Beautiful Thing by Sonia Faleiro

First published in India in 2010; published by Black Cat on February 28, 2012

Subtitled Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars, Beautiful Thing grew out of an article Sonia Faleiro wrote about Mumbai's "bar dancers" that was never published because it wasn't considered newsworthy (perhaps because the bars were officially banned in 2005). It is true that Faleiro's subject isn't groundbreaking, yet the world she investigated -- a world she found fascinating and intimidating even as it left her "feeling frustrated and hopeless" -- deserves to publicized, if only to illuminate the impact of poverty on women who live in a culture of limited options.

Faleiro sketches the hierarchy of sex workers in Mumbai, from the waitresses in a Silent Bar who provide manual relief while serving drinks and tandoori, to brothel workers, to call girls and massage parlor employees. Bar dancers reside at the top of the heap, in part because they sell sex discreetly and infrequently (and thus do not consider themselves to be sex workers), while facing many of the same challenges: paying bribes to the police to avoid being brutalized by their cattle prods; working for violent employers; enduring rude comments and the judgment of a society that regards their profession as impure. Still, by dancing for men, bar dancers gain freedom they could not otherwise enjoy. They do not have to live at home, under the domineering rules of fathers or husbands. They can speak to men to whom they are not related without fear of punishment. Their customers think the bar dancers are dancing for them, but according to Leela (the dancer with whom Faleiro spent tbe most time), the customers are dancing for the bar girls: exchanging money for an insincere smile, rewarding cheesy lines from Bollywood romances with lavish shopping trips, forsaking loving wives for the illusion of a satisfied lover.

Most of the book consists of stories that Leela and other bar dancers told Faleiro about their lives. Faleiro also interviews customers, bar owners, pimps, and a transgender hijra. Faleiro reports the stories told by bar dancers uncritically, without noting that tales of woeful pasts (rapes by their fathers and sons and cousins and strangers) told by women who are ashamed of their profession, as well as tales of success (the power they wielded over men who adored them) may not be entirely true. This seems particularly likely in Leela's case; her smug, self-centered nature is not conducive to honesty. Still, it is certain that the women Faliero interviewed endured horrid lives before they became sex workers, even if they might exaggerate the horror when they chat with a sympathetic listener. Although Leela is more than a little annoying, it would be impossible to read this book without feeling empathy for the abused women in Mumbai and anger at, not just the abusers, but the people in their lives who do nothing to help because they regard the violent behavior of men as none of their business.

Faleiro paints a bleak picture of Mumbai, one that is filled with gangsters and petty criminals rather than Bollywood celebrities. She describes a city ruled by corruption. She attempts to explain why men seek out bar dancers and how the dancers become obsessed with the unlikely hope of romantic love and marriage as the only means of erasing the stigma of their profession. In a chapter that showcases the book's strongest writing, Faleiro interviews a woman who has been diagnosed with HIV Wasting Syndrome and talks to Leela about what will happen to the woman's child.

Beautiful Thing has its flaws. Faleiro often leaves Hindi words and expressions untranslated, and while the meaning is frequently apparent from the context, I still felt I was guessing. An appendix with a glossary of Hindi words translated to English would have been a useul addition to the book. At some point, the stories begin to sound the same; there is too little to differentiate them from each other. Beautiful Thing has the feel of a lengthy magazine article that has been fleshed out to fill the pages of a book.

The second part of the book addresses the 2005 ban on dance bars, a cynical attempt to distract voters from the city's underlying problems (poverty chief among them) by focusing on illusory "quality of life" issues. (Perhaps the politicians in Mumbai learned from Rudi Giuliani, whose war on petty crime in New York City during the 1990s coincided with a spike in unemployment.) Far from improving the quality of life in Mumbai, the ban increased the city's population of destitute women by throwing the bar dancers out of work, placing the women at increased risk of disease and sexual assault. Leela did not fare well after she lost her job as a bar dancer, although there are always places for a sex worker to find employment. As this section of the book illustrates, the real story here is not that poor and abused women turn to sex work, but that poverty and abuse are so often ignored or tolerated by people of means. Beautiful Thing reports nothing new, but the reporting is nonetheless worthy of attention.

