Book Review

  • One Point Safe, Andrew & Leslie Cockburn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Anchor, 1997, 288 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-385-48560-3

    In 1997, then brand-new studio Dreamworks released its first film, a techno-thriller called THE PEACEMAKER. It starred Nicole Kidman and George Clooney and dealt with their efforts to retrieve a few nuclear bombs stolen by a terrorist. Unfortunately, the film received a mixed critical reception and quickly sank at the box-office, pulling in only $41 million US and quickly fading in memories.

    Too bad; I enjoyed the film a lot, finding it to be one of the only good techno-thriller of the late nineties. It seemed reasonably authentic and adequately detailed; the film is still the only one I recall in which the protagonists realistically disarmed a nuclear weapon. Small surprise to learn -later- that it was based on Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s One Point Safe, a non-fiction book about the nuclear dangers to come out of the ex-USSR. Both writers were even credited as the co-producers of the movie and penned the original story.

    What you can’t know until you read the source book is how the reality is presented as being far more chilling that the fiction.

    One Point Safe begins with a bang, as it describes how a team of German terrorists tried to steal a tactical nuclear weapon from an American base in 1977. Their assault was thwarted by the failure of their diversion, but as the authors write, “No longer was it a question ‘if’ terrorists wanted to steal a nuclear weapon.” [P.6]

    It gets worse. Much worse, as the Cockburns delve deeper in the wreckage of the ex-Soviet Union. In a few chapters, they describe the awful conditions to which the once-proud Soviet military has been reduced to. Officers in charge of nuclear weapons now starving, multi-megaton storage facilities rusting out of neglect. Plutonium depots left un-garded. The problem with the collapse of an empire is that after the collapse, all the nasty stuff is still there even if the people aren’t.

    The crux of One Point Safe is to show the various nuclear dangers in this post-cold-war era. The guards are gone, corrupt or criminal, but their deadly possessions remain. So the Cockburns describe actual cases of radioactive material theft, the lax security measures in Russian weapons depots, the new ultra-capitalistic Russians trying to make money off the Soviet arsenal and how nuclear non-proliferation agreements aren’t worth much when transgressions mean eating again.

    Things aren’t necessarily better in the United States. The Cockburns take an almost sadistic delight in describing a botched anti-terrorism exercise gone hilariously wrong. “Mirage Gold” becomes a parade of mistakes, and latter exercises designed to intercept nuclear smuggling aren’t any more successful. Those mistakes are compensated, somewhat, by a few intelligence coups, such as the American purchase of important quantities of plutonium from Russia. Once such operation, codenamed Sapphire, is a marvel of logistics meticulously described by the Cockburns.

    Still, as the book advances, you can’t help but feel increasingly spooked by the missing “backpack nukes”, the widespread corruption, the “accidentally discovered” smuggling rings, the open borders, the broken Russian chain-of-command and, oh, the narrowly-avoided nuclear war of 1995.

    All of which raises the question, of course, of the veracity of One Point Safe. Certainly, the tone is cheerfully sentionalistic. Online ( www.bullatomsci.org/issues/1998/jf98/jf98arkin.html ), you can find a letter from an atomic scientist protesting the alarmist tone of the Cockburns. Indeed, they probably overstate their case. But even if half of what they say is true… In any case, it makes for exciting reading.

    Beyond the compulsive narrative drive of this book, you can also look at One Point Safe for one of the clearest description of how executive policy is formed, as a team of analysts tries to convince the Clinton administration to do something about the Russian situation.

    In short, One Point Safe is a meanly effective read. Sensationalist but always effective, this non-fiction account will make you cringe and hope that the intelligence community is doing its work. Because otherwise…

  • Our Dumb Century, The Onion

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Three Rivers Press, 1999, 164 pages, C$24.00 tpb, ISBN 0-609-80461-8

    It always amazes me whenever someone opines that history is boring. To hear them talk, history’s just a dull recitation of dates, names and events. Don’t they realize that history can explain everything that happens today? Don’t they know that the best stories ever published don’t even equal some of the amazing stuff that has truly happened in the past? Don’t they even remember Santayana’s admonition?

    Maybe all that’s missing is a gifted vulgarizer, someone to make the study of history amusing, accessible and worthwhile. I don’t think that this is what the staff of The Onion had in mind when they set out to put together Our Dumb Century, but the result certainly makes history a lot of fun again.

    You might or might not already be familiar with the web humor magazine The Onion ( http://www.theonion.com/ ), but it doesn’t really matter; all you need to know is that Our Dumb Century‘s shtick is to “reprint” a hundred year’s worth of front pages from the Onion as a retrospective of the century. None of it is available on the web site.

