Author: Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Jim Rugg

2012, Titan

Filed Under: Graphic Novels, Historical

It’s not difficult to understand why the Red Army Faction, a leftist revolutionary sect that was founded in Germany in 1970 and existed in various forms for nearly 30 years, has inspired so many books, films, plays, songs, paintings, and other works of art. Young, politically minded people banding together under charismatic leadership, the journalist who puts her ideals into practice and co-founds the group, the campaign of violence, prison break, subsequent arrest and final fate of the leaders – the story is an a la carte menu for any kind of statement you’d want to make. And largely because of that appeal, it’s also easy to romanticize the group, and gloss over the consequences of the violent acts attributed to the them, which include 34 deaths. Even Uli Edel’s 2008 film The Baader-Meinhoff Complex, which effectively charts the group’s violent pathology, can’t resist a bit of mythologizing.

Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Jim Rugg’s graphic novel One Model Nation, originally published by Image Comics in 2009 and now republished by Titan Books, attempts a corrective to that dynamic, presenting the RAF as a frustration in the lives of four musicians who are trying to progress to the next stage of their career. But none of the criticism levied against the RAF, and Andreas Baader in particular, by the main characters amounts to anything more than insults like “assholes” and “turd.” They seem more concerned that their young fans’ sympathy with the gang has ruined some of their gigs and attracted unwanted police attention than with the RAF’s ideology, or the bombings and killings they commit. As an indictment of violent political action Taylor-Taylor’s story is toothless; it doesn’t fare much better as an account of a mythical band’s glory days.

One Model Nation begins with a framing sequence set in the present, in which an American documentarian meets with Olaf, a former member of the German art rock band Werkstatt, the subject of his next film. He’s unable to help, but the director presses ahead, asking “what really happened to the band called One Model Nation?” You’d be forgiven for assuming that Olaf would play some pivotal role in the flashback that makes up the rest of the story, but neither Olaf nor Werkstatt are mentioned again until the final pages, when we return to the framing sequence for a non sequitur ending. This kind of elided storytelling continues throughout the book, such that it feels like Taylor-Taylor is deliberating leaving details out, as if to preempt accusations that he’s holding his reader’s hands. But there’s a difference between expecting readers to think and engage with the text, and preventing them from doing so by excising important story elements.

The flashback takes us to Berlin in 1977, when One Model Nation is an apparently internationally popular krautrock band in the Kraftwerk vein, who are tormented by both the RAF and the police. During a meeting with a local promoter, the band is faced with two options: appeal to the West German government to get the police off their case, or play at an illegal festival in Frankfurt. They can’t come to a decision, but soon it doesn’t matter because one of their numbers, Sebastian, leaves the group after their specially-equipped studio is destroyed during a police raid. The remaining members tinker with electronics and meet David Bowie while Sebastian spends time in the countryside with his elderly father, a former Nazi officer, who convinces him to return to the group and face his frustration with the deterioration of society. The group eventually decides to play the festival, but an encounter with Badder, Ulrike Meinhoff, and their former roadie who’s become a full-fledged RAF member, lands them all in prison.

As a central tension, deciding whether to keep it real or sell out isn’t particularly compelling, especially when it’s already been established that One Model Nation is famous in Germany, England, the United States, and elsewhere. Taylor-Taylor inexplicably begins the story after the more interesting conflicts that arise in stories about mythical bands/artists have already resolved, and ends before a compelling mystery or ambiguity about the characters is established. The sound of the band’s music is never addressed, either – fans of bands like Kraftwerk and Can probably have an idea, but anyone uninitiated in krautrock would be largely in the dark (Note: Taylor-Taylor – the frontman of the Dandy Warhols – is releasing music under the name “One Model Nation” to accompany the Titan reissue, which is a fun marketing idea, but it doesn’t really solve the problems raised by the text. The songs I’ve listened to are ok.) The answer to “what really happened to the band One Model Nation” turns out to be “nothing, really,” and as the plot returned to the framing sequence I wasn’t sure why the question had been asked in the first place.

It’s often difficult to distinguish the members of One Model Nation from one another, with the exception of Sebastian, as their surface personality quirks (Ralf is sheepish, Wolfgang is outgoing) come and go as the scene dictates, and their dialogue is mostly interchangeable. Artist Jim Rugg makes an effort to differentiate them through facial features, but still, they’re all tall, thin, and pale with long dark hair (except Wolfgang) – it wasn’t until 2/3rds of my way through the book that I felt comfortable pinning names, much less motivations and personalities, to the characters.

Taylor-Taylor’s depiction of Ulrike Meinhoff as Sebastian’s vapid, easily manipulated ex-girlfriend is particularly deplorable. When we first encounter Meinhoff she is faking the sounds of sex from inside her apartment to prevent Sebastian from knocking on her door – in the afterward we learn that this actually happened to Taylor-Taylor, but does such behavior square with the historical Meinhoff? Later they meet in a café, and in response to Sebastian’s rambling about the nature of mankind, Meinhoff can only say “I really love you” and “I’m bummed we never could get it together.” Couple that with Taylor-Taylor’s description of Meinhoff in the Titan edition’s backmatter as a “left-wing political journalist with the facial structure of a bull terrier” and “German radical left-winger she-beast” and it’s clear that One Model Nation’s gender politics are retrograde (and I haven’t even mentioned the sexy punk rocker who only shows up in the final act to dispense some exposition and act as a romantic interest for Wolfgang).

