Book Review: The Singer's Gun. Emily St. John Mandel (2009).

The author of The Singer’s Gun, Emily St. John Mandel, is a Canadian author best known for her bestselling dystopian novel of a global plague and community in the post-apocalyptic aftermath, Station Eleven (reviewed here).  That novel was also turned into a popular mini-series on Max (formerly HBO).

 

I really enjoyed Station Eleven, and was very impressed with it, but I’ve been less enthusiastic about a couple of her more recent novels. Despite that, I discovered The Singer’s Gun, her second novel, on a bookshelf recently, and decided to give it a try. I’m very glad I did, because it has been one of the surprise treats of my fiction reading this spring.

 

And I do mean surprise, because it’s a little difficult to categorize what sort of novel this is. I didn’t know that much about it when I picked it up, but despite that it continued to intrigue and surprise me all the way through -- I never knew quite what to expect as I read along.

 

The book has been described as “noir”, and it definitely is that in terms of its mood, but it’s not a conventional murder mystery. It has aspects of a crime novel, and of a spy thriller, with a little dystopian flavor added from the realistic surveillance technology and lack of individual privacy which plays a part in the plot, and is recognizably creepy yet very true to contemporary life. Reading it, you immediately feel that the story, personalities and situations are believable, even as you pray you never find yourself in any situations like those of the main characters.

 

The hero of the story is Anton, an up-and-coming young professional in New York with a problem. Actually, he has several problems. One of them is Sophie, the girlfriend he is trying to marry, who has already cancelled their wedding once, and may or may not do it again, and really, he’s not even sure he loves her. But his biggest problem is that he has secrets from his early life growing up in a family of criminals. He very much wants to leave his own life of crime and dishonesty behind, but his family has issues with that, especially his sister, who is involved in something sinister, and is determined to get him to do one last job for her.

 

Meanwhile, there’s also Elena, a young Canadian woman who’s been Anton’s personal assistant at work for the past several years. She has her own set of problems, including her own spouse Caleb, who doesn’t seem to be a great fit for her, and a set of false papers for immigration she bought from Anton.

 

Into this situation of two basically nice and decent young people trapped by the lies and crimes of their past, and the bad choices they’ve made in their love lives, comes Broden, an investigator, leading an Orwellian investigation that slowly but inexorably pulls them each into its orbit. As the investigation deepens, and Anton’s final job for his criminal sister is repeatedly postponed, things begin to fall apart for both of them, and their desperation grows as each of their individual options for survival and freedom narrow.           

 

The author does a wonderful job of developing her characters, and slowly but steadily ratcheting up the fear and tension as events move to their unexpected conclusion. I have to admit that I was so wrapped up in all their immediate problems as they unfolded, and their attempts to avoid the consequences of their past bad decisions, that I didn’t see the final dramatic developments coming. That just made the end of the story that much more satisfying and compelling.

 

I won’t say more about the plot details, but this is a very entertaining, suspenseful and romantic novel with some thought-provoking social commentary embedded. It would be a fun book for a book club to discuss, and would definitely make for an exciting movie plot if anyone ever made one from it! Great summer beach reading too. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Every (Dave Eggers, 2021).

A while ago, I wrote a review of Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle from 2015, which was made into a good film with Emma Watson in the starring role. The Circle told the story of a naïve young woman who goes to work for a huge, powerful California tech company (called The Circle), that combines an insular campus full of idealistic young employees, a charismatic male founder with cult-leader magnetism, and the sort of messianic “save the world through better tech and openness” approach to business that is by now all too familiar.

I’ve recently become a real fan of Dave Eggers, as I’ve read more of his books and come to appreciate what a fine and prolific writer he is. He is one of the few popular authors I know of who routinely produces outstanding, smart best-sellers in both fiction and non-fiction categories, and I’ve now enjoyed and appreciated several of his books from each genre.

 

But in The Every, Eggers’s sequel to The Circle, he has outdone himself, with a just-barely fictionalized account of a recognizable, chaotic, fast-evolving version of our society that will make you laugh at its absurdity, at the same time it will terrify you with how closely it appears to mirror our own world, and the dangerous directions in which we seem to be heading.

 

In The Every, The Circle has grown by mergers and acquisitions into a new mega-corporation (The Every) that now dominates almost every sphere of global business, and increasingly politics, communications, healthcare and the environment, through its tight control of supply chains and its massive financial power. But the real source of its power is data, obtained through the steady erosion of personal privacy protections, which are collapsing under a relentless onslaught of popular new smartphone applications, sold by The Every to an eager population under the guise of personal empowerment and self-improvement.

 

As in The Circle, the main protagonist is an intelligent and sympathetic young woman. But there the similarities end, because in The Circle, our hero (or anti-hero) Mae Holland took the frustrations and setbacks she encountered in her job as the fuel that led her to challenge the company’s leadership to a dangerous game of corporate politics, and through a series of smart moves and timely revelations to ultimately triumph over them.

 

In the nearly omnipotent and all-knowing environment of The Every, though, our hero is Delaney, on a secret private mission to work her way into the company, to find the one lever that will allow her to destroy it in the hope of saving human privacy and freedom. With the help of a hacker friend, she manages to get hired, then slowly evolves a plan to use her social engineering skills to propose new applications so horrific in their privacy implications that she dreams they will create a public revolt that must lead to the company’s demise.

