Paved with good intentions

TITLE: An Ungodly War—The Sack of Constantinople & The Fourth Crusade
AUTHOR: W. B. Bartlett
PUBLISHER: Sutton Publishing, 2000

RATING
5/5 “The Dark Knight Returns”; 4/5 “Knights who say, ‘Ni’”; 3/5 “Knight Rider”; 2/5 “Knight and Day”; 1/5 “Marion ‘Suge’ Knight”
SCORE 3/5

Almost exactly 800 years before the invasion of Iraq, there was the fourth crusade. Some things never change.

Commentators have been quick to see parallels between the medieval crusades and America’s wars in Iraq. Rowan Atkinson’s definitive retelling of the First Gulf War was titled “Crusade”. Director Ridley Scott hinted at this theme in 2003’s “Kingdom of Heaven”. Doing a Google search for “crusade Iraq” gets you something like 21 million hits.

It’s not an analogy W. B. Bartlett makes in his 2000 study, “An Ungodly War”, but after reading this clear if rather dry account, the parallels between the two events are inescapable. The fourth crusade is the story of how a Western army in the Middle East, lied to by its leaders and diverted in the name of money, turns on its allies and attacks the wrong target. Sound familiar? Let’s look at the evidence.

Misleading Your People

The reason for any crusade was to recapture the Holy City of Jerusalem. The Pope himself promised anyone reaching the Holy City a VIP pass to paradise, no questions asked. However, the failures of the second and third crusades had shown that reaching Jerusalem would be a tall order. The leaders of the crusade reckoned attacking Egypt would be much easier. But how to break the news to the men?

“Many believed that the Holy City was the ultimate destination of the crusade, and any idea that this was not, in fact, the case could have the gravest repercussions for the success of the enterprise,” writes Mr Bartlett.

Of course, lying to your army about who the enemy was and why they were fighting would be incredibly dishonest and morally bankrupt. So that’s what the crusade’s leaders did.

Cui Bono?

Deciding where to go was one thing. Getting there was another. Travel from Europe to Egypt required ships and sailors, and those required money. The ablest sailors of the day were the Venetians. They agreed to transport the crusade for 85,000 marks ($500 billion in today’s money, though I could be making that up), which turned out to be about double what the crusaders could afford.

To pay off part of their debt, they agreed to capture the city of Zara (Zadar, in modern Croatia) for the Venetians. Which happened to be a Christian city. And nowhere near the Holy Land. But the crusaders needed the money, so they attacked it anyway.

For his sources, Mr Bartlett relies heavily on the works of crusaders Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert de Clari, which although inescapable, is a bit like relying on George W Bush’s “Decision Points” for a balanced account of the invasion of Iraq. Nevertheless, even from their chronicles, it’s clear many started to have doubts at this stage. Some allies started bailing on the whole enterprise, leaving a sort of “coalition of the willing”, if you like.

Mission Accomplished

European civilization’s greatest bulwark against the Muslims was the Byzantine Empire, with its capital at Constantinople (now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople, been a long time gone, Constantinople). Constantinople was one of the greatest cities in the world, economically, spiritually and culturally, New York and London and Paris all rolled into one.

As Mr Bartlett explains at some length, the Byzantines were also Christian, but not Catholic. As a result, although they were ostensibly on the same side as the crusaders, there was little love lost between them. So when the son of a recently deposed ex-emperor appeared at the crusader camp in Zara, offering them Constantinople’s wealth if they helped them retake the imperial throne, he found a receptive audience.

The title of the book rather gives the ending away. Constantinople fell to the crusaders in April 1204, but only after it had been burned down twice, the library destroyed, and its churches systematically plundered. The crowning achievements of this crusading army had been to devastate Christendom’s greatest city, slaughter thousands of Christians, and enrich a bunch of Italian merchants.

It’s a truly damning indictment of the mindless stupidity of religious bigotry and fanaticism, and of the enormous threat posed by powerful, greedy men who feel accountable to nobody. The analogy to the Iraq war isn’t perfect, I know. On the Western side, the toughest, most bloodthirsty bunch were the French, for a start. Nevertheless, I strongly feel it is modern events that make reading this book now worthwhile.

“An Ungodly War” would have made a far more interesting read if Mr Bartlett had been willing to go out on a limb and draw these kinds of parallels. Instead, the conclusion is littered with ponderous, grade-school platitudes such as, “we should reflect on the demise of a great civilization … and ponder deeply that nothing, however permanent it might seem at the time, lasts forever”. Mr Bartlett is content to let history be history, and confines his opinions to questions of how to interpret events, rather than asking what significance they have for us today. This is a sane and sensible approach for a historian, I know, but when discussing the crusades (even back in 2000), this is the equivalent of not mentioning the elephant in the room.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the writing were a bit more lively. Mr Barltlett tries, but the results sometimes English creative-writing-class level cringeworthy: “only ten knights managed to fight their way back … the rest … lay still, where they had fallen, their life-blood drained from them.” Life-blood? Give that boy an “F”.

Nevertheless, the incredible episode of the fourth crusade deserves to be better known, and “An Ungodly War” is a solid introduction.

Zero Gravitas

TITLE: Zero History
AUTHOR: William Gibson
PUBLISHER: Putnam

RATING
5/5 “Zero-zero-seven”; 4/5 “Zero gravity”; 3/5 “Zero-sum game”; 2/5 “Zero calories”; 1/5 “Zero friends”
SCORE 4/5

With "Zero History", you get the feeling that William Gibson, finding the world has finally caught up with his Marshall McLuhan-meets-Timothy Leary vision of the future, has decided to escape instead into the world of fantasy.

This accentuates a trend in Mr Gibson's recent novels. Starting with 2003's "Pattern Recognition", the settings of his books have pulled closer and closer to the contemporary world, even as his storylines have pushed further into la-la land. You almost wonder if he's being deliberately perverse. How else to explain "Zero History's" bizarre concoction of macho military fashion designers, ninja rock drummers, Japanese tailors and base-jumping super-spies? And that Mission Impossible-as-done-by-the-A Team ending? Please dear God, let that be a joke.

Don't get me wrong, Mr Gibson remains one of the most effortlessly stylish and readable authors out there. It's his choice of subject matter. I feel like I'm watching Michelangelo doing potato painting.

Let me explain.

"Zero History" completes the trilogy begun with "Pattern Recognition" and continued in 2007's "Spook Country", though it is much more closely tied to the latter. Freelance journalist Hollis Henry returns, again in the employ of insatiably curious marketing bigwig Hubertus Bigend. So is Milgrim, the benzo-addicted translator from "Spook Country", now straight thanks to Bigend's largesse and a stint at a clinic in Switzerland.

Also making a reappearance is the style of "Spook Country", which ratcheted down the flowery language in favor of bare-bones structures, non-linear conversations and off-beat settings. When it works, and it usually does, the words glide effortlessly, supple as old-fashioned denim.

There's a nice touch early on when Hollis googles "Gabriel Hounds" and describes what comes up first--a book by Mary Stewart, a Wikipedia entry, a CD title--because of course that's exactly what comes up if you or I try it, giving you a weird behind-the-looking glass feeling, and lending the story that extra touch of verisimilitude. There's also a reference to a YouTube video of someone jumping from the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building. Again, same thing.

Hollis remains something of an enigma, a sort of existentialist hero drawn into absurd events, seemingly lacking the will to extract herself. Milgrim is more sympathetic, an innocent reborn through his detoxification, and not surprisingly he provides the loom that spins this particular story. Bigend remains plausible, a billionaire brat more spoiled than malevolent, but no less dangerous for it. This time, the objective of Bigend's fascination is fashion. Specifically, a cutting-edge guerrilla brand called "Gabriel Hounds", and in a parallel plotline, military outfitting contracts.

Fashion provides Mr Gibson an excuse to revisit his theme, present in both "Pattern Recognition" and "Spook Country", of the tension between the cutting edge and the mainstream, how the former becomes--or desperately seeks to avoid becoming--the latter. The subtext is that the mainstream is derivative, exploitative and false, an elaborate con game. One would-be designer speaks of her dream to escape "the seasons, the bullshit, the stuff that wore out, fell apart."

I might feel better about this subplot if I didn't find the whole premise such an offensive, heaping, steaming pile of Hounds doo. There is nothing inherently superior in cliquey exclusivity or snobbery. I couldn't care less about "secret brands" of canvas shoes or Japanese denim, and as a result, this part just feels tiresome. At one point, Bigend refers to companies that "find brands ... with iconic optics or a viable narrative, buy them, then put out denatured product under the old label." I wish I could say this barrage of pretentious bafflegab is supposed to be indicative of the character, not the author, but Mr Gibson is forever having people spout lines like this.

It didn't use to irritate me. Mr Gibson has always been a bit of a hipster, but it grated far less when he was writing about the far future. Geeking out over the (purely imaginary) "Hawker-Aichi roadster" in 1999's "All Tomorrow's Parties" didn't bug me--the endless iPhone, iMac and Twitter references drive me a little bonkers.

The main plot kicks into gear, and sadly loses touch with reality, when Milgrim's investigation into military clothing upsets a competitor, who first tries to kidnap Hollis and Milgrim, then succeeds in nabbing one of Bigend's other employees (no, I won't spoil it by telling you who, though it's another returning character from "Spook Country") in retaliation. This sets up a rescue that involves the cast of Ocean's 11, conspiracy-theory worthy technology, the makeup effects from Mission Impossible, the camera balloons from "All Tomorrow's Parties", and the martial arts moves from, er, "Rush Hour 3". It's a hopeless, hideous letdown, a bit like the new Gap logo.

I said much the same thing about "Spook Country", and this only confirms it. The more I like Mr Gibson as a storyteller, the less I like the stories he tells. "Zero History" is a beautifully written, vividly imagined, totally preposterous pile of bunk.

