Stephen Fry has the kind of effort­less tal­ent that makes me envi­ous. He is a bril­liant actor and come­dian (Black­ad­der; Jeeves and Woos­er; A Bit of Fry and Lau­rie), and fine writer of fic­tion, non-fic­tion, screen­plays and plays (I’m in the mid­dle of his nov­el Mak­ing His­tory). Nat­u­rally, such a per­son would be expect­ed to write an inter­est­ing biog­ra­phy. But I was unpre­pared for the extreme hon­esty and sparkling wit of this book. It’s devot­ed entire­ly to his child­hood and teenage years, always the most inter­est­ing parts of an auto­bi­og­ra­phy, if it is hon­est. His descrip­tion of his first expe­ri­ence of feel­ing love is among the finest I’ve read. His self-eval­u­a­tions strike me as spot-on, his con­fes­sions to mis­deeds are not twist­ed into self-glam­or­iz­ing. The book is absolute­ly engross­ing. For the aspects of human cul­ture that offend him, he reserves a spe­cial, elo­quent anger: Read more »

This is Jon George’s sec­ond nov­el, which I read eager­ly after being very pleased by Faces of Mist and Flame. This one is much more com­pli­cated, jug­gling sev­eral char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions. The plot involves a sud­den alter­ation in the fab­ric of real­ity, expe­ri­enced by the whole earth, a char­ac­ter try­ing to pin down the nature of psy­chic abil­i­ties, and char­ac­ters flash­ing on events in the past. Among those events is the assas­si­na­tion of SS–Ober­grup­pen­führer Rein­hard Hey­drich, who was per­haps the prin­ci­pal archi­tect of the Holo­caust. This fas­ci­nated me. I not only made a study of the Wansee Con­fer­ence, where Hey­drich con­sol­i­dated his plans, but a friend showed me the exact spot in the Prague sub­urb of Kobylisy where he was shot by Czech par­ti­sans. I will rec­om­mend this nov­el, espe­cially to any­one who has already read Faces of Mist and Flame, with the caveat that its nar­ra­tive com­plex­ity requires more atten­tive reading.

14749. (Cory Doc­torow) Some­one Comes to Town, Some­one Leaves Town
14750. (Joseph Kage) Chapitre Pre­mier: Esquiss­es de la vie Cana­di­enne sous Le Régime Français
14751. (David G. Hub­bard) The Sky­jack­er, His Flights of Fancy
(Bernard DeVo­to) Mark Twain At Work:
. . . . 14752. (Bernard DeVo­to) The Phan­ta­sy of Boy­hood: Tom Sawyer [arti­cle]
. . . . 14753. (Mark Twain) “Boy’s Man­u­script” [frag­ment antic­i­pat­ing Tom Sawyer]
. . . . 14754. (Bernard DeVo­to) Noon and the Dark: Huck­le­ber­ry Finn [arti­cle]
. . . . 14755. (Bernard DeVo­to) The Sym­bols of Despair [arti­cle]
14756. (Robert Graves) I, Claudius
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There was some­thing absolute­ly won­der­ful about the kind of sci­ence fic­tion that was pub­lished in the Amer­i­can SF mag­a­zines in the 1950’s. While the “main­stream” fic­tion writ­ers strug­gled to obey increas­ingly rigid notions of “real­ism” and the short sto­ry vir­tu­ally dis­ap­peared as an art form in the lit­er­ary world, Sci­ence Fic­tion writ­ers flour­ished in their small ghet­to, free to let their imag­i­na­tions roam, and free to sat­i­rize soci­ety with infi­nite jest. That won­der­ful cre­ative caul­dron gave us Theodore Stur­geon, Philip K. Dick, Avram David­son, Edgar Pang­born, William Tenn, Alfred Bester, and many, many more. These were among the finest writ­ers Amer­ica ever pro­duced. There was one writer that almost all these men looked up to and admired, and that was Cyril M. Korn­bluth. Sad­ly, his career end­ed with pre­ma­ture death in 1958, after only sev­en years of writ­ing. But in those sev­en years he pro­duced sev­eral mas­ter­pieces in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Fredrik Pohl —such as the bril­liant satire of adver­tis­ing, The Space Mer­chants, and the remark­ably pre­scient Glad­i­a­tor-at-Law. He also pro­duced sev­eral fine nov­els on his own, much more bit­ing (per­haps because Pohl’s mel­lower per­son­al­ity influ­enced the col­lab­o­ra­tions), as well as a pletho­ra of bril­liant short sto­ries. ‘The Lit­tle Black Bag’ and ‘The March­ing Morons’ are per­fect exam­ples of his superb artistry.

