Oct 06 2017

The Last Man in Russia by Oliver Bullough

Oliver Bullough’s first book, Let Our Fame Be Great, examined the encounters between Russia and the smaller peoples of the Northern Caucasus. They generally ended badly for the smaller nations. In his second book, he looks at how the larger nation has fared. (At the time he wrote the book, he was Caucasus Editor for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. I have never met him, though in the way of things, we probably have mutual acquaintances.) If the title didn’t give the prognosis away, the subtitle of The Last Man in Russia And the Struggle to Save a Dying Nation certainly does.

As long as foreigners have been writing about Russia, they have been commenting on Russians’ propensity for alcohol. Bullough opens his book with a story of a fellow journalist, Misha, who called him in the middle of a four-day bender to ask, “What is the meaning of the word zombie hedgehog?” (p. 1) Asked later, Misha had no recollection of the call. On a trip to Chechnya a few months later, Misha had downed a liter of brandy before nine in the morning and collected a bottle of vodka shortly after breakfast. “This is not one of those stories of journalistic excess that end with the drunkard doing his job despite being barely coherent. … By evening, he was comatose and a few of us cobbled together some material to send to Moscow under his name.” (p. 2) Individually, the stories range from hilarious to tragic, the stuff of travelers’ tales or the colorful parts of a magazine article. Added together to encompass the entire nation, looked at demographically, they become something else entirely.

Done once, it is an amusing anecdote. Done daily and it is a disease, and it is killing the nation. Between 1940 and 1980, Russian consumption of all alcoholic drinks increased eightfold. The natiion decided, apparently as one, to go on a huge zapoi [a multi-day bender], and the consequences have been disastrous.
In 1950 — when Stalin was at his most erratic, when the country was still half destroyed by World War Two, when terrible sacrifices were being demanded from the population — births outnumbered deaths by 1.7 million.
In 2010, deaths outnumbered births by 240,000, and that was the best year for a couple of decades. In 1991, the country was home to 148.3 million. In 2010, that number had fallen to 141.9 million. The Russian nation is shrivelling away from within.
And it is not just that Russians are not being born. Russians are dying. The average Russian male born in 2010 was calculated to live less than sixty-three years. Russians of both sexes taken together are almost four times more likely to die of heart disease than a Western European, and more than five times likely to be killed by an ‘external cause’ — murder, suicide, drowning, poisoning, car crashes. (p. 5)

In the late 1990s, when I worked for a think-tank in Munich, I looked at this from the perspective of global comparisons. Russia was the only developed country for which external reasons were in the top five (maybe even top ten, my recollection is not complete) causes of death. Alcohol is the reason.

It is widely assumed that the drinking and the population crisis are a post-Soviet problem. It is true that the problem accelerated with the collapse of communism and the extreme economic dislocation that followed. … Russians drank to blot out the times they were living through. In truth, however, they were drinking before.

Bullough talks about Russia’s shrinking population from two ends. First, lower birth rates. He notes that Russia dropped below replacement-level total fertility rate (TFR) in 1965. That’s not actually so unusual among industrialized countries. Japan was below replacement TFR in 1965, rose just barely above it for 10 years, and then slid steadily to a nadir of 1.26 children on average in 2005 before rising to 1.46 in 2015. In Western Europe, the fall below replacement happened slightly later than in Russia: by 1970 for West Germany, 1975 for France, and 1980 for Spain. In the former Eastern bloc, Hungary teetered around replacement from the mid-1960s, rising noticeable above it in the mid-1970s, before sliding gradually to its 2015 level of 1.44. (All figures from World Bank data.) On this measure, Russia is not faring badly, with birth rates that have risen steadily from around the year 2000 to the 2015 level of 1.75. (On the other hand, Bullough argues on p. 216 that the post-2000 rise is an echo, at reduced level, of the rise in the early 1980s when Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign raised both life expectancy and fertility.)

