Alligator

If you've heard of this book, you know the opening scene. A man puts his head between an alligator's jaws with predictable results. The splendid cover evokes the horror of such an encounter.

The novel is set in St. John's, bracketed by a pair of Louisiana gators. The opening scene, where a man's sweat triggers an instinctual reptilian response, is metaphorically replicated in St. John's, where it's hot and rainy, and spanworms descend from trees, giving the city a swampy feel. Through the streets a Russian psychopath moves like an alligator.

Moore does an impressive job getting inside the skin of each of her characters. Her approach is impressionistic, though, and it takes a while for readers to get their bearings. Tenses shift, scenes hustle back and forth in time, the POV changes from chapter to chapter. Finally the story sorts itself out and moves forward.

Madeleine has a heart condition and is trying to finish directing her last film, in which Isobel, an actress past her prime, has a role. Isobel is having an affair with Valentin, a Russian thug. Frank (an appropriately named hot dog vendor) falls in love with Colleen, a reckless teenager. She is the daughter of Beverly, sister to Madeleine.

Though the book is very readable, it's also sad and bleak. Everyone is alone, isolated. Madeleine thinks about happier days before her divorce. Beverly misses her dead husband, Frank his mother felled by cancer. Valentin was abandoned by his mother, his father executed, and he himself tortured. As for Isobel, she...

...had been pouring herself into camera lenses since she was eighteen and she had done this for her entire career without questioning the effects of the transference. She knew, now, that she had been diminished. She had become unknowable.

Headless images recur. The man with his head stuck in an alligator. A videoclip of a beheading. A naked Iraqi prisoner with a bag over his head. A mishandled ceremonial sword breezing past a little girl's face. An Inuk hanging by his neck in a rooming house.

Alligator was shortlisted for the 2005 Giller award, and won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Canada/Caribbean region.

Spook Country

Anyone who knows SF knows William Gibson. He has written two previous, loosely connected trilogies, one known as the Sprawl, the other as the Bridge.

The former is set in a dark future of drugs, cyberspace, and neural implants. The latter’s setting is an earthquake-ravaged Pacific Rim.

Gibson brought his vision to the present when he released Pattern Recognition in 2003, and Spook Country earlier this year.

The aftermath of 9/11 permeates these novels like background radiation, and two characters appear in both books -- Pamela Mainwaring and the ridiculously named Hubertus Bigend -- which leads one to believe that his next novel will conclude this set of real world adventures.

Bigend is the head of a shadowy organization called Blue Ant. He has a maglev bed, and says things like, "Quebec is an imaginary country" and Intelligence is "advertising turned inside out."

The title Spook Country carries several shades of meaning. First of all, the story is about “spooks” or intelligence agents. Second, non-corporeal entities can be found in each of the three narrative threads. Finally, the word “spooky” is employed in the sense of “scary.”

The book consists of 84 titled chapters, tracks the movements of a mysterious shipping container, and concludes in Vancouver.

Hollis

A former member of a cult rock group, Hollis has come to LA to do a piece on locative art, virtual reality pieces commemorating events in the location where they occurred. For example, by donning a VR helmet a person can witness Scott Fitzgerald having a heart attack.

The scene is created in much the same way that game designers create shapes, beginning with a wire frame and adding textures. The piece exists on a server somewhere, and is made accessible by Wifi and GPS. The technical end has been worked out by a Canadian geohacker named Bobby Chombo. Spatially tagged hypermedia is the way it’s described by Odile, curator of this new artform.

Tito

Tito is a Cuban-Chinese teenager living in New York. He is part of a tight-knit family of "illegal facilitators" who employ impeccable KGB tradecraft. Sometimes they work for the government, sometimes they don’t. Tito speaks Russian, delivers iPods used as storage devices, and is a gifted streetrunner who at times gets a supernatural assist.

Milgrim

Milgrim is a drug addict held captive by a man named Brown, who may or may not be a government agent. Brown is coordinating surveillance of Tito's family, who seem like ghosts to him and his colleagues, one of whom used to work for Blackwater.

Brown introduces Milgrim to a new drug called Rize, which at one point allows Milgrim to catch "glimpses of spectral others, angels perhaps." Milgrim speaks Russian, and knows a dialect called Volapuk used for text messaging on keyboards not equipped with Cyrillic characters. Vancouver, according to Milgrim, "had an oddly low fuckedness index."

The Author

William Gibson came to Canada as a counterculture kid in the Vietnam era. He’s lived in Vancouver for over 30 years, and earned a degree in English from UBC.

