The Doomsday Book - Elegy in a country churchyard...

The more days that pass since my completion of Connie Willis' The Doomsday Book, the less I find that I want to say about it. Was it an enjoyable read? The last 200 pages perhaps. Did I like it, all along its torpid meanderings? No, no I didn't. Maybe that phrase "torpid meanderings" is all that needs to be writ. Maybe I'm concerned that once I get rolling with "some" of what I though about this novel, I'll get carried away reviewing terrain that I'd just as soon be done with.

I don't feel like I need to warn of spoilers ahead, since all the information found here is also available on the back cover of the mass-market paperback edition. Along with a pithy comment about "the triumph of the human spirit..." I kid you not. Which may well be my greatest criticism of the text: the novel takes around 400 pages to get to the shocking revelation that we all expected on page one. The endless, tedious buildup to something that we already knew seems more than a little pointless. The characters certainly weren't well developed enough for us to care about their gradual realization of the situation. But I digress...

The Doomsday Book gives you two stories for the price of, well, like five better ones: a near-future narrative of an (*gasp*) influenza epidemic and subsequent government quarantine, and a 14th century narrative dealing with two weeks of, yes, the flu, as well as other more major illnesses encountered by the novel's young protagonist. Time travel has inexplicably been developed in a society that seems remarkably unchanged by and uninterested in the feat. One competing university faction recklessly hurls a 20 year old grad student, alone, into the 1300's. Was I the only person who thought this sounded like risky business, perhaps making it a little difficult to suspend disbelief? No, no I wasn't - in fact we put up with the rheumatic moaning of the novel's best supporting actor (of whom on completing the tome I feel I know little more about than I did in the first chapter) for most of the 300 pages not spent depicting just how banal the 1300's were. We're strung between endless worrying in the 21st century, and endless worrying in the 14th century, with very little action, character development or interesting ideas in between.

I must admit that Willis' account of the black plague was compelling. The final quarter of the novel that actually describes Kivrin's desperate struggle to save the pathetically flawed residents of her village was moving. As was, for me at least, the character of Father Roche: probably my favorite character in the novel. I could have done with much more of this: a fuller, more developed 14th century narrative - fuller development of Kivrin even. Or a shorter novel that poignently told the interesting story. A novel is a frame: the narrative begins and ends at carefully seleted points. Not so here. The text would have benefited from some significant cropping. I could have done with much, much less of unfunny, absurd "comic relief" and pointless, transparent "suspense" in the 21st century.

Maybe I was looking for something that wasn't there... Where was the "big idea?" Was it time travel? Was it that "folks is folks," even in the 14th century? Was it the human cost of epidemic disease? It certainly couldn't have been the painfully superficial musings about God, and bad things happening to good people...

I'm sorry - the Hugo/Nebula vein has provided some truly marvelous reading. It has also exalted some duds. I feel like I could go on with this review, but I'm just really ready to be done with this one...

Final Grade: B-
Re-read? No.

The Generator Speaks

Next Train:

Journey Into China - National Geographic Society

Dated coffee-table book reading, anyone?

The Generator Speaks

Next train:

The Doomsday Book - Connie Willis

Farewell, My Lovely

“I thought of a lot of things. It got darker. The glare of the red neon sign spread farther and farther across the ceiling… I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room...”

What is it that so draws me into these novels? Have you read Raymond Chandler? He wrote Farewell, My Lovely in 1940, one year after crafting his masterful The Big Sleep. The exhaustingly lame schticks featuring solitary private detectives sitting behind their desks, cigarettes smoking through the slit-light of Venetian blinds are all pale shadows of Chandler’s Noir paladin, Phillip Marlowe. Here, in Chandler’s sodium-lit, Santa Ana scoured night streets of 1930’s Los Angeles, a truly 20^th century archetype is born… Something more than Byronic, he is our broken Lancelot, our Childe Rowland, yes, our Dante, and our street-running Leatherstocking with a gat. Ah, Marlowe… His name invokes stories told in the dark, our prow drifting down the widening estuary into the vast and savage night.

