Book Review

  • The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967, Hunter S. Thompson

    The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967, Hunter S. Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine Books, 1997 (1998 paperback re-issue), 683 pages, C$24.95 pb, ISBN 978-0-345-37796-8

    My lofty intentions to read Hunter S. Thompson’s entire output in strictly chronological order of publication don’t make much sense considering The Proud Highway, a 1997 collection of letters written between 1955 and 1967. In a bid to solidify Thompson’s position as an American writer of some renown (and to please legions of fans accumulated since 1972’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), Thompson authorized noted academic Douglas Brinkley to dig in his archives and assemble volumes of correspondence.

    Thompson famously kept copies of nearly everything he wrote, even from a young age, and it’s those copies that fuel this collection of letters published before his first book (Hell’s Angels) hits the market. Those are the letters of a young man, a cocksure writer just waiting for greatness. Some juvenalia aside, the first letters collected here date from Thompson’s years in the Air Force, where he channels his renegade energies into sports writing, and then in engineering his own departure from the US military forces.

    The rest of the book follows Thompson as he travels across America, and then from one continent to another. Thompson fans will track his travels from New York to San Juan to Big Sur to South America to San Francisco, only to end up, pages before the end of the book, in his home base of Woody Creek, Colorado.

    This is as close as we’ll ever get to a Thompson autobiography, as we track his progress through quasi-weekly letters written from always-desperate circumstance. A vivid letter describes as Thompson manages to write in the cargo hold of a military flight heading back to his usual post; another hilariously portrays Thompson as battling insects while writing to his friend. One thing’s for sure: Thompson’s character was forged well before he hit his stride with Hell’s Angels: even his early letters show an aggressive and self-assured spirit: in fact, some of his letters to female acquaintances are uncomfortably pointed –especially for those who don’t know the context.

    Still, life wasn’t easy for the young Thompson. Nearly every single letter mentions monetary difficulties of some sort, to the point where it becomes tiresome. Small wonder if Thompson-the-older-man would remain fixated on monetary issues, often to the detriment of his relationships.

    Readers with specific interests may learn a few good details of trivia through those nearly seven hundred pages of letters. As a science-fiction fan, for instance, I was amused to find out that Thompson had sent a few stories to SF magazines at the beginning of the sixties –what an alternate universe that would have been if he had found success in that field! Similarly, the first editor to buy something from Thompson was Frank M. Robinson, an editor who would move west to San Francisco, become Harvey Milk’s speechwriter and eventually develop in a fine SF writer in his own right. Small world…

    It almost goes without saying the The Proud Highway is aimed squarely at Thompson fans and scholars: Brinkley’s contextual input is slight, and the book’s best moments often illuminate other aspects of Thompson’s work. (The whole bizarre “American ambassador to Samoa” allusions in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 finds an explanation in a series of letters actually sent to Democratic Party honcho Larry O’Brien, for instance.) A lot of the material is either repetitive or desperately trivial, and casual readers may not want to wade through it all.

    But for the Thompson fans, The Proud Highway is a look at the early years of a noteworthy writer. The 1967 date at which the book ends is significant, since it finds Thompson safely housed in Woody Creek Colorado, waiting for Hell’s Angels to hit bestseller lists and the subsequent events that would catapult him to national fame. But that story is covered in a second book of letters, aptly named Fear and Loathing in America…

  • The Kitchen Readings: Untold Stories of Hunter S. Thompson, Michael Cleverly & Bob Braudis

    The Kitchen Readings: Untold Stories of Hunter S. Thompson, Michael Cleverly & Bob Braudis

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Perennial, 2008, 272 pages, C$16.50 tp, ISBN 978-0-06-115928-2 Jun 24

    Since Hunter S. Thompson’s death in 2005, there’s been a small cottage industry of books about the writer’s life. There’s certainly now enough related material about Thompson to rival books by Thompson: He led a wild life, and what he did to his friends has noteworthy enough to fill books of stories.

    Which is exactly what we get here with Michael Cleverly and Bob Braudis’ The Kitchen Readings. A book squarely aimed at existing Thompson fans, it doesn’t even try to provide an overview of the writer’s career: It just tells stories of what it was like to live near him. Both were friends of Thompson for decades: Cleverly is an Aspen artist and writer while Bob Braudis, as most obsessive Thompson fans know, has long been the sheriff for the county where Thompson lived.

    The Kitchen Readings is their chance to tell all about being Thompson’s friends and neighbors. Most of Thompson’s proclivities are mentioned at least once: The drinking, the drug use, the shooting, the crazy driving, the peacocks… There’s little in here about Thompson’s literary output, but plenty about what it felt to live near him, and how unpredictable life could become when he was around.

    On a certain level, it’s hilarious fun. Conceptually, a character like Thompson is the stuff legends are made: Apt to shoot guns at propane tanks for fun, drive with one hand on the wheel and another one around a bottle of Wild Turkey and scream at neighbors to blame them for the actions of his own escaped peacocks, Thompson’s legend is likely to be further enhanced by some of the tales within this book. The one that first sticks in mind is a crazy reverse-driving drunken race through Woody Creek’s snowy streets, culminating with property damage.

    On the other hand, virtually the entire book bolsters my own feeling that Thompson was, essentially, unable to function in society and a real pain to be around. Beyond the surface mumbling and obvious drug use, Thompson is again and again shown as taking casual advantage of those who surround him, whether for money, favors or their indulgence after incidents that would have sent non-legends to either small-claims court or prison.

    It’s to Cleverly and Braudis’ credit that their tone remains bemused and sympathetic throughout; It’s not hard to imagine that more casual acquaintances of Thompson may not have been so kind in their assessment. Still, from time to time, some less-honorable feelings seep through. In the chapter detailing Thompson’s disastrous adventures in Vietnam, it’s obvious that Thompson wasn’t as much of an action junkie as he pretended: his tolerance to real danger imposed by others was lower than anyone else would think. Elsewhere in the book, we get obvious hints that Thompson craved everyone’s attention and couldn’t tolerate being upstaged. Much of Thompson’s personality and social interactions stemmed from the idea that he liked to think of himself as being, in the most literal of sense, an outlaw.