A is for Anomie and Anti-globalization

TITLE: Generation A
AUTHOR: Douglas Coupland
PUBLISHER: Windmill Books

RATING
5/5 “Double rainbow. All the way”; 4/5 “Where the hell is Matt?”; 3/5 “Sneezing panda baby”; 2/5 “Gummibear song video”; 1/5 “Miss teen USA 2007”
SCORE 4/5

“A" is for apple, and where would we be without them? It's funny to realize that although apples, like the letter A, were there at the beginning (think Adam, think Eve), the last apple you ate probably didn't exist until about 100 years ago. Granny Smiths started in 1868, Golden Delicious in 1900. Mucking about with nature doesn't always end in disaster.

Canadian author Douglad Coupland's 2009 novel, "Generation A", is also about beginnings, and apples, and mucking about with nature, though his take is more acidic Granny than sweet Golden. Despite some excellent writing, however, the book is an excellent beginning in search of an end, and A without a Z, a flower waiting for a bee.

Mr Coupland first buzzed into the public conscience on the wings of his high-flying 1991 novel, "Generation X", which for better or worse helped popularize "Gen X" as handle for those born in the 60s and 70s. I admit that, in a fit of contrarianism familiar to anyone who has ever been 17, I never read the book precisely because of its popularity. My confident predictions that Mr Coupland would be quickly swatted away have been decisively disproved over the last 19 years, as Mr Coupland has continued to pollinate popular culture with a steady stream of both non-fiction work and novels, of which "Generation A" is his thirteenth.

Over the years I have at times bumped into Mr Coupland's works on bookstore shelves, each time experiencing the disquiet I normally reserve for new Pearl Jam albums or Rutger Hauer movies--are you allowed to stay popular for 20 years? It all seems so old-fashioned somehow. Fittingly, the disconnect between popular culture and the individual has been a recurring theme in Mr Coupland's novels over the years. His work has hovered between consistency and repetitiveness, always engagingly and amusingly written, balancing mysticism and realism, although he tends to revisit similar situations and themes. Often, the strength of the writing overcomes the touch of déjà vu you feel on cracking open one of Mr Coupland's books.

Not surprisingly then, "Generation A" (Aha! Thought I'd never get around to it, didn't you?) is in many ways an echo of "Generation X". The structure is the same, with a framing narrative used to set the stage for the five main characters to tell a series of stories. The characters themselves are Mr Coupland's usual suspects, social outsiders in various stages of anomie, twentysomethings trying to extract meaning from a random universe.

"Generation A" is set in a near-future in which bees are believed to be extinct (this was a topical issue in 2007-8, when there were stories of mysterious disappearances of bee colonies; it now appears reports of their extinction were exaggerated). Believed to be, that is, until five young people in countries around the world are all stung. First is Zack, an Iowan corn farmer with ADD and a reckless streak. Then there's Julien, a socially awkward shut-in who spends his life in World of Warcraft, Diana, a religious Canadian dental hygienist with Tourette syndrome and Samantha, a New Zealander gym trainer. Rounding out the quintet is Harj, a Sri Lankan orphaned by the 2004 tsunami who works as a telemarketer for Abercrombie & Fitch.

The five are first put in isolation, extensively studied, and then released. Thanks to the Internet, they each discover they have become major celebrities without the compensation of celebrity paychecks. It comes as a relief when one of the scientists whisks them all away to a secluded island off the coast of British Columbia, where he instructs them to tell stories as a way of prompting their bodies to secrete proteins that may have attracted the bees.

It's much like Mr Coupland's other books. If you haven't read them, it's a bit like Douglas Adams on drugs, or Chuck Palahniuk off of them. The other obvious comparison is to fellow Vancouver author William Gibson; the two share a fascination with popular culture and technology, though Mr Coupland seems less enthusiastic on where they are taking us. As a result, his tone is more direct and satirical than Mr Gibson's. In "Generation A", the words positively sting. Diana's ex-boyfriend smells "of Rogaine and failure", Harj's call-center job involves discussing "colour samples and waffle-knit jerseys with people who wish they were dead."

However, some of this waspish criticism feels cheap and easy. Globalization has become this year's political correctness, the soft target that nobody will stand up for. Abercrombie & Fitch are already something of a self-parody. And do we truly live in a "fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information"? Maybe. Some people do, I guess. But that leaves millions upon millions who don't have a Facebook account, couldn't care less about Rihanna or Justin Beiber, and whose only use for a cell phone is, er, to make phone calls. Mr Coupland demolishes this straw man effectively, but I feel his anger is largely misplaced.

On a technical level, there is a lot to like here. The first half of the book, as we are introduced to each character and watch their reactions to becoming specimens in a jar, is some of Mr Coupland's sharpest, juiciest writing. The second half, not so much. As amusing as it all is, the whole thing starts to feel a bit false. I don't for a minute believe any of the characters introduced in the first half would come up with the stories presented in the second. Mr Coupland champions story-telling as a means of creating order in our lives, but the ending is a chaotic, gooey mess. It's the literary equivalent of "Lost", 300 pages leading up to and ending that leaves you feeling a bit cheated.

It's as though you're reading two books awkwardly grafted together--one, a smart, biting social critique set in a nicely downbeat near-future, where mankind's doom is more apathetic than apocalyptic; the other, a weird mish-mash of offbeat short stories suddenly cut off by a "what the--?" ending. No guesses which of the two I'd rather be reading.

Still, grafting is what gave us the Golden Delicious, and there's still plenty to savor here. Just don't let the ending leave you with a bitter aftertaste.

Men who hate "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

TITLE: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Original title Man Som Hatar Kvinnor): Millennium, Book 1
AUTHOR: Stieg Larsson/Translation by Reg Keeland
PUBLISHER: Quercus

RATING
5/5 “Full-body tattoos of Buddhist demons”; 4/5 “Chinese characters you can’t even read yourself”; 3/5 “Bands of any type”; 2/5 “Anything Celtic”; 1/5 “(Ex) Girlfriend’s names”
SCORE 3/5

Shrug. Sorry, that’s the best I can muster after finishing Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s serial bestseller, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. I know, phenomenon like this tend to produce tsunami-wave cycles of popularity, of crest and trough, of adulation and backlash, and back again, pushing opinions to the extremes and drowning out the middle ground. Does anyone find the Twilight series, “OK, I guess”? How many people finished “The Da Vinci Code” and thought, “Ho hum”?

You can’t doubt “Girl” and the other two books that make up the Millennium trilogy are very much at the peak of the crest now. Last month Amazon announced Mr Larsson had become the first author to sell over one million e-books for the Kindle. The Huffington Post reports that sales of trilogy exceeded 30 million worldwide. But after wading through 500-plus pages of turgid exposition, choppy dialogue and wet characters, the most I can say for this book is, It’s OK, I guess. Ho hum.

I admit though, it is refreshing to read a novel set in such a little-known nation, and there’s no denying the old-world charm that rises like perfume from place-names like the Furusund Strait, Arholma, Gotgatan and Gamla stan. True, some of the cultural references may be hard to follow, such as to Sweden’s interest rate crises in the early 90s, but in a way that kind of adds to the enjoyment of experiencing something new and foreign. But that’s just about the only nice thing I can say about the book.

Much of the hype surrounding the Millennium series focuses on its characters, and they are the book’s first disappointment, but not its worst. Theoretically, the hero of the story is political/financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, but the publisher knew what they were about when they changed the title to focus on his partner, dragon-tattooed computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (the original Swedish title translates as “Men Who Hate Women”). It’s undoubtedly a smart publicity move, but sadly Salander, billed as a Goth-punk Bourne with an extra X chromosome, instead comes across as yet another fantasy figure, the kind of kick-ass girl introverts dream of dating, one whose real turn-on is diffidence. “Dammit, he had treated her like a human being” she thinks to herself before hopping into bed with Blomkvist.

If Salander is a disappointment, Blomkvist is a disaster. His defining characteristic is passivity. He’s accused of libel by a shady businessman, but refuses to defend himself, and is disgraced as a result. Luckily, he’s then hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger to investigate the case of a child that disappeared 40 years previous, but for much of the book he manages to do little but drink coffee and have sex. Blomkvist’s only other character trait, you see, appears to be his alarmingly omnivorous sexual appetite. He sleeps with every single major female character in the book, a list that includes a woman half his age (Salander), the (married) editor-in-chief of the magazine he works for, as well as the (married but separated) niece of Henrik Vanger, a woman much closer to 60 than 16. For Mr Larsson, a journalist, to write about a journalist having such success with the ladies, will probably a too-transparent bit of wish fulfillment for some readers.

The other attraction the novel offers is its choice of themes. Here, the situation is somewhat better. The overriding theme, as the Swedish title suggests, is violence against women, especially sexual violence. Each part of the book begins with a grim statistic such as “48% of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man”, and this carries over into Blomkvist and Salander’s investigation, as they turn up evidence (after much coffee-fuelled bed-hopping) that someone in Vanger’s family harbors a serious grudge against the opposite sex.

Mr Larsson has other irons in the fire as well. There’s his evident disgust with the cozy ties between financial journalists and their subjects, his hatred of both Sweden’s unrepentant Nazi movement and abuses of power, and perhaps more oddly, his airy dismissal of the role of stock exchanges. To be sure, Mr Larsson’s rage is evidently heartfelt, though Blomkvist’s sudden outbursts against these targets feel as though they come from the author rather than the character. Still, these doses of raw emotion help to enliven an otherwise lifeless plot.

The real drawback of the book, you see, is the positively somnolent progress from plot point to plot point. The convoluted backstory could probably have been dealt with in a fraction of the space. We learn a lot about the Vanger family but little that relates to the case. There’s a buildup of evidence but no corresponding narrowing of suspects, leaving the reader with nothing to get involved in, but instead watching the investigation at arm’s length. Just when the novel feels like it might be suddenly getting interesting—a Dan Brown mystery for grown-ups—Mr Larsson suddenly shifts gears, reveals the culprit and then just as quickly kills him off. The remaining 100 pages are an entirely unnecessary epilogue in which Blomkvist gets his revenge on the man who framed him in the libel case.

