The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie

Book #95 of 2022:

They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie

This novel can’t decide whether it wants to be a spy thriller or a farce, two impulses which develop at cross purposes in my opinion. It’s very coincidence-heavy and full of frustrating implausibilities, beginning with the plucky heroine who falls in love with a man after a single conversation and decides to make her way from England to Iraq to find him again without even knowing his last name, inevitably getting wrapped up in espionage shenanigans in the process. Elsewhere, a secret agent running for his life enters a room in disguise and recognizes an old classmate, whom he’s able to alert via tapping out a message in Morse code under the nose of the enemy operative there seeking him (who apparently missed that particular day of lessons).

It’s all a bit of a lark, with nonsensical plot twists making it hard to invest in any angle of the story. And while author Agatha Christie avoids the overt antisemitism found in some of her other works, such prejudice still feels implied in her characterization of the villainous group here, a shadowy cabal pulling strings to manipulate capitalists and communists into fighting one another and who are described as non-Christian “antichrists” of no national allegiance. Even taken at face value as mere sinister goofiness, the premise is too absurd to accept as drama yet too contrived to be read effectively as comedy instead.

[Content warning for gun violence and racism.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Deception by K. A. Applegate

Book #94 of 2022:

The Deception by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #46)

We’re in the Animorphs endgame now, as is perhaps best indicated by the numbering convention breaking down. For the first forty-five novels of the main series, the narrators followed a predictable loop, with Jake at the start of each cycle telling stories #1, 6, 11, 16, 21, 26, 31, 36, and 41. But here at the top of the next go-round, we have Ax, who has previously only led books ending in 8. It’s mayhem!

Well, okay, maybe not really. But it does speak to how the franchise is approaching its conclusion, unwilling to put out a disposable Cassie-goes-to-Australia sort of episode just because of the current position in the lineup. The scenario in the present adventure needs to follow directly from the events in #45 The Revelation, and it has to involve Aximili as the focal character. Ergo, he gets to anchor the title.

Understandably, it’s a pretty continuity-heavy outing. The archvillain Visser Three has been promoted to Visser One, placing him in charge of earth’s invasion, which he has always wanted to enact via outright warfare rather than the stealthy approach favored by his predecessor. Our heroes catch wind of his plans on their new ansible — sorry, long-range zero-space communicator — shortly after speaking with Andalite command, who do not immediately accept their report of Yeerk activity and seem unlikely to send the requested reinforcements. For now the Animorphs remain on their own as they face the fanatical Visser Two in the body of a U.S. Navy general, scheming to bring about a nuclear contest with China to weaken humanity on a global scale.

To stop him, the team has to race a thousand miles into the Pacific at a rate no animal morph would be able to achieve, which requires them morphing adult humans and stealing an Air Force jet. This is theoretically another watershed moment for the group, who have long resisted copying other members of their species the way they regularly do for bears and gorillas and the like, but it rings a little hollow since that’s never been a moral objection that makes much sense to me, and it isn’t given any further justification here. In any case, they soon successfully reach their target coordinates and sneak on-board the aircraft carrier they find there, hoping to figure out some way to derail the enemy operation.

Unfortunately, a lot of this feels half-baked to me as well. In order to navigate around the ship, Jake displays an encyclopedic recall of naval hardware specifications that he’s never remotely evidenced before, and the extent of the protagonists’ plan honestly is no more well-thought-out than ‘locate the Yeerks and start trouble.’ Even the visser himself is rather undefined as an antagonist, making his sole appearance in the entire saga with no indication of whether he’s newly-promoted and placed in his host or just empowered by his boss, and he only agrees to stand down at the end because Ax has a nuke he’s threatening to use against the thousands of Yeerks and Controllers at the Yeerk pool. Yet there’s no reason he couldn’t resume his mission as soon as the good guys give up the weapon (as I assume they must, though it happens off-screen — it’s not like ordinary teens can keep a nuclear bomb lying around or like the government wouldn’t hunt after their stolen equipment)!

I complained all the way back in my review for book #9 The Secret that “the dastardly villains simply accept defeat and make no further efforts” towards their current goal, which in that case was merely some illegal logging in the forest. It was already silly enough on that scale, but it’s mindboggling to repeat again later when the stakes involve literal millions of lives and a plot that must have taken months of careful arranging to get all the pieces in place.