    Nonetheless (and if you haven’t figured out that Thompson was a pain to live with in other biographies, you haven’t paid attention), The Kitchen Readings is a worthwhile addition to the small library of posthumous testimonies about the Gonzo Doctor. It read a lot as if anecdotes in the Gonzo oral biography were fleshed out and tells us much about Thompson’s daily life in Woody Creek. It’s often a pleasure to read, and pays service, in its own way, to the memory and legend of Hunter S. Thompson. Fans will be pleased; many others, appalled.

  • Still Life With Crows, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    Still Life With Crows, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Grand Central, 2003 (2004 paperback reprint), 564 pages, C$9.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-61276-6

    Whenever the prosecution will put together its case for my terminal jadedness in matters of reviewing, I expect that this review will be high on the list. Because here I am, praising a thriller for its setting and dismissing it for its thrills.

    On the other hand, who can argue against the idea that there are only so many thriller plots to use? A serial killer with quasi-supernatural methods isn’t just a well-worn plot driver, it’s arguably the same formula that allowed Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child to hit it big with their debut novel The Relic: mysterious murders in an unusual location reveal a killer that’s half-man, half-creature.

    While Still Life With Crows may abandon Preston/Child’s usual urban haunts for the American Midwest, it’s pretty much the same story: The book opens on the discovery of a body in a corn field. (A gruesome discovery, of course) The murder appears to have ritual overtones, which quickly attracts agent Pendergast, now more fully defined than ever after the events of The Cabinet of Curiosities gave him a starring role.

    The first 150 pages of Still Life With Crows are certainly the book’s best, if only for seeing dapper Pendergast stuck in the strange new environment of a tiny American town. This is American Gothic in more ways than one as Pendergast’s ideas about gastronomy and correct police procedures often run at odds with the local way of doing things. No matter; Pendergast quickly befriends the local goth, gets emergency cooking supplies delivered to his temporary headquarters and makes progress when the police forces seem unable to go further.

    It follows that the small town of Medicine Creek, Kansas is a hotbed of potential drama: Beyond the usual small-town rivalries, we understand that the existence of the community depends on a major poultry processing plant and the promise of a major corn research projects. Ancient Indian lore eventually make their way in the plot, along with a seemingly-useless visit to a cave system managed by Pendergast’s landlord. Some of those elements are nothing more than artful diversions; others end up being part of the solution.

    But the answers, when they come, end up deflating the entire novel, leaving us with nothing more than an overcooking killer that wouldn’t exist anywhere but in a thriller novel. The clever sense-of-place carefully built in the first act of the novel ends up taking a back seat to the usual running-in-the-dark hijinks. At 564 pages, Still Life With Crows is far too long for its own good, and most of this lengths, absurdly enough, comes toward the end of the novel even as the pacing should accelerate.

    This isn’t as much of a problem as you may suspect: For their meanderings and tendency to recycle plot premises, the Lincoln/Child duo hasn’t become the most popular team in the business by skimping on readable prose and interesting characters. Agent Pendergast remains one of the most compelling protagonists in modern thriller fiction, and there are enough small details here and there to keep our interest. (For instance, there’s a cute little wink at their previous The Ice Limit via a character reading a paperback thriller called Beyond the Ice Limit).

    It’s still a shame, though, that the vast corn fields of Kansas so impressively portrayed in the first half of the book had to cede the spotlight to yet another confined space. The interest of Still Life With Crows lies chiefly in how it manages to wring thrills out of an environment that many would consider terminally dull. But there’s such a thing as overdoing it, and the last few chapters of the novel could have easily been swapped with the end of The Relic.

    On the other hand, maybe I’m just terminally jaded. I’ll let the jury decide.

  • A Certain Chemistry, Mil Millington

    A Certain Chemistry, Mil Millington

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Flame, 2003, 372 pages, C$24.95 tp, ISBN 0-340-82114-0

    You wouldn’t normally expect infidelity to be a good engine for a comic novel, but it’s true the Mil Millington doesn’t write about conventional subjects. His first novel, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, was directly inspired by the autobiographical website that first brought him so much attention: It was based on, well, a couple that argued a lot. From there to infidelity is a logical progression on the list of unpleasant things that couples do, which brings us to his second novel: A Certain Chemistry.

    Stepping a bit farther away from autobiographical experiences, Millington’s second novel features a professional writer whose five-year-old relationship is seriously tested when he’s asked to ghost-write the autobiography of Britain’s most popular soap star. He’s funny and ordinary, while she’s famous and gorgeous: this is all headed toward disaster. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that infidelity does occur, and that a good chunk of the novel is spent looking at the narrator as he tries to cover up his infidelities in bumbling and inept fashion.

    Meanwhile, in interstitial chapters, God is our narrator and he can’t shut up about the evolutionary processes that doom our relationships. Apologies for the way we’re designed don’t make him any less sorry for the tribulations that the narrator is going through.

    Despite the premise (and, almost despite where the novel inevitably goes), A Certain Chemistry is a very, very funny book. Most of the humor is on a page-per-page level, as the narrator always have a good turn of phrase to describe the humiliating situations in which he is forced, and the slapstick nature of the various adventures following his affair with a celebrity. As one could expect, other people find out, the whole mess gets bigger, and we’re left wondering how this is going to be settled.

    One thing is certain: This is a two-page-a-minute read: The narration is engaging even when the character is doing reprehensible things, and the voice of a late-twenties man trying to muddle through life is convincing. Our protagonist is frequently being an idiot, and it’s not his privileged position as a narrator that absolves him from our disapproval. There are a number of situations where the conclusion of the narrator’s efforts is foregone from the start… and yet it keeps its appeal.

    On the other hand, there’s no denying that the novel is constantly headed towards a depressing crisis. The balance between this overarching impression of doom and the jocular nature of the narration is one of the trickiest aspects of the novel, and it’s entirely possible to be depressed while reading some amusing passages: what they mask isn’t all that different from tragedy in the classical sense, a hero’s flaws being the seed of his downfall-by-pratfalls.

    Compared to Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, A Certain Chemistry has a plot that’s more than episodic, and a definite conclusion that puts things to rest rather than let everything hang in mid-air. The life of a professional writer (ie; someone who writes, preferably on command, those articles in popular magazines) is described with a number of amusing peeks inside the industry, and there’s a sense throughout that Millington is breaking free from the web personae that so obviously fueled his first novel.

    So it’s not that improbable that a typically-British humor novel would be hilarious even as it’s treating one of the least amusing subjects on record. It’s Millington’s charm, after all.