Partly, I suspect, this long-windedness is the result of the book’s rather unique genesis. As most of you will know, Mr Larsson died of a heart attack shortly after delivering the manuscripts of the series to his publisher (this wouldn’t sound nearly so eerie if he’d written, say, a work of adult erotica, but hey). So bang went any chance of give-and-take between editor and writer as they sought to hone the work into the finished product. Would you want to delete a dead man’s words? No? So that’s very much what it feels like we’re getting, a raw, unvarnished manuscript, one showing lots of promise but lots of rough edges, too.

Hic Sunt Cuddly Dracones

TITLE: His Majesty’s Dragon (In the UK: Temeraire)
AUTHOR: Naomi Novik
PUBLISHER: Harper Collins

RATING
5/5 “HMS Victory”; 4/5 “HMS Beagle”; 3/5 “HMS Bounty”; 2/5 “HMS Pinafore”; 1/5 “RMS Titanic”
SCORE 4/5

Time was, dragons were the stuff of nightmares, horrors lying beyond the horizon, "Hic Sunt Dracones"—here be dragons, and watch out, they're coming for you. How times change. Revisionism is in, and our old nemesis has gotten a makeover. "His Majesty's Dragon" shows this isn't necessarily a bad thing, provided you don't mind having your dragons declawed.

At first glance, "His Majesty's Dragon" seems like a one-trick dragonet, its one twist being that it puts dragons in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars. The idea of mashing up fantasy and Napoleonic adventure is cute, but not terribly original. It's been done before, most notably with Susanna Clarke's 2004 bunker-buster "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell". Fortunately, that's not all "His Majesty's Dragon" has to offer. Like many good works of speculative fiction, it takes a well-worn concept and stands it on its head—here, deadly fire-breathing dragons are not monsters, but our friends and allies.

This too, has been done elsewhere, often in kiddie stories like "How to Train Your Dragon". But whereas these boy-and-his-dragon stories tend to present dragons as a geeky kid's dream pet ("does whatever I say, and if anybody gives me any grief, turns them into smoked baby back ribs"), the dragons in "His Majesty's Dragon" are more like a geeky adult's dream kid.

Dragons in Ms Novik's book are smart, sentient chaps who imprint themselves on the nearest suitable candidate after they hatch from their shells—much the way birds do in the real world. As the novel opens, Royal Navy Captain William Laurence captures a dragon's egg from a French frigate, and no prizes for guessing who the little critter picks to be his mommy-surrogate when he hatches. A panicked Laurence names his new companion "Temeraire" (French for "rash") after a ship in the Royal Navy—which sounds about par for guys' choices of baby names. We're always trying to get the kids named after our obsessions: I know one soccer-mad father who planned to name his son Zidane, while in Japan a certain Mr Hayashi (the name translates as "Wood(s)") was thwarted in his attempt to name his son Tiger.

Also like some new parents, Laurence isn't overjoyed at the prospect of giving up his career and private life to look after a needy, grasping infant. The two of them are packed off to join Britain's Royal Aerial Corps, currently going tooth-and-claw with the French emperor Napoleon's own squadrons of dragons. The training scenes that follow are more 'Cosby Show" than "Karate Kid", as Laurence helps Temeraire to make friends, learn about where he came from, and steers him through the treacherous shoals of adolescence. This is light, breezy fun, as we watch Laurence go from reluctant parent to proud father, and Temeraire from shy stripling to king of the skies. There is skullduggery and violence of course, even a climactic aerial battle against the foul and most foreign French, but this is a kind of "Princess Bride" combat, deadly without every feeling threatening.

This is to the fantasy genre what the marshmallow is to Irish cream cheesecake; soft, squishy and sweet, simple yet a little bland. "His Majesty's Dragon" under-does the action, adventure or humor in favor of "awww, shucks" moments of bonding between Laurence and his dragon. Characterization is also marshmallow-simple, especially among the human cast. It's "The Black Stallion" with scales, surprisingly without bite for a book about dragons. The best that can be said of its Hornblower-meets-Helm's Deep setup is that Ms Novik at least explores how this might change history, with the Battle of Trafalgar as a sneaky deception to hide Nappy's real plan for invading England (this compares well with Ms Clarke's work, in which a powerful magician uses his wizardry to enable the British to beat Napoleon at Waterloo—which is, er, precisely what happened historically).

The real joy of the book is found in the energy Ms Novik invests in her scaly heroes. Thought has gone into getting the tone of each dragon right—from the dim-bulb chirpiness of the smallest dragons, to the earnest inquisitiveness of Temeraire himself. Speaking as a father, I'd say that in Temeraire, Ms Novik also strikes about the right balance between children's clinginess and their desire for independence. Ms Novik also obviously takes great joy in devising weird and wonderful breeds of dragons, with names to match, from the Winchesters and Parnassians of Britain, to the Pecheur Couronne (crowned fisher) and Flamme de Gloire (flame of glory) of France, and the Imperials and Celestials of China. Perhaps it's not surprising her human characters seem deadly dull next to these flamboyant butterflies.

Still, just as not every movie needs to be in 3-D, not every fantasy novel needs blood and guts. "His Majesty's Dragon" is a gentler kind of tale, as warm and cuddly as a dragon itself. And if that doesn't make sense to you, you're behind the times!

Can You Dig It?

TITLE: Warriors
EDITORS: George RR Martin, Gardner Dozois
PUBLISHER: TOR

Rating
5/5 "Can you dig it?"; 4/5 "OK, let's get down to it, boppers."; 3/5 "Warriors, come out and play-a-ay!"; 2/5 "The chicks are packed!"; 1/5 "What's the matter? You turning faggot?"
Score: 3/5

"OK, let's get down to it, boppers"

Call it the antidote to the Amazon effect. Modern technology is good at helping us find things similar to the ones we already own or like, but it's completely duff at leading us to new discoveries. Enter the short-fiction anthology. In the foreword to "Warriors", Editor George RR Martin compares anthologies to old-fashioned wire spinner racks, with "all the books jumbled up together". In "Warriors", he and co-editor Gardner Dozois set out to break the walls between genres by mixing up stories from all shades of the literary spectrum.

It's a laudable effort, and one that feels especially timely now, with the rise not only of chain superstores, as lamented by Mr Martin in his foreword, but also of on-line retailers offering sophisticated recommendation engines. It's a pity that much of the material in "Warriors" is not up to the task.

"Warriors, come out and play-a-ay!"

Partly, this is due to the subject matter. Mr Martin and Mr Dozois have made stories about warriors their unifying theme, and this has inevitably limited the range of stories they have collected. The 20 stories gather mainly around the poles of science fiction and historical fiction, with only a few pegs from other genres to support the idea that all fiction can fit under one tent. However, there are one or two exceptions, which not coincidentally turn out to be some of the best in the book.

It is also partly due to the very uneven quality of the stories on offer. While there are a few which are genuinely worthwhile entries, there are far too many which feel merely phoned in or hastily scribbled on the back of an envelope. Surprisingly, Mr Martin himself is one of the culprits here.

Now, let me say I stand in awe of Mr Martin's literary talent. I have encountered few writers in any genre with his gift for instant, vivid, believable characterization and ability to communicate this personality through the character's own voice. I am also staggered and humbled by the man's ability to juggle a best-selling fantasy series, a spin-off TV series, convention appearances, and still find time to edit this collection. So I call automatic BS on anyone who suggests I am insufficiently appreciative of his work.

The fact is, "The Mystery Knight", the latest in his "Dunk and Egg" series of short stories set in the same world as the "Song of Ice and Fire" novels, is just plain no good. Rather than building on our investment in Sir Duncan and his squire, Egg, Mr Martin invents a host of new characters, gives us no reason to care for them, then abruptly resolves the whole situation in an unsatisfying deus ex machina. Considering Mr Martin's name and the prospect of another entry in the Dunk and Egg saga was my main reason for buying the book, this is a terrible letdown.

"We're gonna rain on you, Warriors!"

Mr Martin can perhaps take small comfort in the fact that he has plenty of company. For a bunch of warriors, there are a disappointing number of misfires. Mr Dozois's own entry is not so much a letdown as simply baffling. Some of the big names, including Robin Hobb and Tad Williams, produce only shrug-inducing duds.

There are worse offenders, though. "King of Norway" by Cecelia Holland features a long, tepid battle scene followed by an escape that is pure hokum. David Weber's "Out of the Dark" is a shambling patchwork of Roland Emmerich's "Independence Day", Tom Clancy style military techno-fetishism ("the fifteen-pound round from the M-136 light anti-armor weapon struck the side of his vehicle's turret at a velocity of 360 feet per second") and a truly cringe-worthy Gothic third act. Diana Gabaldon's piece is utterly twee and far too taken with its own preciousness.

"You Warriors are good, real good." "The best."

Fortunately for those of us who already paid full-cover price for the hardback, the collection is not a total loss. In a development that's almost worth a "warriors" story on its own, the day is saved by the veterans of the old guard. Robert Silverberg, 75, turns in a melancholy yet thought-provoking piece on what warriors would do once there is nobody left to fight. Peter S. Beagle, 71, takes the warrior theme in an interesting direction, in a story that unfolds like a dream, which may be appropriate, since the hero may not--if you want to get technical about it--actually exist. S. M. Stirling, 56, gives us a light-hearted, fast-paced romp in a neato retro-future that mixes Napoleonic with post-apocalyptic settings. There are also solid entries from veterinarian James Rollins and closet botanist Naomi Novik.

