Book Review

  • American Backlash, Michael Adams

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Viking Canada, 2005, 230 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-670-06370-3

    I don’t think it’s possible to be too laudatory about Michael Adams’ previous book, Fire and Ice: Canada, The United States and the Myth of Convergence. By putting some statistical rigour onto a national feeling that had been growing for years, Adams crystallized the Canadian zeitgeist at a time where it finally manifested itself. It’s a bit pretentious to say that 2003 was the year that Canada grew up, but it certainly stands as a significant moment where (thanks to marijuana, same-sex marriage and staying-the-hell-out-of-Iraq) the country realized it was truly different from the United States. That it wasn’t just not converging with the US, but actively moving in a different direction. Sharply written with a mixture of structured polling results and pop-culture references, Fire and Ice went to to earn wide acclaim and healthy sales.

    American Backlash is more or less a direct sequel to Fire and Ice, except that the analysis focuses almost exclusively on the United States. Once again, Adams takes a look at the results of his periodical household opinion surveys and draws inferences about the American character. What’s that fuss about culture wars? Is it true that, socially, the US is made of very different regions? Is the US growing more nihilistic by the minute?

    As a Canadian, I’m almost disturbed at Adams’ presumptuousness in daring to psychoanalyze another country, especially if that country is the US. Through written and published for Canada, American Backlash takes on the risky task of finding out what Americans think, and if Canadians know one things very well, it’s that the US never, ever reacts favourably to outside opinion. Wouldn’t it be better, asks the polite Canadian, if we just avoided the subject altogether? I wouldn’t enjoy reading Adams’ hate mail after the publication of this book. It’s hardly surprising if the book still hasn’t found an American publisher.

    But never mind my nervous fretting of hands. What does Adams have to say about the US?

    One of his early conclusions is that the so-called culture war in the US is taking place upon the least important social axis. While Adams finds clear differences between self-identified conservatives and liberals (although those differences are almost orthogonal to one another: “liberals have issues while conservatives has values” he memorably coins on page 156), committed voters on both sides are very similar in terms of aspirations and community engagement. The real difference comes when you study voters versus non-voters: Perhaps predictably, non-voters are more likely to be hedonistic, consumerist and accepting of violence. It’s not such a stretch to assume that those evils that conservative and liberals are arguing against are to be found not in each other, but in this politically disengaged third group. (Ha! And you thought gansgta rap fashion was just an aberration, not a personification!)

    At a thin 230 pages (only 177 of which are the main text, the rest being taken up by notes on methodology, sources and an index), American Backlash doesn’t have much more space for other subjects. It still does manage to study regional characteristics of America (suggesting that the stereotypes about this or that area of the US are largely based on real differences) and present a short history of political trends in twentieth-century America. (Hence the title, painting a picture of American politics mostly defined by what it opposes rather that what unites: the modern conservative movement as an overreaction against the evils of those “liberal hippies” of the sixties, just as the hippies were overreacting against mainstream values of the fifties…)

    Unfortunately, American Backlash is not designed to speak about Canada, or how the US compares to other nations. Beyond cursory mentions of increasing liberalism everywhere else in the first world, Adams remains focused on the American national character. Readers hoping to catch a glimpse of Adams’ 2004 survey results for Canada will have their appetites whetted but left unfulfilled: you can bet good dollars that those results will have to wait until Adams’ next book. (In the meantime, Adams shows a sharp turn toward authoritarianism in the US from 2000 to 2004, and suggests a similar, but not as extreme trend in Canada.)

    This being said, I think that fans of Fire and Ice will be the most disappointed in American Backlash. While the book is interesting and relatively solid, it does cover a lot of ground already explained in the previous book, and adds only a few points of interest. I supposed that many American readers will be offended by the besmirching of their national character, but then again they will have to make an effort to get the book from its Canadian publisher. For everyone else, it’s an interesting analysis of the social mood south of the border: will it be proved right just as Fire and Ice found its own vindication?

  • Plan of Attack, Dale Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2004, 345 pages, C$39.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-009411-7

    Long-time readers of these reviews may ask why I keep reading Dale Brown’s novels if I obviously hate them so much. Part of the answer lies in my admiration of Brown’s early novels: If he was able to do it once, why not again? But the real answer is elsewhere: For years, I just kept purchasing Brown’s books whenever I found them at used book sales, piling them up unread and always thinking that I’d end up reading them all sooner or later. My mistake was in assuming that they would get better. Now I have to tough it out until the very end.

    And Plan of Attack, if I’m to judge from Brown’s web site, is a temporary end of sorts: The last Patrick McLanahan novel before Brown’s newer series. You would think that this would be good news: after all, haven’t I spent the last mumble-mumble reviews of Brown’s books complaining about how the McLanahan universe is now completely irrelevant to the new geopolitical reality? Wouldn’t it be great to see Brown properly dispose of McLanahan and his cohorts? The only problem is that I’m not convinced Brown is done with McLanahan yet. Then there’s the fact that even just one last lap may be too much to bear again.

    Picking up where Brown’s last half-dozen snooze-fests have left off, Plan of Attack begins with Yet Another Stupid Move by McLanahan, one that results in another international incident in McLanahan’s long career. This time around, though, this very career takes a hit as McLanahan is busted down a grade and shuffled to another area of the Air Force. Still, you can hardly count him out, especially when he discovers evidence of an audacious plan by Russia’s president to bomb America’s strategic nuclear arsenal…

    Said Russian president is insane, of course, and so is the novel. While Plan of Attack is generally more interesting than Brown’s previous three novels put together, it’s the kind of interest caused by train-wrecks or forensic reports: it’s horrible, but fun to piece together why such a bad thing happened.

    The main problem, of course, is that Brown’s fictional universe has long lost any relevance to the current geopolitics. McLanahan has now battled enemies in eleven novels stretching all the way back to the last days of the Cold War: Any attempt to reconcile it with real-world event is doomed to failure. (And so is any attempt to point out that the plot is pure paranoid nonsense.) Yet Brown piles on the incoherences by weaving 9/11 in the narrative, though without it having any impact on the characters or the environment in which they work: Brown’s “American Holocaust of 2004” [P.340] ends up casually dwarfing 9/11 and that’s that. A better, more confident writer may have used this premise as the basis for an alternate history novel set in a different Reagan era, but one gets the sense that Brown isn’t interested in pushing the envelope, just in delivering a pat novel that does exactly the same thing as any of his previous novels.

    Unfortunately, those would be the exact same things that made his previous novels such painfully uninteresting piece of work. The overdose of jargon and minutia; the wretched dialogue (“’This is unbelievable!’ President Anatoliy Gryzlov shouted. ‘I cannot believe the sheer audacity of these Americans!’” [P.330]); the reliance on fantasy technology like the “Tin Man” suits; the indifferent characterization; the flat prose; the lack of interest in following the story where it truly leads (you will never read a less involving nuclear war novel); the way the high tech equipment makes it easy for the protagonists to kick ass without any personal danger or involvement. Whatever was promising in previous instalments is constantly neutralized and defanged: if you were expecting a political showdown between President Thorn and Martindale, you can forget it as one of them (you’ll guess who) simply steps aside off-stage to let the Republican take charge. Lazy plotting doesn’t stop there: When two powerful commanders league up to stop McLanahan, they are neatly taken out of the plot by a convenient plane crash.

