Book Review: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

 

 

© 1963 by John Le Carre

 

This novel was a bucket list accomplishment for me, and, to be honest, an act of courage.

 

My mother-in-law, well-read in the genres of mystery, espionage, and New York Times best-seller lists, is a huge Le Carré fan and has been recommending him to me right from day one, almost thirty years ago. I knew Le Carré as an intellectual master builder of intricate plots, shadowy characterizations, and don’t-look-behind-the-curtain all-is-not-as-it-seems scenarios. Cat-and-mouse who-can-you-trust and who-can’t-you-trust. Twists and turns, third act revelations that will drop the jaw agape in wonder. A parsimonious writer who only deals out to the reader clues that seem senseless to what is shown unfolding. A storyteller who crafts a tale backwards but tells it in a deceptively straightforward way.

 

In lieu of all this, I was intimidated.

 

Sometime fifteen or twenty years ago I decided that the water’d be fine to jump right in. And being Hopper with an overly large ego and inflated sense of comprehension, I started with Le Carré’s masterpiece: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. And immediately got lost fifty or sixty pages in. Could be life with a newborn in a new house; could be the surgeries I had around that time. Or it could be I was just not ready for it. I put it away, sold it to a used book store, and vowed I would return at some later point in life; hence, the bucket list.

 

My mother-in-law sent me some money for my birthday back in September and this rekindled the interest. I decided to start off where the Internet pretty much unanimously tells Le Carré newbies to start off with – The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. And I fearfully kept it on my shelf until, quite on a whim and after three exhausting literary false-starts, read in in a week in mid-December.

 

My daughter’s kitten Sweet Potato stretching out with my 

copy of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

If I were to encapsulate the plot in a short paragraph, it’d be something like this: world-weary MI-6 intelligence officer Alec Leamas, fresh off losing a double-agent escaping at the checkpoint at the Berlin Wall, is recruited for one last mission – one last strike against the red menace before being allowed to “come in from the cold.” He’s to play a defector, be picked up and brought into East Germany, where he would lay the groundwork to eliminate London’s nemesis, a brutal genius named Mundt. Leamas plans to do this by lies and suggestions in his debriefing. But things escalate and swerve out of control, as things like these tend to do, and however cautious our hero is, mistakes are made – or are they? Not everything is as it seems, and third act revelations abound, culminating in a finale Mundt-like and brutal in its concision.

 

I was able to follow the novel, the allegiances, and the surprises, and enjoyed it immensely. That weekend I went to a local library and found a 1990 Le Carré book, The Secret Pilgrim, on sale for a dollar. But Le Carre is meant to be read in some kind of order, if only to stay as spoiler-free as possible as the author references earlier plots in later books. So I was planning to buy some prequels to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold with any Christmas money. But the Mrs. beat me to it and wrapped Le Carré’s first and second novels, A Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) and placed them under the tree. I’m currently reading a SF paperback (my last from my pre-holiday haul a few weeks ago), and will crack Call for the Dead come January.

 

And after that, George Smiley, in Le Carré’s masterpiece, the “Karla” trilogy:

   Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)

   The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)

   Smiley’s People (1979)

 

“Grade” for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold – A-plus. Probably the best first-time fiction I read this year.

Book Review: Pirates of Venus

 

© 1934 by Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

This was a completely random find perusing a new semi-local bookstore two weeks back. More importantly, this book has a little history with me. I vividly remember reading this in paperback form in the late 70s. My father was a high school football defensive coordinator, and young nerd me was devouring this olden-time story one fall in the late 70s on the practice field, on the sidelines, in the school weight room, under the bleachers. Fond memories from long ago.

 

Now, I did not remember the plot at all. Being an Edgar Rice Burroughs story (1875-1950, author of numerous series of novels starring Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, hollow-earth Pellucidar, among others), the story is a basic rags-to-riches jungle adventure that could take place anywhere in the Solar System of Burrough’s mind (and time). This one featured an Earthling hero named Carson Napier and unfolds on Venus, with warring tribes, naval battles, piracy, giant monsters, princesses, and swashbuckling swordplay taking center stage.

 

But this is not why I remembered Pirates of Venus. This must have been the first story – having read it way before Tolkien – where a new language is a prominent feature. Well, not exactly prominent per se as one finds it in The Lord of the Rings, but Napier drops some Venusian vocabulary and grammar rules here and there, and it’s these that stuck with me over 45 years:

 

As we battled futilely to disengage ourselves, the klangan settled to the ground, each pair upon opposite sides of the victim they had snared. Thus they held us so that we were helpless, as two cowboys hold a roped steer, while the fifth angan approached us with drawn sword and disarmed us. (Perhaps I should explain that angan is singular, klangan plural, plurals of Amtorian words being formed by prefixing kloo to words commencing with a consonant and kl to those commencing with a vowel.)

   (page 92 of my Ace science fiction paperback

 

There is so much in a name. I had liked the name of the Sofal from the first. Perhaps it was the psychology of that name that suggested the career upon which I was now launched. It means killer. The verb meaning kill is fal. The prefix so has the same value of the suffix er in English; so sofal means killer. Vong is the Amtorian word for defend; therefore, Sovong, the name of our first prize, means defender; but the Sovong had not lived up to her name.

