Feb 11 2019

The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick

Y’all, that was delightful. Ngl, I totally pictured Bradley Cooper and JLaw in the roles (and had to suffer the cognitive dissonance of her being way too young to play Tiffany) but that aside, I was incredibly moved by this surprisingly gentle tale of lost love, mental illness and sports fandom.

Pat Peoples is not well but he’s working on getting better. Formerly an out-of-shape history teacher and sports coach married to the beautiful English teacher, Nikki, something terrible happened that landed him in a neural health facility. His mom, Jeanie, lobbies for his release to her and therapist Cliff Patel’s care. Once out of the Baltimore facility and living back with his parents, Pat discovers that a lot has changed while he was inside.

One thing that hasn’t is his dad, Patrick, an emotionally constipated older man whose only joy seems to be watching the Philadelphia Eagles play. He barely speaks to Pat, despite Jeanie’s entreaties. Pat’s younger brother, Jake, does his best to help smooth things over, both at home and out in the rest of the world, while Pat’s best friend Ronnie even fixes him up with his damaged sister-in-law, modern dancer Tiffany. Not that Pat has any interest in her romantically: he’s patiently working on bettering himself, inside and out, in order to finally reunite with his beloved Nikki.

Another reviewer compared this book to Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks Of Being A Wallflower (which is one of the greatest books of all time, IMO) and I can definitely see how this is an adult version of that. The narrator is a guy trying to figure out his place in the world by being kind, who is often beset by a blinding urge to violence that threatens everything he’s worked to build. He has a supportive, if unconventional, circle of friends and family. In addition to these similarities, Pat has a connection to the Eagles and their fandom that almost transcends the (somewhat acknowledged) fact that Eagles fans are the absolute worst. I actually really enjoyed reading about their rituals and camaraderie, and comparing it with my own love for the Arsenal. The book also promotes over-tipping, literature and modern dance, and I don’t know if it was written specifically for me, but it sure does feel like Matthew Quick is my people.

But most of all, it’s a thoroughly convincing examination of a damaged man’s efforts at recovery by practicing kindness and consideration, and I was completely enthralled by it. Can’t wait to read more of Mr Quick’s stuff!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/02/11/the-silver-linings-playbook-by-matthew-quick/

Feb 10 2019

Don’t Panic by Neil Gaiman

Don’t Panic, subtitled Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began as a labor of friendship in 1987 when Nick Landau of Titan Books, which had Adams’ agreement to write a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy companion book, called up Neil Gaiman “and asked if I was interested. I wanted to write this book more than anything. I said yes.” (p. ix)

Gaiman had Adams’ full cooperation. “Douglas Adams opened his address book to me. I talked to his colleagues, and went through his filing cabinets. I read dozens of scripts and photocopied all of Douglas’s press clippings. I played the Hitchhiker’s computer game to the end, and battled with primitive word processing programs trying to find one that would let me do footnotes. My favourite bits were interviewing Douglas, though, and the way he’d manage to be funny, and serious, and faintly baffled, all at the same time.” (p. ix) The original book ran 23 chapters, now the first 170 or so pages of text. It has been updated three times; David K. Dickson added three chapters in 1993, M.J. Simpson added four in 2002 and “overhauled the entire text” (p. x), and Guy Adams adding another eight chapters in 2009.

The first part of the book, Gaiman’s text, forms something of a professional biography of Adams, circling around his precarious circumstances until he finally found his niche at precisely the right time, telling the story of a wholly unremarkable Earthman and a wholly remarkable book, in a radio series that wasn’t quite like anything before or since. Simon Brett, a radio and television producer among many other things, said, “Douglas was a talent without a niche.” Gaiman adds, “Brett had the wit to see that Douglas needed a show of his own, rather than to try to cram his own strange talent into someone else’s format, and on 4th February 1977 Douglas traveled to Dorset to see Simon, who wanted to know if he had any ideas for a comedy show.” Adams initially tossed out some conservative ideas, “And then history differs. As far as Douglas remembers, Simon Brett said, ‘Yes, those ideas are all very well, but what I always wanted to do was a science fiction comedy.’ According to Brett it was Douglas who suggested it, and he who agreed. … The subject was broached, both were enthusiastic, and Douglas went off to come up with an idea.”