    I like to be lenient on military thrillers and enjoy them for that they try to be, but there’s a limit to being complacent: After a steady string of failures, enough is enough: it’s safe to assume that Brown’s not aiming particularly high any more.

    If there’s any consolation to the fact that I’ve got yet another Brown book in my stack of stuff to read, it’s that Act of War promises a brand-new hero and a focus on the war on terrorism. As long as Brown keeps recycling McLanahan, he’s at a dead end. It’s high time for him to do the honourable thing and let McLanahan retire. Or else Brown himself can start thinking about doing something else and leaving the novel-writing business to professionals.

    [March 2009: After two off-McLanahan novels that were substandard even by the low standards of his late career, Brown returns to his favourite series in 2007’s Strike Force, but brings back links to nearly all of his unconnected novels so far, ignoring huge chunks of his backstory for the sake of bringing all of his novels in one continuity. The increasingly self-satisfied solipsistic nature of his writing gets worse, and the result is a novel so awful that I’m thinking that enough is enough: for the near future, I’m done with Brown. Anyone in the market for a full run of his hardcovers?]

  • The Gold Coast, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1990, 626 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-36085-6

    As I slowly make my way through Nelson DeMille’s oeuvre, two things strike me about his books: The first one is that they all succeed to a degree or another. Some of his books are less interesting than other, but they’re still well worth reading even with the skimming and the speed-reading. But the second thing about DeMille is the most fascinating: His books work even when they shouldn’t.

    Even though we could point at Word of Honor and Spencerville as other books that shouldn’t be as gripping as they are, The Gold Coast is the clearest example so far of a story that simply shouldn’t be as preposterously readable. A bare plot description is trite beyond belief: it’s about a rich middle-aged man who starts doubting his life and finds uneasy comfort with a new friend. I shudder to imagine how many awful novels have been written about mid-life crises, especially once you start looking at literary novels written by middle-aged academics. To imagine DeMille, master of the contemporary thriller, tackle such a subject is almost beyond description. Where are the guns? Where are the thrills?

    As it turns out, you may not need any of the above –though they do make an appearance at some point. No, the big surprise is that The Gold Coast is a middle-age crisis novel written by a writer who’s a pro at holding his readers’ attention. Protagonist John Sutter is like every other DeMille narrator so far: self-deprecating, smart-alecky, perhaps a bit too smart for his own good. He’s living in a curious situation, having married well above his class: he makes a decent living as a Wall Street lawyer, enjoys his boat and drives nice cars, but his wife is the one with the real class, being the latest in an old-money family living on a Long Island estate that dates back to an earlier and more glorious time. For Sutter, trouble starts once his new neighbour moves in: Frank Belladonna, an old-style Mafia don who starts taking a bigger and bigger portion of Sutter’s life.

    Belladonna, of course, is a magnet for danger. When guns finally make their appearance in The Gold Coast, they come courtesy of the Mafia. But that happens relatively late in the book: what really makes up the meat of the novel is DeMille’s description of the last remnants of old-style American aristocracy, compared and contrasted by the similarly dying nobility of the New York Mafia. Sutter see this through the troubled eyes of a besieged man, with a wife that grows more distant and tax troubles that are not coincidental to the tug-of-war between his neighbour and the federal government. Sutter lives at the edge between the world of the super-rich and the rest of us: an outsider to all, he makes a rich narrator who notices everything.

    And indeed, the interest of The Gold Coast comes not from the late-book thrills, but in the vivid study of a way of life, of characters living down an era. DeMille’s characterization is impeccable: don’t be surprised if you’re seduced by the rough-hewn charm of Belladonna even as he’s clearly more trouble than Sutter can handle. The Gold Coast is a trial by fire for Sutter, and part of the fun is seeing him harvest the just deserts of his life so far. Scenes after scenes of delicious characterization make this novel a lot more fun to read that you’d expect from a 600-page novel about some rich guy undergoing a mid-life crisis.

    And so I remain astonished at DeMille’s capacity to wring interest from an unpromising premise. Unlike some of his novels (The Lion’s Game being the worst offender), he also maintains our interest through the entire duration of the book: It’s hard to look at any 600-pages book and not think that it should be cut by a hundred pages, but trying to guess where to cut in The Gold Coast would be an exercise in futility. Suffice to say that it’s a book that will never be too far away once you start reading it. DeMille’s prose here is like popcorn, with a very real “just one more chapter” quality.

    In short, The Gold Coast makes an unexpected entry at the top of DeMille’s oeuvre: Well-written, endlessly fascinating and surprisingly engaging, it shows what happens when genre writers turn their sight to more prosaic literature: perfect pacing and sharp characterization in the service of a story for the ages. It shouldn’t work, but it certainly does.

  • The Draco Tavern, Larry Niven

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2006, 304 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30863-0

    Long-time Larry Niven readers only need to be told one thing about The Draco Tavern: This is another one of Niven’s mostly-reprint anthologies, but it’s much better than the other ones. Even the newer stories don’t suck as much as you would expect.

    Niven’s career, by now, is a case study in wunderkind turned has-been: From fresh, vivid and compulsively readable material in the sixties and seventies, Niven began a steady slide into mediocrity and beyond starting with The Ringworld Engineer in 1982, a decline only stemmed by a number of collaborations —although even those have started to stink since The Gripping Hand. The latest development has been his repackaging of linked short stories in a series of themed anthologies revolving around specific characters or universe: While N-Space and Playgrounds of the Mind were decent best-of collections, books like Crashlander, Flatlander and Rainbow Mars could be dismissed in one damning sentence: Collection of several good stories from the early Niven, followed by an unreadable new story by the later Niven. Sequels like The Ringworld Throne did nothing to enhance Niven’s tarnished reputation, to say nothing of “original” works like Destiny’s Road or collections of recent sub-standard work such as Scatterbrain. So imagine the low expectations upon reading The Draco Tavern.

    As usual, the beginning of the book plays to expectations: Niven’s new introduction is rambling and repetitive, whereas the early stories are classic Niven from his prime. Many SF writers try bar stories at one point or another and it’s not hard to see why: the classic set-up involves a world-weary but removed narrator, inebriated guest stars and stories that -being told twice-removed- may or may not be true. (Arthur C. Clarke packaged his bar stories into one of my favourite books, Tales from the White Hart, whereas Spider Robinson turned his Callahan’s stories into a career.) Niven states that he designed the Draco Tavern cycle as a way to explore the Big Issues, and the first few stories do justice to his ambitions, regaling us with ideas and speculations about life, the universe and everything in-between. I still vividly remember those stories from the classic Niven era, from the punchline of “The Green Marauder” to the unsettling core idea of “The Subject is Closed”.

    Then, true to Niven’s career, the level of quality of the stories begins to slide down. The freshness of the Draco Tavern stories turns bland. The action occasionally moves away from the tavern itself (“Table Manners”), with mixed results. Niven transforms his narrator, Rick Schumann, into an active participant —but fails to develop his character unless it serves the stories. Packaged closely together like this, the stories in The Draco Tavern offer the outline of a dramatic arc as Schumann gets married, has a kid, sees the tavern get destroyed at least twice and then rebuilt. Unfortunately, it remains only a faint outline: particularly disappointing is the lack of attention paid to Schumann’s personal life, which barely gets more than a passing mention except when it’s meant to be a plot driver. (See “Playhouse” for an example.)

