One of science fiction’s most enduring traits is its ability to ruminate upon the ways in which science and technology allow us to manipulate and re-engineer society. In this sense, the distinction between soft and hard science fiction disappears—all science fiction is inherently social, for no matter how much detail goes into describing the technological advances that populate possible futures, the meat of the story is always the effect these technologies have on the people using them. Innovation begets change, and change is often disruptive—our future mirrors the past in this respect. Brave New World is rightfully a classic work of science fiction that demonstrates the potential for technology to help us reshape society. Aldous Huxley leaves us with a potent question: what kind of society do we want to make?

Brave New World is deceptively simplistic in its structure. Top-heavy in exposition, the novel begins with a walking tour through the Central London Hatchery. Women no longer give birth. Instead, babies are grown and then decanted, an ultimate triumph of genetic engineering. Even before birth, each potential person’s life has been mapped out and determined by gene sequences and other processes. Some are destined to be Alphas, the intellectual elite. More will be Betas or Gammas, who provide the specialized labour that keeps places like the Hatchery in operation. More still will make up the bottom of the social pyramid, the Deltas and Epsilons with their restricted worldviews and even more restricted intellects. Huxley makes it very clear that this vision of the future is one based on the mass production, mass consumption ideals of twentieth century America and, in particular, Henry Ford. Everyone has his or her place, a cog in the great machine of civilization as it grinds onward in stability for all eternity.

This is the nightmare of Huxley’s utopia, at least for me. It’s that inexorable predestination of one’s life and potential: you are a Beta, and that will never change. You will be trained, in your sleep and while you are awake, for a single job. You will consume the basest forms of arts and entertainment—high art having gone the way of history. Such weighty endeavours are too emotionally complex for these new humans. Tragedy and suffering have been sacrificed in the name of stability, and what few passions are allowed to citizens are carefully monitored and controlled through very specific outlets. While the World State is not the overtly totalitarian presence made manifest in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is still a covertly authoritarian government in which people are happy only because they have been manufactured that way.

Huxley then proceeds to show some of the cracks in the otherwise perfect society. Bernard Marx is an Alpha-Minus who has somehow developed a little too much individuality. In a society predicated upon sameness, this is undesirable. While visiting a Savage Reservation, where specimens of the old style of humanity continue to live their squalid, imperfect lives, Bernard makes a discovery that changes everything for him. John Savage (as he comes to be called) is the child of a modern woman who became trapped in the Savage Reservation after she was separated from her party and given up for dead. Bernard takes John back to England with him and proceeds to show him off to society (and show society off to him).

Huxley sets up Bernard as the protagonist of Brave New World, but this proves to be a smokescreen. Earlier on, Huxley hints at Bernard’s vanity. Indeed, Bernard becomes caught up in the celebrity that he shares with John. It alienates him from those few people he numbered friends before bringing John to England. And when John’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and disruptive, Bernard is the first to seek to distance himself from the Savage in a bid to save his own skin. As the climax unfolds, any prospect of Bernard rising to the occasion and assuming the mantle of hero fades away with a whimper. Bernard is a diversion, a stepping stone towards the piece’s principal protagonist, John Savage himself. He is Huxley’s reminder that merely possessing individuality does not itself make one brave or honourable or heroic.

John’s heroism is passive; he does not actually take down the World State or even offer serious opposition. Rather, he exists as the embodiment of what the World State does not offer: passion, a penchant for peril, and a spirituality that is practically profane in the face of a society that has conflated Henry Ford and God. Long before John’s final conversation with the World Controller, we see this in his dealings with Lenina Crowne.

He falls for her but is not sure how to make his feelings apparent. Raised on Shakespeare and community ideas about marriage and proving one’s devotion, John is not prepared for Lenina’s extremely casual approach to sex—nor can he handle her commitment to promiscuity, any more than she could conceive of dedicating herself exclusively to him. For me, the most emotionally-charged and harrowing scene in the entire novel occurs when Lenina visits John’s apartment, strips, and throws herself at her. He freaks out and flies into a fit of rage that, in turn, causes Lenina to become more terrified than she has ever been in her entire life. After living entirely on-script, Lenina finds herself in an entirely new situation, and she can’t handle it. John’s reaction channels the darker aspects of humanity that the World State has worked so carefully to repress through its redaction of art, history, and literature (there is a reason these are called the “humanities”, after all). He calls her a strumpet and a whore, and then his verbal abuse escalates to physical violence:

The Savage pushed her away with such force that she staggered and fell. “Go,” he shouted, standing over her menacingly, “get out of my sight or I’ll kill you.” He clenched his fists.

Lenina raised her arm to cover her face. “No, please don’t, John …”

“Hurry up. Quick!”

One arm still raised, and following his every movement with a terrified eye, she scrambled to her feet, and still crouching, still covering her head, made a dash for the bathroom.

The noise of that prodigious slap by which her departure was accelerated was like a pistol shot.

This scene crystallizes the complexity of Brave New World. It’s a genuinely frightening moment, because John’s behaviour endangers the empathy I, as closer to him in many ways than to Lenina, felt for him up until that point. Huxley reminds us that there is nothing saintly about individuality or non-conformity. Similarly, while I continue to feel sorry for Lenina as a victim of her conditioning, the sinister subtext of her beliefs is laid bear here. As Bernard is fond of repeating, she sees herself as meat. The World State offers casual sex on a platter, but it’s still a patriarchal, heteronormative approach to casual sex. And it’s one where consent is valued less than conformity—Lenina and Fanny’s conversation prior to the former’s confrontation with John demonstrates this, and Lenina’s persistence in offering herself to John despite his hesitation reaffirms it. The idea that one might reject an offer of sex is so alien that it smacks of illness.

The World State is a utopia. It is stable, free from war or strife. Even natural causes of distress, such as disease or disaster, are mitigated by propaganda, enforced hormone supplements, and of course, the ubiquitous and subliminally-reinforced use of soma. But if the World State is utopia, then I don’t want to live in utopia. It’s bland and boring—for those same passions that drive John to violence and to self-flagellation are the same passions that make life worth living. It’s stable but also stagnant, for even science is seen as an enemy, a potential source of innovation and thus disruption.

It feels … like a dead end. Our society is far from perfect, but one of its best attributes is its constant state of flux. Everything is changing all the time, and we can try to predict what our world will be like in twenty or fifty years, but the truth is, we don’t know. The World State doesn’t have that luxury. Aside from the minor advancements and tweaks the World Controllers allow through the decades, it will keep grinding on in the same fashion for as long as possible. With no potential for dramatic paradigm shifts, for revolution or evolution, for the comforts of chaos, we can’t really call it living any more. Humanity is alive, but in the big picture, it has been reduced to little more than cellular automata.

