The best (5 stars):
Boy swallows universe was the highlight of the year. An amazing book. Rebecca was an unlikely find from a best-of list. James Islington came up with a great new fantasy series perfectly contained in three books.
Special mentions (4.5 stars):
YES! This is what I want. The west wing in space, but not just politics and government, give me an industry I know nothing about and do a deep-dive within a fictional framework.
Anyway, this novel delivers a political game-of-thrones power struggle for an alien planet whose culture is significantly defined by poetry. There's some interesting alien tech, called an imago, but it comes with significant problems that mean our protagonist has to get by without it for a large part of the novel.
Martine delivers a great political maneuvering thriller between different factions as viewed by an outsider who needs to negotiate a complex geo-political and personal landscape from a weak position. There's a good amount of action in the form of assassinations and uprisings to keep things interesting, although it felt a little under-described in some places.
Apparently the author leaned heavily on her knowledge of Byzantine history and politics to build the plot and power struggle, of which I know nothing, but it certainly felt very real and plausible. Considerable effort went into world building: linguistics, naming, poetry, political factions.
Some minor quibbles and slight spoilers:
Very deserving of the Hugo.
4.5 stars.
It starts out great. The incremental reveal of knowledge facilitated by amnesia was masterful, I was so thirsty to learn everything about this mysterious and dangerous world creating weird monsters and its mysterious powerful siblings warring with each other. But within a few pages our protagonist walks a deus ex machina pattern and now knows everything he forgot. There goes all of the anticipation and world building.
The strange part is that nothing is explained to the reader. He's just now trying to be the king of Amber for literally no defined reason. And apparently everyone else wants to be the king too, and are willing to kill their siblings for the privilege. Why? Power? Money? Do they not have enough of those already as princes? Who knows because literally none of the character motivations are revealed.
And where did it all lead? To the throne of Amber, of course. For that was sufficient justification for anything.
Is it? WHY?
Even now, Bleys and I could find Shadow Ambers where each of us ruled, and spend all of time and eternity ruling there. But this would not be the same, for us. For none would be the true Amber, the city into which we were born, the city from which all others take their shapes.
What, so now you're explicitly telling me this is all pointless. Why should I care about any of these idiots then?
But whatever, let's go pick up an army for this dumb war. Done. In like a page. Let's vaguely describe what they look like, and I'm now their god. Not telling why they think that or how I convinced them to die for my inexplicable power trip:
Then I reviewed the troops again and told them more of Amber. Strangely, they go along like brothers, the big red guys and the little hairy ones. It was sad and it was true. We were their gods, and that was that.
OK I think I need a navy, let me talk to my brother, OK cool got one. Let's go:
We talked for maybe an hour, after which time the northern seaways were open to the three phantom fleets of Bleys, which might enter expecting reinforcements.
Then most of the army and the navy died on the way into Amber, I won't describe it in any detail though, wouldn't want a pesky story to get in the way of just delivering death statistics:
It was three more hours before things let up, and many more later I learned that we had lost half of the fleet (and on my vessel—the flagship—we had lost forty of the crew of one hundred and twenty). It was a hard rain that fell.
Oh, and by the way, I know it's kinda mean to delude millions of people into thinking I'm a god and kill them in a pointless war for a throne I could just have in another identical world, but I feel a bit bad about it:
Then there was the card for Amber itself. I could take myself there with it and try an assassination, but I figured the odds were about a million to one against my living to effect it. I was willing to die fighting, but it was senseless for all these men to go down with me.
I mean I'm totally willing to die for this, but not if I might actually die, like, for real. Far better for millions of my red furry slaves to die instead for a war I'm pretty sure I won't actually win anyway.
If you're so keen on killing Eric, just go there and try yourself again, you came pretty close the first time.
1 star.
Having survived the cruelest of wars, how does one go on in a hostile or indifferent world?
When you have lost everything except memory, how can you count on the future or become attached to another person? Wiesel has written that God died in the camps for him, and it shows in the self-reflection here.
Once I asked my teacher, Kalman the cabalist, the following question: For what purpose did God create man? I understand that man needs God. But what need of man has God?