Five out of 20 hits might be a good average in pro baseball, but makes these warriors look decidedly amateurish. Mr Martin's fumble as the slugger of the team is especially galling for us fans that were rooting hardest for him. We can only hope this shows his entire attention is going into the "Ice and Fire" series. Sadly for Mr Martin's lofty aims, none of the stories here were impressive enough to make me want to read more from the contributors. Though in a weird way, this is also a defeat for the Amazon effect he rails against, since I only got the book because Mr Martin's name was attached to it.

Call it a draw, then.

Not Dead Yet

TITLE: Before They are Hanged
AUTHOR: Joe Abercrombie
PUBLISHER: Pyr

RATING
5/5 “Hang ‘em high”; 4/5 “Just hangin’ out”; 3/5 “Hung jury”; 2/5 “Hung out to dry”; 1/5 “Hangover/Sexual hangups (tie)” DNF “Hanged, drawn & quartered” DISQ “Hung like a horse”
SCORE 4/5

Iconoclasm is fun at first, but it's got a shelf life shorter than a Japanese pop band. Once the glitter rubs off, what once seemed glam feels about as hip as Jefferson Airplane.

"Before They are Hanged" doesn't fall quite so far, but the biting satire is beginning to dull. I confess, I had a whale of a time with Joe Abercrombie’s first book in the series, “The Blade Itself”. Here, Mr Abercrombie cheerfully vivisected some of the ropiest fantasy clichés, from savage barbarians to kindly old wizards. Logen Ninefingers, the barbarian, spent more time screaming in pain than anger. The old wizard proved as kindly as Vlad the Impaler, and the nicest bloke in the whole book turned out to be the torturer.

Mr Abercrombie returns to the bonfire of the inanities in the second book, this time stoking the flames with the concept of heroic journeys and quests, heroes who get through battles without a crease in their woolens, traitors and sieges, heroic romance and famous last words. Nothing is sacred. Again.

The action quickly picks up where “The Blade Itself” left off, with the ramshackle kingdom called the Union facing threats on multiple fronts. The armies of the prophet Khalul, led by a coterie of invincible, cannibalistic Eaters are bearing down on the Union city of Dagoska from the south, while those of the barbarian King Bethod threaten the province of Angland to the north. Inquisitor Glokta arrives in Dagoska to shore up the defenses and unravel the mysterious disappearance of his predecessor.

Bayaz, the First of the Magi and former brother-in-arms to Khalul, journeys in search of a weapon that can stop Khalul’s unnatural underlings. He is joined by a mismatched band of five would-be heroes: Logen, Bayaz’s apprentice, a talkative guide, a dashing swordsman and a feral escaped slave.

A third story arc follows another band of misfits with colorful names like Dogman, as they accompany a Union army heading north, under the dubious leadership of the Union’s vain and cretinous Crown Prince.

We've already been introduced to this identity parade of characters, which leaves Mr Abercrombie more time to expand and enrich his world. We get a little further under the unwashed, flea-bitten skin of Logen and Dogman in particular, and these fatalistic, straightforward yet blackly humorous heroes are easily Mr Abercrombie's best inventions. The backstory to the adventure also contains intriguing hints that all this has gone before--hints that Mr Abercrombie has something to say other than "high fantasy sucks!"

All the same, there’s still plenty of fun to be had in “Before They are Hanged”, watching a string of stale genre staples receive a well-deserved comeuppance. Sword fights become interesting again once you realize Mr Abercrombie is unlikely to let his heroes escape unscathed. Their mask of invulnerability gets its face quite messily mashed in, knocking one hero out but waking the reader up to the possibilities inherent in a story that doesn’t handle its characters with kid gloves. The sex is almost as messy as the fighting, uncomfortably believable, mildly embarrassing and—because hey, it’s not you—sniggeringly funny.

However, all this relentless stereotype-bashing is starting to wear a little thin. There’s now something almost predictable about the character’s inability to dig themselves into anything except more trouble. Some of the catch lines too, such as “Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say…”, have outstayed their welcome, and feel shoehorned into the narrative to suit the author’s desire for continuity. Some of Mr Abercrombie’s deconstructions have themselves become stereotypes—the hapless Crown Prince being a classic example. If Mr Abercrombie really wanted to surprise, he’d have the foppish Prince suddenly turn out to be a military genius. Surprise—nepotism works!

It’s always easier to destroy than make something new, and I hope that before the end Mr Abercrombie builds something on the smoking rubble of fantasy conventions he’s created. In any event, after two books in the series I wonder if he’s run out of targets to obliterate. I kind of hope so, otherwise he might be heading back to the remainder bin with all the other glitter boys.

Pop Goes the World

TITLE: The Windup Girl
AUTHOR: Paolo Bacigalupi
PUBLISHER: Night Shade Books

RATING
5/5 "Led Zeppelin"; 4/5 "99 Luftballons"; 3/5 "Balloon boy"; 2/5 "The Hindenburg"; 1/5 "Lead Zeppelin"
SCORE 3/5

Dirigibles. I knew we were in trouble as soon as the story introduced dirigibles. They’ve become a sort of billboard for an entire class of bloated speculative fiction, an all-too literal metaphor for lardy, lumbering stories flogging thinly-veiled allegories of modern ills—Goodyear blimps for the beard-and-ponytail set. My advice to authors is, you see a zeppelin lumbering into the airspace over one of your stories, show no mercy—shoot that bastard down. Kill your darlings, as Faulkner said. You’ll be glad you did.

Mr Bacigalupi’s novel has rightly won praise and awards for its original blend of futurism and steampunk, a kind of retro-future that preys on modern fears, but the whole structure is a bit like a dirigible itself—the impressive-looking frame most just holds a tub of gas.

“The Windup Girl” is set in Thailand, in a near-future where pretty much every bad thing you’re worried about happening, happened. It’s a kind of scrapbook of apocalyptic newspaper headlines. Oil and gas have run out, leaving civilization dependent on muscle power and a bit of coal (peak oil fears, check!). Airplanes and cars have gone the way of dinosaurs and mammoths, which is ironic, since thanks to genetic engineering, mammoths (“megadonts”, sorry) are back in fashion as a source of muscle. Oh yeah, zeppelins are back in too. Sigh.

Speaking of genetic engineering, geneticists at a “calorie companies”, a bunch of evil corporations located in Des Moines for some strange reason, have deliberately created super-parasites and crop blights, to wipe out the world’s food sources and make everyone dependent on their genetically-modified (GM) products (GM food fears, check! Large, faceless company fears, check! Fears of Midwestern states, che—wait, what?!).

Genetic engineering ain’t all bad though, since it’s allowed the Japanese to neatly solve their problem of a declining population without having to rely on any foul-smelling foreigners. They’ve created “windups”, tailor-made test-tube people, smarter, faster and stronger than ordinary folk, but with deliberate built-in weaknesses to stop them taking over the planet, such as the stuttering motion that gives them their nickname.

Emiko is the “Windup Girl” of the title, bred to be a businessman’s ideal personal secretary—sexy, multilingual, obedient, and when you’re done with her, pop her in the recycling bin. Her last boss didn’t want to keep her but didn’t have the stomach to mulch her, so she has been abandoned in Bangkok, forced to work in a nightclub where she is continually humiliated as subhuman.

There she meets Anderson Lake, whose name sounds like it should be the title of an accounting firm, ostensibly the owner of a factory manufacturing coiled springs, but actually an agent of the “calorie companies”, searching for Thailand’s secret source of new foodstuffs. His mission is complicated by his scheming factory foreman, Hock Seng, an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia who barely escaped an Islamic-inspired pogrom against his people (Fears of fundamental Islam, check!).

Mr Bacigalupi’s Thailand is filled with bowing and corruption, ladyboys and royalist-popularist tensions, a weird mish-mash that feels cribbed from the introduction to a Lonely Planet guide and the “Asia” section of the Economist magazine. This is symptomatic of the wider problem with the book—once you get past some rather neat ideas that went into building this world, there’s not much to keep you there.

The setting is relentlessly grim, and other than Emiko none of the characters is even remotely sympathetic. I enjoyed the book, I’ll admit, but I don’t think I smiled once the whole time I was reading it. It feels downbeat and didactic, more like a Greenpeace manifesto than a work of fiction. I wonder if Mr Bacigalupi isn’t preaching to the converted here, though. I imagine plenty of speculative fiction readers are already composting and bicycling to work and eating locally-grown organic vegetables, or at least wish they did.

The plot, too, feels as thin as a zeppelin’s skin, with events floating from point to point without any particular thrust or trajectory. The climax in particular feels just plain false, involving a sudden and near-psychotic change of heart on the part of one character, while the epilogue’s note of hope jars against the crushing despair of the rest of the book.

In short, I feel Mr Bacigalupi’s imagination and talent for twisting modern fears into future fables is not matched by his skills as a storyteller. I’ve already noted the lack of humor, or even humanity in his characters. At times, he slides into cliché—just once, I’d like to read about a band of evil misfits and rebels brought to heal by a benevolent faceless corporation, just for the hell of it. I’d read that.

Just so long as you promise not to put any dirigibles in it.

Pip of the Pacific

TITLE: Mister Pip
AUTHOR: Lloyd Jones
PUBLISHER: Vintage Canada

RATING:
5/5 “Oahu Island”; 4/5 “No Man is an Island”; 3/5 “Bikini Atoll”; 2/5 “Dan Ger Iland (unpublished manuscript by Giles Gammage, age 5)”; 1/5 “Island of Domination”
SCORE
4/5

Your first really good book is a bit like your first cigarette, your first drink, your first lover. It’s an experience that lodges within you, one you keep coming back to, so deeply unique and personal you cannot share it on anything but the most superficial level. “Mister Pip” is at once a really good book itself, and a book about reading really good books.

