Book Review

  • The Charm School, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1988, 630 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-35320-5

    As we uncertainly make our way through this fifth year of the current self-proclaimed “war on terrorism”, it’s good to remember that it wasn’t always so. That barely twenty years ago, everyone was looking anxiously at the Soviet Union as the potential source of nuclear Armageddon. Now, of course, we know better: The Soviet bear turned out to be a paper tiger, a third-world country with a nuclear arsenal and not much else.

    But as of 1988, paranoia and cold war thrillers were still hot viable commodities. The Charm School, an espionage thriller set deep behind Russian borders, may seem a charming antiquity today —but it must first be viewed through its historical context before being criticized as a relic of another era.

    It begins with an American student, as he makes his way through Russia on his own set of wheels. A chance encounter allows him to see something he shouldn’t know about, rolling the plot into motion. Before long, intelligence officers inside the American embassy are alerted to the horrible secret, and plunge neck-deep in a vast conspiracy. DeMille being DeMille (see Up Country), he can’t resist the temptation of using his novel as an excuse to travel and probe the depths of late-Cold War Russia.

    The Charm School has both its good and less-good aspects, but one of the highlights of the book -indeed, one that has survived intact through what we now know of the defunct Soviet Union- is to be found in its depiction of the USSR as a joyless place barely subsisting above poverty levels. Through its investigating protagonists, DeMille takes us deep in Russia, from the tourist spots of Moscow (which, I gather, DeMille visited) to the rural countryside. DeMille nails down two important aspects of the experience; first, the sheer backward nature of a place where electricity is still a tenuous privilege; second, the domination of a totalitarian regime where anything can happen to anyone on a whim from the upper hierarchy. Nearly twenty years later, The Charm School is a time capsule dedicated to a defeated enemy: Let’s just hope that things are better over there today.

    The not-so-good parts of the novel come when the Vast Conspiracy is exposed, the one that directly threatens America’s very own social fabric. Knowing what we know about the relative strengths of both societies, especially given the problems described by DeMille elsewhere in the novel, it seems unlikely that the Charm School could have had even a minimal impact on America. (Heck, some will say that home-grown Americans are far more likely to behave stupidly on their own than due to a Vast Conspiracy. Indeed, it remains to be seen if a Soviet-penetrated US would end up more like Canada than Russia.)

    But it’s a constant strength of DeMille’s writing skill that we’re more than able to overlook this dated piece of hysteria. (If there’s something to overlook, naturally; readers with a good knowledge of Cold War clichés and rumors will just read the back cover blurb, guess the conspiracy, raise their shoulders and read on anyway.) The first half of the book is a quick and impeccable espionage thriller full of trade-craft details and slices of life in an embassy. Protagonist Sam Hollis is a tough-guy that clearly represents the early prototype for such latter-day DeMille heroes as Plum Island‘s John Corey or The General’s Daughter Paul Brenner, minus the polished sarcasm. The relationship he has with Lisa Rhodes is also emblematic of DeMille’s male/female character dynamics, though Up Country keeps coming back to mind thanks to the “travelogue in a totalitarian regime” aspect. (This being said, I keep going back up DeMille’s early bibliography and finding those elements over and over again. Don’t be surprised if an upcoming review ends up saying something about earlier characters being early drafts for Sam Hollis.)

    If the novel suffers from a third-quarter slowdown (in which description takes the place of action), DeMille’s terrific prose is delicious enough to keep us reading without pause. Fans of the author already know all about the addictive nature of his plotting: The Charm School is no exception to the rule. It helps that the ending is both suspenseful and mournful, allowing both personal triumph and political hard edges. As a novel, The Charm School has aged relatively well, especially when compared to other similar novels of the era: It counterbalances its wilder moments with enough careful accuracy to make the final result seem worthwhile. Even today, it remains an essential piece of DeMille’s work.

  • Warrior Class, Dale Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 2001, 473 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-18446-3

    As long as Dale Brown will continue to write more novels in his increasingly unworkable series, his fiction will continue to suffer. Warrior Class, like Brown’s last few books, is no exception to this trend: at best, it’s a grab-bag of ideas made weaker by the necessities of serial fiction. At worst, it showcases why Brown has lost the place he enjoyed at the top of the techno-thriller writers’ pantheon.

    Plot-wise, it’s another re-thread of the usual: Once more in this comfortably post-Cold War Browniverse, US interests and world peace are indissociably threatened when a Russian gangster seizes an advanced warplane to ensure his own plans for private economic supremacy. It’s up to Patrick McLanahan, again, to fight the good fight using his high-tech toys and a complete disregard for the protocols of military engagement.

    But in what feels like a breath of fresh air, there are consequences to this type of cow-boy mentality. As the novel slowly opens, we’re introduced to a new US President: Thomas Nathaniel Thorn is Kevin Martindale’s successor and as befits his name, he proves to be quite a thorn in the heel of the US military. A third-party governor from eeevil liberal Vermont, Thorn is not much for official ceremonies but truly enjoys Transcendental Meditation. What more, he’s ready to sharply reduce the size of the armed forces and reveal confidential information to the public. Surprisingly enough, Brown resist the temptation to paint him as a foolish villain (though this may come later in the series).

    Meanwhile, Patrick McLanahan is sitting pretty in Nevada as the operational chief of the top-secret high-tech “Dreamland” facility. When tensions erupt in Eastern Europe, he’s fast up on a plane trying to do what he does best: breaking direct orders. When things turn sour, only a presidential gambit saves him from certain death. Unsurprisingly, he finds himself nudged toward the civilian life as soon as he lands. This, of course, just won’t do…

    From the above, you may suppose that this is a significant entry in the McLanahan saga, and you would be half-right: On some aspects, Warrior Class shows some promise and excitement. McLanahan has often defied orders without consequences, so it’s only too fitting to see him suffer from the fallout once in a while. His trajectory out of active service surely won’t be allowed to stand for more than a volume or two , but it’s a development that could be interesting. (Indeed, by the end of the novel it’s only too obvious that Brown is indulging into one of the favorite fantasies of many right-wing writers: A private armed force that can pretty much kill whoever it wants without any kind of paperwork.)

    But there are problems, and many of these spring from the uneasy interaction between reality and Brown’s universe. It’s bad enough that an author’s note at the beginning of the book has to explain what fictional constraints were introduced in previous books, only to be followed with three pages of “real-world news excerpts”. A significant problem is, of course, that Brown gets to keep what he likes and ditch what’s inconvenient; there’s a mention of what happened in Day of the Cheetah even despite the fact that Brown’s 1988 novel was clearly a story that took place in a world where the USSR made it intact to 1997!

    But even overlooking the problems in trying to stick to a series well beyond its best-by date, Warrior Class has problems of its own. As with most of the latest Brown novels, it spends too much time with “the enemy” even as the emotional strength of the novel is with the American characters: Little of what’s discussed by the antagonist is relevant to the rest of the novel. McLanahan himself doesn’t make an appearance in the first fifth of the novel, a delay that highlights the narrative’s padded nature more than anything else. A number of subplots go nowhere and do nothing, bringing along a few supporting characters: You really have to work hard at extracting the good from the bad in this bloated excuse for a military novel.

