best fiction books 2014

Ten best books published in 2014. In no particular order.

Tigerman, Nick Harkaway

Orfeo, Richard Powers

Eyrie, Tim Winton

Fourth July Creek, Scott Henderson

Munich Airport, Greg Baxter

In the Approaches, Nicola Barker

Us Conductors, Sean Michaels

Gretel and The Dark, Eliza Granville

Prayers for the Stolen, Jennifer Clement

The Wind is not a River, Brian Payton

best non-fiction books 2014

Time to wrap up the year. Only two categories this year, fiction and non-fiction, with comics and poetry absent. In no particular order.

Sibilant Fricative, by Adam Roberts
Mass Incarceration on Trial, by Jonathan Simon
Violins of Hope, by James Grymes
My Salinger Year, by Joanna Rakoff
The Getaway Car, by Donald Westlake

The New Jim Crow

Michelle Alexander
The New Jim Crow

The New Press, 2012

Every once in a while comes a book that says some things obvious to everyone out loud. Sometimes even obvious things should be said out loud. But the thing with this books is that everything written inside it is not obvious and said out loud these things will open someone’s eyes.

Indeed, The New Jim Crow starts with the premise that sounds more like a conspiracy theory than a solid social theory written by a legal scholar and civil rights lawyer. Inside America exists caste system, where an undercaste is black and brown people of America. Instead of slavery and racial segregation, Americans now have a caste system, that is quite legal. Instead of Jim Crow, America now has New Jim Crow.

Living outside of US, I can only judge the American social system by that information US media supplies us. Imagery presented by media mostly shows a safe and comfortable life for whites and not so rosy life for blacks. But, as media hastens to explain, it is only so because blacks themselves chose this life, chose criminal path. Til this day we read and watch “horror stories” about black men, their drug usage and their violence.

Yet this image has no similarities with the image of America presented in this book. If even for Americans it will be a shock to learn about the real state of things, then what about us, on the other side of the pond? It seems like everything starts with the image. No matter how things stand, the only that matters is how they are presented. Michelle Alexander, step by step, paints a bleak picture. After the WWII African Americans, it seemed, received their freedom and civil rights, finally. Yet it was only a start, a beginning of the end. In the new era where an image dominates it was very important to create needed image. After that, this image will start working without additional efforts. People holding power in a matter of decades created that image, of a black man who is a threat, who is an animal, who is a merely life form, not a proper human being. With racism successfully remained in the past (or so they said), it was only with the new image government could control the masses and win the minds of those who were in doubt.

And the image has been sold, successfully. African Americans remained the same, yet he was labeled a criminal. Not only labeled, first he (as the author focuses on males on her book) was made a criminal, then labeled, as an animal, and then excluded from society.

Alexander explains on all the levels how the government succeeded. First the courts, then public image, then war on drugs, then mass incarceration, then ghettos, then total exclusion from American society, discarded as trash. The author makes strong arguments, especially on war on drugs and legal system, and it is difficult to imagine one who would not be persuaded by these arguments. It is always easier to control a large layer of people when this group of people are rounded up and sent to ghettos or, worse, to prisons.

When a large part of African Americans is in prisons or in ghettos stripped of basic rights and privileges, how could we say that USA is a democratic society? When governments makes its own citizens mere life forms, how can we say that it is a democracy? Democracy is based on equality for all, not for those chosen selectively.

The New Jim Crow is a truly eye-opening book. It changes your views on today’s America and African Americans.

Mass Incarceration on Trial

Jonathan Simon
Mass Incarceration on Trial

The New Press, 2014

America worries about its citizens. America wants to reduce crime, separating those who have comitted crime from those who are victims or can become victims. The method of the separation the US have chosen is imprisonment everyone who poses even a slightest threat to society.

Mass incarceration has become panacea for all crime related illnesses in America. Prisons lose their rehabilitation status, turning into human warehouses storing people as objects that have lost all their value for the government.

Jonathan Simon in his study of mass incarceration writes that the society and then government views on crime and crime prevention toward incapacitation changed their views on prisons significantly only recently. On an example of California, Simon shows how a state with moderately small amount of prisons during only two decades had made a big step forward to a prison state, where “more than twenty new prisons [were built] during 1980s and 1990s”. The state abandoned all rehabilitation programs for prisoners, adapted new harsh sentensing laws, made parole impossible, with the only solution in mind – incarceration. The newly builded prisons couldn’t catch up with the number of newly convicted, who received long sentences even for smaller crimes. It had led to overcrowding in prisons, that itself had become the source of another issue for prison inmates. The conditions of their imprisonment worsened. While the official theory was that prisons are safe for those who are unsafe to society, in real life prisoners suffered from absence of elemental medical treatment. The prisons became places of torture tucked away from our eyes.

Examining new trial cases, regarding mass incarceration and prisons conditions unfeat for any human, especially those who suffer from mental and chronic illnesses, Simon find the reasons as to why California and the rest of America found this brutal and most unhuman way to treat persons who were found guilty of comitting a crime. I avoided in the previous sentence the notion that state found a new way to prevent crime by building new prisons. In this book Simon (and he’s not the first) argues that it’s been established already that there is no direct relevance between crime rate and incarceration rate.

Thus we should regard the reasons that caused and started mass incarceration across USA. In one of the strongest arguments Simon explains how society viewed an ordinary criminal, the two most common types being black violent revolutioner and white serial killer hunting in suburbs. It seemed there were no other way to be saved from crime, other than to place every person who committed any crime possible in prison for the longest term possible. Simon convincingly argues that it is the government itself who sold the society this idea about incorrigable criminals, and then after society in fear changed its views toward the need of a harsher punishment, the government simply used society’s approval of mass incarceration.

Building prisons is the simplest way out, also being not the cheapest one. Mass incarceration requires minimum brain work, as prisoners are treated as things that are needed to be placed inside cells, and then forget about them, for life if possible. Rehabilitation, working with people, treating human beings with dignity they’re entitled to, this is a hard work. Government “treat(s) members of the human race as nonhumans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded”. For a few decades government was focused on the materialistic side of the problem, being interested in contruction, safety inside of prisons for prison officials, supermax blocks and whole prisons.

Simon slightly touches one, as it seems for me, important point: the new prisons were considered as safe places for work of prison officials in the first place, and only in the second as a safe place for prisoners. Prison officials viewed prisoners as dangerous species, animals who deserved to be treated as such. Therefore all in prisons was made so that prison officials could feel and work safely inside prison walls.

While completely forgotten and deprived of decent medical treatment and opportunities for education, communication and rehabilitation, prisoners struggled all these years. The prison population grew, the average age of prisoners raised, the suicide rate among prisoners high as ever, and only recent litigation cases drew attention of media and social scientists to the issue of total incapacitation.

Simon delves into three most important cases, where whole population of several Califotnia prisons demanded the right to medical treatment and human conditions in prisons. During these cases, it was found that mass incarceration leads to a violation of Eighth Amendment. The Brown vs. Plaza court’s recommendations on reducing prison population is only a start. The three cases examined in this book initiated the end of mass incarceration. The government still fights this decision, yet there were some progress already made.

Mass Incarceration on Trial is a superb study of American penal system, its issues and the possible ways to solve them. It a book for prison freaks and for those who studies law.

Tigerman

Nick Harkaway
Tigerman

William Heinemann, 2014

“ON THE STEPS of the old mission house, the Sergeant sat with the boy who called himself Robin, and watched a pigeon being swallowed by a pelican.”

The Sergeant himself is on his way to become a local Batman, who as one would have guessed from the title, will be called Tigerman. The boy will remain the boy, though the Sergeant will find a name for him closer to the end of the novel. As a pair, the Sergeant and the boy fight evil of a undefined type, since the source of evil is often uncleared, as it often is if it’s a matter of global politics where good and evil not easily recognizable. As just local people, and on the island of Mancreu everyone is local and alien from somewhere else, the Sergeant and the boy are hardly in need of names. They remain symbols, of a wanderer, wounded and faithful to the Crown, being an army vet, semi-retired, and of a child in need of a proper parent, or so it seems.

The heroes are introduced at the beginning, and the place also plays a significant role in the book. Mancreu has no proper government, being a former colony in post-colonial time when it already doesn’t matter who governs whom. “In theory, of course, the British presence here had been withdrawn three years ago, claims of sovereignty having been yielded to the NATO and Allied Protection Force on Mancreu, NatProMan.” The Sergeant serves here a role of an observer, and there is nothing really to observe, except to keep your routine, eat, talk with the boy. The Sergeant is in position when he just needs to do nothing until the island is liquidated, and the rumors going from the start of the novel have it that the island will be eventually destroyed. There will come Leaving time, and one just ups and goes home.

