Reviews

  • The King’s Daughters, Nathalie Mallet

    The King’s Daughters, Nathalie Mallet

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Night Shade, 2009, 299 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-1-59780-135-5

    Anyone who thinks it’s easier for reviewers to discuss books by friends and good acquaintances is seriously deluding themselves.  Serious reviewers are pathologically unable to say “Great book, buy it” unless they mean it.  They tackle books by acquaintances with even more trepidation than usual: If the book sucks, they either have to say so or shut up.  Given that shutting up a reviewer is about as easy as telling the hot wind not to blow (and I weigh my metaphors carefully here), you can imagine the tremendous psychic toll those situations can take.  Woe is us.

    Where I’m going with this introduction is that I don’t consider myself a trusted impartial source when it comes to Nathalie Mallet’s work.  Like me, she’s a French-Canadian living and working outside Quebec: we first met at a west-coast SF convention and I have, since then, had a few good conversations with her and her husband at other conventions.  I was relieved to find out that I actually enjoyed her debut novel The Princes of the Golden Cage despite my general lack of enthusiasm for fantasy novels.  Similarly, I’m just as happy to report that The King’s Daughters is just as much fun to read, and confirms along the way that Mallet’s in business to write accessible, entertaining fantasy.  (It also avoids some of the deficient copy-editing that plagued the first volume; good job, Night Shade!)

    It picks off where the first volume left off: Our narrator, Prince Amir, is heading north to meet his new fiancé’s family.  Given that she’s one of the titular king’s daughters, that means that Amir is about to enter another palace full of intrigue.  His first moments as a diplomatic envoy representing his country go spectacularly badly (it’s a bit of unconvincing plotting that diplomatic protocols aren’t as developed in Prince Amir’s time: you would expect in a real-world situation that gifts would be cleared with lower-ranked staff –alas this isn’t that kind of world), but pleasing his would-be in-laws soon the least of Amir’s worries: Amir’s delegation has been decimated by brigands, the king is a tyrant, the queen is sick, their daughters are being kidnapped one by one and a local bully has taken an unfortunate interest in our narrator.  Before we know it, we’re back knee-deep in issues of succession, magical enchantments and personal danger for Amir.  A colourful assortment of characters are there to spice up matters, from a pair of sinister foreigners to a flashy libertine who’s obviously not who he seems, without forgetting the usual proto-scientist.  Amir gamely tries to follow along, his known detective skills blooming into flashes of magical abilities.  While the first volume was steeped deep into Arabian mythology, this one makes use of its cold snowy Scandinavian environment, with a very different feel.

    Although the plotting has a conventional quality that sometimes bothered me, The King’s Daughters makes good use of its narrator: Amir has the potential to develop into a full-blown hero, but he’s not there yet and part of his appeal is to see him flail about, get into impossible situations, not figure out the obvious and be flummoxed by the unexpected.  The sudden blooming of his magical abilities is a bit convenient (not to mention a tricky complication when Amir is often portrayed as a champion of rationality), but it does portend good things about his future adventures.

    There’s certainly a lot more planned for Amir: The King’s Daughters ends on a surprising bittersweet note that defies a good chunk of reader expectations while making perfect sense in the context of a continuing series.  This is one of those books where it’s a relief to find the first chapter of the next volume included as a teaser: Amir is changing quickly, and his follow-up adventure Death in the Traveling City promises much.

    In the meantime, The King’s Daughter is the kind of mid-list fantasy novel that plays up a few strengths of the genre (the romance of a castle, the power dynamics of a monarchy, the interplay between rough science and advanced magic) while avoiding some of its usual traps: It doesn’t depend on the events of the previous volumes for context (in fact, it does well at recreating an entirely new setting in less than 300 pages) and manages to take advantage of an unusual mythology without overwhelming readers with context.

    I may not be entirely objective, but as a base reader I’m pretty happy with the result.

  • Moon (2009)

    Moon (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, August 2009): Let me count the reasons why I wanted to love this film: It’s a pure science-fiction piece whose visual aesthetics clearly owe something to great SF films of the seventies.  It’s a quiet piece of psychological drama, limited to a few sets and a handful of characters (including a strong performance by Sam Rockwell.  It’s relatively smart, doesn’t depend on action or humour, and was produced on such a small budget that, if it’s successful, it may lead to other SF films of the same ilk.  Furthermore, Moon has been acclaimed by critics throughout its limited-release run, which is another rarity for films that wear the “Science Fiction” label with pride.  This being said, Moon may be a bit too successfully SF for its own good in that it wants to be compared to top-level genre stories… to its detriment.  No one will question the scientific accuracy of Star Wars, but the realism of Moon’s setting and machinery create expectations that can’t be met by the rest of the film.  As a nitpicky nerd, I was bothered out of my suspension of disbelief by such scientific errors as the Earth-normal gravity, the communications without light-speed delays or (ack!) the use of Helium-3 as an energy source.  Other signs suggest that the seventies aesthetics also betray the last time the screenwriter seriously read top-level SF: Question the assumptions of the plot (that a vital money stream depends on a single human point of failure; that the base’s Artificial Intelligence is incarnated in a single machine rather than distributed throughout the entire complex; that one would jam signals through blunt interference rather than by selectively manipulating the data stream) and everything feels dated and simplistic.  Throw in more explosions, gunfights and bouncy wenches and no-one would question Moon seriously.  As it is now, though, it looks close enough to hard-SF to be considered by hard-SF’s own standards and suffer from the comparison.  It’s still a really interesting film, of course, but it’s hard to recommend as a success when it fails to withstand the scrutiny it invites.