But at least it’s a good showcase for the Andalite cadet’s latest ethical dilemma, driving him to make that call of targeting the pool and all the innocent bystanders around it, which even Jake balks at. Ax is forced to strike and incapacitate his ‘prince’ in order to do what he sees must be done, which really emphasizes how rudderless the distrust from his people has made him. And I do like how the armed conflict spills out into the open, with human sailors opposing the alien forces even without the full context behind the attack. It’s another nice late-series note of the kid’s secret war growing less secret by the day, although it’s somewhat spoiled by Ax’s absurdly out-of-character patriotism towards the American military, at one point using the words “magnificence,” “desecrated,” “noble,” and “valiant” all in the space of a few sentences. (Marco has a gross comment here too, joking of the Navy fighters joining their side that maybe “Rachel told those guys what she really looks like and promised them all dates.” She’s still like 16 at the most; can we not talk about her seducing grown adults, please?)

So it’s not the finest showing of our squad, and ghostwriter Elise Donner probably misses some of the elements that can help kick these stories into a higher gear. But it effectively ratchets the final plot forward once more, which is ultimately all it’s asked to do.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

Movie #10 of 2022:

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

I don’t think this final TNG film is nearly the franchise-killer of its lowly reputation — it’s not even the worst Star Trek movie, frankly — but it’s not really a great time, either. Most of the cast is sidelined, which is fine for an hour of television when someone else might take center stage in the next episode, but less reasonable in a major motion picture like this. So instead of sharing focus among the whole group of familiar heroes, we are centered primarily on Captain Picard and his evil young clone, as played by Tom Hardy in a truly bizarre piece of casting.

Nothing about this villain makes much sense, from his weird medical condition to his stated motivation to the specifics of his plan to the unquestioning acceptance of his rule by the Romulan / Reman people. There’s a gratuitous scene where he and his flunkie telepathically launch a sexual assault against Deanna Troi, for no clear reason except their apparent sadism (and so that the script can later have her retrace that connection and pierce their ship’s shields). And far too many shots of him and Jean-Luc glaring at each other amid all their boring dorm-room philosophizing over questions of nature versus nurture.

The action largely tracks so long as you don’t stop to ask why the characters are doing all this, and the ending achieves some poignancy despite being so heavily copied from The Wrath of Khan. It’s overall a decent place to leave this ensemble, though I wish I had known to wait until after I’d finished Voyager first, given a rather substantial spoiler here for how that series ends. But mostly I’m finding it hard to care strongly one way or another towards this title.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Forever, Interrupted by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Book #93 of 2022:

Forever, Interrupted by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This 2013 debut is the fourth Taylor Jenkins Reid book that I’ve read, and the first one that hasn’t really wowed me. The premise is certainly designed to tug at heartstrings — a young woman is widowed not even two weeks into her marriage — and that section of the story does so effectively, capturing the universality of sudden grief and making it easy to imagine ourselves in the protagonist’s awful situation. But the novel also contains a flashback timeline that alternates with the present chapters to explore how the couple originally fell in love, and I’ve found the characters there to be utterly insipid in their specificities. (She’s a 26-year-old librarian who doesn’t know the meaning of the words “supernova” or “macabre.” He’s a pushy whiner who’s hiding the relationship from his family. They each make a few lightly bigoted remarks, and get married after knowing one another for only six months.)

At least the speedy romance allows the entire plot to unfold over the course of one calendar year, which is a neat little structural flourish. And I do have sympathy for the older version of the heroine, especially in her arc of belatedly meeting and getting to know her mother-in-law. But it’s hard to look past how unlikeable Ben and Elsie are before his death, so although I can see the authorial talents that the writer would hone for subsequent works, I’d have to say they’re in pretty rough form here overall.

[Content warning for disordered eating, racism, fatphobia, and slut-shaming.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

Book #92 of 2022:

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

An underwhelming cross between Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House, in which a recently-married woman finds her new home literally haunted by the malevolent spirit of her husband’s first wife. (The publisher’s blurb compares it to Mexican Gothic too, but that similarity is basically limited to the fact that each title is, well, a gothic horror set in Mexico. They do wildly different things within that loosely common genre tradition.) There are some interesting ideas and scary scenes here, but too much of it feels underbaked to me, from the basic character motivations and reasoning of the villains — both dead and alive — to the handsome and brooding young priest who functions as love interest, exorcist, and secondary narrator.

