Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (39 page)

Ship of Fools

by Richard Paul Russo

Ace, 370 pages, paperback, 2001

To say that a novel would make a marvellous movie is one thing; to say it is a marvellous novel is another. The two statements are usually seen as mutually contradictory.

Not in this case.

The generation starship
Argonos
has been travelling the spaceways for centuries, its original mission long ago forgotten. Onboard there has developed a stratified, ossified society, one that has come to depend for its survival on its remaining intact and aboard the ship: colonization of discovered terrestrial planets has turned from an aim, if it ever was one, into a taboo. The downsiders (as the lower orders are called), being little more than slaves, are eager to change this
status quo
; but for obvious reasons have little opportunity to do so in the hopelessly long intervals between the rare discoveries of habitable worlds. In the meantime their overlords, the upsiders, squabble and play all the games of politics and coups, even though changes of personnel will and
can
have little effect on the fortunes of this small floating world.

Bartolomeo Aguilera, born grossly deformed but more physically capable than most men through sophisticated prosthesis, is a sort of troubleshooter and advisor-without-portfolio to the
Argonos
's captain, Nikos Costa – although the captain's regime seems nearing its end because of a recent series of disastrous destination choices he has made. Chief rival in the undeclared struggle for ascendancy is Bishop Soldano, semi-charlatan head of the powerful shipboard religion, which mixes Christianity with spacefaring-tinged other elements, including the tenet that the
Argonos
was never created but has drifted among the stars for all eternity.

Now a new planet is visited, and it is clear that at least in the past it was colonized. Aguilera leads an expedition to the surface to investigate the enigmatic signal being transmitted from one of the ghost population-centres; sent with him as representative of the church is the priest Father Veronica. She and he discover, in the vast basement of the colony's central building, the evidence of a colossal and sadistically barbaric massacre, with even infants having been impaled alive upon metal hooks. The cruelty is all too human, they assume; what they do not find out until a little later is that their discovery has triggered the sending of a fresh signal, its destination a gigantic and seemingly dead alien spaceship beyond the boundaries of this planetary system.

Despite the gruesome evidence, the downsiders wish to disembark and recolonize the world, dubbed Antioch. Believing that Costa's regime is about to die and also that Father Veronica (his initial respect for whom is slowly turning into a near-obsessive love, possible returned) covertly approves the scheme, Aguilera abets it. But Costa ostentatiously thwarts the rebellion, thereby strengthening his own position in the power struggle.

That beamed signal was detected aboard the
Argonos
, and so the next port of call is the alien spaceship. It appears to be a long-dead artefact, yet its very alienness renders it lethal to the exploratory teams sent in from the
Argonos
– lethal in ways themselves so alien that none can understand properly why various humans are slaughtered or driven mad. A further mystery is that, in all its recorded history, the
Argonos
has never yet discovered so much as the slightest trace of any other advanced species, yet here is an artefact of a technological sophistication far beyond the human: how could such a spacefaring civilization not have been noticed before?

Aguilera and Father Veronica head a new expedition into the alien vessel and, through trying to accept it rather than force their own humanity upon it, seem to make progress towards unravelling its riddle. They discover the relic of a further massacre of humans – but, far more dramatically, a human survivor ...

The temptation to synopsize beyond this point is almost impossible to resist, especially since so far this might seem to be a fairly orthodox piece of hard sf. Yet to do so would be to give away too much. Way too much.

To say there are constant surprises in store for the reader would be to mislead. Any competent tale-teller will make sure to have up his or her sleeve an abundance of plot twists with which to startle the reader – the apparent goodie who proves to be a baddie, and all the rest of the rigmarole. Russo goes far, far beyond such cosmetic mechanics. Not only are we forced to realize that much we have accepted at face value is in fact otherwise, but even the
tale itself
is otherwise, as is its telling: its motivation is not what you have been lulled into expecting.

Let's jump off this train of thought; to continue it would again be to spoil the book for you.

An important underpinning of the novel concerns the nature of religion. Bishop Soldano, with his publicly pretended beliefs and private lack of faith, might seem to be a set-up, stereotyped target for atheistic darts; yet in fact his belief system proves to be far more complex than his self-prepared veneer would suggest. Much more interesting, though, is Father Veronica, whose faith, however misguided one might believe it to be (and the word "believe" is here double-edged), is not just sincere but properly coherent. It is entirely understandable that Aguilera should fall so much in love with her; the fact that she is a woman of some physical attractiveness is almost irrelevant beside her quality of mind and her humanity.

(This entire strand of the novel is superbly handled; as Aguilera falls in love with Father Veronica he sees her with progressively greater clarity. Initially all he sees is the packaging: she is a "striking woman" rather than any great beauty. Later she is fairer by far than the stars and all under them; his initially vaguely carnal inclinations intensify and then become almost unimportant to his love. I cannot easily recall having seen, in any form of fiction, this process of tumbling into love so accurately and honestly depicted.)

Contrasted against Veronica's faith is Aguilera's atheism; with a sweetness of thought, the two worldviews are found not incompatible: Veronica's belief system may not be valid, because its axioms are not valid, yet it has full validity as a model of reality. This causes us to think – as it certainly causes Aguilera to think – about the status of his own atheism: does it reflect the truth, or is it merely another model? His own axioms are being shredded by the presence and nature of the alien starship; he clings to them, regardless, despite realizing that perhaps they are as faith-bound as Father Veronica's.

Also of great interest is the writing style. To generalize, the mode of writing used in the modern "literary" novel is one that seems designed to distance the reader from any direct involvement, as if storytelling (an art shameful, because millennia-old) were the antithesis of fiction. Russo nonetheless deploys this mode; his doing so should clash wildly with the parameters – with the
raison d'être
– of storytelling in general and of hard sf in particular, yet it works superbly well. Aguilera and the rest work, as characters, even better because you have to grope to reach them; the action sequences work at least doubly well because so understated.

At one level, this is an outstanding piece of hard sf. But the book is much more than that: it has subtexts below subtexts below subtexts. It's the kind of book that people pin you to the bar about at parties; it's the kind of book that academics will argue over; it's the kind of book you'll start off reading with the expectation of some Sense of Wonder and discover you never before fully understood what the expression "Sense of Wonder" actually meant; it's the kind of book that would make a marvellous movie ... but a movie after the watching of which the cognoscenti would say: "You thought
that
was good? Wait'll you read the novel ..."

—Infinity Plus

Drive

by James Sallis

Poisoned Pen, 158 pages, hardback, 2005

If you're going to start to play tricks with the styles and conventions of noir fiction, you have to be pretty certain you know what you're doing and why you're doing it. Although in general I'm a great fan of James Sallis's work, I found that his new revisionist-noir novella
Drive
fell down on both counts. The tale could have been told far better without all the undoubtedly clever but soon irritatingly confusing flashbacks: there was no need for the telling of the tale to have been made artificially convoluted; and, even if there had been, the execution is fumbling.

The story's in fact pretty straightforward. The central protagonist, Driver, is good at only one thing: driving cars, at which he's not just good but superbly good. For this reason he has become a movie stunt-driver while also developing a lucrative sideline as a confidential driver for criminals, or even as a getaway driver in the perpetration of heists. Inevitably, the seedier side of his life begins to take over, however hard he attempts to distance himself psychologically from the crimes: he's not in fact a criminal, he persuades himself, just a driver-for-hire who takes on commissions from whoever might offer them.

But then one day a robbery goes not just wrong but spectacularly, inexplicably wrong. It soon becomes evident to Driver that it was always intended to be that way, that the robbers were set up as patsies for the furtherance of an agenda at whose purposes he can only hazily guess. The sole survivor of the "tidying up" operation and hunted by the shady masterminds of this crime, he decides his only possible means of self-preservation is to take the fight to the foe, which he does with lethal effect ... discovering to his slow surprise as he does so that in fact he's superbly good at two things, not merely one.

As you'd expect from Sallis, the writing, read from one page to the next, is gorgeous. Where the novella disappoints is, as noted, in the structure. Noir fiction is often very clever indeed, but tales in this genre lose their effectiveness if they wear their cleverness on their sleeve.
Drive
does, and very ostentatiously does. That is its failing. At the same time, I can see how it would make a wonderful movie,* because the plot

[* 2011 note: And, sure enough, into a movie it was duly made:
Drive
(2011), directed by Nicholas Winding Refn and starring Ryan Gosling as Driver.]

itself, sans the pretentiousness, is a great, near-archetypal tale.