 

There’s only one problem with her plan. Each time she helps create another terrible new privacy-violating app, it becomes wildly popular, leading to even less freedom and privacy for everyone, and turns into another huge triumph for The Every instead. Can Delaney find a way out of her increasingly hopeless situation? And how long can she keep up her quixotic campaign to save the world, before she’s discovered and fired or worse?

 

This is an inspired dystopian novel, and a black comedy as well. It’s funny in the sense that every time another setback occurs, as Delaney’s subversive plans produce the exact opposite result that we would expect and hope for (in terms of peoples’ presumed desire for freedom and dignity), you have to laugh. And admit to yourself that although it’s another very depressing plot twist, it also seems perfectly realistic – exactly what you believe would probably happen in our own society, as well as the world of the novel.

 

It’s brilliant too in its portrayals of the behavior of people at work in a modern tech company, as they deal with the internal contradictions between their desire to please management, to gain status relative to their peers, to conform to get ahead, and to handle qualms about doing something seemingly immoral or repugnant when it also pays their salaries.

  

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World asked essentially the same questions about what we humans want (as between technology and freedom) almost a century ago, but most of the science and technology he envisioned in his story didn’t exist yet.  It does in the world of The Every. There’s hardly any advanced technology, or corporate, political and social behavior modification in this book that isn’t already here, or utterly believable based on current trends.

 

Read it and dread (or maybe not, depending on where you are on the “convenience versus privacy” spectrum).  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Slow Horses (2010). Mick Herron.

Hello, and welcome to the new year here at The Memory Cache. Today we're talking about spies, and novels about them.  

I recently became aware of a long-running series of spy thrillers, beginning with this one, Slow Horses, and their author Mick Herron, while reading end of the year book reviews in one of my favorite magazines.

This series of novels is in the process of becoming much more widely popular and better known, since it is now being produced on Apple TV+ as a TV series. I haven’t seen the TV show yet, and haven’t read the books either, except this one, the first in what have become almost annual new installments in the book series (right up to Bad Actors, 2022), but so far, it’s looking very promising.

At one point in my life, I was an enthusiastic fan of spy novels and authors, although not all of them by any means. I generally liked the stories that focused on the people, the relationships, the betrayals, the conspiracies, the lies and deceit – if it’s all just exploding gizmos and car chases, it’s not that interesting to me. I was never a big James Bond fan. But there were other spy stories and writers that I did like.

My favorite author in the genre for many years was Charles McGarry, a former career CIA agent who wrote an entire series of novels about an old American family of blue blood New Englanders, the Christophers, for whom espionage had been the family business for generations. 

There was even one historical romance in the series, The Bride of the Wilderness (1988) about the family’s origins, set in the early colonial era. The greatest of McGarry’s novels, though, was probably The Last Supper (1983), about young Paul Christopher, whose fictional brilliant career but tragic personal life spanned World War II, Vietnam and the Cold War, as well as several of McGarry’s other novels.

McGarry was one of the most literarily satisfying spy writers I’d encountered. His mastery of character, convoluted plots, believable but unforeseen betrayals and realistic spy tradecraft put him at the top of my list of spy novelists for many years. Of course, I read and enjoyed many of the other most celebrated spy novelists of our times too, including John Le Carre’, Frederick Forsyth, Alan Furst and Tom Clancy among others.

But when the Cold War ended, for a while it seemed to me that maybe there wasn’t much to write about anymore, at least with contemporary plot lines and stories, until the 9/11 era got well underway and dispelled our "end of history" illusions. Fortunately, with the writing of Mick Herron, and his Slow Horses (or Slough House) series, we now have a worthy successor to the World War II and Cold War masters of the spy thriller, creating rich new tales of people and espionage in our current moment.

It’s interesting that many of the greatest spy writers of our era, including Le Carre’, Forsyth, McGarry and Ian Fleming, had been spies themselves, which surely informed their portrayals of spy tradecraft, conspiracy and the personalities of their characters. Mick Herron, like Tom Clancy, was not a former spy. He was just a struggling British crime novelist, looking for a new angle to try to achieve some success as a writer. So, he decided to try writing spy novels, and Slow Horses was his first attempt. It was clearly successful.

The setting is modern London circa 2010, where (in the story) MI-5 (Britain’s domestic intelligence organization) maintains a seedy, depressing office called Slough House, populated with secret agents who have somehow failed or embarrassed themselves, and are therefore assigned to pass their days doing demeaning errands and pointless scut work for the “real” agents at Regent’s Park. The whole idea of the place is to put disgraced agents (mocked by their peers as “slow horses”, like the losers that compulsive gamblers always bet on) somewhere so demoralizing that they will quit their jobs and save the organization the trouble of firing them.

In his introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of Slow Horses, Herron reveals that he didn’t really know anything about spies when he set out to write the book, but he did know about organizations, and people, and modern office workplaces. And that is the genius of his premise for the book (and presumably the series).

He tells an engaging story of a group of damaged people in a recognizably dysfunctional modern office environment, at work, under the most demoralizingly bureaucratic circumstances imaginable, and then shows how an unexpected challenge brings out the individual and collective capacity for creativity and heroism in a team of hopelessly normal and flawed humans, in a workplace we can all recognize, even if we’ve never been spies ourselves.

