All reviews copyright 1984-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME by Mark Haddon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/23/2004]
Mark Haddon's THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME (ISBN 0-385-51210-4) will undoubtedly be compared to Elizabeth Moon's THE SPEED OF DARK by those reviewers who have read the latter. However, since Moon's book is science fiction and this is not, most mainstream reviewers probably will not have read the Moon. Both are about people with autism (Asperger's Syndrome), but there the similarity ends. THE SPEED OF DARK is told by a third-person narrator, and is set in a future when major medical advances have been made regarding autism, while THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME is told in the first person by its main character in what is very much the present. Only in the sense that the main characters have similar personalities are the books similar. Since they seem to have consistent views of how autism affects people, and since both authors have direct experience with autistic individuals, I am assuming the portrayals are reasonable. In Haddon's book, the narrator (Christopher John Francis Boone) is a fan of Sherlock Holmes (because he thinks Holmes has a lot of the same personality traits as he does). But though it starts as a mystery, the mystery is solved relatively early, and the book is more about Boone's learning to cope with his family and with the world at large. Perhaps because of the first-person narration by someone whose though processes are very different than mine, I was reminded more of FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON. (I hasten to add that this is not because Boone has a lower intelligence than average--it's quite the opposite, in fact.) For readers who want books examining "alien" ways of thinking, this is a reminder that sometimes other human beings can be the most alien of all.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/30/2006]
The regular book group this month read THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME by Mark Haddon (ISBN 1-400-03271-7); the science fiction group read THE SPEED OF DARK by Elizabeth Moon (ISBN 0-345-48139-9). I have already commented on both of these (THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME by Mark Haddon in the 04/23/04 issue of the MT VOID and THE SPEED OF DARK by Elizabeth Moon in the 03/28/03 issue), but I have to add that on second reading, the Haddon stands up much better than the Moon. One problem is that Moon's autistic characters have undergone a science-fictional treatment, "early intervention", which made them basically less "autistic" and more "normal". (Yes, I realize that the terms "autistic" and "normal" are both politically incorrect and medically inaccurate. But I am trying to keep this column short.) This treatment makes the story easier, but less interesting. Haddon's character is more authentic, which ultimately makes him more interesting. (I will note that other people thought the Moon was more interesting than the Haddon.) One thing everybody agreed on was that many of the symptoms displayed by the autistic characters in both books were characteristics of a lot of (presumably) non-autistic people that they knew. A lot of the discussion time, in fact, was spent discussing just what autism is and how one arrives at that diagnosis.
To order The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time from amazon.com, click here.
THE GIFT by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/10/2008]
Of the great Islamic poets, the best known in the West are probably Omar Khayyam, Rumi, and Hafiz. I cannot say for sure, but I suspect that a fair part of Hafiz's fame may be due to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who has Sherlock Holmes say, "You may remember the old Persian saying, 'There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.' There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world." ["A Case of Identity"] I should note, however, that extensive searches by Holmes scholars have failed to find any such quotation anywhere in Hafiz's writings.
In any case, THE GIFT by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky) (ISBN-13 978-0-140-19581-1, ISBN-10 0-140-19581-5) is an attempt to create a modern translation of Hafiz. However, at times I think Ladinsky gets a bit *too* modern. For example, "The Clay Bowl's Destiny", Ladinsky translates the the last phrase as "In/His sublime,/Ball-busting course/Of/Spirit/Love." (Ladinsky also seems to want to maximize the number of lines, and minimize the number of words per line.) One also finds the word "dropkick" and poems called "The Bag Lady" and "There Could Be Holy Fallout".
A more representative sample of Hafiz might be "The Sun Never Says": "Even/After/All this time/The sun never says to the earth,/You owe/Mr."/Look/What happens/With a love like that,/It lights the/Whole/Sky."
To order The Gift from amazon.com, click here.
THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE by Joe Haldeman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/05/2007]
THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE by Joe Haldeman (ISBN-13 978-0-441-01499-6, ISBN-10 0-441-01499-2) is a return to classic science fiction themes. Matt Fuller accidentally builds a time machine that jumps forward into the future. But each time the button is pushed, the time jump is twelve times greater than the previous one. This is very reminiscent of H. G. Wells's Time Traveler stopping at various points, except that Fuller has no control over when he will stop. The only problem is the end, which seems a trifle contrived, but in spite of this I would recommend this to all of you who miss the good old stuff.
To order The Accidental Time Machine from amazon.com, click here.
FOREVER PEACE by Joe Haldeman (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00406-7, 1997, 326pp, hardback):
One, this is not a sequel to The Forever War. Two, the title of this is Forever Peace, not The Forever Peace.
Haldeman has claimed that Forever Peace is part of a triptych of thematically connected novels containing The Forever War and 1968. This is true, but only to the extent that they are all about war and what makes us fight and kill each other. And while the idea of Forever Peace is that there may be a way to end the killing, most of it is devoted to descriptions of battles and attacks and killing.
One problem is that the pacing is off. We spend half the novel following Julian Class, the operator of a "soldierboy"--basically a remote-controlled robot soldier. Then suddenly within a few pages, we find out that there is something happening that can destroy the universe, and that there is a way to convert humanity to a non-aggressive state. Another problem is that while the first plot twist is moderately believable, the second I found completely unconvincing. All the problems that are introduced are solved with a wave of the hand. It's as if we have a solution to world hunger that involves getting to Proxima Centauri in an hour, and then on the next page someone says, "Oh, by the way, we just discovered how to travel faster than light." (And while we're at it, Haldeman also postulates the miracle of nanotechnology, which can provide for all material needs.) Another problem (at least for me) was the foreshadowing, where you would read some first-person narrative from Julian, and then a third-person omniscient would break in to say, "But Julian had no way of knowing how wrong he was," or some such.
But Forever Peace is still worth reading. Haldeman is at his best when he is describing everyday life in the "permanent war footing" of the future, with all its restrictions and "acceptable" dangers. If The Forever War was the Vietnam War transposed to the future, then Forever Peace is Nicaragua, Kuwait, and Oklahoma City. It's a world full of security precautions that don't work, but which are followed because they make people feel better. (Exactly what purpose does showing a picture ID serve when you fly somewhere now?) It's a world of elaborate rules of friendship based on who gets paid what, and when, and how. (And haven't you heard of someone picking up a dinner check by explaining that they can claim it as a business expense?) One of the aspects of science fiction I like is the way it looks at the near-future and consequences of our current politico-economic situation. Had Haldeman just written about nanotechnology and the war between the haves and the have-nots, it would have been far more satisfying. As it was, there was too much going on here for any one thread to be given sufficient space.
As I said, I think Forever Peace is worth reading, though not for the plot so much as for the setting. The obvious comparison will be to The Forever War, and it doesn't stand up to that--but then, that is very high standard.
To order Forever Peace from amazon.com, click here.
"Four Short Novels" by Joe Haldeman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/09/2004]
"Four Short Novels" by Joe Haldeman is really four connected riffs on immortality, each linked with a classic title from literature. (I have forgiven F&SF for describing this in the previous issue as being "four short novels by Joe Haldeman", implying a rather thicker issue than either usual or delivered.) You could think of them as short-shorts, but they do relate to each other such that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
THE SIGN AND THE SEAL by Graham Hancock:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/25/2005]
A friend recommended Graham Hancock's THE SIGN AND THE SEAL (ISBN 0-7493-0186-4), which postulates that 1) the Ark of the Covenant is being kept in the church of Saint Mary of Zion in Axum, Ethiopia, and 2) the Ark itself is an amazing technological weapon. powered by tablets made of some radioactive material. I will state up-front that I went into this book skeptical, and that may have colored my reading. I found the book overly long and complicated, with too much time being spent on describing Hancock's travels and all his "amazing insights" (e.g., "What I found most exciting of all about the obelisk was that it was intact--not rusting and crumbling--and that it was covered with fresh red primer paint. Someone, clearly, was still taking an interest in the explorer...." [page 185]). I also thought he was too quick to grasp at what would support his theories and to dismiss conflicting evidence. For example, he makes much of the fact that Moses spent forty days on Mount Sinai: it should not take God that long to write two tablets, so Moses must have been building something (page 347ff). But he does not deal with all the other occurrences of "forty days" or "forty years" in the Torah:
Why forty? I could just as easily argue that many of those could be connected to gematria: "40" is the number for the verb "lamed- heh-heh" meaning to wander or to err. And all of these are connecting with wandering, or the erring of the Israelites, or both. Even if it was 42 or 38 days, perhaps there would still be something to explain, but there is no evidence to support the conclusions that Hancock draws.