    Of course it’s all made up. Headlines like 1917’s “Pretentious, Goateed Coffeehouse Types Seize Power in Russia” or 1953’s “A-Bomb May Have Awakened Gigantic Radioactive Monsters, Experts Say” should be a giveaway. But the most amazing thing about Our Dumb Century (past the funny stuff, of course) is how real it looks. The front pages from the beginning of the century look exactly like the old newspapers did, with shaky typography, badly-reproduced graphics and overstuffed layout. The graphical team responsible for the design of the book truly did their homework, and visually, there isn’t a single detail that looks out of place. It’s one of the small pleasures of the book to flip from page to page and see the evolution of “The Onion” through the century.

    All of which is considerably reinforced by the pitch-perfect style of the writing. The Onion’s writers have convincingly re-created the characteristic tone of reporting through the century, through the biased, wordy style of the 1900s to the carefully antiseptic prose of the 1990s. It may or may not be exact, but it adds a lot to the impact of the jokes.

    And what jokes they are: From 1900’s “Death-by-Corset Stabilizes at One in Six” to 2000’s “Christian Right Ascends To Heaven”, Our Dumb Century offers a century’s (and 164 pages’) worth of satire. Every page is shock-full of stuff in 8-point type, with enough nastily funny headlines to make you groan in pure sadistic delight. (How about 1963’s “Kennedy Slain By CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemason: President Shot 129 Times from 43 Different Angles” or 1937’s “German Jews Concerned about Hitler’s ‘Kill All Jews’ Proposal”?)

    Naturally, this isn’t for everyone. The level of sadistic irony can be shocking (1976: “Cambodia to Switch to Skull-Based Economy”), as can be the intentional profanity (July 21, 1969. ’nuff said.)

    Historical figures are in for a thorough irreverent thrashing, of course. There’s an alternate-universe arrest/getaway/manhunt/shootout involving Nixon (1974), a few good slams at FDR (1933: “President confronts depression with ‘Big Deal’ Plan: ‘Big Deal, I’m Rich’ Roosevelt Says”) and welcome nastiness about various great villains of our century (1977: “Idi Amin Praises Former Ugandan Defense Minister as ‘Delicious’”)

    A sense of history is, of course, as useful as a sense of humor, but while Our Dumb Century can motivate anyone to learn a bit more, it’s unclear whether a sense of humor can be developed. For those with some knowledge of the past hundred years, though, the payoff is enormous. The staff of The Onion laughs at an astonishing variety of subjects, from arts to politics, military affairs to fashion fads and you never know when your favorite areas of interest might pop up.

    The only flaw of the book that I could find was a loss of historical perspective over the last 30 pages of the book in favor of lighter pop-culture references. Maybe inevitable given the lack of perspective… or accurate given the real nineties.

    Not only is Our Dumb Century an instant classic and one of the funniest books of the twentieth century, but it’s also one of the best gift ideas I’ve ever seen for smart people. Buy a crate, encourage The Onion, distribute at will and get compliments on your impeccable taste. Easy!

  • H.M.S. Unseen, Patrick Robinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper, 1999, 526 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-109801-9

    There are times where I seriously wonder if reading more than 170 books a year is somehow rotting my mind. Why else to explain peculiar attachment to authors I don’t care about? H.M.S. Unseen is Patrick Robinson’s third novel and freakishly obsessive readers of my reviews will remember that I haven’t liked either Nimitz Class or Kilo Class very much. Robinson writes badly, has no gift for effective characterization, doesn’t know how to structure his stories and has a rather curious sense of global geopolitics. I might have picked up H.M.S. Unseen with the hope that he has improved, but he really hasn’t.

    The story is a loose follow-up to Nimitz Class in that the terribly anticlimactic death of the first novel’s antagonist is revealed to be the sham we suspected all along. Ben Adnam is back in action, but maybe not as smoothly as he wants to: The first few dozen pages of H.M.S. Unseen describe how the Iraqi government decides to get rid of their most troublesome agent, and how Adman escapes through marshes and deserts to join Iran’s government. His proposition? To exact revenge, he will frame Iraq for a series of devastating terrorist attacks.

    I’d say “so far so good” if it was the case, but it isn’t. Early on, all of Robinson’s usual faults come back to haunt us. He can’t write. Still. Clumsy exposition drowns out dialogue to such an extent that there isn’t any dialogue left. His sense of dramatic structure is shaky at best; events happen out of nowhere without preparation and then he’ll spend dozens of pages on the most insignificant details before kicking the plot in an entirely different direction again. The downing of the experimental plane is a perfect case in point; what could have been milked for drama simply becomes another plot point without too much importance. But, oh, Adnam’s Scottish escape becomes a marathon of tiny details we couldn’t possibly care about, given that we know he will do it.

