Book Review

  • Girls on Film, Clare Bundy, Lise Carrigg, Sibyl Goldman and Andrea Pyros

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Perennial, 1999, 227 pages, C$20.00 tpb, ISBN 0-06-095310-1

    The popular stereotype of an accomplished movie critic usually revolves around a monocle-wearing, pipe-smoking intellectual with an European accent who goes bonkers for three-hour-long subtitled Iranian films about a broken cup of tea. On the other side of the spectrum, you’ve got drooling brain-damaged teens who thought BATTLEFIELD EARTH was “a lot of fun”. Surely there must be a middle ground, a place where intelligent, unpretentious movie lovers can come together.

    Girls on Film is a book for those people who aren’t afraid to like both independent films and Hollywood blockbusters, people who love both Woody Allen and John Woo, people who see film as a media with the duty to inform, move and above all entertain. The “Girls” of the title are ex-college friends, at the time of publication editors/reviewers of a popular film website. The book isn’t a compendium of web-published material (“You won’t find any of this on the Web site!” claims the back cover) but a self-contained, strongly-structured film guide that will make you rush out to the nearest video store.

    The hook of the book (“Gee whiz! Young women can talk about movies too!”) is actually a misdirection: Even if, yes, the authors unabashedly present themselves as, well, girls writing about movies, the potential public of the guide is much larger than the 18-34 female demographics. They’re so knowledgeable and -more importantly- enthusiastic about their subject that their passion becomes universal. It helps, of course, that they focus on almost all areas of cinema, not simply what you’d expect from “flick chicks”. (Their discussion about how to be a film snob at parties is a pure hoot.)

    The structure of the book is simplicity itself: Eight sections about different types of movies, each section being composed of an introduction, four essays about the genre (by each of the girls) and a must-see list of 25 typical movies, accompanied by various side-bars. So we get sections such as Dramas, Comedies, Indies, Romance, Horror, Tearjerkers, Coming-of-Age and Blockbuster movies chapters. The eight top-25 listings alone will make you want to carry this book to the video store with you: There’s enough intriguing material there for a few weekend’s worth of classic rentals. There is -alas!- no index, so if you want to track down why HEATHERS affected Andrea’s early love life, you’ll have to re-read part of the book. Or not, given the strong organization of the sections.

    A book of this type depends a lot on the personalities of the people writing it. Fortunately, the “girls”, as a group, more than adequately create a distinct atmosphere about their preferences; witty, unpretentious yet with a solid vigor that doesn’t trivialize their efforts whatever the subject discussed. It’s a shame that the different authors themselves aren’t more distinctive, but that’s not as much of a flaw as you’d expect—it’s a lot like listening to a good band; you don’t complain that the bassist should be more distinctive… In any case, all of them sound like your best down-to-earth friends. You’d love to go see a movie -any movie- with these four. They’re not always “right” (duh!), but they argue so well… Laugh-aloud stuff at times. The cartoon illustrations are great.

    Easy to read and even easier to love, Girls on Film is one movie reviewing book you’ll pick up again from time to time to get recommendations, or simply for the fun of reading a few page again. Accurately targeted at a large segment of the population and not simply “at the girls”, this is a book worth tracking down in used bookstores.

    [November 2001: Regrettably, a late-2001 web check reveals that the original girlson.com site has been bought and closed by a bigger company. The girls have split up, one of them going all the way west to become a media journalist. The remaining ones have created another site -www.critichick.com- to re-create the girlson.com feel, but said site hadn’t been updated in six months… A shame, really.]

  • Ghosts of the Titanic, Charles Pellegrino

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 2000, 339 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-380-72472-3

    Now that the TITANIC movie has come and gone on big screens, VHS and DVD, it seems as if everyone’s an expert on the subject, citing diagrams and expert advice on exactly how the Big Ship sank. In the wake of the film’s boffo success (biggest moneymaker ever, anyone?), shelves of books on the subject were ransacked by new catastrophe enthusiasts.

    One of those books was Charles Pellegrino’s Her name, Titanic. Faithful readers of these reviews may remember that I’ve been a Pellegrino enthusiast for some time, hence this review. Ghosts of the Titanic is a sequel of sort to Her Name, Titanic, but don’t worry if, like me, you haven’t read the first volume; the sequel is mostly self-supporting.

    Some knowledge of the Titanic disaster is essential, though, as Pellegrino wastes no time explaining the basics. (This being said, one of the book’s highlights is the illustrated timeline of events running from page 176 to 195.) In some ways, this is a post-TITANIC book, immediately accessible if you’ve seen the film. James Cameron even wrote the foreword.

    And what Pellegrino says is really “what the movie left out”: An examination of the current state of the wreck, the likely composition of the iceberg, the fire that had been raging deep in the ship’s structure during the whole trip. Pellegrino tells us stories that couldn’t fit in the three-hour movie, such as the efforts to keep the electricity running and Colonel Gracie’s narrow escape.

    Using new testimonies, computer models and scientific evidence (some of which he himself collected during his visits to the wreck), Pellegrino uncovers yet more details about the events of April 14, 1912. One of his most fascinating findings is the fate of the Grand Stairway: Contemporary examinations of the wreck have so far failed to find it—leading James Cameron to theorize that the massive wooden structure could have ripped free of the sinking wreck and floated to the surface. A finding, ironically enough, supported by his experiences while filming TITANIC, as the Stairway replica started to rip itself from the set once submerged.

    This anecdote, like many others, shows Pellegrino’s knack for finding the most astonishing things in places we wouldn’t expect. Coincidentally or not, his misfortune for being in a weird place at a weird time also pops up with alarming frequency and spine-chilling effects. (Here he describes missing TWA flight 800, and being cured of a fatal disease in extremis by one of his friends. I’m still waiting to hear more details about the nuclear device “accidental energetic disassembly” he survived, briefly mentioned here once again.)

    All throughout Ghosts of the Titanic, Pellegrino exhibits a heart-wrenching sensitivity that will put a lump in your throat. It’s not easy to publish a book on this subject without somehow coming across as an opportunistic fellow, but Pellegrino’s mourning feels genuine and the result is a book that never seems exploitative.