Herron’s ability to describe situations and settings is gifted, and leans toward the dark and comical. I struggled a little to get through the first third of the book, in which he describes this bleak, dirty and depressing office, and introduces each of the seemingly pathetic agents working there. But the writing was so funny, smart and ironic that I stayed with it, until an important plot twist – the kidnapping of a young man by unknown assailants, who threaten to chop off his head – jump starts the members of this hapless group of slow horses to try to do something, and act like secret agents, even if their bosses don’t want them to.

Once we’d met all the characters, toured their shabby offices, and the plot got going, it was almost impossible to put the book down. And in the course of the rest of the story, there were some prescient and very timely observations and plot twists that spoke to genuine perils and afflictions of British society and politics today, as well as the expected dangers and adversity experienced by the characters.

Slow Horses was a lucky first book for 2023 for me – it’s so much fun to read an exciting and entertaining story like this one, and discover there are many more of them waiting to be read. I expect I’ll be bingeing the other ones in the series over the next few months. And no doubt I’ll check out the TV show too, just to see how it compares to the book(s). Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Sweetness of Water (2021). Nathan Harris.

I picked up this recent first novel by Nathan Harris, which became an immediate bestseller and an award-winner last year, based on rave reviews from my wife and several friends in her book club who had already read it. It did not disappoint – it’s a beautifully told story of white and black characters trying to survive and find meaning in the deep South, in the midst of the social turmoil at the end of the Civil War.

The slaves have been freed, and the Union Army arrives in town to enforce the new social order. That doesn’t protect the freed slaves from the hostility, fear, racism and hatred of much of the white population, but it has opened the door to some new opportunities and possibilities.

If this were just a book about the struggles of recently freed slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War, it would still be remarkable, but it is so much more than that. At the center of the story is an old white man George and his wife Isabelle, living alone on their farm outside of town, as they await news of the fate of their son Caleb, a Confederate soldier in the war. 

Caleb turns out to be a complex character himself; once we learn his story, it’s revealed that he is something of a disgrace, and is carrying several heavy secrets that could exact a terrible price on him and his family if they were revealed. Yet he is an only child, and is still loved by his parents.

Then there are two young brothers, Prentiss and Landry, freed slaves who George first encounters in the woods near his home. Out of their basic human decency and kindness, and perhaps measures of guilt, both George and Isabelle each slowly become involved with the two brothers, and try to help them get a start on their new lives, in part to fill their own feelings of loss and loneliness.

Under the stresses of their world and their individual situations, we come to learn ever more about these five people, and a number of other characters that come in and out of their lives. Through their eyes, we experience something of the intense social pressures at play in the small southern town, and we feel the savage cruelty and intolerance of the many, but also the human kindnesses and vulnerabilities to be found among individuals, even within a community poisoned by prejudice.

The exploration of the emotional dynamics of the marital relationship between George and Isabelle is particularly moving. It captures perfectly the search for balance and harmony between two different (and difficult) personalities in a long-term love relationship, and probes some of the different ways in which compassionate people try to come to terms with their own guilt and responsibility for the monstrous crimes of the unjust society they inhabit.

The Sweetness of Water is one of the most satisfying and realistic stories I’ve read about what social life looked like in the late 1860s in the South, as the Civil War ended and southern society tried to figure out what to do next. It is certainly not a hopeful portrait of where things were headed, yet for these characters, we’re left with some sense of redemption and the promise of better lives for the future.

This is a truly excellent fictional account of a difficult historical period, with strong resonance in our own society today, more than a century and a half later. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Sea of Tranquility (2022). Emily St. John Mandel.

This is an earnest first attempt at a real science-fiction novel by the author of Station Eleven, which follows a number of ordinary human characters in different earth eras, from the early 20th century to an imagined future a few centuries ahead, where there are human colonies on the moon, and in deep space too.

In addition to those sci-fi story creations and plot premises, she also includes a time travel element, and plays with the contemporary fascination with the possibility of reality being nothing more than an advanced computer simulation. In this book, she imagines a world where that may in fact be the case, but also poses the question of whether that actually matters to the people experiencing that reality.

There’s also a global pandemic in the story, and an author separated from her family, on a book tour at its onset, who may or may not die as a result of the disease. Remember that this story is coming from a popular real author, who had previously written a real novel about a global pandemic (Station Eleven), then had to keep functioning as a professional writer and mother during an actual pandemic. There’s something so familiar sounding about that scenario! A little projection onto her fictional character, perhaps?

As with her other books, Mandel’s strength is in creating believable characters with whom we can empathize, and believable dialogue in unusual or unfamiliar situations. Even though the story suggests themes of the COVID-19 era of the past two years, and our collective experience of it, it is still an entertaining and engaging tale. Recommended.

Book Reviews: Honorable Mentions: Fiction, Mysteries and Thrillers.

Today I'm posting another one of my "Honorable Mentions" special features of short reviews of five related types of books.  Today I want to talk about historical novels, spy thrillers and mysteries I've enjoyed. 

Book Review: The Girl From Venice (2016). Martin Cruz Smith.

Martin Cruz Smith is a very good and rather prolific thriller writer, most famous for his nine-book Gorky Park series about Arkady Renko, the disillusioned Russian police detective just trying to do his job while faced with nearly insurmountable political, bureaucratic and international espionage situations in the late Cold War and post-Cold War eras.