The official reason for destroying Mancreu is its dangerousness to the rest of the world. The island has mutant bacteria somewhere around it, and it needs being stopped from potential future spreading. While the island is still functioning (and no one asks locals whether they want their home demolished), it remains a strange and lawless place, where shady deals are going. And soon the Sergeant finds himself first in the role of a country detective, and then of Tigerman.

It can seem that the fantastic element of Tigerman masks behind not so fantastic theory about dangerous island. This element is obscured by the rest not so fantastic stuff. In fact, Tigerman reads like a work of fantastic genre. Superhero fights and mysterious women, known only by name legendary villain are all part of the atmosphere, and this unforgettable atmosphere makes it read like an adventerous novel with fantastic elements inside. It is enormously entertaining, remaining thoughtful and heartbreaking. Bat(Tiger)man on an aboriginal island saves the world, with a touch of international intrigue, what else do you need?

It is not all BANG and BING, though. Harkaway is pretty realistic in depicting so called Third World problems. And the tension between a grown man imagining himself as a father and a boy in need to be fathered and their shyness about their thoughts and emotions on that create careful examinations of human feelings. The novel asks, are adult and child equal in their bond, or is it always unbalanced relationship? Who manipulates whom?

Prepare yourself for a wild ride. It’s one of the most poignant SF books I’ve read in years.

The Dog Stars

Peter Heller
The Dog Stars

Headline Review, 2012

Hig, a pilot and the hero of this novel, lives in an abandoned hangar with his beloved dog Jasper and dangerous companion Bangley. Nine years ago, a fever of unknown origin wiped out almost the entire population of the planet, yet leaving some alive who carry now the disease called just The Blood. After losing to epidemic fever wife Melissa and an unborn child, Hig left the city in Colorado and moved to the hills, where all this time he’s been fighting for survival.

Together with Bangley they equipped the perimeter - a small piece of land, which became their refuge. On their land Hig and Bangley have built an observation tower, have armed to the teeth (for that is responsible mostly Bangley, an ex-SEAL, in his spare time working on his weapon arsenal) and now they defend themselves from time to time wandering on their territory strangers. Hig makes rounds on his old plane “a 1956 Cessna 182, really a beaut”, watching the area from the sky, searching for strangers, as well as game and possible supplies, while Bangley watches the perimeter that at any moment could be invaded by "guests". Jasper serves as a night alarm, sleeping side by side with his master. The dog is old, has been with Hig before the fever, but still not in a bad shape.

Heller, who before this book has written about the adventures and travelings around the globe, debuted with a novel. The author immediately went on the genre territory, namely the post-apocalyptic science fiction, certainly causing with that the displeasure and open envy among SF writers. Because science fiction writers don’t write so well. Some do, of course, but it's a small percentage. Let any publishing house throw «The Dog Stars» to its science fiction imprint, and other novels of this genre will look poor, gray and dull, at least stylistically.

And it is not the fault of SF writers that they write that bad, it is Heller’s fault (or achievement) that he writes that well. In building fantastic entourage he, on the contrary, is not too skilled. The novel’s premise is familiar even to those who have not read fiction at all. Heller does not invent the wheel, just takes those wheels that have already been invented, and just put them on his bike, as it is convenient to him. Heller is not particularly interested to play in virologist: there was an epidemic (big deal!), almost the entire population died out (so what?), someone got infected and become a carrier of a strange plague (who cares?), a global warming started - what now, contrary to logic, to make a hero to get behind the microscope and make him study different science fields at once? In conclusion, the author of the novel makes a few vague allusions to the origin of the disease, by the time that's already not important.

What’s important is, Heller has written a book that reads in one breath, you do not want to close it, you beg the author to tell something else, some small detail from the protagonist’s past. The Dog Stars is the imposition of a skillful adventure about the survival out of civilization on a modernist style with the elements of post-apocalyptic fiction and men’s fiction about the search for love. And it makes no sense to look for where one layer ends and the other begins, as they lapped each other.

Depopulating the planet using a fantastic element, Heller makes a perfect background for his drama - the natural world, where people seem to have already become superfluous, but still clinging to existence. For nine years Hig lived only by relying on a fading memory, and almost extinguished hope. Why does one needs a life if the world around you died? Just for the sake of life itself? Having made his hero a pilot of the aircraft, Heller drew an allegory between Hig and birds, but of that sort that is bad with flying: Hig is attached to his piece of land, which gives him at least some security, and missions only tease his imagination and are part of self-defense. The hero can fly, but can not fly away - no place and no need.

As an extraordinary traveler, Heller with unprecedented skill transfers his knowledge of nature and on a page. It's one thing to conquer the rivers and peaks, and the other to describe it as if you the reader plunge into nature, too. To do this you need experience - even if you're a stylist's number one, sitting on a chair somewhere in a residential area of Chicago, you can’t imagine and can not describe all that so authentically as it does Heller.

If Heller’s spirit is closer to Jack London, the style is closer to the experimental prose. The novel is written as a stream of consciousness, where past and present merge, and mangled vocabulary, poeticized in some places. The storyteller prior to the epidemic wrote prose and poetry, perhaps, hence originates the style of The Dog Stars. Remained essentially without writing (the only example in the book is the scene where Hig writes a warning to farmers), Hig initially focuses on spoken language, which has its own laws.

The Dog Stars deserves the highest praise.

The Ice Cream Man

Katri Lipson
The Ice Cream Man

AmazonCrossing, 2014

Before us is a fine example of European metaliterature which playing with the themes of human identity and WWII.

The book begins with the shooting of the film in the postwar years in the Czech Republic, where a man and a woman during the German occupation are fleeing the country, but their train is canceled because of the explosion on the bridge, and they are forced to stay in a small village (on the outskirts of a city).

An unnamed actress plays Esther Vorszda and an actor Martin Jelinek plays her husband, Thomas Vorszda. In fact, Esther and Thomas are not the husband and wife to each other, they were forced to create their new identities to not draw attention by the Nazis. They made up their new biographies, and who these two are actually remains unknown.

The shooting happens on location, besides an unnamed actress and Martin a very limited number of actors and movie crew participates in the filmong, including the owner of the house, who gave a pair of fugitives a roof, and a one-legged man who appears closer to the film ending.

In the second part, the author presents us with the film’s plot, which is, perhaps, not a film, but a real story that happened. Thomas and Esther, the people hiding behind these names, come by taxi to the train station, where from they have to take the train and leave. The train is canceled, Thomas decides to stay and wait, the taxi driver is sent back, and Thomas and Esther drag their large suitcases on themselves. Thomas negotiates with a widow, Madame Nemcova, to stay with her for a month.

While the English-language authors chew the last bones of war stories and suck the remaining tissue while looking for suitable candidates for their war melodramas, European writers set themselves more sophisticated and complex tasks, seeking first of all new approaches to the form, not the content.

A Finland native, Lipson tries to destroy all canons of war melodrama as weel as family saga stretching from World War II. The plot of the film that is laid in the basis of the book is fairly standard, even on the contrary, devoid of frills. Two fugitive hiding from persecution live in a widow’s house, then the man disappears (in another meta-layer there is a hint of the reason for his disappearance - he did not run away, but went for the forged documents, and was killed), and the woman is left alone, then becomes the wife out hopelessness to a decent man, whom she doesn’t love.
Thу story is very touching, and if it is only that, a touching, simple sketch of the past. On this layer, let’s call it a narrative layer, Lipson puts two more. The first chapter makes it clear to us that behind the masks of Esther and Thomas the actors are hiding, we assume it. We watch their play, know that it seems to be unreal, the director makes it grim. This layer is adjacent to another, pseudo-actor-ish: Thomas and Esther behind the masks are the real people who have to become actors, to reluctant fictional husband and wife. The price of an error will not be a verbal abuse of the director, but death. Accordingly, never knowing for sure what is in front of us, just a movie or reality, we see how these actors play two strangers who play two people who are close to each other, husband and wife.

