ARMADA by Ernest Cline (2015)

"Well? Are you just gonna sit here and let these things kill us?" - Ernest Cline, Armada 

DISCLAIMER: This review is, first and foremost, constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. I can’t forecast whether or not you will like it, since I’m quite terrible at recommendations because I always assume that people will like everything I like. Please don't let me put you off reading this book; it's important for you to come to your own decisions about its quality. I was disappointed, but that’s a matter of opinion. Some people are liking it, as I did when I initially read it. Some people are really hating it. So it goes. 

Everyone remembers the first time they read Ready Player One. I remember it like it was yesterday, even though it’s been nearly two years. I remember the heart-gripping excitement, the edge-of-your-seat tension, the geeky I-understood-that-reference catharsis of it all -- and I remember my epic disappointment when I learned that RPO had neither a film adaption, nor any siblings. When I heard earlier this year that it was due to have both (God bless you, Spielberg), you can only imagine my excitement. I pre-ordered Ernest Cline’s second novel, Armada, immediately, and when it arrived in my mailbox, I fully expected it to be as good as, if not better than, its predecessor.

In hindsight, this was a bad idea. To compare any book to Ready Player One is already to stick a lamb in a lion cage; the little guy is going to get massacred. It was unfair of me to read Armada with such high expectations, given that RPO is truly in a league of its own. That being said, there’s a reason it took me a month to write this review: it took me that long to rid myself of the delusion that Armada was actually good. (I’m so sorry, Ernest Cline. For what it’s worth, it physically pained me to write that.) My initial rating for Armada was five stars out of five. So what? It entertained me, it made me laugh, and it’s RPO’s kid brother; I was biased and punch-drunk, and I wanted it to be good so badly. As time has gone on, however, and I’ve struggled through countless drafts of a positive review, I’ve found myself simply morally unable to go through with it, and I’ve since taken my rating down a star or two. It might even lose another. Oxymoronic is my situation: I enjoyed Armada, but I couldn’t look you in the eyes and tell you that it’s a good book. I just can’t bring myself to lie like that.

Even when I was still telling myself that Armada is good, I could recognise its plentiful flaws. The most noticeable is definitely the lukewarm characterisation. Protagonist Zack Lightman is an eighteen-year-old gamer geek with supposed IED and only one parent at home. Look at all that potential! Now watch Cline, bless his soul, totally waste it by making Zack’s IED so intermittent that he has not a single ‘rage’ throughout the entire book and never properly developing the promising dynamic between an angry almost-adult and his young, single mom. To quote Roger Ebert (albeit out of context), Armada is mostly a series of sensations, strung together on a plot. Zack’s two best friends serve no purpose other than providing crack-a-grin comic relief when it’s not needed. His ex-girlfriend has literally no use to the story whatsoever, mentioned briefly in the first chapter to show that Gamers Can Get Girls Too and then never coming up again. His beef with the school bully? Nonsensical. His fling with the manic pixie dream gamer girl? I don’t even know why she made the cast list, and her characterisation was inconsistent and clichéd to boot: just picture Jane Lynch’s character in Wreck-It Ralph, but completely useless. Not a single character was convincingly fleshed out, most were inconsequential to the storyline and only acted to withdraw some sort of mangled emotional response from You, Reading This, and none had any particularly redeeming traits, qualities, or characteristics. Zack even sounded exactly the same as Wade in Ready Player One, just incredibly more of an asshole, which ticked me off more than I care to admit. It feels almost as if Cline cast his eyes over a typical cast list for a YA novel and filled in all the blanks. Moody ex-girlfriend, gormless school bully, absent/dead father, eroticised fantasy of a dream girl, ambiguously ethnic best friend for comic relief: check, check, check, check, check x2. I’m sure Cline put a world of effort into writing these characters, and I love him for trying. His hard work just doesn’t show through.

            Something else I noticed but chose to ignore while reading Armada was the plot – or, rather, the kind-of total lack of one. Okay, so Armada did have a plot—it followed a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, climax, and resolution – but said plot just wasn’t good. Firstly, Cline expected me to believe, and then comprehend and reasonably process, the fact that his massive story – saturated with elaborate backstory and exposition – happened over the space of two days. He condensed a modern history of science fiction, the entire concept of an MMO video game, the foundation of an extra-terrestrial war, Zack’s whole tragic life story, and the rise and fall of a myriad of terribly underdeveloped relationships, in a ‘two-day’ time period. It’s just unrealistic, and so mashed together that the coherent structure becomes unintelligible. There was also an absolute overabundance of deus ex machina usage; you just knew that none of the character’s problems would have any significant impact on the story, because oh, no! We need a passcode to enter the supercomputer! That’s okay; Zack’s useless manic pixie dream girlfriend just so happens to be a master hacktivist! Oh, no! Cline needed to justify Zack not getting asked to join the [spoiler redacted] earlier! That’s okay; we’ll just give him anger management issues that are never properly addressed, demonstrated, or worked on or with! It just felt weak, and reminded me of a problem I often face when writing: you have this great idea that will make an excellent base for a story, but that’s it. No character development, no convincing subplots, no compelling beginning and no acceptable ending. All you’ve got is this idea, and I get it: sometimes an idea can feel so good that you just roll with it anyway, because this is your baby, your passion project, and you love it so much that you’re blinded to its flaws. That’s what Armada felt like to me: Ernest Cline piggy-backing off of the success of Ready Player One to try and get his passion project off the ground. There’s just no momentum, and thus no trajectory. 

            Admittedly, Armada wasn’t all bad. It did keep me mildly entertained most of the way through, I laughed out loud more than once, and yes, there were some moments where I may or may not have gotten off on understanding-that-reference. And granted, it isn’t and could never be Ready Player One, which was so amazing that I, a writer, can’t put it into words, so unparalleled that even its author, no matter if he were Whitman or Shakespeare, could even come close to duplicating it. All that aside, however, I still can’t truthfully put a positive review out into the world. There’s just not enough for me to go on. I tried, I had an existential crisis about my moral ambiguity, and I considered it an abject failure. No matter how much I want it to be,  Armada is not a good book – but I still have hope for Cline. In the words of Ariel Bissett (her review of Armada helped me come to terms with the fact that I had to write mine – read it here), I haven’t given up on him yet. I know he can do better than Armada – the infinite praise on all sides for Ready Player One is undeniable proof of this – and I know that whatever his next book may be, I’m going to be excited for it, because the potential is there. Armada just didn’t hit the mark. That’s okay. We all have our bad days. Cline, from my point of view, is no one-hit wonder; he’s just a one-hit wonder so far.

TL;DR: I keep bringing my initial rating for Armada down, because as it gets further from my having finished it, the illusions of it having actually been good fade more and more. I wish it could have kept its five star rating, I really do, but the more I think about it, the more the underdeveloped back stories and lukewarm characterisation hurt my feelings. I'm absolutely certain Cline can do better than this. We've all seen him at work. To paraphrase Ariel Bisset and Gregory White, Armada just feels rushed and holey, and might make a good movie, but just isn't a good book. That's not to say I don't trust Ernest Cline -- clearly I do, if I went on pretending Armada was good for so long -- but I know he can do better. It's just disappointing that he's so far proved to be a one-trick pony. I'm waiting on tenterhooks for him to prove that he most certainly is not. 

GO SET A WATCHMAN by Harper Lee (2015)

"The time your friends need you is when they're wrong, Jean Louise. They don't need you when they're right." - Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman 

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

DISCLAIMER: This review is, first and foremost, constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. I can’t forecast whether or not you will like it, since I’m quite terrible at recommendations because I always assume that people will like everything I like. If you decide to read this book because of this review and end up not enjoying it, I humbly apologise. Please don’t get your hopes up if you think they might be let down. I think the book is great, but that’s a matter of opinion. A lot of people are really hating it. So it goes. 

I have to admit: I was excited, but incredibly nervous when I was first informed about Go Set a Watchman. Harper Lee hadn’t released a book since 1960, when To Kill a Mockingbird came out; what could I possibly expect from her second novel, the first in fifty-five years? Then, of course, came the terrible rumours that Atticus Finch, my humble hero, had turned on me, gone dark side (or, more realistically, white side), and become racist. Atticus Finch, racist? The world tipped off its axis. How on Earth was Lee going to pull that one off without making me want to toss Go Set a Watchman directly into the ninth circle of Hell? Thankfully, however, she managed it, and I don’t have to sacrifice my beautiful hardback to the Muses. Yes, Atticus is racist (although he does mean well; that’s no excuse, but I’ll acknowledge it), and yes, it breaks my heart to say that the former champion of civil rights would do this to me, but in the context of the story, and in the context of Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch’s narrative arc, I think it works, and I think it works well. Add on top of my begrudgingly-accepted heartbreak the keen nostalgia this trip back to Maycomb made me feel, Scout’s razor sharp wit, and the ana-chronological storyline, and you’ve got a book that makes you feel all the feelings, good and bad and somewhere in between.

This is supposed to be a book review, so I’ll start with all the things I like about Go Set a Watchman before I dive into the blow-by-blow analysis I’m simply dying to pen. One of my favourite things about Go Set a Watchman is how god damn timeless it is. Maycomb, while a bit of a dump, is so rich in interesting and diverse (at least in terms of personality) people, that to be able to visit it and them again when I never thought I’d have the chance was quite honestly magical. Harper Lee’s unique style of writing made the nostalgia hit all the more dizzying; I didn’t know I’d missed Maycomb until I began reading in Scout Finch’s classically comedic, but also newly retrospective, voice, and felt joy unlike anything I have ever experienced. (I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea.) I enjoyed how the narrative jumped from its prerogative – third person – to first person, dipping directly into Scout’s mind and mental processing for brief periods to illuminate how Scout was deciphering each moment, and I also loved and loathed in equal amounts the parts of the story that flashed back in time, giving the salivating reader a long-desired taste of Scout’s childhood after To Kill a Mockingbird (loved because how could I not?, loathed because it reminded me of a certain character in To Kill a Mockingbird who is no longer with us in Go Set a Watchman, which hurts like a knife in the chest). It’s an undeniable fact of life: Harper Lee is good at what she does. She’s good at drawing an emotional response from the reader, and while admittedly, nostalgia did a lot of the work for her, I’d argue that wielding it as a weapon was one of the smartest things she could have done.