The germ of the idea was the parallel between the demolition of an everyman’s house and the simultaneous demolition of the earth. Adam’s initial idea was for a series of shows, each dealing with the destruction of the earth for different reasons.

“It was going to be called The Ends of the Earth. It’s still not a bad idea,” [said Adams].
“But it was while I was tinkering with the story idea for the first one that I thought, to give the story perspective there really ought to be somebody on Earth who is an alien and who knows what’s going on.
“Then I remembered this title I’d thought of while lying in a field in Innsbruck in 1971 and thought, ‘OK, he’s a roving researcher for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’ And the more I thought about it, the more that seemed to be a promising idea for a continuing story, as opposed to The Ends of the Earth, which would have been a series of different stories.” (p. 25)

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/02/10/dont-panic-by-neil-gaiman/

Feb 10 2019

The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross

I suppose The Labyrinth Index marks the time in the Laundryverse when horror overtakes humor, and the combining apocalypses leave the characters nothing to do but get on with it in the face of diminishing hope for the human race, but honestly it makes the book a bit of a slog. The Laundry is, or by the time of The Labyrinth Index, was, a secret agency of the British government devoted to defending the realm from supernatural enemies, mostly unspeakable Things from beyond the walls of time and space that like nothing more than feasting on consciousness, especially of the human kind. The series began as a mashup of The Office, spy novels, and H.P. Lovecraft, leavened with a hefty dose of Stross’ manic glee.

Over the course of eight books, it has become clear that the barriers between the mundane world and the dimensions full of soul-eaters are weakening, and this could go very badly for humanity. In the seventh book, all pretense of secrecy was blown away, as an army of extradimensional elves with dragons for air support invaded northern England and made a hash out of downtown Leeds. In the eighth, apocalypses started piling on top of each other, as Bob Howard, the series’ main protagonist, fought to prevent the UK government from being taken over by the avatar of an Elder God, and lost.

As The Labyrinth Index opens, the Laundry has been officially disbanded, but the new Prime Minister wants to stand up a new organization that can take offensive sorcerous actions against the enemies of the realm, as designated by the PM. He gives that task to Mhari Murphy, former MBA at a large bank, former Laundry HR, and now full-time vampire. She’s the main narrator and protagonist of the book, and to tell the truth, I have never warmed to her as a character. The PM, or New Management as Mhari refers to him, is inhuman and has plans for the UK (and the world) that are only marginally less horrible than extinction. Mhari likens the New Management to a beekeeper with humanity as his hive, and he’s only interested in fending off worse things because he wants us to make honey for him. Such is the cheery world of The Labyrinth Index.

The worse things are currently stirring up trouble in the USA, and Mhari’s task is to assemble a team that will put a spanner in their works. The American counterpart to the Laundry, casually referred to as the Nazgûl though their three-letter agency name is quite different, has been captured by cultists who want to bring back to our dimension an entity that is even less well disposed toward humanity than the New Management. As part of the plan, they have laid a geas over most of the country to forget that there is a president. The idea is that they will be able to substitute in a new focus of belief for 300 million people, helping to immanentize their particular eschaton.

The real president is still out there, on the run but protected by a small band of Secret Service who manage to remember who and what he is. Mhari’s team is to figure out what’s actually happened, and if possible make contact with the president to either offer him political asylum or improvise something equally inimical to the Nazgûl’s plans. As thrillers go, The Labyrinth Index is not half bad; the bit with the Concorde is neat. But it’s missing the humor and dark glee that have been a trademark of the Laundry series even in its bleakest moments. It’s been a very difficult year for Stross, and The Labyrinth Index was not the book he had originally planned to bring out in 2018. In the story, there are some hints at efforts to avoid the worst apocalypse and get Britain out from under the New Management. I hope Stross shows more of that in the next Laundry book, and I definitely hope that he has a kinder fate in store for Pete the vicar, because what appears to have happened to him in The Labyrinth Index feels like an arbitrary betrayal. Most of all, though, I hope that whenever Stross returns to the Laundryverse, he finds the humor again.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/02/10/the-labyrinth-index-by-charles-stross/

