Books this year: a book diary

The Pioneers was the first of Cooper’s “Leather-stocking Tales” to be written, though it is the fourth and penultimate in terms of the series’ internal chronology (The Last of the Mohicans being the second, both written & in terms of internal chronology). It is set in the late 1790s, in the frontier of New York, in the new settlement of Templeton, a barely-fictionalized version of Cooper’s hometown of Cooperstown, founded by the author’s father.

The plot – which is laughable, in my opinion – is convoluted: Judge Temple, the founder of Templeton and owner of something like 10,000 acres, acquired about half of his land when it was confiscated from his dear friend Edward Effingham (who sided with the British during the War, serving as a Colonel) and sold at auction. This Effingham’s son, Edward Oliver Effingham, returns to the States (shortly before the novel opens) to care for his senile grandfather, Major Oliver Effingham, and to reclaim the property he believes Judge Temple wrongly acquired from the middle Effingham. Despite the obvious pseudonym he assumes – Oliver Edwards – and his “inexplicable” hostility toward the Judge, his true identity isn’t revealed until the novel is almost over – when it is also revealed that Judge Temple was really a good guy, who tried repeatedly to restore lands and fortune to his friend, until his letters began coming back unopened, and he heard that the two younger Effinghams had perished (and, conveniently, the old senile Major had long been “lost”). At that point, everyone’s happy, Edward Oliver Effingham marries the Judge’s daughter, Elizabeth (the whole romance subplot is heavily influenced by Pride and Prejudice, published about a decade earlier), and the American aristocracy is stabilized and justified.

Fortunately, this part of the novel is secondary (in practice, if not by Cooper’s intent) to the primary conflict driving the novel: that between the frontiersman Natty Bumppo and the settler & bringer-of-civilization Judge Temple. This conflict plays out in numerous incidents, some of which contrast the “wasty ways” of the settlers (as in their indiscriminate slaughter of the pigeons migrating in great swarms over the settlement, many of which are left to rot on the ground where they fall) and the kill-only-enough-to-eat practices of Natty and Chingachgook; other incidents center on the conflict between the “law of the wilderness” and the “law of civilization” (as when Natty is fined for killing a deer “out of season,” deer season being something he views as an utterly arbitrary construct).

These conflicts are often complicated, however. The young Effingham, who will eventually inherit all of Temple’s lands and fortune, and thereby continue the conversion of wilderness into cultivated land, dotted with towns, is, for most of the novel, a companion of Natty and Chingachgook, and appears to espouse their ideals. Judge Temple himself is often portrayed as wishing to find a middle ground between Natty’s absolute rejection of cultivation and “civilization” and the rampant, wasteful consumption of natural resources practiced by most of the settlers and endorsed by his verbose and outspoken cousin, Richard Temple. The Judge, however, is also generally portrayed as weak-willed and ineffective as a responsible cultivator of the wilderness, alternately giving in to the “excitement” of his cousin’s activities (the trawling of the lake, for instance, which produces a harvest of as many inedible fish as edible ones) and quietly disapproving from the comfort of his manor-house. Cooper seems incapable of or unwilling to consider the middle way the Judge (usually) espouses; there is no room in the novel for a westward expansion of civilization that also preserves areas of wilderness.

Though Cooper often seems to side with Natty, the cruelly ironic final line of the novel – “He [Natty] had gone far toward the setting sun, the foremost in that band of pioneers who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent” – betrays, in my opinion, a belief that the time has come for Americans to dominate and utterly transform the landscape as they move West to the Pacific – and that such domination and transformation is inevitable, if not also divinely ordained.

Yes, this is a novel about zombies. Yes, the author did a stint writing for SNL and happens to be the son of Mel Brooks. And, yes, one of the characters is an old, blind Japanese man who survives alone in the wilderness for years killing zombies with a “monk’s shovel” before teaming up with an otaku-turned-samurai-badass-motherfucker. It’s still a good novel, even if you’re not generally a fan of the undead.

It’s worth reading because it’s not really about zombies — or, rather, it uses zombies to talk about one possible way a lethal and easily-spread virus might spread and disrupt global society in a spectacularly clusterfucky manner. Zombies are more fun than ebola (well, in a manner of speaking), but the principle is the same.

