Ursula Le Guin's "The Telling": Book Review

This was inspired by the suppression by the communists of the Taoists in China. Le Guin in her introduction to the 2017 Library of America edition of her collected Hainish works admits that her knowledge of this cultural obliteration came relatively recently. She fits this into her system, with an emissary from Terra, of Asian Indian origins, living in Vancouver. Terra is in tumult too; fanatics try to impose a one-god regime upon the disparate peoples in the tellingly named Sutty's multicultural land. She is sent as an anthropologist to Akan to investigate that world's parallel descent into control.

The control is exerted by a relentless hatred of the old. The peons are remade into "producer-consumers," and the state itself, influenced by the same fanatics earlier, seems to have learned their dark lessons well. Le Guin sharply depicts the soulless situation of the inhabitants who toil mirthlessly. Redolent of not only China under Mao or North Korea under its dictators, Akan is bleak. 

Sutty finds her mission to observe on behalf of the Ekumen, and to report back, compromised by a minder called by her The Monitor. Their fates will intersect as Sutty travels north from the megapolis into rural areas where she learns that not all of the old learning and forbidden ways have vanished. 

At this stage in her long career, Ursula Le Guin incorporated feminist themes and fluid sexuality into her characters. Sutty's lesbianism puts her further apart from those seeking complete domination over the private as well as public life. Technology has advanced, too, and the parallels to our age are there.

This story moves slowly. Especially at first, Le Guin channeled through her protagonist parcels out facts we need to know sparingly. But there is a fascination with the way that Akan plays off our Earth. Totalitarian dystopia in the name of progress, unity and conformity isn't only "science fiction." 

It also wraps up very suddenly. Sutty's summoning is brought about in a paragraph halfway, with seemingly no foreshadowing. This may reflect life's surprises, but it threw me off. The conclusion follows rapidly after some earnest negotiation. It's not a tidy ending, either. But it may be more real. (Amazon US 9/24/17) 

Ursula Le Guin "Hainish Novels + Stories": Book Review

These Hainish fictions aren't a cycle. Rather "a convenience" than "a conception." So Ursula Le Guin introduces this deluxe edition from Library of America in typically forthright, pithy, and sly terms.

Daughter of a groundbreaking anthropologist who taught at Berkeley and Columbia, Ursula Le Guin pioneered the meticulous investigation of her imagined societies within the popular genre of speculative storytelling. She began writing as a child during the Depression. Beginning in 1966, her contributions began in the Ace Doubles, SF pulp. Editors and fans recognized her skill. Although her sophisticated interplanetary system took a while to form, and even if its inconsistencies bother nitpicking critics, Le Guin avers this genesis gave her freedom to shift between stories and novels. She learned the difference between "willful suspension of disbelief" and merely "faking" it when invention stirred. (Her Hainish books need not be read in order, she has assured readers before.)

Part of Le Guin's innovation came through the "ansible," a device enabling instant communication across the universe. This became a standard tool throughout the science fiction cosmos. Her other innovation in the 1960s, she notes, has received less attention from a wider audience. The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula prizes, but it faced backlash, from pedants and from feminists. Le Guin's decision to use a fixed "he" for her people lacking a fixed gender--it alternates in the month--leads to her reiteration fifty years on. Despite many recent changes in social perception of gender differences, "we still have no accepted ungendered pronoun in narrative." Demurring from the term "prequel" for her story "The Day Before the Revolution" preceding her anarchist utopia novel The Dispossessed, "word-hound" Le Guin returns to her central verbal concern. "What matters most about a word is that it says what we need a word for. (That's why it matters that we lack a singular pronoun signifying non-male/female, inclusive, or undetermined gender. We need that pronoun."

This anthology's first volume gathers the first five Hainish novels. In a brief review, only a glimpse at the many realms Le Guin presents can suffice. Roncannon's World turns out for the Hainish ethnographer Roncannon an orb which will bear his name. (Hain's a planet resembling our own as the original homeland of humanity; the handsome endpapers in volume two make its earth-tones of continents heighten this suggestion, but it is not equivalent to Le Guin's Terra: an example of Le Guin's off-kilter approach to world-building.) Some telepathy occurs, but this wound up so overwhelming a condition for her menagerie of bio-forms that their creator edged away from it as a must as she expanded her fictional forays. Roncannon blends SF with fantasy. Its episodes entertain.

But eagle-eyed readers of venerable tropes may not be entirely convinced. There's a lot of humanoids evolving here on a smallish globe, so how they remain dispersed and sustaining may stem from Le Guin's anthropological curiosity more than a command of her developing talent in constructing plot.

Two more shortish novels follow. Planet of Exile as the title tells finds human colonists stranded on a hostile Werel. The arrival of attenuated seasons will become a factor in her present and future Hainish terrains: when winter comes, it stays for 15 years, and the "hilfs" arrive during this cold snap. These nomads call the humans "farborns." They both face savage hordes and snow-ghouls. One wonders if George R.R. Martin's vast audience knows of this 1966 predecessor, pitched again at the Ace crowd.

