Book Review: "Love in a Fallen City" by Eileen Chang

Love in a Fallen City (2007; stories originally written in 1943-47) 

Eileen Chang (1920-1995) 

Translated by Karen S. Kingsbury

324 pages

Chinese society experienced traumatic changes during the first half of the twentieth century. As the Qing dynasty ended in 1912 with the founding of the Republic of China, ancient traditions were giving way to western influences. In the midst of this cultural upheaval came the Japanese invasion, in 1937, and a brutal occupation that deteriorated into a harsh struggle for survival for the Chinese people. Even after the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, the remaining years of the decade saw China descend into a long civil war.

The Chinese writer Eileen Chang lived through these dramatic and difficult years, and they colored her work. Born in Shanghai, in 1920, she spent much of the first thirty years of her life both there and in Hong Kong. In the 1940’s, while studying English literature in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation, she began writing stories and essays, taking care to remain below the radar of the occupation regime.

Love in a Fallen City collects together a half-dozen of her stories from that period. (It also contains an Introduction by the book’s translator Karen S. Kingsbury, with biographical information, and a short Notes section that provides context for some terms in the stories that may be unfamiliar to a western reader.) Chang’s stories reveal the challenges faced by both men and women as the strict cultural norms of their parents slowly, fitfully gave way to more western notions of romance and love. Where before families had carefully arranged the meeting and nuptials of a couple, now some young men and women could choose for themselves; but they might also suddenly find themselves judged and trapped by old standards and customs to which many in Chinese society steadfastly held. For some this resulted in a paralysis of choice mixed with fear, while for others it became a time of reckless abandoned.

In the opening story, Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier, a girl from Shanghai is living with her family in Hong Kong and attending university. When her family decides to return to Shanghai, she resolves to find a way to stay in Hong Kong and continue her studies. She approaches a wealthy, divorced aunt who lives in the city, but who has long been estranged from the family for her socialite behaviors, and asks to live with her. Though the aunt takes her in, the girl soon realizes that her aunt has motives beyond simple familial obligation. As she becomes increasingly caught up in the charms and risks of her aunt’s social world, and the barely hidden schemes in which her aunt involves her, the girl struggles to maintain her balance.

An awkward boy is befriended by the attractive daughter of one of his professors in Jasmine Tea, but doubts the depth of her feelings. Hints he has found of an earlier relationship between his dead mother and the girl’s father further complicate his relationship with her.

In the title story Love in a Fallen City, a woman has divorced her husband and moved back in with her family; the family resents having the extra mouth to feed, and yet also refuses to try and help her re-marry. She realizes that she must take matters into her own hands, and when she is attracted to a man who had been picked out for her younger sister, but who seems to show an interest in her, she makes her move. But does he seriously want to marry her, or simply have an affair?

The only one of these stories to be translated by Chang herself, The Golden Cangue follows the life of a woman whose family has married her into a more well-to-do family, but to a husband who turns out to be a sickly, tubercular cripple. (A cangue is a heavy wooden collar enclosing the neck and arms, and resting on the shoulders; it was used in Asia to humiliate petty criminals.) On her own in the family and frustrated by her situation, the woman turns bitter and vindictive, simply waiting for her husband to die so she can inherit his money. When this finally comes to pass she receives enough for her, and her son and daughter, to live on comfortably, but has become so scarred by the experience that she alienates everyone around her, believing that no one cares for or loves her, and that they are only after her money.

In a demonstration of Chang’s elliptical reference to the Japanese invasion and occupation in these stories, Sealed Off opens inside a Shanghai tram filled with passengers as it comes to a halt one evening rush hour when unnamed authorities unexpectedly seal off parts of the city. A businessman heading home discovers that a pestering nephew is also on the stuck tram. Not wanting to talk to him, the man quickly switches seats to sit next to a young woman with whom he then strikes up a conversation. Initially cool to his sudden attentions, she gradually opens up to him; but what are his motives with her, and how deep his interest?