Enough beating around the bush: it's time for analysis. Sure, Go Set a Watchman is surface-level great – timeless, funny, exciting and dramatic, it’s exactly what a Harper Lee novel should be – but it's also one of the most controversial novels I've ever read, because oh my God, Atticus is racist. Atticus Finch, protector of the Negro and do-gooder extraordinaire, is racist. This goes so heavily against the Atticus we came to know and love in To Kill a Mockingbird that when I first heard the rumours, I simply didn't believe them. How happy was the blameless vestal's lot! My blissful ignorance was short-lived: I, too, had to come to terms with the fact that I had named multitudes of stuffed animals after a pretentious bigot. Godspeed, old friends. Discovering Atticus' change of heart was the second most heart-breaking moment in the story (I won't say what took first place, but if you've read the book, you know. You fucking know), but as the book comes to a close, you realise -- and I'm not bringing anything new to the table analytically, this is all discussed in the story -- that Atticus hasn't really changed at all. In To Kill a Mockingbird, we see Atticus as some mighty crusader of civil rights, but think about it: his court case with Tom Robinson was never specifically about protecting a black man from a biased white court. It was about protecting an innocent man from incarceration that he hadn't earned: "Shoot all the blue jays you want, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." Atticus was probably racist all along; it was his sense of criminal justice that coerced him into defending Tom Robinson, not his belief in racial equality. Yet fear not, dear reader: you're not the only one who was duped. Scout was, too, and it's for this reason that Atticus actually needed to show his dark side. Half the reason readers of To Kill a Mockingbird believed in Atticus as the son of God was because Scout did, too, and since we see To Kill a Mockingbird through her eyes, we assume that she knows what she’s talking about. Atticus is her father, after all, but consider this: Scout is only a child in To Kill a Mockingbird. She’s young and naïve, and in a story constructed on bias, she’s the most biased character of all. Atticus is two-dimensional to her, and she absorbs his ‘worldviews’ like a sponge. She becomes, in short, a mini Atticus, and that’s no way to live. In the context of literary devices, Atticus needed to be revealed as someone we don’t recognise in Go Set a Watchman so that Scout could move out of his shadow and, in the words of the Buddha, become her own lamp. She had to “kill [herself], or Atticus had to kill [her] to get [her] functioning as a separate entity”. Atticus, unfortunately, didn’t change; he just let his true colours show. Scout, however, changed almost entirely. Go Set a Watchman is ultimately a coming-of-age tale, and considering how many people named their children after Atticus and are now sorely regretting it, I believe that it was long overdue.

TL;DR: I did not think that Go Set a Watchman would be a coming-of-age story, and I did not think coming-of-age stories could be written about twenty-eight-year-olds, so Harper Lee's second book in fifty-five years surprised me to no end, because it's the most cutting-edge – and cut throat – coming-of-age story I've read since The Perks of Being a Wallflower. A lot of people are giving Go Set a Watchman bad reviews – if you've read it already, you'll know why – but I couldn't help but love every second of this sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. Like its predecessor, Go Set a Watchman is smart and fun and witty and oh-so-potent in its social commentary, but with the added advantage of hardcore nostalgia: those of us who never thought we'd ever see Maycomb again can revel in how it is exactly the same, but also entirely different, for better or for worse. In short: I'll stand by you, Harper Lee, even when the rest of the world stands against us. I missed Jean Louise Finch too much to write you off, but even without the nostalgia, Go Set a Watchman earned from me five stars that I feel are well-deserved.

THE MARTIAN by Andy Weir (2011)

“If a hiker gets lost in the woods, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do.” – Andy Weir, The Martian 

BEFORE READING ON: Watch the trailer for the film adaption of The Martian first, so that I'm not held responsible for potentially spoiling anything for you. Cheers.

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

DISCLAIMER: This review is, first and foremost, constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. I can’t forecast whether or not you’ll like it yourself, not only because I’m terrible at recommendations because I always assume that people will like everything I like. If you decide to read this book because of this review and end up not enjoying it, I humbly apologise. Please don’t get your hopes up if you think they might be let down. I think this novel is the second coming of Christ, but that’s a matter of opinion.

Ever looked up at the night sky and wondered what it might be like to get stranded on Mars? Me neither, but now I don’t have to: Andy Weir’s The Martian has done all the wondering for me. (Ever wondered what Matt Damon looks like in a space suit? The Martian does all that wondering for you, too. True boys.) I picked up The Martian on a whim earlier in the year, and I’m so glad that I did, because this book is honestly incredible. I might be a little bit biased, given that anything and everything to do with space childishly enthrals me, but hear me out: The Martian is more than just a space book. Sure, it’s quite literally entirely comprised of wordy and articulate astronomical jargon, but it’s also a tale of humbling humanity. It’s about life and death and desperately fighting for one while the other looms over your head; it’s about smarts and cleverness and problem-solving under a lethal time limit, faith and fear and finding the will to go on as life keeps fucking you over, but mostly, it’s about loyalty, and how far we will go to save each other, even when the odds of survival are zero to none. (Plus, it’s about space. FRICKING SPACE. How cool is that?!) The Martian is the first book I’ve read all year that has simply refused to give me a god damn break, and I personally can’t thank it enough.