    But the big surprise is that even if the late-Niven stories aren’t nearly at neat (nor as readable) as the first ones, they still maintain a basic level of interest. Unlike most of Niven’s short fiction since the early nineties, the more contemporary half of The Draco Tavern is still a good read. The verve is gone, but it still works somehow. Readers who were disappointed by Niven’s most recent collections won’t feel as cheated by this one.

    Still, there’s still plenty to criticize in the last half of the book. The jarring introduction of contemporary references to Toshiba laptops and 9/11 terrorism strips away some of the timeless quality that such a collection should have. Niven’s increasingly cranky politics also muscle their way in the narrative with a conspicuous lack of cleverness. There’s a tin-eared reference to Saddam Hussein on page 257 that makes Niven look like an idiot who overdosed on Fox News. Those details pile up so that, in the word of another Niven story, “the magic goes away”.

    But these false notes and atonal passages are almost reassuring: it just wouldn’t do to assume that “Niven’s back!”, wouldn’t it? It may be just a bit better to feel that the time-tested template of the Draco Tavern stories was enough to keep the brain-eater at bay, just for this one book. For those who wondered where the early Niven went, The Draco Tavern won’t offer any happy explanation… but it just may be enough to feel that he still has a few more good stories left in his head.

  • America, Stephen Coonts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 2001, 436 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-312-98250-X

    Genre fiction is often an exercise in balancing realism against excitement. Real life is boring, doesn’t make sense and shows an annoying reluctance to pay off in dramatic satisfaction. Yet fiction that relies too heavily on dramatic conventions is more easily dismissed as unrealistic. Hence the tightrope act of any fiction writer in balancing the demands of reality versus the thrills of a good story. Ideally, it’s best to establish just enough reality to suspend disbelief, and then step hard on the dramatic accelerator.

    This balance between reality and fiction is tricky to get right in any genre, but military thrillers present their own particular problems, and it’s a mark of the sub-genre’s low storytelling standards that even its best-selling authors have such a hard time succeeding. Too much realism, and the novel sinks in impenetrable jargon, uninteresting details and amiable characterization featuring idealized martial clones. Too much action, and the novel leaves reality as we understand it to end up in a paranoid fantasyland where every non-American is best killed with extreme preemptive prejudice. Dale Brown is particularly bad at this, but he’s far from being the only one.

    Stephen Coonts has usually been more successful than most of his colleagues in delivering solid stories with just enough real-world foundations. While he’s been slipping as of late (Saucer and Hong Kong certainly weren’t his best efforts), the early Coonts managed a good mixture between believable realism and big-screen thrills. America, unfortunately, is closer to a disappointment than a success, even though all the elements are there for something much better.

    It begins as the United States’ newest nuclear submarine, the USS America, is boldly hijacked by a group of terrorists. That in itself would be bad enough, but what’s in the launch bays makes it even worse: a bunch of cruise missiles equipped with EMP warheads.

    This premise by itself wouldn’t be a bad start to a crackerjack thriller. There’s an element of originality, a built-in tension (especially if the missiles are launched in separate waves) and a good hunter/killer element. Find a good antagonist and the rest of the novel practically writes itself.

    Alas, Coonts chose to burden his scenario with too many elements that only serve to defuse the tension and increase the giggle factor. There’s an underwater satellite recovery subplot that scatters the story in a direction it didn’t need (and suffers in comparison with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Bright Star), along with money-grubbing villains (some of them French, of course) whose motivations and methods don’t even make sense.

    What also contributes to America‘s failure is Coonts’ annoying tendency to re-use the same characters in novels set in the same universe. I’m rarely a fan of loose series, and they make no sense in the military thriller genre: Once you’ve nuked a city, killed a president or fought a war with China, what’s left to do? Coonts has been bitten by this bad habit before (resurrecting Castro for Cuba after killing him in Under Siege) and his habit of trotting out Jake Grafton, Toad Tarkington and Tommy Carmellini for little more than secondary roles is truly starting to grate.

    Worse yet is America‘s flat-line dramatic tension. The writing is limp and without energy, with scenes strung along a thin clothesline of plot. Hampered by their existing back-stories, the recurring characters are simply not placed in good positions to follow and intervene in the action. Everything feels removed, distant and telegraphed. It’s only too easy to see where the novel’s good sequences (a cruise missile attack on New York, an underwater submarine duel, a failed assassination attempt) could have been strengthened with just a little bit more dramatic glue. Instead, America often feels like the product of a tired author, a formerly hot novelist now phoning them in for an undemanding audience. After the dramatic drop in quality of his previous few novels, I can’t say that I’m surprised or even disappointed.

    Still, what’s especially frustrating about Coonts is that he’s not completely clueless. Unlike Dale Brown or Patrick Robinson, his plotting is serviceable, and there are hints that he still understands the demands of dramatic tension. His writing seldom slides into jargon-heavy militarism, and intermittent flashes of interest show that there may still be hope for him. Unfortunately, I’m thrice-burned, twice-shy on his stuff. If I end up reading the follow-up Liberty, it’ll be by pure used-book-sale happenstance: like so many of the young techno-thriller punks of the late eighties, Coonts has become and old tired warhorse practically fit to be put to pasture, defeated by the twin inability to keep it real and keep it interesting.

  • Clade, Mark Budz

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2003, 372 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58658-0

    The publishing industry has evolved a lot over the past decade, and one of the most profound changes has been nearly-invisible to end-readers. The consolidation of book distribution to just a few players has wreaked havoc on mass-market paperback distribution in non-bookstore outlets, which means that if your corner convenience store may once have boasted a well-stocked paperback section, today’s books are selling primarily in bookstores and nowhere else. Financially, this has destroyed the niche for mass market paperback, concentrated the buying public in bookstores visitors and driven publishing toward higher-priced formats, hence the explosion in hardcover and trade paperback publishing. The classic mass-market paperback survives, but as a second life for books already very successful on the hardcover circuit.

    Alas, this squeezes out newer and mid-list writers who had, up until that crunch, relied on sales from truck stops and drugstores to make up their numbers. Today’s mass-market paperback original is a solitary and beautiful creature in danger of extinction.

    Which brings us to Clade, a first novel by SF writer Mark Budz. I know that I should pick up more first novels by unknown writers as a matter of principle, but I can claim no such lofty intention for buying Clade: I just loved Stephen Youll’s luminously futuristic cover. That, and the fact that Budz’s second book, Crache, was neatly shelved right next to it, with matching cover art. Who can tell what will work in convincing people to pick up strange new books?

    As it turns out, I’m not displeased at all by this debut novel. The central conceit of Clade is simplicity itself: what if we end up using our knowledge of biotechnology to enclave ourselves? Social classes are already a fact of life, but what if poor people could be made to be sick in rich people’s presence? Wouldn’t that be an efficient way to clean the room for the rich? But why stop there? Why not codify racism as an allergen responses? What if the presence of a certain ethnic group can truly made you sick?

    Not a fun future, but one worth pondering. Despite SF’s claims as an all-inclusive literature, class issues don’t often pop up as a issue of interest to its writers. (Cynics will say that as a middle-class American literature, SF loathes to cut too close to the central assumptions of its readership: the very thought that America is a class-stratified society is so taboo that everyone pretends it’s not there.) In Clade, Budz doesn’t shy away from a future where Caucasians are in the minority, where the rich use everyone else for their own purposes and where ethnic/social/cultural barriers are accepted with scarcely more than a resigned shrug.

