Reviewing You... RevYou-ing.

 (x-posted to This Is Where The Voices Go)

While promoting my deconstruction of Andrew Klavan's Man and Wife, I made the mistake of linking myself on what I thought was a fan page but turned out to be a page managed by Klavan himself. Suddenly (and pretentiously) I felt his eyes and the eyes of his core fans turning on me, putting pressure on the quality and content of my eventual review.

 I should've left it there, but I made the mistake of digging around in Kalvan's info and background, reading some of his posts, and checking out any other titles he'd written or was working on. I discovered some opinions and standpoints, which I didn't wholly agree with on the surface level, despite appreciating their research and construction and the fact I found them stimulating reads.

Unfortunately this stumped me. I was no longer critiquing a Crap Looking Book of Which I'd Never Heard, but an offering from an author with whom I was now familiar, and had to constantly second guess myself to produce a review that while wholly subjective, was only subject to me, and not to any further outside influence.

Hitler liked to paint. We know this, and we look at his paintings and say "Hitler did those." Quite frankly, they're awful and inconsequential paintings that would have been ignored except for the fact that he was Hitler.

Lovelorn stalkers write poems. They're not the kind of poems you want to read, and they make for a damn uncomfortable narrative voice experiment when you try to emulate them. But without the identity of the author providing the foreknowledge that this is a Stalker Poem (a genre I have no intention of promoting), it's just an over-passionate, unnecessarily graphic love poem.

My point is that without the author the text is just a text. I could attack the characters as ridiculous, the settings as dull, and the plots as contrived or incomprehensible. However with the author's politics and bibliography in hand, the reading is sullied as I find myself seeing it not as a narrative in its own right, but as the weighted words of a man I don't really agree with, and have to constantly try my best not to see my reaction as personal difference. If I genuinely disagree with something the author says within the text, it's essential not to subsequently disregard that as a part of my pre-informed attitude towards them.

As a knock-on consequence, while writing I often find myself wondering and worrying if I am entrusting the text with too much intent and identity, and if wholly removed from any knowledge of me it would weakly collapse in on itself. Secondary to this I can't ignore that such public advertising of a review would mean there would be genuine fans, and perhaps the writer themselves reading the review, or at very least the preamble, and suddenly I'm writing for audience, trying to toe the line between my actual opinion and not pissing of a very specific readership.

I was free to be downright vicious about Linda Barnes' The Snake Tattoo, because I never imagined anyone would have read the book, never mind that she herself or anyone she knew would read the review, and I'd be free not to worry about wounding authorial pride or alienating a fanbase, and wouldn't present myself as a pedantic and unpublished dickhead, screaming at the mistakes and folly of others while weeping in the dark over my own lousiness.

Nick
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Crap Looking Book Responses #4: Man and Wife

If someone is so loathe to talk to you about their dark past, you shouldn't be so surprised when you hear about their dark past.

Well my very first impression of Andrew Klavan's Man and Wife was wrong: the cover was not an inconsequential image, but a depiction of a locale that was used extensively in the book. Yet it had no real specific weighted prominence as a site and was only a place where things happened to happen. It is such a placid and innocuous image and place that the cover could just have easily featured a picture of the main characters car, or his wife's winter coat.

According to the narrative voice, Man and wife is a story of how love blinded psychiatrist Cal Bradley to his wife's true nature or history, and as such allowed BAD THINGS to happen while homo-terrified patient Peter Blue healed lepers, talked in riddles, and reminded Cal of his dead sister. In actual fact, it's a story of how one man knew and suspected exactly what his wife was doing and used the narrative voice to tell us all about it, then expressed surprise when he was proven right. His closing declarations that "I didn't see what was right in front of my eyes ... if only I'd seen through [the] lies" are absolute bull.

I am sick of lazy protagonists. Cal Bradley doesn't do anything, he merely walks in on others as they do things (usually suicides), or responds to their actions with mood swings, brooding, and ridiculously long chains of thought. His constant speculation stream-of-consciousness narrative and the way the "story" constantly jumps from one point and event to the next with very little stringing them together obviously appeals to me as anyone familiar with my own style would expect, but it is lazy writing. He turns over one idea then another just to dismiss them both and the you can't help but feel he's dawdling for word count and padding, while the frenetic leaps in story and backstory allow seemingly unconnected events to be strung together, deadening any surprise when it turns out (shock! horror!) that they are in fact connected.

