Horns - Joe Hill

I was discussing this book with a friend before I was finished. A dangerous game, sure, but I am always sure to mention I am unfinished with it when I have such talks. And my friends are decent enough people not to ruin it with a devastating spoiler. But she told me she really loved this book, and I said “yeah, it’s pretty good. I mean, as far sex murderer stories are concerned.” She responded with “but it’s so much more than that!” and I honestly didn’t feel, at that point in the story, that it was. Well only a couple of chapters after thinking that horrible thought, there was a majour turning point in the book. I got hit like I’d insulted someone’s mother with a twist I didn’t expect. And not just a plot twist, but one that changes what you feel the story is really trying to convey. It was beautiful. I mean, tragic, and I wanted to cry or take shots or break something, or maybe do all that at the same time, but it was still a very moving moment in the book.

And it is in regards the most important topics with which one can concern his/her self: life, death, and love. Life is no guarantee, but once it is obtained it is your right to keep it, and let others keep theirs. Death can only come once life is granted, and will follow life where ever it may exist. Love, unfortunately, is no guarantee either, and the worst thing to think of is people who experience life until death but never get to experience, or exercise, their right to love. And dying before one can experience love is the greatest crime of all for humanity, in my opinion.

This book takes all of that and, instead of elaborating on it, concentrates it into one vicious strike to your heart. It happens all in one moment. One moment realized after the person everyone loved has been dead for some time. It is truly tragic but truly wonderful.  I really cannot stress that enough.

There is also a very King family influence, and much of the book can be looked at as being written by “Stephen King’s son”. There is that lovable, cynical charm and the dirty, nasty secrets everyone holds within with hidden evil, dark desires that mostly revolve around sex or violence, or violent sex.

But even with that, he is still a unique author, and the book is great on its own, regardless of the fact that you might think, at many different points, it seems like something written by a young Stephen King. “Huh, I could imagine a universe in which the guy that wrote The Dead Zone also wrote this book” I said to myself on more than one occasion. Like, for example, when he touches someone and knows everything about them.

I did find a few faults with the book, I think the plotline of illness making people turn into real assholes is a common enough issue that he may write about it, but not so common that it is on the level of common knowledge that everyone turns into a wicked person when they are ill. I also felt there was some really good irony when he had his horns and people were coming out with these horrible secrets, but sometimes they would act upon their desires with the removal all inhibitions (the true effect of his horns) but there was never any follow-up as to what resulted from people making good on their horrible actions.

Really look forward to more from Joe Hill though. This story had a very “early stages of a great author” feel too it, not a perfect but still very good, and I hope he only improves with time. But then again, he is Stephen King’s son, so who the hell knows.

The Man Who Sold The Moon

Early Robert Heinlein! Always a great read, no matter where in his career you find yourself as you dig through  the gems of his literature.

I read this book not too long after watching the History Channel series, The Men Who Built America. Which is about how strong armed, cut-throat, ruthless, ambitious, and never-satisfied our turn of the century (the earlier one) entrepreneurs were. It chronicles the corporate lives of Cornelius “The Commodore” Vanderbilt, JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and to some small extent, Tesla, Ford and Charles Schwab.

The fun thing is how people revere what these assholes did for American free market Capitalism. Which is to say, they forced federal regulation in a lot of areas. They also were key in bringing about labour unions, ending monopolies, and breaking ground on federal anti-trust lawsuits. Plus a few other things in terms of stock market and inner-company control were made illegal after these guys had their way. I mean, whoa, I know they were crooked back then, but to be the wealthiest humans in the entire world and battling like that, trying to end the other moguls? It was crazy!

How does that relate to this book? Well free market capitalism, when we can find loopholes in the federal government, really helps the rich get richer. But in this instance, the rich man, Delos David “D.D.” Harriman, isn’t out to make himself personally wealthy just for the fuck of it (like Steve Jobs). He is out to do it and raise enough money to get us to the moon. And eventually, get us to expand to more than just this tiny planet (which isn’t dying, by the way).

The concept of expansion, colonization in space is favourite of mine in Science Fiction, I feel we need to help support that. Companies like Planetary Resources backed by Google billionaires trying to expand our natural resources, Blue Origin backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Red Bull with their Stratos jump are all examples of privately funded space exploration opportunities that provide more science and learning than NASA alone could ever dream to offer. And I like all that. And so does Robert Heinlein.