RECOMMENDED

Force of Nature by C.J. Box

Published by Putnam on March 20, 2012

Force of Nature is much better than the last Joe Pickett novel, which was so full of plot holes that it made for an awfully bumpy ride.  Force of Nature focuses on Nate Romanowski, who is finally facing a showdown with rogue elements of “The Five,” a group of Special Forces operatives to which Romanowski once belonged.  Their leader, a megalomaniac named Nemecek, wants to take Romanowski out.  To that end, Nemecek recruits three amateur assassins who approach Romanowski in a boat.  Pickett becomes involved when a fisherman discovers a boat full of corpses.  With the sheriff he despises nipping at his heals, Pickett finds himself facing the uncomfortable choice of pursuing or helping his buddy Romanowski.

Romanowski is a falconer and so is Nemecek.  C.J. Box appears to have done meticulous research into the art of falconry.  His descriptions of a falconer’s mindset are convincing.  The symbolic parallel between the falcon that hunts other birds and the dangerous man who hunts Romanowski might be a bit obvious but it’s nonetheless an effective device for telling the story.  Romanowski’s relationship with falcons and the role they play in his connection with Nemecek is the most interesting part of the novel.

Pickett appeals to readers because (in Romanowski’s words) Pickett is “straight and upright and burdened with ethics, responsibility, and a sense of duty.”  Romanowski also has a sense of ethics, but “straight and upright” he is not.  Romanowski has a sort of spirituality -- he tells us that he is of the Earth, not walking upon it -- and pursues falconry to get closer to “the primitive world.”  Romanowski is unquestionably primitive.  He keeps a braid of his dead lover’s hair dangling from his gun -- which is strange, but Romanowski is a strange dude, machismo on steroids.  That makes him (in this novel, at least) an interesting character, although Box sometimes takes him a bit over the top.

By contrast, when Box writes about Pickett, the reader is treated to a strong, silent man.  When he doesn’t know what to say (which is often), he looks down at his boots.  The boot gazing wears a bit thin after a few novels.  At least Romanowksi forces Pickett out of the rather dull (from a reader’s perspective) black-and-white world in which he prefers to dwell.  Romanowski doesn’t worry much about hunting season or game permits as he kills his evening meal, the kind of attitude that Pickett, in his role as game warden, frowns upon, but Pickett gives his friend Romanowski a pass for his many transgressions (revenge killing among them).  Pickett’s discomfort -- his attempt to have it both ways by refusing to listen when Romanowski wants to confess his sins -- exposes his willingness to engage in situational ethics when it comes to friendship and thus humanizes him.

As is so often true in thrilerworld, the story suffers from credibility issues.  It feeds upon the popular paranoid delusion that the government has the ability to intercept and erase all digital communications (including emails and website postings) that mention a particular subject or person.  Romanowski should know better.  It’s also hard to accept that a trained operative like Romanowski would be wedded to the belief that “torture works” when most serious students of interrogation agree that torture produces inaccurate information.  Romanowski even makes a bizarre speech about the “savagery in the streets” America would experience if not for the underappreciated tough guys who torture the evildoers in faraway lands.  Finally, I didn’t believe for a moment the romance that develops late in the story.  On the other hand, Romanowski’s dark secret, when finally revealed, is believable if anti-climactic, although his explanation for failing to blow the whistle on Nemecek makes little sense.

Credibility problems aside, Force of Nature tells an enjoyable story.  The action scenes are fun, the pace is swift, and the parallel plotlines come together nicely in the end (with, of course, the obligatory but unusually clever shoot-out).

