The Sense of an Ending, a book review

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, is a short book; a novella (my copy is only 150 pages long), but a healthy bundle of reality is included in the small package. The book slowly pieces together a mysterious tragedy; it is skillfully written, and highly readable. The narrator — Anthony (Tony) Webster — struck me as willfully dense, yet I empathized with his character weaknesses.

As old-age and death approach, Tony struggles with elusive memories in an attempt to make sense of his life: “History is that certainty produced where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” (p. 17 & 59)

The book ended on a resonant, minor key; and, although not necessary, I think a re-read might provide additional insights.

Recommended

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His Master’s Voice, a book review

Głos Pan (’68), trans. from Polish by Michael Kandel (1983)

Stanislaw Lem (1921 – 2006) was one of the great equalizers of my youthful reading habits; as I was escaping life’s absurdities via science fiction novels by Heinlein, Asimov, etcetera, I also chanced upon Ursula K. Le Guin, Olaf Stapledon, Stanislaw Lem, and others who bent my mind along more diverse pathways.

In Lem’s famous novel, Solaris, humanity was in an uncomfortably insecure, intellectual situation; after years of careful study, scientists were unable to comprehend — in any meaningful way — an alien intelligence. In His Master’s Voice (HMV), humanity is caught in a similar state of confusion (in Solaris, the characters are involved in a psychological morass, whereas in HMV a more philosophical aura pervades the narration).

The aliens in HMV are only oblique characters; their neutrino-stream message is discovered and a top-secret, scientific task-force (including formal, natural, and social scientists) is assembled in an attempt to decode the message; ultimately, the scientists are unsuccessful (the failure is stated at the beginning of the book: it is the pathway to failure that propels the story, which is, in reality, a backdrop to Lem’s philosophical monologues). There are some minor accomplishments, but the narrator, Peter Hogarth, remains cynical (“In my opinion, the code was not intended for a civilization as low on the ladder of development as ours…” page 93). Hogarth is critical of humanity’s maturity — at an individual and social level — and the concept of stretching the mind, rather than focus on specification, is a theme that ripples throughout the novel. Hogarth becomes annoyed at the reductionist approach employed by the scientific team; he believes that the team’s successes are trivial because they do not ponder the message as a whole. When Hogarth reaches out with his intellect, he senses something meaningful in the totality of the message; unfortunately, he cannot grasp anything tangible. However, even though he failed to find the answer, he was left with a delightful sense of contented-wonderment:  “The oddest thing is that defeat, unequivocal as it was, left in my memory a taste of nobility, and that those hours, those weeks, are, when I think of them today, precious to me.” (page 131).

There were several themes within the novel, but the aliens’ message as a metaphor for valuable information hidden within noise struck an interesting chord. For example, Lem — through the novel’s narrator, Peter Hogarth — explains his frustration with the information age:  there is too much information, and it is extremely difficult to sort through and extract the worthwhile from the useless (interestingly, the book was written in 1968, before the great proliferation of information — both worthless and indispensable — on the web). One of the main characters in the novel, the head of the project, Ivor Baloyne, is characterized as a genius; however, he is involved in so many projects, with so much competing information, that he “…will always remain greater than his achievements, because it very rarely happens that in so gifted a man all the physical horses pull in the same direction” (page 54-55). The modern age of specialization has created noise in its wake: it is difficult to acquire a view of the whole if researchers drill-down too thoroughly into specifics (it becomes difficult to ‘see the forest through the trees’). The concept of extraneous information is further developed with an attack on the modern excess of poorly written works.  Lem was always critical of mainstream science fiction and eschewed the cliché, which he felt spoon-fed readers with a too-comfortable form of escapism (in HMV his criticism is expanded to the vast majority of writing in any genre: “…in bookstores one can find any number of books by persons without decency — let alone knowledge.” page 21). Lem’s irritation with formulaic science fiction (especially American SF) surfaced palpably several times in the body of the novel (see pages 38, 92, 99, 106-107). Lem expands on this theme when his narrator laments the modern world’s general level of reading and writing: he points out that reading and writing were, at one time, solely in the hands of the intellectual elite (not a desired state of affairs, but it helped control the quality of writing); however, in modern times anyone can write a book and economics trumps intellectual merit, which has produced a flood of drivel that makes it extremely difficult to find the worthwhile amongst the rubbish (see p.21). This theme of ‘valuable information buried in the noise’ is also revealed in the way the aliens’ message is discovered, serendipitously, via random astronomical data, con-artists, pseudo-science, tabloid journalism, curiosity, and chance.

I found His Master’s Voice difficult to appreciate at first, but once past page thirty — or thereabouts — I was sucked into its vortex; as usual, Mr. Lem’s imagination created an interesting pathway. The novel is firmly entrenched in the sub-genre of social science fiction (my preferred variety) and is really not about aliens, but about humanity’s failings. It contains scathing critiques of politics and scientific ethics and methods, and the choices about which ‘Master’s Voice’ is listened to. It is a philosophical work with shrewd depictions of the human psyche. At times the novel struck me as too cynical, but I sense that it is a deeply honest dialogue from the author to the reader.

By the end of the term of scientific study, several theories arise regarding the neutron signal’s creation, but Peter E. Hogarth remains convinced that the signal is a message from an intellectually superior being, and he insists that the message must include instructions regarding how to send a message back. “Skepticism,” he says, “is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly  increased; the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only to be inferred.” (page 198)

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Recommended

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The Cat’s Table, a book review

The Cat’s Table is the first Michael Ondaatje novel I’ve read, but it won’t be the last. The book is deceptively simple; at first, its depths lurk below the surface.

