What I read last month. The magnificent Christopher Moore. The delightful Terry Pratchett. The outrageous Helene Hanff. The cybercool William Gibson. The sublime Peter S. Beagle. And several highbrow tomes of various degrees of literary merit. Enjoy.
Thou Shalt ROFL: Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore :
And the angel said, "What prophet has this written? For in this book is foretold all the events which will come to pass in the next week in the land of Days of Our Lives and All My Children."
And I said to the angel, "You fabulously feebleminded bundle of feathers, there’s no prophet involved. They know what is going to happen because they write it all down in advance for the actors to perform."
"So it is written; so it shall be done." said the angel.
I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed next to Raziel. His gaze never wavered from his Soap Opera Digest. I pushed the magazine down so that the angel had to look me in the face.
"Raziel, do you remember the time before Mankind, the time when there were only the heavenly host and the Lord?"
"Yes, those were the best of times. Except for the war, of course. But other than that, yes, wonderful times.
"And you angels were as strong and beautiful as divine imagination, your voices sang praise for the Lord and his glory to the ends of the universe, and yet the Lord saw fit to create us, mankind, weak, twisted and profane, right?"
"That’s when it all started to go downhill, if you ask me," Raziel said.
"Well, do you know why the Lord decided to create us?"
"No. Ours is not to question the Will."
"Because you are all dumbfucks, that’s why. You’re as mindless as the machinery of the stars. Angels are just pretty insects. Days of Our Lives is a show, Raziel, a play. It’s not real, get it?"
"No."
And he didn’t. I’ve learned that there is a tradition in this time of telling funny stories about the stupidity of people with yellow hair. Guess where that started."
Forget my book posts for the rest of the year. Forget last month's The Master and Margarita and The Watchmen. There's no way anything else I get to in the foreseeable future is going to top this. I defy the Universe to find me anything better. (Mind you, if it somehow does it, I don't mind being proven wrong; but I don't think it can). The Gospel According to Biff was sent to me last October by an enthusiastic friend, and I've been reading it aloud to The Redhead in segments during a series of road trips, alternately savoring it and needing to continue and dreading it being over. It's that good. It's also one of those books you really need to read out loud. Christopher Moore does wonderful things with inflection and subtle gags that a speed reader might miss.
The story is a retelling of the Jesus myth focusing on the 30 odd years missing from the Gospels between the manger and John the Baptist singing "Prepare ye the Way of the Lord". Levi (who is called Biff) has been resurrected in modern times and commanded by a mind-bogglingly stupid angel to set down the story of his years with his friend the Messiah (who is called Joshua bar Joseph), from their childhood years playing Stone The Adulteress and resurrecting dead lizards to their buddy road trip to the Orient in search of the three Wise Men who might tell him what the Son of God is supposed to actually do. As it turns out, the kings are, respectively, a Confucian, a Buddhist and a Hindu, and the two friends' adventures studying under them are not just split-your-sides funny; they also point at the tenets that these eastern belief systems have in common with Christianity by speculating how Jesus might have been influenced by them. Hence The Gospel According to Biff makes for interesting theology as well as entertainment.
Here they are writing the sermon on the mount together:
"Who else shall we include in the beatitudes?"
"Sluts?"
"No."
"How about the wankers? I can think of five or six disciples that would be really blessed."
"No wankers. I've got it! Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake."
"Okay, better. What are you going to give them?"
"A fruit basket."
"You can't give the meek the whole earth and these guys a fruit basket!"
"Give them the kingdom of Heaven."
"The poor in spirit got that."
"Everybody gets some"
"Okay then, the kingdom of Heaven." I wrote it down.
"We could give the fruit basket to the dumbfucks."
"No dumbfucks!"
"Sorry. I just feel for them."
"You feel for everyone, Josh. It's your job."
"Oh yeah. I forgot."
