it comfort you that, sometimes, sale numbers do point at something worthwhile.

  • Pygmy, Chuck Palahniuk

    Pygmy, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday Canada, 2009, 241 pages, C$29.95, ISBN 978-0-385-66629-9

    Ever since discovering Chuck Palahniuk’s brand of outrageous fiction a decade ago, I have sometime wondered what it would take for me to really dislike one of his books.  Once you’re suitably jaded at the violence, perversion and generally antisocial behaviour of his novels, it’s hard to raise an eyebrow at his ever-increasing outrageousness.  Palahniuk is a professional provocateur, and there’s an ongoing game between him and his readers to see who blinks first.

    Now, with Pygmy, I know what makes me blink… and it turns out to be bad grammar.

    From the distance of a plot summary, there’s little in Pygmy to scare away Palahniuk’s usual fans: As the novel begins, a young trained assassin from an unspecified totalitarian regime lands in America to be adopted by a typical American family.  But this turns out to be one facet of Operation Havok, a plan to place sleeper agents in American cities where they can directly attack the Midwest way of life.  Our narrator knows everything worth knowing about America, Americans and how to kill them: He’s got intricate martial arts training, the ability to smell people down to their most intimate secrets and the equivalent of a post-graduate degree in terrorism.  Now imagine him dealing with a typical High School and you can imagine the fun.  Raised in a totalitarian regime to despise everything America stands for, it’s not a surprise if our narrator describes suburban life in utterly alien terms.

    It wouldn’t be a Palahniuk novel without the usual amount of blood, sex and over-the-top personal behaviour.  Never mind the adoptive mother’s unquenchable passion for vibrators: Barely three chapters into Pygmy, our narrator takes revenge on a bully by brutally sodomizing him –thus unleashing a latent homosexual passion that, once spurned, leads to a high school shooting midway through.  This is fairly tame material for Palahniuk readers, who have come used to far more disturbing stuff.  It helps that Palahniuk never forgets to be intensely (if darkly) funny in most of what he writes: Pygmy has a splendid opportunity to comment on modern Americana and makes the most out of it.  Perhaps the best sequence of the book is a Model United Nations featuring a bunch of horny teenagers, leading to such instant-classic lines as “Sri Lanka says Afghanistan has the biggest crush and could totally jump the bones of Morocco.” [P.84]

    But one of the reasons why this sequence works is that you can actually understand much of it.  Otherwise, Pygmy is narrated in approximate broken English, a stylistic choice which quickly goes from odd to exasperating.  Eventually, as the narrator develops his own way of describing suburban normalcy, we’re asked to decode paragraphs such as this one:

    For official record, additional reside aboard bench cushion vast breathing cow, host father.  Twitching chicken, host mother.  Dual host parent unconscious splayed wide limbs spread, neck muscles lolling heads loose until rest own shoulders, lips loose, trickling long ropes translucent saliva.  Unconscious, breathing prolonged liquid inhales, loud sputtering exhales. [P.101-102]

    This is irritating enough in small doses; now imagine an entire 240-pages book of it.  Reading Pygmy gave me horrible flashbacks to my abortive attempts to read James Joyce: my eyes skipping from one familiar word to another and my brain rejecting any attempts at making sense of the sentences, eventually resolving meaning from loose associations and accumulated context.  It’s unpleasant like little of Palahniuk’s fiction has been so far –and I kind of liked “Guts”.

    Add to that the usual Palahniuk recurring motifs used with ever-lessening effect (Repeating periodical table elements?  Now you’re reaching), the uneasy tension between the satire and the dirt-serious mechanisms of indoctrination, the too-brief usage of the book’s best character (a “cat sister” worth an entire book by herself), the often-lazy satire and the flaws of the book don’t accumulate as much as they multiply… and the result seems to confirm Palahniuk’s sliding standing ever since 2007’s Rant.  There are rewards in this novel, but they’re slight and unpleasant to decode.  Maybe it was a good thing if Pygmy waited a year in my to-read pile before being revealed as a disappointment: Now I can jump over to follow-up Tell-All and hope that it gets better in a hurry.

  • Horns, Joe Hill

    Horns, Joe Hill

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2010, 370 pages, C$27.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-06-114795-1

    Joe Hill is one of the most brilliant new horror writers, one who justifies the recent migration of genre horror novels from mass-market paperbacks to hardcovers.  His second novel, Horns, follows in the footstep of his debut Heart-Shaped Box in showing how, unlike some of his more gore-oriented colleagues, Hill seems to be using horror as a mechanism through which damaged characters can work out personal issues, rather than an end in itself.

