Book Review

  • Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré

    Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Penguin, 2012 movie tie-in reprint of 1974 original, 381 pages, C$15.90 hc, ISBN 978-0143120933

    I’m hardly the first one to note the fact, but as I age, I understand that some books are best read by older readers.  Tastes change, our knowledge of the world evolves and we come to appreciate atypical takes on standard material.

    I first read John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in my early twenties, and it may be better to say that I tried to read it.  I was on a thriller binge at the time, and had to sample le Carré’s fiction.  Alas, I still vividly remember being so disappointed by the conclusion of A Small Town in Germany, and not quite knowing what to make of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s dull and dense accumulation of details in non-linear chronology. 

    Flash forward twenty years, and some things have changed in the meantime.  By 2004, I was able to give a lukewarm review to The Russia House.  By 2007, I was positively enthusiastic about The Constant Gardener, helped along by great memories of the film adaptation.  When I watched the 2011 big-screen version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, I knew I had to give another chance to the novel.  (I have no shame in leveraging movie adaptation in order to improve my reading experiences.  With time, by brain has learned how to use visuals in order to make the reading experience even more enjoyable.)

    Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy certainly feels a lot more interesting than it did two decades ago.  I’m no longer necessarily opposed to le Carré’s meandering style, or his dedication to presenting a view of the intelligence establishment that favors analysis and reflection over over-the-top action heroics.  My own years within a bureaucracy make it easier to appreciate the inner working of the British intelligence service as described in the novel, and the emphasis on adult themes seem to resonate more strongly now than they did before.  At last, I’m at a point in my life where reading about a humble public servant uncovering a Soviet spy through conversations and deductions fits my definition of a cozy thriller. 

    The story is archetypical spy stuff: There’s a Soviet agent working within the British Intelligence Service, and it’s up to disgraced/retired intelligence analyst George Smiley to uncover him.  A predecessor has narrowed down the possibilities to four people, all of whom have suspiciously ascended to the top of the national spy establishment.  But it’s up to Smiley to work outside the system and assemble the pieces of the puzzle: gently interrogating witnesses, poring over documents, reminiscing about the past with past colleagues and thinking really hard about what he has learned are the tools of his trade.  le Carré makes it clear that Smiley is a gifted interrogator, able to tease secrets out of his interlocutor without them even realizing it.  When comes the time to take action, Smiley’s methods are as subtle as they are efficient, leading to a terribly British climax in which he sits in a chair and waits for the arrival of the unknown traitor.

    Stylistically, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a dense accumulation of details about its characters, chronology-hopping subplots, personal issues and trade jargon.  Le Carré’s literary style is low-key to the point of downplaying even important events, something that may unsettle readers with higher expectations of action.  (Again; see the movie first, and only read the book if you liked the film.)  Every conversation is described in subtle nuances, the narration barely tipping its hand when something important has happened.  Readers sometimes have access to Smiley’s inner monologues, but usually not: the voice of the novel floats around the plot without getting involved at all times.

    The result can feel detached, cold, lengthy or meandering; all valid charges against this kind of procedural, reality-based spying suspense novel.  On the other hand, it succeeds at what it tries to do.  The result is interesting in its own right, and the fact that the novel was published in 1974 now tends to give it a nice patina of historical charm: it has aged well by remaining a reflection of its time.  Ultimately, what works best about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the change of pace is presents from much of the spy fiction genre: it’s still, nearly forty years later, a fairly unusual novel in this regard, and readers who have seen everything in the thriller genre may come to this novel (or, indeed, much of le Carré’s fiction) seeking something different.  While the novel won’t please all readers, it remains a quasi-definitive Cold War thriller, plunging us even today in a different time and place.  Is it any coincidence if it took me until my late thirties to appreciate that intention?

  • Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins

    Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Scholastic, 2010, 400 pages, C$19.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-439-02351-1

    Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” trilogy wraps up to a close with Mockingjay, a final entry that abandons the previous novels’ structure (which was admittedly wearing thin in Catching Fire) in favor of an outright story of rebellion against the established order of Panem.

    After the events of the story so far, series narrator/heroine Katniss Everdeen shows up in Mockingjay even more damaged than she has ever been.  Forced to abandon the ruined remnants of her home district, coerced in acting as the Rebellion’s “Mockingjay” spokesperson, Katniss certainly isn’t an enthusiastic rebel.  It doesn’t take a long time for her to realize that the rebels aren’t necessarily morally superior to the regime they’re fighting against.  The book doesn’t end with another bout of the Hunger Games, but sends Katniss deep in enemy territory in the hope of ending the war.

    Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Mockingjay is the depiction of the heroine as a traumatized survivor.  Katniss’ heroics have only bought her most pain and suffering.  As the book progresses, she sees her ambiguous paramour Peeta brainwashed by opposing forces to the point that he tries to kill her.  A lot of people die around her, more poignantly toward the end of the novel.  Her thirst for vengeance isn’t noble or admirable, but twisted and self-destructive.  War isn’t glorified, but shown as an atrocity, and she can’t even be sure that the rebel leaders will be any better than the established order, which is the kind of thing that tempers any kind of enthusiasm.  Readers are brought along cringing and fearing the next plot point, especially when characters openly start discussing what is real and what isn’t.  (One can argue that the epilogue is just a hallucination, but that’s being a bit too mean.)

    Fortunately, this increasing grimness isn’t a jarring evolution in the series.  The Hunger Games was noteworthy for its blood-thirstiness even in today’s unsentimental Young Adult marketplace, and Katniss’ gradual deterioration well in-line with her character’s arc through Catching Fire.  Given that she narrates the events, however, it does become a bit tedious to live in her head.  The announcement that Mockingjay would be adapted on-screen as two separate movies raises a few interesting questions regarding the re-structuring of the novel, especially given how much action takes place away from Katniss and thus far removed from her narration.  There are a few plot cheats in order to give her essential information, but it’s going to be interesting to see how the novel makes the leap from first-person to third-person narration.  More explosions are likely, but what’s going to be more interesting is in seeing whether the rather loose plotting of the book will be further diffused by spreading it over more than three hours, or if the filmmakers will be able to tighten up the story.  (Given the first film’s clunky third-person exposition, it doesn’t bode well.) 

    Otherwise, it does bring the series to a conclusion, even though some plot threads are cut short in the rush to complete the ending.  Katniss, damaged as she is, is still a likable protagonist, and the characters surrounding her all have a role to play in the unfolding of the story.  Anyone who makes it to the third volume is likely to be satisfied, even though this novel is substantially different in structure from its predecessor.  While the trilogy may not be entirely believable nor all that pleasant to experience, it’s a well-told story with a strong heroine, and the bittersweet conclusion decently wraps it up.

  • Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins

    Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Scholastic, 2009, 391 pages, C$19.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-439-02349-8

    The plot summary for Suzanne Collins’ Catching Fire, sequel to The Hunger Games, almost reads like a cheap joke: After surviving the deadly Hunger Games of the first novel, protagonist Katniss has to… do it again.  It’s a legitimate tactic for sequels to repeat favored plot elements from previous books, but… really?

    Ah well; this isn’t the series’ first uncomfortable encounter with the problem of basic suspension of disbelief, and while one could fault the author for going back to the same formula, Catching Fire does feel different enough to hold our interest.

    It’s clear from the beginning that series heroine Katniss Everdeen has been severely damaged from the events of the first volume.  Back in her home environment of District 12, Katniss has been freed from daily concerns: her victory ensures that her family and her district are well-fed, but at the same time have isolated her from any semblance of normal life.  It’s also clear that she has made powerful enemies during her time in the arena: A surprise visit by oppressor-in-chief President Snow makes it clear that her stunts have not been appreciated by the ones in charge, and that she better behave.

    Of course, things don’t go as planned, and telling surly Katniss how to behave is bound to backfire.  As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the entire country is about to go in flames, with insurrections fanned by Katniss’ own behavior.

    The twist of the knife becomes more obvious mid-way through, as the Seventy-Fifth Hunger Games participants are culled from past winners… landing Katniss and her ambiguous paramour Peeta back in the arena.  These Games, taking up the last third of the book, are a great deal more fragmented than the first ones, in-between Katniss’ increasingly fragile state of mind and various manipulations by the game-masters.  And that’s not even mentioning third-party interference in the conduct of the games…

    While The Hunger Games focused on the Games in a general contest of rebellion against authoritarian rule, Catching Fire clearly shifts the emphasis of the plot onto the growing insurrection.  For Katniss, the political becomes undistinguishable from the personal as she and her immediate circle of friends and family are directly targeted by the regime.  Surviving the Games once was enough, but being thrown in the arena again?  It’s a wonder the regime in place actually expected that to work.

