tikitu-reviews's reviews from LibraryThing

The city & the city by China Miéville

Thu, 28 May 2009 14:03:43 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "This is a tricky novel to review. I want to convince you to read it, but I can't tell you why. It's a police procedural, taking Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad from his native city-state Besźel to neighbouring Ul Qoma to investigate a murder. The (decidedly odd) relationship between Besźel and Ul Qoma is the grand metaphysical conceit that drives the whole book, and it's what I have to try not to tell you about. Miéville has written the first five or so chapters very carefully to ease you into an understanding of why these two nations are so unusual. If you read anything online about the book, you'll find out rather more abruptly. I'd like to set you up for the slow reveal, so you can get the most from his craftsmanship. So my first advice is, don't read any other reviews unless they advertise themselves as stringently spoiler-free. But then how will you know if you want the book or not? Let me try to hint at the awesomeness of the central conceit by analogy. In A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick described an undercover narcotics officer who is forced by stringent double-blind anonymity conditions to report on the behaviour of his own undercover identity. As he becomes more drug-addled he loses the ability to maintain the cohesion of his identity: stoned he worries about hidden cameras without realising that his official persona knows where they are, while on the job he reviews hidden camera footage of himself stoned, without realising he is looking at himself. Miéville plays a similar trick with his twin cities (although distinctive enough that I hope the analogy will only become apt with the benefit of hindsight). The border between the city-states has a checkpoint, yes, with passport and visa checks and a rather efficient bureacracy, but it's also an almost metaphysical transition. The first third of the book takes place in Besźel; then Borlú's investigation takes him to Ul Qoma, and we get to experience the discomfort of that transition with him. Miéville is particularly good on what it is like to be Besź in Ul Qoma. The story is told by Borlú, in unreflective first person; Besźel is comfortably familiar while we see Ul Qoma through his slightly cynical eyes. He notices the more agressive driving, the noise, the neon. His hotel meals are "Okay. Bad. No worse than any other hotel food," while a meal in the home of a local is "more Ul Qoman, though that is not an unmitigated good." As a character Borlú is understated but solid. He's a good detective but not a magician, compassionate, quiet. There don't seem to be any skeletons in his closet. We see everything through his eyes and it's a comfortable viewpoint. I suppose Miéville deliberately kept his protagonist low-key, to leave more room for the twin stars of the show: the two cities. This is where he really gets to shine. Miéville is an acknowledged master at bringing urban settings to life, and here he gets to work with contrasts. Besźel is economically depressed, democratic, slightly fusty; Ul Qoma is a one-party state with a moderately brutal police force ("They're old-school here. Robust interrogations.") and a booming foreign investment economy. Besź eat potatoes while Ul Qoman food is spicy; Ul Qoma carefully protects its archaelogical finds while Besźel has a history of selling them to the highest bidder, but Ul Qoma has only recently (under pressure from the World Heritage Committee, if I remember correctly) stopped demolishing historic buildings to make space for boomtown development. These are places that are alive well beyond the confines of the story Miéville is telling. The two cities (and their unique relationship) are really what the novel is about, but it's also about Borlú's investigation of a murder. My only complaint about the book is the pacing of this investigation. For most of the novel it proceeds slowly, calmly, and with a convincing mix of frustration and progress. Suddenly, though, twenty-seven chapters into twenty-nine (and the last a Coda of five pages) everything happens at once. I don't mean that nothing has happened before that, but those last two chapters begin with open rioting in the streets and pass through two twists (of the "Yes but actually it was that other guy behind it all the time" variety) before ending with the tense confrontation with the talkative mastermind, tying up all the loose ends and explaining everything -- and that's all before the Coda. But if the pacing is a little off, all the loose ends are tied up and everything does come together. And if your experience is anything like mine, you'll be left satisfied by the solution to the mysteries, but far and away more enthusiastic about the bigger picture: Besźel, Ul Qoma, and what lies between them."
New York : Del Rey Ballantine Books, 2009.

