Reviews

  • Roman Holiday (1953)

    Roman Holiday (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2009) This romantic fable about a princess finding temporary romance in the arms of an American journalist would be unremarkable if it wasn’t for a few crucial elements. Good use of Roman locations is one of them (unlike many movies of its time, Roman Holiday has a generous amount of material shot on location), but the real star of the film is and will remain Audrey Hepburn in her first screen role: even with little knowledge of her work, it’s hard to watch the film and avoid being charmed by her first major role. She went on to win herself an Oscar (cementing this film’s pedigree), but the performance itself is mesmerizing. A strong performance by Gregory Peck as the lead actor doesn’t hurt, and neither does a capable script that manages to write itself in a satisfying bittersweet corner. The pacing is a bit slack by modern standards, but as a time capsule of studio film-making in the early fifties, it’s a worthwhile choice.

  • Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)

    Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2009) As the saying goes, this may not be good, but it’s certainly interesting: In a dystopian future where organ transplants have become the norm, an all-controlling company is wracked by succession drama as their organ repossession operative has family problems of his own. Hybridized from many genres, Repo doesn’t work if considered from the usual perspectives: As Science Fiction, it’s implausible, simplistic and phantasmagorical. As horror, it low-balls the gore and is seldom scary. As a musical, it stumbles with its on-the-nose lyrics and forgettable melodies. As a comedy, well, it’s more peculiar than amusing, most of its humor value coming from strange things blended together. (After all, how many movies feature Paris Hilton in a singing sequence in which her face keeps falling off? That’s some quality post-modernism right there.) Alas, most of the film’s first half is more odd than satisfying as the screenwriters and lyricists seem unable to find their groove. It’s only in the film’s second half that some of the musical numbers seem to click and hold the rest of the film together. Few of the actors hold their own musically (Sarah Brightman is the obvious exception), but that doesn’t matter as much as you think, because more than trying to be a musical, there’s a sense that Repo really loves being odd, and that it doesn’t care about large audiences. The path from this attitude to a cult film is clear, which makes the film doubly difficult to criticize: Even when it’s doing its own thing, someone else, somewhere, is probably loving it. Until then, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to see a trash horror musical float up alongside bouncier fare such as Mamma Mia! and Dreamgirls, targeting another audience and hopefully breaking down barriers for other experiments of the type.

  • Without Fail, Lee Child

    Without Fail, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Jove, 2002 (2003 reprint), 401 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-515-13528-3

    Every Jack Reacher adventure is slightly different, and so it is that Without Fail‘s distinction is to put Reacher in a situation that’s closer to official power than ever before. Having left behind the small Texas towns of Echo Burning, he finds himself on the East coast, hired by the US Secret Service to find ways to assassinate the Vice-President-elect of the United States. Or rather, to find ways in which the VP could be assassinated so that it doesn’t actually happen. Reacher is good at that; in fact, he’s pretty good at anything a thriller requires from a protagonist.

    This being said, it’s a bit of a stretch for involve perennial loner/drifter Jack Reacher into the middle of official operations. So Child reaches way back in Reacher’s history to create a link between Reacher, his estranged brother (killed back in Killing Floor, the first book of the series) and the brother’s ex-girlfriend, now in charge of the Vice President’s security details for the US Secret Service. It’s a tenuous connection, but it almost doesn’t qualify as a coincidence unlike a few of the series’ preposterous setups so far.

    Fortunately, this weakness soon becomes irrelevant once the action starts. The would-be assassins that are gunning for the vice president are kind enough to call their shots, providing plenty of investigative opportunities for Reacher and the Secret Service. Although the story doesn’t contain quite the number of conceptual twists and turns that other Reacher novels have managed, it does have a surprising development midway through, and manage to turn the initial expectations on their head: As it often happens when Reacher is around, the motivations are often more personal than political, even in assassinating a vice president.

    If the twists are muted down, that’s thankfully not the case for the series’ attention to procedural detail: As usual, Reacher knows a lot about everything and a lot of this knowledge proves essential when tracking down suspects, whether it’s penetrating security protection or figuring out how a sensitive message was placed on a desk under constant video surveillance. To those procedural details, Child adds a lot of information regarding the protection of VIPs: The United States Secret Service has a thankless job when it comes to protecting its charges, but the details of how it tries to do so are almost endlessly fascinating.

    In Reacher’s world, some things don’t change no matter the adventures, and so he once again finds himself romantically entangled with a female character. What’s slightly different is her connection to Reacher, and the reasons why she falls in love with him. Also slightly different is the fact that Reacher spends a good chunk of Without Fail working with a partner —someone who can actually give him some serious competition in the usual skills required to track down his opponents. What this means for future installments of the series can only be guessed at.

