Nicholas Nickleby

What better time of year to read Dickens than Xmas, with his cosy celebrations of family, friends, food and drink, while Scroogelike villains pinch their pennies?

My choice for this season was Nicholas Nickleby, which Dickens produced next but one after my current favourite, Pickwick Papers. I was hoping for something simpler and more comic than the last three I read, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and Little Dorrit -- and until midway through the book I was not disappointed.

The plot moves along in a straightforward and unencumbered fashion. Ralph Nickleby finds employment for his nephew Nicholas with a brutal one-eyed schoolmaster named Wackford Squeers. Nicholas thrashes Squeers and runs away with a simple-minded young man named Smike, an abandoned student kept on at Dotheboys Hall as a servant. Nicholas finds employment tutoring French for the Kenwigs family, then he and Smike end up with a theatrical company run by Vincent Crummles. They return abruptly to London on receiving an urgent message from Newman Noggs, Ralph’s clerk. It regards Nicholas’s sister, Kate.

Ralph is a familiar figure in the pantheon of Dickensian villains, an implacable “usurer” whose chief goal in life is the acquisition of money. After finding employment for Kate with a milliner named Madame Mantalini, he dangles her before two debauched noblemen, Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Verisopht, as an inducement to maintain their financial dependence on him. They pursue Kate when she takes up new employment as a lady's companion with Mrs. Wititterly.

By this time Nicholas is back in the city and happens to overhear Kate’s name being bandied about by Hawk and his confederates. He accosts Hawk, rescues Kate from the Wititterlys, and denounces Ralph.

This is a very condensed version of the novel's first half, which I enjoyed enormously. But then a change takes place as Dickens starts herding his characters toward a conclusion. Comedy gives way to cloying sentiment, unlikely coincidences, contrived backstory, ridiculous melodrama, and stuffy Victorian morals. All of these elements are present to some extent in any Dickens novel, but they overwhelm the last half of this one. The turning point comes with the introduction of the insufferable Cheeryble brothers, through whose charitable hands money pours "as freely as water" (chapter 35), and the astonishing change of Lord Verisopht from a weak-willed dupe to a defender of Nicholas and Kate (chapter 38).

Dickens is forced to introduce several shady new characters to service the plot - Bray, Brooker and Arthur Gride. Squeers is dragged back into the story more times than is necessary. There is a soppy death scene for Smike, and an outrageous passage where Frank Cheeryble and Newman Noggs sneak into a room and get close enough to Squeers to peer over his shoulder at an important document – a will, of course. The marriage of Madeleine Bray to a disgusting old miser (Gride) is prevented by the timely passing of her father, which not only contributes to Ralph’s ruin but also saves her for Nicholas (who loves her even though he has scarcely spoken to her).

The worst is saved for the end – the revelation that Smike is Ralph’s son (with an implausible explanation of how he ended up with Squeers), followed by a saccharine triple wedding. One illustration in particular sums up all the corny melodrama.

This is not to say the last half of the book is without merit. Chapter 50, for example, is a fine set piece, culminating in the duel between Hawk and Verisopht. Overall, though, the final half fails to live up to the superb promise of the first half.

Characters

For me the most memorable characters are Wackford Squeers and Mr. Mantalini. Is it not odd that two such scoundrels are also the most amusing? The combination of humour and villainy makes for doubly potent comedy, and is one aspect of Dickens’s genius that I greatly admire.

I also enjoyed seeing Nicholas portrayed as a headstrong and fiery young man. His physical courage in confronting Squeers, Hawk, the actor Mr. Lenville, and his uncle Ralph is refreshing; while Kate as a spirited young woman is more satisfying than the meek and long-suffering Madeleine Bray, who serves as a template for subsequent boring heroines like Esther Summerson.

One of the best scenes in the book occurs when Nicholas seeks employment with an MP named Gregsbury, at the same time that he is being confronted by dissatisfied constituents. The Crummles theatrical troupe also affords a number of excellent moments.

Of no interest whatsoever are the saintly Cheeryble twins, who are as credible as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Also, the machinations of Ralph Nickleby are a little too convoluted to be completely believable, though a trace of remorse early in the novel for manipulating Kate is a nice touch, as is his rationalization for doing so.

Marriage

Marriage, family, and parental responsibility figure large in the work of Dickens, but here they are of central importance. Of the five weddings in the book, three of them take place at the very end -- Nicholas and Madeleine, Kate and Frank, Tim Linkinwater and Miss La Creevy. The other two occur earlier and offstage -- John and Tilda Browdie, and Mr. Lilyvick and Henrietta Petowker. The latter relationship ends when Henrietta runs off with a half-pay captain. A sixth wedding (Madeleine and Gride) is aborted at the last moment, and a wedding anniversary is celebrated by the Kenwigs.

In Chapter 4 we are introduced to Mr. Snawley, who, having just married, is sending his two stepsons off to Dotheboys Hall to prevent his new wife from squandering money on them. Dotheboys Hall, it turns out, is a dumping ground for unwanted children. Ironically Squeers is devoted to his wife and offspring. The Squeers and Mantalini families form a suitable contrast to the happy Kenwigs and Crummles (the latter containing the celebrated "Infant Phenomenon").

Family contrasts are also central to the Nickleby saga. The secretive marriage of Ralph ended badly, his wife running away with another man, his child (unbeknownst to him) ending up at Dotheboys Hall. Nicholas senior, on the other hand, married for love and headed up a happy family. Unfortunately, while Mrs. Nickleby's heart is in the right place, her brain isn't. She urged her husband to speculate, which led directly to his death and the family's financial ruin. She completely misjudges Hawk and Squeers, and in this respect resembles another incompetent parent, Madeleine's father. Apparently she is modelled on Dickens's own mother.

As important as love is, it takes second place to other things, and not just money. Nicholas and Kate are both ready to forgo it for the sake of appearances; they don't want the Cheerybles to think they are being taken advantage of. In a similar confusion of values, Madeleine Bray is willing to suffer a loveless marriage out of blind devotion to a worthless father.

Consider Her Ways

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard, and consider her ways," says the Bible, and Frederick Philip Grove takes the advice to heart, travelling to Venezuela to study leaf-cutter ants and making telepathic contact with Wawa-quee, leader of a great journey of exploration undertaken at the behest of Queen Orrha-wee. The book is the record of that journey.

The expedition heads north, crossing the Panama canal and the Mississippi River before arriving in New York City. The journey takes years to complete, and enables the author to introduce a wide variety of ants and their amazing adaptations. In addition to the agricultural leaf-cutters, we meet army ants, honey-pot ants, harvester ants, slave-making ants, and ants that herd aphids.

The author's second purpose is Swiftian satire. He gives us an ant's-eye view of human affairs that is delightfully skewed, while at the same time poking fun at the ants themselves, who are as guilty of misplaced pride as the humans they look down upon. During the journey they meet a dentist, a farmer, and a myrmecologist, but the most amusing bits occur in New York City. There they take up residence in the Public Library, and one of them becomes addicted to crime fiction. Wawa-quee's confused observations about clothing are priceless.

Unfortunately, while ants are fascinating creatures, Grove fails to find a consistently entertaining way of melding fact with fiction. The subplot he comes up with (seditious egg-laying) is not very compelling, and in fact is just another way of including an interesting bit of ant lore. As a result the book is rather dry and tedious until the last of the five chapters, when the ants finally reach New York. For me, the book remains an interesting but flawed attempt (like Anthill by E.O. Wilson) to novelize the lives of ants.

