books 2020
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Apparently I’ve also read Be My Enemy. I don’t remember anything about that one, and I only mentioned it in passing there. ↩︎
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Interesting to note that even programmers for the government are called ‘hackers’ here. In the positive sense, of course. ↩︎
- Note the lack of names, too: the editor is given an initial, R, but the only character given an actual name is a dog. ↩
Boiling a Frog by Christoper Brookmyre (Books 2020, 8)
The last Brookmyre I read was Pandaemonium, in 2010. Before that, his first, Quite Ugly One Morning, before I started writing here. The second of those introduced campaigning journalist Jack Parlabane. There’s another one before this, but you don’t need to read them in order. There are also a stack more.1
Anyway, what’s it like? No bad, as we say in Scotland. It starts off with Parlabane in prison. Part of the story, including how he ended up there, is told in flashback. It’s all set in the early days of the new Scottish Parliament, around 2000, 2001.
It’s a decent page turner, I can’t deny. My main criticism in writerly terms is about the old ‘show, don’t tell,’ thing, which we’ve discussed here before.
In at least one of those pieces I counsel against setting that injunction in stone. But it’s notable how much of this novel violates or ignores it. For large chunks of the flashbacks we’re told what happens. It’s fine. The writing style flows and it doesn’t feel like infodumps, but I was certainly aware of it.
Worth reading. I’ll probably read more of him, eventually. Still looking for a sequel to Pandaemonium, though.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (Books 2020, 7)
I decided I needed something SF-y that I knew I’d enjoy: a reread, in other words. Something with spaceships. Prowling my shelves, this is what I came to. No spaceships, but fast skateboards and faster motorbikes, katanas and glass knives; and of course, the Metaverse.
I was struck by how little of it I remembered, but it is something like 26 years since I read it (published 1992, so I’m guessing I read it in 94 or so).
Hiro Protagonist, the fantastically-named hero, is a hacker.1 He’s also the greatest samurai swordsman alive, supposedly. And he’s delivering pizzas for the Mafia. Which fact is the first view we have of how the world – or at least America – has changed. There is almost no government, no laws; and everything is split up into ‘burbclaves’ and franchises, run by companies, churches, or criminal organisations.
But there is the Metaverse. Nothing we have today is close to what it is like, but it’s what virtual reality wants to be, and maybe will be one day.
The internet is everywhere (which of course wasn’t the case when it was written). Though phoneboxes still exist, and using them is one way to get into the Metaverse. And if you want mobile access, you have to ‘go gargoyle.’ Which is to say, wear your special goggles and carry a computer around with you, strapped to your body. There are mobile phones, but the conversion of them into pocket computers is not something that Stephenson foresaw. Or at least, not something he made use of here.
The Ending
I had the impression that everyone thought that early Stephenson had problems with endings. I mean, I had that impression myself, and have alluded to it here before. And I thought that this was one with a slightly weak ending.
But it isn’t at all. The bit that I remembered – the climax that takes place in the Metaverse – comes at the end of a tense chase/fight sequence, and while it depicts a scene that might be anticlimactic for the people in-universe who witness it, it’s fully satisfying and sound to us, the readers. Then the last couple of chapters wind things up neatly back in the outer world.
The criticism that might be levelled at it, especially in SF terms, is that we don’t see how the world has been changed by the events of the story. But I think that can easily be left to our imaginations.
A genuine classic.
Ayoade On Top by Richard Ayoade (Books 2020, 6)
This is Richard Ayoade’s detailed analysis of the 2003 film View From the Top, directed by Bruno Barreto and starring Gwyneth Paltrow. It is, by all accounts, a masterwork.
By Ayoade’s account, at least. I haven’t seen it. Ayoade is a comedian. The book is pretty funny. The film, I suspect, is quite bad.
