Reviews

  • A Certain Chemistry, Mil Millington

    A Certain Chemistry, Mil Millington

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Flame, 2003, 372 pages, C$24.95 tp, ISBN 0-340-82114-0

    You wouldn’t normally expect infidelity to be a good engine for a comic novel, but it’s true the Mil Millington doesn’t write about conventional subjects. His first novel, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, was directly inspired by the autobiographical website that first brought him so much attention: It was based on, well, a couple that argued a lot. From there to infidelity is a logical progression on the list of unpleasant things that couples do, which brings us to his second novel: A Certain Chemistry.

    Stepping a bit farther away from autobiographical experiences, Millington’s second novel features a professional writer whose five-year-old relationship is seriously tested when he’s asked to ghost-write the autobiography of Britain’s most popular soap star. He’s funny and ordinary, while she’s famous and gorgeous: this is all headed toward disaster. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that infidelity does occur, and that a good chunk of the novel is spent looking at the narrator as he tries to cover up his infidelities in bumbling and inept fashion.

    Meanwhile, in interstitial chapters, God is our narrator and he can’t shut up about the evolutionary processes that doom our relationships. Apologies for the way we’re designed don’t make him any less sorry for the tribulations that the narrator is going through.

    Despite the premise (and, almost despite where the novel inevitably goes), A Certain Chemistry is a very, very funny book. Most of the humor is on a page-per-page level, as the narrator always have a good turn of phrase to describe the humiliating situations in which he is forced, and the slapstick nature of the various adventures following his affair with a celebrity. As one could expect, other people find out, the whole mess gets bigger, and we’re left wondering how this is going to be settled.

    One thing is certain: This is a two-page-a-minute read: The narration is engaging even when the character is doing reprehensible things, and the voice of a late-twenties man trying to muddle through life is convincing. Our protagonist is frequently being an idiot, and it’s not his privileged position as a narrator that absolves him from our disapproval. There are a number of situations where the conclusion of the narrator’s efforts is foregone from the start… and yet it keeps its appeal.

    On the other hand, there’s no denying that the novel is constantly headed towards a depressing crisis. The balance between this overarching impression of doom and the jocular nature of the narration is one of the trickiest aspects of the novel, and it’s entirely possible to be depressed while reading some amusing passages: what they mask isn’t all that different from tragedy in the classical sense, a hero’s flaws being the seed of his downfall-by-pratfalls.

    Compared to Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, A Certain Chemistry has a plot that’s more than episodic, and a definite conclusion that puts things to rest rather than let everything hang in mid-air. The life of a professional writer (ie; someone who writes, preferably on command, those articles in popular magazines) is described with a number of amusing peeks inside the industry, and there’s a sense throughout that Millington is breaking free from the web personae that so obviously fueled his first novel.

    So it’s not that improbable that a typically-British humor novel would be hilarious even as it’s treating one of the least amusing subjects on record. It’s Millington’s charm, after all.

  • Gone Tomorrow, Lee Child

    Gone Tomorrow, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Delacorte, 2009, 421 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-34057-1

    Jack Reacher has a knack for finding himself in plot-rich situations, and his thirteenth adventure Gone Tomorrow is no exception to the rule. As usual, Lee Child confronts the coincidence-driven nature of his premises head-on, from the very first page. Reacher is back in New York, late at night, in a quasi-deserted subway train. Except that something is wrong: the woman in front of him shows clear signs that she’s a suicide bomber. As Reacher ticks off his mental checklist of suicide bomber traits, everything makes sense except for the timing. Why conduct a suicide mission late at night?

    So Reacher gets up and confronts the woman. The results of his action will surprise even him. Not that he stays confounded for long: Once again, he has stumbled into a puzzle box of surprises and twists and revelations, and he’s the best man to get to the bottom of it.

