The 2009 Hugo Awards: The Best Novel Shortlist, Part 1

I have a shocking confession to make: I did not read all of the best novel Hugo nominees before the July 3rd voting deadline. I have an even more shocking confession to make: this was not because I didn't have the time to read these novels, but because of a lack of inclination. I'd read the two nominated novels I was actually interested in--Neal Stephenson's Anathem and Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book--long before the nominations were announced, but whether because of previous experiences with their author, or because of reactions from people whose opinion I trust, or because of the impression I'd formed of their topic and tone, none of the remaining three nominees--Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi, Saturn's Children by Charles Stross, and Little Brother by Cory Doctorow--appealed to me. I'm used to grumbling through Hugo reading when it comes to the short fiction categories, but committing myself to three novels I had not the least expectation of enjoying was a bit more than I could stomach, and if it weren't for this blog and the commitment I'd made on it to write about the best novel nominees, I probably wouldn't have made it through.

I wish I could say that at least some of these novels surprised me, if only because I'd come to them with such low expectations, but though one or two turned out to be not nearly as bad as I'd feared, on the whole this year's best novel shortlist is really, really disappointing. I'd happily trade at least three, if not four, of the nominees, and even the remaining novel--the only one I consider remotely worthy of the award--is deeply flawed. Perhaps the most notable attribute of this year's best novel ballot is how thoroughly dominated it is by YA genre fiction. Zoe's Tale, Little Brother, and The Graveyard Book were written and marketed for the YA audience, and Anathem, though ostensibly an adult novel, is also written in the YA mode, centering around a teenage protagonist who finds himself at the epicenter of a world-altering event, and ends up becoming a hero. In general, this seems to me like a reasonable reflection of the state of the genre. The shift towards YA-oriented writing has been several years in the making, and a sizable portion of the most talked-about genre books of the last few years have been geared, at least in theory, towards young readers. It follows, therefore, that the Hugo would also be dominated by these novels.

Though it might be tempting to conclude that the shoddy state of this year's shortlist is the result of the infantilization of the genre, to my mind the problem isn't that YA books are being nominated, but that the wrong YA books have been. How much stronger would this year's best novel shortlist have been if Terry Pratchett's Nation, Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels, or even Allegra Goodman's The Other Side of the Island had been on it? (This is not even to mention books that have received a great deal of critical attention, but which I haven't yet read myself, such as Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, Kristin Cashore's Graceling, or Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games.) In adult publishing, we have Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia, Iain M. Banks's Matter, David Anthony Durham's Acacia, and Felix Gilman's Thunderer. Understand, there isn't a single one of these novels that I consider exceptional, and I have serious problems with most of them--for all that I think that the Hugo voters were asleep at the switch, there's no denying that 2008 was simply not a very strong year for genre novels--but each and every one of them would have made this year's best novel ballot stronger, and, quite frankly, less embarrassing.

Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi is a companion volume to The Last Colony, itself the third volume in Scalzi's series of novels about John Perry, and preceded by Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades. Coming to Zoe's Tale cold, as I did, makes for an odd reading experience not only because I haven't read the previous novels but because Zoe's Tale itself is a story that takes place in the interstices of another story, with which I'm unfamiliar. Though Scalzi goes to some lengths to clue newbie readers into the events of The Last Colony (one assumes that the novel was intended, at least in part, as a introduction to the Old Man's War universe for young readers), it's easy to guess where he's eliding over scenes which in the adult novel were fleshed out, and where he's relying on the reader's familiarity with The Last Colony. The result, though nominally self-contained, feels very much like half a story, but what's more, it creates the impression that The Last Colony was itself an incomplete story. As Scalzi notes in his afterword, he was inspired to write Zoe's Tale because of complaints from readers of The Last Colony who felt that that novel ended with an unearned last minute save--Zoe turning up in the nick of time with just the right alien technology to save the colony. Zoe's Tale does tell the story of how Zoe was able to achieve this, but it's hard not to feel that we're reading Scalzi's make-up work, his retroactive justification for a piece of lousy plotting that ought not to have made it out of the editing stage, for which he's been rewarded with a Hugo nomination.

Zoe is Zoe Boutin-Perry, the fifteen year old adopted daughter of John Perry and Jane Sagan, who in The Last Colony are asked to lead the colonization effort of an uninhabited planet. On their arrival, the colonists discover that the planet is in a zone disputed by an alien alliance which has made--and made good on--the threat to violently uproot any human colonies. The colonists are therefore not only living under the threat of imminent death, but have to maintain strict radio silence and do without any EM-generating technology for fear of giving away their location. This is a dubious premise to begin with (why, despite knowing about the EM restrictions before dispatching the colony ship, and despite the existence among the colonists of a contingent of space-Amish whose equipment is purely mechanical, is the majority of the colony's material computer-controlled?), and it only becomes more so when it turns out that the colonial government is not simply stupid but actually evil, attempting to orchestrate the destruction of the colony as a means of starting a war (this, however, may be a complaint best laid at The Last Colony's feet). Zoe's Tale only becomes closely involved with this story towards its end, when it gets to work plugging the hole in The Last Colony's resolution, and most of its action is concerned with describing Zoe's acclimation to her new home and her coming of age under extremely unusual circumstances. Far from being an average colonist, Zoe is a messianic figure to an alien race, whose peace treaty with humanity stipulates that she be accompanied constantly by two alien bodyguards, who also report on her every move to their entire race (which means that the colonial government's decision to place Zoe on a colony they plan to sacrifice to an invading alien horde makes perfect sense). The crux of Zoe's Tale is Zoe's struggle to decide just to what degree she's justified in taking advantage of the aliens' devotion to her, and whether she's willing to continue in her role as their goddess despite having done nothing to earn it.

Zoe's Tale is, therefore, a novel driven by its narrator's interiority and her personal growth, and though Scalzi is to be commended for stretching himself beyond the space-adventure format of the Old Man's War books, in trying to write a character-driven novel he's bitten off a bit more than he can chew. Zoe is entirely unbelievable as a teenager--too self-possessed, and all too apt to spout platitudes about teenage behavior that make her sound like nothing so much as an adult talking about teenagers from a vast distance of years. Actually, what Zoe really sounds like is Scalzi himself--but for its events, her narrative reads like your average Whatever entry, and her voice and sense of humor are all but indistinguishable from his. This is not entirely a bad thing--Scalzi's sardonic humor is a big part of his blog's appeal, and in Zoe's Tale it translates into several extremely funny sequences. As unrealistic as Zoe is, she is more often amusingly unrealistic than annoyingly so, and the novel moves at a fast enough clip that her, and Scalzi's, tendency to become too pleased with their own cleverness is rarely given time to grate. The novel's emotional climaxes are blatantly telegraphed and arrive with all the subtlety of a meteor impact, but they never fail to hit their mark, and despite there never being any real doubt on this count, by the end of the novel you do find yourself rooting for Zoe to take charge of her own life. Zoe's Tale is an enjoyable novel, and so unassuming that to stress its flaws--the silly premise, the unbelievable narrative voice, the predictable and manipulative plot--feels a little like kicking a puppy. If I were discussing it in any other context but its having been nominated as one of the five best genre novels published in the last year I'd probably be happy to cut it some slack. But it has been nominated for the Hugo, which is to say that someone took that puppy and entered it in the Kentucky Derby. Whether or not that's fair to the puppy, it sure as hell isn't fair to the people who came to see a race.