Feb 09 2019

Why We Took the Car by Wolfgang Herrndorf

Why We Took the Car seems to have established a fixed place in the German YA firmament since its initial publication as Tschick in 2010. Young people read it on their own, they read it for class, and it’s part of the general culture. There was a movie in 2016. It has also done well outside of Germany, with Wikipedia noting the novel has been published in 25 different countries.

It’s easy to see why. The book tells the tale of Mike Klingenberg, whose wealthy but dysfunctional family is blowing up around him, and what happens at the end of eighth grade when the girl he has had a crush on all year utterly fails to notice him, and summer vacation opens up with his parents absent. Enter Tschick, Andrej Tschichatschow, a Russian immigrant who joined the class mid-year, scandalized people by occasionally showing up to school drunk, and alternated between brilliant and surly.

Why We Took the Car opens with Mike bleeding in a police station, apparently missing a large chunk of his calf. In the first three short chapters, Herrndorf establishes that Mike may be criminally responsible for something major, that the police should have turned him over to the doctors much sooner, and that he was trying to get to Wallachia. The rest of the book fills in how Mike came to be in precisely that state.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/02/09/why-we-took-the-car-by-wolfgang-herrndorf/

Feb 08 2019

A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka by Lev Golinkin

How did A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka turn out to be such an impossibly good book? I picked it up more or less on a whim during a visit to Texas — ok, memoir of leaving the Soviet Union as a kid and growing up in the States, could be interesting — and it sat unassumingly on my shelves for a couple of years. Now I know it was lying in wait to wallop me with a story that is by turns touching, harrowing and astonishing.

Lev Golinkin was born in 1980, in Kharkov, which was then part of the Ukrainian S.S.R., one of the fifteen union republics of the USSR. His early childhood memories recall for the reader how thoroughly rotten so much of the Soviet Union was, even under Gorbachev, even as Stalinist terror had receded to something less overwhelming but still capable of engendering random fear and harm. In Golinkin’s case, the harm is less random because his family is Jewish, and the casually violent anti-Semitism of the environment reaches even into the first grade. He is beaten by other boys for being Jewish, shit-stained toilet paper held in his face as other elementary school kids tell him that’s what he is for being a Jew. The teachers were studiedly indifferent.

The rot was there at the top, too:

On April 26, 1986, the year before I entered first grade, the Chernobyl nuclear plant (located less than three hundred miles from Kharkov) exploded, spewing a radioactive cloud over the Ukraine. Other, weaker countries would’ve had their citizens hunkering indoors and popping iodine tablets. But May 1 was International Workers’ Day, cancelling the parade was unthinkable, and so on we marched, blissfully unaware, soaking in the sunshine and the radiation. The reviewing stand was mostly vacant, of course, since local Party leaders had been alerted beforehand and had long evacuated the area, but the parade went off without a hitch. That’s commitment. (p. 7)

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/02/08/a-backpack-a-bear-and-eight-crates-of-vodka-by-lev-golinkin/

Feb 04 2019

The Tower of the Swallow by Andrzej Sapkowski

The Tower of the Swallow is what happens when an author wrestles with the middle-book problem, and loses. Nothing happens, or rather, a great deal happens but none of it matters a dickie-bird until the last 30 pages or so (out of 400), at which time Ciri, the child of destiny, definitively escapes the several people who have been trying to capture her and claims her power through the magic of the titular Tower.