His first novel Neuromancer, released in 1984, is one of the most influential in all of SFdom. Today, it is still on Amazon.ca’s best seller list for first novels, and its opening line is one of the most recognized: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Gibson coined the word cyberspace and jumpstarted a whole new subgenre called cyberpunk, a future noir of drugs, urban sprawl, and computer cowboys who plug their brains directly into the Internet.

To understand Gibson’s vision, you must realize that the World Wide Web did not exist in 1984, and the first PC virus had not yet been invented.

Later, Gibson co-authored with Bruce Sterling a book called The Difference Engine, which featured a mechanical computer created by Charles Babbage. The book spawned another subgenre called steampunk.

But it is not just Gibson’s vision for which he is famed. He is above all things a stylist, turning sentences into a menacing cocktail of technology and brand names.

A Mondrian security man was looking at her, one ear Bluetoothed beneath the shaven cliff of a military haircut. The door opened like some disturbing hybrid of bank vault and Armani evening purse, perfectly balanced bombproof solidity meeting sheer cosmetic slickness. [The rifle’s] barrel...was encased in a long tube of lustrous gray alloy that reminded her of expensive European kitchenware. Like a rolling pin by Cuisinart.

About Blogs

Bobby Chombo, talking about reality, locative art, and how cyberspace has "everted," delivers the following McLuhanesque observation:

But when you look at blogs, where you're most likely to find the real info is in the links. It's contextual, and not only who the blog's linked to, but who's linked to the blog.

Official Site: William Gibson

The Tower

Look on its broken arch, its ruin'd wall,
Its chambers desolate and portals foul;
Yes, this was once Ambition's airy hall,
The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul:
Behold through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole,
The gay recess of Wisdom and of Wit,
And Passion's host, that never brook'd control:
Can all saint, sage, or sophist ever writ,
People this lonely tower, this tenement refit?

                                               -- Byron

Refiner's Fire

I was overjoyed when I realized there was one more Helprin novel I had not read -- his first, the full title being Refiner’s Fire: The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, A Foundling.

Marshall is born on a vessel packed with Jewish refugees running a British blockade of the new state of Israel. His mother dies after giving birth, so the ship’s captain sends him to America, where he is raised by a family named Livingston. While still in high school, Marshall and the Livingstons relocate to Jamaica for a couple of years, where he gets involved in fighting Rastafarian bandits.

Back home he goes to Harvard, but drops out in his senior year, wanders America for a while, and has some surreal experiences. He spends an unknown length of time working in a Midwest slaughterhouse, after being recruited by a black man named Monroe, who (like Robert Service’s Sam McGee) warms himself in the flames of a furnace. In the Rockies he meets a biologist who is studying eagles, and whose 40-foot telescope has the ability to look into the past. He is the sole survivor of a shrimp boat that sinks in a fierce storm, only to discover later that the boat was lost years ago.

Finally he is reunited with Paul Levy, the captain on whose ship he was born. Levy explains that the reason Marshall’s life has been so erratic is because of his lost heritage as a Jew. Marshall soon ends up in Israel, where he is conscripted and badly wounded during a major Palestinian offensive.

These are the broad outlines of the novel, whose chief attraction is the quality of Helprin’s prose. It flows across the page like a mountain cataract, an exuberant torrent of wit, silliness, and striking images. A little boy invents a horse bicycle. A little girl wonders what would happen if the White Sea flowed into the Black Sea. A mechanic works on a car "as if he were cleaning a fish and did not fear the entrails."

[Soldiers] had a crazed demented look which caused their eyes to seem like the windows of a slot machine in which were visible not the symbols of apples, diamonds, or bells, but rather a high-speed shuffling of evil thoughts, remembrances and anticipations of evil deeds, and the singular electrical flashes of the evil mind.

Helprin fans will forgive the fairy tale ending, having already been rewarded by the rich prose, the wild and goofy adventures, and the enjoyment of Helprin’s trademark passions: horses, trains, paintings, mountains, New York, the Hudson, winter, war, etc. In particular they will enjoy recognizing in Refiner’s Fire the seeds of all his later novels.

A punishment meted out to Marshall in school (he is forced to eat a coffee bean) beomes the departure point for Memoir from an Antproof Case.

The Italian family that he stays with before attending Harvard (the daughter heads off to attend the University of Rome) presages A Soldier of the Great War, which is set in Italy during WWI.

Marshall’s travels across America are repeated by the Prince and Princess of Wales in Freddy and Fredericka.

