My monthly book post.
This month we're big on escapist lit, as I wnjoyed a post-election bit of relaxation. Some nice whodunnits, sci-fi and horror, as well as Richard Dawkins on atheism, Scandinavian Communist literature and one of the most annoying financial advisers ever.
Prequel to Buffy: Dracula, by Bram Stoker:
On the bed beside the window lay Jonathan Harker, his face flushed and breathing heavily as though in a stupor. Kneeling on the near edge of the bed facing outwards was the white-clad figure of his wife. By her side stood a tall, thin man, clad in black. His face was turned from us, but the instant we saw all recognized the Count—in every way, even to the scar on his forehead. With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink. As we burst into the room, the Count turned his face, and the hellish look that I had heard described seemed to leap into it. His eyes flamed red with devilish passion; the great nostrils of the white aquiline nose opened wide and quivered at the edge; and the white sharp teeth, behind the full lips of the blood-dripping mouth, champed together like those of a wild beast. With a wrench, which threw his victim back upon the bed as though hurled from a height, he turned and sprang at us.
Booga-Booga, kiddies! I started this one for Halloween, and didn’t finish it until November. It was a surprising break from the traditional vampire lore I was expecting. There was no slayer-girl and no witches, and the vampire hunters were all mortals, all male, and had no superpowers at all. It was like they were sitting ducks! One of them even blithely accepts an invitation to Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, not even suspecting that he’s a vampire. Hello, HIS NAME IS DRACULA!!!! Admittedly, the Van Helsing character is almost like a Watcher, but it would have been nice to see him take off his glasses and do a few kung fu moves. There are also several images of foggy London dockyards and deserted city and country houses, complete with crypts and boxes of mouldy earth to track down and consecrate before the vampires multiply. One of the great classics of horror literature.
Devout Atheism: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins :
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror. A naif blessed with the perception of innocence has a clearer perception. Winston Churchill’s son Randolph somehow contrived to remain ignorant of scripture until Evelyn Waugh and a brother officer, in a vain attempt to keep Churchill quiet when they were posted together during the war, bet him he couldn’t read the entire Bible in a fortnight. "Unhappily, it has not the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before, and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud ‘I say, I bet you didn’t know this came in the Bible...’ or merely slapping his side and chortling ‘God, isn’t God a shit!’"
I really wanted to like this one. I mean, how could you not like an author who cites Douglas Adams, Fawlty Towers, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and PZ Myers’ Phyrangula blog as sources? It’s also a breath of fresh air to finally have someone stand up to the representatives of Jackass Christianity who plague American streets and letters to the editor and who damn near wrestle you to the ground if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas".
And yet...it was missing something. Maybe it was the pages and pages of pointless refutation of the tired old Existence of God proofs from Aquinas and Descartes and Pascal. I mean, we’re past the age of proofs. Modern theology is pretty much "God exists because we’re bigger than you and will blow up your school buses and force your children to pray in schools". Or maybe it was some of the same smugness of disbelief that I find annoying from other people in their pro-belief. Maybe I just want to be left alone to find spiritual sustenance in my child’s smile or in a sylvan island in the river. Then again, if I’m totally sick of theology, it’s not the fault of Richard Dawkins that I affirmatively picked up his book right at that time.
Atheists who deny agnosticism as wishy-washy and who force choices on people who wish to claim the unknowable as simply unknowable are pushing something on me the same way theists are. Yes, I realize that "a-theism" literally translates as "without theism", such that not firmly embracing theism arguably makes you an atheist by definition. I simply don’t care.
Nevertheless, I have the distinct feeling I’d enjoy meeting Dawkins and/or PZ Myers at a con someday and having drinks with them. They’re clearly brilliant scientific minds, just like creationism proponents are not.
Sherlock Holmes he ain’t:Dover One, by Joyce Porter :
There are certain people who really rise to a crisis, and it can be fairly said that Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover of New Scotland Yard was one of them. At Christmas-time, some children have the distressing habit of blowing up toy balloons to their fullest extent and then releasing them so that the air rushes out of the mouthpiece and the rapidly deflating balloon shoots around dementedly all over the place. This is how Dover habitually rose to a crisis, with the same undignified lack of control and pretty much the same kind of noise.
Character and atmosphere are the keys to the success of this comic whodunnit, the first in a series featuring Scotland Yard’s best British answer to Archie Bunker and Oliver Hardy wrapped up into one bumbling crackpot who nevertheless finds his culprit through dumb luck. The victim is one of the least mourned nasties in the genre and the ending is positively Hitchcockian. Well worth the read.
