The Only Winning Move

If crime fiction is the most deconstructed genre, then because it was also the most constructed. And in its way, it was always the most self-aware. We read any book in any genre to “find out what happens” after all. Crime fiction just went ahead and codified that. Any story in any genre is ultimately driven by the interacting motivations and desires of its characters. Crime fiction just took the liberty of listing these neatly. Any theme in any genre stands or falls on its moral implications. Crime fiction went ahead and focused its ethics discussions on murder. And. so. on.

On finishing Arnaldur Indriðason’s much-lauded Silence of the Grave, these are the kinds of thoughts that occur. And that because this book seems so frustratingly determined to get away with violating as many crime fiction conventions as it possibly can.

I read somewhere the suggestion that Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was meant to be a sending up of “Jumping the Shark”. Every episode of that season takes some common “tonight on a very special episode of … ” cliche and exploits it. (Nice touch: an actual shark-demon makes an appearance in “Tabula Rasa,” and Buffy has an opportunity to jump over it.) There’s the one where she dies and gets brought back to life. The one where “they get married” (or don’t). The one where “they do it.” The one where “our friend’s evil now.” The one where “it’s all a dream.” Even the one that’s a musical! It was brilliant, in its meta-fictiony way, because although all that was played for laughs, the real story also went on in its very real way, and We the Audience were left with the uncomfortable feeling that we were being punished for not being able to let go of our heroine when it was actually time (i.e. last season).

That’s kind of how I feel about “Silence of the Grave.” It’s really hard to take this book entirely seriously a lot of the time because it seems so determined to be the least crime-fictiony of any crime fiction you’ve ever read. I think the most galling moment for me was the denoument - when, rather than having the traditional scene where Erlendur (the detective in this particuar one) confronts the villain and he confesses, a character we’ve never met before turns up to just tell us the story, mentioning in the process that both the villain and victim are long dead. Seriously - this was a “mystery” where the police get interviewed on TV about an old crime, and someone who’s known the solution for years just shows up to tell them what it is, and no one is brought to justice at all.

But of course it turns all the traditional rules on their heads. The villain, for one thing, is so thoroughly a villain that he might as well be wearing a mask and black cape. If it’s become fashionable to build up some sympathy with the bad guy by, at the very least, making him psychologically plausible through backstory, then this book is a leisure suit. Absolutely nothing positive is ever said about him. Nothing. It’s true that we have vague memories of hearing some positive things about him - but think about it, it didn’t actually happen, did it? What you think was a psychological explanation for his behavior was actually his victims speculating about same. We don’t ACTUALLY know where he came from, or what his childhood was like, or what led him to do the things he did. Which was really satisfying if I’m allowed to read that as a satire on the pop psychology that pervades so many mystery novels these days - and I think I am.

And then there’s the matter of the mystery. It isn’t actually a “whodunnit” so much as a “whoboughtit?” Throughout the novel, we’re more interested in the identity of the victim than in the identity of the killer. If most mystery novels get the crime out of the way early, this one doesn’t even tell you what the crime was until it’s all over. Which is again kind of satisfying as a metafictional statement. A crime novel needs a crime - any crime will do - as something on which to hang its action. So in a clever way, Indriðason is pointing out that the actual nature of the crime hardly matters!

And the pacing. My God, this was the most brazen flouting of conventions I think I’ve ever seen. As one point in her narrative, the person who’s come forward to fill in the detective on what happened decides to turn in for the night and finish her story in the morning, right there at a chapter break! Unbelievable! But it wasn’t just that. There was also the oh-so-convenient fact that the body had to be unearthed slowly, as in an archaeological excavation. At so many points when a crucial bit of information from the dig would’ve been helpful if on hand, you can almost hear Indriðason rubbing his hands together with glee over the computer as he types that the detective will just have to wait because the dig is taking a long time. How very, very convenient. (And how very interesting that for all that the archaeologists don’t end up telling us anything that a simple digging up couldn’t have.) But of course the way relevant information shows up in any novel (and not just detective novels!) is at the whim of the author. Part of the illusion that makes it possible to get involved with a book is our ability to forget that - but Indriðason is determined not to let us!

And of course you can almost hear him chuckling at the inevitable clever lit crit student rushing to write about how brushing dirt off of the body slowly is brushing dust lovingly off of an old, forgotten, but still important thing, breathing life into it, blah blah blah. The metaphors basically write themselves here, which is the “ok, let’s do it, bad boy! Take me!” rape defense applied to literature. If you’re handing lit crit grad students their thematic analysis on a platter like this, maybe they’ll just lose interest and leave you alone? It’s no fun without a fight, right?

And the MacGuffin is an actual bone! The story starts when a human rib shows up at a child’s birthday party, which just happens to be attended by a medical student with enough training to identify it. Why not?

Another one that I would’ve missed but for having read this review: there are lots of mentions of Iceland without telling us all that much about Iceland.

For example, here are some of the things I discovered about Iceland from Silence of the Grave. Yellow police tape is used to surround crime scenes. During Christmas, they listen to Bing Crosby sing White Christmas (presumably in English, unless Bing really covered his bases). Their garages are filled with old bikes and barbeque grills. The lead detective is haunted by various mistakes he made in his Past. And when these harried cops are in a rush, they scarf down cheap hamburgers.

HA! But again, I wonder if this isn’t by design. In fairness, some post-war Icelandic history does play an important role - though not, one hastens to add, a role that is by any means indispensible. (There is absolutely no reason in the world why the savior American soldier needs to have been an American soldier. He could, just as easily, have been a random Icelander.) But the riff here seems to be on the “exotic locale” fetish in a lot of crime fiction. So many of these stories are sold as though they depend on a particular location when in fact largely similar crimes happen everywhere. And so it is with this one - it’s a pretty nation/culture-neutral situation that just happens to be punctuated by a lot of Icelandic names - names that stand out in an almost comedic way, like Rose Nylund talking about St. Olaf. Again I wonder whether Indriðason isn’t setting his readers up to fail. The credulous reader (foreign reader, anyway) will read these people’s problems as in some way a commentary on Icelandic society, when the story is actually as universal as it is banal. The sendup is of people who think they can learn much about a culture through detective fiction.

Or - who knows - maybe I’m imagining all this. Maybe this is meant to be taken very seriously, maybe none of this is metafictional commentary, and maybe Indriðason really wrote it all with a straight face.

But I doubt it.

Still, it’s a mistake to read this entirely as a send-up. The backstory about Erlendur’s brother and how it affects his relationship with his daughter in the present - these are at least meant to be taken seriously. And while Indriðason may well be having a laugh at the expense of politically correct types who fight wife-beating with political slogans and taboos rather than more sensitive attempts to understand where it comes from, of course he isn’t laughing at the violence itself, which he paints with sobering realism. And it’s interesting [SPOILER ALERT] that the wife-beating ends only when the wife is pregnant by another man. There’s more being said about gender relations here than meets the eye, even if the male villain is overtly a caricature. [END SPOILERS]

In the end, I don’t know quite what to make of this book. I like it a lot, and feel like I shouldn’t. Which is to say, I don’t know why I like it. It’s one of those things where all the parts are wrong, and yet the whole works - somehow. I will need to read it again someday.

If you like crime fiction at all, you may have noticed that a lot of the best authors are currently from Sweden - and felt a little odd about that. But there it is - a lot of the best crime fiction writers are currently from Sweden. It’s so noticeable recently that the Germans have even given it a subgenre name all of its own: Schwedenkrimi.

But just being from a country doesn’t make you a genre, right? So what’s a Schwedenkrimi really? Is it just a crime story written by a Swede about Swedes for Swedes and set in Sweden? Having just finished Johan Theorin’s Echoes from the Dead, I’d like to give a tentative “no.”

This is a book that’s - to borrow a great Luke Burrage quip - “very much set in Sweden,” so there’s no question of its national creds. And it has at least hints of the social commentary that a lot of critics have noticed in Mankell and Larsson, the dueling (bucept that Larsson’s recently deceased) kings of the genre. But it’s the wrong commentary. And it’s the wrong Sweden.

