Author:

2012, The Dial Press

Filed under: Literary, Historical

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I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that began with a more aptly chosen pair of epigraphs. Lurking in the front pages of Jennifer duBois’s debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, you’ll find these two gems:

All of us are doomed, but some are more doomed than others.

–Vladimir Nabokov, from Ada, or Ardor

And if in this wide world I die, then I’ll die from joy that I’m alive.

–Yevgeni Yevtushenko

The novel’s action takes place at the extremes of optimism and pessimism expressed here. Everyone in this book is doomed (some more so than others), and yet the main characters never give up on trying to make something out of their inevitable descent, looking for answers to long-buried questions, looking to leave a mark, however faint, on history.

In 2006, after Irina’s father dies from Huntington’s disease, a debilitating genetic disorder which she is predisposed to develop as well, she finds an old letter he sent to the Russian chess world champion, Aleksandr Bezetov, back in the 80s. In the letter, her father asks “what is the proper way to proceed” when playing in matches “that have been lost from the start.” He never received a reply from Bezetov.

Approaching the expected age of onset for her inherited disorder, Irina decides to spend what time she has left seeking answers to her father’s question. With a half-hatched plan, as selfish as it is romantic, Irina cuts ties at home in the United States and takes off for St. Petersburg to track down a chess master turned presidential candidate.

Written with a humbling emotional intelligence, A Partial History of Lost Causes contrasts personal struggles against historical conflicts. While Irina is searching for a broader narrative for her life, something to which she can dedicate her remaining days of cognizance, Aleksandr is locked in a political prison of his own choosing. Campaigning against the “democratically” elected Vladimir Putin, Aleksandr receives regular death threats for his opposition to the autocrat’s reign. Unable to leave his apartment without a small army of bodyguards and handlers, he finds little relief from a marriage gone stale and regret as fresh as a first love.

“You haven’t lived in a place unless you have at least one major regret there,” Aleksandr’s old friend Ivan tells him in the Soviet days of their youth, in the city that was once Leningrad. It’s one of my favorite lines in the book for the way it encapsulates the issues of tragedy and ownership that link and animate both Aleksandr and Irina. Presences from their pasts haunt them as they progress into their joint future, making nostalgia for lives that never were into the enemy of the present. Personal regret, it turns out, isn’t nearly as regrettable as the effort to banish it by sacrificing the lives we are leading, while there’s still so much to do, while history still races on.

Irina and Aleksandr make an intriguing if unlikely pair of lost causes. The plot staggers somewhat from the effort required to crash their storylines together, but it recovers for a surprising and surprisingly thrilling set of closing chapters, and thematic echoes between the dual narratives remain strong throughout. For anyone interested in chess or Russian history, or prone to profound musings that border on the uncomfortably comic, this is an easy read to recommend.

If that doesn’t sound like your particular shot of vodka, you might keep your eye out for Jennifer duBois anyway. She’s a young writer making an ambitious debut, and I’m sure readers everywhere can look forward to more from her in years to come.

Similar reads: Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart), There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya), The History of Love (Nicole Kraus).

Author: George Mann

2008, Snowbooks

Filed Under: Mystery, Historical, Sci-Fi

Find it on Goodreads.

If you’d listened to our most recent podcast (you didn’t, because the recording got messed up, so you might never hear it at all), you would have heard me say this was a Sherlock Holmes-y book that was sort-of-but-not-really steampunk. I was half correct; full of airships and clockwork automatons and laudanum benders and Queen Victoria on an artificial lung crafted from bellows, it’s squarely steampunk. But to define it as that would be to sell it really short. Rather than relying on the setting, Mann writes a good story, leaving the setting to seep in around the edges.

Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. There’s a blight on my reader’s record, a mark of shame I really need to correct. I’ve never read any of the Sherlock Holmes books. From what I’ve picked up (thanks mostly to Gregory House), this book shares a lot in common with Doyle’s beloved mysteries.

Maurice Newberry is a detective and an “agent of the Crown.” He’s not an actual cop, but is good chums with the head of Scotland Yard in addition to packing royal credentials as a sleuth. He lives alone, and spends long hours in his study, often reading books on the obscure or occult, and his hobbies include laudanum and deductive crime-solving. His Watson is a Miss Veronica Hobbes, a sharp and fairly courageous woman, who compliments Newberry nicely. (Her character is fairly nuanced, and quite possibly the strongest in the book.)

