Brian McKenzie

One of my favourite comedy bits is Robin Williams pretending to be Elmer Fudd singing Bruce Springsteen's "Fire". In a similar vein, I imagine that, in sitting down to write The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry asked himself "what if Terry Gilliam channeled David Lynch pretending to be Franz Kafka writing a Sam Spade novel?" You can almost sense him smirking and glancing over at you as you read along, as if to say "you get it?"

This is a fun novel. It's not exactly weird, it's more unsettling, like a strange noise in the upstairs bathroom when you're home alone and the cat's curled up in your lap. Everything is just . . . off: the endless rain. The retro-futuristic setting. The rigidly bureaucratic, hierarchical Agency. The preoccupation with umbrellas, wet socks and squeaky shoes. It's hard to get a handle on where and when it's taking place, and even harder to pin down the mood. 20 pages in I checked to see if I had missed an opening chapter or prologue; I felt like I was missing some key piece of information that would establish context. Like I said: unsettling.

But then I just surrendered to it and let the story carry me along like a lazy river. The protagonist, Charles Unwin, is a clerk in some kind of monolithic corporate detective agency reminiscent of Pinkerton's. His job is to write the official case reports of his assigned detective, Travis Sivart, based on Sivart's narrative notes. It is a job at which he apparently excels and takes great pride in doing. As the story opens, he finds himself unexpectedly promoted against his will to detective, replacing Sivart who is mysteriously absent. Completely unprepared and unqualified, he sets out to obtain an explanation for, and reversal of, this decision and stumbles upon the murder of Sivart's Watcher (i.e. supervisor) for which he is framed. This sets everything in motion.

All the 1940s detective story tropes are there: the beautiful femme fatale, the mysterious woman in distress, the hardboiled detective(s), the sassy secretary, the frame-job murder, the hapless patsy. But again, things are off. For one, what exactly is the nature of this detective agency? For another, why are people so strangely somnambulant? Why does Unwin's choice of hat matter to his job? What are we to make of the clipped, Edwardian prose, so curiously flat and detached?

The mysteries include the mummy with modern dental work at the Municipal Museum, the theft of the 12th of November (you read that correctly), the 7:27 a.m. train that always runs a minute late, a defunct carnival, dream infiltration, a casino where sleepwalkers gamble with alarm clocks, and a man who has died 3 times. How they are related to the missing Travis Sivart, the murdered Watcher, a recently-resurfaced magician, the menacing, formerly-conjoined twins who drive the steam-powered carriage, and the museum cleaner who wrote the titular "Manual of Detection" makes up the meat of the story.

And what a story. Again, lots of fun, but I confess at times I allowed my attention to wander largely, I think, because of the flat prose style. It's necessary for the key plot point, the dream infiltration reminiscent of Inception, but until you understand that, keep the background music off and eliminate external distractions so that you can focus on the narrative.

Once the pieces start falling into place, the pace accelerates and, again like in a classic detective novel, the good, the bad and the ambiguous all meet their various rewards. Plot twists, big reveals, character reversals, and comeuppances abound. It seems like we're back on traditional ground, but it's all clever parody, subversion, and (God help me) deconstruction. The book leaves us with a number of questions about the surveillance and control, the illusions we trade for reality, and what it means to be "awake". It's not for everyone, and, judging by some other reviews, a lot of readers couldn't/didn't finish it. But if you are looking for something subversive, original, a little confusing, and, yes, fun, give it a go. You might just enjoy yourself.

Thus ends the Shakespearean tragedy of Cromwell, the brilliant man hoist on his own Machiavellian petard. Unlike the first two novels, The Mirror and the Light shows us the Cromwell that history remembers: ruthless, violent, all-powerful, and, ultimately, undone by vindictive enemies and a paranoid king.

Mantel's achievement here (and across the trilogy) is monumental if for no other reason than she makes the reader sympathize with Cromwell. This is, of course, narrative sleight of hand as her limited third-person perspective is really just first-person in disguise: we only get to see and hear what Cromwell sees and hears, and we only get to understand events through his understanding of them. And while we know what is ultimately going to happen, we are still surprised when, seemingly out of the blue not long after being made Earl of Essex and Lord Chamberlain, Cromwell finds himself in the Tower on charges of treason and heresy.

Mantel plants the seeds early. In the moments after Anne Boleyn's execution at the beginning of the novel, Wriothesley, loyalties divided, tells Cromwell,

“People have been talking of the cardinal. They say, look at what Cromwell has wreaked, in two years, on Wolsey’s enemies. Thomas More is dead. Anne the queen is dead. They look at those who slighted him, in his lifetime – Brereton, Norris – though Norris was not the worst . . . They ask," Wriothesley says, “who was the greatest of the cardinal’s enemies? They answer, the king. So, they ask – when chance serves, what revenge will Thomas Cromwell seek on his sovereign, his prince?”

The answer comes during his interrogation:

“Let me remind you,” Riche says. “At the church of St Peter le Poor, near your own gate at Austin Friars, on or around …” Riche has lost the date, but no matter, “… you were heard to pronounce certain treasonable words: that you would maintain your own opinion in religion, that you would never allow the king to return to Rome, and – these are the words alleged – if he would turn, yet I would not turn; and I would take the field against him, my sword in my hand. And you accompanied these words with certain belligerent gestures – . . . You also stated,” Riche says, “that you would bring new doctrine into England, and that – and here I quote your own words – If I live one year or two, it shall not lie in the king’s power to resist.”

The cards thus stacked against him - by none less than Richard Riche, whose perjured testimony cost Thomas More his head - Cromwell understands that he has lost. But it's not due to any trumped-up charges of treason - no, he gets that all the crazy talk of aspiring to be king by marrying Mary, of sorcery, of conspiracy with the Emperor, and seeking to raise a "pauper army" is all just a smokescreen for the king's true grievance:

“The king hates a man who breaks his word. You said you would kill Reginald Pole.”

“Not a drop of his blood is shed,” Gardiner observes.

He thinks, now we come to it. This is why Henry faults me. And so he should. This is where I have failed.

This is life in Henry's capricious court. Henry, assessing Cromwell's almost superhuman accomplishments, finds him lacking because he failed to kill the pretender. Norfolk, resentful that a commoner should be ennobled, and Gardiner, vengeful at being replaced as Master Secretary and shipped off to France, conspired to light the fuse.

Mantel gives full rein to her imagination in this novel, the longest of the three (in fact, almost as long as the other two combined). Cromwell is given to increasing flights of memory of his childhood and his years of apprenticeship in Italy. He continues to be haunted by Wolsey, tormented by More and guilt ridden over his mysterious daughter, Jenneke. Her canvas is huge - the economics of the dissolution of the monasteries, the diplomatic intricacies of the marriage to Anne of Cleves, the religious crisis over the Pilgrimage of Grace - and reveals her thorough research and deep understanding of the period. Clearly she had great passion for the story, and saw in Cromwell some kind of archetype of hero/villains throughout modern history: his own great nephew Oliver Cromwell; Maximillian Robespierre; Otto von Bismarck; Vladimir Lenin; J. Edgar Hoover; Richard Nixon. Men who rose to great heights; who sought to reshape the world in their own image; who ultimately destroyed themselves.

Are we to draw lessons from Cromwell's story about the dangers of pride and self aggrandizement? If history is truly written by the victors, has his story been accurately told? Is Cromwell Macbeth or Lear? These are tough questions and I think Hilary Mantel wants us to see, in the mirror and the light, something of our own place and time. Mantel's Cromwell, really, is a projection of our own worst instincts and the embodiment of modern homo politicus; and perhaps what she wants us to understand that there will always be a Cromwell, the one with the dirty fingernails and bloody knife; the one who takes care of the jobs no one else can stomach; the one we ultimately can't keep around because he reminds us too much of our own base nature. Cromwell, hero or villain, is not so much a man as a matter of perspective.

I've read a few Scalzi novels and generally enjoy them. They are, of course, not Great Literature, but that doesn't seem to be Scalzi's goal as a writer. Instead, he wants to be the iconoclast of science fiction. In many cases, science fiction writers affect an elevated tone and style: characters Speak and Proclaim. Dickensian comes to mind (looking at you, Asimov).

Scalzi is far more colloquial, drawing his tone from everyday people in everyday situations. He loves tough, glib, no-nonsense heroes who find themselves in bizarre circumstances: galactic wars, collapsing empires, or, in this case, a succession crisis on an extraterrestrial planet.

As in most of his novels, he eschews world building to explain how Earth became part of a pan-galactic empire. We are meant just to take it as a given. He is also vague about when this story takes place: there are vague references to the twentieth century being some time in the distant past but no clear sense of how far back or what the current year is. Despite this, everything feels completely contemporary: other than the spaceships, there are few references to exotic, futuristic technology; the USA is still a functioning political entity (amusingly, Scalzi suggests that, even in the distant future, the US is the de facto world government that alien civilizations deal with); a key scene takes place in a suburban shopping mall; and characters use “communicators” that are indistinguishable from smartphones. Even Robin Baker, the heroine/Maguffin, owns a small pet store and lives in a small apartment on the brink of poverty.

The key conflict involves a succession conflict between two noble clans (with confusingly similar names) on the homeworld of the Nibu, one of the members of the galactic federation to which Earth belongs. Without getting too deep into the weeds, the conflict has to do with the adherence to certain rituals in the succession ceremony. For complicated (and funny) reasons involving a genetic experiment gone haywire, Robin Baker (or, more accurately, her blood) is a key element in the succession, so the two clans engage in espionage and other hijinks to either secure Robin or prevent her from being part of the ceremony.

What follows is standard action-adventure fare: shootouts, chases, brinksmanship, risky escapes, high-tech computer espionage, and score settling. There's even a little bit of courtroom drama with a controversial court ruling raising the stakes in the succession crisis. Clearly Scalzi is sending up political action-thriller potboilers like the books of John La Carré, Len Deighton, Ian Fleming and others while writing a fairly strong story that stands well on its own. It's not Austin Powers but it also doesn't take itself too seriously. While it's a little loose and talky in the first act, the balance of the novel is tightly paced and efficient, leavened with a healthy dose of humour and plot armour.

Overall it's a fun read, one in which you can easily spot elements of other books you've read before while yet finding a few innovations. Fans of Scalzi know what to expect, and newcomers will see the foundational elements of what has become his signature style.

My fascination with the Tudor dynasty began in my early university days and for reasons I cannot fully explaing it has never really let me go. From Henry VII's victory over Richard III at Bosworth Field to the death of Elizabeth I, England was ruled by a strange and volatile family that dragged it kicking and screaming out of its violent, feudal backwardness and made it into an early modern imperialist nation state. I recall reading eagerly the course text (I cannot for the life of me remember the author but I can very vividly picture the book's cover; accursed aging!) and took copious notes during lectures. I got A's on my essays, and flatter myself that I impressed the professor with my depth of reading.

And it was in this reading that I first encountered Thomas Cromwell. History generally hasn't been kind to him, and in both history and literature he has been portrayed as the villain (more correctly, the villain) of the Tudor period due to his work on Henry VIII's behalf in disposing of Catherine of Aragon, securing the marriage to (and subsequent beheading of) Anne Boleyn, the dissolution of the monasteries, and, of course, the Protestant Reformation in England. As a high school English teacher I reinforced this perception of him through teaching the play A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, which adds a few additional layers to his reputation: not only was he bad to Henry's assorted wives, but he was also a vindictive, jealous, petty bully who manipulated Henry into executing Sir Thomas More, one of the leading intellectuals of Europe and a man renowned for his faith. Bolt's play, and the subsequent 1966 movie adaptation starring Leo McKern as Cromwell, is probably the reason most people think of Cromwell so negatively, and its influence is clearly felt throughout the novel.

Mantel clearly set out to take advantage of the huge resurgence in interest in Tudor history that began in the 1990s with novels (Antonia Fraser, Phillippa Gregory), histories (Alison Weir, Peter Ackroyd, Tracy Borman) and even TV series (most notably The Tudors). But, she must have wondered, what's my angle? What would be a fresh, interesting perspective on this wildly erratic period of history? And her answer, of course, was to centre Cromwell and retell the story through his eyes. Is he really the bad guy history has made him out to be? What were his motivations? His desires? His objectives?

Mantel seeks to answer these questions and more as she provides Cromwell with an origin story that evokes pity and admiration. In her telling, Cromwell was the son of a violent, abusive blacksmith from the slums of Putney who left home at 15 and sold himself as a soldier to the French. Tough, smart, and highly adept at learning languages, he reinvented himself multiple times as an accountant, lawyer, merchant, businessman and banker all before he entered into the service of Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York. Under Wolsey he blossomed further to become first advisor, then privy councillor, then personal secretary to Henry VIII on the strength of a) his uncompromising willingness to speak truth to power and b) his effectiveness in disposing of Henry's problems. A nobleman getting out of line? Send Cromwell to have a little talk. Debts mounting and revenues faltering? Cromwell will balance the books again. Marriage inconvenient? Get Cromwell to draft some new laws. Hassles with the Pope? Cromwell will sever relations.

Cromwell here is a kind and loving husband and father who reads bedtime stories with his youngest daughter and crafts homemade angel wings for her to wear in the family's Christmas pageant. He graciously takes in the sons of prominent houses to train them in the law, business, accounting, mercantile trading, and (more subtly) espionage. He's glib and witty, bordering on insolent with his superiors (Norfolk: ‘I spoke to the king for you and he is also content. You will take his instructions in the Commons. And mine.' Cromwell: ‘Will they be the same, my lord?'). He adores Wolsey and demonstrates unwavering loyalty, telling an aggrieved Henry who's badmouthing him “I have never had anything from the cardinal other than kindness.” So he's courageous too, standing in the wind that Henry blows, and refusing to cower before him.

But recasting Cromwell as the (for want of a better term) tragic hero of the piece means seeing everyone else through his eyes. Henry VIII, long portrayed as blustering, bellicose and belligerent, is presented here as insecure, impulsive, immature and highly malleable, haunted by the ghost of his brother Arthur, who, had he lived, would have been king after Henry VII, keenly aware that he was never intended to rule. He's as horny as a teenager (and, apparently, about as effective), fragile, and clever with a prodigious capacity for compartmentalizing his life. Sir Thomas More is angry, bitter, vicious and cruel, almost gleefully torturing and burning Protestant heretics. He's also self-righteous, condescending, resentful and dismissive toward Cromwell who does his level best to protect More from himself and prevent his execution. Catherine of Aragon is whiny, sickly and vacillating, sometimes The Queen, sometimes the victim, sometimes the desperate petitioner for the King's mercy. Anne Boleyn (to whom he is deeply attracted along with her sister Mary) is manipulative and sly, sexually dominant (and, despite her claims of virginity, probably highly experienced), and ruthless. Wolsey is generous in spirit, slavishly devoted to Henry, and though corrupted by his wealth and years in office, immensely likeable. He teaches Cromwell statecraft, how to work the king, how to get around the nobles who swarm on Henry for favour like flies after honey and, most importantly, how to be true to himself.

What is most engaging about this novel is not the palace intrigues or political machinations: no, it's the way Mantel carefully structures each scene in such a way to make Cromwell emerge the winner. He seems to do everything exactly right, say everything exactly right, know everything exactly right, and, as a result, come up with exactly the right outcomes. Things we shrink from, like the execution of More, seem to emerge logically and naturally, certainly not the fault of Cromwell who did everything he could to save him. If More died, it was due to his own stubbornness and sinful desire to be a martyr. What else could a good and reasonable man like Cromwelll have done? If Catherine was set aside and Henry made supreme head of the church in England, was it not due to the intransigence of the Pope and the Spanish crown who held the gun to his head? Clearly they didn't understand the pressures, the threat of a return of civil war. What choice did they leave Henry? And those monasteries? Dens of iniquity (‘May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organise a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery?'). Break them up, confiscate their wealth for the good of the realm. The monks will actually be grateful.

It doesn't matter that (or if) this is revisionist history. It doesn't matter that this Cromwell is probably not any closer to the real one than Bolt's eye-rolling, moustachio twirler. What matters is that Mantel has a firm grasp on history, a good ear for dialogue, and a sharp sense of how to recast the ambiguous in certitude with a little clever characterization. Cromwell is her Macbeth, and we are, with this first part of the trilogy, witnessing his rise and catching mere glimpses of the flaws that will eventually (spoiler alert) result in his fall from grace and death. It's a hell of a ride, and worth every moment.

Like many others, I have read this book a number of times because it has a fascinating and irresistible concept: the fall of an empire. Asimov, by his own admission, drew on historical examples - mostly the Roman Empire - so a lot of the story contains plausible and reasonably sensible portrayals of how such a collapse would occur. I also very much enjoy the very American subtext of the conflict between individualism and collectivism, and the much broader philosophical conflict between determinism and free will.

But (and you knew a but was coming) the problems are myriad. Blatant sexism, if not outright misogyny, for one. Asimov's is a man's universe. Men do all the thinking, ruling and leading. Group addresses uniformly begin with “Gentlemen . . .” Women are non-existent or ornamental at best. Despite his ability to forecast the growth and change in technology tens of thousands of years into the future, Asimov seems incapable of imagining any change in ca. 1941 gender roles. Then there's his weird obsession with age, and his belief that 50 is old age (full disclosure: I'm 56 and only just got my first senior's discount card at the local pharmacy). The dialog is just plain weird, with a stilted, formal, expository and very British style (correction: a young American man's misapprehension of British style). Granted Asimov was a teenager when he started writing, and barely 21 when he started on Foundation, but still. The characters don't talk: they Elocute, Declaim, Pronounce, and Inveigh.

And the repetition. I get that the novel began life as a series of stories, but once they were collected into a novel someone somewhere should have sat down with a blue pencil and deleted the almost continuous restatements of the key plot points. After the fifteenth time being told “psychohistory was the creation of Hari Seldon who . . . “ I wanted to throw the book against the wall (which, as it's a Kindle, would have been a Very Bad Idea).

There are some logical issues as well. The size of the empire strains credibility. Asimov posits that in the roughly 12,000 years of the galactic empire, humanity has grown to quadrillions of humans on millions of worlds. This is too fast a growth rate. Consider that on earth at the time Asimov wrote this, there were approximately 3 billion people after more than 150,000 year of human growth. Wars, plagues, disasters and other factors kept the population growth rate relatively low for all but the last 100 years or so. How are we to believe that population expansion on other worlds wouldn't have similarly been constrained? For that matter how are we to believe that that many habitable planets could be discovered, let alone settled (and terraformed) in sufficient numbers to sustain such growth?

And where are the alien species? A pan-galactic empire spanning millions of planets and not a single non-terran life form? No exotic animals? No sentient beings? Not even a plant? In later novels Asimov goes to great lengths to hand-wave this problem away, but those were 40 years in his future. Maybe, despite his misogyny and imperialism, Asimov wasn't a colonialist.

I like very much the idea of psychohistory and the idea that it is possible to predict the economic, political and sociological trends of human behaviour. To some extent, that has come true and we are able to forecast somewhat based on mathematical trends. I also like the emphasis on non-violent means to solve political crises, a stance that I'm sure was influenced by the world war that was raging while Asimov was writing the book. Many have commented (some complained) that all the action takes place offstage with most of the book being consumed with conferences, meetings, discussions, assemblies and conclaves. Asimov himself said that upon rereading the book in the 80's he kept waiting for something to happen. But I think I can forgive that as, really, most problems that we encounter in our lives are settled non-violently through talk and careful thought. Yeah, there are some space wars, and there is loss of life on an appalling scale, but to my mind it was the right approach to focus on solving (and resolving) the crises rather than the disasters the crises caused. Smarts and wisdom will take us farther than guns and ammunition.

So who should read this book? And why? Anyone with a desire to understand the history of science fiction for sure if only to hear the echoes of later works (the Ringworld series, the Star Wars cycle, The Co-Dominium Universe). Suckers for the triumph of the cerebral over the physical will also be rewarded, as well as those who reject the western-frontier-in-space trope of many works of SF. But don't go into it expecting grand insights or even commentary about the contemporary world. Asimov's vision, unlike many SF writers, was squarely backward looking which is odd given what was going on in the world when he was writing it. Maybe that's the point: by averting his gaze he could pretend, for a while, that he wasn't living in a dystopian world of violence, corruption and wholesale slaughter. Maybe he wanted to imagine a world where reason, logic, and intelligence could rule.

Ok, be honest: how many of you pictured Matt Damon playing Our Hero? How many of you heard the same narrative voice from The Martian? The “aw shucks” charm. The slightly narcissistic, “gee ain't I clever?” persona. The “wait'll you see how I solved THIS” schlock.

Yeah, ok, this isn't literary fiction. It's pop fiction, a beach read for nerds. Diversion. So that makes it ok, right? Well, no. I don't think so. I don't think that, just because it's for a pop audience, that a writer can't ask more of the readers than “just sit back, relax and turn the pages.” This is what I find plagues Weir's novels. Sure he put a lot of time and effort and research into them, but he's the one doing all the work. The reader is not put upon in the least - he even goes so far as to use clunky expository dialogue to define and explain scientific concepts like relativity, atomic structure and basic chemistry concepts. It's like he doesn't trust anyone to know anything.

So, as the story goes, Doomsday looms. Why? The sun is dimming. Why? Ah, that's the central problem that trillions of dollars, an international effort led by a cardboard cutout named “Stratt”, and various scientists and astronauts are determined to solve. And Our Hero, a former exobiologist turned middle school teacher named Ryland Grace (a name charged with significance as we find out), finds himself at the centre of the whole thing due to having once published a controversial paper that made him the laughing stock of the science community. What? That he rises to be the second in command of the project despite Stratt having assembled the top minds of their respective fields, then finds himself on the mission itself taxes the reader's willing suspension of disbelief.

Like all good hard science fiction, this book is full of Smart People (who, regrettably, come straight out of TV Tropes: the hard-drinking Russian, the tough, inscrutable Chinese, the clumsily kind Canadian. Like I said, it's an international effort) and their quest to launch the titular Hail Mary Project (given that it's an international effort, the white, Christian name is fun (lampshaded by Our Hero when he muses on what other names recognizing non-Christian deities might have been used)), a space mission to a distant star to find a solution to the Doomsday threat. Lots of Unobtainium; lots of Handwavium. New technologies and galaxy-spanning settings. We're continuously reminded that the mission is up against a tight deadline, that billions will die, that misery and privation and drought and and and . . . well, it'll be awful, so the mission can't fail and all stops are pulled and no expense is spared.

The fun of this novel is, of course, the tone. If you've read an Andy Weir book you know what I'm talking about. It's all major chords. If it were a song it would be stuck in your head. Weir's charming and easy style keeps you hooked and you can't help but like Ryland Grace. His story unfolds across two timelines, past and present, interwoven such that questions arising in the present are answered via flashback, while conversations and aha moments in the past inform the present. It keeps you reading.

There are also some big plot twists that are heavily foreshadowed: how Grace ends up on the mission, how the mission almost ends before it starts, how it goes off the rails (then gets back on track) and how it ends are all supposed to be big surprises but you just know they're coming. The themes of the book are what you'd expect from the plot, Teamwork, Sacrifice, Loyalty, Friendship and Redemption, and scene after scene of never-say-die, can-do, gitterdun, good ole Amurican know-how ensure the bestseller status. What there is not is growth or change. Our Hero is Our Hero from the moment we meet him until the final droll scene, and if the outcome is never in doubt, well, that's only because it's a first-person narrative.

So yeah. Fun story, competently if not capably told. I'm sure it'll be a Netflix series before too long.

See, I was misled. I'm not a big fan of melodrama, and this doorstop (900+ pages) is a genre-defining example. But I was told by friends that this was A Great Novel, you know, literary, thoughtful, philosophical, enlightening. I was told that it was the Harry Potter of its time, turning reluctant readers into enthusiastic consumers of historical fiction and high romance, sparking the boom in equally thick historical tomes by such writers as Philippa Gregory, Bernard Cornwell, Diana Gabaldon and Sara Waters (among many others). I was told it was relentlessly suspenseful and exciting, exceedingly clever in its many twists and turns, and even inspirational (and somewhat anticipatory) for its portrayal of strong, independent women who defy societal expectations and do what suits themselves best.

So, where to begin? I guess with the plot and story structure. For its length this is a book with a surprisingly thin story: the smart, young and industrious (and it must be said, prideful) new prior of Kingsbridge (Phillip) wants to build a cathedral in his backwater village where nobody goes. Hijinks ensue. That's it. That's the story. Highly episodic and cyclical, the novel takes us through a simple pattern:

1. Big problem
2. Clever solution
3. Incremental success
4. Complication and setback
5. Repeat

This pattern repeats, I don't know, eight, ten times and each time we are meant to sigh in relief as the clever Phillip overcomes complications to get his cathedral done (and, sorry, it's no spoiler to say he does. I mean, this wouldn't be one of the most beloved novels of all time (no, seriously) if the whole purpose for the book were never realized).

And what are the obstacles and complications? Two unidimensional guys, Bishop Waleran Bigod (and there's a name dripping with Signifance: the priest who serves two gods, get it?) and William Hamleigh, the villainous, ham-fisted, moustache-twirling Earl of Shiring, both of whom oppose the cathedral because it thwarts their own ambitions and offends their pride and they don't like Phillip because, in customary good guy-bad guy rivalry fashion, he makes them look stupid. They conspire repeatedly to stop the construction using means legal (trumped-up charges), illegal (murder), political (changing allegiance in the civil war), physical (attack and plunder) and ecclesiastical (trumped-up charges again but this time churchy), but each time good Prior Phillip outwits, outlasts and outplays them. Sometimes he gets mad and yells, but most of the time he is serene, urbane, sensible and wise.

The story plays out over 54 years of 12th century English history, beginning in 1120 with the sinking of the White Ship (a maritime disaster that killed the heir to the English throne) and ending in the aftermath of the murder of Thomas Beckett, the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury. We get a Forrest Gump's eye view of this period as our main characters, despite being in the aforementioned backwater village of Kingsbridge, find themselves central to the political and religious intrigue of this period known as The Anarchy. Along the way we are treated to micro-credential courses such as Gothic Architecture for Dummies, Introduction to Feudal Capitalism, Pre-Industrial Labour Relations and Collective Bargaining, and, most critically, Medieval Gender Equity and Feminist Theory. Seriously, at various points throughout the novel, the too-clever-by-half (and highly articulate) characters lay the groundwork for socio-economic developments that took centuries to manifest in Western Europe and North America. I was actually a little surprised that Follett didn't have Prior Phillip invent banking and the stock market.

I can't really offer an in-depth look at all the main characters because they are really just character types. Strong and decent Tom Builder, the stone mason. Alfred, his bullying, thick-headed son who also becomes a stone mason. Ellen the mysterious, incredibly beautiful, forest-dwelling woman who carries a dark secret. Aliena (another Significant Name), the also incredibly beautiful, willful daughter of the original Earl (deposed for backing the wrong side in the civil war). Richard, Aliena's thumb of a brother, good for fighting wars but little else. William the sadist. Bigod the corrupt. Jack Shareburg, hanged mysteriously in the prologue, and father of Jack Jackson who was raised by Tom to be the Greatest Builder Ever. There are more but you get the picture. It's a clockwork novel, and though you hear the machinery creaking, it keeps its steady time and plodding pace, the action rising and falling until we reach the big concluding scene where the righteous get their reward, the unrighteous their punishment, the cathedral its grand opening and the future its path forward. It's easy to see why fans clamoured for more but hard to understand why it took Follett another 20 years to accommodate them. Once he did, he figured out what butters his bread and now there's no stopping him as he has written 5 or so sequels in 14 years.

This book will appeal to readers who like their lines between good and evil clearly marked, their heroes unambiguously good, their villains irredeemably bad, and their plots linear and well lit like an airport runway. Those who seek something focussing more on the conflict between church and crown, or the complex role of religion in medieval life will want to look elsewhere.

What struck me most in re-reading this fabulous novel (having first read it as an undergraduate English major in the mid 1980's) – or more accurately, what I'm more capable of putting into words – is that it is a veritable handbook for psychiatrists and psychotherapists on the subject of inappropriate emotional response. Literary conventions vary by era and culture, of course, but I have to think that even a contemporaneous Russian reader would have felt as exhausted by the wildly erratic mood swings of these characters as I was. I wonder, in reading some of the other reviews here, if this is why it is so difficult to get through for so many readers.

The novel falls squarely into the realm of melodrama, and you can hear the machinery creaking as you read along. The plot is deceptively simple: a father and his son compete for the love of a manipulative, deceptive prostitute, and drag everyone around them into the fight causing various degrees of collateral damage. When the father gets his head cracked, we are plunged into an episode of Law and Order and see both the (surprisingly modern) police investigation and the (surprisingly contemporary) trial. The brothers K, all types, represent various philosophical perspectives on what to do about the decaying and decadent Old Russia as represented by Fyodor Pavlovich, their father. So as a work of fiction it's not overly complicated or difficult. Money and wealth (Katerina), sexual mores (Grushenka), morality (Fr. Zosima) and social hierarchy (Snegirov) are the problems that New Russia must tackle. What is the way forward? Traditional Orthodox Christian monarchy? Socialist, atheist revolution?

What makes this novel so compelling (and so long) is the psychological portrait Dostoevsky paints of each character. Types though they are, he takes great pains to show us the history and motivations of each character in a way few modern novelists do anymore. Whether or not we like them is one thing; whether we understand them is another, and I think that is what was most important to Dostoevsky, and what makes this novel more than the sum of its parts.

The omniscient first-person narrator with the front-row seats to all the action, very subtly influences our perceptions. Fyodor Pavlovich, depicted as a drunken and depraved old man (well, in his 50's which, in 19th century Russia was old) gains a backstory at the hands of the prosecutor that, while not rehabilitative, depicts him as a rather pathetic figure. We can almost feel sorry for him, and whatever his sins, we can say he certainly didn't deserve to be murdered in cold blood for the sake of a man's twisted beliefs about morality. And then we can't fully condemn the murderer either because we know the deprived and horrific upbringing he endured. Every character receives this kind of detailed portrait. As a result, no one, with the possible exception of Alexei (Alyosha), emerges from this novel looking good, but they don't emerge looking fully bad either. What they are is human - broken, flawed, contradictory, confused, and even at times lost, but they are human. Dostoevsky's achievement, again, is not in the structure and style of the novel, but in his deep and moving insights into people. No matter how many times you read this book, read it again.

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHORperG.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”

Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) kind of called the shot with this book, a complicated, difficult, arcane and puzzling tale about . . . something. It's never really clear what the point of this sequel to the enviro-disaster novel Borne actually is other than, perhaps, to provide some sort of outlet for the assorted notes and sketches Jeff Vandermeer accumulated while writing it. Where it fails, for me, is in the hazy narrative which takes a variety of perspectives but can't quite focus on anything. The dead astronauts of the title, first seen in Borne, are some kind of shape-shifters capable of moving through time and space. Ostensibly human, they are apparently the creation of The Company, a sinister, nebulous entity that tinkered with biotechnology and (I guess) interdimensional portals. Their creations, both dangerous and innocuous, fill the landscape through which the astronauts move on a mission to . . . do . . . something. Then there's Charlie X (a name deliberately or innocently nicked from a classic Star Trek , episode about a young boy with godlike powers (so, maybe it wasn't as innocently used as I first thought)) who seems to have been responsible for the creation of some of the worst/most dangerous biotech creatures like The Blue Fox and the Behemoth, both of which cast menacing and dark shadows over the story as they . . . do . . . something. Again, the beams lose their coherence.
Vandermeer's fiction is called Weird for good reason. It is not just that the subject matter is strange and exotic; it's not just that the story (for lack of a better term) is elliptical and indirect; it's more the whole premise of a world gone to hell (cue the old sci-fi trope of Misused Technology Gone Bad) filled with bizarre new creatures. In a sense, he has turned traditional science fiction inside out: instead of elaborate stories about interstellar space travel to new worlds with bizarre alien life, he has centred the story on earth and put all the expensive gadgets and toys in the service of creating wacky biotech. No need to leave the planet when we can have the monsters here. And what could be a worse “alien invasion” story than one in which the monsters are of our own creation. Frankenstein meets the 21st century with predictably dire results. On a side note, I recently read Margaret Atwood's Madadam trilogy and have to confess that the worlds of these two series are so similar that I kept expecting characters from Atwood's books to appear in this one.
So Vandermeer can write, there's no doubt, but it's not always clear in this book what it is he's writing about, or even for. I imagine his poor editor, sitting across from him all headachy and confused, saying “ok, Jeff, I get what you're saying, but what the hell is going on here?” The book is kaleidoscopic and vivid but ultimately it's devoid of anything resembling plot, structure or narrative. Maybe that's Vandermeer's point: in a post-human, fragmented world the stories are equally distorted, fragmented and incoherent.

If you've read a Jeff VanderMeer book before, you know what I mean when I say it's disorienting. VanderMeer's prose style is not so much dense as elliptical; oblique rather than straightforward, and you can't help but feel you've entered three chapters in and missed all the early exposition that sets up the story.

So it is with Borne, a novel set in an unspecified future post-apocalypse hellscape, one in which humans have messed about too adeptly with biotechnology and unleashed monsters. As with most stories of this ilk, humanity has been reduced to a paltry few, living as scavengers picking at the bones of civilization. They live in destroyed buildings, forests, valleys and wherever else they can make a meagre life, all the while dodging the monstrous bear, Mord and his proxy bears which seem to have no purpose other than rage-fuelled destruction. Did I mention that Mord, the bear, flies? And that his proxy bears are venomous?

So, yeah, it's strange, and it takes you on a complicated and weird journey through the remains of civilization with dark hints and glimpses at the causes of its collapse: the mysterious Company that seems to have been at the center of the aforementioned biotechnological meddling. The world, now filled with . . . creatures . . . is a land straight out of legend and myth.

In fact, I think that's what makes this book so interesting (and enjoyable). The legends and myths of our world have come down to us through hundreds of generations in a long, epoch-spanning game of broken telephone. We know that the stories of gods, demons, wondrous creatures, magic and all the other archetypal fantasy elements are the result of uncounted retellings around fires, at court, in villages, even in what we would now call nursery rhymes. What VanderMeer has done here is invert that model. In Borne the first-person narrator describes the mythic, fabulous events as she witnessed them. It's like we're at the birth of myth itself.

Which, come to think of it, is mirrored in the story of Borne, the creature cum Maguffin that begins as an unknown blob on the back of Mord and gradually evolves into . . . something. We witness its growth, see it acquire new powers that it brandishes like its many tentacles which, in case you missed the point, are like the many accretions of myths and legends that pile on over the generations, until the climactic, epic conclusion where Borne literally becomes . . . well, I'll leave it to you to see.

This, I think, is the value of the novel. The plot, such as it is, meanders (and owes a huge debt to Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy); the characters are barely fleshed out; the setting is straight out of the zombie movie playbook. What's left? What is the point? The birth, curation, and transmission of myth itself. We are meant to experience this story in the way those who came after its events would, hearing with wide-eyed wonder the story of monsters laying waste to the land (tip of the hat to the Welsh Arthurian legends of the great boar Trwyth), of magical beings (I mean, really, one character is called The Magician, for heaven's sake), of warriors and spirits and gods . . . it's Joseph Campbell and Jung and Eliot and Frye but rather than sitting in the lecture hall we're sitting around the fire ourselves.

So give it a read and think of it in terms of what it's trying to do rather than what is going on. VanderMeer writes strange, challenging books that raise a lot more questions than they resolve. That's good. He leaves space for his readers to suggest some of their own.

Religious people of all faiths eventually ask one (or both) of the following questions: “What is God's plan?” and “Why does God allow suffering?” And religious or not, I'd wager that more people than we would ever imagine have been faced with a personal existential crisis at some point in their lives and wondered whether life was truly worth living. Add to this some ancillary questions about what are the things that give meaning to a life and how does one reconcile morality with duty and you have pretty much summed up the personal themes this wonderful novel explores.

But it doesn't just work on the personal level. No, this is also a book about The Other – the strange, the unknown, the (pardon the pun) alien – that confronts us and makes us question our beliefs, preconceptions, standards and expectations. Institutionally, societally and again personally, the cast of this story are forced repeatedly to confront what they think they know, and to fill in the gaps of their ignorance; and repeatedly, what they find is not clarity but confusion. In its simplest terms, then, this is a book about the consequences of failing to learn.

Exploration and curiosity are hard-wired in the human brain. We are a race of explorers, and the archaeological record bears this out. With no new terrestrial lands to conquer we have turned skyward, and even as I write this, plans are underway for missions to Mars. We also listen in the remote hope that we will hear the telltale signal that confirms the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. And though, frankly, I'm not sure what we'll do if we ever receive it, this novel posits an expedition, led by the Vatican, to visit The Other in a replay of the 15th and 16th century missions to the New World. We know from our history books how those turned out, and a few dozen kilometres from where I now sit is the Martyr's Shrine dedicated to the Canadian Martyrs, so I wasn't completely surprised that the mission in this novel would turn out the way it did. It's no great spoiler to say that it goes terribly, horribly wrong. It's the reasons why it went wrong that make the novel so compelling. But let me warn you: as compelling and readable as it is, it's bleak. It bares the very souls of its characters and exposes them to the pain, terror and torture of learning the wrong lessons, like the spectator who goes to a public hanging expecting it to be a physics lecture. The reason for their failure? The usual suspects in tragedy: hamartia brought about by hubris and willful blindness.

The joys and horrors of the story are revealed incrementally (echoing a common refrain in the story) even as the characters (primarily Sandoz) are gradually stripped of their humanity. The climax, when it comes, brings the shattering truth that the shattered protagonist, his identity so thoroughly destroyed that he's no longer sure what language he speaks, must choose between impossible alternatives. In agony and permanently scarred (spiritually and physically); and dependent on literal and metaphorical prosthetics, he comes to the only conclusion possible for a man of faith who finds himself struggling to reconcile his belief in a Divine plan and the reality of profound suffering.

I've deliberately avoided mention of all the sci-fi stuff, i.e. the world building, the alien culture, the technology, for the simple reason that they are all McGuffins. This could just as easily have been set in 1647 during the fur trade but the author, Mary Doria Russell, for reasons of her own, decided on this setting in time, place and space. Really, it doesn't matter. Russell's focus is on how faith, certitude, and clarity of purpose, despite good intentions, can lead us to ruin. But to be clear, she's not indicting faith as the culprit. Rather she's attempting to show that faith alone is insufficient, and we must also use our brains, experience, and shared history to avoid replaying the same old tapes.

I've read a few of Blackman's books so I entered this one with expectations of the same quirky humour and quiet observations about human relationships and the nature of love. But this is not like the other novels. Unlike A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry or Anxious People, all of which deal with the pain of loss and finding new hope, this book is about violence.
This is an angry, angry Backman writing this story. The basic premise is simple enough: what happens when a star athlete in a small town gets accused of sexual assault? Backman explores the ways that loyalty, fear, pride, hope and, yes, violence, drive people's reactions and responses. In Beartown, the people love their hockey team and have pinned to it their hopes for economic recovery after shifting market conditions have resulted in lost jobs. Now, perceived as a depressed (and depressing) backwater in comparison to the more successful town of Hed just down the road, Beartown needs a miracle, and what better than the promise of an almost supernaturally talented young player to lead the team to the national title? Surely all good things will flow from that. Surely nothing must get in the way of that for the life of the town depends upon it.
But Backman isn't taking the side of the town in this novel. He looks instead at how these kinds of pressures and forces create the conditions for violence of many kinds: sexual violence, physical violence, psychological violence, and epistemological violence. He explores how otherwise good, right thinking, honest people with conflicting loyalties allow their fear, pride, hopes and needs to cloud their objectivity. And just as he explores violence, Backman also deftly shows how fear begets fear, and how lies beget blindness.
Sexual violence is not the stuff of comic novels so Backman wisely tones down his trademark wry humour but leaves much of his wit and charm, a tough balance to maintain. What humour there is gets expression in the eccentricities of Ramona, the bar owner, the town's drunken Diogenes who literally has to slap the truth into a wavering friend when he refuses to see it.
Interesting to note that Backman wrote two sequels to this novel. Clearly the themes he wished to develop were greater than could be accommodated in one novel and it's no surprise given the subject matter. He only touches the surface on questions of healing, recovery and growth and I'm sure seeks to examine the aftermath of explosive events such as the ones at the heart of this novel.
I will have to live with this book for a while before I can turn to the sequels. Living in a hockey town myself, and through my job as an educator, I have witnessed the corrosive effects of the idolizing of athletes. I have seen how people lose perspective and I have seen how adolescents with very little understanding of who they are suddenly find themselves thrust into the adoring spotlight of small-scale fame. Backman does an excellent job of depicting this situation and like all good writers holds a mirror to his time and place to show us how we really look. It's up to you to decide if you like what you see.

This book amplifies all the weaknesses of the previous books in the Foundation series: terrible dialogue, clumsy authorial intrusions, uneven pacing, overt misogyny, and deus ex machina endings. My sense is that if Asimov had come of age in a later generation, he would have papered his office walls with the rejection slips he would most assuredly (and deservedly) have received.

This is not to say that this book (and, by extension, the others in the series) is not a triumph of imagination. I agree with the many others who say that the Seldon Plan, psychohistory, the fall and re-establishment of a pan-galactic empire, and the development of a technocratic civilization are intensely fascinating and exciting concepts. And the early books do have their flashes of brilliance in execution. The flaws are all in the execution.

As others have detailed here, Asimov is just not a great novelist. He's lazy, for one thing, as evidenced by the lack of editing. I complained in my review of Foundation about the needless repetition of key plot points, but here it's worse. If Trevise said it once he said it thirty times in this novel that he was embarking on his mission because he didn't fully trust the intuition that led to his momentous decision in . We get it, and, as relatively sophisticated readers, we can be trusted to retain this motivation for a few hundred pages of uncomplicated narrative. As well, as the characters make much of the need to visit and explore a number of planets, what was needed was a writer who could build worlds, and devote large sections of the book to these planets, their histories, and the secrets they could reveal as our heroes sought to assemble the puzzle of Earth. Instead, we got treated to endless days and weeks of travel on a needlessly small spaceship with Trevize acting like an absolute ass, Pelorat sniveling and groveling for his attention, Bliss alternately complaining and mothering, and the plot itself absolutely foundering. When we do eventually get to the planets, we get a few hours' visit, immediate peril, and very little reward for the effort.

A second problem in Asimov's writing is his incapacity for making small leaps in imagination. Sure, he can conceive of humans evolving to have biological power transducers in their brains and powers of telepathy that work across galactic distances, but he is utterly incapable of seeing a future where women are more than objects to be ogled, dominated, owned, and used (I won't even get into his problems with intersexuality other than to say I've never felt so embarrassed reading something that purports to be from a “Great Writer.” It's as though he introduces the characters of Bander and Fallom just to point at them and say “ewwwww”). He also seems to think that a galactic civilization 25,000 years in the future will still run on Commodore PET computers and a ca. 1982 BBS despite the fact that Moore's Law was well-established at the time he was writing. Everyone who was anyone in SF circles had had more advanced ideas about computers and technology for decades by the time this book was written, and yet Asimov still thinks the typical computer will be disk-based terminals.

My greatest regret is with the dialogue. If you're going to force us into a confined space with three characters for weeks on end, you can at least have the decency to write dialogue that doesn't sound like it came from a late-Victorian-era George Bernard Shaw drama. Pelorat's use of “old chap”, “dear fellow”, and “my good man”, not to mention Trevise's near-constant disquisitions, became so grating that I impatiently glossed over their discussions. Trevize's unbearably crass treatment of Bliss and Fallom were even worse. At one point, he orders Bliss to take Fallom into the other room and instruct them “children should be seldom seen and almost never heard.” I started to think his irascibility was part of some larger plot point – maybe he was being emotionally controlled, maybe he was losing his grip on rationality – but it turns out, no, he's just a dick. Could this really be Asimov's idea of a galaxy-saving hero, a surly, pompous, short-tempered, condescending jerk? Or was this Asimov's own personality intruding as it did with Hari Seldon, Salvor Hardin, Hober Mallow and all the other strong men of Asimov's universe? I really wonder.

At the root of what makes this novel hard to like is Asimov's admitted motives for writing it in the first place: fan demand and filthy lucre. He didn't particularly want to return to the Foundation universe and it shows. I think his editor and publisher, desperate to get the book to market, or lacking the courage to challenge Asimov (or both), didn't have the willingness to make the extensive revisions necessary to turn this bloated, awkward, and dreary draft into a polished piece of SF literature that could provide a fitting end to the Foundation series. Shame.

You know, I really had high hopes for this story, which is kind of like “Dark Mirror” meets “Abbott and Costello”. In showing us a satirical vision of the our obsession with connectedness and instant communications, Connie Willis could have made a powerful statement about conformity and lowest common denominator entertainment. In sending up our demand to know what is always on everyone's minds via social media apps like Twitter/X and Facebook, she shows us our vanity, shallowness and insecurities. But in casting the novel as a silly romantic comedy/farce, she dilutes some of its power.
The basic premise is that a neurosurgeon has developed technology that, through a brain implant, allows emotionally-bonded couples to experience one another's emotions. Trent and Briddey, two young lovers who work for an Apple-like electronics giant, are planning to undergo the procedure so that they can be more fully connected – at least, that's according to Trent, at whose insistence they are planning to do it. They do, over the objections of a co-worker, CB Schwartz, and, as expected in romcom, hijinks ensue – the hijinks in this case being Briddey and CB discovering they have a telepathic (as opposed to merely empathic) connection. Which is fine, I guess, and there are some funny bits along the way but it's the way Willis brings about the complications that kind of got on my nerves.
Willis uses fractured, elliptical dialogue, interruptions from ringing phones (and absolutely grating family members), and disjointed conversations to create misunderstanding and confusion. Typical of Willis, she also uses subtle hints and narrative misdirection to spring plot twists that set the narrative careening off in a new direction.
But after awhile it all becomes tiresome, delay and obfuscation for their own sake. As with any romcom problem, this one could have been solved with a simple conversation but, as with every romcom ever, the characters choose the least sensible response.
Fans of Willis's novel To Say Nothing of The Dog will recognize her style and wit. In that book, though, it came across as Wildean comedy of manners. In Crosstalk it feels a bit forced. Unlike To Say Nothing . . . (and the other time travel novels), which handwaves away the sci-fi elements, Crosstalk bogs down in complicated explanations of the causes and effects of the telepathy. And in standard romcom fashion (no spoiler), true love wins, the crooked is made straight, the complications simplified, and the characters stand blinking in the bright, shiny dawn of new possibilities.
It's ok, but just ok. If you're looking for Connie Willis's magnum opus, this isn't it.

