| 25 August 2010
Why is it that genre writers, just when they are about to step onto a wider stage of literature, tend to lose heart – or nerve?
I first noticed this in 1998 when Stephen King, after almost a decade of increasing critical acceptance, retreated to the comforts of Bag of Bones, an overlong, overstuffed supernatural thriller of the kind that made him famous earlier in his career. Perhaps spooked by reviews that took him seriously (from the likes of The New York Times), King abandoned, if only temporarily, the more rigorous pleasures of novels such as Misery, Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne.
Now China Miéville seems to be following a similar pattern. Last year Miéville, already a popular figure in the neo-horror genre sometimes known as “weird fiction,” gained new readers and critical acclaim with the spare but deeply inventive fantasy-detective novel, The City and the City. Some critics named it to their year’s best list and at least one (uh, that would be me) said it was the top novel of the year.
Miéville’s follow-up to that breakthrough, alas, is an exercise in apocalyptic excess titled Kraken (yes, “kraken” as in Liam Neeson thundering, “Release the Kraken!” in Clash of the Titans). It’s a huge disappointment, not only because it signals an aesthetic retreat from the high-wire performance of The City and the City, but also because it’s only so-so, even on its own weird fictional terms.
The ponderously convoluted plot starts when a kraken – a rare giant squid – disappears from the Natural History Museum in London, along with its tank of formalin. This is an impossible crime, of course, requiring dozens of men to carry out, and besides, the huge tank would not fit through any of the available doorways.
Genre geeks (or at least those unfamiliar with the kitchen-sink aesthetic of weird fiction) will think they know what kind of story this is when the police send the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime (FARC) Unit to investigate. We’re well familiar with occult cops via The X-Files, Torchwood, Fringe, etc., and we’re primed to admire their interaction and heroics.
Miéville has bigger, er, calamari, to fry, and the FARC squad is soon revealed as unequal to the present apocalyptic crisis. Billy Harrow, the squid’s young curator, doesn’t trust them, casting his lot instead with a cult of kraken worshippers who, to his discomfort, regard him as a prophet. The kraken cult proves impotent as well, and soon Billy is careening around London in the company of Dane, a stupendously competent kraken-cult apostate, trying to recover the missing squid and thereby avert a Fiery End of Everything.
While I’m all for subverting genre expectation – surprise is the soul of great horror, not to mention comedy – Miéville packs so many ideas, characters, and spoofs into this trunk that the fun goes out of the thing. One minute it’s a parody of Star Trek, the next it’s a labor comedy, with magical familiars going on strike against their oppressive masters, and the next it’s a religious thriller. And it’s always a Lovecraft spoof. No matter how clever Miéville is (and he is), this is not storytelling, it’s riffing.
Much can be found to admire in Kraken. Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and an idiot boy, make for a supernatural team of hit men fit to scare the small child in all of us. Likewise the Tattoo, an occult gang leader turned into, well, a tattoo by a rival – not that this hinders him much in the administration of his underworld business interests.
Kraken also is admirable for taking religion seriously – or, if not religion, then at least the faith of those who believe. Of course, it turns out that all religions are equally true, which, in a tiresomely predictable bit of triumphant secularism, means they cancel each other into mutual irrelevancy. This is nicely illustrated when various cults find they have scheduled their competing apocalypses on the same date, one of Miéville’s more successful stabs at humor.
Overall, though, Kraken is just too, too much. On top of everything else, it’s needlessly long. This book would have been significantly more effective with 200 pages cut out. It has too many passages in which the narrator explains what’s just been made abundantly clear in an exchange of dialogue. Wati, a spirit who can inhabit statues and figurines, spends much of the story in a Capt. Kirk action toy. He’s an important character – yet we do not need the detailed account of how he made his way back from the afterlife to become the leader of the magical helpers’ union.
A little restraint might be hoped for next time out, the kind Miéville used to craft the superior The City and the City. Does he know his Lovecraft? Indeed he does. But the way Miéville includes every Lovecraftian idea he’s ever had robs the Cthulu tropes of all their uncanniness, leaving them about as scaresome as a pickled specimen in a museum.
Miéville seems to have written Kraken in that café where Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman and Douglas Adams take tea. His debt to each one is plain as a nametag or a numbered jersey. While Miéville is as gifted as these esteemed Brit fantasists, this novel, alas, is neither as charming as Gaiman, as funny as Adams, nor yet as sexy (or terrifying) as Barker. I’ve seldom opened a book with as much anticipation, after the satisfactions of The City and the City, nor been so keenly disappointed.