The Girl from Venice is one of his creative departures from the Arkady Renko books (I previously reviewed another one, December 6). This one is also a very worthwhile entertainment, and a quick-read historical thriller, about a 28-year-old war-weary fisherman in 1945 Italy, who catches a "dead" young woman in his fishing net, only to stumble into a whole series of dangerous situations as World War II in Italy, and the Allied invasion, rushes to its final chaotic conclusion. Recommended.
 

Book Review: The Red Sparrow Trilogy: Red Sparrow (2013), Palace of Treason (2015), and The Kremlin’s Candidate (2018). Jason Matthews.

This is an excellent set of modern spy novels, written by a real-life veteran CIA agent. When the cold war ended, a lot of us thought it might be the end of the great spy novel era too. As this trilogy demonstrates, there’s nothing to worry about on that front – the world’s second oldest profession is alive and well, along with the literary scene devoted to it.

These books have well-developed characters, a brave and tough heroine, great plots, nerve-shattering suspense, incredible complexity and realistic details of how modern spy operations are planned and carried out. The fact that they centered on the vicious and toxic regime of Vladimir Putin and the political world of post-Soviet Russia, before all of us were fully aware of the nature of his brutal regime, gives the books added authenticity.

The first book, Red Sparrow, was made into a popular spy thriller movie starring Jennifer Lawrence. These books are all recommended.
  

Book Review: Everyone Brave is Forgiven (2016). Chris Cleave.

This is a fictional story of three young people (a woman and two men) coming of age in London and Malta during the Blitz in the early part of World War II. Through their stories, we see the hard choices each one has to make, between their dreams for their own personal futures, and the unavoidable and limited options to be had in a time of war, sacrifice and loss.

There’s a love triangle, and a good English World War II adventure story, with a particularly vivid description of the lesser-known privations and tragedy of the British attempts to defend Malta. 

Apparently the author was inspired to tell this story by love letters from the period by family members. The book is beautifully written. Recommended.
  

Book Review: Midnight in Europe (2015). Alan Furst.

This book is a predictably great read, as we can expect with most Alan Furst novels. For those who are not familiar with him, Alan Furst is arguably the best World War II spy fiction thriller writer of our generation. 

His books tend to take place in different locales across Europe in the pre-war 1930s, and during the early war years, and he focuses on portraying the kinds of dangerous situations and unavoidable daily moral choices people faced as a consequence of the simultaneous rise of fascism and Soviet communism during this period.

This particular novel takes place in Paris in 1938, as the Spanish Republicans try desperately to find arms across Europe for their lost cause, the Spanish Civil War against General Franco and his army. It has Furst’s usual cast of mostly middle-aged men and women trying to figure out how to survive and maneuver against Nazi and Soviet spies and sympathizers, the secret police of various countries, local informers and the coming onslaught of total war. Recommended. 

 

Book Review: Another Man's Moccasins (2008). Craig Johnson. Walt Longmire Series #4. 

I previously reviewed the first three books in Craig Johnson’s 20+ book series about his modern western sheriff Walt Longmire, and his fictional Wyoming world of Absaroka County, where he tries to keep the peace and solve murders in his fraught small-town rural community of whites, Native Americans, Basques and others, with the help of a memorable supporting cast, including his Indian friend Henry Standing Bear, his tough young female deputy Vic Moretti, his daughter Cady and others.

Along the way, he usually has to interact with and come to understand a variety of new local characters and competing economic interests, in order to get to the bottom of whatever crime has been committed.

In Another Man’s Moccasins, the main crime at the heart of the story involves the murder of a young Vietnamese woman, possibly but not definitely by a disturbed young Crow Indian man. Without giving away the plot, I’ll just mention that there is a story line about sex trafficking, but also a mysterious link to Longmire’s own history as a U.S. Marine Military Policeman in the Vietnam war, a plot device that allows the author to further develop Longmire’s character and backstory, as well as that of Henry Standing Bear and their lifelong friendship.

This will probably be my last Longmire book review – it’s a very good series, the best murder mystery series I’ve encountered recently (I’m not generally that big a fan of the genre), especially because of the excellent characters and great dialogue. But it is a long series, and after awhile it just becomes an enjoyable pastime to read them. They’re not that individually memorable after you've read a few -- a common problem with long-running mystery series, I find. But still, recommended.

Book Review: The Lincoln Highway (2021). Amor Towles.

The Lincoln Highway is the third and most recent bestselling historical novel by Amor Towles, who left a twenty-year career as an investment professional to become (more or less out of nowhere) one of our most skilled contemporary novelists and storytellers. It has some similarities to the other two novels, but diverges in its narrative approach, which entails jumping back and forth between the stories of four different characters, all tied together by their roles in a youthful road trip.

Towles’ specialty seems to be in focusing in on the lives of rather ordinary fictional characters, and artfully depicting their everyday growth and struggles, while bringing alive the historical eras in which their lives take place. In the process, his beautifully drawn main protagonists also come into contact with other interesting characters, and find themselves in unexpected situations that range from the amusing and mundane to the morally challenging and dangerous.

