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.

Et tu, Sidebottom?

TITLE: King of Kings
AUTHOR: Harry Sidebottom
PUBLISHER: Penguin

RATING
5/5 "Lord of the Rings"; 4/5 "Prince of Bel Air"; 3/5 "Queen of Hearts"; 2/5 "King of Pop"; 1/5 "Ace of Base"
SCORE: 3/5

If there's one thing the Romans had a talent for, even more than oratory and regicide (et tu Brute and all that), it was for getting on the wrong side of history's Samuel L Jackson types. Hannibal of Carthage, Attila the Hun, and the Sassanid Persian Shah-an-Shah, the King of Kings.

The last was for centuries perhaps the most dangerous. The Sassanid Persians were the only regional "superpower" that could fight the Romans on anything like equal terms. It's this conflict that forms the focus for Harry Sidebottom's "Warrior of Rome" series, and provides the best bits of the second installment, "King of Kings".

The first novel, "Fire in the East", was hugely fun. Mr Sidebottom teaches classical history at Oxford University, allowing him to bring tremendous depth to the subject. His fist novel was vivid, detailed, richly imagined and with a clear narrative focus that drove the action like a circus charioteer. Ballista, former barbarian hostage and now Roman general, is sent to defend the city of Arete from a Persian invasion. He travels to the city, readies the defences, then leads his men in a desperate but hopeless resistance.

"King of Kings" suffers from a lack of similar story arc. Here, you feel Mr Sidebottom is mainly playing for time, shuffling the pieces on the board in order to set up a cliffhanger ending. This leaves his characters at loose ends for prolonged periods. We pick up with Ballista as he flees the fallen city. He becomes a general again, fights a battle, gets sent to persecute Christians in the Anatolian city of Ephesus, quits and gets called back to the colors again. While "Fire in the East" built nicely from the first sparks to the final conflaguration, "King of Kings" gutters in the breezy subplots, never building much heat until the final few chapters.

To constructively fill the time, Mr Sidebottom recycles a number of old enemies, as well as the "whodunnit" device of the first book. There, Ballista faced a traitor in the city, here, a string of assassination attempts. Mr Sidebottom's portrayal of Christians also echoes the less than heroic role they played in "Fire in the East". More orthodoxly religious readers may find his squabbling, fanatical Christians a little disrespectful.

Still, if it's Romans red in tooth and claw you're after, Mr Sidebottom is your man. Ballista isn't shy about spilling a little claret, as he carves his way through assorted assassins, rioters, pirates and Persians. The setting remains richly detailed and imagined, giving you an enjoyable peek at Roman life. Mr Sidebottom's scholarship shows in other ways too, such as the winks he throws to readers who know their Roman history. When Ballista's chum Aurelian gets on the wrong horse, for example, it's more than mere accident.

With so many enemies, it was inevitable that the Roman Empire would end badly. See Decline and Fall Of, Sack Of, etcetera. Let's hope the "Warrior of Rome" series avoids the same fate in the final novel, "Lion of the Sun".

The Matter with Banks

TITLE: Matter
AUTHOR: Iain M Banks
PUBLISHER: Orbit

RATING
5/5 “Oxygen”; 4/5 “Dysprosium”; 3/5 “Neon”; 2/5 “Krypton”; 1/5 “Berkelium”
SCORE: 3/5

There’s a popular anecdote about an old woman (or Hindu mystic in some versions) who proclaims the world is a disc supported on the back of a turtle. When challenged on what the turtle is standing on, she famously replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

A similar metaphor plays out in Iain M Banks’ 2008 science fiction novel “Matter”, the seventh in his series set in the “Culture” universe. The central setting and model for Mr Banks’ cosmology is the “shellworld” of Sursamen, an artificial planet made up of a series of increasingly larger, concentric hollow spheres, so that the inhabitants of one level live on the “sky” of the one below. Galactic society, too, operates on the same principle: the inhabitants of Sursamen at the bottom, with progressively more advanced races above them, up to the hyper-tech level of the Culture and their equals. The question, as the title indicates, is whether the universe works the same way—is it turtles all the way, are there levels of existence above us, or is this all there is?

