Immigrant communities and the future Local in the dystopic On Such A Full Sea

From The Week of January 6th, 2014

Customs and traditions, laws and codes, shape our cultures, giving them their definition, their structure and their uniqueness. And yet, to us the culture simply is, the ever-present framework in which we have the experiences that make up our lives. It is as familiar to us as our friends, and so its trials and tribulations are taken as what must be, the tapestry of our individual existences. It's only when we absorb the strangeness of other cultures, either ones with which we share a world, or the ones that fell before our times, that we come to understand that what we assume to be normative, customary, is not so because it is the right way. Rather, it is simply the way it is done, for us and no one else. This is a powerful truth. For it grants us perspective not only on the human capacity to acclimatize, but it teaches us that nothing is as it must be, that everything is subject to change, to evolution, to improvement. This, if little else, is a point delightfully made in Chang-Rae Lee's dystopian novel.

In a near-future world blighted by widespread, environmental upheaval, life for the many has become difficult and often brutal. In the region formally known as the United States, society has devolved into three distinct groups which are characterized by varying degrees of autonomy and economic power. The Facilities are coastal communities, agrarian settlements that have grown up in the hollowed-out cores of former seaboard metropoli. They are nourished by trade with the Charters, a collection of seemingly powerful and healthy enclaves made prosperous by their isolation from the rest of the world. Occupying the wild, untamed lands between these two kinds of communities are the Open Counties, a seemingly lawless region of broken land in which the unfortunates of the world eke out a meager existence and to which tourists from more stable lands visit out of anthropological curiosity.

A resident of a Facility which has grown out of old Baltimore, Fan is a Tank Girl, a laborer tasked with ensuring the livelihood of the Facility's stock of essential sealife. She seems largely content with her existence until, one day, her boyfriend disappears into the Open Counties, to where and what end no one knows. Fearing for him, Fan decides to follow in his footsteps, forsaking the relative safety of her familiar little world and entering into the great, dangerous beyond. Repeatedly beset by powers much more ruthless and potent than she, Fan must continually scrabble for a foothold in this strange place, little knowing if the winds of fate will carry her to or from the boy she loves.

A fascinating treatise on the nature of expectations and human malleability, On Such A Full Sea is, nonetheless, a failure as a work of entertainment. Mr. Lee, an author and professor of literature, has fashioned a darkly captivating world full of half-glimpsed political machines and well-thought-out immigrant communities which have adapted to the violent tides of history by coalescing into their own, largely self-sufficient units. In this, they convey one of the work's most powerful ideas, that power is fundamentally local, that the global superstructure we've managed to erect over the last century is fragile, and that any significant disruption to the world order will plunge us back into a world where community is everything and where banishment from the collective is a punishment worse than death. In the hands of a skilled author, this is a notion brought vividly to life in this richly imagined future.

However, in almost every other way, On Such A Full Sea is an irritating bore. Its most frustrating element by far is its composition. Written in a kind of observational prose, the narration is from the perspective of an omnipotent first person, a collective we that hovers over Fan and her quest while remaining removed enough to provide the reader with details of the world that Fan may not know. This style certainly helps Mr. Lee make broader points about class and culture, and it absolutely lends the work a literary polish rarely seen in genre fiction, but it also precludes us from feeling any emotion from, much less for, the actors on its elegantly wrought stage. On Such A Full Sea is the literary equivalent of buying the worst ticket to a 50,000-seat house. We are left to watch from the nosebleeds while tiny ants down below execute their intricate skills, every nuance of detail and emotion occluded by distance. Worse in this case because while purchasing the ticket is a conscious act, a voluntary imposition, here, it is imposed on us for negligible gain. Mr. Lee could've illustrated his broader points without reducing Fan from a living, breathing person into a tiny puppet, propelled by the winds of plot and fate.

It pains me to be so critical of such a rare work. For infrequent is the genre novel with aspirations of being more than a pulpy adventure. On Such A Full Sea is as much sociological study as it is an adventure novel, and anything that bucks the norm should be welcomed. But enjoyment here is made all-but-impossible by the work's tone which suppresses the value of the individual to such a degree that caring about anyone is difficult at best. A fascinating failure... (2/5 Stars)

A thrilling demolition of tropes and expectations in The Demon Cycle

From The Week of December 30th, 2013

There are many ways to measure a man. We can judge him on how he treats his fellows, on how he acts when there's no one around to watch him, even on how he represents himself to those who know no better. But these observations can only tell us so much, and mostly about the public and private faces of someone shaped by a million different experiences and interactions. Hence, it's popular to suggest putting him to the most extreme test, of stripping away every advantage to see what he is like when the crucible is upon him. But even cowards can find courage when there's nothing left to lose. No, the best way to measure a man is to give him the world, to grant him godlike powers to change the destinies of himself and everyone he knows. Only then, when there are no societal checks left to confine him, can you truly know him. And this truth is vividly rendered in Peter V. Brett's fascinating and often exhilarating series.

In a devastated world, ground to dust by an unstoppable threat, life is as difficult as it is short. Civilization has been reduced to isolated hollows, semi-autonomous hamlets notionally under the control of various neighboring duchies. But while these regional authorities provide a threadbare framework of centralized control, this is, at best, lip service to a humanity traumatized into servitude by immortal demons which, every night, rise up from the earth's core, yearning for destruction and sustenance. Manifesting from stone and wood, from wind and fire, these seemingly unvanquishable foes reek havoc upon society, preventing it from advancing upon the medieval creeds and conditions that define it.

However, despite the insurmountable obstacles these demons represent, not all hope is lost. For these creatures are susceptible to sunlight, which dispatches them back to the hell they came from, and to the Wards, a hieroglyphic language that, when properly composed, has the power to not only repel the demons with magic, but to harm them as well. Only, the secrets of this language have been long lost, forcing the surviving humans to huddle in their houses, behind the few wards they remember, and pray for a dawn that never comes swiftly enough.

This gruesome stalemate, however, is shattered some 300 years after the rising of the demons when an ancient city is re-discovered by a wandering youth, searching, earnestly and hopelessly, for answers to the demon threat. At great peril, the young man liberates not only warded weapons from this sacred place, but also knowledge of long-lost wards that may well allow humanity to hold its own against the demons. However, this city is not of his heritage and the fight that ensues, over possession of its relics, and the mantle of its stewardship, may well shatter humanity forever and see a permanent night ascend from the Core to claim the world.

A thrilling ride through a broken world yearning for any sign of hope, the first three volumes of the Demon Cycle is, on balance, excellent fantasy fiction. Drawing on the venerable traditions of the epics that have shaped the genre, Mr. Brett begins with a premise that that has underpinned thousands of tales like it, the young man rising out of obscurity to defeat the indefatigable dark power. And yet, instead of relying upon the tropes typical of such tales, he exploits them, establishing the reader's expectations only to shatter them with creative developments of character and plot that charge what should be a stale adventure with energy and vigor. This is no mean feat; it is far easier to travel the well-worn path than it is to strike out on one's own. Thus, Mr. Brett should be celebrated for the exhilarating surprises his subversiveness generates.