    Calling a novel “post-cyberpunk” nowadays is doing no one any favour, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to see the common links between this novel and the Gibson generation of the late eighties. The world awareness, the dirty side of technology, the idea that corporations certainly aren’t our best friend: These ideas, now familiar, permeate Clade and yet do much to give it the feel of a contemporary piece of Science Fiction.

    Given such high and exciting ambitions, it’s perhaps no surprise that the execution of the novel can often be disappointing. Budz’s writing betrays a lack of polished experience, and the structure of the story can be a bit clunky: the ending, in particular, seems rushed and pat. It is a conclusion, but one that seems to leave a lot of material up in the air. (Crache is billed as an independent sequel –we’ll see what that means.)

    The other problem with the book is that it works as long as you’re willing to grant the author a bit of indulgence. When words like “ecocaust” figure heavily in the novel’s backstory, it’s a good hint to stop worrying about consistency and just enjoy the ride: Standard post-apocalyptic SF reading protocols suggest that said catastrophe frees the author to do whatever is necessary to required to set up the world of the story. That the “cades” and “pherions” of the story aren’t plausible isn’t the point: The point is using those tools to tell a story about something. It’s just a shame that it’s impossible to believe in this future as anything but authorial decree, a feeling that the sometimes-silly thriller mechanics don’t do much to dispel.

    But I still enjoyed the book: as a debut novel, it’s got good energy, a few terrific idea and -perhaps most importantly- the willingness to engage with some vital issues. Crache is up next on my reading stack and I’m looking forward to it. While Clade may not blow open any doors nor any minds, it’s a perfect example of the type of good solid mid-list SF that is threatened by the disappearance of mass-market paperbacks. Do yourself a favour: The next time you’re in a supermarket, have a look at the paperback originals on the wire racks.

    [June 2006: Alas, sequel Crache isn’t nearly as interesting. While more complex, better written and gifted with higher stakes than the prequel, Crache is far less grounded in reality, and that ultimately takes away a lot of Clade‘s initial appeal as a champion of the lower classes. There are three plot-lines in Crache and the only one I found constantly interesting was the one about “L. Mariachi”, a former rock star now surviving as a migrant worker. The rest was hit-and-miss, damaged by lengthy interludes, wonky plot mechanics intersecting hard science (including programmable matter, straight from Will McCarthy’s speculations) with quasi-mysticism in which a guitar song can cure cancer. (Well, maybe not cancer, but at least an otherwise incurable disease.) Some aspects of the book are stronger than Clade (something I have to admire), but the overall impact is muted. Though billed as an independent sequel, Crache uncompromisingly re-uses so much jargon and setting from the first novel that people reading this without the required background may find it a hard slog.]

  • The Merchants of Souls, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 398 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-58969-6

    John Barnes’ work may have polarized readers, but his career has been fascinating to follow. Now solidly ranked in the Science Fiction mid-list after a promising debut in the late eighties, Barnes has written everything from hard-SF blockbusters (Mother of Storms) to glorified men’s adventure (The Timeline Wars trilogy), with an orthogonal side-step in fantasy fable with One for the Morning Glory. And yet, over a career that now spans two decades, his most solid work may be the cycle initiated by Ten Thousand Doors: four novels charting the life of special operative Giraut Leones as he works in a far-flung future where humanity has colonized thousands of planets.

    The first novel in the series was interesting and almost charming, but the second one (Earth Made of Glass) ended on such a terrible note that it felt like a sucker punch: The double whammy of a failed marriage and a failed mission, with the likely death of an entire planet as a consequence. Not the kind of stuff that’s worth cheering for, especially when it looked like the end of the story for Giraut.

    But it wasn’t the end of the story. As The Merchants of Souls picks up, Giraut is still reeling from the aftermath of his divorce and what has since become known as “the Briand disaster”. Friends get together to cheer him up, but nothing works like getting back in the saddle again. Before he can catch his breath, Giraut is once more an Office of Special Projects operative. This time, he’s headed for Earth and its billions of inhabitants at centre of human civilization. But he’s not working alone, and this time he’s trying to stop all of human society from making a big mistake. What’s more, he has no clue who his true enemies are, or what they’re up to…

    Beyond the “portal” technology linking all thousand planets together, the most distinguishing feature of Barnes’ “Thousand Cultures Universe” has been the “psypyx”, a device allowing another mind to “ride” a functioning human. This usually takes place for medical purposes, as a clone is force-grown for a psypyx personality back-up: To train their mind, resurrected personalities undergo a period of apprenticeship by re-learning human skill in someone else’s skull. Perhaps the best thing about The Merchant of Souls is how it plays with the concept, both as a plot driver and as am innovative feature of the narration.

    Giraut gets fitted with a psypyx not only to help out a friend who is about to be re-born, but also to demonstrate (on OSP’s orders) something vital to the teeming population of Earth. As humanity has retreated further and further in entertainment-driven lives, some are pushing for psypyx exploitation: imagine the lure of millions of lives saved on silicon, ready to be popped into the entertainment console for cheap thrills. The fact that those are human lives and not ready-made casual entertainment barely resonates among those pushing for the exploitation of that particular natural resource: in fact, they’re denying that psypyx images are even sentient. Giraut, allowing an old childhood friend (Raimbaut) access to his mind and body, hopes to convince the decision-makers that this isn’t the case. From a special operative, he’s reluctantly forced into the role of a lobbyist.

    And so The Merchants of Souls goes on, with the added narrative twist that the tale is told by two narrators sharing a single body. This makes for curious scenes and ellipses, as Giraut may go to sleep just to allow Raimbaut to do his thing (or vice-versa). Hilarity ensues when both of them end up falling for different women. While the mechanics of body-sharing can be a cause for some head-scratching, it adds another layer of interest to a novel that, for a long time, seems to spin its wheels.

    Let’s be clear about this: The Merchants of Souls is never dull, but there are times, especially in the middle third, where it looks as if the plot is just idling and waiting for something to happen. If it’s an intentional ploy, it works remarkably well: When the third act kicks in, it does so with an event so shocking that it sends the novel spinning in another direction entirely. Suddenly, psypyx-drilling becomes a front for something much more dangerous. While this part of the tale isn’t flawless (Barnes can be a bit abrupt and gloss over crucial details when the action starts firing up), it strengthens what had been, up until then, a moderately good but unspectacular SF novel.

    It also made me reconsider a number of things I didn’t initially enjoy about the series. Now that I’ve seen where Barnes intended to go with this book, Earth Made of Glass suddenly feels a lot more appropriate as a step away from the innocence of the first novel. With its juiced-up ending, The Merchants of Souls fulfils its potential and promises much for the fourth volume, The Armies of Memory, which made it in bookstores as I was reading this volume. You can be sure that it’s going on the pile of things to read.

  • Rebel Without a Crew, Robert Rodriguez

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Plume, 1995, 285 pages, C$22.50 tpb, ISBN 0-452-27187-8

    As a certified fan of director Robert Rodriguez (I saw THE FACULTY in theatres; I’ve got ADVENTURES OF LAVA BOY AND SHARK GIRL on DVD), I had meant to pick up his tell-all non-fiction account Rebel Without a Crew for a while. The story of Rodriguez’s 1992 debut EL MARIACHI is now well-known, but anyone who has sat through one of Rodriguez’s entertaining audio commentaries already know that the man can be a show of his own: Who better to tell the story of Rodriguez’s breakout than Rodriguez himself?

    Rebel Without a Crew mostly take the form of a diary detailing Rodriguez’s adventures while making EL MARIACHI, and then what happened to him as he was courted by Hollywood studios. It began as Rodriguez consciously decided to make an ultra-cheap feature film for the Spanish-language video market —as nothing more than a practise movie. Strapped for cash and free time, Rodriguez then volunteered for medical experiments (a thirty days stint in which he hoped to make money and write a screenplay), travelled south of the border and shot an entire film in two weeks without the benefit of a film crew. Most of the film’s $7,000US budget went to pay for the film stock: Rodriguez’s contacts and personal charm helped do the rest.

    Strictly speaking, the story of the making of EL MARIACHI isn’t unique to Rebel Without a Crew. A trip to the local video store will net you the DVD edition of EL MARIACHI, complete with enough special features to give you a complete picture of how the movie was made. In the book, the shooting phase of the film barely takes 17 pages: the real story comes after, as Rodriguez drives himself sick editing the feature on primitive equipment, then goes off to Los Angeles to find a buyer for the feature. But then something very weird happens: thanks to an unbelievable series of coincidences, contacts and a really good film, Rodriguez caught the eye of major studios players. (As the subtitle states, this is How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player) The bulk of the story is seeing Rodriguez negotiate his way to a contract, even as things are grim at home. In a poignant moment, Rodriguez is forced to hock his prized film camera even as the studios are promising him a six-figure contract.

    Then it’s the whirlwind of film festivals, audience acclaim, media frenzy and the unbelievable experience of seeing that $7,000 feature film (suitably sweetened) released nationwide. Day by day, entry by entry, we see Rodriguez stumble upon wild success, bewildered by the changes in his life. As a rag-to-riches story, Rebel Without a Crew is hard to beat. As a look inside the mechanics of the film industry, it’s invaluable. Legend has it that the book has quietly become a cult item for the last generation of independent filmmakers: it’s not hard to see why thanks to Rodriguez’s indefatigable optimism, awe-inspiring determination and personal charm. Much as I defy anyone to listen to Rodriguez’s DVD commentary without feeling admiration for the man, it’s impossible to read Rebel Without a Crew and escape the contact high of a supremely confident artist. Few of us are as brilliant as Rodriguez (who can write, draw, compose and direct), but we can all learn a lesson from his experience.

    (Rodriguez makes it sound relatively easy, but it’s worth remembering that he didn’t get up one morning and decide to make EL MARIACHI: he had been shooting video, drawing and writing since childhood. It’s no accident if EL MARIACHI, even today, feels more self-assured than most of the slick straight-to-video trash you can find in video stores: Rodriguez had already mastered storytelling before shooting his feature film. This may serve to explain why there hasn’t been a glut of Rodriguez-level talent recently despite the wide availability of digital video cameras and material such as Rebel Without a Crew. For extra credits, cinephiles may want to compare Rodriguez’s approach and results with Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma-tic Make Your Own Damn Movie!)

    As a straight-up narrative, Rebel Without a Crew is a great read, even for those without film-making experience or intent. Rodriguez is an enormously likable narrator, and it’s all too easy to root for him as he’s slowly noticed by Hollywood’s hype machine. Fortunately, the story has a happy ending: Today, Rodriguez reigns as a filmmaker at the threshold between niche and popular success. At 38, he already has two successful film trilogies under his belt, a handful of standalone features and seems poised for Tarantino-level stardom with the success of the first SIN CITY film. As if that wasn’t enough, a look at his DVDs shows that he’s making exactly the films he wants to make, with a home-grown studio and a low-budget cleverness that protects him against studio interference. If Rebel Without a Crew, proves something, it’s that it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

  • Wry Martinis, Christopher Buckley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Perennial, 1997, 294 pages, C$20.00 tpb, ISBN 0-06-097742-6

    April 2005, all told, was a pretty good month for Christopher Buckley: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, the movie based on his 1994 novel, enjoyed a wide release across North American theatres. It may not have been much of a hit, (Budget: $6.5M. Box-office results: $23M), but the associated sale of the novel must have been a nice little bonus. Buckley, of course, is well-known for being a humorist, a journalist and an editor: Those who may know him only through THANK YOU FOR SMOKING may want to have a look at Wry Martinis, his non-fiction collection, to see what else he’s been writing.

    Whimsically illustrated around a Martini theme, Wry Martinis begins with an introduction that purports to describe Buckley’s search for a good collection title, but ends up describing nearly everything in the book before smoothly moving over to the acknowledgements. Subdivided in several sections, Wry Martinis brings together a number of Buckley’s pieces published over twenty years, from the serious to the very, very funny.

    The serious pieces may surprise some: Buckley, after all, is best knows for his satirical novels. But there’s a lot of heartfelt material in Wry Martinis, and some of it is bound to trip readers who are expecting a cover-to-cover laugh riot. The serious material ranges from travel writing (“One Way To Do the Amazon”) to straight-up reportage (“I Visit the Nimitz”) to op-ed (“What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?”). Buckley is never deathly serious, of course, but some pieces do mix real-world material with a keen eye for hyperbole. “Driving Through the Apocalypse” manages to make fun of bodyguard training, while “How I went Nine Gs in a F-16” is a hilarious take-off on a day-trip most of us would pay dearly to experience. Other pieces are more somber, even reflective: “Macho is as Macho does” discusses the trappings of a manly attitude with something approaching melancholy, an interesting reflexion on some of the most testosterone-driven material elsewhere in the book.

    As a mostly reformed fan of Tom Clancy, I thought that one the highlights of the book was the “Homage to Tom Clancy” section, a series of pieces about the author. It begins innocently enough with “The Ego Has Landed”, a mostly-sympathetic piece on Clancy as a new writer in the wake of the boffo success of The Hunt For Red October, and continues in a similarly affectionate vein with “Tired Gun”, a wickedly funny take-off on Clancy’s usual writing style. But Buckely then unsheathes the knives with “Megabashing Japan”, a hilariously mean review of Clancy’s Debt of Honor that hits all of the book’s sore points. This, in turn, leads to “Fax Fire”, the only piece in the book not authored by Buckley: It’s a fluffy newspaper piece detailing the acrimonious exchange of faxes between Clancy and Buckley that followed the publication of the piece (complete with Clancy’s final apology) Taken together, those pieces illustrate Buckley’s strengths in Wry Martinis: a willingness to tip over sacred cows, a ferocious sense of observation and a sense of wit that cuts to the essential.

    As with most humour columnists, the shorter pieces take on a free-form quality that can go from fake new reports to bestseller list parodies. Fans of Buckley’s Thank You For Smoking will enjoy “How I Learned to (Almost) Love the Sin Lobbyists”, a description of the research Buckley undertook to write the book, up to and including portraits of the real-life lobbyists Buckley interviewed for background material. Finally, a number of portraits betray Buckley’s more serious writing, from memories of his mother (“Mom, Fashion Icon”) to a profile of the woman behind “Ann Landers”.