Matilda is a teenage girl growing up on Bougainville, a large island North East of Australia, during the early 1990’s. A war of independence against the rulers on the neighboring island of Papua New Guinea is in full swing, causing the entire white population and many of the black, including the local schoolteachers, to flee the island. Only one white man remains, a lonely eccentric named Mr. Watts, who begins to teach the children of Matilda’s village by reading from Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations.”

At first glance, there’s not much common ground between Victorian England and a tropical island, but the story of Mister Pip, the hero of “Great Expectations” who rises from poverty to riches, strikes a chord with Matilda and the other children, and their own dreams of escape. “It was always a relief to return to Great Expectations,” says Matilda. “It contained a world that was whole and made sense, unlike ours.”

Fantasy is not always healthy of course, and reality, if shut out, has a way of kicking in the door. At first there is resistance from some of the more religious parents, including Matilda’s mother, who feel the Bible is the only book worth reading. The not-quite-battle of words between Matilda’s mum and Mr. Watts is a triumph of understatement, a subtle thing that swims beneath the surface of otherwise placid encounters. Later, the war intrudes, as you knew if must from the beginning, with sudden, deadly consequences for the entire village.

Anyone who has ever felt affected by great literature will find resonance in the story. “Mister Pip” is a slim little thing, almost waif-like, weighing in at a hair over 250 pages. No Dickensian language or convoluted phrasing here: there is an economy of words and emotion in Matilda’s voice, which only underscores the horror as events go from bad to worse. Yet in the end the novel’s message is one of hope, if tempered by a realistic awareness of the limitations of what fiction can accomplish.

Much could be made of white guilt in the setting of this novel, of the exploitation of Bougainville’s copper mines, which leads to the rebellion, and of the backing provided to the Papua New Guinean government’s efforts to crush it. Mr Jones acknowledges these issues, but never takes sides nor lets them overwhelm the main story.

You might also be forgiven for feeling there’s something a bit too “Dances With Wolves” about the story of a white teaching a black village, but Mr Watts is never presented as a heroic or wise figure, someone at the mercy of events rather than their master. The character of Matilda helps illustrate the interplay between the two cultures, with her fascination of Dickens balanced against her love of folk tales and stories, proving there is something for both sides to gain from the exchange. “We feel white around black people,” says Mr Watts, uncomfortable with the truth, only to be answered with “We feel black around white people.”

I like the book, really I do—see the rating I gave it at the top of this review—but allow me to let my cynical side show for a moment. It must be said there’s something a little self-serving about novelists writing novels that tell you how wonderful novels are—a bit too close to patting yourself on the back, that one.

Still, with a work this accomplished Mr Jones can probably be forgiven for patting himself on the back a little. I can’t say I will always remember it—the title of first great book is already taken for me—but it is one I will certainly be in no rush to forget.

The Killing of Words

TITLE: Succession (Risen Empire/Killing of Worlds)
AUTHOR: Scott Westerfeld
PUBLISHER: TOR

RATING
5/5 "Obsession/Nonagression (tie)"; 4/5 "Expression"; 3/5 "Impression"; 2/5 "Recession"; 1/5 "Depression"
SCORE 3/5

So much SF gets garishly tarted up in a bid to make it more appealing to 'mature' audiences, only for the end result to turn out like a five-year-old getting into Mommy's jewelry and make-up (anyone for midi-chlorians?). This is cute with kids, squirmingly embarrassing with adults.

So when author Scott Westerfeld proudly proclaims he wrote "Succession" as a space opera "for [his] 14-year-old self", the teenage part of my brain lights up like a video game played by preschooler after three cans of Red Bull. While "Succession" stays on this caffeine high for most of its first half, it crashes badly in the second half with some misjudged material and poor handling of pacing.

The key to impressing boys is, in a vulcanized, carbon-fiber machine-actuated cyber-nutshell: Cool Stuff. And early on, Mr Westerfeld delivers cool by the ice bucket.

In the fine tradition of space opera, Mr Westerfeld drops us straight into the middle of the action, as Laurent Zai, captain on the imperial frigate Lynx, prepares a mission to rescue the Child Empress held hostage by the cyborg Rix on the planet Legis XV below. Mr Westerfeld gleefully pushes us to the logical extremes of both technological and human capabilities, teetering just on the edge of scientific plausibility: millimeter-scale remote spy drones, orbital drops by imperial space marines embalmed in shock-absorbent gel, spaceships controlled via deliberately induced synesthesia (the perception of one sense being felt in another—seeing sounds as colors, for example).

The central Cool Thing in all of this is Laurent Zai's Emperor, who happens to be dead, and has been for quite some time. This slows the Emperor down less than you'd think, because 1,600 years ago he discovered a means of reanimating the dead by implanting something known as a Lazarus symbiont, which not only restores life but also keeps the risen dead in perfect health. For example the Emperor's sister, the aforementioned Child Empress being held hostage, is physically a child but over a millennia old.

The ever-growing ranks of the undead have produced an unstable, two-tier society in the Empire, which the recent Rix attacks threaten to tear completely asunder. A second strand of the novel, intercut with the action above Legis XV, revolves around empathic Senator Nara Oxham as she leads a sort of "loyal opposition' political faction against the aristocracy of the dead. Additional chapters taking place 10 years before the main action of the novel cover the romantic history between Zai and Oxham.

The cuts between characters come thick an fast, keeping the action zipping along like an overexcited nerve cell, spitting out new ideas and technologies on every page. The weightier questions hanging on Oxham's story—is death necessary for progress? Do new ideas only arise because the older generations pass away?—form a nice complement to the shoot-'em-up frenzy of Zai's rescue mission.

The neurons begin to misfire in the second half, however, as once-perky ideas are replaced with sluggish technobabble. There is much talk about virtual matter involving "quantum wells", hardly the space adventure fare the target audience is looking for. Oh hell, even if they were begging for it, it's still dreadfully dreary. To fill the gap, a subplot involving a self-building, sentient house suddenly gets more air time, which is about as exciting as it sounds. The already fractured plot speeds up, skipping whole blocks of time, before juddering to a sudden halt that positively screams for a sequel, though as of June 2010 none has been forthcoming.

In short, "Succession" is hugely fun when it acts its age, a bit of a bore when it puts on grown-up airs.

More Fiction, Less History Please

TITLE: Conspirata
AUTHOR: Robert Harris
PUBLISHER: Simon and Schuster

RATING
5/5 "Plot to kill Hitler"; 4/5 "Gunpowder plot"; 3/5 "Garden plot"; 2/5 "Plot device"; 1/5 "Excel scatter plot"
SCORE: 3/5

Halfway through "Conspirata", I had one of those terrible epiphanies, the sort that usually only strike middle-aged men in dead-end jobs just before they either leap out the window or take up organic farming. And the epiphany was this: There really is no point to this.

"Conspirata" is the second in a series of novels by British author and former political correspondent Robert Harris, based on the life of famous Roman statesman and orator, Marcus Cicero. The first book, "Imperium", charted his rise from ambitious lawyer to his election as consul, the highest political office in Rome. The narrator in both books is Tiro, a slave owned by Cicero and something of a historical figure himself, thanks to his purported invention of a system of shorthand (though Mr Harris erroneously also attributes the invention of the ampersand, "&" to him).

Readers drawn by the martial-looking eagle on the cover, or who assume any Roman epic is going to involve gladiators, orgies and crucifixions will be cruelly disappointed. "West Wing" fans will be pleased, though. This is a political drama, proudly all talk and no action, where the climactic scenes take place on the rostra, not the colliseum. The single, solitary episode of toga-lifting naughtiness, a tryst between Tiro and a slave of another household, takes place firmly off-camera.

Instead, Mr Harris throws us headlong into the political arena, when Cicero uncovers evidence of a plot against both himself and the City of Rome. The plotters are never much of a mystery, and the focus is instead on how to outmaneuver them. Once they are defeated, the focus in the second half of the novel shifts to Cicero's diminished status once his term of office ends, and on the rise of a fellow named Julius Ceasar in the ensuing vacuum.

Mr Harris displays a casual knowledge of the inner workings of Roman government, but despite the notes provided at the end of the book it can sometimes be a headache to keep your praetors separated from your tribunes, your augurs from your pontifex, your Metelli from your Claudians. Indeed, there is precious little description of anything outside of Senate speeches and private intrigues. The storytelling is competent but uninspiring. Certainly, no Cicero.

I say the novel is "based on" the life of Cicero, but this is doing Mr Harris a disservice. Hell, this is the life of Cicero. "Conspirata" is first-rate history, which sadly sometimes makes it second-rate entertainment. Ostensibly a novel, the story line hews so closely to historical fact that five minutes on Wikipedia ruined the entire plot for me. For a work of historical fiction, this is too much history, too little fiction. Mr Harris neither alters nor adds to the facts, never suggests an alternative interpretation, never illustrates some unrecorded adventure. The whole thing soon becomes a bit like being cornered at a party by a dreadfully earnest history professor.

This flaw is exacerbated by Mr Harris's choice of Tiro as narrator and Cicero as subject. Particularly during the second half of the book, once Cicero's term as consul is over, he is reduced to mere bystander in greater events. That makes our man Tiro peripheral to the periphery, a third-hand news source doubly removed from all the action. Here you have Julius Ceasar, Rome's most ambitious and ruthless man, Pompey, her greatest general, and Crassus, her richest man, seizing control of the republic, but we see none of it.

It was then that the epiphany hit me. Why bother reading "Conspirata", when a history book would achieve much the same end?

The limited insights Mr Harris offers us are that Cicero was patriotic, Ceasar unscrupulous, Pompey vain and Crassus dim. What is the point of historical fiction, if not to make suggestions, interpretations or changes, to fill in the missing pages or otherwise doodle in the margins of history's textbooks? Why write a novel if not to present us with a work of fiction? This is not a bad book; the plot plows along straightforwardly, characterization is consistent if a little thin. Mr Harris just doesn't seem to have anyting particularly interesting to say about any of it.