   (page 135 of my Ace science fiction paperback)

 

And tidbits such as these are what called out to me over half a century; this tree trunk appendage of neurons and neurolinguistic programming remained in place all that time for me to recall it and overwhelm me with a cascade of sublime nostalgia.

 

Overall, I ‘grade’ Pirates of Venus a B-minus. Probably thought it was an A back when I was a young’n, but time is too short to spend on such tales as an adult. A smorgasbord of ERB should definitely be fed to tween boys in perpetuity; and a whole rash of newly-hatched science fiction authors will emerge …

 

Notes:

1) “Amtor” is the name the Venusian give to Venus. Napier fights for the nation of “Vepajan” in the novel.

2) I found a different Amtor novel about 13 or 14 years ago and started to read it, but the damn thing disappeared on me, vanished without a trace, and thus permanently remained unread. To this day, I still think a toddler living in the house with me named Patch had something to do with the theft. 

Book Review: In the Ocean of Night

 

© 1972 / 1987 by Gregory Benford

 

Here’s a little short reaction to the Gregory Benford science fiction novel In the Ocean of Night. Benford is a legitimate PhD’d astrophysicist who’s been putting out science fiction novels and short stories for over a half a century. He’s been nominated for a couple of Hugo Awards and won a Nebula (the Oscars of science fiction literature). He specializes in speculative hard science fiction. Science fiction that one could plausibly consider reality in a couple of decades.

 

Now you might think this author would be a gold mine for a passionate reader with a physics background like me. But, truth is, I only read one other of his novels, If the Stars are Gods, a collaboration with Gordon Eklund, and that was nearly a quarter-century ago. Benford has written or collaborated on something like 30 or 35 novels and has produced something like twice that in terms of short stories and novellas. Why I haven’t explored his works in depth I will get to in a moment.

 

I picked up In the Ocean of Night during my Halloween haul specifically because it was written by Benford. The summary on the back cover is quite vague. It describes the futuristic world of 2018 in shades of triumph and tragedy: technological wonders such as lunar colonies and cybernetic advancements and despair in the forms of pollution and famine. Then – “far beyond the shores of space, there comes a mystery as vast as the limitless sea of stars, as beckoning as the unending depths of space.” You need to buy the book if you want to find out more, which I did on both counts.

 

It was a good read. Didn’t like the main character, a rock-the-boat English astronaut, but enjoyed the reveal: not one, not two, but three alien space probes which enter the solar system and which our protagonist makes contact with. Some involved, some haphazard, some monumental, some hushed up by the government. The science was quite intriguing and well done and made up for any shortcomings in the characterizations and the liberal authorial bias that crept through here and there. Oh, and best of all, an infamous north American cryptid makes a cameo at the end.

 

There’s stuff in the book I really liked. The ingredients were all there, and the dish I wound up eating was satisfactory, but I’m not sure if I’d leave a 5-star Yelp review. I don’t regret reading it; I savored my journey through its 321 pages. I fact, I plan on exploring more of Benford’s work. I kinda remember similar feelings after reading If the Stars are Gods back in 2001. Perhaps I’ll check out his award-winning novel or, better yet, another of his collaborations.

 

Grade: Solid B.

Book Review: The Jupiter Plague

 

 

© 1982 by Harry Harrison

Minor spoilers for this 43-year-old SF thriller …

 

This is the second of my four-book haul this Halloween, a haul designed for some quick, distractionary reading as a counterpoint to The Three Musketeers and other epics I put away this year. It clocked in at 283 pages, a bit long but the typeface was slightly larger than normal. It was probably of a similar wordcount to my prior read, The Other Side of Time.

 

I picked it up more for the author than for the story (though the story did intrigue me) – Harry Harrison, a science fiction master whose pedigree stretches from 1951 to 2010. And like the author of my prior read, Keith Laumer, the centennial of his birth passed too earlier this year.

 

Never read much of Harrison. I do recall as a youngster seeing his name adorn many a hardcover spine whilst perusing the library’s science fiction shelves. The “Stainless Steel Rat” and “Bill the Galactic Hero” were names I did not know then but now know them as the typical Harrisonian protagonist – unlikely, anti-traditional, satirical, a middle-finger to Joseph Campbell and all those heroes on their heroic journeys – but most of all, comedic. Before I leave physical existence on this sphere I’d like to read the origin novels of the Rat and Bill; they go on my bucket list immediately.

 

However, I did read a trio of his works 10-15 years ago: Planet of the Damned, Deathworld, and its numerical sequel, Deathworld 2. Good reads but overall unremarkable; I think I ‘graded’ them all B’s, which – spoiler alert – I also ‘graded’ The Jupiter Plague.

 

But what of this Plague? I hear your exclamatory inquiries. That’s the word that tickled my ear. Since we’re all victims to a greater or lesser extent of a recent – ahem – plague, I wondered if it was too soon to read a science fiction tale about a deadly contagion. Truth be told, it wasn’t, for this one descends upon mankind not from the laboratory of a foreign competitor but from another world: Jupiter.

 

Published in 1982 but based on an earlier 1965 story, the setting appears to be the New York tri-state area around the year 2000. A weird blend of the area I grew up with rockets and spacepads thrown in. A lot of action takes place in my old stomping grounds – just across the Hudson River in New Jersey along Route 9. Most of the story, though, is centered in New York City, between the two poles of Kennedy Airport and Bellevue Hospital.

