Review: The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The small Ohio town where I grew up was a stop on the Underground Railroad. One of my neighbors lived in a house supposedly old enough to have been part of the actual network, and I remember climbing into a rocky little space that – if it had been there 120 years before – might have been where some slaves hid for a time.

I think of that space and it gives me the illusion of a connection to that overwhelming experience, but I know it’s only an imagined connection. The slaves who fled the unspeakable horrors of the plantations endured things far worse than what the metaphor of “underground railroad” suggests, but that’s what we call it.

The central power of this novel is that it takes that metaphor and makes it real. It’s no longer just a way of describing people who came together desperately to fight slavery; it’s an actual railroad, a set of tunnels dug deeply and impossibly by hands we never see.

That vision alone makes this one striking and memorable. When Cora first gets away from the plantation and finds her way to a station, it feels like the end of a terrible nightmare. She’s saved by the anonymous and staggering work of others. It promises her a way north, and it obligates her to do her part for others who come after. It’s all there, dug in stone and soil.

But this novel is much more than just a metaphor made real, more even than an inspired marriage of the runaway slave narrative and the magic realism method. It’s also about the limits of the collective work of salvation. The bitter truth is that slavery so deeply marks its victims (and, in ways less deserving of sympathy, its victimizers) that there is no real escape. In the closing pages, [SPOILER] when Cora limps down a dismal track along a discovered line of the railroad, the grand promise of the original vision is gone. She’s survived and escaped, but so many others have not.

We get a glimpse in Indiana of what a genuine post-slave community might look like, but the world is too intolerant, too violent to let it stand.

We have, in other words, metaphors to name an experience larger than any one of us, but beneath them lies a suffering that challenges everyone telling story to make fresh. Whitehead does that, and Cora’s dreams have real and rare power in the face of the horrors she has endured. In his imaginative manner, he does it better than Octavia Butler or Samuel R. Delany (to name two skilled writers who’ve used fantasy or science fiction to probe the experience of slavery). He does it so well, in fact, that I thought at times I was reading the even better still A Mercy by Toni Morrison.

The wonder that comes with the vision of the railroad makes fresh what it meant to resist slavery and its supporters. The collapse of so much of that wonder makes the awfulness of that history come down with new weight as well.


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Review: The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Who owns our dreams? That’s the implicit question underlying the whole Sandman series, but, to my persistent irritation, Neil Gaiman has always seemed to blink in the face of it. He’s asking a deeply human, deeply personal question, but he’s allowed much of the series so far to deal in cosmologies. Sometimes that’s been the generally satisfying cosmology of Morpheus and his siblings. Other times it’s been the less rewarding appropriation of extinct mythologies.

Here, for the first time in my experience, Gaiman gets it right. He gets it brilliantly and beautifully right in the way he stares at the deep question of what it means to claim a dream. That carries with it the question of how we understand creativity (and possibly creation itself) and also how we, as humans, need others for our own completion.

Somewhere in the Dreaming there lies a tiny island, a skerry, first brought into the quasi-real by Morpheus for Alianora, a beautiful girl who needed (or simply asked for) a space she could populate with the sorts of comforting childhood fantasies that live in places like Oz or Narnia. What began as her place, though, passed on to others after she died. One young girl after another found her way to the tiny place and added to it. It became a kind of communal dream, a place open to a select few – one at a time – who peopled it in their dreaming and may have only dimly remembered it in their waking. In other words, Alianora did not own her dreams any more than the others who came after her. In an unacknowledged Jungian sense, there was a collective unconscious – or perhaps collective semi-consciousness – that tied a handful of strangers into a genealogy of demiurges.

Our main protagonist, Barbie, is the last of those dreamers, and, without knowing it, she’s the victim of the Cuckoo, a creature whose impulse is to worm her way into the nest of another and kick out the legitimate offspring. The Cuckoo has taken control over most of the skerry, claiming its dreaming for herself at the expense of its existence. She believes that destroying it will free her to fly elsewhere, to dream in new ways or, more sinisterly, to supplant the dreams of others elsewhere.