A reader accustomed to easy, straight narrive may not like such complexness. What's next is a little easier, though again you need to keep in mind that the events may be real, but it may be some rehearsal to a shooting. Lipson extremely quickly replaces generations, time from post-war changes to post-Soviet, and then gets to the present day. Jan’s plot line sheds some light (actually only obscures which is the same thing) on Esther’s past. Lipson again throws us between layers: Jan could be Esther’s son, and could be the son of the actress who played Esther.

In any case, it does not matter when the film moves to our days, where the final major focus is on the granddaughter of Esther Gunilla, a strange creature either going crazy, or by inheritance becoming an actress.

Our memory casts doubt on the past, it is what Lipson wants to say. Something hiding inside us is transmitted from generation to generation. And yet there is a gap between generations, judging by the structure of The Ice Cream Man. The book is as if glued together from two different novels, and the final cut is a little bit rough. Two parts - the life of Esther and the life of Jan and his daughter - have only a few points of intersection. The thread of the past is lost somewhere in the middle. Both parts are original and charming, they do not have enough sequence between them.

The novel is beautifully translated into English, its prose is elegant and devoid of Britanisms which often spoil the historical novels. Lipson surprises with her book and her courage in fighting cliches.

Rough Cut

Ed Gorman
Rough Cut

St. Martin’s Press, 1985

Michael Ketchum is a partner in a small advertising agency. Michael seems to be the only one who really works there, not only looking after the artistic side of the business, but also taking part in the creative process. The other advertisers, starting with Michael’s partner Denny Harris, are preoccupied by different activities: looking for mistresses on the side, stabbing each other in the back, scheming, drinking during working hours, at best, doing nothing.

Michael suspects that his partner Harris keeps the biggest client wife's named Clay Traynor as a mistress. If this secret will emerge, Traynor is likely to stop working with Michael’s firm, and the firm simply will go bankrupt. Michael hires a sleaze private detective to gather evidence on Harris. With photos from a private detective Michael goes to his partner to confront him and put pressure on him. In the Harris’ house the corpse of his partner greets Michael. Michael, scared, doesn’t report crime to the police, and soon someone kills another agency employee and another. Michael must find the killer before Michael will be the next.

After Rough Cut Gorman will write a few dozen books, but in 1985 this will be his debut. The circle of the novel's characters are only employees of an advertising agency, and the action rarely spreads beyond the office and apartment of the protagonist. This makes the mystery local, and the atmosphere stuffy. Everyone is a suspect, and the suspects die one by one. Could the killer be a secretary? The agency employs envious cowards and careerists that even secretaries are not to be excluded.

The intrigue expertly is stretched until the very end, and I can assure you, you will not guess who is a killer.

I also quite enjoyed the novel because of the presence of a bad private detective. If usually private detective is a knight on a white horse, a hard man, walking down the mean streets, and in these cases invariably P.I. is a main protagonist, in this book the private detective Stokes is an aahole, blackmailer and sissy, and not the main character either. I have not seen such disgusting private investigator in a long time.

Gorman’s prose is another pleasant surprise, not rough cut at all, the refined product.

«After my divorce, and before I felt much like falling in love again, I spent many evenings alone in my bachelor apartment feasting on Stouffer's frozen dinners and using self-pity the way other people used drugs. I also got into the habit of approximating a sensory-deprivation tank by sitting in the bathtub, throwing back several gins, and coming dangerously close to dozing off in the hot water.

Which is where I was three-and-a-half hours after somebody knocked me out at Denny Harris's house.»

This is conscious, adult, men's prose, surprisingly assured for the detective genre. Rough Cut is a pleasant debut.

Donnybrook

Frank Bill
Donnybrook

William Heinemann, 2013

«Donnybrook was a three-day bare-knuckles tournament, held once a year every August. Run by the sadistic and rich-as-fuck Bellmont McGill on a thousand-acre plot out in the sticks. Twenty fighters entered a fence-wire ring. Fought till one man was left standing. Hordes of onlookers-men and women who used drugs and booze, wagered and grilled food-watched the fighting. Two fights Friday. Four Saturday. The six winners fought Sunday for one hundred grand.»

At this tournament on a remote farm, sooner or later the protagonists of the debut novel by Frank Bill will gather to settle things. Someone will come as a fighter, someone as an onlooker, and someone will come here for other reasons.

The main characters of the novel are the fighters, in the sense that they are ready to defend what is theirs and fight for what had been taken away from them. Coincidentally, four of these characters are also bare-knuckles fighters that can compete for the top prize. Jarhead robbed a gun shop to get money for the fee for the tournament, and only wants to feed his family with the money won («I's hungry, Dada») and to cure an ill back of his wife. Angus and his sister Liz before the tournament won’t divide rightfully cooked drugs and will scatter in different directions, Liz in the company of another fighter named Ned, they as a team will sell meth during the tournament. Deputy Sheriff Whalen rushes for Donnybrook to get revenge. A Chinese named Fu will look at the tournament for the people who owe money to his boss.

Each character has its own motivation, everyone arrives at Donnybrook as to some place where the dreames come true, and by the start of the tournament there will be several lives taken by each main character. Personality of these characters should represent the greatest interest to us, because the tournament itself is crumpled, fistfishts remain in the background, and - spoilers - because of general chaos the tournament will be disrupted, and all that remains of it will become a great slaughter.

Actually, the events preceding the tournament, which reveal the nature of the violent people of Southern Indiana, are the best part of the novel. The closer to the finale, the more boring the novel becomes, despite the seemingly appealing knuckle fights. The problem of the book is just that it becomes non-stop action, and that in itself becomes too much and makes too little sense. With each chapter the heroes’ teeth, heads, kidneys and thighs are kicked in, but they ignore all that, and they like zombies crawl to Donnybrook as if there human flesh awaits them. Instead of a play of characters we get a play of rifles and fists, and dialogues’s semantic sense decreases rapidly («Spit and hollered," Fucking-fuck-fuck-fucker! "»). When everyone is fighting with everyone - it's tiring.

In his short stories from his debut collection Frank Bill saw some big picture. Bill created the mythology of his native land. In those stories were mundane wisdom of a person for whom violence was a form of existence. In Donnybrook the author as if destroys his own mythology. No wisdom here but only a scuffle. All is solved by a gun, there is no difference who you are.

Bill makes no attempt to get to the causes of criminal life in Southern Indiana. One of the characters, Purcell, makes superficial conclusions:

«He was honing an edge. Thinking about what he'd read in the newspaper earlier in the day, about wage cuts and unemployment. How companies across the U.S. were in a slump. Some were sinking while others tried to do more with less. The American way had expired, been lost somewhere. Now it seemed to work in the US just meant you were a number trying to make big numbers for the men above you. And if you could not do it, there was another number that could.»

Ragged style suits the lifestyle of characters:

«A deafening blast erupted from the .30-30's barrel. Half the officer's face opened. He stutter-stepped backward, fell out the doorway. His body spread out like a puppy-soiled rug on the porch, wet and spotted.»

Only the style, too, becomes stale in the second half, turning into a parody of itself:

«Fu sat in the Jeep's passenger seat meditating on needles puncturing skin. Tethered bodies. Inhales and exhales of pleading. Breaking a man's will. Loyalty.»

The first half of the novel, one that recalls the best Bill stories claims the real depth, and the second one is smeared with action bordering on self-parody. Perhaps the best is to re-read Bill’s short story collection.

Anarchaos

Curt Clark
Anarchaos

Ace Books, 1967

The narrator of this story, that is placed in the unidentified future, Rolf Malone, is released from the prison on the Earth and he is on his way to another planet called Anarchaos where the events of the novel will take place. There, on Anarchaos, the narrator’s brother Gar Malone worked, and before his death he has written to Rolf to come to Anarchaos. Now Gar has died under suspicious circumstances, and Rolf is eager for some answers, for instance, whom his brother worked for and how exectly his brother died.

Right after his arrival on Anarchaos, Rolf is warned that Anarchaos and its habitants are dangerous, and it will be better for his health if he goes back to Earth. These words only fuel the protagonist’s need for answers: he checks his luggage at the station and hails the taxi to get to the town where the corporation his brother worked for is situated. During the drive, feeling that the taxi man sooner or later will kill him, Rolf strikes first, killing the driver and makes his way to the corporation tower alone.

There representatives of the one of the largest corporations on the planet greet Rolf, tell him that his brother was killed during an ambush when Gar was on a survey, and while Gar was killed, his guard survived, and he’s the only one who can provide some answers to Rolf.