A fine intro­duc­tion to Kornbluth’s work would be this nov­el, The Syn­dic, pub­lished in 1953. It posits a future in which gov­ern­ments have col­lapsed under their own weight of bureau­cracy and been replaced by the Mafia. In 1953, it was far-out whim­sy. How would an East­ern Euro­pean read it today? The real plea­sure in read­ing Korn­bluth is that his sharp satire is deliv­ered in a crisp, pure­ly col­lo­quial style, as if Damon Run­yan where writ­ing soci­o­log­i­cal Sci­ence Fic­tion. A seri­ous writer, today, would make heavy going of this stuff, stretch­ing it out and fill­ing it with styl­is­tic tricks and learned ref­er­ences. Korn­bluth wrote like an expe­ri­enced bar­ber.… a few deft strokes with a very sharp blade, done like mag­ic, and over before you can catch your breath. Fifty-three years have passed since this nov­el hit the stands, and it is not quaint. It’s still a good, clean shave.

In the late 1960’s, there was a wave of “sky­jack­ings” — where lone gun­men would force air­planes to fly to Cuba. This book was a con­tem­po­rary psychiatrist’s attempt to ana­lyze the moti­va­tions of the Sky­jack­ers, based on inter­views with them in jail. In most cas­es, Cuba sim­ply extra­dited them to Cana­da, which then extra­dited them to the Unit­ed States. Even at the time, it was under­stood by every­one that the sky­jack­ings were not ini­ti­ated by, or encour­aged by the Cas­tro regime, which was actu­ally rather embar­rassed by the phe­nom­e­non. The author rejects the idea that there was any seri­ous polit­i­cal moti­va­tion behind the sky­jack­ings. In most cas­es, the polit­i­cal procla­ma­tions of the per­pe­tra­tors were far too shal­low and sil­ly to be tak­en seri­ously as motives. He goes through the per­sonal his­tory of each sky­jacker and finds that they are remark­ably uni­form. The typ­i­cal sky­jacker was the child of a vio­lent, bul­ly­ing father and a deeply reli­gious moth­er, who sub­se­quently failed mis­er­ably in carv­ing out any kind of suc­cess. They were usu­ally obses­sively reli­gious, and social­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cally extreme­ly con­ser­v­a­tive. Their sex­ual lives, most of the time, were pathet­ic. After some par­tic­u­larly dev­ast­ing fail­ure or betray­al, they quite spon­ta­neously con­cocted a scheme to cre­ate a dra­matic event that would some­how, they felt, resolve their dif­fi­cul­ties, at least in a sym­bolic sense. The idea of the sky­jack­ings seems to have occured to them sim­ply because oth­ers had done it, and it was a big thing in the news. The sim­i­lar­ity to the psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­files of ser­ial killers, dis­cussed in Elliott Leyton’s work, is strik­ing. Ley­ton would have had a more com­mon-sense approach to the case his­to­ries. Hub­bard used his data to con­coct a rather lame the­ory from the pseu­do-sci­ence of psy­chother­apy which was then still very influ­en­tial. But the case his­to­ries speak for them­selves, and it’s inter­est­ing for a read­er in 2006 to be remind­ed that air trav­el was not par­tic­u­larly safe forty years ago.