    But Without Fail‘s overall success isn’t something left to guesswork: While it won’t stand out from the series as a particularly strong entry (there’s something amusing at the on-the-nose symbolism of the number of suits that Reacher has to wear during the novel), it does play with the formula a bit, and delivers the expected clean prose, strong plotting and tough-guy action we’ve come to expect from Jack Reacher. For those who wishes they could see Reacher in a suit with some official status, it’s a welcome entry, and few fans will be disappointed.

  • Man On Wire (2008)

    Man On Wire (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2009) Telling the story of a tightrope walker’s odyssey to walk between the World Trade Towers in 1974, Man On Wire combines humor, suspense, archival material, dramatic re-creation and talking heads in order to give life to its subject. Left unsaid through it all is the sobering thought that the WTC is gone, but it’s hard not to feel that weight on the film as is portrays the towers as pretext to something noble. As a story, Philippe Petit’s daredevil act is unlikely to the point of preposterousness, an impression that is further reinforced by the incredible incidents and setbacks met along the way. Reality, obviously, can be stranger than fiction. Fiction there is, alas, in the use of actors to re-create and simulate the events of 1974 as the original protagonists tell the story in voice-over and shot footage. It all wraps up in an unusually satisfying documentary, one that hits dramatic points as surely as fiction does.

  • Frost/Nixon (2008)

    Frost/Nixon (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, January 2009) What an odd and fascinating film. Staging a series of conversations as if they were confrontations, Frost/Nixon is quiet without being dull, and relatively demanding in the knowledge is presumes from its audience. A number of the film’s more amusing lines, for instance, come from catching ex-president Richard Nixon saying things at odds with his behavior during the Watergate events: those without a certain knowledge of the time may not fully appreciate those moments. But even for younger viewers, Frost/Nixon spends enough time introducing its subject that most of the dramatic importance of the interviews between Nixon and journalist Frost is obvious early on. It’s also hard to avoid thinking about the parallels between the Nixon and Bush administrations, and to wonder if ever there will be a television interview to replace “the trial that he deserved”. While Frank Langella’s “Richard Nixon” doesn’t really look like the original, his portrayal of the man as a canny opponent is something of a revelation to those raised on thirty years of caricatures. The film is too dramatically enhanced by pseudo-interviews and artificial dramatic moments to be fully credible, and places far too much importance on its original subject, but that’s not really a serious problem for a film that does most the rest right, from good dialogue to lively pacing. Those who were waiting for intelligent adult cinema to come back to cineplexes may want to have a look at this one.

  • Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, Jann S. Wenner & Corey Seymour

    Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, Jann S. Wenner & Corey Seymour

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Back Bay Books, 2007, 467 pages, C$17.99 tpb, ISBN 978-0-316-00528-9

    Some will be surprised to learn that I’m a big fan of writer/journalist Hunter S. Thompson. After all, there’s no comparing our prose styles, and I couldn’t be farther away from Thompson on the drinking/drugs/bad-behavior spectrum. (I make straight-edgers look like boozy degenerates.) But what keeps me coming back to Thompson’s work is his strong prose and the strength of the convictions that shine through his articles. For most people, though, Thompson-the-writer remains a second to Thompson-the-man, still the stuff of legend decades after his best work and his worst excesses.

    It took a chance theater viewing of the documentary GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON to rekindle my interest in Thompson’s work: For years, I accumulated his books but never committed to a chronological read-through. Well, no more: This is the year of the Thompson, and there’s no better way to begin than by a look at the man, the life and the legend with Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour’s oral biography Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson. (The movie is arguably adapted from the book, but both stand as different works in their own right. The midium is the message, and so the film doesn’t offer the depth of the book, while the book doesn’t have the archival material showing Thompson at work or play.)

    Oral biographies are basically snippets of personal recollections artfully edited in a coherent whole. It allows for many descriptions from different perspectives, sometimes strengthening the theme, sometimes contradicting it. Given Thompson’s legendary excesses, an oral biography is just about the only way to do him justice, as only the accumulation of first-hand witnesses can convince us

    Like most biographies, this one starts at the beginning –Hunter’s troubled childhood, running around making trouble until his arrest and expeditious referral to the army in lieu of incarceration. The tone having been set early, the rest follows almost naturally: the wild early years in New York, Puerto Rico and San Francisco, followed by the breakthrough success of Hell’s Angels, the Aspen sheriff race that brought him to the attention of Rolling Stones magazine, then the two Fear and Loathing books about Las Vegas and the Campaign trail ’72. After that, Thompson-the-man recedes and makes way for Thompson-the-legend: As the contributors allude to, Hunter took comfort in living the myth that he and others had created for himself. Alas, it made him even more uncontrollable and indisciplined. His work, not so coincidentally, also began to slide after that point: The testimony of the participants makes it clear that it took heroic efforts to bring a Thompson piece to print, but left unsaid is how much of Thompson’s published work really owes to the editors who put everything together at the other end of Thompson’s crises, substance abuse and unwillingness to act as a professional.