Brave New World is nothing short of a horror story. And it works because Huxley writes with such earnestness. He doesn’t try too hard. On paper, it’s terrifying, although if you think about it long enough and start poking enough holes, it starts to become almost as unrealistic as the post-apocalyptic world of The Hunger Games. Huxley’s World State has figured out what the Capitol has not: to avoid rebellion, make your subjects feel like they don’t need to rebel. Even when John manages to incite brief moments of passion in a group of identical Deltas, a little bit of soma and some riot police contain the situation quite easily. Rebellion has been bred out of people.

Some people don’t drink the koolaid, and then the oligarchs who maintain the utopia have to deal with them. There are basically three choices: death, co-option, or exile (also known as the Omelas outcome). Bernard and his friend Heimholz end up exiled to an island where they will join fellow Alphas who have drifted too much towards individuality. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Western Europe, was like them once, but he chose co-option over exile and is now one of the ten wizards behind the curtain.

I’d be on the island.

Brave New World pits individuality against social stability and asks if happiness is more important than the freedom to be unhappy. Other books have asked this question before, and others have asked it since. Yet Brave New World endures long since we have left behind the pre-war climate of the 1930s. It endures because, as Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, our society still seems to be on this trajectory. Mass consumption and mass production remain the rule. And, as much as Orwellian surveillance haunts us after September 11, 2001, corporations that want the public to consume still attempt to persuade us that the latest and greatest technology, fashion, or food will make us happier.

That’s not to say that a Brave New World-esque future is inevitable. Like most utopian authors, Huxley glosses over a lot of the process involved in forming the World State (though, to his credit, he gives us a lot more than some authors do). As much as globalization and telecommunications have brought us together, I feel like it would still be very difficult to establish the level of control and uniformity that the World State has at the beginning of this story. I like my postapocalyptic menu as varied as the next reader, but tales of fractured societies and isolated governments seem a little more realistic these days than a fraternity of World Controllers.

And I’m not just saying that because they’re reading this.

I’m not a connoisseur of Coen Brothers films, but there are two I love: Fargo and Burn After Reading. Both of these bleak-yet-comic films have in common their stellar ensemble casts and strong, interwoven stories. Neither has a single, clear protagonist following a simple, linear plot. That would be boring! Instead, each film presents a complicated set of narratives in which everyone is the protagonist of their own life even as they antagonize others.

Counting Heads is a bit like these Coen Brothers films, in that it doesn’t have a single protagonist or a single plot. The back cover copy on my edition is outstandingly, astonishingly, unabashedly misleading in this respect. It promises a thriller in which Sam Harger is on the run from the authorities while trying to retrieve his daughter’s cryogenically preserved head so he can resuscitate her. Instead, we have more than 300 pages of several slow-moving, dare I say smouldering embers of, plots, with more characters than I can comfortably include in any kind of stick-shaking.

I have nothing against ensemble casts in general, as evidenced by my movie preferences above. Unfortunately, David Marusek’s ensemble cast here isn’t … ensemble … enough. His choice to use a three-part structure doesn’t help either, because the first part (which was apparently its own novella originally) feels very different in tone from the subsequent parts. After getting used to the idea of Sam and Eleanor as the protagonists, fighting back against the corrupt rich who have manipulated their lives, suddenly Marusek has skipped decades into the future, and Sam is an old man who isn’t going anywhere. All of these new characters enter the narrative—and then they never leave.

This wouldn’t be so frustrating if the plots to which these characters cling all came together into some kind of climax of mutual annihilation. Although many of the plots are resolved, some are left dangling badly. For instance, in the first part of the novel, Eleanor and Sam posit that a single individual is behind their sudden social and political success (and Sam’s equally sudden and unjust pariah status). They call this person the Unknown Benefactor, and Eleanor bends all of her resources and paranoia towards finding that benefactor … or at least, that’s what she says. This plot never resurfaces later in the book, leaving us to wonder exactly who manipulated Eleanor and Sam into those circumstances, or why.

Marusek seems overwhelmed by the sprawling complexity of the world he has created. At first, I admit I was seduced by the setting of Counting Heads. From nanotechnology to artificial intelligence, Marusek envisions a fascinating future where life extension and other revolutionary medical treatments has made aging and death rare at the expense of further taxing Earth’s resources. The rich continue to get richer; the poor can’t afford such treatments and continue to die.

Indeed, there are a few aspects to this future that particularly intrigued me. For example, I enjoyed the doubt regarding whether mentars like Cabinet and Wee Hunk were compromised by their trip through probate. I loved the idea that their programming might have been altered without their knowledge. Alas, this is another plot point that Marusek never fully puts to use.

And as the story goes on the setting continues to unfold, it lacks a complexity comparable to the plot. So there’s nanotechnology and easy tissue regeneration and lines of clones bred for a dominant trait. North America is a surveillance society dominated by the super-rich, while the poor countries have remained poor. But how has living longer changed the way democracy works? With mentars practically running companies, why do people bother doing any work at all?

Counting Heads strikes me as a book that could be a thriller, or a social thought experiment, or both … yet it manages to be none of these things. It is so frenetic, so full of furious yet unfocused ideas and plots and characters and emotions, that, at least for me, it is just untenable. There were times when I just wanted to put it down and walk away; I soldiered on because, to be fair, the writing is not poor and the characters are, on their own, interesting people. It’s just when you take them altogether that they become a bit much.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic or positive, because Counting Heads started with plenty of potential. Unfortunately, it quickly loses altitude as it starts to go into a fatal tailspin, and there’s no one around to make an emergency landing. Marusek doesn’t quite manage to achieve the type of balance between social commentary and thriller that Neal Stephenson pulls off in something like The Diamond Age. Instead, Counting Heads is little more than a way of killing time.

If you were an investment banker before the 2008 recession, and you had just begun your first vacation in four years prior to moving from New York to a cushy new position in London, would you take on a job unpacking and cataloguing an ancient library for an elusive, eccentric, and extremely wealthy British couple who also happen to be nobility? That’s what Edward Wozny does in Codex, and it changes everything. On the surface, that seems like it should be a good thing to say about a novel. Change—and specifically conflict—keeps things interesting. Unfortunately, Lev Grossman seems to have a knack for writing characters with whom it becomes difficult to sympathize, and Codex proves no different in this respect from his later efforts.

