These people are oddly obsessed with putting bathrobes on after showering. She used his bathrobe, so he had to settle for a towel—what, you don’t towel off and then put on a bathrobe?

I was hesitant to borrow this from the library—the description screamed “generic pseudo–science-fiction thriller.” Neverthless, I resolved to give it a chance. I swear I didn’t notice that John Scalzi had blurbed it until I started reading. And it makes sense that Scalzi would blurb this, because it’s in his wheelhouse—but neither Steven Brust nor Skyler White writes it the way Scalzi does. The Incrementalists is a bizarre mix of John Scalzi and Tim Powers (I like one and not the other, but it’s the worst of both, so don’t take this as a recommendation).

Now, I love me some Scalzi, but I’ll happily admit that there are things about his style I don’t like. He writes great, snappy dialogue—a lot of great, snappy dialogue. Too much, sometimes, to the point where all of his characters just feel so snappy and sarcastic and witty that they fade together. Scalzi is not a hugely descriptive writer. And that’s OK—not every writer needs to be descriptive or should be. And I get that thrillers, as a genre, tend to be lighter on description and heavier on dialogue and action. The fact that I only enjoy this occasionally, like I only occasionally enjoy a whipped topping dessert, is one reason I don’t read them that often.

Unfortunately, The Incrementalists seems to reside towards the lower end of the scale. It’s particularly nondescript, except when it gets way too descriptive. I just opened to a random page (303) and was confronted with this gem:

He was all that mattered. The taste of his mouth on mine, the solid unyieldingness of his body that my body wanted to wrap and mold and form itself around. Everything else felt irrelevant and trivial to me, and we almost shedded our clothes trying to get free of them fast enough to fill our hands and mouths with each other again. There was no fear, no pulling away or even holding back, nothing reserved or restrained or considered. His hands hurt me, and I wanted them to. His mouth took from me and I wanted nothing left behind.

This is only really a problem when it comes to the scenes in the Garden, where description is everything. I admit I’m not the best person to critique stuff like this, because I don’t visualize places as they are described when I read. But everything about this book just seems like a confusing mish-mash of same-same.

Even Ren and Phil feel very similar. The first-person perspective jumps between them within chapters. Now, I recently ran across an identical narrative device in Trouble. It worked fine there, because Pratt managed to differentiate between the two main characters. Here, I often forget whether Ren or Phil was the narrator, reminded only if the other character was in the scene and being referred to in the third person.

The basic premise of The Incrementalists is great. It’s like reincarnation lite—personality continuity suspended in a kind of symbiosis, with an agenda on top to “make the world better.” I liked it, and I genuinely liked how Brust and White handled the concept. Even the plot—Celeste, a recently deceased Incrementalist, is running a Xanatos gambit (TVTropes) that could destabilize the entire operation—is fantastic. By all rights, this should be a fun thriller.

Other than the stylistic and narrative issues, though, I just feel let down by the execution of that plot. The main characters spend far too much time sitting around talking about the Garden, explaining the Garden to Ren, “grazing” in the Garden, or mumbling pseudo-scientific stuff. It’s all very Roger Zelazny (or, as I mentioned, Tim Powers), in that it’s the magical realist equivalent of science fiction. But the most tense moment has to be when Celeste and Phil are at odds over a gun—that was exciting. The rest of the book is just work trying to follow the meandering, sometimes thorny explanations that Brust and White serve up to shore up an increasingly fractured “magic” (for lack of a better term) system.

Look, if you have a higher tolerance for this type of novel, you might enjoy this, just as I have a much higher tolerance for the pedantic hard SF technobabble of Alastair Reynolds than a lot of other people just as, if not more, intelligent as me. To each their own, right? But just because other people might enjoy this novel doesn’t mean it’s well-written or even all that good, in the same way that a serviceable cup of Tetley orange pekoe tea is nowhere near as good as loose-leaf. I drink the former pretty often when I’m too lazy to steep it properly—but I don’t pretend it’s amazing.

Previously, on Ben’s reviews…

Jody and Thomas. I can’t even.

I find Jody’s characterization hugely problematic…. I just wish Moore hadn’t ruined what might have been a great thing by falling back on clichéd jokes, like, “I could stand to lose five pounds.” We get it: women are obsessed with their weight! Hah-hah, very funny. I’ll pencil in a laugh sometime next week.

I’m going to try the next book, because Moore has earned a lot of credit with me. But if Thomas pulls anything like that again, I’m out of here. I have better things to do with my time than watch an insecure guy try to stop his vampire ladyfriend from leaving her in progressively creepier and rapier ways.

And now, the continuation…

You Suck picks up almost literally where Bloodsucking Fiends left off: C. Thomas Flood is a vampire, having been bitten by his vampiric girlfriend Jody. Once her daylight minion, now they have to find a new minion for the both of them. But the heat is on in San Francisco, because they have savvy detectives, an Emperor, and a Safeway night shift crew breathing down their pale necks.