    This, if dwelled upon, rapidly leads us back to the series’ severe credibility problems.  In fact, the more we learn about the future world of Panem, the less-believable it becomes.  We’re supposed to believe in a mixture of very advanced technology intermingling with a poor coal-producing District 12 with a few mere thousand citizens.  This lack of believability is where Collins’ series continues to run aground, but it’s not clear whether this is a evidence of Collins’ lack of skill in world-building, or an unsuccessful attempt to simplify a plot structure in order to make it understandable to young adult audiences.

    Fortunately, there are more interesting things to discuss than the series’ unconvincing background.  Katniss’s narration seems even more fragmented here than in the first volume, lending a clipped rhythm to the prose that does a lot to propel readers forward.  Her refusal to play anyone else’s game seems even stronger here (especially now that’ she’s dragged back in the arena rather than volunteering for it.  Her attempts at self-sacrifice get less and less effective.)  Collins also adds a number of other characters to the series, adding complexity and nuance along the way.

    The science-fictional nature of the story seems more obvious in Catching Fire, which suggests spectacular visuals given the inevitable movie adaptation.  Adult readers with an interest in the current cultural teen zeitgeist will find little that’s objectionable here for young-adult readers, and even quite a bit of entertainment along the way as they zip through the book.  It’s a middle-of-the-trilogy book, but a competent one… and readers who make it to the final line of Catching Fire will immediately jump to concluding volume Mockingjay to find out what happens next.

  • Far Horizons, Ed. Robert Silverberg

    Far Horizons, Ed. Robert Silverberg

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harpercollins, 1999, 482 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-380-97630-7

    If you’re looking for a review of the science-fiction short-story anthology Far Horizons, edited by Robert Silverberg, I suggest that you look elsewhere.  Because as I close the book, I have plenty of things to say… but few of them actually have anything to do with its specific content.

    I suppose that a few declarative sentences may not hurt in setting the stage, though, so here goes: Far Horizons is an all-original anthology in which Silverberg has asked an all-star roster of Science Fiction authors to write short stories set in their well-known fictional universes.  The result brings together new stories set in David Brin’s Uplift Universe, Ursula K. Leguin’s Hamish universe, and so on.  Niven’s Known Universe may be missing, but otherwise what you get is a series of call-backs to SF’s best-known universes from the 1960s to the 1980s.  Nearly every story has an award-winning pedigree, and even moderately knowledgeable readers will know every single name in the table of content.  As far as sheer SF star-power is concerned, I don’t think there’s been quite another anthology like this.

    Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the stories are good, new, inventive or even enjoyable.  Most of the writers try to position their stories in cracks left by their novels.  Orson Scott Card, for instance, uses his story to describe an interlude in-between Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide (that story was later collected in First Meetings.)  Minor episodes are what Far Horizons has to offer, although the story I enjoyed the most, Pohl’s “The Boy Who Would Live Forever”, is set to run in parallel with its parent Heechee saga.  (That story first had me thinking about re-reading Gateway, only to recant as I was reminded of just how weird the later Heechee novels eventually became compared to the first novel.)  Some of the stories from writers I was eagerly anticipating, such as David Brin and Dan Simmons, left me almost completely cold.

    Still, even in disappointing, the anthology got me thinking about the renewal of the SF genre and how to let go of the past.

    Readers should be aware that the next few declarative sentences are far more personal in nature, and have even less to do with Far Horizons: I became a father in 2012, and (newborn duties obliging) took a voluntary year off from freelance reviewing.  This “semi-hiatus” isn’t absolute (hence this review), but it has shaped my reviewing choices so far this year.  I’m reading a lot of books that I don’t expect to review, which includes anthologies.  I rarely review anthologies because they’re seldom coherent enough to offer a solid reviewing thesis, and also because I tend to skip a lot of stories if they don’t grab me by their second page.  I can finish anthologies in two commuter bus rides, but it won’t be because I have read them from beginning to end.

    I’m also using this semi-hiatus to put some distance between myself and what I used to do out of routine.  Becoming a father changes things (everything), and my relationship with reading genres is being tested: What was I doing out of inertia, compared with actual honest interest?  I have nearly stopped buying books “to take a chance” on new or marginally-interesting authors.  My book reviews are now motivated by creative impulses rather than habit. (i.e.: “I’m going to go insane if I don’t write this review right now!”)  And, perhaps inevitably, I’m using this distancing to re-evaluate what I thought I knew about such things as Science-Fiction.

    I started reading SF by the truckload in the mid-nineties, taking the list of Hugo and Nebula-winning novels as my primary reading list.  Taking advantage of used-book sales and the accumulated mass of SF commentary then available, it’s natural that I regard the 1960s-1980s era of Science-Fiction as my own formative period.  An era that happens to match almost perfectly with Far Horizons.

    But Far Horizons dates back to 1999.  One of the authors in the table of content has died recently, and many of the others have seen their relative profile within the genre fall precipitously in that they no longer command the same kind of attention they once did.  Meanwhile, the genre now looks very different from what it was in 1995 or 1999: media SF is more pervasive, video-games are narrowly trailing movies as a dominant vector for genre visuals, and print SF is now quite a bit more diverse than it used to be.  There are relatively fewer pure-SF readers, and even the dedicated ones now have trouble placing Heinlein, Niven and Sturgeon, just as I’m fuzzy on earlier SF writers such as Weinbaum, Nourse or Kuttner.

    I’m not bemoaning the death of an era as much as I’m finally acknowledging that it’s happening, and trying to look forward.  SF-as-a-genre has died and been resurrected in radically different ways a couple of times in its history (from magazines to books, from paperbacks to hardcover bestsellers, and now from paper to electrons), and that’s OK.  I’m all for change if it means that I get to read great stories that wouldn’t have been welcomed in the old-school SF ghetto.  More diversity, more viewpoints, more takes on our possible futures?  Yes, please!

    Heck, the amount of physical household space re-arranging that a newborn requires even had me chipping away at the certitude that well-stocked bookshelves are an unarguable boon.  I’m nearly convinced that I can enjoy ebooks without having to purchase a physical copy.  I suspect that the way I’m defining fixed spaces for my CD/DVD collections and then culling ruthlessly is a harbinger of things to come for my book collection.  Isn’t it easier to make a backup on separate drives than to move books from shelves to shelves as the collection expands?

    As I focus on the health, safety and happiness of the cutest baby in the world (another declarative sentence; no argument tolerated) you can say that I’m looking forward to the next generation of readers in more ways than one.  I will eventually return to reading current SF as my backlog of unreviewable books gets exhausted and as I catch up on my accumulated sleep deficit, but I have a feeling that the pause will do me some good.  As with all genres that are in conversation with themselves, SF renews itself and a fundamental disservice that older fans may bring to the table is an obstinate inability to acknowledge the current state of the art.  Old-school SF as showcased by Far Horizons is still great fun to read and has provided happy memories to generations of readers, but it’s not the culmination of the genre, nor does it reflect the best of what’s now possible to do with the tools of the genre.  Rather than rant at the disappearance of the good old stuff, I choose to welcome the even-better new stuff.

  • A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin

    A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2011, 1040 pages, C$38.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-553-80147-7

    So, here we are.  After manfully resisting the impulse to start reading George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series before it was published in its entirety, the TV show made me break down and now I reap the consequences of my folly: I’m done reading the fifth volume, and now I have to wait for the rest of the series like so many other readers.  At the pace Martin is writing his thousand-page doorstoppers, the next volume isn’t expected until 2014 at the earliest, and the planned concluding volume of the series probably won’t hit shelves before the end of the decade.  So it goes; I’m joining the club of impatient Martin fans.