The difference is that he wrote this in 1949 before NASA was what we think of when we think space exploration. So he wrote about a corporate mogul, a real wealthy bastard swindling his way to get ownership rights to the land, and mineral rights, and a space craft, for the goddamn moon! Maybe it is difficult for some to put themselves in the position of how it could be exciting to try and claim the moon in the name of exploration and exploitation in the days before NASA, but not for me.

How does he do it? Simple. First there are some mergers and investors coming online with loads of more cash to support this venture and claim some part of the moon once they are there, plus corporate advertising giants and why not sell out to the media and take the highest bidding studio to make the documentary of the project? Then there are children. Like 40 million of them or whatever. He says if they each send a nickel to him, he’ll have their names individually engraved on a plaque that is going to be planted there as a memorial for the first ever lunar landing. But if they send 1 dollar, they get an autograph from the astronauts, plus other cheap swag! He neglects to mention this plague’s engravings are microscopic so as not to take up weight on the craft’s journey. He also sets up a non-profit organization, like National Geographic or B&MGF shit, which allows for a massive amount of money to roll in from people interesting in this project, and since it is led by the same tycoons all their work goes to it, but at the last moment the non-profit foundation makes a massive donation to the project. Awesome.

It is a future history tale, so there are chapters of other things going on, plus some corporate/federal regulation fights over patents that aren’t so pretty, including some pretty damn accurate conspiracy theories. Or at least, close to what we have seen in our history with some innovative minds *cough* Tesla! *cough*cough*.

I love American capitalism when it works this way, and I love people’s ambitions to get us off this fucking rock, before everyone goes mental. Let us expand! Let us conquer! And regardless of what that tree hugging hippie next to you says, don’t ever lose that ambition and drive to conquer all, it is our key to getting off this fucking rock and putting our roots in other places. Earth first, moon next, Mars after that, and later on, the rest of the stars!

Prisoner of Heaven

Or Shadow of the Wind Part 3, or Cemetery of Forgotten Books vol III, or Angel’s Game Part 2. Whatever it is called, it is Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s third book in a gothic series relating Barcelona post-Spanish-Civil-War to a family struggling to maintain a bookstore, a real awesome cemetery of forgotten books (which is like a library of Holy Grail conditioned books banished from contemporary society for any number of reasons), and the Sempere family. Though the series started out with one of the best books of the last ten years, and I am not exaggerating to reinforce my point on the other two, the books that followed just didn’t seem to contain the same awesome crime-mystery-thick plotlines with great points on the wickedness of people keeping secrets, the twisted nature of war and its longterm affects, and the general magic with which Zafon writes. It was almost as if the second two were written by another person trying to cash in on the fame of the writer of the first one.

Anyway, this book deals a lot with the same family we were introduced to in the first book, only at a much later time. Daniel is all grown up now and is a father. Fermin is looking to get married to Bernarda and the bookstore is, predictably, struggling. Fermin’s wedding prompts the issue we were introduced to in the first book but didn’t worry too much about, his fake name. His lack of real identity. His true identity cannot be known because he changed it during the civil war and for all intents and purposes became this Fermin Romero de Torres.

 So he tells Daniel why he did it, and that story becomes the plot, or most of it, for this book. It covers his time in prison during the conflict (or shortly after the war, I am not really familiar with the history of Spain), and his time in a cell across from the guy who is the main character of the second book. Not only does this plot totally try to mindfuck what the reader thought was going on in the second book (if you haven’t read it yet, The Angel’s Game, don’t bother, as The Prisoner of Heaven suggests none of it happened that way anyway), but it also weaves its way into about a 100pg section recreating the prison scene of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree with Mr. Ruiz Zafon, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of if not thee greatest book written in modern literature. But you can’t just take a scene from it (which, since it’s a 1,000 pg book, each scene is a novel or novella in itself) and use it as the plot for a modern day book. It just doesn’t work. It also doesn’t if you’re trying to tie into another book in your series but without really tying into it, just saying “that whole time you that this was happening…well that was happening.”

Aside from all my whining, it is a good book, just with a weak plot. Its greatest flaws are that Carlos Ruiz Zafon wrote an absolutely mind-blowingly good novel in Book I of this series, The Shadow of the Wind, and each book since has disappointed fans of him and the series; and other flaws include the aforementioned Alexandre Dumas tribute gone wrong and a plot that just doesn’t amount to much. I meant the villains in the story meet unexpected ends but not in a way you’d dramatically, climactically hope for, especially after reading The Shadow of the Wind.