  • Gone Tomorrow, Lee Child

    Gone Tomorrow, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Delacorte, 2009, 421 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-34057-1

    Jack Reacher has a knack for finding himself in plot-rich situations, and his thirteenth adventure Gone Tomorrow is no exception to the rule. As usual, Lee Child confronts the coincidence-driven nature of his premises head-on, from the very first page. Reacher is back in New York, late at night, in a quasi-deserted subway train. Except that something is wrong: the woman in front of him shows clear signs that she’s a suicide bomber. As Reacher ticks off his mental checklist of suicide bomber traits, everything makes sense except for the timing. Why conduct a suicide mission late at night?

    So Reacher gets up and confronts the woman. The results of his action will surprise even him. Not that he stays confounded for long: Once again, he has stumbled into a puzzle box of surprises and twists and revelations, and he’s the best man to get to the bottom of it.

    This time, his enemies are a bit stronger than usual: It turns out that there is a terrorist connection to the whole business, not to mention a presidential hopeful. When that happens, official US forces don’t stop to make subtle distinctions between allies and enemy combatants, and Reacher soon finds himself targeted by elements of his own government. The left-leaning political content that bubbled up in Nothing to Lose is present here in a different way: Reacher’s struggles against the new half-corporate security apparatus show the way in which the thriller game is still evolving, and which contemporary threads can be used by authors to put their heroes in ever more complex jeopardy.

    Along the way, Reacher does get to go on a rampage of sorts through New York, beating up opponents who don’t consider him a threat, or enough of a threat. Unsurprisingly, his most formidable adversaries end up being those who look least threatening. Reacher doesn’t often end up in the hospital, but there are exceptions to most rules.

    Gone Tomorrow (the title can be found in-text as part of dialogue referring, bitterly, to Reacher’s lack of roots) features political maneuvering, New York lore and long-hidden military secrets dating back to Reacher’s early days in the military. The twists and turns are among the series’ best: It takes a while before the true plot is revealed, and there are plenty of surprises along the way. And yet… Child does foreshadowing and red herrings effectively, which is partly why latter plot development don’t seem as outlandish as they would have seemed if presented cold.

    As with the last few novels in the series, there are references to Reacher getting old: His old contacts aren’t working as reliably as they should, his technological know-how is primitive, and even the people in the US Government don’t think much of Reacher’s “prehistoric” history with Uncle Sam. One of the most damning aspects of the series’s structure is that Reacher seldom gains new friends and contacts along the way: Since the goal is to have all volumes read independently, Child can seldom point back meaningfully to Reacher’s previous adventures. In this case, readers could have expected Reacher’s US Secret Service adventures in Without Fail to have been mentioned whenever he’s contacting a high-level politician, but that’s not the case. This is a frustrating tension at play, in the middle of such well-constructed novels, and it’s getting harder to ignore.

    But it’s not difficult to avoid thinking about these things in the middle of any Lee Child novel: His crisp, detailed and fluid writing is as good as ever, and the plotting of Gone Tomorrow takes us back to the good days of One Shot in giving a good time to seasoned thriller readers trying to figure out the true plot of the story. Reacher’s problems with the shadow US intelligence apparatus are a fresh wrinkle on old plot drivers. None of Child’s increasing fans will be disappointed by this one, and he may pick up a few along the way.

    As for me, this thirteenth Reacher Novel marks the end of my monthly Lee Child Reading Project: I have now read the entire series, switching like a real fan from paperbacks to hardcovers along the way. The results are unarguable: Child may be the best pure-thriller series writer on the market today.

  • Avenger, Frederick Forsyth

    Avenger, Frederick Forsyth

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s Press, 2003, 370 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-31951-7

    In the grand arc of Frederick Forsyth’s multi-decade career, Avenger was a return to form: Between 1996’s Icon and 2003’s Avenger, Forsyth published a gothic romance follow-up to The Phantom of the Opera (The Phantom of Manhattan, 1999) and a book of short stories (The Veteran, 2001). Avenger not only returned to the long-form thriller, but had the added advantage of being the first Forsyth novel written after 9/11.

    It’s a bit of a surprise, then, to find out that despite the frequent reminders that the bulk of the story takes place during the summer of 2001, Avenger is more concerned about a Serbian mass-murderer than a middle-eastern terrorist. It’s not a complicated story: Our protagonist is an ex Vietnam-era “Tunnel Rat” named Calvin Dexter, and his specialty is tracking down criminals that have somehow eluded traditional justice. He extracts them from their hiding places and delivers them to the proper authorities. Avenger tells the story of one such extraction, Dexter taking on the task of bringing back a Serbian involved in the murder of a young man with very rich relatives.

    The rest, frankly, is just detail. Fortunately, details are what Forsyth does best. Avenger lies somewhere between Icon and The Afghan (2006) in exposition delivery and structure. As in Icon, Forsyth interleaves vignettes describing Dexter’s life in-between installments of his Serbian adventure. If the detail with which he describes the story is heavier than in previous novel, it’s still not up to the quasi-ridiculous voice-of-God level of The Afghan. There’s quite a bit of dialogue, and the political outlook of the story doesn’t fall as deep in right-wing blood-lust territory as his follow-up novel.

    It’s also meant to take place in the real world, and isn’t set “five minutes in the future” like many of his other novels are meant to. The historical focus alludes to the waste of intelligence resources and shady deals that led to the events of 9/11 without necessarily beating readers over the head with them (or, worse, using the event as an escape hatch like Nelson DeMille did in Night Fall.) Elements of the epilogue seem familiar (Forsyth has used the “character having deeply-buried personal connections to another character” twist before), but then again the whole novel feels like another solid bag of Forsyth’s tricks.

    The real fun and interest of the novel doesn’t come as often from the sequence of events than in the flashbacks, extraneous details and technical knowledge that Forsyth weaves into his fiction. It’s instantly credible even in trying to justify something as trite as a white girl being led to prostitution by non-Caucasian criminals. When Forsyth spends the first half of the novel hopping around Dexter’s chronology, it’s not a holding action as much as an excuse to present a few showpieces (such as an excellent description of the “Tunnel Rats”’s activity in Vietnam) and slowly build up the character we will follow for the rest of a novel. It’s an effective trick, especially given that this is at least the second time Forsyth has tried it.

