Empire State by Adam Christopher

Published by Angry Robot on December 27, 2011

Start by combining a depression-era gangster story with a comic book saga of superheroes wearing rocket boots, mix in a private detective, toss in a rogue robot, add an alternate history in which a parallel version of New York City is isolated and at war with an enemy that surrounds it, top it off with transdimensional travel and time confusion and you’ve got Empire State.  Sounds like a mess, doesn’t it?  Empire State is such a strange novel that, despite being unimpressed with Adam Christopher’s prose and unenthused about the storyline, I kept reading just to find out what would happen next.  I suppose that’s a recommendation of sorts.

The two superheroes who once protected New York City -- the Skyguard and the Science Pirate -- have taken a holiday from crime fighting so they can battle each other, leaving the depression-era city at the mercy of bootleggers and mobsters, predators and corrupt officials.  One defeats the other and a gangster named Rex Braybury seems to defeat the winner.

Years later, a private detective in Empire State named Rad Bradley (who bears an uncanny resemblance to New York’s Rex) is hired to find a missing woman. The woman’s corpse turns up before Rad has a chance to conduct a serious search.  The evidence suggests that the woman was murdered by a robot but in this novel things aren’t always as they appear.  Besides, robots are generally found only on the ironclad ships that sail off to war in defense of the Empire State, never to return -- except, that is, for the ironclad that recently came home and is now quarantined at a safe distance from the port.  Could a killer robot have come from the ship?  Rad, his reporter friend Kane, and a strange character named Captain Carson resolve to find out.  Rad soon uncovers secrets about the war and the robots that are concealed from the Empire State populace.  Later he learns an even bigger secret about the nature of the Empire State itself.

Adam Christopher’s writing style is ordinary, at best -- not awful, but this isn’t a novel you’ll read for the beauty of its prose.  The convoluted plot just barely holds together.  In the end I thought this was a novel in search of an identity; it doesn’t know quite what it wants to be.  It doesn’t work as a crime or detective story, despite the presence of a detective and mobster, nor does it succeed as an action/adventure story.  Empire State is more tongue-in-cheek sci-fi than serious speculative fiction (I wouldn’t even regard it as serious comic book fiction; I’m not sure why superheroes are part of the plot) but it often reads as if it were meant to be taken seriously.  Still, if you ignore the absence of any reasonable explanation for nearly anything of consequence that happens as the story unfolds, Empire State does have some limited entertainment value.

Part of the fun of Empire State is picking out all the in-jokes.  In the Empire State, Seduction of the Innocent isn’t Fredric Wertham’s infamous diatribe against comic books but a quasi-religious “moral code” written by The Pastor of Lost Souls.  (Of course, a character named Frederick turns up in the novel.)  From a street named Soma to a theater production called Boneshaker, the novel is filled with thinly veiled references to the history of science fiction and comic books -- the character Kane, for instance, brings to mind Bob Kane, who created The Batman.  Mix together Bradley and Braybury (the twinned characters from the parallel worlds) and you get Bradbury.

Based solely on its audacity, I am tempted to recommend Empire State, but I can do so only with the warning that its many flaws nearly outweigh the fun factor that might motivate a reader to give it a try.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS 

Children of Paranoia by Trevor Shane

Published by Dutton on September 8, 2011

Children of Paranoia begins with a murder: an efficient strangulation. We soon learn that Joe, the murderer, is a professional killer, part of a group of assassins who carried out a series of murders that same day. Their motivation, revealed in an early chapter, is linked to the novel's premise: a clandestine war is afoot, waged by participants who begin training at sixteen and begin killing at eighteen (unless they are assigned to be intelligence officers or breeders). Trevor Shane is less quick to explain the war's purpose, why it started and what the two sides represent. Joe doesn't know. He simply believes he's one of the good guys and that the world will be a better place when all the bad guys are dead.

The war seems like one of those Hatfield-McCoy style feuds that has lasted for so many generations nobody can recall why it started. The beauty of this story lies in the uncertainty: Why is this war being waged? Are the bad guys really bad, the good guys really good? When two people on different sides happen to be friends, neither of them aware that the other is involved in the war, should their status as soldiers overcome their friendship?

The story of a professional killer in an unlikely war eventually intermingles with an even less likely love story as Joe meets the woman of his dreams while stalking his latest target. Most of the book, in fact, is written in the form of a letter (a very long letter) to the woman Joe loves (a technique that is ultimately flawed, since Joe ends up giving his lover detailed accounts of events she experienced firsthand). Due to a bizarre rule that binds the war's combatants, that relationship eventually causes a problem for Joe. While the rule and the problem create the dramatic conflict that drives the second half of the story, I have trouble making any sense of the rule. My inability to suspend disbelief ultimately made it difficult to remain engrossed in the novel. More troubling is that the story's second half tends toward melodrama. It sometimes has the feel of a made-for-TV-movie; at other times it seems like a cheesier version of Logan's Run. The second half is redeemed, however, by a strong ending that truly surprised me.

