A thoughtful glimpse of civilization's fall in The Last Policeman

From The Week of March 31st, 2014

Civilization is so pervasive, so consequential, that it's all-but impossible to imagine our lives without it. It has sparked ideas and ignited industrialization, enshrined the rule of law and elevated the power of the people, but it has also virtually blinded us to the truth, that it has bound us up in its conformist chains. This is a good bargain. After all, whatever we lose by way of personal freedom we more than gain back in enlightenment and wealth. This is indisputable. But just what have we surrendered? Is the absence of civilization truly so destructive? Would a world predicated on personal freedom necessarily be anarchic? Philosophers and anthropologists have been asking themselves these questions for generations, but Mr. Winter's has run the experiment. And though the destination may not be revelatory, the journey certainly is entertaining.

It is virtually certain that, in six months, everyone on Earth will be dead. This is the truth that confronts Harry Palace one unforgettable morning when he wakes to the news that a planet-killing asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. A policeman in a quiet, new-England town, one would expect that he, like every other living human, would be tempted to throw off the boring mundanity of daily existence, either by revelling in the freedom of these final days, or by ending it all on their own terms. But Harry Palace is not like the thieves and the opportunists, the professors and the pilots, who have forsaken their lives and their posts for a final, explosive experience. Harry palace holds the thin blue line against the darkness, righteously holding up the law in a world going to pieces.

The only problem is that it's almost impossible to be a policeman in the endtimes. Cell service is spotty, hospitals are barely staffed and the police force's investigative powers are being shut down. After all, what's the point in solving any sort of crime when there's so little time left? But to harry palace, truth is truth, right is right, and an oath is an oath. And even if it kills him, he's going to hold that line until the bitter end, as best he knows how.

An engaging journey through a tragicomic landscape, The Last Policeman and its successor Countdown City are pieces of imaginative near-future fiction. Ben Winters, though far from the first to attempt to conceive of a world careening through its last days, nonetheless manages to lay it out with style, with passion and with originality. His post-Announcement New England is vividly and organically drawn, a place where, though law and order is practically maintained, the soul has been ripped out of the community. There remains a societal superstructure within which to operate, but families are deteriorating, services are decaying and people are wandering off to please themselves before the end. Consequently, the author's world is not one of instant and gratuitous violence, but one in which the social, economic and civil webs that bind us all together are being sundered thread by thread, widening existing holes through which yet more vulnerable people slip into oblivion.

More than its rich environment, though, The Last Policeman's protagonist is also relatively rare. In a world slowly fraying at its seams, harry Palace is a humble, even geeky, rock of stability. He's a square, a man who does good because he has never thought to do anything else. While many of his fellows escape their obligations, he stays to do the job he's always wanted to do, an unthanked, unwanted, and unacknowledged pillar of civilization that someone will eventually break. In this, Palace does the series wonderful service as both an object of amusement and admiration. The former comes as the reader snickers at his naivety and his earnest doggedness; the later arrives when we come to understand just how much he must sacrifice in order to stand up in the face of a tide that even he seems to know will wash him away.

The first two volumes of the Last Policeman are by no means perfect. The author's mysteries are as threadbare as they are insignificant. Thus, as Harry labors to solve them, we are left to snicker and scorn him for either his thick-headedness or his gullibility. And given that Harry was already a square, having these attributes emphasized in this way is less than flattering. Moreover, we're often left with the impression that Harry's humanity only exists as a means by which to highlight its absence in everyone else around him. Which draws scrutiny to Harry's spotless character that it cannot withstand. Howevermuch the works may be flawed, the extent to which Mr. Winter's has avoided the cliches of apocalyptic fiction, and attempted instead to ask intriguing questions about what the world would realistically look like if all our deaths were as certain as sunrise, grants his work imagination and depth that easily overcomes its shortcomings.

An interesting idea that is neither boring or derivative... (3/5 Stars)

Corruption and the new France in the dark The Marseilles Trilogy

From The Week of December 16th, 2013

Corruption is a cancer that, when unchecked by the will to do good, spreads malignantly through the body of society, devouring virtue at every turn until civilization is simply a wasteland of broken dreams. Other crimes, other sins, lack this power to spread and infect. They are either regulated by the good around them, or quarantined into small ghettos where such behavior is, if not normative, then certainly expected. But corruption cannot be confined in this way because of its most potent weapon, the communication to the minds of the good that they are fools for playing by society's rules, that only dupes refuse to partake of the sweet fruit of all of corruption's temptations. No other form of wickedness can so swiftly convince the good to do bad, a truth made abundantly clear in Jean-Claude Izzo's engaging trilogy.

In the late 1990s, at the dawn of modern Europe, life in the French port city of Marseilles, the first city of the third world, is difficult and divisive. Not only are jobs relatively scarce, making rife the exploitation of the vulnerable, poverty and the influx of immigrants have created fertile soil for the racist National Front to bed down and nurture their cruel plots against all those who do not look like them. But underneath the drumbeat of the Front's marches, beyond the screeds of their pamphlets, is an even deeper threat from Italy, a Mafia culture that threatens to reach out and worm its corrosive tentacles into every aspect of European life.

Fighting a one-man war against these threats, which are as foul as they are pervasive, is Fabio Montale, a cop come reluctant crusader who has lived all his life in this dirty city of discontent. A hoodlum in his youth, he found his way onto the side of justice when he could no longer stomach the nihilism of criminality. And yet, while Fabio finds purpose with the police, he does not find peace. For they, in their own way, are just as corrupt as the world they seek to marginalize. Isolated in his quiet quest to keep the Mafia and the national Front from ruining Marseilles, Fabio is ill-prepared for the lengths they are willing to go to win, against him and against the world they want to own. Killing his friends, or even just people seen with him is nothing. What will Fabio have to surrender to continue on the path of righteousness? And does he have the right to endanger those closest to him to fight a war he cannot win?

Adventures through the racist and corrupt underbelly of this French city, The Marseilles Trilogy is as riveting as it is sloppy. Mr. Izzo, whose work helped create the genre of Mediterranean Noir, of which this trilogy is a stalwart, has created a gritty and wine-soaked world that more-or-less operates at the behest of organized crime. These syndicates, in penetrating governments and the police, have largely sheltered themselves from mainstream prosecution, allowing them to conduct their consequential business well outside of the light of day. This cunning investment has short-circuited resistance against them, leaving it to individual journalists, policeman and social crusaders to fight against a monolithic machine they have no hope of destroying.

Which leads us to Mr. Izzo's most singular and effective creation, the battered and beleaguered Fabio Montale, a man who staggers from crisis to crisis without plans, without hope, and certainly without any reasonable expectation of victory. Fabio is aware of all of these truths. And yet, miraculously, despite the pain this world has caused him, he persists in pursuing it precisely because of what said world has cost him. This may be insane; it's most certainly foolhardy; and it will someday, undoubtedly, get him killed. But whatever flaws of character Fabio may possess -- a closed-off heart, an inability to relate to the women he loves --, he is not a coward. He introspects. He reminds himself of what others deserve and he uses this motivation to deal small defeats to a darkness that will endure until long after he is gone.

the Marseilles Trilogy is rich with detail, with chaotic streets and crowded bars, with cynical racism and elicit drugs, with new music and old loves, all of which provide a rich tapestry around its reluctant hero, Fabio. But for all its sensory hedonism, for all that its leading man is worthy of the silver screen, its plots leave a great deal to be desired. At practically every turn, Mr. Izzo falls back on the old chestnut of the murdered woman Fabio could have loved to galvanize him into action. This an effective trope, one that has withstood the test of time, but when overused so blatantly, it gestalts into a writer's crutch that, when kicked away, leaves no other foundation upon which the tale can rest. Moreover, the resolution of these stories are so dizzyingly swift that they are in no way clear or coherent. The author's reluctance to grant Fabio any major victories is understandable in light of his overall message, but his manipulations, to keep Fabio from anything like triumph, is too readily apparent. The reader is never allowed to feel as though his conclusions are organic outcomes of real scenarios.

Nonetheless, The Marseilles Trilogy and the genre in which it has found such a profitable home, is a valuable work that not only speaks to the challenges faced by lone crusaders and large institutions trying to resist the infestations of crime, but to the kind of society that results from allowing the wielders of corruption to operate with relative impunity. These lessons grant these works their potence and their passion. (3/5 Stars)

A tumultuous and revolutionary season recounted in Freedom Summer

From The Week of October 1st, 2013

As much as the religious would have us believe in the holiness of an ideal standard of conduct, an unchanging set of views and values from which one may never need to deviate, we know this is absurd. After all, such standards are informed by the times and the cultures in which they were enshrined. And the merest glance at human history, both recent and ancient, tells us that social mores change over time. What is inexcusably taboo in one culture might not even be worthy of a whisper of controversy in another. Which leads us to an inescapable conclusion. As our physical forms evolve, so too do our morals and mores, taking us on a long and winding journey to freedoms both of the flesh and the mind. This should not be feared. On the contrary, it should be embraced. For to do so is to accept that we can always be better.

But there's a deeper question here, one that cannot be so easily dispensed with. How do mores evolve? What motivates social change? Is it the introduction of foreign elements that must be grappled with, incorporated into our cultural worldviews? Or are mores changed by insurgency, an upheaval from within the culture that has woken to an injustice that must be corrected? Both may be applicable, but I cannot think of a better argument for the latter than the remarkable story of hardship and endurance laid out here by Bruce Watson.

Fully a hundred years after the Americans fought a great, transformative war to expunge their nation's original sin, slavery, life in parts of the racially divided American South had changed amazingly little. African Americans were still segregated, forced to use different washrooms and schools, restaurants and churches, distinctions imposed upon them by their white masters, men and women who had refused, since the end of the Civil War, to admit defeat. Their rage and humiliation coalesced into a movement to deny the rights of their black neighbors, not only disenfranchising them, but igniting the creation of a culture that caused the law to look the other way while the descendents of their slaves were beaten and murdered, raped and marginalized.

Tired of the indifference and the status quo, and chafing at the soulless, forced conformity of the homogeneous, 1950s white culture, a group of young, rebellious, earnest and devoted students, from schools all over the country, descended on the South, in 1964, armed with a mission to compel change upon the ignorant and the backward. With songs and leaflets, energy and passion, they helped to shield the African American community from the slings and arrows of their white peers while they organized to do what most of them hadn't done in their lifetimes, register to vote. The riots and killings that flowed from this hellish summer would change forever the way the world viewed the American South, inspiring lasting legal and social change worthy of Lincoln's memory.

From the policy arguments to the tactical disputes, from the mobilization to the execution, Freedom Summer collects the stories of these legendary rebels that helped to finally abolish this most enduring stain on the American fabric. Shaping his narrative around a number of the Summer's key figures, revealing them in all their admirable passion and headstrong determination, Mr. Watson allows his chronicle, of those few, memorable months in Mississippi, to telescope back and forth between the heatedness of the view on the ground and the more calculated coldness of the view at 20,000 feet, where politics and necessity trump individuality. In this, the reader is afforded an excellent overview of this reckoning with the old South that is as comfortable sitting in the White House, with a conflicted and annoyed Linden Johnson, as it is roaring along at 100 MPH through the Mississippi heat, with the bringers of change and those who sought to snuff them out before they could work their will.

As of this writing, we're less than a year away from the 50th anniversary of this revolutionary summer, a fact which will surely author thousands of recollections, white and black, liberal and conservative, of what happened in 1964. There will be analyses of what it meant, some arguing for everything, others countering with nothing. Freedom Summer may not have all the definitive answers to these inevitable disputes. What it does possess, though, is far more important, a knowledge of the means by which positive change can be wrought. These rebels didn't have to have a coherent message -- on the contrary, the author is quite clear about the many, ruinous disputes that convulsed the SNCC. No, all they needed was the will, and the courage, to enable, and to motivate, the criminally disenfranchised to vote. The poisonous snakes obstructing them, envenomed by their irrational hatreds and burdened by their cultural conservatism, would happily expose themselves at this provocation, slithering out into the bright lights of the national spotlight where they could be judged and found wanting.

Freedom Summer is not a perfect work. It could have spent more time on the lead up to, and the aftermath of, this critical conflagration. Moreover, Mr. Watson virtually ignores the terrible optics of white people, however good-intentioned, riding bravely to the rescue of the beleaguered and uneducated blacks. This must have created fallout, both at the time and thereafter, but these are small quibbles with what is otherwise a wonderful work that exposes, and largely celebrates, the lives of heroes of all stripes who recognized an injustice and, instead of whining about it, chose to attack it directly. Would that they were better remembered by the culture at large.

Inspiring work... (4/5 Stars)

One of the most shameful episodes in French history in The Dreyfus Affair

From The Week of September 9th, 2013

There can be no doubt that the concept of the nation state has been a net benefit to humanity. It organizes disparate populations, it implements a standard of law and personal conduct that fosters communities, and it ignites the twin fires of enlightenment and industry that are the engine of progress. However, no matter how long the nation state abides, it will forever be plagued by an unreconcilable conflict of interests that is sure to eventually doom it. For the nation state requires individuals to believe in a collective idea, an artificial construct of borders and traditions that, as time advances, as its honor, its past, and its values become ingrained in generations, its adherents will increasingly strive to protect. And given that national power is accrued at the expense of individual power, eventually, the rights of the individual will become completely subject to the whims and the needs of the state, requiring revolution and upheaval to reset the balance. This lesson is made exquisitely clear in Piers Paul Read's excellent work.

In 1894, France found itself embroiled in a scandal that, with the benefit of hindsight, seems fitting for its troubled nineteenth century. For these hundred years were, for this proud nation, some of the most turbulent in its history. Continental wars, political crises and social upheaval all had their violent moments in the sun, requiring the French people to continually adjust themselves to ever-changing circumstances. But while most of these conflicts were instigated by external provocations or internal ambitions, the Dreyfus Affair was a trauma that bubbled up from a most unexpected and well-regarded source, the grand French army.

A relatively well-off French Jew, Alfred Dreyfus was a difficult man to like. A serious officer who had attained the honorable rank of captain, he appears to have had little regard for what others thought of him, a disposition no doubt accentuated by the fact that he earned, as a result of his family's extensive holdings, a pension far in excess of the wage of most of his comrades. However, no matter his social shortcomings, he seems to have been an honorable member of an honored institution, making it all the more shocking when, in 1894, he was accused of treason.

Still smarting from defeats in the Franco-Prussian war, French relations with Imperial Germany were uneasy at best. So when evidence arose, of classified French-Army documents being passed to the Germans, an investigation was feverishly launched to find the perpetrator. Suspicion immediately fell upon Dreyfus who, despite the case against him being weak-unto-nonexistent, was hurriedly convicted, court marshalled and sent to rot in a hellish French penal colony. This injustice inspired a five-year campaign, spearheaded by his wife, his family, and certain honorable members of the Army high command, to exonerate him, an effort that was ultimately successful, though, not before damages to health, to career and to reputation were done to Dreyfus, to his allies, and to France itself, damages that would leave scars well into the next century.

A riveting tale of betrayal and determination, The Dreyfus Affair is first-rate micro-history. Drawing upon the documents from Dreyfus' two military trials, as well as the victim's personal correspondence, Mr. Read has fashioned an arresting work of injustice and dishonor that not only explicates this 120-year-old crime, but rightfully elevates it into a parable for humanity. All of the players in this repugnant incident are given life and form. Moreover, the reader is made to understand both the agonies of the wrongfully accused and the torments of solitary confinement in ways that will linger for some time. All of these virtues do merit to the memory of a shamefully persecuted man.

The Dreyfus Affair is a complex work that is at its best when speaking to the shortcomings of humanity, in general, and French culture, in particular. The men and women who fought righteously for Dreyfus are inspiring. For these ranks were not merely made up of a family that would naturally be expected to defend him. Officers, novelists and politicians all rallied to Dreyfus' cause. And while it's too much to expect that they did so without any sort of personal agenda, it's clear that their motives were pure in a manner that does honor to the French character. However, on the other side of the ledger lies some of the most shameful conduct imaginable. The strong skein of anti-Semitism that ran through French society at this time is made eminently and revoltingly clear. Moreover, the willingness of the Army's high command to blithely let Dreyfus rot even long after they learned that the case against him was nonexistent is nothing short of the definition of selfishness. For these men put the health of the state and the honor of the army ahead of the truth and, in doing so, consciously protected a "pure French" traitor while condemning the innocent "French Jew." The state over the individual, concealing a crime to shield the honor of institutions... It does not get more convenient, nor more despicable.

An absolute must-read that transcends time and place and speaks to political and philosophical conflicts as real today as they were in the nineteenth century... Excellent work... (4/5 Stars)

A phenomenal look at a forgotten massacre in King Leopold's Ghost

From The Week of August 26th, 2013

Of colonialism's many sins, the degree to which it encourages humans to separate the strong from the weak, the momentarily superior from the disadvantaged inferior, must be its most grievous. After all, by dint of being both the planet's apex predator and foremost intelligent species, humanity is already predisposed to a self-centered view of the world, skewed to favor the viewer at the expense of all else. To then exacerbate this existing trait with all of colonialism's criminal enticements is akin to pouring gasoline upon a fire, an inferno of injustice, exploitation and degradation from which few ever recover.

Worse yet, though, is what this mental sense of otherness does to the victims who, starved, beaten and destroyed, having no culture or resource left to fall back upon, cultivate the victimizer's toxic tactics in hopes of lifting themselves out of the mire into which their fellows have been plunged. Abused becoming abuser creates the most pernicious vicious cycle imaginable, one in which peace and justice are made foreign concepts to entire generations. This Adam Hochschild exquisitely and passionately captures in his valuable investigative work.

Positioned in the heart of Africa, the war-torn and resource-rich country we know today as The Democratic Republic of the Congo has had a long and tragic history. Though claimed by the Portuguese in the 15th century, it was virtually inaccessible to European imperialism until the nineteenth, when Henry Morgan Stanley successfully traversed its dangerous terrain in hopes of locating Dr. David Livingstone, the missionary doctor and explorer who had famously vanished into this strange and foreign place. Until this time, and despite the Portuguese's unenforced claim, the Congo was an organized, self-sufficient kingdom ruled from present-day Kinshasa by a lord known as the Manikongo. But once Stanley's expedition proved that Westerners could withstand the dangers of the Congo, albeit with an excess of luck and endeavor, this kingdom would fall to the voracious hunger of Western appetites.

By the late nineteenth century, most of the world had been claimed in one way or another by the major western European powers of France, Germany and england. When Stanley's expedition proved that the Congo could be a prize to be won, tiny Belgium, lead by the ambition and hunger of its king, Leopold II, leaped at the opportunity to conquer it and, in a stroke, vastly expand its power and prosperity. Though this conquest would take many years to complete and be recognized by the international community, King Leopold II, with a combination of guile and relentlessness, would eventually prove victorious, creating the Congo Free State which began to export large amounts of priceless ivory and rubber to Belgium in exchange for relatively worthless items like glass and beads. But however horrendous this economic exploitation, the human cost was far worse. For in order to create this trade, Leopold's men instituted one of the most ruthless and degrading administrations in history, one in which women and children were systematically starved, beaten and murdered to encourage Congolese men to labor for Belgian gain.

The tale of these abominable crimes and how they came to light, King Leopold's Ghost is a mesmerizing and moving work of non-fiction. Mr. Hochschild, a first-rate historian who rarely disappoints, has set his nimble pen and sharp mind to detailing an all-but-forgotten chapter of western imperialism, one made all the more shocking for its darkness. For make no mistake. The crimes of King Leopold II and his men are at least as grave and despicable as those of the holocaust. The only difference here lies in Leopold's motives which were not forged by ethnic hatred but by greed, made no less potent by its simplicity. Step by cautious step, Leopold convinced the western powers that his intentions with the Congo were humanitarian, even pious, all while implementing, throughout this conquered land, a rule so foul, so cruel, that it inspired the writing of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a work which was, in no way, forced to exaggerate for effect.

Of King Leopold's Ghost's many virtues, the most memorable is the way in which it it reveals the role bias plays in the lives of man. Belgian crimes in the Congo were brought to light by a series of brave men, white and black, European and American, who, thanks to first-hand experience with the systematized beatings, shootings and rapes of the Congolese people, saw through leopold's lies and began declaring them to the public. However, these individuals were only few in number, a tiny fraction of the thousands of Europeans who had been to the Congo under Leopold's reign and watched the hands of the disobedient chopped off, looked on while entire villages were wiped out and the survivors forced into chaingangs, and observed the punishments with the vicious chicotte which often left its victims mortally wounded. This vast majority were silent. They were content to steal from an oppressed and brutalized people. They were content to earn and look the other way.

Even more troubling, though, are the biases amongst the social crusaders, all of whom believed in the rightness of British imperialism. The queen's justice was righteous and true, a light that should be shone upon the whole of the savage world. But Belgian imperialism was another story, the sins of which had to be exposed. This narrowness of thinking, this inability to recognize the universal despotism and criminality that arises out of colonialism, is utterly arresting, but no moreso than the will of the Belgian people to deny that their little country was complicit in the deaths of nearly ten-million people. Not until the 1980s were the records of this time revealed. And even then, no one was encouraged to read them. This is a crime against humanity they would just as soon bury.

But while there are in this tale no clean skins, there is this. When others forget, we can remember. We can read great books and remind ourselves that all crimes have been executed before, in one form or another. And in this way, when they are tried again,we can recognize them. We can be there to say "stop," "no," "this will not be allowed to pass."

A work as riveting as it is valuable... (5/5 Stars)

Blade Runner redux in Montero's Tears in Rain

From The Week of August 26th, 2013 Exploitation is one of the enduring quandaries of our age. For there can be no doubt that it is an unavoidable necessity of human progress. Be it the labor we capitalize on, or the resources we pull out of the ground that gave us life, our creations come at the expense of someone or something else. And yet, this very same progress, which drives us to create ever-more powerful technologies and to harbor ever more rational ideas, is the only means by which exploitation can be eliminated. So which is it? Press on in hopes of banishing the scarcity of resources that drives such exploitation, knowing that it will create even more of it in the interim, or return to a simpler time in which exploitation still existed, just in a gentler and more localized form? Neither option is very appetizing, however, it will be a question we'll increasingly ponder over the next fifty years, when many forms of alternative life, from the artificial to the posthuman, are introduced into society. Rosa Montero pegs out her pragmatic position in this debate with her interesting if problematic novel. The year is 2109 and Earth is not what it was. Not only does it harbor guests from alien worlds, it is now the hub of a modest interstellar civilization composed of colonies and artificial worlds. Its wars, of which there have been many, fought over everything from robots to political ideologies, have been largely outsourced to androids known as Replicants, fully fleshed and self-actualized beings grown from stem cells. Due to their rapid development -- they mature in approximately 12 months --, they are implanted with false memories, written by talented writers and thinkers, that substitute for actual experiences. Armed with this core knowledge, Replicants are deployed as laborers and security guards, functionaries and pleasure slaves, as a means of improving life for the standard strain of humanity. Through this tense, exploitative society prowls Bruna Husky. A combat Replicant, she has taken up work as a private detective since her discharge, managing to keep a moderately low profile, that is, until her neighbor, herself a Replicant, has a nervous breakdown in front of her which culminates in the woman tearing out her own eye. This dramatic and traumatic episode leads Bruna to the chilling discovery that the female victim is only the latest in a series of Replicant suicides. Hired by an aggressive Replicant organization to get at the bottom of the deaths, Bruna plunges into a world of drugs, schemes and false memories that will only yield up the truths she seeks if she's willing to confront her own constructed identity, the plumming of which might well break her before someone can kill her for snooping. At times entertaining and melodramatic, Tears in Rain is a thoughtful work of science fiction that never quite manages to escape its derivative roots. Ms. Montero, who has had a distinguished career both as an author and a journalist, has created an interesting, detailed world that has all-but-turned identity into a commodity, to be bought and sold, written and implemented, at whim. This notion has grave implications for humanity which, at the best of times, is tempted to exploit individuals and groups for its own gain. Doing so to people who can be programmed at any time to d as they wish, to fulfil whatever desire they wish, would not require a second's thought. Given such weighty issues, one would expect Tears in Rain to be a read as difficult as it is depressing. However, despite the amoral world in which it is framed, the tale rings surprisingly loudly with hope for the future. It is uplifted by the belief that individuals will always have the power to stand up and effect positive change. That change may be limited; it may even come at a terrible cost, but it will come. And that kind of incremental progress is both priceless and cumulative. However, notwithstanding its positivity and its engaging heroine, Tears in Rain cannot distinguish itself from the masterworks that preceded it. Clearly inspired by 1r\& and the short story from Philip K. Dick that gave it life, Ms. Montero virtually copies the idea of the Replicants as represented in those works, changing only the means of their creation. All else, from their artificially limited lifespans, to their tailored occupations, to their constructed memories, is unchanged, a fact which would be insulting if the author wasn't so quick to acknowledge these formative works. Heavens, even the protagonists hold the exact same occupation! The rot, though, runs deeper than the mere appropriation of ideas. Ms. Montero's true sin here is that she does so and fails to say anything that wasn't said, or implied, by these prior works. It's one thing to channel one's inspirations as a means of making your own vital statements about life and society; otherwise, the sum total of English literature would belong to William Shakespeare. But it's entirely another to do so and fail to expand on these existing ideas. The whole point of standing on the shoulders of giants is to be a link in the chain of knowledge and progress, not so that you can take advantage of the poor schmuck you're standing on. Interesting, but its failure to be what others have done better firmly mires it in banality. (3/5 Stars)

A difficult and disgusting descent into the mind of an American Psycho

From The Week of August 19th, 2013

Superficiality is a dangerous and pernicious force. For in deadening our spirits, draining meaning from our dreams, and attenuating our connections to the world, it robs us of the capacity to have both genuine emotions and authentic relationships. It allows us to skim along the surface of existence without ever plunging down into life's depths, the dark, challenging undercurrents where truth abides. This is reason enough to avoid it, and yet, this is nothing next to the damage superficiality does to cultures, to civilizations, infecting them with a kind of euthanizing, materialistic hunger that cannot be easily uprooted. For once superficiality has been embraced, the humiliation inherent in rejecting it, in being forced to acknowledged that it was, even for a short while, accepted practice, is too much for most to bear. This is the lesson taken to remarkably disturbing heights in Brett Easton Ellis' notorious classic.

It is the dying days of the 1980s and New York city is a cesspool, a collection of alleys spewing trash, of streets clogged with the homeless, and of clubs laden with narcotics. Crime, fuelled by the rise of Crack Cocaine, is rampant, a cancer that eats away at the soul of one of the world's foremost metropolises. And yet, for all of their destructive power, these are but venial sins when set against the awesome greed of Wall Street, an assemblage of banks and trading firms who, gripped by the feverish desire for wealth and power, strain mightily against the ever-weakening legislative chains that bind them.

Through this modern morass glides Patrick Bateman, a cog in this Wall-Street machine who notices brands, not people; who thirsts for gratification, not enlightenment; and who values besting his fellows, not uplifting them. A conglomeration of glitz and glamour, he absorbs this toxic environment and uses it to fuel his own psychosis which expresses itself through bouts of misogyny and misanthropy so violent and depraved that no one believes it of him even when he confesses it. This is his world, a creature of its creation and an aspect of its evolution. He cannot be put down.

A vicious and difficult novel, American Psycho is an adventure in filth. Characterized by orgiastic episodes of abject cruelty, it is an exercise in shock, with large swaths of the work surrendered to the unchained lusts of the greedy, insecure id. Pornography and murder are the primary forms of this authenticity of the foul, coming together to create such a potent mixture of ugliness that, even 20 years on from its original publishing, in a culture far more accustomed to such degradations, sexual and otherwise, it has lost none of its overwhelming force. It is not at all hard to imagine why the novel was released to such widespread outcry.

However, dismissing it as nothing more than the wet dreams of sadists would be a mistake. For this is not just atavism run amok; it is a commentary on the height of American materialism. It is a characterization of life at the heart of American Gomorrah and the existential price its occupants pay. Patrick Bateman is inescapably wicked, and yet, he is by no means alone. He is merely a more virulent strain of a virus that ravaged this place, at this time, an adherence to superficialities at the utter expense of the real that severed the bonds of mutual decency and submerged its victims into desiccated lives, sucked dry of all meaning. This is powerfully manifested in the work's obsessive attention to commercial details, brands, songs, the price of luxury goods, all of which help these victims of a decaying culture to deny their own emptiness.

But while American Psycho has value, its length is indulgent. Mr. Ellis could have made the same, provocative point with a book half its length. Not only would such a slimmed-down version have increased the sharpness of its satire, it would have shortcircuited the suspicions of even open-minded readers that this was an exercise of endurance, a challenge to see precisely which moment of wickedness finally succeeded in alienating its consumer. Instead, we have a 400-page celebration of depravity whose repetition dilutes its objective and leaves the reader wanting a shower and the comfort of good friends.

This is emotive work. Patrick Bateman will likely go down in history as one of the most despicable characters to ever be realized in literature. And at least in this, Mr. Ellis and his stylized distillation of a dark moment in American history won't soon be forgotten. However, being remembered is not the same as being valued. (2/5 Stars)

A searing, riveting portrait of the Mexican Drug War in El Narco

From The Week of August 5th, 2013

Nations have narratives, a collection of facts and theories, stories and biases, that coalesce, over decades, into a fundamental mythology that is programmed into most, if not all, of its citizens. For successful nations, this is a largely positive outcome, primarily because it re-enforces those ennobled traits that have purportedly empowered them to the top of the heap. Yes, this comes at the expense of absolute truth, but this is a relatively small price to pay for having such a high bar set for subsequent generations. However, for nations who haven't enjoyed such success, this same mechanism re-enforces a sense of chaos and failure, a toxic stew that embitters all but the most pure of heart.

All of this belief is predicated on the notion that these mythologies are accurate, that they have tangible meaning for those alive today, but what if they don't? What if the fates of nations are determined less by the individual actions of those involved, but by a combination of environmental and circumstantial factors now centuries in the past? For failing states, such a train would be hard to turn around, especially in our modern world in which results are expected to be immediate. And yet, what else is there but to try? Ioan Grillo, here, documents just such an attempt.

For generations, Mexico has been a nation teetering on the brink of catastrophe. For much of its history, these crises were political in nature, as powerful men drew upon the destructiveness of armies to exert their will upon a country troubled by the noxious legacy of Spanish conquest. More recently, though, particularly as Mexico has made the slow, stuttering transition to democracy, these existential challenges have shifted into the much more complicated arenas of economics and social policy which possess contradictions and dilemmas that not even successful nations have ironed out. Unstable currencies, corrupted police forces and concentrated wealth have all taken their toll. And yet, combined, it is difficult to imagine them causing as much damage as Mexico's position on illegal drugs.

Unwisely taking its cue from the United States, Mexico has attempted to prohibit the sale of marijuana and narcotics in its country. But unlike the US, where stable judiciaries and largely honorable police forces keep the trade largely confined to ghettos and dark street corners, Mexico has been overwhelmed on three fronts: by a warmer climate agreeable to plantation of such crops, by widespread poverty that guarantees a steady supply of desperate souls who turn their hands to cultivating them, and by its proximity to South-American nations from which these drugs can profitably flow north and into the United States. Together, this mixed bag of incentives and misfortune has plunged Mexico into a war with a powerful group of highly trained, borderline psychotic, and profoundly motivated insurgents who will stop at nothing, not even butchery, to maintain their hold over an unfathomably profitable trade.

In El Narco, Mr. Grillo investigates these cartels. And by interviewing both its members and its victims, he creates a deeply moving portrait of Mexican life that has been transformed by thirty years of growing strife and deepening social divisions that are ripping the country apart. Seeing before them the most enticing of dangling carrots, the cartels have seized upon a means of acquiring wealth and power that is as old as civilization. And yet, through his narration of the unimaginable cruelty and depravity of their crimes, the author convinces us that the Mexican cartels are newer, more nightmarish beasts that have been nourished not only by Mexico's troubled present, but by its turbulent past in which infighting and discord prevented it from joining the United States in the league of thriving nations.

But while the cartels understandably occupy the core of this work, El Narco's most revelatory and wrenching passages are reserved for those who have had their lives shattered by them. From families forced to participate because of the sheer, dumb randomness of living in the wrong part of Mexico, to innocents who have been caught up and gunned down in the crossfire between the cartels and the Mexican army, and even to the men and women who have been raped and killed as a result of this terrible war, El Narco is a shattering demonstration of the randomness of life, of its preciousness, and of how quickly it can be snatched away. Granted, most of us do not need reminders of the fitfulness of the spark of life, and yet, it is something entirely else to see the blood and the pain spilled out over these 320 pages, to comprehend the twin cancers of grief and nihilism that grow from it. Their stories are impossible to turn away from.

There are no policy positions here. Mr. Grillo certainly seems sympathetic to those who argue for legalization, but how could he not? For while, to us, this may be an academic debate, albeit one steeped in bias and political ideology, prohibition is, for him, a remedy for a bloodbath. Legalization would undoubtedly de-fund the cartels to an extraordinary degree. And that the US has pressured Mexico not to do this out of its own cowardly self-interest, and that Mexico has itself not summoned the courage to do it on its own, is nothing less than a crime against humanity, an unwillingness to acknowledge the terrible cost of preventing people from doing as they choose so long as they do not harm anyone else in the doing. Other than this, though, Mr. Grillo chooses not to editorialize on guns, politics, or culture which, though consequential, seem almost shallow compared to the human stories that fill these pages.

Searing and mesmerizing... An absolute must-read... (5/5 Stars)

A profoundly disturbing look at a disintegrating American city in Detroit

From The Week of July 29th, 2013

Urban decay is a scourge on the modern world. The natural outgrowth of economic systems that discourage centralized planning, they are unsightly and unsafe. But for as much as abandoned blocks and decrepit buildings may offend our sense of aesthetics, the extent to which they degrade the spirits of those exposed to them, draining them of hope and passion, is their truest and profoundest sin. For this cancer, once rooted in the hearts and minds of people who feel as abandoned by society as their neighborhoods are of people, cannot easily be taken out. It must be bulldozed and paved over, in the hope that the new will make everyone forget the old. And yet, that damage is generational, ensuring that it will linger as long as there's anyone around to remember. This is a lesson taught with chilling effect by this mesmerizing volume from Charlie LeDuff.

Once a thriving hub of industry and wealth, Detroit, Michigan has reached rock bottom. Forty years of White Flight, corrupt politicians and automotive decline have reduced its population by half, made a sham of its city government and exposed its remaining citizens, 82 percent of whom are African American, to the kind of impoverished, urban decay more in line with the Third World than the First. This rot is most consequentially reflected in the city's emergency services which are slow, inadequate and profoundly underfunded, resulting in obscene waiting times for 911 calls that would trigger hearings in other cities. But it's most obviously represented in the city's vacancy rate which experts peg at somewhere between 25 and 40 percent, meaning that, at best, an entire quarter of Detroit has been completely abandoned by citizens looking for hope under other lights.

Charlie LeDuff knows this all too well. Having grown up in the midst of this long, devastating collapse, he moved away to pursue a career in journalism before Detroit's siren song called him home to a position at the Detroit News where he began to document the city's decomposition. From this post, he spent several years wading through government corruption and civic crime, all while ruminating on the ways in which Detroit devoured him and his family, claiming the life of his sister, the joy of his mother and the self-respect of his brother. These observations, alongside his own failings, leave little doubt of just how monumental Detroit's fall from grace has been.

Detroit is a shattering piece of gonzo journalism. Comprised of Mr. LeDuff's experiences while working at the Detroit News, its narrative is explosively propelled by the author's disgust with his and the city's failings which are entwined to wonderful and shocking effect. The reader is exposed to abandoned neighborhoods and decaying courthouses, beleaguered firemen and crooked judges, their collective stories weaving a tapestry of life in the heartland of American decline. One would naturally expect this to be a difficult and challenging experience, but such is Mr. LeDuff's skill, and such is the overpowering nature of his subject, that the reader is often left gobsmacked by the depths to which this poor place has sunk.

Though the personal nature of this account is its greatest virtue, compelling the rubbernecking reader to look past the atavistic excitement of a train wreck and to the real damage that's eventuated as a result of unchecked corruption and decay, its most memorable punches are saved for some of the local customs. Mr. LeDuff contends that Detroiters will buy cans of gasoline which they use to set vacant houses on fire, entertainment for the whole family for less than the cost of a movie ticket. Such anecdotes, which one expects to only find in dystopian novels, do more in one sentence than thousand-page reports to convey the unfathomable degree to which Detroiters have been altered by their environment. Gentrification and urban planning need no other advertisement than this.

Detroit is not without flaws. One senses that Mr. LeDuff enjoys a good story. And given the appalling disposition of his subject, it's easy to imagine that some of the details here have been exaggerated. For instance, every poignant episode seems to conveniently include an appropriately profound quote from one bystander or another. Perhaps the author is merely lucky to be have been in the right place at the right time, but the frequency of these lucky moments seems a bit too high for comfort. That said, this is also part of gonzo journalism's appeal, an intense subjectivity that draws us into the world at the expense of objective truth. So it's not as though exaggerations aren't expected.

A profound experience. It would be a hard heart that remained unmoved for the having of it. One of my best reads this year... (4/5 Stars)

The many faces of man and India in the long and winding Shantaram

From The Week of July 22nd, 2013

Though we can try to broaden our experiences with travel and literature, exposing ourselves to classes and customs of which we know little or nothing, we will never know others the way we know ourselves. From the thoughts that define our darkest moments to the rhythms of our lives indelibly shaped by the cultures that nurtured us, this is what we know. Everywhere else, we are strangers, floating through societies, defined by languages and landscapes, that would require years to understand. But what if we don't even belong to the places that nurtured us? What if, even there, we are misfits, our energies and temperaments mismatched with what we know? Then escape is our only option, a commitment to life as a stranger in a strange land, the price of which is exquisitely captured in Gregory David Roberts' sprawling work of autobiographical fiction.

The product of a working-class upbringing and a life-defining stint in a harsh, Australian prison, Lindsay Ford is a stranger to himself. A bank robber of some repute, he has fled his native land, and the jail that sought to cage him, and traveled, on a fake passport, to India which, initially anyway, serves as merely a stop on his way to freedom in Europe. However, before Ford can move on, events and new friends conspire to keep him in this unknowable, tumultuous country that he is forced to embrace and understand when, in an act of karmic revenge, he is himself robbed and deprived of all but the shirt on his back.

This defining event sends Lindsay on a remarkable journey of criminality and philanthropy that begins in a Mumbai slum and concludes in the violence of war-torn Afghanistan. Between, he will learn Indian languages, Indian customs and even Indian prisons, each of which serve to deepen his understanding of not only himself, but the suffering of the world. Enlightenment, however, may just come at the cost of his soul which may well be the only thing that one cannot sell in this land of noise and opportunity.

Shantaram is a monumental work of fiction that asks far more questions than it answers. Built on the back of Mr. Roberts' remarkable life, it is a thousand-page odyssey into the India of the 1980s, a place of corruption and sorrow, kindness and justice, that is undoubtedly the star of the tale. For the author forsakes a desire to constantly entertain the reader with plot and action and devotes large swaths of the work to simply describing this nation of a billion souls scrambling to get ahead in a world that makes that an all-but-impossible achievement. Villages and slums, cities and jails, are revealed in all their structure and their limitations, exposing India, at the least the India of this novel, as a place where the failure of organized, fair civic institutions have been replaced by ad hoc operations that attempt to provide some sort of framework for the lives of the lower classes. The patchwork nature of this tapestry is both beautiful and tragic.

Though Shantaram speaks at length to issues that range from morality to corruption, suffering is its profoundest and most consistent theme. Lindsay, Mr. Robert's fictional alter ego, endures a remarkable amount of degradation, all of which eats away at his spirit. In this, he becomes our entry point into the Indians who live with the same treatment, or worse, on a daily basis and do so with, what is to the western mind, a stunning degree of fortitude. The scars of unfathomable poverty linger on them, certainly, but it's the novel's caucasian characters who seem far more burdened by their experiences here. It is they who lack the armor that comes from properly understanding a place, of having their expectations for life calibrated from the moment of their births. The Indians know how to take life's slings and arrows without having them damage their spirit. The westerners, meanwhile, have no such protection which causes them, in the face of all of India's thunder, to break down and lose their way, to become trapped by its schemes, radicalized by its violence, and numbed by its capacity to test the depths of the human spirit.

Shantaram has some revolutionary moments, perspectives and phrases that leave the reader alternately breathless and enlightened, but it does this at the expense of the plot which is picked up and set down at the convenience of its author. Fully half of the work is made up of one rumination or another on the nature of existence which, after awhile, becomes both burdensome and far too apparent. The reader begins to sense the digressions into moral philosophy, to feel them coming, to resist the urge to skip it in order to stay within the story's arc, a frustration that weighs down this truly tome-like work. Had the author made more of an effort to intertwine these spiritual musings with the story's significant episodes, one senses that the read would have been legendary.

Fascinating and enlightening... (3/5 Stars)

A charming and sober look inside a women's prison in Orange Is The New Black

From The Week of July 15th, 2013

Civilization has always required prisons, a means by which to segregate the disobedient, the disharmonious and the dysfunctional from mainstream society. After all, if such chaotic elements were allowed to freely roam, they would diminish not only the people's belief in the rule of law, but they would promote a kind of anarchic individualism that would make governing all but impossible. The state needs conformity. It can operate no other way. And so we gather up the offenders of society's codes, everyone from thieves to rapists, and we shut them away until they have ostensibly learned their lessons, until the deprivation of their liberty has scared them straight. We do this, paying only passing heed to the circumstances that encouraged them to commit their crimes in the first place. We do this, little knowing the costs, in coin and in futures, we waste. This Ms. Kerman conveys in her charming and disturbing memoir.

Piper Kerman received an excellent education; she was nurtured by a successful and caring family; and she possessed an intellect capable of propelling her to the heights of her society. But none of this abrogated her sense of adventure, her desire to color outside the narrow lines proscribed by her gender and her class. Which is how she entered into a consequential infatuation with Nora, an older but not necessarily wiser woman who used the funds earned from her position as a member of an international drug ring to take Ms. Kerman to the world's most exotic locales where the pair could live, explore and enjoy life. Such a heady existence is not built to last though, a fact ms. Kerman realized soonafter foolishly agreeing to help her partner launder money through a European airport.

This fateful decision would not only accelerate the end of her relationship with Nora, it would lead to agents from the US Customs Service turning up on her doorstep two years later, charging her with Moneylaundering and insisting that she tell them everything she knew about the then collapsing drug ring. Shocked to have her past come back to haunt her, Ms. Kerman engaged in a five-year-long odyssey to fight the charges, but her battle was ultimately a losing one, leading to a plea agreement that would see her spend thirteen months in a minimum security women's prison in the American northeast. Though she would ultimately serve far less time than many of her fellow inmates, these thirteen months would have a profound impact on Ms. Kerman, her friends, her family and her fiance. And they would forever reshape her idea of prison and the heavy toll it takes on all those who come in contact with it.

A breezy memoir, full of amusing anecdotes and rueful revelations, Orange Is The New Black is an entertaining and enlightening chronicle of life in a women's prison. Ms. Kerman, who has since gone on to work for a non-profit, has a keen eye for detail, a sympathetic heart that bleeds for her fellow inmates, and a rare degree of self-awareness that leads her to be honest about her flaws and her foibles. This combination of talent and integrity quickly earns the reader's respect and confidence. For this is no self-justifying polemic against the state. This is no screed of self-denial that seeks to blame everyone but the blamer. This is an earnest catalogue of both her own shortcomings and those of the penal system that so briefly captured her, a fact which elevates this work out of the mire of the self-reverential and into the world of the societally useful.

Though Ms. Kerman primarily focuses on the day-to-day grind of prison life, she does not avoid some biting social commentary. She is deeply critical of the harsh sentences, required by America's system of Mandatory Minimums, that end up burdening marginal criminals with debilitating stretches of time. She does not deny that there are violent women who have earned their segregation, but these individuals are few when compared to the legion of women ensnared in the criminal enterprises established by boyfriends, husbands, fathers, and brothers. These opinions are no doubt colored by Ms. Kerman's sympathies, but this in no way invalidates her overarching point, that the sentences for nonviolent drug offenders are extreme, disproportionate, and profoundly shattering. They not only disconnect these women, 80 percent of whom are mothers, from their families, they wrench them out of society, compelling them to forever exist outside the margins where only a handful of social crusaders care to even notice them.

Orange Is The New Black is by no means flawless. While it has little of the sensationalism or salaciousness one might expect from such work -- a truth for which we should be grateful --, it exposes a certain self-involvement on the part of the author. Very little actually happens to Ms. Kerman during her time locked away. And yet every detail of her stay is picked apart. This is a benefit, in that it reveals the degree to which prison is essentially enforced tedium, but it also leaves us to occasionally wonder if this is a worthwhile exercise.

Notwithstanding its occasional missteps, however, this is engaging work that, while light on policy recommendations, certainly confirms the suspicions that the penal system, as practiced by western society, is deeply flawed. And through the lives and experiences of these women, we come to understand that in the most intimate of manners. (3/5 Stars)

A long, filthy descent into nihilism in The Avery Cates Series

From The Week of July 8th, 2013

For civilization, devastation is a disease. For not only does it destroy buildings, disrupt basic services, and overturn the rule of law, it infects the humans exposed to its necrotic caress with a persistent sense of nihilism. It entices them to believe that society, as it was, is gone and that only fools would waste time re-establishing it. It convinces them that the only worthwhile virtue of their new existence, amongst the smoldering rubble of what was, is to survive and to do for oneself at the expense of everyone else in the name of that survival. But herein lies devastation's true perniciousness. For if everyone adopts this selfish attitude, then nothing is ever repaired, rebuilt, reborn. The world, staffed by survivors, is allowed to decay until even the memory of civilization is gone. This is the attitude that pervades the first three volumes of Jeff Somers' series and its one he wields to great and depressing effect.

It's the 21st century and life as we know it is gone. Nation states, and the individual freedoms they granted to their citizens, have been swept away by the System, an apolitical surveillance state that has, in the name of uniting the world, deployed bombs and droids, wars and assassins, as a means of establishing a new, peaceful order. For a time, widespread resistance to this new, globalist regime burned bright, but eventually even these organized pockets of rebellion were ground out beneath the ruthless bootheels of the System cops and their masters, men and women who would rather rule over rubble than not rule at all.

Through this dystopian world simmering with resentments slouches Avery Cates, a 27-year-old mercenary who barely remembers the world before unification. The totality of his adult life has been lived beneath the merciless eye of the system and their enforcers who roam the ruined streets of his native New York with a kind of brutal and uncaring vigilance. Cates' only means of survival in this world of solitude and disenfranchisement is to hire his gun out to those who can pay for murder. But though his skills have kept him alive for longer than most of his compatriots, his luck appears to have run out. For Cates has been tricked into killing a system Cop, a crime that generally results in long spasms of torture, at the hands of these new brothers in blue, prior to a painful death. His only escape from this particularly grim fate is to allow himself to become a tool for the director of the system Cops' Internal Affairs division, an exploitative relationship that will send Cates on a long, destructive spiral into the very bowels of his dirty, corrupted world.

A dark and difficult experience, The Avery Cates Series is a coarse and clumsy take on dystopian science fiction. Mr. Somers draws on 20th-century history to essentially recreate, in the 21st century, life imagined by the Third Reich, corporate fascism in which people were only allowed to act with the permission of the all-powerful, all-seeing state. This framework is then married to a series of explosive challenges for Cates to overcome at the expense of everyone around him. This union of historical influences and Hollywood blockbusterism initially stirs powerful emotions, particularly for those readers even passingly familiar with Nazism. Unfortunately, this is where the author's creativity ends. For all else is merely a stress test to see how far Cates can be pushed before he cracks and relinquishes what's left of his humanity.

Perhaps the most unpleasant part of Mr. Somers' work here, though, is his reliance on foul language. Any good story deploys its fair share of epithets which, when properly and sparingly used, have an unrivaled impact upon the reader. But the author completely rejects this philosophy, instead, peppering his work with every permutation of what George Carlin called the seven dirty words. Yes, to some degree, this harsh and violent language helps convey both the brutality and the hopelessness of Cates' world, but he accomplishes this at the expense of the reader's attention and respect, both of which are eroded by his reliance on such a flippant means by which to communicate personal and societal desolation.

There are virtues here. The Avery Cates Series challenges notions of what it means to be human. It adopts and darkly distorts proposed technologies such as digitized consciousness, mechanized exoskeletons and the artificial hivemind to create an affectingly grim view of a possible future. Imagining and spinning out such scenarios is not a simple achievement. And yet, this is at far as it goes. Mr. Somers does not grasp these tools and fashion something with which to advance the conversation. He has, instead, adopted the themes and the rhythms laid down by the masters before him and, sadly, re-constituted them with only marginal success.

For those looking to be entertained by a swift, atavistic plunge into a grim, pugilistic world, there is material here worth exploring. But for anyone seeking to find enlightenment amongst the ashes, such embers are few and far between. (2/5 Stars)

A dark journey through L.A.'s underground in Drive

From The Week of July 1st, 2013

Until science solves for the mysteries of the mind, the age-old debate of nature versus nurture will continue to percolate, propelled onward by the desire to understand unfathomable humanity. Why do some of us become saints and others sociopaths? Why do some of us have indomitable tempers while others possess uninterruptable serenity? Why do some of us drive ourselves to the heights of fame and fortune while others never make it out of our neighborhoods? Questions and accusations, theories and excuses, abound, some of them helpful, others generated from bias. Until we have a roadmap to human nature, we're left with only our intuitions and our suppositions, a circumstantial uncertainty played to eerie effect in James Sallis' brief but bloody piece of crime fiction.

A son of the American Southwest, birthed from a home of deep dysfunction, the Driver moves through life as if it were a movie. He remembers meals and jobs, girls and cars, but the rest is sloughed off as vestigial to his Polaroid life. Lacking even a name, he is a quiet ghost in the City of Angels, performing car stunts for Hollywood by day and acting as the wheelman for criminals by night, a dual life that seems to suit him quite well, that is, until two transplanted connected gangsters from old New York decide to tear up the rulebook to their underworld game, stalking him for ill-gotten gains Driver would have happily returned if they had the courtesy to ask nicely. That they don't is, for Driver, causes belli and the fallout promises to be spectacular.

Barely a hundred pages, Drive is nearly a perfect piece of dark, summer reading. Emerging from the swift, flashy tradition of crime fiction popularized by Elmore Leonard et al, Mr. Sallis has constructed a series of dramatic, even moving vignettes that act upon the narrative like flashbulbs, momentarily shedding light on fragments of time in the life of a man (Driver) who has only a foothold in our world, the rest of his nature lost to some netherspace of deeds and apparitions. Consequently, Driver, the only character who claims more than perhaps ten percent of the tale, is a person barely glimpsed, his motives hidden behind a creepily affectless facade that Mr. Sallis has miraculously imbued with magnetism, not repulsiveness.

Reducing his cast to but one serious player is, for the author, a toss of the dice, a roll made in the confident hope that Driver will captivate readers. And he does. For he is not a simple monster who demands that we accept his nihilism-as-parable for 21st-century America. Rather, he is a deeply damaged person who has come to imprint upon the world certain codes of conduct that are, for him, inviolate. This is not some ancient skein of honor upon thieves co-opted from the Mediterranean. It is the means of his survival in a world that, without his rules, is completely inexplicable. In this, is just like everyone else he shares the world with. The difference rises only when we contemplate the particular codes which, for a man who does not seem to feel pain, much less emotion of any kind, are quite apart from the ones we would know. This is why he is a creature of fascination. He is a puzzle, not an animal.

There are other pleasures here, certainly. Mr. Sallis' Los Angeles operates in that entertaining pretend space of urban cities devoid of law-enforcement, a world fully endorsed by Hollywood that suggests that civilization is merely a series of encounters and exchanges moderated by the threat of violence and the possession of power. This may be absurd, but it is also profoundly appealing, offering up a glimpse of an unrestrained life that our savage sides long to experience. It is the forbidden sandbox of no holds barred that we all left behind AS toddlers learning that we had to accept society's chains in exchange for life. This adrenaline hit never gets old.

A rewarding read... (4/5 Stars)

Faith, justice and innocence all go missing in Redrum The Innocent

From The Week of June 17th, 2013

As much as we plan and dream, organize and hope, our lives are beyond our control. We live in a world of billions, a world in which, every day, countless people make decisions that have an impact on both our present and our future. We can't resist that. We lack the knowledge and the power to turn back that flood. And so we ignore it, concentrating on what we can change, on what we can see affecting us in the moment. This is a much more palatable existence, one that gives us the illusion of command. But what happens when that illusion is shattered? What happens when our lives are turned upside down by events we could no more predict than we could accept? What are we then? And how do we survive? Kirk Makin ruminates in his sprawling work of non-fiction.

On October 3rd, 1984, Christine Jessop, a playful, adventurous, nine-year-old girl living in Queensville, Ontario, vanished without a trace from her quiet, suburban home, shocking a community unfamiliar with such terrible events. Over the next three months, fuelled by her mother's hope for the girl's safe return, the police and the public would undertake a regional search for little Christine, one that would end in tears when her broken body was found some 50 miles from her home, in woods frozen by winter. With only a few suspects and even less evidence, investigators soon locked in on Guy Paul Morin, the Jessops' eccentric, 24-year-old neighbor who, though lacking any sort of motive, much less a criminal history, was extensively questioned by cops increasingly eager to find their man. Their suspicions were only strengthened when they learned that Morin declined to join the extensive, public search for Christine, in the desperate days just after her disappearance.

Using hair and fiber samples taken from Morin and his car, police would eventually arrest Morin, charging him with Christine's murder. Fixated by his social awkwardness, they would spend the next year largely ignoring other suspects, SHAPING what few pieces of evidence they had into a case against Morin that would lead to two controversial and contentious trials, the second of which would finally convict him of a crime he did not commit. This truth, however, would only come to light in 1995, 14 months after his conviction, when newly developed DNA techniques would rule out his involvement with Christine. This shameful miscarriage of justice would conclude with a 1997 inquiry which excoriated the police and the judiciary, accusing the former of leaping to unsupported conclusions and recommending that the latter change its prejudicial procedures. But none of this would help Guy Paul Morin regain his life. Nor would it return Christine to a Jessop family shattered by her disappearance.

As shattering as it is revelatory, Redrum The Innocent is Mr. Makin's extensive chronicle of both the murder of Christine Jessop and the judicial farce that would attempt to identify and punish her killer. Drawing on dozens of interviews with the principals and countless hours spent observing Morin's two trials, the author masterfully weaves together the personal and the professional, painting intimate portraits of the prime movers while methodically laying out the dubious evidence used to first hound and then to imprison an innocent man. Between, Mr. Makin systematically savages the case against Morin, not only revealing its shoddy construction, but detailing the unforgivable extent to which police fixated on Morin, contorting the facts to better fit their assumptions of his guilt. His efforts here are so thorough, so overwhelming, that they leave the reader's faith in the judicial system deeply shaken.

There is no doubt that Redrum The Innocent is at its most potent when describing the ways in which the police bungled the investigation of Christine Jessop's murder. In fairness, the cops in question were neither trained nor prepared to handle such a complex and difficult case. None of their rural charm, or good ol' boy instincts would help them find their man. For the degree to which they were overwhelmed by what unfolded, we can have sympathy. However, what we cannot tolerate, much less accept, is the degree to which the police refused to acknowledge their own inadequacy. Instead of welcoming outside assistance, they fell back on interdivisional rivalries out of the selfish desire to claim the glory of finding Christine's killer. This hunger would lead them to not only manipulate evidence and coach witnesses as a means of firming up the case against Morin, it would cause them to unforgivably dismiss the leads that might have lead to Christine's killer. As a consequence of hurling all their energies at an innocent man, the killer was never found, a fact which has left the Jessop family in ruins.

If this is the work's travesty, its tragedy is saved for the Morins and the Jessops, two families smashed by this ordeal. As a result of the harsh light of the investigation, secrets and lies are forced out of the shadows, truths nearly as cruel as the murder itself. This endless, grinding process of lurching towards something like justice leaves the reader hollowed out, hoping for some measure of peace, of justice, that never comes. We should be better than this. It should be easier than this. Alas...

Redrum The Innocent could have used an edit trim some of its 750 pages. Nonetheless, it is, in every other respect, a mesmerizing read that withstands the test of time. For though its subject is primarily the murder of a young girl, the ways in which it branches out to speak about the law, society and human nature is timeless. A must-read... (4/5 Stars)

Honor killings, multiculturalism and a horrific murder in Honour on Trial

From The Week of June 17th, 2013

Multiculturalism has, and will likely always be, problematic. For though many of the world's countries pride themselves on open borders and hospitable populations founded on notions of generosity and the will to be free, humanity has spent the bulk of its history as a species in homogeneous environments, ensconced in tribes and lands where everyone walked and talked like everyone else. Certainly, there were exceptions, particularly in the most recent millennia in which technologies that allowed for large empires were deployed to conquer other lands, but these centuries are but the tip of the iceberg poking out of the waters of our evolutionary past.

As a consequence, human beings living in multicultural environments experience a quiet tension, one that pits the wisdom of their cultural enlightenment against the suspicion of their genetic makeup. While times are good, with crime low and jobs plentiful, wisdom wins out. But when times are difficult and money scarce, like for like takes the day, causing suspicion of the unknown to override judgement and for cynicism to replace kindness, a matter made all the worse when this multiculture is forced to grapple with crimes it cannot imagine, emanating from backgrounds with which it has only a passing knowledge. This is a truth chillingly rendered in Paul Schliesmann's brisk work of true crime.

For Canada, a country that has never experienced a high rate of crime, relative to much of the world, the Shafia Family murders came as a severe shock. An honor killing that claimed the lives of three teenaged daughters of a successful, immigrant family from Afghanistan, then living in Montreal, it would launch a three year odyssey beginning with a lengthy police investigation and concluding with a high-profile trial in which Mohammad Shafia, the family patriarch, Hamed, his son, and Tooba, his second wife, would stand accused of executing a cruel plot to drown the three young women, along with Rona, Mohammad's first wife, in a Kingston Mills Lock. It would take time for a motive to emerge for such a terrible and senseless crime, but eventually an chilling image of the family would take shape, one colored by tribal customs transported to the new world, customs that endow females with family honor to such a degree that any significant act of disobedience brings a stain upon the family that can only be cleansed with blood. This would prove to be true of the three Shafia daughters who, having once agreed not to date boys, broke with their eastern customs to embrace the western culture in which they were immersed. For this, they died in the cold and the darkness.

A thorough primer of the Shafia murders and the complex trial that would follow on from them, Honour on Trial is a read as swift as it is informative. Mr. Schliesmann, a Canadian journalist, possesses a newsman's prose, pages stripped of any sense of excess or flair. In its place, cold, hard facts which paint a portrait of events that are as clear as they are difficult to stomach. In this vein, the author makes no judgement calls about the Shafia family, leaving such editorializing to others. Instead, he uses established truths to depict the tragic, senseless course of events with heart-sinking deliberation, leaving little room for doubt.

For those looking for a simple chronicle of events, Honour on Trial serves admirably, but the Shafia case demand more than this. This was not only a murder. This was the premeditated killing of four women for reasons that are inescapably barbaric. Yes, we must be sensitive to the customs of other cultures, to embrace them and weave them into the fabric of who we are. But we must test those customs against not only our ethics, but the widely acknowledged human rights that should exist for all individuals. Any customs that fail that test, that violate the rights to be free for which countless people have fought, then those are customs we can all rightfully reject, leaving them in the dust of history along with every other unenlightened, self-serving notion that we've evolved out of. But for a brief section describing honor killings and the causes that give rise to them, Mr. Schliesmann fails to articulate this important point.

Every day, innocence is lost because of ignorance, because of customs that are not knocked down by exposure to other cultures. This is multiculturalism's value, a test of who we are against the values of others, a crucible from which reasoned truth can emerge. If only such enlightenment did not have to come at such a terrible cost... (3/5 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)<(

The Petrovitch Trilogy booms and sizzles like a Hollywood blockbuster

From The Week of April 15, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the rocky road to Justice in postwar Kosovo in Under The Blue Flag

From The Week of April 15, 2013

When tallying up the cost of war, it's natural for our minds to first turn to the most obvious losses: lives and fortunes. These are measurable deficits, quantifiable burdens that can be inscribed into the hearts and textbooks of a people and used as a crude means by which to compare conflicts. But just because they are obvious doesn't make them foremost in importance. On the contrary, sometimes those things we cannot measure -- the grief of a broken heart, the arrested development of a child without a school, the cynicism of a citizen who knows the rule of law does not hold -- have far more lasting consequences than the readily apparent. Their ephemeral natures trick us into underestimating their collective power to instill in war's victims a gloominess about the future that means far more than a rubbled building. After all, a building can be rebuilt. A broken spirit cannot so easily be mended. This Philip Kearney convincingly contends in his memoir of the most fascinating and challenging adventure of his career.

One of the bloodiest chapters in a most gruesome campaign, the Kosovo War, lasting little over a year, pitted two ethnic communities against one another in a vicious fight for freedom. Unwilling to allow one of its provinces to secede from its collective, Yugoslavia endeavored to crush Kosovo by subjecting it with crimes the likes of which Europe had not seen since the Second World War some five decades earlier. Equally unwilling to be ground out beneath the Serbian bootheel, Kosovo violently resisted, an act which caused it to spawn the powerful and ruthless Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) which sought to win, through terrorism and guerilla warfare, what could not be won in open combat. Though the war lasted over fifteen months, it devastated Kosovo to such a degree that the United Nations stepped in to run the protectorate until it could stand on its own.

At this time, Mr. Kearney was a successful prosecutor in his native San Francisco. Married, and with work to keep him occupied, the prospect of him traveling to Kosovo to help the UN bring cases of war crimes against some of Kosovo's foulest characters must have seemed impossibly remote. And yet, the restlessness of a midlife crisis, combined with an abiding desire to do lasting good while at the height of his powers, found Mr. Kearney applying to the UN for a six-month stint in Kosovo as a UN-appointed prosecutor in a postwar Kosovo coming to grips with its deep and enduring wounds. This first adventure begot a second and, before he was through, Mr. Kearney would have spent eighteen months in war-ravaged Kosovo, helping to restore order to a lawless and broken place.

While problematic as a work of history, Under The Blue Flag is nonetheless an inspiring document that wonderfully captures the rewarding nature of dangerous, but ultimately righteous, work. Mr. Kearney virtually abandoned his comfortable life, trading it in for an existence in Kosovo that was both imperiled and difficult. Threatened by gangsters and terrorists, none of whom were interested in the niceties of civilization, he helped bring to that war-torn place a measure of justice long lost in first the corruption of Communism and then in the depravity of ethnic strife. He did all this all while knowing it would cost him money, friendships and even his marriage. He did it to satisfy the thirsts of his spirit, but also for a sense of rightness, of accomplishment, the potence of which only comes from a job well done under extraordinary circumstances.

However, for all that Mr. Kearney paints vivid portraits of the men he prosecuted, and while his detailing of their crimes sheds light on the awfulness of postwar Kosovo, his prose leaves a great deal to be desired. Under the Blue Flag is devoid of literary flare. Other than a few paragraphs describing the destitute nature of the author's environs, we're almost never presented with a verbal image of Kosovo. Mr. Kearney is fond of describing how much he loves this beleaguered place, and the loyalty he feels to the men and women with whom he worked to put some truly gruesome characters behind bars, but his talents utterly fail him when it comes time to root these criminals in the homeland for which so many died. Moreover, Mr. Kearney makes virtually no attempt to describe the Kosovo War, much less to place it in any historical context. Other than a few scant references to 14th-century battles that live on in the hearts and minds of modern-day Serbians, he makes no attempt to inform his readers about the creation of Yugoslavia, much less the Kosovo war which gave him the opportunity to serve in such a remarkable way. These are bodyblows to a memoir that aspires to be more than self-aggrandizement.

Under the Blue Flag is moving work that inspires us to take chances and be true to our selves and our desires. However, its failure to educate its readers on any issue but the personal history of Mr. Kearney, and the suffering of the peoples of the Balkans endeavoring to find justice in a broken world, prevents it from achieving greatness. (3/5 Stars)