Our story spans the dreaming and the waking, and Gaiman handles that juggling act with much more finesse than he has in earlier volumes. Barbie has a coterie of friends – all women, though one of those is a former man transitioning – who live in a small apartment building together. When Barbie gets summoned back to the skerry, to serve as the dreamer (and bearer of an ancient dream/real artifact) who can overcome the Cuckoo, her friends split up, one to protect her helpless sleeping self and the others to venture into the dreaming through the power of the moon and in opposition to Morpheus’s decree. (And what a beautiful stroke of creativity to assign the moon a kind of backdoor status to dreaming. It fits in a fresh and mythical way.)

In the end, [SPOILER] our heroes fail. The Cuckoo has an irresistible hypnotic power, and she forces Barbie to break the artifact, which summons Morpheus who’s pledged to destroy the skerry in such a case. He explains the facts of dreaming, and he gathers the wonders of the generations from Alianora to Barbie, taking in their quirky dreams and converting them back to the sand that gives dreams to others. If that suggests at first that all dreams belong to Morpheus, though, there is a compelling sense that he merely directs their flow, a flow that he acknowledges is greater than himself. (Gaiman has hinted at this in earlier volumes but never to the poetic effect of the conclusion here.) As dust, these rich imaginings are recycled into the seeds of others’ dreams to come.

Even more striking, it becomes clear that Barbie herself is a kind of dream. She is, as the story tells us, recently divorced from Ken. We also see, in the moments after Barbie arrives on the skerry, a Mattel Barbie doll on which she dreamed as child. Someone has infused her with the dimensions of a real girl, and that someone seems equal parts Neil Gaiman and a generic little girl humming to herself before her private “Dream House.”

In the introduction to this volume, Samuel R. Delany talks of Gaiman’s capacity for infusing the everyday with mythic qualities. In the earlier volumes, I’d disagree and say he’s doing the opposite: what else is happening when a demon like Azazel or a cat deity out of Egypt gets coopted for a kind of Demonic Celebrity Apprentice? Those stories bleed the mythic from myths and give us gods and demons as human-sized characters.

Here, though, as Delany says so strikingly, Gaiman takes the toys of childhood and raises them to the status of archetypes. Barbie’s dreamworld quest alongside animated stuffed animals feels eerily familiar, a twist on the adventures we all know from Alice or Dorothy, but it feels new as well. It’s as if he’s re-opened a door that only our most expert dreamers have managed before.

All of this works because it insistently reminds us of the degree to which our deepest wonder comes not from our private dreaming, but from our attempting to claim someone else’s dreams only to discover ourselves in some new place. We are all, in one degree or another, cuckoos who insinuate ourselves into others’ creations, and as such we simply follow our nature (as Morpheus explains the Cuckoo is indeed doing through her impulse to destruction) when we take the wondrous and claim it for ourselves.

In another context, the change from one illustrator to another would really irritate me. (Especially because I think Colleen Doran is so perfectly suited to the material that I find the other five wanting in comparison.) Here, though, it amplifies the sense that we depend on others for the beginnings of our dreaming and for taking what we dream someplace beyond our private imagining.

In the end, this volume gives us what the others have so far only vaguely gestured toward: Morpheus alone can navigate the twisted paths of the dreaming, but the place belongs – in its fragmented and directionless fashion – to all of us.


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Review: The Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists

The Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m starting to run out of excuses for not loving Neil Gaiman – as so many have told me I would and as I fully expected. (I wouldn’t have bought the first eight volumes of The Sandman if I didn’t expect to love it the way so many others do.)

I was disappointed in volume three because I found it a series of disconnected, one-off stories. This time, there is a full arc: Morpheus comes into possession of hell, and he has to decide which of several claimants he wants to give it to.

