The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks

Published by Orbit on October 9, 2012 

The Gzilt are about to transition from the Real to the Sublime, where they will live a blissful existence in dimensions seven through eleven. In most instances, an entire civilization must enter the Sublime at the same time to retain individual identities, and this is what the Gzilt are preparing to do in 24 days. When a ship from the Zihdren-Remnanter attempts to deliver a message to the Gzilt -- a message that could undercut the very foundation of Gzilt society and possibly affect the civilization's readiness to join the Sublime -- a Gzilt ship blows it to bits. Ever watchful, the Culture dispatches Caconym, one of its Mind ships, to join an advisory group that is responding to the incident. Caconym is a logical choice since it shares its structure with another Mind that has actually been to, and returned from, the Sublime.

Other than various Minds, the central character in Iain Banks' latest Culture novel is a Gzilt named Vyr Cossant, who added two arms to her body so she could play The Hydrogen Sonata on the elevenstring. Because she once met an entity (sometimes humanoid, sometimes not) named Ngaroe QuRia who has lived for thousands of years, Cossant is recommissioned as a lieutenant commander and ordered to find QuRia. QuRia is thought to possess the information that the Zihdren-Remnanter were attempting to deliver to the Gzilt. Also making an attempt to find QuRia is his former lover, Scolliera Tefwe, whose consciousness has been stored on a Culture ship for the last four hundred years. As the Gzilt countdown to the Sublime continues, Cossant and Tefwe and a number of Culture Minds race to uncover the truth about the Gzilt before the civilization makes its collective journey, a task that is impeded by some Gzilt political/military folk who would prefer that the information remain buried.

There is, of course, quite a bit more going on: political scheming to determine which race will become the rightful heir to the worlds and possessions the Gzilt leave behind; political quarrels among the Culture Minds; military maneuverings leading to explosive confrontations between the Gzilt, the Culture, and others. All of this adds up to a fun, intelligent, fast-moving story.

If this abbreviated plot summary is confusing, you probably haven't read any of Banks' Culture novels and are therefore unfamiliar with the ancient, droll, sarcastic, pedantic, and sometimes mentally ill Artificial Intelligences known as the Minds.  Don't worry.  You can read The Hydrogen Sonata as a stand-alone novel and it will all make sense to you before too many chaters have gone by.

The best thing about The Hydrogen Sonata is that it is wildly imaginative without becoming too silly. From the descriptions of alien beings to the wonders offered by other planets, Banks creates a fully realized environment. He effectively conveys a sense of the age and vastness of the universe, plays with theories about other universes/dimensions that might exist, and peppers the story with a wonderful array of gadgetry. Not all of this is original, of course, but Banks often uses technology and theory in original ways.

I particularly like Banks' playfulness: the amusing names the Culture gives its ships; the banter between ships' Minds; the quirky personalities the Minds develop; the nettlesome nature of inter-species politics; a dirigible that hosts a five-year-long going-away party prior to the Sublime; an avatar whose head is made of alphabet soup; the fact that audiences other than academics and Culture Minds regard The Hydrogen Sonata (which may or may not be a musical representation of the periodic table) as unlistenable; the snarky pet Cossant wears around her neck; an android that mistakenly believes it's in a simulation as mayhem surrounds it; some truly bizarre sexual escapades ... and more.

The novel concludes with an intriguing moral equation. Members of the Culture learn that a shared belief critical to Gzilt civilization is false. Should the Culture reveal the truth on the ground that it is always best for the truth to be known? Or should the Culture keep quiet to protect the Gzilt from the social disruption that the truth might cause? An interesting quandary, but this isn't the kind of science fiction that lends itself to deep thought. It's meant to be fun and exciting, and it achieves that goal admirably.

RECOMMENDED

Noughties by Ben Masters

Published by Hogarth on October 9, 2012

Eliot, the narrator of Noughties, is a soon-to-graduate English lit student at Oxford. Noughties reads as if it were written by an English lit student, one whose knowledge of the world is confined to classrooms and college bars. The story, to the extent one can be found, is common: boy meets girl, boy goes to college while girl stays home, boy tries to change girl, boy loses girl, boy wants girl back. While Eliot has mastered the young person's art of creating unnecessary drama on the way to maturity, he hasn't hit upon any insights more worthwhile than "Ah, mate": the standard greeting for a fellow student who is clueless about relationships.

