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.

Come As You Are

About a Boy

by Nick Hornby

p. 1998

While staying at someone else’s house, I raided their teenage daughter’s bookshelf for something that struck my fancy and came up with Nick Hornby’s About a Boy. Since I was only there for the weekend, and I’m too lazy to track the book down elsewhere, out of necessity, I read this book in a single day. I specify the ‘necessity’ because, while I liked it, it’s not exactly a book I’d describe as ‘a constant page turner.’ I could have put it down, and would have, if it had been in my possession, because the speed at which I read makes me unfit to read 300 page books in a single day, but I wanted to finish it in one go, so I did. The simplicity and flow of Hornby's language thankfully allowed me to do so.

About a Boy is my second outing with Nick Hornby. Earlier this year, the first book on my 2014 roster was his earlier novel, High Fidelity, and you can really see the similarities. One of About a Boy’s two primary protagonists, Will, might as well be the same person as High Fidelity’s Rob (both likely extensions of Hornby himself), and in fact they do exist in the same universe, as Will refers to Rob’s record shop, Championship Vinyl.

Will is a 36-year-old bachelor who is content with his freewheeling, childless, unattached ways, who decides that a great new way to meet women is to target single mothers. He does this by going to single parent groups and posing as a single father, fabricating a child and a life to go with it, in order to get closer to women. It almost works, but backfires when, instead of meeting women, Will finds himself saddled Marcus Brewer, the 12-year-old son of Fiona, a depressed single mother to whom Will is not attracted. Early in the novel, Fiona attempts to kill herself by swallowing a bunch of pills, and Will is present when Marcus stumbles upon the aftermath. While Fiona has her ups and downs, Marcus realizes he has to do a bit of growing up on his own, and sets out to hook Will up with his mother, so that she is not so alone and Marcus has a male figure in his life outside of his estranged father.

Marcus and Will’s friendship develops over much of the book, the point of view alternating between the two. Marcus continues to show up on Will’s doorstep, despite the latter’s reluctance and his mother’s downright rejection of their unusual friendship. A subplot involving Marcus’s infatuation with a teenaged punk, Ellie, who is in love with Nirvana singer, Kurt Cobain, and thinks Marcus is a funny/weird little boy, is the catalyst for the novel’s climax, colliding with Marcus’s dilemma with his mother in ways that are predictable to the reader, but not to the characters, of course.

Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, in a weird way, are an element of this novel that sort of possess it. For the reader, it sets us in a specific timeline, so I can see why references to it are left out of the 2002 movie version and this year’s 2014 TV show. To them, it would seem anachronistic and unfitting for the characters. Unfortunately, the alignment with the novel’s main events sort of guide the characters to realizations about themselves, so it’s a shame that element was lost. I guess that’s what you get when you guide a novel based on pop culture of the time; the TV version will just have to find another way to tell the story. [On an inconsequential side note, I unknowingly read this novel exactly one week before the 20 year anniversary of Cobain’s suicide.]

About a Boy is a title with more than one meaning. It’s supposedly a reference to Nirvana’s song, “About a Girl,” it’s ostensibly about a boy—Marcus—and his coming of age tale, but it’s also about the maturation of a much older ‘boy,’ Will himself, who realizes through the precocious Marcus that he has a lot of growing up to do himself. Young Marcus often seems like the smartest person in the room, as the adults he is surrounded by can’t seem to get it together. It’s a bit of a cliché, but not unwelcome. Adults and their problems must seem really incomprehensible to kids; sometimes a child’s simplicity is all we need to reevaluate our opinions.

Thanks to Marcus, what everyone comes to realize is that life is too complicated to do it alone. As a strange, friendly but bullied boy, Marcus had no choice but to fly solo his first twelve years. Will and Fiona and Ellie and the others do have a choice, but choose to alienate themselves. About a Boy teaches us that all we really need in life is a community, someone to rely on, someone to be there when someone else is not, because life will be hard, no matter how you try to insulate yourself from its troubles, but it’s a hell of a lot easier when someone’s sitting next to you.

This Story Really Has Nothing to Do With Being Irish

Dead Irish
by John Lescroart
p. 1989

Needing to take a little break from science fiction after my letdown with the Trilogy of Disappointment, I pounded out a quick murder mystery I’d had lying around for ages, Dead Irish, by John Lescroart, whose name I still can’t pronounce for the life of me. Dead Irish is a crime/thriller novel with a wide cast of characters revolving around the untimely death of young Irish Catholic Eddie Cochran, allegedly a suicide until the truth is slowly unraveled.

The central character in Dead Irish is Dismas Hardy, a former cop, former lawyer, [former everything in the way that only serialized private eyes can be], who currently works as a bartender for Eddie’s brother-in-law. Hardy only obliquely knew Eddie, but he is roped into investigating the young man’s death, for the sake of his young, pregnant wife, who would receive no benefits if her husband’s death were declared a suicide, and Eddie’s despairing family, who cannot believe their eldest son would take his own life.

I initially had no idea that Dismas Hardy was a serialized character. When I thought that the book was a one-off, I assumed that Hardy was investigating the death because he wanted to get into the pretty widow’s pants, which was a little tacky, considering she was pregnant with the dead man’s child and all, and also a good 15 years younger than Hardy. It wasn’t until I caught on that Dead Irish was just the first in many investigations of Hardy and the LA detectives that I realized his motives weren’t self-serving.

The fact that Dismas Hardy and his detective friend Abe Glitzky both recur in many other Lescroart novels also excused the lack of culmination to their individual storylines. A lot of threads were introduced and Lescroart didn’t really do justice to them all. The ending itself was terribly rushed, but in the context of what Dead Irish is—one in a series of neo-noir style thrillers starring a hardened ex-cop—I guess I can excuse the slapped-together ending.

I’m not overly fond of Hardy as a protagonist. Early on in the novel, one of his methods of information-gathering involves vaguely threatening dead Eddie’s teenage brother. It was mildly effective, sure, but the kid really had nothing to do with the murder and smacking him around while he was grieving was a bit unnerving, even if he was being a bit surly. At the end, when the real killer is outed, Hardy encourages him to kill himself instead of turning himself in, for no discernible reason... and he does, screwing over his detective friend, Glitzky, in the process. Hardy also shows up at a ton of crime scenes when I feel he probably doesn’t have any business being there, but it was the eighties, so maybe the LAPD didn’t care that some dude who was only a beat cop for half a minute twenty years ago is hanging around telling them what to do. Maybe they would care if they knew Hardy was handing out guns to murderers and telling them to take care of it themselves...

I feel like all of this is supposed to make me think of Hardy as something of a maverick, but I really just thought he was kind of a self-serving jerk and the LAPD were all idiots for not being able to do the legwork themselves.

I also guessed the killer after like thirty pages (of a 400 page book), but then I subscribe to the school of televised crime procedurals, in which it is always the last person you should suspect, and after you cycle through all the more obvious suspects, only then the truth will out, so really, the last person you should suspect is actually the first person you should suspect. It’s like, why else would they spend all that time on that seemingly inconsequential character if he didn’t do in the dead guy? It’s really the only thing that makes sense, from a storyteller’s point of view.

Read this book. Read another Lescroart book. Read any crime thriller at all, really. I’ve got a feeling there won’t be much variation, when all is said and done.