  • Brimstone, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    Brimstone, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Grand Central, 2004 (2005 mass market reprint), 728 pages, C$9.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-61275-8

    Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are among the most reliable writers in the contemporary thriller genre, and they can be counted upon to deliver the thrills that today’s readers demand.  But even they can have their major books and minors ones.  If their previous effort, Still Life with Crows, was a perfunctory thriller in-between more ambitious instalments, its follow-up Brimstone has all the markings of a major new work.  Or, make that the beginning of a major new cycle.

    For one thing, it goes back to the New York metropolitan area.  After the corn fields of the Midwest, FBI Agent Pendergast is called to investigate a mysterious death on a Long Island estate.  This time, a wealthy man has seemingly burnt to death from the inside, all signs pointing to nothing less than supernatural intervention.  This being a Preston/Child novel, we can guess that it isn’t so; in fact, the key to this mystery will be pretty obvious to a number of tech-savvy readers.  But the fun of those novels is in the ups and down of the investigation, as it keeps traveling to stranger and stranger places.  By the time Brimstone is over, it even indulges itself in very traditional thrills.

    But the other big sign that this is a major Preston/Child novel is in the return of several characters from previous novels.  Here, we don’t just get a featured role for agent Vincent D’Agosta, but secondary roles for journalist Bill Smithback and NYPD Captain Laura Hayward.  It’s a lively cast, but there’s something else at play too: a subplot slowly develops regarding Pendergast’s brother, a criminal mastermind whose plans come to overshadow the investigation that launches the novel.  Sometimes billed as “The first book of the Diogenes Trilogy”, Brimstone launches a new arc in the Pendergast cycle… and we can only guess at the brother-against-brother confrontation that awaits in the next few books.

    In the meantime, there’s plenty of material to enjoy.  The early investigation of the devilish-smelling murder lands them into New York high society, meeting other people who seem to have made deals with the devil earlier in their lives.  But murders are contagious in the Preston/Child universe, and so other victims quickly follow.  After seeing Pendergast work solo in the previous book, it’s good that D’Agosta is back to give him a foil: Preston/Child’s best-known protagonist is a joy to follow, but it often takes a more grounded presence to truly highlight how special he can be.  One of the book’s best moments comes when Pendergast takes on a rich and arrogant businessman on his own yacht: among other things, Brimstone shows how much it takes to really upset the normally-unflappable FBI agent.

    The novel eventually makes its way to Italy, dodging ancient mythology, cutting-edge technology and recent history along the way.  One subplot further sets up the rest of the Diogenes trilogy by portending imminent doom for New York, even as the thrills rely less and less on high technology the longer our protagonists spend in Europe.  The mixture of contemporary suspense and arcane knowledge is a good chunk of what makes a Preston/Child novel truly distinctive, and it’s amazing to see how a lecture on the essence of a Stradivarius violin eventually makes its way back in the plot.  Preston/Child never miss an opportunity to goose up their plotting with whatever classic thriller elements they can stuff in their story, although they can get too ambitious at times: The way they manage to get rid of a world-class assassin smacks of contrivances, especially when they have to skip over elements of their characters’ chronology in order to fool the reader for a few more pages.  It also goes without saying that any thriller that reaches 700 pages can use some editing, but it’s to Preston/Child’s credit that they rarely overstay their welcome.

    By this moment in their career, though, Preston/Child both know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.  Brimstone may not be lean nor overly mean, but it is a well-oiled thrill machine with an abundance of chrome.  It probably works a bit better as an introductory volume to a trilogy than it does as a self-contained murder thriller, but it’s a reliable test of their skills that it does both in a relatively successful fashion. After all, there’s little doubt that most readers who pick up Brimstone will race over to the next volume.

  • Hunter S. Thompson, Simon Cowan

    Hunter S. Thompson, Simon Cowan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    The Lyons Press, 2009, 252 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-1-59921-357-6

    Four years after Thompson’s suicide, the market for his biographies is booming.  Other than William McKean’s dispassionate, meticulous and mesmerizing Outlaw Journalist, there has been a small but steady stream of personal recollections of the man by friends.  Simon Cowan’s Hunter S. Thompson is entering a crowded market, and one of the questions that arises isn’t just whether it accurately portrays Thompson, but if it manages to say something new about him.

    Cowan has a privileged perspective in that he grew up near Thompson’s Woody Creek (one of the first chapters has him describing, as a high-school student, one of his first meetings with Thompson), eventually became a caretaker on Thompson’s ranch -imagine having Thompson as a landlord!- and ended up a journalist with solid publication credits.  This gives him both the anecdotes to write a personal recollection of what it was like to live alongside Thompson, and the writing skills to deliver an overall evaluation of Thompson’s work.

    The result is a surprisingly good piece of work that few Thompson fans may have expected.  It does more than go beyond the legend.  Cowan was close enough to Thompson to see him at his best and worst: The revelations in the book will do much to confirm a few suspicions.

    If you have only one chapter to read, make it “Guns, Lawyers and Money”: This is where we learn much about Thompson’s history of legal trouble (including a few DUI incidents that, to the best of my recollections, were not often mentioned in other Thompson biographies), his constant need for attorneys (and tangled relationship with them), the fact that hasn’t a very good shot despite his fondness for weapons, and does its best to answer the question of why Thompson was always broke despite -especially in later years- a fairly comfortable stream of royalties.  Part of the answer, unsurprisingly enough, is drugs: Cowan loosely estimates that Thompson’s lifetime drug tab to be around two million dollars (not all of which came out of his pocket, mind you), which puts to rest one my own long-standing questions about Thompson’s lifestyle.  Add to that Thompson’s lavish and impulsive spending habits and you do end up with someone who, financially speaking, spent his entire life on the edge.

