Book Review

  • Fatherland, Robert Harris

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House, 1992, 338 pages, C$26.50 hc, ISBN 0-679-41273-5

    I’m not a big fan of alternate-history fiction, but even casual readers familiar with the concept know about Fatherland, Robert Harris’ highly successful 1992 debut novel. Whereas the alternate history sub-genre is often seen as a creation of science-fiction storytelling, Fatherland owes more to a blend between historical studies and crime fiction. While this may make the novel more accessible to general audiences (It was published by Random House, after all), I suspect that it also makes it a slight disappointment to experienced SF readers.

    Fatherland takes place in 1964, in a very different Germany. The Reich has won World War II by playing it smarter on the Russian front and then coming to an arrangement with the United States. Don’t expect many details: Harris apparently thought it better to stay vague and not give any ammunition to overly critical readers. It’s not as if any of the counter-factual details are important anyway: the real intent of the novel in not to reimagine WW2 as much as it’s to explore what it would be like to live under a victorious Nazi regime.

    As a “Nazi victorious” vision, it’s certainly more developed and interesting than, say, Len Deighton’s SS-GB, which laboured under the handicap of taking place too soon after the Nazi victory. Here, things have had time to change. The German population is living the life of imperial citizens and the centrepiece of this victorious Nazi Berlin is a trip through a rebuilt Grand Avenue, an imperial showcase in which the 80ft Brandenburg Gate is a mere architectural footnote when placed next to Hitler’s Palace, the 400ft Arch of Triumph, the 3 miles long Grand Avenue or the 1,000ft-tall Great Hall. It’s no accident if the hardcover’s flyleaf contains an illustration of the area, or if all of Chapter 3 is a guided tour of the area.

    But before you start applauding Harris for this spectacular setting, keep in mind that the details of this imperial Berlin were set out in Albert Speer’s architectural plans. Fatherland is not a work of imagination as much as it’s a work of historical scholarship, a fact that becomes obvious once the curtain starts rising on the book’s biggest revelations.

    Plot wise, Fatherland begins with the discovery of a body, a discovery that, in time-honoured noir tradition, will reveal bigger and darker secrets, leading SS investigator protagonist Xavier March straight to the secrets of the Nazi regime. This “secret” is all too familiar to us real-world readers, so don’t expect to be surprised by the story as much as be a witness to March’s own aghast surprise.

    Hence lies, I believe, the crucial difference between genre readers and general readers when looking at Fatherland. For genre readers, living in a Nazi regime is a hook and (perhaps more importantly), a good jump-off point to other things: If SF writers have taken so well to alternate history, it’s because they can then play with “what if?” scenarios and develop them in ever-wilder speculations. Here, living in a Nazi regime is the big concept and the point of the novel; all else plays within the margins set out by this cadre. I imagine mainstream readers reading this and going “Wow, Nazi Germany victorious!”, but genre readers going “Nice… but is that all?”

    It certainly doesn’t make Fatherland a bad book: The investigation proceeds at a decent pace, the characters are interesting (especially March’s own growing dissatisfaction) and the emotional punch of the novel does manage to wring some interest out of familiar elements. It succeeds very well in presenting a society that has integrated the banality of evil, and has even convinced itself of its righteousness despite a gaping blind spot in its recent history. Early twenty-first century readers may want to read the novel with an eye on imperial mechanics, and how a steady stream of far-away terrorism and dirty little wars on the empire’s outskirts are seen as good for “perpetual alertness”.

    On strictly literary qualities, Fatherland delivers more than enough interest to keep you reading. It certainly has found an audience over the past twelve years: Made in a movie in 1994, Fatherland has sold well and earned Harris a steady place on the best-seller lists with every one of his three other novels so far (Including Enigma, reviewed earlier). While a bit basic for SF fans, it’s a strong fiction debut, a satisfying read and conceivably a good introduction to the whole alternate history sub-genre.

  • ReVisions, Ed. Julie E. Czerneda & Isaac Szpindel

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    DAW, 2004, 312 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7564-0240-9

    As an on-line critic (or, more accurately, “some guy with a web site”), I seldom meet the authors of the books I’m reviewing. In all honesty, that’s a good thing. Otherwise, I’d spend half my time apologizing for writing “literary abomination” when I really meant “not up to the author’s usual standards” and then see subsequent reviews contaminated for having spoken to the author in question. Imagine my inner turmoil whenever I’m at a Science Fiction convention.

    All of which to say that this is a contaminated review. A while back, during my 2003 Prix Aurora Award roundup [May 2010: now offline], I bitterly complained about the quality of the nominated short stories and mentioned that “should I be forced to do so, I’d say that Isaac Szpindel’s ‘By Its Cover’ is a decent second choice”. Imagine my surprise when, looking through my web referral logs over the next few months, I started seeing hits from keyword searches on “christian sauve review szpindel”. Imagine my further surprise when, at Noreascon4, I found myself standing next to Szpindel. Fortunately, you won’t have to imagine my surprise when Szpindel proved quite amused by the comment and then turned out to be one of the friendliest author I’ve ever met.

    How do you not buy the guy’s next book after that? How do you not go to the book’s official launch event? How do you avoid having your evaluation of the work stay unaffected by the encounter?

    Well, you buy the book, you go to the reading, you get your autographs, you let yourself be influenced (that’s what signatures are about, right?) and you at least admit it up-front whenever you review the book. Onward, then.

    ReVisions is another of DAW’s original theme anthologies, which at least has the merit of offering another book-like publication outlet to SF authors at a time where readers, myself included, aren’t particularly tempted by magazines. DAW usually does a pretty good job at finding niches for their original anthologies, and so ReVisions is a straight-up collection of alternate history fiction.

    The pedigree of the authors’ contribution to ReVisions varies widely, and so does the quality. Veterans of past anthologies know to expect duds along with the nifty pieces, and as a reader, there’s nothing to do except go on to the next story. (As a critic, it’s perhaps best to highlight the successes and be silently nice on everyone else.)

    As usual, you can depend on the first and last stories to deliver on their promises and so hard-SF veteran Geoffrey Landis opens up the festivities with “The Resonance of Light”, a pre-WW1-era story that I particularly enjoyed given my fascination with Nikola Tesla. On the flip side of the book, lesser-known Australian writer Jay Caselberg also scores a hit with “Herd Mentality”, a whimsical little vignette in which cloned Einsteins plot to take over the world in a kindly older-uncle fashion. Not much plot, but an amusing atmosphere, and I can forgive a lot to a story that makes me smile.

    As it happens, ReVisions‘ best stories are, overwhelmingly, those who take chances with the “alternate history” premise and have a little fun on the side. Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross’ Unwirer is a lot like that, though their type of fiction is written in my native techno-English dialect; non-nerdcore fans may not get so much from this electronic civil rights tale. James Alan Gardner also tries an unconventional approach with the conterfactual angle, and so his oddly elliptical “Axial Axioms” works well, though it may require a second reading to fully appreciate. While “fun” is not a word we usually associate with Peter Watts, his “A Word for Heathens” is awe-inspiring in its unremitting pessimism, and almost delightfully enjoyable if you’re familiar with Watts’ oeuvre. As if it wasn’t enough, you can even call his highly unlikely story an exercise in converging history.