And apparently, Carlos is Espain's answer to Karl Pilkington

My ultimate review comes down to this: Read  the series thus far in reverse. And let me know, when you get to The Shadow of the Wind, if you liked it as much as me. Seems you will, as each book will build to that magic moment in literary history (it was good beyond description…every sentence was so well thought out and placed and written I couldn’t do it justice with a review here, honest!), until you reach the punch line or “ah-ha!” moment of it all. Just, someone, for the sake of literature and recommendations, please try it. So I can know if that’s how I should recommend these books to friends. Because I have unfortunately made a friend read The Shadow of the Wind not long after I read it and he still has not picked up a copy of the others. I could be ousted as a good source of recommendations if I tell him to continue the series…

The Man Who Was Thursday – A Nightmare

Remember that kids. A nightmare. It is important.

So G.K. Chesterton was a big guy who threw his weight around and liked to use rhetoric to argue with people, on all points concerning mankind and society, until he died? A man after my own heart. Truly. I picked this book up because I had found it and subsequently purchased a copy after I learned it makes its way into Neil Gaiman’s top 10 books. That he has read. In his life! That has some notoriety to it. Not that I would read all books on his list, he described one as a “slow version of Dickens’ Bleak House” and I nearly fell over with exhaustion just imagining it.

And some background on Gilbert Keith: He was a massive man, joked about it, wrote a lot about politics and religious apologetics, also wrote poetry, mystery, fantasy and spent the rest of his time arguing philosophies with George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was a modernist, and Chesterton an orthodox Catholic. But they had very spirited bouts and always remained great friends. Wish we could do that more now days. I mean I can, I don’t care who believes what, just as long as we all are good humoured about it and the views of others.

Anyway he wrote The Man Who Was Thursday as a detective novel where people are recruited into an anti-anarchist wing of Scotland Yard’s detective agency and must use their wit to infiltrate the ring of anarchists known to be amongst commoners in London, but operating out of the London Underground. The plot follows Gabriel Syme, who outwits a man named Gregory, who is an anarchist trying to prove to Syme that they are a real force to be reckoned with. Syme must protect his own identity, however, and accomplishes this by suggesting Gregory isn’t a good enough anarchist at a secret meeting Gregory drags him to where they are voting on a new leader of their local chapter, which happens to be a position in the council of 7 and is code-named Thursday. He uses leverage to speak to the council and gives such a great speech, condemning Gregory, that he wins the vote. Syme is going to be Mr. Thursday!

 

Once at these meetings of the 7, Syme learns something awful, however. That they no longer believe in keeping anarchy a secret, and instead believe the best way to appear harmless if for the heads to appear right out in the open. Has to make the detective nervous. What’s worse? (SPOILER ALERT!) Syme learns quickly that five of the seven member are also secret detectives like him, policemen from Scotland Yard sent to infiltrate the Council.

Even more mindblowing is that they learn all this as they come together, and figure out that a real anarchist revolution is going on without them, whilst they are busy hunting each other down in the woods trying to point out members that are actual anarchists. Turns out none of them are! And the anarchists move on with an insane plan, leaving them all hopeless and desperate.

In the end, Sunday is revealed as Gregory, only masked, and tells them all that his people are the ones who have suffered, hence the revolt. But good Syme responds with a “you don’t know what I just went through, what I experienced, what I suffered” speech and caps it off with a quote from Jesus: “can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?” Bravo G.K. Nightmare over. Book end.

I thought it was a nice, short and simple story with great post-Victorian British humour and rhetoric. I don’t know when I aged 120 years and started enjoying that stuff, my guess is sometime after my first go at Dickens’ Bleak House, but I really do like that stuff. If it’s not for you, it’s not for you. Otherwise, it is a fairly entertaining nightmare.

Pavane

Geez a month since I last blogged here, what the fuck has been up? Oh yeah, illness, work, travel and holidays. Sorry folks. Enjoy my review of this one though, I loved this book.

Keith Roberts wrote Pavane in 1968 as an alternate history if Queen Elizabeth was assassinated before England’s big battle with Spain and the Spanish Armada won; hence the Catholic Church ruled, Protestantism never began; hence technological developments and indeed all progression of human development was done only with the oversight of the Church. Need I say more?

It is a collection of short stories, or a novel told in small parts, all of which intertwine of course and have a few common denominators: the power of the Church, stunted technological growth (i.e. no electricity), the mechanical wooden semaphore towers and their Guild, feudal system, and the family of Eli Strange and his hauliers business of steam engine hauling cars.

I had no idea what a steam engine car looked like either. Makes sense though.

