Talented Sower

I was impressed by Parable of the Sower, and finally got around to reading the sequel, Parable of the Talents. It picks up chronologically after the first one ends, but tweaks the format a little bit, bringing in additional voices and commentary to open up the story a bit more. It's just as dystopic as the first novel, and somehow even more bleak, but in an earned fashion that feels grounded in real problems and points the way towards possible solutions, rather than wallowing in grimdark fantasies.

 

MINI SPOILERS

Like the first book, the story is mostly conveyed through Lauren Olamina's journal entries, each dated and written shortly after the events she describes. Also like the first book, these are usually prefaced by a verse from Earthseed: The Book of the Living. By this point in her life Olamina has published the book and has a full conception of this new religion, so it's much less about her figuring things out or expressing them and more about convincing others.

The book as a whole, though, is not written by Olamina, but rather by her daughter Larkin. Larkin introduces each section, glosses the background of events, and often provides bitter commentary. Larkin is not a fan of her mother, or of Earthseed: she faithfully reports the facts of Lauren's life, but makes it clear that she does not approve of her choices. While most of the actual words are Lauren's, Larkin also brings in some short passages from her father Bankole and her uncle Marc, providing brief first-person insights from these important people.

I think of both Parable books as staying balanced between the macro and the micro. On the macro scale, Butler was writing thirty years ago about problems that plague us today: global climate change, warming weather patterns, rising sea levels, a coarsening of American society, deep mutual suspicion between police and civilians, sagging American exceptionalism and a call for jingoistic renewal, accelerating gaps between rich and poor, dominance of wealthy and powerful corporations, a political system that seems strung between inefficacy and cruelty, increasing drug abuse, public health pandemics. On the micro level, she's writing about the particular experiences of Olamina, the community she was born into, and the community she creates around herself: the struggle to get food in an increasingly arid biome, walking a freeway with other desperate refugees, deciding whether to find safety in anonymity or popularity.

One seemingly macro element is the 1932 presidential election. One candidate is the dull, frumpy, old-fashioned vice president who seems to promise more of the same, when nobody is happy with the same. The other candidate, Andrew Steel Jarret, is a fascistic demagogue who promises to "make America great again" by returning to its core values and excluding anyone who doesn't belong. There are some obvious parallels to Trump, but as the book continues it's clear that Butler intended Jarret as much more of a theocratic Inquisition-like figure: Jarret is the founder of Christian America, which actually reminds me much more of the Leviticans of Ameristan in Neal Stephenson's "Fall". This is a perverse nationalistic religion that takes Christ off the cross and hands him an AK-47, ready to slay anyone who doesn't follow him.

Like in our own timeline, the presidential election seems remote to many characters in this book: they feel the outcome won't affect them, and vote based on vibes or to express their protest of the system as a whole. Nobody thought it was possible, but Jarret wins, and casts a huge shadow over the rest of the book despite never actually appearing.

MEGA SPOILERS

He has a big influence in his direct actions, most spectacularly by declaring war against the seceding state of Alaska and its ally Canada. Ironically, this has almost no effect on Olamina's precious community of Acorn. But his election also has a huge indirect impact on the culture as a whole, emboldening religious zealots to take actions that would have been unthinkable before.

Much of the middle section of the book takes place after "Jarret's Crusaders", a paramilitary wing of "Christian America", seize control of Acorn and turn it into "Camp Christian", a brutal re-education camp. It supposedly exists to rehabilitate the cultists, petty thieves, homosexuals and other undesirables, turning them into reliable patriotic Christian Americans. In practice, nobody is ever declared rehabilitated. It is just a brutal torture prison for slaves. Everyone is made to wear a high-tech slave collar, causing immense pain if they try to escape or merely at the whim of their tormentors. There are cruel beatings, senseless executions, and countless rapes of the women. This is all terrible, but made even more sickening by the faux piousness of the "teachers", who are typically married and living respectable lives in public, while somehow justifying their terrible acts to themselves.

Prior to Camp Christian, Olamina was pursuing an ambition of promoting Earthseed by making Acorn into a sort of model community: self-sufficient, but friendly and helpful to its neighbors, able to offer safety from the gangs and criminals roaming the land, and able to teach children to read and write and the precepts of Earthseed. She has a vague sense that, beyond a certain point, Acorn will grow too big, and will be able to divide into more communities, gradually spreading the word.

Instead, Lauren spends 17 months in living hell. Her husband is murdered at the start, her daughter snatched away, and over the term many more of her friends are killed. They eventually manage to get free and take their vengeance: not due to any great plan or action on their part, but the stupidity of their captors and the help of a natural disaster. After this experience, Olamina is understandably opposed to restarting Acorn or otherwise providing a permanent target to Jarret's Crusaders. There's a diaspora, where the surviving members of Earthseed split into small groups and fan out through northern California, Oregon and Washington, taking on false identities and seeking to avoid attention.

In the end, Olamina rediscovers her passion for proselytizing. She begins to reach out, one-on-one with strangers in towns she is passing through, spending days with people to get to know them and share verses of Earthseed. We then fast-forward several decades to when Earthseed is a thriving and influential faith. I would have enjoyed reading more about this transition - it would have been a lot more fun than Camp Christian! - but we get the general gist of it. Olamina eventually makes contact with some bright, wealthy and bored childless people who are intrigued by Earthseed and start giving her the resources to scale up her mission. They help her put her book online, fly across the country to meet other people, and organize larger lectures for her. Over time Earthseed becomes a cross-cutting community: still very active with direct service to the poor and illiterate people of America, but supported by many prominent businesspeople, lawyers, politicians, entertainers and other influential people.

It's interesting to think of these books as science fiction. From early in the first book, Lauren has been talking about how mankind's destiny is to spread among the stars. I imagined that we might be reading a lot about space ships and stuff. Instead, the contents of the books are mostly a dirty-regressed Earth: there are a few technological advances, but mostly people are walking instead of driving, reading paper books instead of browsing the Internet, listening to radio instead of watching TV. In this book, Olamina expresses why that interstellar Destiny is so important. Throughout history, mankind has constantly fought stupid, pointless and wasteful wars against itself: wars between tribes, between religions, between nations. This causes so much needless suffering and has held back our advancement. Because of this, Olamina believes it's critical to make people passionate about a shared, common goal: something that will unite them and overcome our biological instinct for conflict.

It's a cool idea, and at least in this book, seems successful. Stuff still isn't great by the 2080s, but it seems like the worst days of the Pox are in the past and society is healing, at least partly thanks to Earthseed. The book ends with the first (ugly!) spaceships lifting off, joining generation ships that will undertake incredibly lengthy voyages towards the Destiny. Olamina herself won't be able to join them, but she seems to take comfort in seeing her vision fulfilled.

So the macro level ends up much better than where it started, but on the micro level, things are pretty sad. Lauren and her brother Marc are badly estranged: Marc became a minister in the church of Christian America, finds Larkin, and lies to both her and Lauren to keep them apart. Larkin and Lauren finally meet near the end of the book, but too much time has passed. Lauren is (understandably!) bitter and angry at Marc; Larkin is put off by Lauren's intensity, and feels an unfair-but-understandable sense of abandonment. Despite Marc lying to her, he's the only family Larkin has known, and a more important relationship to her than her own mother.

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This is definitely not a feel-good book! But it is a good book. Hard to read and not offering a lot of comfort, but with a seething sense of anger at injustice that feels really compelling. It's wild to see how foresighted Octavia Butler was when writing this book nearly 30 years ago, in a much different world before 9/11 or An Inconvenient Truth or Citizens United. Dystopias by definition aren't fun, but they can be very valuable warnings to us, and this one is definitely worth heeding.

Inescapable

Chance plays as big a role in my reading decisions as anything else. I recently went to the library with the explicit intention to check out The Unknowns by Gabriel Roth. And, while sifting through the "FIC-ROT" section, I of course came across a trove of Philip Roth books. I like Roth, and had read good things about Nemesis, so I snaffled that book as well in my most recent visit.