While The Demon Cycle, thus far, has a cast of engaging, if overexposed characters, and a familiar world so reminiscent of more epics than I can name, it is pleasingly original in its willingness to draw in the symbols and the tropes of different genres to forge something new. Elements of horror, romance and dystopianism are all present here, lending the work the doom of a post-apocalyptic novel. And yet, these various threads are united by the work's protagonists, all of whom stubbornly put a shoulder into the plot until it is flying along, the work of potent, if opposing, wills. What's more, the author has drawn on the tropes of the video-game world to provide an even more familiar structure to the plot which sees heroes and villains alike methodically ascending from powerless obscurity to triumph and wonder.

The Demon Cycle ought to be a Frankenstein, a monster built from the stolen parts of unconnected creatures and, certainly, it has its bad moments. The genre-bending sees Mr. Brett discordantly inject episodes of extreme violence and physical and sexual abuse into a tale that, at times, feels as emotionally harmless as the Lord of The Rings. What's more, it's borrowing of things familiar to us leads it down a road to cultural insensitivity. For Mr. Brett has uncritically appropriated swaths of Bedouin and Arabic society to stand in for his world's desert people, exposing his readers to a thoroughly westernized view of cultures more complex than he often gives them credit for. These are flaws that drag on the three published novels, burdening them with unnecessary baggage. And yet, given that the series' strength is its capacity to subvert, perhaps these too are simply expectations being set up to be knocked down. We can hope.

This is a superb and unexpected delight that resists being set down. An adventure of the most darkly engaging kind... (4/5 Stars)

A profound journey through the shoals of fame in The Zuckerman Trilogy

From The Week of December 1st, 2013

Our lives are defined by pivotal moments, convergences of chance and self-determination that redirect us towards new and unexpected destinies. Of these impactful moments, we remember the negative outcomes with far more clarity than the positive, not only because it is in our natures to rue our failures more than we celebrate our successes, but because these misfortunes leave us grasping vainly for our fleeting triumphs, leaving us to dream of what could have been. But while this is understandable, perhaps we should give more thought to the consequences of our successes as well. After all, achievement doesn't come without its own costs. In fact, often, those costs are cloaked by the warm glow of having advanced our interests, making it all the more difficult to brace for them. This is a lesson driven home by Philip Roth's at-times mesmerizing trilogy.

It's not easy being Nathan Zuckerman. He may have come from good, Jewish stock that drove him to be his best; he may be an ambitious and talented writer with a deep desire to make his mark on the world; he may even be a man of some considerable attractiveness and charm, allowing him to enjoy all of society's various pleasures. But these advantages, both external and internal, are of little comfort to a man haunted by his most famous, and infamous novel, a work of fiction that drew on aspects of his own youth to make some difficult and pointed comments about American and Jewish culture.

For anyone else, becoming a famous author would be cause for celebration, and perhaps it was for Zuckerman too, for a time. But as the years accumulate, he finds himself, his family and his relationships increasingly defined by the audaciousness of that novel which deeply offends his father and compels his mother to continually guard herself against the snide and insinuating comments of her neighbors. This ever-increasing burden robs Zuckerman of his health and his happiness, plunging him into a succession of relationships that are as torrid as they are dysfunctional. Eventually, Zuckerman's bitterness completely seizes hold of his existence, making a mockery of his dreams, his plans and his hopes and leaving him with nothing but his dark emotions.

A journey as brief as it is profound, The Zuckerman Trilogy is a fascinating examination of the life of a man blessed and cursed by talent. Mr. Roth, widely thought to be one of the greatest living American authors, creates something of an alter ego in Zuckerman and then heaps upon him all the punishments of ambition and unrestrained desire which feast upon him until there is nothing left of the man but the most jagged of emotions. In lesser hands, such a premise might seem like the height of arrogance and self-indulgence. Writing harshly about one's own fame, knowing that to do so will only make one even more famous? It seems rather cynical. And yet, Mr. Roth is such a keen observer of the human condition, and is so disgustingly skilled at conveying his own revelations through taut, imaginative prose, that the reader is left humbled by his prowess rather than being amused by his conceit.

Of the three works, the first is the most narratively engaging. While introducing us to Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer posits the idea that Anne Frank survived her ordeal with the Nazis and emigrated secretly to New England where she proceeded to live out a quiet and secretive life, cognizant that revealing her existence would inestimably reduce the power of her diary which she never expected to be published. This is a delightful thought experiment and one that helps carry the novel to a complex conclusion. But it's The Anatomy Lesson, the trilogy's final work, that finds Mr. Roth at his most spellbindingly profound. From about the halfway point of the work, the author goes on what must be one of the most powerful and entertaining rants in literary history, one that combines conceit, cowardice and cruelty in a manner that cannot but move the reader to conclude that the author is truly as skilled as his puppet Zuckerman is disfigured by a life lived at odds.

For all of the wonderful ideas and exchanges contained within these pages, however, most lasting is Mr. Roth's implication that fame is an uncontrollable beast. Zuckerman sets out to be successful, certainly, but he never contemplates what that fame might do to him and to the people he's closest to. Nor does he realize that the moment he publishes his work, he loses every ounce of control he has over his public life. He cannot dissuade people from judging him, much less judging his parents. He can't unmake the work. He can't unmake the thoughts people have about the work. He cannot make a plea for people to not read the book. He has made himself subject to the riptides of history and popular opinion which he is in no way able to steer, or even to influence. This is a delicious insight that lends fire and force to the trilogy throughout.

Challenging at times, but well worth the contemplation. For this is nothing short of work that stretches the boundaries of fiction. Such blazing lights are exceedingly rare. (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)

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)

An innovative if monotonous The Book Thief

From The Week of October 1st, 2013

However much it entertains us in theatres and agonizes us in our personal lives, tragedy, more than anything else, is the revealer of true character. For it is only when pushed to the extremity of ugly circumstance and torturous emotion that we come to understand who we are. Do we buckle in the face of cruelty from both the world and our fellow humans? Do we resign ourselves to fates imposed upon us by powers far more immense than ourselves? Or do we remind ourselves that setbacks, in whatever form, are merely opportunities to learn, to grow and to be better next time? All humans, at one point or another, have been compelled to respond to tragedy by taking one of its many roads, but how many of them have comprehended just how consequential that decision was, just how much it shapes their lives and their souls? Marcus Zusak ruminates in his interesting, if problematic, work.