The following year, City of Illusions presents one raised by forest dwellers, but not born one of them. His quest across a ravaged earthscape and a dystopia full of occluded psychics also includes talking animals. Who can and cannot take life provides the complex theme, further taking on brainwashing.

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974) attain canonical status. Many will be most familiar with these dense novels. They deepen the SF genre. They will demand attention; they will reward reflection. This volume adds an "original" version of the experimental core of what became Left's alternating genders on Gethen. "Winter's King" sparked Le Guin's curiosity. What if "the king was pregnant" popped up in a tale? Both tales investigate how warfare equates with "predominantly a male behavior," If some people reverted to being female with an overwhelming sex drive for a few days a month, while others were male, how might this play out for an Ice Age planet a.k.a. Winter? Furthermore, Le Guin addresses how language, power plays, and relationships evolve.

The last work in the first volume, The Dispossessed may not have lasted as long in curricula and on reading lists as its gender-driven counterpart. It emerges from Le Guin's weariness with the Vietnam War, and her Cold War affinity for Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman's non-violence. Pairing this via her youthful exposure to Lao Tzu, Le Guin incorporates the Tao into a study of no-coerced-order.

For it has to recognize anarchy's discontents. Determined to leave his anarcho-syndicalist home on Anarres, physicist Shevek travels to a patriarchal society on Urras. Class war, religious dissension, and the grip of the in-group naturally mesh with Le Guin's intellectual interests. While less read now than Left, this novel of ideas also remains less popular than certain pulps penned by Ayn Rand. But Rand cannot match Le Guin's U.S.-of-A.-like A-Io for its ambiguous appeal as the Yang to the Yin of Urras. Capitalism gets its comeuppance, but so does socialism. Despite dense discussion, it's far more vivid than any Rand. For one "cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution." How one's possessive power gets mired in habit dramatizes--admittedly too tediously for readers craving more drama--its theories and its morality, as a thought-experiment.

As her fiction sweeps up allegory, her story arcs sometimes twine; but not neatly or necessarily. Her motivations push reflection arguably more than action. She leaves one pondering, despite what can be ponderous to those weary of nuance. Her erudite character studies and linguistic riffs predominate.

Le Guin's Hainish elaborations continue into the mostly shorter pieces of the second volume. The novella The Word for World Is Forest has always struck me as a protest against the defoliation of Vietnam. It may align more with the Earth Day sentiments of the early Seventies, but either way, the revolt of those on Athshe against the invading Terrans bent on taking its resources to sustain their own depleted earth has remained topical. Le Guin acknowledges this sad truth in her appended 1976 introduction for Word. She relates how her own "fantasy" at that time that a Philippine tribe called the Senoi stood for a "dream culture" akin to her imagined one for her indigenous resisters. While these claims were largely debunked among anthropologists, Le Guin reasons that for her threatened world, the use of its scientific data may diminish accordingly as its "speculative element" compensates.

Hainish stories overlap in characters and ideas now and then among the seven compiled here. Her faster-than-light communication device the ansible excited her fellow scribes. By 1990, Le Guin took up a possibility akin to Madeleine L'Engle's "wrinkle in time." Le Guin was "allured by the notion of transilience, the transfer of a physical body from one point in space-time to another without interval."

Christening it "churtening," she allows that those who pull it off in her fiction are never sure how they did it, or if they can do it again. "In this it much resembles life." Her 1994 collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea weaves influences from a Japanese folktale with Hain-adjacent love stories. She attempted in this decade "to learn how to write as a woman." Her latest brainstorm, the "sedorutu," sets on the world named O an institutionalization of hetero- and homosexual relationships "in an intricate four-part arrangement laden with infinite emotional possibilities--a seductive prospect to a storyteller." Her "gender-bending" produces stories enriched by her own decision to speak out not only on behalf of women, but all who are loners and introverts. In an era bent on overpopulation, "unlimited growth," and "mindless exploitation," Ursula Le Guin retreats. She considers the misfit.

Her final entries twist more categories. Dark-skinned people enslave light-skinned ones. The emerging "story suite" becomes Four Ways to Forgiveness. Meanwhile, Le Guin learns of the destruction of "religious Taoism" during the regime of "aggressive secular fundamentalism" in China.