    At face value, the novel certain needs the help –if you disengage even slightly, the protagonist’s improbable accumulation of skill and talents seems wildly over-the-top. It’s a testament to Forsyth’s skill that he can not only pull it off, but make it seem all normal.

    While Avenger isn’t Grand Forsyth, it’s markedly more palatable than The Afghan, and far closer to the author’s core strengths than some of his previous books. As a bridge between Icon and The Afghan, is a nearly perfect fit. Fans will be pleased, beach readers will get a decent read and everyone will have a good time. Even Forsyth’s average novels are worth a read, after all.

  • Finity, John Barnes

    Finity, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1999, 303 pages, C$31.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86118-4

    I’ve read the majority of John Barnes’ work, but a few books got forgotten along the way –such as Finity. It’s not much of an oversight: Finity is a minor novel, a trifle compared to some of Barnes’ other efforts. It’s not a success, and a look at Amazon confirms that the book received mixed reviews (29 reviews, and not one of them a five-star!)… but it fails to cohere in interesting ways.

    If nothing else, it does have the decency to start promisingly: The first hundred pages or so take place in an alternate reality where Nazis have taken over the world, yet feature the quasi-comical adventures of one Lyle Peripart, a quiet academic whose days are calm enough to allow for pleasant exchanges with the panoply of AIs managing things around him. But for Lyle, a successful job interview becomes the prelude to an increasingly baffling series of events that he can’t understand –almost as if reality was being altered around him.

    By the time his wife kills a Nazi spy and then disavows all knowledge of her actions, the readers are getting clued onto the fact that the many realities of Lyle Peripart are merging, splitting, shifting –and something has to be done! Good thing, then, that he suddenly finds himself in the middle of a group assembled especially for this occasion.

    Alas, this middle chunk of the book presents its own unique challenges. As Lyle and friends shift between realities, the reader has little solid footing. Everything known is wrong, which includes all of the lovely amusing bits in the book’s first third. Our characters are stuck in a storm of parallel realities, and the impression left by this extended sequence is unique: It’s like reading in a fog, where the words on the page can be trusted, but the entire conceptual framework carried around by the reader has to be purged again and again. It’s not a pleasant moment, but I’m struggling in vain to remember a similar reading experience elsewhere in fiction.

    When things settle down, they don’t go back to the world of the first third. In fact, our protagonist has to contend with altered version of his friends and significant others –a difference that leads to a pretty ugly scene of non-consensual sex between a bound and bewildered narrator and a girlfriend whose kinks don’t include safe-words. (Never underestimate Barnes’ ability to insert forcible anal penetration in an otherwise light-hearted adventure. But his fans already knew that.)

    Alas, the novel continues unraveling from that point forward, to such an extent that it’s legitimate to wonder if Barnes is doing it on purpose to annoy genre readers. Even after all the characters are reunited and bound in a single stable reality, their grand quest peters out as characters are killed one by one, until the remaining ones decide to retreat into a passive lifestyle. This, too, may be a radically innovative concept for genre fiction: In how many novels do you recall the protagonists giving up the adventure in order to stay away from it all?

    The fact that all of those things are interesting doesn’t in any way make them more satisfying. Finity messes with the genre fiction formula to its own perils: There’s a reason why formula works the way it works, and any attempt to defy convention also risks a backlash worse than just “a dull book”. Despite trappings of conventional adventure, Finity certainly engages the reader in ways that defy conventional reading protocols… but it’s the kind of experience that leaves readers without satisfaction. I certainly wouldn’t be so kind to the novel if I wasn’t already well predisposed to Barnes’ work, and if I didn’t suspect that his fiction often means to enrage a certain kind of readers. At the very least, the middle portion of Finity is a really fascinating reading experience; I wonder if the whole “reading in a fog” feeling couldn’t be exploited in other contexts.

  • Millennium, John Varley

    Millennium, John Varley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 1983 (SFBC reprint), 214 pages, C$??.?? hc, ISBN ???

    With my ever-growing stack of books to read, I don’t often re-visit thing I have already read. But an idle viewing of the much-maligned Millennium on DVD left me wondering once again about what, exactly, John Varley had in mind before the movie industry made mincemeat out of his concept.

    The essential back-story of the saga goes like this: After causing quite a stir in written Science Fiction circles at the end of the seventies, Varley went to Hollywood to work on movies. His written output during those years slowed down considerably, and the only tangible result of those years is his screenwriter credit on the 1989 film Millennium. There’s a dearth of documentation regarding the film’s troubled production (If Varley talks about it briefly in his 2004 retrospective The John Varley Reader, corroborating documentation is difficult to find on the web), but it’s no accident if this 1989 film looks as if it’s been shot years earlier. The finished movie reportedly languished in studio vaults for years until it was finally released. Varley started work on the script in 1979, and his “novelization” (credited to MGM/UA) came out in 1983, and ended up nominated for that year’s Hugo Awards.

    At its best, the film plays like a fine science-fiction thrillers set in the early eighties. The first half-hour is intriguing, but everything quickly cheapens once the central mystery is explained. Millennium then gets bogged down in a redundant temporal loop (we really don’t need to see the middle when we know the end) and becomes increasingly inept at portraying the future sequences that are supposed to be the showpieces of the film. The end result is frustrating: there are a bunch of great ideas in the whole mess (the premise itself, about time-traveling operatives snatching away passengers of doomed flights, is the kind of idea that gets into your brain and then never goes away, especially for frequent flyers), but the execution becomes increasingly disjoint, all the way to a ridiculous amount of mystic yadda-yadda by the closing seconds of the film.

    The book, unsurprisingly, is much better. At a pleasantly-short 214 pages, it moves quickly and keeps the strengths of the film while adding the rest of Varley’s original vision for the concept. Alternately told by the two main characters of the story in first-person “testimonies”, Millennium first reassures readers by giving them an early-eighties inside look at air crash investigations, with all of the procedural details and jargon-laden knowledge that presupposes. But the book’s most-improved aspect is in depicting the time traveler’s perspective on the events. The film’s unconvincing supermodel actress becomes a tough and uncompromising operative with her own distasteful habits, and her narration show how much of the character was watered-down for the big screen.