In his first novel, Rules of Civility (previously reviewed), his main protagonist is a young woman from a lower class background, trying to work, party and find her way into the elite social world of New York’s upper class during the 1930s. In A Gentleman in Moscow (also previously reviewed), Towles’ main character is a former member of the Russian aristocracy, now trying to build a life under house arrest in Moscow in the post-revolutionary 1920s.

The Lincoln Highway is primarily the story of Emmett, an 18-year old Nebraska boy in 1954 rural America, who is being driven home at the beginning of the story to his late father’s farm. Emmett is driven by the warden from the reform school where Emmett had been incarcerated for the past year, for accidentally killing another young man with an angry (if perhaps justified) punch. Waiting there for him at the farm are his exceptionally bright 8-year old brother, as well as a neighbor girl (who appears to be fond of him) and her farmer father, who wants to acquire the farm.

In the course of the first chapters, we realize that Emmett is basically a good kid, who lost his temper and made a mistake, but who’s done some growing up as a result of his hard life experience. However, his immediate prospects are discouraging: the family farm is forfeit because of his father’s inability to make it work, so Emmett has a different plan. He wants to abandon the farm, take the small amount of money he inherits, and set out with his younger brother in his well-maintained Studebaker sedan to California, where he hopes to start buying and renovating houses, and building a good life for the two of them.

Unfortunately, fate has different ideas, in the form of two of his fellow young prisoners, who appear unexpectedly after escaping and stowing away in the warden’s car, with their own plan to join Emmett and his brother on their road trip. These two young fugitives have come up with a plot to steal one of their inheritances on the way, and share the loot among the four of them. What could go wrong? But of course, plenty could and does go wrong, and eventually they will all end up not in California, but in New York instead.

Along the way they get separated, face different dangers, meet unusual new characters, reunite, and bring their strange road trip to its unexpected end, with powerful and life-changing consequences for each of them.

At the beginning, as soon as the two escaped prisoners showed up and revealed a little about their respective characters and backgrounds, I could barely stand to keep reading. It was so obvious that they were going to spell trouble for Emmett and his little brother, and that their clever plot would go wrong. Three teenage young men with histories of poor judgment, and a vulnerable but precocious child, heading off in a car on a seemingly larcenous and crackpot quest? It sounded like a prescription for a heart-breaking disaster.  

Fortunately, the plot twists and surprises continued to be intriguing and unexpected, and new revelations continually added depth to each of the characters, so I kept with the story just to find out what would happen next. It turned out to be well worth the trouble, as the pace steadily picked up, and the suspense increased all the way to the dramatic conclusion. Recommended.

Book Review: The Overstory (2018). Richard Powers.

I previously reviewed three books by Richard Powers, including his most recent novel, Bewilderment, and two older ones, The Echo Maker and Orfeo, each of which were powerful tales of well-drawn characters struggling with individual personal crises in the midst of the larger calamities of planetary environmental decline and threats.

Powers’ 2018 novel The Overstory is very much in the same vein as these other works, but is perhaps the most remarkable of all of them, in that the central figure in the story is not the humans, but the ancient trees that surround them and sustain them. The dramatic tension at the heart of the story is the conflict between the humans who would destroy the trees, whose very existence supports their own lives, and a small group of humans who dedicate themselves to trying to save the trees and the forests, by whatever means they can devise.

Powers creates a powerful narrative story line about the trees themselves: he vividly describes their incomprehensibly long lives, their astonishing forms of communication and mutual support, and the complex planetary ecosystem which they have created over vast periods of time. In doing so, he provides a fascinating lesson in the contemporary scientific understanding of trees, and reveals many remarkable aspects of this ubiquitous ancient life form that is all around us, yet so often taken for granted.

However, there are important human characters in the story too. And here Powers uses a narrative device that is at first frustrating, which is that he slowly develops the backstories for a number of these characters in isolation from the others, one chapter at a time, so that deep into the book, it still seems that all we have is a series of short biographies of different people in different places, each in some way tied to a story of trees. 

Eventually, though, Powers brilliantly weaves all the threads together, as the characters meet each other, and begin to take individual and collective action, to fight for the trees, and to seek solutions to the environmental crisis they recognize. 

It was at this point, late in the book, that I began to recognize similarities to the real life story of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) in the American West in the 1990s and early 2000s, whose idealistic young members’ first non-violent tree-sitting actions eventually led to the formation of an eco-terrorist group.  

This book is fictional, and not in any sense a historical account, but the group's development within the novel, the psychological evolution of the members within the group as they become increasingly desperate to stop the logging of old growth forests, and many other aspects of the story seem reminiscent of what is known of the ELF, as well perhaps as that of many other small militant groups of young idealists throughout history.

The Overstory is simply a stunningly powerful novel about trees, our dependence on them, and the increasing urgency and desperation of sensitive souls among us who recognize the destruction we have wrought as a species on the trees and the planet, and try to take collective action to stop the devastation and save the forests. In the process, they run into the limitations of individual and small-group solutions, and are forced to face their own powerlessness to compel the outcomes they believe are necessary to save the world.

Although his most recent novel Bewilderment is also outstanding, and has very similar themes, I believe The Overstory is Powers’ greatest novel thus far, a marvelous book which has forever changed my own understanding of trees, their lives and the essential role they play in the environment of our world. Very highly recommended.

Book Series Review: Outlander. Diana Gabaldon.

I previously reviewed the ninth novel in the long series of Outlander novels by Diana Gabaldon, Go Tell the Bees that I Am Gone (2021), but have now decided that I ought to provide a little more information and a description of the entire set of books in the series, which began with the release of the first novel, Outlander, in 1991. That's mainly because, after spending several years reading all nine of the gigantic Outlander novels (each one runs roughly 900 pages of hardback-sized pages filled with small, densely compacted text), I've become a completely devoted fan of this amazing long-running book series.

I was happy to learn last year, around the time Go Tell The Bees That I Am Gone was published, that Dr. Gabaldon (yes, the author is also a PhD biologist) plans to write a tenth and final Outlander novel before the series concludes at the end of the American Revolution. This may take her a few years, if past performance is an indication; each novel she's added to the series has taken roughly five years to appear after the preceding one.  Fortunately, recent online stories confirm that she is now at work on this tenth novel, so at least we can start the clock running on when it might arrive!

I decided to try to read the first book after becoming a fan of the Starz TV show, Outlander,  which is closely based on the book series. These novels (and the show) are a curious mix of genres, combining well-researched historical fiction, romance and sex from a woman's perspective, and science fiction/fantasy, which have drawn generations of enthusiastic readers and now TV viewers to the outstanding TV version of the story.

The main character and principal narrator at the heart of the stories is Claire Randall, a modern Englishwoman and feisty, resourceful young veteran of World War II service as a combat nurse. While on a "getting reacquainted" holiday after the war with her husband Frank, she accidentally falls through a time portal in a ring of ancient standing stones, and ends up alone in early 1740s Scotland, where she has to quickly adapt to a very different world and life in order to survive. 

They're very thick novels, rich in period detail, adventure and racy love stories, and very addicting, but they take a long time to read, and the plot jumps around between olden and modern (20th century) times, so I'll refrain from recounting the contents of each book in my review.

So what are they about? Mainly, they're incredibly rich historical novels. They portray individual, social and family life in the past through a large cast of interesting characters, whose stories and fates are interwoven through their family relationships, wars, rebellion and coincidence across a specific arc of past time, history and locations.

That arc begins with the Jacobite uprising for “Bonnie Prince Charlie” in Scotland in the early 1740s, then moves through the post-Culloden Scottish migration to America, colonial life in the new world, and the years of the American Revolution -- which, as Diana Gabaldon has explained in interviews, is the period when the pre-industrial world was transitioning to the modern scientific and technological era.

They're also wonderful romance novels, focused primarily on one couple (Jamie and Claire Fraser), but also on their children, close family members and friends, and the intimate details of their various sex lives, loves, traumas, battles, adventures and relationships over decades.

But wait, there's more! They also contain a very good sci-fi/fantasy time-travel story, with occasional bits of apparent magic thrown in, as well as a fascinating ongoing exploration of modern medicine in contrast to primitive healing, and the knowledge and beliefs of each, along with convincing portrayals of what ordinary life was like before germ theory, anatomical knowledge and penicillin were discovered.

With all that going on, these Outlander books take forever to read and absorb, but at least from my perspective, it is totally worth it. These books now rank among my top fiction series ever, along with Patrick O'Brien's epic 20-volume Master and Commander Aubrey/Maturin series, C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, Frank Herbert's original 6-volume Dune series, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Very highly recommended.

Book Reviews: Honorable Mentions List (Fiction and Science Fiction)

In my most recent personal note from last Sunday, July 23rd, I mentioned that I wanted to try occasionally posting an "Honorable Mentions" list, with only short descriptions of a number of items at once, rather than a longer review of a single book or show. Let's try it today! There's no time like the present for trying new things, is there?
 

American War (2017). Omar El Akkad.

This is a dark dystopian tale of a young woman growing up in a refugee camp in the 2070s in what remains of the American south, and becoming a fanatical warrior for another lost cause as a result of the traumas of her life, suffered in an America torn by a second civil war, the ongoing disasters of climate change, sea levels rising, and a pandemic caused by a bio-terrorism attack.

As in the nineteenth century Civil War era, the south is again the center of misery, ignorance and bigotry, but in a drastically reduced nation where no one has escaped the pain or moral conflicts growing out of multiplying political and ecological crises. 

It's thought-provoking, and definitely captures a lot of the fears and zeitgeist of our own times, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent Trump presidency and its turbulent aftermath. Recommended.

 

The Anomaly (2021). Herve Le Tellier.

This is a science fiction thriller and philosophical exploration of the contemporary theory popular in tech and gaming circles that life and "reality" may be a computer simulation.  The plot is set in motion when a commercial passenger jet passes through a violent storm, and then emerges safely to land – twice – but four months apart.

In the story, when this mysterious event happens, we then have two sets of the same people aboard, with a four-month difference in their experiences (the later arrivals would have missed what the other ones had been doing in the meantime). 

The rest of the story explores many aspects of the chaos such an event would create.  Among the passengers and flight crew, who is the "real" person? How would the discrepancies be resolved about who is really who, and who owns what? How would people in various types of human relationships and organizations with the two sets of survivors contend with the sudden appearance of apparent almost-duplicate people? And how would governments and the public deal with a logic-defying problem of this magnitude?