    Hill’s stories usually begins with an intriguing character, and our protagonist Ignatius Martin Perrish (“Ig” for most of the novel) is an interesting guy: Physically frail, member of a rich and influential family, blessed with the love of a good woman, Ig saw his good fortune disappear when his girlfriend was found murdered a year before the novel begins.  Immediately suspected of killing her, Ig was never formally charged… but in small north-eastern towns, it doesn’t take paperwork for a community to condemn someone.  As Horns begins, Ig has spent a year in purgatory, consumed by grief, unable to work and ostracized even by his family.  On the first anniversary of the murder, Ig goes out, gets drunk and indulges in minor desecration.  The following morning, he wakes up with horns growing out of his forehead, and an uncanny ability to make other people blurt out their darkest, deepest desires.

    The story begins with a bang the moment Ig stares into the mirror and sees the horns.  Within pages, strangers tell him things no one should ever share: confessions of gluttony, lust and wrath.  Ig just has to be in their presence for secrets and desires to be expressed.  But as soon as he turns his back, people forget both about his horns and their own revelations.  Soon, Ig can’t help but learn everyone’s true opinion about him and they are damning: Everyone thinks he killed his own girlfriend, and used his family’s influence to avoid charges.  But confession by confession, Ig also learns clues that allow him to piece together the identity of the murderer, and the revelation is nothing short of shocking.  As his horns grow and his devil-like qualities develop, Ig also learns the fine art of revenge…

    Horns has a lot of things going for it, but none of them are as potent as its mixture of clear prose, attention to character and ability to ground its fantastical premise in believable details.  Ig’s personal history is gradually revealed in detail, allowing us to understand the tapestry of loyalties, betrayals, guilt and cover-ups that have so affected his life.  Horns could have used its premise in a very different fashion, but it ends up become one character’s journey to understanding and ultimate expiation.

    Which isn’t to say that Horns is a perfect novel.  Many of the clever devilish puns and references only makes sense to those steeped in Judaeo-Christian mythology and North-American cultural references: I wonder how much sense the book can make to someone coming from other contexts (or even someone who hasn’t paid attention in a while to religious teachings about hell and the devil.)  More seriously, the novel’s structure is generous in multi-chapters flashbacks, and the roaring opening doesn’t accurately reflect the rest of the novel as it soon takes on a more contemplative quality.  At times, the story seems to meander off-track to such an extent that we’re left wondering how much better it could have been if it had been published as a novella.  As it is, the novel never misses out on an occasion to explain in great flashback-reinforced detail almost all of the passing references that could have been left alone.

    But novellas don’t sell, and Horns’ accumulation of explanations ends up sketching a remarkably lived-in background for the protagonist.  There’s a fundamental pleasure in the kind of character study that Hill delivers with this novel, and it’s different from the one we can get from a straight-ahead horror thriller.  Horns may look like the latter at the end of its first few chapters, but it’s a different beast by the end of it.

    Most of the elements that made Heart-Shaped Box such a success are just as skilfully used in this second novel: The down-on-his-luck character, the fascination for music (including a Morse code tip-of-the-hat to an obvious musical inspiration on the book’s endpapers), the sly humour, the interest for personal atonement, the precise prose… it places Hill somewhere between the literary mainstream and the thrills of the horror genre: a great niche for such a promising writer.

  • The Secret, Rhonda Byrne

    The Secret, Rhonda Byrne

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Atria, 2006, 198 pages, ISBN 978-1-58270-170-7

    Yes, your honour, I am possibly the worst possible person in the world to review The Secret.

    As I stand before you explaining what would motivate me to write about a book that I found obnoxious and exasperating, I confess that I am guilty of crass materialism in all facets of my personal philosophy.  I believe that hard work and self-confidence are the way to get what we deserve.  I don’t place any trust in purveyors of pseudoscientific woo-woo.  I am allergic to much of the self-help literature.  I don’t even watch Oprah.

    I have read The Secret.  I found it at a used book-sale.  The type of book sale where they weigh your box, charge you by the pound and don’t ask to see what’s inside.  I can’t imagine that I paid more than a dollar for it.

    Well, maybe a bit more, given how it’s printed on heavy paper.  Amazon tells me that it has less than 36,000 words, but they’re all set on glossy photo-paper, and every page has a faux-scroll background, with color icons to introduce every contributor and full-color pictures of them at the end.  This is a really well-designed product.  It’s not a book as much as it’s a slick piece of Da Vinci Code-inspired marketing designed to sell other derivatives of itself.  Most of those derivatives, I assume, must try to sell the book in return.

