Book Review

  • The Forever Machine, Mark Clifton & Frank Riley

    The Forever Machine, Mark Clifton & Frank Riley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Carroll & Graf, 1992 reprint of 1954/1981 original, 351 pages, C$5.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-88184-842-5

    In a better world, I would be able to discuss The Forever Machine more substantially than simply describing it as “the most forgettable novel to ever win the Hugo Award”.  Compared to other great Science Fiction novels honoured by a Hugo, Mark Clifton and Frank Riley’s They’d Rather be Right (which formed the basis for the slightly-reworked Forever Machine) simply doesn’t sustain comparison.  Even looking at its 1954 contemporaries, you get classics like Mission of Gravity, The Caves of Steel, Double Star, Childhood’s End, The Space Merchants, Fahrenheit 451… a good chunk of essential reading for the dedicated SF fan.

    Meanwhile, The Forever Machine is… a story of its time.  It stinks of 1950s attitudes and prejudices, while failing to deliver much in terms of contemporary SF wonders.  Explaining why it won the Hugo isn’t difficult for people who voted for it at the time: while Riley never had much of a writing career, Clifton (who recently won the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, given out annually to unjustly-forgotten writers) was a reasonably prolific writer in the SF magazines at the time: The Internet Science-Fiction Database lists nearly a dozen stories published in a handful of publications during 1952-1953, including two stories set in the world of The Forever Machine.  Keeping in mind that the total number of people to attend the Clevention Worldcon in 1955 (when the Hugo was awarded to this novel) was 380: it doesn’t take much to see how a then-hot writer would, thanks to a novel serialized in the top SF magazine of the time would earn enough votes to get the prize.  Furthermore, it’s not as if more recent Hugos show a better track records at picking the best-of-the-best either. (Hominids, anyone?)

    But let the past remain the past and consider The Forever Machine as a novel sealed in a time capsule and sent in the future by fifties fandom as a novel they thought would be worth a read by their descendants.  56 years later, what do we have?  As seen from today’s perspective, the efforts to build a really big computer and then feed it all known facts to create an emergent AI (dubbed “Bossy”) are kind of amusing.  (But then again, we did the same, called it “Google” and mostly use it for entertainment.)  Where the story gets a little bit crazier is when Bossy figures out how to rejuvenate a test subject. (“My instructions, regarding therapy, were to find all tensions of any nature, and remove them” [P.176] says the computer.)  From Artificial Intelligence, the novel turns into a consideration of immortality… but only if you can make it past the unselfconscious sexism that permeates the novel alongside mentions of cable cars, and plastic tape for data storage.  The universe of the novel is one where fathers “thrash” their misbehaving kids, women are either housewives or secretaries, and “public opinion” is basically what a mass of white middle-aged male house-owners think.  The rejuvenated character of Mabel is treated in a patronizing way that shows the infantilization of women at the time.  Against that background, a story of emergent singularity (have a telepath invent an AI, and immortality for all soon follows!) definitely seems strange, maybe sufficiently so to still warrant a trip to Fifties middle-class America.

    But I’ll stop short of leveraging this back-handed compliment into a recommendation.  While there are interesting little bits here and there in the narrative, the entire novel is almost perfectly forgettable.  It dissipates quickly after completion, to the point where you’d be challenged to come up with specifics only days after reading it.  This is my second encounter with the novel (which I first read in 1999), and I remembered little of the previous attempt; I don’t expect to remember much of it when/if I read it again, and the lack of substance in this review will, I hope, serve as a warning to my future-self contemplating a re-read.

    When I started systematically reading all Hugo-winning novels in the mid-nineties, it took me years to find a copy of They’d Rather be Right, and even then it was loaned to me for a few hours during a science-fiction convention.  Now, thanks to the internet, the book isn’t as hard to find as it once was.  Furthermore, every few years, a publisher figures out that this is one of the few Hugo-winning novels to be out of print and reprints it.  So, even ignoring that illegal copies are available only a Google search away, there isn’t much of an excuse for being unable to find the novel.  Whether you’d want to read it as more than an exercise in list-checking is something I will leave to others to decide… despite my hearty endorsement of list-checking.

  • Clubland, Frank Owen

    Clubland, Frank Owen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s Press, 2003, 323 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-28766-6

    One of the reasons why I can’t stop reading non-fiction books these days is the renewed realization that the world is vast and contains an infinity of interesting things.  No matter how tightly the subject is defined, there are more than enough interesting narratives out there to keep anyone reading forever.

    For instance, you wouldn’t necessarily expect the mid-nineties New York club scene to be be interesting enough to sustain a hardcover book… and you’d be tragically wrong.

    Frank Owen was there at the time, and Clubland is a fascinating report on what he witnessed.  He’s not a big part of the story that plays out, but he’s not entirely detached from it either.  It starts as he buys a new popular drug, Special K, from a distinctive dealer.  This scene is important, but it takes about a hundred pages to understand why.

    For Clubland is, in many ways, structured like a drug trip.

    The first third is the high.  Here, Owen takes his time to clearly identify his subject.  Within mid-nineties New York club culture, he focuses on four different individuals: One-eyed Canadian-born club owner Peter Gatien, imaginative promoter Lord Michael Caruso, unhinged party animal Michael Alig, and shady small-time thug Chris Paciello.  All four men intersect in oft-surprising ways during that time.  But for the first hundred pages of Clubland, everything feels like a great night out: Gatien’s clubs are the toast of the town, and the rave culture of the mid-nineties seems to herald a happy kind of lifestyle the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Disco’s heyday.  Esctasy is the drug of choice, and uninhibited self-expression on the dance floor seems to be without consequences.

    Unfortunately, this temporary reprieve soon turns dark.  The second third of Clubland is where the high peaks and transforms itself in an acute case of paranoia and madness.  Gatien’s successful clubs attract enough drug dealers to interest federal authorities.  Caruso helps Alig become his own exuberant self after a repressed childhood, but Alig ends up accidentally killing the very same dealer who sold Special K to Owen during the prologue.  For a chapter or two, Clubland changes gears: After a lengthy stretch of objective reporting, Owen comes back to the forefront as he describes his own efforts as a journalist for the Village Voice to find and expose a murderer.  Nightmares abound as the club culture turns sour, sometimes with hilariously awful results:

    …the most notorious of Alig’s outlaw events took place in the back of a moving eighteen-wheel big rig outfitted with a sound system, a bar, and a disco ball. “Rudolph and Michael Alig dare you to ride the Disco Truck,” read the invitation for what would become a nightmarish journey around lower Manhattan.  Two hundred partygoers climbed into the back, and, as they soon discovered, the truck had little in the way of suspension.  As a consequence, the disco ball fell and smashed.  Then the sound system toppled over.  There was precious little air, so people started to faint, while others began to cry.  Partygoers pounded on the wall of the truck, begging to be let out, but the coked-up driver in the front failed to hear their cries for help.” [P.132-133]

    As horrible as this excerpt sounds, I can’t help but giggle uncontrollably at the idea of an out-of-control Disco Truck.

    While this is going on, Chris Paciello begins his unlikely rise from New York mob relations to the top of the Miami club scene, befriending a number of celebrities (including seemingly-wholesome Sofia Vergara, who even tried to help him pay bail when he was arrested) and changing the nature of East Coast music along the way.  The last third of Clubland feels like the letdown phase of a drug trip as the crazy stories and violent excesses all turn to numbing series of accounts and consequences: Gatien, Alig and Paciello all do time in the courts, some of them landing in jail for what they have done.  Meanwhile, the New York club scene dissolves and the temporary scene that Owen chronicles in his book seems to disperse.  (Whether this is truly the case I’ll leave to the partygoers who were there, and are better able to talk about what else was going on at the time.)