The final story, Red Rose, White Rose, centers on a man who has studied in England and returns to China to take up a job in Shanghai. He moves in with a friend and, despite having a reputation as someone who can remain unaffected in the presence of a beautiful woman, falls in love with the friend’s wife. But he finds her too flirtatious and not very smart, and he worries about the scandal of an adulterous relationship, so he leaves her and settles for an arranged marriage. Increasingly unhappy with his new wife, he begins questioning the path he has chosen, his behavior becoming erratic and destructive. How can he regain his former peace of mind?

In each of these stories Chang mixes incredibly rich and colorful descriptions of life in early 20th century Hong Kong and Shanghai with the inner thoughts of her characters and their often pointed dialogue, as they verbally spar with one another, each trying to discover the other’s true motives while not revealing their own. The stories are written as though someone is remembering back to these times, and in fact some of the stories open with a brief paragraph or two which set-up a narrator telling the story to someone sitting with them. Although there is a main character in each story, whose path and thoughts Chang generally follows, she also switches at times to the point of view of another character, and their thoughts, before returning again to the main character. This technique deprives us as readers of the typical sympathy toward the main character over others in the story; here we find that each character struggles with and feels trapped by their own confused desires in the world of changing norms in which they live. And each discovers their own way of dealing with this struggle.

The wonderful stories in Love in a Fallen City provide us a window back into the tumultuous world of mid-20th century Shanghai and Hong Kong.

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Other reviews / information: Eileen Chang also wrote the novel Love, Caution, which was recently made into a movie, directed by Ang Lee; watch the trailer here.

Others of her stories, including some in this collection, have also been made into movies in China.

Born Zhang Ying, she also went by Zhang Ailing (Zhang being the family name).

This is yet another wonderful selection from the NYRB Classics collection. See their review of the book here.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The War Prayer" by Mark Twain

The War Prayer (1905)
Mark Twain (1835-1910)

85 pages

To Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him,
Clemens read the “War Prayer,” stating that
he had read it to his daughter Jean,
and others, who had told him he must not
print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege.

“Still, you are going to publish it, are you not?”

Clemens, pacing up and down the room
in his dressing gown and slippers,
shook his head.

“No,” he said, “I have told the whole truth
in that, and only dead men can tell the truth
in this world.

“It can be published after I am dead.”

From: Mark Twain, A Biography by Albert Bigelow Paine
Harper & Brothers, 1912 

This recollection serves as the Forward to The War Prayer by Mark Twain. (Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens; Dan Beard was an illustrator who work on several of Twain’s books.) Reading The War Prayer one can understand Twain’s hesitation. This powerful short story represents a carefully crafted indictment of the feverish righteousness and thoughtless jingoism that leads to the glorification of war, and that can bring forth cheering crowds of soldiers, their loved ones and also their envious “neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag or failing, die the noblest of noble deaths.”

In the story, Twain turns the tables on these cheering masses as they gather in church before the troops head for the front, where the preacher beseeches God to watch over “our noble young soldiers and aid … them in their patriotic work; … [and] help them to crush the foe.” As the preacher finishes his rousing speech “an aged stranger” enters the church, and ascends to where the preacher stands before the crowd. After some moments silently staring down at the crowd, he announces to them “I come from the Throne --- bearing a message from Almighty God,” and proceeds to describe to them the “full import,” the “unspoken” in what they have asked of God. He lays bare for the crowd the gruesome reality behind their requests to God, the horror of the war for which they cheer so mightily.

Based on what I’ve learned, the story was originally written in 1905, but not published until 1923, after Twain’s death. The Perennial Library edition I have logs in at 85 pages, but the story is really only a relatively short text, spread out among many illustrations, with sometimes only a few words or lines per page. The illustrations were created by John Groth in 1968, and are hauntingly arresting ink drawings that complement the story perfectly; the book cover, pictured above, shows an example. One can easily imagine the impetus for these drawings, and the reprint of the book itself, arising out of the growing anti-war sentiment of the late 1960’s. The book is as brilliant and concise an anti-war statement as can be found.