I can hardly claim to be a Roth expert, having only read perhaps a half-dozen entries from his voluminous output, but I have read enough to be really impressed at the variety of his writing. Which I suppose shouldn't be surprising... it would probably be more shocking if a non-genre writer managed to keep doing the same thing for more than fifty years without changing his or her style. Still, I'm regularly impressed at just how assuredly and confidently he can write any of these stories, making it feel as though he's been practicing that particular style for decades.

Nemesis is one of his latest books, but if I didn't know that, I might think it was one of his first. The story structure is more straightforward than in books like The Counterlife, and the writing is fairly direct, with less of the intricacy I remember from entries like American Pastoral. Of course, simpler doesn't mean worse, and while there are only a few themes in this book they are very powerfully explored. I'm left with a few very strong, gripping images, rather than the sometimes-bewildering array of memories after reading Roth's more complex stories.

In some ways, this book reminds me a little of The Plot Against America: the circa-WWII setting, with a focus on New Jersey, along with a highly readable and gripping prose style. Nemesis is much less fantastic, though, and deals with an actual historical moment rather than the counter-factual history of TPAA. Nemesis also feels like a more human story: it's very focused on a small collection of characters, particularly the protagonist, while TPAA had more fun spinning out the plot, and tended to use characters as a means towards that end.

MINI SPOILERS

Nemesis focuses on Bucky Cantor, who I think is one of the most likeable characters who I've recently encountered. Like many of Roth's characters, Bucky is Jewish, living in the Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic in Newark. It's the summer of 1944, at the height of American involvement in WWII. All of Bucky's friends have gone to war; he tried to enlist, but was rejected as a 4F due to his poor eyesight and short stature. Despite that, though, Bucky is a powerful and vigorous young man, who has been physically training and excelling at sports for practically his entire life. He's a hero to the young Jewish kids of the neighborhood, where he supervises the playground in the summer. He's about the most perfect role model you could imagine: he's patient with the unskilled kids, encourages their progress, sets good examples of sportsmanship, and protects them against threats both on and off the field.

It's a huge testament to Roth's writing prowess that this might be the first time in my life that I've been able to think about organized sports as a positive thing. My attitude towards gym class while growing up varied between hatred and resentment; it seemed frustrating, pointless, and demoralizing. (It wasn't until I became an adult that I realized that I actually enjoy physical activity, just not the competitive nature of organized sports.) Bucky, though, is a very eloquent champion of the virtues of sports and physical fitness, and ties it to these young boys' self-esteem and role as citizens. Many people in this neighborhood were just one generation removed from the ghettos of Europe, and excelling in sports isn't just a means to assimilation, but also a way to give oneself the confidence to protect oneself against anti-semitism.

Bucky isn't the most bookish guy, but he's also hardly a dumb jock: he was the first member of his family to graduate from college, thanks in part to the amazing emotional support of his grandmother and grandfather, and he takes his mission as a caregiver to children very seriously. He still feels a lot of guilt over "missing" the war in Europe, but that just increases his already-substantial sense of purpose and responsibility to his community.

Bucky was already admired, but becomes a minor hero when a polio epidemic strikes. I have to admit that, from my sheltered perspective in 21st-century America, I had only a vague notion of exactly what polio is. All I knew was that FDR got it, and it made his legs weak, and it was somehow connected to the iron lung. I succeeded in the difficult task of preventing myself from jumping on Wikipedia to research it, partly because I liked the idea of keeping myself in a mindset similar to that of the characters in this book. Polio is a mysterious disease, and while nobody in the novel is exactly sure what causes it or how it is spread, its effects are horrifying. It seems to particularly target young children and infants, much like a predator, killing many of them outright and leaving the survivors mangled, with twisted limbs.

Early on, Bucky's virile protection of the playground seems to provide some sort of protection over Weequahic as a whole. While most of Newark has been infected, this community remains safe. That begins to change, though, and Bucky feels partly responsible when children from his playground are the first to be infested and die.

Of course, people are worried by this, and the increasingly fraught nerves as the toll climbs higher threaten to transform into a panic. I was a little reminded of the antisemitic pogrom in The Plot Against America, but rather than false accusations being levied against a particular target, here there's a very particular harm but no certainty about the culprit. The reasonable pillars of the community seek to comfort people and keep them calm, but even they have to admit that they aren't sure what specifically can be done to halt the disease's spread. They offer their best possible advice: wash your hands, keep your home clean, avoid contact with the sick, try to get fresh air, and so on. But, of course, many of those who die seemed to have followed all of this advice, while others who flout it remain unscathed.

In light of all this, it's natural that people in general (and Bucky in particular) begin to think dark thoughts about the fairness of life and the universe. This is rather cliche territory, but Roth explores it with fresh urgency: how can one believe in a loving and all-powerful God who allows innocent children to be killed? Why should we give God credit for prayers that are answered, and not ascribe blame for those that are ignored?

It might be worth pointing out here that, as usual, Roth makes good use of the separation between author, narrator, and protagonist. I was reminded a little of American Pastoral's structure: in that book, it was easy to think that we were reading a third-person attached narrator of a story about The Swede. However, what we were actually reading was Nathan Zuckerman's embellishment of a story he'd heard about The Swede; Zuckerman only appears briefly on page near the start of that novel, but every word we read was written by him (as written by Roth). Similarly, Nemesis seems to be entirely about Bucky, but the actual narrator is one of the kids from the playground. It's a little surprising to hear him chime up at one point in the book - basically just saying, "Oh, yeah, that kid who got polio was me" - and then he appears for a bit longer near the end, describing how he was reunited with Bucky decades later and learned his story.

All that to say, while the novel tackles some heavy stuff, it doesn't really feel like a polemic. We get Bucky's perspective of a cruel and malicious God, which is viewed with skepticism by the atheistic narrator, all of which is being presented to us by Roth. The mediation isn't nearly as important here as it is in some of Roth's other books, but it's still interesting and effective.

MEGA SPOILERS

Nemesis feels unusually propulsive, and late in the book, one bombshell drops after another. Bucky surprises us and himself when he agrees to abandon his playground duties and retreat to the safer environments of a remote summer camp. That was very narratively surprising, since it seemed to violate the heroic structure of the story so far. The book reaches a dark climax when polio cases begin to appear in the camp as well, and reaches its apex/nadir when Bucky himself is diagnosed with polio, confirming his horrible suspicions that, rather than being the guardian of the children, he was in fact their destroyer.

The actual truth of this belief is left open to questioning, as the narrator does at some length. For whatever it might be worth, I'm inclined to agree with him. I could believe that Bucky could be an asymptomatic carrier, who ignorantly infected his charges. However, given that he actually starts showing symptoms several days after the counselor does, I don't think it's possible that he could have first started carrying it way back before all the kids were infected. The timelines just don't seem to add up. (And, now that I've finished the book and finally rushed to read all about polio on Wikipedia, I feel vindicated in that decision).

That said, though, even if I don't believe that Bucky was responsible, I certainly can believe that he felt responsible. For so much of the book he felt like he was abandoning his moral obligations - to serve in the war effort, to stand by his post at the playground - even though reasonable people would certainly say that he was hopeless to prevent the first case and making a perfectly defensible choice in the second case. That sense of guilt easily transmutes into a sense of failure, and a mind like Bucky's will seize on something tangible to anchor that failure to.

This book ended up being far more depressing than I had initially thought. Rather than the tale of a solid, reliable young man who stood up for what he believed in and helped people survive the emotional trauma of a horrific plague, it became a tragedy, the tale of a man deserting his post and losing all happiness from his life. For all the sadness, though, it's still a beautifully written story, if not one I see myself running back to any time soon.

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Nemesis might be the most accessible Roth I've read yet, alongside The Plot Against America. It's simple but powerful, not unlike its protagonist. As with many Roth tales, it's rooted in a very specific time, place, and community, but that same specificity allows it to address some universal ideas in a very engaging way. While I can't say this is the most enjoyable Roth story I've read, it's very well-crafted and another fine example of his vast range.

Melon-Collie Baby

Like everyone I know, I have more books that I want to read than books I can read. Since I'm a nerd, I handle this situation via an online Google Docs spreadsheet that includes the titles of the novels I want to read, along with pertinent information like their authors, the source of the recommendation, their availability in my local library, and perhaps a few brief notes. The list isn't a queue, so some books can languish for many years before I get the chance to pick them up.