Along the way, we get apocryphal adventures that explain why Jesus's image keeps appearing on pieces of toast and how his people developed the tradition of eating Chinese food on his birthday. Not to mention Biff's modern adventures coming to grips with the 21st Century while trapped in a hotel room with the stupid angel. Just read it out loud to someone you love. Very highest recommendations.
Letters of WIN: 84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff :
WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS’S DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS??? This is not Pepys’s diary, this is some busybody editor’s miserable collection of EXCERPTS from Pepys’s diary may he rot.
I could just spit.
Where is Jan 12, 1668 where his wife chased him out of bed and round the bedroom with a red hot poker?
Where is Sir W. Pen’s son that was giving everybody so much trouble with his Quaker notions? ONE mention does he get in this whole pseudo-book, and me from Philadelphia.
I enclose two limp singles, I will make do with this thing till you find me a real Pepys. THEN I will rip up this ersatz book, page by page AND I WILL WRAP THINGS IN IT!
---HH
PS: Fresh eggs or powdered for Xmas? I know the powdered last longer but "fresh farm eggs flown from Denmark" have got to taste better. You want to take a vote on it?
OMG, this book is NOTHING—it’s just a collection of actual correspondence between the staff of a tweedy, dusty old booksellers’ shop in London (Anthony Head would be picked by central casting to play Frank, the senior purchaser) and a lady in NYC who buys books from them (Diane Wiest, maybe, as Hanff the Book Lady). Except that what starts out as a couple of business letters evolves before your eyes into the kind of friendship that inspires laughter and tears and groundswells of gushy Hallmark music and leaves you wondering how different your life might be if you wrote letters like Hanff did. The bookstore, I’m told, has long since been converted to a restaurant or an office or something, but has a commemorative placque outside because of these letters. Marks & Co. is more famous because of their purchaser’s correspondence with a customer than for anything else it ever did since it was incorporated some time in the James II Administration. Think about that for a moment...
People who write blurbs on the backs of books like to say "I couldn’t put it down". This is the second book ever (the first was the Joe Gores mystery Dead Skip, which kept me up till way into the early hours one night in 1996) for which that was literally true for me. I picked it up for just a few minutes between projects, intending to graze through a few letters, and ended up procrastinating some work because I just kept on reading until it was done. Fortunately, the book was under 100 pages, with a lot of blank space where letters ended early at the top of a page, and I was done in about 40 minutes. It was THAT riveting.
I think the last time I read a book of someone’s letters it was slogging through Pliny the Younger and being bored out of my mind. This, by contrast, is like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. I loved it; you will too. Highest recommendations.
Slices of Courtship Pie: Take a Girl Like You, by Kingsley Amis :
He swayed diagonally forward and over her, his hands thudding down on the arms of her chair. His face searched for hers, weaving to and fro like a hungry fish. Jenny folded her arms over her bosom and dug her chin into her shoulder. She could tell now that he had indeed been mixing his drinks, with evidently a bit of coal gas thrown in for good measure. All the time she laughed in the jolliest way she could, searching her memory for all the funny things that had ever happened to her and getting a good ten seconds worth out of the time the nice-ears boy-friend had been helping her on with her topcoat—he was always full of manners—and in putting his hand up at the back to pull her suit coat down had put his hand up her skirt instead (by mistake). She tried to keep up the laughing when Dick found the edge of her mouth and began squirming his own along it, caterpillar-fashion, towards the middle, but laughing into someone’s mouth is hard work, she found, especially when their arms give way and they squash down on your chest. The broad tip of his nose was against hers, too, pushing it far enough round the corner to cut her air intake by another fifty per cent.
A newer take on the whole country-vs-city values thing, this time bringing a plucky, clever, honest woman from some northern Yorkshire-ish town and putting her in 1960s urban England among a bunch of guys with the libido and culture of Austin Powers. Or maybe, not quite that groovy and full of themselves, but getting close to it. The humor comes from juxtaposing the manners and courtesy of a Jane Austen heroine with that of boorish rakes who think she ought to loosen up and shag a little.