    This dovetails nicely into the foremost lesson of this biography: Thompson was a nightmare to live with. The same hard drinking, copious substance abuse, pranking and womanizing that made Thompson-the-legend so impressive also made Thompson-the-man impossible to tolerate on a daily basis. Even close friends have stories of awful episodes. The accumulation of such incidents, contribution after contribution, also make it clear that Thompson’s eccentricities were a lifestyle. The book’s second half, once past the early seventies, make it hard to avoid thinking that Thompson could have, should have been a far more active participant in American culture if it wasn’t for his strong streak of self-destruction. (There’s something blackly humorous in reading a doctor’s opinion that “Hunter had a superhuman liver.” [P.396]) For him, the end came ingloriously by way of self-inflicted gunshot in 2005.

    As a tribute to Thompson, Gonzo is essential: It shows that the legend was based on something real, but never sugarcoats the price that Thompson and his friends paid for his excesses. The worst thing that one can say about the book is that it’s too short (“Freak Power” is only mentioned twice, for instance). Thompson may have the last laugh over his biographers, having lived a life too rich to be contained between two covers.

    [March 2009: After binging on several more Hunter S. Thompson biographies, I have a slightly better perspective on the book: Gonzo may not be the best in-depth Thompson biography (for that, I would recommend William McKeen’s Outlaw Journalist) but it deepens our understanding of Thompson in ways that are difficult to explain in a straight biography: By allowing people to tell stories about Thompson, Gonzo strengthens the legend, but also relays the impact of the legend on others. On the other hand, The lack of a unified thread can also be a problem at times; as I read other biographies, I found places where Gonzo skipped over important events, and failed to connect them with others. It may be best read as a companion to a more conventional biography, as a way to extend the Thompson experience.]

  • Disaster Movie (2008)

    Disaster Movie (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2009) The Friedberg/Seltzer writing/directing duo is well on its way to the Comedy Hall of Fame in that everything they’ve done is almost purposefully unfunny. With a track record that spans everything from Date Movie to Epic Movie, the only reason to see their films is to check if they’re still just as painfully dull as the last time. Most of Disaster Movie is reassuringly awful, showing no comedic talent whatsoever, and even less writing/directing skills. They still think that a reference equals a laugh, that abusive violence is always funny and that vulgarity is the height of subversion. They also don’t have a clue about pacing, or when a joke is best left alone. Clearly, the under-12 crowd has lower standards than the rest of us. Still, there are occasional signs of life in Disaster Movie, and they usually occur whenever Friedberg/Seltzer reach away from their usual shtick: The parodies of Juno and Enchanted‘s Princess work about half the time because the characters do more than beg for recognition by offering genuine criticism of the originals. But trying to salvage something out of this mess is a bit desperate, because the lame gags outnumber the tolerable ones by about ten to one. It’s probably best to skip this film, and even preferable to avoid thinking about why Friedberg/Seltzer are still getting work in Hollywood after a career as terrible as theirs.

  • Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995)

    Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2009) It turns out that I had avoided this film for nearly fifteen years for a good reason: It’s really not very good. The first few minutes are the worst, as they show everything that can go wrong in a comedy sequel that believes its own hype without understanding why the first film was a hit. We get the mannerisms, the same catchphrases, the goofy faces, but little of Ventura’s skill or a sense that the quirks are coming from the same core: it’s all surface imitation without any depth, and it’s the difference between spending 90 minutes with a fascinating person, and knowing them for a week and finding out that they constantly recycle the same jokes. Fortunately, things improve a little bit in the film’s second half, what with a too-short early role for Sophie Okonedo, more complex plotting and some original comedy. Still, there isn’t much here to recommend, especially for those who liked the first film.

  • Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)

    Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On DVD, January 2009) There should be a warning on the DVD: Watching this film may rekindle annoying mannerisms. Like all great comic characters, Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura is a mesmerizing creation that rises above its own infectious catch-phrases and absurd moments. Don’t be surprised to catch yourself repeating one-liners or mugging for attention with Carrey/Ventura’s facial expressions. Fortunately, there are quite a bit more comedy moments than just Ventura’s character, and a generally solid plot holds it all together. As a result, the film has survived the last fifteen years better than you’d expect. The DVD contains a pretty good commentary track by director Tom Shadyac that spends most of the time discussing how the filmmakers felt their way by trial-and-error to bigger and bigger laughs.

  • The Futurist, James P. Othmer

    The Futurist, James P. Othmer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday Canada, 2006, 257 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-385-66209-2

    It’s a strange new world out there, in these early days of the twenty-first century. Past certitudes seem to have crumbled on themselves, and what’s left is a troubling memetic wasteland where labels don’t apply, no one knows anything and past performance is no guarantee of future results.

    Imagine being a futurist during those times, trying to tell people what’s going to happen when it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s happening now. You can recite the events of the past twenty years from the end of the cold war to the invasion of Iraq, but at a time where everyone is still trying to figure out what it means, even finding out what’s going on is a challenge.

    In its way, James P. Othmer’s The Futurist is a novel of its time: confused, snarky, torn between narratives, aware of the world but reluctant to engage too deeply with it. It’s almost science-fiction, almost comedy, almost a thriller and almost general literature at the same time. It’s an interesting read, but not a likable one.

    As the title suggests, The Futurist is first and foremost a character study. Yates (just as often called “The Futurist” in the prose) is someone who knows what to say to the paying audiences in front of him. He masters the jargon, has learned to limit his vision and enjoys a carefully calculated sociopathy. He’s so good that he’s able to speak in front of dramatically opposed groups and get standing ovations at both places.

    But as the novel begins, he dives headfirst into a mid-life crisis; his long-time girlfriend has dumped him for a history teacher, a space tourism crisis threatens to kills people who followed his past recommendations, and a drunken episode leads to an incendiary speech in which he renounces the fundamentals of his own field. But since no good deed ever goes unpunished, he finds himself even more in demand than ever before: the corporate gigs keep piling up, and a shadowy organization that may or may not be acting on behalf of the US government coerces him into acting as an informal spy for a nebulous project. Threats, both vague and specific, keep piling up in his mailbox. At home, his parents are acting strangely, and at work an ex-colleague is none too pleased with his recent actions.

    If you’re looking for a strong common thread or a plot-driven genre story, you’re not going to be entirely satisfied: The Futurist is perfectly happy to take place in a smog of disinformation. Yates doesn’t have a clue, and we’re not expected to know more than him in a tight third-person narrative. He does have a curious tendency to find himself in the middle of riots and explosions, but don’t worry: he can always depend on a retired multi-billionaire to help him out. Convenient plotting? Of course.

    It all reaches a climax of sorts in someplace that feels a lot like post-invasion Iraq, as Yates confronts a variety of enemies and reaches yet another epiphany. Given the novel’s generally aimless feel, a surprising number of plot threads are wrapped up, although the tentative epilogue reinforces the novel’s lack of certitudes.

    Looking for descriptive adjectives to describe this novel, it’s hard to do better than “William Gibsonian”, which is straight out of the novel’s second page: Like Gibson, Othmer is writing fiction inspired by his RSS feed, and uses genre tropes without really committing to them: A subplot about disaster in space could have been torn out of Analog SF magazine, but here remains a distant echo of bad headline news. Othmer is a bit better than Gibson at using guns and explosions to make plot points, but if The Futurist has to be shelved somewhere, it’s going to be next to hip contemporary character studies and not anywhere near thrillers. Like Gibson’s novels since Pattern Recognition, The Futurist hovers as the edge of our certitudes, which makes for an interesting reading experience but not a comfortable one. Much like the world out there, it’s amusing without being funny, action-packed without being entertaining and almost completely impossible to describe with any satisfaction.

  • The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan

    The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Penguin, 2006 (2007 reprint), 450 pages, C$19.00 tpb, ISBN 978-0-14-303858-0

    I should preface this review by saying that I worked several summers on my uncle’s farm, and that I’m no stranger to that end of the food production chain. Several of the experiences described in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma aren’t so strange to me: I have moved cattle from one field to another, shoveled excrement, held on to carcasses being gutted and everything in-between the life of a farm hand from dusk to dawn. When I eat steak, I can tell you where it came from, how it was processed and why cows deserve to be eaten.

    But few North-Americans can say the same about what they eat, and the nature of the modern food-processing industry is such that no one can vouch for the provenance of the stuff they eat. It’s that realization that led Pollan to embark on a major documentary project: Trace the origins of what we eat, and do so using the excuse of four different meals.

