Neil Gaiman's "Norse Mythology": Book Review

This prolific and popular fabulist retells the legends he first loved. As an English boy, Neil Gaiman took inspiration from stories set in the Northern lands. He credits Roger Lancelyn Green and Kevin Crossley-Holland for their compilations of its lore. What Gaiman contributes to this short shelf, beyond name recognition, is wit and verve. His Norse Mythology compiles brisk chapters revealing a cosmology's creation, and the fulminations and machinations of its gods until its destruction. 

We retain few sources about this venerable treasure-trove. Gaiman's brief introduction surmises: "It is, perhaps, as if the only tales of the gods and demigods of Greece and Rome that had survived were of the deeds of Theseus and Hercules." Similar to the 85% of classical literature lost, a fraction of the Northern corpus survives. From these fragments, Gaiman in everyday language which children and adults will both enjoy invigorates a wise and worthy chronicle of exploits, often tricks, schemes and brawls.

"I was surprised, when I finished the stories and read them as a sequence, to find that they felt like a journey, from the ice and the fire that the universe begins in to the fire and the ice that end the world." Gaiman's admission prefaces an exciting episode of the dawn of his frozen setting. Inside Ymir's skull, readers see the how the Norse sky shines as stars, as sparks "that flew from the fires of Muspell." Clouds pass as the remnants of Ymir's brains, "and who knows what thoughts they are thinking, even now." Gaiman's simple prose allows readers to enter into a mindset of primeval awe. 

Odin's plot to build a wall may remind audiences of another land of fire and ice, in Game of Thrones. Today's fantasists as fans and writers turn to George R.R. Martin as they long have to his predecessor J.R.R. Tolkien, whose scholarship and passion for the sagas enriched his mythology. Trolls and giants, elves and the dead, humans and dwarfs and demons loom large in Norse Mythology too. Action does not falter in Gaiman's performance (also issued as an audiobook). This collection flows, caught up in primal energy. As a towering figure takes on Thor, the narrative suddenly veers to his rival's perspective. "The mountain giant saw the hammer getting rapidly bigger as it came hurtling toward him, and then he saw nothing else, not ever again. A piddling pair outwitted flail in a rowboat "like a couple of bearded lobsters." 

Such imagery and control show Gaiman's affection for his material. Frey from Odin's throne looks out over the four points of the world. "And then he looked to the north and saw the thing that was missing in his life." Echoes of oral tradition linger on the page. Drama and love enter, and then tragedy.

A terrifying climax pummels the reader. Ragnarok, as doomsday, dominates an apocalyptic morass. Within it, Naglfar arrives. "This is the biggest ship there will ever have been: it is built out of the fingernails of the dead. Naglfar floats upon the flooded seas. The crew looks out and sees only dead things, floating and rotting on the surface of the sea." Poe or Conrad, Melville or whatever account of Noah or a "perfect storm" rivals or heirs to these primordial tales may invent cannot improve on this scene. Given storm surges and "sunny-day flooding" pepper our news lexicon now as common phrases, this conclusion to Norse Mythology remains relevant. Neil Gaiman charms and frightens his wide readership with this welcome, memorable compendium. (Spectrum Culture 2-12-17; A different version to Amazon US 2-7-17)

Neil Gaiman's "Norse Mythology": Audiobook Review

 

"From the lands of ice, snow, and fire"

Would you listen to Norse Mythology again? Why?

Definitely. I read an advance copy of the book before hearing this, and I enjoy the experience of learning about a body of lore I had remained unfamiliar with for far too long in my life. Neil Gaiman is at ease with the corpus after many years of immersion, from his boyhood on.

What other book might you compare Norse Mythology to and why?

The retellings of myth by such as Robert Graves or Edith Hamilton for the Greeks, or the Celts by Frank Delaney or Marie Heaney. That is, they make the stories into our own diction, and they encourage as Gaiman does to relate them in turn to each other under the stars.

Which scene was your favorite?

The ending. Terrible and unfortunately relevant, in an era of melting icecaps and "sunny day flooding." Ragnarok is horrible, and the apocalyptic climax betters the stories in Revelation.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes, but two or three are more likely as it's nearly seven hours. Neil Gaiman takes up a rather mid-Atlantic accent and the narrative pace is steady. It's appropriate for the effect.

Any additional comments?

Recommended for a family, as the stories teach us about trickery and truth, honesty and betrayal. Not sure if the pantheon are role models all, but it's instructive to consider gods and goddesses as if archetypes from one's culture, and less supernatural and apart from people. The name recognition Gaiman holds will surely find new audiences for these ancient quests. (Audible US 2/7/17)

Bram Stoker's "Dracula": Audiobook Review

Overall

Performance

Story

"More English reporting than Transylvanian action"

If you could sum up Dracula [Audible Edition] in three words, what would they be?

Menacing. Meandering. Maddening.

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

Shift all action onto Dracula's home turf. So much of this narrative is off-stage from the Count, in the second location of England. Characters debate how to fight the force, but from a distance. They talk and talk about Dracula, but take a long time to form a big showdown.

What about the narrators’s performance did you like?

The "all-star cast" fulfills its mission. The voice for Van Helsing is effective, and the report of the Russian sea captain and that of Mina's trance-like message both add depth and doom.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

It's faster than the novel.

Any additional comments?

Revisiting this after thirty years, the layered narratives are inventive ways to tell a tall tale. But their cumulative power dissipates as the antagonist is tucked away as it were for a great part of the plot. This diminishes rather than increases his terror. Stoker's inventive staging of the novel in many reports and letters remains admirable, but the force of it all is lessened. (Audible US 12/6/16)

Dante's "Divine Comedy": Audiobook Review

Overall

Performance

Story

"You are not a child anymore"

If you could sum up The Divine Comedy in three words, what would they be?

Inspiring, instructional, immersive

What did you like best about this story?

This encapsulates through a clever three part (!) layering the Tuscan verse of the original, the pilgrim Dante in deft translation, and the recollections of the poet Dante. It refreshes even for veteran readers key themes and characters, and it moves along with momentum.

What do the narrators bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

The tender but firm teaching of Beatrice, the dignified guidance of Virgil, the plaints of the lost, and the praise of the purged and saved souls, all are given nuanced texture. The music is aptly chosen, the sound effects are convincing, and the scope of the otherworld in this audio rendering are evoked dramatically, but soberly and sensibly, clear of unearned emotion

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The gasps as Dante sees Christ, his struggles to comprehend the Trinity, and the final scenes as his consciousness blurs with the Beatific Vision are portrayed convincingly. Not an easy feat, given the limitations inherent in even a BBC radio drama's compressed format.

Any additional comments?

