The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Book #26 of 2022:

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

I would not call this experimental novel from 2004 a stone-cold classic, but it’s a surprisingly readable tome with an interesting structure of six nested narratives, each of which is reasonably compelling in its own right while offering thematic parallels forward and backwards in time to the others. The entire work is rendered symmetrically, so that we enter a successive sequence of framing devices and then ultimately exit them in the reverse order, revisiting and concluding the earlier concerns.

The story begins as the nineteenth-century journal of an American notary on a naval voyage from New Zealand to Hawaii, describing his odd illness and the racism he’s encountering, only to suddenly cut off mid-sentence. In the next section, letters from a flamboyant English composer to his friend and lover back home detail his amusing experiences aiding / cuckolding an older musician in 1930s Belgium, and include his disappointment that the engrossing travelogue he’s discovered is torn and incomplete. His tale then too stops abruptly at a moment of unresolved tension, whereupon the book turns into a 1970s conspiracy thriller featuring the recipient of those missives, who has kept them into his old age as a whistleblower about unsafe nuclear power.

And so on. When the reporter at the heart of that third plot is attacked and seemingly killed, we jump to a contemporary editor who has received a manuscript submission novelizing it. He winds up involuntarily committed to a nursing home with an abusive staff, and is reviewing the document and plotting an escape when he has a sudden stroke. We next visit a dystopian future Korea where a clone has been fighting for her kind’s rights and remembers watching a movie based on the previous protagonist’s institutionalization, one of the few pieces of media to survive from our time to hers. Finally, the title arrives at a post-apocalyptic Hawaiian society whose agrarian inhabitants worship the memory of that lady as a goddess and where, despite much knowledge of technology being lost, the holo-recorded interview between her and her government interrogator that made up the prior chapter is still preserved.

And then back out again: the end of the recording, then of the part of the resident’s memoir the woman didn’t get to see adapted, then of the novella about the journalist he resumes reading, then of the further batch of old letters she is delivered after breaking her coverage of the scandal, then of the final diary pages that the dandy mentions he has eventually managed to find. Phew!

It’s a tough aggregate to summarize more succinctly than that, but it’s not particularly challenging or confusing to read. (I understand that the 2012 film adaptation from the Wachowskis, which reuses the same cast from era to era and cuts back and forth so that they all unfold over the length of the picture, is as a result far more mindbending yet perhaps less effective.) The project is so strange that it somewhat defies critique, although I’m not always satisfied with the metatextual links across the six divisions and think that the vague suggestion of reincarnation could have been explored at a deeper level. But I do like each item independently — to an admittedly varying degree — and I can see the benefit of presenting them together, so that recurrent human ailments like slavery, intolerance, and exploitation can be highlighted as perpetual problems for every generation to overcome. The overall message does seem to be that we share a common humanity throughout time and space, and there’s a definite beauty in witnessing some of its permutations here.

[Content warning for racial slurs, sexism, antisemitism, transphobia, homophobia, torture, gore, near-drowning, gun violence, suicide, eugenics, cannibalism, and rape.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi

Book #25 of 2022:

The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi (The Gilded Wolves #1)

This YA fantasy novel reads as a blend of National Treasure with Six of Crows, which is not a combination that entirely works for me. (I’m not using that latter title as a shorthand for any heist story, either: this is specifically a book with a gang of teenage master criminals, featuring a central M/F romance of long-time allies ignoring their mutual pining, a side M/M love interest involving the newcomer to the group, and a diverse yet somewhat tokenized cast, none of whom appears to hold any meaningful ties to anyone else from their respective racial or cultural backgrounds.)

It’s a competent plot, give or take the sometimes-goofy ancient traps and puzzles and the weird ultimate villain motivation, but I wish it all felt more distinctive. The characters have occasional depths, but the alternate-history nineteenth-century worldbuilding never really develops a strong identity for itself, and the magic system seems likewise cobbled-together and not too rigorously defined. I’m interested enough by how this debut volume ends to check out the sequel, but I can’t say it’s a series that’s earned a place in my heart just yet.