One book had been on there for so long that I remember its presence on the list far better than I can recall any reason why I put it on the list: "The Melancholy of Resistance," by the Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai. It's one of the few titles on my list to have come from a review in the New Yorker. I almost always read the fiction reviews in the magazine, far more often than I read the actual fiction. The few New Yorker recommendations I've read have included Murakami's Kafka on the Shore and Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, so it's a pretty high bar. Basically, a review has to not just say "this is a good book," but also "this is a very weird book."

Melancholy's weirdness is of a whole different order than my other weird books. While there is a slight tinge of supernatural atmosphere within the book, the vast majority of it is very ground-level, realistic, and grimy. However, its form is very different and challenging; even when the author is describing a fairly mundane scene, like a widow's pantry of jarred preserves or the behavior of feral cats, the author uses very purple prose and a visually impenetrable block of text. I'm curious what this book looks like in the original Hungarian, but I imagine it looks almost identical, because I can't imagine any translator cruel enough to invent this style. Each chapter is exactly one paragraph long, so every page is one solid block of end-to-end justified text. The sentences tend to be quite long as well, many about a page long, although there's no great consistency to their length. The other oddity in format is the author's use of "a veritable plethora of" quoted phrases, inserted into the middle of sentences "without a care in the world," often using expressions that are "dull as dishwater." Sometimes these quotes appear to be verbatim snatches from dialog; very little straightforward conversation appears in the book, instead we get long descriptions that summarize what a person is saying, peppered with those periodically quoted words. Quite often, though, the quotes belong to the narrator and not to a character, and I still don't really get what purpose they serve. They're kind of self-evidently cliched, and I can't tell if they're being quoted as a way of apologizing for them, or to expose their artificiality, or what. It's cool, just a bit mind-boggling.

MINI SPOILERS

The book seems focused on decay, in all its forms. The surprising and saddening opening chapter focuses on the perspective of an elderly woman who is returning to her hometown after a shopping trip, and we see her bemoan all the ways in which the world is getting worse. People are getting increasingly rude or even violent; the town's infrastructure has decayed, such that buses no longer run late at night and even street lighting has been lost; everywhere the city is in disrepair, and nature itself is either reclaiming land or destroying itself, as when a giant tree simply topples over, lifting up all of its roots and a wide chunk of pavement around it. This sense of disintegration spreads throughout the book, growing blacker and darker. Great public minds have been reduced to bizarre private obsessions; petty ambitions win out in an environment of absolute lethargy; goodness and innocence is swept up in a silent, ominous swell of violence.

I found myself often thinking of Thomas Pynchon. Although in many ways these books are complete opposites, Pynchon's books are keenly interested in the idea of entropy, which seems closely related to Melancholy's theme of decay. Reflecting on it, I came to the tentative hypothesis that entropy, as explored in Pynchon, is primarily about inorganic systems, like physics, or abstract systems, like conspiracies. Decay, as explored in Melancholy, is primarily about biological and organic systems, like human health, the human mind, wooden structures, and the psychology of crowds. To put it bluntly, decay is a sadder topic than entropy, probably because it's closer to our daily experience and harder to separate from ourselves. And Laszlo doesn't give us the feel-good new-age solution of decay and death being part of a cycle of rebirth and grows. We never see anything good and new being created in this book, just the corruption of what was once good and its replacement with something lesser, something evil, or nothing at all.

The few truly active forces in this book are primarily destructive in aspect, and they are never seriously opposed by anything else. Mrs. Eszter is a shockingly venal person, who seems willing to bring down the whole town in exchange for a better house, an impressive title, and some of the respect that she feels she was missing. She plots, but her plots just seem so petty and so ineffectual that it's amazing she succeeds as well as she does. Much more interesting, and much more mysterious, is The Prince, whose seemingly supernatural control over the army of ruffians is the most inexplicable part of the book. Laszlo does an amazing job of creating an intense atmosphere around the circus, filled with dread and wonder. (Between this book and Something Wicked This Way Comes, I have very little desire to ever visit a carnival again.) We never get a truly satisfactory answer as to... just WHAT the Prince is, how much control he has over the acts of the mob, whether he has long-term plans and what they might be.

And, boy, that mob sure was brutal. At a couple of points I felt like I was reading Blood Meridian again. Laszlo's prose isn't nearly as gory, but it's at least as dreadful, in the literal sense of causing dread. Between that darkness of spirit, and the highly idiosyncratic writing style, these two books could be pillars in the tales of the awfulness of man.

Against these forces of evil we have two points of light who fill most of the novel's middle pages. Valuska is a simple-minded person, but I don't believe he's actually an idiot like the rest of the town believes: his mind just works in a very different way which is much less helpful and practical, but creates real good in the world: sharing his largely incomprehensible but deeply, profoundly felt awe at the movement of solar bodies provides the town with entertainment and a relatively peaceful way to wind down a night of drinking. Valuska's deep, almost spiritual connection with the stars is of a kind with Mr. Eszter's own profound connection with music; however, where Valuska's obsession gives him drive and a means of social engagement, Mr. Eszter's has brought him misery and isolation. I was fascinated by Laszlo's intense description of the crisis of faith Mr. Eszter underwent when he discovered the mutability of musical scales and tuning.

MEGA SPOILERS

I don't think "crisis of faith" is too mild a term for the wrenching psychological upheaval that Mr. Eszter underwent; glum and despairing of any certainty in a relative world, he cast himself adrift from the warm companionship of the town to gloomily contemplate the meaninglessness of art. Valuska's presence is the only flickering candle that lights Mr. Eszter's existence, and it's utterly tragic that 

The book ends in an utterly fascinating way. Mrs. Eszter, triumphant, presides over a funeral and reads a speech. From here, the narrator abruptly departs from the story he's been telling for the previous 300+ pages and starts talking about a body. (I suspect that it's the body of Mrs. Plauf in the coffin, but there's absolutely nothing in the text that segues from the funeral to this section.) He gives a vivid, clinical, scientific description of the body succumbing to death. This included some of the most chilling passages of the entire book, including the phrase at the end of this sentence, that instantly reverberated within my mind:

"As a result of the endeavours of the enslaved enzymatic units the glycogen in the liver decomposed into its simple elements and this was followed by the autolysis of the pancreas, the term autolysis throwing a pitiless light on the truth it hides, which is that from the moment of birth every living organism carries within it the seeds of its own destruction."

Goosebumps! I felt like I recognized it; I may have picked up on it from the original New Yorker review. There's also powerful stuff like this:

"So, through various delicate channels, a superior organism welcomed them, dividing them neatly between organic and inorganic forms of being, and when, after a long and stiff resistance, the remaining tissue, cartilage, and finally the bone gave up the hopeless struggle, nothing remained and yet not one atom has been lost."

There isn't a single word in these last few breathless pages about the town, about the circus, about Mr. or Mrs. Eszter or Valuska or the Harrers or anything outside the body. The narrative slams you into a close-up focus and holds your gaze on the decaying, disintegrating, doomed flesh. It isn't as macabre as it sounds, but it's still shocking and a heck of a way to end this tale.

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This book was originally published in 1989, and I can't help but think of the historical moment while reading it. Hungary, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, was emerging from the shadow of the USSR; it was a chaotic time, but in retrospect far less bloody than people had thought. I have no idea if the story is meant to be at all allegorical, and if so, what its target is. Is it trying to shine a light on the internal rot of the Soviet state, showing how everyone had given up trying and surrendered to apathetically enduring? Or, more worryingly, was it a comment on the revolutions of its day, arguing that changing leadership could not improve a poor situation, that revolution could only destroy and not create? It's perfectly possible that Laszlo didn't write this as a political book, but it's hard to believe that he wasn't influenced by the violence occurring in his country.

I think The Melancholy of Resistance is a great book, but also one that I'll have a tough time recommending. It's a downer of a story, and the prose is deliberately challenging. Still, those who can persevere through the technical and emotional challenges will be rewarded by the complex and deeply felt story.

