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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