 

A mission to Jupiter returns after a long absence crashing into a runway at JFK. Our hero, Dr. Sam Bertolli, is the first on scene and helps the sole survivor out the hatch before the man seals the metal door behind him and dies. Sam is an ex-soldier turned medic, still technically an intern despite his age. The man he rescues, however temporarily, was the commander of the mission and his face is covered with bursting read pustules.

 

Sam, along with a beautiful bacteriologist who arrives shortly after, are placed in quarantine, but the disease – named Rand-alpha – soon escapes. It’s a fast-acting bug, killing victims within twelve hours of contact. Sam and the beautiful doctor, Nita, remain uninfected due to medical precaution, but the disease spreads through the population. In fact, it soon mutates into Rand-beta, affecting birds, and Rand-gamma, affecting canines. The army shows up to enforce a containment perimeter, and as society trapped within the 100-mile circle breaks down the race is on for Sam and Nita to find a cure before the tri-state area is nuked.

 

All this was by-the-book for me, but I didn’t see where the novel was heading. Ask yourself: why did the commander seal the ship shut? Hmm. Answer: because the cure is inside the ship, along with something that could make the plague a hundred times worse. And what this is … is, a real, live, breathing Jupiterian. How they found it, where they found it, and why the plague is unleashed is the subject of the final quarter of the novel, and made it worthwhile. In a sentence, the Jupiterians live on a giant ice rock in the planet’s upper atmosphere and harness energy like moray eels – bioelectric – but a failure in the communication of the two species leads to the unleashing of the plague as a sort of defense mechanism.

 

Bottom line, it was a quick, neat read. Like my prior read, no earths were shattered of paradigms shifted. But it beat watching a four-hour TV series on Netflix.

 

Grade: solid B.

 

N.B. Two other fun facts regarding Harry Harrison: 1) his 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! supplied the general plot for the Charlton Heston 1973 SF movie Soylent Green, and 2) the man taught himself Esperanto while bored by his duties as an Army Air Force officer in World War II and often incorporated it in his novels.

Book Review: The Other Side of Time

  

© 1965 by Keith Laumer

Minor spoilers for a sixty-year-old pulpy SF paperback …

 

Bought this at Halloween mostly for its short page length – 171 pages. And true to this objective, I did finish it in four hours, albeit over the course of five days. Anyway, a blessed relief from the long slogs I’ve been doing this reading year. The quick and fun distraction. I likened it to watching a two-part made-for-TV show.

 

Though I never read Laumer before, the experience hearkened back to my golden age SF reading (that is, the devotion I showed the field as a tween). The gnarled yellowed pages, the campy 70s cover, the pleasant finely-aged aroma of the binding. All that was missing was a library check-out card on the inside of the back cover. Best of all, though not earth-shattering or life-changing, it took my mind off my troubles for a few hours. Oh the joy of reading a 60-year-old SF paperback!

 

First, who was Keith Laumer? We just passed the centennial of his birth back in June. Part of the Greatest Generation, he served his country in the Army Air Force in World War II, went to college, and re-enlisted and later worked in the diplomatic corps. In fact, his enduring character Retief, his “James Bond” character, was a galactic diplomat and the protagonist of more than a handful of short story collections and stand-alone novels. Back in the day when I fancied myself an up-and-coming SF author, I did pickup his 1963 Envoy to New Worlds and may have read a short story or two; unfortunately they have slipped the bonds of my memory.

 

Dog not too happy to have his nap interrupted to become 

an unwilling participant in this book review

The Other Side of Time takes place in an alternate reality universe where technology exists to move between differing worldlines forward or back through the threadstream of time. Our hero is also a diplomat (and possibly a secret agent) but is not Retief; this character is a man name of Colonel Brion Bayard of similar aristocratic bent. Our protagonist narrates the tale of being taken in to HQ for a possible mission and – after an explosion of sorts and spotting a fiery man coming toward him – awakens to find his city of Stockholm completely devoid of inhabitants.

 

Thus into the timestream to unravel the mystery. He encounters invading cannibalistic ape creatures, is captured, befriends and escapes with a more intelligent ape name of Dzok who is also, coincidentally, a diplomat and possibly a secret agent. The two form an uneasy alliance to discover and later trick the nefarious genocidal baddies behind Earth’s potential demise and set things right.

 

The best thing about the novel, though, the one that will probably keep it from fading into obscurity for me, is the ending. I love a Big Reveal at an ending. And it is simply this: the final word of the novel reveals the identity of these cannibalistic ape-like creatures, called the Hagroon, who are bent on eliminating mankind. They are tricked in the final chapter and are exiled unwittingly, without their technology, dozens of thousands of years deep back into Earth’s prehistory. Speculating whatever became of these lost-to-history villains, the scientist tells our hero that “they were safely marooned there in the age of mammoths and ice. And there they left their bones, which our modern archaeologists have found and called Neanderthal …”

 

Grade: Solid B.

Book Review: Run Silent, Run Deep

 

© 1955 by Commander Edward L. Beach

 

Contains spoilers for a 70-year-old novel …

 

I bought this on a whim a half-dozen years ago – and it spent a half-dozen long unearned years in the On-Deck Circle, surviving the Great Book Triage of 2021 before the move down to Texas. And good thing, too, because I finally got around to reading it – also on a whim – and must say I enjoyed it thoroughly.