—Crescent Blues

Quietus

by Vivian Schilling

Hannover House, 600 pages, hardback, 2002

You've all read or watched the story about the small group of people who, through some trivial quirk of circumstance, fail to get killed in an air crash but are thereafter pursued by the Angel of Death who wants to put Heaven's accounting straight by bumping them all off.

Well, that's what this long novel is about – and if it were practically any other novel on the theme I almost certainly wouldn't bother reviewing it. However, with any standard theme in fiction there comes along, every now and then, a novel which seems to be
the
definitive treatment; and
Quietus
, I maintain, is it for this particular plot.

It's a very long book (small print on nearly 600 big pages) but it's utterly absorbing, and never for a moment does its plot display any signs of tiredness. Schilling has done her homework on the subject of the Angel of Death, and it shows. Moreover, her central characters aren't just the usual stereotypes – not a scantily clad co-ed among them. These are real people, with genuine rather than stereotyped problems concerning booze, their marriages, their feelings towards others, their perceptions of their inadequacies, and so on. This extends even to the particular Angel of Death who's been charged with disposing of the main protagonist, Kylie O'Rourke, and with whom she establishes a loving and intimate relationship; it feels odd to find myself typing this, but Schilling's Angel of Death is not the standard two-dimensional nemesis.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and would have done so even more had it not been for the intrusion of countless small editorial and proofreading errors – "sanctity" for "sanctuary", "peak" for "peek", "may" for "might", "eminent" for "imminent" ... One can only hope that Schilling has had stern words with her publisher so that these blemishes will be eliminated from the paperback edition.

—Crescent Blues

Louisiana Breakdown

by Lucius Shepard

illustrated by J.K. Potter, foreword by Poppy Z. Brite, afterword by J.K. Potter

Golden Gryphon, 145 pages, hardback, 2003

Somewhere in Louisiana, USA – or, to be more accurate, in the country called American Gothic – is the small town of Grail, filled with drunks, the jobless, bigots and centuries-old tradition. More centuries than there have been white human beings here, it seems, for the town's central tradition is that of the May Queen. Every twenty years, as part of a deal done with The Good Gray Man, the folk of Grail must appoint a ten-year-old girl as the new May Queen; she will, it is believed, draw all the town's bad luck to her during her period of tenure.

The current May Queen is Vida Dumars, and her reign will end tomorrow when the Good Gray Man comes to claim her as his bride. She has no thought of bucking her fate until drifting into town comes guitarist Jack Mustaine. As he slowly pieces together the town's – and Vida's – secret, the pair become lovers, and the dream dawns in Vida of running far, far away with him and escaping the Good Gray Man ...

Brite's foreword to this short novel tells us, helpfully, that unless we're from Louisiana we won't really "get" this tale; Lucius Shepard must be wondering who his friends are. Be that as it may, this Scottish reader felt he was "getting" it OK; the dialect is easy enough to follow after a few brief moments of splashing around in it, uncertain if one will sink or swim. And that's an apt metaphor, because the richness of the swirling prose Shepard manages to draw from the dialect does make the experience of reading this tale feel like a languorous swim in waters that are placid but, one is aware, deceptively so: powerful currents hide below.

There are many moments of incidental sweetness here. The jukebox in the local bar, Le Bon Chance, contains records of past and future events. Nedra Hawes, the local psychic, seems at first a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman, but makes no secrets about her pretty young black girlfriend, Arlise – who's one of the most winning characters in the book. Local Sicilian petty crime boss Joe Dill has an outrageously sexy Vietnamese concubine, Tuyet, who may or may not be a witch and, indeed, may or may not control Dill.

Like all Golden Gryphon's output, this is a beautifully produced book, although Potter's interior illustrations, while nice enough, seem nothing special. The character portrayals are enjoyable, with Grail itself the most central character of all; and the story serves well. But what really holds one is the writing – this sea of words in which one swims.

Louisiana Breakdown
is a slight book, but a very engaging one.

—Infinity Plus