Russian people are having children at rates not too terribly different from their peers in other industrialized and European countries. It’s the other end of demographic measures where Russian differences appear. “In the early 1960s, the average Russian and the average Austrian both lived for about sixty-nine years. By 2005, the Austrian was living for an extra decade and a half, the Russian for four years fewer.” (p. 7) The main difference is alcohol.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/10/06/the-last-man-in-russia-by-oliver-bullough/

Oct 02 2017

Akata Witch (Akata Witch #1) by Nnedi Okorafor

It was so nice to read something really new for a change, a fresh perspective, to me at least, on the traditional fantasy coming-of-age novel. The Nigerian setting is terrific, and I loved the magic systems and cultural information that came bursting out of this book like the delicious, nourishing flesh of a perfectly ripe mango. It was so great to read of Sunny’s day-to-day life, told as casually to the reader as if everyone had a Nigerian upbringing: it’s an excellent reminder that for the vast majority of the world, a Western upbringing isn’t the norm. As a novel of ideas and an ambassador for Nigerian and African culture to the rest of the world, it’s a superlative book.

But I really did not like Nnedi Okorafor’s pacing. There was so much random deus ex machina stuff, with things that weren’t explained regarding her otherwise really cool magic system, that it was as frustrating to me as a lot of early 20th century sf&f works, which require that the reader suspend all disbelief and accept that things happen just because the author says so. I didn’t understand about 50% of what happened in the climactic battle because Ms Okorafor doesn’t explain any of the spells except Chichi’s. I get that there are all these really cool things you want to pour onto the page, but please, God, don’t be like Steven Erikson. It’s especially annoying because this is a coming-of-age tale and we should be learning alongside Sunny: instead, things just happen in fits and starts and very little is explained and it’s all very frustrating to follow.

I do have high hopes for Akata Warrior coming out soon and remedying some of these shortcomings, and I’m planning on eventually reading some of Ms Okorafor’s more acclaimed works. But this one was oddly disappointing in its craft, tho absolutely mesmerizing in what content and context it had to display.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/10/02/akata-witch-akata-witch-1-by-nnedi-okorafor/

Sep 28 2017

The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett

“I only invented the Discworld,” said Terry Pratchett, “Josh [Kirby] created it.” Kirby painted the exuberant, detail-filled covers of the Discworld books that gave the series an unmistakable visual identity, suggesting that there were multitudes of other stories happening on the Disc and that Pratchett just chose some of them to tell. His teeming figures, his illustrations’ multiple layers of action, their over-the-top liveliness certainly inform my view of Discworld as a place constantly in motion, with more taking place than any author, even one as prolific as Pratchett, could hope to capture. Kirby died in 2001. Paul Kidby (the similarity of their surnames is surely a coincidence) succeeded him, and The Last Hero was his debut.

What a start! It’s not, strictly speaking, a graphic novel. Nevertheless, every page is illustrated; the whole book is printed in full color; numerous two-page spreads capture landscapes, characters and crucial parts of the action. The Last Hero would be far slimmer, and far less satisfying, without Kidby’s illustrations.

The story plays off of the legends of humanity’s first hero, the person (known by numerous names on different parts of the Disc) who stole the secret of fire from the gods. Cohen the Barbarian and his Silver Horde aim to become the last heroes by returning it. Fire, in this form, of a massive magical incendiary device which they will detonate in the middle of the gods’ abode, doing away with the gods and providing a suitable conclusion to Horde members’ careers as heroes. They have even specially recruited a singer to witness the events and write them down in a song that will be remembered forever, the only form of immortality that the heroes believe in.