The arrival by Shaun Tan

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 14:15:47 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "A beautiful wordless story-in-pictures. Australian artist Shaun Tan tells the story of an immigrant, leaving his family and travelling by sea to a fabulous new country. He doesn't speak the language, cannot read the writing; the foodstuffs at the market are all strange to him, as are the omnipresent animals and birds, and even the design of the clocks leaves him baffled. Little by little he settles in, finding a room and a succession of jobs. He sends money back to his family and eventually they are able to join him; the final image is of his young daughter giving directions in her turn to a newly arrived immigrant. The simplicity of this summary elides the extraordinary emotional power of Tan's drawings. He captures perfectly the alienation of cultural incomprehension, as again and again the new arrival is shocked or baffled or simply intrigued by some detail. The reader shares in this alienation, as Tan's creation is just as unfamiliar for us as for his character. The alien script (which is woven delicately into the architecture everywhere we look) is constructed of familiar elements (bowls, ascenders and descenders; serif and sans-serif designs) but arranged in unfamiliar forms; the clock (if that is indeed what it is) carries a system of nested sun-like disks. The dining table in the lodgings our hero takes carries an array of obscure machinery, some of which startles him by jetting flame when he picks it up. In a later scene he is invited home for dinner by a new friend, who we see toasting some sort of root at the table during the meal. By subtly reintroducing the unfamiliar, first as foregrounded object of incomprehension and then as background, we are coaxed into the same trajectory of acclimatisation that the protagonist follows. The recurring animals illustrate this point very nicely. Freshly arrived in the city, our first sight of its details is a double-page spread of eight vignettes, the eighth of the protagonist standing suitcase in hand and pondering the first seven. In one a woman carries a cat-like beast casually in her arms; in another a barber shaves his customer while animals with coiled shells crawl on tentacles across the floor. A street vendor's stall has a basket on the side, carrying something with a pointed snout and spines along its backbone, while birds with high ear-tufts wander at the feet of two street musicians. Certain of these animals will recur, tucked subtly in the sides of street-scene panels or enthroned in gigantic statues. Our hero acquires his own pet, and it slowly becomes apparent that everyone in this city goes accompanied by some sort of animal -- if you can't see it at first, it may be carried in his pocket! By the final chapter the protagonist's own (rather bizarre) beast has become a symbol of the familiar, bringing his daughter her woollen hat so she can run an errand outside in the cold. As well as this story of our hero's physical (and more gradual emotional) arrival, we are given three glimpses into the lives of people he meets and is befriended by. All three are immigrants, and their stories tell how they came to the city: fleeing a life of slavery, or an invasion by giant destructive figures, or as a soldier who marched away to war and returned to a home destroyed by it. The cataclysmic opening image of one of these stories (<a href="http://shauntan.net/images/books/the-arrival8.jpg">"The story of the Giants"</a>) can be seen on the artist's website. This is a good moment to comment on the artwork: it's exquisite. His site contains <a href="http://shauntan.net/books/the-arrival.html">more images from The Arrival</a> along with <a href="http://shauntan.net/books.html">similar collections</a> for five of his other books. The style is different for each book, and the realism and soft pencil shading of The Arrival gives it much of its emotional effect. My only complaint is that Tan has not extended the exaggerated realism of the architecture and mechanisms he portrays to the animals. The animals shown in <a href="http://shauntan.net/images/books/the-arrival11.jpg">"Ticket"</a> are typical: they are bizarre and engaging, but they don't give the sense of solid reality that the ticket machine does. (Does our friend's pet have fur, or is it naked skin we're seeing? Are those ears, or wings, or something else entirely on its back? And how exactly do its knees articulate?) This is really a minor quibble, though -- indeed, it only comes to mind because the standard set by the rest of the artwork is so high. As a small image on your screen, <a href="http://shauntan.net/images/books/the-arrival4.jpg">"Flock"</a> is already lovely. As a full-page illustration it's breathtaking. There are many such moments in The Arrival: moments when my breath literally paused a moment, to let me appreciate in stillness. The departure scene in the first chapter, which introduces the menace from which our hero is escaping, is another. The length of his journey by steamship is shown in a double-page spread containing sixty small, square sketches of cloud formations. The elegance and simplicity of the technique is just as beautiful as the image itself is. The back cover blurb describes The Arrival as a graphic novel. It's a term I dislike, and it seems odd here to describe a book that can be read comfortably in two hours as any kind of "novel". The name "comic" is equally unsuitable, unless it's used as bait: "It's a comic, but not like what you're thinking…". It's published as a children's book, which it isn't either. It's a quiet story with a lot of deep emotion and warmth, told beautifully, without using words."
South Melbourne : Lothian Books, 2006.

