by John Grant
An additional point of interest in Operation Hollywood is that Robb has managed to obtain copies of various bits of correspondence between moviemakers and the military censors, and these he reproduces in facsimile form. He also presents a convincing counter-argument to the defense of the Pentagon's attitude that refusing cooperation is different from censorship in that no one would accuse (say) Exxon of censorship if it refused to assist a movie fiercely critical of the company's approach to clearing up oil spills. Robb points out forcefully that, unlike Exxon, the Pentagon is not a private company: it is in fact the property of the US public, and thus has no moral license whatsoever to rewrite its own and US history for the purpose of keeping that public in the dark.
Despite the irritation – even exasperation – generated by the total dereliction of auctorial and editorial duty in the preparation of its text, Operation Hollywood is one of those must-read books: no understanding of movie history is remotely complete without it. It certainly deserves far more attention than it so far seems to have received.
—Crescent Blues
Scorched Earth
by David L. Robbins
Bantam, 352 pages, paperback, 2003; reissue of a book originally published in 2002
Elijah and Clare Waddell, inhabitants of Good Hope, Virginia, have a child, Nora Carol. However, Nora Carol is born deformed and dies within minutes. So that the parents' grief may be minimized, Clare's mother arranges with the Rev. Thomas Derby that the burial take place as promptly as possible in the graveyard of her family church, the Victory Baptist Church. No sooner is the child interred, however, than the deacons object, for Elijah Waddell is black: this is the "white folks' church". It's not that they're racists, you understand, but Nora Carol must be dug up and reburied at the nearby "black folks' church".
The night of the reburial, the Victory Baptist Church is burned to the ground, and Elijah is found next to it, drunk, dancing for joy ... but adamantly denying that he set the blaze.
No one believes him, of course. His situation worsens when a body is discovered among the ashes. Worse, the body is of the brutish local sheriff's daughter, who, the postmortem reveals, experienced both a broken jaw and sex not long before death. Elijah stands accused of arson, rape and murder.
Nat Deeds, a lawyer who fled Good Hope and his job when his marriage fell apart, is called back to defend Elijah. Nat has difficulties of his own believing Elijah's story, and his ability to concentrate on the case is hampered by his emotional turmoil in the presence of his estranged wife Maeve. Yet slowly his opinions shift. As, with Maeve's encouragement and sometimes help, he unravels a tangle of corruption, hypocrisy, racism and deceit that long predates Nora Carol's birth, he realizes both the truth of that fatal night and the possibility of at least rapprochement between himself and Maeve.
That might possibly all sound standard enough stuff. But what's truly outstanding is that in no way can this be described as a legal thriller, as a crime novel, or as belonging in any other neat genre category – any more than, say, To Kill a Mockingbird could be so dismissed (and I was constantly reminded of that novel while reading Scorched Earth, even though the books aren't markedly similar). The overtly dramatic elements are played down in favour of an extremely complex plot of which they are merely a part, with characters, their interplay and the corruption of human weakness being portrayed to extraordinary depth – all this done in a writing style that has the richness and smoothness of a vintage port.
Yet don't get the idea that this is one of those novels you ought to read only because it's a "worthy literary achievement" or something equally dull. In fact, it's riveting: the bedroom lights burned late despite grumpy comments from the other side of the bed.
And, even before I'd finished reading the paperback CB's editor had sent me, I went out and bought the hardback.
—Crescent Blues
Any Time At All
by Chris Roberson
Clockwork Storybook, 213 pages, paperback, 2002
Eleven-year-old Roxanne Bonaventure, a difficult child, encounters a dying woman in the woods, and is given an amulet. By use of the amulet Roxanne is able to travel through the many worlds and times of the Myriad (rather like Moorcock's multiverse or my own polycosmos), although aging only at the speed of her own internal bodyclock. Recursive elements abound during her various adventures; the author's appendix gives brief details about such varied cultural icons as H.G. Wells, Sexton Blake and The Beatles.
No prizes for guessing the identity of the old woman who gives the 11-year-old Roxanne the amulet, but that's not the kind of game Roberson is playing in this highly enjoyable book.
I've had to choose that phrase, "highly enjoyable book", with some care. First, the word "book", because Any Time At All isn't really a novel in the accepted sense. It's not a collection of linked stories, either, or even a fixup (whereby pre-existing stories are cobbled together with additional plot elements to create the appearance of a novel). Rather, it's a pseudo-novel which takes the form of a fixup, the tales that comprise it not having the status of independent short stories.
This is a useful form for novelists to exploit, but one of its drawbacks is that, unless the segments together build towards some kind of conceptual or emotional resolution, the expectations of the reader, whatever the intentions of the author, do demand that they can indeed stand alone: that each bears its own resolution. This is where Any Time At All tends to fall down; a few of its chapters are individually strong enough to satisfy, but too many of them have the status of "build-up" chapters – and, as they do not in fact build up to anything, the reader is left with the feeling of having been stranded.
Even so, the book is, to return to the other part of my phrase, highly enjoyable in that for the most part the prose – frothy and dancing, often delightfully elegant – a joy to read. Chris Roberson is obviously an author to watch, and this book is an ideal companion for a train journey, even if at its end one wishes it could have been something a little more.
Oh, and Any Time At All has a very nice John Picacio cover.
—Infinity Plus
Salt
by Adam Roberts
Gollancz, 256 pages, paperback, 2000
A string of almost-generation starships, each bearing a different dissident culture, goes to colonize the habitable-but-only-just planet called Salt – so-named because that is what the land is largely made up of, with a consequent lack of vegetation. The two cultures upon which the story focuses are diametrically opposed: one is a sort of US market-oriented pseudo-democracy taken to manic extremes (its spokesman produces an eloquent justification for regarding the straightforward, legalized buying of votes as the purest form of democracy) while the other is a benevolent cashless communism/anarchism. There are social difficulties between the cultures through misunderstanding of conventions: one person's expression of common courtesy is another's deadly insult. Despite the fact that there are virtually no resources on Salt to squabble over, so that the only sane option is for the cultures to cooperate, the crazed pseudo-democracy declares war for ideological reasons.
The book was first published in 2000, but the power of its satire could hardly be more relevant today,* with a pseudo-democratic US
[* 2011 note: The review was written at the height of the Bush/Cheney imperium.]
administration using every doublethink technique to proclaim its adoration for freedom on the one hand while introducing increasingly anti-democratic legislation on the other, all the time pumping up public fear of external foes as a way of papering over the cracks. This is not to say that Roberts's satire, while obviously political, is directed at specific political targets; just as Orwell satirized not communism but totalitarianism in (particularly) Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), Roberts is really dissecting human stupidity, as expressed through political insanity, rather than any particular political ideology, be it capitalism or anarcho-communism. The problem with his capitalist culture is not that it is capitalist per se but that its mover
s and shakers are, at a fundamental level, intellectually and morally corrupt, justifying their most despicable actions through the abuse of such terms as "peace" and "freedom".
In many ways this is a brilliant piece of work, and it lives long in the mind; as a novel, however, it is less successful, in that the scenarios it sets up are, perhaps inevitably, artificial-seeming. Or, at least, one would hope they are; looking around today, one sees whole bevies of real-life scenarios that would have seemed artificial if novelized just a few years ago. This is a book I'd strongly advise you to read: almost certainly you'll hugely enjoy it.
The Years of Rice and Salt
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Bantam, 672 pages, hardback, 2002
This is a huge alternate-history novel which takes as its thesis that the Black Death didn't kill only about one in ten of the European population but instead virtually annihilated it – and in so doing extinguished Christianity (and indeed virtually all white-skinned humans). The account of how the rest of the world gets along without the WASPs over the centuries from then until now is episodic, these long episodes being linked by a set of shared characters.
Shared characters in scenes separated by decades and centuries? Well, yes. The artifice that makes this possible is the Buddhist notion of the jati, or group of souls that cyclically reincarnate together, with each person, in each new corporeal existence, having to identify the other members of the group. Between each episode on Earth we have shorter accounts of the procedures the group members go through in order successfully to renew their mundane activities. This artifice in the main works extremely well.
As do the episodes, although they each have their different characteristics, which makes for a patchy read. Probably the most enjoyable is at the same time the most artificial: "The Alchemist." The central figure of this section, the alchemist Khalid, is a sort of alternate-world SuperLeonardo, but possessed also of a greater practical bent. Khalid and his team invent practically every technological device we recognize today with the possible exception (I may have missed items) of the digital computer and MTV; they also make scientific conceptual breakthroughs likewise without number. This is of course a preposterous conceit, and it's thus impossible to suspend one's disbelief and accept the episode as a "real history"; at the same time, though, rather like a poetic truth, one can regard it as a mythopoeized history, with all the products, attained by countless nameless individuals, of a scientific/technological revolution being ascribed to a single semi-legendary figure – rather in the way that all sorts of stuff from diverse sources has been attributed to Pythagoras. And, anyway, the section is a lot of fun, so who really cares if it's plausible?
Among the other sections, those dealing with the interactions between the oriental races and the Native American cultures are especially successful, while the final section – set around now if not a smidgen into the future – is a bit of a mess, with two stories starting and neither reaching completion (which may be highly realistic, but not what one rightly expects from fiction).
This is a book that is vast in its ambition and indeed just plain vast; it is for the most part beautifully written, although there are a few short (two- or three-page) sections that seem to have been dashed off in a hurry, and the omission of hundreds upon hundreds of question marks is astonishingly irritating. There's been talk of its being the ultimate alternate-history novel, the benchmark against which all others will in future be judged; and such talk is not entirely hyperbolic. But to do both its virtues and its flaws justice would require far more than just a brief review like this one.
—Crescent Blues
The First Cut
by Peter Robinson
Dark Alley, 310 pages, paperback, 2004; reissue of a book first published in 1990
Originally published in the UK in 1990 as Caedmon's Song, the retitled The First Cut represents the first US publication of this early psychological thriller by Robinson, who has since become better known for his Inspector Banks detective novels. Although I've not read any of the Inspector Banks series,* I
[* 2011 note: A shortcoming I've now emphatically corrected.]
slowly became aware as I read The First Cut that I'd read the novel before, presumably around the time of its original UK publication. I could remember rather enjoying it first time around; sure enough, I rather enjoyed it this time as well.
University student Kirsten is attacked one night in a local park and left for dead; she has been sexually assaulted and so grievously wounded that, not only will she never be able to have a child, she may never be able to have full sexual intercourse again. She is the first victim of a serial sex-killer who comes to be known as the Student Slasher, and the only one to survive. In one strand of the novel's narrative we follow her slow psychological rehabilitation, aided by sympathetic friend Sarah and her own not-so-sympathetic parents.
In the book's second strand, we are with Martha Browne, who comes to the seaside town of Whitby, in Yorkshire, posing as a writer doing research but in fact doing her best to track down and kill the Student Slasher. Although it's presented in due course as a Terrific Revelation, it's pretty obvious from early on to the reader that Kirsten and Martha are one and the same, the latter being merely the nom de guerre Kirsten has adopted some while later as, with the help of her confused and partial recollections of the attack, she hunts the man who has ruined her life.
And she finds him – or so she thinks. Unfortunately, she discovers from the newspaper that, the same night she was exacting her terrible revenge, the Student Slasher struck yet again, in a different part of the country. Clearly she was mistaken in her identification, and has killed an innocent man. But that hardly deters her: the necessity to stop the Student Slasher from killing any more young women and to gain vengeance for what he did to her overrides all other considerations. So Kirsten/Martha, aware that she's in danger of becoming a serial killer herself, continues her hunt ...
The best parts of this book are the scenes where Robinson explores Kirsten's reactions in the weeks and months after her tragedy, as she tries to reconcile herself to the fact that she has been virtually neutered, even though her hormones continue to drive her as they always have. There is genuine insight and compassion here, of the kind that one wishes a few more thriller writers could conjure. And Martha's painstaking detective work, and her stalking of the men she suspects, could hardly fail to grip the imagination. But The First Cut is almost fatally flawed by the fact that the central revelation of the Kirsten/Martha identity falls as flat as a pancake. As a result, while still thoroughly engrossing, it falls short of being one of the great Rendell-style psychological thrillers.
—Crescent Blues
The Vampire's Violin
by Michael Romkey
Del Rey, 294 pages, paperback, 2003
Dylan Glyndwr (presumably pronounced "Glendower") is a brilliant violinist and a centuries-old vampire – a rogue vampire, indeed, because unlike most of his fellows he has no compunction about killing his prey, even revelling in it. He once briefly possessed one of the "Angel" violins – one of a series of just 13 phenomenally fine instruments made by an 18th-century Italian luthier after blindness had struck him in his old age. Ever since losing that violin, Glyndwr has combed the world seeking another.
Maggie O'Hara is a violin student whose future career seems likely to be blighted by her paralysing stage fright. But then she inherits from her dying grandfather the battered old violin he bought in a devastated Europe during the last days of WWII. It proves, of course, to be an "Angel" – perhaps the last one left in existence – and it transforms her from merely a promising tyro into a virtuoso performer. Soon Glyndwr is on her track, and only the friendship of good vampire maestro conductress Maria Rainer and lusty swain Carter Dunne may save her ...
The first thing to say about The Vampire's Violin – the latest in a longish string of vampire novels by Romkey – is that it's really very nicely written; he has an easy style, elegant without being ostent
atious. The second thing is that this is an incredibly slight book: it seems entirely to lack the desire to be anything other than a throwaway quick read. All through the book I found myself baffled by the conundrum of why an author capable of writing so well should be bothering to waste his time on such an unambitious novel.
—Infinity Plus
Home Front
by Joel Rosenberg
Forge, 304 pages, hardback, 2003
Ernest Hemingway, Doc Holliday, John Crazy Horse and George Washington all suffered from being named the same as famous Americans, and all were by a cruel jest of the Army made to serve in the same tank in Vietnam.
Nowadays Ernest "Call me Sparky" Hemingway is a middle-aged, crankily divorced freelance copy-editor in the small North Dakota town of Hardwood. Out of the blue he's phoned from Minneapolis by the teenaged daughter, Tenishia, of his war buddy "Prez" Washington. Her daddy's been the victim of a gangland killing, and he once firmly instructed her that, if anything like this happened, she was to contact one of the other three old comrades. Now the gang that killed Prez is after Tenishia too.
Despite himself, Sparky is dragged in. As a first measure he brings Tenishia home to Hardwood, but the gang that killed Prez isn't going to let her go so easily. All three surviving buddies reunite to face up to the Minneapolis gangbangers and solve Tenishia's little difficulty.