In the novel’s early going, there are three primary plot lines. Firstly, there is some sort of plague brought over from India. It is ravaging the slums, and is effectively a small, but obviously hazardous, zombie outbreak. Secondly, there as been a string of murders in Whitechapel, seemingly perpetrated by a glowing blue policeman’s ghost. Thirdly, an airship crashes catastrophically, killing 50, and no sign of the brass automaton pilot is to be found.

It’s fairly obvious of course, being the sort of book this is, that these three strands will eventually be braided together. The fun is in following Newberry and Hobbes as they solve the case(s). So I won’t spoil any of that. As it plays out, this book delivers from every angle. The characters are well rendered. The dialogue has a decorous, almost too-proper politeness to it, one that any fan of Victorian literature will probably find as charming and funny as I did. There are plenty of exciting action scenes, as well as cerebral “Aha” moments. The writing fits the novel’s historical motif well, never underwhelming but rarely going over the top either. The sci-fi elements are plentiful, but don’t overstep their welcome–or worse become so over-concerned with plausibility as to drag down the tone.

This is a fun, engaging book that I think may be criminally underlooked due to genre. Don’t let the steampunk setting repel you, the setting is crucial to the story, but in no way the reason for its success. If you like mysteries and adventure stories, you’re almost certain to enjoy this book.

Similar Reads: The Map of Time (Palma). Also, check out this cool Kickstarter project Nico came across.

2012, Ecco

Filed under: Literary, Historical

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I loved Ron rash’s gritty, atmospheric Depression-era novel, Serena, and I’m looking forward to the movie version, where the badass title character will be played by Jennifer Lawrence—lately Katniss Everdeen in the solid adaptation of The Hunger Games. But Rash’s follow-up to that electrifying novel, a lackluster collection of stories called Burning Bright, left me flat.

This latest offering disappoints in much the same way those stories did: it feels small and too quiet. In fact, The Cove feels like a short story idea stretched past its rightful size. It’s not bad, certainly, but it possesses only tiny patches of the dark tension and classic drama that made Serena so great.

The cove of the novel’s title lies in backwoods Appalachia and the locals believe it to be cursed. The closest patch of land to it is farmed by the Shelton family, which has dwindled, in the midst of World War I, to only two members: Hank, a young veteran who lost a hand in Europe, and his sister Laurel, who is pretty and very smart, but the target of a lot of town mockery because she was born with a large “birth stain” across her shoulder blade, and so the locals believe her to be a witch.

The Sheltons are unlucky, no doubt: their parents died too young, in nasty ways, and their farm barely survives each year. But their luck starts to change when a grungy young man named Walter washes ashore on the Sheltons’ property. He can’t speak, but can play the flute beautifully. The Sheltons figure out that he was on his way to New York when something happened that he can’t seem to communicate, and doesn’t want to.

That something, Rash shows us, was that Walter was imprisoned and escaped, nearly killing a man in his flee.

Still, on the Sheltons’ farm, Walter is a godsend. He helps Hank rebuild the fence and dig a well, and falls in love with poor neglected Laurel. Always, though, the secret of his imprisonment—and what he did to deserve it—hangs over all their heads.

Meanwhile, a poncy rich army recruiter drums up anti-German sentiment in town, and so fervently that even the college’s foreign language instructor faces the town’s wrath for having the audacity to know German.

All these things come to a head, and while Rash makes that climax good, it’s also simple and a little too pat. His style, too, is plain, and altogether the novel is a very fast read, but an equally shallow one.

The strength of Serena lay in the feeling of doom that Rash evoked in his depiction of a plagued logging camp. This time around, Rash tries to achieve the same sense of treacherous dread but instead of building it through events and characters, he simply tells us that people think the cove is unlucky—it doesn’t work nearly as well, and, unfortunately, neither does this novel.

Similar reads: Serena, by Ron Rash; The Marrowbone Marble Company, by Glenn Taylor; The Missing, by Tim Gautreaux

Author: David J. Kowalksi

2012, Titan

Filed Under: Sci-Fi, Historical, Thriller

Find it on Goodreads.

Writing a time travel novel is a big endeavor. There’s a slew of things you can mess up, and even one loose end can unravel the entire plausibility of your plot.

