Fails to Rise to the Occasion

TITLE: Empire Rising
AUTHOR: Sam Barone
PUBLISHER: Harper

RATING
5/5 "The Empire Strikes Back"; 4/5 "Empire of the Sun"; 3/5 "Emperor Penguin"; 2/5 "Inland Empire"; 1/5 "The Soviet Union"
SCORE: 2/5

At the dawn of history, one man sketches the first outlines of a civilization on a dangerous and uncaring canvas. By the time you finish reading Empire Rising, you may wish he hadn't bothered.

Sam Barone's Empire Rising is so epic in scope and ambition, you desperately want to like it. And there's no denying Mr Barone's dedication and energy. What's more, the first jottings in recorded history offer enormous dramatic potential. Consider: the people of ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) built one of the world's earliest civilizations out of nothing more than mud and reeds. However, this potential is sadly left to rot, as the book is plagued by historical inaccuracies, turgid writing and connect-the-dots plotting.

Eskkar, a former barbarian solider, is now leader of the fledgling city-state of Akkad. In the wake of a barbarian invasion, described in the previous book of the series, Dawn of Empire, and the resulting breakdown of order, the land is overrun with bandits and outlaws. Eskkar sets out to restore peace, leaving his pregnant wife, Trella, in charge of the city. In his absence, an ruthless and greedy Egyptian fugitive, Korthac, seizes Akkad for himself. Eskkar rallies his men and mounts a desperate counterattack.

The novel starts by giving us the date 3157 BCE, and you wish Mr Barone had left things a bit vaguer, since he immediately introduces a series of historical inaccuracies that poison any goodwill you might have been willing to grant him for taking on this topic.

Admittedly, a work of historical fiction isn't a textbook, and we might expect the author to take liberties with the facts to cook up a better story, but the anachronisms that lace Mr Barone's work smack more of shoddy research than literary craft. The author is guilty of jumping the gun on a number of inventions, including coinage and sandals, as well as the domestication of the horse. The former two didn't enter use for another 2,000 years, while the Mesopotamians apparently didn't even have a word for "horse" until 2000 BCE, 1,000 years after the book is set.

I suspect Mr Barone's choice of reading material is partly to blame for these errors. For example, his personal website lists "The End of the Bronze Age" by Robert Drews as one of his sources--despite the fact that Empire Rising is set at the beginning, not the end, of the Bronze Age. More puzzlingly, he also lists a book about the Mongol invasion of Europe--an event that happened 4,000 years later, on a different continent, using weapons, tactics and technology totally unrelated to those of ancient Mesopotamia. Then again, Mr Barone also claims on his site that the book came to him in a series of dreams, so perhaps he knows something we don't.

Tellingly, Mr Barone lists techno-thriller author Tom Clancy among his influences, and Empire Rising has more in common with Mr Clancy's Red Storm Rising than Polybius's Rise of the Roman Empire. Character and plot are secondary to action, of which there is plenty--the final climactic battle alone runs around 100 pages. We get each sequence from the perspective of two or three characters, but rather than presenting us with a Rashomon-like mosaic of conflicting perceptions, we just get the same hack and slash over and over again. Bows and arrows become the machineguns of the ancient world, mowing down baddies by the dozen. Eskkar's stratagem to retake the city is pure Splinter Cell. Complex questions like "How did the first set of laws get created?" are presented with almost childish simplicity: Trella sits down with her councilors and says, "Hey guys, I've got a great idea..."

Character development is handled by providing the reader the character's entire life story the moment they are introduced. We know the hero's wife, Trella, is wise and intelligent, because all the other characters say so. Eskkar, meanwhile, is called upon to do nothing more challenging than lop off heads and engage in the requisite, mechanical sex scenes--more Conan-era Arnie than King Arthur. The resulting prose is a trial to wade through.

Of course, literature's bookshelf is wide enough to accommodate some trashy, cod-historical action and romance, but shouldn't guilty pleasures feel, well, more fun? Nicholas Guild's Assyrian (1988) tackles a similar historical period and theme with far more verve. The action sequences of Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire (1998), are shorter but punchier, and far more convincing. May Renault's Alexander Trilogy (Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, Funeral Games) features both more exacting research and more believable characters. All three authors show how you can color within the historical lines, but still paint a pretty picture.

