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Octavia E. Butler – Dawn (1987)

I assumed I would like Dawn, the first of three books in the Xenogenesis Series, by Octavia E. Butler.  I’m a slow reader, so reading time is too valuable to spend on books I don’t decidedly enjoy.  It’s a bit of a close call, since I dedicated the time to finish the first book, but right now I don’t plan on reading the remaining two books of the series – and it pains me not to know how things will turn out.

For the past year or so I’ve limited my reading to recent fiction reviewed by the NY Times.  In the interests of using my reading time wisely, I decided to let the NY Times cull out good book prospects.  However, I miss my days of reading science fiction, so I called my well-read daughter and asked her for recommendations.  She suggested Butler, especially this series.

The basic premise of the book is deliciously clever and lends itself to awesome possibilities – only a few humans survive a nuclear war, and they are transported without their consent to an orbiting ship by extraterrestrial beings whose mode of evolution is to “trade” favorable gene traits with other species.  The Oankali are a long-lived extraterrestrial species who have found something in humans that is worthy of trade, so they propose to clean up the earth and send humans back to re-establish a human presence while in some undisclosed way merging the Oankali/human lines.

Our protagonist, Lilith, is the human the Oankali identify as the most appropriate remaining human to prime with extra genetic powers of recollection and strength for purposes of leading the first group of humans back to earth.

This is a sensational premise.  It doesn’t require a lot of science, but it does lend itself to a wide-open imagination to the possibilities of human/alien interaction.

Lilith develops intense relationships with individual members of the Oankali, while becoming essentially a beloved member of one of the alien families.  She is conflicted throughout the book, however, with ambivalence of whether she is being co-opted by the Oankali for a purpose that will forever undermine the human species, or whether the Oankali are creating a reasonable way forward for humans.

My dissatisfaction with the book is with the dialogue between human and alien, and the unpredictability of Lilith.

The dialogue is stilted.  The characters speak in full sentences that seem to serve more as explanatory narrative than as the free-flowing fits and starts of real conversations.  In our daily lives, people (and perhaps aliens who speak with people) speak ambiguously and in clipped phrases of conjunctions and equivocation.  But in Dawn, people speak like a novelist’s narrative.

Lilith herself is all over the place.  At one point she’s sleeping with an alien, while at another point she’s angrily rejecting the plans that she has been going along with for months.  At times, it seems like Butler uses Lilith’s unexpected anger to create a dramatic tension to drive the book forward.  However, this makes Lilith into a foil rather than a human we follow for her intelligence and personality.  It would have better for our protagonist to either cannily create a plan to bust up the whole Oankali plan for humans, or to obtain better intelligence on her role, but instead Lilith seems to unpredictably react in a way that makes it harder for a reader to join her life.  I’m just not sure I like or appreciate Lilith enough to spend three books with her.

Otavia E. Butler is an accomplished writer, winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.   She knows her science fiction.  In the end, Lilith was a dominant character in 99% of the scenes of the book, but with her stilted dialogue and inconsistent character, I just found it difficult to get close enough to become vested in her life.

Bearskin – James A. McLaughlin (2018)

James McLaughlin’s debut novel, Bearskin, is as much about the mountains, forests and weather of southwestern Virginia as it is about rural violence, Mexican drug cartels, and the dogged resilience of its characters.

It is a suspense novel or thriller – the distinction is not entirely clear to me – that moves fast, especially in the second half.  Our protagonist, Rice Moore, is a self-sufficient outdoorsman with just enough college science to land a job as caretaker of a privately-owned mountain preserve of Appalachian old growth forest in southwestern Virginia.  Rice has arrived from Arizona as a man in trouble, with a new name, Rick Morton, and an undisclosed past that he is trying to outrun.  His job as a caretaker is to make scientific observations of fauna and animals, and to keep trespassers and loggers out of the lands.

In the course of three or four months or so Rice gets into so many fights and receives so many haymaker shots to the face and body that it’s like a thriller movie in which the combatants land dozens of blows, any one of which would have knocked out even Joe Frazier.

The novel opens (no spoiler here) with a great scene in which two cartel assassins arrive in Rice’s cell on his first night in a Mexican prison.  Rice has anticipated this, and waits on his prison bed hiding a heavy pipe.  Rice surprises them and in a quick fight knocks both unconscious.  Rice’s laconic Mexican (cartel) cellmate advises Rice to slice the Achilles tendons of the men, rather than kill them.

McLaughlin gives us short flashbacks of the prior troubles that has driven Rice east under a new name.  But, it is quite clear from the outset the Rice expects someone from his past to try to find him, so many of Rice’s tactics consist of trying to live off the grid in the Virginian preserve.

While keeping his low profile, Rice learns that local black bears are being poached on his lands.  The poachers attract the bears with bait hanging from branches and then kill the bears at close range with poisoned crossbow arrows.  Apparently, there is a huge Asian demand for wild bear galls and paws, so the poachers extract the gall, cut off the paws, and leave the remainder of the bear to rot.

This nice novel has many believable twists and turns, but probably the least likely plot pivot is when Rice decides to single-handedly investigate and stop the poaching.  He doesn’t want to report the poaching to the local sheriff or game warden for fear that his identity will be exposed in an investigation.

As should be obvious, however, Rice sticks out by merely going into town.  The lands have been a private reserve for over 100 years, owned by a rich non-Virginian family, and the local people have long resented being treated as outsiders to these local lands.  In that small town, everyone knows and instinctively resents whoever the caretaker is at any given time.  Rice compounds his notoriety by visiting local bars and stores to seek out information about poaching.  It doesn’t take long for him to get into fights with local toughs and bear hunters.  It is seemingly strange behavior for a man seeking to avoid attention.  Rice is a man of personal honor, however, and he takes the duties of caretaker of protected lands seriously.

The protected lands coalesce into a character of their own.  Rice is a keen observer of weather and nature, and we are treated throughout the novel to beautiful descriptions of the heat and humidity of Virginia in August, the hints of cooler clean air in the fall, and the approach of a late fall tropical storm making its way up the mid-Atlantic.  McLaughlin brings home the cacophony of late summer sounds of crickets, cicadas, katydids and tree frogs.  His descriptions of a wild honeybee hive, of wayward hunting dogs, of copperhead and rattlesnakes are as engaging as the humans fighting each other.

McLaughlin grew up this region of Virginia, and he casts an observant, appreciative eye to the ways of the mountains – as well as to the rhythm of this local, poor, proud rural population.

There are two women in Rice’s life, one a girlfriend tangled in the past of Mexico, and the other the prior gamekeeper of the lands.  Rice has a strong sense of justice, and some of the twists in plot that put Rice in danger arise out of his commitment to right the wrongs the women have experienced.

Rice ruefully puts himself in harms way many times over in his commitment to his gamekeeper job and to the women he knows.  But, it is a fast and furious suspense, rolling to an end that leaves the reader satisfied and wanting more.

The Overstory – Richard Powers (2018)

Richard Powers’ The Overstory is an accounting, a reckoning, of our invasive species.

It is a novel of context, where the context is four billion years.  Our species being recently arrived, it is self-evident that ours is to be a short-lived species.

It is a tale told in anger, particularly at the conceit of homo sapiens to consider themselves different from all other forms of life, entitled to exploit resources beyond their needs.  Our pending fate is an ironic reckoning of the survival of the fittest.

Powers brings us eight or nine individual diverse members of the homo sapiens species in the nation of America, each of whom have an unrelated short story told in parallel over the first half of the novel.  Eventually, many of these individuals meet and their stories come together.  Each person is or becomes damaged in some way, but the damage enables them to see the world differently.  Their perspective enables them to take a step back from the hustle and con of commerce.

Some of the individuals find each other and pair-off, others find and then lose the other.  One is Nick, the great-great grandson of a Norwegian immigrant who planted a chestnut on his Iowa homestead.  Another is Mimi Ma, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant who planted a mulberry in his suburban Illinois backyard.

Many of our characters are inspired by Olivia, a beautiful, vacuous east coast college girl who dies, for a minute and 10 seconds, of accidental electrocution.  When revived by a jolt to her heart, she has become changed by the voices of beings who inspire her to seek out a group of protesters defying loggers on the west coast.  She is irresistibly drawn, like a salmon seeking headwaters (or like the survivors in Stephen King’s The Stand), to cross the country to find her destiny.

Our companions find common ground with trees.  They witness an exuberant cycle of inter-related birth, growth and death.  They come to see their lives in relationship to trees, and seek to take individual responsibility by escalating activism to block de-forestation.

Olivia (nicknamed Maidenhair) and her Iowan friend, Nick (Watchman) protect an ancient redwood named Mimas by living for a year on a platform built into its high canopy.  The loggers harvest all the trees in the vicinity and will not leave, on arrogant principle, without the victory of also taking down Mimas and its grove.

It must be said that The Overstory is polemical. The novel is 500 fast-moving pages, even though the tension propelling the plot is thin.  Powers is at his best when we are with his characters as they find and lose each other, and as they fight their quixotic battles for their trees.  He beautifully describes the interwoven relationships of trees, and compares the balance to our self-centered species.  However, could it be that only our species is brazen enough to acknowledge aloud the imperative that all life shares to grow, expand and subjugate?  Does not every species expand, at the expense of others, to its maximum reach in whatever niche is available?  Perhaps Powers’ response would be that we could, if it wanted, self-regulate this instinct, and that we are all-the-more damned for choosing not to do so.  It would have been an interesting argument to acknowledge, even if just to knock down.  There is no questioning, however, Powers’ point, repeatedly made, that our consumption of resources is gleefully disproportionate to our needs.

The Overstory offers several options of what might be called redemption.  Is our extinction inevitable?  What can a person do to make a difference?  One option is suicide in the interests of culling the human population. Or, one could choose “unsuicide” by taking personal responsibility to change society’s collective suicide pact — act, even on an individual level, to change the trajectory.  Suicide or unsuicide is our sacrifice and our debt to life.

Another option seemed a bit too easy, too magical, too much wishful thinking — a technological Hail Mary.  It is the vague suggestion that artificial intelligence might evolve into its own species and self-interestedly arm earth with the means to fight back against the human course of destruction.  The Terminator (please forgive me) would impose conditions upon the human species in the best overall interests of the earth.

I don’t have an editor to stop me from my own self-destructive over-reaching, so here goes:  I was reminded in a way of Sartre’s Nausea.  When we step back, what are we?  We cannot justify our separateness from existence.  Who are we to believe we have meaning that is somehow unique?  A tree’s form is defined by our expectation, but if we look closely at a tree, we see its essence as viscous living mass.  Nature exists with us or without us.  In fact, we stand in the way of trees.

Richard Powers won the National Book Award in 2006, and has received a MacArthur Fellowship.  He’s written 12 novels, but The Overstory is my first Powers book.

A good novel can create mindfulness (at least for a few days).  Powers’ trees are beautifully loved on every page.  Trees communicate and defend each other.  Over the years I’ve often kissed newly planted trees in my yard on the presumptuous assumption that somehow my essence will endow the tree.  I’ve catalogued the trees of my backyard, including a Chestnut Oak, Black Tupelo, Scarlet Oak, White Oak, Red Maple and white flowering Dogwood.  (I’ll ignore, in deference to Powers’ thesis, the pine that seems to repulse its nearby deciduous companions.)  I’ve posted index cards on our deck to remind me of their names. And yet, I don’t even see most trees that I mindlessly walk by every day.  This book reminds us of their very long lives and our short lives.

Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday (2018)

Happily, Lisa Halliday’s debut novel Asymmetry has enjoyed some nice success.  The NY Times favorably reviewed it several times and named it in “The New Vanguard” of the top 15 books of fiction by women in the 21^st Century.

The book is structured asymmetrically, one might say, with two completely different stories.  The stories are not interwoven and they are not related to each other, except that perhaps the difference in perspective and consequence of the stories is itself the point.  A brief final third coda suggests such a purpose.

The storytelling is deceptively simple, masking an exploration of the subtle, complex layers of a writer’s craft, while also exploring a writer’s responsibilities.  The language is unusually precise, and the spare dialogue serves a poignant ambivalence.

The first story is a third-party narrative of an affair, from 2002-2005, of Alice, a young woman in her early twenties, and a much older man, Ezra Blazer.  Alice works as an editorial assistant for a NY publisher, and Ezra is a famous and wealthy novelist living in the Upper West Side.  By all accounts, the character of the older man is based on Philip Roth, with whom Halliday, working as a young assistant editor for a NY publisher, had a relationship.

The affair is not torrid, though it is sexual.  Ezra is apparently an old hand at affairs with younger women, and he picks up Alice sitting on a park bench with his well-worn line of “Are you game?” For Alice, it starts as a matter of curiosity, for her life is small and directionless, and she recognizes Ezra as the grand writer himself.

Ezra is initially cautious, avoiding a situation in which the young woman would assume a sense of belonging and entitlement in his apartment, but gradually they grow comfortable and she begins to accompany him on the town and out to his Long Island getaways.  Alice is a woman of few words — just enough to passively assent to his suggestions regarding food, entertainment, sex, and help with his ailments and medications.

But, it is an affair of mutual benefit.  Ezra understands that he can provide Alice real value, so he gradually introduces her to the world of books, classical music, and shopping.  He nurtures her path to independence, giving her the money to buy at Searle a warm nylon coat with a hood of black fur, and even paying off her student loans to reduce her financial dependence on her job.

My take is that the story of the affair is purposely written as an exercise, demonstrating an evolution of a writer’s craft, starting with a simple self-conscious narrative to increasingly detailed dialogue and descriptions.  In the actual story, we are told that Alice has begun to write, but we are never shown her writings.  There are some cutaway, intermittent scenes between Alice and her neighbor – a lone older woman who gradually can no longer care for herself – that I interpret as Alice’s first attempt at writing a short story.

Alice occasionally tells Ezra of her stepfather in Boston, an alt-right anti-Semitic flamethrower.  Ezra asks whether Alice writes about her father.  No, Alice assumes a writer should write about important things like world affairs and war.  Ezra says “world affairs can take care of themselves,” and that Alice should write about her father – “it’s a gift.”

Ultimately, it is a domestic affair, a passing of time for watching baseball on TV, for shopping for quality foods at boutique delis, and for help managing each other’s health and comfort.

The second story is a first-person narrative of a young man with dual citizenship of the U.S. and Iraq, born of immigrant Iraqi parents.  He is informally detained in a London airport in 2009 while en route to Iraq to visit his older brother.

The airport detention scenes have numbing, almost comic, inane dialogue between unfailingly polite British airport security officers and our narrator, Amar Ala Jaafari.  The security officers are nonplussed by dual-passport Amar’s story that he has arrived from the U.S. to spend a couple of nights with an old friend in London before departing for Turkey where he will drive into Iraq to visit his brother in Kurdistan during the height of war.

Amar is an accomplished American, though, having graduated from fine schools and obtained his PhD in economics.  Amar is serene during this detention, even internally, while patiently answering the same questions over and over.  Amar knows that the officers are waiting for some indication of irritability or insolence to justify his detention and their suspicions.  The airport detention is mild and civilized, in spare empty rooms near the passport control gates, and Amar uses his time to reflect on his life and family.

Amar’s older brother never felt comfortable in America and idealized a grand future for Iraq.  He had moved to Iraq before George W’s war, and became a doctor.  Amar and his parents visit the brother several times during the war, and Halliday’s spare precise language to describe kidnappings, bombings and hospital triage is the more effective for its understatement.

The point, I believe, for the two seemingly unrelated stories is the juxtaposition, the asymmetry, of the two stories.  The affair is a gilded world of abundance and indulgence, of time to waste, of affection without passion, of the aches and pains of old age, and the dullness of an editor’s office.  But, is it of consequence?  Perhaps Ezra is wrong about the place of world affairs – should a writer just permit world affairs to take care of themselves?

It is fair to say the stories are unrelated by character or scene, though their very differences are intended to show the choices available to a writer and all of us.  I think I noticed a cameo appearance of our beautiful blond Alice, by then in her late twenties some three years after her affair with Ezra, sitting across the large detention room from Amar, with her legs impeccably crossed and her coat neatly folded on her lap, crying silently in her black fur hood.  This is a woman in trouble. Perhaps she has been detained for some action of consequence.

The brief final third story, an epilogue really, is a 2011 interview with Ezra in London for the Desert Island Discs program.  This is a literate radio interview that explores Ezra’s life and writing, while at the same time allowing Ezra to describe and choose his favorite music.  At one point Ezra notes the heavy price that will be paid by the safe, self-centered modern way-of-life for failing to engage the warning signs of madness outside the affluent cocoon.  Ezra then mentions a recent book by a “young friend of mine” that transcends her provenance by engaging in a wider perspective.

This is a book of nearly imperceptible layers.  The prose is delicate, precise, lean, suggestive.  One story is of writing, an exercise of writing craft utilizing the narrative of an affair, followed by a juxtaposition of writing for consequence utilizing the wartime story of Amar’s family.

The teacher of a class I’m taking suggested we compare the different choices by a novelist and film director to the same story.  Looking over my bookshelves I spied my old copy of A Clockwork Orange — what could be better than to compare this classic novel with a Kubrick screenplay.

A Clockwork Orange – the novel and the movie

What’s it going to be then, eh?  So begins each section of A Clockwork Orange – a thematic and rhetorical offer of choice for Your Humble Narrator, Alex.

How do they differ — the 1962 book A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, and the 1971 movie with Stanley Kubrick as director and screenplay writer?

They differ plenty, even without considering that the book’s final chapter 21 was not included in the 1979 American edition of the book I read – and was not reflected in Kubrick’s movie.

The story is of a dystopian society in the apparently near future that is scoured with teenage ultra-violence, as it is called by 15-year old Alex.  Competing small gangs of teenage males seek out violence and rape.  Streets and public places are deserted at night, except for the few unfortunate victims who must venture out.

Alex narrates in the teenage slang of nadsat.  This, from page one:  “[t]here was no law yet against producing some of these new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrowshow.”  As generously explained by Alex, this means, as they used to say, that you could drink milk with knives in it to sharpen you up and make you ready.

This is slang brilliantly created by Burgess for the book, combining Russian words (nadsat is the Russian suffix for “teen”) and out-of-its-place English.  Even though many of the sentences contain three or four slang words, readers can pick it up by context and repeated usage.  This was a re-read for me of a book I hadn’t picked up in 30 years, and my reaction to the first few pages was probably the same as the first time – reluctance to make the effort to understand the slang.  I looked for a glossary on google, but I learned that Burgess was dead-set against providing a glossary for readers.  In deference to Burgess, I went with the flow by getting the gist of meaning in the early parts of the book, and then later feeling fluent.

The book is unyielding in violence.  Burgess doesn’t attempt to explain the genesis of the violence, or to judge the violence; rather, it just happens continuously and unmercifully.  Alex and his droogs (chums) seek violence as entertainment – they jump lone stumbling drunkards, they gang rape any female who falls in their hands, and they steal cars to drive the countryside looking for random homes to invade.  When they need money, they take it from a flogged victim, but their objective is to dominate, injure, and rape for kicks.  Blood is a high.

Alex is convicted of murder, and while in prison volunteers for a new technique by the recently installed law-and-order government to re-condition convicts from violence.  The technique forces him to watch films of ultra-violence while on a drug that causes intense nausea.  Once he is conditioned to invariably associate nausea with violence and the old in-out-in-out, he is released from prison as cured.

A unique twist is that Alex is, incongruously, a classical music lover – especially of good ole Ludwig Van.  Some of the conditioning movies are old Nazi propaganda films accompanied by classical German music, including Beethoven.  Of course, this means Alex associates the debilitating feelings of nausea with classical music.  The technique works — no more violence or Beethoven for Alex.

