Yo-Ho-Ho and a Bottle of Rum

Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson
p. 1883

It feels strange to admit that I’ve never actually read Treasure Island when the story is itself such a mainstay in pop culture. For sure, it is a tenacious tale that has been reinterpreted over and over again every couple of years for almost a century and a half, and no doubt it will continue to endure the ages because it is such a classic adventure tale with vibrant characters.

It’s always the infamous rogue pirate Long John Silver who gets the most press when people think of Treasure Island, and that’s not a bad impulse, per se, but though Silver is a dynamic and complex character, finally reading him as he’s written made me realize he’s actually rather pathetic. Silver may have been able to round up a herd of mutineers to steal the treasure, but his grasp on their loyalty is tenuous at the best of times and in the end, he is defeated by a smaller party of men, half of whom weren’t even accustomed to sea life, and one of whom is a 14-year-old boy. The film portrayals have gotten one thing right though: Long John Silver is a man of ever-shifting motives and he goes through the whole range of them, but he does have a special fondness for Jim Hawkins and I felt it strongly throughout the book, though I wish we would have had more context as to why.

As for Jim Hawkins, I was a little disappointed that he was so... competent. You have to keep reminding yourself that your narrator is a teenage boy (even upon the retelling of the story, some years later), because he doesn’t present as one. He makes a lot of mistakes, but he’s astoundingly efficient for a boy who has never set foot on a boat before. Hawkins is the catalyst for the treasure hunt, he discovers the mutiny plot, he single-handedly regains control of the ship, endures a bit of suffering and isolation and eventually kills a man who attempts to attack him, and none of this seems to have a lasting effect on his psyche. I would imagine in real life, a boy would show a little more reticence in Jim’s place but young Hawkins is quite bold when confronting the pirates, and he never really sees any consequences for his rash behavior. Everything pretty much works out for the kid. Still, Treasure Island was intended as a boys' adventure novel; that Jim shows incredible mettle and comes out on top is not all that surprising considering the genre.

I’m actually surprised that Smollett, the captain of the Hispaniola, which takes the party to and from their voyage, isn’t a more renown pop culture icon because he was totally awesome. The captain had some of the best lines in the book and it was during the parts where he exerted his leadership that I most felt myself attuned to the action. I wish Robert Louis Stevenson had written a book entirely about Captain Smollett and his prior adventures because I would totally read that.

I am a kid who grew up on "Muppet Treasure Island" and Disney's futuristic reinvention, "Treasure Planet," and I like both of those adaptations, even if they soft-pedal things a bit. Last year I caught a new mini-series adaptation with a pretty great cast, including Eddie Izzard as Long John Silver and Elijah Wood (of all people) as Ben Gunn. For whatever reason, it was on SyFy, so I watched it expecting some fantastical twist on the tale but it ended up having no science fiction elements and I'm still perplexed as to how SyFy ended up with it. That version was a fairly faithful update but what I'm really interested in is the new Starz series starting next month, "Black Sails," which is a prequel to Treasure Island featuring a young John Silver. In an age where the antihero is king, it should be quite compelling to see a story entirely from the pirates' point of view.

John Hawkes is an Enemy of Prose

Second Skin
by John Hawkes
p. 1964

Second Skin is an experimental fiction novel by John Hawkes. On John Hawkes’ Wikipedia page, there is a quote of his that reads as follows:

"I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained."

And if I had known about this ahead of time, I might have been forewarned that I would hate John Hawkes.

But alas, I tend to avoid looking up plot or author style to keep my reading as pure as possible the first time around. Unless I am delving into a popular book I’ve heard a lot about, or a serial book by an author I enjoy, I am usually going in blind. Only after I’ve reached the end and have allowed myself some time to consider what I’ve read and form my own impressions do I then research the author and specific novel (if indeed there is any context to research).

With Second Skin, I truly had to resist the urge to look up the book before I was even halfway through, if only for some clue about what was going on. I can honestly say that 200-odd pages later, I still have no idea what was happening in that novel. I know it’s about a middle-aged man named Edward and his tragic, tragic life wherein all his loved ones commit suicide (father, wife, daughter) or are murdered (son-in-law). I got the impression that there was some strange incestuous aspect of his relationship with his daughter Cassandra but this is never confirmed. The whole novel is just weird. Things happen for seemingly no rhyme or reason and they happen in non-linear fashion, of course. It is just chapter after chapter of tragic bemoaning without any cause or consequence or seemingly any wisdom to be gained. Every other word out of the narrator’s mouth is ‘poor’ this person and ‘poor’ that person and oh isn’t it just so sad? And Edward has got to be the most passive narrator ever because he just lets it all happen.