Much Ado about "Nothing"

TITLE: "Prince of Nothing" Trilogy
Book 1 "The Darkness that Comes Before"
Book 2 "The Warrior Prophet"
Book 3 "The Thousandfold Thought"
AUTHOR: R Scott Bakker
PUBLISHER: Orbit

RATING
5/5 "Princess Bride"; 4/5 "Count of Monte Cristo"; 3/5 "James Earl Jones"; 2/5 "Dukes of Hazzard"; 1/5 "Dollar King"
SCORE: 3/5

High fantasy is the Rodney Dangerfield of literary genres, where tentative stabs at seriousness tend to result in self-inflicted wounds. Such, alas, is the case with Canadian author R Scott Bakker. The quest for artistic respectability through moral ambiguity and "realistic" writing reaches its zenith (or nadir) in his "Prince of Nothing" trilogy. Part alternate history, party weighty meditation on the nature of free will, the book's airy ideas are nearly asphyxiated by a setting not merely "gritty", but downright squalid.

The book's realism is mostly borrowed, having been lifted directly from the annals of medieval history. The main story arc reads like a palimpsest of a text on the First Crusade: The Shriah (Pope) declares a Holy War (Crusade) against the herectical Fanim (Muslims) who occupy the holy city of Shimeh (Jerusalem). Even minor events like the People's Crusade find their parallel in the book.

In a nod to the cliches of the genre, there is also a shadowy bunch of black hats with the unlikely corporatist name of "the Consult" (I picture them not slaughtering innocents, but boring them to death with business buzzwords and endless PowerPoint presentations), out to destroy the world by resurrecting their "No-God".

If that ambition sounds like something out of Nietzsche, it's no mistake. Mr Bakker holds a Ph D in philosophy, and the central figure in his tale is the Nietzschean super-man Anasurimbor Kellhus, who plans to control the Holy War for his own ends. Kellhus possesses a kind of Spock-like emotional detachment and intellect, and in Mr Bakker's worldview, this enables him to manipulate those around him, since their actions are guided not by free will, but by ingrained habit, culture and emotion.

To his credit, Mr Bakker is able to insert these ideas into the plot without reducing the novel to a Socratic dialogue. Sadly, Mr Bakker's writing style detracts from this complex message. He brings the trend towards greater realism full circle, presenting us a world that is so relentlessly bleak, it is utterly unbelievable. Battle scenes wallow in gore, like a Frank Miller comic without the distracting pictures. There is also a distasteful obession with sexual degradation -- the two major female characters are both prostitutes, and the agents of the evil Consult are fixated on the subject. The other main characters are almost uniformly unsympathetic; Kellhus is repellently cold, calculating and manipulative; his barbarian companion Cnaiur, savage, bestial and nihilistic, a pseudo-Scythian with Gnostic tendencies ("The world is a lie," he claims, and you know, he's right--it's a complete fiction).

Another distraction is Mr Bakker's indulgence in that worst of high-fantasy vices -- silly names. I've never seen an author quite so in love with the dieresis. He confettis the page with dotted vowels, pausing only to slap a cricumflex on the odd "u" or two.

"The Darkness that Comes Before" and the rest of the series deserve respect, if only for the depth of research and the complexity of its theme. However, the presentation is so unpleasant, it is unlikely to get it.

Realism Meets Ripping Yarn

TITLE: Fire in the Eat (Book 1) Warrior of Rome
AUTHOR: Harry Sidebottom
PUBLISHER: Overlook TP

RATING
5/5 "Julius Ceasar"; 4/5 "Mark Antony"; 3/5 "Spartacus"; 2/5 "Caligula"; 1/5 "Sillius Soddus"
SCORE: 4/5

"Write what you know" is probably good advice for first-time authors, and Fire in the East shows us the virtues of following this dictum. However, there is such a thing as overdoing it, as the novel falters when it steps away from the author's area of expertise.

