All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN RELIGION by Alan Wolfe:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/16/2004]
Alan Wolfe's THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN RELIGION looks primarily at Christianity and Judaism, and even in Christianity skimps on the various Orthodox churches and the Mormons. Wolfe's contention is that far from leaning toward the "old-time religion" of the song, Americans have transformed religion into a self-help program, a social club, a community service organization, or just about anything except a theology that gives its members rules to live by and a belief in a strong theological underpinning based on divine revelation. People are looking to stay within a "comfort zone" (e.g., evangelicals often end up "witnessing" only within church groups and other areas where they will be met with acceptance, rather than by going out into the larger community and risking rejection or hostility). And people "shop around" much more for churches these days--a hundred years ago, almost everyone stayed within the religion they belonged to as children, while now large numbers change religion. I recommend this book.
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"Memorare" by Gene Wolfe:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/11/2008]
"Memorare" by Gene Wolfe (F&SF Apr) has a future Thuggee-like cult in space that uses space-based memorials as a trap for its victims. In spite of how this description sounds and its space- based setting, this is more low-key and character-focused than one might expect. Then again, it is by Gene Wolfe, so maybe you would expect that.
LOOKING FOR THE MAHDI by N. Lee Wood (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00450-4, 1997 (1996c), 337pp, mass market paperback):
This book is not without flaws, but it did keep me up until 3 AM to finish it, so I guess that serves as a recommendation.
Kahlili bint Munadi Sulaiman is a television journalist. She covered a war in Khuruchabja (not unlike the war in Iraq, from the description), and now finds herself involved in escorting John Halton to Khuruchabja. But neither are what they appear: Sulaiman is also K. B. Sulaiman, male journalist (because frankly, there was no way a woman could cover a war in a Muslim fundamentalist country), and Halton is a fabricant. And besides the issue of gender, there is also the layer of deception and concealment inherent in the television journalism business: the newscasters are just "bubble-heads" repeating the words fed to them and nothing is what it seems. Given that the whole Middle East situation in real life and in the book seems tied up with identity in strange ways, I am sure that this emphasis on multiple and hidden identities is not accidental. (I might quibble that "Khuruchabja" sounds more Central Asian than Middle Eastern, but let it pass.) If you question whether Sulaiman could carry off her disguise, consider Linda Hunt in the film The Year of Living Dangerously.
Halton is also trying to conceal his identity. Fabricants are not entirely popular, even with heavy government regulation. This regulation, by the way, is one of my two major complaints. Looking for the Mahdi was obviously written before the recent cloning announcements, but even then reproductive technology had gone far enough that the sorts of definitions of "human" used here would never have been accepted.
Wood thinks through this whole issue of concealment more than most. Her characters need to acquire more than just the clothing and the hair cuts, they need to think and react the way their false egos would. They do not always succeed. One of the things that makes the story ring true is that they are not perfect at it. They make mistakes. Things happen beyond their control. And they have to deal with it.
Wood focuses primarily on intra-Muslim strife, and maybe because both (all?) sides are Muslim, she seems to avoid the stereotypes and extremes that so many writers fall into when they have the Muslims all on one side as inhuman monsters bent on destroying Western civilization. My only other complaint is the ending--I find Wood's "solution" to the Middle East situation unlikely, to say the least.
I haven't read Wood's first novel (Faraday's Orphans), but after reading Looking for the Mahdi, I will be looking for that one as well. Wood is an author to watch and Looking for the Mahdi is a book to read.
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INTRODUCING ARISTOTLE by Rupert Woodfin and Judy Groves:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/21/2004]
Rupert Woodfin and Judy Groves's INTRODUCING ARISTOTLE (Totem Books, ISBN 1-84046-233-7) is yet another in the graphic book series of introductions to various scientific, cultural, and philosophical subjects. This one is a bit harder going, and is sprinkled with drawings of later philosophers who covered some of the same topics but who are not always identified. I guess they assume that if someone reading this book sees a picture of a brooding man in a World War I trench and the word "Tractatus", they will automatically think "Wittgenstein".
I am reminded of one of my favorite moments. When I was working, there was a table where people from our project tended to gather for lunch. Four or five of us would often get into discussions about philosophy or theology, but not everyone was into these topics, preferring cars or sports. One day we were discussing the implications of transubstantiation and one person was explaining that "the problem is that you've all bought into the Aristotelian notion of substance," just as one of the cars-and-sports folks arrived and started to sit down. The bemused expression on the latter's face was quite amusing.
However, this brings me to a problem with this book (and others in this series): the index is very skimpy. It fits (one suspects by design) on a single page, and doesn't include the word "substance" at all, or "morality", or many other concepts that do appear in the book. I guess I'd say that this book is a good introduction, but not good as a book to refer back to, and may serve best to help the reader decide whether to continue in studying Aristotle. (Even here I have a quibble. The author says, "[R]eading Aristotle in the original is not an easy experience." However, his subsequent remarks lead me to believe he doesn't mean not just in the original Greek, but even in translation, because he then recommends a lot of books about Aristotle rather than suggesting which translations might be the best.)
