Because I follow disability news pretty closely, I knew where this book's title came from as soon as I saw it, and just seeing it made my blood run coBecause I follow disability news pretty closely, I knew where this book's title came from as soon as I saw it, and just seeing it made my blood run cold.
(If you don't know, it came from a news story from a few years back, about a boy named Jonathan Carey who lived at an institution for the developmentally disabled in New York. He was being driven somewhere in a van, with one aide driving and another riding in the back seat with him, and the aide in the back seat got on top of him and smothered him, crushed him beneath his weight. The aide who was driving later said he overhead the aide who killed Jonathan Carey say "I can be a good king or I can be a bad king" to the boy as he struggled. So for me the phrase evokes, not just the absolute power of life and death that support staff wield over their disabled charges, but also the deliberate choice this man made to use it in one of the worst possible ways.)
The book doesn't start out this heavy, though: it starts by introducing us to its protagonist, a sixteen-year-old girl named Yessenia Lopez, who has just lost the aunt who has raised her, and whom she thinks of as her mother. She's absolutely distraught, and she gets into a fight at school, which results in her being sent first to juvie and later to a group home for disabled young people called ILLC.
(Though the book is told from multiple characters' perspectives, and shifts perspective every chapter, I consider Yessie to be the protagonist because 1. the first and last chapters are hers and 2. her actions drive the plot towards its resolution.)
ILLC is the common thread tying all the different characters' stories together: besides Yessie, the viewpoint characters include her fellow residents Mia Oviedo and Teddy Dobbs, staff members Ricky Hernandez (the bus driver), Joanne Madsen (a data entry clerk who is also disabled herself, and who sees a lot of things the other staff members don't about what things are like for the residents), Jimmie Kendrick (a "houseparent," which is the book's generic term for what you might also call aides or orderlies) and one character who works for the company that owns ILLC and a lot of other nursing homes as well, and whose role in the story is to investigate ILLC and look for ways her company might be able to save money in running it.
The overall plot of the book involves several horrific incidents of abuse or neglect, which -- with Yessie's help in bringing the incidents into the public eye -- result in huge changes to the way ILLC is run, and in the arrests of all the bad actors. Yet the book makes clear that the problems with ILLC (and, by analogy, with similar institutions in the real world) go much deeper than a few bad apples. Ricky's chapters work well to illustrate how even a good person can be pressured to do bad things -- he has several lines where he questions the morality of what he's doing, or says he doesn't like the person he's becoming.
Seriously, Nussbaum did a great job choosing her viewpoint characters. Each one serves a vital purpose in the narrative, and each one has their own plot points that appear first in just their chapters, and later spill over into everyone else's.
One character in particular I feel like I need to single out because she surprised me. Michelle Volkmann, the woman from the parent company, first appears as a vacuous, amoral character concerned only with money, but as the story goes on she starts to look beyond that, to reveal herself as a human being with a conscience. (It's no accident that she is one of only two characters who ends up worse off than she began. For her, there is a heavy emotional cost to learning just what kind of a system she's been part of. I even pitied her by the end, and I had spent most of the book hating her!)
Anyway, if you think you can handle the graphic descriptions of abuse in an institutional setting, this book is well worth your time. I would compare Susan Nussbaum to George Eliot in her meticulous rendering of individual characters' psyches, and her deep interest in each character's moral development....more
This book includes not just Schismatrix, but also a handful of short stories set in the same universe.
Schismatrix itself I'm going to review separateThis book includes not just Schismatrix, but also a handful of short stories set in the same universe.
Schismatrix itself I'm going to review separately, because there's so much to talk about, so in this review I will focus on the short stories and what they add to the experience of reading Schismatrix.
There are five stories: "Swarm," "Spider Rose," "Cicada Queen," "Sunken Gardens" and "Twenty Evocations."
Swarm - a suspenseful tale in the classic tradition of "hunter becomes prey" stories; it follows two Shaper scientists, Simon Afriel and Galina Mirny, as they engage in some very dangerous field research. They are studying one of the nineteen other space-faring races besides humankind and its new trading partners, the Investors. The beings they are studying -- by means no less drastic than going to live in one of their colonies for two years -- are essentially gigantic social insects called the Swarm. Like ants or termites, the Swarm lives in a vast complex of underground tunnels that they have dug for themselves. Also like ants, they have many different castes, with body types specialized for each caste's function. There are large, imposing warriors with huge mandibles; there's a vast Queen who lays eggs endlessly and is the mother of every individual in the colony; there are legions of small, bustling workers; there are a few "sensors" whose function is to monitor air quality in the colony to make sure it stays livable -- they are little more than eyes, brain, antennae and lungs, and have to be carried by workers; and there are tunnelers, huge living bulldozers with spadelike legs and jaws adapted for crunching rocks. There are also an astonishing array of "symbiotes" -- creatures that are not of the Swarm, that had clearly once been something else, but which, through long cohabitation, have been absorbed into it.
None of these critters possesses anything like human intelligence or sentience; in an exchange that effectively sets the mood for the whole story, Simon Afriel tells an ensign on the Investor ship that carries him to the Swarm colony that this alone makes them worth studying. How does a species without higher consciousness take to the stars?
The Investor, characteristically of his species, cannot understand why Afriel is so anxious to know this. He tells Afriel that humans place too much value on mere information, information that cannot possibly profit them. Afriel tells the Investor that humans are a young species, only children to the ancient and long-lived Investors, so the Investor should not be surprised to see a childlike curiosity from them.
I don't want to reveal too much about what happens in this story, because it's such an incredible twist, but let's just say that this Investor ensign -- and also Mirny, who has been with the colony longer than Afriel has and who shows him the ropes when he arrives -- serve very poignantly as voices of reason, trying in vain to sway Afriel from his hubris. The ensign's words, especially, give you insight into how the Investors have lasted for so long as a species, and hints that perhaps their laziness and incuriosity are survival traits rather than vices.
Spider Rose - This is a very sad story. It's also the only one told from the perspective of a Mechanist rather than a Shaper (although there is one character who is both, but he begins as a Shaper so I'm not sure he counts). The protagonist, Lydia Martinez, has been widowed for thirty years (her husband, a wealthy businessman who traded with the Investors, had been murdered by Shaper assassins) and has taken to calling herself Spider Rose. Where the "Rose" comes from I don't know, but the "Spider" serves as a neat symbol of her approach to ensuring her own survival; she's a Mechanist, and an old one, so her body has been extensively modified with cybernetics. The surveillance system of her spaceship feeds seamlessly into her brain; its cameras are her eyes just as much as the ones in her head; and the vast nets she uses to fish for salvageable materials in the rings of Uranus feel like a web in whose center she waits. A spider can sense prey approaching by feeling the vibrations in its web; so for Spider Rose, nothing enters the perimeter of her tiny enclave without her knowledge.
This sounds nice and cozy, but it's not the whole story. Inside her spaceship, the only thing Spider Rose has for company -- besides some pet cockroaches -- is her grief, with which she is locked in an eternal stalemate. She can keep it at bay with mood-suppressing drugs, but it's always there, waiting. So in a sense Spider Rose has an internal version of the web she's built in space ... a fragile wall around herself consisting mainly of her own vigilance.
