Book Review: "TransAtlantic" by Colum McCann

TransAtlantic (2013)
Colum McCann (1965)

307 pages

There are passages in Colum McCann’s novel TransAtlantic in which the suffering and loss the characters encounter tear at one’s heart. And yet in other scenes these characters experience wonder and accomplishment that fill one’s heart with hope. Here, condensed into a novel, are the vagaries of life.

Spanning the past one hundred and sixty some years, McCann builds his story around brief but critical times in the lives of several historical figures. These ‘real’ characters, otherwise unrelated, become linked together in his novel through the transformative effect they have on the lives of four fictional characters, one or another of whom they happen to come into brief contact with: four generations of women --- mothers and daughters, one to the next. Through his characters, historical and fictional, McCann explores the vicissitudes of everyday life, whether experienced by the famous or the unknown: from the dreams and passions that motivate us to push beyond what we already know, to the natural and man-made disasters that can threaten to destroy our hope and our will.

The novel focuses on each of the main characters in turn (if not precisely in chronological order), and is built around crossings most of the characters make of the Atlantic Ocean, between North America and Ireland.

The first half of the book tells the stories of the historical figures in the novel. In the mid-1840’s Frederick Douglass, then an escaped slave living in Boston, spends time in Ireland speaking on the need to abolish slavery and raising funds for anti-slavery groups in the United States, as well as receiving donations to buy his own freedom. Some seventy-five years later, in 1919, Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown fly a modified World War I bomber --- a cloth-framed biplane --- non-stop from Newfoundland to Ireland, the first such plane flight across the Atlantic. Finally, another eighty years further on, in the late 1990’s, former Senator George Mitchell leads negotiations to end the “Troubles,” the long period of self-inflicted death and destruction in Northern Ireland.

The stories of these famous men become bound together, in McCann’s telling of their histories, by a woman who encounters Douglass during his time in Ireland, and then by the woman’s daughter, grand-daughter and great-granddaughter, who eventually cross paths with Alcock and Brown, and later Mitchell. Though the meetings are tangential to the lives of the historical figures --- unimportant to them really --- for the women these encounters provide a glimpse into possibilities for futures different than they had earlier imagined for themselves.

The second half of the book details the lives of each of these four generations of women. The men of the first half drift for the most part into the background, though never completely disappearing. Instead it is now several of the women who are inspired to make trans-Atlantic crossings and search out their destinies, as had before them the famous men they have met. Each in their own way, these women experience both the marvels and the pains of life, as they travel far from their origins.

In a note at the end of the novel, McCann thanks among others Wendell Berry, who, like McCann, has written movingly of the land and people’s place on it, and also forcefully on injustice and against violence. These themes appear through TransAtlantic: Douglass goes to Ireland arguing for justice for slaves; a century and a half later George Mitchell makes that same trip to try and bring peace to Northern Ireland; one of the primary motivations of Alcock and Brown to make their historic flight was to turn a machine of war, the WWI bomber, into one of peace. The women of the story, in their more private histories, also engage with the injustice and violence of the world, whether it is the struggle to work alongside men, the misery of the U.S. Civil War or the seemingly endless and random death of the Irish “Troubles.”

McCann’s powerful writing envelopes a reader in his characters; he does not so much tell us what they are thinking as form images of their emotional reaction to the world, as they reflect on their past successes and failures, try to make sense of their present struggles, and imagine their potential futures. The images he paints can sometimes amaze with their beauty and precision, but also in other passages break one’s heart when faced with the crushing depth of a character’s pain.

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Book Review: "Shift" by Hugh Howey

Shift (2013)
Hugh Howey (1975)

603 pages

[Note: although I make it a point to not include spoilers in my reviews, this is the second book in a trilogy, and it's not possible to write about it without including some context from the first book, Wool.  So, if you haven't read that first book yet, I suggest you jump back to my review here.]

In Wool (reviewed here), Hugh Howey introduced us to a world of silos, deep underground structures home to thousands of people living beneath a poisonous surface. The story in Wool takes place during a critical couple of weeks in the life of a silo, as the elite of the existing order struggle against a revolution from below. The novel provides some hints at how this strange, future world came about, but we readers only come to know what the characters themselves can ferret out from the well-hidden information they discover, and we are constrained too in our understanding by the characters own biases based on their limited view of the world they grew up in. Shift, the second novel in the series, serves as a prequel to Wool, describing the origin history of this future world.

(If you have not yet read Wool, then you may want to skip the rest of this review until you have; I try to keep any of my reviews from containing significant spoilers, but it is not possible to review Shift without giving away some information that is only revealed well into the telling of Wool. Even my opening paragraph above reveals a subtle piece of information that many of the characters in the story only discover well into the action.)  

Shift tells the founding story of the world of silos. Spanning several centuries, the action begins just thirty-five years or so in our future, concluding at roughly the same point as Wool, though from a new point of view. In Shift, Howey describes all too plausible global dangers and political machinations during the middle of our current century that lead to the construction and operation of the silos. By transforming relatively minor extrapolations of current technology into deadly weapons, evil forces in the world threaten to destroy humanity even as powerful leaders aware of the danger struggle to put in place their solution to it. Once the silos have been built and populated, the remainder of the story takes place over the succeeding centuries, as the law of unintended consequences frustrates the careful planning, and many checks and balances, that the “founders” built into their system.

Whereas Wool reads as an adventure story of revolution and discovery set in a far, if dystopian, future, Shift adds to the mix a nightmarish reality of how the silos come about that feels too probable not to leave a reader scared for the future of our real world.

Like Wool, Shift was originally written as a set of e-books which have been combined here into a single print edition titled The Shift Omnibus. The approach Howey uses is similar in both novels: in each of three sections (originally released as separate e-books), the action is divided into very short chapters which alternate between two frames of reference, the two paths eventually coming together as the action in the section plays out. And, as in the earlier novel, this technique and Howey’s writing style in general give the story an urgency and ‘cliff-hanger’ feeling that make it hard to set the book down.

A quote from my review of Wool applies equally to this prequel: “Whatever you do, don’t read Hugh Howey’s novel Wool --- unless you are prepared to drop everything else you are doing and stiff-arm any interruptions. Once you have entered into his dystopian view of earth’s future, you won’t want to set the book down until you finish.”

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A third novel, Dust, will apparently be appearing soon.

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Book Review: "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman

The Forever War (1974)  

Joe Haldeman (1943)

266 pages

What are the consequences of a militarized world prone to a policy of ‘shoot first and ask questions later,’ both for the soldiers who most leave home to fight and for the societies they leave behind? In the novel The Forever War, couched in the techniques and devices of science fiction, author Joe Haldeman provides his reflections on this question. Written in 1974, the story opens in 1996, which would seem to date it for a modern reader; however it serves Haldeman’s purpose perfectly: as the Vietnam veteran explains in the Author’s Note to the edition published in 2008, he wanted the story set in a time when military (and to some extent political) leaders would still be products of the Vietnam War. This choice of starting points turns out not to be a distraction, even for a reader in 2013, and is at any rate quickly left behind by the rapid progression of time in the story.

As the novel opens, a group of draftee soldiers struggle though basic training on Earth. Soon enough, however, they ship out for further training on a planet far outside Pluto’s orbit. It turns out that portals in space have been discovered that allow ships to jump instantaneously to distant points in the galaxy. This has led to shiploads of colonists traveling out to earth-like planets around far-away stars; when one such ship ends up destroyed, political and military leaders quickly put the Earth on a war footing. A planet-wide military command is created, and the best and brightest among all nations are drafted into a fighting force to counter an alien race known as the Taurans.

Through the eyes of the main character, William Mandella, we get an intimate view of this war of the future. Though the technology may be new, and the locations exotic, Mandella experiences the personal and organizational confusion of being a foot soldier in a conflict that he feels little direct stake in. The disorder and contradictions arise even before the first battle: though they have trained on a planet that has the near absolute zero temperatures the military leadership expected to encounter in the war, the new soldiers’ first engagement is on a jungle planet, against an enemy that no one can even tell them the shape or look of. That the confusion of the battle scenes and the camaraderie between the fellow soldiers feels so convincing would seem to reflect the experience Haldeman brings to the story from his time fighting in Vietnam.

The novel’s title comes from the time dilation the soldiers experience as they travel at near light-speeds across the galaxy from one battle to the next. The story spans a little over a thousand years of Earth-time, though Mandella ages only about a decade during that period, participating in only a handful of battles. When his first two-year period of military service ends, he heads back to Earth, on which thirty years have past. Once back, however, Mandella and his fellow returnees struggle to re-integrate into a society that has changed dramatically during their absence. He and many of his former colleagues soon end up back in the service, returning to the one home where they feel, if not exactly happy, at least a part of something they understand. As his time in the war continues, Mandella’s degree of separation with society back on Earth only widens, eventually impacting even his military life and relationships, though he himself remains far from Earth.

Haldeman’s style and some of his themes reminded me a bit of the science fiction stories by Robert Sheckley, in Store of the Worlds (reviewed here), particularly Sheckley’s depiction in Morning After of an economic system on a future Earth in which there are not enough jobs for everyone; and his description in If the Red Slayer of the life of a soldier in a future war, in which the wounded are able to be repaired no matter what their injury, and are then sent back into battle. As does Sheckley, Haldeman wraps his story in a science fiction structure, but at its heart this is a tale of the chaos and confusion of war, and its impact on both the soldiers who go off to fight, and the society on the home front built around its demands. As but one small example, Haldeman’s imagined solution to the issue of men and women serving together in the military will certainly surprise many readers.

The Forever War stands as a rousing novel of science fiction, with a fascinating imagination of our future. At the same time it provides social commentary relevant even today, forty years after it was written.

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Book Review: "The Lives of Things" by José Saramago

The Lives of Things (1978) 

José Saramago (1922-2010)

translated by Giovanni Pontiero (1994)

146 pages

For anyone who has not yet read any of José Saramago’s fiction, this collection of six short stories in the slim volume The Lives of Things provides a wonderful introduction to his sensibility and style. Four of the stories share the same world as several of the novels for which Saramago is well-known,  Blindness, Seeing and Death with Interruptions, in which the actions and behaviors of governments, and our reaction to these policies as citizens, are held up to examination with often disturbing results. The last two stories in the collection recall the wonder and imagination of The Cave, and other aspects of again Death with Interruptions, taking place in a region situated somewhere between our daily lives and our dreams.

The opening story, The Chair, describes the critical role a simple, everyday piece of furniture reportedly played in ridding Portugal of the dictator Antóio de Oliveira Salazar in 1968. Salazar is not mentioned by name in the story; instead Saramago has created an extended history for the fateful chair, elaborating on the often minor elements that led to its decisive moment of “fame.” The opening paragraph of the story displays Saramago’s style well:

The chair started to fall, to come crashing down, to topple, but not, strictly speaking, to come to bits. Strictly speaking, to come to bits means bits fall off. Now no one speaks of the chair having bits, and if it had bits, such as arms on each side, then you would refer to the arms of the chair falling off rather than coming to bits. But now that I remember, it has to be said that heavy rain comes down in buckets, so why should chairs not be able to come down in bits? At least for the sake of poetic license? Therefore accept that chairs come to bits, although preferably they should simply fall, topple, or come crashing down.

This circuitous route to his goal, and direct appeal to the reader’s understanding characterize much of Saramago’s writing. It can at first seem like he is wasting words on meaningless distinctions, until, as the story continues to develop, it becomes clear that it is precisely the distinctions that are most important; and by directing his thoughts at the reader, he subtly succeeds in getting our agreement by taking us through his logic path, one step at a time.

The next several stories in the book satirize the absurd and not-well-thought-out policies that governments can develop, and that we as citizens often collude in supporting, if only through inaction and inattention. Not so directly linked to a particular dictator as the first story, they nevertheless comment on the potential hazards of overly powerful ruling class.

In Embargo, restrictions have been placed on the sale of gasoline, and a man looking to top off his tank as he drives to work finds concern about this new policy in an unexpected place. Reflux carries an obsession by an absolute ruler to its unnatural extreme, demonstrating how a policy can seem odd but achievable at the beginning, only to become perverted by a literal interpretation of and compulsive fixation on the details of its implementation, so that it eventually collapses under the weight of its own structure. And in Things, the government has put in place policies to carefully control the availability of material goods, basing distribution on a clearly defined class system; the arrangement works smoothly until one day an initially unnoticed rebellion begins to grow, from an unexpected quarter.

In these stories, as in his novels that touch on similar issues, Saramago allows the absurdity of the system to expose itself as he develops it to its natural end. Even his characters, for the most part, take their society and its goals as perfectly normal, making it all the more jarring for them when their world begins to breakdown under the weight of the heavy-handed policy.

Stepping away from the political and social commentary of the first four stories in the collection, the final two stories share a different tone and feel. The Centaur imagines the fate of the last of those mythological creatures, spared from death by the gods when his fellows are slaughtered in their war against the Lapithae; the same focus on the details that Saramago brings to the stories on political commentary serves here again, with a description of the life of this last man-horse so vivid that it cannot help but stir the reader’s empathy.

The final story, Revenge, is only a few pages long, and seems almost like a piece of a larger narrative, or maybe the back-story of a painting; in it Saramago nonetheless contains a singular image of nature that for many readers will linger long after the book is closed.

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Other works I have read by Saramago:

• Blindness: The population of a city goes suddenly blind, and the authorities struggle to respond.  (I read this book before I began doing these reviews.)
• Seeing: What happens when no one bothers to vote in an election.  A story set four years after <u>Blindness</u>, as the authorities again struggle to deal with what they see as a political calamity.  I reviewed it here.
• Death with Interruptions: Death takes a holiday; after the initial celebrations the people, and the government gradually realize the full impact of this change. I reviewed it here.
• The Cave:  When a potters clay pots and jugs are no longer wanted by a population the prefers plastic, he tries his hand at making small figurines instead, with unexpected results. (I read this book before I began doing these reviews.)

 You can find quotes from some of these works here.  

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Book Review: "While the Women Are Sleeping" by Javier Marías

While the Women Are Sleeping (1990) 
Javier Marías (1941)

Translated (2010) by Margaret Jull Costa

129 pages

The nebulous region between our daily lives and the supernatural world of our imaginations and dreams provides the stage for Javier Marías in this collection of ten short stories, While the Women Are Sleeping. His characters in these stories lead normal lives, and seem to feel largely in control of their destinies, until Marías presents them with a person or an event that lies outside their previous understanding of the world. At that moment they are forced to confront the uneasiness, and sometimes fear, that come with facing the unknown.

In the title story, the narrator and his wife are enjoying a long holiday at a beach resort; they pass their days on the hot sand watching their fellow bathers, commenting on their peculiarities. One day a new couple arrives at the beach, drawing their interest, and, over the next many days they observe this couple, watching the man spend all his time circling the woman with a video camera, as she sits tanning herself or wades briefly into the water. The narrator and his wife notice that the man “didn’t ask the young woman to do anything … he seemed content with making a visual record, day after day, of that naked statuary figure.” Late one evening the narrator meets the man next to the hotel pool and, as the wives sleep unaware in their rooms, he learns the strange compulsion behind the daily videotaping.

Gualta opens with a man attending a company dinner, where he meets a colleague who could not only be his twin, but who in fact has all his same mannerisms and attitudes. After the initial shock wears off, the narrator engages, experiences and judges … himself. Surprised at what he finds, he returns home from the dinner with a new awareness --- and a new obsession.

A man looks up on the world from his grave in The Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga. As the story opens, it is the one year anniversary of his death, and his wife is visiting, bringing “a bouquet of flowers which she very carefully places on top of me … blocking my view.” He remembers back to the sudden illness he developed in the months leading up to his death, and the strange and unexpected transition to a new state of being that he experienced upon dieing.

The majority of the stories in this collection are told in the first person, which heightens our connection and empathy with the characters as they confront these unforeseen shifts in their conception of the world. Marías writes with a mix of sly humor and directness that draws us into the stories, and allows us to see ourselves in them --- including our largely subconscious fear that we do not actually have it all under control.

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For American readers of a certain age, these stories will have a bit of the feel of a literary version of the old Twilight Zone television series.

Other works I have read by Marías, though I read them before I began this blog of reviews:

• When I was Mortal: A collection of short stories.
• A Heart so White: A novel of a man who upon getting married reconsiders his past.
• Dark Back of Time: A novel written as a kind of imagined biography; a study of human nature that will pull you in deeply and force you to consider ideas and fears you had tried to leave buried in your subconscious. 

 You can find quotes from these works here.

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Book Review: "Wool" by Hugh Howey

Wool (2012)
Hugh Howey (1975)

514 pages

Whatever you do, don’t read Hugh Howey’s novel Wool --- unless you are prepared to drop everything else you are doing and stiff-arm any interruptions. Once you have entered into his dystopian view of earth’s future, you won’t want to set the book down until you finish.

The story is set in a giant, underground city that its residents refer to as the “silo”. Though sealed off from the toxic atmosphere and barren landscape on the surface, the people lead seemingly normal lives, raising families and working at the jobs needed to maintain the silo and its population. With only a hazy understanding that anyone had ever lived on the surface above, they have largely adapted to the rigid and structured roles that living in such a confined space requires.

The one taboo, the most serious law that can be violated, is to speak of the world the silo or express a desire to go ‘outside’. To even show an interest in going outside the silo condemns one to being exiled to the surface, and so nearly immediate death. The novel takes its name from a part of the sentence the condemned face: to clear off the silo’s outside cameras and sensors with wool and cleaning solution in the time before they succumb to the deadly conditions on the surface.

 These facts come out in the first few pages of the novel; to say more would rob a reader of the joy of discovering the details for themselves. Howey’s writes in a style that heightens the tension of the story, with relatively short chapters alternating between different characters and places in the silo. I found myself pulled forward through the story, reading faster and faster, so that at times I had to consciously slow myself down. And he avoids settling into a predictable narrative; as the novel develops it becomes impossible to predict which characters will survive the events of the story and which will not. This fits neatly with his answer in a short addendum to the book, ‘A Conversation with Hugh Howey,’ to the question “Is this really the end?”: “There’s always another story to tell. Just maybe not the one readers expect.”

What can safely be said without revealing too much is that the novel’s themes are universal: in any society there will be revolutionaries who want to know more and do more than what the rules allow, and reactionaries who will stop at nothing to preserve the status quo. Between these two groups, the rest of the population will split into pieces, some following the one side or the other, while most simply keep their heads down to avoid trouble. Timeless themes, but ones around which Howey builds a compelling view of a dystopian future world that feels all too possible.

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The books were originally published as e-books, before being brought together into this print edition.

Howey has written three stories that serve as a prequel to Wool, called Shift.

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Book Review: "After the Apocalypse" by Maureen F. McHugh

After the Apocalypse (2011)

Maureen F. McHugh (1959)

188 pages

What I find intriguing about the subset of science fiction dealing with apocalyptic visions --- enough so that I give the books a shelf of their own, both at home and on this blog --- is learning how authors imagine we might react when faced with the new reality that comes After the Apocalypse. How will we wrap out heads around it? How will we interact with our family, friends, neighbors and strangers? How will we move forward?

Precisely these questions lay at the heart of the nine short stories in the collection of that name by Marueen F. McHugh. As shown by the picture on the book’s cover of a clock reading 12:05, McHugh begins these stories just after the apocalypse has occurred, or at least is well underway. It is no longer 11:59; the characters can no longer hold out hope of preventing the fateful turning point at midnight. And, unlike most apocalyptic fiction and movies, in which a deadly asteroid, super-plague or nuclear war figure prominently in the plot, McHugh focuses here on how people experience and get by in the new worlds created by the various versions of the apocalypse that she imagines. To borrow from the end of Laurie Anderson’s performance piece From the Air, the human race in each of these stories “had passed through a door. And we would never be going back.”

McHugh sets the stories in the near future, sprinkling in cultural references, such as movie titles, stores and products that will be familiar to most all readers. This approach gives added punch to the telling --- as readers we have little trouble identifying with the characters, or at least imagining ourselves in their shoes, as they fight to survive in the new reality. With the exception of one story that features zombies, and another in which some people can fly, McHugh creates worlds that are immediately identifiable to us; even in the two outliers mentioned, the fantasy remains a prop in the story, not the point of it. Thus these stories are more accurately called speculative fiction than pure science fiction.

The collection opens with The Naturalist, in which an outbreak of some kind has turned a portion of the population into zombies, though the zombies have been contained into major metropolitan areas. One of these cordoned-off zones is Cleveland, which the government has also begun using as a penal colony into which to dump the worst criminals, the implication being that it is a cheaper alternative than to house them in prisons. The main character, a convict recently transferred into Cleveland, decides that to survive in this city abandoned to the zombies he needs to study them, to understand their patterns and habits. He goes about his research thoroughly and carefully --- and with whatever means he has at his disposal.

In several of the stories, McHugh imagines near futures in which the economy has partially or completely collapsed. These are perhaps the scariest of the stories in the collection, because the worlds that McHugh creates seem so much like our current one, but with one more trigger, one additional event that pushes things over the edge into chaos. In these new realities we find that there are still rich and poor, only there is little left of the middle class, and the ranks of the poor have swelled beyond measure.

One example of this type is the title story, in which a woman travels on foot with her thirteen year old daughter through the central United States, scavenging in abandoned towns as they seek out a rumored refugee camp in the north. They are escaping from the border area with Mexico, which has turned into a war zone as heavily armed drug cartels, suffering from the economic crisis unleashed by the chaos following a “dirty bomb” attack in the U.S., lash out in search of food. The mother, recalling her own self-sufficiency during a youth lived largely on the streets struggles to handle a clinging daughter with whom she can barely identify.

In another example of economic collapse, a strain of bird flew has killed many millions in China (where McHugh has lived for a time) in the story Special Economics. The ensuing economic crisis has created massive unemployment, allowing companies to gain the upper hand over workers and the government. Two girls, desperate for work, struggle to avoid becoming trapped by their company’s feudal system of employment.

Other of McHugh’s stories tell of more “local” disasters, in the way that 9-11, for example, created a kind of local apocalypse for the people of New York City, leaving them scarred and reeling. The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large is written as a newspaper article detailing the life of a teenager caught in a “dirty bomb” attack on Baltimore. The boy suffers amnesia, and gradually creates a new life for himself; when his mother eventually finds him several years later, he struggles to reconcile his two lives. In Honeymoon, a young woman participates for money in a medical trial that goes horribly wrong.

Perhaps the darkest story in the collection, The Effect of Centrifugal Forces, has a bit of the feel of the novel by Nevil Shute from 1957, On the Beach, in which a group in Australia await the inevitable spread of radiation, and so death, from a nuclear war that has taken place in the Northern Hemisphere. In McHugh’s story there is no war, but still the gradual inevitability of a spreading disaster that destroys hope and morale. Without giving too much away, it is safe to say the story will make any reader consider again the merits of becoming a vegetarian.

This strong collection of stories avoids the dramatics of typical apocalyptic fiction, the detailed descriptions of wars and plagues and such, and instead examines how we go about fighting for survival when we have no hope of going back to the lives we knew. McHugh shows with stark honesty how we might sometimes hold onto our principles and our humanity, while at other times compromise them at a most basic level.  

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