Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  It's a good life until the day Sam discovers the Thunderbird he's just stolen has a dead body in the trunk. His first task is of course to get rid of the corpse before the cops come sniffing (perhaps literally) around. But the problem's bigger than that. The whole situation smacks of a setup: someone's trying to land him not just in trouble but in serious trouble, including a possible murder rap. That someone has to be stopped before they try something, well, worse.

  Aided by Billy, Robin and Sam's man-mountain friend Way-Way, Sam soon traces the line back to seedy car fence Ernesto Morales and beyond him to drugs kingpin Phil Ortiz, who, it proves, is seeking revenge for the time Sam boosted one of his prized collection of vintage cars. The makeshift team of buddies find themselves taking on Ortiz and Ortiz's equally murderous army of thugs in a tit-for-tat war of thrust and counterthrust, all the while keeping out of the clutches of both local and federal cops. This is not a war Sam intends to lose, even though just capitulating and getting out of town could well be his wiser course. But to win it he's going to have to be very inventive indeed ...

  This is modern, straightforward, fast-moving, no-nonsense caper fiction at something close to its finest. The characters are beautifully and economically drawn, in the best noir tradition – not just the major players but also the supporting cast, including notably the cops Stanton and Delgado and their fed counterparts Brock and Jones (Jones is an especially delightful creation). At times the text is as laugh-out-loud funny as anything by Donald E. Westlake; at other times it's as grim as anything by Westlake's auctorial alter ego Richard Stark. Always it's possessed of a lively wit and intelligence ... and it would make a marvellous movie.

  This little gem of a novel is thoroughly recommended.

  —Crescent Blues

  Expatria

  by Keith Brooke

  Cosmos, 177 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1991

  It used to be difficult, most of the time, to tell British sf apart from its American counterpart: in cargo-cultish fashion, British sf writers did their best to imitate the strand of the genre originated by the fixed notions of John W. Campbell Jr, which notions shaped American sf for better or worse. However, there has always existed alongside this a distinctly British version of mainstream sf, which looks back less to Campbell than, arguably, H.G. Wells. Whereas Campbellian sf relies for its effect on the use of twinned floods, if not torrents, of event and ideas, this distinct British strain sets the ideas – which may be every bit as radical – to play second fiddle to two other elements: first, the actual craft of writing, which includes the grace of the prose and the concentration on character; and, second, a subtext ... what the book is about, as apart from what the tale tells.

  There have been many distinguished contributors to this strain of sf aside from Wells: some that come to mind are Keith Roberts, Christopher Priest, Michael Coney (despite his departure from the UK as long ago as 1973), John Wyndham, Edmund Cooper (when on song), J.G. Ballard (in his earlier days, before he struck out to carve a niche all his wonderful own), Eric Brown, John Christopher ... There have even been a few US writers who have worked along the same lines: George R. Stewart and Walter M. Miller are two.

  Keith Brooke's novel Expatria, now deservedly reissued, belongs to this tradition. While some of its events are startling, even approaching the melodramatic, its carefully measured, consciously understated prose eschews any of the customary cheap stunts used by genre authors in their attempts to keep the reader whizzing through the pages. This is a novel that happens to be sciencefictional rather than the escapist whirlwind that is normally implied by use of the term "sf novel". To describe it as gripping would be accurate but would at the same time mislead: it grips because of the reader's absorption in the characters and the significance of the events rather than through any nonstop pulse-racing action. It introduces you to a world which, without your perhaps consciously realizing it, comes to permeate your mind, so that you have to shake your head to return yourself to 21st-century Earth.

