A PERFECT SPY by John LeCarré has a horrififed British intelligence officer trying to track down chameleonic spymaster Magnus Pym without letting the US know that he may be a traitor of Kim Philby proportions. This, however, is mostly a frame for Pym to reminisce about his life and how it was molded by his even more chameleonic, glad-handing, manipulative father. This is LeCarré’s personal favorite of his books (with the possible exception of The Constant Gardener) due to the heavy autobiographical content, Rick being a stand-in for LeCarré’s own manipulative father (judging from the intro to this edition, the real deal was considerably nastier). Well written though a bit uneven, and even more cynical than LeCarré’s usual, Pym scoffing at Spy Who Came in From the Cold’s claim that the spy networks are the Sane People who keep the crazies from destroying everything.
AMERICAN DAUGHTER GONE TO WAR: On the Front Lines With an Army Nurse in Vietnam by Winnie Smith is, like Home Before Morning, background reading for Southern Discomforts. This is well-executed, though familiar, in its story of grim combat surgery, but it’s interesting to compare the personal lives of the two women: Smith’s comes across much tidier, with fewer affairs and no drugs stronger than booze and tobacco until after the war. Smith also appears to have become much more bitter than van Devanter at everyone from rear-echelon officers to pampered USO stars to the trivial problems of the patients she treated later in the states. According to Smith, it wasn’t until she read Van Devanter’s book that she realized how much anger and pain she was holding inside; good, though I’m not sure it added more to my insight.
SID AND MARTY KROFFT: A Critical Study of Saturday Morning Children’s Television, 1969-1993 by Hal Erickson looks at the creators of countless Saturday morning shows of my childhood including such time travel-relevant ones as the two Land of the Lost series and Lost Saucer. Erickson follows the Kroffts from their Poupees de Paris nudie puppet review (“In those days, live nudie shows were rare enough some of the audience found it quite titillating.”) through their long chain of kidvid starting with H.R. Pufnstuff and their several prime-time variety shows (most successfully Donny and Marie). Dry, but interesting as someone who grew up with these guys (though I was never as fond of them as Erickson). There’s also an interesting appendix discussing a lawsuit the Kroffts filed against McDonalds over ripping off their ideas for McDonald land
H.G. Wells’ THE TIME MACHINE, of course, time travel’s other foundational work, and like Connecticut Yankee it proved informative to reread it. I hadn’t realized how closely the Pal movie follows the book, the big change being that the Time Traveler rescues Weena from the Morlocks and then destroys them (in the original he heads home after she dies in a fire).
While Wells certainly gets as didactic as Twain, he has the advantage of writing at much shorter length and not having his protagonist as smugly confident, the Time Traveler admitting how often his theories about the future world turn out dead wrong. Wells also works in a lot of jokes about previous utopian/future SF, pointing out that most people who visit the future are unlikely to get detailed explanations of how the sewers work (the emphasis on the personal side is what keeps Wells’ SF alive when so many others of that era are vanished).
Tag Archives: John Le Carre
Reading Material (#SFWApro)
Filed under Now and Then We Time Travel, Reading
Movies and Books (well, one of each)
As I’ve always heard, The Omega Man is far and away the worst adaptation of Richard Matheson‘s I Am Legend but after my recent Matheson film festival, I couldn’t resist checking it out.
The movie has the same basic concept of one true human (Charlton Heston here) surrounded by monsters but instead of Matheson’s vampires, they’re traditional post-apocalypse mutants (though as light-sensitive albino mutants they still shun the light). And the real threat is that they’re also fanatical Luddites led by Antony Zerbe, blaming technology for the world’s collapse and hating Heston as a reminder of the age of the machine. Which I think, makes the mutation pointless—human fanatics would have had just as much threat. And if the mutants aren’t inherently hostile, who cares if they mutate?
The other big problem is that while the abandoned LA of the opening looks very cool, Charlton Heston can’t pull off the one-man show this requires (I like Heston, but Vincent Price he ain’t), so everything bogs down until Rosalind Cash and a few other survivors show up (and even then it’s rather lacking in ooomph). Not recommended. “Tell me something, are you folks really with the Internal Revenue Service?”