There is no arguing Harry Sidebottom knows his Roman history. He holds a doctorate in Ancient History from Oxford University's Corpus Christi College, and now lectures on the subject at the same university. He is the author of two books and a number of articles and reviews on Roman history and ancient warfare. This is undoubtedly a man who knows his gladius from his gluteus maximus. While his rhetoric may not be up to Cicero's standards, the freshness and realism of the book help propel it over the sometimes clunky prose.

In Fire in the East, Mr Sidebottom's first work of fiction and the first book in a planned trilogy, he sets the stage during the so-called "Crisis of the Third Century", the period between 235 and 284 AD, when Rome came to within an imperial whisker of total ruin. The economy was in tatters, barbarians were invading, and if that wasn't enough, the army had invented a new form of imperial succession known as "stab the man in the purple toga". No sooner had one general proclaimed himself emperor than he was assassinated by followers of another, or even by his own disgruntled troops--25 men ruled in the space of 50 years.

Into this tumult Mr Sidebottom throws Marcus Clodius, or "Ballista" (a kind of catapult) to his chums, a former barbarian hostage turned Roman general. The emperors du jour send Ballista to defend the Syrian city of Arete, on the eastern edge of the empire. There, Ballista's small garrison is expected to hold out against a massive invasion by the Sassanid Persian army--Alamo for the swords and sandals set, with Ballista in the Davy Crockett role. The word "Arete" means "virtue", but its people ironically turn out to have precious little of it. Ballista's already hopeless mission is further complicated by rivalry with one of his commanders and the disappearance of another, and mounting evidence that there is a traitor at work in the city.

The first section of the novel is redolent with the murmurs of Roman life. Here Mr Sidebottom's learning proves its worth, filling the early pages with details of ritual and religious observance, of banquet manners and bathing customs. His Romans feel like Romans, not just Englishmen in bed sheets. In the second section, Mr Sidebottom's familiarity with the gears and cogs of the machinery of war enables him to put us on the barricades with Ballista and his men during the siege of Arete, giving us a sense of the brutality and madness of ancient war, equal easily to anything produced in the killing fields of Baghdad today.

It's when he wanders from these strengths that Mr Sidebottom's footwork fails him. His prose is sometimes as square-cut as a Roman profile. The novel opens with the clunker, "War is hell. Civil war is worse". He has Ballista add a clumsy appendix to Ben Franklin's famous phrase, telling the leaders of Arete "if we do not all hang together, we will all hang separately on the cross of crucifixion". He sometimes overdoes the Latin, producing such battering-ram lines as: "'May I present the decurion, commander, of this turma, cavalry unit, of the cohors?'"

The novel also suffers from the lack of a tangible villain, a Santa Anna to Ballista's Crockett. The Persians exist only as cannon fodder and plot device, no more worthy of hatred than Star Wars stormtroopers. True, there is a traitor in the city, but the threat never builds and the revelation of his identity and motives feels not like a payoff, but like a cheap sandal to the posterior. Likewise, the antagonism between Ballista and a snobbish subordinate gathers some initial traction, then quickly peters out once the Persians heave into view.

Then there is the problem of Ballista himself. Giving the reader an outsider as the main character is often a device used to ease us into an unfamiliar setting, as we learn about the culture and customs along with the hero. Here, however, we meet Ballista when he is already an established member of the Roman political and military class, so making him a barbarian serves no purpose other than to enable Mr Sidebottom to populate his work with various stand-ins for modern British: Ballista himself as a pseudo-English nobleman, with his Caledonian (Scots) servant and Irish bodyguard. You wish Mr Sidebottom would decide whether he wants to write escapist fantasy or historical realism. Treating the fall of the Roman Empire as a kind of Dan Dare adventure very nearly destroys the credibility Mr Sidebottom has so painstakingly built up.

Nearly, but not quite. The odd misstep in tone and character aside, there is still a lot to like about this novel, and it is such a rarity and joy to find an author who masters both the military and social aspects of Rome. Mr Sidebottom does indeed know the Romans, and has laid himself a strong foundation for the next book in the series. I for one will be buying a copy.