    After three connected novels, I still can’t care about one single character in Robinson’s oeuvre. He tries to make an antihero of his terrorist villain, but it comes across as just… insipid. Late in the book, he tried to make me pity the antagonist (aw, looove… and it just so happens that the girl is now married to the protagonist of the first two novels!), but my only wish remained for the bad guy to irrevocably die so that I could move on to other things.

    More and more, it looks like Robinson simply has no clue about what makes a good technothriller, whether it’s the tiny (oh; the writing, maybe?) or the grand. On an overarching level, I just can’t believe in what Robinson does. Late in HMS Unseen, for instance, Adman encourages the United States to destroy -with cruise missiles!- a large dam in Iraq, killing thousands of civilians, setting back Iraq a few decades in hydro-electrical capacity and, oh, provoking a major international incident in the process. (The characters pooh-pooh such objections as “we’ll be caught!”) Utterly unbelievable, especially in a context where the States are already being unjustly blamed for “hundred of children dying every day because of sanctions”. Now imagine actually destroying a dam. I was practically screaming at the novel “No, you moron! Leave the civilian targets alone!” No such luck.

    The structure of the novel is even more insipid, bouncing from situation to situation without a sense of heightened stakes. The final few pages are emblematic of the problem, as the villain is dispatched almost with a yawn and a wave of the hand. Almost as if by then, Robinson hated his novel as much as I did.

    Still, you got to hand it to the guy. To be able to publish three awful novels in a row (and to get me to read’em) takes a special skill. You know what? I’m almost certain I’ll read his fourth. I might spend my time cursing at it and muttering dark promises of retribution, but at least it’ll be more entertaining than reading, say, yet another dull and tired Dale Brown B-52 fantasy.

    Egad. Maybe I am brain-damaged after all.

  • Marrow, Robert Reed

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2000, 502 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-56657-2

    Readers of these reviews won’t be surprised to learn that I don’t necessarily review everything that I read. Aside from my technical/reference reading, there are a considerable number of books that are either too inconsequential or too boring to review at length. Over any given period, I will review one book in three or four that I read.

    While it’s relatively easy to praise or condemn a book, it’s much harder to find ~650 words about a book that didn’t even register in the first place. Unfortunately, I also try to review every recent SF book that I buy, if only to justify my SF purchases. With Robert Reed’s Marrow, I find myself with a conflict. I want to review it because it’s recent SF. Yet I don’t want to review it because it’s such a blah book.

    It’s long. It takes place over thousands of years. It features only a dozen characters, and not many of those are of any interest. For ten Canadian dollars, you can get a much better book.

    And yet… here goes:

    Let’s start with the premise, arguably the best thing about Marrow: It all takes place in a big alien ship. A really big alien ship. I don’t exactly recall the dimensions, nor can I be bothered to dig them up, but it’s such a big alien ship that humans eventually discover a Mars-sized planet deep inside after a few hundred thousand years of occupation. Mars-sized. And they’d sort of never found it before. Big alien ship.

    Due to life-extension technology, the lifespan of our characters is virtually infinite barring any unfortunate accidents. This has two important consequences on the plot of the novel. First, these characters think nothing of waiting a few hundred years before doing something. Second, we can never be totally sure they’re dead until their individual atoms are fissioned. There are more fakeouts in Marrow than there are in an entire season of your favorite soap-opera.

    The plot involves a few hundred senior ship officers being stranded on the Mars-like planet as no-one ever goes to look for them. Thousands of years (and hundreds of pages) pass. They eventually manage to re-create a complete industrial civilization and go back to the ship, only to discover a dastardly plot to take over the ship. There’s a war in which millions of sentient beings die. There is an ending of sort. The end.

    Now milk out all the drama out of the above, add in some spurious pseudo-melodrama and let fester for five hundred pages. Your result will look a lot like Marrow; good potential, but it’s just not a lot of fun. I was lucky enough to be stuck witnessing a day-long management conference with the book as my only friend. It was probably the most efficient way to make me read a book I didn’t care too much about.

    And that, in a nutshell, is all you need to know about Marrow: I didn’t care too much about it. Certainly didn’t love it, but neither did it actively start annoying me. It just… was.

    Unfortunately, that means that your hard-won entertainment dollars (and your even more precious entertainment-time) can be spent more efficiently elsewhere. Bruce Sterling. Learning Spanish. A yo-yo. Heck, even a Hollywood movie. Oh, Reed completists will presumably love it, if they exists. Some SF critics may be tempted to read it if only to find out how some exciting ideas can be ruined by tepid writing. Many of us, though, may very well just not care. Too bad.

  • Sea Fighter, James H. Cobb

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Jove, 2000, 513 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-515-12982-8

    Over the past year, I’ve read so many limp military thrillers (Brown’s Fatal Terrain, Rugerro’s The Common Defense, Stewart’s The Kill Box, etc…) that I had almost forgotten what it felt like to read a genuinely entertaining one. Fortunately, James H. Cobb’s Sea Fighter was there to make me believe in the genre again.

