Avatar

Let's get this out of the way: Avatar is a beautiful movie.  Stunningly, even shockingly beautiful, and not in the inert, static way of Watchmen or the more recent work of Tim Burton, which emphasize the creation of detailed, meticulously crafted tableaux.  Avatar is beautiful in a cinematic way.  The individual details of its locales are lovely, but it's the movement--walking, running, swimming, flying--within those locales that takes one's breath away.  And breathtaking as its beauty is, Avatar isn't eye-popping.  The film encourages you to forget that you're watching computer generated characters in a computer generated environment, and its use of 3D technology is subtle and thought-out.  Avatar is the third 3D film I've seen this year, and if Up treated the technology as an afterthought and barely made use of it, and Coraline went out of its way to poke the audience in the eye (and made me very queasy in the process) with Avatar James Cameron has fully integrated this new tool into his director's toolbox, using it not to draw attention to itself but to create a fully immersive environment.  There are people for whom this kind of aesthetic achievement is sufficient in itself to make a successful piece of cinema, and if you're one of those people then God be with you, but I'm not.  So having established just how beautiful Avatar is, let me pay it the greatest compliment that its beauty will buy from me: Avatar is beautiful enough that for most of its 160 minutes, that beauty is very nearly sufficient to distract from the fact that it is such a boring movie.

I use that word deliberately.  Avatar's problem isn't that it has a stupid plot or that it is racist, though both criticisms are true.  The latter should probably bother me more than it does, as it turns out that all the Dances With Aliens/What These Blue-Skinned People Need is a Honky/Pocahontas in Space jokes were dead accurate.  The thing is, though, we started making those jokes when the first trailers and plot descriptions rolled out.  We all knew what we were getting into when we bought out tickets, and it seems almost redundant to criticize a movie that wears its racism so proudly on its sleeve.  When the film's production designer obliviously explains that making the film's Others blue-skinned aliens freed the filmmakers to tell a story that would have been considered racist if told about humans, and doesn't see the problem in what he's saying despite the fact that the only thing distinguishing those aliens from stereotypical Native Americans is their blue skin, what is there for a humble blogger to add?  Of course, the very fact that such opinions are held and expressed means that it isn't pointless to criticize Avatar and films like it for their racism, and I'm grateful to those who have done that work already, but that racism is not, to my mind, a problem that could have been fixed and whose repair would have made Avatar a better film, like the Nigerian characters in District 9.  Racism is baked so deeply into the film's makeup that if Avatar were not racist, it would be a completely different movie.  This is, perhaps, desirable, but it's not a particularly meaningful criticism of the film as it turned out, nor the reason that it fails.

Similarly, when initial reviews of the film called it technologically groundbreaking but moronically plotted, my reaction was: And?  So?  Therefore?  This is a James Cameron movie we're talking about, right?  Cameron is one of my favorite filmmakers.  Aliens and Terminator 2 are films that I can never get enough of.  I saw Titanic twice at the movie theater, and not for the love story.  I even like The Abyss, which a goodly portion of Cameron fandom seems to consider a snoozefest.  But as much as I love his movies, I can't deny that technologically groundbreaking but moronically plotted is a pretty accurate description of each and every one of them.  Avatar's plot--a human marine infiltrates the native population of an alien planet in an attempt to persuade them to move away from a priceless resource his employers want to get at, goes native, leads alien revolt--is not significantly dumber than that of any of Cameron's other films, and neither is it a huge break with tradition for him to cast a black-hearted, baby-killing military-industrial complex as the film's villain while making sweeping, vastly oversimplified statements about the wonders of nature and the evils of technology. 

The reason that Cameron's previous films worked despite their silly and simplistic plots is that he has an almost preternatural talent for writing engaging action narratives within the boundaries of those stupid premises.  It's a very simple formula--a sequence of set pieces in which the characters encounter and overcome a life-threatening challenge, each iteration raising the stakes and ratcheting up the tension while also laying the groundwork for the film's culminating life-threatening challenge and the method by which the characters overcome it--and Cameron's gift is the ability to string together these challenges in a way that seems organic, and to build towards the film's climax without letting the story go slack or overwhelm the viewer.  At the same time, Cameron knows how to write characters--not as Dostoevskian portraits of complexity and contradiction, but as recognizable and easily distinguishable individuals.  At the end of the wakeup from cryo scene in Aliens, we know most of the important marine characters--Vasquez is a butch woman, Hudson is a clown, Gorman is a green officer, Bishop is a robot.  None of these are particularly nuanced or subtle characterizations, and they are never expanded upon, but they are vivid and effective, so that later on in the film, when Hudson goes to pieces, or Vasquez and Gorman die a badass death together, we're affected.  Cameron can craft these kinds of plots and characters because he knows how to write essentially, making plot points and lines of dialogue do double and triple duty, leaving not a single ounce of fat on any of his narratives.  In Aliens, Hicks gives Ripley his locator bracelet.  It's a gesture of friendship and perhaps nascent romance, which brings Hicks into focus and sets up his greater importance in the film's second half.  Later, Ripley gives the bracelet to Newt, as a way of establishing their mother-daughter bond.  At the end of the film, Ripley uses the bracelet to find Newt in the queen's lair.  A single prop fuels two character dynamics and a major plot point.

There are, in other words, two James Camerons.  There's the detail-obsessed technophile, who invents new kinds of submersible cameras with which to film the wreck of the Titanic on the ocean floor, recreates the ship's interior down to the wallpaper and table settings, waits twelve years for filmmaking technology to catch up to his vision before he makes a movie, and then uses that technology as if he's been working with it his whole career.  And there's the writer, who knows how to sweep viewers along into his story, create characters whom the audience will immediately latch onto and wish to see triumph, and arouse fear and tension when those character are put in harm's way.  The problem with Avatar, the reason that it is a beautiful but boring movie, is that only one of those Camerons turned up to work.  When Avatar reaches for our emotions, it reaches exclusively for a sense of wonder at its beauty.  Not joy at the characters' triumphs, not fear for their lives, not love or hate or horror, only wonder.  Yet for all that emphasis on wonder, there is not a single scene in Avatar which is the equivalent of the "I'm the king of the world!" scene in Titanic--no moment in which we experience the characters' happiness vicariously.

The reason for that is that Avatar deliberately short-circuits that vicarious reaction by leaving its characters out of the equation.  Avatar's characters, and particularly Jake Sully, the human lead, aren't people in their own right, but avatars for the audience.  Their purpose in the film is to provide us with a point of view from which to see its beauty.  Jake is a blank, a black hole at the center of the film (and quite stupid to boot--there is not a single moment when one senses that he can guess the consequences his actions, no matter how obvious those consequences might be) and this is entirely deliberate.  His purpose is to give us a window on Cameron's technological accomplishment, but because no matter how immersive 3D technology is, we never forget that we're sitting in a movie theater, the only reaction we have to that accomplishment is wonder.  We don't feel joy, we don't feel exhilaration.  We don't feel like the king of world.  Cameron knows this, so he doesn't bother to make Jake feel these feelings either, and neither does he try, as he did in his previous films, to create tension or fear.  What's left is a plot we all recognize, whose beats are slow and predictable.  It's pretty easy to guess which characters will live and which will die, and since Cameron has done so little work to invest us in them, it's hard to care about either outcome.  And thus Avatar becomes boring.

It's interesting to look back on 2009's science fictional film output.  At the end of a decade so thoroughly dominated by comic book and superhero films, 2009, through a confluence of scheduling issues, saw these drop away (except for the abysmal Wolverine) to make room for a slate of, at least on paper, very interesting science fiction projects.  Even if we discounted the extruded science fiction products like Transformers 2 and Terminator: Salvation on the one hand, and the independent and semi-independent outsider efforts like Moon and District 9 on the other, we'd still be left with a whole raft of bold, risk-taking films: Watchmen, which tried to adapt one of the most difficult, critically beloved, and unwelcoming graphic novels ever written; Star Trek, a reboot of a franchise worn into the ground by its previous handlers and left behind by most of its fans; 9, a steampunkish animated film geared at adults (which, with its emphasis on visuals over plot and characters, feels like an appetizer for Avatar); Avatar, a lavishly expensive experiment in an untested technology from one of the most famously temperamental and self-indulgent directors in the business.  Such a wide variety of styles and approaches, and yet nearly all of these films ran the gamut from beautiful failures to deeply flawed successes.  Moon is the best science fiction film of the year, but it's also the one whose ambitions were slightest--a short chamber piece whose success was derived mainly from the strong performance at its center.  It's the cinematic equivalent of a short story, and though these are rare enough that efforts like Moon should be cosseted and protected like hot-house flowers, I'm also partial to the space operas and planetary romances to which the cinematic medium is so uniquely suited.  It's been a long time since we've seen a successful one of these, and if James Cameron can't even deliver one up, what hope is there for the future?