    This time, his enemies are a bit stronger than usual: It turns out that there is a terrorist connection to the whole business, not to mention a presidential hopeful. When that happens, official US forces don’t stop to make subtle distinctions between allies and enemy combatants, and Reacher soon finds himself targeted by elements of his own government. The left-leaning political content that bubbled up in Nothing to Lose is present here in a different way: Reacher’s struggles against the new half-corporate security apparatus show the way in which the thriller game is still evolving, and which contemporary threads can be used by authors to put their heroes in ever more complex jeopardy.

    Along the way, Reacher does get to go on a rampage of sorts through New York, beating up opponents who don’t consider him a threat, or enough of a threat. Unsurprisingly, his most formidable adversaries end up being those who look least threatening. Reacher doesn’t often end up in the hospital, but there are exceptions to most rules.

    Gone Tomorrow (the title can be found in-text as part of dialogue referring, bitterly, to Reacher’s lack of roots) features political maneuvering, New York lore and long-hidden military secrets dating back to Reacher’s early days in the military. The twists and turns are among the series’ best: It takes a while before the true plot is revealed, and there are plenty of surprises along the way. And yet… Child does foreshadowing and red herrings effectively, which is partly why latter plot development don’t seem as outlandish as they would have seemed if presented cold.

    As with the last few novels in the series, there are references to Reacher getting old: His old contacts aren’t working as reliably as they should, his technological know-how is primitive, and even the people in the US Government don’t think much of Reacher’s “prehistoric” history with Uncle Sam. One of the most damning aspects of the series’s structure is that Reacher seldom gains new friends and contacts along the way: Since the goal is to have all volumes read independently, Child can seldom point back meaningfully to Reacher’s previous adventures. In this case, readers could have expected Reacher’s US Secret Service adventures in Without Fail to have been mentioned whenever he’s contacting a high-level politician, but that’s not the case. This is a frustrating tension at play, in the middle of such well-constructed novels, and it’s getting harder to ignore.

    But it’s not difficult to avoid thinking about these things in the middle of any Lee Child novel: His crisp, detailed and fluid writing is as good as ever, and the plotting of Gone Tomorrow takes us back to the good days of One Shot in giving a good time to seasoned thriller readers trying to figure out the true plot of the story. Reacher’s problems with the shadow US intelligence apparatus are a fresh wrinkle on old plot drivers. None of Child’s increasing fans will be disappointed by this one, and he may pick up a few along the way.

    As for me, this thirteenth Reacher Novel marks the end of my monthly Lee Child Reading Project: I have now read the entire series, switching like a real fan from paperbacks to hardcovers along the way. The results are unarguable: Child may be the best pure-thriller series writer on the market today.

  • Up (2009)

    Up (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, June 2009): Will Pixar ever stop surprising audiences? It’s not enough for them to keep producing the best animated films on the face of the planet: They have to take insane chances with what they try to do. Up may be for kids, but it talks to adults by starring an old cranky man who seizes upon his last chance for adventure; it may be a comedy, but it starts with the single saddest ten minutes of film in recent memory. I’ll argue that the film never completely recovers from the strength of this first segment (even the comedy rings hollow when confronting death and loneliness), but I have to acknowledge the insane artistic ambition of the entire thing. The risk-taking never stops: The cast of characters for the entire film is tiny, half of them aren’t human, and the blatant symbolism of a character walking around with an entire house’s worth of baggage never feels forced. (On the other hand, the mean-spirited climax strikes a false note.) Ultimately, I may not love Up (and Wall-E) quite as much as I love Ratatouille, but it’s impossible to take a look at Pixar’s last few films and feel that they’re not trying to do things that other filmmakers won’t even contemplate.

  • Avenger, Frederick Forsyth

    Avenger, Frederick Forsyth

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s Press, 2003, 370 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-31951-7

    In the grand arc of Frederick Forsyth’s multi-decade career, Avenger was a return to form: Between 1996’s Icon and 2003’s Avenger, Forsyth published a gothic romance follow-up to The Phantom of the Opera (The Phantom of Manhattan, 1999) and a book of short stories (The Veteran, 2001). Avenger not only returned to the long-form thriller, but had the added advantage of being the first Forsyth novel written after 9/11.