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross is the only novel on the shortlist written for and about adults (though one might argue that its central character arc, which sees the narrator from a meek, unquestioning acceptance of her fate to self-directing kickassness, has something of the YA about it). So wouldn't you know, the main character is a sexbot. Freya is one of a line of robots whose emotional template was designed for sex and, in the right circumstances, for complete, slavish infatuation. She's doomed, however, to spend her life in unfulfilled loneliness, as it's been more than a hundred years since the humanity died out. Freya and her fellow sexbots and servants are a society of slaves, still hard-wired to serve an extinct master race and struggling to cope with freedom. The premise, of course, borrows a lot from Asimov and makes several overt references to Heinlein, most particularly Friday, but Stross's emphasis on agency and free will is all his own.

If Zoe Boutin is an unbelievable teenager, Freya is an unbelievable person. Her narrative voice amounts to little more than a litany of the events she experiences--mostly crisscrossing journeys across the solar system, as she first becomes the employee of a shadowy cabal attempting to smuggle biological organisms into the inner planets, and then the target of several factions who want control of a fabled reconstituted human--with no sense of a personality underlying them. This is partly in keeping with the novel's depiction of Freya as an unformed person, who still defines herself through her model's purpose and her inability to fulfill it, but Stross's method of infusing Freya with personality is for her to absorb the memories of an older and more experienced model, who was employed as a spy and an assassin. So that not only does Freya lose what little self she once had, the person she becomes is spy thriller cliché, indistinguishable from the hundreds of timid girls turned tough who came before her. Other characters in the novel suffer from a similar flatness, which is compounded by the presence of different yet psychologically identical iterations of the same model. Again, this is clearly an extension of Stross's premise, but it amounts to an emotional deadness in the novel's heart, with no characters emerging as fully-formed people for us to care about or even take an interest in.

It's not simply the characters' sameness that breeds a deadness in Saturn's Children. Stross's tendency to simply fling Stuff at the readers--sociology, physics, fashion, eroticism, philosophy, architecture, a couple of daring escapes and fight scenes--all viewed through Freya's undiscerning, unfiltered gaze, leaves the novel all but shapeless. For a novel that is clearly informed by the thriller, Saturn's Children is too flabby, too weighted down by all this Stuff, to work. The thread of plot is almost impossible to discern, and with Freya such a passive protagonist for most of the story the novel feels like nothing more than a lot of events strung together. Between Freya's flatness and the novel's flabbiness, it's hard to tell where the twists are supposed to come, the emotional climaxes, the funny bits. I think, for example, that Stross expected me to be surprised when Freya, a couple hundred pages into the novel, copped to being a robot. I wasn't, of course, because I'd known the novel's premise going in, but in most novels you can tell where a revelation was supposed to be even if you see it coming. In Saturn's Children I'm just not sure. There's no shift in the novel's tone, in Freya's voice, in the things she says or doesn't say--beyond actually saying the word robot--to signal that this was supposed to be a major turning point in the story, or if there are they have been so thoroughly snowed under by Stross's beloved Stuff that I can't make them out. And yet the word itself is so heavily signposted that I can't help but wonder if I was supposed to be shocked by it. Similarly, I think that Saturn's Children was intended as a raunchy sex comedy, and there are a few lines and scenes that drew a chuckle out of me, but there's so little sense of the narrative's ups and downs that in most cases I couldn't pick up on the laugh cues until they'd sailed past.

Saturn's Children is littered with moments like these, in which you stare at the text and wonder 'was I supposed to feel something here?' It's a novel that turns its readers into robots. It concludes with a climax so anticlimactic that I was shocked to turn the page and find myself confronted with an epilogue, but even worse than that, I have no idea what Stross was trying to accomplish with it. There's clearly a dialogue here with Asimov and Heinlein's ideas about personhood and the feasibility and morality of intelligent, mechanical servants, but beyond the obvious point that slavery is wrong and free will is good (and what I assume is a corollary point about religion, as Freya's devotion to humans is frequently described in terms that recall religious ecstasy), I'm really not sure what Stross was trying to say.

[to be continued]

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters and I have had our ups and downs, mostly due to the fact that I read her first three novels in reverse order of their publication--from the twisty, superb Fingersmith, through the intense but punishing Affinity, to the borderline unreadable Tipping the Velvet. However unfairly--since, after all, Waters had been improving as a writer--I found myself reluctant to go any further with her, and gave her fourth novel, The Night Watch, a pass. Positive responses to it, as well as the slow healing of the wounds left by Tipping the Velvet, persuaded me to make a stab at her latest effort, The Little Stranger, and I'm glad I did. Fingersmith remains my favorite of Waters's novels, and I have serious problems with Stranger, but there's no denying that it is both absorbing and intense--shockingly so, given the ordinariness of its setting and the matter-of-fact way in which its events are reported. Even more importantly, it demonstrates--as the first three novels would have, had I not had the misfortune to read them in the wrong order--that Waters is not content to rest on her laurels, either in her settings or in her style. She's an author who is testing the boundaries of her talent and continually complicating the kind of stories she writes, with results that are, at the very least, fascinating to observe.

What I find interesting about Waters is that she's clearly a writer who is torn between her romantic and realistic impulses. Her first and third novels are driven by the vast array of pulpy tropes that make up the romantic novelist's toolkit: the babies switched at birth, mistaken identities, wicked guardians, and false confinement to a mental asylum in Fingersmith; the sequence of evil, unworthy, or unsuitable lovers the heroine must traipse through before she meets her one true love in Tipping the Velvet. In between these two novels, however, Waters wrote Affinity, a claustrophobic psychological novel which concerned itself almost exclusively with its narrator, Margaret's, troubled state of mind, and whose events and settings were stiflingly mundane. Affinity's plot is essentially Margaret moving back and forth between the cramped, airless house in which she is profoundly unhappy, and the drab, institutional prison where she visits female inmates, as she falls deeper into the delusion that one of the inmates--who is clearly manipulating her--loves her, and draws closer and closer to ruin and suicide. Though Waters's descriptions are undeniably effective, I found Affinity to be a profoundly mean-spirited novel, the literary equivalent of a splatter film. I felt that it expected me to enjoy the intensity with which Waters described Margaret's unraveling--certainly there was no room for pity, only a cold disdain, in her descriptions of the lonely and pathetic Margaret--and couldn't help but wonder if like so many artists before her, Waters had mistaken ugliness for realism.