    The wait is made even more maddening by the unusual structure of the series.  It started out as a trilogy and then escaped all control, growing into a pair of linked trilogies, then grew even more misshapen when the fourth volume was split up in two based on the geographical location of its characters.  A Dance with Dragons is the second half of this split, and it covers the characters missed by the fourth book A Feast for Crows until its last third, at which point the entire story once again starts moving forward in time.  Readers hoping for significant forward progress may want to temper their expectations, though, since this is really still the beginning of a new story arc: This fifth volume is so busy setting up its pieces that it practically forgets to deliver any payoffs.  The last third of A Dance with Dragons doesn’t really move the story forward in time as much as it sets up cliffhanger after cliffhanger, all leading to… the next volume in the series.  Which is at least a few years away.  But I repeat myself.

    Fans of the series will, at least, get to spend some time with familiar characters.  Lovably modern Tyrion is finally back in-narrative after a sorely-missed absence in A Feast for Crows, and the adventures he gets into while exiled from Westeros are good for a few picaresque thrills.  Meanwhile, at the Wall, Jon Snow gets busy with the business of leading the Night’s Watch, preparing for winter while setting up defenses against the foreseen invaders and managing the influx of refugees clamoring for resources and protection.  Alas, A Dance with Dragon also goes back, at length, to dragon-queen Daenerys Targaryen, who has decided to stop traveling for a while and try to lead for a change.  It doesn’t go well, but the Mereen chapters of A Dance with Dragons have a bigger flaw: they’re remarkably repetitive, with Daenerys occasionally reverting back to love-struck teenage moping while the situation around her goes from bad to worse.  Even the convergence of plotlines and characters toward her doesn’t reach a meaningful conclusion in this volume, a long-promised battle being pushed into the next volume.  And that’s without mentioning another battle in a land far away, much-teased but not delivered.

    At this point, not having any idea how this turns out, much of A Dance with Dragons is, as with A Feast for Crowd, just set-dressing.  Martin introduces a lot of new characters here, and their importance isn’t particularly clear.  Some of it feels arbitrary, as when another pretender to the Iron Throne is introduced without too much ceremony.  Some of it feels dull, as with the Iron Born racing from Pyke to Mereen.  Some of it feels pointless, as with the entire Quentyn Martell storyline.  None of those new characters can measure up to the ones introduced in the first three books and imprinted onto the readers.  Maybe it will all make sense with the added resonance of the next volume.  At this point, though, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that Martin has lost control of his series. 

    At least the novel is more satisfying when it comes to its established characters.  Red Priestess Melissandre gets an intriguing passage told from her own point of view, whereas Arya features in a pitch-perfect chapter titled “The Blind Girl”.  Tyrion is as self-aware as ever, and despite some reprehensible acts at the end of A Storm of Swords, seems to be one of the few characters with a sense of humor about his own trials.  Everyone who went through A Feast for Crows hoping that paranoid sociopath Cercei would get some comeuppance will get their wish here, although in typical Martin fashion the punishment seems rather harsh, and leads to a closing passage with ominous overtones.  Still, her retribution is nothing compared to what happened to a much-hated character after his last appearance in A Clash of Kings: returning as a spectacularly damaged shadow of his own self, “Reek” shows how mean Martin can be to his characters, and how readers’ expectations about some characters can flip from one book to the other.  (Also see; Jamie Lannister)  Finally, the epilogue of the book marks the bloodthirsty return of a character who had disappeared almost completely after the third book, setting up bigger questions about true allegiances and what that means for the rest of the series. 

    But, as tantalizing as those developments can be, it’s easy to feel as if the last two volumes have been a spectacularly overblown exercise in throat-clearing.  It’s not clear whether the relevant plotting in this huge split-up mess couldn’t have been condensed in a single snappier tome, or whether the incredible amount of detail in this series has grown too unmanageable to handle.  It’s all nice and well to feature dozens of protagonists, hundreds of secondary characters and somewhere around 1500 named characters spanning an entire world, but keeping up with all of these people takes time, and Martin is still adding more complexity to the mix.  His ultimate success will be judged after he delivers the ending of his saga; in the meantime, it’s not as if any fan of the series will skip a volume on their way to the conclusion.

    A Dance with Dragons does at least feel like a step up from A Feast for Crows.  During the last third of the novel, as more and more plotlines were advanced forward, I even found myself getting back some of the pure reading joy I had last experienced in the latter half of A Storm of Swords.  That joy was muted when it became more obvious that this was just another round of cliffhanger-making in time for another long wait.  It’s a bit of a shame, from a reviewing perspective, that appreciation for A Dance with Dragons is so closely linked to unknown factors.  Maybe the conclusion will wrap it all brilliantly.  In the meantime, readers are left hoping that the next volume will step on the gas a little bit.

  • A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin

    A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2011 reprint of 2005 original, 1104 pages, $C10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-553-58202-4

    One of fiction’s most fundamental narrative engines is the balance between tension and release.  Typical fiction-writing advice is to send your characters up a tree and then throw rocks at them.  The more rocks you throw, the sweeter their success once they climb down the tree.  Authors spend most of their time setting up dramatic payoffs –the fun is in releasing all the tension the closer we are to the end of the story.

    This ties in A Feast for Crows insofar as this novel is almost entirely pure buildup.  As fans of the A Song of Ice and Fire series know, Martin first planned on a trilogy.  Then the trilogy grew to a planned six books: two linked trilogies separated by a gap for five years in the internal chronology.  But life seldom goes according to plan, and that’s how Martin found himself with a fourth volume so big that it couldn’t fit between the covers of a single book.  Unusually, he split the book in two halves, following a different set of characters separated by geography.  (It helps when you’re writing about an imagined world so big that characters can go entire novels without meeting each other.)  A Feast for Crows is the first half, A Dance With Dragons following (six years later!) to complete the experiment.

    The first discovery of A Feast for Crows is the realization that it’s meant to re-start the series with a chunk of new characters.  (This isn’t surprising given how many died in the third book.)  Alas, the first hundred pages of the novel is laborious, as the usual fatal prologue is followed by two chapters going off to the Iron Island and Dorne in order to open up new plotting avenues.  There’s a definite break in structural form as Martin titles chapters using mysterious titles rather than the names readers were used to see.  The three leading characters by number of chapters aren’t even from the Stark family: Cersei, Jaime and Brienne have much of the book to themselves, although that usually translates into interminable treks in a devastated post-War Westeros.

    The title of the book hints at the gloominess of the setting (which turns into autumn as the foretold winter is coming), as the continent of Westeros wakes up from the ravages left by the War of the Five Kings.  Brienne and Jamie, in particular, each do their tour of the land, meeting ancillary characters while smelling the carrion.  Brienne remains herself, while Jamie continues his unlikely narrative redemption as one of the sanest characters left alive.  Meanwhile, the ten chapters given to his sister Cersei’s viewpoint do nothing to make her more likable: If Jamie got more likable as we got inside his head, Cersei gets progressively more despicable even as we understand her particular brand of madness.  Her inner monologue is that of a paranoid sociopath, and reading her chapters are like being stuck in a very unpleasant mind that keeps plotting (not very well) against a plethora of enemies both real and imagined.  Additionally, we do get a handful of interesting chapters from the perspective of the two Stark daughters, another not-so-interesting handful of chapters from Dorne and the Iron Island, engaging episodes of Samwell Tarly’s fearless journey to Oldtown and a few more new characters that, frankly, don’t do much to earn the reader’s affection.

    The problem with A Feast for Crows, however, isn’t as much with the characters as with the fact that little actually happens.  As the opening of this review suggests, Martin is setting up a new tetralogy’s worth of narrative threads, and with a series of this bulk, it takes time to put everything into place –so much time, in fact, that we can expect A Dance with Dragons to be more of the same.  (Late in this book, Petyr Baelish has a few lines about “wishing he had four or five more years” to set up his plans that hilariously reflect Martin’s own experience with the series.)

    This translates into a curious reading experience: While the main attraction of the series has been its deep immersive nature alongside a cast of thousands (no, really), it’s not designed for fast reading.  A Feast for Crows is even slower than any of the previous three books, and the conscious absence of half the characters only reinforces that this book feels like imposed exercise before getting to the good stuff.

    Not that there aren’t any rewards in here.  In addition to the numerous chapters of palace intrigue in King’s Landing there are plenty of rewards in-between the cracks of the novel: Alert readers will notice a short homage to “Archmaester Rigney”’s Wheel of Time series; and those who, ahem, go look up online concordances will find a lot of fascinating back-stories, some of them even acting as possible epilogues to striking characters from earlier books.  Martin appears to continue his heartless dismissal of beloved characters with a few minor deaths and what looks like a big cliff-hanger.