Plot and characterization problems aside, Jim Rugg’s art is gorgeous, particularly his detailed views of the Berlin cityscape. There’s a sense of location, both geographically and temporally, in every panel – little touches with clothes, cars, hairstyles, and other signifiers of the late 70s reveal the care and precision in Rugg’s disarmingly simple linework. He sticks to a nine-panel grid for most of the story, which drags the pace down a bit, particularly in dialogue heavy scenes that might play better in larger panels, but does set up some nice surprise moments when the grid is broken, particularly a stunning explosion and the few concert sequences that convey the excitement and energy of a One Model Nation show. Colorist Jon Fell also deserves praise for the palette of grays, browns, and whites that give the book a quiet, subdued feel, and the moments of shocking color that accompany major plot points.

There’s an interesting story in the intersection of competing youth-oriented cultures, but One Model Nation is a few drafts away from really telling it. It’s revealing that Taylor-Taylor originally conceived of the story as a screenplay, and only adapted it into a comic after it failed to gain momentum with producers and directors – comic scripts and screenplays suit different purposes, and one can’t and shouldn’t just replace the other. That Taylor-Taylor’s friend, indie comic stalwart Mike Allred, guided that transition is encouraging, but I can’t sense his expertise in the final product. One Model Nation is a beginning writer’s good effort, but is ultimately disappointing.

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

Author: Scott Westerfeld

2011, Simon Pulse

Filed Under: Young Adult, Sci-Fi, Historical.

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Goliath closes the YA trilogy Westerfeld opened barely two years ago with Leviathan (if you want to get caught up, you can read my review of Leviathan here, and my review of the middle book, Behemoth, here). Like its predecessors, Goliath is a fun adventure set in a creative alternate history, where World War One is a fierce battle between the steampunk Clankers (Germany and friends) and the Darwinists (headed by Britain) whose army consists of giant biological weapons created by genetically modifying lifeforms–the titular Leviathan being an armored airship supported by a flying whale.

Deryn, the girl posing as a midshipman in the British Air Navy, and Alek, the Hapsberg prince hoping to find a means of peace, continue their adventure right where things left off. There’s plenty of spectacle in this book, and even more historical figures make their way onto the pages (Nikola Tesla, William Randolph Hearst, Pancho Villa, and others).

As you might expect from the third book of a trilogy, Westerfeld elevates the main characters to global importance, making them lynchpins in the outcome of a world war. Another major factor is a doomsday weapon know as Goliath. With it, Tesla has managed to harness the ability to influence electrical currents from across hemispheres. But whose side he’s on isn’t entirely clear.

There’s a healthy dose of politics at work in this installment, both concerning the war and allegiances, but also in the bubbling up and concealment of series-long secrets–namely Deryn’s gender. It’s good that these threads carry so nicely between the books, because like its predecessors’ plotlines, the events here all open and close neatly in a single volume. But unlike the previous books, which more or less occur in a single setting, this book features lots of globe-trotting.

While adventurous, this served to highlight for me this series’ biggest shortcoming: Westerfeld focuses too much on moment-to-moment adventure at the expense of big-picture storytelling. There’s a a really interesting overarching storyline, it just isn’t granted enough attention to feel nearly as epic as it should. This is a book about a great war fought between nations that use fantastic machines and creatures as weapons and vehicles. It’s a creative setting, and an awesome one; one that ought to be vibrant and as memorable as you can get. The elements are all there, but even after three books, it just never clicks.

Here’s where I come down: this entire trilogy should have been one book. Had that been the case, I think talking about it as a lasting work of children’s lit could be warranted. But instead, the story has been chopped up into 3 somewhat short and easily consumable–then, unfortunately, forgettable–pieces. This was a concern I mentioned in my write up of the first book, as the plot arc quickly closed just as I was being drawn into the greater story, leaving the novel feeling more like an episode than a complete entity.

All told, this entire trilogy isn’t that long. Each book weighs in at 400-500 pages, but with big margins, lots of white space and dialogue, and the copious illustrations (one of the books’ many strengths), they feel a whole lot shorter. The entire trilogy would fit, I surmise, in a normally laid-out paperback of about 500 pages or so.

An epic story like Westerfeld’s in a single big novel is the kind of thing I would have gobbled up when I was younger, and probably still might today. (Of course, in that form it couldn’t be sold to me at the price of 3 hardcovers.) I hope these books found success, it is a great adventure set in a unique world. And perhaps it’s not fair to blame Westerfeld for following the genre’s conventions for serialized scenarios, or for earning the best living he can. But it’s impossible not to notice.

It’s just a shame this is the kind of book that gets lost in a sea of shiny-on-black-cover YA books lined on a Barnes & Noble shelf, rather than one earning its tattered cover in a young reader’s backpack. Hopefully when they get around to releasing these in paperback they consider compiling them, but somehow I doubt that happens.

Similar Reads: Leviathan (Westerfeld), Behemoth (Westerfeld), Boneshaker (Priest)

Author: Umberto Eco

2011, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Filed Under: Literary, Historical.