The humanity of the quest and nimble explanations of how God's will is enacted in his creatures caught or liberated here by grace. love,and by choice earns respect. Whatever your own views on theodicy, this thoughtful presentation rewards reflection. A set of masterful and insightful performances allow us to enter into the mindset of eight hundred years ago. (Audible US 1/18/17)

Philip Pullman's "The Amber Spyglass": Audiobook Review

Overall

Performance

Story

"Tell them true stories"

What did you love best about The Amber Spyglass?

I loved the evocation of the underworld of the dead souls. Philip Pullman may draw inevitably from Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton, but he uses these venerable sources well. He reshapes his last volume of His Dark Materials to expand his vision of the cosmology that promises a second chance at Eden, if one tempered by realities not even fantasy can avoid.

What did you like best about this story?

The boatman's warnings as he ferries certain characters across to the land of the dead remains haunting and moving. It channels classical motifs inventively and engagingly.

What does Philip Pullman and full cast bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Again, the range of voices makes the slower parts (and there are many, alas) move along. If I'd have just read this novel, I might not have pressed on through the particularly perfunctory parts often involving a character returned from the second installment, Mary Malone. Also, the disjointed nature of much of this plot challenges patience, even if moments glimmer.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Adversary or Authority: who do you love?

Any additional comments?

Like even the beloved Tolkien, fellow don Pullman falters when he tries to wrap up his trilogy. The climax happens well before the end, and a particular character's fate is almost an aside, barely seen, when other writers would've made this a blockbuster showdown. Pullman elaborated so much earlier that too much of this feels didactic and not adventurous. Still, despite the structural clunk, his characters can tug at your heartstrings and even the walk-on parts evince the author's profound humanism and the Keatsian "negative capability" at work. (Audible US 1/16/17)

Philip Pullman's "The Subtle Knife": Audiobook Review

"Upending the Story of the Fall, part 2 "

If you could sum up The Subtle Knife in three words, what would they be?

Inventive, unpredictable, menacing

What did you like best about this story?

Philip Pullman's second installment delves into the tale of the Fall and the rebel angels, combining this with speculations about dark matter and parallel worlds, in an engaging manner. I like the intellectual underpinnings of this segment, more than the main action.

Have you listened to any of Philip Pullman and full cast ’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Yes, and this compares equally to the first I heard, The Golden Compass. More witches this time, and we are introduced to Will Ransom as a co-protagonist in another Oxford. He seems hesitant and petulant, but we learn why this may be if we stick to the storyline ahead.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The showdowns of two main characters ending each of the two last chapters.

Any additional comments?

I liked the introduction of Mary Malone. Her demeanor changes from chipper to awed, understandably, as she learns verification for some of her far-fetched research. The return if briefly to the academic setting where the first book began is welcome. It's Pullman's milieu. (Audible US 1/10/17)

Philip Pullman's "The Golden Compass": Audiobook Review

"Against the powers that be"

Would you consider the audio edition of The Golden Compass to be better than the print version?

Did not read the book, but I reckon this works well on audio, as it's been recommended as one of the best such adaptations we have of a novel by an ensemble cast.

What did you like best about this story?

The inventive, slightly altered world. We have amberlit, chocolatl, coalsilk, and smokeleaf as indicating this realm nearly like our own, in the wake of Pope John Calvin and the lands of New Denmark and New France indicating a bit of a shift from our own time and society.

What about Philip Pullman and full cast ’s performance did you like?

Philip Pullman handles the narrative evenly. I liked the variety in the bear and human and witch voices. The children and adult roles both meshed smoothly.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Two. The fate of the sundered daemons, and Serafina Pekkala's lonely admission.

Any additional comments?

The story has plenty of sudden turns. That kept the pace lively. But some of the latter half dragged for me, not enough to ruin the storyline, but enough to make me wonder if the next two installments will turn didactic or talky." (Audible US 12/16/16)

"The freedom to be left alone"

Reminded by my friend who found a typically endless rant by this addled pantheist during research at the Huntington, I pulled my copy of Porius: A Novel of the Dark Ages off my shelf and picked up somewhere near the two-hundred page mark I'd left off a while back. For this meandering narrative takes eight days in late October, the year 499, and stretches it into a reading experience demanding weeks, at least. John Cowper Powys remains as Morine Krissdottir's Descents of Memory (2008, reviewed by me) attests a difficult, elusive figure to grasp and not always an appealing one to like.

I suppose I was one of the few who checked that bio out of the library never having read the subject. I'd see at the old Bodhi Tree used bookstore on Melrose a big paperback of his earlier A Glastonbury Romance but the silly names within (a deal-breaker for me with Dickens as well as nearly all fantasy save that of the one linguist who knew of what he invented, J.R.R. Tolkien) discouraged me from it. (I have since learned that JCP changed names to protect himself against lawsuits by real Glastonburians.) The Grail and the Arthurian corpus never excited me in grad school, although I did like Excalibur. John Boorman considered filming this novel, fittingly. And, come to think of it, I did not mind Malory's realms at all. But I atavistically favor the Celt and the pagan, the resisters to Saxon rule and Catholic imposition, more than I do magic-kal conjuring, dodgy cant, fiery horses or swords.

At least in my fiction. But finding two years ago David Goodway's Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow (2006; reviewed by me) revealed what Krissdottir's study had not: the promise of Portius as a hold-all for a lot of my own pet pursuits. Anti-statist/ anti-capitalist libertarianism, Celtic lore, British origins, Welsh resistance, and Joycean immersion. Goodway had I think found some key connections. He compared what Kevin Birmingham has more recently credited as Joyce's "philosophical anarchism" to Powys' retreat from any political fray (which caused differences with his friend Emma Goldman). He assumed that inevitably that freer outlook would prevail--but not for a very long time.

And as for liberation, so far in my return to the 1951 tome, the restoration of a new Golden Age surfaced. The freedom to be left alone, Myrddin Wyllt surmises, is to be desired. No priests, no emperors, no governors, no druids even. This "pagan" yearning, as with Powys and so now, may be quixotic. Where would I be without a dentist (even if my plan fails to cover my teeth; don't get me started on my "vision plan;" Cal Grants and scholarships to cover college, or the ability to stay afloat post-"recession" if not for some nanny state)? Few of us grew up in the comfort afforded the gentrified class of Powys, a vicar's son and a Cantabrigian. Most of us coddled in this world, 1616 years after Merlin, need help to live, not in the glade, but in a toxic megapolis that consumes our soul.

Still, this odd fictional volume, standing by the voluminous epics of Glastonbury and its less-heralded successor Owen Glendower which I've ordered and half keep asking myself why, poses a nagging question that left-libertarians, cranks such as JCP, and misfits like me keep pursuing. Why are some of us born discontented by the system we labor for and live under? Given many of this contingent are soft intellectuals like me rather than hardy folk of the soil like I presume my drizzly Connacht kin, what realistic chance do we have of proclaiming any self-sufficiency when surrounded as JCP was not, of his privileged choosing, once he claimed to inherit his Welsh corner and make himself its returned ruler? I suppose this "lordship" was not entirely in jest. We all bear our own inconsistencies.