Putting Away Childish Things: Dexter Goes Fourth

After four seasons, it's easy to become blasé about the magnitude of Dexter's accomplishment.  In a television landscape in which so many shows flare brightly and briefly and then go to pot, and others are cut off in their prime, and others still are content to wallow in carefully maintained mediocrity, Dexter is that rare artifact--a series that has maintained, with some peaks and troughs, a high and highly satisfying level of quality for four years.  It's not a perfect show by any means.  It relies too heavily on clomping, obvious dialogue and an times insultingly over-explanatory voiceover; its pacing is often off, with seasons dragging in their middles and racing towards their endings; it tends to shunt off interesting minor characters into uninteresting, dead-end plotlines.  The fourth season, just now concluded, suffers from all these flaws as well as other, more serious ones, which we'll discuss below.  But it also displays the show's strengths--a rollicking, twisty plot, well done intrigue and high-intensity storytelling, and some of the best character work currently on our screens.  Dexter maintains this quality, as I've written in the past, by constantly reinventing itself, while holding fast to its core elements.

The fourth season is thus simultaneously a break with tradition and return to the show's roots.  After two seasons that deliberately broke with it, the fourth season returns to the format established by the first--Dexter playing a game of cat and mouse with another serial killer.  This time, however, Dexter is the predator, insinuating himself, under a false name and false pretenses, into the life of his quarry, a killer known as Trinity (John Lithgow, in a chilling, magnificently creepy performance) who has evaded capture for thirty years while killing dozens of people.  But if previous seasons portrayed the battle of wits between Dexter and his psychopathic antagonist as something self-contained, a game which Dexter could, for the most part, control and keep separate from his normal life, the fourth season is primarily concerned with the collapse of these barriers, between Dexter the serial killer and Dexter the upstanding citizen.

As the fourth season opens, Dexter is a family man: married to Rita, living in the suburbs, raising his two stepchildren and infant son, Harrison.  The loss of the privacy he enjoyed as a single man living on his own on the one hand, and the new responsibilities of a husband and father on the other, leave Dexter very little time or space in which to pursue his second life.  The season begins by treating this dilemma as a joke--Dexter can't get around to killing his latest quarry because he's kept hopping by the demands of job and family, and just as he's about to carve the man's body up, Rita calls him with an urgent request that he pick up medicine for Harrison--but as it draws on, the pressure it causes begins taking its toll.  Rita becomes impatient with Dexter's secretiveness and emotional distance, and suspicious of the occasional flare-ups of his violent temper.  The increased demands on his time make Dexter sloppy and frazzled--he kills an innocent man, having rushed to the conclusion of his guilt based on circumstantial evidence, antagonizes and arouses the suspicions of Quinn, a detective in his department, and even gets himself arrested while in hot pursuit of Trinity.  Despite his scrambling and furious effort, Dexter's life keeps slipping through his fingers--his marriage crumbling, his camouflage fading, and Trinity constantly one step ahead of him.

The result is the show's darkest and most tragic season.  In its previous seasons, Dexter showed us its main character playing childish games, rebelling against the rules laid down for him by his adoptive father and toying with the possibility of giving his murderous urges freer rein.  These experiments invariably ended in failure, with Dexter learning, as I wrote in my third season write-up, that "Though none of the people who love him will ever truly know him, their love is worth so much more than the love of the kind of person who would accept him for what he is."  As the fourth season begins, Dexter has finally taken this lesson to heart.  He's given up on the games and experiments of his bachelor life, and fully committed to hiding his true nature from the people whose love he wants--Rita, his children, his sister Deb.  What he discovers is that he may not be able to have this love: that he can't have a happy marriage with woman to whom he is constantly lying and from whom he is hiding the most important part of himself; that his children are rapidly outstripping him in their emotional development; that his sister won't be swayed from investigating their father's past, and thus coming closer to the truth about Dexter.  The same in-between-ness that makes Dexter such a successful character--monstrous enough to be interesting but human enough to be appealing--may also doom him to a life of unhappiness.  He's not so much of a monster that he can't love or desire the love of others, but he may be too much of a monster to keep it.

Even worse, during the fourth season Dexter is constantly accosted by characters who insist that he is not only going to fail as a husband and father, but that he's going to hurt his family terribly.  A fellow psychotic who murdered her husband and daughter (Christina Cox, in one of the series's most memorable guest appearances) promises him that one day he'll snap and do the same.  The ghostly apparitions of Dexter's father Harry warn him that he won't be able to hide his murderous activities forever, that his increased engagement with the world will in fact hasten the day he's discovered, and that Rita and the children will be destroyed by his arrest and execution.  When Dexter learns that Trinity, far from being a loner, is a family man like himself, he puts off killing his quarry in order to learn how to juggle serial killing and a normal life, but Trinity's happy home life turns out to be a facade.  His wife and children live in terror of him, with hints of physical and even sexual abuse, and Dexter is forced to wonder whether he too will have such a corrosive effect on his family.  It is with a growing unease that we viewers, along with Dexter, dismiss these concerns.  It seems impossible that Dexter could ever hurt his family--on the contrary, his uncontrolled violent urges invariably express themselves at the suggestion of a threat to Rita and the children.  Dexter's arrest seems more likely, especially given his growing sloppiness over the course of the season and Deb's slow closing in on the connection between him and the first season's Ice Truck Killer, but Dexter's evaded the law for long enough that his capture doesn't seem like a foregone conclusion.  By the time the ugly truth about Trinity's family is discovered, however, Dexter's own home life is so strained that it's hard not to wonder with him whether twenty years by his side will have the same effect on Rita and the children. 

In previous seasons, Dexter's fears that he might be damaging his loved ones, or might simply not be human enough to function as they need him to, were always allayed by the story's conclusion.  By killing the season's antagonist and rejecting the freer expression of his monstrousness that they offered him, Dexter would shut down the possibility of danger--from himself or from external sources--to his family, while reinforcing the good that he was doing in their lives.  The fourth season makes it clear that that good is inextricably bound with damage.  When Deb confronts Dexter with the knowledge that the Ice Truck Killer was his brother, Dexter first feigns shock, and then genuinely apologizes for bringing such a horror into her life, making her the target of a monster simply for being his sister.  Deb angrily shuts him down: "If you hadn't been in my life, I wouldn't be who I am.  You've given me confidence and support.  You've been the one constant... the one constantly good thing in my life."  She's right, of course--it's impossible to imagine Deb growing up with only the emotionally distant Harry as her family and still becoming the awesome, confident, strong person we know (and though this post is mainly about Dexter, I would be remiss not to note that the fourth season continues Deb's growth as a person and a detective, and that Jennifer Carpenter continues to deliver a stellar performance in the role)--but at the same time Dexter's right that his presence has twisted and distorted Deb's life, if for no other reason than that, unbeknownst to her, Deb is in the classic position of the healthy sibling of a sick child--Harry was neglectful of her because he was so busy trying to manage Dexter's psychosis. 

By the same token, as good as Dexter is for Rita and the kids, he also damages them, at no point so horribly as at the end of the fourth season, when, in the most prosaic and tragic way possible, Dexter's vigilante activities come back to haunt him.  Returning home after disposing of Trinity's body, Dexter discovers that the older man, having learned Dexter's true identity and eager for revenge, has killed Rita.  So not only has Dexter caused Rita's death, but he's orphaned her children (in fact, Dexter is responsible for the deaths of both their parents--he framed their abusive father Paul for drug possession and got him sent to prison, where Paul was killed in a fight) and possibly doomed his son Harrison, who witnessed his mother's murder, to the same psychosis that afflicts him.

What makes this ending all the more grim is that it comes as a counterargument to the seemingly hopeful reply that Dexter gives to the season's underlying question.  The fourth season is essentially the drawn out process of Dexter's life falling apart under the combined weight of his two personas.  In the series finale, Dexter for the very first time not only acknowledges the impossibility of continuing in this fashion, but chooses his family over his murderous activities.  He takes the huge step of admitting that he wants to stop killing, but whether or not that is even possible for someone with his deep-seated psychological trauma, his progress is undone by the loss of Rita, his reason for wanting to change.

This would all make for an extraordinarily satisfying and well-done season if it weren't for one very big problem--Rita herself.  Dexter has always walked a fine line where Rita is concerned, somehow avoiding the ever-present danger of making her seem like a deeply deluded and even pathetic character--a woman who has fallen in love, married, and had a child with a serial killer, a man she doesn't really know.  It did so by insisting that not only did Dexter have genuine feelings for Rita, but that the two shared a connection that ran deeper than the secrets Dexter kept from her, that at their core they wanted the same things.  Even so, there's no avoiding the fact that much of the romance in Dexter and Rita's relationship was rooted in Dexter's lies and Rita's willingness to interpret them in a way that best suited her desires and the image of the life she wanted.  When Rita discovers that she's pregnant, she rejects Dexter's first few marriage proposals for being utilitarian and unfeeling, telling him that she wants a proposal from the heart.  In a darkly demented scene, Dexter cribs lines from the confession of a woman who murdered a man she was obsessed with in order to propose to Rita properly, which she tearfully accepts as a true expression of his feelings for her.  Once they're married, however, it becomes impossible for Rita to avoid seeing that Dexter is holding back a vital part of himself.  If in previous seasons Dexter used half-truths and careful elisions to maintain a balance between exposing himself emotionally and concealing what he was, in the fourth season these are insufficient.  In couples therapy with Rita, he emotionally explains that he's afraid to let her see his dark side for fear that she'd reject him.  Rita tearfully promises not to do so, but what the fourth season stresses is that this promise only comes because she doesn't understand the full extent of Dexter's darkness.  Every step forward in Dexter and Rita's relationship is only achieved because Dexter has found a new way to lie, massaging the truth about himself in a way that makes Rita think he's being more open while still concealing the most important part of it.

