Book Review

  • Southern Cross, Patricia Cornwell

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1998, 382 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-17254-6

    This is the first Patricia Cornwell book that I read, and as such, there are things that I do not know. I have been told, for instance, that Cornwell’s best work is the “Kay Scarpetta” series, but I have no way of affirming this for myself without reading her other books. I have seen references to a previous novel featuring the protagonists of Southern Cross, but can’t verify the assertion. I suppose that the Scarpetta novels are more serious fare, and that Southern Cross is a departure of sorts for the normally staid Cornwell.

    But there is one thing I can say without need for comparisons with other Cornwell works and it’s that Southern Cross is just not a very good book. On this, I have no need to consult with Cornwell enthusiasts: Failure is obvious whatever the context. It’s not a complete disaster, mind you. It’s just that this novel is simply too dull to be liked.

    A large part of this failure can be blamed on Southern Cross‘s chosen tone: The light, borderline-comic crime novel genre is well established (Hiassen, etc.) but isn’t a natural fit for every author. It takes more than characters with funny names, sprawling incompetence and amusing vignettes to sustain the interest of chuckle-deprived readers. A touch too much drama may sour the bouquet; a too-heavy hand on the tiller can make the whole thing crumble in trivialities. Sadly, Cornwell does both in this botched attempt to amuse readers.

    Southern Cross takes place in Richmond, Virginia, a typical Southern city whose best years are unfortunately long gone. The tobacco industry is fast dying, poverty is rampant, racial problems can resurface at any time and natives aren’t keen on seeing g’darn Yankees try to impose their way. Unfortunately, that’s the perception when super-cop Judy Hammer comes in with her team to try to solve Richmond’s crime problem through computer analysis and better policing methods.

    As a Canadian, I’m basically ignorant when it comes to the reality of the southern United States. Plenty of prejudice has made its way up north and Southern Cross doesn’t do much to correct them. Rednecks named “Bubba” may or may not exemplify the South, but one certainly star in Cornwell’s novel and while his portrait is eventually sympathetic, it’s not exactly flattering. The same goes for the incompetence, stupidity and stereotypes confronting Hammer’s team as they try to do their jobs. Hilarious interludes include a fight between a police officer and a dispatcher (the fun of which is carried over in the resolution and the aftermath), a governor who seems vastly more competent than anyone else and a black policeman slightly too sensitive to perceived racial slurs.

    But those comic highlights are far and few. The rest of the novel seems mired in pointless sequences and interminable dialogues about trivialities. Worse; there is a highly dramatic subplot running through the novel involving the murder of a secondary character, a narrative thread that seems to belong in another book entirely. Technological details are, er, unconvincing. The resolution of the book means nothing, concentrates on subplots and may even suggests that the villains may go free for lack of proof. Overall, the tone is both scattered and forced, as Cornwell can’t focus her narrative to a cohesive plot and simply tries too hard to include “light” elements while forgetting to make them mean something.

    There are fine character portraits and a few amusing moments in here, but they seem to belong in another novel. As it currently stands, Southern Cross is a mess that can’t support its own weight, a tedious read occasionally enlivened by flashes of interest. It certainly doesn’t make me curious about the rest of Cornwell’s oeuvre, even though I’ve been told that the rest is much, much better…

  • Honor Among Enemies (Honor Harrington 6), David Weber

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1996, 538 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-87783-6

    While recurring series are a boon for authors and publishers trying to make a honest buck by luring readers back for “one more adventure”, they also present particular challenges. How you you keep your protagonist fresh and interesting? How do you develop him or her in a realistic fashion even as they encounter murder, mayhem and mystery in every new volume? How do you explain or exploit their progress through the years?

    At the speed by which Honor Harrington progressed through the ranks in the first three volumes of the series, readers could justifiably wonder if she’d end up Queen of the Known Universe by the end of the tenth book. While this may still be in the cards, the fourth volume’s conclusion made it amply clear that her career had been derailed for, oh, at least the following two novels. While she made good in an allied navy in Flag in Exile, she’s back in Her Majesty’s service for the in Honor Among Enemies. She’s wearing the proper Royal Manticoran Navy uniform once more, but don’t think that she’s back on the admiralty career track; summoned by her enemies for an impossible mission far away from the front-lines of the Havenite war, Harrington is being set up for an scenario where the odds are stacked against her.

    But both Harrington and Weber’s readers are alike in that this is the kind of situation they like best. Once more thrown in the middle of lethal space battles (there’s even a hilarious moment where her new crew bemoan the body count that seems to follow her wherever she goes), Honor once again upholds the honour of the Queen, triumphs against impossible odds, trashes Havenite forces and acts like an officer and a gentlewoman should.

    After the more complex political plots and subplots of Field of Dishonor and Flag in Exile, Honor Among Enemies is a return of sort to more straight-up military SF. Asked to destroy a ring of pirates decimating commercial traffic, Honor is ideally placed to use her tactics against a variety of enemy forces, most often than not at a numeric disadvantage. It works well, and it sure seems as if Weber is improving the pacing of his battle sequences with every successive book.

    By isolating Harrington and putting her in a smaller cadre, Weber is also setting up a return to the more intimate settings that characterized the first book of the series, before Harrington started commanding small fleets. Honor can once more get the privilege of captaining a ship, with all the assorted challenges associated with the role over and above the inevitable space fights. In fact, Honor Among Enemies marks a first in the series by featuring an interesting subplot (Aubrey Weatherman’s adventures) that does not feature Harrington. (Heck, there’s even a treecat romance thrown in) That too works well, as it’s sort of a teaser -we guess- for what will follow as she starts playing a more active role in the Havenite war.

    In short, this is yet another satisfying entry in the Honor Harrington series. Provided you’re still a fan by this point (and why shouldn’t you be if you’re reading the sixth volume?), there’s plenty of things to like in this book. The standard plot template is faithfully followed, but Honor Among Enemies delivers what it’s supposed to; a pretty decent reading experience for the fans. Now, could we get cracking on the Havenite war in time for the seventh volume?

    (I should finally note, as an interesting factoid, that even though I own the paperback version of this book, I ended reading it as an ebook provided on the War of Honor CD-ROM. In this particular case, it was initially a question of convenience (I had my PDA with me at the opportune moment) and then of physical preference (my paperback had a horrible “crinkly” binding, with practically no inner margins) Hmm… Could I be catching the ebook bug?)

