Territory. Emma Bull, 2007.

This book was a genuine pleasure: compelling and gripping and interesting and engaging. I know I’m being a little empty in my compliments here, but I was just so pleasantly surprised by how good it was that I’m in a hurry to make it clear that I liked it a lot – in fact, I’m looking forward to getting just enough distance from it that I can read it again, but more slowly this time and with a little more lingering over the details I might have skipped in a hurry to find out what the hell was going to happen to these delightful characters.
Quite the opposite of Life of Pi, I kind of thought Territory was going to be not very good, judging by its book jacket description: “Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 is the site of one of the richest mineral strikes in American history, where veins of silver run like ley line sunder the earth, a network of power that belongs to anyone who knows how to claim it.” I mean, it’s no tiger in a life boat, right? But here was my chance to have learn, once and for all, about the consequences of judging a book by its cover – after picking it up three or four times off the library’s “Staff Recommendations” table and putting it back down, I was finally convinced by the blurb on the front from Neil Gaiman, whose work I love: “Emma Bull is really good.” (I will also add that only after finishing the book did I realize that I have actually read, and reread, another novel of hers, in a totally different style, and that I also quite enjoyed that one.)
On the surface, Territory is a fantastical historical fiction novel, about what might have been going on in the town of Tombstone leading up to the gunfight at the OK Corral, if it were the case that certain people had magical powers. See, even my description makes it sound pretty crappy, or at least fluffy and stupid. But the historical landscape is flawlessly researched and seamlessly introduced to the reader. And each of the characters emerges as so strikingly real that the element of fantasy doesn’t seem fantastical at all: if Wyatt Earp can bend the people of Tombstone to his will with his mind, well, it’s not all that much odder than the frontier justice being meted out to cattle rustlers or suspected cattle rustlers, or the way women have to handle their precarious position in a town full of well-armed and mostly drunk men, or the mysterious workings of Tombstone’s Chinatown. The moral center of the book is Mildred Benjamin, a Jewish widow raised in high society in Philadelphia, with dreams of being an author and a pragmatic mind set – and Bull’s choice to give so much attention to this woman in a novel about a gunfight would also seem fantastical, but it’s not a feminist revision of history where we learned that the women were calling all the shots (pun intended), because the novel is also populated with Chinese prostitutes and brazen mistresses and subdued wives and ceaseless gossips, to Mildred is just one face of what women could actually have been doing in Tombstone in 1881. You know, if certain people had magical powers.
Like Neil Gaiman’s excellent American Gods, there’s something refreshing about how Bull inserts the magical into the mundane, reminding me that it’s possible to read science-fiction that’s not overwrought or too caught up in its own cleverness. And that when it’s not, it can be a real joy to read in its own right.

Unaccustomed Earth. Jumpha Lahiri, 2008

Jumpha Lahiri has some very strong themes that repeat themselves again and again in her short stories. This is certainly something that can be found in many short story writers as well as novelists, but there is a certain repetitiveness to the set-up in Lahiri’s stories that gets overwhelming when reading her collected stories. Lahiri’s stories in this book almost all involve:

1. Bengali fathers who have Ph.D.’s and are unable to be emotionally present for their children or their wives.

2. Bengali wives who stay home to raise the children and feel isolated in American suburbs.

3. Arranged marriages for Bengali immigrants, but the children of these marriages tend to marry Americans.

4. First generation Bengali-American daughters who have affairs with married or unavailable older American men.

These are just a few of the rampant similarities in the characters of Lahiri’s stories. And while this becomes tedious, she is an engaging writer and her themes speak to something larger and universal. Lahiri consistently comes back to the idea of family and the conflicting distance and intimacy that exist in these relationships. At the end of the title story a Bengali immigrant father, now in his 70’s thinks about his own alienation from his children and his late wife, and about his daughter’s future, “That loss was in store for Ruma, too; her children would become strangers, avoiding her…He wanted to shield her from the deterioration that inevitably took place in the course of a marriage, and from the conclusion he sometimes feared was true: that the entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start.”

