Book Review

  • 500 Essential Cult Books: The Ultimate Guide, Gina McKinnon

    500 Essential Cult Books: The Ultimate Guide, Gina McKinnon

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Sterling, 2010, 384 pages, C$20.00 pb, ISBN 978-1-402-77485-0

    If you’ve come here for a detailed, well-argued review of Gina McKinnon’s 500 Essential Cult Books: The Ultimate Guide, then prepare to be disappointed, because I’m going to use the book as an excuse to blather on The State of My Reading Habits circa 2013.

    A bit of a recap may be in order: For most of my life, I’ve considered myself at the far end of the reading bell-curve.  I scoffed at those 50-books-a-year blogging challenges: At my peak, I could knock off between 250 and 300 books per year and review a hundred of them thanks to a quiet single life and a lengthy bus commute.  That gradually stopped once I got married, became a father and moved dramatically closer to my place of employment.  As a result, I’m going to close 2013 having read fewer than thirty books –most of those late at night, on a handheld device while sitting in the smallest room of the house.  Things change!

    So you can imagine my mixture of delight and bitterness at receiving, as a birthday gift from my sister, 500 Essential Cult Books: The Ultimate Guide.  Oh sure: Rub some salt in those wounds, won’t you?  I’m already complaining that I read a tenth of what I read before, and now here are more reading suggestions?  Well-played, sister.  Enjoy your pre-mothering days.  We’ll talk again in a few years.

    My first impulse was to throw the book into one of the dozen boxes where my “to-read” pile has come to roost following The Great Household Move of 2013.  But 500 Essential Cult Books had a few things going for it: An attractive visual design, bite-sized text snippets describing the titular 500 books, and an appeal to my inner bean-counter: How many of those essential cult books had I actually read?  (As it turns out: roughly 111, although I’d like to claim half-credit for roughly 30 more due to having either seen the movie or read abridged versions.)

    So I packed the book in my work bag and resolved to read a little bit of it every day at the office while my workstation was booting up, or during those inevitable downtimes where I was stuck between a few minutes to waste and a good book at hand.  It took two months to make it from one cover to another, but I did… and that feels like a victory in itself.

    The most obvious comment about 500 Essential Cult Books is that McKinnon’s definition of a cult book is quite expansive, in both the best and not-so-best sense.  If you’re particularly picky, describing The Da Vinci Code as a cult book will strike you as nonsense: How can a massively successful book, mainly read by people who hadn’t picked up a suspense novel in years, even qualify as cult?  But McKinnon’s argument is solid: the novel has inspired an unusual devotion amongst its readership, leading to countless spinoff books, tourism tours and passionate commentary –not to mention the movie adaptation.  (As an aside; a significant proportion of those 500 cult books have been adapted to the big screen –a clear indicator of a readership passionate enough to risk the vagaries of moviemaking) So it goes –if you prefer, call McKinnon’s book “500 books that inspired a lot of people” and drop the “cult” as inconvenient shorthand.

    Otherwise, there’s a lot to like about the breadth and variety of the books that McKinnon has selected.  She gets to pick works originally written in other languages than English, has no trouble mixing fiction and non-fiction, seems to enjoy graphic novels as much as I do, and subdivides the book in categories (“Incredible Worlds”, “Thrilling Tales”, “Inner Spirits”) that are more suggestive than restrictive.  Each book gets a plot summary, a critical commentary and further reading suggestions, and if it all feels a bit short, her list of 500 titles is broad enough to reach anyone and everyone.  If nothing else, it’s a far more entertaining set of “read this” recommendations than yet another attempt at canon-making: McKinnon is positively joyous in suggesting the kind of oddball and unusual titles that earn devotion rather than mere respect.  So it is that as I made my way through the book, my nods at “yeah, I read that and it deserves to be on the list” were followed by a number of “Oooh, that sounds interesting and I want to read that”. 

    That last, obviously, is a harder sell now than it used to be: long gone are the days where I could just order a dozen books on Amazon and dispose of them in a few weeks, or embark on a year-long massive reading project.  I have bought fewer than half a dozen books for myself in 2013, and given the sheer amount of stuff to be done around the house alongside an active toddler, I’m not foreseeing 2014 as being any less punishing than 2013 in terms of free time left for reading.

    But I am exactly where I want to be in my life, and far wiser avid readers have assured me that it’s normal and expected for everything else to pause while raising young children.  To risk an old cliché, I’ve learned quite a bit more this year caring for a little person than I’ve gotten from the books I would have read otherwise, and there’s no way I’d be tempted to trade the experience.  Those 500 books will still be there, just as intact and fascinating, once I get a bit more time; isn’t that the best thing about reading?

  • Double Down: Game Change 2012, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann

    Double Down: Game Change 2012, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Penguin, 2013, 512 pages, C$31.50 hc, ISBN 978-1-594-20440-1

    In an age of twitter-sized text bites, continuous news cycle and fragmented constituencies, there is something to be said for long-form narratives that seek to explain months of events and incidents.  This goes double for attempts to describe something as complex as a presidential campaign.  Following in the footsteps of their vastly entertaining Game Change (which tackled the 2008 presidential campaign, with a focus on the Obama/Clinton primary challenges and the impact of Sarah Palin on the campaign), Mark Halperin and John Heilemann have spent much of 2011 and 2012 following the main players involved in the 2012 American presidential campaign, and Double Down is an attempt to weave what they’ve learned into a coherent narrative.

    The biggest problem with the 2012 campaign, of course, is that it was a fairly dull affair: Barack Obama went into the contest with the advantages of the incumbency, while Mitt Romney was seen as the least-objectionable pick from an uninspiring selection of candidates from a Republican party fractured between the older establishment and the extreme tea-partiers.  Save for a lopsided first debate that temporarily upset expectations, the campaign had few dramatic moments.  By the time November rolled around, the only people claiming a close election were media outlets hyping up their viewership number and the Romney campaign itself.  Watching the results at home, I knew enough about the possible swing-states to be able to call the election for Obama roughly three minutes before CNN did.

    As a political junkie, I’m the natural audience for a book such as Double Down… even though I spent much of 2012 a step removed from American politics, preoccupied with a brand-new baby at home.  And while I may have opened this review with lofty goals of narrative-making, let’s be honest: I read book such as Double Down to get pieces of gossip, new revelations and an idea of what I’d missed from the usual open sources of information.

    As it turns out, Double Down is most interesting when it does delve into what I’d missed: Mostly the early stages of the Republican nomination process, as promising candidates decide (or are strongly encouraged) to sit out the 2012 election cycle.  This, improbably, opened up the field for Romney, who managed to remain the least-terrible alternative after a succession of other would-be nominees flamed out early on.  The look behind the scenes of those failed contenders is often fascinating, and perhaps more affecting than the winning campaigns: I never thought I’d feel a bit of sympathy for Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry, but seeing them struggles with (respectively) debilitating migraines and post-operative back pain is enough to remind you that for all the overheated partisan rhetoric, these are still real people running for office. 

    Amusingly, the authors also have to contend with their own precedent in writing Double Down: Parts of Chapter 3 are spent describing the White House’s dealing with the authors, while one of the most hilarious anecdotes of the book has VP nominee Paul Ryan trying to calm down before his major convention speech by watching… the HBO movie adaptation of Game Change, focusing on the shortcomings of his predecessor Sarah Palin.  Fortunately, the book itself is not perceptibly biased, save for siding with the winner and being harsher on the losers: While Obama is criticized for his failings as a contemplative president and as a reluctant candidate, Romney gets worse by being described as a curiously ambivalent candidate, one that maybe didn’t want the presidency enough.

    The authors have a knack for creating a compelling narrative (even though their vocabulary often runs wild, along with their tendency toward nicknames or metonymy) and the book is a joy to read, although a good background in American national politics is required before making sense of most details.  Still, it’s worth remembering that Halperin and Heilemann are part of the old-school of journalism.  Never mind the off-handed (and faintly reprobate) mentions of social media (and even, just Twitter –never Facebook!) as if it was just a fringe phenomenon: this mentality leads to a few curious omissions in what is otherwise a complete account of the campaign. 

    For instance, while nothing made me smile wider than seeing the author dismiss Ron Paul as a man whose “radical libertarianism, out-front isolationism, and just plain kookiness— from his abhorrence of paper money to his ties to the John Birch Society — made him more likely to end up on a park bench feeding stale bread to the squirrels than become the Republican nominee”, Paul did earn more votes during the primaries than many other candidates described at length during the book.  I suspect that access has to do with this snide dismissal: that is, if the authors were rebuffed by the Paul campaign, then they found nothing interesting to say about him.  Far more troubling is Double Down’s refusal to mention Nate Silver even once.  Silver, as you may recall, was the most visible of the web-based statistical pundits who uniformly predicted an Obama victory, even as the traditional media was still creating a smokescreen of uncertainty over the election.  Also significant is the lack of discussion about the Romney campaign’s ORCA IT problems, which may have led to a false sense of confidence in the final weeks of the campaign in a supposedly data-centric organization.  Those stories were well-covered in the days immediately after the election, and it seems curious that they don’t even rate a mention even as figures who played no part in the election such as Haley Barbour rate pages of anecdotes.  (And let’s not even mention Chris Christie, who should consider sending copies of this book to registered Republicans in anticipation of his 2016 run… or not.)

    And this brings us to my original assessment of Game Change, which holds true for Double Down as well: It’s become a quadrennial gossip rag for the political set.  Data, infrastructure, trends and strategy aren’t nearly as important in Double Down as screaming, shouting, money problems and dramatic narration.  That’s to necessarily a bad thing, as long as readers understand that this is political reporting as entertainment.  Insight will come from elsewhere.

    Is it any surprise that a movie adaption has already been announced?

  • Tom Clancy (1947-2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tom Clancy is dead.