    Other stories are fine, but lack a bit of extra oomph to make them succeed on all registers. Browsing through the book after a few days, the one that strikes me as having the most unused potential is Robin Wayne Bailey’s ultra-dark “The Terminal Solution”. Excellent concept (HIV escapes from Africa during the Victorian age, leaving pre-viral medicine completely helpless), fascinating philosophical implications (do diseases progress alongside medicine?) and familiar setting (London, 1864), yet the overall impact is muted. Unfortunate. I found less to remember about John G. McDaid’s “The Ashbazu effect”, but this Sumerian-printing-press story seemed generally more satisfying. Mad props, half-raised, go to Isaac Szpindel for “When the Morning Stars Sang Together”: This Galileo-influenced tale fulfils its relatively ambitious stylistic aspirations, but loses in impact what it gains in fine writing. Paging through the rest of the book, I’ll finally single out Laura Anne Gilman for the pleasantly hard-SFish underwater thriller “Site Fourteen”. The remaining stories may or may not be any better, but they fail my memory test.

    Every story is followed by a “Revision Point” afterword, in which the author gets to explain where and why the short story diverged from our world. Some of those afterwords have an annoying pedantic edge to them, but others do offer some amusing or interesting insights into the short stories —often telling us more about the author than the stories themselves. Your mileage may vary, but I’m the kind of reader known for browsing through collections just for the interstitial material.

    As expected, ReVisions is an average original anthology with the usual mix of good and not-so-good. While the cookie-cutter nature of some of the early material can give the impression that this is an anthology at the frontier between adult and young-adult categories (a “problem”, if you think it’s a problem, that also plagued editor Czerneda’s previous Space, Inc.), the rest of the book is more assuredly in the adult category.

    As the product of two solidly Canadian anthologists, ReVisions includes more than its share of non-American authors, and will form essential reading for whoever wants to nominate stories for the 2005 Prix Aurora Awards. Heck, if two or three of the stories I mentioned above make it on the final ballot, I won’t even have to complain about a weak line-up this year.

  • The Partner, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Island, 1997 (1998 reprint), 468 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-22604-X

    Ever since John Grisham started hitting the best-seller lists, critics have been saying terrible things about his fiction: His stuff repeats itself, deals in easy populist clichés, lacks stylistic flair, etc. For a long while, I bought into the anti-hype: After an indifferent reaction to Grisham’s first four novels (A Time to Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief and The Client), I took a long break. It took the movie adaptation of The Runaway Jury to make me interested in Grisham’s fiction again, with pleasantly surprising results. Picking up The Partner and being equally entertained may be the beginning of a renewed appreciation for the author.

    It starts as if it was a sequel to The Firm: After years spent running and hiding from his old life, ex-lawyer Patrick Lanigan is captured by men hired to find him. His crime? Faking his death, stealing ninety million dollars from crooks and slipping away. As you can guess, criminals can do many unpleasant things to get that much money back. Torturing Lanigan to find out the location of the money is one of the first things that comes to their mind once he’s safely handcuffed. But Lanigan has an accomplice, one that will engineer his transfer to lawful authorities and provide his defence lawyer with enough legal ammunition to keep things interesting.

    As the story moves back to Mississippi, everyone is only too happy to welcome Lanigan with a flurry of lawsuits. His wife files for divorce; insurance companies sue him for fraud; everyone wants the money and the state charges Lanigan with murder to explain the fact that a body was certainly buried in his place… Welcome back, Patrick; this way to the courthouse, please.

    Tortured, detained, swamped in unfriendly lawsuits, you’d think that Lanigan is merely a few courtroom scenes away from a crispy spot on the electric chair. But don’t be so sure: As the story of Lanigan’s disappearance is gradually revealed, there’s a lot more to this story than you may think. Maybe not much more than you’ll be able to guess, but more than enough to keep you interested.

    Entertainment is what Grisham is all about, after all. The Partner is a page-turner of frightening efficiency, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that most of the book consists of exposition thinly disguised as conversations between lawyers. Lanigan’s capture is the defining action moment of the story, but The Partner often spends more time explaining, in painstaking detail, the way Lanigan got away with his fabulous escape plan four years earlier. Before long, it’s not hard to guess where the novel is heading. (I certainly had an early lock on the big final revelation, though the last-page twist caught me by surprise.)

    From a technical perspective, Grisham often slips viewpoints between character without the adequate breaks, a sloppy lack of control that may annoy a number of readers. It’s not the book’s worst flaw: From the audience’s point of view, The Partner flounders a long time in search of a protagonist. Lanigan may have the lion’s share of the scenes, but he’s so secretive, even to the reader, that he’s more akin to an interesting phenomenon (a genius-level legal escape artist, one is tempted to say) than a sympathetic protagonist. Readers may come to rely on friendly defence lawyer Sandy McDermott as a stand-in, but even he is just another one of the supporting characters revolving around the bed-ridden mystery that is Lanigan. Too bad… but then again, if this is a procedural legal thriller, maybe it’s best to consider the convoluted escape plans as the book’s true stars.

    But no matter, because it’s difficult to stop reading once the The Partner gets going. Frankly, it takes a lot of guts and skills for Grisham to immobilize his main character in a hospital room, set most of his action in a series of meetings and still manage to deliver a novel that reads at two hundred pages per hour. The writing may be featureless, but it’s perfect when it’s intended to keep the reader around for “just one more chapter”.

    You could dissect The Partner until you’d be left with yet another populist southern-lawyer thriller written for speed over style, and you’d end up missing the point of the book: It’s fun, it’s surprisingly interesting and it leaves a good impression. Maybe even reason enough to pick up Grisham’s other novels.

  • Broken Angels, Richard Morgan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2003, 400 pages, C$24.99 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07324-1

    Few SF readers were left unimpressed by Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan’s enviable debut novel. A dazzling mixture of pitch-black detective fiction and hard-edged extrapolation, Morgan’s first book immediately announced the arrival of a promising new author, one who could build upon the genre’s traditions and bring them forward in the twenty-first century. While Broken Angels is a conventional side-step in a different genre, it offers plenty of rewards to anyone who won’t mind a bit of action-packed futuristic adventure.

    Takeshi Kovacs, the hero of Altered Carbon, is once again the star of this follow-up novel, but whereas his first adventure was modelled on crime fiction, this one is straight-up military SF served with a touch of treasure-hunting. Stuck on a remote planet fighting a war he never believed in, Kovacs begins the novel in rehab after a particularly nasty battle. He’s soon contacted by a man with a tall story of alien artifacts and a lost starship. Pages later, Kovacs can be found leading the retrieval effort, making deals with amoral corporations and training his crew of intrepid special forces soldiers.