Theorin’s Sweden is cold, misty and pervaded by beautiful wilderness. It managed to stay neutral in WWII without much of a cultural or political price. It’s a place where the elderly get personal care in state homes and a grieving mother can extend her sick leave indefinitely with only minor bending of the rules. True, there have been some budget cuts recently, but we barely notice them. (There was no bus shelter at a stop on a nearly-uninhabited island when our hero found himself without an umbrella in the rain, for example.) And true, there are lots of annoying mainland tourists on the previously unspoilt island where the action takes place, but then, the country is also richer and more populous than it used to be. In short, this is the Sweden we’ve heard so much about … and so maybe not one that we needed a Swede to describe to us.

There’s social commentary, but it’s also exactly the kind of social commentary we expect a citizen of this Sweden to write. It all starts with a bit of inequality. Young Nils Kant doesn’t get as many toffees as his brother. It was probably an innocent mistake: Nils got his some time before Axel; probably Mother just forgot how many she’d given out. But a child’s world is much smaller and more personal and more immediate than ours, and how many toffees you get matters. Nils ends up tricking his brother into drowning in the sound, half-aware of what he’s doing. And having killed (sort of) this once, he finds himself able to cripple later, and eventually he ups the ante enough to kill in cold blood. (This isn’t a spoiler: we’re told early on that Nils Kant is a killer; the central question in the novel is whether or not Jens Davidsson is one of his victims.) In all cases, there are circumstances, and none of Nils’ actions are premeditated, exactly. But what premeditated crimes do occur in the novel are reactions to him, the results of things he set in motion - whether protecting him or trying to take revenge on him. So it really does begin with those toffees - and if there’s anything special about Nils’ circumstances that push him over the edge (not every child who gets shorted toffees and ends up exacting some kind of horrible revenge out of childish short-sightedness and lack of emotional control ends up beating people with oars and shooting them to death, after all), it’s that he’s raised as an only child in a privileged family. His mother tells him he’s entitled, superior - and so he is.

This is all pretty standard Social Democracy. People are neither good nor bad by nature - nature is in fact something that is largely acquired through social interaction. Fix the society, and you fix the individual. And you fix the society by making sure that everyone gets his “fair share.” So - be very careful not to give anyone more toffees than anyone else! And if someone does get more toffees than someone else - where “toffees” might here be, say, a metaphor for getting a bank loan to modernize your shipping company that other seafarers on the island didn’t get - it’s definitely not because he earned them in any way. Nope - inequality is always and everywhere a result of accident or corruption - and inequality itself corrupts. Even the author’s political opinions are a Swedish stereotype, in other words, and again we question whether we really needed an actual Swede to write this.

Mankell and Larsson’s books, by contrast, really couldn’t have been written by anything BUT Swedes, and that’s because they’re telling us things about the Swedish welfare state that no outsider could possibly know. In fact, they’re telling us things most outsiders don’t even want to know. It isn’t just that their villains tend to be corrupt representatives of that state. There’s corruption everywhere, after all, and if our stereotype of Sweden doesn’t make much room for it, it would take hyper-naivete to be honestly surprised about it. No - it’s more than that. The state IS the villain - and not so much in the kind of way that you can put your finger on. Like one suspects must be the case with all political novelists, Mankell and Larsson have turned to fiction to describe things that they think they know but can’t exactly prove. It’s a feeling more than anything - that there’s something really creepy at the heart of the whole setup.

The source of the evil is different, of course. For Larsson, it seems to be the uneasy compromise that Sweden made with the Nazis in WWII. In what I guess Larsson views as cowardice, Sweden made a separate peace to keep from being invaded, and it let a lot of ruthless Nazi sympathizers into the halls of power. What masquerades as patriotism, a healthy confidence in and devotion to one’s nation, is for Larsson in fact something much more sinister. For Mankell it’s harder to say. In fact Mankell rallies a lot against Swedish racism and xenophobia as well, so perhaps the compromise with the Nazis is implicated for him too. But in other books - especially Sidetracked - the problem seems to follow a more orthodox Marxist analysis. The trouble with Socialist Sweden is that it never went through a revolution - it was all too comfortable, and so the people in power are the people who would be in power anyway, in any society, only more sinister because they have more power. It amounts to the same thing, I suppose - a cowardly compromise somewhere in the early history of the welfare state leaves a beast lurking at the heart of the system.

The point is just that, having finished Theorin, I felt this lacking. The welfare state wasn’t the enemy. What criticism it came in for was pretty pedestrian, really - there for signaling purposes more than anything (Theorin can’t be taken seriously as a writer if he’s politically easy to satisfy, now, can he?). Instead, it was the enemies of the welfare state - or at least the enemies of the welfare state’s ideals - that were the villain here. More accurately, it was the imperfect implementation of the welfare state. Doling out the incorrect number of toffees can happen to anyone, of course - that’s just noise in the system. The problem here is that what should be a blip was amplified by Nils’ privileged circumstances into something really ugly, something that becomes the source of Evil in the novel, even if that Evil isn’t contained in any single action or individual. The question is - when first confronted with a salient inequality, which do you conclude? Do you determine to fight inequality so that others don’t have to suffer under the same dejection as victims of inequality that you did? Or do you decide that the world is inherently unfair, that there are winners and losers, and determine to be one of the winners? The trouble is, since empathy is imperfectly formed in children, the deck is stacked in favor of the latter interpretation. So if society doesn’t act to fix it, Nietzschean culture is the inevitable result. Or, such seems to be the point of view that Theorin is pushing. Nils Kant only is the way he is because his formative years happened when the welfare state was young - when there hadn’t yet been time to level everything out. Later, when equality is a national ideal taught in secondary schools and enforced by the tax code, would Nils really be able to feel so privileged? Privileged enough to strike out savagely at those who questioned his status? Theorin wants you to think it unlikely.

And maybe it is. There are always tradeoffs, and probably welfare states do mitigate a lot of petty criminal impulses. Enforced equality almost certainly does lower resentment. The question is what you have to pay for that, and whether it’s worth it? Theorin’s book fails for me because it doesn’t ask that question (doesn’t even acknowledge that the question is there). In short, the commentary here isn’t wrong in any particulars, but it’s incomplete, which is worse, from a certain point of view. No one likes a yes man, and an author who sets out to critique his society and comes to the conclusion that it’s basically wonderful, that if anything it needs to be truer to itself - keep on keepin’ on, but maybe a little harder, comes off like a hack. As I said, this isn’t a Sweden that we needed a Swede to tell us about, really, since it’s the kind of Sweden that every politically correct intellectual everywhere in the world assumes Sweden already is. That, I would like to believe, keeps it from being a full-blooded Schwedenkrimi. This is just a Krimi that takes place in Schweden.

Mankell and Larsson have more to say. They have uncomfortable things to say. And if Larsson seems to be battling straw mans a bit (how many honest-to-God Heil-Hitlering Nazis can there really be in Sweden?), at least his delivery is unflinching. Mankell and Larsson want the world (presumably including especially their countrymen) to know that Sweden is NOT perfect, that indeed it might in fact be rotten. And this - since it isn’t what we’re used to hearing - is a much more interesting and informative point of view. All the more appealing to me personally, I must admit, because they read like Libertarians.

They’re not. Emphatically not. Both Mankell and Larsson were social activists from the very far Left. But in a strange way all extremists are brothers - if only because we all advance social theories that are unlikely to be tried, affording us the luxury of infinite hedging about what “life would be like” under our chosen systems. Well, that plus a heartfelt opposition to the status quo (mere tweaking isn’t enough!). And if the enemy of my enemy isn’t exactly my friend, he’s still the enemy of my enemy, and with enemies as powerful as the state I’ll take all the help I can get. The thing about both Mankell and Larsson is that they depict abuses of state power that can only be abuses of state power - in the sense that the victims have nowhere else to turn because all the alternatives have been shut down. That is at least a shared fear with Libertarians. It’s not that we don’t mistrust corporate power - we do. We nevertheless prefer it to state power in many cases because rivals among corporations have a way of keeping the ecosystem balanced. I doubt that Mankell and Larsson have a preference one way or the other - they just happen to live in a society where state and corporate power are the same - where they feed each other. For Sweden is, after all, a classic example of what the term “National Socialism” might have meant without all the agressive militarism and syphilitic lunacy of the Holocaust. That is, a brand of corporatism where the strength and health of the nation is the primary economic goal. Sweden’s brand has a softer edge than Germany’s or Japan’s, but it’s essentailly the same thing. If Mankell and Larsson are more radical socialists, then they share a commitment to internationalism - to human rights and dignity for all, regardless of national origin.