In the intro to this edition of THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL John LeCarre chuckles about how the end of the Cold War had many people predicting he’d be washed up, when he’d already written multiple novels that didn’t depend on it. This one, for instance, focuses on a British actress whose half-baked radical sympathies make her a perfect mole the Mossad can use to penetrate a Palestinian terrorist network by fabricating a relationship between her and the brother of the network head. LeCarre does a good job presenting both sides as devious and ruthless in their covert battles, but not evil (which unsurprisingly got him criticized as too sympathetic to the Palestinians). The detailed look at his protagonist’s mindset as she moves through different roles in “the theater of the real” bogged this down a little for me, but leCarré ultimately carries it off.
Books and Graphic Novels
SMILEY’S PEOPLE was John LeCarre’s farewell to George Smiley as the Circus calls him back to clean up the mess left when a Soviet defector (whose ominous warnings were blithely ignored) winds up shot in the street. Smiley discovers the man’s claims of an intelligence coup were spot-on; tracing his activities for the past few years leads to the discovery of Soviet spymaster Karla’s one weakness, which Smiley ruthlessly exploits. LeCarre says in the intro that he’d planned several more Smiley/Karla novels, but realized he couldn’t write the stories he wanted to with a protagonist who “despite his misgivings always did the job, even if he had to leave his conscience at the door. This book makes for excellent reading, though, so I’m glad Smiley got such a fine chance to bow out.
CHASING GIDEON: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice by Karen Houppert looks at how the right to have a public defender works in practice and concludes that it’s not working out the way the landmark Gideon vs. Wainwright case said it should. Houppert looks at cases in Washington state, Miami, Louisiana and Georgiato show appointed attorneys are invariably underpaid, not to mention compromised by politics and cronyism (Louisiana judges often appoint their court’s PD), corruption, incompetence (one PD requesting a genetic test wrote it as “D and A test”) and the sheer volume of cases resulting from the war on drugs and increasingly harsher sentences. Houppert has no particular solution to offer, but it makes compelling reading nonetheless. It also sheds some interesting history on the original Gideon.
MADNESS: A Brief History by Roy Porter looks at the way insanity has been studied, explained and treated through the centuries, from the view of it as a form of possession, sin (since in rejecting reason, we rejected God’s Great Gift), brain damage, bacterial infection and imbalance in the humors. The questions of how we treat and confine the loonies have been almost as varied, as have the question of defining them and the perennial efforts to prove that genius and madness are somehow linked. Not an in-depth study, but I don’t know that I’d have wanted one.
BPRD HELL ON EARTH: The Long Death and the Devil’s Engine by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi and others, squeezes together two different miniseries. In one, the BPRD’s Devon goes into the field to bring back Feenix, a psychic who seems to know something about the chaotic world they’re now living in (I’m guessing with the roster trimmed so muh, she’ll be a new teammate); in the other, the ectoplasmic agent Joachim confronts Capt. Daimio, now a were-jaguar, and resolves some old issues. Okay installments, but neither one a standout.
LOBSTER JOHNSON: The Burning Hand by Mgnola, Arcudi and Tonci Zonjic is chronologically the first appearance of the vigilante Lobster, as he stumbles into a gangwar involving phony ghost Indians, an Eastern mystic and a woman reporter. Lively, though as the reporter notes, the Lobster doesn’t do welll here.
The chronologically later but earlier published LOBSTER JOHNSON: The Iron Prometheus by Mignola and Jason Armstrong is a stronger story and more integral to the Hellboy-universe mythos, as the Lobster goes up against the mystic Memnan Saa in a fight over the lost secrets of Hyperborea. The Lobster comes off more competent here (though punching way out of his weight class), though Saa is a stock Sinister Oriental (knowing he’s actually a British occultist doesn’t change the imagery).
JACK STAFF: Soldiers by Paul Grist was the first color collection of the series (following Everything Used to be Black and White) revealing how Jack hung up his hat 20 years ago after a cataclysmic battle with British living weapon Capt. Hurricane (like Albion, portrayed here as a Hulk-type berserker). Only now the energies unleashed by defeating the Hurricane are resurfacing and driving everyone around to fits of rage. A bit more linear storytelling would have helped, but good overall.