    The news came in via the internet, as all things now do: Within moments, it was the at top of news sites, and managed the rare quadrifecta of topping Reddit’s /news/, /books/, /movies/ and /gaming/ forums –an eloquent testimony to Clancy’s impact in three very different fields, and his once-preeminent status as America’s best-selling novelist.  (Cardinal of the Kremlin was the best-selling novel of 1988 in the United States; Clear and Present Danger repeated the achievement the following year.)

    As I read the eulogies, what struck me is how distant the news felt.  2013 hasn’t been a good year for author deaths (Jack Vance, Richard Matheson, Vince Flynn, Iain Banks, Elmore Leonard, Frederik Pohl… geez, and that’s just a selection from relatively-famous authors I found interesting) but what was different with Clancy is that once upon a time, I could claim with conviction that he was my favourite author.

    The reviews of his work on this web site don’t accurately represent that: they were all written after 1995, past the point of Clancy’s most successful work.  By lieu of apology-by-eulogy, I thought I’d take a trip back in time and revisit myself as a younger reader.  There may be some autobiographical content below.  (And given the vagaries of memory, there may be some unintentionally erroneous material as well, but if you know the truth, don’t tell me –I rather like my version of the story.)

    It starts in Rockland, a small (mostly French-language) town in eastern Ontario, circa 1989 or thereabouts.  At the time, I’m a bright 13-year old mostly-francophone nerd just beginning high-school.  I love reading (well, in-between computer games) and I’m taking up more adult novels in English, but the local selection is limited: the (mostly French-language) school library is aimed at teenagers, the (mostly French-language) local public library is small and there’s no bookstore closer than the one 15 kilometers west in Ottawa-suburb Orléans.  Not that it would matter, since I don’t have any money.  My interest in science and technology make science-fiction my favourite thing, but the small local selection means that I have already read everything SF.

    Enters Clancy.

    Thanks to a kindly great-aunt who loves reading as much as I do, I end up borrowing The Hunt for Red October (a battered gray paperback edition, portraying a submarine through a periscope) and I get hooked: The writing is plain and effective, the plot moves forward relentlessly, the technology feels cutting-edge and, perhaps most importantly, the book is filled with the kind of delicious expositionary material that I had until then only seen in science-fiction.  Being thirteen-year old, I’m able to read my way through Clancy’s back-catalogue in a few weeks.  By 1989, he not only has a small back-log of six novels (all stocked at the local library), but his success has also created the techno-thriller genre.

    I’m not alone in discovering Clancy.  My small coterie of proudly nerd friends and I (“The Nerd Squad”, yup, we were nerd-chic a decade before it was chic to be nerd) find Clancy to be the best thing ever.  It helps that there’s a link with computer games (ah, the DOS version of Red Storm Rising: awesome!), that Clear and Present Danger is atop the bestseller charts and that the movie version of The Hunt for Red October is buzzing around.  I remember talking about specific chapters of Red Storm Rising at a hockey arena with friend Sylvain (hey, what’s two nerds to do when the school forces you to watch a game at the local rink?); I remember my dearly departed friend Yves (RIP) telling us about how a boating mishap sent the Rockland Public Library’s sole copy of Clear and Present Danger in the Ottawa River, where it “rolled in the water like a donut being fried” (the water-damaged version would stay on their shelves for years; I wonder if they still have it); or both of us arguing about whether it was OK to peek ahead at the last page of a novel as you’re reading it (he had read the last page of Patriot Games to make sure it wasn’t going to end badly).

    In some ways, Clancy leads us small-town nerds to the wider world.  I remember all of us Nerds Squad members making a then-rare road trip to go see the film adaptation of Patriot Games in theaters (in Gloucester, 25 kilometers west) on its first weekend of release in June 1992.  We start picking up other techno-thriller novels and exchanging recommendation.  My first big new-book book purchase, at Place d’Orléans’ Coles bookstore, is three mass-paperback techno-thrillers in the Clancy subgenre by Dale Brown, Larry Bond and Harold Coyle.

    At the time, Clear and Present Danger is the best thing I have ever read.  When teenagers tackle their first big adult novels, they feel insanely big and imposing, and so the details stick in my mind even though I’ve forgotten many better books in the meantime.  I still remember elements of the climax (such as Jack Ryan finding a long gash in his helmet, caused by a near-miss from a high-powered bullet) to be the measure of how thrillers should be written.  Heck, even without looking it up, I still remember the closing line: “Silence is the greatest love of all.”  (After checking: Aw, close: “silence was the greatest passion of all” [P.688, a page number I still remembered given the association with submarines.])

    Given the scorn with which I reviewed latter Clancy novels on this site, I feel almost obligated to point out how good the first half-dozen Clancy novels actually were.  Mixing up my own impressions of the novels with a wider critical appreciation of the subgenre:

    • The Hunt for Red October (1984) remains the prototype for the techno-thriller genre.  There had been earlier examples of the form (such as Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969), Craig Thomas’ Firefox (1977), Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s The Fifth Horsemen (1980)) but this is the one that codified the form and made it popular: Blend in real-world references, high stakes, cutting-edge technology, detailed information lumps, plain writing and straightforward characterization.  Even as a first novel, it’s amazingly self-assured: the plotting is tense, the pacing rarely flags despite the digressions and protagonist Jack Ryan’s heroic journey as an analyst forced in active operations is credible.  It’s a terrific book, and I hope to be able to revisit it someday soon.
    • As a novel trying to describe an entire World War III in less than 700 pages, Red Storm Rising (1986) may read today like hopelessly outdated alternate history.  But in 1989/1990, even as the Soviet Union was breaking up, it still read like a chillingly plausible scenario.  What still works, as long as you allow for the WW3 scenario, is the complexity of the plotting and the success with which Clancy and acknowledged-but-uncredited collaborator Larry Bond manage to depict a multi-fronted WW3 through a few viewpoint characters.  It compares very positively with other WW3 fantasies that appeared on bookshelves during the end of the Cold War, most notably Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War.  I have great memories of the book, and it’s another one I hope to re-read some day.
    • Patriot Games (1987) proves that Clancy can be just as good with smaller-stakes.  This time (with a story predating The Hunt for Red October, something that had blown my unformed mind at a time where “prequel” hadn’t become a cash-in staple), Clancy focuses on a man protecting his family from terrorists and keeps up the tension even without world-threatening stakes.  Even if I’d probably find the ending overdone nowadays (what with a terrorist assault, a storm and a birth all converging) it seemed at the time like a perfect little ending to a perfect little thriller.
    • The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988) goes big once again, focusing on spying games between the US and the Soviet Union.  A direct sequel to The Hunt for Red October, The Cardinal of the Kremlin stands tall as a refined example of sophisticated late-cold-war spy fiction.  It blends together a number of political, military and technological elements that make it seem quite a bit more complex than the usual spycraft thriller.  Even today, there may not be a better late-cold-war spying novel.
    • Clear and Present Danger (1989) is discussed above, but I want to highlight how prescient it was at anticipating the post-Cold War era.  It may have featured drug-lord antagonists, but the real point of the novel was the tension within the US forces in authorizing operations running against public policy and ethics.  It’s probably Clancy’s most thoughtful novel, and the portrait of squad-level combat operations is still memorable.

    By the time The Sum of All Fears was published in 1991, all of us Rockland nerds were ready to jump on the book.  My parents were kind enough to get me a brand-new shiny hardcover from the local Price Club as a gift: I devoured it in days.  If you chart Clancy’s career and critical success, you can make a case that his first five novels are all unchallenged successes, and that the slide down begins with The Sum of All Fears.  That’s certainly my thesis, and even at the time I noted that the novel took almost forever to begin and went nowhere while the plot strands were assembled.  The spectacular last 150 pages, taking the world all the way up to the brink of nuclear war even as Washington is paralyzed by a snowstorm, more than made up for the lacklustre rest of the book.  Still, even today, I think of the “timber” subplot as an example case in savvy plotting.  (ie; something like thirty pages, throughout the novel, are spent setting up a freakishly coincidental collision between a nuclear submarine and a piece of timber.  The whole thing starts with the lumberjack that fells the tree.  It works spectacularly well.)

    The next book, Without Remorse (1993), would be a return to an earlier time and simpler stakes, but not quite as effective.  As a Vietnam-era blend of combat and urban revenge story featuring another character from latter books, Without Remorse seemed a bit too simple even while it was, at a significant 639 pages, quite a bit overlong.  My friends and I still liked the book, but I was wondering about a few questions: Did we need the story to take place in the same universe as the one launched by The Hunt for Red October? Did the novel need to be so long?  Was anyone editing Clancy anymore?

    Knowledgeable readers here recognize the early trends that would send Clancy into a critical tailspin in latter books.  By the mid-nineties, Clancy had nothing left to prove.  He’d made his money, beaten down reviewers and conquered a loyal audience (such as myself) that would buy his books on sight.

    Debt of Honor (1994) was, I thought, a return to partial form: it moved the story back to modern times, and speculated a limited war between the US and Japan, with a big spectacular climax that not only predated eerie similarities with 9/11, but thrust once-analyst Jack Ryan to the presidency.  Bold, big, maybe highly implausible, but a heck of a conclusion nonetheless.

    Meanwhile, I had (more or less) escaped from the confines of Rockland, attending university in central Ottawa and suddenly having access to quite a bit more reading material.  While this would have disastrous consequences (some college freshmen can’t tolerate suddenly-easy access to alcohol, parties and partners; my own first-year grades were terrible because of too many books and early access to the Internet.) an upshot was a reading regimen that allowed for a bit more discernment.  I started reading SF by the bucket-haul and even publishing reviews online.  Along the way, I acquired all of Clancy’s mainline novels in hardcover editions, even a prized copy of The Hunt for Red October in its original Naval Institute Press edition.

    I soured on Clancy in 1995.  My parents were excited to report that Clancy had a new book out!  I was surprised to learn of it, and even more to learn that it was an average-sized original mass-market paperback.  Wasn’t Clancy supposed to write big hardcovers?  Well, it turned out that Tom Clancy’s Op Center was the first in a long, awful and unexplainably long-lived series of ghost-written “apostrophe” novels that carried Clancy’s name and none of his strengths.  The accompanying TV series wasn’t much better.