The novel begins as a coming-of age tale; the narrator, Michael, an eleven year old boy, strikes out on a three-week boat journey from Sri Lanka to join his mother in England. Michael meets two other boys on the boat and they become a rambunctious trio, enjoying many adventures onboard. Michael also meets an interesting retinue of adults, each with secrets.

Interspersed in the book are glimpses from the narrator’s adult life, the last half of the novel in particular (for me, the second half of the novel turned a pleasant story into a gem). The behind-the-scenes lives of the adults on the boat voyage are slowly revealed.

The book has an autobiographical thread running through it as well; the narrator’s name is Michael, he travelled from Sri Lanka to England as a boy, and he grew up to be a writer in North America. There is an interesting, third-person introductory section to the novel (the rest of the novel is written in first-person), which includes a wistful statement, as if from the mind of a man looking back at the child he was, or possibly the author inventing the character in the story:  “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self is not even there…” (p.4).

Ondaatje writes wonderfully; occasionally, I would pause for a moment to appreciate a turn of phrase: so effortless, so well crafted.

Recommended.

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The Quantum Thief; a book review

I really wanted to like this book, but it didn’t quite work for me. It garnered glittering reviews, and the few that didn’t appreciate the novel seemed to focus on the difficulty of unexplained jargon in the first third of the story

[There is a plethora of undefined, eccentric terms tossed into the story at the beginning, but things sorted themselves out quite nicely as I kept reading. A glossary would have been a nice addition; and, in case you plan on reading The Quantum Thief, there is a glossary at Wikipedia]

The problems I had were more related to character and story: I prefer characters to be more fully developed than they are in this novel, and the story, though at times interesting, didn’t have enough depth to carry the novel.
The novel was plot driven, which, for a light-reading experience, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There were some interesting flourishes — for example, the gogols, alluding to Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol — but the plot was filled with resolutions that depended on various forms of deus ex machina: it seemed more like the running commentary of a computer game than a novel. I think the book would appeal to MMRPG (massively multiplayer role playing game) enthusiasts who enjoy reading.

The author, Hannu Rajaniemi, has a PhD in String Theory and has created an interesting phantasmagoria within (I assume) a realistic depiction of theoretical physics. The story delves far beyond cyber-punk; it is set in a future that has left humanity behind, where the synthesis of human and machine has spawned a solar system filled with god-like beings, incredible possibilities, and deadly weapons.
The story moved along at a quick pace, and I enjoyed the imaginative architecture of the author’s world-building; but, as a novel, it wasn’t quite my cup of tea.

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A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a prismatic journey that documents the effects of relationships, reminiscences, narrative, and time. The author — Jennifer Egan — has indicated that the book was influenced by Marcel Proust’s A la Recherché du Temps Perdu (usually translated as either In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past) and The Sopranos (I’ve never watched the show, so I can’t comment on any plausible connection).

The book is, in part, a study of how the characters journey from ‘A’ to ‘B’ through narrative, through time, and through connection to others and their experiences. It is even structured in to an ‘A’ section and a ‘B’ section, rather than a Part I and a Part II.

The ‘goon’ in the title refers to time. The passage of time has a brutal effect on the bodies and minds of the characters. And the story itself is at the mercy of the goon-squad of time: the narrative is thrust from the present into the past and/or future, and back, through decay to redemption (and sometimes destruction).

The novel is filled with the stories of its many characters, all with some connection to Bennie, the music Producer, or his kleptomaniac assistant, Sasha. The writing is inventive: Ms. Egan used first person, second person, and third person — and there is even an emotionally moving chapter in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, which illustrates the novel’s themes of the effects of technology on culture, and our inability to communicate with each other effectively.

The characters were well-depicted: for the most part I was sympathetic to their plight, and there was humor to be found in unusual circumstances.

The book could be categorized as either a novel, or a series of interconnected short-stories, but in the end analysis it doesn’t really matter. A Visit from the Goon Squad is intelligent fiction.

Recommended.

 

The Secret Pilgrim, a book review

John le Carré’s Cold War spy stories are more like a Graham Greene novel than an Ian Fleming’s James Bond adventure. Le Carré (David John Moore Cromwell) fills his novels with a moral miasma: the characters are occupied with internal, psychological struggles, and the ethical differences between Eastern and Western policies are indistinct.

Ned, the narrator in The Secret Pilgrim (written in 1990), is a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) agent who is spending his final years in the service as a trainer because his ‘cover’ was blown. He invites his mentor, George Smiley, to give a talk to his students; and, while Smiley speaks, Ned recalls episodes from his own past. The novel is a collection of Ned’s reminiscences, presented as linked short-stories.

Ned is an intriguing character, but George Smiley is one of my all-time favorite fictional personalities and I found myself wanting more from him, which detracted somewhat from Ned’s stories at the beginning of the book. I’ve read quite a few le Carré novels, but I somehow missed this one; it was pleasant to revisit Smiley’s world, however briefly (and this certainly felt like le Carré’s farewell to George Smiley).

The stories in The Secret Pilgrim were all good — some were excellent — and by the end Ned was a fully formed character, with all the tell-tale, humanistic blemishes and scars of a le Carré creation. The writing is vintage le Carré: intelligent (even donnish at times) and infused with melancholic, humane, and authentic characters. The author was in the SIS during the Cold War and I think that his depiction of  ‘the game’ is genuine.

Recommended, but read the ‘Karla Trilogy*’ first; or, at the very least, Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy (I think that TTSS and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (in which Smiley appears, but only briefly) are his best books: both are classics in the genre).

[Other John le Carré books I’ve read: A Murder of Quality; Call for the Dead; The Spy who Came In from the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy*; The Honourable Schoolboy*; Smiley’s People*; The Drummer Girl; Russia House; Our Game; The Constant Gardener; The Tailor of Panama; and  The Perfect Spy]

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