The Tempest Tales by Walter Mosley

And so began the story of Tempest Landry, three years after his death in Harlem, USA.

When Tempest Landry finds himself in front of St. Peter, he provides a justification for each of the sins he is charged with, he argues his case, and eventually refuses to go to Hell. No one had ever done this before, but if they had, they would have found out that the free will that man has on Earth follows him into the afterlife. St. Peter cannot force Tempest to go to Hell; Tempest must be convinced of his wrongdoings and accept his punishment. Heaven has no choice but to send Tempest back to Earth, albeit in the body of a recently damned soul. However, Tempest is not given more time on Earth to rebuild his life, but to accept his sins and their dire consequences. To that end, Heaven sends an accounting angel down to Earth as well. His job is to work on Tempest and persuade him to accept the divine judgment of St. Peter. Joshua Angel takes his task seriously, but he has never been to Earth in human form before. There are so many things to distract him, so many things for him to experience. It isn't long before Angel and Tempest both realize that there is much more riding on Tempest fate than either of them thought.

Paralleling Langston Hughes "Simple" stories, Mosley's characters reflect a complex African American identity. Angel mirrors the middle class African American, while Tempest gives voice to the common Harlemite. The story is fascinating and incredibly original. The characters and story have a depth to them that few authors are able to achieve. As the book comes to a close, it is clear that the tales of Tempest are not finished. As he did with Easy Rawlins and Socrates Fortlow, I hope that Mosely writes a number of books centering on Tempest and Angel.

Highly recommended.

The Magus by John Fowles

If The Magus has any "real significance," it is no more than that of the Rorschach test in psychology. Its meaning is whatever reaction it provokes in the reader, and so far as I am concerned there is no given "right" reaction.
--John Fowles

Whew. That's a relief. Because I can tell you now, I have as little idea of what The Magus means as when I started. But you know, I don't really mind, because even if I'm a little fuzzy on the concepts, there is no book like The Magus. I cannot remember the last time a piece of literature had me so on edge--it is a book that thrives on suspense, and not just the "erotic adventures" and "terrifying violence" promised by the jacket.

The protagonist of the book is Nicholas Urfe, a young Londoner just out of college who takes a job as an English teacher on the remote Greek isle of Phraxos in order to escape a messy and ruined relationship with an Australian girl named Alison. (Okay, so, besides the school being in Greece, does that sound like anyone you know?) Before he leaves he is warned by his predecessor not to fraternize with a particular man, a foreign millionaire who owns a mansion on the island's west side and is widely believed to have helped the Nazis during their occupation of Greece.

But of course, Nicholas' interest is piqued and he ends up visiting the man, whose name is Maurice Conchis, at Bourani, his massive estate. Conchis begins to tell him the story of his life, and asks Nicholas to return and stay with him each weekend. But after a while strange things begin to happen--mysterious figures appear, seeming illustrations of the stories that Conchis tells. No sooner does Conchis tell him about his childhood sweetheart who died decades ago than Nicholas, lulled out of the guestroom at night by the sound of music, comes downstairs to find Conchis playing piano accompanied by a young girl on recorder, the spitting image of his long-dead lover. It is all a game, of course, but the underlying lesson is always just out of Nicholas' grasp. It is as if he is trapped in a grotesque performance, a masque, and it can be truly bizarre. Here he is walking down on the beach with the girl, whose name is Lily, and looking back toward the house:

A figure appeared on the terrace, not fifty feet away, facing and above me. It was Lily. It couldn't be her, but it was her. The same hair blew about in the wind; the dress, the sunshade, the figure, the face, everything was the same. She was staring out to sea, over my head, totally ignoring me.

It was a wild, dislocating, disactualizing shock. Yet I knew within the first few seconds that although I was obviously meant to believe that this was the same girl as the one I had just left down on the beach, it was not. But it was so like her that it could be only one thing--a twin sister. There were two Lilies in the field. I had no time to think. Another figure appeared beside the Lily on the terrace.

