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5/5 “Oahu Island”; 4/5 “No Man is an Island”; 3/5 “Bikini Atoll”; 2/5 “Dan Ger Iland (unpublished manuscript by Giles Gammage, age 5)”; 1/5 “Island of Domination”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

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.

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.

Smooth as Ceramic, Thin as a Microchip

TITLE: Spook Country
AUTHOR: William Gibson
PUBLISHER: Putnam

RATING
5/5 "Pussy Galore"; 4/5 "Honey Ryder"; 3/5 "Plenty O'Toole"; 2/5 "Kissy Suzuki"; 1/5 "Xenia Onatopp"
SCORE: 4/5

A slick casing of ultra-modern style hold a wafer-thin plot in William Gibson's "Spook Country". Mr Gibson returns to the augmented-reality world of 2003's "Pattern Recognition" and uploads us into the minds of Hollis Henry, a freelance journalist working for a magazine that may not even exist, Tito, a Russian-trained Chinese-Cuban smuggler delivering iPods to a mysterious client, and Milgrim, a benzo-addicted Russian translator kidnapped by a pseudo-military team shadowing Tito.

Mr Gibson's writing is ceramic-smooth minimalism, slick and stylish as an iPod, and easily its match in self-conscious hipness. Sentences are subject, verb, object, although two of these may be optional. "She'd Google him later" sums up the style--five words or less, including brand name. There is much guff talk about "preubiquitous media" and cyberspace "everting", but the prose is rescued from pretentious silliness by eye-catching imagery, like calling a sidewalk an "abstract in blackened chewing gum". It shouldn't work, but it so often does. It's a powerfully immediate and electrifying style. Sadly, there are some distractions. Mr Gibson outfits his text with more name brands than a Tokyo teenager, and sometimes the triple-lacquer layer of coolness is as numbing as it is hypnotic, like watching computer-generated fractals on endless loop.

The real letdown is the plot. There's some silliness involving superman criminals using Russian martial arts and voodoo to outwit Blackwell government types, and the subtext of the novel reads like an unsubtle small-l liberal bible, name-checking such cause celebre as disaffection with the war in Iraq and anguish over the growing divide between haves and have-nots. What's worse, the patently silly denouement in Mr Gibson's hometown of Vancouver robs the story of any gravitas it may have had.

It's a pity. Such silken skill with words should be put to use with a more engaging story. That said, Mr Gibson's invigorating Hunter S Thompson-does-sociology approach remains one of the most interesting, original voices in fiction. Let's hope he downloads something meatier for his next oeuvre.

Solid Writing, Phantom of a Plot

TITLE: Stalin's Ghost
AUTHOR: Martin Cruz Smith
PUBLISHER: Pocket

RATING
5/5 "Staypuff Marshmallow Man"; 4/5 "Christmas Past"; 3/5 "Flying Dutchman"; 2/5 "Casper"; 1/5 "Patrick Swayze"
SCORE: 4/5

Ghosts are said to be the uneasy souls of the dead, and in Martin Cruz Smith's Stalin's Ghost, "Uncle Joe" plays a role akin to that of Hamlet's father--never on stage, but always present. The device works well in developing the characters, but the central mystery is too insubstantial and crowded with sub-plots to truly grip.

There are surely few twentieth-century figures who merit an eternity or two in purgatory more than Joseph Stalin. His rule of the Soviet Union from 1922-1953 was so murderous that he is one of the few people who can be honestly compared to Hitler without hyperbole. In the first half of his rule an estimated 5 to 10 million Soviet citizens had been starved, frozen or worked to death in the Gulags or simply shot. The second half saw Stalin lead his country to victory in a war with Nazi Germany so staggeringly bloody, it makes even Eli Roth puke (possibly out of envy).

Yet despite being 50 years in his grave, he still has influence in Russia, thanks to his usefulness as a symbol and an excuse for all manner of sins. Stalin's reputation continues to divide people--ruthless but strong leader, or pathological murder?

Moscow police investigator Arkady Renko, the hero of five previous novels by Mr Smith, is struggling with the spirit of Stalin rather more literally. Stalin may be safely dead and buried, but there's been a spate of incidents in which riders on the Moscow metro claim to have seen him at one of the stations. The case has deeper resonance for Renko, whose father was one of Stalin's generals during the war.

A separate train of events is set in motion when Renko's partner, detective Victor Orlov, finds out someone on the force has been offering their services as a paid assassin. The snag is the prime suspect, Nikolai Isakov, is not only a hero from the Chechen war, but also a candidate for a far-right political party whose adopted mascot is--you guessed it--Joe Stalin.

The connection between Renko, his father and Stalin is ironically when the book comes most alive, and Mr Smith deftly interweaves the investigation with flashbacks to Renko's childhood, and the shadow hanging over him due to his parents' suicides (WHO reports that Russia's suicide rate is three times higher than the US. Don't say you never learn anything on Amazon). We also get more background on Zhenya, Renko's 12-year-old ward, and his lover, Eva Kazko, both of whom appeared in 2004's Wolves Eat Dogs. Indeed, Stalin's Ghost is the first of the Renko novels to feel like a proper sequel, and it is all the richer for it.