Books
John LeCarre’s TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY brings the retired George Smiley back to center-stage for the first time since A Murder of Quality as a group of agents recruit him to investigate a defector’s claim there’s an Ultimate Mole in the highest levels of the Circus (as LeCarre now identifies Smiley’s brancy of British intelligence). A book that manages to be absorbing (this is more compulsively readable than I usually find LeCarre) despite having lots of talk and very little action; I suspect one reason it’s LeCarre’s most adapted work is that it’s neither as dark nor as heavily Cold War as Spy Who Came in From the Cold so it doesn’t age as badly. This also introduces Karla, a mastermind of Soviet intelligence who met and outwitted Smiley years earlier, and remains the running foe for two more books.
Someone in marketing screwed up the cover for Robert Bloch’s PLEASANT DREAMS as the back cover completely misidentifies the contents. Fortunately, what’s actually inside is excellent, including a creepy haunted house (“The Hungry House”), a pair of accursed spectacles (“The Cheaters”), the gory little “The Mandarin’s Canaries” and “I Kiss Your Shadow” (which now looks like a tale of a female stalker, but back when it came out would have seemed like a twisted take on how women catch and “tame” men into husbands). The weakest stories are “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (standard story of a mentally handicapped man tricked into committing murder) and “Sweet Sixteen” (relies too much on then-current fears of juvenile delinquencey to work now, even though the same fears recur generation after generation).
THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER by John Brunner is a 1975 novel set in a dystopian future (heavily inspired by Alvin Toffler’s Nonfiction Future Shock) where relationships are all transitory and “plug-in” and surveillance is omnipresent (both enabled by what amounts to a form of Internet), a situation an escapee from a Think Tank of Doom hopes to change (like Zelazny’s My Name is Legion he’s a chameleon who can escape detection even in a world of massive data-gathering and omnipresent surveillance). Although the lead is interest, this is unfortunately one of those Novels of Ideas where people are forever debating their Brilliant Theories about How To Fix The World rather than acting (and the issues are dated, even though the underlying theme of overwhelming change has hardly gone away)
FRANK R. PAUL: Father of Science Fiction Art by Stephen D. Korshak is a collection of cover paintings by the Golden Age artist, along with a short and interesting biography. While I haven’t always been a huge fan of Paul, this collection of massive spaceships, weird monsters and alien landscapes makes me appreciate him a lot more. Thanks to my friends MLR and freemonkeys for giving me this.
PEACE was Gene Wolfe’s first novel, a magical realist piece in which a retiree slips into his flashback booth while taking time trips to visit his dead doctors and wondering why his house seems to be growing. Unfortunately, the more fantastic aspects don’t leaven the endless mundane reminiscences of his childhood and his family enough to hold me (Neil Gaiman’s afterword insists that the closer we read this, the more amazing it gets, but it’s just the sort of book I’m more inclined to skim). More a case of mismatching writer and reader than an actual bad book, I think.
Filed under Reading
Movies and Books
THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994) is the Coen Brothers Capraesque tale (the ending owes a lot to both It’s a Wonderful Life and Meet John Doe) of how Indiana hick Tim Robbins becomes president of a national conglomerate as part of Paul Newman’s scheme to drive down the stock price, then snap it up for a song. Jennifer Jason Leigh further complicates the mix doing a dead-on Katherine Hepburn impersonation as a brash reporter (but frankly I think a more toned-down Barbara Stanwyck character would have fitted better). Entertaining, but not as hilarious as Raising Arizona—I think the Coen style clashes with the style of the forties material too much. With Charles Durning as Robbins’ predecessor, Bruce Campbell and John Mahoney as fellow newshounds (Sam Raimi cowrote this, which may explain Campbell showing up) and Jon Polito and Peter Gallagher in bit parts. “I’m never supposed to do that—but could you think of a better option?”
