Book Review: The Baron in the Trees (1957) by Italo Calvino

How much did I love this novel? If someone gets a Kickstarter going to adapt it into a film, put me down for one million dollars. I'll have to borrow the million first, but you get the idea. The title character is Baron Rondo, the eldest son of a noble family leaving on a large rural estate near Genoa. On June 15, 1767,  the twelve-year-old Rondo, in a fit of pique over a dish served to him at the family dinner table, climbs up a tree and refuses to come down...ever.

Rondo is true to his word and spends the next fifty-plus years living a completely arboreal life. He learns to move with incredible agility across the forests of the region, but he's no hermit or wild man of the woods. Rondo continues his education, writes pamphlets and runs a newspaper, conducts love affairs, engages in acts of heroism and bravery, maintains a correspondence with some of the leading intellectuals of the time, and generally makes his life in the trees almost as comfortable as life in his ancestral palazzo.

The jaw-dropping brilliance of this novel is that it works as both a charming fantasy and as an acute novel of ideas. As a fantasy, Calvino shows some amazing skill as a world-builder; Rondo's life in the treetops is fully and imaginatively realized, and there's a host of sequences that are begging to be filmed. I'm not joking when I say that if a visuals-obsessed director like Steven Spielberg got a look at this novel he'd probably drop every other project to film it. There are fights with pirates; treetop lovemaking; battles with packs of starving wolves; a troop of French soldiers covered in living vegetation; and a final scene that's as heartbreaking as it is extravagantly visual.

As much as this novel is a fantastical, lavishly imagined folktale, it's also about the birth of the modern world. The society Rondo is born into is one of aristocratic privilege matched with a deferential peasantry. Over the course of his life the Enlightenment produces the French Revolution, which is followed by Napoleon's rubbishing of ancien regimes throughout Europe, and as the novel ends there are hints of reactionary political forces coming to the fore. Rondo is, in his limited way, a liberal and a bit of a revolutionary, but what his odd life choice seems to represent is the ascendancy and triumph of the individual in society. His entire life, as eccentric and as uncomfortable as it is, is an expression of what he wants to be, as opposed to what society, from high to low, expects him to be. Rondo has cast off all the expectations of his family, class and society to literally move onto a different plane of existence.

The Baron in the Trees is also whimsical, funny, sad, and features a charming and poignant love story between Rondo and the beautiful Viola, a noblewoman who's as enthusiastically individualistic as he is, which, of course, means trouble all around. I really can't recommend this book enough. It's a superlative, one-of-a-kind fantasy that's in the same league as Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels or Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. And don't forget what I said about Kickstarter; I'm good for at least $100 this week.

Book Review: Scrivener's Moon (2011) by Philip Reeve

With this, the third and concluding(?) prequel to the four volume Mortal Engines series, Philip Reeve has created what has to be the gold standard in steampunk literature. Or perhaps I should say the brass standard. One of Reeve's best attributes as a steampunk writer is that he's not self-conscious about it. The seven novels in his imagined world aren't overly barnacled with the bling of steampunk, such as quirky, Victorian-themed nomenclature; heroes and heroines who are more ripping yarn archetypes than real characters; cameos from famous individuals, both real and fictional; and an obsession with all things that produce steam and smoke and are covered in brass. Reeve reverse engineers his novels, as it were, by starting with some dazzling creative concepts, adding in clever plots, and finishing off with well-rounded characters. With those building blocks in place the steampunk elements are never made to feel like the main attraction. Too many writers make the window dressing of steampunk the entire purpose of their novel.

Scrivener's Moon, which is set in the far, post-apocalyptic future, finishes the story of Fever Crumb, a teenage girl who's witness to the birth of London as a mobile, heavily armed city. It's almost impossible to do a synopsis of the story without launching into a lengthy outline of all seven volumes, but rest assured that Reeve's skill and imagination are undiminished in what might be his final outing in this genre. What's particularly pleasing is that his sense of humor remains intact. The term "post-apocalyptic" doesn't usually go hand in hand with humor, but Reeve knows that a largely grim story needs a bit of balance, and his sharp wit provides that contrast. And bonus marks for the subtle and natural way in which he shows Fever discovering that she's gay.