 

During the early phases of the Wu Flu, when uncertainty was running rampant and the grocery store shelves lay in a state of depletion I never experienced in my fifty years, when fear descended upon the land and it felt like the worst might come true, during that period I needed to take my mind off it all. I wanted to dive headfirst into something completely unrelated to Daily Life in March 2020. Something meaty, something that could consume me, something challenging but also something that ultimately had a good ending. I needed a good ending in March of 2020. Since I enjoyed my previous dives into military history, I decided a deep dive into World War II could take my mind off the current End of the World. After all, WW2 was a legitimate end of the world for large swaths of the globe, especially Europe. And most survived, because the human spirit rose to the occasion.

 

So in addition to buying all sort of “bird’s-eye” and “ground level” books on World War II, I also bought fiction written about the time period. Over time I picked up The Winds of War, The Thin Red Line, and The Naked and the Dead. I also purchased Run Silent, Run Deep. But, for some reason I can’t pinpoint, I never did read World War II fiction during this time period.

 

Regardless, that’s how it came into my possession, and just now I read and enjoyed it. The cover boasts a quote line from the Dallas News: “THE BEST SUBMARINE YARN EVER WRITTEN.” I admit this intrigued me. Having just re-read Tom Clancy, and all his “submarine yarns” a year ago, I wanted to see how it added up. So much of Clancy’s books contain scenes in and about submarines I felt like a vicarious brevet submariner. I opened this book and couldn’t put it down; I read its 337 dense pages in eight days … maybe six hours of reading spread out around Halloween.

 

The main characters are Rich, a sub captain, and Jim, his executive officer. In the days just before Pearl Harbor Jim is on a test mission to earn his captain stripes, but overreacts and Rich has to flunk him, causing quite a bit of friction. Then the Japanese sneak attack, then missions right up to the waters off the coast of Tokyo. There’s a Japanese destroyer nicknamed “Bungo Pete” that sunk Rich’s prior boat and nearly sends our heroes to their doom. Some more action and Rich gets his leg broken and must recuperate back at Hawaii, while Jim – facing a shortage of sub commanders, is promoted and actually does a fine job hunting and sinking Japanese ships.

 

Rich is put to work on solving a realistic problem early in the war: the ineffectiveness of American torpedoes. Then, Jim’s sub – Rich’s old command – goes missing and is presumed sunk. Rich gets a new command and sets out to end “Bungo Pete” and get vengeance for his old friend and his old crew.

 

The summary does not do the novel justice. There are many mini-vignettes that show life about a sub in both normal and stress situations. It’s very Clancy-like in conveying how blind subs are and the need to rely on sonar, timing, mathematical equations to get the torpedo to the enemy before he gets one to you, and the imperative to get into your opponent’s mind. How “Bungo Pete” knows the names of the vessels he sinks (bags of garbage the subs release when surfacing are later retrieved by Japanese fishing boats who bring them to the destroyer where the trash is sifted through for intelligence), how he knows what a US sub captain will do with uncanny perception (Pete’s an ex-Japanese sub commander himself, too old to command but old enough to serve Imperial Japan’s defense), how Jim will finally get his vengeance; all factor into this well-told tale.

 

The novel has all the other requisites this old dog likes. Written in the 1950s, there is no post-modern claptrap, no deconstruction, no multiculturalism, no kumbaya. The Japanese are referred to on a handle of occasions with slurs common at the time. This was an existential crises, and the Imperial Japanese forces were just as cruel as the Nazis. Though Commander Beach writes interpersonal dialogue well enough (about just as good as Clancy did), the woman do seem a little shallow and stereotypical, but one does not pick up Run Silent, Run Deep for the romantic shore leave episodes.

 

A random piece of trivia I learned is this:

This geologic formation is known as Lot’s Wife. It stands 325 feet above the surface of the northwest Pacific waters and was discovered in 1788 by an English merchant vessel. In World War II the giant crag was used to indicate the start of Japanese waters and to calibrate instrumentation. For if you follow Lot’s Wife directly north (slightly off by a degree or two) for 5,700 miles you wind up in Tokyo Bay.

 

Anyway, how does Rich resolve the “Bungo Pete” challenge? Knowing he’s up against an old sub vet, he tricks and gets the drop on him, resulting in the destroyer’s sinking. But that’s a temporary solution. He sees three lifeboats, each with two dozen men, and … war being hell, realizes he has no choice but to ride down each lifeboat, for the old sub vet could be in any one of them, and if the old man lives, more American lives will be lost down the road. It was brutal, and it takes it’s toll on Rich. However, our hero gets some redemption in a fourth act rescue of some downed US pilots, and is able to live with himself and his actions.

 

Overall, I give it a solid A. Good book for historical aficionados, good book for Tom Clancy fans. Jack Ryan would’ve read this book in high school.

 

Imajica

 

 

© 1991 by Clive Barker

 

When I was a young lad I devoured a lot of horror literature.

 

In high school I mostly read Stephen King. I had a friend who had all of King’s books in paperback, and he’d feed them to me one by one. By the time I graduated I read every one from Carrie to the Bachman books, including his short story anthologies. The following year I read It, and the year after that, The Tommyknockers. I stopped reading Stephen King around the year 2001. I think Dreamcatcher was the last one of his I read.