First, let’s talk about suspense, and how The Martian has it nailed down to a fine art. In books or on the big screen, the only thing I’ve found that comes even close to matching The Martian’s intensity is the climax of Ben Affleck’s Argo, which was so stressful that I could barely watch it. Yet somehow, The Martian managed to be even more so. How did Weir do it? By making his protagonist the most likeable guy ever, of course. Mark Watney becomes stranded on Mars after a freak accident leads the rest of his mission team to believe him dead, but does he let that get him down? Hell no, he doesn’t. He’s described by his teammates as being excellent at solving problems, so excellent that it’s almost unrealistic, but while in some cases this would drag the story down, in this case the exact opposite occurs: Watney’s insatiable optimism and belligerent refusal to give up make you root for him harder than I rooted for Ben and Leslie to get together on Parks and Recreation, which is really saying something. The book is so suspenseful because you want Watney to survive so badly. Mars being Mars, it perpetually throws obstacle after obstacle Watney’s way, and each time you find yourself gritting your teeth a little harder, clenching your fists a little tighter, because oh God, there’s no way he’s going to survive that one. Some people hate suspense. I, personally, love it. This book has been dubbed a thriller, and I couldn’t agree more: there is nothing more thrilling than the most lovable character in recent literature having to desperately fight for every day of his life.

I’m a reasonably knowledgeable and intelligent person, but I don't know jack about space. Doesn’t matter. The Martian knows everything about space, and better yet, it knows just how to translate all that astronomy mumbo-jumbo into comprehendible English. This was something I greatly enjoyed about the book. From the start, it was clear that Andy Weir is a nerdy guy – and I'm talking I-know-fifty-digits-of-pi-and-taught-myself-quantum-mechanics-for-fun nerdy, not I-love-Star-Wars-and-Pokémon nerdy – but it was also clear that he understood what an outlier his extensive knowledge of space and space travel made him, and so he kindly dumbed it down just enough for us Earthling simpletons to understand. Of course, the sheer density of the technical language could have gone either way. Filling your fiction novel with enough jargon to give a textbook a run for its money could have seriously backfired, but Weir, it seems, is about as lucky as Mark Watney: his attention to detail, aside from being incredibly accurate, only does him credit. Far from being bored by the compact, complex NASA-speak I was being bombarded with, I was simply fascinated; I was learning all about space travel and how to live on freaking Mars without having to experience the danger and hardship myself. Weir’s technical accuracy allowed true and complete immersion, while his knack for putting it simply disallowed any of it from going over my head. It made the book, like Watney, extra likeable, and I doubt the novel’s suspenseful atmosphere (pun intended) could have been maintained without it.

So Watney is a Stand-Up Guy, and he knows a lot about space. What, exactly, makes him so damn worth saving, and worth reading about? In the end, Weir has led me to believe that it might not be about Watney at all. Sure, not a single person has a bad word to say about our reluctant hero, but I’d make the argument that what makes Watney worth the billions of dollars NASA flings at trying to retrieve him doesn’t have anything to do with his shmuck attitude and charitable personality. Maniacal is the way I would describe it: the directors and researchers and engineers and astronauts at NASA are maniacal in their efforts to save Watney, but it’s not because they love Watney oh so very much. It’s because Watney is human, and humans help each other no matter what the cost. Touching and truthful is the true theme of Weir’s debut: the idea that our potent humanity creates out of us a band of brothers, a brotherhood of man, and that our allegiance to this comes with a motto: leave no man behind. Recognising this universal human trait, Weir put it directly into action, and this is why the book is so brilliant, why NASA throws everything they’ve got into trying to get their boy home. When another person is in danger, we launch ourselves into the line of fire to get them out of it, regardless of the consequences. That makes us human. That makes us worth saving. (And honestly, if you wouldn’t jump in front of a train for Mark Watney, what kind of monster are you?)

TL;DR: The Martian presented a conundrum to me, because I wanted it to end as much as I never want it to end at all. I've had a pretty unimpressive reading year so far, but this book -- this blessed, beautiful book -- redeemed absolutely every terrible tale I've been subject to in the last six months. Context considered, it was an oddly fun read -- Mark Watney, Earth's (or, more accurately, Mar's) Mightiest Hero, has an astute ability to make light of a dreadfully dark situation -- but it was also the most stressful book I've ever read in my entire life (this is a good -- no, a great thing!). The last time I was as wired as I was while reading The Martian was when I watched Argo in history class last year, and if you've seen Argo, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Andy Weir's debut had it all: thrilling suspense, light-hearted fun, a dynamic cast of wonderfully diverse characters, and fascinating, fluent, factually-accurate science that even the dullest student would find stimulating. Andy Weir, I thank you. You've saved my reading year.

MOTHER NIGHT by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1961)

 

"Future civilisations - better civilisations than this one - are going to judge all men by the extent to which they've been artists. You and I, if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night

DISCLAIMER: This review is, first and foremost, constructed upon my personal response to the book. I can't forecast whether or not you'll like it yourself, not only because I'm terrible at recommendations as I always assume that people will like everything that I like. If you read this book because of this review and end up not enjoying it, I humbly apologise for wasting your time, and ask you kindly to leave this blog and never return. (I'm kidding. But seriously: how can you not like Kurt Vonnegut?) Please don't get your hopes up if you think they might be let down. I think this book is a work of genius, but that's a matter of opinion. 