SHADES OF MILK AND HONEY by Mary Robinette Kowal Is a not-quite-successful fantasy set in a Jane Austen world where illusion casting is considered a demure womanly art like painting watercolors or playing piano. The protagonist is the ugly-duckling sister of a pretty young thing and, unfortunately, comes off even more passive than the protagonist of Mansfield Park, spending most of the book sitting around wringing her hands and wishing she were pretty. This has all the elements Austen heroines deal with (Obnoxious and Irritating Suitors, insecurity, annoying relatives and protecting friends from bad decisions) but never catches the magic.
John LeCarré forsook espionage in THE NAÏVE AND SENTIMENTAL LOVER for the old warhorse of a successful man having a midlife crisis—specifically a British businessman who dives into the waters of the sexual revolution, most significantly with a male author who’s slid into obscurity since his legendary first bestseller. This didn’t work for me, but I agree with LeCarré in the introduction that it’s not as far removed from his spy thrillers as critics complained at the time (as the author puts it, Aldo has the same inability to work out his personal issues as Smiley does and for the same reasons).
BLACK PANTHER BY JACK KIRBY reminds me why it took years for me to take Kirby’s standing in comics seriously—I didn’t start reading his stuff until the New Gods era was almost over, and almost everything he wrote after that was pretty feeble (Eternals and Kamandi excepted). While this collection is full of energy as T’Challa falls in with a scheming group of relic hunters called the Collectors, the stories and concepts are recycled old-hat pulp stuff (with the exception of King Solomon’s Frog, a tiny time machine in the shape of a frog figurine—a shame everything wasn’t that zany). For most of the series, T’Challa’s standing as King of Wakanda and a technological genius is largely ignored in favor of reducing him to the big tough sidekick (to the primary Collector, Mr. Little) who hits things. Very unimpressive.
WORKING-CLASS WAR: American Combat Soldiers & Vietnam by Christian G. Appy argues that class was the great dividing line between Vietnam veterans and non-veterans as the lower classes went to ‘nam for reasons ranging from lack of a job to ignorance about ways to get out of the draft to the guilt or shame factor when everyone else in their neighborhood was signing up. Appy’s work follows a general overview of how the grunts reacted to Vietnam, the Vietnamese and the war, and the shift in attitudes over time, most of which he finds More Complicated Than We Think (a lot of veterans who opposed the war didn’t come out and say so because they found the anti-war protesters equally objectionable). Very good
And then there’s books
John LeCarre’s A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY kicks off when the British embassy in Bonn discovers one of its German employees is missing along with some embarrassing files, threatening to kill German support for the UK’s entry into the Common Market if the theft becomes public—and what does it have to do with a radical student anti-Brit movement in Germany? This reminds me a lot of his first two novels, being very much a mystery, though with a lot more politics—LeCarre actually served at the consulate and this reflects both his distate for it (“Like every British embassy, it’s an outpost of a suburban Britain 20 years out of date that carries all our prejudices about the country it’s stationed in.”) and Germany (being conscious how very much of the Nazi presence still lingered). Very good—and like Spy Who Came in From the Cold, notably more cynical than I think a 21st century American author would dare.
THE YEAR OF THE GRIFFIN is Diana Wynne Jones’ sequel to Dark Lord of Derkholm and could be either a satire on Hogwarts or on education generally, as a university dedicated to churning out D&D style wizards finds itself flummoxed that it’s new class includes one of the griffin wizards from the previous book, a dwarf revolutionary and a startling number of royal runaways, all of whom have alarming ideas about what magic can really do. This is a very leisurely book, without much of a narrative spine (it’s closer to a collection of interweaving short stories) but it’s still a good read.
SUPERMAN VS. HOLLYWOOD: How Fiendish Producers, Devious Directors and Warring Writers Grounded an American Icon by Jake Rossen doesn’t really live up to its title as it shows how Superman or Superboy has consistently made it to the big or small screen througout the decades (not to mention the 1940s radio series)—and at the time this came out (2006) Rossen anticipated the Superman Returns sequel coming along in just a couple of years. This is very good if your prime interest is the Chris Reeve Superman series, much skimpier when covering post-George Reeves TV series and very poor on comics (Rossen asserts Mario Puzo turned Clark Kent into a TV reporter for his Superman script, but Clark had been broadcasting for several years at that point in the comics—and Rossen screw up on other points too). Fair, but the writing’s very stiff.
