Book Review

  • Web Bloopers, Jeff Johnson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morgan Kaufmann, 2003, 329 pages, C$75.00 tpb, ISBN 1-55860-840-0

    As someone with more than a passing interest in web design (I know enough about what I don’t know enough to avoid calling myself a “web designer”), any book that wants to tell me what I shouldn’t do will be met with a mixture of eagerness and wariness: Yay for the hints and tricks, but really, who are you to tell me what to do?

    For Web Bloopers, usability expert Jeff Johnson scoured the web for examples of bad design and collected the worst examples. Government sites, educational sites, even commercial sites are all implacably dissected for lousy usability features in sixty “common web design mistakes”, themselves split in three parts (“Content and functionality”, “User Interface” and “Presentation”) and eight chapters. Aside from the mandatory screen-shots, Johnson describes and dissects the bloopers in detail, then presents solutions to avoid them. Most of the examples are illustrations of things to avoid, but some others are highlighted as best practises worth emulating.

    Like most technical books destined to a professional audience, this one doesn’t come cheaply at nearly 75 Canadian dollars. But the flip-side is that few expenses have been spared to give the book a generous design. There are enough illustrations in here to satisfy even the most demanding readers. (Though the accompanying text often tends to run ahead of the illustrating material) The layout is free enough to accommodate illustrations, annotations, cartoons, footnotes and very generous amounts of text.

    Perhaps too much text, in fact. Johnson has a tendency to repeat material and describe things in too much detail. His straightforward writing style works well when comes the time to present straight-up information, but it’s a fair thing to say that no-one will read this book for the style alone. Furthermore, the solutions he offers to solve the mistakes he describes are often implicit in the description of the problem. A lot of them simply boil down to “don’t do this”, which is a bit useless after an entire page of “this is not right because…”

    Now don’t get the wrong impression: “Too much detail” is a very minor sin in the litany of problems a technical book can suffer from. While Web Bloopers doesn’t have the same density of information-per-square-inch as Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think!, not everyone can be Steve Krug. (Nor can everyone get Steve Krug to pen the foreword to their book, as Johnson has been able to do here.) If you assume that the book will more frequently be read by non-technical web managers rather than actual webmasters, the repetition almost becomes essential.

    As someone with a fair bit of web design experience, it was almost inevitable that I would have objections to some of Johnson’s “bloopers”. Non-standard link colours (#53), for instance, aren’t always a mistake; well-used, they can be a boon to the site’s design. (But a cursory recognition of this is included ) Redundant navigation schemes (#16) can, once again, be immensely helpful when properly used. Johnson’s perspective may be influenced by his experience in application GUI design; the web is evolving its own usability standards, and those often run at odds with the “usual” common wisdom. Then you have to consider the target audience of Web Bloopers, more likely corporate web managers than independent web designers willing to push the envelope and purposefully break rules.

    But a few disagreements here and there shouldn’t be interpreted as a dislike of the whole book: By and large, Johnston succeeds in presenting an invaluable collection of web design mistakes to avoid. The web would be a much better place if the principles of the book could be drilled into the heads of those wacky webmasters poisoning the experience for all of us. Yours truly included.

  • Blind Lake, Robert Charles Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2003, 399 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30262-4

    The most interesting thing about Robert Charles Wilson’s career is how he’s been able to re-invent himself and raise the quality of his work from very ordinary first novels to his current Hugo-award level. While Blind Lake may not be as good as The Chronoliths (even though opinions will certainly differ), it’s still a solid work of modern science-fiction from an author who knows what he’s doing.

    It doesn’t start out all that promisingly, if by “promisingly” you mean “Ooh! I have to read this right away!”: We’ve seen top-secret scientific bases elsewhere in fiction, we’ve seen “remote viewing” elsewhere and we’ve seen marital strife elsewhere too. But just wait: From the first few pages (in which one of our protagonists lives the morning aftermath of a one-night stand copiously sprinkled with illicit substances), it’s obvious that this is one novel that is going to take its time and avoid the usual clichés of bygone SF. The novel quickly shapes itself around four characters: A divorced scientist chafing against the restraints of objectivity, her manipulative ex-husband, their troubled daughter and a journalist with plenty of accumulated guilt.

    When those four characters are isolated from the real world, along with the rest of the staff at the “Blind Lake” scientific facility, tensions are left free to rise and boil over. The strife between the heroine and her ex-husband keep worsening, dragging along the sympathetic journalist. People are left to wonder why the entire world has cut them off. The daughter resumes having unusually persistent hallucinations. And the very purpose of the scientific facility changes when their subject of study (an alien they can track on its own planet thanks to a quasi-magical technology) dramatically changes its daily habits.

    It’s not a story that can be summarized in a few exciting lines. But don’t worry: Wilson makes it ridiculously easy to be engrossed in the lives of its characters, and milks a lot of effective scenes out of low-key events. To an unusual degree, the characters take as much space as the plotting… not that the plotting is in any way deficient once things start rolling. The mysteries of the book are sustained just long enough to make us interested in reading the next page, then the one after that, and yet another… before you know it, you’ve read the whole thing in a straight afternoon.

    Technically, Wilson has seldom been better, and it’s little tricks of the trade that show how much he has progressed since his early books. While he’s not a scientist, his novel is about scientists and he creates a believable bunch of them, along with the required technical and administrative support required in a modern research facility. He slights the jargon just right, with enough detail to satisfy and yet not too much to bore. (I was especially impressed by the way he described how the “mysterious” technology at the core of the book’s science got so weird: It’s still mysterious to the scientists in the story, but at least we as readers know exactly why it’s mysterious.) By shutting the real world out of the novel’s setting, Wilson is also able to use small hints and references (such as the “Saudi conflict” and the none-too-pleasant-sounding “North American economic confederacy”) to suggest a plausible future society without actually spending too much time describing it.

    Not that the entire novel is so credible, of course; it’s hard to imagine the feasibility of a complete shutdown of data transfers, even less so an extended one. The ending of the book is also surprisingly tepid despite the scope of the revelations and the sense of a good story well-told. I suppose that different readers will have different impressions.

    This being said, I found a delicious parallel between the plight of the isolated scientists, watching an alien far way, and the possibility that they themselves had to be watched by the rest of the world outside their perimeter. And yet another parallel with us, readers, watching them in their fishbowl…

    I wouldn’t have read the novel so quickly after its release had it not been nominated for the Best Novel Hugo Award. But having done so, I find it ranking pleasantly high on my list of 2003 SF novels. After such great books as The Perseids and The Chrononolith, Wilson continues his winning streak with Blind Lake. I wonder: what’s next for him?