    The first meal in an all-American McDonald’s lunch, and it’s the most hard-hitting part of the book. While many people (myself included) still harbor quaint notions of family farms, feeding North America requires an industry that is more about chemicals and overproduction than free-range cattle. In a few eye-opening chapters, Pollan describes entire agricultural landscapes taken over by the monoculture of corn, floating on virtual oceans of oil given how non-renewable substances are essential in pushing corn growing well beyond self-sustainability. In a few cogent passages, Pollan directly links government policies and subsidies to the corn-saturated diet of all Americans, a diet whose deleterious impacts are still being discovered. Corn has come to invade nearly every single aspect of food production, even in food that seemingly has nothing to do with corn: the modern chemical industry has found hundreds of derivative corn-based products, and a similarly robust effort to re-create artificial smells and flavors can seem to transform corn into just about anything. That’s the first of the many revelations in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but the shocks keep piling up as Pollan tries to learn more about how beef is grown and raised on the gigantic meat factories of the Midwest. (There’s a limit to what he can find out when the biggest meat-producers forbid him from getting inside their factories.) Pollan’s first meal tastes of chemicals and oil in more than metaphorical ways as we’re left to contemplate a system engineered for cheap food, not necessarily for good or healthy or sustainable living.

    But is there an alternative? Pollan’s second meal is assembled from ingredients purchased at Whole Foods supermarkets, but his research into “Big Green” suggests that the Organic movement is little more than a feel-good label on environmentally unsound practices. Better than McDonald’s, sure, but still nowhere near self-sustainability: on the way from the hippies to Whole Foods, the process was co-opted and corrupted by the very same corporations that Organic food was supposed to run against.

    Pollan’s third meal is a little more encouraging. Wearing overalls for a week, Pollan finds himself on Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm, working for his food in a highly optimized ecosystem where few things are ever wasted. As luck had it, I ended up reading this section on the family farm, and my descriptions of the various ways in which Polyface recycles and reuses its ecosystematic components caused a number of favorable comments from family members better equipped to evaluate the process. Pollan finds some peace and contentment in putting together his third meal from the environmentally-sustainable Polyface products, but he’s more than ready to admit that the process doesn’t scale up: Trying to feed North America using a Polyface model would require a lot more land and farmers than we’ve got.

    But the experience of cutting chicken necks on Polyface soon leads Pollan to his fourth meal, for which he intends to gather all the material himself from local sources, from killing a wild board to gathering salt from the ocean. His experiment doesn’t always go as planned (the salt from the San Francisco Bay seems too toxic to consume), but the digressions along the way include meditations on being a hunter, and the strange sub-culture of mushroom-gatherers.

    But a bland recitation of Pollan’s four meals misses the point that this is a fantastic non-fiction exploration of food and how it’s tightly integrated with the environment, with economics, with society and with our own biology. This is investigative journalism at its finest, as Pollan not only finds the facts, but manages to present them vividly. The Omnivore’s Dilemma has a nearly perfect narrative drive (the only exception being Pollan’s chapter-long exploration of vegetarianism, which isn’t something in which I’m terribly interested) and plenty of jumping points for personal inquiry.

    I found myself wondering, for instance, whether there was an appreciable difference between Canadian and American diets: given the role that US sugar subsidies have played in promoting the use of high-fructose corn syrup in just about every facet of American food; can there be other differences between Canadian and US food? Despite its climate, is Canada closer to food self-sustainability than the US?

    But chances are that everyone will find themselves looking at food differently after reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Going to the supermarket becomes a different experience once you can picture the oceans of corn that are distilled into making up a significant fraction of what’s on the shelves. Ingredient labels become fascinating. Processed food become less appealing. Heck, even a locally-grown stalk of broccoli is somehow ennobled by Pollan’s book.

    It helps that Pollan isn’t quite as strident as other food writers (such as Susan Powter, for instance) in convincing us to change our rotten ways. Most of his argumentative power comes from implication. Environmentalism may be an unarguable conceptual virtue, but it’s more sobering to consider that the end of cheap oil will have a profound impact on our food supply. Self-sustainability means planning for the long term, and our food supply chain in its current form definitely isn’t built to last.

    Good non-fiction is always a pleasure to read, but The Omnivore’s Dilemma goes beyond that to become a mesmerizing experience, filled with revelations and questions. It will spur you to learn more (Pollan’s own follow-up In Defense of Food was written partly to answer some of the most nagging questions left by this book) and maybe even nudge you gently toward more responsible lifestyle choices. Even, especially, if you’ve never worked on a farm.