If you want to know me, here’s two facts: that was a terrible Bo Burnham reference, and I love Kurt Vonnegut with the same force that lights the stars. (Third fact: that was a David Foster Wallace reference. Is it plagiarism if you can admit to it?) I read what is arguably Vonnegut’s most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, last Christmas, and have since been yearning for more from the man who had fast become my favourite author. To my surprise, the opportunity was quite literally handed to me, when I inherited Vonnegut’s third novel, Mother Night, from a teacher who I overhead talking about Vonnegut and instantly gravitated towards. Thank God for my nosy nature, because Mother Night is brilliant. It’s the fictional memoir of Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American playwright reluctantly coerced into espionage who becomes one of the highest ranking Nazi officials of World War II. His recount is being broadcast to us from a prison in Israel, where he is preparing to testify for war crimes he unwillingly, albeit knowingly, aided in, and is a minefield of classic Vonnegut-isms: humour as black as the night, satire as rich as honey, existentialism rife and bittersweet and biting cynicism perfectly poised against fascinated humanism. Howard W. Campbell’s life asks you the big question: what is a man’s life worth in the scheme of all things? The answer, I’ve found, is not as easy to formulate as you might think.

Mother Night is a book about morals – three of them, in fact.  The first provides the basic scaffolding around which the story is built and the remaining two are practically garbage at surface level, but all three are, in typical Vonnegut fashion, not quite what they appear. The first moral is, according to Campbell, “not a marvellous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Of course, this makes perfect sense in the context of the novel – Campbell is literally pretending to be a Nazi, so he must be careful lest he actually become one. Except, this is Vonnegut, so it’s not that straightforward. He moves to Germany as a child and has no interest in the growing political tensions there once he reaches adulthood, but as Jonathan Sircy writes, “the war will not allow him to remain neutral”. Campbell becomes a faux-fervent Nazi with a side project in taking the Nazis down from the inside, and it’s all supposedly for the Greater Good; but in doing so, Campbell becomes what he pretends to be – not to himself, but to literally everyone else. Campbell famously dedicates his novel to himself, “a man who served evil too openly and good too secretly,” and it’s true; as he becomes a beloved icon for the German public, he becomes Public Enemy Number One in the USA. His own people turn against him, not knowing that he is the reason they’re gaining the upper hand, and it may or may not drive Campbell a little bit insane in the end – how else would you expect him to handle it? At one point, his father-in-law tells him this:

 “’You could never have served the enemy as well as you served us (…) I realised that almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler – but from you. You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.”

How beautiful a phrase, how noble a sentiment, yet how terrible a thing to say. Campbell knows that he’s on the same team as the ‘Good Guys,’ but no one else is clued in. He’s on his own, so deeply rooted into his secret life that he can’t escape it, ostracised and villainised despite the fact that beneath his façade, Campbell is a creative, passionate, loving and thoughtful man, all traits of a hero, not a villain. This matters not to the Americans the Israelis, who want his head on a stick, but it matters to Campbell, and it matters to us. Humans, I think, are set apart from animals not only by our opposable thumbs, but also by our ability to self-identify. Our identity is who we are fundamentally, the thing we most fear losing – and Campbell loses his somewhere along the way. What’s Vonnegut trying to tell us with this? It’s a signal, I believe, a warning to us all: if we pretend to be someone we’re not, we can lose everything, including ourselves.

Is it worth it, then? Is it worth sacrificing our selves in the name of the Greater Good? Mother Night’s second moral is “When you’re dead you’re dead,” and although most people argue that the second two morals are simple jokes with no connection to the story, but I don’t think that’s how Vonnegut rolls. Campbell doesn’t officially die [spoiler redacted], but metaphorically, Howard W. Campbell Jr. dies the moment he agrees to be a U.S. counter-spy. A Nazi takes his place, and we never see Howard W. Campbell again, at least not as the man he once was. Campbell’s super-secret intelligence work was invaluable to the U.S. during the war, but the question still remains: was it worth it? Was it worth losing everything, quite literally everything, to save the world? In the big picture, none could say no, but Campbell isn’t concerned with the big picture at this point. He’s concerned with the fact that Howard W. Campbell is dead, and there’s nothing that he can do about it. There’s a reason Campbell is a playwright: he likes to tell his own story, write his own rules, but this is taken from him when he hands the Allies the pen and lets them write the story for him. Again, I’ll ask: is it worth it? Campbell hands over his life and he never gets its back, but he saved countless lives in doing so. He loses his identity, is as metaphorically dead as dead can be, and is America’s Most Wanted, but it was for a good cause, right? Vonnegut poses this impossible question, the one that we simply cannot and will not answer, and that is why I love him so. Campbell’s bitter cynicism, so potent that it literally foreshadows Slaughterhouse-Five, is a window into Vonnegut’s deep and poignant humanism. He can make you question life and death and all the things in between; he can make you stop and think and question, all the while making you giggle and gasp and grip at the book with a stranglehold. What’s a man’s life worth, Vonnegut asks, in the scheme of all things? The answer is inconclusive: everything, and nothing at all. Yet somehow, Vonnegut makes this comforting. Mother Night is about morals so bleak that they’re actually reassuring, and if that’s not the makings of a masterpiece, I really don’t know what is. 