A Great Fall

While I was grabbing Vulcan's Hammer from the library, I also picked up another Philip K. Dick book that grabbed my eye: "Humpty Dumpty in Oakland." With that title, how could I not grab it? I knew nothing about it, and it turned out to be a fascinating counterpart to Vulcan's Hammer. Evidently, Humpty belongs to a set of books that Dick wrote but didn't publish during his lifetime. Unlike his much-better-known sci-fi books, these stories are set in modern times, and feature more realistic plots.

I can't say that I loved it, but it was an interesting and fairly engaging read. The characters in the book are all fairly ordinary people, and while they encounter problems that represent huge stakes for them, they're the sort of huge stakes that you or I might encounter during our lives. Parts of the book were a bit painful to read, when people act self-destructively or come into bitter emotional conflict with others. With Vulcan's Hammer so fresh in my mind, it was easy to pick out the differences between the books: Humpty had a larger cast of characters, who were more realistic and fleshed-out, and we get more insight into people's relationships and thinking (or lack thereof). In trade, we lose the nifty fast-paced plotting of Vulcan's Hammer.

Both books do feature some ambiguities, but in very different ways. Vulcan's Hammer unravels like a mystery: we're presented with a situation, then throughout the course of the novel more facts and alignments are revealed to us, until at the very end we have a clear picture of what has happened. Humpty presents a situation, and throughout the course of the novel we're never entirely sure whether this situation is what it seems or not; as the characters talk with one another and learn more information, they start believing one thing, and then another, leaving a large cloud of doubt hovering over everything like the smog over San Pablo Avenue.

While Humpty isn't a sci-fi book, it does have an interesting perspective on the future that seems very much a part of its time. Dick wrote it in the late 50's and finished in 1960, and the characters within the book share a sense of wonderment and bewilderment at the changes happening in the world around them. The Bay Area is expanding, with brand-new suburbs being created from green fields; older low-tech professions are confronted with modern methods of management and the introduction of post-war technology; even culture is rapidly changing, with people chasing newer forms of recreation. One of the funniest parts of the book comes when one character presents another with the music of the future: electronic barber-shop music. That's right, it's the barber-shop that you know and love, but produced electronically! All the kids will love it, and it will be the soundtrack of the future!

It's also interesting to see race relations depicted in this book. It was written before Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement gained national traction, and doesn't have the political correctness that seems to hover over a lot of later fiction, but also avoids the cringe-inducing invocations of race that we get from authors like Twain. Dick lays out the racial situation in Oakland fairly straight-forwardly: as I imagine was common at the time (and, frankly, often still is today), the city was red-lined into white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods. One of the main (white) characters lives in a mixed neighborhood where both races live; he can live here more cheaply, and he enjoys socializing with African-American people, which the other white characters do not. While the legacy of slavery probably isn't as strong in California as in the south, there's a definite hierarchy in place: a female black character needs to speak very carefully when she's describing her low opinion of a white man, since it goes against the mores of the time. Black characters speak in a dialog with some dialect, but more in the sentence structure than pronunciation; I found myself getting a feel for the cadences and emphases of "black" speech, while not feeling like they were being presented as unintelligent (which, again, is how African-Americans tend to come off when writers like Twain write dialect). While this stuff isn't crucial to the book, it ended up being one of my favorite aspects, because it opened a window on what it might have felt like to live here sixty years ago. (On a more-exotic level, Dick similarly plays with the speech for a major character who hails from Greece.)

MEGA SPOILERS

Fundamentally, the book revolves around the question of whether Chris Harmon was trying to dupe Jim Fergusson into parting with his money, or if he was genuinely trying to be helpful; in the first case, Al is a tragic hero who is destroyed for doing the write thing; if the latter, Al is an inadvertent villain. From peeking at some online reviews after finishing the book, it seems like the consensus is that Chris was legitimate. That's certainly the note that the book ends on, but I'm still not convinced that we're meant to 100% agree with it. The key bit at the end that planted doubt in my mind was the lawyer mentioning that he was part of Chris's organization. That means he could easily have covered for Chris and convinced Lydia of the venture's legitimacy. It also makes Chris's earlier behavior seem less honorable; early on he had encouraged Jim to consult with his own lawyer before investing, which seemed at the time to be looking out for Jim's interests, but actually would serve to further Chris's goals while reassuring Jim.

I don't necessarily think that Chris was bad; I just think that Dick meant to keep us wondering at the end. It isn't as though Al is anywhere near a reliable character; we never learn why he has all those pills, but I presume that he has some sort of mental imbalance to start with. In the end, Al is just a tiny, limited guy who's fumbling around in the universe, and whether he's right or he's wrong, it feels kind of inevitable that he would come to an ignoble end.

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I doubt I'll pick up any other of Dick's books that have this sort of setting, but I'm glad I read this one - it shows another side of the author's prolific output, and also functions as a fascinating time capsule that gives a ground-level look at life in the East Bay of the 1950's.

The Filth

Warren Ellis isn't exactly Neil Gaiman, but if you squint you can see the similarities: both are English, both made it big in America with their personal, idiosyncratic limited-run comics, and both branched out into regular novels. Gaiman has gone on to become the master of all media, while Ellis is content to mostly stay in the graphic novel world with occasional forays into script-writing.

As far as I can tell, Ellis has just published one novel so far, Crooked Little Vein, and it's a doozy. The language and thematic content will be familiar to anyone who has read Transmetropolitan (which I'm tempted to call his opus, except that probably isn't fair since I haven't yet read Planetary). It's about moral decadence and the breakdown of contemporary society, and primarily revolves around sexual perversion, drug abuse, misuse of power, and cringe-inducing physical injuries. All of this is channeled through a kind of refracting lens; in TransMet it was the gleeful hedonism of Spider, in CLV it's the jaded resignation of private investigator McGill.


MINI SPOILERS

Speaking of McGill, the book also centers around a MacGuffin: in the impressive first chapter, we meet both McGill and his unexpected employer, the heroin-addicted White House Chief of Staff. The job: track down the "secret Constitution of the United States." This vaguely seems like a DaVinci Code-esque bit of history-inspired creativity. According to the Chief of Staff, after writing the famous Constitution, the founding fathers got together and secretly penned ANOTHER document that laid out their private vision for the country. It includes several "invisible amendments," and has guided the actions of Presidents throughout centuries. It also resonates at the same frequency as our eyeballs, which somehow compels you to read it? And it turns people into upstanding and proper citizens? None of this actually matters at all: it's a very entertaining MacGuffin, but for all that it affects the plot, it might as well be a nuclear launch code or a bag of jewels or incriminating blackmail photos... it only exists to motivate the characters to go on their journey.

McGill is a fairly likeable, fairly blank character. His only really distinguishing characteristic is his rotten luck; bad stuff always seems to happen when he's around. Early on he joins forces with a polyamorous girl (who I couldn't help thinking of as his Filthy Assistant), who navigates him through the landscape of bizarre sexual peccadilloes and other corruptions. They embark on a fascinating tour of America, starting in grimy New York, moving on to featureless Cleveland, down into smug San Antonio, over to tacky Las Vegas and finally ending in soulless Los Angeles. I don't think any of the later cities topped the craziness of New York, but the overpowering blandness of many suburban landscapes are even more offensive to the protagonists than, say, Godzilla fetishists.


END SPOILERS

The book is a really quick read; I polished it off in a few days, but you could probably do it in a single sitting. It's entertaining for most of the same reasons that Transmetropolitan was entertaining: it's dirty, dangerous, funny, and direct; it gestures at the filth in our society without making you feel bad about it. Like Transmetropolitan, I personally feel a bit uncomfortable about that mental perspective; it's tough to tell when Ellis is glorifying something, or condemning it, or just gleefully observing.

I can't say that Crooked Little Vein is high literature - this ain't no American Gods - but it's a great modern noir-ish adventure detective story, and if you can stomach the subject matter, you'll have a blast.

The Saddest Kid on Earth

I worry about my tendency to identify with fictional protagonists, especially when they're highly neurotic.  Fortunately, I don't think I have much in common with Jimmy Corrigan, but still, I frequently found myself wincing in sympathy while reading this book.