Now if you will excuse me, I have some organic vegetables to tend to.

Rick of Conscience

TITLE: Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944
AUTHOR: Rick Atkinson
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster

RATING
5/5 "Battle of Hoth"; 4/5 "Battle of Wits"; 3/5 "Battle of the Sexes"; 2/5 "Battle of the Bands"; 1/5 "Battle for Terra"
SCORE: 4/5

World War 2 is our low-fat war. One we can indulge in as much as we want, secure in the knowledge that the glorious fallen do not remain to lard our consciences, but rather have been transported to light, airy heaven. With other wars, we may have to rationalize, but there's little doubt that fighting the Nazis was the Right thing to do.

When you get to the question of when and where we fought them, though, things get a little stickier. Not every battle or campaign is so easy to justify, and as Rick Atkinson shows in "Day of Battle", the Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy is the ten-pound ball of deep-fried butter ruining our no-guilt diet. The campaign left 100,000 soldiers dead, perhaps four times that many wounded, without striking any decisive blow against the Germans or sufficiently distracting them from other theaters. Was it worth it?

Mr Atkinson equivocates on the question, but he does so beautifully. "Day of Battle" forms the second of Mr Atkinson's planned "Liberation" trilogy following the history of US armies in the major European campaigns of World War 2. The series began with 2002's Pulitzer Prize-winning "An Army at Dawn", an engaging, in-depth history chronicling the US landings in North Africa. "Day of Battle" maintains this high standard of writing, even if it lacks the former book's driving narrative.

Mr Atkinson brings a humanist touch and eye for detail to the little-studied invasion of Italy. His book combines memoirs, first-hand as well as official accounts, and stacks of letters to from soldiers to those waiting at home. This intimate look at the war, combined with a heavy dose of poetic license, makes this a surprisingly readable book despite its 600-page-plus length. The only fault in the style is the aforementioned poetic license, which crops up in Mr Atkinson's tendency to embellish his descriptions. "The dappled sea stretched to the shore in patches of turquoise and indigo," he says, which is nice to read but hardly good history.

The supporting maps are likewise something of a mixed bunch. While clean and informative for the most part, in the paperback edition I read a number of printing errors had left some names with missing letters, so that "Monte Lungo" is rendered "Lun o" and Major-General Hawkesworth "Awke w r".

The level of detail of Mr Atkinson's account is, however, amazing, covering the US involvement in the campaign from the Anglo-American conference in May 1943 where it was conceived, to its climax in the fall of Rome in June 1944. Altghough the descriptions of acutal battle are sometimes a little vague, "thrusts met stout resistance", "a flanking attack ... unhinged the German line", Mr Atkinson's coverage of the leading personalities, from US commanders George Patton and Mark Clark, to divisional commanders like Lucian Truscott and even more junior officers, is much stronger. Mr Atkinson projects genuine respect and admiration for these men, though you feel he might be too easy on them sometimes. Mr Atkinson lists their ailments and worries sympathetically, but I can't stomach commanders sleeping in sprawling Italian villas and complaining about stress or tiredness, when a dozen kilometers away their men are getting dismembered by the truckload. Clark in particular gets off lightly, despite coming across as slighly insubordinate and egocentric.

Rather, Mr Atkinson saves his venom for the real enemy: the British. "Day of Battle" is a fine account of the campaign, provided you are utterly uninterested in the involvement of the British, Canadians, Polish, New Zealanders, Indians and other nationalities who made up the Allied force. Whenever the "cousins" do pop up, they soon disappear under a barrage of criticism for poor leadership, lack of offensive spirit, and failure to support or appreciate their American allies enough.

The most troubling part of the book, however, is Mr Atkinson's attempt to justify the campaign as a whole. In "An Army at Dawn", he convincingly argued that the African campaign helped steel US forces for the war in Europe. The argument doesn't work as well here, especially as he himself notes that soldiers not killed or wounded tended to become psychiatric casualties after 200-240 days; men can only be tempered so far before they break. Instead, Mr Atkinson falls back on the stale comfort that, in the words of war correspondent George Biddle, certain qualities "give war its justification, meaning, romance and beauty. The qualities of valor, sacrifice, discipline, a sense of duty". This flies in the face of the evidence Mr Atkinson presents in the previous 600 pages, that the war was horrible, meaningless, savage and hellish.

Far better is another quote by Biddle, "I wish the people at home, instead of thinking of their boys in terms of football stars, would think of them in terms of miners trapped underground or suffocating to death in a tenth-story fire." Sometimes, I think, it's only right that our consciences should be troubled.

War is Hell for Other People

TITLE: D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
AUTHOR: Antony Beevor
PUBLISHER: Viking

RATING
5/5 "The Mother of All Battles"; 4/5 "The Aunty of All Skirmishes"; 3/5 "The Granny of All Protest Marches"; 2/5 "The Niece of All Arguments"; 1/5 "The Step-Sister of All Tantrums"
SCORE: 4/5

The D-Day invasion of France, the golden moment of the Greatest Generation, is probably one of the best-known battles of the whole war. A new book on the subject sheds little new light on the events, but helps remind us of the staggering cost in lives, Allied, German and civilian, that was the price of victory.

In "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy", British historian Antony Beevor attempts to recreate the award-winning formula that served him so well in 1998's "Stalingrad" and 2002's "The Fall of Berlin 1945". With these books, Mr Beevor found something of a niche between scholarly, broad and sweeping histories like John Keegan's "The Second World War", and more intimate accounts like Stephen Ambrose's "Band of Brothers".

Mr Beevor's style is to weave together first-hand accounts of generals, soldiers and civilians into a coherent and comprehensive account of battles. This again is the pattern for "D-Day", flitting among personal anecdotes as it follows the campaign from the initial airborne landings to the liberation of Paris. He does an admirable job of balancing his sources, including American, British, Canadian, French and German voices.

If the objective is to let you know how it felt to be there, then the book fails. You can't pretend that reading about the explosions, the screams, the fear, the stench can come within shooting distance of the real thing, any more than watching "House MD" trains you to be a doctor. It does, however, give you a better sense of war as something experienced by its participants, rather than some abstract development on a map. You can appreciate the feelings expressed, even if you can't understand them.

Mr Beevor's style also allows him to highlight previously under-appreciated aspects of the campaign. In "Stalingrad", this was the role of the hapless Soviet "volunteers" in the German armed forces, viewed as traitors by their countrymen and sub-humans by their new masters. In "D-Day", the spotlight again falls on those dealt the lowest of war's playing cards: civilians, prisoners and the wounded.

These people tend to get short shrift in most accounts. War is hell, we are often told. Yes, but who for? "Saving Private Ryan" or "Letters from Iwo Jima" focus on the plight of the men in uniform, but by contrast Mr Beevor's account makes it clear the real horrors happen not on the front lines, but behind them. Indeed, the book leads me to the (admittedly unoriginal) insight that it's much easier to shoot people who aren't shooting back, and the safest thing to do on the battlefield was probably to be the one holding the machinegun. Mr Beevor presents us with a series of saddening, sickening stories of prisoners and wounded shot, civilians murdered, towns massacred and destroyed. It's sobering to realize that more French people died being liberated by their allies, than Englishmen did being bombed by their enemies.

However, what worked so well in "Stalingrad" and "Berlin" begins to feel a little forced here. The two previous books were both about sieges, which by nature gave them both a limited scope and a natural beginning, middle and end. The colossal scale of D-Day, and the lack of clear ending work against Mr Beevor's style.

"D-Day" provides only a sketchy overview of the strategic course of the battle, supplemented by some awkwardly-placed maps. It does not stay with any one figure long enough to give us any insight into their personal lives. Analysis of leading figures never rises above the level of oft-repeated cliches: vain Montgomery, nagging Churchill, foul-mouthed Patton. The rank-and-file get even less air time. Ironically for a book built on first-person recollections, we never get to know any of the participants as people. Instead they frequently get used as local color, to spice up the account and move it along, before returning to obscurity. The book does not so much reach a conclusion as abruptly stop, with a lame comment on how different the world would be if the invasion had failed.

In spite of these shortcomings, "D-Day" is a highly readable addition to the coverage of the campaign, and a useful guide to the true costs of war.

Sharp-Edged Wit

TITLE: The Blade Itself
AUTHOR: Joe Abercrombie
PUBLISHER: Pyr

RATING
5/5 "Go ahead, make my day."; 4/5 "You talking to me?"; 3/5 "Say "hello" to my little friend!"; 2/5 "Yo, Adrian!"; 1/5 "You maniacs! You blew it up! Oh damn you! Goddamn you all the Hell!"
SCORE 5/5

Logen Ninefingers is the toughest, baddest fighter in all of the North, the kind of stone-cold killer who could eat Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone for breakfast, and still have room for Arnold Schwarzenegger for desert. When we first meet him, he's doing what he does best: killing things. Of course, like all action heroes, he cracks wise as he breaks heads; his first lines are, "Shit", followed by "Gah!", "Hah", "Shit" yet again, then "Aaargh!". Ah, such poetry. He whimpers, grunts, squeals, then falls off a cliff.

He what?

Yes, the heroes of "The Blade Itself", by British author Joe Abercrombie, are not what you expect. It's as though Mr Abercrombie has taken well-worn archetypes of fantasy and swords & sorcery, the Tough Barbarian, the Wise Wizard, the Young Gallant, the Cynical Veteran, the Damsel in Distress, placed them lovingly on a pedestal, bowed deeply before them, then cut their throats, ripped out their entrails and set them on fire. Rarely have such genre clichés been deconstructed with such élan and obvious glee.