  • American Rhapsody, Joe Eszterhas

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Knopf, 2000, 432 pages, C$38.95 hc, ISBN 0-375-41144-5

    Let’s see: The screenwriter of BASIC INSTINCT and SHOWGIRLS writes a book-length op-ed about the Clinton/Lewinski affair. If there’s an award for literary irony, American Rhapsody is a automatic winner. Who else would be best equipped to deal with the national trauma of presidential adultery than the man who wrote Sharon Stone’s flash to fame? The man who wrote the trashiest big-budget sexploitation films? Who but, indeed, a Hollywood screenwriter to write about an event that makes even SHOWGIRLS look like high art? If Larry Beinhart can playfully suggest (in American Hero, later filmed as WAG THE DOG) that the first Gulf War was a conspiracy designed for Washington by Hollywood, why not the whole Monicagate?

    American Rhapsody stands at the intersection of entertainment and politics, in an American Republic where the two are less and less distinguishable. It stands in an America divided (torn or polarized might be better words) between “left” and “right” in a culture war where vocal minorities of extremists on both sides have the unfortunate tendency to silence the ambivalent majority. American Rhapsody is a series of musings on the aftermath of the sixties, the legacy of Richard Nixon (here brilliantly referred to as “Night Creature”), the status of Bill Clinton as the first rock’n’roll president (or the first baby-boomer president, or the first black president, or the first female president; take your pick) and the inner nature of the dominant political players in 1996-2000. It also stands as a biography of sort for Eszterhas, who tells plenty of salacious anecdotes in a history spanning nearly two decades as one of Hollywood’s army of bitter screenwriters.

    By far the most satisfying aspect of American Rhapsody is its willingness to name names, cite facts and use colourful language. This book holds back preciously little, whether in form or in content. Eszterhas obviously paid attention during the whole Lewinski affair, absorbing details long after most of us had overdosed on the entire business. Even though the book makes no attempt at straightforward reporting (no bibliography, no footnotes, no sources, no index), it’s nevertheless stocked with factual detail. One chapter lists five excruciating pages of American scandals since WW2. Another gives the inside story on Clinton’s Vietnam-era behaviour. Yet a third describes Sharon Stone in far more detail than you’ll ever need. It’s a whirlwind trip through American obsessions and it’s very convincing.

    But beyond the sleazy facts and the even spicier rumours, it’s Eszterhas’ verve which makes the book worth reading. He is variously amazed, amused and betrayed by Bill Clinton, who embodied most of the liberal virtues, yet was made a national mockery by his actions. Eszterhas knows how to write: the pages of American Rhapsody are filled with nasty little turns of phrases, cool linkages, laugh-out-loud moments and passages of dripping anger. While the second half of the book isn’t as interesting as the first (digressions about characters like James Carville can be fascinating, but they remain digressions nonetheless), this is a unique book. I don’t recall reading something so politically charged, so nakedly expressed, so compulsively readable in a long while.

    And this, naturally leads to other issues. Published in 2000, American Rhapsody already belongs to another era, one that seems quaintly appealing in retrospect. The Culture War described by Eszterhas has only grown more vicious, and the neo-conservatives’ reign over the White House has exposed national flaws that Eszterhas could only whisper about. His portrait of Bush Junior (“stupid… and mean”) takes on a frightening quality circa 2003. Heck, after American Rhapsody, it’s not such a stretch to think that if Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush only had affairs with interns once in a while, they wouldn’t go around killing innocent people by proxy so often.

    American Rhapsody ought to anger plenty of conservatives, and rightfully so: this is, after all, a piece of ultra-liberal agitprop par excellence. But it’s not all cheers and roses for the Clintons and their ilk either, and this free-flowing, sometimes stream-of-consciousness anger is, almost above everything else, honest. In an age where Washington campaigns are meticulously calculated and Hollywood films are shaped to please commercial requirements, this makes American Rhapsody an even more subversive book. Heck, the fact that it comes from Joe Eszterhas even makes it beautiful as far as I’m concerned. Gonzo Eszterhas as the new Hunter S. Thompson? Another level of irony? If pornographer Larry Flynt can shape the destiny of a nation by stopping an impeachment procedure, why not?

  • Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Peter Hoag (Translated by Tiina Nunnally)

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Seal, 1992 (1994 reprint), 499 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7704-2618-2

    As an avid reader who happens to watch a lot of movies, some things never fail to amaze me. Whenever I need some measure of the true intellectual worth of the average American, I simply start making comparisons between the two medium. Frank Herbert’s Dune, for instance. Worldwide Science-fiction bestseller, all eras confounded. One of SF’s best novels, with enough depth and complexity to make any reader scream in admiration. The movie presented shiny images, reduced characters to ciphers and compressed seven hundred pages in less than three hours. A lot of people hated it, including fans of the novel. It tanked at the box-office. And yet, a random sampling of people on the street will quickly reveal that far more have seen the movie, even as unsuccessful at it was, than have read the best-selling book.

    Consider Smilla’s Sense of Snow, too: it was originally written by a Danish writer, translated in dozens of language, loved by critics and became an international bestseller. A middling movie came out, didn’t do too well at the box-office and yet still managed to be seen by more people than the novel. Funny universe, isn’t it? Not that I should be any shining beacon of virtue; I managed to avoid the novel for years until I happened to grab a cheap paperback copy at a charity sale.

    It is undoubtedly an original book, if only for the setting: Taking place in Denmark, this thriller describes (through a first-person narration) a woman’s investigation of the death of an acquaintance, a small boy she had previously befriended. Her investigation takes us through early-nineties Copenhagen, which in itself alone is a welcome change of scenery for most jaded American thriller readers. But as far as pure escapism is concerned, just wait: Denmark, among other things, owns Greenland, and all the clues that Smilla uncovers seem to point to Greenland as the solution of the mystery… Polar temperatures, here we come!

    As the sensuously sibilant title suggests, this is a novel built around a character. Smilla Jasperson is an almost-perfect outsider. Born of an union between a Danish doctor and a Greenlander huntress, Smilla finds herself ill at ease wherever she goes. A woman of exceptional talents (her “sense of snow” makes her an incomparable scientist and an invaluable member for any Arctic expedition), she is nevertheless a recluse. Shunning human contact for the reassurance of science, numbers and study, Smilla is unapproachable, unsympathetic and unwilling to pursue human contact. The small boy was the only one to manage that trick, out of shared loneliness. Now he’s dead and Smilla wants to know why.