It was a man, much too tall to be Conchis... I couldn't see, becasue the figure was in all black, shrouded in the sun, and wearing the most sinister mask I had ever seen: the head of an enormous black jackal, with a long muzzle and high pointed ears. They stood there, the possessor and the possessed, looming death and the frail maiden.

There are twin sisters; Nicholas sees through that ruse instantly. But what he cannot see through is the next layer of the ruse, and when he does, he is met instantly with the next. Conchis' explanations shift, he readily drops one explanation for another while intimating something completely different; he is playing three or four hands at a time. This is what makes The Magus so fascinating; the game is labyrinthine, circular, impenetrable. So many books and films play with this conceit--one man trapped in the mind-games of another--but their games are so simple and flimsy. But there is no opportunity for Nicholas to gain any sort of understanding of what lies behind the masks; behind the doors there are only more doors. He falls in love with Lily, but which explanation of her identity can he trust? Is she a ghost? An actress? A psychological patient? Or perhaps a psychologist herself? Or maybe, like Conchis, simply a pure sadist?

And truly there must be sadism here. There is no other way to explain just how vicious the game becomes. Nicholas' amusement fades to abject desperation and terror; while the players in the game never pretend that it is anything but, the stakes begin to look increasingly serious. Mental abuse morphs into physical abuse, and Conchis plays one trick that is so savage, so heartbreaking, that it makes the book's final chapters difficult to read. I had to stop myself from writing that the masque "spins out of control," because as dark as it becomes, every move seems preordained by Conchis, and culminates in a surreal tableau that reminds me of Heironymous Bosch, or perhaps the end of The Man Who Was Thursday viewed in negative.

Ultimately, perhaps it was foolish of me to expect such an unwieldy trick to tie itself neatly at the end, and moreover I expect that if Conchis' motivations could be explained away in a pithy sentence, the masque would hardly have been worth it. But the book is so heavily decked in concept, in philosophy and ideas, that I feel as if I, like Nicholas, have come out the other end of the ordeal with very little to show for it. What is it he--and I--are meant to understand? While in a way I am relieved by Fowles' quote above, I consider it also a bit of a copout.

I recall a blog post by my friend Helen that suggested that there can be no humility without humiliation. I wonder if that isn't part of it--Conchis games are, ultimately, quite cruel--but Nicholas in many ways is a puffed-up little shit and treats Alison quite cruelly himself. Nicholas comes out of the ordeal a different person, a better person; he has been broken and remade. But what of his anger, which is surely justified? Once the anger is gone, as is true in so many cases, there is only sadness, and it is that sadness which is transformative; he cannot be remade if he is not broken and there is no way to break a dish gently.

The greatest flaw of this book is that it succeeds on account of its terrific plot when it wishes to succeed on account of its ideas. But that's hardly damning, isn't it?

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross.

- Milton's Paradise Lost, Book II

The Amber Spyglass is the final book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. He got the name for the trilogy from Paradise Lost, and supposedly the three books are influenced by Milton's classic work. I can't comment on that aspect since I have not read Paradise Lost. However, quite often this book put me in mind of The Inferno by Dante Alighieri.

The story picks up right where The Subtle Knife left us, in cliffhanger fashion. Lyra has been kidnapped and Will is trying to find her. For the most part it closely follows Lyra and her friend Will, two tweens on a multifaceted quest that changes drastically throughout the course of the book.

The plot of this book is much more complex than that of the first two. However, while the story is complex, it is also very clear. Not only does Pullman write clearly, but he also writes well. For example:
"She took a deep shuddering breath. She pressed her hands and legs against the rough planks of the platform, and having a minute ago nearly gone mad with fear, she was now suffused with a deep, slow ecstasy at being one with her body and the earth and everything that was matter."
As with the first two books, Pullman does an excellent job with battle scenes.

Although Pullman is a somewhat vociferous atheist, this trilogy focuses heavily on religious themes such as God, hell, and the afterlife. Granted, he has his own unique take on these themes. Also, Pullman often makes biblical allusions with his choice of words, and in a few instances he uses specific biblical characters, like when we find out that Metatron, an angel, is Enoch from Genesis.

I had some questions while reading the first two books -- things that appeared to be minor plot holes -- but Pullman was able to clear those up in this final book. More importantly, Pullman managed to end the series well.

I loved all three of these books. They were well-written, incredibly original stories.

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

The Golden Compass closely followed Lyra Belacqua. I don't think there were any chapters in which she did not appear, if there were, they were few and far between. The Subtle Knife, the second book in the trilogy, does not follow suit. It opens with a fairly lengthy chapter about a young boy named Will Parry, whose mother has some serious cognitive disabilities that require him to look after her. His father, although alive, is not in the picture. It is not clear what happened to him. Will gets an elderly neighbor to watch his mom for a few days, because he "has something to do". Upon returning to his empty house, he is attacked by to men, one of whom he unwittingly kills. As he is on the run, he notices a cat acting weird and then leaping forward and simply disappearing. He approached the area where the cat was, and realizes something is not right. He steps forward, through a "window" into another world.

At the end of The Golden Compass, Lord Asriel -- whom Lyra discovers is her father -- has opened up a "bridge" between worlds. The idea is that there are many worlds that inhabit the same space -- Earth. While there are similarities among these worlds, they have major differences as well.

Will and Lyra meet in a world that is strange to the both of them, in a town called Cittagaze, a town that appears to be inhabited solely by children. It turns out that the adults have fled the town because of specters that suck the souls out of adults, but pass right over children. Lyra starts to notice some connectivity between her world, this one, and Will's. Her daemon, Pantalaimon, is comparable to what Will would describe as his soul or conscience. The elusive dust, which played such a big part in the first book, closely resembles original sin. Lyra comes to the realization that she must help Will find his father, an arctic explorer who inexplicably disappeared with his group a few years back.

The subtle knife turns out to be a implement that allows one to cut windows into other worlds. However, it chooses its owner in a rather gruesome way. The knife chooses Will, and along with Lyra they set out to find his father. My question is, if there are countless "worlds" on Earth, what controls what world one cuts into? This is never really explained, as Will and Lyra seem to stay within three or four worlds throughout the book.

Compared to the first book, this one is complex. There are many more characters, and the plot is much more complicated. Everyone always says that the Harry Potter series gets more grown-up with each book. This may be true, but the His Dark Materials trilogy easily trumps the Rowling series in this aspect. Will spends the better part of the book bleeding profusely. People die left and right, including principle characters. There is a noticeable degree of sexual tension between Lyra and Will. And it becomes apparent about halfway through the book that many of the main characters are attempting to wage a war against God himself -- referred to as The Authority. It is not clear which side of this battle Will and Lyra will fall on, but I suspect that they will join those fighting The Authority. I find this concept interesting, and rather crazy for a children's novel. I have heard that the next book, The Amber Spyglass is even darker, weirder, and more complex. I am really curious whether Pullman can finished this series in an effective and satisfying way.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

I was looking forward to seeing the big-screen adaptation of this book; you might even say that I was excited. I liked the visuals that I saw. It had a good cast. It had talking, armored polar bears. It was co-written and directed by Chris Weitz. What could go wrong? Apparently everything. The movie was a startling disappointment.

The main problem with the movie was that it felt cobbled together. It jumped from scene to scene, with very static, utilitarian dialogue. This was odd, because I would describe Chris Weitz as a good writer. The movie just barely made sense, giving the impression that it had been heavily edited. Supposedly this was the case. Whether to quell the cries of conservative watchdog groups that were calling for a boycott of the movie, claiming it was anti-religion and even anti-God – something that simply does not come across in the film – or because they thought that it needed to be punched up, or because of any number of reasons the studio stepped in, chopped the film to pieces, and shoved it back together again.

I knew the books had to be better. The overall premise of the story was intriguing. In an alternate universe much like our own, people’s souls are outside their bodies, in the form of animals. (The explanation and depiction of this in the movie was incredibly piss poor.) The book opens with Lyra Belacqua, an orphan who was deposited at Jordan College after her parents died. The college has no means in place to train a small child, but Lyra gets a cursory education from the various scholars that grace the campus.