Technically, "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" is a masterpiece.  I've loved Chris Ware's work for years, although I've only seen it in small pieces published in The New Yorker or McSweeney's.  He has a very distinctive style, crisp and clean, highly geometric, with backgrounds that looks almost computer-generated.  The characters themselves are fairly simply drawn, more evolved than stick figures but not by a whole lot.  That said, Ware can convey an astonishing range of emotion with just a few lines; a straight line under the eyes betraying a character's fatigue; a slightly arced line above the eye showing despair.


MINI SPOILERS

Structurally, JC is a 90's masterpiece, epitomizing the same indie spirit of Slacker.  It's a bit of an adventure, and a coming-of-age story, and an epic.  But the adventure is a trip from Chicago to Michigan; the coming-of-age is about thirty years too late; and the epic shows how three generations of Corrigans have endured painful, emotionally bereft lives.

I think my favorite parts of this sprawling tale were those set during the Columbia Exposition in Chicago.  This is a story-within-a-story that at first seems unconnected to the surrounding narrative, and eventually takes over it.  It really isn't much more important than the present-day tale - both deal with the daily events of powerless people - but it sustains a bit more of a story, and at least the 19th century Jimmy Corrigan takes a few actions on his own initiative, even if they don't lead to anything enjoyable.

The story effectively portrays how traits can pass from generation to generation.  We see the modern Corrigan's repressed racism at its roots.  We see how abandonment emotionally stilts a child, who then cannot provide emotional support to their own offspring.  All in all, it's moving, but, man, depressing!


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In terms of comics, JC seems closest to Daniel Clowe's "Ghost World" among comics that I've read, and Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor" among comics that I have not.  These are stories set in the real world, drab and dull: most of the action takes place in fast-food restaurants, hospital waiting rooms, efficiency apartments, cubicles.  There's a great interlude within the book that displays cut-out trading cards for some of the locations from the story.  On the front you see bleak scene after bleak scene: highway rest stops, shuttered businesses, strip malls.  On the back are eloquent and loquacious captions extolling the high virtues exemplified by these places.  That gets at the crux of this work.  It isn't about elevating the mundane to the level of art.  Nor is it about satirically mocking the ugliness in our world.  It's about staring unflinchingly at that ugliness for as long as we can bear, and then staring some more.  I don't think that there's any redemption in JC, but neither is there condemnation.  For myself, all I can do is mutter, "There but for the grace of God go I."

Venetian Blind

My ongoing quest to read books that I should have read before continues to yield mixed results.  Sometimes I come up with something amazing, like Pale Fire; other times it's a dud.  Sadly, "Death in Venice" falls into the latter category.  I don't think it's a bad story, it just doesn't do much for me.


MINI SPOILERS

Thomas Mann wrote this novella, in which a middle-aged writer mopes around and obsesses over a much younger boy.  The language of the book is great - it's hard to tell how much is the translation and how much is Mann, but there are some really beautiful passages.

But - and this is a failing of mine, not a failing of Great Writers - I want more than great language from my books; if I was satisfied with beautiful similes and thoughtful construction, I'd read a heck of a lot more poetry than I do now.  When all that great writing is devoted to the task of illuminating the sad, pathetic, often petty life of a rather pompous man, well, I just don't feel that thrilled.

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I wasn't enthralled by this story.  I'm sure it didn't help that my copy started with a translation of "Tobias Mindernickel", in which a strange man buys a dog, pampers it, and then stabs it to death.  (Yes, that's an oversimplification, but I don't have a lot of tolerance for that kind of thing.)

I'm definitely not done with Mann - I'll probably pick up The Magic Mountain one of these days, and may also give Doctor Faustus a whirl.  I doubt that I'll return to his short fiction any time soon, though, based on what I read here.

Brutal

Many years ago, my grandmother was talking with my mom about a book she had brought with her on a visit. She said that she had been careful to not leave it out where we kids could read it, warning, "The language was so bad, I could hardly stand to finish it!"

This has become a favorite saying of my family since then. While it's amusing, I have to admit that I can sympathize with her feeling. Certain books can feel painful to get through, but once you reach a certain point, your desire to finish outweighs your discomfort of reading additional pages.

"Blood Meridian" is definitely the best example yet of a book that I could hardly stand to finish. It is a pretty extraordinary book, with a very raw, compelling language, a pulsing plot, and amazing, surreal characters. It is also the most graphic, disturbing, disgusting thing I have read in ages. I felt physically ill while reading the book - not in one or two scenes, but every couple of pages.

If nothing else, "Blood Meridian" has shown me that I'm not nearly as desensitized as I thought I was. I thought I'd gotten past the point where violence in fiction can bother me. I play GTA, I watch Dexter, and while there's a certain automatic reaction to violent images, it no longer really sticks with me. Not so much with this book, and isn't that interesting? It has no pictures, no audio, no immersion, and yet it haunts my thoughts in a way that other art cannot.

I think part of this is the overall art of the book. It takes a while to get used to the language; it's one of those things that breaks almost every rule that you learn about writing, and yet becomes much stronger for it. The language is raw, minimalist, wind-stripped... it perfectly matches the desolate and desperate Western desert where the book takes place. It feels like you're inside someone's head, hearing their jumbled, mumbled, half-panicked thoughts at the horror they see around them. There's a strong immediacy in the writing that brings you right up close to and in contact with the action, not viewing it distilled through a traditional detached narrator.

MINI SPOILERS

As I try to analyze why the book disturbed me so much, I think that only part of it was the actual gore, which admittedly is quite shocking. We're treated to elaborate and detailed descriptions of scalpings, how body parts were peeled away from one another, what fluids went where, and so on. But what makes this truly disturbing is the sense of evil malice that lies behind it. I usually hesitate to use the word "evil," but it's hard to think of any other term to describe the men in this book. Some of them seem to have abandoned morality, caring nothing for human life. One seems to have moved beyond that, actively delighting in the infliction of suffering.

I refer, of course, to the Judge, one of the most mesmerizing characters I've come across. In his very first appearance someone identifies him as the Devil, and the evidence in the rest of the book continues to support that assertion. I'm not sure if he actually is the Devil, but he bears the hallmarks. He's kind of a blend of Milton's Satan and Dante's Satan, if that makes sense - like the former, he loves independence, and seeks to create a world without God; like the latter, he's filled with lies, responsible for the bad things in the world, and is stuck in Hell.

Anyways, it's interesting that the Judge is practically the only well-spoken individual in the whole book. Listening to him is like listening to the Serpent. Everyone else is quiet, cussing, highly casual in their speech, while the Judge declaims, cajoles, and exposits.

All the characters were well-written, though. The Kid is an enigma who we slowly get to know through his actions, even though we never get inside his head. Tobin the expriest is great, although I was never sure exactly what we were supposed to make of him. Glanton is nearly the Judge's match, but very immediate; his actions are just as awful, but only focused on what's directly in front of him, without the Judge's wider-ranging cruelty. All the desperate men in the gang of vigilantes are also compelling, and surprisingly well differentiated given how little time is devoted to each.

The first part of the book was especially devastating. McCarthy casts the Kid in the deep end, unloading trial after trial on him, much (keeping the Biblical theme here) like Job. Every time that I thought the Kid had escaped from misery and the story might become more enjoyable, he was plunged back into violence, even worse than before and worse than I could imagine. This pattern is finally broken after the massacre of a rogue invasion force from the U S Army, but what replaces it is even worse. The Kid becomes part of the devastation, an agent of the kind of chaos that previously oppressed him.

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This book kind of messed me up. I suppose it's nominally a Western, but it reads and feels like a horror book to me. I can't say that I'm glad I read it, but it is an amazing book, and I'm glad that it's over now.

What A Philip

I didn't like "In Milton Lumky Territory."  I suppose it's partly my own fault.  These days, I virtually never read the back cover or inside jacket for books that I'm about to read; they inevitably give away things that I'd rather keep as surprises, and for many of my favorite authors, they actually get important things wrong.  So, when I saw this book at the library, I focused on the fact that it was written by Philip K. Dick and figured that was enough for me.