The noughties are Jack, Scott, Sanjay, and Eliot, four pub mates in their final year as Oxford students, "quotidian calamities" who, according to Eliot, are "lugging twentieth-century regret on our backs." If you are turned off by phrases like those I've just quoted, you probably won't like this book -- it's loaded with them.

"The noughties" is also a name given to the first decade of the twenty-first century (the one following "the nineties"). While the title suggests that Ben Masters wishes to use the novel to give the decade an identity, Eliot makes clear early on that the task is impossible: "We have no foreseeable narrative, untaggable as we are. Ours is a lost period ... spiraling off in referential chaos." Eliot sees life in the noughties as a performance; the play's the thing. Eliot exhibits the hubris of youth when, recognizing that "the performance of self is nothing new," he claims it has never before been "so vital, so fundamental." Maybe he means that no generation has been so fully self-absorbed as his own, but I doubt that's true. The MTV-driven Eighties wasn't about self-absorbed performance?

The story unfolds during a pub crawl -- more particularly, a pub to bar to club crawl, each drinking establishment representing a section of the narrative. As Eliot moves through the last drinking night of his university career, he mopes about Lucy (the girl he met, tried to change, and lost) and recalls the significant landmarks in their relationship, of which there are few. He also mopes about Ella, a fellow Oxford student who (unlike Lucy) reads the right books, listens to the right music, and is conveniently available when she's not with Jack. Frequently he indulges in "referential chaos" as he quotes, alludes to, or mimics the authors and poets he has studied (or those that Masters admires).

There are bits of Noughties I liked. Not the constant drinking and vomiting (dull). Not the quasi-love triangle (trite). Not the attempts at profound philosophical observation (shallow). I enjoyed Eliot's amusing description of his Oxford interview, some of the bar chat, and the way Eliot's mind wanders during tutorials, causing him to miss the questions he's asked. I liked Lucy's spot-on analysis of Eliot's faults as a boyfriend. Eliot's insecurity with regard to Lucy during his first year at Oxford, his worry that she doesn't fit in with the crowd, is convincing. His jealous behavior, while obnoxious, seems genuine. A riff on men who are still zipping their flies as they exit the men's room is funny. Sadly, those bright moments are overshadowed by all the empty rhetoric.

Eliot thinks Dickens is "all about the primacy of style," an apt description of Masters' writing. Whatever merit is to be found in Noughties lies chiefly in the cleverness of its prose. The blurb for Noughties compares Masters to Martin Amis, a writer I regard with indifference, and I think the comparison is apt. Like Martin Amis, Masters has nothing much to say, but he says it very well. Sometimes he's quite funny -- describing a drunken encounter with a girl in a bathroom, Eliot recalls his hand wedged inside her tight jeans, fumbling about like "a man rummaging for loose change." Had Masters kept to the humor and not worked so hard (and with so little success) to produce something serious, this might have been a better novel. 

NOT RECOMMENDED

Janus by John Park

Published by ChiZine Publications on October 9, 2012

Most of us have a hidden side, a part of our personality or past that we choose (sometimes unsuccessfully) to bury. Janus plays with that reality (sometimes unsuccessfully) by introducing characters with a hidden past, albeit not hidden by choice.

Traveling through the Knot (which, though unexplained, is presumably something like a wormhole or a stargate) to the planet Janus seems to provoke amnesia in about 30 percent of the people who make the journey, a condition that technicians on Janus are trying to correct. Attempts to restore Elinda Michaels' memory have been unsuccessful; why she emigrated from Earth to Janus remains a mystery to her. Her lover Barbara suffers from the same impairment. New arrival John Grebbel is troubled by the scars on his hands and arms but does not remember their cause. He just knows that something feels wrong.

Shortly after leaflets appear suggesting that immigrants have come to Janus from asylums and prisons, Barbara disappears. Suspecting a connection between those events, Elinda tries to track down the origin of the leaflets. At that point, Janus takes on the flavor of a detective story. The elements of a thriller or a spy story are added when a bomb explodes, an apparent act of sabotage. Yet the novel isn't really a detective story or a thriller, and it has only the trappings of a science fiction novel. Fans of world-building won't find much here. Except for its longer nights and some unusual animal life, Janus is awfully Earth-like.  Maybe that's why the two planets are linked by the Knot, but we'll never know since none of the characters know what the Knot is all about.

Two aspects of Janus are moderately interesting. One, of course, is the mystery of the missing memories, the characters chasing their hidden pasts. The other is the colony's response to the bombing -- interesting because of its deeper political ramifications. The head of security behaves in a way that is typical of those who value security over civil liberties, invoking "emergency powers" that permit security forces to detain and question people on a whim. Other colonists worry that by sowing the seeds of distrust, the security hawks will destroy the colonists' sense of society. Had that theme been developed more fully, Janus would have been a better novel.

The mystery, unfortunately, is more interesting in its development than in its resolution. A troubling surrealism creeps into the story that left me asking, "Why is any of this happening?" When the novel's big moment finally arrives, the revelation that explains it all, it seemed so contrived and improbable that I was left scratching my head and asking, "But why is any of this really happening?"

John Park's prose style blends power with grace. At times, the writing is too fractured -- a paragraph about this character, a paragraph about that one, then on to someone else -- but it is the story, rather than the way the story is told, that left me vaguely dissatisfied. I can't say that I disliked Janus, but neither can I say that I'm enthused about the novel.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler

Published by Mysterious Press on October 2, 2012

Robert Olen Butler returns Pancho Villa to life as a supporting character in his latest novel. The Hot Country follows a literary path marked by Graham Greene (among others) -- within the trappings of a thriller, the author undertakes a deeper study of human nature. The "hot" country is Mexico in 1914: hot because of its climate, because it is a hotbed of revolution, because its women are passionate. The result is entertaining but not as compelling as Greene's best novels -- or Butler's.

On the day when the United States begins its military occupation of Vera Cruz, a news photographer snaps a picture of Christopher "Kit" Cobb, a reporter for a Chicago newspaper, standing near two dead Mexican snipers. The story jumps ahead a few weeks as Cobb gazes at the photograph in his editor's office, remembering the woman in the picture, Luisa Morales. It then moves back in time to the day Cobb met Luisa, shortly before the Marines arrived in Vera Cruz. The remainder of the novel covers the time that passes between the day of the invasion and the day Cobb returns to Chicago, then moves forward another few days.

Cobb is intrigued by Luisa, even as he comes to suspect her as the sniper in nonfatal shootings of a Mexican priest, a city official who is cooperating with the Americans, and an American Marine. While he wants to pursue the story of the shootings, he's also intrigued by the tall scarred German he sees sneaking ashore from the Ypiranga, a German steamer. During most of that novel, Cobb is chasing a dangerous story that focuses on the scarred man, Friedrich von Mensinger, a representative of Germany who wants to persuade Pancho Villa to launch a counterattack against American forces.

Butler avoids the improbable shootouts and one-against-five martial arts battles that are commonplace in ordinary thrillers. There is a knife fight, there is a gunfight, there's even a sword fight, but they are realistic -- they always convey the sense that Cobb's life is at risk. Most of the time, Butler creates tension with more subtlety: using a fake passport on a train, Cobb must persuade the Federales that he is a German; searching through Mensinger's saddlebags for hidden documents, Cobb is hyperaware of the sounds that signal danger.

Still, in his attempt to meld a literary novel and a thriller, Butler doesn't fully succeed in the creation of either one. The final scene in Mexico is enjoyable but unconvincing, while the novel's final scene (a revelation about Cobb's mother) is from well beyond left field. Key characters have the feel of stereotypes: an embittered news photographer who stopped writing (and started drinking) as a protest against censorship; an American mercenary who has signed on to support Pancho Villa's cause. We spend too little time getting to know Luisa and Mensinger and Villa. Although Cobb could have stepped out of a Graham Greene novel, Butler doesn't quite capture the tortured soul that makes Greene's central characters so memorable.

This is not to say that Cobb is the empty shell that so often characterizes a thriller hero. Cobb describes himself as "a gringo with imperialist politics and moral indifference," a self-definition he will eventually test. Cobb's relationships with women -- his mother, Luisa, the washer girl who replaces Luisa -- are both complex and superficial. His attempts to communicate with them are muddled; he either fails to speak from his heart or does so at the wrong time.

Butler toughened his prose for this novel without sacrificing its customary elegance. He fills the book with atmosphere, making the reader hears the sounds of war, smell "the complex body-and-equipment stink of fighting men in the field," taste the sourness of pulque. My only stylistic gripe is that during The Hot Country's action sequences, Butler uses run-on sentences to convey Cobb's rush of adrenalin. It is a technique that should be used sparingly, if at all, and one in which Butler overindulges. In all other respects, the prose is stirring, well-suited for a literary thriller.

RECOMMENDED

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

First published in 1953; published by New York Review of Books Classics on October 2, 2012

Kingsley Amis' first novel is arguably his best and probably his funniest. While Lucky Jim is an amusing send-up of academia, it is also a wicked examination of sexual dynamics as they were evolving in the post-war world of the early 1950s. Amis generates laughs by dishing out example after example of the perennial inability of men to understand women. He is particularly adept at exposing the transparent shallowness of men -- but the likable man who is the novel's protagonist is never a total cad, and Amis pokes fun at men with such good humor that male readers can recognize a bit of themselves in his characters and laugh. (Female readers, I susect, will nod their heads knowingly.)

James Dixon is in his first (and possibly last) year of employment as a lecturer in the history department of a provincial college. Despite his position, Dixon is disinclined to do any work that might be considered academic. As he avoids preparing the "special subject" he is supposed to teach in his second year, his only concern is the number of pretty girls who will sign up for the class. Whether Dixon will be invited to return for his second probationary year depends upon his ability to keep Professor Ned Welch happy. Welch is the prototypical absent-minded professor, a model of the pretentious and dull academic, the kind of scholar to whom Dixon is incapable of sucking up, no matter how hard he tries.

Dixon begins the novel in a spotty relationship with Margaret Peel, a lecturer who is taking a paid leave after her unsuccessful suicide attempt (triggered by the news that, in her words, Catchpole was leaving her for his "popsy"). Despite Margaret's prim and earnest nature (quite the opposite of Dixon's), Dixon enjoys spending time with her as long as "the emotional business of the evening" can be "transacted without involving him directly." More to Dixon's liking is Christine Callaghan, the current girlfriend of Welch's son Bertrand, an untalented painter. But Bertrand is also having a go with Carol Goldsmith (behind the back of Carol's husband Cecil, another history department colleague of Dixon's). Bertrand is interested in Christine largely because Christine's uncle is Julius Gore-Urquhart, a wealthy arts patron who is searching for a private secretary, a position Bertrand covets.

Invited to spend a weekend with the Welches, Dixon makes a mess of it in an impressive variety of ways. He does the same at a dance and, finally, at a public lecture he has been invited to give on a subject ("Merrie England") dear to Welch's heart. Dixon spends the most of the novel mildly misbehaving while trying to sort out the relationships between the various characters as well as his own (mostly superficial) feelings about them. Should he stay with Margaret? Should he try to win Christine's affections? Should he punch Bertrand in the ear?

Amis was a master of understated humor enlivened by slapstick moments. He packed more wit into a single sentence that most comedy writers manage in entire chapters. Take this description of an incipient fistfight between Dixon and Bertram: "They faced each other on the floral rug, feet apart and elbows crooked in uncertain attitudes, as if about to begin some ritual of which neither had learnt the clues." Of course, the brief fight causes more damage to a china figurine than to either of the combatants. Among the many jokes Amis tells in Lucky Jim, my favorite is the formula for love: ignorance of the other person plus unsatisfied sexual desire equals love.

As obnoxious as Dixon can be -- he schemes and manipulates, he drinks too much, he hides the evidence when he burns his host's blanket, he's lazy, he hates everything -- Amis manages the astonishing trick of making the reader identify with him and root for his success. Unlike Welch and Bertram and many of the novel's other characters, Dixon is genuine. He isn't a snob, he's incapable of disguising his faults, and he's cheerily self-deprecating.

The New York Review of Books edition of Lucky Jim includes an entertaining and informative introduction penned by Keith Gessen, notable for its frequent quotations from correspondence between Amis and Philip Larkin. It's interesting to note the parallels in experiences and attitudes between the lives of Amis and Larkin and the fictional life of Jim Dixon. The introduction also provides context to the novel in its discussion of post-war England.

RECOMMENDED