    (What were a bit better were the non-fiction trade paperbacks that, in seven installments from 1993 to 2001, gave an insightful look within elements of the US armed forces.  I’m still not sure that Clancy wrote most of those, or that they didn’t take away time and energy best spent on novels, but they were interesting to read.)

    When Executive Orders appeared in 1996, I’d started a reviewing web site –you can read my reaction to the book as I wrote it.  The review is a bit embarrassing to re-read more than fifteen years later –it’s one of my earliest entries and I wasn’t even 21 at the time.  This being said, I still stand by the overall critical assessment (“it isn’t Clancy’s best effort”) and note, while re-reading the review, that I’d started picking up on the right-wing politics, tepid pacing, loose editing and dubiousness of trying to keep up the Ryanverse.  Still; it wasn’t an embarrassing novel for Clancy, even if it was far from the best.

    What would be embarrassing is SSN, a 1996 minor videogame tie-in that has none of the flavour or interest of Clancy’s mainline novels.  My review (also embarrassing to re-read) started badly with “Tom Clancy wants your money. It’s as simple as that.” and then uttered the fatal “The sad thing is, he used to be my favourite author.” It’s so different (and worse) than his usual novels that I still doubt whether Clancy did more than contribute an outline.  Considering that Clancy was, at the time, moving toward video game conceptualization and had already started franchising his name, it’s a possibility that I’m not discarding.

    Rainbow Six (1998) would, at least, be a bit better.  It may even be Clancy’s last decent novel, although that assessment comes with a number of caveats: More than any one of Clancy’s mainline novels at that point, it would showcase increasingly right-wing politics, seal itself more firmly into the increasingly fantasy-based Ryanverse and display an author scarcely reined in by editors.  The writing got worse, the story got duller and Clancy got caught embarrassingly believing manufactures’ press releases with the DKL LifeGuard fiasco.  If there are a few good moments in the novel, they don’t amount to much in the aggregate.

    By the time the world saw the massive The Bear and the Dragon (2000), the decline was unmistakable, and Clancy was teetering on the edge of “bad”.  I wasn’t impressed: The novel has good moments, but they came at the expense of considerable time wasted, bad writing and a cumbersome attempt to reconcile the real world with the Ryanverse.  Unlike many of Clancy’s previous novels, it felt like a chore to read.

    Red Rabbit (2002) tried to deal with 9/11 by going back in time for another increasingly far-fetched prequel that contradicted much of Jack Ryan’s early history, messed up a number of key historical facts and simply didn’t add up to much.  It had the virtue of a slightly lower page count, but not much more action.  The writing got even worse.

    The last straw, as far as I was concerned, was 2003’s The Teeth of the Tiger: I spent nearly all of my review pointing with laughter at the book’s problems, from the writing to plotting to ludicrous attempts to reconcile the Ryanverse with real-world history to the crazy political stance that ran counter to Clancy’s previous better novels.  It hadn’t helped that 9/11 sent me politically leftward while Clancy grew more and more stridently right-wing.  (Or, more generally, that 9/11 sent nearly all military fiction authors into right-wing lalaland, leading me to lose touch with the genre.)

    Following The Teeth of the Tiger, I basically swore off Clancy, which was auspicious given that Clancy himself seemed to swear off writing.  For reasons that, I hope, will be elucidated by competent biographers, Clancy handed over his series to collaborators, retreated in non-writing pursuits and paradoxically saw his fame increase due to a well-received string of videogames sporting his name.

    By the time he died in October 2013, I hadn’t seriously thought about Clancy in years.  I haven’t bought or read a single Clancy book since The Teeth of the Tiger.  I don’t live in Rockland any more, I’m married, I’m raising a daughter and consequently don’t have as much time to read.  The Nerd Squad has long disbanded (one member dead far too soon, the other ones having moved on in their separate orbits despite occasional contacts throughout the years.  Half of the Squad have become video-game professionals.)  I’m reviewing movies professionally.  I stopped playing videogames due to lack of time.  Despite my voluntary sabbatical from reading, I still have a long list of favorite authors… but very few of them write techno-thrillers.

    But I would still like nothing better than to find an author who writes like Clancy at his finest.   I still do like the concept of techno-thrillers a lot, and I bemoan that much of the genre now seems so stupidly right-wing and insular.  I still own three linear feet of Clancy books, the earliest and best of them (from The Hunt for Red October to The Sum of All Fears) even adorning the “prestige” bookshelf meant to impress visitors.  In my own thankfully-unpublished fiction writing, I can recognize the mark left by Clancy’s clean prose and straightforward exposition.

    Like it or not, I’ve been shaped in some way by Tom Clancy, and the memories of his best books (alongside what they meant at the time) will remain with me.  His critical trajectory was an exemplar of the so-called “brain-eaten” bestselling author, but he’s hardly unique in this regard.  While I may have soured on his latter output, I’m still just as eager to suggest his first six novels as essential reading for thriller fans.  If you haven’t done so already, have a look at The Hunt for Red October and keep going until The Sum of All Fears.  Those are still books for the ages, and no amount of latter-day critical souring should change that.

    [February 2024: I have culled roughly a third of my hardcover fiction library.  The only Clancy titles that have survived are… His first six books, from The Hunt for Red October to The Sum of All Fears.]

  • A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

    A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Anchor Canada, 2004, 560 pages, C$23.00 tp, ISBN 978-0-385-66004-4

    It’s hard to find out a book that lives up to its hype, especially when the hype is near-unanimous.  For years, I’d heard about Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything in numerous book-recommendation lists, usually accompanied with superlatives about it being an exemplary work of science vulgarization, and the kind of book fit to expand minds.

    So imagine my surprise in finding out that A Short History of Nearly Everything lives up to its intimidating hype.  The most surprising thing about the book’s success may be that Bill Bryson is not a trained scientist.  Nor was he, prior to the book’s publication, known as a science writer: His output until then focused on light-hearted travel books and other personal essays.  A Short History of Nearly Everything was designed to be something else: A 500-page behemoth taking on all of creation, doubling as an exploration of the state of scientific knowledge and where much of what we know about the universe comes from.  In the book’s introduction, Bryson flat-out sates that he wrote the book for himself, to self-learn what he through he’d missed in his formal education, and to patch the holes left by dull science textbooks.

    He succeeds admirably well.  A Short History of Nearly Everything is supposed to start at the Big Bang and end at the dawn of human history, but the entire book is a celebration of the human drive for knowledge.  In discussing Earth’s formation, for instance, Bryson spends as much time telling us how scientists came to understand what we know about the Earth.  There are numerous anecdotes about the early days of science, and the heroic sacrifices required to find out things that we now take for granted.  Disastrous expeditions seem to be the norm for 19th century science, even (especially) when they lead to comparatively mundane innovations such as topographical map contour lines.  A Short History of Nearly Everything presents the scientist as a hero, and well-chosen portraits make it clear that even ordinary people can make extraordinary discoveries.  Little of it is dull given how the scientist-as-an-eccentric becomes a constant through much of the narrative.

    Even for readers with a good general scientific background, the list of new and unexpected nuggets of information and overarching links between disparate fields to be gleaned from the book is astonishing.  Nearly every page has a fascinating snippet or two, and Bryson’s generalist instincts serve him well in drawing evocative parallels between dissimilar areas.  It helps a lot that Bryson knows how to write smooth and easy yet factually-dense prose.  He’s as insightful as he is hilarious, and the resulting blend is simply intoxicating.  A Short History of Nearly Everything is a fantastically well-written book, and the prose style is just as entertaining as the subject matter.

    More than celebrating science, though, A Short History of Nearly Everything is perhaps at its most interesting when it charts the circa-2005 limits to human knowledge.  He acknowledges the limits of what we know and the ways we think we figured it out: It turns out that our understanding of fossils is based on a far small sample than you may expect, and that several areas of human knowledge remain curiously under-explored.  Rather than cast doubt on science itself, those gaps and paper-thin inferences only serve to inspire: There is still a lot of science left to be done, and the way we’ve been able to learn so much from so little, is nothing short of awe-inspiring at our own human cleverness.

    Nearly ten years after the book’s writing, and at a time when it seems that nearly every scientific popularization is riddled with errors and simplification, you may expect A Short History of Nearly Everything to be similarly undermined by a long list of errors.  But a look through reviews and commentary about the book merely reveals a distressingly short list of errors for such a big book and general praise from knowledgeable audiences.  (Although I’ve been able to find a few strongly dissenting voices, most of those are in the form of forum posting, not well-argued reviews.  Leave any in the comments, please..)

    Frankly, A Short History of Nearly Everything is such an exceptionally good book that the worst thing I can say about it is that I’m already mad at having forgotten a substantial chunk of it.  Get the book, read it and be amazed, not only at the prose, but what it tells us about ourselves.  Then don’t be surprised to find yourself praising its merits to others.

  • Above, Leah Bobet

    Above, Leah Bobet

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Arthur A. Levine, 2012, 368 pages, C$19.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-545-29670-0

    I really should preface this review by saying that I’ve had a decade-long nerd-crush (in the most geeky platonic sense) on Leah Bobet, and so anything I write about her debut novel Above is likely to be highly subjective.  But time has come to pay tribute to Leah, and this review might as well be the best way to do it.

    It started, appropriately enough, at a Science Fiction convention. (If you don’t come out of a major SF convention with at least half-a-dozen nerd-crushes, you’re not attending them correctly.)  August 2003, Toronto: The much-maligned Torcon 3 worldcon.  I was attending a panel about Artificial Intelligence, featuring several genre big-time writers when the discussion veered severely off-topic.  After a few minutes of this nonsense unchecked by the moderator, a voice from the audience prompted panelists to get back on topic, please?  As someone who gets exasperated at bad panel moderation, I silently tipped my non-existing hat at the young woman who had brought back the panel on-track.  Reading a post-convention report by Cory Doctorow gave me the name to go along with the person.

    And that, with a bit of hindsight, was how I became aware of Leah Bobet.