    Pellegrino’s polymath familiarity with widely divergent fields of study also gives him a unique expertise to slip in and out of the strict subject of the book. Perhaps the most fascinating section of the book is Chapter 5, when he examines “rusticles”, iron structures formed by the bacteria slowly eating the tons of metal in the wreck. Not only does he conclude that the Titanic will eventually disappear (there goes the end of Arthur C. Clarke’s The Ghosts of the Grand Banks!), but he also describes how the rusticles structures are evolving internal circulation systems… from unicellular organisms! As the ultimate kicker, he suggests that new medical research stemming from the study of rusticles might eventually save more lives that were claimed by the Titanic tragedy.

    In short, Ghosts of the Titanic is another success for Pellegrino, another savvy mix of science fact and good heart-felt writing. Give it a try if you’re interested in the author or the subject matter. If you don’t think you’ve had enough of that subject yet, Pellegrino promises us, in the epilogue, that Ghosts of the Titanic is the second volume in a trilogy he expects to complete in 2010-2012. Given what he managed to tell us this time around, I can’t wait.

  • Towing Jehovah, James Morrow

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harcourt Brace, 1994, 371 pages, C$30.00 hc, ISBN 0-15-190919-9

    The famous German philosopher (and occasional smart-ass) Frederick Nietzche once said, in his amusingly Teutonic way of his, “God is dead”. I bet he never expected anyone to take him so literally than James Morrow in Towing Jehovah.

    In it, the God actually croaks, dies, passes away (end up being no more) and his body is found floating in the Atlantic Ocean not far away from central Africa. The Catholic Church, naturally, is concerned. Not only does most of the theological corpus pass away along with Him, but the disposition of His two-miles-long remains poses a few non-trivial practical challenges. So that’s how disgraced supertanker captain Anthony Van Horne is contacted by an angel to carry God’s body to its eternal resting place; a specially-constructed tomb in the eternal ice of the Arctic Circle.

    Before long, readers are privy to such unique scenes as plotting the careful displacement of an iceberg-sized cadaver, hooking up towing chains to God’s ear bones and fighting off sharks around His body with rocket launchers. It get weirder after that, as Atlantis pops up and World War 2 re-enactment societies are hired by militant atheists to sink God’s body.

    From this fantastical premise, you would be entirely justified to expect a wacky treatment of the story, with plenty of silly hijinks and uproarious punchlines. That’s not what Morrow had in mind, however, and so the first and final thirds of the books are written in a mode that almost brings to mind the usual dry technothriller à la Clancy. (Myself, I was reminded of Preston and Lincoln’s The Ice Limit) Tons of realistic details ground the story’s initial whopper in hard believability. It’s an unusual choice, and an effective one; whenever Morrow departs from it in mid-book for the Atlantis sequence, the book loses some of its interest.

    In many ways, the fantastical spectacle of a two-mile-long body of God is weird enough to have no need for extra strangeness. Whether they’re driving across His body in a jeep, dancing in His bellybutton or try to bomb the entirety of His body, our characters are too close to insanity as it is. Not that it stops them from discussing profound theological issues in what I thought was a witty fashion. “What if you could prove that God doesn’t exist?” is one of the less-complex questions discussed.

    It’s all joyously irreverent, of course. Not only is Morrow lampooning the biggest target of all, but he also allows equal-offense time to atheists and other unbelievers through the Central Park West Enlightenment League, a dysfunctional bunch of irreducible skeptics who arrange for the disappearance of the most convincing proof faith can have. Don’t worry; whatever your own convictions, you’ll certainly find something to be offended about in this novel. And yet, even as you’re scandalized, you’ll be amused: Towing Jehovah is no constant laugh-riot, but it’s a steady giggler.

    Best of all, maybe, is that Towing Jehovah is reader-friendly to the highest degree, with limpid writing, complex characters and occasional examination of deeper issues without too much guilt. The ideas keep on coming, as do the unorthodox scenes and character-driven twists. Some late-minute appearances are contrived, but they heighten the tension quite effectively. It’s a solid and satisfying read; it’s no accident if it won the World Fantasy Award in 1994. Chances are that you’ll enjoy it too.

  • The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Seal, 2000, 659 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7704-2882-7

    The most overwhelming impression I got from Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is how subtle it all was. Compared to this book, other novels are written with all the skill of a two-year-old kid messing around with markers. Atwood introduces, develops and disposes of her characters in such a delicate way that you only feel the cut of the knife long after it’s been pulled.

    A substantial part of this success must be attributed to the intricate structure of the novel, which takes place on roughly four continuums at the same time.

    The most immediate of those four threads is a first-person narration of Iris Chase’s life at 83. She putters around the small city of Ticonderoga, Ontario while reflecting on the nature of passing time and the fates of people she knew. Not quite a crotchety old lady, Iris still has an eye for things, and an ironclad memory of the early years of her life.

    These early years form the bulk of the novel, as Iris relates the events leading up to her sister’s death, when “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” [P.1] That’s literally how the novel begins, and also figuratively how it ends, being the climax of Iris Chase’s life despite the fifty-odd years that would follow.

    Interleaved along this parallel narrative is a third thread, made up of newspaper articles directly or tangentially related to the Chases’s life. Gossip columns, eulogies, newspaper reports provide a dry view of what happened to them, offering an “official” view of events that is often simply fantastical.

    And, finally, as a fourth thread we get excerpts of “The Blind Assassin”, a cult-novel-within-a-novel written by Laura Chase. It’s about a woman who falls in love with a pulp science-fiction writer, but is it what it’s really about? In between the gaudy alien creatures, fantastical planets and simplistic plotting of the stories imagined by the writer, you can guess a deeper meaning.

    You might find The Blind Assassin shelved in the “general fiction” area of your bookstore or in the “mystery” section, and both would be correct locations. Even only a few pages in the novel, troubling questions appear. Besides simply seeing how everything comes together, we get troubling hints of suicide, murder and utter downfall. Why is it that Iris Chase, daughter to an industrial magnate, would end her life as a near-pauper? Is it as awful as it appears?