    Not having to worry about a production budget, Varley is able to add all the depth and credibility that the story requires. Amazingly, the plot points of both versions of the story are largely similar: Varley, on the other hand, doesn’t play silly temporal games with his audience (when he does, it feels natural) and is able to give some sorely-needed background justification. He doesn’t try to tie the characters together more than strictly needed (the epilogue even suggests how unreliable the testimonies are) and is able to speak knowledgeably to his genre-hardened readers: all chapter titles are taken from previous time-travel stories.

    Of course, it’s written with Varley’s usual verve. I had fond memories of the book, and revisiting it only underscored how good Varley could be even in delivering a run-of-the-mill SF thriller. It’s not just an illuminating look at how mishandled adaptations can keep the bones of a story and still mess up everything else: Millennium is a truly good SF novel, one that still has a lot of charm and value as an increasingly-historical context. (Which bolsters my contention that Back to the Future aside, the most interesting time-travel stories are ones where the future intrudes on a present, not ones where the present revisits the past.) Happily, I see from Amazon that Millennium is still in print; give it a try –it’s better than most novels published these days.

  • The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly

    The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Little Brown, 2009, 419 pages, C$30.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-316-16630-0

    For series readers, some books are an investment, while others feel like payoffs. While The Scarecrow will be perfectly intelligible and interesting to readers coming in cold to Michael Connelly’s crime thrillers, there’s no doubt that those who are familiar with the Connollyverse are going to get the most out of it. Starting by the fact that it’s a thematic sequel of sort to the author’s most successful book, The Poet.

    It’s true that there has already been a direct sequel to The Poet: The Narrows, after all, featured Harry Bosch disposing of the serial killer known as “The Poet”, while Jack McEvoy had small roles in other Connelly novels, most notably in A Darkness More Than Night. But this is McEvoy’s first return as a narrator, and the links between The Scarecrow and McEvoy’s previous adventure run deep.

    The Scarecrow certainly opens on some of the most depressing passages ever featured in a Connelly novel so far: As the novel begins, McEvoy has been fired. Newspapers everywhere are downsizing (the novel even includes a timely reference to the Denver Rocky Mountain News, which went web-only in early 2009), and veterans like McEvoy are too costly to keep in an era of corporate efficiency and dirt-cheap bloggers. Given two wholly unrealistic weeks to set his affairs in order and train his replacement, McEvoy is pushed to investigate a murder case where the accused has been coerced in an unconvincing confession. But in doing so, he alerts the real murderer, and this “Scarecrow” is a piece of work: an experienced serial killer with near-magical hacking skills, this antagonist takes no chances in dealing with McEvoy. Events unfold at a surprisingly fast pace from that moment: Only the timely appearance of FBI agent Rachel Walling saves McEvoy’s day, and their rekindled relationship isn’t much of a comfort when Walling’s career is once again on the line.

    As a reunion of familiar characters, The Scarecrow does quite a few things very well indeed. Harry Bosch is alluded to along the way, but his absence as the heavyweight protagonist of Connelly’s fiction frees Rachel Walling to become an interesting character once more. McEvoy’s narration is a welcome return to a journalist’s perspective on the usual sordid business that takes place in a Connelly novel: his wealth of experience as a reporter gives a neat twist to the procedural details of the tale (the book’s most telling detail being McEvoy’s recommendation to his successor to move a policeman’s quote closer to the top of the article, so that it will survive editing and create goodwill from the policeman) and echoes The Poet: the motto “Death is my beat” makes a return appearance, even as McEvoy seems at the end of his rope as a journalist.

    Otherwise, The Scarecrow hops between California and Nevada, goes from a newsroom to hotels to a data center, features some decent action scenes for McEvoy and doesn’t skimp on the denouement. Connelly’s prose is as crisp as ever, and if the result can often feel a bit familiar (especially toward the end), it’s a solid piece of summer reading with most of the qualities of the author’s fiction and few particular flaws. The novel’s cutting-edge references to the end of the newspaper era may prove to be just a bit too timely to act as an entirely escapist piece of fiction, but fans of Connelly’s output so far will be pleased to see familiar characters on-stage once more, while newer readers will come to understand what all the fuss around Connelly’s fiction is about.

  • Nothing to Lose, Lee Child

    Nothing to Lose, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 2008, 407 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-34056-4

    In this twelfth entry in the highly successful Jack Reacher series, it’s a given that some plot mechanics will feel very familiar. Reacher being arrested in the first chapter of the book is a reminder of the very first volume of the series, whereas the small-town setting can bring to mind the rural Texas landscape of Echo Burning (with which it also shares an unfair bar-room fight). Reacher is always taking on hopeless odds; what’s wrong with staring down an entire town in this entry?

    Yet, at the same time, there’s something new in this twelfth adventure as well. For perhaps the first time, political content makes its way into Reacher’s actions as the background of Nothing to Lose depends heavily on the invasion of Iraq for its premise. In at least three sub-plots, casualties of the war find their way to America, and its consequences weigh heavily on every character. For a series that has so far navigated gracefully between the shoals of American politics, it’s a bit of a surprise to find this twelfth entry embracing material most readily discussed in left-leaning company.

    This time, Reacher’s troubles start as he walks over the wrong border: Trying to make his way from one American coast to another, he ends up at the border between the cities of Hope and Despair, Colorado. Things go sour as soon as he’s spotted in Despair: arrested without too much ceremony, he’s eventually scolded and deported back to Hope. Reacher, naturally, doesn’t like being told what to do: His aroused curiosity soon turns to obsession as it becomes clear that Despair holds many, many secrets.

    In fact, Nothing to Lose isn’t a thriller as much as it’s a description of how Reacher teases all the mysteries out of a puzzle box. Despair features three ongoing sets of secrets and a fantastically unlikely accumulation of surprises that would be unbelievable anywhere but in a Reacher novel. (Amusingly enough, a fantastically unlikely coincidence is outlandish enough to be discussed and rationalized by the characters: As one of them puts it, “That’s a coincidence as big as a barn.” [P.72])

    Fortunately, Child knows how to tease information effectively: By the time Reacher faces down a literal human chain of Despair residents determined not to let anyone sneak into their town, it’s easy to believe that something has gone deeply, deeply wrong in that small city. Seeing Reacher take down Despair’s entire police force feels like divine retribution over a hive of sin. The action set-piece of the book is either a demolition derby that leads to the hospitalization of Despair’s remaining police force, or a bar-room brawl in which Reacher manages to incapacitate half-a-dozen opponents and stare down the rest of the patrons.