So-called "romantic battle of the sexes" books tend to be tiresome. They’re either about doofuses, still adolescent in their thirties, who get tamed and civilized and brought into their best by the love of a long-suffering superwoman whose motives for sticking it out with him are never really made clear, or about uptight humorless feminists whose achievements make them unhappy until they learn that real fulfillment means choosing to surrender themselves to the right man. Either way, it’s kinda hard to like or respect anyone in the story.
The protagonists here, Jenny Bunn and Patrick Standish, end up breaking through the stereotypes, but not by much. Jenny spends the book suffering through a lot of male attention, and turns to Patrick almost as the lesser evil. Patrick does have a fully functional brain, but behaves badly on too many occasions, and we’re expected to forgive him a little too readily simply because he thinks it over afterwards each time and is sorry. This was 1960, and it may be that Amis was trying to teach the kind of people he saw around him to stop acting like Patrick, but I see no other excuse for Take a Girl Like You.
Senseless Waste of Human Life: Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara :
Your home is the center of many zones. The first zone is your home, the second can be the homes around you, which you know only less well than you do your home. In the second zone you know where the rain pipes have stained the shingles on the houses; you know where the doorbell button is, how much of a bedpost can be seen in an upstairs window; the length of slack taken up in the porch swing chains; the crack in the sidewalk; the oil spots from the drip pans in the driveway; the lump of coal, which you remember from the time it was not swept away, and its metamorphosis from day to day as it is crushed and crushed into smaller lumps and into dust and then all that is left of it is a black blot, and you are glad one day that it has been crushed and no longer is there to accuse you of worrying about your neighbor’s slovenliness. And so on.
The next zone is the homes and buildings you pass every day on your way to work. The tin signs outside little stores, the trees with the bark gnawed away by horses, the rope on the gates and the ancient weights, the places where the street ought to be repaired, the half-second view of the town clock tower between two houses. And so on.
And more zones, zones that the farther you get from the center, the longer spaces there are in the familiar things. In one zone, a hundred yards of highway will be familiar, while in another zone the familiar spaces are a matter of inches. In the familiar zones remembering is effortless. An outside zone is where your brain begins to tell you where to make a turn in the road and where to keep going straight and where to blow your horn and where to slow down for a curve.
The title comes from an old fable about a man in Baghdad who sees Death and immediately rides of to Samarra as fast as he can, hoping to hide. It turns out Death was surprised to see him in Baghdad, because It knew It had an appointment with him in Samarra that very night...the point, I suppose, being about how fate cannot be avoided and how your attempts to avoid fate will themselves cause your predestined, inexorable, no-hope, no-reprieve fate to happen.
Enter O’Hara’s middle-class North Pennsylvania protagonist Julian English, who doesn’t seem all that interested in avoiding fate. Seemingly in a comfortable life, self-employed, with a good family, a good wife and a decent income, he spends the book’s three days drinking alcohol, behaving badly in ways that threaten but do not ruin his reputation, his business and his marriage, and commits suicide, drunk, regardless of the opportunities to salvage everything. And neither the reader nor the other characters are ever told why. You might guess that it has something to do with pointlessness of mundane life in middle America, but you’d be guessing. Maybe the guy just had winter depression.
I tend to not like stories about slow self-destruction. Your mileage may vary. This one is considered an important part of the American canon, like Gatsby without the glitz, and it’s short, but I don’t se much more than that in its favor.
Songbird in the Snake Pit: Evelina, or the History of a Young Woman’s Entrance Into the World, by Fanny Burney :
THE die is thrown, and I attend the event in trembling! Lady Howard has written to Paris, and sent her letter to town, to be forwarded in the ambassador's packet; and, in less than a fortnight, therefore, she expects an answer. O, Sir, with what anxious impatience shall I wait its arrival! upon it seems to depend the fate of my future life. My solicitude is so great, and my suspense so painful, that I cannot rest a moment in peace, or turn my thoughts into any other channel.