RECOMMENDED

Glow by Jessica Maria Tuccelli

Published by Viking on March 15, 2012

Ghosts are common characters in horror stories, but only a few writers (Toni Morrison and William Kennedy come to mind) have successfully incorporated ghosts (real or imagined) into literary novels.  Although she isn’t at the level of either of those two fine authors, Jessica Maria Tuccelli deserves credit for having the courage to attempt a literary ghost story.  I give her even more credit for doing it well, although I suspect the novel would have been just as good -- maybe better -- without its supernatural elements.

Glow is more about the evolution of American race relations and the struggle for civil rights than it is about ghosts.  Tuccelli inserts historical documents into the text -- including congressional resolutions and instructions to census takers -- to emphasize how African Americans and Native Americans were differentiated, or discounted, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  That theme carries through in the more personal stories she tells.  Tuccelli might have been a bit too ambitious in addressing such a complex issue during the course of a hundred years, but she ultimately provides a journey worth taking.

The story has an unusual arc, beginning in the first half of the twentieth century, then working its way back through the nineteenth until time begins to move forward again.  The first quarter of the novel follows two main characters.  In 1924, Amelia J. McGee, the nine-year-old daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and Irish-Scottish father, uncharacteristically defies her parents and enters the woods alone, where she encounters the ghost of a black girl named Lovelady Belle Young.

Amelia’s story alternates with that Ella (E.F.) McGee, who, as a little girl in 1941, gets sidetracked at the end of a bus trip and ends up with Willie Mae and Mary-Mary, two women who have their own experiences with the spirit world.  Ella has her own encounter with a ghost -- one that is decidedly less friendly than Lovelady -- while staying with Willie Mae.

Glow then begins to move back in time.  Born into slavery in 1845, Willie Mae Cotton’s head begins to glow shortly after she survives a serious illness, just after she is separated from her mother and given to a new master.  Her story forms the next section of the novel, featuring some of the most intense scenes in a book that is filled with powerful images.

This is followed by the novel’s weakest section, one that reaches back to 1834 to tell the story of Riddle Young, who raises his sister Emmaline after their father’s death, using Shakespeare’s plays as bedtime stories.  This section of the novel provides an interesting look at the ancestry of characters who appear in earlier (and later) sections, but I’m not sure it adds anything of value to the narrative.

Riddle’s voice strives to be Shakespearean, or at least eloquent.  It is the only unconvincing voice in the novel, although it’s fun to read.  The varied dialog is otherwise well tuned to each character.  From the educated to the pompous, across racial divides and different eras, each character speaks in a unique voice.

Time moves forward again as we return to Willie Mae, pass through the Civil War, and are reintroduced to Lovelady, whose brief section is written in a completely different style, almost a form of free verse.  Racial violence is in full force as the story winds its way back to young Amelia and then to young Ella.  By that time, however, it is difficult to reconnect with those characters (particularly Ella) who have been absent from the text for so long, exposing the most serious drawback in the novel’s structure.

There is much to praise in Glow, beginning with the high quality prose.  Given the difficulties the characters endure, I am impressed by the sense of optimism that runs through the narrative.  Tuccelli mixes humor with tragedy, tosses a few romances into the mix (including one that is quite unconventional), creates compelling moments of drama, and manages to link all the stories together in a way that justifies the novel’s unusual structure.

Still, Glow is not without flaws.  The story wraps up a little too neatly, too coincidentally, in the end (although maybe when ghosts get involved there are no coincidences), and some of the characters -- particularly a biplane pilot and his wing-walking sister, a suffragette who is campaigning for Fighting Bob La Follette’s Progressive Party in the 1924 presidential election -- seem out of place and underdeveloped.  A scene that might have been more at home in a conventional ghost story didn’t work for me, and I’m not at all sure what Willie Mae’s glowing scalp adds to the story.

Although not entirely successful, Glow is a novel of big ideas, strong characters, and vivid images.  I easily liked it enough to recommend it, and I look forward to Tuccelli’s next effort.