Can you tell a forbidden romance with someone sworn to celibacy? Of course. But that element has to actually be addressed and worked through, which this novel never gets around to doing. The protagonists are worried about the propriety of being seen together, yet neither struggles with the conflict between their heart and their prior vows. A similar lack of tension exists for the clergyman’s Catholicism against the ‘witch’ magic he’s inherited from his native grandmother. He calls his powers a darkness he has to keep bottled up, but does not question the Christian framing of that notion or ever reach a point where he has to find a way to reconcile the divergent teachings of his heritage.

Ultimately if all you want is a ghost story set soon after the Mexican War of Independence, this book will get you there. But I’ve found it pretty generic and frustratingly developed, especially compared to the masterful Mexican Gothic.

[Content warning for gaslighting, rape, racism, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Voyager, season 4

TV #25 of 2022:

Star Trek: Voyager, season 4

This is far and away the best run of the series yet, partly because the writers have gotten much of the early silliness out of their system as they determine what stories work well for the premise, but mostly because of the introduction of new main character Seven of Nine, a Borg drone soon cut off from the Collective and given a strained position aboard Voyager. Her unique perspective makes her a fascinating addition to the ship, and perhaps the only protagonist besides the EMH to still be meaningfully challenged and grow now that the former Maquis are so settled in their Starfleet roles. Her reluctant mentor-mentee dynamic with Janeway shines a more interesting light on the captain, too.

On the downside: Seven’s other major “relationship” this season involves Harry Kim’s obnoxious crush, and the bits of serialization unrelated to her often feel pretty halfhearted. The departure of original cast member Kes, for example, plays out rather suddenly and without clear ties to any driving motivation outside that particular hour. And although the episodic plotting is generally tightened, there remains a degree of pulpy genre nonsense like body-swapping or Holodeck programs run amok. Even our newest star, though provided some genuinely strong material throughout the year, is sometimes saddled with absurdities like visions of a raven to represent her traumatic past or the infuriating storyline where she mistakenly claims someone has medically abused her — an episode whose ultimate moral is apparently that false assault allegations can ruin an innocent man’s life. It’s gutless and gross, even by 1998 standards.

With those weaknesses in mind, I continue to deem this show at least slightly more good than great overall. It’s improving, and adding Jeri Ryan to the mix is certainly a step in the right direction, but it has yet to completely win me over.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Shelter by Jung Yun

Book #91 of 2022:

Shelter by Jung Yun

Just like author Jung Yun’s second novel O Beautiful, her 2016 debut is an absolutely brutal read, this time beginning with the protagonist’s elderly immigrant parents suffering assault and rape during a terrifying home invasion. In the aftermath, the story explores everyone’s deep layers of trauma, both from that immediate ordeal and from the family’s own abusive past, in which the father would beat the mother and she in turn would become physically violent toward the boy. As an adult, the hero is estranged from them for exactly that reason, along with shame over their wealth versus his near-poverty and anger at their perceived habit of writing checks in lieu of ever apologizing or addressing their actions. And now they are all living together under one roof, bringing the older generation their most sustained degree of interaction yet with their young grandson.

If this title is divisive among readers, I suspect it’s due to frustrations with our main character, a bitter and self-destructive man who seems to make every situation worse. He’s repeatedly swept away by his emotions, leading him to punch walls, break dishes, and even cheat on his wife. Although clearly dealt a lousy set of circumstances, he takes no responsibility for his own choices, and while he has not yet raised a hand to his son, it’s plain that he is losing control of his temper and in dire risk of repeating the cycle of abuse. It’s a powerful and well-wrought study, but I can understand anyone who gives up on it/him in disgust long before the plot’s tensely open-ended conclusion.

