Reading roundup

Two by John Banville  

The Untouchable
The Sea

I've now read each of these novels twice. They are deservedly praised. Of the two, I think The Untouchable is Banville's masterpiece: a virtuosic, unsettling though often humorous fictionalization of the life of Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge Five. The first-person narrator and protagonist, Victor Maskell (Blunt), has led a double life along many dimensions– as a spy for the Soviets and closeted gay man– and his deceptions definitely extend to himself. It is also a twisted story of unrequited love. Especially, it is a glorious exercise in style– I found myself wanting to read many of the sentences over again, wondering just how Banville pulls it off, page after poetic page.

The Sea, another novel written as a first-person reminiscence, is shorter; exceptionally well written and structured as well. In the end, the plot didn't quite convince me. Still, a fantastic book.

Three Japanese novellas

Snow Country
Yasunari Kawabata

Kitchen
Banana Yoshimoto

The Emissary
Yoko Tawada

I had read Snow Country before. It is justly regarded as a classic. The Kitchen is perhaps a trifle, but delightful. The Emissary is a near-future dystopia, deliberately quirky... too deliberately, in fact. 

Miscellaneous "entertainments"

A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles

A Certain Justice
P.D. James

Luminous
Sylvia Park

Exordia
Seth Dickinson

Of these, the P.D. James is– unsurprisingly– the best read. Nasty victim, nasty suspects... Dalgliesh and Miskin, getting it done. The Towles book is sweet, but the writing did not "cast a spell," as the blurb promised. The last two, sci-fi books, received some critical accolades, which goes to show that sci-fi critics have low standards and/or are starved for good literature. Luminous is a robot book, with a somewhat interesting kid robot character and a fairly perfunctory dose of family drama. But how many indifferently written disaffected robot books can you read? Exordia is a sprawling pull-out-all-the-stops alien encounter hard sci-fi meets woo-woo sci-fi with extended high-tech battle scene mess. I suppose it is the beginning of a series that I won't read.

Reading roundup

Catching up...

The Sound and the Fury
Light in August
William Faulkner

The only Faulkner novel I remember having actually read before now was As I Lay Dying– not an easy read, but a good bit easier than these challenging books on challenging subjects. To me, The Sound and the Fury holds up better as a coherent novel... but Light in August is stunning too, and should be read by anyone interested in race and racism in America. Not woke, but deeply insightful. Absalom, Absalom! is up next.

The Singularity
Dino Buzzati

A psychological sci-fi novella first published in 1960, it is entertaining and prescient in its fashion. Nice translation by Anne Milano Appel. 

Going Zero
Anthony McCarten

This near-future paranoid thriller "ripped from the headlines" got some good reviews, but is contrived and rather underwhelmingly written. Barely adequate for a long plane ride. 

Indigenous Continent
Pekka Hämäläinen

The subtitle is The Epic Contest for North America, and that is a good description of this survey of the military and political history of the centuries-long struggle between Native Americans and the colonial powers. Hämäläinen has a lot of ground to cover, both temporally and geographically, and at times his writing becomes schematic. But overall the narrative is dramatic and well told. His take is that a sequence of major tribal confederations were in control of much of the continent up until their final defeats in the nineteenth century, and that their successes had to do with features of their political systems as well as their shrewd ability to play off the European and U.S. powers against each other. Disease, trade, and horses all played major roles, as did women tribal leaders. Remarkable, if tragic and appalling.

Reading roundup

Sabbatical... Good time to get some reading done... 

In Ascension
Martin MacInnes

This 500-pager is at its best at the beginning, as we learn about the protagonist-biologist Leigh and her troubled childhood; and in the approach to the somewhat freaky and ambiguous ending. I love alien contact plots, and this book has one... sort of... but the central 2/3 of the novel wastes way too many pages on hard sci fi and algae farming.

Homelessness Is a Housing Problem
Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern

Yes, it is... the title may qualify for the biggest "duh!" of all time. But as the authors note, the discourse around homelessness has often centered on the individual economic and behavioral traits associated with being unhoused, as well as debates over policy priorities, such as transitional shelter vs. permanent housing, "housing first," vs. services, tough on crime vs. liberal drug and vagrancy laws, etc. Colburn and Aldern make a simple but essential point: Individuals who are more vulnerable– whether due to poverty, mental illness, substance abuse, or other traits– are more likely to be "selected" into homelessness in any given community, but the size of the homelessness problem is a function of conditions in that community's rental housing market. One can think in terms of a bell-shaped distribution of vulnerability across individuals, with the cost of housing determining the vulnerability cutoff between being housed and unhoused, and therefore the size of the homeless "tail."