I have to say, this book starts off with much more promise than Bloodsucking Fiends. Tommy and Jody’s relationship dynamic has changed. I wouldn’t say they are on “equal” footing now, but they are both vampires, at least. Jody herself is definitely more confident here, and Moore explicitly shows how much she delights in flaunting her sexuality for herself, because she no longer fears walking alone at night. That’s all well and good.

Indeed, I’ll go ahead and say that the characterization of the two protagonists is much improved. The other characters? Not so much. Every remaining character falls back into one or more stereotypes in Moore’s attempt to wring as much clichéd humour from this book as possible. I started to tune out and skim when he introduced Blue, the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold (and blue skin), and almost entirely checked out when dead whores started showing up.

Right, Moore, look … I don’t care whether your book has a “strong female protagonist.” I don’t care if your book has two female protagonists who show interesting and different sides to living as a woman in San Francisco. (I love Abby’s gothy teenage geekiness!) Fridging women is not OK. Joking about fridging dead whores is also not OK. The former does not, will never, excuse the latter. Similarly, the fact that Blue comes back—out of the blue—as a vampire doesn’t make up for the tasteless jokes at her expense.

Any enjoyment I was getting from You Suck was sucked out of me—pun intended—by these missteps.

At least Bloodsucking Fiends had stakes. (No, I mean plot stakes, not wooden stakes—gah. Why is this happening?!) The elusive and mysterious Elijah was a credible antagonist in the first book. Now he’s just a nuisance, and most of the conflict comes from Tommy and Jody running around trying to train Abby and move. Yes, this entire book is a sitcom about moving to the apartment down the block.

Towards the very end, the book shifts more and more into Abby’s first-person diary perspective. Now, I love Abby, and I loved her diary entries when they were intermittent. The more frequently they appeared, the more they grated in tone, though. The sudden appearance of Steve as a vampire hunter/love interest for Abby at the eleventh hour is almost as unsatisfactory as the wimpiness of the new vampires on the block.

Sigh.

I didn’t even realize how worked up I was about this until I wrote this review, and now I just can’t even.

Do I read the third book? It’s on my shelf, checked out the same time I borrowed this one. They are quick—I read this at a ball game, so I could read book three in less than an afternoon. But is it worth it? The cover copy seems to promise that it foregrounds Abby and includes a vampire cat.

But is it worth it?

I have since read the third book. It was worth it. Kind of. Review forthcoming!

There was this show, Chuck, on NBC back in the day. It began as the story of a computer technician at a “Buy More” who receives an email from a former college roommate. The email uploads the Intersect, a CIA/NSA supercomputer, into his brain. So the CIA and NSA send two agents, Sarah Walker and John Casey, to be Chuck’s handlers, to watch over him and keep him safe until the new Intersect is built and Chuck can be “decommissioned.” But if Chuck isn’t prepared for life as a spy, Sarah and Casey are equally unprepared for the crazy world of the Buy More. And as the show progresses, all the characters change. Chuck becomes less the nerdy and awkward “loser” type character—but even as he gets new Intersect abilities, he never quite loses a certain goofy quality. He and Sarah fall in love, as you do on these kinds of shows, and they rescue each other all the time. It’s just such a great show, because the writers take the time to develop the characters along a long, meandering, but totally believable arc.

The Lives of Tao reminds me of Chuck. Roen Tan is a computer programmer in a dead-end job—Office Space, if you’ve seen it, but instead of the hypnosis, confidence comes in the form of a gaseous alien who takes refuge in Roen’s body. Tao is a Quasing, and his people crash-landed on Earth millions of years ago. Unable to survive in our planet’s frigid atmosphere, they inhabit living bodies and have shepherded humanity throughout its entire existence, advising people telepathically, hoping to propel us to a point where we can help them return home.

Roen is drafted into this conspiracy—Tao has no choice but take Roen as a host, because he’s on the run from the other faction of the Quasing. So no one asks Roen if he wants his entire life to change. And, frankly, Tao is not enthusiastic about taking on a “fixer-upper” as his next host, as he puts it.

So we have a dynamic very similar to the one in Chuck: a loser character joins a secret organization carrying a lot of knowledge in his head but little enough experience or physical training. It’s up to Tao and a few supporting characters to train Roen literally into shape. What could have been boring gets spiced up by the way Roen interacts with Tao, Sonja, Antonio, and the others. As with Chuck, Roen’s development is gradual but noticeable. By the end of the book he is just becoming competent—not unbelievably badass, but probably better than he ever thought he might be at something like this. I give Chu a lot of credit, because most of the time writers don’t put much effort into making the “zero to hero” transformation very believable; they just hope the audience will put up with it for the awesomeness factor.

Chu has no choice to make the transformation believable, of course. The Lives of Tao is all about the measure of a person. Tao recounts snippets of his past lives to Roen and the audience, explaining his mistakes with Genghis Khan and the founder of the Ming Dynasty and an Italian priest. Nature versus nurture runs as a common motif throughout these stories, culminating in Roen’s transformation. It’s not the fact that Roen has access to an alien being’s knowledge and assistance that matters, really—it’s Roen’s discipline and determination (both of which are enforced, somewhat, by Tao) that allow him to achieve so much.