The plot of the story concerns a huge jewel she's found in the Ring. Its immense size and the unique circumstances of its formation ensure that no Investor will be able to resist it, so she haggles shamelessly with one, trying, it seems, to buy herself a way out of her emotional hell. The Investor starts out by making her generous offers of money, technology, information ... but she refuses them all. Eventually the Investor realizes what she's looking for, and offers her a cute animal that he calls his ship's mascot. She is taken with the animal and accepts the offer, for a trial period of a little under two years.
The animal does make her happy, but the story ends tragically. (view spoiler)[Her Shaper enemies find her, and destroy her web, leaving her blind and helpless in space. (hide spoiler)] I'm not sure if it happened because she let down her guard a little, because she finally has a little joy in her life -- something to take her mind off the grim, monotonous business of survival -- or if it would have happened regardless, but just the possibility that it might have been this fleeting happiness that doomed her makes this story almost unbearable.
(It's not a bad story -- it's a very, very good one -- but if your emotional landscape is anything like mine it will make you cry.)
Cicada Queen - One of the more interesting stories in terms of worldbuilding, and also the one that overlaps the most with the events of Schismatrix. Both texts benefit hugely from being in the same volume, so that the reader can page back and forth for additional context.
This story takes place in Czarina-Kluster, the floating city-state built around the engineless hulk of an Investor ship that imprisons the disgraced Investor Queen whom Lindsay blackmails in Schismatrix, and picks up pretty much where the novel leaves off; Wellspring, the enigmatic terraforming advocate whom Lindsay coached in the art of cultivating a personal mystique, has successfully risen to prominence in Czarina-Kluster's government, and is busily directing the terraforming of Mars.
The plot concerns a new arrival to Czarina-Kluster, a Shaper named Hans Landau (which is bizarrely the name of the Nazi character in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" -- a fact that, lacking the gift of prophecy, Bruce Sterling could not have known when he wrote the story but which is nonetheless very distracting to the modern reader! Even though I succeeded in stripping the name of its sinister connotations, I continued to imagine the character looking and sounding exactly like Christoph Waltz) who is a gifted genetic engineer and scholar of lichens. He has invented a lichen that can grow inside stone, which he has used to create a unique gem as a gift for Czarina-Kluster's Queen. (Lavish gifts are the rent she extracts from people who want to settle in Czarina-Kluster -- they call it "the Queen's Percentage"). Landau has the singular bad luck to make his debut just as the political structure of Czarina-Kluster is imploding, with the Queen growing increasingly bored and frustrated with her exile and wishing to leave, venting her rage by ordering whichever of her advisers is currently annoying her to kill himself.
The plot also concerns a space voyage intended to tow a vast ball of ice from the rings of Saturn to Mars, where it will be steered onto a collision course with the planet in hopes of creating a sea. Landau seizes upon this as an opportunity to leave the fraught environment of Czarina-Kluster, to pursue his research on Mars as part of the terraforming project.
The voyage to Mars is ... eventful, to say the least.
Sunken Gardens - A follow-up to "Cicada Queen," taking place on Mars two hundred years after the fall of Czarina-Kluster and Hans Landau's migration to Mars. Landau, having undergone extensive cybernetic alteration to enable himself to survive in space, is still alive (err, for certain values of "alive), ruling Mars as its "Lobster King".
He does not directly appear in this story, though; the plot of this story concerns people living on Mars as the unwilling hostages of Terraform-Kluster, a satellite orbiting Mars where Landau and his clique live and direct the ongoing terraforming project happening on the surface of Mars.
We only meet one member of Terraform-Kluster in the story; Arkadya Sorienti, who appeared briefly in "Cicada Queen" and now serves as the Lobster King's envoy to the surface. Her job is to judge the competition that takes up the bulk of this story: a sort of ecological Hunger Games in which five participants battle for control of one of the Sunken Gardens -- craters on Mars where a rich atmosphere has pooled and water has settled, enabling the growth of vegetation. The contestants each come from a different faction that has been subjugated by Terraform-Kluster and marooned on Mars, forced to give their labor to the terraforming project started by Wellspring and Landau. Each contestant is given their own sector of the Garden to seed with whatever life forms they want -- they use robot drones to do this, and also to make whatever modifications to the environment they see fit, like cutting down trees, spraying herbicides, setting fires etc. The only rule limits their interference with the Garden ecosystem to a period of twelve hours. After that, they can only watch and wait, to see whose life forms survive and whose do not. The winner will ascend to Terraform-Kluster with Arkadya Sorienti, and take his or her place among the ruling faction.
The protagonist of this story is a young woman named Mirasol ("look at the sun" -- appropriate advice for a terraformer), who is a member of a splinter group of Superbright Shapers called Patternists, after the nature of their neurological ReShaping. They all have hypertrophied right brain hemispheres, which enable them to see patterns everywhere.
Mirasol's competitors are just as outre and remote from recognizable humanity as she is -- the weirdest one is a nameless woman whose legs terminate in a second set of hands, and whose knees bend like elbows. Two of them are Mechanists -- one so unaccustomed to planetary gravity that he requires a cybernetic exoskeleton to walk, and another who is heavily armed and armored, and clearly does not trust his fellow human-offshoots. There is also a sixth competitor who never appears, and whose sector is divided among the rest. It is to be inferred that he died, and possibly that Arkadya killed him for violating some rule of the contest.
This story serves as kind of a counterweight to the ecstatic hopefulness of the terraforming ideology presented in Schismatrix and "Cicada Queen." The people doing the actual work of terraforming are slaves, and the Sunken Gardens are more like arenas than gardens, where each nascent life form that appears is dwarfed by piles and piles of dead ones, and the horizon of that life form's future may only last until the next competition is held in that particular Sunken Garden.
Twenty Evocations - Paradoxically the most and the least accessible story in this collection. It's very, very short; more a prose poem than a story, with twenty very cryptic passages a paragraph or two in length that tell the story of Nikolai Leng, a Shaper whose life path echoes those of the two main characters of Schismatrix in a lot of ways. Like Lindsay, he defects from the Shaper Ring Council, marries advantageously (but also really loves his wife), carves out a sphere of influence outside the Ring Council, meets the Investors, founds a satellite Kluster and crosses paths with an assassin. Like Constantine, he loses the woman he loves early in their relationship and tries to fill the hole in his heart by having her cloned. Unlike either of them, though, he gives the impression of being buffeted along by events, just trying to keep his head above water, rather than trying to seize the reins of history like Lindsay and Constantine do.
Probably my favorite thing about this story is its judicious employment of word salad. Every so often, the final paragraph of one of the numbered sections will just be a string of phrases echoed from previous paragraphs, but placed in a new, surreal order that gives them new meaning. It can be very hard to see what this meaning is supposed to be, though. It gives us glimpses into Leng's state of mind at various important moments in his life, but his mind is chaotic. The reader has to do a lot of work to piece together a coherent story, a consistent characterization for Leng, and a sense of his emotional journey through the twenty vignettes. The reader has to do a lot of work to piece it all together, but Sterling has made sure there is enough raw material there to work with.