And now for a word about steampunk. There are endless, geeky arguments about what steampunk is or isn't, but my simple but comprehensive theory is that a steampunk novel is always set in either an old-fashioned future or a futuristic past. So there. This unruly bastard child of SF and the traditional adventure novel has attracted a lot of top-notch writers. Reeve, Nick Harkaway, Jonathan L. Howard and Toby Frost have all produced highly original, funny and exciting novels in the genre. What they all have in common, aside from talent, is that they're all British. Coincidence? I think not. I have a theory that the present dominance of UK writers in the steampunk field can be traced to TV shows like Dr Who, The Avengers, Quatermass, and all those Supermarionation shows such as Thunderbirds. The commonality in these programs is that anything goes, imaginatively speaking. Those shows mixed and matched all kinds of plots, characters and genres in the name of adventure and humor. Dr Who and The Avengers were particularly gleeful and energetic in this regard, and both were among the most popular and long-lasting shows of the 1960s and '70s. Today's steampunk writers grew up on those shows and I think it's fair to say that their ability to synthesize disparate genres into coherent, gripping stories owes a lot to Steed, Mrs Peel, the Doctor, and Captain Scarlet.

Film Review: Wake In Fright (1971)

Well, I didn't see this one coming. The blurb on the DVD case led me to expect some kind of thriller in which a schoolteacher battles for his life against Aussie yobbos in the outback, a kind of all-male Straw Dogs. I can understand why the blurb writer might have resorted to this plan of attack because what actually happens is far more subtle and ambiguous. The teacher, John, is working in a one-room schoolhouse in what looks like the emptiest, flattest, most desolate piece of real estate on Earth. It's the Christmas break and he heads by train to Yabba, a mining town, to catch a flight to Sydney. It's clear John, who is English, is dying to get back to civilization and is regretting whatever steps led him to end up teaching in the outback.

John has to spend the night in Yabba and unwisely goes on a gambling spree that costs him all his money. His motivation for gambling is that if he quits teaching he'll forfeit a $1,000 bond to the government. He hopes to win enough money to free himself from this indentured servitude. Thus begins John's descent into a personal hell. He's "befriended" by a variety of boozy, loutish locals who over the next 48 hours or so practically drown him in beer and testosterone. Oh, and there's a drunken, late night kangaroo hunt that ends with John going mano-a-roo armed only with a knife.

What this film isn't is a thriller or an action film. It's primarily an unflinching, critical look at Australia's macho, matey culture. The outback in this film might as well have a giant sign over it that reads MALES ONLY. Women drift around the periphery of the story but receive less attention than dogs or, of course, beer. The only woman of note in the film walks around with a zombiefied look on her face, apparently numbed by all the macho posturing. One line says it all about relations between the sexes: a Yabba local notices John talking to a woman and asks one of his mates, "Why would he talk to a woman when he could be drinking beer?"

It would have been easy for the film to take a condescending look at the stupidity and coarseness of outback males, but what  makes it better than that is that John becomes a willing participant in his own degradation. At the beginning of the story he sees himself as superior to everyone around him, and it's hard not to disagree with his point of view. What's brilliant about the story is that John becomes a willing participant in his own downfall. Like a  doomed character from a nineteenth-century Russian novel, John takes one crucial misstep that drastically and painfully alters the smooth course of his life. He discovers that part of him embraces the feral, alcohol-fueled life of Outback Man. There's even a suggestion that thanks to all this drunken male bonding and camaraderie, John has had sex with one of his new manly friends.

The actors range from very good to excellent, with Donald Pleasance a standout as a creepy doctor who lives in an alcoholic haze in a shack. Gary Bond, who looks a bit like Peter O'Toole, plays John and does a nice job of making his character's fall from grace seem plausible. But most of the credit has to go to Ted Kotcheff, the director. It would have been so easy to make this story overly dramatic, but Kotcheff takes a documentary approach that makes the film's greasy, grisly events seem all the more horrible and believable. Wake In Fright is definitely not for all tastes; in fact, I can almost guarantee it will leave a bad taste in your mouth, which, of course, is exactly what happens to John, although his hangover comes at a steeper price. And if someone wants to redo the blurb on the back cover, I'd suggest they describe it as a feverish, beer-soaked Australian version of Deliverance.

Film Review: Behind the Candelabra (2013)

Director Steven Soderbergh has stated that Behind the Candelabra is to be his final film before a hiatus from filmmaking. Good. Based on this film it's clear Soderbergh has nothing to offer the general public, or even fans of esoteric indie films. It's hard to imagine a more pointless, lazy, calorie-free film than this one. Soderbergh gives the film a sleek, glittery, Las Vegas kitsch with extra epaulettes look, and his actors are excellent, but the whole production is baffling in its lack of purpose or point of view.