    Not that I could have avoided her, given that over the following years I kept seeing her name attached to a growing number of fascinating short stories.  As if being a remarkable new author wasn’t enough, she also worked as a bookseller at the legendary Bakka-Phoenix genre bookstore and became a regular panelist at a number of Toronto SF conventions I also attended.  When you go to a lot of SF conventions, you learn how to pick panels by participants rather than subject matters.  Leah quickly became one of my reliable makers for good panels.  At some point we started greeting each other in that “Oh, you, from that other convention!” fashion.  Most seasoned SF fans have this weird proprietary sense of “I knew that author way before the rest of you”, and I suppose that Leah is one of “my” discoveries in that way.  When Above was announced, I was thrilled to re-enact the classic fan-paying-for-author’s-drink convention ritual on her behalf.

    So, if you only get one thing out of this review, it’s that Leah is awesome, you should read what she writes and if you find yourself at a convention where she is on the participant list, make a point of attending her panels. (Also, don’t be shy and say hi: she’s friendly.)

    I should have reviewed Above when it came out in January 2012.  Instead, I was… otherwise preoccupied in taking care of a newborn daughter and taking an extended sabbatical away from just about everything, including reading and SF conventions.  Now that I’ve managed to read the novel and am now paying my dues with a review, it’s 18 months later (24 months later considering that I’m posting all 2013 reviews in a yearly January 2014 lump) and the chances of this review helping the novel’s sales numbers are approximately close to nil. 

    And I feel guilty, because you really should read it.

    Gloriously set in and under Toronto (have you seen that gorgeous cover art?), Above is an acknowledged re-thinking of the old city-underneath-a-city premise, where marginalized outsiders come together and build a community of their own by living off the scraps of the city overhead.  While treatments of such an idea run the risk of growing overly sentimental (or worse, romanticized), Above takes a harder-minded stance and adds just enough urban fantasy to make things interesting.  In Above, Safe is a place underneath Toronto where people who can’t fit in normal society can gather.  This being a fantasy novel, their differences run deeper than usual, with body deformities and supernatural powers that clearly can’t be reconciled with consensus reality.  Our protagonist is a young man who has lived all of his life in Safe, but that soon ends when the refuge is attacked by someone it once exiled, and survivors have to seek refuge… above.

    Mix well with a tough romance between two dysfunctional characters, and the result is a tough, gritty, fascinating and uncommonly mature debut novel.  It’s at its best in quieter character-driven moments: As I edit this review months after reading, my strongest memory of the book is an awful epiphany during which the protagonist recognizes that he has badly hurt someone he loves.  It’s a novel filled with terrible moments, sharply-defined characters, a bittersweet conclusion and a strong sense of place.  It growls ominously when other debut novels shout, and it’s that kind of admirable restraint that makes it work.  The ending has the maturity to acknowledge that self-isolation is not the answer to co-existence problems, and it’s too smart to glorify the outsiders at the complete expense of the white-coated mainstream.  It’s unfortunate that the style of writing may be a bit too difficult for casual readers (I had to slow down, and ignore my growing resistance to Capitalized Meaning), but once you get used to the prose, it delivers on the way it chooses to tell the story.

    On a somewhat grander genre consideration, Above feels like a novel from a new generation of fantasy writers: street-savvy authors who have grown with a strong sense of connection to others thanks to the various social networks that weren’t available to older writers.  There’s an innate sense of social justice and inclusiveness to Above that simply feels different from the fantasy norm, and it’s a set of values and ethics that have far more to do with ongoing online discussions than genre conventions.  Leah Bobet is far from being the first (or only) author to take this attitude and mesh it with the conventions of genre fiction, and I can’t wait to see where this trend takes us.

    Similarly, I may be 18 months late in reviewing Leah’s first book, but I’m also 18 months closer to the appearance of her second.  That means that you too can catch up!  Read it now!

  • 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson

    2312, Kim Stanley Robinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Orbit, 2012, 576 pages, C$29.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-316-09812-0

    I’ve spent the last year-and-a-half doing things other than reading voraciously, and as a result I’m not as up-to-date on the state of written Science-Fiction as I used to be.  Gone are the days when I could read a just-published book and justifiably call it one of the year’s best: Now I’m not even keeping up with the slate of Hugo-nominated novels.  Years ago, I would have read Robinson’s 2312 within a week of publication: Now, I’m belatedly coming to it after it winning the Nebula and being on the Hugo short-list.  But then again, years ago I would have given it unqualified praise.  Now, with a bit of perspective, I have a few doubts to share.

    The good news, without any doubt, is that 2312 showcases Robinson in heavy-duty Science Fiction futurism mode, harkening back (sometimes ironically) to Robinson’s Mars trilogy.  It’s the kind of sweeping mid-future tour of the Solar System that makes up the core of the written SF genre, and yet seems so rare nowadays.  It’s a vision of the future that’s big and grand and optimistic and filled with complexities.  It’s a big fat novel designed to show ideas –there’s a plot somewhere in the novel, but it’s not nearly as important as seeing our protagonists experience life circa 2312.

    Our protagonist is Swan, an impulsive artist/ecodesigner who gets involved in a system-wide investigation following the death of her grandmother and an attack on her Mercurian home-city.  She soon comes to spend a lot of time with Fitz Wahram, a cool diplomat who is in many ways opposite to her personality.  This fire-and-ice romance ends up being one of the book’s plot driver, the other being the quest to unearth a conspiracy designed at taking over the various political entities of the Solar System. 

    But reading 2312 for the plot (or the strangely off-putting characters) is a bit of a waste when the novel seems to be built around experiential set-pieces.  The novel is structured as a series of episodes as Swan makes her way throughout the Solar System, living life to its fullest by taking advantage of the various opportunities offered to her.  She hears opera on Mercury, surfs Saturn’s ice-rings, drops animals over the Canadian wilderness, and runs with the wolves within traveling asteroids.  There are a lot of big ideas on display along the way (some of them recycled and updated from previous Robinson works, such as the roving city of Terminator), facilitated by the explicit encyclopedic passages that are an essential chunk of the structure of the novel. (Thanks, John Dos Passos!)

    For seasoned SF fans and Robinson enthusiasts, it’s hard to read the book without missing the various shout-outs to classic SF works dropped without ceremony in the text itself.  There’s a self-referential bit of plotting in that for a writer best known for his Mars trilogy, Robinson never allows his system-spanning plot to go on Mars except at the very ending of the novel, once the conflicts and contradictions have been resolved.  Anyone familiar with Robinson’s work will also see that the characters’ hobbies (in particular their tendency to go trekking in the wilderness at the slightest opportunity) seems to be a direct extension of the author’s interests.

    You can see what kind of reception this core-genre SF book may receive.  Seasoned old-school Science Fiction fans are likely to love this book.  It feels like an updated and beefed-up version of the kind of plot-light futuristic travelogues that Arthur C. Clarke did so well thirty years ago, or the kind of solar-system tour of wonders that John Varley attempted in his heyday.  It’s a kind of SF that feels familiar, comfortable and positively inspiring after the genre’s recent fascination with the apocalypse in all of its forms.  I have no qualms to state that I loved most of 2312 and wish that they would be many more SF novels in the same vein.  Robinson can be a frustratingly uneven writer, but this novel is one of his good ones.

    On the other hand…

    Reading the online chatter about the book has been both illuminating and exasperating.  For every bad review where the reader approached the book antagonistically, there has been comments reminding me that Robinson’s aims with 2312 are centered at a fairly narrow group of core-SF readers.  Info-dumps are features for the kind of readers Robinson is writing for, but I can see why more casual readers may be put off.  Heck, Robinson’s interests aren’t exactly mine, and when his characters go out of their way to enjoy pastimes typical of wealthy educated left-leaning upper-middle-class Californians, it’s hard not to feel left out or, worse, feel that this shiny view of the future doesn’t necessarily reflect everyone else’s.

    This idea ties into the “irrefragable Africa” passage that so rightfully annoyed and enraged some readers.  To sum up the controversy: In the middle of a Solar System bustling with activity, Robinson’s protagonist goes to Earth (where things are usually bad, as the planet staggers under the impact of global climate change and entrenched political/economic systems), and then to Africa where she finds herself stymied by a continent that seemingly refuses help from well-meaning richer people.  She leaves in frustration, concluding that Africa is forever doomed to act against its own self-interest despite the righteous intervention of people who (from the protagonist’s perspective) know much better.

    It’s hard to know where to begin in taking down this small piece of the novel.  Perhaps by pointing out the terrible legacy of colonialism and then the neo-colonialism that took its place?  Perhaps by pointing out that this vision of a self-defeating Africa ignores the real and tangible progress being made continent-wide for the past few decades?  Perhaps by reminding first-world readers that their hopes and aspirations should not be imposed on a continent?  Robinson gets half-points for mulling that all of Earth in 2312 is just as self-defeating, but he should understand that he’s writing at a time where SF’s shortcomings in matters of class, inclusiveness, racism and sexism are under intense scrutiny.  Any slip-up is likely to be criticized, let alone a spectacularly dumb passage like this one, which feels like a rich Californian punching down at a less-privileged target. 

    This, in turn, easily leads to a contemplation of the current state of the Science Fiction genre.  I have an awful suspicion that 2312 may be one of the last big hurrah of the genre at it used to exist, in particularly the WASP Southern-California school of SF as it shined most brightly in the 1970s and 1980s.  Writers such as Bear, Benford, Brin, Niven and Robinson: save for Robinson, who has earned some general literary renown, most of those writers aren’t the dominant voices they used to be.  Science Fiction is changing profoundly and rapidly, shattering in a million pieces that reflect the increasing diversity of its authorship and audience.  We should be welcoming this change for the better SF it brings, but at the same time it’s becoming obvious that some of the older guard is having trouble keeping up. 