Deeply interested as I now am in the event, most sincerely do I regret that the plan was ever proposed. Methinks it cannot end to my satisfaction: for either I must be torn from the arms of my more than father,-or I must have the misery of being finally convinced, that I am cruelly rejected by him who has the natural claim to that dear title, which to write, mention, or think of, fills my whole soul with filial tenderness.
The subject is discussed here eternally. Captain Mirvan and Madame Duval, as usual, quarrel whenever it is started: but I am so wholly engrossed by my own reflections, that I cannot even listen to them. My imagination changes the scene perpetually: one moment, I am embraced by a kind and relenting parent, who takes me to that heart from which I have hitherto been banished, and supplicates, through me, peace and forgiveness from the ashes of my mother!-at another, he regards me with detestation, considers me as the living image of an injured saint, and repulses me with horror!-But I will not afflict you with the melancholy phantasms of my brain; I will endeavour to compose my mind to a more tranquil state, and forbear to write again till I have in some measure succeeded.
This one made me ashamed to be male, and ashamed of my liking for England in the 18th Century. In foolish moments, I think of the age of Fielding, Adam Smith and Samuel Johnson as some sort of Golden Age of Civilization, one of the few places I might pick if I was forced to live in an earlier time than today. Evelina, ostensibly a comedy, made me cringe and see the age as an age of rot gilded by an oppressive code of manners which was to its victims what the Catholic Church was to the Middle Ages.
Evelina is an innocent, kind-hearted country girl, brought up by a decent country gentleman after her high born mother dies in childbirth after being abandoned by the high born "noble" rake who disavows her marriage. Upon coming of age, she leaves her idyllic, rustic home and comes into contact for the first time with the high society of London. You can see where this is going, can’t you?
That’s right. An endless succession of foppish "gentlemen" whose wigs and powder can’t cover their curly tails. They thrust their attention on poor Evelina—it is considered impolite and a sign of ill-breeding to refuse their attention; wonder who thought of that rule*--and subjected to endless verbose mawkish, flowery, diabetes-inducing poetry, followed by whining and wheedling to get into her hoop skirt, followed by attempts at rape. In the elaborate code of manners, attempts at rape are to be tut-tutted over, but humiliation of a gentleman, or loss of virginity—THAT is a real scandal. I’m amazed the women of the day didn’t universally spend their days knitting ominously.
This being a "comedy", the attempts are unsuccessful, the fops are at least somewhat chastened for their boorishness, and things work out well for Evelina, in that she ends up wealthy in her own right and betrothed to someone decent. On the other hand, I didn’t laugh once. Burney has some of the good qualities of Fielding and Jane Austen, but doesn’t rise quite to the level of either, and her "humor" is comparable to one of those Ben Stiller movies where the laugh track goes wild as the protagonist suffers a mounting series of indignities, not caused by her own foibles. There are better things to read than this.
State of the Heart: The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle:
It was not her dream that chilled him, but that she did not weep as she told it. As a hero, he understood weeping women and how to make them stop crying–generally, you killed something—but her calm terror confused and unmanned him, while the shape of her face crumbled the distant dignity he had been so pleased at maintaining. When he spoke again, his voice was young and stumbling.
"I would court you with more grace," he said, "if I knew how. My dragons and my feats of arms weary you, but they are all I have to offer. I haven’t been a hero for very long, and before I was a hero, I was nothing at all, nothing but my father’s dull, soft son. Perhaps I am only dull in a new way now, but I am here, and it is wrong of you to let me go to waste. I wish you wanted something of me. It wouldn’t have to be a valiant deed—just useful."
Then the Lady Amalthea smiled at him for the first time since she had come to stay in King Haggard’s castle. It was a small smile like the new moon, a slender bend of brightness on the edge of the unseen, but Prince Lir leaned toward it to be warm. He would have cupped his hands around her smile and breathed it brighter, if he had dared.