That’s too bad, really, because one of the virtues of Sapkowski’s series of books about the Witcher is that they have not followed the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon fantasy. Sapkowski grew up in communist Poland and began writing his fantastic stories as the old system collapsed. He draws on Polish history and legends, lightly, and structured his books and longer saga according to rhythms that do not match the customs of the genre as it has grown up in English. All of that has typically added to the fun of the gripping adventure tales that Sapkowski spins. There are familiar aspects, and memorable characters, but they are often at odd angles to expectations that I had built up over a lifetime of reading English-language fantasy stories. Indeed, I wrote that Baptism of Fire, the book immediately preceding The Tower of the Swallow, “does not seem to be aware that there is such a thing as a middle-book problem.” Maybe Sapkowski was still unaware in 1997, when he published The Tower of the Swallow, and that’s how he got so comprehensively waylaid.

To recap, Ciri is the child of destiny, but she is actively avoiding it by running around with a bunch of brigands and basically taking advantage of the unsettled situation that general war has brought. The Tower of the Swallow opens with Ciri being found nearly dead and nursed back to health by a hermit who lives deep in the equivalent of the Pripyet Marshes. About half of the book recounts how she came to be in the swamp, while the other half follows the efforts of Geralt of Rivera, the Witcher who is tied to Ciri’s destiny, to catch up with her. There are a number of incidents that feature neither Geralt nor Ciri, and these detail either army movements, political machinations divorced from ties to any character I cared about, or efforts of a few other characters to try to find Ciri. The most memorable of those was the sorceress Yennefer, who is closely tied to Geralt in other stories, but it’s not clear in the end what she is up to or how it ties in to any other thing.

I found myself skimming a great deal in this book, never a good sign. Telling Ciri’s story retrospectively, as she relates it to the hermit, just made the whole thing tedious. Her gang comes to a bad end; she spends a bad time as captor of a powerful bounty hunter; she claims some of her power and escapes, but is badly wounded and winds up deep in the swamps. Once she recovers, she leaves to meet the next stage of her destiny at the Tower of the Swallow. Geralt wanders around a lot, but never gets any closer to Ciri. The end.

I sure hope that the long saga of Ciri and her destiny wraps up more convincingly in the next book, The Lady of the Lake. After that, there is a standalone Geralt novel to look forward to, Season of Storms. Sapkowski still writes enjoyable adventures, but The Tower of the Swallow just got away from him.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/02/04/the-tower-of-the-swallow-by-andrzej-sapkowski/

Jan 29 2019

The Dead Queens Club by Hannah Capin

The sordid tale of King Henry VIII and his six wives is probably the one most well-known to those with even only a passing interest in English history. As an Anglophile myself, I grew up reading Antonia Fraser’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII alongside other titles more obscure on the topic, and heartily enjoyed the many popular TV adaptations. I tended to avoid the fictional stuff, an inclination cemented by viewing the movie of The Other Boleyn Girl. It was so terrible that, for once, Natalie Portman’s acting was the highlight of a movie for me (and she was quite good in it, don’t get me wrong, but the lack of historical rigor was appalling!) Most historical fiction about the six queens tends to follow some weird agenda, such as Ford Madox Ford’s attempt at redeeming Katherine Howard by pretending she was Anne Boleyn in The Fifth Queen. I did, however, give in and read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall because Booker, and found it, while an excellent portrayal of Thomas Cromwell, a somewhat tedious read.

All this is by way of saying that I’ve read tons and tons of books on the subject and consumed so much film and TV on it, that when I watched the Mark Rylance-starring version of Wolf Hall, it was actually a shock to me to realize for the first time what a monster Henry VIII was. It was as if some BBC producer got tired of everyone pretending that Henry was just a quirky horndog and decided to finally put his sociopathy front and center (and God bless you, BBC producer, for doing it.) Pretty much everything ever written or filmed about Henry before the Beeb’s Wolf Hall tried to justify his actions because romance or religion or monarchy or whatever, but guys, he sucked, and nearly everything good that came out of his reign happened almost in spite of him.