    Oh, yes, your honour, I have understood The Secret.  The Law of Attraction is nothing more than wishing hard enough to make things come true.  Was that a spoiler?  Well, what can I say: You can probably read any page in the book and grasp as much, given how it just keeps repeating its basic points over and over, adding up potentially fraudulent, delusional or bias-confirmed anecdotes until they’re meant to look like data.  It’s all wrapped up in quantum pseudo-science spouted by professional cloud-peddlers –including my own favourite crackpot Fred Alan Wolf, who provides a telling link between The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know?

    You could describe my overall reaction to the book as a mixture of exasperation and cackling sarcasm.  It’s actually intriguing in how it sets up a delusion that makes The Secret seem so important and all-powerful: It’s linked with safely dead figures such as Einstein, Shakespeake and Mother Theresa, then puts up a baroque system of negative belief meant to immunize believers against skeptics: According to the book, harbouring any doubt at all about wishful thinking will make it fail.  It’s then your fault if it doesn’t work.  If that’s not a cult-like indoctrination device, I’m not sure what is.

    In fact, I would propose that The Secret is a really handy pseudo-religious device to keep the proletariat down.  It’s a straight-up money transfer from the readers to TS Production LLC, and a way to keep the dissatisfied wishing for more.  If it doesn’t work, it’s not because the universe doesn’t work like that: It’s because their own faith in The Secret isn’t strong enough.  They can either reinforce it by buying another TS Production LLC product or blame mysterious elites for keeping The Secret a secret.

    What annoys me the most about The Secret is that it actually trivializes a lot of useful behavioural techniques.  Self-confidence is always a performance-booster, positive thinking can help in identifying opportunities and moving expertise from the conscious to the subconscious is a mainline to mastery… there’s a lot of common-sense in here, but it’s wrapped in pseudo-conspiracy theories, slick marketing packaging and insidious memetic content.  The Secret is probably not dangerous in that it reaps its rewards from the same people periodically picked clean by other new-age money-grabs… but it’s always a disappointment to realize that despite the demonstrable rewards of hundreds of years of rational thought, there is still a substantial appetite for such nonsense.

    Now, I understand that I’m about four years behind the times in blathering indignantly about The Secret.  People have moved on, much like copies of The Celestine Prophecy are gathering dust on so many bookshelves.  But, you know what?  When The Secret was hot, I wished for a way to read it without paying any money at all to the hucksters at TS Production LLC.  I could have borrowed it from the library, mooched it from a credulous friend or gone digging through recycling bins, but I just waited and the Universe sent a copy ripe for picking at my favourite book sale.  HOLY CRAP IT WORKS!

    Never mind, your Honour, I rest my case.

  • Suck it, Wonder Woman!, Olivia Munn & Mac Montandon

    Suck it, Wonder Woman!, Olivia Munn & Mac Montandon

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin, 2010, 269 pages, C$28.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-312-59105-2

    Amazon’s recommendation engine usually has a good understanding of what I’m looking for.  It has served me well in exploring the world of books about food, leading me from Pollan and Bourdain to Rayner, Sheehan and others I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.  But it’s not perfect and when it starting suggesting Olivia Munn’s Suck it, Wonder Woman!, I should have been a bit more sceptical.

    My first warning sign was asking Who is Olivia Munn? It turns out that Munn is a popular entertainer who has become something of a geek celebrity over the past few years: She has a growing number of small roles in TV show and feature films but also, crucially, co-hosts a geeky cable show named Attack of the Show! and shows up regularly at Comic-Con.  Her attractiveness explains the endless stream of pictures that shows up above her Wikipedia profile in a casual Google Search.

    Welcome to the age of the micro-celebrity, then: Munn has found herself a rewarding niche in the universe of young actresses by claiming the geek flag for herself.  Suck it, Wonder Woman! is a slight attempt at an autobiography crossed with a humour book.  Subtitled “The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek”, the book quickly shows its true colors as soon as it’s out of the Amazon packing box: Not content with a front cover design that highlights Munn’s cleavage, the back of the dust jacket urges us to discover the “Surprise on the other side”, which is to say a full-color pinup in a bikini and naval cap.  Look inside the book and you will see that, aside from the photo-insert chapter introduction and occasional galleries, Munn can also be seen on every single bottom-right page corner doing a flip-book dance.

    So, yeah: Cheesecake for so-called geeks.