    It’s no insult to Morgan to call him a white-knuckled writer of upscale men’s adventures. Altered Carbon‘s mix of hardboiled sex and violence made even jaded reader wince in shock. Broken Angels follows in the same path, even finding (not always successfully) a surprising amount of sex into a situation custom-made for action. Mercenaries, traitors, body-destroying weapons and humans sins are the norm in this thrill-a-chapter roller-coaster.

    Perhaps the best thing about Broken Angels is how it builds on the hints left in Altered Carbon (Martians!) to create a far more complex universe featuring a long-lost alien race, dirty wars galore, complex power plays between governments and corporations, factions within factions and enough grittiness to make it all feel real despite the plot contrivances. Clearly, Morgan has made himself a playground rich enough to serve as the setting for a few more novels if he so chooses. (Early word suggests that Kovacs will return in 2005’s Woken Furies) Kovacs himself is far more in his element here as a gun-for-hire, thanks to top-notch UN Envoy training and tons of hard-won experience. You can’t ask for a better narrator, even despite his tendency to keep the emotional side of what he does carefully locked away from his tough-guy personae. (Which often works at the novel’s disadvantage —especially when he flips out and starts shooting in chapter thirty-nine.)

    Perhaps just as interesting is Morgan’s explicit political positioning. After a number of rather heavy hints in Altered Carbon (where only the rich can exploit the advantages of “sleeve” technology, etc.), Kovacs’ reluctant-warrior reflections place Morgan squarely alongside other newish writers (Miéville, etc.) whose left-of-centre politics fully inform their fiction. Some will undoubtedly find this tiresome, but in many ways it’s a welcome shot in the arm for a genre who should be asking questions and upsetting the status-quo. In Broken Angels, the merciless portrayal of the corporations running the show is as nasty as the worst cyberpunk had to offer, but it’s partly influenced by the new anti-globalisation movement and developed with a great deal more skill and complexity. (More on this in the singleton Market Forces… at least if I understand the cover blurb correctly.) Despite the sex, the violence and the big guns, Broken Angels doesn’t have much in common with stereotypical military-SF nuke-em-ups. Imagine cyberpunk spliced into an anti-war novel.

    Cynics will be quick to point out Morgan doesn’t innovate much when plotting Broken Angels: “Explorers of various backgrounds banding together to explore an alien environment” can date back all the way to Burroughs’s The Lost World and earlier. But Morgan succeeds reasonably well in updating this template to current standards. Every weapon description is peppered with enough techno-jargon to make you see the serial numbers. The last chapter has as many twists as an entire noir novel. As alluded above, even the generic “war is awful and corporations are bad, m’kay?” message is developed with enough skill to be palatable, maybe even engaging.

    Nothing in Broken Angels is broken. Familiar, maybe, but in the end, what’s left is a fine slick read, with steady forward momentum and enough action to satisfy anyone looking for faster SF. Yes, Broken Angels suggests that Morgan could become a one-trick action/adventure writer if he so chooses. But it’s too early to tell: In the meantime, Broken Angels is a whole lot of fun, especially for reader who like stuff blowing up, but can’t face the prospect of yet another generic Baen military-SF book.

  • Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    NEL, 2002, 372 pages, C$14.99 tpb, ISBN 0-340-73357-8

    Jasper Fforde made quite a splash with his 2001 debut novel The Eyre Affair, a dazzling mix of humour, alternate fantasy, thriller and romance in a world where barriers between fiction and reality aren’t quite as solid as anyone would think. This assured debut quickly won him the favour of book-lovers around the world, and the least one can say about the sequel Lost in a Good Book is that it won’t disappoint any of his fans.

    Fforde leads us once more into his madcap alternate reality via the narration of detective Thursday Next, a woman of uncommon abilities and unparallelled contacts. Her father is a time-traveller, her colleague is a supernatural slayer and her pet is a dodo. Given that her enemies range from criminal masterminds to the Goliath mega-corporation, it doesn’t take half a book before her husband is erased from history. Next step? Recruitment by a very special policing force and the impending end of all life as we know it.

    Oh, yes, all the fun of Fforde’s first novel is to be found in Lost in a Good Book, and much much more. This sequel deals heavily with the reality/fiction transgressions that shined so brightly in the first book, playing well to his established crowd of book-loving readers. Picking up scant weeks after the events of The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book fulfils the first requirements of a good sequel by confronting its protagonist with the consequences of her earlier actions.

    Once more, Next has to defy the odds against her and navigate through impossible adventures to make it alive at the end of her novel. What’s new in this volume are her added powers and responsibilities as a junior member of Jurisfiction, an organization dedicated to keeping literature free from tampering. You see, all books in history are kept at the Grand Library, most novels have lives of their own and Jurisfiction is the agency that keeps it all in order…

    This particular subplot leads to one of the best scenes in the entire novel: As Next greets her compadres in literary enforcement, she recognizes them easily from classic works. But then…

    “Welcome to Norland Park, Miss Next. But tell me, as I am not so conversant with contemporary fiction – what book are you from?”

    “I’m not from a book.”

    Upon which her interlocutor “looked startled for a moment, then smiled even more politely” [P.265]

    Heh. And if you don’t think that’s mildly clever, just wait until Next uses decreasing levels of entropy to her advantage.

    But one could quote favourite bits for ages without touching upon how Lost in a Good Book lives up to the expectations raised by its title: There isn’t much in this book that isn’t tons of fun, from the daily details of the protagonist’s life to neat ideas (such as communication through footnotes) and an increasingly sophisticated mythology featuring all, er, creation. Readers should rejoice, because Fforde is writing catnip for bibliomaniacs. (From the title of the third book of the series, The Well of Lost Plots, I’m guessing we’re not done exploring meta-fiction. Particularly absent is the role of the authors in this fictive cosmology, which is probably being kept in reserve for a latter instalment)

    This being said, Lost in a Good Book comes with its share of dark moments, characters being eliminated and a finale that is more of a temporary respite than a conclusive victory, suggesting that this is only a middle tome of a continuing series. While few would designate this series as anything but a comedy, I suppose that every character will have to take a few hard knocks until the grand happy ending.

    But don’t let this discourage you: If you enjoyed The Eyre Affair, it won’t take much to convince you to race through the rest of Thursday Next’s adventures. I myself am rationing all Fforde Ffiction to one per month, and there are regrettably only two more to go. Know simply this, though: During Lost in a Good Book, I never peeked at the page number to gauge my progress through the book. Not once.

  • Salt, Adam Roberts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2000, 248 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-575-06896-5

    Having been favourably impressed by Stone, my quest in reading the whole Adam Roberts back-catalogue properly begins with his first novel Salt. Even without the benefit of more than two data points, I can see a few trends in the entire Roberts oeuvre.

