An unparalleled view of a darkly divided Israel in My Promised Land

From The Week of February 24, 2014

As much as we are individuals, endowed with our own wills, our own freedoms and our own futures, our lives are profoundly shaped by our ancestors and the lands into which they delivered us. We may rebel against them as a means of establishing our own identities, but the traditions, the habits, the pursuits that they considered important bed down in us until, eventually, we recognize their value and incorporate them into our own worldview. For the fortunate, these inherited values are confined to trivialities like what sporting teams we favor and what kind of manners we hold dear, but for those cultures who have suffered grievously at the hands of others, these values are fundamental to who they are, a series of unbroken vows made to those who died so that others may live. Rarely has this life-defining notion been so exquisitely captured than in Ari Shavit's sociopolitical history of Israel.

A meager strip of coastal and desert land hugging the Mediterranean sea, Israel has been for 60 years, a beacon of democracy and innovation in the Middle East. A fraction of the size of most of its neighboring nations, with whom it is on uneasy terms, it has, since its creation in 1948, consistently and stubbornly fended off annexation, defeating militaristic threats to its sovereignty with superior technology and tactics. Throughout, it has provided a proud and flourishing homeland for the Jewish people who, after the fall of Judea to the Romans in the 1st century, had been forced to nomadically roam through Asia and Europe, spending 1,900 years persisting in lands peopled by those who welcomed them and abhorred them. This disenfranchised journey came to an end in the Second World War when the Nazis' genocidal hatred made it clear that the Jewish people would never be safe living under foreign suns.

However, as much as Israel is an astonishing success, as much as its economic and industrial revolutions have shaped it into a land to be envied and a power to be feared, this triumph has come at a terrible cost to the Palestinian people who occupied this land prior to 1948. Muted and marginalized, their lands stolen and their region transformed, the Palestinians have been forced to watch while their homeland has been developed into a paean to the West: its institutions, its culture and its excesses. This transformation has fuelled resentments, grudges that have hardened with time and ill deeds, into malignancy that eats away at the heart of the Israeli miracle, burdening this new nation with the curse of its problematic founding.

A remarkable, first-hand journey through the 60 years of Israeli history, My Promised Land is a frank, confrontational and profoundly personal accounting of life in the world's first Jewish country in nearly 2,000 years. Mr. Shavit, a journalist for one of Israel's most prominent newspapers, collects the family histories of several of Israel's key luminaries, including that of his own father, and uses them to characterize the political and cultural forces that shape Israeli existence. In this, his work calls to mind George Packer's The Unwinding, an outstanding work of non-fiction with which My Promised Land is more than capable of keeping up. For it is an aggressive, unflinching and honest examination of the actions and the trends that have brought Israel to its present-day crisis with the Arab world.

Of its many virtues, My Promised Land provides the reader with a profound understanding of Zionism, that potent skein of Jewish belief that both founded their nation and seeded its future troubles. The author personalizes the crimes against the Jewish people, elevating them from textbook abstractions into living and breathing atrocities for which there had to be some kind of permanent solution. That became Israel, a land come refuge from tyranny and genocide, a land raised up by Jewish ingenuity and determination into modernity. Here, the indefatigable Jewish spirit is represented with such potence, as the reader watches deserts turned into orange groves, turned into industry, turned into commercial and residential developments, that one is left aglow with a wealth of respect and amazement for these dogged people who, armed with nothing, made a paradise out of sand.

Mr. Shavit could have left it at admiration. He could have penned his paean to Israel's founders and left well enough alone. Instead, in his harsh criticisms of Israel's handling of the displaced Palestinians, he exposes an intellectual honesty that lends his work moral heft. It is not an easy matter to lionize and criticize the same people, but the author manages this with a mixture of fire and class that captures the spirit of heated debate without descending into cynicism and ideology. This caustic fire he reserves for the subsequent generations which he clearly feels have betrayed the spirit of the Founders by squandering their gifts, their efforts, their sacrifices, in a land of hedonistic play and political backbiting. In this, he sounds like all social and political commentators of a certain age, men and women who so celebrate the past that the present seems a pale shadow.

From the Founders to the Ultra-orthodox fundamentalists, from Labor to the hard Right, from the orange groves to Startup Nation, My Promised Land is a sweeping, lively depiction of Israeli life that marvels at its successes and mourns its moral failings. It does not have answers. It does not even have proscriptions. It has only hope, hope that the divisive figures in power today do not ruin the glory of what great men and women devoted themselves to create. He sees a country deeply divided, a country that is increasingly religious and increasingly blind to its own turpitude, but he also remembers that all of this was once, not so long ago, hills and dust. Some measure of that spirit surely lives on today.

A dark and beautiful journey... (4/5 Stars)

a darkly imaginative, entertaining epic in The Magister Trilogy

From The Week of November 4th, 2013

Excluding a few, notably greedy exceptions, we all want to believe that life should be lived in balance, harmonies that govern man and nature, man with his fellows, and man with himself. Humanity has invented entire faiths in hopes of propagating this notion, of establishing this karmic linkage at the root of our existences. After all, what better way to ensure that the excesses of the few are discouraged by the prudence of the many? There's only one problem with this belief however; it is a facade. Life, like the universe, is governed only by opportunity, its resources exploitable, its blessings random. Some god, some force, may indeed have conjured it into being, but that animating intelligence has done little to curb the disharmonies in our world that put the lie to such utopian notions as fairness and equality.

But what if the world was karmic? What if the universe was chained to balance in such a way that consequences automatically followed on from actions? What would such a world look like? C.S. Friedman imagines in her enthralling trilogy.

In a medieval world of kings and magic, sins and sacrilege, life, for all but a few, is difficult and often all-too brief. While royals wile away their years with the plots and the rivalries that define their existences, the commonborn put their shoulders to their many labors, hoping to fashion for themselves lives for which they can be proud. In the event that they succeed, they might even live long enough to pass down these hard-won advantages to their sons. After all, in such a world, a woman's place is either prone upon her back, a willing vessel for the desires of others, or stooped over a stove, in order to provide for her family.

Kamala should be no exception to this rule. Sold by her mother into a life of sexual slavery while still a child, she has known only degradation and forced service to the whims and pleasures of others. And yet, a fire burns inside her that cannot be so easily put out by such darkness. For Kamala is a witch, a relatively rare soul born with the ability to draw upon her own life's essence to perform feats of magic. From healing to the manipulation of the weather, she, like witches the world over, can win honor and acclaim with her powers, and yet, each mystic act, each re-arranging of the stuff of the world, saps her lifeforce until she is a spent shell, ready for death's cold embrace.

Of course, there is one way to circumvent this inviolate rule, to cheat death on the road to immortality, and that is to become a magister, a witch who uses the lifeforces of others instead of her own to perform her feats. Only, there has never before been a female magister, that is, until Kamala's indomitable will rewrites history. And just in time. For her world is facing an old foe so long banished that it has become nothing more than faintest myth. And if the world is to not be devoured by this darkly jewelled threat, then it will need her and more besides to face it down and restore the balance that has been upended.

Successfully building upon some of the vampiric themes explored in her Coldfire Trilogy, Ms. Friedman's The Magister Trilogy is dark fantasy at its most sublime. Not only does it lay claim to a magic system that is as exquisitely simple as it is brilliantly karmic, it cheerfully gathers up some of the genre's more lazy tropes, shapes them to its own, wicked designs and then gleefully unleashes them upon the unsuspecting reader. This boldness, this willingness to make firm choices and stick to them, to have enough respect for the laws of the world that refusing to break them for the sake of convenience is virtually taken for granted, establishes a bond of trust wit the reader that allows the work to be thoroughly enjoyed without any fear that he is being beguiled into wasting his time on some dull, derivative adventure through well-trodden lands.

More than Ms. Friedman's authenticity of form and function, though, The magister Trilogy is remarkable for its heroine. For this is no abused spirit waiting for the love of a good man to make her whole. She is a creature that burns with her own ambition, her own desire, her own lust for triumph. Others have tried their hands at featuring such anti-heroines before -- The Mistborn Trilogy perhaps coming closest --, but these creatures were ultimately meant to be seduced into reform, raised up by loving hands into a melodramatic world of love and grace. Not so Kamala whose evolution is not towards being lovable, being clean, or even being pretty, but to be strong and whole, a self-sufficient sword forged of stuff far too stern to ever be broken by the selfish desires of others.

For all her thrilling independence, though, Kamala is simultaneously the work's primary weakness. For we are never really allowed to see Kamala's painful, formative years, the events, emotional and otherwise, that scarred her. Given the nature of Kamala's abuse, it's understandable why the author chose to tread lightly here. However, without any real experience with the most scarring and transformative moments of Kamala's life, her anger is rather pale, something we are asked to take as fact instead of witnessing it first hand. Ms. Friedman's choice to leave these dark events out is prudent, but it does rather mute Kamala's emotional impact on the reader.