Vegas showman/pianist Liberace and his boyfriend Scott Thorson are the subjects of this biopic. The story of their relationship goes in a predictable arc from infatuation to disillusion to divorce, and this paint-by-numbers approach is handled in about as original and insightful a manner as an Entertainment Tonight celebrity profile. The only aspect of Liberace's life and career that's at all interesting is that his stage persona was flamboyantly gay, but he resolutely maintained that he was straight. It's not surprising that a performer of his era would stay in the closet, but why were his fans so willing to suspend their disbelief and go along with this fiction? It's an interesting question but it's not answered or addressed here. The film is more fascinated by moments of weirdness from Liberace's life: his mother playing slots on her own, Liberace-supplied machine; interior decor that embraces the grotesque; Liberace's voracious sexual appetite; and Liberace's plastic surgeon, a man who's possibly even weirder than Liberace himself.

The vanity, shallowness, excess,  and narcissism of stars like Liberace is not news. Various biographies and biopics over the years have told us the same thing about people like Elvis, Michael Jackson, and a host of others. This film can't break out of the rut of simply itemizing the eccentricities of its main character. And what are we to make of Scott Thorson? He's a poor kid from a broken home and simply seizes the main chance when Liberace comes along. There's nothing to him other than his relationship with Liberace, just as there's nothing to Liberace other than his love of tacky furnishings, outrageous costumes and pretty young men. Is Candelabra a critique or analysis of the vanity and emptiness of celebrity? Not really, it's more of victim of Liberace-itis: in love with prettiness and cheap emotions.

Book Review: Shadow of the Rock (2012) by Thomas Mogford

One of standup comedian Eddie Izzard's best pieces is about how the British Empire arose thanks to the "cunning use of flags." Most of  those flags have come unstuck from the four corners of the world, but if the Brits no longer acquire territory through the agile use of flags, their writers seem keen on claiming a literary empire through the cunning use of fictional detectives. British authors Michael Dibdin, Robert Wilson, John Burdett, Martin O'Brien, Colin Cotterill, Tarquin Hall, Barbara Nadel, Michael Pearce, Martin Walker and Nicholas Freeling have all made a good living writing about crime and detection in foreign climes. It's an odd phenomenon. As far as I know no European authors have set detective series in the U.K., and only a handful of American writers have tried it. So it would seem that the spirit of empire-building still lives on in the imaginations of British writers, and it can truly be said that the sun never sets on Britain's empire of fictional sleuths.

One of the newest empire-builders is Thomas Mogford, author of a series of mystery/thrillers featuring Spike Sanguinetti, a lawyer living in Gibraltar. The trick with writing a mystery novel for an audience that's unfamiliar with the locale and culture the story is built around is to avoid sounding like a Lonely Planet guidebook. Not every author manages this; in fact, some of the cozier mystery writers positively wallow in local colour. These aren't so much mysteries as they are porn for armchair travelers. Mogford avoids this trap. Shadow is set in Gibraltar and Morocco, and most of the local colour we see is dusty and dirty: no moonlit, romantic strolls in the Casbah. Mogford also does a good job of integrating background info and current events into his descriptions without sounding like a Wikipedia entry.

The plot has Spike investigating a murder charge against a childhood friend who's been accused of killing a woman in Tangiers. The investigation bounces between Gibraltar and Morocco, and involves a hi-tech energy firm, Bedouin tribesmen, and a variety of people who don't feature in ads for Moroccan tourism. Mogford writes with energy and efficiency, never slowing down for any of those and-here's-another-interesting-aspect-of-life-in-blank moments that other mystery writers working in this sub-genre often succumb to. The story is enjoyably twisty and nasty enough to deter readers who might think this is a cozy travelogue with a dollop of murder. My only complaint would be that Spike is a little too laconic. We can see that's he's good at what he does, but getting a fix on his personality is pretty difficult.

Book Review: The Oxford Gambit (1980) by Joseph Hone

After reading and reviewing Joseph Hone's first spy novel, The Private Sector, I resisted the urge to dive into another of his books. He's only written a handful of novels and I didn't want to use up the limited supply in a matter of weeks. I failed. I simply couldn't help myself; his writing is so good, in so many ways, I just had to try another to see if he was more than a one-novel wonder. No worries; The Oxford Gambit is also in the stratosphere of espionage fiction.

This time out, Peter Marlow, the hero (if that's the right word) of The Private Sector is brought out of retirement to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Lindsay Phillips, one of MI6's top-ranking officers. It's not clear if Phillips was abducted or defected, and there are some within MI6 who don't want Phillips found at all. Marlow is a friend of the Phillips family, and for a time was romantically involved with Lindsays' daughter. Marlow's investigation takes him across Europe, and each stop on the journey reveals as much about Lindsay and his family as it does the reason for his disappearance.