Theorin wouldn’t deny that, obviously. No doubt he believes that human rights are universal too. But believing in something and making it a priority are different, and internationalism just doesn’t seem to be a priority for him. He talks about Sweden the way that a guitar enthusiast talks about an Ibanez: he can tell you the flaws if you ask, but mostly he just likes rambling on about things he loves. The purpose here seems to have been to write an enjoyable thriller that would earn some kind of kudos for being deeper than just an escapist crime novel. Which is the whole paradoxical problem with it, really: it aims to please. It wants to be escapist entertainment for the kind of person who thinks himself above that sort of thing. It wants to be politically aware, but doesn’t want to rock the boat. It even does the oh-so-hip bit of flirting with supernaturalism. You know, nothing that could be called religious or even credulous - just enough dropped there for people who think “there are more things in Heaven and Earth (, Horatio, ) than are dreamt of in your philosophy” is a clever way of being an atheist without offending the religious. All very chic; all very lacking in balls. Yes, I said it: in the schoolyard of Swedish crime fiction, Theorin is the studious nerd and Mankell and Larsson are the big kids. Kickball: Mankell and Larsson are the team captains, and Theorin gets picked maybe 6th? Because Mankell and Larsson have something to say; Theorin, for all his pretentions to the contrary, is just writing beach books.

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is a tough nut to crack precisely because it’s so transparent. It’s one of those books that I feel like I should hate, and so am surprised to find I really loved! What gives?

Its probably the best exemplar of what I’d like to call the “new high-brow.” I don’t know if I made up that term, or if I’m stealing it from someone who uses it quite differently, or if someone else has alredy come up with a better bit of compact snark for what I mean. “What I mean” is this. Once upon a time it was easy to keep genre lit separate from “real” lit. Faulkner went on the shelf in the living room, Doc Smith by your bedside table, and your spouse could be trusted to keep your secret. But then people like Heinlein and Sturgeon came along, and if they didn’t exactly count as university-worthy “literature,” what they did succeed in doing was demonstrating that genre lit - well, science fiction, anyway - had a lot more potential beyond fun pulp serials. Couple that with an economic expansion that meant that university education was available to all, and you got a generation of writers like Harlan Ellison and Ursula LeGuin who were raised on the bad stuff but had the training to appreciate the good stuff. And so we entered a second phase - a kind of golden age, to my mind, where science fiction was interesting and enjoyable, and informed enough about literary conventions that you didn’t have to cut it too much slack. Unfortunately, things went a bit sour from there. The inevitable attention that some of these writers got from high-browed types went to their heads - and, more importantly, to the heads of the next generation - and we got saddled with a kind of in-between genre of really pretentious people. There has been a controversy ever since - between the camp of those like Jonathan Lethem, who think that science fiction was a training camp that should graduate to real lit now that it’s gotten the New Yorker’s attention, and that of those like Lester Del Rey, who think that science fiction is its own thing and wish lit professors would “get out of my ghetto!” The Jonathan Lethems of the world - they are the third phase, in which doing genre send-ups - science fiction and fantasy send-ups in particular - is a kind of automatic writing algorithm. Basically the exchange is this: the New Yorker readers need an insider to tell them how horrible science fiction is so that they can continue to believe that buying a single magazine which is bland but at least never disappoints constitutes being “informed” about literature, and said insider needs the New Yorker to console him that he is not a talentless hack passing off meta-literary conceits as studied observation. And that’s, roughly speaking, where we are now. But like all conceited shortcuts, this one only works so long as it’s not too obvious. And so out of the ashes is rising - well, not a phoenix, exactly, more like a pallid canary - of a fourth phase of genre-meets-university-lit writers that I would like to call “the new high-brow.”

“The new high-brow” is the camp of people who would be Jonathan Lethem and M. John Harrison if these people hadn’t already cornered the market. Or - more likely - they’re people who were in danger of becoming Lethem and Harrison until they got a foretaste, via the works of Lethem and Harrison, of just how pretentious they would sound. And so they lightened up a bit and weren’t afraid to admit that actually enjoying genre lit for the sake of a good adventure story, or for the sake of a mind-blowing concept, didn’t automatically brand you with a scarlet L on your forehead. And of course it helped that what they were doing - writing real adventure stories - could be taken as meta-commentary on the Lethems and Harrisons by any New Yorker types so inclined! If the original gambit was to prove your high-browed mettle by demonstrating that you had tried science fiction and found it lacking, the new sexy would obviously be to try science ficton and find it satisfying - without, of course, compromising your literary principles. Or, put differently, once the average New Yorker reader had been soothed about his anxieties that science fiction might be good, he now needs to be soothed about his anxieties that he himself might be stiff and repressed.

This is Lev Grossman and Michael Chabon. Where Jonathan Lethem was clever by condescending to genre lit while pretending to love it - only one step above camp, really - Grossman and Chabon are clever by self-consciously NOT condescending to it, while at the same time declining to really write it.

So I should probably hate Grossman, and I should probably hate Chabon - because the trick hasn’t really changed. These are still literature professors gentrifying my ghetto, which I liked a lot better when Silverberg and Ellison and Niven were my neighbors. And they’re still writers who have a despicable craving for mainstream attention, such that they feel the need to subtly distance themselves from the genre lit I love. But I don’t hate them. I enjoyed The Yiddish Policeman’s Union quite a bit, even if I did think it was overrated, and I enjoyed The Magicians even more, almost without reservation.

Make no mistake - The Magicians is a genre send-up of the kind Lethem wishes he could write. It doesn’t hate fantasy, but I wouldn’t say it endorses it either. It’s a realistic retelling of Harry Potter that takes the Narnia stories as its real object of analysis. The characters are ordinary teenagers who first find that they can do magic, and then end up at a Hogwarts analogue, and then at a Narnia analogue, each of which is more disappointing than the last. The point is about as transparent as it’s possible to be: magic here is a standin for landed wealth, these are the kids of the privileged who have everything they want and therefore nothing they want. It’s the old suburbia conundrum - where comfort is comfortable, and therefore preferable to the alternative, but also boring and meaningless.

So on a superficial reading this book should be offensive to me. Isn’t it making the same cheap and easy point that has driven the publication of The New Yorker for the last 90 years? You know, how there’s real, authentic life, and then there’s fantasy, and growing up, which is unequivocally a Very Good Thing (and women are better at it than men), is about rejecting fantasy in favor of Authentic Real Life? And yes, I suppose it is making that point. But the difference here - for me anyway - is that this book isn’t sneering. It isn’t recycling the same, tired false dichotomy so much as it is seriously asking questions about why we like fantasy. The trouble with the sneering at genre lit was always that it protested too much. If science fiction and fantasy are unalloyed garbage, then why pay attention to them at all? University lit professors who prescribed a healthy dose of Cheever to cure the Stephen King blues always came across a bit like the closeted gay jock. If there’s something appealing about this stuff, then wouldn’t we like to know what it is?