None of this would be a problem if it weren't for the writers' handling of Rita herself, who stops being that subtle blend of obliviousness and deep sympathy and becomes a nag and a shrew.  Again and again, Rita is painted as a spoilsport, who interrupts Dexter's nocturnal activities and the flow of the plot in order to demand prosaic things like medicine for Harrison's ear infection or Dexter's presence at Thanksgiving dinner.  None of these are, of course, unreasonable expectations, and it has been enormously dispiriting to read reactions to the season that have castigated Rita for being a bitch and cramping Dexter's style.  "Rita the big fat nag returns this Sunday when she guilt-trips Dexter into escorting the kids on a camping trip. Girlfriend needs to either accept the fact that her husband has a higher calling that involves killing bad people or simmah down now," writes TV Guide's Michael Aussiello, and TWOP's Dexter recapper Joe R wonders whether the writers "know they've written Rita past the point of no return for most fans."  When really, Rita's sole crime is that she believes the lies Dexter has told her, that she isn't aware of his second life, and that she expects him to be a full and equal partner in the marriage he chose to enter into.  The problem is, these are exactly the reactions the show's writers are courting, not only by marginalizing Rita as a point of view character and locking us into Dexter's view of their marriage, but by using her to spoil the audience's fun, to interrupt the story we want to see--Dexter's pursuit and capture of Trinity.

Rita's death, though not really a refrigeration--it not only doesn't motivate Dexter but takes away his main motivation to change, and revenge is impossible because an unwitting Dexter had already killed Trinity before discovering Rita's body--serves to flatten her character.  She can no longer make demands on Dexter, no longer complicate his life.  She exists now solely as a saintly and tragic figure who might have granted Dexter salvation, not the damaged and slightly screwed-up person with whom he had a loving but troubled marriage (and her death comes at the end of a season finale that sweeps away all the problems in that marriage and paints Rita in a suddenly saintly light as she once again promises Dexter to accept him along with his demons).  Add to that the fact that the fourth season seemed to take far too much pleasure in depictions of women's suffering--Trinity kills two women and a man on screen, and whereas the man's death is bloody but clearly driven by rage, when Trinity kills the women it's clearly a sadistic urge that's driving him, the desire to see them in terror, which they oblige; Quinn's girlfriend is so desperate for her father's approval that she kills for him, and realizing that he doesn't care for her, kills herself; Rita's death, though not seen, was clearly in the same fashion as Trinity's first victim--and it's hard to keep seeing Rita as a person rather than a plot device.

That said, I am very much looking forward to Dexter's fifth season. After all, my main problem with the series this season--the writing for Rita's character and the manner in which she was killed off--won't be an issue next year, and there are so many questions I'd like to see answered, so many possible avenues of story the show could go down.  Will Dexter be raising his stepchildren and son?  Will Deb finally make the last logical connection and discover his true nature?  Will Quinn continue his investigation of Dexter?  Most importantly, will Dexter commit fully to Harry's code, cutting off all human contact, or will he reject it completely and become a full-fledged monster?  Every time Dexter delivers a triumphant conclusion to an excellent season, I find myself praising it and nervously hoping that the next season will be the show's last--after all, how much longer can the writers keep up this streak?  I have the same reaction to the fourth season, mainly because it feels like crunch time--Dexter's lost most of what was keeping him human, and in the wake of that loss he needs to make a final choice between his two personas.  After four years, Dexter's writers have certainly earned enough indulgence from me to believe that they can pull off that story successfully, and who know?  Maybe even keep going after it.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Paolo Bacigalupi's debut novel, The Windup Girl, reads like an extended version of his short stories.  It is set in the future introduced in his 2005 short "The Calorie Man," in which the global economy has been brought to its knees by oil collapse, and genetically engineered plagues have killed many people and most naturally occurring grains and crops, creating a 'calorie monopoly' of biotechnology companies who sell their disease-resistant, sterile strains, whose copyrighted genomes they protect with ruthless efficiency, to the starving nations of the world.  It takes place in the same Bangkok which was the setting of Bacigalupi's 2006 story, "Yellow Card Man."  Its characters are either transplants from these stories or parallels of their protagonists, and its themes are the same grim fare that permeates all of Bacigalupi's output.  This is both a very good and very bad thing.

It's a good thing because Bacigalupi is one hell of a writer, and the same skill that has earned him accolades and award nominations, and made his debut collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, one of the essential genre collections of the decade, is very much on display in The Windup Girl.  More than any other writer currently working in science fiction, Bacigalupi knows how to make the future palpably, plausibly horrific, and what sets The Windup Girl apart from other If This Goes On novels is that instead of imagining the complete collapse of civilization (the go-to technique of many mainstream writers dabbling in SF) it tells us what happens after that collapse--or, to take a dimmer view, acknowledges that such a collapse would take a very long time, and that human society would have time to regroup and reshape itself even while in its midst.  Much as it extrapolates from the present day, The Windup Girl isn't telling the story of the near future in which the wages of our wasteful lifestyle and unthinking expectations of abundance come due.  It takes that future for granted, and tells us what happens next. 

In the Bangkok of the novel, the burning issue of the day are the first stirrings of a second Expansion--the possibility that international trade and travel on a 20th century scale might once again become a reality, that the world is once again becoming smaller and easier to traverse.  It's a possibility that sparks a power struggle in the Thai kingdom's government, between the ministry of Trade, eager to embrace the opportunities of this new day and rejoin the free market, and the ministry of Environment, whose mandate has, for decades, been to keep the kingdom in a state of near isolation--to destroy contaminated crops and livestock, quarantine the victims of the ever-mutating plagues, regulate carbon emissions, and keep the agricultural conglomerates from gaining a toehold in the country and turning it into a client-state, to which end Thailand has closed its borders to nearly all importation of biological material.  These are not, by and large, tasks that endear an organization to the public, and the ministry's troops, called white shirts, pursue them with such brutality and tolerate such widespread corruption within their ranks that hatred of them is kept in check only by an even greater fear.  With Trade on the ascendancy and the second Expansion on the horizon, that fear is muted, and the stage is set for a scramble for dominance that escalates, over the course of the novel, from espionage-driven cold war to strong-arm tactics to urban warfare.

All of this is to make The Windup Girl sound much more purposeful than it actually is.  A lot happens in the novel--the calorie man Anderson Lake lies his way into Bangkok in search of the kingdom's seed bank, which his employers, an agricultural company, want to plunder for fresh genetic material, to which end he volunteers to bankroll Trade's strike against Environment; white shirt officers Jaidee and Kanya respond to Trade's brazen flaunting of quarantine and embargo laws by clamping down on Lake and other foreign businessmen, and find themselves caught between two giants; former shipping magnate Hock Send ("Yellow Card Man"'s Tranh, renamed in the novel), who fled ethnic cleansing in Malaysia with just the clothes on his back, plots and schemes to regain his fortune; and the title character, Emiko, a genetically engineered being created to be a dutiful servant who was abandoned by her Japanese employer when he left Thailand, evades the white shirts, who would kill her on sight, by securing the protection of a pimp--but I wouldn't go so far as to call any of these events a plotline.  A plot is a journey from one point to another, a story with a discernible shape.  In The Windup Girl, Bacigalupi deliberately avoids giving his characters' narratives such a shape, repeatedly allowing their stories to jump the tracks, introducing false starts and false bottoms.

Again and again, we leave a certain character's point of view just as they've hit on a course of action which, they believe, will bring them to their objective, only to discover, when we rejoin them, that an event outside their control has thrown a monkey wrench in the works and forced them to retreat and hatch a new plan, which is dismantled in its turn.  Lake, for example, wants to make a deal with trade minister Akkarat.  First he's rebuffed, then the white shirts make a violent strike against Trade and Lake is embraced, then his ploy to gain the inner circle's trust backfires and Akkarat has him tortured, then he proves his innocence and gets his employers access to the seed bank, then the coup is achieved without his help and Lake is dismissed, then he gets sick and is abandoned to his fate.  Lake is by far the most powerful and privileged of the novel's characters, and yet like all of them he's buffeted by events, neither comprehending nor controlling them to any meaningful degree, and influencing them in ways he doesn't really understand and whose consequences he quite frequently fails to predict.  Similarly, The Windup Girl can't be said to be a novel of the struggle between Trade and Environment, which the reader pieces together from glimpses, snatches of conversation, and from the chaotic, partial view most of the characters have of it.  Rather it is, like Bacigalupi's short stories, the story of how one lives in the kind of world that gives rise to these struggles, and of how that world came to be.