The Little Stranger is a partly successful fusion of these two impulses. It's a ghost story mixed with the story of the decline of the British upper class, a sort of cross between Brideshead Revisited and The Haunting of Hill House. It achieves its romantic effect--the ratcheting dread experienced by the inhabitants of Hundreds Hall--through mundane means, and describes that dread and its causes through the eyes of a thoroughly mundane and rational man. In 1947, Doctor Faraday (whose first name is never revealed to us) is called to the dilapidated Hundreds Hall to treat a servant. Once the home of one of the county's most illustrious families, both the house and its inhabitants--the widowed Mrs. Ayres and her grown-up children Roderick and Caroline--have fallen into disrepair. The changes in economic reality and attitudes towards class wrought by the two world wars mean that the Ayreses no longer have the financial wherewithal to field the army of servants needed to keep their house from falling apart and themselves in the manner to which they had been accustomed. Faraday finds them living in genteel squalor--Mrs. Ayres clinging to the affectations of the squire's wife even though she has no one left to condescend to, Roderick faltering under the cumulative weight of lingering shell-shock and the stress of keeping the failing estate afloat, and Caroline, cursed with a plain face and a decent brain, desperate to get out.

Faraday, whose mother was once a servant at Hundreds and who carries a chip on his shoulder for that, as well as for his own confused class feelings--his working class parents worked themselves into an early grave in order to put him through medical school--is nevertheless drawn to the family, becoming their confidant and benefactor, offering advice, free medical care, and the occasional luxury item in exchange for a half-hearted acceptance as something between a servant and a member of the family. Dan Hartland calls Faraday's confused response to the Ayreses an expression of England's continuing love-hate relationship with its upper class, which is no doubt true, but not having experienced this ambivalence first hand I was mainly reminded of other novels that toy with it--Brideshead Revisited, of course, but also The Go-Between, The Line of Beauty, and Beware of Pity. Like the protagonists of those novels, Faraday is a man who has had to discard his origins in order to advance in life, and now finds himself without a sense of self. He's drawn to the Ayreses not because of their privilege and wealth--which they no longer possess--but because of the unshakable certainty with which they regard their place in the world. That same certainty, however, renders the Ayreses impermeable, a self-contained unit which Faraday can observe and occasionally interact with, but to which he can never truly belong. The only way for Faraday to gain admittance to the family is for it to be torn down.

And torn down it is. One by one, the Ayreses fall by the wayside, undone by poverty and their inability to cope with their reduced circumstances. As, of course, we knew they must, as Waters promises in the novel's opening paragraph, in which Faraday recalls a childhood visit to Hundreds, which even then seemed to him "like an ice ... just beginning to melt in the sun." It is precisely this certainty of the family's doom, however, that recalls the mean-spiritedness of Affinity. The whole point of the novel seems to be for us to observe the disintegration of a family whose destruction is assured from the get-go. Because Waters continues to grow more subtle and more sophisticated with each novel she writes, The Little Stranger is not nearly as uncomfortable a read as Affinity. Several off-ramps appear on the family's path towards doom, making that doom seem less inevitable, and the obvious homage to Brideshead Revisited and its ilk softens the sting of the Ayreses' failure to take advantage of these opportunities, a failure which seems less like a choice on Waters's part and more like keeping faith with her literary antecedents. Nevertheless, there is no denying that the novel's emotional charge is derived mostly from waiting for the next axe to fall, for the next calamity to afflict the Ayreses and claim another one of their number.

Far from being tragic, this anticipation of calamity is the source of the novel's pleasure--the pleasure one feels at the thrills and scares of a horror movie. It's through the romantic, ghost story aspect of the novel that the Ayreses' destruction is related, as the family experiences hauntings and supernatural events which rattle the self-assurance that their real-world troubles had left untroubled. If, in the past, the Ayreses had been able to retreat to Hundreds Hall and pretend that the world hadn't changed around them, now the house itself seems to have turned against them. All of which is not to say that The Little Stranger is a genre novel--indeed it is determinedly, deliberately ambiguous about its genre, offering a rational explanation immediately alongside each supposed supernatural happening. For that matter, the specific type of supernatural phenomenon at work is never settled upon, with several different explanations suggested--is Hundreds haunted by the ghost of Mrs. Ayres's oldest daughter? Does it house a poltergeist? Is the emotionally unstable Roderick a firestarter? Does the teenage servant Betty have telekinetic powers? Is Caroline unconsciously punishing the family that has immured her in her childhood home?--but never enough 'evidence' to support any of them over the others.

To a genre reader, this ambiguity seems a little like the coyness of a mainstream writer not quite willing to admit having written a genre novel (though given her pulpy leanings this may be an unfair charge to lay at Waters's feet). I certainly found it less effective than in novels like The Haunting of Hill House, which like The Little Stranger leave us uncertain as to whether the haunted character is truly haunted or insane. In these more overt genre works, the uncertainty is used to bring us into the main character's fractured headspace. The Little Stranger, however, uses it as a distancing device. Faraday being so entirely rational means that the dilemma is just that--two competing theories, each with evidence for and against it--instead of the mingling of rationality and horror that make Hill House or The Turn of the Screw so effective.

That said, it is probably the case that Waters wasn't trying to emulate The Haunting of Hill House or any other straight up ghost story, for all that she may be recalling them, and that the distancing she creates through Faraday's mundane, unimaginative worldview is quite deliberate. Dan Hartland's reading that the supernatural elements of the novel are both a smokescreen and a metaphor for the more mundane attacks against the Ayreses and their class--as another character says to Faraday, what's sucking the life out of the house is the labor government and its deliberate strategy of taxing and regulating the upper class out of existence--is more generous than mine and quite likely closer to what Waters intended with the novel. It doesn't, however, change the fact that Waters takes advantage of an ambiguity she has no intention of supporting. None of the supernatural explanations for the Ayreses' predicament--not even the supposed revelation of the novel's closing paragraph--truly hold water, and in the end it's hard not to feel that Waters was simply wasting our time, using the ghost story--and the question of whether the novel actually is a ghost story--to gussy up a too-familiar Brideshead retelling, then tossing it by the wayside when it's no longer useful.

I've touched here mostly on my complaints against The Little Stranger, which is unfair because, as I said at the beginning of this review, I did find the novel nearly unputdownable. There's a lot here that's worth reading for--Faraday himself, with his complete lack of self-awareness and mixed up class prejudices, is a masterful example of the unreliable narrator, and his descriptions of the increasing calamities at Hundreds are a fine demonstration of the power of an affectless, boring and personality-free voice to create tension and horror. It's what's left when the last page is turned and the effect of the novel's romantic elements is allowed to subside--the Brideshead homage, the discussion of class in post-war Britain--that is leaving me, if not cold, then a little put off. Though The Little Stranger restored my faith in Waters as a writer, I can't help but feel that it is a mean novel. It may not be a ghost story, but it is uncomfortably reminiscent of the kind of horror novel that gives its genre a bad name--the kind that expects us to turn off empathy and enjoy the suffering of others. I can't help but feel that between this extreme and Evelyn Waugh's fawning lament for the death of the British upper class there is a more sensible, more compassionate middle ground, but Sarah Waters hasn't found it yet.