    It doesn’t get any better later on, as fancy gadgets work alongside realistic military hardware. Brown has never been at his best portraying realism: Chains of Command tried to stick as closely as possible to reality, and it was a singularly dull novel. On the other hand, Brown’s earlier deftness with fancy hardware has lately metastasized into an unwieldy habit of reusing the same gadgets over and over again. Here, the silly “Tin Man” suits make a return appearance and the result is more ridiculous than exciting.

    As callous at it may sound, Brown’s next, Wings of Fire, should be worth a read if only to find out how he’ll handle 9/11’s major reality reset. How will he square Bush, al Quaeda and the rest with increasingly fanciful tales of big bombers and super-powered suits? Of course, he could choose to ignore it completely and go even deeper in his dead-end universe… which wouldn’t be surprising.

  • Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2005, 242 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-073132-X

    As a reviewer, part of my mission is to single out worthy books that deserve your attention. There’s nothing better in this hobby than to discover an unjustly forgotten work and sing its praises in the hope to convince even just another reader to seek it out.

    In the case of Freakonomics, though, it’s far too late to be celebrating anything: Published in early 2005, this book of practical sociology quickly became one of the best-selling books of the year, topping the charts even as I write this, even after finding a 24th hardcover printing copy at the local remainder bookstore. Critics ranted and raved, blogs embraced and dissected, readers bought and enjoyed: At this point, there doesn’t seem anything left to proclaim about Freakonomics, the book of choice for everyone who was looking for a brainy-but-not-too-much gift for Christmas 2005.

    So much for trying to find a hidden gem. But what about celebrated gems? Knowing its massive runaway success, it’s difficult to read Freakonomics, without trying to identify what made the book such a hit. There’s the catchy title, there’s attractive green-apple-and-orange cover, there’s the short page count, there’s the enticing cover blurb by global best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell.

    But there’s more. As the subtitle suggests, Freakonomics describes how “a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.” The premise is simple: Apply the dismal science of economics to study how people behave. While sociologists have been doing this kind of social science thinking for a long time, Steven D. Levitt has the added distinction of being a certified economist. Is it possible to suppose that Americans, fascinated by the comforting certitude of numbers, would flock to a kinda-scientist if he promised to make sense of the world?

    Maybe. But that kind of description severely belittles the sheer fun and impact of Freakonomics. The book doesn’t lose any time in announcing its colors. In the introduction alone, we’re told that legalized abortion lowers the crime rate; that real-estate agents demonstrably shirk their clients; that money doesn’t buy elections. Then Levitt promises to overturn conventional wisdom through hard numbers. In short, Levitt promises a better understanding of the world. Think of is as unlocking the inner working of society’s engines. Who could resist such a call? It’s like the intellectual appeal of The Da Vinci Code… for real.

    Culled from Levit’s academic work (with, presumably, prosaic glue by Dubner), Freakonomics upsets a few bandwagons, teases fascinating results out of spreadsheets and does a fine job at applying the analytical tools of economics to real-life conclusions. The result is closer to sociology than economics, but who cares when you’re having so much fun?

    And if Freakonomics has one particular distinction, it’s the sheer reading pleasure with which readers will tear through it. Dubner’s style is crystal-clear and Levitt’s conclusions are fascinating: It doesn’t take much more to blaze through this book without slowing down. The only thing to stop anyone, in fact, may be the desire to slow down and think about what’s just been written.

    Because there is plenty of food for thought here. Among the book’s controversial assertions is the elegant deduction that the current slide in crime rate is partially due to legalized abortion: Disadvantaged people who would have committed crime starting from the early nineties were simply never born thanks to 1973’s Roe-vs-Wade decision. While the proof of such an argument is left to people curious enough to track down the references (Freakonomics is exquisitely well annotated), it’s certainly a decent conversation item at your next cocktail party. This shock-conclusion also announces Levitt’s twin interest in both parenting and crime. Levitt has spent a lot of time thinking about both, and Freakonomics spends most of its length studying the interactions between incentives, crime and parenting, teasing out conclusions that you will either find self-obvious or provocative.

    Levitt concludes, for instance that pools are far more dangerous for children than keeping a gun at home. Similarly jolting conclusions are to be found throughout the book, whether it’s the revelation that teachers cheat, that seven million American “children” disappeared on April 15, 1987 and, perhaps more amusingly, that parenting doesn’t matter as much as you’d think in raising a child.

    (I might as well explain that last one rather than tease you about it: Levitt, looking at the data, figures that who parent are is more important than the explicit steps they take in order to be good parents. Simply put, well-adjusted individuals are, almost by definition, more likely to be great parents than problem personalities trying to compensate through fancy educational programs and techniques. Good parents will have books in the house, for themselves, before the baby is born: they don’t rush out and buy a library for the kid in the hope that proximity to books will somehow increase their child’s IQ. It’s cause-and-effect all the way, baby.)

    Freakonomics rates highly on the idea-per-page scale, with at least one provocative fact or one inspiring conclusion every few pages. Beyond just being good conversation fodder, this is a good that does present some sensible ideas about today’s society.

    There’s a flip side to the book’s razzle-dazzle, though: For one thing, it’s very short at less than 250 loosely-packed pages. Even though the book contains both a great “Notes” section and a complete index, it often feels like an advertisement for more serious research. Readers with a greater craving for details, methodology and “proofs” will have to go digging in academia to be satisfied. There are also times where the authors make sweeping assertions and fail to connect them satisfactorily to their specific proof, leading me to think that any of the book’s fantabulous theories should be taken with a grain of salt. Finally, I wasn’t taken by the quotation of Dubner’s New York Times article about Levitt here and there between chapters: Why not reprint the article as an introduction and let the rest of the book expand on it?

    But those disappointments seem minor compared to the intellectual charge that Freakonomics contains. Even hyped as it is, it’s well worth a read: Like most ideas-driven work, Levitt’s theories expand your mind in strange and pleasant directions. The last few years have seen a rise in this type of “let’s rethink the world” non-fiction (what with authors such as Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Friedman and others) and the result is a big cauldron of new ideas, counterintuitive theories and fresh approaches. Why not jump in and and see that’s brewing?

  • Persuader, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 2003, 465 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-24100-6

    I like to think of myself as well-read in the modern thriller genre, but now and again I get a reminder that I still have a few blank spots in my evaluation of the field. Lee Child was one of those regrettable oversights: I had managed to avoid any of his nine novels so far. With Persuader, the seventh book of his “Jack Reacher” series, I finally correct the error.

    Jumping in the middle of a series is supposed to be a difficult thing, but there’s no such trouble with Persuader, as the plot is quickly set in motion with a minimum of back-story fuss. Narrator Jack Reacher, we are quick to understand, is a man without a fixed address, a capable operative -last formally employed as a military policeman- with a tendency to take the law in his own hands. In Persuader, he’s called to action to protect a young man from a kidnapping attempt… or does he? The deliciously untruthful first chapter sets the tone with a sharp action scene and a frenetic escape sequence with a twist.