Longer Views: Extended Essays by Samuel R. Delany

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:18:57 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "When Delaney is writing about literature he loves, he's fascinating. His philosophy is trite ("About every fragment of reality, an infinite number of different statements can be made. For every fragment of reality, an infinite number of different models can be made.") and his formal criticism is to me incomprehensible; the worst of this collection is far too personal and unpleasantly confessional. Folk who know Delaney won't be surprised by that last response, but might be surprised by what provoked it. I'm not bothered by his sexual anecdotes (indeed, there's a fascination to a sexual experience so different to mine and to what I consider in many different ways the mainstream). Instead, what left me embarassed for the guy is the kind of self-conscious self-judgement on show in the following: "Like many children who get along easily with their peers, I was an incredibly vicious and self-centred child, a liar when it suited me and a thief when I could get away with it, who, with an astonishing lack of altruism, had learned some of the advantages of being nice to people nobody else wanted to be bothered with." This paragraph is followed by "I think, sometimes, when we are trying to be the most honest, the fictionalizing process is at its strongest." I couldn't agree more, but Delaney seems to say this in the same confessional mode ("What do they remember that, perhaps, I have forgotten--either because it was too painful, too damning, or because it made no real impression at all?") while I'm left wishing he'd written with a little more distance and a little less grovelling. It's a shame to only be able to quote in support of my negative response, but the positive one (which on balance outweighs the negative) comes much more from the large-scale structure of these essays than from any specific felicities of phrasing. The preface describes the collection of long essays as "the least commercial of all works", while the introduction by Ken James notes the "norm which is somehow being supplemented, exceeded, transgressed" presupposed by the term "extended essay". Some of these essays are simply long, like an unextended essay with more of the same. But some are structural experiments that do indeed transgress, as gay critics are wont to do, and delightfully so. 7. I never thought of myself when young as someone who, someday, would have "quite a collection of old moustache-wax brushes." But I do ... simply because I now have quite a moustache! And much later in the same essay (which begins with the proposition "Rhetoric is the ash of discourse"): 24. "Man," says Dennis in the half-dark, "I'll fuck you up the ass so much the cum'll be runnin' out your nose--you won't need any moustache wax!" Odd how affection manifests itself in various ages and epochs, in various social niches. The humanity undercuts the pretension, and forces you to reconsider the possibility that there might be something to "the ash of discourse" after all... if you can identify with a gay man's sexual affection via his moustache wax, maybe you can identify with a postmodern critic as well. (I'll be honest: my identification didn't go so far as to make any part of the "cyborg" essay Reading at Work comprehensible to me.) I left this collection with enormous curiosity for Delaney's fiction; I'd be equally curious about his autobiography if I didn't expect him to spend a good deal of time excoriating his former self."
Wesleyan University Press (1996), Paperback, 384 pages

The war against clich�e : essays and reviews, 1971-2000 by Martin Amis

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:18:35 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "Opinionated, biting criticism. Well worth reading whether you agree with his judgements or not. The foreword warns the reader to watch the datelines: "You hope to get more relaxed and confident over time; and you should certainly get (or seem to get) kinder, simply by avoiding the stuff you are unlikely to warm to. Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose the taste for it when you realize how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember[.]" The acidity of the critical critical responses is wonderful fun, from a safe distance ("The Green Movement needs a holy book. So does Viking Penguin. So do I. So do we all. Our need survives The End of Nature, in which Bill McKibben fails to fulfil the rolling prophecies of his publicity kit.") but given the illustrious names he tears into and the span of 29 years the reviews cover, I can easily imagine some hindsight reservations here and there. It's the detail of Amis's response, and the evidence he insists on providing, in quote after quote after quote, that makes these pieces so very succesful as reviews. I'm adding a great many books to my wishlist, not because he recommends them but because reading his reviews I'm confident that I know enough to decide for myself that I will enjoy them. Even when he's unimpressed, Amis has a response -- sometimes quietly hilarious in its animosity, sometimes more forgiving and plainly informative. The best of these reviews are worth attention both as analysis and as (anti)recommendation, and also simply as plain-spoken and extremely vigorous prose."
London: Jonathan Cape, 2001. xv, 352 p. ; 24 cm.

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:25:44 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "Less gratuitiously unpleasant than Light, and I think much more successful. My central complaint about Light is that the spectacular disfunction of the characters is both too extreme in specifics and is trivialised by the too-clever plot that ties them together. In similar fashion the various characters of The Course of the Heart are variously damaged by an encounter with something beyond their comprehension, but where in Light they respond with murder and other forms of flagrant disfunction, in The Course of the Heart their differing breakdowns are less generic and more private. Light only came clean about its plotline at the end, and in doing so made its themes relatively clear as well. We know from very early in The Heart how the characters are connected, but the specifics of their experience remains unrecoverable. The narrator is constantly chewing over and reconsidering theme, the stories he and his friends tell themselves to try to understand (and, increasingly desperately, to try to restrain and control) what is happening to them. But Harrison refuses to define the Pleroma and the events of their contact with it, and that mystical incomprehensibility is in the end far more satisfying than the neat-and-tidy resolution of Light."
Night Shade Books (2006), Paperback, 224 pages