"Sing to me," she said. "That would be valiant, to raise your voice in this dark, lonely place and it will be useful as well. Sing to me, sing loudly—drown out my dreams, keep me from remembering whatever wants me to remember it. Sing to me, my lord prince, if it please you. It may not be a hero’s task, but I would be glad of it."
I was lucky enough to meet Peter S. Beagle at a convention once and listen to him read out loud from one of his books. He has a magnificent, sonorous voice, full of tenderness and wisdom, like James Earl Jones without the implied dominance. Having heard that voice, I was able to imagine the whole of The Last Unicorn in that voice, and it managed to touch the most intimate places in my soul and let them know that they were neither alone nor insane, that there was another soul out there that understood what really mattered, in terms I hadn't been able to put words to before.
The story is simple. All the unicorns have vanished except one, who is on a quest to find the others, with the help of Schmendrick, the worst wizard in the world. Schmendrick's magic is intermittent and pathetic; the unicorn's is older than the weather. From that kernel comes one of those marvelous, marvelous yarns that manages to simultaneously satirize a genre and celebrate it as it has never been celebrated before. A good satire, because it doesn't take itself seriously, can get away with going much farther down a path than a serious story, since that path leads to absurdity...and to the most intimate places in the soul. Places with cursed kingdoms and travelling carnivals and forest outlaws waiting for folklore students to come and record their ballads.
The edition I read included "Two Hearts", a 2007 story that serves as a coda to the original 1968 novel. Highest recommendations.
Smocks and the City: The American Painter Emma Dial, by Samantha Peale :
The gallery was mobbed. Only the edges of the canvases were visible above the crowd. Frederich Hecht spoke to a couple of collectors from Santa Monica who had once watched me paint while they sat on the floor eating tuna salad sandwiches and asking me where I grew up, what my parents' professions were, whether I had siblings. They thought they were being friendly and democratic, but I found their questions silly and it was humiliating to talk about myself in front of Michael and especially Frederich.
We all scanned the room for people we knew. Hordes of young art professionals with advanced degrees in curatorial studies and arts administration swiveled their heads looking for the stars. Michael and Philip's peers, the ones who got successful thirty years ago, the big dealers, collectors, and curators, and a whole subset of photogenic art lovers: film directors, actors, musicians and their model girlfriends. One museum director kept his hand proprietarily on Therese Oller's naked shoulder. Anyone who was not famous was someone's assistant.
If anyone cares enough about my bookish opinions to actually send me something just to see my commentary, I promise I will read and blog about it. In fact, I’m a little overwhelmed at the thought. Message me for my address if you want....that’s my policy, and I’ll stick to it, even if it means I get Chyck Lit. Case in point: The American Painter Emma Dial, a novel about the utterly fabulous New York art world, where the characters spend so much time and energy sitting around being either fabulously angsty or angstily fabulous that it’s hard to tell how they have a spare moment to paint, or do much of anything with their lives.
Emma Dial has an understanding with a hotshot, fabulous painter named Michael. She paints paintings. He signs his name to them and they are considered his artwork. Everyone in the art world knows this is what happens, and considers the paintings his work. WTF? She talks about branching out on her own and people, standing in a room full of paintings they know she painted, caution her because they’re not sure whether she has actual talent. Michael grudgingly gives her one of "his" paintings, but if he doesn’t include it in his official portfolio, the painting will be considered valueless. Michael is twice Emma’s age. She sleeps with him. Of course. Will the relationship continue? Did Rembrandt use Prussian Blue?
Other than the surreal "She paints it; it’s his work" thing, the book is mostly realistic.
People go to an exhibit, and a huge amount of the text is devoted to describing what the important people are wearing. They go to a restaurant, and several paragraphs describe the food. They go to Florida, and by God we get to know what color every house in Miami is. As is typical with books of this kind, most of the characters are either too two-dimensional to care about, too caricatured to care about, or actively repulsive. I suspect Samantha Peale may be a painter herself, writing what she knows about; she’s very good at describing what things look like, but does not tell you what they’re like on the inside.
