Revelation Space, Hidden River

I finally finished Revelation Space, which I previously wrote about here.  It was a fun read, mostly because it gave me that mind-blowing feel that only science fiction can give, of a universe where all sorts of crazy things are possible.  As science becomes more and more esoteric, I think it becomes ever-harder to write this sort of sf correctly but still keep it comprehensible for the lay reader.  (Reynolds is already on pretty thin ice by the end, where he talks about space-like particles switching places with time-like particles inside the Schwarzchild radius; I've read enough physics books to know what he's talking about, but I'm sure most readers haven't.  The thing that saves him there, I think, is that it's a couple of not-so-important pages in a 580-page tome).

Reynolds also has all the problems of "classic" sf, particularly in his characterization, which is pretty flat. Looking at the amazon reviews, it seems that this aspect of his writing doesn't improve, while his imagination gets more decoupled from real science, which seems like a lose-lose situation to me, so I guess the search for great sf continues.

I don't know if Adrian McKinty originally planned for his Dead trilogy to be a trilogy, but in any case, he interrupted it after the first book to write Hidden River, and Hidden River offers an interesting comparison to Dead I Well May Be.  Before I start on that, I should make clear that Hidden River  is an impressive novel in its own right, and doesn't need to be coupled with Dead.

Both novels are about an intersection of Ireland and the US.  Hidden River spends much more time in Ireland than Dead (as well as a crucial bit of time in India), but its center of gravity is Denver. Alex, the hero of Hidden River seems to know a lot about US politics for a recent immigrant, down to the difference between Senators and Representatives, which bothered me a bit, but it does give McKinty space to poke fun at US politics from an outsider's perspective, and it's handled well.

Both books are very heavy on the foreshadowing, Hidden River even more than Dead. I must say that I found it annoying after a while; it's as if McKinty doesn't trust the reader to remember that John is going to die, that everything will go to hell in a hand-basket.  It seems McKinty may have decided the same thing, since the other two Dead books have this aspect much more under control.

I loved the ending of Hidden River, more than any of the Dead books.  It doesn't have the visceral satisfaction that they have with the violent denouements in each case, but its made up for in believability.  When characters get into a shooting-match against incredible odds, there's always a feeling of unreality when they emerge unscathed, no matter how skillfully the author orchestrates things.  By opting for a quieter ending, with much of the Mulhollands' downfall off-screen, McKinty leaves the focus on Alex's character arc, as well as closing on a more realistic note.

Venus in Copper, Academ's Fury

It's been a busy couple of weeks, so not much time for reading.

Following up The Catiline Conspiracy, I decided to try a Roman mystery by a different author, Lindsey David.  Her novels are set a little bit later, in the time of Vespasian, but it's still the time of the high Roman Empire.  Overall, the book didn't do anything for me.  Davis has obviously done her research; there are a lot of details about Roman food, housing, and so on.  But the characters felt like modern Britons playing in a meticulously detailed set -- they never felt to me like people from another, somewhat alien, culture.

I haven't finished Jim Butcher's Academ's Fury yet, but it's another fun popcorn novel.  Lots of excitement and heart-stopping moments, and Butcher is just good enough to keep his plot under control.  He'll never win any writing prizes, but he achieves his goal, and that's more than can be said of many books.

The Fall of Rome, In the Woods, The Catiline Conspiracy

Tana French breaks one of the mystery genre's prime conventions in In the Woods, which is that murders must be solved, even cold cases from twenty years ago.  Her central character, Adam Ryan, was playing in the woods with two friends who disappeared, leaving him behind.  He was traumatized by the experience, and, when he was found two days later, had lost all memory of the event.

Flash forward twenty years, and Adam is an investigator in the murder squad.  When a child is murdered near the same woods that Adam's friends disappeared from, he and his partner dive into the investigation and he becomes quickly convinced that there's a connection to the old case.  In the end, though, there isn't actually a connection, and Adam descends into a breakdown; in fact, the old case is never resolved, and Adam is left in disgrace.

French has left us some ambiguous clues to the first case, and I saw some threads where readers had some ingenious solutions to the case, but I think that they're missing the point.  The novel is more of an existential statement -- some mysteries are truly insoluble, particularly to the people most tied up in them.  Adam is in a sort of limbo; he consciously wants to never think about the old events (he tells us so many, many times), but his subconscious drives him to solve the mystery.  In the end, the contradiction is too great, and he runs away from every attempt to actually resolve his issues.

Jenna bought me R. A. Lafferty's The Fall of Rome, just about the only one of his books I don't own.  It's an interesting read from a number of perspectives.  The subject matter itself is moderately interesting, and Lafferty is a lively writer, making it easier to keep track of the many personages who wander through the history.  But it's also interesting as a lens through which to view Lafferty's fiction.  He has the same themes; the forces of disorder are constantly nibbling at the edges of established order, and will eventually bring it down.  He's got the same ideas of archetypes recurring again and again (in Fall, one of the Goths is Cain, waiting to swoop in and destroy his brother and the Roman empire).

