Reviews

  • The Summons, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 2002, 373 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-24107-3

    For a writer often decried as a populist hack, John Grisham sure stretches his grasp a lot wider than some critics may be willing to acknowledge. After a few debut novels so similar in tone that they made Grisham a sitcom gag, readers were delighted to find a slightly different style following The Rainmaker: Novels that were as much characters studies as social critiques, coming at the “southern legal thriller” label from very different directions. Then came even looser works such as the straight-up family drama A Painted House or the holiday comedy Surviving Christmas. The Summons is another successful entry in Grisham’s post-Rainmaker renaissance, still a southern legal thriller, but with yet another emphasis.

    It starts as law professor Ray Atlee receives a letter: His father, a well-known judge in a small rural Mississippi community, is dying and wants to see his two sons. Summoned to his childhood home, Ray makes two shocking discovery: First, that his father died before he could meet his sons a last time; second, that there are millions of dollars in cash hidden away in the house. Where does the money come from? And who else knows about it? As a comfortable academic, Ray doesn’t really need the money… but it sure would be handy. But it’s not simply a matter of picking up the money and depositing it at the nearest bank: as the threats pile up and the mystery of the money’s origin becomes more dangerous, Ray may have to do a lot of hard thinking in order to keep the money… or his life.

    But there’s more to The Summons than just a thriller about a man and three million untraceable dollars in cash. Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the novel (beyond its awesome page-turning appeal) is how it engages in a moral discussion about money and how it affects people. Ray Atlee is a decent man, but his first thought at the sight of millions of dollars is to hide and keep it all. Potentially complicating his actions are his doubts about the origins of the money: was his father part of a criminal ring? Was he bribed for a decision? Was he holding on to the money for a shadowy acquaintance? As Ray takes stock of his own life (divorced, comfortable, perhaps a bit lonely), the money -even left unspent- starts having an influence. For the reader, a lot of time is spend on the razor’s edge, wondering about Ray’s likability. Much like Scott B. Smith’s A Simple Plan (which is even acknowledged in Chapter 19), The Summons is an attempt to square off morality against or alongside money. Unlike Smith, however, Grisham isn’t so dark or so blunt to assume that money is evil: His thinking leads to a conclusion that twists without snapping believability and brings along an interesting moral reversal. Not since The Partner has Grisham played so well with expectations.

    There are other treats here and there in The Summons, of course: Ray is an amateur pilot, and so we get a glimpse of life at ten thousand feet aboveground. Ray’s brother is what could be called a professional addict, with all the consequences and detox details that this implies. The portrait of the elder Atlee’s lingering influence in a small town is a nice piece of atmosphere that probably owes much to A Painted House. A late-book visit to a multimillionaire lawyer nicknamed “The King of Torts” oozes contempt.

    As a thriller, The Summons isn’t Grisham’s best, but that’s unlikely to be much of a bother: it wouldn’t be a Grisham novel without the author’s usual terrific style. The Summons reads at two hundred pages an hour, propelled forward by an easy prose style, solid structure and a good bunch of characters.

    Still, there is a bothersome aspect to the final revelations, which satisfy on a moral standpoint but leave a lot to be desired in terms of plausibility. Worse; a number of questions about the how of the deception are casually dismissed by a reference to two hoodlums conveniently kept off-stage. After the red herrings raised earlier in the book, it all seems a bit quick, a bit pat in order to bring along the last few pages on which Grisham wanted to end. A slight problem in a book otherwise so fun to read it’s hardly worth the trouble to complain.

    What more satisfying is the constant appreciation of how Grisham is leveraging his strengths and limits into a series of highly enjoyable books. After his blockbuster success during the nineties, it’s good to see that Grisham is still stretching the envelope, still playing along with his chosen areas of expertise, still delivering good entertainment to fans and readers. The Summons may not be anything more than a good thriller, but it’s satisfying enough as it is.

  • Air Battle Force, Dale Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2003, 426 pages, C$39.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-009409-5

    Let us resolve, from the onset, that people in the military are, as a group of people, worthy of our admiration. After all, they’re doing dangerous jobs that would make most of us readers cower in helpless fear. Let us also maintain that military hardware is often a thing of beauty, marrying human ingeniousness with fearsome power. (Like power tools, except cooler). Furthermore, let us state blandly that military fiction, when properly written, can combine the best of several traditions, marrying slam-bang adventure with clever commentary on the nature of power and competition between nations.

    This being stated, let’s now turn our attention to why Dale Brown’s Air Battle Force is not just a career low for Brown (which takes some doing after stinkers like Fatal Terrain or Wings of Fire) but is also one of the most inept piece of military fiction I’ve had the misfortune to read so far.