Rolf goes to the shack where this guard lives, and there someone ambushes them, killing the guard who hasn’t had time to tell anything about Gar and wounding Rolf. Malone starts his trip to hell.
I have read this novel not to remind myself what state SF had been in during 60s. Curt Clark is a pen name of Donald Westlake, and Anarchaos is his the only SF novel, and I am slowly grinding through Westlake’s entire catalogue.

First, let me say that I hugely enjoyed it. It’s a good novel, perhaps not as good as 361, with which they share more than a few similarities, still it’s quite powerful piece of writing.
That’s said, I wouldn’t say that Anarchaos is truly SF novel, it is a thriller dressed in science fiction clothes. But first things first.

Anarchaos is one of the future Earth colonies, where a few generations of colonists had already changed. On every colony there are embassys of the Union Comission, United Nations-like Earth organization, only unlike its earth counterpart not interfering with colonists activities. Every colony can choose any of the existing government systems and live under this system. Anarchaos colonists remenbered “an obscure Rus¬sian nihilist named Mikhail Bakunin” and his writings, and made his theoretic ideas real on Anarchaos. Therefore the colony dove deep into anarchy, smoothly flowing into chaos. The only anarchy-free places became embassys of the UC.

The planet itself has a few differences with the Earth: Anarchaos doesn’t spin, so there is not a change of day and night there, one part of the planet is Sahara-hot under the sun called Hell, another is dark and cold. The development level on the planet is primitive, early to mid XX century only with scyscrappers.

All that we learn from the first chapters, as part of that Malone tells himself, and another part is a lecture of one of the UC man. Westlake does his infodumping straight away, and not in a subtle way, so for the rest of the story we won’t be distracted from the main plot. Infodumping like this looks too inelegantly, and trick with a lecture is too straightforward.

But does the colony structure play an important role in the book? It does, though not important one. How inventive is Westlake SF writer? Nearly not as much as Westlake the writer per se. We see a distant colony, almost like the Earth, we see people populating this planet, and they are as human as we can be. We see cars, horses, guns, explosives, earth army titles – Westlake just describes Earth. What language do colonists speak? English? Not even without any dialects? Well, there is a bigger difference between accents and dialects between US states than between Earth and Anarchaos. What is that, laziness in the worldbuilding or Westlake’s ignorance? Possibly none of that. He just writes a crime story where a place plays little, very insignificant role.

What I want to say is we can easily imagine a Latin American or African country instead of Anarchaos, and almost nothing will change. An American arrives to Guatemala, to a mineral plant, where his brother died. An American is fed and clothed in the embassy and then goes to the plant. Some thugs from the jungle kidnaps him, he becomes a slave, then he escapes, then he’s soon captured by some General (there are plenty of generals in military states), then he kills a general from this plant, and then another General from another plant. It’ll be the same story. It is a very small bridge between Anarchaos and chaotic republic somewhere on Earth. Blow up a few embassys in African country and there will be chaos (as if there isn’t now).

It should be said, though, that for some plot turns it is important that the action takes place on another planet.

It is a good adventure story, where the premise borrowed from 361, and the middle probably straight from a Grofield novel, where Grofield is in his Lemons-Never-Lie-mode. As SF, the story lacks focus on otherworldliness and scientific details. The only thing from the future here is flights between planets. The rest come from the 60s: paper geographical maps, primitive calculating machines, guns, knives, food. The novel should have been called not Anarchaos, but Archaic-aos, the novel is dated.

As a novel of ideas Anarchaos is far from dated, and it reads as a novel of ideas just fine. Anarchaos could have been called an adventure story with ideas, if that hasn’t been an oxymoron, like Tarzan with brains.

The Leftovers

Tom Perrotta
The Leftovers

St. Martin's Press, 2011

Three years before the events described in the novel, a mysterious phenomenon occurs that is similar to the Rapture, to use a biblical term. Millions of people in an instant just disappear from the face of the earth. Among them are not only faithful Christians, but people of all religions and of various moral behavior. Some take the disappearance for the real Rapture, meaning that those who remain on the earth are judged as unworthy of heavenly life, while others believe that the phenomenon only had common features with the predicted phenomenon from the Bible, but the real Rapture it is not.

After The Sudden Departure, as it is called by some, the government announces the state of emergency, shuts down schools and other institutions, the people mourn the missing, and those who had seen their loved ones disappear, are called The Witnesses.

Grief can last for years across the country, and gradually the United States return to normal. The consequences of a global phenomenon in a small town of Mapleton, New York, are described in the novel. In the center of the story is one family in which oddly enough no one has disappeared. The patriarch of the Garvey family, Kevin, was a successful businessman at the time of the Rapture-like phenomenon, his wife Laurie was a housewife, and two children were students - the eldest son Tom in college and daughter Jill in high school.

From chapter to chapter, we move from one family member to another. The global phenomenon has splot split the family, and every family member in their own way is trying to find his/her place in almost new world.

Tom Perrotta has used in his book sci-fi device, and, like many mainstream writers treated to a fantastic device and its properties with disrespect and disdain.

Placing in the base of the story a phenomenon of religious matter, Perrotta surprisingly spends very little time answering the proper questions of religion. Perrotta chose an interesting approach to a global phenomenon: not giving a full explanation of the departure, the author left his world and the characters in it to the freedom of interpretation. Characters had all prerequisites for a full discussion of the phenomenon, similar to that described in the Bible. Perrotta does not even take the side of the supporters of the biblical version, nor on the side of the rationalists, he generally rejects any discussion of the origin of the departure. The most important thing for Perotta was make something so erase as many people from the face of the Earth as possible, while the reason for this disappearance was of the minor importance. So, instead of the Rapture in the book it could have been any epidemic or meteor rain. Not a word was said about the research scientists, nor the statement of high rank religious people (Pope, Orthodox Patriarch etc), respectively, we do not know about the socio-economic implications of global disappearance of countless people. What impact it does on demography, economics, world politics - it seems like nothing has changed.

And even if you convince yourself that Perrotta was interested not in the phenomenon itself, but in what was after, the picture still looks fragile. After such religiocentric phenomenon we see three options for the development of the world in terms of religion. Among all the official representatives of the Catholic Church we see only one priest, highly pissed at the world and God, bringing risen to the path of revenge. The priest began to argue that God took the sinners and betrayed those who truly believed. Is this priest representative? Probably not, but we do not find others, and it is hard to say whether all priests were so bitter that have fallen to the level of gossipers and blackmailers, or just this one turned out rotten.

Two other religious paths are the religious groups, early on quite different with dissimilar structure, and by the finale, we see the corruption and lies within both these newly formed cults.
Church of Holy Wayne is a typical example of the American sects, they usually do not even need a reason for existence. They were there, and Perotta just uses the template of the structure and motives of the already existing sects. Other religious groups, The Guilty Remnant, at first seems like an original idea, with their spying and remaining silent. Perrotta does not develop the theme: the cult was created as if by itself, its structure remains opaque, it does not set any goals, and all that we see is the work of lower-level sectarian and their recruitment methods. By the final sectarian motives become clear: to gather the property and finances of sectarians, choose the most persistent, testing their strength on the ability to kill.
While staying at the dorm Laurie and Meg relate only to those down-to-earth conversations, completely ignoring the issues of religion and faith. Both women chose to stay withing the cult not as a possible way to salvation, but as an opportunity to fence from the world. You can put into question the motives of the two women as they both have not lost the loved ones during the departure. Their families remain on the Earth, and Laurie, if act by logic, should have by all means hold her family together, to support her husband and children, to consider herself lucky that an unknown cataclysm did not violate the integrity of their family.

Perrotta on the contrary is as if blaming Kevin that he hasn’t joined the Guilty Remnant, and sympathizes with and endorses the choice of Laurie.

Novels of ideas too are often elevated and distant from reality. It is a pity that Perrotta could not squeeze in «The Leftovers» any resonable ideas, focusing on daily life of the characters. With the same success, the book could have been written about 9/11: before us is a soap opera about a family where everyone is struggling with the pain and despair in his own way. I do not know whether Perrotta conceived the novel as the basis for the HBO series or rights have been sold after the book was published, but The Leftovers reads as a TV series on paper. It has quite diverse storylines to please everyone, here is enough melodrama and sex (heterosexual and lesbian), there is sufficient amount of details so that the novel had meat on the bones. The problem lies in the fact that Perrotta as if from the very beginning knows how it ends, and simply writes scenes, separate episodes for the show, and he does so without a flame in the heart. Worn style completely denies the story of some colours. Dialog is like a mix between the utterance of banal wisdoms and everyday chitchat. Simply put, the novel lacks some spark, not in the least a stylistic one. For the realist Perrotta is too boring and pat, as a writer with the ideas he lacks his own ideas.