  • Hacking Matter, Wil McCarthy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Basic Books, 2003, 222 pages, C$40.00 hc, ISBN 0-465-04428-X

    Oh sure, you know all about nanotechnology. The science-fiction you read describes atoms being rearranged all over the place and you’ve already put a pre-order on Amazon for the first prototype of the HomeNano universal assembler brewing kit. Good for you.

    But wait a minute: Not only is high-end nanotech a while away from Wal-Mart, it’s not even clear if it will solve everything we expect it to fix: Issues of energy requirements, information transfer, safe control and speed of operation continue to confound even the sharpest thinkers on the subject. Even when you’re done doing all you can, nanotech simply rearranges atoms around; it can’t create new elements and probably will take a while to work.

    Programmable matter is something else. A theoretical concept based on real-world research in the strange properties of quantum dots, it bridges the gap between straight-up nanotech and coarser material sciences. In theory, one could end up with a silicon material that could be programmed at will to emulate the characteristics of other elements, maybe even elements we haven’t yet discovered. While the actual real-world implementations of the technology are still a far way away, the theoretical underpinning seem reasonably solid. Hacking Matter is an overview of the subject, from the labs to the theory to the speculations.

    Fortunately, a uniquely qualified author is at he helm. Wil McCarthy is best-known in some circles as a capable science-fiction writer, one whose career has progressed from run-of-the-mill SF adventures (Aggressor Six) to meatier fare (Bloom). But McCarthy is also a tech journalist and an engineer and Hacking Matter is the ideal book for someone at the intersection of those three fields: Not only is he capable of vulgarizing the subject matter, he’s able to speculate on where it’s going, and even make useful contributions to the field himself.

    After a whiz-bang intro featuring some of the most outlandish speculations about programmable matter (including what happens when you bash artificial iron with a golf club), McCarthy settles down to the painstaking business of explaining the science behind the speculations. Don’t worry if your high-school physics are too far away to be useful; just keep reading until you reach the conclusions. It boils down to an arrangement of silicon in such a way that electrons are made to behave in unnatural ways. How unnatural? Well, unnaturally enough to recreate the properties of other elements that don’t exist. Unnaturally enough to change behaviour at the flick of a switch.

    Thanks to descriptions of the Boston-area research centres where this is taking place, interviews with the concerned scientists and the other usual tools of good scientific journalism, McCarthy efficiently illustrates the field’s current state of the art. But the book truly hits its stride when McCarthy-the-journalist cedes the stage to McCarthy-the-SF-writer. After a meaty chapter on how architecture (houses, cities, etc.) will be revolutionized by programmable matter, it’s hard not to wish for these cool toys, right away. There’s more good stuff squirrelled away in the last chapter (along with a comparative examination of other life-altering technologies currently inching out of laboratories), and if you want even more, well, there’s always McCarthy “Queendome of Sol” science-fiction trilogy.

    How credible is that stuff? Though it certain sound credible, that’s not neally for me to say. But simply consider this: McCarthy-the-engineer has his name on a patent application for a “Wellstone”. He obviously believes in it, and so do the scientists currently working on the field. (Check the latest version of the “Programmable Matter FAQ” for more details.) The history of science has progressed from far less likely concepts.

    And so Hacking Matter remains a tease of bigger things to come; clocking in at 175 pages without appendices and the index, it’s leaves us hanging just as things get interesting. A fitting impression for a book describing cutting-edge tech: How are we going to perceive this book in twenty years? As an overly-optimistic pop-science work, or the first mention of a commonplace technology?

  • Tilt, Nicholas Shrady

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 2003, 161 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-7432-2926-6

    Designers will be the first to tell you you that design isn’t about funky colours, outlandish forms or eye-splitting typography. Design is, more than anything else, the art of solving problems. A well-designed chair is, simply put, more useful, more comfortable, more perfectly a chair than a badly-designed one. Granted, design can also be beautiful (ugliness is just another type of problem, after all) and not all problems are solvable at the same time (a chair designed to “solve” high manufacturing costs may not present the same solutions as a chair designed to “solve” lack-of-comfort), but those are minor issues when measured against the goal of good design.

    In publishing, the biggest problem is simple: How do you sell a book? How to you convince your average book-buyer to take hard-won money and exchange it for a mixture of paper, ink and glue? Success is measured both individually (has at least one individual been convinced to buy a book that, with an inferior design, would otherwise have been left on the shelves?) and collectively (has the publisher made more money on the book than would have been the case with a lesser design?)

    While I can’t say anything about the overall success of Nicholas Shrady’s Tilt (I did, after all, find it at a discount bookstore), I’m the living example of individual design success: Had the book been ordinary, I would have left it on the shelf without a second thought. The subject isn’t that compelling to me. But throw it a little bit of inspired design and, whoops, there I find myself at the cash register.

    You see, Tilt is no ordinary book-as-a-physical-object. Rather than being as square as most of the other books you’ll see in your life, this short history of the Tower of Pisa is… skewed. It’s a parallelogram. The edges of the books don’t meet at 90 degrees. Open the book flat, and it looks like a fat chevron. Put the book upright on the table and it tilts… just like the Tower of Pisa (albeit at a sharper angle).

    It’s a gimmick, of course, but also an inspired piece of design. Everyone knows the tower of Pisa because it’s skewed, because it’s unusual, because it looks as if it’s not supposed to exist like that. Well, Tilt is exactly like that.

    As a “biography” of Pisa and it’s infamous campanile, Tilt is slight but serviceable. At a scant 161 pages, it’s not very profound, and even pads its subject matter with (not uninteresting) digressions on Galileo and Italian history. It’s readable, features a few fascinating facts, includes a fair number of illustrations and pictures (though not quite enough to my own liking) and does its share to debunk many rumours about the Tower’s history (not built for skewing, not an experimentation site for Galileo). Even readers with a casual interest in the subject will get what they seek. If nothing else, it’s a lovely little (too little) piece of engineering non-fiction.

    But let me go back to the subject of the book’s design, given that it has its share of problems. For one thing, the interior design of the book hasn’t been optimized to take advantage of the tilt: The recurring page numbering and book titles are uncomfortably close to the edge, and copious amount of blank space is left in the “extra” areas. Maybe that’s part of the point (if the campanile wasn’t built to be skewed, why should it be the case with the book?), but it leads me to suspect that the skewed design was finalized after the interior layout of the book. The dust jacket itself is skewed.