The Telling (2000) closes this volume. Le Guin sees around her in her own homeland the rise of similar "divisive, exclusive," and dogmatic instigators of hatred perverting "the energy of every major creed." This concluding novel depicts "the secular persecution of an ancient, pacific, non-theistic religion on another world." Those responsible, tellingly, originate among "a violent monotheistic sect on Earth." No matter what ignites the dynamic fusion of thought and action in her Hainish fictions, Ursula Le Guin generates provocative and intelligent considerations of complex forces. A tribute to her craft, these elegant volumes combine into a welcome set for loners, introverts, and the rest of us.
(Combined volumes: Amazon US 9/5/17. Vol. 1  and  Vol. 2 ) PopMatters as Ursula Le Guin's Science Fiction Stories about Class, War, Religious Dissension and More  9/14/17)

Phillip Freeman's "The Gospel of Mary": Book Review

Since I was a teen reading James Michener's "The Source," I've had a weakness for "So-and-so has discovered a missing Gospel" yarns. I liked the prolific Professor Freeman's recent Oxford UP retelling of Celtic mythology, so I gave this a try. Via an e-galley, I did not know until I finished that this is the third in his Sister Deirdre series. That explains some backstory I kept wondering why not more was divulged herein. I had no trouble following along, but it's better I assume to have caught up with the previous books, for the main character evidently has a complicated past and much to tell.

Not be confused with another, recent Irish-oriented story, Colm Tóibín's drama "The Testament of Mary," Freeman's "The Gospel of Mary" features the rapid pace, genial tone, and expository dialogue that fills us in on an Ireland when Christians still number few. Deirdre's grandmother was a druid and she claims the same identity, although when her mother died, her grandmother fulfilled her promise to raise Deirdre in the new faith. With allusions to a failed marriage, other past liaisons, and a child who died young hovering about, it's clear that Freeman's protagonist has had more adventures than most nuns might have, at least in later times. She lives with her friend and sidekick Dari in a monastery founded by Brigid, which to Rome's discomfort hosts celibate men and women together.

Rome's unease deepens as it sends a clever emissary to find out what the truth might be to a manuscript smuggled into the island with haste, secrecy, and danger. It is, naturally, the tale of Jesus told by his mother, and its passages intersperse, as they are translated by Dari from the Aramaic, with the fate of the two women as they get caught up in keeping their treasured text safe from the Church. The Church, after all, fears that its integrity will crumble if Mary's words are proven true, and even if they are not able to be verified, that the heresies and tumult generated by them will bring down Rome

It all moves satisfactorily. I read it in a sitting. Freeman has done his biblical homework, and he blends it with a quest that dashes about Ireland. There's plot complications, but the story line as a whole does not surprise. It's a pleasant narrative, and it likely will educate as well as entertain you.
(Amazon 9/5/17)

Jean Raspail's "The Camp of the Saints": Book Review

Recent flotillas of refugees from Africa and Syria caused a few bookworms and pundits to name-check this 1973 novel. Liberals practically put "scare quotes" around a mention of what they term a racist screed. Conservatives may praise it as a "classic." I knew of it way back via the maverick Garrett Hardin's perspective; he appealed if in different aspects to both ends of the political spectrum.

It popped into my mind the other day so I sat down and read it. It took two sittings. Raspail, as here translated by Norman Solomon, has a feverish, testy style that Michel Houellebecq, in his formative years in France, I suspect may well have come across. However, as Houellebecq's mordant fiction gains the same condemnations in bien-pensant right-thinking and left-leaning circles as Raspail's book, readers familiar with H. may find an encounter with R. bracing, infuriating, or baffling.

Raspail is credited on the blurb for The Camp of the Saints as a prize-winning author in his native land. Yet this novel flails from the get-go. The end of the story, or near it, jumbles up chronology. The sneering tone of the misanthropic narrator, the overabundant detail, the cardboard characters, the fact you don't care about anyone in the entire storyline: Raspail has scores to settle, but whether you'll be cheering him on or chasing him away depends not only on your own ideological bent, but your tolerance (a theme put through the wringer herein) for prattling. Raspail has it in for his countercultural era of the slightly aging hippies and the faux radicals of the early 1970s. He also despises the press, and some of the admittedly best barbs come as his narrator skewers the posturing.

I thought of the New York Times, for instance, when I found a similar send-up of earnestly PC journalists, who lambaste capitalism and despise corporations and capitalism in the same pages whose sponsors are those fat cats, and whose underwriting, so to say, supports the fulsome claptrap.

The key criticism, as Hardin reminded American readers decades ago, is that the "lifeboat" (here not symbol but story itself, multiplied all over the ocean as refugees set sail for Europe and the rest of whatever is the Western world circa 1973) cannot hold everyone. Either the rich have to share, and become poor themselves as such largess will not balance but tip over everyone into poverty, or they have to defend their realms with force, and "contempt" as Raspail later put it, lest they lose it all.

Odd tangents speckle this work. Clement Dio, a preening poser of the Third World solidarity his own bloodline allows him to capitalize on in more ways than one, is the best of a bad lot. But Raspail's mouthpiece hates worker-priests (back when there were enough clergy to go around), and the Dominicans (not for once the Jesuits) come in for comeuppance. Funny that one Benedict XVI reigns. Along with the Church, the unions, the press, and the military all get their turn at this "roast."

Yes, Raspail makes some points early on about the hypocrisy of the West, the implosion of its value system in a secularizing (well, not quite as it's still France in the post-Vatican II guitar mass phase) and skeptical society, and the contradictions inherent in the post-colonial world supported by the five (now more like six and a half) billion whose labor and losses prop up the seven hundred million whites. "The Last Chance Armada" makes a few at first hesitate but the pressure to welcome the human tide from over the sea leads many addled or idealistic Westerners, guilt ridden and excited to expiate their sins of neglect and greed, to proclaim "We Are All From the Ganges Now" as the first wave from India crests and others then join the exodus to the Northern Hemisphere, at least the wealthy part.

The narrative, such as it is, lurches through scenes of the army, a strange tangent with Benedictine monks, the chattering classes, a token couple from the working class, and those in factories and offices who find, as all anticipate the Easter Sunday mass landing of the sordid ships and their cargo, the early advantages taken by those in France itself who have earlier emigrated, and who maneuver their own prospects, eased by the care or fear taken by their "host nation," as it capitulates to them too

Interesting idea. Promising set-up. Fumbled execution. Fizzled climax. Ho-hum resolution as the narrator and Raspail seem too wearied or jaded to bother carrying on after so many pages of rants.
However, the relevance of this scenario cannot be gainsaid. Look at headlines. (Amazon US 6/5/17)

Lionel Shriver's "The Mandibles": Book Review

After nearly 130 reviews posted [on Amazon US, where this appeared 9/28/16], mine will not rehash much of the story. I like Lionel Shriver's little-known novel on the North of Ireland and while her take on obesity in Big Brother was less successful, I admire her willingness to immerse herself, whether the theme is snooker, bicycling, tennis, or a child who is a bit of a problem. So, as a fan of dystopias, I wondered how she'd handle the near-future economic meltdown of the Renunciation.

Turns out she puts enormous paragraphs in the mouths of not only the put-upon Georgetown professor of economics, but a teen prodigy. They wind up having to explain theory and practice of the "dismal science" to the family, which grows as hard times fall and never ebb in 2029. Shriver tackles the misanthropy and growing chaos well, if from the perspective of a hard-to-like matriarch of a privileged clan in Manhattan. True, pity is needed for those who as the prof notes have more than one pair of shoes, and to her credit, Shriver moves the family tale along rather briskly.

But as the professor lets on early, his pontifications are hard to let go of, and other characters speak like educated folks on paper, with almost no distinction. Only a burst of "black English" by one client of the protagonist of the first 3/4 of the novel seems to come from another class or reality. Still, seeing a New York streetscape where the homeless do include nuclear physicists in fact and not fantasy, and where the street people have their pick of Posturepedic mattresses discarded as the system breaks down and selfishness gives way to brutishness seems to confirm Hobbes.

She gets digs in. No more worries about lactose tolerance, or gender dysmorphia. Or, obesity, in the harsh reality that replaces coddling or comfort.

Oddly, in the last quarter of the book, from the view of a particularly annoying if prescient person, the presumed religious backlash to the surveillance of the resurgent US government is absent. Shriver succeeds as many writers have in showing us the New American Order, but she shrinks from the rural reaction, and her observation of the world outside NYC does not convince. As she divides her time between Brooklyn and London as a longtime ex-pat, perhaps she is too used to reading about her fellow 'Muricans rather than roaming beyond the chattering creative classes she likes to skewer. True, mango-wood side tables won't rouse much of a reaction vs. a 5 lb. bag of rice in 2029 where "dial 2 for English" is the new norm. Her predictions may come true--I fear that of the "cuboids" of dead trees once known as books may be hastened, despite her dire estimation of Amazon itself in this brave new world. Anyone having read Huxley's tale may find The Mandibles an echo, if another uneven message.

Dave Eggers' "The Circle": Audiobook Review

When I found this at my library online, I wondered why the queue for copies put me at #163. I had wanted to read this since I saw the first chapter excerpted in the NYT Magazine back near its 2013 publication. I dimly recalled that many scoffed at its Silicon Valley speculation, but it intrigued me.

I chose it as I'd liked Dion Graham's entertaining audio reading of a Neil DeGrasse Tyson book. He brings to "The Circle" a range of California-speak techies, as well as some international types. He's adept at conveying Mae Holland's voice and indirect first-person interior monologues, as the events are told from her perspective. As the fresh new hire, we see through her eyes and ears the ambitious projects of a firm that has in the near-future become the one-stop shop for goods, transactions, and socializing. The rapid transition from a do-good company to a benign surveillance operation appears convincing, given the acceleration towards relentless glad-handing, monetization, and capitalizing on one's own "brand." The pace becomes nearly inhuman, as those in The Circle seeks its "completion."

Dave Eggers takes his time over these 13.5 hours as heard here, and his careful explanation of how this corporation combines the earnest wish to possess all knowledge for of course the betterment of all, the corporate drive for perfection, the demand for ubiquity, and eventually the perceived will of the informed populace works well to keep you wondering what's next for Mae and her fevered peers.

As she says late on, "you're surrounded--by friends!" Privacy turns suspect, for what do honest folks mean to keep from the scrutiny of billions of "watchers" online? Rank has its privileges, Sharing is caring, why should what people do be left private? The common good is perceived to depend upon data-mining of all that humans have done or witnessed. Transparency. Is there any opt-out left?

For 12.5 hours, this set-up won me over. The problem is that the last hour of the audio, the last portion of the narrative, has the protagonist in my opinion making a decision that while not totally out of character seems churlish and childish. This may show her flaw. But the events that wrap up this, reminiscent of parts of "Brave New World"'s dramatized divide as debated between the Savage and the technocracy, seem to hurry along plot points, It also compresses some characters into foreshortened depictions not in line with earlier depth. I ended this wondering if there's a sequel. I'd like to find out a lot more. For now, not having any idea of the fact there's a 2017 series starting up, I may prefer to hide that visual depiction away, and choose my own depictions. Eggers writes this with clear details, as if he's preparing for a screenplay, and it translates the action and settings well.
(Amazon US 5-22-17)

"V for Vendetta": Audiobook Review

"The inch of integrity"

Would you consider the audio edition of V for Vendetta to be better than the print version?

You need to read the graphic novel first. Then the film, Then this. All 3 merit respect. They all adapt their chosen medium well. While anyone will turn to the Alan Moore-David Lloyd ur-text, I approve of all three versions as worthy. They elaborate the story for each format.

What did you like best about this story?

Steve Moore's novelization allows you to "see" in the mind's eye images that compliment the original source written by (here uncredited by his request) Alan Moore and the cinematic adaptation of the Wachowksy Brothers' script.Themes are deepened at nine hours that the film could not suggest, and I was pleased how intelligently composed was the novelization. It can stand on its own as a deserving representative of the source. It's smart and it's moving. Anarchism at its best. 

Which scene was your favorite?

Evie's enlightenment. No spoilers, but Simon Vance delivers this tale with deft and subtle readings of the dramatized text. He's the perfect "British" voice to convey irony and emotion.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I found, listening to this the week of the Westminster Bridge attack in London near the very Parliament of this narrative, eerie similarities. And the way a demagogue exploits the fears of a populace, naturally, is not only akin to the way totalitarian and fascist regimes operate. The 20th chapter delves into the rise of the ruling class well in this dystopia, and it remains both prescient and wise. It takes a side, but it is fair to the opponents even as it condemns. It is a sophisticated morality tale, and it is not the facile depiction of an avenger, but a careful study of opposition, and the price it costs more than one key character, dramatically.

Any additional comments?

The storyline takes care to not glorify any deaths or sufferings. Not an easy feat. There is no exploitative violence or sabotage, The Guy Fawkes echoes resonate. And we see how V's message inspires not only the expected dissidents, but others who are surprised to hear it. (Audible US 3/25/17) 

David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks: Audiobook Review

Overall

Performance

Story

""I've seen the future, and it's hungry""

Would you consider the audio edition of The Bone Clocks to be better than the print version?

Yes, having read the novel first. The characters come alive and the prose sharpens. The plot is clearer to understand, too.

Who was your favorite character and why?

I liked Hugo Lamb. Not to spoil anything, but he bore a difficult role in the storyline. Harder to cheer him on, but his choices are understandable and add depth to the impact overall.

Which scene was your favorite?

Hard to pick, but the last chapter with the Irish encounters appealed. The accents were a nice change from the predominantly English ones and the setting deepens as it's set where the author has chosen to make his home, away from his own island.

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

The scenes between Hugo and Holly are very human. Despite their differences in class and outlook, their attraction softens the harsher edges of the story, and we need to see these characters in a vulnerable predicament. This also sets up some key themes later on.

Any additional comments?

This book is imperfect, but hearing it, after you read it, is recommended. David Mitchell is a great storyteller and the performances of all six readers keep you engaged. Not a book to be heard in the background. I listened to this late each night, and this enabled full attention...

(Audible 11/21/16)

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)

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)

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)

"MYFAROG": Book Review

How far the creator of this My(thic) Fa(ntasy) Ro(le-Playing) G(ame) can be critiqued as for his creation, like many controversial artists of all sorts, I leave to the inquirer. Some have slagged off this tabletop RPG on hearsay or rumor; it's unclear how many naysayers have actually played it and found it wanting. To be sure, it's challenging. These 160 closely printed pages fill with charts and directions, even if version 2.6 is streamlined. The author encourages novices to follow suit, and as with younger players, to leave off the stamina and power modules. I am in the minority, for I have nobody to play this with. But, given my research into Ásatrú and native European spiritual and cultural pursuits, MYFAROG sparked my curiosity.

For now, I'll look at the context within which this RPG unfolds. Perhaps solo practitioners may cobble out a way to invent scenarios? I also wonder how those incarcerated, or lacking a GM and others available to join in, might deploy the characters, settings, beliefs, and actions entertainingly. I welcome any suggestions as to how players have modified or customized this for such applications, even if this logically may contradict a RPG.

You can play as various types of humans, or as a wood elf, Fairling, or god-fathered or divinely born. Traditional magic followed by natives appears there on Thule to be giving way to religion as Ásatrú. Groups on the islands correspond roughly to nine nations of ancient Europe. This text refers to a map included in the book, but this is superseded by an eponymous online site where the maps of these locations can be downloaded via pdf's.

Scanning the contents, you'll see on the first page nods to Homer, Tacitus, the Stoics, the author of Parsival, Lovecraft, and Tolkien among others. That anticipates the brickbats tossed at this game for its labeling of some races along with species beyond the Thulean natives and nobles. Surely some of these venerable storytellers also stand accused under contemporary standards promoted by many as suspect of bias and imbalance? The frank fun of such narratives generates good and bad forces, those seeking to subvert and infiltrate, and those trying to resist and fight back. In other conflicts, these may take the name of vampires, zombies, or aliens. And as the writer reminds us (156): Thule can be reassembled to be what the participants want it to be. It's not historical. Perhaps those hostile to MYFAROG did not reach this penultimate page of the text proper.

It is, however, intriguingly based on a stretch of northern Norway that may have been free of glaciers even during the last Ice Age, thanks to the Gulf Stream. Thule corresponds to this territory, and suggests that its proto-European peoples may have survived from times far before. Their struggles can parallel realms as far back as the Stone Age for some, transitioning into the Bronze, or for others, the Iron Age. "Be prepared to enter a world very different from our own" (4) is advice to take to heart. It's fantasy, and exists on its own terms, which one is welcome to tinker with.

Gender, social class, birth place, life stance, tribe, age, origins, and talents all inform one's character role. Dice serve to toss in the element of chance or luck, as in every existence. Gear must be donned and skills amassed as much of the material relates in such a barbaric location to battle, quest, attack, and defense. While the laws may not be those of our own era in regards to sexual behavior, the code is based on pre-Christian and pre-Roman standards of honor above all. Fidelity is praised; non-conformity often receives the force of consequences for resistance.

Outside the Thulean circles to be guarded, bands of rivals lurk. This creates conflict, for no land in this cosmology rests unperceived by intruders. As with any contest, the enemies are subtle and their methods sinister. Betrayals can happen, but the price for exile or outlawry is harsh indeed. Animals, animated objects, nymphs, human NPC's, trolls, and the fearsome ettins (a particularly inventive set of foes) eye Thule with their motives.

Names, a calendar of festivals and feasts, deities, and samples of character sheets fill out this volume. The level of detail may seem excessive, but as with any visionary landscape populated by the enchanted witness turned seeker, this will not seem neither superfluous nor extraneous data. (Amazon US 1/7/17)

"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 .

Alan Moore's "Jerusalem": Book Review

Renowned for his graphic narratives, Alan Moore creates this massive work of prose fiction, rivaling War and Peace in length and Ulysses in ambition. While not his first novel, it continues themes begun two decades ago in Voice of the Fire. In twelve deft chapters, Fire dramatized the evolution, in dazzling linguistic and intricate historical terms, of Moore's native Northampton. Jerusalem inflates this setting even as it narrows it down to a few blocks of the once-bustling Boroughs, which exist in a "simultaneous eternity" as developers build and then tear down this English city's core. Its working class dwellers find not an afterlife so much as a recurring existence, within a "trans-temporal chess game."

Defying the span of a brief review or facile summation, Alan Moore's evocation of his hometown sustains the meticulous composition of his graphic excursions. Lacking the brevity of a speech bubble or the compact limits of a comic-book format, Jerusalem challenges any reader's attention. Heady passages unfurl, as many of those taken up into the elevated realm of Mansoul, towering over the Boroughs (yet less apparent to those below still living) enter under the influence of Bedlam Jennies or Puck's Hats, fungal concoctions inviting comparisons to "eating fairies," amid a paranormal panorama of undines, Salamanders, and an Ultraduct. Those in this vortex may travel, in one case surpassing H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, to witness beyond "the death of day." Moore's inventive powers accelerate here, but they might bewilder, especially in the middle sections of this triple-decker tale which is a Victorian trope renewed. Rather than faltering, pressing on unveils to one’s mind many wonders.

Facing this other-world, two intermarried families comprise the central characters which Mansoul invites or repels. The Warrens arrive first. Siblings artist Alma and laborer Mick introduce us, via the largely omniscient narrator's voice, to their scrappy surroundings, after demolition of its imperial-era landmarks. Jerusalem then ambles back a century and a half, when Ern worked on London's St. Paul's. Mick, Alma and Ern receive eerie revelations from angels and Builders. Moore gradually reveals the reason for these ancient architects, and he populates the story-line with more Warrens and Vernells, who also have their own close encounters with those who hover about Mansoul. Named after John Bunyan's {Pilgrim's Progress}, "it was the very seat of war." Here, clashes summon demons.

Mansoul, made of "congealed dreams and memories," stands for Moore's version of space-time itself. "Think of your life as being like a book, a solid thing where the last line's already written while you're starting the first page. Your consciousness progresses through the narrative from its beginning to its end, and you become caught up in the illusion of events unfolding and time going by as these things are experienced by the characters within the drama." This scene's shifty teller boasts a lineage back to the apocryphal Book of Tobit. He tells Mick, swept up on a memorable "Sam O'Day ride" through the dark and the light as "an astral toddler," how "life and death" work, with admirable if surprising clarity. 

Sam continues: "In reality, however, all the words that shape the tale are fixed upon the page, the pages bound in their unvarying order." In the mind of their reader, progress occurs, but this remains an illusion. Instead, the book of life can be read over and over. So, every day "and every deed's eternal." Sam urges on his transported charge a motto Moore shares: "Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally."  Jerusalem, for Moore, represents more than his fantastic plot. It stands for a credo, one that in our world refusing conventional belief may survive past piety or doubt.

For, as an eighth-century monk learns, when he tries to center Northampton at the exact crossroads of England, hauling a stone from the real Jerusalem all the way to St. Gregory's Church, mysticism can tempt earthly calculations and thwart clerical confidences. The uncanny interactions the Warrens and the Vernells endure closer to the present (having taken ten years for Moore to write, most of this action stops in 2006) echo. A freed slave from America, the son of immigrants from post-war Sierra Leone, Ern's demented son, Buffalo Bill, Oliver Cromwell, the author of "Amazing Grace" and the members of the band Bauhaus fill the parade of figures who pass through or set up home as mortals in Northampton. What connects them, surmises Moore, is a gothic, altered, visionary sense. 

Their exchanges upend conventions. Moore favors his own detached telling more than the chronologically faithful linguistic ventriloquism of dialects and vocabularies that kindled Voice of the Fire, but some chapters in this one-volume trilogy adapt their own styles. Notably, a play starring Bunyan, the mad poet of nature John Clare, James Joyce's daughter and psychiatric patient Lucia, her friend Samuel Beckett, St. Thomas Becket, a "half-caste woman" elsewhere appearing as Marla Stiles and a married couple stirring up the Warren-Vernell mix demonstrates Moore's knack. He creates a Beckettian drama even as he satirizes its content, improving on its form as he links it to local history. 

And, as with the analogy that other Sam shows, characters repeat and return throughout this unvarying book's order. It's not all gloom. Humor surfaces, whether poking fun at Alma's scarecrow appearance, the simply wrong name of Newlife granted a hideous corporate block, or an everyday night down the pub. Hapless Ben Parritt "looked round appraisingly at the establishment's half-dozen other clients, motionless upon their stools like ugly novelty-set chessmen, sidelined and morose."

Moore varies approaches, when he lets one character late on burst into rhyme, or earlier when Lucia's monologue descends into a verbal morass of Finnegans Wake, fifty daunting pages mirroring the opening of Fire, when Moore reduced the consciousness of a Neolithic boy to 4000 stunted words. Here, Moore opens up rather than contracts his expressions; that contrast will weary some while exciting many. A reader may wish to pause, and let this epic find its rhythms within oneself. 

Moore never seems to flag in this telling. One part begins with Bob Goldman's gumshoe parody before settling into a more Moore-ish pace. But this may be an inevitable capitulation to the weight of the imaginative universe built here that threatens to crush any single inhabitant's utterances or ego. 

In this gigantic production, Moore avoids cliché, he regales us with a local chronicle demanding immersion into its erudition and he plays fairly with expectations. How this new Jerusalem ends will be discovered by the dogged, but the conclusion, circling back to the invitation offered Mick by Alma, satisfies and stuns. Having announced retirement from the graphic arena, in this printed spectacle, Moore dazzles. (Amazon US 9-13-16)

Adam Roberts' "Salt": Book Review

 

I wanted a smart parable about anarchism and I have already read Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed." Adam Robert's debut novel from 2000 came up in my search and it sounded intriguing. Obvious predecessors are Le Guin, and as he acknowledges, Nabokov's wonderful "Bend Sinister" (which personally I enjoyed more than this novel or Le Guin's work, as an aside).

But Roberts opens with a powerful evocation, with religious as well as chemical references, about the powers of salt, and how sodium brings humans closer to heaven in its ubiquity, and towards hell through chlorine. This recalls many SF descriptions of hostile battle and unforgiving terrain, as well as the gloom accompanying conflicts.

Analogies flourish in this narrative, and Roberts alternates the hierarchies of the Senaan society, one of those who have colonized the planet Salt, with another tribe, as it were, a nation of Alsists who have Magyar names and an anarchic way of life, where "to have love" in its brief manifestation sexually is about the only thing that can be possessed, according to their rigid refusal of any claim to ownership of anything. Roberts introduces Barlei and Petja as spokesmen for the two clashing nations. Zealotry fuels the Bible-based civilization of Senaan, sort of a combination of Zionist remaking of a desert into a garden, and a Spartan regime bent on military triumph and fierce patriotism and class divisions.

Neither the Alsists nor the Senaans come off as very appealing. I liked Petja proclaiming how his rivals have internalized the law, so they cannot function outside of their own mental construction and practical prison. One's sympathies may be with Alsists in the beginning, but that protagonist on behalf of his side shows his folly, understandably if predictably, when escorting in rather ambiguous fashion the stranded representative, Rhoda Titus, from the Senaan's hostile camp. War ensues and violence consumes both nations. The course of the novel plays out depressingly.

The decision of Roberts to shift to a third narrator to close this stern debate shifts the balance, and while this appears to open up another sequel, it leaves the reader a bit let down. The absence of humor, unless unintentional, in the Alsists' stolid refusal to compromise, played off the Senaan elevation of duty and order and conformity, drags down both cultures to similarly grim levels. While this is Roberts' intent, it makes "Salt" bitter. (Amazon US 1-12-16)

Ruth Francisco's "Amsterdam 2020": Book Review

This sequel to Amsterdam 2012 continues the resistance by a few against the Islamist takeover of Eurabia. That first novel focused on America, despite starting in Amsterdam, where murders sparked a worldwide revolt that led to much of Europe capitulating to Muslim regimes and submission to their demands by the remaining Jews and Christians and secular residents. Among these, as well as some liberal Muslims, the Dutch fight back against the Islamic Republic of Holland. Here, Katrien, who converts with her family--as many do---takes the name Salima, but goes underground as Lina.

Her dual existence is of course complicated. The first novel made links between Ann Aulis in Southern California and Anne Frank, and similarly, another young woman--younger than Ann--faces the predicament of an arranged marriage with a leading kingpin from a prominent Turkish-Dutch Muslim clan. Teenaged Lina must face the challenge of the Resistance to infiltrate this family as a new bride, while trying to figure out the true motives of her husband, fifty-two year old Kazan.

On her author's blog, Ruth Francisco tells of finishing the book, started in 2013, in the past year of the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan murders, and the San Bernardino CA shootings. While many reviewed her first novel on Amazon and dismissed it as far-fetched or needlessly provocative, readers intrigued by the dystopian scenarios of Muslim domination imagined in Robert Ferrigno's Assassin trilogy or Michel Houellebecq's similarly barbed Submission (both authors' works reviewed by me) may welcome this. I found the writer's voice for Ann earlier and Lina here engaging, even if in this 2020 installment, the choice to make a transition between her narration and a third-person indirect for another key character sometimes a bit bewildering, as chronology is no longer straightforward.

The supporting figures get fleshed out more, as in Kazan's school friend at a Swiss academy, and humor in the pranks played there, or the "plucked and marinated" chicken the oiled and depilitated virginal Salima feels herself on her wedding day, offer some needed levity to a tense thriller. The delight Ruth Francisco has in plotting out the geopolitical and practical ramifications of Islamist social power gives her details more depth here, and from inside the divided Dutch culture, we understand the difficulty the Muslim authorities have in getting even their fellow congregants to submit to sharia law and all the puritanical trivia enforced on the Westernized Muslims themselves.

I also liked the Resistance scenes. Many of these were pitched for action more than insight, but how the burkas are deployed by men and women alike against the Islamic police and military makes for clever encounters. I felt there was more of an attempt by Ruth Francisco to delve into the intricacies of how an Islamic imposition would play out in daily life, and how individuals react and endure. Again, the parallels to Nazi occupation are evident, and the Dutch setting draws out "secret annexes" and hidden rooms, traditions still clung to by some Netherlanders, effectively to enhance a setting.

Suffice to say that Ruth Francisco slows down here to let us understand Kazan better, and how Lina (under more than one name or identity) relates to her new spouse. While as before some leaps in the tale-telling and the jumbled order challenge the reader, headings break up the chapters and dates are there to guide the confused. It's not perfect, but it's intelligent. This expands in dramatic fashion, more smoothly in a narrative than 2012 if bumpy as a thriller. (Chance meetings and just-in-time interventions make this a bit melodramatic at times.) The inherent interest in how Islamists might expand their caliphate and how those within it and from the outside might oppose it sustains itself. I am not sure of more to come is on the way from the Amsterdam series, but this is enjoyable. 
(Amazon US 1-12-16)