    What often happens with military-series writers is that they eventually get stale, don’t renew their premises, barely allow for character growth and simply lose touch with how to write an exciting novel. Not so here: After two similar novels, Cobb shuffles the deck with skill, and Sea Strike continues the series with sustained originality.

    The novel’s first few pages are deliciously jarring, as protagonist Garrett writes a “If you read this, I’m dead…” letter from a marine platform a few miles away from the African coast. Veteran readers of the series will be immediately concerned; where’s “the Duke”, the high-tech destroyer that starred in the first few books? What is Amanda doing, planning to lead a ground expedition in Africa?

    The next few pages lay it out for us; the USS Cunningham is in dry-dock for repairs after the events of Sea Strike, and Amanda Garrett’s been offered a post coordinating the UN forces in a nasty little war in Africa. This sets up a devilishly clever scenario where the might of the US military is handicapped by political concerns to such a degree where a battle with an African navy becomes more of a test of cleverness than a war of firepower. Garrett is forced to out-think a dangerously intelligent antagonist and win the war through unconventional means… a intellectual contest in which the biggest winner is the reader.

    From large-scale naval engagements, Garrett is forced to move to coastal tactics and gadgets. Amphibious crafts and SEAL-team tactics are in the foreground in Sea Fighter, which is a nice change of pace and a welcome renewal of Cobb’s fiction. The featured techno-gadgets here are the titular “Seafighters”, experimental armed hovercrafts that do pretty much everything including cutting and dicing. The new tactical capabilities of the “Air Cushion Gunboats” are a good excuse for new tactics and original spectacular scenes; Cobb has a lot of fun with his gadgets, and so do the readers. Now that we’ve seen the first military novel about hovercrafts, I’m waiting for one on hydrofoils.

    It’s been an axiom of mine that you can reliably gauge the worth of a military technothriller by the number of Cool Scenes it features. Sea Fighter ranks highly on that scale, with an assortment of well-narrated battle scenes, clever maneuvering on both sides of the conflict and accessible political/strategic considerations. The care with which the antagonist is established as a nuanced opponent is one of the highlights of the novel and yet another facet of Cobb’s skill.

    While war is a grim subject and current real-world conflict headlines are hardly amusing, military novels are a different things, and indeed the best of them can also be distinguished by a sense of compulsive fun. Sea Fighter understands this perfectly and is quick to establish the book’s main conflict as a chess game in which moves and countermoves alternate in a compulsively readable fashion.

    Don’t make the mistake of assuming that it’s all simplistic fluff, though; the geopolitics of Sea Strike are plausible and realistic to a degree that is far more convincing than some of its brethrens. Cobb can also rely on an impressive catalogue of historical references. Here, a raid on enemy lines isn’t presented as a cowboy manoeuvre, but a Civil War tactic adapted to modern times.

    It all adds up to an intelligent and entertaining war novel. Dig deeper and you’ll see Sea Fighter as a true example of the dirty-little-wars era military novel, where reduced stakes don’t mean a reduced interest for the reader. Grab it as soon as possible if you’re a fan of the genre. Don’t forget to pick up the rest of the Cobb oeuvre while you’re at it.

  • The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, Cory Doctorow & Karl Schroeder

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Alpha, 2000, 360 pages, C$25.95 tpb, ISBN 0-02-863918-9

    One of the most unlikely publishing trends of the nineties has been the Dummies’ Guide to… series of books, along with the inevitable knock-offs, such as -surprise- the Complete Idiot’s Guide to…. Using a voluntarily provocative title as a hook for a series of excellent reference works, the publishers of these two series have moved away from the obvious computer training manuals to delve into subjects we might not have expected from dummies guides.

    Publishing Science-Fiction is one of those unlikely subjects. Few would be prompt to categorize idiots as a prime demographic for writing SF—though the jury is still out on Star Trek readers. Delve beyond the silly title, however, and you’ll find the best book on the market to teach, as it says, how to publish Science-Fiction.

    Rising Canadian SF superstars Cory Doctorow (2000 Campbell Prize Winner) and Karl Schroeder (Ventus, The Claus Effect, etc.) have put together a step-by-step guide to writing SF where the only ingredient missing is determination. This Guide starts with an introduction to the genre, of course, then moves on to the essential mechanics and techniques of SF writing. The authors don’t try to teach how to write as much as they highlight the differences between SF and other types of literature. As could be expected from a general guide, their explanations are limpid and eminently accessible.