    Still, A Feast for Crows isn’t nearly as satisfying as the previous books in the series.  The events on the Iron Islands are dull (the ironmen are not sympathetic characters to begin with, and nothing that happens in this novel makes them look any better), while the Dorne chapters don’t seem to amount to much.  Much of the novel is spent setting up new elements, or looking at the wreckage left by the previous books and saying “well, that happened.”  Meanwhile, nothing (much) is happening, even though some of the latter chapters hold some promise.

    Fans of the series will read the novel anyway: it’s an essential bridge between A Storm of Swords and whatever form the continuation of the series will take.  It keeps up A Song of Fire and Ice’s immersive sense of detail, but it may also present a lesson of sorts to writers embarking on very long series –it’s not hard to feel as if Martin’s control over the story has slipped away from him, and that the book is a lengthy attempt to start wrestling it back.  Ultimately, we will have to wait for the entire series to be completed before passing final judgment on its installments.

  • The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

    The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Scholastic, 2008, 384 pages, C$19.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-439-02348-1

    So, what are the kids up to these days?  From the best-seller lists and the mass marketing push accompanying the release of The Hunger Games movie, it’s obvious that they’ve moved on from Twilight and Harry Potter onto Katniss, bow-wielding heroine of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy.  Tell no one, but I enjoy reading Young Adult books to find out where the zeitgeist’s at: They’re usually good books, don’t take too much time to read and they give conversational material in case I unaccountably find myself hosting a middle-school party.

    So it is that The Hunger Games (first volume of a trilogy by the same name) introduces the world of Panem, a post-apocalyptic North America that has the luxury of dispensing with every familiar social institution in order to set up a tyrannical regime in which the twelve districts of the empire are kept in their place through a cunning piece of social engineering: Annual survival games in which the districts each send two teenage participants.  The last of the 24 contestants left standing wins a title, and the district gets extra food rations. 

    As a premise, it’s far-fetched enough to make SF readers reach for their “one big deviation from reality is allowed” suspension-of-disbelief card.  There’s practically no precedent in American culture for this kind of deadly contest (no, reality TV doesn’t count), and you’d think that sacrificing 23 teenagers per year would stoke populist anger rather than put it in its place, but hey –one big deviation from reality is allowed.  This is a YA novel and its whole point is to pit teenagers against each other in a fight to the finish, no matter how thin the rationale leading to this point can be.

    Our heroine to guide us through the inevitable rebellion (but not yet, not in this first volume) is Katniss, a bright sixteen-year-old girl from poor District 12, the coal-mining Appalachian backwater of Panem.  As the novel begins, Katniss is struggling to put food on the table for the ineffective mom and younger sister.  Fortunately, she’s handy with a bow and isn’t afraid to venture beyond the fences of District 12 to hunt down wild game.  Otherwise, she’s got an ongoing not-quite-romance with neighborhood boy Gale and seems headed for a quiet life of eternal desperation.  But then… the games come calling and her sister is picked as a District 12 representative.  Fortunately, she can volunteer to take her place, and that’s how she ends up on a train to Capitol, stuck alongside a boy with a crush on her (Peeta) and a boozy mentor who hates them both.

    Things get more interesting during the lead-up to the Games, as Katniss and Peeta are groomed like reality TV contestants, a romantic storyline manufactured out of thin air to make them seem more compelling to the audience.  We get to see them undergo wardrobe design, physical training, TV interviews… and a few political games alongside hints of Capitol’s terrifying power.  Little of the background details sustain any kind of scrutiny: there’s enough advanced technology around to fix the problems that the Districts seem to be having, suggesting either a deliberately cruel society, or more plausibly incompetent world-building.

    Fortunately, there’s more to The Hunger Games than cardboard-thin landscapes: Katniss’s first-person narration is a no-nonsense blend of clipped sentences, tangled emotions, descriptive statements and overall skepticism when confronted to the wonders of Capitol.  She’s not buying into the mystique, but there’s little choice than to comply in order to get to the games.  She doesn’t have any illusions regarding her chances for survival, especially when confronted to the contestants from the richer districts that actually have training programs for Game contestants.  It doesn’t really help that Peeta reveals his crush on Katniss, and that their mentor seems particularly ineffective.

    Soon enough, though, the action moves into the gigantic arena of the Games, where fairness is just a concept to be discarded by the game-masters, and where some contestants band together to hunt down their isolated counterparts.  The book isn’t particularly sentimental about the violence perpetrated by the contestants (there’s even a mention of a particularly psychotic past contestant), all the best to raise the stakes against Katniss.  Much of the action takes place in a wilderness fortunately similar to District 12’s forested hills, and Katniss soon finds herself in the last half, then the last quarter of the surviving contestants.  There’s no doubt that she’ll survive, but it’s all in the way she defeats her opponents… some of them outside the arena.

    The Hunger Games survives its unconvincing premise thanks to a blend of effective prose, lively plotting and an admirable heroine.  Katniss is both endearing and credible: her abilities are impressive, but she has the self-doubts, indecision and cynicism of a teenage girl.  She’s not a victim, not a prize to be claimed by someone else and actively resents the “star-crossed couple” narrative imposed by the game organizers on Peeta and herself.  Even by the end of the novel, it’s not too clear whether her emotions about Peeta have settled in a definitive form.  It’s not surprising if the book has found a large audience in its target market, especially with young women.

    Given this, the success of The Hunger Games with its teen audience has a comforting lining to the edge of its violent premise.  It’s an engaging read, and while it’s hardly surprising, it does wrap up nicely and it sets up its two sequels effectively.  Better yet, it gives some compelling reason to read those two sequels… and given that a lot of box sets of the series are being sold in the wake of the film version’s success, that’s a really good thing.

  • The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton

    The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 1993 reprint of 1969 original, 270 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-099-42765-0

    I hadn’t read The Andromeda Strain in more than a decade and a half when a chance viewing of the classic 1971 film adaptation rekindled my interest in Michael Crichton’s breakout novel.  At an admirably concise 270 pages, the novel wasn’t going to crimp my limited reading time, and my accumulated shelves of already-read books aren’t just for showing off, right?

    You probably remember the premise, either from the novel’s best-selling reputation, the 1971 film or the 2008 miniseries: a satellite falls back on Earth, bringing back something that kills nearly everyone in a small Arizona town.  Four scientists are asked to investigate: Locked in a secret underground laboratory, they race against time to solve the mystery of the so-called Andromeda Strain before the inevitable “containment measures” escalate.  Briskly told at the cutting-edge of late-sixties technology, Crichton’s first best-seller is an unusual page-turner, enthralling readers through reams of well-written exposition, while codifying the conventions of the techno-thriller genre.

    Perhaps the biggest surprise of re-reading a 1969 techno-thriller is how gracefully it has aged.  There is no going around the fact that the book was written a long time ago: Any narrative that spends a few paragraph explaining how “time-sharing computers” work seems almost irremediably quaint in the age of ubiquitous smart-phones.  (If you want to feel old, consider that 1969 is now 43 years distant as of this writing.)  But despite the novel’s carefully-circumscribed focus on contemporary techno-scientific matters (if there are references to Vietnam or hippies in the book, a speed-read hasn’t revealed them), it’s animated by a decidedly contemporary intention to try to explain the world to the reader.  As a techno-thriller, it revels in the telling (sometimes made-up) detail that bridges the gap between fiction and reality.  For readers with finely-attuned genre-protocol antennas, it’s this willingness to engage the cutting-edge of the Known that, ironically, enough, makes the novel feel fresh.  If you accept that the general perception of reality lags behind the time, you can also argue that most people never bother to adjust their perception of reality beyond the model they learned as teenagers (which was often based on pop-culture, and so a few years behind the times).  Techno-thrillers and science-fiction are two genre that sometimes attempt to describe the scary implications of progress, and this attitude show no sign of growing old.  Compare The Andromeda Strain to something like Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (which applied the same didactic perspective to history) and it’s not hard to imagine that if a 2012 writer wanted to write a circa-1969 techno-thriller, he’d end up with something very similar to The Andromeda Strain.  Older books that age gracefully become period pieces.  In this light, having the author explain time-sharing computers takes on a new and not unpleasant flavour.