It’s on this level that The Magicians really works for me. We didn’t exactly get answers to our questions, but at least this time they felt like questions. Like, for example, when Quentin and company take the horn from the naiad, there’s just something about the atmosphere of this book that tells us it’s probably not a good idea. And yet, in the fantasy books that this one is half-satirizing, it’s just sort of taken for granted that when a beautiful woman of the water hands you something, it’s not only Deeply Important but also Helpful. In this case, it turns out to summon the villain. Not only that, but in the scene in which Quentin blows it, he has explicitly decided to do so because it seems like the kind of thing that a character in a fantasy novel would do. All this in combination could be sneering but for the fact that we’re pretty clearly meant to identify with Quentin (albeit probably reluctantly). If we know enough to question taking, let alone using, the horn in this book, what explains our willingness to suspend disbelief for similar scenes in others? And the same is true when Quentin’s coveted quest turns out to have made him a catspaw in a dubious fight in which he had no personal stake. Again, once Quentin finds this out we the readers are not terribly surprised. But if we’re not surprised in this book, what explains the fact that we WOULD be completely stunned to find, say, Garion misled by the voices in his head, or Shea Ohmsford getting bad advice from Allanon? Why, indeed, would anyone without prior interest in combat training want to go on an adventure quest - and why would any self-respecting prophecy FAIL to choose a commando badass for this kind of thing? For once, I felt like these questions were actually being asked, rather than presented as excuses for not reading any further. And if it isn’t exactly the kind of loving fan satire that Peasant’s Quest is for early PC games, neither is it the kind of sneering condescenscion that marked the later seasons of Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. This isn’t turning fantasy on its head for the purpose of showing off (though there’s plenty of that to go around, mind you), it’s actually sort of trying to figure out how and why it works, what explains its appeal.

That said, there were two conceits that I did feel went a bit too far. The first was having every minor character in the story turn out to be important in some way. I don’t mind the infamous final scene of the novel - so despised by others - but I DID mind the gratuitous appearance of a minor character from the begining, and only becuase there had been too much of this already. The only spin I can put on the relentless devotion to resolving minor plot details that makes it work is as a kind of literary double-bluff - pointing out to We Readers that for all our griping about plot holes, we’d like the other extreme even less. But the worse of the two conceits was having the Fillory books be books in the first place. Which is an odd thing to say, given that I enjoyed the book and given that this “conceit” is indispensible to how it works. Nevertheless, having Fillory appear as an honest-to-God work of fiction in an honest-to-God work of fiction makes the preferred New Yorker interpretation - that fantasy is something that by definition can’t be real, and that any attempt to reify it would result in the kind of broken an imperfect world that “real”-world Fillory turns out to be, and that there are people who don’t know this - hard to shake off. As I’ve always said, I think the most frustrating parts about Lit Prof trashing of genre lit is that they don’t understand what it’s for or on what level we enjoy it. None of us are confused about its reality. Most of us are as self-aware where it is concerned as Alice is in Grossman’s book, in fact. It isn’t that it’s a strawman to imply that we read these books to escape reality - because that is exactly what we do. It’s that it’s a lie to suggest that New Yorker readers are not similarly motivated to read their own favorite authors. The point of genre literature isn’t so much that we dream as how we dream, and the definitive critique of the New Yorker genre from a science fiction critic, if it ever gets written, will no doubt take the tack that the only salient difference between we Scifi fans and They HighLit fans is that they are deluded about what they are fantasizing about, and we are not, and that is why their fantasies are so perverse. By making the Fillory novels real as novels in his own universe, Grossman just misses being this critic, I think. The infamous ending could be read as his attempt to adopt this mantle (SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ONWARD). Quentin’s decision to give up magic-denialism could be read as a clever slight to those who criticize escapism: Quentin has, after all, taken on his real-world job as a way of avoiding the “escapist” world of Fillory! The implication being that escapism and embrace of reality aren’t functions of the world you’re in or the content of your imagination such that minor details can tip you off to when you’re doing it so much as your willingness to confront and take responsibility for what happens to you. And on that level, it really does drive a dagger at the heart of the vanity that is The New Yorker - in the sense that it isn’t enough to pick out keywords to know when you’re reading “the wrong kind of thing,” you have to actually pay attention to its plot and character motivations too. But it doesn’t quite work, and that’s because we’ve already been to Fillory and know it isn’t what Quentin’s looking for. It just isn’t possible to believe that Quentin has come to terms with anything, and the gratuitous appearance of his friends there at the end will likely be no different than his hasty decision to round everyone up and go to Fillory much earlier in the novel - the kind of ill-thought meta-avoidance tactic (”meta” in the sense that you’re avoiding by charging in) that caused so much trouble in the first place.

I think if there’s a point to the supposedly-horrible ending it’s that it could have been anything. I can’t imagine a twist that Grossman could’ve used (save breaking the Fourth Wall, of course, which would have been annoying enough to cause me to hurl the book across the room!) that would’ve been any better or worse than the one he did use. By the end of the book, nothing surprises you anymore, because it’s abundantly clear that Quentin’s case is hopeless. He hasn’t found satisfaction at his “real”-world job, he hasn’t found satisfaction in magical studies, he hasn’t found satisfaction in the fantasy world, and just about everything that could’ve jarred him out of his complacency has already happened. So I think the point about the ending is that it doesn’t matter what the ending is. I can reinterpret Quentin’s flying off with his friends at the end as him jumping to his death in a delusion and not alter the meaning of the story a whit. And I have to say, I find that - strangely - Very Cool.

I don’t think this should be mistaken for genre lit. It’s post-modern lit that happens to be written in a particular genre. I do not think it is aimed at genre lit fans. It is pretty clearly addressing the New Yorker’s straw man conception of what the fantasy genre is. It’s aware of Narnia primarily, Harry Potter in close second, and yes there’s a throwaway reference to Tolkein here and there. Which is to say, it’s primarily aware of a fantasy series that New Yorker readers have actually read, one that they may or may not have read but have certainly read a lot about, and a third one that they have friends who have read (and may have seen film versions of), but are otherwise uninterested in aside from a passing familiarity with the terms and setting and minor interest in invented languages. So to answer Abigail Nussbaum’s implied question - the reason there is no reference to China Mielville or Susanna Clarke is because Grossman isn’t talking to fantasy readers at all. I think this is meant to be a kind of trojan horse for those New Yorker readers who dismiss fantasy out of hat. It doesn’t work on that level (they can get out of it by simply telling themselves that Grossman goofed the ending), but that is nevertheless how I think it is intended to read. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself whether Quentin really reminds you more of your average genre fan, or of your average university literature professor and you’ll see what I mean. None of this means genre fans can’t read and get a lot out of it, though. And actually, the fact that I don’t think it’s aimed at us primarily is what makes it possible for me to enjoy it. If I thought I was the butt of the same flat joke I have been the butt of so many other times, a joke based on misunderstanding about what I get out of reading science fiction and fantasy to begin with, this would be but one drop in the sea of ink already devoted to rehashing that theme.

In summary, it isn’t the best book you’ll ever read, nor is it exactly the hillarious sendup of Harry Potter the reviews might have led you to expect. It isn’t going to teach you anything you didn’t already know, and it certainly isn’t going to change your life. But it is well-written, it does have a nice eye for detail, it throws you a couple of nice “sucker punches” (to borrow an observation from Rob Bedford) that keep you on your toes, and it doesn’t hate you. Enjoyable all-round!

Vienna Blood isn’t just a novel, it’s TWO novels - and I’ve read both of them. Recently. So I felt the need to clarify, since this review is only about the Vienna Blood that Adrian Mathews put out in 1999, and not the (vastly superior) Vienna Blood that Frank Tallis put out last year.

Both Vienna Bloods are mystery novels (broadly defined), both have pretentions about taking Vienna and the roots of Naziism as a subtext, and both got really good press on publication. Unfortunately, the Adrian Mathews Vienna Blood - which is, additionally, a science fiction novel - doesn’t really deserve its accolades. Overrated, in a word.

It has an interesting premise. And, for once, it’s a crossover genre science fiction that actually works as science fiction. We’re innundated these days by clever people who think it’s terribly clever to combine science fiction with some other genre and call themselves clever (*cough* Joss Whedon *cough*) - and Adrian Mathews isn’t, or doesn’t seem to be, one of those people. I won’t say too much about the plot - just that it deals with speculation about near-future advances in genetic engineering, including one very interesting potential use for “junk” DNA.

Unfortunately, it squanders the goldmine premise by being annoying in a whole host of other ways.

For one thing, it’s not very convincing as a “near-future” setting. Global Warming, for example, has advanced to the point where it’s perpetually springtime in Vienna, and yet no mention is ever made of the globe being uninhabitable at the equator, or any other catastrophic side effects. And this is 2026, a number that even people living in 1999 must have known was an implausible date for observable climate change! But it’s really just a whole host of minor details that don’t seem to fit. People all still read print magazines, security decryption keys are only six digits long, ad absolute nauseam. It just - subtly - doesn’t work.