    But the Guide doesn’t stop there. Once the stories are written, the hard part begins: they have to be sold! It’s no accident is this is a guide to publishing rather than writing SF: Doctorow and Schroeder spend more than half the book discussing how to build a professional SF-writing career, from the initial story sales to fiscal considerations whenever a significant fraction of your income comes from book royalties. While this will probably annoy any “true artist” in the crowd, very few resources actually deal with material considerations for budding authors.

    Through it all, the Guide really represents a cause for minor astonishment at market forces: Given such a niche market fed by only a few hundred authors, who could have contemplated a market for a book on how to become a pro SF writer?

    This being said, it’s not as if only budding writers will benefit from reading the Guide. By lucidly explaining the mechanics and distinctions of SF, Doctorow and Schroeder have also allowed the rest of us a glimpse at the hidden engines of modern Science Fiction. For instance, their discussion of SF character-building [Chapter 11] -and the embodiment of SF themes in events rather than characters-, will be enlightening to fans and critics of the field by explaining why SF works like it does. The first part of the guide, which introduces SF to the masses, is also invaluable in providing a succinct, but thorough overview of the field. Naturally, the glimpse in the dirty mechanics of the SF publishing industry will also help any avid fan to understand the market forces driving the field.

    The Guide is a reference book that knows how to grow with its owner. While most will initially pay more attention to the earlier parts, the latter sections of the book -on self-promotion, awards and contracts- become more important as the writer matures in his chosen profession.

    Finally, it’s worth noting that the book is a delight to read from start to finish, thanks to its efficient structure and the accessible style of the authors. Good fun, even if it doesn’t directly concern you.

    In short there isn’t a lot to dislike about the Guide. While already occasionally dated barely a year after release (Please note that the accompanying web site has moved to http://www.kschroeder.com/guide/ ), most of its advice will remain effective for a long time. Check it out at the local library if it sounds interesting to you, and definitely consider buying it if you think you want to be a pro SF writer.

  • Time Future, Maxine McArthur

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Aspect, 1999 (2001 reprint), 445 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-60963-3

    Looking at the recent SF production of 1999-2001, it does seem ironic that at the very turn of the century, some of the most vital novels of the genre are from non-American authors. You might even call it the revenge of the British Commonwealth, what with Britain (Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter) and Canada (Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Charles Wilson) churning up excellent material. Now Australia joins the pack, with the ubiquitous-yet-unseen Greg Egan, and now Maxine McArthur. It’s much too early to say whether McArthur will establish herself as a first-rate writer, but Time Future is an interesting first novel that bodes well for her next.

    Arriving on American shores in paperback form nearly two years after original publication, Time Future comes pre-packaged with a few choice quotes and even an award, the George Turner Prize for best Australian SF novel. Try to lower your expectations, though; at its heart, Time Future remains a standard space-station-bound space-opera the sort of which Babylon-5 did so well.

    On the other hand, Babylon-5 never dropped its characters in such a prolonged nightmare: As Time Future begins, the Jocasta station’s been under siege for over a year. No transit, no supplies, not even any communication with the outside universe. No trace of a rescue attempt either. Inside the station, things are looking grim, what with a growing refugee problem, failing environmental systems, increased hysteria amongst the factions aboard the station and no hope in sight.

    Commander Halley is the one who must deal with this situation, and after more than a year, even the strongest women can falter under the constant stress. Nightmares, personality conflicts and plain desperation are her daily torments. As if that wasn’t enough, the novel piles up the difficulties: The blockading aliens want to talk to her, the alien factions inside the station aren’t helping at all, a mysterious ship is cause for more questions than answers, an alien trader is killed in an impossible fashion and her estranged alien ex-husband comes back to haunt her.

    It’s definitely not a cheerful novel. No one will be blamed if they’re tempted to fast-forward rather than slog through more than 400+ pages of claustrophobia, depression, no hot showers and constant peril.

    Through it all, though, McArthur creates a fascinating universe. Perhaps reflecting Australia’s geopolitical status vis-a-vis the United States, her humans are merely bit-players on the galactic stage. They barely rent out faster-than-light travel, own a station more through chance than merit (it’s not even human-built) and more or less acknowledge that they can be wiped out at any time. Hmm. (Someone could build a fascinating thesis comparing and contrasting this attitude against the British post-colonialism and the American hegemonism. But that’s not going to happen in this review.)

    As far as the novel itself is concerned, Time Future is merely adequate. It can be read, and eventually picks up some narrative steam, but it’s not much of a page-turner. The details are convincing but not mesmerizing. The writing doesn’t flow as easily as it should for a mystery/adventure such as this one. The characterization is well-done, though maybe more by piling up problems on the characters rather than making them sympathetic. (The protagonist herself is afflicted with yet another one of those “murdered relatives” trauma.)