    But such things are to be expected in this series. What’s perhaps a bit wilder is the identity and affiliation of the book’s main set of villains, another signal that will please left-leaning readers of the series. Alas, one of the plots uncovered by Reacher seems a bit too big, a bit too unlikely to sit comfortably. Reacher, after all, is at his best saving widows and orphans, not taking on entire geopolitical issues.

    On the other hand, Nothing to Lose proves that there’s still quite a bit of juice left in the Reacher series’ most enduring conceits: Reacher is still believable taking down unbelievable odds and the accumulation of technical details is still layered enough to strengthen the credibility of the entire novel. While this twelfth entry feels a bit like others, it’s also distinctive enough on its own. The strengthened political content may or may not lead to anything in further Reacher adventures, but it’s an intriguing development in a genre that sometimes has trouble balancing political views.

  • The Joke’s Over: Ralph Steadman on Hunter S. Thompson, Ralph Steadman

    The Joke’s Over: Ralph Steadman on Hunter S. Thompson, Ralph Steadman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harcourt, 2006 (2007 reprint), 396 pages, C$16.95 tpb, ISBN 978-0-15-101282-4

    Hunter S. Thompson was (sometimes) a brilliant writer, but most of his legend is based on stories of hard substance abuse, aggressive behavior and casual disregard for authority. While that makes for spectacular adventures, it’s quite another thing to reflect upon the consequences of that kind of mindset on close friends and family.

    Ralph Steadman’s The Joke’s Over is that strangest of autobiographies: a personal narrative almost entirely centered around another person. The autobiography of a sidekick, so to speak. Gonzo fans already know that Steadman is the artist responsible for the signature illustrations bundled with Thompson’s best-known work: The nightmarish caricatures in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are as much part of the reading experience as the text itself, and so Steadman has become an integral part of the Gonzo Journalism myth, the visual representation of Thompson’s prose aesthetics. Steadman is an accomplished artist in his own right, but there’s no doubt that there are more Thompson fans than people interested in a straight-up Steadman autobiography: Hence The Joke’s Over, a lengthy testimony of what it was like to be a friend of Hunter S. Thompson.

    It’s not a simple friendship made of friendly communication and simple fishing trips: From their first meeting in Kentucky (The first chapter of The Joke’s Over reads like the mirror image of Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”, down to Thompson macing Steadman and driving him away to the airport in a cloud of invectives), Steadman and Thompson seem to oscillate between common admiration and shared loathing. Steadman, upon writing down his memories, becomes conscious that it was a relationship in which only Thompson could see himself as the superior one. It didn’t help that the writer suffered from life-long money problems, and that a recurring topic in this biography is royalties and how much Thompson wrangled over his share of the proceeds. Not that Steadman took advantage of his partner: Tales abound about how his illustrations were re-used at a pittance, and how difficult Thompson could become whenever financial issues were discussed.

    Steadman never quite says it, but he comes close to acknowledging how much of an abusive relationship his friendship with Thompson could be. While the two remained close during their entire lives (which tells us something about how fiercely loyal Thompson could be, and how he inspired his friends to be the same to him), it wasn’t always smooth or simple. One thing almost left unsaid by Steadman that you have to read about in other biographies is the rift that erupted between the two men in the early nineties as Thompson had a stint in jail (which led to a fund-raiser, which led to more money issues) and Steadman contributed to unauthorized biographies that displeased the writer.

    It’s all great material, but one of the most frustrating things about The Joke’s Over is that it’s best read with ample knowledge of the context: Steadman may or may not be a skilled writer, but the editing of the book is deficient: The stream-of-consciousness gonzo writing style has no place in a biography of the sort: Entire paragraphs of The Joke’s Over are incomprehensible or tangential, veering off in wild political screeds that aren’t uninteresting, but distract considerably from the main text. At 396 pages, Steadman’s book is far too long and disjoint, not to mention unpleasant to read.

    It goes without saying that The Joke’s Over is a book for the die-hard Thompson fans: Most will be better off reading William McKeen’s superlative biography Outlaw Journalist to be told crisply what Steadman takes forever to say. On the other hand, skipping over The Joke’s Over means missing out on the feeling of being stuck with the Thompson whirlwind, having pills pressed in our hands and flying off in a daze of violent fear and loathing. The Joke’s Over may not be entirely pleasant experience for grounded readers, but it’s a minor success of gonzo writing taking Hunter S. Thompson as its subject.

  • Hunter’s Moon, David Devereux

    Hunter’s Moon, David Devereux

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2007, 231 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 978-0-575-07985-4

    The recent explosive rise in urban fantasy (the new kind, with leather-clad heroines) has been one of the big publishing success stories of the past decade, and a lot of it has been fueled by a hybridization of romance with supernatural thrillers. The result, perhaps inevitably, has remained chiefly (although not exclusively) aimed at female readers, with the boys joining in for the thrill of reading about “kick-ass chicks”.

    Now comes David Devereux with Hunter’s Moon, a self-conscious reactionary take on the same themes that reads like urban fantasy hammered by military thrillers. It’s almost ridiculously aimed at male readers, and has an admirable determination in fulfilling that objective. The results may not be entirely comfortable, but it’s a bit of distinctiveness in a fast-expanding field that seems determined to race to the broadest generic denominator.

    The fun starts with the series tagline: “Magician by Profession, Bastard by Disposition”. Our narrator “Jack” may work for the British government, but he is not a nice man, and he means it. Like an authentically spicy dish in a small restaurant, his brand of nastiness has nothing to do with the watered-down bad boys that populate less determined thrillers: He knows magic and he’s paid to be ruthless. Not content with merely killing opponents, he’ll bring their spirit back from the netherworld and curse it so that even their souls will be lost. Now that’s hardcore.

    It seems like overkill to set such a protagonist against a mere convent of witches bent on assassinating the British Prime Minister, but that’s as good an excuse as many to initiate readers to the twisted world of military operations and magical incantation that “Jack” inhabits. One thing that may catch readers’ eyes before starting Hunter’s Moon is Devereux’s forward note saying “All the magic in this book is fake. I made it up. The Principles are sound, but since I don’t want anyone out there trying to do the things that Jack does, I assembled his methods from a wide variety of incompatible systems…” If that sounds like a stronger variety of “Don’t try this as home, kids”, it’s no accident: A look at Devereux’s site reveals an authentic interest for the occult (his first book, an autobiography, is titled Memoirs of an Exorcist) and while we’ll agree to disagree on the existence of occult phenomenas, Hunter’s Moon does a splendid job in setting up a messy magical system that feels as if it’s got the patchwork consistency of an authentic discipline.