To order Introducing Aristotle from amazon.com, click here.
ORLANDO by Virginia Woolf:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/30/2009]
Anyone familiar with the plot of ORLANDO by Virginia Woolf (ISBN-13 978-1-853-26239-5, ISBN-10 1-853-26239-0) knows that it plays with gender: Orlando is born male, but one day wakes up to discover that he has turned into a woman. But it also plays with time, and with space.
For example, early on Woolf writes, "It [the hill Orlando is on] was very high, so high indeed that nineteen English counties could be seen beneath, and on clear days thirty, or forty perhaps, if the weather was very fine." Seeing forty counties from a hill would be impressive indeed, as according to what read when I looked it up, there were only thirty-nine in all of Britain. But even assuming that this is a rounding error or something, one clearly cannot see thirty-nine counties unless the hill extends into the stratosphere. And Woolf continues, "To the east there were the spires of London and the smoke of the city; and perhaps on the very sky line, when the wind was in the right quarter, the craggy top and serrated edges of Snowden [sic] herself showed mountainous among the clouds." Snowdon to London is about 180 miles. Snowdon is 3560 feet high, so an observer at the top with perfect visibility could see 72 miles (assuming the Earth is a perfect sphere 8000 miles in diameter, thus giving an arccosine of 0.999854, implying an arc of 1 degree 5 minutes). Therefore, the furthest from Snowden anyone could see it would be 72 miles, but that is less than half the distance to London, and London is not 3560 feet above the plain.
Woolf also intermingles space and time. On page 112 she is talking about Orlando's house (an structure in space), which has 365 bedrooms and 52 staircases (clearly references to days and weeks of the year).
Orlando is described as being thirty in the time of Charles II (1660-1685), but was alive during Elizabeth I's reign (ended 1603) and writing during or shortly after Marlowe and Shakespeare.
Indeed, the trance which resulted in the gender change started on Friday, May 4, almost definitely in the reign of Charles II, which theoretically has to be either 1666, 1677, or 1683. (page 133) I say "theoretically", because Woolf later says that June 16, 1712, was a Tuesday (page 195) when it was actually a Monday. It is conceivable that Orlando remained ambassador through a change of monarch and even through the Glorious Revolution, adding 1688 and 1694 to the list, but this just makes Orlando even older.
From the ship returning to England, the Captain claims to see Addison, Dryden, and Pope dining together. (page 167) Their lifetimes did actually all overlap between 1688 and 1700, but in 1700, Pope was still only twelve. (Woolf even points this out in a footnote, in case the reader doesn't realize it.) For that matter, this return has to be after 1702 since William III is already dead (page 165), so Dryden was also dead as well.
And the name "Princess Marousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch" is wrong--it would be "Romanova", not "Romanovitch".
Woolf's punctuation is eccentric at times. Frequently when she has a subordinate clause, she leaves off the second comma. For example, "At any rate, it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck that she realized, with a start the penalties and privileges of her position." (page 153) Or, "Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one...." (page 173)
But Woolf is able to laugh at literary styles: she writes, "Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher's a poet; who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November, 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the masthead ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon: Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer 'Yes'; if we are truthful we say 'No'; Nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, ..." (page 78) At 197 words and 16 commas (plus three semi-colons, two dashes, and a colon), it's a sentence worthy of Jose Saramago.
The core of the novel, though, seems to be when Woolf writes of Orlando, "She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. 'Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires,' she reflected; 'for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline." (page 156) This incorporates several ideas. Woolf is suggesting that what people think of as the womanly attributes are merely learned behaviors. (One can argue that basing this notion on a person who was born a man and has been a woman for only a short time is not entirely convincing.) But more importantly, Orlando (Woolf) recognizes that a culture that treats people unequally may seem good to those on top, but if there is any chance of a change in status, these people might wish for a more fair (i.e. equal) society. (This is actually a philosophical theory proposed in the 20th century--justice is what you would arrange for a society if you were responsible for setting it up *before* you knew what your position would be in it. Maybe it's just me, but I see echoes of Jorge Luis Borges's "Babylonian Lottery" in this.)
This is one of the few novels that has an index. (In fact, I can think of no others.) It's true that all that is indexed are the various people Orlando meets or refers to, and I'm sure the intent is to make this seem more a real biography. In this sense, I suppose it is an early example of trying to make a fictional story appear real--though frankly there are enough impossibilities in it to make a careful reader question it early on. Ironically, the main impossibility when Woolf wrote it was the notion that Orlando could be transformed from a man into a woman--and that is no longer impossible at all. But seeing Snowdon and London simultaneously from the ground ... no, that is still impossible.