    If you like thrillers, Persuader quickly becomes a compelling read full of developments, twists, counter-twists, shocks and suspense. Reacher, as a narrator, is the prototypical strong silent type, an attitude that sometimes clashes with the demands of storytelling. Still, we get a strong impression of a no-nonsense guy with a frightful amount of experience. The prose can be overly descriptive at times, but the overall impression is of a lean thrill ride with a sufficient amount of technical details to make it completely convincing. After reading the book, I was half-convinced that Child must have been a military operative himself, but from interviews I gather that’s he’s “just” unusually skilled as a researcher. Among other crunchy details, Persuader digresses on the advantages and disadvantages of Uzis, how to smuggle things past a metal detector and the way to beat Russian Roulette. (Kids, don’t try it at home. Or anywhere else.)

    Persuader attains a comfortable balance between the thriller conventions and the need to be original. Even as we get the usual twists and double-crosses, Child often throws in a interesting sequence or two with a flair for the dramatic. Reacher is not someone who dawdles a lot on his convictions, and so the novel can ofter veer suddenly into hard-edged violence, which is always a good way to keep things interesting. But beyond surprise, Child also knows to to create suspense efficiently: One of the book’s standout sequence occurs late in the novel as Reacher knows that his cover is about to be blown by two escapees. What he does to stop them is suitably inventive and dangerous.

    But as satisfying as it is, this is hardly a perfect novel. Perhaps the single sustained low-point of Persuader are the running flashbacks: While Reacher’s motivations in this book are more than partly personal, I’m not sure that we needed to read the entire subplot explaining his present-day attitude, especially since we already know where Reacher ends up. As a newcomer to the series, I can’t say whether this look back at Reacher’s career introduces incoherences with his story line up to now, but I suspect that Child may be running into the typical problems of a series writer trying to stuff too many significant episode in a character’s pre-series history.

    On the other hand, Persuader makes very few references to Reacher’s previous adventures, which may or may not be a good thing: newer readers such as myself can enter the series without too much trouble, while seasoned fans may miss the development of the characters and the consequences of his previous actions. I keep writing that series fiction is double-edged sword, but this is one of the few times I find myself on the “neophyte” side of the equation rather than in the “established fan” category.

    This won’t remain the case much longer, of course: While I’m stopping short of rating Persuader as a solid formula thriller, it does show that Child is an author worth investigating further. Don’t be surprised if reviews of other books in the series start appearing here soon, as I pick them up in used book sales and remaindered sections. There may not be anything completely fresh in the Jack Reacher books, but well-handled thrillers are always a joy to read.

  • Be Mine, Rick Mofina

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pinnacle, 2004, 344 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7860-1526-8

    I’ve been following the career of local Ottawa-based mystery writer Rick Mofina with some interest, even despite my occasional reservations about the way he re-uses and overuses elements of his continuing series. As I mentioned in my review of his previous novel No Way Back, protagonist Tom Ridge has had members of his family kidnapped or threatened roughly once per book so far, and it was a fair question to ask whether Mofina could free himself from one of the cheapest thrills in the genre.

    If nothing else, Be Mine shows that Mofina is capable of playing creatively in his own sandbox. While firmly set in the established universe of Mofina’s series, Be Mine has the good sense to focus on other things: The result is, despite a number of mis-steps, closer to what feels like a reasonable thriller as much as it’s a murder mystery.

    While series protagonists Tom Reed (journalist) and Walt Sydowski (policeman) are in no immediate danger this time around, one can’t say the same about Tom’s colleague Molly Wilson. Molly, a supporting series character here getting a starring turn, is devastated when she learns that her cop boyfriend has been found dead, possibly murdered. Could this possibly be the work of a desperate stalker trying to kill any possible competition for her affection?

    Of course it is. The only questions worth asking in this type of thriller are Who? and How long before he strikes again?

    Quickly, efficiently, Mofina cranks up the tension. His real-life experience in newsrooms serves him well when comes the time to show how the media reacts to a crisis, especially when one of their own is concerned. As with the series’ previous novels, editorial conflicts, procedural details and deadline imperatives all add to the verisimilitude of the book and give a different spin to the usual police thriller. Tom Reed is once more on the case, and everyone will be overjoyed to learn that neither he or his family even come close to being kidnapped during the course of this adventure.

    The prose is brisk and transparent, delivering the kind of efficient reading experience that Mofina fans have come to expect from the author. This is a classic paperback thriller, fit to entertain on the bus and be read in not much more than an afternoon.

    Which isn’t to say that the book doesn’t have its occasional weaknesses. The identity of the killer (after multiple red herrings and a narration that pretty much lies to us), is a real let-down, completely ludicrous yet easily deducible by experienced genre readers. (For the second time this month, I found myself muttering “Don’t do that, don’t go there, don’t make this guy the real killer” as I was nearing the end of a book.) It’s fortunate that there’s more to mysteries than a simple revelation of the killer’s identity, because that “No! It’s him!” shtick is getting seriously old. (What happened to real procedurals? Eh, don’t answer that.)

    Among other minor let-downs, I note a weak resolution to this book’s bit of newsroom infighting, almost as if Mofina was reaching the degree of diminishing returns with his series of Bad Editors. Then there’s the book’s last-minute slide from murder mystery to action thriller, in an explosive finale that feels disconnected from the rest of the novel. Maybe it’s time for Mofina to commit himself to a full-fledged action thriller from start to finish?

    But all in all, it’s hard to be disappointed: After five books, Mofina fans know what they’re going to get with every book. While annoying, Be Mine is generally as enjoyable as Mofina’s previous novels and avoids many of the pitfalls that plagued his last few books. While I remain convinced that the Reed/Skydowski protagonists are played out as dramatic leads, Be Mine is fair in how it uses their particular skills in service of someone else’s story. I remain hopeful that Mofina will next tackle a different set of characters (Indeed, The Dying Hour seems to feature new protagonists) and maybe step up the ambition of his projects, but Be Mine is a solid entry that should satisfy his fans.

  • Woken Furies, Richard Morgan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2005, 436 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07326-8

    I’d been waiting a while for Richard Morgan’s follow-up to Broken Angels in the “Takeshi Kovacs” SF/thriller series. After the unsubtle but strangely compelling singleton Market Forces, where would Morgan take his tough-guy hero?

    Back home, of course. As Woken Furies open, Kovacs is back on his native Harlan’s World, trying to stay alive as he pursues his own little vendetta. Scarcely anything is left of the Envoy he once was, or the widely-respected operative he then became: Reduced to taking up arms with a mercenary unit, Kovacs looks as if he has nowhere lower to go. But just wait, for famous revolutionary Quellcrist Falconer just may be back from the dead… and few on Harlan’s World are ready for another uprising.

    An amusing feature of the Kovacs series so far has been seeing how Morgan buried hints about his upcoming books in the previous ones. Altered Carbon mentioned Martians, which were covered in Broken Angels, which spent some time discussing Quellist philosophy, which is studied in Woken Furies. Also worth mentioning is how the flavor of each entry differs slightly: the first was a hardboiled mystery; the second was closer to military science-fiction; the third is more akin to a straight-up thriller.

    Unfortunately, those are just about the most interesting things in the book. After three vivid novels, Morgan here displays a creative stall: Kovacs is too familiar to be interesting, his universe now seems too well-worn to be surprising and the quality of the novel’s individual scenes never reaches the level of his first three books. Wasted elements abound, perhaps showing a lack of interest in pursuing the story to its logical end.