    The second issue is that in Tilt‘s case, the design doesn’t just overshadows the content of the book; it stomps on it and leaves it as a mere afterthought. Just look at this review; I’ve spend one mere paragraph on the book’s content, and the rest of the words discussing the actual physical object. An ordinary version of Tilt may not have been bought, but it would have been reviewed with a greater attention to the actual quality of the text.

    Yes, sometime design can be too successful. And I’m not just saying that because I bought the book knowing fully well that I will never figure how to position it on my bookshelves.

  • Rules of Engagement, Gordon Kent

    Rules of Engagement, Gordon Kent

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 1998, 474 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-17858-7

    If you read a lot of military thrillers, you may feel as if you can know everything about this book merely by reading the cover jacket: A young naval aviator following the footsteps of his celebrated father. A mysterious accident during a combat mission. The hunt for a traitor. Ah-ha.

    Reading the first few chapters, in which our protagonist comes to learn about life on-board an aircraft carrier, you may even feel that your assumptions are correct: This is going to be yet another average military thriller, with plenty of military details and vignettes, all leading up to a confrontation with the evil traitor. With a few combat scenes.

    Well, the above summary is not entirely incorrect (especially the part about the final confrontation), but the twists and turns in the tale make it a little different from the usual military thriller.

    For one thing, the biggest departure takes place as soon as the protagonist ends his tour of duty and goes back stateside for an assignment in naval intelligence. Yep; no more aircraft carrier life for us as we’re thrown, unusually enough, in the mechanics of intelligence analysis at home. While you’d except a fictional traitor to be exposed within days, Rules of Engagement stretches out over weeks, then months, then years. The death of the protagonist’s father is investigated, then dropped, then raised again.

    Rules of Engagement is, at times, a military thriller, a procedural mystery, an adventure novel and a spy suspense. The story twists and turns, characters are introduced or dropped (I especially liked the sudden revelation of the hero’s initial love interest as a promiscuous, coke-addled schemestress. Whew!) as the story is told over years, spanning the Gulf War (carefully kept in the background, if you can believe that of a military thriller) and the evolution of a career. Even the usual right-wing slant of most military fiction seems carefully leashed here, a smart choice that will broaden the book’s appeal to all sorts of readers.

    The focus on desk-bound analysis and intelligence work is certainly interesting: Apprehending a traitor takes a lot of work from several people, and it’s a treat to see this treated as a bureaucratic endeavour, with a team of investigators and the usual amount of red tape. The way this is mixed with spycraft and military protocols is quite intriguing and does a lot to distinguish this novel from countless other similar novels. Gordon Kent (actually a pseudonym for Ken and Christian Cameron, a father-and-son team whose web site can be found at www.navnow.com) knows his stuff and shows an impressive ability to ground his fiction in believable reality. It all moves more slowly than usual, but there are a lot of good details in this book.

    That’s good, but is it good enough? Well, it all depends on your tolerance for drawn-out plots. At some point near the novel’s two-third mark, things are proceeding too rapidly: The villain has been identified and all that’s left is to apprehend him. But, just as the novel should slide smoothly to a perfect finish, complications arise, and an unwelcome fourth act springs from the third, transforming the cloak-and-dagger intrigue to an adventure in a dangerous foreign land. It may sound intriguing, but once it happens, it’s hard to keep going the extra mile along with the author; a shorter finish would have done much to keep the best parts of the novel intact. As it is, the pleasantness of the book is almost stretched beyond reasonable indulgence by the last hundred pages.

    It’s still a pretty good book, mind you. But the lengths are barely justifiable in the context of a genre novel which should move as quickly as possible. It doesn’t help that the conclusion requires the involvement of another major character who really shouldn’t have been involved. Still, if that’s the kind of thing unlikely to bother you, there are certainly worse novels out there than this intriguing debut.

  • The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, Neal Pollack

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Perennial, 2002, 205 pages, C$20.95 tpb, ISBN 0-06-000453-3

    I suppose that there’s something to be said about blogs when it comes to self-marketing: Had I not already been under the spell of Neal Pollack’s prose and his pleas to buy his books, it’s unlikely that I would have picked up his stuff at the local remainder sale. Hurrah for shameless self-promotion!

    Now, keep in mind that Neal Pollack is the very definition of shamelessly self-promoting writer. (And I don’t say this as if it’s a bad thing) His latest book, Never Mind the Pollacks, is a rock-and-roll novel telling the story of Neal Pollack, famous rock journalist and confidante to rockstars from Elvis Presley to Kurt Cobain. His first book, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, is a mock collection of snippets from the decades-long career of Neal Pollack, greatest American writer. While Never Mind he Pollacks is best left to those with enough knowledge of rock to appreciate the fine in-jokes, the Anthology is something else.

    For one thing, I suspect that it’s a bit more accessible to everyone. In this book, Neal Pollack’s character is that of a writer as a rock star, a fantastically self-absorbed man’s man whose universe revolves around him. It may be useful to be an avid magazine reader to piece together the pieces of his parodies (I kept flashing back to Sebastian Junger’s Fire pieces myself), but the bombastic quality of Pollack’s alter-ego is amusing enough that even people unaware of, say, Norman Mailer, will laugh along.

    The biggest wonder of the Anthology, surprisingly enough, is that it sustains this simple satiric concept for a full two hundred pages. Pieced together as an anthology of “Pollack”’s forty-year-long journalism career, it’s merely an excuse to explore different themes and subjects as a knuckle-busting, hard-drinking man’s man. “Pollack” has been everywhere from the USSR to Mexico, has written back from countless wars, has seduced hundreds of women (most of whom just have to hear his name before cooing “take me!”), is best buddies with this world’s leading figures (but especially John McCain) and has stopped at least one dastardly plot against the USA. Whew! Just take a look at some of the chapter titles: “I Am Friends With a Working-Class Black Woman”, “The Burden of Internet Celebrity”, “Why Am I So Handsome?”… An interview with his sister is, of course, all about him. Hubris seems too small a word for this oversize personality.

    (The “real” Neal Pollack, should you be spoilsport enough to ask, is in his thirties and is only beginning to take the literary world by storm. If he exists at all. But the real danger in reviewing Pollack is in either trying to be as funny as him, or doubt nothing.)

    In some ways, this is reminiscent of Mark Leyner’s Et tu, Babe?, another delicious piece of humour writing in which the author was left free to push the limits of literary self-disillusion to insane levels. While Leyner’s book was funnier (c’mon; visceral tattoos?), Pollack’s Anthology holds better as a unit. As a parody of those other “anthologies of literature”, it’s pitch-perfect… from the ancillary material (chronology, family tree, study guide…) to the tapestry of the star protagonist’s imagined career. Faked photos included.