The Leftovers justifies its title: the tastiest pieces have already been eaten, what’s left is the leftovers.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Richard Flanagan
The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Chatto & Windus, 2014

In the center of the novel is an Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans, who during World War II was captured by the Japanese and among other prisoners of war built the Thai-Burma Railway, also known as the Road of Death.

The novel skips across continents and time layers, but the main events can be divided into three groups: the life of Evans before the war in Melbourne, Japanese camp and the post-war period, when Evans even received a certain notoriety.

Dorrigo was the youngest in a family of seven children. He soon lost touch with his brothers and sisters, every member of the family went on their path. He grew up in Tasmania, but later moved to the mainland, to Melbourne, where the six-foot tall Evans enters the university. Dorrigo shows no special abilities to medicine, but still graduates from the university. Since the beginning of the war he was a surgeon being moved to a military camp in Adelaide, where Evans goes through training. Evans marries, has a lover called Amy on the side and flies to Singapore to fight on the side of the Allies.

Evans in Singapore meets with other soldiers from his unit, and when Singapore surrenders to the Japanese army, the Australians are captured. Evans and his colleagues formes a special unit of prisoners, which includes only the Australians. His unit is sent to the construction work, namely for building of the Thai-Burma railway, which will run from Thailand to Burma.

In his novel Richard Flanagan is trying to lay on paper using artistic methods the story of Australians who were stationed at the Japanese POW camp. Perhaps the main problem of the novel is that it is too artistic. Flanagan has a lush style, he now and then inserts a quote from poetry, tends to bold descriptions and refuses to use quotation marks for dialogue. Such stylistic brightness, sometimes even with a touch of poetry, perfectly matches the life of the main character in the civilian world. Dorrigo Evans loves books and women more than anything else. Women like him, and he fascinates them. Evans is bursting with feelings. Despite his obvious sins (Evans does not even cheat on his wife, he acts as if he does not notice her, at least most of his life he did not notice her), Evans is a likeable hero. He is persistent, passionate, honest man of not too many words, and he is understood without words, by both men and women. He seems not to be blamed for his sins. He's like this by nature. Especially because in the novel his wife Ella is a pale shadow, not full-blooded person, and how we can sympathize with her that her husband is a womanizer?

The protagonist’s soul wanderings is the most intriguing part of the book. Whom he will choose and what happened to Evans after the war, these questions claws at us most of all. Colorful prose of Flanagan comes over already colorful with passion "civilian" part of the plot. But for the life in the camp are Flanagan’s colors are not so suitable. Too unnatural it looks, like a circus, not a camp for prisoners of war. Indeed, Flanagan doesn’t know a sense of proportion. Evans and his friends in the camp act like clowns, tirelessly repeat Britanisms «mate» and «rightio», Nakamura tells long tales about the wisdom of the emperor, as if sitting with friends and colleagues drinking tea, and in general it is not like a camp at all, but Chinese, or rather Japanese, circus. Flanagan goes over the top with paints: if everything is so colorful, it may be that all the prisoners do well in the camp? Maybe they were there on vacation and not with their bones the Road was built? The main hero has a horrible diarrhea, but the author depicts.

«He raised a crumbling canvas flap and Dorrigo Evans followed him through the flared nostril of the tent into a stench, redolent of anchovy paste and shit, so astringent it burnt in their mouths. The slimy red flame of a kerosene lantern seemed to Dorrigo Evans to make the blackness leap and twist in a strange, vaporous dance, as if the cholera bacillus was a creature within whose bowels they lived and moved. At the far end of the shelter, a particularly wretched-looking skeleton sat up and smiled.»

A friend of the protagonist is drowning in a pit of waste and Flanagan again uses colorful prose. Thus, this style fails to convey the monotony, the horror and darkness of life in captivity.
In general, Flanagan’s book entertains more than makes us to think. Among the interesting thoughts there is one that the author touches upon in the chapters written from the point of view of the Japanese officers and guards. One of the guards says that it turned out like that: the Japanese, who had committed crimes against the Allies, white people, were sentenced to death and declared war criminals. But at the same time, the Japanese, who bullied and killed other Asians, weren’t even touched. It turns out that the racial-class division was under any conditions and at all times, whether it was war or peacetime.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North stirs the heart, but only at the beginning and at the end. The middle part on life on POW camp is a failure.

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Eimear McBride
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Galley Beggar Press, 2013

The nameless narrator of this convulsing story begins at age two when her brother went to the surgery to remove a brain tumor. The narrator wakes up in the hospital, he sees her bloodied older brother, tries to tell her mother not let her brother be touched.

A close relationship with her brother largely determines a way of life of the girl from the title, from age two to 20 years. The narrator and her brother were born in a Catholic family, about the father it’s known only from the words of the mother that he had died, their mother is pious and cruel as a Christian woman can be cruel, asking ffrom her children humility before God. As a result, there are the constant punishment, beatings, prayers, blind adherence to the precepts of religion.

The brother after surgery eventually becomes retarded, and with a limp. The surgery for the time being saves him from the consequences of the tumor.

The mother rears her daughter and her brother in the severity and the Catholic faith, even though they both do not know the prayers and do not believe in God at all. Children’s grandfather blames her for bad parenting. She did not even thanked her father for sending money when the boy was ill. Only sometimes the mother shows love for her daughter, for example, comforting the girl after she had a nightmare.

The brother, because of his illness, remains largely untouchable (part of the story is written with the frequent use of "you" as a way of addressing to her brother), the narrator gets all the beatings. Until school time girl remains as if in the shadow of her brother, and during school years the narrator is formed, gradually becoming a separate person and not an appendage of the ill brother.

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is anything but convenient, comfortable reading. Moreover, this book is as far as possible from comfortable reading. Hard to imagine a person who in the evening, drinking a mug of tea, rushes to the chair, to enthusiastically read even 10 pages of this novel.

The reason of the caused discomfort lies in form and in content. Stylistically, McBride does not use commas in his novel, and sentences are written so chaotic and convulsive, it will take a long time to find the novel’s rhythm. Even after forty pages there is no adaptation. Each page literally you take by assault. Literally every paragraph requires slow rereading.

McBride uses a narrative technique called stream of consciousness. Streams can be different, coherent and not. This is far from the connectivity and directness. Thoughts of the heroine (and almost everything that happens, happens inside the head of the narrator, the external description is given a minimal amount of text) rush to and fro, stumble, catch up and overtake each other. The heroine seemed to stutter in her mind, sometimes swallowing sentences or pieces of sentences.

Keeping it in mind, the book though doesn’t read as a burden. It reads slowly, but if you really read it, then you catches every word in it. The novel forces the reader to work, with eyes, brain and heart, and if you try to get away from this job, you will not be able to read even a dozen pages. «A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing» is of those books, after which it actually can be said that reading is a hard work.

The story in this book is quite linear (one might even say conservative, as style is experimental). It’s an Irish story of growing up, amid domestic problems, strictly with Catholicism plus heightened sensuality. Again, the reader will not find solace in the story of the lonely girl with the terminally ill brother, a cruel mother and pervert uncle. Realism of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a sharp object penetrating the skin. Reading such prose hurts, not reading probably is even harder.

McBride’s talent lays in that her novel is not an experiment for the sake of the experiment, while reading you are gritting your teeth and congratulating yourself: I'm smart, if I’m reading such intricate prose, - and dreaming for the book to end quickly. This book is a fully formed, finished thing.

Orfeo

Richard Powers
Orfeo

Norton, 2014

Powers's novel tells the story of an elderly avant-garde composer Peter Els, accused of bioterrorism and on the run. In the novel there are the two intertwined plot lines - present, actually where Els hides from the law, and past, which tells the whole story of the life of the composer and DIY-biologist.

The book events begin in 2011 in the noirish tones. Els, who is well over 70, finds his beloved dog dead, panics, dials 911, hangs up, but the police still checks his call. Patrolmen are puzzled by the cause of Els’call and advise to call Animal Control for the proper disposal of dog, noticing Els’ home office, in which the protagonist keeps his tools, flasks, jars with bacteria.