Chu deliberately presents Roen as somewhat unsympathetic at first—Tao in particular is very critical of Roen’s attitude, and this perspective infects the narration. This innoculates the reader against the intensive training regime that Tao and the other Prophus inflict upon Roen: we are allies against him, deaf to his misery, because we know he’ll be better off for it. And by the end, when Roen starts showing more confidence in matters like dating Jill, it’s actually very rewarding.

As Tao fills Roen (and the reader) in on the backstory of the Prophus versus Genjix factions, Roen goes on a series of escalating missions. That is, missions with stakes that escalate, not missions that require Roen to scale things. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.

I don’t visualize when I read, so when I say something is “cinematic,” I mean I can imagine movies like this book working for me. The Lives of Tao certainly feels like it could work as a science-fiction action movie. The whole arc of training is Act I, with Roen’s minor missions as Act II, followed by the Decennial as Act III leading into the climactic assault on the evil fortress. Did I see the ending coming? Like many action movies, yes I did. But it was still fabulous.

Although the whole “Holy One” rhetoric that the Genjix foist on their hosts is over the top, for the most part Chu portrays the two Quasing factions as different rather than good versus evil. It’s easy for us to empathize with the Prophus and support them, because they seem to be the ones who want to keep humanity largely intact and out of major conflicts. But Chu shows us that the Prophus are also responsible for problems—polio in the States, anyone?—and reminds us that, ultimately, they don’t care as much about human affairs or happiness as they do about getting home. They are, in short, alien; while individual Quasing like Tao or Baji might feel somewhat human because of the time they have spent inhabiting humans, the Prophus and Genjix collectively are frighteningly alien in their aims and plans.

As far as debut novels go, this is impressive. I was sceptical when I started. I was worried that the story would drag, that there would be too much back-and-forth between Tao and Roen. But it never really gets in the way, and Chu balances the need for characters to remark on changes and the need merely to show those changes obliquely to the reader. This grasp of subtlety, combined with a flair for the larger-than-life action sequences, makes for a great read.

My reviews of the Tao series:
The Deaths of Tao →

I like meta-books, books about books and writers and readers and how stories influence our lives. As someone who spends what, I admit, is probably an inordinate amount of time reading, reading about books is important and informative. Wit’s End is metafiction about mystery. Rima’s godmother, Addison Early, is a successful Agatha Christie—like mystery writer. Rima comes to stay with Addison at Wit’s End, Addison’s little refuge from the world in Santa Cruz. Cut off from the rest of the world by the loss of those closest to her, Rima is adrift. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, she latches on to stray elements from Addison’s past, determined to unearth some sort of mystery to solve.

This idea that the detectives in mystery novels have it easy because the author does the hard work of supplying the mystery is perhaps Karen Joy Fowler’s most sublime observation in the entire book. I had never thought of it that way before, but it’s true. Detectives get all the breaks: neat, orderly clues; clear-cut motivations; a nice timeline of events. Real life is much messier than that, and in many cases, as Rima discovers, the nature of the mystery is not clear.

Alas, little else about Wit’s End held my attention. Rima herself is a cipher of a character. We never really get close to her. Fowler shares morsels of backstory with a parsimony that I would envy in a science-fiction author. I got the sense that she was never really close to anyone except her late brother. With him they were a dyad; now she is a monad and unsure of how to live.

None of the other characters are all that intriguing either. Fowler tries. She alludes to Tilda’s checkered past of homelessness and alcoholism and the struggles reconnecting with her estranged adult son. Addison is supposed to be a kind of ageing grand dame, resplendent in her achievements but worried by the ticking clock on the mantle. Martin is supposed to be … I don’t know, what passes for a cad these days?

Yet all this amounts to is a series of set pieces, and static ones at that. None of the characters change much (not even Rima). I kept expecting Addison to get tetchy when Rima continued to prod Addison’s past and look into Holy City. I kept expecting a fight, or at least an argument—nothing. Aside from that very real, very rewarding moment between Rima and Martin, the emotions in this book are flat. Even when Rima winds out trapped in a house with her “stalker,” Fowler manages to puncture the tension building in the room and replace it with an underwhelming, albeit humourous, resolution.

In its attempts to be a character-driven story centred on Rima, Wit’s End fizzles out into a boring book where nothing happens. The promise that this book’s cover copy makes—that this would be about how Addison’s fans have taken over her characters and plotlines—never materializes. There are references to fanfic (especially slashfic) and Wikipedia pages and blog comments, but it’s all ancillary. That would have made for a more interesting story. Still, this is not merely a case of a book misrepresented by its description.

I enjoyed the way Fowler uses Addison to share one type of writer’s perspective on readers. But that’s about it. The characters in this book are dull; the plot is largely a collection of unrelated events; as a protagonist, Rima is about as interesting as paint that has very nearly dried. Fowler can do much better, and you, as a reader, can do much better.