There’s cleverness throughout this – Gaiman is always clever – but I sometimes get the feeling it’s cleverness for the sake of cleverness. I enjoy seeing the gods from different pantheons come together (it’s especially fun to get a Thor who is the anti-Marvel version – a buffoon who eats and sexes himself into near stupor), but after a while I get frustrated that there’s no cosmology that underlies their shared space. Odin can be powerful in one sense – he is still the all-father – but in another he is just a guy standing alongside Egyptian or Miltonic figures. The importance of each seems to rise and fall with the attention Gaiman wants to pay rather than with anything intrinsic to the story.

That becomes especially clear at the end. (I hesitate to call it a climax because, as I often complain about stories crafted into single-issue comic episodes, there’s not all that much to build up to it. When that chapter comes, it feels almost like a new start to the story we’ve been reading.) When the demon Azazel threatens to destroy Nada, Morpheus has a showdown with him. It’s all on Morpheus’s terms, though – which feel like all on Gaiman’s terms in the sense that he’s after the splendor of the moment rather than pay-off for the story he’s been building up – and the final conflict falls flat in many ways. It starts, and then it’s over.

All that said, there do remain some touches I deeply admire. Two of those comes at the very end. First, while the Azazel showdown leaves me wanting, the concept of it brings me back. It really is beautiful to consider the demon as trapped somehow in dream. By giving vent to his own desires, he ventures into the space of pure dream, pure creation, and that renders him a plaything in Morpheus’s hands. I want Morpheus to be more of a stable hero, and I want Gaiman either to step entirely outside the story or more directly into it. Still, Morpheus as the story-maker of the story – Morpheus as Gaiman – is compelling at the end.

And, at the very end, Gaimain gets off one of those moments that really moves me, that makes me frustrated that I only like this rather than love it. That’s because I love the idea of Nada reborn as an infant without memory. It’s a beautiful instant, one that gives me hope that I’ll finally be able to click with what Gaiman is doing.

On to volume five with an open mind…


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Review: Hidden River

Hidden River by Adrian McKinty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one isn’t great art, but, oh, is it a lot of fun.

Check your skepticism at the door if you feel like giving this a shot. It turns on several hard-to-believe coincidences – something that ordinarily bothers me a great deal. [SPOILER] To start with, what are the odds that our hero would escape injury so often, that he’d never be suspected in the range of killings and set-ups he’s behind, that he’d get hired at the one environmental group that he wanted to investigate in the first place, that he’d find two guys loyal to him to the death, or that no one would ever bother to ask him what happened to John once he returned to Ireland without him.

Those are, in most cases, the sorts of holes I’d feel a truck driving through. They’d distract me to the point of not caring about anything else.

Oddly, though, McKinty pulls off the opposite trick here. I find myself – for reasons I can’t fully identify –drawn to the character and the situation. Alex is a Jewish cop in the middle of Belfast’s Catholic/Protestant wars. He’s a too-good-for-his-own-good cop, and he’s a heroin addict. He has a mysterious history from the end of his police career, and now he’s a wit’s end.

It’s fun to get McKinty’s hardboiled take on Belfast – I read his The Cold, Cold Ground which I liked at least as much and admired more – and then it’s fun to see him grapple with the different world of Denver. He has a tone and a way with character that grips you – or grips me at least.

It’s fun as well to feel him manipulating you throughout. In this case, he’s even somewhat clumsy. [SPOILER: I knew from early on that Amber was the real threat.] But so what? Most of the fun is in seeing the oh-so-clever Alex get confused in the midst of his sex-and-heroin lust.

I don’t want to lean too heavily on this because I suspect my enjoyment of it would come tumbling down if I worried too much about things like how it morphs from a confession from someone who seems already dead (in classic noir-like feel) to a feel-good self-transformation instead. Or about how seriously to take the Hindu theology thread that runs throughout, even giving the novel its name.

No, bottom line, this is a guilty pleasure that I can recommend to others only with mixed feelings. But I promise you that I’ll be snatching up the next McKinty I come across, and I bet it will make it from the to-read pile into my hands pretty quickly.