And this is where we circle round to The Dead Queens Club by Hannah Capin. It takes the story of Henry and his queens and transplants it to a small-town Indiana high school in the modern day (and frankly, if you’re trying to reshape history to fit your own agenda, this is the way to do it, by changing the scenario entirely so that it makes sense to pick and choose what you carry over.) Our narrator is Annie Marck, the adopted Asian daughter of Cleveland professors, who is the best friend of Henry, the most popular guy in Lancaster, Indiana. As the book opens, Henry is dating Annie’s other best friend, Katie Howard, while Annie, an aspiring journalist, is constantly thwarted by her nemesis, editor-in-chief of the high school paper, Cat Parr. When Katie dies at a party in the woods, Annie must start to confront Henry’s terrible dating history and, more sinisterly, the death of yet another of his exes, Anna Boleyn.

While modern and feminist, TDQC hews quite closely to the history, performing a remarkable feat in repotting this Tudor drama into the hothouse of an American high school. Ms Capin clearly knows her stuff, and readers will find themselves absorbing actual history almost unwittingly, as we’re carried along by the narrative. Her portrayals of Katherine Howard, especially, and (Jane) Parker (Boleyn) Rochford are both loving and illuminating. I have to admit that it took me a while to get really comfortable with Annie’s first person POV, as she’s a decidedly idiosyncratic personality, but that’s sort of the point, that she’s the quirky one. And also? A teenager. Ms Capin does a really terrific job of taking these archetypes and pinning them on to actual teenage personalities.

I really enjoyed this book, and am looking forward to reading more from Ms Capin, perhaps with more non-white characters (tho I’m going to pretend that Lina is a brown Latina, because if Annie can be Chinese, why not?) I especially recommend it to everyone tired of Henry VIII being given a pass on being a bad dude. It doesn’t fix what he did, but it does help people see better the truth of his court, quite an accomplishment for an ostensibly YA novel.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/01/29/the-dead-queens-club-by-hannah-capin/

Jan 28 2019

The Smoke by Simon Ings

I read a lot of novels and it is perishing rare for me to feel genuinely intimidated by the intellect of an author but here we are! Simon Ings’ terrifying intelligence is palpable throughout the pages of The Smoke, with my only quibble being why London is called such, as the text doesn’t seem to offer any explanation. Is this a British thing that has eluded me as a foreigner, albeit an Anglophile?

Anyway, a bright if otherwise ordinary young man named Stu breaks up with his girlfriend, Fel, the daughter of a prominent scientist who has pioneered a means of prolonging life. Stu and Fel lived in The Smoke, near The Bund, as the colony of Fel’s people — a hyper-intelligent race who are evolving to hyper-efficiency — is known. Years ago, Stu had an unsettling encounter with a member of another of the human races, known somewhat disparagingly as Chickies, that continues to haunt him. Stu’s family begins to fall apart as war and destruction loom, and Stu finds himself at the mercy of forces beyond his control.

Mr Ings switches masterfully from third- to second- to first-person narratives and back again in a stylistic carnival ride that takes us from alternate history to space opera to classical mythology homage, all the while touching on class conflicts (in a world cheerfully devoid of America with all its complicated geopolitical neuroses,) anti-Semitism and the sociopolitical ramifications of advancing technology. It is at once an homage to classic British SF and a weirdly bold paean to love, tho not perhaps in the way you’d expect. Personally, I thought the main weakness of the book was in Stu and Fel’s relationship. Like everyone else in the novel, I had no idea why she loved him.

The Smoke is a truly weird, profoundly intelligent science fiction novel that dares to extrapolate a richness of both wonders and horrors from our own modern world. Pick it up and prepare to be dazzled by its sheer inventiveness.

Interview with Simon Ings to come soon!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/01/28/the-smoke-by-simon-ings/

Jan 26 2019

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

You know how sometimes you think you’ve read a literary classic but it’s only that (you think) you know the story from sheer media saturation? I thought I’d read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein decades ago, at the very least as an Illustrated Classic, but there were very many scenes completely unfamiliar to me, particularly where Adam went when Victor first cast him out, and how he thus suffered and learned. I was familiar with the Arctic ice floes, however, and found it strange that the framing narrative was essentially the only part of the book I could recall from my earlier “reading.”