    The first is, obviously, Roberts’ fondness for weird planetary environment. Salt‘s main claim to distinction isn’t the story (an early-colonization tale of war between cities of different cultures) but the environment in which it takes place. As the title suggests, the human colonists of Salt end up on a planet covered in deserts of fine salt. There are only two main water bodies to provide essential fertile ground and we’re constantly reminded of the difficulties in colonizing what remains a hostile planet. Life on Salt is dominated, well, by salt. Howling winds that can sand-blast everything through fine grains of NaCl. An atmosphere containing mostly chlorine. Vegetation that isn’t much more than an organic salt arrangement. Undrinkable water. High levels of solar radiation. It’s not particularly convincing (you’ll have to suspend your disbelief for a while as the colonists manage to raise the oxygen content of the atmosphere from zero to fifteen percent in a few years, and believe a world map with only a few distinguishing features) but it’s a fine and original playground for a short novel.

    The second of Roberts’ distinctive traits would be a tendency toward gentle stylistic experimentation. Salt‘s tale of strife is told, alternately, by Petja and Barlei, two representatives from opposing sides. The Alists are anarchists without a central government, organized only through strong motherhood rights and computer-selected work rotas. The Senaarans, on the other hand, are ultra-capitalist fundamentalists with an absolute belief in hierarchy and military power. You can see the basic problem between those two factions, and it doesn’t take a long time (say, half the book) before shots are exchanged. Roberts chooses to tell the tale through self-serving alternating viewpoints, with both sides colouring events and perceptions to suit their own beliefs. (With sometimes curious ironies: Petja, we quickly learn, is an anarchist who takes up leadership quite naturally) As with Stone‘s “translation footnotes”, Barlei’s manuscript is occasionally interrupted by vocabulary notes from a transcription machine, raising the possibility of built-in censorship in between the teller and the receiver. It’s easy to be fascinated by the alternating viewpoints, which makes the structure of the book more than an empty trick.

    Unusual world-building and gentle structural/stylistic experimentation are both admirable in a Science Fiction book, and they do much to gain goodwill amongst hard-core fans of the genre. Fortunately, Salt benefits from a certain innate interest beyond those two characteristics: I’m a sucker for colonization stories and so the nuts-and-bolts details of how Salt is tamed into (slight) submission were almost endlessly fascinating. Later, the details of the military engagements between Als and Senaar are similarly interesting, without falling in the usual military SF tediousness. Some may have problems with the pacing (and I do have issues with the last tenth of the book) but hard-SF fans should breeze through Salt.

    But easy reading and a bunch of good ideas aren’t all it takes to deliver an above-average reading experience. In fact, they may make obvious fundamental problems that wouldn’t be so glaring in a badly-written novel. In Salt‘s case, what quickly becomes obvious is that the opposing factions are so unspeakably dumb that all pretences of a realistic conflict are erased. The “negotiations” between the two groups have no basis in reality as we know it; even the most elementary political rudiments are ignored. Heck, all of Salt‘s decks are stacked: think “ADD-addled Hippies” versus “Fundie Patriarchs” and reflect on how such political structures could exist. They can’t (and neither could such monolithic ideologies stay pure in a population numbering at least hundreds) and so Salt feels a lot like a contrived moral lesson.

    And what’s the lesson? Wars are pointless. Many die. Wow. Good thing that the book is only 250 pages long, because as it peters out to its weak ending (including a last twenty pages that tells nothing new), I may have been frustrated by the novel’s lack of a stronger point. Oh, wait, I am.

    No surprise, then, if Roberts’s debut is such a mixed bags of impressions. It fulfils a basic level of expectations, but at the same time contains such fundamental flaws that it’s hard to take seriously as a contemporary piece of SF. As a fable, it may have worked back in the sixties. But with the amount of serious details and sophistication, it simply invites a degree of real-world scrutiny that it can’t withstand. Oh well; on to Roberts’ next novel then.

  • Light, M. John Harrison

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2002, 320 pages, C$24.99 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07026-9

    I seldom check other reviews of a book before I write the first draft of my own reviews: doing so could compromise the integrity of my thoughts as they’re initially set down. (I have no such qualms checking other reviews between the first and final draft, if only to see if I haven’t missed anything, so it’s not as if I’m a purist about this.) The exception in this case is that I read a lot of reviews about M. John Harrison’s Light well before purchasing the book. It was hard not to, given how the book was uniformly lauded by just about every member of the online SF critic community. From Cheryl Morgan to Matthew Cheney, sfsite to scifiweekly, Light scored reviews that read a lot like “Buy it, read it, it’s the best book of the decade, in fact it’s so good that I’ll never read anything as good, aaargh, I might as well kill myself now.”

    Wow. How do you resist such unanimous applause? So I chose not to.

    But a caveat came attached to just about every recommendation: Light was a difficult book. A stylist’s book. A stylistic hologram where every sentence was linked to some other part of the novel.

    Now this is exactly the kind of warning that would mollify my enthusiasm. I’m not a very patient reader, nor much of a stylist. In fact, years of reading have revealed that I have something like a tin ear whenever prose quality is concerned: I’d rather wade through journalistic prose to get to a dozen ideas than to read twelve finely crafted sentences containing a single concept.

    So I set aside an afternoon and waded in Light with a certain amount of apprehension. I ended up satisfied and relieved, though I fear that my own take on the book will prove to be a lot less enthusiastic than the Big Boys (and Girls) of SF Criticism.

    Light is made of three strands of story. The first stars a physicist who murders more people than he does science. The second is all about a starship pilot who, in essence, is so melded to the ship that she barely qualifies as human (and flippantly kills even more people than the physicist). The third is about a burnt-out explorer who lives on the run from the mob. The last two story lines take place in 2400; the first in 1999. But they’re all related, oh yes.

    The first few pages make it clear that we’re in for a long read despite the book’s short length and big typeface: the density of the prose is quite amazing, and Harrison had honed the prose for maximum efficiency. It’s a style that requires some unpacking, so don’t be surprised to rewind and read a few sentences a few times to understand what’s going on.

    And yet, it’s not a bad read. Despite my own problems with fine writing, I had no problems making my way through the book, despite the unpleasant characters, tortured psychodramas and alternating viewpoints. I grew worried that the three strands of the narrative wouldn’t mesh together beyond the obvious ironic value, but the last few pages managed to bring everything in a satisfying whole.

    But as I closed the book, I found myself wondering if that was it. Competent, sure. Satisfying, yes, but hardly worthy of all the hype. Re-reading the raves, I belatedly noticed that most reviewers had far more affection for the previous works of Harrison than I did (whereas I approached it as, essentially, a first novel by an unknown author), which probably had something to do with it.

    But at the same time, I would myself agreeing with some of the most laudatory statements about things I may have dismissed too easily upon first reading. Light increasingly seems like one of those novels that appreciate with time: You find yourself reflecting on what had seemed like an easy trick at the time and realizing that it was, in fact, fiendishly clever of him. Harrison makes it all appear effortless, even matter-of-fact, but isn’t that the mark of great art; to make it seem natural?