And you know what else doesn’t work? Setting the thing in Vienna. Not that I’ve ever been there - well, not for any length of time, anyway - but I’ve been to Austria, and these characters are not Austrians. And the American who shows up? He’s American enough, but only in a Bad British Stereotype of Americans kind of way. So bad that you’d almost think Mr. Mathews were writing in 1918 kind of way. In fact, the descriptions of Vienna and Austria are so unconvincing that you find yourself defensively weeding out the mentions, only to stumble across a passage wherein the main character speculates about his nonexistant Austrian national identity and find all your best efforts to ignore it in a rubble heap about your feet. Adrian Mathews is just bad - rotten, awfully, spectacularly bad - at writing about people from other cultures, and I wish someone would have told him that BEFORE he wrote the book so that we could’ve had the same story set in the UK. Which brings me to what’s really offensive about the setting, actually: it is - or at least comes across as - a way of deflecting responsibility for Britain’s own racist past.

OK, it’s no great spoiler to tell you that a thriller about genetic engineering set in near-future Vienna is going to be about racism, is it? Well, it is - about racism, I mean - so there. And I couldn’t, the whole time, shake the uncomfortable feeling that Mathews is just the kind of philistine who thinks that to write a book about racism you have to have a racist setting, and that it’s all very worldly of him to know that Austria is a more plausibly racist place these days than that old standby of Germany. To give credit where it’s due - he’s right that Austria has managed to dodge a lot of the soul-searching that Germany has done since the war by falsely claiming to be a victim, rather than the enabler it actually was, of Naziism. In fact, as we all know, the Anschluss was widely supported in Austria, it wasn’t an invasion in anything but the most surface reading of international law, and in any case it was in the cultural millieu of Vienna that Hitler developed his attitudes in the first place. Hitler was an Austrian. True as all this is, it’s a pretty shallow reading of Austrian history. If it’s true that Austria hasn’t properly confronted its Nazi past, then not primarily because they’ve managed to explain the Anscluss away as an invasion, but rather because of an uneasy political compromise between ex-Nazis and Socialists that dominated Austrian politics until quite recently. This gets some mention in the book, but incorrectly as a mechanism for keeping fascism just below the surface. Little mention is made of its role in allowing old war criminals to stay in power. So Mathews knows nothing about Austria, and it shows, and this is insulting becuase … if you’re going to make the setting of your story an important part of the underlying political statement, as is pretty patently the case here, you really, really, really, really, really owe the people who are actually from the place you’re slandering the courtesy of doing even basic reserach into their culture and history. And having done that research, the story needs to be dependent in some way on details that you learned therein. But this story isn’t. It could just as well have taken place in the UK, and in fact should have done, if for no other reason than Mr. Mathews patriotism shines through. We get obscure mentions of unimportant British scientists left and right in memos that purportedly Austrian experts on genetic engineering are writing to each other - mentions that either are not germane to the matter at hand, or are but would have been so obvious to the characters writing the memo that they wouldn’t have wasted the ink. Like, for example, the time the world expert on genetic engineering notes in a parenthetical in a purely company-internal memo to other experts on genetic engineering that was never intended for public viewing and was in fact encrypted and password-protected that the first test-tube baby was born in the UK in 1978. As though there is possibly any genetic expert anywhere in the world who would consider such a fact obscure enough to be worth mentioning in a memo to other genetic exerts. Please! There are scores of such examples, and they all underscore a kind of childish Canadian sensibility to the book - where national identity is (to borrow from Heinlein) kind of like dandruff: ultimately a nuissance but so much fun to pick at that people can’t leave it alone. The first rule in the book about how to have maturity beyond that of a high schooler in your speculations about national identity is, of course, to be fair and not slander other people without doing some soul-searching of your own. But Britain gets only a handful of favorable mentions here, end of story. Great.

And you know what further doesn’t work? The plot. I said the premise was interesting - and it is. But unfortunately this doesn’t translate into a good plot. Here again, the term that springs to mind is “high school.” Mr. Mathews seems to have designed the plot first and then hung the characters and setting on it. He knew the twists he wanted, and he made them happen, never mind that it leads to several of the characters doing hugely implausible/inconsistent things. I guess listing these implausible things counts as indulging in spoilers, so skip the rest of the paragraph if you’re sensitive about that kind of thing - but in one case a man bombs the apartment of someone he’s trying to save for no good reason; in another a death is faked by someone that seems to serve no purpose other than to restrict his future movements, causing distress to someone he purports to love in the process; a character who claims to want another character to know something deliberately deceives him about that thing, etc. etc. etc. ALL of these things happen purely for the purpose of having plot twists. For example, the faked death seems to have happened just so that a character we assume for most of the novel to be dead can be alive in a surprise twist at the end. And the character who deceives the narrator about the point that she later claims to have been helping him to discover was only so that we can be shocked that she’s the very person she’s claiming not to be later on. NONE of these “twists” make any sense from a character point of view - some of them (the faked death) not even from a conspiratorial point of view (what does it accomplish other than restricting the character’s movements? it hardly furthers his political cause!) - and it’s all just very sloppy.

The cherry on top is that Mathews can’t write. If you guessed that the prose here is straight out of the Reader’s Digest School of Amateur Writing - that is, “describe EVERYTHING, include pointless dream sequences, and use your thesaurus like you’re getting paid by the letter” - go to the head of the class. Painful.

So how did I make it to the end? Well, it wasn’t ALL grit and determination. Like I said, the premise is actually pretty good, and the first half of the book is significantly better-plotted than the second. For the first 150 pages or so you really care and are honestly puzzled about what’s going on. By the time you get to the last sections, you know what’s going on, and wouldn’t care if you could even believe it, but you’re - or at least, I was - still kind of interested in sniffing out what the political axe to grind here is. I know what you’re thinking: book by a crappy amateur British writer on genetic engineering that takes place in Austria for no discernable reason - it’s GOTTA be anti-fascist, right? And I think it’s trying to be, yes. But it can’t quite take the final step, and that’s interesting. It comes across as something written by someone who wants to be anti-fascist because that’s what all the cool kids are, but he can’t make all the pieces fit. As such, this had potential for being a really thoughtful book on the subject.

The trouble with political fashions, such as the knee-jerk vilification of fascism, as we all know is that they tend to oversimplify complex issues. And one side-effect of such oversimplification, naturally, is that the more convincing arguments don’t get enough air time. Unfortunately, I think that’s Mathews’ problem. He’s heard all the left’s slogans about fascism, and he’s on board (or at least willing to let his audience think he is) about hating it, but the slogans just aren’t all that convincing when you start to really think about them, and so he’s stuck. The slogans are all against straw man versions of fascism - wherein the state needs an external enemy to crush, etc. etc. But what if fascism really were about what it claims to be about? That is, what if it really were just a glorified tribalism, dedicated to the health of the state as a cohesive body, the promotion of the nation, to which each citizen owes obligations and from the strength of which he can expect to benefit if those obligations are met? And what if it admitted without prompting that the nation-state is an arbitrary construct, but a beneficial one, and made the argument explicitly that we have something to gain in breathing life into this construct? In fact, these are pretty popular ideas if you’ve ever spent much time in a bar, and, more to the point, they’re not all that inimical to the way Socialism is generally sold. Once you give up on the cartoon version with all its race hatred and homoerotic uniform fetishes, it gets a little more difficult to convince the average Joe that this stuff is poison. Which, of course, is the reason National Socialism - broadly defined - has such international appeal. If Mathews had made wrestling with these questions the centerpiece of the book from page one, he would’ve had a lot of really interesting stuff to write about. But again, the situation on the ground seems to be that one of the index cards in his pile said something like “give a more complex treatment of fascism,” and it was at the bottom of the pile, and so we only really deal with it as a result of a bunch of contrived plot turns there at the end of the book.