Anyway! This self-involved young sociopath named Victor Frankenstein stitches together a bunch of dead people and animal parts and somehow imbues the entire framework with life (it’s never made clear how, though Ms Shelley did refer to galvanism when discussing the conception of the novel.) When the creature stirs, Victor, a shallow narcissist through and through, realizes that the thing is fugly, and in keeping with his habit of judging a book by its cover, declares the creature evil and an abomination and then, um, runs away. The creature, waking to such warm reception, himself flees but then undergoes all manner of deprivation and rejection as he learns that everyone hates him because he looks hideous. Calling himself Adam, the creature endeavors to learn language and other subjects, but mostly discovers that he is hella lonely. So he goes to find Victor and ask for a mate, promising that he and his intended will run off to darkest South America to bother humanity no more. Victor first says yes, then says nah, so Adam is once again driven to homicidal despair.

The story is told in letters from a reckless explorer, Captain Robert Walton, trying to discover a Northeast Passage, who comes across first Adam then Victor in the ice far north of Russia. He pulls Victor off an ice floe and swiftly falls in love with him, so readily accepts all the nonsense Victor spouts even tho anyone with a lick of sense would know that Victor is shady af. His narration tries to make Victor sound noble, even sympathetic, but fails utterly in the face of Victor’s sheer sociopathy. In just one example, when a childhood companion is set to hang for a murder Adam committed, Victor complains that he’s the one who’s suffering the most of them all because he is the most tormented by guilt. I had very many moments of “shut it, bitch” whenever Victor wallowed, which was often. I couldn’t quite figure out whether Ms Shelley was trying to show the reader that Victor sucked or whether she bought into his assertions of grandeur herself. I do believe that she meant for Victor to be an anti-hero, but to me, he’s just the villain of the piece. There’s a pretty terrific cautionary tale in here for learning to take responsibility for one’s actions, but it’s rather contradicted by the ending, plus the whole “well, it was ugly, so I was justified in being a shit” attitude is wildly underwhelming.

I’m minded now to see if I can find a taping, if any exists, of the relatively recent stage play starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller; I’d heard about it but actually reading the book makes the conceit that much more compelling, where on any given night, each actor will play either Victor or Adam, emphasizing again the interchangeable monstrosity of both.

Had I more brain power atm, I’d dive into my concept of the book as modern-day allegory for white supremacy only, in that case, with even less sympathy for creator and created, but it’s been a long day with very little coming up Milhouse, so I will leave you to your own conjectures on the topic, dear reader.

Kudos go out to Kiersten White’s The Dark Descent Of Elizabeth Frankenstein for looking at this novel and creating a terrific counterargument to all of it, and for forcing me to actually read the original.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/01/26/frankenstein-by-mary-shelley/

Jan 24 2019

The Dark Descent Of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White

It’s interesting how quickly one’s sympathy for a young girl raised to cosset a psychopath plummets as she goes from teaching him social skills to actively enabling his monstrous tendencies. And in this political climate, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for a woman who knows that her man is a shit but feels she has to protect him in order to protect her own way of life. Granted, Elizabeth Frankenstein faces much more dire circumstances in 18th century Europe than she would in the modern day, but that didn’t mean I had to root for her till she finally came to her senses.

That aside, I quite enjoyed this retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that makes it very, very clear that the real monster here is the doctor, not his creation. Friendships are what ultimately save Elizabeth, and I must say that Mary Delgado is much more forgiving than I was — but Mary is also a product of the time, so it’s easier for her (and also I’m a grudge holder myself.) Kiersten White’s intelligent use of perspective re-imagines the classic in ways that point out the true horrors of her source material, teasing out subtext and really making the reader reconsider their prior notions.

I’m ambivalent about the inclusion of said classic in the ebook version, however. Ms White has a terrific imagination and style, but her writing cannot help but pale in comparison with Ms Shelley’s. It’s great to be able to readily reference the original in the same volume, especially for the teenage target audience who might not yet have read it, but the vivid 19th century prose washes out the preceding text, which does a disservice to Ms White’s achievement here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/01/24/the-dark-descent-of-elizabeth-frankenstein-by-kiersten-white/