Alas, although I do so enjoy the Renko books, but I must admit the series is starting to show its age. The ghostly mystery and its link to Isakov is far too obvious and easily resolved, leaving Mr Smith to pad the book out with meandering storylines that add little to either character or story development. Speaking of age, Renko must be well into his fifties by now, and I can't entirely block visions of Roger Moore circa Moonraker whenever I read the book's action or sex scenes.

The amount of punishment Renko absorbs is also a little eye brow-raising. The poor man is, at various points in the story, garroted, stabbed, buried alive and, most improbably, shot in the head at point-blank range. The operating and recovery scenes read like they were lifted straight out of a medical text, and this is easily the book's weakest section.

That said, wry, sardonic Renko remains an engaging reading companion, but my wishes that the man be granted a little rest seem doom to be dashed. Renko is set to return in "Three Station" in 2010.

Grand Master at the Top of His Game

TITLE: Wolves Eat Dogs
AUTHOR: Martin Cruz Smith
PUBLISHER: Pocket

RATING
5/5 "Maria Sharapova"; 4/5 "Pavel Chekov"; 3/5 "Dolph Lundgren"; 2/5 "Rasputin"; 1/5 "Ivan the Terrible"
SCORE: 5/5

On November 1, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, outspoken critic of the Russian regime and former KGB officer, drank a cup of tea at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London. Floating in his cup was the subatomic version of a pipe bomb packed with ball bearings--an estimated 10 micrograms (the size of an ambitious speck of dust) of polonium 210, a radioactive substance over 250,000 times more toxic than cyanide. In three weeks Mr Litvinenko was dead, almost certainly poisoned by another former KGB man who shared Mr Litvinenko's table at the Pine Bar.

All this is a true story. And truth, so the saying goes, is stranger than fiction--unless, of course, fiction has already anticipated truth by a good two years. It's a testament to Martin Cruz Smith's insight into the way modern Russia functions (or more precisely, the way it doesn't) that his 2004 novel Wolves Eat Dog is almost eerily prescient in anticipating many of these events.

Wolves Eat Dogs is the fifth book in the series of novels featuring Russian police investigator Arkady Renko. From the start with 1981's Gorky Park, the Renko books have been as much about the cancers eating away at Russian society as they have been about the cynical, saturnine investigator. The conceit of having a thriller set on the metallic side of the iron curtain could have died with the cold war, but Mr Smith has kept the series fresh by bombarding his hero with events that mirror Russia's own deterioration through the past two decades. There are the Soviet era novels (Gorky Park and Polar Star); the Yeltsin revolution one (Red Square); the fall of the Communist bloc one (Havana Bay).

Wolves Eat Dogs is the corporate oligarch one, and starts with Pasha Ivanov, one of Russia's newly-minted billionaires, leaving an indelible impression on the Moscow pavement after reaching it rather directly and messily from his high-rise apartment balcony. A wolf like Ivanov makes enemies on his scrabble to the top of the pack, and Renko suspects something other than personal demons was eating away at the man. There is, for example, the question of why Ivanov had a mountain of salt in his closet. Renko's persistent probing irritates his superior, prosecutor Zurin, who would rather get back to the business of being bribed by Ivanov's successors. When Ivanov's business partner also turns up as a corpse near Chernobyl, Zurin seizes the opportunity to rid himself of his subordinate and dispatches Renko to investigate.

The remainder of the book largely takes place in the Exclusion Zone, a 30km no-go area surrounding the ruins of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Radiation from an explosion at the plant's reactor number four on April 26, 1986--by far the worst nuclear disaster in human history--killed about 50 plant workers and firemen in a matter of days, and released a cloud of toxic dust that continues to make the region uninhabitable 20 years later. Mr Smith's books draw power from the setting more than the plot, and with the Exclusion Zone he has tapped a source of skin-tingling unease and slow-motion dread. How odd that we have such an atavistic fear of such a twentieth-century invention. Yet there is no denying the menace felt in Mr Smith's description of the concrete sarcophagus entombing the remains of reactor number four, like a band-aid over a hole in the universe.

It's an environment that brings out some of the best in Mr Smith's writing since Gorky Park. Mr Smith's talent lies not only in his acute observations of Russia and its environment, but also in his mastery of the gallows humor this setting produces. Wolves Eat Dogs is easily one of the funniest books you will never laugh at.

A few minor quibbles. Readers of other Renko books will see familiar patterns developing. His ongoing feud with his superiors is wearing thin--surely the man would have been transferred, demoted, or just plain, old-fashioned shot by now. The central mystery isn't much of one, and the reader is left with more of a howdunit than a whodunit--and even then, is given no clues to go back and shake your head at the author's craft. The endings, too, have become slightly formulaic, and one simply waits for Renko to be rescued from Certain Death at the last minute.

Ah, but these are minor quibbles indeed. Who killed Ivanov? Who cares! In Mr Smith's hands, Renko's search is not about the journey, nor even the ending, but rather how one faces it.