    Most of the book’s problem stem from Brown’s now-ridiculous obsession in continuing a series that should have been put of of its misery a long time ago. Having locked himself far away in his imagined universe, Brown now finds himself unable to engage meaningfully with the issues of the day: Explicitly set in 2003, Air Battle Force declines to even recognize the events of 9/11 (save in the acknowledgements) despite mentioning here and there that the American government has spent years and millions of dollars chasing down the Taliban. Beyond the cartoonish dullness this gives to Brown’s “Air Battle Force” military unit, this refusal to acknowledge contemporary geopolitics betrays an author that may be unable to engage with current reality.

    His skills as a storyteller certainly aren’t improving. While he doesn’t repeat some of Wing of Fire‘s stupidest moments (no nine-year-old PhD. in Air Battle Force), Brown here struggles to even define an exciting story. In boldly examining the US Air Force’s future in unmanned vehicles, Brown has also taken his heroes out of the action. Protagonist Patrick MacLanahan only get in danger once in the prologue, and that’s following Yet Another Dumb Command Move. Otherwise, Brown’s series is becoming a series of fancy technological demonstrations in which the back-room boys look on as their unmanned weapons remotely kick whatever anti-American ass there is to kick.

    This doesn’t help Air Battle Force‘s pacing one tiny bit. For a 426-page novel, not a lot happens: Despite the interesting rumblings of an upcoming presidential campaign between Thorn and Martindale, Brown loses himself (and his readers) in dull back-water geopolitics that can be skipped one chapter at a time. Brown has never been an elegant stylist, but even his low standards are slipping with passages in which character viewpoints switch from one paragraph to the next. Brown has struggled with plot even since Storming Heaven, but Air Battle Force marks an even bigger failure than usual. By the end of the novel, all that remains is the impression of having read an extended prologue to the next novel. Brown shows no sign of actually being willing (let alone able) to fix what’s wrong with his fiction. Even by the undemanding standards of military fiction readers, Brown has reached the bottom of the barrel and seems intent of clawing his way even further down. His characters are as bland as ever and he can’t even write a decent action scene with whatever new toys he has. Add that to his inability to adapt his fiction to the new shape of the real world and one question remains: Why would anyone want to read anything by Dale Brown ever again?

    I have long considered Brown’s post-Hammerheads output as being inferior to what he’s capable of writing (which truly dates us), but now has come the time to consider (reluctantly) that this may be as good as it gets; that Brown will never again be able to write the kind of stuff he did so well earlier in his career. It speaks volume that in sinking lower and lower, Brown has never acquired the kind of inspiring right-wing craziness that now makes Clancy so much fun to read: He has simply become a rambling, boring writer coasting on the laurels of better books long past gone (and possibly a percentage of Dan Brown’s new fans.) I’ve got two more books by Brown on my shelf, bought well before he went in his current death spiral: I can’t wait until I’m done with them.

  • The Snow, Adam Roberts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2004, 297 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07181-8

    Canadians enjoy a worldwide reputation as easygoing, unflappable, even dull people. It’s long been a national contention that our long winter have something to do with this placid nature. Good government and central heating really do sound like excellent ideas in a country that spends at least four months per year in freezing temperatures. But don’t think we can’t be scared out of our wits. If you want to give nightmares to a Canadian, just start talking about a winter that never ends.

    That’s exactly how The Snow begins. Snow starts falling on September 6th… and never stops. Our narrator for most of the novel, Tira Bojani Sahai, is a young English woman of Indian descent that manages to survive the snowfall as London gets buried under a blanket of snow of glacial thickness. Not that the rest of the world has done much better, she finds out once she’s rescued after this harrowing first section: As far as anyone knows, the entire globe is now encased in an icy shell. And yet humanity endures. But to what purpose?

    As the stuff nightmares are made of, The Snow is top-notch. Straight in the conceptual footsteps of J.G. Ballard’s catastrophe novels, Adam Roberts’ fifth novel starts off by killing billions of people. Promising start, delivered with matter-of-fact prose that only makes the horror more obvious. But those of you expecting the hard-SF version of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW may be disappointed: In Roberts’ typical fashion, this is a novel about precariousness, weird environments, unreliable narrators, ludicrous plot twists and unsatisfying developments. As with the author’s previous novels, it’s both lovely and frustrating in equal fashion, praiseworthy and damnable for never doing the expected thing. One thing is for sure: this is not a boring book.