  • The Last Theorem, Arthur C. Clarke & Frederik Pohl

    The Last Theorem, Arthur C. Clarke & Frederik Pohl

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2008, 299 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-345-47021-8

    Any critical commentary regarding this novel takes a back-seat to a simple fact: This is Arthur C. Clarke’s last novel, and it’s a collaboration with Frederick Pohl, one of the most respected veterans of the Science Fiction field.

    Everything else is practically irrelevant. The Last Theorem is practically critic-proof: no matter how good (or bad) it is, there’s a good chance that it will be read by a large audience over the next few years, as fans of both authors make their way to a quasi-legendary collaboration between two giants of the genre, and to “Clarke’s last novel”.

    So what’s left for a poor reviewer to do?

    The best ones will use this opportunity to link the novel to the co-authors’ careers. Those who know that Pohl wrote the novel based on Clarke’s outline won’t be overly surprised to find out that the book’s structure and themes most closely resemble a collection of Clarke’s usual obsessions, and that the writing style is closer to Pohl’s usual clean prose. (Not that Pohl usually wrote in a wholly different way from Clarke, mind you.)

    The story itself is closer to biography than to thriller as we spend the book following the life of one Ranjit Subramanian, a Sri Lankan whose tortuous life ends up chronicling an entire future history. Ranjit is unusually fascinated with mathematical proofs, and his pet obsession is Fermat’s Last Theorem. Unsatisfied by Andrew Wiles’ 1994 proof, our hero sets out to solve the theorem with a far more elegant proof. But there’s more to his life than mathematics: His confused love life, his semi-willing abduction by pirates and (later) his work for the United States, involvement in the establishment of a world government and the construction of a space elevator all come into play sooner of later. And that’s not even mentioning the coming alien force mentioned in the early pages of the novel.

    If you think that this gives a scattered quality to The Last Theorem, you’d be right: As a combination between a fictional biography and a collection of the author’s latest pet preoccupations, it’s not bound to the rigid demands of time, theme and place. It veers between eras, sometimes jarringly (pirates?).

    But if you think that’s a major problem, well, you haven’t read enough Clarke novels. The latter stage of his career (roughly from Imperial Earth to The Hammer of God, but especially toward the latter half of that period) produced a handful of utterly admirable works of pure science-fiction, generally less concerned with plot than neat ideas and concepts that he couldn’t wait to tell us about. Few other authors have dared write such novels, and even fewer have succeeded at it. They remain unique fiction artifacts, among the purest and oddest long-form SF texts the genre has produced. The Last Theorem is often best seen as a slightly more structured example of that form.

    Needless to say, it’s best appreciated by lifelong Clarke/Pohl fans than fresh-off-the-street readers. For civilians, The Last Theorem will be self-indulgent, packed with infodumps and without much suspense. The narration is intrusive (the three preambles leading to the novel and three postambles leading from it, many of them about Clarke, Pohl or Fermat, are a good example of the authors directly addressing the reader) and the authors often can’t be bothered to show rather than tell us outright what’s happening.

    It’s a strange reading experience, and one that trades heavily on nostalgia. But the last pages of the book only solidify the thought that many had upon learning about the book: This is Clarke’s last novel, and it’s a collaboration with Frederik Pohl. Everything else is irrelevant.

  • Skipping Christmas, John Grisham

    Skipping Christmas, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 2001, 177 pages, C$22.95 hc, ISBN 0-385-50841-7

    Western civilization (if there is such a thing) has a very strange relationship with cynicism. It is, for many people, a defense mechanism. A way to feel above a system in which we are all co-conspirators; a way to show how much better we are than everyone else; a way to assert that we’re better than our neighbors, our parents; our former naive selves. Pushed too far in that direction, cynicism can be over-used to disengage from the world and create a solipsist personal reality from which everything else looks stupid. And yet cynicism is necessary at a time where we’re bombarded with a web of emotional manipulation hiding commercial intent.

    Yes, this is a review of John Grisham’s Skipping Christmas.

    You see, it begins as our protagonists peek behind the sham that is the Christmas frenzy. Left home alone after their daughter’s departure, the Kranks make a few calculation and discover that they can afford a lavish cruise holiday as long as they refuse to spend the $6000 they usually put aside for the holiday celebrations. It means no tree, no party, no gifts, no charitable donations, no decorations.

    The first reaction of most readers will be something like “$6000? That’s your first problem right there!”, but never mind: We’re in American upper-middle-class fantasy-land, here, and sympathizing with idiots is the first requirement of this inconsequential fable.