Such flowing text also poses problems laid next to speech, often presenting a scene where the characters seem to be idly pausing, waiting for the narrator to finish rambling before they continue their sentences, destroying the sense of time and causing distance between the reader and the situations of the text. Not that they can get a word out with the number of cliches they're choking on "...a gun's just gonna piss him off ... it warmed my cockles... let the chips fall where they may ... put a sock in it ... oh my stars and garters..."

Omnipotent narrators have the benefit of placing no doubt on how people and places look, and Klavan has a good gift for keeping the text visual and energetic, but this all-is-known attitude removes the opportunity for questions and interpretation. The more questions that a first person narrator asks of the story, the less that a reader will ask questions for themselves. 

Man and Wife even occasionally pauses to check that the reader truly understands and is on the side of the narrative voice, forcing a bending of interpretation that is in danger of alienating the reader. Which is a pity, since Andrew Klavan has enough strength and quality in his wordcraft to be able to trust that the reader is already responding accordingly.

That said, the characters are quite grey and mailable, with so little that their physical attributes are constantly reiterated and their names are almost onomatopoeic. It's no surprise the smallest child is affectionately called "Tot". Bradley's seems at odds with himself, viewing infidelity and lies as VERY BAD THINGS but seeming shrugging off murder, thinking the lies about such an act are much worse than the deed itself.

There is no explanation for the Jesus-like nature of Peter Blue, or how he is able to affect those around him and why. One scene even has him doling out endless sandwiches ala loaves and fishes, and all those observing seem to take this as just a character quirk rather than, oh I don't know, SOMETHING THAT DEFYS THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. 

Blue has an anti-church, Gospel of Thomas-esque view, but this is never truly explored, and left under the question mark of whether it's a progressive, forward-thinking thought that Klavan wants you to think on, or just the off-kilter ramblings of a damaged child with trouble integrating.

I'm slightly annoyed and pleased to admit I enjoyed reading Man and Wife, pitting my expectations of loathing against my eagerness of reading as ti did. However I felt myself once again following a narrator inside and outside his head only out of curiosity as to where the author will take them, and not out of any genuine concern or interest in the character themselves...

Nick

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Crap Looking Book Impressions #4: Man and Wife

When I was hunting for Crap Looking Books, I almost glossed over Andrew Klavan's Man and Wife but found myself drawn back to it. The cover is unassuming to the point of being inconsequential, a passive, calming scene that could belong to any novel without having much affect on the interpretation of the story. This could be an Iain Banks, or an Ian McEwan, or an Iain Hollingshead, or even a book written by someone with a different forename.

We have a tree. We have a lake. We have sky. Nowhere on the blurb or jacket notes is there any mention of these three things. All the front cover gives us to go on is the suggestion that "Maybe if I had loved her less there would have been no murder."

Putting aside the poor grammar, this set up is ok on the surface, it doesn't give too much away and it puts the hooks into the reader or potential buyer a little... but it’s also an insulting abuse to the craft of... cover... making.

Consider the following possible replacement texts:

“It was an ordinary summer until the Nazis fell from the sky.”

“Perhaps if I’d been less bored I wouldn’t have sat on it.”

“Finally, I knew the way to San Jose. And I’d been away so long...”

“It was the day my eyebrows started talking to me.”

The lack of relation between the story and the cover lead me to think there is simply nothing in the story that is worth putting on the jacket, no defining image or moment that can be represented visually.

As such I expect a lot of very ordinary characters in ordinary locations, and a predictably generic sense of some secret beneath and behind everything that turns out to be not exactly the secret the protagonist expected. A gun will make a dramatic and striking appearance, and someone’s going to spend half a chapter having very specific and descriptive sex with someone else.

Nick
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The great leap forward is just a great leap forward away

 (x-posted to This Is Where The Voices Go)

So recently I saw that Ridley Scott is committed to a new Blade Runner film and I had the predictable reaction of feeling nothing was sacred anymore, followed by hoping, really hoping, that this film is not a sequel, prequel or remake, but merely further stories set in the Blade Runnerverse. There's enough unused material in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? to make that possible without much creative effort.

My predominant, non-reactionary thought however, is that not only should any new Blade Runner material be set in the original film's timeframe of 2019, but that it most assuredly won't be.

Face it. We can't imagine it being only a mere 8 years until off-world colonies, human-like replicant robots and flying police cars. The idea is as much a joke to us as the classic science fiction assumption that we'd all be sat around in foil suits by the year 2000.