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (Books 2020, 5)
I’ve never read Greene before, except for I think one short story, and a chapter or two of his autobiography. This is fascinating. It’s the story of a Catholic priest in Mexico at a time when the church was banned. I had no idea that such a time existed: I think of Mexico as a very Catholic country, so such oppression is surprising.
The genius of it is that all the characters are so convincing. From the “whisky priest” himself – sinful, still believing, considering himself damned, yet trying to do what he can for people he feels are his parishioners; through to the hardline atheist lieutenant of police that is trying to find him. No-one is entirely good or bad, but there is sympathy for them all.
It’s justly considered a classic.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk, Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Books 2020, 4)
I like this quote from near the end:
The fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future is a terrible mistake in the programming of the world. It should be fixed at the first opportunity.
When I read Tokarczuk’s Flights at the start of last year, it was actually this one that had led me to her. Warren Ellis recommended it in his newsletter, if I remember correctly, and the title intrigued me. What I didn’t realise then was that the title is a quote from William Blake: “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead,” he says, in Proverbs of Hell. With that spelling, I note.
Apparently it caused a great fuss when it was published in Poland. I don’t understand why, but cultures are different.
Unlike Flights, it’s a complete, single story. It’s also much simpler. The narrator is an interesting character, though her practice of astrology adds nothing to the story and gets in its way to an extent.
Each chapter has a quote from Blake as an epigraph. I don’t think she used the thirteenth proverb of hell, though it could be seen as the narrator’s north star:
All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Books 2020, 3)
Harry Potter fan fiction, by Merlin’s beard! I heard of this book — HPMOR, as it’s known — from my son, a couple of years ago. Didn’t think about it for a while, and then recently I saw a tweet from a friend-of-friends, @ciphergoth:
The correct quote is "There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion." https://t.co/n3qAmdyhV2 pic.twitter.com/Agxq7FruRk
— Paul Crowley (@ciphergoth) January 28, 2020
The fact that it was a quote from Harry Potter, and that I didn’t recognise it — indeed, it didn’t seem like something Harry would say — intrigued me, so I clicked through.
And then I shortly found myself downloading the ebook and reading it for the next… actually, month or so.
Because this book is looooooong! It’s a retelling of just the first Harry Potter book, along with much more, and it’s about half as long as all seven of the JKR originals.
In fact, it could have done with an editor. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it has some weaknesses.
First, the strengths, though. Yudkowsky can write a page-turner almost as well as Rowling. What we have here is an alternative universe in which Petunia Evans marries someone else, not Vernon Dursley. They adopt Harry, and bring him up in a loving home. Harry’s adoptive father is a scientist, which is where he learns his rationality. So his first thought when he discovers that magic exists is to try experiments to understand its capabilities and limits. Experimentation soon gets overwhelmed by events, though, as the plot gets going.
There are other differences from the original, of course, and the end result is very different.
Part of what Yudkowsky does is takes the literal translation of Voldemort’s name — “flees from death,” essentially — recognises the rationality of that feeling — who wouldn’t prefer going on living, to dying? — and builds from there.
The major flaws are wordiness and couple of authorial tics that get repetitive and mildly annoying. He has a tendency to refer to people by their role, rather than their name: “The Defence Professor,” rather than “Quirrell,” for example. Which is fine if used sparingly, for variety. But he has people referring to other people like that, when they just wouldn’t.
There’s also overuse of scenes that start like, “The boy stood in the forest…” and only slowly revealing which boy. Again, fine occasionally, but he overdoes it.
And a few Americanisms creep in: like calling the staff of Hogwarts the “faculty.” And anachronisms: nobody apologised for their snarkiness in 1992, since the word hadn’t been coined yet. Well, I could be wrong there: this site says it goes back to 1906 or earlier. No-one in Britain, then.
But I shouldn’t complain. It’s an astonishingly well-constructed work, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa (Books 2020, 2)
Translated by Stephen Snyder. I asked for this for Christmas, because I saw it reviewed in The Guardian and it sounded interesting. And it is, but I had some problems with it.