    2312 wouldn’t have earned half the disappointed comments it got had it not explicitly positioned itself at the cutting edge.  It’s supposed to be as inclusive a vision of the future as it can be (and for his slip-ups, Robinson has at least presented a joyously polymorphous future when it comes to gender and sexual preferences), meaning that it invites non-inclusiveness criticism by default.  I may think that Robinson has done a pretty good job –but then again I’m pretty close to Robinson’s demographic profile.  It may take another kind of writer to write about a future that acknowledges and celebrates a greater audience.  And as I read less and less SF, it dawns on me that it may take another kind of reader to best appreciate it.

  • This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don’t Touch It, David Wong aka Jason Pargin

    This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don’t Touch It, David Wong aka Jason Pargin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Thomas Dunne, 2012, 416 pages, C$29.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-312-54634-2

    When I end up reading a book and its sequel back-to-back, my review of the sequel is usually appended, capsule-style, to the review of the first volume.  Usually, this is enough: most sequels are attempts at recreating the feel of the original book, after all, and a review can simply say whether it was successful at that goal and then take off for holidays.

    The case of This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don’t Touch It (don’t you love this subtitle?) is different, though.  While it’s definitely a sequel to David Wong’s John Dies at the End, it’s also remarkably different in atmosphere, and flawed enough to warrant specific discussion.

    A good chunk of the difference between both books can be explained by fairly dull real-world considerations: The original John Dies at the End was developed over a period of years as a web serial, and it displayed a pack-rat’s accumulation of ideas, genre elements, plot twists and creative impulses.  It was filled with the kind of narrative hooks and somersaults that come from a loose writing process without a clear ending in mind.  This Book is Full of Spider was developed over a much shorter period of time to capitalize on the success of the first book, was not (as far as I know) subject to public feedback as it was written, and was clearly conceived as a coherent whole from the get-go.

    As a result, This Book Is Full of Spiders feels quite a bit different from its predecessor.  The rhythm is considerably slower, the density of ideas similarly sparser and the plot can indulge in a bit of leisurely scene-setting rather than being an accumulation of one-damn-thing-after-another.  As the novel begins, our two protagonists David and John are roughly where they were at the end of John Dies at the End: stuck in [undisclosed], more or less subsisting on their slacker’s lifestyle when they’re not reluctantly pressed in service as paranormal specialists.  But as This Book Is Full of Spiders begins, they’re soon confronted with something far deadlier than occasional monsters from nowhere: Brain-parasite spiders turning their unfortunate victims into zombies.

    For a while, This Book Is Full of Spiders treads extremely familiar grounds: The zombie-outbreak narrative model, slightly tweaked for laughs (here, it’s the protagonists who arguably let the zombie outbreak spread) but otherwise followed with a reasonable degree of familiarity.  Adding to the handicap, This Book Is Full of Spiders side-lines John’s character for a very long time, which becomes a problem once you remember that John is the most interesting character of the series, one who makes things move through sheer lack of sensible instincts.  As David is stuck in a prison hastily created to contain the growing zombie contagion, This Book Is Full of Spiders doesn’t evoke the first book’s freewheeling fun as much as yet another dreary “man’s inhumanity to man” nightmare.

    That goes on, with minor variations, for almost two-thirds of the book.  After the quasi-anarchic inventiveness of John Dies at the End, it’s easy to wonder where the magic went.  It’s not that This Book Is Full of Spiders is in any way bad or dull: It is, however, markedly less interesting than its predecessor for most of its duration.

    Fortunately, the last third brings it into focus.  For the zombie outbreak in [undisclosed] is closely watched by the rest of the nation via the Internet, and most people seem positively delighted by the presence of zombies, including a group of trigger-happy nerds pretending to be tough zombie hunters.  At another level entirely, the presence of zombies makes it really easy to justify the complete eradication of [undisclosed], no matter the collateral damage.

    And as This Book Is Full of Spiders wraps to a conclusion, the author serves us with an unexpected thought-piece: the development of zombie in pop culture as this irredeemable evil to be destroyed at all costs carries a hideous cost: the ability to brand someone a zombie and justify its extermination.  The creation of pure evil brings about the need to complete destruction, argues Wong, and that’s an exceedingly dangerous weapon in itself.  From hum-drum zombie fare, This Book Is Full of Spiders develops into something much rarer: a humanist critique of horror fiction.

    It helps, of course, that the last quarter of the book is filled with a bit more of the expected David & John craziness: From John finally ramping something, to a heavier use of Soy Sauce, to a penile joke literally writ large, to another narrative game involving a policeman, to the presence of the series’ shadowy antagonists.  The end of the book is quite a bit more satisfyingly than its beginning and anyone still dissatisfied by the novel should finally get their time’s worth at the end.  That’s the beauty of strong finishes: they forgive almost everything.

    Still, there’s little that needs to be forgiven in the novel’s explicit intention to deconstruct the zombie trope and dispatch it with a big humanistic smooch.  It’s a fantastic conceit, and one that should be taken up more often at a time where horror fiction seems hell-bent on presenting evil in its purest form.  Our attitudes toward the world are shaped by fiction and there’s something insidious in letting narrative constructs take the place of critical or even empathetic thinking.  [December 2013: Case in point being public apathy to the slew of revelations following Edward Snowden’s release of confidential NSA documents: Many see this as confirmation of decades’ worth of paranoid thriller fiction, and so not worth getting bothered about.  That in itself is an outrage: Are we letting thrillers condition us to accept pervasive and intrusive surveillance programs?  What is wrong with us to let our brains being altered that way?]

    And that is finally why This Book Is Full of Spiders is worth discussion by itself, and not just as a mere follow-up: It tries something just as ambitious as its prequel, but in a different direction.  It’s still a great read, but it’s also trying to get us to think about innate genre prejudices.  Don’t expect exactly the same as its predecessor, and it will be a great read.

  • John Dies at the End, David Wong aka Jason Pargin

    John Dies at the End, David Wong aka Jason Pargin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 2010 reprint of 2009 original, 480 pages, C$18.50 pb, ISBN 978-0-312-65914-1

    Ever since the rise of the Internet, the expression “cult novel” doesn’t mean what it used to.  Once upon a time, it conjured images of a battered paperback passed from one set of hands to the other, its hushed-tone reputation growing through the yellowed pages of mimeographed fanzines or late-night college-dorm conversations.  Nowadays, it’s almost too easy for things to earn cult status.  Quasi-forgotten novel from the sixties discussed by half-a-dozen readers on Goodreads?  Cult.  Mid-list writer with fifty comments on her latest blog post?  Cult figure.  Episodic novel published at irregular intervals on an out-of-the-way web site and discovered by a growing number of readers thanks to blog-of-mouth?  So-cult-it-hurts.

    And that takes us to John Dies at the End, a horror/humor hybrid which was written and self-published on the web by Jason Pargin, a writer best known as “David Wong” for incisive essays such as the famous “Monkeysphere” piece.  Having attracted a devoted following, Wong added material to the story for years before wrapping it all up for publication.  The result is quite unlike anything you’ve read so far.

    The adventures of John and David, two twenty-something slackers who find themselves involved in paranormal affairs despite their best intentions, John Dies at the End blends stoner comedy with existential horror and ends up as a hip mix of cool things.  Thanks to Wong’s irreverent narration, the novel recycles, twists and extends familiar tropes in a potent mixture of dread and comedy.  For seasoned horror/fantasy readers, John Dies at the End is particularly interesting in that while it’s clearly aware of genre antecedents, it’s clearly not beholden to the genre in its narrative construction.  The web-serial origins of the story are clearest in considering its structure: the novel divides itself into two major adventures, interrupted by a shorter interlude episode.  Perhaps most significantly, Wong has a decidedly irreverent attitude toward familiar plot conventions: The protagonist’s narration is rich in self-awareness, peaking in a late-book refusal to further investigate a troubling mystery.  (A good thing too, since he admits that had he done so at that time, he would have killed himself.  By the end of the story, we readers understand what he means.)  When I say that John Dies at the End is a delightfully profane novel, I’m not speaking as much about the harsh language of the book as much about its willingness to embrace irreverence in dealing with genre ideas.

    On a related note, John Dies at the End is also particularly good at maintaining both the laughs and the chills that a hybrid novel should ideally contain.  There are at least two deeply troubling ideas embedded in the very narration of the novel, challenging our ideas about unreliable narrators.  Otherwise, Wong doesn’t hesitate to laden on the graphic descriptions when talking about the horrors that confront John and David on a near-constant basis. 

    It helps that the funny parts are almost laugh-out-loud hilarious.  I have a particular affection for a chair fight between the heroes and supernatural demons, in which the hits only stop when the characters run out of chair-related fighting puns. 

    It all amounts to an engrossing, hilarious, chilling and unique reading experience.  John Dies at the End is almost the definition of a break-out first novel: You can see here the culmination of years of development, ideas piled upon each other as if the writer had put everything he’d ever wanted to say between two covers.  The pacing has to be frantic to keep up with the inventiveness, and if the structure suffers a bit from the development process, who cares?  It’s one more welcome quirk for a book loved for its quirkiness.

    And from quirks, we quickly go back to cult.  Of course, few things truly stay cult these days, and so it is that John Dies at the End was successfully adapted for the big screen in 2012.  The film is quite enjoyable, but the legions of new fans who will come to the book after the movie will be delighted to find out that the film has maybe only half the plot of the novel: Save for the first third and the last tenth, there’s almost an entirely new film’s worth of stuff in the novel, including some of the most disturbing material in the book.  (The film, for all of its qualities, is considerably funnier than horrific.)  This review may have begun by suggesting that the death of old-style cult status is somehow a bad thing, but let’s be clearer: At a time where everything is cult thanks to immediate electronic communications, nothing is cult.  Which is fortunate, given that nobody is a completely mainstream individual.  We are all of our one-person cult culture.  Given that, doesn’t it make you positively gleeful that something as strange and enjoyable as John Dies at the End can be written, published and enjoyed by exactly its rightful target audience?