Frederick Philip Grove

Grove was born in Europe, where he translated into German the work of many important writers (Swift, Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, etc.). He was a friend of H.G. Wells, and led an adventurous and somewhat unsavory life, which included a stint in jail and a faked suicide, before he finally ended up in Canada. Grove is not the name he was born with, and he wrote under a number of pseudonyms.

In Canada he achieved a lasting respectability, publishing the following novels: Settlers of the Marsh (1925), Our Daily Bread (1928), The Yoke of Life (1930), Fruits of the Earth (1933), Two Generations (1939), Master of the Mill (1944), and Consider Her Ways (1947). He won the GG for non-fiction in 1946 for the autobiography In Search of Myself (parts of which are fictionalized). He died in 1948.

The Cave

James Fitzjames

The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition

The early naval record of James Fitzjames, third in command of the lost Franklin expedition, is confusing and incomplete. He gave conflicting accounts of his age and place of birth, and his baptismal certificate was fraudulent.

The story that author William Battersby has pieced together is this: Fitzjames was the illegitimate son of an important British diplomat serving in Brazil, while his mother was "almost certainly" Portuguese. In England, he was raised "from an early age" by a foster family, the Coninghams, and maintained a deep attachment to them for the rest of his life.

At the age of 12 he went to sea on a ship captained by a blood relative, and a few years later parlayed an ambiguously worded letter into a rating as midshipman.

After serving in the Mediterranean, he signed on with the Chesney expedition, which was endeavouring to set up a mail route to India via the Persian Gulf. As part of this expedition he undertook a 1000-mile overland journey from the Euphrates to Beirut.

He received advanced training in gunnery, which he put to use in China during the Opium Wars. His fighting there came to an end when he was struck by a musket ball that pierced his arm, entered his body via the armpit, and lodged next to his spine. It was successfully removed without the benenfit of anaesthesia.

A second unknown in Fitzjames's life is the act of assistance he rendered to Sir John Barrow's son, George, in Singapore. Whatever it was, it was enough to earn Sir John's lasting gratitude, and resulted in Fitzjames obtaining his first command, the HMS Clio, and later his place on the Franklin expedition.

The Franklin Expedition

Fitzjames harboured a secret ambition. Once the Northwest Passage was conquered, he wanted to deliver the news to England via an overland journey across Siberia. It was a characteristic attitude of the time that all one needed in a risky undertaking was sufficient pluck.

Ironically he thought Franklin reckless for piling on too much sail as they made for Greenland, and ordered the canvas reduced after Franklin had gone to bed. But he was not alone in this view, and Franklin after all had not commanded a ship in 10 years, and never in arctic waters.

Several of his crewmates were close friends or former shipmates, including LeVesconte, DesVoeux, Fairholme, and Couch.

Refutations

Battersby is at pains to correct the previous image of Fitzjames as "well-educated, aristocratic, wealthy, of good family, Church of England, fast rising in the service -- and thumpingly, lispingly, English to the core," which is Scott Cookman's description of him in Ice Blink, and one that has been generally accepted for over a century, and so entrenched that it has found its way into popular works of fiction (e.g. Clive Cussler's Arctic Drift and Dan Simmons's The Terror.)

Fitzjames, who was responsible for selecting most of the crew of the Erebus and Terror, has been criticized for choosing men without polar experience. Battersby refutes this charge, and here again Cookman is specifically mentioned.

Battersby also challenges the contention of Michael Smith (Captain Francis Crozier: Last Man Standing?) that Crozier's Irishness was prejudicial to his advancement within the Royal Navy.

Summation

This book contains an astonishing amount of original research, though some of the conclusions that Battersby reaches are speculative. He provides an interesting snapshot of what it was like to serve as an officer in the Royal Navy in the first half of the 19th century -- the hardship, danger, camaraderie, and travel to far-flung places.

Fitzjames, in the course of his career, visited Lisbon, Malta, Troy, Constantinople, Babylon, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, and Hong Kong -- to name some of the better-known spots. Two of his more colourful experiences: being mooned by a group of women while steaming up the Euphrates, and being clawed by a pet cheetah while aboard the Clio. (It used to climb up the rigging with the sailors.)

Fitzgerald himself was handsome, charismatic, and ambitious. He was fluent in Portuguese and French, with some knowledge of Spanish and Arabic. He was a competent artist (the book reproduces a few of his sketches) and the author of a 10,000-word naval poem. He was a lover of elaborate practical jokes, and almost recklessly brave.

In the end he left this life as mysteriously as he entered it.

Links

Updates and Corrections
Hidden Tracks (Battersby's blog)
Review by Russell Potter

The Tiger

A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

We tend to associate tigers with jungle settings, but the Siberian subspecies lives in the subarctic and has no difficulty surviving minus 40 degree temperatures. It's the largest big cat in the world, but unlike its Bengal cousin does not have a reputation as a man-eater. Yet in 1997 a male killed and devoured two men in Primorski Krai, a region in the Russian Far East.

John Vaillant's book recounts these events, and the subsequent tracking down and killing of the tiger. It's a sensational topic, but the author's handling of it is sensitive and wide-ranging. His portrait of life in Primorski Krai, and of the ghastly effects of perestroika, is empathetic without being sentimental.

Particularly moving is his sketch of the first man to be killed. He was poacher, yes, but he was also a person who had not been ground under by the harsh realities of life in post-Soviet Russia. Whether or not he was a victim of bad luck, or caused his own demise by interferring with the tiger in some way, perhaps by pilfering some of its kill, remains unknown.

What is astonishing is the vindictive manner in which the tiger acted, seeking out this man's cabin, vandalizing everything he had touched, and then waiting for his return. There can be no question that the tiger was targetting him.

Vaillant's approach to this extraordinary tale is similar to that of Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm. Indeed, Siberian tigers are so fierce and implacable they seem like a force of nature. Vaillant likens an attack to having a piano dropped on you from a two-storey window. The difference is that tigers act with intent. They are endowed with ferocious cunning, a hypnotic gaze, an earth-shaking roar, and an almost supernatural ability to move invisibly through the forest.

As of December 2009, only 400 remain in the Russian Far East. Some of the proceeds of this book go toward their protection.

Go HERE to watch the author speaking about The Tiger. He won a G-G for a previous book, The Golden Spruce.

Zero History

More thriller than SF, Zero History is set mainly in London. It's not the latest Ono-Sendai cyberdeck that's being sought, but a particular kind of denim and a designer who markets her clothing in secret.

The narrative alternates between two characters last seen in Gibson's previous novel, Spook Country -- Milgrim, a recovering drug-addict, and Hollis Henry, formerly of the cult band The Curfew. They are now working for Hubertus Bigend and Blue Ant, two unifying threads in the trilogy.

Gibson's fine prose propels the story along magnificently until about two-thirds of the way through when Hollis's boyfriend, Garreth, rides in on his wheelchair. Although he likes jumping off very tall buildings, he is far less interesting than Hollis. His presence dilutes her role somewhat, and the ending he orchestrates is a little underwhelming.

Still, Gibson slides in a couple of pleasant surprises which nicely tie together the three books. These surprises are a reward, or Easter egg, for those who have read Pattern Recognition.

Best of all is the prose, a cutting-edge combo of clipped sentences and ornate descriptions, infused with with brand names and technological gadgetry. Even when Gibson writes about the present, it sounds like SF.