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There’s but one fictional element to Eco’s newest novel: the main character. Every other character, conversation, and event in this dense novel is pulled from historical records, or else constitutes an amalgamation of real persons or happenings. This is Eco’s claim, and if true–and I’m inclined to believe it is–this book is even more impressive than it would be on a blind read.

Set in Europe in the last quarter of the 19th century, The Prague Cemetery tells the tale of Captain Simonini, a French-Italian document forger who works, more or less freelance, as a subversive agent for a number of different governments. His profession sometimes has him infiltrating radical groups in order to incite incidents (in hopes of swinging public or political favor back to the ruling party), and other times falsifying documents and news stories in order to influence public opinion or have someone tossed in jail. He’s a murderous villain, but Eco’s comprehensive and careful narration makes him easy to cling to as a narrator and as a character–in that regard he’s got a bit of Iago in him.

The improbability of a reader finding Simonini likeable is all the more exacerbated by his personal agenda. Simonini is ferverntly anti-semitic. The novel is steeped in the nationalist ideologies (and fear-mongering) that was so rampant in the decades building up to the great wars of the 20th century. Much of that boiled down to deeply anti-semitic movements across most of Europe. The Prague Cemetery opens with a chapter-long racist tirade, not only denigrating the Jews, but pinpointing and exploiting ethnic and cultural stereotypes and hateful prosaisms about every race and nation in Europe. By opening the book with a tearing-down of everyone, Eco cleans the slate for Simonini. He’s not a fascist, because he would hate the fascists too. Instead Eco has created a character that represents that dark part in our collective mindset, the one that, amongst other things and whether we agree with them or not, recognizes stereotypes and associates them with groups and cultures.

In Simonini’s case, he was indoctrinated with these ideas at an early age. Young Simonini’s grandfather bequeathed him a copy of a letter he’d once wrote to high ranking member of the clergy warning of a conspiracy between the Jews and Freemasons to take over the world (I’m grossly oversimplifying). Hateful conspiracy theory stuff. Simonini, through all his tasks and forgeries, keeps as his own priority the creation of an ever-evolving grand forgery detailing a secret meeting (in a Prague cemetery) between Jewish elders in which they plot the economic and ideological take-over of the world.

Simonini works his document over countless times, taking into account all the political lessons and cultural fears he comes across in his various tasks and subversions. (These sometimes involve defaming someone, sometimes involve constructing and executing a terrorist plot, perhaps to sink an ocean liner or destroy a subway tunnel.) As his document evolves into a powerful piece of progaganda, he also disseminates it in parts. Thus the lies perpetuate into other lies and ideologies. The whole thing sounds insane. A forged document describing a ludicrous conspiracy theory about a secret society of the world’s most powerful Jews meeting in a graveyard to plot world domination. But this part we already know is true: in real life, it is called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and it gave Hitler his justification for the Holocaust.

Its American publication was funded by Henry Ford. It is because something so insane can be real that Eco’s creation is so powerful. The Holocaust wasn’t the Nazis’ fault; it was the world’s for allowing it to happen. Simonini embodies that piece of us as a people that turns its back to atrocities we find politically inconvenient or sees basic human rights as debatable topics. As Simonini puts it: “To hate someone, you don’t have to speak the same language.”

In writing a sweeping history of the past, of a section we like to blot out as vanquished along with the axis of evil, Eco draws connections to our past, like a grandson seeing his visage in a grandfather’s portrait. In The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Eco biographed a culture through pop art and pulp fiction. Here, in much the same way, he cuts up a dark moment in fairly recent human history, and collages together an ugly but honest reflection of our current society. The Prague Cemetery is not the easiest read, but it is an important one.

Similar Reads: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Eco), The Erasers (Robbe-Grillet)

Author: Tom Frick

2011, Burning Books

Filed Under: Literary, Historical.

Set in the early 1800’s in Robin Hood’s territory, Thomas Frick’s The Iron Boys is a real tour de force that takes the mayhem of the Luddites who resisted the Industrial Revolution as its subject.  The term “Luddite” has long been used to describe a person who resists technological change, but it’s a sure bet that not many are really aware of its historical roots as an unorganized, almost spontaneous insurrection against the dehumanizing tendencies of the emerging capitalist economy.

The  Luddites flourished in the second decade of the nineteenth century in the Northern English counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire and  Nottinghamshire.  Ned Ludd, the mythical figure after whom the movement was named, was reputed to live in Sherwood Forest.  The Luddites were crafts workers who largely had control over their lives and livelihoods until the advent of the textile factories, which dehumanized workers in the name of profits.  Indeed, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written to an extent as a reaction to Luddism, an eloquent treatise against the machine.  Byron championed the movement in the House of Lords, a lone voice against the machine.  The Luddites attacked the mills and smashed the machines that were ruining their autonomous way of life.

The Iron Boys in Frick’s novel are Luddites by another name.  Related in the semi-literate first-person voice of Corbel Penner, a paraplegic middle-aged loner, the narrative meanders according to Corbel’s whimsical thinking but ultimately culminates in the Iron Boys’ futile attack on the textile factory owned by George Cogent Meadows Richard Pilfer Withy, a pontificating, greedy capitalist, a comical if slightly sinister character who was made to be played by W.C. Fields.