TL;DR: I once met a man in a second-hand book shop who referred to Kurt Vonnegut as 'the Master,' and frankly, I have never agreed with a complete stranger more heartily in my life. Mother Night is Vonnegut's third novel and is the second Vonnegut book I've read, but it's the first book I've read this year that has truly blown me away. I call Kurt Vonnegut my favourite author with good reason: he's a genius. He's a master storyteller, a hilarious cynic, a champion of satire, and most importantly, he gets the world (or at least, he got it - Godspeed, my beloved. So it goes.). Mother Night is inappropriately funny, quietly questioning, and unconventionally eloquent, and like all Vonnegut literature, it made me stop. It made me think. It made me listen to the world, as it was and as it is. Long story short: I love you, Kurt Vonnegut, and I love Mother Night. Maybe man will only remember you for the value of your art, but I will never forget.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA by Lauren Weisberger (2003)

 

"Oh, don't be silly - everyone wants this. Everyone wants to be us." - Lauren Weisberger, The Devil Wears Prada (2003)

DISCLAIMER: This review is, first and foremost, constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. I can’t forecast whether or not you, reading this, will like it yourself, not only because I’m quite terrible at recommendations because I always assume that people will like everything I like. If you are a big fan of this book and find yourself deeply and mortally wounded by my criticism, I humbly apologise. I think the book is quite bad, but that’s a matter of opinion. Lots of people love it. I would hate to be those people. (Side note: the film adaption is a modern classic. I wish I could say the same for its origin.)

I first watched the film adaption of The Devil Wears Prada when I was fourteen, and I’ve loved it ever since. There’s something so compelling about watching Anne Hathaway go through life-changing physical transformations and Meryl Streep curb-stomp people just for the good and pure fun of it, so naturally, when I discovered that The Devil Wears Prada was actually a book before it became a blockbuster, I was itching to get my hands on it and devour a great story in the form I love the most.

Here’s where it gets a little tragic: The Devil Wears Prada movie rocks. The Devil Wears Prada book does not.

Three pages in, and I was already disappointed by how utterly weak the book was; a sure sign that this was not going to be a promising reading experience. TDWP tells the story of the young and ambitious Andrea Sachs, twenty-three and qualified but totally unemployed.  Desperate for a buck or two to rub together, Andrea eventually gets a job as the junior assistant to Miranda Priestly, chief editor of the famous Runway magazine and, as it turns out, the eight-headed hydra from hell. If Andrea works a year for her, Miranda has the power to bump Andrea straight from zero to hero, inserting her into any position she wants within or without  Runway, and while Andrea, a budding writer with a thirst for the real world, would love to be inserted among the big-wigs at The New Yorker without having to painstakingly climb the social ladder, she first has to survive an entire year of service with the most finicky, unpredictable and maniacal nit-picker to ever walk the Earth – or the Underworld. Sounds like a great story, right?

Wrong.

Raving praise littered the back cover of Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel, calling it ‘deliciously witty and gossipy’ (Publisher’s Weekly) and ‘this season’s must-have accessory’ (Rocky Mountain News), but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from The Devil Wears Prada, it was that you can never, ever judge a book by its cover. Sure, the book is kind of sassy, and it gossips like a tenth grader with a chip on their shoulder, but there really is nothing ‘delicious’ about it at all. For one thing, the prose is thoroughly feeble and unrealistic. The dialogue is often staged as if Weisberger has never had a real life conversation with a human before, and there were several whole pages that I would have ripped out if it wasn’t my library’s copy that I was reading – for example, the entire paragraph where Andrea describes in graphic detail climbing the stairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m a seventeen-year-old with no experience in publishing whatsoever, but I would have fired Weisberger’s editor on the spot – so much unnecessary, boring and waffle-y nothingness made it into the final cut of the book that it was almost as if no one had edited it at all. As a writer, the weak phrase work really got under my skin. Weisberger tried many a time to make grand exclamations of disgust, relief, exhilaration and exhaustion, but more often than not, she failed quite miserably. Couple this with a storyline that sustained me only because I wanted to be informed when I tore it to shreds, and you’ve got a snooze fest – but TDWP, ever so smug and pleased with its ‘hip’ and ‘edgy’ attitude, seems to have no idea that hip and edgy don’t come in its size.

This book tries so hard to be fun and carefree, but here's what I picked up: it’s Gillian Flynn’s ‘Cool Girl’-type fun. “Cool Girl is hot. Cool Girl is game. Cool Girl is fun,” may as well be the novel’s motto, because when I read it, I didn’t see the bright sophisticated, high-brow young woman in Andrea that Weisberger wants you to see; I saw a pretentious, condescending brat, convinced that the sun shines out of her ass and that every person she ever meets is a planet revolving around her. Andrea thinks that she’s better than everyone else due to the fact that she loves to write (because authors are so great, right?), yet she literally writes nothing at all until the very end of the book. Seriously. She doesn’t write at all, despite how dreadfully she claims to adore it, which makes me think that her writing career was merely a plot device used to make Andrea look better than her colleagues, rather than an actual facet of her character. Weisberger has clearly channelled herself into every fibre of Andrea’s being, so much so that it was desperately evident from the off-set that our protagonist was the World’s Biggest Mary-Sue. Andrea believes that an interest in fashion makes you inferior to the high-and-mighty minds of intellectuals and scholars, and given that this worldview is brattish and precocious and would be more at home in a spoiler toddler rather than a twenty-three-year-old woman, you’d think that Andrea would eventually have some life-changing epiphany in which she realises that her sneering attitude makes her the vapid and shallow one rather than her Vogue-loving, Prada­-toting co-workers, but she doesn’t. She remains patronizing, arrogant and impudent throughout the entire story, convincing me that Weisberger actually believes in Andrea’s ideals and has essentially written her in the image of herself – a terrible trick for a Paid and Professional Writer to play.

