Under Whelming

Title: Under Heaven
Author: Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher: Roc

3/5

It's a bit like opera, really. Majestically overwrought melodrama, populated by breast-beating, scenery-chewing actors emoting their hearts out over their tragic loves and losses. It's also quite brainy beneath all that, but despite some nice interplay between the characters this book is weighted down with a leaden ending.

Did I mention to happen to like Mr Kay's books? I should, before we go too far. Been a fan since 1984's "Fionavar Tapestry", unfairly dismissed as "Tolkien lite" by critics who looked no further than the first line of Mr Kay's resume ("1974: Edited J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Silmarillion'--in your face, suckers!"). Despite some derivative story elements, Mr Kay displayed an aptitude for shamelessly playing your heart strings, most especially to the tunes of loves and losses.

After the pure fantasy of "Fionavar" Mr Kay has settled into a long run of works labelled "historical fantasy"--historical events with the names changed and a few magical notes added. Thus, "Tigana" was renaissance Italy, "A Song for Arbonne" medieval France, "Lions of Al-Rassan" reconquista Spain, and so on.

In "Under Heaven", Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay swaps the familiar harmonies of Europe for the more exotic tones of China, but the leitmotif remains the same--the power of personal decisions to shape world-shaking events.

Tang Dynasty China is here thinly disguised as the land of Kitai, where an ageing emperor grows besotted with his newest concubine and a barbarian general and aristocratic chancellor vie for power in the ensuing vacuum. The story follows Shen Tai, second son of famous general Shen Gao, who as the novel opens is observing a two-year morning period for his father's death by burying the dead at the site of one of the late general's battlefields. For this deed, he is rewarded with 250 horses by the wife of the opposing king.

This lavish gift sends Tai into paroxysms of self-doubt, and into the maelstrom of power politics in the imperial capital. The set up for this is nicely paced and features some vintage Kay moments, mostly in the nuanced interplay between Tai, his new female bodyguard, and an alcoholic poet. The imperial intrigues also have some nice moments in the rivalry between chancellor Wen Zhou and general An Roshan, underscoring Mr Kay's belief (stated in earlier books, especially "Last Light of the Sun") in the power of on-the spot decisions to change the course of history.

This is, however, as good as it gets in "Under Heaven", as the resolution to all this conflict gets described in the stuffy terms of an academic textbook. "Three historians of a later dynasty expressed the view...", "historians agreed" "historians wrote" "almost universally accepted opinions among historians"... On no fewer than a dozen occasions, we are informed of what future "historians" will make of the action. Which is of course so much more exciting than actually showing us what happened, right? No, perhaps not.

The constant referral to historians is apt, as the last quarter of the book follows history's score to each and every note. For example, An Roshan (the book's stand-in for the historical An Lushan) rebels, just as he did in history. He wins a battle in exactly the same manner, captures the capital in the same manner, and gets murdered by his son in exactly the same manner as his historical counterpart. The ostensible main character does little but trot about the countryside, fail to rescue his lover and wring his hands a bit. There's an equally pointless sub plot involving his sister, who gets shipped off to marry some chieftain on the steppe, but who instead rides around a lot before disappearing for 50 pages or so.

At least opera ends when the fat lady sings, but alas this story hasn't the sense to stop even at the death of the emperor's consort (Tang Chinese standards of beauty were, er, Reubenesque). The end is overly long, and a bit of a chore to sit through.

"Tigana" and "Arbonne" in particular remain some of the best fantasy books ever written, but "Under Heaven" is not up to their standard. Let's hope Mr Kay changes his tune for his next novel.

The beauty of science and the science of beauty

Title: Stories of Your Life and Others
Author: Ted Chiang
Publisher: Small Beer Press

5/5

Science can be beautiful, but you don't always have to be a scientist to appreciate its beauty.

Anyone can appreciate a mandelbrot set, the mathematical designs on a mosque dome, the earth-rise over the moon, the impossible staircases of MC Escher. Add to this list the works of Ted Chiang.



If you're already a science-fiction fan, likely Mr Chiang will need no introduction. Despite producing just 12 short stories in his career, Mr Chiang has amassed about a dozen literary awards and a cult following of enthusiasts. If you're not a fan, Mr Chiang is one of the best arguments for becoming one.