Corbel is a likeable character.  When we first meet him he is conversing with the birds.  Ricky did it.  Ricky did it, they say, and Corbel responds, Whos Ricky. Whadideedo.  Whos Ricky. Whadideedo. It’s clever the way Frick mimics birdcalls here and puts a human voice to the sounds, onomatopoeically, but it also suggests to us that Corbel is one with the natural world, which in the context of the story is crucial: nature versus machinery.  By the end of the novel Corbel is no longer conversing with the birds, though he has not been conquered by the machines; he has achieved a new maturity, a level of equanimity.

Corbel tells us of his life, his love, his legs–we know that he has lost them but only find out how during the climactic scene, a plot development Frick handles skillfully, just as the turn of Corbel’s love life/family life by novel’s end is also handled with skillful storytelling.

In his meandering, Tristam Shandy-like narrative, Corbel introduces us to the principal characters in the story, including the machine=loving (anti-life) Withy, and the other Iron Boys who will challenge him.  These include the inscrutable Pank, leader of the Iron Boys if there is one, William Dogg, Rose Stonewarden, Maggie Moats and New Billy, a sort of village idiot who may or may not be the pattern of Ned Ludd himself.

Many of the little stories that Corbel tells us along the way, which feel like pure digression, have the force of parables:  the story of Black Whopper, William Dogg’s Lustrabustions, the construction of Withy’s factory compared with “the Babble Tower.”  Corbel frequently mentions “the Black Book,” whose obscure prophecies make one wonder if this is some sort of magical Book of Runes, until it becomes clear he is talking about the Bible.  Indeed, numerology has an importance for Corbel, the magic of numbers.  Numbers also represent the mechanical, as embodied in Withy’s factory’s clock.

Frequently Corbel breaks into song, little bits of doggerel verse – some from the Black Book indeed–that have a sort of psalm-like folk wisdom.  At times they echo with the simple emotion of folk tales.

Will Flowers “63”

Plays the Heavenly Lyre

Born bred & hanged

All in the same shire

The hanging of Will Flowers for killing a factory guard during an attack on a mill is an event that galvanizes the Iron Biys.  Flowers’ father had been forced out of his household shop and so had a justifiable grudge, but it’s also likely he was framed by the authorities, made an example of.  Withy, meanwhile, has delivered his own lecture about how “machines improve men.”

The Iron Boys carry little pouches of iron filings that they superstitiously believe have magical, transformative powers – alchemy – and it is from these that they derive their name.  The Iron Boys take the iron oath:

With this sacred oath

I weave my word and will

With those of every Iron Boy

Our mission to fulfill

Their very words are one

An oath to set us free

And never shall it be undone

Unto eternity

The salient part of  Corbel’s “speech”–of the novel itself–a decision Frick has made, is the lack of punctuation–no apostrophes, no quotation marks, no question marks, no punctuation of any kind except periods at the end of sentences.  The narrative is presented in paragraph-like chunks that are not really “paragraphs” but blocks of thought, or speech.  Words are frequently spelled as they sound.  The intention here is to sink the reader into the stream of Corbel’s thought, as if the entire book were being spoken, an oral presentation rather than a written one.  Indeed, this idea reflects the basic tension between “nature” and “machine”: written language is artificial; grammar is a mechanical device imposed on organic speech; writing is a lifeless (mis)representation of speech.

The hillbilly-like voice is not meant as dialect, therefore, but the reader is still left wondering about it.  Is this the way a person of a certain class in early nineteenth century England talked?  Thought is the shadow of speech, after all.  Even though Frick does not mean to represent “dialect,” the paradox is that this is a written narrative, a “book,” and not really a story being told aloud a la Homer.

At times you can even hear Huck Finn in Corbel’s narrative, as when he satirizes Withy.  Withy the blowhard, the pontificator, makes pompous speeches that borrow Biblical language; he uses phrases like, “Verily I say unto you,” straight from the Sermon on the Mount.   “Not that we eat more but there be ever more that eat he says.” Here Withy seems to be justifying the need for mass production, and Corbel comments with sly innocence, “Although you ask me I think Withy do eat more to judge from what his tailor let out.”

The Iron Boys is definitely a book that makes a reader think. It’s one of those books whose difficulty of style could easily result in a reader simply hurling it across the room in frustration and giving up on it, but it’s satisfying to those who pursue it to its end.  Moreover, in its conflict between man and “progress” the plot has a contemporary relevance.

Similar Reads: Henry James’s The Ambassadors, L.D. Brodsky’s This Here’s a Merica, and Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opionions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Author: R. William Bennett

2011, Shadow Mountain

Filed Under: Literary, Historical.

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I’ve been reading a bunch of Halloweenish books lately (you’ll notice werewolves and cemeteries in my upcoming reviews), and while Bennett’s retelling of A Christmas Carol does feature ghosts, it’s (somewhat obviously) a full-on Christmas story, probably even more so than its inspiration.

The story begins just a little before the events of Dickens’s classic. Marley is alive and a ruthless business man. He forsook any sort of interpersonal relationship for the almighty buck. He takes on a young financial prodigy as a partner (Scrooge audaciously refuses to apprentice), teaches him all he knows about being ruthless, then dies with only Scrooge begrudgingly by his side, waiting with impatience to sieze his mentor’s assets. But just before dying, Marley has an ephiphany, and he regrets his avaricious life.