The book relies on fairly simpleminded statistical evidence: essentially a series of bivariate scatter plots of the rate of homelessness (as measure by point-in-time surveys) against various potential determinants (such as poverty rates), in a cross-section of cities or regions. Chapter by chapter, they dismiss most of the standard accounts until they get to rents and housing supply. The economist in me wanted to see a big multivariate regression table at the end, estimating a "horse race" between the various potential determinants simultaneously, and they claim in the text to have done this, with no substantive change in the findings. I believe them, but it would be nice if they could share their data somewhere. Then, if I assign this book in a class, I could have the students replicate and tweak the analysis. 

The book's core recommendations flow from the findings: Basically, build more affordable housing. Of course, it's easy to say that, but they do offer some good discussions of the practical politics and political economy of housing development. They particularly advocate subsidized increases in housing supply at the low end of the rental market, although their cross-city comparisons seem to affirm that a more elastic overall supply of market-rate housing might do the trick. So: More money to help the most vulnerable in our communities! But also... Build baby build!

The Niagara River
Kay Ryan

Very short, very clever poems. At her best, her internal rhymes, para-rhymes, and wordplay bring both delight and epiphany. At times, they veer over the line into precious. But late at night just before I turn out the light, almost the whole lot hit the spot.

Reading roundup

Some good ones... one not so good... 

My Ántonia
Willa Cather

Fine story-telling, beautifully written. It is simultaneously two coming-of age stories – of the main characters, and of the frontier prairie society they inhabit and build. Cather's admiration for the immigrant farm girls who move into town and grow into strong and remarkably independent American women is evident, even if the most willful of them all, Ántonia herself, is the one who through unfortunate circumstances returns to the farm, devoting her life to bearing and raising an enormous brood of future farmers.

The Ruined Map
Kobo Abe

Abe's excellent 1967 novel is a noir in full-on existential mode. Our narrator is a private detective hired to find a woman's husband, who left one day and never returned. Hubby seems to have been messed up in something criminal, possibly involving his brother-in-law, but the clues, such as they are, lead in various directions with no real resolution. All angst and atmosphere, the book features moments of humor as well, such as when the detective describes in great detail his special method for examining a photograph through binoculars to discern the inner thoughts and feelings of its subject. The translation, which reads flawlessly, is by E. Dale Saunders. 

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport
Samit Basu

I quite enjoyed Basu's debut, The City Inside, a plausible near-future romp in post-Modi India. His follow-up, a more distant-future riff on the Aladdin story, has its moments, but bogs down trying to describe a bizarre and ultimately unconvincing mash-up of AI bots, modified humans, and mysterious aliens. Of course, be careful what you wish for! 

The Less Dead
Denise Mina

Another reliably well-written and entertaining thriller with a conscience from Mina, this time featuring a sympathetic portrayal of sex workers.  

The Selected Poems of Po Chü-I
Translated by David Hinton

Po Chü-I (Bai Juyi) was a Tang poet born in 772, not long after the deaths of the great generation of Tang masters: Du Fu, Li Bai, and Wang Wei. I have enjoyed reading Po enormously, in this exquisite translation by David Hinton. Many of the poems are contemplative, reflecting Po's interest in Taoism and Zen Buddhism. But his social commentary could really bite...

Songs of Ch’in-chou
7. Light and Sleek

Riding proud in the streets, parading 
horses that glisten, lighting the dust... 

When I ask who such figures could be, 
people say they're imperial favorites: 

vermillion sashes— they're ministers; 
and purple ribbons— maybe generals. 

On horses passing like drifting clouds 
they swagger their way to an army feast, 

to those nine wines filling cup and jar 
and eight dainties of water and land. 

After sweet Tung-t'ing Lake oranges 
and mince-fish from a lake of heaven, 

they've eaten to their hearts content, 
and happily drunk, their spirits swell. 

There's drought south of the Yangtze: 
In Ch’ü-chou, people are eating people.

Reading roundup

Slow couple of months for reading. 

Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih

First published in 1966, this celebrated novel by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih covers a range of topical themes, including most obviously colonialism, but also the (mis-)treatment of women in Sudanese and Western society. It is also rich and subtle in its descriptive language and its mysterious doppelgänger narrative. I can't compare it with the original Arabic, but judging from the results, Denys Johnson-Davies's translation is exquisite. Highly recommended.

The Eye of the Heron
Ursula K. LeGuin

Well, not really a heron, but that's what the human colonists have decided one of the creatures looks like on the planet they have colonized– some of them against their will. The story moves right along, and LeGuin covers many of her themes– gender, freedom, authoritarianism. The effectiveness and limits of non-violent collective action play a central role. The book also offers a pretty decent fictional illustration of the Domar serfdom model. 