Gritty, dark fantasy seems to have enjoyed a surge in popularity over the past decade, boosted by authors such as George R R Martin, Stevan Erikson and Scott Bakker. Their heroes are anything but heroic, sometimes die, and frequently swear. Of course, there's an inherent contradiction in trying to write a "realistic" fantasy, and all too often such stories become a race to the lowest, pimpley-est of adolescent common denominators, stuffed with blood, gore, swearing and sex. Mr Bakker's "Prince of Nothing" series springs to mind as a particular culprit. "The Blade Itself" neatly avoids these pitfalls. The charm of Mr Abercrombie's work is that he manages to wallow in the mud without getting dirty. He remembers fantasy is, above all, supposed to be fun.

Mr Abercrombie has a rare talent for sketching vivid personalities in just a few strokes. His characters may be more memorable than believable, but always sympathetic. Take Logen, for starters. You'll never have such a soft spot for such a hard lump of a man. He's lost his family, his friends and his axe – now all he has for company is a cooking pot. Mr Abercrombie deftly portrays him as a worn nub of a man, tired from years of fighting, who could still snap you in two if he had a mind to.

His fall from the cliff is not the end, and eventually he falls in with Bayaz, a man who claims to be the First of the Magi. Unlike most Wise Wizards, he's not much of a one for fireside wisdom and heartwarming homilies. Waving magic wands and speaking pig-Latin doesn't appear on his "To Do" list, either. The Darth Vader neck-crushing thing is more Bayaz's speed, when he's not making people spontaneously explode, like Tetsuo in "Akira".

Bayaz brings Logen to the city of Adua, the capital of a massive but decrepit, patchwork kingdom called the Union. There, they cross paths with Jezal dan Luthar, a dashing and dishy young swordsman callow to the point of almost mental incapacity, and Inquisitor Glokta, a torturer with unique insights into his job thanks to two years spent in the dungeons of the Union's enemies. He walks with a limp, climbs stairs with reluctance, is missing half his teeth but none of his wits. You feel sorry for him, when he's not cutting people's fingers off.

There are plenty of fingers in line for the chop, as the Union is beset by enemies within and without, real as well as imagined. People claiming to be powerful wizards go right to the top of the inquisition's Suspicious People list, and Glokta is put on the case of finding out whether the old man really is who he claims to be. In this, he's aided by two thuggish helpers, an ex-criminal and a giant, near-mute albino, who naturally gets one of the novel's best lines.

There also are a number of minor stories, each packed with equally quirky characters. The requisite Damsel in Distress is Ferro Maljinn, an escaped slave and, incidentally, a feral, evil spirit of a woman, madder than a pit bull on acid. When offered salvation, her first instinct is to stab her rescuer. Other interwoven lines follow dour Major West and his hard-drinking sister, and a band of northern outlaws with colorful names like Dogman and Threetrees.

As the first book of a trilogy, much of "The Blade Itself" is spent on stage-setting and world-building. You get the sense of forces gathering, like mountaineers under a snow shelf after someone says, "Atchoo". The aims and motives of the protagonists remain mostly shrouded, and the overarching mythology is revealed in teasingly brief glimpses. The action is therefore episodic rather than epic. Some readers may be put off by the slow plot development, but although small-scale, the fights are never less than electric in intensity. It all builds nicely to a climactic, crimson scene where we learn why Logen Ninefingers is also known as "The Bloody-Nine."

"The Blade Itself" is stripped-down fantasy, anarchic and endless fun to read, Monty Python does Conan the Barbarian, with Jason Bourne in the lead. It is not an Important Book, it won't change your life, just give you a few hours of genuine pleasure. You'll whimper, grunt, and perhaps even squeal with laughter. Then you'll go and buy the next book in the series.

Guilty on all Counts

TITLE: Previous Convictions
AUTHOR: AA Gill
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster

RATING
5/5 "Espionage"; 4/5 "Treason"; 3/5 "Blasphemy"; 2/5 "Sedition"; 1/5 "Littering"
SCORE: 3/5

There comes a time in every love affair when the emotions finally release the optic nerves, letting you see your partner as they really are, when last night's date becomes this morning's hangover, when you stop locking the bathroom door and start cutting your toenails in front of one another. It's surviving that moment, more than any other test, that makes or breaks relationships.

That moment arrived for me and AA Gill about a third of the way into "Previous Convictions". I'll save you from skipping to the end: it turns out all right, we're still together, but it was a close-run thing.

Partially it was my fault. I was quick to overlook Mr Gill's faults. At first, I knew him only vaguely by reputation, as a witty and acerbic columnist for the UK's Sunday Times newspaper. The first book of his I read was "Angry Island", and I was hooked. The vitriol sometimes fell wide of the mark -- he seems to have a personal animus against the Welsh, for instance, which seems to be about as relevant as being against quilt-making or the color green. But he was always original, always fun to have around. His travel writing collection, "AA Gill is away", sealed the deal. It's like pumping ten thousand volts through your literary nerves, blowing all your preconceptions of what travel writing should be. I had it bad, as you can see.

"Previous Convictions" started out right. Oh sure, there was a bit of pretentiousness in his division of the articles into "Here" (the UK) and "There" (everywhere else). The first piece though, on the Glastonbury music festival, had me in hysterics. The high point arrives when the police attempt to escort away a naked, elderly woman noisily masturbating in front of the stage. "Come quietly, love".

But then, I started to notice the little things. How his heart really wasn't in it sometimes. The line about Africa waking up with such promise? That's from "AA Gill is away". The paean to India, ditto.

Sometimes, he was so self-indulgent, like he couldn't even be bothered trying. Like the article devoted entirely to a phone call to his 11-year-old son. Worse yet, he started throwing his own relationship in my face. Here's AA Gill and Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson in Texas. Here's AA Gill and "Jeremy" in Iraq, in Mykonos, in Amsterdam. Other than as showcases for Jeremy's asinine prejudices and Mr Gill's love of name-dropping, there's not much to recommend about any of these pieces.

I was almost in tears. The bastard, how he let me down. Then I went back, reread the better pieces, the middle stretch especially. Wait, the magic was still there. The piece on gold mining in South Africa, that's good, you get a real sense of the oppressive heat, the stifling dark, the hellish noise. His take on the essential loneliness and desperation of fitness clubs ("As close as most of us non-Hindus will ever get to knowing what it's like to be a hamster") has the disturbing ring of truth, his anger at the massacre in Darfur feels genuine (the book was pusblished in 2006, before Darfur became a cause celebre).

His bleak portrait of Haiti is timely given the recent earthquake, and a reminder that it will take more than money to get this basket-case country on its feet again. The trip to Peshawar, near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, is nicely balanced, a human look at the conflict that has dragged on through British, Russian and American occupations for over a century.

In short, "Previous Convictions" is patchy, baldingly uneven, but when Mr Gill gets it right, it shines. Brilliantly.

Sometimes you just have to close one eye, accept the other's faults, and learn to appreciate the good times. Luckily, in "Previous Convictions" there's still plenty of the latter. I just pray that's the last I've heard of Jeremy-bleeding-Clarkson.

Humanity 101

TITLE: Origin of the Species
AUTHOR: Nino Ricci
PUBLISHER: Doubleday Canada

RATING
5/5 "Rain man"; 4/5 "Gingerbread man"; 3/5 "Iron man"; 2/5 "Method man"; 1/5 "Piltdown man"
SCORE: 3/5

I'm not normally partial to romances. I mean, "happily ever after"? Yeah, and then what? This, though, is my kind of love story.

Love, sex: it all boils down to genetics, which when you think about it, boils down to sheer, dumb, blind luck. Primates' nearest cousins died out 50 million years ago. There's maybe one lucky mutation that separates a dead species from one whose descendents will be using opposable thumbs to text each other Tiger Woods gossip.

That's the rather bleak message at the heart of "Origin of the Species" by Canadian author Nino Ricci; life is random chance. Nobody better exemplifies this than Alex Fratarcangeli, an Italian-Canadian graduate student studying at Montreal's Concordia university. Alex drifts along, a passenger in his own life, carried by the currents and eddies of chance as they bring him bumping against fortune's flotsam and jetsam. These include Esther, a bubbly neighbour who sadly suffers from multiple sclerosis, Ingrid, a Swedish divorcee with unfortunate taste in men, Desmond, an unlucky British would-be researcher, Maria, an El Salvadorean refugee, a professor on the skids, a businessman with a disease -- Yes, there's plenty of dumb, stupid luck to go around.

There isn't much plot, but then that was Darwin's point as well; there's no grand plan, no script, no author, no guarantees other than a very final End.

Alex scrapes a living teaching English as a second language while trying to muster enough enthusiasm to finish his thesis on the biological origins of storytelling. Books, in other words, are just another way to propagate your genes -- to get people to have sex with you (fair warning: book reviewing, on the other hand, has no such power). Not that Alex needs any help in this department, despite his rather passive approach to life. The main branches from the main plot follow his disfunctional relationships with a raft of women, including Esther, Ingrid and Maria, as well as with Desmond and the others.

Without plot, you're left to fall back on character and setting, and this is where Mr Ricci's writing comes to life. Alex and his companions are not just believable, they're disturbingly familiar. You want to hate Alex, then catch part of him in your reflection. Ingrid, Esther and the others exist as fully-formed individuals, never mere ciphers or signposts. Each adapts to their environment, showing you different facets of thier personality, now a bullying tyrant, now a cringing supplicant. Only in Desmond, relentlessly awful and irritating, does Mr Ricci get carried into caricature.

"Origin of the Species" isn't a compelling story, but it's filled with compelling people. They pull you along in their wake, unwilling to let go so you can unravel their codes, see what makes them tick.

I said it was a love story, didn't I? And the object of desire is Canada. Canada in the 1980s, in Montreal, to be precise. American readers be warned; Mr Ricci expects you to keep up when he references Steinberg's, Pierre Trudeau and Peter Gzowski. "Origin of the Species" is brashly Canadian in exactly the way that Canadians aren't. It's like the Group of Seven, Canadians are always drawn to the land, even if it's seen from the windows of a coffee shop. The rush of names is overwhelming even for a Canadian, but you'll manage, you'll adapt. It's in your genes.

