Book Blurb: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: a sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.

For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.

A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.

I could have given this book the full five-star rating, and I still wonder if I'm being a little too hard on it. It's a wonderful book, well-written, gripping storyline, which kept my interest throughout -- except when it didn't. Its main drawback, I found, is something it has in common with other multi-POV narratives I've read; some characters just aren't as interesting as others.

Actually, this book doesn't just change its POV character every so often -- it also jumps ahead decades at a time. Each new section drops you into a whole new story: new characters, new time period, new setting, new circumstances. Only gradually does it start to tie it back to previous sections, and to the larger narrative. And most of the time it works fabulously. It's only a few instances where my interest started to lag, though even then the connection to the larger narrative kept me plodding on.

Over all, a very engaging read despite a few slow moments.

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Some Holiday Blogging

The Flynn Center is our local performing arts venue in Burlington. They put on many great shows throughout the year, and as an occasional contributor to their blog I'm able to see some of their shows for free (in exchange for blogging about the shows I see, of course.)

Most recently we saw the music group Sweet Honey in the Rock. My two posts for the show are on the blog now: one before the show:
http://www.flynncenter.org/blog/2014/12/sweet-honey-rock-sings-world/

And one after:
http://www.flynncenter.org/blog/2014/12/darkness-light-sweet-honey-rock/

Book Blurbs: "Femme: A Nameless Detective Novella" by Bill Pronzini

Femme by Bill Pronzini
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is the second Bill Pronzini book I've taken out of the library. The first -- I think it was Betrayers was a really enjoyable, tightly written mystery/thriller that left me wanting to read more.

The book was part of Pronzini's "Nameless Detective Agency" series. It's one of the only times I've seen detective literature deal with an agency of several detectives instead of the traditional solitary private-dick. Different chapters take different detectives as their point-of-view character, sometimes weaving back and forth between different cases that have little or nothing to do with each other. So the book came out feeling like a really well-written television serial, the kind that pulls you in and makes you want to keep watching.

Unfortunately, Femme seems to be where the series jumps the shark. It's shorter. It only focuses on two point-of-view characters, who are both working the same case -- a case either one of them should have been able to handle on his own. It builds up a lot at the beginning but never quite delivers on its promises.

The previous book I'd read was good enough that I'll give Pronzini, and his "Nameless Detective" series, another chance. But if I'd started with Femme, I can't say that I would have.

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Kairos

A bit of short fiction for Holy Thursday.

 I’m not really one of those hard-core Catholics. I don’t get into self-flagellation or anything; I don’t even raise a fist to my chest during the penitential rites. But I am on the parish council and I’m involved in various ministries, so I try to put in the facetime as often as I can.

This year has been especially difficult, and the people at church have kept me grounded. So I really kind of did want to be at that evening mass for Holy Thursday. It’s the kick-off for the Triduum – it starts the countdown to Easter and commemorates the night Jesus was abandoned by all his disciples. So if you’re at all prone to feeling guilty about missing a mass, this is the Big One.

But I’m lucky to have a job right now. I’d been laid off last summer, and nobody wants to hire a forty-seven year-old ex-middle-manager. So I’m here, watching the booth of a near-empty parking-garage, and counting it as a blessing.

My friend Claire is texting me from the church, giving me a play-by-play of the Mass. Singing the Kyrie. The choir is killing it! she texts. Or, My boys are really into the part where we all shout, ‘crucify him!’ Should I be worried? And later, Father Tom is washing my feet, immediately followed by, He says ‘hi’.

Claire and I met through the divorced-Catholics support group (my wife and I split up when we lost the house after I lost the job … I said it was a difficult year), and we quickly became the best of friends. Not in the way most people assume – neither of us is ready for that just yet. And it’s complicated by the whole Catholic thing, and by the “setting a good example for her adolescent boys” thing. Right now we’re just taking it one day at a time.

At eleven, Claire texts me that she’s going to bed. Can you not stay awake with me just one hour? I tease her. I’ve stayed with you three, she responds. That’s her last text for the night. At midnight I close up the garage and head for home.