    If there’s an problem with the collection, it’s that it remains a prisoner of the context in which its individual components were written. Topical humour seldom remains relevant for longer than the current issue of the publication in which it appears, and so younger readers may need a refresher on two decade’s worth of cultural icons before making sense of some material in here. (I recommend a healthy usage of Wikipedia for the Reagan years.)

    But all in all, there is a lot to sip in Wry Martinis for both Buckley fans and newcomers. While the inclusion of more serious articles can be surprising to those who know the author solely for his humour pieces, it’s a testimony of Buckley’s writing that the serious pieces can be just as fascinating as the more overly humorous texts.

  • A Paradigm of Earth, Candas Jane Dorsey

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 366 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-87796-X

    As regular readers of these reviews already know, I’m not much for fuzzy-huggy Science Fiction that deals with grand statements on what it is to be human. I’ll leave that to others who are fascinated by the idea: they’re probably as uninterested in what does fascinate me, and that’s perfectly okay. Science Fiction is big enough to accommodate all type of readers, and the only mistake lies in criticizing what is obviously best suited for others.

    No, I didn’t expect much from Candas Jane Dorsey’s A Paradigm of Earth: Her previous Black Wine had left me shrugging, and there wasn’t anything in her latest novel’s premise to get me interested. In some way, A Paradigm of Earth is yet another variation on the old “first contact with alien serves to illuminate human nature” SF story. In this case, a dozen alien infants are left on Earth (roughly distributed around the globe) to learn everything they can about humanity. As it happens, one of them ends up in Edmonton, Alberta, where it’s assigned to a social worker named Morgan. Morgan, as it happens, is a woman with a number of unsettled issues: the recent death of both of her parents has left her without any clear goal, and even the vast house she has inherited isn’t much comfort. But when the alien decides that he’d rather stay at her place rather than at the government facilities, she realizes that she’s humanity’s representative… no matter how ill-prepared she feels for it.

    While I can respect the quality of Dorsey’s writing, she is obviously writing for a very, very different type of reader. A Paradigm of Earth is the type of quiet and contemplative story that, most days of the week, would send me running to faster-paced works. But great writers can be recognized in how they can cross boundaries and reach readers of all type, and so I felt myself sucked into A Paradigm of Earth almost despite myself, gradually wondering what would happen next to the characters.

    There is a very comforting Canadian-ness to A Paradigm of Earth, a quiet matter-of-fact quality that seems almost calculated to trump traditional genre expectations. No explosions, no “aliens are going to destroy the planet unless we show them how worthy we are” histrionics. The alien decides to live in a boarding house, and the Prime Minister thinks it’s a splendid idea; how much more Canadian could this novel be? Heck, one of the protagonist is even a bureaucrat with tremendous depth of personality. Despite the murders that pepper the narrative (!), this novel has a comfy feel: call it a “cozy first-contact” novel. Dorsey’s stripped-down style chugs forward despite some plot lulls, leaving no barrier between reader and story.

    Readers of Theodore Sturgeon’s story will feel at home with this book: Though well-labelled as Science Fiction, A Paradigm of Earth uses aliens as an excuse to explore humanity and how they react to this new situation. Love of people permeates this novel from beginning to end. But Dorsey’s slice of humanity, as is happens, is not the type of overachieving clean-cut atomic stereotypes so prevalent elsewhere in SF: They’re a diverse bunch of misfits, rebels and dissidents. Even the policemen and bureaucrats, defenders of the orthodoxy, often prove to be as unusual as their charges.

    Gender issues are raised (the alien has no specific gender, which makes an odd match given Morgan’s own preferences), although the impact of those issues remains diffuse: The quiet intensity of the novel tends to make the gender issues disappear in the background of the novel, as just another piece of the alien’s education. As a reader who’s not particularly interested in gender issues, I remain unsure how I was supposed to be affected by this material, or if I was supposed to have strong reactions to a number of scenes that, to me, just blended with the rest.

    But as I said, I’m not the kind of reader who’s supposed to be enthusiastic about this type of novel. That it worked well enough on me is enough of a compliment: Imagine what an effect if could have on you, if you think you wouldd enjoy this type of stuff!

  • The Summons, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 2002, 373 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-24107-3

    For a writer often decried as a populist hack, John Grisham sure stretches his grasp a lot wider than some critics may be willing to acknowledge. After a few debut novels so similar in tone that they made Grisham a sitcom gag, readers were delighted to find a slightly different style following The Rainmaker: Novels that were as much characters studies as social critiques, coming at the “southern legal thriller” label from very different directions. Then came even looser works such as the straight-up family drama A Painted House or the holiday comedy Surviving Christmas. The Summons is another successful entry in Grisham’s post-Rainmaker renaissance, still a southern legal thriller, but with yet another emphasis.

    It starts as law professor Ray Atlee receives a letter: His father, a well-known judge in a small rural Mississippi community, is dying and wants to see his two sons. Summoned to his childhood home, Ray makes two shocking discovery: First, that his father died before he could meet his sons a last time; second, that there are millions of dollars in cash hidden away in the house. Where does the money come from? And who else knows about it? As a comfortable academic, Ray doesn’t really need the money… but it sure would be handy. But it’s not simply a matter of picking up the money and depositing it at the nearest bank: as the threats pile up and the mystery of the money’s origin becomes more dangerous, Ray may have to do a lot of hard thinking in order to keep the money… or his life.

    But there’s more to The Summons than just a thriller about a man and three million untraceable dollars in cash. Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the novel (beyond its awesome page-turning appeal) is how it engages in a moral discussion about money and how it affects people. Ray Atlee is a decent man, but his first thought at the sight of millions of dollars is to hide and keep it all. Potentially complicating his actions are his doubts about the origins of the money: was his father part of a criminal ring? Was he bribed for a decision? Was he holding on to the money for a shadowy acquaintance? As Ray takes stock of his own life (divorced, comfortable, perhaps a bit lonely), the money -even left unspent- starts having an influence. For the reader, a lot of time is spend on the razor’s edge, wondering about Ray’s likability. Much like Scott B. Smith’s A Simple Plan (which is even acknowledged in Chapter 19), The Summons is an attempt to square off morality against or alongside money. Unlike Smith, however, Grisham isn’t so dark or so blunt to assume that money is evil: His thinking leads to a conclusion that twists without snapping believability and brings along an interesting moral reversal. Not since The Partner has Grisham played so well with expectations.

    There are other treats here and there in The Summons, of course: Ray is an amateur pilot, and so we get a glimpse of life at ten thousand feet aboveground. Ray’s brother is what could be called a professional addict, with all the consequences and detox details that this implies. The portrait of the elder Atlee’s lingering influence in a small town is a nice piece of atmosphere that probably owes much to A Painted House. A late-book visit to a multimillionaire lawyer nicknamed “The King of Torts” oozes contempt.

    As a thriller, The Summons isn’t Grisham’s best, but that’s unlikely to be much of a bother: it wouldn’t be a Grisham novel without the author’s usual terrific style. The Summons reads at two hundred pages an hour, propelled forward by an easy prose style, solid structure and a good bunch of characters.

    Still, there is a bothersome aspect to the final revelations, which satisfy on a moral standpoint but leave a lot to be desired in terms of plausibility. Worse; a number of questions about the how of the deception are casually dismissed by a reference to two hoodlums conveniently kept off-stage. After the red herrings raised earlier in the book, it all seems a bit quick, a bit pat in order to bring along the last few pages on which Grisham wanted to end. A slight problem in a book otherwise so fun to read it’s hardly worth the trouble to complain.