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Other reviews / information:

For another amazing anti-war piece, see the short story The Dog of Dürer in Marco Denevi's Falsificaciones (Falsifications).
 
A sentiment similar to that expressed by Twain in The War Prayer appears in a novel from 1938 by the German writer Erich Wiechert, The Simple Life (Das einfache Leben; my review here). In that story, a man who finds himself lost in an existential crisis in the wake of his experiences in the first world war seeks out a new life of simple labor in the countryside. Finding profound and compelling meaning in the work and natural surroundings of his new life, he begins to reconsider the meaning of the faith he grew up with.  Questioning the character of God, or perhaps more precisely, the commonly accepted image of God held by his fellow countrymen, he decides:

...I will find a different face [of God]. Not one that is to be beseeched, and not one that is to be thanked. Not one before whom people will begin shouting: “Now thank all ye God!”, if they have just beaten to death a thousand or ten thousand men. Because then must the others clearly be shouting: “Now curse all ye God.” (241)

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Disgrace" by J. M. Coetzee

Disgrace (1999)
J. M. Coetzee (1940)

220 pages

In the New York Times Book Review a few months back, two essays appeared in the Bookends section that considered the question of whether it is important for readers to like the characters in a novel. I don’t recall how the two writers came out on the question, but I remember thinking that, for me, although I don’t feel that I need to particularly like the characters of a story, or agree with their world view or their actions, it would be difficult to read a novel built around a main character who I fundamentally dislike. Then again, if one believes Carl Jung’s claim, it may be that such a book is the best one to read: “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

Which brings me to J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, and its main character David Lurie, who I admit I found extremely difficult to like. Lurie, in his early 50’s and divorced, is a professor of literature at a university in Cape Town, South Africa. Early in the story he meets one of his students, twenty year old Melanie, while walking across campus, and in short order prevails upon her to have sex with him. Events quickly spin out of his control, and soon the university has expelled him. Shunned by the university community and his neighbors, he leaves Cape Town and heads across South Africa to the home of his daughter, Lucy, who lives on a small plot of land in the countryside. There she boards dogs and raises produce for the local farmer’s market. The transition for Lurie from his urbane, university lifestyle could not be more dramatic.

From my summary so far, Lurie is simply a character exhibiting his humanity, flaws and all. But then we turn to his personality. He arrives at his daughter’s doorstep “disgraced,” as he puts it, and yet immediately begins to judge her lifestyle and life-choices, as he does with everyone he meets in the novel, even those from his past who he only thinks about. And he doesn’t keep his opinions to himself; insufferably smug and self-righteous, he criticizes most everyone he meets, whether the university committee members who bend over backwards trying to find a resolution short of expelling him, or his daughter and her friends and neighbors. And he appears to wear his disgrace as a badge of honor, proudly describing to his daughter how he did not give in to the investigating committee, did not allow any compromise that would impugn on what he found to be the romantic and poetic beauty of his love for Melanie, irrespective of her being his student. Most disturbingly, though he at times recognizes the effect his actions or words have on others, this self-recognition at most moves him to pity them, not to hold back his pointed comments. Lurie is a difficult character to stand, and as a reader I often wanted to reach into the pages, grab hold of his shoulders and give him a good shake.

Which Coetzee then does for us, as South Africa’s post-apartheid history rides hard into the lives of Lurie and his daughter. The moment arrives with little or no warning for them, or for the reader, and it changes completely the physical and psychological trajectory of the story. As Lurie attempts to come to grips with what has happened, he first turns angry, trying to manage the aftermath with the overarching self-assuredness that comes naturally to him. But the incident has shaken him deeply; where he had earlier confidently justified to himself his coercion of a student into bed, or his high-handed disdain for his university colleagues, he now finds himself unable to make things right again, or even shepherd them in a direction he finds appropriate. Suddenly isolated and at a loss how to move forward, he struggles to recreate himself as he contemplates his now shattered self-confidence and emasculated wit. Moving between his old home in Cape Town, and living near his daughter to support her, he passes through a kind of wilderness of the soul as he seeks a new basis for his life.