Exhibit Q, ladies and gentlemen, is that the book ends on elipsis. No shit - he actually tapered the book off with three dots - JUST in case you missed that the ending is ambiguous and deliberately refuses to tie up some loose ends.

So, OK, I’ll be avoiding the name Adrian Mathews like the plague in future - but I don’t necessarily think everyone should. If theme is what you read for, and you like questions posed but not answered, and you like to question taboo, and you’re looking to improve your vocabulary in the process, then this book is for you. And, let’s face it, I’ve just described the bread and butter of a certain breed of science fiction fan. There IS an audience for this kind of book, and for that audience, I would say that this is above-average fare. I am not a member of that audience, and so my opinion is pretty negative. Just thought I should make that clear.

Out of four stars? Two. For the interesting premise. And for the potential. This could’ve been a superior book if the author had been willing to do third and fourth drafts. Mathews may become a good writer someday, for all I know. So two. I wouldn’t call it grading on a curve, exactly, but it probably is generous.

This year’s Nobel Prize winner for Literature is Herta Müller, the best author I’ve never read. I first came across her while shelving books at the library as an undergrad. I worked in a room where books came in from publishers for review by professors. The way I understand it, each department was allowed a certain number of purchases per semester, and it was my job to take the books out, organize them, and then send out some kind of notification that they’d arrived so the designated prof. from each department could come and review them. Being very interested in foreign languages and majoring in Literature, I usually took the time to look over the foreign language literature section, and Müller’s The Land of Green Plums was there one day. I stole it to read it - because I was and am very much interested in the Ceausescu dictatorship, and information on it was a bit hard to come by in 1996 - but I was a big stress case as an undergrad, constantly taking too many classes and therefore overcommitted, so I didn’t make it much more than 30 pages in before quietly returning it.

Anyway, it seems she’s something of an international sensation among literary critics, and now they’ve awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature. Congratulations, I guess. I wasn’t too impressed with the bit I read, I have to say, but it wasn’t very much, and I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep at the time! I should probably pick up that book again, for old times’ sake.

Two interesting sidenotes from the Spiegel article about the prize if you happen to read German. First, nowhere in the article is Müller referred to as an “Aussiedler(in)” - the common expression for someone who is of German descent and has moved back to Germany. She’s simply German. It’s especially noteworthy in this case because she’s otherwise an Aussiedler’s Aussiedler - born, raised, and lived the first half of her adulthood in Romania, writes, talks and lectures about life in Romania, is presumably bilingual in Romanian and German, and even writes essays about how foreign Germany was when she first moved there in the 1980s. I say this because Herr Henzl, the caretaker of the dorm I lived in in Würzburg in 1995-6 was also an Aussiedler from Romania, and everyone knew this and felt the need to bring it up. So, the conclusion seems to be, then, that just as in Korea and Japan, people who would otherwise be only half-acceptable as natives are suddenly the real deal when they’re internationally famous. I’m so glad I’m not from a country that’s obsessed with ethnic identity…

The other one being - and this is a feather in Robin Hanson’s cap - that even though Müler is not typical of the recent trend in prize winners and was considered a longshot for the prize this year, the London bookies managed to call it right, even if most Nobel Committee watchers had their eyes on other balls. So we get another neat demonstration of the uncanny ability of betting markets to aggregate disparate bits of information accurately, telling us something that all experts knew without a single one of them being aware they knew it. Or, more accurately, they knew it even though no one of them did. Legalize them already!

To Say Nothing of the Dog is Connie Willis’ Hugo novel (class of 1999, published in 1997), and it comes highly recommended by a lot of critics I trust. I myself will go with “fun but overrated.”

The emphasis goes on the “fun.” If the purpose of a novel is to entertain, then I can’t say enough good things about this one. It’s a page-turner, but it’s also no trouble putting it down and picking back up later. It’s funny. It’s intelligent enough to be engaging, but it’s not, like so much science fiction, a philosophy paper pretending to be a novel. The book tries to be, and works as, a P.G. Wodehouse-style comedy of manners - with everything else it has to offer tacked on as a nice bonus. An excellent choice for the beach or the plane.

As for the “overrated,” this book is fan fiction. Well-written, novel-length fan fiction, mind you, but fan fiction all the same. There isn’t a single bit of originality here. Willis is a fan of P.G. Wodehouse, a fan of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, evidently a bit nostalgic for pre-war sections of Brideshead Revisited, and so she’s thrown all that together in a pot, stirred it up, and come up with a workable bit of escapism. The plot goes like this: in Oxford of 2057 some clever people have come up with a way to travel into the past. And so they do - for research purposes. One bit of research they’re engaged in at the moment is an attempt to restore Coventry Cathedral faithfully. By way of macguffin, it turns out that they’re having a lot of trouble getting the details right on one detail - “the bishop’s bird stump,” a piece of victorian kitsch that may or may not have been in the Cathedral when it was bombed. They can’t really tell because it turns out the Timestream protects itself from tampering by not letting time travellers too close to critical junctures. And so the question is, why is the bishop’s bird stump so all-fired important that the Timestream goes to such a fuss to keep people away from it? There is also a secondary macguffin in the form of a cat that one of the time travellers was able to bring back to the future - something that has heretofore been impossible, and so everyone’s scratching their heads about why this cat is apparently an exception. Our protagonist is sent back to 1888 to return the cat, and of course he gets himself entangled in a comedy of manners while doing so.

The problems with this setup are these:

(1) Too much authorial liberty taken - a lot of the plot is motivated by the protagonist’s suffering from “time-lag,” a kind of jet-leg that you get from time travel that keeps you disoriented. So, he makes a lot of uninformed decisions when first plunked down in 1888 - can’t really remember why he’s there, what he’s supposed to do, etc., all of which comes across like a big cheat on the author’s part, since had he been better rested he wouldn’t have made all the missteps that get him entangled in the comedy of manners. Even worse is the fact that they’re only restoring Coventry Cathedral (and so completely obsessed with knowing whether the bishop’s bird stump was there during the bombing raid) in the first place on the force of one Lady Schrapnell’s personality, and the degree to which everyone is afraid of her and hops about doing her bidding is as implausible as her name. All of which is to say the entire plot gets a push from behind to pop it into gear on the basis of a giant IOU which never gets paid. Narrative hook by fiat.

(2) Deus ex machina - our heroes don’t end up solving their own problems. Rather, “The Timestream” does it for them - by shunting them off to remote locations in time just as everything works itself out. This is frustrating for all the normal reasons - plus one more. The extra bonus source of frustration in this case is that a lot of the positive reviews I’ve read of this book praise it for leaving behind an even bigger mystery than the one it solved. Actually, it did no such thing. All it did was move the point of disturbance that the Timestream is working to correct outside of our time horizon (500 years into the future rather than in good ol’ 2057). So it’s not so much giving us a bigger “sense of wonder” kind of mystery as it is just refusing to solve the one it posed. Which is LAZY.

(3) Makes excuses for its affectations - my least favorite most hated literary failing. It’s fine to try your hand at writing a comedy of manners, or an Agatha Christie. But you have to really do it. What’s annoying is when you make the characters in the story aware that they’re in a mystery story, like Willis does here. The protagonist and female sidekick consciously ape Dorothy Sayers characters - with the one even proposing to the other (and her accepting) in exactly the way their Sayers counterparts did in the Wimsey novels. And that’s not even the worst of it. In one throwaway scene, the everpresent hand of the Timestream sends our protagonist to the wrong destination briefly just so he can overhear a bunch of old women discussing Agatha Christie novels, providing him with a valuable clue. People with 5-6 PhDs in literature may wank off to this stuff; the rest of us find it boring.

(4) Libertarian political message misfires and comes out conservative - like all comedies of manners, this one has an uppity butler. He sits around reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire all the time - amidst all these upper class types who lounge about and do nothing useful, which I took to be a sly reminder that the dole is the dole is the dole, whether it’s doled out to the poor or the aristocracy. And if it’d ended there that would’ve been a nice vindication of Capitalism (you know, corporate welfare is welfare too, and worse for being given to people who don’t need it). Unfortunately, there’s still Lady Schrapnell and her vanity project of saving Coventry Cathedral, which turns out to be massively important to the Timestream for reasons the lazy authoress declines to elaborate in the end. Which is really nothing more than the typical conservative bully pitch: “trifles of tradition and ritual may be hugely important for all we know. Let’s pretend they are and never mind that that works out for me and not for you. Now eat your peas and don’t ask questions.”