RECOMMENDED

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abé

First published in Japanese in 1962; first published in English by Vintage in 1964

Sand takes on a life of its own in Kobo Abé's disturbing novel, The Woman in the Dunes. An entomologist spends his vacation scouring remote sand dunes in the hope that he will find a previously unknown beetle. As night falls, he accepts an invitation to stay in a villager's home. Since each village home is built at the bottom of a bowl that has been dug from the sand, the man must climb down a rope ladder to meet the woman who will be his host. The woman spends the night (as she does every night) shoveling sand from the home's perimeter; if she does not, the home will become engulfed in falling sand. In the morning, the rope ladder is gone, and the man realizes he has been trapped, forced to join the woman in her endless labor.

Notably, the man's absence is not quickly noticed. Given his lonely and judgmental nature, he has no friends. "He longs so much for freedom and action that he can only hate people." In the hole, he has exchanged one empty existence for another. Although the man plots (and attempts) various schemes to escape, we learn in the first pages that the man is declared missing after a seven year absence from his home and job.

The Woman in the Dunes is strange but compelling fiction. The man (we never learn his name) experiences the range of emotions associated with death, from denial through acceptance, as he endures his years in the hole. The woman explains that the sand never stops falling. Each night brings the Sisyphean task of shoveling sand into buckets that village employees will lift from the bowl on ropes. The next night the shoveling must start anew. "But this means you exist only for the purpose of clearing away the sand," the man observes. If ever there was a pointless existence, the man has stumbled into it.

Yet his new life may not be as bad as it might seem. Interestingly, the man comes to value pointless work; it is a tool that makes self-denial possible. The man's relationship with the woman changes over the years, from revulsion (he initially sees her as "an old tube that has been squeezed dry of all sex") to -- if not love -- at least understanding and empathy. Perhaps this is a manifestation of the Stockholm Syndrome, although the novel predates that term. The psychological and philosophical implications of the novel are fascinating.

The story has a surrealistic quality. Abé makes no attempt to explain why this village exists, yet I found it easy to accept the premise. While I am not usually a fan of the existential novel (like many people, I suspect existence is pointless but I find it comforting to pretend otherwise), The Woman in the Dunes is more than a commentary upon the futility of life. Yet as the man comes to terms with his plight -- as he ponders whether his enemies are the villagers who keep him captive, the woman who meekly shares his fate, or the sand itself -- the man is forced to reinvent himself. Much of the novel consists of his internal monologue, the moment-by-moment evolution of the man's reaction to his predicament and his constantly vacillating response (sometimes anger, sometimes desire, sometimes both at once) to the woman whose home (and body) he shares. The novel's ending is foreshadowed but, in the context of the story, it is perfect; no other resolution (if one could call it that) would be true to the events that preceded it.

In short, The Woman in the Dunes is a remarkable piece of fiction. It combines the qualities of a myth with the gritty realism of a suspense novel, all the while challenging the reader to make sense of the story's broader implications.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year vol. 6 by Jonathan Strahan, ed.

Published by Night Shade Books on March 6, 2012

Despite their occasional overlap and inevitable shelving together in libraries and bookstores, science fiction and fantasy are typically as different as physics and magic. One problem with including both fantasy and science fiction in a "best of" anthology is that fans of one but not the other must endure (or skip) a number of stories that they aren't likely to enjoy. Another problem is that the anthologist, in order to please everyone, must assemble a large volume that probably won't entirely please anyone. As dictated by my own preferences, I tended to favor the science fiction over the fantasy in this collection, although Jonathan Strahan selected stories in both genres that I enjoyed.

Two memorable stories that start the collection -- one clearly fantasy and the other sort of a hybrid -- revolve around bees. Eugenia Lily Yu's allegorical "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" imagines map-making and empire-building wasps negotiating with delegates from a hive of bees to resolve a territorial dispute. In "The Case of Death and Honey," Neil Gaiman sends Sherlock Holmes to China, where black honeybees figure in his investigation of the greatest crime of all: the inevitability of death.