World War Z was published in 2006, and the zombie pandemic with which the novel deals seems to begin (in China, of course) sometime around then. The novel is composed of a series of interviews (or excerpts therefrom) conducted toward the end of the decade of “peace” which followed humanity’s decade-long struggle for survival; the interviews are arranged chronologically according to which part of WWZ they address, from the initial outbreaks, through the “Great Panic” and humanity’s return from the brink of extinction, to the decade of rebuilding after “victory” is officially declared.

Though Brooks acknowledges his debt to George Romero, the novel is far different from Romero’s films in that it posits humanity’s survival; the humans win, and the zombies are contained, though not eradicated (some spend their winters frozen and thaw out in the spring, millions and millions wander around on the oceans’ floors, and, hilariously, Iceland is still completely overrun). Humanity survives, but the cost is high: not only are there significant (catastrophic, even) ecological consequences – the extinction of the whales, for example – but the survival of some humans means the sacrifice of many more. Israel totally isolates itself for the duration; South Africa adopts the Redeker Plan, which calls for the establishment of safe zones by simultaneously establishing “live bait” zones (and guess where most people end up?); and there are plenty of smaller instances of military units abandoning civilians, or civilians abandoning each other, or resorting to theft, rape, murder, cannibalism, &c. Good times.

The fact that this is a novel about zombies will, I think, keep it from being widely read, which is a shame; it deals intelligently with the issues that arise during and after a catastrophic disruption of society, and such things happen on a local (and not-so-local) level all the time. Reading the novel (or anything else, fiction or otherwise) won’t prevent such disasters, obviously, but being forced to think about the ways our choices and behaviors can exacerbate or alleviate the suffering of those affected by such disasters is a good thing – or, at least, a thing that’s good for us.

This novel was published in 1985, and set in what would then have been the not-to-distant future, in the Republic of Gilead – a totalitarian regime set up by a bunch of fundies who managed to kill the President and all of Congress and make it look like Islamic fundies were responsible. Despite the fact that I have a really hard time believing that people like Fred Phelps or even Pat Robertson (who seems reasonable in comparison) would be capable of such a coup, the novel is an extremely accurate portrayal of the repressive and hypocritical morality of religious fundamentalists, especially when it comes to sex.

Not only has the United States been overthrown by fundies (who are purging not only Catholics but Baptists – the novel has its darkly funny moments), but the birthrate has also plummeted, for a variety of reasons, including severe environmental degradation (nuclear and toxic wastes everywhere, pollution, etc). This leads to the establishment of “Rachel and Leah Centers” where fertile but not exactly moral (but not really really immoral) woman are indoctrinated and then assigned to high-ranking officials with infertile wives (because, really, it’s always the woman’s fault, right?) to have babies for them – like Bilhah and Zilpah did for Rachel and Leah.

The novel is narrated (”reconstructed”) by one of the handmaids, given the name “Offred” – which is both a patronymic (”Of Fred”) and a pun (”off red”), as the handmaids are dressed totally in red. Before the shit hit the fan, she was married and had a daughter; their attempt to escape to Canada (where else?) failed, and Offred ended up a handmaid, her daughter was given to someone more worthy, and her husband’s fate is unknown.

There are, as are required in dystopian novels, a secretive and potentially omnipresent police organization, an underground resistance, double agents, an escape attempt – but these are secondary elements: the novel is primarily concerned with exploring the role and psychology of a woman living under an oppressive patriarchy, and it does this quite well. The epilogue (a transcription of an academic talk titled “Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale” and delivered in 2159) adds, well, problems of authentication – it draws the reader’s attention to the “reconstructed” nature of narratives that appear to be offering a running account of events, among other things.

Though I may not have made this novel sound interesting, it actually was; I finished it in two days because I couldn’t put it down. Certainly I would recommend reading a little of it before deciding that my taste in novels is not to be trusted.

I was first introduced to this book via an excerpt posted here, and it instantly earned a place on my “find this and read it” list – and it’s only taken me about two years to get to it.

Invisible Cities (or Le città invisibili) was published in 1972, and translated into English by William Weaver in 1974. Italo Calvino was born in Cuba to Italian parents; the family returned to Italy shortly after his birth in 1923.