    Her investigation has all the hallmarks of a carefully contrived thriller. Chases, uncooperative witnesses, corporate machinations, pressure from police officials, family issues and even a romantic entanglement are blended in the narrative. Meanwhile, Smilla accumulates clues suggesting that this may not exactly be a completely straightforward thriller: something very unusual may be hidden up north… The climax switches genres and presents an explanation that may be jarring to readers who haven’t paid attention to the ream of scientific explanation and rationalization peppered throughout the book. Smilla is, after all, a scientist and her skills will seem natural given the resolution of the book.

    It’s a shame that, for such a thriller, the prose seems so glacial. It’s not as if it’s badly-written: Even in this transparent translation, the thick prose is stuffed with scientific metaphors, and the glimpse in Smilla’s head is simply fascinating. But this literary/thriller hybrid takes far too long in moving from one high point to another. Then there’s the last few pages, which elucidate the mystery but snatch away any reasonably pleasant conclusion. “There will be no resolution” is not something you want to read after nearly 500 pages, and yet it’s the book’s last line.

    If you want to savour the flavour of the Danish setting, cheer at the reclusive nature of an unspeakably cuter Smilla, experience the best thrills of the story and nod your head at a satisfying conclusion, you would be better off renting the cinematographic adaptation. In two hours, it tells the story, showcases Julia Osmond, presents spectacular polar landscapes and wraps up everything decently. It may not be as complete as the book, but it’s certainly easier to digest. But then again, you would become one of those people on the street with a better knowledge of the movie than the book. Why not get both?

  • Total Risk: Nick Leeson and the Fall of Barings Bank, Judith H. Rawnsley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper, 1995 (1996 reprint), 256 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-109535-4

    In many ways, it seems like a tale too implausible to be true: How a young 28-year-old trader managed, through a series of increasingly risky trades, to wipe out the assets of a major British bank and drive it to bankruptcy. You probably heard about it a while ago; the story made plenty of headlines in early 1995. In 1999, the docu-fictive film, ROGUE TRADER (starring Ewan McGregor) even brought the story to European silver screens. (The film was a straight-to-video release in North America, perhaps indicative of its low-budget, mildly-imaginative execution.)

    Though ROGUE TRADER was based on a book, it used Nick Leeson’s autobiography as a starting point, not Judith H. Rawnsley’s rather more objective account. Total Risk is a more straightforward retelling of the story by someone who’s familiar with the context: Interestingly enough, reporter Rawnsley found herself fascinated by the fall of Barings Bank because she herself had worked there years before the scandal, even meeting Leeson on a few occasions. In the early parts of the book, she makes full use of her personal experience by describing the environment in which Nick Leeson operated and how it may have fostered the sense of invulnerability that lead to the financial collapse of the bank.

    Structurally, Total Risk begins with an explanation of the author’s relationship with Barings Bank, a short description of the collapse of the institution and only then begins to explain what led to this crisis. It’s a good decision, but a risky one; as it stands, Total Risk is never as good as when it describes both the fall of Barings and the background elements that allowed such ambition to take hold in Nick Leeson. (Latter parts of the book delve into financial minutiae and are not quite as fascinating as the first half.) One of the strengths of the book are the numerous quotes and opinions presumably obtained by Rawnsley herself, allowing us to peek under the curtain of what happened during that time.

    As Rawnsley explains, Barings Brothers lasted some two hundred years as one of Britain’s most renowned banks before deregulation was introduced in 1986 in an effort to improve the efficiency of British financial institutions. As a result, Barings started looking for more exciting ways to make money, spinning off a unit called Barings Securities, which in looking around for profitable markets, settled for Far East bureaus. Total Risk hits its stride in describing the alpha-male social environment in which the expatriate young traders evolved, and how this led to some curiously excessive behaviour. Still, initial successes were so impressive that the Singapore branch was allowed greater and greater independence, a lot of it concentrated in the person of one hot-shot trader —Nick Leeson.

    When Leeson’s luck ran out (as it usually does in every gambling environment, high finance being no exception), he started making illicit loans to cover his losses. When his further investments also started panning out, he borrowed some more. Rawnsley is quite effective in describing the all-or-nothing frenzy which may have gripped Leeson at this junction, racing with himself in order to obtain the one break -only one lucky break- which would pay off everything.

    But it didn’t, and soon enough no one could hide the magnitude of the disaster. Leeson escaped, was caught, manipulated public opinion (the description of this PR campaign is another of Total Risk‘s best moments) and went to jail. Most of Barings was bought by ING and controls were tightened to ensure that nothing like this will ever happen again.

    Well, at least until the next new financial scam. As the spectacular collapses of Enron and Worldcom, indicates, there may be an infinite market for financial-swindle non-fiction. What sets Total Risk apart from such other works as Diane Francis’s markedly inferior Bre-X is a viewpoint halfway between an insider and a reporter, a sense of closure and an interesting writing style that often has more similarities to fiction than to financial analysis. While it would be unfair to say that this book has wide appeal, it’s more fitting to suggest that readers with a built-in interest in such stories will find a lot to like about this particular account.

  • Anonymous Rex, Eric Garcia

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Villard, 2000, 276 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-375-50326-9

    If you’ve been searching for a deliciously original piece of fiction, look no further than Eric Garcia’s Anonymous Rex. Easily one of the freshest novel I’ve read in a while, this is a book that lures readers with a delicious mixture of classical gumshoe prose and an off-beat twist on the usual. Then it keeps them flipping the pages with a sustained rhythm. What more could we ask for?

    Part of the appeal of Garcia’s first novel is how, on the surface, protagonist Vincent Rubio is virtually indistinguishable from prototypical down-on-his-luck Private Investigator so beloved of mystery fiction. He used to be a hot shot, but then his partner got killed, he developed a serious substance abuse problem and went on a violent bender. Now he’s broke, his name is mud and no one wants to even talk to him save for the debt collectors —and even those aren’t terribly interested in idle talk. No, nothing revolutionary here so far.

    Same thing with the plot, which involves Rubio’s old boss handing over an investigation to our unfortunate protagonist. A sombre arson affair, which our hero has to untangle because no one else wants to do it. The classic elements follow: the witnesses, the diseased, the secret, the wife, the mistress, the affairs, the wealth, the hired thugs and the casual assassination of informers. Even the late slide of the narrative in science-fiction isn’t terribly new when considering that the same shtick’s been attempted by just about every SF writer trying to break in the mystery genre. (See Walter Jon William’s excellent Day of Atonement, etc.)