As with Sector, Hone uses the spy genre as a framework for a more ambitious goal; in this case, a meditation on the impossibility of knowing everything, or anything deeply meaningful, about an individual's character and beliefs. In Hone's view, no matter whether a relationship is based in politics, faith or love, nothing a person says or does in front of a loved one or an ally or even an enemy is ever fully representative of what that person truly feels or believes. A relationship, like espionage, is a game of bluffs, ruses and, sometimes, cruel betrayals. Hone doesn't forget to incorporate the traditional elements of spy fiction--danger, violence, intrigue--but his emphasis is very clearly on how human relationships can mirror the twists and turns and horrors of the cloak and dagger world.

Another brilliant aspect of the novel is it's look at how the political and moral choices made by people before and during the Second World War have cast long and deadly shadows. The story is set in the mid-1970s, but for the main characters events of forty years ago are still dictating their actions, and, for some, secrets kept too long can be as deadly as bullets. Hone's twin themes of the mystery at the heart of the individual and the terrible and difficult choices made by people during Europe's descent into war, come to a head in the climax of the story in a way that makes this possibly the saddest, most haunting novel about spying that's ever been written. And in the character of Lindsay Phillips Hone creates a brilliant symbol of the duality of the individual, and especially of those caught up in the spy business. Lindsay is, to all outward appearances, the exemplar of all the characteristics and virtues of the English gentleman. His truth is far more complex. And his relationship with his daughter, which might be called platonically incestuous, ends up as a symbol of the dashed dreams of those who believe in an idealized England.

So why is Hone almost forgotten these days? I think part of the reason is that the spy genre has fallen on hard times. Since the removal of the Iron Curtain, novels about the bloody chess match between the intelligence agencies of the East and West have been largely replaced by straight up thrillers about terrorists, which is a change it's hard to argue against based on current events. A more particular reason for Hone's obscurity is that he strays too far into literary fiction. His novels are fully satisfying as espionage stories, but for readers who are familiar with the work of Le Carre, Ambler, Deighton and Julian Rathbone, Hone's elegant, exact prose and fascination with the human heart might seem daunting or distracting. So now that I've exhausted the library's supply of Hones, expect to see me haunting the spy section of your local used book store.

A Man of the (Wrong) People

One of these things is very much like the other.

As I write this, Toronto mayor Rob Ford and his administration are doing their best impression of the Hindenburg's final moments in New Jersey. Staff members are lined up at the printer to grab copies of their resignation letters, while Ford hires unqualified football buddies to take their place. All that's missing from this scenario is a bunker and a girlfriend named Eva. If you're not from Toronto, Ford and his brother Doug are nose-deep in allegations that they have used and sold drugs. This is just the latest in an epic series of scandals, blunders and gaffes that Ford has embarrassed North America's fourth-largest city with.

But what might be the most discouraging part of this cartoonish fiasco arrives in the form of a poll showing that Ford appears to have the unwavering support of roughly a third of the electorate. Ford has done everything he possibly could to prove that he's incapable of holding elected office, but he's got a base of voters who just can't say no. The problem here isn't Ford, it's the voters. It's a sad fact that a certain percentage of the general public is pleased, even eager, to put people in power who are blatantly stupid, venal, mendacious and corrupt. What's the psychology behind this? Do people enjoy being ruled by someone they feel they can look down on? Do they believe that a politician who purports to be a "regular guy," a "man of the people" gets a rain check on any number of scandals?

It's easy and tempting to blame sophisticated PR campaigns and toothless media outlets for allowing someone like Ford to assume office, but Mr and Mrs Toronto Voter should get their full share of blame as well. Clearly, democracy is wasted on a significant chunk of the population. This shouldn't, however, come as a huge surprise. Every democracy shows this potentially fatal flaw. Overtly racist and fascist parties in places like the UK, France and Greece have significant support, and the US Republican Pary is simply filled with ignorant loonies who get enthusiastic electoral support, not to mention fawning attention from outlets like FOX News. A greater problem is that parties of the left and centre don't know how to deal with the mouth-breathing portion of the population. The left likes to pretend they don't exist or that they can brought round with reasoned argument. Centrists make the crucial error of pandering to them, tossing them a few right-wing bones (more law and order!) in the hope that they can poach some votes from maniacal politicians like Ford. That only feeds the hunger and makes it easier for the Fords of the world to hold the reins of power. So until the left and centre get their respective acts together and learn how to effectively communicate with the lunkheadproletariat, Rob Ford and his ilk will always have a base upon which they can build their empires of misrule.

Some related posts on this topic:

Worst of Breed
What Makes a Conservative Conservative? 
The Madness of King Ford