    I’m not going to comment upon Munn’s shtick as a sex-symbol for geeks: That’s a line of thought that quickly veers into misogyny.  If Munn claims herself as a geek, then welcome aboard.  I’m not even going to insist on how geek standard for sex-symbols don’t include many more requirements than “female with a pulse and no visible scowl at unwanted male attention”: It’s a good insulting line to get a rise out of geeks, but it also fails to acknowledge that Munn does stand out as an attractive woman no matter the surrounding crowd.

    But what this book drives home are the reasons why I occasionally want to get as far away as humanly possible from the modern hyper-packaged definition of “geek”.  It used to be that geeks were incredibly driven people with strong technical skills and weaker social graces: In any case, it’s their attitude toward the world that counted.  Geeks were the high-school larval stage of more fully-rounded individuals who would learn how to fit in society, but would always keep their attitude of gentle manners and frequently intense curiosity about the world.

    Fast-forward to 2010, however, and “geek” has become another marketing category for the entertainment-industrial complex.  Comic-Con has become Ground Zero for the co-optation of the geek: Now, the word has become synonymous with the mindless consumption of dull comic-books, lousy genre movies, loud video games and lightweight books written by pretty girls who know which buttons to press in order to rouse their audiences.  It used to be that geeks could be counted upon to know some valuable technical knowledge of interest to the world at large: Now, just buying Lord of the Rings figurines is enough to qualify as a Hollywood-approved geek.  Newsflash: video-game trivia and glass shelves for Star Wars memorabilia don’t translate by themselves into useful contributions to society.

    I am, obviously, overreacting: It’s in the nature of geeks to be picky, and nothing forbids me from charting my own brand of nerdiness.  But as I was reading Suck it Wonder Woman! and taking in its assumed pandering, I ran mind-first into the contradictions between my own conception of geekiness and the now-approved cultural stereotype.  Geeks may be socially inept, but that shouldn’t translate into a universe in which every video-game, comic book or genre movie representation of a female seems to feature enhanced pneumatics, plastic skin and personalities tailored to appeal to male interests.  There’s something wrong if I either want to wash myself with bleach or send a neutron bomb to San Diego every time I dig into Comic-Con coverage, gaming advertisements or so-called geeky forums.  My conception of geekiness, obviously, has a lot more old-world gentlemanliness than I first suspected.

    But to return to the book I’m supposed to discuss, I’m not necessarily immune to Munn’s considerable charm: Her tales of growing up as an ethnically-mixed outcast in Midwest America touch a chord, as do her adventures as a nice girl abruptly thrown into the Hollywood cesspool.  There’s a heartbreaking chapter midway through the book that tells us about the worst day of her life, and some of her relationship advice is amusing in a way that doesn’t necessarily relate to anything geeky.  But her co-written book (take a bow, Mac Montandon, even though you barely rate a mention in the acknowledgements) doesn’t have much more content than half a dozen good blog entries.  It’s thin, breezy and empty: rather the opposite of what I would be looking for as, ahem, a geek.

    Obviously, the best possible reader for the book is someone who can answer the question Who is Olivia Munn? without having to resort to Wikipedia.  Otherwise, accidental Munn readers are going to confront a lot of unpleasant questions about contemporary geek culture, and how it relates to women.  I forget whether current feminism says it’s OK to get down with the boys as a trash-talking Princess Leia lookalike and, in doubt, would have to agree with anyone willing to fit into a brass bra.  But much like there’s a reason why I prefer referring to myself as a nerd rather than a geek (never forget the etymology of both words), I also choose to opt out of the geek marketing segment if it leads to a half-empty shell of a book whose selling points include a dust jacket that reverts to reveal a photoshopped come-on.  My ideal cheesecakes can seduce me with their minds.

  • Wireless, Charles Stross

    Wireless, Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2009, 352 pages, C$31.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-441-01719-5

    Over the last decade, Science Fiction author Charles Stross has established himself as one of the genre’s top writers thanks to novels combining strong plotting, sly humour, substantial horror and enough SF ideas to inspire an entire generation of readers and writers.  Commercial imperatives mean that most of Stross’ output has taken the form of novels or series, but like many SF writers in love with the possibilities of the genre, Stross has also kept up a small but creatively rewarding stream of short stories alongside his long-form output.  Nearly a decade after the acclaimed Toast that collected many of his early work, Stross now has a new short-story collection bringing together much of Stross’ post-2000 short fiction output.