His other typical touches work well with a history from this period.  One of the oddities of Lafferty's style is a third-person seemingly-omniscient narrator who will nevertheless flat-out tell you that things couldn't have happened the way he just told you they did.  Here, he does something similar -- he'll quote a source, then tell you it makes no sense, but after all the source was there and we weren't.

From the fall of the Empire, I jumped back to just before its start, in John Maddox Roberts's Catiline Conspiracy, a historical mystery set at the time of the Catiline Conspiracy (who'da thunk it?).  Roberts's protagonist, a low-level noble named Decius Metellus, is an engaging narrator, and the minor characters are enjoyable.  But he has a fundamental problem with fictionalizing the conspiracy -- in the end, the conspirators weren't that competent (which is why Cicero was able to stop them so easily).  So he adds in a sort of super-conspiracy, of which Catiline was just the most visible part, and I found it to be not so convincing.  I enjoy the narration, but Roberts is a little too tied-down by the real history, so I may just jump ahead a couple of books -- the next one goes from a real case that Cicero tried, but after that he has Decius working on cases too minor to be part of the historical record.

Never Let Me Go, The Office of the Dead

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go works on so many levels it's hard to know where to start.  It's a coming-of-age novel, a consideration of bioethics, a novel of alienation, a subtle science fiction novel, and more.

A lot of what makes this book work is the slow pace at which Ishiguro reveals details about the world of the Haylsham students.  As they learn about themselves, they also learn about their place in the world around them; I think this is why so many reviews talk about this as a coming-of-age novel.  But that's too reductive a view of the novel; the coming-of-age part is only the first two-thirds of the story, and the final third gives the story its resonance.

We follow Cathy, Tommy, and Ruth through their childhoods, but it's when they reach adulthood that their story reaches its full level of pathos.  More than that, though, I think that the pathos runs through the novel, in Cathy's off-handed comments about other characters who've "completed," or in the way she just accepts things that we readers recoil at.

This also isn't really a book about cloning or medical research.  As Samuel Goldwyn famously said, if you have want to send a message, send a telegram.  Ishiguro is using the bioethics theme to give context to his deeper story about alienation, not to posit some realistic "this is where things are going" warning.

Overall, Never Let Me Go is one of the best books I've read in a long time.

I liked Andrew Taylor's Office of the Dead, as well, the third volume in his Roth trilogy (The first two were The Four Last Things  and The Judgment of Strangers)  I liked the first one a lot, but, in retrospect it was the most traditional of the three.  A serial killer kidnaps a little girl, and the hunt is on to find her before she can kill the girl.  It stuck out for me because of the sympathetic portraits of the people involved, and the way it didn't spend too much time on the mechanic of the police investigation, preferring to spend time on the girl's parents.  The second one was, I thought, less successful, partly because nothing really happens till right near the end, and Taylor wasn't able to drive the book forward without a suspense angle.

It seems he figured out the trick for Office of the Dead, though.  There's no real suspense here, either -- the suspicious killing shows up 270 pages into the novel, and is disposed of a few pages later.  Instead, Taylor has written a novel about the way that our past binds us into our present.  It's a theme of the whole trilogy as well; Francis Youlgreave becomes a major influence on events in the three novels, even though he died decades before the first one starts.  This third novel, though, charts a course of redemption for its protagonist.  She's the only one of the major characters in the three novels who can accept her past but still move on, forgiving wrongs done to her by others.

Dead Beat, Red Mars, Revelation Space

The only book of the above that I've actually finished is Dead Beat, so I'll start with that...

Dead Beat is the the 7th book in the Harry Dresden series, and it feels the most polished by far -- nice to see that Butcher hasn't rested on his laurels.  The surprises are nicely set up; they rarely feel like they come out of nowhere, which used to be a problem.  Even better, there were elements that I could tell were going to be used from the beginning, but I still didn't quite put them together until the end (for example, once Harry mentions the Field Museum, it's almost inevitable that Sue the dinosaur will play a part in the proceedings).  In previous books, Harry ended up relying on dumb luck, mostly to make up for deficiencies in Butcher's plotting -- here, the plot flows quite smoothly.

Lastly, Butcher has toned down Harry's constant interjections of "Hell's Bells!" which were really getting irritating.  Harry is now a much smoother narrator.  Butcher's style doesn't really stand out for me in a positive way, but it's not the negative it used be.  (As I recall, for one of the previous novels, I said that the plot overcomes the negatives of the style; now, the plot can stand without interference from the style).

Red Mars and Revelation Space are part of the trend to ridiculously large science fiction books, shared by books like Pandora's Star.  Although all three are very different in most respects, they each could use an editor with a heavier hand.

Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson, seems the worse offender so far, but maybe that's because I'm further into the book.  Robinson has chosen to write about the settlement of Mars in fairly realistic terms, including a lot of the political infighting among the early settlers.  When it works, it's fantastic -- it's easy to imagine the debates about how far we should go to terraform Mars vs. leaving it in a pristine state.  But his characters aren't rounded enough to carry the places where it's not so interesting.  In trying to write a realistic treatment of settlement, Robinson has ended up with lots of time when nothing much is happening.  When that happens, the shallowness of the characters is thrown into sharp relief, and it makes it that much harder to continue with the novel.