    From what I can gather, the original hardcover version of the Anthology, as published by McSweeney’s, was a superb design parody of this type of book. (Head over to Amazon, and “look inside” the hardcover for a few extra laughs) While the Harper Perennial edition isn’t quite as respectable-looking, it does contain a third more material, and even brings up “Pollack”’s career to the Post-WTC era. It also includes Jack Shafer’s New York Times Book Review piece on the Anthology, which says everything I wanted to say about it, and better. (Bastard.)

    I’m always a sucker for satire, and this one is better than most. While the book didn’t make me laugh out loud constantly, I had a hard time wiping a constant smirk off my face; The only reason not to read it in a single sitting is running out of time. (Hey Neal; you can use this as a blurb: “There aren’t enough hours in a day for Neal Pollack.”) Witty, well-executed and liable to make you look at literary celebrities in a whole new light, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature is well-worth a look. Even if Neal Pollack’s ceaseless stream of self-promotion hasn’t yet reached you.

  • The Shores of Tomorrow (Chronicles of Solace #3), Roger MacBride Allen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2003, 493 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58365-4

    It’s not uncommon for third volumes of trilogies to make up for lacklustre middle tomes. Heck, it’s not unknown for conclusions alone to save entire series. But what’s not as common is for trilogies to dissolve as blandly as the Chronicles of Solace does in The Shores of Tomorrow.

    Actually, allow me to rephrase that: There is nothing strictly wrong with the way The Shores of Tomorrow wraps up the material first explored in The Depths of Time and The Ocean of Years. Nothing at all; the story of Solace is decently concluded, there’s a happy ending, characters get what they deserve and we finally see the logical implications of the series’ pet concepts.

    But what could have been done in fifty pages was stretched out to nearly ten times that. Worse: beyond the obvious waste of time, this lack of concision ends up harming other areas of the trilogy.

    If you can muster up the courage to go read my reviews of the trilogy’s first two volumes, it’s obvious that even from the first book, the series had serious pacing problems. Developments that could have been shown in a few lines took entire chapters to unfold, with preciously few marginal gains as far as pure entertainment was concerned. This tendency reaches an apex of sorts in The Shores of Tomorrow, especially when you consider the NovaSpot ignition sequence, a tense plot point that ends up spread over 90 pages of fluff.

    It gets worse when you consider the useless plot threads that are carelessly thrown in the mix. Despite the “Chronicles of Solace” designation for the entire series, there’s little doubt that the real story told here is the one of Anton Koffield and his quest to uncover and then understand Oskar DeSilvo. All else is sideshow, which becomes increasingly intrusive as the third book unfolds and the action is indefinitely delayed. Book One had its share of sideshows, and they make a return here; Any competent editor would have cut the “Elber Malloon” scenes, so peripheral are they to the book’s main story. But no; they’re all there along with even more filler. I buy trilogies with the assumption that they contain enough material for three books; here, it becomes obvious, after the fact, that the Chronicles of Solace is a two-book, maybe even a single book’s worth of intrigue.

    I can understand a deliberate and careful pacing when it’s leading up to something worthwhile, or when it’s sustained to enhance suspense. But there’s no real reason to delay anything in this story, especially given its race-against-the-clock quality as a failing world is at stake.

    But this slow-poke pacing has another effect that may be even more disastrous: It allows the reader to think about the story as it goes along, and even start to out-think the writer. When Oskar DeSilvo outlines his grand unified theory of terraforming, cultural stagnation and technological development, we’ve been waiting for it so long that it comes off as obvious and maybe even trite. The “solution” to the terraforming crisis was implicit at the end of volume one, and the characters were just too blind to see it. Allen stretches his central concept so much that he nearly snaps it. The whole “Chronological Patrol” concept, already iffy at first glance, suffers a lot from the extended story treatment; I doubt that it would have been as unconvincing in a single zippy 400-page novel.

    The other thing that bothered me about the trilogy’s intellectual climax is that it acknowledges humanity’s thirst for knowledge and innovation, and then immediately says that it can be delayed indefinitely. Not bloody likely, and that reflects badly on the series. Again; I doubt that I would have been so severe in the context of a short story or a single novel, but trilogies demand a higher degree of scrutiny.

    Take scissors, start cutting, end with a 500-page singleton and maybe the Chronicles of Solace would be worth a recommendation. As it stands now, there’s far too much build-up for too little pay-off. There are a few good ideas, the second volume has nifty material and the ending is suitably optimistic, but frankly, you could read three better single novels for the time and money you’d otherwise spend on this series. It’s no wonder if the last two volumes didn’t even get a hardcover edition.

  • Spin State, Chris Moriarty

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2003, 485 pages, C$17.95 tpb, ISBN 0-553-38213-6

    For me, one of Science Fiction’s more endearing qualities is its capacity to imagine neat futures where most of today’s less interesting problems are neatly solved away. Distances are erased, material needs are satisfied and reason takes over as a dominant conflict-solving mechanism. Humans are, at last, left to work on the most interesting problems –and half the fun is in figuring out which ones those can be.

    Such an interesting future is not in the cards for the protagonists of Chris Moriarty’s Spin State, a 2003 Philip K. Dick award-nominated first novel by a brand-new author who’s also seriously vying for the 2004 Campbell award. Once again, scarcity rears its ugly head, and millions suffer for lack of something: “Coal. Oil. Uranium. Water. This is not the first time humanity has depended on a nonrenewable resource.” [P.153] In this case, the nonrenewable resource is Bose-Einstein condensates, a substance that allows faster-than-light communication and teleportation. There’s one catch, though: Bose-Einstein condensates doesn’t occur in nature save from inside a coal mine on a backwater world called Compson’s World.

    As luck has it, that’s where protagonist Catherine Li comes from. But despite her best efforts at staying away, a series of unfortunate events lead her back home as the lead investigator in the mysterious death of a top-ranking scientist. As you can expect, complications rapidly accumulate: The scientist shares the same DNA as the protagonist, Compson’s World is on the edge of rebellion and Bose-Einstein condensates are a major source of friction between the UN-led Earth and the breakaway Syndicates. As is the norm with SF thrillers, the murder case quickly morphs into a nexus of major forces. Throw in a few AIs, genetic discrimination, twisted allegiances and long-buried secrets and it will take more than enhanced reflexes and superior combat abilities for Li to get out of the situation relatively intact.

    In some ways, Spin State is a solid SF thriller in the noirish vein. In others, it’s an attempt to integrate a few good ideas. It’s a typical first novel, filled with promises and yet not completely successful.

    There’s not a lot that’s wrong with the novel, mind you: A lot of the initial ideas are intriguing and introduced with skill. Li is adequately twisted: as a super-agent for the UN, she’s not terribly beautiful, remains wracked with neuroses, can’t trust a soul and has a quasi-omnipotent (yet completely untrustworthy) AI as a best friend. Far from the slick superhero of so much SF, Catherine Li works quite well as a real protagonist.

    But I kept waiting for Spin State to become more than something average, and that never happened. It’s far too long, for one thing: Cut at least a hundred pages of the interminable investigation (which doesn’t really pay off when the real story starts moving) and we’ll start talking again. Other annoyances are there; the contrived excuse to set a Science Fiction novel in a coal mine, coupled with unconvincing “evil leper mutant” discrimination yadda-yadda. Let’s move on, shall we? One of the book’s last big revelations is blindingly obvious hundreds of pages before, as soon as coral is mentioned. Though the book flaunts itself as hard-SF and includes pages of bibliographical references on quantum physics, not a lot of explicit science makes its way in the novel itself.

    (It doesn’t help that, by sheer coincidence, Spin State follows on the heels of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, a superior novel that just happens to touch upon some of the same subjects in a far more energetic fashion.)

    All told, it’s hard to read the novel with anything approaching enthusiasm. I trudged on out of duty and obligation, awaiting the magic spark that would ignite everything. Oh, I don’t begrudge the money I spent on the novel, or the time it took me to read it… but it’s not making me overly anxious to rush out and get Moriarty’s next book. One thing that SF can’t solve is scarcity of time and money… especially when it comes to reading more SF, some unpleasant choices must be made.

    (One final note; I’m a bit dismayed at the carefully gender-neutral jacket blurb and author biography. Yes, a trip to Chris Moriarty’s official web site will reveal Moriarty’s gender. But surely we know better than to assume that hard-SF readers will avoid works by a woman writer? Why the deception?)

  • The Ocean of Years (Chronicles of Solace #2), Roger MacBride Allen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2002, 441 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58364-6

    It is true that publishers are in the business of making money, not telling the truth. Still, you have to wonder at the relationship between the two when marketing ploys backfire. When, for instance, books like Roger MacBride Allen’s The Depths of Time come out and the only reference to it as the first book of a trilogy is buried, by inference, in the author’s note. Readers (and reviewers) charge through the novel only to find an ending that doesn’t solve much. And then Bantam Spectra wonders why sales tank.

    Unfortunately, sequel The Ocean of Years suffered from the stupidity of the original book’s marketing: Whereas the first volume was available in trade paperback format, this one was relegated to a cheapo mass-market paperback debut edition. As consolation, the follow-up book is more forthright about what it is, as can be read on the title page: “Second book of The Chronicles of Solace.”

    When we’d last left series protagonist Anton Koffield, he had just found out why he was marooned 128 years in a future not his own: A devilish plot by mastermind Oskar DeSilvo to prevent him from telling a secret too soon. But a lot of things happen in 128 years, and so Koffield also happened to come across nagging clues leading him to the current hideout of DeSilvo. As The Depths of Time ended, we were left with one certitude: Koffield was going to solve the puzzle, track down DeSilvo and ask him a few good questions.

    So it shouldn’t be a surprise if he does exactly that in the sequel. Travelling with a band of characters with as much interest in DeSilvo’s answers, Koffield makes his way to the Solar System of year 5341. Then their group splits up in search of clues, sending emissaries to Earth itself and the Grand Library in orbit around Neptune.

    One of the book’s highlight happens then, as three characters make their way through the gargantuan Permanent Physical Collection, a mega-library to end all libraries. So big that they have to hike in it, making their way from own human-livable reading room to another (the books are kept in a pure nitrogen atmosphere to ensure their preservation) to find out the real state of the physical terraforming collection as opposed to the one in the digital archives. Library freaks are sure to enjoy this passage, much like another latter one in a forbidden museum. MacBride Allen surely knows how to exploit environments that should be dear to anyone likely to be reading this trilogy.

    Secrets, archives, knowledge and patient clue-hunting form the backbone of this second volume. Save for a desperate what-are-they-going-to-do-now sequence in chapters 18-20, and a tiny act of physical violence at the very end of the book, there isn’t much conventional action in The Ocean of Years. It’s all exploration, searching, deduction and cogitation. Old-school science-fiction by any yardstick, this is the kind of comfortable genre novel that would be familiar for any pre-New Wave SF reader in the Asimov vein. There is nothing beyond a PG rating in this trilogy so far.

    Alas, the pacing is just about what you’d expect from brainy novels that take place in libraries. Just like in the first volume, the first hundred pages don’t mean much. Just like in the first volume, we spend a lot of time going from one place to another. Just like in the first volume, the characters think a lot before they ever act. It’s not a bad thing per se (it certainly creates an atmosphere, maintains the suspense and heighten the action whenever there is some) but there’s no telling what a more succinct version of the same events might have gained. The prose is compelling enough that it doesn’t matter a whole lot if it’s 400 pages rather than 200, but if the difference would have been a single 600-pages tome rather than a full 1200-pages trilogy, well, I know where my loyalties lies.

    Still, don’t think that I’m giving anything less than a good rating to this book and the series as it stands at the end of the second volume. There’s a lot of well-developed ideas here, a bunch of sympathetic characters, crystal-clear prose and a great sense of discovery as we peel away the layers of this imagined universe. Stay tuned for the final review of this trilogy.

  • Double Whammy, Carl Hiaasen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1987, 320 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-35276-4

    Over the years, I never had the luck to actually sit down and read one of Carl Hiaasen’s novels despite the good things heard about them. That changed when Double Whammy landed in my reading stack. If it’s any indication of what Hiaasen is capable, I just may have found a new favourite author.

    In the mystery genre, Hiaasen is often mentioned as being part of the “Florida school”, along with such writers as Lawrence Shames, Dave Berry and James W. Hall: Apart from the Sunshine State as a common setting, all of these writers also share a highly atypical sense of humour, especially when you compare it to the usual dour brand of crime fiction. I’m always a sucker for silly laughs, so it was only a matter of time before I got to Hiaasen’s stuff.