“Home” at the moment is a dreary little efficiency at the edge of a questionable part of town. But when you’re unemployed for six months, you take what you can get. The streets are deserted, traffic lights set to blinking red at intersections, as I make the fifteen-minute walk.

Two blocks from home I see something – a shapeless, man-sized lump in the middle of a dead-end street. I keep an eye on it as I walk past, and notice that it is moving. As I watch it starts to look like a man struggling to pick himself up off the ground.

I come closer. The man is dirty and weathered, obviously homeless. Maybe he’s drunk or on drugs, maybe he’s sick or disabled. I don’t know how to tell the difference.

I help him to his feet. He can barely stand upright. I wonder what the hell I’m supposed to do with him.

Up the street there’s a shelter. Usually I’ll take the long way around, or cross the street when I have to pass the building. But tonight I haul my companion right up to the door. It’s slow going because he can barely stand and is just a lot of dead weight on my shoulder. For some reason it never occurs to me to just leave him on the sidewalk.

The shelter looks like any other old tenement building. The door is locked, and my knocking doesn’t do any good. The guy, whom I’ve left slumped on the front steps, begins to shake violently.

I grab him, try to calm him, try to stop his flailing, just try to do something, I don’t even know what. I shout and pound on the door. Someone up the street opens their window and yells at me to shut the fuck up.

A large, hairy, young guy opens a side door and looks at us. He asks me, “is he okay?” and I have no answer. The young guy takes the man from me and leads him inside. I go home.

I pour myself a glass of wine and try to relax. Before I turn in, I send a text to Claire. Spent some time with Jesus after all. Turns out, he’s awfully demanding.

Book Blurb: Three Graphic Novels. House of Java; Feynman; Three Shadows

On the website GoodReads.com I've been briefly logging my thoughts about the books, comics, and graphic novels I've been reading. Here are a few recent entries.

House of Java: Vol. 1
by Mark Murphy

Jul 01, 13

3 of 5 stars

A slim collection of short, slice-of-life comics -- not stories so much as little vignettes, mostly centered on a Seattle coffee shop and the people who frequent it. Interspersed within these vignettes are longer stories, some of which work better than others. The first of these long-form stories, "Rest Stop," seems decidedly out of place among the low-key everyday kinds of character-driven narratives that make up the rest of the book. "Rest Stop" feels as though it wanted to be a kind of psychological thriller but lost interest somewhere along the way. The rest of the stories, though, are enjoyable. I also like the loose, sparsely elegant drawing style, which accents the feel of quick sketches grabbed at the local coffee shop.

Feynman
by Jim Ottaviani (Goodreads Author), Leland Myrick (Goodreads Author) (Illustrator)

Jul 22, 13 

4 of 5 stars

I'm becoming quite a fan of Jim Ottaviani's graphic novels, which focus on notable scientists and scientific achievements. I'd never heard of Richard Feynman, but this book presents him as an intriguingly eccentric sort of genius with a fondness for expressing quantum physics principles using funny little pictures -- making him a natural subject for a graphic novel.

At times the presentation of his physics lectures gets to be rather dense and hard to navigate. At least, I found it so for a few days when I came to it at the end of a long day and was probably more than a little too tired to wrap my head around these ideas. Feynman, at least as presented here, seems to take a kind of impish delight in accentuating the ways that physical laws at the quantum level simply don't conform to any of our usual expectations and common-sense. The funny little pictures ultimately make it easier to follow, I think, but it is more dense in places than the average comic-book. 

Three Shadows
by Cyril Pedrosa

Josh Mcdonald's review

Aug 16, 13

5 of 5 stars

It's difficult to say a lot about this story -- a kind of allegorical fantasy about a family trying to avoid a dark, threatening destiny (represented by the titular three shadows).

It shouldn't be much of a spoiler to say that the book is the author's response to the death of a friend's young son (the cover-flap says as much.) I saw where at least one reviewer questioned what exactly the story is saying about destiny and the necessity/futility of trying to change it. But I think it's a mistake to try and pin this story down to a "message". Instead, it should be taken as a kind of meditation, as the author's attempt to come to grips with unacceptable reality, to explain the unexplainable. The two parents in this book have very different responses, and ultimately neither is any better or worse than the other.

The artwork I found particularly engaging. It seems at times deceptively simple, almost haphazard in its loose sketchy quality, but there is a tight precision behind it all. It carries the story well without being distracting.

Four Doctors, Chapter 10

The foppish, Victorian-garbed Doctor was somewhere in the midst of explaining the current state of the time-war and why it required the intervention of his own future incarnations, when both of the other Doctors suddenly cried out in agony and collapsed to the floor. It took Victorian Doctor a moment or so to notice.

"... of course we want to contain events and keep them from impacting the rest of time and space but we're finding leaks in the safeguards we've setting up so ... what is it? What's wrong?"

"Oh, it's nothing much," Tweedy-Doctor said as he picked himself up off the floor. "Just pieces of ourself being stripped away rather abruptly. You didn't notice?"

"No. Can't say as I did."

"Which means," Pinstriped-Doctor chimed in, "that it's happening somewhere between him and me."

"That might explain why the grumpy one hasn't turned up yet," Tweedy-Doctor said. "I do hope he's all right."

Rory stepped into the middle of the collected Doctors. "Excuse me a moment here, I just want to get a few things straight." He addressed the one he'd known all along as the Doctor. "Are you saying that you three ... you're all the same person, just...?"

"Earlier versions of me, yes. It's a bit complicated to explain just now..."

"And one of these earlier versions has gone missing."

"More or less, yes."


"But if you ..." he looked around to Pinstriped-Doctor, "if you both are later versions of the same person shouldn't you remember what happened to him?"

"You would think so," Tweedy-Doctor said. "But timestream-crossing does some funny things to a person's memory."

"Define 'funny,'" Rory said.

"Worst-case scenario, it could completely wipe a person's complete memory of everything that happened before he crossed his own timestream," Tweedy-Doctor said. "I've ... we've ... done this sort of thing before and we know what we're doing so the effects are more subtle."

Pinstriped-Doctor picked it up: "it's a bit like reading a book you'd forgotten you'd read before. It all starts to feel very familiar and you remember being there before, but details only fill themselves in as you keep going forward."

"Seems awfully inconvenient," Amy said.

"I know, right?" Tweedy-Doctor answered. "And that's the best-case scenario."

"Right," Pinstripes interjected, turning toward Victorian Doctor. "So, where are the others?"

Victorian Doctor looked confused. "The others...?"

Tweedy cut him off, impatiently. "The others. Teeth and Curls, Technicolor Dreamcoat, and the rest."

"The Time-War doesn't involve them."

"I'd say it does," Pinstripes said.

"We're the one who started it," Tweedy said. "We antagonized the Daleks and dragged the Time Lords into it. Or did we antagonize the Time Lords, and drag the Daleks into it?"

"In any case, it's our war ... all of ours, like it or not," Pinstripes said.

"Still," Victorian said resolutely, "I've chosen to keep them out of the thick of it."

"Probably for the best," Pinstripes murmured. "They'd probably just get in the way."

Tweedy just shrugged. "So what exactly are we doing here?"

"I've been explaining that," Victorian said in exasperation. "If you'd been listening..."

"...instead of writhing on the floor as large bits get torn out of our past, yes, we're so sorry."

"There are leaks in the timestream," Victorian Doctor went on, pointedly ignoring the commentary. "We've found a scattering of time-corridors..."

"Yes we've noticed," Tweedy said. "At least I noticed, and I assume that's why he's here."

"And more than a scattering," Pinstripes said.

"A whole network," Pinstripes said. The Victorian Doctor was brought up short by that.

"A whole network? Are you sure?"

"Reaching out to some of the worst wartime atrocities throughout time and space," Pinstripes said.

"And centered right here," Tweedy said. "On Gallifrey."

"Well," Victorian said. "It seems like this is worse than I thought."

"Isn't it always?" Tweedy said.

"That's always been my experience," said Pinstripes.

Chapter 9 >

Chapter 1 >>

Four Doctors: Chapter 9

Takeshi Watanabe settled into the grass under a tree to watch the gathering crowds in the park.  Rose sat beside him, trying to gauge the emotion behind his stoic facade. She wondered, alternately, about the best way to initiate a conversation and whether she should even try. And so they sat, side by side, watching as benumbed survivors accumulated around them. The Doctor paused by Rose's elbow just long enough to thrust a testing finger into the air.

"The time-distortion is thick enough to cut with a knife here," he said, before wandering off to explore the park.

Once he had left, Takeshi spoke up. "What is it, this 'time corridor' your Doctor is looking for?"

"Your guess is as good as mine," Rose said with a shrug. Then thought better of it. "Actually my guess might be a bit better than yours..."

"I would guess a time-corridor is a thing that is used somehow for traveling to a different time."

"Right. Okay," Rose said. "So your guess really is as good as mine."

"And the blue box," Takeshi continued, "this is also for traveling to different times? You and your Doctor, you have come from the future I perceive."

"Yeah," Rose said.

"Did you know of this ...?" he waved a hand to encompass everything around them. "You knew this would happen today?"

"Yeah," Rose admitted. "I mean no, we didn't know it was today ... I mean, we didn't know when we got here.... See, I think the Doctor doesn't always manage to steer the TARDIS -- his time-machine, I mean -- as well as he pretends to. Half of the time we don't know where, when, we end up. So yeah, we knew, historically, that this happened ... but we didn't know it was happening here, now, while we were here. Does that make sense?"

Takeshi sat in brooding silence for a bit before speaking again. "You could change what happened, could you not?"

"I don't know," said Rose. "The Doctor, he does seem to get involved wherever he goes. I think he can't help himself, he just tries to fix things wherever he goes. And yet... I don't know. I almost destroyed everything by trying to save my own father's life. I think some things, somehow, can't be changed."

"We call them 'fixed points,'" the Doctor said from behind them. "And Hiroshima, August 5, 1945, is one of them." He squatted beside Takeshi. "Hundreds of people have tried, hundreds of times, to change what happened here today. I've tried myself, more than once. I am truly sorry." He put a hand on Takeshi's shoulder. Takeshi bowed his head and appeared to be fighting back tears.

The Doctor stood up. "Right," he said. "Work to be done. You wait here." And he strode off across the park.

Takeshi and Rose sat for some time in awkward silence. Eventually Rose spoke up: "The Doctor really does a lot of good, you know. Even if he can't change ... all this," she waved a hand at their surroundings, "he ... he's a good man."

Takeshi said nothing, but pulled a small chess set from his jacket pocket and began setting it up. He moved a few pieces, playing both sides of the board without much enthusiasm. Rose, having run out of encouragements to offer, watched in silence. Neither of them saw the man approach until he stood directly above Takeshi's chessboard.

The man looked ... not quite right, somehow, but not in any way they could put a finger to. His eyes seemed wrong, devoid of life. His movements were a little too deliberate, too precise, as he lowered himself to sit at the chessboard and move a black pawn.

"Play," he said to Takeshi. And Takeshi played. The game was intense. Neither man spoke, all focus was on the board. Rose soon lost interest and went to find the Doctor.

She discovered him standing by the river, watching people wading into the water. Wading in, and not coming out.

"They're going in to die," the Doctor said to her. "They're drowning themselves. Do you notice what's wrong here?"

Rose looked. She studied the scene intently. Aside from the obvious, abject despair of a population trudging so numbly to its death ... "Where are the bodies?" The Doctor nodded. That was the right question, though she still wasn't quite sure what it meant.

"Where's Takeshi?" he asked suddenly. He looked back, then took off running toward where the old man and the odd man continued their game.

Takeshi was decidedly uncomfortable about this strange adversary. For all his intensity he seemed dispassionate about the progress of the game. Even as Takeshi stood poised to force mate in the next four moves, the other hardly blinked. At the last moment he switched his move. A weak feint with a pawn, which left his rook exposed, just to see how the other would react. He didn't; he took the rook without comment.

Then the Doctor was there, nudging Takeshi aside to take his place for the rest of the game. The Doctor recovered easily and pushed boldly into mate in two. The stranger looked up, raised his hand, and touched his fingertips to the Doctor's temples. The fingertips shone suddenly with a bright light. The Doctor cried out briefly, then went silent. The stranger hauled the Doctor's limp body over one shoulder and carried it off toward the river.

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