Suffering brings out the lowest, the most cowardly in man. There is a phase of suffering you reach beyond which you become a brute: beyond it you sell your soul—and worse, the souls of your friends—for a piece of bread, for some warmth, for a moment of oblivion, of sleep. Saints are those who die before the end of the story. The others, those who live out their destiny, no longer dare look at themselves in the mirror, afraid they may see their inner image: a monster laughing at unhappy women and at saints who are dead…
The problem is not: to be or not to be. But rather: to be and not to be. What it comes down to is that man lives while dying, that he represents death to the living, and that’s where tragedy begins.
Our stay there planted time bombs within us. From time to time one of them explodes. And then we are nothing but suffering, shame, and guilt. We feel ashamed and guilty to be alive, to eat as much bread as we want, to wear good, warm socks in the winter. One of these bombs, Kathleen, will undoubtedly bring about madness. It’s inevitable. Anyone who has been there has brought back some of humanity’s madness. One day or another, it will come to the surface.
3 stars
This one is a thought experiment from Wiesel about an alternative path his life could have taken after the war and the liberation of his concentration camp. In his own words:
Suppose the American army, instead of sending me to France, had handed me a visa to the Holy Land—would I have had the courage to join one of the movements that fought for the right of the Jewish people to form an independent state in their ancestral homeland? And if so, could I have gone all the way in my commitment and killed a man, a stranger?
and not just after the camps, but what would he have done if he'd spent two or four years in the camps instead of one? Would he have become a kapo and what would he have done if he was required to strike a friend?
The novel is deeply introspective:
A man hates his enemy because he hates his own hate. He says to himself: This fellow, my enemy, has made me capable of hate. I hate him not because he’s my enemy, not because he hates me, but because he arouses me to hate.
...Because my people have never known how to hate. Their tragedy, throughout the centuries, has stemmed from their inability to hate those who have humiliated and from time to time exterminated them. Now our only chance lies in hating you, in learning the necessity and the art of hate.
3 stars
I have no idea how to rate this book, and doing a literary critique just feels wrong, so I'm leaving it unrated. If you're looking for a first-person non-fiction account of the horror of the Holocaust, this is your book. It's a raw account of survival from a child in just the most horrendous environment.
This is not the sort of book you enjoy, but it's a very important book for educating future generations. I've visited Auschwitz/Birkenau in the winter, so I was able to vividly picture the brutal concentration camps in winter, it's something I'll remember forever.
3.5 stars.
If you can become a character, replicating their mannerisms, opinions and outlook on life so completely as to fool others at what point do you become that character? What if you did that daily for months or years? Where does the character stop and how do you keep yourself separate?
The story and concept isn't bad, but the plot twists and outcome are obvious.
3 stars.
We see McMurphy's fierce individualism, independence, and belief in himself under attack and eroded over time in an effort to make him fit in to continue the "efficient" operation of the hospital. It's a thought provoking example of how power wielded without compassion can lead to catastrophic outcomes.
Imagine applying McMurphy's feelings of being trapped under a weight of meaningless rules, deprivations and indignities to other power relationships: government/citizen, white/black, employer/employee.
4 stars.
I'm not sure it's inspiring, more horrifying, knowing that there are many more like her that don't make it out of poverty and abuse to a comfortable life, let alone international success.
Another thing that suck with me is just how destructive conspiracy theories can be when combined with mental illness. Her Dad's paranoia and radicalization were stoked by the events with the Weavers on Ruby Ridge, and very nearly destroyed the entire family.
4 stars.
He likes me in the way I like Jasper [the dog]
Her footsteps sounded in the corridors, her scent lingered on the stairs. The servants obeyed her orders still, the food we ate was the food she liked. Her favorite flowers filled the rooms. Her clothes were in the wardrobes in her room, her brushes were on the table, her shoes beneath the chair, her nightdress on her bed. Rebecca was still mistress of Manderley.
When the reveal comes it's amazing. And the change it wreaks in our narrator is spectacularly written. Apparently it was too much for Hitchcock, he watered it down for the movie version!