In Grade 11 English we read A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, as our Novel, and I hated it. Now, I know that hating the assigned reading is a time-honoured tradition in English class, but you have to understand that this was my first experience with such an emotion. I was the book-addicted, scholarly, high-achieving nerdy student who, in Grade 10, had gotten together with friends and their English teacher at lunch to read Shakespeare (and then after our school closed at the end of Grade 10, continued to meet up outside of school over the following year). I had never not enjoyed the assigned reading before; I, with all the plucky naivety of someone who looked up to teachers and already wanted to be one, assumed that if the teacher chose it, it must be good.

Oh, how much I had left to learn.

Now, full disclosure: the aforementioned school closure and move to a new school took its toll on me and my peers, and my way of coping with it was to be somewhat of a jerk to my Grade 11 English teacher. I took it into my head that I wasn’t being “challenged” enough and me sure she knew that I wasn’t happy that this year’s Shakespeare selection would be The Taming of the Shrew (even though it’s actually an all right play to study, and later that year I went to see a neat theatre-in-the-round version). This was one of the few times as a student that I was not-pleasant to a teacher, and I regret that.

So it’s hard to say how much my displeasure over being forced to discuss and analyze A Separate Peace was caused by the book and how much came from simply being resolved not to enjoy this English class. But ever since then, I’ve had a complicated relationship with books about private boarding schools. I file them away into a mental folder in which the “boarding” has been crossed out with “boring,” and only John Irving or Robertson Davies can usually manage to break out of the cabinet at night to haunt me with dreams of tattooed wrestlers, bears, and snowballs inducing labour.

Fall reminded me a lot of A Separate Peace—or, to be more accurate, since I don’t remember the book at all, it reminded me of my memory of an idea of A Separate Peace. Colin McAdam creates a fictional Canadian private school and follows two boys, roommates, eighteen years old and thus men, really, as they orbit the eponymous girl who is the object of their affections.

I cringe as I write that last clause—a subordinate clause, even—because I’m sad that a book about two dudes moping over a woman still managed to get shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2009. Have we not moved on from such pubescent writing? Apparently not. Fall is every bit an object in this book, denied both voice and agency, forced to exist simultaneously in the fantasies of these two young men as well as a character who serves only as a sexual mirror for one and a fixation for the other. And everything about this plot is so earnest. It’s as if McAdam thinks he’s on to something big, like no one else in the history of the Western world has thought to write about teenage boys discovering sex and love and obsession in this way before. There’s not even a hint of self-deprecating self-awareness here, just the pure and honest pain of it—and yes, it’s well done in that CanLit sort of way. But my point is that Fall takes itself way too seriously about two decades too late. If it had decided to subvert itself at any point, maybe it could have had a chance.

Instead we have Noel, called Wink because of his lazy eye in that painful way boys have of giving out cutting nicknames. Noel is withdrawn, introverted and intellectual and actually getting something out of this fancy education his diplomat father is paying for. Rooming with Julius, the most popular of the seniors at St. Ebury’s, Noel falls for Fall, Julius’ girlfriend. At first we’re supposed to see this as the kind of unrequited pining of someone for his friend’s girl, but soon McAdam shows that there is a darker undercurrent to Noel, one that culminates in tragedy for all involved.

If Noel is unplumbed depths, then Julius is tapped out shallows. I suppose the stream of consciousness narration of his chapters is supposed to emphasize this: Julius is all surface, no depth. I’ll be honest: the stream of consciousness didn’t do much for me; it’s an effective narrative device, but I don’t like it.

The fact that this is a Canadian private school is mildly interesting. Unless you go to one, or know someone who does, you probably don’t think much about private schools in Canada. They seem like a foreign thing. Indeed, St. Ebury’s and its real-life counterparts are the domain of the old moneyed types, Canadian or diplomatic as depicted here, who still cling to the boarding-and-starched-uniform visions, complete with “masters” and complicated disciplinary codes. It’s interesting to be reminded that this is still a thing.

McAdam points out the hypocrisy of those places, the tension between the cost of providing such an education and the way the straitjacket of rules infantilizes these adult boys. This is a legitimate criticism. But it’s also a little beside the point, given what Noel ends up doing.

The inevitability of Noel’s heel turn is fairly obvious quite early in the book. So it’s not so much a surprise as it is the fulfilment of a promise when it happens, and everything that follows is anticlimactic. There is a strange beauty to the plot as McAdam has structured it; Noel is at least semi-fascinating as a character study of a species of sociopath. We could have long, meandering conversations about unreliable narrators and suppressed memories.

But that doesn’t dispel my ultimate discomfort, which is that when you strip away all the decoration, what you have is a plot driven by a damsel in distress. Fall is not about Fall the woman but what these two men imagine Fall might be. And that is interesting psychologically, yes. But it’s been done before, and I don’t know that it’s all that necessary for us to keep retreading the issue from this privileged perspective of the poor damaged rich boys.