    It’s a bit of a surprise, then, to find out that despite the frequent reminders that the bulk of the story takes place during the summer of 2001, Avenger is more concerned about a Serbian mass-murderer than a middle-eastern terrorist. It’s not a complicated story: Our protagonist is an ex Vietnam-era “Tunnel Rat” named Calvin Dexter, and his specialty is tracking down criminals that have somehow eluded traditional justice. He extracts them from their hiding places and delivers them to the proper authorities. Avenger tells the story of one such extraction, Dexter taking on the task of bringing back a Serbian involved in the murder of a young man with very rich relatives.

    The rest, frankly, is just detail. Fortunately, details are what Forsyth does best. Avenger lies somewhere between Icon and The Afghan (2006) in exposition delivery and structure. As in Icon, Forsyth interleaves vignettes describing Dexter’s life in-between installments of his Serbian adventure. If the detail with which he describes the story is heavier than in previous novel, it’s still not up to the quasi-ridiculous voice-of-God level of The Afghan. There’s quite a bit of dialogue, and the political outlook of the story doesn’t fall as deep in right-wing blood-lust territory as his follow-up novel.

    It’s also meant to take place in the real world, and isn’t set “five minutes in the future” like many of his other novels are meant to. The historical focus alludes to the waste of intelligence resources and shady deals that led to the events of 9/11 without necessarily beating readers over the head with them (or, worse, using the event as an escape hatch like Nelson DeMille did in Night Fall.) Elements of the epilogue seem familiar (Forsyth has used the “character having deeply-buried personal connections to another character” twist before), but then again the whole novel feels like another solid bag of Forsyth’s tricks.

    The real fun and interest of the novel doesn’t come as often from the sequence of events than in the flashbacks, extraneous details and technical knowledge that Forsyth weaves into his fiction. It’s instantly credible even in trying to justify something as trite as a white girl being led to prostitution by non-Caucasian criminals. When Forsyth spends the first half of the novel hopping around Dexter’s chronology, it’s not a holding action as much as an excuse to present a few showpieces (such as an excellent description of the “Tunnel Rats”’s activity in Vietnam) and slowly build up the character we will follow for the rest of a novel. It’s an effective trick, especially given that this is at least the second time Forsyth has tried it.

    At face value, the novel certain needs the help –if you disengage even slightly, the protagonist’s improbable accumulation of skill and talents seems wildly over-the-top. It’s a testament to Forsyth’s skill that he can not only pull it off, but make it seem all normal.

    While Avenger isn’t Grand Forsyth, it’s markedly more palatable than The Afghan, and far closer to the author’s core strengths than some of his previous books. As a bridge between Icon and The Afghan, is a nearly perfect fit. Fans will be pleased, beach readers will get a decent read and everyone will have a good time. Even Forsyth’s average novels are worth a read, after all.

  • Drag Me to Hell (2009)

    Drag Me to Hell (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, June 2009): After the indulgent and bloated Spider-Man 3, one could justifiably wonder what happened to Sam Raimi, and if ever the champion of such films as Evil Dead, Army of Darkness and Darkman would ever find his way back to the kind of superlative B-grade movies that made his reputation. Well, all of those doubts can be laid to rest with Drag Me to Hell, a convincing throwback to the core of old-school horror. Relentless to the point of seeming mean-spirited, Drag Me to Hell has a lot of sadistic fun pitting its blonde heroine against a dark curse that will not stop until she’s gone. The mechanics are unsubtle (everything worth understanding is highlighted about three times), the heroine isn’t distinctive and the stereotypes are rough-hewn, but the jumps are plentiful (the cell phone one is particularly effective) and the pacing seldom slows down. A mixture of occult traditions, shlocko movie-making and over-the-top wackiness, it’s a film that feels reinvigorating not only for Raimi, but for horror fans in general. The third act is marred by an obvious set-up, but most of the film is pure horror gold: Fans will be delighted, and not only because it’s such a refreshing change from the dross passing itself off for horror these days. Just don’t look for a moral message.