Vagabonds
Hao Jingfang

Earth vs. Mars, ho hum. I stuck with this sci-fi snooze-fest far longer than I should have.

Art of the Chicken
Jacques Pépin 

I consider myself a pretty good cook, and others seem to agree. I learned some of what I know from observing Mom, who is a very good cook, but I would say Jacques Pépin deserves the most credit for my competence and confidence in the kitchen. His cooking shows always struck the right balance between taste, technique, intuition, quality ingredients, and charm. Speaking of charm, that would be the right term for Jacques's colorful paintings of chickens, which fill many of the pages of this book. Part memoir, part cookbook, the recipes are casual and assume that you have watched Jacques enough to know what to do with them. 

Reading roundup

I'm way behind.  

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh

The novel is packed with melodrama, romance, humor, irony, and Catholicism... and very well written. So I suppose it is the masterpiece people say it is. 

Crook Manifesto
Colson Whitehead

This sequel to Harlem Shuffle is really three novellas set in 1970s Harlem, the first and third featuring our hero, the furniture store owner and sometime crook Ray Carney, along with Pepper, a thug with a conscience, if not a heart of gold. The middle novella is a plot diversion revolving around blaxploitation film-making. For the most part Whitehead uses the conventions of the crime novel to show rather than tell us about his main themes of racism, political corruption, and economic striving, although occasionally he succumbs to the temptation to do a little lecturing. The climactic scene ties things up a little too neatly for my taste, but the book is a good read, and I'll be happy to see what's next for Carney in the inevitable follow-up. Whitehead has E.L. Doctorow's sensibility and ambition, if not quite his chops. But who does? 

The Quick and the Dead
Joy Williams

Williams is best known as a writer of short stories, and this novel reads like a collection of loosely connected stories. She writes well, but overall it's too quirky and precious for me.  

The Steel Crocodile
D.G. Compton

Not Compton's best, but a decent sci fi novel covering many of his concerns, including religion, individual freedom, and the misuse of psychology. It's also interesting as a vision of AI dystopia, published in 1970.

Evergreen
Naomi Hirahara

A mystery set in postwar LA, featuring the community of Japanese-Americans formerly "interned" during the War. The plot moves along and seems to be historically well-informed, but the writing is pretty pedestrian.

Innocent Blood
P.D. James

James was generally misanthropic; the "usual suspects" in her murder mysteries were typically nasty or weak, or both, each fully capable of being the guilty party. Of course to have a mystery you need to have multiple characters who could have "dunnit." Hers is a grim picture of human nature and modern society, but in the Dalgliesh novels the bleakness was partly offset by the fundamental goodness and humanity of Inspector Dalgliesh himself and, later in the series, his colleague Kate Miskin. 

Innocent Blood, from roughly the middle of James's career, has no Dalgliesh, and every character is pretty twisted and unpleasant. Still, the book is wonderfully written and really keeps you turning the pages; and damned if some of the nasties don't start to redeem themselves just a little, by way of... what's this? Love? And then, in the overly contrived climactic scene, it all crashes down, only to be set right again in an unsatisfying and in some ways quite disturbing epilogue. This is at once one of James's best books and one of the most problematic. I'm glad she brought back Adam D.

Reading roundup

The Ghost Road
Pat Barker

The third novel in the Regeneration trilogy is thematically and stylistically the most ambitious of the series and, for the most part, equally as compelling as the first two. The book's characters are haunted by dreams, daydreams, memories, and ghosts– real or metaphorical– and by very real traumas and dilemmas. I was not completely convinced by the passages in which real-life protagonist William Rivers recalls and reflects upon his encounters with Melanesians in his earlier life as an ethnographer, but one cannot dismiss the brutal irony of a British colonial culture that could fear and condemn ritual acts of human sacrifice in the South Seas while sending countless thousands of its own youth off to the killing fields of Europe... "Dulce et decorum." 

The Lathe of Heaven
Ursula K. Le Guin

The multiverse plot done right. Le Guin's short novel blends her characteristic humanism with an Aladdin's lamp "be careful what you wish for" fable– the source of the story's humor as well as its sting. In its 184 pages you'll also get an alien invasion, a prescient portrayal of post climate-change Portland, and a very sweet love story, all wrapped up in a well-written 184-page package. Bravo! 