Light (Gollancz SF S.) by M.John Harrison

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 11:30:17 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "Self-consciously literate sf. I admire what Harrison is trying to do here (which I might inadequately gloss as "using standard sf tropes in a novel with literary merit") but I don't like the result. The sf elements are effective, both as traditional tropes and in literary terms, but the break-out-of-the-box elements struck me as strained, self-consciously shocking, and artificial. There are a number of separate stories in Light, which seem distinct but are ultimately seen to be interconnected. All turn about some type of sexual, social or emotional dysfunction, and the extremity of these dysfunctions is the major bone I have to pick with the experiment. Without spoiling too heavily, I think there are interesting stories to tell about people with emotional problems who don't resort to random murder to deal with them. If I can split the novel into these two parts (the pure-sf portions of the stories and the various dysfunctions that give them emotional momentum), my second major complaint is the way the resolution stitches them clumsily together. Again without spoiling too heavily, the sf elements in some sense intrude to variously solve or justify the social/emotional problems that have been driving the characters. This isn't a careless deus ex machina, it's clearly the conclusion that Harrison has planned throughout the novel, but it still struck me as abrupt and (again) artificial. Light has had a lot of attention, and deservedly so. It's an attempt to add some conscious literary artifice to a genre that has historically been plagued with good plots told badly. I think it's a failed attempt, but it's admirable for all that; I can't recommend it though."
Gollancz (2002), Paperback

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 11:30:46 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "A difficult read, but highly rewarding. The first difficulty lies with the language. The story is set in the mid-18th century, and Pynchon has chosen to write in period style. I can't speak to how accurate his imitation is, but it's a far cry from modern standards. My review of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker should convince you that idiosyncratic language doesn't usually scare me off, but (somewhat to my own surprise) I never really got used to the idiosyncratic capitalisation. To the very end I read the capitalised words (in my inner voice) as more heavily emphasised than the author probably intended, giving the sentences a decidedly odd rhythm. Here's a passage from early in the frame story (the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke is telling, in chaotic and fractured style, the story of the title characters Mason & Dixon), to show you what I mean: Tenebrae has seated herself and taken up her Needlework, a piece whose size and difficulty are already subjects of Discussion in the House, the Embroidress herself keeping silence,-- upon this Topick, at least. Announc'd by Nasal Telegraph, in come the Twins, bearing the old Pewter Coffee-Machine venting its Puffs of Vapor, and a large Basket dedicated to Saccharomanic Appetites, piled to the Brim with fresh-fried Dough-Nuts roll'd in Sugar, glaz'd Chestnuts, Buns, Fritters, Crullers, Tarts. "What is this? Why, Lads, you read my mind." "The Coffee's for you, Nunk,--" "--last Time, you were talking in your sleep," the Pair explain, placing the Sweets nearer themselves, all in this Room being left to seize and pour as they may. As none could agree which had been born first, the Twins were nam'd Pitt and Pliny, so that each might be term'd "the Elder" or "the Younger," as might day-to-day please one, or annoy his Brother. The passage isn't chosen at random; it's the moment that I decided I loved the authorial voice, even with its erratic capitals and disconcerting spellings. The same light humourous touch runs through the entire novel, and remains a delight whenever it comes to the fore. The story itself is about the friendship of Charley Mason and Jere Dixon, the astronomer and surveyer who laid down the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland. On one level Pynchon is playing it straight: he sticks to the known historical details of the period and the pair, and indeed the book is meticulously researched not just for accuracy of detail but for the various flavours of the times, the concerns of society and so on. In another sense, though, the novel is a surrealist and comedic extravaganza, featuring a talking dog, Vaucanson's famous mechanical defecating duck (escaped from Paris and in amatory pursuit of an ex-chef), an invisible American Golem, a sinister Jesuit and his insane Chinese feng shui-adept nemesis, were-beavers... One sign of Pynchon's mastery is how he weaves together the surreal/comic and the serious, putting the dichotomy to work in parallel with the changing sympathies of the two central characters. At root, as I said, the novel is about their friendship. It begins and ends with Mason's death, taking in their first posting together, their epic collaboration in the young America, and their partial estrangement and eventual reunion. At the beginning the story is fairly simply told, and by the end it's a bit of a tear-jerker, but (like that recent invention the "Sandwich") the meat is in the middle. Cherrycoke's narrative becomes fragmented, the same episodes are retold with variations or explicitly denied, at one point a separate story (an erotic fantasy of Indian capture being read by two of the Reverend's audience) somehow folds itself into the story he is telling... When Mason & Dixon turn back East there is an explicitly counterfactual passage detailing the increasingly mystical consequences if they had continued West... This layered, interwoven narrative conceals rather than reveals the 'plot', in the sense of the precise story of the actions of the characters. There are also (of course) hints and shadows of conspiracy, which might be their imagination or might be political or even metaphysical... but neither type of plot is really the point of the exercise. Mason & Dixon is at root a study in character and atmosphere, and what plot or plots it contains is very deliberately kept kaleidoscopic and unclear."
Picador (2004), Paperback, 784 pages

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 11:28:18 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "Beyond spectacular. The only reason I can't tell you that you have to read this book is that some people simply won't manage to understand or appreciate the language. So I'll say instead that you have to read the first page, and if you can make some sense of it, then you have to read the rest. The problem --and the glory-- of this book is that it isn't written in English. Hoban has done properly what Burgess half-attempted with A Clockwork Orange: he uses a created language to separate the reader, in time, from the setting of the novel. In this case it's not a question of filling in a glossary of some thirty terms, though, the effort extends through vocabulary, idiom, spelling, right into the rhythms and structure of the prose. The story is told in the first person by Riddley Walker himself, a young man in a post-apocalyptic England where society has rebuilt to something like the late Stone Age. The comparison is inexact because the remnants of our own culture and technology complicate the picture, and in fact the 'historical' level of the plot concerns the disruptive influence of anachronism on this culture, as certain technologies are *re*discovered without the wider scientific context that cushioned their impact the first time around. The vagueness of "certain technologies" is intentional. There are many ways to enjoy Riddley Walker, and one of them is as a puzzle: the language is obscure enough that it's great fun to try to puzzle out what is being referred to before further context makes it more explicit. Actually you'll have to read it this way to some extent, which is why I (sadly) have to admit it's not for everyone. Here's the first paragraph, so you can make your own mind up: On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later.' The other spears gone in then and he wer dead and the steam coming up off him in the rain and we all yelt, 'Offert!' If the spelling is getting in the way try reading the passage aloud. One of the magic things Hoban has achieved is to capture the rhythm of spoken storytelling in prose, so that the spelling and the runon grammar are not just signs saying "semiliterate" but actually integral parts of an idiosyncratic voice. Riddley is a storyteller (indeed, he tells several 'official' stories in the course of the novel, as well as the frame narrative itself) and his voice is a storyteller's voice. While it's important, the language is not the only thing to love about the novel though. The story itself is simple in events but complex in terms of the connections between them, the wider effects and subtle, mystical resonances they set up. In the same way that the language reflects Riddley's oral-historical society, the story itself reflects his mystical pre-(or post-)scientific worldview. Again, this is present superficially in Riddley's interpretation of events, but more subtly in the events themselves and Riddley's (Hoban's) choice of which events to relate. As well as this historical/mystical level to the story there's the personal aspect, as Riddley (become a man, remember, on his 12th birthday) loses his father and leaves his home village, becomes a mystic and gets caught up in the politics of the larger society he lives in. Riddley is a sympathetic narrator and you quickly get caught up in his reactions to events, which are both totally foreign and totally familiar. And finally there's yet another way to read the novel, as a black comedy on the impossibility of reading and understanding the traces of history. Riddley's people have a number of legends and stories of our history and the fall of our society, and there are a few artifacts that have survived into their time. The most complete is a description in modern English of a painting, "The Legend of St Eustace", and the interpretation Riddley is given (since he "dont even know 1/2 these words") is hilariously wrong-headed. I recommend re-reading the passage after you've finished the book though, and you'll see how black the humour really is; that one misreading contains essentially all the tragic errors of the story and the misunderstandings that hobble Riddley's society in its attempts to climb back to half-remembered glories. I recommend reading Riddley Walker at least twice anyway. If you can handle the language at all, you'll find that it becomes transparent surprisingly fast, but still if you begin again after you finish you'll understand a lot more clearly what Riddley is trying to say. Part of the honesty of the voice Hoban has created is that the character never explains what is to him obvious, so that we build up only slowly a partial picture of the world he lives in, and reading the novel again with this picture in mind from the beginning gives a much richer picture. In fact, if you love Riddley Walker even half as much as I do, you won't want to stop at a second reading. Each time I return I discover more details that have slipped past me, and each time I enjoy anew the unique voice that Hoban has created. May you do the same!"
Indiana University Press (1998), Edition: Expanded, Paperback

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 11:28:36 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "Magnificent, funny and tragic and ultimately optimistic... Chabon tells the intertwined stories of two Jewish cousins during WWII, in the early boom and heyday of the American comic book industry. I can't really discuss this one without spoilers, so be warned: some significant plot elements are going to show up. I'll leave some surprises, I promise. Josef Kavalier trained as an escapist as a boy in Prague, before fleeing the Nazi occupation to live with his aunt's family in New York. There he and his cousin Sam Clay create the superhero The Escapist, one of the most successful comic book series of the boom. Joe is saving everything he can in order to pay for his younger brother's escape from Europe, while Sammy manages a growing stable of comic book artists; meanwhile Joe meets the love of his life and Sammy realises --slowly and reluctantly, in 40s America-- that he is gay. Suddenly, for both characters, everything collapses. Sam is confronted with how marginalising his burgeoning sexuality is, while Joe loses the brother he has worked so hard to save. Both, in different ways, are broken by what they cannot accept, and it takes until nearly the end of the novel for them to achieve some partial recovery. I said the novel is "ultimately optimistic", which is perhaps an overstatement. The theme is escape, but again and again this is made impossible or shown to be insufficient for the characters. In fact the final, tentative, turn of Sam and Joe's fortunes only arrives when they stop trying to escape their respective problems and turn and engage them instead. At their respective low points Joe and Sam are truly pathetic figures, escaping from the unacceptable into despair and madness. At the apex of their collaboration, though, they and their creation are equally magnificent. Chabon describes The Escapist so lovingly that it is hard to believe that the series never existed, and weaves it seamlessly into the real (and fascinating) history of the growth of the comics industry during the war. Perhaps the greatest strength of the novel is how its personal and historical stories interlock so tightly, as do its own themes and those of the comic strip it describes. We've seen some aspects of these stories before (Jewish survivor's alienation and painful coming-out stories are hardly original subjects) but they're made newly fresh by the escapist material, and above all by Chabon's enormous enthusiasm for comics and his talent for conveying their visual appeal in prose. Highly recommended."
Picador (2001), Paperback

The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols

Sun, 13 May 2007 15:30:46 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "Both better and worse than the film, but on balance the worse wins out. It's better in tone: the film is a feel-good family drama/comedy with a happy ending, the book has more dirt and alcoholism and stupidity. The Coyote Angel of the novel deserves the name ("a half-toothless, one-eyed bum sort of coyote dressed in tattered blue jeans and sandals, and sporting a pair of drab motheaten wings [...] [T]he angel, startled by Amarante's voice, froze stiff with its ears lying back flat; and then, realizing there was no immediate danger, it turned [...]"), while the film's version is just tricksy. The same dusty, worn, and shabby sensibility underpins the story as well. Of course there is space for much more story in a novel of 630 pages than a movie of 117 minutes, and many of the extra glimpses of Milagro that we get have a nasty edge to them. The backstory on the characters that made it into the movie gives them more depth as well, although many of the characters feel more like multi-stereotypes than real well-rounded individuals: several flat dimensions glued awkwardly together to give a semblance of depth, as in "Horsethief Shorty's a real tough wiseguy, I bet you didn't expect him to have a purely platonic and tender love affair, now, did you?". (In one case, the film's character even manages to completely outshine the book's. Christopher Walkin's Agent Kyril Montana is a different, though related, character to the one Nichols wrote, and the original couldn't drive out the newcomer in my mind.) Where the film shines is in the sheer beauty of so many of the shots (the Coyote Angel, despite his relative good health; the senile brigade on the back of the truck; Amarante on the bulldozer), and where the book fails is in the writing. The following example took me less than ten minutes to find by random page-flicking: Bernabé cleared his throat once while ambling nochalantly onto the front porch. There his eyes met his own pickup, and he was staring at this vehicle feeling uncomfortable, though unable to ascertain the reason for his disquiet, when Bruno Martinez sauntered out the front door and articulated the reason for Bernabé's discomfort[.] Wordy, clumsy, and packed with irrelevant detail; it's not by any means all this bad (or I wouldn't have made it through) but this is fairly representative. My advice, though it pains me to give it: watch the movie with the kids and skip the book."
Ballantine Books (1987), Edition: Reissue, Paperback

The Fifth Head Of Cerberus (Millennium SF Masterworks S) by Gene Wolfe

Sun, 13 May 2007 15:35:55 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "Story-behind-the-story done right. These are three stories that stand on their own as SF works, but taken together the sidelong glances and allusions and discrepancies add up to another story in the background, making the whole experience much richer. I imagine this was the effect that Jeff VanderMeer was aiming for with City of Saints and Madmen, but he tried too hard: many elements of the city and the stories were obviously only present to hint at the "mysterious" backstory. Wolfe nails it: the odd elements all support their individual stories, indeed are necessary for them to exist, but combine as well into something larger. The worlds Wolfe describes (two sister planets) are present mostly in the corner of the eye, rather than being fully-fledged intricately worked-out creations. One planet is clearly based on the early colonisation of Australia: the original inhabitants are subsistance desert-dwellers, referred to by the colonists as "abos" and apparently driven to extinction by a combination of deliberate hunting and fatal cultural contamination. The assumptions and expectations this resonance sets up give us a sense that we know more of the planet than we do (of course the correspondence is not exact, and some of these expectations are subverted by later discoveries). We get much less sense of the other planet (where the first story takes place); while Wolfe again provides only sparse details out the corners of the eyes, these neither relate to any contemporary stereotypes nor provide any coherent picture. This is the very opposite of world-building, in one sense: the details we get are only those that relate directly to the story, and there's no sense the Wolfe has filled out all the others himself. On the other hand, the result is, paradoxically, to provide a strong sense of a world that does exist, but to give the view of it that a traveller might take away: fragmentary, confusing, incoherent and contradictory in some ways, but definitely a view of somewhere real. In some sense this is the view we get of the story-behind-the-story as well: fragments, individually dubious and collectively incoherent, that nonetheless can (with half-closed eyes) form the shape of something greater. This seems to be the mood Wolfe is building towards throughout; in the third story the narrative takes the same form, a collection of notes and diary fragments read out of order and written by a man (or possibly several) who was (were?) possibly insane and definitely deliberately deceptive at times, so that they cannot be read as a coherent or total narrative. It's at times a frustrating form in the effort it demands from the reader, but Wolfe's writing is good enough and the selection of fragments has enough narrative justification (on top of its puzzle-setting function) to make the whole extremely rewarding."
Gollancz (1999), Paperback, 256 pages