    Clubland may not be a deep and meaningful examination of world-changing events, but it’s certainly an entertaining look at a unique culture that briefly blossomed and fell apart.  It’s a terrific read, and a powerful reminder that all sorts of horrible and beautiful events are taking place around us, even when they escape our notice at the time

  • The Five Greatest Warriors, Matthew Reilly

    The Five Greatest Warriors, Matthew Reilly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket Books, 2011 reprint of 2010 original, 574 pages, C$9.99 pb, ISBN 978-1-4165-7758-4

    Consistency is usually a good thing for authors and their readers.  Writers accumulate fans thanks to their particular set of strengths, after all, and the path to popular success is capitalizing on the reason why buyers will pick up books by authors they like.  Matthew Reilly has developed a reputation as the novelistic equivalent to a big-budget action-adventure movie director: He writes novels as if they were action movies with an unlimited budget, and dangerous spectacle is his stock in trade.

    Still, there’s something to be said against too much consistency.  The Five Greatest Warriors is the third novel in the “Jack West Jr.” series, but while I reviewed first volume Seven Ancient Wonders a few months ago, I found nothing interesting to say about sequel The Six Sacred Stones given how similar it was to its predecessor.  This third entry isn’t all that different from the second one and what had been a lack of variety now becomes a bit of a problem.

    Tough audiences that readers are, there’s a fine line between consistency and self-repetition, and The Five Greatest Warrior tiptoes a bit too close to the edge.  The blend of high-tech action theatrics with mysterious ancient fantastic settings and low-grade mysticism that seemed so interesting in The Seven Deadly Wonders now seems like more of the same, repeated again.

    The biggest problem of the Jack West Jr. series so far is the inherent problems in having a sequel to world-saving heroics.  Once characters have saved the world once, what’s to do for an encore?  Save it again?  Reilly’s oft-stated wish to go faster and bigger with each successive novel runs into self-defeating diminishing returns.  Little can surprise these characters now, and rehashing yet another set of ancient mysteries coupled with mystical cosmic alignments can get less and less forgivable.

    The formula that seemed so crazy (in a good way) at first glance can now seem crazy (in a bad way) when it’s repeated again with minor variations.  Lessening the blow somewhat is that The Five Freatest Warriors is a wrap-up of the plotline introduced in The Six Sacred Stones: Nobody really relieved that Jack West Jr. was dead when, at the end of the previous volume, he leaped into a pit.  Not only is he alive and healthy in this sequel, but he wraps up the adventure even though, at nearly 1200 combined pages, it feels far too long for its own good.

    At least the action set-pieces are, as usual, ingeniously constructed.  As West and his group keeps unearthing fantastic ancient sites, we get to go inside a tower set in a Mongolian crater, run around a massive Japanese complex, and give a spectacular send-off to the 747 that starred in the series so far.  Massive inverted pyramids are found everywhere, and helpful diagrams will make it easier for readers to keep up with Reilly’s videogame-influenced imagination.

    Sceptics should be warned that The Five Greatest Warriors is definitely not the book that will change their minds about Reilly’s work: His narration is still just as full of exclamation points, one-word paragraphs and cliffhanger chapter endings (If you want to speed-read Reilly’s work, simply glance at the last sentence of each chapter.  All action, no filler.)  Maybe there’s an argument to be made for readers to let a generous amount of time elapse between every book of the Jack West Jr. series: Its thrills operate on a too-similar level to sustain close comparison, so a bit of distraction can work wonders for those coming back to Reilly’s universe.

    Still, it works.  Reilly can stuff more imaginative concepts in a disappointing novel than most other reality-bound writers can manage in a handful of theirs.  (In this volume, his idea for “living human tombs” manages to strike a nerve.)  The series may look like a bunch of dumb action thrillers, but Reilly repurposes a lot of historical research, trivia and coincidences for his own purposes.  For all his faults, he knows what he’s trying to do and reading his self-interviews at the end of each book is worth the trouble if only because he manages to pre-empt most of the basic criticism about his own novels.  Referring to the Jack West Jr. as contemporary epic fantasy pretty much says it all, really.

    The interview also outlines the rest of the series, down to “The One Something Something”.  I’m not in any hurry to see the rest of the sequence, but keep in mind that this may be about satiation more than disappointment.  Let Reilly write something else for a moment, and in a few years, who knows, I may be in the mood again for that kind of spectacular blow-em up action thriller.

  • Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography, Katherine Ramsland

    Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography, Katherine Ramsland

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper, 1997, 508 pages, C$7.99 tp, ISBN 0-06-105351-1

    I’m in a confessional mood at the moment, so here goes: I’ve got a shelf full of Dean Koontz novels at home, and I you won’t find any evidence of that based on the reviews available on this web site.  They were a gift; I read them all (I had a lot more free time back then) and decided that I didn’t like Koontz’s fiction that much.  Based on a somewhat representative sampling of 21 books published between 1973 and 1995, I finally decided that Koontz’s fiction was a low-grade blend of tepid genre elements, featuring overwrought prose, slow pacing, stock characters and even more familiar moralizing from a somewhat conservative perspective.  If pressed, I will acknowledge some affection for Intensity’s madcap go-for-broke forward momentum.  Otherwise, well, I can recognize (without any snark) that Koontz is writing bestselling fiction, aimed at the middle of the road and quite successful at that.

    So why read an entire biography about the guy?  Because I happen to think that writers can be interesting independently of their output.  I’ve been to countless SF conventions, and stories about writers are like catnip to me.  Some people dream of becoming rock stars and Oscar-winning movie idols.  But whenever I picture the idealized life of the rich and famous, I always picture myself as a bestselling author.  Call it aspirational reading, then.

    But it turns out that Koontz’ life is far more eventful than most other writers.  Despite what you may think, most writers come from the same stock: middle-class upbringings, some schoolyard ostracism and life-long love for reading translating into writing skills.  Most horror writers that broke into print during the past ten years learned to love horror while watching movies on their parent’s VCR in the basement.  No complex life story; not much hardship; certainly no trauma.  Attend the World Horror Convention and, despite the sick sense of humour, you’ll find a fairly dull bunch of slightly-overweight overgrown white kids from the suburbs.

    But not Dean Koontz.  Born in a very-low-class family, from a victimized mother and an abusive father, Koontz quickly realized the darkness of the world.  Katherine Ramsland’s biography may have a lot of problems, but it clearly show how tough an early life Koontz had.  If you ever wondered why “Dean R. Koontz” became simply “Dean Koontz”, realize that the R stood for his father’s name Ray… and that the death of Ray Koontz was felt as liberation more than loss.

    But to reduce Koontz’s biography as a simple escape from an abusive alcoholic father is to minimize the energy with which Koontz honed his craft.  The first half of the biography shows just how relentlessly prolific he was, especially during the first ten years of his career.  Writing in different genres under a variety of pseudonyms, Koontz once looked like a promising SF writer before eventually finding his own path as a suspense novelist borrowing both from supernatural and realistic elements.  (Speaking of which, the SF&F community doesn’t fare well in this biography.  While Silverberg, Ellison, Powers and Blaylock all get compliments -the first two as mentors who encouraged Koontz to find his way; the last two as latter-day friends-, Damon Knight and Forrest Ackerman are both portrayed as distant boors.)  Koontz, more than many, earned his bestselling status after a lot of hard work.  Reading about the choices he faced as an increasingly popular writer is exactly the reason why I wanted to read this book.

    Alas, much like there’s a difference between a writer and his work, there’s also a difference between someone’s life and the way it’s chronicled.  There’s a terrific book to be written about Dean Koontz, but Katherine Ramsland’s Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography isn’t it.  Several annoyances all combine to take away from the book’s impact.  The first and most annoying of those is Ramsland’s tendency to look at Koontz’s life and works through a psychological analysis lens.  Here, nearly every event of significance in Koontz’s life seems to be linked to his fiction, and while that’s not exactly a stretch for some of his work (especially the ones dealing most directly and explicitly with his father), it’s a tendency that grates over 500 pages, especially when the parallels get more and more tenuous.

    I’m also not terribly happy with the semi-rigid way the book is structured, every chronological year introduced through a summary of events.  Ramsland’s matronly conservatism show often in her editorializing, but worse than that are the several mistakes of fact in describing events taken from an almanac.  “In 1977… the first manned space shuttle took flight” [P.220] is only true if you count atmospheric gliding: the first real space shuttle orbital flight was in 1981; more seriously, “1990… was the year when United Nation forces liberated Kuwait from Iran’s aggression” [P.367] is so wrong that I can only wonder how many people didn’t proofread the book correctly.  Neither mistakes seen on a casual read directly impact Dean Koontz’ narrative, but I don’t know Koontz’ life at all, whereas I know a bit about world news –if the book can’t get Iran/Irak right and misreads shuttle flights, then what mistakes are in the rest of the book?

    It doesn’t really help my suspicion that the book is missing chunks of Koontz’s life by virtue of being semi-approved by Koontz himself.  While the biography isn’t explicitly authorized and Koontz reportedly had no say in the final manuscript, it’s a book that clearly depends on Koontz as a primary source, and so avoids a number of touchier issues while putting the best face on others.  Koontz rarely makes mistakes in his own biography: he changes agents often due to their incompetence or fails in business thanks to other people’s problems, but we never hear about Koontz from adversarial sources.  From time to time, clearer gaps emerge from the narrative.  The worst is probably the way the Koontz are described as having to leave Las Vegas.  The sum of what’s written about this is…

    “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” says Dean, “and I witnessed a major crime.” The investigation moved slowly, and given the nature of the crime and the way everyone in that town seemed to know everyone else, Dean and Gerda decided they would feel safer somewhere else.  Their friend hated to see them leave, but agreed that they should. [P.212]

    Details?  Forget about it.  Now that’s why you want biographers to be sympathetic but impartial.  (And never mind asking embarrassing questions such as why Koontz went from balding to a head full of hair.)  While Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography serves as a good introduction to Koontz’s life and is filled with exclusive information, it does fall off the mark as a serious biography of the man –there’s little journalistic rigor, many errors of fact, not enough diversity of sources and curious gaps in the narrative.  It’s this close to a hagiography, and even a quick look at other reviews of the book on Amazon unearths a few narrative threads left unexplored.  To contemporary readers, Ramsland’s 15-year-old biography also leaves out a good chunk of her subject’s career –although an uneventful one, as Koontz has continued selling steadily in the meantime.

    And yet, despite those troublesome issues, I come away from the book with more respect for Koontz, despite my conviction that I still wouldn’t like his fiction.  Ramsland may not have delivered a particularly good biography, but it’s serviceable enough.  It may even act as a precious source for whoever decides to write a real biography.

  • The Silver Bear, Derek Haas

    The Silver Bear, Derek Haas

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 2010 reprint of 2008 original, 215 pages, C$9.99 pb, ISBN 978-0-515-14763-6

    Reviewing books is one of my favourite things in life, and the evidence for that is everywhere on this site, which has seen something like eight book reviews per month for years.  There are times, however, where even the fun hobbies can feel oppressive.  You’re not seeing any sign of the problem here because I’m back-dating my reviews like crazy, but I spent most of February 2011 reading one unreviewable book after another: Lengthy tomes that left me feeling nothing; non-translated French novels with no audience for an English-language review; humour books that I enjoyed but couldn’t comment at length.  As I found myself reading but not reviewing, my backlog grew and I entered March without having met my reviewing quota from January.  I lost patience with lengthy books that had no obvious reviewing hooks; was exasperated by pleasant but vapid comic books that couldn’t sustain 600 words of commentary; and started wondering why I was reaching so far in my stacks of books to read when I could just go grab something new and comment-worthy.  (The answer to that last question, incidentally, is “reading old stuff to make way for new stuff in the piles.”)  Suddenly, spending a week and a half to finish a single 1,600-page French novel in two volumes didn’t feel like such a good idea.

    At some point, in bleary existential anguish, I started remembering the wisdom of more grizzled reviewers.  Which White Dwarf reviewer had made a comment about his brain shrinking to the size of a white dwarf after reading so many routine Science Fiction books?  Who was it who said that after reviewing for pay for years, short books looked more and more attractive?  Was it the same reviewer who said that after a while, they stopped grabbing the fat books if they had deadlines to meet?

    In any case, I found part of my reviewing-mojo back in Derek Haas’s The Silver Bear.  Picked up a year ago partially because it had been misfiled in the SF section, partly for the novelty of seeing such a thin book published as a mass-market paperback, The Silver Bear is a short thriller with a lot of style.  It’s not that good, but it’s an entertaining read –and you can polish it off in two commutes even if you read slowly.

    While The Silver Bear is a first novel, Derek Haas isn’t a first-time author: His credits as a screenwriter include familiar action films such as 2 Fast 2 Furious, Wanted and the somewhat more respectable 3:10 to Yuma.  That his name is recognizable and marketable explains why such a short novel made it to bookstores: Given contemporary publishing economics, few publishers would take such chances in publishing a slim, expensive novel from an author with no track record.  In fact, the last time remember such a slim book in paperback, it was Steven Bochco’s Death by Hollywood.

    (Intermission note, since I’m padding this review: Reviewers shouldn’t make assumptions about publishing, fame and marketing.  A lot of stuff happens when Hollywood and New York publishers intersect, and only a minority of it actually make sense.  Agents can do wonders, as do promises of returns against favours.  Less cynically, there’s also the possibility that, you know, good novels get published no matter who wrote them.)

    But what The Silver Bear doesn’t have in length, it has in attitude.  A first-person narrative detailing the formative years of an assassin in-between his preparation for a high-profile hit, it’s a novel that chooses to be snappy and efficient.  The antihero’s no-nonsense narration is clipped and to the point, while the plot moves swiftly in-between the flashbacks and the details regarding the life of a professional assassin.  You can check off the tropes:  Organized crime; the use of a contact point; forbidden romance; affectless professionalism; rivalries between competing assassins… On some level, this is very familiar stuff: the kind of building blocks many movies (including Haas’ Wanted adaptation) have used in the past.  But the down-to-earth nature of the details is convincing (our assassin’s path through the Chicago underworld is gritty) and the very dark world Haas needs as a backdrop to his novel is credible enough.

    It almost makes up for the sketchy nature of the novel’s plot to be found in-between the flashbacks and the conventional nature of the narrative.  The been-there-done-that feeling of The Silver Bear weakens a final revelation that doesn’t seem all that consequential.  It’s always tempting, when considering novels written by screenwriters, to speculate as to whether the story would have been best-served on-screen, or if there’s a shelved screenplay somewhere with the same title.  Chances are that, at a different time, The Silver Bear wouldn’t have seemed as compelling as it does to me at the moment.  But I’ll take the small reading pleasures I get, and right now this novel is exactly the length I needed, with pretty much all the ingredients I needed for a punchy read.  Now let’s go on to weightier material.

  • Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer, Vern

    Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer, Vern

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Titan, 2010, 420 pages, C$18.95 tp, ISBN 978-1-84856-371-1

    Let’s put it as straight as Vern would: If you’re a reasonably smart moviegoer and you’re not reading outlawvern.com, then you’re missing out on one of the best movie reviewers writing today.  His self-assigned beat is, basically, “movies for guys”: action movies, horror movies, thrillers… but it’s always a treat to see him occasionally venture out of that demographic segment.  He combines a deep knowledge of film with serious analytical skills and an entertaining online persona.  He may still make intentional use of faux-dumb neologisms as “filmatism” and “web sights”, but there’s a lot of keen intelligence behind the plain-speaking outlaw façade. (Accordingly, his only recorded use of the word façade is in a review he has since half-disavowed.)  With Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer, you too can get a selection of his best online writing in one handy paper package.

    Ignoring the possibility that “Vern” is a pseudonym for someone with an established track record, this is Vern’s second professionally-published paper book: His first was Seagalogy, a surprisingly worthwhile book-length study of the film of Steven Seagal.  This time, most of Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer is material reprinted from Vern’s web site, bringing together more than ten years’ worth of content in one handy package that makes for perfect bathroom reading.

    Despite the obvious jokes about paying for content you can get online for free, there’s an obvious added value to collections of online content.  On an obvious level, Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer comes with a generous amount of organizing, contextualizing, footnotes amending the original text and a bit of copy-editing as well.  The book is divided in sections prefaced by original introductions, and the familiar typography is certainly easier to read than outlawvern’s default white-on-black-with-red-highlights site layout.  But there’s also a less-obvious value in selecting content for print publication, picking the best or most representative pieces in one single package.  The cognitive savings in not having to navigate a web site in order to read scattershot reams of content are usually underestimated by the why-pay crowd: Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer offers a controlled reading experience, coherent mini-theses and the opportunity to send a few honest bucks (um, cents) to the hard-working author.

    Divided in thirteen sections, Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer starts and ends firmly in action-movie territory, as the Die Hard-inspired title may imply.  When you start a book with a review of 300 and end it with a section dedicated to one Bruce Willis, it’s hard to argue that the book doesn’t deliver for action fans.  But there are plenty of big and small delights in-between.  Vern is able to write entertainingly about obscure films; few other reviewers can make readers hunt down long-forgotten movies as effectively as he does.  (I suspect that his commentaries are more entertaining that some of the movies he describes, but that goes without saying.)  Even in discussing films far from the “movies for guys” beat, Vern is reliably entertaining: His takes on films such as Crash (2005), Garfield and The Real Cancun show what happens when a reviewer brings his acknowledged biases to a different kind of film and writes for an appropriate audience.  From time to time, his reviews are springboard to larger concerns (such as the place of the American male in contemporary society, or the debate about the Hostel-inspired Torture Porn horror craze).  Some sections of the book are meant to form a sustained argument: After suffering through Transformers and being aghast at the “summer movies aren’t supposed to be good” argument, Vern revisits some of the best summer genre movies of the past and, in doing so, pretty much demonstrates that laziness from filmmakers and viewers is no excuse.

    The result is quite a bit more valuable than a reprint of online reviews: It’s a great time in company of an articulate, sympathetic and knowledgeable critic who wants, in his own fashion, to raise the level of discourse surrounding popular genre movies.  Even in discussing movies that are -at best- forgettable exploitation films, Vern can be counted upon to make one or two observations worth our time.  Trust me on this: You want to be reading outlawvern.com, and there’s no better introduction to Vern than Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer.

  • Shine, Edited by Jetse de Vries

    Shine, Edited by Jetse de Vries

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Solaris, 2010, 453 pages, £7.99 pb, ISBN 978-1-906735-66-1

    Sometimes, when I get bored reviewing books, I take on self-imposed challenges.  Many of them are self-defeating.  Some are just silly.  A few have gotten me in trouble.  But some are interesting style exercises, such as Can you review a themed anthology without saying anything meaningful about any of the individual stories?

    Most of the time, that’s simply not possible.  As much as anthologists would like us to appreciate all of their hard work in delivering themed anthologies with carefully-picked stories, there’s rarely more to see in the package than stories around a common, sometimes arbitrary theme.  “Oh, some Sherlock Holmes mysteries”.  “Oh, a book of cat-detective stories.”  Shine is different.  It’s “an anthology of near-future optimistic science-fiction”

    It says a lot about the current state of SF that we’re at a point where this kind of theme would be noteworthy.  Simplifying outrageously, SF as a literary genre tends to be manic-depressive, with phases of excitement alternating between cycles of depression.  The manic excitement of cyberpunk may have followed the dour catastrophes of the seventies, but the genre currently seems stuck in a gloomy phase, reeling from the aftershocks of the Bush administration and associated traumas.  In-between milestones such as The Windup Girl, The Road and one-note symphonies of gloooooomy “Year’s best SF” anthologies, the fact that an anthology of optimistic near-future SF would get people excited is itself noteworthy, and a welcome push-back against the prevailing atmosphere.

    We’re also lucky that this someone would happen to be Jetse de Vries, an oversized personality who managed to transform his vision in a coherent book.  Thanks to his introduction (in which he clearly outlines the goal of his anthology) and individual notes on each story detailing how he got in touch with the authors, de Vries transforms Shine from an anthology to a sustained think-piece, each story flowing into the next.  If Shine can be discussed without paying attention to the stories themselves, it’s because it feels like a substantial piece of work by itself

    It probably helps that the universes imagined in Shine’s sixteen stories end up sharing quite a number of common assumptions.  I don’t think that’s an accident: Today’s fears about the future are clearly defined, and so are our best hopes for salvation.  As a result, the fiction collected here is heavy on globalization, social equality, environmentalism as a way of life, tightly-connected communication networks and a long-term vision that goes beyond the next quarterly report.  I’m pleased, after years of having internalized the notion that “there’s no common future any more”, to discover that there can actually be a vision for a better tomorrow… and that it doesn’t look like classical Science Fiction as much as a trawl through interesting blogs.

    That’s as good a reason as any to discuss Shine’s list of contributors, and how it doesn’t look like the usual slate of suspects you can find in other SF anthologies.  Flipping through the list of authors, I notice only two established SF writers, may up-and-comers, a lot of non-Americans (this is significant), a few scientists, some bloggers (heck, even a regular commenter on blogs I read) and others whose biography escapes any easy categorization.  At a time where genre SF is contemplating its own insularity, this too is a welcome change.

    This diversity of voices goes hand-in-hand with de Vries’ up-to-the-moment use of social media tools to solicit stories and draw support for the anthology.  Since the project’s beginning, de Vries has been updating a web site and tweeting, getting in contact with newer authors in this fashion.  (I’m probably breaking my vow to not say anything substantial about individual stories by pointing out that one of them is written Twitter-style.)  The impression that de Vries’ enthusiastic use of modern communications suggests is a demonstration of his own thesis: there’s still a bit of wonder in seeing how an individual can assemble not just an anthology of this global reach, but a social community of like-minded people by using tools freely available to all.  (And lest you think that this was just a promotional effort, note that the Twitter feed is still active as of February 2011, nearly a year after the release of the book.)  In some ways, Shine is the first true major twenty-first century SF anthology, inconceivable and impossible even ten years earlier.

    The flip-side of such a strong editorial presence and crisp premise is that the project can overshadow the stories to a point where a review can dispense of discussing them entirely.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing for the project, or the anthologist himself, but the poor authors may have to read other reviews in order to get their kudos.  Fortunately, thanks to our bright current future, that too is just another web search away…

  • The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, Don Thompson

    The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, Don Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Anchor Canada, 2009 reprint of 2008 original, 268 pages, C$22.00 tp, ISBN 978-0-385-66678-7

    One of the reasons why I’m reading and reviewing mostly non-fiction books these days is that the real world seems to have, in its quasi-infinite diversity, a lot more to offer than the well-trodden pathways of fiction.

    For instance, it’s hard to imagine a fictional universe more irrational than the high-end contemporary art market.  What could possibly motivate otherwise intelligent and accomplished people to drop a few million dollars on objects of dubious artistic value?  Damien Hirsch’s titular artwork, after all, is £50,000’s worth of dead shark, preservation fluid, glass and steel.  Why would it be worth so much more to collectors, galleries, auction houses and dealers?  As contemporary art becomes baffling to the average viewer, why does it continue to fetch such high prices?

    The simplest answer is a variation on “It’s crazy!”  But that’s the kind of explanation made to annoy every professional economist, trained to believe in the rationality and efficiency of the marketplace.  In other words, it’s a perfect research opportunity for academic economist Don Thompson, who sets out to understand the business of contemporary art in less than three hundred pages.

    The $12 Million Stuffed Shark ends up being a far more revealing journey than anyone could expect.  If you want to start somewhere, go with the buyers and collectors.  One of the smartest passages of the book illustrates just how rich big-time art collectors actually are: Twelve million dollars, at their level of income, is something like a week’s salary –substantial, sure, but not crippling.  The buyers are from all around the world, and many of them are on a quest for social respectability.  How best to prove their upward mobility and refined artistic tastes than to display a work from a familiar name?  Some buy sight-unseen; others will borrow the work for a few weeks to see how it fits in their décor.  Other will buy for investment opportunities, but even Thompson (who has since joined the staff of The Art Economist magazine, a periodical aimed at art collectors/investors) cautions that overall, most art never sells for more than it was bought at.

    Most artists, after all, reach a plateau; most art ends up stored somewhere; museums have more art than they can display (leading to a credible argument for museums selling work); and most would-be investors never see a return on most of their investments.  This makes art a risky investment, but not a hopeless one, because some work from some artists do appreciate, and everyone is in a race to identify the next hot artists before they hit big-time prices.

    From that starting point, we get to explore art auctions, auction houses, the dance between dealers and their competitors, the increasing importance of art fairs and the artists that are getting most of the attention nowadays.  Get ready to distinguish your Saatchis from your Christies and maybe even appreciate some work from Jeff Koons and other contemporary artists.  One of the best chapters in the book explains the curious psychology of auctions in a wonderful wealth of subtle details that show how people react in constrained situations.

    Even fast readers shouldn’t be surprised if they remain glued to the book for a while.  Thompson covers his subject through anecdotes, interviews, historical information, plenty of money figures and a few illustrations along the way.  Avowedly inspired by Freakonomics, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark becomes a layman’s introduction to contemporary art from a non-artistic perspective.  Thompson doesn’t spend a lot of time on quality judgement, except to suggest that if there is considerable disagreement as to what is a good art piece, it’s easy to quantify what is an expensive art piece.  This should make most artists and connoisseurs wince, but it’s an essential assumption if the book is to explain the field as it is rather than how it should be.

    Ironically, Thompson’s book feels like dense reading in part because it doesn’t skimp on telling anecdotes, biographical profiles and preliminary conclusions on the state of the field.  I found it to be absorbing –I didn’t want to miss anything, so I ended up reading it very slowly to be sure to keep up with Thompson’s thorough exploration of the relationships between the various players involved in the field.  Perhaps more tellingly, I bought this book in the wake of the excellent “Pop Life” exhibition of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada, and now regret that I can’t go back to the gallery to see a few Warhols, Koonses, Hirsches and other darlings of the contemporary art market.  Thompson may have focused strictly on the economics of the market, but he may be able to stoke up a continued interest in the art.

  • The Discovery of the Titanic, Robert D. Ballard

    The Discovery of the Titanic, Robert D. Ballard

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Books, 1998 reprint of 1987 original, 287 pages, $13.99 tp, ISBN 0-446-67174-6

    I know that Titanic-mania is so 1997-1998, but there’s no expiration date for good books.  I’ve had Robert Ballard’s The Discovery of the Titanic in my to-read stack for nearly forever and now seems as good a time to read it as ever.

    An account of the discovery of the Titanic shipwreck by the oceanographer in charge of the expedition, The Discovery of the Titanic sometimes feels like a throwback to the heroic era of exploration.  It’s not much of a stretch to point out that less than six months elapsed between Roald Amundsen’s December 1911 expedition to the South Pole (the Earth’s last great unexplored frontier) and the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912.  A frontier opened even as another one closed, as generations of curious observers wondered about the exact location of the wreck.

    It wasn’t as simple as looking somewhere near the approximate location of the Titanic’s last know position.  Given the depth at which the ship sank, no attempt could be made until technology improved.  Several expeditions simply couldn’t find the wreck.  Meanwhile, popular culture spun its own tales: As a kid, I remember being told fanciful tales of how the wreckage of the ship was still traveling underwater, moved by underwater currents to circle the world.  As amazing at it may sound, it wasn’t until nearly sixty years later, in 1985, that the wreckage was found once again –four kilometres down on the Atlantic ocean floor and broken up in two pieces six hundred meters apart.  Overnight, historical accounts of the ship’s sinking were revised, as common wisdom until then (As reflected in such things as Clive Cussler’s overblown thriller Raise the Titanic!) held that the ship had sunk in one piece.

    The discovery of the wreck, far from dampening interest in the story of the ocean liner, revived interest in the matter and eventually led to James Cameron’s blockbuster 1997 movie.  A minor boom in Titanic-related publishing occurred to coincide with the film’s success, and this re-edition of Ballard’s 1987 book, revised to take in account the latest discoveries, was part of the mania.

    Still, discounting fads, there’s little doubt that this is one of the essentials on every bookshelf dedicated to the Titanic.  While it doesn’t seem to be in print at the moment, it’s a first-hand account of the discovery of the wreck by the lead discoverer himself, has been favourably reviewed, frequently cited by latter works and is still fascinating to read even a quarter of a century later.  There are better accounts of the sinking itself, and more complete examinations of the wreck (some of them by Ballard himself), but when it comes to describing the moment of the discovery itself, this is the source.

    The book does feature a summarized account of the sinking; just enough to set the scene, provide context and prepare readers for the discovery.  Ballard also provides an overview of the previous failed efforts to find the wreck, not sparing one or two barbs at his predecessors.  Describing his own attempt to put together an expedition of his own, Ballard is notably coy about the now-known deal he made with the US Navy to get funding in exchange for exploring US nuclear submarines wrecks prior to his own search for the Titanic.

    The world had to wait until a French/American 1985 expedition, using what was then state-of-the-art technology, for the wreck of the Titanic to be found. Ballard’s account of the discovery, in the wee hours of the morning, remains the book’s best passage.  He’s also candid in describing the aftermath, the way the discovery escaped in the press before they had a communication strategy to go along the scientific agenda, and the difficulties dealing with the media circus that accompanied his return to shore.  Ballard’s factual description of the debris found in the field underneath which the Titanic sank is curiously effective in describing the human element of the tragedy.  The book comes with a full-color insert showing beautiful illustrations showing the state of the wreck in 1985.

    The Discovery of the Titanic also explain why, as discussed in the afterword of the 1995 edition, Ballard did not raise any artefact from the site –a decision that eventually let others take possession of the wreck under maritime salvage law.  As of this writing, the Titanic wreck is property of a for-profit company putting together traveling museum shows, the debris field has been picked clean of artefacts and numerous visits to the site have left the wreck in far worse shape.  We may want to enjoy the thought of having access to the wreckage site, because chances are that it will be gone, rusted beyond recognition, within a few more decades.  Isn’t it remarkable to realize that the Titanic may have a shorter life as a known site than a lost legend?

  • Seven Deadly Wonders, Matthew Reilly

    Seven Deadly Wonders, Matthew Reilly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 2007 paperback reprint of 2006 original, 547 pages, C$9.99 pb, ISBN 978-1-4165-0506-8

    Matthew Reilly writes thrillers like Michael Bay directs movies.

    I will let you figure out if this is a compliment.  There’s little grace and subtlety to Reilly’s writing style and it only takes a few pages into Seven Deadly Wonders to be reminded of his overuse of exclamation points, illustrative info-graphics, short paragraphs (sometimes even one-word paragraphs) and tough-guy machismo.  Every sentence has its own camera angle and his action scenes aren’t written as much as they’re loudly pounded with a thrash metal back-beat.

    It doesn’t make for fine writing, but it does amount to a unique reading experience akin to an unlimited-budget summer blockbuster.  Reilly’s never been one to think small, and Seven Deadly Wonders roars forward from the very beginning, occasionally pausing for explanatory interludes and flash-backs.  Moving away from his usual military techno-thriller plot formula to embrace a Da Vinci Code-esque blend of modern gadgets, supernatural mysticism and historical trivia, Reilly posits a vast Antique conspiracy to hide away a terrible artefact in vast trap-filled catacombs.  When three competing forces all start gunning each other to gain elements of the artefact, the fun begins.

    Breaking away from his series of novels featuring top US Special Forces operative Shane Scofeild, Reilly doesn’t go looking too far for his next protagonist: Jack West Jr. is a top Australian special forces operative with two degree in ancient history –which proves handy given the book’s emphasis on ancient mysteries.  Refining his usual formula of thrusting a team of special operatives against ever-increasing odds, Reilly has some fun in incorporating a ten-year-old girl in the proceedings (she ends up re-naming the rest of the team, tweaking tough-guy names like “Saladin” to something like “Pooh Bear”) and making the ensemble cast a more integral part of the story.

    The biggest change in attitude between both series, however, is the inclusion of a dose of supernatural content in the form of prophecies, ancient advanced technologies and mystical light-shows.  In an insightful afterword, Reilly refers to Seven Deadly Wonders as contemporary fantasy, which is really just another way of saying that he’ll push premises as far as they can go.  Compared to most of the other thrillers clearly showing a Dan Brown influence, Reilly prefers a far more muscular thriller component: The book doesn’t skimp on large-scale action scenes, explosions, advanced military equipment and global power-plays.  It offers a frenetic global hunt for relics of the Seven Wonders of the World and ends with a spectacular set-piece involving the great pyramid, a hovering 747 and blood sacrifice leading to no less than a thousand years of domination for the winning team.  Whew!

    As long as you consent to play by Reilly’s rules, this is pure escapist entertainment.  Reilly’s intention to always go bigger, faster and crazier sets him apart from other writers still preoccupied with plausibility, and results in some spectacular sequences –there’s a really good set-piece set in an overhanging garden that’s as crazy as it’s entertaining.  While some of Reilly’s tricks will strike high-brow readers as skirting illiteracy (read the book aloud to realize how insanely dramatic his prose style can be), there’s something fascinating in seeing him re-use blockbuster and video-game aesthetics in a prosaic context.  Seven Deadly Wonders is abundantly illustrated with diagrams designed to make sense of the action, making for a very peculiar reading experience bridging the gap between prose and videogame mechanics.

    Perhaps the most amazing thing about Seven Deadly Wonders is how it manages to one-up much of Reilly’s already-extreme bibliography.  The mysticism may be off-putting in a thriller context, but the atmosphere of everything-goes is coherent, and there’s a lot of cleverness in fitting modern action in ancient settings and layers of mythology.  Reilly makes most other thriller writers look like sedate bores.  There’s no need to look for social relevance or dramatic depth here: Seven Deadly Wonders is purely committed to its own aesthetics, and that’s a huge part of why it feels so interesting.  Like it or not, few other writers are as dedicated at pushing the state-of-the-art in that particular direction, and even those who complain about this book being geared to the ADD generation may find something of note here.

    [February 2011: A full-length review of follow-up Jack West adventure Six Sacred Stones would be redundant, as it has pretty much the same strengths and weaknesses as Seven Deadly Wonders: action-movie-inspired plotting and prose, numerous diagrams, constant movement and a blend of high tech gadgets in spectacular ancient settings.  It does feel a bit duller when read shortly after its predecessors and redundant as well: The first book ended on a definitive note, whereas this one sets up a cliff-hanger to be resolved in Five Greatest Warriors. I have no plans to stop reading, but I would like Reilly to write something else at some point.]

  • Barney’s Version, Mordecai Richler

    Barney’s Version, Mordecai Richler

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Knopf, 1997, 355 pages, C$25.00 hc, ISBN 0-679-40418-X

    Commonly-held wisdom is that movies ruin books, but that relationship usually proves true in only one direction, for readers of the original who then see the movie adaptation.  There is much less appreciation for the way the arrow runs in reverse: how movies can enhance books when viewers go on to read the original.

    Seeing 2010’s Barney’s Version movie adaptation is an ideal way to prepare for reading Mordecai Richler’s 1997 novel, his last work of book-length fiction.  Given how Barney’s Version is a lengthy autobiographical ramble by a man who has had three wives, the opening pages of the story makes no attempt at nicely introducing the reader to the gallery of characters what have come to populate Barney Panovsky’s life.  What are those references to Bogie?  Who is “the second Ms. Panofvsky”?  How many wives has Barney had anyway?

    The relationships aren’t one-to-one between novel and film: The events of the film version has been pushed fifteen years forward, ditch a Paris-set prologue for Rome, update details of Barney’s television-show production company, combine a few characters, streamline some scenes and abandon many of Barney’s crankier reflections on Montréal and Québec society as seen from the perspective of a Jewish English-Canadian.  Gone are the vicious attacks on separatism, dismissive thoughts on young activists and conscious rebellions against political correctness.

    But all of those are in the book, and more.  The point of reading Barney’s Version is to understand more fully the characters surrounding Barney, and peek a little deeper in his mind.  Among other treats, we get to know what happens to a few characters abruptly evacuated from the film as soon as their plot points are accomplished –I particularly appreciated learning how the now-obese “second Ms. Panofvsky” kept hounding Barney throughout his life, or what happened to Cedric after Paris.  Barney is such a character that reading him about circa-1995 annoyances is good enough for a few smiles –and I’m voluntarily not trying to link Barney to Richler himself.  As a nod to Richler’s best-know work, Duddy Kravitz is even mentioned a few times as another elderly businessman who has never lost his touch for the subtle con.

    Barney’s Version can feel like hard work at first, though: The blizzard of names, disconnected events, shorthand references and deliberate mistakes in the text is meant to reflect the way Barney is losing his mind to Alzheimer.  The first few pages don’t make for a friendly reading experience, though –and that’s with the help of the film in mapping the relationships between the characters.

    One of the question that often comes in recommending that readers spoil themselves rotten with the movie adaptation before tackling the source novel is whether the reader can still be surprised, satisfied or otherwise caught up in a story whose twists and turns are already known.  Ignoring adaptations that use a premise before going in their own direction, or those who change key elements of the resolution, Barney’s Version proves that a sufficiently skilled storyteller can keep up the surprises even when you know all the tricks up his sleeve.  The framing device of the book itself (untranslatable in film) is remarkably effective and even if the final revelation to the book is the same as the movie, nothing can quite prepare the reader for the last page: even the last few “damn, damn, damn” of the novel give the extra emotional layer to the truths left unrevealed to some characters.

    If you’ve seen the film and thought that maybe something was missing, do yourself a favour and get a little bit more of Barney Panofvsky’s cranky wisdom.  (It’s no exaggeration that the written Barney would have hated the film version of his life, restructured around a pat romantic drama.)  At the same time, you’ll understand why Mordecai Richler’s ghost still remains such a presence over the Canadian literary scene, even a decade after his death.

  • The Gate House, Nelson DeMille

    The Gate House, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Grand Central, 2008, 677 pages, C$27.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-446-53342-3

    Even twenty years after publication, Nelson DeMille’s The Gold Coast remains an oddity in the author’s bibliography: It’s not a thriller as much as it’s a romantic drama, a social study and a mournful look at the end of an era.  Set among the Long Island upper-crust, it tells of a tragic love triangle between a narrator, his wife and a Mafia don having purchased a property in the very exclusive old-money “Gold Coast” community.  It doesn’t end well, and by the end of the novel our narrator left Long Island for an unspecified duration, taking a sailboat trip around the world while the old way of life on the Gold Coast continues to disappear.

    As The Gate House begins, ten years later, John Sutter is back on Long Island to take care of business: After sailing for years and establishing himself in London, Sutter is compelled to head to the scene of The Gold Coast when his old housekeeper is hospitalized for her last few days.  Trying to take care of the estate, he discovers that his ex-wife is back in the area as well, and he is soon contacted by the son of his deceased nemesis for “business”.  Before long, Sutter is once again navigating the dangerous shoals between love, in-laws, mafia lords, yachting clubs, Iranian expatriates and everything else that can fit on Long Island.

    Readers used to the typical DeMille protagonist will feel instantly comfortable with Sutter’s smart-alec narration.  Sutter, having married into money, had always been described in the previous book, as being in the Long Island aristocracy and yet not part of it.  After ten years away, his detachment is even more pronounced in the sequel.  His comments on everyone are acerbic and often very funny –no one deals with in-laws as acidly as a DeMille protagonist.  His narration gives some narrative energy to a very long book in which not much actually happens.

    If there’s one thing to keep in mind about The Gate House, it’s that it’s not driven by plot.  Leisurely-paced, it spends pages ruminating on the events of the previous novel (so much so that even readers who haven’t read it will be thoroughly spoiled within a few chapters), and then lets plot points accumulate every fifty pages or so.  Even Sutter’s easygoing and witty narration can’t mask the slow pacing or the thinness of the story.  Much of the point in describing the evolution of Long Island feels like a rethread as well –if The Cold Coast was about the end of eras as nouveaux riches were invading the hunting grounds of the old aristocracy while the mafia was losing its influence, then The Gate House is an epilogue in which the invasion is complete, estates having being replaced by McMansions, and the mob being unable to provide leaders as capable as the previous ones.  The Gate House is also significantly lower in thrills, not only compared to the rest of DeMille’s work, but also compared to The Gold Coast itself –while the original was already more focused on relationships than on action sequences, the sequel is even more sedate, physical danger being late in threatening Sutter and sharply resolved when it happens.

    For readers worried about DeMille’s career after a few duds in a row and an unhealthy obsession with 9/11 (the two being related), The Gate House offers a cautiously optimistic indication: DeMille is still obsessed with 9/11, as the events of the novel take place in 2002 and semi-faithfully recall the paranoia of the time.  Fortunately, The Gate House isn’t as  thoroughly insane as either Night Fall or Wild Fire… even if some character decisions seem dubious at best, or plot-driven at worst.  The Gate House is, at least, pleasant to read throughout, even entertaining to a degree that DeMille hadn’t been able to sustain since Up Country.  While the result won’t be enough to make any sceptic claim that DeMille is back, it’s better enough to make us believe that he’s taken a step away from the edge.

    Since “too long” has been a feature of DeMille’s novels for a while, and since DeMille has dabbled with romance in a few books (in Spencerville, for instance), it’s not as if fans will be caught unprepared by The Gate House’s mixture of slow pacing, courtship and sarcastic narration.  But compared with the rest of DeMille’s pre-2001 bibliography, The Gate House isn’t much of a success.  It’s an average entry in the author’s bibliography –entertaining, even amusing, but far from reaching any kind of high point in either thrills or drama.  It will make fans happy… but it’s unlikely to draw in newer readers, or restore faith that he’s regained his touch.

  • American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, William Langewiesche

    American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, William Langewiesche

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    North Point, 2003 revised edition of 2002 original, 218 pages, C$21.50 pb, ISBN 0-86547-675-6

    The surprise about American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center isn’t that it presents a factual, generally unsentimental and highly informative description of the way the ruins of the World Trade Center were removed from downtown New York in the months following 9/11.

    The surprise is that it was published in 2002.  Even the revised paperback edition is dated 2003, a time during which, to non-American observers, much of the United States went violently insane and invaded a small country on a spurious “weapons of mass destruction” rationale.  It took years for America to collectively calm down and generally acknowledge that delusion.  Given the time lag between fantasy and acknowledgement, one would expect a sober account of traumatic events to take years to put together.  Yet William Langewiesche was able to do so in mere months.

    To do this, he gained access to the site even as authorities were still busy putting together a response plan.  For weeks, Langewiesche was able to walk though the Ground Zero site, interview those who were involved in the effort and get answers from people in charge.  His narrative describes how a response was assembled in the hours following the tragedy, in-between a destroyed section of downtown, people wanting to go forward with rescue efforts, investigators looking for clues in the debris, an environment filled with unstable rubble, multiple levels of overlapping authority and all of that set in one of the densest urban areas on Earth –basically, the worst imaginable combination of complications.

    American Ground also describes the often-amazing story of what happened at the site long after the news channel stopped the round-the-clock coverage.  How the containment basin nearly crumbled and flooded the area; how four construction companies were hurriedly contacted to provide services; how the debris were finally taken out of the area by barge, processed off-site, inspected multiple times for human remains, and ultimately sold to foreign buyers.  Those who have always loved triumphant engineering stories will be amazed at the complexity of the effort and how people can rally behind a common cause in times of crises.

    Little is said about 9/11 itself in American Ground, the subject matter carefully restrained to the engineering challenge of clearing out the debris from the area.  It doesn’t really need to do anything more: readers will provide their emotional soundtrack.  And yet, by being as clear as possible, but refusing to engage in drama, Langewiesche is able to faithfully represent the emotional charge of working at what was, after all, both a grave and a crime scene.  It also allows him to present factual but unpleasant information on conflicts between various groups on people working on-site, some of which does not reflect very well on groups that had been, at the time, placed on a pedestal.  NYFD firefighters are described as acting far more reverently when a body from their service is found in the wreckage; 9/11 widows are portrayed as emotional and unhelpful in meetings.

    It’s not surprising for a circa-2011 reader to find out that the book raised a considerable amount of controversy in the two years after its release.  The paperback edition of the book is recommended over the original hardcover for an after-word that describes some of the controversies.  Extra fun can be found by looking at the book’s one-star reviews on amazon –the most ironic being a one-star review from “C. Pellegrino “timewalker””, aka Charles Pellegrino, whose professional reputation would be destroyed in 2010 in the fracas surrounding the recall of his book Last Train from Hiroshima.  Much of the criticism is based on emotional disbelief: How can you say bad things about people involved in such an event? Years later, we’re readier to acknowledge that even good people can act badly in some circumstances, that some people’s anecdotal behaviour does not change the magnitude of a collective achievement and that the way New York regained its footing after 9/11 was just as extraordinary as the event itself.  Langewiesche simply arrived to those conclusions long before his detractors.

    So it is that ten years after 9/11, we can see more clearly how much of an achievement American Ground was at the time.  It’s unusually honest, devoid of cheap jingoism, and mesmerizingly readable from beginning to end.  As much of the then-chatter about 9/11 now reads as ridiculously overdone, American Ground remains just as compelling today.  That it got published in 2002 is just as impressive as the content of the book itself.

  • Hot Stuff: A Brief History of Disco, John Manuel Andriote

    Hot Stuff: A Brief History of Disco, John Manuel Andriote

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 2001, 195 pages,C$19.95 tp, ISBN 0-380-80907-9

    Given that I spent most of the month reading non-fiction about Very Important Subjects such as declassified national secrets, the tension between contemporary science and business, the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the exploitation of third-world workers, it seemed perfectly acceptable to kick back for a while and relax with a book entirely dedicated to a frivolous subject.  Something like disco, for instance.

    Disco never gets any respect.  Rising and crashing over a period of a few short years at the end of the 1970s, disco music is today best remembered as a temporary embarrassment (by those who embraced it at the time) or harmless retro kitsch fit for self-consciously ironic role-playing (by those who didn’t).  Disco precisely sets any party back to 1978, seems inherently campy and still (thirty years later) has produced some of the best dance music on planet Earth.  If disco doesn’t get any respect, it’s partly because it has never wanted any: It’s out-and-out fun, hedonism, play and release wrapped in one hot package.

    John Manuel Andriote’s Hot Stuff: A Brief History of Disco isn’t meant to be a scholarly or encyclopaedic discussion of the subject: Experienced non-fiction readers will recognize the kind of workmanlike craft through which the book was assembled from interviews, personal recollections and a huge number of newspaper clippings.  But even if the book sometimes feels like a contractual obligation by a writer looking to pay the bills in-between weightier projects, it reaches its essential objective: Provide a brief, entertaining, cogent and even insightful history of disco through its origins, beginnings, full-blown craze, rapid decline and periodic revivals.

    Much of this is due to the book’s breezy and accessible style: Andriote’s no-nonsense approach covers disco’s rise and fall chronologically, broadly dividing the book’s six chapters and illustrating his examples with a variety of historical sources.  The frequent mentions of important songs makes the book’s reading experience curiously synesthesiac, as readers won’t help but replay excerpts in their head as they are mentioned in the text.  (The more technically adept will know to read the book with their disco-drenched iPod at their fingertips.)

    For those of us who were far too young during disco’s original run to remember anything but TV re-runs of Xanadu and a few suspicious vinyl records in our parents’ collection, Hot Stuff does well in telling us about disco-as-a-lifestyle.  For many Americans at the tail end of the baby-boom, disco was their coming-of-age ritual: The self-conscious dressing-up, the mindless dancing, the creation of the discotheque concept… disco’s distinct visual aesthetic ensured its abrupt popularity as much as its rapid downfall: it was something new, something unique and something that people wouldn’t fail to remember fondly despite the backlash.  It was, after all, a music made to have fun –and people did.

    But there’s a bit more to disco than booty-shaking beats, and Andriote (best known for Victory Deferred, a book about AIDS and the gay community) never neglects the link between disco and the gay community: How disco started out marginally and had to be made safe for mainstream consumption, how even clear links between disco and the gay community were denied by many “average fans” (with hilarious anecdotes of denial about the Village People) and how homophobia fed into the disco backlash.  The Seventies, we are reminded, were not a good decade in America, and disco happened in part due to a complex interaction between a downbeat decade and people looking for something else.  Left unspoken is whether the wild nights of disco eventually led to Reagan’s “morning in America”.

    Are there better books out there about Disco?  Probably.  Even a cursory look at the book’s Amazon reviews brings up Saturday Night Forever as a recommended alternative.  But as a book found in the bargain bin, Hot Stuff remains a great stepping-stone introduction to the subject, and a literary break equivalent to a fun disco tune in-between heavier pieces.  It’s not as if I can deny my own fascination for the music: Disco all happened during my first half-dozen years, but when I picked up the music bug during the early nineties, Time Magazine assured me that my dance music was “The Revenge of the Disco Babies”.  There are only a few more degrees of separation between that, the Big Beat of the late-nineties and the Drum-and-bass of now: Disco’s echo continues even today.

  • Dark Waters, Lee Vyborny & Don Davis

    Dark Waters, Lee Vyborny & Don Davis

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    New American Library, 2004 paperback reprint of 2003 original, 243 pages, C$21.00 pb, ISBN 0-451-21161-8

    Like submarines, some military projects can stay submerged a long time, occasionally appearing on the radar come procurement time, but otherwise remaining away from public view, conducting operations that may not be revealed publicly for years or decades.

    So it is that Dark Waters takes us behind the scenes for a look at the NR-1, one of the most unique craft in the US Navy’s fleet.  Designed to operate at depths far below other submarines, only one NR-1 was ever built: the cost overruns, technical complexity and limited uses for the craft basically made the construction of a second one unthinkable.  (Interestingly enough, the craft was never formally commissioned by the Navy: By keeping it on a special status, it freed up a spot in the Navy’s counted inventory and allowed the craft to avoid official scrutiny).  What a unique submarine it is, through: Resistant to pressures that would crush other submarines, the NR-1 could go explore the seabed by sinking to the bottom and then driving on the ocean floor using the special tracks it had been built with, grabbing things with a claw for retrieval.  Even at times where weather would drive away ships and submarines relying on surface assistance, the NR-1 could continue to operate.

    Designing such a craft takes a special kind of madness, especially during the sixties, a time where computer-assisted design was still notional and material science wasn’t nearly as powerful as it is now.  The NR-1 came equipped with a mind-bogglingly primitive Sperry computer, had to be tested in dangerous conditions (nearly being hit by other US Navy crafts during testing in shallow domestic waters), often suffered from its own design compromises and demanded much of its sailors.

    It’s one of those sailors, Lee Vyborny, who tells us of his time aboard the NR-1’s inaugural missions in Dark Waters.  Working with journalist Don Davis, Vyborny tells the biography of a unique machine, halfway between national security asset and scientific instrument.  Given Vyborny’s career path in and out of the NR-1, most of the details in the book are about the submarine’s first few years when he was a crewmember: the rest is covered less precisely, via official reports, recently-declassified documents, personal recollections and interviews with other crewmembers.  But even chunks of the book excerpted from the official record are fascinating, in no small part due to the role that the extraordinary admiral Hyman Rickover played in the NR-1’s conception and construction.

    Some of the book’s best moments come when Vyborny describes some of the close calls encountered by the NR-1 crew during the early years of the project.  Whether it’s nearly being rammed by a friendly aircraft carrier, or encountering such a catastrophic equipment failure that the sub looked destined for a one-way trip to the bottom, Dark Waters gives us a sense of the dangers faced by men aboard semi-experimental crafts.  The other big thrill comes when Vyborny tells of actual military operations undertaken by the NR-1: There’s a gripping chapter about the recovery of a downed F-14 fighter jet and its precious munitions, while another chapters describes how the US Navy was able to sneak the NR-1 in the Mediterranean, past active Soviet listening posts, by smuggling it within another US warship.  Later in the book, we get to see how the NR-1 was used to re-write oceanography textbooks, scientists being amazed at the amount of new data they could see with their own eyes while aboard the submarine.

    It’s not entirely true to say that the NR-1 was a national secret (it featured in a number of press reports), but it’s correct to say that until recently, much of its true covert nature was left unspecified to observers.  Starting in 1995, the Navy started letting go of a few secrets about the NR-1, helped along by the growing popularity and scientific worth of its non-military missions.  This increased publicity continued well after Dark Waters‘ publication: We barely get a mention of the NR-1’s involvement in the recovery of the Challenger debris, whereas the topic is now well-covered on-line.  Still, Dark Waters is likely to remain the definitive book about the NR-1 (which was deactivated in 2007 and is currently awaiting scrapping): Don Davis’ prose ties up Vyborny’s recollections, making the book just as interesting to read as countless fictional submarine thrillers.  A number of novelists could use it as reference and inspiration, not only in historical terms, but also for details of daring experimental projects and the ways they can (almost) go wrong.  It’s also a fascinating look at a footnote in the complex history in the Cold War, and how fascinating stories are still lurking in the archives… just under the surface.