Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (7 page)

Let's All Kill Constance

by Ray Bradbury

Morrow, 210 pages, hardback, 2003

The nameless narrator of this book, a Hollywood screenwriter – clearly identified by the circumstantial information given on page 68 as Bradbury himself – is beachfront neighbour to fading movie queen Constance. One dark and stormy night she comes to him telling him that she is in threat of her life; when she shortly afterwards disappears he goes off on a quest – sometimes on his own, sometimes accompanied by one or more friends including cynic-with-heart-of-gold private eye Crumley – in an attempt initially to save her but soon just to work out what the hell is going on. As we follow them we gain a portrait of the Hollywood of yesteryear, its idiosyncrasies and its fundamental glamorous tawdriness.

This is Bradbury's third attempt at a roman-a-clef noir detection – earlier were
Death is a Lonely Business
(1985) and
A Graveyard for Lunatics
(1990) – and it's enjoyable enough in a superficial sort of a way: vaguely entertaining, but completely uninvolving. It is this latter quality, or lack thereof, which is the novel's downfall as a noir, for noirs depend above all on an atmosphere that requires the total involvement of the reader. Bradbury's natural style, with its flightiness and exaggerated poeticism, works against him in this genre – ironic to find oneself saying this, because of course it was precisely that style which made particularly his early works of fantasy so comprehensively engrossing. There it was perhaps that the style left open so much space for ambiguity; here the ambiguity irks. (Chandler's language, for example, was often richly poetic, but at the same time its meaning was always crystal clear.) Here's a sample:

All the doors still stood wide, bright lights burned inside while Gershwin punched holes in a player piano roll in 1928 to be played again and again, triple time, with no one listening except me and Crumley walking through lots of music, but no Constance.

Even after one's worked out the meaning of this sentence there are still, as it were, bits of scattershot phrasing left flying adrift. That "triple time", for example. Did Gershwin, working in 1928, record the pianola roll at one-third speed? Perhaps pianola rolls were
always
recorded at one-third speed, for technological reasons – the punches could work only so fast, or something? If so, this is a bit of knowledge beyond your humble reviewer's ken. Or maybe Constance set her pianola to play at three times normal speed. Come to think of it, it must have been an
electric
pianola, because otherwise she'd still be sitting there pumping the pedals. When was the electric pianola invented? And so on.

A reasonable practitioner of noir fiction would have had the mesmerized reader two-thirds of the way through the chapter after next by now, not still stuck on page 20 grappling with this sentence.

There are some memorable moments, though, most notably the narrator's encounter with Constance's first, forgotten-nonentity husband, now dwelling eremitically in a hilltop shack surrounded by tottering megaliths of piled old and rotting newspapers. There is a skewed richness in such caricatural scenes, reminiscent of Mervyn Peake. But they are oases of vividness amid much that is desert.

There are annoying technical blemishes. On pages 44-5 there's an extended exchange of dialogue in the midst of which Bradbury loses track of which of the two characters is speaking. On page 72 there's reference to the British beer Old Peculier, but spelt "Old Peculiar". And so on.

But what's most irritating of all about this book is its lack of ambition. Yes, even the greatest of writers – and Bradbury's career speaks for itself – may obviously want to relax with a romp every now and then rather than attempting a masterpiece with each and every new book, but Bradbury of all people is surely capable of producing an
excellent
romp rather than just a piece of lazy froth like this.

To put this another way: Bradbury has the prized capacity to create works that (and this is irrespective of whether the reader necessarily
likes
all of them) give the impression of having been greatly loved – loved with an enormous passion, with a fullness of the heart – by the writer. It's a magical ability, and every writer in the world wishes s/he had it.

This book doesn't have that quality.

—Infinity Plus

Boost

by Steve Brewer

Speck Press, 252 pages, hardback, 2004

Sam Hill is a professional car thief. Boosting cars is his main source of emotional stimulus ... with the possible exception of his romantic yearnings toward his fence, Robin Mitchell, daughter of the fence and car thief who mentored Sam way back in the days before he'd found anything worthwhile to do with his life. In turn Sam is mentoring the youth Billy Suggs, teaching him not just how to be a car thief but the
artistry
of the profession – for Sam's specialty is not common-or-garden theft but the stealing, under commissions channeled through Robin, of rare and collectible items.

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