An interesting and well-told "thought experiment" story, with a philosophical and logical exploration of the "simulation" theory of reality. Recommended.  

 

The Circle (2015). Dave Eggers.

The Circle is a science fiction novel that focuses on the cultish behavior and seductive powers of social manipulation exercised by our major tech companies. In this telling, "The Circle" is a giant Facebook-like tech company that creates inexpensive networked micro-cameras that can easily be placed anywhere, to surveil anything, anyone and any place.

Along with its ubiquitous spying and secret-smashing technology, The Circle has a founder and leader with a charismatic hold on the tech company, a compelling utopian vision of a society seemingly based on a radical form of honesty and truth-telling, and personal growth objectives for employees (and ultimately for all of society) that are being sold as positive and beneficial, but which contain a dark potential for ultimate control by the few leaders at the top. 

This book, told through the experiences of a naive young woman recruit to The Circle, was the basis for the 2017 movie of the same name starring Emma Watson. It is a very nice literary companion piece to various "big data" and "four big tech companies" nonfiction books I have read about the risks posed by the dominance of Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google in our high tech modern world. Recommended.
 

Exhalation (2019). Ted Chiang.

I read this excellent collection of science fiction short stories on the recommendation of the New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein, who interviewed the author on one of his podcasts. Checking the book listing on Amazon, I discovered that it has an A-list of other celebrities, starting with President Obama, who have also read it and given it outstanding reviews.

The short stories were indeed remarkable, beautifully written and explored deep philosophical topics. I find that my retention of the details of the plots of a number of different short stories like this is shorter than with a novel, but it wouldn't add anything to this review to go into those details anyway. Better to just get the book and read it yourself! 

It was definitely an enjoyable read, and time well spent. Recommended.


Station Eleven (2015). Emily St. John Mandel.

Station Eleven is a powerful end-of-the-modern-world dystopian novel, seen through the eyes of a small cast of characters whose lives are connected through the events of a world-wide plague that ends civilization and kills off 99% of humanity.

In addition to imagining what that world would be like, where modern technology is gone but the memory of it remains, the story focuses on a set of curious personal connections and events that tie the characters and their lives together at different times and in different places.  

This book has now been made into an HBO Max mini-series, which was also good, and which I will review at some point. The book and its author have also become somewhat legendary, for the book's seemingly prophetic exploration of the kinds of personal isolation and changes to social relations that might result from a massive pandemic, written shortly before the less catastrophic yet still profoundly disruptive COVID-19 pandemic that struck the world in 2020. Highly recommended.

 

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014). Clare North.

This book contains a time-travel plot device that is quite like the one in my longtime favorite novel of this genre, Replay (1986) by Ken Grimwood. The story of Harry August again poses the question of what it would be like, and what you would do, if you got the chance to live life over and over again, starting in the same young body and identity, in the same family, and in the same time period and circumstances, but where each time you started over again, you carried with you the memories of your previous lives.

What things would you change about yourself? What would you do to try to achieve better personal outcomes than previous times? Would you actually be able to improve your outcomes, or would the endless possibilities of every lifetime simply lead you to a life that was different, but not necessarily better or worse than the others?

Could you actually alter the course of human events and history? Would you end up with God-like powers of prediction, and the ability to shape events, or simply be endlessly frustrated by your inability to change the course of what is to come? And are you alone in this strange cycle of lives lived repeatedly, or are there others to be found out in the world who are on the same treadmill? 

All these endlessly intriguing themes, and more, are explored and woven into the fascinating story of the many lives of Harry August, in a plot that moves quickly and maintains interest and suspense throughout. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Varina (2018). Charles Frazier.

This is a beautifully written, haunting novel about Varina Davis, the much-younger wife of Jefferson Davis, and First Lady of the Confederacy, by the noted author of another Civil War epic and award-winning novel, Cold Mountain (1997) (which was also made into an outstanding movie of the same name in 2003 starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renee Zellweger).

Varina is written in a non-sequential fashion, jumping from her youth and adolescent years, to the story of how she ended up married to Davis, with important moments, insights and experiences she had from before, during and after the Civil War, and then from episodes and periods later in her life.

In the story, we gain a sense of a young woman who made understandable choices out of necessity early in life that unexpectedly took her to a position of power and influence in a revolutionary moment, yet who was sensitive enough to realize along the way, and in the aftermath, the profound injuries and injustices of the course and the cause she’d chosen, and to regret her complicity in them.

I don’t know if this fictional portrayal of her character is fully accurate to the life and person of the real Varina Davis, but in Frazier’s telling, we get a very three dimensional portrayal of an intelligent woman trying to find her way through a life that was (for a time) exceptionally privileged, yet achieved at the expense of the suffering of so many others. 

She becomes increasingly aware of that suffering through the events and hardships she experiences as the southern rebellion collapses, and she has to find ways to go on with her life as a wife, mother and then widow, as well as a venerated celebrity in the South for her role in a failed cause that was considered traitorous and despicable by most of the rest of American society, and perhaps as well by her own conscience.   

Another interesting aspect of the story is Frazier's exploration of the extent to which Varina was automatically held responsible by many for the decisions and actions of her husband and the other powerful Confederate men around him, but on some levels had little agency in those decisions and their consequences, as a woman in 1860s American society.