In the version I read there's an excellent analysis in an afterword that I'm tempted to quote from, but too many spoilers. Interestingly though, du Maurier applied parts of her life and character to multiple women represented in the novel.
Loved it.
5 stars.
Spoilers ahead.
When humans build a habitat on the ocean the planet creates a replica of the human they have most injured in their lifetime. This part was amazing, the suspense was great, the tension of what the other men were dealing with was incredible, the killing and rebirth sequences were amazing. The narrator is terrified, not knowing the consequences for not playing along. Here we have outstanding structure for a rollicking horror story, amazing stuff.
But he blows it, completely.
We get these extensive detailed descriptions about the structures made and destroyed by the planet:
the hardened planes on which the layers of ductile matter rising from below have accumulated, while at the same time the deep-ocean geysers mentioned above condense and transform into mobile tentacle-like columns; clusters of them reach toward loci of construction that are strictly determined by the dynamics of the whole, recalling some sort of immense gills of an embryo growing a thousand times faster than normal, and streaming with pinkish blood and a green water so dark it’s almost black.
delivered in the most boring way possible: the narrator reading scientific summaries in the habitat library. Why not first-person? I don't want to read a book about someone reading scientific papers. This is boring AF:
Its extensors and mimoids were seen as tumorous growths; the processes that moved its huge fluid body were examined for indications of chaos and anarchy, to the point that this orientation became an obsession, and the entire scientific literature of the following seven or eight years, though of course free of expressions explicitly indicating the feelings of its authors, nevertheless was like one long barrage of insults—revenge taken by the gray leaderless masses of solaricists upon the unchangingly indifferent object of their intensified research, which continued to pay no attention to them whatsoever.
yawn. OK but eventually he has to get back to the creepy mimics, right? And reveal what the mimics were for the other men?....OK more boring papers, nothing happening. OK the mimics are gone. The end. Flips table.
2 stars.
Perhaps too much is lost in translation...but I loved roadside picnic by the same translator? I suspect the part that doesn't do well in the translation is the humour. It swings between fairly heavy handed, hey don't kill all the scientists and intellectuals or you will destroy society philosophy:
No country can develop without science—it will be destroyed by its neighbors. Without arts and general culture, the country loses its capacity for self-criticism, begins to encourage faulty tendencies, starts to constantly spawn hypocrites and scum, develops consumerism and conceit in its citizens, and eventually again becomes a victim of its more sensible neighbors.
and Monty Python moments:
Is it true that you have hemorrhoids?
I get that this was an incredibly important subversive text of its time, wrapping up a political message in sci-fi. but it doesn't hold up well through time or translation. It's only very notionally sci-fi too, the main character is an alien, but you wouldn't know it without him telling you and the occasional demonstrations of advanced technology that don't fit the otherwise medieval world.
It certainly isn't without quotable moments:
And if the fates decreed for one of them to be born or become a master, he didn’t know what to do with his freedom. He would again hurry to become a slave—a slave of wealth, a slave of outlandish excesses, a slave of his slaves. The vast majority of them weren’t guilty of anything. They were too passive and too ignorant. Their slavery was the result of passivity and ignorance, and passivity and ignorance again and again breeds slavery.
Everyone is free to understand this in his own way. For us scholars, evil is in ignorance, but the church teaches that ignorance is a blessing and that all evil comes from knowledge.
there will always be the ignorant masses, who admire their oppressors and loathe their liberators. And it’s all because a slave has a much better understanding of his master, however brutal, than his liberator, for each slave can easily imagine himself in his master’s place, but few can imagine themselves in the place of a selfless liberator. That’s how people are, Don Rumata, and that’s how our world is.”
“Cruelty is power. Having lost their cruelty, the princes would lose their power, and other cruel men would replace them.”
1 star.
White people tell me all the time that they support racial equality and that they "would have voted for a third Obama term if they could". That's the whitest possible thing to say.