It is a relatively dark world in Lahiri’s estimation. Her characters by and large do suffer the deterioration of their marriages and the loss of their children. And while her characters are all Bengali families who are recent American immigrants, these are not experiences unique to Bengali immigrants to America or immigrants in general, but instead these are visions of the human experience.

I remember being entranced by Lahiri’s first book of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies. I wonder now if those stories were less repetitive or if it was just that it was the first time I encountered her writing. Regardless, I recommend this book and enjoyed being immersed in Lahiri’s world as I was reading.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I thought this book was too clever. Normally, I’m a big fan of clever –subtle hidden messages, extended allegories, clever names, social satire. I chuckled every time Neil Stephenson referenced his Snowcrash hero/protagonist, Hiro Protagonist. I read deeper messages about mid 20th century European politics into Lord of the Rings. I slogged through all of Moby Dick (OK, I skipped a few of the whale chapters). Plus, Life of Pi had the added bonus of being a Booker Prize winner – the Booker is awarded to the best full-length English novel by a writer in the British Commonwealth of Nations or Ireland – and I’m usually so cowed by the credentials of Booker winners that I’m willing to at least pretend I like their books, in casual conversations. I’m not sure I totally understood Ian McEwen’s Amsterdam (the 1997 winner), but I understood why it won.
But Life of Pi was unrelentingly clever, and it started to grate on my nerves. I wouldn’t want to ruin the plot, but I think I can safely give away information that’s revealed by the front cover illustration: it’s the story of a young Indian man, on his way to Canada, who is stranded on a life boat in the middle of the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. But before we get to the meat of the story – and it was certainly a tasty plot turn, and a great idea for a novel – we have to sit through a fictional “author’s note” at the beginning, in which we are supposed to believe that the author actually met the protagonist and learned the story through him, a pretense maintained in intervals throughout the book without, in my opinion, much pay off character-development-wise. Martel also takes the first quarter of the book to let Pi expound on his religious philosophies, taking the reader aside to explain how Islam “is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion” (p.61), that “The presence of God is the finest of rewards” (p. 63), that “it is on the inside that God must be defended, not he outside…religion is about our dignity, not our depravity” (p.71). Martel seems to trying to coerce the reader into understanding the rest of the book as some kind of religious experience, but I found his machinations a bit heavy handed.
Once the book gets to the lifeboat, things definitely pick up and Martel’s tight, matter-of-fact prose style captures Pi’s terror and exhaustion quite well. Since the book is told mostly in the first person, the absolute clarity with which Pi recounts his horrors gives the reader a glimpse of the man he has become after this ordeal, as well. But Martel is not done with plots twists and turns, I think to the book’s detriment. I suppose this means my place on the Booker committee is getting revoked, but I think if you want to read a clever piece about tigers, you’d do just as well to stick with “The Lady or the Tiger.”