City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer

Sun, 13 May 2007 15:33:40 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "I was disappointed, but I had very high expectations. The stories are good, the 'concept album' design is very nice indeed, but the world-building struck me as gimmicky and failed to take itself seriously enough. This is not to say that you shouldn't read it. Taken invidividually, most of the stories are good and a few are excellent. Top pick goes to "The Transformation of Martin Lake", an eerie account of the psychological breakdown that created a great artist. VanderMeer alternates excerpts from a critic's discussion of Lake's work with the gradual unfolding of the events leading to the breakdown, which at the same time shows us the true inspiration behind the work and exposes how baseless the critic's theorising is. It's a nice combination of pretty nasty psychological study and pretty funny satire. Another favourite piece is "In the Hours After Death", which in any other collection would be straight-up surrealism. It tells of the temporary reanimation of a recently dead trumpet player, by fungal infection. Read as pure surrealism it's lush, beautiful and strange. The problems start because in some sense we're supposed to take it seriously. I described City above as a 'concept album'. The first half of the book consists of four stories set in the city of Ambergris (one of which is presented as a tourist guide to the history of the city). The second half is nominally the personal effects of a mental patient appearing in the last of the stories, "The Strange Case of X". As I said, the design is lovely, with each story presented in its own typography and page layout, really giving the impression of facsimile copies of a disparate collection of original documents. The downside to this conceit is that it reinforces the realistic interpretation of the surreal elements of the stories: we are to take seriously that Ambergris is a real place, in which apparently surreal events are commonplace. This isn't bad in itself, but the nature of the surrealism becomes problematic. It can be summed up in two words: fungus, and squid. The fungal element runs through Ambergris like ... well, like mould through cheese. It's part of the atmosphere of the place and underpins lots of the more overt horrific elements (although not those of "Martin Lake"). And the squid are there for laughs. At least, that's the impression I get. They're funny, sometimes, but Ambergris is not a comedic invention. Somehow the world-building is deeply inconsistant in its combination of comedically-inspired and horrifically-inspired elements. Another sign of the kind of imagination at work is the view we get of the city itself. This is characterised by a few towering landmarks that are visible from all quarters; not just geographically but historically and socially as well. It's the Borges Bookstore, Hoegbottom & Sons, Voss Bender, in story after story after story. And in much the same fashion, fungus and squid. I get an impression a little as if VanderMeer wants to brand his creation as clearly and distinctly as possible: "fungus and squid... that must be Ambergris!" "Yes, you're right, there's the Borges Bookstore, it is Ambergris!" I can't help comparing the style to China Miéville's Bas Lag novels, unfavourably. It's an unfair comparison, since Miéville is holding himself to standards of realism that VanderMeer seems to have rejected. The result, though, is in the Bas Lag case a factual description of a fictional world, while Ambergris is very clearly fictional at all levels. This might seem odd, given the attention to detail in the design and typography, but again the comparison to a concept album seems appropriate. There's a consciousness of the game being played, a self-consciousness which gives rise to in-jokes and which can't help subverting the apparent realism of the depicted world. Just as we know the Beatles aren't really Sgt Pepper's band yet we sing along about Billy Shears, we're encouraged not to take the city of Ambergris seriously as a world (the backdrop for the collection), even as we take the individual settings as seriously as the stories require us to. So I'm in two minds about a recommendation. Many of the stories are stronger taken individually, but the 'concept album' design of the book as a whole is pretty neat. Check it out, but don't expect it to be a believable solidly-constructed world."
Tor (2004), Hardcover, 496 pages

The meaning of everything : the story of the Oxford English dictionary by Simon Winchester

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 11:45:45 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "Light but fun. Lots of amusing anecdotes, but nothing that I felt drawn to investigating further. Nicely written, but nothing special."
Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2003. xxv, 260 p. : ill., ports. ; 23 cm.