At some point in the novel, I half expected the author to reveal that Edward the Sad Sack King had a dark alternate ego (a ‘second skin,’ if you will) that was responsible for the highly improbable number of deaths in his life, that he in fact murdered his wife and son-in-law and daughter/lover then blocked it out of his conscious mind.

And you know what? That kind of reveal would have absolutely saved this novel.

Perhaps I just don’t ‘get it.’ Perhaps the deeper meaning was more articulate than I’m giving Hawkes credit for and it all just went over my head. I am certainly not the target reader of this novel; I’ve had a long-standing detestation of poetry. My brain has always angled towards the direct over the abstract and I prefer my novels to present themselves as prose. That this novel read more like an epic poem is probably what turned me off it.

Here is another quote of Hawkes’s that I discovered in my attempt to dissect this impossible book:

"Like the poem, the experimental fiction is an exclamation of psychic materials which come to the writer all readily distorted, prefigured in that inner schism between the rational and the absurd."

In other words: this book is intentionally irrational and there’s probably no point in trying to figure out what it all means anyway. What I’ve gleaned from this experience is that I should probably be a little more choosy with what I waste several hours of my life on next time.

You Blew It Up! You Damn, Dirty Hippies!

Directive 51 
A Novel of Daybreak
by John Barnes

p. 2010

John Barnes’ Directive 51 is the latest in the slew of post-apocalyptic fiction novels in my repertoire, but unlike most of the others I’ve read, it is not a product of Cold War propaganda, but rather a modern day take on the apocalypse, in that it hits us where it counts—technology. Directive 51 is the first in a trilogy of novels (titled the Daybreak trilogy) detailing an attack on the world using bio-terrorism that targets all mechanical and plastic materials, effectively reducing us to pre-industrial-revolution times.

Let’s start with what exactly Directive 51 is. It’s real, for starters, a term coined under the Bush administration, but existing, in some form, under some other title, for a couple decades, according to the afterword by Barnes. It’s the rule that states what happens when the president is found unfit to lead the country, and that is precisely what happens when Daybreak—the name for the underground eco-terrorist movement—is unleashed on the planet. The search for a fitting president in the crisis loosely provides the basis for the first installment in this trilogy... and it’s exactly as boring as it sounds.

Directive 51 is fundamentally an ensemble story, but indispensable government agent, Heather O’Grainne, often takes center stage. Heather works for the department of 'Future Threat Assessment’, a group meant to anticipate crimes and prevent them, and since the story picks up on the very morning that Daybreak (a worldwide coordinated event amongst thousands of different groups and millions of participants) is unleashed, I think it’s safe to say that Heather is probably terrible at her job. But we’re supposed to see her as the smartest person in the room, so it’s probably a good idea to adopt a ‘Just shut up and go with it’ attitude from the start.

A lot of the characters in this story have the potential to be interesting. A lot of the first part follows various ‘Daybreakers’ as they deposit their instruments of destruction around the U.S. and a couple of them are mentioned later, but for the most part, they are dropped without ceremony or just plain presented as brainless, selfish hippies. If Barnes was intending for their cause to be sympathetic, he failed miserably, but I don’t think he was; I think he had every intention of bashing young eco-crusaders for the dirty hippies he thinks they are.

Barnes isn’t very transparent in general. Despite the fact that two party politics really have nothing to do with the conflict, it is repeatedly stressed that the acting president when Daybreak occurs is Democratic, and when he suffers an untimely mental breakdown, his replacement—another Democrat—quickly turns tyrant and stages a coup, actually succeeding in murdering the first president so he can’t reclaim power. The new president is a Republican who had been planning to run in the upcoming election anyway. It is mentioned that he leans towards religious fundamentalism, leading me to suspect that this president will also be problematic when he tries to sneakily impose his beliefs on the American people, vulnerable in this time of crisis... but that entire thread is dropped and it turns out this president is, like, the best prez evah and exactly what America NEEDS... until he gets martyred in a nuclear attack. His replacement? Another Democrat who lets power go to his head... of course. Very subtle, Barnes.

Dropping story threads is something else I have issues with. I understand that this is a trilogy and this is only book one, but nothing really happens. There are a small handful of actions scenes interspersed in a 500 page book, and the rest is all talking, and not even fun or interesting talk at that. Lots of talk is forgivable if the reader is enjoying themselves, but Barnes’ dialogue is forced and his characters are too bland. All of them are either no-nonsense government officials who were too stupid to do anything right or dirty hippies who only thought of themselves. I didn’t find myself rooting for any of them and any of those I thought could be interesting were dropped halfway through. So much for that.

But Directive 51’s biggest problem is in the subversion of its genre. The reason I love reading post-apocalypse stories is to see how ordinary people adapt and survive, but none of Directive 51’s characters are regular people; they are the most important people in the country, literally, and as such they don’t really get to experience the full realm of Daybreak firsthand. They get showers and electricity and access to the last working forms of transportation where others do not, because they are that important. The full depth of human struggle of Daybreak—the starvation, the riots, the ravages of disease—are not felt and these characters are not relatable.