[Content warning for alcohol and drug abuse, torture, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Wool by Hugh Howey

Book #90 of 2022:

Wool by Hugh Howey (Silo #1)

This book, the first in the Silo trilogy, is itself made up of five sections, each originally published as a standalone novella: Wool (later renamed Holston), Proper Gauge, Casting Off, The Unraveling, and The Stranded. Of those, the debut is a wicked slice of science-fiction with a fabulous twist ending, but it’s also the only one that I feel actually works in isolation. Although the rest have clear structural breaks between them, they really function more as successive movements within a linked broader piece. That is, while I’ve enjoyed reading these all together, I think I would have been frustrated to receive them independently upon release.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the story, but our setting is a massive underground bunker, over a hundred narrow stories deep, where a population shelters from the post-apocalyptic nightmare of the uninhabitable earth outside. For generations, the only people to exit the silo have been condemned criminals, who are fitted with survival gear to keep them alive just long enough to scrub the cameras that look out on that barren landscape. In fact, even expressing a desire to leave is considered a capital offense — our earliest indication of the authoritarian horror governing this dystopia and the truths that might be suppressed in order to maintain that power.

I like the beginning of this tale better than the end — I’d say part one is stronger than the next two, which are likewise superior to the last couple — but it’s kept my interest throughout, and overall painted a bleakly distinctive vision of humanity’s future. I will likely move on to the second novel (a prequel that has its own three separate component segments, presumably for maximum reader confusion) at some point.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Russian Doll, season 2

TV #24 of 2022:

Russian Doll, season 2

The story of a couple New Yorkers repeatedly dying in a loop of the same birthday party was always going to be a difficult act to follow, and this second season makes the smart choice to keep those characters but totally reinvent the premise. This time, there are subway trains that mysteriously lead back into the past — only as Nadia and Alan soon learn, they are actually inhabiting the bodies of their direct ancestors Quantum Leap-style when boarding. This allows the heroine to see a new side of her mother and grandmother and try to change their family fortunes, while her counterpart is off on a similar adventure a few generations back himself. In a way, it’s honestly a better fit for the title “Russian Doll” than the first year ever was.

As for what else works, the members of this cast still feel sharply written as people, and the dialogue is funny, particularly in that “only in New York” fashion where everyone is half-listening and overlooking one another’s eccentricities including their blabbering about time travel and alternate identities. But the two leads are separated and unevenly balanced in their share of the plot for too long, and the ending ultimately collapses in a confusing and dissatisfying mess. To be fair, I think the writers are trying to say something here about trauma and grief as messy, nonlinear processes, but the trippy execution itself is so muddled and contradictory that it’s hard to especially follow or appreciate.

I’ll come back for round three if Netflix grants creator/star Natasha Lyonne her stated wish to take this program into the future next, but this past edition has been a bit of a letdown compared to the original present one.

[Content warning for Nazi antisemitism, racism, institutionalization, drug abuse, and child endangerment.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Crossing by Michael Connelly

Book #89 of 2022:

The Crossing by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #18)

This is one of the better Harry Bosch titles I’ve read, which makes me particularly excited that it’s reportedly going to be the broad basis for the upcoming second season of Bosch: Legacy, despite how the TV canon has diverged from the novels. As a book, the story succeeds both for presenting an interesting central case and for placing the now-retired LAPD detective in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable set of circumstances, working as an investigator for his defense attorney half-brother. Harry is not only cut off from his usual police resources, but he’s also helping the side of justice he’s opposed for his entire career, resulting in some complicated feelings on that shift as well as a firsthand look at the department’s underhanded tactics against their suspect and the team claiming he’s been framed. It’s a change-up that’s more effective than Mickey’s own brief stint as a prosecutor in The Reversal, and a problem that’s exacerbated when the hero realizes that the actual culprits behind the violent murder at hand are a pair of dirty cops who have already silenced several potential witnesses.

Author Michael Connelly sometimes frames his fiction as mystery, but there’s no obfuscation here; readers know right away “whodunnit,” although we only learn the exact motive for the crime later on as Bosch relentlessly follows a loose thread back to its source. That allows for some dramatic irony of us being ahead of the protagonist for a while, and a general sense of watching a strategic chess match unfold as we bounce between his perspective and that of his adversaries in a torrent of careful moves and countermoves. None of these elements is exactly new for this writer, but they’re perfectly calibrated in this particular exercise and a good check on his occasional instincts towards copaganda.

[Content warning for gun violence, rape, necrophilia, disordered eating, and transphobia including the so-called “gay/trans panic defense.”]

★★★★☆