Sometimes it feels like it's only just barely enough, though. Even when I did put all the pieces into place, I never felt as much for Nikolai Leng, or got as deeply absorbed in his story, as I did for Abelard Lindsay, Simon Afriel, Spider Rose, Hans Landau and Mirasol. There wasn't as much to grapple with, thematically and in terms of worldbuilding, as there was in "Swarm," "Cicada Queen" and "Sunken Gardens," and there was nowhere near the emotional depth of "Spider Rose." Especially when you've already read the whole of Schismatrix, "Twenty Evocation" feels a lot like a dry run at telling that story....more
I'd been wanting to read this book for a while, partly because it was so well reviewed and partly because its author is from KCMO and I hoped to pore I'd been wanting to read this book for a while, partly because it was so well reviewed and partly because its author is from KCMO and I hoped to pore through the book hunting for little hometown details like Easter eggs.
I didn't really get to do that, since the book is not set in KCMO but in Carthage, Missouri, where I've never been. It did have kind of a homey feel, though, in the way the characters spoke and other things too nebulous for me to pin down.
In any case, I quickly became so absorbed in the story itself that I largely forgot my metatextual Easter egg hunt.
I had already seen the movie, so I knew everything that was going to happen, but that didn't matter. Gillian Flynn is such a master of suspense that you are excited and worried for the characters even when you know what's coming.
I'm trying to keep this review spoiler-free, so I'm going to try not to talk about the plot.
(I know I've just said that my own enjoyment of the book was not dampened by my having had the entire plot spoiled for me, but I'm still going to try to keep the experience pristine for the benefit of any readers of this review who haven't already read it, or seen the movie, themselves.)
Plot, characterization and mood are this novel's greatest strengths. The story is told in short chapters, alternating between the two main characters -- the protagonist, Nick Dunne, and the title character, Amy Elliott Dunne -- in point of view.
Nick narrates in the moment, describing what happens as he comes home from a visit to the bar he co-owns with his twin sister to find his house in disarray and his wife missing.
Amy's narration is retrospective, given in the form of diary entries starting when she met Nick almost six years prior to the events of the novel. She gives us a long, tantalizing look at the relationship she had with Nick, which is ... "troubled" is putting it kindly.
Nick and Amy each have their own, distinctive voices -- you could probably correctly identify the speaker of each chapter even if all the names and chapter titles were blacked out. Nick is kind of a scatterbrain, and his narration is very reactive; lots of things take him by surprise. He also thinks a lot more about other people than Amy does; he cares very much what people think of him, and when the police are asking him questions about his wife's disappearance, trying to figure out if he had anything to do with it, his awareness of genre conventions wars with his inherent willingness to trust people, to cooperate, to play ball. He knows what a good cop act is, and he knows when one or another of the detectives is using it on him, but underneath that awareness he really, really wants to think they're on his side and trying to help him.
Amy is not a scatterbrain, nor is she very easily taken by surprise. You can tell she's used to being very much in control of her life, and in her relationships. She asserts things authoritatively, and when she makes a prediction she gives it the weight of prophecy. What's more, her chapters are very writerly -- much more so than Nick's, despite the fact that both characters are writers by profession. (Actually, if anything, it was Nick who had the more serious writing career -- he had written articles about pop culture for a magazine, while Amy had written those personality and relationship quizzes you sometimes see in women's magazines.) But it is Amy whose writing is clearly working for her, laying groundwork, subtly leading the reader by the nose. Her diary reads curiously like a soliloquy, a lengthy, formal speech that a dramatic character gives directly to the audience -- a dramatic convention more than a naturalistic representation of how people talk to themselves.
There are several very good reasons for this, but I can only tell you one of them (spoilers be lurking in the others): Amy has grown up in the shadow of her parents' phenomenally popular series of children's books about a heroine transparently based on her -- "Amazing Amy." Amazing Amy is a heavily idealized version of Amy; even as a child, Amy knew what it meant when her fictional counterpart diverged from her actual self. Amazing Amy was who her parents wanted her to be, who she learned at an early age to pretend to be.
The pages of her diary are full of ironic references to Amazing Amy.
Pretending to be someone you're not is a very important theme of this book -- the most famous passage from it, that you've probably seen quoted even if you haven't read the book, is the "Cool Girl" monologue. I will quote it in full here:
That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don't mind, I'm the Cool Girl.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they're fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men -- friends, coworkers, strangers -- giddy over these awful pretender women, and I'd want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who'd like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I'd want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn't really love chili dogs that much -- no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They're not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they're pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you're not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn't want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version -- maybe he's a vegetarian, so his Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he's a hipster artist, so his Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing that he likes and doesn't ever complain. (How do you know you're not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: "I like strong women." If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because "I like strong women" is code for "I hate strong women.")
I waited patiently -- years -- for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.
But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard girl. Men believed she existed -- she wasn't just a dreamgirl one in a million. Every girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren't, then there was something wrong with you.
I feel like this monologue deserved to be enshrined next to other righteously angry, bitter monologues by fictional women catching their first whiffs of sexism or the sexual double standard. Val in The Women's Room, ranting about how every man is really a rapist at heart, Joanna in The Female Man cynically narrating the ritualized dance of male dominance and female submission as manifested in small talk at a cocktail party ... given time I could probably come up with a whole reading list, piece together a whole consciousness-raising group session made up of these monologues. Most of the characters who speak these lines would probably get along great with each other, but not Amy Elliott Dunne. She'd have nothing but contempt for the other women speaking, she'd see them as failed women with whom she could not possibly have anything in common. (She's like Cersei Lannister in that way, though I doubt she and Cersei would get along either. Each would probably think the other a bitch.)
Well, that was quite a tangent.
To get back on track: it's not only in Amy's chapters that themes of sexual politics come up; they are also frequently alluded to by Nick, often in the person of Nick's virulently woman-hating father, whom Nick hates. He hates him and at his darkest moments he worries that he might have the potential to become him. He is acutely aware of his own disproportionate anger whenever a woman challenges him or thwarts him, though he (almost) always manages to keep it contained. He knows he has this character flaw, he works hard not to act on it, but he cannot eradicate it. His father made too deep an impression on him for that.
The characterization in this book, as you can see, is incredibly deft and subtle. These characters feel very real, and we are granted such access to their innermost thoughts, fears and desires as we are seldom -- if ever -- given by any friend or lover.
Flynn spends the most time developing Nick and Amy, but there are other characters who caught my attention, too. Nick's twin sister Go would be at the top of that list; she's an incredibly compelling and sympathetic character whom we pretty much only see through Nick's eyes. (Amy has never had much use for her. Early on she dismisses her with the line "She's very ... Missouri.")
Go was just as deeply affected by her and Nick's father's misogyny as Nick was, and I would have loved to see more of that dynamic. I understand why Flynn doesn't give it to us -- to give the level of detail I'd want, she would've had to write from Go's perspective, which would have broken up the nifty he-said-she-said structure of the novel -- but I still found myself wanting more of her.