Therefore, I will press on. After all, Powys' notion however unverifiable of an "ichthyosaurus-brain" recoverable by concentration as a proto-Jungian mind-memory, a collective guide and individual vision, appeals to me in a VR-sort of literary way (not sure about a real one). Lawrence Millman in The Atlantic admits: "One doesn't read Powys so much as enlist in him." Of Porius (and he wrote in 2000): "it is, I think, Powys's masterpiece. It calls to mind novels as diverse as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Finnegans Wake, and Alice in Wonderland. At times it reads like an extended study of what Powys called 'the three incomprehensibles': sex, religion, and nature. At other times it reads like a magical mystery extravaganza." That promise will keep me plodding along, as Millman in his Arctic.

P.S. Amber Paulen blogged back in '08 about this novel: "It gives me great pleasure not to be finished yet." I wonder how long it took her? Andrea Thompson, in for her a mercifully allotted "briefly noted" slot in The New Yorker, reminds us that over five hundred pages were cut from the original, restored in this 2007 edition. (He preferred little editing, and less as he aged, which can bedevil the most patient of his cult following.) Margaret Drabble (whose surname JCP could have used) begins her review in The Guardian: "The realm of John Cowper Powys is dangerous. The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end. There is always another book to discover, another work to reread. Like Tolkien, Powys has invented another country, densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien's, but it is as compelling, and it has more air." In an undated online entry of what I assume is the original text, Kirkus Reviews sums it up: "Among those who enjoyed the author's previous novels in this historical sequence, there may be some who will find themselves at home in the midst of the tangled beliefs and superstitions of the Persians, the Romans, the Greeks, and the Druids with which these early Welshmen spiced their Christianity. But others will find the obscurities of both diction and dogma almost impenetrable." For the willing bold few, seek ye here .

Game of Thrones: Who's next?

I've been very busy with the new term and teaching and mentoring. So, not much downtime to ruminate. So, for the record, a quick entry. My older son told me about this and given I rarely mention the idiot box on this forum, I am happy when it's not so sophomoric or soporific. Having enjoyed Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, and The Wire, to name finished series of high quality; in the middle of House of Cards, Masters of Sex, Homeland, and Better Call Saul (two of these are very good, the other two....); in hiatus for Black Mirror, Peaky Blinders as well as this series, I offer this:

Game of Thrones: Seven Wildest Theories about the forthcoming season. I have a hard time keeping dark bearded armor clad Brits apart if less so their fetching and disrobed Celtic, exotic, or even Brit counterparts or foes of the distaff gender, and I resist any character brought back from the dead (even Sherlock or Spock), but in the meantime, for those with more time to obsess and fantasize, have at it.

Evangeline Walton's "Mabinogion Tetralogy": Book Review

This retelling of the Welsh Mabinogi, acclaimed as one of the best fantasies of the 20th century, finds a long-overdue reprinting in a single volume from Overlook Press. I review the 2002 printing; the volume appeared with a better cover in 2012. As a teenager, I always meant to read the Ballantine four-volume paperback box set, part of the revival by that press of worthy tales post-Tolkien, but somehow I forgot. Inspired by two sources, Morine Krissdottir's 2007 biography of John Cowper Powys, and David Goodway's enthusiastic acclaim in "Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow" for Powys' "Porius," I started that even longer epic but paused three chapters in as it reminded me of Walton.

I had to start with her fiction dramatizing the tension between the Old Tribes (akin to pre-Celts, indigenous inhabitants of Britain) and the New (as in the Celts, although they are not named as such), and hints of even newer religions emerging in very far off lands that one day will seek to wipe out tribal faiths and undermine traditional beliefs and customs over all these isles and more. Powys praised Walton's 1936 debut, originally called "The Virgin and the Swine." It met with no wider success then. While not the best title for the masses, the symbols of commodified woman and coveted magic pigs both fit her emphasis, cleverly teased out and elaborated by her into druidic rituals and Pythagorean cosmologies), of the clash between Old Tribe "conservatives" affirming free love and no bonds between men and women, and the New Tribes, who insist on marriage to lock women into their increasingly patriarchal system, one which traps both sexes into lifelong commitment. It's surprising for that time period, but very congenial with Powys' own take on tribal times. Both Walton and Powys imaginatively delve into this cultural strife, and both elaborate the battles both physical and spiritual, sexual and tribal, between those who push empire or impose rule, and those who fumble to try to attain a more individually based, and erotically liberating, lifestyle.

It's livelier in Walton than this summary sounds. Renamed "The Island of the Mighty" after Betty Ballantine finally tracked Walton down in the 1960s to learn that she had written three other installments, which precede it in this omnibus, the series was published in roughly chronological order as to its narrative in the early 1970s. "The Prince of Annwn" starts off splendidly with the weird hunt, the bargain with forces beyond, and it progresses smartly into the epic fight in the Underworld.

Her prose carries the action along, yet pauses for insight, and commentary. "Blackness terrifies; it is sightlessness, it blinds a man and hides his enemies; yet the darkness within the earth is warm and life-giving, the womb of the Mother, the source of all growth. But in snow or in white-hot flame nothing can grow. Whiteness means annihilation, that end from which can come no beginning." (18)

However, Walton leavens the mythic tone by making her characters believable, and taking down a peg the boasts of legends. "The Mabinogi says that no house or ship could hold him, though if that tale has not grown in the telling, houses and ships must have been very small then. One thing seems certain: Bran was very big." (153) Lightening the tone of much of the original, wit proves welcome.

Poetry fittingly enters into a Welsh setting. "At night the stars, watching those many bright fires upon the once dark earth, must have wondered and searched the sky for a gap in the constellations, shivering lest they too should fall." (164)  This is early in the second book, "The Children of Llyr," which describes the stubborn rivalries that will tear apart not only the Mighty Island but Erinn too.

My favorite hero in this section? A brave starling who speaks. Amidst the war, powerfully evoked. "Dawn found them there, gray men fighting amid gray shadows; as perhaps every man who fights in war fights a shadow, the death that he sees as death because it sees him as death; so that out of their common passion for life all are turned into its foes and kill." (243) Walton subtly raises dark specters of brutality and cunning, even as she gently commemorates those who resist evil with compassion.

An eerie gray figure makes a prophecy not only the Welsh live with today, when "fair-haired invaders will sweep over all and subject us all." The power of women having been abandoned as birth is limited to their domination by men (as procreation begins to be understood by the Old Tribes), and as rebirth (a subject sprinkled deeply into these tales by Walton's hand) eventually is denied, "for ages women will be as beasts of the field and we men will rule, and practice war, our art. By it we will live--or by it, rather, we will struggle and die." (277) The earlier respite from pain gives way to pain.

Bran's prophetic head predicts, too: force will be unleashed, beyond its proper use "only to keep one man from hurting another"; and governments will elevate the masses over the individual. (289) Gods having been corrupted and cruel, people will set up government, and that in time too will threaten all.

Against this top-down oppression, happiness tries to rebound. As "The Song of the Rhiannon," part three scans the fate of a few who escape human destruction and divine vengeance. In life's plain magic, fragile and elusive hope rests. "Yet a Head that talks after being cut from its shoulders is not, if we stop to think, nearly so vast or all-moving a Mystery as the wonders of growth, or or sunrise and sunset." Walton's narrator avers: "We have made of 'natural' and 'everyday' poor words, ordinary and trite, when they should be the Word, full of awesome magic and might; of cosmic power." (348)

Unlike many who delve into this material, Walton refuses to excavate a spuriously "Celtic" artifact to parade as a proto-New Age bauble to gush about. Her story-cycle fairly examines the strengths and weaknesses of Old and New Tribes, and she judges the excesses and follies of rulers over the ruled, as well as the inevitable bickering and petty strife which appears doomed to haunt families everywhere. Even if paternity at this distant point remains a debated theory and a novel supposition that the New Tribes from Dyved appear to import into the neighboring realm of Gwynedd, it hovers.

As this theory starts to become reality, and as women begin to be vowed for life to one man, the anthology as it progresses gains momentum. The storm that assaults Dyved, the flight of the survivors, the increasing despair of their lives, the poignancy of death, as a few seek to rally magic against cunning power, set up the entry of the last and longest portion. "The Island of the Mighty" feels at first more archaic, having been written nearly forty years before. Some spellings of Welsh names differ, and the register of the prose seems more hesitant in the first chapters of volume four.

Then, the excitement grows: the punishment meted out to impetuous Gilvaethwy and scheming Gwydion, their three transformations, the fate of Pryderi, the spite of Arianrhod, the odd births of Llew, Dylan, and Blodeuwedd, the predicament of Goronwy, and the final rounds of cunning retribution. All these resound. While fantasy looms over all and magical spells proliferate, Walton wisely sticks to the everyday, if that adjective works, reactions of confounded characters trying to survive. This reliable set of plot complications drives the last few hundred pages along swiftly.

A generation gap widens. "For it is a strange thing that the most intimate relations of our lives, those which hold our holiest and deepest loves, should also be innate antagonisms, individual combats in the universal war that is as old as sex and as consciousness and the reproduction of life. Yet it shall be so until the day when the world is healed and the sundered halves are welded, and consciousness is more clearly and truly conscious than ever, yet has fused and melted into the One." (560-1) While I suggested above that New Age musings are absent from Walton's presentation as to "Celticisms," she admits that she interposes some slight Atlantis hints, if not named as such, to account for lore from distant times and lands, and to encourage a "stair of evolution" as Math mentions towards unity. I find hints of Platonic models, or Neo-Platonic conceptions, which on the other hand enrich these themes.

Math warns how, in suppressing these "Ancient Harmonies," the New Tribes' "recognition of fatherhood will enslave women." Either that submission by women or their hiring out of their bodies will make women "the bondmaids of men." (588) Arrayed against coercive arrangements, the consciousness of the Whole--as bees and ants possess-- contends against the individual ambition within humans who fight systematic injustice. Llew learns from Gwydion how people lost consciousness of the Whole so as to shut themselves off, to work for their own gain. In turn, this confounds systems, "for in all systems there is injustice, and one class profiting at the expense of another; and since individuals will always work for their own gain and not the system's, the suffering class will always end by turning and preying upon the other." What will eventually transpire is the winning back of a collective identity, when this "wider consciousness" into a oneness with all species and a fellowship where all creatures are known "alike for our fellow beings" will happen. (595) But "millions of ages will pass" before the world moves ahead this far. By then, who knows about human evolution? Heady topics for a rendering of medieval Welsh legend, but reason why Powys praised it.

Again and again, the "magnet and the sting" of attraction reverberate as men and women strive to first couple and then divide again. Peace must come for this to happen safely, and plenty of instances in the previous six-hundred pages, by the time Math and Gwydion muse about this, demonstrate the hazards of trust and the dangers of lust. Each side tries to devour the other, yearning (again the Platonic notion lingers) "unknowing after that lost wholeness." In the "give and take of exchange," Math observes, "through the brief moments when their flesh achieves it, life goes on and the endless round renews itself, and more souls are embodied in the world to carry on the ceaseless quest and strife." (615) This suggests also a Buddhist notion, perhaps, of clinging to the flesh and the worldly.

Requiring the desire of women for men to be buttoned-down into a life sworn only to one man sparks Llew's lament as to marriage as a "crucifying riddle: how to make painless the love between a man and a woman when love must die in one heart at a time." (704) While this saga ends without resolving this eternal question, the wisdom filling this thick book merits reflection. It's a welcome addition to the shelf, although my 2002 printing has six errors on the copyright page alone, and it has typographical slips here and there throughout the text. Finally, the fantasy genre label may confuse some expecting nothing more than swords and romance. On the other hand, the thoughtful presentation of weighty subjects, and the good-natured tone with which Walton leavens arcane lore, provides readers with a vivid immersion into an ancient time of what-ifs, made relevant for moderns. (Somewhat edited for Amazon US 8-14-2014)

Patrick O'Donnell's "A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell": Review

While often classified as a postmodernist, David Mitchell's novels fit better into other categories. Patrick O'Donnell, in the first full-length study of all six of this English writer's innovative works to date, begins by considering cosmopolitan and anthropological contexts as better suited to this protean storyteller. His books tackle the complexity of how people approach mortality. These tales blur genres, leap across time and space, and dramatize disruption, individually and communally, as threat nears.

Mo Muntervary, an Irish nuclear engineer, observes in Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999): "Memories are their own descendants, masquerading as the ancestors of the present." Her comment reveals her creator's interest in quantum physics and relativity theory. Mitchell applies what O'Donnell labels as the tense of the "future anterior" as past events are linked to a possible future, "on which the past event depends for its significance".

This can be a difficult subject to explain. O'Donnell's study, aimed at an academic audience, focuses on temporal conditions to highlight Mitchell's contribution to current fiction. This critique, as with its sources, challenges easy explication.. Multiple perspectives and genres across the globe mix, while "both human connections and the brutal intransigency of events sporadically collide and conspire in time streaming toward what will have been". While the novels demand close attention, and while they often nonetheless prove more fluid and compelling than a scholarly representation of their contents may express, O'Donnell and Mitchell agree that the events they dramatize matter, far more than as entertainment. They articulate human predicaments, and they confront our planet's danger.

In the unpredictable island nation of monster quakes, sudden death, and mob reprisals, Number 9 Dream (2001) pays tribute to the Japan where Mitchell taught English for eight years in Hiroshima, and where he met his Japanese wife. He also pays homage to Haruki Murakami, for this unstable narrative layers disruptions across Tokyo, as encountered by a young man who may be at different moments or chapters in a James Bond-type of caper, an avatar's fantasy world, a manuscript, or a video game, to name only a few possibilities. As its title indicates, it floats about and jumps around.

Cloud Atlas (2004), Mitchell's best-known novel to date, wraps five dispersed stories, at first partially completed, around the core of a post-apocalyptic adventure set on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Then, Mitchell continues each interrupted account, concluding them in reverse order. O'Donnell relates the "character chains" which not only enrich the novel's formal innovation, but the 2012 film adaptation's own casting choices which tinker further, if fittingly, with Mitchell's fluid representations of characters who repeat in different guises over the centuries. Mitchell's subtexts of reincarnation and shape-shifting reoccur in nearly all of his novels. Pasts and futures shuffle. Narratives progress and regress. His human and post-human figures confront the depravities of capitalism, the constraints of conformity, and the notions of one's own society as the most civilized of all possible worlds.

While Black Swan Green (2006) certainly proves the most streamlined of his narrative models, it shares his scrutiny into the situations which oppress everyday people, nearer our own time. It is based loosely on some elements from Mitchell's own upbringing, for he and the protagonist were both aged thirteen in 1982, in suburban Worcestershire. Both stammer, both face divorce as their parents separate, both seek to fit into what appears an alien atmosphere, and both share a fascination with the onslaught of popular culture as experienced by ordinary men and women. Yet, this novel nonetheless resists any reduction to a straightforward coming-of-age saga or thinly disguised roman à clef.

Contrary to the treatment many give Mitchell's most accessible and apparently most ordinary novel, taking its events as a satisfying, straightforward recounting of a boy's jitters, O'Donnell finds elements recalling Austen, Dickens, and Joyce. Beneath a chronological depiction of thirteen months in a boy's maturation, the fairy-tale, initiation story, and the novel or manners appear. So do historical chronicle, fantasy touches, and hundreds of brand names, song titles, pop song lyrical snippets, books, and television programs from the early 1980s. O'Donnell places the adolescent narrator into this milieu, as his commodified and oppressive reality. Set as the Falklands War and late-Cold War NATO-Warsaw Pact tensions clouded even a lonely English schoolboy's perspective, this novel continues the pattern Mitchell has woven, one in which everyday people get tangled up in history.

As well as mystery, for as one young man had viewed "a row of screaming Russian dolls" in Tokyo, so another visitor to Japan finds himself, too, in another labyrinth, where possibilities overlap and crush. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob Van Zoet (2010) enlivens another familiar genre, that of the historical epic. O'Donnell moves beyond the critical reactions which place this long tale, set in 1799 in Nagasaki harbor as a Dutch trader tries to open up the mainland to trade, within a "stereoscopic" overlay of Asian and Western meetings, or as a post-feminist take on the Orientalist trope of an eager white man falling in love with a, coy, exotic woman. Instead, the personal and the political trip up progress. Translation garbles commercial and intimate exchanges. The lust for profit and the rush for conquest play off against confounding Japanese attempts to manipulate European delegations. Road trips, melodrama, gothic, science fiction, and romance all merge and drift apart in this vast story.

The same ingredients in The Bone Clocks (2014; see my review for PopMatters 16 Sept. 2014) swirl across six decades in the life of another English narrator from the 1980s on, as Holly Sykes finds surprises within mundane circumstances. O'Donnell again shows how Mitchell makes time elastic. In his latest novel, he dramatizes the difficulty of translating concepts, emotions, and points-of-view from one person's perspective into another. Mitchell adds a supernatural dimension. Here, he takes up religious debates, depictions of the sociology of power, late twentieth-century pop culture as trends come and go. He predicts how (a minor but relevant aspect which merited more detail in O'Donnell's critical analysis) reading audiences and literary recognition shift attentions in our own near-future.

Other critics, not cited by O'Donnell in his positive appraisal of Mitchell's fiction, regard some of the writer's efforts as not paying off in their conclusions. His novels all keep a reader turning their pages, they remain honest in their narrative sleight-of-hand, and they offer convincingly drawn protagonists. Yet, some readers and critics shut Mitchell's novels with a sensation of let-down, as if after all the dazzling legerdemain, the magical tricks fail to linger after the performance has ended. O'Donnell diligently finds in each novel the connections which link characters and events across them all (one of the best reasons to read them all in order, I advise) in subtle and playful ways. But if O'Donnell had addressed reader reception by those of us in Mitchell's audience who continue to open each of his works with hope but close them with a nagging feeling that an added effort could be made by their author, this consideration would have strengthened what is an understandable if telling weakness in this work of literary criticism. O'Donnell offers only praise for David Mitchell's diverse set of novels.

Granted, this is not to detract from a considerable achievement. Given he is only forty-five, Mitchell may likely better his present success as an author respected by critics and welcomed on the bestseller lists by readers worldwide. He continues as one of the most talented storytellers and most rewarding fabulists in contemporary fiction. The Bone Clocks handles a very intricate narrative with verve. Mitchell enlivens Holly, telling her life's story, one which for the first time in a Mitchell novel takes precedence throughout the narrative as a female presence. (Typically, this novel's cast of characters and settings overlaps, as we see Mo Muntervary reappear in her Irish home turf, fifteen years after her debut in Mitchell's fiction.) Colliding with what begins the novel (shortly after Black Swan Green) as Holly's daily routine, the clash of the Horologists and Anchorites as they wrestle over "decanting" immortality sharpens Mitchell's depiction of what may be our species' inability to match a utopian concept to a human set of weaknesses, given doubt, lust, temptation, and the profit motive.

Mitchell regards impermanence as the condition in which men and women must endure. He can present this with detachment, another reason some critics and readers get uneasy with his stance. Time, topography, and plot accumulate. They force readers to realize their implicated guilt along with that of characters like us, but as if a few decades later. The plight of the planet, weakened by ecological decay and predatory commercial, political, and social practices we encourage, implicates audiences into Mitchell's dire warnings. Crucial characters cannot be written off as escapist or as alarmist. They face an evil era. While it is close in time to ours, it is one we wish to fend off forever.

Summing up Mitchell's ambitions, O'Donnell charts patterns in six novels which may serve as models of how we can adapt to globalizing circumstances. Individually and collectively, the vexing question of how our lives may continue impels the risks Mitchell takes in each protean narrative. These demonstrate the "clearest sign of his imaginative investment in having a future" we want to create. 
(PopMatters 1-6-15; 1-8-15 Amazon US)

David Mitchell's "The Bone Clocks": Book Review

Gaining front-page coverage in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and the feature review in The New Yorker, this much-anticipated novel delivers a sprawling, exciting, otherworldly epic. However, to keep my own reactions fresh, I have not read any of these reviews before writing mine. I preferred to savor this novel myself, for over the past year I've enjoyed each of David Mitchell's five fictional tales to date. But immensely satisfying as they are, most nag me a little.

Given Mitchell's knack for inventive plots, appealing characters, engrossing lore, and fantastic adventures, at the end of all but one of his six novels so far, I wanted more. Is this a sign of satisfaction, then? Or a hint that a bit more push was needed by Mitchell --rather than me-- to break through from the ranks of a series of impressive tales told with abundant energy and delight, to get to that higher level, where we can agree that his novels will endure as dazzling classics, decades hence?

To begin with, how does The Bone Clocks compare with what's gone before? Eerie machinations of a global conspiracy that stretches past time and place from Ghostwritten (1999) return. So does Mo Muntervary, an MIT-trained physicist. Roughly fifteen years after her appearance in that novel, she lives in County Cork, where The Bone Clocks concludes. Similar to Ghostwritten and Mitchell's next work, Number 9 Dream (2001), shape-shifting scenarios entangle logic and reality, if not those novels' Asian settings. Some of best moments in The Bone Clocks come in exotic locations, but it settles down for most of its six-hundred-plus pages in England, North America, and finally, Ireland.

In Mitchell's semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in the early 1980s, Black Swan Green (2006), Jason Lamb told how he grew up in the shadow of the Falklands War and his parents' divorce in suburban Worcestershire. In The Bone Clocks, we meet his cousin, Hugo Lamb. This callow yet likeable "scholarship boy" studies at Cambridge. He learns of a magical offer. He finds out about the "psychosoterica of the Shaded Way". This quest comprises the backbone of this novel. The details of confrontations and "decanting" demand attention, but a careful reader will find that Mitchell embeds much of this key material early on, even if makes more sense many pages and many decades later. Atemporals seek to outwit mortality. These beings drain "psychovoltaic" charges from mortal souls. Humans live merely as "bone clocks". Our hearts tick away a few years in decaying bodies.  Anchorites disdain humans as Normals, who unwillingly and suddenly may feed the "syndicate of soul-thieves", the few who "under terms and conditions" strive to sustain a provisional immortality.

These sinister forces are countered by the league of even fewer immortals, Horologists who unselfishly seek to protect Normals. As Returnees or as Sojourners, these entities transmigrate into human bodies to continue "metalives". This faction fends off the Atemporals, who as Carnivores feed off of the living. The novel begins with teenaged runaway Holly Sykes. Leaving Gravesend on the Thames estuary, she crosses paths with this cosmic conspiracy one memorable "time-slip" day in 1984. Her predicament brings her into the company of Dr. Marinus, who featured in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (2010). Nearly two centuries after that saga of a Dutch trade mission at Nagasaki set around 1800, the doctor's back. He "returns" as an African Canadian psychologist.

Marinus seeks to penetrate the Swiss fastness where the Atemporals congregate to energize their "twisted version of resurrection" as the Shaded Way. They "consume the psychovoltaic souls of innocent people in order to fuel their own immortality". The battle between this company of Anchorites and the secret society of Horologists who for four centuries have sought to counter these soul-killing "animacides" leads to spirited displays of unpredictable alliances, betrayals, and mind-games at which Mitchell excels. As in episodes of Japanese combat, secret societies, natural wonders, dystopian breakdown, harried idealists, and teenaged desire in earlier novels, so here: Mitchell merges set-scenes of imaginative showdowns with intellectual reflection which will reward the keen and alert reader. Some exposition may seem slow at the time, but varied pace and tone build up suspense gradually. While arguably a few sections might have been trimmed, the experience Mitchell creates for the reader, to revel in the immediacy of unexpected events, benefits from leisure.

I have left out much of an extremely dense plot, so as to avoid spoilers. Much of what may seem baffling when first seen through Holly's teenaged perspective in part one begins to clarify, if gradually. Meanwhile, we learn through Hugo's tutelage in part two what the psychic campaign conducted on a different plane than the mundane means to those in this world who as "Engifted" during a period of their own psychological vulnerability find themselves open to suggestion by the Atemporals. They are lured to a Swiss fortress at Sidelhorn, rich in Templar tradition. "I'm looking through time's telescope at myself." So Hugo reflects as he visits an old pensioner, for frustrated Hugo seeks meaning in life. Shown by a Carnivore how to press "the pause button of time", he faces temptation. An Anchorite promises: "The impossible is negotiable. What is possible is malleable."

Part three, set a decade ago, shows a more mundane if more deadly conflict for millions. Mitchell portrays the Iraqi chaos from the perspective of Holly's partner, a driven journalist who calls himself a "war-zone junkie". This section introduces a Script followed by the Horologists. Later, we learn how "The Script loves foreshadowing." Most what Mitchell scatters will coalesce, if much delayed.

Part four, with my favorite character, the writer Crispin Hershey, delights. In Cloud Atlas (2004), the foibles of hapless author Timothy Cavendish regaled many as they showed Mitchell's satirical send-ups of literary self-promotion engagingly and imaginatively. Similarly, we view a reading at the book festival at Hay-on-Wye through Crispin's jaundiced narration. Doomed to rouse sales for his books, he must face "a contingent of securely pensioned metropolitans stuffed with artisanal fudge and organic cider". Using the conceit of successive literary conferences, junkets, or a professorship from 2015-2020, Hershey's progress and his grumbling maturation reveal Mitchell's sympathy for a middle-aged mid-list writer's plight. "Love may be blind, but cohabitation comes with all the latest x-ray gizmos." Plagued by divorce and driven by ego, through his journeys all over the world, we learn how redemption can be sought, even by a figure of fun. In this section, Mitchell's talent shines.

Marinus in part five deepens the confrontations as the Horologists square off against the Anchorites. We learn through Holly how this strife has continued for centuries. We get a glimpse of what Mitchell has promised in a 2010 interview. He intends Marinus to be the central figure (rather than one of five protagonists here) of yet his next novel. Still, this nimble glimpse late in The Bone Clocks of possible fates for him in other "metalives" makes his present fate less satisfying. Presumably Marinus'  temporal status and immortal shapes, vaguely hinted in Thousand Autumns, elucidated in The Bone Clocks, will gain from the clarity of Mitchell's novel to come. Meanwhile, one leaves this section, for all of its energy and excitement, with a sense that an escape clause has been left open for Marinus.

As lively and thought-provoking as the final chapter proves, there remains a further letdown. This comes amidst a very dramatic scenario. As a major character confesses: "I've seen the future and it's hungry." She speaks for us. In her mid-seventies, in 2043, she attests to our present folly: "my feckless generation trusted our memories to the Net, so the '39 Crash was a collective stroke". The costs of convenience, as skills were left to tablets and mental powers of recall to a Cloud, result in an apocalyptic payback. What we fuel every time we fill up our tank --the hastening of economic collapse and planetary chaos as the "law of the jungle" returns to plague the survivors on Earth-- shows how greed today leads to plagues tomorrow. As Mitchell shows for those struggling in the Irish West in a neo-colonial system where the yuan gives way to barter and banditry, not even the Chinese capitalists can keep the world together. At last, nature pays back humans for the greed we earlier in the century have indulged in. We're selling off our descendents' future, for present pleasure.

A deus-ex-machina arrives, clunkily. A novel of speculative fiction could be defended as saving such contrivances for retrieval by an author. Yet, I felt it was too facile. Still, many may welcome it, as it eases a harrowing chapter. This arrival promises faint hope, if for very few. For, the final section depicts a dismal dystopia of post-Endarkenment. By 2043, we watch in rural Ireland the breakdown of Western society without electricity, the Net, or transport as we know it. "Civilization's like the economy, or Tinkerbell: if people stop believing it's real, it dies." Global warming triggers a lapse into the first stages of Earth's collapsing culture in Cloud Atlas, three centuries on. Overall, despite those two places where I felt disappointed, Mitchell succeeds in spinning out his complex plot. In retrospect, The Bone Clocks fits together neatly. I anticipate its ambitious storyline may open up nicely into future novels. Then, more past characters, along with Marinus, may return to surprise us.

(In shorter fashion at Amazon US 9-13-14; revised as above to PopMatters 9-17-14. I recommend  Jill Owens' interview at the Powell's website with Mitchell about how and why he constructed this novel such; I did not read this or any other discussions of the new novel before I wrote my review.)

Big Brother, Little Sister

Lately, some European artists protest as if only those who were born into or who affirm a particular identity can claim entitlement to act as, speak for, or depict that identity's experience. The somewhat forced diction of my first sentence indicates the similarly awkward expression of this reductive claim. Sharing on FB an article I found from the imploding New Republic (another story that fits in neatly), Exhibit B: Really Useful Knowledge and Europe's Art Censorship, my friend mentioned Ray Bradbury's novel as part of the warning about closing off alternatives, refusing controversy, and socially dumbing down our sensitivities.

Lots to discuss; a few excerpts to spark reflection. Ross Douthat, the resident conservative columnist at the New York Times (not imploding, but as a Sunday-only home subscriber, I note it's going to cost $9 weekly for that and digital access; my dad exploded, my wife recalls, when he saw we paid $3.50 for the treasured old-school paper--it sure was thick not that long ago--less than two decades ago.), discussed the impact of "vertically integrated media" as in the takeover of The New Republic by a Silicon Valley VC:

So when we talk about what’s being lost in the transition from old to new, print to digital, it’s this larger, humanistic realm that needs attention. It isn’t just policy writing that’s thriving online; it’s anything that’s immediate, analytical, data-driven — from election coverage to pop culture obsessiveness to rigorous analysis of baseball’s trade market.

Like most readers, I devour this material. Like most journalists, I write some of it. I’m grateful that the outlets that produce it all exist.

But among publications old and new and reinvented, it’s also hard not to notice that John Oliver videos — or, more broadly, the array of food and sports and gadget sites that surround Klein’s enterprise at Vox Media — aren’t just paying for the policy analysis. They’re actively displacing other kinds of cultural coverage and interaction, in which the glibness of the everyday is challenged by ideas and forms older than a start-up, more subtle than a TV recap, more rigorous than a comedian’s monologue.

That last snippet caught my attention. A few days after it did, Obama regaled The Colbert Report crowd, surely his demographic as any show on Comedy Central by default, with his ten-minute entertainment, pumping Obamacare while keeping his voters clapping. This made my wife and probably millions of fellow Dems happy, but shades of Nixon on Laugh-In saying "sock it to me," this left me disturbed. This capitulation, which others such as my son and his friends at dinner just applauded as a wonderful demonstration of how Our President handles the media and the message, to what the hipper and I guess alas younger folks "want" unsettles me even as it appears inevitable.

In turn, Tiffany Jones in concluding her article on "Exhibit B" cautions against what happens when "we" as in the same cohort Obama and Colbert and (at least most of) Silicon Valley appeals to make demands as to what "they" want to see as art, and what they want art to stand for, past or present:

The premise of art is that one can think up and convincingly construct for others, across time and place, a different life, another experience which becomes real to the reader or viewer because it has been written, painted, performed—not because the audience has been there, seen it, or done it themselves. Just think of all your favorite productions, books, or paintings and how they differ from your personal experience but seduce you into believing in them.

At their core, these calls for censorship dictate that only certain groups or people can create art because only they have the experience. Underlying these protests, then, is the idea that we, the audience, are not capably of empathy, and that the purpose of art is not is not to create and convince people of other worlds but to reflect the reality as the self-selecting chosen ones see it. It is an exclusive and divisive outlook, and it is one that ultimately negates the basis of art.

Fahrenheit 451 as read by Tim Robbins, as reviewed by Dave Itzkoff, revealed a subtlety I admit I was surprised to find in that author. I met him when I was in college and he spoke; he seemed very eager to promote literacy and love of the written word at our literary festival, but he also seemed to like himself a lot. Still, he signed my paperback of The Martian Chronicles (it was out on t.v. as a miniseries in the days we watched such on networks en masse, before DVR, DVD or even VCR).

Itzkoff wonders if Robbins is "phoning in" his reading of the book, and whether such a delivery of what remains a paean to the printed word should rather be preserved as Bradbury intended it. He goes on to consider the power of the moral, as the printed word did not capitulate to censorship (as perhaps art is in "Exhibit B" under pressure of P.C. dogma and a growing refusal to challenge certain religious oppositions to explicit or daring content, as well as the burgeoning industry bent on coddling us all against anything deemed disturbing, graphic, unsettling, or merely confronting our congeries of what we bundled up and thrust about as "identity" against presumably all who are less enlightened than us). Itzkoff concludes his review of Robbins' audiobook with a rousing recall to take up books, again:

But Bradbury knew, 60 years ago, that more seductive, less effective forms of information conveyance were coming to tempt even the most diligent and dedicated acolytes of the printed word, and that it was not a distant stretch from dismissing books as quaint and obsolete to banning them outright. As Captain Beatty explains to Montag, recounting how audiences’ attentions drifted from books to television, cartoons, “super-super sports” and “three-dimensional sex magazines”: “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.”

To the end of his life, Bradbury seemed surprised that he had to keep explaining that the novel was not about the dangers of government censorship or authoritarian rule; as he told his biographer Sam Weller, “ ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is less about Big Brother and more about Little Sister.” By this he seemed to mean all the small discouragements and impediments that take us away from our intellectual pursuits, whether peer pressure, encroaching technology or apathy. Fortunately, a few thousand years ago, we gave ourselves a sustainable and still reliable mechanism to provide shelter from these distractions, as well as the option to use it or not. It is a choice as simple, and as significant, as the decision to light up a mind or to extinguish it.