It’s an intricately structured novel, but the short version is that its made up of nine sections, each itself made up of short (1-3 pages) descriptions of cities ostensibly visited by Marco Polo during his travels through Kublai Khan’s empire. Each of the larger sections both begins and ends with a dialogue between Marco and Kublai narrated by a third-person narrator; the descriptions of the cities are (apparently) narrated by Marco Polo himself. Some of them, though, are blatantly anachronistic, and I think a few more are subtly so, though I don’t know enough to know.

The headings of the descriptions recur – “Cities and Names,” “Cities and Desire,” “Thin Cities,” “Continuous Cities,” etc – and are incrementally numbered, which is important to one of the novel’s patterns. Several major themes run through the novel: on the dual (or tripartite) nature of cities; on what distinguishes one city from another, and what doesn’t; on how a city is different for an inhabitant and a visitor; on how cities endure and change through time. The dialogues between Polo and Khan deal with, among other things, memory, desire, facing one’s mortality, and the futility of attempting to know or understand everything, or even much of anything.

It’s a beautiful book, and I wish I had room to quote about half of it – so really, you should just go read it. It’s short (about 160 pages) and the brevity of its sections and subsections makes it easy to read in bits and pieces – though I imagine reading it in one sitting is an interesting experience.

I’ll end with an excerpt, the second section titled “Continuous Cities”:

If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have though I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, with the same little greenish and yellowish houses. Following the same signs we swung around the same flow beds in the same squares. The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had not changed at all. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already knew the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with the buyers and sellers of hardware; I had ended other days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.

“You can resume your flight whenever you like,” they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.”

Billy Budd is Melville’s last novel: it was left in manuscript (and possibly unfinished) at his death in 1891, and not discovered until 1924; a poorly-edited edition was published that year, and the corrected text was published in 1962.

The novel is set on the HMS Bellipotent, and follows Billy Budd, a young sailor impressed into service in Her Majesty’s navy. The ship’s master-at-arms, John Claggart, develops an odd, sexually-charged, lust-filled hatred for Billy, and eventually decides to accuse him of conspiring to mutiny. This is a serious charge at any time, I suppose, but the novel is set in the late 1790s, shortly after a couple of serious mutinies (one of which is the awesomely-named Spithead mutiny) — and so the charge is especially serious. The ship’s captain, Edward “Starry” Vere, has also taken a liking to Billy (though probably not that kind of liking), and doesn’t really believe Claggart. Vere brings Claggart and Billy both into his cabin, so they can work things out man-to-man-to-man, which doesn’t go well: Claggart accuses Billy to his face, Billy’s stutter kicks in, and so he punches Claggart (really, REALLY hard) instead of offering a more reasoned rebuttal, and Claggart falls dead to the floor. Vere decides Billy will have to hang for killing an officer, because order must be maintained on the ship at all costs.

The current in the novel that deals with fears of mutiny and the rule of law in a closed system like a naval ship is both interesting and well-handled; for instance, it’s difficult to fault Vere’s line of reasoning, despite feeling that his conclusion to execute Billy is completely wrong. The novel’s examination of Claggart’s psychology — his reasons for hating Billy — is also excellent; there’s the infamous “soup scene” which you should just read, right now. The sexual symbolism is, I should hope, both obvious and hilarious.

What I found most interesting about the novel, however, was the way it played with the idea of narratorial authority. The penultimate chapter (or maybe the one before it…) is the ‘official’ version of the events recounted in the novel, published in a naval gazette; it describes Budd as a budding mutineer, and Claggart as an upstanding officer stabbed in the performance of his duties. The novel’s narrator disparages this account, naturally, as it contradicts the entire novel – but the novel is being recounted long after the fact by a man who gives no indication that he was an eyewitness, and so there’s no reason to believe that the novel’s version of events is any more correct than the ‘official’ version. The reader doesn’t become aware of this problem until the novel is nearly over, though, by which time the narrator’s authority has been taken for granted. It’s diabolical, is what it is.