Where’s the story from Fall’s perspective? Why can’t we learn about who she is, rather than who Julius and Noel tell us she is? Why can’t we hear her thoughts on whether Julius is a bore (but great in bed) and how Noel is sweet but also a little creepy, and how she loves her mom but is afraid she’ll never get a streak of independence? Of all the poorly-sketched characters in this book, Fall definitely seems like the most lively, most interesting, deepest of them all. Shame we never meet her.

I’d love to see Fall make decisions. I’d love to see her fight back at the river instead of serving the role of prop to cement Noel’s downfall. McAdam has so many opportunities here to elevate the story rather than go through the motions.

I don’t question his skills as a writer, really. It’s a nice enough book, albeit one that is unquestionably shooting for that “literary” label. And therein lies the problem: Fall just takes itself too seriously. McAdam hopes to become great by following in the footsteps of those we consider great rather than stopping to critique the greats, to steal what works from them but question and tear down the things that don’t. The result is simply a reiteration of what has come before: there is nothing in Fall you haven’t seen elsewhere, and it’s the same ol’, same ol’ stories of men obsessing over women that male writers have been writing for a very long time.

Previously, on Ben’s reviews…

… the characterization of the two protagonists is much improved. The other characters? Not so much….

Fridging women is not OK. Joking about fridging dead whores is also not OK.

Yes, this entire book is a sitcom about moving to the apartment down the block.

And now, the conclusion…

Well, I did it. I read Bite Me, because I am a sucker (gaaaaaah, vampire puns again) for punishment. And also I like my trilogies like I like my modifiers: undangling.

So, we pick up with Thomas and Jody bronzed and Abby as our viewpoint protagonist for much of the book. Eventually Thomas and Jody escape, or get released accidentally, and the book follows them for a bit too. So it alternates between Abby’s annoying first-person narration (I love Abby, hate her narrative voice) and a third-person narrator.

This book is actually the best of the trilogy.

Better yet, I can tell you why.

With the convergent plots of Chet the Vampire Cat and Elijah’s child vampires cleaning up this mess in San Francisco, Christopher Moore doesn’t have as much time to make stupid, unfunny jokes at the expense of women and minorities. They are still present, but their quantity is greatly reduced, and they tend to be sandwiched in between more important bits. This is a sharp contrast to the previous two books, which seemed mostly to comprise such jokes strung together with the remnants of what once was a plot.

Bite Me’s story is actually good and, in some parts, fairly intense. Elijah’s children want to eliminate anyone who knows about vampires. That’s basically the entire cast from the previous two books. Meanwhile, Steve discovers that people turned by anyone other than Elijah (the “prime” vampire) don’t last long. This is bad news for Abby, who turns herself into a vampire by injecting blood from a rat (you don’t want to know how the rat became a vampire).

So it’s pretty much chaos in San Francisco, and there is a lot going on, and it gets very confusing at times. Nevertheless, I enjoyed a good deal of it. The characters always have something to do—and because they have something to do, Moore can’t spend pages reflecting on how Jody’s vampiric state will impact her continual disappointment of her mother or her need to lose five pounds. It’s win–win.

I only wish Moore had introduced Elijah’s children in the first book. We get hints that there are other vampires in the world, and then of course they show up at the very end of You Suck. But there is a rich backstory to this world that Moore doesn’t reveal; I can’t help but wonder if it is more interesting than what we get in these three books.

This has been a long journey, and it’s not one I would want to take again or recommend someone retrace. Bite Me might tickle vampire fans. In general, though, these are not the Moore books that I want people reading. Their humour does not work for me. Moore relies on stereotypes, clichés, and generally very lazy types of humour. The result is occasionally, almost accidentally, funny, in the style of the brain-dead sitcoms of network television. But it lacks the literary comedy that I so value in some of Moore’s other work.

Britain had some whack ideas. Remember that time they colonized an entire continent with convicts? That was whack.

Gould’s Book of Fish is the epistolary adventure of William Gould, a convict imprisoned on Sarah Island. Somewhere along the way he picked up enough painting skills to become an artist, and he starts painting fish for the island’s science-and-status–obsessed Surgeon instead of working on the chain gang.

I enjoy books (The Luminaries comes to mind) set in this frontier period of the colonization of Australia and New Zealand. Like The Luminaries, this book has a somewhat pretentious structure and style as Flanagan attempts to use Billy Gould to plumb the depths of human suffering and soul-searching. Each chapter is headlined by a particular fish from this book that Gould is working on, and the fish becomes a metaphor for the philosophical ramblings of that instalment in Gould’s life.

Basically this book is an account of Gould’s suffering on Sarah Island, and of the various strange and nonsensical happenings that he witnesses there. Since we’re being told this all from Gould’s perspective, there are some serious unreliable narrator issues here. So it’s not possible to take the events of the story at face value, to say, “this happened,” and use that certainty as the metric by which we can judge Gould’s rambling.

Case in point: the characters of this book aren’t so much people as they are examples of types of excess that afflict the human experience. (This is confirmed, in the most postmodern of ways, by the “afterword” note.) Each character is a facet of Gould’s madness—a madness that might have been exacerbated by his imprisonment but maybe has lurked there all along, lurks beneath all of us.

Two things that I loved about this book.

Firstly, Gould’s narrative voice is rich. It’s one thing to write a book set in a historical period and another thing to write with the voice of someone from that period. Through diction, sentence structure, and punctuation, Flanagan makes Gould’s voice come alive. This makes the book entertaining despite the darkness inherent in Gould’s experiences.

Secondly, just when you think you’ve seen all Flanagan has to offer, he manages to change things up and deliver an even crazier situation. He certainly has imagination, and it shows on every page here. This is a very creative book, and that made it more enjoyable.

So what stops me from singing more than dull praises? Is it the weird ending? The bizarre use of a frame story that Flanagan never returns to (except with one passing reference)? Or the constant parade of deaths, either real or metaphorical, without much in the way of happiness? Gould’s is a very Hobbesian view, mixed in with a certain amount of postmodern irony. Humans are just other animals, full of natural and atavistic urges. We pretend we suppress those urges, but that’s a lie. And that’s apparently the source of our unhappiness.

This is a book that tries to be deep, and I suppose if you are willing to spend the time to study and analyze and prod it, you’ll find those depths. Maybe I’m just growing impatient in my old age. Maybe I’m losing my enjoyment of subtext. Whatever the reason, Gould’s Book of Fish was an adequate way to spend my time. But neither Gould’s voice nor Flanagan’s capacity for storytelling surprises could quite compensate for the almost desultory atmosphere that pervades the text. Maybe this will be the intensely philosophical, brooding text that you have been waiting for—I can’t discount that possibility. It just didn’t speak to me. I know this because I’m not particularly proud of the quality of this review. I could have spent more time talking more deeply about the philosophical underpinnings of this book. I just don’t care enough about it to do so. I’m going to go buy tea now instead.

For people who like their thrillers with a heavy dose of depth.

Seriously, The Water Knife is a thriller for “the thinking person.” If you’ve read many of my reviews, you might have noticed that I rail against thrillers on a semi-regular basis. I like to say I’m a semi-reformed literature snob—that is, I don’t like partitioning books into genres, but sometimes they are convenient labels for discussion and critique. Now, I’ve read some good thrillers in my time. But The Water Knife is definitely one of the best I’ve read.

It’s the near future, and water shortages have devastated the American Southwest. Think Mad Max: Fury Road without the Max. Or the fury. But plenty of mad roads. Like, mad people … on dusty … never mind; I haven’t even seen that movie, so I’m not sure I’m really getting the comparison right. Next paragraph!

Paolo Bacigalupi’s other near-future eco-thriller The Windup Girl is notable for how he deals with the dominance of corporations that produce GMOs, and the way we are failing to manage the planet’s biosphere. For The Water Knife, Bacigalupi narrows the scope a little bit. This is less a global problem (although global warming is obviously behind it) and more a regional one. Mismanagement of the aquifers west of the Mississipi mean that entire states and millions of people are living in desert, third-world conditions. We get the sense that the eastern United States is, much like our glimpse of Vancouver, B.C., not as badly affected. This is a localized issue that has nevertheless torn the United States apart.

I want to emphasize that last part, and at the same time I want to highlight that this is not a post-apocalyptic book. No huge disaster wiped out those good ol’ United States. This is the prelude to the apocalypse, the long, slow rearranging of the deck chairs while everyone blames everyone else, tries to steal everyone else’s water, and generally continues to ignore the problem. Florida would be doing the same thing, except I imagine Florida is largely underwater in this book, as it will be in reality in decades.

It’s tempting for those of us who have led sheltered lives to believe that no matter how bad it gets elsewhere in the world, we are somehow safe. That these walls and the social niceties cushioning us can’t come crashing down. I’m not saying they necessarily will. But part of the reason The Water Knife works so well is because it feels true. It’s not what will happen, but it’s what could happen. Because it’s very similar to how our world is now: the rich use their money to insulate themselves from upheaval while the middle class become poor and the poor get dead.

In the midst of this, I wasn’t sure if I was going to like any of the main characters. Angel is technically a “bad guy” in the sense that he is a mercenary (albeit one who is “going soft” in his own words). Lucy seemed like a generic journalist at first. And while Maria’s story is heart-wrenching, I was so saddened by the string of bad fortune she experiences that I almost couldn’t keep reading. I thought to myself, “Bacigalupi is not going to let her off the hook here; this is not going to end well for her.”

This is a bleak book. My friend Rob over at Random Comments examines this from several angles. In particular, I agree that the ending—which is actually a “happy ending” from the perspective of at least some of our characters—betrays a deeper cynicism than it might otherwise appear to have. In particular, Bacigalupi seems to be saying that realism and self-interest is the only route towards survival in this wasteland. In that desert show-off, Angel is poised to be an angel—but he can only act as such after one of the characters gives him the opportunity by shooting another.

Bacigalupi also channels William Gibson in the way he weaves this possible near-future. He’s got the lingo down: “water knife” and “cutting” to talk about rerouting or otherwise obtaining water from another reservoir; “wet” and “Zoner” as pejorative terms. These are great from a narrative standpoint, because they make the world feel more authentic. But, like Gibson, Bacigalupi has the ability to make this world fit like a strange glove you never knew you owned. Catherine Case (who, in another life, might have become a Marvel superhero) is much like businesspeople who exist today. Gibson’s work is so powerful because he draws upon threads that already exist, plucks them from the quotidian, and rotates and remixes them until they become noticeable, troubling, and bizarre in how real they nevertheless feel.

Because even though cyberspace cowboys or water knives might never actually exist, the people who inhabit these roles already do. As we change our planet and our societies shift, crumble, and reform in response, we don’t see the emergence of new types of people, just new structures for them to inhabit. With Angel, Lucy, and Maria, Bacigalupi demonstrates how these structures oppress even those who appear to have some kind of power. At one point, Angel tells Lucy he believes people are basically the same, and that circumstances dictate who they become: grow up with a silver spoon and you’re a doctor; grow up in the hood, and you join a gang. Bacigalupi parallels this with Damien in Maria’s story, and how he seems to have more of a conscience than those higher up in the gang’s ranks—but that’s not enough to give him courage.

This self-reinforcing style of writing is powerful, and it’s why The Water Knife is a damn good thriller. You want action and shoot-em-up? It’s in here too. There’s politicking and conniving. Terrible situations where men and women are forced to compromise their ethics for the sake of survival. People driven the breaking point—and beyond. And man, it is depressing. But it’s also so very good.

Yo dawg, I heard you like Internet sites.

The plot basically goes like this: Jake is online, back in the days when most of the people online were nine-year-olds and 40-year-olds on the prowl for nine-year-olds. He discovers a Yeerk website and lurks in the chatroom, wondering if these people are for real or if it’s a trap. The Animorphs decide to investigate by raiding the offices of the AOL analogue that holds all the subscriber information for the people using this chat service. But this leads them further down the rabbithole, culminating in Jake becoming a rhino and one of the best action sequences yet.

The amount of nostalgia trips Animorphs induces is dizzying sometimes. The Warning brings us a blast from the Internet past: dial-up modems, dot-com AOL-like subscriber services, and “chatrooms.” I just barely remember dial-up (although, sadly, I know people who are still on it because they can’t get anything else). And I still hang out daily in IRC. Nevertheless, watching the Animorphs talk about the Internet and the web like it’s this strange and boring but occasionally useful technology is so funny to a reader of 2015. If Applegate had only known … well, I guess she would have invested in Google or something. (Actually, this book predates the formation of Google as a company by a few months.)

I sometimes think that it would be harder to describe the web as it is now to someone from the 1980s or 1990s than someone from, say, the nineteenth century. (I’m talking “average Joe” people here, not computer nerds.) Because the latter group has no idea what computers are like, so once you figure out the right metaphors, they’d be cool with it. But computers in the 1980s were, compared to what we have now, terrible and clunky. So your average mullet-loving consumer would stare at you, and then laugh in your face, because no way would those dumb PCs ever be able to do what you describe.

So, anyway, the Animorphs trash the home of a dot-com billionaire, and it’s pretty awesome. As I mentioned above, Jake decides to acquire a rhino morph to bust through the security, gates, etc. Rhinos, however, have such poor vision that Jake needs the other Animorphs—in bird form—to “aim” him. This leads to hilarious exchanges such as:

It felt like getting hit in the face with a sledgehammer! But it was like getting hit and not caring. I felt the impact. But my rhinoceros body was used to impact. It was built for impact.

<What happened to the gate?> I asked, too blind to be sure.

<What gate?> Marco said.

And then:

I kept running. This time it was just chain link. I felt something sort of tug at my horn.

<Where’s the fence?> I asked.

<You just went through it,> Cassie said.

And it’s basically just a series of that, for about two or three pages, while Jake acts like a bulldozer through a rich dude’s home.

Man, this book is a terrible influence. I love it.

Turns out the dot-com billionaire is a Controller, but not your typical Controller. He’s a traitor and Visser Three’s twin brother! Yes, it turns out that Visser Three has twins, and Visser Three is the more evil of the two evil twins. His brother was too good with computers, though, and was going to make Visser Three look bad, so he had to go on the run before Visser Three killed him. Oh, and he has a way of surviving without access to Kandrona rays, but it’s icky.

I forget that, even this “early” in the series, Applegate is all about extending the mythology in different ways. Visser One and Visser Three’s enmity was our first glimpse at the internal politics of the Yeerk Empire; now we see that some Yeerks can reach compromises with their hosts, and not all Yeerks are hell-bent on this world domination scheme. (That doesn’t make those Yeerks good, mind you.)

The question of what makes the Animorphs, who take animals’ forms without their permission, and the Yeerks, who take animals’ bodies without their permission, appears again. The Animorphs yet again reject the idea to acquire other humans, morph them, and use it to sneak into a facility. That’s crossing a line, because the humans are thinking beings who haven’t consented to such an invasion of privacy. I love that Applegate brings up these thorny issues and inspires young readers to consider things like consent. Consent is hot.