Which is where the bad part comes in.  What's good about The Windup Girl is exactly what's good about Bacigalupi's short stories.  Hock Seng's chapters read like what would happen if Bacigalupi sat down to rewrite "Yellow Card Man" again and again, each time with slight variations.  Other characters' narratives similarly recapitulate attitudes and observations from Bacigalupi's stories.  Like the stories, their purpose seems to be first and foremost to create a sense of urgent dread, to impress upon the readers the fervent and genuine belief that it is all--oil, food, clean air and water, civilization itself--about to run out.  The problem is that what works in a short story is sometimes a poor fit for a novel.  As skilled as Bacigalupi is at evoking dread, he can't keep The Windup Girl from being, at points, slack and repetitive.  If the space restrictions of a short story or novelette gave him just enough room to find just the right words to use as a scalpel, the same concepts expressed in hundreds of thousands of works start to feel more like a sledgehammer, and towards the end of the novel Bacigalupi seems to have run out of ways to hammer in his point.  "Yellow Card Man" was harrowing, but Hock Seng's narrative loses a little more of its bite every time the old man flashes back, yet again, to the massacres in Malaysia, or laments, yet again, his reduced circumstances.  By the end of the novel, the repeated failures of his get-rich schemes have slid from tragedy towards farce.

There's a problem here that run deeper than recycled material, though, and that is that Bacigalupi is repeating not only his stories' plots, but their emphasis on the doom that awaits us--not the characters, us.  By doing so, he has made his novel something beyond plotless.  He has made it self-annihilating.  With only one exception, each of the narratives in The Windup Girl trends towards entropy--not only towards the failure of the characters' plans, but towards the loss of the ground they've already gained and sometimes of their lives.  And the destruction runs even deeper--Bangkok itself is overrun by the end of the novel, which holds out little hope for the human race.  This is a problem not because bleak endings are depressing, but because of the goal of that bleakness.  All of Bacigalupi's careful worldbuilding is undone so that The Windup Girl can be a statement about the present, a wagging finger--like the most simplistic of outsider SF apocalypse novels--about what might happen If This Goes On.  It is, perhaps, foolish to have expected Paolo Bacigalupi to have written any differently, but once again the novel format undercuts his message.  He's asking us to do a lot of work, to invest ourselves emotionally and intellectually in a whole world, for hundreds of pages rather than a few dozen.  When he destroys that world just to make his point, the feelings of frustration and resentment that destruction causes overwhelm that message.

This is doubly frustrating because there are hints throughout The Windup Girl that it might have been a different, more ambiguous, less didactic novel.  The one character who not only survives but gains ground in the devastation of the novel's ending is Emiko, who roams the ruins of Bangkok, free of the white shirts' persecution and the brutality of her johns, and who ends the novel by meeting a 'genehacker' who offers to give her fertile children (Emiko and others like her are sterile), reasoning that her kind is better suited to survival in this new world because it is immune to the diseases that have made it such a hell.  As the novel stands, this ending feels like a non sequitur--Emiko has expressed almost no desire for children and very little fellow feeling for other windups.  But it's a hint of a future for humanity--or its engineered descendants--that chimes with other elements in the novel.  There is a repeated emphasis in The Windup Girl on the futility of trying to recapture the past--Hock Seng's repeatedly-frustrated desire to be a magnate again, research into a cheap, portable energy source that provides Lake with cover as he searches for the seed bank, or the people of Bangkok, who are quite literally holding back the ocean, building levies and sea walls to keep the city from being swallowed by rising sea levels.  But the past is gone, Jaidee tells Kanya near the end of the novel.  What matters isn't cities but people, and those people might be windups, inheriting the earth from humanity, and perhaps even its spiritual successors--a repeated concern of the Thai characters is the proliferation of ghosts in the city, virtuous dead who have no one to reincarnate into because the dead humans outnumber the living ones.

It's a reading that might have been satisfying if the windups themselves were better sketched, but we only meet Emiko, who spends most of the novel either fearing for her life, being brutalized and raped (in two extremely graphic and uncomfortable scenes in which Bacigalupi oversteps the boundary between grimness and torture porn) and expressing the genetic limitations on her personality that incline her to meekness and servility by chastising herself for not being a more pliant sex slave.  It's a narrative that manages to be both self-pitying and self-loathing.  We only meet one other windup, very briefly, and from what little we see of her personality she seems to be the same person as Emiko under less dire circumstances.  If this is the future of humanity, it's a boring, limited one.  No wonder Bacigalupi seems more interested in the doomed, but infinitely more vibrant, human characters, and no wonder he pours more energy into their narratives than Emiko's, which comes to seem almost perfunctory--yet more abuse, yet more self-loathing, yet another near escape.  Ultimately, the destruction at the end of the novel rings truer than the hope it holds out for the windups' salvation--it seems to be where Bacigalupi's heart was.

Well written and impressive as it is--and this is still a work by one of the major voices working in the genre, if not a major work in its own right--The Windup Girl is undone by the ambiguity at its heart.  Not just because it's an agglomeration of short stories trying to be a novel, but because it can't decide where its focus should be--in the future or in the present.  This is a problem endemic to cautionary SF, and may be the reason that much of the environmentally themed science fiction we've seen in recent years has taken place in the near future--once you take the time to imagine the future as a world in its own right, it's hard to keep an eye on the present and on the developments you're trying to warn against.  It is surely one of the reasons that he's gained so much acclaim in recent years that in his short stories, Paolo Bacigalupi has found a balance between worldbuilding and science fiction as a warning about the present, but The Windup Girl demonstrates that he's yet to find a way to translate that ability to novel length works.

(500) Days of Summer

There's a scene that comes about halfway into Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and very early in the romance between its main characters, Joel and Clementine.  After a less than ideal first meeting, Joel visits Clementine at her workplace in search of a second chance, and though she's willing, she also matter-of-factly lays down the ground rules of their fledgling relationship.  "Too many guys think I'm a concept or I complete them or I'm going to make them alive," Clementine tells Joel, "but I'm just a fucked-up girl who is looking for my own peace of mind."  A beat, and then the two shift character, into the Joel who is deleting his memories of Clementine following the failure of their relationship, and the Clementine in his head, who acts as his tour guide in a nonlinear reenactment of it.  Ruefully, Joel admits that he didn't heed Clementine's warning.  "I still thought you were going to save me.  Even after that."

Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer, from a script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Webber, recalls Eternal Sunshine in several important ways.  Like Kaufman's film, it is nonlinear story about a romance, told after its failure, but lacking Eternal Sunshine's SFnal component, it holds out no similar hope for a happy ending for Tom, a wannabe architect who writes greeting cards, and Summer, the girl who, over the course of 500 days, he meets, falls desperately in love with, dates for several months, is dumped by, and spends several more months getting over.  Perhaps the most important similarity between the two films, however, is that Tom is exactly one of those men Clementine is wary, and weary, of--the kind of who wants the woman in his life to be an adventure and a way of imbuing it with meaning.  But then, (500) Days, and Tom, seem to be an amalgamation of so many other romantic comedies and their heroes.  Like High Fidelity's Rob, Tom is a man who thinks that compatibility in pop culture likes and dislikes is the same as compatibility of personalities (and perhaps even that those likes and dislikes are a meaningful way of evaluating a person).  He's got a bit of Nice Guy about him--his reluctance to acknowledge his feelings for Summer, even when asked point blank, very quickly transitions from charmingly insecure to cowardly and manipulative--and not a small amount of Apatovian man-child.

All of which is to say that (500) Days of Summer is a great deal more unromantic than even its premise and title suggest, and much more than it seems to think it is.  It seems almost unkind to criticize a film as eager to charm as this one, but that charm is rooted in the assumption that we, the viewers, will be rooting for Tom and Summer to make it work, to find a loophole in the ending we're promised by the film's beginning.  This was not my experience.  Almost from their first meeting, it was clear to me that Summer and Tom were poorly suited to one another, and maybe to relationships in general, not only because of the sheer tonnage of neuroses, insecurities, and immaturity that weigh Tom down throughout most of the film, but because Summer is such a complete blank, to him, it seems, almost as much as to us.  In the bleak months following their breakup, Tom is advised to get over Summer by following Lawrence Durrell's edict (attributed to Henry Miller) of turning her into art.  It's left to us to judge to what degree we should take this as a meta-statement on the film (just as we need to decide how seriously to take the film's opening titles, which promise that any resemblance between its characters and reality is a coincidence, "Especially you Jenny Beckman.  Bitch."), but the fact remains that Summer is much more a work of art, a construct, than a person.  Tom, we're told, has been conditioned by pop culture to anticipate The One, and the magical, true love that will accompany her.  What matters to him in his relationship with Summer is not who she is, but how that relationship conforms to his image of what love should be like.  When Summer brings him to her apartment for the first time and tells him intimate, personal stories about herself, the voiceover drowns her out, telling us how thrilled Tom is to be at this crucial relationship milestone.  What's important isn't what Summer is telling him about herself.  It's that her stories are capped by what the voiceover calls the six magic words: "I've never told anybody that before."

