Thursday, May 29, 2014

Free Willy's Killer Instincts

Orca
by Arthur Herzog
p. 1977









I knew I was getting myself into trouble when, two pages into Arthur Herzog’s Orca I encountered this line, about its main protagonist:


“Jack occasionally wondered—though not for long—what his sister was like in bed.”


Hm. Okay.


Though, to be fair, ‘trouble’ is what I was expecting when I decided to read a book with a giant killer whale on the front cover obliterating bay area housing structures while a flaxen-haired Adonis accosts it with a javelin.


(None of that happened in the book, by the way.)


I would feel bad for Arthur Herzog that his novel was so grossly misrepresented by ambitious cover art drawn by someone who clearly hasn’t read his book... but an epic battle between man and beast is far more easily depicted than the barely-concealed incestuous undertones actually found in this novel.


So, Orca is a book about this dick who gets menaced by a killer whale for a few days off the coast of Newfoundland. Jack Campbell and his crew, including his airhead blonde bombshell sister, her dopey hippie boyfriend, and a wizened old salt who is like a father figure to Jack (so, like, you know he’s toast...) set out from Florida to catch a shark for some Japanese equivalent of Sea World, but decide to nab themselves an orca instead after the alpha male kills the shark they are hunting. In their attempt to ensnare a live orca, they totally fuck it up and kill the alpha’s mate and the baby she is in the process of calving.


The orca proceeds to stalk Jack—about as well as a sea creature can stalk someone on land—which is to say it just sort of swims around all threateningly and destroys a few boats in the harbor. For contrived reasons, Jack apparently can’t just... drive home... on land... where the whale can’t get him... and hangs around like the dick he is, not caring that he is totally mucking things up for everybody. So the Canadians decide to go all Children of the Corn on Jack and basically sacrifice him to the whale by sending him out to confront the enraged animal, which is sort of rude and so un-Canadian.


At some point in the novel, the orca bites Jack’s sister’s leg off, which should be an indication that he should cut his losses and take the bus or something, but instead, Jack gets all obsessive and decides he must kill the whale himself. It’s not so much a poor man’s Moby Dick as it is a stupid person’s Moby Dick.


Intertwined with this idiotic tale of revenge is an even more idiotic love story between Jack and a professor of zoology, Rachel Bedford. Rachel is in town to study the whales and even though the first few times she meets Jack he is calling her a "stupid bitch" and generally being a crude mysoginistic asshole, they eventually end up sleeping together because apparently Rachel is into crude, mysoginist assholes. I lost track of the number of times Herzog offended me with the way he depicted his female characters, but here is a nice snippet:


She smiled warmly. “Maybe we’d better stay with our problem for now. What I should be telling you is... hop on the first bus and get out of here. But I’m not. Know why?”

“Why?”

“Because this is the most interesting experiment I’ve ever encountered—man against super-whale.”

“Cold-blooded bitch,” he said, half-joking.

“Also, I’m terrified. Kiss me, darling.”



But women aren’t just dumb and scared in Herzog’s story. They’re also entirely incapable of thinking for themselves. Rachel initially opposes Jack’s vendetta against the creature she has come to respect through her studies, even going to far as to join his final voyage with the intent to sabotage his efforts to ‘slay the beast’ but it takes about five minutes for her to change her whimsical female brain and decide she was in fact for killing the whale. No reason. Just ‘cause she finally realized that Jack must be right all along, and she just didn’t get it. The piece of dialogue that actually made me laugh out loud, though, read as follows:



“Rachel, let’s go to bed.”

“I don’t know if I can get my mind off that whale,” she said hesitantly.

“Try.”

“Okay.”


Wow. Bravo, Arthur Herzog. Clearly you are an orca among the sharks when it comes to clever crafting of phrases. I bow to your superior wordsmanship.


But I digress.


I’d say overall my experience with Herzog’s Orca was a satisfying one, because it delivered exactly what I thought I was getting into—a quick read, a fair bit of head-shaking, and the literary equivalent of a summertime creature-killer flick. Incidentally, this book was immediately made into a creature-killer flick, but coming out on the heels of Jaws, Orca, sadly, faded into 70's horror flick oblivion. The orcas may have won the battle but the sharks won the war.