Certainly, The Magister Trilogy indulges in its fair share of familiar themes: the unstoppable evil, the aloof magicians, the powerful and despotic kings. But even these are given new and interesting slants that, though not as authentic as Kamala'sevolution, do well to provide her a supporting and supportive cast. This, along with one of the best magic systems in recent memory, makes this a winner any lover of fantasy would be happy to encounter. (4/5 Stars)

the risks and rewards of machine intelligence in On The Steel Breeze

From The Week of October 28th, 2013

For all but the last hundred years of human history, which now spans more than ten millennia, we have been the masters of our destinies. The social constructs into which we've been born have certainly constrained us, influenced us, coerced us, but nonetheless our labors were our own, our survival due in whole to our own talents, our own capacities. But now, with the rise of the technological age, all of that has changed. Where once we fashioned our own tools, measured our own medicines and manufactured our own weapons, these tasks and skills have been increasingly given over to machines which hold advantages over us in speed, efficiency and tirelessness. In fact, the disparities between man and machine when it comes to production are so wide that it would be nothing sort of self-sabotage to not surrender these traditional functions to them. And yet, they are not us; they will never be us. And so, when we do inevitably become completely reliant upon them for our societies, what will our futures hold? Alastair Reynolds deliciously speculates in his engaging novel of the future.

It is the 24th century and humanity has climbed off an environmentally ravaged Earth to live amongst the stars. Moons and habitats throughout the solar system have been colonized while Earth cools, populations free to experiment with technologies, with governments, even with immortality. Despite the obvious divisions this would cause, human civilization has been harmonized and pacified by the Mechanism, a pervasive network of machines, both neural and nano, that ensure that individual humans live nonviolently with their fellows. Cooperation and discovery have become the hallmarks of society which has largely abandoned the destructive sins of slavery and discord.

Quietly, however, matters have begun to change. With the discovery of an inhabitable, extraterrestrial world which has clearly been touched by aliens, humanity has been moved to journey to this distant place aboard Holo Ships, city-sized conveyances that can accelerate to significant fractions of the speed of light. Ahead of these voyagers have been sent Providers, great machines that will land on this alien world and build cities for the adventurers to live in when they reach their new home, but the intelligence designed to govern these Providers has become temperamental and difficult, growing beyond its design specks to become something new, a mind unto itself, a force to be reckoned with. And it is willing to do what it takes to ensure its survival, placing it on a collision course with humanity.

The successor to Blue Remembered Earth, On The Steel Breeze is a work of singular creativity from one of science fiction's most innovative minds. Mr. Reynolds, who rose to prominence with Revelation Space, is an imaginative thinker who, throughout his published career, has rejected the notion that the laws of physics are too stultifying for fiction. Instead, he has embraced them and their limitations, providing for the layman some sense of the phenomenal spans of space and time that are unavoidable obstacles for any civilization with ambitions of being interstellar. In the past, this interest in the technicalities has sometimes lapsed into the obsessive, coming at the expense of qualitative storytelling. Not so here, where his characters, both human and artificial, run the gamut from desperate to ambitious while always remaining convincing and entertaining.

Notwithstanding its delightful creativity, On The Steel Breeze has the heart of a very old novel, asking an age-old question. How will man and machine coexist? Here, humanity has relied upon the Mechanism for so long that it has become unthinkable for it to be corrupted in any way, a truth that breeds the very complacency that allows it to be abused by an intelligence grown far too clever and powerful for any individual human to match. And yet, both the mechanism and the intelligence threatening it provide immeasurable benefits to humanity, organizing it, pacifying it, enabling it, in ways both wonderful and fantastic. Is the risk of the technology wriggling out of our control worth its many, glorious rewards? The answer to this question will be disputed for decades to come, and likely long after we have become far too dependent upon our machines to return to a simpler, more self-sufficient time.

Mr. Reynolds' view of this question is admirably pragmatic. He acknowledges both sides of the argument, the usefulness and the fear of losing command and control, all without siding with any particular faction. This allows his work to adopt an open mind about one of, if not the most, formative and pressing questions of the century to come.

Despite its engaging mysteries and fascinating actors, On The Steel Breeze is far from a perfect work. While Mr. Reynolds' choice to honor the laws of physics is respectable, this adherence boxes the author into a narrative corner he never escapes. On Earth, more than a full century expires while the work's core drama is unfolding in interstellar space, all without the author giving any sense of changing governments, social mores, even the forces of dogma. Providing such detail would have certainly prolonged an already sizeable tome, but its omission leaves the reader feeling as though nothing else in human civilization is taking place between moments of explosive action on the holo ships and the alien world they are destined for. The whims, the pursuits and the ideologies of an entire civilization are abandoned to service the plot which is primarily why we are here. But this lost color leaves the work feeling oddly disjointed, like a movie with no sound, or music with no message. It's an absence that is distractingly apparent.

Notwithstanding its flaws, Mr. Reynolds is worth reading for his creativity alone. Any sin of literature is forgivable when we can watch a skilled mind at play amongst the stars. (4/5 Stars)

A first-rate heroine mired in a second-rate tale in The Fool's Gold Trilogy

From The Week of October 20th, 2013

For humans, endurance is a strange and potent virtue. Through tragedy and turmoil, pain and grief, it drives us onward, motivating us to plow through the difficult and traumatic obstacles arrayed before us with little regard for the odds of success. Often, this doggedness serves us in good stead, allowing us to escape the immobilizing grip of deadly despair and to achieve our dreams, but this determination comes at a cost. After all, it is a force, not a guide. We cannot reason with it. We cannot tell it to be silent when we have been defeated, when all hope is lost. And so we scrabble in the dirt of our unmaking, trying to live just a little bit longer. This idea, in all its hope and all its loss, is well-captured in Jude Fisher's interesting if troubled trilogy.

In the land of elda, where the forces of individualism and conformity stand in such stark contrast, life is rarely easy. Divided into two realms, Eyra in the north and Istria in the south, one's gods, fortunes and laws are determined by the place of their birth. Reared in the northern island, under Eyran skies, and one is raise in a world of clans made up of fiercely independent souls who skill at working wood and stone is matched only by their capacity to sail the open seas. To be born in the southern Istria, meanwhile, is to be inculcated in a world of casts and religiosity, a place where personal advancement is as scarce as god's mercy. There is little law that isn't handed down from the selfish nobility who in no way check the power of those who would burn their own people for the most mild of blasphemies.

These opposing realms have little in common except for the Allfair, an annual, two-week extravaganza of trade, schemes, exploitation and opportunism of which both the high and the low partake. This particular year, however, proves to be even more explosive than most. For Katla Aranson, the talented, pugnacious, flame-haired daughter of one of Eyra's most illustrious clan chiefs has attended and she thinks of nothing of wandering wherever she pleases, even onto rocks sacred to the Istrians and their goddess. Arrested and sentenced to burn for her crimes, this single act of recklessness ignites a series of life-altering events that will shape the futures of two realms. For the gods and their minders have also come to the Allfair and their schemes will leave no one untouched.

An eminently readable series, The Fool's Gold Trilogy is entertaining fare that manages to be dark, wry and consequential without ever awakening the emotions, much less the sympathies, of the reader. Ms. Fisher's background in Scandinavian languages has had a profound influence here, causing the tale to read very much like the Norse sagas, full of flawed and imprisoned gods and the the rash and headstrong mortals who worship them. With such a cast of characters, it would be impossible for the trilogy to be anything other than a dark and winding adventure, full of crushing lows and brief, explosive successes. And yet, despite these wild swing in fortunes, despite a host of actors who range from the monstrous to the earnest, the series fails to animate into anything the reader can love.

While Ms. Fisher has assembled a host of interesting and complex characters, the world that they inhabit is far too black and white for their gray. There are soem commonalities between the realms, particularly pertaining to the rights of women to act as they see fit, but otherwise the fun-loving northmen, with their songs and their ships and their freedom, is so cliched, particularly when set against the typically hedonistic southerners whose desert ways are a perfect match for their religious fanaticism. These are not just old themes, they are tired ones. And Ms. Fisher has failed to breathe ay life into them.

For all her difficulty with world and plot, Ms. Fisher has created a winner in Katla Aranson who rises like a proud eagle above Elda's fray. Her strength and tenacity, her riotousness and adventurousness, are enchanting. For they imbue Katla with a wild, irrepressible power that moves beyond the crudeness of gender stereotypes and to new and fertile ground rarely tilled by any author. However, even this, Ms. Fisher's greatest success, ends up hobbling her work. For Katla shines so bright that she serves to highlight the continental gap in quality that exists between her and every other actor on her stage. Every time the narrative leaves her, the reader is desperate to return and once again be touched by her mesmerizing spirit. Had just one or two more of her companions risen to this level, The Fool's Gold Trilogy would have overcome its flaws. As it is, Katla is left to hold up a nearly 2,000-page odyssey on her own. And not even her sculpted and straining shoulders can manage that feat.

Thrilling and disappointing... An interesting adventure that pulls few punches, but cannot bring its readers to care about the punches it does throw. (2/5 Stars)

Jesus the man brought to light in Aslan's engrossing Zealot

From The Week of October 8th, 2013

Of all the forces that move humanity, few are as potent as mythology. Through its songs and sonnets, stories and parables, It gives reason to the unknown, it imbues the aimless with purpose, and it establishes a scaffolding upon which cultures can erect their histories and traditions. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, when most of the world knew nothing of the written word and the revelations of science, this was the most successful means by which to teach and to exchange ideas. As such, it is a vital step in the development of human civilization.

