Sunday, March 31, 2013

Taking Suspension of Disbelief to New Heights

Roofworld
by Christopher Fowler
p. 1988




High above the city streets of London there exists a culture of young people who live among the rooftops, swinging from metal cables and living off the grid, unseen and largely forgotten by the world below... that is, until a couple of hapless twenty-somethings stumble upon their niche society and get thrown in the middle of an urban gang war fought right over our heads. That is the general idea behind Christopher Fowler’s Roofworld—a dark, at times absurdly comical, at times distinctly horrific thriller novel—that introduces the reader to a different kind of ‘high society,’ and one that exists entirely in secret.

As a part of his boring job finding books to translate to the big screen, 24-year-old Robert Linden must track down Sarah Endsleigh, the elusive daughter of a recently murdered author, as she holds the rights to her mother’s only novel. In doing so, Robert meets Rose, the author’s feisty, independent landlord, and the two of them stumble upon Sarah’s alternative lifestyle—as one of the inhabitants of ‘Roofworld,’ a community of young people who live on the rooftops and travel among a long-existing series of cable wires in order to escape the drudge of everyday society. There are two warring factions, Sarah’s people, led by her enigmatic boyfriend (who later turns out to be a dud), Nathaniel Zalian, and a much larger, Nazi-esque lot of screw-ups, skinheads and drug addicts who bumble around under the guidance of their cult leader, who calls himself Chymes. It’s got something to do with occult mumbo jumbo—something about the sun and the moon and zodiac signs or whatever and there’s a lot of cult-ish yammering going on amongst Chymes and his disciples, but it’s all very boring and eye-roll-inducing and really only there to amp up the danger element.

I had a funny moment early on, when it struck me how similar Roofworld felt to Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, which Iread a few weeks back, except that Roofworld was published 8 years prior to Gaiman’s book.

It’s pretty striking: a boring, young man in a dead-end job (even their names are similar—Richard/Robert) meets a mysterious girl and is thrust into an alternative London society that ‘normal’ people completely overlook in their day to day lives—only while Neverwhere implores you to look below, Roofworld has you looking at what’s above. When his life is threatened, the unwitting hero must summon  unnatural courage to save the day. There are dubious allies, lots of murders going on thanks to a villain with a God complex, and, although Roofworld is mostly grounded in ‘reality,’ there is still a distinct magical feel to it reminiscent of Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

All of this is not to say that Gaiman stole his idea from this lesser known author. I fully believe that it’s possible that two authors can come up with the same idea independent of one another, or that even if one did inspire the other, the interpretation of the idea can vary and the author’s can have different things to say. Besides, Neverwhere is supposedly based on the book Free Live Free, by Gene Wolfe, and that was published four years before Roofworld. Having not read that one, I can’t claim any similarities but it does illustrate the point I’m getting to here, which is that this journey—the unwitting hero who is thrust into a world parallel to our own—is quite a popular one in fantasy/science fiction. And it’s not hard to see why—the idea that there is an escape to the mundane, that we are destined for something greater, that it’s waiting for us just outside the door if only we would look, it’s the stuff urban adventure tales are made of, and it’s applied here to great effect.

Though I found Fowler’s book hard to put down, I still had some complaints about it. The focus shifts around too much, like Fowler couldn’t decide what kind of a story he wanted to write. There are the chapters focusing on the Roofworlders and their battles, there are the chapters about Robert and Rose—the newcomers and outsiders—and there is a third thread about headstrong, sexist Detective Ian Hargreave, his coworker/lover Janice, and the commissioner’s puny son, Butterworth, a young constable needing to prove himself and whom Hargreave constantly picks on. And littered in between all of this are a smattering of tedious chapters wherein Chymes predictably offs another dumb disciple. Fowler tried to go in too many directions at once and the whole thing is just kind of a mess. Though occasionally entertaining, Hargreave and Butterworth’s side adventures were totally unnecessary and detracted from what should have been the main focus—the state of Roofworld and the people who inhabit it.

