The Twelve by Justin Cronin (3 stars)

The Passage was a very strong book, what of its successor? Sadly disappointing.

I opened The Twelve to find myself back at year zero, immediately after the release of the virus. Sigh. Cronin intricately led us through the release of the virus in the first book, so I wasn't at all interested in taking two steps back.

Nevertheless, I dug in and was once again impressed with Cronin's character building: 'last stand in Denver' was brilliant, and PTSD-denial-Lily was quite well-drawn in the early novel. Although that's not to say I liked reading her passages, they were really annoying, and made me want to slap her, but that was the point. Here she is, in full-delusion mode, musing about where she could go for dinner, despite there being virals ready to eat her outside her front door:

They had a marvelous patio draped with vines of fragrant flowers, and the most wonderful chef - he had visited their table once - who had trained at Cordon Bleu. Pierre? Francois? The man could do the most amazing thing with sauces, teasing the deepest flavor from even the simples dishes...

And I thought the reasoning for her self-inflicted delusion was actually quite well constructed. Later in the book I thought she was also good in her mad queen of hearts role.

Danny the autistic busdriver I could have done without. Not only did it start to feel like the mentally ill survivors club, but Danny seemed to be copied from Tom Cullen in The Stand. In fact, I commented on the Passage being less mystical than The Stand as a good thing, but Cronin obviously read my review and took it as criticism because The Twelve is every bit as mystical as The Stand.

The worst part of this was that the storyline with Danny, 'last stand in Denver' and the pink-punk chick was unceremoniously dropped, presumably to reappear in the third book. It felt like pushing through a lot of packing material to find out someone sent you an empty box.

At least Danny was a real character. I have no idea what is up with Lore, whose character seems to be solely defined by who she is having sex with. I was assuming she was a spy for the homeland red-eyes, but it seems not, so I suspect she has some sinister Zero-related role to play in the final book.

One of my favourite parts of the book was the massacre in the field. The tension was unbelievable, it was obvious something was going to happen, but the actual events were quite unexpected and it felt like a return to form. Hardboxes, scary virals, eking out a living in the shadow of danger.

Unfortunately as the plot continues it makes less and less sense. Here come the spoilers.

After Amy visits Carter's lair, which was awesome, we descend into what feels like a screenplay sketch: there's little character development, the plot follows along in a predictable direction, and the sinister feel of the whole world just evaporates. Why did the 12 leave their armies of virals behind to join the humans for a drac convention? Sure they need a stable human population, but they have all the power, they can dictate the terms. It felt like Cronin just needed to get done with The Twelve to focus on Zero in the final book.

Don't expect to fully understand what is going on without re-reading The Passage. Despite re-reading my review, the wikipedia summary, and the clumsy biblical recap at the beginning, it wasn't enough for when Cronin finally got back to the original story 200 pages in. He expects you to recall a lot of the details and relationships from the previous novel.

I'll still read the next book, let's hope he can bring it home.

3 stars.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (4 stars)

Quick, movie's out, read the book again! Since Peter Jackson chose to stretch one small children's book into 3 long movies it turns out you can easily read the book chapters covered by the movie faster than you can watch the movie, and reading the whole book only takes a few hours.

As a children's book I think it is pretty damn good. You can see Tolkien building up ideas for Lord of the Rings: the easily-killed but numerous spiders are the building blocks for the much more sinister and powerful Shelob, the swords taken from the trolls were very reminiscent of the swords acquired from the Barrow-wight and used to kill the Nazgul, and the Battle of Five Armies is a smaller scale template for the epic battle of Helm's Deep.

On a less positive note, I found the foreshadowing fairly annoying, and I'm not sure why it is there. Maybe Tolkien thought kids needed to be reassured that everything was going to work out in the end, or needed all the dots explicitly connected?

...which shows he was a wise elf and wiser than the men of the town, though not quite right, as we shall see in the end.

...And the knotted ropes are too slender for my weight. Luckily for him that was not true, as you will see.

Great children's book, and I'm going to score it as such, I certainly loved it as a kid.

4 stars.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (4.5 stars)

Miéville drops you straight into a foot of New Crobuzon muck:

It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protuding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering...

Some people got sick of reading about how dirty New Crobuzon is, but when it is said like this, I could read it all day:

Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt.

The scene-setting and the prose are simply fantastic. If you had to look up 'troglodytic', keep your dictionary close by for 'liminal, 'autopoiesis', 'deracinated', 'stygian', and 'etiolated'. I didn't know whether to be impressed by these, or annoyed, it felt like Miéville had lost a bet and had to include half a 'word a day' calendar in the novel.

But it's hard to stay mad at a dark, dirty steampunk world with insecto-humanoids, menancing mind controlling aliens, and mechanical super-intelligences. Miéville's city-world is fantastically imagined and described. Remaking, magic-come-bio-engineering-on-LSD, is particularly horrifying and grotesque, especially when used as punishment:

A failed burglar, he had refused to testify against his gang, and the magister had ordered his silence made permanent: he had had his mouth taken away, sealed with a seamless stretch of flesh. Rather than live on tubes of soup pushed through his nose, Joshua had sliced himself a new mouth, but the pain had made him tremble, and it was a ragged, torn, unfinished-looking thing, a flaccid wound.

And that's not even close to the most disturbing example, think about what remaking means for a red-light district. And yes, Miéville describes it.

Isaac I liked, although I had trouble imagining him and his voice - the many 'Yag, mate' phrases could have been cockney or even Australian. I got sick of the pseudo-scientific crisis theory discussions:

So I'm a MUFTI, a Moving Unified Field Theorist. Not a SUFTI, a Static Unified...you get the idea. But then, being a MUFTI raises as many problems as it solves: if it moves how does it move? Steady gait? Punctuated inversion?

y and z were unified, bounded wholes. And most crucially, so was x, Andrej's mind, the reference point for the whole model. It was integral to the form of each that they were totalities....

But I'm totally with Isaac as regards to Palgolak:

Palgolak was a god of knowledge. He was depicted either as a fat, squat human reading in a bath, or a svelte vodyanoi doing the same, or, mystically, both at once....He rather hoped the fat bastard did exist, in some form or other. Isaac liked the idea of an inter-aspectual entity so enamoured with knowledge that it just roamed from realm to realm in a bath, murmuring with interest at everything it came across.

And I have to admit the crisis engine as a power source for the Construct Council steampunk supercomputer (punch cards!) and its minions is a storyline I wish was followed more. Steampunk skynet:

My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.

I enjoyed the Aliens/Predator-style slake-moth hunt, but I felt a significant disconnect between the descriptive world-building of the early novel and the alien top-gun style dogfight battles.

So maybe the climax was a little silly, but it was definitely entertaining. The denouement was horrible though. A tacked-on boring sequence of events, a bizarre moral dilemma, and a walkout. Ending a book like this was always going to be tough, but this really detracted from the whole experience.

4.5 stars