Nor do we ever get a sense of the nature and tenor of the relationship between Tom and Summer.  Even before they become involved, Summer warns Tom that she doesn't believe in love and doesn't want a boyfriend, and no matter how intimate they become she insists that they are merely friends.  It's never clear whether she's given him fair warning, or mixed signals.  In their last meeting, after her marriage to a man she met shortly after breaking up with Tom, Summer tells him that with her new husband, she knew almost immediately "what I was never sure of with you."  Which puts an entirely different spin on the relationship--it's not that Summer didn't believe in love, but that she simply didn't love Tom.  So which is it?  Is Summer selfish ("you always do what you want," Tom tells her in that last meeting) or just someone who knows what she wants?  Is she a user, leading Tom on even though she knows she doesn't love him, or just a fucked-up girl looking for her own piece of mind?  We never find out, and don't seem to have been expected to care, and neither, it appears, does Tom.  The film's title turns out to be much less of a pun than it at first seems.  Summer isn't a person so much as she's a season, a phase, an experience Tom needs to go through.

And hence the failure of the film's attempts to charm, despite throwing every clever storytelling device imaginable at the screen--its nonlinear structure, a counter that ticks back and forth between the 500 days, a voiceover that seems to be imitating Jim Dale's work on Pushing Daisies, a musical scene, a pseudo-documentary, a medley of 70s art-house film parodies expressing Tom's misery after the breakup, fantasy sequences, split-screens, and Tom's wise-cracking ten year old sister, who imparts her worldly wisdom, and the film's morals, to her clueless brother.  Romantic comedies work because they provide us with the vicarious thrill of infatuation, making us party to what in real life is a private enchantment that often leaves outsiders befuddled.  As Tom puts it, during a burst of greeting card creativity he experiences when things are still going well with Summer, "I Love Us"--it's the entity that the characters create together, the back and forth between them, that is at the heart of a good romantic comedy's appeal.  But there is no Us in (500) Days of Summer, no sense that Tom and Summer have created something that transcends the two of them as individuals.  We see a few cute scenes between them in its early days, a few rather tepid fights towards its end (despite Summer saying, when she breaks up with Tom, that they fight all the time), but almost nothing of the actual substance of their relationship, and almost no sense of what Tom-and-Summer were like.  Without that invitation into the relationship, the vicarious effect of most romantic comedies isn't achieved, and Tom and Summer come off the way real couples do when they, to take examples from the film, sing to each other on their cellphones from adjoining rooms, or compete to see who can yell 'penis' the loudest in a public park--annoying and self-absorbed.

There is, of course, another way of looking at (500) Days of Summer, and that is that for all that he recalls the heroes of many romantic comedies, at his core Tom has more in common with their heroines--the ones who are hopelessly romantic and desperate to find The One, who can't imagine themselves happy without a man, can't believe that any man will want them, and are too caught up in their obsession with romance to notice the men who bring it into their lives.  Summer, meanwhile, plays the commitment-phobic, emotionally withdrawn Wrong Man--a reversal that the film stresses in one of its earliest scenes, in which Summer explains that she's breaking up with Tom because they've been fighting like Sid and Nancy, then clarifies that in this analogy, she's Sid.  When Summer reveals, in her last meeting with Tom, that she never loved him, what comes to mind is Sally Albright, wailing after making a similar discovery about a man who wouldn't commit to her: "All this time I thought he didn't want to get married.  But the truth is, he didn't want to marry me!"  If you read the film this way, the fact that Summer isn't really a person becomes less important, because what Tom needs to get over isn't the individual woman but the idea that he needs a woman to be happy, and that fulfillment and a sense of self-worth can only be achieved in the arms of a soulmate.

Even this more satisfying take on the film, however, isn't completely so, because despite the role reversal at its heart, (500) Days of Summer still trades in many of the gendered tropes and assumptions of its genre, making for an uneasy mixture.  Summer may not be a person, but she is a weighty presence in the film--far too weighty for someone whose sole purpose is to be the means of achieving the main character's personal growth.  As opposed to, say, High Fidelity, which uses Rob's ex-girlfriends to achieve a similar goal and, like (500) Days, sketches those female characters very thinly as a result, (500) Days tries to romanticize Summer.  There is a sense that the writers can't help but shift their focus to her, can't keep from making her as charming and adorable as they can.  Instead of showing us Tom's infatuation with Summer and using it to illuminate him, they try to make us share that infatuation, and let Tom get lost in the shuffle.  More disturbingly, there is the fact that making ciphers out of female characters, treating them like saviors or villains, but never real people, is something that traditional romantic comedies do quite often.  (500) Days is using an allegedly anti-sexist role reversal to justify employing sexist tropes.

The biggest problem, however, with reading (500) Days of Summer as Tom's coming of age story is that at the end of the film he hasn't really done so.  He's more confident, better able to deal with rejection, and taking steps to improve his life on his own rather than waiting for a woman to give it meaning--great strides all, but despite all of them Tom still hasn't let go of his binary concept of love.  In the wake of his breakup with Summer, Tom, like so many other foolish and self-absorbed characters before him, decides that love must not exist, that it is a fantasy dreamed up by greeting card writers like himself.  In their last meeting, the now-married Summer tries to dissuade him of this cynicism.  It's not that love doesn't exist and that the search for The One is pointless, she tells him.  It's just that she wasn't The One.  Which is fine as far as it goes, but what neither Tom nor Summer seem to have considered is that it's possible for love to exist and still be entirely unlike what pop songs and, yes, romantic comedies, make it out to be.  For all that he's learned, Tom still doesn't realize that love is so much more complicated than his concept of it, and requires, among other things, treating its object as a person rather than a concept.

The relationship between Eternal Sunshine's Joel and Clementine flounders because once the first flush of infatuation fades, they can't deal with the real, messy person they find themselves entangled with, and their decision at the end of the film to try again holds out some hope for success because both acknowledge the inevitability of this disenchantment, and vow to find out what lies beyond it (though in his original script, Kaufman famously undermined this hopeful ending by revealing that Joel and Clementine spend the rest of their lives failing at their romance, erasing their memories of each other, and trying again).  Tom, who never reaches that stage in his relationship with Summer, doesn't seem to have realized that it exists, so that when his story ends on what it seems to think is a similar note--Tom meets a new girl (rather sickeningly named Autumn) and the counter that's accompanied his relationship with Summer drops to (1)--it's hard to feel as hopeful as we do at the end of Eternal Sunshine.  For all his hard-earned wisdom, there's no indication that Tom has learned not to think of women as concepts, merely that some concepts might not complete him.  That's by no means an unusual conclusion for a romantic comedy--the traditional, female-centric often end on this note (though this is also one of the reasons that the genre is generally considered to be such a critical and artistic wasteland)--but (500) Days of Summer has positioned itself as this year's off-beat, intelligent romantic comedy, and it is disappointing to discover that at its heart, it isn't so different from the Hollywood product to which it pretends to offer an alternative.

Recent Reading Roundup 23

It's been a long time since I did one of these, so long that some of the books I read in the interim have already faded so much in my memory that I can't comment meaningfully on them.  Here are my thoughts on the ones that have lingered.

1. Sunnyside by Glen David Gold - Gold's long-awaited follow-up to the enormously enjoyable Carter Beats the Devil features the same careful attention to period detail, and the same seemingly effortless evocation of early 20th century Americana, but it is also so shapeless, so caught up in the desire to make Meaningful Statements, that it becomes the exact opposite of Carter--a genuine chore to read.  Like Carter, Sunnyside is a When It Changed novel, this time focusing on film, and particularly film star celebrity, rather than television.  But whereas Carter made a relatively modest statement--that the invention of television changed the face of public entertainment, in the process putting acts like the superstar magician out of business--Sunnyside tries to tie the growth of Hollywood and the celebrity culture into just about every major event of the beginning of the twentieth century, including World War I, arguing that the emergence of people who are famous simply for being famous was also the death knell of the old, aristocratic world order.  At best, it's an oversimplified argument, and when Gold uses it draw connections between Charlie Chaplin's early film career and World War I, the novel--which starts out with the same verve and sense of fun that made Carter Beats the Devil such a joy to read--collapses in on itself.  It certainly doesn't help that the characters are uniformly unpleasant, most especially Chaplin, the heart of the novel, whom Gold portrays as a narcissistic user.
   


2. Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory - Gregory's debut novel, after several years as a well-respected short story writer (his "The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm" was one of my favorite short stories from 2008), takes place in a world in which spirit possession is a fact of life.  With seemingly no rhyme or reason, random people are possessed, not by demons, but by archetypes--The Truth, who punishes liars, The Kamikaze, who possesses Japanese men and compels them to crash planes, The Captain, who appears on battlefields to lead troops to victory.  What's best about this novel is its worldbuilding--Gregory's fashioning of an alternate history influenced by possessions (Eisenhower is killed by The Kamikaze, O.J. Simpson doesn't live to be acquitted) and of the ways in which human society has changed to accommodate the possibility of possession, deal with those who have been possessed, and try to explain the nature and cause of possession.
   