"Stories of Your Life and Others" is a collection of eight short stories, relentlessly inventive, wildly diverse in content but strongly unified in spirit. Whether he's talking about building the Tower of Babel or being able to predict the future, Mr Chiang builds rational, internally consistent worlds that unify scientific thinking with humanistic sensitivity.

The capstone of this construct is undoubtedly "Story of Your Life". In it, a linguist named Louise Banks learns an alien language, and this new frame of reference enables her to see into the future. Intellectually, the story is a marvel, as Mr Chiang concocts a plausible basis for foretelling the future, and a philosophical theory as to how fate and free will could coexist.

But the real punch is emotional. Banks is a mother (or was, or will be--it's complicated) and knowing the future gives a new twist to the questions faced by any would-be parent: Are we ready for this? Will our child be healthy, happy, successful? The kicker of course is that Banks already knows the answers.

For stories with such strongly rational overtones, there is a surprising fascination with religion and faith in Mr Chiang's stories, and God pops up (or conspicuously fails to) in one form or another in several of the stories, the best of which is "Hell is the Absence of God". Here, Mr Chiang wrestles with the age-old chestnut, Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People, by does so by making the mystical commonplace.

In this story, Acts of God, in the insurance sense, really are literal Acts of God, as every earthly manifestation of the heavenly host sets off lightning storms, tidal waves or hurricanes. Not surprisingly, some innocent people get hurt or even killed, and among them is the wife of the protagonist, Neil Fisk. Fisk then faces the impossible task of trying to love the God who killed his wife, and the story follows the increasingly desperate steps he takes to be reunited with his wife in heaven.

In lesser hands, such a story could come off as mere church-bashing, but here you get a strong sense of a sensitive man struggling to accept the random cruelty of existence, and the fact that "God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful, and understanding that is essential to true devotion."

That said, Mr Chiang's writing is somewhat hampered by his apparent discomfort with dialogue. Instead of getting the character's words verbatim, we often get stories related almost entirely by narrators. While in some ways this further underlines the veneer of rationality over these fantastical stories, it somewhat dulls the emotional impact. Also, in one or two stories, Mr Chiang manages the balance between head and heart, intellect and emotion, rather less well, and throws at you such complex concepts that the story becomes head-scratching rather than heart-warming.

Still, "Stories of Your Life and Others" is a literary accomplishment no mere harpings of mine can diminish. Art is not always appreciated in its own lifetime, but here's your chance to put that to rights.

Three strikes for Mr Smith

Title: Three Stations
Author: Martin Cruz Smith
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

1/5

Back in 2008, I read a fantastic article in National Geographic by Mr Smith, "Moscow Never Sleeps". In the article, he plays on the contrast between the outrageous wealth of Russia's nouveau riche and the sorrowful squalor of society's least fortunates, geographically embodied in the part of Moscow known as Three Stations.

"Three Stations", the novel, is basically that article turned into a book, minus the focus and editing, 30 times longer but many times less interesting. It's social commentary masquerading as a crime novel, and doing neither with any particular distinction.

The seventh outing for Mr Smith's Moscow police investigator, Arkady Renko, packs a surfeit of plots into its slimmish 240 pages. There's a runaway teenage prostitute, whose baby has been stolen. There's a pair of hired killers looking to bring her back to the whorehouse. A kindly teenage street gang. A murderer obsessed with ballet.

What there isn't is a coherent story line stringing all these plot points together. Characters are introduced, only to vanish for chapters on end. The abducted baby and a murdered ballerina fight for space, and as a result neither story line feels fully developed. Also missing is the coherent social commentary that marks Mr Smith's other works, including his National Geographic article.

Renko this time is almost a parody of the established character--still the only one who believes a crime has been committed, still fighting with his boss, still bemused stepdad to chess prodigy Zhenya, still hooking up with women in passionless encounters (his girlfriend of the last two books has conveniently disappeared, for reasons not immediately obvious). There are the odd glimmers of Mr Smith's trademark dark wit, but mostly this Renko feels locked in a holding pattern, like a car in a traffic jam on Moscow's ring road.

The end result is a bit like "Indiana Jones 4". Or "Blair Witch 2" or "Son of Mask". In short, a poorly-written sequel that does its best to kill whatever good memories you had of the works that came before.

If the plot is a mess, the editing is worse. Mr Smith keeps forgetting to tell us things. An old woman appears; "It was the babushka who had been suffering the crumbs of the priest"--but Mr Smith never said there was a babushka with the priest. A bad guy is nasitly disemboweled by a hero who magically appears in just the right spot--but quite how this feat is managed is never entirely clear.