    There is a tricky equilibrium between being “intimate” and being “dull”. While no one will deny that this is Takeshi Kovacs’ most personal story so far, it’s a matter of preference to say that Woken Furies is the series’ most boring entry so far. Kovacs may be more involved in this story than in any of the previous ones, but it’s difficult to care. Indeed, it seems as if we learn even less about him than in either of the previous two books. His motivations become increasingly implausible as he is drawn into another uprising. The sad truth may be that there isn’t much left to learn about Kovacs.

    But worse is the dawning realization that the same may be true about his universe. The joyously fresh “sleeving” tricks used to such great effect in the the previous Kovacs book here seem ordinary and expected. While Altered Carbon and Broken Angels each had a handful of dynamite set-pieces, Woken Furies is far less distinctive, fading in memory almost as soon as it’s completed. There is as much sex and violence here than elsewhere in Morgan’s oeuvre, but even it seems forced and featureless.

    This lack of distinction further contributes to the sense of aimlessness while reading the book. At a dense 436 pages, Woken Furies simply doesn’t deserve to be that long. It takes forever for the ghost of Quellcrist Falconer to emerge from the morass, and when it does, the novel scarcely focuses on that aspect. It says much about the book that I’ve managed to come this far in the review without mentioning the sub-plot in which Kovacs is being hunted down by a younger version of himself. Unfortunately, the encounters between the two don’t seem all that worth a mention. Oh well.

    But be careful: don’t jump ahead of me and presume that this is a bad novel. For all of my ambivalence regarding its length and impact, Woken Furies is still better than the majority of the books I’ll read this year. There’s plenty of political material, for instance, with assorted fundamentalist-bashing. (Or, in Kovacs’ case, rather more than just a bashing). There are musings on the nature of revolutions and popular movements. There’s action, sex and violence, as expected as they may seem from a Morgan novel. There’s an interesting development to the revolutionary ideal (when people essentially live forever, it become reasonable to say “if all else fails, enjoy life and wait until the time is right”). If that had been a first novel by an unknown author, chances are that I would have flagged the author as someone to watch.

    But this is Richard Morgan we’re talking about. One of the brightest young firebrands of British SF. Despite the body count and the established series, Woken Furies is dull, and that activates a warning signal regarding Morgan’s next few novels. I really do hope that Black Man is a step in the right direction; at the very least, it appears to be disconnected to the Kovacs universe, and at this point, that can only be a good thing.

  • 1st to Die, James Patterson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 2001, 462 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-61003-8

    If I had a subtitle to this review, it would be something like “A Twist Too Far”: James Patterson is a professional thriller writer, but with 1st to Die, it looks as if he got caught in the who-blinks-first game of twisty chicken, where authors always try to top themselves in shocking the readers out of their socks with unpredictable endings in which everything we know is wrong. With credibility-shattering circumstances.

    Here’s a hint, thriller authors: It ain’t the twists, but what leads to them. There’s a reason why procedural thrillers are good fun to read: Everything is on the table and if the writing is good enough, there isn’t any need to twist the story. Because the most twists you try to put in a novel, the more you run the risk of wringing the story dry. And with that type of stuff comes the annoyed reactions of readers about a novel which doesn’t make sense.

    First in a series titled “The Women’s Murder Club”, 1st to Die (Annoying title, grrr) is the story of a serial killer going after newlywed couples. As the overbearing prologue suggests, the officer on the case is about to drop straight through an abyss of madness trying to catch the killer. The rest is fairly standard thriller territory, what with a clever killer, an overwhelmed protagonist, twists and turns and alibis and fake-outs. We get first-person chapters told by the protagonist and third-person chapters from the misleading perspective of the killer.

    But as the first novel in a series, it is also an origin story. Here, Inspector Linsday Boxer spends a bit of time making friends from different professions (journalist, lawyer and doctor; a handy bunch of people to keep around) and bringing them around a table to think about her newest case. Neat idea, which will probably pay off in a later novel, but not here: 1st to Die is first a foremost a novel about Lindsay Boxer, and she’s the one who does most of the work. The Club is really just a sideshow, a set-up for the series’ main premise.

    While I’ve seen a number of films based on Patterson’s books, it improbably seems as if this is my first novel of his. I suppose that at this point, my first question is to ask whether Patterson always thinks he can get away with such obvious plot cheats. At one point, for instance, a prisoner escapes thanks to… an earthquake, which somehow snaps open his prison transport van. Hmmm. Elsewhere in the novel, the first big twist is fine (it’s well-announced, and somewhat reasonnable), but the last-chapter twist (which is predictable, but more in a “no, don’t do that Patterson, nooo” sense) is just one big piece of tripe that actually diminishes the novel’s impact. It only makes it obvious that Patterson isn’t content with the usual amount of misdirection –he actively cheats and lies in order to maintain a thin presence of plausibility when the final twist comes around.

    To that, you can add a number of other flaws. The super-heroic abilities of the villain, for instance: I’m tired of antagonists who seem to know more than even the author. Patterson also crams too much stuff in too little space: The gratuitous death of one character is so predictable in an “no permanent attachment for the protagonist” fashion that it barely raises any emotional stake. There is also a medical subplot which doesn’t really lead anywhere nor do anything, but acts as, I guess, further set-up for the rest of the series.

    And yet, and yet I must say that I’m not that disappointed, overall, by the book. The ending is often far less important than anyone may think, and so perhaps the only thing worth remembering about 1st to Die is the energetic writing. The story advances at a nice pace, and even if the upcoming twists are obvious, it’s a pleasant read. There are a number of interesting details that show that Patterson at least knows how to do research, plus a thriller-writer character that almost makes me wonder if the novel’s just an elaborate game of “screw you, reader”. That’s got to be worth something, even if only for audacity.

    It all amounts to a fast novel that ends just as you realize that it’s not all that good. Fun to read, but unpleasant to think about, 1st to Die is, I hope, some kind of an anomaly in Patterson’s career. Of course, I’m not in too much of a hurry to find out right now: There may be no 2nd Chance.

  • Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis & Darick Robertson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Vertigo, 1997-2002 (1998-2004 reprint), ??? pages, C$???.?? tpb, ISBN Various

    Originally published as a series of sixty comic books from 1997 to 2002, Re-published as a ten-volume series of trade paperback from 1998 to 2004

    Well, that was an experience.

    Over the years, friends having succumbed to the Transmetropolitan bug kept pressing issues of the comics on to me. “It’s great!” they said. “Spider Jerusalem! You’ll love him!” Oh, I was convinced all right from the first few issues… but finding the money to buy the entire ten-volume trade paperback run was another challenge entirely. I finally broke down and went ahead in January 2006, using the thin pretext of a New Year’s present to myself. The comic book shop guy and amazon.ca were both pleased with my choices, though they probably each kicked themselves for not having the entire series in-stock when I wanted them.

    So I finally sat down and read the series in full, re-experiencing the issues I had already read and tearing straight through the remainder of the story. From a distance, it’s an admirable model of narrative simplicity: Journalist Spider Jerusalem comes back to a city he dislikes yet can’t live without. As a skilled stranger with a number of archetypal resemblances with Leone’s The Man With No Name, it doesn’t take a long time for him to start clearing the system. And then the system starts fighting back…

    Transmetropolitan takes place in an unspecified future (even the characters aren’t too sure when) in a city obviously modeled after New York, complete with a Kafkaesque sword-raising Statue of Liberty. The city is a teeming mass of wonders and misery, and Jerusalem has a wonderful romantic relationship with it, simultaneously disgusted by its excesses, yet dependent on it to survive and thrive.