Every generation rolls back the placement and expectations of their science fiction by another fifty or more years, and as time passes, new science fiction seems to be getting even further and further away from present day. Who's to say that the new Blade Runner won't be set in the 25th or 35th century, in a time so distant and unreal that the writers can do whatever the hell they want with settings and expectations?

Classic science fiction was never about the impossible or the mythic, but the possible and seemingly achievable, the extraordinary made ordinary and how the human spirit deals with the challenges and developments of these fantastical worlds and advancements. It was never about the unlikely or the ridiculous, but rather the predicted evolution of life, based on all human endeavour from the dawn of time right up to the point of writing.

If we keep rolling back the date of our expected future, then we will stop expecting our future, and hide it behind so many supposed great leaps forward until its distance makes us feel the impossibility of reaching for it, doubt our personal and global potential, and be content to wallow in a present without goals, dreams, or ambition.

Nick
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P.S If it is a remake, I am going to be fucking livid.

Crap Looking Book Responses #3: Northworld: Vengeance

There's nothing you can say, but you've got to say something.

David Drake's Vengeance is the tale of... erm... it's a story about... there's a guy, and another guy, and a magic mirror...

Quite frankly, it's hard to say what Vengeance is about, if it's about anything. As I expected, it's a tapestry of sweeping landscapes and quirky homesteads littered with unnecessary violence, obscure genetic variations, exciting technology, and effects and explosions that would make Michael Bay weep. They don't have horses or pigs and cows but they have onions and squirrels and something that makes wool, and apparently they know Wagner was.

The closest thing to a plot is our supposedly main guy's attempts to stop peace by going to war. Or stop war by going to a bigger war. Or spend 350 pages missing his one true love while sleeping with someone who can look like her at whim, before settling down with someone he's never mentioned before, and only met through a magic mirror.

The world (or worlds, since apparently there are 9) of Northworld are punctuated by random and outlandish technology, delivered via engineers from a place that is (most unfortunately) called The Matrix. Scrying mirrors, dragonfly motorbikes and battling laser suits of armour are in abundance and drive the threadbare plot forward, but it is never truly explained how they work, why they work, and just what on earth this ridiculous Matrix depositing cool toys around the world(s) is all about.

Since the success of JK Rowling, a lot of publishers of fantasy and science-fiction insist that all new submissions feature a coherent, explainable system for their magic, technology, aliens or lizard-people and whatnot. This barrier against novels stuffed with random !COOL! and pointless tech often frustrates me as a writer, but as a reader of Vengeance I can see it as a blessing.

It's hard to get behind the motivations of a people who inhabit a world or nine when you can't comprehend the realities of those worlds themselves. The Matrix spews out tech as and when it is needed and no-one questions or wonders why and even the back-cover blurb resolvedly claims that it "defies explanation". Characters in science-fiction should never be excited, scared or even aware that they are in science-fiction, but Vengeance shows their lack of curiosity as ignorance, and has them stumbling round a world with little care or knowledge of the real things of consequence.

Perhaps it is better to leave the reader to apply their own understanding to how a world works, and meet the text somewhere in the middle, but there is nothing to stop them adopting the laziness of the author and exclaiming "it's just MAAAAGGGIIIIC" before giving up and failing to stretch their understanding any further.

Any links between the three divergent and weak narratives are not particular obvious either, and there is no sense as the pages turn that the story is rushing towards any kind of climax, with the final coming together (for a bloody and unnecessary battle, of course) feeling like an arbitrary after thought, all that keeps three lacklustre short stories together long enough to pass them off as a completed novel.

I found myself simply not caring what happened to the characters, inserted where needed like the tech of which they made such frequent use, and didn't really care what happened next, possessed of a page-turning curiosity from only a writerly point of view to see what David Drake figured would come next, and what ridiculous tech would take us there.

I know what the central character's name is and what he's done and where he's been but never truly worked out who he is. All he seems to do is tell people off or encourage their better natures, almost like he disagrees as much as I did with the narrative content and direction. He has sudden rushes of realisation that seem at odds with what he's doing, as if he's becoming whatever he needs to be for the task at hand. In a world where things were out of his control he'd be an excellent unwilling protagonist, buffeted and shaped by events around him, but since everything is happening because of him and at his request, he quite frankly he should show a bit more interest.

Did I like it? I suppose so. Do I value you it? Get a clue.

If a music video were a book...

Nick
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Crap Looking Book Impressions #3: Northworld: Vengeance

Next up in the crosshairs, David Drake's Vengeance. What is NOT to love about this Crap Looking but also somehow awesome book cover? We’ve got two robot suits of armour, battling in the snow with what look like either laser whips or red liquorice pipes. The robots have the anatomy and proportion of a middleweight Rob Liefield cover, but I think you have to forgive that because they’re LASER-BATTLING ROBOTS IN THE SNOW!