    No, the real find of Anonymous Rex is that it presupposes that our protagonist is… a dinosaur. And so is a sizable proportion of humans living on planet Earth today.

    No, not metaphorical we-loved-the-fifties arch-conservative dinosaurs, but the literal stuff of the fossil record: T-Rex, Velociraptor, Brontosaur, Stegosaurus and the rest of the gang. Thanks to elaborate costumes, strong species discipline and the influence of a hilariously inept system of “Councils”, dinosaurs live among us, participate in society, own most of the nightclubs, love the mind-altering effects of aromatic herbs and try their best not to prey on puny humans. (They also presumably enjoy palaeontologist trade publications)

    It’s a concept that could be described as unusual (or “zany”, should you be of the less imaginative sort), and which could have very well been amusing for a chapter and a half before starting to recycle its own cleverness. But there’s no reason to worry; Garcia’s dino-universe is well-stocked with interesting new surprises and sufficiently fast-paced to keep us interested even when he’s not busy exploring the social customs and quirks of modern-day sapient lizards.

    Among many other fine qualities, Anonymous Rex is generous enough to allow the reader to follow along with the mystery, being neither too obscure or too simple. Rubio is a sympathetic protagonist (he’s a Raptor who could eat you for lunch, sure, but then again he’s meddling with dinos who could eat him for lunch!) The writing is brisk, but also loaded with fine descriptions and dialogue that would make any hard-boiled novelist proud by association. This is a clever novel that’s pure fun from beginning to end; don’t be surprised to find yourself reading it late at night.

    The gumshoe mystery has been exploited in fantastic ways for a while, by virtue of well-established genre conventions that are easy to subvert. (even forgetting about the countless genre SF and Fantasy novels with a mystery template, one could easily recall Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music and the original Who Censored Roger Rabbit?) Anonymous Rex is another fine entry in this offbeat vein, a wonderful little book that is well-worth your time and attention. Don’t miss it, especially if you’re looking for something endearingly different.

  • The Forge of Mars , Bruce Balfour

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2002, 404 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-00954-9

    It seemed promising enough: A novel mixing alien relics, a maverick hero, nanotechnology, robots, artificial intelligence and conspiracies reaching back in our history. It’s not as if there hasn’t been plenty of good SF novels with “Mars” in their titles over the past few years. Plus, Balfour has designed one of my all-time favourite computer adventures, Wasteland. What could go wrong?

    Well, The Forge of Mars doesn’t go wrong as much as it doesn’t go anywhere coherent, interesting or pleasant. The novel switches sub-genres every hundred pages, creating the impression of a monster with too many heads and not enough muscle.

    Even the opening sequence smacks of trouble, combining a training scenario shuttle crash with some muddy mysticism. Yep, this is the entrance of our hero, Tau Wolfsinger, a genius half-Native American whose rebel ideas prove too controversial for the NASA. Meanwhile, behind the shadows, a group of powerful men and women are dealing with the sudden appearance of alien artifacts on Mars… artifacts that may be not dissimilar to those discovered in Siberia on the site of the Tunguska disaster. One of the elements of the plan consists in manipulating Tau to ship him off to Mars. But whereas a simple “please” might have sufficed, a convoluted plan emerges which involves first shipping off his girlfriend, killing his mentor and assigning him an aggressively seductive colleague.

    This first part of The Forge of Mars plays like a high-tech thriller, and it does contain interesting elements. The menace of the conspiracy is disturbing, and the NASA bureaucracy is used in an intriguing fashion. But already, signs of narrative fatigue are obvious; the useless detours can tax anyone’s patience, and the murder scene which tops this section seems gratuitously gory in light of the rest of the story. It’s an effective, unsettling moment, but it belongs in another book.

    Then the book, midway through, shifts gears just in time for the lengthy voyage which will take Tau to Mars. This sequence is oddly familiar, given all the similar sequences that pepper the countless Mars-themed Hard-SF novels that have been published since the early nineties. This sentiment of familiarity carries over the initial scenes on Mars, as Tau establishes his research operation.

    But don’t get too comfortable: before long, Tau fails to reunite with his girlfriend and is taken hostage by an evil Russian conspiracy member and his dog. He escapes, only to have the thematic ground of the novel shift under him once more as he’s asked to lead a series of war games for an alien race someplace far far away from Mars. Naaah, I’m not making this up. Fortunately, battle-wizard Tau eventually comes back to Mars to lead an attack against the evil Russians (and the dog) to liberate Mars.

    Or something like that. Despite the various interesting elements used by The Forge of Mars, Balfour always takes the long way around, thus dissipating whatever tension accumulates. By the time Tau has become some sort of alien Ender Wiggins, readers might be wondering if there was even an editor around when they decided to publish the novel; too many plot threads, not enough narrative energy. The writing is nowhere as good as it should be to make us shrug off the rest of the book’s weaknesses. Bland and disjointed a dull novel it makes.

    In the end, it doesn’t amount to much, and I suspect that my fuzzy memory of the book will erode even further in the next few months. It’s probably no accident if this is an Ace paperback original; certainly, it’s a cut below what we may expect for an average SF novel, let alone something worth our attention. Nothing to see here; let’s move along.

  • McDonald’s: Behind the Arches, John F. Love

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 1986, 470 pages, C$24.95 hc, ISBN 0-553-05127-X

    I didn’t pick this book; it picked me. Fell on me, actually. Slipped off the shelf at a used book sale and was caught in mid-air by a reflex action of mine. One can’t ignore those signs; I brought it home.

    It’s hard to find a more iconic institution than McDonald’s. Given that the average North-American is almost always within good walking distance of one of their outlets, this restaurant chain has come to represent far more than just fast food. It has been associated with gastronomic imperialism, the culture of speed, the fattening up of America, the perils of globalization and a rigid sense of order. Step into any McDonald’s anywhere in the world and you will find commonalities with all the others.

    From the outside, McDonald’s seems to exemplify rigidity, stability and hierarchy. But as John F. Love manages to show in Behind the Arches, this is an incomplete, carefully cultivated portrait. For the strength of McDonald’s has been not unthinking devotion to order, but reigned entrepreneurial spirit. McDonald’s has always encouraged innovations, both inside and outside their immediate purview.

    Obviously, this is a “friendly” biography of McDonald’s. While the project wasn’t commissioned by the company, extensive collaboration was given to Love in order for him to complete the project. While the book does discuss the sometime-rocky corporate history of the firm with a critical eye, it seldom delves into the darker side of the company. You’ll have to read Fast-Food Nation for that.