    Still, it’s a relatively enjoyable novel. The mystery isn’t as interesting as it thinks it is (not all the required facts are available to the reader from the onset), but it’s fun to piece together the various parts of the narrative. Hey, it’s a promising debut.

    Finally, it occurs to this reviewer that the claustrophobic setting of the Jocasta station is in fact an ideal way to introduce the first novel in a space-opera series. Further volumes may uncover and fully use the complexity of the galaxy unveiled in Time Future, much like David Brin’s Uplift series had to wait until volume six to really expand the scope of the action. Who knows?

  • Dispatches from the Tenth Circle, The Onion

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Three Rivers Press, 2001, 174 pages, C$24.00 tpb, ISBN 0-609-80834-6

    I have long been a steadfast admirer of The Onion, a devastatingly funny web humor magazine with the guts to say out loud what most of us can’t even conceive. That admiration became nothing short of worship on September 26, 2001, when The Onion was the first publication to face the 9-11-2001 tragedy with smart satire. (The “Holy F*cking Sh*t! Attack on America!” edition included such disturbing gems as “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule”, “American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie” and “Hijackers surprised To Find Selves in Hell”)

    While Dispatches from the Tenth Circle doesn’t contain post-2000 material, it represents your most accessible option to reward the good staff of The Onion: rush out to your local bookstore and pick it up, along with their previous Our Dumb Century.

    Inside, you’ll find 174 densely-packed pages of the best of The Onion over a period of a few years (roughly 1998-2000), a steady assortment of howlers and an unflinching look at today’s North-American society. There aren’t very many book out there that fully deserve their price tag, but if anything, Dispatches is a bargain even at cover cost.

    I’d classify the Onion’s shtick to be divided in four rough categories. My general favorite is the “full-blown satire” mode, with such articles as “Doritos Celebrates One Millionth Ingredient”, “South Postpones Rising Again For Yet Another Year”, “Coca-Cola Introduces New 30-Liter Size” or “Video-Game Characters Denounce Randomly Placed Swinging Blades”

    Then there are the “Ironic twist on common headlines”, such as “Supreme Court Overturns Car”, “Loved Ones Recall Local Man’s Cowardly Battle With Cancer”, “Fun Toy Banned Because Of Three Stupid Dead Kids” or “ACLU Defend Nazis’ Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters”

    Some of the best laughs, of course, come from the “Slice of Daily Life” features, where stupid everyday stuff somehow headline material. Who can resist “Woman Who ‘Loves Brazil’ Has Only Seen Four Square Miles Of It”, “Twelve Customers Gunned Down in Convenience-Store Clerk’s Imagination” or “Graphic Designer’s Judgment Clouded By Desire To Use New Photoshop Plug-in”?

    I’m not generally a fan of the “Other Features” of The Onion, but the “What Do You Think?” often features small gems. A few Point/Counterpoint features (“You The Man / No, You The Man!”, “My Computer Totally Hates Me! / God, Do I Hate That Bitch”) can be priceless.

    Don’t skimp out on the details, either: Some of the best lines in Dispatch are hidden on the margins. Granted, the “STATshot” features are usually lame, but you can’t beat such one-liners as “Standard Deviation Not Enough For Perverted Statistician”, “Georgia Adds Swastika, Middle Finger To State Flag” and “Artist Starving For A Reason”.

    Funny? Damn straight. Expect to laugh aloud, groan, roll your eyes and quote the book for weeks afterward.

    It’s not stupid humor, mind you. If ever you happen to be familiar with one of the subjects lampooned in The Onion, you’ll find that these guys know their stuff; it’s very, very rare to catch them using an improper reference or to make an unintentional factual mistake.

    Of course, the most seductive aspect of Dispatches is how clever it is underneath that veneer of hilarity. Pay attention, and you’ll acknowledge hidden truths about today’s world. The Onion‘s staff is not merely skilled at humor, but at social commentary. (A “vox populi” about middle-east violence includes “Maybe we should stop thinking of it as middle-eastern conflict and start thinking of it as middle-eastern culture.” Ouch.)

    Needless to say, Dispatches from the Tenth Circle is highly recommended. It makes a great gift, and should provide you with enough quotable/photocopiable material for a while. Don’t you dare miss it, nor any of The Onion’s other collections. Needless to say, you can always go to http://www.theonion.com/ for your weekly fix.

  • Lunar Descent, Allen Steele

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1991, 325 pages, C$5.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-50485-X

    All too often, catching up on an author’s entire oeuvre is an exercise akin to completing a puzzle. You’ll read the most available/important/distinctive works first, then work your way to, eventually, the rest of the picture. Whenever you do complete your work, though, you might find out that the smaller pieces illuminate something unexpected in the panorama.

    So it was that I began to read Allen Steele with his ninth book, and gradually worked my way to the rest of them in time. With Lunar Descent, Steele’s third novel, I finally put in the missing puzzle piece, and it all forms an interesting portrait.

    Orbital Decay was about a semi-rebellion among workers building a space station. Clarke County, Space was about a semi-rebellion among residents of a space station. Lunar Descent… is about a semi-rebellion among workers on the moon. Okay, so the details differ (Clarke County, Space isn’t about the rebellion, though it happens shortly after in the same timeline and Lunar Descent is about a strike action), but at this stage we’re merely playing with words. Suffice to say that some recurring themes do figure pro-eminently in Steele’s fiction.

    The style, too, has similarities. Most of his novel are built around straight-ahead prose supplemented by other forms of writing; interviews, oral testimonies, media articles, etc…

    Both of the above similarities, make sense when you know about Steele’s background as an investigative journalist before he started writing SF full-time. It’s no accident if he’s one of the most liberal SF writers in the business. His blue-collar characters like to have chemically-influenced fun, disrespect authority and do the job their pointy-haired managers have assigned them.

    The protagonists of Lunar Descent are no exception. Our “moondogs” are the few, the brave, the proud men and women mining ore on the moon for the Solar Power Satellite projects back on Earth Orbit. Think about those hard-workin’ oil rig personnel and you’ll have a fair idea of their mindset. Sure, they get high and mean from time to time, but -wink, wink- work hard, play hard, right?

    Apparently, the evil corporate villains of Steele’s fiction don’t think so, and before long they tighten the screws on operations, replacing half the personnel, finding a wholly unsuitable station manager, clamping down on “non-essential” imports and generally doing everything in their power to be completely unlikable. Boo! Hiss! Fight da power!

    So our guys strike, and unfortunately, their evil managers declare their SPS work crucial to national economic indicators, and send in the space marines to quell the rebellion. So it’s exoskeleton-boosted marines against weaponless marines. Who will win? Well, yeah, but not in the way you’d expect, fortunately.

    All and all, even though we’d seen this before, Lunar Descent is a success because of its likable characters, the vivid description of life in a workplace 300,000 kilometers away, the snappy writing and the good humor with which Steele nails down the essential details. Some stuff doesn’t ring true (why is it, for instance, that characters born in the 80s or 90s will always be fascinated by the same classic-rock enjoyed by the author? Hmm.) and Steele’s usual biases make the action predictable at times, but no matter; here’s another solid hard-SF book well worth your time and money. Lunar Descent is what the SF mid-list is all about.

  • First Contract, Greg Costikyan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2000, 287 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-54549-4

    You would think that more than a hundred years after H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, Science-Fiction would have managed to come up with every single imaginable twist on the “First Alien Contact” scenario. And yet here’s First Contract, a refreshing take on the subject that will make you smile in amusement even as it describes the complete economic collapse of Earth.

    The hook is simple: Aliens descend on Earth, say “hi!” and propose a small trade; a copy of the galactic encyclopedia in return for the low-low price of, say, Jupiter. Before anyone can scream out “REMEMBER MANHATTAN!”, the deal is done and humans are stuck with a set of UN-controlled data files that no one can figure out. Meanwhile, aliens set up shop on the planet and destroy most of our industries by offering better products. The resulting economic catastrophe makes the depression of the Thirties look like a trifle.

    I won’t pretend that this type of scenario has never been explored before in SF (who knows what might have been published in “Analog”, not to mention Costikyan’s own seed novella, “Sales Reps From the Stars”), but it’s certainly not a common spin, and the style with which it’s explored deserves mention.

    In many ways, this is a novel that should have been published by Baen Books. The glorification of market forces, the deep and thorough knowledge of economic drivers, the quasi-encyclopedic knowledge of past historical precedent all bring to mind the usual Baen potboiler. But no, surprise, this is a Tor book… Jim Baen must be kicking himself.

    The story takes the form of a narrative by Johnson Mukerjii, initially a hard-working high-tech CEO whose business, marriage and life are irremediably destroyed by the aliens. Before long, he’s huddled underneath a bridge, plotting his revenge. Mukerjii makes a perfect narrator, his lively wit illuminating the dry exposition passages he must dish out throughout the story. Hey, it works; expect to know a lot more about stock markets, financial statements and trade shows by the end of First Contract. Heck, the novel will even make you understand how third-world countries have to behave in light of rich-nations imperialism.

    It’s worth repeating that even though the novel deals with heavy-duty economic SF theory, it’s never dull or difficult; Costikyan vulgarizes quite well, and if the novel isn’t all hilariously funny, it’ll leave a quasi-permanent grin on your face while you’re reading it. Which isn’t as straining as you might think; you’ll probably end up reading this book in a single sitting.