    Cowan is not necessarily any kinder when it comes to the mystique of Thompson-as-a-writer, especially during his least productive years: Cowan was around when Thompson wrote the San Francisco Examiner columns collected in Generation of Swine, and his description of the process clearly highlights the importance that his editors and assistants had in re-shaping Thompson’s prose into something workable.  Cowan isn’t particularly sympathetic to the moments where Thompson drank or snorted himself in a stupor: One particularly affecting passage describes the scene when a high-ranking Gary Hart staffer, seeking advice in the wake of the scandal that destroyed Hart’s 1988 presidential bid, discovers a “nearly catatonic” Thompson unable to do anything but “open his eyes, roll his head around and utter noises” [P.201].

    Even for those who have read nearly everything else by or about Thompson, Cowan’s book offers an unflinching series of anecdotes and fits them into the known legend.  Cowan tells the real story behind The Curse of Lono, describes some of Thompson’s celebrity encounters, recalls with a cringe his participation in a failed intervention to get Thompson to lay off drugs, and eventually acknowledges the role of Thompson’s abuse of his female companions in driving a wedge between himself and his subject.

    But best of all, the book is narrated with a strong sense of what makes anecdotes work, and Cowan has enough distance from his subject to be able to ties those anecdotes in an even-handed portrait of his subject.  Hunter S. Thompson is a breezy, fair and often-amusing look at a fascinating subject.  It complements such works as The Kitchen Readings and Outlaw Journalist without contradicting or repeating them, and ranks among the finest books written so far by Thompson acquaintances.  Few may have expected this book, but most will agree that it’s now an essential part of any Thompson retrospective.

  • Graveyard Alive (2003)

    Graveyard Alive (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, July 2009) It takes a special kind of viewer to appreciate low-budget horror comedies, and those who feel up to the task may want to have a look at Graveyard Alive, perhaps the finest zombie nurse low-budget comedy ever made.  Deliberately made to ape a number of black-and-white cheap horror films of the 1950s, Graveyard Alive’s budget is almost visible on screen, and so are its intentions to embrace camp: There’s as little dialogue as possible (what remains is badly dubbed; apparently the film was first intended to be silent), constrained locations, a handful of hammy actors and staging meant to simplify the number of camera setups.  But once you learn the grammar of the film, it’s not entirely unenjoyable: Anne Day-Jones makes a strong impression as a frumpy nurse who, thanks to being turned into a zombie and (then) devouring acquaintances, discovers her inner sex goddess.  The film turns more conventional once the narrative shifts and nurse “Goodie Tueschuze” (yes, it’s that kind of script) discovers that she’s the last edible human in the hospital.  There are a few laughs along the way –including the visual aftermath of a spectacularly thorough zombie meal.  Graveyard Alive is not a classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the kind of film that sympathetic horror fans will like to recommend to each other: “So, hey, have you seen the zombie nurse movie?”

  • The Spirit (2008)

    The Spirit (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, July 2009) There are many ways to be disappointed by Frank Miller’s The Spirit.  The most esoteric one is by comparison to Will Eisner’s classic comic strips (or even Dwayne Cooke’s wonderful revival): The off-beat medium-specific tone of the original is a tough assignment for adaptation at best, but it becomes a mishmash in Miller’s hands, who seems more interested in ripping off his own Sin City than to deliver a coherent film.  But you don’t have to be familiar with Eisner’s form experiments to think that this is a poor film:  The Spirit veers from high camp to pitch-dark noir without much grace, and not even an astonishing gallery of lovely actresses is enough to redeem the result.  Samuel L. Jackson does well as a high-spirited villain, but it’s a shame that Gabriel Macht doesn’t have more to do as the square-jawed hero.  Visually, it’s a Sin City sort-of-sequel, although the quality of the images is much higher than what comes out of the speakers: The dialogue is over-the-top to a degree that seems stiff and self-conscious rather than amusingly arch.  For a mash-up of crime and superhero fiction, there aren’t that many set-pieces worth remembering and the only one that sticks in mind has no choice than to resort to full-blown Nazi imagery.  Little of it makes sense, and so the biggest disappointment of The Spirit is to think of what a much better film it could have been in other hands.

  • Gaudeamus, John Barnes

    Gaudeamus, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2004, 320 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30329-9 jul30

    I rarely get close enough to authors for them to give me reading tips about their own novels, but a chance encounter with John Barnes at 2006’s L.A.Con IV had him telling me that I would either love or hate Gaudeamus.

    Never mind that it took me three years to follow up on his suggestion: I can definitely see what he meant by polarized reactions.  Gaudeamus is anything but a conventional genre SF novel: It’s meta-fiction, tall tale, genre parody and RudyRuckeresque weirdness all at once.  It makes little and complete sense, takes risks that would doom less outrageous SF novels and manages –almost despite all ongoing expectations– to fulfill its own ambitions.