Read it for the hot lesbian sex.
Skalded Skeins: Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset :
Now, tonight, he saw it clearly. Kristin, his sweet, his dearest love--true, deep-hearted joy he had never known with her, save in those days when he was leading her astray in sin.
And he had believed so surely that the day when he won Kristin to have and to hold her before God and Man--that day all evil would be wiped away from his life so wholly that he would forget it had ever been.
He must be such an one that he could not suffer aught that was truly good and pure near him. For Kristin--aye, since she was escaped from the sin and uncleanliness he had led her into, she had been as an angel from God's heaven. Mild and trusty, gentle diligent, worthy of honour. She had brought honour to Husaby once more. She was become again what she had been on yonder summernight when the pure young maiden soul nestled in under his cloak out there in the cloister garden and he had thought as he felt the slender young body against his side--the devil himself could not find in his heart to hurt this child or cause her sorrow...
The tears ran down over Erland's face.
--Then belike it was true, what they had told him, the priests, that sin ate up a man's soul like rust--for no rest, no peace, was his, here with his own sweet love--he but longed to be gone from her and all that was hers...
This one earned Sigrid Undset a Noble Prize in literature, and it’s not hard to tell why. Kristin Lavransdatter is unquestionably a Great Book in the Western Canon. Set in the 14th Century, the Nordic epic explores heavy duty philosophical questions about family, parenthood, religion, ethics, nobility, happiness, duties to parent, spouse, child, community and God. With a cast of characters rivaling The Brothers Karamazov, the story primarily concerns the efforts of Kristin and the two main men in her life, Erland and Simon, to live good and honorable lives.
As usual in stories of this kind, the main barriers to happiness are caused by successful and unsuccessful attempts to conform to the idiotic superstitions of religion and the close-minded bigotry of rural communities. The author actually takes the side of religion and goes out of her way to assert repeatedly that Kristin’s ill fortune is brought on by herself for having "sinned" (OMG, she had a child gasp just seven months after marriage! She is EVIL!); however, she can’t quite convince on that point. The ill fortune is really brought on by the prejudices of entire communities that inflate the importance of petty things and deflate the value of what really matters. To the extent that she brings anything on herself, she does so by setting unusually high standards, marrying a well-intentioned doofus who clearly will never meet those standards, and then holding grudges until long after they die of old age, and then taking them to the taxidermist. At least two major plot turning points that are allegedly brought on, though not intended, by Erland’s folly, are equally precipitated, though not intended, by Kristin’s nagging over years-old wrongs. Kristin’s marriage, overall, is a good one, but there is much to be learned from it about things couples should not do.
As an aside, it also contains maybe the first use of the term "unfriended" in literature.
Every so often, I meet someone (usually someone with a bad but not criminal significant other) who thinks it is a pity that "public shaming" has gone out of fashion. I suppose it makes for nice dramatic revenge fantasies, but I’d like anyone who really longs for those days to read Kristin Lavransdatter to see how the actual practice combines immature school clique behavior, petty gossip and the kind of neoCalvinist mentality associated with townships of population 67 where they stone people by lottery to appease the plague gods.
The Middle Ages are far better when re-enacted by the SCA than they were in practice. Nevertheless, Kristin Lavransdatter is very highly recommended.
Cyborgpunk: Neuromancer, by William Gibson :
Case was twenty four. At twenty two, he'd been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief, he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.
He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it mattered now. He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled. Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because--still smiling--they were going to make sure he never worked again.
They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian Mycotoxin.
Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.
The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.
For Case, who'd lived in the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.