Case in point: when Nick is telling us how their father affected him and Go, he says two things: One, where Nick became excessively eager to please, Go became closed-off and defiant; and two, "Go will probably never get married." A simple sentence, but one I wanted very much to know the story behind it....more
Well, this book is Margaret Atwood's attempt at writing that Neal Stephenson novel. This character, Zeb, is the primary protagonist and narrator, though the novel's framing device is that he is telling his life story to Toby, one of the two heroines of The Year of the Flood. So sometimes we get passages narrated by her, asking Zeb questions, drawing out more of the story from him, but mostly the book is told from his point of view, recounting his entire life up to the point at which the story is taking place: the aftermath of the Waterless Flood, with all the former God's Gardeners and MaddAddamites (the undercover scientists who passed information about the various genetic-engineering projects their employers were working on to the Gardener leaders) who survived the Flood reunited and living together in an uneasy, awkward peace with each other, the Crakers (the genetically-engineered humanoids created in Oryx and Crake) and the pigoons (the super-intelligent feral hogs likewise introduced in Oryx and Crake).
The present-time storyline, the one narrated by Toby, deals with the forging of that peace, particularly with the pigoons, with whom only the Crakers can communicate. With the help of the Crakers, it is established that the reason the pigoons are stalking the humans is because the humans have killed some of their young and eaten them, and the pigoons want justice. (The humans had not realized that the pigoons were sentient.) This process -- the hammering out of terms on which the humans and the pigoons might coexist -- is fraught with tension and makes for very interesting, suspenseful reading. The pigoons might not seem as malevolent now as they did in the first book, but they are still scary and they are as inscrutable to the reader as they are to the characters. In time, we see that they are trustworthy, but it takes a while.
There are also short passages where Toby narrates to the Crakers who the other humans are (the Crakers had only ever known about Crake, Oryx and Jimmy; Crake never intended for anyone to survive the Flood, and he deliberately sheltered his creations from contact with any human except Oryx), where they came from, and what happened to bring them to this place. It's tricky because she has to interweave her story with the mythology of Crake that Jimmy has already established in his role as their somewhat reluctant storyteller and prophet. Craker minds do not work like human minds, their thinking is much more literal and less abstract, so Toby does not try to tell them Jimmy's account might be incomplete or mistaken. Instead, she finds out what he has told them, and tries to graft the things she needs them to understand onto this accepted body of lore. These parts of the book are also very interesting -- Atwood does so much with so few words, such simple language.
One of my favorite passages is one of these: the Crakers ask Toby why Zeb says "oh, fuck!" whenever he's upset. Their formula for addressing another person is "oh [person's name]", so they assume that Fuck is a person. They ask Toby who this person is, and she tells them that he is an invisible friend who comes to help Zeb in times of great need.
But the majority of the book is taken up by Zeb's flashbacks, which detail his childhood in the house of an abusive stepfather, his escape from that household with his nerdy, exceedingly clever older brother Adam, and Adam's efforts to build an underground network of shady characters to enable him to steal his father's money (of which he has a lot, being the leader of a megachurch). That network becomes the one that encompasses the God's Gardeners, the undercover scientists and the people who re-settle the scientists with new identities once they've blown their cover, like a Witness Protection Program for radical environmentalists.
That's the part of the book that kind of reminds me of a Neal Stephenson novel -- Zeb and Adam fall into some fairly stock cyberpunk tropes in their use of the Internet to facilitate theft, fraud and espionage, and their donning and shedding false identities like so many different hats. Also, so many of Zeb's adventures, as well as Zeb himself, have that larger-than-life quality that so many Stephenson plots and characters have. (One example: one of the cover identities Zeb uses has him working at "Bearlift," a company specializing in helicopter airlifts of food for polar bears, who are finding it harder to forage with their environment changing so rapidly. One of these airlifts goes south, leaving Zeb and a fellow Bearlifter stranded on a mountain, where Zeb ends up killing both his co-worker and a bear in order to survive. This is all so incredible, and told with such nonchalance, that it is at least as funny as it is exciting.)
But Margaret Atwood is not Neal Stephenson -- if this were a Stephenson novel, we'd probably meet Zeb and Adam as adults, while Atwood sees fit to show us their childhoods. Zeb is an interesting character, and because his brother plays such a pivotal role in bringing about the Waterless Flood, you can kind of see why she chose to include so much backstory on them both, but sometimes you do get the sense that not all of these threads are connected, and that some of these plot lines are dead weight.
Not all -- sometimes, Zeb's story serves to fill in missing pieces from Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. The biggest, most obvious instance of this is Zeb's account of the formation and organization of MaddAddam, and his explanation of what their relationship to Crake and the Waterless Flood was (they knew of him, he was very loosely affiliated, but he acted on his own when he decided to design a plague that would wipe out all humankind and hide it in a mass-marketed sexual-enhancement pill), but another, equally satisfying bit of closure comes when we finally find out what happened to Jimmy's mother, whose mysterious disappearance was one of the things that didn't quite add up for me in Oryx and Crake.
I almost want to reread that one again, and see if I like it better now that I have a fuller appreciation of the whole story.
(A couple paragraphs up I compared Margaret Atwood somewhat unfavorably to Neal Stephenson, saying that she had taken characters and story elements similar to a lot of his, but told a much slower-paced story that takes longer to get off the ground, and sometimes drags a bit, but she does much, much better than he usually does at tying all the different threads in her tapestry together.)...more
What was that famous saying about how there are only two plots: the hero goes on a journey and the hero comes home? Something like that? Well, this boWhat was that famous saying about how there are only two plots: the hero goes on a journey and the hero comes home? Something like that? Well, this book tells both of those stories at once, and still has room for a very beautiful love story on top of that....more
I got this book because I have an abiding interest in science, in the history of science, and in the history of various wider cultural backlashes agaiI got this book because I have an abiding interest in science, in the history of science, and in the history of various wider cultural backlashes against science. (I am a STEM/humanities dual degree holder, and came of age in Kansas during the most recent "Evolution Wars," so that's why that sort of thing interests me. How could it not?)
That's kind of what I thought this book would be --- an exploration of counter-trends to the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and empiricism. And, to an extent, it is; the author is a medievalist, not an Enlightenment historian or a historian of science, and he makes the very interesting claim that the "occult" pursuits mentioned in the title were of a piece with the more widely known, and celebrated, empirical investigations of that era.
(This is not the first time I've encountered that idea, but John Fleming does a very good job of making the case for it. His training as a medievalist works to his advantage here, because he can trace the medieval roots of both Enlightenment science and Enlightenment "magic.")
But the thing that was most counter to my expectations was that this book wasn't really the kind of history I was expecting -- one that dealt with places, events, ideas, trends, and in which individual people appeared briefly, like rocks in a streambed, subtly changing the water's flow and then quickly passed by -- no, this was more like a series of long, detailed biographical sketches.
Fleming chooses individuals or groups that he thinks illustrate something important, arrayed more or less chronologically from the late 1600s to the early 1800s, and he focuses on them, bringing in the broader cultural trends as needed.