I’ve catalogued books before. During one of my summers working at the art gallery, I spent several hours a week in the tiny room that served as our library. It contained a diverse collection of arts books, catalogues from other galleries, newsletters and flyers announcing exhibitions from other galleries, and all manner of slides and film reels and bric-a-brac mouldering away. Armed, like Edward, with a laptop and a cataloguing program and, like Edward, lacking any experience in this field, I gamely went through the collection. I looked up books in online databases, estimated how much they might be worth for insurance purposes based on their condition and a search of used booksellers. I printed labels with Dewey classifications on them and stuck them to the spines before replacing the books on their shelves. It was an interesting experience, but it took a long time. And that tiny library is a lot smaller than the one Edward must tackle.

So I can understand Edward’s reluctance to get involved initially. And to some extent I can empathize with how he gets sucked into the task after that first day. But I don’t understand how, after he is dismissed, the hunt for a codex by Gervase of Langford still consumes him. Why is he still so obsessed with the Duchess? Grossman gives Edward an academic background in English, probably in an attempt to make Edward’s atrophied interests germane to the subject matter here. It’s not enough, though. Similarly, Edward’s newly found passion for the game that his techie friend Zeph passes on to him is unimpressive.

The problem here is simple: Grossman tries to emphasize that Edward is acting out of character. Yet we have met Edward so recently that we don’t have a good baseline for his character. So instead of internalizing this idea that Edward is deviating from his typical lifestyle, it just seems like Edward is a massive idiot. And my opinion of him does not improve at any point in this novel. He consistently and constantly invites disaster by confiding in people or failing to act when action should have been taken. The entire fizzling, disappointing coda to Codex could have been titled, “Why Edward Deserves to Fail”. At no point does he decide to take charge and do something his way.

Its black hole of a main character aside, Codex tries to be a thriller and just doesn’t work. Worse, it tries to be a literary thriller. This is no The Name of the Rose, an eminently superior book that Grossman name-checks with a bit of a pretentious literary wink. I don’t think Codex is trying to be The Name of the Rose, because it lacks any of the academic or philosophical depth that makes the latter such an amazing book. Nevertheless, Codex just isn’t very thrilling.

One reason is a lack of strong, nefarious antagonists. The Duke and Duchess are remote characters whom, aside from a brief cameo at the beginning, we never see. Moreover, Grossman tries to build the former up as this imposing person who should not trifled with, but he doesn’t even kill off a lackey. How are we supposed to find these people threatening? About the worst thing that happens is that Edward doesn’t sleep enough and fails to pack before his move to London. Oooh, so terrible. Where are the consequences here? Various people seem to insinuate that it isn’t easy to disentangle oneself from the grasp of the Wents once they have their cold, rich fingers closed around you. Yet at no point does Grossman ever do anything to demonstrate this is true.

And then we have the ending. Without going into spoiler territory, let’s just say that the eponymous codex puts in manifests in time. But, of course, Edward screws it all up even as he gets betrayed. We don’t really learn why he gets betrayed, nor do we get even a hint of the aftermath involved. Indeed, after all that sabre-rattling about how unpleasant his life would be if he failed at his task or displeased the Duke, the ending of the book makes it seem more like Edward is just going to get let off the hook. But I guess we’ll never know.

Reading Codex wasn’t a waste of time. It provided a certain level of empty enjoyment. It’s clear that Grossman did some research here, and his love of literature shines through. Edward and Margaret’s conversations about medieval scholarship and speculations on Gervase of Langford were genuinely interesting. It’s these few redeeming qualities that make this book so disappointing. As with The Magicians and The Magician King, Grossman infuses the story with a highly sophisticated literary subtext—but he does so at the expense of the story itself, and that is problematic.

As I mentioned in my recent review of Jane Eyre, I have the pleasure of teaching an AS Level English Literature course (with a grand total of two students). For the prose study section, we are studying Jane Eyre paired with Wide Sargasso Sea, a combination selected by the teacher with whom I share the course. I had read Jane Eyre a long time ago and was happy to revisit it. I had never heard of Jean Rhys or Wide Sargasso Sea, but the description along the lines of, “Postcolonial take on Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester from Bertha Mason’s point of view” meant I was looking forward to it.

Spoiler alert not for this novel but definitely for Jane Eyre.

Let’s unpack that description, starting with the character of Bertha Mason (or, really, Bertha Rochester). She is the bogeyman of Jane Eyre even before we become aware of her identity. In that grand Gothic tradition that Charlotte Brontë emulates, Bertha is the mystery at the centre of the house that will bring Rochester’s careful facade of normalcy crashing down around him. She, not Grace Poole, is the owner of that haunting, diabolical laugh. That she is mad Brontë establishes beyond much doubt—the notorious attempt to burn down the house is but one example. But the backstory to that madness is more pithy than it is palatable—she is mad because she has to be mad, to make the plot work. Could there be more to it though?

I suspect that I would not have been as disposed towards Wide Sargasso Sea if I hadn’t recently re-read Jane Eyre. In part it’s because this book is probably easier to understand within the context of its connection to Jane Eyre. However, it’s mostly because my recent re-read highlighted the flaws of Rochester’s personality—how his passion and vanity makes him selfish and somewhat controlling. Rhys saw these qualities as well, replicating them in the unnamed man who marries Antoinette Cosway and calls her Bertha. Then she adds additional cultural baggage to make the relationship and the romance all her own.

This is where the postcolonial part of that description enters the picture. As in Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason hails from the Caribbean Islands. In Wide Sargasso Sea, she is not Richard Mason’s brother but instead the daughter of his wife by a previous marriage. And Bertha’s real name is “Antoinette.” Her late father was a slave-owner, and at the time of the book, Britain had only recently freed all slaves. As a result, the local Black community views Antoinette and her mother with suspicion and disgust, compounded by the family’s obvious fall from grace. Her mother exists in a state of withdrawn depression. These factors conspire to cause Antoinette to grow up in isolation, first with her mother, then at a convent school. Antoinette is a woman grown before she re-enters society and is almost immediately thrust into marriage by her stepfather.

Antoinette belongs nowhere, a situation summed up by the label that the island’s Black community gives her and her family—white N-word. The colour of her skin, not to mention her heritage, means she is forever an outsider. Yet to the English who visit (and marry) her, she is just as much a foreigner. She has no concept of England as they do, very little concept of anything, really, aside from her limited vista and, perhaps, God.

It’s this naivety, I think, that eventually pushes her husband’s feelings for her from apathy to outright loathing. Rhys provides a much more intense and sustained exposure to his feelings of betrayal and dissatisifaction with his marriage-for-means scheme than Brontë ever gives us with Rochester. In the sections of the novel told from his perspective, he wastes no time reminding us that Richard Mason deceived him, that he’s a nice guy who doesn’t deserve to be burdened by a woman who is apparently on some kind of countdown to madness. What really seems to trigger him, however, is Antoinette’s refusal to confront or even interact much with the real world.