Kraken, by China Miéville; Ballantine Books; 509 pp.; $26.
| 07 July 2010
Most civilians are unaware of the physical and psychic horrors endured by soldiers, according to this timely new book by Nancy Sherman, a professor at Georgetown University.
Sherman says up front that The Untold War “is not a political tract for or against a war.” Rather, it is about “the inner battles … the moral weight of war that individual soldiers carry on their shoulders and don’t usually talk about.”
Sherman interviewed numerous soldiers and officers who described their conflicted emotions on and off the battlefield. “They feel pride and patriotism tinged with shame, complicity, betrayal, and guilt,” she writes. Many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, with symptoms that can last for decades.
Soldiers should “not have to bear the moral burdens of war on their own,” Sherman writes. “We need to begin to cultivate the kind of empathy that will allow us to support our soldiers properly when they return home to our communities.”
One can’t help but feel sadness and anger when reading about the brutality and ugliness of war, the occasional resort to torture, the killing of civilians referred to as “collateral damage” and the heavy toll of smashed bodies and minds.
Sherman describes the work of one expert who tries “to turn reluctant-to-kill soldiers into ready-to-kill soldiers” who know the difference between “murder and justified, lawful killing in war.” One challenge, she says, is making sure that soldiers “preserve their humanity” in the midst of killing.
Soldiers must be encouraged to get in touch with their emotions, rather than bottle them up and pretend that everything is fine, the author says.
Because Sherman is a professor, philosopher and psychoanalyst, her writing sometimes has an off-putting academic tone. She calls this book a “philosophical ethnography” and quotes liberally from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud and others to make her points about war and ethics, which sometimes leads to dry prose.
Sherman is more compelling when she offers case histories based on her interviews. One poignant story involves Maj. Tony DeStefano, a married man in his 50s who was diagnosed with severe post-combat trauma and mild traumatic brain injury related to the war in Iraq, and is racked with guilt and shame about not being able to support his family because of his injuries. One of DeStefano’s teenage daughters told Sherman, “The second time he came home he was totally different. He wasn’t the dad I knew. He snapped a lot; he’d go 100 miles per hour in the car. It’s so scary.”
When DeStefano suffered a massive panic attack, his doctor suggested inpatient treatment at a Veterans Administration hospital. DeStefano balked, saying that if he sought such help, it would be “a disgrace to the officer class,” explaining later that “we’re taught to suck it up and truck on.”
Unfortunately, many of the profiles are too short and superficial to leave lasting impressions. Sherman talks in general terms, for example, about returning soldiers who engage in “risky and aggressive behavior: motorcycle accidents on bases, bar-room brawls, and domestic violence.”
Some officers and soldiers, according to Sherman, feel profound shame “that we have become a country that has morally and legally justified the use of torture. … The fact of torture has opened disturbing questions of identity – just what does the uniform stand for and what are the ideals that they have signed up to defend?”
Sherman also describes the moral ambiguity of various interrogation techniques that involve stress and deception, but fall short of torture, and she faults health professionals for their role in the mistreatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Detention Center.
An estimated 30 percent of soldiers return from Iraq with emotional problems. The number of those who need treatment for brain injuries, lost limbs and post-traumatic stress symptoms is growing.
Soldiers struggle with ambiguity. One soldier thought that his killing an enemy soldier was fine, until he approached the body and took out the wallet, which contained family pictures.
“The pictures were like those he carries in his wallet,” Sherman writes. “That empathic moment unleashed a torrent of guilt.”
Many people do not realize the extent of limb injuries and disfigurement in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We don’t see the wheelchairs, the canes, the stumps, the prosthetics, the burns, the empty eye sockets.” Soldiers often are scarred by the memory of collecting the body parts of comrades killed in roadside bombings, sometimes having to retrieve limbs from tree branches.
Although this book has weaknesses, it nevertheless sheds light on an important topic that has received too little attention from the general public – the crushing burden carried by soldiers who return home broken by the terrors they have experienced or witnessed.
Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers, by Nancy Sherman; Norton; 338 pp.; $27.95
| 23 June 2010
If Harold Kushner had been a literary critic instead of a rabbi, he might have asked, “Why do bad books happen to good writers?” And if Leo Tolstoy had also been a critic, he might have answered, “All good books are alike, while every bad book goes bad in its own way.”
