Miami by Joan Didion

What is a non-fiction book about? Some are obvious: biographies, histories of wars and other clearly defined things.

But a book called Miami, published in 1987, based on interviews and conversations and reportage in that city and Washington, DC, over the course of the previous couple of years? What do you think that is about?

Cuba. It's about Cuba.

And revolution, or more specifically the dream of counter-revolution. About realpolitik, more specifically the ways people who refuse to believe in it bang their heads on it repeatedly over the years. About US policy and "regime change," or the dream of it. About exiles and the exile experience, about that endless desire to go back, to take back what you know is rightfully yours. About ideological inflexibility, and the power of a cause, especially the power of a myth that you've been stabbed in the back.

As I said: Cuba.

I don't know for sure that Joan Didion came to the reportage for this book deliberately after Salvador, to take a wider view of US meddling in Latin America, at the broken promises and curdled dreams and the ways anti-Communism transforms from a crusade to a comforting excuse and back again, repeatedly. But it certainly feels that way. The focus here is mostly on the Cuban exiles of Miami, the ones who mostly were born in Cuba before the 1959 revolution and fled, then or soon afterward, for the US. In the mid-80s those men were mostly in their middle age - many had been young and energetic and violent in their youth (the Bay of Pigs looms large in this book), and are still unyielding and demanding twenty-five years later, though less active in their revolution.

There is less immediate death in Miami than there was in Salvador. Miami in 1985 did not have designated regions where murdered bodies appeared every morning the way San Savador did in 1982. But Miami is a bigger city, and the violence and anger bubbling through all of these Cuban exiles, mostly relatively rich and powerful but obsessed with the position and possessions and lives they feel were stolen from them by Castro, is central to the book.

As always, Didion is clear-eyed and precise. She lets these men tell their stories, she presents their concerns and obsessions as straightforwardly as such insane things can be - let's remember this was a large number of fairly well-off men who thought the US owed them an entire foreign nation, that government policy of their adopted country should have been, at all times, to invade and overthrow Castro's regime and give them back control of their former land.

Well, it's more complicated than that: the exiles had many factions and groups, as of course they must. No one hates better than compatriots: they all hated Castro, but most of them hated each other more.

Miami is an odd book to read thirty-plus years later: I get the sense that nothing has essentially changed. The men Didion talked to are old, many of them dead. But Cuba is still there, still 'Communist," and the exile experience seems to have perpetuated itself through another couple of generations - I'm sure the demands and anger aren't the same, but I'm also pretty sure there are still loud, volcanic demands and anger, from the children and grandchildren of the last ones to actually set foot in Cuba.

But maybe that makes it more important to read books like this; to see what the anger was like several twists of the tale earlier, when it was at least somewhat more straightforward. Even if, in the end, all those angers are the same thing: that core demand to have everything you ever had, and everything that could have come from what you had - the demand for endless possibilities, perfect outcomes, only for you.

Spirit of the Season

So I'm not saying the oddball Hallelujah the Hills "mixtape" The World Is Most Certainly Haunted and I Am One Of Its Best Ghosts from two years ago is the greatest Halloween record ever...or am I?

Maybe I am, actually. There's a lot of great stuff on it - "Highschoolvania" stomps like crazy, and "Enough Blood to Bathe a Zombie" just had me yelling along in my car only yesterday. Two fine covers, two nutty versions of great older HtH songs, and it ends with the one-two punch of "Popular Anti-Depressants of the 21st Century" and "Enter the Exit Interview."

If you're looking for something different to listen to this season, go for it.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 1, 2022

Two books to write about this week; both of them from the library. I put in a bunch of requests, so I think there might be more library books coming next week, or after that.

Black Are the Stars is the first book in a fantasy adventure comics series from Lewis Trondheim called "Ralph Azham," after the main character. I am slightly confused, because ten years ago there was a different first book in the Ralph Azham series, but it looks like this one collects 3 bandes desinees, of which the book published way back then is the first. So it all makes sense, I guess. The final book I have on hand says "Vol. 1 (of 4)" at the bottom, which I assume is a quiet way of assuring the audience the series won't disappear for another decade and possibly an indication that it's already complete in France. (I can find up to "Tome 12" online, which tends to support that theory.)

At the other end of a series is George O'Connor's recent book Dionysos: The New God. It's the twelfth and last in his "Olympians" series, since, as you know Bob, there are twelve Olympians and he's now done books about all of them. This is officially for middle-grade readers and in comics form, but, frankly, it's one of the best popularizations of mythology I've seen in a long time, full of great art and dramatic moments, and deeply informed by a lot of research. (See my post on the previous book, Hephaistos, which links back further.)

Books Read: September 2022

As always, I try to do these index-style posts on the first weekend of a new month, so this is about as timely as possible, since October begins on a Saturday. Here's what I read last month; links will follow when the posts go live.

Kristen Gudsnuk, Minecraft: Wither Without You, Vol. 3 (9/1, digital)

Jeff Lemire, Tonci Zonjic, and Steve Wands, Skulldigger and Skeleton Boy (9/2, digital)

Bastien Vives, The Blouse (9/3, digital)

John McNamee, Goldilocks and the Infinite Bears (9/4, digital)

Liz Prince, Be Your Own Backing Band (9/5, digital)

Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest (9/5)

Sergio Aragones with Mark Evanier, Groo: Friends and Foes, Vol. 1 (9/10, digital)

Sam Kieth, Batman/The Maxx: Arkham Dreams (9/11, digital)

George O'Connor, Dionysos: The New God (9/17)

Ysabeau S. Wilce, Prophecies, Libels and Dreams (9/17)

Lewis Trondheim, Ralph Azham, Vol. 1: Black Are the Stars (9/18)

Gary Panter, Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise (9/23)

Bastien Vives, Florent Ruppert, and Jerome Mulot, The Grand Odalisque (9/24)

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum, Unshelved: Library Mascot Cage Match (9/25)

Next month, I feel confident in predicting, there will be more books.

Quote of the Week: The Power of the Pen

Time was when men of Horse Watson's profession typically never slept sober, and died when their livers eroded. It must have been fun to watch the literate swashbucklers make fools of themselves in their frontier saloon, indulging in horse-whipping and shoot-outs with rival journalists and their partisans. But who stopped to think what it was like to have the power of words and publication, to discover that an entire town and territory would judge, condemn, act, reprieve, and glorify because of something you had slugged together the night before? Because of something you had hand-set into type, smudging your fingertips with metal poisons that inexorable began their journey through your bloodstream? For the sake of the power, you turned your liver and kidneys into spongy, irascible masses; you tainted the tissue of your brain with heavy metal ions until it became a house haunted by stumbling visions. Alcohol would temporarily overcome the effect. So you became an alcoholic, and purchased sanity one day at a time, and made a spectacle of yourself. It was neither funny nor tragic in the end - it was simply a fact of life that operated less slowly on the mediocre, because the mediocre could turn themselves off and go to sleep whether they had done the night's job to their own satisfaction or not.

 - Algis Budrys, Michaelmas, p.147 (in SF Gateway Omnibus)

The Good Asian, Vol. 1 by Pornsak Pichetshote and Alexandre Tefenkgi

Things have to be murky in noir: that's the point. If the world was clear and crisp and easily understandable...well, then, it wouldn't be a noir world, would it?

The Good Asian, Vol. 1 collects almost the first half (the series has ten issues; this book has four and the sequel has the remaining six - I have no idea what happened there, why it's not five and five) of the Image comics series of the same name, written by Pornsak Pichetshote and drawn by Alexandre Tefenkgi. Colors are by Lee Loughridge and lettering by Jeff Powell.

It is noir. That means the world will be both murky and bad - that we the audience won't understand everything at first, but we can assume that authorities are corrupt and scandals are rife and everyone with any power will abuse it. That crime definitely does pay, and has been paying very well. That people will do the worst things you can image, and then go beyond that. That you may be able to trust the one central tarnished hero, maybe, to do right - but no one else. And even he will probably only do right after he's tried doing everything else first.

That hero, this time, is Edison Hark. He's back in San Francisco, in 1936 - I'd say he's maybe thirty, not just out of youth but not middle-aged yet. He grew up there, adopted by a rich man after his cleaning-lady mother died when he was young. Before he was done growing, he was sent off to Hawaii, where he's since become a police detective.

Oh, and he's Chinese. That's important. 1936 is racist in much more obvious and casually cruel ways than the modern day, and the Chinese on the West Coast get that more than most.

Edison is back in SF because his foster father is ill, probably dying. Or, at least, that's the obvious reason: he hasn't come back in at least a decade, and the old man is lying in bed, unresponsive. His foster brother and sister - let me underline here that they, and the old man, are all white, but you should have understood that when I said "rich" - have complicated relationships with Edison.

The old man also had a complicated relationship with his upstairs maid, Ivy Chen. According to the kids, it was entirely aboveboard, but they had great feelings for each other - and, in a noir, that's only the finest weapons-grade bullshit. Ivy has disappeared recently - disappeared totally, without a trace, leaving the old man sad and bereft and possibly leading to his current nonresponsive state.

Edison is looking for Ivy, on behalf of that foster family. He's not a cop in SF - as a Chinese man, he's only intermittently considered a man - so he has no power and outdated mental maps of the people and places of the city.

And the disappearance of Ivy Chen intersects a whole bunch of other things, starting with the background police brutality against Chinese and rising to murders and possibly resurgent Chinese Tongs and all sorts of businessmen and authorities who have their own secrets and corruptions and lies.

Edison is in the middle of all that, trying to solve a mystery for the white people who gave him a home when he was a kid. But, along the way, he starts to wonder why they did that. And whether his mother had a "complicated relationship" with the old man, too...and what that means for him.

This is not the end: it's only just the beginning. This is the part of the noir where things are introduced, plots get knotty, and the bodies start to fall. Things look very dark at the end of this book; but that's what the middle of a noir is like.

The end, too, often. We'll have to see what Volume Two brings, but I know it's won't be White 1936 America embracing "the Chinaman," calling him brother, and all singing Kumbaya together.

Not a Review: See How They Run

I used to write about movies here a lot; when I saw more movies. This is not going to be a return to that form in any way.

But I did recently (last weekend) see the newish movie See How They Run, a mostly-British seriocomic detective story set in the early 1950s and centering on the Agatha Christie play The Mousetrap.

And I recommend it, especially to bookish people and those with writer- or editor-brain; it has some nice structural stuff (he said, being vague) and pays off its set-ups very nicely. Parts of the ending had me laughing out loud when I realized what was happening (he said, still trying to be vague).

Without giving anything away: it has a bunch of awesome Chekhov's Guns, and it pulls them down and fires them with magnificent pinpoint accuracy. Lots and lots of fun.

Full of good performances, too.

The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag

Morgan Kwon knows exactly how her life is going to go. She's going to get through highschool, being exactly the person she seems to be now, with exactly the same friends, and then she is going to get off Wilneff Island forever, go to some big city, and begin her real life as the person she really is. All she has to do is keep everything packed up in the right boxes until then, and everything will be fine.

Narrator: everything will not be fine

Morgan is at the center of Molly Knox Ostertag's mid-grade graphic novel The Girl from the Sea, and I think every reader - even those on the young and thoughtless end of that age-band - will sense that Morgan protests too much, that she can't keep all of the boxes separate. Her parents have already separated when the story starts, so that's one box broken up...and that, of course, is the point: she's trying to control the things she thinks she can control, because something so central to her life was just totally uncontrolled.

In the opening pages of Girl from the Sea, Morgan slips on some rocks and nearly drowns. She's saved by what she thinks is a cute girl, Keltie. And, if we readers are paying attention, we notice one very big box that she's trying to keep separate and closed: that she likes girls. She thinks that's got to stay hidden until she gets away, that it can only be a piece of her eventual adult life.

But Keltie is not just a cute girl: she's something more special, and already loves Morgan. She's loud and pushy and wants things and can show Morgan different ways of viewing and living her life.

Some of that is a metaphor for coming out. But a lot of it is literal: Keltie is a selkie, transformed from seal to girl, and with a lot of the traditional folkloric issues. (Ostertag plays a bit with reader expectations for some of these, I think, especially Keltie's skin, but she's not retelling any specific story or doing the usual folkloric stuff here.)

So: this is a story about whether Morgan will let herself unbend, if she will let herself break through her own boxes and be the person she actually is right now. And what will happen along the way: do her friends and family react the way she fears they will?

Oh, and Keltie has something pretty important she needs to do, too - she's not in human form for nothing. Oh, sure, she's crazy about Morgan, too - that definitely is part of it - but she has a mission for her people as well, and that's not optional.

I liked Girl from the Sea better than Ostertag's Witch Boy books - those were fine, but had a slight whiff of formula about them, a sense that they were Teaching Lessons and Being Good Models and all that. Girl from the Sea feels more personal and specific, tied to a specific place Ostertag knows well and centered in a deep but new relationship. I also like the way it implies conflicts that never happen - there are things that are huge in Morgan's head but don't really exist in the real world. It's still very much a book for younger readers, so people even more cynical and world-weary than me might find it too too, but it's the kind of book I love to see for young readers, the kind that tells them they can be exactly the people they really are and that they have good, loving places in the world that they just need to find or make.

That may not always be true, in the actual real world. But it's an important story, and it needs to be said as often as possible.

Michaelmas by Algis Budrys

The traditional description of the trade-off from "classic" SF to "modern" SF goes something like this: we used to have zippy, short books, without a lot of nuance or fine writing, but now we have much longer, denser, more detailed books that have much better writing and greater scope.

It's not exactly wrong, but it elides a lot. And it paints thousands of books from hundreds of different writers, across multiple decades and several major literary movements, with a very, very broad brush. There are plenty of "classic" books that are most of those things combined: short, precise, zippy, deeply nuanced, and entirely comfortable with ambiguity.

I finally got to one of those books, forty-five years after it was first published: Algis Budry's 1977 novel Michaelmas. It's about the secret ruler of the world, and it never actually says he's the secret ruler of the world. Oh, a reader should figure it out pretty quickly, and the central conflict related very directly to his behind-the-scenes manipulation of events, but Budry's tight third-person narration never dips into infodump, or wastes a second on details that aren't immediately pertinent.

Some readers would probably hate that: it's a novel that takes place mostly in the quiet corridors of power, among a small cast, and Budrys gives us vanishingly few descriptions of those corridors and that cast: the focus is on what they do and think, how they scheme and plan, and what results from those events.

Laurent Michaelmas is a newsman in what seems to be just about 1999/2000, as predicted from twenty years earlier. As usual with SF, some things are vastly further ahead than the real world (what seems like workable AI, large crewed space missions to the outer planets), and some things are oddly aligned with the real world (miniaturized and ubiquitous communications gear, the fact that the newspeople here are all freelancers fighting for every hot story and pitching to multiple global outlets all the time). Social attitudes are more or less 1977-standard, though Budrys has a lot of things on his mind, so he doesn't get into that too much.

It's a durable, believable world: not our world of 2000, and probably not a world we actually could have gotten to from the real 1977, but plausible enough.

Michaelmas has an AI assistant, Domino. It is a secret; it's probably the only one in the world. The book doesn't explain it, and the timeline implies that it grew out of some kind of digital assistant Michaelmas first created in the late '60s (which is the main reason why I think this is a world we never could have gotten to). But it's the usual SF AI: swooping through the networked computers of the world, seeing all and touching all and giving Michaelmas the insights he needs to push lightly, here and there, to make things go the way he wants.

We realize he's been doing this for a couple of decades now: lightly, mostly as part of his work as a trusted face and voice on global news. He's been making the world, bit by bit, more peaceful and settled, less likely to break out into crisis, exposing corruption here and quietly engineering the downfall of extremists there. What he says about his purpose - what other people say about how the world has changed, become less wild and less fun for newspeople - struck me as something like a fictional twist on all of the arguments for the EU: Michaelmas is that same kind of thing, done as a secret plot rather than in public democratically.

Since this is a SF novel from the mid-20th century, one big piece of the Making the World Better Program involves shooting monkeys in cans out into space, ever more and more. This is a world that still has a NATO and a Warsaw Pact, where the Soviet Union has not fallen, but the Cold War seems to have almost entirely quieted down - there's no sign of small proxy wars, not even the Clash of Civilizations talk of the mid-century. Everyone seems to get along, and the big space missions are crewed by combined teams from all major nations - not unlike how it has been in our real world for the last couple of decades.

But there is a crisis, and it of course involves space. An American astronaut died in a small aircraft crash, just a couple of months ago, putting plans for a big Jupiter-bound mission into confusion. But now, apparently, he didn't die. He is announced to have been recuperating at the nearby compound of a brilliant scientist, and a press conference is announced.

Michaelmas must be there. Both as the globally-trusted newsman he is in public and the Secret Master of the World he really is. And so he goes, and so he learns what's going on.

It is all a very SFnal explanation, as it should be, and a pretty good one: it was close to my theories early in the book, so I count that as a good thing.

Maichaelmas is a short book, focused entirely on the main character: my guess is that a majority of the dialogue in the book is in his head, between him and Domino. It takes place in a few locations: clinics and government installations and offices and high-end hotels, in Switzerland and elsewhere. It has the kind of narrative ruthlessness borne of a genre where word-counts mattered: it's here to do what it needs to do, to tell its story, and to end. It is a damn good SF novel that implies ten times as much as it says, and it reminds me that Budrys was always a master at that kind of compression. (I'm also a huge fan of his late novel Hard Landing, which is if anything even tighter.)

Stone Fruit by Lee Lai

One of the things I love about comics is how the drawing can be a separate thing from the words: the style and manner of a panel or a page can comment on or amplify or undercut the dialogue or captions there immediately, giving a reader two things to read simultaneously and insisting that both are true and correct.

Stone Fruit is a book that does that: Lee Lai mostly draws it in a precise indy-comics style, thin lines outlining faces with small features, her people all guarded and emotionally closed-up. But when they let themselves go, when they play like a small child (with a small child), she draws them feral: pointed faces full of contour lines, huge grins, giant eyes. Their whole posture changes - they're different people when they let themselves go.

They're better people, maybe. Purer. More in touch with themselves. More able to express what they feel and care about. More able to be happy.

This is a book about people who have trouble being happy. Eventually, we readers learn why, more or less - the specifics, I mean. Most of us have trouble being happy, I think. Most of us want to be happier than we are, want to enjoy moments more than we feel we actually can. So we know what this feels like from the beginning, and learn more and more as we go.

Ray and Bron are a couple: the two women have been living together for a few years. They're each other's first big relationship, I think: both still somewhere in their twenties. Ray is Rachel, Bron is Bronwyn. Ray wants to talk about the relationship, at least sometimes. Bron does not seem to be good at talking, or explaining, and we don't know exactly why for a long time.

The things they don't talk about are problems. The problems are large and central. None of it is either one's fault: it's who they are, who they've been, who they're becoming. Maybe what their families are like, how they're pulled in other directions.

Ray and Bron watch Nessie a couple of days a week. She's the daughter of Amanda, Ray's sister. Amanda doesn't like Bron, doesn't trust Bron. We're not sure why. Bron avoids Amanda, as she avoids conflict and talking as much as she can. Ray and Amanda are snippier with each other, that back and forth needling that only siblings can do, the way only siblings know how to use a few quick words to hurt as much as possible.

That's the three of them, on one of those happy days, on the cover: Ray and Nessie and Bron, in that order. That's their best time; Ray's narration says as much. And like all best things, it doesn't last.

Ray spends more time with Amanda afterward. Bron spends more time with her sister, Grace, and her emotionally closed-off parents, who are said to be horrible repressive Evangelicals, but who seem to be trying, as much as they can: they're even quieter than Bron, even less likely to talk about anything emotional or fraught. They're probably good people, basically. And they weren't the worst parents for Bron, not by a longshot. But they can't give her what she wants.

Stone Fruit is a book about a whole cluster of people who can't give each other what they want. What they need.

Amanda wants a sister like herself who will watch her daughter while she works, doing exactly what she would have done.

Ray wants Bron to express deep love, to talk to her about feelings, to really commit to their lives together. Maybe she also wants her sister to trust her.

Bron's parents want things to go back to how they used to be, years ago. Or, failing that, to never have to talk about any of it again or spend any time noticing it.

Bron wants....Bron, I think, doesn't know what she wants. She wanted One Big Thing, something overwhelming and central, and after getting that, more or less, she's left on the other side. But when she's watching Nessie, I think she has moments when she doesn't need to want anything, when she can just be, true and happy in her own skin, alive and roaring and making funny little doggerel chants.

That's Stone Fruit: the stories of these people. Centrally Ray and Bron, secondarily Nessie and Amanda and a bit of Grace. They're damaged, as everyone is damaged, each in their own ways, and they're living through that. It is a book magnificent and true and compelling and deeply moving in its unflinching view of people who can't fix themselves and can't fix each other - but can keep going, and keep looking for those best moments.

Reading Into the Past: Week of September 24, 1992

When I get new books, I write for Monday mornings on the new book. When I don't, instead write about old books, picking a random year and seeing what I read "this" week that year. Today, we're hitting the WABAC Machine for 1992:

Marc Laidlaw, Kalifornia (typescript, 9/17)

I feel like I'm being horribly dismissive if I call Laidlaw "a minor cyberpunk," but that's what pops into my head: he was part of that circle, I think more from the literary end, and he didn't publish as much or yell as loudly as some. (Looking at Chairman Bruce in both cases here.) I remember liking his books and stories, but I'll have to dig to figure out what this one was.

(One quick refresher later.)

This is the one set in 2050, with people who livestream their lives (directly from a brain interface, I think?) out to the world, and get massive audiences for it. A baby has just been born, the first to be thus wired up from the beginning, and is immediately kidnapped - so her uncle, the ne'er-do-well of the wired-up family, goes after her, I think with millions of people watching his every move. I remember nothing of the plot, but the premise sounds pretty spot-on prescient almost thirty years later.

Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus (9/18)

I was reading through Gould at the time; I'm not sure if I managed to get through everything, or if I kept reading him for the new books afterward. But I did hit at least half-a-dozen Gould books over the early '90s.

At the time, I think it was part of a whole cluster of interests or self-image pieces: CSICOP, the day-job in SF, relatively serious scientific nonfiction like this. I was a Serious Person interested in Serious Things, and wanted to focus on the true and the real. (I later on soured on SF in a lot of ways, and tend to prefer various flavors of fantasy these days, but it isn't now and never was a simple dichotomy.)

This was his brand-new book, published in 1992. And if you don't know who Gould was: he was a paleontologist and biology professor (mostly associated with Harvard) who also wrote a long series of essays for Natural History magazine on mostly evolutionary topics. He was a fluid, entertaining writer who was also deeply knowledgeable and thought-provoking; a rare combination. And those essays were collected into a series of best-selling books, one of the few signs in the '80s and '90s that the world was not horrible and entirely made up of stupid people. (Those signs are even fewer nowadays, of course.)

Gould is worth reading, I think. Some details of some essays are certainly outdated, since he died - way too young at 60 - twenty years ago. But the style and the concern for science and the principles will always be good. I think I lost all of his books in my flood; I might need to read him again.

Mark S. Geston, Mirror to the Sky (typescript, 9/25)

Another awfully-literary SF writer! I definitely had a type. (Other things I read for the SFBC within a month of this date: Silverberg's Kingdoms of the Wall, Turner's The Destiny Makers, Wolfe's Nightside the Long Sun, Womack's Elvissey, Brust's Agyar, Witches Abroad, and, um, The Gripping Hand by Niven & Pournelle. Some things you can't avoid.)

I seem to remember this was Geston's return to SF after a long quite time - maybe since a couple of novels in the '70s? I also think this was from Michael Kandel's line at HBJ (or was it just HB at that point? They had so many name permutations over the years), which I always loved but often had difficulty convincing others the books would sell for us in the SFBC. (And even when I did convince people, I was not necessarily correct.)

Let's see if I was right about any of that.

Return to SF? Yes.

Harcourt Brace? No - William Morrow. Not sure at this late date who his editor would have been.

As I remember, and the reviews on Amazon bear me out, this was a quite literary book which was not entirely positively received, and Geston has not published another novel since then. (But he only had four in the 1967-1976 main phase of his career, so he was never prolific.)

This is a First Contact book, subcategory godlike aliens, sub-sub-category where they show up on Earth and are strange and enigmatic. In this case, they give humans some of their art - maybe inadvertently? - and that causes massive disruptions. I don't remember it well at all.

Quote of the Week: Ain't Nowhow Permanent

Logically - for what had a more gloomy prognosis than Life? - every morning one should say to one's friends: 'I grieve for your irrevocable death,' as to anyone suffering from an incurable disease, and was the universal omission of this minimal gesture of sympathy the model for their reluctance to discuss the dreams?

 - J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, p.86

Zoc by Jade Khoo

Some books are influenced by other books - that's what we expect, most of the time. But some are more influenced by other things - especially in a visual medium like comics, where the influences of other visual media can be immediate and clear.

Jade Khoo's debut book, Zoc, is strikingly influenced by animation; I would say most deeply Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, in both her character designs and larger story structures - the way she draws landscapes and the ways her narrative turns to landscape to rest between story scenes. I see online that she works in animation, so I don't think that's just my eye: I think it's the way she thinks and lays out stories....at least this time. (The way anyone does their first big professional work is not necessarily the way they'll go on in the future.)

Miyazaki is a huge influence for a lot of younger animators and cartoonists, but Khoo is closer to the model than most. She doesn't just use Ghibli-esque moments or motifs; the whole story and structure of Zoc feels like a new or lost Ghibli movie - which, again, is a major achievement for a young creator. Zoc is a mostly quiet, character-focused work, with lots of stillness and silence in it - there are larger things happening outside the narrative, but this book is mostly about one girl, walking - trying to figure out what to do with her life and how to best use the things she can do.

Zoc is French, like her creator. She's still in school, but old enough to be responsible. Khoo's Ghibli-esque style makes her look young, but my guess is that she's in the high-school equivalent: just a year or two away from the end of this phase of school, at the point where next steps and life paths and purpose start to loom larger. At the beginning of the book, we see her with a career counselor, and she has only one vague thought about the future path of her life.

She has a special ability: water is attracted to her hair. It accretes and is pulled along, in a growing, gelatinous mass, like she's some kind of highly-specialized katamari. She can do it on purpose, to move masses of water from one place to another, but it happens all the time no matter what - in the first scene we see her walking along, the rain gathering behind her, until a passer-by complains. To release the water, she needs to cut the end of her hair: cut the water away to let it settle into its new place.

Zoc can pull what seems to be tons and tons of water; this isn't a book about examining or defining powers, so we don't know how much. But we think she could move an entire river, if she wanted to. Maybe a medium-sized lake. We have no idea what would happen if she went to the sea.

She wants to use that power as an adult. She wants to have a job that somehow is "dragging water with her hair." Everyone around her, obviously, thinks this is not a viable path.

But Zoc puts up ads in her town, to see if she can get jobs. And, quickly, she does get one: the town of Nemours has just been flooded. She's hired to take the waters away. For reasons the book doesn't go into, she doesn't take those waters to a lake or river, but across country to near the town of Marsier - maybe that's just where the best lake or river is. That journey will be long, taking several days and covering about a hundred miles. And she's dragging a whole flood behind her the whole time.

Along the way she meets a boy of about her age: Kael. He has a special ability as well: when he's around someone in pain, he catches on fire. He's been driven out of his home town for obvious reasons; he's even more solitary than Zoc. But he walks with her for the rest of her journey.

The narrative is closely focused on Zoc. We only see pieces of the outside world when she does: coming into towns, talking to wandering minstrels (drawn as colorful animal-headed people, in another Ghibli-esque touch), meeting other walkers. We hear that the countryside is divided about her work, that she's become famous, that the flood dragged behind her has had some not-good effects on the lands she's dragged it through.

In the end, she makes her delivery. She's ready to go back home. She's not sure if this is the right way to use her special ability. But things happen, and a new idea, a new model, comes to her.

Zoc is a lovely, fully-formed story. It can be read to have a message, but it's a story rather than a fable or parable, set in a self-consistent world and about real people. I'd recommend it particularly to anyone intrigued by the Ghibli influences: Khoo is good at the quietness and calming camera of that style. This book may be organized into a Young Readers section by some libraries or stores, but there's nothing childish about it: what can be more grown-up than the question of what purpose your life has?

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard

I hope you've already heard of this book. I read the fiftieth anniversary edition ten years later: this is a 1962 novel by a writer who died, after a very long and distinguished subsequent career, in 2009.

J.G. Ballard started out in SF. He could have started nowhere else; SF was necessary for his work, but, eventually, it was no longer sufficient. But that's getting ahead of myself: for the potted Life of Ballard, see my obituary here or his last book, the memoir, Miracles of Life.

His first four novels were all apocalypses, published as if in the British tradition of cozy catastrophes, though they quickly got thornier and more complex than that. The one central thing about Ballard is that all of his writing was Ballardian; that may seem like a tautology, but it's deeper than that. His concerns and central images and character types and visions were remarkably consistent for fifty years, even as they were embedded in turn in SF short stories and SF novels and experimental fiction and mainstream novels and magic realists works and thrillers and less genre-typeable writings. A Ballard book could have been written by no one else, and will be filled with viewpoint male characters who are doctors of one kind or another, with ruined human-made structures and technology, with frighteningly charismatic Others, and with women who are more symbols than people. (Well, that last is very mid-century and not unique to Ballard.)

The Drowned World is Ballard's second novel, his first "serious" one, set a hundred or so years hence. The flap copy says 2145; I saw no dates in the novel and assumed it was sixty to seventy years on from when it was written: the transition to this world took that long and the pre-apocalypse world is clearly that of when it was written. This is a massively warmed world, though not caused by man: the Sun warmed up and has cooked the tropics to near-boiling. Landscapes have been transformed within a generation by meltwater dragging silt in its wake: this is a much shallower world but a wetter, steamier one, with nearly all of the great cities buried in mud and then covered in water.

Humanity is reduced to a few million in outposts in the Artic and Antarctic. With temperatures reaching 150 in places, I assume the two ends of the Earth can now never meet - but Ballard's characters live through higher temperatures than I thought possible. Here I should point out that Ballard did train as a doctor, and does always write in a mesmerizing tone of authority, but that all science in his books must bend to the force of his narrative and to the psychological concerns of the book - accurate science can be found, but not always consistently, and it's very much not the point.

Our viewpoint character is Dr. Robert Kierans, head of a small biology team in a traveling semi-military mission to explore those overgrown cities of Europe and, perhaps, bring some positive news back to the North. The book takes place in the lagoons and swamps above the ruins of one such city: the reader will guess which specific, important city before the novel makes it clear.

Drowned World is not exactly a response to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but there are similar elements, and places where the two works rhyme or harmonize. Drowned World is much more overwhelmingly apocalyptic: this world has been utterly transformed, and the men left living in it are going through a destructive transformation of their own, which Kierans and the others characterize as evolution running backwards to recapitulate previous forms, both physically (giant insects and crocodilians) and psychologically in the human brain. The tone is Ballardian pessimism: the human race is not actually extinct yet, but hope is slim and opportunities to rebound nonexistent.

This is a short novel with a small cast set mostly in one place, primarily circling the same few concerns and obsessions. (But, then, I said it was a Ballard novel.) As the time to move on to the North approaches, some of the men feel irresistible urges, driven by unsettling dreams, to stay behind - even to head deeper to the South and the ever-hotter temperatures.

Kierans is not immune. No Ballard protagonist is immune; a Ballard protagonist is always at the heart of the transformation that book is about. I said the cast was small, but they are not all in place at the beginning of the novel. There will be changes in the lagoons above this dead city, new interlopers with their own demands and obsessions. There will be conflict. There will be death.

This is a Ballard novel, arguably the first truly Ballardian novel. This is where it all started, I suppose, though I could muster as strong an argument for a number of the stories as well. And the vision of a hothouse world that has driven humanity to the margins is vastly more relevant now than it even was in 1962. I recommend it. I recommend nearly all of Ballard, actually. If you're living in the 21st century, the classic SF writers you should know are Ballard and Dick: we live in their worlds.

The Trials of Agrippina by Claire Bretecher

It's important to know when a book came from, as well as where. Usually, the who is very obvious, but I suppose I should throw that in as well.

The Agrippina stories, about an unimpressed teenager in the "modern" world, were published from 1988-2008 in French. I've heard of them - I think most recently and clearly when their creator Claire Bretecher died in 2020 - but I don't think they've been available in English consistently or perhaps ever. Reading between the lines, Bretecher used an invented, baroque version of French teen slang in these books, and translating that to English was clearly a major hurdle. (Edward Gauvin translated this edition; I have issues with the text that I'll mention in a minute, but his translation is sprightly and amusingly idiosyncratic.)

So I finally read my first book of Bretecher's, 1992's The Trials of Agrippina (les combats d'Agrippine in French), which is presented as the first volume in this version from Europe Comics. But, unless something odd is going on with the titles, that seems to be the third book of the original series.

I go into this detail because, while reading, I kept wondering "when is this?" Agrippina and her friends don't have phones or computers: it felt more like my teenage years than those of my (now-adult) sons. My guess, during reading, was a vague '80s-'90s feeling, and I'm happy, I suppose, to see that I nailed it pretty closely: the first Agrippina book was in 1988, and it looks like the background stayed mostly consistent through the last book in 2008. (Just before the smartphone era, as it happens.)

The other thing I kept thinking while reading was "what does that say?" This is a French album, so originally on larger-size pages, but I read it digitally, since it was only published digitally. That shrinks everything to begin with. The text is lettered in a fussy, scripty font, I assume because it's all dialogue, and that makes it look quick and authentic. I also assume, without evidence, that is based on the lettering in the French originals; if this was a new creative choice, I am very angry at someone.

What's my point? This book is very difficult to read physically. The words are cramped and in a font that fights legibility. The phrasing is odd and quirky. The names are wordplays based on allusions to things French people in the '90s would recognize: Bergere Leprince, Morose le Hachis, Morphee Naumann.

And the humor is arch and mannered to begin with. Agrippina is a faux rebel, like all of her friends, aping ennui and obsessed with trivial things, while the older generation are the usual morally compromised losers in stories about teenagers. All of them are superficial in their own ways, nattering on at length about silly things - so the reader has to be able to scan the text, understand it on the surface quickly, and also make judgements about these characters on a deeper level.

The book physically fights against that from the first page. I found myself squinting around my glasses, blowing up individual panels, and making guesses about things like "Ben Zynsgzwa" (?) over and over and over again, making every last panel an effort of decoding and interpretation. If there's a better way to destroy any humor in a book, I don't know it.

Now, I think this book is also somewhat out-of-date to begin with, its concerns those of a previous generation, which doesn't entirely help. But it could be much better if presented properly, in a format that English-speaking people can understand quickly - a lot of the wordplay would have been really funny if I could have just read it rather than decoding it.

The substance of the book is a lot of short stories, most of them just one comics page, most often nine or twelve panels squashed up against each other without gutters, most often with a single Feiffer-esque viewpoint that's repeated in every panel. Bretecher's art is quick and light, which gives that bland layout some more energy and movement, but the style of this book is pretty old-fashioned.

All in all, you may guess that I was not thrilled with The Trials of Agrippina. The book design and lettering do their best to hide and obscure what is good and interesting about this work, and time has taken a few potshots at it as well. I may read Bretecher again, but I would want to make sure I can actually read it before diving in.