A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

We got word that General Westmoreland wanted us to "maximize" destruction of the enemy.

"What the fuck does that mean?" Peewee asked. "We get a Cong, we supposed to kill his ass twice?"

This is one of the best Vietnam War novels I've ever read, and I've read quite a few of them.

It follows the usual structure of a novel from the point of view of an American soldier: the arrival of a naive kid who has no idea what he's in for, his brutal baptism of fire, his bonding with his fellow soldiers, his realization of the absurdity of military rules in a situation where logic doesn't seem to apply; disillusionment, misery, PTSD, questioning of what the war is about and whether killing other scared kids is right; black humor, grief, violence, terror; concluding in either death or a homecoming that, whether it's actually depicted in the novel or not, the reader knows is just the beginning of yet another long and harrowing journey.

Myers' novel fits that structure to a T. What makes it special is that it's just so well done: the black humor is actually funny, the characters are vivid, the atmosphere makes you feel like you're there, the philosophical and moral dilemmas are real and complex. Myers particularly excels at making combat suspenseful without making it seem glamorous. He captures the boredom of the troops without boring the readers by depicting them doing all sorts of ridiculous things, like watching a movie with the reels mixed up, in a desperate effort to kill time.

The dialogue is especially great. I kept marking pages with bits I wanted to quote, then moving the marker to the next page, and the next. Highly recommended.

The book's dedication: To my brother, Thomas Wayne "Sonny" Myers, whose dream of adding beauty to this world through his humanity and his art ended in Vietnam on May 7, 1968.

Click here to buy the paperback from Amazon: Fallen Angels

This intricate novel about how the disappearance of a Canadian photographer in East Timor connects people across continents is an unconventional love story, an unusual murder mystery, a suspense novel, a political novel, a character study, and probably more things I didn't think of, and yet it reads as a perfectly integrated whole.

It's one of the best novels I've read all year, and it's sheer chance plus lack of marketing that it didn't become one of those internationally bestselling literary novels that read like thrillers, like Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow. I opened it to the first page just to get a sense of the style, and twenty minutes later, still leaning against my bookshelf, I gave up on my plans for the rest of the day and spent the next few hours on the sofa with it.

I don't want to reveal too much of the plot, since it begins taking unexpected turns somewhere around page thirty, but it begins with Rachel, a burned-out human rights worker in London, getting yet another call about a person who has disappeared overseas. While she begins tracking down information, the eccentric doctor with whom she has a fraught relationship is dealing with people disappearing on the streets of London: not being swept into mass graves or secret prisons, but falling through the cracks of society because nobody cares, or nobody cares enough, or because one person's caring isn't enough.

I also don't want the book to sound preachy or depressing, because it isn't: some of the events are horrifying and tragic, but I was left with a sense of profound and earned hope, and the uplift that comes from reading a really good story. I also wanted to be a better person, or at least more socially committed.

The characters are vivid, the approach to politics is sophisticated, and there's an unexpected amount of rather sideways, deadpan humor. The climax is more startling and powerful than I had expected, having been braced for a let-down just because the build-up was so good. The only misstep I found was that the photographer's boyfriend never came alive for me as a character, and his hobby struck me as more poetic than likely. Highly recommended.

coffeeandink has a much better review here.

ETA: Order via amazon.ca

I really like Sarah Waters. Her other novels all feature Victorian lesbians. Affinity is a very spooky, claustrophobic thriller/love story/spoiler about a medium imprisoned after a seance goes horribly wrong, and the woman who visits her in prison. Tipping the Velvet is a very fun picaresque which bounces from oyster bars to theatres to the rooms of kept girls. Fingersmith is a wild thriller which doesn't entirely make sense in places, but is one hell of a ride. I recommend all of those. Some people hate Affinity because of the DO NOT SPOIL ending, but it's my favorite.

The Night Watch is well-written and gripping, but lacks the excitement, passion, and sense of joyous discovery that permeate Waters' other books. (Even her tragedies seem like she had fun writing them, even if the characters didn't have fun living them.) It's about the intertwined lives of several Londoners after and during the Blitz, and is told backwards in time. This narrative device is not arbitrary, and provides for a few interesting discoveries and poignant moments; but it also makes the entire book quite depressing, as we already know how everyone will end up, and nobody ends up better than "maybe, just maybe, they will now take a tiny step toward improving their life," and some of them don't even get that.

Several years after the war is over, everyone is miserable. Kay, the butch former ambulance driver, is mired in post-traumatic stress, depression, and agoraphoia; Duncan, the young former prisoner, is living with an old man and collecting worthless antiques; his sister Vi, a young woman, is stuck in a loveless and passionless affair with a married man; and Helen, whom I regret to say that I HATE, is obsessively jealous of her lover, the cold writer Julia whom I also kind of hate.

After a long section exploring their lives, the narrative jumps back to the Blitz, and we see who they were before, what their relationships were, and some light is shed on the more myserious elements of the first section. At the end of this, the concluding section jumps back even further, to the start of the Blitz; the concluding scene is lovely, but intensely depressing because we know how that particular relationship worked out.

I was fascinated by Kay, the heroic ambulance driver, her work rescuing victims of the air raids, and the society of butch volunteers she hung out with. I could have happily read an entire book about her and her friend Mickey, whom I loved with a passion disproportionate to her brief appearances. The other characters either interested me less, or their situations interested me less; the reason Duncan was in jail was tragic and not a story often told, but he was a rather opaque character and so were the men he interacted with; I liked his sister Vi, but except for her brief but wonderful interaction with Kay, her story was mostly about loving a married jerk and that has been told a million times; Helen and Julia I just didn't like, ever, and the more I learned about them, the less time I wanted to spend in their company, even on paper.

Worth reading if you're a Waters fan, but not a good introduction. It did make me want to read more about the Blitz, though. (Two of my favorite short stories of all time are set there, Connie Willis' "Fire Watch" ("deaths: one cat") and "Jack.") Any recommendations? Especially, any recommendations for fact or fiction featuring lesbians and/or people doing the more dramatic sort of volunteer work, search and rescue, fire watch, ambulance drivers, and the like?

I mentioned this here before.

This is a very long historical novel about a Victorian prostitute, Sugar, whose brilliance and ambition is spent making her customers very, very happy, and on writing a semi-autobiographical wish-fulfillment novel in which a prostitute named Sugar inventively murders all her customers; William Rackham, who is pretty much a loser until he falls for Sugar, and she repays him and uses him by letting her smarts and his money transform him into a perfume magnate; Agnes, Rackham's mad and religiously obsessed wife, who hallucinates nightly about being cared for at the Convent of Healing; Sophie, their young daughter, who seems to take more after Sugar that she does after either of her parents, at least in the brains department; Henry, Rackham's sweet, socially awkward, devout brother, who is guiltily in love with; Emmeline Fox, an independent-minded and socially progressive widow who works with an organization that tries to get women out of prostitution, but is hampered by its inability to offer them opportunities that are actually better.

I feel so torn about whether or not I should recommend this book. About four-fifths of it was brilliant and entertaining and incredibly well-written and well-characterized, and I would recommend that part unless you have a very low tolerance for excessive scatology and tragic irony.

Aaaaand then there's the last part, which was still well-written but in which the plot takes some strange turns when characters do things that don't make a whole lot of sense, and then, just as events seem to be building toward a climax, the whole thing just stops.

I like open-ended conclusions of the sort where you have enough knowledge of the characters to make a reasoned choice between which of several outcomes might happen, or the sort that conclude with the sense that while this story is over, the lives of the characters will continue and there will be other stories that will remain unwritten. But this is not that sort of ending. It's just a stop, with nothing concluded, at least one very important mystery left unsolved, and with the reader not in possession of enough information to determine what had happened, or what might happen next.

This is doubly frustrating because the entire conceit of the book is that the narrator tells us things that the characters cannot know. This is one of the book's best and most powerful devices, such as the moment when the narrator tells us that the mad wife, Agnes, has a brain tumor-- something none of the characters could possibly know at that stage of medical science, nor do anything about if they did know. So with that device in place, and so important in the rest of the book, it makes no sense for the readers to be suddenly deprived of information about what had happened right before the ending, and then deprived of an ending as well.

( Massive spoilers regarding specifics of the last fifth )

Short version: Brite conclusively breaks out of the horror ghetto with this charming mainstream novel about two New Orleans cooks who open a restaurant. Full review at Green Man Review:

I know you know who wrote this book—her name is right there at the top of the review, about a quarter-inch above this sentence— but pretend for a moment that you don’t. Pretend you never read a horror novel called Exquisite Corpse, featuring two gay necrophiliac cannibals, or else pretend that you, like I, never started it and couldn’t get past the first disgusting chapter. Pretend you never read any short stories by a woman with a certain gloriously improbable name, not even that sizzling demonstration of the fine line between arousal and terror called “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves.” Most importantly, pretend you never read a book called Lost Souls and forget all about its cast of Goth vampires drinking Chartreuse in the steamy streets of decadent New Orleans.

You don’t have to pretend quite so hard that you never read Drawing Blood, in which a haunted house provides the backdrop for a touching romance between two troubled young men. And if you happen to have come across the short mainstream novels Plastic Jesus or The Value of X, you may not have to pretend at all.

Clear your memory of all preconceptions, and read this excerpt from a novel called Liquor, by some woman named Poppy Z. Brite, in which a young man reminisces about being a cook at the Peychaud Grill :

Rickey sometimes wondered what would have become of them if the Peychaud crew hadn’t imploded one night in a marathon of apocalyptic drunkenness. No one remembered much of this night, but by the end of it, two cars were totaled, the sous chef and the bartender were in Charity Hospital, the chef was in jail, and the grill guy’s wife was filing for divorce. The owner decided to close the place and they found themselves jobless. Rickey guessed this kind of thing was known as a “wake-up call.”

