Prophet (2023) by Sin Blache and Helen MacDonald

 Book Review

Prophet (2023)

by Sin Blache and Helen MacDonald

  I never read H is for Hawk, the 2014 falconry memoir turned surprise best-seller, but I darn sure saw it nearly everywhere- and still do, for that matter.  H is for Hawk is still in print, and its still selling.  As far as I'm aware (not very) all of her books have been non-fiction type stuff about birds.  So when I read- in the Guardian I think- that MacDonald's newest book was a techno-sci-fi-lgbt-thriller- I was intrigued.  Who had that on their 2023 bingo card:  Helen MacDonald sci-fi techo thriller?

   Not really a cross-over you expect to see at the highest level of literary fiction or literary fiction genre cross-over.  I have to say- the genre elements are quite strong here- if you look at the cover art, for example.  I listened to the Audiobook, and it sounds like a straight-forward, albeit bizarre, techno-sci-fi-thriller written by a top-flight author of non-fiction works about birds that have found a huge mainstream audience.    The essence of the book is the relationship between Sunil Rao- a self-destructive London born "human lie detector"- he is able to determine the truth value of any statement and Rubenstein- a steely Jewish-American jack of all trades for the CIA.

   The story begins in the fields of rural England, where a 50's style American diner has appeared in the middle of an English pasture on a US military installation located in the English countryside.  Rao, lately of HMS prison, is summoned by the American military to assist in the investigation.  There he is tasked a handler- Rubenstein- they've worked before. Rao has just, an incredible amount of LGBT back story- like it feels like half the book is Rao explaining himself and his backstory. 

  The thing they've invented for the novel- a drug (or is it a drug?) called Prophet- is a very interesting proposition and what starts out as a crazy drug turns into a substance that may cross dimensions and contain some kind of sentience.  There were plot elements that left me scratching my head, but in light of the obvious literary fiction pedigree any reader has to give the authors vast artistic license to diverge from genre bound expectations regarding plot development in the context of a sci-fi thriller type book.

   Maybe a Hugo Prize Winner?

The Bee Sting (2022) by Paul Murray

 Book Review

The Bee Sting (2022)

by Paul Murray

  The Booker Prize shortlist announcement is this week (9/21).  I got a tip from an acquaintance who served as a judge on the Costa Prize until it ended that The Bee Sting, by Irish author Paul Murray was a hot pick over in the UK so I prioritized getting my hands on the eBook and then reading that eBook (I have a pretty high percentage of NOT completing the eBooks I check out from the library).  This is the fifth book from the longlist I've tackled (Western Lane, In Ascension, This Other Eden and Old God's Time).  Of those five I'd say that this book and Old God's Time are both likely shortlist candidates, followed by Western Lane and that In Ascension (genre) and This Other Eden (white male American author) are both unlikely to make the cut.

  In fact, The Bee Sting could very much be the winner this year since it combines elements that Booker juries have prioritized in recent years: First and foremost, it's a good read- a book with interesting, sympathetic characters, a definite story to tell and a plot that rewards reading the whole book.  That's the main thing I've noticed from the last several years of Booker nominees- the shortlisters and winners tend to actually be entertaining books that reward the reader.  Like many books in this category, the description "An Irish family tries to deal with the fall-out from the 2008 recession," doesn't do the book justice.  It's also true that this is one of those books where an in depth review is likely to compromise the reading experience.   Indeed though, this book has the feel of a winner (as does Old God's Time).

Ascension (2023) by Nicholas Binge

 Book Review

Ascension (2023)

by Nicholas Binge

  I checked out the Audiobook of Ascension by Nicholas Binge after reading the the New York Times book review.  The mere fact of a work of speculative fiction getting a full length book review in the Times is unusual.  Ascension is also a take on the genre known as "cosmic horror"- pioneered by H.P. Lovecraft and his ilk.  I was intrigued.   As it turned out, Ascension was almost too faithful to the conventions of the genre.  Start with a clunky format- letters discovered by the relatives of a scientist who has gone mad after an expedition to a mysterious mountain that has just "appeared" in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean.   Add a healthy dose of the "nameless horror" situation as the crack team of soldiers and academics makes their way up said mountain.  Conclude with a prototypical white male narrator who spends most of the book regretting his emotional unavailability which caused him to split up with his ex-wife (who of course, is also on this same expedition).   It made, quite frankly, for a tedious Audiobook and I think the print version would have been a better experience. 

   On the positive side, Ascension does deliver a fun adventure yarn with a suitably mind-blowing conclusion-none if it makes a lick of sense, but that is cosmic horror for you.