Spook Country by William Gibson, 2007

In line with William Gibson’s other novels, Spook Country is an only-just-futuristic science fiction story with technological innovations as the anti-hero focus. Although science fiction has a much longer history, Gibson is thought of as the father of “cyberpunk,” which Wikipedia assures me is characterized by a focus on “high tech and low life,” which sounds about right.
In Spook Country, Gibson’s focus seems to be virtual reality: the protagonist, Hollis Henry, is a retired rock musician trying to write a magazine article about artists in Seattle who are creating installation pieces that can only be viewed with a VR helmet. But she’s soon distracted by finding out the ulterior motives of the man financing her magazine, meeting up with the socially inept programmer who provides the technological structure for this art, and eventually by a mysterious shipping container that seems to be of interest to everyone in the book.
At the same time, Gibson introduces the reader to another plot line, with a diazepam addict strong armed into helping a shadowy government agent trace the actions of a Cuban-Chinese family in New York, who seem to be in the business of facilitating illegal transactions. If that sounds a little convoluted for the B-plot, well, it was. And “introduce” probably wasn’t the right verb, since Gibson does his best to make sure that the reader is just as confused as most of the characters are about the bigger picture of the novel. The few characters who do seem to know what’s going on – the programmer, the financer, the government agent and an old man working with the Cuban-Chinese family – are given the least characterization. I appreciate the focus on the cogs in the machine as much as anyone else, and like the idea of these technological advances allowing people to take part in convoluted conspiracies without totally understanding their role. But it seems to me that the advantage of giving us so many characters’ points of view would be to give the reader a better-rounded view of how events were unfolding, and instead I mostly found myself experiencing the same kind of bigger-picture-blindness from multiple angles. Similarly, Gibson occasionally gets a little distracted by all the shiny technological possibilities – having characters pass on secret information encoded in iPods, and having information being routed through all sorts of global networks – without all of those nifty tricks having a particularly great payoff, plot wise. Even the VR innovations don’t really seem to have been that important, at the end of the day.  Gibson seems to just be trying to point out the reader how crazy technology could be, even technology we already have, and isn’t that wild? But it was too much of a distraction for me.
The strength of the book lies, for me, in some of Gibson’s characterizations and how he lets his characters blend technology and “low life,” like when Tito, the young Cuban-Chinese criminal, plays meditations to the vodoun gods on his iPod. Hollis’ relationship with her former band-mates also seems well cast. But the book still felt disjointed to me, unable to bring together its various strong points – Gibson’s great feel for technology, some compelling characters, and a passably intriguing mystery about the shipping container – at the same time. I enjoyed Gibson’s last novel, Pattern Recognition, much more, since it had a stronger protagonist voice, a better melding of the technology with the plot, and a mystery that actually kept me on the edge of my seat.

The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and The Snow Dog. Doris Lessing, 2005

Doris Lessing has been publishing books since 1950, and wrote this one at the age of 86. Lessing has written over 50 books in a combination of short stories, novel and nonfiction, and I have to say that in part her prolificness made me nervous to read any of her work, especially something published so late in her career. So many writers fall prey to repetitiveness and when they write books for over 50 years the later books seem often to be lame reproductions of earlier stories that were acclaimed when they came out. Doris Lessing does not appear to be a writer who has this sort of problem. She wrote The Golden Notebook, which is considered a feminist classic, as well as writing a series of science fiction books. However, I was not aware of how much variation there was in her career, so before reading this book I was a bit nervous that I would not like it. Two other points against the book for me were that it is an apocalyptic novel which I often am not interested in, and it it is a sequel. However, the book was given to me as a gift, I loved Doris Lessing’s novel The Fifth Child, and I had an inordinate amount of time on my hands to read while my infant son was breastfeeding seemingly nonstop. So I read it.

I loved the book. It was the kind of book that took me about 50 pages to realize how engrossed I was in the characters and in the world that Lessing created. After I would put the book down I would find myself thinking about the characters and worrying about them. I would wake up in the morning and be picturing landscapes described in the book.

At the center of this story is General Dann (obviously). He is an extremely sympathetic character: a self-reflective and thoughtful man who is unsure about other people’s confidence in him. The world Dann lives in is bleak, hopeless and wrought with violence, but he finds humanity time after time. One of the most touching relationships in the book is the one the General has with his Snow Dog: a beautiful creature of Lessing’s imagination. The book follows Dann as he initially tries to escape from his fated responsibility to bring peace and hope back to the people who follow him, and we are with him as he begins to accept the responsibility presented to him. In addition to her skill in creating engrossing and real characters, Lessing is also very able at writing a world that the reader can truly picture. She has come up with a highly imaginative vision of our world after the apocalypse both visually and in imagining how humankind will rewrite and lose touch with history when all records have been destroyed.

I don’t want to spoil any more of the story, so will leave it at that. I highly highly recommend this book, and will be reading its predecessor as soon as I get the opportunity.