"Three Station" was almost physically painful to read, especially since I have long been an enormous fan of Mr Smith and his Renko books (read my reviews of "Wolves Eat Dogs" and "Stalin's Ghost"). Read Mr Smith's earlier Renko books, especially "Wolves Eat Dogs", read the National Geographic article, but whatever you do, don't read this.

Small book with big ambitions

Title: The Art of Travel
Author: Alain de Botton
Publisher: Penguin

3/5

"Vacation" and "travel" have become so synonymous that in order to separate these words, we had to glue two others together to make "staycation". The question of why we feel this urge to spend our free time somewhere, anywhere but here, is at the heart of Alain de Botton's nerdy but entertaining book, "The Art of Travel".

Yes, nerdy. You will read few books so proudly, unashamedly in-your-face intellectual as "The Art of Travel". Mr De Botton is a social geologist, and to explain his take on questions such as why we are drawn to the exotic, to the countryside or to the monumental, he digs into the history of literature, of art and philosophy, and brings up parables drawn from the lives of Gustave Flaubert, William Wordsworth or Edmund Burke to illustrate his point.

This is a little book with big ambitions. In a series of essays on our motives for travelling, what we do when we arrive at our destination, and how it makes us feel, Mr De Botton trawls the lives and works of these classic authors and artists to try to explain first, why we are so often unhappy in our travels, and second, how we can become better travelers.

Despite such lofty goals, ponderous stuffiness is fended off--if only just--by a whimsical turn of phrase; Birds in Barbados "career through the air in matinal excitement" he says, going to to note the "democratic scruffiness [of] street furniture" in Amsterdam, and elsewhere he remarks that "man seems merely dust postponed" in the face of the bleak majesty of the Sinai.

Less successful is Mr De Botton's attempt to bolt his own travel experiences onto his exploration of universal themes. For example, he inserts an anecdote on his delight in the "neighborliness" of the u and i in the Dutch word "Uitgang" (Exit) into a description of Flaubert's travels in Egypt. In such cases, it seems a stretch to equate his experiences with the lives of the greats, or else he seems to be pushing too hard to make events fit whatever point he is trying to make.

The other limitation of Mr De Botton's work is his narrow definition of "travel". I started reading "The Art of Travel" after returning home from visiting relatives in Canada, and found it silent on the themes that mattered to me at the time, aspects of travel like "leaving loved ones behind". I finished it during a business trip to the Middle East, and again Mr De Botton had little to say to me. Mr De Botton's homilies on how to enjoy architecture or museums are nicely argued, but how about gastronomic travel? Shopping travel? "The Art of the Sightseeing Holiday" might have been a more accurate, though admittedly less catchy title.

Yet this is a book that rewards perseverance. I find myself returning again and again to Mr De Botton's themes, holding them up and examining them from each angle, trying to find what I believe. Strip away the ostentatious wordiness and awkward personal anecdotes, and you are left with some though-provoking insights, perhaps the greatest of which is that "vacations" and "travel" need not be the same.

Rather, in the words of Nietzsche, the key is to be the kind of person who "know how to manage their experiences ... who know how to make much of little". You might try starting with this little book.

The devil is in...

Title: Surface Detail
Author: Iain M. Banks
Publisher: Orbit

4/5
The devil is in the details. Actually, several are in Surface Detail, which is fitting, because the book itself is obsessed with details.

[I'm trying to cut down the self-indulgent crap, and answer the questions that actually matter]

What's it about?
Breezy dialogue (by either smart-arse AIs or idiots in over their heads), balls-out techno-blitzkrieg battles, and densely detailed, borderline obsessive-compulsive world-building. There's some stuff about virtual reality heavens and hells, a virtual war being fought to shut down the latter, and a reincarnated woman out for revenge on her murderer, but that's just to keep the cheap seats happy.

What's it like?
Spending 10 years in Banks's hyper-advanced Culture setting. Gives you an ever-escalating series of imaginative and outlandish settings, in a kind of literary tinnitus that fills each page with vision after stupendous vision. Catnip for the devotee, but bafflingly self-indulgent to everyone else.

Is it any good?
Mostly yes, but leavened with bouts of dullness, unless you like your SciFi chattier than Stephen Fry's twitter page.

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!