Book Review: Gregory Maguire's "Out of Oz"

Out of Oz, the fourth and final book in the Wicked Years series, is as disappointing as its two predecessors. Though Maguire’s Wicked offered an enchanting re-presentation of the events of the Wizard of Oz and recast the Land of Oz in an exciting new hue, his subsequent attempts to complete the tale that he started lead readers into an unenchanting labyrinth of intertwining stories that fail to capture the imagination. This final installment in the mind-numbing saga is littered with uninspired dialogue and is infested with stock characters. The story moves along at an erratic pace, often taking unnecessary and unappealing turns to entertain bland side narratives. The tale was so uninspiring that it has taken me several weeks to sit down and write about it.

          Out of Oz follows the exploits of Elphaba’s young granddaughter, Rain, who like her grandmother possesses magical abilities. Rain comes under the protection of Brr the Cowardly Lion, who attempts to keep her out of the clutches of the armies of Munchkinland and Oz, who are locked in a long war in which neither army has been able to gain the upper hand. The leaders of Oz and Munchkinland—Rain’s uncle Shell, the self-proclaimed emperor, and a mysterious sorcerous, respectively—seek to capture Rain and use her magical abilities to defeat their enemy.

          In a parallel storyline, Rain’s father (Elphaba’s son Liir) remains on the run from the authorities of Oz, who want to capture him and try him as a traitor for his exploits (previously chronicled in Son of a Witch). Liir’s main task is to keep himself safe and his daughter hidden from the powers that besiege them. He fears that his enemies will use his daughter to seek revenge against him, if they cannot capture him.

          The narrative is sprawling and dull, and somewhere along the line, Dorothy makes her much unappealing appearance to annoy readers until the tale finally ends. I’m surprised that I did not abandon this novel. After reading the previous two installments, I simply wanted answers to the mysteries that Maguire had dangled in front of me like stick full of carrots. Alas, few of the mysteries are solved by the end of this novel, and those that are answered are not done so in any fulfilling way. As a reader, I expect more from a novelist. I expect a series to be more rounded out, or to at least carry out its themes and maintain its promises. Some mysteries are meant to be left unsolved, but in this case, the mysteries were simply too powerful for Maguire to corral.

          I am pleased to say that my next read is much more exciting. I’m already halfway through the seven-hundred-page tome  Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. I look forward to getting back to you with that review. In the meantime, enjoy Wicked, but expect anything from the other books in the series; avoid them at all costs.

JCM

14 December 2014

Book Review: Martaget Atwood's "Maddaddam"

          In Maddaddam, Margaret Atwood masterfully concludes her post-apocalyptic trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake.

          The book follows a group of survivors from the bioengineered disease that decimated the human population, as they contend with other humans, other species—some natural and some engineered—and the elements, adjusting to a life without the technologies that had made their pre-disease world so much easier to navigate. Luckily, many of the survivors were once members of the Gods Gardeners, a group that was eventually disbanded by the government, but that once promoted clean living, recycling, and harmony with nature in the pre-apocalyptic world. The Gardeners had learned how to cultivate land, survive in the wilderness, and, more importantly, they avoided the products being created and peddled by the Corps (large, often corrupt, corporate conglomerates that had sold anything from healthcare products to bioengineered food products), which had saved them from ingesting the carefully planted and disseminated pills that had carried the cataclysmic disease.

          Joining them are the Crakers, semi-human species that were bioengineered by the disease’s creator to replace the human species after his disease had wiped it out. The Crakers are engineered to lead a simple life: they can only subsist on a plant based diet; they are devoid of any propensity for violence; and all tendencies of jealousy have been removed from them, as has the desire to create a culture. Anything that their creator, Crake, thought had led to human conflict and the disfigurement of the planet by humans has been stamped out the Crakers genetically.

          Crake, however, could not stamp out everything, though he may have thought his creation was perfect. The Crakers do possess some society-building tendencies and they are a highly curious species. The Crakers take to writing and storytelling. Undoubtedly, Atwood intended her portrayal of the Crakers, their slow development, their acute culture-building tendencies, and their need for a god and mythology, to represent a vision of humanities own development. Perhaps, in tens of thousands of years, the Crakers, will have created nations and begun to carryout experiments similar to those the human species had conducted, experiments that had slowly destroyed the earth. But, in asserting this last, I am overstepping the boundaries of Atwood’s work.

          The book, and the series as a whole encourages reflection. It makes its readers think about their own responsibilities, and it forces them to see that everything has consequences, many of which are largely unforeseeable. No creation is perfect.

          As a story, the novel is intriguing and enticing. Characters introduced in the other two books of the series are given greater prominence here, and their backstories are slowly flushed out, though not completely. There are many questions that are left unanswered; Atwood intends to leave these questions unanswered. The only downside to the narrative is its ending. I found myself intrigued for the whole book, but when the ending came, it was not what I expected. While the ending was neither bad, nor was it unfitting to the book or Atwood’s project as a whole in the series, it was simply a little bit of a letdown. Nonetheless, I recommend the series highly. Start with Oryx and Crake, then read The Year of the Flood, before starting on Maddaddam.

          As a side note to all of this. I realize that in my last post I had said I would be reading the Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson next. I did begin reading the novel, but found it both appalling and boring. It’s not worth picking up, and certainly not worth reading. I chose to abandon that novel in pursuit of other interests.

JCM

2 October 2013

Book Reveiw: Richard Russo's "Empire Falls"

          In Empire Falls, Richard Russo offers a vivid portrait of a small, New England town that has slowly succumbed to poverty since the closure of its textile mill and clothing factory several decades before the novel’s beginning. The town’s population has slowly slipped away to more prosperous townships and cities, leaving most of the town’s property in the hands of Mrs. Whiting, the widow of C. B. Whiting, the last of the Whiting dynasty’s male line. Mrs. Whiting lives alone in her hacienda by the river, on the other side of the “iron bridge” from the town—except for the times when her crippled and mentally unstable daughter Cindy, comes to visit. She is an old, but active and vivacious woman, who possesses a keen ability to read human character and understand the motivations of her interlocutors, so that she can more easily manipulate them.

          Russo’s novel follows Miles Roby, the proprietor of the Empire Grill, in the months the months leading up to his impending divorce. Miles has just returned from his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, where he and his teenaged daughter, Tick, stayed with Miles’s college friends, who own on a summer home on the island. It is an annual visit that always raises, for Miles, visions of what could have been, if his mother had not fallen ill and he had not put his studies on hold to return to Empire Falls, where he subsequently fell under Mrs. Whiting’s thumb, as manager of her Empire Grill.

          Miles is a man of deep loyalties, who trusts others easily and readily, and is sure that Mrs. Whiting will honor her promise to leave the Empire Grill to him after her death,—an event that, given the woman’s good health, is still many years off—despite all evidence suggesting that Mrs. Whiting only keeps the promises that suit her. Small-town life is not an existence that Miles relishes, and it’s not a life to which he wants his daughter to succumb. He tires of the demons from his past, the living men and women who walked beside him in his youth, and continue to harass and haunt him in adulthood. He dreams of inheriting the Empire Grill so that he can sell it, and use the money to help his daughter escape the life that he could not escape.

          Slowly, and with his brother’s urging, Miles begins to take some initiatives. Together, they make the Empire Grill profitable again, though they know that the Grill’s profits can never be optimized without Mrs. Whiting’s help, which she seems unwilling to give. As Miles works to change his future, visions of his past become interspersed with the novel’s narrative, revealing more about Miles and his family’s past, as well as the town’s past. The relationship between the Robys and the Whitings, between employees and employers is also more fully revealed, and the cyclical nature of Miles’s predicament, a cycle that he is trying to break, is more fully understood.

          Russo tells a story rich with detail and imbued with true to life characters. The writing is lucid and the story is intriguing. Emotion, hope, fear, ambition, love, compassion, cruelty, hate, pettiness, and vengeance all come together in the novel through characters who are, for the most part, just behaving as readers can expect them to behave. Russo is true to his characters, and true to the ambiguity of humanity: good people have faults, and bad people also have virtues. Empire Falls steadily builds toward its climax, using small details as large stepping stones to create, out of this perceptive investigation into the human character, a heart-pounding climax that concludes with a heart-touching denouement. This was my first Russo novel, and I’m definitely interested in reading another one soon.

JCM

1 September 2013

Book Review: Salman Rushdie's "Shalimar the Clown"

          Salman Rushdie’s “Shalimar the Clown” begins with the murder of the former American ambassador to India, Max Ophuls, and then proceeds to tell the events leading up to his death at the hands of a Kashmiri militant, Shalimar, on the former ambassador’s daughter’s doorstep. It is a tale of larger than life personalities, of opposing players on the world stage whose personal worlds also intersect, and do so in ways that are, perhaps, more important than the intersection of their political lives. It is a story in which personal honor trumps the importance of a particular cause and provides a motive for action and life itself.

          It is a story that begins in the 1930s, against the backdrop of an Alsatian printing shop run by a Jewish family in the years before World War II. The story tells of Max Ophuls’s youth, his days as a freedom fighter during the Great War, and his legendary flight out of France as the first pilot of a top secret fighter jet. Then, the backdrop changes, and readers find themselves in the valley of Kashmir, where ominous portents suggest an unkind end to the tranquility that has blessed the professional entertainers of the town of Pachigam. Against this backdrop, a young love blossoms between the daughter of the Indian pandit and the son of the village’s chief, a Muslim. It is a welcome, though anomalous love, for in Pachigam, as in much of Kashmir at the time, Muslims and Indians live peacefully alongside one another, though it is uncommon for them to intermarry. Despite the promise of young love, ominous portents must have their way, and eventually Pachigam, along with the rest of Kashmir, is plunged into a war of ethnic and national strife.

          Shalimar the clown comes into his own during this turmoil, nursing personal hatreds and vowing to take back his honor from those who have taken it from him. The novel’s timeline catches back up to itself, and readers are returned to the doorstep where Max Ophuls lies in a pool of his own blood. But, the story is not finished, for Shalimar the clown must still reckon with the late-ambassador’s daughter before the novel can be fully played out.

          Like all Rushdie novels, Shalimar the Clown delves deeply into the background of its central characters. Rushdie uses his keen insight to develop the minds and motives of his characters. He uses these characters and their personal histories to depict Kashmiri identities, and the struggles of Kashmiri’s to establish their own national identity on the world stage. To create this perspective, Rushdie uses his characters’ similar pasts to draw parallels between resistance fighters in the Alsace-Lorraine territory during World War II, and the Kashmiri fight for independence from India and Pakistan. But, as much as Rushdie wants to create a parallel, he also wants to emphasize differences, because it is differences—in choice, personality, and values—that drives the different outcomes of his various characters’ lives.

          Ultimately, the story moves toward a compelling end, one that seems to promise a striking resolution, but one that ultimately refuses to draw its own firm conclusions; it refuses to provide a dénouement. Instead, the novel insists that the reader actively participate in the story’s conclusion.

          Admittedly, this is not my favorite Rushdie novel. The book fails to live up to the epic quality of novels such as “Midnight’s Children” and “The Satanic Verses.” Compared to other Rushdie novels of its size, like “The Moor’s Last Sigh,” “Shalimar the Clown” seems to lack thoroughness, as if it would benefit from a wider scope, or, at least, a large page count. Though it dives deeply into its characters’ backstories and personalities, the novel seems to have failed to completely plumb the depths. Additionally, Rushdie seems to have tried to distance himself from his iconic use of magical realism. While it would be impossible to say that the novel was entirely lacking of magical realistic elements, to say that these elements took a central stage in this novel—as they have in others—would be incorrect. Instead the novel’s fantastical qualities were pushed into the background. Rushdie would have done better to have embraced the novel’s magical realist elements, or to have eschewed them entirely.

          None of this is to say that the novel wasn’t enjoyable. As always, Rushdie has presented an articulate, well thought out, and potent piece of literature. If, at times, the coincidences and parallels in the novel seem slightly overbearing, then they only do so because lack of complete depth has forced these parallels to become more striking than they normally would be in a novel of this caliber. I recommend the book to anyone interested in reading one of Rushdie’s shorter works, but only after they have read the more compelling novel, “The Moor’s Last Sigh.”

JCM

6 August 2013

Book Review: Dan Brown's "Inferno"

          All of Dan Brown’s books, Inferno included, are highly formulaic in construction. The protagonist faces some sort of diabolical problem, which can only be prevented if the pieces of some great puzzle are put together. There is a chase, a love interest, and then a series of small revelations that the reader could never figure out (hence why Brown’s books are thrillers and not mystery novels), and finally there is a big plot twist that throws all the reader’s expectations askew.

          Nonetheless, the books are intriguing and enticing. Brown is a master at juxtaposing chapters so that readers draw false conclusions about what, exactly, is happening. Perhaps if one approached all of Brown’s novels with all of his tricks in mind, then the novels would be less enticing, but, for someone who only reads each novel once, usually shortly after they come out, the tricks are effective. For without these tricks, there is nothing very special about Brown’s writing at all; but, the man can tell a good story.

          Certainly, it’s the story, not the flat and static characters that drive Brown’s books. Even here, where his most successful and most beloved character, Robert Langdon, takes center stage, a reader can’t really get interested in characters. I, for one, found myself focusing less on Langdon himself, and more on Langdon-as-portrayed-by Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks is, in my mind, the only reason Langdon is anything more than words on a page. Brown certainly doesn’t give him life, even though he seemingly goes out of his way to make him larger than life: the perfect hero, a genius, who for some reason rarely thinks about his past adventures, while he is running for his life.

          If you are looking for a quick, intriguing, easy read, a book to take to the beach, one with plenty of stopping points to accommodate all the breaks you need do to accommodate everyday distractions, then pick up Inferno. If you are looking for something to make you think (and I mean really think, not just puzzle over a mystery that is impossible to solve with the clues that you are provided), look somewhere else.

JCM

7/21/2013