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Ireland Unfree Will Never Be At Peace

Star of the Sea
by Joseph O'Connor
p. 2002

“And yet, could there be silence? What did silence mean? Could you allow yourself to say nothing at all to such things? To remain silent, in fact, was to say something powerful: that it never happened: that these people did not matter. They were not rich. They were not cultivated. They spoke no lines of elegant dialogue; many, in fact, did not speak at all. They died very quietly. They died in the dark. And the materials of fiction – bequests of fortunes, grand tours in Italy, balls at the palace – these people would not even know what those were. They had paid their betters’ accounts with the sweat of their servitude but that was the point where their purpose had ended. Their lives, their courtships, their families, their struggles; even their deaths, their terrible deaths – none of it mattered in even the tiniest way. They deserved no place in printed pages, in finely wrought novels intended for the civilised. They were simply not worth saying anything about.”




Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea became an overnight hit when it was published a little over a decade ago, a sprawling melodrama set against the backdrop of the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. I included the above passage because it is the one that stood out to me most amidst the 400 pages O’Connor has provided for digestion. Though that is probably an inappropriate choice of words for a book primarily preoccupied with the topic of starvation, I think it’s nonetheless a fitting one, since there is an awful lot of material here to break down.


Star of the Sea took me awhile to get into, and—I have to admit—even at the height of its mystery I still couldn’t find myself enthralled or unable to put the book down. Period-driven melodrama isn’t exactly my forte, no matter how finely wrought the language is, and I found there to be a lot of filler in O’Connor’s story, probably to enshroud the mystery at the center of this novel—the murder of one of its central protagonists at the hands of another central character.


The entire history of each main protagonist is covered in extensive flashbacks, but half of the novel takes place in the present, aboard a ‘famine ship’ (the Star of the Sea), a passenger ship sailing for America carrying a great many poor and starving Irish who have given up everything they own for the passage, in the hopes of eking out a living in a new, potentially more promising landscape. The story is told from the point of view of an American author on board the Star, many years after the voyage, so we are allowed the full range of perspective—we know the hardships leading up to the voyage, the suffering aboard the ship, the many who never made it, and the disappointment felt by those who did make it, only to discover their coveted new life may not have been as forgiving as they’d hoped.


No character in Star of the Sea is entirely innocent, nor are they all thoroughly despicable. Even the most ‘villainous’ character has a well-drawn out history that makes you feel somewhat for his plight. My second favorite passage in the book comes from a chapter focused on a murderer and thief:

“The lexicon of crime became his favorite contemplation. The English possessed as many words for stealing as the Irish had for seaweed or guilt. With rigour, with precision, and most of all with poetry, they had categorised the language of thievery into sub-species, like fossilised old deacons baptising butterflies. Every kind of robbery had a verb of its own. Breeds of embezzlement he never knew existed came to him first as beautiful words. Beak-hunting; bit-faking; blagging; bonneting; broading; bug-hunting; buttoning; buzzing; capering; playing the crooked cross; dipping; dragging; fawney-dropping; fine-wiring; flimping; flying the blue pigeon; gammoning; grifting; half-inching; hoisting; doing the kinchen-lay; legging; lifting; lurking; macing; minning; mizzling; mug-hunting; nailing; outsidering; palming; prigging; rollering; screwing; sharping; shuffling; smatter-hauling; sniding; toolering; vamping; yack-snatching and doing the ream flash pull. Stealing in London sounded like dancing and Mulvey danced his way through the town like a duke.”


The book has a preoccupation with the multivocality of words and of silences. Although a murder and the torrid past love affairs and tragic deaths that led up to it seem to guide the novel’s events, it is really the starvation—the pain of hunger and a slow, agonizing death—and the division of classes that possess O’Connor’s novel. The privileged British aristocracy rather expect to find desolation and hunger in third world countries. That it was happening in their own proverbial backyard was unthinkable, and so many of the rich simply turned a blind eye to the Irish famine. This story is an attempt to give a voice to those whom society deems invisible; and this is a universal phenomenon, something every society has experience with at one time or another.


Like many things wholly ‘Irish,’ Star of the Sea is quite heavy and a bit depressing, but never without a touch of wit to break the tension. I’ll wrap up this review by including my favorite quip here: “Lord Kingscourt said he would need a short time to discuss it with his wife. (His Ladyship, it appears, is the wearer of the britches.)"