  • Striptease (1996)

    Striptease (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, June 2009): Carl Hiaasen’s particular brand of comic crime fiction can be tricky to swallow even on the page, so it’s not much of a shock to find out that this straight-up adaptation somehow fails to click. His usual strategy of surrounding a competent character with a bunch of idiots may be successful in a novel, but here it creates a comedy vacuum around lead Demi Moore, which becomes a problem since most scenes revolve around her. Hiaasen’s all-knowing narration can’t be used, and the uneasy mixture of comedy and violence becomes even more uneasy on-screen (even after toning down the book’s gratuitously blood-thirsty ending) Worse yet are the problems that the film creates for itself: While a film about strip-teasing is expected to show some flesh, the entire club sequences lose their charms quickly, especially when they still grind the film to a halt about three different times: it doesn’t help that Hiaasen’s twisty plot is snipped to a only a few thin threads that don’t create much suspense. Still, the film isn’t the disaster one could expect: Ving Rhames is hilarious in one of his first big-screen roles, whereas Burt Reynolds hits a late-career peak as a particularly perverted politician. The Miami locations are often well-used, and the whole thing is over before anyone has time to be really displeased.

  • The Addiction (1995)

    The Addiction (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, June 2009): It goes without saying that a horror monster is seldom “just” a horror monster, but Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction takes things to a conceptual extreme by cramming vampires in a film chiefly about addition and the philosophical implications thereof. Pretentious? Very much. Intriguing? Definitely. Shot in stark black-and-white, The Addiction features a number of notable names (including an unusually fetching Lily Taylor, and a scene-grabbing cameo from Christopher Walken) and an improbable number of soliloquies that, stripped of their pretentiousness, still manage to deliver a number of fascinating ideas. The vampire here is a junkie who has managed to blame others for his addiction, and whose appetite is only matched by self-loathing. As horror, it’s generally lame (although there is a vampire feeding frenzy late in the film), and yet there’s no denying that The Addiction is a lot more worthwhile to watch than any half-dozen cheap vampire movies.

  • Finity, John Barnes

    Finity, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1999, 303 pages, C$31.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86118-4

    I’ve read the majority of John Barnes’ work, but a few books got forgotten along the way –such as Finity. It’s not much of an oversight: Finity is a minor novel, a trifle compared to some of Barnes’ other efforts. It’s not a success, and a look at Amazon confirms that the book received mixed reviews (29 reviews, and not one of them a five-star!)… but it fails to cohere in interesting ways.

    If nothing else, it does have the decency to start promisingly: The first hundred pages or so take place in an alternate reality where Nazis have taken over the world, yet feature the quasi-comical adventures of one Lyle Peripart, a quiet academic whose days are calm enough to allow for pleasant exchanges with the panoply of AIs managing things around him. But for Lyle, a successful job interview becomes the prelude to an increasingly baffling series of events that he can’t understand –almost as if reality was being altered around him.

    By the time his wife kills a Nazi spy and then disavows all knowledge of her actions, the readers are getting clued onto the fact that the many realities of Lyle Peripart are merging, splitting, shifting –and something has to be done! Good thing, then, that he suddenly finds himself in the middle of a group assembled especially for this occasion.

    Alas, this middle chunk of the book presents its own unique challenges. As Lyle and friends shift between realities, the reader has little solid footing. Everything known is wrong, which includes all of the lovely amusing bits in the book’s first third. Our characters are stuck in a storm of parallel realities, and the impression left by this extended sequence is unique: It’s like reading in a fog, where the words on the page can be trusted, but the entire conceptual framework carried around by the reader has to be purged again and again. It’s not a pleasant moment, but I’m struggling in vain to remember a similar reading experience elsewhere in fiction.