What they have not reckoned with, however, is that the force of the magical explosion in that particular place would be enough to destabilize the Disc itself, leading to its demise sooner rather than later. Minutes, actually. The Horde would not only be the last heroes, they would ensure that everyone on the Disc when they set off their device was the last of every kind.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/28/the-last-hero-by-terry-pratchett/

Sep 27 2017

Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling

The collapse of the European empires at the end of World War I produced considerable political strangeness. Béla Kun. The Czech Legion in Siberia. The Bavarian Soviet Republic. Baron Ungern. Flights of fancy, seizures of power, and some powerfully fancy seizures. In Pirate Utopia, Bruce Sterling sails off to another corner of collapsing empires rubbing up against barely victorious powers: the city of Fiume, which had been Austrian before the war, promised to Italy during hostilities, and awarded to the future Yugoslavia at the peace conference.

Enter Gabriele D’Annunzio, an Italian poet, journalist, playwright, daredevil fighter pilot during the war, and adventurer afterward. He parlayed pre-war literary fame and further glory gained as a daring flyer against Austria’s forces into leadership of a troop of roughly 2000 irregulars who protested the peace conference’s award of Fiume to Yugoslavia by marching on the city and forcing out the Allied garrison. D’Annunzio tried to attach the Fiume and surroundings to Italy, but the Italian government was having none of it. Spurned, D’Annunzio proclaimed an independent state, the Regency of Carnaro.

Sterling picks up the story of the Regency, mashes it up with some plausible alternative events, and puts it all into overdrive with the energy and polemical voice he poured into the Viridian Green art movement. John Coulthart’s design and illustrations aid and abet Sterling’s piratical pillaging of history, dressing the tale up in Futurist garb and reminding readers that the revolutions of the early 20th century aimed to sweep art and technology along with them, and not merely power and politics.

In our world, the Regency turned out to be a dress rehearsal, in several senses of the phrase, for Italian Fascism. D’Annunzio proclaimed himself Duce; he and his legionnaires set up a corporatist microstate.

In Pirate Utopia, D’Annunzio goes by one of the nicknames he had in history, “The Prophet.” He is surrounded by an improbable cast that includes The Ace of Hearts, Lorenzo Secondari (the Pirate Engineer), and Blanka Piffer (mad dictator of her Torpedo Factory). They are trying to make revolution, they are trying to revolutionize technology, they are trying to bring justice. They are also trying to stay on top, keep their several lovers, and do it all with style. The story itself is relatively brief, a bit more than 150 smallish pages with plenty of whiz-bang Futurist graphics. In revolutionary style, gestures stand in for longer scenes, and much of the action is implied. Then Houdini shows up, with H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard in tow; an escape is not the only magic he proposes. The future looks bright!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/27/pirate-utopia-by-bruce-sterling/

Sep 19 2017

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett

Death’s adoptive granddaughter. A perfectionist clockmaker. An unassuming monk. An uncannily talented novice, who’s prone to stealing things. These four form the primary cast of Thief of Time, the twenty-sixth Discworld novel.

The conceit of the story is that if time is ever measured with perfect accuracy, it is captured, and stops. Completely. AFTER ONE O’CLOCK NEXT WEDNESDAY THERE IS NOTHING. JUST ONE O’CLOCK NEXT WEDNESDAY, FOR EVER AND EVER. (p. 105)

Pratchett is, however, in no particular hurry to get to the main action of the plot. Time, like light, runs a bit differently on the Disc than it does in more familiar parts of the universe. Many of the characters in this book have even looser relationships with time than the average denizen of the Disc, so Pratchett’s jumping about at the beginning prepares readers for the messing about that will continue through the rest of the book. True, he shows within the first dozen pages of narrative who has it in for all of the universe, and he hints at what their method might be, but then appears to bounce randomly through several periods of Nanny Ogg’s life and then briefly stop in during a conversation between the clockmaker and an exacting client before settling firmly on a tangent involving the granddaughter’s current occupation.