My final bit of nostalgia-driven reflection: this book is so clearly pre–September 11. No way the Animorphs would be able to get close enough to an airport departures gate to plant a smelly diaper in a trash can. These days they’d have to fly so far in fly morph to get back past security.

The whole flying-on-planes-as-flies part, which comprises the first third of the book, is very innovative, though. When Jake is brutally cut down in the prime of his fly life, his terror at possibly dying as a fly is palpable, thanks to his role as the narrator of the book. It provides Applegate an opportunity for him and Cassie to have a “very special conversation” about his role as the Animorphs’ leader. So much more going on here than meets the eye in a “young adult” series.

Next time, the Animorphs discover the Yeerks’ one weakness … is oatmeal?

My reviews of Animorphs:
← #15: The Escape | #17: The Underground →

This is not the type of novel I am meant to enjoy. Even meant as satire, War of the Encyclopaedists just screams “I am the product of an MFA writer.” It flounders in its pretentiousness, then washes up on the rocky shores of “but … but … plot?” before an errant wave knocks it loose and the undertow drags it out to the sea of irrelevance.

Hey, I can write metaphors too. Graduate degree, please!

In all seriousness—

—actually, no, I can’t lie to you, Reader. I started this review tongue-in-cheek and will likely remain that way. So, in very little seriousness…

Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite are two young men, one a graduate of a Bostonian MFA program, the other a platoon leader who served in Baghdad. They teamed up and produced a book about Halifax Corderoy and Mickey Montauk, who are two young men, one who studies in a Bostonian literature program and the other a platoon leader who serves in Baghdad….

Oh. I see what you did there.

The “write what you know” advice is sound in most cases, and I won’t knock Robinson and Kovite for taking that route. It’s obvious that Corderoy and Montauk are not them—names like that should clue you into the fact the book is satirical, even if every other clue flies over your head. And I’ll grant them this: the juxtaposition of Corderoy’s semi-privileged but dull and pointless grad school experience with Montauk’s semi-privileged but dangerous and pointless deployment experience is interesting.

Or, at least, it should be. The Montauk parts in Iraq kept me riveted. I don’t subscribe to the idea that war is glorious, and generally I don’t read books about war. But I genuinely enjoyed all the details that Robinson and Kovite include about the training Montauk undergoes leading up to his deployment and his actual tour in Iraq. In particular, they focus a lot on his relationship with the men under his command and his lack of confidence as a leader.

Corderoy’s sections, on the other hand, were uphill filler between Montauk’s, at least for me. I cannot bring myself to care about the fact that this whiny brat is bored by school and just wants to slack off. Excuse me while I play my extremely tiny violin, Mr. Corderoy—what, you borrowed it to do lines of coke off it and then sold it for whiskey? That’s fine, son. Go have unprotected sex with your girlfriend. Because you’re wild and carefree and don’t have any connection or sense of responsibility as a twenty-something in the 2000s. I get it!

The forced pretentiousness of both the novel’s content and style is a response to “Great American novels” about men and youthfulness that have seeped into our collective consciousness. Corderoy and Montauk are spoofs and riffs off Holden Caulfield, Gatsby, Stephen Daedalus, and half a dozen other characters I don’t know about because I tend to avoid such novels. That this could work at all is only because of the very postmodernist/deconstructionist schools that Robinson and Kovite satirize in this story. So … yeah. Paradoxical postmodernist self-criticism.

Unfortunately, that’s why despite enjoying the story on the surface, I can’t say I enjoyed War of the Encyclopaedists. It smugly wears its pretentiousness like a badge of literary achievement, and that rubs me the wrong way. It’s like the comic friend you have who keeps going, “Eh? Eh? See what I did there?” after delivering her latest zinger. I totally saw what you did there, but thanks for pointing it out and ruining the joke.

Of course, the other danger with a satire is that, in attempting to emulate the form or content you’re satirizing, you become that thing. War of the Encyclopaedists has an omniscient narrator—the most pretentious and literary of narrators; to compound this effect, Robinson and Kovite deploy the narrator in the least efficient, most annoying way. Omniscient narrators are like the nuclear weapons of narration: extremely powerful, very easy to mishandle, and prone to being messier and not worth your time. Writers who know what they are doing can use them tactically to good effect. In the hands of some writers, though, omniscient narrators become mushroom clouds of exposition. I don’t, actually, need to know every interior and ancillary thought and feeling that all these characters have. Why not show instead of tell?

If high-concept literary takes on literary-ness from MFA grads are your thing, then you’ll probably like War of the Encyclopaedists. It is competently constructed in that most technical of senses—so technically that anything resembling a soul or spirit has fled. I damn it with faint praise not so much because it isn’t clever but because it just isn’t as clever as it wants to be (or as it thinks it deserves to be)—and that is a sin I don’t quickly forgive in my books.