Set in 1988, Roofworld has a style that is—at times painfully—reflective of its time. This is a deviation where I appreciate Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere over Roofworld, because the former painted a decent comparison to our tendency to overlook the disenfranchised, while the latter focused on people who chose to be disenfranchised, and spent a lot of time ragging predictably on big corporations and ‘the man,’ though not in so many words. I believe Fowler had some big ideas but not enough follow through for it to mean anything. Roofworld, though it is swinging away towards its inevitable dissolution, is presented as a sort of utopia, but I felt no compulsion to join them. Perhaps it was in part due to my inability to fully picture Fowler’s strange world. Having never lived in an urban landscape, I have a hard time picturing how such a thing would even be possible.

But mostly, I just found the Roofworlders obnoxious and pretentious ‘kids’ who don’t want to grow up.

Roofworld is not a bad book, and it certainly gives you some things to think about, but I’m going to need more than a few cables and wires attached to buildings to suspend my disbelief for that long.










(And let's talk about that byline on the back page for a minute... "You won't see them unless you know where to look"? Well that just sort of invalidates the entire plot of the book you're about to read. Shame on you, publishers!)

Monday, March 25, 2013

... And Now For Something Completely Stupid



Blood Worm
by John Halkin
p. 1988 



After reading a lot of heavier fare lately, my mind cried out for something mindless and entertaining, and directed my eyes to Blood Worm, because what screams ‘mindless entertainment’ better than giant, bloodsucking worms terrorizing London? Penned in the late eighties by John Halkin, author of such revolutionary literature as Slither, Slime, and Squelch, and with a hilariously over the top cover featuring a slathering serpent rising from untold bloody depths to twine itself around a crumbling Big Ben, Blood Worm seemed like just the remedy I needed, but sadly it fell prey to the old standard for horror books of its sort: too ridiculous to be taken seriously, but not ridiculous enough to circle back around to awesome.


There’s nothing wrong with the mechanics of Halkin’s prose. If anything, it’s too ordinary. Riddled with clichés—such as the hero championing his wild theories, whom no one believes until it’s too late, the constantly-in-peril child, even a disorderly death scene where a former soldier suffers from ‘Nam flashbacks while he is devoured by beetles—Blood Worm just tries a bit too hard to be something it has no chance of being. Bloodsucking worms and beetles are swarming over small town England; nobody cares that the hero’s wife was unfaithful to her marriage or that another character feels shame at her cowardice. All of these tedious things detract from the BLOODSUCKING WORMS.


And let’s talk about those worms for a minute here.


The cover of Blood Worm, which undoubtedly drew me to the book in the first place (years ago, before it sat on my shelf collecting dust), presents a gigantic, skyscraper-sized beastly worm, but this is false advertising. The worms in the book never reach this size. At most they are human-sized, and even at that size, they aren’t even the biggest threat in the novel. That honor is bestowed upon the green and pink beetles from which the worms emerge. Dazzling and deadly, it is the beetles we see first and the beetles which are significantly harder to defeat, especially since they present a double threat as they also eat away at the wooden infrastructure of the town’s buildings, threatening collapse if not properly inspected. And here is exactly why I suppose nonexistent Megaworm got to star on the book cover: it’s just not as thrilling to tell a story about the dangers of compromised structural integrity.


But, like the reporter in the story who sensationalizes the insect threat and coins the term ‘Blood Worm’ for the headlines, the advertisers of Blood Worm know how to get ya.


I know this stretches the bounds of believability that I expected anything at all from a book called Blood Worm, but I must admit it was a terrible letdown. I expected to read the literary equivalent of a bad SyFy movie—you know, like Mansquito or Arachnophobia or Dinocroc or any of the wretched tripe you catch on Saturday morning television or at 3 a.m. when you can’t sleep. Blood Worm started off promisingly but quickly failed to meet my expectations.