    The other substantial asset of the novel is Crichton’s uncanny ability to Make Stuff Up.  From 2012, it’s easier to tell fact from fiction: Kalocin (a drug that kills “every known virus, bacterium, fungus, and parasite”, with hideous consequences) doesn’t exist, obviously.  But you’d swear otherwise from The Andromeda Strain’s narrative, as seamlessly as the device is inserted in-between convincing technical details, documentary framing devices (“this is a reconstruction based on interviews…”) and frequent blurring between reality and fiction.  Crichton had a great ear for plausible-sounding nonsense, something that the careful explanation of the “Scoop” program (which is almost meaningless in the movie adaptation) makes amply clear.  Elsewhere in the narrative, the Odd Man Hypothesis (which “proves” that you want a single unmarried man to have a finger on the trigger of a nuclear device, although even the characters acknowledge that it’s an elaborate rationalization for a more sinister purpose) is bunk, but you could almost swear that it was the subject of a Malcolm Gladwell essay not too long ago.  This aptitude for believable lies may be worth recalling in studying Crichton’s entire bibliography, and most notably his romans provocateurs phase in-between Rising Sun and Next.

    All of these elements accumulate into a nice tight thriller in which, ironically enough, the characters don’t actually do all that much.  They poke and prod at the mystery, but ultimately can’t do much to fix the problem.  The protagonist’s big act of heroism consists in avoiding death, which may be laudable, but tends to obscure the War-of-the-Worldsian irony of the novel’s plot.  It’s either lazy plotting or a brilliant counter-weight to the novel’s detailed paean to the power of human ingenuity.  Latter techno-thrillers wouldn’t be as willing to acknowledge humanity’s lack of agency over doomsday threats.

    There’s little need to add that all of these factors, and a few more I don’t have the patience to list, make up for a 1969 book that is well worth a re-read even today.  It still exerts an undeniable fascination, and its place in history as a seminal thriller is practically assured.  You can find echoes of its impact today, but the original is still resonant.

  • A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin

    A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2011 reprint of 2000 original, 1216 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-553-57342-8

    George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice fantasy series may have been originally conceived as a trilogy, but by the time third volume A Storm of Sword wraps up, it’s obvious that we’re in for a much longer story.  The cast-of-thousands carnival of the story’s sprawling plot has seldom felt as chaotic, and the conclusion is nowhere in sight.  As ironic as the statement can be after a 1,216-pages book, it’s time to settle down and enjoy the ride.

    It goes without saying that long-running series have the strengths of their weaknesses, and vice-versa: There’s enough space and time to fully develop the world of the story, to pile on characters and see them evolve through dramatic changes in situation.  Properly handled, this can lead to a fundamentally different reading experience than single novels or even mere trilogies: an entertainment experience closer to a long-running TV series (in which Martin’s series is slowly being adapted) rather than anything else.

    On the other hand, multi-strand narratives featuring the proverbial cast-of-thousands can also test readers’ patience.  Not everything is equally compelling, and some characters are just annoying.  The setup/payoff cycles pacing, in particular, can be off for a while as the author builds plot-lines that will resolve later on.

    These strengths and weaknesses are particularly obvious in A Storm of Swords, which contains some of the dullest but also some of the finest moments of the series so far.  The first half of the book is about setting up dominoes; the second half is about upsetting them.  The wait is substantial, but the payoffs just keep happening once the book races to a conclusion.

    For series fans, it means that Arya keeps wandering around Westeros, never quite reaching her intended destinations.  It also means that she gets a long-awaited payoff late in the book.  Jon Snow keeps trudging through the snowy north, but he also gets a bit of recognition for his efforts at the conclusion.  Far away, Daenerys Targaryen is still in the process of trading a paperclip for a house a trio of dragons for an empire, but even the growing power of her fire-children can’t completely excuse the monotony of her quest so far away from everything we know about this world.  Closer to the center of action, Tyrion Lannister can’t get no respect as the unheralded savior of King’s Landing, but the book ends on a few shocking development that may make readers wonder about him and the nature of his revenge.

    Not that he’s the only character to be re-evaluated by readers.  One of the first groans in A Storm of Swords is seeing Martin give viewpoint chapters to Jamie Lannister, the no-good incestuous children-thrower who crippled Bran Stark at the very beginning of the series.  Imagine our surprise as Jamie undergoes enough extreme hardship to deserve some sympathy, and reveals himself to be more than a good-looking psychopathic warrior.  (It helps that he’s one of the wittiest characters around.)  Such, again, are the advantages of lengthy pre-planned series: Villains to heroes, and possibly heroes to villains.

    The first half of A Storm of Sword may not escape a bit of tedium (something that the narrative structure of the book, which locks itself in subjective point-of-view for lengthy chapters, does little to soften), but the accumulation of shocks and revelations in the book’s final third more than compensates for the initial slow burn.  Even readers who feel that they have spoiled themselves reading about the book will find that there are more surprises in store than they ever expected.  (Hint: don’t read about the “Red Wedding”.  Just accept that it’s coming and it’s going to be bad.)  HBO recently announced that A Storm of Swords would be adapted as seasons 3 and 4 of the Game of Thrones miniseries; I’m already looking forward to comments and reactions to the second half of season 4, as the body count piles up and characters start doing things that will surprise even their biggest fans.  It’s going to be a wild ride.  If people through season one was merciless, they haven’t seen anything yet…

    These adaptation considerations, of course, have no reflection on this third book, which eventually ranks as the strongest volume of the series so far.  Martin has embarked on an ambitious project with A Song of Ice and Fire, and A Storm of Swords suggest that he’s making things even harder on himself as he goes along.  In the wreckage of the book’s multi-strand conclusion, readers are expected to blink in astonishment and wonder… what’s next?

  • A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin

    A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2012 reprint of 1998 original, 1040 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-553-57990-1

    Reading a long and tightly-plotted series of books isn’t like other kinds of reading experiences.  Unlike loose series of novels, a fantasy saga spread over five books (so far) with dozens of characters and almost as many subplots demands commitment, patience and indulgence.  In fact, considering the experience of reading a fantasy series like George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice like a long-term relationship makes a whole lot of sense, especially in considering what to say about the second volume in a series. 

    The first volume is all about boundless expectations, the thrills of seeing something new and the giddiness at what’s going right.  A Game of Thrones spent so much time introducing its gigantic cast of characters, discussing eight thousand years of back-story, establishing its harsh and unforgiving tone (most notably in getting rid of its most honorable character) that readers couldn’t help but be enthralled at the result.  With second volume A Clash of Kings, however, the long-term relationship is starting to set and some of the charm is becoming an established pattern.

    If nothing else, the novel does deliver on the mayhem promised at the end of the first volume.  The king is dead, there’s considerable turmoil surrounding his succession and no less than five kings are proposing themselves as the rightful heir to the throne.  (How complex is this series’ plot?  Well, consider that one of the self-designated heirs is on another continent and remains unknown to the other four.)  After a first section in which it becomes clear that there will be no gentle alliances, the remainder of the book sees the four pretenders fight it out.  Westeros is scoured (peasants don’t have a good time during wars), various dirty tricks take place, fortresses fall and Martin once again presents his battles in an elliptical, highly subjective point of view.  One major battle midway through the book is averted through a shocking death that still remains unexplained by the end of the book (one of the hallmarks of the series are its longstanding mysteries), whereas the results of the second half of another major battle late in the book is announced through an unreliable character’s ranting.  Fans of battle action may want to confirm their impression that the series is not meant to wallow in lengthy fight sequences (although there’s a rather good naval engagement near the end of the book.)

    But never mind the broad strokes of the war of succession: What about the characters?  Long-form series such as this one live or die based on their cast of characters and whether we want to follow them along.  With nine viewpoint characters and about ten times that number of secondary speaking characters (and who knows how many named ones), there’s a lot of ground of cover.  Poor Arya gets hauled from one part of the continent to another, gradually regaining agency in the second half of the book.  Jon Snow goes trekking in the Great White North.  Tyrion Lannister gets the chance to prove how clever he actually is.  Theon Greyjoy gets less and less likable.  Mom-and-daughter Catelyn and Sansa Stark don’t do much but look on as other people do interesting things around them.  Meanwhile, far away, Daenerys Targaryen solidifies her power base and plots her return.  There are, mind you, a few significant plot developments.  Another king dies in mysterious circumstances; a mighty safe haven is burned down; two pretenders to the throne clash leaving one triumphant; and the Starks lose one major engagement, with several supporting characters killed in the process.

    More significantly, the series’ mostly hands-off approach to magic gets a bit less hands-off in this volume.  Characters comment that magic spells are becoming more effective; the best-informed of them suspect that dragons have something to do with it.  Reading between the lines, a red priestess seems to be raising all kinds of hell in the parts of the story our viewpoint characters can’t see, whereas the North’s zoo of bad critters seems to be poised to bring even more misery to the Seven Kingdoms.  Slowly, the action is reaching a boiling point.

    And “slowly” is a key word in this case.  One of the particularities of long-form series is that they favor depth and scope over pacing and intensity.  We do not experience these stories as a series of events as much as we live with the characters as the events occur around them.  The difference is as significant as watching a long-running TV show over a feature film: The ten-twenty hours of a series make up for a radically different pace from the energy of a two-hour film, and so Martin’s series is meant to be read leisurely.  There’s little instant gratification as plot threads and unanswered questions multiply: there is, however, a far stronger sense of identification with characters and sympathy at their odyssey.  This is a different kind of reading experience, and Martin’s better at building up the atmosphere required for this kind of narrative than most of his contemporaries. 

    If it means that readers have to be patient and enjoy the trip rather than being in a hurry to get to destination, then so be it.  The sequels will tell if the journey is worth the trip –in the meantime, it’s best to be swept along with the plot and make frequent reference to the cast of characters at the end of the book.  Because, as in any relationship, you get as much from Martins’ series are you’re willing to invest in it.  With A Song of Ice and Fire so far, Martin’s achievement has been to present a hugely detailed universe that rewards intense attention.  Even small characters can live fully and die (dis)honorably in the back-pages.  Such depth isn’t common, nor can it be found easily in smaller narratives.

    While even the kindest reviewers will note that A Clash of King may not carry the same punch as its predecessor (fewer set-pieces, repetition of effects, a sense of languid rhythm are all fair charges against this second volume), it does an effective job at carrying the story forward, delivering on a few promises and setting up further mayhem later during the series.  That’s good enough for most middle-volumes of series, and when it’s done as skillfully on a chapter-by-chapter basis as it is here, there’s little cause to complain.  A long and complex series is what readers asked for in reading this sequel, and A Clash of Kings delivers in that regard.

  • A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin

    A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2011 reprint of 1996 original, 864 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-553-57340-4

    When it comes to long-form epic fantasy, I have no scruples relying on social proof as a reading guide.  I’ll make my own damned reading decision with shorter books or in genres I like, but if I have to read a 5,000+ pages epic fantasy when I don’t particularly like either long-form stories or epic fantasy, it better be worth my time.  It’s been a fixture on the Hugo nomination ballot?  It’s a New York Times best-seller?  It has a monstrously big fan following?  It led to an HBO mini-series?  Those are all reassuring hints telling me that George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, as launched by A Game of Thrones, is better than the usual fantasy swill that I’ve become allergic to.

    I’ve had the first four books on my shelves for years now, but it took the HBO series and an extended amount of time spent at home to convince me to pull the trigger and start reading.  I have a few rules of thumbs when it comes to selecting books to read, and A Game of Thrones pitted two of them in a match to the finish.  Should “Read the book as soon as you can after seeing the movie” win over “Don’t read a series until all the books are out”?  Well, sure.  It’s not as if the last volume will be published before 2018 anyway…

    And let’s make one thing clear: The HBO series couldn’t be a better advertisement for the book.  Adapted with a surprising faithfulness to the source material, it’s a monumental ten-hour achievement that manages to portray an epic fantasy with dozens of characters and sweeping events within the scope of a TV series budget.  SF/Fantasy fans are used to reading books while understanding that they could never be adapted for the screen, but this is an exception. The casting is perfect (something that becomes clearer after reading the book), the advantages of a lengthy miniseries over a motion picture are cleverly exploited (by featuring depth of characters, density of plotting and a rhythm that has time to breathe) and it shows just enough to make would-be readers about the extra depth that the book could contain.  By the time the bittersweet conclusion of the first season rolls, it’s hard to take a look at Martin’s series lying on the bookshelf and resist the impulsion to read the first volume and rush through the subsequent books.

    The first surprise is the lack of surprise. Or, rather, it’s the satisfaction of seeing how closely the series has adhered to the novel.  There are a few changes, of course: Most of the young characters are even younger in the book (something that works better on the page that on-screen), the book is told in tight point-of-view that restricts the omniscient viewpoint of the series, and some scenes feel noticeably looser in the book, as if the series had tightened the bolts of an unwieldy mess of plots and sub-plots.

    But more significant are the similarities: Fans of the series will immediately recognize the characters, events and complex lineages that end up forming the backbone of the series.  The density of back-story that this first volume has to explain is such that having seen the series pays off almost immediately in the first few pages: References that would be meaningless to first-time reader are immediately understood, enhancing the immersion in this new universe.

    Commenting the story on its own merit, it’s now clear that Martin, when this first volume was published in 1996, was trying to deliver a somewhat grittier take on heroic fantasy than many of his colleagues.  The universe of A Song of Ice and Fire is tough and unsympathetic toward its heroes.  One of them falls because he is too moral for his surroundings; he even disgraces himself in vain in a bid to gain mercy for himself and his family.  Another dies of infection following a relatively minor wound.  This is a universe with stillborns, prostitutes, self-deluding would-be princesses and very little explicit magic despite hints that the world used to be far more interesting in this regard.  Most of the book is centered toward palace intrigue writ large, with warring factions being set up and lined for a fall.  (If the series had an earnest subtitle, it would be something like “Problems with the concept of hereditary succession, with many examples.”)  The temptation to be attached to characters is tempered by the suspicion that Martin is only too ready to kill them off at the slightest opportunity. 

    In short, A Game of Thrones takes familiar elements of classical epic fantasy and re-uses them competently.  The density of awe-inspiring wonders is less here than in other series, but the attention to characters, the depth of the imagined mythology and family lineage, the deceptively easy prose all combine to produce a smooth reading experience.  This is about as good as long-form epic fantasy ever gets, so it’s no big wonder if the series has gained such a popular following inside and outside the usual fantasy circles: It’s good, it’s handled with skill and (it always helps) it’s now even further enhanced by its TV adaptation. 

    The result is good enough to make me ignore my usual “don’t read books before the last volume is out” guideline.  It’s a roaring start to a promising series, and I’ve got four more books to go before I’m as caught up with it than the other fans.  Onward!

  • The Happiest Baby on the Block, Harvey Karp

    The Happiest Baby on the Block, Harvey Karp

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 2003, 288 pages, C$18.00 pb, ISBN 978-0-553-38146-7

    Part One: January 2012

    You may expect the reviews on this web site to be intended for visitors, as guides to good or bad reading, movies worth watching or avoiding: the self-styled blogger as one more voice in the cacophony of recommendations.  The truth is that more often than not, this site serves as a public archive of what I was thinking at a given moment –an online journal of striking experiences as mediated by movies and books, if you will.  So it is that in early 2012, few things weigh heavier on my mind than the imminent birth of my daughter.  I have planned in consequence; as far as this web site is concerned, I have made sure the coding can sustain a few months’ worth of inattention; more visibly, I have put up a semi-hiatus notice so that no one can expect me to post much in 2012.

    But that doesn’t mean I’m completely off the reviewing game.  You can turn a reviewer in a father, but you can’t entirely erase the reviewing impulse.  When I get my hands on a book such as The Happiest Baby on the Block, my second thoughts (after reading and absorbing its content) are to talk about it online.

    I picked up the book in the first place because it is a quasi-universal reference whenever expecting parents ask for recommendations online.  It usually follows the encyclopedic What to Expect The First Year (which is as review-proof as they come –just buy it!) as an essential resource in dealing against the dreaded colics, those endless crying bouts that seem to take so much out of new parents during the first three months of many babies’ lives.  The recommendations usually come along with a variation on “This really works”.  So; is there some truth in this book’s reputation?

    The only way to say for sure is to report back in three months.  In the meantime, though, there are a few things to say.