    The rest of the book flies along at a snappy 230 pages as Jack infiltrates his target, depending either on military skills or occult knowledge to advance in his investigations. The twists and turns pile up, and there’s seldom a dull moment negotiating between national state secrets and black magic. There’s a lot of dark kink-friendly sex and even more neck-snapping violence, so don’t let the kids get a copy of this book unless they really, really want it.

    This being said, one aspect of Hunter’s Moon left me quite a bit less enthusiastic. “Jack” may be an equal-opportunity professional bastard, but it’s hard to avoid noticing that his targets in this book tend to be overwhelmingly female. Blame my upbringing, but (even in targeting a witch convent) male-on-female violence tends to stick in my craw a bit more than the other permutations. The torture scene, with its strong overtones of dominance and submissive behavior, is about as bad as it gets (well, if you don’t count the whole excessive kill-a-housewife-then-destroy-her-soul bit mentioned above.) I suspect that other readers’ reaction to this material will vary quite a bit.

    Others will argue that this type of discomfort is a good sign that this energetic, relentless urban fantasy is meeting its goals. If nothing else, Hunter’s Moon is a rarity in that it doesn’t have any fat nor mercy: it’s lean, it’s mean, and it’s a fast read. In most circumstances, it would be difficult to find anything more appropriate to say about it.

  • The Great Shark Hunt, Hunter S. Thompson

    The Great Shark Hunt, Hunter S. Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1979 (2003 reprint), 602 pages, C$25.00 tpb, ISBN 0-7432-5045-1

    Perhaps the most surprising thing about Hunter S. Thompson’s work is how short his most productive period has been: From Hell’s Angels to the end of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, his best years all took place during the 1965-1975 decade, with significant fallow periods within: Aside from his prolix biweekly schedule during the 1972 election (one that he wasn’t able to sustain past August/September), Thompson wrote far less than you’d expect from such a well-known journalist.

    But still frequently enough that a collection of his best work between 1960 and 1980 manages to fill a hefty trade paperback. From the National Observer pieces in which he criss-crossed South America to the post-celebrity pieces of the late seventies when Thompson had carte blanche to write about anything, The Great Shark Hunt is the essential collection of his pure journalism work.

    All the big classics are there: “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” marked the launch of Gonzo journalism, where the journalist becomes a primary motor for the events being described. Even today, no one is too sure how much of the piece is outright fiction and how much is altered fact: it certainly reads like a lively short story, and still works best as such even as the culture revolving around the Kentucky Derby has completely changed.

    Other landmark pieces include “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan”, a typically apocalyptic piece (featuring attorney Oscar D’Acosta) that would eventually lead to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That article would be bookended six years later by “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat”, which served as a requiem of sort for the still-absent D’Acosta. In between we get the entire 1972 campaign, the Watergate hearings, and the beginning of Thompson’s legend as a drug-addicted, catastrophe-minded, anti-authoritarian symbol. The title piece of the book may have been the first and purest piece written by Thompson as playing on his own legend: The subject becomes secondary to Thompson’s chemically-fueled adventures facing the emptiness of his assignment.

    For fans, half the fun is in discovering lesser-known material. There are a number of more overly humorous pieces here that leave an impact, from the Swiftian satire of “The so-called ‘Jesus Freak’ scare” to the overblown aggression of “The Police Chief” (which features the line “[tear gas] only slaps at the problem: nerve gas solves it” [P.416]). Other great moment in Thompson history include the bittersweet let-down at seeing Nixon resign in disgrace in “Mr. Nixon Has Cashed His Check”, to a fanciful speech from the balcony at the beginning of “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl” that brings to mind the kinship between Thompson and Transmetropolitan‘s Spider Jerusalem.

    In many ways, The Great Shark Hunt is designed to be the perfect introductory volume to Thompson’s work: In addition to the pieces that would make his renown as a Gonzo journalist, we get some of the best excerpts from his three best-known books: The “Edge” piece from Hell’s Angels is here, as are the first few pages of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the “220 million used car salesmen” rant from the end of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. If you only get one Thompson book, get Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas… but if it’s not available, you won’t go wrong with The Great Shark Hunt.

    Still, it could have been a better volume. Insufficiently organized in four sections (unnamed, but summarized as “The Birth of Gonzo”, “Politics 1968-1976”, “Pre-Gonzo Journalism” and “Full-Gonzo Thompson”), the collection often seems to veer from one piece to another without reason, and now sorely lacks connecting material. Thompson’s prose is always an acquired taste, but the book often seems to assume that the reader is already convinced of Thompson’s brilliance.

    Hunter S. Thompson’s flame may have burned too briefly, but never as brightly as during the years chronicled in The Great Shark Hunt. If you’ve been wondering which volume best showcases Thompson’s considerable writing talents, look no further.

  • The Lost Fleet: Dauntless, Jack Campbell (John G. Hemry)

    The Lost Fleet: Dauntless, Jack Campbell (John G. Hemry)

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2006, 293 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-441-01418-7

    It’s an uncontroversial assertion to say that an author’s name is a more reliable marker for satisfaction than a genre label, which is why savvy readers are advised to take a look at “Jack Campbell”’s The Lost Fleet: Dauntless and flip over to the copyright page, which blandly attributes the book to “John G. Hemry writing as Jack Campbell”

    Hemry, of course, is the writer of the well-regarded “Paul Sinclair / JAG in Space” tetralogy. While the series obviously didn’t sell all that well (hence explaining the transparent name change), it was above-average military Science Fiction with an appealing protagonist and strong moral underpinnings that informed the content of the fiction. Those are the very same qualities that help make this first volume of The Lost Fleet series so engaging, even for those who don’t have any particular affection for military SF.

    The premise has its own kick of interest: A hundred years after being cryogenically frozen following an military engagement between two splinters of humanity, Captain John “Black Jack” Geary is revived to find out that the war is still going on, and that he’s been placed in charge of a fleet far away from home. The enemy is closing in; his own troops are demoralized and his reserves are running low. That’s the first chapter.