 

In the late 80s I shifted to Dean R. Koontz. Within three or four years I put away something like 18 of his novels. Though somewhat formulaic, they all were quick, fun reads, always with a dash of horror, a lot of suspense, and usually a happy ending. The thing I liked best about his stories was the fact that you could never predict what the solution to the existential threat was. If Koontz wrote Dracula instead of Bram Stoker, the monster would be revealed at the end not to be a vampire of the traditional sort but a secret government black ops scientific experiment mixing human, bat, and alien DNA gone terribly awry. With some form of time or interdimensional travel tossed in. That kinda thing.

 

A few years ago I read on a message board that, broadly speaking, King could be regarded as the Rolling Stones of horror and Koontz, the Beatles. I agree.

 

I also read a smattering of other horror writers in my teens and twenties. Peter Straub, John Saul, Whitley Strieber, William Peter Blatty, Peter Benchley, Thomas Harris. And, of course, Clive Barker.

 

I moved on to Clive Barker roughly after reading through most of Koontz: Cabal, Weaveworld, The Hellbound Heart, The Damnation Game, The Thief of Always, The Great and Secret Show, Everville, and, lastly, Imajica. Barker is quite different from the aforementioned horror writers. His stories are more fantastical, more occult-ish, populated by various forms of magic and myriads of strange, grotesque creatures, both good and evil. There is a sexual amorality (“anti-morality” I initially wrote) that is quite in vogue now but wasn’t so much 30, 35 years ago. While not on the same equivalence of, say, the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Barker seems to be well acquainted or aspires to such dark things.

 

Anyway, my Halloween reading back in 2019 was a re-read of Weaveworld. The next year, during the Summer of Wu Flu, I re-read The Great and Secret Show. The first took me 12 days but I burned through the latter in 5. In other words, both fun reads. The stories were weird and out there – in Weaveworld, a magic carpet that unfurls in our world and grows to enormous dimensions releasing warring factions that includes an all-powerful but psychotic angel and a salesman who’s jacket can cause anyone to do anything, and in The Great and Secret Show the inter-generational struggle of two men trying to master a form of sorcery known as “The Art” and control a mythical dream sea and the evil beings that inhabit it. Whew. Heavy and heady stuff. I read most of Barker’s works originally at my parents’ weekend house at Lake George in upstate New York, so a lot of that imagery was mixed in with Barker’s. I enjoyed the re-reads.

 

So it was with anticipation I cracked open Imajica on October 1. If I kept to a brisk schedule, I could finish the 827-page novel on Halloween night.

 

Alas, I set it aside three weeks in. I couldn’t finish it.

 

Now, I remember having difficulties wading through Imagica way back in the early 90s when I last wrestled with it. Recall a giant push for the last 150 or 200 pages to finish it. The memory’s very hazy. It seems, however, that the same thing happened to me this time around, thirty years later. Now I’m much, much more careful with how I spend my time as I’m getting up there a bit in years, and I just didn’t think a 150 or 200 page push to get the novel done was worth it.

 

Now, YMMV, as they used to say here on the internet a few decades back.

 

I don’t feel like rehashing the plot; perhaps a quick summary like the ones above might suffice. “Imajica” consists the five dominions, of which Earth is the fifth. The main characters meet other characters who know how to travel between the dominions. There are your typical Barkian malformed monsters and semi-human sub-species, there’s magic, there’s war between the forces of magic and those that want to eradicate it. There is an evil sorcerer Autarch who rules the four dominions (not Earth, the fifth, though that’s on his plate) from his palace in the first dominion. There are shapeshifters, dopplegangers, and lots of Catholic piety twisted slightly askew in that Barkish way.

 

 

I may not have enjoyed Imajica, but Charlie wants to give it a go

 

On paper this seemed to be an enjoyable read. A whole new worldview is developed for the novel with its accompanying landscapes, much more so than his prior works, even Weaveworld. I originally compared it to a warped version of Middle-earth. But it didn’t work for me, and I think, having ten days or so to reflect on it, I think its because the main goal and the main threat of the novel wasn’t fully developed or communicated to me, the reader. I didn’t feel the “ticking time bomb”, though there is one. The stakes didn’t keep me turning the pages. The characters kept having emotional crises and there are loads of indecisions and 180-degree turns that motivations did not seem to make sense to me. The main twist in the plot, which I saw early on during the first read and never forgot this second read, didn’t glue me to the pages in anticipation but just felt like another dreary task I had to wade through to get to the last page. And there was also one scene which, as a father of daughters, truly turned my stomach, a scene I did not remember first time around.

 

I dunno. Mixed feelings are still washing over me. I wanted to like it, truly. But I’m a different man than that young lad of 30 years ago. Horror is no longer an upfront interest for me, and Catholic piety is much more so in my daily life (or at least the struggle to attain it). I do seek out new literary worlds, but I need something more enlightening, more expansive, something I can take with me, possibly, beyond the grave. Not sure if this makes any sense, to you or to me. But these are my mixed feelings over Clive Barker’s Imajica.

 

What I Took from Gibbon

 

Just some ideas here, none really fully fleshed out or truly deep. Some observations I had while reading The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, when I took the time to write them down. Something to review should I ever take up and finish the book, which I probably won’t do unless I suddenly become independently wealthy. (😊)

 

* I started The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on January 18, intending to finish my two-volume “Great Works of the Western World” set by May 18. This was to be while my oldest daughter was studying abroad in Italy. To do this I would have to read ten double-columned pages a day (there are something like 1,270 of these pages to get through.)