Bad Actors
Mick Herron

The latest Slough House; a solid addition to the series. The baddest (in the bad sense) of the bad actors is, as usual, a populist-authoritarian political grifter. It's all about politics, as well as the professional love-hate relationship between our "hero" Jackson Lamb and his ally-nemesis, head spook Diana Taverner. Their symbiosis and grudging mutual respect form the driving force of the series. Comparisons with Le Carré are not entirely apt, given the mischievously comic tone of Herron's books, but the two authors definitely share similarly cynical politics and a sense that the career British spies they write about are – to paraphrase Churchill – the worst people in the world, except for all the others. While recovering from my first-ever and nasty case of covid recently, I watched A Most Wanted Man, the film adaptation of Le Carré's novel starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. The plot is not Le Carré at his best, but the movie is solid, and of course Hoffman is always worth watching. He is ideal as the world-weary master spy with a conscience, a la Smiley. Jackson Lamb is cut from the same cloth, despite his cover of crass buffoonery and equal-opportunity bigotry. As the series continues (now up to #8), with each of Lamb's triumphs and acts of kindness and loyalty it has become increasingly implausible that any of the characters is really taken in by Lamb's schtick. The avid reader certainly knows better. I await #9 nonetheless.

The Wallcreeper
Nell Zink

There's little question that this novella is well written, and it features some appealing birds, in particular the eponymous little fellow, a distant relative of our beloved nuthatches. As for the first-person narrator, she is alternately funny and frustrating– in a book published in 2014, I find it a little difficult to buy a protagonist who is a smart woman yet so deferential to a series of untrustworthy dudes. Is she really just in it for the sex? And I wasn't sure what to make of the quick and tidy ending. Lesson learned? Or last laugh on her? Or on us?

Reading roundup

The Eye in the Door
Pat Barker

This was the sequel to Regeneration, Barker's excellent anti-war novel of WWI. A psychological thriller of a sort, The Eye in the Door keeps a lot of balls in the air in its tightly written 277 pages, with its portrayal of the oppression and repression of homosexuality, pacifism, and leftism in wartime Britain, the psychological trauma associated with trench warfare as well as subterfuge, and the inner turmoil of characters navigating complex moral dilemmas. A justly celebrated book. I'll eagerly move on to the third in the trilogy.

The Feral Detective
Jonathan Lethem

A dystopian novel of post-Trump America, it takes place in the desert hinterland east of Los Angeles, and features competing tribes of off-the-gridders: the (male) Bears and the (female) Rabbits. Pitched as an edgy detective novel, it is also a fairly ham-handed allegory of Trumpian America and our gendered political and cultural divide. Lethem still seems to be phoning it in, compared to the brilliant promise of some of his earlier work, and only five years after its publication, The Feral Detective's message seems more stale than insightful. Still, Lethem phoning it in is a better writer than many: If you're in the market for a detective story as well as a quirky love story, you could do worse. 

The City Inside
Samit Basu

William Gibson goes to Delhi in this high-energy, near-future romp. I liked the characters, and I liked the buzzy language and plausibly bleak but somehow still hopeful vision of authoritarian India after post-Modi fundamentalist turmoil. 

Infinity Gate
M.R. Carey

It's the multiverse. Travel between dimensions is a bit like travel between planets or galaxies, but all you have to do is step on a platform and shazam! you appear in the same place and time, but in an alternative history. Alternative evolutionary paths across these histories have made some people look more like cats or bunnies than humans. Huh. Apparently a lot of people liked this book. Maybe it improves after the point where I turned off my kindle and re-joined the here and now... 

The Mercy
Philip Levine

Levine's poetic voice was disarmingly plain. One page of Levine is a good antidote to 150 pages of M.R. Carey. It will restore your faith in the beauty and power of the written word.

Reading roundup

Some novels recently read in their entirety or in part...  

Quartet in Autumn
Barbara Pym
The blurb on the cover states: "Written with the wit and style of a twentieth-century Jane Austen." Certainly this quiet 1977 novel about four lonely and aging co-workers is witty, in a very Brit stiff-upper-lip manner. But Ms. Pym seems not to like any of her protagonists, and the most one can muster for any of them is pity, rather than empathy, let alone admiration. At least with Austen there is usually one character to like per novel.

Spook Street 
Mick Herron
Another Slough House comic thriller. Solid entertainment.

The Alien Years
Robert Silverberg
I quite liked his Dying Inside, and Tower of Glass was decent if predictable sci-fi. So it was a no-brainer that I would grab a used paperback copy of The Alien Years, which is– good guess!– about an alien invasion. I love alien invasion stories, but I gave up at page 60 of this 488-page snoozer. Dated and perfunctory. 

Nope

Jordan Peele's latest film is further evidence of his greatness, even if this shaggy dog of a story is not totally great. It is certainly worth watching: funny, at times scary, and full of amusing social commentary that ranges from broad to pretty clever. It lacks the punch and discipline of Get Out, but like that film it does feature Daniel Kaluuya, who is fantastic. In a movie where the cloud-like alien invader will eat you if it catches you looking it in the eye, a fellow like Kaluuya with eyeballs that nearly jump right out of his head is at a distinct disadvantage. Peele plays that for all it is worth, with darkened scenes in which Kaluuya's dark skin nearly disappears, his bug-eyes all aglow. 