At just over 400 pages, this is his longest book yet, and good value for your money.

Misc. Observations

Gibson's always had strong female characters. Here, in addition to Hollis, there's a dispatch rider named Fiona, and Hollis's former bandmate and drummer, the foulmouthed Heidi Hyde, who likes nothing better than a good dust-up.

Gibson has a good ear for names. In this book: Oliver Sleight (Bigend's IT specialist), Michael Preston Gracie (rogue arms dealer), Winnie Tung Whitaker (DCIS special agent), Olduvai George (keyboardist), and Bobby Chombo (unpleasant Canadian hacker who appeared in Spook Country).

Some techy stuff: rattan bone, ekranoplan, darknets, RFIDs in US passports, using a Taser to disable a LAN.

And listen to this for Gibson's keen powers of observation:

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.

At the end Gibson not only thanks SF writers Jack Womack, Paul MacAuley, Cory Doctorow, and Bruce Sterling, but also fellow Vancouverite Douglas Coupland.

Bering

The Russian Discovery of America

Vitus Bering was a Dane who served in the Russian navy from 1704 until his death in 1741. He is best known for leading the Second Kamchatka Expedition, which sailed from the Russian Far East to the Gulf of Alaska.

This book is primarily an account of that astonishing journey, which started out from St. Petersburg and took four years just to cross Siberia. On the east coast another four years passed before two ships, the St. Peter and the St. Paul, finally put out to sea in June of 1741. They made landfall on several islands in the Gulf of Alaska and brief contact with native Americans. In the latter case the two groups only succeeded in perplexing each other.

The St. Paul returned to Kamchatka in October, but Bering's ship, the St. Peter, was hampered by bad weather and bad decision-making, and in November was wrecked on an island (later named after Bering), which was mistaken for the mainland. Bering died the following month at the age of 60. The survivors built a smaller vessel out of wood scavenged from the St. Peter and sailed to Kamchatka the following summer.

Misc. Notes

The author incorporates two recent sources of information. One was the exhumation of Bering in 1991 by a joint Danish-Russian expedition. The other was the discovery in 1996 of a dozen letters that Bering and his wife had sent home from Kamchatka.

Bering (the author says) was virtually a hostage of his officers. In an eerie foreshadowing of socialism his orders were sometimes overturned by a sea council. The fatal decision to land on Bering Island rather than continue sailing west was not made by the captain.

Bering Island was thronged with "wicked" arctic foxes. They "dragged apart all the baggage, ate the leather sacks, scattered the provisions, stole and dragged from one man his boots, from another his socks and trousers, gloves, and coat.... They even dragged off iron and other implements that were of no use to them."

The men survived by killing manatees, also known as sea cows. One was 30 feet long and weighted nearly four tons. The men not only ate the meat and fat of these gentle creatures, but also drank their milk.

Bering's "discovery" of Alaska led to an influx of Russian fur traders, and the eventual formation of the Russian-American Company, which constructed settlements as far south as California. "Russian America" came to an end in 1867, the same year as Canadian Confederation, when the US purchased Alaska.

Stellar Steller

Bering for me remained a rather distant and shadowy individual. As the author explains, there are valid reasons for his aloofness and expensive tastes, but these are attributes that do not endear one to a modern sensibility.

Most readers, I think, will find Georg Stellar a more interesting and praiseworthy figure. A naturalist and physician, he was the butt of much unprofessional behaviour by the officers and Bering himself. Yet Steller's interest in nature remained unquenchable, and his humane behaviour when shipwrecked was exemplary. He used plants and fresh meat to cure scurvy in his crewmates, and provided the kind of leadership that helped carry them through the winter.

Steller survived the expedition, returned to Kamchatka, and died a few years later in Tyumen. Today his name graces a number of species, including Steller's Jay and Steller's Eider.

His Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742 is available in a 1993 edition prepared by the author of Bering, Orcutt Frost.

Death with Interruptions

A light-hearted tale set in a small European country where people stop dying on January 1st, with unwelcome consequences for hospitals, funeral homes, insurance companies, and religious institutions.

Worst off are those permanently stuck on the verge of death, neither recovering nor passing away. Soon family members find a very pragmatic solution. They cart their loved ones across the border, where death still has dominion, and bring them back for burial.

After seven months of these moral and economic difficulties, a letter arrives from death. People will resume dying after being notified one week in advance so they can put their affairs in order.

At this point we meet death herself, who is portrayed as a skeleton, and learn of a difficulty of her own. A letter she has sent out is inexplicably returned. It was intended for a cellist in a local orchestra, but somehow he remains alive.

Death clothes herself in flesh and pays him a visit.

Mortal Syntax

When death's initial letter is published in a newspaper, after its grammatical errors are cleaned up, including the "obsessive elimination of paragraphs" and "the intentional and almost diabolical abolition of the capital letter," death pens a heated response.

In fact, the same "syntactical blunders" in the letter are present throughout the entire novel.

What letter is that, Let's just say that I wrote it after attending the rehearsal for your concert, You were there, Yes, I was, But I didn't see you, Of course not, you couldn't, Anyway, it's not my concert, As modest as ever, And saying let's just say isn't the same as saying what actually happened, Sometimes it is, But not in this case, Congratu-lations, you're not only modest, your're very perceptive too, What letter do you mean, You'll find out in time, So why didn't you give it to me if you had the opportunity, Two opportunties, Exactly, so why didn't you give it to me, That's what I hope to find out...

Saramago won the Nobel in 1998. He died earlier this year.

Desolation Road

I've been a fool for Mars ever since I read Robert Heinlein's juveniles as a kid. So I was immediately hooked when I saw Desolation Road's splendid cover by Stephan Martiniere. It captures perfectly the flavour of the book. (Click on the image for a closer look.)

Desolation Road is the story of a remote community on Mars that pops up unexpectedly in the middle of the Great Desert. Transportation is supplied by the Bethelem Ares Railroad, which exploits local resources as well as its own workers under the guise of "industrial feudalism."

What makes the book special is the author's fervid imagination, and his obvious relish in embroidering this world with extravagant detail. Various travelling side-shows visit the town, the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption erect a basilica, and the Truth Corps of the Whole Earth Army sets up a pirate radio station that broadcasts vampire music.

The large cast of characters includes:

• Persis Tatterdemalion
• Inspiration Cadillac
• Johnny Stalin
• Ruthie Blue Mountain
• Our Lady of Tharsis
• Heart of Lothian
• a time-travelling greenperson
• a fetus that gets exchanged for a mango
• a man whose soul passes into a locomotive
• an aging couple who turn into trees
• the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Has Ever Known
• the legendary King of Swing, Glenn Miller, who arrived on Mars via a time warp

My only complaint is that the latter part of the book is dominated by a series of tedious battles. I got tired of the all the tachyon beams and casual bloodshed, and especially of the ultimate deus ex machina, a timestorm brought about by Dr. Alimantando's chrono-kinetic arts.

Once things quieted down the story rolled on to a shapely and satisfying conclusion. The book is a clever combination of fantasy and SF, and the writing (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls it "rococo") is superb.