Growing up in the harsh, racist nationalism of Nazi Germany, Liesel is an angry girl with nothing to call her own. Her parents, communists who fear the worst from Hitler, have sent her to a foster home in Munich where she's softened by the kindness of her foster father, Hans, and stiffened by the sternness of her foster mother, Rosa. Teased for being slow to learn how to read, she proves to be fearsome with her fists, pummeling anyone who deigns to scorn her. For she is a girl determined to overcome her own shortcomings and prove everyone wrong.

With Hans' help, Liesel slowly learns her letters, knowledge that kindles a lifelong thirst for books and the wisdom contained within. Her family's relative poverty, however, leaves little expendable coin for the buying of such luxuries, so Liesel turns to stealing them from book burnings and private libraries, insatiably accumulating a collection of works that fill her with words and dreams. But no collection of books can shield her from the outside world which is convulsed by World War II and all of its civilian atrocities. Liesel may have conquered the word, but she cannot conquer the world that made them, and so she must hold on in hopes that those she's come to hold dear make it through to the new dawn.

The claimant of numerous honors and awards, The Book Thief is inventive fiction. Told from the perspective of Death, a seemingly omnipotent force tasked with the claiming of the souls of the recently deceased, it narratively dips in and out of the lives of its main actors, sometimes granting them the privacy of their own thoughts while at other times exposing, in depth, the secrets of their most closely guarded memories. In this, Mr. Zusak is able to paint a wide canvas, filling in his characters at the pace and the style of his choosing. This proves to be a fairly successful technique that affords the reader a blend of both the intimate and the removed, the soulful and the dispassionate, as we revisit the harshness of Nazi Germany and life beneath its yoke.

Despite the grimness of its setting, The Book Thief is populated by warm characters who, though they possess different motivations and occupations, share in a common desire to endure, as best they can, this life as they know it. Kindness, faithfulness and generosity from the commonfolk stand in stark contrast to the uncaring mercilessness of the Nazi machine which does its best to feed them into its voracious maw. Most everyone in Liesel's orbit exhibits a desire to protect what they have and to forge ahead despite the nightmare in which they've found themselves. Liesel, meanwhile, takes that stoicness a step further, repeatedly placing herself in danger to aid those that society has deemed unworthy. For her, kindness does not stem from pamphlets or marches. It flows from deeds, a truth she does not forget despite her own thievery.

Despite its engaging themes which ask us to contemplate both the ascendent good and the inescapable bad of humanity, The Book Thief is ultimately a disappointment that failed to hold my interest. Liesel's combativeness is, at times, engrossing, as is the sweetness of her foster father who will stop at nothing to make her dreams come true. But these virtues cannot make up for the slow, grinding relentlessness of the plot which fails to come to anything like a culmination. Our protagonists are merely presented with incident after incident, moment after moment, challenge after challenge, and asked to react to them. And so, when the novelty of Death-as-character wears off after the first few chapters, we're left with a monotonous journey that leads nowhere. This is a work animated by a wonderful idea that, for all its potence, lacks the power to carry 500 pages on its own.

At times fascinating and touching, but too much of a slog to be laudatory... (3/5 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)

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is beautiful, exquisite irony

From The Week of August 19th, 2013

What is a hero? The people admire them, our cultures celebrate them and our literature elevates them to immortality. So it is safe to say that we know a hero when we see one. But if pressed to define the criteria for becoming one, we might offer up very different answers. Some of us might value the unsung heroes who toil quietly at thankless jobs that ensure our safety on a daily basis. Others, meanwhile, might emphasize self-sacrifice, believing that a hero is only a hero if we know of, and are inspired by, his or her actions.

But as difficult as it might be to define a hero, it is even harder to unknot the complex relationship between heroes and the societies that harbor them. For while society hails them, upholds them as objects of valor and achievement, it also devours them, reducing them from human beings, with flaws and tempers, to useful paragons that further society's ends. This is no way to treat anyone, let alone those for whom we have the deepest respect. This Ben Fountain captures in his outstanding novel.

For the men of Bravo Squad, they were just doing their jobs, doing what they were trained to do. But for everyone back in America, the ambush at the Al-Ansakar Canal is a defining moment of the Iraq War. Captured on film and replayed for all to see, this four-minute-long engagement, in which Bravo Squad risks their lives to rescue a convoy trapped by insurgents, is a re-affirmation of what they already know, that American soldiers are the bravest and best the world has to offer. And so, it seems only fitting that the survivors of the ambush, while being patched up, and while grieving for the men they've lost, be flown back to America for a thank-you tour, a whirlwind, whistle-stop affair that sees them shaking hands and smiling for photographs in a dozen major US cities before concluding at that most enduring of American rituals, an NFL game at Texas Stadium where they will be honored at Halftime.

For Billy Lynn, the star of the footage which caught him trying to save the life of his dying friend while continuing to kill the enemy, this is a completely disconcerting experience. A 19-year-old boy from a small, Texas oiltown, he is utterly unprepared to be the center of anyone's attention.. And now there are 70,000 people who want to congratulate him, to tell him what they think about the war, and hail him as the bravest of the brave. He must interact with the rich and the poor, the kind and the venomous, all without doing dishonor to the army that has put him here. Over these few hours, he has to be what America needs him to be, but can he be that when he doesn't even know himself? Cheerleaders and millionaires, footballers and fans and at the end of it a war he must go back to, a war that might never end...

As winningly poignant as it is sharply satirical, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is fiction at its best. Juxtaposing the small lives of the men of Bravo squad against the enormity of the spectacle of an NFL game, Mr. Fountain beautifully captures America's tortured relationship with its heroes, with its superficiality and with its founding mythology. For this is a country built on the idea of freedom, constructed to be welcoming to all those who wish to escape tyranny, that is, nonetheless, engaging in two savage and costly wars that have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Rather than deal directly with such a difficult truth, however, the people wrap themselves in the sanctity of their flag, focusing on the deeds of heroic men in order to avoid looking at the price they are all paying in a place that few of them could even find on a map. Never in history have so few been asked to bear the weight of so much for so many and this cultural, economic and experiential divide could not be better represented than it is here.

Beyond its potent cultural critiques, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a wonderful and warm character piece. From its young, virginal protagonist, Lynn, to his friend, Mango, his sergeant, Dime, and the film producer, Albert, who is trying to make their story into a movie, the actors here are complicated, rich and deeply entertaining. Mr. Fountain embraces their flaws, depicting them as young men who both love and hate war, who appreciate and scorn their treatment subsequent to the ambush, and who accept and yet cannot abide the empty platitudes of the rich, entitled men who want to be seen to be doting on them. For all their warrior prowess, these are clearly vulnerable men who would benefit far more from a few days respite than the overstimulated chaos of an NFL spectacular. And this brings us to the author's most trenchant observation.