Police notifies the Joint Security Task Force, and two federal agents, who “looked like counterfeit Jehovah’s Witnesses” pay Else a visit, asking him how he set up his home laboratory, what he's doing, what bacteria he’s working on, and then illegally confiscate his incubator for tests. Els hopes that this will be the end to the inquiries, but the next day, returning from a run, he sees outside his home federal agencies vans, Feds searching his house, and a crowd of journalists. Els decides not to voluntarily give up but run, removing a small amount of cash from ATM machine to no longer use a credit card.

Musical title of the novel fortunately does not imply that the novel should be written in musical language, that is a melodic style, that gurgling and strumming, but leads somewhere to the void. Richard Powers’ Orfeo is not a beanbag, designed for public entertainment. Also true that you will not call this an avant-garde novel, despite the genre direction of the protagonist. Novel in this form is quite accessible to the unsophisticated reader. Each chapter has some kind of epigraph, very odd, but that is the end to the experiments with form.

Melody of the novel lies in a different layer. Powers finds a match of the rythmes between the two plotlines of the novel, the past and present. Like a real drummer, the author makes the elements of past and present equal. They may sound one after another, or simultaneously. These lines are of different timbre, but have the overall goal. The present line has alarming notes with noir overtones. Powers took a real case of a homegrown biochemist for adaptation, although if you do not know the whole story it may seem very much like science fiction. This line is not so deep, but it is the driving force of the story and gives you the opportunity to make the book even more full-bodied. Hysteria and obsession with terrorism are exposed in this novel as things dangerous and unpredictable. Intelligence agencies are engaged not in the search and filtering of real terrorists, but in fact they create their own home-grown criminals out of harmless "scientists" (the same applies to bombs makers) to improve their statistics.

The book raises not only relevant, but also the eternal questions. Els’ story is the story of a mad composer, and doomed genius, anda loner trying to remain in eternity. Man creates music, remains alone, and there is no one around to listen to his music. And if you believe the hero of this novel, the music is written not for someone, but for eternity. But eternity is not near enough, and time passes so long. (“The best music says: you’re immortal. But immortal means today, maybe tomorrow. A year from now, with crazy luck.”)

Everything Powers writes about is authentic, no false notes. Biochemistry and music, it would seem, are things that are not compatible, and it is still unlikely to meet a person who understands both. Powers brilliantly passes the test for the plausibility where the whole situation seems to be unplausible.

In Powers’ favor plays his stylistic choice when describing the music. It is basically a mechanical description, the actual technical descriptive process, without heaps of words around music, with a bunch of adjectives and a small share of sense. The main thing is that this choice works. Reading a novel, you feel the greatness of the music created by the protagonist, and the strangeness of his gift.

Orfeo is dear to mind and heart. And the ears, of course.

He Wants

Alison Moore
He Wants

Salt Publishing, 2014

There are novels about the mid-life crisis, and there are ones about crisis of retirement days. The protagonist of the novel, Lewis Sullivan, just like his father Lawrence, worked all his life as a R.E. teacher before retirement. With his father, a teacher of the same subject, they worked in the same school, always causing confusion in the paperwork.

Lewis became a E.E. teacher not because he wanted to, but it turned out so, his father set the example, when, in fact, Lewis wanted to teach chemistry, but after a failed experiment he gave it up.
Lewis did have a lot of what he wanted (and wants still), but all his wants remain just that, wants, no more. He always wanted to live near the sea, and lived all his life in the central part of Britain. He wanted to discuss classic literature with his wife, a librarian, but his wife said that the classics were not her thing. He always wanted to read all the books from his library, and when he started to read them, he found that he had already read them, and now what remains is to re-read them.

Now when Lewis’ wife died, his daughter Ruth comes to visit him every day and brings the soup that Lewis does not want to, but eats anyway not to displease the daughter, and it seems there is no point to looking into the future, as the future doesn’t promise that any longstanding desires will come true.

He Wants, nominally, is a novel, but in fact it is a novel in stories. The structure of the novel is whole – it’s not stories united by common characters, or stories strung on a skewer of the main theme. At the same time, each chapter of the book seems to be a separate story, and each links with the next one so that there is a number of well-proportioned stories, with a logical narrative and a natural finale.

In these chapters/stories, Moore, slowly, introduces us to the main characters. In the center of the book is Lewis, and the rest of the characters get a chapter or two, no more. Each chapter is quite self-sufficient to get the pleasure of reading it as a finished product. And almost every chapter of the novel is a Lewis’ want, his unfulfilled desire, his missed opportunity. Lewis’ dominance is broken with the stories about other characters. Thus, Lawrence Sullivan, the father of the hero, is the source of violent laughter, though suddenly you catch yourself that it is not good to laugh at the old and the sick. Chapters about Sydney, Lewis’ school fiend, is most filled with action, once Sydney appears into Lewis’ life, it becomes clear that it will be he who will shake Lewis’s peaceful life.

He Wants is a novel of small actions, almost idle. The plot is minimal, almost nothing happens. Actually, Moore basically describes what doesn’t happen, or rather, what did not happen. Moore tests her reader: will we be able to sympathize (and empathize with) a person who is an absolute conformist? Life is in our hands, as we hear every day from our elders. But does this passivity, inactivity, stiffness a man flawed, defective, bad, in the end? Lewis was adrift all his life, and didn’t find harmony. Yet he was looking for it and still is looking for it, as the harmony itself seems to avoid him. And how this is his fault?

Lewis, like other characters in the book, is a loner. Moore shares this loneliness with her characters: she writes in the third person, with the explicit presence of the narrator in the text. Her narration is sort of mythic, which is the boo’s chapters look like completed stories.

The end probably will excite and surprise. This possible surprise is one weakness of the novel. In the novel, there are just no clues that would indicate such a finale. Hence, you feel somewhat cheated, the ending something appears like from nowhere, without preconditions leading to it.

In any case, it must be admitted that He Wants as a novel definitely is a success. We want more.

The Golem of Hollywood

Jesse Kellerman, Jonathan Kellerman
The Golem of Hollywood

Putnam, 2014

LAPD Detective Jacob Lev wakes up after a rough night in his apartment with a woman he sees for the first time. She calls herself Mai, goes to take a shower, and then mysteriously disappears. The same day, on Jacob’s doorstep appear two men in suits, Paul and Mel, from the Special Projects department and tell Jacob that he is temporarily transferred to their department, to help with the investigation of a murder. For some time before these events, Jacob, after seven years in homicide, asks his boss to transfer him to a desk job due to depression, and the boss moves Lev to Traffic to work with statistics.

«For most of his adult life, he’d been a high-functioning alcoholic, although sometimes functioning was the operative word, and sometimes it was high. Since his transfer to Traffic, he hadn’t been drinking as much—he hadn’t needed to—and it bothered him that he’d blacked out last night.
Now that he was back in Homicide, he supposed he was entitled.»

Paul and Mel bring Lev to a house in one of the remote areas of Los Angeles. There have been found severed head of a man, a package with vomit and a few words in Hebrew carved in the table’s wood. Woman detective of Indian origin Divya Das at the crime scene explains to Jacob the situation. The body has not been found at the site, there are no signs of a struggle, too, and no other clues. Head of Special Projects (which Jacob has never heard of) Mallick says that Jacob is in charge of the the murder investigation because of his Jewish origin.

After an unsuccessful previous novel Jesse Kellerman, this time in tandem with his more famous father, shoots the bull's eye. The Golem of Hollywood’s genre can be defined as a Jewish novel about a serial killer, but it is better not to define it in any way. It does not fit in any genre framework, although composed of the elements of police procedural, serial killer novel and Biblical apocrypha. A good novel about a serial killer is very hard to write, it is very few people who can do it. The very definition of a serial killer novel has become clichéd. Kellerman Jr. until this book avoided genre conventions, while Kellerman Sr. did quite the opposite – he wrote quite a lot of genre books, unashamedly put them in series, where the number of volumes surpasses two dozens, perhaps. And reading this novel, you guess all the time what parts elements of the book the son wrote, and what the father. I have read, only one Jonathan’s book, but all but one of Jesse’s, so I will not be a good judge, though to me this novel’s style was very Kellerman Jr.-ish. Here we have Jesse’s witty dialogues and his nimble prose. The protagonist Lev here is also the heir to protagonists of Jesse’s previous books, he’s again a strange loner, confused and sometimes funny. Jesse’s father apparently came up with a serial killer plot, police procedural parts and Jewish topic, and theme of fathers and sons was close to both Kellermans.