Chandler’s novels are written all in the first person, and Marlowe is our narrator. And oh, that voice… Marlowe transcends the merely hardboiled: he is eerily self-aware, a being of light in a sinner’s frame. The angels and demons about him discuss guts and brains and heart and blood and hate, but Marlowe knows only poetry:

“The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.”

His darkness is the seeping darkness of twentieth century cities, of Hopkins’ smeared and trodden world, of the rotten gridlines. But his victories are like no other – brilliantly individual – salvation, like suffering can only be personal. The darkness, in the end, sheds about him…

Am I making my case too strongly? Again, have you read Raymond Chandler?

In Farewell, My Lovely we follow Marlowe as he unravels the mystery of Moose Malloy. Chandler’s novel which begins in a lament over the second-class status of African Americans in 1930’s L.A, soon sees Marlowe slipping into a fog-drenched wonderland of gamblers and gigolos, predatory chorus girls, sea-spray and suburbs. Whole towns seem owned by mysterious kingpins berthed in offshore gambling palaces; allies arrive from unexpected quarters, and Marlowe suffers – oh, how he suffers – on the trail of a lost love, a job gone terribly wrong, a deadly mystic and Chinese jade. We meet Anne Riordan, Marlowe’s dark (or auburn as it were) angel. The eventual climax runs a whole quarter of the novel, and once Marlowe catches the scent, the final hunt is spellbinding.

When I write about Chandler, I run the risk of losing my footing in the crush of hyperbole. When people talk about “pulp” or “hardboiled” fiction, certain expectations arrange themselves. Chandler’s “hardboiled” is to his many imitators as a Bach organ concerto is to “chopsticks.” There I go again…

2009: In Review

The stats are finalized: it was a recession year. I would quip about it ... but then you reach a certain age and etc, etc. I keep statistics on the number of books I read in a year - I've kept them now for 5 years. How did 2009 rate? Not badly. I averaged around 3.6 books a month, down from last year's 3.8, but up from other years. The total was 43 titles, and did I enjoy reading them? I did.

Analysis? The last year of residency? College exams? Who knows - I read only a third of the titles during the first half of the year. Perhaps there's nothing more insightful to say than that more of my time is now my own, again.

High Points of 2009's Reading:

Jack Vance's Lyonesse Trilogy, that I read compulsively and considered driving through the night to Hornby Island just to pick up the final volume; my introduction to the poetry of W.H. Auden; re-reading Haruki Murakami's first short story collection in translation, The Elephant Vanishes - imagine your favorite meal, at your favorite restaurant, on a perfect day... In a world with few clear favorites, Murakami Haruki is and has been for many years now my favorite author in any language. I also had a powerful experience with Dante's Inferno.

Low Points of 2009's Reading:

James Tiptree Jr.'s Star Songs of an Old Primate: aside from the solid SF pulp in "Your Haploid Heart," the collection itself was a major disappointment - I'd forgotten how repulsive I find "Houston, Houston Do You Read?" The disappointment comes of regarding Tiptree's other work, like Tales of the Quintana Roo so highly. Also, Zelazny's The Dream Master was drab and uninteresting with the least sympathetic main character I can imagine.

2009's Interesting Reads:

Richard Lewontin's wonderful prose, and even more important ideas in It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions; also Victoria Freeman's astounding genealogical opus Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America. Thor Heyerdahl's seminal adventure diary The Kon-Tiki Expidition was marvelous and transporting, and leaves you feeling hopelessly melancholy that the world he describes vanished before you were born - a world in which people receive telegrams that read "Sailing home-made balsa raft from Peru to Micronesia, stop. Are you coming?" And last but not least, how long has it been since you read early Robert Frost, say A Boy's Will, aloud? Too long. That's the answer.

Up or down on the graph, 2009 was a good year of reading.