    But if Transmetropolitan is such a success, it’s in no small part thanks to the character of Spider Jerusalem himself, a pushed-to-eleven take-off on Hunter S. Thompson’s model of a gonzo journalist with a cynic’s heart and a staccato vocabulary. Jerusalem is alive in a way that very few characters are, and if nothing else, Transmetropolitan is worth a look just for seeing him do what he does best. Great secondary characters complete the portrait, from a two-fisted editor to filthy assistants to a drug-addicted universal assembler to the vast cast of characters necessary to keep a 1,300-page novel running.

    Surprised by the length? You should be: Unusually enough, this sixty-issues, five-year-long series was designed with a specific end in mind. As a result, the complete run of Transmetropolitan feels like an unusually satisfying complete story, along with a lengthy prologue (Book one sets up Spider; Book two sets up the series.), a few interstitial mood pieces and an issue-long epilogue. Transmetropolitan may at first look like science-fiction, and then like edgy comedy, but as it progresses it inches closer to political satire with a real heartfelt message. Fiction for budding revolutionaries, stuck between evils of differing statures.

    I’m not completely sold on certain aspects of the series (the technological levels shown here seem mutually inconsistent, for instance) and I’m still smarting over the cost of the series (I could have bought six hardcover novels for that price! Six! That’s the rest of this month’s reviewed books alone!), but there’s little doubt in my mind that Transmetropolitan is one of the most important SF novel of the late nineties. Its drawn-out episodic publication nature made it difficult for non-comics SF specialists to evaluate properly, but now that everything is out in trade paperback format, it’s time for a critical reassessment, and hopefully a wider acceptance in the written-SF community. Here’s my Transmetropolitan low-cost guarantee: Buy the first two volumes. If you can’t stop at the end of the second trade paperback, forge forward with the confidence that you’ll enjoy the rest.

  • Hot Six, Janet Evanovich

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 2000, 336 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-312-97627-5

    There used to be a time, I imagine, where murder mysteries were deathly serious things. The very British origins of the mystery genre may account for it: It’s difficult to imagine Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple bitching about her sex life or dealing with mobsters with a flip remark and a few four-letter words. These days, of course, things are different: comedy and chaos go well with all sorts of criminal activities.

    Janet Evanovich’s Hot Six, as the cheeky title suggests, definitely isn’t your grandma’s cozy mystery. Protagonist Stephanie Plum is a bounty hunter with a complex caseload and too many personal problems. As the novel begins, her dynamo grandmother moves in her apartment. A dog soon follows. Tasked with finding and bringing back a fugitive who taught her everything she knows, Stephanie can barely deal with the lack of sex, grandma worries, casual threats and multiplicity of crises that soon overwhelm her life.

    One thing’s for sure, there’s no chance to be bored when you’re riding with Evanovich: As Stephanie Plum finds herself juggling with half a dozen subplots, the action switches tracks faster than you can catch your breath. Scenes crash into one another without warning, and you can often find the protagonist juggling two, even three things in the span of a single page. This isn’t a quiet way to spend an afternoon: This is an all-point-bulletin, fire-alarm running, acrobats-and-fireworks carnival of plotting. It’s exhausting and still somehow highly satisfying.

    The good thing is that this speed-metal riff on criminal investigations is packed with terrific characters and slick writing. Evanovich writes clearly and packs more meaning in a short conversation that most other writers can achieve in entire chapters. This is partly a consequence of the speed at which her novel flies by, but it’s certainly effective: Once you start reading the book, it will be difficult to stop. There are plenty of laughs along the way and few speed traps as the pages breeze past without effort.

    But my biggest surprise with Hot Six is how quickly I got drawn into a series despite having no clue about the character or the setting. While I suspect a number of running gags (hmm… The bad luck with cars? The bad shooting? The donuts?), Evanovich does an excellent job at holding the newer readers by the hand and showing the main series landmarks even as the action starts. I suspect that some of the book’s romantic tension may have been heightened had I read the previous books, but that’s not really a significant complaint. (More serious are the shifts in tone required whenever the author needs to show that her heroine is in real trouble, but that comes with the territory when you’re writing a comic crime novel.)

    If I have a single complaint about the book, it’s that it leaves a sweet but empty impression. Looking at the book only days after completing it, I remember having a good time, but very few of the specifics. But is that so bad?

    As the title indicates, this is the sixth book in the series (which has since grown to include a twelfth volume, with no signs of slowing down) and I can only presume that the chaotic, pedal-to-the-metal style of Hot Six is representative of the rest of Evanovich’s fiction. If so, I’ve got plenty of reading to do. (Of course, it also remains to be seen if Hot Six is too representative of the rest of the series…)

  • Battle Born, Dale Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 1999, 555 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58003-5

    Dale Brown’s last few novels have been a rough patch of reading. After a spate of steadily disappointing aerial thrillers ending with the dismal Fatal Terrain, he made a well-intentioned, but ultimately unsuccessful foray into more land-bound action with the techno-fantasy The Tin Man. While his early novels remain models of the techno-thriller genre, Brown has since been unable to re-capture that earlier spark. The bad news with Battle Born is that he still has a way to go. The good news is that his latest book is a step in the right direction.

    For starters, perennial Brown protagonist Patrick McLanahan is back in the air. While I’m not too fond of series fiction and even less of Brown’s obstinate refusal to start completely afresh, there’s little doubt after the silliness of The Tin Man that McLanahan (and maybe even Brown) are at their best when they’re flying. As Battle Born opens with an exciting training sequence featuring B-1B bombers, we sense that, somehow, we’re back in a comfortable environment.

    Fortunately, there is some evolution in this series. Time is catching up with McLanahan: His career has progressed to what may now be called a supervisory position. After a training accident, the Nevada National Guard Bombing unit has to be re-certified for active duty and the officer responsible for re-grading the unit is McLanahan. Of course, he may have plans of his own concerning the fate of the unit…

    You see, technology also marches on. Dreamland, the gee-whiz research and development shop explored in previous Brown novels, is back in business and fiddling around with B-1B bombers rather than creaky old B-52s. More than just rejuvenating the jargon, this also gives a face-lift to the series: While B-52s are still expected to keep on flying for several more decades, Brown (himself an ex-B-52 crewmember) had definitely milked the plane for all it was worth during his previous novels. The new emphasis on the B-1B is a chance to explore a few more capabilities and update the limits of airborne military intervention. Series fans won’t be overly surprised to learn that Dreamland has now adapted the “Megafortress” concept to embrace the B-1B.

    Battle Born is never better than when it follows the National Reserve crewmembers trying to regain their certification. In these scenes, Brown is writing from the heart and it shows: There’s a real spirit to the scenes between the fliers, and so the book’s best sequence comes during a highly unorthodox training exercise in which procedures are repeatedly broken –with consequences. Whew; it’s good to have the old Dale Brown back, even if only for a few pages. Once the Guard fliers are brought in the Dreamland fold under McLanahan’s supervision, well, it’s a clear signal that the series just got a boost of energy. (Unfortunately, it also includes a bit more silliness in the form of subcutaneous always-on transmitter/communicators.)