Disgrace begins as a character study of a man deeply set in his rather pedantic ways, before becoming, in hardly more than an instant, the story of someone forced to recognize and confront his advancing age and abrasive personality. In that same pivotal moment Coetzee shifts the place of the novel under the readers feet, from a nearly generic anywhere to a harsh and bracing commentary on modern South Africa and its apartheid past --- a past that can seem like a distant memory only a heartbeat before it comes exploding back into the present. And the disgrace that opens the novel, the one that Lurie can appear to wear as a badge of honor: that disgrace suddenly pales before real disgrace, violently imposed, whether individually or collectively, leaving a stain difficult to bear.

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Other reviews / information:

I have also reviewed Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians.
 

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Book Review: "2312" by Kim Stanley Robinson

2312 (2012)

Kim Stanley Robinson (1952)

660 pages

Science fiction stories tend to imagine one of two distinct futures for humanity: a collapse into dystopian chaos, or a transcendent shift into a more advanced phase of existence. Dystopian societies have been generally described as resulting from both unforeseeable events, such as an asteroid hit or alien invasion, or unsustainable choices, such as human environmental or political shortsightedness. More optimistic writers have shown us overcoming and moving beyond our self-induced difficulties --- often after teetering on the brink of disaster --- to move ahead together to explore space as a united world.

In 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson envisions what could be considered a third, middle path into our future, one in which humanity survives, and science and technology continue their accelerated development, but in which people are fundamentally little different from us today. Looking three centuries into our future, Robinson assumes that a too long delayed response to global warming has led to significant ice melt and so rise in ocean levels. Inundated coastal areas have either been abandoned or had their cities built up Venetian-style, with skyscrapers towering over flooded former streets, and people using built-up promenades and boats to get around. Looking for relief, and resources to use on Earth, mankind has moved out into the solar system, establishing laboratories and mining settlements on other worlds. On planets, moons and asteroids communities and eventually colonies have grown from these initial footholds; in some places terraforming has been done to create human-habitable climates, while in others covered cities have been built. Technological development in the areas of computing power and robots threatens to cross that difficult-to-define boundary into the dream (or nightmare?) of artificial intelligence. Perhaps most dramatically, scientific understanding and developments have led to radical changes in medicine and human biology, leading to significantly longer life spans, and the emergence of what can best be referred to as new varieties of people, with extremely small or tall body types say, or mixtures of male and female characteristics.

Yet despite all of these marvels, in Robinson’s imagined future human nature has not fundamentally changed from our present day. The science and technology that have allowed expansion into the solar system have not resolved Earth’s significant problems: it remains a densely populated world with extreme inequality and balkanized politics. The colonies, for their part, have largely resolved the inequality issues that plague Earth, but people have carried their tendencies toward nationalism and provincialism out into the solar system; even as the colonies have grown independent of the Earth-side nations that founded them, and trade and travel have flourished, they struggle among themselves for access to and control of the resources of the solar system. And although Earth and these off-world communities remain reliant on one another in significant ways, their interactions are marked by escalating tensions; Earth-bound societies envy the prosperity of the colonies, which, aided by the limitations inherent to the physical realities of their off-world existence, have been able to experiment with new, more effective economic and political regimes.