    It helps that the Kranks, as stupid as they may be, aren’t the biggest idiots around: their entire neighborhood is even more moronic, exerting considerable peer pressure to make the Kranks reconsider their worst Christmas-blackout intentions. Their street is obsessed with decoration conformity; various charities are socially mugging them for money; everyone expects a party.

    That first asocial section of the novel is enjoyable as long as you manage to identify with a single-income couple blowing $6000 on Christmas holidays and weeping about it. If you happen to read the novel in the maniacal run-up to Christmas Eve, part of it will make you want to cheer and say “Good for you , Kranks!”.

    It’s when the plot meets a major contrivance (along a seemingly endless succession of contrivances) that things take a turn in another direction. Forced to dramatically change plans, the Kranks bow frantically to peer pressure, outspend their way into a last-minute celebration and end up saving that elusive spirit of the holidays by bowing down to the golden altar of social conformity. Minor characters provide emotional catharsis. Readers who applauded the novel’s initial cynicism are made to feel like chumps for ignoring the true meaning of Christmas.

    That’ll teach you to be cynic.

    So who’s the target audience of Skipping Christmas? Everyone and no one. Much like its protagonists, it tries to dismiss Christmas yet can’t help but pay tribute to it. People who love the first half may not be quite so taken by the second one (and vice-versa, although it works better in that direction). To give some credit to Grisham, though, the novel is never less than a joy to read, even if you almost violently disagree with what it’s trying to do: there are a number of good laughs here and there, and as long as you buy into parts of the premise, it’s amusing to see the protagonists flail away from Christmas, then back to it.

    If nothing else, this is the kind of flawed novel that is fascinating to discuss with others: Like it or not, it features plenty of things to argue about. After all, what was the last Christmas-themed novels that gets a reviewer going about the nature of cynicism in Western civilization?

    (I’ll note in passing that the movie adaptation -which I haven’t seen yet- got excruciating reviews.)

  • So Yesterday, Scott Westerfeld

    So Yesterday, Scott Westerfeld

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Razorbill, 2004, 225 pages, C$25.00 hc, ISBN 1-59514-000-X

    At this point, I don’t have to be convinced anymore that Young Adult fiction can be just as enjoyable than adult fiction for older readers, but Scott Westerfeld’s So Yesterday clues me in that there are some issues that are best discussed within the frame of a YA novel.

    I’m not necessarily talking about novel about specifically teenage issues. Obviously, YA is a natural choice for discussing first loves, teen angst, coming-of-age narratives or high school odysseys. But there are issues of universal importance that are best tackled by teenage protagonists.

    The issue of cool, for instance.

    Or, more specifically, the issue of how cool is identified, formalized and marketed to the population at large. How individual quirks can be marketed as counter-cultural icons and end up defining a demographic category. How culture is co-opted for strictly commercial goals, and how the landscape of our identities is shaped by other people. This is the kind of material that is important to all of us, no matter our age, gender or social demographic. But if you’re going to look at cool, what better protagonist than a teenager whose quest for cool occupies a significant chunk of his life?

    Meet Hunter Braque, New Yorker. His job is to spot the new trends, and report them back to his employers. If something new walks down the streets of the Big Apple, it’s up to him and his colleagues to pass it along so that marketing directors and ad agency designers make use of it. From New York to the rest of the world is just a matter of data transmission: It’s not a stretch to say that Hunter has the power to alter culture around the globe.

    But it’s not his job to worry about such things. He’s just supposed to live in the city and report on the new things that catch his eyes, snapping pictures along the way. Occasionally, he’s asked to comment on ad campaigns or walk around to demonstrate fancy new products. But everything takes a strange turn when his boss is kidnapped and he discovers a well-orchestrated marketing effort whose goals he can’t understand. A lavish launch party turns surreal when the invited jet-set is drugged and provided with party gifts of unexpected capabilities. Who’s calling the shot? And what are they selling?

    If you’ve read at least one issue of Adbusters magazine (and you should), you will figure out that Hunter has fallen through the rabbit hole into the plans of a few culture jammers. The mystery soon turns to thriller as Hunter is chased for having discovered too much. Along with a few friends, Hunter is stuck between curiosity and paranoia as he comes to realize how cool is manufactured…

    As a YA thriller, So Yesterday isn’t without flaws: There are questions raised about counter-culture financing that the novel never bothers to address, even when the answers would have been even more thematically pernicious. But on a surface level, this is a quick and efficient novel that rushes through a number of good ideas, features compelling characters and has more on its mind than a simple adventure through the streets of New York City.