Revelation Space, by Alistair Reynolds, is a huge novel, and at 120 pages, I'm just a fifth of the way in.  Reynolds has some great ideas in there, and it hasn't felt tedious yet, but not a whole lot's happened, either.  In days of yore (say, the 60s), a Heinlein or a Clarke would be halfway through the story by this point, not just introducing characters and concepts.  And, again, the problem here is that the characters aren't strong enough to carry the weight of the novel.  A 600-page novel needs characters who are intriguing, not slightly filled-out stereotypes of the hard-working scientist, the driven spaceship captain, etc.

Catch 22, Open Season

After the first few hours of reading Joseph Heller's Catch-22, I wasn't sure I would make it all the way through to the end.  In some ways, Heller puts his worst foot forwards.  Most of the humor in the first part of the book is pretty jejune, thin stuff, the sort of thing you might see on a sitcom.  As Heller tightens his focus, though, the humor becomes much more incisive and bleak.  Milo Minderbinder best demonstrates the book's arc through his own character arc.

At first, he's a kind of goofy mess sergeant who buys eggs for 7 cents and sells them for 5 cents.  However, as he grows into a wheeler-dealer, he develops a sleazy edge, removing the tubes that inflate the soldiers' life jackets so that he can use them to make something else that he can sell in the mess hall.  Eventually, he mutates into a sort of one-man KBR, reminding everyone that "what's good for [his business] is good for the country."  By the end of the novel, he'd rather spend time chasing after some profit in cigarettes than look for a missing 12-year-old girl.

In the same way, the novel moves from the goofy humor at the beginning, where Yossarian signs his name as "Washington Irving," triggering an investigation into whether Washington Irving is a code word, through the bleaker humor where the men in his squadron get shot down one at a time, culminating in the nightmare evening in Rome, which is not funny at all.

C. J. Box's Open Season is entertaining enough in its own way, but was too predictable for my tastes.  In addition, Box can't leave well enough alone with his villains.  Bad enough one is a murderer, but he's a child molestor and sadist (for no plot reason whatsoever).  It's too bad -- I like Joe, the main character, but not enough to read any more of the series.

Cosi Fan Tutti, Orlando Furioso

My last outing with the Aurelio Zen series was to Venice, in Dead Lagoon.  This time, I followed him to Naples in Cosi Fan Tutti.  Dead Lagoon is, I recall, the darkest piece in the series; Cosi Fan Tutti, in a bit of chiaruscuro, is by far the lightest.  Dibdin weaves in wit, slapstick, mistaken identity, and other tools of the farce-writer's trade in a masterful comedy.  It's a pity that, although he delved in humor in other novels, he never wrote another full-on humorous mystery.

In general, I think it's hard to write a humorous mystery -- either the humor or the mystery tend to get short shrift.  Here, it's definitely the mystery.  In the end, Zen "solves" a crime he wasn't even investigating by the criminals' mistaking him for someone else.  But I can forgive Dibdin this, for a few reasons.  First and foremost, it fits the tone of the novel; the novel's light tone would be undermined with a lot of actual investigating.  In a way, the best way to think of the book is as a comedy which uses the trappings of the detective novel. 

Second, the whole thing feels legitimate.  Often, when a mystery focuses on the humor, the actual crimes end up being completely implausible.  (E.g. Amanda Cross, who's very funny, but ends up with solutions involving filling a swimming pool with salt water, then draining it and refilling it with regular water.)  Here, although the plot is over the top, as befits a farce, the actual motivating events (a simple gang war) make sense.  Although Zen stumbles through the novel, the underlying events are well-motivated.

From modern Italy, I then retreated a few hundred years, into the world of Orlando Furioso.  Ariosto, the poet who composed the epic Orlando has been considered second only to Dante among Renaissance Italian poets.  Sadly for him, since most people only know one Italian Renaissance poet, his work is not as widely read as it used to be.

Penguin splits Barbara Reynolds's translation into two parts, and each part is very long -- part I is 700 pages, without the introduction, endnotes, etc.  It's a sprawling epic -- in Part I, Orlando himself barely shows up.  Instead, Ariosto concentrates on a number of his compatriots, Ruggiero, Bradamante, Ferrau, Astolfo, et al.  He somehow manages to keep them all straight; although the poem jumps around among them very frequently, whenever it returns to someone, it only took a line or two for me to remember who he was.

I think in some ways the jumping around is one of the defining characteristics of this work.  Ariosto will jump away from his current thread several times in any canto, saying something to the effect of "this is exciting stuff, but now I want to draw your attention somewhere else; we'll return here later."  It's a very different feel from the classical epics I'm used to.  On the other hand, his use of simile is clearly influenced by Homer.  Many of the subjects could have come straight out of the Iliad, and Ariosto develops them at a length (half a stanza) that feels Homeric as well.