Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (51 page)
Read Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews Online
Authors: John Grant
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Reference, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #History & Criticism, #Criticism & Theory
The Otherhood
by Lytchcov Zammana
American Book Publishing, 340 pages, paperback, 2001
Sometime not too far from now, Victor Jones falls foul of a family/business feud, and his mind is genetically transported into the following: (1) the year 2084; (2) the body of one of his descendants, Viceroy Jones; (3) an organic, sentient California megalopolis called the Terramyd, ruled by descendants antagonistic to him. Meanwhile, the mind of Viceroy Jones has been transported back to near-future California and into the body of his ancestor, Victor Jones. In their two different and differently unfamiliar new-found eras, the "brothers" have adventures battling against a tyranny headed by a member of their own family.
Zammana's ambition in this fiction is to be commended – indeed, admired. Unfortunately, the standard of writing isn't quite up to the ambition; if ever there was a case for a nurturing editor, this book is it. With the characters being little more than names and the immensely complex interior of the Terramyd being always described rather than experienced, it becomes virtually impossible for readers – this reader, at least – to keep a grasp on what's actually going on at any particular moment. That said, for the ambition and imaginative fervour alone,
The Otherhood
is well worth a look.
—Infinity Plus
Magic Time
by Marc Scott Zicree and Barbara Hambly
Eos, 373 pages, hardback, 2001
Crackpot scientists at a covert Government research centre have been working on a device whose purpose is unclear. The team leader decides to press the button even though the proper testing hasn't been done. For some reason, all electrical devices, including communications devices, stop working throughout the USA and possibly the whole world. Most people start transmogrifying into exaggerated archetypes based on their pre-existing personalities and, often, develop paranormal powers. Looters, rapists and murderers fill the streets. Planes plummet from the sky. Headed by Martha Stewart, mobs crazed through being deprived of watching Martha Stewart on tv rampage through the city streets, slaughtering everyone in sight by cramming them into kitchen blenders ...
Okay, I admit it: that last sentence was a fib. But you get the general idea. This is a disaster novel in which, as in so many disaster novels, idiot technologists bring about global doom through their asinine recklessness. Where it differs, of course, is that the ramifications involve nothing so trivial as nuclear winter but the rapid alteration of human beings into strange monsters and superhumans possessed of seemingly magical abilities.
As in most disaster novels, we follow the adventures of various groups of plucky survivors whose fates eventually intertwine. The main group is that of which callow lawyer Cal Griffin is a part. In order to save his teenage ballet-dancing sister Tina, now transformed into an aethereal floating creature, from the clutches of his rapacious ex-boss Stern, now transformed into a dragon, he has to become in effect St George, complete with sword. He's aided by buddies like Colleen, a real tough broad with a heart of gold; Doc, an exiled medic from behind the Iron Curtain who since arrival in the USA has been flogging hot dogs; and Goldie, a Manhattan street crazy who's (nudge, nudge) not so goddam crazy after all. Tina picks up from the ether that there are two sources of the disturbances, one to the south and one to the west, so off go our disparate pals on a quest to Do Something About It.
More, perhaps, than any other form of genre literature, the disaster novel has a template; the broad outlines of that template can be easily enough deduced from the above. When reading a disaster novel, therefore, you don't expect to find many surprises in terms of the overall plot. What you look for instead are strong involvement with the characters and gripping, fast-paced adventure narration – as well as for any new variations on the template, although this latter is less important. Unfortunately,
Magic Time
– at the end of which the tale is only half told, so, oh fuck, a sequel seems inevitable – falls short on both counts.
The main problem is the characterization – without much feeling of involvement with the protagonists, any adventures they might have seem distanced, as if they were players in a tv soap opera glanced at from time to time while one's doing something else. Who really cares if Cal saves Tina from a fate worse than death at the mercy of the dragon – and at the best of times it's pretty difficult to imagine how a massive dragon is going to have its way with a small, aethereal humanoid – if in fact all three characters are merely jerkily moving puppets on someone else's stage? There's a sense, too, while reading
Magic Time
that the authors were likewise less than fully convinced by their own characters, rather as if they'd planned out a movie script with all the requisite stereotypes and plot events but left it to the actors to bring the characters to life, to make them people.
Another obstacle to involvement is the nature of the catastrophe. One can accept that the side-effects of the device might be pretty implausible, but there seems no rationale for the device ever having been invented in the first place. What was it intended to
do
? Was it some new bit of war technology? – something of the order of the Goons' Bracerot, perhaps: "The enemy will never be able to resist us if they're all turned into parsnips, Neddy." Or was it supposed to transform humanity into something superhuman, shoving us along through a passel of evolutionary leaps? Neither answer seems to be the correct one, yet there's no other on offer; with the result that we seem to be reading about a disaster that has no cause. This lack of any underpinning once again distances us from the characters: since there's no obvious reason for them to be in the situations they're in, the fact that those situations are mere artifices, mere whims of the storytellers, is constantly at the forefront of the mind, as is the realization that the novel as a whole has been written according to template.
Still, still, all could maybe be rescued if the writing itself were gripping. Sadly, it plods – and it's not helped by disruptive misspellings all over the place: "ibuprophen", "Gurjieff", "leeching" (for "leaching"), "peddled" (for "pedalled/pedaled"), "nickle" ...
There is one aspect of
Magic Time
, however, that is really exceptional: the cover illustration, done by Iain McCaig. This appears to be a piece of concept art for a tv series or tv movie related to the novel, and it's very striking indeed.
Pedestrian writing, cardboard characters, a plot without rationale, an adherence to template ... All of these comments might suggest that
Magic Time
is an out-and-out stinker. In fact, it's not quite that bad. Its real problem, for all the reasons cited, is that it's boring.
—Infinity Plus
TWO GROUP REVIEWS
Cruci-Fiction
The Jesus Thief
by J.R. Lankford
Great Reads Books, 285 pages, hardback, 2003
Cloning Christ
by Peter Senese with Robert Geis
Orion Publishing & Media, 333 pages, hardback, 2003
It seems there is a season for novels about the cloning of Jesus Christ, and we're in the middle of it; in addition to the two discussed here there has recently (January 2003) been published the first volume,
In His Image
, of an entire trilogy of them, James BeauSeigneur's
Christ Clone Trilogy
. The tv miniseries cannot surely be far away, doubtless to be followed by the reality show:
Survivors of the Cross
. The two novels discussed here are of astonishingly different standards; I cannot speak for BeauSeigneur's series as I have not seen it.
J.R. Lankford's
The Jesus Thief
is essentially a thriller with sciencefictional and theological overtones. Improbably wealthy Dr Felix Rossi is part of the latest team permitted by the Vatican to examine the Turin Shroud. He has plotted to snip a tiny thread from one of the apparently bloodstained areas in order to attempt to create a clone of Christ. His plans become more urgent when he discovers, just before his trip, that, while raised a Catholic, he is in fact the child of Jews who sought refuge from Nazism in the USA and adopted Catholicism in order better to fit in; since Jews are held responsible for Christ's death and persecuted as a result, reasons Rossi, then his restoration by a Jew might decrease the attacks.
Thread snipped, back home he goes, and he sets to work in the laboratory in his luxury Manhattan apartment. His maid Maggie, discovering what's up, volunteers herself as the vessel for the developing fetus; she, it proves, is a virgin, so could hardly be more suitable for the role.
The owner of Rossi's apartment block is a Mr Brown, whose enigmatic doings are mysterious indeed; even his closest aides seem to know little of their nature beyond that some of the most powerful people in the world seem to be beholden to him. One of the building's doormen, Sam, is among Mr Brown's little army of agents-cum-hired-muscles. However, Sam falls in love with Maggie, and thereby soon becomes allied to Rossi's cause – which, for reasons scrutable only to himself, Mr Brown strenuously opposes.
Despite this opposition, Rossi has enough money to evade pursuers, with Sam's active help, and Maggie's pregnancy slowly advances ...
It's all tremendous page-turning fun, and it has also some more thoughtful elements that make it – unlike so many thrillers – a rollercoaster ride that one actually remembers after finishing the book. Here, for example, is a little bit of dialogue that not only gives the rationale for the tale but also rather nicely deals with any idea that the cloning of Christ might be in some way blasphemous:
"That's true," Maggie said. "Every Sunday in my church the preacher climbs the pulpit and talks to mostly women and children and precious few of them. Can't hardly find a man there at all. You know why? Because religions won't change. We got six billion people already, and the Pope's out telling Catholics to have billions more. People got common sense. They know better than that. The Jews are still carrying on about eating pork chops and Trick or Treating on Halloween. So is the Christian right. I mean, do you really think an all-loving, all-knowing, omnipotent God is worried about Trick or Treat?"
[Rossi] looked confused. "Then why are you doing this, Maggie?"
"Because I think we need him to come back. Religions have stood still but their congregations haven't. People have moved on and, Dr. Rossi, I'm telling you that's God's plan. It was him that made us thinkers, him that made us curious. Take a baby in diapers, put him alone in a room with a box, and the baby's gonna crawl to that box and see what's in it."
As befits a first novel,
The Jesus Thief
isn't entirely flawless. I could personally have done with a few less than the half dozen or so moments of spontaneous religious ecstasy (or whatever) experienced by one or other of the characters – you know: okay, so we
know
s/he's a holy roller, now could you please get on with the
story
? And just once or twice Lankford fumbles with the motivations of her characters; for example, Sam's reaction, when he first discovers that Rossi is experimenting with Maggie, seems totally out of proportion to the situation. Quite frankly, though, the tale rattles along so fast in all other respects that these minor blips are easily ignored.
The contrast with
Cloning Christ
, by Peter Senese "with Robert Geis", could hardly be greater. To be honest, I'm somewhat hesitant to say what I really think about this novel, because any description I give of its dreadfulness will surely come across as just a spate of negative hyperbole.
Archaeologist/geneticist Max Train, who a decade or so ago was accused and acquitted of massacring his family, is in Israel excavating with his old friend Luke Gartner and a couple of graduate students. In a cave they discover what appears to be the True Cross. As they examine further, an explosion kills all except Train, who escapes a fusillade of gunfire to bear much of the Cross away for analysis and in due course, using the bloodstains, for the attempt to clone Christ. Nasty Cardinal Anselm Mugant, hearing of this, mounts a clandestine, unsanctioned mission to stop him at all costs, including mass murder – which is carried out joyously by a psychopath called The Scorpion. We know that The Scorpion is very nasty indeed, because the authors tell us so, repeatedly; one suspects they'd have shifted to boldface in order to make this even plainer had they thought they could get away with it.
The problem
Cloning Christ
has is that it is execrably written, so that for much of the time I was scratching my head trying to work out what the hell was actually going on. The main characters do presumably have motivations, but I'm as baffled as to what they might be as I was before I started reading. The blurb, perhaps, gives a clearer clue than the book itself in this latter regard:
Mugant is made to represent how Man, when completely self-serving, can actually do great harm, including the destruction of God's Way no matter his original intention... . Mugant soon enlists the services of the internationally
rumored
assassin known simply as "The Scorpion" to track down Max and silence him with death. The Scorpion, a one-time penitent of the Cardinal, is a force of pure evil and who challenges life. He forces this same challenge onto Max as he casts a deadly shadow over his praised soul and every move he makes.
Adding intricate subterfuge to the plot is the existence of Mugant's "Fifth Crusade", five international industrialists with great power and reach devout in the Cardinal's perspective on human genetic science. Together, Mugant launches an all-out attack to find the ancient artifacts in Train's possession, and prevent the genetic scientist from doing the unthinkable in his eyes – announcing to the world a cross containing bodily remnants could indeed be the True Cross of Jesus of Nazareth – and clone the body of Christ!
I've quoted a little more of the blurb than need be in order to give you a flavour of the writing; please let us have no cheap jokes about the phrase "prevent the genetic scientist from doing the unthinkable in his eyes". The text is littered with homophones – "threw" for "through", "shown" for "shone", "their" for "there", "scene" for "seen", "peaked" for "piqued", etc. – but the problems go far, far beyond mere lack of proofreading. Or lack of copy-editing, come to that: a kindly copy-editor might have introduced the authors to the pluperfect ("He clapped his hands in song, participating in the gypsy-like festivities that occurred daily on the Spanish steps for centuries") and other items of basic grammar:
Rapid sonorous beats of turmoil and uncertainty pulsed in his head to near unimaginable proportions as the potential ramifications perpending if what he expected to discover was to come true overtook him.
Here are some further curios that any competent copy-editor would surely have picked up:
His itinerant brown eyes darted onto the dim city street outside.
Presumably they were on their way to some gypsy-like festivities.
The Scorpion smirked before sending a bullet into Francesco's forehead. Looking around the blood and gut-spattered dining room, the killer ...
How a single bullet to the head could have spattered the room with guts is anyone's guess.
"The Crusader vision of our equestrian order is at the service of our faith" were words from Muhlor's investiture into a centuries old order of Church knighthood that he carried with him everywhere.
A weighty religious burden indeed. And:
The patron licked his fingers with saliva.
It is of course a great shame for Lankford that these two novels, with such similar themes, should have come out almost at the same time, since word of mouth about the Senese/Geis book will inevitably affect sales of hers: "You know that novel about cloning Christ? Well, I found it unreadable ..." It's worth your effort to make sure you have the two clearly distinguished in your mind, because
The Jesus Thief
is a thoroughly entertaining tale with just about the right amount of thought-provoking ingredients in the mix.
—Infinity Plus