    Watchers of the contemporary SF market know how unlikely it is for a major publisher to produce a hardcover short story collection: they don’t sell as well as novels, and the tendency over the past few years has been for smaller presses to pick up those collections in a targeted appeal to reach the author’s fans.  For Ace to publish Wireless is a testimony both to Stross’ popularity and to the rewards that his fans can expect to find in his short stories.

    Those expectations are well-placed: Even before mentioning the anthology’s reprinted stories, the major reason to read Wireless is “Palimpsest”, an original novella published here for the first time.  Here, Stross tackles time-travel by confronting clichés: As we follow an operative recruited by an incredibly long-lived organization tasked with the survival of the human race, we begin by seeing how operatives are asked to murder their grandfathers.  It gets much weirder after that, as timelines are changed and overwritten from the fabric of the universe, leaving the operatives with memories contradicting history.  It’s a major novella with an ultra-wide-screen scope that is rarely seen in today’s Science Fiction.  Tackling issues spanning millions of years, “Palimpsest” (currently nominated for a Hugo) delivers on that good-old sense of wonder, sums up the state of a familiar theme and extends it a bit further.  It’s an impressive story, and its density of ideas alone justifies Wireless’s purchase: Most SF novels on the market today don’t even have a fraction of the excitement that Stross crams in a single novella.  (Better news yet: During an interview at Readercon 2010, Stross admitted that he’s thinking hard about continuing “Palimpsest” to a full-length novel.)

    The rest of the book’s table of content may be more familiar, but it’s no less thrilling.  Wireless reprints “Missile Gap”, another impressive Hugo-nominated novella that uses familiar Stross tropes and sends them out for a ride. The conclusion is similar to Stross’ classic “Antibodies”, with a Tipplerian spin: Big thinking designed to make us feel very small.  Its mercilessness is only matched by Stross’ celebrated “A Colder War”, which blends Cold War paranoia with Lovecraftian horrors; it’s an early test-run for the Laundry Files universe, and it’s still as bleakly devastating today as it ever was ten years ago.  It’s not the only test-run in the volume: “Down on the Farm” is another entertaining adventure set in the world of the Laundry Files, while “Trunk and Disorderly” is an amusing Wodehouse pastiche that prefigures some of Saturn’s Children.

    Like many other anthologies, it also comes with a bunch of weaker and slighter stories: I must have read “Rogue Farm” three times by now, and never developed any affection for it.  “MAXOS” is a short-short that’s more of a joke than anything else.  “Unwirer” is written in collaboration with Cory Doctorow and goes overboard with Doctorow’s usual didactic discourse on technological freedoms.  Finally, “Snowball’s Chance” is an amusing deal-with-the-devil story that is probably more fun for Scottish readers with a fondness for reading their accent in print.  It’s no accident if those underwhelming pieces are also the shortest in the book: Stross needs space to properly unpack his ideas.

    I have long considered “A Colder War” to be a classic of sorts, and I think that “Palimpsest” will soon join it as a defining Stross story.  To see both of them in print in the same volume is a wonder in itself.  That they come packaged with a few more of Stross’ shorter pieces will satisfy both fans and neophytes: For anyone looking to discover why Stross has become such a major SF author, Wireless densely demonstrates why even his short stories can be as satisfying as his longer work.

  • Seagalogy, Vern

    Seagalogy, Vern

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Titan, 2008, 396 pages, C$16.95 tp, ISBN 9781845769277

    A quick look at this book’s cover blurbs confirms that I’m not the only one surprised that Vern’s Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal even exists.  For so-called serious cinephiles, Steven Seagal has stopped mattering about ten years ago, when his movies stopped showing in theaters and started going straight to DVD.  Even before then, Seagal’s movies were usually B-grade action films, the occasional exceptions (Under Siege, Executive Decision) often being hailed in spite of Seagal’s presence.  Somewhat savvier filmgoers can point at 1994’s poorly-reviewed On Dangerous Grounds as the film that broke the back of Seagal’s reputation as an actor/director, highlighting its earnest environmental monologue awkwardly inserted as a coda.

    That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway.  For Vern, though, all of Seagal oeuvre is worth scrutiny.  His thesis, quickly stated, is that Seagal’s influence on his own roles and films has been markedly stronger than many other contemporary action stars: That most movies featuring Seagal are, in fact, best considered as “Steven Seagal movies” rather than belonging to their screenwriters or directors.  Vern highlights Seagal’s pet themes and obsessions, and then charts how they are reflected in the vast majority of his work.  To top it off, he also reviews Seagal’s music CDs and energy drink.