This reluctance to change on her part means that he views her as a child and treats her as such. He negates her as much as possible. In the middle of the novel, after she discovers that a relative has been sending him letters warning him of her impending insanity, he refuses to discuss the matter rationally with her because he claims she is too emotional, too volatile for such deliberation. His anger at the situation in which he finds himself blinds him to any reconciliation with Antoinette; she is not a person but a symbol of his discontent.

During my recent re-reading of Jane Eyre, I paid a lot of attention to how Rochester treated Jane and the extent to which he attempted to impose his own worldview upon hers. This is a man who locked his mad wife in the attic and then agreed to marry someone else! Whereas Brontë focuses on Bertha’s state when she is at Thornfield, and how her actions (and very existence) affect Jane, Rhys is more concerned with Antoinette’s transformation and descent into madness. Though Bertha is an intriguing character, she is essentially a plot device. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette is a living, breathing, changing human being.

As a companion to Jane Eyre, this is a thought-provoking work that highlights several important themes for careful consideration. Literature isn’t a vacuum; books can be conversations. On its own (i.e., if you have not read Jane Eyre—and why not?) Wide Sargasso Sea still works quite well. That being said, Rhys’ style can make this book feel a little inaccessible at times—in this respect, it reminded me of The Woman on the Edge of Time. This is a strong novel, but had it not hitched its star to a literary classic, I’m not sure if it would have had enough of an impact to stand on its own. Surely this is a moot point, though. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to call Wide Sargasso Sea an essential follow-up to your Jane Eyre experience, I suspect it is a far superior option to any possible sequels floating around out there à la Pride and Prejudice.

Goodness, it’s been a long time since I read Altered Carbon, and nearly as long since I heard about The Steel Remains, Richard K. Morgan’s foray into fantasy, and knew I needed to give it a try. I was intrigued by the promise of a gritty approach to epic fantasy. Much like in the shooter genre of video games, the term gritty as applied to fantasy can get tossed around a lot without much accuracy. But I was pretty certain Morgan would deliver. In this respect he did. As a novel, however, The Steel Remains still leaves much to be desired.

The basic mechanics of Morgan’s fantasy world are nothing to write home about. There’s a powerful empire and a network of free cities nominally at peace after working together to repulse an invasion a decade ago by reptilian people from across the sea. There are steppe nomads with their own religion that doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the empire’s official monotheism. Humanity used to co-exist with a species known as the Kiriath, but after the Scaled Folk were beaten back, the Kiriath decided to attempt the long journey back whence they came, leaving behind a single, solitary, half-Kiriath woman named Archeth. Oh, and a lot of Kiriath artifacts, like the sword of Ringil Eskiath, the other protagonist of The Steel Remains. Ringil also happens to be gay, which in a better world than ours would be nothing to write home about either, but because our society remains stubbornly heteronormative, a gay protagonist (and gay sex! gasp!) in an otherwise “mainstream” book is significant.

Of course, in our world there are varying responses to homosexuality, ranging across a continuum from “OK. Go marry someone, if you like” to “Well, we’ll stone you now, and then you will burn in eternal hellfire!” Although the same is somewhat true in the world of The Steel Remains, most responses lean towards the eternal hellfire end of the continuum. Ringil has killed a dragon, but unlike his Majak friend Egar, who has also done this, Ringil doesn’t get the title Dragonbane. Despite his prowess and skill in the service of his people. Ringil doesn’t get much recognition or respect; even his family normally keeps him at a distance. He is an outcast in all but name.

This is something, in fact, that all three main characters share in common. Archeth is the last of her kind, surviving mainly in the service of a capricious emperor who is trying to hold on to an empire he doesn’t seem to deserve. Egar is the leader of a nomad clan, but his leadership is precarious owing to a lack of respect for the gods and his people’s shamanistic rituals. Notice that Morgan doesn’t necessarily go out of his way to show Archeth, Ringil, or Egar as “good” people. They are people, with good points and bad points, and I can appreciate that.

What I don’t appreciate is how The Steel Remains reads like it was written by … well, by me when I was in high school and making my first stabs at a fantasy novel. Morgan seems to have set out to write a fantasy novel, and boy has he ever. From the map at the front of the book to the names to the pacing of the story, The Steel Remains feels like an amateur effort. That surprises me so much, because I know Morgan is far from an amateur. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t shake that feeling as I read. Despite trying to shake up the typical fantasy tropes—such as the identity of the prophesied Dark Lord, which is pretty obviously telegraphed at several points in the story—Morgan doesn’t quite manage to pull it off.

The three protagonists share a common bond from their past involvements in war, and as such they have similar scars and burdens. As they come together to defend the world against a great threat, those scars show. These are far from perfect people, and they are weary of doing what they see as their duty. It takes a long time for this to happen, though. Morgan, to his credit, manages to avoid much in the way of infodumping—to the point where I would have been grateful for when, because half the time I had no idea what was going on.

There is one respect in which The Steel Remains strikes a chord with me. I don’t want to say too much, lest I spoil parts of the book. However, let’s just say that Morgan lets his science-fiction street cred show more than once, and it’s entirely possible that all the magic happening in this story is actually just sufficiently advanced science. I enjoyed how he put the clues there for the reader to see but didn’t beat us over the head with these implications. If/when I get around to reading the next book in this series, I look forward to seeing how Morgan develops this subplot further.

The next book isn’t jumping up my list, though. The Steel Remains didn’t grab me like Altered Carbon did. For the most part, I found it messy and far less skillful than any novel by someone of Morgan’s calibre has any business being. I do not recommend this as your first foray into Morgan’s writing; and, if like me you’ve already read some of his science fiction, be prepared for a big genre shock.

Identity is a very fragile and ephemeral concept, and the philosophy surrounding identity fascinates me. If, in the immortal words of Ke$ha, “we R who we R”, then who we are differs depending upon whether we are alone or with people, with friends or with enemies (or, if you are Ke$ha, with frenemies). We perform identity, wearing it like a costume. But it’s not something we entirely control. Identity is not so much a costume as it is a negotation between two entities, for part of my identity is not just what I seem to be but how others see me and interact with me.

Now imagine that with a sloth clinging to your back as an external manifestation of your complicity in someone’s death, and you have Zoo City.

Lauren Beukes returns to Johannesburg, South Africa in her second novel, but it’s not the same city. Instead of a tour of a corporate-dominated near future, Beukes spins a bit of alternate history our way. Magic is real, albeit not as potent as some people might like, and it’s never more obvious but with the zoos, animalled, or—if you are feeling polite and politically correct, the aposymbiotic. People who are guilty of another person’s death—i.e., murderers—become spiritually attached to an animal. They can’t stray too far from the animal without suffering great pain. And if the animal dies, they are consumed by a cloud known as the Undertow. The animalled, or apos, are thus identified as murderers beyond the shadow of any doubt, and are treated like outcasts.