Motley Crew Murder: The Congo Venus, by Matthew Head:
[Distraught woman is mourning the death of her pet cat, who apparently was mauled by wild animals; nonetheless, she goes on with the scheduled recital of the local chamber quartet.]
They rested a moment before beginning Madame’s ordeal of the second movement, and she and Dr. Gollmer fooled around with the string quite a bit. She seemed to be objecting to something or other; later, in her public statement, she said that she had noticed the wavering tone of the string and was reluctant to go on with the second movement. They began playing, though, and as the movement went on, the wavering tone was more and more apparent to everybody. The tone also seemed to be deteriorating in quality. She would draw her bow straight across the string, but the tone would change as she drew it, going a little up or a little down. Also, the bow seemed to stick slightly to the string, as if the gut were not perfectly cured....the string wailed more and more irregularly. People laughed a little, but in a friendly and sympathetic way. But as the wailing grew worse, as it began to have a very particular quality half-harsh and half-resonant, as it began to suggest, in sudden uncontrollable yowls, the tone of a small accordion with laryngitis, my own spine prickled, and even from where I sat I could see the sweat drip from the forehead of Madame de St. Nicaise. She began to tremble; her eyes bulged. The other musicians regarded her in alarm, but she was unaware of them, even when they stopped playing. She panted, her eyes transfixed on her instrument. She drew her bow across it one last time; the string gave one final YOWL, the very sound of an anguished Siamese. Madame de St. Nicaise dropped her bow and screamed, "C’est Mimette! Mimette! My Mimette!"
Then she staggered up, and the cello banged to the floor in front of her. She raised an arm straight out, rigid, and pointed a quivering finger at Dr. Gollmer.
"Murderer!" She screamed. "MURDERER! MURDERER! MURDERER!!!!!!
The repercussions of Mimette’s death and possible transfiguration into an E-String naturally precede the appearance of a human corpse, and the relationship between the two deaths is part of the puzzle.
A very good mystery from the Golden Age, which, coinciding with the zenith of the British Empire, produced at least as many mysteries in exotic locations as it did stodgy old British cozies. You can find classic whodunnits full of Brits in Iraq, in India, in Australia, even one of my very favorites set among misfit settlers on an uncharted tropical island (I call that one the Gilligan’s Island Murder). Congo Venus is set in Leopoldville at a time when Natives weren’t allowed to give testimony even when they were the sole witnesses, and the insular community of whites seemed to spend their days leisuring at various clubs. Good atmosphere, quirky characters, interesting plot.
Dare to be the Same: Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis :
He had heard it said that "conditions" in the County Jail and the Zenith City Prison were not very "scientific"; he had, with indignation at the criticism of Zenith, skimmed through a report in which the notorious pessimist Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, asserted that to throw boys and young girls into a bull pen crammed with men suffering from syphillis, delerium tremens, and insanity was not the perfect way of educating them. He had controverted the report by growling, "Folks that think a jail ought to be a bloomin’ Hotel Thornleigh make me sick. If people don’t like a jail, let ‘em behave themselves and keep out of it. Besides, these reform cranks always exaggerate." That was the beginning and quite completely the end of his investigations into Zenith’s charities and corrections; and as to the "vice districts" he brightly expressed it, "Those are things that no decent man monkeys with. Besides, smatter fact, I’ll tell you confidentially: it’s a protection to our daughters and to decent women to have a district where tough nuts can raise Cain. Keeps ‘em away from our own homes."
As to industrial conditions, however, Babbitt had thought a great deal, and his opinions may be coordinated as follows:
"A good labor union is of value because it keeps out the radical unions, which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to join a union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn’t to be any unions allowed at all; and as it’s the best way of fighting the unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers’ association and to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any selfish hog who doesn’t join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced to.
The Path of the Frosted Mini Wheat really does try to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. I’ve found other books this year (Gide’s The Immoralist; Hesse’s Steppenwolf) about people facing the abyss of nonconformity and life with no limits. Babbitt masterfully takes us to the other extreme, where tortured souls dash themselves on the rocks of conformity and strangle themselves in the attempt to belong.
This is an amazing book. For one thing, the biting satire allows pages and pages of description of mundane life in a lively style that is not the least bit boring. For another thing, the book was written in the early 1920s, and yet we find the Republican base using the EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS, indeed, the exact same words, to attack "socialism", "liberalism", organized labor, welfare programs, health care reform and regulation of big business that they are using today. And not incidentally, Lewis nails the attitudes and customs of small-city boosters, go-getters, lodge members and the Chamber of commerce in a way that, since it’s still as accurate today as it was then, may well be timeless.
