Book Review: The Dark Fields

© 2001 by Alan Glynn

Re-titled Limitless when it was brought to the big screen, starring Bradley Cooper.

Limitless is one of my favorite movies of all time. I saw it out in the theaters when it came out five years ago and have seen it at least a half-dozen times since on cable and DVD. In fact, it won the “2011 Hopper Best Of” category for Best Movie, a little thing I do at the end of each year to let you all know the best and worst books, movies, and fads the Hopper has seen, read, and experienced.

So for five long years I’ve kept my eye out for the source novel, Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields. Had no idea how it would sync up with the film. But it didn’t matter to me. The chance to get deeper into Eddie Morra’s thoughts under the influence of NZT-48 made the book a MUST for me. Back in September I bought it online and finally got around to reading it over five days this past week. (Would’ve read it sooner but I, er, misplaced it for a few months among the ten or fifteen piles of fifty or sixty books I have floating around three levels of my house …)

The premise is endlessly fascinating to me. What would you do if someone handed you a pill that increased for intelligence tenfold? Drove your IQ into four digits. Oh, and also shot your confidence through the roof, shoved your creativity into overdrive, and put an encyclopedic memory at your disposal. Would you take it? Such is the opportunity presented to down-on-his-luck struggling writer Eddie Morra.

A quick summary, from my review of April, 2011:

Lovable loser Eddie Morra is a down-on-his-luck writer. Defeated by mental blocks, his publisher threatens to call in his advance. His girlfriend / bank dumps him and his landlord itches to kick him out on the street because he can’t pay the rent. One random day sadsack bumps into his old brother-in-law – yes, the only women he’s ever loved divorced him – an unsavory character who happens to be ... a drug dealer.

Brother-in-law is hawking a new type of drug. Right off the pharmaceutical company’s experimental drug assembly line. Allegedly it enables you to use 100% of your brain, percentages based on the old wives tale we only use 20% of our brains (the figure I recall hearing ages ago was 5%). So, what the heck, there’s nothing left to lose. Just pop that experimental drug into your mouth and see what happens.

Here’s where the movie shines. The drug, known as NZT, enables you to see everything “clear.” Thirty seconds after ingestion, you have access to everything you’ve ever seen, read, heard, done. You can make the connections instantaneously. You see the big picture. Everything around you is in slow-motion, and you’re in comfortable confident overdrive. And, apparently, you have boundless energy, because, I guess, gifted with such visioneering capabilities, who would want to sleep?

The movie details Eddie’s rise to the top. Yes, he finishes his novel in four days, and it’s a revolutionary sort of work. He gets a loan from his generic neighborhood Russian mob guy and transforms $12,000 to $2.3 million in ten days trading stocks. Swarms of interesting people flock to him at cocktail parties. Connections are made. Our boy soon comes to the attention of Karl Van Loon, DeNiro’s character, a smorgasbord of corporate tycoons with shades of Trump, Bloomberg, Soros, and the cigar-chomping financiers of the 18th century. He also has to deal with the Russian mafia, and there’s a monkey wrench thrown into things when that neighborhood mobster ingests one of Eddie’s pills and becomes supersmart himself.

(The rest of the review can be found here.)

So … what did I think of the book?

Bottom line: Movie better than the book.

[Warning! Spoilers large and small …]

The writing in The Dark Fields is very, very good. It flowed, and pages turned. Exposition flawlessly transitioned to dialogue and vice versa. Great big heapings of italics, emphasizing specific words in speech the way real people talk, a grammarism I really like. About half to two-thirds of the book made it into the film, sometimes shot-for-shot and word-for-word, so I felt comfortably nostalgic, revisiting an old friend and reliving exciting times. Most of this complementarity occurs in the first half of the story, for the film’s ending is radically different from the novel’s.