Putting aside my reservations about plot development in its second half, I consider the novel as a whole to be a worthwhile read. Shane writes in a compelling style, deftly mixing scenes of death with images of ordinary life, creating sympathy for those fighting on both sides of the war. His point, I think, is made rather explicitly when one of the soldiers comments about fighting in three wars -- Korea, Vietnam, and this one -- and complains that he was lied to each time about the threat posed to the "good guys" by the "evil enemy."

I don't know that the premise underlying Children of Paranoia merits a trilogy but it isn't fair to judge books I haven't read; they might turn out to be stellar, and this one sets up the next one quite nicely. Children of Paranoia showed enough promise that I am mildly interested in reading the next one, if only to find out whether Shane can concoct a plausible explanation for the secret war.

RECOMMENDED

The Washington Square Ensemble by Madison Smartt Bell

First published in 1983; digital edition published by Open Road Media on December 6, 2011

The Washington Square Ensemble starts with a few lyrics of a Tom Waits song but the novel is like an extended version of Tom Waits, a story of downtrodden life on the streets, of mislaid hopes and shattered dreams. The sections narrated by the central character, Johnny B., read like a prose version of beat poetry spoken with Waits' gravelly voice. There are, unfortunately, too few of those sections. If the entire book had been written in Johnny B.'s voice, it would have been a more successful venture. Still, Madison Smartt Bell's first novel provides an enjoyable glimpse of the writing ability that he refined later in his career.

The titular ensemble consists of several sketchy characters. Johnny B. Goode, a/k/a Gianni Dellacroce, a/k/a Enrico Spaghetti, is a drug dealer in New York City's Washington Square. His ex-friend Porco Miserio is an alcoholic musician and scam artist who recently acquired a Storytelling Stone. The other characters sell drugs for Johnny. Yusuf Ali is Johnny's muscle. Despite his drug dealing, Yusuf is trying to be a devout Muslim, a delicate balancing act made necessary by his belief that he must live in the world he can see, not in the realm of spirituality. Santa Barbara is a Puerto Rican who practices Santería. Holy Mother is an ex-con, a former mob member and current addict.

The novel is structured as a series of short chapters, each narrated by one of the central characters. Bell reveals each character piece by piece, building them into whole men, gritty and sad, by the end of part one. While Bell deserves credit for giving each character a distinctive voice, I wasn't always convinced that the voice was authentic. Santa Barbara, for instance, sounds more like a caricature of a Puerto Rican than an actual Puerto Rican, particularly not one who came to the United States at the age of five. I had a similar reaction to Yusuf, whose voice struck me as artificial, the voice of a cartoon Muslim.

Uneven storytelling is the other significant flaw in The Washington Square Ensemble. I was fascinated by Holy Mother's story, including his life in the mob and his accidental involvement in the 1971 Attica prison riot. Porco's story is almost as good; his attempts at philosophy add welcome humor to the darkness. The stories told by the other characters are less interesting.

About halfway in, the characters' backgrounds having been established, a plot begins to take shape. My affinity for all the characters (whether I believed them or not) grew as the story progressed. The plot -- and there isn't much of one -- has an unfortunate tendency to meander before fizzling out altogether. I thought more might be made of the Storytelling Stone, or of Santa Barbara's Santería, but the talking rock is just a device to get the story moving and Santa's witchcraft merely furnishes an excuse for an amusing examination of comparative religion.

Fortunately, rooted beneath the seemingly random events that occur during the course of the novel is a story of friendship. Even when they don't want to, even when they're not supposed to, even when there's no profit in it, the characters care about each other, help each other. Bell makes the oft-forgotten point that even the lowliest members of society, even those who live beyond the bounds of society, need (and are made better by) friends. Friendship is the plot thread (thin though it may be) that redeems the novel -- friendship and humor and enough solid writing to make the reading experience worthwhile.

RECOMMENDED

Red Flags by Juris Jurevics

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on September 20, 2011

Solid writing, intense action, strong characters, and a vividly detailed setting make Red Flags a winning hybrid of war story and espionage thriller. The book also offers a nice history lesson in some lesser known aspects of America's involvement in Vietnam.

Erik Rider, an investigator with the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, is assigned to disrupt the manufacture, transportation, and sale of drugs that are used to finance the Viet Cong. Rider travels to Cheo Reo in his undercover role as a captain, where he meets the CO -- Lt. Col. Bennett -- and a CIA agent named John Ruchevsky. After Rider finds and destroys a marijuana field, there's a price on his head, but his real goal is take out the poppy fields. That goal proves to be unpopular with people in the money chain -- people who might be closer to him than he thinks. As Rider digs more deeply into the drug trade, Ruchevsky searches for the spy who is giving classified information to the North Vietnamese. The two investigations eventually become entangled.