    But in some ways, it doesn’t matter. McDonald’s success story can be appreciated regardless of one’s feeling toward the food offered there. At times, it almost seems too good to be true; the story of two brothers with a good idea (speed and price; always speed and price!), a refined system and a convinced salesman who’d transform this kernel into the foundation of an empire. Behind the Arches is also the story of the people who made a success out of McDonald’s, and none of them as grandiose as Ray E. Kroc, the man those no-nonsense approach made an empire out of McDonald’s.

    The early struggles of McDonald’s are told in a detailed, almost breathless style that requires very little effort to read. While the early heroics of the corporation latter transform into high-finance deals (including a disastrous flirtation with a more rigid style of management), the book remains interesting from the start to end. Seldom has there been a more compelling corporate biography.

    It’s not as if it’s an ordinary story. The bare facts are astonishing: The way McDonald’s restructured whole industries in order to be best-served. The importance of the franchisees. The decentralized fashion by which advertising is used. The emphasis on real estate. The technological innovation that went into developing even the simplest food products. The difficult foreign expansion of the company. The battle for rumour control and favourable opinion. There’s a lot of good stuff in here, and it’s all worth reading. The origins of Ronald McDonald are almost charmingly quaint, whereas the process by which some of the most recognizable McDonald staples were created is a monument to food engineering.

    The biggest problem of Behind the Arches, naturally, is the 1986 publication date. Fifteen years past, who knows what has changed since then? Is McDonald’s still so loyal with its suppliers? Does it still depend so much on the individualism of their franchisees? An update would be useful.

    But in the end, I was so impressed (and, true, so curious), that I willingly stepped in another McDonald’s (meters away from my workplace, a location that was the sole victim of vandalism during the Ottawa anti-globalization protests of 2001) after years of absence. Despite the noon-time crowd, service took less than five minutes. Once back at my office, I offered brief congratulations to Ray E. Kroc, started eating and headed over to www.mcspotlight.com because I’m such a sucker for irony. The meal reminded me of why I hadn’t eaten McDonald’s in a while, but in a way, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as the impressive display of ingenuity, determination and sheer cleverness that is the true basis of McDonald’s success. Even critics and pundits can’t help but being impressed, whatever their sentiments may be regarding what McDonald’s stands for.

    So here’s to you, Ray A. Kroc, Fred Turner, and united franchisees. Good show.

  • Flag in Exile (Honor Harrington 5), David Weber

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1995, 480 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7434-3575-3

    (Read as an eBook, from the War of Honor CD-ROM)

    It’s become customary to introduce every new instalment of the Honor Harrington series with some variant on “Honor is Back!” But this time around, the twist is that she is not back. Exiled from the Manticoran Navy after her actions in the previous volume, she’s back “home” as the steadholder of a brand-new territory on Grayson, the planet she managed to save in The Honor of the Queen. She may not be a ranking officer of her majesty’s navy anymore, but she keeps busy: Running a stead takes a lot of time and energy, especially when she’s the first-ever female steadholder in what is still a deeply conservative society. Some people clearly aren’t happy about that particular achievement…

    Meanwhile, the Royal Manticoran Navy is still fighting the war initiated by the eeevil socialist Havenites two volumes ago. The engagement seems protracted enough to last for several more novels, and to make things worse, the Havenites are planning on attacking Grayson. As it naturally turn out, Honor Harrington is ready for them given her newly-acquired commission as an admiral of the Grayson Navy…

    After the successful non-military focus of Field of Dishonor, Weber takes an hybrid approach in plotting Flag in Exile: While the military aspect comes back along with Honor’s admiralty, the political conflicts are also present in her efforts to defend her stead against the more backward elements of Grayson’s elite. Cynics will merely point out that this is like recycling the best bits of the second and fourth novels (complete with a duel and a big space engagement), but when it works, it works: There’s no need to be a spoilsport.

    It’s not as if there isn’t something new to gnaw upon: Honor Harrington’s gradual apprenticeship as a steadholder is a new element, and we get to see her spend quite a lot of time in this uncharacteristic environment. Maybe too much time is spent describing the intricacies of Grayson politics, though the payoff is immense. The sheer boo-hiss perversity of her opponent’s plans are a marvel of audience manipulation, and so is the way she fights back against them. For a second volume in a row, she has to match wits with experts in martial fields not of her choosing. Unsurprisingly, she comes out ahead, though Weber actually manages to make us believe in how it’s done: We go from dreadful certainty of failure to triumphant (and inevitable) victory in only a few pages, an achievement that may have been impossible for another less experienced reader.

    Then it’s off to space for the routine big space battle, the issue of which is a foregone conclusion. Worth noting this time around, though, is the good portrayal of performance under duress: seldom have we seen Harrington placed under so much stress, and the constant pain in which she has to operate is well-described. Also amusing is the return of the second book’s antagonist, this time as a colleague of Harrington in this new Grayson Navy. Cute.

    All told, it’s another pretty good entry in the series, with Weber’s usual flair for good characters and clear prose carrying the series along as much as the plot and the overall arc. By this point in the series, it’s obvious that this is closer to an episodic TV soap than a feature film in terms of dramatic construction: The series can afford to take forever in setting up a few elements given that they’ll play out over a lengthy period. (The Havenite War, for instance, seems to be good for at least another trilogy) Naturally, this episodic nature strengthens even more the importance of recurring elements: We’re now at a point where we’re expected to recognize characters as they come back in Harrington’s life.

    These are certainly not bad things if you’ve got all the novels so far (say, as provided by the CD-ROM bundled with the Hardcover edition of War of Honor), but they may be a dampening factor for everyone contemplating to dive into the series. Hey, it’s well-worth it… but be prepared to spend a lot of time in Harrington’s universe.

  • Fashionably Late, Olivia Goldsmith

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 1994, 431 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 0-06-017611-3

    If the fashion industry mystifies, amuses, annoys or interests you, Fashionably Late ought to prove a delicious reading experience. Pop-fun author Olivia Goldsmith has trashed the acting and publishing professions elsewhere (in Flavour of the Month and The Bestseller, respectively)… but this time she’s got another field to explore, and she proves remarkably adept at presenting both the glory and the misery of haute couture in this novel.