    Certainly, there’s something in this novel for everyone. Family portraits are always compelling, especially when they’re tragic. I was compelled by the inevitable descent of Iris Chase, even as it’s really liberation in disguise. And, of course, I couldn’t help but like the sympathetic portrait of pulp SF writers, with their imaginations being used for courtship and sustenance alike. There are beautiful phrases and memorable epigrams, as would be expected from an accomplished writer like Atwood.

    It all comes together in the end, of course. In such a beautiful way that you close the book and whisper a stunned wow of astonishment at how well the structure converges to a single unification point, at how deeply you’ve come to care for these flawed characters, at how even characterization mistakes are intentional. Don’t be surprised if you like The Blind Assassin better after you’ve read it that during an initial approach. It’s an admirable book as much as it’s a compelling one.

  • The Lion’s Game, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 2000, 926 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-60826-2

    Prior to September 11, 2001, I merely disliked terrorists.

    Living in good old peaceful Canada, I’ve never had any direct nor indirect experience with it. It was something that happened elsewhere. Sure, people got killed, and for this reason alone terrorists should be caught and tried… but as far as day-to-day life went, they did their stuff, I did mine, and that was it.

    That notion came tumbling down along with the World Trade Center.

    Now I simply hate terrorists. Unconditionally.

    On July 1 2001, me and me sister, while visiting New York, passed through the North-West Tower ground floor, snapped a picture and left.

    Now we can’t go back. The whole area has been destroyed. Terrorists have effectively destroyed part of my history.

    The effects ricocheted back to the present. A dear friend of mine was forced, amidst great personal turmoil, to cancel two trips she was looking forward to. And now I find that terrorists have invaded my library.

    The Lion’s Game should have been a good read. Indeed, I passed up an opportunity to buy the hardcover edition in August 2001, rationalizing that I’d read it sooner or later, so why not later?

    Later, after the WTC collapse, proved to be an atrocious idea.

    On the surface, without any outside influences, The Lion’s Game is a promising read. It brings back John Corey, the wisecracking narrator of DeMille’s good Plum Island. This time around, though, Corey has accepted a job with the New York Antiterrorist unit. As the book begins, he’s en route to the airport to pick up a terrorist in transit from Europe. So far… so good?

    Alas, any of the novel’s innocuous mentions of the World Trade Center now triggers a reflex. And that’s without counting lines such as “the quality of terrorists we get in this country is generally low… and the stupid things they’ve done is legendary… But then again, remember the World Trade Center. Not to mention the two embassy bombings in Africa.” [p.47] Later, there’s the disturbing scene on page 219-220, where our narrator stares at the WTC, reflects on the near-miss of 1993, possible worst-case scenario and the efficiency of American anti-terrorist units. Ow.

    But the worst realitymod in The Lion’s Game is the nature of the terrorist himself. The titular “Lion” acts too much like… a honorable villain. He kills specific targets to fulfill a personal objective; he doesn’t blindly strike at whoever he can kill. He is up-close and personal with his victims. He goads our narrator. He in no way acts like the monsters of September 11. He’s clearly a fictional construct.

    The resulting chase, which wouldn’t have been very good even when read “cold”, now seems more trivial than DeMille intended when writing the book. A few dead people here and there. Oh well.

    There’s plenty to say about the book in itself. How the narrator is the main attraction, and the chapters starring “The Lion” are merely filler. How the book is much too long. How the ending, as original as it is -in the sense that you probably haven’t seen anything like it before-, wraps the book in a messy fashion that satisfies no one. How Corey once again gets to sleep with a different woman. How little there is in these 900+ pages.

    But no; now, the main problem of the book is its attitude, its approach, its lackadaisical attitude toward terrorism. Scenes that now couldn’t exist. Lines that were funny, now turned sinister.

    The terrorists that killed 6000+ persons on September 11, 2001 and destroyed the World Trade Center have also invaded our libraries and video stores, turning run-of-the-mill thrillers in distasteful disappointments. They’re messing with the 1976 remake of KING KONG. They are retroactively planting bad memories in our minds. They are souring the thrills out of thrillers. They don’t even need to kill another person to do so; the damage is self-sustaining, rotting away our leisure time.

    That’s why there’s no escape, no surrender and no mercy possible for terrorists. And that’s why I hate their guts. No one messes with my library.

  • That Bringas Woman, Benito Pérez Galdós

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Everyman, 1996, 218 pages, C$12.99 tpb, ISBN 0-460-87636-8

    Through a set of circumstances too heart-breaking to explain, a good friend of mine gave me a copy of Benito Pérez Galdós’ That Bringas Woman to read. I never refuse given books, but in this case it turned into something bigger: As someone who generally reads modern genre fiction, I perceived this both as a challenge and an opportunity to broaden my literary horizons.

    And what a broadening it would become: Benito Pérez Galdós lived and wrote in an entirely different world. He was born in 1843, was educated in Madrid, traveled to Paris, witnessed the Spanish revolution of 1868 and remains widely credited with bringing the Realist novel to Spanish Literature. He died in 1920 after being “denied a nomination for the Nobel Prize for political reasons.” His 1884 novel That Bringas Woman, alas, isn’t considered to be among his finest work.

    And yet, it starts promisingly enough. The first chapter is akin to a gauntlet being thrown at the modern genre reader that I am, consisting in a long drawn-out description a picture, which we eventually find out to be made entirely of hair. It was a clear and unconventional signal that I’d better pay attention to the book, or else.

    Fortunately, I stuck with it. That Bringas Woman is a sly satiric portrait of a dysfunctional family headlined by a boring accountant who develops a quasi-morbid fascination with creating a hair picture memorial to a departed friend (“the whole thing must be done in the family hair” asks the widow [P.5]) and a woman (that Bringas woman, as it is), who is consumed with an irresistible compulsion to buy, buy, buy more and more fine clothes. All obsessions have their prices, and so is is that the Bringas man goes blind and the Bringas woman accumulates some significant debts. Only sin will save her… or will it?