    A conventional plot summary would probably start by an acknowledgement that the novel’s narrator is one “John Barnes” and that most of the novel is made out of three long conversations with a friend of his.  The friend in question, Travis Bismark, is an industrial spy whose latest case gets weirder by the minute, and it’s Travis’ story that Barnes tells, at a remove.  Technically, Gaudeamus doesn’t have to be a Science Fiction novel: you can dismiss it by saying that it’s all taking place in Travis’s head and the rest is just a tall, tall tale.  How tall?  Tall enough that coincidences and long-lost friends all fit perfectly… and that’s not even considering the science-fiction elements.

    Because whenever it comes to SF elements, Barnes uses the freewheeling spirit of his story to pull out all the stops.  Gaudeamus (“Let us rejoice” in Latin, and not a regionally-accented bastardization of “Goddamn mouse” as I was hoping for) ends up being a code word for all sorts of neat classic SF devices all thrown willy-nilly in the plot.  Not to spoil anything, but: Telepathy, teleportation, time-travel or aliens?  All Gaudeamus!  (Also; a web comic)

    To fit all of this, plus mainstream observations on the daily life of one SF writer named “John Barnes” (the first few pages are all about how to begin a story), Gaudeamus moves at a pretty fast pace, especially when Travis’ initial investigation quickly evolves out of anything we can feel comfortable with.  My most serious complaint about the novel, in fact, is that a fascinating techno-thriller could have been written out of Travis doing industrial espionage and stumbling into a high-tech mystery.  Still, that Gaudeamus then pick up at light-speed toward ever-stranger vistas isn’t really a problem, so file this under “Ideas another writer may want to use some day.”

    In fact, there’s a refreshing looseness in the story that Barnes allows himself with the tall tale conceit.  In its attempt to go against the grain of genre SF, Gaudeamus manages to become a rather charming novel in which the usual tropes are displayed differently, and with constant winks to the seasoned readers.  I’m not sure that I would like to see a steady stream of such self-referential novels, but once in a while isn’t a bad thing.  I’m also pleased and impressed at the way the entire story comes together at the end, even when it seems, at times, that the whole thing will crumble on its own rich mixture of elements.  (For all remaining complains for plot holes, see “Tall tales, telling of”)

    Gaudeamus also fits pretty well in Barnes’ bibliography as a genre SF writer: Elements of the conclusion seem to echo a little bit of Barnes’ Jak Jinnaka series, while we get a sly wink about his two collaborations with Buzz Aldrin.  That it laughs, in-text, at overly picky SF readers is an extra bonus.  In fact, I regret that the narrator never makes to the SF convention he spends a few moments complaining about: it would have been fun to see such an event from the point of view of narrator-Barnes.

    In short, Gaudeamus is weird, unique, intentionally off-putting and yet completely successful.  It’s a successful gamble, and the kind of novel that ought to appeal to SF readers who don’t mind a bit of genre-bending.  I’d go as far as saying that it’s one of Barnes’ strongest efforts in ways that directly relate to the rest of his bibliography to date.  In fact, looking at his list of publications to bolster this argument, I’m struck at how Barnes fits the model of a mid-list genre SF author while, at the same time, writing a long and relatively successful series of books that struck back at genre conventions.  But we’re running out of space, and so this observation will have to be postponed to another review…  In the meantime, frankly, I’ll read anything the man will write.

  • In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

    In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Penguin, 2008, 244 pages, C$26.50 hc, ISBN 978-1-59420-145-5

    “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly Plants.”

    There.  In seven words, that’s a summary of Michael Pollan’s wisdom.  Helpfully, the cover of the book even sports those words.  If you’re not yet satisfied, you can always read Pollan’s New York Times article “Unhappy Meals” in which he laid out most of his book’s central message.

    Otherwise, well, what can I say?  It’s tough to review great books.  Once I have urged you to go and get the book, everything else is an anticlimax.

    Oh, OK, a few more contextual details may be useful: For instance, you really should read Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma before tackling In Defense of Food.  While both can be read independently, Polaln’s previous book provides a theoretical framework over which his latest book elaborates.  In fact, Pollan is up-front about the fact that reader reaction to The Omnivore’s Dilemma led him to write In Defense of Food: After spending four hundred pages explaining all about the unsustainable and unhealthy process through which our food comes from, Pollan found himself deluged with questions about what to do about it.  In Defense of Food is an answer: not a rigid system, but a set of ideas and guidelines meant to help us navigate through supermarkets booby-trapped with false nutritional claims and processed variants of mostly-corn.

    The first few chapters of In Defense of Food tackle the industry of nutrition.  With brief historical overviews of how Americans have been seduced over and over again by dubious claims about what they should be eating, Pollan comes to the conclusion that trying to add explicitly-nutritive ingredients to synthetic food is a losing proposition.  Humans, he reasonably reminds us, have co-evolved with their natural food sources for thousands of years: The interaction between human nutritive systems and natural food means that it’s difficult to isolate the building blocks of what food does to the body.  A reductionist approach (add this much fat, that many carbohydrates, a little bit of protein…) is actually harming us: it’s better to stick as closely to naturally-grown whole food as possible.

    That’s not exactly a new or revolutionary message, although Pollan’s catch-phrases are memorable: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” is one of the best.  But as a reminder of what we should strive to do in-between the convenience of food-court lunches, it’s an entertaining and convincing discourse.

    Along the way, though, we learn a bit more about government intervention in the mechanics of the food pyramid (both the one that hangs on walls, and the real one that favours certain industries over others in bringing you sustenance) and reflect on the meaning of a healthy food culture.  Passing nutrition manias such as the “Atkins Diet” (which seems to have disappeared from the mainstream as quickly as it entered it) are symptoms of a bigger problem, which is to say the appalling lack of knowledge that most (North-)Americans have about how and what to eat.