    The narrator alone is a piece of work: While it’s easy to feel a lot of initial empathy for Tira as she struggles through a situation that would kill most of us, latter developments refine her personality in increasingly complex fashion. We come to doubt her narrative, a doubt that is rewarded late in the novel as her unreliability is exposed in a short heartbreaking conversation. As far as characters are concerned, Tira is one of Roberts’ most achieved creation.

    A shame that one can’t be so complimentary about the story that surrounds her. The Snow may be a clever metaphor for many different things, and that’s part of the problem: Readers flail around like Canadians without snowshoes, sucked into a bottomless pile of fluffy stuff.

    Reigning in my runaway metaphors, it suffices to say that The Snow goes nowhere for a while, spends some time describing yet another repressive regime, spends more time doing nothing, backtrack to a current-day narrative (a first for a Roberts novel) then goes on a wild tangent in which the real story behind the real story of the Snow is exposed. The end takes a loony turn that is as endearing (in a “Whee!” fashion) as it seems clobbered out of thin air. Lengthy delirious passages leading to the conclusion don’t do much to prepare anyone for the last few twists.

    By this point, you can figure out that The Snow leaves a scattered impression. Parts of the novel are brilliant, and other parts feel like filler. (A digression about skin colour never quites gels, even as an instance of the narrator’s unreliability) As with most other Roberts novels, there is a hidden narrator between the text and the reader: Here, an unseen censor peppers the text with [Blank] character names and a few [expletive deleted], warning the reader of dire consequences if those top-secret pieces are read by unauthorized personnel. Interesting, although the tell-all epilogue takes away part of the fun.

    In some ways, The Snow is the best thing that Adam Robert has done. The initially endearing narrator, the suffocating first fifty pages, the layering of an unseen layer of interpretation are all top-notch. Heck, even some of the disappointing elements are pure genius. But the final result lacks cohesion even as the novel works overtime to drive readers away. While it’s easy to appreciate Roberts’ constant refusal to do the easy thing, how hard would it be, once in a while, to throw a bone to his audience? Could that explain why, even after a string of disappointing novels, I keep coming back to his stuff in the hope that this, finally, will be his novel that truly satisfies all expectations?

  • The Toxic Avenger (1984)

    The Toxic Avenger (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On VCD, April 2006) Troma films have acquired a very special reputation in the low-budget movie industry, and this is the prototypical Troma film: A mixture of horror and comedy on a shoestring budget, with plenty of gore effects and a sense of humour that’s best described as wide-ranging. Most straight-to-video films have more maturity than this film, but the unabashed looniness of Troma film is part of their charm. In fact, one could say that Troma has managed the singular feat of turning every single potential problem into an advantage. Nonsensical plot; lousy production values; exploitative nudity; interminable fight sequences: who cares? Even more than twenty years later, you can still watch the film with some interest, which is more than one can say about some of 1984’s Oscar-nominated films. It goes without saying, though, that you have to be able to tolerate a considerable amount of silliness to make it to the end of this film. This version of The Toxic Avenger is the (legal) “Gametek cinema digital movies” one that was converted to Quicktime format and sold in computer stores in the mid-nineties. Audiovisual quality: atrocious, but at least you can make up most of the film.

  • Thank You For Smoking (2005)

    Thank You For Smoking (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2006) Christopher Buckley’s satiric novel had me pleased, but hardly bowled over. The film adaptation produces a similar effect, though the sardonic tone of the narrator seems to work better in a cinematic context, especially when it’s strengthened by some clever direction. But after a promising start, Thank You For Smoking gradually settles in a comfortable groove, a move that’s not helped by changes bringing this film away from the thriller plot-line of the book to a more conventional “moral redemption on the kid’s behalf” third act. But even those changes fail to do much damage to the film: Aaron Eckhart does really well with a role that allows him to caricature his squared-jawed all-American looks; other supporting players do just as well. While Thank You For Smoking fails to make any lasting impression, it’s a pleasant time at the movies and plays well enough to satisfy anyone.

  • Slither (2006)

    Slither (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2006) Horror/comedy hybrids aren’t rare, but given how they tend to flop at the box office, seeing such an unabashed monster comedy like Slither is always something of a wonder. Boldly indulging in the limits of its R rating (except, alas, for the nudity), writer/director James Gunn delivers a movie that would make his old Troma pals proud. (It’s no accident if there’s footage of The Toxic Avenger on a TV screen midway through the film) Slither isn’t really interested in horror, but it’s keen on grossing you out; indeed, one could argue that it’s even more interested in showing gore than in making you laugh: This is a film where the one-liners are tossed off with negligent verve, but where every single gunshot takes off a chunk of flesh. The overall impact of the film will be amiable for gore-hounds, but a bit puzzling for civilian moviegoers: too much yuck, not enough yucks. Otherwise, well, Nathan Fillion retools his Firefly persona to good effect and Elizabeth Banks does her best to be as innocuous as possible. Frankly, it’s a measure of the film’s good-natured tone that it doesn’t leave much of an impact despite some truly stomach-churning visuals. But don’t get too excited: in the genre, it’s not up to Eight-Legged Freaks, and nowhere near the classic Tremors.