    Clearly, my opinion of the book is shifting upward even as I write this. Should Light come bundled with a reader’s guide? Maybe reading a few other reviews could help…

  • A Year at the Movies, Kevin Murphy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 2002, 362 pages, C$22.95 tpb, ISBN 0-06-093786-6

    Ask two cinephiles about a certain movie and you’ll get at least three different opinions. This is, mind you, before the cinephiles use the films as branching point for discussions about life, the universe and everything. Soon enough, you will find that every film can lead to hours of free-ranging discussion, and it doesn’t take much (“So, hey, how was the last Spielberg?”) to unleash the average cine-geek.

    We’re like that. And I say “we” self-consciously, because it’s a bit useless to deny any association with cinephiles when I consider my weekly movie theatre habit, my movie-reviewing column, my obsessive reviewing and/or my own tendency to use movies as intellectual springboards to just about everything else. So when I saw Kevin Murphy’s A Year at the Movies, I didn’t have to make any particular effort to understand what he wanted to do.

    And his particular premise for the book is simple, insane and admirable: For the entire year of 2001, Kevin Murphy (best known as “Mystery Science Theater 3000’s “Tom Cervo”) saw at least one movie per day. And no cheating: At least one movie per day in theatres, with a backup plan that included a portable movie projector. Whoa.

    It’s a quest that would take him on at least three continents to visit theatres big and small, hot and cold. Assorted challenges (such as seeing the same romantic comedy seven times with seven different women) are included in the mix, and the book takes a chapter-per-week (roughly) approach at telling Murphy’s odyssey. Every chapter begins with an itemized list of movies seen, and usually takes the form of a short essay on this or that aspect of cinema-going. From the onset, it’s obvious that Murphy isn’t interested in the films themselves than in the cinema-going aspect. He seldom discusses the merits of specific films, preferring a broader approach suggested by the week’s experience. In short, this is a book for moviegoers, not critics.

    The first few chapters strike an intentionally jarring note. As Murphy bitches and moans about the sorry state of Hollywood movie-making, doubts begin to creep in: is the entire book going to be like this? Saddled with gratuitous slams at mainstream cinema? It doesn’t help that there are contradictions: more artistically challenging films are alternately praised and dismissed, proving that Murphy has as many conflicting opinions as the rest of us. Then there’s the supplemental amusement value in reading Murphy complaining about modern audience’s talkback and ironic detachment… after spending so many years on MST3K.

    But Murphy’s initial snobbishness proves to be an integral part of the book’s main dramatic arc. By the time new year’s eve rolls in, Murphy has learnt to appreciate cinema once more, with perhaps a little bit less condescension. Still, he suffers for his art: his travels take him to googolplexes and the world’s coldest theatre (in Canada, obviously), from Australia’s outback to the long Scandinavian day. It is, indeed, a moviegoer’s odyssey, and from what I could gather from the narrative, he only missed his self-imposed objective once, stuck deep in Italy with a broken projector.

    As a fellow movie geek with plenty of stories to tell (2001 was also a big cinema year for me, from plenty of free screenings, movie dates, first movie-reviewing column, 9/11 at the movies, to breaking out of mild depression during ZOOLANDER), it was remarkably easy to cheer for Murphy one the initial unpleasantness rubbed off. In a year that included JOE DIRT, FREDDY GOT FINGERED, CORKY ROMANO and PEARL HARBOUR, I kept saying: Oh, poor you! But imagine my whoops of laughter as Murphy managed to smuggle an entire Thanksgiving dinner to a screening of MONSTERS incorporated, or his fabulous adventures at the world’s classiest theatres.

    I may be considerably softer on the commercial imperatives of the movie industry (I would love, for instance, to spend time at the business side of Sundance or Cannes) and my threshold for entertainment is far more lenient than Murphy, but there’s no denying that we’re part of the same tribe of cinephiles. A Year at the Movies is an example of great film writing. Read it and cheer. Heck, no, Murphy and I don’t have the same opinions, but that’s how it should be… and I certainly enjoyed disagreeing.

  • House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pantheon, 2000, 706 pages, C$29.95 tpb, ISBN 0-375-70376-4

    Reviewing books on this site for the past few years, I’ve said plenty of ignorant and silly things about a mythical group of “literary types” who would (I imagine) snottily read pretentious literature, pooh-pooh genre fiction and cling to their English Literature degree as if it had any real-world relevance. As I grow older, weaker and softer, I’m ready to admit that this confrontational attitude may not be the best, and that I do no one any favours by opposing the worst clichés of “mainstream literature” to an idealistic image of “genre fiction”. In the real world, isn’t it all middle ground anyway?

    Certainly, books like House of Leaves do a lot to bridge the gap between the two mythical groups I have the unfortunate tendency to oppose. At its heart a horror story merged with a suburban romance, Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel also earns the distinction of being one of the most playful literary experiment I’ve ever read, all categories combined. A dazzling mixture of book design, subtle jokes, mixed storytelling and erudite writing, it’s also devastatingly effective as a horror novel.

    Where to begin to describe the unique features of the book? How about this: all mentions of house in the book’s 706 pages (in all languages) are printed in blue. It has footnotes, footnotes within footnotes, circular footnotes, “transparent footnotes”, sidenotes and endnotes. It purports to be a manuscript studying an eerie film about an impossible house, commented by the discoverer of the manuscript, further commented by the editors of the book. It consciously mixes fonts according to the author, features struck-out passages and accelerates the pacing through fewer words per page during action scenes. Pages are printed sideways, at an angle and upside-down. It includes pictures, letters, manuscripts and tons of spurious references to things that don’t exist.

    It is, in short, a book that you can’t read passively. It’s constantly playing along with the audience, daring it to follow as it gets weirder and weirder. One of House of Leaves‘s best aspects is how it gradually reveals its madness, up to a paroxysm where you have to flip over the book frantically to keep up with the action. Wonderful!

    What is perhaps more amazing for genre readers is how the low-key terror of the book ends up being far more effective than pure out-and-out gore horror fiction. The uneasiness is introduced so seamlessly in the course of the character’s ordinary life that a 5/16” discrepancy in measurements is almost unbearable. Then delicious shivers start as shelves don’t meet the walls. Latter scenes featuring a multiplicity of closing doors and (later) a wall dissolving in nothingness produce reactions that have everything in common with the best shock horror movies. There’s never been such a haunted-house story before, and there’s seldom been more efficient ones. But you’ll have to read the book to find out why a line like “Ftaires! We haue found ftaires!” [P.414] can produce an audible “whoah!”

    It’s not all effective, mind you: As playful as it is, House of Leaves often gives the impression that it’s just screwing with the readers for the author’s own perverse pleasure. Most footnotes are supremely gratuitous, but few are so useless as the ones extending for pages on end, simply enumerating names, places and things that are or aren’t of relevance at this point in the story. Sadly, the book is also overwritten: As a big believer in the “Less is more” philosophy, I could have lived quite well without most of the Johnny Truant passages, or some of the most self-conscious passages that exist solely to demonstrate the author’s erudition.