The Catholic Church being the sole source of knowledge, progress and science in a much less than preferred society was very reminiscent of one of my all-time favourite books: A Canticle for Leibowitz. It’s Dark Ages, monks abound and people fight and torment themselves in a helpless, hopeless, heart-wrenching quest for progress. Sad, but the empathy seems to come easy for characters fighting these fights.

The rebellion is also a thrilling factor. Or should I say, the Rebellion, as you seemingly cannot find anything about this book without someone quoting the first page’s brilliance:

"Over all, the long arm of the Popes reached out to punish and reward; the Church Militant remained supreme. But by the middle of the twentieth century widespread mutterings were making themselves heard. Rebellion was once more in the air . . ."

Brother John, who when I read this immediately thought of my new musical hero Father John Misty, is a monk tasked with witnessing and transcribing the acts of punishment to witches conducted by the contemporary equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition, referred to in this book simply as the Inquisition.  The torture scenes, for that is what they really are, become almost too much to bare, and are more violent and obscene than just about anything I have read lately, including 200 pages of Cormac McCarthy’s masturbation material, but is over and done with fairly quickly (maybe 3 pages) and helps shape Brother John into one of the most powerful, demented (yet not quite powerfully demented) heretics I have ever come to know in the world of books.

There is really nothing more fascinating to me than human beings behaving like non-human beings. It’s really a something I could study the rest of my life. Holy wars, for example. Totally awful behavior. But torturing people who speak out against your beliefs, or either just do not believe, quite innocently, or simply do not believe hard enough. That takes it to a whole new level. Incredibly awful stuff, and Roberts conveys it in a very meaningful way. Violent, yes, but not so much that you lose your lunch and have another 100 pages of baby impalement to get through after ten hours of stomach churning gore. Do I sound like I’m still bitter about Blood Meridian? Good.

The book also incorporates a feudal war. As a bit of a nerd for Medieval Epics and some of the stories of Middle English/Middle Germanic Kings and Queens – some of whom I still tell friends of whenever drunkenly possible – I really enjoyed the second to last story titled “Lords and Ladies.” It was the best for me, as the aristocratic governess, once again tying into the Strange family as she is the grand-niece of the main character of the first story, defies the orders of the Holy Roman Emperor and a war ensues with the Catholic Church as she tries to defend her people. The woman holding down the castle as the greatest army assembled on Earth has her entire land under siege was very much like one of my all-time favourite Germanic Medieval epics, Willehalm, and had perhaps an even more charming ending.

Really wish I had more to say without spoiling anything, but definitely pick up a copy of this book, or ebook it or audio it some way. Just....give it a go, it is great.

The 19th Wife - David Ebershoff

Well election time is upon us, or just behind us, depending on when this gets posted, and I think it is interesting one of our candidates is a Mormon. Or funny. Or scary, maybe. Because 19^th Wife is packed with them. Like sardines in a f***ing tin. Wives everywhere. Prophets prophesying, angry mobs, chat rooms, fabulously gay ex-Mormons (and by ex I mean Ex-communicated) and of course, what book club book is complete without white people scalping each other and making it look like the Indians did it?

Naturally, I went into this knowing a fair amount about the LDS faith, having sat through many a talk with their door to door salesmen and even reading a bit of their book, which is less of an instructions manual or “how-to” on getting into heaven and is more of another “New Testament” sort of story involving entirely new characters I have never really heard of but are all loosely based on, if you can believe it, characters from the Old Testament.

It all seems very confusing but if it’s a faith you are into, then try not to get too bogged down by the details and focus on the main point: Jesus had a sweet sequel and did really well in coming to North America to spread the word because he is actually a white guy, (and Native Americans love white guys, right?) so naturally we should all fit in quite well in his system, being white Americans (not that everyone who reads this blog is a Caucasian/White/North American, but most Mormons are, so there you have it).

Anyway, the progenitor of all this madness was a very imaginative, captivating and handsome white American who just wanted people to call him Prophet. He also had a sexual appetite that defied his role as a contemporary Christian so he got around that by saying Bog instructed him to take many wives, a loophole of sorts to avoid the oh-so-demeaning title of adulterer, which was barely a step down from being considered a witch.

The 19^th Wife chronicles this man and his successor, Brigham Young, an even hungrier breeder, from the point of view of Brigham’s last wife, illegitimate or legitimate (it’s up courts and Jesus to decide these details). Sure, she brings an end to the fad that was plural marriage, but at a great cost and brings about a mysterious end to her own life.