I think this might be the first Dick story that I've actually read.  Like everyone else in America, I'm familiar with his stories because of their ubiquitous translation into movies.  (My favorite is probably still Blade Runner, with A Scanner Darkly close behind.)  From what I understand, most of the adaptations have come from short stories of his.  This is the perfect source for a really talented director like Ridley Scott or Richard Linklater, since it gives them a cool plot to play around with, and also enough freedom to make appropriate additions to grow out the story to make it fit the scope of a major movie.  That's a much better approach than the typical novel adaptation in Hollywood, which is all about simplifying and cutting down the more complex source material.

What I'm saying (in a very round-about way) is that In Milton Lumky Territory isn't sci-fi - it's a realist novel.  That isn't necessarily bad, even though it wasn't what I expected.  However, on the whole it was a thoroughly disappointing book. 

I should have taken as a warning the Author's Note at the very beginning.  It's quite brief, and says something like, "This is actually a very funny novel, and a good one, too."  That "actually" ought to have tipped me off... if the author is responding defensively before you've read the first sentence, he knows something's up.  Even with that note in my mind, I didn't think the story was at all funny.  It didn't seem to be trying to be funny, either... maybe it was just being too subtle, but I rarely have trouble detecting subtle humor.  And I didn't think it was all that good.  Oh, from a technical perspective it's just fine - no writing errors, the dialog was fine, and there aren't major unexplained holes in the plot.  But it's pretty boring, and often pointless, and features characters who aren't very remarkable, and on the whole it was a waste of time to read.


MINI SPOILERS

Some of this might have been deliberate, perhaps?  Is it ever valid to write a bad book if you want to make a realistic portrayal of a dull subject?  The story is set in the 1950's, and features a commercial buyer who falls in love and decides to work in a typewriter shop.  The book is utterly focused on the feel and pace of 1950's America: small towns that are being encroached upon by national marketers; the federal highway system opening up new freedom of movement for everyone; the relatively insular lives of rural folk, and so on.  So if the point was to communicate how boring the 1950's were by writing a boring book... well, mission accomplished.

I found myself often thinking of The Man Who Wasn't There, and then wishing I was watching that movie instead of reading this book.  There are a lot of similarities between the two.  Billy Bob Thornton is a barber who dreams of opening a drycleaning business; Bruce is a wholesaler who dreams of managing a typewriter shop.  Both are set in the 1950's.  Both look at the attitudes of people in small towns.  However, TMWWT is an interesting movie, where things actually happen, with a character who you genuinely like (or at least are interested in)... it sets the stage with dullness, but the dullness isn't an end within itself, but rather a springboard for some really thoughtful and shocking developments.

The only time that there's any real energy in this book is when Milton Lumky is on the stage.  He shows up for the first time around page 90, and has a total of maybe 25 pages throughout the whole book.  Unlike the other characters, he's at least interesting - he's got a world-weariness about him that he displays acerbically, a weird blend of camaraderie and depression.  He's always a minor supporting character, not someone who you can root for, but at least he livens things up a little.

I get the awful suspicion that Dick started writing this book based on the name alone.  I can just imagine him going, "Milton Lumky.  That's a great name.  I wonder what a character named Milton Lumky would be like?  Hmmm... I bet I could write a story about him!"  His Milton Lumky is as Milton Lumky as you can get; I can't think of a better representation of that character name than what Dick comes up with.  That's nowhere near enough to carry this story.


END SPOILERS

I'm definitely not going to give up on Dick, but I'll be much more careful before the next time I pick up one of his books, and will definitely go for his science fiction next time.  After I wrapped up the book (it's just over 200 pages, but feels much longer), I finally read the supporting promotional material.  It would have saved me some grief - the best praise they come up with is something like, "Arguably Dick's best realist novel, apart from [some other title]."  Just how many realist novels did he write?  It would be pretty funny if it was just two.

Hellish

I think I need to lay off the "macabre comic book with sinister spiritual overtones" jag I've been on.  It's messing with my head.

On the plus side, I can report that, yes, From Hell really IS that good.   It's breathtakingly ambitious, incredibly broad in scope, laying out Victorian London in all its filth and glamor.  Like many of my favorite works, it first focuses on getting the world right - making it real, ensuring we understand its rules and how it works, feeling the rhythm of the ordinary - before we plunge into the plot proper and experience Jack the Ripper's killings.


MINI SPOILERS

I'm definitely not an expert in JTR mythology, but it does feel like it's often presented as a mystery: the purpose of a JTR movie or book is to chase down the mysterious individual who perpetrated those crimes.  From Hell inverts that.  After a brief prologue, the very first thing we see is the man who will become Jack, as a small boy.

Only, we don't really see him.  There are so many amazing techniques in this book that I can't start to list them all, but one of the earliest is its presentation of Gull.  Through the entire chapter, we don't see him, and yet he is present in nearly every scene.  Generally we are seeing from his perspective, literally looking through his eyes, Halloween-style.  We see all the moments that the adults miss.  We see the son playing with his dead father's face, giggling softly as the eyes open and shut.  We see him finding an animal in the grasses, and cheerfully tearing it apart to expose its innards.  With this as background, we see Gull steadily advance into the upper tiers of Victorian society, and bear the uneasy knowledge that the grown man likely holds the same morals as that young boy.

At the very end of the chapter, we finally see Gull himself.  And, when we at last can connect a shape to those words, those thoughts, those actions, we find it to be perfectly ordinary.  He's an Englishman, distinguished-looking, calm.  Perfectly ordinary.  Which, of course, makes it all the creepier.

The murders themselves take a long time to start.  The wait is not a boring one.  I made the mistake of reading From Hell right before bed, and blame it for some poor sleep over the last few weeks.  There's one incredibly long chapter that features Gull and his coachman driving around London and looking at historical sites.  Sounds dry, doesn't it?  But there's an amazing diabolical energy behind that tour which pulses on every page.  I felt my mouth growing dry as their sinister touring reached its conclusion.  Gull is firmly in control, laying forth his erudite knowledge, the connections between points on the map and points in time, describing the gods of Britain, the gods of Atlantis, the God of Christianity.  Netley, who doesn't seem to be a particularly pious of virtuous man, is driven, panting, to the limits of human endurance, by nothing more than Gull's words and some creepy architecture.

(Very rough analogy: think of the Winkie's Diner scene from Mulholland Drive.  Nothing but talk, and yet, mind-blowingly frightening.)

Of course, this is all a huge testament to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's talent.  Preacher frightens with buckets of blood.  From Hell has buckets of blood, but it doesn't need them - you're awash in horror before the knife is ever drawn.

There's lots of other stuff I could mention, but I wanted to hit on Gull's visions.  I thought this was an absolutely amazing idea.  Gull has a minor stroke, and has a vision while his brain is under stress.  This vision seems to propel him; he would have carried out his mission regardless, but that vision leads him to be Jack the Ripper and not just Jack the Causer of Accidental Death.  Later, he starts to have more visions as he continues his murders, and they grow longer and more elaborate, seemingly in response to the increasing violence of his crimes.

So, with visions, we are naturally led to consider a Macbeth-like query: are those visions "real," in the sense that they actually are communication from some force outside of nature?  Or are they illusions, brought on by physiological processes in our brain, and ascribed significance when they actually represent nothing more but randomly firing neurons?

Here, they opt for the first answer, and - this is the cool part - they completely take away the possibility of the second answer.  Suppose that Gull's visions had been of, I don't know, a secret conversation in the Royal Palace, or a war in Egypt.  He and we might take those visions as being "real", but we could still argue for him having invented them.  Similarly, if he had had further visions of Jubelah, we would recognize their content as spiritual, but still not be able to say whether they refer to actual spiritual objects or not.

However, they give Gull extremely lucid visions of life in the 20th century.  Which is brilliant.  Gull doesn't understand what he's seeing - he knows that they're otherworldly, that he's being granted insight into something that his contemporaries cannot see, but has no framework for processing television sets, fax machines, computers, spandex.  It's a mystery to him.  But not to us.  Moore and Campbell place the reader in the position of confirming Gull's visions.  Within the context of the work, we know that there's no way Gull could have this knowledge, and no way he could have accurately imagined it, and so we are forced to acknowledge that some supernatural force is at work.

Like I said: Creepy!


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Messes with my head, but in a very memorable way.  From Hell fully deserves its reputation at the top of the comics heap.  Any work of its scope and detail would inspire awe on its own, but it builds on top of its densely created world and creates one of the most amazing horror stories that I've read.  If that sort of thing appeals to you, read it.  If not, keep your distance!

Holy Graphic Novels, Ronin!

I continue my march through the works of Frank Miller and Alan Moore with two totally different graphic novels: The Killing Joke and Ronin.

TKJ seems to be one of the most famous modern Batman stories, possibly just behind The Dark Knight Returns. The look of this book is wholly unlike that one. Where DKR's art was impressionistic, with evocative pencil strokes that contained little detail, TKJ's art is lush and rich. An afterward explains that the artist has retouched the book from its original form, but still, even if it was uncolored it would be gorgeous. The color isn't an afterthought, though... particularly in the nightmarish carnival scenes, it lends a hallucinatory quality to the proceedings. Even the pure whiteness of The Joker's face feels somehow new here.

I think that TKJ is one of the most attractive comic books I've read. I can't say that it has the best story... it's good, but doesn't really amaze.


MEGA SPOILERS

I like the idea of showing The Joker's origin, but it feels kind of anticlimactic. I suppose this is inevitable - it would be really hard to come up with a story that matches the consistent menace and creepiness of the character - but given that, I almost would have preferred that they kept the mystery there. It does serve a really important purpose... by seeing what The Joker was like before his life collapsed and he turned to crime, the idea of him achieving redemption becomes feasible. Heh... it sure is easy to criticize and second-guess other writers. Anyways, it would have been cool to either have a more exciting origin story for The Joker, or found another hook that showed there was a real human underneath the pallor.

That idea of redemption, incidentally, was hands-down my favorite element of this book. It's kind of depressing that that the idea of a bad guy atoning for his crimes and turning good would seem so radical, or even that a good guy would reach out to someone with a plea to stop the endless cycle of violence. I think it's even more radical to tell that story in the context of a well-established comic world, rather than inventing new characters for it... it helps the book immediately impress on us the importance of what Batman is offering, since we know who Batman is, who The Joker is, and how fraught their relationship is. That final page, of course, is ambiguous... I don't think you can really know whether The Joker has given up or not. But even the possibility that he might have surrendered is exhilarating. It's also incredibly significant, of course, that Batman laughs at the joke. This means that he isn't in a pure power play, forcing The Joker to play the script written by Batman; he's engaging with him, giving and taking, letting his facade slip a little, accepting something offered by The Joker.

Back to the downside - the shooting of Gordon's daughter was incredibly dramatic and powerful, as I'd expect, and the whole photo thing was extremely creepy. Still, the whole incident plays into the comic convention of nothing ever changing - she didn't die, she'll get better, Gordon had a rough time but he's fine now. Gordon's trip into madness was yet another thing that I thought sounded much cooler than it ended up being. It mostly came down to seeing pictures of his daughter and saying "Oh God" a lot. The most interesting part by far was The Joker's patter, but the visuals didn't really convince me that Gordon was on the edge. (Of course, this may be a case where I would have a different reaction if I was more plugged into the Batman mythos and had stronger relationships with these characters.)


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On an almost totally unrelated note: Ronin! There actually is a tenuous connection: Ronin was the book that paved the way for The Dark Knight Returns, and DKR has affected every Batman story (and many comic stories) since. Ronin stands entirely on its own, though, as a fully independent universe.

I really, really liked Ronin a lot. Let's talk about the universe, the story, and the meaning.

I believe Ronin was written in the 1980's, and it projects that decade's gritty view of New York far into the future. Manhattan in the 21st century is a chaotic, lawless land run by racial gangs. Worldwide, economic recession has largely decimated the nation-states, and corporations hold what little power is left. However, in the center of urban squalor lies mankind's hope.

A scientist, Peter McKenna, has succeeded in bridging the gap between biologic and electronic components. He is able to create living organisms, fleshy robots and buildings, and an artificial intelligence called Virgo. With the support of Mr. Taggart, a natural leader and keen businessman, McKenna builds Aquarius, a gigantic, living, utterly secure oasis lying among Manhattan's decaying skyscrapers. Throughout the book you repeatedly catch glimpses of Aquarius, and it looks much like kudzu: a breathing, living thing spreading across the landscape.

The whole setup is pretty fascinating... that's not the whole thing, but enough to see that the book can play with some pretty interesting ideas. The barrier between man and machine is breaking down, and as the book progresses the characters are trying to make sense of what it all means.

Now, for the story.


MEGA SPOILERS

"Ronin," of course, refers to a masterless samurai. The book actually opens in ancient Japan, where we learn about a samurai's battle with and eventual loss to a powerful demon. His follower pursues the demon throughout his life, and the conflict eventually brings them into the time of Aquarius.

So, in addition to the man/machine tension inherent in the future, you also have the added tensions between ancient and modern, magic and science. In the center of all this, though largely absent from our sight, is Billy, who in some ways seems even more out of place than the samurai. Billy is a man-child with telekinetic powers. Throughout the book he is goaded and manipulated into using his powers. Finally, in a shocker near the end, we learn that Billy may have invented the whole story of the ronin and the demon from his own mind, and the chaos their battle has brought to the world is the result of his feverish imagination.

It's a deeply satisfying story, complex and full of interesting little twists and reversals. Best of all, the story sets you up to seriously ponder the underlying meaning that they're getting at.

For me, the book seemed to ultimately be hinting at the creative power of storytelling. This isn't a new idea, but it's still an incredibly exciting one that I never seem to tire of. Billy has had a rough childhood, and is helpless to act on his world the way he wants... he gets picked on, he loves a woman who won't love him back, his mother smothers his ambitions. Within the story, Billy acts out through telekinesis, reshaping the world to act out his fantasies. In a way, that's what most artists do: they create a narrative, and bring that narrative to life in the context of their medium. You could view the whole book - both the past AND the future parts - as being one long dream of Billy's. Well, how is that so different from the author's experience while writing it, or our experience while reading it? The fictions we create and consume can exert enormous influence on us... they may not be "real," but they have very real effects on us.


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Both books were excellent. I'd give a personal hat tip to Ronin for its originality and really fascinating world, but you can hardly go wrong with either one.

And now it's been ten years, I'm still wondering who to be

I've finished reading Haruki Murakami's excellent nonfiction book "Underground." Murakami is the novelist who wrote "Kafka on the Shore," possibly the best book I've read so far this year. After I finished that book I thought, "Who IS this guy?" and did some research. Several of his other novels also sounded good, but one book in particular caught my eye. "Underground" is his look at the 1995 sarin attacks on the Tokyo subway. I think there are a few reasons I thought it would be interesting. First, I tend to really dig it when novelists write nonfiction; George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" is a great example of very fine work done outside an artist's main mode. Second, like a lot of Americans I've grown much more interested in terror as a weapon after the 2001 WTC attacks; I want to better understand where it comes from, what its goals are, and how to respond to it. Japan has historically been one of the safest countries in the world, and I thought their shock to this attack would probably be very similar to our own. Finally, I thought it would be a good opportunity to maybe understand the Japanese psyche a little more. I've had a lot of exposure to Japanese culture through video games and anime, but I'm sure that's a very skewed perspective; nonfiction seemed like a better "in", and who better to get it from than an author I already enjoyed?

Murakami's structure to the book is really interesting. It isn't told as a straight narrative; rather, as he describes in his introduction, he wanted to experience the attacks through the eyes of the victims. The events in the book cover only a couple of hours. There are maybe thirty or so chapters in the book, each one a first-person account of one victim's experiences, based on their interview with Murakami. He strikes an interesting balance between compassion and objectivity. Within the interviews he is almost entirely absent from the text, only occasionally asking for more clarification or otherwise prompting them; for the most part he just lets them tell their stories. However, his overall project is extremely considerate and careful towards the victims. He honored anonymity requests, met with them under the victims' preferences, and, what I think is really amazing, sent each person's chapter to them for their approval before publishing. This means that some things were taken out when they changes their mind, which clearly frustrates him as a writer, but his way of honoring them is a great testament to his character.