As the book progresses, more and more differences show up. Carl Van Loon is essentially a secondary figure, and only became the film’s antagonist after DeNiro signed on. Van Loon’s daughter plays a part in the book as Eddie’s love interest, a somewhat boring and clichéd part that did not make the film. Dark Fields also makes a big to-do about the model Eddie may or may not have killed, fleshing out her identity as a Mexican celebrity which leads to a larger backstory of a US-Mexican crisis. The movie glosses over the global impact of this, instead using it to ratchet up the tension around Eddie getting found out and introducing the scummy lawyer subplot.

NZT-48 is called MDT-48 in the novel. The movie really took pains to create an exciting and illuminating experience on the big screen to show Eddie coming under the influence of the drug. Brighter colors, Eddie’s eyes are bluer, different camera angles and visual effects. The book can’t do this, but I was expecting some literary special effects from Glynn. Perhaps a change of writing style, a change of words used, a change to iambic pentameter, something. But despite wanting to experience MDT as I did NZT, it was not to be. In the book MDT is described as “a drug for anal retentives who want to become more anal” (as it also is in the movie), but in the novel that’s all it really appears to be. In addition to giving you an overwhelming desire to clean your apartment and buy some swankier clothes, it does makes you smarter, yes, but that’s certainly not demonstrated by Book Eddie.

Book Eddie is dumb, Stupid. I was yelling at him – as I mentally yelled at Bradley Cooper watching the film – not to make stupid mistakes, and come up with a Plan. Movie Eddie pretty much does so, at least compared to hapless Book Eddie. For example, Book Eddie fails to grasp the importance of replicating the drug and getting his own supply until there’s a dozen pages left in the book. Our printed-page hero also keeps his MDT supply (a couple hundred pills) all together in one unguarded place. He also never comes up with a decisive plan to deal with Gennady, the Russian mobster. Though Movie Eddie also failed in this regard, Book Eddie keeps saying, “I needed a plan to deal with Gennady” every freakin’ time he finishes up an encounter with him.

This guy has a four-digit IQ?

The book’s ending is a super downer. In the film Van Loon and Gennady are developed to be the baddies, especially the financier, as potentially lethal roadblocks to Eddie’s vision of creating and doing something fantastic with the world. In the book, it’s a faceless eeeevil pharmaceutical corporation that’s been using Eddie as an unwitting and ignorant participant in an illegal drug trial and ultimately sentences him to a powerless death. (Though Glynn ends the novel before poor Eddie suffers his agonizing withdrawal-induced demise.)

There were better plot twists in the movie (i.e., Hank Atwood being on NZT, the aforementioned scummy lawyer stealing the NZT supply, the whole knife guy character), though this isn’t saying that the novel didn’t have its share. There’s a particularly good one on the final page. But after initial enthusiasm, I felt The Dark Fields kinda just plodded on, with ever growing certainty, toward a sorta deus ex machina of Eddie’s epic failure.

But I think the biggest reason the book let me down is that it’s yet another example of the “you can’t cheat the system / Mother Nature / Human nature” and “no good deed goes unpunished” theme so overused in science fiction. If this is the case, why does man bother extending himself with any type of self-improvement? Oh, but – you say – The Dark Fields and Limitless is a story about a drug … and drug use, abuse, and addiction.

And I say – it isn’t. It’s about potential. Unbounded potential.

Would I have liked the book better had it not been made into a movie? In all honesty, probably. It’s still a riveting read. I enjoyed every minute with it, with the possible exception of the final twenty minutes. In the final analysis, to me at least, the movie took what was good with the book and made it better, and excised completely what was not up to, say, NZT levels.

Grade B+

PS. A minor, minor point, but the editor in me sees these things: several Britishisms yanked me momentarily out of the story, i.e. “kerb” and “cheque.” Might have been another one; if so, it didn’t make a lasting impression.