Prince Ferbin, formerly from the eighth level of Sursamen, is certainly hoping there’s a higher power than can help him. Though in his case, he’s thinking something a little more concrete than divine intervention. His father, the king, has been murdered, his younger brother is a hostage, and he is forced to flee his homeworld. He has reason for hope though; his father’s old mentor is a general for Sursamen’s rulers, while his sister Djan is now an agent for the Culture’s dirty-tricks department, known as Special Circumstances. There’s an old-fashioned race against the clock, as he tries to find help and return home before his brother gets bumped off by the usurper.

I’ve long seen Mr Banks as a successor to the literary tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, with a seamless blend of science fiction, humor and a philosophy best summed up in the words of Isaac Asimov: “We’re here to help each other get through this thing—whatever it is”. Those elements are all present and accounted for, but the balance is off. While Mr Banks is normally a dab hand at infusing broad-brush, cartoon-color space opera adventure with his own unsentimental, hard-edged worldview, he muddies the colors a bit on this one.

Much of the novel is taken up with characters moving from place to place without doing very much of anything except ruminating on the nature of the universe. Go-nowhere subplots overload the front end, while the ending feels rushed and compressed almost to the point of unintelligibility. The end result feels hurried and uneven, with little payoff for your efforts to wade through the earlier chapters. The ending is pure Banks, an Othello mix of Shakespearean tragedy and upbeat hopefulness familiar to anyone who had read his earlier Culture novels: “They all died and lived happily ever after”.

That's the bad news. The good news is that this is indeed some of the most inventive fiction out there, and the scope of Mr. Banks' universe-building remains awesome. Every setting is entirely fresh, fascinating in concept and thoughtful in delivery, populated with truly *alien* aliens, and powered by technology of almost giddy inventiveness.

Still, it is hard to recommend Matter to anyone new to Mr. Banks' works. Consider Phlebas also explores our insignificance in the universe, but does so with far more wit and dash and far less navel-gazing, while Use of Weapons is both more inventively structured and more entertainingly written. Both are highly recommended.

Pure Brilliance!

TITLE: Use of Weapons
AUTHOR: Iain M Banks
PUBLISHER: Orbit

RATING
5/5 "Killing Time"; 4/5 "Reformed Nice Guy"; 3/5 "Gunboat Diplomat"; 2/5 "It's Character Forming"; 1/5 "Death and Gravity"
SCORE: 5/5

Ingenious. Melancholy yet consistently funny. Thought-provoking. Had enough yet?

I really shouldn't review this book. Bad idea. How can I criticize something that comes as close to perfection as I dare hope for in this imperfect world? So excuse me if what follows seems more of a love-in than an objective critique. If it will make you feel better, I promise to be rude about J.D. Salinger or make jokes about Kurt Vonnegut. The bastards.

I love "Use of Weapons" as a science fiction novel that isn't about science fiction. Oh, for sure, it takes place in Mr Banks's "Culture" universe, first introduced in "Consider Phlebas", a galactic society with technology so mind-bogglingly advanced that everyone has everything they could wish for, except for a sense of purpose. But the book isn't about the Culture. Instead, it's about people, or rather one man in particular, a man called Cheradenine Zakalwe, and his purpose is quite clear. To quote, "the need was obvious: to defeat that which opposed [his] life. The method was that taking and bending of materials and peoples to one purpose ... that talent, that ability, that use of weapons".

As the title suggests then, the book struggles with questions of ends and means, and the justifications we require to bridge the two. Zakalwe is a mercenary in the service of the Culture, tasked with intervening in the wars of less-developed civilizations in order to steer them towards becoming kinder, gentler, more Culture-like people. He is also a very troubled man, haunted by a horrific event in his past. The title works on two levels then; it questions how societies that consider themselves moral and just rationalize the use of sometimes ruthless means to make others so too, and on the personal level, how each person justifies their own existence.

There's that philosophical edge, but this is no cerebral treatise. It is space opera with a point, Han Solo as Hamlet. Zakalwe is the classic Harrison Ford-fiqure, snarky humor and brash cynicism wrapped around a surprisingly vulnerable core. The structure compliments that message beautifully. It feels like sliding down the proverbial slippery slope, like riding on a bomb as it leaves the bay doors. The genius of the book is in the way Mr Banks shows us that moment, the point of impact.

We begin after the bomb. Zakalwe, scarred psychically, begins another mission for his paymasters in the Culture. From there, Mr Banks sends us blasting both forwards and backwards in time through Zakalwe's life in alternating chapters -- following the course of the mission on the one hand, and viewing progressively earlier and earlier episodes from Zakalwe's career on the other. The two tales travel in opposite directions, but loop back together as we hurtle towards the inevitable revelation of the dark secret in Zakalwe's past.