When a mysterious socialite shows up at the college, Lyra is intrigued. She is more than happy to accompany this lady to the North. But not long into the trip, Lyra realizes that things are not as they appeared. She becomes involved in a plot, involving warring polar bears, skyships (think Teddy Ruxpin but less colorful), and the Aurora, or what we here in our universe would call the aurora borealis or northern lights. (Incidentally, this book was first released under the name Northern Lights in England. They must have assumed that U.S. kids would be uninterested in one of the most amazing natural phenomena that our world has to offer...but how about a shiny piece of metal?) Lyra is guided along her journey with the help of a compass of sorts that she alone appears to be able to read.

Philip Pullman does an excellent job of progressing the plot. It moves at a quick pace, with surprise and danger always waiting in the wings. His writing is fluid, and he does a good job with dialogue, especially with capturing the differences between the ways children and adults speak. His description of battles were great, unlike the battles in the movie, which were quite boring, and resorted to standard film tropes, like deus ex machinas, which were not in the book.

At the beginning of the book, Pullman explains that this story is set in a universe like ours, but different in many ways. The way that this is played out in the book is rather bizarre. Lyra lives in Oxford, England. They refer to the 17th century, and wine from 1898, so they appear to be using the Gregorian calendar. The United States does not appear to exist, but one of the characters is described as coming from the nation of Texas. This character mentions sending money back to the Wells Fargo Bank. There are countries and ethnic groups that don’t exist in our universe. It is rather odd. I hope Pullman has an interesting explanation for these crossovers from our universe to this one. I wonder if his explanation will be similar to the view espouse in the "documentary" about spirituality and quantum physics, What the Bleep Do We Know?. I suspect it will be.

The Golden Compass is the first book of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I plan on reading the next before too long. Now that I am familiar with the material they had to work with, I can't believe how crappy the film was.

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman

If someone had told me that Einstein’s Dreams is a book about the various ways one could consider time, whose main character is a fictionalized Albert Einstein, I probably would not have picked up the book. If I had known it was written by a physics professor from MIT, it might have even been intimidating. Luckily, I stumbled across it with only an hour’s worth of free time to kill and saw that it was just small enough to read in one sitting.

For readers who require a considerable plot, dialogue, suspense, or characters that one can become emotionally invested in, this book would not be pleasing. Einstein’s Dreams is more geared toward the bullheaded, inquisitive reader. The way that the book is set up does not allow you to know much about any one character. It comes in sections: a prologue, a considerable number of chapters about time interrupted with three interludes about Lightman’s version of Einstein himself, and an epilogue.

The bits about time are roughly three to five page chapters, each dealing with a What If question…What if you could travel back through time? What if you could only live for one day? What if you knew the exact day the world was going to end? (Maybe we should keep that one in mind for 2012.) The result is creative and intelligent approaches to the same kinds of questions your younger siblings have probably pestered you with. When Lightman plays out these scenarios, the characters all change, with the exceptions being a chemist who works for a pharmaceuticals company and his wife. Both characters are unnamed throughout the novel. The setting remains the same, however, being Berne, Switzerland. All of these mini-stories are meant to be the dreams Einstein is having while he works on his theory of relativity.

The chapters about Einstein don’t give much away about his personal life. This was nice, however, because the less Lightman wrote about Einstein, the less he could potentially misinform the reader. What we do know from this book is historically sound: He worked at a patent office. He was married to a woman named Mileva. He maintained a close friendship with Michele Besso who was also a co-worker.

The style of writing is light and whimsical, not at all what I would have expected from someone who also wrote Great Ideas in Physics. It was an enjoyable read for the most part—but after I read past the halfway point the book got a bit monotonous and dull. Is it fair to recommend the first fifteen chapters of a book and not the rest? Either way, whether you are a person that runs on bodily time or a person that runs on mechanical time, there’s something in this novel for you.

The chapter entitled “3 May 1905” was the one that won me over, where Lightman theorizes on what life would be like if everyone was forced to live in the moment: “It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.”

While this may not be a book that teaches the reader anything scientific, it is surely a book that encourages the reader to rethink the way they live their life.