    What more satisfying is the constant appreciation of how Grisham is leveraging his strengths and limits into a series of highly enjoyable books. After his blockbuster success during the nineties, it’s good to see that Grisham is still stretching the envelope, still playing along with his chosen areas of expertise, still delivering good entertainment to fans and readers. The Summons may not be anything more than a good thriller, but it’s satisfying enough as it is.

  • Air Battle Force, Dale Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2003, 426 pages, C$39.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-009409-5

    Let us resolve, from the onset, that people in the military are, as a group of people, worthy of our admiration. After all, they’re doing dangerous jobs that would make most of us readers cower in helpless fear. Let us also maintain that military hardware is often a thing of beauty, marrying human ingeniousness with fearsome power. (Like power tools, except cooler). Furthermore, let us state blandly that military fiction, when properly written, can combine the best of several traditions, marrying slam-bang adventure with clever commentary on the nature of power and competition between nations.

    This being stated, let’s now turn our attention to why Dale Brown’s Air Battle Force is not just a career low for Brown (which takes some doing after stinkers like Fatal Terrain or Wings of Fire) but is also one of the most inept piece of military fiction I’ve had the misfortune to read so far.

    Most of the book’s problem stem from Brown’s now-ridiculous obsession in continuing a series that should have been put of of its misery a long time ago. Having locked himself far away in his imagined universe, Brown now finds himself unable to engage meaningfully with the issues of the day: Explicitly set in 2003, Air Battle Force declines to even recognize the events of 9/11 (save in the acknowledgements) despite mentioning here and there that the American government has spent years and millions of dollars chasing down the Taliban. Beyond the cartoonish dullness this gives to Brown’s “Air Battle Force” military unit, this refusal to acknowledge contemporary geopolitics betrays an author that may be unable to engage with current reality.

    His skills as a storyteller certainly aren’t improving. While he doesn’t repeat some of Wing of Fire‘s stupidest moments (no nine-year-old PhD. in Air Battle Force), Brown here struggles to even define an exciting story. In boldly examining the US Air Force’s future in unmanned vehicles, Brown has also taken his heroes out of the action. Protagonist Patrick MacLanahan only get in danger once in the prologue, and that’s following Yet Another Dumb Command Move. Otherwise, Brown’s series is becoming a series of fancy technological demonstrations in which the back-room boys look on as their unmanned weapons remotely kick whatever anti-American ass there is to kick.

    This doesn’t help Air Battle Force‘s pacing one tiny bit. For a 426-page novel, not a lot happens: Despite the interesting rumblings of an upcoming presidential campaign between Thorn and Martindale, Brown loses himself (and his readers) in dull back-water geopolitics that can be skipped one chapter at a time. Brown has never been an elegant stylist, but even his low standards are slipping with passages in which character viewpoints switch from one paragraph to the next. Brown has struggled with plot even since Storming Heaven, but Air Battle Force marks an even bigger failure than usual. By the end of the novel, all that remains is the impression of having read an extended prologue to the next novel. Brown shows no sign of actually being willing (let alone able) to fix what’s wrong with his fiction. Even by the undemanding standards of military fiction readers, Brown has reached the bottom of the barrel and seems intent of clawing his way even further down. His characters are as bland as ever and he can’t even write a decent action scene with whatever new toys he has. Add that to his inability to adapt his fiction to the new shape of the real world and one question remains: Why would anyone want to read anything by Dale Brown ever again?

    I have long considered Brown’s post-Hammerheads output as being inferior to what he’s capable of writing (which truly dates us), but now has come the time to consider (reluctantly) that this may be as good as it gets; that Brown will never again be able to write the kind of stuff he did so well earlier in his career. It speaks volume that in sinking lower and lower, Brown has never acquired the kind of inspiring right-wing craziness that now makes Clancy so much fun to read: He has simply become a rambling, boring writer coasting on the laurels of better books long past gone (and possibly a percentage of Dan Brown’s new fans.) I’ve got two more books by Brown on my shelf, bought well before he went in his current death spiral: I can’t wait until I’m done with them.

  • The Snow, Adam Roberts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2004, 297 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07181-8

    Canadians enjoy a worldwide reputation as easygoing, unflappable, even dull people. It’s long been a national contention that our long winter have something to do with this placid nature. Good government and central heating really do sound like excellent ideas in a country that spends at least four months per year in freezing temperatures. But don’t think we can’t be scared out of our wits. If you want to give nightmares to a Canadian, just start talking about a winter that never ends.

    That’s exactly how The Snow begins. Snow starts falling on September 6th… and never stops. Our narrator for most of the novel, Tira Bojani Sahai, is a young English woman of Indian descent that manages to survive the snowfall as London gets buried under a blanket of snow of glacial thickness. Not that the rest of the world has done much better, she finds out once she’s rescued after this harrowing first section: As far as anyone knows, the entire globe is now encased in an icy shell. And yet humanity endures. But to what purpose?

    As the stuff nightmares are made of, The Snow is top-notch. Straight in the conceptual footsteps of J.G. Ballard’s catastrophe novels, Adam Roberts’ fifth novel starts off by killing billions of people. Promising start, delivered with matter-of-fact prose that only makes the horror more obvious. But those of you expecting the hard-SF version of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW may be disappointed: In Roberts’ typical fashion, this is a novel about precariousness, weird environments, unreliable narrators, ludicrous plot twists and unsatisfying developments. As with the author’s previous novels, it’s both lovely and frustrating in equal fashion, praiseworthy and damnable for never doing the expected thing. One thing is for sure: this is not a boring book.

    The narrator alone is a piece of work: While it’s easy to feel a lot of initial empathy for Tira as she struggles through a situation that would kill most of us, latter developments refine her personality in increasingly complex fashion. We come to doubt her narrative, a doubt that is rewarded late in the novel as her unreliability is exposed in a short heartbreaking conversation. As far as characters are concerned, Tira is one of Roberts’ most achieved creation.

    A shame that one can’t be so complimentary about the story that surrounds her. The Snow may be a clever metaphor for many different things, and that’s part of the problem: Readers flail around like Canadians without snowshoes, sucked into a bottomless pile of fluffy stuff.

    Reigning in my runaway metaphors, it suffices to say that The Snow goes nowhere for a while, spends some time describing yet another repressive regime, spends more time doing nothing, backtrack to a current-day narrative (a first for a Roberts novel) then goes on a wild tangent in which the real story behind the real story of the Snow is exposed. The end takes a loony turn that is as endearing (in a “Whee!” fashion) as it seems clobbered out of thin air. Lengthy delirious passages leading to the conclusion don’t do much to prepare anyone for the last few twists.

    By this point, you can figure out that The Snow leaves a scattered impression. Parts of the novel are brilliant, and other parts feel like filler. (A digression about skin colour never quites gels, even as an instance of the narrator’s unreliability) As with most other Roberts novels, there is a hidden narrator between the text and the reader: Here, an unseen censor peppers the text with [Blank] character names and a few [expletive deleted], warning the reader of dire consequences if those top-secret pieces are read by unauthorized personnel. Interesting, although the tell-all epilogue takes away part of the fun.