I read this one because of an article stating that "the greatest science fiction novel ever written" was going to be made into a movie. The article was not an opinion piece; it called Neuromancer "the greatest science fiction novel ever written" the way AP might say that Barack Obama is the 44th President or that Bolivia exports tin. Seems to me, you do a book a disservice saying things like that; people expect perfection and are disappointed. Is it better than Mirror Dance? Ender’s Game? Foundation? Stranger in a Strange Land? 1984? How about the early masterpieces by Wells and Verne? How do you compare works in such a diverse genre and say that one of them is the best ever? It would be like asserting that Agatha Christie, or Dashiell Hammett, or even Ed McBain, wrote "the greatest mystery novel ever written".
Neuromancer is pretty gorram good. It’s apparently the original cyberpunk tale, the one that invented a whole set of tropes that have been done to death since then: geeks with plug-in technology surgically implanted into their bodies, who can send their consciousness into cyberspace; geek-fancying girl ninjas in tight outfits; drugs to enhance fighting and hacking abilities; huge corporate-government-gangster conspiracies; deadly cyberspace defenses to elude when hacking data; streetdealing whiz kids with their own geekspeak street language comparable to the slang of A Clockwork Orange; artificial intelligences that can do or be anybody. There are paragraphs in Neuromancer that could have been expanded into entire stories themselves (the paragraph on Case’s backstory, above, for example).
It’s one of those books where it’s hard to describe the plot without spoilers, as it unfolds chapter by chapter, full of plots, betrayals and counter-betrayals. Fortunately, the plot is almost secondary. The point of the book is the atmosphere. Everyone should read it at least once; it may not be the greatest SF ever written, but it’s certainly on any top 20 list.
Nightmare Farce: Auto Da Fe, by Elias Canetti :
He wanted to see whether the books in the neighboring room were still alive. His anxiety arose more from a rooted sense of duty than from any real love. Since the preceding day he felt tenderness only for books which he did not possess. Before he could reach the door, Therese was already there. How had she noticed his movement in spite of the Spanish screen? How was it that her skirt carried her forward at a quicker pace than his legs? For the moment he laid a hand neither on her nor on the door. Before he had assembled even the courage which words cost him, she was already nagging:
"You dare! Because I’m good enough to let him use the passage, he thinks the rooms are his, too! I’ve got it in writing. Black on white. He mustn’t even touch the door handle. He can’t get in anyway, I’ve got the key. I’m not giving it up. The handle belongs to the door. The door belongs to the room. Handle and door belong to me. I won’t have him touching my handle!"
He fended off her words with an awkward movement of his arm and unintentionally touched her skirt. She began to scream loud and desperately as if for help.
"I won’t have him touching my skirt! The skirt’s mine! He didn’t buy it! I bought it! He didn’t starch it and iron it! I starch and iron it! Are the keys in my skirt? The very idea. I’m not giving up the keys. Not if you were to bite it. The keys aren’t in it. A woman gives her everything to a man. Not my skirt! Not my skirt!"
Okay, here's one in which the fuddy-duddy Admiral maybe needs a clue. Canetti got the Noble Prize for this book, and I don't have the chutzpah to sit at my blog and tell you that a Nobel Laureate sucks. But while Kristin Lavransdatter is unquestionably a great plot and contribution to the best of the Western Canon, Auto Da Fe looks suspiciously like a lot of nonsense to me. One reason is that every single character behaves like an overgrown toddler with zero impulse control and motives solely out of the Id...and I have a hard time enjoying a book that does not have at least one likable character.
The Professor, for example, is so nonfunctional and self-defeating that it's hard to feel sorry for him, even empathizing with his bookishness. He is so bookish that he is in trouble with life. He talks to his books and only to his books, and he can't deal with people in even the most simple transactions. OK, fine...I can deal with an absent-minded professor type. But professor Klein is not only dependent but yells in impotent rage every chance he gets. Early in the story, he is mean to a child who shares his love for books, which seemed out of character for such a person. A little later, his illiterate housekeeper fools him by pretending to read a book so reverently that he proposes marriage on the spot, where it would be alomost impossible to believe that a real book lover could be fooled.