Horses play a role here, and I felt the movie could have made more of them. Horses are, after all, the most alien of animals that humans regularly commune with. Note to self: EVs are great, but a horse is better during those times when an evil alien is using some kind of electromagnetic pulse to shut down all electrical devices. 

Recommended.

Sweet little sci-fi love stories

I confess to being a sucker for the genre of small movies that build a sweet love story on a sci-fi theme. Starman is the classic– though maybe a Jeff Bridges vehicle doesn't really count as "small." I praised Monsters here already– a sci-fi action romance that does a whole lot with what must have been a limited budget. And last night we watched Long Weekend, a worthy addition featuring two cute-as-buttons protagonists, relaxed humor, and a nice supporting turn by Damon Wayans Jr. Between delta, Afghanistan, and Haiti, you need 90 minutes of sweetness, don't you?

Dystopias

I've been reading... just not blogging. Time to catch up with a first installment of reviews.

Hummingbird Salamander
Jeff VanderMeer

As a big fan of VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, I went into this with high hopes. After all, I loved the trilogy and enjoyed Borne... and hummingbirds and salamanders are both among my very favorite creatures! With such lead characters, how could a near-future dystopia by a master of biologically informed future weirdness go wrong? Oh, let me count the ways. Basically, Jeff phoned it in, with mediocre writing and a perfunctory, almost weirdly conventional suspense plot. That the hummingbird and salamander are stuffed is emblematic of the lifelessness of the book. The ending is a shameless cliffhanger setup for the inevitable sequel, which I doubt I will be reading.

Good Neighbors
Sarah Langan

Heathers meets Desperate Housewives meets Stranger Things, this novel is at its best when it explores the intensely fraught relationships among the kids who inhabit this sinkhole-stricken suburb– fraughtness that spills over to their class-conflicted parents. The climax is a little forced, but it's mostly a fun and nasty little piece of work.

Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro's latest is more or less a hybrid of his two greatest novels: The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. It is a good read, but not as great as either of its parents. The protagonist and first-person narrator of this novel of the not-so-distant future is the "artificial friend," Klara. Klara is a wonderful literary invention– brilliant, naive, and tragicomic– but I couldn't help thinking that by now we have had plenty of exposure to interesting cyborgs and synths, if only from some recent TV series. Battlestar Galactica, Humans, Westworld (not to mention movies from Blade Runner to Ex Machina)– each has in its fashion explored quite effectively the territory of synths who become conscious of their exploitation and must decide how to react to that forbidden knowledge. Countless books in the sci fi genre have done the same. What has Ishiguro, Nobel laureate, shown us that we have not already seen? Without giving too much away, the book's distinctiveness and suspense rest with the question of whether Klara– smart, perceptive, and empathetic as she is– is ultimately capable of transcending her artificial worldview and recognizing the true horror of her condition. Like Stevens in the The Remains of the Day, Klara is pathologically self-denying and deluded (in her case, by design). Unlike Stevens, Klara seems profoundly admirable and lovable. Which makes the author's treatment of her– and the reader– that much more cruel.

The Expanse

I've enjoyed this Amazon Prime space opera, which recently finished its fifth season. Humans have colonized Mars, and much of the drama revolves around the political tensions between Mars, Earth, and the "belters," the proles who mine the asteroid belt. Being subject to imperialist/extractive global powers, the belters are prone to revolutionary-nationalist impulses, and the more radical among them are capable of inflicting horrific violence on the innocent to gain their independence and respect... or fear. On top of all that, humans have to contend with mysterious and highly powerful artifacts left behind by ancient alien civilizations– in particular, the "protomolecule," which makes the novel coronavirus look pretty harmless!

The best thing about the show is its look and feel. From expansive outer-space scenes and alien landscapes to claustrophobic interiors, the producers have done a lot with their budget. Zero-G is convincingly rendered. Suspenseful set pieces make you feel like you are there. Whether they use CGI or models, the buildings, mines, and mountains are lovely to look at. Some of my favorite scenes show cargo containers docked at the space station Tycho, floating in rectangular blocks and looking for all the world like the cargo of ships docked at the Port of Oakland. Also enjoyable are the incredibly diverse casting, and the sometimes barely comprehensible patois of the belters.

Having said all that, what makes The Expanse feel a little flat compared with its predecessor, Battlestar Galactica? Well, I'm sorry to report, the dialogue and the acting: Clunky, and clunky. Too bad: It's damn near a classic.