    Everyone’s first reaction at a 395-pages book covering all things Seagal is likely to be similar to mine: No, really? Is there a subject of more trivial importance?  Couldn’t this be settled in a quick and cheap blog post?  Aren’t we wasting time, energy, paper, etc, even contemplating such matters?  Go ahead and wonder the same things.  I’ll wait for you to realize that in the end, the only valid appreciation of this book is based on results, not intent.

    Because the damning thing is that Seagalogy is a lot of fun to read.  It even convincingly proves its thesis: By the time we reach 2008’s Pistol Whipped, there’s little doubt that Seagal returns again and again to themes of official corruption, blowback and environmental degradation.  His characters are largely cut from the same clothes, featuring the same taciturn attitude, fascination for other cultures and fleeting family ties.  His methods frequently include improvised weapons, bars fights and people being thrown through glass.  No matter his screenwriters or directors (who range from video-directing pseudonyms to Oscar-nominated Hollywood veterans), Seagal remains Seagal.  For an actor often dismissed without a thought, he has shown remarkable resilience at a time where other actors simply disappeared: More than half of Seagalogy covers his direct-to-video (DTV) films, with as much attention as his theatrical releases.

    This means that Vern has gone through each movie with a fine comb, unravelling the shaky plotting of incoherently-made DTV features and telling us about scenes that barely make any sense on-screen.  He doesn’t review those films as much as he rebuilds them to see how they work (or don’t).  His commentary on DTV features is enlightening in that he has seen far more of them than most of us, and he can spot production flaws that set them apart from their more respectable theatrical brethren.  Even in structure, the book shines by its clear sections, careful interludes, meticulous appendices about minor and never-seen projects, with a poignant ending in which the author finally meets Seagal.

    It helps that Vern’s style is a straightforward mixture of straight-ahead writing, well-chosen details, self-deprecating humour and a keen understanding of the action film genre.  I’ve known of Vern ever since he started writing for aintitcool.com almost a decade ago and while I have often suspected his “Writer who is trying to go clean after a life of crime, alcohol, etc.” shtick to be indulgent performance art by either a bored film student or a struggling screenwriter, I still treasure in my archives an in-character email from him acknowledging my congratulations for a piece he’d written.  I’m not sure I would ever want to know the truth behind the pseudonym.  Much of his profane, consciously-illiterate online style is barely reflected in Seagalogy, though: At the exception of a consistent mistitling of “The Ain’t It Cool News” that plays as an in-joke, the entire book is scrupulously written and edited to the usual standards.  This isn’t a complaint: As much as I want you to read outlawvern.com on a regular basis, a book written and designed like his site would be practically impossible to read at length.

    Because, oh, yes, Seagalogy eventually becomes addictive reading even if you haven’t seen a Seagal film in a decade: For a book with a less-than-respectable subject, it quickly becomes an intelligent trip throughout the clichés of action cinema, and a fascinating discourse on all things Seagal.  It may even make you respect him for the first time.

  • Directive 51, John Barnes

    Directive 51, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2010, 483 pages, $32.50 hc, ISBN 978-0-441-01822-2

    One of the reasons why I’m quickly cooling off on Science Fiction’s current post-apocalyptic craze is my nagging suspicion that not everyone sees the apocalypse (whether it’s climate-, alien- or zombie-driven) as a bad thing.  There’s a streak of wish-fulfillment in “rebuilding the world” fantasies that makes me uneasy: I love the comforts of our civilization, and anyone talking about bringing it down strikes me as an enemy more than a romantic.

    Knowing this, you can probably guess why the opening section of John Barnes’ Directive 51 struck such a deep chord: As this first novel in a new trilogy begins, an uncoordinated group of eco-saboteurs, disaffected college students, back-to-the-Earth dreamers, international terrorists and other miscellaneous hoodlums spontaneously act on the belief that October 28th, 2024 is “Daybreak”: The day modern civilization dies.  Three particularly nasty pieces of work have a disproportionate impact on the story: A biological critter that disintegrates plastic and rubber, some nanotech that eats electronics, and the kidnapping of the US Vice-President.  While the breathless thriller of the vice-presidential kidnapping unfolds, our heroes from the US “Department of the Future” are introduced: a couple of brainy protagonists who desperately try to figure out what’s happening even as the world breaks down around them.