BLOOD MAIDENS is Barbara Hambly’s third vampire novel, as retired British spy James Asher and his wife are once again recruited by the undead Castilian Ysidro, this time to investigate rumors the Kaiser is preparing for the approaching war by recruiting vampires to breed an undead army. Like Year of the Griffin, this is very leisurely, often feeling more like a travelogue than a novel (or like set-up for the fourth book which I imagine will tackle some of the myseries raised herin)—still, it’s quite readable (and better than the second book, Traveling With the Dead).
PILGRIM IN THE SKY by local Durham author Natania Barron has a young woman’s soul transported into the body of her parallel-world counterpart, which she’s assured is just so that she can wrap up old business with her supposedly dead boyfriend (in reality, she learns, he just jumped to this world), but Maddie soon begins to suspect there’s much more going on than she’s told. There’s a lot to like in this (I love the underlying concept and the ending is spectacular) but it does take a very long time to get going (Maddie spends several chapters after her kidnapping just drifting passively). Still worth a read.
Books
John LeCarre’s THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR, has a minor branch of military intelligence, largely reduced to shuffling papers since WW II, convinced its glory days have returned when an agent uncovers evidence of a Soviet missile base in East Germany. In some ways this comes off as LeCarre’s real anti-Bond novel, as the department’s dreams of excitement and adventure are largely, obviously delusional; also bitingly cynical in showing the turf wars between agencies, as it becomes obvious Control (the head of Smiley’s outfit) is setting the group up to fail to eliminate a possible rival operation. Very good.
BPRD: Being Human is a so-so collection of BPRD stories by Mike Mignola and various artists, wherein a teenage Liz gets her first field mission, Roger the homonculus learns to kill, and ectoplasmic agent Johann Kraus takes on a conniving, soul-eating mystic. The latter story was far and away the best.
SUPERSTAR: As Seen on TV is a pair of stories by Kurt Busiek and Stuart Immonen featuring Superstar, a super-hero who derives his powers from draining other peoples’ life force; to use his power for good, he has to promote himself so that millions of people will donate a small percentage of their day’s bio-energy to the cause. The good news is, he’s able to fight against adversaries such as the poetic machine Robo Sapiens; the bad news is, setting up his marketing requires working with his greedy, manipulative father. A one-shot, but an interesting one.
RESURRECTION Book One by Marc Guggenheim, Justin Greenwood and David Dumeer takes place in 2007, 10 years after the alien Bugs launched an unstoppable invincible invasion (though there’s lot of flashing back to the invasion and times in between). Now the Bugs have disappeared, their ships all crashed … but why? Will the good guys or bad get to rebuild the government? Is it true the military knew about the Bugs before they attacked? Art is so-so, but the story is interesting enough I’ll check the next volume out of the library eventually.
DEJAH THORIS: The Colossus of Mars is a spinoff from Dynamite’s Warlord of Mars series, set 500 years before John Carter arrives on Mars. In this era, Helium’s twin cities are at war, which soon pales as a problem next to a scheming jeddak (monarch) who’s reactivated an ancient weapon of war to conquer everything with. Enjoyable, but not up to the best of Marvel’s John Carter Warlord of Mars series.
Spy Who Came in From the Zeitgeist
John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a terrific book (as mentioned last week), but I don’t know that it ages well.
First, some background for anyone young enough to need it: Following WW II, Germany divided up into Communist-controlled East Germany and democratic West Germany, with Berlin split between them. In the early sixties, East Germany found a solution to stop residents evacuating to West Berlin: It built a wall right across the city, manned by guards.
In the novel, (Spoilers Ahead) Alec Leamas is MI5’s Berlin head of operations. After his East German adversary Mundt assassinates yet another British mole, Leamas returns home in disgrace and slides into alcoholism, unemployment and burn-out. His only connection to life is Liz, a Communist Party member working at a library. Desperate for money, Leamas contacts an East German agent and offers to sell his knowledge for a price.