Posting It Home

TITLE: Notes from a Small Island
AUTHOR: Bill Bryson
PUBLISHER: Harper Perennial

RATING
5/5 "Year in Provence"; 4/5 "Summer of '69"; 3/5 "12 Days of Christmas"; 2/5 "Weekend at Bernie's"; 1/5 "Day of the Dead"
SCORE: 4/5

Mr Bryson, American by birth but British by choice for most of his professional life, built a thunderous reputation for his hysterically funny, gloriously opinionated and deliciously warped writing style. His brand is built on the comfort that comes from reliability, and Notes from a Small Island comes as close as you'll get to a pure distillation of the Bryson mini-genre.

Reading one of Bill Bryson's books is, ironically enough, a bit like stepping into one of the McDonald's he so loathes. His name on the cover is as much a signpost and promise as the golden arches. Before you've even digested the Library of Congress data, you already have a fairly good idea of how the rest of it is going to taste.

The ostensible subject is Mr Bryson's tour of the UK prior to moving briefly back to the US in the mid 90s, but this quasi-victory lap gets second billing next to Mr Bryson's own interior monologue of memories, acidic commentary on the state of modern architecture, and other off-the-wall thoughts. For such a brilliant travel writer, he again proves an appallingly bad traveler. Mr Bryson travels largely alone, often by rail or bus, frequently without checking the timetable and almost never with a reservation waiting at the end. He encounters Fawltyesque hoteliers, boorish trainspotters and man-eating Labradors - but the main threat to his health is his habit of trying to walk back to his hotel after about three pints too many.

Travel writing can sometimes feel like subsidizing somebody else's good time, to places you've never heard of at prices you couldn't afford; Andean backpacking, Andaman Sea scuba-diving, or pretty much anything in Conde Nast Traveler. Not so with Mr Bryson. Let other writers tackle the Bamiyan Valley or Borobudur - Mr Bryson takes you nowhere more exotic than Barnstaple and Bradford. But then, that's what makes reading his books so much like burrowing into a favorite sweater.

Not that Mr Bryson is without the power to impress. The awe he feels on viewing a Roman mosaic at a ruined villa in Spoonley Wood, intact and in situ, is palpable and moving. The anger and sadness he seems to feel at the cancerous corrosion eating away at small-town England feels genuine, as does his passion for the English countryside (and, unlike many weekend enthusiasts, Mr Bryson put his family where his mouth is, living first in rural Yorkshire, and more recently a small town in Norfolk).

Above all, in spite of his news-ticker stream of grumbling about almost everyone he meets, you get a strong sense of Mr Byson's love for the English themselves. He is full of praise for their politeness, good humor, their delight in life's small pleasures. That said, the book's one sour note is how pat Mr Bryson's observations of the English are. According to Wikipedia, in a 2003 BBC4 Radio poll, Notes from a Small Island was voted the book which best represented England, which probably says far more about the British self-image than the reality. At the very least, you have to think there's something other than good manners and jokes at work in the country that gave the world soccer hooliganism.

Just as the portrait of the English painted here somewhat lacking in perspective, Mr Bryson's coverage of the British Isles is on the teenager end of the spotty scale. Of the UK's great university towns, Oxford rates a visit, but Cambridge gets a miss (secretly gratifying to those of us whose parents went to the former). The famous white cliffs are notable primarily for their absence. There's a gaping hole where the center of England should be, and what bits of Wales make it into the book probably wish they hadn't.

However the greatest problem with Notes from a Small Island, as with Big Macs, is that comfort starts to wear after a bit, and you yearn for something a bit tangier, a bit zestier, something that will surprise. Just as his books are superficially similar to one another, so the individual episodes that make up Notes from a Small Island begin to run together - small towns, good, large towns, bad. Old buildings good, new buildings, bad. To paraphrase Mr Bryson himself, the trick to good travel writing is knowing when to stop, and here--even when presented with an obvious finale like the northern tip of Scotland--he fails to take his own advice. The end result is undoubtedly funny, but in need of some strategic trimming.