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

I am quite thankful to be done with this maddening, suffocating, revolting book. I only finished it because I had to read it for a class, and if I hadn't vowed to read fifty books I probably wouldn't have read the whole thing then, either. Here is the plot as best as it can be described: A massive and maniacal person known only as the Dog-Woman fishes a baby out of the Thames and names it Jordan. They live through the rule of Cromwell and Jordan imagines some really dumb crap and tries to pass it off as a narrative. At the end, there is a hastily tacked-on epilogue which tries to introduce a couple of new modern characters and convince us that they are the reincarnations of Jordan and the Dog-Woman, and that that is somehow interesting or innovative.

The whole thing is full of metaphors beat senselessly into the ground:

He called me Jess because that is the name of the hood which restrains the falcon.

Palpable anti-male bias:

5. Men deem themselves weighty and women light. Therefore it is simple to tie a stone round their necks and drown them should they become too troublesome.

6. Men are best left in groups by themselves where they will entirely wear themselves out in drunkenness and competition. While this is taking place a woman may carry on with her own life unhindered.

And a whole bunch of forced images and vignettes that have no connection to any plotline whatsoever, and are only justified through the use of tired and half-baked metaphysical garbage:

OBJECTS 1: A woman looks into her bag and recognizes none of her belongings. She hurries home. But where is home? She follows the address written in her purse. She has never seen this house before and who are those ugly children wrecking the garden? Inside a fat man is waiting for his supper. She shoots him. At the trial she says she had never seen him before. He was her husband.

Winterson is insulting me by placing that last line there; I knew it was her husband. Read the whole thing again but leave off the last line--isn't that much better? Writers like Winterson spend so much time being clever that they come off as if they think they are much more clever than you. And then there's the recycled time is not linear ideas, the liberal self-righteousness, the flat characters, the Faulkner-lite trading off of point of view. This book prides itself on being about ideas, but if these ideas didn't get worn out in the twentieth century, surely Winterson has killed them.

Do not read this book.

The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

I am going to give away the big sort-of secret in this book, because I believe that it is a.) crucial to explaining the plot, and b.) quite obvious, quite early.

The Man Who Was Thursday is about a man named Gabriel Syme, who is a poet recruited by the London police into an undercover unit designed to combat intellectual threats to the government, specifically "anarchists," by which Chesterton means not quite what we would mean, but a wide-ranging group of intellectuals whose ideologies are closest to nihilism. Through Syme's cleverness, he successfully masquerades as an anarchist and is elected to the worldwide council of anarchists, of which there are seven, each named after a day of the week. Syme is Thursday, and the group is led by the intimidating and mysterious Sunday. If you think the fact that anarchists have an organization is funny, well, that's the sort of humor you're getting with this book.

Thing is, as the book develops, you find out one by one that all six of the "Sabbatarians," excluding Sunday, are policemen in the same unit tracking each other. I think that's a really funny twist, and it's certainly a funny book. When Syme's fellow anarchists explain why the former Thursday must be replaced, this is what they say:

As you know, his death was as self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a hygenic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and involving cruelty to the cow.

These sorts of nihilistic and existentialist philosophies are the butt of Thursday's extended joke. Chesterton "claimed afterwards that he wrote this book as an unusual affirmation that goodness and right were at the heart of every aspect of the world," according to Wikipedia--at the heart of the book is an affirmation of the great order of God that rules over chaos. "Chaos is dull," Syme says, trying to argue with an anarchist and fellow poet that order and lawfulness are the most poetic things in the universe.

This book is only around 150 pages, but it's packed very tightly with a lot of ideas. Despite its philosophizing, its humor makes much of it a very light book, and some of the more "adventurous" scenes would make an awfully good film--there's even a car chase. But the book's final chapters, in which Syme seems to exit the reality of London and enter the fantastic and surreal world of Sunday's grand estate, and where the book's overt Christian themes are the most evident, that are the most impressive.

I would like to film this book, casting Cary Elwes as Gabriel Syme. If you are a movie producer, please e-mail me.