Because of this final moment, Marley finds forgiveness in the afterlife. He does penance by wandering the world as a shade, dragging heavy, chest-laden chains that rattle behind him. Marley blames himself for Scrooge being and even crueler, more miserly dick, so he petitions the spirits of the afterlife to allow him to help Scrooge. If he fails, Marley will have to continue to drag his chains–and Scrooge’s–for eternity. From there the book is a faithful retelling of A Christmas Carol, written from the perspective of Marley, who, Bennett tells us, was always there, just invisible to Dickens’s protagonist.

Despite it occurring on a Christian holiday, I’ve always read A Christmas Carol as largely, like much of Dickens’s work, more about social contract and free will than any sort of lesson in piety. But Marley, and through him this book, seems more concerned with Scrooge’s eternal salvation. Scrooge’s redemption as Dickens wrote it was not a Christian repentance. He reforms his ways for the betterment of man, and finds personal reward in that offering. Bennett’s tale offers more of a trickle-down morality scheme, a golden-rule, pay-it-forward kind of thing. In the end, of course, the resulting message is the same: as Abe Lincoln once put it, “Be excellent to each other–and party on, dudes.”

Bennet never narrates with blunt religiosity. Christianity isn’t discussed besides through implication in Marley’s first meeting with a spirit in the afterlife–”Are you…Him?” But under the surface there’s a seemingly much more pointed agenda:

“Ebenezer would have chased him out with a rod?”

The spirit nodded, “He might have. But he also might have thought, ‘Who is this man who needs nothing from me, but only wishes me comfort?’ He might not have changed that moment, but that experience might have worked within him.["]

It’s subtle, but there’s a tone at work in lines like this that smacks of religious pamphlets. Not that it ultimately matters, but dollars to donuts Bennett is either Mormon or Born Again. (His publisher’s mission statement proclaims they are “committed to providing books that offer values-based messages that strengthen individuals”–doesn’t say how they are funded.) The didactic tinge that gives me this feeling is not so potent as to ruin the book, but it’s certainly noticeable enough for me to recognize I’m not the ideal reader here.

But that’s not really a criticism of the book so much as a warning that this is for a certain readership. If that’s your cup of tea, you will really like this book. Bennett is an above average writer and pulls off a more than decent approximation of Dickensian style. The book is well structured and paced. And I admit I got drawn into it, feeling excited for what I knew was going to happen (funny how retellings always manage to at least tap that vein). If you like Christmas books, or just really like A Christmas Carol, this book is a good pick up. If you’re looking for an easy Christmas gift for a grandparent or holiday book to stick in a guest room this winter, this is a good choice I suppose. If you’re really into Dickens but not so much into God, you should probably pass.

Similar Reads: Drood (Simmons), The Resurrectionist (Bradley), Bloodline (Cary), Grendel (Gardiner).

[A review copy was provided.]

2004, Bear & Company

Filed Under: Nonfiction, Historical, Sci-Fi.

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Not that I buy into them, but pseudo-documentaries like the kind often played on The History Channel are a guilty pleasure of mine. Sitchin’s books (there are many) were mentioned in one I’ve been watching recently called “Ancient Aliens.” That show’s title pretty much sums up Sitchin’s thesis: aliens used to live on earth, and live amongst humans as gods.

Sitchin’s clearly a smart guy. He reads multiple languages (including Sumerian), and has spent a lot of time studying ancient artifacts. His basic supposition is that if Homer’s Troy (long thought by scholars to be a mythical place, until its excavation around the turn of the 20th century) can transcend myth, there’s no reason to outright discredit the rest of his rendition as untrue just because we don’t believe it. Hence there were really gods and demigods involved in the politics of men.

Based upon Sumerian legends of “sky people” called Anunaki, legends from which he inferences robots and rocket ships, Sitchin takes his literalist line of logic surrounding Troy one step further and asserts that the gods were aliens. It’s all pretty ridiculous of course, but what follows is some interesting, and often exciting, quasi-science. (I ought to point out, as batty as all this sounds, that if you were to reductively sum up the “plot” of pretty much any of the world’s major religions into a single sentence, it would probably sound equally as ludicrous.)

The book is broken into sections, with the ancient objects targeted for his various trips to the the Mediterranean and Middle East (a carving of a rocketship, a statue with an “airtank,” Sumerian characters charved into an unrecognized bronze smelting ruin in Greece) used as thematic dividers. More than once he roots a premise on what he believes is a mistranslation, such as the Hebrew “Elohim” for God, which he asserts is actually plural–and referring to alien “gods.”  If Indian Jones were an aging, paunchy Jewish man prone to excitability and content to walking tours rather than whip-swinging through temples and tombs, he’d resemble Zecharia Sitchin.

Still, Sitchin does bring up a lot of interesting comparisions between ancient cultures that existed oceans apart. Sitchin draws lines between the Maya, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Olmecs. Of course, when you approach such a topic looking for such comparisons, they’re not hard to find. Things like a certain style of tongue on certain idols indicate, to Sitchin, a relationship between the gorgons of Greek mythology and a Mayan god-beast. This connection could mean that Medusa’s family could have traveled freely across the ocean, or it could touch on some archetypal imagery used by ancient humans, or it could just be coincidence.