Perhaps even Mr Bryson began to feel he was recycling his own greatest hits, as he now writes on diverse subjects such as the English language, the history of science and the life of Shakespeare. Luckily, these books too are uproariously funny, and highly recommended once you've devoured Mr Bryson's travelogues.

He'll be black...

TITLE: AA Gill is Away
AUTHOR: AA Gill
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster

RATING
5/5 "Blackadder"; 4/5 "Black Sabbath"; 3/5 "Blackberry"; 2/5 "Black-Listed"; 1/5 "Black Friday"
SCORE: 5/5

The cover is black. Matte, ominous, "2001" monolith black, the title spelled out in stark white letters. It's a collection of travel writing, but no clues for guessing that when AA Gill is away, he's not sunning his backside in St. Tropez or picking sunflowers in Andalusia (or if he is, he has to good sense not to tell anyone). It's not just the cover that's black and white: Mr Gill takes us to some of humanity's darkest hellholes, but also shines a light in some surprising places. He veers between apoplectic rage and childish glee, but his writing always sears like a quicklime shower. This is travel writing like you've never seen before. Ladies and gentlemen, AA Gill is the new black.

The AA Gill of the title is Adrian Anthony Gill, restaurant and TV critic for the UK's Sunday Times newspaper, travel writer and contributor to magazines such as Vanity Fair and GQ. The key word there is "critic", and Mr Gill has scribbled himself a very profitable byline in being an outrageously, provocatively opinionated ass about most things. In the course of his literary career he has managed to give offense to--in order of decreasing plausibility--animal-lovers, the Germans, the Albanians, and the Welsh. Irritatingly, he also happens to be a very, very talented ass. Mr Gill is the master to the unexpected metaphor and vivid visual imagery, each page hitting you like a psychedelic thunderstorm.

He's also one of the few writers this side of Edgar Allan Poe who appears aware that English is a spoken language, not just a written one. Try reading it out loud, "chuckling children being bathed in tin buckets ... gaggling women at the wheezing water pump filling the first of interminable four-gallon plastic cans", and you realize there's more to Mr Gill than foreigner-baiting. It's travel writing, but at times it's closer to poetry.

"AA Gill is Away" is a collection of 25 travel articles by Mr Gill, previously published in either the Sunday Times or GQ (the latter are easy to spot--they're about either cars or porn), mainly between 1998 and 2001. The book is divided into four sections, titled South, East, West and North, though these divisions only make sense if you happen to be Maltese: Argentina and Cuba are West, but Milan and Monaco are North.

Mr Gill is not a foreign correspondent, and these pieces tend to be more snapshots than in-depth analyses. Often, when he takes us somewhere unexpected or makes us look at something in a new way--he spends several days as the director of a pornographic movie--this is effective and informative. Bethlehem on the eve of the new millennium is a revelation, he piece on sleeping sickness in Uganda is a wakeup call. However, when it really is just AA Gill on holiday, the end result meanders about very prettily but doesn't leave any lasting impressions.

As delightful as the articles are, Mr Gill's hyperactive vocabulary and emotional extremes can be a little wearying. Sometimes, too, he's so busy tossing out Technicolor commentary he forgets there are readers trying to keep up with him. You want to sit him down, fix him some ice tea, and say "Now the Gilly, what was that about Canadians and Cubans being the opposite poles of human variation? Can't make head nor tail of it." What does he mean when he says hating Germans is "the only thing that truly emulsifies us"? I don't hate the Germans; I know what an emulsion is, but I'm clearer of how they work in chemistry than international relations. Maybe the line works better in Britain, as do the references to Britons famous in the UK and not elsewhere.

Intellectually, "AA Gill is Away" is like learning at the feet of Socrates. You shake your head. "If only I could write like this". Emotionally though, it's hard to know how to react to the book. Mr Gill is a professional critic; that is, he earns a living by being contentious. You always wonder how much is heartfelt, how much is calculated to push your buttons. Does he really hate Japan or is that what he thought would make a better story? A little of both, perhaps. No doubt he feels, but also he exaggerates.