Needless to say, when I read the premise of this book (alternate history, time travel, some guy trying to save the Titanic) and that it was a debut novel 15 years in the making by a practicing OB/GYN, I didn’t really expect much. Even a few hundred pages into this behemoth of a book, I still wasn’t really sure which way things would fall. Luckily, they fell toward the side of awesome. I found myself really enjoying this novel, churning through the last few hundred pages excitedly.

As you might expect from 750 pages of time-travel fiction, the plot gets pretty complicated. It’s hard to explain my thoughts on the book without a somewhat lengthy set-up, so bear with me.

Things start out fairly straightforward. A man named Wells has traveled back in time and finagled his way aboard the Titanic. He’s from our present and he’s attempting to “correct” history by preventing the ship’s sinking. While he does manage to affect history and avoid the iceberg that famously brought the boat down, the ship strikes a different iceberg while correcting course and sinks all the same. Thus, some of the people who died on the Titanic now no longer died, and history changes.

John Jacob Astor IV is the new survivor most crucial to the plot. After returning to America, the influential tycoon involves the US in a diplomatic feud with England, which results in America staying out of World War I. Flash forward 100 years to 2012. World War II never happened. Most of the globe is split between the German and Japanese empires. The United States didn’t survive a second secession of the South and the Confederacy is now a nation of its own, largely in bed with Germany. The North, however, is largely occupied by Japanese forces. There is no active fighting between the empires, but things are tense and Cold War-like.

Joseph Kennedy Jr. (who couldn’t have died in a WWII that didn’t occur) has attempted some unsuccessful political bids and is now the head of the Confederate Bureau of Investigation. He’s been working on a secret project called Camelot, a gambit move intended to re-unite the USA through causing a clash between the empires. But Kennedy has deeper secrets: through a particular chain of events, he has access to the very same time machine as Wells. As the book opens, the Camelot plot, which involved lots of double agents and similar tactics, has broken down. However, things are still set in motion to trigger a great, and likely apocalyptic, war between the two sides–with America as the battle ground.

I’m oversimplifying things a lot here, Kowalski planned out everything fastidiously. The book is rife with historical figures and events, many skewed due to his alternate history. It doesn’t read like someone read a couple entries on Wikipedia and fictionalized some things, or dropped actual names into a plot that would work fine without them. Kowalski obviously did his homework, then took the time to properly synthesize portions of history into a fiction with clear lines of plausibility.

The main plot that follows features Kennedy and clan scrambling from now war-torn New York City to make a hail mary mission to the time machine (which is located in Nevada), in the hopes of correcting time and undoing the only history they’ve known. Not really sure what will happen, but assured that if they do nothing things will end in ruin (via a test run of the time machine to the future), they opt for a possible chance of freeing the world from doom, even if would result in they themselves ceasing to exist.

Just like Wells before them, Kennedy and his team believe the key to repairing history is… to save the Titanic. They concluded that Wells had brought the Titanic down, not attempted to preserve it. The dramatic irony this injects into the plot is palpable and satisfying. It was perhaps this twist alone that the book won me over. Dramatic irony is easy to abuse or otherwise misuse, but when executed properly it can do wonders for a book. In Kowalski’s case, it propels his characters nicely, and furthermore ratchets up the tension for the reader the closer the character get to achieving their goal. Eventually I found myself genuinely excited while reading, not something I had expected going into this book. Then, as the complexity of the plot’s workings became more visible, Kowalski introduces some very interesting and slightly brain-bending play with time travel and paradoxes, at which point I was all-in.

Further explaining the plot, though, or what those paradoxes might be would take forever and spoil too much. Suffice to say, as things move on, it becomes clear that Kowalski did an impeccable job with his plotting–many things crop up later in the book that I only then realized I had been clued into hundreds of pages earlier. But I rushed past the dangling hints while racing along with Kennedy in his urgent race to save the Titanic.

When I agreed to read this book, I didn’t think it was going to be very good, but figured just maybe it would at least be entertaining. It did manage that, but also managed to impress me. Kowalski’s never going to win any awards for his prose. There’s plenty of clunker lines like this: “He hid the dread behind the rampart of his face.” But when a book’s plot structure is as tight as Kowalski has delivered here, that’s fine with me. If Kowalski writes another book, I’ll read it. I just hope he takes his time with it and gives the particulars the care he gave Company of the Dead–even that means waiting fifteen years.

Similar Reads: The Revisionists (Mullen), The Map of Time (Palma)

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

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.

Get the book.

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.