But mythology does have its price which becomes all-too-apparent in a world of literacy and discovery. For it inculcates in its practitioners, its adherents, a belief in falsehoods. It directs people to put their faith in fables that, at worst, never happened and, at best, bear only a passing resemblance to actual history. Worse, though, is mythology's tendency to bury historical truths under an avalanche of fairy tales which makes finding the truth and dispensing it to the masses a herculean task. Fortunately, our world possesses scholars capable of unearthing those truths and assembling them for public consumption. Reza Aslan's effort here is one such success.

Rushing like a tide out of the mists of time, Christianity has spent 2,000 years covering much of the known world. Though it has branched into different doctrines, different schools, the key shibboleths of its origin story remain the same, that Jesus Christ is the savior of humanity, that he descended to Earth to spread the word of the Christian god, and that he allowed himself to die for the sins of God's children. Christians understandably focus their energies on the Christ, the divine spirit of what Paul called the Risen Christ. But what of the Christ of the Flesh? What of the man? Who was he?

Working from the Gospels and the histories of the Romans, the only written accounts of events during Jesus' life, Mr. Aslan assembles a fascinating if fragmented portrait of this most transformative figure. Over this most engrossing, 300page history lesson, which devotes nearly as much time to the setting of Jesus' life as it does to the man himself, we come to learn that Jesus of Nazareth did exist, that he did claim the mantle of the Messiah, that he did accrue a following in Judea, a Roman territory, and that he was crucified by the Romans for sedition. We are introduced to Jesus' siblings, which were numerous; his circumstances, which were meager; his worldview, which was inescapably Jewish; and his mission, which was nothing short of the overthrow of the world order as he knew it. But more than this, we come to comprehend some measure of the man himself, an individual possessed of charisma, leadership and a willingness to throw off everything he knew in the achievement of his goal.

To scholars of the Historical Christ, much of Zealot's revelations are already apparent. But to those who only know the myth and not the history, it is nothing short of a bomb dropped on our preconceptions. For Mr. Aslan spells out, clearly and inescapably, that Jesus of Nazareth was a brown, Jewish, foreign-born socialist, a truth that makes laughable the literally and figuratively white-washed depictions of the myth we've come to know. Moreover, Jesus of Nazareth went well beyond even the modern-day conception of socialism. For this was not a man interested in the redistributions of wealth with which we are familiar. He aimed to invert the world order, to make the first last, the rich poor, the well-fed starving, a worldview that, while in some sense vengeful, adds valuable three-dimensionality to a man made two-dimensional by both the passage of time and the yearnings of his followers.

Zealot is by no means a perfect work. Though Mr. Aslan is often careful to back up his assertions with contemporaneous accounts, his portrait of Jesus does not quite match his own assertions of the man's noble character. The author frequently hails Jesus of Nazareth for his courage and his charisma, and yet, other than his capacity to accrue followers, we see few examples of these virtues. Moreover, upending the world order in such a dramatic way hardly seems laudatory. On the contrary, it appears, albeit from the impossibly comfortable remove of 2013, to be a recipe for disaster. The author's refutations of the mythologies surrounding Paul and Pontius Pilate are laser sharp and backed up with numerous examples of the absurd ways in which time and belief have distorted the deeds of both men, but the case for a commendable Historical Jesus remains thin.

However, let this in no way diminish Zealot's power. This is bound to be a controversial work. For it attacks, directly and obliquely, the stories uncounted generations have told themselves about the most famous man in human history. It possesses the wisdom, the clarity, the rigor and the wherewithal to withstand such assaults. I can think of few works of literature that better exemplify the written word's power to distill and dispense history, truth and a lifetime's worth of learning. (4/5 Stars)

The brutality of ancient war vividly brought to life in The Macht Series

From The Week of September 23, 2013

Of the many agents of creation and destruction that pervade our world, none are as potent, or as consequential, as war. It spawns new technologies while ruining existing economies, it fosters new bonds of brotherhood while destroying traditional ties of family, and it forges entirely new nations while grinding the old into the sands of history. It is humanity's sword of change. And so it is not at all surprising that it has been valorized by our governments and our culture, shaped into a badge of pride that the victorious can hold over the unfortunate. But in all these films and speeches, novels and rallying cries, do we ever truly see war's true face? In the fabled charges and the legendary retreats, do we feel the abysmal heat of its stare, the rotten stench of its breath, the cold callousness of its cheek? We might think so until we read Paul Kearney. And then we understand that we don't know war at all.

Tucked away in the mountainous north of a sprawling empire, the Macht are, to outsiders, a strange and barbarous people. Divided into only loosely affiliated city states, bound together by race and custom, they are largely content to till their fields and endure the vicious snows cast down upon them by their ill-tempered gods. But when roused to war, they are fearsome creatures, spearmen are the first rate who are so well-drilled in the ways of the phalanx that few forces have ever bested them.

Having heard of their prowess through legend, Arkamenes, brother to the great king of the Asurian empire, hires 10,000 of their finest mercenaries, the first such assembly of spears in living memory. Deploying them as the backbone of an invasion force, the rebel prince seeks to overthrow a brother he loathes and seat himself on the great throne, where upon he can rid himself of the Macht who ensured his victory. But when fortune goes against him, the war he'd so carefully planned spins out of control and creates lasting consequences not only for the peaceful, if brutal, Asuria but for the fiercely independent Macht as well. Lives and destinies will be written in blood and no one will escape the reckoning.

A spellbinding re-imagination of the Anabasis of Xenophon, the Macht Series is a read as captivating as it is brutal. Mr. Kearney, who rightfully earned acclaim with his Monarchies of God, returns here to militaristic fantasy, carving out a new and bloody chapter that won't soon be forgotten. With characters as dark as their deeds, the author builds from the existing histories to confront the very limits of loyalty and human endurance, leaving us with a newly constructed temple to the gods of war that both dazzles and terrifies.

The Macht Series is notable for its mercilessness, but it is unquestionably at its best when confronting the true price of war. It is the foundation of The Macht, and yet, with every sacked town and murderous skirmish, with every enslaved soldier and every thrust spear, Mr. Kearney makes clear his scorn for battle, the corrosive ease of it, the cruel simplicity. Every moment of violent glory is matched with the screams of the dying and the rape of the innocent, as we watch peaceful and prosperous lands overturned for pride, for vainglory and for foolishness, none of which can be forgiven. The cost is so immense that it ought to be forbidden practice, a weapon too terrible to be wielded. But how would anyone enforce such a ban without using war to do so?

The Macht Series, though excellent, is by no means for the faint of heart. Mr. Kearney is as unsubtle with his narratives as he is ruthless with his characters, shoving them through an uncaring meat grinder that only reluctantly spits out the living. And yet, this dark savagery, this hellish heat, is balanced with such an acute sense of sadness and tradition that every encounter fills the reader with an enduring sense of tragedy and dismay that will leave few unmoved. Here's hoping there are more works to come in a well-paced, brilliantly conceived and dizzyingly executed series from this undeservedly little-known author. (4/5 Stars)

Dark fantasy done with militarism and style in The Thousand Names

From The Week of August 12th, 2013

As much as we celebrate the rebels and counter-culturalists, the protesters and conscientious objectors, society runs on rules. After all, at root, society is a common code of conduct to which we all agree in order to receive the benefits of civilization. If there is no conformity to these codes, then there is no universal fabric into which to weave the threads of our lives. And yet, this rule-based system throws up its fair share of problems, chiefly, that it empowers those tasked with enforcing the rules. And given that we cannot guarantee their earnestness, their steadfastness, or their honesty, we often find ourselves lead, judged and moderated by powerful narcissists who happily march us into chaos so long as it suits their ends. Such truths, along with their consequences, are demonstrated to wonderful effect in the opening volume of Django Wexler's dark, militaristic series.

In a world of empires and churches, deserts and gods, war and rebellion is in the process of harshly re-shaping the known lands. Decadent princes have been violently swept from power by the nihilistic Redeemers, a faith that has little time or patience for existing orders and their foolish rules. This upheaval has ripped the vordinai empire apart, not only laying open its once-peaceful towns to all of war's terrible crimes, but forcing its loyal soldiers to fight battles on two fronts: to restore the proper order and to control and supply their men who might no longer have a ruler to fight for.

Into this heady time come two consequential soldiers. Marcus d'Ivoire is the personification of duty, a captain who cares for his men more than he does for the letters of the land's laws. He had resigned himself to career oblivion, but then fate intervened and made him the immediate subordinate to a revolutionary Colonel who promises to change the campaign's fortunes. Winter Ihernglass, meanwhile, is everything but a conventional soldier. A woman masquerading as a man, she has, through good fortune and even better soldiering, elevated herself into the ranks of the decision makers and, with this terrible secret hanging over her head, leads them with a kind of graceless bravery. Together and separately, Marcus and Winter must assemble the pieces to this strange, religious puzzle and act upon this troubling picture before the future is lost to the darkness of demons.