In Winter’s Tale the "colour gravity" affliction of Pearly Soames harks back to Marshall Pearl’s seizures caused by flashing colours, and the impassable cloud wall that surrounds New York City is first glimpsed during the storm that sinks the shrimp boat in Refiner’s Fire.

Is it Helprin’s best? Probably not. I still prefer Winter's Tale, followed by A Soldier of the Great War. But then I've noticed that (Helprin being such an unique writer) people often like best the first of his books they encounter.

Official Site: Mark Helprin
Harvard Magazine article: Literary Warrior

Third Class Superhero

Every once in a while you take a chance on a book with a great cover and it turns out to be a fabulous choice. Third Class Superhero is that kind of book, chock full of the kind of stories I love, stories that are not just well written, but have an innovative or experimental bent. In fact, the book reminds me of one of my favourite literary movements, the New Wave.

If you've never heard of it, the New Wave was a long-ago movement that consisted of fiction whose form or content defied logic. Though published in SF venues, New Wave writers sought to sever ties with traditional SF.

Two of the most powerful stories I've ever read came from that movement. They are "Descending" by Thomas Disch, and "The Heat Death of the Universe" by Pamela Zoline. The former describes an event that could never occur, thus placing it in the realm of fantasy or allegory, yet without the obvious trappings of either. The latter is a story that is fractured in such a way as to reflect the narrative, a housewife's nervous breakdown.

It is "The Heat Death of the Universe" that the stories of Third Class Superhero most resemble. They tend to be plotless and fragmented, sometimes with numbered or titled sections, and often with doses of scientific or pseudo-scientific blather. Despite the occasional SF paraphenalia, the author's interest remains with issues of identity and existence rather than cosmic adventure.

The titles of some of the stories give a clue to Charles Yu's intent: "Problem for Self-Study," "The Man Who Became Himself," "Man of Quiet Desperation Goes on Short Vacation."

Stories like these are not easy to write, for they can easily become boring and pretentious. Only the concluding story in the collection comes close to suffering this fate. For the rest, the author delivers wry humour, great ingenuity, and darn good writing.

"401(k)" features a couple trying to find meaning in an existence defined by the products they consume. "We don't need the Good Life. The Pretty Good Life would be just fine."

"My Last Days as Me" is about an actor in a family sitcom whose members are constantly being replaced. The story is full of wonderful lines. "Just to get things straight. Me is sixteen years old. I am twenty-two. I have been playing Me for as long as I can remember."

"Realism" begins with the narrator's mother reading a book called Realism. The narrator asks, "What is a story in this kind of universe? What is character, what is plot?" A little later Yu performs a reverse Kafka by having an insect turn into a human being.

In "Florence" the narrator is trapped on a distant planet, alone and neurotic. His boss sends him messages, singing in the nude. A parcel arrives from his aunt Betty. Everyone is a recording.

Christians in the year A.D. 1,002,006 are few and far between. A lot of people don't even know what they are. Mainly because there are hardly any people left. Also, most of us stopped believing in God after black hole XR-97-ID got so massive it started swallowing itself over and over again in a recursive loop -- like some cosmic Escher print -- resulting in an object ten times the mass of the rest of the known universe. Personally, that did it for me.

"32.05864991%" refers to the statistical equivalent of the word "maybe," and the story itself is a crazy combination of probability, parallel universes, and the likelihood of a man and a woman making a connection through a telephone call.

"Two-Player Infinitely Iterated Simultaneous Semi-Cooperative Game with Spite and Reputation" begins by describing a game somewhat like The Sims, then morphs into something entirely different by offering a game cheat. Enter player 1's house, turn on the shower, and look into the mirror:

If you wait long enough, the game will give up and override its defaults. It will recognize your reflection in the mirror as a different player, Player 2. Now you are Player 1 and your reflection is Player 2. Now, say you are sorry.

The title story is the most conventional of the lot, featuring a superhero named Moisture Man, whose special power is the ability to condense moisture out of the air, which allows him to douse small fires and quench the thirst of his colleagues. A minor ability, to say the least. That's why he's stuck at being a third class superhero. After years of trying he's still unable to move up the ladder, and each year has to re-write a test to keep his superhero licence. This year he looks around and sizes up the other losers who are in there with him, writing the exam.

To my left is Itch-Inducer Boy. To my right is a pebble shooter. Over by the door are Malaise Man, The Fatiguer, and The Nauseator aka Slight Discomforto."

Charles Yu's intelligence, humour, and ability to craft great lines makes this one of the most entertaining short story collections I've come across in a long time.