Zinzi, our intrepid narrator, has a Sloth. It could be worse—at least she doesn’t have a carnivore, which I think would be more of a burden—but a Sloth is kind of a handful to carry around at times. Beukes implies that Zinzi’s complicity is not entirely with malice, thus establishing our otherwise downtrodden and morally ambiguous protagonist as someone who is, if not righteous, capable and worthy of redemption. Zinzi struggles to earn a living using her shavi—if you get an animal, you also get a minor superpower to go with it. Zinzi can find lost things, so that’s how she makes most of her money. In her downtime, she reluctantly composes new email scams for a company to whom she owes quite a bit of money. She gets involved with some even more unsavoury characters, like you tend to do, and that’s where the story becomes interesting.

From thereon out, Zoo City becomes a spiralling descent into the dank madness of a divided city. Beukes’ economy of exposition and keen ear for dialogue and characterization are an asset here. I found this Johannesburg and this cast far more bearable and likable than Moxyland’s. I could sympathize with Zinzi’s plight and genuinely wanted her to succeed, cheering for her resourceful resilience and sighing whenever she suffered a setback. The plot is of the type that doubles back and folds up on itself several times over, which is not to say that it is too complex, but Beukes has skillfully tangled the various threads.

On the one hand, this is a missing person mystery, with Zinzi in the role of lead private investigator. It has all the hallmark archetypes prowling its pages: the shadowy kingpin who both hires Zinzi and poses her a threat; his nefarious henchmen who are Zinzi’s untrustworthy allies; the love interest, whose relationship with Zinzi is far from one-dimensional; and so on. On the other hand, Beukes explores some of the ramifications of her magic and what it means to have an animal. In particular, the book takes a very sharp turn towards the end, after the mystery part is largely resolved, and Zinzi finds herself on the run for a crime she hasn’t committed.

The twin motifs of guilt and innocence are huge here in Zoo City, for they compound that problem of identity that Zinzi and every other person with an animal feels. Nowhere does Beukes so clearly portray this as with Zinzi’s sometime-boyfriend Benoit. He has a Mongoose, and eventually we learn how he got it—the action of a terrified nineteen-year-old in genocidal Rwanda. Like Zinzi, he bears an external marker of his guilt—but does that make him a bad person? Benoit discovers his wife and children might still be alive in a refugee camp outside of South Africa, so he resolves to leave Zinzi and find them. Not only does this alter their relationship irrevoccably, it sets up an ending that is both poignant and nearly perfect.

As I mentioned earlier, Zoo City takes a sharp turn two thirds through. Just as it seems that the plot is winding down, Zinzi stumbles on to a larger game as people try to get rid of their animals (without dying themselves) in a particularly gruesome and costly manner. I’m not a fan of this transition, because it felt jarring. Beukes puts enough foreshadowing earlier in the book that this additional story element doesn’t seem entirely out of place. But I wish it had been developed more gradually instead of suddenly exploding into the foreground in the last part of the book.

Nevertheless, Beukes make up for it in the ending. I love the ending. It’s quite possibly the only way Beukes could have ended the book in a manner that is happy yet costly for Zinzi, which is exactly the balance she needed to strike. For Zinzi to escape these events completely unscathed would have been unrealistic and thematically unsatisfactory: after all, Zinzi still has to redeem herself for her actions as a scammer. Yet she is, I remain convinced, a good person who deserves that chance—and a chance is exactly what Beukes gives her. At great personal cost and with no promise of success, Zinzi sets out to fill in for someone else, just as that person made a regular habit of filling in for another.

Because it all comes back to identity. We aren’t who we think we are; we are our actions. This is the truth Beukes exposes through Zinzi’s voice and decisions. Despite all the prejudice and hardship Zinzi endures as an impoverished, animalled Black person in South Africa, she realizes that there is one thing no one else can determine about her life: what she does. Other people might judge her and construct their own versions of an identity for her, but that can never rob her of her ability to act on her own beliefs and convictions. In Zoo City, Beukes hands us a protagonist with blood on her hands and a Sloth on her back, and in so doing she tells a story about a woman who reclaims her freedom to be who she wants, not who others expect her to be.

Can we take a moment to bask in how far the Dresden Files, as a series, has come? From its humble beginnings in Storm Front, this urban fantasy series about a Chicago wizard/private detective has become my golden standard for urban fantasy. Over the course of 13 books, the Dresdenverse has expanded from wizards and sorcerers to an epic mythology comprising monsters and magical beings of all kinds—and its characters, plots, and themes have all kept pace with that growth. It's safe to say that this is one of my favourite series I've ever read, that I'm a fanboy, if you will. On my bookshelves, my Dresden Files books abruptly shift from paperback to hardcover at White Knight as I caught up to the series' publication. Beginning with its previous instalment, Proven Guilty, and ending its sequel, Small Favor, this marked what I consider the highest point, so far, of the series. Don't get me wrong: the subsequent volumes have been excellent, just not quite as good as those three books. Ghost Story has not changed my mind on this count. Nevertheless, it is a marked turning point for the Dresden Files.

My friend Aaron saw me reading this at lunch, and so of course I had to rave about the Dresden Files and, being the book pusher that I am, "suggest" that he borrow the first book from me. (I am a coercive suggester, no matter how good-natured my friends might be about it in front of me. I know they're just trying to placate me so I will not spam them with more book recommendations. Too late!) Anyway, I love introducing friends to new series and watching their reactions. Speaking from experience, having re-read all of these books last year prior to reading Changes, I know how powerful it is to see these characters and their universe grow with each subsequent book. It's an awesome and inspiring feeling, and I marvel at Butcher's ability to construct such intricate narratives that draw upon the richness of previous books.

Now that we've considered how far the series as a whole has come, can we stop for a moment to celebrate Karrin Murphy? Seriously, along with Molly, she's one of the best things about the Dresden Files (we'll get to Molly in due time, don't worry). And it didn't strike me until Ghost Story how drastically she has changed. In the first book, she was so suspicious and leery of Harry. She didn't quite see him as a con artist, like her partner Carmichael did, but she viewed him with that same mixture of distrust and disdain that cops often have for consultants (worse yet, psychic consultants). Murphy was a reluctant and sceptical member of Chicago PD's "Special Investigations" unit. Since then, Murphy and Harry's relationship has evolved to the point where they trust one another implicitly. They've saved each other's lives so many times, and Murphy has gone from doubting that magic even exists to actively understanding how certain aspects of magic work. As of Ghost Story, she has lost her job with the police and has been attempting to hold together the network of magic practitioners—the Paranet—that Harry helped to establish. And she is so close to breaking, because she has gone through so much in the past few years. Harry's death didn't help either.