  • Counting Heads, David Marusek

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2005, 336 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-31267-0

    2005 has been an embarrassingly good year for high-end science-fiction: Stross’ Accelerando, Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes… Gee! And now, like a cherry on top of an excessively rich sundae, here’s Counting Heads, David Marusek’s long-awaited first novel. While it doesn’t completely live up to its advance expectations, Marusek’s novel is a head-spinner of the first degree, a vision of the future with three times the idea density of other solid SF works. Despite a number of misfires that would doom a lesser novel, it’s also a lot of fun.

    Counting Heads spins rather directly from Marusek’s excellent 1995 novella “We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy.” Slightly revised and included as the first part of the novel, the original story tells of one Samson Harger and his union with an unbelievably powerful woman named Eleanor K. Starke. Ten years after publication, the novella doesn’t seem so fresh (signs of evolving genre expectations, now that people like Charles Stross are writing entire novels in that exuberant style), but it’s still a delight to read. I compared the revised version with the original and the changes, at one searing exception, seem limited to a stream of line-editing corrections that neither add nor subtract much from the 1995 version.

    The real plot of Counting Heads begins nearly thirty years later, as a assassination plot kills off Eleanor and severely wounds her daughter Ellen. In a deliciously intense scene, Ellen’s skull is preserved in its own crash-proof helmet, setting in motion the rest of novel: In a few words, Counting Heads is a treasure hunt in which the prize is Ellen’s cryogenically preserved head.

    But the book can’t be reduced to a few words, because Counting Heads quickly takes on the quality of an amusement park ride. In a world where nanotechnology is a fact of life, life isn’t as easy as you’d expect. Unemployment is prevalent, money is hard to come by, and being poor in a society of abundance can be even more maddening than living in a backward society. (Plus, there are good chances that you’re genetically identical to thousands of other clones bred for personality quirks) The threat of rogue nano-bugs (“blooms”) makes today’s fears about terrorism seem laughable, leading straight to the book’s humourless “HomCom” police forces. Eleanor Starke’s assassination turns out to be the opening salvo of a “correction” among the affluent populations of the novel, with consequences that are still very much in play by the end of the novel.

    Because, oh yeah, Counting Heads is the first volume in a series, even through you’ll find no hints of this anywhere in the book. While the story reaches a resting point of sorts, most overarching threads are left dangling, with the identity of Starke’s enemy still a point of contention by the last page. (Careful readers will have a rough idea of who’s to blame, but there are no definitive answers here.)

    This unfinished quality severely harms the novel’s impact. For all of its clever details, cool ideas and amusing sight-seeing, Counting Heads leaves the impression of an unfinished work. The high-flying virtuosity of Marusek’s speculation carries along its own dangerous possibility: that it may fail in the next instalment, that the ride may not lead anywhere. As it stands Counting Heads‘s last fifty pages betray a lot of movement and not much development: any further evaluation will have to wait until the conclusion, whether it comes in the second volume or much later.

    This makes me hesitant to recommend Counting Heads as a standalone unit. I certainly can’t get enough of that type of Science Fiction, but I freely acknowledge that cool ideas can often overshadow more significant problems in my appreciation of any work of fiction. I’m not sure what less dedicated readers may think of the novel: This is a dense piece of work both conceptually and visually (to save money, the designers crammed an extra 20% of text on every single one of the book’s 336 pages). My unconditional love for the result is, well, unconditional: not everyone will be so taken with the result.

    What is certain, however, is that I’ll be one of the first in line to buy the sequel. Counting Heads may only leave half an impression, but it’s one heck of an impression.