The people and groups he chooses to profile are: Valentine Greatrakes, an Irish country gentleman who became famous for miraculously curing people of scrofula by touching them; a small French Jansenist sect that venerated a churchyard where a Jansenist deacon who was thought to have been able to heal people during his lifetime was buried, and who were struck with shaking fits when they visited his grave; Alchemists; Kabbalists; Freemasons; Rosicrucians (who these people were wasn't entirely clear to me! They don't seem to have been an order or a club so much as any people, anywhere, who were interested in discovering things? So I'm not sure who wasn't a Rosicrucian?); Count Cagliostro, who was actually a Sicilian named Giuseppe Balsamo, who went all over Europe founding Masonic lodges of his own "Egyptian" rite, and who was imprisoned in the Bastille because Marie-Antoinette believed (unfairly) that he had participated in a scheme to defraud her that is remembered today as "The Affair of the Diamond Necklace"; and the very interesting Julie de Krudener, a Latvian noblewoman who first became famous in pre-revolutionary Paris's literary scene, where she befriended lots of people who are still famous today, like Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, and who later in life converted to Pietism and achieved further fame (or notoriety) as a sort of itinerant preacher. Most amazingly, she became convinced that Napoleon Bonaparte was the literal Antichrist, and that it was her special duty to stop him.
This is all very interesting, and also very well written; Fleming can be very funny. But what I thought was most admirable about his treatment of all these eccentric historical figures is how much he seems to respect them. No one is a fraud or a charlatan in this book, even when what they purport to be doing is physically impossible. Cagliostro in particular he seems to feel it his duty to rehabilitate, because Thomas Carlyle once called him the King of Liars. Fleming does his best to convince us that Cagliostro was not a liar, nor particularly mercenary; that he seems to have been a genuinely nice person, a loyal and honest person, and perhaps a bit too trusting. He is similarly gentle with Julie de Krudener. Lots of people have written her off as a frivolous, selfish, self-aggrandizing adulteress and social climber. Fleming does not deny the things she did to give people this impression, but he also tries to give us the full context of her actions, and to tell us how she saw things. He sees her as a woman of intense emotion, whose marriage could not give her everything she needed, and who did really love the men she had affairs with. He also does an admirable job of connecting her earlier "worldly" behavior -- her seeking out the literary salons like a flower follows the sun, and also her affairs -- to her later religious conversion, saying that both phases of her life follow logically from her florid emotionality and her need for an outlet for all those emotions. We are sympathetic to men whose devotion to Art, or to Principle, lead them to abandon their duties to family and community; why, besides sexism, would we not extend a woman the same benefit of the doubt?
My only complaint with this book was that it ended too soon; it cuts off abruptly after explaining how Julie de Krudener reached the conclusion that Napoleon was the Antichrist. We are not shown how it affects the rest of her life. What did she DO with this astonishing information? Did she preach against him on street corners? Did she abandon all other pursuits, to devote her life solely to denouncing him? This sounds like a life-changing revelation, but we don't get to see how, or if, it did change her life! We're just left hanging....more
I've started to review this book a couple times, and just could not get a grip on it. It's a hard book to review, because it's so piecemeal. Instead oI've started to review this book a couple times, and just could not get a grip on it. It's a hard book to review, because it's so piecemeal. Instead of a single argument or thesis given a book-length treatment, Feminism Unmodified is a series of transcribed speeches grouped by theme. Each one can stand alone, but they overlap a lot with one another in terms of subject matter and the argument they are making. You can read through them all, cover to cover, or you can flip through the book and read them as they pique your interest.
I knew of Catharine MacKinnon before I got this book --- indeed, having heard of her was the reason I got it; the book itself isn't terribly inviting. (Neither is the other book I have of hers, Toward A Feminist Theory of the State. I probably wouldn't have bought either one if I hadn't been introduced to MacKinnon first, through a philosophy class.) I knew that her primary goal in her legal and theoretical writing is to point out that the abstract "person" is a man, and that there are gaps in law and philosophy where the laws and theories that fit around this theorized man don't work as well for women. (There are tons of other kinds of people who don't fit the mold either, and thus are also ill served by existing laws and social theories, but this book only deals with women. Indeed, probably the book's biggest failing is its supposition that women are all failed in the same way by male-dominated, male-defined laws and social structures --- that's where it is most apparent just how old this book is! There's a big difference between, say, a white, middle-class married woman and how the law fails to protect her interests and, say, an undocumented immigrant woman or a transsexual woman or a lesbian or a woman with disabilities whose caregivers live with her or are a party to her major life decisions. The law fails all of these people, and more, some more than others and all in different ways. The study of those differences is called intersectionality*, and it's a pretty big deal in feminism.)
Anyway, on to a more specific discussion of what this book is about. The essays are grouped in three categories --- Approaches, Applications and Pornography --- but it seems to me that there's a lot of cross-pollination across categories, especially the first two. I don't know that MacKinnon ever talks about her approach to achieving equality between the sexes without bringing in specific examples, or discusses a particular application of her ideas without rehashing the general theory. The third section of the book stands out a little more from the others, since it has a much more specific aim: making the case that pornography isn't speech, but actual violence against women. (This is another thing that most feminists today seem to consider dated and wrong, but I find it persuasive.)
In the first part, Approaches, there are five essays. The first one is a defense of the Equal Rights Amendment (which still hasn't passed, a generation later) given as part of a debate with Phyllis Schlafly. The second talks about how MacKinnon sees the relationship between the sexes: to her, "gender" is not the social roles built on top of naturally occurring sex differences, but is instead a violently imposed hierarchy of male over female. The third piece covers similar ground, but it does so differently, in more philosophical terms. It was derived from a talk she gave at a Marxist conference, so there's a lot of reference to the Marxist doctrine of class struggle, which she uses to describe her understanding of the relation between the sexes. Man is capital, woman is labor, and they are in conflict over the means of (re)production. The last two essays are a bit random; one of them could fit just as easily in the second part, as it is an analysis of one particular court case, and the other deals with what it's like being a woman in the male-dominated legal profession, and how the success of a few women in male-dominated fields doesn't change anything for women as a whole.
The essays in the second part, Applications, are less theoretical and more concrete and specific. They also deal more with specific points of law than they do with any broad philosophical framework. The first one talks about rape, and why so few women report their rapes; the second one (which is actually pretty philosophical; it could fit in just as easily in the first section) about areas of overlap between sex and violence (MacKinnon, unlike some, sees rape, sexual harassment and sexual assault as both violent and sexual acts); the third is a long dissertation on Roe v. Wade and why MacKinnon thinks it was a bad idea to base Roe on the right to privacy rather than on the right to equal protection under the law; the fourth is about sexual harassment, and looking back on how sexual harassment has been prosecuted since it was first defined as a crime; and the last one is about Title IX and the importance of sports in helping women understand that their bodies are their own.
The third part, Pornography, is about ... you know what it's about. More specifically, it's about Deep Throat, and what it means that Linda Lovelace has said she was forced to perform in it. (MacKinnon says it means that Deep Throat is not mere speech, but the record of a crime, and itself an act of violence against its unwilling star). It's also about Playboy, and why MacKinnon thinks feminist organizations need to stop taking money from the Playboy Foundation. Another essay, "Not a Moral Issue," revisits in broader, more philosophical terms the same points made in the brief discussion of Deep Throat: pornography is not just speech, and obscenity law is irrelevant to what MacKinnon sees as the central harms of pornography, which are 1) direct harms done to the performers themselves, who may, like Linda Lovelace, have been forced to perform; and 2) indirect harms to all other women who have to deal with men who watch pornography and think of all women in pornographic terms. She explores this latter idea more in another long essay, "Francis Biddle's Sister," in which she riffs on Virginia Woolf's conception of Shakespeare's sister, talking about all the ways that rape culture hems women in and makes them divert energy that could be used to do great things into simple survival, and into trying to avoid being victimized. Another essay deals with the ordinance MacKinnon wrote with Andrea Dworkin, which would enable women to sue for damages if they thought they'd been victimized by pornography, and the last one addresses the Supreme Court decision that found that ordinance unconstitutional because it violated the First Amendment. MacKinnon is not a First Amendment absolutist, and she thinks it's wrong that one person's freedom to make pornography should supercede another person's right to be compensated for wrongs that she can attribute to the first person's exercise of said freedom. For the longest time I thought I was a First Amendment absolutist, that words were only words and they ought to be protected because they can't really hurt you and they are the one thing the least powerful people can use as effectively as the most powerful, so they deserve to be as unrestricted as possible, but lately I've been reconsidering the part about how they can't really hurt anyone. MacKinnon's writing is one of the first things that made me start to question that.
*There is one essay where she deals with this: "Whose Culture?", where she talks about a 1978 court case involving a Native American woman who was trying to get her children recognized as members of her tribe --- a right that, at the time (I don't know how it stands now), only applied to men who married outside the tribe....more
With this enormous volume, the Baroque Cycle comes to a close. While there is the same kind of speeding up, adding new plot threads and jumping from oWith this enormous volume, the Baroque Cycle comes to a close. While there is the same kind of speeding up, adding new plot threads and jumping from one set-piece action scene to another that is typical of Stephenson's endings, I thought he actually succeeded at tying everything up in this one. I guess he can do that when he's got an entire epic-length novel in which to end things, as opposed to the fifty pages or so he tends to devote to endings in his stand-alone novels.
In this volume, unlike its predecessor, the three books blend seamlessly into one another, and the mega-novel reads just like it had all been written at once. (Maybe it was --- it was published first as a three-in-one volume, and only later were the individual books released.)
Daniel Waterhouse, the first of the three protagonists to be introduced in Quicksilver, is also the first to show up here. Having been drawn out of his long retirement in Massachusetts by Enoch Root, to try and mediate Newton and Leibniz's decades-long feud over (nominally) the credit for inventing calculus and (ultimately) differences of opinion on cosmology, he has arrived in England, where he is standing in a field that will be the site of an "Engine for Raising Water by Fire" (i.e., a steam engine). From there, he goes on to London in the company of a mysterious person named Threader, whose innumerable discreet business transactions with various wealthy townsmen make the trip take far longer than it should. Daniel figures out that Threader deals in the newfangled paper money that Daniel finds so baffling. At the end of this long, meandering trip, something explodes near their coach. Daniel recognizes the flame as that produced by phosphorus, which tells him 1) the explosion was not an accident and 2) whoever made the bomb is an Alchemist.
This one simple task that Daniel is given --- get Newton and Leibniz to talk to each other and start working together instead of at cross purposes --- mutates into an imposing snarl of "side quests" in RPG parlance: Newton is Master of the Mint, and plagued by a mysterious counterfeiter named Jack the Coiner, whom Daniel ends up helping him hunt down; Leibniz has found a royal patron for his Logic Mill project, and he wants Daniel's help in getting the thing built, as well as giving it raw information to encode. There is also a succession crisis --- Queen Anne is childless, old and sickly, and both her brother James and her cousin George have claimed the throne --- and a criminal investigation for Daniel to embroil himself in.
Both of the other protagonists, Jack and Eliza, have entered the story by now: Jack is, of course, Jack the Coiner, working covertly for Louis XIV to undermine Britain's economic power, and Eliza has attached herself to the Hanover court, as she is a close friend of Princess Caroline, whose mother wed George August, who is now one of the claimants to the English throne. Eliza and Daniel are playing for the same team --- Daniel is a Whig, mostly for cultural reasons (he's a Puritan, and there is strong overlap between the Puritans and the Whigs), he's helping Leibniz, whom Eliza also tries to help, and he's helping Newton, whom the Tories are trying to discredit as Master of the Mint. But Jack is working against both of them, which must cause him some internal conflict because he still loves Eliza, though he tries to make himself forget this.
Other characters figuring in this volume are Jack's brother Bob Shaftoe, who is still a sergeant in the Queen's (later King's) Own Black Torrent Guards, and who, with his regiment, helps Daniel and Newton raid a castle belonging to a Tory lord where they suspect Jack the Coiner may be hiding, and later takes part in some skirmishes with Tory militiamen. His regiment is also charged with guarding the Pyx, where samples of coins taken from circulation at regular intervals are kept under lock and key, stored until such time as someone high-placed takes it upon himself to have their purity assayed in a Trial of the Pyx.
There is also Eliza's handsome and resourceful German-born son, Johann; a Puritan shipbuilder named Nathan Orney, who has some wonderfully arch exchanges with Daniel (they call each other "Brother Nathan" and "Brother Daniel," though their feelings for one another are pretty far from brotherly); the huge, one-armed Russian agent provocateur named Yevgeny; the wily Jesuit priest Edouard de Gex, who is in England supervising Jack's sabotage of the English currency; Dappa, who has left Jack's employ for Eliza's, and who has taken up the pen to write articles condemning slavery; and Charles White, an odious person who serves the Viscount Bolingbroke, leader of the Tory faction, and who decides that Dappa, being a black man in England, must be someone's property, so he might as well be his, Charles White's, property. He has Dappa thrown into jail, from whence he directs all his pamphleteering at White personally. Their feud culminates in what may be the most absurd dueling scene this side of Twain's "The Great French Duel."
The ending of the book is truly epic: two climaxes build at once, cutting from one to the other. They have been long in coming: they are the Trial of the Pyx and the execution of Jack the Coiner. Stephenson draws them out, longer I think than any other scene in any of the books. But the drawing-out doesn't feel slow at all; it gives those scenes a sense of grandeur and finality.