The culture does not feat heroes for their benefit. They feat them to assuage their own guilt about what the heroes have been forced to do. The culture doesn't care about these boys. If it did, they would ask them what they wanted. They would help them with their care, with their futures. Instead of this substantial and meaningful aid, the heroes get fifteen minutes of unwanted fame while being jerked around by titans of industry with whom they have nothing in common and who seek to only use their momentary celebrity to polish their own egos. It is a display of such profound self-indulgence that would descend to the level of disgusting if it weren't so painfully predictable.

Mr. Fountain has a nimble pen, a sharp eye for cultural critique and a strong sense of injustice and irony, all of which he uses to wonderful effect in one of the best reads in years. (5/5 Stars)

Ordinary lives during the Cultural Revolution in Under The Red Flag

From The Week of May 13, 2013

Traditions are difficult to uproot. For humans are, by and large, creatures opposed to change, huddling around the fire of what's known while periodically peeking out at the darkness of the scary unknown. It's perfectly natural, then, to codify the truths we understand and impose them upon subsequent generations. From time to time, however, this chain of traditions is broken, interrupted by governments that seek to impose upon us their ethics, their ideals. They do this even while fully aware of the cognitive dissonance this creates within a public trying to marry generations of knowledge with months of political re-education. The results are understandably tragic and that is demonstrated to wonderful effect in this collection of short stories from Ha Jin.

China under the Cultural Revolution was a dangerous and merciless place. Thousands of years of Chinese history and tradition was forced to make way for a new, Maoist world, a theatre of imposed Communism that compelled all those within its grasp to not only act according to a new morality, but to meet standards of organized, centralized productivity never before seen in this country, much less in the world. Driven by a need to compete with a West awash in capitalistic competition and anchored by industrialized workforces, this new world sought to reach its hands into the lives of every-day Chinese to prod, manipulate, coerce and threaten them into contributing to the whole. No aspect of private life was exempt from government scrutiny which possessed the power to make even the brave tremble.

From lasciviousness to food-hoarding, from heroes created from happenstance to villains forged from jealousy, Under the Red Flag knits together a tapestry of rural and semi-rural, mid-century Chinese, men and women who largely endure the misfortune of being born in a chaotic time. Mr. Jin, who has won numerous awards for his literary work, steers clear of the tales of great and consequential men, choosing instead to document, with fiction, the lives of ordinary people growing up during the dawn of the modern Chinese state. In this, we come to understand the ripple effects caused by the uneven application of a new set of rules. For where some might implement them out of an earnest belief in the new China, others implement them with only personal gain in mind, using them to indulge their own biases, their own desires, their own jealousies.

It's often said that nothing great can be created without breaking a few eggs. Well, these are the broken eggs, lives distorted and set adrift by a new set of standards. For all this, though, Mr. Jin's tales are not heavy-handed. On the contrary, it's to his credit that each tale of woe and adolescence, of confusion and desperation, is enjoyable and affecting. And yet, at every turn, we see the shadow of the Cultural Revolution flickering at the edge of our vision, its caresses, its influences, subtly and drastically altering a way of life so familiar to generations prior. In this, Under the Red Flag Manages to not be in the least bit depressing. It is, instead, a testament to human adaptability, to the awareness we all possess of life's fleeting nature, and how we are, in some sense, subject to both external forces we cannot control and internal desires we cannot resist.

This is a brief and effective introduction to Mr. Jin's work. A fascinating glimpse of a world that, though it has slid into our past, will certainly rise again. For governments invariably seek to impose the moralities of the moment upon the publics they purport to serve. It is merely a question of how bold they are willing to be in the forging of that idealized future. (4/5 Stars)

The enduring damage of family violence in A Cupboard Full of Coats

From The Week of May 13, 2013

As much as we may wish to whitewash our pasts, to scrub them of missteps and misdeeds, the truth is always with us. It lives on in our dreams and in those thoughtful silences that bring us face to face with our darkest desires, those times in which, because of pain or envy, we fell from grace to yearn for what we'd never admit to the world. We comfort ourselves with the notion that we are not those desires, that they are simply outbursts of frustration and anger, but this doesn't make them any easier to deal with, not in a mind that cannot hide from itself, not when it's so plain to us that we are largely responsible for our own terrible misfortunes. This is nearly as difficult a truth to express as to confess and yet Yvette Edwards does it with style in her engaging work of British fiction.

A mother with a job and a future, Jinx Jackson should have plenty to live for, but she is a woman haunted by her past. Fourteen years ago, when she was but sixteen, growing up in an islander-heavy part of London, she witnessed the murder of her mother, an event which caused her to emotionally distance herself from the world. Instead, she poured her energies into mortuary work, the systematic and artistic restoration of the dead that possesses the power to transform how the family views the fallen, replacing pain with peace, dismay with closure. But Jinx's days of hiding have come to an end. For not only has her marriage dissolved, not only is her emotional distance caused her to be an alien presence to her five-year-old son, an old friend has shown up on her doorstep for the first time since those terrible, bygone days, and he's disinclined to leave without revisiting old wounds that may well jar free truths Jinx would have rather stayed hidden.

A snapshot of immigrant London of the 1980s, A Cupboard Full of Coats is an enduring portrait of a life derailed by secrets and jealousies. Ms. Edwards, in cycling between the present day and the months surrounding the death of Jinx's mother, endows her protagonist with humanity and cruelty, empathy and viciousness, contrasting emotions that can only be simultaneously present in a spirit riven by conflict and guilt: at not doing more, at not being better. The author unfolds the mystery of the book's central death with mesmerizing deliberateness, methodically introducing us to Jinx's abusive stepfather who gradually succumbs to the white-hot rages only experienced by the acutely jealous. This tragic unraveling, as unstoppable as a freight train, artfully mirrors the disintegration of Jinx's life and mental health in the present where she has virtually alienated everyone who cares for her.

Knowing all of this, Jinx should be an exceedingly unlikeable character, an isolated depressive who drags us down into her well of loneliness, and yet this is not at all the case. In showing us who she used to be, and in giving us a glimpse of who she wishes to be, Ms. Edwards succeeds in attaching our sympathies to Jinx which makes the book's potent conclusion all the more affecting. Moreover, the emotional and psychological harm we see befall Jinx transforms her into a creature for whom we can safely root, or can we?

This is a lush novel, full of rich foods, colorful stories, engaging accents and dark deeds which is remarkably enjoyable for the grimness of its subject matter. A significant achievement for a work of quiet, period fiction. (4/5 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)

A beautifully written snapshot of a global city and its history in Istanbul

From The Week of April 15, 2013

Do cities have personalities? They are old and young, big and small, dirty and clean. They come in nearly as many varieties as their human builders and occupiers, but are they alive? Logic would say no, that they are nothing more than an accumulation of glass and concrete anthropomorphized into existence by humans who wish it so. And yet, if they are not alive, how else can we explain their attitudes, their dispositions, their moods? How else can we account for the seemingly obvious reality that generations hand down a city's character like a badge of honor or a cross to bear? Orhan Pamuk, arguably turkey's most famous, living writer, seems to have no doubt that cities have personalities. For he was raised in one of the most glorious of them all.