    Dig a bit deeper and, of course, you’ll find here a deep and knowing satire on corporatism and the new feudalism. Or is it? Costikyan understands his subject so well that it can play both ways. Certainly the last few pages of the book take the Wal-Mart philosophy of retail (and supply) to its logical galactic extreme… and if that’s not satire, well, I’m ready to send back my SF-Critic’s license.

    It helps, of course, that the book is a throwback to the plucky-humans-über-alles philosophy of so much golden-age SF. Despite being technologically pounded, economically colonized and spiritually destroyed, humanity -through our stalwart hero- finds a way to make a good deal. We haven’t conquered back the universe by the last page, but it’s obvious that we’re on our way and it’s only a matter of time. Say what you want about self-image and wish-fulfillment, but that type of attitude usually earns a bonus point or two in my ratings.

    I wasn’t so taken by the last two pages, which seem a lot like a gratuitous extra spin than a knock-out ending. (Cut it, and the true ending sentence is much funnier. You better believe they’d ship on time.)

    But taken as a whole, First Contract ranks as one of the best SF novels of 2000, a unique blend of big business and alien invasion. Cleverly imagined, compulsively readable and constantly amusing, this is a book that should please a wide array of readers. Don’t miss it.

  • Die Hard [Nothing Lasts Forever], Roderick Thorp

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ivy, 1979 (1988 reprint), 232 pages, C$6.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-8401-0229-5

    You remember DIE HARD? Bruce Willis stuck in a skyscraper with terrorists? Alan Rickman as the bad guy with a weird European accent? “Yippey-Ka-Yay”? The hero throwing himself down the roof with a fire hose attached to his waist? Exploding helicopter? Glass shards embedded in foot? “I now have a machine-gun, ho-ho-ho?” One of the best action movies ever?

    Of course you remember DIE HARD. Everyone does. It’s a bona-fide modern film classic. It’s worth viewing every Christmas.

    But what you probably don’t remember is that the film is based upon a novel, Roderick Thorp’s Nothing Lasts Forever. And what you really don’t know is how much the film improves upon the book.

    Oh, it’s obvious that the two works are connected. In both cases, one lone man dispatches a busload of terrorists inside a high-rise building. The various action beats of the film are generally original to the screenplay, though the same general locations (elevator shaft, executive suite, roof) are used. The dramatic arc is identical, gradually mowing down through enemy ranks up to the final mano-a-mano showdown. But even with similar premises, the differences can be dramatic.

    Most significantly, the protagonist of Nothing Lasts Forever is nothing like Bruce Willis. Joe Leland (not John McClane) is a sixty-something man, an ex-New York detective with a clouded past, a wrong-man-condemned affair presumably stemming from a previous novel. He’s divorced, slightly bitter and not really prone to wisecracks. The author doesn’t wait a long time before using his alter-ego to fulfill deep wishes; barely twenty-five pages in the novel, Leland’s get a date with a woman nearly half his age. Creepier: the damsel-in-distress in the novel is the daughter of the protagonist rather than his wife.

    Where it gets interesting, though, is in the tone shift from novel to screenplay. Whereas the book is dark and nasty, the film is joyful and uplifting. Antagonist-wise, we go from political terrorists to high-tech robbers. Thorp intended to write a “serious” thriller; Screenwriter Stephen de Souza, coached by producer Joel Silver, obviously meant to sketch a mass-market blockbuster. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the conclusion of the novel, in which not only does Leland learns that his daughter is up to no good (P.207-208: “’Klaxon Oil has promised to supply the Chilean fascist regime with arms… Your daughter is one of the principals in this illegal transfer of weapons.”) but she actually dies, dragged outside the skyscraper’s 32nd floor by the corpse of the lead terrorist as he’s shot by the protagonist. Talk about a downer!

    But outside the obvious cheer of DIE HARD’s revised ending, the clean mechanics of the film contrasted to the often-muddled structure of the book clearly illustrate what a good cinematographic adaptation should be. The temporal unity of the action is tightened: The film ends at dawn while the novel drags on until nearly eleven AM. The film squeezes in an early ironic confrontation between hero and villain. Comparing both versions, the film comes out as a leaner, more focused work, a pure thrill machine unburdened by any higher aspiration, yet more effective because it doesn’t dwell on whatever issues bugged the novelist. Compare and contrast Leland’s internal monologue about women in positions of authority versus DIE HARD’s elegant watch symbolism and you’ll see for yourself.

    That’s not even touching upon the things that film can do better than prose. While the jumping-off-roof, breaking-window, being-dragged-by-falling-hose scene is in both the book and the novel, the written version seems limp and lacking in energy compared to the taut filmed sequence.

    In the end, Nothing lasts Forever is an average novel turned in a superior film, a book more interesting as an origin piece than a work by itself. Worth a look for fans of the film who want to understand why it’s so good.

  • 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.