It’s also the story of a modern family, one that is based on the goings on in Colorado City, Arizona. Showing some state pride, I have to say I was sad to read the fictional town belonging to this story was actually set in Utah. How dare the author rob us of one of our finer points in this great state, that of personal and religious freedom! Nevertheless, the modern story works out to be a similarly crazed Prophet obsessed with a massively high girl-to-guy ratio in each married man’s house. The details are all a bit creepy and get the reader to think about what is morally acceptable and where we draw the lines between practicing religion in a free state/country vs. the damages and sacrifices people in these faiths must make. I am big into moral theory, it was a favourite subject of mine in college (amongst many), so I had some key points I liked about this book:

•                 Free will, for example. Everyone is entitled to it by virtue of their consciousness. Freedom of religion is not only guaranteed in this country, but is an important subject under our ability to exercise free will as free thinking humans. It is not the government’s job, President Grant in Brigham Young’s case or the Utah/Arizona government on a smaller scale, to draw lines and enforce laws that limit our ability to practice religion in this country. Unless it happens to –
•                 Take advantage of members of a religion. There are always things people do that we find goofy, but some things actually have negative consequences and hurt the fabric of society. This book really stresses what Ann Eliza Young, Brigham’s 19^th, tried to get across to us in her quest to break the bonds of women in a polygamist society. It is a double edged sword, religious freedom. “I can do whatever Jesus or his dad Bog instructs me to do as I am a prophet, his mouthpiece to the world, without fear of Government intervention” is true so long as no one gets hurt. But what if everyone is quite miserable? What if followers are mostly going along with it out of fear? Either out of fear of un-provable consequences for blasphemers that includes death or constant intimidation and fear of not reaching heaven? That’s where one more thing should come into play –
•                 Common sense. People need to use it. Following a pioneer into a fresh, virgin new world because he is a great man is really a good thing, and is how a massive part of the American West was settled. But entering into these marriages is not quite forced, merely creepily coerced through the use of a sneaky secret service and lots of black mail, if what we read from Ann Eliza’s perspective is to be believed. If there isn’t any pushback even though everyone finds it either morally repulsive or completely unnecessary, you get a society that is almost being led by a dictator and they are fear mongered or intimidated into this until, ultimately, we have –
•                 Revolution. Not in a grand sense of the word really, but one woman escaping the confines of polygamy, which is almost like being imprisoned, except the sex is legitimate because you’re actually married to the guy, not his cell mate. But more in the sense of someone escaping and challenging the views of the prophet until popular demand suggests they change their ways.

All in all I’m actually sort of glad it worked out the way it did. As in real life, not just the book. Brigham Young was an excellent pioneer, one of the better heroes we’ve ever venerated in this great nation, and he did what he had to do to get everyone settled in Salt Lake City where the West really boomed. And in a pretty civilized manner, polygamy or not. Without polygamy, would they have been able to populate and grow so rapidly and thrive the way they did? Even if all it provided was an outlet for Brigham so that he could focus more of his attention on other things, like sending out missionaries and bringing in immigrants from England, Sweden, Germany etc, it served his purpose and hence, served the West well. Who knows if he would have been as effective without that release, without a new bang-maid every 2 years? It’s not for us to say.

Also, this beer is very damn good if you can find it!

But I will say that morally, I find it compelling. Polyamoury really doesn’t need to be thought of as morally repugnant as it is viewed in this book, or indeed as it is viewed by this nation in general. It is perfectly fine. If a thriving civilization wants to practice polyamoury, or polygamy or whatever, and they are all perfectly happy, then that’s fine. What I have a problem with is how it was administered, and how it was controlled. Saying it is done in the name of God is never a reason to do anything to anyone else, in my opinion. It should never affect anyone negatively, what you do for your religious deity, because that’s not how I feel religion, or my God, operates.

The other problem I have with how it is administered is men can take many wives, but women must remain true to that single husband. Plural marriage or celestial marriage, as Joseph and Brigham defined it, was sort of a one-way street for them. It ensured they always had fresh p***y, but the women got screwed! And not in a good way! Ann Eliza was a beautiful young woman, and had to put up with a fatter, old and bearded Brigham. No thanks. If polyamoury is your practice, why can’t she take all the men she wants? The book doesn’t really address this, instead it just blasts the Mormon and the Firsts, the breakaway of the Mormon church who were polygamy exteremists views of polygamy. And I’m okay with tearing that idea up because, as I just said, how they did it was wrong. Morally. End of story. Pretty good book though.