For nearly 1,600 years, Istanbul has been an ornament of the world. Christened by an emperor of Rome, it has been home to Byzantines and Arabs, ottomans and turks, civilizations which have, over the centuries, bequeathed this great city with gifts of culture and history, some of which stand to this day, defying disasters, both man-made and natural, to sunder them. It is home to great temples and even greater legends. But beyond its bizarres and its attractions, it is a city that straddles Europe and Africa, west and east, Christianity and Islam. It is a city of millions of souls seeking enlightenment and enrichment, culture and advancement, at the nexus of the world.

The son of one of its once-proud families, Mr. Pamuk grew up on these busy streets. He explored Istanbul's neighborhoods and matriculated through its schools. He dated its women and tested its limits, all while attempting, with his artist's heart, to capture Istanbul in all her glory. Imagining himself a painter, he tried countless times to represent the essence of the place on canvas, to distill its essence into something tangible the world could understand. But these talents eventually shifted to pen and paper, a medium in which he is an undeniable master.

Interweaving his personal history with that of his beloved city, Mr. Pamuk has created, in Istanbul, a moving and unflinching portrait of a life at the crux of the world. As critical of his own failings as he is of Istanbul's, he nonetheless manages to convey, over his many, long walks through this city of ten million, a sense of fog and mystery, of western thought and eastern passion, that fills the reader's senses with the sights and sounds of an unforgettable place. But more than simply describing it to us, he reveals the minds it has shaped and who have shaped it, past giants of literature whose melancholia not only captured the imagination of the author, but so clearly permeates the place. This, along with Mr. Pamuk's willingness to share so much of himself, his struggles and his fears, makes this an irresistible read.

For all of the splendor of Mr. Pamuk's prose, Istanbul could have benefited from more history. The author reaches into Istanbul's past only to conjure forth the great minds it has helped to nourish. Otherwise, he makes no attempt to describe, or to elucidate, the civilizations and the societies that have claimed it over the centuries. A pity, really. For the work does so much to reveal the gloominess and quirkiness of the place, to imbue its streets with meaning, that one can only imagine how Istanbul would have come alive if the reader was endowed with the context of its glorious and violent past.

This is mesmerizing work. Even if one has no time for the topic, the pleasure of watching Mr. Pamuk at work is sufficient to make this a memorable and rewarding experience. (4/5 Stars)

Humor, tragedy and social injustice in the excellent The Observations

From The Week of April 1, 2013

We are what we make of ourselves, not what others make of us. This is a fundamental truth of human existence that seems, today, inarguable. And yet, for centuries, it was rejected for a more convenient truth, chiefly, that we are born into the fates and the circumstances that suit our personalities. If a man was born into a life of slavery, then that was what he was best suited for. Similarly, if a woman was born to a life of prostitution, then her character was capable of nothing else.

The appeal of this view is obvious, for it re-affirms to the holder that their world is exactly as it should be. To view the slave or the prostitute as we would, that they were forced into those circumstances by ill fortune and socioeconomic pressures beyond their control, would shatter the holder's conception of the world, would reveal to them the fundamental unfairness of their society and would call upon them to change a system that would have seemed to them monolithic. So they wrapped themselves in their biases and condemned untold millions to proscribed lives. This unbearable narrowness of life is beautifully, and humorously, captured in Jane Harris' outstanding novel.

The year is 1863 and life for a poor Irish girl, trying to make her way in Scotland, is far from easy. And yet, this is the lot of Bessy buckley, the Catholic daughter of a woman of ill repute and dark disposition who, alone and sixteen, is attempting to find a place that will allow her to get ahead in the protestant world. Made aware of a job opening in what she imagines to be a castle, young Bessy stumbles, starving, into an estate outside of Glasgow where she encounters the intellectual wife of a lawyer who offers Bessy everything she could want: a wage, a roof and all the food she could desire. Only, as with everything in life, there are certain...strings.

At first, Bessy imagines she can cope with the lady's odd requests. Beginning a daily diary and handing it over to the lady isn't terribly onerous. Nor is acceding to the lady's desire to take every conceivable measurement of her head and body. But when Bessy learns the truth, that she is little more than a pawn in a demeaning game, she's had enough. And her response will set into motion a chain of events that not even she can imagine.

A finalist for the Orange prize, The Observations is first rate historical fiction. Narrated in Bessy's mesmerizing brogue, it exquisitely animates 19th-century Britain in all its narrowminded, classist claptrap, revealing, through Bessy's sharpness of mind and wit, the depths of her society's idiocy. This, naturally, is thanks to the skillful and steady hand of its author, Ms. Harris, who possesses not only a keen eye for the entwined polarities of humor and tragedy, but the the often-times devastating consequences of cause and effect. She deserves, here, every bit of acclaim that has and will come to her.

Of the work's many virtues, though, none shine more brightly than the degree to which it demonstrates the travesty of a society, and a culture, that invests importance in classes and casts. The notion that we somehow deserve, or are tailored for, our lots in life is laughable now that we understand that we are born to a particular life, but that we are shaped by the circumstances into which we are born. Thus, if we are born of tailors, and our society makes it difficult or even impossible to rise above our station, then of course we too will be tailors. We have no other option. But rather than comprehending this obvious truth, Victorian Britain goes the other way, believing that people wind up in the occupations they are made for, awfully convenient for a society trying to justify its unimaginable disparities in income, privilege and opportunity. And yet, though society is inarguably damaged by this reality, the people are moreso. For the women who wish to be scientists are barred from that life. And the poor men with keen minds for finance and politics are cordoned off from the halls of power. The misery of people forced to endure lives unsuited to their natural talents is unimaginable.

The Observations has its shaky moments. Its plot is, at times, too tidy, with every piece fitting neatly into place, holding little of the messiness of real life. Moreover, its resolution strikes this reader has too hopeful for the time and place. And yet, even these flaws seem like small sacrifices in the name of irony and poetic justice, virtues that Ms. Harris puts to good purpose throughout.

A deeply enjoyable romp through a tragically narrow world. It won't soon be forgotten... (4/5 Stars)

A beautiful, bleak tragedy slowly unfurled in Hugh Howey's Wool Series

From The Week of march 4, 2013
Our lies are always with us. For as much as we try to extricate ourselves from them, their stains linger so long as the truths sequestered by their telling remain obscured. And even though it is within our power to remove such a stain with a simple, straightforward confession, most of us cannot bring ourselves to do so. For with the passing of every moment, a lie grows in power, accreting in proportion with the damage it would cause when revealed. For most of us, this is a relatively small problem confined to relationships which operate almost entirely on trust, trust that is undermined with every falsehood. But what about the big lies? The lies institutions sell, the lies societies nurture, the lies governments spin? What if a lie is so monstrously large that the confessing of it would break the world? Mr. Howey uses this question to wonderful advantage in his engrossing and creepy series.

Centuries from now, Earth has become a wasteland. Soaring cities and resplendent nature have been rubbled and ruined by human hubris. What form this hubris may have taken has been obscured by time, by the passing of generations absorbed by the rhythms of life. And yet, the evidence of that ancient disaster remains, the images of gray skies, vicious winds and dead earth beamed into the silo that now harbors what is left of humanity. Outside, the world is cold and decayed, but within the Silo it is warm and vibrant, 144 floors of orderly existence shafting deep into the earth where oil and nitrogen, the essentials of life, can be mined and used to empower civilization.

From all outward appearances, the Silo is quite a harmonious place. Modelled on a small American town, it deploys a hierarchical power structure to safeguard the survival of the species. Its many trades, from engineering to portering, are clearly delineated, their talent pools refreshed by a well-organized cast system that, though not completely rigid, ensures that vocational knowledge is largely past down through families instead of being lost in the chaos of self-determination. This eliminates the need for universities. For aside from some basic knowledge, children grow up absorbing what they need to know from their friends, their family and their environment, a perfect incubator for the generation to follow.

This harmony, however, is a facade. For within the Silo, knowledge is tightly controlled, the rebellious sins of the past erased by not just censorship, but the pact each individual makes with the Silo's collective, that he or she will obey the laws and will avoid heretical questions about the past and the outside, the contemplation of which can lead to disaster. The Silo is largely successful in maintaining this pact, but when the wife of its sheriff is broken by the discovery of one of the Silo's most terrible secrets, the Silo's lawman initiates an investigation, the consequences of which will rock the Silo for generations to come.

One of the first major, sustainable successes in self-publishing, The Wool Series is a riveting collection of short stories which re-imagines the post-apocalyptic drama for the 21st century. Harnessing the most terrifying elements of horror, mystery and science fiction, Mr. Howey manages to infest the reader with a powerful sense of creeping wrongness, of gnawing claustrophobia, of crushing bleakness which, though potent, is rarely off-putting. This is a serious alchemical achievement. For activating such emotions can, when overcooked, provoke in the reader an antipathy that, when conjured, is all-but impossible to suppress. That Mr. Howey has found the proper balance here exemplifies his skill.

Though the series adopts a fairly novel approach to an old premise, the notion of a civilization in a bottle, this is not its only virtue. Mr. Howey has imbued his characters with winning personalities that rarely stray into two-dimensional caricatures. What at first appears to be overly simplistic blacks and whites eventually evolve into far more complicated grays whose ambiguities please far more than they irritate. Moreover, the author's sense of cause and effect is delightful. For its clear that the entire plot of the series is kicked off by a single, subtle action, one that creates a subsequent chain that ignites wholesale changes in the author's universe. Instead of fighting this, or even modulating it, Mr. Howey appears only to encourage the eruption, to follow eagerly where the falling dominos lead him. This is a refreshing development for a fairly stale genre.

For all its virtues, though, The Wool Series is not without its flaws. Some of its ex-post justifications for how the world came to be so twisted are decidedly threadbare, revealing gaps in logic that are troublesome. Moreover, after the first five stories, which grapple with the lives of those within the Silo, the series branches out to try to animate the days leading up to the disaster that created this dark world. This fails both theatrically and as a character study. For not only are the near-future characters decidedly less interesting than those who populate the Silo, the premature revelation of how the Silo came to be robs us of one of the series' most successful features, that the reader knew only as much as the Silo's characters knew, a reality which allowed us to unknot the mystery of its secrets and its origins alongside them. Granting us this omnipotent perspective severs this intimate connection with the Silo. It's clear that the author did this with an eye towards converging past and present at the climax of his tale, but the price he has paid for this is, to my mind, too high.

This is excellent, cross-disciplinary science fiction with the power to keep one up at night with dreams of a dark, authoritarian future. It would be worthy of your hard-earned even if each tale wasn't priced at $1, a supreme value that lights the way to the future of publishing, a little coin from a mass audience. One of the most inventive reads in some time... (4/5 Stars)

Lauren Myracle vividly explores small-town culture in mysterious Shine

From The Week of December 31, 2012
While there exists, in most of us, an appreciation for the rhythms and the purity of small-town life, these modest communities are defined by a darkly potent catch 22 that makes actually living there problematic. For the great virtue of small town life is its hospitable culture, a set of values that make neighbors of strangers, that make family of the forlorned, which speaks to a generosity of spirit rarely found elsewhere. However, this ethos, spawned from homogeneity, from shared values and shared customs, creates both a distrust of, and a distaste for, other, those individuals who, through gender or genetics, race or religion, present as different. These outsiders are shunned by these same, generous people, not because the shunners are evil, narrow-minded, or cruel, but because they live in sameness, in normalcy, in a world that is never challenged by chaos or elseness. Their kindness is purchased at the expense of multicultural inclusiveness. And this Ms. Myracle wonderfully demonstrates in her vivid, young-adult novel.

Darkness has come to the small town of Black Creek, North Carolina. For, as much as its country residents may wish to think otherwise, one of their number has committed a crime so violent, a sin so vile, that they can barely bring themselves to believe it's actually happened. Someone they go to church with, someone they have gone to the movies with, someone they've said hi to in the street, someone whose held a shop-door for them, used a baseball bat to beat unto death a sixteen-year-old boy before tying him to the town pump and pouring gasoline down his throat. There is only one thing about Patrick, the victim, that could have inspired such hate, only one characteristic that could have unearthed such rage. Patrick is gay. Not quietly gay, not passing gay. Resplendently gay. And for this he lies in a hospital, fighting for his life.

Tormented by this crime, Cat, herself sixteen and Patrick's dear friend, refuses to accept the sheriff's assertion that the perpetrator must have been a drifter, an evil sort who came and went, stopping only long enough to leave his mark. No, she knows better, that some people in Black Creek aren't talking, that people who once met her eyes will no longer look at her, that secrets are being kept about that fateful night. Unwilling to allow Patrick to go unavenged, she embarks upon an investigation to unearth Patrick's would-be murderer, little knowing the price that must be paid for the exposing of a town's deepest secret.

Though characterized by a simplicity of prose endemic to mainstream youth fiction, Shine is exquisite work. Ms. Myracle, herself a child of small-town life, captures, to a chilling degree, the blessings and the curses of homogeneity, the excruciating awkwardness of adolescence, and the subtle devastation done to the outsider by the society that refuses to love him. For while toleration has become commonplace, while it has become standard practice, toleration is not acceptance. It is not willing. It is reluctant, a begrudging sentiment born of culturally imposed political correctness. This narrow mindedness not only does damage to the individual who does not belong, it discredits the community that shuns him, making a lie of all the values they stand for.