  • Inferno, Dan Brown

    Inferno, Dan Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 2013, 480 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-53785-8

    How appropriate that Dan Brown’s Inferno would have me thinking about catastrophe theory and how it relates to reviewing: If Brown can link trans-humanism, obsolete Malthusian hysteria, Florentine history and Dante’s Inferno in the service of a moderately dull thriller, then what’s stopping me from misappropriating a branch of mathematical theory in order to make the point that I’m suddenly exasperated by Brown’s shtick?

    I suppose that a few reminders and pieces of background information are in order: Inferno is Brown’s sixth novel, the fourth to feature “symbologist” Robert Langon racing against the clock to solve intricate historical puzzles before a very modern and immediate threat unfolds.  The Da Vinci Code (2003) needs no introduction as one of the most widely read novel of the past decade, leading to controversy and a movie adaption in 2006; Angels and Demons (2000) was also adapted to the big-screen in 2009, whereas The Lost Symbol (2009) made a splash as the first direct sequel to The Da Vinci Code after years of silence from Brown. 

    Inferno shows up four years later, and delivers almost exactly what readers had been expecting: Standard thriller mechanics set against a richly-detailed travelogue, as the protagonist uses arcane knowledge to fight against a very contemporary threat.  This time around, it’s Florence (and a few other European destinations later in the novel) that provide the scenery, historical facts and enigmas to solve. 

    But the real mystery is this: I have defended Dan Brown against a number of detractors in the past, especially when I pointed out the savvier aspects of The Da Vinci Code against those who wanted to dismiss the book entirely.  Save for Digital Fortress, I could find good things to say about every one of Brown’s other books.  Why, then, do I feel so exasperated and frustrated by Inferno?

    It does handle a few things quite competently.  The initial set-up makes good use of the good old amnesia trope in order to place our protagonist in desperate circumstances.  Why is he in a Florentine hospital?  Why does he have a dangerous-looking artifact in his possessions?  And why-oh-why are people shooting at him?  As he retraces his steps with the help of a beautiful smart woman (the fourth in as many books –Langdon clearly isn’t very good at long-term relationships), he get to understand that he’s going through a do-over of his past few days, hoping to avoid what put him under medical care.

    And for about three-quarter of the book, it feels dull and interminable.  The accumulation of historical details that Langdon absorbs is a flood of trivia that has little to do with the plot, and unless you happen to be fascinated by Florentine history to a level to rival the Roman, Parisian/Londonian and Washingtonian settings of the previous Langdon novels, chances are that Inferno will be a tough slog.  Readers will make it through by repeating to themselves that it will get better, eventually.  Or that the novel may work better if you’re on the ground in Florence, pointing at the things described in the novel.

    And while it does get better, this change for the best comes at the expense of credibility-destroying narrative tricks in which villains are revealed to be heroes, allies are unmasked as psychopathological monsters and everything Langdon thought he knew (or more pointedly didn’t) crumbles as a sham.  In order to do that, Brown has to skirt perilously close to lying to his audience –readers who don’t like such narrative sleight-of-hand won’t find much to love here.  On the other hand, it does give a narrative kick in the pants to what had, until then, been a fairly sedate thriller, so there’s that.

    But as the last act of the novel unfolds, my boredom at the novel transformed into annoyance, especially as the villain’s plan was revealed.  While Brown does his damndest to give a shred of justification to the actions of his antagonist by pointing out the evils of overpopulation, his screed seems to be roughly forty years out of date, and unsupported by current research.

    (To summarize a complex set of objections, in a nutshell: Overpopulation is real and dangerous, but unlike the alarmist predictions of the 1970s, we now know a few things: Big populations have advantages for just about everything, from medical care to arts development to scientific progress to a well-functioning economy to better models for feeding a densely-packed community.  Better yet: Demographic statistics clearly demonstrate that overpopulation is a self-regulating problem, and that the world’s population will stabilize within a few decades –in fact is already doing so in large areas of the world.  Furthermore, advances in agriculture, environmentalism and logistics show that sustainable populations are within reach –the realities of 2013 disprove most of the so-called “realistic” thinking of the 1970s.  Simply put: Overpopulation is solving itself to non-problematic status.)

    Lunatic thinking by a novel’s villain is, of course, nothing new or unexpected.  The end of Inferno, however, suggests that this is lunatic thinking by the author himself.  The world-changing stunt at the end of the novel is problematic on numerous levels.  Even by the standards of previous novels, it may be time for Langdon to take an indefinite retirement while Brown moves on to other protagonists, because the universe he inhabits is getting cluttered by incompatible mythologies, radical events and Grand Revelations.

    Other annoyances abound: After several bout with Brown’s tone-deaf style, I’m finally acknowledging that he could write better.  I’m not at all pleased by the easy equation of trans-humanism with cuckoo-crazy antagonists.  Langdon is still as boring a protagonist as it’s possible to write in popular fiction.  The ending shows that the protagonist’s efforts all were for naught, negating the point of the narrative.  And have I mentioned that before the frantic last quarter of the novel, practically nothing noteworthy happens as we’re fed reams of Florentine history?

    Aas you already surely know, faithful reader, catastrophe theory is the study of “sudden shifts in behavior arising from small changes in circumstances”.  None of what has annoyed me in Inferno (the digressions, the nonsense science, the bad writing, the repetitive plotting, allies revealed as villains, Langdon’s lack of personality, the insane plot twists) hasn’t shown up in at least two of Brown’s previous novels.  But something has certainly changed since The Lost Symbol: myself as a reader, Brown’s smugness as a writer, the cultural matrix in which we live, or some deep zeitgeist shift barely perceptible through anyone’s Twitter feed.  As a result, I find myself disenchanted by Inferno and generally put off by Dan Brown as a writer.  His shtick doesn’t feel interesting any more, and I’m not at all tempted to defend him anymore.  Small changes, big behavioral shifts: I don’t intend to buy his next novel.  I’m pretty sure I already know how it turns out.

  • I am Spock, Leonard Nimoy

    I am Spock, Leonard Nimoy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Hyperion, 1995, 352 pages, ISBN 0-786-86182-7

    At some point over the past few years, I got my hands on a copy of Leonard Nimoy’s second autobiography, titled I am Spock.  Dimly aware that the title was a reference to a first autobiography titled I am not Spock, I refrained from cracking open the book, hoping that someday I’d be able to read both books back-to-back and get the best out of the entire experience.  Against all odds, I got my wish when my work manager left a battered paperback copy of I am not Spock lying on her desk.  So how do the two compare?

    It’s worth keeping in mind that I am not Spock was published in 1975, at a time when cult interest in the then-defunct first Star Trek series was growing rapidly.  Nimoy earned much attention for his portrayal of the alien Mr. Spock, an unlikely sex-symbol who threatened the actor with typecasting and caused all sorts of amusing confusion when fans called by his character’s name or reflected upon him the qualities of the character.  I am not Spock, upon close reading, reveals no real animosity between Nimoy and Spock –merely a mildly-frustrated desire to distinguish between the character and the actor.  (Hence the book’s dialogues between actor Nimoy and character Spock.)

    While much of I am not Spock is about Nimoy’s formative experiences and the roles he played before and immediately after Star Trek, you can imagine that much of the book is about the making of Trek’s original three-season run, and the conflicts that eventually developed between Nimoy and the producers.  It’s an early revealing look into the difficulties of the show (one that would later be completed by other Trek autobiographies) that retains an evergreen fascination for fans.  Interestingly enough, it’s the now-dated parts of the book that remain most fascinating for contemporary readers, from slightly-psychedelic passages in which Nimoy argues with his alter-ego, or the typically-seventies expressions, hobbies and attitudes that Nimoy describes.

    I Am Spock’s title became mandatory considering that fans were not at all pleased with the title of the first book.  Hoping to make amends, Nimoy presented his twenty-years-later follow-up autobiography as even more of an unabashed love letter to his character.  You’d think that the narrative would simply pick up where the previous one ends, but I Am Spock incorporates and updates much of the previous book’s content.  The good news is that it makes the previous book redundant if you can’t find it.  The bad news is that if you’ve just read the previous book, much of the second one will feel like a re-thread, down to the same anecdotes and punch-lines.  There’s also a peculiar weirdness in reading I am Spock as a response to a book that it essentially contains: Your mind can expand in strange directions trying to make sense of this.

    But there is new content as well.  On the Star Trek front, I am Spock discusses the unexpected revival of Trek over the years, which included a series of successful movies featuring the cast of the original series.  On non-Trek matters, Nimoy discusses other acting jobs, and a successful foray in movie directing that saw him direct two Trek movies and the commercially-successful comedy Three Men and a Baby.  This, with the added benefit of twenty more years’ hindsight, make the follow-up book quite a bit more interesting than the 1975 installment: it presents Nimoy as a seasoned entertainer, able to fluently discuss challenges behind and in front of the camera. 

    One almost expects a third installment in 2015 called I Will Always be Spock; Nimoy, after all, has continued his association with the character by playing him as recently as in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, and has added more roles and artistic activities to a lengthy career. 

    Unusually enough, I would advise time-pressed readers to skip the first book and focus on the second: while both are breezy, fun and revealing autobiographies, the second one has more to offer and repeats much of the first book’s material.  Reading them back-to-back is not a fascinating experience in how twenty years can change a person: it’s more of a exercise in repetitiveness.  Leonard Nimoy is Spock, and let’s leave it at that. (Sorry, Zachary Quinto.)

  • The Travis Chase Trilogy, Patrick Lee

    The Travis Chase Trilogy, Patrick Lee

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    The Breach, Harper, 2009, 384 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-06-158445-9
    Ghost Country, Harper, 2010, 384 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-06-158444-2
    Deep Sky, Harper, 2011, 384 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-06-195879-3

    As someone who loves both Science Fiction and techno-thrillers, I’m always a bit surprised at how few authors have been able to combine the strengths of both genres into a hybrid success.  Science Fiction is about awe at the possibilities of the universe and the futures available to us; techno-thrillers are usually a distillation of the same possibilities, in a contemporary setting that can make everything feel more relevant.  Of course, there are differences in approach and easy pitfalls in both genres: At its worst, techno-thrillers reject the intrusion of the future in our realities, making sure that the genie goes back the box at the end of the story.  Meanwhile, bad science-fiction is about gadgets more than human emotions, and narrative patterns that only make sense to long-time genre readers. 