    It’s too late, though: As plastics melt away, electronics are reduced to dust and the US president declares himself mentally unfit to cope with the situation, order breaks down in more ways than one.  Before long, our protagonists are stuck between an implausibly clueless acting president, an ultra-right-wing challenger, massive systemic shortages and increasing violence.  It gets even worse as evidence accumulates that Daybreak was carefully orchestrated with follow-up strikes designed to wipe out any hope of recovery.  As the book ends, the duelling Presidents of the United States have to confront one question: Is there still an active campaign against them, or are they stuck dealing with a dead man’s switch?  (We readers, having been made privy to one crucial half-page scene [P.220], know better: something is going on, and I’d be surprised if the next volumes don’t explain how Daybreak was less spontaneous than it may first appear.)

    Given that this is the first volume of a trilogy, it’s no surprise if Directive 51 is all set-up with partial payoff: Much of the book is spent contemplating the rapid destruction of modern American civilization (with late and occasional glances at the rest of the world, which doesn’t do any better) through viewpoint characters who either caused part of it to happen or are desperately trying to mitigate the millions of deaths that follow.

    Frequent readers of these reviews know that I’ve been a fan of John Barnes’ work for a long time and so shouldn’t be surprised if I end up soft-pedaling a number of Directive 51’s annoyances.  The first chunk of the book is more irritating than the rest: In an effort to telescope as many things as possible in his “One Day” structure, Barnes’ hand is more obvious than usual in the interlocking plotting.  Worse, though, is that much of the book’s first third is spent with the terrorists, saboteurs and fools who initiate Daybreak: There’s nothing pleasant in reading about people you just want to hit on the head (with something suitably low-tech, such as a shovel or even just a baseball bat) for bringing about the end of civilization.  This explains, in part, why the VP-kidnapping subplot feels so thrilling: here’s a chance for heroics against the impending doom that cloys the rest of the novel.

    The novel gets more interesting after Daybreak is over, as our characters get the chance to be protagonists, are stuck in an impossible crisis of succession and more unusual plotting elements get their chance to shine.  The first presidential succession crisis is great good fun for political junkies readers, posing questions about personal responsibility in serving the nation even when it contradicts regulations.  Few non-rabidly political novelists ever end up writing about gunfire and insanity in the White House, so Barnes at least has that running in his favour.

    But what the second chunk of the book (“Ten Days”) ends up revealing is a curiously bloodless approach to the end of civilization: Cities burn, libraries are torched, super-weapons are detonated, billions of people die and the narration barely raises an eyebrow.  It takes a while to understand that the disaster is not limited to the US, and the novel seems to be in such a hurry to tear everything down that it barely manages to give us a sense of how bad it’s getting: There are a few moments in the narrative where the characters coolly mention how Daybreak is irreversible, that it will destroy all electronics, that it will take hundreds of years to recover from it (if ever) and those one-liners are everything we get in order to realize that this is as bad as it gets.  Perhaps worse is the lack of resentment and regret from the characters at how primitive their situation has become in a matter of days: A couple of saboteurs are treated sympathetically (well, sort of; as so often happens in John Barnes’s novels, one of them gets raped –albeit off-screen in an unusual show of restraint, although see “bloodless” above.) and even the so-called heroes end up saying things of comfort to the Daybreakers.  Hard-SF is about brainy readers more than emotive characters, but even that stance be carried too far.

    On the other hand… this novel has haunted me more than most of the others I’ve read this year.  I’d acknowledge my unusual attachment to civilization if it wasn’t for the fact that you’re reading this on a website, maybe from devices that didn’t exist as recently as five years ago.  Everyone has their particular nightmares, and when my own Maslowian hierarchy of needs is nicely fulfilled, I worry a lot about the fragility of our contemporary way of life.

    Then there’s the entertainment value of the scattered political outlook of the novel.  Barnes is a professional contrarian, and it’s amusing to see how he tweaks current partisan outlooks as the world of the novel changes around its characters.  There’s some sympathy for ultra-rich libertarians as they finally get to make use of their “Castles” enclaves built during the Obama administration even as the novel concerns itself with the (re)establishment of a national government.  A right-ring evangelical politician initially disliked by the book’s progressive heroes ends up rising to the occasion and being a preferable alternative to a delusional old-school Democrat.  Part of Directive 51‘s effectiveness lies in showing how crises can change our certitudes, so it’s no surprise if hyper-partisan readers will be upset at the novel’s shifting political sands.  More independently-minded readers will have more fun –especially when reading the amazon.com reviews accusing the novel of being a mouthpiece for whatever extremism is convenient.