    The first is that The Happiest Baby on the Block is a very enjoyable read.  Karp writes at length about a fairly simple topic (much of the book can be summarized in a few words –swaddle, side, swing, shush, suck–, and in fact you will find a handy two-page summary of the book on pages 127-128, right where you’d break the spine to keep the book open) but he does so in a relatively entertaining fashion, with plenty of repetition, anecdotes, call-backs and amusing illustrations to make his point.  The repetition may be annoying, but it may also be essential for a book of this kind –you’re not going to read it at 3AM when baby’s bawling, so it does its best to repeat a simple message in many ways and hope that one of those formulations sticks in your mind long enough to be useful in the wee hours of the morning.

    Much of The Happiest Baby on the Block is built around the “Fourth Trimester” theory –based on the observation that babies don’t really start interacting with their environment until the three-month mark; Karp theorizes that the first three months of live are really a “fourth trimester” in which the just-born fetus becomes a true baby.  The better we understand and try to replicate the environment in which the baby has spent the first three trimesters, the better are our chances are at calming it down.  For instance, Carp reminds us that newborns like background noises (the womb is very noisy) and like to be coddled (they’ve been squeezed from every direction for months).  More audaciously, Karp looks at the evidence about colics to suggest that they’re often not about innate factors as much as they’re about developmental anxieties from babies suddenly experiencing the world.  He points at the lack of colics in other cultures and other hints to suggest to parents that colics can be controlled and managed –if not avoided entirely.

    There is, of course, a slight cultish tinge to Karp’s book: The first few chapters are classic “don’t listen to anyone else; only I have the truth” indoctrination.  The sometimes-cloying writing style makes the same point over and over.  Keep in mind the intended audience of the book, though: ultra-stressed sleep-deprived parents seeking any kind of reassurance.  At least one friend has compared infant-caring to brainwashing (no sleep, constant focus on one individual and repetitive mindless tasks –hello, Geneva Convention abuse hotline?) and it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to imagine Karp trying to impose another kind of brainwashing over the one created by the newborn.  The fact that the book comes accompanied by an online store filled with a small galaxy of related products (Web site!  DVD! CD! Blanket), and is prefaced by celebrity endorsements (including one by “Pierce Brosnan… environmentalist and actor”) will count as negatives for readers eager to distrust the too-slick “baby MD to the stars” approach.

    Still, it’s a fun read.  The writing style is easy to grasp and the book is greatly enhanced by a number of adorable Parisian-style cartoons illustrations by Jennifer Kalis (“You will soon fall in love with a bald stranger who doesn’t speak a word of English.”)  The book’s primary value for expectant fathers without much baby-handling experience is to offer a framework of things to do in handling a newborn: Reading the book is a huge confidence-booster while anticipating baby’s arrival.

    But, of course, there’s no way to be sure whether the book works until we make it out of the first three months.

    Part Two: May 2012

    Now that our daughter has celebrated her sixteenth week, we can almost safely say that we’re out of the colics danger zone.  And the biggest news to report on this front is… nothing.  Baby has cried a lot during these past three-and-a-half months (her parents will never take sleep for granted ever again) but there have not been any extended bouts of unexplainable crying.  Most of the time, baby cried briefly or for easily-identifiable reasons (most of them gas-related) and we were able to clam baby down by applying the techniques described in the book.

    So there’s your review of The Happiest Baby on the Block.

    The confidence-booster in reading the book can’t be overestimated.  We started applying the book’s calming techniques moments after birth (most dramatically trying to calm down baby while blood samples were being taken by the nurses) and haven’t really stopped so far.  As someone with non-existent baby-handling experience, the book’s recommendations were immediately helpful in knowing how to handle a baby and calm her down.  While the effectiveness of some techniques has ebbed over the past sixteen weeks (swaddling was immediately helpful the first three weeks but became counterproductive once baby grew; pacifiers only became useful around week six), the overall message that crying can be controlled was a huge help in approaching the issue.  The book keeps telling readers to apply calming measures vigorously, to be persistent, and meet the baby with an appropriate level of effort: This helped a lot in sticking to the plan and as a result, baby seldom cried more than a few minutes at a time.

    The big question becomes; were we exceptionally lucky in having a good non-colicky newborn, or did the book help?  My own suspicion, based on nothing more than a hunch, is that babies can often be “programmed” to go into colics, or conversely avoid them.  Reading the book may have helped us create an environment in which baby has always been effectively reassured, hence unlikely to resort to the kind of constant crying that drives parents crazy.  It helped us calm down the nagging doubts that we may be spoiling the baby by providing this much attention (at nearly four months, we are only now progressively leaving her by herself for longer periods of time) and helped us figure out what was likely happening.

    For expectant parents, The Happiest Baby on the Block shouldn’t be your only pre-birth reading material (taking care of a baby is a project of vast scope, and this only covers “calming down baby”) but it’s likely to become an essential set of tools in dealing with the chaos of the first few weeks following birth.  It’s a morale-booster, a conceptual framework (especially helpful if you’re the analytical kind –and here you are reading book reviews, aren’t you?) and a helpful guide at once.  It’ll help.  Don’t worry.

  • American Steel, Richard Preston

    American Steel, Richard Preston

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 1992 reprint of 1991 original, 278 pages, C$12.00 pb, ISBN 0-380-71822-7

    Even two decades later, journalist Richard Preston is still best-known for The Hot Zone, a mesmerizing account of deadly viruses run amok.  A few follow-ups, including The Demon in the Freezer and the novel The Cobra Event followed; his collection of non-fiction pieces was even titled Panic in Level 4 as a nod to his best-selling work.  But Preston’s bibliography is more diverse than just deadly viruses, and 1987’s American Steel is a good demonstration of his versatility in telling us about the renewal of the US Steel industry as exemplified by the construction of a Nucor facility in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

    Preston was allowed access to the site as it was being built and tested; no insignificant achievement as the “Crawfordsville Project” tried to build a new kind of facility at a time where few were willing to even bet on the company’s chances of success.  The history of US steel-making, explains Preston, is one where gigantic steelwork operations were gradually replaced by nimbler, smaller competitors.  The “mini-mills” led by technological innovation, a willingness to deal in smaller profit margins and a belief that they could do better jobs if they specialized in specific market niches.  The Crawfordsville project was one of those status-upsetting move; an American company using German technology to develop a machine that could transform rusting carcasses into shining new metal.

    One of the most surprising facts from American Steel, especially to 2011 readers, is the blanket statement that over half the steel used in the US in the mid-eighties was recycled.  (This figure has since gone up significantly.)  Newer steelworks don’t refine iron ore extracted from the ground as much as they recast existing iron in newer forms; the Crawfordsville location was selected in part because it was geographically located close enough to the ruins of the “rust belt” and amply served by train lines carrying recyclable metal.

    But machinery is far from American Steel’s only concerns, especially not when steelworkers prove to be such memorable characters.  It takes a special kind of man to work in a steel foundry, explains Preston; trying to manipulate hot steel with cold steel is a bit like building a water machine with ice, except that renegade hot steel tends to explode, melt human bodies and destroy buildings.  Working in such facilities means always being ready to run outside at a moment’s notice, breaking bones after jumping down platforms if the alternative is being burnt alive.  Those steelworkers are the focus of the book, and hanging with them as they work hard and party even harder becomes one of the Preston’s ways to involve the reader with his subject matter.

    You would think that presenting a corporate history of parent corporation Nucor would be relatively dull in comparison, but that’s not considering the tortuous road taken by automobile manufacturer REO (as in “REO Speedwagon”, the O of REO also standing for “Olds” as in Oldsmobile –it’s a complicated story) as it transformed itself in a Nuclear-focused company (hence “NUclear CORporation”), then as a holding company for various ventures before realizing that the best profits were to be made in the steel industry.  Nucor eventually became one of the most aggressive of the US steelmakers that renewed US steel production.  What contemporary readers know is that the electric arc furnace-driven mini-mills as exemplified by Nucor did manage to remake the US steel industry to their image: Once-mighty corporate behemoths such as blast furnace-powered Bethlehem and U.S. Steel have closed down, bought by mini-mills or been restructured in smaller entities.  There’s a darker side to Nucor’s success in its opposition to labour unions, but Preston also portrays a corporation with few management perks, a strong emphasis on humane working conditions and no layoffs to date.  The safety of Nucor’s plants is disputed throughout the book; a spectacular blow-out with fatal consequences at the Crawfordsville plant is discussed in one of the last chapters.