    By its nature as a YA novel, talking to readers whose identities are directly shaped by marketing forces, So Yesterday also manages to tackle its themes in ways that are far more intriguing than any adult novel may have been able to do. That’s quite an achievement, and it’s a good lesson for writers who may be tempted to submit a YA book proposal. In retrospect, the thematic links between So Yesterday and Cory Doctorow’s acclaimed Little Brother (also concerned with teenage cultural sedition) are intriguing, and quite specific to YA. You won’t find quite the same stories in adult fiction; why not see for yourself if what the kids are reading is all right?

  • Wild Fire, Nelson DeMille

    Wild Fire, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 2006, 519 pages, C$32.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-446-57967-4

    I used to believe that Nelson DeMille couldn’t do wrong, that even when he padded a wildly implausible story with hundreds of useless pages, there was always something to rescue the wreckage and send it soaring about the norm. Night Flight was the novel that disabused me of the notion, and now Wild Fire is the one that confirms that DeMille is a fallible writer after all.

    What’s dispiriting is that Wild Fire repeats a good chunk of Night Flight‘s mistakes, and indulges in a few more along the way. It’s almost as if DeMille was at a point where he didn’t have to care anymore. As a thriller, it’s botched from the get-go; as a sequel, it’s well within diminishing-returns territory; as a reflection of the zeitgeist, it’s ridiculously paranoid.

    But let’s start with the essentials: Wild Fire is John Corey’s fourth adventure, after Plum Island, The Lion’s Game and Night Flight. Like its predecessor, it’s voluntarily set in the recent past, taking place in September 2002, which is to say a year after the events of Night Flight and sometimes between 9/11 and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

    The historical setting is part of the conceptual problems that plague Wild Fire like they plagued Night Fall. We know how, in large strokes, the story is going to end. Given how DeMille spends his first 120 pages explaining a plan to nuke two American cities, this becomes a bigger problem than in Night Fall. We knew that Night Fall was going to run into 9/11. This time, we know it’s not going to run into a nuclear apocalypse. This transforms the novel from a suspense thriller to a procedural one, as Corey uses his skills to discover and defuse the conspiracy.

    That’s not necessarily a fatal problem: DeMille has certainly managed to produce strong novels from weaker premises. But the alpha-male charm of DeMille’s usual heroes, often the single best things about his stories, here seems to run on empty. Corey’s narration often plays up his loutish humor at the expense of his real skills as an investigator, but Wild Fire overindulges in the regard and Corey seems more like a caricature than ever before, a smart guy playing a shtick to the benefit of the peanut gallery.

    It doesn’t help that DeMille seems bored with the proceedings, throwing bones to his audience more out of expectations than organic plotting. When a much-hated recurring characters makes a brief appearance before being taken out again, it feels like a wink and a shrug rather than the culmination of a long enmity. The macho banter between Corey and just about every other character (flirtatious with the women, aggressive with the men) feels tired and ready to be taken out.

    Maybe it’s a sign that both Corey and DeMille still feel shell-shocked by 9/11. Corey can’t shut up about it, while DeMille indulges into paranoid plotting in which the American conspirators plan the deaths of millions of Americans with a sense of dutiful glee. The title of the novel itself refers to a doctrine (secret to us, but apparently known to all terrorist sponsors) in which terrorist nuclear attacks on American cities will result in the retaliatory glassification of most of the Islamic world. In some ways, Wild Fire accurately reflects the Bush-era paranoia of an American population feeling stuck between bloodthirsty terrorist and an uncaring government. But in others, the idea of a government-led conspiracy to kill Americans is fast becoming a cliché as thriller writers try to re-fight the last 9/11: Wild Fire may have been one of the first novel to touch upon that notion, but since then there have been quite a few more, including Steve Alten’s even more paranoid The Shell Game. It’s time to move on.

    And by “move on”, that includes the notion that DeMille may be better off writing original novels again. For an author who, from 1978 to 1997 wrote ten independent novel, DeMille has turned to the dark side and produced a string of five sequels, up to and including 2008’s The Gate House. Enough is enough; just kill Corey once and for all (yes; I’m at the point when I’m actually cheering for his demise) and go do something else. Because the current 9/11-obsessed, sequel-writing, formula-set DeMille is a shadow of his former self, and it’s exactly the kind of slide into self-absorbed irrelevance that has doomed a number of his thriller-writing contemporaries. He has pulled some improbable writing challenges before, but the biggest one is going to be to save his own career from implosion.