I was hoping this book would shed some light on what is behind that sentiment, and I wasn't disappointed. I think this series of quotes is the explanation:
“There are no more,” the comedian Sinbad joked back in 2010. “There are no black men raised in Kansas and Hawaii. That’s the last one. Y’all better treat this one right. The next one gonna be from Cleveland. He gonna wear a perm. Then you gonna see what it’s really like.” Throughout their residency, the Obamas had refrained from showing America “what it’s really like,” and had instead followed the first lady’s motto, “When they go low, we go high.”
What proved key for Barack Obama was not that he was born to a black man and a white woman, but that his white family approved of the union, and approved of the child who came from it. They did this in 1961—a time when sex between black men and white women, in large swaths of the country, was not just illegal but fraught with mortal danger. But that danger is not part of Obama’s story. The first white people he ever knew, the ones who raised him, were decent in a way that very few black people of that era experienced.
He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people.
What Obama was able to offer white America is something very few African Americans could—trust.
So not only was this guy one of the most incredible leaders, orators and politicians of a generation, but his upbringing uniquely positioned him to be able to appeal to white voters. So of course you would have taken Obama for a third term. If as a white voter, Obama wasn't good enough for you, it's unlikely that any person of colour would ever get your vote.
In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much.
And your vote doesn't cost you anything personally. You had to give it to someone. Another podcast "rich white parents" introduced me to the concept that the only time rights for African Americans advance is when their objectives happen to overlap with those of white people. Such was the case with Obama given his obviously strong leadership and suitability for president.
It’s likely that should white supremacy fall, the means by which that happens might be unthinkable to those of us bound by present realities and politics.
For someone who didn't grow up in the US and with limited American history knowledge this book was a difficult read, and generally pretty dense, but still approachable. I didn't know the names Du Bois, Garvey, Dyson and even those I did recognize: MLK, Malcolm X, I learned more about their world view and how they fit into the the bigger picture.
The historical context in the earlier essays is interesting, as is Coates' narration and background for each of the published essays that goes along with each. What really got to me though was that “We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. And how Coates draws a depressingly strong connection between that reaction and the election of Trump.
For some not-insubstantial sector of the country, the elevation of Barack Obama communicated that the power of the [white person] badge had diminished. For eight long years, the badge-holders watched him.
Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. And yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition’s resolve to destroy him.
“If Republicans didn’t cooperate,” Obama told me, “and there was not a portrait of bipartisan cooperation and a functional federal government, then the party in power would pay the price and they could win back the Senate and/or the House. That wasn’t an inaccurate political calculation.”
Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that in working twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive—work half as hard as black people and even more is possible.
Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won young whites, age 18 to 29 (+4), adult whites, age 30 to 44 (+17), middle-age whites, age 45 to 64 (+28), and senior whites, age 65 and older (+19).
Four years later, an incumbent Obama lost in ten counties in West Virginia to Keith Russell Judd, a white felon incarcerated in a federal prison who racked up more than 40 percent of the Democratic primary vote. A simple thought experiment should be run here—can one imagine a black felon in a federal prison running in a primary against an incumbent white president doing the same?
It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.”
It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington, schooled in the methodology of governance, now liberated from the pretense of anti-racist civility, doing a much more effective job than Trump.
I feel significantly more enlightened after reading this book, but I know I still have a lot to learn. (4 stars)
Much of this book reminded me of The Goldfinch where Theo gets led astray by Boris in suburban Vegas, making bad choices that set him up for failure. Just like in a horror movie I found myself screaming, "nooooo! don't do that!".
That makes it sound dark and desperate, but it isn't. The amazing feat of the writing is that Dalton creates Eli's character with a calm acceptance, a uniquely Aussie self-deprecation and matter-of-factness, a cute and naive romantic crush, and a lot of fairly dark humour about his situation.
The toilet’s floor space is just long enough and wide enough to accommodate a porcelain toilet and an opening door and the floor is currently holding an inch-deep pool of my father’s piss.
Nothing connects a city quite like South-East Asian heroin.
There's drug dealers, an alcoholic father, a mother in prison, domestic violence, gang violence, ex-cons as mentors, and a ruthless bikie anti-hero. But somehow it's...funny. And beautifully poetic:
August is one year older than me but August is one year older than everybody. August is one year older than the universe.