It’s alll a lie. Leamas still works for MI5: His story subtly fingers Mundt, a loathsome ex-Nazi, as a British agent, while MI5 plants evidence to confirm it. But when word of Leamas’ supposed defection leaks out, his East German handler kidnaps him to East Germany. He becomes star witness at Mudnt’s trial, but Mundt has a counter-move. It turns out MI5 has been helping the impoverished Liz, making it seem it comes from Leamas. Mundt brings Liz to Berlin in a cultural exchange program, then puts her on the stand: Her evidence implies Leamas has the money to support her, which shreds his cover story. Mundt clears his name and eliminates the underling who suspected him.
Mundt then sets Leamas and Liz free to escape over the Wall: He is the informant, and the whole operation used Liz and Leamas as pawns to place him above suspicion. The supposed safe point on the wall turns out not be so safe: The guards shoot Liz and Leamas, at the top of the wall, drops back to East Berlin to die rather than keep playing the game.
The book is way better than LeCarré’s first two novels, but I wonder how well it would work for someone the age of, say, my 18-year-old niece, someone for whom the Cold War is ancient history? I was alive during the era, and I still found the Berlin setting and the security and paranoid counter-spying almost as alien as the world of Avatar. Spying in a hot war is one thing, but I’m honestly not sure anyone who wasn’t there will make sense of the Cold War’s intrigues.
When I began the book, I also thought LeCarre’s cynicism about the petty, backbiting, status-hungry world of intelligence would date poorly too. While it was shocking at the time to suggest spies sometimes acted unethically, these days most spy fiction acknowledges the existence of ambitious schemers, paper-pushing bureaucrats and immoral acts.
There, however, I was wrong. Most spy stories I catch (and I don’t catch a lot, so take that into account) assume that while some guys in the agency may be bad, they’re just blemishes on a heroic face, so to speak. In LeCarre’s world, they are the face. The cold-blooded willingness to sacrifice Liz (or an intentional plan to have her killed, as this review suggests) isn’t some rogue operation, it’s sanctioned from the top. In LeCarre’s world, the work they do is vital, but the people who do it are immoral, often self-serving, bastards. And that’s their good points.
If anyone tried portraying the CIA like that today, I think the outrage would actually be worse.
Filed under Reading, Uncategorized
Yet more books
Still catching up … CITY COME A WALKIN’ by John Shirley was a 1980 urban fantasy set in the far future of 2008, wherein a San Francisco night club owner is roped into a scheme by the city’s collective unconscious, which seeks to crush a scheme to eliminate hard currency in favor of digital transfers and to prevent telecommuting (for fear the resulting decentralization will lead to the death of cities). This is considered a cyberpunk precursor, but it seems more in terms of influence (Gibson admits in the intro to this edition that he idolized Shirley when he was starting out) than concepts. Not bad, but not great (though I suspect it would have seemed fresher back in 1980).
A MURDER OF QUALITY was John LeCarre’s second novel, in which a friend asks Smiley (now retired and separated from his faithless wife) to investigate a schoolmaster’s wife’s claims that her husband is trying to killer; when Smiley arrives at school, the brutal murder has already happened. While I found Call for the Dead to be very detective-story in style, this is even more so, having no spy element. At the same time it’s also very much in LeCarré’s usual vein, with the public school setting showing the same kind of backstabbing, snobbery and conniving that LeCarré finds in espionage. Smiley, too, shows the mix of basic decency and relentless cunning that makes him an interesting protagonist.
THE FIRST FOSSIL HUNTERS: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times by Adrienne Mayor shows how the fairly common European remains of fossil elephants, rhinos and other animals fascinated inhabitants of classical times as much as they do our own era prompting stories of Giants of the Past, Fabulous Monsters or fairly accurate assessments of ancient beasts (Mayor makes a good case that griffins were based on protoceratops skeletons found further east in Asia). Mayor concludes that the ancients imagined more than we usually think, with some conceiving of extinction and others coming close to a concept of survival of the fittest to explain the disappearance of centaurs and similar creatures.
