Yellow Blue Tibia, a book review

Yellow Blue Tibia is the first novel by Adam Roberts I’ve read and I chose the novel because of Kim Stanley Robinson’s claim, reproduced on the novel’s cover, that it “Should have won the 2009 Booker Prize.” Robinson feels that science fiction novels are marginalized, and he may have a point, but to make a claim that a certain novel should win a prize is rather fatuous:  it would have been enough to state that he thinks it should have been considered for a Booker Prize (it wasn’t even long-listed), but to state that it should have won is provocative and invites undue criticism.

Although I began the novel with a certain prejudice, I was won-over by Robert’s writing, but I don’t think the book should have been considered for a major literary prize. The main character, Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky, is an enjoyable invention (sarcastic, and teeming with wry wit), and the story is quite engaging, but there wasn’t enough depth to fully immerse me as a reader, and Roberts has an annoying tendency to overdo some sections, as if readers are obtuse.

I enjoyed the novel, but it didn’t strike me as a particularly brilliant work of literature. As I mentioned, Kim Stanley Robinson believes (stated, in an article for the New Scientist) that Yellow Blue Tibia should have won the Booker Prize in 2009 (won by Hilary Mantel, for Wolf Hall). In the article, he complained that the novels that win tend to be ‘historical’ novels, which “…are not about now in the way science fiction is.” I disagree with his statement, but we all have our personal opinions.  Robinson lists a few other science fiction novels that he believes should have won the Booker Prize in previous years; again, I think to be taken seriously he should propose the novels as worthy choices for the prize, rather than stating that they should have won. I have only read one of the other books he mentioned (Air, by Geoff Ryman in 2005), and it is a novel that I think should have received more attention as a work of literature, but that is only my opinion, and — not surprisingly — I’ve never been asked to participate on the Booker Prize advisory committee, or as a judge. I don’t always agree with the winning book in prize selections; oftentimes, I think the Booker short-listed novels are superior to the winner; however, it is a subjective opinion, and the Booker Prize is not awarded by an individual.

I’m glad I read Yellow Blue Tibia; for the most part it was well written and I’ll probably try another of Adam Robert’s books. I was ill-disposed toward him ever since I read his review of Grass, by Sheri S. Tepper, in which he refers to her novel as “….an unusually literate piece of SF.” I think Grass is a decent book, but not particularly ‘literate.’ After reading the review I decided to steer clear of Adam Roberts’ novels; well, I have now read one, and I think he is a much better writer than Ms. Tepper, but that is only my opinion.

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All the Pretty Horses, a book review

All the Pretty Horses — the first book in The Border Trilogy — won the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The book is crafted with care, with awe-inspiring descriptive prose, authentic characters, and dialog that draws the reader into the story’s landscape. I first came across Cormac McCarthy’s writing in the novel The Road, which has a completely different mood, but a similar style.

All the Pretty Horses is written without conventional punctuation; there were many passages that reminded me of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, with ideas strung together with conjunctions (particularly and), which evokes a gentle cadence (the meditative rhythm of riding a horse through the prairies?) and possibly compensates for the lack of commas:

"When the truck finally pulled out and they saw him still standing they 
offered their bundles for him to sit on and he did so and he nodded and 
dozed to the hum of the tires on the blacktop and the rain stopped and 
the night cleared and the moon that was already risen raced among the 
high wires by the highway side like a single silver music note burning 
in the constant and lavish dark and the passing fields were rich from 
the rain with the smell of earth and grain and peppers and the sometime 
smell of horses." 
[Ch. IV, p. 219-220, The Border Trilogy, Everyman's Library edition]

I was curious, so I searched around and discovered a term for writing that uses several conjunctions in close succession:  polysyndetic syntax.  Further, The King James Version of the Bible uses similar syntax, and All the Pretty Horses is permeated with a biblical mood.

There are no quotation marks used, and I found that the dialog occasionally blended into the story, which had the effect of drawing me further into the novel. The dialog is sparse, but has a genuineness that enhances the mood and reveals layers naturally, where descriptive prose would sometimes falter.

The protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a fully realized character, and he is perhaps the coolest sixteen year-old I’ve come across in fiction. It is 1949, and John Grady’s world has been irrevocably altered: his grandfather died, his parents are divorced, his father is fading, his girlfriend has dumped him, and his mother is selling the family ranch (excellent material for a country song; some band should experiment with his words as lyrics). Rather than move into the city, John Grady decides to run away to Mexico with his best friend, Lacey Rawlins. John Grady has a special relationship with horses and the expanse of an open landscape. He expects Mexico to be more like the ‘old world’, before the advent of cars, high-rises, and the claustrophobic concept of subdivided land. John Grady and Rawlins have a few adventures before they find work on a ranch, and John Grady inevitably faces disillusionment, but endeavors to unearth the inherent beauty and quality in the world.

In Mexico, John Grady’s expertise with horses is appreciated by the ranch owner — the hacendado, Don Héctor— and he is promoted to a high level of responsibility. John Grady begins a dangerous liaison with Don Hector’s daughter, Alejandra, but I found the romance less convincing than the bromance between John Grady and Rawlins. Alejandra’s character, and the result of the affair, felt like a plot device, though a device that was worked into the story quite smoothly. John Grady’s conversations with Alejandra’s grand-aunt, señorita Alfonsa, were more poignant. But I’m quibbling…

All the Pretty Horses is not a long novel, but Cormac McCarthy is a marvelous writer, and he has infused the story with surprising depth. I’m looking forward to the other two books in The Border Trilogy (The Crossing and Cities of the Plain), but I have many books to read before I continue the journey (including Blood Meridian, by McCarthy) .

Highly recommended.

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The Wasp Factory, a book review

Sadly, Iain Banks passed away earlier this month, but his fiction lives on. I’ve read (and enjoyed) quite a few of his science fiction novels, but have never read any of his mainstream fiction books. I’d heard a lot about The Wasp Factory, and decided to give it a try. As he explains in his introduction, it was his first attempt at mainstream fiction: he’d written a few science fiction books, but couldn’t get them published. The Wasp Factory  gained him instant notoriety; he garnered critical praise, but there was also some disgusted furor.

The novel’s narrator, Frank Cauldhame, is an intriguing, but seriously warped, individual. He is an intelligent, obsessive-compulsive teenager with a personality that displays a strangely innocent morbidity; he performs truly despicable acts, yet he can be accepted as a sympathetic character. His dysfunctional family is intriguing, but not fully explored: this is Frank’s story, and the other characters are satellites who orbit about him.

I can’t say I ‘enjoyed’ the book; it is too macabre to consider it an enjoyable reading experience, but I found it interesting and well-structured. As usual, Iain Banks was able to wedge in examples of his dark humour, and I particularly enjoyed Frank’s re-telling of his uncle’s successful, yet bungled, suicide.

A warning: animal rights activists and feminists should probably be tranquilized before reading the book.

The plot is well thought-out, but I thought the twist was over-telegraphed; perhaps I knew the twist and had forgotten I knew it (i.e.: a subconscious knowledge), but once I’d caught on, it seemed rather obvious.

There were quite a few grizzly sections in the book; and, to balance things out, the next novel of his I’m planning on reading is The Crow Road, which is supposed to be a more light-hearted read (but, if I know Iain Banks, there are some grizzly events within it).

 The Wasp Factory is too twisted for a recommendation, but it was an interesting novel.

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Among Others, by Jo Walton

Below is a ‘synopsis’ review; for my full review, check out Retrospeculative

In Among Others it’s unclear where the line between autobiography and fiction resides; but, at the very least, I assume fiction takes over where magic blurs the edges of reality. The novel won the Hugo Award (2012), the Nebula Award (2011), and the British Fantasy Award (The Robert Holdstock Award, 2012).

The novel is, in part, a love-letter to science fiction and fantasy books and their authors (and librarians), and there are numerous references to ‘speculative’ fiction within Among Others.

I enjoyed the novel, and there were even a few references to works I haven’t read that I may look up. Events proceed with a charming aura and, although not much happens in the novel, it is the journey that makes the experience worthwhile. For me, the journey began decades ago as a young boy. Since finishing the novel I’m almost sure I’ve detected fairies out the corners of my eyes, at the edge of what is called reality.