The other teachers in the school were known as Stephanie and Joan and so on, but to her lass she was very strictly Miss Susan. “Strict,” in fact, was a word that seemed to cover everything about Miss Susan and, in the classroom, she insisted on the Miss the way that a king insists upon Your Majesty, and for pretty much the same reason.
Miss Susan wore black, which the headmistress disapproved of but could do nothing about because black was, well, a respectable colour. She was young, but with an indefinable air of age about her. She wore her hair, which was blond-white with one black streak, in a tight bun. The headmistress disapproved of that, too — it suggested an Archaic Image of Teaching, she said, with the assurance of someone who could pronounce a capital letter. But she didn’t ever disapprove of the way Miss Susan moved, because Miss Susan moved like a tiger.
It was in fact always very hard to disapprove of Miss Susan in her presence, because if you did she gave you a Look. It was not in any way a threatening Look. It was cool and calm. You just didn’t want to see it again.
The Look worked in the classroom, too. Take homework, another Archaic Practice the headmistress was ineffectually Against. No dog ever ate the homework of one of Miss Susan’s students, because there was something about Miss Susan that went home with them; instead the dog brought them a pen and watched imploringly while they finished it. Contrary to the headmistress’s instructions, Miss Susan did not let the children do what they liked. She let them do what she liked. It had turned out to be a lot more interesting for everyone. (pp. 32–33)

Death’s granddaughter makes for an interesting elementary school teacher.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/19/thief-of-time-by-terry-pratchett/

Sep 18 2017

A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré

It’s a John Le Carré book, so you know that someone is going to get screwed in the end. In his Cold War books, which were on the whole more subtle in their plotting if not as deft in their characterization, it wasn’t always possible to tell who was doing just what to whom, because the characters themselves did not know for sure, and the looking-glass effect was one of his points about the superpower confrontation. I remember that Le Carré endings would unfold in my mind for hours, or sometimes days, as I turned events around and around, each flip revealing more possible layers of deception and intent. A Most Wanted Man is not like that.

The ending, when it comes, is hard and brutal, upending the carefully balanced forces Le Carré has spent the book detailing. It’s his comment on how the shadowy worlds of espionage, private banking, and the fight against Islamist-inspired terrorism worked in the middle part of this century’s first decade, when he was writing this book. There are subtle planners, updated versions of his Cold War subjects who were often skilled improvisers (both bankers and spies in this book observe that one of the few true constants of dealing with clients is the cock-up), and then there are people who don’t care about any of that and just want to blow things up. That last group, when they come from the US government, have the power to do nearly anything, though they seem to have neither the will nor the wit to do anything except smash and grab.

Parts of this book — most of its scenes, in fact — are very good indeed. His portrait of the banker Tommy Brue is idealized but melancholy, a representative (he thinks) of a world that has passed, enjoying one last tilt to redeem both his personal choices and the sins of his father. On the other hand, he falls for the much younger woman (though she is no naif, at 35) who starts as an adversary. On the other other hand, Brue the character knows that his interest is terribly cliché. On the other other other, Le Carré still lets it happen in his book. Brue also stands in for waning British power in a world order that has long since passed the main action to other players. The Brits are still subtler and cleverer, and willing to do more or less the right thing. Le Carré hasn’t changed in that regard.

Annabel Richter rings true as a committed German lawyer who acts as an advocate for people in irregular immigration situations in Germany. I’ve met her type in various guises during the nearly two decades I have lived in Germany, and Le Carré sketches this character very well, complete with the personal dynamics within the non-profit where she works, and the mix of competitiveness with a complex relationship toward the privilege of her family background. She’s also a step ahead of Brue in recognizing that he will fall for her, and not above using that for her goals.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/18/a-most-wanted-man-by-john-le-carre/