Sitchin does this over and over: he points out an interesting connection, poses an interesting question, jumps three steps ahead of himself and calls it “irrefutable” proof that the ancient alien Anunnaki once co-inhabited the planet with us. He even claims that the smoking guns are being shadily hidden away, or possible destroyed, by museums. Assertions like that push the book too far into paranoid conspiracy theory for my taste. Moreover, you can’t just pick and choose myths to “prove” true–the sun isn’t pulled by a chariot, and why would an advanced civilization capable of intergalactic travel fight primitive wars with arrows and build space stations out of rock?

That’s not really a criticism, though–it’s not like I went into this believing it anything other than hooey–because it’s fun. Sitchin ties most of his conclusions to a single place, the one he believes was the Anunnaki “Mission Control Center”: Jerusalem’s Temple on the Mount.

Was this Holy of Holies, the former home of the Ark of Covenant, also a launching pad for an ancient rocket ship? Probably not. But the enthusiasm with which Sitchin relates his (admittedly pretty ballsy) sneaking into a prohibited inner sanctum of one of the most sacred places on Earth makes me wish, just a little, that he had stumbled upon a bunch of aliens playing canasta around the Ark of the Covenant.

I really liked this book. Take it for what it is: a man who looks at statues and convinces himself they are wearing spacesuits, then enthusiastically shares his “discovery” with you. It’s mindrot, but it’s fun mindrot.

Similar Reads: I’ve never read anything like this. Watch “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel (and Netflix streaming) for a taste.

2011, Touchstone

Filed Under: Romance, Historical.

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The experience of reading Wildflower Hill was similar to watching a Lifetime movie: it has a weak plot and bland characters, but I found myself staying up late to finish it anyway. The novel tells the story of three generations of a Scottish family, the Blaxland-Hunters, as related through alternating narratives by both the matriarchal grandmother, Beattie, and her granddaughter, Emma. There’s plenty of romance (and with it heartbreak), ballet, fashion design–but it does manage to dodge being either your typical romance novel or, worse, chick lit.

The opening pages introduce Emma, an 11-year old consumed by dancing, and her rich and successful grandmother, Beattie. The story looks backward in time to Beattie at 18, then a poor Scottish barmaid struggling with a pregnancy by a married lover, before flashing forward to Emma at 31, by then a prima ballerina, struggling with a break-up and a career-ending injury. Emma returns home to lick her wounds, where she learns from her mother that Beattie, now dead a few years, left her a a sheep ranch (the titular Wildflower Hill).

The trajectory of Beattie’s success unfolds slowly through parallel narrative, while Emma’s physical and emotional recovery occurs at the ranch. Freeman structures the intertwining plots well, revealing secrets and twists along the way that genuinely took me by surprise on a few occasions.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the characters. Emma and Beattie evolve over the course of their respective stories, but lack any depth or nuance. Freeman wants them both to be atypical heroines, but she does it in far too stereotypical a manner: Beattie challenging the mores of the day; Emma starting out insufferably self-involved but ultimately developing an ability to reach out and embrace her community. Character development was there, but it was too obvious to be compelling.

Freeman’s storytelling is strong, but the same can’t be said for her abilities as writer. Nonetheless, it was no struggle to plow through this novel. While the prose is mediocre, transitions from one storyline to the next are seamless and well-timed–I didn’t tire of the two characters’ perspectives or the switching between them. Nor did I feel shorted when each section ended. And while the descriptions didn’t strike me as well-written at the time, I can easily conjure images of scenes and settings. Wildflower Hill doesn’t break any new ground or turn any impressive phrases, but it is engaging. I was surpised by how hard it was to put the book down.

Similar Reads: Plain Pursuit (Wiseman)

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

Author: Carol Birch

2011, Doubleday

Filed Under: Literary, Historical.

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I read a review of this last Wednesday and, thanks to the magic and compulsive buying ease that comes with owning a nookColor, had finished by Sunday night. I’m ready to jump on the top of the pig-pile of glowing reviews. This book was a blast. How can you not like a novel that begins like this:

I was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began.

As far as plot goes, this book is almost a mash-up. It has three distinct parts, each of which reminded me of an old favorite. The first section is solid Dickens: it follows Jaffy Brown, a London street urchin in the true Dickensian sense. (The son of a young “fallen” mother, we meet him happily walking the sewers, searching for coins in the muck with his bare feet.) A chance encounter with an escaped tiger leads Jaff to the title character, the eccentric Charles Jamrach, an overblown menagerie owner and importer of exotic animals who quickly takes the youth under his wing, where the innate animal magnetism that led Jaff into a tiger’s mouth quickly leads him to success.

With bustling London, a young street urchin, and a benevolent benefactor this includes nearly all of Dickens’ favorite tropes except for mistaken identity, and this is a near-miss: although Jaff’s new friends Tim and Ishbel Linver, are twins, they are brother and sister.

Once established, the story quickly changes gears. A rich collector tells Jamrach of a dragon sighted near in the Philipeans (Komodo Dragons were not yet discovered), and Jamrach charges Jaff and Tim with collecting this animal that may or may not exist. The pair serve on a whaling boat along the way. An animal lover, Jaff muses “I wanted to look a whale in the eye,” as if he would be on a sight-seeing trip. Once aboard, the narrative shifts. Someone once wrote of Melville’s Moby Dick that after reading the novel one could go to sea and expect success as a whaler. An exaggeration, sure, but a compliment to Melville’s exhaustive detail.

Birch’s novel is not as concerned with the minutia of whaling, which makes for a quicker and less tedious read, but she still manages to capture the essence of the experience Melville described: the cycle of long periods of tranquility upon the seas, shocking violence initiating whales upon seeing a whale’s death, and bone-wearying days of work following a kill. Waiting for the first whale to die, watching as ten, fifteen, twenty minutes pass while the animal struggles in its own gore, Jaff is horrified, commenting, “It was then I truly realized the whale is no more a fish than I am.”

Following a disaster at sea while returning, the novel takes its final, dark turn, from what feels like a YA adventure to a gritty survivor’s tale. I was reminded most of The Life of Pi, and anyone even vaguely acquainted with the plot will be able to guess why. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that the wide-eyed musing and adolescent whimsy that made Jaff such a likeable character in the first sections of the book will be long, long gone by this part’s end.

The three distinct sections could seem shoe-horned together, but Birch avoids this. She convinces us with telling but not distracting details, and under the wide-eyed voice of Jaff, there are no seams showing.

“I got to know the stars well at sea,” Jaff says of his journey.

You can’t rely on the sun and moon–they do funny things sometimes–but you can rely on the stars. When you look at them through a telescope, they start to flutter like little white wings burning in a silver fire. Then, if you focus you lens her below on a bird’s eye, you can see the shine in it, the life. And sometimes a thing comes so close it makes you jump.

It’s the same when you look at the past. Far away the white wings twinkle, nothing can be known. Further in, details: the riggings of great ships that web the darkening sky; rooftops, clear on the inner eye, magnified; and sometimes a pang, up close.

It is here the frame of the story is revealed for the first time, and we learn this story is being told as a reflection as an older Jaff is muses about the loss of a valuable gift, a telescope. This is fine, and allows for some clever foreshadowing (although this might not be necessary considering the very compelling plot). However, this is the one area I find fault with.

The voice of teen Jaff is so strong that, for me, the adult voice did not ring entirely true, and was still under the influence of the wide-eyed narrator. This doesn’t seem to be an adult reflecting on his curious, and ultimately tragic, misadventures as a youth, but more what a child might assume an adult would be like. The lessons learned between adolescence and the ripe old age we leave him at are never revealed. What this amounts to is a loss-of-innocence through adventure, and a great one, but without a realistic adult reflecting on that loss, a piece may be missing.

But that’s a minor criticism, the kind a person rereading his book review throws in to counter-balance what he wrote earlier out of a kind of embarrassment for gushing so much (did I really just compare the book to Dickens, Moby Dick, and The Life of Pi?). But I am not ashamed at all to endorse this book wholeheartedly to anyone, especially those interested in fleet-footed, wide-eyed novels of youth, inevitable loss, and rolicking adventure.

Similar Reads: The Life of Pi (Martel), Moby Dick (Melville), Great Expectations (Dickens)

2008, Overlook Duckworth

Filed Under: Literary, Historical.

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For a debut novel by a 76 year-old man, this is a pretty ambitious book. It’s not long (a slim 120 or so pages), but it is fairly dense. The Voyage of the Short Serpent tells the tale of a medieval Scandinavian bishop sent to the Greenlandic colonies to restore order. The church believes the colonies have fallen into abject hedonism (accompanied by incest and cannibalism) and need salvation. That political mission becomes a lifelong adventure, however, as traversing the arctic in a tiny wooden boat is no simple task. A grueling adventure follows, and from it springs a story of surprising depth.

One of the book’s strengths is the narration. Different sections of the book are told by a few different players, and the styles du Boucheron employs vary greatly. Velmans deserves plenty of credit here as well: he utilizes all kinds of sesquipedalian choices that are especially impressive when used in a translation. Unfortunately for both of them, one of the most difficult to navigate segments of narration comprises the first quarter or so of the novel. It is a letter of assignment from a cardinal to a priest called Insulomontanus, naming him a bishop and sending him to Iceland to rein in the flock as it were. There is a lot of interesting doublespeak at work, but it gets buried in ecclesiastical jargon and archaic syntax. It does the author a disservice, as I imagine many readers will be turned off by the formal, old-fashioned language utilized to set up the rather great story to come.

Once the mission actually sets sail, and the bishop is established as the primary narrator, the book becomes infinitely more readable. The action ramps up almost immediately. Insulomontanus’s party is quickly trapped by sea ice. They pull the boat from the ice and flip it over into a shelter. Slowly the men freeze to death and are forced to cannibalize the dead for survival. The fact that they are forced to commit one of the very sins they are en route to punish is not lost on them.

Eventually they make it to their destination, the colony New Thule. There they find things about as they expected. Gory violence, incest, feral wolves, and suspected witchcraft fill the bishop’s report. They eventually oust the governor as they were sent to do and Insulomontanus assumes control.

He gets creative in his punishments and means of restoring order, and it quickly becomes clear that the bishop is a liar and a psychopath. He doesn’t take long to become fully corrupted. It all calls into question just whose adventure this is. As the plot unravels, the book reveals itself to be a morality tale of sorts. It is also darkly funny, namely due to the bishop’s hypocrisy, as well as a few instances of the over-the-top gore.