Thunderer by Felix Gilman

Here's a conundrum for you to chew on: is a derivative work worthwhile if it's successful in its derivation? Felix Gilman's debut novel, Thunderer, gives the unmistakable (but, it must be noted, perhaps mistaken) impression of having been written as a result of its author reading China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, turning the last page and saying 'I can do that.' And the thing is, he can, and has. Thunderer recalls Perdido Street Station (and to a lesser extent The Scar) in its plot, characters, setting, and most of all its tone, but it also recalls its quality. Like Perdido, it is a sprawling, multithreaded narrative which coalesces into a rip-roaring adventure. Like Perdido, it is the story of a place--a city--which is illuminated through its inhabitants, both natives and newcomers, and the story of how those people are changed--elevated, broken, or simply made different--by that city. Like Perdido, it describes a society in a moment of flux, whose weaker members are on the brink of achieving real social progress, and the forces arrayed against that change. Like Perdido, it features magic being transmuted into science, quantified and made ordinary, but also still so much stranger and more dangerous than the people investigating it realize. There is, in short, very little here that hasn't already been done, but Gilman carries off his own iteration so well that it seems--especially when one considers that Miéville himself has long since moved on to other things--more than a little churlish to complain about his unoriginality.

All of this is basically to say that Gilman--who is nominated for the Campbell award this year, and is certainly my choice for the win--is a very good writer, and wastes no time in proving it. Thunderer's first chapter is a panoramic introduction to the novel's main characters as they experience the event that sets each of them on their path throughout the novel--Arjun, a traveler arriving in the city of Ararat; Holbach,a scientist getting ready to conduct the most important experiment of his career; Jack, a teenager preparing to escape from the workhouse in which he's spent most of his young life; Captain Arlandes, about to experience the defining tragedy of his life--but it is also an intensely kinetic scene. The narrative swoops in and out of the lives of the different characters because it is following the Bird, one of Ararat's divinities which is gracing the city with a visitation. Holbach's experiment is an attempt to capture some of the bird's magic and use it to his, or rather his patron, the Countess Ilona's, ends--to raise her warship the Thunderer into the sky, thus cementing her dominance over the city. Gilman's description of the Bird's arrival and Holbach's experiment is suffused with motion and activity, and at points quite overpowering (it also put me in mind of several similar scenes in Miéville's novels, most particularly the capture of the avanc in The Scar).

The Bird curves itself in space toward the balloon, leisurely, as if curious about this bright clumsy challenger. Then it rushes suddenly forward, its presence sharpening into a line across the sky. The balloon leaps and the Countess's men are dragged from their feet and let the ropes slip from their burnt and bloody hands. Lucia shrieks. The Bird soars close past the balloon and the feathered cloud following the Bird engulfs it for a second. Half obscured by the flock, the balloon seems to turn itself inside out, and for a moment it becomes a great pair of wings, sixty feet of azure taffeta spread out on the wind. The wings beat once, then the fabric falls slowly to the ground, curling smokily in the air. The basket drops, not slowly. The little menagerie of birds in the basket takes flight, their wings whole again, and joins the god's flock.

(It is perhaps worth noting that all of the characters mentioned here are men. Though there are women in the novel, they tend to stand out less. The Countess is more an éminence grise than a character. More central than her is Holbach's attorney Olympia, who is mentioned obliquely in this chapter but not introduced for several more. She, however, is the only main character without a trajectory of her own, and spends the novel advancing the agendas of others and getting caught in their wake.)

The main plotline of Thunderer reads very much like Perdido Street Station retold with Yagharek as the protagonist. A newcomer from a foreign culture arrives in the city looking for help--Arjun is a devotee of the god known as the Voice, whose presence has receded from the monastery at which he's spent his life. He's come to Ararat, the city of gods and a sort of gravity well for divinity, in the hopes of finding it again. To this end he approaches a scientist who is associated with a bohemian, freethinking set--Holbach's efforts on the Countess's behalf fund the Atlas, the definitive portrait of Ararat through which its compilers hope to expose the city's workings and spur its inhabitants to improve on them. This group is a target of the city's authoritarian rulers--in Ararat, mainly the censors who view any attempt at cartography as heresy, but also the ruling powers of the city who fear the change the Atlas might bring about. The scientist's investigations (or, in Thunderer, Arjun's pursuit of the leads Holbach offers him) inadvertently unleash a dangerous being into the city, which menaces its population and finally threatens its very existence, placing both the scientist and the newcomer at odds with the city's rulers even as they scramble to save it. A secondary plotline follows Jack after his escape and draws on a different literary source, as Jack, whom the Bird has gifted with the power of flight, becomes an emblem of freedom and gathers around himself a band of similarly lost boys who spend their days thumbing their noses at authority. The blatant Peter Pan reference seems to be the only reason for the existence of a third plotline, revolving around Arlandes as he captains the Thunderer and sinks further and further into depression following the death of his wife during its raising. Despite showing us Arlandes's growing detachment and his willingness to perform greater acts of cruelty on the Countess's behalf, his story ultimately fizzles out, and the character seems to exist mainly to act as the Captain Hook to Jack's Peter.

Of course the true main character of the novel is the city itself. Gilman has the knack of making Ararat seem not only believable--complete with different neighborhoods, each with its own flavor and social set, theaters and music halls, restaurants and cafes, businesses and warehouses, a vast array of temples and places of worship, parks, prisons, statues and landmarks--but incomprehensibly vast. This vastness is brought home by Holbach's Atlas, which, in its fourth edition and comprising dozens of volumes, still can't capture the true form of the city, which anyway changes faster than it can be described. Though most of the characters in the novel make some attempt to shape Ararat, the sheer size and complexity of the city means that their efforts have chaotic, unpredictable effects, and even the most powerful characters such as Ilona and her political enemies find themselves powerless before the mass of the city and its collective will. As in Perdido Street Station, it is Ararat's survival that is the novel's primary concern. The monster Arjun releases into the city--a demented river god who spreads disease and turns people into zombies--is a threat not because it kills people but because those deaths threaten to send the remaining population away, to turn Ararat into a ghost town. Like Perdido, Thunderer ends with its main characters dispersed, damaged, and for the most part frustrated in their goals, but the ending is nevertheless a satisfying one because Ararat has survived.

Gilman's one original touch in Thunderer is the god angle. Ararat is home to a thousand divinities, each with its own followers and places of worship, and each with its own irrational affect on the city--the Spider, whose followers receive cryptic instructions to change their lives according to a master plan they can't see; Tiber, a pillar of fire; The Spirit of the Lights, whose appearances blind some of those who see it, and leave others incapable of seeing anything "but colors and glitter and star-blaze." It is precisely this proliferation of gods, however, that leaves Ararat's natives intolerant of Arjun's single-minded devotion to a god who has abandoned him. They view it as a selfish obsession, an addiction, and Arjun himself begins to question his devotion after his encounter with Typhon, the river god he inadvertently infects with humanity and turns into a monster. The loss of self Arjun experiences with Typhon is so similar to his single, life-changing spiritual experience with the Voice that he begins to question his faith, and to wonder whether the gods aren't simply, as Holbach describes them, forces of nature, to be studied like the tides or the weather.