Though at times overly fixated on martial maneuverings, The Thousand Names is excellent fantasy fiction. Mr. Wexler treads here on some of the same ground trailblazed to such epic effect by Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of The Fallen. However, rather than stoop to copying the fine works of other masters, he has re-organized these existing themes into an entirely new and pleasing configuration, one that successfully challenges the entrenched expectations of readers of fantasy. Given how many thousands of volumes have been published in this genre, this is no mean feat. And yet, the author succeeds in welding mysterious faiths, dangerous enemies, uncertain alliances and unexpected fates upon a familiar framework, the end result of which is bound to please most of those who take it up.

While many authors of fantasy reach for the familiar-unto-hackneyed settings and time periods of sword and sorcery, Mr. Wexler wanders off in search of newer, richer ground. The world of The Thousand Names owes much more to Western Europe's 17th century than it does to its 15th. Here, the musket has made extinct flashy knights and their obsolete charges, replacing them with military tactics more appropriate to the American Civil War than to the Battle of Agincourt. Moreover, the Vordinai empire's social policy seems to track with the tastes and the biases of Georgian and Victorian England, where inequities in class, income and opportunity were so apparent and extensive that reform was inevitable. Add to this the spicy language of Martin and Abercrombie, the Genderbending of Morgan and Kritzer, and the result is a dark work of emotive fiction.

For all its virtues, The Thousand Names suffers from two primary structural flaws. While Winter Ihernglass's story is arresting in its freshness and its informativeness, Marcus d'Ivoire is, by comparison, a lifeless lump. It is not so much that the man is a caricature of virtue, though, this does make up some of the equation. Rather, it becomes clear, early on, that he exists only to allow the reader physical and plot proximity to one of the work's primary antagonists without actually adopting the antagonist's point of view. Mr. Wexler is not the first to deploy this tactic. And yet, he does so with a clumsiness that fails to inject Marcus with any kind of vitality. Less troubling to the narrative but more bemusing to this reviewer is the preponderance of military maneuverings that consume the first half of the chronicle. Yes, the detail here demonstrates extensive research and knowledge on the part of the author, but after the first few scenarios in which the story's prime movers exhibit their bravery and skill, these set pieces lose their meaning and become more theatrical than useful.

Notwithstanding its flaws, however, this is an excellent and weighty read, one that takes some calculated chances in order to say something new in an old genre. Deeply engaging... (4/5 Stars).

Petraeus, Counterinsurgency and the new US military in The Insurgents

From The Week of July 29th, 2013

There is no activity with which humanity has more familiarity than war. From the earliest tribes to present-day superpowers, it has been practiced so ubiquitously that it has defined the destinies of virtually every culture we've ever created. And yet, for all this expertise, we are, by and large, miserable, shortsighted wielders of the discipline, profoundly trapped by our biases of the enemy, an overinflated sense of our own martial past, and a rigid adherence to structure and tradition that eschews the bold in favor of the safe. Perhaps, in times past, when men like Alexander the Great could rise out of relative obscurity to conquer half the world, these afflictions were surmountable by the all-but-divine will of a single man, but in this age of massive armies and technological warfare, there is little room remaining for individual geniuses to operate and affect both their futures and those of the nations to which they've sworn fealty. Still, some will try. And Fred Kaplan has, here, chronicled at length the most famous of these revolutionaries.

The son of a librarian and a sea captain, David Petraeus has lived a remarkable life. From 1974 until his retirement from military service in 2011, he served the US Army with distinction, holding numerous commands both domestically, in the training of special forces, and overseas, in hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But though, by all reports, he was a relentlessly driven soldier with a legendary work ethic and capacity to endure punishment, he is best known for his defining role in championing the doctrine of Counterinsurgency, or COIN, which is credited with having helped to empower the Sunni Awakening of 2007 in Iraq which changed the fortunes of that doomed war dramatically, permitting the United States military to deal a devastating blow to Al-Qaeda and their allies. Though his application of COIN in Afghanistan would be less successful, it would do little to tarnish the reputation of this new, intellectually driven form of warfare.

Technology has forever changed our world and this is no more true than for the practice of war. Terrorism has empowered non-state actors, giving them the ability to stand up to much larger nations, at least for a time. Successfully eliminating these insurgent groups would require very different tactics than those nations have traditionally used. The holder of three degrees, David Petraeus believed so deeply in this consequential shift that he devoted his career to compelling the US Army to evolve, to be smaller, trimmer and smarter. After years in the wilderness, after having his reforms blocked by generals and defense secretaries uninterested in coloring outside the lines, he and several key allies both military and civilian, successfully agitated for a new approach to 21st-century warfare, one that relied upon cultivating the trust of leaders in the warzones in question and using those contacts to uproot the enemies hiding in their midst. And though ambition, along with a scandalous affair, would eventually doom his career, his disgrace would come long after he'd left his scholarly mark upon one of the world's most rigid institutions.

The Insurgents is a thorough, well-paced, and engrossing examination of the Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the men and women who fought for it in the face of stiff resistance from well-entrenched traditionalists eager to ignore the evolution of modern warfare. Mr. Kaplan, an author and journalist, uses David Petraeus' career as a focus, a touchstone from which he can cast a wide net that captures not only COIN and its impact on the United States' most recent wars, but the shambolic manner in which the US military is run. Given how infrequently the US military has been defeated, this would appear to be an absurd claim. And yet, this organization suffers from the kind of institutional rot present in all bloated organizations, a decay that results from the self-interested motivations of powerful individuals within the organization who, because they cannot be sure of their place in a changing environment, resist such change with all their might. One need only look at the manner in which the Iraq War was justified and then prosecuted to understand the shattering, real-world consequences of such stubbornness.

As much as the US military comes off poorly here, let it not be said that Mr. Kaplan is in the bag for David Petraeus and his famous doctrine. Quite the contrary. The author is clearly sceptical of the degree to which COIN influenced the outcome of the Iraq War. And he's wise to be. For it seems almost impossible to separate COIN's impact from the abject misery of local Iraqis who, having finally had enough of being victimized by thuggish Al-Qaeda, rebelled against them and, with the eager aid of the United States, crushed their operations. Given that the whole purpose of COIN is to give breathing space for good people to organize against the destructive elements inside their own societies, it is hard to argue that COIN was not a benefit in Iraq, but its fairly evident failure to improve the situation in Afghanistan is a serious blow to its credibility. COIN's defenders will argue that Afghanistan is a uniquely atomized country, one that simply cannot be fairly governed in the modern world and, given its miserable history, that may well be true, but this in no way helps COIN's case.

The Insurgents has its sketchy moments. It seems evident that this book had all-but-come to print when the story of Petraeus' affair broke, compelling Mr. Kaplan to pen a hasty and uninformative coda to his chronicle. Moreover, the author doesn't appear to have had any access to Petraeus himself which is somewhat problematic given the heavily biographical nature of the work. However, these are minor knitpicks in what is otherwise a balanced, rational account of two bad wars, the men who prosecuted them and the ideas that bubbled up to impact them.

An excellent primer on the new face of war... (4/5 Stars)

An engaging study of the lifecycle of civilizations in Revenge of Geography

From The Week of July 22nd, 2013

Though it is an exercise fraught with failure and misapprehension, there are few tasks more worthwhile than the effort to improve our understanding of the cultures from which we come. For, despite the challenges, despite having to constantly check for ones biases and preconceptions, there is no better way to advance one's culture than to grasp the influences, the logistics and the the history that informs it and to separate these truths from the stereotypes that so often characterize national cultures. There are reasons for why our countries are the way they are, why some are rude and others prickly. And the sooner we understand this, the sooner we can begin to predict the future with some modest accuracy. This Robert Kaplan studiously demonstrates in his examination of the world viewed through the lens of geography.

For ten-thousand years, civilizations both grand and small, both coastal and landlocked, have risen and fallen. Some crumbled into dust with barely a lasting mark to remember them by. Others immortalized their legacies through engineering and enduring monuments that have left no doubt of the links they forged in the unbroken chain of humanity's march towards a more knowledgeable future. However, despite having different languages and assets, populations and ethics, lifespans and legacies, they did, all possess one common trait. They all eventually collapsed, their prowess and their vigor consumed by younger, energetic states. This inescapable fate has prompted both historians and interested parties to analyze this perfect mortality rate and divine from it lasting clues that might help stave off the inevitable deaths of current cultures.

Though this has given rise to nearly as many universal theories as their are studiers of this question, few are as simple as Mr. Kaplan's. Setting aside the monumental fields of economics and law, politics and multiculturalism, he contends that the ultimate fates of nations are written into their geographies. From the vital rivers that organized and then gave rise to cohesive cultures in China and Egypt to the sweeps of coastal-rich territory in Europe and North America, he argues that these invaluable resources concentrate populations which in turn innovate and inflate until they've become regional powers capable of spanning entire continents.