    At it happened, I ended up reading That Bringas Woman concurrently with Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke. That was an invaluable exercise in perspective. Despite their different backgrounds, eras and approaches, both authors are really writing about the same things; characters consumed by their ambitions to the point of self-destruction. Palahniuk’s Victor Mancini might be a sex-addicted swindler with strong issues with his mother, but is he so different from Pérez Galdós’ Bringas, whose insatiable lust for fine things drive her to debauchery?

    Now don’t get the impression that I thought this was a fantastic novel. After a very good first half, the novel sort of settles into inconsequentiality for much of its latter portion, never fully exploiting the various tensions set up in previous portions of the novel. Several seemingly useless passages are revealed to be ultimately just that; useless. While it would have been natural to expect a dramatic humiliation for Bringas, she barely suffers for her sins, as if Pérez Galdós couldn’t make himself be too harsh on the character. The parallels between the Bringas and the royal Spanish regime are also less and less exploited, leading even more to a strong feeling of untapped potential in the novel’s promise.

    On the other hand, I can’t say enough good things about the Everyman edition of That Bringas Woman: Not only is the translation delightfully spot-on (with added modern touches, such as when the story of Adam and Eve is said to be so timeless as to be worth featuring on yesterday’s evening news), but the novel is encapsulated in enough supporting material -author biography, critical analyses, structural description, further reading, etc…- to make the novel accessible to any sufficiently-interested reader.

    In the end, I come away from That Bringas Woman with a feeling much like the one I was expecting; a few great epigrams (“Oh, children! They’re an illness that lasts nine months and a convalescence that lasts your whole lifetime.” [p.21] is one for the ages), great character descriptions (See Chapter 12 and the hilarious “triplicate” statement), a sense of deep intellectual satisfaction and, yes, an impression of broadened literary horizons. Not bad at all.

  • Appleseed, John Clute

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Orbit, 2001, 337 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 1-85723-758-7

    After suffering through John Clute’s Appleseed, I’m ready to propose a law that will require mandatory knee-breaking for every critic who has the gall to unleash a fiction borefest on an unsuspecting public.

    An explanation is in order: John Clute stands supreme as the world’s best science-fiction critic. His incisive commentary is compelling even if you haven’t read the book he’s talking about, and his views on the state of the genre deservedly provoke controversy. Read his reviews, and you’ll pick up vocabulary. His essay collection Look at the Evidence is in my library; I still refer to it from time to time as a demonstration of my complete lack of talent as a critic. In short, he’s the man, and I’m the weasel.

    So, naturally, the release of his first science-fiction novel, Appleseed, should be an event in itself. Who better than a critic to show a lesson to the rest of the SF world?

    Hey, stop laughing. It’s hard to lose one’s illusions.

    The problems begin even before the first page of the narrative, as Clute thoughtfully includes an Author’s Note explaining the meaning of “Azulejaria” and “Mappemonde”. Sound the warning bells; we’re in for a bumpy ride.

    How bumpy? How about a randomly-chosen prose excerpt for your perusal? Ready? Here goes: “Opsophagos consulted the crippled captive AI in its iron mask. They agreed that the Johnny Appleseed face of Klavier was artefactual, a play of light visible only from the command skiff. But the other face was no decal, no trick played on the instrument of the Harpe. The other face was the face of a planet.” [P.166]

    That might have been a bad random selection; it’s actually almost vulgarly accessible compared to the rest of the novel. The word “unreadable” generally comes to mind.

    But “boring” quickly follows it. Because not only is reading Appleseed a lot like wrestling in a mud pit with an octopus, when you manage to shine a light through the clouds of obfuscation and uselessly fancy prose, you end up with… not much. A standard mercenary trader story. A space opera that could have been written in the fifties if it wasn’t for the bad language and the sex.

    Oh yeah, the sex. And the bad language. Having lived only five years in the seventies and having never indulged in recreational drug-taking, I don’t have LSD flashbacks. But I can certainly have bad literary flashbacks, and reading Appleseed took me back to my least favourite SF period, the brain-damaged late-sixties/early-seventies when “experimental” authors like Moorcock, Delany or Russ urinated in the common pool by stuffing as much gratuitous sex and language in otherwise insipid stories. Appleseed is not only an atrocious book; it’s an atrocious book from the seventies.

    Egawd.

    I seriously thought about stopping to read, an exceedingly rare event for me. I kept slogging on, against my better judgement. Maybe it would get better. It sort of did, for a while, but that ultimately proved to be a cruel illusion. I might have read the last third of the book. I certainly don’t remember any of it.

    My point ultimately being that Appleseed is one of the worst SF books I’ve read in a while. Give me Star Trek novelizations or even another book by William Shatner; I might hate it as much as I do hate Appleseed, but at least I’ll have much more fun doing so.

    [July 2006: Years later, not necessarily any wiser, I have come to regard my impression of the book as a personal failure of comprehension. Clute rocks and we’re just hicks trying to catch up. There’s a telling passage by Neil Gaiman in the Clute-hommage anthology Polder that goes like this…

    [During the Milford writer’s workshop] we questionned his metaphors and similes. We would say: “John. You say here that ‘it was as if an entablature of salamanders performed a [myoclonic] can-can.’ Isn’t that a rather laboured, not to mention utterly opaque simile?”

    And he would brush off such foolishness with an airy gesture. “You may think that,” he said, “but later in the story an entablature of salamanders will actually perform a myoclonic can-can. And then it will resonate.” [P.158]

    …and so I am humbled. I will try this book again.]

  • Choke, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 2001, 293 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-385-50156-0

    Well, Palahniuk’s back with another book, and the bad news are that he’s not stretching many new writing muscles with his latest effort. Choke is in many ways the same type of stuff we’ve come to expect from the author of Fight Club, Survivor and Invisible Monsters. A first-person narration by a flawed character whose self-destructive impulse eventually break into weird self-salvation; this is and isn’t something we’ve seen before.

    Victor Mancini, medical school drop-out, has two jobs: The first one is at one of those fake historical villages. The second is to pretend to choke in fancy restaurants and “allowing” people to rescue him, then milking their sympathy for a few checks from time to time. Whenever he’s got time, he hits sexual addiction recovery groups for hot chicks or visits his mother, currently wasting away at a retirement home.