These rising tensions in the solar system drive Robinson’s plot, his novel being part vision of our future and part detective story. His main character is Swan Er Hong, an artist living in a city on Mercury, who finds herself thrust into the middle of a mystery as the story opens, when her grandmother dies of apparently natural causes. Swan discovers that her grandmother had been leading a system-wide group of people trying to find a way to counter what they see as the growing threats from balkanization of political power across the solar system. Though she initially hesitates to join the group, the need for action becomes clear to her when an attack destroys her city on Mercury. She joins her new partners as they move back and forth through the solar system over a period of years struggling to understand who is at the center of the Mercury attack and other similar disasters, and how to stop them. In the year 2312 events come to a head, as conflicting parties struggle to impose their will on events that will impact the future development of civilization on Earth and throughout the solar system.

Despite the plot that ties the story together, Robinson’s novel is not a simple action-adventure story. It develops slowly, moments of drama alternating with sections that introduce to us the outlines of this future world. Chapters that advance the plot are interlaced with several titled simply “Lists”, which itemize things or ideas, confronting the reader with the variety of this future world, and still others labeled “Extracts”, which contain a few pages of what appear to be brief passages from some far future encyclopedia, looking back at the events leading up to this pivotal year of 2312. 

All of these parts together present to us Robinson’s imaginative take on how our present day world will develop into the future, which can perhaps best be captured in his reference to “Jevons Paradox, which states that the better human technology gets, the more harm we do with it.”(348) Robinson makes clear that in 2312, the jury remains out on whether Jevons Paradox stands as an ineluctable destiny, or a fate that can be overcome; his main characters fervently desire to believe the latter, but events continuously conspire against their hopes. (William Stanley Jevons was an 1865 economist.)

Throughout the novel, Robinson leaves little doubt about where he sees our current choices leading us; in one of the Extracts chapters a future historian looks back, stating:

the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils. (138)

 In a similar vein, his main character, as she struggles to provide aid back to Earth and its people, observes with frustration the plight of the masses at the bottom of the income ladder:

Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them three thousand calories a day and few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. (350)

Enter Robinson’s world of 2312 not for the action and adventure, though his story also succeeds on that level, but rather to immerse yourself in a vision of what our collective future world could become. The detective story that drives the plot develops rather slowly through this book’s 600-plus pages, and ultimately the struggles and experiences of the characters as they uncover the dangerous forces at play in the solar system serve as only a part of the whole in our understanding of this future world Robinson imagines. What fleshes out his vision for us are the ideas and future-history Robinson details in the interludes and asides to the main story; in these we discover one of human kind’s possible futures, and how it will be driven by the consequences of the political and economic choices we are making today, and as well as our inherent capabilities and limitations.

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Other reviews / information:

Maybe better to check-out after you finish reading the book, as I suppose it represents a very minor 'Spoiler', but there is an interesting representation of one aspect of the story at Orbit Books.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Falsificaciones" by Marco Denevi

Falsificaciones [Falsifications] (1966) 

Marco Denevi (1922-98)

159 pages

Jonah and the Whale 

Jonah harassed the whale, insulted it, provoked it, told it that it fed on small fish but was incapable of devouring a man, called it a herring, a little bream and other offensive epithets. Eventually the whale, fed up with finding itself so vilified, or perhaps to shut-up this madman, swallowed Jonah without causing him the least injury. Once inside the belly of the whale, Jonah began running to and fro. He barked wildly, and punched and kicked the walls of the whale’s stomach. Within a few hours the whale, sick with nausea, vomited Jonah onto the bench. Jonah told everyone that he had spent a year inside the whale; he invented heroic adventures, and declared that the whale was afraid of him. Moral: if you are large and powerful like a whale, and some sort of Jonah defies you, don’t devour him, because you will vomit him transformed into a hero.

Marco Denevi turns the well-known parable of Jonah being swallowed by the whale on its head in his book Falsificaciones (in English: Falsifications), inventing a new version and moral for the ancient parable. In some seven dozen similar vignettes in the book --- running from a few lines to a few pages --- Denevi reaches back to mostly familiar scenes from mythology, literature and the Bible, and bends them to his will, creating idiosyncratic but enchanting alternative explanations for stories we assumed we knew and understood.