Another thing I loved about the ending of this book --- which, after the two climaxes play out, consists of a series of epilogues showing where each major character ends up --- was its thematic coherence. Toward the middle of the book the title is explained: Princess Caroline is presiding over the reconciliation of Newton and Leibniz, and she tells them she wants them to work together because she senses that a new System of the World, a more rational one guided by science, technology and commerce, was being born, but that it was a fragile one that would require both of their combined efforts to keep on track. She specifically worried that the flowering of science would lead to a withering of Christianity, and she called on both philosophers to try to forestall that. At the end of the book, Daniel is standing in the middle of a mine that has been pumped dry by one of the new steam engines, and he reflects that the new System has succeeded in displacing the old. Throughout the saga, Daniel and Eliza have been instrumental in bringing it forth: Daniel has furthered the cause of Natural Philosophy, and Eliza has championed commerce. Eliza's anti-slavery labors also fall under the rubric of this new System: as Daniel sees it, the machines the new System enables man to build will do the work that slaves used to do, and will render slavery obsolete as well as morally wrong. (I do not think that this is true; I know that slavery has survived the machine age.) Newton seems to have one foot in the old System and one foot in the new; he's the world's pre-eminent Natural Philosopher, and as Master of the Mint he oversees the rationalization of England's economic system, but his great passion is Alchemy. Indeed, he tells Daniel he only took the Mint position to try and get his hands on the fabled Solomonic gold, the gold suffused with the Philosophic Quintessence that makes it heavier than all other gold and that, distilled, hardens into the Philosopher's Stone that grants eternal life. And Jack seems to be entirely a man of the old System, thriving on chaos and unpredictability. Everything he does --- undermining Newton's coinage, trying to have Daniel, Newton or both of them killed, throwing his lot in with the absolutist King Louis XIV, as opposed to the ever-more-republican English government, stealing the Solomonic gold and unleashing it upon the world --- seems opposed to the forces of Reason and Modernity, except that he also exemplifies some very modern values, like individualism and egalitarianism. As King of the Vagabonds, his command of the Mobb, and his appreciation for the Mobb's power and knowledge of its nature, prefigure the modern era when most countries are democracies. And in that way, Jack comes off as the most forward-looking of the characters, seeing the potential of mere peasants to be political actors when Daniel and Eliza are fixated on Kings, Barons, Dukes, Princes and Princesses.
Long story short, Neal Stephenson is a genius. I do not doubt I will revisit this series many times....more
I started reading this book to prepare for the 2012 election, since the welfare state was one of the main issues in contention that year, and I figureI started reading this book to prepare for the 2012 election, since the welfare state was one of the main issues in contention that year, and I figured I might as well bone up a bit on its origins and evolution.
(I did not finish the book by the time the election happened. It's dry, densely written and makes for slow going, even if the subject matter is vitally important.)
Also, I very much recommend reading the author's prefaces. In the Sixth Edition (the edition I read), there are six of them, in reverse chronological order, written between 1973 (the First Edition) and 1998 (the sixth), and each one lists the things the author has added to the book to cover the things that had changed in social welfare policy since the last edition. What I found most interesting -- and also very darkly amusing -- were his personal hopes and predictions that he concludes every preface with, and that every succeeding preface opens by addressing just how wrong he was in the previous preface, and how things have actually turned out so much worse than he could have imagined.
Most hilariously (or most depressingly, depending on your mood) the most recent edition was published in 1998, during the second term of Bill Clinton. One can only imagine what the author of this book would write if he were to publish a Seventh Edition!
After the prefaces, there is a Background section that briefly discusses how the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Jews, the early Christians, the medieval Europeans and finally the England of Queen Elizabeth I treated their poor and homeless citizens. It is the Poor Laws of this latter time and place that is given the most attention, since they are the most direct predecessor to the laws of the earliest English colonies in America.
The themes that he establishes in his description of the Elizabethan Poor Laws -- categories of deserving and undeserving poor, the question of whose duty it is to find work for idle vagrants, helpful vs. punitive approaches to homelessness, unemployment and beggary -- will show up again and again throughout the rest of the book.
The rest of the book covers all of American history up to (and including part of) the Clinton presidency, with each chapter dealing with a discrete unit of time. He does not break them up by periodicity, but by notable changes in policy, or sometimes disruptive events like the American Revolution or the Civil War.
The first chapter deals with the colonial period (about 1620-1700); the second with the era of the American Revolution (that's what its title says, but it would be more accurate to call it the entire 18th century); the third deals with the first half of the 19th century, concentrating on "the trend toward indoor relief" ("indoor relief" meaning poorhouses, workhouses, "poor farms" and similar institutional settings); and the fourth with the Civil War and the period immediately following it. After that, the chapter organization shifts to being more thematic than chronological, though the overall direction of successive chapters is still forward in time. The fifth chapter talks about child welfare, and the approach that emerged in the 19th century to treat poor and indigent children differently, and create different institutions to serve (or, less charitably, warehouse) them, than poor and indigent adults. This was also around the time that laws against child labor were being enacted, and schooling was becoming mandatory for all children. The next three chapters are about the Public Health movement, the Settlement House movement (settlement houses being ), and the mental-health movement. Then there are chapters on the "renaissance of public welfare" at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, and the "quest for professionalization," or the transition between social-welfare type work being mostly private, individual or religious charity work and the development of a body of professionals analogous to doctors, nurses, teachers, pharmacists etc. Following that chapter, the organization of chapters reverts to a more straightforward chronological order, with chapters on social work and welfare in the 1920s; the Depression and New Deal eras; the World War II and Great Society eras; the transitional period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, that bridges the gap between the Great Society and the Reaganesque approach to social-welfare policy that continues to dominate today. The last two chapters deal with Reagan's policies, and their continuation by Presidents Bush and Clinton....more
This book blew me away with its depth of feeling, characterization, fast pacing and deceptively simple language. I was also astonished at how seamlessThis book blew me away with its depth of feeling, characterization, fast pacing and deceptively simple language. I was also astonished at how seamlessly Madeline Miller interweaves her own smaller stories into the larger backdrop of the Iliad.
I'm a huge Greek mythology nerd, have been so since childhood, so this is a book I theoretically could have written: taking something huge, like the Iliad, and adding your own small details to it. Filling in between the broad strokes of these archetypal characters. Retelling this ancient story in a modern way, while retaining a sense of its epic scale.
It accomplishes that by deliberately limiting its perspective to that of Patroclus, Achilles' beloved companion. Patroclus does not participate in the fighting until the very end; he stays with Achilles in his tent, and sometimes helps the medic, Machaon, tend the wounded. So the epic battles are largely happening in the background. What's in the foreground is Patroclus's relationship with Achilles, which is told to us in a series of vignettes covering a much broader time interval than the Iliad does, starting in their shared childhood at Achilles's father's court.
We see the action of the Iliad approaching, first from a distance, and inching closer and closer as the book progresses. The seeds of the Trojan War are planted early in this narrative, in a scene placing the child Patroclus in a room with all the other kings and heroes vying for Helen's hand, and swearing the oath with them to come to the defense of whomever Helen marries if anyone steals her from him.
There were a couple of other things I loved about that scene, besides the foreshadowing: first, Miller's ingenious sketching of all the other major Greek heroes of the Trojan War --- she gives only a few lines to each man, but those lines are so evocative that you immediately know who everyone is before she names them --- and second, her impressive rendering of Helen. Helen appears only once in the story, in this betrothal scene, and Miller makes the counterintuitive choice not to describe her.
(What ambitious writer could resist the temptation of describing the most beautiful woman who ever lived? There were lots of points in this book at which I had to stop and acknowledge Miller's cleverness as a storyteller, and the decision to keep Helen veiled was one of them.)
Anyway, once that scene is over and the war, and Patroclus' and Achilles' deaths, are looming ominously in the distance, there's a long lull in which Patroclus and Achilles become close friends, and then lovers. The scenes between them are probably the most romantic thing I've ever read. I can't do them justice in this review.
Besides their heartbreaking tenderness, these scenes also stand out for their characterization of Achilles. Reading Miller's writing of Achilles feels a lot like watching someone walk a tightrope, or successfully make a series of increasingly precarious leaps. There is so much that could go wrong trying to write a novel about someone like that, someone so much larger than life. The most obvious risk to me is making him seem arrogant, selfish, spoiled or rude. It would also be easy to make him a Mary Sue, too perfect to be believed. Somehow Miller manages to give him flaws, make those flaws believable, and also keep the character likeable without compromising the disastrous nature and grand scale of his flaws.
(Another masterful bit of foreshadowing: when Achilles is just getting to know Patroclus, and asks him what he did that his father would exile him to Achilles's father's kingdom, Patroclus answers that he killed another boy who was trying to take something from him. Patroclus wants to know what Achilles would've done in that situation, and Achilles says something like, "I don't know, no one has ever tried to take anything of mine! I imagine I'd get quite angry at them if they did." And does he ever.)
Around the same time Achilles and Patroclus are falling in love, we meet Thetis, Achilles's sea-nymph mother. Her characterization was another thing I thought was absolute genius on Miller's part; rendering a convincing, psychologically complex and realistic character who is also obviously not human is HARD, and Miller does it beautifully. This Thetis has a lot more going on than the Thetis we see in the Iliad, who acts solely as Achilles's advocate to the Olympian gods. Her interests are identical to his in the poem, but not in this novel! Here, she has certain ideas about what kind of a person she wants Achilles to be, and what kind of life she wants for him, and those ideas are not necessarily what Achilles wants for himself. He's torn between Thetis's dreams of godlike glory for him and his love of Patroclus, which brings him closer to the human side of his nature. Accordingly, this Thetis hates Patroclus and tries to chase him away from her son.
I also just like the way Thetis is described. You tend to think of the Greek gods as looking just like people, writ large, because that's how they act most of the time, but yet you also know that in their true forms they're almost unbearably fearsome. Miller's description of Thetis walks this line perfectly; she's a woman, with black hair and pale skin, but she's also scary and otherworldly. Her voice is not a woman's voice; it's a horrible rasp, a noise made by saltwater and stone, not vocal cords. Miller always uses the same sets of similes to describe her: her skin is as pale as bone, the line of her jaw is like the blade of a knife, her mouth is a jagged red rent in her face. She doesn't blend into a scene: she appears, and there is one or two people in particular she's appearing to; no one else even registers to her. You get the impression that she sees people --- mortal people --- as annoying brief intrusions on her timeless, eternal solitude. Characteristic of her are the words with which she dismisses Patroclus the first time she meets him: "You will be dead soon enough."
The last thing I want to single out in this review is Miller's handling of the relationship between Patroclus and Briseis, the girl taken prisoner by Achilles and then taken from Achilles by Agamemnon. In the Iliad, we never really see them together (they're both secondary characters who don't get a whole lot of lines in the poem, though Patroclus gets more than Briseis) and don't get the idea that there's any special bond between them until Briseis speaks at his funeral, saying she loved him. This novel, with its more intimate scope, shows us this relationship from start to finish. It also gives Briseis a personality and desires of her own, which is tough when your only role in the story is that of human MacGuffin to be fought over, and traded between other, more important, characters.
That's probably the essence of this book's genius, right there: centering the book on characters who are secondary, or even peripheral, in the Iliad and giving them enough depth to anchor a novel.
This is the book I will probably always wish I had written....more
This is the third book in the eight-book Baroque Cycle, and also the third part of the first volume. So it involves a fair amount of tying together seThis is the third book in the eight-book Baroque Cycle, and also the third part of the first volume. So it involves a fair amount of tying together separate characters and story arcs introduced in the first two books, Quicksilver and King of the Vagabonds, which is mostly accomplished by having Eliza meet up with Daniel Waterhouse in England. (Jack Shaftoe does not appear at all in this book, though he is alluded to a few times by other characters. His brother, Bob, does make an appearance near the end, introducing a story arc of his own that intersects with those of Eliza and Daniel.)
Structurally, this book follows the latter part of King of the Vagabonds in switching back and forth between two geographically distant characters' points of view. Where in the second book it was Eliza and Jack, here it is Eliza and Daniel, who are much more similar in temperament and habit --- both are smart, cautious characters who observe, plan, and then act, rather than heedlessly throwing themselves into the thick of things. This makes for more suspense, and more sense that each narrative is building toward something, as opposed to just listing along from one episode to the next. But it also makes for fewer entertaining incidents, so if you really liked Jack's part of the last book, you might find yourself bored by this one.
Eliza by now is ensconced in King Louis IV's court at Versailles, where she has a sponsor of sort, the comte d'Avaux, whom she met in the previous book and who has gotten her a position as governess to the children of some noblewoman. That's only a pretext for her to be at Versailles, though, where she has several more important roles she keeps shrouded in varying degrees of secrecy. Nearest to the surface, she acts as personal finance manager to practically the entire court, most of whose members are nearing bankruptcy trying to maintain their households and wardrobes at a suitable level of opulence. Known to fewer people, she corresponds with d'Avaux, keeping him updated on what goes on at court; she also corresponds with the Natural Philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who has published his calculus. She uses a couple of different codes to write her letters; the letters she writes to d'Avaux are written in a simpler code that she anticipates will be broken by Dutch spies, who are her real audience for those missives. (D'Avaux, it was revealed in the last book, is working to undermine King Louis, but is not pro-Dutch either. I'm not 100% sure how much his agenda and Eliza's overlap, though I don't THINK he knows the Dutch are reading his correspondence ...) Anyway, at the highest level of secrecy, she's spying for William, the Prince of Orange, who intends to seize power in England.
And, reading that paragraph, you will start to see why I don't like the title of this installment in the Baroque Cycle. An odalisque is a woman whose defining feature is her idleness; she's kept by others to be idle, and beautiful, for them. Eliza, who has to be the one the title refers to, is dizzyingly active ALL THE TIME, simultaneously doing two or three incredibly difficult things, and making sure no one sees her doing them, at any given time. Stephenson might well have chosen the title ironically; that's the only way I can see it making any sense.
I mentioned that Daniel Waterhouse comes back into play in this book; he does, and when we meet him he has come into his own as a political power player. He's still a Fellow of the Royal Society, but he doesn't conduct any research of his own. Instead, he hangs around King James II's dwindling court, watching his doctors try to treat his advanced syphilis and talking with other people about what's going to happen next. He intercedes on behalf of his fellow Puritans, getting them released from jail whenever they get rounded up on suspicion of fomenting another rebellion (remember that in the first book, Daniel's father Drake was instrumental in bringing Oliver Cromwell to power, and was rewarded for this by having his head cut off once Charles II was restored to the throne). While he's watching and waiting, the Glorious Revolution happens around him. He knows he has played some role in bringing it about, but he mostly just wanders around dazed once it actually starts unfolding. Mostly, he tries to keep an eye on his friend Isaac Newton, who is going off the deep end, abandoning physics for some sort of esoteric metaphysics. His parts of the book, especially compared to Eliza's and especially toward the end, are anticlimactic. ...more
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