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Review: The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country

The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The good news is that I remain intrigued by the possibilities of The Sandman as I finish volume three of the collected works. I thought I knew where it was headed, then discovered I was wrong, and now am still curious about where it’s going. Almost a third of the way through the series, I still have the positive sense that it could turn into almost anything.

The less good news is that I liked where I thought it was going more than I like where it has gone to this point. I loved the first volume, Preludes and Nocturnes, because it was such a fresh take on the comic genre. It had the form of a superhero book, giving us a different kind of hero who was caught up in an intriguing story of revenge and perpetual reinvention. I enjoyed the second volume because I thought it was reloading for another multi-issue narrative in which Morpheus deals with an anomaly in his universe.

This volume, though, is a grab bag. Instead of giving us an extended story arc, this one gives one striking issue after another. It’s fun to see Morpheus invite the lords of fairy to see a production of the still-living Will Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it’s intriguing to see the story of how a seductive death helps a woman disfigured into invulnerability eventually kill herself.

Each of those stories is its own, though. We’ve lost the continuity of the series. On the one hand I admire that a lot. These are, in effect, short stories, and it takes enormous skill to tell a new one every issue. And I enjoy most of these.

But, again, it isn’t quite what I expected. I’ll keep reading these one-offs for a while, but I signed up because I thought I’d get to see Morpheus dive into an extended, novel-like experience. I still think that might be coming and, if I know it is, I think I’ll come back and revise my estimate of these interesting stand-alones upward.


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Review: Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I think of despair, I think of mutism. That is, I associate the deepest loss of faith with the inability to use words at all. Hemingway’s power derives mostly from the sense he gives that silence is so close at hand. It’s not just that he’s efficient with his language; it’s that each word carries a heavy emotional cost since the temptation to turn inward is so strong.

In this novel, one of the candidates to be his masterpiece, Vonnegut is playing a slightly different game. Words come easily. When someone dies, the phrase is right at hand, “And so it goes…” Ask our narrator a question, and he’s got a glib answer. There’s always something to say, and the words themselves are as cheap as the paperbacks Kilgore Trout writes and releases to the world. No one seems inclined toward silence. We talk because it’s what we do.

Yet despair is here, and it manifests itself in a pressure against narrative rather than language. Vonnegut, as the character of the narrator here, has no trouble spinning out a goofy premise like Tralfamadore or explaining the didactic point of a Trout novel, but he never lets us forget the effort it takes to tell a straightforward story. That’s because stories, as such, pretend to make sense of a world that he despairs of making sensible.

We see that assertion most clearly in the first chapter, when our narrator describes how he’s failed to write anything directly about his experiences in Dresden. When Mary O’Hare gets angry at him for preparing to write a novel about World War II, she angrily explains it’s because the stories always get it wrong. “Wars are fought by children,” she explains. And our narrator, acknowledging she’s right, agrees to call his book “The Children’s Crusade.” He doesn’t want to write a war novel, but he wants to try to tell a story – a senseless story of a devastating bombing raid by our own country that had no strategic value – so he has to write a novel about the war.

And the novel he writes goes on to fight with itself throughout. Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time because of the trauma he’s experienced, and that expresses itself most clearly in the way it breaks Vonnegut’s narrative. There is none of the conventional consolation that story/plot/narrative brings. We know early on that Billy will die in an assassination. We know he’ll be kidnapped by Tralfamadorans. We know that the universe will end when the Tralfamadorans screw up a test of their advanced rocketry. And we know that U.S. bombers will obliterate a German city called Dresden while a group of American P.O.W.s survive the onslaught in an underground slaughterhouse.

We see the same assault on conventional narrative in the comic book existentialism of the Tralfamadorans. Since they experience all time as happening simultaneously, nothing is ever a surprise. They urge you to cling to beautiful moments, knowing full well that they cannot control what will happen any more easily than they can control what’s already happened. There’s no surprise in their lives, only the capacity to choose what they focus on.