Main plotline, the police investigation itself, is very intense and very reliable as far as possible considering the supernatural elements. The novel is written in the tradition of Michael Connelly, who also wrote (and writes) deep police procedurals set in Los Angeles. Detective Jacob Lev can be a geek or a daddy's boy, a man with complexes or an alcoholic, but he knows his business. All answers here are not taken from the air, only hard work brings results. Leo uses his head and his legs.

The plot is complicated to the extent. It is not simple, but the simplicity only harms books as this one. And if the novel didn’t have the Jewish line, the novel would already be outstanding. Jewish storyline, apocryphal, is mystical and pretty confusing, not everyone will understand it fully. It helps to understand the events taking place in the present, helping to find answers, but does not give clear answers. As a non-religious person, I was lost in the twists and turns of the Jewish line, and not only lost, but did not understand it.

And this lack of understanding is the understanding itself - understanding of the novel as a whole. «The Golem of Hollywood» deserves comparison with the two other novels, written by Russian writers. These novels are Master and Margarita by Bulgakov and Faculty of unnecessary things by Yuri Dombrowski. In both of these books the main plot line takes place in the present, but there is also a secondary line - the Biblical one. In these books, I did not fully understand the biblical line, but that did not stop to highly praise the contemporary line. The same situation is also with this book: the main line is so good that you can judge the novel considering only this modern part. (However, it is worth noting that the endings in both Master and Faculty are more powerful than "Golem"’s, although I do not think that stylistically Kellerman is weaker than Bulgakov and Dombrowski.) Biblical line gives the depth to the main line, and the entire book makes it something than was never written before.

In this novel, Jesse Kellerman first stepped on the genre territory, but all signs of the genre have been turned on its head. Superb.

What If?

Randall Munroe
What If?

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014

Randall Munroe is the creator of the popular web comic xkcd, and a physicist with a degree, who once worked in NASA. I've never read his comics, and in general would never have guessed that Munroe the comics writer and Munroe the author of this book is the same person, if not the press release from the publisher.

Munroe writes quite unpretentious comics, we can say even amateur, and this simplicity is in many ways very suitable format for this book. Munroe the artist helps Munroe the physicist to illustrate the text blocks. Moreover, some fragments are generally similar to the graphic novel.

Munroe not out of the blue has written this non-fiction. He has for more than a year on his website received weird questions from readers and wrote detailed, reasoned answers to them. Weirdest and even worrying questions (like "How many nuclear missiles would have to be launched at the United States to turn it into a complete wasteland?") have gone unanswered, whether because to the fact that they are weird, or because Munroe could not answer to them, but they are included in the book in separate units, often with a humorous response in the comic form.

The questions that deserve an answer got the most detailed answers with calculations, proofs, experiments and sometimes help from scientists from the respective areas. At first glance, the questions themselves seem silly and unworthy of response. I’ll list some questions:

- What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light?
- If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?
- What would happen if everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?
- In the movie 300 they shoot arrows up into the sky and they seemingly blot out the sun. Is this possible, and how many arrows would it take?

Perhaps, any physicist with proper training can answer these questions,. The problem is that you will not find a solution in a textbook, and you will need to apply your erudition and imagination, to advance even a little closer to the answer.

Since the questions are usually from people who are far from physics, Munroe first sets out the conditions of the problem, and only then begins to consistently solve it. In some questions, you just need to strictly follow the logic, and the answer will come by itself, and in some cases you need to apply some erudition, as there isn’t the only correct answer. The questions themselves are asked by curious people and even geeks, and the book seems to be written just for geeks from science. This does not negate the fact that approximately 90 percent of questions and answers are written in a completely accessible way and will be understood by everyone, from children to senior people. Even if some formulas cause confusion, they can be compensated by pictures.

Not all questions are from the physics. There is a question on mathematics, logic, there are questions from mixed areas. It is important that any of them Munroe treats seriously. That means that the answer to the question will rely on scientific calculations, research, logical assumptions. At the same time, the author is not afraid to joke and even, where possible, jokes heavily, don’t forget that What If? is written for geeks, without humor any geek quickly will be tired.

Well, the most interesting questions are those where Munro in his answers dives into improvisation. The author deliberately think up additional conditions to the problem, expanding his answer, offers the alternative solutions. For example, the question about Lego "How many Lego bricks would it take to build a bridge capable of carrying traffic from London to New York? Have that many Lego bricks been manufactured?". The author obviously enjoys the answer. Initially, he comes up with a floating version of the bridge, then, as a protection against storms, makes the bridge more durable and stable, and then offers a bridge, resting on the sea ground, and finally calculates the cost of the bridge.

In conclusion, Munroe gives an unexpected alternative: why build a bridge when it is possible even for part of the cost to buy the entire real estate in London and ships it to New York?

It is difficult to say whether it is possible to grow wiser after reading this book. It is sure that strange questions start to appear in you head and you want to ask Munroe to answer them.

Violins of Hope

James Grymes
Violins of Hope

Harper Perennial, 2014

The history of the Holocaust in violins - you can describe the contents of this book with this sentence. In six chapters (with a prologue and epilogue) Grymes tells the stories of six violins, and, most importantly, their owners in the days when the Nazis came to power, and during the Second World War. Link between these stories is a violin collector, Amnon Weinstein, who originally made violins and became engaged in their repair, and then went over to collecting them. He created a program in the memory of the victims of the Holocaust called Violins of Hope.

All violins, which will be in the center of the book stories, were in his collection, he also later began collecting stories about these violins. Amnon’s parents in time fled Nazi Germany and escaped to Palestine. Amnon’s father Moshe was a violinist, repair master and music teacher. In Palestine, it was difficult to make a living playing music and giving musical lessons, and Moshe went into commerce, thinking that that thousands of Jews would flock to Palestine with their instruments, and it would be a profitable business, to repair violins.

He gave gis craft to his son, who carefully preserved hundreds of violins that waited for their owners, or at least relatives of the deceased owners.

Grymes starts the history of violins in Nazi Germany from the beginning of the thirties.

Violins of Hope is one of those non-fiction books about people that does not pretend to be fiction. Stories told here speak for themselves, in any language and need no preening. Author Grymes is concise and academically calm. All that happened happened, history has shown what’s what, all sides are known, and there is no need to put pressure on the reader with pity or preaching.

This book is especially good in that: you soak in the will to live, and the author does not even cries till the sore throat to achieve that the whole story come down to us. Grymes has a clean style, and the book even has footnotes.

Musical instruments from the book’s title are only mediums, not violins for the sake of violins. This book is about people, not about violins or music, unless it’s the music of pain and suffering. Violins saved lives and helped to survive and overcome the difficulties almost non-human. At the same time the violin is an an occasion to tell the stories of people, almost all of whom were not even professionals. The whole project "Violins of Hope" allows you to look at the Holocaust at unexpected angles.

The choice of characters in the book, probably, was not accidental. The author would like to give the widest range of victims of the Holocaust, and it worked. Grymes, of course, could not ignore the largest concentration camps with their orcestras, which are known to the public now, and at the same time, Auschwitz and Birkenau are given only one chapter. This is surprising, of course.
Grymes made a large geographic sample, this is another advantage of the book. Here are an almost unknown refugee camp in Mauritius, and the atrocities of the Romanians, and Ukrainian partisans, and Nazism in Norway. As they say, all the facets of fascism.

Grymes easily controls the general historical information. The book is rich in a variety of facts. In Germany during the war there were chemical plants, which produced condoms for the army, and they were called "Sanitary Articles." In Palestine, the Arab uprisings put pressure on the British government as to limit visas for Jews. Those Arabs even blew a ship with refugees, fortunately, the number of deaths was minimal. By the end of the war the heads of the concentration camps almost lost their minds and asked to play the "Internationale."

In addition to these small facts, Grymes is generous with the historical background. Each story is accompanied by a briskly written historical information about the country, a concentration camp atrocities of the Nazis and their allies - so the book becomes a treasure trove of information. In a concise and accessible way, we obtain all the necessary information, which helps to better understand the history of a hero.

The book became a pleasant surprise. Subtle, clear, on the point - and touching, of course.

Sibilant Fricative

Adam Roberts
Sibilant Fricative

NewCon Books, 2014

[The first draft if this review was titled Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia]

Not only books should entertain, but also book reviews. If the criticism is boring and dull, there is not much sense in reading it, even if it reveals any hidden meanings of reviewed work or points to the book’s strengths. Boring criticism can always be replaced with not so boring prose.

Brit Adam Roberts at first glance (in the literal sense - look at the cover) is far from what might be called an entertainer. Roberts has an academic background, he teaches at the university, and also writes science fiction. Overall, not a clown or a stand-up comedian. But Roberts-critic and Roberts-reviewer (perhaps it is this side of Roberts is responsible for this book) both entertain the reader with reviews populating this collection.

The collection could well use the title Punkadiddle, so was called now closed blog, where the reviewer over four years posted his reviews on books and movies. Best from this blog, as well as reviews from online venues, and became part of Sibilant Fricative, a collection which has taken the title of another, new, Roberts’ blog.

For me, who has been following Roberts’s publications on the Internet, Sibilant Fricative became an occasion to re-read and recall the most memorable reviews (it’s a pity that the book, as opposed to the internet, is limited in size, and the collection did not include much of the rest). Since the book was published by a genre publisher collected, reviews on books and movies have also been limited to one genre (in fact, the book is divided into two parts, «Science Fiction» and «Fantasy»). Limited print run (while the digital version is available) is unlikely to help the promotion of book and, most importantly, the author's name to the masses.

And that’ll be loss for the readers. Roberts is definitely among the top five British reviewers, stuck somewhere between the genres. He can read the dullest fantasy, and can casually review Booker short list in its entirety. He is always looking for something new in the literature, but not disgusted by musty space opera. Roberts is a heir to John Clute and a colleague of Paul Kincaid, but will compete with Adam Mars-Jones, with whom they shared Guardian pages, Roberts has not yet made it to London Books Review.

Speaking of newspapers. Roberts almost has not been published in the newspapers, only in his blog (blogs) and SF online venues. Was he rejected or just doesn’t want it himself? Rather, the latter. Newspaper frankly will be too tight for Roberts. It's not just the space. The book contains either very tiny reviews and detailed reviews in several parts. The critic will be constrained by the form but not the space. What other reviewer in his sane mind will review all parts of Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, or will write a twitter review, or even choose to review not in the prosaic form, but poetic? Such liberties Guardian, or Locus (for example) would not stand.

Sometimes experiments with form have negative consequences. For example, from a review of The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi written in the mocking form of a poem by Robert Browning you hardly will have an impression of the novel, just will applaud to Roberts’ creative abilities. And sometimes these experiments seem pampering and splurge: I can do this and that. And I can write a review with a glossary. Which, of course, does not negate the author’s talent.

If Roberts wrote only entertaining, he would have remained at the same level with a million Amazon reviewers. Roberts is well-read and educated. He can place any book in literary context, not just say is it good or bad, Roberts-academic gets in his reviews in the form of an abundance of quotations and references. Roberts is capable of almost chapter-by-chapter analysis of an unpublished Tolkien, with his heavy vocabulary, as well as lightweight or moronic thriller\space opera. Roberts can pick in a book, can dissect a book - and this is a quality that I value very high in the criticism.

Having written all this, I must now answer two questions. First, and whether you want to buy this book, given that the paper edition is not cheap (but digital one is)? My answer is positive. On paper these reviews are read more carefully than on the net, and has another advantage: while reading the rest of the Internet is not distracting you. In addition, the blog where reviews were posted from the collection, is now closed (and not everyone, as I have, at one time has saved the posts from the blog to his HDD).

The second question is what statement actually gives this book? Those who wanted, has long ago discovered, read and appreciated Roberts’ writing. And now still can read him on the Internet.

Sibilant Fricative release secured Adam Roberts’ status of an important British critic (ie, just critic, not just the genre critic) - that is the importance of this book. Prior to the release of the collection Roberts was one of, but not much more. Now, with the book of reviews under his belt, the world officially has to acknowledge Roberts-reviewer, as previously acknowledged Roberts-writer and Roberts-academic. Not every reviewer has published the collection of reviews. Even Adam Mars-Jones has not.

Given all this, you do have just not one reason to avoid reading this important and necessary book.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

David Shafer
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Mulholland Books, 2014

Three main characters of this novel have different ways of life and live at different places on the planet. With the development of the plot their destinies intertwine in unexpected ways, and it is worth noting that two of the three heroes already know each other.

Of these three characters is only one woman, young, exotic Asian working in a non-profit organization based in the United States Leila Majnoun. Leila arrives with humanitarian aid to Myanmar. Her mission is to scout out the situation, find out what help the state needs to provide the best. Regardless of gender, Leila is a brave, courageus woman, with the ability to overcome difficulties. And difficulties Leila has plenty. Her cargo was taken to the military customs. A local general who handles things avoids her. She has almost no allies in the country. In case of emergency no one will come to rescue her. The only help she has is a local taxi driver, but he is powerless against the army. In an attempt to find this general Leila and the taxi driver pulls into a kind of base near the jungle where Leila accidentally sees two mercenaries who speak English guarding something important and secret, otherwise no one would hire the elite troops for protection.

Two other characters of the novel, Mark Deveraux and Leo Crane, once were friends in college, but they parted ways after graduation. Mark settled in Brooklyn, thanks to the success of his debut book in the self help genre, which has sold a huge number of copies. Now Mark is writing his second book, and becomes something of a personal guru/mentor for the boss of a large corporation SineCo James Straw. The big boss was impressed with Mark’s book and as Mark has signed a contract with a subsidiary company of SineCo, that in fact Mark is already working on Straw.

Lifepath of Leo Crain is significantly different from Mark’s. Leo is a failure, with the possible psychological and mental health problems. The son of wealthy parents, he and his several sisters received an inheritance in the form of a company for the production of games and now live on that. Leo abundantly uses drugs, drinks in the morning, is not stable, does not stay long on one job.
David Shafer is a talented writer. He's a great stylist, he has the experience, the characters in his book are full-blooded people. And this talented writer has written not entirely successful novel. «Whiskey Tango Foxtrot» as a thriller is mediocre enough to forget its plot in a few weeks, as a drama, or High Literature, the novel is too uneven and subordinated to a thriller story, as near future SF , it is not cooked enough and with a bend in the theory.

The first half of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is wonderful. I especially liked how Shafer lets us wonder in the mist and is not in a hurry to open the cards. Under the cards I have in mind the theory of a larger conspiracy: the three central characters as if just live their lives, overcome their difficulties, each struggling with his or her loneliness. In the first third of the book there is no hint to science fiction at all, it's good-quality prose about young professionals. It would be better novel if it remained in this vein - a bitter statement on the harsh reality.

And the characters in fact are all close to the heart, the new American generation, no longer kidults, not yet formed adults, spitting on ideals. The most prominent is Leila, fragile Asian-American, rotating in the men's militarized society, but not even thinking that at any time she can be raped (such an idea only once visited the heroine). Mark of the trio of characters is least sympathetic to us, because of this he’ll get the main mission - to rehabilitate himself in front of friends, himself and humanity in general.

Once Shafer introduces his theory of digital conspiracy plot as the slender design of the novel begins to sag. The idea of a storage server for all the information about the people living on the planet is not new. Only in the last year I have read a few works with a similar idea. And every time the world conspiracy theory with an emphasis on the accumulation of digital information has no valid arguments. This idea usually is built on the arguments usually vague. How really ownership of all the digital information about people can lead to total control over the people? Shafer builds some shaky structure of the future, with no real backups. And since evil can not impress and scare enough, then the threat to peace seems phantom. All the arguments in this case are reduced to the commonplace "to spy on people is bad." This we already know.

Unable to build a potent image of the enemy, Shafer throws his heroes to fight against windmills. Both secret community are so smooth, they do not have any form at all. The mission of the trinity against mythical evil is also doubtful. As in the worst examples of literature of adventure, the world from destruction is necessarily saved by the amateurs. Secret organization entirely relies on the wild girl, alcoholic and plagiarist - apparently the situation inside the organization was quite bad, if it would need to use help of unbalanced people.

The second half of the novel is quite a burden to read. The first one slowly build a story, and that was a plus to the novel. We did in fact read a mainstream novel. The second part is already full thriller, shamelessly overlong, sweetened with melodrama between Leo and Leila, predictable and linear. Shafer writes in the second half still brilliantly, but the story buries stylistic clarity under itself.

Talented author Shafer stumbled with this debut. He writes charmingly, but the plot of this book is very much shaky like tango after whiskey. Or foxtrot after whiskey. There is probably no difference.