Other stories also stand out. Jeffery Ford writes of a weary priest at the end of the world, a talking fish, and the lives changed by the foot of a dead saint (or maybe she was a sinner, and maybe it isn't her foot at all) in "Relic." Paul McAuley tells an unconventional story about a common sf topic in "The Choice" as two young men decide whether and how to use an alien artifact they come to possess. "Malak" refers a robotic military craft with a twist; Peter Watts has imbued his robot with a type of conscience, the ability to assess collateral damage and (if not overridden) to take it into account when making tactical decisions. I would never have thought I'd admire a story about a troll, but Peter S. Beagle's "Underbridge," about a washed-up professor who befriends Seattle's Fremont Troll, made me a believer.

File these under interesting but odd: In Geoff Ryman's "What We Found", a young man tells of growing up in Nigeria before discovering the scientific principle that truth wears out over time. I can't begin to understand "The Server and the Dragon," Hannu Rajaniemi's story about a server (one of many seeding the universe) that has sex with a dragon, but I admire the way it is written. In "The Dala Horse," Michael Swanwick writes of a little Swedish girl with a toy horse who turns out to be something quite different than she first appears ... or is it is the horse that is different?

Funny is always difficult to do well. Cory Doctorow kept me laughing (and thinking about whether "smart" technology might be too smart) with "The Brave Little Toaster," his tale of a squeeze pouch energy drink that turns out to be a rhyming prankster. Dylan Horrocks contributes the very funny (and serious and bizarre and strangely touching) "Steam Girl," about a girl who tells (and illustrates) stories about a dimension-jumping steampunk heroine on Mars ... or perhaps she's telling (and drawing) true stories about herself. How does a colonist establish diplomatic relations with body-snatchers on an alien planet, particularly when the colonist is terrified of them and specializes in waste disposal rather than diplomacy? That's the question posed in An Owomoyela's amusing story, "All That Touches the Air." Karen J. Fowler's "Younger Women" is a cute story about a woman's reaction to the discovery that her daughter is dating a vampire.

Many of the stories are good but not exceptional. Ian McDonald contributes a fairly ordinary story of Martian adventure called "Digging." Ellen Krages writes about the first baby born on Mars in "Goodnight Moons." In the world Kij Johnson constructs in "The Man Who Bridged the Mist," an architect faces the daunting task of building a life-altering bridge over a dangerous divide between the two sides of the Empire, a mysterious flowage of mist in which monsters dwell. Robert Reed writes of a digital man, seemingly immortal, who travels the stars and encounters new life, all the while pining for the long-dead woman who created him, the "Woman in Room." Grown in Tower 7 with a variety of other freaks, an accelerated woman with unusual abilities discovers a secret and yearns for freedom in Nnedi Okorafor's "The Book of Phoenix." What starts as a first contact story turns into something quite different as the approaching aliens bypass Earth so they can focus their attention on the vastly more intelligent Venusians in "The Invasion of Venus" by Stephen Baxter. In "Old Habits," Nalo Hopkinson writes about ghosts who live in a mall, haunted by the life that surrounds them. Echoing Amadeus, "A Small Price for Birdsong" by K.J. Parker explores the relationship between murder, freedom, and musical genius. After America self-destructs, the mother and daughter in "After the Apocalypse" start walking toward a rumored camp in Canada -- Maureen McHugh's answer to The Road (featuring a parent who is less noble but considerably more complex than the "man carry fire" character in Cormac McCarthy's novel).

Strahan chose some stories that, while not necessarily bad, just didn't appeal to me. They were written by Caitlín R. Kiernan, Catherynne M. Valente, Ken Liu, Kelly Link, M. Rickert, Robert Shearman, Bruce Sterling, Margo Lanagan, and Libba Bray.

On the whole, I think there are better annual collections than this one (if only because they are more limited in scope), but the book still offers a chance to read some very good stories.

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