The thing about this book, this overly-long book, is that it's a kitchen sinker. It has everything you want in An Important Novel: the World War II setting; the big, chunky themes of human connection, heroism, loss, redemption and Good vs. Evil; pathos; profound insights; measured, weighty prose; significance-charged dialogue . . . no wonder it took Anthony Doerr the better part of a decade to complete. It's like he just couldn't stop tinkering with it and, like an obsessed medieval lord, kept adding wings to the castle.

The second thing is that everything about it is vaguely familiar. Wasn't there another book about a precocious young teenaged girl from the second world war? Don't I recall a movie about an obsessive Nazi searching Europe for a precious artefact? Didn't I once read a heartbreaking story about a besieged city, secret communication, brave partisans, doomed soldiers, and an improbable rescue just when all seemed lost? Isn't there a tale about a charmed talisman that simultaneously endangers and protects its holder that the minions of evil are hunting? Like The Barenaked Ladies sang, “It's All Been Done.”

I'm not taking away from Doerr's achievement. It is a very well written, moving novel, and at times I had difficulty putting it down (though possibly that's from the gimmicky and propulsive 2 page chapters). I do enjoy historical fiction, and have a particular fascination with the interwar and World War 2 era. Doerr took a risk in setting his story in World War 2, probably the most written about period in history, to tell this story of human connection and loss. I mean, it has to be tough to find a story that doesn't rely on, well, everything he ultimately relied on, and it has to be even more difficult to catch the imagination of the reader who will wonder what else is there to explore.

In telling the story through the eyes of two children Doerr found his novel approach. Marie-Laure and Werner are paired opposites joined by the light we cannot see. She, blind, lives an auditory existence and he, a brilliant, self-taught radio engineer, develops a range-finding device for the Wehrmacht that allows its users to find hidden radio transmitters (just in case you missed the point, we get a snippet of a lecture by Marie-Laure's haunted great uncle that the electromagnetic spectrum is mostly invisible). Marie-Laure and Werner are further linked by loss and loneliness, and their yearning for human connection. Letters, infrequent and maddeningly censored, are their only tethers to the people they love most dearly, and their lost connections only make their suffering worse. How awful it is, we see, to live in literal and metaphorical darkness. We get to know them the most intimately, so much so that by the time the book ends the rest of the main characters feel more than a little undercooked.

There are moments of great poignance and profundity - the friendship between Werner and Fredrick, the discovery of the secret place under the ramparts, Frank's personal mission in 1974 - and a deeply painful sense of futility and loss as we see how Hitler's megalomania affects the people whose only crime is living in the path of his war machine. And there are moments of great, shocking surprise, horror, dread, and fear that will have you half afraid to turn the page, half afraid not to. Despite its heft, the book does keep you reading.

Overall I have to recommend it if only for the prose. Doerr is a skilled craftsman and many chapters, while short, read like paintings - a frozen landscape here, a Paris street scene there - and the dialogue is naturalistic and spare. People chat, discuss, sometimes expound but, consistent with the themes, they communicate.

This is very clearly an early work by a writer still honing his craft and who perhaps relied on a badly-translated “Guide to Writing Novels” that you used to be able to order from the back of Mad Magazine in the 1960's. It's all very Romantic and picaresque, and cast with stock characters: the mad scientist; the lone wolf; the breathtakingly beautiful but brilliant soldier-woman-scientist; the mysterious keeper of the ancient wisdom; the handsome warrior; the gruff general. All the stuff of a straight-to-DVD SF thriller if it were a movie. What redeems it, if anything, is Liu's innovative explanation for ball lightning (a term that gets used at least 10 times on every page, maddeningly), an elusive and strange natural phenomenon that has puzzled scientists for centuries.

Liu would go on to learn a lot more about how to write compelling fiction, and his Three Body Problem made him an international bestselling writer in hard SF. And interestingly enough, he plants the seeds of the latter novel in this one – though whether by design or not is unclear. So should you read it? I don't know. It's really not a great work: wooden dialogue, slothful pacing, cartoonish plot, weak characters, deus ex machina ending. But the premise is interesting, and despite Liu's ham-handedness with the keyboard, there are a few good scenes here and there. Load it on your ebook and read it on your daily commute. If nothing else, it will make the subway ride a little less tedious.

I'm embarrassed that it has taken me so long to read this novel, a classic of Western literature and favourite of adventure story fans the world over. The story of Edmond Dantés, the hapless sailor unjustly imprisoned over false accusations of "Bonapartism" during France's turbulent civil war period, embroils us in a story of violence, deceit, vengeance and redemption. And though it is most commonly considered an adventure story in the vein of The Three Musketeers or A Tale of Two Cities, I think it's more accurate to classify this fun (and expansive) novel as a genre-defining example of espionage fiction. Yes, Le Carré, Fleming, Deighton and all the others owe a big debt to the structure, plot and style of Dumas' breathtaking and exciting story.

I say this because of all the spy novel tropes Dumas seems to have invented. Disguise, subterfuge, miraculous escapes, clever ruses and traps, exotic locales, secret operatives and operations, compromised dupes, misdirection . . . along with James Fennimore Cooper, Dumas laid down a template that spy novelists to this day still follow. The novel, complex, lengthy, and twisty though it is, has a fairly simple plot which, by now, everyone knows: Dantés escapes from the dungeons of Chateau D'If, recovers a hidden treasure, becomes the fabulously wealthy "Count of Monte Cristo" and sets about avenging himself on the men who had him imprisoned. The fun is in the methods.

Dumas takes great pains to construct Dantes' elaborate plot of revenge, deftly weaving multiple narrative strands together, telling in great detail the many backstories that modern authors would banish offstage and merely summarize through exposition. No, Dumas, clearly paid by the word, lets his story sprawl for over 1200 pages across the Mediterranean. At times you will wonder "why are we suddenly in Turkey? What was the point of the Carnival scenes? Why is the Pope releasing a condemned prisoner?" Not to worry: it all comes together and climaxes with Dantés having his revenge. That's no spoiler. Of course he has his revenge and emerges the victor. Watching it play out, though, is immensely satisfying as we see the way Dantés, playing the long game, builds a sham edifice in which he traps his foes.

But Dumas tells more than a tale of revenge. This is a highly moralistic novel, one that decries the sins of pride, envy, wrath, jealousy -- hell even gluttony and lust show their faces. The ending, while bringing satisfaction, also leaves us a little sad, a little regretful that a good man, faultless and loving, loses himself in the pursuit of his vengeance. Dumas the dramatist tells a compelling, propulsive and ultimately satisfying tale. Dumas the moralist asks us to consider whether it is all worth it in the end.