    Suffice to say that Double Whammy is an interesting introduction. Would you expect, for instance, a thrilling laugh-filled novel about bass fishing? It starts when R.J. Decker, a Miami-based private detective (also an ex-newspaper photographer, also an ex-husband, also an ex-convict), is hired to catch a bass tournament cheater in flagrante delicto. Soon enough, clues then bodies accumulate and it’s hard for Decker to deny that he’s stuck in a situation that goes way beyond getting the biggest fish.

    The laughs are obviously Double Whammy‘s biggest attraction. Hiaasen’s sarcastic eye for details does wonders at satirizing redneck America and the dangerous silliness that seems to permeate Florida. His improbable characters at generously fleshed-out: even the bit players all have a distinguishing trait or two. The narrative often takes tangents to describe an aspect of Floridian life or another, with smile-stretching results.

    But Hiaasen’s less overt accomplishment is to manage a delicate balance between tragedy and comedy without renouncing the funny stuff. There is a lot of truly nasty material in this novel, and a lesser writer may have been unable to reconcile the two. Beyond the murder and maiming of sympathetic characters, Double Whammy makes sure to remain in the domain of unlikely reality, rather than plunge ahead into a straight-out comedic vein. (Read Dave Berry’s stuff for that… not that there’s anything wrong with a pure comedy) Beyond the laughter, there is an array of serious issues brought forth in the novel, from environmental concerns to the easy media manipulation of crowds. But here too, the message doesn’t overshadow the plot as Hiaasen moves his pieces too quickly to dwell on any single element.

    Indeed, Double Whammy holds its own in the plot department against thicker and more serious novels. Anything you think you can depend upon at the novel’s beginning is overturned sooner or later. The protagonist is revealed to be someone with a bottomless reservoir of issues. Characters switch allegiance. Twists abound. Revelations are made. Readers are thrilled.

    All of that would be for naught if it wasn’t for Hiaasen’s impeccable style. So-called “humorous” crime fiction is not an easy thing to write and several writers have only managed a marginal success trying to do so (Joseph Wambaugh, I’m looking at you). Here, fortunately, we’re in good hands: The prose is straightforward and the scenes fly by. The quick-paced resolution ties everything together. Truly excellent beach reading, should you be so inclined.

    In short, a wonderful introduction to the Hiaasen oeuvre, and one that is likely to keep me coming back for more. Given my existing predilection for Shames and Barry, I just have to wonder –what is it they put in Florida’s water supply…?

  • Separation of Power, Vince Flynn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 2001, 436 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-04734-5

    After the trashing I gave to Flynn’s previous The Third Option, you would think that I’d stay away from any of his other books, let alone a direct sequel. But hope springs eternal, some authors can be forgiven the occasional awful novel and it’s entirely possible to succumb at a used book sale where everything is cheap, cheap, cheap.

    So, onward with Separation of Power, which picks up moments after the conclusion of The Third Option. Once again, villains are running rampant over Washington and flawless hero Mitch Rapp is hunting them down. His attempts to find the real culprits of the previous book’s events soon take him to Italy (along with his civilian fiancée), where he’ll have to deal with a beautiful yet deadly assassin straight out of Central Casting. Meanwhile, brainy Irene Kennedy has been nominated to become the director of the CIA, drawing out plenty of political enemies, and Saddam is hiding nuclear weapons under an hospital in downtown Baghdad. Separation of Power isn’t quite a three-ring circus, but it’s scattered enough to make anyone feel like it is.

    I should probably tone down my sarcastic tone right away, though, because even though Separation or Power breaks no new ground and is unlikely to be celebrated by anyone but the author’s most ardent fans, it’s still much better than The Third Option.

    Oh, the annoyances picked up in the previous volume are still there: If there’s one genre that should just avoid series, it’s thrillers: Part of the fun of reading a suspense novel is in wondering how far the author will push it. Will presidents be killed, cities destroyed, countries devastated? Or will everyone live to sell another novel? When The Third Option ended with a pat “to be continued” promise, I surely wasn’t the only one to ask for my money back. At least Separation of Power offers a conclusion of sorts, even if it’s rushed in the last few pages.

    Alas, Flynn is still padding his books with useless material. Had Separation of Power been half of its length, I wouldn’t be so picky. (Heck, had The Third Option and Separation of Power been one single 400-pages novel, I might have given it a passing recommendation) But when Flynn piles useless scenes one after another right when the plot should get underway, it’s hard to be forgiving. It all reaches an exasperating apogee in the latter half of the novel, as we take a trip through pure soap-opera romantic theatrics, reading pages after pages of mopping even as we know that it’s profoundly silly. Someone needs an editor, and quickly!

    Fortunately, there is some good material buried under the morass of indifferent passages. Two good action scenes come late in the novel, saving it from total lack of interest. Plot-wise, it’s obvious that Flynn loves complications without understanding how they could all relate together: The connections between the three plot lines are tenuous if not ridiculous (see how Mitch Rapp gets to participate in all three for no good reason whatsoever!), even as they sheer kinetic force of the conclusion creates interest whether we want it or not.

    (I should probably make a note of this as being Yet Another Pre-9/11 Anti-Saddam Novel. In retrospect, there’s plenty of material in 1990-2001 American thrillers to show the widespread blood thirst that America had for Saddam Hussein’s regime. Canny social psychologists will undoubtedly mutter something about how the Bush II regime was able to tap into those unconscious feelings to obtain popular support for an unjustified invasion. But I digress severely.)

    All told, Separation of Power marks a slight step up for Flynn. It’s still average in almost all aspects, but at least it’s not actively bad, nor as dull as The Third Option. But we’re still far away from the promise shown in either of his first two novels: Before he started churning out those formula products, Vince Flynn had the spark of a real thriller author. Let’s just hope that he’ll regain it someday soon.

  • Singularity Sky, Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2003, 313 pages, C$36.00 hc, ISBN 0-441-01072-5

    These reviews are often written to share my joy at coming across fine examples of genre fiction. Dull books I ignore and bad books I warn about, but it’s the good ones that keep me going month after month. While I won’t try to pretend that Singularity Sky is a classic for the ages, it’s a damn good example of what modern SF should be, and a fine way to spend some quality reading time.

    It starts with phones falling from the sky in what looks like a pre-industrial world. No, it’s not a Nokia stunt: These freebies from heaven are the first signal of an alien invasion. Answer the phone and you’ll be asked to entertain the mind at the other end of the line. In return, your wishes can be granted, with an emphasis on materialistic possessions. Within days, the tranquil bucolic existence of that particular planet is shattered through centuries worth of future shock all hitting at once. Imagine going from horses to nanotechnology in a single day for a taste of the trauma.