  • The Sentinel (2006)

    The Sentinel (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2006) It had been a long time since the last thriller set in the White House, and The Sentinel is a good return to the sub-genre with a welcome emphasis on Secret Service characters. While the film can never completely shake off the shadow of In The Line Of Fire, it’s not a bad take on the same elements. What is a bit more distracting is the presence of two TV mega-stars in important role. “Desperate Housewives” Eva Longoria is Teh Cuteness, but her casting here seems more like a stunt given how that role could have been played by just about any actress in Hollywood. Meanwhile, Keifer Sutherland reprises a role very, very similar to the one he plays on “24”, constantly welcoming comparison to the TV show’s intensity. Alas, it’s a comparison that often works to The Sentinel‘s disadvantage: loosely adapted from a novel by Gerald Petievich, the film moves well but doesn’t have the same breakneck pacing nor surprising plot twists. Which isn’t to say that the script holds together: There are a number of troubling implausibilities through the entire film. Almost entirely bereft of humour, The Sentinel will still amuse Canadians given how the last act is spent shooting and running near the Toronto City Hall. Director Clark Johnson does an unspectacular job: whatever stylistic flourishes there are in the movie disappear once the film’s second act is well under way. While this certainly won’t go down in history as anything more than an adequate thriller, The Sentinel delivers what’s expected from a genre B-movie: It’s the cinema equivalent to a decent beach-side page-turner.

  • Scary Movie 4 (2006)

    Scary Movie 4 (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2006) Roughly similar in tone to the previous Scary Movie 3, this one is a comedy grab-bag that chiefly goes after (in decreasing order of importance) War Of The Worlds, The Grudge and The Village, with other assorted pokes and tweaks at other films (Saw, Million Dollar Baby and Brokeback Mountain) and pop-culture icons. Scary Movie 4‘s biggest problem is that it’s quite happy to pastiche other films, but seldom goes for the jugular: Movie critics had funnier jabs at War Of The Worlds during the summer of 2005 than the parody ever manages to put together. (The constantly-screaming little girl shtick isn’t even mocked.) Scary Movie 4, alas, is almost completely bloodless in its parodies: it recreates the original with some goofiness but seldom more. (This being said, the production values are often impressive, especially considering the short shooting schedule) Even the rare political gags only make us wish for much more. It’s no surprise, then, if some of the film’s cleverest moments stand completely apart from previous films. As for the actors, well Anna Faris is still cute in an increasingly irritating clueless shtick, while Craig Bierko does well with the thankless task of parodying Tom Cruise. Still, it’s Regina Hall who steals the show as the insatiable Brenda: her arrival in the movie kicks it up another notch (plus, doesn’t she look unbelievably gorgeous in founder’s-era clothing?) Yes, Scary Movie 4 will make you laugh. Dumb, cheap, easy laughs but still; consider it your reward for slogging through endless mainstream horror films.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, October 2021) One of the side-benefits of my Scary Movie series marathon is a renewed appreciation of how the series is broken down into three distinct phases, and how closely related are the films of those phases. Phase one is the Wayans Brothers phase—closely following genre protocols, often very funny but just as frequently too gross or too dumb for any laughs. Phase Two, the Zucker phase, is more controlled in tone but deliberately chaotic in plot, with fewer gross-out gags but far more comic violence that quickly gets old. Scary Movie 4 is very much of a piece with its predecessor, blending together the plots of very different films in order to create a clothesline on which to hang smaller film-specific parodies. There’s an effort to go beyond simple re-creation to create a more comic tone, and the number of known names in the cast is proof enough of the budget that went into the thing. Anna Faris makes a final appearance in the series (Phase Three of the series is the Faris-less one, which doesn’t help anything) and once again bears the brunt of much of the gags, but Regina Hall sharply improves the film once she joins in mid-plot. (She does look real nice playing a nymphomaniac in 18th century garb.)  Craig Bierko does well in a role asking him to spoof Tom Cruise, while various smaller roles are held by Leslie Nielsen, Bill Pullman, a pre-stardom Kevin Hart and many others —alas, Chris Elliot is once again a laugh-inhibitor whenever he shows up on-screen. In the end, Scary Movie 4 is not a great spoof comedy, but it’s better than many others (including Scary Movie 2) and works reasonably well when the filmmakers can keep their worst tendencies in check (their fondness for hitting women and children aside, at least they don’t include an excruciatingly long door unlocking/opening sequence). It’s more or less the end of the series, though—Scary Movie 5 is a different, almost unrelated beast, and another other sharp turn lower for a series that doesn’t have a lot of room to spare before hitting the bottom of the barrel.