    If nothing else, In Defense of Food will make you feel a lot better about how much you know about food.  In the last section of the book, Pollan suggests ways to best shop at the supermarket: Avoid food with unpronounceable ingredients, avoid food that make health claims, go to a farmer’s market whenever possible, cook, eat slowly, plant a garden… the trouble with a lot of those recommendations are that they’re very familiar: It’s what your mom told you, and most of it can be deduced from “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly Plants.”  Culinary wisdom is simple:  it’s sticking to it despite inconvenience that’s hard.
    There’s also the suspicion that In Defense of Food will mostly be read like people who intend well and already do most of what it recommends: At a time where market forces are what really changes supermarkets (and in turn, what’s easily available to us), the real issue here will be to get people who aren’t concerned about their diet to start paying attention.

    So: “Read Pollan.  Eat better food.  Discuss issues.”

  • The Brothers Bloom (2008)

    The Brothers Bloom (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, July 2009): It’s a familiar and dispiriting feeling to watch a brilliant first ten minutes of a film lead to a good middle hour and then on to an average third act.  So it is that The Brothers Bloom (yes, there’s a meaningful pun in the title given that “Bloom” is the first name of one of the brothers) over-thinks itself all the way into a box stamped “I don’t care anymore”: As a self-aware story about two con artists and their latest (last?) scam, it’s always engaged in a war of deception with its audience, and if that works when the audience is pleased with an ending, it’s not so amusing when the story keeps going where the audience is unwilling to follow.  There was a point, late during the film, when I thought that the film was ninety seconds and ten lines of dialogue away from a happy ending; alas, it just kept going in another darker direction, jettisoning the absurd comedy that was such a highlight of the film’s first sequences.  The Brothers Bloom may not be taking place in our world (what with bowler hats, steamships and cellular phones), but it’s certainly taking place in the con-movie continuum, and its attempts to buck the formula carry a penalty.  It’s a shame that the film we get isn’t the charming offbeat comedy that the trailer and the first half of the movie promised to us.  Oh, it’s not a complete loss: Rachel Weisz has seldom been as captivating as she is as an eccentric millionaire; Rinko Kikuchi is hilarious as a quiet demolition expert; there are a few fantastic moments along the way; and at times it’s handled with an old-fashioned charm that makes one long for far many more movies of that type.  But The Brothers Bloom is easily three twists and twenty minutes longer than it should be, so that by the time it ends on a note meant to make audiences reflect on the nature of storytelling-as-cons, nobody will care as much as they should have.  Card tricks are tough, but movie tricks are even tougher.

  • The Hurt Locker (2008)

    The Hurt Locker (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, July 2009): There can be such a thing as too much of a good thing, and the second hour of this film is a case in point: What starts out as a tight episodic war thriller with uncanny suspense sequences eventually loosens its grip on the audience and meanders on its way to a meaningful conclusion.  Don’t be fooled: even with its loose and predictable third act, The Hurt Locker still is one of the best action films of the year, and one of the best Iraq war movie so far.  But a better-controlled film would have been even more powerful.  Director Kathryn Bigelow makes a welcome return to the big screen and shows from the start that her action sequences can be as good as anything else: The Hurt Locker’s best moments (including the hair-raising image on the poster) are in the half-dozen action/suspense sequences putting us far too close to American bomb-defusing experts working in Baghdad.  This film justifies the whole quasi-documentary handheld-camera aesthetics to a level of clarity that other glossier filmmakers can’t even imagine: As a depiction of war-driven action, it’s as good as it gets –a fortunate achievement for a film that focuses on the adrenaline junkies for whom war is a continuous peak experience.  There are a few familiar faces among the supporting characters (including Ralph Fiennes as a foul-mouthed English mercenary), but it’s the relatively-unknown main characters that make the strongest impression: In particular, Jeremy Renner is a revelation as a loose-cannon protagonist whose motivations eventually become the crux of the film.  Despite the meandering subplots that shed a lot of energy in the latter half of the picture (and the accumulation of inaccuracies to pump up the drama at the expense of realism –how handy that one of our lead sappers is also a sniper!), The Hurt Locker remains a strong piece of cinema, and one of the rare war films about Iraq to make its point with little partisan content.  It’s both exhilarating yet realistic, reaching out to both the action-movie fans and those who think that war is hell.

  • Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, Hunter S. Thompson

    Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, Hunter S. Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 2000 (2006 paperback reprint), 756 pages, C$21.00, ISBN 978-0-684-87316-9

    This second volume of Hunter S. Thompson’s letters takes us to Thompson’s most memorable years: 1968-1976, spanning not only the eight years of the Nixon/Ford administration, but most of Thompson’s best-know work.  Gonzo journalism was born in 1970 with “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”, with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas written not too long after, eventually published in the middle of the 1972 presidential campaign that Thompson was covering for Rolling Stones and eventually ended in Fear and Loathing ’72: On the Campaign Trail.  Add to that the continuing echo of Hell’s Angels (1966), his candidacy for Aspen’s Sheriff position, Thompson’s increasing fame and the crystallization of his reputation as a hard-living journalist and you end up with a fascinating eight years.

