Before Bill McKibben started 350.org, his grassroots organization (he makes quite explicit it’s for young people, implying us older folks have dropped the ball) campaigning to roll back global warming, he asked climatologist James Hansen what number he should choose. Having just read James Hansen’s compelling semi-memoir Storms of My Grandchildren (see my review), as soon as I saw that McKibben was putting out a new book, I grabbed it. Well, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet is a scorcher, if you’ll excuse the expression, and no, the title isn’t a spelling blooper. McKibben, who has written extensively on climate change and its politics, has now declared our known planet a goner, transformed by already, and even more so in the future, into a noticeably different place. Like Clive Hamilton (see my review of Requiem for a Species), McKibben catalogues the compelling scientific evidence for unstoppable climate change. While Hamilton is a cogent writer, McKibben is genuinely stylish, lacing his pungent news with verve and humour (yes, humour, despite the grim news).
This is another contemporary must-read book. Fear grips our hearts when we contemplate mankind’s future on Earth (whoops, I must remember to call it Eaarth), so we need to let our rational minds read stories of the future, realistic stories. The tail end of Eaarth presents McKibben’s morsels of hope but they seem scant indeed – more productive, holistic, natural agriculture; distributed, small-scale energy; the Internet as a unifier. Yet the book is laced with the author’s irrepressible, instinctive call to action.
Passionate yet grim. 3½ stars.
The Twelve (sold in America as The Ghosts of Belfast) by Stuart Neville fizzes with energy from its first paragraph. Irish paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan is dizzingly portrayed as an alcoholic has-been tormented by twelve ghosts of his brutal past, ghosts who torment him to exact vengeance on other Sinn Fein heavies. After the first action-laden section, I wondered if Neville had trapped his antihero in a predictable sequence of killings, but the plot constantly lurches sideways, and by the middle of the novel I was truly hooked. An action thriller, The Twelve also illuminates modern Northern Ireland and the unresolved consequences of generations of deaths.
Rich characterization, gripping action scenes, even a convincing romantic subplot . . . this is a rare modern thriller that delivers on all fronts. 4 stars.
The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, by distinguished American historian Joyce Appleby, is a tour de force of broad historical writing. We all imagine we ‘know’ what capitalism is and how it must have arisen out of older ways of societal organization, but of course we know nothing. From the very start of her lively, erudite yet thorough account, Appleby is at pains to demonstrate that nothing in the development of capitalism was smooth or preordained. Beginning with the uneven transition from agrarian systems to trade and mercantilism, and then continuing with the hit-and-miss development of market-based notions in parts of Europe in the 17th century, she convincingly shows that capitalism is not some inevitable outcome based on mathematical certainty but a societal construct, one expressed differently in different societies. ‘Capitalism is not a unified, coordinated system,’ she writes, ‘despite that suggestion in the word “system.” Rather it is a set of practices and institutions that permit billions of people to pursue their economic interests in the marketplace.’
I found especially valuable a chapter on how the United States and Germany outstripped Great Britain over the turn of the 19th century to become capitalism’s exemplars; what fascinates me is how powerful Germany’s advance was, even though its paternalistic, rigid society was nothing like the freewheeling, individualistic American system that we often mistake as capitalism’s natural form. And a 21st century chapter focusing on China reinforces the need to guard against assuming even that capitalism presupposes democracy.
The Relentless Revolution is not just about conceptual correctness. Appleby brilliantly proclaims its sparkling triumphs over the last two centuries. She is an evocative yet precise stylist and I cannot recall a more compelling paean to the virtues of capitalism’s efficiency, vigour and promotion of innovation. Yet she is also clear on the downsides of capitalism; it is not, she illustrates plainly, a moral force. The Relentless Revolution is an ideal book for people like me who believe in the power of capitalism controlled by strong, moral, democratic government.
Scholarly, readable, thought provoking . . . a must. 4 stars.
Jack Reacher, Lee Child’s nomadic, taciturn action man, has recently been compared to Philip Marlowe. Marlowe he isn’t, but amongst the panoply of male antiheroes so treasured by us mystery/thriller readers, Reacher definitely stands out. The ultimate baggage-free male (literally and emotional), he’s unnoticeable until the world needs him, then becomes brutal, rational, efficient . . . the traditional superhero. I know, I know, that description slights Reacher, but the truth is, the real hero of the Reacher books is Lee Child himself. Unusually for this genre, Child is not only stylish (that’s a given for successful thrillers), he is also acutely intelligent, melding superior plots, wonderful scene pacing and even humour.
61 Hours finds Lee Child at his most playful. He wields the countdown device from the first page to the last, in a Reacher episode in which the reluctant star finds himself trapped in a snowbound town assailed by bikie gangs, an assassin and out-of-town gangsters. I found the cocktail of seamless action, tension and plot puzzlers a wonderful single-sitting read.
61 Hours is Lee Child and Jack Reacher at their peak. 3 stars.
Point Omega, the fifteenth novel by Don DeLillo, one our most profound living novelists, is longer than a novella, 117 pages in a slim volume, but not longer by much. Yet the reading experience rivals that of the 900-pages plus of 2666, Roberto Bolano’s masterpiece. Every word, sentence, paragraph and page of Point Omega hums with weight. I’m a quick reader but you don’t read DeLillo fast. You taste, you savour. The pleasure is in the characters, always close to either collapse or ecstasy as a result of existential gravity. DeLillo’s oh-so-familiar prose is in top shape in this outing – bask in the gliding sentences, the pared dialogue, the sidelong flights into the underside of reality.
The book begins with an unnamed obsessive watching a slow-mo replay of Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy in a gallery. This is DeLillo at his art house best. Then the story proper kicks in: a young filmmaker staying in the desert with the subject he hopes to film, a scholar once co-opted by the American war machine to help conceptualize Iraq and rendition and all that nightmare. When the intellectual’s daughter arrives to stay, the plot deepens, and somehow by the end DeLillo has constructed a mini thriller puzzle even as he toys with subjects like identity and guilt and the human condition. I’m in awe of the perfection embodied in the author’s execution.
Right now I’m feeling guilty because I skipped Fallen Man, DeLillo’s previous novel. If it’s half as good as Point Omega, I was a fool.
A master – of language, of ideas, of atmosphere, of modern story – at his peak. 4 stars.
I bet I’m not the only one drawn to the notion of a complete fresh start, some way of casting the past aside and beginning with a tabula rasa. In Martin Westley Takes a Walk by Sydney author Andrew Humphreys, a businessman wakes up in hospital after being knocked unconscious by a falling kite. He can remember nothing about his life or family. Returning home with the stranger he is told is his wife, he is forced to reconstruct himself, only to find he is now nothing like the man he was.
Beginning with the sweet premise, the first third of Martin Westley Takes a Walk is a lovely mixture of plot revelations and unadorned, descriptive prose. The cast of characters – Martin’s hard-bitten wife, his rebellious children, his rapacious best friend, an Indian chief he befriends – is brought vividly to life. If the author’s inventiveness had been sustained, and if the themes of existential identity and morality were explored more thoroughly, this would be a superb novel. In the event it falters and I was left with minor letdown.
An intriguing and rather daring read. 2½ stars.
Michael Lewis is one of our most compelling, original chroniclers. He combines instinctive storytelling and fascination with the hidden interstices of the human world. All his books are gorgeous reads but it’s when he explores and explains conceptual material that he soars. And in The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, he has a sublime notion to play with. The result astounds.
The GFC sprang upon the world as a huge shock, yet dozens of books since insist that the crash was quite predictable. Lewis tackles the question of cause from the most original angle of all, by focusing on those rare financial players who bet money – hefty licks of money – against the herd. A fascinating set of mavericks and misfits spent the years before the GFC seeking ways to make fortunes by gambling that the boom would turn to bust: a rebel with no social skills, a bunch of newbies with one good idea, a recluse with Aspergers, a glib salesman with brains. Lewis burrows deep into their lives, dovetailing their almost unbelievable stories as the storm approaches.
Throughout what reads like a Matthew Reilly thriller, Lewis gradually explains, evocatively and clearly, the intricacies of mortgages, derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, sub-prime, and the interlocked financial markets. In the process, his portrayal of the money world is staggeringly simple: yes, there was evil afoot, but most of the supposedly ‘perfect’ market were simply thick and driven insane by greed.
The Big Short is the one account of the global financial crisis you simply must read, and it’s my pick for best book, nonfiction or fiction, of 2010 so far. 4½ stars.
The end of the Shins felt premature, so when its pivotal member, James Mercer was announced to be working with producer/musician Danger Mouse, loud cheers could be heard. And the fruit of that collaboration, the self-titled release of Broken Bells, has been worth waiting for.
Mercer writes nifty, slightly askew alt-pop songs with Stipe-ish, involving lyrics. His clear, high singing has the expressive quality of the voice of Tim Booth (of James fame). The Broken Bells release is relatively short at ten tracks, but each one is polished, rhythmic, melodic and expressive. Much of it could have come from a Shins release, albeit with a keyboards orientation, but he does branch out into some more funky or dubby songs. In all senses of the word, this is a collaboration: the keyboards of Danger Mouse range from burbling synths to roaring organs to tinkling keys, he contributes all the drums, and he and Mercer share bass duties. Top track picks include ‘The High Road,’ which kicks off with bubbling synth percolation and settles into a lovely repeated coda; the delightful keyboard intro and high vocals of ‘October’; and ‘Sailing to Nowhere’, with its acoustic guitar and keys intro overlaid by falsetto, morphing into Mercer’s lovely chorus backed by organ, finalized by an extended musical finale. But the truth is, this album is very much a unified pleasure.
Buy anything James Mercer puts out! 3½ stars.
One approaches franchise books and films gingerly: ‘massively popular’ often indeed means ‘crap’. But instant franchise books can signal an artistic creation that has seized the public imagination because it is brilliant, at least in some aspects. Take Harry Potter – it succeeds because it deserves to. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series is another example. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo spread globally like a super virus, readers engulfed by its potent combination of intricate, raw plots and intensely individualistic characters observed in minute detail. (Here I’m indebted to perceptive analysis by Laura Miller.)
I read the second in the series, The Girl who Played with Fire for a book group, and enjoyed the experience without falling in love with the series. Too many endless details, I sniffed. But now I’ve seen the film of the first, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I wonder if I was mistaken. For the movie is a humdinger. Casting is a primary strength – Noomi Rapace is perfect as the emotionally fragile but unstoppable super hacker, Lisbeth Salander, and Michael Nyqvist steals every scene as the dogged investigator Mikael Blomkvist. By necessity the film version truncates the exhaustive plot of the book but under the direction of Niels Arden Oplev, it maintains a kinetic pace while constantly revealing the characters. The lovingly shot Swedish countryside and cities, plus the exotic (to my ears) Swedish language, convey Larsson’s fascinating Swedishness. Not peppered with violence like most modern thriller, the film nonetheless is graphically raw when it depicts one of Larsson’s major themes, that of male violence toward women. All of this intoxicating package unfurls at the best movies do – two and a half hours vanished from my life.
It is now clear to me that Larsson does indeed weave modern storytelling magic, and the film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo captures that magic triumphantly. 4 stars.
Years ago, when I read Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s Dogs Never Lie About Love and When Elephants Weep, I recall being impressed by his wide-ranging, compassionate mind. So it seemed natural, after Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (see my review) profoundly affected me, to read Masson’s new book The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food. Like Foer’s book, Masson’s effort is a plea for ethical treatment of animals, by refusing to harvest, kill and eat them, but it is also a paean to the joys of vegetarianism. The author has a magpie’s instinct for collecting interesting facts and stories, and here he weaves his knowledge into a plea for compassionate, healthy eating. Especially valuable for me was a chapter in which Masson chronicles his own diet and culinary habits. How rich he makes the vegetarian life sound!
The structure of The Face on Your Plate is discursive, sometimes almost random, and anyone seeking a coolly logical treatise on the moral advantages of vegetarianism would best go elsewhere. Yet it is the humane, highly personal exploration of these issues that gives the book its strong charm. Masson is an eloquent stylist, and that style is put to the service of an emotional message that hits its mark.
Powerful but never sanctimonious. 3 stars.