Vortex (Spin #3)

#768
Title: Vortex (Spin #3)
Author: Robert Charles Wilson
Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates
Year:2011
368 pages

Audiobook.

Not his best, I think, but not bad at all. This is the third in a 3-book series, so it has some exposition to take care of. Wilson manages this through a couple of strategies--a framing narrative, a text within the framing narrative, a person out of his time element and his cultural translator, and a character who becomes functionally omniscient. There are two main sets of characters, one in the book's present and one in the distant future. The personalities and options of each coalesce with or diverge from its counterpart as the tale unfolds.

I initially thought "uh oh" when Wilson had a character give a mini-mental state exam but attributed this to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR. Nope, MMSE is not described in the DSM (though it is indeed standard practice for the kind of interview the character is conducting). Fortunately, that was the big egregious psych slip-up. In its long temporal jump and some of the issues that arose from this, the novel reminded me at times of Larry Niven's A World Out of Time. The conclusion is a happier version of Bios, though by "happy" I mean "the satisfactory poignancy of the heat death of the universe and its collapse into entropy--but in a good way". As in many of Wilson's novels, part of the climax or denouement is the hero's capacity to really die (rather than dying but being stored as data, for example). I don't buy the moral argument that since a person doesn't pass through a temporal arch but is recorded and recreated, that person is not the person who entered the arch and therefore is not responsible for their own regrettable acts. This seems like space lawyer sophistry. If it were true, any evil Star Trek denizen who used a transporter could simply claim, "I'm not the guy who did that thing--I'm a very close replica of him!"

What first attracted me to Wilson was a couple of his early books where the hero's journey was inverted so that the chracters the reader identified with were those who encountered the traveler, not the traveler him- or itself. (Think Brad and Janet rather than Frank N. Furter.) Wilson's stories have become less overtly Jungian, but no less interesting. This one was more clever in its construction than some, but not his very best.

Ashfall (Ashfall #1)

#769
Title: Ashfall (Ashfall #1)
Author: Mike Mullin
Publisher: Tanglewood Press
Year: 2011
466 pages

Adding to the broadly-based pleasures of a good YA post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, Mullin includes volcanoes, scientific plausibility, incidental characters in a same-sex relationship that is presented in a matter-of-fact way, teens who want to have sex and also are concerned about the risk of pregnancy, and bad guys in the form of privatized for-profit services. Also, cannibalism. Also, volcanic ash in your underwear. Also: generalized smashing. 

The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time

#767
Title: The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time
Author: Jeff Deck & Benjamin D. Herson
Publisher: Harmony
Year: 2010
269 pages

An amusing cross-country sojourn to correct typos, including prosecution for unwittingly desecrating an historical sign. The tone wears on one in places, but I can't fault their intentions, and do admire their discussions of descriptive versus prescriptive linguistics.

The first major typo I remember encountering in my childhood was at a mall. The signboard, which should have read "The Hecht Company Will Be Close to You" (Just like me/Hecht's want to be/Close to you) instead proclaimed "The Hecht Company Will Be Closed to You". I recall worriedly asking one of my parents to whom we should report this error. Years later, when I had mastered "squirrel" and "scissors" and was aware of Captain Kirk's bold split infinitive, I lived hard by a FURNITURN store in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and later, on my daily commute to Boston, I would pass the new Home Depot in South Attleboro that was adorned with giant letters reading MASSACHUSETT'S. I called corporate about that one, as, presumably, did many, and the offending apostrophe was removed. This is to say that I understand.

Postcards from the Grave

#766
Title: Postcards from the Grave
Author: Emir Suljagić
Publisher: Saqi Books
Year:2005
Country: Bosnia-Herzegovina
196 pages

Bosnia-Herzegovina. A non-linear report/memorial in pastiche form from a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre. Suljagić was spared the fate of his compatriots because he was working as a translator for the UN forces. To understand what's happening in this collection of short essays, first read about the Serbian expansion into Bosnia in the 1990s. As I read, I kept being reminded of Elie Wiesel's holocaust narratives, and particularly of the tension in novels such as The Oath: A Novel in which telling versus not telling the story of the destruction of the community creates terrible conflicts for the narrator.

An often-occurring typo in this book is the inconsistent but frequent elision of a word followed by "I"--"promisedI", for example.

Black Swan Green

#765
Title: Black Swan Green
Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Random House
Year:2007
304 pages

Audiobook.