    What editor Douglas Brinkley has done with this second volume of letters is similar to the work accomplished on the first volume of Thompson letters (The Proud Highway), with a few differences.  For one thing, there are quite a bit more contextual notes to explain passing allusions, which reflects Thompson’s gradual accession to national affairs.  The other difference is that the book reprints a number of letters sent to Thompson, including a number of dark and angry missives from Oscar Acosta, the “Chicano Lawyer” often mentioned in Thompson’s seventies work that was so famously parodied in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  It’s easy to see the rough nature of their friendship, and even easier to see how it breaks down to mutual hostility.  Other notables whose letters are included are Tom Wolfe, George McGovern, Katharine Graham, Pat Buchanan, Jann Wenner, Gary Hart and Jimmy Carter.  There are also, unusually, snippets of Thompson prose that don’t seem to have been reprinted anywhere else –including fragments about his influential experience in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, where he got caught in riots and beaten up by policemen.

    Many of the notes and caveats about The Proud Highway also apply here: This is the closest we’ll ever get to a Thompson autobiography, especially as it details on a quasi-weekly basis what Thompson is working on.  (Alas, reading the book as it details numerous projects that Thompson never finished is enough to make one wonder about What Could Have Been –am I the only one who thinks “Guts Balls” could have been a splendid Palahniuk-like story?)  It’s a very, very long book, and the low density of content will make it of interest to dedicated Thompson fans.  There are minor revelations here and there, but rest assured that those have already been cherry-picked by the recent wave of posthumous Thompson biographies.  A few photos, some never seen before, are inserted between each year’s worth of letters.

    A few things do evolve, though: Thompson’s worries about money never completely disappear, but Fear and Loathing in America takes place after his move to Woody Creek and the relative peace of mind that a stable home base provided to him.  At the same time, though, Thompson’s prose style finally solidifies in the aggressive gonzo style that he would keep until his death in 2005: the strong-willed but polite southern gentleman of his formative years has ceded place to an obsessive writer whose invectives become legendary.  It’s also worth nothing that, perhaps due to the increased panoply of communication devices available to Thompson as the seventies go on, the bulk of the book takes place before 1975, and the lengthy “here’s what I’ve done lately” letter updates are increasingly replaced by letters regarding specific issues.

    It all neatly sets up the much-awaited third tome of the series: The Mutineer has been promised for years by the Thompson Estate, and was pushed back from October 2009 to June 2010 as I was reading this second volume of letters.  Who knows what awaits in Thompson’s correspondence between 1977 and 2005?  We’ll find out in a year or so… assuming the book isn’t pushed back even further until then.

  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

    Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, July 2009): By the time this sixth instalment of the Harry Potter story rolls in, it’s about as critic-proof as it can be: By now, everyone knows how much they like the series and when they’ll catch the next instalment(s).  For reviewers, there isn’t much else to do but comment on the ongoing story and how well the film does as a movie.  The good news this time around is that the direction is generally well-handled, the story holds up for those who haven’t read the book (aside from a few early missteps) and the film feels too short rather than too long, although much of this impression is given by the absence of a few recurring characters.  The big problem with the film, on the other hand, is how abruptly it veers from fluffy teenage high-school drama (With kisses!  And jealousy!  And hormones!) to dark fantasy verging on horror.  There’s a lot more blood in this instalment, and if the first 90 minutes amble loosely in teenage romance territory, the last half-hour suddenly shifts gears, ditches all attempts at humour and races to a major death.  It’s true that the Potter series has been on a steady “darker, more adult” arc since the first volume, but the shift is more noticeable this time around, and maybe not handled as well as it could have been: as usual, read the book to get the full story.  Still, chopping down a fan-favourite 600-pages book in a coherent film is a tough assignment, and perhaps the most amazing aspect of the series so far is how well it holds up as an ongoing whole story: We’re not yet done with the series, and it’s already a landmark piece of cinema.

  • How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate, “Honest” Ed Mirvish

    How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate, “Honest” Ed Mirvish

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Key Porter, 1993, 220 pages, C$21.95 hc, ISBN 1-55013-506-6

    If you have never been to Toronto landmark store “Honest Ed”, don’t miss a chance the next time you’re in the area: It’s worth a trip to the Bloor/Bathurst intersection only for a visit.  (It’s a lot more interesting than another trip to the Eaton Centre!)  Once you get past the flashy facade that sports 23,000 light bulbs (go at dusk for maximal impact), there’s the store itself: four floors of merchandise organized in a crazy organically-grown fashion, where stairs, basement, an overpass and crooked floors all work together with the bombastic signage, showbiz relics and deeply discounted prices to produce a multi-layered experience quite unlike anything else in the world.  Even once you think you’ve seen it all, you will end up confronting the cuckoo clock… and you will remember that moment forever.  (Usually with an “OH MY GOSH WHAT IS THAT?”)  Such an accumulation of effects can only exist because the store has existed for decades, constantly adding more details and reflecting the passions of its owner, Ed Mirvish.

    Honest Ed continues to thrive today years after Mirvish’s death in part due to the impression that his personality has left on the store.  Fortunately for everyone, it’s possible to re-live the Mirvish experience thanks to his autobiography, How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate.  Growing up poor in Toronto in a family of American immigrants, our narrator learns his first business lessons from the family store, before going from one venture to another and eventually founding his own store.  His discovery of the discount merchandising model isn’t obvious, but once perfected the formula becomes hard to resist.  Past the autobiography of his early years, the book’s second quarter section becomes a succession of anecdotes about doing business as “Honest Ed”.  His flair for flashy gimmicks (such as a 72-hours dance marathon for which Mirvish gladly paid store closing fines) becomes a rich source of stories for the book.

    The third quarter details Mirvish’s increasingly diverse activities beyond his store, most notably buying two theatres (one in Toronto, the Royal Alexandra, the other one on London, the Old Vic), expanding their scope in a line of restaurants to feed their King Street theatre patrons, and building a third theatre (the Princess of Wales) in Toronto.  Mirvish approaches those ventures with no preconceived notions, and apparently upended much conventional wisdom along the way.  The last quarter of the book is a series of “121 lessons I never learned in school” that riff on anecdotes about the store, the theatres, the restaurants or the rest of Mirvish’s life.

    As you may expect from such an eccentric character, the book itself is a joy to read with well-written anecdotes, fast pacing, a triumphant attitude and deliciously accessible prose.  Paul King (A Toronto Star reporter who passed away in 2008) is credited in the acknowledgements as having provided “invaluable help in penning and polishing this story”, and a good chunk of the book’s appeal is surely his.  Mirvish himself is a curious mixture of self-humility (“I was the only adult raised by my wife and our son.”) and cocky self-confidence: like the best of books in the “business inspiration” category, his autobiography leaves readers with the sense that nothing is impossible.  There’s an authenticity in Mirvish’s voice, however, that impossible to fake: I ended up reading How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate the same week that I read Donald Trump’s Think Like a Billionaire and the contrast between Mirvish’s likable persona and Trump’s all-bombast all-self-promotion all-greatest shtick couldn’t have been more enlightening.

    The only exception to the book’s overall geniality and accessibility comes in the odd little moments where Mirvish goes off on rants about government, taxes and regulations.  It’s to be expected, of course: Mirvish’s often-successful fights against city hall are part of Toronto lore, and it’s hard for any entrepreneur to be all that well-favoured toward government taxation or oversight.  But his small-c conservative rhetoric is shockingly naive and may put off a few left-leaning readers.

    Otherwise, it’s a great book that has the merit of having been written just at the right time to herald Mirvish’s greatest successes.  The Old Vic theatre was sold to a theatre trust in 1998 and while the end of some of his early King Street restaurants is acknowledged in the book, all had closed down by 2000.  Mirvish himself passed away in 2007 to much local mourning, but his legacy continues: Honest Ed is still open and busy, while his theatres are still in business in the middle of a revitalized Entertainment District that Mirvish jump-started by purchasing the Royal Alexandra.

    How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate is currently available on amazon.ca, but with a shipping estimate of one to two months.  It may be better to schedule yourself on a trip to Honest Ed to pick up copies of the book there.  You can’t miss it: excluding the kids’ books, it’s pretty much the only book on sale in the entire building.

    (And if you do go to Honest Ed, turn to your left upon exiting the store and walk down a few meters down Markham Street.  Not only will you see a bit of the “Mirvish Village” local artistic enclave, but you will also find yourself at the front door of The Beguiling, perhaps Canada’s finest comics and graphic novel bookstore.  When I’m in Toronto, I visit Honest Ed’s for the atmosphere… but it’s at The Beguiling that I spend serious cash.)

    [August 2009: There’s no Business Like Show Business… but I Wouldn’t Quit My Day Job is Mirvish’s second book (also ghost-written by Paul King), and it focuses strictly on theatre anecdotes.  Good, funny stories with nary a political point in sight… but it works better if you know a lot about 1960-1990 theatre legends.  ]

  • The American Zone, L. Neil Smith

    The American Zone, L. Neil Smith

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 350 pages, C$38.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-87369-7

    Complaining that L. Neil Smith uses his novels to indulge in libertarian propaganda is a bit like commenting upon the kinkiness, depravity and foul language in Chuck Palahniuk’s work: While true, it’s not exactly a new or enlightening observation.  Smith has long been a writer of explicitly-libertarian fiction, and if the result can be unreadable or silly, he can occasionally manage entertaining novels whenever he soft-pedals the rhetoric.

    Perhaps his best novel to date remains The Probability Broach (1980), an action/adventure tale in which private eye William “Win” Bear discovered a gateway to another dimension where libertarian ideals had triumphed.  My fond memories suggest that the book managed an ideal balance between robust ideology and non-partisan entertainment: It was obviously a libertarian novel, but one that didn’t actively work to annoy whoever wasn’t in complete agreement with core libertarian principles.

    The American Zone may be a direct sequel to The Probability Broach, but the years in-between the two books haven’t improved or softened Smith’s tendencies to discuss libertarianism in the middle, the side, the top and the bottom of his fiction.  It features Win Bear a few years after the events of his previous adventure, now solidly established in his new community.  Not that everything is utopian in Bear’s new world: The opening of the dimensional gates has created a new type of immigration, and not everyone can cope well with the freedoms of the “Gallatin Universe”: The titular American Zone is a Colorado urban ghetto where refugees from Bear’s United States tend to congregate when they can’t cope with the rest of the world.

    Keep in mind that there are plenty of differences between Bear’s new and old worlds.  In the Gallatin Universe, the “North American Confederacy” is loosely presided over by an ape (uplifting being common, there are also a few dolphin characters), all levels of government are ineffectual by design and (this being an American libertarian utopia) there are guns, big guns, and beautiful guns everywhere for everyone.