The Last of the Mohicans is the second in a series of five novels about a woodsman/scout/marksman/mythic figure named Natty Bumppo (aka Hawk-eye, aka Deerslayer, aka Leatherstocking), his Mohican “brother” Chingachgook, and Chingachgook’s son Uncas, who’s the titular “last of the Mohicans” (really, his father’s the last one, because Uncas dies in this book and Chingachgook lives another four decades, but whatever). It’s set during the French and Indian War, although it’s more about rescuing a pair of damsels in distress from the Indian that’s kidnapped them (a vile, violent, manipulative man who also happens to belong to a tribe allied to the French).

As an adventure story, it’s actually fairly entertaining - lots of suspense, chases, tracking, a few grisly murders, tight spots, improbable escapes, convenient coincidences, and feats of bravery and derring-do. The prose - well, it’s not what I consider elegant, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ponderous. Judge for yourself.

It’s an incredibly racist book, though its racism is that odd sort which would be offended if you called it racist. The Native Americans are constantly referred to as savages, though sometimes this means barbarian cannibals and sometimes it means “noble savages.” Hawk-eye constantly reminds whomever he’s talking to that his blood is “without a cross” of Indian blood, even though people might think otherwise because he’s such an awesome woodsman/scout/hunter/whatever. At times this anxiety about purity is ridiculous: the French Indians have named him “La Longue Carabine,” a name he takes issue with on the grounds that his gun is a rifle, and not a carbine.

The ending bothered me: the older of the two kidnapped (half-)sisters, Cora, who is “remotely descended” from an African, is the one who dies at the end (and in such an unceremonious way!), while the younger, fairer, blonde sister marries a strapping young major in His Majesty’s Royal something-or-other. I don’t think Cooper would say so if one could put the question to him, but it seems obvious (at least to me) that the novel’s internal logic requires that Cora die, because she’s a tiny bit not white.

I hate recommending books merely because they’re “classics,” so I won’t recommend this one; I’ll say, instead, that you should start with The Pioneers, and move on from there if the spirit so moves you.

This is a strange novel, and I mean that in a good way. Well, mostly.

It alternates between two closely-related plotlines: before everybody dies, and after. It follows Jimmy/Snowman, a slacker who happens to be born into (moderate) wealth and privilege in a world where corporations (most of them doing some sort of genetic-engineering work) have built enclosed city-states to house their employees – and everyone else lives in a slum that covers most of the rest of the world (sort of a lot like Snow Crash). He befriends Crake (not his real name), a genius who turns mad-scientist and engineers a virus that will kill everyone, all at once; Crake brings Jimmy to work at his big fancy-ass corporation (which is mostly a cover for his diabolical plan) because he wants Jimmy to watch over the ‘Crakers’ – the race of perfect plant-people that Crake has built from the gene up to replace humanity. After everyone dies, Jimmy becomes Snowman, turns into a grumpy old man who grudgingly tells stories about the ‘time before’ to the Crakers, dreams about the past, and scavenges for stuff (the Crakers, being plant-people, totally photosynthesize their food). The major action of this plotline is Snowman’s trek to the (recently-abandoned) headquarters of Crake’s corporation to acquire some super-antibiotics to deal with the super-infection he gets after cutting his foot (because he has no shoes).

It’s a well-written novel: Snowman’s character is believable and even sort of likable; his trek for the antibiotics, though I’ve made it seem somewhat silly, is actually pretty suspenseful, and leads to a great cliffhanger ending (which her recent sequel apparently resolves, six years later); and the world she creates is rich and detailed.

The richness and detail of the world she envisions is part of my problem with the novel: the world of the novel is one in which genetic modification of everything is rampant – a fast-food corporation develops a chicken that’s basically eight breasts and a digestive tract. While genetic modification of plants and animals is certainly an issue that ought to be discussed, it’s also been going on since humans started domesticating animals and raising crops; the novel’s tone on the subject is not balanced, but shrill. The tendency of corporations to amass more and more power and capital, which seems (at least to me) a much more pressing issue, is relegated to the novel’s background. This overemphasis on a problem that is more or less a bogey, and the concurrent minimization of an actual (and perennial) problem, didn’t ruin the novel for me, but it certainly lessened its impact.

Of course, it is “speculative fiction,” and a second reading (or a reading of the sequel) might change my mind. And there’s always the possibility that it will turn out to be prescient, like Brave New World (though it could also turn out to be mostly wrong, like 1984). Either way, it’s worth reading.