The Passage

This 872-page post-apocalyptic thriller by Justin Cronin seemed interminable. It is well written and had its moments but I begrudge the way it pushed other books to the side for the weeks it took me to read it.

It is a fantasy saga that aspires to the same cult status as Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, but it not  nearly so compelling as those classics. The first third of the book, which takes place in the Time Before -- the proximate future leading up to the apocalyptic event -- was for me the best part of the book. When the narrative picks up a hundred years later, describing the world of the human survivors and the nasty vampire-like creatures transformed by a virus (called variously virals, smokes and dracs), there are moments of action and suspense punctuated by long periods of tedium as Cronin laboriously details the social structure and way of life in the Colony, an outpost of human survivors where the days are numbered by failing batteries needed to power the lights and keep the virals at bay during the night.

It is an intriguing and coherent world and Cronin's writing is consistently literate and at time quite captivating. But it just goes on and on and on way too long. It takes us down multiple labyrinths into the minds of various characters who then disappear from the narrative. Why? Yes, we get it that some of the virals practice mind control, but we don't need to see it repeated in several characters we don't care about and won't see ever again.

Cronin is color blind in depicting his characters, with both human heroes and virals being both white and black, and race is only occasionally or never indicated. The Jaxons, for instance, Theo and Peter, are presumably black because of certain details in the family history and the description of their "Auntie". Amy is clearly white because her mother is surprised to find so many black people in Memphis. In other cases, names indicate a Latino or Indian heritage. Race is simply not important in this post-apocalyptic world where people are just happy to be with other humans.

I do have a weakness for the genre, which is probably why I stayed with this book through the tedious parts. I like catastrophe films, too; there's just something appealing about disasters that threaten humankind. I'm not a big fan of zombies or vampires, but Cronin does add some original twists to his creatures that make them more interesting.

The author is a bit heavy-handed about fate and destiny and things meant to be. If there is a solution to these enigmas, he doesn't disclose it in this book, the first volume of what is already a series following the release this summer of the sequel, The Twelve. When all is said and done, I liked this book well enough and the world it created, but I'm not sure I'll wade through an over-long sequel any time soon.

The Siege of Krishnapur

J.G. Farrell's epic of the East India Company's rule on the subcontinent and the 1857 mutiny is a compelling action story, but it is above all a savage satire and a novel of ideas. His success at combining these genres into a literate masterpiece won him the Booker Prize in 1973.

Farrell depicts in biting detail the fatuousness of British rule in India as the colonialists preserved their Victorian preoccupations in a fundamentally hostile environment. They were largely clueless -- as Farrell's protagonist, the Collector, observes -- about the culture around them and smugly disregarded how their new subjects chafed under their rule. Still, the mutiny itself was not really a surprise. The only surprise was that it took so long to put it down and the cost was high.

The physical environment was also hostile. Farrell relentlessly pictures the unrelenting heat, the blistering weather of India's northern plain, where the fictional Krishnapur, like the Lucknow it is based on, is located. During the siege itself, the role of the heat in amplifying the ever increasing hardships is almost nauseating -- the rot, the smell, the cholera, the death. The horrifying invasion late in the siege of the cockchafers -- little black bugs who descended on the Residence by the million -- matches anything Hollywood has put on the screen. Even in this scene, however, Farrell manages a hilarious take on Victorian prudishness.

The precision of the language and description, ranging from a discussion of German rationalism to details on gunnery, makes the novel so tangible the reader has no trouble inserting himself into the scene. Especially the terminology to describe British life in India, with its assortment of servants and privileges, transports the reader back to this time.

As brutal as he is in satirizing the motives and values of the imperialists, Farrell nonetheless depicts the casual courage and residual integrity of some of the characters. The fact is that some of them survive the five-month siege in the face of long odds and as a rule recover from the ordeal to resume an ordinary life back home.

Farrell says in a brief note that he relied on numerous firsthand accounts from the Lucknow siege and the details of the hardships have as a result a terrifying authenticity.

As Pankaj Mishra notes in an introduction to the edition I read, Farrell keeps the Indians themselves largely offstage. The one Indian character, a local maharajah, is a weak and puzzling addition to the narrative. The introduction, by the way, reads better as an afterword because it offers so many details of the plot it is in some ways a spoiler.

Regeneration

I want to read Ghost Road by Pat Barker, so I thought I should start with the first book of the trilogy to lead up to it as the third one. I did not realize that the action of the novel is not actually in the war theater but in a psychiatric hospital where the reader is exposed to the horror of the trenches in the psychic damage it does to the soldiers.

Nor did I realize that the characters were largely real historical characters -- not only the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, but the doctor who treated them, William Rivers.

The horror is still there, as Barker relates the traumas that led these men to lose the power of speech or in other ways find physical expression for the grisly sights they were exposed to. But this setting allows her to approach in a more nuanced way the real dilemmas between duty and sanity, courage and cowardice, discipline and empathy.