   Less successful is the novel's plot, which centers around and is narrated by Del Pierce, a thirtyish man still struggling to recover from his possession as a child by The Hellion, a trickster spirit which takes young boys and forces them to commit dangerous and destructive mischief.  After years of shaky mental health, aimless wandering, and a haphazard job history, Del begins to feel genuinely unbalanced, and fears that he has somehow trapped the Hellion, and that the demon is trying to get out and take over him again.  The novel's focus on a mentally unstable main character whose exposure to the supernatural has led to a lifetime of inadequacies and disappointments brings to mind Sean Stewart's Perfect Circle, but Pandemonium lacks that novel's admirable resistance to settling into the thriller plot, and soon introduces a paramilitary group convinced that the possessing entities are aliens, and a secret society trying to understand the demons by studying Jung's Red Book, both of which tend to obscure Del himself.  Not helping matters is the fact that Del's journey throughout the novel consists mainly of learning the truth about his possession as a child, but as I had guessed that truth very early in the novel I quickly grew impatient with the characters and how long they were taking to realize it.  I was much more interested in the questions it raised about personality and personhood and the nature of the possessing demons, which Gregory, by delaying the novel's main revelation, left himself very little time to explore.  This is, obviously, to blame Pandemonium for not being the novel I wanted to read, but that's a risk an author takes when they hinge their entire plot on a single revelation, and in my case that risk didn't pan out.
   


3. Warlock by Oakley Hall - Perhaps the simplest way to describe Hall's 1958 Western is that it is Deadwood in book form--a sprawling, beautifully written, unflinching examination of the myths and realities of the American West.  The town of Warlock has been plagued by outlaws and ruffians, who have repeatedly driven out or killed the representatives of the law provided by a distant and uncaring territorial government.  The town's merchants and prominent citizens decide to hire a gunslinger, Clay Blaisedell, to act as Marshall and bring order to Warlock.  From this simple and familiar premise Hall crafts an enormous and complicated tapestry of characters and points of view, all chewing on and providing different perspective on the novel's central question--what, if anything, gives Blaisedell the right to kill?  It would be a vast oversimplification to say that good and evil are not clearly delineated in Warlock.  Rather, Hall turns a searching but sympathetic eye on each and every one of his characters--Blaisedell, the town's deputy John Gannon, a former member of the gang menacing the town, the merchants who hired Blaisedell in an attempt to bring Warlock into the civilized world, the local judge, who rants and raves that Blaisedell's presence represents a refutation of civilization and the rule of law, and yet has no effective law to offer in his stead, Blaisedell's friend, the cynical, dangerous saloon owner Tom Morgan, Kate Dollar, a former prostitute who blames Morgan for pitting Blaisedell against her lover, the local miners, who are striking for safer conditions (and whose leaders the merchants try to persuade Blaisedell to run out of town), and even the outlaws themselves.  Warlock is about many things, but perhaps most importantly, it is about the allure and horror of violence and bloodshed, the way that the gunslinger, be he Marshall or outlaw, is simultaneously a hero and a villain, and the near impossible complexity of the attempt to craft a peaceful, lawful society through force of arms.  But this is only one of its many themes and pleasures.  If you're feeling Deadwood withdrawal, or just in the market for an engrossing read, I highly recommend Warlock.
   


4. Just After Sunset by Stephen King - In the introduction to his most recent short story collection, King talks about falling out of the habit of writing short fiction, and becoming reacquainted with the form during his stint as guest editor for Best American Short Stories, in the wake of which he decided to try his hand at writing them again.  Which leaves me with two possible explanations for how disappointed I was by Just After Sunset, despite being a fan of King's, and particularly of his short fiction, for many years: either King still hasn't gotten back into the short story groove (and is still so famous and bankable that no one is willing to force him back into it) or I've outgrown his writerly ticks.  Most of the stories in this collection are slow and familiar, but what manages to obscure even the occasional successful moment in an otherwise failed story--the central romance in "Willa," in which the main characters have been waiting for what seems like forever for a train to replace their stalled one; the apocalyptics ending of the vignette "Graduation Afternoon," in which a townie girl grits her teeth through her upper class boyfriend's graduation party--is King's reliance on folksy speech patterns.  It used to be that, if nothing else, you could count on a Stephen King story to sound real, as if an actual person was talking to you (or to someone else), their every word choice a reflection of their personality and a reason to keep reading.  In Just After Sunset, King seems to have lost his voice(s).  His narrators and protagonists sound contrived, even fake--aiming at the folksiness of his previous novels and short stories, and failing so badly at the attempt that they sound ridiculous.  Only two stories manage to survive this failure of voice--"Mute," which veers away from the something-nasty-in-the-woodshed template that seems to underly most of the stories in the collection, and delivers a magnificently nasty punch in its final revelation, and "A Very Tight Place," in which King gets, quite literally, down in the dirt when he traps his protagonist inside an abandoned port-a-potty and describes, with obvious relish, the visceral horror of his attempts to escape.
   


5. Eclipse 3, edited by Jonathan Strahan - The third installment in the controversy-ridden original story anthology series represents a departure from the previous two volumes on almost every level--the tenor of the stories, the authors, even the (quite lovely) cover design.  In his introduction, Strahan explains the shift, in a rather roundabout way, by describing Eclipse 2 as science fiction oriented.  The implication, one takes it, is that Eclipse 3 is fantasy oriented, but both characterizations strike me as inaccurate.  There are science fiction stories in Eclipse 3 just as there were fantasy stories in Eclipse 2, and the difference between the two volumes seems to have more to do with the type of genre story they feature.  If Eclipse 2 leaned towards the purely generic, pulp-inspired end of both genres, the stories in Eclipse 3 are more literary (the significance of the fact that Eclipse 2 was dominated by male writers whereas 3's table of contents is dominated by women is left as an exercise for the reader).  I was underwhelmed by Eclipse 2, and Eclipse 3 reveals that it's not the type of stories that was my problem so much as Strahan's editorial taste.  My reaction to both volumes is, in fact, almost identical--there are a few stories I like very much, one or two decent ones, and a whole mass of pieces I genuinely disliked.  The standouts are Karen Joy Fowler's "The Pelican Bar," which very nearly outdoes "What I Didn't See" for flimsy generic connections, but is nevertheless quite harrowing in its descriptions of the protagonist's hellish experiences in a reeducation camp for wayward teens, and Maureen F. McHugh's "Useless Things," a stately, plotless but evocative piece about life in the wake of economic and environmental collapse.  The best story in the anthology is Nicola Griffith's "It Takes Two," in which a female executive for a high tech company struggling to overcome the boys' club atmosphere in her profession ends up hacking her brain to get ahead in business.  Despite a shaky premise, "It Takes Two" is a meaty story that comments intelligently on several thorny issues.  The remaining stories, however, are so disappointing, veering too often towards tweeness and sentimentalism, that I'm genuinely torn about whether to continue with this series, which for the second time around has delivered much too low a ratio of good stories to bad ones, but also includes what I suspect will be a couple of my favorite stories of the year.  I guess we'll have to see how the Eclipse 4 table of contents shapes up.
   


6. The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt - We end as we began, with a historical novel about America the first half of the twentieth century.  Hunt's slim, dreamy novel about the last days in the life of the inventor Nikola Tesla seems like the polar opposite of Gold's Sunnyside.  Instead of a sprawling cast and huge stakes this is a very intimate story, with only a few characters--Tesla himself, Louisa, a young chambermaid in his hotel, and her immediate family--and hardly a plot in sight.  Instead, Hunt moves back and forth between the major events of Tesla's life--his arrival in America, his adversarial relationship with Thomas Edison, fading into obscurity even as his greatest invention, alternating current, becomes the industry standard, consumed with obsessions both fantastical and merely too forward-thinking for their time--and intersperses them with Louisa's personal crises.  For all their differences, however, The Invention of Everything Else is ultimately as shapeless and unsatisfying as Sunnyside.  Hunt seems to have done her research, but her overwhelming focus on her characters' interiority leaves her with hardly any space to develop a sense of period--1943 reads just like 1893, and given the non-linearity of Tesla's narrative I was often at a loss to guess when a particular scene was set.  This might not have been a problem if the characters themselves weren't so unbelievable, but I struggled to accept any of them--not just Tesla, who in Hunt's hands is literally a mad scientist who concocts plans to talk to Mars and resurrect the dead, but also Louisa--as actual people rather than mouthpieces for a rather stultifying melange of cod-philosophy and surrealist images.  There are a few moments of genuine emotion in the novel--a short interlude describing Louisa's parents' courtship and her father's experiences during World War I, a trip to the beach Louisa takes with a suitor--but for the most part The Invention of Everything Else gave me nothing to grab onto.
   

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2009 Edition, Part 4

My God, it will not end.  Progress report: Community and The Good Wife remain very good.  Stargate: Universe seems to be using the loosest possible interpretation of 'plot' (it would be nice to think that the two episodes in which the characters gloomily contemplate their imminent demise as the ship flies straight towards a star, only for its automated systems to save them at the last minute, represent the nadir of the show's storytelling, but as we're only seven episodes in that seems unlikely) while expending most of its energy on soapy shenanigans.  But since most of the characters are underdeveloped, the relationships between the main castmembers are nearly nonexistent, and the writers show little or no flair for enjoyably trashy, Melrose Place-style plotting, it's hard to care about X's affair with Y and A's unrequited crush on B.  The show seems determined to alienate the franchise's core fanbase without doing enough to capture a new one.