    Given all of this, it’s a real shame that Brown had to go and include a full-scale war in the same novel.

    Hey, it’s not as if wars aren’t a good and cool thing to read about in a techno-thriller. Unfortunately, the way through which Brown shows how a United Korea goes to war with China with nuclear weapons (!) just doesn’t ring true, nor does it make the most out of the tension offered by the situation. For every good scene in which the American Vice-President is stuck in the middle of an impossible situation, or in which departing Chinese soldiers are stopped from smuggling weapons out of the newly-united Korea, the novel bogs down in foreign minutia handled without much energy or interest. You can almost hear the gears and pulleys moving in Brown’s head as he makes up a war as a way to prove his new Dreamland crew. Sadly, it comes it too late and too predictably. Despite the wholly unnecessary final sacrifice of the novel’s best new character, Battle Born deflates as it suddenly sprints toward a finish. A shorter, snappier novel would have been more interesting.

    (Add to that the difficulty of setting up a convincing international crisis in a series where nuclear weapons have been detonated a few times after Nagasaki. Whoever cares for series fiction as little as I do may start giggling as the characters remind each other of the fact that China atom-blasted an American base in a previous novel and… nothing much happened. The big problem with series thrillers is that their imagined geopolitics stop matching those of the real world, or require so much back-tracking that they become ridiculous.)

    Still, Battle Born still feels a lot better than Brown’s novels since Storming Heavens. As characters repeat to each other, “Battle Born” is Nevada’s state motto. But it’s also appropriate for a novel that carries along a faint whiff of rebirth. If I had my choice, Brown should drop the McLanahan series entirely. But I’m just a lone reader in an ocean of commercial imperatives: If Brown is going to continue with the same characters, Battle Born shows the way to go. Now let’s see what happens in Warrior Class.

  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Raincoast, 2000, 636 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 1-55192-337-8

    Another Potter movie, another Potter book, another review where I struggle to find something to say.

    At this point, I mean, what is left to write? Amazon.com lists no less than 4 198 reviews for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire alone. It’s been read, reviewed, pirated, plagiarized, parodied and pilloried by thousands of people, most of whom are much smarter than I am. What else is there to add to the critical carnival?

    Not much except for my own impressions, most of whom boil down to “eh, I liked it.”

    The fun part with the Potter book so far, of course, is that even with the enormous hype, the mainstream spoilers, the merchandising, the myth-making, it’s possible to just sit down with the book and read it fresh, reasonably confident that it’s still going to be a worthwhile read.

    And so this fourth volume begins like the others, as Harry is spending the last days of the summer with his evil mundane (er, muggle) relatives. Before long, through, it’s back in the magical world, back in Hogwarts, and back in unspeakable peril as The-One-Who’s-Always-Coming-Back is, well, coming back. As Harry and cohort are now 14, this leaves ample opportunity for more conventional teenage drama, including the dreaded “whom shall I take to the ball?” question. The budding romance between Hermione and Ron advances a bit, but not as much as Harry’s funny feelings for Cho.

    If, like me, you’re reading along with the movie release schedule, you won’t be surprised to see that the fourth film left out a lot of background material from the book. The entire house-elf subplots are gone, along with bits of characterization (such as Harry’s anger fits) and smaller, more amusing moments. The journalist character, dropped in mid-film, is present through the whole book. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire isn’t exactly a fast-paced page-turner, but at least it keeps the considerable charm of the series so far: reading the book is like slipping in old comfortable slippers.

    Not that it’s all fun and games, of course. Harry and his friends may just want to pass their exams and have fun with each other, but they’re stuck in a situation not of their own choosing. As this instalment makes it clear, the whole Voldermort situation has a rich political history, with shades of McCarthy-like witch-hunting (ahem) and complex personal histories. Among the book’s new characters is the newest Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody, a man with a rich past in special operations… The higher authorities of British magic also get a bigger role this time around, leading this “children” book in very adult places.

    The Potterverse also expands significantly in this instalment, with the arrival of foreign wizards in Hogwarts. It’s been a stated wish of mine that the very English magic of the Potterverse be expanded to take in account foreign flavours of the supernatural, and so we here get a glimpse of magic as performed in France (Beauxbatons) and Eastern Europe (Durmstrang). If we’re lucky, we may get to see a little bit more of the world in subsequent volumes.

    The big plot segment of this volume, though, is the Tri-Wizard tournament, which purports to find a “best” wizard through a contest of magical abilities. You probably won’t be surprised to learn who wins: While the Potter series may be charming, it becomes somewhat contrived at times. In fact, the big finale is likely to engender questions like “wasn’t there an easier way for the villains to reach their objectives?” Harry himself is curiously passive (although less so than in the movie) and exhibits better networking than magical ability.

    But (making “bla-bla-bla” sign with hands), none of that really matters to anyone likely to read book four of the series. Perfectly pre-packaged to fans, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire delivers on its promises and expands the series in a satisfying fashion. No further comments are required.

    (Well, maybe another: This didn’t deserve to win the 2001 Hugo Award. But I digress.)

  • I am Jackie Chan, Jackie Chan & Jeff Yang

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 1998, 398 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-42913-3

    As I write this, it looks as if Jackie Chan’s reputation in Hollywood has been wrung out: Despite a pair of successes with the Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon series and the promise of a third Rush Hour, Chan’s other western films have not impressed anyone: The leaden and faintly creepy The Tuxedo was followed by the pointless The Medallion, which was trashed by critics and went unseen by audiences. Seeing this almost-criminal waste of talent, one can’t really fault Chan for heading back to Hong-Kong and more favourable projects.

    And yet, if you ask around, you will see that Jackie Chan remains, if not a household name, at least a well-known action cinema icon. There’s a good reason for that: From 1985 (POLICE STORY) to 1994 (DRUNKEN MASTER II), Chan starred in a handful of films that can justifiably be called action classics. What’s more, Chan mastered a unique screen personae based on a mixture of goofy charm and jaw-dropping stunt prowesses. Chan reliably became his own brand, uncopyable by anyone else.

    But this success was a long time in the making. Born in 1954 Hong Kong, Chan was enrolled at a very young age in a small academy with rough living conditions, an apprenticeship that taught him the skills and will to succeed in latter projects. Many years of further struggles within the Hong-Kong film industry eventually led to a number of lucky breaks, and then to the global super-stardom that we know even today.

    It’s no surprise if most of his autobiography I am Jackie Chan (as told to Jeff Yang), is spent describing those early hungry years: While Chan’s latter success-story is known to most, his apprenticeship is more mysterious, and here well-described in evocative anecdotes. As Chan acknowledges, his tutelage would easily be classified as child-abuse in the West, but he’s visibly proud of his training and the skills he developed during this period. As a reader, it makes for fascinating and cringe-inducing reading. On one hand, the atmosphere of Hong Kong during the sixties and seventies is well-pictured; on the other, his memories don’t seem fun at all. (Neither do most of his American adventures, but that story isn’t new.)