It's an interesting approach, but it feels underdeveloped. Though Gilman contrasts Arjun's devotion with Holbach's scientific approach, there's very little comparison between Arjun and believers within the city, so that the notion, raised several times throughout the novel, that Arjun is fundamentally different from a native of Ararat because he isn't accustomed to a profusion of gods is left unexplored. Gilman also doesn't do enough to distinguish the Typhon from any other kind of supernatural menace--for example, Slake Moths--and only introduces, but doesn't really explore, the idea that it's the touch of humanity that turns the god monstrous and makes it loathe its disciples. There are a lot of bald statements when it comes to religious attitudes--mainly Holbach, Olympia, and even Jack's belief that Arjun's faith is a selfish addiction--but very little explanation of them, or exploration of their subtleties. Ultimately, the religious theme is overpowered by the novel's plot. By the end of the story, when Thunderer's plotlines tie into one another and become the single story of Arjun and Jack's last stand against the Typhon, the monster's divinity feels almost incidental.

A sequel to Thunderer, Gears of the City, was published late last year. The brief excerpt from it which appears in Thunderer, and its plot description, give me hope that it both moves away from established Miévillian plots and does more with Ararat's unique characteristics--not only the proliferation of gods but what appear to be gateways to alternate dimensions or past and future versions of the city, through which Arjun learns to navigate. Whether or not it does, I think that Thunderer establishes Gilman as an author to watch. It is, despite being derivative, an excellent, exciting, and extremely well-written novel. Though I certainly hope that Gilman goes on to make his own unique mark on the genre, he's done enough to earn my attention and wholehearted recommendation.

The Weekend's Films 2

Last minute Hugo reading is keeping me both busy and quiet, though I hope to have some more Hugo-related stuff by the end of the week. In the meantime, here are a couple of films.

• Virtuality - Not a film per se but what was to have been the pilot for Ronald Moore and Michael "Unfinished Business" Taylor's follow-up to Battlestar Galactica, it aired this weekend as a standalone movie (which was quite unfair of Fox as the pilot by no means stands alone). Taking place aboard the spaceship Phaeton as it approaches the point of no return in its journey outside the solar system, Virtuality's chief virtues are its looks--Phaeton's interiors and its CGI exteriors, some nicely done action scenes, and the judicious integration of surveillance footage into the show's traditionally shot scenes. Other than that--and the fact that space-set television has become an endangered species--I see no reason to lament Virtuality's early demise. The pilot feels several drafts short of completion--or, to be less charitable, it feels lazy, as though Moore and Taylor didn't feel any obligation to hook their audience with a coherent story or a discernible direction for their show. Instead, they seem to have written the first chapter of a story, which makes gestures towards several different plotlines and takes it on faith that viewers will tune in next week to see which one of them the writers are actually interested in telling.
  
  Virtuality is telling at least four different stories. At its most fundamental level, it is the story of an isolated, multi-racial, multi-gender, multinational crew on a years-long mission towards what may be humanity's last hope of survival (in its presentation of this story the pilot steals quite shamelessly from Sunshine, though not when it comes to visuals, which is really the only aspect of Sunshine you'd want to imitate). The mission, however, is being funded in part by a media conglomerate, and crewmembers are made to participate in a reality TV program, complete with a confessional chamber and cheesy promos interspersed with the show's action (besides being over the top, this storyline completely ignores both the transmission lag once Phaeton leaves the solar system and the strain that time dilation will place on program scheduling). Meanwhile, crewmembers entertain themselves in VR simulations, but one by one these programs are corrupted, turning violent and traumatic. Finally, frequently voiced suspicion of the mission's sponsors boils over when one of the characters is killed and another becomes convinced that they were murdered. Virtuality gets so bogged down in establishing each of these stories that it forgets to tell a story in its own right. When the credits roll, all we're certain of is that weird shit is going on. Between the proliferation of plotlines and the sheer size of the cast, the characters are given very short shrift--most of them are types (the tough as nails female pilot, the scientist who is grieving for a son he neglected for his work, the oily psychiatrist slash reality show producer) and those that aren't are simply tough to get a handle on--the mission commander careens unexpectedly from dourness to euphoria without ever letting us see his center, all while we're being told that he's a natural leader and the only person who can keep the crew together. There are one or two nice exchanges between the characters, but no exceptional ones, and hardly any really cool moments of any kind. These are all problems that might have been dealt with had the series gotten a season order, and it is true that odder and less coherent pilots, by which I mean Dollhouse, have been given that chance. The difference, of course, is that Dollhouse is made by someone who has earned my indulgence whereas Virtuality's creators are the main point against it, and in order to have developed any investment in the series, much less tolerance for its faults, I needed the pilot to be exceptional, not busy and underdone.


• Coraline - Once again, this is a film whose chief virtue is its looks, though in this case that's clearly intentional. The stop-motion animation is stunning, and the use of 3D only intensifies its beauty and its creepiness (though on a personal note I have to say that 3D gave me a headache so bad that I was barely able to make it through the film's 100 minutes. I certainly won't be able to put up with it for 2+ hours of James Cameron's Avatar, so sign me up for the 2D version). The film sticks rather close to the plot of the original novel, but for the addition of a boy in the real world whom Coraline befriends (this is only annoying at the very end of the film when he rescues Coraline at the last minute). This faithfulness, however, is actually a problem, as much like the novel Coraline has a lot of dead space, moments whose purpose is merely to show off Gaiman's odd inventiveness. These work better in the novel where they take less time to get through (though the cumulative weight of their tweeness does get a bit wearying). In the film, we end up with several set pieces which do nothing to move the plot. This is where I think the decision not to make Coraline into a musical a la The Nightmare Before Christmas (according to IMDb They Might Be Giants had already recorded several tracks for the film before the change was made) serves the film ill, as the songs could have filled up this dead space. On the other hand, songs would certainly have undercut the creepiness of the second half of the film, in which the true nature of the other world is revealed. I never found Gaiman's novel particularly scary, but the film really is, both in its depiction of the Other Mother and in the way it captures the enormity of the danger and challenges that Coraline finds herself facing. The strong second half, and the beautiful animation, mostly make up for the film's slow buildup, but in the end I find myself having roughly the same reaction to the film as I did to the book--nice, and with occasional flashes of excellence, but ultimately too enchanted with its own weirdness to be much of a story.