    It all revolves around Karen Kahn, fashion designer and owner of her own prestigious label. At first glance, she’s got everything one would want: Money, fame, love and the admiration of her peers. But even as she’s awarded an important industry prize, a doomed man appears (in classic tragic fashion) to warn her that fame is feeling and it can end very, very quickly. As the novel progresses, there are plenty of opportunities for Karen’s world to crumble: her family is packed with dysfunctional relatives, her husband is prone to bouts of moodiness and her business is being courted by a rich buyer. As if that wasn’t enough, Karen is also contemplating her own lineage; though she knows she’s an adopted child, her own biological clock has rung out: Adoption is the only possibility if she wants to raise a child.

    Melodramatic stuff, but that’s half the fun of it. Goldsmith can write big fat pop novels like none other, and her professionalism shines throughout the book. The fashion industry is a big and complex beast, and one of Goldsmith’s most successful talent is to manage to slowly reveal it all, from sewing to modelling, in compelling and unobtrusive scenes. Exposition is well-handled , and doesn’t take much to be fascinated by the convincing background details. In many ways, this feels like one of Arthur Hailey’s docu-fictive novels, except that Goldsmith can juggle both plot and documentary with an ease that leaves good old Arthur coughing in the dust.

    A large part of this superiority depends on her strong sense of characterization. While Goldsmith can’t be accused of too much ambiguity, she knows exactly what is needed for the type of novel she’s writing. Here, it’s interesting to see the distribution of quirks. While Fashionably Late features several viewpoint characters, it spends most of its time inside Karen’s head. Fittingly enough, the lead protagonist is emotionally bland while her entourage is stuffed with showy supporting characters. This allows the reader to project emotions on the protagonist and be impressed by the actions of others. Good stuff!

    While I’m working from an incomplete database (three novels out of nearly a dozen), Goldsmith’s moral storytelling seems ironclad so far. Heroes win; villains are punished. While Fashionably Late isn’t as decisively punitive as, say, Flavour of the Month, it certainly rewards the good guys and promises pain and punishment for the evil ones. The suspense in Goldsmith’s novels isn’t in seeing who wins, but in seeing them err on either good and evil before settling on one alignment and suffering the consequences. Manipulative and populist, maybe, but also decidedly comfortable; reading an Olivia Goldsmith is guaranteed to be a satisfactory, uncomplicated experience.

    Satisfactory and amusing, naturally. The prose style is deliciously clear and compelling; while it may take a while to absorb all the characters and the multiple plot threads the novel acquires quite a narrative momentum that does a lot to propel the book forward. Don’t be surprised to read more and more of the book as it advances. The little twists thrown at the end are a bit over-the-top, but that too had become somewhat of a Goldsmith griffe. It’s not as if half of the so-called “twists” can be seen well in advance. (Oh, gee, I wonder what will happen to the baby…?)

    As Fashionably Late concludes, it also moves both the protagonist and the reader toward a more balanced view of the fashion industry, after showing both the glamour and the misery, the admiration and the contempt engendered by it. Few will fail to be impressed to see where Karen end up, though some may step back and tut-tut the warm and fuzzy feeling of the conclusion. To those I say shoo, because they obviously haven’t understood the rules of Goldsmith’s universe. It may not be the real world, but it works for me, in a certain fashion.

  • The Manly Movie Guide, David Everitt & Harold Schechter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Broadway, 1997, 287 pages, C$16.00 tpb, ISBN 1-57297-308-0

    As the proud owner of the fantastic movie-recommendation guide Chicks on Film, the thought of buying The Manly Movie Guide was irresistible, if only for the kick of placing both books one alongside the other on my movie-reference shelf. As a bonus, maybe I’d get a cool book that would properly appreciate the aesthetic qualities of modern classics such as DIE HARD and HARD-BOILED.

    (Please understand that I do not jest when I say this; the artistic worth of action movies, to me, has been severely misunderstood. Pulling together a satisfying action sequence, for example, is an art, as a random selection of scenes from direct-to-video “action thrillers” will demonstrate. It involves writing, action editing, scoring and effects. The best of them demand a sense of pacing, a dramatic arc, a perfect integration of sight and sound as well as an emphasis on characters. Show me someone who can explain how the themes and aesthetics of TERMINATOR 2 re-enforce the kick-ass action scenes and I will show you a friend for life.)

    Alas, The Manly Movie Guide barely deserves to be put on the same shelf as Chicks on Film.

    It’s not as if it’s a worthless book. Any guide which puts GOODFELLAS in “Comedy” and NATURAL BORN KILLERS in “Romance” has something going for it. And any guide with the guts to dismiss THELMA AND LOUISE with a tart capsule review like

    Two suburban babes hit the road to become modern-day, gun-toting desperadoes. What’s goes on here? Aren’t Tupperware parties good enough for those chicks? [P.70]

    deserves at least a modicum of respect. Maybe not admiration, but respect.

    Alas, occasional mordant barbs don’t make a full-featured book worthwhile. It doesn’t help that the main conceit of The Manly Movie Guide is that the two authors are writing as if they were ignorant machos writing for a similar audience. (Get it? Get It? Ooh! Genius!) The whole package is there: Phobia of all things French, casual misogyny, disdain of intellectualism, love of firearms and strong homo-erotic fascination for John Wayne and similar icons. It’s easy to picture the audience tearing through cases of beer, slapping their girlfriends around and voting Republican.

    It’s meant to be satire, but there’s a limit to the enjoyment you can get from such shtick, especially when it’s dragged on for so long. A good number of their capsule reviews are interchangeable, and don’t be surprised if you find yourself overdosing on words like “virile”, “two-fisted”, “rugged” and the omnipresent “manly”. The book is best approached in very small doses; maybe a page a week.

    The authors aren’t fooling anyone with their dumb-and-dumber masquerade: occasional polysyllabic words slip by, and the old-school focus of the book (with a strong emphasis on westerns and films of the forties) is something what wouldn’t pass muster with a manly crowd deeply suspicious of black-and-white features. I don’t think I’ve heard about half the movies described in here and for the most cases, I now feel as if I don’t need to know any more about them.

    But that places The Manly Movie Guide in a strange demimonde (Ooh! Fancy French word!) with its ironic detachment working against both the high and the low-brow crowd. There’s too much sarcasm for real rednecks and too much repetitiveness for the film geeks like me. This is a strangely misguided book, its encyclopedic knowledge of “manly” movies (itself a very limiting restriction) being undone by an exasperating tone.