Perhaps this was just bad timing. Blood Worm seems like the type of book I would have loved to read when I was younger, laying on the beach in the summertime, lazily soaking in the cheesy action—the kind of book you can put down at any time to do something better or from which you can still absorb most of the bullet points no matter what sort of commotion is going on around you in the physical world. Perhaps this relaxed setting would have been more conducive to my enjoyment of Blood Worm.


... Then again, delivering the super-sized bloodsucking beasts the cover promised us certainly couldn’t have hurt.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

The Kids Are Totally Not Alright...



Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
p. 1954



When I mentioned my latest literary venture, several people remarked how shocking it was that I had not read William Golding’s quintessential young adult novel years ago, and I agree. It’s rather unbelievable that this book skirted by my required reading lists for so long, so I finally gave it a go, so as to dispel any incorrect notions I may have gathered about it over the years.

I would garner that few people are unaware of the basic premise of Lord of the Flies. Most people, myself among them, are aware that it centers on a group of boys stranded on an island who go a little... savage without adult supervision. However, I think there is a tendency to describe it as an adventure novel or a story of survival and at its heart that is just not what Lord of the Flies is about. Rather, it is a story of the loss of childhood innocence, the corruptibility of mankind, and the total breakdown of ethics in the absence of culture... and I would wager that it is actually inappropriate for most grade school children as reading material, despite focusing on a group of characters under the age of 13. Lord of the Flies may star kids, but it is not really about kids, per se.

Ralph is the protagonist of the book, one of the oldest kids on the island at twelve, but still the embodiment of childlike innocence at story’s start. I thought him a bit bratty at first, refusing to call portly, asthmatic ‘Piggy’ by his real name and allowing the cruel nickname to become the standard among the other boys (and even to the reader, to whom the bespectacled Piggy’s true name is never revealed). But watching Ralph struggle with the responsibilities that are bestowed upon him and the unchaperoned quick flight into adulthood that is forced on him makes his earlier faults disappear. Whoever the boys were before they landed on the uninhabited island, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is who they choose to be going forward, and if there’s one thing that Lord of the Flies teaches us, it’s that there is no going back.

I found Piggy and Simon much more interesting characters, but especially poor Simon. Whereas Piggy represented the logic and rationale of adulthood, it was little Simon alone who possessed a true understanding of their situation, even if he didn’t know it, first suggesting that the ‘beast’ they all feared and hunted was perhaps only themselves, and later prophesying that Ralph would make it off the island, subtly suggesting that he would not be there with him. Ironically, Simon, though he is the least ‘beastlike’ of the group and the only one who never gives in to his id, is ripped to shreds by the savage boys when he is mistaken for the beast. He is also the one who confronts the “lord of the flies” himself, a severed sow head that ‘talks’ to him, but if it can be surmised that this encounter was all in Simon’s head, then those insightful words came from the boy as well.

It’s easy to see why the other boys didn’t take to Piggy when he attempted to be heard. As a child, Piggy stands out in every way possible, and it’s easy to pick on those who are weaker and separate from the herd. As an adult reader, it was frustrating to watch Piggy and later Ralph display all the traits of a sensible adult determined to go home and be completely ignored by the mob. While it was frustrating though, Piggy and Simon's demises are not surprising, as they represent logic and innocence and those are some of the first things to go when society falls apart.

The more thought I give to Lord of the Flies, the more I respect it, and the more I am intrigued by it, but I can’t say I loved it or that it will have a place of honor among my collections, because while it is a curious allegory for humanity and societal breakdown (and occasionally religion, if Simon's Christlike qualities are to be acknowledged), it is altogether not a very positive outlook on humanity. I guess how you choose to read Lord of the Flies says more about the reader and their place on the optimist spectrum than it does about the way society really is. As I’d like to believe that people tend toward ‘good,’ I’d hate to imagine a group of boys descending into savagery like those on the island... but then, maybe that’s just my adherence to the existing society butting in. If all the constraints of society were removed and I had no other context to structure my life, perhaps even I might give in to ‘the beast.’