I feel like the book is trying to convince me that there is some serious awesomeness contained in the pages, like every day I don’t read it I’m missing out on a fantastic explosion of awe that will seriously shake the foundation of my inner being. There’s going to be blow-by-blow descriptions of fights. There’s going to be blood. There’s going to be very little plotting or story, and what there is will be squeezed into heavily-worded chapters every 100 pages or so before we get back to the action.

Be fair now, it's clearly over-compensating for something. I expect to love it, and I expect it to be shit.

Nick
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Crap Looking Book Responses #2: He Who Hesitates

I thought He Who Hesitates would have little or no space for character development. Apparently it made it by throwing everything else out. Let the ripping to shreds commence, in Crap Looking Books of Which I've Never Heard...

Roger Broome came to the big city and did a BAD THING, and he's going to spend all fucking day deciding if he should tell someone, including the reader.

From the start of this tissue-thin novel there are some obvious rookie mistakes and terrible, terrible devices, most notably the ability of the narration to switch just which head it's coming from, often mid-sentence. Literally everything is explained with painstaking detail, which serves to highlight Broome's naivety, but also makes the entire text slow and ponderous, and has him crawling through the city like the slow fucking Norris while everyone zips around him.

When he's not sitting on a bench staring slack-jawed at a lamppost or contemplating every single sip of a coffee, Roger's thinking back to earlier events, events that are quite frankly much more entertaining and better written. It's as if the writer had a few good scenes in mind and trussed up a novel around them for padding.

Then again, that's most fiction.

The characterisation of Roger Broome is a little bizarre. The distance the author maintains by not revealing the full depth of his Roger's thoughts makes it unclear as to exactly which of the words on the page are Roger's thoughts. On one of the many occasions he decides not to contact the police, there is the suggestion that "maybe it was too early to be bothering them" and I still can't decide if the writer is interpreting that as Roger's reason, or if Roger himself is actively thinking this.

Not a big deal, right? Right, unless the author/Roger starts talking about children and "their small high perfect breasts" or the concession that a rape victim "was probably a slut anyway." Does the author think that kids and their under-formed breasts are just great, or is it just that Roger's a little bit more twisted than his constant James-Stewart-esque "well how do you do?" nonsense would have us believe?

I don't think I've ever wished so hard that someone was a sex offender, that the narrative resolution would show Roger as a baby-eating cattle-raping racist, that it was all in his head and not just the world how the author sees it. Unfortunately, other than the BAD THING, little or no insight is given into Roger's attitudes, and the author apparently remains happily complicit in the racial ignorance and pederasty throughout.

Roger learns nothing, and the reader gains nothing by reading about him. He Who Hesitates is just a wank fantasy toilet book for repressed serial killers and first year college students. Any shock of the final narrative resolution is overshadowed by the ineffectual way the BAD THING is presented, and the fact that pretty much nothing happens.

He sits somewhere. He has a coffee. He sits somewhere else. He takes a "coloured" girl for a walk (and oh it's such a damn shame that's she's "coloured") and then he fucks off home.

He Who Hesitates... fills pages.

Nick
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No more crime fiction for a while, and hopefully no more pederasty.

Crap Looking Book Impressions #2: He Who Hesitates

Roll on another Crap Looking Book of Which I've Never Heard...

I let this slim volume jump into my hand because I wasn't exactly sure which of the words on the cover was the book title... Is the book called 87th Precinct, while "He who hesitates..." is a quote or allusion to the story? Maybe the author's name is "Ed 87th Precinct McBain" since as a critically acclaimed writer of "police procedurals" he felt a change in name was necessary, or his obscure middle name has driven him to write them since childhood.

I'm not even sure what "police procedurals" are. I hope I'm not going to read 151 pages on traffic violations, paperwork and donut runs.

The book is so light I can hold it and forget where it is. I doubt it leaves much time for the characters to evolve, or develop a genuine understanding of where they are and what they’re doing. So the crime fiction eye for detail is likely to be stripped back, while the central character (Ed McBain? Is it a character-as-title novella?) lets everything unfold around him and does very little to actually advance the plot.

I expect to digest this one in little more than an evening, and if there's not at least one prostitute or junkie adding to the gritty-bafta setting, I'm going to be disappointed.