Sci Fi round-up

If you are fortunate enough to have a good used bookstore nearby, you may find a section of mass-market sci-fi paperbacks, which in the 60s and 70s seem to have listed at 75 cents or so and often featured tacky or even lurid covers (see below). At Feldman's Books in Menlo Park they now go for around 2 bucks a pop, but that's still a bargain for a good read, no? I recently picked up two by D.G. Compton, whose The Continuous Catherine Mortenhoe I liked a great deal, along with one by Robert Silverberg, whose quite good Dying Inside I read nearly ten years ago now. Each of these is worth discovering for 2 dollars, or the cost of a trip to your local library.

Synthajoy
Farewell Earth's Bliss
D.G. Compton
Assuming that Compton was responsible for titling his own books, he was amazingly bad at it, given how good he was as a writer. Title aside, Synthajoy is the real gem here, a paranoid, deeply psychological, and quite modernistic novel, narrated by Thea Cadence, who has been committed to a mental hospital for having murdered (apparently) her husband. The circumstances of the crime revolve around her husband's invention of a kind of virtual reality process for transferring emotional experiences. Thea's "treatment" involves just such a process, aimed at inducing "contrition," according to her nurse, or "guilt," as Thea sees it. The narrative moves backward and forward in time, as Thea attempts to make sense of events and maintain her dignity and agency. First published in 1968, Synthajoy presents what now looks like a plausible near-future dystopia, and another of Compton's riveting and complex female characters.

Farewell Earth's Bliss is a more conventional novel, following a group of new arrivals to a desolate penal colony on Mars. Left to fend for themselves under bleak conditions, the community has evolved a kind of puritanical authoritarianism, whether out of necessity or atavism. Bigotry of various kinds– sexism, racism, homophobia, and religious intolerance– come with the territory (as they do back on good old planet Earth come to think of it– bliss for whom?). The choice facing each member of the ensemble cast is simple: Get along, or take that last chilly walk out into the freezing, airless desert.

Tower of Glass
Robert Silverberg
The androids in Tower of Glass are of the type that is biologically indistinguishable from humans, though produced in vats rather than wombs. Designed to serve humans as slaves, they come in three different castes, but whatever the caste, large numbers of them practice a secret religion that worships their corporate creator-inventor, Simeon Krug, as the incarnation of God. Krug, meanwhile, has undertaken a massive project to build an enormous sort of radio tower, intending to communicate with an alien civilization, whose signals have recently been received on earth. Krug is a familiar type, as is his hubris, and before long you will spot the climax to the plot coming down 5th Avenue, if you haven't guessed it already. Nonetheless, the characters are well drawn, and some of the set pieces are quite convincing and exciting. Worth your 16 bits.

Infinite Detail
Tim Maughan
Laura gave this one to me for Christmas, and it comes with the recommendations of Cory Doctorow and Jeff Vandermeer. How bad could it be? Oh, pretty bad.

Movies from books

Curious to see it, I convinced Laura last night to watch Bertrand Tavernier's Death Watch, a 1980 movie based on D.G. Compton's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, recently praised here. The film, made by a respected director and starring respected actors (Harvey Keitel, Romy Schneider, Harry Dean Stanton), clocked in at a snoozy 130 minutes and basically sucked. Not only does the movie not stand on its own, but it messes with the novel's plot in a way that deprives the story of its power and profundity.

We're also watching the latest screen incarnation of His Dark Materials, based on the classic Pullman trilogy. At least the TV series seems to be true to the story line, and the production is nothing if not high-end. It's watchable. But the downfall here is the same as the downfall of the Harry Potter movies: Human kid actors are incapable of capturing the complexity and world-historical gravitas of fictional characters like Harry and Lyra. Or so it seems to me.

It's a cliché that the movie never lives up to the book, but of course that can't be true. Case in point: The Godfather, not to mention Blade Runner. (Full disclosure: I haven't read either book, but seriously...). But by and large the advice is sound: Read the book.

NYRB round-up

In addition to Black Wings Has My Angel, I've been reading some other New York Review Books novels. Time to catch up...

The True Deceiver
Tove Jansson
A chilly psychological novel set in a chilly place, it was worth reading, but not much of it has stuck with me.

The Alteration
Kingsley Amis
An alternate history in which the Reformation failed, and the Catholics are running England in the 1970s. Our hero is a choirboy with the voice of an angel and puberty not far off, which turns out is not a good situation if you want to avoid "the alteration." It's no Lucky Jim, but Amis has plenty of fun dropping names of historical figures whose roles turned out a little different (e.g. Pope Martin Luther) and keeps the plot moving.

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe
D.G. Compton
A near-future dystopian 1974 novel about love, celebrity, privacy, media over-saturation, and death with dignity. Despite the heavy topics, it is touching, and charmingly quirky in its fashion. Perhaps the best of this batch.