• White Collar - Yet another entry in the subgenre of charming, effervescent crimesolving dramedies whose main appeal is their characters and humor (see also Monk, Psych, Leverage), White Collar stars Matt Bomer (the criminally underused Bryce Larkin on Chuck) as a master forger and art thief, and Tim DeKay (Jonesy from Carnivalé) as the FBI agent who catches him and then recruits him to work in the white collar crime division. Frothy enterprises of this variety are usually a pretty delicate balancing act--the plots have to be tight enough to obscure their silliness; the character interactions compelling but not too deep or angsty--and White Collar doesn't seem to have found that sweet spot.  The three episodes I've seen have been slack, and though Bomer and DeKay play well off each other, most of their meaningful interactions are with other characters with whom they have less crackle and pop.  Also disappointing is the fact that, though the pilot featured two interesting female characters--a wealthy society matron whom Bomer's character charms into giving him a swanky place to stay, and a lesbian FBI agent (whose preference neatly obviated the sexual tension between the top-billed single female character and the single male lead which often seems obligatory in shows of this type)--in subsequent episodes these have been, respectively, disappeared and replaced.  Though I'm glad to see The Middleman's Natalie Morales getting work, her job in the first episode of the season seems to have been to wear three different revealing outfits, and in the second, to moon over Bomer's character.  Which is a shame, because even within the restrictions of its deliberately shallow format, White Collar's pilot gestured at issues of class and wealth--both Bomer and DeKay's characters are middle or working class people moving in upper class circles, and they have very different attitudes towards the finer things in life--and with Leverage already starting to go off the boil, I was in the market for a new show of this type.


• Emma - Again, not a fall pilot, but the BBC's latest adaptation of the Jane Austen novel.  Between the already quite good Gwyneth Paltrow film adaptation, the still-painful memories of the abysmal "Jane Austen Season," a series of cut-rate, uninspired adaptations of several other Austen novels from a few years ago, and the fact that writer Sandy Welch's most prominent work is a mediocre version of Jane Eyre from 2006, I had very low hopes for this miniseries, but it turned out to be a pleasant surprise.  It's not perfect, by any means, and especially when considered as an adaptation--though Emma is by no means an uneventful novel, four hours seems to have been too long for Welch, mainly because she has drastically reduced Harriet's presence in the story. This alteration seems to be a consequence of Welch's take on the novel, which in her hands becomes a meditation on the warring desires to make a home for oneself and go out to see the world--Emma representing the former, and Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax the latter.  This is, to say the least, a rather strange approach to take with a Jane Austen novel.  With the possible exception of Persuasion, it would be impossible to describe any of them as ambivalent on this point, and Emma, which begins with its heroine already the mistress of an estate and ends with her husband leaving his home to join her there, is perhaps the most decisive in extolling the virtues of domesticity.  The more Welch stresses this theme, the more she seems to have imposed her own story (one not too dissimilar to the one she told with Jane Eyre) on the original work.
  
  Still, taken as a work in its own right, the miniseries offers many pleasures.  Despite her shift in emphasis, Welch hits many of the novel's key scenes beautifully (though not, sadly, its most crucial one, Emma's cruel joke at Miss Bates's expense).  After two decades of near-constant Austen adaptation, I've built up a gallery of my favorite character portrayals, some of which crop up even in otherwise dreadful adaptations--the younger Bennet sisters in Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice, Olivia Williams as Jane Fairfax in the Kate Beckinsale Emma--to which we can now add Johnny Lee Miller's turn as Mr. Knightley (all the more notable when one considers that, with the honorable exceptions of Colin Firth's Mr. Darcy and Ciaran Hinds's Captain Wentworth, Austen's male leads tend to fare rather poorly in adaptations, often fading into the wallpaper).  Miller plays Knightley as an appealing blend of self-assurance and self-doubt.  In the early parts of the miniseries, his abrasive intelligence is proudly on display, but as the story draws on we see his growing awareness that the same qualities that made him an excellent foil for Emma in his capacity as her surrogate older brother might be entirely unappealing in a potential lover.  His simultaneous dismissal of the fashionable, flattering young men he views as his rivals for Emma's affections, and growing envy of them as he realizes how ill-suited he is to their manner of courtship, is very well played.  Miller has fantastic chemistry with Romola Garai, who plays Emma, and Welch furnishes the two with several magnificent arguments, either embellished from conversations in the novel or invented, which show that chemistry off.  Garai herself, though she doesn't quite unseat Gwyneth Paltrow, is very good as Emma, and my main complaint against her is that between her blonde hair, wide mouth, and tendency to smile broadly and bug her eyes, she kept reminding me of how Katee Sackhoff used to play Starbuck in her more lighthearted moments, which as you can imagine is a strange association to make when watching a Regency romance.  On the whole, then, Welch's Emma is far from definitive, but it is nevertheless worth a look both for its reflections on the novel and as a piece of entertainment.


• V - In a word, yawn.  Like the now-defunct Eastwick, V is a show with a shocking secret that everyone already knows (which is why spoiler campaigns like this are so utterly pointless), but whereas Eastwick tried to compensate for this predictability by cramming its pilot full of events and character introductions, V's premiere is slow and slack, hitting the story's salient points (the aliens have arrived; they're creepily perfect; they're really man-eating lizards) with so little verve and conviction that it feels less like a reboot of the original series and more like a lifeless imitation of it.  Given how familiar the story is, it would probably have been impossible for the remake's writers to replicate the original series's eeriness and slowly mounting horror (I say this as someone who watched the original V as a young child, though I know that those who have returned to it as adults have generally come away disappointed), but they don't seem to be aiming for any other tone, and their insistence on following the original's plot makes no sense in light of the changes they've made to its premise.  The main character is an FBI agent, who at the end of the pilot has a foolproof way of identifying stealth aliens and definitive proof that they have secretly been on Earth for many years.  And yet instead of going to her superiors with what she knows, she forms a resistance group with an admittedly very cute priest.  A potentially even greater flaw is the fact that as this lead character, Elizabeth Mitchell has all the charisma and range of expression of a cucumber.  If it didn't seem more than likely that V will prove a dud, I'd wish that Mitchell had switched roles with FlashForward's Sonya Walger, who is clearly better suited to the task of acting as a counterweight to Morena Baccarin's fantastically creepy alien leader.
  
  On a side-note, the show's writers and actors can protest all they like, but if they're not deliberately writing V as anti-Obama propaganda, they're using so many of its tools and buzzwords (which are, as Fred Clarke repeatedly tells us, also the tools and buzzwords of evangelical rapture-nuts) as to make no difference.  For pity's sake, the pilot could not have stressed that the evil aliens' evil plan for evil world domination begins with universal healthcare any more if there had been title cards to that effect.  Which, when you think of it, is a neat trick, because at the same time that they're telling us that peacemakers who urge humanity to embrace its nobler urges are actually wannabe tyrants secretly plotting our demise, the writers are also announcing that all the recent expressions of humanity's worst urges--war, genocide, terrorism, racial and religious strife--have happened at those same aliens' instigation.  So we don't have to listen to those pesky peacemakers, because really, we're rather peaceful ourselves, when left to our own devices?  Makes perfect sense.
  

Thank Goodness for Small Favors

TV site CliqueClack interviews Defying Gravity creator James Pariott about his plans for the now-defunct series's future, and his revelations about the planned storyline for the character Nadia--a no-nonsense, unemotional, extremely sexually aggressive German woman--put even the most fail-tastic of science fiction shows to shame:

Nadia — She had quite the odd hallucinations, didn’t she? Who was that man she kept seeing, and why did he look so much like Nadia? As Parriott revealed to me, some fans of the show got it right in their guess that she was, in fact, a hermaphrodite when she was born. The choice was made for her when she was 11, by her parents, which sex she’d ultimately become. So that man we’re seeing is actually what Nadia would have been, had they chosen to raise her — or him — as a man.

Now, here’s the wild kicker. All those DNA changes that are happening with the crew, caused by Beta and the other artifacts? Well, they would eventually wind up causing Nadia to gradually turn into a man.

Parrriott also said that it was planned for Nadia to really have a more significant presence in season two. “If you see the way we wrote her, she sort of had that male sexuality about her, that ‘fuck ‘em and forget ‘em’ mentality. So we wanted to write her sort of as a male character in a female body.”

As you may recall, I wasn't terrifically impressed with Defying Gravity to begin with, and in its later episodes the show lost what little charm it had when it downplayed its trashy soap opera aspects in favor of a dull and drawn out SFnal story, but I wasn't actually glad, even thankful, for its cancellation, until I read this.  Honestly, I'm willing to forgive this entire crappy fall pilot season just for knowing that there is no chance in hell that this abominable storyline will ever see the light of day.

Future History, Repeated

In my post about The Children's Book, I suggested that historical fiction might be broadly defined as fiction that takes place in a time and setting not directly experienced by its author.  Within that definition one can distinguish between different kind of historical novels according to how close they come to recorded history, to the people and events in the history books.  A historical novel can center entirely or for the most part around fictional people living ordinary (for their time) lives in the past (The Little Stranger, Sacred Hunger, Possession).  Or it can describe fictional people being caught up in momentous events (Octavian Nothing, Year of Wonders, The Children's Book).  Or it can place fictional characters at the epicenter of the great changes of their time, sometimes rubbing shoulders with historical figures, sometimes taking their place (Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, The Baroque Cycle).  Or it can dispense with fictional characters and plots altogether, and simply fictionalize the recorded events of the past.