Babbitt is supposed to be an object of contempt. I didn’t see it that way. I felt sorry for him. He’s one of the few people in the novel who even makes an effort to see an alternative to the world of Reader’s Digests and green jello that surrounds him, and if he doesn’t have the inner resources to tell everybody whose opinion he values to go jump in the lake while he himself steers toward the frightening abyss, well, no one ever showed him how to think for himself. In fact, they did a pretty good job nipping any individualistic tendencies he expressed in the bud.
This book makes me think of what Brazil would have been like without the futurism and the over the top police presence. In Zenith, Indiana, the police state is in our own heads. Hit a man over the head with a fish, and he will have a headache for a day; teach him to hit himself over the head with a fish, and he will have headaches for the rest of his life. Mission accomplished.
FAILK (Financial Advisor I’d Like to Kill): You’re So Money, by Farnoosh Torabi:
I’m going to be your Sassy Aunt Farnoosh, the chick who comes to family functions in skinny heels, gets drunk off gin martinis, and is crazy for the word FABULOUS. She inspires you to take chances and occasionally slips you a $50—way more than nerdy uncle Jed, who takes pride in his dollar coin give-outs. On a separate note, would someone please forward him the 1988 memo about no longer combining socks with Teva sandals? The air Jesus look is so over.
And I’m going to be your Nerdy Uncle Miles, old and crotchety beyond his years, who shows up to family functions dead sober (well, sort of), wearing his SCA garb and carrying an enormous Edwardian ear trumpet in one hand for shaking at those kids on the lawn, and in the other hand a supply of fava beans and a nice Chianti. Everything about him is shabby and unfashionable, but he’s happy. He gestures toward the grisly spectacle being slow-cooked on the outdoor BBQ spit and informs you that we’re having sassy roast chick for the family feast. Oh, wait. You mean "Farnoosh Torabi" is NOT a traditional South Sea Island cannibal delicacy? Oopsie, my bad. And no great loss.
Seriously, this book is outside my target demographic. If you’re a cosmopolitan metrosexual millionaire born after 1982, with the trendiest jet-setter job and a circle of friends who party at the hottest clubs and live in the hottest Upper West Side apartments and are addicted to the trendiest new designer drugs and have or want the most fabulous accessories and need to be told how to save for retirement while having it all, then you might find some use out of this book.
The rest of us are going to look at the 10% of our disposable income left over for luxuries after putting the usual percentages aside for taxes, mortgages on the condo, the IRA and 401(k) contributions, the rainy day fund, the meals out, the plane tickets, the fabulous clothes and fabulous grooming products and fabulous accessory essentials(and boy does Tobari love these. She doesn’t so much drop brand names as back them up in a truck and dump them—not as a prequel to how to get bargains, but just to let you know how trendy and fabulous you are if you splurge on the brand name "quality" items), with no health care expenses factored in because, you know, fabulous people take yoga and pilates and ju jitsu and have nothing but fabulous, trendy health....the rest of us are going to look at what is supposedly left over after deducting for good-new-fashioned trendy sassy financial discipline, and have ourselves a good cry into our fabulous Ketel One martini.
Maybe Farnoosh is what George Babbitt would be a century later, if he left the conformist Midwest city and became a trendy, fabulous metrosexual where all the jet-setters are nonconformists who all act alike.
Bronze Beauty: DragonFlight, by Anne McCaffrey:
As the golden beast, crying piteously, lurched down from the raised arena toward the scattered women, Lessa moved. Why hadn’t that silly clunk-headed girl stepped aside, Lessa thought, grabbing for the wedge-head, at birth not much larger than her own torso. The dragon was so clumsy and weak she was her own worst enemy.
Lessa swung the head around so that the many-faceted eyes were forced to look at her...and found herself lost in that rainbow regard.
A feeling of joy suffused Lessa; a feeling of warmth, tenderness, unalloyed affection, and instant respect and admiration flooded mind and heart and soul. Never again would Lessa lack an advocate, a defender, an intimate, aware instantly of the temper of her mind and heart, of her desires. How wonderful was Lessa, the thought intruded into Lessa’s reflections, how pretty, how kind, how thoughtful, how brave and clever!
Mechanically, Lessa reached out to scratch the exact spot on the soft eye ridge.
I can relate. The Redhead sometimes looks at me that way. I try to look at my clients that way and instill similar feelings, but I’m afraid I come up short. It’s harder to get the nuances of telepathy just right is you aren’t a dragon by trade.