Rider has an interesting relationship with a female doctor -- interesting because Juris Jurevics avoids treating the reader to a clichéd combat romance. In fact, nothing about Red Flags is clichéd. The story is original, the characters genuine.

Clean, crisp, evocative prose sets this novel apart from most war thrillers. Jurevics crafts scenes of war that are poignant and heartfelt. The action scenes in Red Flags are written with adrenalin-pumping power. Although the novel moves at a brisk pace, there are only a few combat sequences. Rather, Jurjevics creates stark images of the fighting's aftermath: devastated landscapes, bloated corpses, haunted soldiers and grieving civilians. He also builds tension with anticipation: you know the shooting is coming but you don't know when. Jurjevics masterfully conveys a soldier's sense of waiting in dread, always living somewhere between boredom and terror.

As background to Rider's personal story, Red Flags captures the political complexity of Vietnam during the war era. The novel's focus on drug trafficking -- an instrument that financed both sides of the war -- isn't new, nor is its depiction of widespread corruption among the South Vietnamese leadership, but its emphasis on the role played by the Montagnard is something I haven't seen in other Vietnam fiction. Jurjevics manages to explain the conflicts between the different political, ethnic, and religious factions in South Vietnam without slowing the novel's pace.

The plot is well constructed and a critical event near the novel's end, although foreshadowed in the prologue, comes as a shock. The novel doesn't have a happy ending but neither did the war. The ending is nonetheless satisfying. The story as a whole conveys a feeling of reality seldom found in the shallow tales of heroism that too often characterize military fiction. This is one of the best military espionage thrillers I've encountered.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Spurious by Lars Iyer

Published by Melville House on January 25, 2011

If it weren't so funny, Spurious would be insanely depressing. W. and the novel's narrator, Lars, both know that, lacking the genius of Kafka, they will amount to nothing. They have been destroyed by literature; it has made them "vague and full of pathos." They are equally unskilled as philosophers. They would like to be intellectuals but they suffer from a deficiency of intellect. Drinking their way through Europe, they are overwhelmed by history that magnifies their own insignificance. A double suicide seems to be in order, but the logistics of accomplishing that task are beyond them. Yet even their deaths would be pointless because they are inconsequential parts of larger structure, easily replaced by others of no greater importance.

Paradoxically, the gloomy friends describe themselves as "joyful." They tell themselves that they are content with their idiocy. They are "celebrants of rivers"; a view of the sea from a passing train while holding cups full of gin is their definition of happiness. Contradiction is a constant in their lives; they never seem to be bothered by (or even to notice) their inconsistency. W. strives to puzzle out the meanings of primary sources written in languages he doesn't understand and to decipher mathematical concepts that are well beyond him. That he gains nothing productive from these efforts does not deter him; he is certain that his life will be spent in continual amazement at his utter lack of ability. Lars, on the other hand, is a capable administrator; he feels the need to earn a living, for which W. frequently belittles him. In fact, Lars is the constant recipient of W.'s insults (W. regards verbal abuse as "a sign of love"): Lars is (according to W.) obese, stupid, lazy, untalented, ill-mannered, incapable of love, and without any fashion sense.

The story careens between the philosophical and the frivolous (as when W. tries to persuade Lars that a "man bag" is preferable to a rucksack). One moment W. and Lars are discussing the relationship between God and mathematics, the next they're pondering the causes of the incurable dampness in Lars' flat or the merits of living in Canada, where residents presumably carry "bear-frightening devices" in their vehicles. There is a zany intelligence, an absurdist wit at work here (in that sense, Spurious reminded me of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). Lars Iyer takes two characters who are lost in existential angst -- indifferent to their fates, deliberately living meaningless lives, convinced they are powerless to change the hopelessness and suffering that surrounds them -- and exposes their vapid, self-indulgent natures. Iyer's satirical take on intellectualism is spot on. Anyone acquainted with a "serious thinker" who takes his or her thinking too seriously will smile with recognition while reading Spurious.

At the same time, intermingled with the silliness are bits of genuine philosophy, deep thought disguised as idle chatter. The book demands a second reading just to sift out the sense from the nonsense, assuming it's possible to tell one from the other. As W. moans, he can never be sure whether he is "at the summit of his creativity or the peak of his idiocy."

This isn't a book for readers who can't abide stories that have no plot. This is a novel of comedic conversation, an examination of two friends who travel together, who gaze at the sea and mull over their lives, confess their shortcomings, debate the meaning of friendship, discuss obscure filmmakers, mourn or welcome (depending on their mood) the coming apocalypse, and accomplish nothing. If you can appreciate the humor in that, and don't mind that nothing of consequence happens to the two characters, you'll probably enjoy Spurious. It's fresh, it's original, it's insightful, and above all, it's hilarious.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED