Exit Strategy by Martha Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Murderbot Has a Fraught Reunion Murderbot is on its way to reunite with Dr. Mensah so as to hand its benefactor some data clips to help her nail the villainous corporation GrayCris when it discovers that GrayCris has accused Dr. Mensah of corporate espionage (a classic case of obfuscating projection because GrayCris’ motto is We Kill You and Take Your Stuff while Dr. Mensah is the “president” of a mild, quasi-utopic culture called Preservation) and then apparently kidnapped her to hold her for ransom and or to lure Murderbot into a trap. What’s Murderbot to do? Something risky like the stupid humans it always finds itself dealing with? Murderbot—a uniquely autonomous construct organic-mechanical security unit who doesn’t need to eat, drink, or sleep, can turn its pain receptors up or down and interface instantly with ships, drones, bots, and the like, and has guns that can shoot out of its arms, but who has been modified to look more human, including the ability to grow its hair, and who has learned much about human behavior by watching thousands of hours of dramas—is still uneasy around humans and has a whole knot of confused emotions attached to the prospect of meeting Dr. Mensah again, because “I didn't know what Mensah was to me.” Because my favorite parts of Martha Wells’ Murderbot stories are the conversations between her autonomous (rogue!) security unit and its various organic and inorganic interlocutors, this fourth novella in the series, Exit Strategy (2018), starts slowly, because for a long time Murderbot is on its own trying to figure out what’s going on with Dr. Mensah and GrayCris, checking news feeds, thinking, and planning. Luckily, the extended climax scene, starting with “Operation Not Actually a Completely Terrible Plan” and taking place on a corporate hub (hotels, transportation tubes, space port, security forces, etc.) with many people doing their normal business while a select number of hostiles try to ratfuck “team Preservation” is vivid, suspenseful, unpredictable, scary, and exciting. Wells has made us really care about Murderbot and its (fragile) human friends and really loathe GrayCris and to a lesser extent the Bond Company who originally owned Murderbot (“The Company is like an evil vending machine, you put money in, and it does what you want unless someone else puts in more money and tells it to stop”). And the resolution is satisfying. Throughout, there are, as usual, cool lines aplenty, like: “How humans decide what to do with their arms on a second-by-second basis I have no idea.” “I entertained myself by infiltrating the hotel security system while I waited.” “We humans tend to think that because a bot or construct looks human its ultimate goal is to become human.” “That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.” “I hate having emotions about real humans.” “I made the ultimate sacrifice: ‘You can hug me if you want to.’” And Kevin R. Free reads the novella audiobook perfectly. I’ve really enjoyed binging on Murderbot novellas (like Murderbot watching umpteen episodes of Sanctuary Moon!), but I’ll take a wee break before diving in again. (And I do think that the first four novellas at least could be combined into a single novel, as they form a kind of self-contained story arc.) View all my reviews
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Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Murderbot Befriends a Pet Robot Murderbot wants to sneak down onto an abandoned terraforming facility orbiting the planet Milu to get data proving that the awful GrayCris company (motto “profit by killing everybody and taking their stuff”) was doing something like illegally mining alien “strange” synthetics. Such data should help Murderbot’s benefactor Dr. Mensah in her legal fight with GrayCris. To further its plan, Murderbot (a security unit construct comprised of cloned human tissue, mechanical parts like guns that shoot out of its arms, and a self-hacked governor module that makes it autonomous) has to “befriend” a cute and loyal “pet” human-form robot called Miki, who’s “friends” with some researchers whose company has bought the former GrayCris terraforming facility and who are going to investigate the place with a couple augmented human security consultants. Without revealing itself visually, Murderbot approaches Miki (via feed) as wanting to help the robot’s human friends stay safe, so as to invisibly hitch a ride with them down to the terraforming installation. What could go wrong? Well, nasty corporations and stupid humans being involved and Martha Wells exceling at writing clean, suspenseful, unpredictable stories, in her third Murderbot novella, Rogue Protocol (2018), the free agent SecUnit soon enough finds itself in the middle of a “clusterfuck shitstorm” complete with fearsome three-meter-tall, four-armed combat bots and hostage researchers and has to (instantly) decide whether or not to intervene to save the lives of people who aren’t even ITS humans, when doing so will reveal itself, and it doesn’t want anyone to know it’s a rogue SecUnit. Parts of the novella read a bit like the first Alien movie or two minus, you know, the aliens. As in the other Murderbot novellas, neat lines abound: “I hate caring about stuff, but apparently once you start, you can’t just stop.” “Humans are so fucking unreliable when it comes to maintaining data.” “I was tired of trying to be human. I needed a break.” “Somewhere there has to be a happy medium between a terrifying murder machine and being infantilized.” “There was something about this place that made my human skin prickle.” Murderbot is a great character, given to ironic, negative, self-deprecating comments like, “Who knew that being a heartless killing machine would present so many dilemmas?” Of course, Murderbot is anything but a heartless killing machine! It wants to protect stupid humans from themselves, only kills bad humans as a last resort, and its favorite hobby is watching human dramas, with potentially problematic results: “When most of your training and tactical thinking comes from adventure stories…” I like the times when it uses audio clips from the dramas in its database to trick hostile humans, or when it rewatches an episode of its favorite drama, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, to chill. Kevin R. Free does a great innocent, cheerful, sweet Miki (“Okaaay!”), and a suitably indeterminate gender Murderbot, and I am really getting into the SecUnit not being male or female but it. Back to my Murderbot Binge and the next novella! View all my reviews
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Murderbot Researches Its Past—with Mixed Results Murderbot needs to find the answer to a question: Just what happened some time ago when it apparently killed 57 people? To return to the scene of its supposed crime, a station called RaviHyral, the security unit has hacked its way onto a research transport bot who turns out to be way more powerful and sophisticated than anything Murderbot can control and who wants to help Murderbot out of curiosity and—is it possible between such beings as they—friendship. Should the loner Murderbot trust ART (“Asshole Research Transport”)? Does it have any choice? As Artificial Condition (2017), the second Murderbot Diaries novella, gets going, author Martha Wells efficiently works in some background from the first novella (All Systems Red [2016]). Murderbot is a SecUnit construct comprised of organic cloned human bits and many mechanical parts, made to slavishly and expendably serve without eating, drinking, or sleeping as bodyguard or laborer etc. any human who owns its contract. Murderbot, however, is a unique SecUnit in having hacked its governor module to free itself from human control. Murderbot is subject to anxiety and depression and is uncomfortable around humans, fearing to harm or fail to protect them or to have them see through its assumed identity as an augmented human, as the revelation of its true nature as an autonomous “rogue” SecUnit would likely lead to it being “repaired” or scrapheaped. At the end of All Systems Red, the benevolent scientist Dr. Mensah bought the SecUnit, intending to give it a free life in her home Preservation system, but Murderbot sneaked away, not wanting to live in a culture where SecUnits are unnecessary and not wanting to get too close to its human benefactor. Wells imagines a space opera future in which humans, augmented humans, and various bots (hauler, combat, etc.) and constructs (SecUnits, ComfortUnits, etc.) work for a variety of corporations or startups or cultures while competing (especially in or near Corporation Rim) for exploitation rights to new planets and, illicitly, for off limits alien remnants or strange synthetics. What about gender? Well, it seems that women and men are generally equal as there are male and female scientists, engineers, leaders, and security consultants. As for Murderbot, it has no sexual organs or desires and sure wants to stay that way. Do NOT mistake Murderbot for a sex bot! It is definitely an “it.” But because Wells is a woman and her story first person, when I read the first novella, I tended to “see” Murderbot as female and had to remember to avoid female pronouns in thinking or writing about it. But because I listened to this second novella as an audiobook, and the (excellent) reader Kevin R. Free is male, I started to kind of see Muderbot as male. It’s my problem, having grown up in a gender divided world, as Wells doesn’t give Murderbot any of our stereotypical gender traits. With the kibitzing help of ART (who from a distance advises Murderbot on acting human etc.), Murderbot gets hired as an augmented human security consultant called Eden (of “indeterminate gender”) to protect some young and naïve technologists (“stupid humans”) as they attempt to retrieve their wrongfully confiscated data concerning some strange synthetics from a ruthless woman called Tlacey who will likely try to kill them, all on the very same installation where Murderbot supposedly killed the 57 people... Wells tells a clean, fast-paced, compelling story in the voice of the sympathetic and sarcastic Murderbot in such a way that it’s an entertaining pleasure to read on and find out what will happen. Many cool lines, like: “There are different kinds of unrealistic things. One kind takes you away from reality, and the other kind makes you forget that everyone is afraid of you.” “I felt that this is the point where a human would sigh, so I sighed.” “Young humans can be impulsive. The trick is keeping them around long enough to become old humans.” I like how Murderbot says negative things about itself like, "I wish being a construct made me less irrational than the average human, but you may have noticed that this is not the case," but always acts in the best interests of its (often stupid) human clients. Interestingly, Murderbot’s favorite pastime is watching human entertainment dramas (“media”) like the umpteen episodes of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Murderbot tells us that there are no dramas with security unit main characters, because according to accepted wisdom they have no point of view. But Wells’ novella is just such a drama! (Actually, it is a stretch to believe that no one in Wells’ fictional world would imagine Murderbot type characters in a future where there are so many robots and cyborgs.) The Murderbot Diaries series is similar to Anne Leckie’s Ancillary trilogy, in having an inhuman, construct narrator/protagonist with super physical and sensory and mental and communicative abilities trying to pose as human and really being at least as human as most of the other characters, organic or otherwise. Though Wells’ Murderbot stories and hero are more humorous and straightforward than Leckie’s Breq. Kevin R. Free reads it all really well. A neat story: interesting, page turning, unpredictable, developing, exciting, moving. And neat themes: What is human? How helpful is it to delve into one’s traumatic past? I'm looking forward to the future episodes, er, novellas! (My only complaint is that I wish they'd release a complete set of all the novellas in one book.) View all my reviews
The Dawn of Political History: Thucydides and the Peloponnesian Wars by Fred Baumann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Devastating Fruits of Ignorance, Fear, and Honor I should say first that although I enjoyed and learned from Professor Fred Baumann’s The Dawn of Political History: Thucydides and the Peloponnesian Wars (2012), a compact series of eight roughly 30-minute lectures about Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (which lasted for 27 years in the 5th century BC), and it did make me WANT to read Thucydides, Baumann felt so concisely complete that he made me not want to HURRY to read Thucydides… The audiobook belongs to The Modern Scholar series of lectures by various professors of various fields. Dr. Baumann, a professor of political philosophy at Kenyon College, speaks well, with much (but not too much) enthusiasm, clear pronunciation, good pace, and few distracting mannerisms (apart from an occasional confirming, “Yeah?”). Unlike with the Great Courses series, the Modern Scholar lectures don’t impose catchy music or canned applause to start or end each lecture. Really, anyone interested in the war between Sparta and Athens or ancient Greek culture should find a lot of enrichment here. Dr. Baumann begins by telling us that Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War—written some 2000 years ago—is the best book on politics he knows and that he’ll be using the Crawley English translation of the Greek original. He’ll analyze Thucydides as a work of political philosophy rather than as a work of art or military strategy. Then he leads us through Thucydides’ history book by book, pointing out important events, elements, ideas, and figures. One of the high points for me was Dr. Baumann covering the spectacular debacle that was the Athenian “invasion” of Sicily and saying that at times reading Thucydides is like reading or watching a horror story, where the characters do something REALLY stupid, so, because you care what happens to them, you’re (internally) shouting, “Don’t go in that house again!” Only in the case of Thucydides, you’re shouting at the Athenians, “Don’t put all your ships in the harbor!” and “Go home now while you still can!” Another high point was learning about Alcibaides, the most fascinating figure, a celebrity athlete, friend-student of Socrates, purely ambitious, prodigiously charismatic, consummately conning, a supreme manipulator-schemer who defected from Athens to Sparta, from Sparta almost back to Athens but then to Persia, always getting in good with the powers that be and getting them to follow his advice. One wonders how he got away with as much as he did and yearns for a book or movie about him. Here are a few of the other interesting things I learned from these lectures: *Athenian Thucydides approaches his history (much of which he was a participant of or witness to) objectively, almost never giving his opinion about events or people, so you have to get at what he thinks by looking at which events he chooses to relate and at which events he chooses to juxtapose them with. For example, after he relates Pericles’ famous funeral oration featuring an almost utopic Athens, he covers in vivid detail the terrible plague that soon killed Pericles shortly after his famous speech and helped doom Athens. *Thucydides’ work is a political history because it teaches us about how people behave in a crisis. *Athens and Sparta were prodigiously contrasting cultures: Athens cosmopolitan, innovative, democratic, outward looking, nautical, expansive, etc., and Sparta provincial, conservative, oligarchic, inward looking, land-based, stable, etc. Athens on the surface had a “realistic” view of human nature that let them treat treaties flexibly, whereas Sparta on the surface had an ideal view that made them act “honorably.” In fact, Athens did act for honor, while Sparta could be flexible with treaties. And finally both were alike in going to war from fear, Athens fearing that if they didn’t continue expanding their empire their colonies would rebel, Sparta fearing that an expanding Athens would swallow them. *People are crazy, acting against their own self-interest, especially when subject to fear or honor. *Pericles’s successor Cleon was (for Thucydides) a demagogue, appealing to and fanning the fear of the Athenian people, and saying that only he could save them and that every other politician except him would lie to them so they should trust only him. Not unlike certain thug politicians of our present time… *Athens had numerous chances to end the war but repeatedly rejected Spartan overtures. *The war devastated both cultures (and probably helped prepare the way for Alexander the Great). *Problems with democracy (overreach, martial folly, etc.) happen especially in GOOD times. Baumann closes by explaining why we should read Thucydides: 1) Lessons on statesmanship and the relations of political reality to morality and of international to domestic politics. 2) Exploration of what it is to be a democracy. (Thucydides was an honest critic of democracy and therefore a true friend of it.) 3) Lessons on how to be and how people are, without any Christian salvation. View all my reviews
The Veiled Throne by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Cooking, Conversations, and Cross-Cultural Exchange The Veiled Throne: The Dandelion Dynasty Book 3 (2021) is a nearly 1000-page epic fantasy novel whose long set piece climax is a three-part cooking contest between rival restaurants that even the gods of Dara show up to watch. Although the novel does also feature infiltrations, massacres, and escapes, as well as a large-scale naval battle involving a gargantuan city ship, a submersible ship, a large-screen shadow-puppet show, explosives, hand-to-hand combat, cow-dragons, and whales, author Ken Liu seems most interested in cooking and conversations—about politics, love, philosophy, strategy, engineering, storytelling, truth, taste, drama, disguise, parents and children, teachers and students, literacy vs. orality, genius vs. nature, character-based writing vs. alphabet writing, accommodation vs. war, and more. The Dandelion Dynasty is closer to traditional sf than to traditional epic fantasy, in that the books are novels of ideas based on the concept that the universe is knowable, with biological/scientific explanations for the seemingly fantastic creatures (like the flight and fiery breath of the cow-dragon garanafin) and convincing cultures (art, religion, war, language, cuisine, ethics, funeral customs, gender roles, families, and foundation myths) extrapolated from different environments and histories. No magic. Although gods do play a role, at times trying to influence events, they generally fail to prevent the mortals from doing what they want to do and mostly serve as a chorus for the action. It has been called a silkpunk epic, with technology, devices, and inventions based on scientific principles, e.g., silkmotic (static electricity) lamps and lances, airships, submersible ships, programmable mechanical carts, a roller coaster, etc. The main plot starts eight years after the events of the second book, The Wall of Storms (2016). Two years remain in the uneasy ten-year truce between the “barbaric” Lyucu invaders of two Daran islands (Unredeemed Dara) and the rest of the “civilized” Daran islands (Free Dara), with Daran Empress Jia still wielding power as Regent for still “unready” to rule twenty-year-old Phyro, while mollifying the Lyucu occupiers by giving them tribute and ignoring their atrocities and attempts to use pirates to kidnap scholars and craftsmen from Free Dara. As usual, Jia is working on a secret scheme “to uproot the weeds of war and cultivate the plants of peace” despite knowing it will alienate her from her people and family. (To—unfairly—generate suspense, Liu narrates much of the novel from Jia’s point of view so that whenever we’re in her head she avoids thinking about the details of her it’s-fine-to-fight-evil-with-evil plan, apart from a highly addictive drug she’s developing.) The conquering Lyucu stuck on their two occupied islands are divided between their accommodation faction wanting to treat the local Darans as subjects rather than slaves and wanting to learn Daran writing and technology and to incorporate the Darans into their government and army and the hardline faction wanting to destroy the language, religion, bodies, and souls of the Darans to turn them into obedient slaves and their towns into pastures. The Lyucu ruler Tanvanaki is trying to strengthen the accommodators with the help of her righthand thane Goztan (whose son Kinri is secretly learning Daran history and language and culture from a Daran scholar), but the hardcore haters are persistent and potent. At the end of the second novel, Thera abdicated as Empress of Dara to sail on a desperate mission with about 1000 Daran soldiers and scholars and her husband to be, Takval, scion of the Agon (ancient enemies of the Lyucu) to the scrublands on the far side of the world across the Wall of Storms to make an alliance between Dara and the Agon which will (she hopes) end in the Agon conquering the Lyucu so they’ll be unable to send another invasion fleet with which to complete their conquest of Dara. In this third book Thera is discovering the unexpected costs of merging her Darans with the native Agon. Whew. Liu develops all those situations and sub-plots through a rotating array of compelling characters from various classes and cultures. Most of his villains have appealing qualities, as his heroes have disappointing flaws. One of my favorites is Rati Yera, an elderly, illiterate, wheelchair-bound, graverobber-inventor and the leader of the do-gooding Blossom Gang of street performers, but I also like the earnest Kinri, drawn to Daran culture despite being the son of an important Lyucu thane, and the naïve Princess Fara, aka Dandelion, who likes art and stories, unlike her martial, older brother Phyro who’s all, “Free occupied Dara from the yoke of barbarian oppression NOW!” It’s very much a novel of cross-cultural conflict and influence. Many Lyucu see Daran writing (“word scars”) as an evil force stifling the natural breath of the spoken voice, farming as soul-destroying, and Darans as cowardly, sneaky, scheming villains, while many Darans view the Lyucu as illiterate, savage, sadistic, treacherous monsters. As characters say, “In war you tend to become like the enemy.” Indeed, the Darans are working on raising Lyucu garanafin, while the Lyucu are working on adopting Daran military technology. Is it possible to merge with the other by sharing non-martial things like language and cuisine? Where should one’s loyalty lie when one has a parent from each culture? Will it all end up in an Adrian Tchaikovsky-like salvation via enriching cultural interchange or in a mutually destructive apocalypse? We’ll have to read the fourth novel to find out. Liu too often indulges in easy plot contrivance, moments where careful characters get sloppy with disguises, or shrewd characters get gullible with untrustworthy villains, etc. But there are also many more impressive scenes (like the cooking contest) and many cool lines like these: “To hold competing ideals might save your life.” “Why should we listen to the gods or to dead scholars? What do they know of being alive?” “History is always a story told through the present.” “Young people who haven’t experienced suffering easily romanticize the past.” “One of the best things about teaching is learning something new from one's student. Audiobook reader Michael Kramer does a professional job of enhancing the story. By the end of this book, Liu has set up situations with different sets of characters in different places, all of which ought to come together in a massive climax in the last novel, so I’m looking forward to the (41 hour, eek!) conclusion to the series, Speaking Bones (2022). View all my reviews
A Red Death by Walter Mosley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “You’ve got a big problem, son.” July 1953. World War II veteran Ezekial “Easy” Rawlins is sweeping one of his secretly owned buildings, the Magnolia Street Apartments near Watts, when he does some provocative foreshadowing: “Everything was as beautiful as always … it wasn’t going to last long. Soon Poinsettia would be in the street, and I’d have the morning sun in my jail cell.” Five years ago, the affair of The Devil in the Blue Dress (1990) gained Easy $10,000, under the table money with which he bought some apartments to rent out under an assumed name, and now a disheveled, persistent white IRS agent given to calling Easy “son” starts investigating him for tax evasion. As Mofass, the man who collects rents for Easy (and acts like his boss to hide that Easy is the owner) tells him, “They got you by the nuts, Mr. Rawlins.” Meanwhile, EttaMae Harris, a beautiful, strong, sexy woman Easy still loves fifteen years after she married his murderous best friend Mouse, has just left Mouse and moved from Texas to LA with her cute son LaMarque. Who knows what Mouse would do were he to show up and find EttaMae and Easy together? Then a fervid anti-communist FBI agent named Darryl T. Craxton offers to dismiss Easy’s tax troubles if our man will just get to know Chaim Wenzler, a Jewish union organizer who’s helping the First African Church in charitable activities. Soon murder victims and Easy are turning up together, making the LA police suspect him of being a killer. Like many private eyes in hardboiled detective stories, Easy is an observant and laconic first-person narrator, drinks too much, gets plenty of straight sex but remains single, is observant and thoughtful, is not a sadist but can deal out punishment in self-defense, has a handy gun or two, and has a moral compass more active than most people’s around him. Unlike many typical private eyes, Easy is not actually a detective but a favor exchanger, helping people in his community when they’re in trouble with the law or each other. And he’s telling his story some thirty years after the events occurred. Also unlike many genre private eyes, Easy is African American, and many of the most interesting parts of this second novel in his series, A Red Death (1991), come from Walter Mosley’s depiction of 1950s era Los Angeles as experienced by people of color. This novel says some interesting things about African Americans’ identification with Jesus and the back to Africa movement. I really liked the concise and vivid descriptions of the different shades and kinds of skin color among the African American community: e.g., “His color was dark brown but bright, as if a powerful lamp shone just below his skin,” “Jackson's skin was so black that it glinted blue in the full sun,” and “Mouse's color was a dusty pecan.” As the novel progresses, Easy finds it increasingly difficult to steer clear of the IRS agent, to satisfy his FBI handler (“I'd become a flunky for the FBI”), and to avoid self-loathing while becoming good friends with Chaim and sleeping with Mouse’s wife. He nonetheless has the time (and energy) to engage in some one-night-stand action and to visit his good friends the Penas, who run a Mexican luncheon café and take care of his abused and mute adopted son Jesus, as well as to learn about communism, blacklists, and the like. I liked the first Easy Rawlins novel and was looking forward to this second one. Mosely has an ear for dialogue, writes concise and vivid descriptions, is good at evoking 1950s era LA, and weaves potent themes about race, religion, the Cold War, and human nature into his book. But… despite Michael Boatman’s professional reading of the audiobook, I didn’t enjoy this novel. I got tired of Easy’s (easy) self-recriminations and self-condemnations, didn’t enjoy his ability to have sex with near strangers while supposedly sleeping with the woman of his dreams, and was unimpressed by his detective abilities. And I found the denouement too speedy after the gradual development towards it. I will listen to other Easy Rawlins mysteries but won’t be in a hurry to return to him. View all my reviews
Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Innocents Abroad in an Apocalyptic Appalachia (?) Hiding out in some derelict cabin in some mountainous swampy woods (maybe Appalachia?) in some time (late 19th or early 20th century?), siblings Culla and Rinthy Holme (an ironic family name for the homeless pair) become young, unready parents of their (!?) baby. Culla can’t accept “the chap,” “a beet-colored creature that looked to him like a skinned squirrel,” and takes it from the labor-drained mother (his teenaged sister!) and abandons it in the woods and tells her it died. A nosy (saintly?) “gnomic” itinerant tinker (who mule-like pulls his own wagon and but for cocoa sells everything, including books with “sorry illustrations” of “grotesquely coital couples”) follows Culla’s tracks, rescues (steals?) the baby and brings it to some town to find a nurse for it. When Rinthy discovers that the baby didn’t die and looks at her brother, he panics and runs away, and Rinthy sets off looking for her baby by hunting the tinker. Outer Dark (1968) then depicts the siblings’ contrasting odysseys—Culla escaping, Rinthy searching—through “a landscape of the damned,” where sunlight is “an agony” and the dark more distressing than the dark of blindness: “The flowers in the dooryard have curled and drawn as if poisoned by dark and there is a mockingbird to tell what he knows of night.” This novel is almost reminiscent of McCarthy’s later The Road (2006), though that book’s father and son team is more poignant than Rinthy and Culla, who are not exactly traveling together. The ignorant, innocent siblings wander through insular, shabby towns and past ramshackle, isolated dwellings set in a beautiful and hostile natural world, encountering an assortment of grotesque denizens, from families to solitary widows and widowers. While people mostly are kind and helpful to Rinthy, they are often suspicious of and hostile to Culla, blaming him for any local crime or catastrophe. Indeed, one of the men Culla meets in his peregrinations tells him, “I don't believe you're no bad feller and no lucky feller neither.” It is interesting how calamity and mayhem accompany Culla without his fully being aware of it. Woven here and there through those parallel road trips are the murderous travels of three demonic figures, comprised of a philosophical bearded man and his two acolytes, one mute and one mentally challenged. With casual efficiency and atrocious good humor, they kill anyone they meet. Are they following or leading Culla and or Rinthy? McCarthy wouldn’t have either or both siblings run into the three demons, would he? And while we’re asking, will Rinthy ever find her baby or Culla Rinthy? Did the tinker manage to find a good home for the newborn “chap”? Will the baby redeem the fallen world? It's impressive how McCarthy gets us to root for the (probably) incestuous brother and sister, homeless orphans without anything of their own in the world. Perhaps Rinthy is superior to Culla because she at least wants something—her baby—and ever retains a natural, sacred grace despite (or because of) her bare feet, threadbare raiment, and lactating aching breasts: “She gave him a little curtsying nod, ragged, shoeless, deferential, and halfderanged, and yet moving in an almost palpable amnion of propriety.” The novel is vintage Cormac McCarthy: uneducated and ignorant but intelligent and articulate people engage in laconic, demotic, almost poetic conversations; work and craft are carefully depicted; apocalyptic natural settings stun the mind’s eye; amoral killers operate for opaque purposes; unpredictable and awful violence suddenly erupts; godless biblical similes compare people to lone acolytes, trembling penitents, witless paracletes, ruinous prophets, disciples of darkness, gospel miscreants, crippled marionettes, the morbidly tranquil drowned, spiders hanging in the darkness of a well; and everything combines to evoke a feeling of impending doom. He writes grand set piece scenes of catastrophe and terror, like a ferry crossing a raging river at night or some men driving a vast polychrome tide of hogs along a bluff or Culla finding the wrong campfire or even Rinthy modestly seeing a doctor. Ed Sala is a great reader for McCarthy, because his gravelly voice convincingly handles the long sentences and difficult words and dialect-inflected dialogue and evokes the ominous significance of it all. If you like McCarthy’s overwrought, bleak, and beautiful writing, you would like this novel. It might traumatize people who have had babies or wanted babies. It might disturb pious Christians who believe that God knows what he’s doing and has us act according to His divine plan and who believe that preachers are efficacious and sinners pernicious. Despite its awful things, I found reading this novel to be a strange pleasure: “Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen and near mute with dew. On their chairs in such immobility, these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.” View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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