This was my first reading of a Pern book. Most of my friends and family have read and loved the Pern books (there’s at least a dozen more in the series, maybe two dozen or more, and Dragonflight is the first), and some of them will be astonished that I haven’t gotten around to the series until now, but there you are. I picked a good time to start; the sci fi convention I just attended had about five filkers singing Pern songs, and the references to threads and Weyr and the like would have gone right over my head.
The world of Pern takes some getting used to, and my first impression was that the dragons were a bit Mary Sue-ish, having been given powers of teleportation, telepathy, and time travel ALONG WITH the traditional powers associated with huge armored beasts that fly and breathe fire and have huge teeth and claws. And they’re supposed to have worthy formidable adversaries in the form of threads? I also kept giggling to myself at inopportune moments, as my mind kept comparing Lessa and Ramoth to the protagonists of childrens’ "a girl and her horse" books. Well, I kept reading, and I’m certainly glad I did.
Los Miserablos: The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene :
The banana plantations came down on either bank: his voice boomed under the hard sun: that and the churr of the motor were the only sounds anywhere—he was completely alone. He was borne up on a big tide of boyish joy...doing a man’s job, the heart of the wild: he felt no responsibility for anyone. In only one other country had he felt more happy, and that was in war time France, in the ravaged landscape of the trenches. The tributary corkscrewed farther into the marshy overgrown state, and a vulture lay spread out in the sky; Captain Fellows opened a tin box and ate a sandwich. Food never tasted so good as out of doors. A monkey made a sudden chatter at him as he went by. And Captain Fellows felt happily at one with nature, a wide shallow kinship with all the world moved with the bloodstream through the veins: he was at home anywhere. The artful little devil, he thought, the artful little devil. He began to sing again. Somebody else’s words a little jumbled in his friendly unretentive memory. "Give to the life I love, bread I dip in the river, under the wide and starry sky, the hunter’s home from the sea". The plantations petered out and far behind the mountains came into view, heavy black lines drawn low-down across the sky. A few bungalows rose out of the mud. He was home. A very slight cloud marred his happiness.
He thought: after all, a man likes to be welcomed.
What a strange little book this is. It is about a priest trying to get out of Mexico at a time when Catholicism was outlawed by the Mexican government and punishable by death. The point is supposed to have something to do with the triumph of the spirit and all, and yet the effect is spoiled by the priest’s continual casting aside of rescue. He’s about to take a boat to safety, but he misses it to perform some Catholic ritual. He makes it to the border, but turns back in order to administer a confession. It is not clear whether the man is an idiot, or whether he is actually seeking martyrdom, but it’s hard to feel sympathy for the plight he so eagerly brings down on himself. Another oddity is that the other people, Catholic and noncatholic alike, condemn the priest because he drinks and has a coarse, earthy manner of speaking, and yet not even the atheists wonder whether he abuses little boys.
The priest is pursued by a police officer who is, I suppose, the "bad guy", and yet he is neither a corrupt official nor a Javert-like fanatic, but merely a believer in the government who willingly follows orders and has a quite sympathetic dislike of the horrors that religion have brought to the country, especially upon the least fortunate among the peasants.
Gripping at times, but the characterization is just about incomprehensible.
Triumph of the Proletariat: Pelle the Conqueror, By Martin Andersen Nexo:
Most people had wandered hither in search of fortune—Poverty had destroyed their faculty of surrendering to fate; they were weary of waiting and had resolved to take matters into their own hands. And now here they were, sunk in wretchedness. They could not stir from the spot; they only labored and sunk deeper into the mire. But they continued to strive, with the strength of their bodies, until that gave way, and it was all over with them.
Pelle had often enough wondered to see how many poor people there were in the town. Why did they not go ahead with might and main until they were well off? They had all of them had intentions of that kind, but nothing came of them. Why? They themselves did not understand why, but bowed their heads as though under a curse. And if they raised them again it was only to seek that consolation of the poor...alcohol, or to attend the meetings of the home missions..
Here is some heavy duty stuff! Early 20th Century Scandinavian Communist Literature! The story of a peasant who travels from farm to town to the big city, observing the plight of the proletariat, organizing strikes and bringing the Capitalist Class to its knees against all odds! I’m not sure I’d ever read a pro-communist novel before, and I’m not likely to read another one soon, but if you’re at all interested, this may be the one to choose.
Most of the rest of November’s list is very brief reading. This is the long one, but it goes down surprisingly smooth and easy. The best parts are the personal stories of Pelle and his father, and later, of Pelle and his wife, and the desperate poverty of those around them, the seeing, the feeling, the learning, and then later, the action. Later on, it gets a little heavy-handed and preachy, with the dull solemnity of the fervent ideologue, but by then I was already hooked.