    Anyone who has heard Chan in interviews know that his English is hardly perfect (late in the book, he even allows himself a crack at how, with the upcoming rise of China, everyone will have to learn Chinese; whether he means Cantonese or Mandarin is not specified); in this context Jeff Yang’s work in translating not just the words and stories, but feel and context of Chan’s life becomes even more admirable. The book reads breezily as if it was a monologue by Chang, enlivened by reconstructed conversations. It flows well, and provides just enough background information to tie everything together, from Chan’s family story (an incredible adventure in its own right) to the particular context of Hong-Kong movie-making.

    As this is an autobiography, what’s missing is Chan’s darker side, even though he does acknowledge a number of mistakes and youthful indiscretions. One supposes that Chan’s rumoured womanizing and early-year excesses will be more evenly described in unauthorized biographies. At least Chan clears up the various organized-crime rumours concerning his departure to Golden Harvest. (Hmm… also missing is an index for the book.) A complete list of his injuries and films (those he can remember, anyway: Hong-Kong produced films by the truckload in his early years) completes the book.

    Obviously, this book is for Jackie Chan fans, especially those who already have a rough idea of his career and movies. There is often a sense that Chan is working himself up to the story that fans really want to hear, and the looser focus on his successful years makes it a bit difficult for non-fans to figure out why Chan is such a legend. Reading the book alongside a DVD player and a stack of his greatest hits is not a bad idea.

    As for Chan himself, I’m willing to bet that his eclipse is temporary: In addition to the long-rumoured RUSH HOUR 3 project, you can bet that despite his advancing years, Chan will not be refused much in Hong Kong studios. If Americans don’t know what to do with him, let’s just enjoy what he does on his home court.

  • Tricky Business, Dave Barry

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Putnam, 2002, 320 pages, C$35.99 hc, ISBN 0-399-14924-4

    Regardless of what’s actually in Florida’s water supply, its place at the problem child of American states is, by now, quite secure. It’s always been, really, but its 2000-2005 temper tantrums, what with hanging chads, repeated hurricanes, Terry Schiavo and assorted weirdness, have made its weirdness unassailable, even from Texas. Is it any coincidence if Florida has also developed the funniest school of crime-fiction writers? This is unlikely to be a coincidence.

    Dave Barry, of course, has no reputation to establish: The Pulitzer Prize on his mantelpiece is license enough to write whatever he wants. But beyond the award-winning humour column and the best-selling humour books, there is always time for something else. After Big Trouble, whose underrated movie adaptation you may have caught at one time or another, Dave Barry tries a second full-length crime novel with Tricky Business. The result is as pleasant as anything you may imagine from Dave Barry, but I can’t shake the stray thought that it may be better experienced… as a movie.

    Not that it’s unworthy as a book-bound piece of fiction. As with Big Trouble, it slaps together an ensemble cast of unlikely Florida residents in a crime caper novel whose madcap nature emerges full-blown during the last half of the novel. In Tricky Business‘s case, all characters eventually converge toward a floating casino, the Extravaganza of the Seas, where a high-stakes robbery is about to take place. There can’t be that much money involved without organized crime, and there can’t be organized crime without police presence. Add to that a pair of seniors out for a night of fun and a mediocre rock band headlined by a guy still living with his mother and you’ve got the ingredients required for three hundred pages of fun.

    And fun it is, or at the very least unpretentious beach reading. Tricky Business may not score all that high on the laugh-o-meter, but it’s hypnotically readable in less than an evening: The chuckles are constant throughout and the protagonists are drawn with some skill. The novel isn’t equally successful with all characters (the bad guys, most notably, are flat and not particularly well distinguished), but we don’t need them to go through the novel.

    As far as the plot is concerned, this is a novel with a lot of movement, but little overarching plot: People move frantically to get on board, and then from one end of the ship to the other as the bullets start flying, but readers without the patience to piece together an intricate whodunit shouldn’t worry about keeping track of who’s doing what. Tricky Business takes place on a single day (you’re unlikely to spend any more time reading the book itself) and ends as sweetly as would befit a comic novel.

    Not that anyone seriously reads Barry for the plot. In terms of jokes, Barry makes the most out of a flatulent character and an “Action News” station whose newscasters are a bigger danger to themselves than valuable news sources. The rest of the novel is a lot more sedate despite the sex and violence sprinkled throughout. Tricky Business is entirely safe to read on the bus: you’re unlikely to be raked with laughter from one page to another.

    But don’t let that discourage you from picking it up if you’re in the mood for a little criminal silliness. While it’s certainly not better than the rest of the Florida school of comic crime-fiction (Carl Hiassen and Laurence Shames are generally more dependable), there’s still enough in here to keep anyone interested. Why not wait for the movie adaptation and buy the paperback?

  • The Golden Age Trilogy, John C. Wright

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    SFBC, 2003, 848 pages, US$17.99 hc, ISBN 0-7394-3965-0

    (Omnibus containing The Golden Age, The Phoenix Exultant and The Golden Transcendence)

    Whew. Whoah. Wow.

    It’s difficult to be coherent after reading through The Golden Age Trilogy, John C. Wright’s bravura debut performance. A dense idea-a-page vision of a far future where no certitudes remain, this trilogy is a challenge in more ways than one: Packed with concepts, it will defy critics, exhaust readers and make fellow SF writers whimper in despairing envy. I loved it without reservations, but history will note that it took me five months to read it from the first to the last page.

    For someone who reads SF for its heady mix of ideas, philosophy, speculations and intellectual daring, The Golden Age Trilogy is a dream come true. It comes close to Charles Stross’ Accelerando in sheer density of new ideas, and I never thought I’d write this so soon after reading Accelerando. I note with some humility that The Golden Age Trilogy predates Stross’ masterpiece (and Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes, with which it has a number of speculative similarities) by two years, leading me to wonder how I could have missed the series when it first came out.

    Not that the wait didn’t have its side benefits: Originally published by Tor as The Golden Age, The Phoenix Exultant and The Golden Transcendence in 2002 and 2003, The Golden Age Trilogy was republished in an omnibus edition by the Science-Fiction Book Club, and there’s little doubt in my mind that this is the preferred edition of the story. While the trilogy has natural breaks in the action that allowed for a three-volume split, it was really conceived as a single story.

    In a few words, The Golden Age Trilogy is post-singularity science fiction in which our protagonist, Phaeton, discovers decade-long gaps in his memory. Upon investigations, he is very clearly told that he himself placed those memory locks, and that dire things would happen if he chose to override them, up to and including bankruptcy and existential exile from the “Golden Oecumene” in which he lives like a god. It goes without saying that he’ll become too curious for his own good, especially after convincing himself that the very existence of the Golden Oecumene is at stake.