Falsifications has a similar structure and feel to Denevi’s book The Garden of Delights: Erotic Myths (in Spanish: El Jardín de las Delicias: Mitos Eróticos; find my review here). Whereas in The Garden of Delights Denevi focused on human struggles and whims in romance and loving, with Falsifications he takes on a broader scope, examining all manner of human foibles. Tales of eros of course have there place in these alternative narratives created by Denevi, but so too do stories of prideful vanity, grasping greed and blind hero-worship. In each case Denevi seems to humanize these old stories, introducing behaviors and motivations that make the original versions of the stories seem quaint and idealized.

In a brilliant several pages of imagination, for example, Denevi creates a story based on a famous old painting by Albrecht Dürer called The Horse, Death, and the Devil. Titled The Dog of Dürer, in reference to a hound that accompanies the knight in the painting, Denevi’s tale skewers jingoism and the supposed joy of battle, and lays bare the awful realities of war. He paints, in words, the future that lies before the returning warrior, forever changed from traumatic experiences incomprehensible to the society which awaits him. The story has a bit of the feel of Twain’s The War Prayer, but from the point of view after the fighting has, for that moment in history at least, concluded. I would argue that it represents as powerful an anti-war statement as can be made.


As with The Garden of Delights, I have unfortunately not found that there exists an English translation of Falsifications. But, if you know a little Spanish, and are willing to work through the book with a Spanish-English dictionary at your side, these stories are well worth the effort.

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Book Review: "The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes"

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)  

Translated by W.S. Merwin

118 pages

Historical fiction, at its best, can transport readers into a past era in a way that a history book generally can not. When the historical fiction was also written during the time in which it is set, the benefits can be multiplied --- just reading a story written in a distant age provides its own special window into that time.

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, first published in Spain in 1554 by an anonymous author, satisfies on both counts by taking us back to life in mid-16th century Spain through both the story itself, as well as its writing and presentation. The book is apparently considered to be one of the first picaresque novels. (In case you have to look that up, as I did, Merriam-Webster defines it as “a type of fiction dealing with the episodic adventures of a usually roguish protagonist” --- think Huckleberry Finn; picaresque comes from the Spanish word pícaro, which can refer to a ‘crafty devil.’)

Lazaro de Tormes --- Lazarillo being a diminutive of Lazaro --- narrates the story, recounting his life as an itinerant worker in central Spain to someone he refers to as “Your Excellency,” who “has written to ask for a full account”(5) of his life. Lazaro states that he lost his father when he was eight years old, and his mother could eventually no longer support him and so gave him over into the keeping of a blind man who passed through their town. The blind man became Lazaro’s first master, and through his nasty and tight-fisted ways, taught Lazaro harsh lessons about the difficult life of the poor. Even as he suffered under the cruel treatment of the blind man, Lazaro watched him ply his myriad of tricks for defrauding people in town after town; as Lazaro says upon leaving him, “the blind sinner had taught me a great many things.”

After escaping the blind man’s control Lazaro wanders from place to place, finding jobs with masters each more miserly than the last, whether priest or squire, constable or seller of papal indulgences. Each of Lazaro’s masters represents an archetype of Spanish life in the 1500’s, and the anonymous author spares none of them his sharp pen. The novel stands as a scathing critique of clerics more worried about their own pleasure than the lives of their parishioner or the poor, and nobility more concerned about appearances and honor than in doing an honest day’s work.

History books on Spanish describe the disintegration that began in Spain and its economy in the 1500’s after the initial boom time that came from the silver and gold discovered in the New World. Much of these riches from the colonies ended up squandered on religious wars throughout Europe, while a significant part of the rest often found its way into the coffers of the church in Spain. Many people followed that money, entering religious institutions instead of working to earn a living; the Spanish have a disparaging expression for this that translates as these people having entered the contemplative life. The gentlemen class too had little interest in getting their hands dirty working, too busy worrying about protecting their honor. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes depicts these times in a novel form, and the accuracy of the representation can be judged by how quickly the Inquisition in Spain banned the book after publication.