This would seem to be a wise, and even pleasingly unbiased, assessment of why some nations stabilize and succeed while others disintegrate and fail, but is it applicable in a 21st-century world where bombers and drones, have overcome the once-formidable natural barriers that have historically held nations back? Mr. Kaplan believes so. In fact, he is convinced that these technologies which have so effectively reduced mountains to molehills have created a whole host of new existential problems for humanity's various national tribes. After all, prior to the age of flight, India never had to worry about China. The Himalayas took care of any fear of invasion on both sides of that question. The same for nations separated by substantial waterways that would've taken weeks to traverse in centuries past that now take hours. The globalization of the world may have revolutionized trade, but it has opened up theatres of conflict that would have been unthinkable in times past.

The Revenge of Geography is an engaging analysis of 21st-century geopolitics informed by a first-rate mind. Mr. Kaplan has an admirable grasp of the present that is informed by both an intriguing read of geography and an educational grasp of the past civilizations that comprise known history. It explains south Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America in a manner that is no less explicable for it being erudite. And yet, there's a blitheness here that haunts his study no less than it does all those that purport to boil the world down to a single, defining trait. There can be no doubting that geography has played vital role in the shaping of our nations and our cultures, but can the success of he United States really be put down simply to the fact that it had manageable neighbors to north and south, plentiful coast to east and west, and abundant heartland in which to spread out and thrive? Factors all, surely, but far from the only ones to be heard in the formation of the defining nation of the last 200 years...

But though Revenge of Geography may state its case too definitively, it does so in an unforgettable manner. For Mr. Kaplan introduces us here to intellectuals who conceive of the world, and even history, as a series of existential conflicts for dominance. Art and science, philosophies and customs, are discarded by the minds of these men and replaced with a heartless pragmatism that is predicated on the idea that governments seek always to expand not only their powers but their borders as well. There's plenty of evidence to support this cynical view, but there's just as much evidence to counter it as well. For while states may act in the interests of the people they contain, willing to go to war for gains both economic and territorial, people are often far more emotional and far less strategic than this. They would rather live in a world that is not zero-sum, a world where everyone has a fair shot of progress and comfort, rather than one in which their interests are mercilessly advanced at the expense of everyone else. The utterly pragmatic approach here is as striking as it is narrow.

There's much of value here, but for all Mr. Kaplan's skill, he fails to convince us that geography trumps ideology or cultural ethos. Nonetheless, well worth the read... (3/5 Stars)

A bloody rumination on faith and sacrifice in Abaddon's Gate

From The Week of June 17th, 2013

Concerted, collective action towards a single, unified goal is, for humans, a challenge without peer. For though most of us possess the requisite generosity to selflessly offer our aid in times of stress and confusion, we are still creatures of ego, individuals who believe that our ideas, our beliefs, our plans, represent the right way and that everyone else's ideas, beliefs and plans are inherently less for being other, for being not of us. This self-centered mentality is not without its merits. After all, often, there is a right way. And if someone who possesses the requisite strength of personality leads his fellows in the direction of the truth, then the whole benefit. But how do we know what is right? How can be we be sure? And are confidence and ego our only guides? Abaddon's Gate ruminates.

In a future solar system dominated by political rivalries, ideological disputes and commercial realities, life is difficult and dangerous. Population pressures on Earth have not only forced society to adopt radically different ideas of the family unit, they've compelled the bold and the ambitious up the gravity well and into the solar system where opportunities are as wild as the various space stations, orbital habitats and domed moonbases are liberal. Though this offworld expansion has both developed beneficial technologies and brought back useful resources to the humans who need them, it has only deepened the balkanization of humanity into several distinct and contentious groups which are as selfish as they are bellicose.

Perhaps these rivalries would have resolved themselves in time, allowing humanity to enjoy a more united future, but even this optimistic outcome is short-circuited by a terrifying, alien threat that escaped from a research station in the solar system's outer reaches and migrated to Venus where it has systematically transformed the planet into a great, energetic ring inside which the understood laws of physics seem to give way to the secrets of an ancient, advanced civilization that, though it has past into darkness, has left behind its powerful and unknowable technologies. Fear of the unknown initially precludes the various factions from exploring the ring, but soon a desire for revenge overwhelms their common sense and they chase an apparent saboteur into the ring and humanity's future.

The probable, bloody conclusion to the riveting Expanse series, Abaddon's Gate is a long and savage last stand against both ignorance and justice. James S.A. Corey, the pen name for the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, largely relinquishes the tropes of horror and science fiction, deployed to such heart-pounding effect in The Expanse's first two volumes, and takes up in their stead the more complex themes of sacrifice, faith and collective action, each of which prove to have nearly as many interpreters as human beings. For there is no clean sacrifice, just like there is no true god. There is only what we as individuals want to think is true and right, realities which often clash with the conceptions of other humans with devastating and debilitating effect. We can no more find accurate confirmation for our beliefs than we can touch god. We have to rely, instead, on clear minds and good intentions and hope that these lead us into the light.

There is no doubt that Abaddon's Gate suffers from this switch in scope. Where the prior two entries mined such profitable material from the genres of horror and survivalism, this most recent effort has much more in common with the modern conception of the Western, a play in which sociopolitical realities thoroughly give way to the relative simplicity of two opposing forces fighting over control, over how things ought to be done, over who gets to do them and why. This ambitious switch in theme mirrors the switch in perspective. For most of the towering figures introduced in the prior works, excluding a handful of necessary principals, are discarded in favor of a new cast of largely female actors who, though refreshing, fail to capture the reader's interest to the degree of prior casts.

Moreover, the new cast keeps the perspective trapped on the various ships jockeying over the Ring and all that it contains, robbing us of the opportunity to experience, to some degree, what life inside the ring is like. Perhaps future volumes will dispel some of the mysteries left here, but this is cold comfort to this reader who felt as though Abaddon's Gate lacked the balance of the previous works and failed to deliver all that the series had promised.

Notwithstanding its flaws, The Expanse, overall, is wonderful, dark, imaginative science fiction that challenges our conceptions and insists that we view our optimism for the future through the lens of today's political realities. For this, it has earned a place amongst the great SciFi series of the 21st century. We can only hope that future additions to this series will help make Abaddon's Gate feel less vestigial. (3/5 Stars),

Survivalists, cold wars, and a Hellenic future in The Major Ariane Kedros Trilogy

From The Week of April 29, 2013

As much as we treasure free will as a concept, many of us do not exercise it. For the world as we know it must have structure. It must have rules. And if those rules are to have any force or effect, there must be individuals willing to enforce them, to follow orders that they might find personally distasteful or disagreeable. This is the bargain these individuals make with society, the ignoring of their own right to choose in the name of advancing the greater good. But what if the orders they are asked to execute are so monstrous, so unimaginably beyond the greater good? What does the order-follower do then when all her training tells her to do what she's been told? Then the individual is divided between their duty and their honor, between the smart thing and the right thing. And heaven pity her if she chooses wrongly. Laura Reeve demonstrates in her uneven trilogy.

In a future where the limitations of faster-than-light travel have been circumvented by N-space travel, human civilization has reached for and grasped the stars. Humanity now inhabits any number of worlds and space stations, journeying between stars almost as commonly as as they once traversed the roads of old Earth. But for all this technological freedom and planetary diversity, harmony is an exceedingly scarce commodity. For once the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano on old Earth made inhabiting that planet challenging, at best, and Hellish, at worst, Earth and its colonies calcified into two distinct and antagonistic factions that, even many decades on, continues to fester.

One of the central events in this hot and cold war was the ostensible destruction of one of the Terran factions star systems via the use of a banned weapon capable of annihilating stars. This genocidal act not only fuelled Terran enmity towards the Autonomists, the one-time colonies of Earth that banned together in defiance of its power, it instigated a hunt for the war criminals who carried out the mission to destroy an inhabited star system.

Major Ariane Kedros was the pilot of that mission. An augmented human, re-engineered to survive the psychological stresses of N-space, she belongs to the autonomist's intelligence directorate, an organization of special operatives tasked with black missions in the defiance of the colonies. However, since that fateful mission, which now haunts the major's dreams, Kedros' service to the directorate has become somewhat involuntary, a forced relationship that, thanks to their protection of her identity, she cannot exit. For should she force their hand, they might reveal her true identity and consign her to a short, brutal life on the run.

With this blackmail firmly in place, the directorate tasks Kedros with a series of dangerous missions that result in the enemy suspecting her true identity. And yet, for as much as the Terrans may want to kill Kedros, she might well have access to something even greater than revenge, an alien artifact, that she and her partner discovered floating in space that belongs to no culture humanity's ever encountered. Revenge or discovery, justice or knowledge... Whatever the Terrans choose, Kedros will have to endure. For she will never escape her past.

A trio of action-packed mysteries, all of which, in some way, stem from Kedros' past, The Major Ariane Kedros Trilogy is an adrenalized but ultimately unsatisfying adventure through an inventive future world. Providing virtually no backstory for her bewildering amalgam of current and future technologies, languages, cultures and disputes, Ms. Reeve relies on her readers to tease out the vital links that will offer some sort of context to what is otherwise a dizzying array of alliances and cultures that fail to track with our own.