    While the book isn’t perfect (some of the dialogues are so steeped in steel-making jargon that they give a flavour of the workers but no real understanding) and could now use at least one updated afterword to bring us up to speed with the latest developments regarding the industry, American Steel is a fine and gripping non-fiction account of a fascinating and dangerous industry.  Considering our reliance on steel produced in facilities just like the Crawfordsville plant, it’s not a bad idea to pay attention to those kinds of things.

  • The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy

    The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Fontana Press, 1989 reprint of 1988 original, 898 pages, C$14.95 tp, ISBN 0-00-686052-4

    Continuing self-education for its own sake is seldom acknowledged in contemporary North-American culture.  There is a strong bias in favour of adult education if it has clear monetary advantages (ie; adult students getting degrees required for better employment) but there seems to be little to no discussion of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, simply to learn more about the world.  We’re expected to perfect our knowledge of matters such as world history in High School, and never think about it again unless it’s somehow part of our jobs.

    Nice theory, but if you’re a product of the modern education system, chances are that world history wasn’t your most compelling subject.  You probably learned about history as it led to the state of your country, with next to no overview about what else happened in the world at the time.  That’s… not ideal, but neither is it one of the big scandals of our society.  History, it can be argued, can’t be fully appreciated by individuals who scarcely have any sense of antecedents.  High School students barely have a past of their own –how can they be expected to think of civilizations are entities lasting hundreds of years?

    This ties into Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers insofar as it remains, even nearly twenty-five years later, one of the best and most readable overviews of world history between 1500 and 1988.  (The book’s subtitle promises “Economic change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000” and that’s a fair assessment, but then there’s the important “1989 – Fall of the Soviet Empire” asterisk to consider.)  This is the remedial class-in-a-book that adult readers may have been asking for, looking at world history from a very broad perspective in an attempt to contextualize the rest.

    It begins by describing the world circa-1500, noting as part of its first sentence that nothing at the time would have suggested Europe’s dominant role in world affairs during the next 500 years: Barely out of the dark ages, severely backwards compared to the Ming, Mogul, Persian or Ottoman Empires, Europe wasn’t seen as a particularly interesting player.  But Europe had the advantage of many smaller opposing kingdoms, all of them jockeying for dominance and nearly all of them ready for radical experiments with technology, economics and political systems.  Over the next half-millennium, the intense wars played over a small territory would lead Europe to dominance over their complacent neighbors.

    Of course “intense wars played over a small territory” is all of European History until 1945 and “Western Europe” is really a basket full of various empires fighting it out viciously.  (For a French-Canadian, reading about European history is an exercise in cheering for either England or France as they take on the rest of the world.)  The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers does an exemplary job at explaining the changing fortunes of each empire as it rises or declines, based on technological advances, enlightened policy decisions or the availability (or lack) of resources.  Names from the past emerge and disappear; why is it that I was never taught about the Habsburg Empire?  Who forgot to tell me about Amsterdam’s pivotal role in world affairs?  Ah, and this is what happened to the Austrian Empire…  and here’s why France squandered its advantages despite all the pro-French propaganda I was taught in High School.

    As much as any other book I’ve read this year, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was a learning experience.  Kennedy writes about world-spanning subjects, but does so with a witty prose style, clear explanations, solid documentation and well-developed theses.  It took me much longer than usual to page through the book, but I don’t regret a moment of it.

    The weaker portion of the narrative follows World War 2, as Kennedy studies Cold War history and engages in nearly a hundred pages’ worth of predictions regarding the world’s circa-1988 power blocks.  It’s duller because it’s more familiar, but I should note that much of his predictions seem spot-on nearly a quarter of a decade later.  Kennedy isn’t particularly optimistic about Japan’s chances (something that economic crises and demographic implosion have since confirmed), is bullish about China (confirmed), thinks well of Europe’s chances as a unified power block (damaged by 2011’s Euro crisis, but still very much the case), is pessimistic about the Soviet Union (confirmed in spade by is implosion two years later) and is cautiously bullish about the United States.

    That last statement unpacks a bit with nearly 25 years’ worth of hindsight.  After considering half a millennium’s worth of history, readers may look at the invasion of Iraq and the United States’ current fiscal problems as a chilling demonstration of the kind of imperial overreach that have doomed empires before.  You can make a case that resource acquisition, at least in 2003, was behind the US actions in the Middle-East; you can also now make a case that like many empires before (or, ahem, during the Vietnam war), the US severely over-extended itself in a doomed attempt to secure its vital resources.  Kennedy, by 1987, was already predicting the end of the bipolar world in favour of geopolitics with several competing power blocks and it’s hard not to use the hindsight offered by his book as further evidence that this is happening.  It’s even possible that, having weakening itself through an entirely optional military adventure, the US has hastened its ongoing decline vis-à-vis other power blocks.

    So it is that by the time I re-emerged from The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, eyes blinking in the sunlight, I felt as if I had crammed a semester’s worth of world history and written a paper on the topic.  The kind of heady sensation isn’t the only reason to keep on learning new things, but it’s near the top of the list.

  • An Unusual Angle, Greg Egan

    An Unusual Angle, Greg Egan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Norstrilia Press, 1983, 200 pages, ISBN 0-909106-12-6 

    Authors who publish at a very young age (that is; before they’re ready) should be aware that anything they’ve written remains in their bibliography forever.  I’m not a big fan of holding earlier works against authors who later went on to write more polished works (everyone is allowed a few youthful indiscretions, and mine happen to be available elsewhere on this web site), but it’s certainly interesting to go and have a look at early works and draw links with what followed.

    Ask around, for instance, and most Science-Fiction fans will tell you that Australian hard-SF superstar Greg Egan’s first novel was 1992’s Quarantine, published after Egan made a name for himself as a writer of fine short stories.  The truth, as more knowledgeable bibliographers know, is that Egan’s real first novel publication dates back to 1983’s An Unusual Angle, a novel that straddles the line between psychological drama and deniable fantasy.  Egan having being born in 1961, it would mean that the novel would have been written and published in his early twenties.

    From the plot summary, we can guess that this is a novel by a writer barely out of school: It’s about a young man going through Australian high school and commenting on the inanity of what surrounds him.  Our narrator tells us that he has a camera in his skull, but that he can’t get the film out.  Much of the novel allows for some artistic discretion as to whether this is a literary device, a delusion or the truth.  (The final chapter, if taken literally, settles the question more conclusively.)

    The point of the conceit is to allow Egan to describe four years of high school with a strongly detached narrator and movie-based metaphors.  Our narrator is brighter than anyone else around him, and seems passionate about film.  He describes school assemblies on a shot-per-shot basis, with occasional flights of fancy disavowed a few lines later.  Strongly isolated in his own head, the narrator has few (if any) friends, certainly nothing as conventional as a girlfriend and actually seems to despise both everyone and everything that’s not from him.  The cumulative impact of such an attitude against the world is toxic; the narrator becomes obnoxious, as the narrative can’t seem to find any joy in the world.  (And I say this as someone who often regarded high school in much the same “I’m bored; when does the real world begin?” attitude as our narrator here –twenty years of perspective works wonders at being embarrassed at our younger selves.)

    Here and there, mind you, we can find glimmers of Egan’s later motifs and techniques.  Our narrator is unusually quick to explain the world in scientific concepts that wouldn’t be out of place in much of Egan’s later fiction.  The way he explains the camera in his skull is the kind of exotic biology that would pop up in his latter short stories.  Furthermore, the impulsion to dismiss much of the imposed events of the ordinary world and seek excitement in outlandish fantasies is common to many hard-SF readers, regardless of their age.

    All of these quirks and hints make An Unusual Angle an unusually interesting read, especially for those who have read nearly everything else by Egan.  Even by SF standards, Egan often stands alone (his hard-SF novels often earn the distinction to be too hard for even dedicated hard-SF readers) and this sense of exceptionality permeates his first novel from beginning to end.  While Egan hasn’t disavowed this novel, he may regard it as non-essential work: a trawl through his extensive web site reveals only two mentions of An Unusual Angle: Once within his official bibliography, and another within an interview discussion of early publishing efforts.  So let us regard this first novel as a curio, and celebrate Quarantine as the real start of his body of work.