  Mathias Hanrahan, who believes people should embrace technological ways and exploit all the artefacts still surviving from the earliest days of colonization, is heir to the Primacy of Newest Delhi, capital of one of the two major nations on the planet Expatria, colonized generations ago by the occupants of Space Arks sent out from Earth. The people and governments of Expatria have largely rejected the science and technology their ancestors brought with them, and now live in a sort of progressive-medieval culture. Mathias's father – the Prime of Newest Delhi – is murdered, and Mathias is framed for the crime. He flees first to the anarchic city of Orlyons and then to Alabama City, capital of the marginally more enlightened other major Expatrian nation. There he is encouraged in his pro-technology zeal, joining a loose-knit organization called the Project, headed by formalistic but eventually good-hearted bureaucrat Sukui and dedicated to rediscovering the technology of yore for the good of the people.

  Fiddling with a radio set, members of the Project intercept radio signals sent optimistically down to the surface by the descendants of those original colonists who elected to stay aboard the Space Arks in orbit around Expatria; just as the surface population of Expatria has never realized such people existed, so the idea that the planet could have a surviving population has become quasi-mythological to the inhabitants of the Arks. The reason for the attempted – and consummated – contact is that the Arks have discovered another generation starship is on its way from Earth intent on converting all Expatrians, surface and orbital, to a fresh religion.

  The sequel, Expatria Incorporated (1992), to this 1991 novel is amply heralded.

  Where Brooke scores highly in his world creation is in his handling of religions and religious sects. The organized beliefs depicted here – though not in detail – are logical descendants, exogamously combined and then distorted and perverted, of the mishmash sects we see around us today; there are, for example, the Conventists, worshippers of the portmanteau divinity Mary/Deus, and the Death Krishnas. Later a pimp actually invents a new and successful religion – the Caravan of the Holy Charities ("Now [...] which of the Charities was it you wanted to fuck?") – which is almost immediately subtly adapted by secular interests to spread the word, in the teeth of the authorities' reluctance to admit this publicly, that the Arks exist and are populated.

  A much less successful element of the world creation concerns music. A nice touch is that in straitlaced Alabama City music-as-entertainment is officially frowned upon, so that entertainment establishments are officially classified as workplaces; audiences come to them not to enjoy themselves, you understand, but simply to facilitate the work's being carried out. But that's an aside. More to the point is that the same understanding of the cultural-evolutionary process as applied by Brooke to organized religion is not carried on in the instance of music. The music played by several characters in Expatria, sometimes to great popular approbation, is bluesy rock, much as in the late 20th century and early 21st. It is of course feasible – just – that bluesy rock will still be being played hundreds if not thousands of years in the future on isolated and regressed colony planets, and it's likewise feasible that the guitar, drums, saxophone and harmonica will still be instruments of prime choice. But everything we've learnt from history insists that such a mode of music would have become a specialist interest, with the vast mass of the people being devoted instead to some new (and not necessarily better) form. Giving the Expatrian populace the blues is much like feeding an MTV audience Mozart; and surely, by the time of Expatria, today's instruments of popular-music choice are likely to have gone the way of the crumhorn.

  The foremost musician in this tale is Mono, and she is also the most beautifully realized of its characters. Her day job, as it were, is as a high-class prostitute; but this career she evidently regards as only a means to an end – the way of financing what she actually wants to do, which is front a rock'n'roll band. It is a nice touch that Mathias, who loves her as a friend rather
than something to screw, is able to use his rudimentary knowledge of the old technology to cobble together for her an electric guitar. The relationship between Mono and Mathias is very sweetly handled.

  Throughout, Brooke's tale-telling is superb; only in the last few pages does it fall down, when too much is revealed too quickly – a fault compounded by the fact that some of the revelations have already made themselves evident to the attentive reader. Until this point there is a lovely steady pacing of the narrative; the final few pages are as disruptive in their effect as if a smoothly, inexorably flowing river had, in its last stages before reaching the sea, suddenly turned into a babbling stream.

  All in all, however, this is a completely absorbing novel ... albeit a minor one. The publisher of this edition of Expatria, Cosmos, is not only reissuing two others by Brooke but has a new Brooke novel imminent; I drool.

  —Infinity Plus

  Keepers of the Peace

  by Keith Brooke

  Cosmos, 179 pages, paperback, 2002; reissue of a book originally published in 1990

  Set in 2083/4, this novel envisages a future in which a fair percentage of humanity lives in Lagrangian-orbit space colonies which have not long before successfully fought their war of independence to rid themselves of direct governance from Earth. Indeed, now the boot is more on the other foot, since the colonies have a strong political and military presence on the home planet, where they dominate the waging of a not-quite-war between its dictatorship ally Grand Union and neighbouring CalTex – two of the states into which the former USA has split.

  Jed Brindle is an average lad from a small, largely agricultural space colony. When called up for the draft he does not, like many of his peers, opt for one of the seemingly relatively easy excuses to deny the call; he is eager enough to leave the stifling confines of home and find adventure in the military. Once there and fitted with implants to control mood, communicate with his fellows and all the other things cyber-implants might be expected to do, he proves to be a frighteningly effective soldier – possessed not just of the requisite fighting skills but also of a ruthlessness that scares his superiors. This book is his story.

  Before we look at that story, a note on the book's structure. The main narrative runs linearly through the odd-numbered chapters. The even-numbered chapters consist of flashbacks that take the form of diary entries (some by Jed), interview quasi-transcripts, etc. The result of this structuring is a very interesting one: at the same time that we are being pulled along by the events of the "now" we are being given an ever more rounded, and sometimes subtly shifting, depiction of Jed himself and of his times. There's something of the same feel, because of this, as when reading the John Dos Passos-influenced novels of John Brunner such as The Sheep Look Up (1972) and Stand on Zanzibar (1968). Brooke handles the dual strands of his narrative adroitly.

  In the "now", Jed and a group of colleagues are conducting a plane hijack in order to kidnap a prominent CalTex figure, Cohen. Things go wrong, and the plane crashes in the middle of the desert with massive loss of life. Jed sets out to lead a small party comprising his injured military colleagues Amagat and Jacobi as well as the uninjured Cohen across the hostile terrain to the nearest Grand Union outpost, which is separated by a matter of just a few miles from the nearest CalTex outpost.

  Along the way, as they survive the desert rigours and occasional aerial attack, Jed goes through a rite of passage – not the stereotyped transition from adolescence to adulthood but something far more interesting than that: the transition from killing machine to human being.

  The cover quotes for Keepers of the Peace cite Heinlein and Haldeman as obvious precursors. In novels like Starship Troopers (1959) and The Forever War (1974) these two authors did indeed tell the tale of futuristic war from the worm's-eye view of the common soldier, showing how the brutalities of active military life can turn a normal, sensitive human being into something quite other. Yes, but ... In Keepers of the Peace there's nothing of the triumphalism of Starship Troopers or of the omnipresent large-scale-combat blood and guts and Vietnam allegory of The Forever War; Brooke keeps his focus far tighter, far more intimate than that, holding scenes of actual fighting to a minimum and tending to depict them with the same flat, sparse starkness that characterizes Jed's own thinking about them. A better comparison, in terms of the feel of the novel, might be with the opening chapter (based on a short story) of David Langford's 1982 novel The Space Eater. Jed's entirely cyborged father at one point spells out this destruction of the personality in the grinding machines of military exigency:

  My son is dead. I guess he started to die back in March when they sent his draft notice, but now it's all over. There's a new person in that body of his.

  And:

  When Jed was called up, Toni was worried about what they would do to his body. I guess she doesn't want him ending up like me. But she was focused on the wrong thing: it's what they do to your mind that matters.

  The military is like one big computing system. The generals do the programming, and there's one awful lot of equipment to be coordinated. The soldier is the place where hardware and software come together and do their work.

  In this view, the individual soldier cannot be a human being: in order for everything to function properly, she or he, whether regarded as stalwart hero or murderous war criminal, must be reduced to the status of not even a silicon chip but of one of its electronic switches. It's a grimly powerful metaphor, and one that is, even more grimly, hard to challenge on its own terms.

  As noted, there's no Vietnam allegory here. In this book's scenario it's rather as if, instead, the triumphant Vietcong had rather rapidly transformed themselves into the US Army. While preaching freedom and democracy – and while doubtless practising exactly those ideals outside the confines of this story – the colonies are in reality, in an echo of US foreign policy, propping up a seedy dictatorship against what appears on the scant evidence presented to be a reasonably liberal democracy, the fundamental spur being, despite the idealistic demagoguery, plain self-interest. Although we can hope it will not, we can anticipate that what is in 2084 merely the making of unpleasant friends will develop into a tyranny of economic dominance, reinforced as necessary by military means, by the colonies over the Earth.

  Despite all the drama of its events and the sternness of its political message, this is an oddly quiet book – something that Brooke effects through a studious restraint of writing style. Those who seek the measured provocation of thought when considering our military future – and indeed our military present – can be heartily recommended to read Keepers of the Peace. Those who seek out militaristic sf for the thrills, the gore, the glory and the melodrama should be prescribed this novel as therapy.

  —Infinity Plus

  Collecting Candace

  by Susan M. Brooks

  Small Dogs Press, 200 pages, paperback, 2005

  The nameless protagonist of this neo-noir piece first encounters Candace in a Florida bar, and is instantly captivated by her. Long legs, skimpy clothing, cute face, suggestive tattoo, beaucoup de bosomry – what sensitive, reconstructed male ascetic could resist her? He picks her up – or is it the other way round? – but not for sex: not only is she seemingly oblivious to the notion that sex might be anticipated, but his desire for her is entirely psychological, you understand, rather than physical, so that an act of sex with her would destroy the iconic Candace he has so swiftly created for himself. He wants to discover her mentally rather than carnally ... with the carnal option perhaps left open for later.

  What he discovers about her is that all the previous males in her life – notably her three husbands – done her wrong in one way or another, perhaps most particularly through their quite inexplicable eventual dumping of her. It soon becomes plain to the reader why all this inexplicable dumping went on: Candace is a vapid moron of the most tedious imaginable kind. The protagonist, however, effectively conceals this patent fact from himself, finding her a constant maze of fascination
and desirability. He casts himself into the role of her Knight in Shining Armor, and sets off, with her in tow, to exact revenge upon those males in her past who have so grievously ill treated her. In merry road-movie-psycho fashion, the pair of them cheerfully and gruesomely slaughter Candace's exes, the inspiration for their crimes being almost as much the searingly hot Florida summer as the protagonist's obsessed quixotry.

  This is a novel with a great deal going for it, and its central premise has a sort of brutal effectiveness. However, the fact that the central femme fatale is seemingly such a complete bimbo, complete with a love for the Bible coupled with a total inability to understand the first word of the New Testament's message, means that soon the reader is filled with the same urgent compulsion to escape her company as her exes undoubtedly experienced. The protagonist is little better: the novel's conceit, initially intriguing, that he can be capable of such profound self-deception over Candace, eventually plummets to become exasperation and even incredulity that he could be such a halfwit. If she were banging his brains out one could at least understand his addiction to her: is there a male who cannot look back on protracted periods of gonads-driven idiocy? But that's not the case, and can't be: he's made her into a figure of chastity.

  Collecting Candace could get around these problems if it were exquisitely written. Unfortunately, the writing is rather clumsy. Were the two central characters possessed of one single scintilla of appeal, this roughness could add to the novel's overall noir ambience. As it is, the roughness soon begins instead to grate.

  Oddly enough, Collecting Candace is worth reading despite all these adverse comments ... if you can stomach the unremitting bleakness of its vision of the most Neanderthal aspects of, and indeed members of, modern American society. It is from such ground that there springs the culture-of-ignorance whose current dominance has done so much to topple our country so swiftly from the position of world leader to world laughing stock. Brooks is to be heartily and very sincerely congratulated on having managed, in such a brief work, to do so much to explain this phenomenon.