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The Algebraist, a book review

Iain M. Banks is one of the more literate authors to take on science fiction (he also writes mainstream literary fiction, as Iain Banks (without the ‘M.’)). I find his science fiction novels highly enjoyable, but he does have tendencies that can be obtrusive; in particular, he invariably includes horrific scenes, he often incorporates overtly evil villains, and his novels tend to be overstuffed with extraneous information (i.e.: they’d make a serviceable doorstop. For pure geek enjoyment this is a good thing, but it is ponderous at times).

I enjoyed The Algebraist, but struggled with a few sections. The villain is so over-the-top that I can picture him twirling the ends of a Snidely Whiplash moustache, and I faithfully slogged through the middle of the novel while feeling as if the book had entered into the ‘slow time’ of the main character, Fassin Taak (a Slow Seer, who delves the depths of a gas giant planet to converse with Dwellers, creatures that can live for billions of years and prefer to cogitate at a slower speed than humans).

The story is presented as an ‘epic’, huge in scope; and yet, it is really quite simple when divested of its accouterments. I enjoyed the first third of the book, aged faster than normal in the middle, enjoyed the build up to the ending, and found the summing-up satisfying (I was especially buoyed by the hopeful statement embodied in the final sentence).

I appreciate Iain M. Banks’ writing style; he can be quite humorous (even his morbid scenes can be comical), he creates interesting characters, and he usually includes enough imaginative ideas for several novels.

I didn’t think this was one of his better books; nevertheless, it was well worth the time invested in reading it.

Sadly, Iain Banks has been diagnosed with gall bladder cancer and is not expected to live more than a year. His final book, a work of literary fiction, The Quarry, is due for publication later this year. He has posted a personal message on his website, and there is a guestbook on his site that is set up for fans and friends to leave messages.

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The God of Small Things, a book review

The God of Small Things has all the ingredients that I love in a novel; poetic writing, intriguing metaphors, language calisthenics, a character driven narrative, a dream-like sensibility, and metaphysical elements. And I did enjoy many sections; unfortunately, I wasn’t particularly fond of the novel as a whole. But that’s just my opinion; others thought very highly of it indeed: it won the Booker Prize, and garnered many glowing reviews. I just wasn’t drawn into the characters as I should have been.

The idiosyncrasies of the author’s prose style that likely helped win her the Booker Prize didn’t quite work for me. Ms. Roy used an inordinate amount of ink to foray into trivialities; not necessarily detrimental, but in this novel they felt forced at times and intruded on the story. I also began to weary of the interminable metaphors and the circling, echoing cadence as the novel turned about the event that shapes the lives of the characters.

The author, Arundhati Roy, has previously written two screenplays for films, and I do think the book would make an excellent movie: the story is quite moving.

Much of the writing is rich, luxurious, and brutally rhythmic: the novel reminded me of the many jazz songs that I couldn’t quite connect with: a song in which I could detect the brilliance in a phrase here, a bar there; but, overall, it just didn’t work for me. Occasionally, I can revisit one of these jazz tunes at a later date and the brilliance coalesces in my mind.

I probably won’t re-read this small, attractive book that I truly wish I could have appreciated more, as it no doubt deserves.

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The Devotion of Suspect X, a book review

The Devotion of Suspect X, by Keigo Higashino (translated by Alexander O. Smith) sold two-million copies in Japan and won the prestigious Naoki Sanjugo prize . The main characters are: Yasuko, a divorced woman with a teenage daughter; Detective Kusanagi; Assistant Professor (of physics) Yukawa; and high school teacher (and mathematical genius) Ishigami.

The novel is a pseudo-Colombo-style, psychological police procedural. The murderer is known near the beginning of the book, and the detective is stuck within the labyrinth of the plot. Detective Kusanagi’s friend Yukawa and the mathematician Ishigami engage in an intellectual struggle — similar to real-life shogi — that results in a slow unraveling of the case’s intricacies.

There are some twists in the plot, but everything is telegraphed to the careful reader.

At first, the ending annoyed me, but then I realized it was apropos: a flaw in one of the main characters causes him/her to neglect one possibility…

An entertaining read; clever, but not too hard on the little grey cells.

Recommended.

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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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The Road, a book review

In The Road, Cormac McCarthy unveils a bleak notion of humanity’s dark side, similar in many ways to the brutality that developed in José Saramago’s Blindness; but whereas the blindness of Saramago’s novel is milky-white, in McCarthy’s brutal world the view is as dark as coal and ash: Night dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world (p. 3). Ash is everywhere, the vestiges of a once vibrant world, destroyed in an apocalyptic event. The cause of the event is never revealed: it is the aftermath that we are immersed into as we follow an unnamed father and son along their nightmarish journey along the road to the sea (the novel takes no prisoners: there is no escape, and no relief for the reader).

Food is scarce (there seems to be no living things other than humans), and cannibalism is rampant. Groups of bestialized humans roam the road, hunting for human livestock. This is the backdrop for the story’s relationship between a father and his son, who are survivors with little hope of redemption (no names are shared in the story: the only time a character shares a name, it is false: names are trappings from a different world). The father explains to his son that they are the good-guys (the civilized, the ‘carriers of fire’), but the son witnesses his father’s descent: the man has begun to lose his sense of humanity because his son must be protected at all costs. Their relationship —expressed in sparse conversations — is complex; filled with faith, love, desperation, codependence, and a tenuous grip on hope.

The father’s stifled memories of the time before the disaster are poignant: …he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it was not about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all (p. 129 – 130).  [McCarthy, for the most part, shuns punctuation].

We should appreciate this world and hold it dear; The Road is a disturbing, cautionary tale; and, as such, it succeeds wonderfully. It is a quick read, seemingly simple, but it hooks the reader, and evokes an astonishing, emotional response.

Recommended.

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Dying Inside; a book review

Robert Silverberg began writing pulp fiction in the 1950s, but was apparently given freer rein in the mid-60s and his output from the late-60s through to the early-70s was fertile and literate. Dying Inside (1972) was among the novels he wrote during this time, and it is ostensibly the story of a lonesome telepath whose powers have begun to fade, but can be read as a metaphor for middle age, or a writer’s anxiety as he senses his talents beginning to diminish.

The author did a wonderful job of characterizing the protagonist, David Selig, a telepath.

David’s story is revealed from his own point of view and he doesn’t particularly like himself; his talent is a blessing and a curse, and even in his early forties he has still not come to grips with his ability to read minds. His talent is a wonderful — though wasted — gift, but it is also an obstacle to forming connections with others: he feels like a voyeur, and his ability to know how others truly perceive him can be disheartening. As his ability begins to fade, he wonders what life will be like if and when the talent leaves him completely.

While reading the novel I wondered how much of David Selig was actually Robert Silverberg, who was the same age as Selig when he wrote the book (Mr. Silverberg also shares a Jewish heritage, a predilection for writing, and a degree from Columbia with the novel’s protagonist). Silverberg’s editor/publisher, Betty Ballentine, also wondered and communicated her concern: “…while I admire the book,” she wrote to him, “I am also worried about you” (from the Preface, p. 13). Silverberg assured her that the work was pure fiction, with a sprinkling of real-life experiences for realism; but still, I wonder. Robert Silverberg was nearing the end of an extremely fertile period of writing, and soon afterward he declared himself burned-out (in 1975 he officially retired from writing, though he re-launched his career in 1980 with Lord Valentine’s Castle).

Dying Inside is a mature, literate work, but the protagonist is overly morose and the novel treads a delicate balance between cleverness and monotony. Even the happy periods in David Selig’s life are presented with foreboding, and there is no counterpoint to his sullen mood until the end, when he finally finds some comfort in life.

The novel was not what I expected and didn’t go where I would have liked; however, it was a satisfying reading experience.

Recommended

(I’ve read three other Robert Silverberg novels written during the same time-frame as Dying Inside that I’d also recommend (with caveats I’ll share if anybody is curious): Downward to the Earth (1970: a science fiction version of Heart of Darkness), Son of Man (1971: trippy, experimental science fiction), and A Time of Changes (1971: socio-philosophical science fiction)).

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