    But of course, you may suspect that as with any Palahniuk book, the real point of the novel isn’t as much in the main character as in the various vignettes he tells. No disappointment here, as we’re treated to a demented behind-the-scenes tour at a historical theme park (Chapter 4, 19, 28), the mechanics of scam-choking (Chapter 12), warning signals in public places (Chapter 15), a consensual mock-rape going hilariously wrong (Chapter 27), rock-collecting addiction writ large (Chapter 29) and the practical considerations of adhering to the Mile-High Club (Chapter 40). Good stuff, funny stuff. Not always particularly well-integrated stuff.

    The usual Palahniuk tic of repeating particular catch-phrases are also included, this time with the medically inspired “See also:” cascades and the recurring “[foo] isn’t the best word for it, but it’s the first one that comes to mind.” These fragments work well, and don’t get too repetitive.

    What is new -but not particularly successful- is how Palahniuk here flirts with the supernatural, with a less-than-definitive conclusion that disappoints in this regard. (It’s not the only problem with the conclusion, which is also a bit too hurried for full satisfaction.) There is also a small twist of sorts, but not a big one like the whopper in Fight Club or the barrage of steady revelations in Invisible Monsters.

    At least one thing that’s steady is the high level of quotable material, hilarious vignettes and semi-deep thoughts. Also constant is the compulsive readability of it all; don’t be surprised to read the book in only one setting, as it’s small enough and vigorous enough to drag you all the way though it. If nothing else, Palahniuk’s prose kicks the stuffing out of all the turgid self-important bon mots found elsewhere in the “general fiction” category. It’s hip writing, and it makes for cool reading.

    (Though, as usual, readers with weak sensitivities should steer clear of the Palahniuk oeuvre, as -in this case- it’s pretty much impossible to talk about self-destructive sexual addicts without, well, being graphic about it.)

    And yet, despite all the reading goodness of a new Palahniuk, it’s hard not to feel slightly disappointed by it all. Familiarity breeds contempt, and if it’s a good thing for an author to deliver similar material to his fan-base, it’s hard to feel as if Palahniuk should unshackle himself and try something different. Even third-person narration might be a break from the norm!

    In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with picking up his latest book. Funny, readable, not entirely superficial and filled with memorable passage, Choke might just make you wheeze, hiccup and snort with delight.

  • Counterparts, Gonzalo Lira

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Jove, 1998, 384 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-515-12429-X

    Why do you read thrillers? To be thrilled, obviously. But as with fine cuisine, there is a palette of possible thrills any writer may wish to play with. While some may thirst for tightly wound-up suspense, others may prefer gore, psychological intensity or military hardware.

    But take a bunch of experienced thriller fans and they’ll tell you that originality is often the biggest thrill of all. There’s a limit to the number of average serial-killer novels you can read. Even such a powerful concept as a government-wide conspiracy can lose its luster after a hundred novels. Thriller fans depend on a degree of innovation, of hard-edged newness to maintain their increasingly demanding fix.

    Chances are that parts of Gonzalo Lira’s Counterparts will please them.

    Certainly, this novel starts out promisingly on realism and meanness, two other thriller staples. Our first protagonist, FBI agent Margaret Chisholm, is introduced with a crackerjack sequence in which she isn’t afraid to amputate a suspected terrorist in order to avert a disaster. Mean, smart, tough and unpredictable, she’s a type of protagonist we could enjoy. Our second hero is a charming, sophisticated intellectual named Nicholas Denton, who controls the CIA through his directorship of the records department. They’re brought together after a shadowy assassin destroys a convent of nuns, and soon have to cooperate in order to find the truth behind the assassination.

    It sounds promising, and is in fact quite intriguing for a while. Lira’s antagonist -“Sepsis”- is an assassin who masters an astonishing variety of skills, and initially seems to be no match even for the united law-enforcement agencies of America. He mulls over concepts such as meta-killing (destruction without assassination), enjoys good books, speaks half a dozen languages and remorselessly kills after sex. Ooooh…

    Furthermore, for a while everything seems to adhere fairly well to the real world, with an extra twist of enhanced originality. Denton’s take-over of the CIA is believable, as are the various descriptions of the inner working of federal agencies. Sepsis’ methods are intricately described, and even if the thought of Quebecker terrorists assassinating Canadian federalists is slightly amusing, everything seems to hang together quite nicely.

    There are even a few exhilarating action scenes. While most thriller writers seem content with a clinical description of bullets, explosions and fatal trauma, Lira does an excellent job at representing action scenes on a purely visceral level. The demolition derby/fire-fight in Chapter 5, for instance, is one of the book’s highlights.

    The problem is that Lira doesn’t do much with any of the tools at his disposition. As soon as the narrative moves to Italy, interest goes downhill. Meta-murder is scarcely brought up again. The motives behind his attacks seem increasingly dubious as more and more revelations are made. The novel even seems to turn in circle past the halfway point, as if certain revelations had been made too soon.

    After that, the novel becomes more and more ludicrous, with extra layers of conspiracy, evil plans and secret identities that don’t make retroactive sense. Chisholm’s sexual preferences are gratuitously brought up. Denton’s lack of knowledge of the “true plan” is similarly unlikely. Sepsis’s origins are sort-of-explained, but it’s really hard to suspend our disbelief in this case. You may be excused a giggle or two during the last chapter.

    Ultimately, the end result is a novel whose freshness wears off midway through, but a promising debut by a writer who can only improve with time. Hopefully, Lira’s next novels will build on his strengths while correcting his deficiencies. Certainly there’s enough raw potential in Counterparts for three other novels. Now let’s see if it’s a false promise.

  • War of the Rats, David L. Robbins

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 1999, 474 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58135-X

    For all the horror and the suffering that came out of the period, World War Two is an inexhaustible source of great stories. Manhattan Project, Pearl Harbour, D-Day… The battle of Stalingrad, while less known in North America, stands as an equally fascinating event, a principal nexus of the Nazi’s Russian campaign and a turning point for, indeed, the whole war.

    Numbers can only tell you so much: Both armies lost 1,109,000 men in that battle. The city’s population was reduced from 500,000 to 1,500 civilians, “Of the million and a quarter invading soldiers who rode across the Russian steppe to the gates of Stalingrad in August of 1942, fewer than thirty thousand ever returned to their homeland.” [P. 470]

    But, as Stalin said, a million death is a statistic but a single death is a tragedy. In War of the Rats, David L. Robbins has found a way to humanize the conflict by focusing on that most personal of military killers, the sniper.

    While no soldier is alike, snipers are a special breed themselves. While they carry a powerful scope rifle, their most efficient weapons are stealth and patience. They will burrow in an innocuous spot, patiently wait -sometime for hours- for their target to make a mistake, and then they will take a shot. One bullet, one kill. While they might take a shot from more than half a kilometer away, there’s no real distance between them and their target. While soldiers often have the luxury of convincing themselves that it’s always the guy to their sides who fired the lethal shot, snipers have no such comfort; each killing is theirs.

    This sniper mystique is one of the many elements that come together successfully in War of the Rats. Based on real events, this novel is about the duel between a Russian and a German sniper in the ruins of Stalingrad during the fall of 1942. When the Germans become concerned about a Russian sniper hailed as a hero -Vasily Zaitsev-, they decide to take measures and send in their best shooter to track him down. It’s not the only story in the book, which uses this simple conflict as a springboard to describe the battle of Stalingrad, as well as a romantic affair between Zaitsev and an American-born (!) woman he trains as a sniper.

    The historical authenticity of War of the Rats is deeply impressive, convincingly representing the atrocious conditions of the battles and doing its best to put us in the soldiers’ frame of mind during it all. Robbins has conducted good research (there’s a complete bibliography at the end of the book), and the results are there for us to enjoy. Zaitsev and Thorvald’s duel comes to symbolize the test of will between the two nations fighting over Stalingrad.

    War of the Rats‘s principal flaws are its occasional lengths, which trade off energy for mood. The book is never snappy or flashy, but it does succeed admirably at building psychological suspense. It’s impressive to see what Robbins can do with a conflict in which both parties spend most of their time immobile, peering through a rifle scope.

    This is a docu-novel that should immensely please war buffs and thriller readers to no end. Historically accurate yet no less exciting for it, psychologically claustrophobic and filled with suspense, this is a novel unlike any you’ve read before. Worth a detour.

    (One last note: There is a recent film called ENEMY AT THE GATES, which also tells Zaitsev’s story though presumably not based explicitly on War of the Rats. Given the choice, see the film before reading the book. Not only will you be surprised at the differences between the film and the book -oh, those screenwriters!-, but the images of the film will help to ease you in the novel’s atmosphere. Though note that the German sniper Thorvalds looked nothing like Ed Harris.)

  • Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Norton, 1999, 297 pages, C$18.99 tpb, ISBN 0-393-31929-6

    The third novel of an author is in many ways the most revealing of his future career. Not only does no-one knows what to expect of your first, but you also have all the time in the world to polish it. If it’s successful, not only will everyone will expect something of your second, but you’ll also be expected it to deliver it in short notice. Most authors have enough material discarded from their first book to inspire a second one. But the third, ah, that’s when the author’s career takes off, with the expectation of a steady level of quality and the time restraints it implies.

    It’s also the novel that shows if the author is a one-note hack.

    Chuck Palahniuk certainly made an impression with his debut novel Fight Club, a blisteringly angry manifesto for the Gen-X generation. Beginning as the narrator has a gun in his mouth, it certainly established Palahniuk’s fascination for self-destruction. His second novel, Survivor, wasn’t much different, presented as the last recording of a man about to crash a plane in the Australian outback.

    So it’s no surprise to find ourselves in familiar territory again at the beginning of Invisible Monsters, as the narrator flashbacks from a scene involving a burning house and people getting shot with an automatic rifle. Rewind a few months, and the plight of the narrator becomes more apparent: An ex-fashion model, she’s been disfigured by a rifle shot across the jaw. Unable to speak, stuck in a relationship with a sexually conflicted vice cop, at the mercy of a clothes-stealing best friend, she quickly succumbs to the peculiar charms of a pre-op transsexual also looking for her true identity.

    If you think the above paragraph is weird, well, you really have no idea. The narrative hops in time like a mad rabbit, character all have multiple identities, self-destruction is pushed to new limits, twists and turns abound, and nothing is quite as it seems.

    The twists and turns of the novel are so extreme that they quickly acquire a quality of our own. Don’t be surprised to whoop and cheer at every outrageous revelation and ask for even more. Remember: No one is what it seems!

    All throughout, Palahniuk keeps up his usual verve and ironic narration. While our protagonist’s voice doesn’t quite fit with her personality, it’s not too much of an intrusion, as if it’s all-too-clear that this is Palahniuk’s narrating as a fashion model and not the fashion model herself. Give me irony. Flash. Give me quotable quotes. Flash. Give me a bookload of fun. Flash.

    As usual, there are several priceless moments scattered over the novel. One Christmas gift unwrapping turns into a nightmare for our narrator as her parents give her boxes after boxes of condoms, overcompensating for the plight of their AIDS-afflicted son. In another instance, we’re treated to a clinical description of the steps required in order to rebuild the narrator’s jaw —no small wonder our stomachs churn, as we understand why the narrator would rather stay that way.

    But what about Palahniuk’s future career, and all that good stuff mentioned in the introduction? It’s obvious that Palahniuk isn’t moving too far away from his usual themes of self-destruction and nick-of-time redemption. It’s also clear that stylistically, he’s sticking to what he knows best. While the shtick is still vastly entertaining, it’s also beginning to show its signs of excessive use. Only Palahniuk knows what his next book holds, but let’s just hope that it will allow him to stretch a few conceptual muscles.

  • Lagrange Five, Mack Reynolds

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 1979, 227 pages, C$1.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-12806-X

    It might be an artifact of growing up, becoming more cynical or watching too much of the evening news, but as I grow older, it seems to me as if Science-Fiction is all too often becoming a nostalgic refuge for the simplistic techno-fantasies of a more naive time.

    Not all science-fiction, mind you, and almost none of the stuff I really want to read. Such luminaries as Bruce Sterling or Greg Egan have proven themselves to be aware of the complexities of our world, and the effects of changing society on our dreams for a better tomorrow.

    In fact, because we’re so close to “our” contemporary SF, it’s often difficult to say what’s being naive for lack of perspective. But take a look a SF twenty years after publication and, oh boy, do you get perspective vertigo. While Mack Reynolds’ Lagrange Five isn’t offensive in its retrograde social values as, say, Martin Caidin’s 1984 novel Killer Station (which comes to mind only because I recently read it and it’s truly atrociously falsely feminist), it’s a novel that is showing some substantial cracks.

    The most visible of those comes from the setting. As you may infer, Reynold’s novel takes place on an O’Neill-type space habitat located in Lagrange Five. That notion was most popular around 1980, but has now proved -with a few year’s worth of hindsight- to be highly problematical. The building costs are unimaginable, the ecosystematic challenges complex (thanks to a few year’s worth of experience in trying to build artificial environments since then)… and perhaps most unsettling, the human aspects are more worrisome than ever. Will humans accept being stuck in an artificial habitat? How do you protect such a fragile habitat against attack or accidents? How do you finance it?

    In Reynolds’ view, few of those are problems, and those that are (claustrophobia) are more like plot devices than real issues. At the heart of Lagrange Five is a thriller, but it’s a thriller of such simplicity that it almost seems a distraction from the habitat so lovingly described.

    As usual with potboiler SF, there is an assumption that smart people never do wrong. Lagrange Five is an idyllic place to live, where several communities provide cultural diversity and people can choose which type of urban setting attracts them the most. Oh, and everyone on Lagrange Five is hyper-intelligent, because they won’t allow anyone with a lower IQ to immigrate. (Even thinking of myself as an intellectual elitist, this notion disturbs me somewhat. At least Reynolds handwaves something about Emotional Quotients.)

    There is also a black superiority subplot, handled with maybe a touch more class than we’d expect from a hard-SF story. Lagrange Five‘s resolution is as unashamedly didactic as the rest of the novel, which spends as much time demonstrating how much of a cool idea it is than to advance the mechanics of the plot.

    And yet, I enjoyed it. The plot advances by fits and spurts, but the details are always interesting. Our averagely-intelligent protagonist easily gets the smart girl, and it’s all really sweet. Reading about a well-adjusted artificial community might be so déclassé, but it’s unarguably more fun than having to suffer through another angst-ridden post-cyberpunk novel.

    So should we conclude that nostalgia has its place? Maybe. After all, if SF can all things to all people, it probably allows some room for everything, including uncompromising optimism in the best retro fashion.

  • Gravity, Tess Gerritsen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1999, 385 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-01677-6

    By now, you should know the rant: Some will argue that after decades of publishing fiction tightly segregated in marketing categories, enough is enough. Critics demand cross-fertilization! Authors are rebelling against the straightjackets of genres! Readers are picking books blindfolded! Everywhere, the crowd chants “Fusion! Down with genres! Mix’em up!”

    Uh-huh.

    I don’t think so, but that doesn’t preclude the odd good cross-over book from time to time. Tess Gerritsen’s Gravity is one such book, a medical thriller with one interesting twist… it’s set on the International Space Station.

    Interestingly enough, you’d expect this crossover between medical thriller and science-fiction to be penned by an author previously associated with SF—if only because authors in other genres are usually reluctant to do research on space technology and associated material. But not so with Gravity and Tess Gerritsen, whose best-known previous novels are unarguably medical thrillers. (She also has nine romantic thrillers to her credit, but is now exclusively “marketed” as a medical thriller writer) Gerritsen has obviously done her research, and the space station segments are lovingly detailed with exactitude to rival the best and most obsessive hard-SF writers. (And, though it’s considerably incorrect to dwell on such details, her photo on the back jacket shows that she’s a real hottie. Ahem.)

    The result of Gerritsen’s work is unusually invigorating, attacking a familiar SF premise with an abundance of hard-edged details that are real now.

    And what a lovely premise it is: After a slight accident with one of the ISS’s biological experiment, doctor Emma Watson—newly sent up as mission medical specialist after an accident that befalls her predecessor—is helpless to prevent the contamination of her colleagues with a mysterious and deadly disease. After NASA decides to quarantine the station rather than bring back the virulent plague to Earth, well, it’s up to her to find a solution…

    The real fun of Gravity isn’t in the premise, nor the overall story or conclusion: It’s in seeing the gradual tightening of the screws taking place in the first two-thirds of the book, where the claustrophobia of the ISS multiplies the creep factor of the disease tenfold, and all the possible options to save our protagonist are gradually stripped away.

    This tension culminates with a memorable shuttle landing halfway through, and the revelation of the nature of the sickness killing off the ISS astronauts. After that, well, things are somewhat obvious. Paradoxally, tension falls as possible paths for survival are reduced to exactly one. It’s a small letdown, but not one serious enough to sink the book… though it definitely strips it of any superlative mention.

    All the way through, Gerritsen manages to deliver an excellent mix of limpid writing and convincing details. It’s not easy to juggle both astronautic and medical jargon at the same time, but here she achieves both with an admirable deftness. (“Combines the tension of ER and APOLLO 13” raves the New York Post on the back cover. Amen.)

    Gerritsen even goes back to her romantic literary origins by including a strong “estrangered couple” relationship in the mix. Have I mentioned the expression “genre fusion” in my introduction?

    While it climaxes before impact and recycles elements that will be familiar to avid genre readers, Tess Gerritsen’s Gravity remains a wonderfully unusual thriller. Impressive research, good use of telling details and an exceptional initial heightening of tension should be enough to make you pick it up if you’re in the mood for this type of novel. I’m definitely curious about Gerritsen’s other novels now.

  • Apaches, Lorenzo Carvaterra

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 1997, 368 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-42251-1

    What is a “structural problem” in the context of a book review? What is “structure”, anyway? Is it easily identifiable? Are you even interested? And why am I asking these questions at the beginning of my review of Lorenzo Carvaterra’s Apaches?