The story is a short 118 pages, and split into roughly one chapter per master for whom Lazaro works. The author skips any detailed description of the countryside or towns through with Lazaro passes, and also avoids full character development in the story. He focuses instead on describing the basest characteristics associated with various vocations at that time in Spain by representing the selfishness, greed and laziness that Lazaro observes in his string of masters. Clearly meant as a critique of his fellow countrymen in 16th century Spain, the anonymous author brings to us, centuries later, a tiny window into the world of his time.

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The cover is a detail from the painting by Francisco de Goya, Pilgrimage to San Isidoro.

This book is part of a wonderful series published by NYRB: New York Review Books.

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Book Review: "Dust" by Hugh Howey

Dust (2013)
Hugh Howey (1975)

458 pages

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

In his science fiction novel Wool (my review here), Hugh Howey launched readers on a wild ride through a wonderfully imagined, if horribly deformed, world: a silo that, rather than rising up to the sky, lies instead buried in the earth. Extending deep underground, the silo houses a community the size of a large town. Afraid of the poisoned landscape they can see only through cameras mounted on the surface, the people of the silo live, work, give birth and die all within their concrete home, the only world they know; curiosity about the outside and the silo’s past have become this society’s most fundamental taboos. For some, however, the desire to understand what guides their existence and what remains hidden from their view overcomes these prohibitions, with dangerous consequences for themselves and the stability of their community’s world. Howey’s sequel, Shift (my review here), continues the story, reaching back into the past to events leading up to the creation of this dystopia, even as the struggles in the silo’s present spin out of control.

The third book in the series, Dust, has now been released. Bringing together the threads begun in the first two books, Howey continues the thrilling pace in this sequel, the tension building with every page. In Dust the struggles of the characters in the first two books evolve into an escalating fight for survival, as opposing viewpoints on how this artificially created world should move forward become locked in a life-or-death struggle; decisions about the community’s future quite literally become the ultimate ‘game of life’. Ironically, even as the tension rises over the course of the three books, the focus of events moves down the silo, deep into the earth. It is those in the community most distant and disconnected from the surface who must lead the way back there.

As in the first two novels, though we come to know some of the history and motivations of a few of the main characters, the trilogy is not built around deep character development. Howey’s focus in Dust remains on the broader psychological aspects of the situation and its effects on this community living underground in their circumscribed home. How have these people, so seemingly similar to us in how they go about their daily lives, managed to adapt to what would seem to be from our perspective an inhuman situation? And even more critically, how will they adjust to the sudden revelations about their world, revelations that will shake the foundations of their beliefs and understanding?

This third book provides a satisfying conclusion to the series, an entertaining resolution to the taut story line that was created for the reader from the first pages of Wool. And though Howey seems to point at Dust as being the conclusion of this story, giving it the subtitle “Every Beginning Has An End,” the final pages of Dust create a new kind of beginning --- so we may yet find that three books are not the upper limit of this trilogy.

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(Mild Spoiler Alert:)
It’s difficult, particularly in a science fiction novel, to have everything ‘add-up’, to seem completely logical, and Howey generally does a fine job of that in these stories. One thing surprised me however: at the end of Dust, when those who have escaped their silo gather outside, and beyond the dead zone round the silos, they discuss where to go next, and there is no mention of the sky scrapers (of Atlanta) that they have seen and wondered at through the cameras of the silos. Even if it’s clear they wouldn’t want to settle in a destroyed city, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t be intensely curious about it, and at least go for a look…

Howey has published a collection of short stories, Machine Learning (my review here), that includes a tryptic of stories collectively grouped as Silo Stories, and that span the period of the Silo Trilogy.  The three tales form a wonderful complement to the original trilogy.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf