A. Hicks Hope

Creativity, Expression, & Entertainment Sought

July 14, 2010                                ISSUE: AHH-10-5 

Fiction Commentary Nothing More

CONTENTS OF COMMENTED ON:

HISTORICAL

The History of PI by Petr Beckman

The Return of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

Helter Skelter by V. Bugliosi & C. Gentry 

Possession by A.S.A. Byatt. 

The Boston Strangler by Gerold Frank

Flashman and the Redskins by George Macdonald Fraser.   

Royal Flash by George Macdonald Fraser. 

Zodiac by Robert Graysmith. 

Picture This by Joseph Heller.

Iron and Silk by M. Salzman

The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. 

Gumshoe by Josiah Thompson.

Burr by Gore Vidal.

Empire by Gore Vidal.

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

LITERARY    

Chimera by John Barth

Dean’s December by Saul Bellow

Vital Parts by Thomas Berger.

Bullet Park by John Cheever

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad.

Worlds of Wonder by Robertson Davies.

White Noise by Don DeLillo.

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Collector by John Fowles

The Revised Magus by John Fowles.

A Man of Property by John Galsworth.

The Wreckage of Agathone by John Gardner

The King’s Indian: Stories and Tales by John Gardener

Forest Gump by Winston Groom

Damage by Josephine Hart

A Widow for a Year – J. Irving

The World According to Garp by John Irving.

The Man Who would be King – R. Kipling.

The Joke by Milan Kundera

Love, again by Doris Lessing

Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Presig.

Lalla: An Investigation into Ethics - Robert Presig

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

City of the Night by John Rechy

Goodbye Columbus by Phillip Roth

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.

The Coup by John Updike.

SPECULATIVE FICTION

Heads by Greg Bear

Slant by Greg Bear

Foundation’s Fear by Gregory Benford.

The Stone that never came down by John Brunner.

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card 

The Red Tape Wars by Chalker, Resnick, and Effinger.

Einstein’s Bridge by John G. Cramer

Unreasoning Mask by Phillip K. Dick.

The Final Encyclopedia by Gordon R. Dickson.

The Exile Kiss by G. Effinger.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

All my sins remembered by Joe Haldane.

The Forever War by Joe Haldane.

Tools of the Trade by Joe Haldane.

Forever Peace by Joe Haldane

The Stainless Steel Rat goes to Hell! By Harry Harrison

Tribe of the Tiger by B. Kurten

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr

Wetware by R. Ruck

Picnic in Paradise by JoAnna Russ.

The Man Who Fell to Earth by William Trevis

The Eye of Cat by Roger Zalenzy.

DETECTIVE / CRIME FICTION

A Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess

Gypsy in Amber by Martin Cruz Smith

Conflict of Interests by Egleton

In the Monkey House by John Fullerton

Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

The Impostors by George V. Higgins.

The Dark Wind by Tony Hillerman.

Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman.

People of Darkness by Tony Hillerman.

The Spy Who came in from the Cold by John Le Carre.

The Tailor of Panama by John Le Carrie

Jack Foley’s Greatest Caper by Elmore Leonard

Bimbos of the Death Sun y S. Macrumb.

Burn Marks by Sarah Partasky.

The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog (Crime Club) by Michael Pearce

The Godfather by Mario Puzo.

Rose by Martin Cruz Smith

Out on the Rim by Ross Thomas.

The Loo Sanction by Trevanian

Drowned Hope by Donald Westlake

HISTORICAL

The History of PI by Petr Beckman

It is a book about a history of mathematical obsession to obtain the exact number for the ratio of the circumference of a circle relative to its diameter.  The mystic value called PI.  It was sought throughout history and is still being perfected.  The number is now known to be transcendental, meaning it can never being “known” completely but people still try.  It is the Mount Everest of mathematics.  The Holy Grail of numbers.  It is the history of Math.  For a history or a math book it is very readable.  The author’s opinions are obvious and amusing in many cases.  I was lost in the algebra section, but still I learned a lot about the human need to know.  I am glad I picked up this odd document.  It is an important book in that it teaches the reader about aspects of the human struggle to understand the universe.  It is a how and why book.  Read it if you can.

The Return of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

Jack Crab is a difficult character, a white boy raised by Indian’s in the American Old West.  He is brave and capable but willing to run for his life rather than fight for it.  He’ll run first, if he can.  He maybe more of the American “everyman” than most of the literary heroes doing all those extraordinary things.  This book is meant to be a study on the character of Jack Crab, Little Big Man.  His Indian grandfather called him that because Jack ws very short but very dangerous.  The history of the time, the people he meets are only there as foils to Crab.  By living to 120 years old, Crab has shown that his philosophy of life worked.  It was a good strategy for survival.  If survival is the only evidence you need for concluding a good way of life.  Crab is fun to be around too.  The book is enjoyable and easy to read.   

Helter Skelter by V. Bugliosi & C. Gentry.

This is a true account of the Mason Trials.  Many facts about the L.A.P.D. and L.A.S.O.  of the time themselves make it worth reading.  But like many of these serial killers books, it becomes an autobiography of the authors of the biography of events.  Gonzo journalism or Mailer journalism or just ego?  It leaves you with a subjective attitude that, explaining the author’s opinion is more important than the facts.  Still, worth reading.

Possession by A.S.A. Byatt. 

When I read this book back in 1992 I didn’t know anything about the author.  If I can, I like to pick up a book knowing little about it and start reading.  If the first paragraph or two grabs me, I continue.  I must have liked the initial part of this book.  I kept reading.  The main character was a man but seemed like a woman to me.  He had too many descriptions of bathrooms.  Too much detail on the curtains.  Most men wouldn’t know the color of the curtains in a house they’ve lived in for years.  Just asked one if he has curtains?  I then read somewhere that A.S.A. Byatt was a woman.  This depressed me.  The sex of the author shouldn’t be so obvious in the fiction.  That’s what I think.  The author should write as a character in a specific situation.  And then the middle section of the book.  Well, it annoyed me.  Most of the book took place in the 20^th Century with only letters referring back to the past, that was fine, and then suddenly, for no particular reason, we are dropped into the 19^th Century.  This displacement did clarify some plot points, but it was unnecessary and distracting in my mind.  More found letters would have been better.  After that, I thought less of MS. Byatt.  Maybe the Editor had her throw the past in for the slower readers, those folks that need all loose ends tightened.  I’m not like that some mysteries should remain unsolved and unresolved, more like the real world.  Instead, MS Byatt wrapped up everything nice and tight.  There was even a last jump back into the 19^th Century to leave the reader with a “feel good” smile.  I had a mixed impression of the book.  The movie was okay.  There was a chase scene thrown into it to add drama.  Academics in a chase made me laugh.  I’ve been an Academic off and on for the last thirty years, watching Academics running for their lives is just so unusual, it’s funny.  Read it.

The Boston Strangler by Gerold Frank

The True story?  More a reasonable and readable account of the facts.  No analysis, just the facts.  It was worth the read just for those facts.  He started out as the Measuring Man.  Accosting women with a measuring tape to get the women’s stats.  There are good descriptions of police technique; real cop stuff.  No overly dramatic fantasy unrealistic solutions or filler chase scenes.  Check all of the taxi fares in the area of the murders, only one will fit, the weird one.  The man that looked guilty usually was.  But the Boston Strangler looked excessively harmless and that was weird.  His weird commonness tagged him.  If you look common, no one remembers you.  A cliché but it works.  Only the conspicuous and odd are remembered.  Worth the time if you like crime. 

Flashman and the Redskins by George Macdonald Fraser.   

This is a historical novel not a sports story.  No baseball teams involved.  The redskins are American Indians, Amerindians.  Harry Flashman is an Englishman, a commoner, a liar.   Harry Flashman is a cad and a lovable rogue, a.k.a. trouble maker.  Mostly “Flashy” spends the book running from one set of troubles to another.  It is enjoyable because charming “Flashy” is always meeting famous people of history and happily rolling around in their historical events.  These events and figures are all footnoted and explained, so you learn about the past while the silly adventure stuff happens.  Part of the novel happens in 1876, so it was nice that I had just read G. Vidal’s 1876.  The two books gave different perspectives of that time.  The only real problem with the Flashman concept is that “Flashy” is mostly acted upon by historical events.  He doesn’t act in them.  He is almost like a leaf being blown in the wind of history.  You don’t learn anything about how human emotion and drive were involved in forming these historical events.  If it weren’t for the historical details though the narrative would wear a little thin.  Plenty of loose ends though.  It was a good quick read though.  Entertaining in a good way.

Royal Flash by George Macdonald Fraser.   

The “Flashy” of 1845 – 1846.  He meets Bismarck and impersonates a Dutch Prince.  Again, “Flashy” is blown about by the winds of historical events, he does not shape them.  Written in a British style by a Canadian author.  Entertaining and informative.

Zodiac by Robert Graysmith. 

The true story of the northern California Zodiac serial killer.  Much of the Zodiac personal particulars come from the media, movies, children’s books and of course, astrology.  Also the silent film, “The Most Dangerous Game” plays strongly in the Zodiac particulars.  The Zodiac Killer was bold and egotistical.  The author equates him more to the sexual sadist category of insanity than to a paranoid schizophrenic.  Funny because most of the sexual sadists live in two worlds; their daily calm quiet person and the other, not calm, sex killer.  Isn’t that paranoia?  Oddly, the psychiatrist will say they are sex crimes even without sexual assault.  That the penetration of the human body with a knife or bullet is the ultimate intimacy.  If so, then War is an orgy.  Maybe they are right.  “The sexual sadist . . . does not suffer from hallucinations but selects his victims for the purpose of venting certain deeply rooted sexual and sadistic urges, such as the need to mutilate parts of the victim’s body to achieve sexual satisfaction.”   Just thinking this kind of stuff shows that these doctors are as nutty as the patients, I say.   Zodiac liked a revolver.  A Smith & Wesson – M59 Pistol, a 9mm Parabellum that operated on a modified Browning system – Police Standard.   There was a whole lot of evidence foul ups with the Zodiac.  For one he knew police procedures and the foibles.  He operated between Jurisdictional lines, at the boundaries where no one was certain of who was in charge.  Let them fight among themselves and the hunters will never find their prey and they never did.  If you like crime, take the time and read this book.  

Picture This by Joseph Heller.

Historical depiction of Aristotle and Rembrandt along with the histories of Athens and Amsterdam.  Quite funny at times and very disjointed.  Odd but enjoyable.  Basically about displaying the universals of human society; greed, power and ego.  Well, politics for short.  The Great Destroyer of order.  Shiva of the ballot box.  I can’t remember actually reading this book though.  Forgettable.

Iron and Silk by M. Salzman

An autobiography about a twenty two year old and his two years in the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.)  He was learning Wu-zhu.  The Chinese martial art.    The portraits of the Chinese he meets are clear and crisp.  He was frustrated with the P.R.C. bureaucracy and China’s misperceptions of the West.  Still, he showed great affection for most of the individuals he described.  He appreciated their struggles dealing with the rigid systems of the P.R.C. and the difficulties of daily life there.  The martial arts teachers were seen as varied and different personalities.  Every teacher did Wu-zhu for different reasons and yet the same reason.  It helped them with the struggle of Life in the P.R.C.  As a Westerner, Salzman only began to understand that their reason, their need to do Wu-zhu was the very same reason he did Wu-zhu.  Every human being struggles with life and society.  Why it isn’t easier has always been a mystery to me and it should be to you.  Read this book if you can find it.   

The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. 

A true story about computer hackers of the late 1980’ and early 1990’s.  I liked it in the beginning.  Learning about how computer networks were developed.  It was what Stoll did for a living.  Stoll’s life was even interesting at first.  But the second half of the story run through too much uninteresting detail about bureaucratic delays and the three initial government agencies involved; their bickering and stupid red-tape.  Documented boredom and real frustration, but it was boring to the reader too.  Stoll’s life even got boring.  We all get old and apparently boring.  I think he just ran out of story before he ran out of book.  Just like real life sometimes; it over before it’s over.  Very few dramatic endings in real life . . . it mostly just trickles out into black.  Of limited interest.  Read something else.        

Gumshoe by Josiah Thompson.

One of the many coincidences of my life, I was wandering in a books store, around the dump table, looking at the cheap, get-this-out-of-the-store books.  So I find this autobiography of a detective called “Gumshoe.”  Not only is this guy a real life detective, he was a real life academic.  A former professor of philosophy from Tiaverford College.  I was working on my first detective novel called “Club Dead.”  It seemed like just the thing I should read, so I did.  Josiah’s marriage had failed.  He is superfluous in life as he put it.  I think he meant irrelevant.  Thus quit his academic job and he became a Private Eye.  At one point he states, “I’d become weary of deception (He means Marriage) . . . But I hadn’t then dealt with my predilection for the dramatic, nor had I acknowledged the price of candor.”  “The price of candor,” that could be the title of a chapter of my autobiography.  I stumble on such works as these and they become relevant to my life or is it that I make everything I stumble on relevant to my life?   I have no idea.  So as a Gumshoe, Josiah wanders around doing divorce cases, stake-outs, and missing persons.  Standard Private Dick stuff.  Of course he ends up talking about himself and his problems with love.  Why he always failed in love.  It came from a phrase of his.  Something he never had, “the nakedness that love requires.”  The story, since it was about his real life, had ambiguousness about it.  Unlike a drama, life just reels on and on with no specific direction, you never reach a conclusive dramatic, climax, things just run down, stopping only because you get tired and want to sleep.  And nothing is ever over.  Nothing is ever decided.  People just forget, like Josiah’s marriage breakup.  He and his wife Nancy just forgot about each other.  And then there was the one piece of advice someone once gave him about a P.I. thing, “Don’t push it, every case has its own rhythm.  It is your job to find that rhythm.”  It’s all about rhythm?  The music of life?  Another coincidence, Josiah turns out to be from Ohio.  My home state.  Josiah’s story is truly a story of the last half of the 20^th Century in America.  Each person has time enough to feel the bleakness of life.  Success in the modern world requires finding a way to deal with that bleakness.  In the Boston Strangler book a psychiatrist states that “Sanity is based on avoiding reality.  Reality really is a constant conflict in life.  Life and death struggle is all around us, but it is the insane person that can’t look away from it.  The sane person gets on with life day to day.  The insane becomes immobile.”  Josiah was a smart guy.  Josiah realized this also.  He just kept at it.  Life that is.   If you can find it.  Read this book. 

Burr by Gore Vidal.

I liked it very much.  Vidal makes his central characters interesting; all are flawed just like real people, so their observations about historical events feel equally real, not newspaper reports of the facts.  Not that newspaper facts aren’t biased, maybe they aren’t even facts, but we should recognize their bias.  With Vidal’s histories, they tell you the story of the events along with the impressions of the people.  Real people not Hollywood hero – villain B.S.  This novel ends with Burr’s death in bed at eighty years old.  He has been crippled by a stroke.  He’s a smashed down elderly man.  No hero there, just a real person, dying like all of us will.  The novel started with great energy and then it ran out of life, just like Burr.  Endings are difficult in novels and life.  Where do you end a true story when life never ends?

Comparing Vidal’s historical novels with the Fraser - Flashman novels is not a good idea.  They are too different, have different goals.  Flashman is always carried by the events like a twig in a river.  Flashy runs away from history refusing to be part of it.  Entertainment only.  Vidal’s characters make history.  Only one of Vidal’s histories, Creation, left me feeling dissatisfied.  Okay, maybe I felt the same about Vidal’s Washington D.C.  You can’t get it right every time.  Burr was Memorable. 

Empire by Gore Vidal.

About President McKinley and the early 20^th century U.S.A.  Oddly I had difficulty reading this book.  I enjoyed parts of it but the overall story is kind of dull.  Okay, maybe it wasn’t dull but too complicated.  Remember, I am a research scientist and used to reading dull and complicated things?  Unless you have an interest in McKinley read something else.

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

It is an historical account of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.).  Okay.  Okay.  It is not boring, despite what you are thinking.  The first chapter reads like a Sherlock Holmes fiction, not history book!  The writing throughout the book is reasonably informal and entertaining.  It drives deeply into the creation and maintenance of the O.E.D.  The author mixes its story with the story of Dr. Minor.  Dr. Minor is an America in the lunatic asylum.  He is responsible for over 10,000 entries in the O.E.D.  It appeared that Dr. Minor was a true lunatic.  He was only crazy at night.  During the day he was a well educated and well read man.  The author describes Dr. Minor and lexicography in detail but in an entertaining and poignant manner.  Like any depiction of the human condition, when told with cantor and attention, it revealed the world.  A good read for anyone that ponders language and the origin of words.  Also, anyone who reads English.           

LITERARY      

Chimera by John Barth

Too cute.  The author was smirking as he wrote it.  I bet he thought himself very clever.  This was an orgy of academic intellectualism.  “I’m so smart.  I’m so smart.”  He was thinking.  “I put diagrams in my fiction to explain to the stupid readers my plot gimmicks.”  Now I admit, I usually like this sort of thing, but not here.  I found the novel very difficult to finish reading.  To me there was very little to gain from a story making insider jokes about mythical heroes.  The sort of the wish fulfillment, imaginary world an Ivory-Tower academic lives in.    Too cute . . . too cute . . . is all. 

Dean’s December by Saul Bellow

A character book.  The Dean has a personality no one understands.  He seems to be aloof but does very emotional and destructive things for himself.  Not anger but vengeance.  That vengeance is ultimately destructive in his society, academics that he turns to journalism.  Academics here is the ultimate closed society, whereas journalism allows openness, actually encourages it.  At the same time, his wife is a contradiction herself.  She is an eastern European astronomer, but she is an emotional scientist.  (Actually they all are emotional but just don’t show it to the outside world.)  The Communist country where her mother is dieing is also a controlling, oppressive and destructive environment.  This is just what it sounds like, a bleak but still entertaining story of coming to grips, to an understanding or tolerance of how the world operates or attempts not to.  The ending of the novel was not as satisfying as I would have liked, but how could it be?  The Dean quits everything and turns toward his wife’s astronomy.  Something he does not understand at all, but since it is cold and distant and ultimately incomprehensible he likes it.  Is the Universe God?  Does God need to be incomprehensible to be an adequate representation of God?  It seems that this is so.  Read it if you are a thinker.        

Vital Parts by Thomas Berger

The third in the Reinhardt series.  I liked the first two volumes, but this was a confused book, not pointless but misdirected.  It jumped all over the place without getting anywhere.  Sort of like a seven year ago boy’s brain.  It had a crummy ending.  Not worth saying more. 

Bullet Park by John Cheever

Yes.  It is a 1960’s book.  Suburbia, tranquil and then attempted violence shatters the world, but it makes everything seem wonderful afterwards.  The violence isn’t even completed.  It was just a knock on the head and some threats.  But the book was a bestseller because it was about the people who would buy it and read it.  Give the audience what they want.  Talk about them.  They are uncertain of their place in the world.  They have everything anyone needs, still they don’t know why they are here on the planet.  No worry for survival, just the worry of a stain on the carpet.  Trivial life attempted to self importance.  Yet with any examination that life collapses as non-essential.  No one knows the historical significance of an act until after it has happened.  Is that so for a life?  The ‘50’ and ‘60’s became an age of triviality and paraphernalia, and it lead to social revolt.  We have more paraphernalia now than ever.  What will come when there is revolt? I won’t be re-reading this book.  Its time has passed.

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad.

“The fear is always there.”  A wonderful view of the world as constant torture and misadventure.  Sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not.  It struck me square in the solar plexus.  Jim was an up and coming Harbor man and then he made one mistake and paid for it, paid and paid.  The British Empire was a small world and people talked.  Jim had to get completely away from it to raise his head again.  A bleak view of success.  “It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence.”  Worth reading again.    

Worlds of Wonder by Robertson Davies.

I loved the first 50 pages, and then it became a sodomite’s dream.  A book for and about the British upper class; elitist and perverse.  An attempt at feelings and emotions but still lifeless overall.  A very Canadian story.

White Noise by Don DeLillo.

Very funny.  A little light narrative touch with a backdrop of death.  The main character is the Chairman of the Hitler department at the College-on-the-Hill in Midwestern State University, USA.  Sort of chaos revisited.  Characters are described by short sketches.  Little substance in character or story though.  Modern Magazine literature I call it.  It reads quickly and entertains while attempting to give an ordered description our chaotic society.  Observations of that chaos are concrete, distinct and clear.  Conflicting purposes certainly.  As you can guess I was disappointed with the book.  No insight that I could see.  Just babbling incidents that have no connection.  Not a bad point but not an interesting one though.  These random incidents fit in with the idea that I have about most people.  Now a days, they are all stoned on something; alcohol, painkillers, some drug, legal or illicit.  Legality doesn’t matter when you’re stoned.  Stoned makes reality disjointed.  So if the novel is disjointed it all fits together, actually.  Maybe the goal.  I forgot I read this book.

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This American novel was written about the same time as Swann’s Way.  This love too is about dreamy love.  Maybe it was a fad at the time?  But in this novel the main characters are even crazier than Proust’s.  Fitzgerald’s words flow well but the story is dated.  Maybe this datedness has come from the repetition, ripping off, of the plot.  To me though, maybe it is just me, but I always thought Fitzgerald too popular.  He played to his readers.  Everything he wrote revolved around romance.  It wasn’t even love.  Romance always has to go wrong, rather than work out.  It always has to be bittersweet.  It happens so much it just becomes bitter to me.  When I read one of these stories, I get embarrassed for humanity.  The best of human emotions, love, gets trashed by excessive sentiment and chill thrills and quick tears.  “Love can Kill!”  Is my general conclusion from a romance.  No warm feelings there.  So in this novel, the main characters wife is a schizophrenic.  She is fine for a while but goes off and almost kills the whole family!  The main character then runs of to Italy of all places.  Italy is a constant in romance novels for some reason.  The Italians don’t know anything about love.  All they know is how to boost about what they would do.  So the main character has an affair with an Italian woman and not surprisingly, it was unfulfilling.  This annoyed the main character so much that he annoys the Italian police and gets his ass kicked.  This simply proves my point; love hurts, love maims, love kills!  I guess that’s why it’s called romance.  Read this novel if you like painful love.    

The Collector by John Fowles

The two perspectives of an event are the gimmick in this novel.  The event was a kidnapping and negligent homicide.  The Collector was an outsider type boy that had won the lottery.  You can do anything with enough money.  He collected butterflies his entire life.  The girl was simply another butterfly.  The girl was the usual light headed young and inexperienced college kid.  Both the girl and the boy were lost but for different reasons, living in different places in society.  After he had collected her, they lived together for months.  It was a domestic relationship at its most warped.  Of course, neither could communicate with the other.  Eventually, the weakest of the couple just collapsed and died.  The strong one was upset but in a while willing to try again.  An allegory of modern marriage, a true crime.  Read it!

The Revised Magus by John Fowles.

The author calls it an Adolescent Daydream.  Funny because that’s what most modern fiction is.  The main character, Urfe, is very naïve and pompous.  It is told in the first person by Urfe. (I guess I don’t generally like First Person Adolescent stories because of my next comment.)  Still, the story held my interest.  This piece was Fowles first attempt at a novel, but not his first published novel.  It wasn’t finished until two other of his novels were published.  It has the feel of a first novel.  Immature.  Hesitant.  Almost afraid of the territory it approaches.  This was the reason Fowles revised it, but not too heavily I gather.  It still feels like a first novel.  Graham Green said once. “You should burn your first novel.  It is the only way not to embarrass yourself.”  You can see this in Fowles book.  The Magus said to Urfe that to truly experience life one must experience the possibility of death.  Thus a game of dice is used for that.  Why not chess.  Cliché is a problem with the novice.  Fowles should have burned, not revised.  I still I liked it for its novelties.

A Man of Property by John Galsworth.

It reminded me of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.  Isn’t that odd?  Galsworth’s words are thicker and more cumbersome than Thompson’s though.  Kinda dull.

The Wreckage of Agathone by John Gardner

I re-read this book after twenty years.  The first time I really enjoyed it.  That was back in the middle 1970’s.  It is a story about Sparta in 200 B.C.  About a philosopher there called Agathone.  He is a sophist.  He eats onions and is revolting in both appearance and manner.  It is on purpose.  It is an attack upon society’s established order.  A very 1960’s story.  Good then but now in the 1990’s, I found it kind of dull and uninspiring.  I’ve grown up and gotten cynical, grumpy and old, I guess.  Oh well, so much for youth.  Read it while you’re still young.  

The King’s Indian: Stories and Tales by John Gardener

This book was published in the 1970’s.  It is divided into three, reasonably independent sections.  The connection among the sections though is the point of view and atmosphere for each section; dark, bleak and insane.  Evil is defined as instability; a break from tradition was the worst thing to do.  The characters are priests, monks, kings, and queens.  Comments like, “Love is a difficult to sustain without hypocrisy on the one hand, stupidity on the other.”

“Who needs salvation if life were art?”  Doctors and technology and finishing with an old New England sea story.  This is another book imbedded in its specific era, the 1970’s.  The writing, though, is clear and crisp.  Mostly, the stories are told by first person narrators.  All the people are of diminished capacity.  They are kind of dumb.  We are all flawed true.  So who am I to judge?  No one can adequately perceive the real world around them.  It is all a big deception, the Big Lie.  Your personal reality is a falsehood.  God is actually the devil and technology is a lie. 

“Life is gratuitous; it has no meaning till we make one up by our intensity.”  Says one of the characters.  Anarchy and the heat death of the universe are main themes.  I guess I got lost in the chaos; I never got around to finishing this book.  The stories were just too disjointed and odd.  I know this sounds very bad, but . . . This book should only be read by an academic.

Forest Gump by Winston Groom

The novel only has a slight similarity to the movie.  Forest slow yet is accomplished as in the movie, but he is not sweet.  He also talks to orangutans.  This Great Ape is truly great; it talks and plays chess.  Forest actually goes into outer space too.  The book ends with Forest giving all of his money away and playing as a one man band on the street.  Jeanie ends up married to Forest’s Baby.  She is married to another man.  Generally it was a harsher story with more sharp edges.  It was as rough as the world is.  Forest did well in the army, because everyone in the army was as dumb as he was.  The stupid succeed despite themselves.  I enjoyed it but if you love the movie don’t read this book.

Damage by Josephine Hart

The ultimate woman’s dream.  A man sees her and is suddenly and destructively in love.  The woman denies any responsibility for the event.  Of course, she meets with him repeatedly and has sex.  Not a big deal except she is going to marry the man’s son.  It is a tale of obsessive and bizarre passion, as a proper Brit, a passion that the man had never felt.  Another, of course, that passion results in the death of the son, when he discovers the man and his to-be-wife in the middle of love, the son falls over backwards off a balcony.  And this was satisfying to her, because it was a death for a death; a love for a love.  In the past, the woman had been so close to her brother.  The brother was deeply and passionately in love with her and killed himself over this forbidden love.  Yet another, of course, the son looked like her brother.  Now they were both dead, the world had become balanced again and the odd connection, her brother – to-be-husband disappeared.  Revenge against the world was no longer necessary?  She suddenly becomes “normal” but the “normal man” she had changed into a bizarre emotion machine, the father of the now dead son, to-be-husband, he couldn’t change back to “normal”.  He just got more bizarre.  In this book love was only destructive and no good comes of it.  This is an unpleasant book with an equally unpleasant conclusion.  But the woman was happy in a way.  She had gotten her sacrifices, two other men’s lives in exchange for her brother’s life.  It was a fair trade for this woman.  Read something else.

A Widow for a Year – J. Irving

This book is obviously an apology, a rationalization for the Author’s style of Character re-use and literary gimmicks.  You know, gimmicks like a Bear in the story somewhere.  The book also directly talks about different methods of story writing.  It has a character that is a writer.  We’ve seen that before too, just like the bear.  “Have a great opening paragraph.”  And this book does.  If I were a writing teacher I would use this book and October Light by John Gardner as my teaching for literary devices.  I would also use a part of Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. It is a good lesson plan but October Light and A Widow for a Year have the real life / fiction tension for which I aspire.  An artist should invent a real life within the story to encompass the reader.  No matter how bizarre that reality ends up.  A Widow for a Year ends with the point, “Grief is contagious.”  Sadness infectious.  But we can’t run away from grief or sadness.  It is always there if you care about something. 

Harlan Ellison in his book of short stories, Angry Candy, stated this sentiment in a slightly different way.  “What it takes to be strong in a world that prefers we be weak and frightened . . . If you can’t be angry about it, how the hell much did you care to begin with?”

In A Widow for a Year the only truly angry person was Hannah.  Hannah had the calculating heart of a prostitute “and a prostitute’s heart, Harry knew was not the proverbial heart of gold.  A prostitute’s heart was chiefly a calculating heart.  An affection that was calculated was never trustworthy.”  Now that should make up sad and angry. 

The main characters of A Widow for a Year all were weak and afraid of loss.  Loss, of course, is inevitable.  Loss is another reoccurring device with Irving.  Marion comes back to Eddie after 38 years.  She’s a bit worn and saggy but he still loves her.  She might die soon.  She is 76.  Eddie is 58.  The end is clarified.  The end is clear.  Only then, it seems, can the novel’s characters accept life. 

This theme parallels our politically correct society.  “I won’t see a movie unless I know what it is about and if it is good.”   Basically, they won’t experience life until they know they won’t be disappointed.

“The rain is the best policeman.”  Is a funny statement that made the avoidance of grief quest clear to me, if no one is out there, if there are no people around, only then the world is safe.  For Irving, it is the people that always hurt you.  Either they attack you or they go off and leave you, either too much attention or none at all.  Real pain is always the fault of another person’s actions.

True, people have hurt me much, but oddly, I still charge on ahead into life.  I get angry if I am disappointed but I keep moving.  I have many scars because of this plowing ahead, but I have accomplished much.  To paraphrase Ellison, “If I don’t get angry, I didn’t care much anyway!”

Go on Read it!  It’s better then I made it sound.

The World According to Garp by John Irving.

I was just in Vienna (August, 1992), I saw all of the many places Beethoven had lived.  He was a grumpy old guy and moved around a lot.  It got chased out places a lot too.  I found where the Author Grillpplizzar lived too.  Once he lived in the same boarding house as Ludwig von.  Grillpplizzar’s mother liked listening to Ludwig von play the piano, but when Ludwig found this out he had them kicked out.  What an old bastard he was. This is the third time I have read Garp.  I’ll read it again.  The death of Walt still makes me cry.  The whole last quarter of the novel made me cry this time.  Weep true tears.  I forgot how Irving’s presentation of the accident makes the horror of Walt’s death so painful.  Irving just doesn’t mention it for a while.  He describes everyone’s situation weeks after the accident, then only in flashbacks.  Are we sure of Walt’s broken neck?  Still, that revelation is vague and painful to the person remembering the accident.  Very effective.  The display of characters of the story is what is important.  The Vienna recollections were fun to read again, now that I have been in Vienna.  Vienna is no longer dead as it was after WWII, but it has become a museum.  In contrast to Amsterdam, a city full of humanity, good or bad.  Vienna had the second highest suicide rate in the world (1992).  The Wieners live off the past empire, trying to forget the wars and brutal dominations of the twentieth century.  Garp is about a person who attempts to protect the world from itself or at least change the world enough to keep his family out of the world’s deadly, craziness.  Of course, this not only doesn’t work, but Garp’s intervention makes matters worse.  To quote the book Garp, “really pisses people off.”  Despite his best efforts.  A comment I can use in my own life.  He shows people what they really are like and it pisses them off.  Pissed off people try killing Garp.  The ultimate human comedy, show people what they really are, hold up a mirror, and you had better run.  Run for your life.  It’ll make them very angry.  No one wants to see what they are really like.  Everyone knows that.  Read it again.  I will.

The Man Who would be King – R. Kipling.

An inherent desire to rule the under-classes but it all goes wrong because of kissing a girl.  Yeah, blame it on the woman.  It’s all about misplacement; misplaced affection, misplaced benefaction.  “We meant well.”  Was that the British Empire’s apology to the world and to history?  But of course, it all went wrong.  There were people involved.  Humans can screw up anything and do it sometimes just for the fun of it.  There were two other stories in this book; The Drums of the Fore and Aft and Mary Postgate.  They were both of the same theme as the more well know story and had the same consequence.  It wasn’t the story, it was Kipling’s style that brought the story alive.  He wrote people well.  The reader identified with or knew the characters.  That was why Kipling is an important writer.  He displayed a time and a mood.     

The Joke by Milan Kundera

Czechoslovakian author of the “Unbearable lightness of being.”  It was a book of conflict between science, art and emotion.  Here the superstructure, the incomprehensible is not God but the Communist government.  The “Unbearable” was hailed as a sensual classic when it is the exact opposite.  The passion and emotion of the Doctor was lost.  No matter what sexual situation he got into, nothing helped his unfeeling nature.  He used the Artist to drill into his sensuality to no avail.  He was a disinterested God, like the Communist government.  They did not love, only needed to fulfill its needs, but not comprehending what those needs were.  Just doing what seemed to feel good, even if it really didn’t.  Now in “The Joke” everything has been reduced to memory and flashback.  Ironically there is no insight in this looking back.  Nothing has been learned, because there was no process going on at anytime.  All passions are “lie” or “jokes”.  “It’s not what I meant.  It’s not what I meant at all!”  Everyone in the novel is an inadvertent confidence trickster.  Everyone is fooling everyone else.  Ludvik is in a camp as a punishment for his attitude.  Everyone in the camp, prisoners and staff all think they are good communists.  Still, everyone disappoints everyone else.  Ludvik even stays an extra three years because it isn’t that bad.  It is better than the Army.  The soldiers are even jealous of the members of the camp.  There are fights over it between the soldiers and the prisoners.  “The Joke” has the incomprehensible beat of everyday existence.  Nothing need be supernatural or cosmic.  Life is hard enough.  Memory could be the enemy, not any artificial state.  Read it.

Love, again by Doris Lessing

I have liked, so very much, Lessing’s earlier works.  The Golden Notebook, The Temptation of Jack Ornkey are two that stand out for me.  These are stories about life and people.  Her characters were so convincing.  There were real people of the world.  The story was less important than the people in it.  Just like life.  I saw her as the type of writer I wanted to be.  No matter what the genra, the plot, whatever, the characters would be real.  The reader could connect with the people of the story, no matter how fantastic the story might be.  But it appears that politics destroyed the writer in Lessing.  In the ’80’s and ‘90’s she could the Political bug and her massage, her agenda, dominated her stories.  Her characters suffered for it.  Poor characters!  I have never been able to finish one of her books from this time.  So why did I try this one at this time?  I saw this book about an older woman falling for a much younger man.  The book passed the “First Paragraph” test, meaning that if the first paragraph grabs me, I’ll read the book.  If that first paragraph fails to hold my attention I would read it no matter what anyone says.  So I took a chance here.  Each novel should be taken on its own merits, right?  So far so good.  First third of the book.  No bad, as look as she stays with the main character, Sarah, the story is great.  Sarah, though, has written and is staging a play about a tragic female French composer of the 19^th century.  That story leaks into the novel.  The composer’s story is too sentimental and tragic.  That is an important contrast in the story, I realize, but a bit too much time is spent in the past, along with Sarah’s impressions of the past and not now, when Sarah is living.  And thus the book got mundane, childish and dull.  Don’t bother.

Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry

Re-reading this book yet again.  Geoffrey, the British Consul to Mexico, is so focused on Life and that he doesn’t like it.  He constantly whines with anguish about it.  He drinks and drinks simply not to feel that life.  He thinks of drinking as clarifying his attention, sharpening his vision.  Alcohol does keep his eyes to the ground, other wise he’d fall.  Sometimes he does fall and his eyes are on the ground, down in the dirt.  One scene has him face down on a road.  Another Englishman comes up beside him in a car and offers him a “Lift.”  “No!”  The only lift Geoffrey wants though is a drink.  I have always been surprised that the depressing nature of alcohol is always interpreted by drunks as a lift.  Obviously, from the falling down, it really holds them to the down, no lift involved.  Geoffrey is always seen walking.  Others travel by car, plane, train and horse, while Geoffrey walks.  The Carried people are the good people.  The bad have to walk.  I guess you have to walk to hell.  Actually that is a good punishment.

The term Cloacal Prometheus comes to mind, the demi-god that brought shit to the Earth not fire.  Shit is as important as fire to the earth.  Both are a change of state, both transform, both allow for future growth.  Fire verses shit.  Walking verses carrying.  Yes, go ahead and say it.  Geoffrey is full of shit!

The quest Geoffrey is on could be called the search for the “Undiscoverable Paradise.”    A futile search, but an endless one, true.  Eternity gets involved in the story, well, Christian eternity. 

You can place the characters of this book into the God hierarchy.  The trinity.

Geoffrey (Consul) – Father / Humanity.

Yvonne (Wife) – Holy Ghost / Angel

Hugh (Brother) – Son / Angel.

Overlapping of themes happen, of course.  Describing the human condition is as confusing as living it. 

Geoffrey is escaping from the pain of unachieved potential and a love gone confused.  It wasn’t lost, just confused.  Yvonne is still there beside him.  It’s just that Geoffrey doesn’t know where he is.

Yvonne – Married an older Geoffrey to save her dead father one last time. 

Hugh – Geoffrey’s brother, wants celebrity and to provide salvation to the world at the same time.  If he can’t do the world, he’ll save his older brother.  Both brothers are on a futile quest. 

Geoffrey, in drunkenness, sees dissolution of the boundaries between inner self and outer self.  The true Nirvana, a drunken stupor.  In Siddhartha,  Hesse states the same thing, get drunk and fly.  Fly spirit fly!  Presig equates Easter Mediation to Westerners “Getting Away” to the mountains or going fishing, doing useless things by not thinking about what you are doing.   

The actual story is pretty straight forward.  Geoffrey is a wandering amusing drunk that Yvonne and Hugh chase after.  There is so much allegory in the novel.  More than enough for everyone. 

There is even a twisted Orpheus and Eurydice myth.  Hugh and Yvonne is Orpheus while Geoffrey is Eurydice.  But Eurydice doesn’t want to leave Hades.  Here Eurydice wants to stay despite Orpheus dragging her – Geoffrey back to the real, sober world.  Eurydice forces Orpheus to look back at her, as Eurydice turns to stone, she regrets the decision but it is too late. 

Another allegorical dilemma arising in this book is “Do Angels affect the world?”  “If they do, is it for the Good?”

Yvonne and Hugh are at one point mentioned with white doves, the symbol of the Holy Ghost, of course.  Angels or Christ’s Spirit get mixed up here.  Spirits can be good or can be bad or maybe they transcend good or bad.  The spiritual world is transcendent.  How could a mere human mind understand a transcendent being?

An Angel has no substance.  They can only persuade, never push.  The Devil, too, who is also an Angel, can only persuade.  It is the delusion of humanity that causes the confusion.  The spirits try to lead humanity somewhere, but is it to a better place?  Is the Devil evil?  Is Archangel Michael good?  Is it that humanity is too frail to be touched by Angels?  Humans break too easily to be held by Angels.  Angels are too beautiful and thus drive humans crazy.  Read the Poet Rilke, he’ll explain it for you.  Angels are attempting to lead humanity to the “Undiscovered Paradise” and it destroys us in the process.  Remember, “It’s your Garden!  Don’t destroy it!”

Read it again.  I just did.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

The doddering professor, Pnin, a comic portrayal of all academics that is lost in the real world.  He lives in a separate reality.   “The world of the mind is based on a compromise with logic.”  He states.  I like Nabokov because he always translates the confusion in the world to comedy, comedy with a sharp edge, comedy that hurts.  He has Pnin, the Russian professor in the German department.  Pnin is a tragic figure there for everyone to laugh at.  Pnin’s confusions and attempts to comprehend the world are amusing because Pnin tries so hard and still fails.  As Humbert Humbert tried at love with Lolita and failed big time. 

Pnin is assaulted by sounds and smells, but mostly by anxiety that he can never escape. He does try to escape.  He moves to a new rooming house or room in a house, every quarter, because some sound drives him away from the old place.  I know what Pnin is feeling at these times.  Attempts to comprehend, put an order to the world can be destroyed by random chaos.  The noise translates into physical irritation.  Most people are to numb or deaf to hear it or fell it.  Maybe they can’t?  Maybe it is an extra awareness, maybe it is a psychosis, but some people are sensitive to the entropy around us and they react negatively to it. 

I have enjoyed the reading of this novel.  The phrasing, the dialog, all add to the characterization.  Nabokov writes for the characters, the story is secondary to the characters.  I look for characterization in my fiction, a specific personality recorded down there on the page.  Such writing is difficult to find.  The story line is supposed to be the main interst but in any good story, the characters are what propel that story. 

Much of Pnin is told with an academic point of view.  The comedy certainly is.  I wonder is non-academics will get the jokes.  In Lolita, Nabokov used everyday obsession translated through the hapless educated European.  I think that point of view gave the book an acceptance and positive response in the U.S.A.  Europeans in general are supposed to be odd.  If it had been an American professor, the story would not have worked as well I think.  The crossing of cultures, as well as, the crossing of generations, were important factors in Lolita. 

In Pnin, it is Pnin as focal point; Pnin as world (reality) modifier and interpreter.  It is also a story of passion or story of lost love.  It is not clear because Pnin can never get the required grasp on the world.  He can’t find any foothold or handhold.  He is always slipping around, always falling.  He can’t be obsessed if he can’t stand still to stare.  Pnin is always left behind at the bottom of the hill.  But still he tries to keep up with his studies.  He tries to adapt to his changing environments.  There’s the comedy.  He can’t and in the end, maybe he doesn’t need to.  Maybe the world changing isn’t that important, it is just change and should be laughed at, not embraced.

Pnin ended in a different perspective.  It wasn’t on Pnin.  It was on one of his “friends”.  Pnin didn’t like this fellow.  The guy replaced Pnin in the department but then wants to hire Pnin to teach other courses.  Pnin refuses and the new guy doesn’t understand.  Pnin finally is in control, even if it hurts him financially.  It is a good story, but it could be a difficult read for some.  It could be called too subtle.                  

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Presig.

In the end of the book, Socrates and Plato were discussed along with insanity.  The main character describes his approach to insanity as a search to define quality.  The Philosophers were always trying to define the most used, common, adjectives.  Like trying to link logical thought to reality, that is the real world, it does not work.  The quest for that connection which must exist in the main characters mind, leads to insanity.  He is lead to insanity because he will not be defeated in his Quest.  The only real solution that others found was Blind Faith.  Just Believe.  It’s easier.  His refusal to surrender to Blind Faith drops him into mental conflict and uncompromising insanity.  I understand oh too well.  Nothing makes sense if you try to think things out clearly.  The gaps in the arguments are too vast to leap and can only be bridged by belief, not rationality.  The leap of Faith.  Intuition saves most peoples lives and their brains.   A book I would like to have written.

Lalla: An Investigation into Ethics - Robert Presig

Presig is pursuing an understanding of the Universe.  He attempts to think it out.  His “Metaphysics of Quality” quest is like my own quest when I was twenty years old, to discover a system of Metaethics.  A system working above social norms and traditions that dictate human behavior.  The majority behavior is ethical and the minority is the unethical acts.  Especially unethical when that behavior benefits the minority and not the majority.  He we get into the outsider philosophy, because the majority tends to be static and thus want things to remain the same.

The minority, by definition, is dissatisfied with something and wants change.  It means that change, which causes and allows growth, can only come from the disruption of the norm.  The minority is thus on the outside of society.

Presig equates this drive for change with biological evolution and even computers.  Events of apparent disruption are factors for eventual growth.  Growth is good, so it follows that disruption is good.  Presig lives in New York City.  NYC equals disruption and change, Dynamic Quality.  DQ is always good.  He counter-poses that view of Dynamic Quality, the city that never sleeps, the culture capital of the U.S.A. with Lalla.  Lalla is a half crazy nomad prostitute (when it suits her) criminal (when it suits her too).  She really can piss people off and she can get really pissed off herself.  He friend Jamie, who she wants to come on Presig’s boat, so she and Jamie can eventually rob Presig, actually steals from Lalla.  Now criminality doesn’t appeal to her.  Lalla is only Dynamic in Quality, but is Lalla good?  She is not good for herself, because she must keep moving all the time.  She annoys everyone.  She is constantly moving through people’s lives.  She changes them in some way each time, but is that enough?  Enough of what?

Does the world need justification?  Does an individual need justification?  Presig talks of being more highly evolved as a basis for the judgment of good, better, best.  He feels that complexity is equal to evolve.  Biological science seems to indicate the opposite or, at least, that it can go both ways. 

Many of the least complex organisms have more complex ancestors.  The less complex organism just found an easier way to live and then dumped their excess baggage.    They look lower in evolution, but actually they are more highly evolved, highly adapted to a specific way of life. 

Dynamic Quality could be defined in the phrase, “It is easy to make a mistake.”  It is easy to deviate from the norm.  Anyone can miss a target.  But in that miss you might hit something that you eventually will also value.  I know it’s confusing.  It’s about understanding, what else could it be?  If you like to think, read this book.

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

It is a difficult novel to get into for me.  It is autobiographical fiction.  It is very descriptive.  It displays the everyday life of a sheltered boy at the turn of the 20^th Century France.  The countryside tranquility slows the novel’s action down even more.  It is a subtle novel.  All the descriptive words and impressions are the vehicle used to explain the only real character in the book, the author.  Or maybe what the author thought he was living.  Life is always self-centered especially for the young.  Family strolls along the River Vivonne appear sedate and pastoral, for everyone except the author.  For him the walks are permeated with sex, desire, self doubt and frustration.  The Vivonne is decorated with attractive, distracting object, women.  None of these women even see the author, let alone his desire for them.  To the author they are all emotionally in the chains of past relationships gone bad.  The Vivonne is teaming with emaciated tadpoles.  They are starved for the slightest crumb of bread.  That imagery is so obvious.  The author doubts everything about himself, even his own writing skills, despite his father’s feelings that they are already great.  The author is young so he has no great insight or philosophical awareness to write about.  How could he be great?  But with all young males, sexual images abound.  Pedophilia, lesbianism, fetishism for Royalty is all there in that tranquil village, so far from the madding crowd. 

All English majors talk about Proust’s memories, his comments on the stimulation of memory.  That what is inherent in memory is what is inherent in fiction.  The author of each shades reality with their personality.  The conclusion, “There are no true memories.”  This conclusion is something every journalist or parent should know already.  Everyone talks from their own agenda.  Proust’s work is considered so important in 29^th century European literature because it points out the obvious in a way most people can understand.  “There is only one voice in fiction, that is I.”

At the end the novel takes a strange turn.  After the pre-adolescent sex fantasy it hopped to post-adolescent sex fantasy.  Swann is madly in love with Odette.  Odette is an opportunist.  She is available to anyone with money or power.  Swann doesn’t want to see this obvious fact about her.  He is in love.  Their relationship though suits him.  He is busy most of the day, doing his own opportunistic glad handing and, of course, Odette just sits quietly at home and waits for him.  Of course she doesn’t.  He throws denial every direction.  Everyone talked about lies but still thinks they are the most straight forward of people.  An evil lot, all of them.  This part of the novel was slow and got slower.  I almost stopped reading it.  I kept ssaying to myself, “This is Proust, it will get better.”  Not really.  Of course, the end has Swann married to Odette with a girl child that the author is enamored with.  Oh well, the next book in the collection, “In the Budding Grive” won awards.  It should be better.  I will leave that to the future though.  If you are an English major read this book.          

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The 1083 pages took me nearly a month to read.  The novel is 35 years old now (at this time).  In so many ways it is quite tame, considering all that has happened in the 1980’s.  Still . . . she paints a very black and white picture.  All of her Industrialists, the successful ones, are good.  All of the Rich are bad.  She eventually gets to the common man about half way through the dome.  Common man is of little importance to her.  He is as important as a parasite.  You only notice it when it causes you irritation and pain.  Not only is she an Egotist, which is her main point, but she is also an Elitist.  Something I think she would deny.  I found myself agreeing with much of the main points of the book though.

1.      Society runs off of a few leaders, not the politicians, that make their own rules and thus get things done.

2.      The rest of society lives off these leaders.

3.      There are groups of men who want to destroy anything some one else has built.

4.      Much of society’s constructs are worthless and could easily be done without.

I find myself wondering though, how I would feel about this book if I read it before I came to McGill University and have experienced, first-hand, many of the evils she discussed.  Would I have accepted her negative statements so easily?  My own mental evolution interests me more than the premise of her book!  I have changed greatly in the last three years.  Are those changes good or bad?  How do you judge?   More effort than return on the book though.

City of the Night by John Rechy

I attempted to re-read this classical novel of the ‘60’s counter-culture.  The 1960s are long gone and from this book, it is a good thing.  The novel is about male prostitute in Los Angeles.  It was shocking back then.  The story caused all kinds of talk.  But now, it is very tame.  No graphic violence, no graphic sex or drug scenes.  Just the subject matter, male on male sex match ups, oh so societally scary.  Not much of a shock now.  Rechy does throw in some very good descriptions of L.A.   There are some good lines, but all of it has been used since way too many times.  Maybe this say more about my reading and viewing habits than it does about the book?  I don’t know.  Of historical value, but don’t re-read it.  You will be disappointed.       

Goodbye Columbus by Phillip Roth

Just re-read this long short story.  I do thin that Roth could win a Noble prize just for this story.  It is such a nice clearly written story about love and how it grows and fades without destruction, just growth.  Read this again!

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

This book was written to be a well written book.  The language is careful.  The plot is historic, biographic and real.  It is about real people, academics that are well off or almost well off.  The whole novel plays it academic safe.  It was very fitting with the title.  This safety was justified by being not being overly violent or sexual.  The things were always close to boring.  I couldn’t decide whether I enjoyed it or not.  Some people think it was the best novel of the decade?  I just must be so out of touch with the literary; the academic world that I can’t see that it is so wonderful.     

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.

Where the far right and the far left meet and have unnatural sexual relations.  A truly paranoid 1960’s book.  Thompson had his hand on the throb of American culture.  He had it right by the crotch.  Funny and dangerous.  He should have been a politician.  No surprise that he killed himself though.  He cried out regularly for attention.  A very human need.  It might make you cry and laugh at the same time.  Read It!

The Coup by John Updike

A first person narrative of an Islamic African dictator.  A very difficult story to pull off.  It was a struggle, but Updike did succeed in providing some insights into this bizarre individual.  But . . . at the beginning of the novel, the writing was stiff and cold, that was the dictator’s character, true, but difficult for the reader to stay interested.  The Coup actually turns out to be more an abdication.  The dictator just lost all contact with reality and wandered off from the capitol city.  Others then took over.  No political intrigue, so to speak.  No drama, I guess I mean.  Very little violence.  Just a dictator lusting for women and dropping into insanity.  This novel is not what you would expect from the title.  By the end of the book I was interested and intrigued by the character of the dictator.  Considering the individual being portrayed, that feeling was a triumph for Updike.  READ IT! 

SPECULATIVE-TECH FICTION

Heads by Greg Bear

A short novel set on the moon as few hundred years from now.  It is a novel of personal growth, a character novel; about people and ideas, not just one or the other.  The Heads are frozen heads of the cryogenic kind.  The Heads are held hostage in a political conflict.  This small book was much more affective in explaining inter-personal conflict than the Foundation Books.  It just shows that a clear simple idea, great things can come of it.  A very good read.

Slant by Greg Bear

A technological future with implants used to improve humans.  There is an anti-government group that has started the “Green Idaho” movement.  There, a large pyramid has been constructed as a reserve for the Elite.  They will go there to survive the fall of the technological world.  They, of course, will help the fall fall.  They will control the implants and thus destroy the people from within.   Artificial intelligent computers do the battle with the “Green Idaho” on moral grounds.  The humans survive, the computers don’t.  Human morality is too much for the computers.  Human morality bends and twists too much.  It is too convenient for the computers rigid programming.  But the technology adapts to the human convolutions and yet again humanity survives its own silliness.  An okay read if you like Sci Fi disaster things. 

Foundation’s Fear by Gregory Benford.

An extension of the Asimov Foundation series.  Asimov is dead so here Benford gave it a try.  Asimov’s first books described a world run by a mathematical formula.  In the Sci FI world, thee books are sacred.  I thought such worship to be unjustified.  The books lack characterization.  Asimov was an idea author, not a character author.  The Foundation Trilogy was more a sociological description than a narrative.  Asimov was a trained scientist.  I guess that was good for a non-scientist, but I am a training scientist, so it bores me.  Okay, so Benford gives it a shot.  His book starts off slow, but finish well or reasonably well.  Still there is this fascination with describing the mechanisms of the operation of this society.  It is the gimmick of the series.  Here it is 12,000 years into the future.  The most frightening aspect of the Foundation is that has been mired in bureaucracy for 10,000 years.  Outside of being more satisfied and fat, not much has changed for humans.  They are just like 20^th century man.  Foundation’s Fear then goes back to the political intrigue and useful murder.  There is also a virtual human in the computer.  There is talk about what makes a person real, no conclusion, so they pass the Turning Test.  It was a reasonable novel, after the first half that is.  Read it if you like this type of stuff.

The Stone that never came down by John Brunner.

A disaster novel of the 1970’s.  It has a positive ending through drugs or rather a synthetic virus.  This virus makes people more aware of their common sense while improving their memory.  In this way people become less self deluding and simply, more considerate to others.  The point of the stories is just make humans more human and things will be fine.  Evil is a pack of lies.  Every human is really basically good.  Modern society had collapsed because capitalism and can only move ahead without lies and liars.  If you eliminate the liars, things of course, will get better.  A “Kill all the Lawyers” solution.  Cute 1960’s ideals, maybe drug-induced.  Too cute.

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card 

The third of the Ender Series novels.  Ender is an adolescent boy in the future who, by being very good at video war games, defeated a real alien invasion force (The Buggers, they are insect-like) with a robot fleet that he didn’t know was real.  Here Ender has reestablished the Bugger’s Hive Queen on Lusitania.  The only world with another sentient life form other than Earth and the Bugger home world which Ender destroyed.  That other sentient life being the Pequininos, an intelligent race with three transitional forms; a slug, then a pig-like thing and then finally a tree.  As it turns out, the Descolada virus which infects all life on Lusitania has caused this transitional life.  The Descolada virus is actually artificial, it is a weapon deployed by another, but unknown alien race.  Sounds fantastic?  Well Yeah!  Actually, the novel is about information transfer.  The Universe as information.  Religion as information.  The finality of the novel has faster than light travel, read instantaneous travel, by wishing it so.  Wish yourself in to the other reality and then back into this reality but in the place you wanted to be.  This reality hopping will work only if you have a big enough brain capacity to remember the present reality.  A super-computer called Jane does this for you.  Another sub-plot reinforces this concept, so don’t worry.  The characters are complex, believable and even likable.  Even though it is fantastic, the story is consistent within itself and believable.  The style of writing gives the novel a quick pace.  I liked this book.  In contrast with most “Hard Science fiction novels” where hardware is everything, here the characters, the software is everything.  Ideas are always important, but here we connect them with biological-life.  Life is information but a physical manifestation of the information.  Life manipulates reality.  Drugs scramble the perception of reality, a fundamental definition of entertainment.  The physical body manipulates the information in the brain, the brain manipulates the body.  It is a feedback loop control system.  How else could the Universe work?  Go on read the series.    

The Red Tape Wars by Chalker, Resnick, and Effinger.

A good idea gone wrong.  A literary game for publication.  Three speculative fiction writers were to attempt to write the other writers into a corner.  Good idea but dull in execution.  Too bad.

Einstein’s Bridge by John G. Cramer

A hard Sci Fi book by a physicist.  I was about alternate universes.  It was supposed to be good.  All the reviewers said so.  It wasn’t for me.  The dialogue was so stiff and unreal, I could have died.  There was a developing sub-plot about a journalist that wrote vermin oriented disaster novels that were just lewd Eros.  It was bad.  I couldn’t get past page 30.  I liked the general ideas, but I was stuck in the swamp of poor prose.  Don’t even try to start this book.       

Unreasoning Mask by Phillip K. Dick.

Multiple Big Bangs.  1960’s drug induced fiction.  Entertaining but not great.  Dick has much better to offer.  Read something else.

The Final Encyclopedia by Gordon R. Dickson

As the cover states, “The Majestic Culmination of the Dorsai cycle.”  I was surprised to like it after that declaration of hubris.  The Universe of humans is on the brink of extinction.  It always is in these books.  One sixteen year old (Hal Mayne) seems to be the key to the future.  That’s what kids are for aren’t they?  He maybe a product of a mutant race of humans called the “Others”.  Their goal in life seems to be to gain control of the fourteen worlds of humanity.  But they are also after Hal.  Hal is on the run to the mining world of Coby.  The book reads well.  Moves at a good pace.  It is good for what it is.  Not too much Future Philosophy.  These sorts of books always have some sermon attached.  But it took a bad turn.  Became predictable and very over written.  The author should have stopped at 300 pages, not go to 689.  Quit while you are ahead thing.

The Exile Kiss by G. Effinger

Not as good as I wanted it to be.  Well written but not creative.  Not a well thought out story of the future.  I was very disappointed.  Oh Well!

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Supposed to be a great, innovative, cyber-punk novel, but with a capital PUNK.  Action packed . . . constant motion, much like a rock video.  Death, sex, great graphic images . . . little else.  I didn’t care if any of the characters lived or died.  Neither did the author, apparently.  Cute graphics, manipulation of reality to no purpose.  The novel ends with a world-wide computer matrix becoming sentient for no reason or purpose.  The computer’s big thrill is that it can talk to a neighboring (in another star system) sentient computer system.  They live to gossip about their stupid meat creators I guess?  The novel had no base, just speed.  I guess if the Emperor moves fast enough no one can see he has no clothes.  I felt used.    

The Forever War by Joe Haldane.

A good, hard science fiction anti-war novel.  Because of relativity, a ten year stint in the Space Marines of 1998, (the novel was written in the 1970’s) traveling at near light speed to get to the battlefields, becomes a 1,200 year, real time, war with the Taurians.  So, Earth soldiers that fight the first aliens encountered by Humanity end up in the 30^th Century having fought Earth’s ultimate enemy, the Taurians, only four times.  Of course, it, the war, was all just a misunderstanding and thus pointless.  The main character was believable, smart but no genius.  Brave but not macho.  Likable and sensible.  Maybe not that real actually.  Not enough flaws.  Still, I liked this book.

All my sins remembered by Joe Haldane.

A stringing together of three short stories about a professional spy / assassin / enforcer with hypno-training and personality overlays.  Pretty standard stuff.  Somewhat interesting but the linkings between the stories were forced pulling them just too thin.  Forgettable.

Tools of the Trade by Joe Haldane.

A Sci Fi espionage novel.  Standard action stuff with one Sci Fi gimmick.  A quick read.  It passes the time.  Fast Food Fiction.

Forever Peace by Joe Haldane

Remote controlled robot warriors.  Industrial and technological Have Nots.  The controllers of the robots have mental links with all the others in the squad.  Everyone becomes part of everyone else.  No secrets here, but lovers on the outside.  Anything on the outside is not good enough.  No sensation is enough.  Turns out that the inside is what saves the world.  Walk a mile in someone else’s Head.  The twist in the story is that the ultimate weapon does end the war making the title.  Characters are good.  The shift in point of view worked as a literary device.  The main character was constantly changing perspective.  An action book with some interesting thinking involved.  Worth the time reading.

The Stainless Steel Rat goes to Hell! By Harry Harrison

Stainless Steel Rat, the anti-establishment crook.  He’s not such a bad gut and cracks wise very well.  The story is action and movement.  Everyone plays off the “Rat.”  There is some inter-dimensional playing around, then some more action and escapes and then all is well.  A good entertainment if you like Sci Fi things.  It’s funny too.

Tribe of the Tiger by B. Kurten

An attempt to portray the time on Earth when both Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man co-existed and intermixed.  The offspring were mules, having hybrid vigor but sterile.  The Neanderthal were white, because they lived in the north.  Cro-magnum were dark-skinned because they had just come out of Africa.  A reasonable idea and it changes attitude about both groups.  Here the Neanderthal had a complex society and language.  They were people too, just isolated.  There is evidence that Neanderthal took good care of their aged and infirmed.  I look for book with moiré hard science in them.  This was one.  The story was also reasonably interesting; revenge, mistaken identity, abandonment, isolation, survival.  All good plot hooks.  Not a great book, but entertaining and enlightening.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Everyone should have read this 1959 classic by now.  It is a post-nuclear holocaust novel.  It’s about the rebuilding of civilization, not countries, because only the buzzards were winners in that last world war.  Mankind just keeps screwing things up.  The screw ups do keep getting bigger and bigger in size though.  Religion persists but it doesn’t ever seem to do anything to stop mankind from committing these screw ups.  Humanity just jumps from one disaster to another.  We are good at that at least.  Religion just seems to give humans a reason to keep doing what they were doing.  Build and destroy.  Build and then destroy.  It is like a children’s game that everyone can die in.  No learning process seems to be involved.  Why not?  If God loves you no matter what you do, it doesn’t matter what you do then.  Keeping the Knowledge safe, even if they didn’t understand it, was the reason d’etre of the main sects in the book.  Preserve the technological Knowledge that lead to the collapse of civilization?  Is that wise?  Or does it really matter?  People reinvent their own destruction.  It’s not the Knowledge, it’s not the Philosophy, it’s ourselves that propagate all those catastrophic evils.  Is the point of the story “Just keep doing it until you get it right?”  Or maybe it’s “Doing it is the point.”  It is not made very clear where humanity was to go from there.  I think the author’s point was “stop it now!”  But humanity never listens to anyone, just like any other child you have ever met.  The novel reads well.  It wasn’t stuck in the late ‘50s politics like many other novels of that time were.  It’s a good read even if you don’t usually like Sci Fi. 

Wetware by R. Ruck

It is what was called a “cyber-punk” sci fi novel.  Here intelligent robots build humans.  That is the story and things of course, screw-up.  I had a difficult time reading this book, I kept falling asleep.  It was an idea without character.  Oh well.  Read something else.

Picnic in Paradise by JoAnna Russ.

A very pointed story.  There is a war on a resort planet.  A mercenary is hired by some people to get them somewhere.  Where is not clear.  These folks then proceed to walk in the snow and get killed.  No! Really!  That’s it.  Okay, if you like that sort of thing.  

The Man Who Fell to Earth by William Trevis

A sci fi novel about the possible invasion of the Earth in which the science and the alien part of the story aren’t that important.  It was a book about characters in an extra-ordinary situation.  The Antheon, Thom, was alone on Earth, attempting to acquire enough money by commercializing Antheon technology to finance his project.  That project was to build a space arc to transport the last 300 Antheons to Earth.  The project, of course, was too much for one being.  He collapsed from loneliness and stress into alcohol and drugs.  Despair took hold when the U.S. government arrested him and accidentally blinded him.  He gave up everything, now he was exiled, stranded, on Earth blind and rich, but goalless, without hope.  A good twist to the invasion stories, good mood set up, good character development.  Not just a genera piece, a good piece of fiction.

The Eye of Cat by Roger Zalenzy.

An odd Navajo based Sci Fi thriller.  A future American Indian tracking of interstellar big game.  He unknowingly captures a sentient being that is also a shape shifter.  When the tracker finds out he also finds out that the fifty years of the being “Cat’s” captivity has made “Cat” desire only the tracker’s death, a reasonable desire I think.  “Cat” escapes and thus the chase is on.  Entertaining but a little pompous at the end.  The struggle with the inner self was a bit too much.

CRIME / DETECTIVE

A Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess

I have always found Burgess entertaining.  This book reads well until its end, but . . . this is a very dated book.  The situation in the book is now extremely common, almost cliché, the book was published in the early ‘60’s.  A spy wants out.  (Yeah, been there! Done that!)  And of course the Agency won’t let him out.  Betrayal is the plot, what else would it be?  Betrayer and the betrayed all become one.  Just like in prison the inmates and the guards take on similar traits.  I know a story that has been re-written a thousand times in the last fifty years.  Maybe it shows more about the late Twentieth Century politics and life than it says about unoriginal authors.  A complex society built on technological wonders, not social skills or even wisdom, might just lead to betrayal, because it is not about the people, it’s about the technology.  And technology is a dead thing even if it looks alive.  If the technology is the thing, the people running the technology are simply innocent by-standers to the ultimate goal.  What is that ultimate goal?  A better technology.  But better at what?  Something different than the routine.  The routine is inherently boring to techno-geeks.  Routine is the definition of boring.  Remember though, those routines are what constitute a society; laws, traditions, culture, reading and writing, religion, any education process teaches by routine protocols.  Technology removes the routine and the difficult.  Technology is by design meant to remove the difficult, make things easier.  But the difficult, the challenge, is what humans need to feel fulfilled.  Technology thus removes human fulfillment.  Furthermore, technology reduces error.  Yet errors are what allow evolution and advancement.  Won’t the removal of errors make life more predictable and routine?  Technology is a logic loop, not an end in itself.  If you make technology development your ultimate goal, then you bent back on yourself.

It is like that joke about the lazy fisherman that only works in the morning when he catches all the fish he needs to live.  But if he worked harder and harder, he could catch more fish, make more money and then hire people to catch more fish for him, so he could make more and more money. 

“Why would I want to do that?”  Asks the lazy fisherman.

“So you can get rich, retire and sit on the beach.”

The lazy fisherman’s response, of course, is, “”I’m already sitting on the beach!”

The end of A Tremor of Intent was sort of like this joke.  It loops back on itself and has no where to go.  A circle is a dead-end in a way.  The book is very dated.  It would be of interest to a ‘60’s scholar, to observe the dawn of Western paranoia for governments and organizational betrayal in the mass entertainment industry, but not much else.  No need to read this book.

Gypsy in Amber by Martin Cruz Smith

Published in 1971, this was one of the author’s first mystery novels.  Gypsies are the main characters along with a band of crazy hippies.  Yes!  Hippies!  It was the 1970’s.  Also antiques and their dealers add the factual texture to the story.  This was a “fiction in which you learn something” book too.  Cruz Smith is known for this but here he didn’t get it quite right.  There are sections of the book that show where “Gorky Park” grew from.  It was nowhere near the quality of “Gorky Park” though.  It was a good try but it lacked something.  Read “Gorky Park” again instead.   

Conflict of Interests by Egleton

 A British crime novel.  It was meant to be a real depiction of detective work.  That part of the book was dull.  Real life is mostly dull and routine, we all know that already.  The murderer was a hired, ex-green beret, ex-CIA gone bad, who kills without remorse or thought.  That part was sort of a dull stereotype.  NWTE.  Not worth the effort.

In the Monkey House by John Fullerton

A detective murder mystery in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where and when bodies lay on the streets.  Everyone was doing extra-ordinary things to attempt to hold together a civilization, a society.  Even though the society wanted to fall and fall hard.  It is a tough read, almost too much truth.  The real events make the novel almost unbelievable.  Power against power.  The corrupt against the not so corrupt.  There must be a line drawn somewhere.  But that line was covered with mud.  It is difficult to see as you bump across it. It is a real fight. Everyone gets hurt.  The result of all power struggles.  If you like real life mysteries, read this one. 

Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

So after reading “Gumshoe” about a real P.I. I had to re-read the Maltese Falcon.  I was in Montreal circa 1993, I had to run all over town to find it?  A classic like this?  The English side of the city was just full of pop culture crap.  But I did find it, finally.  It had been over ten years since I had last read it.  I don’t often re-read books.  I only do it for the really great books.  Maltese falcon is one of those.  I’ll read it again.  It is fast paced, full of essential characters and characterization and moral ambivalence without apology.  There is despair, a whole lot of despair.  Despair is a common factor in modern life.  I wonder if the humans of a thousand years ago, the common man, had time for despair.  Life was too desperate back than to worry about it.  Death was always at your heels.  So there is a story that Spade tells, called the Flitcraft Missing Persons Case.  One of Spade’s early cases.  This guy Flitcraft one day just up and disappears.  After a year or so and the police finding nothing, the wife wants to find out what has happened to her husband and hires a Private Dick.  Spade tracks the guy down to Seattle.  Spade goes up there to confront the guy.  The guy said he had just gotten tired of the Flitcraft L.A. life and wanted something new and different.  It confused Spade, because The new life in Seattle looked a whole lot like the Flitcraft L.A. life had been.  He had the same type of job.  The new wife even had the same hair color.  All that seemed to have changed was the city and his name.  I really like this story.  It demonstrates that the person you are actually running away from is yourself and that person always goes with you wherever you go.  The Maltese Falcon is a story about just that; lies, mostly lies to yourself.  In the book everyone lies about everything all of the time, even Spade.  He does it sometimes just for the fun of it.  All of the characters are constantly making and remaking the world they live in.  Manipulation of; facts, people, circumstances, love, all of it.  Spade says at one point that the way he works is to throw a monkey wrench into the events and then waits to see what happens.  Great!  What an amusing batch of chaos.  Just great!  As I said before, I’ll read it again.

The Impostors by George V. Higgins.

Technically, a very well written book.  My first writing teacher at Northeastern University was a student of George V. Higgins.  But . . . but . . . academics will say that (well written) when there isn’t much else there.  I don’t know.  It was more a slice of crime with low-life characters.  The unlikable doing the unlikable; not the best combination.  They have sex at the drop of a hat.  I guess the unlikable like the unlikable.  A double negative somewhere there.  Unrealistic in the age of AIDS.  Also they were all lairs and thieves that is the definition of a criminal true.  Such people exist sure, but a more interesting story must exist about these low lives.  Wait for that other book.

The Dark Wind by Tony Hillerman.

The dark wind is revenge.  The Navajo do not understand revenge apparently.  Why I don’t know, they are human.  But Jim Chee gets mixed up in a number of cases, of course, that all whined up being related, especially, the most unusual of events.  It is fiction.  It moved quickly and the set of characters are likeable.  Entertaining.  It passed the time.

Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman.

It is an entertaining fast read.  A time passer.  Navajo police and all.  I think Hillerman is getting bored with these characters or I am?  This book didn’t have any snap or the integration of the crime with the characters as in his earlier books.  In his last few book his villains were academics.  Having been an academic, still an Academic part-time, I know their foibles and quirks.  I would like beating up on academic types, talking trash about them, but it is wearing thin.  Most academics are the types that write poison pen letters to the department Chair and Vice-principle of the Institution.  Not much else, hardly ever a face to face confrontation.  It takes too much effort and down right courage to kill another person.  Especially a person that has been trained and badgered into thinking in detail about the past and future; consequences are important to academics.  Killing is unproductive, so for an academic it would have to be spur of the moment.  But spur of the moment doesn’t make drama.  Premeditation has drama.  Another annoying thing, coincidence played too much of a role in this novel.  Coincidence works sometimes, not all of the time. 

What I liked about Hillerman before was that he took the impossible to believe and wrapped it in a rational and emotional base of the Native American culture.  Things that appeared to be supernatural were always explained by the most natural of events.  The most human of doings.  In this book he took natural events and made them unbelievable, maybe a very human thing too but?  Time to move on. Read something else.    

People of Darkness by Tony Hillerman.

An early Jim Chee novel.  Not much mystery.  A little Navajo spiritualism, but not enough.  Mostly, a standard shoot-em-up.  Not one of his best.  

The Spy Who came in from the Cold by John Le Carre

“It is said that men condemned to death are subject to sudden moments of elation; as if, like a moth to a fire, their destruction were coincidental with attainment.”  Page 80 from the novel.  This sentence sums up the novel.  An enormous Plot / Counterplot.  The main character is manipulated even while he thinks he is manipulating them.  As with most LeCarre books, the only freedoms the main character has are defiance and death.  As an American having lived and worked in Montreal, Canada for a little more than three years, I now understand LeCarre’s obsession with this basic story and ending; defiance and death..  The main characters of his books almost always die.  The situation itself is very British.  A very royalist situation.  The Power knows what is best for the masses, even whether they live or die.  Only by out right defiance can you show your freedom from the system, but to gain that freedom you have to die.  I find Quebec to be exactly like that.  (Circa. 1992)  Everyone is caught under the boot of the oppressive “Masters” of the system.  I have beaten the system and refused to show the proper respect, I am an American, so I am despised.  My only salvation is to leave, the terminal solution.  It is what I will do.  (I did.)  But now I understand the resentment for the British society that you find in so many British authors and artists.  Upper class British twits, evil incarnate.  For many who are willing to pay the price though, it is a good predictable, dull life.  But everyone in Quebec has to pay.  Pay and pay and pay.  The book is a good read.  

The Tailor of Panama by John Le Carrie

The post cold war spy novel needs a new twist to make them believable and even interesting.  Here it is Panama after the first Bush’s invasion.  Give the Panama Canal to the British?  Now that would be something.  Britain rules the waves, so the ocean must still be important and thus so is the good ole canal, even if the Americans built it.  Now they are going to give it away.  The canal has to be more important than that.  Something must be going on but with who?  The Japanese?  Andrew Osnard is supposed to find out.  But there are few Brits in Panama.  There is this tailor, Harry Pendel.  Nothing about Pendel is for real though.  He constructed a respectable past to help his tailor business and to keep his wife happy.  Yeah, he is just a liar.  I guess that makes him the perfect spy.  Osnard knows all of this falsity and uses it against Harry to get him to do the Brits biding. Of course, Harry lies to Osnard.  People never change; they just do what they are used to doing.  The laugh is the Deceiver is deceived by a known deceiver.  People believe what they want to believe.  The True Spy Game, mostly marketing.  Make the world you’re your own image.  Unfortunately this is a common theme for Le Carrie.  Still, Le Carrie knows his characters.  He writes them to life.  His descriptions of them make them breath.  Founded in reality, the story moved into the extra-ordinary by the motivations of the characters, very convincingly.  The actual ending of the book meandered a little.  Endings are always hard.  Still this is a very good book.

Jack Foley’s Greatest Caper by Elmore Leonard

I think that was what it was called.  A crime novel about a non-violent bank robber Jack Foley.  He breaks out of jail in front of a beautiful U.S. Marshall.  Not that this is hard to believe but then he kidnaps her.  As he does this he talks to her, casual talk, like they are on a date.  He is so charming that, of course, she falls for him.  She is s U.S. Marshall because she likes criminals, it turns out.  She likes them so much she shot her first criminal boy friend.  So the rest of the book interweaves prison life flashbacks with setting up a BIG CAPER.  It is the robbing of a shifty investment guy they all met in prison.  No honor among thieves.  Foley doesn’t want to go back to prison.  This fact is made clear a number of times.  He doesn’t want it so much that he is willing to die before he would go back.  In the end, after Foley saves two innocents from the really bad criminals, the woman Marshall has to shoot Foley and kill him.  Well, we knew that was coming.  Far reaching this story was.  It was a story of character, yes, but it was very difficult to make such a long leap of faith, the suspension of disbelief.  Odd characters in odd circumstances.  The prose moved smoothly, but it was like a ride in a circle, ending up where you started.   Oh it passed the time.  That is its purpose.  A lukewarm endorsement at best.  Oddly, Jack Foley was not done with me yet.  On an airplane flight to Baltimore, the in-flight movie was “Out of Sight” with George Clooney.  I read the description of the movie and it was the Jack Foley story.  I had to see it, of course.  The movie is the novel, almost word for word.  I think Leonard writes his books as movie scripts.  Of course, the ending of the novel could not stay.  The U.S. Marshal in the film shoots Foley in the leg instead.  Happily ever after you know.  People like that kind of stuff in their star vehicles.  The flight attendants apparently liked the movie so much they showed it again.      

Bimbos of the Death Sun y S. Macrumb.

A disappointing and pointless mystery novel.  Nothing worked in the story.  Don’t even read the title.

Burn Marks by Sarah Partasky.

Female detective who must spend hours in the bath tub.  Her skin must be pruned and white.  She spends a lot of time there.  She is either bathing or thinking about her wardrobe.  There is color aplenty, too much, in fact.  Unfortunately, the color slows things down, down to the point that I just didn’t care about the mystery.  Whatever it was?  It wasn’t made clear either even though the author acts like it was as clear as summer rain.  If that is clear?  Well the book was entertaining, but  . . . too much characterization with not enough character . . . too much detail and not enough plot.  It is not even a slice of life because those types of stories have a specific feeling or mood.  This sort of detection was by random chance, although that is more like reality, it made this story slow.  Slow keeps coming up.  Too slow.

The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog (Crime Club) by Michael Pearce

A crime novel about British occupied Cairo, Egypt.  It was supposed to be a mystery with foreign overtones.  It was dull too.  The Muslim and the Coptic struggle was the central conflict, but you didn’t care about any of the characters.  So what ever happened to them was of no interest.  Not worth the effort.

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

I know.  Everyone knows the story.  Everyone’s seen the movie.  Why mention it?  Well, everyone can be wrong.  I saw the movie twenty years ago and intentionally didn’t read the novel until now (1992).  I got it for $0.50 at a used book story in Montreal.  Okay so.  A good novel, better than I expected.  There are you happy with your “I told you so”? 

Rose by Martin Cruz Smith

A mystery and a coal mining thesis.  Fact mixed with fiction, a two for one.  Everyone likes that in America.  Learn something historical while having a good time.  Painless education, now that’s the American dream.  Also, there is the old switcher-roo.  It is a good read with good characters.  You care about the characters in the story almost immediately.  They are definitely not simply people waiting for the next out of control bus to run over them.  They are odd but believable.  Dark and violent are these coal miners and their lives are all twisted.  Death is always right over their heads as they work down in the depths of the mines so why not be violent?  You really could meet the devil tomorrow.  You already work in his neighborhood.  A miner thus needs to keep in shape for just such a confrontation.  The book is worth the effort to read.  So I won’t say any more and spoil the surprises for you.

Out on the Rim by Ross Thomas.

Good characters.  Believable scamp (trouble-maker) novel on an international scale.  The old fool, Booth Stalling, was played just right, near the edge but not over it.  Believable story because that is what almost everyone in modern society feels; being Out on the Rim.  The situation is just unpredictable enough to keep you guessing, but not too far fetched that it loses creditability.  A good entertaining read.

The Loo Sanction by Trevanian

A 1970’s Spy / Assignation novel.  Jonathon Hemlock, Ph.D. is an academic that is annoyed, bitter, and mean, so of like most Academics I have met in my career.  Still, he has the redeeming virtue of having an eye for good art.  He can spot a fake a mile off.  He writes and tours.  Everyone loves him because his talks piss them off.  The more bitter the better?  The general meanness and his love for art made him the professional killer.  Killing people pays much better than teaching people.  That is still true.  Also, he didn’t much like most people, thus they should be eliminated.  And with the money he can purchase what is really good in this world, fine art.  Oh well.  Character elaboration and the set up is slow.  It was written in the ‘70’s, but it’s okay if the reader finds Hemlock and his cast of odd characters interesting.  Of course the book ends with a killing.  Dr. Hemlock is an assassin, isn’t he?  How else would it end?  But the killing isn’t that big a part of the story.  It is mostly about Dr. Hemlock’s reluctance to kill, but the world forces him to?  Is it Pre-destination?  Force of nature?  He likes it?  Still, Dr. Hemlock pays for his violation of the first commandment, of course, too.  His love dies.  But worse, he survives.  His friend dies too, but he survives.  Dr. Hemlock’s final punishment is to live.  Live a life deformed, contorted.  So here is the most important dialogue in the book.  “The guy pissed me off. . . . You can’t kill the system, so you have to kill something.  A villain is good enough.”  It was an enjoyable book.  It is a period book, but worth the time. 

Drowned Hope by Donald Westlake

A caper novel.  An assortment of relatively dumb criminals attempt to recover a coffin full of dollars, seven hundred thousand of them to be exact, from the bottom of a New York state water reservoir.  The reservoir, of course, is off limits to the public.  Twenty years ago there had been a terrorist event there, so public access was now a no-no.  Terrorist had attempted to put enough LSD into the reservoir to trip out all of New York City.  As one of the characters in the book say, “Who would be able to tell?”  That sentence may be the only intelligent thing said in this adventure of the excessively stupid.  Basically, the morally corrupt are eventually deterred by the intellectually handicapped.  There was no well thought out plan, hardily a plan at all.  As you might guess this was meant to be a Crime Comedy.  There were a few laughs, too few.  I finally got exasperated with this fools club.  This book is a part of an appropriately named series, the Dortmunder Adventures.  Someone likes them just not me.  Read something else.

  ***********

"Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile."

Albert Schweitzer

"I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped."

F. Dostoevski

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