One of the more moving dramatizations for me was when Sassoon visited a club in Edinburgh and while waiting for Rivers to have lunch speculated on the inevitable hostility between old men and young men, with the former demanding that the latter give up their lives for decisions made by the old men. Along with Rivers' own growing ambivalence as an older man charged with returning these younger men to battle, this casts the dilemma in a very poignant way.

We look back on World War I as an unmitigated tragedy and an incomprehensible orgy of self-destruction. Barker's drama gives us more of an insight into how hitherto sane people could make such bad decisions. Sassoon ultimately decides to return to France; his life is spared and he lives to a ripe old age. Owen, like so many talented young men in his generation, is not so lucky.

The point of trying to understand the contemporary thinking about that war is to have a better feeling for the moral dilemmas of our own time. The choices we are faced with will also look much clearer in history's rear-view mirror. We have to make the choices in our own fog of war, however, and Barker's ambivalent psychological landscape gives us some idea of how difficult that is.

In the Woods

Tana French's police procedural set in Dublin won an Edgar and has genuine literary ambitions, not pretensions. It is a layered novel with a depth of characterization seldom found in mysteries and a rare descriptive power.

That said, I have several issues with it. In terms of style, I find it generally overwritten, with too many adjectives and adverbs and long, flowery sentences. Partly for this reason, it is at 429 pages at least 100 pages too long, if not more.

But that is not the only reason. The narrator/protagonist, Rob Ryan, spends an interminable amount of time ruminating on himself in an increasingly narcissistic fashion. These self-therapy sessions are too long and repetitive.

It is venturesome for a woman to write a first-person male character, and this male detective has noticeably feminine sensibilities. The result is to make this a chick-lit version of the hard-boiled detective novel, explaining why it is so popular with book clubs and why it came with such an enthusiastic recommendation from a woman friend. Just as a woman character written by a man is most often a fantasy version of how a man pictures what goes on in a woman's mind, this is something of a fantasy about how the male mind works. Ryan's thoughts and preoccupations simply do not ring true, nor do his reactions to developments in his relationship with his detective partner, Cassie Maddox.

That is just the prerequisite for a more serious criticism. A mirror image of this book -- one written by a man with a woman protagonist portrayed in the way French handles her male character -- would be attacked as misogynist. The men in this book are either super saps or simpletons and the reader ends up having very little sympathy for any of them. Ryan is the sappiest, but he's not the only one, while fellow detective Sam O'Neill is a simpleton. The women characters, as a rule, are much better drawn and more convincing.

French's literary ambition trumps her skill as a mystery writer because the plot is ultimately unsatisfying. The actual solution is fairly obvious from the beginning and most of the book is devoted to a red herring the size of a whale -- which is not the role of red herrings in a mystery. The whole premise of the book -- that Ryan and Maddox randomly catch a case that has such reverberations with his past -- is far-fetched and their approach to the case requires too much suspension of disbelief.

The Irish setting is interesting and the procedural details are mostly convincing. One jarring note for an American reader is French's Irish preoccupation with smoking. The characters live in the era of mobile phones but enjoy their smokes as though there was never any evidence that cigarettes cause cancer. It might well be realistic but it can be as off-putting for an American reader as someone lighting up in the living room.

Are my bookshelves obsolete?

Here is my new posting at the Washington Independent Review of Books:

I’ve accumulated hundreds of books over the years, and most of them are proudly displayed in bookcases adorning several rooms in my house. I’ve read most of these books; others are waiting for that moment when they will be just what I need or want to read.

Periodically, I cull the collection and give some of my books away for a library sale. Sometimes I regret it, when something comes up that makes me want to look at one of the  books again.

But in my last bout of book removal, a new question occurred to me: Do I really need to keep so many books in the age of e-books and print on demand? Increasingly, no book is really out of print. Even if I might someday want to look again at a book I’ve read, I could easily obtain a new copy.

The point was driven home to me as I mulled whether to give away my precious collection of Travis McGee books. I bought them in the U.K. mass paperback edition more than 30 years ago when I was living in Europe, and I’ve lovingly packed and unpacked them through several moves, along with other collections of mystery series.

In his new novel, Madman’s Thirst, Larry De Maria mentioned John D. MacDonald’s classy writing in the Travis McGee series, and I thought maybe I should pick up one of the old books and read it again. So I selected one at random and discovered, to my surprise and dismay, that the print was so small and the pages so yellowed it was virtually unreadable with my older eyes. Large print in mass paperbacks is a relatively new phenomenon, catering, I suppose, to the boomer audience.

But, it turns out, the Travis McGee series is readily available in a new mass paperback edition for $7.99 a novel — the price of two Starbucks cappuccinos. So I obtained a new copy of the first novel in the series, in much larger print and on much whiter paper, to see if I really did want to re-read these stories.

But what a disappointment that the book on my shelf was no good to me! It was like a wine aficionado discovering that a vintage bottle stored in the cellar for years had turned to vinegar.

My book collection consists of a lot of fiction, a large batch of nonfiction books, most of which I acquired in connection with my work as a journalist or for research on my own books, and a good many cookbooks.