    But it’s easy to forgo even those problems when considering the overall impact of House of Leaves. As a stylistic experiment, it’s not just impressive: It’s compulsively enjoyable. This may not be the most fun you’ll get from a novel this year, but it’s almost guaranteed to be the most fun you’ll have with a novel. (I’m also fascinated by the idea that House of Leaves may be just about impossible to replicate satisfyingly in electronic form for years.) As a genre novel (romance or horror; take your pick), it’s quite good. As a bridge between mainstream and genre, it’s just about perfect. What do you know,maybe it extends forever…

  • The John Varley Reader, John Varley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2004, 532 pages, C$23.50 tpb, ISBN 0-441-01195-0

    Let’s make this very simple: If you have never read anything by John Varley, you should get this book. If you have read everything by John Varley, you should get this book.

    If you even nominally consider yourself a Science Fiction fan, I don’t have to explain Varley to you. How he was the Larry Niven of the late seventies; how his short fiction effortlessly slapped around the rest of the genre through limpid writing, audacious concepts and relentless optimism; how vital he was at a time where SF was still trying to sort out the fallout of the New Wave. He combined mature gender politics with Heinleinian verve, anticipated cyberpunk (never being properly credited for it) while writing SF that was decades before its times, shocking and delighting contemporary audiences. His combined body of short stories is, even today, an amazing piece of work. And now The John Varley Reader brings a lot of it together: Seventeen tales spanning thirty years of writing, including three Hugo-Award-winning stories.

    If you haven’t read Varley yet, this is the best place to start: His short-story collections are woefully out of print (Heck, I had to read The Barbie Murders in French translation, and I’ve never seen a copy of Blue Champagne to this day) and trying to accumulate his fiction on a piecemeal basis is an exercise in frustration. (Especially when you consider his sporadic publishing history, with novels published in clusters half a decade apart.) This anthology presents a dynamite assortment of stories that have not lost one whiff of relevance even decades later. This last point seems particularly important, so allow me to rephrase it: The is no nostalgic value in The John Varley Reader: Every one of these tale is as current and hip today as they were when they originally appeared. Even now-historical pieces such as “Press Enter []” have an immediacy that remains current to this day.

    And this goes to everyone, including non-SF readers. John Varley is one of the rare SF writer I would confidently recommend to any sufficiently daring non-genre reader. Now you can just give them a copy of The John Varley Reader and wait until their minds explode from all that accumulated pure-SF goodness. How do you explain something like “The Persistence of Vision”? As the description of an alien society made out of humans? As a realistic piece marred by the inclusion of an explicitly SF element at the very end? Heck, Varley’s take on gender roles alone (what with casual gender-switching so prevalent in his “Eight Worlds” universe) is still amazing today, not to mention his gentle brand of optimistic let-live philosophy. He’s not just an excellent SF writer; he’s -in many ways- the example of what a SF writer should be. His stories are readable, clever and provocative: true models of the short Science Fiction form.

    But for die-hard Varley fans, The John Varley Reader includes another bonus in the form of lengthy autobiographical passages. Varley hasn’t led an easy nor a conventional life, and the autobiography that emerges is both heartening and surprising. As he describes his adventures, we’re privileged to get a glimpse behind the fiction and be amazed once again, this time not at the fiction but at the writer. But wait; there’s more. There are previously-uncollected stories, such as the nifty “Just Another Perfect Day” or “The Bellman”, rescued from the time-capsule that is Harlan Ellison’s mythical The Last Dangerous Visions.

    I bought the book planning to read only the introductions and the stories I hadn’t yet read. But I found myself sucked into the whole thing, even the classic stories, re-reading all once more just for the sheer pleasure of it (Ah, “The Barbie Murders”, ah, “The Phantom of Kansas”).

    Hopefully, this collection also signals a return to form for Varley, whose output has been marked by lengthy periods of quiet followed by bursts of excellence. And maybe it’ll even lead new readers to his other work, from the succinct brilliance of The Ophiuchi Hotline to the wide-screen eccentricity of Steel Beach and The Golden Globe. Every half-decade or so, SF critics collectively say something like “thank goodness John Varley is back”. Now let’s hope he’s back to stay.

  • Pen Pals, Olivia Goldsmith

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dutton, 2002, 360 pages, C$35.99 hc, ISBN 0-525-94644-6

    With the untimely demise of Olivia Goldsmith in early 2004, we can expect her literary output to become a finite set (allowing for the usual posthumous publications). As a reader who likes to make sweeping generalizations about one’s life work, this places me in an advantageous position: I just have to “complete the collection” and I’ll be ready for a scathing assessment. I’m not there yet, but Pen Pals ends up being Goldmith’s last novel published in her lifetime (with Dumping Billy already in the publishing pipeline), leading to a cautious preliminary assessment.

    Unfortunately, the pattern of Goldsmith’s book follows the typical downward arc. From her capable debut with The First Wives’ Club (1992, adapted in a movie, etc.), Goldsmith toned down the “female revenge fantasy” aspect of her first novel to produce a trio of rather moralistic-but-enjoyable docu-fiction studying different industries, from fashion (Fashionably Late) to TV/cinema (Flavour of the Month) to the publishing world (The Bestseller) As the nineties grew to a close, she went back to (poor) female revenge fantasies with Young Wives (2000). Pen Pals ends up being a mixture of both female revenge fantasy and docu-fiction.

    This time around, poor Jenifer Spenser is the victim of a plot hatched by her male bosses: She takes the rap for corporate malfeasance, goes through what is anticipated to be an abortive trial and walks away free in exchange for future considerations. Alas, as you may guess, things don’t go as planned and she ends up serving three-to-five in the pen. Ideal conditions for a revenge plot and a study of the carceral environment? Why, of course: Within pages, Jennifer meets her crew, suffers through the American prison system, engineers a corporate takeover, toughens up and ends up punishing her no-good traitorous boyfriend. Good times, good times.

    As pure entertainment, Pen Pals sustains interest much better than Young Wives (which got old really fast), providing at least the basic requirements of that sort of books. But it’s not quite as fascinating as her previous docu-fiction because the sense of wilful deceit is far greater than it was in, say, Flavour of the Month: Despite a few bad moments early on, prison life turns out to be a blast once snappier outfits are delivered. If we were to believe Goldsmith’s characters, most women in prison are victims of the system, innocent wallflowers that either killed their men when they deserved it, or got lifelong sentences for selling pot to their ailing kids. The few violent and mentally disturbed prisoners can be safely isolated in their own wing (they, of course, are nothing like the heroines of the novel.) Once prison management gets its act together, all can live in peace and harmony.

    Pardon me as I raise an eyebrow.

    Now, it is true that I don’t know much about the subject, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that writing a feel-good novel in a prison environment just begs for selective vision. Even Goldsmith acknowledges as such in the after-word. What compounds this basic problem, of course, is Goldsmith’s knee-jerk repetition of the female revenge theme. While there are ways to make it palatable and not too derivative (see her docu-fiction trilogy for examples), it doesn’t even take ten chapters for Pen Pals to fall into familiar plot templates.