Let’s look at the blurb:
Hat ribbon, bird, rose.
To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.
When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn’t forget, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?
That “[f]or some reason” is where this book doesn’t quite work for me. The setup is fine: a type of item, and the memories, the very idea of that item, disappears. The titular police make sure that all instances of the item — roses, hats, photographs… — are removed. But some people keep their memories and the ideas, and try to keep the things. The Memory Police find them and cart them off.
The protagonist’s mother was taken in that way when the protagonist was small.1
Why is it happening? How is it happening? Who are the Memory Police, and what happens to the people they take? Can they be resisted, and how can the islanders get their memories back? These are the sorts of questions you would expect to have answered, were this a science fiction novel. Are the islanders the victims of some sort of mind-control experiment? Are they in a simulation?
This is not a science fiction novel.
“For some reason”. Don’t read this expecting to find out what the reason is, or to get answers to any of the other questions.
All that said, I enjoyed reading it. The sense of danger, of menace, is palpable, but subtle. It’s about people trying to live their lives under these bizarre conditions. It’s just frustrating thinking about it now, about the unanswered questions.
But maybe I’m reading it wrong. In her essay “SF reading protocols,” Jo Walton writes:
A reviewer wanted to make the zombies in Kelly Link’s “Zombie Contingency Plans” (in the collection Magic For Beginners) into metaphors. They’re not. They’re actual zombies. They may also be metaphors, but their metaphorical function is secondary to the fact that they’re actual zombies that want to eat your brains. Science fiction may be literalization of metaphor, it may be open to metaphorical, symbolic and even allegorical readings, but what’s real within the story is real within the story, or there’s no there there. I had this problem with one of the translators of my novel Tooth and Claw—he kept emailing me asking what things represented. I had to keep saying no, the characters really were dragons, and if they represented anything that was secondary to the reality of their dragon nature. He kept on and on, and I kept being polite but in the end I bit his head off—metaphorically, of course.
The essay is largely about how there is a “toolkit” for reading SF — a set of understandings, of tropes — without which some can find the genre difficult to understand. We learn that toolkit, or build it, from early reading of the genre. But she follows the above quote with this:
When I read literary fiction, I take the story as real on the surface first, and worry about metaphors and representation later, if at all. It’s possible that I may not be getting as much as I can from literary fiction by this method, in the same way that the people who want the zombies and dragons to be metaphorical aren’t getting as much as they could.
Maybe that’s what went wrong for me with The Memory Police: Ogawa wrote a metaphorical work — about people trying to live their lives under bizarre conditions, as I wrote above. I read it with the expectation that the bizarre conditions would have an explanation, and they don’t, because they are “only” metaphors.
For, I would have to suppose, a totalitarian state, where the slightest infraction of arcane and obscure laws leads to being carted away by the secret police.
We also get sections of the novel the protagonist is writing. It is about a woman who loses her voice, and communicates using a typewriter. Then the typewriter is taken away from her. It works as a metaphor for the situation the protagonist lives in: a metaphor within a metaphor.
And from the Guardian review that started this:
Why this is happening is unknown; the ideology of totalitarian control and cultural isolation is implied, rather than explicitly outlined, and its intersection with the supernatural strengthens the feeling of allegory.
So maybe I should have been warned. Calling it “supernatural” suggests something more in the magic realism vein. That might be a better way to approach it. Magic needs — or at least, generally gets — less of an explanation.
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa (Books 2020, 1)
This is a sweet little story, exactly described by its title. The professor in question is an elderly mathematician who has had a brain injury that has left him with only 80 minutes of short-term memory. The housekeeper, therefore, has to introduce herself to him every morning when she arrives at his house.
She has a son who comes along sometimes, and there are maths puzzles and baseball.
It doesn’t sound like much from that description, and it’s very short. But it’s thoroughly compelling and enjoyable.