The 2009 Hugo Awards: The Best Dramatic Presentation Ballots

Since I'm a Hugo voter this year, I thought I'd write about more than just the short fiction nominees, and since there's a mere two weeks left until the voting deadline, I might as well get the least time-consuming categories out of the way first. The best dramatic presentation categories get more votes than just about any other category excepting best novel, and perhaps as a result of that they tend to fall in line with popular tastes, giving nods to effects-laden blockbusters and big ratings hits. This is tolerable in the long form category, since it's a rare year that has more than a few decent genre films to choose from anyway (though for a contrasting opinion, see Jonathan McCalmont's alternative best dramatic presentation ballot. I'm frankly a little surprised that Let the Right One In didn't get a nomination, but I found Blindness underwhelming). But the short form category, which ought to act--as the best novel category does--as a counterpoint to the mainstream tendency to ignore worthwhile genre work, consistently fails in that role, and this year seems to have hit its nadir by ignoring the three best, and now all sadly defunct, genre series of 2008--The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Pushing Daisies, and The Middleman--in favor of the old standbys.

Not, to be fair, that the short form nominees actually matter, as it's been plainly clear since last summer that the 2009 category might as well have been renamed The Joss Whedon Award for Best Doctor Horrible Sing-Along Blog-ness for all that there's been any doubt about the winner. Which I don't really have a problem with--there were hours of genre television I liked better than Doctor Horrible in 2008, but not many, and none of them are among the nominees. I probably like "Turn Left" best of the remaining nominees, though having seen its two followup episodes I'm less positive towards it than I was when I first watched it (and anyway, I think "Midnight" should have gotten a nod instead). My least favorite nominee is Galactica's "Revelations," not so much because it was a bad episode but because the only memorable thing about it was its scorched earth ending (which anyway has been devalued by the abysmal series finale it led up to).

Which leaves Doctor Who's "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead" and Lost's "The Constant." Both are decent enough, but I'm inclined to be harder on Who than on Lost. With three Hugos already on his mantel, I think that Stephen Moffat should be graded on a curve, and this was by far his worst story for Who, overlong and lazily plotted despite his clever lines and fun characters. I also think that "The Constant," the only one of the nominees I hadn't seen in its original airing, didn't really get a fair shake out of me when I tracked it down this morning, since by that point I'd already heard too much about it and its twists. That said, I don't really understand why this episode caused such an uproar in Lost fandom last year. It gets points for focusing on the only character I could still stand when I stopped watching the show and the only relationship I didn't find completely icky, but as a time travel story it relies mainly on handwaving, and as a piece of storytelling it uses the sweetness of its central romance as a crutch. It was very touching when Penny answered Desmond's phone call, but really, was that it?

My votes, then:

1. Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
2. "Turn Left," Doctor Who
3. "The Constant," Lost
4. "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead," Doctor Who
5. "Revelations," Battlestar Galactica

The long form category is similarly dominated by a single nominee. Wall-E is a great story, a great film, and great science fiction, and it was obvious to me as soon I saw it that it should win the Hugo (and though the short form category is letting down the side in this respect, at least by nominating Wall-E the long form category is picking up a tiny bit of Hollywood's slack, as the film was criminally left off the best picture ballot at the Oscars). The next best film on the ballot is clearly The Dark Knight, but I'm inclined to give it a low rating seeing as it's not actually a genre film. As The Dark Knight plainly demonstrates, superhero stories don't necessarily equal science fiction, and neither is it a fantasy or horror story. This is a film that simply doesn't belong on the Hugo ballot, and is probably only on it because of its huge popularity among genre fans. Of the remaining two films on the ballot, Hellboy II and Iron Man, I'm having trouble deciding which one I like better. Both are enjoyable but deeply flawed--Hellboy II is visually stunning and has a fun story, but the characters are non-entities; Iron Man is energized by its central performance and has some nice SFnal moments in its emphasis on technology and engineering, but its plot is entirely predictable and falls apart in the third act. Right now I'm inclined to give Iron Man the edge, but that could easily change.

Which leaves what is probably the most interesting nominee on both dramatic presentation ballots this year, the audio-anthology METAtropolis, in which editor John Scalzi and contributors Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, and Karl Schroeder jointly imagined the city of the future and then wrote stories set in or around it (the anthology is available for free download here, though you'll have to sign up for Audible). It should be said that I don't feel like the best judge of this nominee, since on the one hand it's difficult to compare an audiobook to a film, and on the other hand I'm not a big fan of the audiobook experience, which demands enough of my attention that I can't do anything else while listening, but doesn't monopolize it, leaving me feeling idle and restless. With that caveat, I have to say that I was rather unimpressed by METAtropolis. The stories themselves are exposition-heavy, with very little action or meaningful conversations--Farah Mendlesohn sums them up quite well in her Strange Horizons review when she says that "for too much of the time we are being given a tour of Utopia." This might have been tolerable in a written anthology, but as Farah also notes one can't skim or skip forward when one is being read to, so that what might have been slightly tedious on the page becomes stultifying in the ear. Listening to METAtropolis feels less like being told a story and more like a long lecture from a very enthusiastic Boing Boing contributor who keeps dropping buzzwords like creative commons license or open source technology as they explain how the city of the future will work. Which, obviously, is part of the project's goal, but it's pretty clear that with the exception of Scalzi none of the writers involved gave much thought to the difference between a written and performed work, or tried to tailor their stories to suit a dramatic reading (which is to say, more dialogue and action, only the bare minimum of infodumps and description). Which means that METAtropolis really doesn't work as a spoken word work, and thus gets my lowest rating on this ballot.

Once again, my votes:

1. Wall-E
2. Iron Man
3. Hellboy II
4. The Dark Knight
5. METAtropolis

Next up, I think, will be either the Campbell or best related work nominees. I'm frankly so unenthusiastic about the best novel nominees that I'm not entirely certain I'll manage to read them all before the voting deadline, but one of the nice things about having a blog is that it gives you a reason to take on reading projects, so I may yet post about that category as well.

Recent Reading Roundup 22

1. The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia - Sedia's second novel centers around Mattie, a clockwork doll who has won a provisional freedom from her maker (he still keeps the only key that can wind her mechanism) and trained as an alchemist at a time when magic and mechanics are at odds. Mattie's commission from the gargoyles, her city's patron saints, to discover the reason they are turning into stone, is interrupted by civil unrest, as political struggles between the guilds of mechanics and alchemists boil over into riots, murders, and an uprising by the city's underclass. None of this is badly done, and there are some very nice notes such as Mattie's friendship with a foreign (and thus maligned and suspected) alchemist, or the character of the Soul-Smoker, who gathers up the lingering souls of the dead and is feared and reviled for performing a necessary act. But taken as a whole The Alchemy of Stone gives the definite impression of having been written to meet a checklist of modern fantasy tropes: steampunk, an urban setting, non-Tolkienian fantasy creatures, the intersection between magic and science, issues of class and racial prejudice mapped onto the fantasy world. There's nothing here that hasn't been done better elsewhere, and what Sedia brings to the table--her use of language and her characters--is again well done but unremarkable. It could simply be that I've read too many novels of this ilk to appreciate yet another entry in the subgenre, but I'm not so well read that this is likely to be an uncommon problem, and The Alchemy of Stone, enjoyable as it was while I was reading it, doesn't do nearly enough to set itself apart from the pack.


2. Last Dragon by J.M. McDermott - Narrated by the empress Zhan from her deathbed as a series of letters to her exiled lover, McDermott's debut flits between different periods in Zhan's past, demanding our absolute focus as we piece that past together. Accompanied by her uncle Seth, a shaman, Zhan journeys from her remote mountain village to a great city in pursuit of her grandfather, who has murdered her whole family. Once there, she amasses a fantasy coterie--Seth's gypsy lover, a grizzled mercenary, and the paladin Adel, who is helping Zhan for her own reasons--and must race back to her home in advance of an invading army. All of this is to make Last Dragon seem very conventional, but even ignoring its jigsaw structure, the novel seems to be deliberately defying the conventions of epic fantasy by attempting to depict its characters and their situation as realistically and unromantically as possible. McDermott's focus is not on the few moments in which the characters confront their enemies head on but on the long, unheroic trudge to reach those moments--Zhan and Seth's miserable sea-voyage on their way to the city, the frozen wasteland the group must traverse on their way back to the village, the stinking prison cell in which they're held towards the end of the story--and he truly makes us feel the characters' misery and discomfort, the way that these overshadow their grand motivations of honor and duty even as those motivations keep driving them forward, so that victory, in the end, is simply a way of finally getting some rest.
   
   Last Dragon's tone of mingled determination and despair is so overwhelming that it's easy to simply get caught up in it, and in the pleasure of piecing together Zhan's story, but once the last page was turned I realized that as overpowering as I found the novel, I'm still not certain what McDermott was trying to do with it. Was the point nothing more than to give another whack to the epic fantasy subgenre, whose heroes often dedicate themselves, body and soul, to a cause, without suffering the soul-deadening effect McDermott so ably describes? Possibly, and if so then the point is well made, but it would be awfully disappointing to think that so much effort had been put into contravening the basic assumptions of a subgenre that most of the novel's target audience don't read (it has the whiff of condescension too). There are enough questions left unanswered by the novel's ending--mostly relating to Adel and her true motivations in helping Zhan, but also involving the gap between the end of the novel and the dying Zhan's present--that it could very well be that McDermott expects us to piece together an underlying story, one that I wasn't quite able to see. Or the underlying story might not be there, and the point of the novel could be that we're being told a partial narrative by someone who was only a minor participant in the proceedings--which, once again, is a rather flimsy point on which to hang a novel. Whatever the answer is, the end result is that Last Dragon feels a little underdone, and yet I'm not sure that this ought to matter. McDermott's writing is strong enough that the novel can be enjoyed simply for its tone and effect--not to mention for its plot, which is entirely riveting--and I'm willing to let that be enough for now.


3. Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta - Niall, who liked this novel a great deal more than I did, compares it to David Mitchell's Ghostwritten--which like it is a novel made up of globe-spanning, linked narratives, in which the fantastic is used to highlight some of the aspects of modernity--but I was more strongly reminded of Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales. Unlike Mitchell, and like Valente, Dasgupta--who strands a small group of airline passengers on their way to Tokyo in an unnamed Indian airport and has them tell each other stories to while away the hours until their flight--starts with familiar fairy tale formats and complicates them to the point of surrealism. Either way, the comparison is unkind. Tokyo Cancelled is a great deal more fantastic than Ghostwritten, but not completely steeped in the fantastic like The Orphan's Tales, and the midpoint it occupies does not seem, to me, particularly stable. It's never clear whether we're meant to anticipate realism or surrealism, whether fairy tale logic or real world logic will hold sway, and the result was that I could never quite immerse myself in the novel. It doesn't help that I wasn't particularly taken by any of the stories as stories. There are some nice touches here and there--a touching love story between a woman who has lost hope and a sailor she meets in a coffee shop, the billionaire who builds a tower in which to keep his daughter, who causes all organic matter to sprout and bloom, out of the hands of the ministry of defense, the tailor who buries a garment commissioned by a prince in the desert and returns to find it hailed as a precious antique--but every time, just when it seems that Dasgupta has hit on a compelling metaphor, or has built up a good head of narrative, he loses the thread. The central concept--marrying modernity and fairy tales--is a good one, but Tokyo Cancelled just doesn't manage that mix very well.


4. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin - One of my reading projects for this year is to finally get properly acquainted with Le Guin, whom I've enjoyed well enough in the short form (and in her non fiction and reviews) but whose novels have never worked for me. I started with Lavinia, about which I may have more in the future, and having done reasonably well there felt brave enough to tackle The Left Hand of Darkness, which had already defeated me once in my early teens. I pronounce the experiment a limited success, in that I finished the novel (no onerous chore, to be certain) and liked parts of it very much, mainly the construction of the customs, language, history and folklore of the planet Gethen, and the last third of the novel, in which the human envoy to Gethen, Genly Ai, traverses an ice shelf with a disgraced Gethenian politician, Estraven. The matter of fact way in which Le Guin describes the danger and hardship Genly and Estraven face, as well as their attempts to deal with them, contrasts sharply with her descriptions of the landscape itself, and create an intense and utterly engrossing sequence.
   
   On the other hand, the actual meat of the novel, and the reason that it is so well known--Le Guin's description of the effect that genderlessness has on Gethenian society--left me somewhat cold. Partly, the problem is that the novel has dated rather badly. Jo Walton has a good post here about the difficulties of reading The Left Hand of Darkness in the more feminist era to which it no doubt contributed, and as she says it is hard not to be thrown by Genly Ai's simplistic assumptions about masculinity and femininity, not only because we'd like to believe that in the more advanced era in which he lives such assumptions would be a thing of the past (the fact that he has several female colleagues would certainly seem to support this expectation), but because those assumptions are so different from present-day stereotypes about men and women. Observing Estraven's careful calculation of their food intake during the ice crossing, Genly muses that such behavior would be scientific in a man and house-wifely in a woman, and though clearly Le Guin is making a point, that point is so over the top for our time (when was the last time you heard someone described as house-wifely?) that it is jarring. Beyond its datedness, however, I find it difficult to accept the notion of The Left Hand of Darkness as a feminist novel. Le Guin's point that, absent gender characteristics, Gethenians treat each other simply as people (which is anyway undermined by her choice to use the male pronoun for all Gethenians--a choice which I understand she reversed in several Gethen-set short stories) doesn't deal with gender but circumvents it, and in so doing implicitly reinforces Genly's sexism. If anything, The Left Hand of Darkness is a story about a challenge to Genly's masculinity, and has little or nothing to do with women, but because that masculinity is rooted in such dated notions of gendered behavior, it's hard to sympathize with Genly's ordeal. Not for the first time, therefore, I find myself admiring Le Guin's work but not really resonating with it, and though I'm glad to have read such an important piece of SF history, I don't think I'm going to become a Le Guin fan any time soon.