The flashback chapters in particular are wonderfully inventive, and oddly moving. Zakalwe cycles through just about every activity mankind has found to excuse its existence, and finds them wanting; loyalty to a country (he is betrayed); love (it doesn't last); art (it can't hide ugliness); even drugs (they prove illusory). It's almost a high-tech version of John Gardner's "Grendel" in its quest for meaning. It's Zakalwe's rather sad realization that the struggle for life is all there is, that using weapons is its own justification, that lifts "Use of Weapons" from mere adventure store to top-tier literature.

Some may find the final revelation too melodramatic, too out of character for Zakalwe. Then again, some people don't like Belgian beer, British luxury cars or "The Lion in Winter". So hell with them.

What else can I say? "Use of Weapons" is beautifully written, dazzlingly original, haunting. Pure brilliance, really. OK, I'll stop now.

Fireside Chat with a Favorite Uncle

TITLE: How Would You Move Mount Fuji?
AUTHOR: William Poundstone
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company

RATING
5/5 "Verrry Slowly"; 4/5 "Magic"; 3/5 "Get Godzilla to Stomp On It"; 2/5 "With Chewing Gum, String, and the Moon's Gavitational Pull"; 1/5 "A-Bombs"
SCORE; 4/5

After a really bad job interview, ever felt the interviewer had it in for you right from the get-go? It may not be just in your head. A Harvard study found that random people watching a 15-second clip of job candidates entering, shaking hands with their interviewer and then sitting down scored the candidates almost identically to the interviewers themselves.

That's just one of the fascinating anecdotes that percolates through William Poundstone's tasty blend of corporate history, puzzle book and job-seeker advice, "How Would You Mount Fuji?".

The book feels more like a collection of loosely-linked magazine articles than a single narrative. While it's ostensibly about the "logic puzzles" used in Microsoft's job interviews, Mr Poundstone is more interested in telling a good story than helping you land a job coding for Mr Gates and co. Instead of a how-to guide, it's more like a friendly chat with a beloved but scatterbrained uncle.

Mr Poundstone starts with a critique of traditional interview techniques, where he mentions the Harvard study. He explains how the failings of these methods led to the increasing use of logic puzzles and branteasers in interviews, especially at Microsoft and at investment banks. Next we get a look at the organization and corporate philosophy of Microsoft itself. Mr Poundstone follows with a sample of the puzzles themselves. The second half of the book is more prescriptive, with advice for both job-seekers and interviewers on how to ask and answer logic-puzzle questions.

Regardless of the slightly butterfly progression from topic to topic, Mr Poundstone is always a highly entertaining guide, and despite the math-heavy subject, he writes clearly and simply enough even for an amateur booker reviewer to understand. Some of his proposed solutions to the puzzles seem a little too literal (his answer to the question of the title is to calculate the volume of Mt. Fuji using the formula for a cone, then calculate the number of dump trucks required to haul all the stone away). For most of the others though, you'll be kicking yourself for not getting his answer.

Since the book was originally published in 2003, the reputation of Miscrosoft, and especially its spiritual siblings on Wall Street--such as Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs--have taken a bit of a beating, so whether their model of interviewing is worthy imitating or not is a bit of an open question. The book's utility and appeal to job-seekers therefore seems a little doubtful. However, it is an enormously funny read for anyone just interested in puzzles, the history of interview questions, or the culture of Silicon Valley.

How would I move Mount Fuji? Stand on my head. Voila! I've turned it upside-down.

Hurry up and Wait, and Wait, and Wait...

TITLE: The Innocent Mage (Kingmaker, Kingbreaker Book 1)
AUTHOR: Karen Miller
PUBLISHER: Orbit

RATING
5/5 "Arthur Miller"; 4/5 "Glenn Miller"; 3/5 "Bode Miller"; 2/5 "Frank Miller"; 1/5 "Miller Lite"
SCORE: 2/5

"The Innocent Mage", the 2005 breakthrough fantasy novel by prolific Australian author Karen Miller, pulps together a number of genre stand-bys (boy of humble origins rises to fame, prophecy foretells his coming to save the world from world-dominating evil), but produces only a thin gruel.