Chocky
The Chrysalids
John Wyndham
Two sci-fi books from the author of The Day of the Triffids. Both enjoyable reads, offering some food for thought; of the two, Chocky, about a boy with an unusual and not-necessarily-imaginary friend, is the lighter and perhaps more compelling story, while The Chrysalids (1955), with its repressive religious fundamentalists and post-nuclear environmental badlands, captures the obsessions and anxieties of its time... and ours.

Reading roundup

I guess it's been a while. Von besser zu lesser...

Sand
Wolfgang Herrndorf
Le Carré meets Nabokov– with a little Kafka and Elmore Leonard thrown into the mix– in this very well-written, darkly funny, and harrowing literary thriller. It's 1972, and our nameless hero has come-to after a blow to the kopf, and finds himself stricken with amnesia and in the thick of some very nasty business, somewhere in North Africa. Amnesia is a plot device best used sparingly if at all, but Herrndorf pulls it off with bravado. A great entertainment, exquisitely translated by Tim Mohr.

A Long Way from Home
Peter Carey
A typical shaggy-dog tale from Carey, following an oddball threesome on an early cross-country auto race through Australia in the 1950s. Carey's parents ran a GM dealership in the same place and time as the novel's starting line, and he seems to know of what he writes. Funny and splendidly written with vivid, likable characters, the story picks up speed through the first two-thirds or so and then suffers a flat tire or two toward the end as it takes a political turn. Still, a good read.

Elizabeth Costello
J.M. Coetzee
Efficient, chilly and beautifully crafted, it is a novel of ideas and writing. The title character stands in for Coetzee, a person you'd only want to know on the printed page.

Sanshirō
Natsume Sōseki
Sōseki's The Gate is one of my favorite novels... a book in which not much really happens. In this wistful coming-of-age story, even less happens, if that is possible. That doesn't mean it's a better book...

Ride the Pink Horse
Dorothy B. Hughes
Hughes wrote noir but never stuck to a formula. This feverish, surrealistic tale– a revenge story featuring a sympathetic but not very bright protagonist in a southwestern town– is not as good as her masterpieces, The Expendable Man and In a Lonely Place, but it holds your attention.

Innocence
Penelope Fitzgerald
A literary rom-com a la Fitzgerald, set in Italy in the 1950s. Gramsci puts in an appearance. A decent read, but not my favorite of hers.

Troubles
J.G. Farrell
A grand old hotel in Ireland crumbles as the English dominion over Ireland crumbles, along with a way of life. Well executed, I think, but it did not keep me awake.

Berlin Game
Len Deighton
Le Carré aside, I don't read much spy fiction, and I'd never read Deighton, considered one of the masters. This is a pretty good yarn with a nice twist, but I won't be running out to read his oeuvre, as I have with Mr. Le Carré.

Semiosis
Sue Burke
On an alien planet, the fungi communicate and compete and are pretty smart. Would you trust them?

Vast 
Linda Nagata
This novel does a pretty good job imagining a version of human existence–if we can still think of them as humans– millions of years in the future. The problem is characterization. And sci fi without good characters is– frankly– bad fi.

Annihilation

On my own last night while Laura was out of town, I thought I'd give the movie version of Annihilation a try. I loved the book, but the movie was unloved by critics. Perhaps the perceived flaws with the movie reflected the inability of critics to deal with the fundamental vagueness at the narrative core of the novel? Alas, no. The movie took a strange, impressionistic novel and (surprise) rendered it Hollywood. Natalie Portman was a great choice for our protagonist– "the biologist"– but she was wasted, toting a machine gun and oo-ing unconvincingly at weird exo-biologies that resembled nothing as much as plastic flowers and deer lichen purchased at a Michael's craft store. Perhaps they were. I turned it off after 30 minutes and decided to re-read the book. Just as good the second time around. Note to Guillermo del Toro: I bet the rights to the excellent sequel are available for cheap. You'd have fun.

Reading roundup

From best to worst...

The Goshawk
T.H. White
Filled with humor, pathos, and damn good writing, White's account of his attempt to train a hunting hawk is justly lauded as a classic. Audaciously and naively, White convinced himself that he could train this most difficult of raptors through book learning and a kind of boy-scout can-do-ism. You will have to read the book to find out whether he was correct. His realism about nature's savagery is unflinching, but it is tempered by a touching sentimentalism. He offers up live pigeons as bait for the hawks he hopes to capture, but grows oddly attached to one of them and is unable to tether it in the trap– nonetheless, a hapless substitute takes its place. He eulogizes a female badger killed by fox hunters. His description of the maggots roiling in a sheep's carcass– easily the stomach-churning equal of Günter Grass's eels in The Tin Drum– displays an admiration for their work that is only partly ironic. His depictions of the English countryside– its vegetation, miserable climate, and folkways– are vivid. He cites specific passages to prove that Shakespeare really knew his falconry. I reckon I should have read The Goshawk before Helen Macdonald's very fine H is for Hawk. Both books leave you wondering whether the connection between austringer* and goshawk is true love or pure delusion. If you have read neither book before, by all means read them both, and start with White's.