5. No Name by Wilkie Collins - I like Collins better than Dickens, with whom he shares certain attributes and interests, but unfortunately the portion of his bibliography that's considered worth looking at isn't nearly as large. I'd already read his two best known novels, The Moonstone and The Woman in White, which left me with his second tier, into which No Name was my first foray. Once again, my conclusions are mixed, but in a way that demonstrates just how important historical context is in determining which novels survive the test of time and which fail it. As a piece of writing, No Name is only slightly less successful than either The Moonstone or The Woman in White, and in its middle segment, which describes a battle of wits between the con man Captain Wragge and the housekeeper of the man he plans to swindle, Mrs. Lecount, it even surpasses them. But it's a novel rooted in assumptions I don't share, and it fails because it expects me to react in certain ways to its characters' actions when actually my reaction is the exact opposite.
   
   No Name's beginning creates the expectation of another Vanity Fair--when two sisters are left penniless after their parents' deaths by a quirk of the law and the cruelty of their relatives, the younger, Magdalen, vows to regain her fortune by whatever means necessary. But No Name quickly becomes a soppy, happy-ended Count of Monte Cristo--Magdalen debases herself and abandons her cherished ideals and beliefs in order to avenge herself on her relatives, but ends up alone and near death, and renounces her wicked ways. The problem, for one thing, is that those ways aren't that wicked. Vanity Fair works so well because Thackery, without losing sight of the real hurt she causes, recognizes that Becky Sharpe's offenses against society's mores are, objectively, meaningless, but Magdalen, despite hurting no one but herself--she tells lies, goes on the stage, marries for money--is described as the most wretched and evil creature in existence. Even worse, whereas The Count of Monte Cristo recognizes that a desire for vengeance is normal, and only then concludes that to pursue that desire is soul-destroying, No Name starts from the assumption that there must be something wrong with Magdalen for wanting revenge on the people who have hurt her, that she is perhaps even monstrous (though it's never stated outright, it's pretty clear that what Collins means is that desiring revenge is monstrous in a woman). Magdalen is no Becky Sharpe, whose wickedness is offset by intelligence and humor. All she has is a strength of character which Collins describes as being a manifestation of evil, and unlike Becky she isn't the author of her own life--the actual planning of her revenge is left to Captain Wragge, with Magdalen as the mute driving force behind him. A happy ending for Magdalen, therefore, requires that she lose her one defining attribute, which is what happens when she surrenders herself to a kind man who forgives her past crimes. All told then, a rather disquieting read, despite Collins's great skill at plot and character. I think I'll have to find another Victorian to be my Dickens substitute.

The Weekend's Films

Isn't it just the way: months can go by without me seeing the inside of a movie theater, and then two films I want to see open on the same weekend. Here are my thoughts on both of them.

• Terminator Salvation: As everyone has said, this is better than Terminator 3. It's not, however, so much better as to matter. Christian Bale is a plank of wood as John Connor, which allegedly shouldn't matter as he's not really the star of the film. That would be Sam Worthington (who is decent enough even if he can't seem to keep his Aussie accent in check) as Marcus, the secret Cylon, and of a secondary importance is Anton Yelchin (the best of the three, but also the one who's been given the worst lines) as Kyle Reese. The problem is that despite all the post-Judgement Day window dressing which suggests that Salvation is about the war with the machines, what the film actually does is regurgitate the previous two films' plots: a temporal threat to John Connor's existence--in this case, to the teenage Kyle, whom Skynet now knows to be John's father (probably because John mentions it at the drop of a hat)--which is forestalled by a friendly cyborg who also becomes a mentor, in this case to Kyle (and thus down the line to Sarah and John himself).
  
  So, once again, the film is about saving John Connor, which seems like a less worthy goal when John Connor has all the charisma of day-old bread and seems to have bought into his own myth so completely that he only challenges the order to destroy a Skynet base in which hundreds of prisoners are being held (orders from his evil superiors, of course) when he realizes that Kyle is one of them. Other than that, the plot is so dumb and contrived as to make Star Trek seem coherent in comparison, and the action scenes are frankly dull, completely lacking the excitement and terror of similar scenes in Terminator 2--perhaps because we're never in any doubt as to which of the three leads will live and which will die. The women are completely perfunctory--Bryce Dallas Howard as Kate Brewster has so little to do that she makes the character's role in Terminator 3 seem nuanced and rich, and Moon Bloodgood, though allegedly the tough action chick, is really just a love interest for Marcus. The only bright spot is Helena Bonham Carter as the deliciously twisted Skynet designer and later the face of Skynet, who sinks her teeth so readily into her small role that you don't even care what a huge retcon this is. If number 5 happens, count me out.


• The Brothers Bloom: It was hard not to feel nervous about Rian Johnson's follow-up to Brick, not simply because the bar had been set so high but because Brick was such a precarious masterpiece, constantly on the verge of collapsing under the weight of the seriousness with which it took its central gimmick--a danger from which it was spared mainly through Joseph Gordon-Levitt's searing performance. The Brother Bloom doesn't scale Brick's heights, but it does at least give the impression that Johnson is aware of his predicament, as he's chosen to tell a story about artifice, and the attempt to transform it into something more than a clever performance. The titular brothers, Stephen and Bloom, are not simply con-men but storytellers, criminal therapists who identify in their marks a need for narrative--revenge on an abandoning spouse, adventure after long years as a shut-in--and enact it, as melodramatically as possible ("Have at you, you fiend!" Stephen exclaims at one point). Despite its deliberate recalling of heist films such as Ocean's 11 or The Sting, the double crosses and reveals in The Brothers Bloom have less to do with money and more to do with whether or not the characters are actually feeling what they pretend to be feeling, and whether they can pretend their way into something real.
  
  The Brothers Bloom is therefore a film that draws attention to its over the top storyness as a way of defusing it, with only partial success--when the depressed, perpetually one con away from retirement Bloom says of Penelope, an heiress with a hidden talent for grifting, that she feels like a character, he is only partially successful at getting us to ignore the fact that Penelope is far too precocious and adventurous to be true (and at time too much the perfect girlfriend). There's also the fact that Johnson's total commitment to style works less well in a comedy than it did in the grim Brick--or at least, it makes him seem like nothing more than a Wes Anderson imitator (an impression which is not dispelled by Adrien Brody playing a very similar character to the one he played in The Darjeeling Limited). Still, for all its conscious artificiality it's hard not to be won over by The Brothers Bloom--it is, for one thing, an extremely funny movie, with several clever visual or verbal gags, and the characters are very winning. For all her precociousness, Penelope is a hell of a fun character, but it's Rinko Kikuchi as the brothers' demolition expert sidekick Bang Bang who steals the show. The silent Asian sidekick sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, but Bang Bang is so clearly her own person, and has such a huge personality, that she completely tramples the stereotype, and to top that she and Penelope forge a friendship that transcends their roles as, respectively, Stephen's accomplice and Bloom's love interest, which is enormously gratifying. The Brothers Bloom is by no means a perfect film, but it does demonstrate that Johnson has more in him than clever gimmicks, and makes me very curious to see what he does next.