So, if you’re looking for a bit of mindless fun, you can’t go wrong. Just don’t let anyone tell you it’s more than that, ’cause it ain’t. P.G. Wodehouse does it better.

It happened again. Sometimes you stumble across an idea, or even a particular way of phrasing something, that seems completely obvious in retrospect, and it seems like something you should’ve been hip to for a long time, but for whatever reason you just never got around to thinking of it yourself. That happened to me today with a neat explanation of why people are more forgiving of plot inconsistincies in movies than they are in novels.

It’s in the comments section of this post about Star Trek on Nancy Kress’ blog - this one by “Daniel” (who has his own blog, in which he does cool things like shoot up old C++ books). Kress wonders why film producers are so sure they can get away with the kind of chracter silliness that that movie apparently features, and more or less draws the standard conclusion that it’s anti-science ficiton prejudice (it’s not clear whether this is from the audience or the producers, actually). Thrillers and mysteries don’t indulge in the same kind of lame setups.

There’s a whole can of worms waiting to be opened here, so let’s just cut to the chase. Daniel has a different idea - and that idea is that people are more forgiving of movies in general because they don’t require much of a time commitment.

Wow.

I mean, it’s obvious, right? Which is why it’s sort of frustrating that I have to hear about it from random gun nut named Daniel on the internets (nothing against gun nuts, of course; I’d like to be one but lack the funds). But I think he’s on to something. Call it the Economist’s View of Movie Suckitude. Here it is in more techical terms.

If you want to appreciate a work of art or entertainment, there’s a kind of fixed-cost investment in terms of time and attention and, for lack of a better term, active world construction before you can get any benefit out of it. I’m fudging a bit here, of course, because you don’t necessarily have to watch a movie or read a book through to the end to start getting something out of it - but you do have to at least get immersed in it. Rarely do you enjoy a movie/book from frame/page one - and more rarely still do you enjoy a movie/book less the further into it you get. So there’s a payment: you gotta pay attention and get the world and story going in your head before you get to the toy surprise.

With movies, obviously, that fixed cost is much lower. The money price is about the same - but a movie is over in two hours, and a lot of the hard work of imagining the details is done for you. Since your cost is lower going in, your expectations are also lower, and you’re more apt to feel like the payoff was worth the payment. Note that this is contrary to the standard cognitive dissonance lines - in which a higher fixed cost will prejudice you in favor of voicing approval, because you don’t want to admit that you put a lot of effort into something that didn’t really pay off - which is why it’s the Economist’s View of Movie Suckitude and not the Psychologist’s. Probably also playing a role is the fact that the timeframe is fixed. Going to a movie involves a bit of planning: you have to clear your schedule for the two hours that you’re gonna sit there. Consequently, your opportunity cost is artificially low for watching movies. Not because there aren’t better things you could be doing, but because you’ve taken care to minimize the availability of viable substitutions. Getting up and walking out is an option, but you still have to shift mental gears and drive somewhere else, etc. The opportunity cost of reading a book is usually a bit higher - not just because of the greater time investment, but also because of the relatively friction-free transition to other activities. You just put it down, go over to the computer, and get back to programming … or whatever.

The end result is that movie makers can get away with a lot more than novel writers - just because they have a less demanding audience.

This is a satisfying explanation for me for a number of reasons - but the main one is that it lets us sidestep a lot of standard nonsense on the subject. I’ve never found the typical explanations for the shallowness of TV and movies from cultural critics very convincing. They tend to like to blame the medium itself - because this allows them to conclude that there’s some critical danger to society lurking in television and movies, either from our apparent diminished ability to separate fantasy from reality when presented with primarily visual input, or because it passivizes the audience, discouraging independent thought and transmitting condensed content. The first criticism may have been more true when written - but I think time has laid it to rest. The more realistic-looking movies get, the more ironic detachment audiences seem to approach them with. The second isn’t entirely incompatible with the Economist’s View of Movie Suckitude, actually - but I think it misses the point all the same in confusing the prevelance of mass-market entertainment in general with its particular instantiation in television and movies. The percentage of trash novels is probably roughly the same as the percentage of trash movies, actually (certainly it is if Sturgeon’s Law is to be believed). TV, sadly, still isn’t really an artist’s medium - but we’re getting intimations that it can be (by my book, Space: 1999’s first season is what established this - though most people would probably feel more comfortable with my tracing it to Twin Peaks 15 years later). In any case, what most cultural critics like to do is reach melodramatic conclusions to the effect that that visual media are actually *gasp* changing the way we approach the world. But probably the truth is as Daniel has it: we appraoch the world the way we always have. Homo Economicus isn’t the whole story on human nature, but it’s part of it, and the realtive shallowness of television and movies compared with books is just one example of it in action.

Of course, as insightful as it is, Daniel’s speculation doesn’t really get at the heart of what Kress was complaining about - which isn’t so much why movies in general are dumbed down compared to books, but why science fiction films in particular are. Sadly - I think she’s right. There are plenty of truly complex movies - but I can think of few that are also science fiction. My own thought here is that it’s the same thing that killed Disco - namely why spend all that money on slick production and lush instrumentals when Punk sells just as well and can be made in some douchebag’s garage practically for free? It’s no big secret that the record comapnies - even if they didn’t exactly start the “Disco Sucks” movement - certainly weren’t about to stand in its way once it got started. Why bother finding ways to slash your fixed costs when an army of conformists, clueless to their own conformity and complicity, are happy to do it for you? Something like that probably goes on with science fiction films too. Movie production companies are happy to put up the kind of money that it takes to make a really convincing one in the case of things like Star Wars, which are blockbusters and make staggering amounts of money. But if you’re aiming at a more serious - and therefore smaller - audience, it gets harder to justify the budget. The record company rule holds here too: if you have two niche formats, prefer the one that’s less expensive. It’s good business, and you can hardly blame them.

Being only a semi-regular Will Wilkinson reader, I missed this bit when it aired:

By the way, Atlas buffs, the point of Atlas Shrugged is not that you are John Galt. The point is that you are not John Galt. The point is that you are, at your best, Eddie Willers. You’re smart, hardworking, productive, and true. But you’re no creative genius and you take innovation — John Galt — for granted. You don’t even know who he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train tracks.

As an Ayn Rand fan myself, I’d say he’s got what he’s got right, but he’s only got half of what there is to get.

I’ll admit that Eddie Willers was always a problematic character for me. I was never clear on what lesson we were supposed to be drawing. He’s quite a decent guy - as Wilkinson says, his function in the novel seems to be to represent a commoner who “gets it.” Or, as Wikipedia puts it, “Willers is generally assumed to represent the common man: someone who does not possess the promethian creative ability of The Strikers, but matches them in moral courage and is capable of appreciating and making use of their creations.” And yet, it gets him nowhere. His moral courage is directly responsible for his ending up “weeping on abandoned train tracks” in the middle of the desert by the end of the book. Wikipedia (at the time of writing, anyway) says that it’s unclear whether Dagny or anyone is comming to save him. To me it was clear that NOONE is coming to save him - he dies in the desert. Some reward for doing the right thing!

There’s any number of ways we could explain this, of course. Maybe Eddie is in the story for pure shock value. We the ordinary are supposed to identify with Eddie, and since he comes to a bad end, maybe the point is to shock us out of our complacency and make us realize that talking back to the collectivist nonsense that we hear on TV and see in our universities every day is important. It isn’t enough just to do our jobs and do them well - we have to fight the power too. Kudos to me, then, for writing this blog, eh? Except - this can’t be the right interpretation because everything that Ayn Rand ever says concerns the heroism of just doing what you’re good at to the best of your ability. Her mass appeal comes from taking quite ordinary jobs - like the construction worker (Mike Donagan in The Fountainhead), a line-cook (great philosopher Hugh Akston is found working as one in Atlas Shrugged), middle management (Dagny Taggart) or even Roark’s job as architect - and making them heroic. Eddie Willers and Mike Donagan are clearly sympathetic characters, and partly because they both happily work overtime without pay to make sure they get their jobs done right. So it can’t be Eddie’s stellar work ethic that’s the problem!