Or when he proposes three possible explanations to account for the powers attributed to the Ark:
1) The Old Testament was right, and the Ark contains Divine
powers.
2) The Old Testament was wrong, and the Israelites were "victims
of a collective mass hallucination that lasted for several
hundred years."
3) A little bit of both: the Ark possessed powers which were not
Divine, but were man-made. (pg. 285ff)
Hancock seems to ignore a fourth possibility:
4) Various phenomena were misinterpreted, elaborated on, etc., to
fit in with the myth of Divine power in the Ark, or perhaps just
to make a good story that helped to justify devotion.
If you don't allow number 4, then applying Hancock's three limited possibilities to, say, various relics of the Catholic Church, says that if you do not accept that the relics have divine powers then you must think that Christians have been the victims of mass hallucinations or that the relics have some natural power, neither of which seems credible to most skeptics.
On the whole, while some of Hancock's ideas are interesting, I found the book too convoluted and unconvincing to recommend.
(Thanks to Mark for helping me figure out how to phrase some of this, particularly in trying to describe the visuals on page 117 of the first book. Truly a picture is worth a thousand words!)
To order The Sign and the Seal from amazon.com, click here.
APPLE OF MY EYE by Helene Hanff:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/09/2004]
Helene Hanff is best known as the author of 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD, but she has written some other books as well. One, APPLE OF MY EYE, is a guidebook (of sorts) to Manhattan, written as a series of descriptions of the trips Hanff took researching Manhattan to write a book about it for tourists. (Whether this is the intended book, or just a side effect is not clear.) Of course, being twenty-five years old, it is quite out of date, and not just for its descriptions of the World Trade Center. I know the suggested admission to the Metropolitan is not $1.75, and many of the other sights she described are gone or changed. For New Yorkers, though, it is a great nostalgic look at the city.
To order Apple of My Eye from amazon.com, click here.
84 CHARING CROSS ROAD by Helene Hanff
THE DUCHESS OF BLOOMSBURY STREET by Helene Hanff
Q'S LEGACY by Helene Hanff:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/20/2003]
I did my usual periodic "comfort reading" recently of the "Charing Cross Road" trilogy. This comprises Helene Hanff's "84 Charing Cross Road". "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street", and "Q's Legacy". The first is the most familiar, particularly to me, since I listen to it on audiotape frequently. (For those unfamiliar with these books, Hanff was a scriptwriter in New York who struck up a correspondence with an antiquarian bookshop in London while trying to find English literature not in print in the United States. The second is about her experiences after the first one made her famous, and the third is about how she discovered a lot of this literature in the first place, from Arthur Quiller-Couch's writing.)
But something has always bothered me. In her first letter, Hanff says she encloses a list of her "most pressing needs." The reply says, "In reply to your letter of October 5th, we have managed to clear up two-thirds of your problem. The three Hazlitt essays you want are contained in the Nonesuch Press edition of his 'Selected Essays' and the Stevenson is found in 'Virginibus Puerisque' . . . . The Leigh Hunt essays are not going to be so easy . . . . We haven't the Latin Bible you describe . . . ."
What I can't figure out is how Marks & Co figured they had solved two-thirds of her problem. It appears she requested three Hazlitt essays, a Stevenson essay, some Leigh Hunt essays, and a Latin Bible. And they sent back the Hazlitt and the Stevenson. If you could all the essays for a given author as one request, they "cleared up" half her problem. If you count the essays separately, they sent her four items (three Hazlitt essays and a Stevenson), meaning two were left. But clearly there is more than one Leigh Hunt essay, so this can't be it either.
I know that the answer is that they weren't being mathematically precise, or maybe the Bible didn't count for some reason, but the mathematician in me finds it irksome.
On my business trip to Swindon in 2000, I managed to find Quiller- Couch's anthologies of English and Victorian verse in nice editions in Ludlow, quite reasonably priced. And I just recently ordered his book on writing. Hanff talks about reading one of his books--possible that one--and getting stuck very early because he assumed his readers had read Milton. So she went off to read Milton, only to discover that *he* assumed his readers were familiar with Biblical books such as Isaiah and Ezekiel. Computer types will understand when I say that Hanff found herself pushing more and more onto the stack.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/04/2008]
The BBC recently broadcast a radio adaptation (by James Roose- Evans) of Helene Hanff's 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD. In one way it was more "authentic" than the film version, because it was almost entirely done as letters. (There were one or two lines of dialogue between people in the shop, and a few lines from Helene's doorman delivering book parcels.) But it also added a lot to the letters themselves that just was not in the original. Given that the original book was short, as books go, it is very unlikely that much was cut out of the letters for publication. And what was new here was nothing scandalous or even particularly private. For example, at one point Nora writes that everything is off rationing, so Helene needn't send any more food parcels. And there are long passages about Walton's "Lives" and "The Compleat Angler", as well as other books not mentioned in the original. Since Roose-Evans wrote the original stage play "based on Hanff's memoirs" (according to one site) and I believe also on conversations with her, I am assuming that the additional material, while not absolutely accurate to the letters, is in keeping with what Hanff and Doel might have written. (And it is quite possible that some letters were misplaced even before the book.)
[See also my article comparing the book and the film of 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD.]
To order 84 Charing Cross Road from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street from amazon.com, click here.
To order Q's Legacy from amazon.com, click here.
LETTER FROM NEW YORK by Helene Hanff:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/19/2004]
Helene Hanff is best known for 84, CHARING CROSS ROAD. People may also have heard of her books THE DUCHESS OF BLOOMSBURY STREET and Q'S LEGACY, but she also wrote a few others, including APPLE OF MY EYE (a guidebook to New York) and LETTER FROM NEW YORK (ISBN 0-060-97543-1), which is a collection of short radio pieces that she recorded for the BBC. (The title is obviously patterned on Alistair Cooke's long-running "Letter from America".) They make a nostalgic portrait of New York of the 1970s; New York has changed a lot since then. It's not up to her better-known books, though.
To order Letter from New York from amazon.com, click here.
UNDERFOOT IN SHOW BUSINESS by Helene Hanff:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/09/2004]
Another book by Helene Hanff (and her first) is UNDERFOOT IN SHOW BUSINESS, an autobiography of her life as a playwright and TV writer up until 1961. (For readers of 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD, the only familiar part will be her tooth work.) While a fairly lightweight book, it does have some amusing anecdotes, such as the one about the winners of the fellowships from the Bureau of New Plays the year she won--and those of the previous year. Or the one which truly illustrates the claim from SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE that in the theater everything works out, but no one knows how ("It's a miracle."). But one I will recount here from her experiences as an outside reader for a film studio. A reader is someone who is given a book and is supposed to summarize it for the benefit of those who needed to decide whether to option it. The dread of a reader was to be given "a seven-hundred-page, three-generation family saga that always had more subplots than a soap opera and more characters than Dickens." Well, as she writes, "On the blackest Friday I ever want to see, I was summoned to Monograph and handed three outsized paperback volumes of an English book which was about to be published here. I was to read all three volumes over the weekend, and since each volume was double the length of the usual novel I was invited to charge double money for each. I hurried home with the three volumes and after dinner began to read Volume I. And if Monograph's office had been open at that hour, I'd have phoned and quit my job. What I had to read, during that nightmare weekend--taking notes on all place names, characters' names and events therein--was fifteen hundred stupefying pages of the sticky mythology of J. R. R. Tolkien. (I hope I'm spelling his name wrong.) I remember opening one volume to a first line which read, 'Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his elevnty-first birthday....' and phoning several friends to say good-bye because suicide seemed so obviously preferable to five hundred more pages of that." I guess she concluded that you couldn't make a very good movie from THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
To order Underfoot in Show Business from amazon.com, click here.