My only regret with Butcher's portrayal of Murphy is that there wasn't enough of it. I don't mind that she was paranoid and suspicious of Harry's ghost—considering how often people have tried to use Harry's image to get to her, that's totally logical. More importantly, on the visceral level, she didn't want to believe that Harry's ghost was legitimately him, because she wanted to believe Harry was still alive out there, somewhere. She keeps repeating that they didn't find a body—no body, no proof that he's dead. But if Harry is a ghost, well that's pretty definitive. (Unless you are Queen Mab and a sentient island, in which case it is but a flesh wound.)

Harry is not wholly responsible for Murphy's current state, but he is a factor, and that's something he has to confront in Ghost Story. As with all ghosts, Harry has unfinished business—ostensibly he gets sent back to solve his own murder, but the substance of this book is how Harry confronts his aborted relationships with the people he left behind. Set six months after Changes, Harry's sudden absence has been felt in a big way:

"You don't know how many things just didn't come here before, because they were afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

She looked at me as if her heart was breaking. "Of you, Harry. You could find anything in this town, but you never even noticed the shadow you cast." Her eyes overflowed and she slashed at them angrily with one hand. "Every time you defied someone, every time you came out on top against things you couldn't possibly have beaten, your name grew. And they feared that name. There were other cities to prey on—cities that didn't have the mad wizard Dresden defending them. They feared you."

That's Molly, telling Harry why it's been so hard since he left. She has been going around trying to forge a new defender for Chicago, an alter ego dubbed "the Rag Lady". And it's tearing her apart, because as long as she does this, her psychological wounds from Chichen Itza will never be able to heal. But she feels a burden now that Harry is gone, like she's the only one capable to even attempting to stand in his place and defend the city.

We get to see more of Molly's internal turmoil and doubt later in the book. In fact, it's fairly central to the story. One of the most disturbing facts Harry must come to terms with his how he has failed Molly as her teacher. Butcher highlights this in several ways. The Leanansidhe, Harry's godmother, has taken over his duties as teacher, and her pedagogical approach reminds Harry of his former teacher, Justin du Morne. Both believe that pain is a necessary component for learning. Although I doubt Harry comes so far as to agree with them, by the end of Ghost Story he acknowledges that his behaviour toward Molly has been contradictory: he coddled and cared for her like the daughter of one of his best friends, yet he also used her when it seemed necessary, when her talents could help solve whatever problem he was currently facing. That pattern of behaviour culminated, of course, with the assault of Chichen Itza and the physical and emotional trauma Molly endured there. Harry spends much of the book contemplating whether he should have ordered Molly to stay out of that confrontation, but it's not until the end that he learns his worst offence is something he ordered Molly to make him forget.

There's a spoiler alert on this review for a reason, people.

Although I had my suspicions about the identity of who pulled the trigger, the ultimate person behind Harry's death eluded me right up until the big reveal. I'm sure there are plenty of people who find it unsatisfactory or even cheap, but I think it makes perfect sense. Harry arranged a hit on himself, because he knew that when he donned the mantle of the Winter Knight, there would be no going back. Ever. To me, this cements irrevocably the poignancy of his sacrifice for Maggie: he was out of options, and the only way to save his daughter was to sacrifice himself in a way from which there was no escape. Harry Dresden, master of twisting the arms of various magical creatures, had finally found his own personal kobayashi maru, his no-win scenario. So he tried to cheat.

And he failed. Epic fail, even. Mab brought him back, with some help from the not-so-friendly neighbour island of Demonreach, and he still has to serve her as Winter Knight. Fortunately he isn't so worried that she can twist him into a monster now, but Harry's brilliant plan to evade his duties as Winter Knight by dying did not succeed. Oh well.

Still, having Molly wipe his memory of this set-up was a cruel thing to do to his apprentice. The fact that she had the strength to comply with his request speaks volumes about Molly as a person. And I think it's a very interesting part of the relationship between Harry and Molly, because he trusted her enough with this important task—but at the same time, it's also an example of how human and how flawed Harry remains, despite his terrible legendary status as a monster killer. He is not a monster. But he is oh, oh so human—and one of the paradoxes of humanity, of having free will, is that we can embody both amazing good and horrible evil, and unlike the amoral creatures of Faerie or the Nevernever, we can recognize those dissonant aspects of ourselves and cringe, look away, even deny. We are complicated tangles and snares of emotions and desires and beliefs and actions, and with the moral dilemmas made explicit in Ghost Story, Butcher cuts cleanly through this Gordian knot in order to put that on display for all of us.

While reading Changes, I anticipated that Harry would try to void his deal with Mab to become the Winter Knight by dying and then being resuscitated. So I was somewhat prepared for his death, although its method and madness still made me start—I should have known that Butcher wouldn't be so mundane as to do it the way I had predicted. Similarly, I knew with Ghost Story that Harry would rejoin the world of the corporeal and living by the book's end; there was no question of it. I did not foresee that Mab's deal would still be in effect, and so Uriel's seven words meant as much to me as they did to Harry. The subsequent conversation between Harry and Mab was one of the best moments in the book. Harry stands up to Mab and tells the Faerie Queen of Winter how she will behave—but that's par for the course. What's intriguing is that Mab demonstrates how badly she wants Harry as her Winter Knight. She could have let him die and chosen someone else, but she wants (needs?) Harry Dresden, enough that she worked with a semi-sentient landmass to revive his body.

Speaking of Demonreach, I am so eager to learn more about that island. Ever since Harry got a brief glimpse of references to it in McCoy's journals, I've wanted to know more. It's obvious that there is more of a connection between Harry's past and Demonreach than Butcher has revealed. This is just one of the many tantalizing aspects of the series that continues to run parallel to each book's main plot.

If Harry and Mab's conversation is one of the best moments in the book, Harry's little whirlwind tour of his friends and family, courtesy of Uriel, is the most frustrating. Butcher uses Uriel as an unabashed source of exposition, and it is clunky. It made me cringe, and I wish he had found a better way to explore what had happened to Harry and why he came back to solve his murder. Furthermore, all those glimpses at the people important to Harry were more confusing than helpful. I did like learning that Maggie is in the more-than-capable hands of the Carpenters, but what was up with our look at the domestic life of Thomas and Justine? I have no idea what that was, and I'm just going to pretend it didn't happen until Butcher manages to explain it better….

Narrative issues aside though, Ghost Story is, as I said at the beginning of this review, a major turning point for Harry and for the series. This is the moment when Harry can no longer ignore who or what he is: he is not just some guy who solves magic-related mysteries; he is not just a member of the White Council or a Warden or a mentor. He is a major player in something much larger, something that has been in motion perhaps before he was born. There are forces we've only begun to glimpse that are manipulating Harry, as well as other entities. (I think the Black Council are either pawns or complicit lieutenants in a scheme related to the Outsiders/He Who Walks Behind.) In previous books, Harry has accepted that something sinister has been going down in the magical world and that he can have a role in fighting it—but now he has to confront how major a role that is, how crucial he is to the entire enterprise, for both his friends and his foes. Because as great as it is for Harry's allies that he is now back in action, let's remember who brought him back: Mab and Demonreach didn't do this for the sake of being nice.

I haven't talked too much about the specific plot of Ghost Story, about the reappearance of Corpsetaker as the antagonist or how Harry gains a better appreciation for Mort. To be honest, all that seemed secondary to my reaction to what Ghost Story does for the series as a whole, and more importantly, my reaction to how Harry changes as a result of coming back from the dead. The plot itself? Good. Sufficient for its purpose, and I'm sure that for some, it's really the star of the show. For me though, there is so much more going on here. Maybe as a fanboy I'm reading too much into it, but I like to think that I'm just teasing at much deeper threads of discussion. Like Doctor Who, Buffy, and so many other series that I love, the Dresden Files is just so rich and densely-layered in its mythology and metaphor that it's more than just a series of related stories: it's something beautiful and profound. Ghost Story reaffirms this. It does not, as a story on its own, regain the heights of Proven Guilty or Small Favor. As an instalment of the Dresden Files, however, it is of incalculable importance.

My Reviews of the Dresden Files:
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I almost began this review with, “not your typical Coupland”, but I hesitated. I’m not sure there is a typical Douglas Coupland book. Oh, sure, Coupland—perhaps more than many authors—treats with the same themes, tropes, and even characters time and again. His bailiwick is that angst that seems to live on the flipside of every generation’s zeitgeist. And he examines this angst with zeal and creativity, using such settings as post-apocalyptic coma recovery, a school shooting, and (my personal favourite) metafictional software development. Coupland’s stories are striking often because they are fantastic yet carefully restrained.

One commonality among his stories, however, is a strong narrator or narrators. Coupland’s stories are, among other things, about telling stories, and each novel is a personal missive from one or more people. Each one has a unique voice, a set of interesting problems unique to their position and place in life, and a way of looking at the contemporary world that makes the reader stop and question things that might other slip beneath our notice. If they always seem to return to the same topics—life, aging, relationships, death … well, that’s because those are topics that we humans tend to fixate on. So, when I read a Douglas Coupland book, I try to keep in mind that it will be similar yet also very different from any of his other stories. Coupland’s oeuvre is a garden, not a single tree. Moreover, I’m looking for two things: hilarious or somehow profound quotable passages, and a keen use of character to look at culture in a slightly bizarre way.

All that said … this is not your typical Coupland.

Firstly, Life After God is a collection of short stories. I am convinced I had read this previously, but I had no recollection that this wasn’t a novel, so now I’m wondering. I suppose that, in dim lighting and if one is very tired, these stories are similar enough in theme and setting to seem as one narrative. But they aren’t. Rather than deliver a novel-length exploration of the generation that is “growing up without God”, Coupland takes several similar voices in slightly different circumstances. (The format of this particular edition, which is pocket sized, lends itself well to the format of the book!)

Secondly, there is a lot less sassy or smart dialogue in this book than I’m used to from Coupland. The stories read more like diary entries, heavy on the introspection, with the spectre of the unreliable narrator hanging over every conversation. Each entry is short, which makes the book easy to read in chunks. But aside from one or two keen observations, I have to admit that nothing really jumped out at me and affected me as much as some of his other works. Simply put, the writing in Life After God doesn’t impress me as much.

I was surprised to discover that I am reacting differently to his work now. My life has changed a lot in the past six months—I’ve moved to another country, started my first “career” job, and essentially adjusted to fending for myself and being an adult. Growing up sucks—and now I kind of understand Coupland’s angst a little more. As a teenager and a young adult, I appreciated his writing for its zaniness (this is also why I loved the CBC television adaptation of jPod). Now that I have entered the professional world, I am beginning to comprehend the exhaustion that Coupland’s characters display here. It’s not that life (after God) is meaningless; we just spend so much time trying to figure out the answer to this nagging sense of, “what now?” As one of the characters in this book comments, it’s as if he’s constantly waiting for his life to begin, only to wake up one day and find it has passed him by.

I suppose I could spend time analyzing how the broader reach of secularism has affected culture, but I don’t want to take Coupland too literally here. “Life after God” is more generally alluding to changes not just in what we believe but the way we believe. To say that ours is the first generation “to grow up without religion” is a little hyperbolic. But even those who did grow up with religion (myself included) haven’t necessarily received it in the same way. The myths and promises of the stable nuclear family have faded away. The environmentalist movement, the Vietnam War, the AIDS scare of the 1980s … all of these transformed the way we looked at the later half of the twentieth century, peeling away the layers of varnished optimism that were the product of winning World War II. Life After God is a series of stories about people struggling to find belief, to figure out what this life is all about, at a time where there aren’t that many signposts. And while, depending on the community, religion might occasionally offer some answers, more often it seems to be reactionary rather than not.

The stories here are far more fascinating as a whole than they ever would be apart. I’m not ready to call Life After God one of Coupland’s best works. It strikes me more as a companion document, worth reading for a Coupland completionist like myself, but not somewhere for new readers to start. For those of us who are young enough to be “figuring it out” for the first time (as opposed to the middle-aged or elderly readers, who are figuring things out for the third or fourth times), I think there are echoes here of our own nascent thoughts. This is about the stories we make up to explain the beliefs we don’t have—and to fill the holes left behind by, if not a lack of God, then at least a very vague instruction manual.

As usual, I snap anything up involving artificial intelligence. This has been on my list for a while, and I finally got around to acquiring it. We Think, Therefore We Are is exactly what it seems: a collection of stories about AIs, robots, and other posthuman ideas about disembodied consciousness. Fifteen stories from fifteen authors, all with different ideas about what the next centuries might bring us.

For such a long wait, this wasn’t all that impressive a payoff. This is a rather lacklustre collection. I’m used to anthologies coming with short prefaces to each short story introducing the author and maybe saying a few words about the story, so much so that their absence here seemed gaping. The stories themselves have some interesting ideas, but none of them were very fun, enjoyable, or just plain entertaining. (A few came close.)

The first story, Stephen Baxter’s “Tempest 43”, is probably the best the collection has to offer. It concerns an ailing AI on an ageing weather control satellite. The AI actually has a tripartite personality core, and the three personalities have gone to war. Three humans are caught in the middle. Even this story, however, lacks a satisfying climax, because it feels like the AI is doing all the work while the humans just sit around and watch.

I should also mention “Adam Robots” by Adam Roberts. It is definitely an original tale, a riff off the Garden of Eden story with robots instead of humans and a particularly sad twist at the end. Yet it’s representative of the stories here in another way, in that it relies more on clever premises than any deep exploration of what artificial intelligences might be like. None of these stories really made me go, “Oh yeah, I didn’t think about AI that way before,” and that’s what I want to see in such fiction.

Another weakness is the gender balance here: a single woman author among fourteen men. I don’t mean to say that every anthology should have a ratio of women to men approaching 1:1, but in this case the skew is just so noticeable. It would be easier to excuse if each story were a diamond in the rough, but most are merely adequate cubic zirconium.

We Think, Therefore We Are is neither bold nor brilliant. It doesn’t seem to take many risks; rather, it’s as if someone decided that they should collect some mediocre stories about AI, bundle them, and sell them at a profit. Well it worked, but it isn’t exciting, and it isn’t all that fresh.

Some stories are so popular they have permeated culture to the point where almost everyone knows them, even if they haven’t so much as glanced at the source material. Such is the case with A Christmas Carol, which has inspired numerous adaptations in every medium imaginable. As a result, Ebeneezer Scrooge is a household name, and the basic plot of A Christmas Carol is a familiar one. The source material, however, is well worth the read. Charles Dickens tells the story with his usual skill for setting and characterization. In his hands, the redemption of Scrooge really does become a Christmas miracle.

I confess I find the idea of dedicating the end of the year to a binge on good cheer somewhat hypocritical. Shouldn’t we just be good to people all year long? Scrooge, however, makes any twinges of misanthropy on my part look statistically insignificant. As the fact that his surname has become synonymous with his catchphrase, “Bah! Humbug!” attests, Scrooge is the ultimate antidote to Christmas cheer. For Dickens, he is also a caricature of the cold-hearted, supercilious Victorian businessman who is unwilling to give succour to the poor. Yes—you didn’t think Dickens would write a book without championing the downtrodden working, did you? I love this line uttered by Marley’s ghost:

I wear the chain I forged in life....I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.

I don’t believe in the afterlife. There is no promise, for me, of an eternity in heaven or hell. Some might suggest this leaves me less motivated to do good works—after all, I labour under no fear of eternal damnation, no hope of eternal paradise. I choose to look at it differently: this is all I get, so I better make the most of it. Nevertheless, I still find Dickens’ imagery compelling, and the message behind it equally so: Scrooge has forged the chains himself; they are of his own making. It is our actions by which we are judged (if not by a higher power, then certainly by other people), not our wealth or acumen or even, sad to say, our intentions.

And for Scrooge, Dickens, and his contemporary audience, the idea of Scrooge’s glimpse at his afterlife—and the ghostly visitations that follow—certainly have an impact. A Christmas Carol is not religious in any strict sense. Dickens doesn’t name-check God, Jesus, or the angels. This isn’t about honouring the birth of the Saviour so much as instilling in Scrooge the value of Christmas spirit and, consequently, of being nice to people. While Dickens doesn’t overtly involve the Christian mythos, however, spiritualism and mysticism play a large role. Scrooge is, quite literally, scared into being nicer.

As a narrative device, the visitations of the three spirits works extremely well. They split this novella into three clear episodes, each of which show Scrooge’s progression from curmudgeon to reformed man.

The first ghost, of Christmas Past, provides context, showing how Scrooge grew from a lonely boy into a man who chooses money and business over the love of his life. Here, Dickens criticizes the Victorian “sensibilities” that have supplanted to the Romantic idealism of the previous century. He challenges the reader to entertain, for a moment, what Scrooge’s life might have been like had Scrooge chosen Belle, teasing us (and Scrooge) with a vision of her life with another man. The spirit shows Scrooge how the choices he made have brought him to this point.

The second ghost takes over from there, showing Scrooge how people regard him currently. Two major scenes dominate this section: the house of Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s clerk; and the house of Scrooge’s nephew, who is entertaining some friends. In both cases, Scrooge observes examples of Christmas merriment, the type of unbelievable joy and warmth that can only come from family and friends celebrating together. Dickens works tirelessly to humanize the lower class, to show that even the poorest families can have noble spirits and celebrate in the same manner as the wealthiest of families. Despite their poverty and the ailment of Tiny Tim, the Cratchits seem to have an abundance of joy. Both parties also mention Scrooge at one point—unfavourably, of course—just to hammer home the point that he is not well-liked and is the antithesis of the happy moments they are now enjoying. Scrooge’s reconsideration of his attitude is most evident when he begs the spirit for a glimpse of Tiny Tim’s fate. Suddenly the child he would have consigned to death as “surplus population” seems so important to him!

The final ghost is supposed to be the most terrifying. Whereas the other two spirits were communicative, this ghost is a glorified tour guide. Oppressively silent and cowled, this ghost leads Scrooge into the future—or, at least, a possible future—one where he has died and no one is bothered. The final tally is taken, and Scrooge’s life—all that he has striven for—is worth, what? Some sheets? Some bad memories? Once again, Dickens’ message sneaks through: money isn’t worth it unless you have people to share it with, people who will benefit from you while you are alive and when you are gone.

Scrooge’s redemption in so short a period of time, given how much of a curmudgeon Dickens portrays him as at first, is truly miraculous. I like to think it’s because, deep down, there is a tiny part of Scrooge that knows he should be nicer, should be more humane. All the spirits are doing is talking to this part, giving it voice. And is there really any doubt what the outcome of this book will be? A Christmas Carol isn’t compelling because of suspense; it’s compelling because of the way in which Dickens illustrates Scrooge’s arc. Moreover, in terms of its status as a perennial classic, there seems to be something about this book that makes it easy to adapt (the same can be said for Shakespeare’s plays). Scrooge’s story can be transposed into virtually any setting, from ancient times to the present day, and retold to the delight of any audience. This is what makes it endure, despite the gulf between Dickens’ contemporary Victorian audience and the audience of today.

Dickens has never been afraid to pontificate in his other books, and A Christmas Carol is no exception. In this case, however, he can wrap it in the seasonal setting of spreading the Christmas spirit. The result is something rather beautiful. On one hand, this yet another treatise from Dickens on the inequities of the Victorian class system. On the other hand, it’s a cautionary tale of how our choices and our actions determine how we will be judged—in this life, and in the next. The caution comes with a potent reminder, one of hope: it’s not too late to make amends.

N.B.: This edition also contains The Chimes and The Haunted Man, so I will probably read and review those sometime soon.