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THE POET AND THE MURDERER by Simon Worrall:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/22/2003]
Simon Worrall's THE POET AND THE MURDERER starts in Amherst, Massachusetts (where I went to school at the University of Massachusetts). Daniel Lombardo, as curator of the Jones Library (the Amherst public library), buys a previously undiscovered Emily Dickinson poem at an auction at Sotheby's. Then he starts to have doubts as to its authenticity, and the story it flashes back to Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, in a strange twist that ends up incriminating a man who had forged Mormon Church documents and eventually murdered two people to cover up his crimes.
These aren't "spoilers"--this is all true.
The story is, of course, fascinating. (If it doesn't seem fascinating to you already, well, you could probably skip this book.) My quibbles are that I'm not sure I completely trust Worrall's research and statements. For example, Worrall describes where Lombardo lived as "West Hampton." There's a Westhampton in the Amherst area, but no "West Hampton." And it's not Interstate 95 that one takes to Amherst, but Interstate 91. Also, his statements about the Mormon Church seem to indicate an anti-Mormon bias that might have affected his approach. So when he comes down very negatively on Sotheby's, I have to wonder if there may not be another side to the story. Still, with that caveat, I would recommend this book to all those who like books about books.
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ENGLISH GOTHIC: A CENTURY OF HORROR CINEMA by Jonathan Rigby (Reynolds & Hearn, 2000, 272pp, L17.95)
NIGHTWALKERS: GOTHIC HORROR MOVIES: THE MODERN ERA by Bruce Lanier Wright (Taylor, 1995, 171pp, $17.95)
BRIGHT DARKNESS: THE LOST ART OF THE SUPERNATURAL FILM by Jeremy Dyson (Cassell, 1997, 282pp, price unknown):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/06/2003]
Last year I read Jonathan Rigby's ENGLISH GOTHIC: A CENTURY OF HORROR CINEMA (Reynolds & Hearn, 2000, 272pp, L17.95). Then a couple of weeks ago, I read NIGHTWALKERS: GOTHIC HORROR MOVIES: THE MODERN ERA by Bruce Lanier Wright (Taylor, 1995, 171pp, $17.95). And when Mark saw me enjoying that, he said I should also read Jeremy Dyson's BRIGHT DARKNESS: THE LOST ART OF THE SUPERNATURAL FILM (Cassell, 1997, 282pp, price unknown).
The first point worth noting is that only one of these are British, which is surprising when one considers that when one talks about "Gothic horror films" or "supernatural horror films," often the studio name that first comes to mind is Hammer Films. Ironically, Dyson doesn't cover the Hammer era at all, but instead concentrates on the Universal/RKO era of the 1930s and 1940s. Wright, on the other hand, focuses on the Hammer period from 1957 to 1976 but covers American and Continental horror films as well as British, while Rigby takes an approach orthogonal to both and covers a century's worth of films, all English.
All three have one thing in common--they concentrate on the "horror film" rather than the "terror film." Their goal is not to write about slasher films, or stalker films, or psycho films, but about "supernatural" horror--horror that is based on something beyond the world we know. (Wright makes the distinction at the end between Gothic and Grand Guignol styles, saying the latter emphasizes our physical existence in this world, while the former postulates a structure of good and evil in which we move.)
On to specifics. Rigby's ENGLISH GOTHIC is a very thorough coverage of its topics, with particular value for the pre-Hammer era which tends to be ignored or skimmed over in works of this kind. Rigby does not cover every film in detail, but at least references and puts in context the films for which he doesn't give detailed plot synopses and analyses.
Wright's NIGHTWALKERS is much less thorough, even for the period it covers, though he spends a bit more time on the films he does cover in depth. And Dyson covers even fewer films, but each again in yet more depth, with entire chapters devoted to "King Kong" and "Cat People", for example.
The real problem with all of these, of course, is that after you have finished reading about a film, you'll want to pull out the DVD (or videotape) and watch it again. After reading about what Wright called "the Cornish horrors" ("The Reptile" and "Plague of the Zombies"), for example, I suggested to Mark that this would make a good Sunday afternoon double feature. Luckily, he agreed, and since it just happened to be Sunday afternoon, that was one problem solved. :-)
All three books are somewhat difficult to find in stores, though on-line booksellers have made it relatively easy on-line. If you are going to get only one of the three, ENGLISH GOTHIC is probably the best choice. BRIGHT DARKNESS is the most academic, with NIGHTWALKERS being the most "pop culture" of the three, though hardly a fluff coffee table book.
To order English Gothic from amazon.com, click here.
To order Nightwalkers from amazon.com, click here.
To order Bright Darkness from amazon.com, click here.
THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS by John Wyndham:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/07/2004]
John Wyndham's THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS was a fair success at our science fiction book discussion group. Coincidentally, the New York Review of Science Fiction had just run two articles on John Wyndham, including one which traced the roots of the triffids (as it were) to such works as Edgar Wallace's "The Black Grippe", Edmond Hamilton's "The Plant Revolt", and John Wyndham's "Puff- Balls" (a.k.a. "Spheres of Hell", a.k.a. "The Puff-Ball Menace"-- it went under almost as many names as John Wyndham himself).
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