This is an extreme­ly imag­i­na­tive and well-writ­ten nov­el, pulling togeth­er sev­eral themes that would not nor­mally work well togeth­er. Doc­torow com­bines a real­is­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of life in Toronto’s pleas­antly chaot­ic Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket neigh­bour­hood with night­mar­ish fan­tasy ele­ments that have the feel­ing of the grim­mer parts or Norse, Ger­man or Native Cana­dian folk­lore, and throws in a lit­tle cyber­punk, as well. These dis­parate com­po­nents are not set apart in blocks, but flow and blend into each oth­er on a para­graph-by-para­graph, some­times a sen­tence-by-sen­tence basis. I won’t sum­ma­rize the plot: it will just sound arbi­trar­ily grotesque, and will not give you any hint of the human­ity and the effec­tive lan­guage of the book. The book gives me some hope, because I was feel­ing that Sci­ence Fic­tion writ­ing in North Amer­ica was mori­bund, and this is an exam­ple of a return­ing vigour.

14719. (Bri­an Doyle) Easy Avenue
14720. (Mary Mapes) Truth and Duty ― The Press, the Pres­i­dent, and the Priv­iledge of Power
(Wal­ter Mosley) Future­land: Nine Sto­ries of an Immi­nent World:
. . . . 14721. (Wal­ter Mosley) Whis­pers in the Dark [sto­ry]
. . . . 14722. (Wal­ter Mosley) The Great­est [sto­ry]
. . . . 14723. (Wal­ter Mosley) Doc­tor Kismet [sto­ry]
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This is the sem­i­nal work on the anthro­pol­ogy and soci­ol­ogy of ser­ial killing. I read it in con­junc­tion with an NFB doc­u­men­tary film “The Man Who Stud­ies Mur­der”, which puts a face to the voice of the book. Ley­ton is a coun­try boy from small-town Saskatchewan (who looks and sounds dis­tinctly Metis, though I can’t say for sure that he is) and now lives in New­found­land. New­found­land is rur­al, poor by North Amer­i­can stan­dards, and vir­tu­ally every house has a gun. Eco­nom­i­cally, it’s the Cana­dian equiv­a­lent of Arkansas. But it has one of the low­est mur­der rates in the world. In the film, Ley­ton dis­cusses the rea­sons why he con­sid­ers cul­tural choic­es and mores the prin­ci­pal deter­mi­nant of mur­der rates and styles of mur­der, often using his home as a laboratory.

The book on ser­ial and mass killers, deal­ing with the “clas­sic” cas­es, attempts to get beyond the kind of unver­i­fi­able psy­chi­atric spec­u­la­tions that dom­i­nated the issue before Ley­ton came on the scene. As he demon­strates, psy­chi­a­try has been of lit­tle use in under­stand­ing the phe­nom­e­non. He shows the fun­da­men­tal sim­i­lar­i­ties in most ser­ial killings, and does his best to deflate the non­sense gen­er­ated by Thomas Harris’s “Han­ni­bal Lecter” fan­tasies. Ser­ial killers are invari­ably pathet­ic, inef­fec­tive losers, usu­ally pret­ty dumb.…. nev­er the suave super­ge­niuses of fic­tion. Ley­ton rejects bio­log­i­cal and psy­chi­atric expla­na­tions in favour of a cul­tural one, and argues it per­sua­sively. He may not have the last word on this issue, but his opin­ions are more worth read­ing than most. He is also a wit­ty and enter­tain­ing writer ― and from the evi­dence of the film, has the same qual­i­ties in person.

This book caught my eye because it’s heroes are from the coast of Hudson’s Bay, a nos­tal­gic place for me. Two Cree lads from Moose Fac­tory fight in the trench­es of World War I. Boy­den writes beau­ti­fully, is famil­iar with Cree cul­ture, and researched WWI trench war­fare with a historian’s skill. The book com­pares well with the clas­sic Cana­dian nov­el of WWI, Tim­o­thy Findlay’s The Wars. The Great War of 1914–1918 had a tremen­dous impact on Cana­da — far more than on the Unit­ed States. Cana­da was involved dur­ing the entire length of the war, had twice as many sol­diers on the front per-capi­ta as the U.S., and one Cana­dian fam­ily in five suf­fered a casu­alty. The war end­ed the desire of most Cana­di­ans to keep any seri­ous polit­i­cal ties with Britain, and scarred an entire gen­er­a­tion. So it isn’t sur­pris­ing that WWI nov­els con­tinue to be writ­ten, and loom large in Cana­dian lit­er­a­ture. This is a wor­thy exam­ple. Read more »