    In some ways, The Snow is the best thing that Adam Robert has done. The initially endearing narrator, the suffocating first fifty pages, the layering of an unseen layer of interpretation are all top-notch. Heck, even some of the disappointing elements are pure genius. But the final result lacks cohesion even as the novel works overtime to drive readers away. While it’s easy to appreciate Roberts’ constant refusal to do the easy thing, how hard would it be, once in a while, to throw a bone to his audience? Could that explain why, even after a string of disappointing novels, I keep coming back to his stuff in the hope that this, finally, will be his novel that truly satisfies all expectations?

  • Counting Heads, David Marusek

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2005, 336 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-31267-0

    2005 has been an embarrassingly good year for high-end science-fiction: Stross’ Accelerando, Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes… Gee! And now, like a cherry on top of an excessively rich sundae, here’s Counting Heads, David Marusek’s long-awaited first novel. While it doesn’t completely live up to its advance expectations, Marusek’s novel is a head-spinner of the first degree, a vision of the future with three times the idea density of other solid SF works. Despite a number of misfires that would doom a lesser novel, it’s also a lot of fun.

    Counting Heads spins rather directly from Marusek’s excellent 1995 novella “We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy.” Slightly revised and included as the first part of the novel, the original story tells of one Samson Harger and his union with an unbelievably powerful woman named Eleanor K. Starke. Ten years after publication, the novella doesn’t seem so fresh (signs of evolving genre expectations, now that people like Charles Stross are writing entire novels in that exuberant style), but it’s still a delight to read. I compared the revised version with the original and the changes, at one searing exception, seem limited to a stream of line-editing corrections that neither add nor subtract much from the 1995 version.

    The real plot of Counting Heads begins nearly thirty years later, as a assassination plot kills off Eleanor and severely wounds her daughter Ellen. In a deliciously intense scene, Ellen’s skull is preserved in its own crash-proof helmet, setting in motion the rest of novel: In a few words, Counting Heads is a treasure hunt in which the prize is Ellen’s cryogenically preserved head.

    But the book can’t be reduced to a few words, because Counting Heads quickly takes on the quality of an amusement park ride. In a world where nanotechnology is a fact of life, life isn’t as easy as you’d expect. Unemployment is prevalent, money is hard to come by, and being poor in a society of abundance can be even more maddening than living in a backward society. (Plus, there are good chances that you’re genetically identical to thousands of other clones bred for personality quirks) The threat of rogue nano-bugs (“blooms”) makes today’s fears about terrorism seem laughable, leading straight to the book’s humourless “HomCom” police forces. Eleanor Starke’s assassination turns out to be the opening salvo of a “correction” among the affluent populations of the novel, with consequences that are still very much in play by the end of the novel.

    Because, oh yeah, Counting Heads is the first volume in a series, even through you’ll find no hints of this anywhere in the book. While the story reaches a resting point of sorts, most overarching threads are left dangling, with the identity of Starke’s enemy still a point of contention by the last page. (Careful readers will have a rough idea of who’s to blame, but there are no definitive answers here.)

    This unfinished quality severely harms the novel’s impact. For all of its clever details, cool ideas and amusing sight-seeing, Counting Heads leaves the impression of an unfinished work. The high-flying virtuosity of Marusek’s speculation carries along its own dangerous possibility: that it may fail in the next instalment, that the ride may not lead anywhere. As it stands Counting Heads‘s last fifty pages betray a lot of movement and not much development: any further evaluation will have to wait until the conclusion, whether it comes in the second volume or much later.

    This makes me hesitant to recommend Counting Heads as a standalone unit. I certainly can’t get enough of that type of Science Fiction, but I freely acknowledge that cool ideas can often overshadow more significant problems in my appreciation of any work of fiction. I’m not sure what less dedicated readers may think of the novel: This is a dense piece of work both conceptually and visually (to save money, the designers crammed an extra 20% of text on every single one of the book’s 336 pages). My unconditional love for the result is, well, unconditional: not everyone will be so taken with the result.

    What is certain, however, is that I’ll be one of the first in line to buy the sequel. Counting Heads may only leave half an impression, but it’s one heck of an impression.

  • Word of Honor, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1985, 738 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-30158-2

    Every book review presents its own special challenge, but taking on Nelson DeMille’s Word of Honor presents challenge of its own. Simply put, this is a book that shouldn’t work. Describing it will send you in a coma and make you wonder how it can possibly be a pleasant reading experience. And yet it is. And yet it works.

    For fans of DeMille’s books, this won’t be much of a surprise: While most of his books could be cut by half without much sacrifice, DeMille seldom deliver anything less than excellent novels. Despite the lengths, the indulgences and the sometimes tepid pacing, DeMille means entertainment. Word of Honor may be a bit less interesting than his other books, but it’s still crackerjack good stuff.

    Writers are often advised to “start the story at the beginning, but no earlier” and the first page of Word of Honor is a textbook example of that axiom as Manhattan middle-manager Ben Tyson sees a fellow commuter reading a nonfiction book about Vietnam. Upon verification, Tyson is in the book, highlighted as a commanding officer who allowed a wartime atrocity.

    And so it begins. The book outrages a segment of the American population and forces the US military brass to do something: before long, Tyson finds himself recalled to duty and in serious danger of being court-martialed. The obvious question, of course, is just what happened back there and then: what is the truth behind those so-called atrocities? Could there be some more to the story than wholesale massacre?

    Of course there is. This is a DeMille novel, after all, and anyone who’s read works such as The General’s Daughter knows that the author can spin quite a yarn from the most ordinary beginnings.

    But frankly, Word of Honor is more about soul-searching than plot. DeMille has been to Vietnam and if his latter Up Country remains a classic exploration of the conflict’s lasting legacy, Word of Honor can be seen as the first draft of his feelings about the war. War makes losers of everyone, seems to be saying DeMille, and there are no statue of limitations on atrocities. Ben Tyson may have become a well-adjusted, moderately successful all-American protagonist after Vietnam, but Word of Honor is the story of consequences for what he’s done. The perfunctory plot is just an excuse to think about what happened and continues to happen.

    Doesn’t sound too riveting, right? Can you imagine more than seven hundred pages of that stuff? Contrarily to other DeMille novel, there aren’t too many crazy twists in here: The story progresses linearly to its conclusion, with the expected revelation late in the book and the protagonist’s just punishment. Even The Explanation, when it comes, seems underwhelming.

    And yet Word of Honor is never boring. DeMille’s natural storytelling abilities are such that every page is a delight, that every character is worth understanding. Tyson may be a bit rough around the edges (the sarcasm so prevalent in DeMille protagonists seems muted here, often taking the form of anger rather than flippancy), but he’s worth caring about throughout his entire odyssey. As a Vietnam novel, it’s tremendously effective.

    This 1985 book has aged a lot, but not in the way you may think. In these brave early days of the twenty-first century, it’s impossible to read without making parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. As with Up Country, reading Word of Honor brings along the certitude that the American invasion of Iraq is another national traume in full bloom: We know that there will be further stories of atrocities in the years to come. We know that in some ways, many people have learned nothing from Vietnam. Word of Honor has not aged in twenty years. If anything, it has become even more current.

    So don’t let the lack of plot of the book discourage you. Just sink into the novel’s easy narration and enjoy, if that’s truly the appropriate feeling, DeMille’s sure-handed storytelling. It’s an unconventional novel, but one that delivers solid satisfaction. It shouldn’t work, but it does so magnificently.