True love like this asks lovers to cast aside what is meant to be and work with what is.
‘You’re not a pussy. Don’t you ever be ashamed of crying. You cry because you give a shit. Don’t ever be ashamed of giving a shit. Too many people in this world are too scared to cry because they’re too scared to give a shit.’
There's plenty of bad stuff, but there's also some glorious uniquely Australian suburban life moments that hit me right in the homesickness spot:
with the frozen food section August and I hang out in on the hottest summer days, debating which ice block is more bite for your buck out of a Hava Heart, a Bubble O’ Bill and, the unchallengeable masterpiece, the banana Paddle Pop.
watching Brisbane’s relatively new and promising rugby league outfit, the Brisbane Broncos, playing Mal Meninga’s near-invincible Canberra
and many mentions of Dunlop KT-26s. The classic shoe of my childhood.
It turns, very surprisingly, into a thrilling page-turner at the end. I suspect fans of literary fiction will find this somewhat disappointing, but I thought it was great, and raced through to the end.
There's just a hint of the supernatural that runs through the story, but we never definitively learn one way or another if this is a coping mechanism invented by Eli and August, or something more fantastic. The logical explanation is the former, but interpretation is left to the reader.
5 stars.
We don't get good characters, there's no reason to really care about any of them. Their motivations are unknown. Taj tells us he's in love with someone and it comes as a surprise because despite being inside his head there was no build-up to that statement and if feels unbelieveable.
We don't get good pacing, time seems to expand and contract all over the place. Taj breaks ribs and an ankle and then seemingly in the same day is back to super-athletic fighting of sin-beasts and it's never mentioned again. All of a sudden Taj is an important member of the royal household, how did that happen?
The ending is a ridiculous cliffhanger, but the next book was out, so I was less mad than people who read this when the first one came out :) The world was just good enough to make me want to see if the next one was any better.
3 stars.
My note on the ending was "SPECTACULAR ENDING". There's few books and epics of this length where I've been as satisfied by the ending as this one. The way the time travel was designed we know what's going to happen and it feels so weighty, and significant, and satisfying.
The anti-religion rhetoric continues:
Faithful people suffer and evil people prosper all the time, Davian—you must know that is true. Besides, if our actions are driven only by reward or punishment—eternal or otherwise—then they are motivated by greed and selfishness, not faith or love. That is where so many people go wrong, even those who say they believe in El. They obey because they think it will make their lives better, rather than themselves. And that is very much the wrong reason.”
And there's actually the occasional philosophical piece of wisdom:
You should never judge the sides of an argument simply by who is doing the arguing.
So many great plot arcs built through the time travel get closed that gave me a little shiver: e.g. we finally close the storyline of the ring.
I really appreciated the note on the open plot line on Aelric and Dezia from the author. It was a very very good decision to leave that plot line open for future novels rather than put it in the critical path of closing out this story. I feel like this is the difficult decision and option that more fantasy writers need to take.
5 star series!
I was so happy to see this at the start of the novel:
The following is meant only as a quick, high-level refresher of the events in The Shadow of What Was Lost, rather than a thorough synopsis.
YES! RECAP! This series is crazy complicated, tons of characters, multiple POVs, and very complex time travel as a central conceit. I needed that recap.
Some of the large plot reveals were super obvious, e.g. who is Malshash, but there were still plenty of surprising reveals. One thing that I liked a lot is that Islington didn't shy away from tragedy, the good guys can lose, catastrophically, and have to pick up the pieces. And that tragedy isn't experienced in a battle-statistics-reporting kind of way, we live through it with first person POVs.
There's a definitely some strong commentary on religion in the novel:
There is only one reason to be passionate about a lack of faith—and that is fear,” said Caeden quietly. “Fear that you are wrong. An innate need for others to share your opinion, so that you can be less afraid.” He shook his head. “I do not feel the need to argue, to cajole, to threaten or accuse. If others wish to believe differently, that is no business of mine. I simply do not think that there are gods.
Religion is the following of rules and rituals in the hope that they will somehow garner the favor of a higher power.
5 stars.
This matches really well with my experience: I don't know or care about any "Jordan did it first" criticisms, but I very much appreciate how quickly the plot moves, in a good way! This whole series feels like taking what would have been a 12-volume fantasy epic and editing out all of the time wasting boring stuff, the books that only cover the boring characters and don't advance the plot, and just nailing it.
It was actually very surprising to read fast-paced fantasy that still operates in a deep well-built world with good characters with a well-defined plot arc. Islington knows exactly where this plot is going and how he's going to tie it all together, he has to because the time travel and its implications are crazy complicated and central to the whole story.
I think part of the criticism about lack of detailed descriptions or backstory confuses what I see as a masterful control of plot reveals with a lack of backstory. Having read the full series I can say the answers are there, for the most part, but he's just not going to let you have them yet. I can't recall another fantasy novel where the intrigue is kept so long for such key concepts. I've come to appreciate that one of the most important thing a novel needs to do is keep me hungry for more, to find out why, and Islington does an impressive job of that through the whole series.
The perfect example here is the term "bleeders": we have no idea why they are called that, despite it being an incredibly commonly term, and used hundreds of times in the first book. We don't find out the backstory until halfway through the second book. That's a wait of over 1000 pages.
5 stars.
The bot’s whole body spasmed, his reflexes made useless by bogus and contradictory commands. A wave of ecstatic nonsense gripped him and the file ended.
There's a lot of sex, I think at the expense of character development. There's also some genuinely creepy moments like when Eliasz climbs onto Paladin's back and becomes aroused by shooting the robot's guns...Somehow Paladin spends a ton of time examining how a relationship with Eliasz could work, but no time examining her motivations for killing tons of people to find pirate Jack.
It was an entertaining read, but one I quickly forgot about and now don't have too much to say.
3.5 stars
You, my witness – I saw your eyes under the bed, like two luteous and patient tombolas waiting for a Napoleonic child to grasp them and roll them into war – might decide that by sparing this woman the torments of childbirth I performed a charitable deed. I had no such need to justify myself, my mouth staying as solemn as a toad’s while I murdered her, my shadow on the wall jerking like the silhouette of a man dying at the end of a rope. It was a pleasure to remove the unborn child, the little homunculus, and throw it on the fire.
and
But still, you shall have a garden where the sky sleeps upon a roof of dark leaves and ivies bind Apollo in a green spell, moss grows like a mineral, and herms endowed with speech plead for caresses; and you shall have a room, an octagonal salon lined in silk of your favourite colour, with a carpet of living serpents and a dome girdled by a circular frieze in which the whale rises endlessly to engulf the last individual plankton.
I couldn't do it anymore. Maybe I should have just skipped that section and kept going, but I didn't have any reason to believe the rest of the novel is different. Reading other reviews of people who like this book, a lot of them talk about skipping sections, so maybe it gets better?
1 star.
Tanner eventually crosses those in power that he has been fighting for in service of his moral code. Doing this at great personal cost gave me a lot of respect for the story in that it wasn't going to be an easy path to victory.
Some things began to annoy me in this one though, the name "Krokinthians" was ridiculous, out of some 1930s space invaders comic book. And I got tired of the battle scenes because they were fought with the same technology and just got repetitive. So. Many. Chaff. Missiles. I couldn't stand hearing about them anymore and just wanted it to be over.
A satisfying ending, but I wanted it to be over before it was.
3 stars.
The training to become a military policeman was somewhat tedious, and felt like an obvious setup for him to be able to one day take down rogue captain Casey. I honestly would have preferred to see Casey killed off than this big hero-vs-villian comic book setup.
The cynicism about war remains:
“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
There's another giant battle, but it requires even more suspension of disbelief than the first die-hard version. Good enough to read the next one, but not amazing.
3.5 stars.
It's basically die-hard in space, with space pirates :)
A pretty good chunk of the start of this book is a military training montage, which is fairly standard SF fare, but this one is definitely above average. I particularly liked the intense focus on realistic living conditions (i.e cooped up inside for months with no respite) and battle scenarios run by real veterans. This is much more about staying fighting to stay alive in the environment, understanding how to react to decompression, fix air filtration systems etc. than just fighting bad guys.
The big battle scene is of the Matthew Riley level, but with less dumb tropes and more die hard grit.
The pirates are also not one-dimensional "baddies", although I'm a little fuzzy on where this book ends and the next begins. We get to understand their motivations and empathize to some extent, despite their horrendous actions.
Running through all the novels is the message that piling up young people with student debt, and gatekeeping any high-paying jobs on qualifications that require that debt, is being used as a tool to push smart but poor students into the military. In Tanner's world the bureaucracy has also been weaponized to create crippling debt for those who can't buy their way to high test scores.
“You can mug a man or pick his pocket and anyone would call you a thief, but there are a million ways to cheat a man on paper and just call it a clerical error.”
And she said that virtually all wars are just the young and poor like me dying for the lies of old rich people. And she’s right.”
4 stars.
"In this", said Susan, as if in a novel, "I can consult no one but myself"
Our modern-day author uses a wheelchair and requires care in the home. The description of that care is actually quite interesting on its own and beautifully written, capturing the profound need on behalf of Lyman, the delicious relief of Ada's help, and the companionship she provides.
This quote captures the essence of the novel, and Lyman's pursuit of understanding of his grandmother's life:
Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually–I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That’s where the interest is. That’s where the meaning will be if I find any.
We see Susan evolve as a character, starting out at peak naivete as an aristocratic artist off on an adventure in the west, already a bit disappointed with her husband who didn't pay for her train ticket. Nonetheless, Oliver tries his best to "keep" her in some level of comfort and very much shielded from the harsh realities of living in a mining camp. But reality does start to leak in, starting with her realization that the mine treated workers essentially like prisoners, and her character begins to change.
Now, having had a glimpse of how rotten a string their lives were tied together with, she walked through them smiling a bright smile of fellowship and sympathy, a smile so rigid that her face hurt when she was finally past.
One constant is a continuous disappointment and resentment of her husband, who she sees as below her station:
But it is quite different about Oliver. I should not be surprised if you did not like him much, or disgusted with your taste.
With a sad, defensive certainty she saw that he lacked some quality of elegance and ease, some fineness of perception, that these others had. It seemed to her that he sat like a boy among men, earnest and honest, but lacking in nimbleness of mind.
She wanted more for him, and better, than he apparently wanted for himself.
Which ignites the quest of the author to try and figure out this relationship, why they stayed together, and what they meant to each other.
“A marriage,” I say. “A masculine and a feminine. A romantic and a realist. A woman who was more lady than woman, and a man who was more man than gentleman.
The harsh new, to white people, environment of the West and powerful corporations looking to exploit its resources, are pitted against Oliver and Susan who live through a series of disappointments and failures that are made more tragic due to the intense work, entrepreneurship, and struggle to survive they are undertaking.
Their goals are misaligned and things become more desperate, pitting them against each other:
She turned and saw him sitting on the bed, still feeling criticized. And he would not bend, that was what made her so resentful. He would not defend himself or justify himself. When she questioned him, wanting to be on his side, wanting to help work out a future for them both, he acted as if she were accusing him of deliberately, out of some stupid notion of honesty, throwing away their chance.
The impatience she created in him troubled her, and yet she had to resist his enthusiasm. For her own sake and the children’s sake and for his sake she had to be sensible. But she smiled, trying to express love even while she blocked his way; she felt that she begged, that he could not insist if she made it clear how much the prospect appalled her.
The ending is tragic and in keeping with the direction of their lives.
It's a very impressive novel, but I found myself bored in some places, which is why I'm taking off a star. Because of the narrative style the author occasionally uses the power to skip parts of their lives he found tedious during his "research". I think had that power been used a little more in some slow sections: IIRC the part in Santa Cruz dragged, despite me somewhat enjoying the early west view of a town that is now a sunny beachside tourist town.
4 stars
