Milkman by Anna BurnsMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Thursday, October 29, 2020
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Sunday, October 18, 2020
Saturday, October 17, 2020
Thursday, October 15, 2020
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
Review: The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: Book 1-4
The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: Book 1-4 by Felix R. SavageMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I was looking for something fun and dumb, and I found it.
Notwithstanding an ending that veers too much into existential showdown, this is pretty good sci-fi that doesn’t take itself too seriously. As a stress reliever, it mostly did the trick, and I’m grateful for that.
The gimmick here hits you in the face: Fletcher “Fletch” Connelly is a working-class Irish kid who narrates his adventures in deep space. He hunts down A-tech, technology created by extinct races, and he tries to sell it back to humans.
This isn’t the deep future, just a late 21st Century. So, there are iPhones alongside space ships, and we even have an aging Mark Zuckerberg still standing as one of the titans of finance.
This could easily have been annoying if Savage had rubbed our noses either in the cleverness of his original conceit or in the ancillary sci-fi of his story. Instead, he makes it work by moving quickly and letting much of his real cleverness seep in through the cracks of the narrative.
The central sci-fi notion is clear in the title but glossed over for much of the early parts of the novel. (And that’s a good thing.) It seems one of the central achievements of past sentient races was the creation of what Fletch’s culture calls a “railroad” that spans the galaxy. Earthlings can attach our primitive spaceships to it and fly all around the galaxy, often to planets abandoned for millions of years.
Along the way, we get some fun and fast-moving stories. When Fletch comes across an animal species that drinks energy as moths go after light, it’s a close call. But [SPOILER:] he discovers they might be harvested as superior spaceship shields, creatures that absorb enemy fire should it come.
And Fletch’s in love, but it’s far from perfect. As I say, I’d be tired of a concept that I got my nose rubbed into, but it’s fun to see these space cowboys settle in to play Irish traditional music or to discover that the dread pirate of one adventure is actually a woman.
Make no mistake, this isn’t art. And, I confess, I’d probably had enough of it four-fifths of the way through. Still, this is the sort of fun I was looking for, and I’m grateful to Savage for providing it.
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Thursday, October 8, 2020
Review: The Constant Gardener
The Constant Gardener by John le CarréMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I gathered from reputation that this is supposed to John le Carre’s late career masterpiece. As much as I admire his work, I think it falls short of what I was hoping for.
That said, even second-tier le Carre has its virtues. Here we have the powerful element of Justin, a bereaved husband, trying to unravel the mystery of why Tessa was murdered. The answer, as we come to see in its broadest outlines almost from the start, has to do with big pharmaceutical and its potential for billion-dollar paydays.
Tessa herself may be the most remarkable character in the novel. She is, in many ways, too good for this world. She’s beautiful, intelligent, and wealthy, but she determines to help ‘the wretched of the earth’ by exposing the lax drug trials these multinationals are doing before dispensing their drugs.
That too-good-to-be-true quality works because, since the death of their child, the couple has drifted apart. Justin has taken comfort in his hobbies – in particular his gardening – spending his grief by working to bring something like new life into the world. Tessa, meanwhile, has embarked on her virtuous project and experienced multiple affairs.
As Justin undertakes his detective work, he falls in love with her all over again. There’s an ache in the process, and there were some early parts that made me think of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair where passion flares after it’s too late.
The early promise of the novel fades for me, though, for two reasons.
First, this becomes more of a procedural than I’d have liked. Justin goes from place to place, assembling clues and talking to people in the know, but he doesn’t seem to grow emotionally beyond that early, arresting portrait. When I think of first-rate le Carre – of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or Smiley’s People – I think about the way he asks human beings to carry the emotional weight of the cold war, the emotional weight of a nation’s clandestine misdeeds. Here, though, we rarely get a sense of the wrenching minefield of the experience. We have a flawed, weak man pursuing the work of his flawed, strong wife, but I don’t remember him gaining fresh insight to go with his outrage.
Second, even the procedural quality of this leaves me wanting. I read the even more recently published A Legacy of Spies a year or so ago, and – while I liked it more than this – it troubled me that so much of the ‘adventure’ consisted of that Smiley person, Peter Guillam, reviewing long-sealed records and coming to fresh insights.
I’m a researcher. I’ve spent time in physical and on-line archives, and I know the thrill of discovering some ingot of information buried in a file open to anyone but rarely examined carefully. I love doing it. But I don’t know that I love reading about someone else doing it.
So, as beautiful as this almost is for a stretch, I found myself wanting more urgency both in what is what at stake for Justin and in the way he goes about trying to solve the mystery.
Credit to le Carre for the same soaring moral imagination as always – and acknowledgement that I put this down midway and then picked it up again – but this one doesn’t quite combine that with the page-turner skill of his strongest work.
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Monday, October 5, 2020
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