Sep 14 2017

Europe in Winter by Dave Hutchinson

I should say two things right up front about Europe in Winter. First, intermittently during a bicycle tour across one of Europe’s smaller polities that steadfastly refuses to disappear completely is both the right and wrong way to read this book. Wrong, because it surely deserves closer attention that I was sometimes able to give it on mid-stage breaks or evenings at the campgrounds. I am sure I missed things, possibly even important things, for it is a subtle and uncompromising work. Right because I kept crossing old borders that are still there if you know to look for them, as Hutchinson’s main character Rudi (or Ruudi in his native Estonian, as readers learn in this volume) has learned to look in the course of the two previous books about fractured Europe (Europe in Autumn and Europe at Midnight). The death strip between East and West Germany is long gone, but as the train wends its way through southern Thuringia on the way to Bavaria, settlements dwindle and there is far more forest than anything else. It’s not hard to imagine that the topology of the hills might lead to some of the unexpected places that characters in Hutchinson’s book find themselves in after a funny turn in the Warsaw Metro or the Estonian woods. Bavaria itself, once reached, proves unreliable, or at least not as unitary as it appears from a distance. Franconian flags and coats of arms appear in the towns, but even that fractures into Ober- Mittel- and Unterfranken if one asks the local people. Cities remember their old Imperial freedoms, Baroque palaces perch on the sites of older fortresses atop high hills, and Germany’s old Kleinstaaterei seems just around the next bend. After ten days or so, Legoland appears, brighter, louder and shinier than any place in Hutchinson’s down-at-the-heels Europe but its own country in a sense, distant cousin to the extraterritorial railroad, the Line, that plays a key role in the novel.

Second, for me it was worth reading the whole novel, possibly the whole series, just to have a chapter called “The Justified Ancients of Muhu.” The tip of the beanie to Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson is lovely, and I liked it all the more because I have spent more than time than one would expect on the Estonian island of Muhu. I, too, have failed to have a dinner at the gorgeous estate where Rudi misses a long-planned meal, though for less deadly reasons.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/14/europe-in-winter-by-dave-hutchinson/

Sep 13 2017

One Summer by Bill Bryson

The summer of 1927, to be precise. The summer that Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, that Babe Ruth returned to form and led the New York Yankees to dominate baseball, a summer that Calvin Coolidge didn’t have much to say (not that that was unique to 1927), the summer that Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, and the summer of the invention of a key part of television technology. Bill Bryson uses each of these events as the main element of a chapter covering one month of the summer of 1927. Together, they are intended to form a portrait of America at a particular time in its history, to capture the spirit of the 1920s at their dizzying height, before the stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression ushered in a completely different era.

One Summer is typical Bryson in that it is conversational, congenial, chock full of facts, and completely conventional. I used to be a great fan of Bryson, and I can still see the appeal, but now he feels incomplete to me, especially when he is writing about history rather than, say, personal travel experiences. (I would return to A Walk in the Woods; it’s very unlikely that I will re-read One Summer.) I liked and still like his wry tone, his drollery, though I worry sometimes about the details of his research. But the problem is right there in the structure of the book: the five events that Bryson chooses as the supports for his book are all about men, and white men at that (even allowing for whether contemporaries would have considered Sacco and Vanzetti white, which obviously many did not). Bryson never makes more than an implicit argument about why he chose these five, leaving the reader to wonder whether he is blinkered, whether his publisher is, or both of them worked together to overlook well more than half of America’s population. Bryson’s America of 1927 has two regions at most: the Northeast, though really the bulk of what he describes in the Northeast happens in and around New York City, and the Midwest. Parts of the South flood, but the region is otherwise almost entirely absent, except for a brief excursion into the absurdities of Florida real estate markets. The West provides a place for Coolidge to play cowboy and a location for Mount Rushmore. There are a few more incidents on the West Coast during aviation tours, and Bryson describes the Utah childhood of Philo T. Farnsworth, the television inventor, but the West is also conspicuous by its absence in Bryson’s view of America.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/13/one-summer-by-bill-bryson/

Sep 12 2017

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

In Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, things are not as they seem. She and her first-person narrator tell readers that from the novel’s very beginning: “Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.” Nor is the valley’s Dragon a dragon — “he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man” — but he still claims a girl every ten years, and the people of the valley see both sides of that coin. “He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.”