Let’s say I keep the books I haven’t read yet and some of the cookbooks, but acknowledge the reality that I can let go of the rest, knowing that virtually any book is retrievable if I want to re-read or consult it again. I could empty my bookshelves and get rid of most of my bookcases.

But that would be a big change for me. My vision of an intellectual — an academic, a writer, any reader — is of bookcases stuffed with books, stacks of books on available flat spaces, books lining a wall and creating their own colorful patterns.

Now, however, my entire book collection could be easily held on a Kindle or an iPad, in a more accessible and often more readable format than the heavy, cumbersome print editions I’ve schlepped around for decades. Today’s intellectual has a sleek Mac on a bare desk.

Those shelves lined with books fulfill an additional function, though. In another sign of age, or perhaps just information overload, I have trouble sometimes remembering what books I’ve read. The passive knowledge is there. If someone mentions a book, I can usually remember whether I read it or not. But the active knowledge, the memory of knowing what titles I’ve read, which books I particularly liked or which, indeed, I may want to read again — that may or may not be there on any given day.

Then all I have to do is go to my bookcase, look along at the familiar titles, those volumes that I’ve packed, unpacked and shelved so often, and I remember that, yes, indeed, I liked those Travis McGee books  the vicarious thrill of living on a houseboat in Florida, taking  retirement in installments, fishing with a philosopher friend named Meyer, even though I don’t particularly like boats, Florida or fishing. It doesn’t matter if I don’t or can’t pick up that particular book and read it again. Just seeing it on the shelf is enough to bring it all back.

My bookshelves are an index to my life as a reader — something like an external hard drive, I guess. If they are obsolete, so am I.

Reader's block

Not sure if this is similar to writer's block or if it even really exists, but I'm having trouble finding a book that keeps my interest. I know that reading can be moody -- sometimes you're just in the mood for one kind of book or writing and not for others -- but I'm having more trouble keeping my interest in books that I'm happy to start.

For instance, I discovered the limits of my enthusiasm for Candice Proctor, after finishing the three books she co-authored with her husband Steve Harris under the pseudonym C.S. Graham, by plunging into the first of her historical novels featuring Sebastian St. Cyr, What Angels Fear, which she writes under the name C.S. Harris. As with the other series, this is well-written, with vivid descriptions and good sense of place, though perhaps a little richer with adjectives and adverbs. What I realized as I got further into the book, however, is that this is closer to the romance fiction the author writes under her own name than it is to the thrillers I like. While not exactly a bodice ripper, there's a bit too much focus on the characters' attractive attributes and the plot itself seems overladen with the interactions between people rather than the mystery lurking there somewhere. In short, the author fails to sustain any sense of real suspense as she gets caught up with St. Cyr's relations with his former lover. So I've abandoned it for now.

Because I really liked the four books by Jess Walter that I've read, I've had a fifth, Land of the Blind, sitting on my shelf for sometime. This is his second published novel and features the Spokane detective from his first novel, Over Tumbled Graves, Caroline Mabry. Or so I was led to believe. In fact, Mabry, at least in the first part of the book, is only the frame for what becomes a first-person coming of age story by a somewhat unsympathetic individual that is picked up as a homeless derelict. It still benefits from Walter's glittery prose, but I found myself developing a distaste for the character and the world he inhabits. This may be a tribute to the author's creative power, but the fact is I'm not in the mood to be in that world right now. It is a legitimate plot device -- though of course a stretch to accept that this derelict is actually writing out the narration on a legal pad -- but it's a bit of a bait and switch as far as I'm concerned. In addition, while it is accepted in detective fiction for the protagonist to the anguished and depressed, Mabry is a bit too downbeat considering we don't get to see much of her. Perhaps the book goes on to give her a greater role and a way out of her funk, but that will have to be for another time.

So now I've gone back to my iPad and my collection of indie e-books, returning to Red Right Return by John Cunningham, a first-person story about a discredited pilot based in Key West. So far, so good, so we'll see if he can get me over my reader's block.

Gore Vidal in memoriam

Gore Vidal seemed such a force of nature it was surprising to hear that he died at age 86. He has been in some respects a role model for me as a writer. I admired his graceful style, his trenchant analysis and wit, his versatility as a writer of satire, historical fiction, screenplays, and essays.

However, I often found his novels cold and soulless, more about style than feeling. Julian I liked for his irreverence, and Lincoln and Burr for making these historical figures so real. I liked the left-wing slant of his political and social criticism. His notion that the Establishment runs the country with the president as a front man has never been more apt as in this age of Citizens United and a candidate as robotic as Mitt Romney.

I also liked his epicurean lifestyle (though not his sexual libertinism) and his long sojourn in Ravello. How long will any of his work last? Does Gore Vidal have any sort of legacy, literary or otherwise? Hard to say. I don't think his books are great literature and he may be one of those larger than life characters that people will look back at and scratch their heads at why he seemed so prominent.

But he was a witty, intelligent renaissance man, a prodigious writer, and an important ingredient in the tempestuous cultural milieu of my generation. His time is past and he probably will not be greatly missed, but the qualities of skepticism, irony and irreverence he brought to both his fiction and nonfiction are more important than ever in these days of political polarization.