The book and movie primarily differ in tone and style.  The book creates a society that is going to seed – elevators don’t work, the streets are dark and dirty, the machinery of modernity is broken and not being fixed, while the working class lives in miserable mass-produced flats.  There is no humor, no irony.  Society is broken.

The movie has Kubrick style.  The visual emphasis is on linear modern architectural lines, futuristic furniture, and personal style and flair.  The story emphasis is on Alex’s re-conditioning and the role of music, particularly Ludwig Van.  There is violence to be sure, lots of it, but ultimately the movie is more about the social dynamics than about Alex and his droogs.

Kubrick cut many major scenes of the book, nicely allowing extended time for Kubrickian inane absurdities such as the Chief Prison Warden (beautifully played by Michael Bates) taking inventory of Alex’s possessions and looking up Alex’s arse for contraband (this scene is not in the book).

The film is a stylized and wickedly humorous satire of British society.  Kubrick’s take on the police and prison wardens is almost straight out of Monty Python.  The earnest Chief Prison Guard uses a goose-stepping boot stomp whenever he turns a corner.

Later, there is lusty moaning behind a curtain in Alex’s hospital room, and out runs a naked nurse, followed by a doctor hoisting his trousers.

Alex’s father is brilliantly played by Philip Stone, with an effortless combination of insecurity and ineptness.

However, the final twist of the book (even without the added chapter) and movie is dissatisfying.  To avoid the sickness, Alex attempts suicide by jumping from a window.  Public opinion of the re-conditioning program turns against the government, and somehow the government manages to reverse the conditioning while Alex is in a coma.  The story ends as Alex awakes with his lust for violence restored.

Alex’s transformation back to his old self is unexplained and just too convenient.  It would have been more interesting for the consequences of re-conditioning play out.  This would be in keeping with Burgess’ dark vision of a cynical government co-opting the free will of its citizens.

Burgess explained his views in an article from 1973 and printed by The New Yorker in the June 4 & 11, 2012 issue.  Alex represents human choice, however poor those decisions may be.  The prison chaplain laments that Alex ceases to be a wrongdoer, but “ceases also to be a creature of moral choice.”  Burgess notes that at the beginning of the story Alex, unlike his chums and many others, is endowed with the three characteristics regarded as essential attributes of man – he rejoices in articulate language, he loves beauty as exemplified by Beethoven, and he is aggressive.  To Burgess, the reversal of the aversive training and restoration of Alex’s free condition is meant to be a happy ending.

In contrast, Kubrick’s movie used the restoration of Alex’s lust for violence as something more sinister, to satirize the ludicrous, almost comical, lengths to which a pandering poll-driven government will go to maintain power.

And, that brings us to that dratted final chapter 21.  O my brothers, say it ain’t so.  In that chapter, Alex at age 19 realizes that violence has lost his appeal, and decides that he would like to start a family.

According to the Introduction by Andrew Biswell of the “restored” American edition published in 1986, Burgess originally appended a handwritten note to his editor at the end of chapter 20:  “Should we end here? An optional ‘epilogue’ follows.”  The American editor, Eric Swenson, argued against including it, and according to Swenson, Burgess acknowledged that Swenson was right and that chapter 21 was included because the British publisher wanted a happy ending.

From at least a story-telling vantage, Chapter 21 is as unlikely as sticking a happy ending onto the Trump presidency – it’s just not going to happen.  However, it makes the point for Burgess that the human condition represents possibility – and Alex’s choice of family over violence shows that possibility.

Regardless, over the years since original publication Burgess made it clear to all that chapter 21 belonged, and the American editions since 1986 have included this restored chapter.

Burgess was unhappy that Kubrick did not include this final redemptive ending in the movie.  Kubrick, like me, claims that he didn’t even know of the final chapter, having read the American edition of the book for making the movie; however, others argue that his correspondence at the time indicated he knew of the final chapter.  In any event, he said that he would not have included it even had he known, since the redemptive ending was unconvincing.

The film is biting satire, but with some silliness.  The book is unremittingly grim.  The film has style.  The book has dirt and blood.  Both capture a society in which the cynics are in charge and have relinquished responsibility.