Evening (1998) by Susan Minot

 1001 Novels: A Library of America

Evening (1998)

by Susan Minot

Newport, Maine

Maine: 24/24

   Surprise!  I forgot to read this book from Maine!  In her 1998 New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani called this book "stunning".  It's a very Virginia Woolf type affair: Ann Grant Lord is dying of cancer in her Maine summer home and as she drifts in and out of consciousness she spends the most time not remembering any of her three husbands or four children but rather a doomed love affair with a young daughter at a wedding near her home in Maine.  Kakutani points out something that was very much on my mind at times, "At times, Ms. Minot's efforts to capture Ann's state of mind fall into mannerism -- several passages written in run-together sentences read like poor imitations of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in "Ulysses".  

  I had that exact thought!  Now that I have my subscription status with the New York Times squared away I like to check to see what they had to say about these 1001 Novels authors- it is very much a situation where I expect every single one of these 1001 Novels titles to have a corresponding New York Times review.   Evening also spawned a movie version in 2007 with Meryl Streep and Vanessa Redgrave (27% certified rotten).   FWIW, Evening is the hit of the Minot Bibliography- it has a couple hundred Amazon reviews and her other books have under a hundred for the most part.   

   Heart breaking? Beautiful? Heart breakingly beautiful? OK I guess so 1998 New York Times but I can hear the regrets of an aging white woman every time I call my Mom- I'm not looking for that in fiction or literature.

Faith (2011) by Jennifer Haigh

 1001 Novels: A Library of America

Faith (2011)

by Jennifer Haigh

Boston, Massachusetts

 Massachusetts: 8/30

    I think this is the first 1001 Novels book from Boston.  I have spent a LOT of time in the city of Boston over the past decade- twice a year, usually two to three days each visit.  It's a solid second tier city- I would say the only two really world class, top tier cities in the US are New York and Los Angeles followed by a dozen at the same level as Boston.  Maybe you could put Chicago on a top three with NYC and LA.   Anyway- Boston is a top 10 city.   Not top 3, but top 10.  The positive qualities of Boston relative to other cities in the top 10 are:  the history- as in, it has some.  The center city is relatively compact, 19th century affair making getting around on foot very plausible.  It's located on the water, making for a relatively mild climate for the area.  The airport is 10 minutes from downtown.  Weed is legal, the food and bar scene is and Fenway Park and Madison Square Garden are both in the city proper. Negatives include a horrific tunnel-based road system in the center city, a history of white, working-class racism and a stodgy elite that has been slow to catch up with 21st century trends in urban management.  Those are pretty minor problems as US cities go.

    Faith has a plot that sounds like it was spit out by a Boston literature mad-libs generator:  A priest is accused of child molestation and it impacts his family, mostly his sister (the narrator) and his half-brother. I repeated this description to my Boston-area native partner and she quipped, "Isn't that every novel about Boston?"  As I've mentioned, there is a surfeit of books within the precincts of the 1001 Novels: A Library of America list that deal with conflicts between siblings.  My favorites are the ones narrated in flashback forms about their sibling issues- Affliction is the best example.   So, by those standards, Faith is more tolerable than other books of its ilk because it is narrated by the older half-sister in the aftermath of the events described- same as Affliction.  

    The Boston of this book is drab and colorless, which, don't get me wrong, is an accurate description of Boston, at times.  However, something I'm now looking for when I read books on the 1001 Novels: A Library of America list, is show-piece physical descriptions of these places- Boston- in this book.  Something like the opening sequence of Underworld by Don DeLillo which takes place during a 1951 New York Giants baseball game at Ebbets field.  In the Boston context- the first mention of Fenway Park comes 10 books in, and I've to get even a mention of the Boston Garden, either in the basketball of hockey context.  

   The particulars of the plot of Faith are grim and dare I say, a trifle sordid. The three siblings all have their failings but obviously a priest getting accused of child molestation in the post-Church Child Abuse Scandal era is a big deal for all involved.  I'm not sure I'd put this specific narrative on a "must read" list to understand the story, specifically because it takes place in the aftermath of the original out-cry.  The construction of the plot contains multiple spoilers as Haigh leaves the readers guessing about guilt, innocence and the personal histories of the three siblings. 

  One fact that emerges that I found particularly hard to square with my own knowledge of these situations is that it comes out that the accused priest/half brother was himself molested as a very young child by a local priest who preyed on his single mother.   And yet, he went on to become a priest himself.   If this book was set in the 19th century, perhaps that would make more sense to me, but it is hard to square that later disclosed fact with his earlier decisions vis a vis the priesthood.   I'd be the first to admit that I "just don't get" the cultural values embodied here. 