My only technical complaint about this book is that it was damn near impossible to determine who was talking at any given time, as not everyone in the book is named, dialogue isn’t consistently assigned to a speaker, and the boys generally tend towards chaos in their meetings anyhow. As I said before, I would not market this book towards grade-schoolers. Middle-schoolers might be able to comprehend it, and certainly high-schoolers, but readers below a certain age would, I feel, have a hard time coming to terms with the complex themes. It is an awfully dark and twisted story, after all. I could go on about the themes and wisdom behind this book, but I wouldn’t be saying anything an English teacher hasn’t said a million times over, so I’ll leave it there.

Friday, March 8, 2013

I'm Like Totally All Up in Your Spirit World, Brah

The Worthy
by Will Clarke
p. 2006




After reading some heavier fare lately, I selected the most lighthearted quick read I could find as a sort of palate cleanser and the first thing that caught my eye was a bargain bin impulse buy called The Worthy, by Will Clarke. It’s the story of a murdered rich boy who haunts the halls of his Louisiana fraternity trying to exact his revenge on the frat brother who murdered him. It’s got a goat on the cover and everything to let you know how wacky this book is!


...Well, you can go to hell, Will Clarke.


The Worthy is a lot more twisted than the descriptions would have you believe, and yet somehow the whole thing manages to fall flat thanks to staggering clichés and a total lack of heart.


Conrad Sutton III’s ghost is all that’s left of the 19-year-old former frat pledge, murdered in his freshman year by the psychotic chapter leader, Ryan. Unsure of what to do with his afterlife and unable to move on, his seemingly laid back but deeply angry spirit follows the lives of various chapter members and their peers, hoping to ultimately enact revenge on Ryan. Miss Etta, the house cook, is the only one that can see him at first and advises Conrad to look after an eager new pledge, Tucker Graham, but Conrad is really only interested in using Tucker to get what he wants, and when he finds out he can possess the bodies of the intoxicated, he aims to do just that. The perfect posthumous murder takes some time though, so on the way, Conrad tangles with and impulsively tails Ryan’s battered girlfriend Maggie, his own ex, Ashley, Ashley’s born-again roommate Sarah Jane, and Alex, a naïve frat brother who, upon missing the biggest joke of them all, submits to a hazing ritual that leads to him having... relations with a goat.


With a plot like that, you’d think things would get pretty exciting, but I could never quite get into this book. Maybe it was my indifference towards fraternity lifestyle, my utter lack of experience with southern culture, my dislike for Conrad and his friends, the cop-out ending, or the clichéd hot mess of stereotypes plaguing every—every—character in this short book. Yes, come to think of it, it was probably that last one most of all. And my, what a selection of stereotypes this one offered—you’ve got your vengeful ghost, your southern, cranky, no-nonsense black woman with ties to the spirit world who acts as a vessel, your mousy, abused girlfriend who never learns how to stand up for herself, your good ol’ farm boy, your coked out, psychotic villain whom no one suspects of foul play, your crazy religious nutjob, your dorky kid who pathetically tries to belong... and mountains upon mountains of ‘it’s cool, brah!’ frat boys. Yikes.


It can be argued that Clarke was trying to construct an argument against collegiate hazing... but he doesn't follow through. It can be argued that Clarke was being tongue in cheek about the frat boy overload... but as a former frat boy himself, I don’t think he was. It can be argued that he was going for irreverence and dark humor... but after the goat thing and an additional murder, it was really just awkward and unpleasant. Clarke makes a lot of references to characters being high on their own self-interest, laughing at their own jokes, but he proceeds to make a lot of ‘jokes’ that aren’t remotely funny then indulge himself in a little revelation at his humorous quip. Not a single thing made me react positively in this book. The only physical reactions The Worthy induced was slight disgust. This book is a very quick read, but not because I couldn’t put it down, rather because it was completely devoid of substance. In fact, I feel dumber for having read the whole thing. The only thing this book is worthy of is the bargain bin I should have left it in.