The Blue Light Project

Timothy Taylor
The Blue Light Project

Soft Skull Press, 2011

Eve Latour is a star. She is Olympic champion in biathlon and is known around the world. Latour became famous primarily because during the competition a cracker-sniper shot her in the leg, but Latour gave no sign, hidden injury and completed the race and won gold medal. She was bathed in glory, gave interviews, went around the world, was going to marry, but because of his father's death postponed the wedding.
Latour now works on TV and runs in the mornings. The reason for these workouts is the missing brother of Eve. When she returned from a trip to Europe, Latour discovered that her brother Ali was gone. Ali painted graffiti, filled his pictures in the most remote places of the city, so that Latour runs through the dark streets in hopes of finding his brother or at least someone who can give her any information on the whereabouts of Ali.

When Eve, along with Nick, who has not yet become her husband, watching television, they learn that someone took hostage an entire building with the children who starred in the TV show «KiddieFame», something like the "Minute of Fame" for the children.

Taylor introduces another important protagonist of the book as soon after the scene of hostage-taking. It is Rabbit, he is twenty-six. He partly is graffiti painter, partly parkur, partly implementer of a strange project. Rabbit, adding the device to selected of the roof of buildings, works on an installation.

This is a strange novel. He is superbly written, especially its second half. Taylor has charming style, he is very accurately conveys the tension, confusion, and hopes.
Time of the story is the future, 2014, the city has remained anonymous, but the author does not write science fiction, there is no change compared with our time there. Despite the seemingly serious subject that requires a correct approach, the author hadn’t written depressing novel, there are no anger, hatred, hopelessness, conversely, Taylor selects the protagonist of the novel light itself, and the author earned himself a hundred points with that, he is the author of hope.

The novel turned out metaphorical, not rudely embedded in reality. City’s name does not appear there, any historical names never appear in the text, the state machine is never called such. There are references to the terrorist attacks in Moscow and Beslan, but this is such beacons, which do not play a big role. Taylor seems to be not tied to the details, but it applies only to the details around terrorist attacks: everything else is very plausible, all the characters, their inner world, are three-dimensional; they are not puppets on the author’s string.

What, however, doesn’t quite work in this book, is incongruous inclusion of some storylines. The entire plot line of champion Latour doesn’t work at all. It is bound and serves only as sort of a lever, to somehow tell and fully disclose Rabbit and his project. The very story with the search of her brother, a worldwide fame at times are even annoying. Even the style of the author when he writes about Latour, is as if getting worse towards simplification.

And only that, perhaps, does not let to name the book excellent.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

Lydia Millet
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

Soft Skull, 2005

Ann, an odd librarian, one night has a dream: in the desert in New Mexico, a man falls to his knees, and on that background there is an explosion of the atomic bomb. Sleep does not bode anything abnormal: Ann and her husband Ben, working as a gardener, live in Santa Fe, near the spot where in 1945th were the first tests of nuclear weapons, and Ann is well aware of who is the man in a dream - father of atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer. However, the dream does not leave it up until on the street she meets the man she unerringly recognizes by the photos, available in all the history books. Oppenheimer and two other scientists who worked on the atomic bomb - Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard – are replaced in our time right after the first test explosion in New Mexico. Each of them feels that he is transported in time not alone, but all three, so they quickly find each other. Ann tracks and finds them, too. She tells them that she had a dream about a man in the desert. Each of the scientists has some money, but money is out, and the inventors of the atomic weapons transported in our time need somewhere to live. Anne offers the three of them to stay at their (with her husband) home. Scientists agree.

They eagerly start to absorb information about themselves, about how nuclear weapons were used after 1945, and how in general the world has changed over the years that followed their sudden transfer in time. They make excursions into the desert where the tests were passed, then all together fly to Japan to look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There they get acquainted with the son of one of the richest people in the world, and opens to him the secret of the three scientists. Shortly after returning to the States around the trio a cult has been created.

This Lydia Millet’s novel is both hilarious satire on all in the world and in the same way a completely serious novel. Those who are inclined to reading this book as a satire will find here a large-scale ridicule of modern religion (Christian fanatics see Oppenheimer as Christ), intelligence, science fiction, politics. This is indeed a very funny book: Szilard surfs the Internet, uses teen slang, Oppie smokes marijuana, Fermi closer to the end of the novel differs little from autist - but not with his language. Millet has a very lyrical style; some chapters without exaggeration are finished poems in prose.

The book is written very even: not in the sense that it is not able to awaken the senses (it is able), but that throughout its length the novel does not sag, nor drops into to patter, does not slow down like a train before the station; plot is not stalled.

This can be called a collage-novel, too. Chapters, moving a story, interspersed with chapters, telling about real events: about scientists, the bomb, the U.S. foreign policy. So Millet combines facts and fiction in a wonderfully poetic book.

The author is also a delightful portraitist: each of the heroes of the book is described with love. Also in the background of thinking on God, history and loneliness heroes of the book are not lost, each of them is very memorable character.
«Oh Pure and Radiant Heart» acts with the effect of the atomic bomb: First, the book blows off and tears, like an explosion, and then left a long aftertaste, like radiation. After reading this book it is quite possible to become Hibakusha.

Ruby and the Stone Age Diet

Martin Millar
Ruby and the Stone Age Diet
(Soft Skull, 2010)

The unnamed narrator, who broke up with the girlfriend Sis, lives in the one or the other London squat with his friend Ruby. She told him that the cactus, left by Cis, should flower, and then, according to the book of myths, Cis should return to him forever. While he waits flowering cactus, his life is vain and irrational. He finds the most idiotic work that you have come, and he is abducted by aliens, he met on the street talking robots, writes songs for his group, searching for a drummer, and he is surrounded by gods and goddesses. In all of this is not clear whether it happens to him really, or he is just a great romancer (LSD in the novel is only on one page).

Millar, under the pseudonym Martin Scott once wrote fantasy series about Thraxas, under his real name writes phantasmagoric urban stories, and "Ruby" is one of them. But if poor language of novels about Thraxas is difficult to call positive point, then in this book deliberately simple language is ideally suited for the narrator. Young foolish Londoner seems barely to understand the world organization, and therefore when he writes songs invents goddess of electric guitar players, when he was left - the god of the broken hearts, when he is left alone - the powerful spirit Inka, when he goes to the museum - muse Clio, so that gods does not look like a game of paganism, but rather like the mind games. And in an already slim novel Millar inserts a series of stories, Ruby writes from time to time, trying to either disband number of pages, then draws parallels between the story's heroine, a werewolf girl Cynthia and Ruby: they are both independent, but vulnerable, both were left by their stupid men but they nevertheless continue to miss them, and both write: Ruby - the story about Cynthia, and Cynthia in turn vampire love poems.

Between the myths about robots and ghosts the author inserts the problems of unemployment, the lives of British squatters, suffering literary creation (Ruby rewrites for earnings stories from the tabloids and porno magazines) and the uncertainty in the personal lives of young people, but because of the neighborhood with all written buffoonery in the novel these themes look like as the laws book against the cap and clown nose, and they can not be taken seriously.

Millar confuses the reader with the title (the Stone Age diet is only episodic), but forgets about the plot: the action in the book is virtually absent, whirling around amorous melancholy protagonist, so the narrator cactus is growing faster than anything in the novel takes place. The only intrigue, which the author keeps to the end, but it seems that without even knowing about it – not even whether Cis comes back to the protagonist, but whether his friendship with Ruby becomes something more.

150 pages of the book which the author may well have put in the 4 words – fools can love, too.