    When things settle down, they don’t go back to the world of the first third. In fact, our protagonist has to contend with altered version of his friends and significant others –a difference that leads to a pretty ugly scene of non-consensual sex between a bound and bewildered narrator and a girlfriend whose kinks don’t include safe-words. (Never underestimate Barnes’ ability to insert forcible anal penetration in an otherwise light-hearted adventure. But his fans already knew that.)

    Alas, the novel continues unraveling from that point forward, to such an extent that it’s legitimate to wonder if Barnes is doing it on purpose to annoy genre readers. Even after all the characters are reunited and bound in a single stable reality, their grand quest peters out as characters are killed one by one, until the remaining ones decide to retreat into a passive lifestyle. This, too, may be a radically innovative concept for genre fiction: In how many novels do you recall the protagonists giving up the adventure in order to stay away from it all?

    The fact that all of those things are interesting doesn’t in any way make them more satisfying. Finity messes with the genre fiction formula to its own perils: There’s a reason why formula works the way it works, and any attempt to defy convention also risks a backlash worse than just “a dull book”. Despite trappings of conventional adventure, Finity certainly engages the reader in ways that defy conventional reading protocols… but it’s the kind of experience that leaves readers without satisfaction. I certainly wouldn’t be so kind to the novel if I wasn’t already well predisposed to Barnes’ work, and if I didn’t suspect that his fiction often means to enrage a certain kind of readers. At the very least, the middle portion of Finity is a really fascinating reading experience; I wonder if the whole “reading in a fog” feeling couldn’t be exploited in other contexts.

  • Blood & Donuts (1995)

    Blood & Donuts (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, June 2009): The most frustrating thing about this low-budget Canadian horror film shot and set in Toronto is how uneven it is: Too often settling for a muddy drama somehow featuring a vampire protagonist, it occasionally flickers brightly with a moment of interest, only to fade again. It’s self-consciously ridiculous (David Cronenberg plays a local mob boss with boot-scratching gusto), and yet it also tries to have it both ways as a character study, especially near the unsatisfying ending. (Here’s a hint: Don’t try make us go “Oooh nooo he’s dead” over the film’s most annoying character.) But what do I know? The film was nominated for a bunch of Genies, including for the Best Screenplay award. It’s a bit of a shame to see that lead Helene Clarkson’s IMDB filmography tapered off shortly after this film, because her charm is one of the things holding the rest of the film together. Otherwise, well, fans of Canadian horror will fill a big hole in their cinematography by watching this, and fans of unusual vampire films may as well give it a look.

  • Strange Days (1995)

    Strange Days (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, on DVD, June 2009): You would think that a 1995 film re-casting 1992 racial tensions in then-future 1999 Los Angeles would be irremediably dated fifteen years later. But nothing could be farther from the truth: For once thing, the story (co-written by James Cameron) is a savvy exploration of a seductive SF concept that hasn’t aged a wrinkle since then. For another, Kathryn Bigelow’s exceptional direction keeps things moving both in and out of frame: there’s a terrific visual density to what’s happening on-screen, and the subjective camera moments are still brutally effective. But even the dated aspects of the film still pack a punch, as they now appear to have taken place in an alternate reality where police brutality and memory recording have flourished even as the Internet hasn’t taken off. (History of Science students are free to sketch how one explains the other.) But it’s really the characters that keep the whole thing together: Ralph Fiennes is mesmerizing as a romantic hustler, while Angela Basset’s seldom been better than she is here, all smooth cheekbones, high attitude and shiny dreadlocks. The pacing is a bit slow (how many times do we need to see Lenny pine away for Faith?) and the ending isn’t as snappy as it should have been, but Strange Days is still amazingly peppy for a film with such an explicit expiration date. It measures up against the best SF films of the nineties, and that’s already saying something. The DVD has a smattering of extras (most notably a few good deleted scenes, a twenty-minute audio commentary and a teaser trailer that I could still quote fifteen years later), but this is a film overdue for a special edition treatment.

  • Millennium (1989)

    Millennium (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, on DVD, June 2009): Fans of SF author John Varley often point at this film to explain his silence throughout the late eighties. Varley himself has plenty to say about it (see his short story collection The John Varley Reader for the details), but the result is a pretty poor film. Oh, it starts out well: Despite some unconvincing special effects and moments, the first half-hour creates an effective mystery, and there are a few spectacular scenes detailing the aftermath of a plane crash. Kris Kristofferson isn’t too bad as the lead, although he (like most of the actors surrounding him) look like they have escaped straight from the seventies. But then there’s a time-traveling sequence that, like too many time-traveling sequences, falls in love with the cleverness of showing everything twice when once was dull enough. The result stops the film dead for about twenty minutes, a loss from which it never completely recovers. The film gets worse and worse as it nears its end: despite a few flashes of interest, the film suffers from a disjointed third act that breaks dramatic unity with a few plot jumps weeks ahead before settling for a perfunctory future sequence and a consciously trippy epilogue. Trust me: You’d be better off reading Varley’s 1983 eponymous “novelization” (ie; what he wanted to do, untainted by outside forces) for the better experience. The DVD has a lame “alternate ending” that is suitably hidden deep in the menu system, a few unenlightening production notes, and nothing else.

  • Akira (1988)

    Akira (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, on DVD, June 2009): The world has changed a lot in thirty years, especially in the field of geek entertainment, as so it’s no surprise if Akira doesn’t seem so fresh or eye-popping after three decades of CGI, geek-friendly properties and ever-more-convincing disaster movies. Then there’s the Japanese origins of the film and the adaptation of the story from a much longer manga, both of which don’t help untangle the messy and counter-intuitive story. Still, the amount of imagination on display is awe-inspiring, and there’s no denying that the film still measures up favorably to its contemporaries. While I’ve never been a big fan of some of the back-story (and the end Kaneda/Tetsuo screaming match always makes me giggle for “Canada/Tostitos!” values of immature amusement), the film itself still held my attention throughout, even through the sometimes-lagging pacing and the excessive gore. It’s an important piece of Science Fiction cinema for reference value alone, although viewers coming back to it after a while may find out that they remember scenes and visual images rather than particular plot points.

  • Millennium, John Varley

    Millennium, John Varley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 1983 (SFBC reprint), 214 pages, C$??.?? hc, ISBN ???

    With my ever-growing stack of books to read, I don’t often re-visit thing I have already read. But an idle viewing of the much-maligned Millennium on DVD left me wondering once again about what, exactly, John Varley had in mind before the movie industry made mincemeat out of his concept.

    The essential back-story of the saga goes like this: After causing quite a stir in written Science Fiction circles at the end of the seventies, Varley went to Hollywood to work on movies. His written output during those years slowed down considerably, and the only tangible result of those years is his screenwriter credit on the 1989 film Millennium. There’s a dearth of documentation regarding the film’s troubled production (If Varley talks about it briefly in his 2004 retrospective The John Varley Reader, corroborating documentation is difficult to find on the web), but it’s no accident if this 1989 film looks as if it’s been shot years earlier. The finished movie reportedly languished in studio vaults for years until it was finally released. Varley started work on the script in 1979, and his “novelization” (credited to MGM/UA) came out in 1983, and ended up nominated for that year’s Hugo Awards.

    At its best, the film plays like a fine science-fiction thrillers set in the early eighties. The first half-hour is intriguing, but everything quickly cheapens once the central mystery is explained. Millennium then gets bogged down in a redundant temporal loop (we really don’t need to see the middle when we know the end) and becomes increasingly inept at portraying the future sequences that are supposed to be the showpieces of the film. The end result is frustrating: there are a bunch of great ideas in the whole mess (the premise itself, about time-traveling operatives snatching away passengers of doomed flights, is the kind of idea that gets into your brain and then never goes away, especially for frequent flyers), but the execution becomes increasingly disjoint, all the way to a ridiculous amount of mystic yadda-yadda by the closing seconds of the film.

    The book, unsurprisingly, is much better. At a pleasantly-short 214 pages, it moves quickly and keeps the strengths of the film while adding the rest of Varley’s original vision for the concept. Alternately told by the two main characters of the story in first-person “testimonies”, Millennium first reassures readers by giving them an early-eighties inside look at air crash investigations, with all of the procedural details and jargon-laden knowledge that presupposes. But the book’s most-improved aspect is in depicting the time traveler’s perspective on the events. The film’s unconvincing supermodel actress becomes a tough and uncompromising operative with her own distasteful habits, and her narration show how much of the character was watered-down for the big screen.

    Not having to worry about a production budget, Varley is able to add all the depth and credibility that the story requires. Amazingly, the plot points of both versions of the story are largely similar: Varley, on the other hand, doesn’t play silly temporal games with his audience (when he does, it feels natural) and is able to give some sorely-needed background justification. He doesn’t try to tie the characters together more than strictly needed (the epilogue even suggests how unreliable the testimonies are) and is able to speak knowledgeably to his genre-hardened readers: all chapter titles are taken from previous time-travel stories.

    Of course, it’s written with Varley’s usual verve. I had fond memories of the book, and revisiting it only underscored how good Varley could be even in delivering a run-of-the-mill SF thriller. It’s not just an illuminating look at how mishandled adaptations can keep the bones of a story and still mess up everything else: Millennium is a truly good SF novel, one that still has a lot of charm and value as an increasingly-historical context. (Which bolsters my contention that Back to the Future aside, the most interesting time-travel stories are ones where the future intrudes on a present, not ones where the present revisits the past.) Happily, I see from Amazon that Millennium is still in print; give it a try –it’s better than most novels published these days.

  • The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly

    The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Little Brown, 2009, 419 pages, C$30.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-316-16630-0

    For series readers, some books are an investment, while others feel like payoffs. While The Scarecrow will be perfectly intelligible and interesting to readers coming in cold to Michael Connelly’s crime thrillers, there’s no doubt that those who are familiar with the Connollyverse are going to get the most out of it. Starting by the fact that it’s a thematic sequel of sort to the author’s most successful book, The Poet.

    It’s true that there has already been a direct sequel to The Poet: The Narrows, after all, featured Harry Bosch disposing of the serial killer known as “The Poet”, while Jack McEvoy had small roles in other Connelly novels, most notably in A Darkness More Than Night. But this is McEvoy’s first return as a narrator, and the links between The Scarecrow and McEvoy’s previous adventure run deep.

    The Scarecrow certainly opens on some of the most depressing passages ever featured in a Connelly novel so far: As the novel begins, McEvoy has been fired. Newspapers everywhere are downsizing (the novel even includes a timely reference to the Denver Rocky Mountain News, which went web-only in early 2009), and veterans like McEvoy are too costly to keep in an era of corporate efficiency and dirt-cheap bloggers. Given two wholly unrealistic weeks to set his affairs in order and train his replacement, McEvoy is pushed to investigate a murder case where the accused has been coerced in an unconvincing confession. But in doing so, he alerts the real murderer, and this “Scarecrow” is a piece of work: an experienced serial killer with near-magical hacking skills, this antagonist takes no chances in dealing with McEvoy. Events unfold at a surprisingly fast pace from that moment: Only the timely appearance of FBI agent Rachel Walling saves McEvoy’s day, and their rekindled relationship isn’t much of a comfort when Walling’s career is once again on the line.

    As a reunion of familiar characters, The Scarecrow does quite a few things very well indeed. Harry Bosch is alluded to along the way, but his absence as the heavyweight protagonist of Connelly’s fiction frees Rachel Walling to become an interesting character once more. McEvoy’s narration is a welcome return to a journalist’s perspective on the usual sordid business that takes place in a Connelly novel: his wealth of experience as a reporter gives a neat twist to the procedural details of the tale (the book’s most telling detail being McEvoy’s recommendation to his successor to move a policeman’s quote closer to the top of the article, so that it will survive editing and create goodwill from the policeman) and echoes The Poet: the motto “Death is my beat” makes a return appearance, even as McEvoy seems at the end of his rope as a journalist.

    Otherwise, The Scarecrow hops between California and Nevada, goes from a newsroom to hotels to a data center, features some decent action scenes for McEvoy and doesn’t skimp on the denouement. Connelly’s prose is as crisp as ever, and if the result can often feel a bit familiar (especially toward the end), it’s a solid piece of summer reading with most of the qualities of the author’s fiction and few particular flaws. The novel’s cutting-edge references to the end of the newspaper era may prove to be just a bit too timely to act as an entirely escapist piece of fiction, but fans of Connelly’s output so far will be pleased to see familiar characters on-stage once more, while newer readers will come to understand what all the fuss around Connelly’s fiction is about.

  • Nothing to Lose, Lee Child

    Nothing to Lose, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 2008, 407 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-34056-4

    In this twelfth entry in the highly successful Jack Reacher series, it’s a given that some plot mechanics will feel very familiar. Reacher being arrested in the first chapter of the book is a reminder of the very first volume of the series, whereas the small-town setting can bring to mind the rural Texas landscape of Echo Burning (with which it also shares an unfair bar-room fight). Reacher is always taking on hopeless odds; what’s wrong with staring down an entire town in this entry?

    Yet, at the same time, there’s something new in this twelfth adventure as well. For perhaps the first time, political content makes its way into Reacher’s actions as the background of Nothing to Lose depends heavily on the invasion of Iraq for its premise. In at least three sub-plots, casualties of the war find their way to America, and its consequences weigh heavily on every character. For a series that has so far navigated gracefully between the shoals of American politics, it’s a bit of a surprise to find this twelfth entry embracing material most readily discussed in left-leaning company.

    This time, Reacher’s troubles start as he walks over the wrong border: Trying to make his way from one American coast to another, he ends up at the border between the cities of Hope and Despair, Colorado. Things go sour as soon as he’s spotted in Despair: arrested without too much ceremony, he’s eventually scolded and deported back to Hope. Reacher, naturally, doesn’t like being told what to do: His aroused curiosity soon turns to obsession as it becomes clear that Despair holds many, many secrets.

    In fact, Nothing to Lose isn’t a thriller as much as it’s a description of how Reacher teases all the mysteries out of a puzzle box. Despair features three ongoing sets of secrets and a fantastically unlikely accumulation of surprises that would be unbelievable anywhere but in a Reacher novel. (Amusingly enough, a fantastically unlikely coincidence is outlandish enough to be discussed and rationalized by the characters: As one of them puts it, “That’s a coincidence as big as a barn.” [P.72])

    Fortunately, Child knows how to tease information effectively: By the time Reacher faces down a literal human chain of Despair residents determined not to let anyone sneak into their town, it’s easy to believe that something has gone deeply, deeply wrong in that small city. Seeing Reacher take down Despair’s entire police force feels like divine retribution over a hive of sin. The action set-piece of the book is either a demolition derby that leads to the hospitalization of Despair’s remaining police force, or a bar-room brawl in which Reacher manages to incapacitate half-a-dozen opponents and stare down the rest of the patrons.

    But such things are to be expected in this series. What’s perhaps a bit wilder is the identity and affiliation of the book’s main set of villains, another signal that will please left-leaning readers of the series. Alas, one of the plots uncovered by Reacher seems a bit too big, a bit too unlikely to sit comfortably. Reacher, after all, is at his best saving widows and orphans, not taking on entire geopolitical issues.

    On the other hand, Nothing to Lose proves that there’s still quite a bit of juice left in the Reacher series’ most enduring conceits: Reacher is still believable taking down unbelievable odds and the accumulation of technical details is still layered enough to strengthen the credibility of the entire novel. While this twelfth entry feels a bit like others, it’s also distinctive enough on its own. The strengthened political content may or may not lead to anything in further Reacher adventures, but it’s an intriguing development in a genre that sometimes has trouble balancing political views.