[Content warning for antisemitism, racism, domestic abuse, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie

Book #24 of 2022:

The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #27)

The loose thread linking the twelve detective stories in this collection is that Hercule Poirot is planning to retire, but first wants to solve a sequence of grand cases mirroring the legendary feats of his namesake, the Greco-Roman demigod Hercules. Honestly, though, that’s largely a distraction, especially as most of the tasks that ensue represent fairly strained parallels at best. (Is convincing a town to stop gossiping about a widower they suspect of murder akin to successfully cutting off all the heads of the mythical Hydra? Sure, kind of, maybe. Is cracking a ring of dognappers like wrestling the Nemean Lion? That’s significantly harder to justify.)

Outside of the odd framing device and the fact that we know the investigator is not truly giving up his practice anytime soon, these tales fluctuate between just okay and pretty good. Of course, as ever with author Agatha Christie’s short fiction, it tends to be a bit easier to figure out the solutions yourself than in her full-length novels — look for proof that people really are who they say they are and you’re often halfway there already. But it’s a solid entry overall, and not one to miss as you work your way through the series.

[Content warning for antisemitism, sexism, racism including slurs, gun violence, suicide, drug abuse, and gaslighting.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

Movie #6 of 2022:

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

A solid yet ultimately unambitious Star Trek vehicle, with a title and premise that sound more exciting that what’s actually delivered. Theoretically speaking, this is a story about the Federation trying to force an indigenous(-ish) species off of their planet, so that its unique properties that keep the inhabitants perpetually rejuvenated at the height of their physical prime can be studied, extracted, and used for medical treatments throughout the galaxy. That’s an idea with some bite to it, setting up questions of the greater good, the collateral damage of empire, and the hypocrisy of the Prime Directive. Unfortunately, it never really goes anywhere, and the script plays out not as Captain Picard launching an ethical revolt against the might of his government but rather as a squabble concerning one single corrupt superior officer and his underlings and shady allies. (The vice admiral has supposedly been given approval for his actions from higher up, but he still tries to conceal what he’s doing from our protagonists and then stop them from communicating what they learn.)

The TNG crew eventually save the day, after some variably-charming character work involving the local atmosphere’s effect on everyone. (Good: Troi and Riker rekindling their old relationship and shaving off his beard. Bad: Warf reverting to a Klingon puberty of pimples, oversleeping, and mood swings. Weird: repeated dialogue about people’s aging body parts firming back up again.) Once the villains are defeated, there’s no real resolution to the question of how this delicate diplomatic situation will be handled going forward, or any apparent impact on the wider continuity from the discovery of a verified fountain of youth.

In the meantime, there’s a lot of human-looking aliens running across a California-looking landscape, enemy drones that hilariously just teleport their victims away instead of posing a legitimately deadly threat, a perfunctory twist about the one other faction in the film, an odd early fakeout regarding Data malfunctioning, and a shoehorned romance and requisite action hero sequence for Jean-Luc. It’s all largely fine, but not especially memorable.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Fatal Revenant by Stephen R. Donaldson

Book #23 of 2022:

Fatal Revenant by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #2)

This sequel is rather cleanly bifurcated by a development midway through, and although both of the resulting sections have their strengths, I think the opening is more successful than the close. (Call it a five-star passage followed by a four, for a four-star rating overall.) The shift in gears is slightly disappointing, but the novel as a whole is decidedly action-packed compared to its predecessor, while still rich in the dense worldbuilding and thematic complexities that make this series so rewarding.

And that environment is on full display at the start, as Linden Avery travels back into the history of the Land, finding herself ten-thousand years earlier in the era of Berek Heartthew, the founder of the original dynasty of Lords who was already a figure of ancient legend when her companion Thomas Covenant first traveled to this realm. As the eighth volume in an epic fantasy saga, this title arrives with a wealth of built-up backstory, and it is an unexpected thrill to suddenly be placed in the midst of those olden days alongside our familiar protagonist. People like Berek and beings like the Viles whose names have long been known to us as distant fables are now brought vividly to life, and the new Ringthane rises to their stature as she faces the dire challenges of that time. With gritted tenacity of purpose, she proves her capabilities and earns greater insights of lore and power that only those denizens of the past could teach her.