    There’s a lot more to it, though. Fully half the fun of The Golden Age Trilogy is in discovering the wonderful world of the Oecumene, which has long since been freed from most human problems. Thanks to neural modifications, universal omnipotence and careful eugenics, death is extinct, crime is literally non-existent; police enforcement has been delegated to only one individual. Post-humans have immesurable IQs, multiple avatars, fabulous dwellings, all-powerful AI assistants (House AI “Rhadamantus” is one of the book’s highlight) and infinite possibilities for entertainment or achievement. But not all is well in paradise, as Phaeton discovers. For instance, there’s the curious matter of extra-solar exploration, quickly abandoned after only one failed colony…

    From the very first chapter, The Golden Age Trilogy has the scope and inventiveness of the very best science-fiction. Wright writes with verve and seemingly bottomless invention: There are enough ideas here to fill a trilogy of trilogies. The characters of the story effortlessly move within a world where post-humans are only one type of intelligence (watch out for those sophotechs!), and where everything we know (including notions like gender, bodies, reality, memory, and so on) are infinitely mutable. In one mind-twisting sequence late in the first book of the trilogy, Phaeton breaks the memory locks and causes people across the entire solar system to remember what had been forbidden. Whew! Elsewhere in the trilogy, a stairway to heaven is climbed down, nanotechnology is used to all purposes and a mile-long spaceship acts as a MacGuffin. The first volume takes place mostly in enhanced reality (with occasional cold glimpses of raw environments), but the second puts Phaeton smack down into good old mortality, with compelling results. The third volume is almost too wild for words, ascending and switching between levels of reality with post-human glee.

    This isn’t your father’s science-fiction, and yet the trilogy is infused with classical concepts. Wright is smarter than his readers and isn’t shy about proving it: His prose style has a classical rigour and sophistication that is surprisingly pleasant to read. As character conversations essentially amount to legal arguments, it’s easy to be swept along with the cadence and vocabulary of a style whose roots go straight to Latin and Greek literature: The prose is only a part of it.

    Then there’s a surprising amount of comedy: Daphne, Phaeton’s wife, is blessed with an increasing number of great lines as the story advances and she assumes the mantle of the pragmatic reader stand-in. (On the other hand, for all the infinitely changing nature of the Oecumene, it’s all too easy to picture Phaeton as the square-jawed hero and Daphne as the swooning love interest.)

    The Golden Age Trilogy is an impressive achievement. It’s not light reading, through. Daunted by the length of the book, the density of the prose and the overall lack of narrative drive (I wanted to know what happened next; I just wasn’t in a hurry to find out), it took me five months of reading, sometimes only a few pages per day interspersed between other books, to make my way from one cover to another. This isn’t a book made for casual beach-side entertainment: Wright is after meatier intellectual objectives. The future of the human race, the philosophical point of continued civilization and the very nature of the truths we hold to be self-evident are all discussed here, sometime in labyrinthine detail.

    Generally speaking, the first third of the book is the most worthwhile: There’s a glorious spirit of discovery to Wright’s imagined universe, and the sheer density of concepts to grasp all at once makes for high-intensity reading. The two other thirds are a bit more talky, a bit less surprising, a bit too twisty for their own sake. They’re still enjoyable, but by the time the story reaches its conclusion, it’s entirely acceptable to mutter dark sentiments of will-you-finish-the-story-already?

    It also strikes me that my idiosyncratic reaction to the book, exhausted, sometimes exasperated but satisfied and definitely awed, is unlikely to be shared by other readers. I can imagine some readers giving up on the book. Looking around the web for other critical assessments, I see that a number of other readers were more baffled than satisfied.

    This, in turn, may serve to explain why the series as a whole, and the first book in particular, didn’t get the level of acclaim that such a blockbuster series should have earned. None of the books got anywhere close to the Hugos or the Nebulas. Perhaps their profile was too slight to earn a nomination. Perhaps, given the close-knit nature of the books, people were waiting for the final volume to make an assessment. Per
    haps everyone spent months reading them. Whatever the reason, I think that The Golden Age Trilogy will find a place in the genre’s history as one of the first true Science-Fiction books of the twenty-first century. If there’s a rehabilitation to be made, it starts here: While not perfect, this is the good stuff; this deserves to be read widely. For those who can handle it.

  • Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Aspect, 2002, 630 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 0-446-52708-4

    One of my pet notions lately has been the thought that civilization is a by-product of excess capacity. A group of people scrounging for food and shelter doesn’t have time for philosophy, art and leisure. It’s only with a little bit of redundancy, of waste, of unused potential and free time that we build the things that make like fun and comfortable. Hence my discomfort at concepts such as “efficiency”, “just-in-time inventory”, “outsourcing” and “return on investment”: By cutting away the so-called fat, you end up without a reserve and, eventually, in a constant state of emergency.

    A projection of this unease in the future does nothing to qualm my fears: It goes without saying that our first space colonists will live a hard and uncomfortable life, even if Earth manages to solve its own problems. The implacable laws of “efficient” economics will see to that. With Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton pushes this notion to a logical dead-end, imagining far-flung colonies whose existence are made economically viable by organized piracy.

    It’s not called piracy, of course, just as “outsourcing” and “service fees” are never called “being greedy”. In Hamilton’s grim future, “asset realization” is the process by which the multinationals who financed the colonies (or bought back their establishment contracts) invade the colonies and take all the valuables back to Earth to line the company coffers. At regular decade-long intervals, heavily-armed ships descend upon colonies, establishing rule of law and scouring the planet for low-volume, high-value loot. It’s all scrupulously legal, of course. But try telling that to those who don’t agree with the practise.

    Our protagonist is one of those, and he’s arguably in a position to do something about it: As a squad leader in the corporate appropriation forces, Lawrence Newton is having an increasing amount of trouble rationalizing what he’s doing. A number of flashbacks tell us why. The only reason he’s hanging on for one more mission is the conviction that the Thallspring system has something very interesting hidden on its surface. Little does he know that this very thing, this fallen dragon, is going to make life pure hell for him, his squad, and the entire practise of asset realization.

    After the massive Night’s Dawn Trilogy, Peter F. Hamilton is almost taking a break with the relatively slim (!) Fallen Dragon. But at 630 pages, there’s enough space in here for two novels, and that’s almost what we get: A first story, military SF-style, about piracy on faraway colonies and a well-organized resistance to the pillaging. Then there’s another novel, crammed in the last third of the book, about something much closer to space opera than to economic extrapolation. Some readers are bound to be annoyed by the unsuccessful melding between the two stories; perhaps Hamilton, in his hurry to get to his “fallen dragon” concept, ended up writing a longer and better military-SF story than he expected. It’s certainly far more interesting that the type of military SF self-consciously published by, ahem, Baen: Hamilton’s not a veteran himself, and his prose gets straight to the dramatic point of the scene without too many acronyms in the way.

    What’s interesting about Fallen Dragon is that even if, in retrospect, you can see how the “fallen dragon” of the last act influences the rest of the novel, many of those influences seem dull and frustrating as they happen: The action is often interrupted by lengthy chapters describing the protagonist’s personal history, and they are certainly not vital to our understanding of his situation: A few selected flashbacks might have worked far more efficiently than an entire parallel storyline. But then again, Fallen Dragon may also have been better without its titular dragon.

    This doesn’t detract from the reading pleasure offered by Hamilton’s prose. He may never use just one word when three can fit, but Fallen Dragon, like his previous books, is easy to read and not without its share of good moments. The gadgetry alone (what with its rather-destructible “skins”) is worth a look. While I was never totally convinced by the rationalization of colonial asset realization, it does make a horrible sense in the same fashion as suicidal economic practises like outsourcing and subcontracting seem to do: If it’s twisted and brings short-term gain to someone, you can guarantee that someone will be desperate enough to try it. Especially if there isn’t any excess capacity available.