Short Serpent has a high barrier to entry, but any reader willing to break through that will not only feel smart for being able to do so, but discover a satisfying tale inside the shell as well.

Similar Reads: Heart of Darkness (Conrad), Oronoko (Behn), The Voyage of the Narwhal (Barrett), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Wilder)

Author: Félix. J. Palma

2011, Atria Books

Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Romance.

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There’s very little I can say about this book without spoiling something. So I’m going to try something a little different to start. Let’s do word association. Take a look at this list and see how many things you think could help make for a good story:

Victorian romance. Parasols. Hoodwinks. Murder. Historical figures in fictional situations. Meticulous plotting. Vengeance. Paradoxes. Bawdiness. Secret societies. Blackmail. The Terminator. Drunk British whores. Jack the Ripper slaughtering drunk British whores. Minority Report. Tribal magic. The time machine in H.G. Wells’s attic. Street brawls. Apocalyptic robot battles. Dimensional rifts. Time travel. Henry James and Bram Stoker having a sleepover. Time Cop. Lava guns. Immortal dogs. Naive girls easily coerced into sex. Parallel universes.  Steam powered automatons. Fourth dimensional dragon-like beasts. Sword fights.

Pretty good odds for an entertaining book right? Right. In any case, if that piqued your interest sufficiently, go ahead and skip the rest of the review, pick up this book, and enjoy.  Read on and I’ll try and explain a little more substantively, but be aware that while I’ll try to limit them, there will be spoilers after the break. If you already think you want to read the book, do so, then return to my review in the future (oooooh).

Last chance to avoid SPOILERS. Okay, you’ve been warned.

It’s not perfectly clear that time travel actually exists in this novel. There’s evidence for it, but also evidence against. The reader, much like the 19th century London depicted in Palma’s excellent novel, gets taken in by an elaborate scam. How deep the scam goes remains debatable–perhaps it’s only superficial and H.G. Wells (the primary protagonist) is nothing more than a character embroiled in a twisting murder mystery spanning a multiverse, or perhaps it goes far deeper.

Whatever the truth is, The Map of Time is full of hoaxsters. You will find youself tricked more than once. Yet each time the wool is pulled, you’ll rush to replace it, or begin looking elsewhere for the otherworldy. The twists are never cheap. I continually found myself feeling self-satisfied as I figured out what was going on, just to be wrong again (in fact, I had to rewrite this whole review, because I unwisely began it before finishing the book). Palma sets a meticulous stage, and the readers will see what we want to see, despite any indication to the contrary–I understand how vague that is, but it’s difficult to be spoiler-wary.

The basic plot follows a few main storylines, each twisting from a center plot featuring Wells himself. First there’s Andrew Harrington. He’s a meloncholy rich kid who falls deeply in love with an alcoholic prostitute. On the very night he renounces his family fortune for his love, he finds her skinned and filleted in a Whitechapel boarding room. After despairing for 8 years, Andrew decides to kill himself, but his cousin intervenes with a plan. All of London is talking about Gilliam Murray, who has been leading London’s wealthy elite on expeditions to the year 2000. They turn to him to send Andrew into the past, where he will kill his love’s killer (none other than Jack the Ripper) before her murder can occur.

For complicated reasons, Murray cannot help. But he directs the cousins to the science fiction writer H.G. Wells, who, he surmises, probably has a time machine upon which he based his novel, The Time Machine.

The second storyline features young Claire Haggarty, who falls in love with the savior of the future on one of Murray’s expeditions. After witnessing him destroy the leader of the robot army amongst the ruins of London in an epic sword duel, she swoons. Tom Blunt, a seemingly goodhearted simpleton in Murray’s employ, manages to convince Claire that he’s the savior of the human race, traveled through time to bed her. When this coercion effects life-threatening consequences for the girl, he turns to Wells for help.

Then there’s Inspector Garret of Scotland Yard, who gets a warrant to travel to Murray’s future in order to arrest a suspect for a murder in order to prevent it from occurring in the first place. There are time guardians and pan-dimensional thieves, glimpses into the future and libraries hidden in prehistory. Some of it is real, and perhaps all of it isn’t. Through Wells, everything intertwines brilliantly. And, I should note, the stentorian and somewhat playful narrator–an omnipotent showman of sorts–adds a whole lot of charm to the story.

Palma is not a perfect writer, there are a few smudges on the polish. Occasional bits of dialogue feel stodgy, and the mostly airtight plot has the occasional minor leak in plausibility–namely, characters too often jump to conclusions with too much conviction, a technique that services the plot but hurts the tension and characterization. But as a whole, The Map of Time is an example of a wonderfully planned and crafted novel. Palma keeps a lot of balls in the air, continually adding more; it really is a spectacle.

I was very much looking forward to this book. A steampunk vengeance story about a Victorian time traveler sounds ridiculously awesome to me. Even when I first suspected a hoax, I wasn’t disappointed, not for a moment. I was a sucker spectator eager for what I believed I was being offered. I kept thinking that maybe, just maybe, the illusion was real.

Offering such immersion and such satisfaction is the sign of a top-notch novel. Even when you know its secrets, The Map of Time is very much a Great Read and well worth your time.

Similar Reads: The Time Machine (Wells), The Chess Machine (Löhr), The Resurrectionist (Bradley), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Wilder)