It's not always a fun read, but the love of place is part of what stops things from being completely gloomy. This may be all we have, but hey, isn't it something? We may be no more than genes, but you know, they're pretty good ones at that. There's the possibilty, not the promise, of happiness for those who fall in love. With the here and now.

And that's the kind of happy ending you can believe in.

Mind games

TITLE: Excession
AUTHOR: Iain M Banks
PUBLISHER: Orbit

RANKING
5/5 "Indiscretion"; 4/5 "Obsession"; 3/5 "Possession"; 2/5 "Depression"; 1/5 "Recession"
SCORE: 4/5

To keep themselves amused, the super-AIs known as Minds in Iain M Banks's science fiction universe spend their time runing galaxy-sized simulations, a world of make-believe and might-have-been the Minds call the Land of Infinite Fun.

"Excession" is a bit like spending a few hours in Mr Banks's own Land of Infinite Fun; outlandish, amusing, intriguing, but never quite involving enought to let you forget that it's all just make-believe. Po-faced it certainly is not, it's space opera with a wink and a smile, gently tapping on the fourth wall but never quite breaking it.

"Excession" is the fourth book set in Mr Banks's Culture universe. This universe features technology as ahead of own our as the iPod is to the clay tablet, technology taken to its ultimate extreme, capable of building anything, anywhere, in any quantity desired. As a result, the biological inhabitants have long since given control of space ships and habitats (nobody's so old-fashioned as to live on an actual planet) and pretty much everything else to the Minds, a bunch of computers as pompous as Deep Thought, as twiggy as HAL and as serious as a whoopy cushion at a Shriner convention. They are the perfect security blanket for the cosseted inhabitants of the Culture. Together, they can out-think and out-fight anything the galaxy can throw at them.

Anything? Well, almost anything. The word "excession" you see, means something beyond a civilization's ability to understand, or resist should it prove hostile. The Aztecs would understand the concept. The Culture, as luck would have it, may have discovered an Excession, in the form of an impenetrable black globe which may serve as a link to other universes. As an added complication, it's also rather close to a warlike race called the Affront.

Mr Banks plugs us into the machinations of the Minds, as they struggle to respond to the challenges posed both by the Excession and the Affront, not to mention a cabal-within-a-cabal of rogue Minds with an agenda of their own.

It's not all a meeting of Minds, though they hog the limelight and all the best lines. There's also Genar-Hofoen, a rake in the Clark Gable mould, currently serving as an ambassador to the thuggish frat-boy Affront. Somewhere in his closet, where he keeps his skeletions, is his ex-lover Dajeil Gelian, now a recluse on board a highly eccentric ship called the Sleeper Service.

The Minds have a job for Genar-Hofoen, though it might be pure stratagem. Tricky chaps, AIs. Just ask David Bowman. Are they trying to stop a war over the Excession, or start one?

The mysteries emerge into clearer resolution somewhat haphazardly, as we flicker randomly back and forth between Genar-Hofoen, Dajeil, and the Minds. The plot is mere subroutine, never the main program. The history between Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil, for example, is revealed in flashback info-dumps, and does not resolve so much as suddenly stop, blue-screened by other events around the Excession.
It's never a terribly compelling story, but then it's always fun to watch Mr Banks at play in his universe.

Mostly, you see, the novel is an exploration of the imaginative universe M Banks has created for us. What do supercomputers do for fun? What would post-humans do for religion? What would families be like if you could change your sex anytime you wanted? You get the feeling Mr Banks would rather answer these questions than attend to his sprawling story. It's a nice reminder that while American scifi has the best gadgets, it's the Brits that have the most fun. The overall structure of may suffer as a result, may get a little buggy, but the result is priceless.

It's not quite Infinite Fun, but you don't have to have a brain the size of a planet to enjoy plugging into Mr Banks's universe.

The Pleasures of Utopia

TITLE: Look to Windward
AUTHOR: Iain M Banks
PUBLISHER: Orbit

RATING
5/5 "Look out, there are llamas"; 4/5 "Remove infant before folding for storage"; 3/5 "Caution: Hot beverages are hot!"; 2/5 "Mind the gap"; 1/5 "Duck"
SCORE: 4/5

The trouble with utopias is that perfection gets a bit dull. Unless you're talking about Iain M Banks's "Culture" novels, which get scarily close to perfection without ever losing their charm.

The Culture is Star Trek's Federation stood on its head, anarchic where the Enterprise is hierarchical, post-human instead of stodgily 20th century, interventionist where Kirk's gang (in theory at least) stick to an intergalactic Peace of Westphalia and keep their hands to themselves.

As any American today can tell you, intervening in the affairs of others doesn't always end well. As "Look to Windward" opens, the Culture is wiping egg off its collective face after an attempt to eliminate social inequality in a people called the Chelgrians has instead ignited a bloody caste war. Not coincidentally, the Culture is also marking the 800th anniversary of a battle in their last serious war, which caused the destruction of two suns and a few billion souls.

Death is very much on the mind of Chelgrian emissary Quilan, still mourning the death of his wife in the war the Culture started. He has been dispatched to the Culture world of Masaq', ostensibly to talk a dissident artist into returning with him. However, he has secret orders, so deeply buried in his mind that even he doesn't know what they are.

Masaq' is an Orbital, an artificial world shaped like a gigantic, rotating bracelet in space, millions of kilometers in diameter. As such, it offers its inhabitants nearly limitless space. Technological advances, meanwhile, have banished illness, disease, poverty and starvation.

The plot with Quilan and the dissident composer is only the rim of the story, provided impetus by the hub and the heart, which is looking at how humanity would live in such a utopia. And just as importantly, how we might choose to die.

Mr Banks's Culture novels are never less than full-bore malarial fevers of imagination, and "Look to Windward" does not disappoint. The book's primary pleasure is the chance to sink into Mr Banks's hallucinatory universe and let the ideas and images wash over you: city-sized living zeppelins, sailing cable cars, a fortress perched atop basalt stacks.

How would we live in utopia? Picture your worst American sterotype, dialled up to 1,000. His Culture citizens are hedonistic, selfish and hilariously shallow--high points include a diner unsure whether what's on his plate is food or an alien, and a rafter on a lava stream who is unable to distinguish between base and virtual reality. But Mr Banks shows us the flip side, as well, in their guilt for past mistakes and the way they face life's final end.

Readers looking for something as kinetic as Mr Banks's first Culture novel, "Consider Phlebas", will be sorely disappointed. Like the Masaq' Orbital, "Look to Windward" is in no hurry to get you anywhere, but invites you to take a spin and admire the view. A pretty view it is, nicely leavened with both light and shadow, proof that utopias don't have to be boring.

Time Enough for Love

TITLE: The Time Traveler's Wife
AUTHOR: Audrey Niffenegger
PUBLISHER: Vintage Canada

RATING
5/5 "A month of Sundays"; 4/5 "The eleventh hour"; 3/5 "The nick of time"; 2/5 "Two shakes"; 1/5 "Zero hour"
SCORE: 4/5

I watched my daughter sleeping the other night. I wished I could stop time. I wished I could stay there forever.

My melancholy mood has a name, and it is "The Time Traveler's Wife". Like most novels that claim to be about one thing, it is really about its opposite--here, escaping the bonds of time throws our prison bars into greater relief. The love story at its center is both mundane and profoundly moving. I can't point to any special insight, any masterful display of wordplay, but for days after I wanted to reach out, to cling to my family, to stretch each moment into eternity.

Audrey Niffenegger's novel is about love, but it is also about loss. Clare, the wife in question, is married to Henry, who is sort of an epileptic with a twist--instead of seizures, his fits send his body hurtling randomly backwards or forwards in time. He takes nothing with him; he arrives naked and disoriented, and each time must first set about finding clothing, shelter and food, putting him in mortal danger. Clare must sit and wait, and hope that he will eventually return to her.

The great thing about time travel is it submits docilely to whatever interpretation you care to impose. Pick your metaphor. Relationship woes or dealing with illness and disease are the obvious ones here. Fate and free will are equally plausible. The fleeting nature of time. Life's randomness and unfairness. I suspect it is this malleability of meaning that has made this such a popular book.

Ms Niffenegger concentrates on the story and allows you to scribble whatever meaning you like onto her canvas. What did come through strongly for me was her belief in the power of art to transcend the limits of time. Henry is the son of a violinist and an opera singer. He bonds with teenagers over punk rock music made before they were born. Clare's mother writes poetry, her sister is cellist, she herself is a sculptor. Clare's mother, uncommunicative in life, speaks to her daughter through her poems. Henry's mother lives on in recordings of her performances. Towards the end of the novel, Clare creates a self-portrait, then "I (Clare) place my finger on her forehead, and say, "Vanish", but it is she who will stay; I am the one who is vanishing." Art, in other words, outlives its creator.

It is a moving book, but not especially movingly written. The power comes from the story's conception rather than execution. Henry and Clare are almost too perfect, too pure in their love. I was reminded somewhat of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (the filmic version; I must confess to never having read the original story), in that the remarkable character at the center doesn't do anything especially remarkable with his life.

The only sour note for me was the priviledged backgrounds Ms Niffenegger gives both Henry and Clare. Henry's parents are world-famous, Clare's are fabulously wealthy. While partially this is a plot point--the garden of Clare's house becomes their secret rendezvous--it somewhat blunts the pathos. Consider 23-year-old Ann in "My Life Without Me", struggling to protect her unemployed husband and two infant children from the fact that she is dying of cancer. That gets my sympathy. Being born into immense wealth, staying wealthy because your husband knows all the lottery numbers, but frustrated because he's not always around? Ho-hum.

I know, I know. I'm a stone. The trick is despite the so-so love story, there's enough that lingers with you long enough to get you watching your loved ones at night.