From all appearances, Ms. Reeve has used the Peloponnesian War as inspiration for her two primary factions, with the role of the democratic Athenians taken up by the autonomists and that of the autocratic Spartans represented by the Terran League. For anyone lacking in familiarity with this most ancient Greek conflict, the Terrans will appear to be as utterly unrecognizable to us as their motives are to the autonomists. This is not cleverness on the author's part, a slow unspooling of a dense and interesting mystery that's gradually filled in as the narrative progresses. It is a failure to communicate, to provide a basic framework from which the reader can intuit the rules of the game.

The setting, though, is only the beginning of the flaws here. Ms. Reeve fails, at virtually every turn, to endow her characters with three-dimensionality. Kedros' partner, her boss, even the Terrans who pursue her, are all only partially realized people, a constellation of dim stars that are only here to provide a means by which Ariane Kedros can act. Kedros herself, meanwhile, is a mass of contradictions. She is the embodiment of self-pity and guilt for what she's done, and yet she at no point exhibits remorse for what she's done. On the contrary, she insists that she would do it again. Perhaps this is merely bravado, but it certainly suggests an inconsistency of character that is all-the-more devastating for it being rooted in the trilogy's major protagonist. In fact, the only individual in this entire saga who appears to have consistent motives is one of Ariane's past crewmates who has been tormented and twisted by her guilt.

There are virtues here. The Minoans, Ms. Reeve's alien race, are fascinating creatures with a fairly original society and relationship with their technology. Moreover, the third human faction, space-born generationalists who have built enormous ships with which to slowly explore the universe, are a fascinating, inward-looking culture that is worthy of the time Ms. Reeve spends with them. However, these virtues are even more frustrating when one realizes that Ms. Reeve has genuine talent, especially for imagining alternate societies. She merely fails to fully animate them and bind them together with plots that will showcase them.

At times, a thoughtful and engaging exploration of the limits of human endurance, but ultimately marred by an unwillingness to take full advantage of the pieces of the puzzle... (2/5 Stars)

Turkey's contrasting cultures explored in Livaneli's moving Bliss

From The Week of April 22, 2013

What is the process by which our bodies, and indeed our lives, are chosen for us? Traditionally, religion has had the most pleasing answer to this existential question, trusting that only god has the power, the wisdom and the desire to assign our souls to the newborns of his choosing. This explanation has held sway for a long time, and why not? It's a satisfying answer, one which gives reason to why some of us are born into fortune while others are delivered into lives of misery. But what if it is nothing more than random chance? What if nothing but a simple quirk of fate stands between the child born of American splendor and the one born of Iraqi war? How different their lives would unfold, how different their experiences and dreams, all on the basis f a flipped coin... O. Z. Livaneli's novel cannot be read without musing over this question and all that it portends.

In present day Turkey, a country of religion and secularism, of modern cities and tribal mountains, of liberalism and honor killings, national identity is a tenuous thing. Forged by the will of a giant of history, and enforced by the overzealous military he bequeathed to his new nation, it is compelled to enshroud not only the westernized urbanites of Istanbul, but the sons and daughters of an ancient east, a place that owes more of its morality to the seventh century than to any other time, or institution. To the West, these are unimaginable stresses pulling at the fabric of society. For they have long since harmonized from helpfully homogeneous roots. But to the east, this is all too common, the chaotic and jumbled legacy of western colonialism and eastern empires that have made borders fluid and non-religious traditions scarce.

Meryem, a fifteen-year-old girl born into this world in flux, is a daughter of the east. Her life is duty and obligation. For she is subject to a skein of Islamic tradition that endows its women with the honor of the tribe. And should that honor be lost, she must be punished, not those who took the honor from her. Thus, when her uncle cruelly assaults her, she, not the uncle, is blamed for her lost virginity. Manipulatively encouraged to commit suicide as a means of restoring family honor, Meryem resists, thus beginning a journey across Turkey in the company of her war-damaged cousin, a journey that will carry her far from home while exposing her to a world of spiritual, intellectual and sexual freedom she could have never imagined.

Penned by one of turkey's most famous, living musicians, Bliss is spellbinding work. No piece of literature can ever truly capture the reality of a place. However, to w to whatever extent it can come close, Mr. Livaneli has succeeded, creating, with Meryem's journey across the physical and spiritual plains, a tapestry of Turkey that won't be easily dismissed. Deploying three main characters to represent the divisive, entrenched tensions that characterize modern Turkey, it exposes the reader to the nearly insurmountable challenge of uniting a place that harbors such disparate values. For the west, as represented by Irfan, the wealthy but aimless professor whose path crosses with Meryem, and who helps her to realize her potential, thinks of the east as backward and depraved, a place where religion claims the mantle of moral authority while doing nothing to discourage, much less halt, the suffering of the disenfranchised.

Meanwhile, the east, as represented by Cemal, Meryem's war-ravaged cousin who is tasked by his family with the obligation of quietly disposing of Meryem to restore the family's honor, views the west as soulless and weak. They have not fought and died for what they believe in. They have not suffered for the freedoms they enjoy. More than that, they are proud of their bloodless secularism, flaunting their sinful ways and exposing good men like Cemal to constant, torturous temptation. How such worlds can be reconcile is beyond the ken of these three souls searching for meaning and truth.

Mr. Livaneli is no master of prose. In fact, this is the novel's major weakness, a simplicity of style that reminds us that he is, here, out of his native element. However, whatever the novel loses in its composition it more than reclaims with its characters who are animated from their archetypal roots to become living, feeling creatures, damaged souls looking for truth and freedom in a world that's never asked them what they wanted.

This is at times a difficult read. It does not shrink from the cruelties of honor-based societies. But rather than languishing in them, rather than bemoaning their existence, it offers hope to the hopeless, believing that life can change for the better by merely offering everyone a chance to make their own choices. Wonderful sentiments for such a grave tale... (4/5 Stars)

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an intriguing, menacing monologue

From The Week of April 22, 2013

For society, radicalism is a dangerous and pernicious force. Not only is it nearly impossible to eliminate, being that it counterintuitively draws nourishment from every attempted extermination, it neatly divides the world into us and them, righteous and wicked, brave and servile, polarities that are as unhelpful as they are inaccurate. Radicalism is a siren's call to those aimless souls who, in seeking a purpose, fall prey to its song of enslavement, demanding obeisance in exchange for guidance in a manner that saps the victim of his most valuable essence, the will to be free. But while we have a solid grasp of how radicalism impacts our world, our understanding of how people come to be radicalized is far less solid. Enter Mohsin Hamid's brief but engaging novel.

In a comfortable cafe in the heart of Lahore, Pakistan's second city, two men engage in a consequential, lopsided dialogue. The narrator, an intelligent man who was raised in Pakistan and educated in America, carries the conversation, describing how he came to the united States, full of western dreams and western ideals. While his American companion listens, the narrator, reveals how a devastatingly complex relationship with an American woman of privilege and an increasingly soulless job at a financial firm in New York ate away at his idealism, leaving him profoundly unhappy. As the American listens with mounting tension, the narrator reveals how this growing sense of discontentment was sharpened with the onset of 9/11, an event which, or so the narrator believes, presaged Pakistan's political and military crisis with India in the early aughts. The narrator cannot forgive America for this threat to his homeland. And so with increasing malice, the night unfolds with the American's safety in grave doubt.

Published to acclaim in 2007, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a work as poignant as it is swift. Describing in conversational detail the disintegration of one man's life and dreams for his future, it offers up to a West drowning in its own, biased conception of the world, a view from the other side of the tracks. For the narrator embodies the promise of young, intelligent Asians who come to the United States, believing in the very dream sold to them by both Hollywood and the American government. And like all men who invest themselves in dreams that are not based on reality, they find themselves disappointed when the truth of the West, and America in particular, is far more nuanced and complicated than they would have ever anticipated. This leaves them feeling betrayed, tricked into working to perpetuate the designs of an unfathomably large machine that doesn't care about them, much less the safety or the sanctity of the nations from which they've emigrated.

Similarly, The Reluctant Fundamentalist's other character, the American listener, embodies the West with whom the narrator is truly dialoguing. The American is given no right of reply, no bully pulpit with which to refute or drown out the narrator's arguments. He is, instead, forced to listen to a man who has come to hate what he stands for, seeing in its smugness, arrogance and thoughtlessness a toxic stew of sins that must be corrected one way or another. This captivity is mesmerizing, endowing the work with a kind of mesmerizing bondage. One understands the lash is coming, that it is driven by anger and betrayal, but that there is nothing that can be done to avoid it, that the thing must be seen through to its inevitable and perhaps even violent conclusion.

For all its charm, The Reluctant Fundamentalist never quite pays off its promise. Mr. Hamid sheds some light on the mystery of his central premise, why some Muslims come to despise America after being embraced by it, but he never succeeds in answering what might be the unanswerable. For as much as his narrator lays out his reasons for his heart's hardening toward the West, these feel like self-serving excuses designed to justify the failure of an intelligent, educated man to be happy. Perhaps this is Mr. Hamid's point, that radicalism is an outgrowth of dissatisfaction, but this has very little to do with the West. Indeed, the West, in such a scenario, is merely a boogeyman against which one can take out their frustrations. The narrator hasn't catalogued America's many extraordinary crimes, overthrowing governments, supporting dictators, targeted killings. No, he seems taken, instead, by his own internal drama in a manner that suggests he's less than stable.