I doubt I could be friends with Mr Gill, and I certainly wouldn't want to travel with him. Yet I could read and re-read almost any one of these pieces endlessly and call it perfection. Black, you see, never goes out of style.

Strange brew an acquired taste

TITLE: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
AUTHOR: Susanna Clarke
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury

RATING
5/5 "Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie"; 4/5 "David and Victoria Beckham"; 3/5 "Tom Green and Drew Barrymore"; 2/5 "Kevin Federline and Britney Spears"; 1/5 "Chris Brown and Rihanna"
SCORE: 2/5

"Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" is a series of contradictions. It's a magical tale about the mundane, an alternate history nearly identical to our own, a comedy of manners that is itself as affected as a smoking jacket and meerschaum pipe. It's at once refreshingly new and hugely derivative, a mashup -- "The Prestige" as directed by Tim Burton and produced by Merchant Ivory. Deserved or not, it is a phenomenon.

"Jonathan Strange..." arrives like a Duchess at a royal ball, bedecked with "Best Novel" honors from the Hugo, World Fantasy and Locus awards. Its path was strewn with praise by fantasy's regining King of Cool, Neil Gaiman. The publisher reportedly paid Ms Clarke a seven-figure advance, a bet that paid off when the book peaked at number three on the New York Times bestseller list.

So it's with great trepidation that I step in front of this lumbering bandwagon as it caterpillars toward me, and say, I do not like it.

Sorry. I admire it, respect it, but I don't like it. However much I stand in awe of Ms Clarke's work, and I do, it is awesome in the same way that Stalinist architecture is awesome: the sheer scale takes your breath away, but it is hard to love the final product.

In Ms Clarke's England, magic and fairies (think "Labyrinth", not "Peter Pan") are real but forgotten, and there have been no true magicians for centuries. None, that is, until magic stages a return in the persons of scholarly and Scrooge-ish Gilbert Norrell, and talented gentleman amateur Jonathan Strange. The focus falls first on Norrell, as he rises to fame after bringing back to life the fiancee of a leading politician, then on Strange, as he first becomes Norrell's pupil but then rejects his master's timid approach. In the third act, the two are thrown back together to face the deadly consequences of Mr Norrell's earlier act of resurrection.

Ms Clarke's innovation is two-fold. First, she sets her tale not in some unpronounceable empire ruled by jockstrapping barbarians and pneumatic princesses, nor in a medieval kindgom of errant knights and distressed damsels, but in the stuffy drawing room of 19th century England. Second, the book itself is written in the Romantic style of 19th century literature. Ms Clark uses archaic spellings such as "shewed" and "chuse" in place of "showed" and "choose". The plot is episodic and the pacing not so much glacial as granitic. Finally, the nameless narrator is a keen observer of social manners and possessed of a positively Saharan sense of humor. The illusion of historicity is buttressed by hundreds of footnotes, some of them pages long, detailing an invented history of magic and folklore.

Sustaining this style and tone over the course of a 1,000+ page novel is an act of endurance on par with running back-to-back marathons. Bravo. Sadly, what should be immersive winds up being distancing. "Jonathan Strange..." has been compared to the works of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, but frankly it feels closer to "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", a one-line joke that gets carried on for an entire novel. What's worse, the slightly mocking tone invites you to ridicule rather than sympathize witht the characters, and it is hard to find much warmth for either Norrell or Strange when the author herself regards them so coolly.

As a work of imagination, too, "Jonathan Strange..." is a bit of a letdown. No, scratch that. It positively bubbles and froths with invention and ideas. A pit they are almost all buried in the footnotes. Ms Clarke presents us with a richly-detailed, colorful backdrop, then foregrounds a rather dull, grey tale. The first three quarters of the book are so singularly lacking in incident that the language becomes not sedate but soporific. The final break between the two main characters, for example, involves a mildly critical magazine article.

Despite the hype, this is far to inaccessible a novel to merit the mantle of "Harry Potter for adults". Indeed, the book's highest accomplishment will probably to help move fantasy beyond Rowling and Tolkien wannabes. Funny that a book so rooted in the past should propel the genre forward, but hey, what's one more contradiction?