   I listened to the Audiobook version which was grim- if I had to do it over I would have read the physical book so I could get through it as quickly as possible- not the kind of novel one savors. 

Sparrow (2023) by James Hynes

 Book Review

Sparrow (2023)

by James Hynes

 I practically spit out my coffee when I read the write-up of Sparrow by James Hynes in the Sunday New York Times Book Review last month:  A novel set in post-Christian Rome written from the POV of a slave in a whore-house?  Sign me up!  Serious works of fiction set in this period are few and far between, so kudos to Hynes who includes an afterword showing he was up to date on the scholarship surrounding the delicate issues of sexuality in Rome, a slave-holding society.  Those interested in this place and time will find much to like in Sparrow- though the sexual content is at times cringe inducing- just like- horrible stuff about the experiences of sex workers in the Roman Empire, but Hynes doesn't sensationalize the abuse and I enjoyed the rest of the book.

Christendom (2022) by Peter Heather

 Book Review

Christendom (2022)

by Peter Heather

  British historian Peter Heather is the leading popular voice in the area of the history of late antiquity (Europe).  I've been enjoying his books for years. Heather is part of a generation of historians- he's actually part of the second generation of scholars in this area- who have rewritten the history of Rome by applying advances in historiography which have occurred since the late 19th century, when Edward Gibbons published his monumentally influential The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Gibbons was a fan of the idea that the Roman Empire was felled via the decadence of its own people- many of our received cultural ideas about the insanity of late Rome can be traced directly to people who read The History of the  Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during the century and a half when it was the only such history. 

  Anyway- times have changed, as Heather has repeatedly noted over the past two decades.  In Christendoom he hones in on the changes that occurred after the conversion of the Roman Emperor.  The conventional wisdom- largely put forward by the Catholic church in the early Middle Ages to justify the outsize role they wished to play in Europe- was that the Roman conversion was thorough and involved the vast majority of Roman citizens converting with a generation or so.   This explanation was largely accepted by secular historians in the modern period, and only recently have scholars begun to question this received wisdom.

   As it turns out, the conversion of the Roman country-side to Christianity was nothing like a thorough-going conversion of the entire countryside, rather it resembled an adoption by local elites of a new "Cult of the Emperor" that was very much in their self interest as citizens of the Roman Empire. Those who had less interest in the empire as a whole had almost no reason to convert for centuries.

   Another strand of Heather's analysis concerns the idea that Roman Catholicism and its medieval power structure was somehow present in the time after the conversion of the Roman Emperor.  Heather points to non-controversial scholarship that firmly demonstrates the absurdity of this idea.  Rome was originally only one of four patriarchs and there was no idea of a supreme Rome (outside of Rome) until after the Islamic conquest decimated the patriarchates of the Near East. 

    After a shaky section on the Islamic world made difficult by the lack of medieval Islamic scholars in pre-Islamic local history or early Islamic history (this being a controversial subject inside Islam), Heather gets to the real heart of the book, a tour of recent scholarship on the conversion experience in Northern Europe from Ireland through the Baltics.  This has been a fertile area for scholarship and Heather has absorbed it all and regurgitated it in easily consumable form.

  I listened to the Audiobook- 24 hours in length- because I've got his other hits in hardback and didn't want another on the shelf.  I didn't find it as difficult as the New York Times reviewer- but perhaps listening to it rather than reading it saved me some problems in reading comprehension.

The Last Confession of Slyvia P. (2022) by Lee Kravertz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Last Confession of Sylvia P. (2022)

by Lee Kravertz

Belmont, Massachusetts

Massachusetts: 6/30

      I'm well into Massachusetts in the Audiobook portion of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project- the Audiobooks run ahead of the e-books and actual books because fewer than half of the titles are available as Audiobooks.  The Last Confession of Sylvia P. is an interesting novel by a debut author about- yes- you guessed it, poet-novelist-all-around-icon Sylvia Plath. Kravertz weaves historical fact and fiction together to tell the story of a hand written manuscript of The Bell Jar which is discovered during a house flip in the Boston area in 2019.  Kravertz travels backwards and forwards in time and invents several interesting characters- some real some fictional.  There's Robert Lowell, the real life poet, Boston Rhodes, a fictional antagonist who writes a similar style of poetry and Ruth Barnhouse, a pioneering psychiatrist (by pioneering I mean she is a woman psychiatrist in the 1950's, who treats Plath during her tempestuous teen years.