This first book of a two-book series is set in the hermit kingdom of Lur, shuttered against a world overrun by evil behind a magical wall. Ms Miller gives this evil a name, and it is ... Morgan. Sigh. Morgan the insurance claims adjuster I buy, Morgan the evil sorcerer I do not (Actually, I have trouble taking anyone named Morgan seriously, unless preceded by the title "Captain"). The rest of the novel is likewise enjoyable only as a campy fantasy, a throwaway time-filler.

Asher, the youngest son of a large fishing family, travels to the kingdom's capital, hoping to save enough money to buy a boat of his own. By the second chapter, he is catapulted into the retinue of Prince Gar, the king's eldest son, and it is revealed Asher is a long-awaited savior destined to save the kingdom from impending doom. Oddly, the book is in no hurry to get him doing anything heroic, preferring instead to focus on dialogue and the drama of the royal family. Characterization is strong by unsophisticated, a drum solo rather than a 20-piece orchestra. This focus on character would work better if Asher were a bit less irritating. Ms Miller makes him a peculiarly repulsive form of stick-insect, a prickly, rude and thuggish boor you could cheerfully strangle. Flawed heroes are all well and good, but Ms Miller has her entire supporting cast fall instantly and inexplicably in love with Asher, leading you to suspect we're actually supposed to like this annoying little tick.

Ms Miller's blend of fantasy-lite and talky romance may appeal to adolescents, but there is little here for more grown-up readers. The series concludes in book two, "The Awakened Mage", but after such thin fare it's hard to muster much of an appetite for the sequel.

Kindle Post

PRODUCT NAME: The Kindle
TYPE: E-book reader
MANUFACTURER: Foxconn for Amazon.com

RATING
5/5 "The Alphabet"; 4/5 "The printing press"; 3/5 "Papyrus"; 2/5 "The Da Vinci Code"; 1/5 "Danielle Steel"
SCORE: 3/5

I view the Kindle a bit like the invention of papyrus by the ancient Egyptians. Bear with me. For centuries, any time King Tut or the Assyrian emperor had something they desperately wanted to tell people, "Nubile virgins wanted" or "Mission accomplished in Iraq" and that kind of thing, they'd bang it into stone and make damn sure people would still be reading about the drubbing he gave the Iraqis or the lamentable virgin shortage, three thousand years later.

Then, some clever-clogs points out how much quicker, easier, more convenient, more compact and portable it would be to scribble all the words on bits of mashed-up plant pulp. Voila, papyrus! Only snag is, it rots in moist air. Or crumbles in dry. And tears. And burns. Papyrus, in other words, was a step forwards in convenience, but a step back in permanence.

So too with Amazon.com's Kindle E-book reader, if not more so. Not only does the Kindle transform books into that most delicate of media, 1s and 0s flitting about in server-space, but also its longevity is inevitably linked to that of its producer, Amazon.com, a company that didn't even exist until 15 years ago.

Yes, yes, this is all very retrograde and reactionary of me. I cheerfully confess, as an E-book reader, the Kindle is superb. The E Ink display is crisp and easy on the eyes, and flipping through the pages is as smooth and seamless as reading the old-fashioned paper kind. The small screen on the Kindle 2 (I haven't tried the larger DX version) means there's more flipping to do, but since this is so effortless, it's hardly a drawback. The battery power appears generous, enough for endless hours of constant reading without pausing for a recharge. The built-in free 3G wireless connectivity is nice if a bit slow, letting you grab new titles or samples almost anywhere you please. The physical design too is pleasingly clean and simple, although I found the thumb-activated joystick for navigating menus a little clumsy.

The extra bells and whistles outside or reading E-books seem less well done, however. There is a very basic web browser, which can just about handle Wikipedia but soon collapses, whimpering, when presented with sites more graphic-intensive. The lack of navigation tools is also aggravating, and makes browsing a bit like trying to access the Internet using only a "Pong" controller. In addition, there is also a text-to-audio feature which can read books to you, although I must admit I was never tempted to try.

To reiterate, the Kindle excels for reading books, but falters for anything else. To mangle the famous epigram of Greek poet Archilocus, the Kindle knows just one trick, but it's a good one.

Rather than any specific beef with the Kindle per se, my concern is with the whole concept of an E-book reader. Electronic hardware and the data you store inside them are terribly fragile, and are rapidly overtaken by new technological progress. I've taken my digital camera in to be repaired twice over the last three years. A computer crash wiped out a large chunk of my photo album. Never had to repair or replace a book. Although I never bothered to upgrade my videotapes to DVD, I've replaced my music collection twice already, once with CDs, and now with MP3s. I don't particularly look forward to doing the same with my library.