The narrator is clear on how the price looks from the outside: “He doesn’t devour them really; it only feels that way. He takes a girl to his tower, and ten years later he lets her go, but by then she’s someone different. Her clothes are too fine and she talks like a courtier … they don’t want to marry anyone. They don’t want to stay at all.” They’ve been uprooted.

The narrator, Agnieszka, was born in a year that meant that when she turns seventeen, the Dragon would choose someone from her cohort as the next girl to come to his tower. “There aren’t so many villages in the valley that the chances are very low … There were eleven girls to choose from in my year, and that’s worse odds than dice. Everyone says you love a Dragon-born girl differently as she gets older; you can’t help it, knowing you so easily might lose her. But it wasn’t like that for me, for my parents. By the time I was old enough to understand that I might be taken, we all knew he would take Kasia.” So the story opens, with Agnieszka at seventeen telling her story, and by the way filling in some of the background of the valley with its villages, all overshadowed by the likelihood that at the next festival she will lose her closest friend to the sorcerous lord and his closed tower.

Agnieszka does not have the womanly virtues that her village society esteems, and she has seen nothing else of the world so she barely questions that judgement. “My parents wouldn’t have feared for me, very much, even if there hadn’t been Kasia [who was all the things thought best]. At seventeen I was still a too-skinny colt of a girl with big feet and tangled dirt-brown hair, and my only gift, if you could call it that, was I would tear or stain or lose anything put on me between the hours of one day. My mother despaired of me by the time I was twelve … ‘You’ll have to marry a tailor,’ my little Agnieszka, my [woodcutter] father would say, laughing, when he came home from the forest at night and I went running to meet him, grubby-faced, with at least one hole about me, and no kerchief.” Novik has set up the first opposition of the book — Agnieszka and the expectations of those around her — with the Dragon’s choice soon to tear her best friend away, and lurking in the background whatever it is about the Wood (as opposed to the forest where her father works) that earns its capitalization and the need for the Dragon’s protection.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/12/uprooted-by-naomi-novik/

Sep 11 2017

Grace And The Fever by Zan Romanoff

What struck me most about this book is that it’s really about conspiracy theories and how they just fuel insanity like a monstrous feedback loop enabled by the Internet. Because look, I’ve been a fangirl all my life but the kind of crazy ass behavior the fans of One Direction, um, I mean, Fever Dream indulge in makes even me pause. I understand the dorky love for these cute guys you’ve never met, and I absolutely understand the adrenaline that comes from being in their presence, but there’s a lot of weird shit in this book that made me go “yo, that ain’t healthy.” The convoluted conspiracy theories that the FD fandom come up with felt invasive and dehumanizing. It’s one thing to have fantasies and write fanfic, but to jigger together snapshots of people’s lives and to present them as proof for your personal theories about said lives is borderline psycho.

Which, fortunately, is an issue that Zan Romanoff deals with well in this smart, entertaining novel about what it’s like to be a shy high schooler who really, really loves a boy band. Grace, our protagonist, runs into Jes one night and becomes more involved with the band than anything she could ever dream. Overall, it’s a well-executed book, even if I felt the coda incredibly unlikely. Sure Jes is needy, and I’m glad he and Grace part on good terms, but I do not for a second see the last chapter as anything but fan wank (for a fandom that doesn’t even exist! How delightfully but unnecessarily meta!)

Thing is, I didn’t like Grace. She’s one of those people that expects those closest to her to be psychic and find out what she wants instead of actually speaking up, which is incredibly tiresome. Her interactions with the boy band and their entourage were pretty great, but I found myself rolling my eyes at her a lot when she was talking to her mom and her actual friends. Like other people who forced themselves to outgrow self-consciousness in middle school, I don’t have a lot of compassion for people who are narcissistic enough not to, no matter how it manifests in external behaviors. Which doesn’t make her any less realistic. My opinion of her (she sucks, but she has her moments) doesn’t detract at all from what a overall solid book this is.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/11/grace-and-the-fever-by-zan-romanoff/