    Goldsmith should be applauded for at least trying to raise awareness of problems related to the modern justice system, the increasing privatization of prisons and the plight of prisoners in an overburdened, underfunded environment. But really, the vehicle she has built to share her concerns actively works against what she’s saying: Whoever remembers Pen Pals weeks after reading it won’t recall an impassioned plea for better prisons: They’ll either remember a heart-warming tale of female empowerment, or a bad novel.

    What’s equally worrisome is that Goldmith’s latter work itself will be remembered more as bad fiction than good entertainment.

  • For us, the Living, Robert A. Heinlein

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 2004, 329 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7434-9154-8

    Wonders are all around us if we know where to look, and so that’s how the wonderful capitalistic system conspired to allow me to buy, in very late 2004, a paperback copy of a brand-new Heinlein novel at the local grocery store. Imagine that.

    I may never fully understand what possessed me to got check out the paltry selection of books at the neighbourhood Loblaws during an uncharacteristic salad-dressing-and-soy-sauce buying expedition, but there it was, in a smart hip cover: For us, the Living, by Robert A. Heinlein, “the author of Starship Troopers”. Imagine my thrill at dropping the novel onto the conveyor belt at the checkout. “Found everything you were looking for?” asked the clerk as per store guidelines. Yeah, I was tempted to answer, I’m buying a brand-new Heinlein paperback and it tickles me.

    It’s not as if I hadn’t heard about For us, the Living previously. The unexpected discovery of a copy of the original 1939 manuscript, shortly before the 2003 Worldcon, was widely discussed in the SF&F field. Reviews seemed unanimous in saying that it wasn’t a very good novel, but it was a mesmerizing piece of work for all Heinlein fans.

    I quickly found out what they meant by that. Yes, For us, the Living is a shoddy novel. A study of a 1939 man somehow thrown in a weird and wonderful new future, it’s not dissimilar to the utopian musings of H.G. Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Structurally, it’s what I’d call a walkthrough novel, designed to show the audience the achievements of a new age: the plot is loosely arranged to allow the hero to explore facet after facet of Heinlein’s imagined 2086, a world where everything seems to be working remarkably well.

    As fiction, thus, For us, the Living isn’t a marvel of plotting, or even of characterization: Our protagonist is designed to be a bland stand-in for the readers. The heroine is saddled with -believe it or not- a three-page footnote explaining her life history. (Yikes!) Dialogue is often of the “As You Know, Bob” variety. (Or, more accurately, “Bob, you ignorant twentieth-century dweeb, this is what you should know.”)

    This being said, the fiction may not be gripping, but there’s no mistaking Heinlein’s gift for compelling prose. Even at its most didactic (and believe me, few things are more didactic than a chess game being used to demonstrate the fundamentals of Social Credit), For us, the Living retains an essential interest: It’s just plain fun to read. And some predictions ended up hitting surprisingly close to the mark. Take a look at this quote, for instance: “…if those bankers who were killed in the raid on Manhattan had expected to be bombed and gassed, there wouldn’t have been any war, But they didn’t. They thought the war would be fought far away by the professionals.” [P.88] Hmm!

    For Heinlein fans (and I classify myself as only a mild one), For us, the Living is a virtual treasure chest of early discoveries. Pay attention, and you’ll find the early outline of Heinlein’s “Future History”. Nehemiah Scudder is mentioned by name, as is Coventry. Rolling roads are introduced. Open marriages caps off the novel’s last chapter. If none of these things mean anything to you, well, you’re not the target audience for the book.

    No, the target audience for the book is composed of SF fans who just want a look at Heinlein’s first finished manuscript, and who will nod in agreement when Spider Robinson, in his introduction, refers to the novel as Heinlein’s “literary DNA.” The kind of SF fans who, upon reading the last line of Robert James’ excellent afterword, “A clean sweep at last.”, will know exactly which of Heinlein’s law of writing is being invoked, and what it ultimately means. The kind of SF fans who, in considering the meaning of “a clean sweep at last”, will feel a rush of blood to their heads and maybe even a dab of salty water in their eyes. A clean sweep at last.

    Oh yes, marvels all around us.

  • The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    NEL, 2001, 384 pages, C$14.99 tpb, ISBN 0-340-73356-X

    Every book has an intended audience, and it’s not hard to see that The Eyre Affair is best dedicated to hard-core book lovers, avid readers and English Literature majors. Who else could appreciate this mixture of romance, adventure, mystery and fantasy in an alternate universe where the Crimean war still unfolds in 1985, where time travel is not unheard of, where the written word is still the dominant form of entertainment and where people can travel in and out of novels?

    Oh yes, Jasper Fforde’s fiction is aimed straight at the intellect of people who wish that coin-operated Shakespeare quoting booths were installed in every train station. That Richard III showings had the popularity of camp ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW revivals. That there would be such a thing as a “literary detective”, ill-paid would it be.

    In the meantime, we can live vicariously through the adventures of the capable Thursday Next, a SpecOps agent with curious family relations, much historical baggage and a messed-up sentimental life. A classified assignment with SO-9 quickly turns ugly as arch-criminal Acheron Hades (such a great character name!) kills off her partner and escapes in the wilderness. It gets more complicated when the original manuscript of Jane Eyre is stolen and Hades starts messing with the novel, changing all copies of the book worldwide…

    Oh, what a charming alternate universe is weaved by Fforde in this first volume of what looks like an open-ended series (three more volumes have been published so far; reviews forthcoming). Satiric and believable, with enough hooks to allow further development if needed, Thursday Next’s universe is a book lover’s fondest wish come true. Barriers between fiction and reality are malleable, the written word reigns supreme and one never quite knows what’s going to happen next.

    As you may guess, the reading pleasure derived from The Eyre Affair is considerable. Narrator Next is a capable heroine with just enough problems to make her sympathetic and even the avalanche of convenient coincidences (let’s see: her father is a renegade time-traveller, her uncle is a genius inventor, she’s an ex-student of Hades and all of those things come into play as the plot unfolds) doesn’t do much to dampen our amusement.

    Perhaps the best thing about it is the sense that this is unabashedly high-brow comedy. I may not have caught all the literary references, but it doesn’t change the comfortable sense of being in an imagined universe that’s utterly sympathetic to hard-core readers. References fly high and low, but catching them all isn’t necessary in order to derive considerable enjoyment out of the whole tale.

    Also worth noting is the easy way Fforde mixes and matches genres in order to develop his story. While a thriller template forms the backbone of The Eyre Affair, it also features a substantial romance and borrows the atmosphere of classic comedy. The alternate universe in which Thursday Next operates is introduced through techniques borrowed from the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres, leading to a book you can equally lend to SF fans and mainstream readers.

    Some will say that this book could only have been written in Great Britain, and they’re probably right: It co-exist comfortably alongside the dry wit of series such as Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld sequence while possessing its own distinct identify.