In short, I believe (I hope) that the Kindle and other E-book readers are never more than toys for boys, something to slip into the suitcase rather than taking an armful of paperbacks on holiday, perhaps an aid to those whose eyes and hands are not as sprightly as they once were. E-books and papyrus are all right for some things, but it's comforting to know some things are set in stone for future generations to enjoy.

Inglourious Empire

TITLE: Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe
AUTHOR: Mark Mazower
PUBLISHER: Penguin

RATING
5/5 "British"; 4/5 "Mongol"; 3/5 "Roman"; 2/5 "Macedonian"; 1/5 "Records"
SCORE: 4/5

George Santayana famously said "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it". You are unlikely to ever forget reading Mark Mazower's "Hitler's Empire".

I must confess a geeky fascination with war and military history, with the pageantry of uniforms and the dash of arrows on a map. "Hitler's Empire" is the perfect antidote, reality's slap in the face of boys' bloodthirsty fantasies. It offers no happy endings; there are no Schindler Lists or Bielski partisans waiting to rescue the condemned.

Neither is this popular history in the spirit of John Keegan or Anthony Beevor. Instead, it is an exhaustively researched work of scholarship, the kind of account reviewers tend to describe as "weighty" or "definitive" rather than "readable". It's slow going, and the subject matter, the interminable roll-call of stupidity, greed and murder, does not help. You'll be forgiven for putting the book down once a chapter to go hug your family.

Mr Mazower tries to explain the competing visions that lay behind Germany's conquests, and how they played out in real life. The structure wobbles occasionally, as Mr Mazower tries to juggle both a chronological account of the occupation, as well as thematic discussions on topics that traditionally get little airtime in story of World War II, such as the German use of foreign slave labor, and the occupation regimes of Hitler's allies, such as the Romanians. Some interesting ideas, such as the parallels between German rule and the colonial empires of Britain and France, are raised but then abandoned. A "dramatis personae" and perhaps a timeline would have helped anchor the reader against the flood of details. However, this is more than compensated for by Mr Mazower's ability to tell the inside story, how the Nazis conceptualized their mission, by examining their own speeches, papers and journals.

The narrative that emerges is not a comforting one. For us in the West, the defining story of the German occupation has been defined by the unholy trinity of Hitler, the SS and the Holocaust. Would that it were so simple. Mr Mazower takes pains to show it was not only Hitler, not only the SS, and indeed, not only the Germans who engaged in wholesale slaughter on an unprecedented scale. The victims were not only Jews, though they suffered horrifically, but also included millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Russians and others considered "subhuman".

The other leitmotif running through the book is the inability of the Nazis, in the words of Hitler's interpreter Paul Schmidt, to "think ahead for more than five minutes". Mr Mazower shows that the occupation of Europe was a jerry-built (sorry!) amalgamation of regimes wildly different in aims, execution and effectiveness, riven by infighting among the Nazi Party, the SS and the military. The only constant was their desire to ensure the primacy of the German race, and to make Europe serve their war machine. Mr Mazower shows how the first aim invariably undermined the latter, making their rule as shortsighted as it was brutal, and leaving the reader to wonder how such trigger-happy bunglers were ever capable of bringing Europe to its knees. The sobering conclusion is that they succeeded in large part due to the complicity, or at least apathy, of most of those they ruled.

This book will likely only appeal to specialists, which is a shame. The war in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda show we have already repeated history. Reading this book will help us to remember, no matter how unpleasant the memory.

Stephen Fry in a Hurry

TITLE: Stephen Fry in America
AUTHOR: Stephen Fry
PUBLISHER: HarperCollins

RATING
5/5 "California Girls"; 4/5 "New York, New York"; 3/5 "Meet Me in St. Louis"; 2/5 "Mississippi Queen"; 1/5 "Waking up in Las Vegas"
SCORE: 2/5

I should have known better than to buy a TV series tie-in, but come on, I thought, it's Stephen "A Bit of Fry and Laurie, not to mention some bits of Blackadder" Fry. Surely, it will be worth a chuckle or two.

Alas, as Fry himself has said, "As private parts to the gods are we. They play with us for their sport."

The premise is simple enough: Englishman tours the 50 states, and discovers Americans are not all that bad. The book is structured as a travelogue, recording Stephen's adventures along his journeys. Each state gets its own chapter, preceeded by a list of "Key Facts" such as the State Capital, Motto and/or Neckwear (Arizona: Bolo tie). Very democratic and even-handed, but it does mean that when crammed into the space of 300 pages, each state gets an average of roughly six pages. Well, five, less the Key Facts.

Depth then is somewhat lacking. Each state is reduced to one or two encounters with assorted billionaires, entrepreneurs, hillbillies, indians, stoners, witches and zulus. Delware is passed through without stopping. Stephen gets no further than the state line of Idaho before zipping off to Wyoming. Of course, length is no guarantee of quality, but so much of Stephen's prose is filled with the banal, "I couldn't be happier" (Montana), "I enjoyed myself here as much as I have anywhere" (South Dakota), "I decide that I like the South" (South Carolina).

All this would be less disappointing if it was delivered with a bit more wit. Stephen, however, apparently had other ideas, and plays it straight (badda-bing) for most of the book. Stephen's prose is good, solid, readable stuff, but it rarely shines. There is the odd sally that raises a smile, but for the most part Stephen has decided it is more important to be earnest. Indeed, the book's simplicity of spirit is almost... well... American.

Not a bad book then, simply less than I had hoped for.

Starry Eyed Traveller Brought to Earth

TITLE: The Blue-Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveller to Lifer at Mistubishi
AUTHOR: Niall Murtagh
PUBLISHER: Profile Books

RATING
5/5 "Cobalt"; 4/5 "Sapphire"; 3/5 "Blue"; 2/5 "Azure"; 1/5 "Cerulean"
SCORE 3/5


Over the past 20 years, Japan's corporate giants have gone from walking tall to staggering a bit, to finally lying supinely on the floor. What is surprising is not that the country tripped--we all have our bad days--but that it has never really found its feet again. This insightful book helps you see why.

Before the collapse of its economy in 1989, Japan's manufacturing might had amassed Croesus-like wealth, fueling a spending spree that famously included the Exxon Building and Rockerfeller Center. However, the years since, the main thing Japanese companies seem to be acquiring is foreign CEOs (Nissan, Sony). While Japan still boasts champions in a number of fields (Canon, Toshiba, Toyota), there is no Japanese version of Microsoft or Apple, of Cisco or Oracle, Nokia or RIM, Allianz or AXA, Pfizer or Bayer.

Mr Murtagh was another international acquisition of Japan Inc., and although his book is not written as an analysis of the country's economic malaise, the symptoms are all there in his account. Through his plainly told, straightforward account of his graduate studies in Tokyo, recruitment by the Mitsubishi Group--one of Japan's largest and oldest conglomerates--his growing disenchantment and final resignation from the company, you can start to get a feeling for how myopic and parochial Japanese corporate culture can be. His final, damning analysis is that "The fundamental problem is that the managers making the decisions have no experience of anything other than the company they work for ... they don't even realize their decision-making leaves much to be desired".

After working for 10 years in both the public and private sector in Japan, including a term at another one of Japan's largest companies, I can attest to the accuracy and universality of much of Mr Murtagh's observations, from corporate daddy-cultures that have managers admonishing staff not to walk with their hands in their pockets, to meeting minutes that focus solely on the lofty pronouncements of senior executives.

If all this sounds rather heavy-going, the book itself is a surprisingly light read. Mr Murtagh's style is understated and simple, if a little heavy on sarcasm. It's not exactly sparkingly funny; the tone lurks just beyond the penumbra of wit, exuding a sort of black humor born of corporate cupidity and indifference. The book is at its best when it has management in its sights. A bit like Dilbert, minus the cubicles and punchlines.

The book is not all overalls and overtime, which is a pity, for the bits that aren't about work are easily the book's weakest. In between meetings and business trips, Mr Murtagh details his neighbor troubles and love life--none of which is especially insightful. I'd suggest readers looking for a better treatment of an outsider's life in Japan read Bruce Feiler's "Learning to Bow" (somewhat dated) or even Dave Barry's "Dave Barry Does Japan" (also dated, but hilarious). For the insider's look on daily life, try Alex Kerr's polemical "Dogs and Demons", Karl Taro Greenfeld's "Speed Tribes" or Michael Zielenziger's "Shutting Out the Sun".