Homage to Catalonia (Penguin Modern Classics) by George Orwell

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 11:43:53 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "Disappointing. Orwell is not nearly as crisp and clear here as in his essays, which I'd been reading just before. The history is fascinating, but also deeply depressing. I recommend the essays for his style and 1984 for his pessimism instead."
Penguin Books Ltd (2003), Paperback, 256 pages

Selected essays by George Orwell

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 11:44:11 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "Spectacular writing, whether you agree with him or not. Lots of the politics is completely incomprehensible to me, but I can still take delight in his crisp prose. Of course Politics and the English Language is a classic, decrying sloppy language as symptomatic of careless or dishonest thought; Orwell's own writing, as one would hope, follows the principles he's advocating. Worth it for the style, regardless of what you think of his opinions."
[Harmondsworth, Eng.] Penguin Books [1957] 202 p. 18 cm.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 11:43:29 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "Multiple stories nested like Russian dolls. They're stylistically very varied, but thematically linked, and each appears explicitly (as a film, a found package of notes, and so on) in the next-surrounding narrative. The structure is very regular, you get the opening halves of five stories, one complete, then the conclusions of the five in nested order. Beautifully written, powerfully affecting, recommended."
Sceptre (date?), Paperback

Doctor Faustus; by Christopher Marlowe

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 11:44:30 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "The introductory essay reads almost like a parody of scholarship, and the notes are almost totally useless for appreciating the play. The play itself is great though, particularly the (surprisingly sympathetic) character Mephistophilis. Faustus himself comes across as foolish rather than tragic, and his reaction once his damnation arrives doesn't make him look any better. The demon gets most of the really emotionally affecting lines. I was surprised how much I recognised -- it seems that the play has had just as much influence as any single work of Shakespeare's. Pop quiz: what's the deal with "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it"? Answer: it's Mephistophilis's answer to the question "How comes it then that thou art out of hell?": "Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?" Heavy stuff, to which Faustus proudly replies "What, is great Mephistophilis so passionate For being deprived of the joys of heaven? Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess." If you wanted to make Faustus a Tragic Hero, his fatal flaw would be simple: he never listens to sensible advice and warnings. I recommend the play, but the particular edition I've got is not worth searching out. Depending on your flexibility with spelling, it might be worth getting a modern-language edition like this one though."
London, Methuen, 1968. lxiii, 144 p. facsim. 21 cm.

A Prince of Our Disorder (Oxford Lives) by John Mack

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 11:42:59 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "A psychological take on the life of T.E. "of Arabia" Lawrence. Mack tries awfully hard to avoid sensationalism, which is tricky given the subject, but he pulls it off. The history and politics is fascinating but terribly depressing; the analysis of the heroic aspects of Lawrence's personality just plain fascinating. Mack can't avoid some in-depth analysis of his sexual disfunction, but you're left with the feeling that he'd really rather not focus on it -- his preferred topic is the aspects of personality that (combined with opportunity) can create a hero (in a rather carefully specified sense), and his take on Lawrence's sexual peculiarities is that these are more fallout from some traumatic experiences during his campaigns than features contributing to his unique abilities. Whether he's right or not, he makes the historical/political/psychological stuff far more interesting (I got the feeling he's also trying to avoid the label of sex-obsessed psychologist/psychiatrist)."
Oxford Paperbacks (1990), Paperback, 587 pages

Alan Turing : the enigma by Andrew Hodges

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 11:45:09 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "A good biography, which manages to balance an explicit "gay agenda" along with the more impartial account of his intellectual life and peculiarities of character. It's an academic work with all sources carefully cited, which I appreciated also. Turing of course comes across as a very sympathetic figure, but his quirks are made quite clear as well. Particularly interesting for me was the insight I gained into the British class system and how significant this was for the war effort and in general the 'high intellectual' culture. It seems as if Turing was such an odd bird he couldn't have achieved anything like as much as he did without being treated as an upper-class twit. Also fascinating (and disturbing) was the institutionalised gay repression that (presumably) led to Turing's suicide. I've lost the page reference in the biography, but googling tells me that in 1991 homosexuality was still grounds for dismissal from the British military -- as I recall, Hodges comments on the policy change for the secret service, which was even later."
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. 587 p., [8] p. of plates : ill., ports. ; 24 cm.

Swamp fever : a Golden Bay memoir by Gerard Hindmarsh

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 11:42:24 -0400

tikitu-reviews's review: "My younger brother's high-school class wrote and performed a Golden-Bay-ised version of Romeo and Juliet, in which the two warring houses were the "ferals" and the "rednecks" (or the "alternative lifestylers" and the "local farmers" if you prefer). Hindmarsh's book is a history of the homesteading movement that brought him, along with so many other hippies, to the Bay in the '70s and gave rise to the polarised population that exists today. One of the interesting things about the book (for someone who grew up with the situation as it is) is the glimpse it gives of how disturbing and difficult those early days must have been. This is more a book for Golden Bay folk than for the general reader -- there's a lot of amusing stories but they get an extra zing from being about people you know. The language is very Kiwi, very colloquial and chatty; it's nice to read, but not in large doses."
Nelson, N.Z.: Craig Potton Publishing, 2006. 193 p.