    Patrick Lee’s Travis Chase trilogy is a superb exercise in combining techno-thriller plot mechanics with science-fiction concepts and it’s so successful that it made me giddy with pure reading excitement for the first time in a long while.  Lee doesn’t just play in the sandbox of both genres, but combines them in ways that feel fresh and exciting, playing with the possibilities while never quite betraying both audiences with dead-end ideas.

    The best readers for those books are probably jaded and familiar with tropes of both genres.  Lee’s rapid pacing and go-for-broke plotting is earnest to a point that at times approach self-parody, but it fully shows its cards in the first few chapters.  (It takes a special kind of reader, maybe not you, to appreciate passages such as “He wasn’t going to kill her.  He’d accrued enough of that brand of guilt for one lifetime. ¶ But he was going to kill again. ” [P.33] ) Consider that within seventy-five pages of the first volume, our protagonist (an ex-cop and ex-con) hiking through the Alaskan wilderness for a relaxing holiday ends up stumbling over the fresh wreckage of a sophisticated 747, discovers the body of the First Lady alongside a number of scientists, is given the missing to find hostages and kill them before they can betray national secrets, battles terrorists and discovers a dangerous omniscient artifact that takes over his mind, nearly leading to the launch of a limited nuclear strike against China.  To repeat: all of that takes place in the first seventy-five pages.  It gets crazier after that.

    For our protagonist Travis Chase has become sucked into the world of The Breach, a secret government organization set up to manage the output of an accidental wormhole in a scientific facility deep under the American Midwest.  The Breach, you see, regularly spews out unusual, extraordinary, often dangerous alien objects.  Objects with near-magical powers.  Objects that could destroy a good chunk of the world if mishandled.

    With a setup like that, it’s no wonder that the trilogy gets off roaring and seldom slows down.  Once Chase is accepted within The Breach, he’s quickly led to “the most dangerous building in the world” (how can you resist that as a narrative hook?) where he and other members of the organization engage in a prodigiously vertiginous game of logic-building taking in account that they’re up against an omniscient antagonist.  The gadgets that The Breach bring along help set up a deliciously over-the-top set-piece in which a lone team of special operatives gets to square off against an entire city of antagonists.  It’s ridiculously over-the-top and yet exactly the kind of virtuoso sequence that many techno-thrillers writers don’t have the imagination to conceive, let alone pull off.  Never mind the fantastic gadgets required to make it work: The entire trilogy seems to run from one science-fictional set-piece to another.  The Breach keeps running at a breathless pace, leading to a spectacular conclusion that puts a big question mark over the hero’s true nature.

    The first volume depends upon the concept of The Breach and an omniscient trickster AI, but the second one, Ghost Country, gets to play with an unusual time machine.  Innovatively enough, Lee posits a pair of devices allowing to move back and forth between the present and a future fixed at the moment of the devices’ activation.  The problem is that the future, seventy-five years forward, clearly shows an imminent apocalypse, and nothing they do in the present can change the future.  How can they figure out what’s about to happen?  Naturally, this movement back-and-forth between the present and the future allows for some complicated action set-pieces, not to mention the intellectual thrill of chasing answers in two different realities.

    As a follow-up, the third volume Deep Sky plays along with the idea of a secret at The Breach’s inception, along with a gadget that allows going back in time and re-living that moment with full access to the world of then.  There’s a crackling good sequence later in the book in which Chase gets to use knowledge that would have been impossible to get otherwise, cleverly turning the tables on his trap-laying antagonists.  Deep Sky’s end sequence goes back to mysteries left unsolved in the first volume to deliver a purely science-fictional conclusion that presents an arresting moral dilemma for the protagonist –and, perhaps, the reader.

    Given the trilogy’s unending inventiveness, its straightforward muscular prose, its innovative action sequences, its uncomplicated characterization, its willingness to commit to world-changing events and it’s no surprise if I raced through all three books in a mere few days, rediscovering a pure honest joy of reading that I feared lost to my own jaded self.  The Travis Chase trilogy is fun to read like few other recent books, with enough weighty ideas to make a bit more than disposable entertainment.  No surprise if I eventually found myself selling the praises of the book enthusiastically to a table full of readers, with even the mild spoilers above seeming to give added attractiveness to the series.

    I’m also, from a critical standpoint, impressed at Lee’s ability to combine SF elements within a thriller framework without necessarily compromising the science-fictional elements themselves.  By the end of the third volume, the world is irrevocably changed, and the protagonist has discovered a side of himself that’s potentially as ruthless and homicidal as any of history’s greatest dictators.  The concepts used to bring along this conclusion are as science-fictional as could be, so it’s surprising to realize that the trilogy is practically never marketed as science-fiction.  (The French translation, which is what brought me to the series, is published as overt SF by a specialized genre publisher.)  And yet it is: while some of the plotting is more thrillerish than science-fictional (I don’t think that the first volume’s Berne set-piece would have been accepted by an SF editor, although it clearly fits within the thriller genre’s accepted standards.) it never loses sight of SF’s central ability to play along with an idea until all the good possibilities are shown on-screen.  The trilogy may be built on impossible gadgets, but they’re great gadgets and they’re exploited to the full extent of their capabilities.  It’s books like those that make readers realize how rigid some genre boundaries have become, and welcome the possibilities of a bit of genre-bending.

    While the trilogy isn’t flawless (the second book feel disconnected from the rest of the trilogy’s overall plot, the characters sometimes have a bit too much past history, there’s little rigor to the extrapolations and the over-the-top nature of the plot can be a bit daunting if you’re not already sympathetic to this kind of thing), it’s a memorable read and a completely satisfying reading experience.  As such, I’d rate it as quite a bit more valuable than many more thrillers that take no chances and don’t go beyond the most obvious ideas.  I certainly welcome reading more of Lee’s work in the future, and I hope that a lot of SF fans don’t let this trilogy pass them by due to a quirk of labelling.

  • The Sorcerer’s Apprentices, Lisa Abend

    The Sorcerer’s Apprentices, Lisa Abend

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Free Press, 2011, 304 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-1-4391-7555-2

    I first became aware of el Bulli from The Amateur Gourmet’s blog post/webcomic Dinner at El Bulli: The Greatest Restaurant in the World in August 2009.  Not being much of a foodie at the time, it was my glimpse into so-called “Molecular Cuisine” (a term everyone seems to hate) and a first look at the legend of el Bulli, a place intent on pushing back the definitions of food.  (It definitely left an impression: By February 2011, I was seated at Ottawa’s own Atelier to enjoy the local version of such an experimental restaurant and I still remember it as one of the best meals of my life.)

    As of this writing in early 2013, El Bulli has become legendary… something helped along by the restaurant’s decision to close at the end of 2011 to transform itself into a still nebulously-defined “culinary think-tank”.  During its heyday, El Bulli was named the top restaurant in the world five successive times.  Its chef, Ferran Adrià, has become something of a celebrated genius, an emblem of the new Spanish culinary creativity.  As a result, there is little about el Bulli that hasn’t been documented, filmed, described or exclaimed about: There are documentary films, numerous books and countless newspaper articles to quench your thirst for more el Bull goodness. 

    In this context, what’s left for Lisa Abend to show in The Sorcerer’s Apprentices?  Quite a bit, as it turns out: Taking a bottom-up look at el Bulli through the forty-some stagiaires (apprentices) that form the backbone of el Bulli’s workforce.  As Abend reveals, the mind-bending high-prep thirty-course nature of el Bulli’s groundbreaking cuisine isn’t made possible by high technology or advanced science: it’s made affordable solely due to the highly-skilled, unpaid labour that volunteered to work at el Bulli for an entire season.  The rewards are obvious: who wouldn’t want to hire someone with el Bulli on his resume?  Who wouldn’t want a chance to peek over Adrià’s shoulders?  Who wouldn’t want to spend a few months working at “the best restaurant in the world”?

    There’s a flip-side, of course: Despite el Bulli’s reputation, the truth is that much of the stagiaires’ work is back-breaking rather than groundbreaking.  While the working conditions there seem quite a bit better than most restaurants (ample space to move, workspaces that don’t get overly hot, no reed to run or shout, tightly-regulated reservations that takes much of the chaos out of the evening rush), a six-month season at el Bulli involves living in a small rural Spanish city far from their families, with long hours, mindless repetitive work and not much in terms of pay.  Abend structures her book around the experiences of roughly a dozen of the stagiaires, exploring their backgrounds, the frequent sacrifices required to get the job and then keep it throughout the year.  A number of stagiaires drop out, sometimes happily (getting a job at a prestigious restaurant) and sometimes less so.

    Despite spending a long time at the restaurant during the 2009 season, Abend herself remains a discrete presence behind the scenes as she describe the daily rhythm of el Bulli.  She presents the stagiaires’ stories simply, doesn’t shy away from delving into their fears and moments of doubt, and in doing so humanizes the el Bulli mythology.  Adrià himself remains a formidable presence, but the book wisely shies away from too lengthy contacts with him.  This is about the apprentices, not the sorcerer: It’s about the reality of el Bulli rather the mythology… even if the mythology ends up reinforced by the reality.

    It does amount to an absorbing read, no matter one’s membership level in the ranks of foodies.  There’s some amazing material here in describing how some meals are put together (the crown going to a rose/artichoke plate that’s really roses masquerading as artichokes), and one of the few ways the book could have been better would have been with a stronger visual component to illustrate its subject matter.  It’s a well-constructed book with a fascinated subject, and its execution is well above mere competence.  What’s not to like?  Now that el Bulli has closed, perhaps for good, it’s essential to keep capsule reminders of the way things happened at the restaurant during its heyday.