    There’s also the fact that John Barnes is a seasoned SF writer, so that even when he errs, he’s able to deliver what his SF-reading public wants.  Directive 51 cleverly combines science-fictional concerns with a techno-thriller narrative mode to deliver a novel that’s up to the latest SF gadgets while delivering the thrills we expect from such a large-scale canvas.  When it gets ripping into the mechanics of pure fusion bombs, it directly scratches the sense of wonder that his readers are looking for.  (It’s also an eloquent piece of evidence for critics who argue that techno-thrillers and hard-SF are basically the flip sides of the same storytelling impulses.)  I happen to be unusually susceptible to the kind of narrative strategies used in this novel, so that purring sound you hear from my frantic pre-ordering of the book’s sequels may not necessarily translate into any similar affection from anyone else.

    Ultimately, though, the flaws and virtues of Directive 51 will be best appreciated once the story it’s starting to tell will be over.  Barnes has often upset the narrative certitudes of his previous series, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the upcoming Daybreak Zero ends up telling a different story than what we can predict.  In the meantime, Directive 51 is a flawed but fascinating end-of-the-world narrative that does a few new and interesting things.  It’s good enough to satisfy even those who are tired of SF’s current depressive phase.  Unlike all of the zombie or post-oil catastrophes, it asks the far more disturbing question: What if some people actually worked toward the end of the world as we know it?

  • The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade: The 11 ½ Anniversary Edition, Mike Krahulik & Jerry Holkins

    The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade: The 11 ½ Anniversary Edition, Mike Krahulik & Jerry Holkins

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2010, 164 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-345-51226-0

    One of the great things about book collections of web-comics is that I can use them as an excuse to talk about some of my favourite on-line destinations.

    I’m not much of a gamer any more, but I still pay enough attention to the field to appreciate the genre criticism barely disguised behind the often-profane humour that the Penny Arcade guys offer three times per week.  You can read all of the archives at any time, or get the six annual collections covering the strip up until 2005 so far, but for a truly good look at Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins‘s Penny Arcade empire so far, you can’t do better than The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade: The 11 ½ Anniversary Edition (take off the dust jacket for a slightly coarser alternate title)

    The book brings together a number of pieces written about Penny Arcade, its creators, the massive PAX gaming events and (more responsibly) the Child’s Play charity dedicated to providing games to sick children.  Essays describe how PAX first began (and the mistakes along the way), and how the usual “games are bad for kids” articles led Krahulik and Holkins to throw back clichés in the face of their critics by raising the social responsibility of the gaming community.  Another highlight is Penny Arcade Manager Robert Khoo’s article “Breaking the Law”, detailing Penny Arcade’s run-ins with American Greetings, now-discredited Jack Thompson and “Publisher X”. But for long-time readers of the series, a highlight is (re)reading the lengthy Wired profile about the two creators.  Penny Arcade is, in many ways, an accidental success: the article clearly establishes how everything began and then evolved.

    Weightier material aside, the chief attraction of The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade remains the comic strips, here selected and presented out of chronology for various purposes.  Even though I can’t imagine Penny Arcade picking up new readers from this book (it’s got “for existing fans” all over it, down to an impressive gallery of tribute pieces by other geek-favourite artists), this would in fact be an ideal way to ease oneself into the universe of the strip.  There’s an introduction to the recurring characters (including a few minor ones that only fans with long memories will remember), various continuity highlights (“Paint the Line”, “Cardboard Tube Samurai”, “Twisp and Catsby”, “Armadeaddon”, “On Sorcelation”…) and a few strips selected by Krahulik and Holkins as being “the best”, with commentary throughout.  While some of the references remain obscure to people who didn’t play a particular game at the time of the comic’s publication, it’s about as quick a refresher on the various in-jokes, conventions and overall atmosphere of the strip.  (Much to my dismay, I realized during the best-of retrospective that many of my favourite pieces either featured extreme profanity or obscure geeky references that I may not even remember in five years.)

    It’s all handsomely collected in a full-sized hardcover with generous margins and plenty of incidental illustrations.  Unfortunately, a lot of the filler consists in blown-up, sometimes-edited comics panels.  (You can see the pixels!).  Another relatively low point is the unedited transcript of the Q&A section.  It’s needlessly hard to read; some editing would have been a judicious choice.

    But all in all, this is a perfect gift for the Penny Arcade fans.  Whoever is seduced by this book can already look forward to six annual collections already on shelves, and the entire run of the series on the web.  Don’t worry if some of the references are obscure: Only Gabe and Tycho understood them all in the first place, and they may have forgotten many of them already.  Just go on to the next strip and wonder in amazement at how the web has made such high-quality niche content possible.