 

* This turned out to be a bit too ambitious. The work is divided into six volumes, and I managed to get through the first two, 435 double-column pages, before eye strain kicked in hard. Head-ache hard. So I stopped one-third of the way in, and believe me, I didn’t like giving it up. But better to live to read another day; this was not a hill I was ultimately willing to die on. Or, rather, go blind on.

 

* The theme of the work, to me: The history of mankind is one of never-ending warfare. Peace is an anomaly. Such is the nature of this fallen world.

 

* Gibbon calls Genghis Khan “Zingis”. I love the throwback spelling. Much like the 18th- and 19th century term “Hindoo” for Hindu, and like Lovecraft referring to Eskimos as “Esquimaux”. Oddly-spelled wyrds fascinate me.

 

* Names of the various Roman territories, such as Scythia, Dacia, Sarmatia, and others, gave the whole work a “fantasy world feel.” Not sure if it’s ever been done before (maybe by Turtledove or Saberhagen), but man is the Roman Empire a setting ripe for fantasy fiction.

 

* The first few chapters ended with some variation of the words “… the downfall of the Roman Empire.” I thought this a neat literary device, very modern for a work written near the end of the 18th century. Would every chapter end in such a manner? But this was soon to be not the case as I quickly discovered. Oh well.

 

* Gibbon, at least Gibbon the historian, is not a Christian. He struck me as a solid proto-Nietzschean. I wonder if Friedrich read The History of the Decline as a young man. Gibbon has mad love for emperors traditionally reviled by Christians, such as Julian “the Apostate” and Diocletian, to name the most prominent.

 

* Even though Gibbon is noted for being one of the earliest historians to rely solely on primary sources (the History has an extensive, exhaustive footnote section – 425 of those double-space pages), modern historians consider it rife with error and subjective opinion. I chuckled realizing that one could go so far as to refer to it as “fan fiction.”

 

* Lots of new words, but the only one I (sadly) jotted down was “animadversion.” Dictionary.com defines it as “an unfavorable or censorious comment” or “the act of criticizing.” Synonyms include “accusation,” “faultfinding”, “slur.” A lot of animadversion was slung between the emperors, co-emperors, and their senators.

 

* Trivia tidbit: the epoch of the Roman Empire was the only time in history that the entire shore of the Mediterranean Sea was ruled by a single entity.

 

* Christianity owes a lot to the reign of Constantine (the whole making Christianity the state religion and all), but he was no saint. The most egregious of his crimes was having his eldest son, Crispus, murdered.

 

* No political correctness here: “To these real terrors they added the surprise and abhorrence which were excited by the shrill voice, the uncouth gestures, and the strange deformity of the Huns. These savages of Scythia were compared to the animals who walk very awkwardly on two legs, and to the misshapen figures which were often placed on the bridges of antiquity. They were distinguished from the rest of the human species by their broad shoulders, flat noses, and small black eyes, deeply buried in the head … a fabulous origin was assigned, worthy of their form and manners, that the witches of Scythia, who, for their foul and deadly practices, had been driven from society, had copulated in the desert with infernal spirits, and that the Huns were the offspring of this execrable conjunction.” Sounds like orcs.

 

* More trivia: two elite Legions frequently mentioned were called the Jovians and the Herculians.

 

* The period which the first two volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire cover is from the reign of Marcus Aurelius to that of Valentinian, AD 180 to 375.

 

* It’s best to read with one’s interior voice mimicking that of Sir Winston Churchill. Slow, yes, but so much more entertaining and rewarding.

Les Misérables

 

Forget the musical. Forget the phrase “Lay Miz.” Forget the filmed musical version with Hugh Jackman. What follows has nothing to do with that. The following is simply my “review” – my thoughts and observations – regarding Victor Hugo’s 1862 magnum opus.

 

Can I just say it is such a pleasure to leave behind this completely dysfunctional culture that drenches us in its filth twenty-four seven from every single electronic device I have at home, at work, in my car, and in general in public. I feel that somewhere in the early twenty-first century, maybe around 2008 or 2010 and definitely by 2015, the culture had passed me by. After a decade of youth as a dyed-in-the-wool hedonist I had my first conversion in the early 90s; in 2009 I had my month-long stay in the hospital which cemented it. So I am no fan of contemporary media.

 

Your body is a result of what you’ve put into it. Mine certainly is. And so is your mind. Mine certainly was. And now, especially over the past year, I’ve made an attempt, to varying degrees of success, to watch what I allow into my mind. I spend a great deal of time reading, probably an hour or more a day, and that’s a direct injection into my mind, my thinking and reasoning, my soul. So I like to be careful with what I read (though I’m not often successful in this endeavor).

 

Les Misérables has nothing in common with 2023 America. In no particular order, there is no diversity, no feminism, no girl bosses, no alphabet people, no multiculturalism, no antipathy towards religious belief, no nihilism, no moral confusion, no topsy-turvy white-is-black and black-is-white. True, there is crime. There is injustice. Indeed, injustice is a major theme of the novel. There is poverty. There is corruption. There is bad faith. But as assuredly as a novel written today would allow that crime and corruption and injustice to triumph in a perverse deconstruction of the human spirit, a work written in 1864 would have good eventually triumph over evil.