I will give Barnes one thing though—his ratio of female to male characters is impressive and his women are strong and smart and not totally lacking in a couple spare dimensions... The only time I raised an eyebrow was when Heather—our lead hero and at one point, somehow the only voice of reason and stability in the entire government—decided that the best idea, in the wake of a worldwide attack kickstarting the end of the world as we know it, was to get pregnant immediately with her sure-to-not-survive-the-apocalypse handicapped boyfriend.

Because, sure.

This foolhardy logic aside, Heather did a great job as lead and I’m sure she and all the other characters introduced in Directive 51 continue to grow and have adventures in the next two novels in Barnes’ trilogy... but I’m clearly not the target audience for them.

Victory At Any Cost

Triumph
by Philip Wylie
p. 1963

Something about Triumph feels really familiar to me... and I don’t think it’s because I just happen to read a lot of Cold War era post-apocalyptic fiction. The basic plot of Philip Wylie’s Triumph is almost exactly that of Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7, the book that initially sparked my interest in this very specific genre some years back, so the comparisons in this review are inescapable. Both novels feature protagonists sequestered in a secure, deep, underground base following worldwide nuclear holocaust and their struggle to survive in a world they destroyed in an instant.

Triumph’s chief protagonist is Dr. Ben Bernman, a scientist who happens to be spending a weekend at Sachem’s Watch, the estate of millionaire, Vance Farr, when the world’s arsenal of nuclear technology is unleashed. Luckily for Ben, Vance Farr is The Man Who Thought of Everything, so when the sirens go off, Farr and his friends and family retreat to his vast underground shelter, where anything they could possibly need to survive a long nuclear winter awaits. Not much of import happens in the two years they spend underground; despite a lot of attractive young people of various races congregating in limited space, a few extramarital attractions, and one character’s rampant alcoholism, nothing really dramatic takes place amongst the ranks of the survivors of Sachem’s Watch. People learn to cooperate pretty quickly and—with the exception of one moment of insanity near the end of their internment—jealousy and racism are miraculously not issues.

I found this novel a bit dry, especially in comparison to Level 7, which is strange when you consider that Triumph focused on fourteen civilian survivors (including a billionaire who built a miracle bomb shelter, his alcoholic wife, his Italian-Irish mistress, and a wunderkind Japanese technowhiz, among others) whereas Level 7 was a vague narrative focusing on military personnel who lacked even first names. I think this is because where Level 7 maintained an air of mystery by being so stingy with the details, Triumph tended to overload us with facts, particularly with dry interludes on the remaining American military and their vengeful attempts to bring down the ‘Russkies.' If Vance Farr is The Man Who Thought of Everything in regards to bunker life (he even thought of providing roller skates for entertainment!) then Philip Wylie is The Author Who Thought of Everything in regards to surviving nuclear holocaust. However, I thought the most engaging parts of Triumph were the sporadic diary entries of one survivor describing daily bunker life in her words, and not the 'scientific' or philosophical rambling of the men. I tended to zone out when Ben and Farr were talking tech.

Then there were the jarring segments where the violence of the surviving outside world were described in shocking detail that was atypical of the rest of the book. I feel these were done for shock value and added very little to the story.

naïve.

My initial feeling towards Triumph was dislike. When I read Level 7, I was impressed by its progressiveness. The language was vague and provided no indicators of whose point of view we were getting; it could be ‘us’ or ‘them’ and in the end, neither side mattered because everyone perished at their own folly. Triumph, on the other hand, was not so subtle in their ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ attitude. The constant references to ‘Reds’ and ‘Russkies’ getting ‘what they deserved,’ the revenge-driven interludes with the military, and the obsession with being the ‘winners’ or the last men standing all left a bad taste in my mouth, as it seemed terribly naive.

However, I am willing to lend Wylie the benefit of the doubt and say that this opinion was presented solely as a contrast to the progressive peaceful stance taken by the survivors of Sachem’s Watch. Many times throughout the book, the characters discuss racial relations and how interesting it is that the survivors are so amalgamated—white, black, Japanese, Chinese, Jewish, Italian, rich, poor—it’s a real 'We Are the World' down there. The attitudes presented may seem dated by today’s politically correct standards, but at the time, they were progressive. Everyone gets along and race is rarely, if ever, a matter of contention, so it seems fitting that in the end the fortunate, well-meaning survivors of Farr’s estate—and not the men whose revenge drove them to the inevitable murder-suicide of the entire northern hemisphere—seem to be the only living things to escape the ruins of America unscathed.