And we see it in the quick descriptions of Trout’s novels. They never seem to tell conventional stories either. They aren’t about plots where one thing happens after another. They’re about concepts that make you go “Hmmm.”

Vonnegut was hugely important to me as a high school kid. I read and re-read everything he’d written by the middle 1980s, and he helped me fall in love with literature as something that can expand my ideas in addition to my experience. I didn’t like this one that much in those years, though. I resented its frequent sloppiness, and I thought – despite what I understood to be its critical acclaim – it was a kind of phone-it-in effort after Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and Mother Night. (It does reference important characters from each of those earlier ones.)

Coming back to this after more than 25 years, though, I see its sloppy storytelling as its most articulate feature. I believe Vonnegut when he says it took him more than a quarter century to write about Dresden. His experience made no sense, and trying to make sense of it though story would have been a betrayal of the horrors he saw and that others saw alongside him. Instead, he finds a way here to mock his own effort as a way to counter the despair that tried to keep him from telling that story at all.

If you’ve never read Vonnegut, I still recommend starting with Cat’s Cradle or one of the other early novels (other than Player Piano which is playing a different game). Once you’ve got a handle on Vonnegut’s tone and universe, though, give this one a shot. I see now what I didn’t see then – this is literature at a high level. It is, to paraphrase Ezra Pound, news that has stayed news.


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Review: Babel-17

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reading this book is a little like going back and playing one of those early home video games, something like the first generation of Castle Wolfenstein. There’s something to it, something you know you sensed when you played the game way back when, but you can also clearly see how the technology limited the final effect.

This one has a fabulous premise: the “bad guys” develop a language that corrupts its speakers. It functions less like a human language and more like Fortran or Basic – languages that direct a machine to do a thing without giving it the vocabulary to comprehend itself. Without that sense of self – without the concept of “I” – it isn’t possible to resist the codes one’s programmed to do. In the world of the novel, it turns its speakers into sleeper double-agents, people who aren’t aware of their own duplicity.

I can give that kind of a summary largely because of what I learn in the final pages of the novel, when one of the characters – having been reprogrammed of deprogrammed – explains the phenomenon to everyone else. Otherwise, this is a hard-to-follow story. We get a lot of quick cuts, a lot of characters introduced by pronouns rather than given names, and a lot of action committed by characters under the control of other wills.

Much of the story moves forward through dialogue, often a clunky narrative technology but especially so here. How, I ask, can we contemplate the power of language when we are so trapped in conversation. There are “technologies” that might work better – stream-of-consciousness, multiple narrators, deliberate fragmentation – but Delaney tends to stay with a conventional approach here. He does push against it a little – we get some attempts at weird-angle limited omniscient third person and he opens each chapter with long, allusive quotes from Marilyn Hacker’s poetry – but, ultimately, he doesn’t seem to have the tools to get his fabulous question across.

I don’t think he’s alone. I’m cooler on his contemporary Philip K. Dick than most, and there was a lot of other high concept, overly pedantic sci-fi in those era. It was common for sci-fi to come across as cold, peopled with characters who seem props for ideas rather than characters in their own right. In some ways, the original Star Trek had the same problems: big ideas without quite the special effects to pull them off. It took Star Wars (on screen) and Dune (in print) to begin to develop that technology, and now we have Guardians of the Galaxy (on screen) and Neal Stephenson (in print, when he’s on his game).

There’s certainly something here, and I also acknowledge I read this too quickly to get everything from it. I suspect I’d have been in awe of it if I stumbled onto it as a 13-year-old in 1978. I don’t mean to say I’d have gotten all the bio-linguistic points it raised, merely that I think I’d have sense it even then as pushing toward something it couldn’t quite yet say.

I have the chance to hear Delaney a few weeks from now, and I’m keeping an open mind. I’m blaming him here for a limited technology, but it’s just as possible I’m not bringing all the reading tools to this that I should.


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