Nick
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Crap Looking Book Responses #1: The Snake Tattoo

So it took a while to get started, but once I did I managed to digest The Snake Tattoo in two short evenings. Quite frankly, I'm disappointed I couldn't find more to hate about this one. Still, it breaks into Crap Looking Books Of Which I've Never Heard quite nicely.

Carlotta Carlyle is a straight-talking no-swearing ex-cop by day and cab driver by night, and her world view can be summed up in the following made-up quote: "I used to be a cop, and it gives me an eye for detail that makes near-omnipotent narration in the first person so much easier."

Occasionally her words have the craft and confidence of a Dragnet or Blade Runner voice over, but she explains her jokes too readily, and absolutely everything and everyone must be analysed in detail, at the cost of interpetation. Stab wounds don't get to add character by themselves, we have to know exactly what kind of knife they came from and when, even if it's irrelevant to the narrative itself. Sometimes my reader's eye saw her sat staring into space chalking up the minutiae of a room while other characters shuffled awkwardly around her waiting for her to notice them again.

Directly addressed as "you", whoever I am, it feels too much like me and Ms Carlyle have just met, and she's showing me around her shitty home and through her day, trying her best to impress on me that she's worth knowing and worth following. Unfortunately this approach fails to inspire any confidence in her abilities or intelligence, since her descriptions make it feel like she herself is opening her eyes and seeing everything and everyone for the first time, including her own face and a man with whom she's supposedly had an extensive love affair.

Halfway through the book something hit me. Every man she meets (including the delightfully underage Jerry) is trying to fuck her or get fucked by her, and every woman she meets is someone she wants so badly to be instead of herself. Maybe that's character building and fine craft, but it just made me hate Carlotta just as much as Carlotta does. It felt like I was sat listening to someone I don't know whine about shit I don't care about, channeling the business of everyone else through her own empty self. She's a few decades to early for the cyberpunk boom, but I can't help feeling she and her empty shell of a self would be right at home there.

Her ongoing need to fill that emptiness is no more prevalent than when a large unknown man barges into her home with a knife and the first thing she does is comment how glad she is that he's attractive. I'm never convinced that she thinks that law, honour, justice, and her work are more important than fucking anything that moves, only that they get in the way and you have to lump it.

This becomes quite apparent when, having spent the narrative preaching and practicing a holier-than-thou attitude towards corrupt cops, she suddenly decides to turn crooked when the opportunity arises to shoot dead a paedophile and frame the scene as if it as self defense. The line she apparently walks makes any message or code seem more damaging than moral. Prostitution is bad. Rape is bad. Paedophilia is bad (although one line I had to read more than a few times seems to claim pederasty is okay). Wild fucking and the desire to have it with everything that moves, well that's just fine by Carlotta Carlyle.

And the grand narrative conclusion? Her two cases unravel themselves pretty much without her help or intervention, and she makes up her mind over which of the remaining living male characters she'd rather fuck. Naturally it's the abusive arrogant one.

So maybe I enjoyed this one a little, but I'm a sucker for disappointment.

Nick
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Crap Looking Book Impressions #1: The Snake Tattoo

It's been 6 months in waiting, but I'm finally kicking off Crap Looking Books Of Which I've Never Heard. First in the crosshairs is Linda Barnes' 1989 224 page novella The Snake Tattoo.

Now admittedly, this book doesn't look too crap, although it doesn't look that great either. A "Carlotta Carlyle Mystery", it certainly is a title, series, and writer I've never come across or heard about. The title screams cheesy generic mystery with a central iconic image or theme, while the photo on the cover tells me more than enough about the heroine. Delicate, feminine features, hands and make-up are set against the grimy barrel of a pistol, and a tatty denim jacket.

Evidently Carlotta Carlyle is a feminist with a capital F, balancing beauty and mystique with hardness and determination. Even the Sunday Times review on the front cover speaks to this gender dialectic, specifically referring to the author as Ms Barnes.

I feel like I'm going to see Carlotta tackle situations from a perceived "man's world", feel like the very fact of her having her genitals n the inside is going to be touted as a virtue. Cue strong, rich female characters striving independently against a cast of two-dimensional and ineffectual males.

Flipping the book over to read the blurb, it looks like Carlotta's investigations are going to have her "cruising the red light district by night, and by prowling round a very expensive private school". Well, all aboard for a very open and exposed delve into the early 90s perception of the female psyche.

Bizarre claims in the last paragraph that she "has the builders in" are hopefully not as polysemic or metaphoric as they appear.

First impressions out the way, let the reading commence...

Nick