"Ireland unfree will never be at peace."
I couldn't stop thinking about my study abroad program in Ireland the entire time I was reading Star of the Sea. Probably this was because many of the characters hail from parts of Connemara, including Tully, the city my peers and I lived in for four months, and the descriptions still felt so familiar to me that I could understand the yearning the characters felt upon leaving. I had purchased O'Connor's novel while I lived there, but I held on to it, unread until recently. The above picture is one I took in Derry in 2004.

Monday, May 19, 2014

Ignorance is Bliss

The Giver
by Lois Lowry
p. 1993




Lois Lowry’s take on a futuristic Dystopia, The Giver, is one of those books I just can’t believe I never read in my youth, because it would have been right up my alley, not to mention it has left quite a legacy, so much of one, in fact, that it has finally been made into a movie to be released this year (something I did not know about prior to reading the book). You can be sure that many more people will be talking about it into 2015.

At 12, our protagonist Jonas has entered the phase of maturation when every person in his Community must be given a role to fulfill. Nobody has the ability to choose what they want to do for the rest of their life; in fact, nobody has the right to choose much of anything, as the rigid rules of the Community dictate things like who you are to marry, how many children you are allowed to have, even when to die. Even trivial things like what age you are allowed to ride a bicycle or own a stuffed animal or wear a coat with buttons are determined by the Elders who run the Community. Yet everyone seems content with the system, convinced that they are perfectly happy with the life that is chosen for them.

With such strict guidelines in place, it is no wonder that the whole Community is aghast when young Jonas receives an unusual assignment—the apprenticeship of The Giver, of which there is only one. I won’t bore you with the details of Jonas’s apprenticeship. If you’re reading this, you’ve either read the book already or are perfectly capable of reading it in a single uninterrupted afternoon (and it would not be hard to do so, as it’s the kind of book that implores you not to put it down). Suffice it to say, Jonas’s experiences with The Giver open his mind to a world and a history that his and all of the neighboring Communities could never know of, and forces him into a role of adulthood heretofore unknown.

The Giver is not just a great young adult novel, but a great Dystopian novel, and would serve very well as a young and curious reader’s introduction to the genre. As per necessity, the book is not without a bit of darkness, but then so is life, and a young reader could benefit from the more adult perspective. In any case, The Giver is not too graphic or too dark.

Apparently there are a couple sequels or companion books I will be checking out some time this year. I alternately look forward to and loathe the upcoming movie adaptation. Lowry’s book is one that has become a cult favorite, and it deserves justice on the big screen, but it could easily get caught up in the shallow eccentricities of tween book-to-film adaptations today.

Misadventures With Time Travel

I have no idea why there is an avalanche of naked people on this cover.
The Great Time Machine Hoax
by Keith Laumer
p. 1964




Chester W. Chester IV is an average guy who finds himself the sole heir of his great grandfather’s vast estate, and with it, a massive computer purported to be a time machine. Chester and his friend Case Mulvihill (ringleader and performer in a failing circus owned by Chester’s family) are skeptical but try it out anyway in an attempt to save the circus (and pay for the overwhelming costs of Chester’s inheritance) by creating a new sideshow that gives the impression of time travel to paying customers.

To their surprise, Chester and Case discover that the machine truly is everything it is rumored to be and accidentally send themselves launching through time in an avalanche of misadventures, along with an android-like representation of the machine, who takes the form of a pretty girl named Genie. The trio keep getting entangled in increasingly absurd situations and are eventually separated. Much of the book focuses on Chester after he lands in a strange reality and is taken captive and used in a sort of social experiment. It’s here where the novel starts to get sidetracked as it becomes less of the farcical, snappy, comedy of errors it was before and delves into philosophy and science of time travel. Chester, previously an unremarkable wuss, was unwittingly (and a little disappointingly) transformed into a science fiction hero. I wasn’t expecting this, and I won’t say it wasn’t interesting, but it certainly wasn’t as entertaining as the first quarter of the novel.

Despite the fact that Laumer seemed to not be able to decide what kind of novel this should be, I very much enjoyed the author’s sense of humor and the witty repartee between Case and Chester. Upon finishing this book—my first encounter with Laumer’s writing—I discovered I had more of his novels, and if I enjoy those, I’m sure I’ll be seeking out more of his rather expansive body of work in the future. His view on sixties sci-fi is refreshingly lighthearted and a lot more fun than the post-apocalyptic stuff I’ve been reading.