PPS. For the record, I have never watched the Limitless TV show which debuted last September. I had a feeling it would stink since I found out the main character uses the godlike potentialities of NZT to … solve crimes. Solve crimes partnered with a hot cop chick just like any other of the hundred thousand police procedurals on the tube (cf. The Mentalist, Elementary, and Numbers, just to name a few, though I think Numbers had a hot scientist chick instead of a hot cop chick).

Umberto Eco

(1932-2016)

Umberto Eco was an Italian novelist and professor of semiotics (the study of symbols and metaphors, closely related to linguistics) who had a very big impact on me. He died yesterday at his home at the age of 84.

RIP

His first two novels, The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, were probably the first truly intellectual novels I read. I lived both twice, years apart. The Name of the Rose in college in 1986 and again in 2011; Foucault’s Pendulum as a respite from my wild band days in 1991 and later in 2003. Both are highly original historical detective mysteries, both have tight, compelling plots. Both are highly influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, another of my literary muses.

Both have long been on my list of All-Time Top Hundred Reads, over there to the left.

Eco wrote a couple of novels since, but they seemed instinctively to me to be departures from these first two, so I never read them. Perhaps I will; dunno, but I will keep my eye out for them.

Foucault’s Pendulum introduced me to the Knights Templar 25 years ago, way before they became dumbed-down denizens of our modern day culture’s conspiracy infatuation. The book is gripping, suspenseful, labyrinthine. Three bored Italian editors decide to feed historical conspiracy theories into a computer, and soon their hobby takes on a life of its own. We never know what is real and what is not, but apparently there are forces out there that take it all for reality.

In honor of the great writer I have reposted my review of The Name of the Rose from October of 2011:

With the exception of The Lord of the Rings, no other book has a greater association for me with the place that I’ve read it than Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Vividly do I recall those brisk fall nights I’d trek over to the college library, secure an isolated seat among the islands of privacy-walled desks, and hunker down for a two-hour reading session. Then, under cloudless moonlit nights, the crisp air swirling brown leaves about the labyrinth walkways leading back to my dorm, I’d hurry back, the 500-page hardcover nestled securely under arm. Already thinking about tomorrow night’s reading ... once I got tomorrow’s classes and cafeteria runs and homework and tests, studying and socializing out of the way.

I think it took about two weeks to finish Rose back then. Amidst rows and rows of furiously working students, I had only one objective: find out the murderer in the monastery. Oh, and I was in love with a girl in my hometown, so I counted the hours until Friday classes were done with and I could drive my battered 1969 Dodge Dart home. Of classes and knowledge ingested that November twenty-five years ago I have no recollection (I think I took an astronomy class). But the abbey and its mysterious library – the Aedificium – I have never forgotten.

The setting is an anonymous medieval monastery sometime in the early decades of the fourteenth century. Christianity – as practiced by human sinners, imperfect – is the axel about which all of society revolves. Indeed, civilization is continually thrust forward from the centers of learning populated invariably with Dominicans and Franciscans – the intelligentsia of the couple-century period between the “Dark Ages” and the “Enlightenment.”

Ostensibly, the book is a murder mystery. Who is slaying the monks of this abbey, at a rate of a killing a day, monks whose main task seem to be the copying of ancient and medieval texts (this being some 150 years before the invention of the printing press)? William of Baskerville is summoned to solve these crimes before the Inquisitor arrives under the pretext of settling some high-level political disputes between the Emperor, the Pope, and some orders which may or may not have fallen into heresy. The tale is narrated to us from William’s young but intelligent novice, Adso.

Soon it’s discovered that some cryptic book lies at the heart of the slayings. But the library, the “Aedificium,” is forbidden to all, William included, save the sole librarian of the abbey. The proto-detective and Adso soon sneak into the maze of the library, not once or twice but three times, in their search for the evil book which causes men to kill. The Aedificium is almost a full-fleshed character in the novel, so important is it to the plot, complete with its power to disorient and cause horrible visions and nearly frighten men to death. I was so taken with the Aedificium twenty-five years ago that I sketched out its layout, as done by William and Adso, intrigued at that ingenuous navigation scheme the builders designed within it.

Re-reading this book, as is true with rereading most books, was paradoxically both a disappointment as well as a font of new revelation. On the negative side, I already knew the killer’s identity and his reasonings and rationalizations. On the plus side, I was able to pick up on Eco’s foreshadowing and telescoping techniques that sailed over my head the first time. Some of the more emotionally explosive scenes – and there were at least a half-dozen or so – lacked the sheer punch of twenty-five years ago. Part of my heart hardening with age, I suppose, and part of my self-identification with Adso as we both dealt with our first loves (though in radically different forms)

However, the second reading really flushed out the background for me. For one, I am magnitudes more knowledgeable concerning Christianity, its background, practices, the more famous writings produced by the heroes of the faith, and the structure of the Church. All this I was ignorant of way back in college, and most of it flew over my head. Now, I actually know the relationship of Aristotle to Aquinas, and I know the characteristics of Dominicans versus Franciscans, and I know how the role of the Papacy has evolved, devolved, and re-evolved over the centuries. The second time around, I was a much more attentive and involved reader.

Particularly so since so much of The Name of the Rose focuses on books. Or scrolls to be more precise, the ancient and esoteric texts in Greek and Arabic and Latin that filled the monasteries of the middle ages, tracts not only on religion and theology but on politics, science, emotions, sociology, psychology, alchemy, travelogues to semi-mythical lands, and, of course, pagan philosophy. All tread a fine line between heresy and orthodoxy with the Church, and most at least toed the sands of heretical thought. As a mad crazy bibliophile, always on the prowl for The Book That Will Change Everything (at least in my life and how I perceive it), this substantial part of the Rose fascinated me to no end.

The best analogy to compare the two readings of Eco’s book is the same one I used to describe my re-readings of Tolkien. The first time, I could not see the forest for the trees. The second time, I could not see the trees for the forest. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. I just know that it’s a different thing. If I’m still on walking on this earthly sphere in another twenty-five years, I’ll reread both again, and see if the third time is a charm.

All that aside, The Name of the Rose is a great intellectual read, but not without its shocking share of grit and goth to keep you firmly grounded. I wholeheartedly recommend it, and give it a solid A.

(spoilers)

Second time around I picked up on a couple things, as well as read some revelations by Eco himself and from some online postings from his fans. For one, William of Baskerville is an homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his detective, Sherlock Holmes. The Hound of the Baskervilles, anyone?

I’ve also become a huge fan of Jorge Luis Borges over the past few years. The blind Argentinean writer and poet is known for his cryptic, esoteric, and philosophical fiction that never fails to raise goose bumps over my arms whenever I return to his short stories. How unfortunate that I cannot read him in the original Spanish but must rely on translations! A major character in The Name of the Rose is an ancient, blind monk named ... Jorge of Burgos. Another homage.

Speaking of Borges, Eco himself has said that, analogously, The Name of the Rose is to Borges’s “The Library of Babel” as Eco’s next novel, Foucault’s Pendulum is to Borges’s sublimely weird “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Now, if you’ve never read Borges or Eco, these titles will be meaningless to you. But if you have (or once you do, as I fervently encourage you booklovers to do), a wonderful a-ha! will click in your mind, prompting you to re-read them all again with a better understanding.

It’s been said elsewhere that everyone’s born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. I myself fluctuate, but on any given day I’m perhaps 75% Plato, 25% Aristotle. That being said, I found it a bit difficult to agree with the villain that Aristotle will sow the seeds of destruction for the human race. Or at least the somewhat lighthearted treatise of Aristotle’s the bad guy has in mind. But, I was able to suspend some disbelief and allow a character from a different time period and different culture to have his own set of beliefs and prejudices.

By the way, the movie absolutely stunk! Admittedly, I have not seen it since the late 80s, but it was so bad compared to Eco's source novel, that I won't see it again. However, and it's a big however, the casting of Sean Connery – light years away from his James Bond persona – as William of Baskerville was enlightened. All throughout my second reading of the novel I envisioned William as Connery. But casting Christian Slater as Adso was just a travesty.

The title has absolutely nothing to do with the novel. I learned that Eco originally wanted to title the book Adso of Melk, but the publisher balked. According to wikipedia, he then came up with ten alternate titles and had friends select their favorite. The Name of the Rose was chosen. FWIW.

Bottom line: Good book, good read. Scheduled for a third reading sometime around 2035 or 2036.

Spectre and the X-Files

Spectre

Saw Spectre the other day … and liked it a lot. Not loved it, but enjoyed it. Not a big fan of Daniel Craig’s James Bond. Too dour, moody, thuggish. I grew up on the Roger Moore James Bond, and while that characterization descended into clownishness at times, I miss the humor and suave sophistication Moore brought to those roles, particularly those in the 70s. Sean Connery, I guess, is the best Bond, bringing together the perfect proportions of physicality, light-heartedness, and, when called for, ruthlessness. A balanced Bond, unlike the robotic incarnation we’ve seen over the past decade.

Anyway, Spectre is more back to form, back to the 007 we grew up on and loved. I’ve always thought that the villain, and his egomaniacal world-dominating plot, were equally important, if not more so, to a Bond movie. And face it, the villains from the past few Craig flicks – Le Chiffre, Green, Silva – couldn’t hold a candle to Blofeld, Scaramanga, Drax, Stromberg. But now Blofeld’s back, played by the excellent Christoph Waltz, and he’s got his lair, and he’s got his world domination scheme (although I still pine for a more SF-ish MacGuffin).

Still hate the revisioning, though. But overall, I’d grade Spectre a solid B.

X-Files

Been watching the new X-Files reboot with the wife. Both of us were huge X-philes back in the day, twenty-some-odd years ago. But the new series strikes me as tired and aimless. Mulder looks bloated and drugged up; Scully looks like she went a little overboard with the botox. Both seem to be struggling too hard to recapture the magic. The first four episodes have been uneven, focusing more on gore than legitimately intriguing theories outta left field. I’d grade them, in order, D, C, B, and D. For a series that peaked with its first motion picture installment in 1998, The X-Files: Fight the Future, I’m not so sure the whole thing should have been resurrected.

But I may be biased.

I love reveling in nostalgia. I re-read those goose-bump-inducing books I originally cut my teeth on thirty years ago. I initiate my children in the cinema of my youth. I seek these things out, actively, like a detective, and the rediscovery and re-visitation give me great pleasure. For years I hunted for my beloved physics book, the book that made me major in the subject in college, and I am still searching for a comic book I read, and re-read, and re-read, way back in the fourth grade. Ah, nostalgia.

So I thought I would enjoy revisiting the original X-Files series. A friend has it on his FIOS stick thingie, and he lent it to me. The wife and I settled in for nostalgia overload over the past couple of nights and we watched the pilot and the first two episodes from Season 1. And you know what? I didn’t feel nostalgic at all. Instead, I just felt old.

Not sure why. Well, actually I have a pretty good idea. It’s because I was an adult when I saw the show’s original run. Not a kid. Now I’m just an older adult. And it’s not a comforting feeling.

Don’t know if we’ll continue to watch Season 1. We have the FIOS thingie for another five days. I think if, perhaps, I got Little One into it the show might deliver a good vibe for me, but the wife doesn’t think she’s old enough yet. I dunno; I’ve watched John Carpenter’s The Thing and Vin Diesel’s Pitch Black with her, to no ill effect. But I’ll capitulate to the Mrs. on this. Probably because I’m feeling old …

Miscellanea

Movies on Deck:

The Walk

Everest

Current TV rage:

Portlandia

Current musical infatuation:

Mozart, particularly his piano concertos