In this struggle, she is accompanied by Covenant himself, but a Covenant who feels achingly off from the man she remembers loving — and whom she has previously seen die. He is bitter and cruel, and although she initially cannot account for the alteration she detects in his spirit, a major element of this portion of the text sees the doctor growing to trust her own impressions over his callous explanations and constant belittlement of her, before finally forcing the issue into an open confrontation and devastating reveal. It’s a subplot that works on several levels, but I especially see it as a metaphorical treatment of any partner who realizes a once-healthy relationship has turned abusive and must learn to recognize a tormentor in the guise of someone yet beloved. Or in the words of this series: the only way to hurt a person who’s lost everything is to give them back something broken.

(When I hear fans of the first two Chronicles say that they don’t like this last one, I can’t help but wonder if there is some degree of sexism to blame: in discounting Linden’s hard-fought achievements in order to dismiss her as a ‘Mary Sue,’ in refusing to accept her as a protagonist worthy of the Unbeliever’s old role at the heart of the narrative, and in rejecting a tale that frames him as a potential antagonist in her eyes, even temporarily. If any of those touch on your personal reaction to this quartet, it might be worthwhile to sit and reflect on that further.)

After the Chosen has returned to the present, the latter half of the plot finds her juggling the whirling assortment of factions and individuals of conflicting motivations that populate this moment. As she weighs the daunting costs of offered alliances, makes intuitive leaps from the scant information she’s able to wrest, and seeks ways of pitting adversaries against one another for a minimum of casualties, the book develops a feeling of courtly intrigue, somewhat akin to author Stephen R. Donaldson’s previous Mordant’s Need duology. Meanwhile, the character and her friends are on the move once more — this time to the Hills of Andelain, a place of potency where the darkness of annealed intention within her could wreak terrors or wonders, befitting the old prophecy that the white gold wielder will either doom or save the world. Again the question is raised: can this antiheroine be trusted? And can good ever be accomplished by evil means?

Along the way, we learn of the existence of the Insequent, a loose confederation of sorcerers with apparently extensive roots in the Land, though we’ve never met any before, at least under that name. Their shoehorned appearance here is a bit of a retcon, but it opens up enough storytelling avenues that I can mostly quiet my grumbling on that point. Each member of this group has a distinct theurgy and objective of study, and they too can be friend or foe depending on the circumstances at hand. If nothing else, these folk offer a reminder of the secrets that remain hidden across this setting, with the ability to produce additional complications as we approach the grand conclusion ahead.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Voyager, season 3

TV #8 of 2022:

Star Trek: Voyager, season 3

Overall, this third year of Star Trek’s Lost in Space riff displays the same weaknesses as before. Few of its episodes are terribly awful — and I’d even grant that none are as bad as some of the clunkers from season 2 — but they still tend to offer passably generic science-fiction, rather than much that feels quintessential to this particular starship crew and their unique circumstances stranded far from home. Multiple hours hinge on that tired trope of a holodeck malfunction, for instance, or encounters with one-off species that don’t add up to any coherent worldbuilding which might set the Delta Quadrant apart. For most of this runtime, the only significant addition is the introduction of a Polynesian resort as a holo-setting where people can hang out off-duty, in this show’s version of Ten Forward from TNG or Quark’s bar from DS9.

Nevertheless, I’m hopeful about the future for this series. A few late installments here like “Distant Origin” and especially “Before and After” represent a noticeable improvement, as does the plot development of Voyager finally reaching Borg territory in the finale. And while I am not particularly invested in the Paris / B’Elanna romance that appears to be blooming, I appreciate any signs of that sort of serialized character arc, which we haven’t really had on this program since the Seska subplot came to an end. I’m yet to be wholly dazzled, but I will readily call this the best season so far and hope it’s a sign of even stronger material ahead.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Mutation by K. A. Applegate

Book #22 of 2022:

The Mutation by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #36)

Another somewhat-middling Animorphs adventure, this time by one-off ghostwriter Erica Bobone. The initial premise is fine: the Yeerks are apparently still searching for the sunken Pemalite craft from #27 The Exposed, and have built an advanced heavy-duty submarine that the heroes decide they need to take down. Halfway through the book, however, as the teens are desperately trying to dodge the vessel’s weapons and ram it with their new orca morphs, their target is suddenly hijacked by a group of strange beings… who turn out to be mutated fish-people living in a cavern deep under the sea.

It’s one of those goofy developments that this franchise regularly fits in around all the child-soldier trauma, but this one feels less motivated than usual. At this point in the series, we know that the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life, that time-travel is possible, that morphing technology is unpredictable, and so on. Any plot springing from one of those directions, like a new species visiting earth, seems reasonable enough. But amphibious descendants of Atlantis, who have spent centuries seizing / causing shipwrecks, extracting DNA from their captives, and planning to wage war on us surface-dwellers? That’s a bit tougher to suspend disbelief and accept, and the story would have to work that much harder in order to sell it. In this case, I don’t think it entirely succeeds, especially with a dramatic climax involving the kids teaming up with their enemy Visser Three to escape the Nartec clutches.

I wouldn’t call this title a complete mishap. The challenges are distinctive, and the taxidermied victims left standing in their beached ships make for some effectively creepy set dressing. If nothing else, the novel gives us Jake’s amazing line, <Interesting morph, Visser. Does it work underwater?> as he floods the command bridge they’ve been sharing. (Rachel’s earlier wry comment to Tobias after he’s rescued them, <I hate it when you don’t get taken prisoner with us,> is also a delight.) But it’s hard to square this outing with the team’s typical concerns, or this version of their arch-foe with the one who generally tries to murder them on sight. And there’s not much thematic depth to the material besides a few gestures at the narrator still grappling with his role as leader, long after he seemed to have settled into that.

Ultimately, I guess it’s not the worst of the lot, but it sure is a far cry from the best.

[Content warning for body horror, gore, near-drowning, medical experimentation, and implied threat of rape.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Evershore by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson

Book #21 of 2022:

Evershore by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson (Skyward Flight #3)

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with the first author.]

This final (?) Skyward novella feels like the most perfunctory of the lot, the entry whose events would be easiest to summarize in a sentence or two for any readers who skip over it while reading the novels in the main series. Essentially: Jorgen visits the Kitsen homeworld (of the delightful full name Den of Everlasting Light Which Laps Gently upon the Shores of Time, which the humans insist on shortening for some reason) and learns how to project the telekinetic ‘mindblades’ we’ve seen other characters use before, later earning a military promotion to celebrate his new powers and his bravery. Because this adventure takes place after the book Cytonic, the protagonist is also dealing with some personal fallout of developments there, and I’m glad that co-writers Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson take his mental health seriously by showing his struggle to process and talk about things. But I’m not sure this needed to be an entire story even of this shorter length, rather than just a few chapters elsewhere.

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall novella series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2 > 3

TV Review: The Book of Boba Fett, season 1

TV #7 of 2022:

The Book of Boba Fett, season 1

This spinoff title coasts by on the lingering coolness of a live-action Star Wars show and the fun of revisiting the aftermath of Jabba the Hutt’s death from Return of the Jedi, but it’s a substantial step down in quality from its parent series The Mandalorian. The weakness primarily rests with the protagonist: Boba Fett has a lengthy history in this franchise, but he’s generally been somewhat ill-defined beyond his armored aesthetic, at least as an adult (former) bounty hunter. To place him at the heart of a story, we need to have a clearer sense of what he wants and why he wants it, and that’s something that stays murky for far too long. He’s also revealed as a frustratingly poor strategist, repeatedly taking strangers at their word and having to be reminded when he’s low on soldiers that money can be used to recruit mercenaries.

I believe the idea is to pit a man of honor against a world of sin, to make a thematic statement about earned loyalty versus rule by fear and treachery. In this analysis, the new daimyo of Tatooine is meant to function as a Ned Stark figure, and the season aims to pass judgment on the worth of such nobility. The problem is, that’s a sentiment that’s only vaguely gestured at throughout, and the various betrayals across this run are weightless because we aren’t given the opportunity to know the characters behind them at all. Instead, the hero just seems weak for naively trusting hardened criminals in his circumstances. And while that can feel like a purposeful tragic flaw on a program with the strengths of early Game of Thrones, it reads as yet another inconsistency in the writing here.

The plot structure is wonky, too. We initially spend time bouncing between the present of Boba Fett trying to establish and defend his claimed authority over Jabba’s collapsed empire — which now appears to consist of nothing but a loose protection racket and an effort to stop the flow of drugs — and the past, when he was taken in by a tribe of Tusken Raiders after escaping from the Sarlacc Pit. That flashback sequence is a dull Dances with Wolves routine, a paint-by-numbers tale of the outsider gradually being welcomed into the group’s customs, learning wisdom and combat skills that will benefit him in the future once he’s left them behind. It’s not an exact case of the old Mighty Whitey trope, since lead actor Temuera Morrison is Maori and the masked sand people are aliens rather than visible members of a human minority, but it certainly has that racialized undertone to it.

Later, our star disappears for almost two full episodes — out of merely seven total — in favor of fan favorites Mando and Grogu from the previous show. I think it’s neat for Star Wars to adopt a Marvel approach of having people from one corner of the shared continuity pop up unexpectedly in another, but it needs to be done more smoothly than this, so that viewers who skipped the former don’t feel lost and the story at hand doesn’t get forgotten. (The late appearance of a recurring animated villain making his live-action debut is a great example of how to do this thing well, synthesizing him into events without alienating anyone unfamiliar.) As is, any audience watching The Book of Boba Fett alone will be thrown by the sudden departure, and any Mandalorian fans who neglect this one will miss out on key developments they’d likely care about. It’s a frustrating way to build a cinematic universe of theoretically-discrete titles, and given the characterization issues of this piece, it’s hard not to wonder if devoting that runtime to further fleshing out the nominal hero could have helped.

All in all, this is not a bad series. The action scenes are consistently entertaining, and it remains a joy to see new big-budget Star Wars content delivered on a weekly basis like this, especially with two actors of color leading the cast. But there’s no particular depth or resonance to the material, in stark contrast to what the best of this franchise can offer.

[Content warning for gun violence and genocide.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Boy Who Lost His Birthday: A Memoir of Loss, Survival, and Triumph by Laszlo Berkowits with Robert W. Kenny

Book #20 of 2022:

The Boy Who Lost His Birthday: A Memoir of Loss, Survival, and Triumph by Laszlo Berkowits with Robert W. Kenny

[Disclaimer: Although I did not meet him until 2016 and never knew him especially well, I am a member of the temple where Laszlo Berkowits served as Rabbi Emeritus until his death in 2020. He was a comforting presence and his memory remains a blessing.]

Nearly eight decades after the Holocaust, with denialism and other forms of antisemitism again on the rise, it is imperative for the world to listen to survivors and the testimony they have left behind. In this 2008 memoir, author Laszlo Berkowits relates his own experience as a Jewish teen in 1940s Hungary, presenting a snapshot of his vanished pre-war community and his time in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi concentration camps. Imprisoned there simply for being a Jew, he faced brutal dehumanization, verbal and physical abuse, starvation, exposure to the elements, the murder of relatives and friends, and the acute psychological torture of never knowing when another round of executions was to begin or whether he’d be selected for it.

If you’ve never heard such torments described firsthand, then you really should, either from this source or from another. Even for readers familiar with other accounts of the regime’s atrocities, the future rabbi’s ordeal was uniquely his own, and there is value in adding its specificity to your understanding of the German extermination program. Young Laszlo bonded closely with two boys from his hometown in the camps, for example, recognizing that their friendship was a fount of strength that nevertheless wouldn’t drain him emotionally the way constantly seeing and worrying about his father several barracks away would have done. When the older man was removed suddenly on a work assignment and did not return, his son realized that he must have died but had no way of determining exactly where or when.

All told, it’s an unfathomably harrowing affair, in which the writer avoided death by sheer chance on multiple occasions, as when a guard happened to pick the boy standing next to him to shoot or looked away for just long enough for Laszlo and his friends to sneak from the shorter and weaker group in which they’d been sorted and hide among the taller prisoners, correctly intuiting that the former were soon to face the gas chambers. When the camp was finally liberated and Berkowits was emigrating to America, he discovered that he no longer remembered the date of his own birthday, and had no remaining family left to ask.

At under 100 pages, this book is a bit thin, and there’s certainly much more that could have been shared about the rabbi’s long years and life’s work following the war. It’s not the smoothest text either, with diction that’s occasionally stilted and repetitive, as is often the case for older non-native speakers. But it’s a heartbreaking narrative in a genre of nonfiction that deserves to be more widely-read, if we are truly going to live up to the ideal of Never Again letting injustice to a minority population reach such a horrifying stage.

★★★★☆