    What else is there to say in order to convince you to go out and buy this book? You know you you are. You already know if a trip to an alternate universe in which books are wildly popular appeal to you. If not, what are you doing reading this review?

    (Sequel: Lost in a Good Book)

  • America (The Book), The Daily Show (and Jon Stewart) presents…

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 2004, 227 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-446-53268-1

    Reading America (The Book), I kept flashing back to historian J. Barlett Brebner’s saying that “Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States.” I mean; here I am, good little Canadian, reading a parody of an American civics book and laughing at American politics as if they were my own.

    But when you’re in a country sharing a border with the elephant known as the United States of America, there’s not much of a choice: We Canadians know that even the slightest American tremor will have repercussions everywhere else in the world, starting here. Watching America isn’t just a Canadian pastime rivalling hockey: it’s sheer national self-defence. The USA may not care too much about Canada, but we’re still the ones getting shoved around when the elephant gets prickly.

    Hence our national amusement at TV shows like The Daily Show, a blistering look at American politics front beneath a veneer of silly humour and parody. Hence (I imagine) the good sales figures of an America-centric humour book north of the 49th parallel. Some of us know the American political process better than most US citizens. Part of our national pride (I hate to say) is based on not being part of it.

    What the writers of America (The Book) intended was a picture-perfect parody of your usual Civic Education textbook, down to the full-colour hard cover case binding, wide layout and abundant use of photo clip art. There’s even class exercises and a topical supplement covering the 2004 presidential election. Physically, it’s a wonderful design job. Fortunately, the content is up to the presentation.

    America (The Book) is a sarcastic look at the American political process, from its historical origins (“For purposes of this chapter, ‘person’ still means ‘white males’ up until 1870, then ‘males’ until 1920, then ‘all people but really still just white people’ until 1964” [P.62]) to its current implementation. There’s usually one or two good gags per page, and two or three audible laughs per chapter.

    But as you may guess, it’s not all gags and giggles for the masterminds writing the book: America (The Book) is at the same time a sharp criticism of the less-salient aspects of the US political process, starting with the influence of lobbyists, the way amendments are grafted upon unrelated bills and the structural factors discouraging anything but a two-party system. There’s plenty of serious material in the book, as long as you’re willing to see past the jokes. (Sometimes, you don’t even need to: The pixelicious “Third Party Graveyard” [P.110-111] is worth framing by itself.)

    Ironically (or not), the only let-down offered by America (The Book) happens once it starts looking outside its borders. Canada is gratified with recurring and appropriately self-depreciative “Would You Mind If I Told You How We Do It In Canada?” segments, but passages like “All governmental business is conducted in both French and English, because a small minority of Canadians, called ‘Québécois’, never wanted to learn English, and we thought it was rude to ask them to.” [P.59] don’t exactly betray a witty understanding of the situation. Still, it a comfort to realize that all other countries fare worse; Chapter 9 (“The Rest of the World: International House of Horror”) tries to satirize the appalling isolationism of some Americans, but it merely comes across as a lamer, less funny section. Oh well. Also worth noting as a weaker element is the appearance of some Daily Show regular characters, an inclusion that could puzzle readers who aren’t familiar with the TV show.

    But never mind the above: as self-effacing Canadians, we’re just grateful to be able to buy your wonderful books and find mentions of our country in them. It would never occur to us to have the nerve and write, in bold capitals, FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR DEMOCRACY AND THE FATE OF THE REST OF THE WORLD, BUY THIS BOOK AND UNDERSTAND THE POINTS IT’S TRYING TO MAKE BEFORE YOUR BIPOLAR POLITICAL DISORDER ENDS UP LEADING TO THE DEATH OF THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT FOREIGNERS!!!

    Oh no. Never. We’ll just read the book and laugh respectfully. Tee-hee.

  • Guts, David Langford & John Grant

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Cosmos Wildside, 2001, 173 pages, C$20.00 tpb, ISBN 1-58715-336-X

    Horror novels got you down? Can’t stomach yet another exotic supernatural threat to humankind? Won’t stand the dour pretentiousness of King wannabes? Trust David Langford and John Grant to churn out the most awfully hilarious parody of the entire splatter-shock sub-genre and make you like it!

    There is no cover plot description for Guts and you won’t need one as long as you know cheap horror novels: If, say, you see a horror novel named The Rats, does it take a rocket surgeon to figure out what’s the big concept of the book? In fact, when half the novel on these particular shelves are named The [Something], do you need a plot description other than the classic “[Something], which you thought was harmless and maybe even useful, turns out to have an evil mind of its own and start killing just about everyone in the world”?

    I don’t think so. Hence the previous spoileriffic “spoiler-free” paragraph.

    But onward; suffice to say that Langford and Grant have delivered the ultimate horror novel parody. It combines elements of bad SF, awful writing and wickedly sharp satire for what may very well be an unforgettable reading experience. Silly characters (including clueless scientists, cheap bimbos, broad stereotypes and a journalist who just won’t die) are nice, but it’s the consciously over-the-top nature of the writing that makes Guts such a success. I haven’t yet been disappointed by a Langford book yet and Guts is no exception: If you’re a fan of horror and British comedy (and especially British horror that cries out for comedy), this is the book for you.

    “Warning: Offensive Content!” says the brown-bagged cover, and it’s not kidding. Sensible minds and weak stomachs may be best-served by avoiding this book forever. Langford and Grant pull no punches in serving funny horror on a dripping plate of blood and gore. Perhaps the best scene of the book comes along in Chapter Five, which includes the single best parody ever written of those interminable that-guy-should-be-dead knock-down drag-out brains-hanging-out fights between protagonist and unspeakable horror. It’s as bloody disgusting as it’s compulsively hilarious, and that’s exactly the kind of effect Guts is looking for. It’s so over the top that it’s impossible to mistake for anything but self-conscious satire. If you think that DEAD ALIVE and the EVIL DEAD series were a bit on the wussy side, Guts is what you’re looking for.

    Unfortunately, like most humour novels, it’s not lacking in weak moments. The novel is front-charged with good stuff; the latter sequences leading to the explosive ending (involving a sentient cheese, though that’s already saying too much) are a bit of a let-down. Not all plot-lines are equally compelling; I was a bit underwhelmed by the neo-Nazi segments myself. (Don’t worry; this is a perfectly understandable statement in the context of the book.)

    Published by small-scale house Cosmos Wildside, you can bet that Guts won’t be available at your local chain bookstore anytime soon. If the idea of a splattery horror parody appeals to you, if you’re already familiar with Langford’s typically dry British wit, if you love self-conscious take-offs of bad fiction, you can probably figure out if Guts is likely to appeal to you. It’s a wonderful take-off on a sub-genre that has long deserved some humorous disgrace, and a savvy comment on the tools of lazy horror writers. That it’s unbelievably funny is just a bonus.

    Somewhere, an owl hoots (for you).