Then, of course, there’s the aspect of the book that caused me the most pain (due to the amount of times I physically slapped my own forehead at the idiocy): the themes of subtle, but hideously ugly homophobia. There are Lena-Dunham levels of stereotyping and appropriation in this novel, and while that may have been the In Thing in 2003, when the world was still gingerly prodding at the idea of homosexual representation in the media, it certainly doesn’t fly now. Weisberger has gone, in wholly unoriginal fashion, down the You Have To Be Gay If You Are A Male Who Loves Fashion route, but far from this being racy and exciting, it’s all a bit dull and dank. She often describes Andrea’s male colleagues as being flamboyantly/aggressively gay (those aren’t her exact words, but I don’t really want to trawl back through the book to find the offending instances), which is something I used to say when I was twelve; it’s childish, it assumes that you have to swing a certain way to be interested in fashion, and above all, it’s boring. I would be more outraged by this conduct if it was in any way interesting, but it’s not. It’s old, it’s overdone, but worst of all, it’s not the only archaic allegory Weisberger puts into play. So many of the tropes in this book are just as out-dated and dust-covered as her limited understanding of homosexuality, like the gross stereotype of people of colour being lesser than white people (the POCs are all cabbies, newspaper stand attendants and doormen) and the candid fat- and slut-shaming that I would have relished in as a pre-teen, but am repulsed by now (for example, the fact that Andrea, a size six or eight, is considered ‘fat’ by her size zero and two associates). I suppose there’s a little bit of salvation for this hurtful, cheap naivety in there somewhere: TDWP was published in 2003, and so is quite hilariously out-dated in the context of the modern world. However, I believe that there is a stark difference between the reason and the excuse, and like a racist white grandparent, while the age of the book is the reason for its conservative attitude, it certainly isn’t an excuse.

Maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe The Devil Wears Prada is a crafty, clever satire, buried beneath layers of average story-telling and skimpy wit and intellect, and I’m just a bitchy seventeen-year-old hoodlum who doesn’t understand the art of political comedy. If this is the case, it’s buried far, far deeper than I can be bothered digging. With that in mind, I offer up the following advice: if you’re one of those girls who thinks that staying at home on a Friday night to read books, drink tea, browse Tumblr and watch Supernatural/Doctor Who/Sherlock  makes you better than the girls who spend their weekends partying, drinking and socialising, you’ll love this book. The main character is just like you. 

TL;DR: I'll give The Devil Wears Prada a little bit of credit: it is set in a New York of over a decade ago, and as I was six years old in 2003 and lived in suburban New Zealand, I have to interpret the book in the context of the time of its publication, something I can't accurately gauge as it happened across the world twelve years ago. Of course, this doesn't make up for the boring storyline, the less-than-engaging characterisation and the hopeless character development, but it's a tiny bit of consolation: maybe if I was seventeen in 2003, I might have actually enjoyed this book. As it is, sorry, Lauren Weisberger: better luck next time.

THE SONG OF ACHILLES by Madeline Miller (2011)

“What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.” ― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (2011)

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

DISCLAIMER: This review is, first and foremost, constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. I can’t forecast whether or not you, reading this, will like it yourself, not only because I’m quite terrible at recommendations because I always assume that people will like everything I like. If you decide to read this book because of this review and end up not enjoying it, I humbly apologise. Please don’t get your hopes up if you think they might be let down. I think the book is great, but that’s a matter of opinion. Lots of people hate it. So it goes.