And Klein is nominally the good guy. The housekeeper is brutal, stupid and greedy beyond belief. She has Klein write out a will in her favor, which she decides makes everything he owns her property immediately. She berates him for spending anything on himself and threatens to have the law on him for such things as eating food. She divides his house in half and calls him a trespasser for venturing into "her" half, and then revenges herself by taking half of his half, and then half again, eventually crowding her boudoir into his library while the rest of the house is vacant. He retaliates by wasting "her inheritance" to spite her. She commits adultery with the first furniture salesman she meets, who proposes, on their first date, that they kill the professor. Then she pairs up with the fascist apartment manager, who pawns the professor's books for money and is earnestly confounded and hurt at the professor's disloyalty in getting mad at him, after a lifetime of service and obligation...a recurring "joke" involves the dilemma of a beggar who pretends to be blind and thus has to bite his lip and further pretend to be fooled when people drop buttons into his cup. Other street hustlers laugh at him. And so on. It's Kafka without the laugh track. Anyone who cares to explain why this is the stuff of Noble Prizes, please speak. 'Tis charity to show.
Not the end of the world AGAIN...:Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett :
Spring had come to Ankh-Morpork. It wasn’t immediately apparent, but there were signs that were obvious to the cognoscenti. For example, the scum on the river Ankh, that great wide slow waterway that served the double city as reservoir, sewer and frequent morgue, had turned a particularly irridescent green. The city’s drunken rooftops sprouted matresses and bolsters as the winter bedding was put out to air in the weak sunshine, and in the depths of musty cellars the beams twisted and groaned when their dry sap responded to the ancient call of root and forest. Birds nested among the gutters and eaves of Unseen University, although it was noticeable that however great the pressure on the nesting sites they never, ever made nests in the invitingly open mouths of the gargoyles that lined the rooftops, much to the gargoyles’ disappointment.In the Great Hall, under the carved or painted stares of two hundred eariler Archchancellors, the butler’s staff set out the long tables and benches. In the vaulted maze of the kitchens—well, the imagination should need no assistance. It should include lots of grease and heat and shouting, vats of caviar, whole roast oxen, strings of sausages like paperchains strung from wall to wall, the head chef himself at work in one of the cold rooms putting the finishing touches to a model of the University carved for some inexplicable reason out of butter. He kept doing this every time there was a feast—butter swans, butter buildings, whole rancid greasy yellow menageries—and he enjoyed it so much no one had the heart to tell him to stop.
The air of expectation had even spread to the ravens who inhabited the Tower of Art, eight hundred feet high and reputedly the oldest building in the world. Its crumbling stones supported thriving miniature forests high above the city’s rooftops. Entire species of beetles and small mammals had evolved up there and, since people rarely climbed it these days owing to the tower’s distressing tendency to sway in the breeze, the ravens had it all to themselves. Now they were flying around it in a state of some agitation, like gnats before a thunderstorm. If anyone below is going to take any notice of them it might be a good idea.
Something horrible was about to happen.
You can tell, can’t you?
It’s the fifth Discworld book, and we’re threatened with apocolypse once again, this time in the form of an eighth son of an eighth son—the most powerful kind of wizard that exists. He’s taken a wizarding school full of dusty, indolent academics and turned them into a faction that can pretty much do anything, and together they intend to take over the world—for starters, anyhow.
Sourcery is an appropriate wrapup for this month, as the Sourcerer’s main opponents include a wizard more inept than Peter Beagle’s Schmendrick; a female fighter stronger than William Gibson’s Molly, baggage more frightening than the psyche of Samantha Peale’s Emma Dial, and a monkey more relentless than the one on the back of John O’Hara’s Julian English—all in a world more slapstick than Christopher Moore’s Holy Land. It’s not the best Discworld book, but it’s a delightful read and highly recommended.