    In short, I’d rather read Chick on Film again for a series of recommendation influenced by a gender, but not limited by an artificial set of limits. The Manly Movie Guide may be without any adequate public, and that’s reason enough to leave it on the shelf. Alone.

  • The Moon Goddess and the Son, Donald Kingsbury

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1986, 471 pages, C$5.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-65381-4

    The Cold War has been over for more than a decade, but the books of that era will continue to dog us for a while yet. When readers and critic discuss Donald Kingsbury, they usually talk about Courtship Rite, or even Psychohistorical Crisis, but most tend to forget that the capable Canadian SF author has written a novel in-between, The Moon Goddess and the Son. With good reason, mind you: While I can still imagine the previous two titles being read, discussed and enjoyed decades from now, it’s going to take some effort to even try pretending that his second novel was anything more than an overlong mess.

    No, I’m not going to try to pretend deep love and affection for the novel, despite all the personal respect I’ve got for the author and my usual bias for all things Canadians (or, in Kingsbury’s case, from the Montreal area) I’m feeling cranky, and that’s because dull books that take forever to establish a novella’s worth of story always make me cranky.

    Heralding from the Cold War’s last dying moments (hey, 1986 is already, what, more than fifteen years old), The Moon Goddess and the Son is a hodge-podge of Soviet philosophy, space boosterism, March-September romance (ew), clashing generations and attempts at a political thriller. It’s long, it’s rambling and if there are quite a few things to like about it, it takes forever to get to them.

    You may think, at first, that this is a story about a space-struck young girl who, when she’s abused by her father, escapes into fantasies about a famous astronaut. But don’t, because that’ll come into play only late in the novel (in pretty much the fashion you apprehend). Then again, The Moon Goddess and the Son may be about the famous astronaut and his difficult family relationships. But that’s not it either, at least not at first. Then again, this may be about a role-playing game designer at the end of his rope and the sadistic treatment he’s got in mind for his abusive boss.

    Now that may be a thread. Because the designer’s elaborate pain-and-punishment recreation of Russian history ends up being exactly what his boss is asking for in order to understand the Russian mind. Meanwhile, in another plot thread, our young star-struck teenager will sleep with the spaceman of her dreams as well as his son, helping out the family by doing so. Yes, it’s that kind of novel.

    But it’ll take forever to get to those plot points. Most of the novel is a pointless collection of scenes that does little to advance the story. Character do stuff; we don’t care. Saudi Arabia undergoes a revolution; we care even less. The Russians threaten to take over the world; maybe that would be best for all involved.

    Oh, it’s not as if it’s a total loss: The Russian national character is described with noblesse and respect, setting this novel apart from some of its contemporary ultra-paranoid fiction. Some of the technical details are interesting. It all amounts to a novella’s worth of story.

    But it will take special skills today to slog through this brick. Cold War-era politics are about as useful as Tzarist policies these days, and a lot of the cheering for space exploration seems identical from what we’re hearing these days. Coupled to the lack of sustained dramatic hard, it makes it hard to imagine that anyone but Kingsbury completists (and I’ll raise my hand at this moment) being willing to undergo this particular mild punishment.

    Maybe there’s a historical worth to this book, if only for a feel of 1986-era thinking. But then again you could just grab Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising and “get” the cold war. As far as Kingsbury is concerned, grab Courtship Rite, read it, treasure it, cherish it and skip directly to Psychohistorical Crisis. Anything else would just be a waste of time.

  • The Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy, Robert Anton Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 1979 (1988 omnibus), 545 pages, C$13.95 tpb, ISBN 0-440-50070-2

    Robert Anton Wilson takes great care, early in The Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy, to warn us that “contrarily to appearances, [it] is not a mere ‘routine’ or ‘shaggy shoggoth story’” [P.10] I beg to half-differ. While this trilogy isn’t routine, it certainly feels like a shaggy shoggoth story. Pleasant to read but frustrating in terms of conventional plotting, Schrödinger’s Cat can be lot of fun as long as you don’t expect anything resembling an ultimate answer.

    Nor any definitive plot, character, dramatic arc or conclusion, for that matter. The central conceit of the trilogy is that it studies the adventures of a few dozen characters in parallel universes. Some of them are more-or-less identical from one universe to another; others are rather different. The American political leadership of any given universe ends up having a substantial impact on the overall feel of each universe —though even Wilson couldn’t imagine the Reagan presidency.

    The genius of the trilogy is how the events in one universe inform our understanding of another. Characters are introduced in one timeline, explored in another and left as supporting players in yet another universe. The explanation to some events must be found elsewhere in the book as given situations are explored from other perspectives.

    It’s hard to say anything conclusive about the whole work (as Wilson seemingly takes delight in confusing the heck out of anyone even trying to make sense of the overall flow), but it looks as if every book of the trilogy covers an alternate universe, at the exception of the first volume which gives us a second timeline for free after the catastrophic end of the first one.

    Normally, I wouldn’t be very enthusiastic about such artistic attempts; I like my fiction straight and linear, and have no patience with books where the author tries to pass off indecisiveness as subtlety. But what reconciled me with this trilogy (aside from the emphasis on science and technology as Good Things) is how even if I wasn’t bothered to follow along with what may or not be a plot, there were enough amusing vignettes to keep me occupied. The narrative is filled with zingers, from the tyrannical “Unistat” empire to a literary critic talking about “Norman Mailer-than-thou”. The character sketches are sympathetic and effective. (Heck, even the author is a character.) The various pranks, events, anecdotes that make up the bulk of the trilogy’s vignettes are rather amusing when taken approached one at a time.

    Madness awaits anyone trying to make sense of it all, though. The Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy isn’t a movie, and doesn’t follow a conventional A-to-B narrative. It may be best compared to an intricate surrealistic painting, where elements are disposed on a surface that suggests proximity but doesn’t necessarily represent affinity between the parts. Think hologram. Think author on acid. Think “read a random page, rip it out, repeat”. Think chapters in a blender.

    Yes, there’s no doubt that this is artsy-trippy stuff. I could understand anyone being reluctant to take it on. If you do, one piece of advice; read as much of it at once. The accumulation of background details is slight but noticeable, and you’ll get much more out of the trilogy if you do read a solid chunk of it in near succession. Some jokes play off each other, and the vast cast of characters may be obscure from time to time. (It also helps to have strong and fond memories of the Illuminatus! trilogy, given that elements of it, such as The Beast and Hagbard Celine, make a return appearance) As long as you don’t try to make too much sense out of it, it’s easy reading. But there are no big answers, no big finale, no puppet-master pulling the strings from the metaverse. It ends in mid-story. It probably warrants a re-read every couple of years.