I’ll admit it; I’m a little bit biased when it comes to ancient history, but I promise I’m being as impartial as possible when I say that I was enchanted by The Song of Achilles. Ann Patchett (an author, although not the author of this book) calls the 2011 novel “startlingly original,” and she’s not completely wrong: while Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles by day and our hero by night, has approached this story from an atypical perspective, the story itself is not of her creation. Formally, it belongs to the blind bard Homer, who composed it (with slightly less homoerotic subtext) under the name of the Iliad in the 8th century BCE (although realistically it belonged to everyone; Homer was just the guy who wrote it down). The Iliad is the story of the ten-year Trojan War, and of its demigod hero Achilles, who was fated to be the best warrior known to man, but also to die young should he choose to pursue his divine destiny. Troy would immortalise him, avenging his untimely death by cementing him into the woven tales of generations to come as the greatest hero of all time, but he would also be, you know, dead. In the age of Achilles – roughly 1250 BCE, 500 years before the Iliad was even published – you only chose mortality over glory if you were inclined with intense stupidity, and so Achilles fulfilled his prophecy, fought like War Machine at Troy, and died an unforgettable hero. The Song of Achilles follows this same storyline, but what made Miller’s adaption so interesting was the fact that the hero of Troy was not, as would have been expected from a book bearing his name in the title, the central character. Taking this place was Patroclus, Achilles’ boyhood best friend (in antiquity the term for this was therapon, meaning 'dearest companion’ or ‘brother-in-arms’) and, in Miller’s work, his lover. Historians worldwide have for centuries speculated and debated over whether Achilles and Patroclus actually existed, and if so, were actually lovers rather than just inseparable friends – Plato’s Symposium assumes that the boys were a couple, although the Iliad never makes the distinction – but Miller’s work does, and damn, does she do it well. Awkward and shy in comparison with Achilles’ confidence, grace and composure, Patroclus is exiled from his home kingdom at ten years old and is taken in by Peleus, king of Phthia, the son of whom is none other than Earth’s Mightiest Hero himself. Patroclus swiftly falls for the mischievous, straightforward and charming prince, and Achilles promptly follows suit, but almost as soon as the boys are able to express their love to one another, they are called to war by the cry of a Greek king whose famously beautiful wife was stolen by a devious Trojan prince. Troy being the site of Achilles' prophesised demise, the two boys are reluctant to answer the call to arms, but Achilles' thirst for kleos (along with other binding factors – you’ll get the joke if you read the book) sends them sailing for Troy, where the two lovers will both face some of the hardest decisions of their lives.

I could pretend not to gush, but I’m not going to kid myself. You’d think that as a future Classics major, a simple retelling of an enormously famous piece of classical literature wouldn’t really ruffle my feathers, but you’d be wrong – oh, so wrong. By some strange miracle, The Song of Achilles genuinely surprised me on each and every page. I gasped, I screamed, I danced with the idea of throwing the book out a window more than once; the story simply gripped me, so tightly that it hurt to put it down, with such magnetism that I could barely walk away. There's no denying that it was, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the chemistry between Achilles and Patroclus that breathed such captivity and life into this reiteration. I’ve read many reviews in which people complained that this book about the Trojan War has very little of the Trojan War actually in it (only about half the book occurs during the war, whereas the Iliad begins in its ninth year), but that’s one of the things that really sold this book to me; almost half of it was dedicated to establishing a literally epic love story. Sure, the fighting and bloodbaths were pretty cool, but who doesn't love a little bit of teen angst dating back to the 13th century BCE? Patroclus’ quiet but turbulent infatuation and Achilles’ deep and fierce passion oozed through the pages until I was infected by their star-crossed love, too. It’s helpful that Miller is quite an accomplished writer: her prose, while nowhere near the eloquence of the bard from whom she borrows, nevertheless tangoes and salsas across the page, elegant and violently emotive all at once. Her characters are well-developed: there was such stunning juxtaposition between the individual voices that you almost knew who was speaking without even reading their name. Achilles was cool, collected and bluntly honest, his phrase-work confidently rolling off the tongue like a cat stretched in the sun; Patroclus was weedy, jittery and nervous, but had a calm voice of reason and a strong sense of right and wrong. Chiron was candid and wise, Agamemnon arrogant and proud, Odysseus sharp and witty but not altogether unkind; these personalities didn't bounce off each other listlessly, but interacted fluidly, rendering each character unique in their own small and subtle, but also vibrant and outstanding, ways.

In retrospect, I can’t really pin down any specific thing about this book that coerced me into loving it so deeply, but Rick Riordan’s review of The Song of Achilles spoke of how the story coming from Patroclus’ point of view opened new windows through which to analyse the Iliad, and on reflection, this was one of my favourite things about the novel. Many big-shot reviews labelled Miller’s prose as simple and juvenile, but they’ve forgotten the two most important points: one, that this is YA, and two, that Patroclus was simple. “It was unlikely for my father to have allowed us to be alone together,” he tells us in the first chapter; “his simple son and his simple wife.” This is no wily and silver-tongued Odysseus, no brave and forthright Achilles; this is Patroclus, simple and scrawny but loyal to the bitter end. His story is so captivating because he tells it so plainly. There are no vast metaphors, no rousing paragraphs of rhetoric; as Riordan says, Patroclus cuts straight through the grandeur and heroism of the Iliad to show us the story of the humans behind the heroes. This was what sold the novel to me. Miller hasn’t simply rehashed Homer’s epic hero; she has dug deeper, found the lamb within the mighty lion, and coaxed it into the open, bringing us a story of humanity, compassion and suffering – and above all, timeless love in a hopeless place.

TL;DR: As a future Classics major, I already knew what happens in the Iliad, but somehow The Song of Achilles managed to break me anew. The quiet pain and fierce passion of this stunning tale gripped me iron-tight and dragged me along behind it - I'm lucky to have come out the other side relatively unscathed. Prolific writing skill has joined forces with comprehensive understanding of both ancient history and how to move a modern audience to create one of my favourite stories yet - this is, without a doubt, the best book I've read so far this year, and I'm sceptical as to whether any will manage to surpass it. Granted, I'm biased, given my innate fascination with Classical Greece and its mythology, but give me at least a little bit of credit: this book is really, really good.