    There are much bigger forces at play here, though. The assaulted planet is part of an Russian-styled empire that isn’t too thrilled by the sudden technological spike. So, completely misunderstanding the nature of the invasion, they answer with an attack force and a plan to futz around causality through judicious time-travel.

    But wait! It gets better, because in Stross’ imagined post-singularity universe, the Eschaton has become a force for causal enforcement. Twiddle with time too much and you’ll wake up to your sun going supernova. So Earth itself has put special agents in place to enforce compliance before the Eschaton does… and that’s where protagonists Rachel Mansour and Martin Springfield come in, two agents with hidden agendas. Expect the usual boy-meets-girl stuff (well done) and graft on to this plot the traditional complications.

    Obviously, plotting isn’t the main attraction here, not when we’ve got a vigorously imagined future to kick around. One of Singularity Sky‘s most satisfying aspect is how it reconciles once more the space opera genre with the increasingly probable eventuality of a singularity. By focusing on the left-behinds, by showing different levels of technology interacting with one another, Stross creates tension from above (the threat from the Eschaton) and manages to fit all the good old space battles of golden-age SF with what we now suspect from the universe. It’s canny world-building, and one of the most obvious proofs that Stross is a hard-core SF writer with an easy familiarity with the genre. He certainly can talk the talk, what with the easy sprinkling of technological jargon, future technologies and nifty ideas. (As an added attraction, I’m not sure that the novel is even intelligible to anyone who doesn’t know already a lot about science-fiction) He’s from the Internet generation and it shows, through the novel’s ideological message and the various in-jokes hidden here and there throughout the novel. Make no mistake: this is a deeply amusing book, filled with well-placed silliness (MP-3 missiles?) and compulsively readable despite an impressive density of ideas.

    Still, some of the plot points weaken the overall impact of the novel. Viewed from afar, the novel is a shaggy dog story that, despite the amusing plot developments, ends pretty much exactly as could be deduced from the first fifty pages. It’s also filled with tangents of dubious interest, the worst of which has to be the “Felix” plot thread and the gratuitous space combat scenes. Parricidal elements of the ending stretch plausibility, even in the context of a light-hearted science-fiction story.

    Not that I’m seriously complaining: Anyone who has read more than a few of these reviews already knows that for me, fun trumps structure six days of the week. And so Singularity Sky easily finds a spot on my short list of the year’s best novels. It’s vivid, imaginative, fresh and dynamic. It deftly mixes science and politics. It’s one of the best examples of twenty-first century science-fiction. It reaffirms my growing admiration for Stross’ work and tells me that not all is lost for the genre.

    In fact, I’m so jazzed-up about Singularity Sky that I’m looking forward to the sequel (Iron Sunrise, due Any Time Now) with some trepidation. And that, for someone who doesn’t usually like the whole idea of sequels, is really saying something.

  • All Tomorrow’s Parties, William Gibson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Putnam, 1999, 277 pages, C$34.99 hc, ISBN 0-399-14579-6

    Few first novels have been as successful as William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which hit the science-fiction scene twenty years ago already. It wasn’t just a dynamite book; it coalesced the then-nascent cyberpunk movement and was later co-opted by the mainstream (from Billy Idol to the Wachowski Brothers) as the new face of futurism. Gibson’s subsequent career couldn’t be anything but a let-down. While avoiding spectacular failure, his latter works have been steadily less ambitious from a strictly-extrapolative standpoint. Subsequent novels, while exceedingly well-written, elicited as many shrugs than bravos.

    With All Tomorrow’s Parties, Gibson concludes the “Bridge” trilogy launched by Virtual Light in 1994 and loosely continued in 1996’s Idoru. Characters from both books are back, and so is their universe, with a special place for a Golden Gate Bridge converted in a bohemian paradise. Fans of Gibson’s elliptic storytelling know better than to expect a tidy conclusion. But for all of its flaws, All Tomorrow’s Parties does contain a plot of sorts, and Gibson’s strongest narrative thread since Mona Lisa Overdrive, the resolution of his first trilogy.

    (There are in fact many similitudes between both All Tomorrow’s Parties and my memories of Mona Lisa Overdrive, from the Really Important Object carried by the protagonists, to similar “siege” situations to Gibson’s usual shtick of describing important scenes from a drug-afflicted viewpoint. Remember kids: it ain’t plagiarism if you’re stealing from yourself!)

    It’s not a particularly strong plot, but at least it gives the impression of forward movement. All is set in motion when Idoru‘s data wizard Laney contacts Virtual Light‘s Ryder to be his hands on the ground at what he thinks will be ground zero for a new revolution in human affairs: San Francisco. Before long, old characters meet again, killers are on the loose, human destiny is subtly altered and the street once again demonstrates new uses for high technology.

    It’s all handled competently. I’m not sure if it’s me mellowing since I read Idoru back in 1997, but All Tomorrow’s Parties seemed more accessible, more interesting and more enjoyable than its prequel. Here, we’re back at the guns-and-perils roots of cyberpunk: if all else fails, constant danger to the protagonists can at least sustain basic readability.

    But plotting and intrigue are the wrong reasons to read a William Gibson novel. As usual, his writing is a cut above the rest of what’s to be found elsewhere in the genre: He has an uncanny knack at finding the first description, at seamlessly integrating future artifacts in normal situation and in depicting the banal ways new technologies can be used and abused.

    Sadly, elements of his usual vision are starting to be tiresome. The whole cyber-grunge aesthetic movement has played itself out since Neuromancer and there’s scarcely anything interesting any more in following the homeless set as they set out to confront the next step in human history. Gibson’s novel have seldom featured normal character with whom to sympathize, and All Tomorrow’s Parties is no exception. It often hovers around deja-vu, or even quasi-parody. If it had featured another author’s name on the cover, I’m not sure I’d be so kind.

    Still, it’s a step up from Idoru and a better science-fiction novel than most of what was published in 1999. As millennial SF, it may even be emblematic. But now that we’re in the century described by Gibson, maybe it’s time to start thinking about something else. Gibson may be able to coast forever on Neuromancer‘s reputation… but that’s no reason for him to do so.

  • The First Wives’ Club, Olivia Goldsmith

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Poseidon Press, 1992, 441 pages, C$25.00 hc, ISBN 0-671-74693-6

    As a science-fiction geek, a techno-nerd, a cynic, heck, a young man, I’m not exactly the poster-perfect fan for Olivia Goldsmith’s oeuvre. But look closer: Not only will I admit a deep romantic streak, but Goldsmith’s books aren’t quite your usual run-of-the-mill romantic fiction for women.

    All of the reasons why are obvious in The First Wives Club, Goldsmith’s first published novel. (and the one most likely to be remembered given its status as a mildly successful film back in 1996) All the ingredients that would later surface in what I’ve read of hers (from Fashionably Late to The Bestseller) are all there: the frank language, the adult content, the heavy-handed morality, the use of strong female protagonists, the delightful prose style… For a novel, it’s a pretty good read. For a first novel it’s even more impressive.

    The main dramatic arc (though it would be more appropriate to speak of a comic arc) is straight female-empowerment stuff: Dumped by their husbands for younger, more vapid second wives, our heroic trio decides to get mad and get even. Add to that the new romantic interests of the trio and their ex-husbands, the usual gallery of helpful secondary characters (including the de-rigueur flamboyant homosexual confidante) and you’ve got a cast of dozens with plenty of potential for social satire. There’s a “no trophy” icon embedded in the binding of the Pantheon Press hardcover edition, and it effectively summarizes the take-no-prisoner attitude of the protagonists. Hell hath no fury…

    Some may be tempted to describe the book as man-hating propaganda. But those tedious pundits would probably be the kind of people to protest the oppression of the modern male, and you won’t get two guesses as to what I think of those people. (Or why they’d be better off in self-assertion therapy.) The truth is that the Wives’ revenge would have been useless if their ex-husbands hadn’t all been crooks and perverts. Sicking the IRS one someone is useless unless there’s real financial trickery involved, right? Painting the antagonists as out-and-out villains may not be especially subtle nor realistic, (nor does it reflect well on our poor heroic trio; what the heck were they thinking when they married these guys?) but it’s not gratuitous man-bashing. Goldsmith, more than in any other of her other books, deals in archetypes. It is, after all, a light-hearted revenge fantasy: It’s not as if knives and squishy body parts are involved.

    What is involved, however, is a series of good scenes, especially if you’re a fan of over-the-top bonkbusters. You can almost see the blueprint behind the prose, the conscious attempt to write commercial fiction, the carefully-measured doses of sex and foul language. But scarcely any of that matters once you’re willing to play ball and sympathize with a trio of too-rich women with something to prove. The prose flies, the characters are speedily defined and scarcely any time is lost in attempts at sophistication. The New York social scene takes its lumps and even if there’s something almost annoying in how Goldsmith makes the same points over and over again, it’s hard to be resentful (or even dismissive) when we’re having some much fun.

    As a first novel, it’s a good prototype for Goldsmith’s later string of novels. The one thing that seems to have been refined later on is not the heavy-handed moral ending of her stories, but the delightful suspense in knowing if a character will commit to good or evil. Here, everything initially painted as one or another ends up with the same alignment. Latter books would at least allow some latitude in that choice (though appropriate fates would still befall the characters). I can’t help but think that in a latter book, Mort Cushman’s purgatory would have resulted in moral re-alignment, redemption and maybe even a faintly positive ending. Here, well… maybe in the sequel.

    All in all, though, it’s a worthwhile fun book, not particularly deep but amusing enough to please anyone looking for a few hours of entertainment. I wonder how the film compares, though…?

  • Mystic River, Dennis Lehane

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Torch, 2001, 448 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-380-73185-1

    Books are usually better than movies; that’s not a revelation. But reading Mystic River after seeing the film may provide the clearest illustration of why this is so. Hint; it’s all about bandwidth, baby.

    The first mistake in comparing cinema with prose is using mis-matching examples. Bad books novelized from bad films. Great books that end up being sucky films. Good books that are adapted in good movies that are completely different from the source. No, comparing the two requires an adaptation that is as close as possible to the original material. Needless to say, there aren’t many of these: For some reasons (usually money, insecure production personnel and the perils of collaborative endeavours), film adaptation usually bear only a passing resemblance to the original material. Endings are different. Characters are concatenated. Subplots are eliminated. Only very rarely do you find an adapted film that adheres to the original. It’s even rarer to find a good movie that stays true to a good book.

    MYSTIC RIVER is all that. Scripted with great skill by Brian Helgeland, it does an astonishing job at following the novel almost scene by scene, beat by beat. It’s exceedingly rare to find such fidelity, even more unusual to find that both versions are excellent. (Helgeland himself is no stranger to adaptations, though his 1997 take on L.A. Confidential is a perfect example of a good book turned in a great film that is nonetheless very different from the source)

    There’s no doubt about it: Mystic River is a great story, on the page or on film. A rich crime drama featuring complex characters and heart-wrenching choices, Dennis Lehane’s story escapes from the strict confines of crime-fiction by studying the effects of a murder on the victim’s friends and family, not strictly through the lens of the investigating sleuths. There is a mystery to be solved (and entertainingly so, should I add), but it’s not the main focus of the story. It’s the fragile relationships between three old friends, the environment they live in, their grief and their misguided attempts at justice that end up providing a quasi-tragic feel to the story.

    Anyone with a good grasp of the mystery genre already knows about the book’s reputation or the honours received by the film. There’s no need for me to say that it’s almost an essential piece of genre fiction. Just read or watch it already.

    But for literary film geeks like myself, reading Mystic River after seeing the film is a breathtaking demonstration of the strengths and weaknesses of cinema as an art-form. Given the fidelity of the story, it’s easier to see what, in the background, makes the two ways of telling the story so different.

    To put it simply, the book’s 450 pages allow for a deeper understanding of the story. There is simply more information given about the characters’ state of mind than on the screen. It may not be so atmospheric nor so immersive (It’s easy to sit and watch the film, giving it two hours and a half to just flow without conscious effort), but it certainly communicates the author’s intention more effectively. In On Writing, Stephen King memorably refers to writing as a crude attempt at telepathy. Here, it’s obvious that the prose gets to the marrow of the characters more efficiently that the complicated narrative mechanics of a film. It wouldn’t have mattered in an action-driven film (oh, why don’t you go read the Godzilla novelization?), but it’s absolutely crucial in a story that takes some much time and effort fiddling with its characters as Mystic River.

    Even for fans of the film, the book delivers an entirely new experience; it’s like getting the real story behind the story, with all of its ramifications, historical antecedents and complicated motivations. Suddenly, sketchy movie moments become iconic representations of messy situations. None of that should be a knock against Helgeland, director Clint Eastwood or any of the talented actors involved in the making of the film. It should just be seen as a honest, all-cards-on-the-table comparison between two ways of telling the very same story.