Shine is no glorious mystery. It is not a tale to withstand centuries. But what it lacks in epicness it amply makes up for with pluck and grit. Cat, its heroine, is a fantastically tough hillgirl, a creature formed of indomitable spirit who, nonetheless, manages to be achingly vulnerable and enduringly flawed. Moreover, she has been embedded in a world that is brought into vivid reality by Ms. Myracle's hand. We can feel the heat, see the beauty, taste the dirt of these ancient hills. We can smell the life here, that strain of human stubbornness that refuses to change for anyone. And in this, the author has demonstrated a rare gift, the painting of a portrait in words that can be long-remembered by the mind's eye.

For anyone interested in cultural critiques, gender politics, or even coming-of-age stories, Shine will not steer you wrong. As pleasing as these hills are enduring... (4/5 Stars)

Tiger, Tiger, a chronicle of innocence lost

From The Week of December 31, 2012
Our lives pivot on formative moments, tiny slices of time in which chaos collides us with people we do not know and events we cannot predict. Leave the house five minutes early and meet our soulmate on a train we would normally never take; leave five minutes late and get hit by a car that would have been miles away if we'd left on time. And in this, we come to understand that fortune, or fate, or whatever face we bestow upon random chance, is something we can never anticipate. More's the pity. For while some of us are positively impacted by these collisions, others are utterly transformed by them in ways that leave behind very little of what we once were. Few individuals are more familiar with this than Ms. Fragoso. She demonstrates in her vivid and jagged memoir.

An urban child of the 1980s, Ms. Fragoso was born into a fractious family. Her American mother's psychological instability and her Latin father's searing resentments not only deprived her of a supportive homelife upon which she could build her future, their contentiousness drove her out into ther New-Jersey neighborhood to find there a measure of attention and affection not forthcoming at home. Notionally monitored by her mother, Ms. Fragoso, after encountering various characters, tumbles into the orbit of Peter, a Vietnam veteran who, 44 years her senior, is a creature of paternal gentleness. A twice-married man facing a long and difficult decline into agedness, Peter makes Margaux into a shield against decrepitude, giving to her the attention and play she so craves while extracting from her, in turn, a child's innocence.

As the years pass, Margaux and Peter embark upon a journey of mutual devastation. Their relationship, consummated when Margaux is seven years old, lasts until she is 22, but the intervening fifteen years are far from happy. For what began in affection, albeit manipulated, is increasingly marked by jealousy, discord, envy and emotional abuse. Their interactions, stained by what has past between them, become increasingly toxic until selfishness and despair finally sunder their strange and mutually dependent union, leaving Margaux alone in a world she has not been prepared to confront.

As creepy as it is moving, Tiger, Tiger is a 330-page explanation of why we protect our young from sex and relationships. For while peter is undoubtedly a molester of children, he is also someone Ms. Fragoso loves. She is tortured by that love, but it is still love that she feels, love for a man who took her into the basement of his home and changed her young life forever. She was utterly ill-equipped to recognize Peter's self-important excuses, his self-serving justifications, his self-pleasing manipulations. She, like anyone her age, saw only a man who gave her what her parents did not, love without limits or conditions. She could not recognize his martyrdom, his selfishness, his lack of self-control. And so she allowed herself to be grafted onto him. She allowed herself to be sustenance for a vampire who just happened to enjoy innocence more than blood. She allowed herself to be built up into a fantasy frozen in time because she could not imagine her life holding anything else.

There are drawbacks here. Ms. Fragoso reconstructs long and detailed conversations from her childhood without making any attempt to explain how she accomplished this feat. Moreover, she gives us no sense of perspective, no sense of events that followed Peter's departure from her life. Notwithstanding these small flaws, though, Tiger, Tiger is a vehicle for Ms. Fragoso's keen mind, for her lyrical pen and for her wounded heart, all of which combine to lend the work punch and consequence.

This is no savage, overwrought evisceration of child molesters; popular culture has done that for Ms. Fragoso. No, this is a quieter contemplation of the darker side of love: how much we need it, how we can be fooled into it, and how it can keep us enchained despite our best attempts at freedom. In this, Tiger, Tiger is more than worthy of its grave topic. (4/5 Stars)

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson

From The Week of November 12, 2012 As much as our lives, and thus our personalities, are shaped by a million unpredictable incidents, spanning decades, which are as uncontrollable as they are unavoidable, our parents define our existences. For when we are but blank slates, unformed in childhood, they are there to impart upon us codes of morality and conduct that we cannot reject. To do so would compel us to reject our parents as well and we are ill-equipped, at such an age, to be on our own. Thus, we conform. For good or ill, we learn at their feet, uplifted by their generosity, degraded by their abuse. We are encoded by them in ways we will never escape. No one knows this better than Ms. Winterson, much to her cost.

One of Britain's more famous, contemporary authors, Jeanette Winterson rose to prominence in 1985 when, at the age of 26, she published her first and to-date most successful novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. This coming-of-age tale of a young lesbian suffering the stones and arrows of her narrowminded, fundamentalist mother was as raw as it was vivid, capturing, in its two main characters, both the profound, generational divide that separates postwar parents from their Gen-X children -- repression versus freedom, authoritarianism versus individualism --, and the degrees to which these differences, born of time and circumstance, prevented anything like understanding from forming between the two disconnected groups.

At the time, Ms. Winterson acknowledged that this work was inspired by her own history. However, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal makes clear just how much, introducing the reader to the author's tortured childhood in which her exquisitely miserable adopted mother heaped upon her atypical but talented daughter the sins and the disappointments of her own repressed existence. Obsessed with sin, the elder Winterson could not see past her disapproval to recognize that her daughter possessed an unusual love of literature and poetry, a passion that would carry her to the heights of Oxford and beyond, leaving behind the gray and narrow world in which her mother had boxed herself. From painful, childhood episodes to the search for her biological mother, Ms. Winterson recounts her life, leaping as freely through time as she does from prose to verse, forever exposing the scars of a broken relationship that will never have the chance to heal.

Why Be Happy If You Can Be Normal is a fascinating read. While it is burdened by episodes of distasteful self-indulgence, it is, in every other respect, a revealing portrayal of a damaged person's most private pains. Enchained by her mother's scorn and the secrets of her own origins, Ms. Winterson spends much of her life plagued by an abusive circuit that she cannot break. For as much as she possesses the mental powers to reason her way clear of the wounds her mother burned into her soul, she cannot teach herself how to love. For all her powers, for all her success, this is beyond her talent. It is beyond anyone's talent. For allowing oneself to be loved is something that has to be nurtured in the young, cherished until it can grow armor against life's thorns. It cannot be imposed later on. For the scar tissue has already formed. And this is far from fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of trust and tenderness.

This is a commendable autobiography. For it is as raw as Ms. Winterson's most laudatory work. It is nothing less than the expose of the frailties of one person's mind and soul. And yet, this is also its most grievous flaw. For this is almost too personal, too acute. I feel like a voyeur, like I have been witnessed to something not meant for me. Still, to the degree to which it may help those who have suffered the same or similar dignities from those they trusted most, to make them feel less alone it is worthwhile.

As honest as it is sad... (3/5 Stars)

The Bridge Of D'Arnath by Carol Berg

From The Week of September 17, 2012 Though we endeavor, throughout our lives, to exert as much control over our destinies as possible, Fate is always there, ready to spoil our well-made plans. For while we may find it within ourselves to plot our own futures, we cannot dictate broader events. these are the gestalt of other actors who, in chaotic concert, weave a tapestry of action upon which we must work. Most of us will be indifferent to this fateful intersection of individual and world; after all, most of us experience customary lives which lack the mass to change the pattern of life. and yet, those rare few who do stand at the heart of things will find themselves utterly changed by Fate's hand, a caress that will steer them far from happy lassitude and into painful turmoil. Ms. Berg illustrates in her four-part epic.

Connected by an ancient, mystical bridge that spans the unfathomable void between their two worlds, the lands of Leiran and D'Arnath should have much in common. For centuries, D'Arnathy sorcerers have mingled in medieval Leiran, restoring its sick to health and filling its land with life. but where magic comes easily to the sons and daughters of D'Arnath, it has never been found in the bloodlines of Leiran families, an absence that has encouraged suspicion within the Leiran nobility, suspicions that the realm's priesthood has galvanized into prohibition. Eventually, a ban on sorcerers is found to be insufficient. Now, nothing short of a gruesome death shall be the punishment of any mage found to beoperating within Leiran lands.

One might imagine that the D'Arnathy, superior in every imaginable way to the Leiran, would simply depart, leaving their inferior cousins to their ignorance, but an ancient war with demigods on their own world has reduced 90 percent of their homeland to rack and ruin. what was once beautiful and green is now deserted and brown, the consequence of the wielding of unimaginable power. The D'Arnathy, then, are a people in peril, a people on the brink of homelessness, a people of peace made into the children of war who may yet be wiped clear of the canvas of history.

In The Son of Avonar, the epic's opening volley, we meet Lady Serriana of Leiran, a duchess who has accepted disgrace for living in sin with a D'Arnathy healer. having found in her lover only kindness and steadfastness, her life is shattered when the truth of his identity is publicly revealed and he is put to death in a most cruel fashion. This, coupled with the death of her son by this same man, compels Serriana to reject her life and her station, to withdraw to a distant cottage and spend the rest of her days in solitude.

this reverie, however, is broken when a young man barges into her world. Deeply damaged, he seems not to know his own name, let alone possess any capacity to sensibly communicate with the woman whose life he's interrupted. despite the barriers separating them, though, Serriana comes to believe that this stranger may well come to play a key role in the consequential events to come. For the bridge that has long-connected Leiran with D'Arnath is crumbling. and its falling may well spell the end of freedom on both worlds.

In Guardians of The Keep, the epic's second volume, Serriana's life is once again skewered by fate. having been pardoned by the Leiran king for her relationship with a D'Arnathy, she has returned to Conigor, the keep of her birth, to settle the affairs of her dead brother. duke Tomas' son, however, soon acquires her full attention. for in addition to being somber and sullen, he is deeply suspicious of his aunt who he's been taught to despise. when he fatefully runs away from Conigor, Serriana endeavors to bring him home, but she and her friends are too late. Her brother's son has been welcomed into the arms of the Lords of Zhev'Na, the destructive enemies of the D'Arnathy and they are ready to make of him a god of chaos to stand with them in the ruination of the worlds.

In The Soul Weaver, the epic's third entry, Serriana is again tapped by fate to intercede on behalf of her land when the queen of Leiran herself seeks her out to plead for her aid. the king of Leiran has been incapacitated by agents of the Zhev'Na, a crime which may or may not be connected to the disappearance of their daughter. Serriana agrees to help them even though she is burdened by her own labors. her family, such as it is, is set to be ended by the culmination of the destructive plans of the Zhev'Na. Only a miracle can save them, and Leiran, from ruination.

In Daughter of The Ancients, the final instalment in the epic, the arrival of a thousand-years-dead princess from the wastelands of the Zhev'Na throws the slowly recovering world of the D'Arnathy into chaos. How will she, the eldest heir to the D'Arnathy throne be integrated into the existing ruling structure? Is she as innocent and wronged as she seems, or is she the last ditch ploy of dying gods for one final measure of revenge.? Serriana and her family endeavor to discover the Princess' ultimate purpose while the fates of three worlds hang in the balance.

a sweeping epic, full of consequential deeds and unimaginable dangers, The Bridge of D'Arnath is a difficult, messy adventure. Ms. Berg commands a lyrical pen that does wonderful credit to her work here, blessing it with prose nearly as fine as poetry. But while her facility with language is second to very few, her plots leave a great deal to be desired. Events in this epic lurch from apocalyptic catastrophe to apocalyptic catastrophe, rarely pausing to allow its actors, let alone its readers, to catch their breath. Worse than its implausibility, though, is the degree to which the all-too-frequent explosions, like a bad summer blockbuster, numb the reader, inoculating him to the drama of the piece.

More than the troubled plot, though, Ms. Berg's epic is hobbled by a cast of characters who are rarely allowed to be themselves. Minds are sundered, identities are stolen, and souls are forced into the bodies of those who do not want them. And while these devices allow Ms. Berg to play with ideas of fate and consequence, of identity and personality, they leave the reader with little grasp of what these people are like when they aren't being bombarded by any number of mystical forces. It is, then, no surprise that Serriana is the series' most successful character. for in addition to being a strong-willed heroine worthy of the thousands of pages devoted to her, she is the only one who does not, at some juncture, have her mind scrambled by one godlike force or another.

Let there be no doubt that there is quality here. for all its flaws, The Bridge of D'Arnath bears strong resemblances to the giants of fantasy whose works inspired it. but instead of coalescing from its source materials into its own, distinct being, it is a Frankenstein of Tolkienian questing, Martinian betrayals and Jordanian beauty. It's as if the author conjured up a heroine and welded onto this framework her favorite bits of any number of her own heroes. Unfortunately for her, the weld points are all-too visible to the naked eye.

Interesting work, but the degree to which it is bedeviled by a bloated plot and deformed characters prevents it from taking flight and ascending to the upper echelons of the genre. (2/5 Stars)