  • Lucky Number Slevin (2006)

    Lucky Number Slevin (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2006) There are two good films in this movie, but their union is far less impressive than the sum of their parts. First up is a sympathetic crime comedy, in which an amiable protagonist (Josh Hartnett, playing up his usual lack of passion) see himself stuck between two competing crime-lords. As a fluffy premise, it works well and earns a few laughs, bringing to mind some of the least-annoying post-Tarantino criminal comedies. Plus it’s got Lucy Liu: I could watch her in just about anything, but she’s particularly appealing here as the frazzled-hair girl next door. But this seemingly amusing caper is leading toward a twist loudly foreshadowed by curious ellipses and a number of nonsensical details. When the plot twist comes, it changes the nature of the film, turning it in a story of violent revenge that leaves few threads untied. Taken in bits and pieces, Lucky Number Slevin isn’t bad at all. The impressive cast (featuring Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, Ben Kingsley, etc.) often makes it appear as being much better than it actually is, as do the occasional good lines and arresting set design. There is enough quirkiness in the first half to give the impression that it’s leading somewhere fun. But in the final analysis, Lucky Number Slevin looks like a twist in search of a script. Whatever good ratings it gets are mostly based on potential, because the execution can’t fulfil initial expectations.

  • Word of Honor, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1985, 738 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-30158-2

    Every book review presents its own special challenge, but taking on Nelson DeMille’s Word of Honor presents challenge of its own. Simply put, this is a book that shouldn’t work. Describing it will send you in a coma and make you wonder how it can possibly be a pleasant reading experience. And yet it is. And yet it works.

    For fans of DeMille’s books, this won’t be much of a surprise: While most of his books could be cut by half without much sacrifice, DeMille seldom deliver anything less than excellent novels. Despite the lengths, the indulgences and the sometimes tepid pacing, DeMille means entertainment. Word of Honor may be a bit less interesting than his other books, but it’s still crackerjack good stuff.

    Writers are often advised to “start the story at the beginning, but no earlier” and the first page of Word of Honor is a textbook example of that axiom as Manhattan middle-manager Ben Tyson sees a fellow commuter reading a nonfiction book about Vietnam. Upon verification, Tyson is in the book, highlighted as a commanding officer who allowed a wartime atrocity.

    And so it begins. The book outrages a segment of the American population and forces the US military brass to do something: before long, Tyson finds himself recalled to duty and in serious danger of being court-martialed. The obvious question, of course, is just what happened back there and then: what is the truth behind those so-called atrocities? Could there be some more to the story than wholesale massacre?

    Of course there is. This is a DeMille novel, after all, and anyone who’s read works such as The General’s Daughter knows that the author can spin quite a yarn from the most ordinary beginnings.

    But frankly, Word of Honor is more about soul-searching than plot. DeMille has been to Vietnam and if his latter Up Country remains a classic exploration of the conflict’s lasting legacy, Word of Honor can be seen as the first draft of his feelings about the war. War makes losers of everyone, seems to be saying DeMille, and there are no statue of limitations on atrocities. Ben Tyson may have become a well-adjusted, moderately successful all-American protagonist after Vietnam, but Word of Honor is the story of consequences for what he’s done. The perfunctory plot is just an excuse to think about what happened and continues to happen.

    Doesn’t sound too riveting, right? Can you imagine more than seven hundred pages of that stuff? Contrarily to other DeMille novel, there aren’t too many crazy twists in here: The story progresses linearly to its conclusion, with the expected revelation late in the book and the protagonist’s just punishment. Even The Explanation, when it comes, seems underwhelming.

    And yet Word of Honor is never boring. DeMille’s natural storytelling abilities are such that every page is a delight, that every character is worth understanding. Tyson may be a bit rough around the edges (the sarcasm so prevalent in DeMille protagonists seems muted here, often taking the form of anger rather than flippancy), but he’s worth caring about throughout his entire odyssey. As a Vietnam novel, it’s tremendously effective.

    This 1985 book has aged a lot, but not in the way you may think. In these brave early days of the twenty-first century, it’s impossible to read without making parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. As with Up Country, reading Word of Honor brings along the certitude that the American invasion of Iraq is another national traume in full bloom: We know that there will be further stories of atrocities in the years to come. We know that in some ways, many people have learned nothing from Vietnam. Word of Honor has not aged in twenty years. If anything, it has become even more current.

    So don’t let the lack of plot of the book discourage you. Just sink into the novel’s easy narration and enjoy, if that’s truly the appropriate feeling, DeMille’s sure-handed storytelling. It’s an unconventional novel, but one that delivers solid satisfaction. It shouldn’t work, but it does so magnificently.

  • Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986)

    Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On VCD, April 2006) Troma film; what more is there to say? Actually, this is a bit more interesting than The Toxic Avenger, with a touch of social commentary, decent special affects (for 1986) and the unbelievably cute Janelle Brady as the heroine. The plot is a mess of radioactive goo, monsters, bodily changes, teen sex, potent soft drugs, student unrest and motorcycles. You can’t call this film good, but you can say it’s spirited, with almost enough energy to make anyone ignore the wall-to-wall inanity. Compared to The Toxic Avenger, this film is less linear, somewhat denser, a bit funnier and generally more competent from a technical standpoint. (There are a number of arresting scenes that wouldn’t be out-of-place in a better film.) Still, it goes without saying that this form of film-making is for a very specific type of viewer: It probably loses half its charm per year once you’re older than 15. This version of Class Of Nuke’em High is the (legal) “Gametek cinema digital movies” one that was converted to Quicktime format and sold in computer stores in the mid-nineties. Audiovisual quality: atrocious, but at least you can make up most of the film.

  • Basic Instinct 2 (2006)

    Basic Instinct 2 (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2006) Aside from Sharon Stone, the only people who were actively waiting for this film were the cosmetic surgeons who made sure that Stone still holds together at her age. If you don’t mind bolted-on body parts that nonetheless hang on either side of her navel, you’ll probably find something effective in Basic Instinct 2; otherwise, well, it’s hard to avoid a serious case of the giggles which watching this train-wreck. Nominally billed as an “erotic thriller” rather than the far more honest “silly mess”, this sequel stars David Morrissey as one of the dumbest psychiatrist in England (“You’re addicted to risk! The only thing that will stop you is your own death! So, hey… wanna make out?”) and the most unintentionally hilarious script of the year. Partly set in London’s Gherkin Tower, it brings back memories of Match Point and suffers for the comparison. But perhaps the worst thing about the film is how defyingly boring it becomes in its latter half, as the film frantically tries to spin more and more plot twists that just don’t make sense, while actively failing to engage its audience. What becomes sadly obvious by the end is that frankly, no one actually cares about Stone’s character –and that this is a sequel most of us could very well have done without.

  • Learning the World, Ken Macleod

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2005, 303 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-31331-6

    Stories of first contact between humanity and extraterrestrial civilizations have been a staple of the Science Fiction genre ever since the very beginning of the genre. It’s one of SF’s central myth: what happens when different mindsets meet. While the classic “First contact” story usually involved the aliens coming to us (“Take us to your leaders! No, wait, let’s land on the White House front lawn!”), it’s not rare to see the scenario played in reverse: In Vernor Vinge’s Hugo Award-winning A Deepness in the Sky, for instance, a nomadic human delegation encountered the aliens on their own turf, precipitating a technological revolution.

    For better or for worse, Ken MacLeod’s Hugo-nominated Learning the World has a lot of superficial similarities with Vinge’s novel: It, too is a novel of first contact in which the humans are the visiting party. It, too, features a brand of humanity that is almost unrecognizable to us stock humans. It, too, takes a keen interest in the social consequences of first contact. (The title itself comes from the first obvious lesson to be gained from First Contact, and what it means for basic world-view assumptions.)

    But Learning the World is a novel that comes five years after A Deepness in the Sky: It’s much shorter and has a different agenda in mind when comes the time to confront the issues of First Contact. High on its list of priorities is a set of reflections on the Fermi paradox and what it can possibly mean. As a piece of twenty-first century SF, it’s fluent in economics (the humans of the novel think nothing of describing their interactions in financial terms, with a constant impact of how they act and perceive their actions) and is very familiar with the accumulated mass of other First Contact scenarios. (Heck, the industrial-era alien characters are big fans of “engineering fiction”) It doesn’t innovate as much as it revisits a familiar scenario with the latest lingo and plenty of conceptual cross-breeding: the visiting humans, for instance, are genetically modified immortals traveling on a generation starship. As with MacLeod’s other novels, it’s often the details that make the story worthwhile: tantalizing hints of “fast burn” civilizations and of a society indissociable from ultra-capitalism. There are more than a few good laughs as the First Contact scenario escapes all careful planning. Heck, a good chunk of the novel is made of, essentially, blog posts.

    Unfortunately, all of these good bits can’t amount to a spectacular novel. For such a short book, Learning the World is thin on plot: Not much happens in the first half, and the alien viewpoint chapters can often feel superfluous. Most of the novel’s truly interesting material comes in the last few pages, and even then they roll in a casual “hey, isn’t this interesting?” fashion. Heck, there’s an overall lack of danger, of passion from this book: It ends up passing through as a gentle first cozy contact novel featuring entirely rational characters without much at stake. (“Why, yes, we will break up our society… but everything has to be done for tea-time”) Indeed, some of the final plot developments take on a “ha, aren’t humans silly?” quality for which I’ve never had much use. Looking back upon the entire book, I remain surprised at how so much good material can feel so inconsequential: Is it worth asking if a more dynamic writer would be able to make more out of those same ideas? Or should I feel disappointed for feeling so disappointed?