    But whereas The Probability Broach was a fun romp for all, with concepts that you didn’t necessarily had to buy into in order to enjoy the rest of the tale, The American Zone is a lot more shrill and dismissive of alternate viewpoints.  If you think that putting guns in the hands of everyone may not be a perfect idea, then you’re fit to be laughed at and dismissed.  One of the lasting impressions left by The American Zone is how angry Smith seems to be at whoever disagrees with him.  Grudges about Geraldo Riviera, Ralph Nader, the Clintons, Nixon all lead to so-called amusing passages in which analogues of those characters are ridiculed –which seems particularly curious in the case of the Clintons, since they only came to prominence years after the narrator left their universe.  (Not to mention the improbability of finding such characters in a parallel reality in which, say, Denver doesn’t exist.)  Even Canadians are targeted twice in similes, first as the narrator eats breakfast and feels “as contented as a Canadian” [P.64] and then later as a villain acts “complacent as a Canadian”. [P.136]

    (This would be an ideal place in which to re-establish that as a French-Canadian working for the government, I consider Libertarianism to be a philosophy by aliens, for aliens.  Our world, simply put, doesn’t work like that, and no amount of folksy narration of a utopia whose rules have been stacked in favour of libertarianism can convince me otherwise.)

    If you do manage to put ideology aside to look at the actual narrative workings of The American Zone, well, there isn’t much to gnaw upon.  The best SF ideas are carried over from the previous book, although there’s a little bit of interest in the description of how parallel universes travel is disrupting the way the citizen of the Confederacy live.  A novel on this topic would have been interesting, but The American Zone is really more interested in letting a feisty grandma explain why she should have energy handguns in her personal arsenal.

    That’s not necessarily awful (despite my political objections to Smith’s novel, it’s not exactly difficult or unpleasant to read), but it leads nowhere, and that’s where The American Zone falters: Despite a gorgeous Martiniere cover, it feels hollow the moment you’re not already a libertarian.  It preaches to the choir, leaving the rest of the SF congregation looking bored.

  • The Talbot Odyssey, Nelson DeMille

    The Talbot Odyssey, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Grand Central, 1984 (2006 mass-market re-issue), 543 pages, C$9.50 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-446-35858-3

    A generation after the end of the Cold War, the past already feels like an alternate universe: With the advantage of hindsight, we now understand how weak the Communist forces were, even at the height of the great transatlantic eyeball-staring contest.  It’s strange, after seeing the way Russia imploded after the end of the USSR, to read about all-powerful Soviet forces and the valiant attempts by US secret forces to keep them in their places.

    Nonetheless, that’s what we get with The Talbot Odyssey, a deeply paranoid throwback to the Cold War that survives even today in bookstores because it was an early novel by someone whose reputation continues to sell books.  At the exception of his brand-new The Gate House, this novel marks the end of my effort to read the entire main-line DeMille back-catalogue.  I’m not sure I would have bothered otherwise: Reading about the binary certitudes of the Cold War may be a comfort for those who think today’s world is shaded in too much gray, but it seems increasingly irrelevant.

    Still, the Cold War isn’t too much of a bad time to get back to.  After all, the stakes were high and simple: the survival of western civilization against an enemy seemingly determined to enslave America –and presumably provide free single-payer health-care whether Americans wanted it or not.  1984 was one of the last good years of the Cold War: Gorbachev would ascend in 1985, and after 1986’s Chernobyl, the myth of Soviet technological superiority would ring increasingly hollow.  It’s also noteworthy that the closest we ever came to nuclear war was not in 1962, but 1983: Read up on Stanislav Petrov and Able Archer 83 to learn more.

    So it’s no surprise if The Talbot Odyssey ends up being a muscular tale of espionage set in mid-eighties New York and Long Island, filled with brutal Soviet operatives, able American heroes, quite a few traitors, and a drawn-out ticking-bomb climax.  It involves the weight of decades of clandestine operations reaching out to the 1940s, tangled family loyalties, multiple identities, high-technology threats and a little bit of romance.  The backbone of the tale is about the unmasking of a deep mole in the US intelligence community and the hero is a policeman whose traits echo most of DeMille’s latter protagonists, but the only thing you really need to know is that it’s a superb late-period Cold War thriller, one that fully uses most of the plot mechanics of the genre and seldom hesitates to liquidate its own characters.  One of the book’s standout sequences is a drawn-out torture scene in which a fairly sympathetic character comes face-to-face with a double-agent: it’s a terrifying sequence, and it ends on a spectacular note.

    The cast of characters is large and not always clearly distinguishable and the book’s opening third meanders quite a bit in an effort to establish everyone’s complex lineage and relationships.  No surprise, then, if The Talbot Odyssey feels like a meaty saga rather than light entertainment: This is one book that’s perfect for long flight or other uninterrupted reading moments.  It’s a bit of a backhanded compliment to say that it’s a great book for its time, but there’s really no other way to explain that a novel like this couldn’t be written today: The overdone ruthlessness of the Soviets would be a tough sell now, and we know from our own history that the threat that weighs on every characters’ shoulders has not come to pass.  Quite a bit of the novel plays upon genre espionage conventions, and so we get almost every trick in the thriller source-book except for hidden twins –perfect for a mid-eighties marketplace in which nearly every single suspense novel dealt with Communist spies, but not so much today when a “historical” novel would have to stick closer to accepted facts.

    Nonetheless, it’s a heck of a read and another good entry in the DeMille oeuvre.  By now, it has acquired a comfortable patina of quasi-alternate reality, and can be enjoyed not as a possible story, but as a fine example of once-possible genre fiction.  It almost makes one nostalgic for that kind of fiction, when America-the-virtuous was a credible proposition, and there were implacable enemies up to Western Civilization’s standards.