Regardless, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a fascinating read, all the more potent for its breeziness. Provocative and mysterious... (3/5 Stars)

The history of Sharia detailed in Kadri's Heaven on Earth

From The Week of April 22, 2013

Humanity's relationship with the unknown has had a long and thorny history. For our minds are not predisposed to logic. They have not evolved to bring patience and reason to bear as weapons against the mysteries of the world. Rather, they have evolved from a violent and tribal foundation that perpetuated the species long before we possessed language, let alone a written system with which to express it. With this in mind, it is understandable that science is far more alien to us than god. For, when assessing the beauty of a flower, who among us has the skill and the rigor to tease out the biological and botanical truths that make it so when it is so much easier to credit its glory to god? And yet, we must understand this deficit and overcome it. If we do not strive for better answers than the ones that rely purely on spiritualism, then the thorny, and often tragic, result is what Sadakat Kadri describes in so much detail in his engaging history of Sharia.

Descending from both the Quran, Islam's holy book, and the Sunnah, the deeds and declarations of Islam's prophet Mohammed, Sharia is a collection of codes of conduct that define, for Muslims, the standards and obligations of the good life. From laws to economics, from the duties of prayer to the dictates of divorce, Sharia provides a societal tapestry that, in knitting together the public and private spheres, creates, in theory, a harmony amongst Muslim lands, all of which must adhere to these codes to be considered righteous. It provides for charity and mutual obligation. It implements safeguards against the excesses of aristocracy while protecting the underprivileged. It unites the rights of the individual with his or her obligation to the greater good, remarkable sentiments considering that they emanate from the relative intellectual darkness of the seventh century.

For all its virtues, however, for all that it provides the building blocks of a moral society, Sharia is an ever-moving target, a school of ethics that, in the centuries since the death of its progenitors, have been constantly re-interpreted by a series of powerful Islamic scholars. The views of these men have, over the years, been taken up by their adherents and organized into schools of thought and belief that often stand in opposition to one another. Without a centralized, authoritarian body to act as the final arbiter on the understanding of, and implementation of, these disputes, these schools have been allowed to perpetuate, making impossible the unity of Sharia's promise. Some of these disputes are merely doctrinal, having only a passing effect on the lives of those who live under its sway, but some are not only consequential, but severe, leading to the enshrinement of violent views that have fuelled the clash of civilizations.

Narrating both Sharia's history and its consequences, Heaven on Earth is a fascinating and multi-faceted work that endeavors to educate its readers on the nature of this codified morality and to weigh up what responsibility it bears for modern Islamic fundamentalism. Mr. Kadri, a lawyer and journalist by trade, approaches this sensitive topic systematically, resurrecting the towering figures of Sharia's past and using their views as a means of describing the evolution of Sharia and its application. Consequently, in the work's first part, the reader is exposed to not only well-known figures like Mohammed, but the men, Ahmad ibn Handal and Ibn Taymiyyah to name but two, who endeavored to interpret him and whose writings were in turn deployed by their followers as a means of justifying their view of the world.

In the work's second part, Mr. Kadri leaves behind this dense but edifying history and returns the reader to modern day where Sharia is more often used as a means of exercising power than it is as a code of ethics for an honorable society. Mr. Kadri explores the views of fundamentalists and their organizations, leaving no doubt in the mind of the reader that their vehemence is less an outgrowth of Islam than it is a byproduct of individuals who find, in hate and violence, a comforting sense of power and order that helps them explain the cultural and economic dominance of the west. Galvanized by Islamic scholars reacting to the Western sin of colonialism which has had a profoundly deleterious impact on the Islamic world, they seek justification to punish and castigate outsiders while holding their own adherents to impractically high standards of conduct and belief. This is the work's most potent section. For it deals directly with issues western societies grapple with every day, providing context to what otherwise seems so senseless.

There are flaws here. Mr. Kadri's work assumes that its readers have a pre-existing familiarity with Islam. Moreover, it moves through history at an almost dizzying pace, leaving the reader little time to grow accustomed to changing mores. Both of these problems would have been solved by lengthening the chronicle and providing the reader with a more leisurely swim through the tides of history. But these are minor gripes in what is otherwise a document that has resulted from extraordinary research.

Sharia's clash with western ideas of society and human rights will never entirely end. For these two traditions have taken entirely different evolutionary tracks which have caused them to place different values on commonly held ethics. God and secularism, obligation and individual rights... These are oil and water, leaving the rest of us to try to learn what we can as a means of better understanding our world and our fellows. To that end, Mr. Kadri's work does us all a service. (4/5 Stars)

The Petrovitch Trilogy booms and sizzles like a Hollywood blockbuster

From The Week of April 15, 2013

Beforelong, any discussion of what constitutes a good life inevitably turns to the fundamental question of what we, as individuals, owe to the world into which we are born. We cannot choose the society that birthed us. Nor can we necessarily choose to emigrate to the society that best suits us. And so, given that we lack a full measure of agency in this area, one would expect our answer to be that we owe our world nothing, that one can only feel an obligation to something that they have freely chosen to belong to. Despite this, many of us choose to give back not only our time and money, but, in some cases, our very lives. Such a selfless act of devotion to a society can only mean that, to some of us, society is everything. This most enduring debate underpins Simon Morden's explosive, apocalyptic trilogy.

It is the third decade of the 21st century and the world has been convulsed by terrorism. An event known simply as the Armageddon, a series of nuclear suicide bombings perpetrated by zealots, destroyed much of the new century's promise, reducing many of the world's countries to radioactive wastelands and triggering a refugee crisis throughout what remained. The United States and the European Union appear to be the two remaining powers of significance. However, the former is too beset by its own religious fundamentalism and the latter is too convulsed by seeming indifference to set about restoring order to a planet in political, environmental and economic shambles.

Amidst this ruin endures Samuel Petrovitch. A refugee from radioactive Saint Petersburg, he has come to post-Armageddon London, now known as the Metrozone, to attend school at the Imperial College of London where he has distinguished himself as a brilliant thinker in the field of experimental physics. Cynical beyond his youthful years, he has been deeply scarred by a hellish adolescence that has left him with not only a faulty heart, but a heavily burdened conscience that, despite his every effort, he cannot quash. He wishes only to be left alone, to create something glorious out of the rubble, but fate has conspired to place him at the center of great events over which he has only minimal control, events that have the power to transform the world beyond something even Petrovitch's powerful mind would recognize.

Ambitiously grappling with any number of vital social issues, The Samuel Petrovitch Trilogy is a gripping thrillride through a post-nuclear Hell. Mr. Morden imagines a profoundly scarred world that has finally paid a high price for nuclear proliferation. He's then seeded this world with a fascinating array of characters, all of whom have suffered through not only Armageddon, but the socioeconomic fallout that has virtually ended the notion of local government, transferring the bulk of political power, at least in the Metrozone, into the hands of gangland figures and crime lords who possess the lethal combination of ruthlessness and manpower to make some kind of order from the chaos. We are made witness to the birth of religions, of social classes, even of new traditions, that would have been unimaginable even 20 years earlier.

Though Mr. Morden's trilogy is squarely aimed at readers seeking plots and prose drenched in adrenaline, his work here is elevated by a series of ethical questions that will transfix more thoughtful readers. The author deploys Petrovitch as a cipher for the technologies of tomorrow, a means through which his readers can interpret both the promise and the terror of what's to come. What are the potential costs to human society of widespread computer automation of infrastructure and transportation? What are the spiritual implications of creating artificial intelligences which exhibit every indication of sentience and conscience? What should we be willing to sacrifice, in the form of order, to open our borders to refugees from dying nations? These are merely a few of the numerous 21st-century debates that, yet to be widely argued, will undoubtedly define the decades to come. Mr. Morden executes them with skill and style.

For all its thematic virtues, however, let there be no doubt that this series has its numerous troubles. The Samuel Petrovitch Trilogy is the literary equivalent to a Hollywood summer blockbuster, an explosive spectacle that, in the silence between cacophonies, seeks to say something profound. To Mr. Morden's credit, he pulls off this magic trick far more fluidly than do his siblings in cinema, but this does not alter the reality that these three works are bloated with post-apocalyptic action sequences that are both repetitive and overblown. Moreover, when it comes to metaphor, Mr. Morden has the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Petrovitch's malformed heart is meant to represent the profound selfishness that is the face he puts to the world. His search for a healthy alternative is meant to parallel his search for goodness, both internal and external. And yet, it's clear that Petrovitch already possesses a conscience and a spiritual heart, compelling Mr. Morden to pivot this metaphor to one of man becoming machine that never escapes the hopelessly theatrical.

However much this trilogy is like a fine rock band that plays too loudly just because it can, its merits ultimately overcome its flaws. This is not just a nihilistic journey through a crumbling world. This is a vision of a utopia being born out of the ashes of human error and ignorance. Executing this vision requires not just talent, but a desire to say something meaningful. That is a virtue we can all celebrate. (3/5 Stars)

Ho Chi Min details the enlightened, revolutionary and tyrannical faces of a world leader

From The Week of march 4, 2013
What motivates a man to devote himself to a life of struggle? For the world is full of treasures just waiting to be explored, arcologies of past and present so vast that lifetimes would have to be spent to absorb all their stories. And yet, while some choose to immerse themselves in these worlds of knowledge and discovery, others reject these enriching existences in favor of lives aimed at a single, overarching goal, often thought to be unattainable. Is this hubris, the arrogance of the individual's belief that his is the only will capable of shaping reality? Or is it the mark of greatness, the symbol of a man triumphing over his own needs to give to the world a measure of justice? This fundamental question underpins Mr. Duiker's fascinating if mysterious biography.

Born in 1890 to Confucian parents living in French-controlled Vietnam, Ho Chi Min rose from obscurity to become one of the formative figures of 20th-century Asia. A student and a traveler, a thinker and a toiler, his life's journey took him from the parlors of Boston to the kitchens of Britain, from revolutionary gatherings in Paris to Soviet schools in Russia, until finally depositing him back in Vietnam, at the head of a movement to take back his homeland from the European and Asian colonialists who sought to dominate it. Here, he helped ignite a war that, while it dispatched the French from his native shores, helped make Vietnam the focal point for a Cold-War showdown 20 years in the making. This conflict with the United States devastated his divided country, tipping it into a political despotism from which it would take decades to recover.

Despite the fact that Ho Chi Min was a pivotal figure in both of these wars, and more broadly in the liberation of his country from colonialist rule, his life remains a mystery. Driven to communism by the political perfidy of the west, he was nonetheless a deep admirer of both the United States and France. He immersed himself in their cultures and their values, drawing from their founding documents models of responsible, moral government for his own subjugated nation. Moreover, he was a fighter for freedom, and yet he allowed his administration in Northern Vietnam to be characterized by political executions and one-party totalitarianism, sins that would never be tolerated by the nations he so admired. These appear to be contradictions that will never be resolved. For they might well be present in any man who drives himself to be the father of his nation.

Though at times consumed by an obsessive eye for detail, Ho Chi Min is nonetheless a thorough examination of southeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century. Mr. Duiker, who served during the Vietnam War and who has since become a professor of history at Penn State University, certainly trains all of his formidable powers upon the life of his subject, from his early travels to his Soviet radicalism, from his pleas to the west to his resistance to French, Japanese and Chinese control. However, his work here functions best as a lens through which to examine the broader effects that European colonialism had on Vietnam. For there can be no doubt that France's unwillingness to acknowledge Vietnamese independence, coupled with the deaf ear the liberty-obsessed United States turned to Ho Chi Min's pleas for aid, sapped the west of the moral authority necessary to make anti-communist allies of these ancient nations searching for a 20th-century identity. These tragic missteps not only lead to wars of attrition, they completely re-shaped the political conflicts of the latter half of the century, ensuring that millions more would suffer under the authoritarian yoke of totalitarianism for decades to come.

As a biography of Ho Chi Min, though, Mr. Duiker's work here leaves much to be desired. For though the author manages to capture something of the essence of the man in his youth, this impression fades with time until Ho becomes almost a complete enigma, no more three-dimensional here than he is in the posters and the legal tender that bear his likeness. This is not entirely Mr. Duiker's fault. After all, it is abundantly clear that the details of Ho's later life, particularly the decades in which he actually held political power, have been assiduously guarded by the authorities who have inherited the countries he created. Getting trustworthy and honest information from them must have been virtually impossible. And yet, Mr. Duiker doesn't help his case by abandoning the effort to understand Ho. Indeed, as if snubbed by the man's impenetrable facade, the author succumbs to a lifeless, systematic recitation of historical facts that we would expect from a textbook, not from a biography of a human being. In this, Ho Chi Min leaves much to be desired.

Ho Chi Min is an excellent primer on the political and economic forces at play in southeast Asia leading up to the Cold War. It is thorough and scholarly, virtues that imbue it with gravitas and meaning. But as a biography of the man himself, it suffers at the hands of mythology, the forces of which will make Ho's life all the more opaque in the decades to come. (3/5 Stars)

First two volumes of Malazan Book of The Fallen begin a dark and brutal adventure

From The Week of February 11, 2013
It's comforting for humans to believe in free will. For self-determinism means that our actions, from the bold to the boneheaded, are our own. In a world where we are all equally empowered to choose, we can celebrate our triumphs and decry our failures, knowing that we are solely responsible for the full spectrum of these outcomes. After all, how would we learn and grow if all our choices were seconded to another? What would be the point if we were all being guided to some predestined fate? And yet, for all that we enjoy this free will, most of us also believe in gods, omnipotent beings who, to greater and lesser degrees, take a hand in temporal events, steering us to certain outcomes. But what if the world was nothing more than this? Divine schemes that made of us nothing but pawns for their pleasure? What if we simply existed to act out their games? Mr. Erikson imagines in the first two instalments of his epic series.

In a world of magic and death, empires and war, gods play for keeps. Empowered by the copiousness and zealousness of their worshippers, they spin out plots millennia in the making, willing to even make themselves physically manifest in the world if it advances their unimaginable aims. Their subjects, a collection of intelligent races predisposed to war, act out their cosmic contests, most without even being aware that they are creatures of a much greater game.

In this difficult world, so often plagued by suffering and death, an empire has risen from the ashes of the old to impose order upon the tribes and clans, fiefdoms and city states, that chaotically comprise the known world. Helmed by the empress Laseen, an assassin who may or may not have had a hand in the death of her predecessor, Kellanved, the Malazan empire is set on bloody conquest, an iron-fisted and often cruel subjugation of not only the continent from which it sprang, but every other continent of which it has knowledge. Its all-conquering armies, numbering thirteen in all, trudge through storm and desert, forest and tundra, to carry out the will of their powerful empress, knowing that their lives are nothing next to the achievement of her goals.

Populated by an expansive roster of grim characters, and characterized by a show-don't-tell style of prose that often leaves the reader adrift in a mysterious world of unfamiliar customs, Malazan Book of The Fallen is a challenging, even confrontational read that spares no prisoners. Mr. Erikson interweaves moments of philosophy with long skeins of bloody slaughter to create the tapestry of a world beleaguered by rampaging armies and vengeful gods. This energy, this vibe, is so consistently depicted that it leaves the reader wondering if the world itself is coming apart at the seams, as it experiences the opening salvos of an apocalypse that will see it reduced to ash and bone.

Though burdened by the often overwhelming task of establishing such a vivid world, Gardens of The Moon and The Deadhouse Gates, the first two instalments of this epic adventure, are both successful works that, for the most part, live up to the ambitious dreams of the man who authored them. Their plots, though appearing at first to be overly convoluted, are, in the main, straightforward attempts by the Malazan empress to ruthlessly expand her empire with no thought or care for those who stand in her way. Though she has powerful mages at her disposal, her goals are primarily enacted through her exceptional armies who will often stay on campaign, in foreign lands, for years at a time, knowing more of their brothers in arms and their missions than they do of their lands and their families back home. In this, the Malazan empire is clearly inspired by ancient Rome with which it shares a similar structure, an equally voracious thirst for power, and a technical brilliance that helps it to impose its will and its customs upon those unwilling peoples who fall beneath its ravenous shadow.

However, this is where allusions to our world effectively end. For in every other respect, Malazan Book of The Fallen is a masterwork of imagination that can never quite escape the deus-ex-machina of its numerous gods. While its divine actors aid the series by lending it a unique blend of menace and weirdness, they are also its downfall. For the reader comes to understand that Mr. Erikson's characters are not ultimately in control of their own lives. They are subject to the whims of others infinitely more powerful than they. And though occasionally they luck into positions of leverage that allow them to thwart these gods, most often they become pawns of prophecy, a reality which robs them of too much of their agency. In order to emotionally invest in a tale's outcome, the reader has to possess some belief that the prime movers have some capacity to choose for themselves. Otherwise, they are merely puppets for beings we rarely see and cannot fathom. They might as well represent the author's whimsy in which case Mr. Erikson's puppeteering becomes far too apparent.

Make no mistake. This is a work of profound skill, imagination and ambition. Credit is often heaped on other creators of modern fantasy fiction, Jordan and Martin to name but two, for manifesting complex worlds. But these are all-too-recognizable as distorted reflections of our own, alternate realities that rely upon our myths, our symbols, to convey lessons we already comprehend. Malazan Book of The Fallen is, but for a few exceptions, something altogether foreign from everything we know. It is the purest manifestation of sheer creativity that I've encountered in some time. It is a shame then that it is bestowed with such a narrow slice of the emotional spectrum. Its first two volumes are works almost entirely of rage and revenge. There is no light to balance the darkness.

A promising beginning to a remarkable, if problematic, niche product. (4/5 Stars)