    Definitions first: I’d argue that “structure” is the way the story is put together. It’s neither the premise nor the writing. It’s akin to plotting, but not quite, as you can tell a same story in many ways. Structure is how the author makes a transition from the overall story he’s trying to tell to the mechanics of how to tell it. For instance, the premise might be “farmboy takes over as king”, structure might be “farmboy learns about the world, makes friends, raises an army, attacks the castle and kills the king” while plotting might be the various general events that fill in the structure: “he makes friends by paying them beers and triumphing at a snooker contest”.

    Structural problems arise when, for a reason or another, something prevents the story from being told in a satisfying fashion. This, obviously, is all in the reviewer’s mind. But consider: the movie PEARL HARBOUR puts its most impressive sequence -the attack on Pearl Harbour- right in the middle of the film, padding it on each side by an hour of miscellaneous stuff. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to put it at the very end of the film, during which all the conflicts are resolved at the highest moment of dramatic tension? Or, more interestingly, begin the film with the attack and end it after the battle of Midway, when Americans win a sizeable victory over Japanese forces? That is a structural problem.

    On a straight paragraph-to-paragraph level, Lorenzo Carvaterra’s Apaches is a pretty good read. Heck, even in chapter-to-chapter, it’s sufficiently interesting. He writes clear prose, adequate characters and isn’t afraid to be truly nasty when depicting evil characters. (Two stomach-turning words will suffice: Dead babies) In fact, rip out the first half of Apaches, and you have a fair thriller.

    The structural problem comes up when you consider the first half of the book. Not the first chapter, mind you, an effectively heart-wrenching depiction of a kidnapping. But right after, as “Book one” of Apaches (chapter 1-6, P.7-132) introduces, chapter after chapter, the six main protagonists of the novel. While the chapter-stories are interesting, they’re either too long or to concentrated at the start of the novel at a point where the reader is justifiably asking himself why he should read on.

    There are ways of handling the same material more carefully. In Icon, Frederick Forsyth introduces his main protagonist in the story only midway through. However, the first half of the book interleaves the main plot and the protagonist’s personal history in such a fashion that the protagonist’s backstory is completed just as he enters the stage. That’s good structure and that’s what should have been done here, introducing one character at a time along with their backstories.

    Okay, I’ll admit it; it’s not such a big problem. You can get past it and enjoy Apaches as what it is, a story of hurt ex-cops banding together to rid the world of an evil criminal, shoot’em-up style.

    A word of caution, though: Apaches is one mean book. Each of the protagonists has a violent tale to tell. The villains are truly completely evil. Even our heroes, once they get their mandate to get rid of the scums, are uncomfortably closer to vigilante justice than to law and order. Apaches does some mileage out of an examination of the line between good and bad, righteousness and revenge. Almost by definition it can’t be a pleasant tale. The high body count doesn’t really help.

    But in the end, chances are that you won’t be able to shake off the feeling that somehow, this could have been an easier, a more powerful tale. That’s when abstract notions such as “structural problems” suddenly become compelling.

  • Fortunes of War, Stephen Coonts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 1998, 376 pages, C$33.99 hc, ISBN 0-312-18583-9

    Regular readers of these reviews know that I have said a lot of nasty things about the current works of those who used to write great techno-thrillers in the early nineties. Tom Clancy has killed his editors. Payne Harrison suffered brain damage and turned UFO-nut. Larry Bond took too much Prozac and now writes simplistic crap. Dale Brown re-writes the same boring book again and again. Harold Coyle got lost in the Civil War and never came back.

    Compared to all of his classmates, at least Coonts is making an effort. Granted, The Intruders had problems, and I can’t discuss the formulaic-sounding latest Cuba, Hong-Kong and America trilogy without reading them first, but at the very least he doesn’t actively try to repeat himself. Fortunes of War, despite some shortcomings, is a step in the right direction. One that should be attempted by a few of the afore-mentioned authors.

    The first great thing about it is how it does not take place in the author’s flagship universe. Whereas Clancy continues to play in Jack Ryan’s increasingly divergent parallel Earth and Dale Brown re-uses the same characters over and over again, Coonts temporarily abandons his Jake Grafton alter-ego here and branches off in a new world: In the first few pages of the novel, the Japanese emperor is murdered by hard-liners, and preparations are made by the new government to invade oil-rich Siberia. Oh, and both sides have nuclear weapons…

    Shortly after Japanese troops take over Siberian cities, American pilot Bob Cassidy is dispatched to the area with a squadron of F-22s. The United States want to stop the Japanese intervention, but political pressures force them to send only pilots who will fight for the Russian air force. Of course, things are more complex once the Americans have to face a new Japanese fighter jet, and Cassidy has to fight against a friend on the other side…

    Have I mentioned the coup that drives a rabid dictator to the top of the Russian government? There is a lot of material in here, and it’s Fortunes of War‘s chiefmost problem that it attempts to cover a lot of ground in relatively few pages. Describing a war takes time unless you severely constrain your scope (see Coyle’s Team Yankee), and while Coonts focuses on a few characters, the picture still seems fragmentary.

    It doesn’t help that several pages are spent on the wrong things. Most of Cassidy’s fellow pilots are discussed more intricately during their recruitment than after. A lot of time is spent in preparation rather than the actual war itself. There are only a few glances at the ground war. At the same time, the novel flies from the pilots to the politicians. While the beginning is laborious, the ending is rushed. In short, there seems to be a lack of focus.

    There’s also, in the middle of this realistic scenario, a bit too much of war-stories dramatics. The “elite corps of competent misfits that has to fight battles on their own” motif is, by now, so over-used that even careful rationalization can’t completely excuse it. The friendship between pilots on opposite sides is interesting, but seems artificial. The Russian dictator is straight out of Central Casting.

    Still, the novel is a good read, and not an entirely unsatisfying one. There are good action set-pieces, and a few interesting characters. More of them die than you might expect. Maybe best of all, this novel doesn’t slavishly imitate Coonts’ earlier works, which have concentrated more on the Vietnam War (Flight of the Intruder), limited theater engagements (Final Flight) or more espionage-driven plots (The Minotaur). It’s his first try at a brand-new war; give him some slack. At least he’s working harder at it than his colleagues.