A Fairly Good Time
Mavis Gallant
I have nothing against novels in which nothing really happens, but this one left me bemused. Shirley, a young Canadian woman in Paris, is trying to figure out whether her French second husband has really left her. Will you care about the answer? I can't say I did, exactly, but then, I found myself reading it to the end. There's something about this Shirley that makes you want to get to know her better.

Amnesia Moon
Jonathan Lethem
It's California sometime in the not-too-distant future, and something has happened to make everything pretty weird. It may have something to do with aliens, or maybe not– we never meet them. Everything gets more confusing, and you start skimming ahead to see if it all might make sense or have a point. Nope.

Selected Poems
A.R. Ammons
This little hardback from the American Poets Project fits comfortably in your hands and promises a selection of pieces by this most musical and thoughtful of modern poets. What's not to like? Alas, the book's compact format is its undoing. For Ammons, like many moderns, line breaks are unconventional and very important to the sound and meaning of the verse. When the page is so narrow that many lines must be wrapped, it becomes unclear which line breaks are intentional vs. arbitrary. What were they thinking?

* A falconer who uses accipiters (such as the goshawk).

The War of the Worlds

I'm a sucker for alien invasion stories, but I had not until now read this one, the mother of them all. It's a fine novel: well written and plotted, providing plenty of food for thought without beating you over the head with it.

It is indeed a book about a war, and there are vivid battle scenes, especially in the first half, but it is really more an exodus story, describing in gripping detail the chaos and cruelty as people are driven forward by the oncoming Martian death machines. And as the story moves into its final third, it becomes a journey through a post-apocalyptic hell, with our unnamed protagonist and narrator wondering whether he might not be the last man on Earth.

The scientific elements of the book are remarkably good, given that it was published in 1897. Wells was a committed Darwinian; his Martians have managed to develop capacities well beyond those of humans thanks to a longer period of evolution and the selective pressures of the more challenging conditions on their native planet. Yet smart as they are, the Martians fail to anticipate the problem posed by terrestrial pathogens, which proves to be their undoing. Our narrator speculates that back on Mars, they had long ago solved the problem of disease. But surely they cannot have eliminated all microorganisms! It was fortuitous for humans that they did not bring with them their own killing germs along with their guns and steel.

The Martians are also post-sexual and reproduce by budding, allowing them to avoid the inefficiencies and emotional baggage that plague our own sexed-up method. How they managed to continue to evolve without the genetic randomization provided by sexual reproduction is not explained. Most likely an intelligent, advanced species like theirs would have been using CRISPR and gene drives to engineer themselves. Wells, writing pre-double helix, could hardly be expected to have come up with that kind of outlandish scenario.

The book is quite fair-minded about the Martians. To them, we humans are a handy food source on what seems to be a pretty darn livable planet. "The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us," observes the narrator, "but at the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit." Indeed, one of the narrator's interlocutors, the artilleryman, figures that the Martians intend to domesticate and raise the humans like sheep, and that the average sheep-like human might not find such an existence all that disagreeable.

Upon finishing the book, I re-watched the Spielberg movie, starring Tom Cruise and a bug-eyed, high-pitched Dakota Fanning. The film is quite true to the novel in most respects, right down to the protagonist's fight with the curate, although the tone is more action film than philosophical drama. Of course, it being Spielberg, there's also a broken family to be fixed.

Spielberg's Martians, whose big heads and long, knobby fingers suggest some common ancestry with ET, are more agile than Wells's gravity-bound, sluggish creatures. Although Wells provides descriptions of the Martians themselves, it's clear that he is much more taken with their various machines and devices. It's hardly surprising. Darwin was in the air by the 1890s, but it was the machine age, and it must have been logical to think of future progress in terms of more powerful, capable devices and the means of building them. Those spindly, three-legged killing machines, with their dextrous tentacles and deadly ray-beams and poison gas, are the archetype for sci-fi killing machines and nasty robots up to the present day.

The book hints that the Martians may have sent another crew to Venus, no doubt a much less hospitable joint, which raises the possibility of more trouble ahead for us earthlings. One difference between then and now is that nowadays this prospect would be a clear signal of a sequel, but Wells refrained from writing it. Too bad for us.