      And although The Last Confessions does of course go deeply into issues related to being a young woman and grappling with mental illness, it does so within the context of world-renowned poets, instead of being about another sad working class mom abandoned by the alcoholic father of her children- which is seriously the plot of about 20 percent of the books in the 1,001 Novels project up to this point. 

Zone One (2011) by Colson Whitehead

 Book Review

Zone One (2011)

by Colson Whitehead

  I think if you had to look at the top two authors to combine genre writing with literary fiction it would be 1) Kazuo Ishiguro because he won the Nobel Prize- not known for their embrace of genre-fiction embracing literary fiction and 2) Colson Whitehead- because he won the National Book Award AND the Pulitzer for Underground Railroad- a bold take on the alternate-history genre of science fiction.  His success with Underground Railroad was presaged by The Intuitionist, his debut novel and this book Zone One, his 2011 foray into Zombie-bit.  

  I read Zone One when it came out- bought the hardback first edition- but never wrote about it for this blog.  After listening to his latest book on Libby, I saw the Audiobook for Zone One and thought, "Hey, that looks fun!"  And it is, intermittently- the key difference between this book and his award winners is that this book is less concerned with telling an actual story and reads more like a work of literary fiction/experimental fiction set in a genre world than an actual attempt to fuse the two things- which his books after this point have accomplished as witnessed by their price winning status and universal acclaim. 

  What the reader gets in Zone One is basically a series of flashbacks where the protagonist muses about the lost world, spelled with episodes set in a post-zombie reconstruction lower Manhattan, where civilian-military personnel are mopping up, building by building after the Marines accomplished the heavy lifting.  Mark Spitz, the narrator, wasn't much in the world before, in the world after, he like, everybody else, is a survivor par excellence. If you take out the flashbacks, the story can be summarized in a sentence, but that also functions as a spoiler, so.  

Venomous Lumpsucker (2022) by Ned Beauman

 Book Review

Venomous Lumpsucker (2022)

by Ned Beauman

   There are a couple ways I keep track of what books I want to read- the first tier is the New York Times book section, the reviews that appear in the Guardian and the publications I have in my feedly- Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, etc.  Second tier is the nominees and winners for a host of literary prizes- The Booker Prize is my number one, then the National Book Award then the secondary awards- usually just the winners.  The Arthur C. Clarke award, which was established in 1987 for the "best science fiction" book published first in the UK in the preceding year.   If you look at the past winners you've got a pretty good guide to the important stopping points in the continuing intersection of science fiction/genre and literary fiction.  Previous winners include trailblazers like Margaret Atwood- The Handmaidens Tale was the original winner in 1987, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Emily St. John Mandel, Colson Whitehead and Namwali Serpell- all authors who are widely read by the general reading audience for literary fiction.

   Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman was the Arthur C. Clarke prize winner this year.  I checked it out from the library in an e-book when I read the announcement, only to learn that I'd checked it out when it was originally released and didn't actually read it. Beauman is another science fiction/literary fiction cross-over author.  His 2011 book, The Teleportation Accident made the then Man Booker Prize longlist. 

    Like many succesful works of cross-over literary/science fiction, Venomous Lumpsucker dwells in a future that is close enough to be described with the vocabulary of the present, but different enough to evoke interest.  The world of Venomous Lumpsucker is recognizably a variation on "the not so distant future," global warming/climate change continues unabated, but the United Nations has somehow managed to set up a binding system of extinction credits to manage the competing needs of economic growth and environmental protection but you probably don't need me to tell you how that is going at the beginning of the book.

   The two major characters are Karen Resaint, a hired gun who helps companies manage the extinction process and Mark Halyard, the employee of an Indian mining conglomerate charged with their end of what Resaint calls, "the extinction industry."  The plot is set in motion by a surprise attack on a "bio-bank" used by governments and corporations to store the genetic data of now extinct species.  The bio bank is wiped out.  The value of extinction credits goes up by a factor of 10 (50,000 to 500,000) over-night, which leads to complications for Halyard, who is now caught in a semi-illicit act of arbitrage which centers on the work done by Resaint.  My feeling is that the sophistication of the set-up- which involves an university level of contemporary economics- should be enough to intrigue a potential reader if the pedigree of the Arthur C. Clarke.

  The action that follows the set up isn't particularly inventive, but the reader is carried along by the richness of the world Beauman described- down to his coy use of the term The Hermit Kingdom to describe what has happened in the United Kingdom- a transition that mostly remains off stage until the exciting conclusion of the book.