Hilary Mantel's ecstatically-received, Booker-winning Wolf Hall is of the latter type.  It follows the rising fortunes of Thomas Cromwell, counselor to Henry VIII and one of the chief architects of the English Reformation, from the downfall of his patron Cardinal Wolsey to that of his enemy Sir Thomas More.  It's the kind of historical novel I tend to view with distrust, which tries to make stories out of recorded events and characters out of real people.  I've written before about my unease with works that try to fictionalize reality.  A person's life, be it ever so important and full of event, is not a story, with structure, themes, and most importantly, a point, and to reduce it to one is to diminish it, and that person, in some ineffable but very real way.  And whereas works like The Other Boleyn Girl or the television series The Tudors reshape the events of history into a genre that wears its unreality on its sleeve--respectively, a romantic melodrama and a trash soap opera--and thus defuse that inevitable diminishing, Wolf Hall is told with a straight face, as a naturalistic novel that purports not only to describe events as they were but to describe Cromwell as he was.  It thus borrows significance from history even as it embroiders it and twists it into a shape that suits Mantel's purposes.

It's a difficulty that Mantel herself seems aware of.  Some way into the novel, Cromwell travels to France with Henry's entourage, and has an audience with the French king, Francis I.  As the two discuss their hopes for more friendly relations between their countries, Francis breezily observes "Who now remembers Agincourt?"

[Cromwell] almost laughs.  'It is true,' he says.  'A generation or two, or three... four... and these things are nothing.'

It's a startling exchange, and it takes a few moments to realize just why it's startling--because the event that will make Agincourt immortal won't happen for nearly 70 years, when a playwright trying to curry favor with a queen not yet born will write a piece of hagiography about her ancestor, and tie Agincourt to a piece of writing so sublime that it will come to epitomize valor, leadership, and courage on the field of battle.  To put it another way, very few of us remember Agincourt as it was, or the significance that Cromwell and Francis I attach to it, but very many of us remember the spin Shakespeare put on it in a piece of historical fiction.  The story, so long as it's sufficiently well told, is much more powerful than the fact, something that Cromwell is very much aware of, seeing as much of his service to Henry involves passing laws and proclamations that change the nature of reality and rewrite the past, turning a legal wife into a mistress, a legitimate daughter into a bastard, a pope into a bishop and a king into the head of the church.  "It's the living that turn and chase the dead," Cromwell thinks at the end of the novel.  "The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives."

There has, of course, been much rewriting of the lives of the movers and shakers of the English Reformation, and as much as it is (an attempt at) a straight retelling of that history, Wolf Hall is response to these retellings.  The general consensus they--and most particularly Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, to which Wolf Hall often seems like a direct response--have reached about Cromwell is that he was a grasping, unprincipled man, willing to adopt any creed and mouth any ideology in order to get ahead, as opposed to Thomas More's staunch adherence to his beliefs, which eventually lead to his death.  In Mantel's hands, More becomes dogmatic and intractable, his ironclad belief the root cause of his pitiless pursuit, torture, and brutal execution of anti-Catholic heretics, whereas, as Dan Hartland points out, Mantel makes a virtue out of Cromwell's lack of conviction:

Those around Cromwell are characterised by an allegiance to a system: More’s Catholicism, Norfolk’s feudalism, Wolsey’s royalism. Cromwell, on the other hand, has an almost Nietzschean approach. “I distrust all systematizers, ” wrote the philosopher, “and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” Mantel’s Cromwell likewise believes in personal respect and education, a fully humanist perspective which sets him at odds with the medievalised England to which he is born. Mantel sees his meritocratic rise – from smith’s son to soldier, trader to merchant, lawyer to Lord Chancellor – as a symbol of the birth of our modern age.

I would go even further and say that Mantel makes a virtue out of Cromwell's lack of integrity and sense of personal dignity as well (the latter is presumably linked to his humble origins, which leave him, unlike the nobles around him, indifferent to his family's honor).  Several times over the course of the novel, Cromwell visits prisoners condemned for their words--the heretic John Frith, condemned by More; the self-proclaimed prophetess Elizabeth Barton, who had threatened Henry with divine retribution for casting off Catherine of Aragon and marrying Anne Boleyn; and finally, More himself.  Each time, he counsels the prisoners to lie, recant, and compromise their principles in order to save themselves.  "I would advise anyone to get a few more weeks of life, by any means they can," he tells Barton, advising her to 'plead her belly' in order to delay her execution, and the final conflict of the novel, between Cromwell and More, hinges on More's refusal to compromise his immortal soul by swearing an oath acknowledging Henry as the head of the church in England and the legality of his marriage to Anne.  What in A Man for All Seasons was treated as the crowning glory of More's saintliness is, in Wolf Hall, described as the epitome of his arrogance and self-regard, with Cromwell, instead of the devil trying to tempt More away from righteousness, portrayed as a humanistic angel trying to save More from himself.

But Wolf Hall doesn't simply depict Cromwell as a modern person, but as a modern literary character.  If Mantel is storying history, she's doing so in the style of the 20th century stream of consciousness novel, and her study of Cromwell reveals a very familiar type of person--complicated and conflicted, never entirely possessed by a single emotion or completely certain of his feelings.  The novel's storying of history of overlaid by an almost impressionistic journey through Cromwell's past and present, and his concerns are larger than the affairs of state he's tasked with--securing the future of his children and wards, mourning for his wife and daughters, cultivating relationships with the heretics, freethinkers, and the merchants who are remaking Europe, slowly and imperceptibly wresting power away from the feudal lords.  Mantel's Cromwell may not hold to a system or a creed, but he does have a goal--a stronger, more prosperous England, whose wealth is held by its government rather than by Rome, and whose people, high-born and low, aren't held back by tradition and superstition.

So Wolf Hall does three things--it retells the story of the early years of the English Reformation; it is a character study of Thomas Cromwell as a modern humanist; and it is a meta-commentary on historical fiction and how it can come to supersede historical facts.  Each of these elements is extremely well done, and the novel, despite its brick-like appearance, is such an engrossing read that I very nearly swallowed it whole.  But I find myself falling short of the rapturous praise it's received in other quarters, and I think this is because these three elements end up warring with each other.  Cromwell is the heart of the novel, but how seriously can we take Mantel's hagiography of him when even she's poking holes at it?  And if we were tempted to read Wolf Hall as the character study of a fictionalized Cromwell, there is its careful, almost meticulous attention to detail, to even the smallest events of the period, to contend with, which insists that we take it seriously as a realistic and accurate representation of its era.

I'm not quite as down on the novel as Dan Hartland, who, despite enjoying it, concludes that Mantel goes too far in portraying Cromwell as an accidental politician, and ultimately makes him almost a Mary Sue, but I do feel manipulated by her use of history.  Wolf Hall ends with More's execution, which might be said to be the apex of Cromwell's career--his last and most powerful enemy vanquished, his immediate goals--the marriage of Henry and Anne Boleyn, the divestment of England's ties to Rome--achieved, but rather conveniently leaves off the actual, more bitter, ending to his story.  Mantel has said that she plans to write a sequel to Wolf Hall covering Cromwell's downfall, but it's hard not to feel that she cut the story off when she did not because she wanted to write a duology but because it would have been so much harder for her to spin as sympathetic and humanistic the events of the last five years of Cromwell's life, in which the very mechanisms he put in place to stave off the corruption of the church end up enabling the corruption of the state, and the same tools he used to get rid of Catherine and cement Henry's power will be turned against Anne and finally himself, turning a faithful wife and a loyal counselor into traitors.  Whether or not the sequel was in Mantel's mind when she sat down to write Wolf Hall, the fact remains that, taken on its own, it makes for a confusing statement--simultaneously relying on history, and our familiarity with it, for its significance, and expecting us to ignore those bits of history it finds inconvenient.

Wolf Hall is the third of this year's Booker nominees I've read, following The Little Stranger and The Children's Book, which I believe is a personal record (still on my to be read stack is Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, but I'm not particularly drawn to either of the remaining nominees).  Each of these historical novels is an accomplished, engrossing, albeit seriously flawed read, but if I had to pick a favorite, I would probably give the Byatt the slightest of edges over the Mantel, not so much for being a better book but for treating history in a way that I'm more comfortable with.  As I wrote at the time, Byatt doesn't so much story history as report it, and as problematic and frustrating as this approach can be, it did at least draw a line between the fact and fiction that kept me from being knocked out of the story, as I repeatedly was during my reading of Wolf Hall, by the realization that, for all her acknowledgment of the unreliability of any fictional representation of the past, Mantel was selling as historical fact a bit of mythology.  It is, of course, inevitable that any work of historical fiction will twist and shape the facts of history to fit its own story, but I prefer a work that acknowledges this inevitability to one that pays lip service to it, but also expects us to forget it.