Liquor has no vampires, no serial killers, and no steamy, swampy, Gothy New Orleans clichés. It doesn’t need them.

Rickey and G-Man are young cooks in a distinctly unglamorous New Orleans. They’ve been best friends since fourth grade and lovers since they were teenagers, and their relationship has the playfulness and ease of true love that’s lasted for years. They’re sick of slaving away as line cooks in lousy restaurants and getting screamed at by cokehead managers. While drinking vodka and orange juice in the park, Rickey gets an idea. Since people in New Orleans love drinking so much that it’s legal to get your cocktail in a go-cup so you can walk from the bar to your house without letting your throat go dry, why not open a restaurant called Liquor, in which every dish contains alcohol?

As G-Man points out, there’s the slight problem that the two of them are both unknown and broke. But Rickey’s not going to let persnickety matters like that get in the way of his really great idea. Soon they’re cutting deals with deceptively amiable crooks, renting a fixer-upper of an abandoned restaurant that’s perfect as long as they can convince a booze-hound reporter not to publicize its unfortunate past, hiring eccentric dessert makers and fat-phobic grill men, and hoping Rickey’s vengeful ex-boss won’t snort too much coke and come after him with a sharp kitchen implement.

The details of work are one of the most enjoyable subjects to read about. Often when reading some mystery or sf novel or thriller, I wish that the writer had left out the plot in order to focus on the more interesting subplots involving the characters’ jobs and relationships. Brite concentrates on the fascinating business of cooking and running a restaurant, on the kitchen camaraderie and the New Orleans restaurant scene, and on the sweetly companionable relationship between G-Man and Rickey. There's not much plot but it isn't missed at all.

Brite’s lush horror prose style, in which every noun has an adjective, every kiss has a flavor, and every place has an entire perfumery of smells, is discarded here in favor of an omniscient voice which is crisp, witty, and casual in the way that can only be achieved with great care and skill. The characters are likable, their relationships feel real, and the milieu is irresistible.

If you liked Anthony Bourdain’s foodie memoirs Kitchen Confidential and A Cook’s Tour, you’ll like Liquor. If you never heard of Bourdain or Brite but are looking for a good absorbing novel that will leave you cheered and emotionally refreshed, albeit hungry and longing for a stiff drink, you’ll like Liquor. If you liked Poppy Z. Brite’s horror novels for their romances between young gay men, you’ll like Liquor. If you liked Brite’s horror novels for their purplish prose, air of doomed romanticism, and pale fragile souls too sensitive to live, you’ll have a shock in store for you. But you’ll probably like Liquor anyway. It’s just that sort of book.

I missed her signing in LA yesterday, alas. I had and have a nasty cold and didn't make it to karate either. (I think it's unsociable to share viruses.) But I was pleased to read on her livejournal (docbrite) that she enjoyed a formal Korean banquet.

Yes, it's another mainstream bestseller which is actually sf. Slipstream, anyway.

Paul's wife Lexy plummets from an apple tree in their yard and dies. There are mysterious circumstances surrounding her death, but the only witness is their dog Lorelei. As in this world, dogs have occasionally been taught to talk, Paul tries to teach Lorelei to talk in order to find out what happened to Lexy.

Flashbacks to their nauseatingly cute courtship and marriage ensue. Lexy (lexicon, get it?) made masks. Masks symbolize the surface which Paul is trying to burrow beneath. They symbolize Lexy's adorable surface which covers up her pain. Paul's travails with Lorelei lead him to a bittersweet understanding of the truth about him, his wife, language, love, death, life, dogs...

Here's how you can tell that the author did not think she was writing sf: although the setting is a world identical to our own except that some people have succeeded in teaching and/or surgically altering dogs so they can talk, and though this single alteration is so central to the plot that the book could not exist without it, the thread of the story which deals with an evil dog-mutilating cabal and with the tragic figure of an altered dog is briefly of crucial importance, then abandoned with no explanation of what happened to the dog-mutilators, the mutilated dog, or why they did something of major significance to the main characters, but which makes no sense whatsoever when you think about it.

I didn't like the book at all. I thought it was over-weighted with obvious symbolism, cutesy, sentimental, and that the sf elements were poorly handled. Also I found all the characters annoying, except for Lorelei, who was boring. On the positive side, it doesn't go into any details about the dog mutilation.

(For non-speaking fictional dogs with personality, see Robin McKinley's DEERSKIN, R. A. MacAvoy's back-in-print LENS OF THE WORLD and its stand-alone sequels KING OF THE DEAD and THE BELLY OF THE WOLF (the dog in the latter books might be a wolf and is unlike any of my other recommendations in being overwhelmingly creepy and disturbing), Gerald Durrell's hilarious MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS, the complete works of James Herriot, and all those YA novels where the dogs die gruesomely at the end.)

Great premise, though.