More Mars

Books:
Red Planet (Robert Heinlein 1949)
The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury 1950)
The Sands of Mars (Arthur Clarke 1951)
Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars (Kim Robinson 1992, 1993, 1996)
Mars, Return to Mars, Mars Life (Ben Bova 1992, 1999, 2008)
Moving Mars (Greg Bear 1993)
Red Dust (Paul McAuley 1993)
The Martian Race (Greg Benford 1999)
How To Live on Mars (Robert Zubrin 2008)
Packing for Mars (Mary Roach 2010)
Postcards from Mars (Jim Bell 2010)

DVDs:
Total Recall (1990)
Mission to Mars (2000)
Red Planet (2000)
Stranded (2001)
Ghosts of Mars (2001)
Roving Mars (2006)

ERB's John Carter of Mars is in production and due for release in 2012.

Galore

Galore reads like a chunk of the Old Testament set in a Newfoundland outport, where pagan and Christian beliefs exist side-by-side, and the characters are as odd a bunch as you'll find in fiction.

There's a witch, a ghost, a rogue priest, a man swallowed by a whale, a woman with webbed fingers, a mummer named Horse Chops, a horribly scalded boy, a nasty merchant who gets his ears sliced off, a 16-year-old girl who wants all her teeth pulled out, and identical triplets who impersonate each other so often they forget who they are.

When an American doctor named Newman shows up at the beginning of Part 2, his arrival signals the outport's gradual entry into the modern world. Some of the doctor's impressions:

They described the deathly ill as wonderful sick. Anything brittle or fragile or tender was nish, anything out of plumb or uneven was asquish. They called the Adam's apple a kinkorn, referred to the Devil as Horn Man. They'd once shown the doctor a scarred vellum copy of the Bible that Jabez Trim had cut from a cod's stomach nearly a century past, a relic so singular and strange that Newman asked to see it whenever he visited, leafing through the pages with a kind of secular awe. He felt at times he'd been transported to a medieval world that was still half fairy tale.

In managing such a large cast of characters, the author skims over them quickly, giving us just enough information to keep the story moving along. There is no linear plot as such, just the constant ebb and flow of life and death over several generations, and the slow movement away from a life of hardship and superstition, and the interactions of two warring families whose names, the Sellers and the Devines, provide a clue as to their roles.

The book is filled with wonderful dialogue, thronged with humour and character and incident, and topped off with a satisfying conclusion that gives the story a fine symmetry.

This is a rich novel that people will read more than once.

Jerome

Judah, the man swallowed by a whale, reminded me of Jerome, a man found legless on the Fundy shore in the 19th century. Who he was, where he came from, and how he got there were never discovered. He spent the rest of his life in Nova Scotia without uttering a word. Was he mute like Judah, or did he simply refuse to speak? How he lost his legs, and even his real name (like Judah's), remain a mystery to this day.

John Mutford's interview with Michael Crummey

Adventures Among Ants

A Global Sarafi with a Cast of Trillions

Mark Moffett studied under E.O. Wilson, who described ant societies as "civilizations in the dirt." This book, printed on coated stock and illustrated throughout with wonderful close-ups of ants, is a justification of that term.

The focus is on six different kinds of ants: marauder, weaver, leafcutter, Amazon, Argentine, and African army.

A few interesting details:

The global biomass of ants equals that of human beings.

Ants are self-organizing. They have no leaders, yet somehow accomplish feats rivalled only by humans.

Some species build roadways. Others herd insects and create underground gardens.

Some are arboreal, constructing shelters in trees out of leaves.

Some raid the nests of other ant species and carry home the pupae, which become willing "slaves" of their kidnappers.

Some are a suicide bombers, blowing themselves up and spraying out a toxic glue that immobilizes foes.

Some can remain underwater for several hours, and others when dislodged from a tree can control the direction of their fall and glide back to the tree.

Argentine Ant

This is an introduced species that doesn't sting and is too small to bite humans. Yet somehow it has developed the ability to form "supercolonies," which consist of widely distributed nests.

One of them has taken over most of California. Thus an Argentine ant from LA can be dropped among other Argentine ants in San Francisco, and not be torn to pieces. It is accepted as a sister.

The largest such colony to date is one that stretches from Italy to Spain.

The only ant which so far has been able to resist the Argentine ant is the fire ant, which originates from the same area of Argentina.

Links

Adventures Among Ants website
Mark Moffett's website
Great ant photos by Alex Wild

The Kraken Wakes

This classic SF novel was first published in 1953 and is still in print, a testimony to John Wyndham's ability to create pleasantly chilling scenarios. His calm, matter-of-fact tone is perfect for relating catastrophic events.

In this book, ETs have arrived on earth and taken up residence in the deepest parts of the ocean. Soon ships begin disappearing, then coastal raids take place. Finally the glaciers and ice-caps start melting. London floods and Parliament is forced to relocate. Compounding the problem are inept governments, misguided newspapers, and befuddled scientists.

Through it all a husband-and-wife team working for the English Broadcasting Company provide a sane and steady perspective, especially when society begins falling apart. Their breezy and intelligent conversation helps carry the book through the slow buildup to disaster.

Wyndham's books are the equivalent of cosy English murder mysteries, perfect for summer reading.

Links

1965 CBC radio adaptation (downloadable)
Kraken book sculpture
Kraken Rum

More Tales of a Ruined Earth

The Last Man by Mary Shelley 1826
The Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel 1901
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart 1949
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham 1951
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank 1959
Davy by Edgar Pangborn 1964
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban 1980
The Postman by David Brin 1985
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood 2003
The Road by Cormac McCarthy 2006

A few that I've particularly enjoyed:

Daybreak - 2250 AD by Andre Norton 1952
On the Beach by Nevil Shute 1957
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr. 1960
The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard 1962
Ariel by Steven R. Boyett 1983
Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson 1985
Cloud Master by David Mitchell 2004

The City & the City

A murder has been committed in Beszel, a city in Eastern Europe, and Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad is assigned the case.

But far more mysterious than the crime is the setting. Somehow Beszel and a sister city, Ul Qomar, share the same location, even though the inhabitants speak different languages, have different customs, and are generally distrustful of each other.

Moreover, occupants of each city are forbidden to interact in any way. When they pass in the street they must "unsee" each other. There's only one official channel between the two, and that is (the brilliantly named) Copula Hall, which is a sort of customs and border post.

Should anyone violate the rules of non-interaction, they are said to have "breached" the invisible membrane separating the two cities, and are quickly apprehended by a shadowy but much-feared group known only as "Breach." Its powers take precedence over those of the local authorities.

It is uncertain whether Beszel and Ul Qomar were once a single city, or whether they were two cities that have somehow converged. Canadian archeologists have been working in Ul Qomar, and one of them has written a provocative book called Between the City and the City, which suggests a precursor civilization called Orciny.

Interpretations

At first the book reads like an urban fantasy, describing something that could never exist in the real world. Yet as the reader learns more and more about Beszel, Ul Qomar, and Breach, it becomes apparent that the situation is not beyond the realm of possibility. Surreal, yes, but not impossible.

Even if it were, it still contains uncomfortable echoes of the real world, where there are (or were) divided cities like Berlin and Jerusalem, and societies whose sense of reality has been distorted by secret police. And who among us has not walked past beggars or the homeless without seeing them?

Conclusion

Though the ending was not as satisfying as I wished for, The City & the City is built on a fascinating concept.

Mieville has also altered his style to one that is gritty and noirish, with lots of choppy dialogue and awkward sentences, to reflect the strange and ugly place he's describing. It's a risky but effective artistic choice.

I can't wait to get my hands on Mieville's latest, which came out just last month. There's no author better equipped to tackle a novel named Kraken.

Links

China Mieville talks about The City & the City
SF Reviews
Schuler Books

Moneyball

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

This book follows the fortunes of the Oakland A's around the turn of the century.

Under the guidance of general manager Billy Beane, the team compiled some wonderful winning records despite having one of the smallest payrolls in major league baseball.

In an early chapter, "Field of Ignorance," we learn about sabermetrics, a word coined by baseball nut, Bill James, who came to notice in 1977 when he self-published a mimeographed annual Baseball Abstract.

In it he described his thinking about the need for better baseball stats. He sold 75 copies.

Now, decades after that humble beginning, sabermetrics has become a mainstream concept. Some of the ideas mentioned in Moneyball:

• clutch-hitting is a myth
• bunting, base-stealing, and sac flies are counter-productive
• on-base percentage is a more important stat than batting average or RBIs

Billy Beane's implementation of such radical new ideas makes for great reading, especially as he wheels and deals for players undervalued by traditional stats. People like submariner Chad Bradford, whose unnatural delivery kept scouts from seeing his true worth. His knuckles would actually scrape the ground when he threw.

And catcher Scott Hatteberg, whose damaged arm should have spelled the end of his career. He didn't have a flashy batting average, but he did have an uncanny ability to get on base, so the A's rehabilitated him as a first baseman. Says Lewis: "He waits for pitches like a man picking through an apple bin at a grocery store, looking for the ripest."

Hatteberg's patience at the plate, and his ability to foul off pitches he didn't like, furnishes a priceless anecdote. During a game a frustrated pitcher stepped off the mound and said to him, "Just tell me what you want. Tell me what you want and I'll throw it."

Billy Beane

Baseball is full of colourful characters, and Billy Beane is one of them. His own story is as fascinating as any in the book, first as a highly regarded prospect, then as a maverick GM.

It was hard to know which of Billy's qualities was most important to his team's success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.

J.P. Ricciardi, who was the A's director of player development, said that watching Billy do a deal was "like watching the Wolf talk to Little Red Riding Hood."

(Ricciardi took Billy Beane's approach with him when he was hired as the Blue Jay's GM. One of the first things he did was hire Bill James as a consultant.)

More Lewis

This book was so interesting, so entertaining, that I could not stop reading. I sped through it with increasing delight, and when I finished I immediately made plans to buy more books by Michael Lewis.

One of these has already been turned into a pretty good movie, The Blind Side. Moneyball is next, with Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane.

Anthill

As fascinating as ant societies are, they seem to have limited narrative potential. Usually they're portrayed as menacing hordes or anthropomorphized creatures with little resemblance to the real thing.

Thus, when I heard that the great myrmecologist, E.O. Wilson, had brought forth a novel, I was keen to see how he approached this challenge.

The Ants

The heart of the book is a 70-page account of warring anthills in southern Alabama. A slight mutation has caused one of the anthills to become a supercolony with thousands of "queenlets." This allows it to outcompete all other colonies in the vicinity, to the point that its success becomes its downfall. It is out of balance with its surroundings, and on the verge of a Malthusian downfall, when humans intervene.

The name of this section is "The Anthill Chronicles." It is centrally positioned in the book and purports to be a laundered version of Raff Cody's honours thesis. The colonies inhabit a patch of old-growth forest with which he is intimately acquainted.

The People

Prior to "The Anthill Chronicles" we learn the story of Raff's upbringing, and are given a satisfying glimpse of life -- both animal and human -- in southern Alabama where Wilson himself grew up.

In the final portion of the book, after "The Anthill Chronicles," Raff heads off to Harvard to study law, the application of which he decides is the best way to save the old-growth forest. Wilson's acquaintance with academic life in "the great brainy anthill" of Harvard infuses this part of the story.

After graduating Raff returns to Alabama and, in a nice dove-tailing of events, gets caught up with the very people who intervened in the fate of the supercolony.

The Ending

The novel so far has been an enjoyable read. It educates, it entertains, it keeps us guessing. Now it suddenly shifts gears and becomes a plot-driven thriller with a conclusion that felt (to me) unsatisfying and out of character with the rest of the book.

The Lesson

In a short prologue Wilson says, "This is a story about three parallel worlds, which nevertheless exist in the same space and time." They are the world of ants, the world of humans, and the world in which both live, the biosphere.

The supercolony then is a symbol for humanity. It "mastered the environment, subdued its rivals and enemies, increased its space, drawn down new sources of energy..." We too are in danger of authoring our own demise by our very success. And just as humans played a godlike role in the supercolony's destiny, so too might the biosphere play a similar role in ours.

Links

Margaret Atwood's review ("Homer of the Ants")
Barbara Kingsolver's review ("Ear to the Ground")
Radio interview with Anna Maria Tremonti

Suggested Reading

"The Empire of the Ants" by H.G. Wells (1905) appeared in The Time Machine and Other Stories.

Consider Her Ways by Frederick Philip Grove (1947) is a Canadian SF classic, not to be confused with the John Wyndham novella of the same name.

The Ant Men by Eric North (1953) is pure pulp fiction, yet appeared first in hard cover before going through several softcover printings.

The Fungus Garden by Brian Brett (1988) takes the reader on a surreal journey underground into the world of termites.

Les Fourmis trilogy by Bernard Werber includes Les Fourmis (1991), which sold more than two million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 30 languages (Empire of the Ants in English), Le Jour des Fourmis (1992), and La Revolution des Fourmis (1996).

The Hacker and the Ants v. 2.0 by Rudy Rucker (2003) is a sci-fi tale involving software ants.

Journey to the Ants by Wilson and Holldobler (1994) is one of my favourite books, and likely more fascinating than any work of ant fiction can aspire to. Highly recommended.

Adventures among Ants by Mark Moffett (2010) is a work of popular myrmecology by a former student of E.O. Wilson. Fabulous photos.

Battle Cry of Freedom

The Civil War Era

This 900-page treatment of the Civil War was published in 1988. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and may be the finest one-volume history of the war.

It's not just an account of the terrible battles that took place. It also provides political, economic, and social commentary. The first shots are not fired until page 273.

Having read the book, it now seems to me impossible to understand the United States without having a sound knowledge of the Civil War. As the author points out, more books have been written about it than on any other topic of American history.

There are useful quotes from speeches, newspapers, diaries, and letters from soldiers. Scarcely a page escapes a footnote, yet the writing is clear and easy to follow.

There are two sections of black-and-white photos, and numerous battlefield maps.

Lincoln

The Civil War (1861-65) exactly defined Lincoln's presidency. His election in 1860 triggered the secession of seven Southern states before he even took office. The month after he was inaugurated in 1861, the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, and four more states joined the Confederacy. Four years later, within days of Lee's surrender to Grant, he was assassinated by a Rebel sympathizer who took umbrage at a speech promoting black suffrage.

Lincoln was the first Republican president. The party had only been in existence for a few years. It opposed the pro-Southern Democrats, and one of its avowed goals was to prevent the sanctioning of slavery in newly formed states. Since it was composed completely of Northerners (making it the first "sectional" party in power), the South realized it had lost the ability to influence the federal government, and thus elected to secede.

Lincoln took an active role in the war -- haunting the telegraph office for reports from the battlefield, suggesting strategy to his generals and urging them to take the offensive, visiting fortifications when Rebels invaded the North (where he was told to keep his damn fool head down). When the Confederate capital of Richmond was captured, Lincoln was sitting in Jefferson Davis's study within 40 hours of the Confederate President's departure.

During the war Lincoln and the Republicans enjoyed public support as long as the war was going well. At other times there was widespread alarm, panic and even riots. Confederate forces at one point were five miles from the White House. Lincoln feared that he would not win re-election in 1864.

Generals

In combat, officers "led from the front, not the rear" and "generals suffered the highest combat casualties, their chances of being killed in battle were 50 percent greater than the privates'." In one battle, when Robert E. Lee tried to lead "a desperate counterattack," his troops pleaded with him to return to the rear.

Two of the Confederacy's most effective generals, Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet, were mistakenly felled by Rebel fire. Jackson died, and Longstreet was out of combat for five months.

During the war several Union generals were removed from command for their timidity in engaging the enemy.

John C. Breckinridge, Vice President under James Buchanan (the President who preceded Lincoln), became a general in the Southern army.

After the war Union General Lew Wallace wrote Ben-Hur, the best-selling American novel of the 19th century.

Tactics

"The close-order formation was...necessary to concentrate the firepower of these inaccurate weapons [muzzle-loaders]" and "bayonet charges could succeed because double-timing infantry could cover the last eighty yards [the effective range of muzzle-loaders] during the twenty-five seconds it took defending infantry men to reload their muskets after firing a volley."

"The transition from smoothbore to rifle had two main effects: it multiplied casualties; and it strengthened the tactical defensive. Officers trained and experienced in the old tactics were slow to recognize these changes. Time and again generals on both sides ordered close-order assaults in the traditional formation. With an effective range of three or four hundred yards, defenders firing rifles decimated these attacks."

"The tactical predominance of the defense helps explain why the Civil War was so long and bloody. The rifle and trench ruled Civil War battlefields as thoroughly as the machine-gun and trench ruled those of World War I." Photos of battlefields in both wars are eerily similar.

"...the large caliber and low muzzle velocity of Civil War rifles caused horrible wounds with the bullet usually remaining in the body rather than going through it... Stomach wounds were generally fatal because there was no known prevention of peritonitis."

Miscellaneous

Over 600,000 soldiers died, more than the combined total of all other wars that America has fought in, before and since.

Both sides claimed to be fighting for freedom and liberty. The industrial North wanted to keep the Union intact and end slavery. The rural gentrified South fought for autonomy and against the "wage-slavery" of Northern workers. "We are either slaves in the Union or freemen out of it," declared a secessionist without irony.

The ironclad CSA Viriginia, aka Merrimack, sank two unarmored Northern warships in the space of a few hours, "a feat no other enemy would accomplish until 1941." The next day it met the Union ironclad, Monitor, and fought to a draw. The battle caused the London Times to declare that nearly all of the British fleet was now obsolete.

The James and Younger brothers began their careers as Southern guerillas in Missouri. Wild Bill Hickok was a scout for the Union army in Missouri. Another famous name on the Union side was George Armstrong Custer, who took part in the "bloodiest cavalry action of the war" north of Richmond.

During the war, the North enacted for the first time conscription on a national level. However, draftees still had the option of hiring substitutes to take their place, a practice "hallowed by tradition."

"Several hundred women...dressed as men and managed to enlist as soldiers...."

Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were both born in Kentucky.

Nova Scotia

My interest in the Civil War was triggered last month by a grave marker ceremony organized by the Maritime Civil War Living History Association. A re-enactment unit, the 20th Maine Volunteers, No. 1 Company (New Brunswick), paid tribute to three local veterans:

Ardent Tupper - served in the 20th Maine Infantry, present at Lee's surrender at Appomattox

William Kinsman - served in the 1st Massachusetts Light Artillery, took part in 17 battles

Ben Jackson - served in the Union navy, awarded the Civil War Campaign Medal

Damon Runyon

"One evening along about seven o'clock I am sitting in Mindy's restaurant putting on the gefiltte, which is a dish I am very fond of, when in comes three parties from Brooklyn wearing caps as follows: Harry the Horse, Little Isadore and Spanish John."

So begins one of Damon Runyon's most anthologized stories, "Butch Minds the Baby," instantly recognizable for its voice, humour, characters, and use of the present tense.

Runyon's fiction came out of a life that spanned the lawlessness of two eras - the Old West and Prohibition on the East Coast.

As a newspaperman he covered wars and sporting events. He loved to gamble and hang out in nightclubs with gangsters, sometimes even accompanying them on the way to a job.

According to Breslin, Runyon preferred the company of gangsters because they were much more colourful than politicians and bigshot businessmen, who were equally corrupt:

It was unfortunate that Charles Barney was not smart enough to stop stealing even when he had to take his clothes out of the closet to make room for his money, and he continued into some impossibly corrupt real estate businesses. One day he woke up and found the only way he could see his way out was to blow his brains out, which he did. This did not stop his heirs, who founded Smith Barny stockbrokers and used as their motto, "We make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it." They should have said, "We steal it," but that's all right. This is America.

Patrice

The book opens and closes with Patrice, Runyon's second wife. He met her in Juarez when he was covering Pancho Villa. She was a barefoot girl just past 12 who wanted to be a dancer. He promised to find her a job in New York if she learned to read and write, and paid for her education. Years later he made good on his promise when she showed up unexpectedly in the Big Apple. She became his mistress and later his wife. He was 51 and she 26 when they married. The bridesmaid was his own daughter. His first wife had just died.

Together they fabricated a tale that made her a Spanish countess who possessed one of the 10 largest diamonds in the world. The fabrication was similar to one of Runyon's short stories, and so complete that they came to believe it themselves.

Patrice however chafed at the difference in their ages, and soon began fooling around with the boxer, Primo Carnera. Runyon arranged for Carnera to fight Joe Louis, whose body "looked like the electric chair." He delivered a beating to Carnera.

When Runyon was dying of throat cancer, his doctor asked Patrice to write a supportive letter to Runyon. Instead she wrote that she was now in love with a younger man.

Breslin

There are no footnotes or bibliography. Breslin relies instead on newspaper files and his own memory of stories he's heard over the years. At times he slips into the present tense, and tells it like a Runyon short story. It's incredible stuff -- Al Capone conducting an orchestra, Bugsy Siegel doing a screen test, Jack Dempsey slipping lead pipes into his gloves, Bat Masterson and Benito Mussolini writing for NYC papers.

At one point Runyon was the highest paid newspaper writer in the county. Several of his stories were made into movies. His most famous title is Guys and Dolls. He shares with several other literary greats the distinction of having contributed an adjective to the English language: Orwellian, Dickensian, Runyonesque. He had a liver "weak as a glass chin."

There are no pictures in the book. Here's one I found on the Web:

Insect Dreams

The Half Life of Gregor Samsa

It turns out the protagonist of Kafka's Metamorphosis didn't die after all. He joined a freak show in Vienna where, as "the human roach," he reads from Rilke and holds seminars on Spengler. Such is his notoriety that Wittgenstein and novelist Robert Musil pay him a visit, and in America he inspires a dance craze.

In New York he meets composer Charles Ives, and provides the inspiration for the "Insect Sonata," which is performed on the piano with the use of a brick and a couple of two-by-fours. Gregor goes to work at Ives's insurance firm, where he specializes in risk management and develops a formula to gauge the probability of a person being kidnapped. The formula incorporates an Index of Suffering -- "an original contribution of Gregor's, now in standard use among economists."

                    (unemployment rate in percent)(inflation in percent)
        S =  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
                 1 - (probabability of situation continuing another month)

He moves to Washington DC and takes up residence in a White House broom closet, working for the Dept. of Agriculture as an expert on entomological matters. The US is mired in the Great Depression, and Gregor, while studying grasshopper behaviour, discovers "smelltrons" and invents the Elektroantennograph and the Heuschreckekitzelapparat.

When war breaks out he meets Einstein and delivers his famous letter to FDR, then is reassigned to Los Alamos as a risk management consultant. He pals around with Feynman and Oppenheimer, and suggests the principle for the device used to trigger the atomic bomb.

By then Gregor's despair has deepened to an intolerable level; there's the wound in his back, FDR's dithering over the war, and the decision to continue the Manhattan Project even after Germany had abandoned its own efforts at an atomic bomb.

The book's humour, erudition, historical characters, and WW2 setting reminded me very much of Cryptonomicon and Gravity's Rainbow, but at 464 pages it is much shorter and not as convoluted. Interestingly, all three novels end explosively.

Viva la cucaracha!

The Lost City of Z

A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

Percy Fawcett was an English explorer who became obsessed with finding El Dorado in the Amazon forest. He led several expeditions in search of it, each time emerging virtually unscathed while those around him sickened and died, their minds deranged, their bodies oozing pus and maggots. Piranhas, vampire bats, malaria, xenophobic tribes armed with 6-foot poisonous arrows -- these were just a few of the dangers involved.

Thanks to an iron constitution, ruthless determination, and suicidal bravery, Fawcett became one of the most famous explorers of the early 20th century. He seemed absolutely invincible -- until 1925 when he shocked the world by vanishing without a trace. Party after party set out in search of him, but many of them also disappeared, which only deepened the mystery. As time wore on, cults sprang up worshipping Fawcett.

More recently New Yorker author David Grann joined the ranks of the obsessed and set off to solve the mystery. The result is this compulsively readable book, which cleverly (and somewhat disingenuously) dovetails Grann's own journey with the final Fawcett expedition.

At the end he delivers a surprising conclusion. Fawcett wasn't so crazy after all. Recent findings by anthropologists such as Anna Roosevelt and Michael Hecklenberger seem to indicate that advanced civilizations did exist in the Amazon. One site has been dubbed the "Stonehenge of the Amazon."

Literary Echoes

The Lost World - Conan Doyle knew Fawcett and is believed to have used him as a model for one of the characters.

Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils - Who better to find Fawcett than Indy?

A Handful of Dust - Fawcett's fate likely inspired the ending of this Evelyn Waugh novel.

Gringos - An end-of-the-world cult called the Magical Nucleus reminded me of a similar cult in this Charles Portis novel set in the Yucatan.

The Lost City of Zzz...

Brad Pitt is not starring in the upcoming movie.

What sounds better? The lost city of Zee (Grann), or the lost city of Zed (Fawcett)?

There are interesting similarities between the lost expeditions of Fawcett and Franklin.

David Grann's website
Simon & Schuster book trailer

Salvage King, Ya!

A Herky-Jerky Picaresque

The opening quote from "Heart of Darkness" tells you this is not going to be your ordinary hockey story.

The book's protagonist "desired to have Kings meet him...on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things."

Here the "ghastly Nowhere" is the horrific world of pro hockey, and the word "Kings" refers to both the LA Kings and the name of the salvage yard operated by our hero. To cement the connection with "Heart of Darkness," his fiancée is known only as "the Intended."

The second quote, from Eliot's "The Dry Salvages," announces a water motif, which is reinforced by the hockey player's ironic name, Drinkwater. He prefers booze. Water is something people drown in, like his grandfather, and a dead California surfer, and the ships and planes that sink beneath the waves before his very eyes.

Blindness is another motif. Drinkwater has a bad eye. His uncle wears an eyepatch. A player loses an eye to one of Drinkwater's shots on goal. A dead horse flies past in a tornado, eyes open. A shark is shot in the eye. "Out vile jelly," thinks Drinkwater. He sees but cannot resist the violence, hypocrisy, and decadence of pro hockey. He's unruly on and off the ice. He snorts cocaine, takes Antabuse to control his drinking, shuttles back and forth between the three women in his life, his Intended, his ex-wife, and a waitress known only as X.

The GM has a huge face, part meat, part vegetable. Count your fingers after shaking hands with him. This man wouldn't give you the parsley off his plate, he wouldn't give a worm to a blind robin, he'd sell a blind man a rat's asshole for a wedding ring.

But it's not just pro hockey. The game's ills are society's ills, and violence is everywhere. An ETA bomb blows up Drinkwater's packsack. His dentist commits murder. A bullet hole in his car signals the death of a young boy in a Disneyland parking lot. A Coast Guard ship capsizes, planes keep crashing around him -- a jetliner at LAX, a floatplane cartwheeling across a California inlet, another slamming into the lake in front of his house. He grabs a body but loses his grip. He swims down among the dead.

Drug use is epidemic. Everyone is using or selling. Farmboys, jocks at the local gymn. Coke snorted out of the Stanley Cup, off a model's belly. One of Drinkwater's friends wants him to smuggle in a small boatload. Bodies of addicts turn up in the lake in front of his house. Alberta is a giant quivering nostril. The whole planet is freebasing.

A Hockey Everyman

Drinkwater's played for the Pats, Broncos, Mudcats, Screaming Eagles, and LA Kings. He's played for Billings, Billington, and the Birmingham Bulls, for Kansas City and Salt Lake City, for Adirondack in the AHL, Peoria and Flint in the IHL. He's played the hookworm league, and semi-pro in Seattle, and for $100 a game in Saskatchewan. He's won the K-Mart Player of the Game in Omaha.

His face has been carved up by Bobby Clarke and Billy Smith. He's driven around with Gretzky in a gold Italian sport car. He's played poker with Harold Snepsts, lent smokes to Eddie Mio, sat drinking in the same bar as Chelios and Ludwig, Chris Nilan and John Kordic. He's been coached by Bep Guidolin, defended by Don Cherry.

He wears a knee brace and is "held together with velcro and tape." He keeps breaking his fingers and nose. He's punched a fan and a ref. He's been concussed, knifed in the thigh, defrauded by his agent. He's played the game since before helmets were mandatory.

The forward with Phoenix, an Oiler draft pick, comes at me, using me for a screen, and powers a slapshot right past my midsection. His shot breaks our goalie's stick. I ice the puck up high, ring the glass to get a whistle, to let Dobozy the redhead goalie pick out a new stick. "He broke my stick," Dobozy complains, sounding offended, "my good stick." "There, there, don't cry." I'm just glad the Phoenix guy didn't maim me with his slapshot, a howitzer, a cannon blasting by my gonads. He rang one off our goalie's mask; out cold. 120 MPH. Now: imagine that it's another game in Podunk that means nothing and it's YOUR head, your face on the line. The pruneface scouts at the end of the arena jot down the following brainstorm: "LACKS DESIRE." Fuck them. As if they have the market on desire.

Structure

Jarman is primarily a short story writer, and this, his only novel, is packaged in non-linear chunks. There's no complete game, season or conventional plot. It's all in pieces, like Drinkwater himself. Everything is flattened out, past and present and future rolled into one.

Because of the structure, most readers would not notice if a few of the 58 chapters were sent to the penalty box. They have titles like Kingdom Fucking Come, Sexual Nebraska, Hoarse Latitudes, The Land of No Odometers. Excerpts have appeared in 28 journals and one anthology.

Jarman's latest collection, My White Planet, contains an account of playing hockey in New Brunswick. It's called "A Nation Plays Chopsticks." Any hockey anthology without it is incomplete.

Defining the World

The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson's Dictionary

The making of a dictionary hardly seems a fascinating topic, yet reading this book made me wonder if it's possible to write a dull volume about Samuel Johnson.

Defining the World by Henry Hitchings describes the herculean feat of creating the first comprehensive English dictionary, a task which Johnson completed almost single-handedly in nine years. (Its French counterpart occupied 40 scholars for 40 years.) One of the reasons for the dictionary's success was its inclusion of quotations to illustrate usage.

Defining the World is organized chronologically, while chapter titles are presented in alphabetical order using words from the dictionary, beginning with "Adventurous" and ending with "Zootomy." Johnson's methodology and the dictionary's subsequent influence are given, along with details on Johnson's life in 18th century England.

While a monumental achievement, the dictionary wasn't perfect, and Hitchings doesn't shy away from its mistakes and shortcomings. He notes absent words, as well as words whose meanings have altered over the years, or which have become quaint or are no longer in use, like pissburnt, jolthead, smellfeast, bedswerver, and looby. Some definitions (like the oft-quoted one for oats) have a delightful quirkiness that reveal as much about Johnson as the word itself.

But as Hitchings notes, "Johnson's finest definitions remind us that he was a poet." The dictionary is a work of art, one that can be browsed through for pleasure, not only for the enjoyment of Johnson's prose but also for its snapshot of 18th-century life. As Hitchings says, "it abounds with stories, arcane information, home truths, snippets of trivia, and lost myths. It is, in short, a treasure house."

The dictionary is available as a pair of downloads (Volume 1 and Volume 2), but if you're not interested in perusing an electronic edition, Hitchings's book is the next best thing.

Boswell's Life of Johnson

The World Without Us

The most obvious aspect of this book, and one that has delighted sci-fi writers for years, is what would happen to our cities should the human race be decimated.

Generally, the structures which would last the longest are either underground or made of stone. Khufu after all has diminished only 30 feet in 4500 years, and the astonishing subterranean cities in the Cappadocia region of Turkey have been around since the dawn of history.

The Chunnel and the Moscow subway system would have a a good chance of lengthy survival, though they will eventually be flooded. In the case of the NYC subway system, that will only take a matter of days.

Monuments such as Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, and Hagia Sofia will survive, as well as ceramic objects and pennies that contain substantial amounts of copper (unlike the current ones). Even paper will last a relatively long time if not exposed to air and water.

Poisonous Legacy

Of course, less palatable monuments will also survive. Take nuclear waste. Now there's something that's going to be around for a long long time. How can we warn future generations about the locations where we've stored it? What kind of sign would last for 10,000 years, and would people understand it? In 10,000 years languages will morph into unrecognizable forms.

Then there's plastic. Approximately one billion tons have been produced and all of it is still around. It doesn't biodegrade. It weathers to bits but that only means an increase in the number of creatures that can swallow it, often to their detriment. The oceans are filling up with it. The North Pacific Gyre is an expanse almost the size of Africa, covered with floating garbage, most of which is plastic.

Then there's genetically modified food, POPs and PCBs, and other unsavoury items. Humanity, we are told, has become a force of nature.

What About the Animals?

The author covers the origins of humans, and who might replace us if we disappeared. (The primate with the second largest brain, he suggests -- baboons.)

He visits the theory that megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons were extirpated by prehistoric hunters, and mentions a plan to return elephants to North America. He provides details on more recent extinctions (the dodo, the moa, the passenger pigeon), and discusses the vast numbers of birds killed each year by flying into glass windows or frying themselves on power lines.  One authority says one billion necks are broken annually in the US alone.  Birds will definitely do better without us.

As for our pets, cats will survive but dogs won't. Neither will cockroaches in unheated apartments, nor all those creatures that live in or on us, such as lice and numerous kinds of bacteria.

The End

The author concludes the book by mentioning the Voluntary Human Extinction Project, and the Transhumanist movement, which involves uploading our minds into machines.

Then he heads off into space, tracking the interstellar vehicles we have sent aloft -- the Pioneers and Voyagers -- which will exit the solar system and likely keep on travelling long after we are gone. So too will electromagnetic signals from Earth, including TV shows. I Love Lucy will play to the rest of the galaxy until the signal is lost in the background noise of the universe.

Physically, this well-written and wide-ranging book ends with a 30-page bibliography and a 16-page index. But it is the 14 pages of acknowledgements that gives a better idea of its scope. The author visited Chernobyl, the Korean DMZ, East Africa, a primeval Polish forest, an isolated coral reef in the Pacific, the abandoned resort of Varosha on Cyprus, the petrochemical complex stretching from Houston to Galveston, the Ekati diamond mine in the Canadian Arctic, and other places.

Your Inner Fish

A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Paleontologist Neil Shubin begins with a brief account of his role in discovering an ancient creature intermediate between a fish and a land animal. Its fossils were found on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic in 2004, and the creature was given the Inuit name Tiktaalik.

Later, Shubin pays another visit to Canada, this time the fossil beds near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, on the Bay of Fundy. There they found rare fossils of the tritheledont, a reptile whose teeth showed mammalian characteristics.

Shubin uses these events to anchor a description of how our anatomy contains links to more primitive creatures. For example: "Tiktaalik has a shoulder, elbow, and wrist composed of the same bones as an upper arm, forearm, and wrist in a human."

Following are a number of observations that I found interesting.  

Human Embryos

1. They have four gill arches, which ultimately develop into jaws, ears, larynx and throat.

2. They have a notochord, which breaks up and forms the disks that cushion our vertebrae.

3. At an early stage in their development, their elbows and knees face the same direction, as do fish and amphibians.

4. Gonads are initially located high up in the body, as in fish.

Evolution

1. Two factors may have been involved in the evolution of bodies: predation, and the rise in atmospheric oxygen.

2. "The origin of mammals involved not only new patterns of chewing...but new ways of hearing... Bones originally used by reptiles to chew evolved in mammals to assist in hearing."

Genetics

Shubin also describes some of the Dr. Moreau-like tinkering that scientists have done in order to understand how genes work. Some of the genes he mentions are Noggin, Pax 6, and Sonic hedgehog.

1. Genes from the embryo of one animal (e.g. a mouse), when grafted to the embryo of another (e.g. a shark), can perform the same function.  This leads to a conclusion such as: "all appendages, whether they are fins or limbs, are built by similar kinds of genes."

2. "Inject extra amounts of frog Noggin into a frog egg, and the frog will grow extra back structures, sometimes even a second head."

3. Turning on an "eyeless" gene can result in creatures growing eyes virtually anywhere on the body. For example, "they could use the mouse gene to trigger the formation of an extra fly eye anywhere: on the back, on a wing, near the mouth."

Trivia

1. Fish have no necks.

2. Tooth replacement in reptiles continues throughout their entire lives.

3. Some creatures, like single-celled microbes, have no body at all.

4. Some creatures have no anus, they expel waste through their mouth e.g. jellyfish and corals.