    I’ve had problems with MacLeod’s fiction before (it’s no accident if I hadn’t read anything of his since The Sky Road), and if Learning the World is a bit more accessible than his other books, it still doesn’t give me much reason to be enthusiastic about his fiction. Simply put, Learning the World has the impact of a minor work, with the slight advantage of being a completely standalone novel. MacLeod is a frighteningly smart guy, but this novel reads almost as a half-sketched first draft, with potential for more but a weak execution. It’s been nominated for a Hugo; great news for MacLeod, but there are at least two other better books on the ballot. I’m glad I read it, but no more.

  • Crystal Rain, Tobias Buckell

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2006, 351 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-31227-1

    So this is the twenty-first century. Doesn’t feel much different from the last one so far, doesn’t it? Still no giant robots, lunar bases or flying cars. But sometimes, things change profoundly even when they don’t seem to. Attitudes evolve. New ideas come in. It may be more important to shift our understanding of the world as it exist than try to change it radically. As a genre, Science Fiction is no exception. While it too is pushing forward, it’s also changing from within, opening up to cultural backgrounds other than plain old white boring Anglo-Saxon roots. Look carefully, and you can see the first young wolves of twenty-first-century Science Fiction, and they’re thinking differently even when they’re following the good old recipes.

    Tobias Buckell, for instance, doesn’t stretch any definition of Science Fiction with his first novel Crystal Rain. A good old rollicking adventure across a primitive landscape littered with relics of a high-tech past, Crystal Rain is not particularly original or innovative. But it it succeeds at what it attempts and benefits from Buckell’s atypical background.

    It all takes place on a planet which, as far as we know in this first volume, is inhabited by two very different civilizations: The dominant Azteca and isolated Nanagada. As the story begins, the Azteca (who, as the name suggests, have pretty much adopted everything from the Aztecs… including ritual sacrifice) launch an invasion against Nanagada’s peaceful peninsula. They’ve got number and ruthlessness on their side, but there’s more to Nanagada than a small militia and a capital at the end of the railways: There’s John deBrun, our protagonist, a man who has managed to rebuild his life after being found at sea without memories. There’s a lot more to him than the simple existence he lives, and events will soon push him from one discovery to another.

    An adventure story in a somewhat pulpish tradition (though with far superior prose), Crystal Rain reads like a bucket of fun. The characters are well-drawn, their adventures rarely let up and there’s a satisfying progression to our understanding of the world they live in. The cover jacket illustration has a man with a hook and a gun, parrots, airships and plenty of colour: the novel inside isn’t much different. The cultural nature of the feud between Nanagada (heavily based on Caribbean culture) and the merciless Azteca is a welcome change of pace that does much to distinguish this novel from other planetary romances. Despite a few beginner’s missteps (such as the explanatory conversation in Chapter Two), Buckell’s writing is crisp and self-assured: Don’t be surprised to wrap up this novel in a single afternoon. One fair warning: Buckell’s characters often speak using broken syntax and while the effect is a pleasant reminder of Caribbean accents, it may be distracting to some.

    Unlike superficially similar novels like Karl Schroeder’s Ventus, Crystal Rain has no aspirations at pushing the SF envelope: It delivers the goods, promises more for the sequel and then stops while it’s still ahead of the game. I’m not too fond of series fiction, but don’t be worried by this volume: There’s a satisfying end to the story in this book even as some of the implications of the background suggest a much larger canvas for latter volumes. The Aztecan gods, for instance, are very real and very inhuman: Nanagada’s centuries-long isolation portends nothing good for the rest of the human race. We’ll probably learn more about it in the sequel. (And hopefully make sense of some details that look like contrivances: The focus of this novel is so tightly focused on Nanagata that it often feels like a series of arbitrary authorial decisions: “See, there’s a chain of Wicked High Mountain here… from one sea to another. Yup. Aztecas had to dig through for a hundred years. Couldn’t go above or beside it. Sea-to-sea mountains. Wicked High Mountains.” Best not to scratch the background too deeply here: just enjoy the adventure.)

    But all told, this is an praiseworthy take on the good old Science Fiction adventure genre, with enough action and gadgets to make this a fun read. It doesn’t do anything new, but it does so well, and thanks to Buckell’s own cultural heritage, provides a setting with a welcome difference from what we’re used to. Others may push back the conceptual limits of SF, but Buckell is changing it from within —making it a more diverse, more accessible, more enjoyable genre. That’s not to dismiss lightly.