These bloody thoughts are occasioned by Henning Mankel and Jim Crace, novelists of proven quality who have recently produced very bad books, indeed. Of course, Tolstoy’s resonant but simplistic bifurcation is no more true of books than it is of families. So let us begin by considering what the new novels by Crace and Mankel have in common.
Each author attempts something new. Mankel, Sweden’s most famous living crime novelist, tries to cram a Micheneresque indictment of colonialism, with much globetrotting and historical backstory, into the narrow confines of a police procedural. Crace, an award-winning Britsh litterateur, assays a thriller with faint sci-fi overtones.
Mankel’s strengths include an engaging narrative voice, and he uses it to great effect in the early sections of The Man From Beijing, where we’re shown a wolf gnawing on the murdered body of an elderly man (from the wolf’s point of view!). Soon it’s revealed the victim is only one of 19 people butchered in a remote Swedish hamlet, all pensioners except for a 12-year-old boy.
It’s a splendid set-up, baroque and lurid, and Mankell keeps it grounded by his keen eye for dour Swedish character and social detail, and his way with pungent and credible characters. Indeed, in Vivi Sundberg, a stout, no-nonsense provincial detective in her mid-’50s, he has created a fascinating protagonist – who, alas, he promptly abandons.
Instead of burrowing ever deeper into this remote corner of Scandanavia, with Sundberg as our guide, Mankell supplants her with the much less interesting Birgitta Roslin, an urban judge on medical leave who takes an intrusive interest in the case even though it lies far out of her jurisdiction and despite being warned off by local and national authorities.
Worse, Mankell opens the narrative up like a Russian nesting doll. Soon he’s in 19th- century China, with the story of three peasant brothers. Then it’s the American West, where a sadistic Swedish project manager abuses the Chinese laborers helping build the intercontinental railway – then back to China, with a band of Swedish missionaries. And there are fequent forays to modern Beijing, not to mention Africa, where the Chinese seek to secure energy and mineral reserves.
As long as Mankell remains in Sweden, his story has the ring of deep authenticity. But while his narrative verve never deserts him, he has little feel for the American West, and his presentation of Chinese characters is hackneyed to the point of racial stereotype. One villain wields a sword, like a medieval warrior, while another seeks to assassinate an enemy with ground glass hidden in food – something I haven’t seen since I read Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels at the age of 12.
Moreover, Mankell’s plot hinges again and again on unlikely coincidence, with the climax decided by the abrupt intervention of characters hardly hinted at before that moment. Key characters take drastic action with little coherent motivation, as when a villain murders his most loyal and effective henchman for no apparent reason. I could go on. Almost everything that happens outside Sweden is caricature.
***
A Man Booker finalist and three-time Whitbread Award-winner, Jim Crace certainly knows how to write a muscular and compelling sentence, as well as how to move a narrative forward in admirably subtle ways. But none of that saves All That Follows.
Indeed, prose quality aside, not one thing about this low-wattage thriller is authentic. Set in 2020, its hero is Leonard Lessing, a successful jazz sax player nearing his 50th birthday. Full of self-regard, but maddeningly irresolute and timid, he’s unhappily married to a demanding woman who’s fretting about the disappearance of her estranged daughter.
On a newscast, Lessing recognizes the leader of a terrorist band who has taken hostages somewhere in suburban Britain. It’s Maxie Lermontov, an American anarchist he knew as a young man, a former romantic rival. For no good reason, Lessing visits the scene of the hostage crisis, standing behind police barricades, befriending the teenage daughter of Lermontov and his old love interest and generally behaving like a dull fictional character in an irrational search for psychological motivation.
Lessing is the single most irritating aspect of All That Follows, but by no means the only one. His approach to the teenaged girl is supposed to be ill-considered and wreckless, but it’s actually creepy, with Lessing no less despicable for not acting on his dirty-old-man impulses. When the action goes back in time, to 2007 and Austin, Texas, the narrative enters a bogus fugue. Crace is as awkward and unconvincing in Bush’s America as Mankell is in modern Beijing.
Crace’s decision to cast All That Follows as a near-future thriller is profoundly misguided. Really, I’m heartily sick of serious novelists playing with genre tropes as though they can be picked up and put down at will. On the contrary, sci-fi, fantasy and crime fiction require total commitment, just as serious literature does.
Not for one instant does Crace make us believe that by 2020 we’ll have solved the energy crisis, while his 2007 radical political operatives are actually cut-and-pasted from the Vietnam War era. All That Follows would be far more convincing if it were set in the present day, with Lessing’s youthful Texas sojourn taking place around 1967.
But even then, the novel would still have this limp dishrag of a main character. His arbitrary heroics in the final act would remain ludicrous, and the happy ending, with none of his stupid and selfish actions reaping the consequences they deserve, would still be risible.
The Man From Beijing, by Henning Mankell. Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson. Knopf. $29.95. 366 pp.
All That Follows, by Jim Crace. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $25.95. 223 pp.
| 01 June 2010
Wilbert Rideau was 19 when he impulsively decided to rob a bank in Lake Charles, La., so he could flee to a new life on the West Coast. The botched 1961 robbery ended with Rideau taking three hostages. In the ensuing chaos he fatally shot and stabbed a female bank teller.
Rideau was black and the victim was white, and a seething mob nearly lynched him. He was quickly convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
In the Place of Justice is Rideau’s meticulous account of his 44 years behind bars, during which he became a model prisoner and won national awards for his work as editor of a prison magazine.
Rideau describes the brutal reality of rape, gangs and violence inside Louisiana’s Angola penitentiary, regarded for years as the most violent prison in America. Between 1972 and 1975, some 67 inmates were fatally stabbed and another 350 suffered knife wounds.
The author documents the racism that pervaded Louisiana’s justice system. In the parish where he was convicted, every black person accused of killing a white person between 1889 and 1976 was sent to death row. Whites who murdered whites during the same period were sentenced to death less than 25 percent of the time. Rideau was convicted in three successive trials by all-white juries, but each conviction was overturned on appeal.
At a fourth trial in 2005 a mixed-race jury found Rideau guilty of manslaughter instead of premeditated murder, and because he had already served more than the 21-year maximum for manslaughter, he was set free.
When Rideau entered prison, he was an angry young man with little formal education, but he began to read books, which “helped me survive the maddening monotony and boredom of the cell.”
He started to write and founded a newsletter for black inmates. Angola’s warden invited Rideau to become editor of the Angolite, a bimonthly prison magazine.
Over the course of two decades, Rideau turned the magazine into a publication that won national honors for its investigative reports about prison conditions. He wrote a piece titled The Horror Show documenting how inmates were burned and perhaps tortured by a faulty electric chair used for executions at Angola. Another exposé documented the plight of inmates who were blind, paralyzed or otherwise severely disabled and yet were routinely denied pardons. The article led to the release of about 20 men.
He became a correspondent for National Public Radio and flew to Washington, D.C., to address a convention of newspaper editors.
Rideau won the trust of inmates and officials alike. He was given wide freedom inside and outside the penitentiary, and became the beneficiary of enlightened prison leadership, which allowed him to publish critical articles without censorship, a unique arrangement in an American prison.
And yet his repeated bids for freedom failed. Year after year successive governors rejected commutation, even as scores of other murderers were freed. Rideau believes it had more to do with politics than anything else. Governors feared the public’s ire if they released a convict involved in a high-profile, black-on-white crime in a community with a virulent racist history.
Rideau comes across as truthful, remorseful, and straightforward. “I had been defined as criminal,” he writes, “but I knew I wasn’t an evil or monstrous person, despite my crime.”
In the Place of Justice is remarkably even-handed and generous. Rideau said he never could have accomplished what he did without the help of many guards and prison officials. Guards loaned him books, and officials granted him wide latitude to pursue stories without interference.
After his release, the author married Linda LaBranche, who had befriended him and fought for his release. Now in his late 60s, Rideau soaks up the little joys of daily life, such as being “mesmerized by the aerial artistry” of hummingbirds in his back yard.
“Having so long dwelled in a hellish place,” he writes, “I recognize paradise when I see it.”
Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance, by Wilbert Rideau; Knopf; 366 pp.; $26.95
| 23 May 2010
William Scott Wilson
After the Bible, the Tao Te Ching is the second most translated text in the world, and certainly it is the most famous and influential book of ancient Chinese wisdom in the West. Why, then, with dozens of versions already available, would we need a new one – especially by a translator who made his name in classical Japanese samurai literature?
“My friends all ask that same question,” says William Scott Wilson, the renowned translator of Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, The Unfettered Mind: Writings of the Zen Master to the Sword Master, and The Book of the Five Rings, among other medieval samurai classics.
One reason, says Wilson, who grew up in Fort Lauderdale and now lives in Miami, is the deep connection between the Tao and Zen Buddhism, which, in turn exerts a strong influence on the Japanese martial arts tradition. In a way, he says, all his samurai translations have led him back in time toward the Tao Te Ching.
“Going on to the ‘Tao’ is like going to the source of sources,” Wilson says. “I always wanted to do this, but didn’t think anyone would pay me to do it. It’s one of the three great Chinese books: The Tao, the I Ching and the Analects of Confucius.”
Born in 1944, Wilson was a political science major at Dartmouth in 1966 when a friend invited him on a three-month kayak trip along the coast of Japan. "That trip was an eye-opener," says Wilson. "I didn't know what was there for me, but I knew it was something."
Wilson earned a bachelor’s in Japanese literature and language at the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies in Monterey, Calif. He studied Edo period philosophy at the Aichi Prefectural University in Nagoya, Japan. He translated his first book, Hagakure, an 18th-century martial arts classic, to fulfill an academic requirement – with no thought it might be published.
But since being published by Kodansha in 1979, Hagakure has never been out of print. While he’s had to supplement his income with other jobs, Wilson has steadily built up a body of classical samurai translations. “I've made sacrifices to do what I love," Wilson says. "You do what you can to keep doing this. I've been fortunate in recent years, when Kodansha issued new editions of all my books. They look really nice."
Wilson’s big break came in 1999, when indie film director Jim Jarmusch made the Zen thriller Ghost Dog, starring Forest Whitaker as a mob hit man who reads Hagakure and lives by its warrior code. After the movie came out, sales for Hagakure went "way up and remained up for years," Wilson says.
Gradually Wilson’s interest expanded beyond samurai literature to related fields – first to Nō drama (The Flowering Spirit: Classic Teachings on the Art of Nō; 2006), then to ancient Chinese maxims (The 36 Secret Strategies of the Martial Arts, ancient sayings collected by Hiroshi Moriya; 2008) and ancient Chinese philosophy (The Unencumbered Sprit, by Hung Ying-ming, published earlier this year.)
hagakure
Because classical Japanese writing is derived from Chinese, Wilson had to study both languages, and therefore is qualified to translate each. “I picked Chinese as my second language for my master’s,” he says. “I wanted to learn to read Chinese. It’s just a beautiful, wonderful language.”
Wilson is one of those rare people who seem born with a gift for languages. In high school he taught himself Spanish in six weeks “for fun.” To illustrate a point about the Chinese concept of “te” and how it’s related to the English word “virtue,” he recites a few lines from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – in what sounds like flawless Middle English.
What really distinguishes Wilson’s translation of the Tao is his attempt to push it 300 years deeper into antiquity. Written about 500 B.C., supposedly by the legendary sage Lao Tzu, the Tao exists only in the “new” text of 200 B.C. Wilson wondered what he might get if he recast the text into the archaic characters in use at the time the original was written.
“I said, ‘Let’s go back to the source,’ ” Wilson says. “I had books with ancient characters and etymology. Maybe I could find new meaning, or at least nuance, if I can translate it as it might appear to its first readers.”
Much of Wilson’s version is similar to existing translations, but he does find nuance, if not altogether new meaning, in the archaic characters. For example, one of the key principles of the Tao is to “act without acting, to go on intuition rather than rationality,” Wilson says. “If we think we have it, we don’t.”
One version of that thought, which repeats throughout the Tao, is to act without relying on anything. Through the use of archaic characters, Wilson realized the word usually translated as “act” is closely related to the word for “fabricate,” which allows for a fine adjustment in connotation.
“I used the word ‘fabricate’ instead of ‘act’ in the theatrical sense,” Wilson says. “That was the revelation: It doesn’t just mean mindless acting. It means act without making something up. Whoever put this book together felt strongly about this idea. It’s one of the lodestones of the ‘Tao.’ ”
Wilson’s translations of classical Japanese – and now Chinese – literature have proven so distinguished they have been translated themselves into 18 languages, including Magyar, Lithuanian, and, in some cases, modern Chinese — which, ironically, Wilson cannot read.
“Modern Chinese has been simplified down so much I won’t even look at it,” Wilson says. “It’s lost all its charm. The Communists ordered it made so simplified they wiped out 2,000 years of Chinese literature. All it’s good for is Communist propaganda.”
Still, Wilson is grateful for every translation. Take the Magyar edition of Hagakure, which earned him, in total, a check for $66: “If I hadn’t been so broke, I would have framed the check and hung it on my wall.”
Chauncey Mabe is the former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel. He can be reached at
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