 

All right; enough of that. The bottom line is I loved this novel and it is without a doubt the best book I’ve read this year. It’s probably on a short list of the greatest books I’ve ever read; certainly in the top twenty. I enjoyed it immensely, and I am a better man for it, and really for one reason.

 

It truly is a magnum opus, emphasis on the “magnum.” My version of the book clocks in at 1,232 pages. I started it on November 1st figuring that, if I averaged 20 pages a day, I’d finish it by year’s end. Truth is I finished it by December 4. I nearly doubled my page output because I couldn’t put it down.

 

How to sum it up succinctly? Hard to do … Suffice it to say that it takes place in France during a forty-year period of, say, 1792-1832. It’s a turbulent time, similar to ours, I suppose, in the degree if not the substance of the turbulence. We have the tail end of the terror of the French Revolution, the rise and subsequent fall of Napoleon with the nearly two decades of continental war that accompanied it, the Restoration of the Monarchy and the failure of the French economy resulting in yet another upheaval. It’s tough to make a living; if you manage to survive the guillotine, Egypt, the Italian Campaigns, Jena, Austerlitz, the fighting in Spain, Moscow, Waterloo, the Bourbon Restoration, and the July Revolution, you still had to find a way to feed yourself and your family.

 

After a wonderful and lengthy introduction to a saintly man, we are introduced to the protagonist of the story, Jean Valjean, the source of the cliché “gone to prison for stealing a loaf of bread.” Newly released and shunned by the populace, he reverts to his thieving ways yet receives life-changing mercy. This changed man then works through the novel, in varying disguises to stay one step ahead of his nemesis, Inspector Javert, to better the lives of the many he encounters in his travels. Central to this is the orphan Cosette, who Valjean eventually saves, adopts, and raises to adulthood and sees her married. And all this over the scope of the history mentioned above.

 

There is tragedy. What happens to the young woman Fantine, Cosette’s unwed mother, nearly broke my heart (and mine is a heart of stone). There is evil. What the Thenardiers do to Fantine, Cosette, Jean Valjean – and, come to think of it, most of the major characters – will make you ache for vengeance. There is nobility – the idealistic if misguided youth Marius, comes immediately to mind. And there is transcendence, the best thing you can ever find in a written work, in the arc of our main character and several of the others.

 

Hugo tends to digress at extreme length into side subjects not necessarily related to the plot. There are several chapters on the Battle of Waterloo, the idea of the convent, the Parisian sewer systems, the street “urchin” common of the era, and the “argot” spoken by the common and less-common man. Two of these are placed in appendices (which I did not read), but the other three are found within the novel.

 

Les Misérables is the model novel I used for an earlier post on why I enjoy French literature more than Russian. To reiterate, there is no “translator creep” of an editorial nature in this novel. The translation is © 1976; I would not trust a later translation, and certainly none after 2000. The spirit of the novel was very artistic and visual, holistic and free-form. It meanders towards its conclusion like a rowboat drifting down a stream, albeit a stream filled with crocodiles and menacing shadows along its banks. It wound this way and that, seeming to derail but never doing so, inexorably plunging to a natural climax you won’t see coming, almost as if the reader and Hugo discover the ending together. There is no modern spastic rush to induct artificial anxiety in the reader in a mistaken attempt to provoke excitement.

 

So this is an easy A+ for me. I can see a future re-read in five years, something more in-depth, perhaps accompanied by a well-written historical study of the time period or a user-friendly analysis of the novel.

 

A piece of trivia for those French-challenged, as I am. Les Miserables does not necessarily mean “The Miserable,” as I ignorantly assumed. A quick bit of research means it translates better to “The Wretched”, “The Outcasts”, “The Dispossessed.” I like “The Outcasts” the best, artistically and thematically.

 

Oh, and that reason mentioned above is the example Jean Valjean provides to the common man, a common man such as myself.

Four Quick Book Reviews

 

So my plan this year was to start off with “anti-epics,” i.e., SF paperbacks under 200 pages. I’ve more or less stuck to that rule, and have put away five so far. I also wanted to pen reviews for each, but, alas, life has intervened (more on that in a follow-up post). The only one I reviewed was the first novel, Between Planets, by Robert Heinlein. Since I want to get at least something of my humble opinions on each here on the blog before I forget, I decided to simply spew a few sentences on the four other tales I’ve read.

Ready?

OK!

 

The Grayspace Beast © 1976 by Gordon Eklund

I first read this book in the summer of 2010, recuperating from all my lung surgeries, when I realized that I really first read this book as a child in the late 70s. Everything came back – the characters, the plot, the beast itself. I vaguely recalled enjoying it thoroughly as a lad, though I was easily pleased, and not really enjoying it as a middle-aged dude. A group of carny-like aliens come together to find lasting and last-ditch glory in hunting down the mythical grayspace beast, a monster inhabiting the “subspace” that’s hardly used anymore since teleportation has become commonplace. Flash Gordon combined with Baron Munchhausen with some very cool SF ideas. It’s also a story-within-a-story, where you have to guess which character in the grayspace beast story is narrating the story as told to a group of children. As it turns out, you can’t, but the double reveals at the end make it a worthy read. Find and devour it if you can.

5-day read

Grade: A-

 

The Deep Range © 1957 by Arthur C. Clarke

A somewhat ponderous but intriguing Clarke novel from his early days. The focus is on oceanography, specifically the herding of whales and gardens on the ocean floor to feed mankind. Strength in ideas as opposed to characterization, though the main protagonist is more fleshed out than the average Clarkian character. A second character’s sacrificial death is basically meaningless. Clarke’s pro animal rights comes out, as well as his Buddhist slant, but I was okay with both. Got me interested in the physics, chemistry, and biology of the seas, if only for a week.

7-day read

Grade: B+

 

Who Goes Here? © 1977 by Bob Shaw

Nifty tale of a man who has his memory completely wiped and joins the equivalent of the space foreign legion. A statuette of a purple frog is the only clue to his prior life. Tries to be an SF comedy, and succeeds more often than not. Kind of like the equivalent of Ron Goulart novel meets that Christopher Nolan movie Memento. There are some real mean baddies called “Oscars”, crazed single-minded bodybuilders with glowing red eyes that will hunt you down and feed you to “throwrugs” – blobby like things that fall on you from trees and eat you alive. Some slapstick stuff, some horror stuff, all mixed into a fast read that went from a B to an A- due to the really awesome reveals at the end, from the Oscars and throwrugs to how the hero got his post-memory wipe name, “Warren Peace.”

2-day read

Grade: A-

 

West of Honor © 1976 by Jerry Pournelle

Straight up military with a dash of SF thrown in. A map on page 1 was a good sign. Seems that Arrarat, an agricultural world settled by Amish-types, is having trouble dealing with convicts Earth is dumping on them. Send in the colonial marines. Heavy on military theory and machismo, but no so much on science fiction. Paradoxically interesting and dull at the same time. Had a hard time visualizing the story as it was unfolding. Learned some good military axioms that most likely young Napoleon heard, maybe even young Alexander. Had a textbook feel to it, and I’d like to have more focus on the commanding officer, Captain Falkenberg, rather than the newbie lieutenants.

5-day read

Grade: B-

 

I’m looking to read two more quickie science fictions paperbacks followed by a return to Richard Sharpe and the Napoleonic wars next, and get all that done by Ash Wednesday. Because I have something interesting I want to do for Lent…

Book Review: Between Planets

 

© 1951 by Robert Heinlein

 

Between Planets, a “juvenile novel” written by Robert Heinlein in 1951, has been sitting on the shelf for six years. I decided to start 2023 with it because my goal this year is to be “anti-epic.” Not anti-epic in scope, theme, plot, or vision, but anti-epic in page length. Between Planets clocks in at a lean, mean 182 pages.

“Juvenile novel” is the term given to the dozen or so science fiction stories he wrote for Scribner’s in the 50s with young male readers in mind. When yours truly was a young male reader I read only two (Red Planet and Time for the Stars) but would have gladly devoured any that would have come into my possession either through the local library or as Christmas or birthday gifts. Nowadays when I come across one I usually pick it up for the nostalgia that the style of story elicits in me. I think, over my adult years, I re-read Red Planet and Time for the Stars and read an additional one, Rocket Ship Galileo. I also own another book of long-shelf vintage, Citizen of the Galaxy, which, unfortunately, is packed away in a box in some closet or possibly the garage after the New Jersey to Texas move, and will have to be sampled at some undetermined time in the future.

Anyway, as I expected, I dug it. It was a quick read – check. It had intriguing aliens – check. It had a space war – check. What more could a young male reader want?

Written before probes were sent to Mars and Venus, it tells the tale of war between colonized Mars and Venus and home world Earth. Rather, the independence war fought by Venusians to escape Earth’s heavy-handed rule. Mars is more or less a research facility, while Venus is growing as a fully populated world (with breathable air and potable water, banks and even Chinese restaurants!).

Our young hero is Don, whose mother is of Venus and father is of Mars (or maybe it’s the other way around – I forget). Don is a student at an exclusive New Mexico high school, and as planetary tensions near the breaking point, gets called back to Mars by his parents. With one request: to bring with him a nondescript but very, very important ring a family friend will give him. He is never to part with it.

Unfortunately for young Don, war breaks out as he’s at the space station in low Earth orbit. He’s sent to Venus against his will along with other passengers as the rebel Venusians destroy the station. Stranded on Venus with no money or connections, he strives to get to Mars, and after a tragic encounter joins the Venus Resistance to fend off an Terran invasion.

Eventually he does get to the Red Planet, a hundred pages later, and the significance of the ring – and Mars – is revealed.

The most interesting part of the story are the native inhabitants of Venus: large, scaley, multi-limbed reptiles called “dragons.” They have a comparable if not superior intelligence to man but lack our belligerent concupiscence. They speak in whistles and have translating devices strapped about their chests. Yet they can speak human, oddly enough retaining the accent of the person who teaches them the language. Hence we have our main dragon character speaking in a cockney accent and another in a Texas twang. Additionally, a dragon will give themselves an honorary name of a human he respects immensely. Our main dragon is named “Sir Isaac Newton.”

The only negative I could put to the book is that the military depicted is basically World War II soldiery. A feature in early SF very similar to the “Asimov effect,” where every novel of Asimov’s reads to my modern ears like 1940s Long Islanders. Understandable, I suppose, as the book is a product of its time. And perhaps endearing. While I noticed it I was never taken out of the story.

Verdict: Good way to start the new year of the SF paperback.

Now to move on to more interesting stuff … !