    Trying to learn as quickly as he can, Geary meets his first fans (who love the long-lost legend more than the real man), makes a few enemies and manages a few fancy military maneuvers. Then things get worse.

    Unfrozen out of his time, Geary quickly realizes that some things have changed dramatically in a hundred years. His own side isn’t quite as honorable as it used to be, and the constant toll of fighting has lowered strategic standards. Some of his early victories depend on tactical knowledge forgotten during the intervening century; others depend on a willingness to take the decisions that everyone else wants to avoid. But even then, a substantial number of officers under his command think that they can do much better than a quasi-mythic war hero…

    The first volume in a series with five volumes as of spring 2009, Dauntless is about setting up a rich framework for adventure. So there are plenty of expected and not-so-expected hints and portents: Geary’s mythical reputation; warring power blocks; the war’s history; hints of a third force; a quest to get back home; and Geary’s own doubts are all put on the table in this first entry. It remains to be seen whether they can sustain the series until the end, or keep it humming until it changes shape. It’s not a baseless concern: If there’s one lasting criticism about Hemry’s previous “Paul Sinclair” books, it’s that they all had the same structure, and that one book was a reliable guide to all the others.

    But at the same time, “Campbell”’s prose style is just as readable as Hemry’s, which can make the difference between reading a single book and committing to an entire series. It helps that Hemry doesn’t write the kind of military SF that most people picture when they think about the subgenre. Here, the emphasis is placed on the burden of being part of a military unit, not on the glory of combat: Geary is acutely conscious that every battle means death for someone, and that his forces aren’t strong enough to sustain the kind of spectacular battle that is the staple of the sub-genre. Oh, there’s clever combat all right –but the interest of the series is just as strong in matters of logistics and politics than it is when the weapons start firing.

    And that, in itself, is a good indicator of Hemry’s writing skill —no matter which name he uses on the cover. We’ll see how many volumes The Lost Fleet sustains, but if previous indicators are a reliable guide to future performance, it will be -at worst- a really entertaining series.

    [June 2009: The Lost Fleet: Fearless indeed keeps things moving in the right direction.  The stakes are raised with unexpected new characters, defections, a romance and stronger suggestions of alien interference.  There are also a few more space battles, although they don’t overshadow the series’ more interesting issues about leadership and cooperation.  The prose style is a jolly good read, and the series manages to hit a sweet spot between shoot-em-up military action and more thoughtful resource-management problems.  The growing sophistication of the characters is a hallmark of addictive fiction.  In short; this is one series that’s doing everything right so far.]

    [May 2010: It took six volumes, but The Lost Fleet: Victorious finally wraps things up.  The conclusion is satisfying, but the series has spent a long time doing nothing before revving into gear in the last volumes and a half.  What could have been a satisfying trilogy has become a badly-paced series.  Good characters, satisfying emphasis on the burden of leadership, but take out some scissors and snip away at the middle third of the series, because it almost overstays its welcome. There’s a reason why I haven’t even mentioned tomes 3-5.]

  • Next, Michael Crichton

    Next, Michael Crichton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 2006, 431 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-06-087298-4

    It’s fitting that Michael Crichton’s last novel before his death in 2008 would encapsulate so many of the most distinguishing characteristics of his fiction. An alarmist techno-thriller with enough hypocrisy to choke two talking monkeys and a sentient parrot, Next is a polemic more than a novel, and it’s best appreciated with tons of contextual information.

    Intentionally structured in a scattershot fashion, Next reads like a free-form exploration of issues surrounding genetic research. For the first half of the book, readers will struggle to identify a plot thread as unrelated scenes pile up, starring dozens of characters that appear out of nowhere and seem to return to obscurity just as quickly. In interviews about Next, Crichton likens the novel’s various plotlines to DNA, with its genetic material that may or may not be important. It’s as fancy an excuse as one can imagine for a free-form whirlwind of loosely connected vignettes. After all, Crichton is less interested in telling a story than he is at baiting readers.

    For a man whose nonfiction writing career has been spent shouting down new technological development (starting with information technology in 1971’s The Terminal Man), it’s a return to basics more than a late-career affectation. Crichton even makes references to his own Jurassic Park (a novel that has aged far less gracefully than you’d expect with its gratuitous references to then-hot chaos theory) and how the state of genetic research has evolved since then.

    So it is that nearly all of Next‘s characters are either villains or victims: Rich businessmen trying to exploit genetic research for their own personal gain, or poor ordinary folks finding themselves in impossible situations —from a man whose DNA is patented by a commercial entity to another one who’s framed for proclivities blamed on genes. Not all victims are humans, this being a novel with an inordinate fondness for talking animals.

    It all gets ridiculous after only a few pages. Crichton’s accumulation of manufactured outrage gets tiresome and transparent; it doesn’t help that after a dozen novels of contrarian shtick, his methods are more obvious than ever. Everyone with money is evil; anyone with power can be counted upon to do the wrong thing; there are no solutions. This knee-jerk cynicism gets as tiresome as idealist naiveté, but reaches exasperation much, much faster.

    Hypocrisy has always been synonymous with Crichton’s fiction, and Next is no exception: Once the fiction is over, associated notes and interviews bundled with the book go on to reveal that Crichton basically feels optimistic about genetic research… provided that a few laws are passed. Not that you would know that from reading the main text: any optimistic viewpoints are carefully kept away from the plotting, and no solutions are portrayed during the course of the novel: It’s as violent a case of intellectual whiplash as you can get without reading an author’s note that says “I really didn’t mean what you just read.”

    But, hey: Michael Crichton. Hypocrisy and self-contradictions have always served him well. Frankly, it’s not as if he never gets anything right: In the middle of the whole reactionary mess that is Next, one can find this unarguable passage:

    Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practitioners aren’t saints, they’re human beings and they do what human beings do –lie, cheat, steal from one another, sue, hide data, fake data, overstate their own importance and denigrate opposing views unfairly. That’s human nature. It isn’t going to change. [P.62]

    Replace “Science” with “writing a novel” and there aren’t many better epitaphs about Michael Crichton’s novels. I happen to believe that fiction should allow for the possibility of being better than our own natures, but you can chalk this up to a philosophical difference between Crichton and myself. At the very least, I’ll grant one thing —Next may or may not be very good, but it’s as entertaining in its own way as the rest of his fiction.