I found it a gripping human story, powerfully told, despite the fact of her inherently unsympathetic supporting role in history as wife and First Lady at the center of the moral calamity that was the Confederacy. Recommended.

Book Series Review: The Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy: Crazy Rich Asians (2014), China Rich Girlfriend (2015), and Rich People Problems (2017). Kevin Kwan.

The first and best known of this three novel series, Crazy Rich Asians, was the basis for the blockbuster romantic comedy film of the same name (2018). 

It tells the story of a young Chinese-American woman and college professor, the daughter of a single mother who immigrated from mainland China, who falls in love with a handsome young Chinese man in New York, not realizing that he is the only son and primary heir of one of the oldest, most powerful and wealthiest families in Singapore. 

The problems begin when he invites her to a friend’s wedding back home in Singapore, without warning her about his family or his position in society there, and she begins to experience and realize the full power of the social forces arrayed against her, and her otherwise happy romance with her charming and attractive boyfriend.  

China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems continue the stories of the same cast of absurdly wealthy contemporary characters and their families from Singapore, mainland China and Hong Kong, presented as modern-day novels of manners, but with a large amount of tongue in cheek. 

This is all fun, light entertainment mixed with plenty of amusing social commentary. Kwan clearly enjoys detailing, relishing and skewering the excesses, cluelessness and foolishness of the over-privileged and over-indulged super-rich from Chinese society and elsewhere. Recommended.

Book Review: December 6 (2003). Martin Cruz Smith.

In my ongoing search for reading and entertainment available from the library by e-book during the pandemic, I started looking for novels from the past in the thriller/mystery vein by well-known authors in that genre, and fortunately stumbled on this one.

I knew I'd read several of the very good Martin Cruz Smith mystery novels about his Russian detective character Arkady Renko a long time ago, but this book is about another sort of anti-hero protagonist, Harry Niles, a cynical, rebellious son of American missionaries who grows up in 1930s Japan.

Niles is a gaijin (a white foreigner) who is nevertheless steeped in Japanese culture, art and criminality from having grown up in it, yet with a part of his identify and loyalty still tied to his American family and roots.

The novel is a well-written, gripping story of life on the edge of danger in Japan during the China war of the 1930s, with a little bit of a spy thriller plot about the impending Pearl Harbor attack included, along with an interesting portrayal of the China war and the lead-up to World War II as seen from the Japanese side.

This was definitely a worthwhile, interesting and exciting read in an unusual and little-visited historical setting. Recommended.

Book Series Review: The Dune Chronicles: Dune (1965), Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), Heretics of Dune (1984) and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985). Frank Herbert.

Today I'm doing something a little different.  Instead of writing a review of one book, I'm doing a quick summary of a series of related books by an author that deserve to be recognized as a whole body of work. There are several such series that are lifetime favorites of mine, so I'll begin with Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles, a 6-book set written and published during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.  

(I am not including in this discussion the many other Dune novels spun off and written by Herbert's son Brian Herbert, and several other writers with whom he collaborated, even though I understand that many of them were based on notes and ideas for stories which Frank Herbert had created).

There is no doubt that the Dune Chronicles is one of the greatest book series, if not the greatest, in all of science fiction.  I re-read all three of the first three Dune books recently for the first time in decades, and then kept going with the other three books in Herbert’s 6-book epic Dune series, in part to see how well they have withstood the test of time.

I’m pleased to report that they are still every bit as relevant, as prescient and as timeless as they seemed when I first read them long ago; in fact, some recent commentators have suggested they’re even more relevant now, given the geopolitical, military and ecological developments on planet Earth since Herbert finished the last of the books in the 1980s.

The first three and best-known novels in the 6-book set, Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune, trace the rise and fall of a galactic empire under a young nobleman, Paul Atreides, who becomes the messianic leader of an oppressed people on the desert planet of Dune when he acquires the ability to see the future. Its narrative arc is centered around a classic “hero’s journey” story line, inextricably linked to a long tale of revolution, imperial foundation, conquest and dissolution.

The stories feature great power conflicts and intrigue on a bleak desert planet, a poor but well-adapted nomadic people with a mysterious, fierce religion, and a valuable resource they control that is key to all interplanetary travel and trade. Sound familiar? It did in the 1960s and 1970s too, even before the 1973 Oil embargo and the Middle East Forever Wars of our recent times.

The remaining three books (God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune) are somewhat more esoteric. God Emperor of Dune brings a final end to the Paul Atreides-centered imperial era, by revealing how his son Leto II acquired godlike powers and near immortality, and then instituted a forced era of peace and civilizational stagnation across the galaxy spanning thousands of years.

Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune then trace various further developments in the long history of interstellar humanity, and the ultimate fates of several of the secretive organizations and movements that played such important roles in the first three Dune novels.

I actually found the latter three books better, and more memorable and intriguing this time, than when I read them when they were first published in the 1980s, but I believe they are more of an acquired taste. They may be too complex and too far removed for many readers from the simpler “hero’s journey” and “rise and fall of an empire” themes of the first three books.

Nevertheless, all these stories are rich in ecological, political, religious, military and economic speculation, and come with loads of intrigue and adventure. They were also exceptional compared to most "golden age" science fiction stories, in Herbert's interest in and explorations of the power and importance of women and their social roles, intellects and abilities in the human story, as well as those of the men. Very highly recommended.