  • Cooking for Geeks, Jeff Potter

    Cooking for Geeks, Jeff Potter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    O’Reilly Media, 2010, 432 pages, C$43.99 tp, ISBN 978-0-596-80588-3

    To repeat the obvious: Books aren’t just about their subject matter than they are about their relationship with their intended audience.  You can turn an ordinary book into a remarkable oddity simply by shifting the audience, and that’s where the genius of Jeff Potter’s Cooking for Geeks comes in.

    Yes, there have been a lot of cookbooks over the past few years.  Cooking has become something cool, and cookbooks are reliably the top-selling genre of non-fiction books.  Everyone needs to eat, so the theoretical audience for cookbooks is everyone.  Who isn’t hungry for a few more delicious recipes? So when publishing house O’Reilly, specialized in technical manuals for computer experts, decides to publish something called Cooking for Geeks, you can expect some serious cooking advice for equally-serious nerds. 

    One of the best things about the book is that it makes no assumptions of competence.  Geeks can learn anything, and much of the book is dedicated to re-explaining cooking from a technical perspective.  If ever you’re in the market for an explanation of food that somehow involves references to UNIX, solid engineering principles and geek-culture icons such as Mythbusters and XKCD, then, well, Cooking for Geeks is exactly what its title promises.

    As may be expected from a geek-book explaining the world, Cooking for Geeks is both playful and endlessly curious.  One of the earliest exercise in the book, demonstrating how recipes aren’t sacred tests, consists in data-mining the internet for pancake recipes, and then averaging out the results into a peer-reviewed meta-recipe of sorts.  Cooking isn’t like programming in that precise syntax isn’t required (loose typing is fine), but cooking is like coding in that there are often many, many ways to get to the same results.  (It’s no accident if Cooking for Geeks contains both “don’t deviate from the recipe” and “deviate from the recipe” as fundamental advice.)  If everything else fails, you can either recompile (alter the ingredients) or go COTS (order pizza).

    Potter’s assured main text is enlivened by numerous pull-outs and interviews with geek and cooking notables.  The interviews bring different voices into the narrative, explore tangential subjects or simply show how cooking is unusually well-suited to personal explorations.  All interviewees are enthusiastic about their topics, and this attitude carries over into the book’s cheerful boosterism for cooking.  Nearly every page of Cooking for Geeks brims with the typical geek attitude of endless curiosity about the world.  Compared to other introductions to cooking, Potter’s technical tangents are what makes the book worth reading.

    From relatively basic beginnings, Cooking for Geeks gets quite a bit more complicated as it goes on, eventually touching upon deeply geeky cooking innovations such as molecular cuisine, sous-vide and “power-tool” cooking in which warranties get voided.  Throw in an exemplary chapter on food safety and the result is a well-rounded introduction to the culinary arts for an audience that wouldn’t necessary know where to begin in the vast, vast ocean of cooking-related information.  Potter has done the research, cleared away the confusion and presented an invaluable distillation

    Will it transform anyone into a decent cook?  It depends on readers’ follow-up, of course: The danger with cookbooks, no matter the audience, is that they are read enthusiastically and then gradually forgotten without having made an impact, falling victim to the chronic lack of time that everyone (not just geeks) is belabouring under.  The same amount of time required to become a proficient coder is the same as one required to become a decent cook, and no amount of cheerleading can go against the pressures of life.  But that’s outside the book, and in the meantime Cooking for Geeks is almost exactly the best cookbook that could have worn this title.

  • Savages, Don Winslow

    Savages, Don Winslow

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, movie tie-in reprint edition of 2010 original, 336 pages, C$17.00 tp, ISBN 978-1-4516-6715-8

    Life is filled with regrets, and as a dedicated reader, one of mine is that there’s simply not enough time in the world to read all the books I want to read.  (Especially given that I intend to spend the next few years raising my infant daughter rather than reading voraciously.)  I know my own corner of genre fiction pretty well, but there are so many other good books out there that I can’t possibly hope to read them all.  But then again, maybe that’s a feature of the reading universe rather than a bug –it means that there are always, and forever will be, great books to read.  Wonders await the constant reader.

    In this case, I’m quite specifically happy to have discovered Don Winslow and Savages.  It took Oliver Stone’s film adaptation to bring me to the novel, but no matter: Savages is a great contemporary crime novel, told in a vivid and efficient style that had me reading the book in the kind of happy trance that I only get from exceptional fiction.

    Little of the impact of the book can be guessed from a synopsis of the plot, although much of the novel’s hip contemporary flavour certainly comes through: In early-2009 South California, two boutique drug entrepreneurs are targeted by a Mexican drug cartel: The cartels love their superior product but wish to muscle in on their profits.  When the two small-time dealers try to opt out of the “deal”, things quickly escalate when the young woman who loves them equally (yes, this means exactly what you think it does) is kidnapped and held against their cooperation.  Before long, our protagonists are pitting corrupt DEA agents against a crime matriarch and her brutal enforcer.

    As a pathological reader with a professional sideline in film reviewing, I have learned a long time ago that it’s always best to go from film to novel, appreciating the way a novel expands upon the events of the film.  Savages does something more, though: while the film adds an unnecessary meta-fictional trick at the end of the story (one that both softens and weakens the hard ending of the novel), the book will surprise movie viewers and please readers through sheer style.  From the very first chapter (solely composed of a popular two-word obscenity) onward, it’s clear that Winslow’s not content with the usual objective tight-third-person hum-drum narration.  Oh no: Savages roars on full-octane style.  Ellipses, parentheses, in-your-face omniscient narration, interrupted sentences, impressionistic fragments, script excerpts, invented vocabulary (as in “PAQU” for Passive-Aggressive Queen of the Universe), short paragraphs, punchy sentences are all part of Winslow’s arsenal here and the result is one constantly absorbing read from beginning to end.

    Despite the economy of words, Winslow also ends up a surprisingly funny writer.  Never mind the implied dialogue between narrator and reader (“and no, there won’t be a quiz at the end because we’re talking about stoners here” [P.21]).  Have a look at this paragraph describing the qualities of a particularly potent strain of marijuana:

    This was a plant that could almost get up, walk around, find a lighter, and fire itself up.  Read Wittgenstein, have deep conversations about the meaning of life with you, cocreate a television series for HBO, cause peace in the Middle East (“ The Israelis and Palestinians could coexist in two parallel universes, sharing space but not time”).  It took a strong man –or a strong woman, in O’s case –to take more than one hit of the Ultra White Widow. [P.37]

    Hilarious… and Savages is filled with passages such as this one.  It amounts to a memorable reading experience that trades heft for speed and impact: It’s a short novel, but one that fully rewards the reader.  As a look at the modern drug business, it feels credible.  But it’s as a piece of storytelling that Savages shines best.  I haven’t read a novel told quite like this before, and I do like the result.  I may currently be in the middle of a self-imposed moratorium on buying new books, but once I get back to my addict ways, Don Winslow is on the list of authors who deserve some further attention.

  • Night of the Living Trekkies, Kevin David Anderson & Sam Stall

    Night of the Living Trekkies, Kevin David Anderson & Sam Stall

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Quirk, 2011, 256 pages, C$16.95 tp, ISBN 978-1-5947-4463-1

    I should probably start this review by reminding infrequent readers that 2012 is my first semi-sabbatical year as far as reviewing stuff on the internet is concerned.  I’m a newly-minded dad, my time is limited, and one good way to give myself more time is to cut down on reading.  But my birthday is this month, and, heck, I deserve the occasional treat. That’s how I ended up cracking open Kevin David Anderson & Sam Stall’s Night of the Living Trekkies, my first novel in months that’s not motivated by having just seen the movie adaptation.

    My expectations weren’t particularly high.  The entire plot is almost entirely explained in the title: Mash a Star Trek convention with a zombie invasion and, well, there you have it. We know how this thing’s going to go from years of zombie movies. As a reader looking for a bit of escapism, I was expecting the usual zombie-invasion narrative arc, some Trek references and (hopefully) a happy ending deviating from the usual “everybody dies” cliché.

    Fortunately, Andreson and Stall are good at exceeding expectations. Night of The Living Trekkies manages to deliver what it should deliver and add a little bit more on the top.  We’ve covered the essentials: it affectionately presents some of the fun surrounding a Star Trek convention (even if it’s one shut down early for cause of the rising undead), then overwhelms it with the Zombie Apocalypse.  There’s no discernible contempt here for either Star Trek or zombies as the authors write from an insider’s perspective.  The Trek trivia runs both broad and deep: while die-hard trekkers will be tickled by some of the references, those whose appreciation for the series runs shallower shouldn’t feel as if they’re missing out on much.  (Here’s a test to rate yourself on the Trekker/Zombie-fan scale: Can you picture a Klingon decapitating a zombie with a bat’leth?  How does that mental picture make you feel?)

    Where the book starts to deliver on more than the stock premise is in its characterization.  Our hero is an Afghanistan veteran whose has come home with the intention of hiding out in a job with no responsibilities and zero potential for danger.  In the midst of a zombie uprising, though, our protagonist finds himself forced into a position of leadership with a lot of potential for personal growth.  He is soon surrounded by an assortment of well-sketched characters, some of them with conflicting agendas.  While the novel has a few technically regrettable point-of-view problems (including a temporary jump into a minor character’s thought processes), Night of the Living Trekkies is written with a certain amount of narrative cleverness, and the novel is rarely less than interesting.  Well-conceived sequences reach an apex of sorts with a dramatic action sequence in a parking garage.  The chuckles are carefully balanced with the chills, creating a successful comedy/horror hybrid.  It even comes to develop a richer back-story than the usual “zombies braaaiiins” shtick, leading to a solidly science-fictional rationale for the zombies that dovetails nicely with the Star Trek motif of the novel.

    In a few words, Night of the Living Trekkies succeeds at what it intends to be.  The cover makes it clear that this is supposed to be lurid pulp-fiction, but it delivers on this premise without going over-the-top with the gore, or forgetting that a solid plot is essential in carrying the side-gags.  It even had me writing my first review in nearly two months and isn’t that something for someone who should be spending time cleaning up his basement?