As for me, I close this brief scan of how the media play into our pleasures by considering the BBC series Black Mirror, as Layne and I binge-watched in three sittings its six parables to date about the pressure technology poses to break our cherished identity and control over our privacy and intimacy in the name of ethics; about a pair of contestants for an American Idol type of contest eerily extrapolated in a manner only half-explained, the better for it to grip you; about how memories can be recorded for instant recall; about the way that a loved one's words and voice, and then presence, might be resurrected and recreated; about how a pursuit for justice might well mingle with a fun day's excursion; and about how nihilistic, entertaining alternative candidate, as a cartoon, might be manipulated by shadowy powers that be. None end happily, but that is no spoiler, only true to life.

Michel Faber's "The Book of Strange New Things": Book Review

I have enjoyed all of Michel Faber's fiction, from sly fables to his eerie alien-on-Earth examination as Under the Skin to his triple-decker epic about a prostitute fending for herself in the labyrinth of decadent Victorian London, The Crimson Petal and the White. Faber displays calm aplomb in inventing fresh tales. Faber tends to peer in at human activities with slight discontent, and to present our foibles and ambitions to us as if with a faint air of disapproval or unease. He escorts us into intricate scenes amid inventive locales. Faber keeps readers wondering, through his unruffled, spare, and steady narrative style. He reminds readers of his skill in creating narratives which disorient us, even as they entertain. His subtle detachment doesn't weaken his literary craft, but it sharpens it, for we see through him our own estrangement.

In The Book of Strange New Things, Faber explores Christianity  (mocked memorably in his novella The Fire Gospel) but he (except in one welcome chapter of this more dour new novel) dampens any satire about faith and belief. Instead, we scrutinize a short span in the life of Peter Leigh. He's a reformed English alcoholic and addict who has turned his life over to Christ. He is recruited for a mission to minister the Gospel to natives. We soon learn they live not on our planet, but another, called Oasis by a shadowy corporation, USIC, which colonizes it.

Chauffeured to Cape Canaveral for his space flight, Peter admits he has no idea what USIC stands for. "Search me,' said the driver. 'A lot of companies these days got meaningless names. All the meaningful names have been taken. It's a trademark thing.'" Although Peter seems to be correct that the first part stands for United States, this multinational firm furthers a enigmatic corporate mission, a truly universal one, so to speak, which will extract energy and resources from Oasis. Faber, keeping the scope of USIC's cosmic ambitions shadowy, heightens their impact upon their newest employee.

Leigh leaves behind his wife, Bea, on a near-future Earth wracked by freakish weather, natural disasters, and social breakdown. The distance between this couple, conveyed by their transcribed transmissions, demonstrates Faber's skill in evoking a fraught relationship. Leigh's own confusion begins to grow despite his debriefing and training as to USIC's protocol. On arrival at Oasis, Peter finds "a red button on the wall labelled EMERGENCY, but no button labelled BEWILDERMENT".

Such suspense throughout The Book of Strange New Things remains vivid, for in Faber's alert depiction we must watch him, always at center stage. Faber juxtaposes the tension of Peter's first assignment, to create an ad hoc eulogy for a coworker he barely has had time to meet, with the news of Bea's pregnancy back on Earth. She tells Peter of its devastation from climate change and economic implosion. By contrast, the placid testimony by colonists and Oasans, as far as Peter can discern, appears to cloak two mysteries: what USIC intends, and why a few natives have embraced the Good News. The abyss between a dying Earth and USIC's coddled comforts on Oasis deepens.

Confronting human colleagues chosen for "no drama", Peter struggles to learn why USIC has sent him to Oasis, and why its some of its inhabitants wish to so fervently adopt the Christian message. Cut off from an increasingly fraught Bea and a home planet whose problems he cannot solve, he strives to rise to his new calling as a chaplain. Meanwhile, adjusting to the indigenous diet and trying to talk like an Oasan, he begins to drift away from the mentality of an earthling. Isolated from his colleagues, his brain starts to scatter, as "it sifted intimacies and perceptions, allowed them to trickle through the sieve of memory, until only a token few remained, perhaps not even the most significant ones".  In turn, he immerses himself into his task, to translate some of the Bible, and to go native as much as possible. Tension increases between his devotion and the mindset of his USIC comrades.

It's refreshing to finish five-hundred pages, which I read in two sittings, that refuse to show off a writer's style or parade his own predilections. Faber manages to speak through Leigh sympathetically. Committed to his calling, Peter honestly responds to all who need him, human or alien, as he strives to do good. Even the USIC plant's heliostats, for solar power collection and storage, cause Peter to be moved by "their inanimate confusion. Like all creatures in the universe, they were only waiting for the elusive light which would grant them purpose". Yet, the omnipotent author remains separate from his troubled protagonist, for we learn of his thoughts only by indirect first person narration, and through the letters Peter and Bea exchange from a vast distance, as their own estrangement widens.

For instance, Peter begins to regard himself, cut off from familiar surroundings and stimulation, differently as he ministers more to the natives than to his own needs. As he preaches to the Oasans, and as he learns their language, he increases his cultural dislocation. "He imagined the scene from above--not very high above, but as if from a beach lifeguard's observation tower. A tanned, lanky, blonde-haired man in white, squatting on brown earth, encircled by small robed figures in all the colours of the rainbow. Everyone leaning slightly forward, attentive, occasionally passing a flask of water from hand to hand. Communion of the simplest kind." Faber leaves these analogies with previous holy men or desert scenes for us to fill in. Their sketchiness enables the reader to view Peter's maturation and his acceptance of a hard-earned wisdom. Faber hints at an objective response, but he presents us only with Peter's subjective resolve. This unfolds convincingly, as this novel with its cautious pace takes its time to portray Peter's transformation on Oasis into a different person.

The novel is simply told. The desert climate of Oasis and its vaporous atmosphere challenge Leigh and his human coworkers to endure its harsh environment, mentally and physically. Endurance dwindles for a few. Faber keeps mum about the back story regarding both planet and the corporation he dramatizes. Whoever knows more about USIC, the Oasans, and the mission Peter joins is not telling. As in Faber's previous fiction, the situation the protagonist meets appears to be more complex than what this idealistic but flawed Everyman can fully comprehend. Not all questions find answers.

Therefore, the ambiguity in this tale, and the "elusive" purpose for which Leigh has been recruited and USIC set up so far away may not find full clarification, any more than the message of Jesus may find complete explication for Oasis' natives, or for Peter Leigh himself. While he imagines success, the ultimate lesson of this philosophical novel may lie in its acceptance instead of what one of Leigh's predecessors may have found, during his own "ecstasy of derision". Faber leaves us, along with Peter, wondering about these elusive and haunting, yet ultimately poignant and down-to-earth, life lessons.
(As above 10-21-14 to PopMatters, originally in shorter form 9-15-14 to Amazon US)