Or maybe Eddie is in the story as a kind of warning against false idols. Even through to the end of the story he fails to appreciate - and to be fair, it takes Dagny some time to appreciate it too, though she does eventually get there (albeit maybe by accident) - that the railroad he ends up dying(?) for is only as good as what it symbolizes. Material things only have meaning in context - as tools to man’s ends. Once the railroad is perverted to an instrument of corrupt ends, the logical conclusion of defending it is that the defender die (for Rand, ethics has its basis in the affirmation of life). This is the more consistent interpretation, I think, and what I have always assumed she meant. I’m not comfortable with it. It’s one thing to rail against false idols, but Eddie’s sin isn’t that he’s worshipping the wrong God. That is, he doesn’t actually value the corrupt government or the cult of collectivism; he values what he’s always valued: the achievement the railroad represents. His sin is just failing to appreciate that the railroad he serves no longer exists. Dying seems like an awfully high price to pay for merely missing the point.

Or maybe Eddie is in the story as a testament to love. He’s secretly in love with Dagny Taggart, and he knows that circumstances that he doesn’t fully understand have forced her to abandon the railroad. He also knows that she can’t have completely abandoned the railroad in her heart, so if she can’t keep it alive he will. And if that means making the ultimate sacrifice, then what choice do his values leave him? This may well be what Rand meant by Eddie. As a self-proclaimed romantic, her more tenuous mental acrobatics come from trying to define “rational self-interest” in a way that still lets her write the kind of harlequin novels where Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine for Lucie in the end. I’m completely uncomfortable with this interpretation - not because I think romantic love is corny (I don’t), but because Eddie’s sacrifice is so pointless. Sydney Carton at least saved Lucie’s lover; what has Eddie saved? Dagny will come back and rebuild the railway someday, and so she doesn’t need his sacrifice in any case. If Eddie is dying for the glory of love, what is the point of so thoroughly writing off his contribution?

Or maybe Eddie is meant to be what Anton Checkhov would’ve called “the tragedy of life’s banalities,” sometimes translated “the tragedy of being ordinary.” On this interpretation, Eddie’s fatal flaw isn’t so much that he’s not John Galt but that he never tries to be. Eddie is someone congenitally happy to be just who he is, and is ultimately doomed by his lack of striving. There’s some indication that Dagny was about to invite him to escape with the Strikers, but she never does - and perhaps it’s because she senses that Eddie only ever does what is expected and never asks for better. At some point early in the book, someone (James Taggart?) derisively calls Eddie a serf. He responds that he is a serf. At the time, the point seems to be that he’s confounded the questioner, who is trying to taunt Eddie into rebellion for subversive purposes. But perhaps the point, by the end of the book, is that Eddie hasn’t actually counfounded the questioner at all - that a working class hero really ISN’T something to be. If he’d wanted a little better for himself, he would have been saved.

There is probably some grain of truth in all of these interpretations. Eddie is meant to put a human face on the pointlessness of the sacrifice that is the logical end of collectivism. Eddie is also meant to be an uncompromising illustration of what is at stake in applying philosophy: he might not have bothered to realize that the railroad had been perverted, but it was nevertheless his responsibility as a thinking individual to do so. Eddie is also meant as a testament to love. The meaning of love isn’t in the end that the sacrifice achieves, but just in the willingness of the lover to hold the object of his affection as his highest value. And Eddie is indeed meant to symbolize the tragedy of life’s banalities.

It’s the last point, in particular, that I think Wilkinson is missing. Yes, Mr. Wilkinson, the point of Atlas Shrugged is that we’re NOT John Galt. And yes, Eddie dies on the train tracks in the end. But Atlas Shrugged is still a deeply optimistic novel, and I don’t think any honest reading of it comes away with the point that we’re all supposed to just lay down, wallow in our inferiority, and die. It’s true that there’s a Nietzschean element in Rand that she never fully purged from her soul. And it’s true that the last 1/3 of Atlas Shrugged is pretty problematic as novels of ideas go. Biographies of her that I’ve read suggest that she rushed through the end to make her deadline - and that rings true for me. Nietzschean misanthropy is an instinct that she had to supress, and when you’re under the gun it’s harder to keep things under control. Taken as a whole, the novel is still my favorite, though, and it’s not because I have a fatalistic interpretation of life where I’m doomed to engage in meaningless pursuits until I die. I like Atlas Shrugged because it’s the opposite of that - a celebration of invidual purpose.

The novel is useless for people who are already John Galt. If you’re already John Galt, you just keep on keepin’ on - no point in wasting your time with diversions like novels. I agree with what I think Wilkinson’s purpose here probably is (and, more to the point, I’ll bet Ayn Rand would’ve agreed too): you don’t get to be John Galt just by reading Rand’s novel and declaring yourself a fan, right. It is precisely this kind of Ayn Rand fan - the kind who thinks he’s already there and that the rest of us are just insects - that gives Objectivism a bad name.

But the novel is also useless for people who don’t want to be John Galt, who are resigned to never being John Galt. If you think you’re Eddie Willers and the best you can do with your life is die on the train tracks in the desert, then you’re better off letting John Lennon rot your brain for you until you don’t even want to save Taggart Transcontinental from the looters. Bob Dylan is a great poet. Really. Just listen hard enough and you’ll get there someday, kid.

No - Atlas Shrugged is a novel for people who are not John Galt and know they’re not, but would like to be. Galt is an ideal - which means he doesn’t actually exist, but the closer you get the better off you’ll be. He’s a symbol of what’s essential to man - which isn’t the complete picture of our species because we’re mammals too. Just what’s essential, what defines man, sets him apart from everything else. He’s a moral beacon - and like with every moral beacon you’re not expected to get it right all of the time, you’re just promised that you’ll be happy to the extent that you do get it right. Eddie Willers’ presence in the novel just means that you don’t get paid for sleeping on the job. It’s one thing to want to be John Galt, but if you don’t actually try to be you don’t get any cookies.

OK - now let me drop the Objectivistspeak, lest I be misinterpreted by succeeding generations when the cities are laid in dust and posterity finds an errant laptop with this blog still open. I don’t actually want to be John Galt. I don’t know the answer to the novel’s great opening one-liner, and I don’t even care, because when I say the last 1/3 of the novel was “problematic” I mean mostly that that character is the problem. All the other heroes in the book are believable and likeable. Despite endless descriptions of John Galt’s perfect physique, though, I can’t even get a clear visual image of him focused in my mind because he’s such a walking literary device that it’s hard to see him as a person. I find that every time I reread Atlas Shrugged, I will have remembered every detail - almost down to knowing verbatim the words used to describe them - EXCEPT those regarding John Galt. What I remember about him from last year, for example, is that he stands around at parties and spoils everyone’s fun by giving philosophy lectures while they’re trying to drink wine. Great.

No, what I’m doing here is not really defending the idea of a John Galt cult, since I don’t know what that would mean. The point is just that Wilkinson, as usual, has got a piece of the puzzle but never the whole picture. Atlas Shrugged is not a giant sneer at humanity for its imperfections. Nor is it an instant transporter beam to paradise. It is what every other morality tale is, really - good advice that’s best when taken, but with no attached expectation that its readers will always manage to get it right. Ayn Rand herself never managed it, and indeed if you read closely there’s a bit of self-parody in the form of a writer who comes to see the Phoenix-Durango on its maiden run.

I write this as one in what I expect to become a long list of reasons why Libertarians can’t really trust Will Wilkinson. It isn’t that he gets Atlas Shrugged wrong. It’s more that I don’t believe this is really his interpretation of it. It’s that I don’t think anyone thoughtful can have read the book and honestly come away with what he’s claiming as its point. As is usual with him, he has cover in the form of never saying anything that’s wrong, per se. But the most insidious way of being wrong is not giving a complete picture of what you know is right. That’s what’s probably going on here.