A bildungsroman from David Mitchell, well-written though ultimately a little precious and formulaic for me. I enjoyed the narrator's voice, and don't care that it's somewhat precocious.

In some ways I wish it had been a novel with a smaller focus--do we really need lessons about racism learned from gypsies? Surely a divorce and a broken watch are sufficient? I couldn't figure out why there was so much emphasis on a couple of characters, and found by Googling after reading that they appear in his other books. That's fine with me, but just as Ezra Pound said that the reader without a classical education should be able to read a poem at face value, without understanding its allusions, so should a reader be able to read a novel without extra-textual references throwing a wrench in the works. (Neal Stephenson, are you listening?)

Listen to Pink Floyd's album The Wall before you start reading this, or read a chapter or two of Lord of the Flies to get you in the mood for British schoolboy hierarchies and bullying. Don't pick up Skippy Dies immediately upon finishing, or you will have to set it down as soon as you get to Chapter 1 in the somnolent, annoying classroom. 

Divergent (Divergent #1)

#764
Title: Divergent (Divergent #1)
Author: Veronica Roth
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Year: 2011
487 pages

Spoilers--highlight to see review. A fun enough young adult novel, though with fluffier world-building than I prefer. Some reviewers have been irritated by the lack of explanation about how the factions came to be; given Tris's often-repeated realization that the imagery of the fear simulations is not actual but symbolic, I will understand this novel in the same terms. While dystopian, the novel's structural base is symbolism and analogy rather than realism. To look at it another way, its underpinning is fantasy with dystopian tattoos, an assertion that this is how things are rather than a scientific explanation of, say, why Harry Potter house elf magic is different from wizard magic.

Tris's ultimate invulnerability is also fantasy-like. Yes, there's a lot of detail about her fear and pain, but she does manage to subvert a number of people and powerful institutions. I may be willing to suspend my disbelief by assuming this has something to do with being divergent, but not if I don't experience it more forcefully in the second book.

There's some internal consistency that knocks this from a 4 to a 3 star book. For example, it's apparently very dangerous for Tris to score so well on the simulations, until it's not. Tris's brother, who's not Dauntless, seems to manage to look convincing with a gun. The Erudite are clever but perhaps not smart. (While we're on the subject, must the intellectuals be the villians? I know we're all supposed to want to be Gryffindors/Dauntless, but I imagine that many readers are Ravenclaw/Erudite.)

Most problematic is what back in my semiotics days we'd have called the suturing of the text with recuperative heterosexuality. The prodigious amount of snogging, tingling, etc. at the end of the book intends to be part of the satisfying resolution of this component of the story arc, but instead diverts the tension, and the triumph, at least for this non-adolescent reader. The message is muddled, not by Tris and Four's nascent romance, but by how it suddenly makes the climactic action slow and diverts the reader (and characters) from the story they should be living. I can't speak for others, but even a really hot divergent boy is not going to take my attention off both my parents being killed, my community being destroyed, a bullet hole in my shoulder, and a known and suspected enemy in the same train car as I'm smooching it up. Since Tris can leap buildings with a single bound (or at least leap from them), I suppose this Mary Sue conclusion is heroic, but from a feminist standpoint as well as that of plot construction, it's pretty weak.

Master and Commander (Aubrey/Maturin #1)

#763
Title: Master and Commander (Aubrey/Maturin #1)
Author: Patrick O'Brian
Publisher: William Collins Sons & Co.
Year: 1969
412 pages
Audiobook.

Well-written, engrossing, and dryly amusing. While I tired of the vast amounts of nautical nomenclature, O'Brian did a good job of filling the reader in. This was generally accomplished by having Captain Jack Aubrey and others explain what was happening to physician Stephen Maturin. Maturin is the foil with whom the reader identifies, and whose musings humanize the larger-than-life Aubrey. Maturin is a philosopher who delights in and reflects on the natural world; Aubrey is something of a lout--loud, heavy, insensitive. Their mutual love of music provides the grounds for their nacent friendship and Aubrey's impulsive invfitation that Maturin become the Sophie's surgeon. The characters complement each other and, in their musings and their interactions with James Dillon, are revealed in their strengths and failings. The narrative under the jargon is clever, skillful, and often quite funny. I'm not sure I'm ready to commit to the whole series, but I'm glad to know it's waiting for me.