Booky Ooky!

Speaker for the Dead / Orson Scott Card
Tor Books, 1994 (paperback) [orig. 1986]

My reading of Speaker of the Dead was inspired by the highest recommendation of a trusted source. I was reticent to do this review because there’s a lot involved in this book, so I’ve put it off for a full two weeks, and now it’s not even fresh in my mind. Fabulous. A+ for dealing with problems. Anyway, today Chris (Trusted Source) finished a novel, so I said to myself, “Listen! If he can write an entire book, you can write one lousy blog entry! Also, order Chinese for dinner! I feel like dumplings.”

So I’m here to contend with the many facets of this book, which I think are perhaps too numerous. I will begin by saying I really really liked Speaker for the Dead, which was a pleasant surprise. Ender’s Game, the prequel, was entertaining, but not mind-blowing, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Speaker was far more mature a piece, and I had trouble putting it down, a problem that led to lack of sleep, lateness to work, and ignoring important phone calls from loved ones. I did not, however, love all the book. The first three quarters were fantastic; the last quarter kind of lost me.

The novel is about a lot of things, but mostly it is about a community of settlers living on a planet they share with these sentient, primitive aliens they called pequeninos. (Incidentally, my ignorance of Portuguese phonetics was a great detriment in reading this novel.) The purpose of the settlement is basically to study these creatures since they’re the first sentient alien life ever discovered besides the bug things from Ender’s Game, which are now extinct. It’s been about 3,000 years.

So, they’ve got their quiet little religious settlement, and all’s well in the world until the peaceful alien society kills the man who’s been researching their behavior. Ummmmmm…. crap.

Enter Ender, Speaker for the Dead, summoned to “speak” the death of the xenologist (kind of like an alien anthropologist). Speaking a death is rather like eulogizing, but instead of blindly praising the dead, a Speaker will give a completely candid account of the person’s life: good, bad, and ugly all right there on the table.

So, relativity being what it is, it takes Ender 20-something years to reach the planet, by which time other people have died and there’s this whole big to-do about an unhappy family and their recently deceased (jerkface) patriarch. Ender ends up speaking the death of this despicable man. This and everything leading up to it was absolutely fantastic novel-writing. Card has this great sense of character and relationships and the human psyche that enthralled me. Ender’s Speaking was one of the most emotionally satisfying scenes I’ve ever read in anything. Card captured the flaws and graces of the man, his family, and his society and shoved them in your face saying “I’m writing about some crazy science fiction world, and we were having a good time pretending before, but this is real. This is your father or your neighbor or yourself, and it’s going on now in your world.”

The characters in Speaker for the Dead are dynamic and visceral. They’re in a fantastic situation, but this never feels like a foreign planet. It’s just people. I highly recommend this book for everything leading up to Ender’s big Speaking. When I got past this part, I knew there was a lot of book left, but I assumed it was going to lead up to another Speaking, since one was requested earlier on. That’s when the novel took a strange turn.

The remainder of the story is about the pequeninos, their freaky biology, and how their society functions. There’s big drama involving a rebellion, hatching a new alien species, and forming a new society. This is all great sci-fi fare, and I know Card could have done so much with it, but with the human-centered story leading up to it, it felt rather jarring to have such a dramatic shift. The ending of the book is about learning to understand a very inhuman society. It’s message comes through clear enough, but I just didn’t care about the pequeninos like I did about the humans. I felt cold to them and never felt such revelatory writing as I did in the first major part of the book.

Ultimately, Speaker for the Dead is about learning to observe and the foil of interpreting others’ experiences through the lens of your own. During the Speaking, this civilization became aware that what they saw, what they knew, and what actually was were distinctly different things. The had radically misjudged the lives of those they called friends and family. It was a powerful message. The pequeninos’ story contributes to this theme with all the misconceptions the xenologists had of the alien society as a result of great logical leaps they took based on the human experience. I understand how the ending quarter of the book fits together with the rest, and I appreciate Card’s intentions. I also think, however, that as a novel meant to speak to our human sensibilities, the pequeninos’s story weakened the intense impact this book may have otherwise had.

Amsterdam / Ian McEwan
Anchor Books, 1999 (paperback) [orig. 1998]

Amsterdam won the 1998 Booker Prize for Ian McEwan, with whose work I am otherwise unfamiliar. It’s short, but it took me forever to read because I just couldn’t muster up much interest.

When Molly Lane dies young, two of her old lovers show up at her funeral. Renowned composer Clive and newspaper editor Vernon are best friends, and following Molly’s funeral, both find themselves out of sorts and make an agreement that if either of them ends up in Molly’s despicable, sickly state, they will pull the plug on each other rather than keep the man alive like Molly’s husband did as long as he could.

Each is also presented with a moral dilemma. Vernon must decide whether to publish compromising photographs of a major politician (and friend of Molly), which would ruin the man and disrespect his past lover, but save his flagging paper. Clive in finally overcoming his writers block is presented with a situation where he could intervene to save a woman being attacked at the risk of losing his inspiration. Both men, being soulless and abhorrent, make the wrong decision.

The book alternates between the two men’s perspectives, which I think is what makes it weak. McEwan presents these two unlikable men as they see themselves, even though we know they are deluded and improperly interpreting the world’s opinions of them. This is comical at first, but it leaves very little room for the characters to be truly examined. By the time half the book is over, they’re just pathetic. At one point, Clive is presumptuous enough to call himself a genius like Beethoven, which is utterly ridiculous. The idea is brilliant on McEwan’s part in terms of coloring his character, but I was so sick of the guy at this point that I put the book away.

Anyway, Clive and Vernon become so wrapped up in their own worlds that they begin to lose each other, only to meet again in Amsterdam after each of their selfish plans inevitably fails. Clive’s symphony is crap (which I could have told you from the paragraphs of tedious musical description) and Vernon is humiliated. They also hate each other.  And you don’t care. (By that I mean I don’t and you won’t.)

This leads to a predictable tragic ending, but the reader is so limited in genuine character analysis by the book’s format and perspective that the tragedy feels out of place. Our understanding of these men is shallow, so the ending fails to be deep.

Final thoughts on closing the book: “Oh. Yeah, ok. Whatever.”

I’ve generally been more than satisfied with other Booker Prize winners I’ve read (The Life of Pi, The God of Small Things) so this was a bit disappointing. McEwan’s got obvious talent, though. I’m going to read Atonement.

Further reading:

• I’m not doing this anymore.

Murphy’s Law / Rhys Bowen
St. Martin’s, 2002 - 978-0-312-98497-7 (paperback)

I’m not a big mystery fan. Apart from a few Agatha Christie classics, I’ve never felt compelled to explore the genre. In fact, if not for the Book Awards Reading Challenge, I’d probably never even realize there were awards dedicated to the genre, and more tragically, I would never have come across Murphy’s Law by Rhys Bowen, a fantastic historical mystery and winner of the 2001 Agatha Award for Best Novel.

The story begins in Ballykillin, a village in Northern Ireland, in the early 1900’s. Molly Murphy, a plucky and quick-witted girl of 23, has just accidentally killed Justin Hartley, the son of wealthy landowners in defense of his attempted rape. Knowing she’d be hung despite her victims intentions, she steals her father’s money and flees. Fate intervenes, and she meets a woman slated to travel to America the following morning with her two children, but the woman has consumption and knows she will be turned away. Knowing Molly needs to get gone, the woman asks her to assume her identity and escort her children to America to live with their father. On the boat, O’Malley, an unsavory upstart of a man, offends Molly, and she slaps him and tells him off in front of everyone. When the boat docks on Ellis Island with O’Malley dead, Molly and a new friend from the boat are the prime suspects. Unable to rely on the police, Molly must set out and solve the crime herself.

Murphy’s Law is immediately compelling. Molly’s situation is outrageous, but not unbelievable. She can’t absolve herself because she is supposed to be someone else. If anyone knew her name, they could contact Ireland and find out what she’d done. She’s a woman alone in a terrifying city, and she has to learn to work with and against the established system and learn how to live as an immigrant and a woman in this society in order to accomplish her task.

The story is authentic. Bowen paints a turn-of-the-century New York straight from the history books. The novel deals with New York (Tammany Hall) politics, class, and gender roles, and Molly is thrust into it with a strange perspective. She’s naive and unaware of how such an advanced, bustling city works, but at the same time, she comes off as a distinctly modern woman, shrewd and unwilling to accept the limits of what women were expected to do.

So many dreams, so many hopes, and it was all going to end like this. If only I could have landed a good kick on [him], the way I had kicked Justin, I would have enjoyed seeing him lying dead beside my kitchen stove. It annoyed me that I hadn’t been quick enough or smart enough or strong enough. It’s stupid being a woman, was one of my final thoughts before I blacked out again.

As a New Yorker, this was an especially invigorating read. Molly’s friend Michael, the man she met on the boat, came to America with dreams of helping to build a skyscraper. Other people in the novel were working on constructing underground trains. The story brought Molly through Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, the Lower East Side. No matter how many History Channel documentaries I watch, nothing has made me aware of the history of the streets I walk down quite like this book has. At one point in the book, Michael is thrilled to be working on a new skyscraper in Union Square that he claims will be the tallest one yet. I have no idea what that building is, but I’d bet you Ms. Bowen knows and that 115 years ago, there was a man like Michael who felt on top of the world.

As with all good books, there’s always a little something to nag about. Here, it’s that Molly finds herself in a blossoming romance, which I think the story could have done without. Also, things tie up a bit too nicely at the end, though I did really appreciate that after everything that happened, the message of the book is that Molly will never fully understand the bizarre politics of New York.

So I’m officially recommending this book to anyone interested in historical fiction, New York history, immigrant history, or anything like that. As mysteries go, I can’t really give an accurate assessment because I don’t know enough. This is the first in a series, and I’m sure I’ll be exploring the rest fairly soon.

More info:

• Rhys Bowen’s Homepage
• Wikipedia site

With the looming conclusion of the Once Upon a Time challenge, I figured I’d sign up for something new. The Book Awards Challenge is low-stress. Just 12 books from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008, and they all have to be prize winners. There’s an approved list of prizes.

I decided to try and get as diverse a list as possible by picking 12 different awards and doing one from each. The best part is, 9 of the 12 books are already sitting on my shelf waiting to be read, so this’ll be a nice way to get my act in gear with those.

I’m not hyperlinking these to Amazon because that takes a babillion years and it’s getting late. Go do a search if you’re so interested in a title, I’ll have your back next time.

1. Murphy’s Law / Rhys Bowen (Agatha Award)
2. American Gods / Neil Gaiman (this won every award ever, but I’m having it count as the Bram Stoker Award)
3. Eats, Shoots and Leaves / Lynne Truss (British Book Award)
4. Amsterdam / Ian McEwan (Booker Prize)
5. Dune / Frank Herbert (Hugo Award)
6. Speaker for the Dead / Orson Scott Card (Nebula Award)
7. The Shipping News / Annie Proulx (National Book Award)
8. My Name Is Red / Orhan Pamuk (IMPAC Dublin Award)
9. The Other Wind / Ursula K. LeGuin (World Fantasy Award)
10. On Beauty / Zadie Smith (Orange Prize)
11. Air / Geoff Ryman (Arthur C. Clarke Award)
12. The Tale of Desperaux / Kate DiCamillo (Newbery Medal)

So there you go. Easy peasy. I’ll probably end up reading a lot more award-winning books than this over the next year because I have such fantastic taste.