A BELL FOR ADANO was John Hersey’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1944 novel dramatizing how the American administrator of one Italian town does right by the community despite both the stupidity of higher-ups (which ultimately gets him punished for doing the right thing) and the wacky antics of the Italians (this reminds me a lot of McHale’s Navy during their stint in Italy). I can see why this impressed the Pulitzer committee when the occupation was front page news; today, the most noteworthy thing is the complete lack of cynicism (not only does the novel embrace the innate goodness of America, but it assumes that this alone can transform the world).
NOBODY GETS THE GIRL by James Maxey is a super-hero novel in which a man erased from reality by time-traveling super-genius Dr. Know (“As a result of my unwitting interference, your father bought a package of condoms none of which broke.”) discovers his nonexistence has turned him into a living phantom and thereby a perfect agent for Know’s utopian crusades. Better than most of this genre, with a couple of ingenious ideas and good action sequences. On the other hand, the final revelations and Dr. Know are pretty predictable, and Nobody himself is a bit bland (so his personal arc lacks much punch).
Books I’ve been reading
Nope, no movies this week.
KULL: Exile of Atlantis by Robert E. Howard is an excellent collection containing the complete stories of Conan’s predecessor barbarian (the first Conan story, Phoenix on the Sword, reworked and improved Kull’s By This Axe I Rule) plus unedited fragments (the seventies Kull collection I had tacked on endings to a couple of them) and related material. Kull was a brooding barbarian joylessly ruling over the ancient Valusian Empire (Howard’s role model appears to have been Saul, whom he saw as an Aryan warrior type drowning in the clutches of the shifty-eyed Jews at his court); his first couple of stories were groundbreaking (the first sword-and-sorcery tales) and way, way too broody (Conan, at least, knew how to party). The stories are good, but suffer from being mostly unpublished, so Howard wound up using similar plots over and over as he reworked them. Nothing essential, but good to have for a Howard fan.
THE LIES OF LOCKE LAMORA by Scott Lynch is a first novel that lives up to its press clippings as a gifted grifter working on the Ultimate Con a vaguely Venician city-state finds himself suddenly embroiled in a war waged the mysterious Grey King on the city’s underworld, in which Locke’s team of “gentleman bastards” seems to have been singled out as a particular problem. An all-around outstanding job with story, character and setting all good.
CALL FOR THE DEAD was John LeCarré’s first novel, wherein minor intelligence officer George Smiley refuses to believe that a perfectly routine security screening could have driven a man to take his life—and if it did, why did he first leave a wake-up call for himself the next morning? While structured more as a murder mystery than a spy story, most of LeCarre’s themes are here already—the moral dubiety of both sides, the struggle between conscientious drones and self-serving careerists,. the murkiness of motive and a protagonist who doubts his own motives as well. Interesting to see his work at the beginning.
THE THIRD SKULL is a fairly straight mystery novel (by Walter Gibson) for the Shadow series, as the death of an old man leads to a frenzied hunt for the title McGuffin that can reveal his hidden wealth, while the Shadow tries to figure out which of the treasure seekers is a killer. Good, though the necessity of having the Shadow figure it out by sheer deduction means an awful lot of stumbling by his agents as they try to shadow people.
This being printed in a double-book, I also got REALM OF DOOM, a stronger story wherein the Shadow hunts down the last of the five members of the Hand crime cartel (regrettably I don’t have the earlier battles), a brainy Brute Man whose plots include a grand-scale kidnapping, an underground lair and an engineering genius (“Once I patent his work, the royalties will explain why I have so much cash to flash around.”). Lively.
THE AFFINITY BRIDGE: A Newberry and Hobbes Investigation by George Mann is the kickoff to a series I won’t revisit, a steampunk set in (I think) an early 20th century Britain (with the Victorian Era prolonged by the Queen on life-support) where the title investigators must cope with a suspicious dirigible crash, a plague of zombies and a sinister scheme to turn humans into cyborgs. Fairly routine—if they’d pushed this into the present, it wouldn’t have changed much
BONE: Out From Boneville is the first in a graphic novel series about plucky Fone Bone, his scheming cousin Phony and their goofball cousin Smiley, and how they wind up in an isolated valley where strange powers are up to no good. Charmingly reminiscent of Carl Barks’ work for Disney, entertaining even though it didn’t really grab me.
Filed under Reading