    In short, this isn’t an ordinary book. It’s both fun and frustrating, easy to read and impossible to understand. Maybe I even completely misinterpreted everything. Yet I don’t care all that much. As long as I’ve been entertained, who am I to complain?

  • Operation Fantasy Plan, Peter Gilboy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 1997, 290 pages, C$30.00 hc, ISBN 0-688-15246-5

    Though it may be hard to imagine at this particular moment in time, there was a time, barely six years ago, where it was fashionable to think dark thoughts about the CIA. Rather than have this reputation as hard-working defenders of our Western freedoms, the CIA could be used in thrillers as a deeply corrupt agency with no compulsions whatsoever. If exploiting human weaknesses was what it took in order to secure access to information vital to the protection of American interests, well, so be it.

    For the longest time, protagonist Peter Gaines had been one of those operators, doing what was necessary in order to weasel information out of semi-cooperative agents. But everyone has his limits, and Gaines’ is reached when he’s put in charge of “Fantasy Store”, a high-class bordello in Bangkok. Here, every vice is catered to as long as cameras are rolling in order to provide good blackmail material. The more despicable the act, the better the blackmail. Gaines reacts poorly and is promptly fired for his excess of conscience.

    There is, naturally, a woman at the root of the problem: Songka, the newest recruit of “Fantasy Store”, the most beautiful woman Gaines has ever seen. He goes nuts for her, and his quest to find her again will take him back to Thailand even though the CIA is watching his every move. In this new civilian life, Peter has to learn that nothing is what it seems and every revelation might not be entirely truthful.

    Operation Fantasy Plan could have been written during the seventies by a British author and it would still be the same novel. The prose exudes an air of deep cynicism and of resigned weariness. The dour narration is interesting at first, taking us deep in a world of secrets upon secrets. The first few chapters are a crash-course in psychological manipulation, as Gaines recounts his training and the major incidents of his career. The first-person narration makes it impossible to hide or to distance ourselves from the narrative. Gaines isn’t much of an optimist, and the style of the novel reflects that.

    As the tale emerges, though, a few problems appear. For a die-hard cynic, Gaines moves deeper and deeper in sentimental territory that’s hard to justify, even for someone as smitten as he is. It’s understandable that this is written as a romantic story as much as a straight-up thriller, but the endless pining of the narrator for “his” Songka gets to be a bit much after a while.

    Then there’s the small-world cliché, in which every single person mentioned in the first five chapters end up being vitally important to the story resolution, with particular boos to “Vaal” as being the worst example of this.

    Plus there’s the novel’s declining interest once the “big secret” is out of the bag, maybe three-quarter of the way in the novel. The rest isn’t nearly as compelling, as we’re down to a who-trusts-who game that gets so twisty it’s tiresome. Compared to the rather fun first third, the third act is too long, too depressing and far too sentimental. What began as summer reading ends up in a heavy philosophical morass closer to John LeCarre than to Richard Marcinko. Some will be impressed; some will be disappointed.

    Not that anyone will have time to complain, I suspect. At a brisk and airy 290 pages, Operation Fantasy Plan is short enough that even the most demanding readers won’t lose too much time over this. The result is an adequate, but ultimately forgettable novel that simply doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from the pack.

  • Maelstrom, Peter Watts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 371 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-56679-3

    I had been mildly critical of Peter Watts’ first novel Starfish, but intrigued enough by his potential that it wasn’t much of a struggle to decide to read the sequel, Maelstrom,. Now it turns out that I’m similarly half-critical of the second novel, but for rather different reasons.

    Maelstrom begins not long after the cataclysmic events of Starfish‘s climax. (Don’t bother reading if you’re not familiar with the first book) The North American west coast has been trashed, and that only make a bad world worse. The whole global communication network is acting up, environmental collapse is well under way, gigantic corporations are up to their usual dirty tricks and a fractal death-wish seems to be affecting every aspect of the world, from single individuals to entire countries.

    In this situation steps in Lenie Clarke, the very very bitter (and very very powerful) surviving protagonist of Starfish. She wants answers. She wants closure. She wants justice. And very few people are going to be willing to stand in her way once she gets going. If she has to kill millions in order to fulfill her goals, well, most of these millions are already ready to die for her…

    If your SF diet has grown a touch too optimistic lately, it’s time to delve in the dystopian nightmare that makes up most of Maelstrom. Here, impending global cataclysm (from a variety of sources) is a backdrop to a series of very dark adventures in which an outbreak of primordial microbes is the least of everyone’s worries. The environment is trashed anyway. Violence is commonplace. Employees are guilt-tripped by their employers in acting in the best interest of shareholders, and the cure to that particular issue may be even worse than the problem itself.

    It’s not a cheery novel and this lack of cheer does eventually take its toll. The dense but generally dour prose style does little to propel the story forward. The book’s single biggest failing may be how it remains curiously indifferent to the events it describes. A more nervous, more direct writing style might have been appropriate considering the magnitude of the story. But Watts seems more content with a style that seems designed to depress even beyond what happens in the story. A most angst-ridden bunch of characters would be hard to find. It’s not obvious (nor even desirable, maybe) to emphasize with them.

    Fortunately, SF fans can look forward to a bunch of tasty little details. From marine microbiology to computer science and neurobiology, Watts reaches deep in background detail (a wonderful pure-science discussion/bibliography is helpfully provided at the end of the book) for plenty of cutting-edge concepts. And not just technical ideas either: Here, Québec has emerged as an important player on the geopolitical scene thanks to its massive hydro-electrical projects ensuring plenty of energy for sale. Resentment is palpable almost everywhere else.

    Indeed, perhaps the best thing about Maelstrom is how the scope of the story has expanded. For a cycle that had its beginning in a short story (“A Niche”) exclusively set on an underwater station, Watts has embraced the whole world (with a focus on Ontario) as a canvas for Maelstrom. The story lives up to the title, offering a shifting web of complex -sometimes even contradictory- alliances.

    In the end, the telling of the tale might not do justice to the content of the story, but Maelstrom certain has a lot to offer to readers with a a penchant for dystopian tales. In some ways, this is grown-up cyberpunk, with its usual clichés assimilated in a larger, more complex setting. It’s not a perfect book, but the good outweighs the bad by a significant margin. Heck, enough to make me interested in his next novel.