The introduction was self-deprecating, filled with him saying things like "I can't hope to even begin to address the emotions people felt on that day. I'm not that good of a writer. I just humbly offer up these few stories I was able to collect." It was effective enough that my expectations were lowered - "Oh, this book won't be as good as I thought it would be. Well, I'll keep reading anyways, to see what these people think." And then? I was blown away. What he does is a little hard to describe, but it's as though he acts as a novelist through the role of an editor: he takes large sections of extant text, which he didn't write, and using only pithy introductions and clever organization, layers an extremely compelling narrative on top of this historic event.

Things get off to a bang with the first four chapters. I defy anyone to read these and not think of Kurosawa's excellent "Rashomon." The four chapters all describe the same event: sarin affects several people riding a train, station agents attempt to clean it up but are affected themselves, they go outside and call for an ambulance which never arrives, then several people use a news van and take a very sick person to the hospital, and later that person dies. It's fascinating to see a character in one story become the narrator in the next; and, like in Rashomon, people's descriptions of the details of the events can vary wildly. A red handkerchief becomes a printed one; a female rail employee becomes a nurse; and a wide variety of people take credit for thinking to use the news van as an ambulance. While the structure feels very similar to Rashomon, though, I think the aims are a little different. Both works are about the ambiguity of truth and how everyone works with their perceptions and memories rather than an objective understanding of truth. Rashomon (to me, at least) felt like it was more about the way people shape their perceptions; it isn't coincidental that every person's version of the incident in the woods casts themselves in the best possible light. Underground has a little of that, but more so I feel it reflects the chaos and trauma that hits the mind in such a situation. When someone's very survival is on the line, their mind will focus on that instead of seemingly extraneous details, and later on the details get filled in, seemingly at random.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the history behind this: Japan is thought of as a primarily secular nation, but many citizens observe Shintoism or Buddhism. A Buddhist-derived cult called Aum Shinrikyo grew sharply in popularity during the early 1990's. I wasn't very familiar with the cult before reading this book; it sounds a little like a cross between the Moonies and David Koresh's group. A charismatic leader with magical powers, Shoko Asahara, led the group; at the bottom were several people who had been effectively brainwashed. They were recognized by the Japanese government, and Asahara campaigned unsuccessfully for a seat in the Diet. The organization grew more militant, operating more like a company or a government, with members being assigned to its Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, and so on.

All that aside, the group was virtually unknown, both within and outside Japan, until 1995. That was when several members, in a coordinated operation, unleashed a liquified version of sarin nerve gas on a half-dozen crowded subway trains. Several thousand people were injured; miraculously, only a dozen or so actually died, but many more only survived as vegetables or with permanent physical and mental damage. Much like the September 11 attacks, it wasn't immediately clear who was responsible; eventually, Aum Shinrikyo's involvement was proven and the members were arrested and sentenced.

Again, Japan is an incredibly safe country, with the lowest murder rate in the world. Understandably, the attacks were a huge blow to the nation, which wrestled with questions about its character and its reaction, including whether to amend the constitution to allow the death penalty.

Going back to the event itself, though: Murakami completely succeeds in conveying the horror and confusion of that day to the reader. The victims did not know who their attackers were, what was making them sick, why help wasn't arriving, or how many other people had been hurt. Again, through careful structuring of the first-person accounts, he makes the reader experience the same confusion and gradual comprehension of what was happening that day. In the first few chapters we hear how the subway mistakenly reported an "explosion" taking place at a station; much later in the book, we finally see when and how that report was made and spread. Sarin is a bit of a mystery early on; the more cases we read the more we understand the different things it does to a body, as well as what the common signs of poisoning are; and towards the end we finally hear from a doctor who gives a comprehensive explanation of medical identification and treatment of sarin. Like us, though, the first wave of doctors didn't underestand what was happening or how to treat it, and so we can't be too angry at their initial slowness in treatment.

Besides Rashomon, another comparison I thought of was "Armies of the Night," Norman Mailer's excellent account of the 1967 march on the Pentagon. Like Murakami, Mailer is a novelist, and both of them treat a single confusing historic event by focusing on ground-level observations. Murakami has a multifaceted, prismatic approach to the problem, staring at the same event from a variety of perspectives. Mailer is the complete opposite: the story is all Mailer all the time, just as much about his selfishness and cowardice and loathing as it is about the march itself. Mailer has a useful device to describe the book: "History as a novel, the novel as history." He explicitly blurs the line between entertainment and information, providing a novelized version of pure fact. Murakami doesn't claim to be doing anything so grand, but I think what he has accomplished here is no less impressive.

The book closes out with a later addition, in which Murakami interviews past and current members of Aum Shinrikyo. The format is superficially identical to the first part, but in practice is radically different. Murakami is no longer a near-silent observer; instead he is an investigative reporter, challenging his subject, occasionally bullying them, pushing incredibly hard to cut to the root of what he's looking for. I didn't expect to feel this way, but I ended up feeling kind of sorry for them. I felt like first they had been abused by life, then taken in by Aum and often abused by them, and finally had their beliefs and values challenged by Murakami. (As with the victims, Murakami did not publish anything without his subjects approving every word he wrote.)

One thing that kind of struck me about this section was how the Aum members often seemed much more interesting than the victims. I don't at all mean to belittle those who were injured or claim that they were all the same; still, most of them seemed like career-oriented individuals who worked incredibly hard and enjoyed a few basic pleasures in life. (This is probably representative of those who ride the Tokyo subway early in the morning than it is representative of Japanese in general.) By contrast, the Aum members were almost all loners. Some were incredibly passionate about mysticism and spirituality and were drawn to Aum because of that. Some were incredibly rational and hyper-scientific, and were drawn to Aum by a desire to study and understand it. Still others just appreciated the attention and camaraderie. A lot of them were voracious readers who always preferred reading to interacting with their peers; others despised books and never read anything, even for school.

Of course, I'm far from an expert on Japanese society, but I think Murakami is correct when he questions how Aum could have arisen in Japan. One obvious explanation is the exciting version of religion it expounded in a strongly secular country. Reading through the members' testimonies, though, I wondered if part of it might be a result of Japan lacking an emotional safety net. Japanese culture is very monolithic, which probably provides a strong feeling of comfort and security to those who fit into it, but can be terrible to those on the outside. I'm reminded of my own feelings of alienation at public school: feeling like you're on the outside can be rotten. America's incredibly fragmented and chaotic culture can leave people just as lonely, but I think the fact we don't highly value conformity here makes life a little more comfortable on the outside. It's harder to blame society or the world for your problems when everyone looks and acts differently from everyone else.

Then again... while the rank-and-file members Murakami interviews seem fairly marginal to society, Aum's upper ranks were filled with extremely intelligent and successful people. The people who actually carried out the attacks included doctors, businessmen and lawyers. So we can't easily say that the cult existed because of people being excluded from society, since society's best were also Aum's best. Here, you can probably make a more compelling argument that what was missing from Japanese society wasn't acceptance of the individual, but a deep sense of spiritual fulfillment. Their testimonies indicate that these people found something in Aum that they couldn't find elsewhere, which was how it earned their devocation and, ultimately, replaced their conscience.

Could it happen here? In a way it did, in the Oklahoma City bombing. That's a case where citizens, alienated from their government, struck out murderously against innocents. The perpetrators look totally different, with one group filled by religious fervor and the other by political rage. In some ways the Aum attack is more terrifying because it required the active participation of such a large group of people. Also, while I've spent a lot of time thinking about how Japanese society could change to prevent such attacks in the future, I confess I've never seriously thought about how American society should change to prevent another Oklahoma City-style attack. Perhaps I should remove the beam in my own eye before criticizing the mote in Japan's? It's a tricky ground to navigate, keeping the blame squarely on those who did violence while also trying to understand why they did it and what steps should be taken to prevent future harm.

So, that's that. Yet another good book, and I think I'll continue hitting up Murakami in the future. I hear The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is good.