Culture from the darker side

Neil Gaiman has been one of my favourite writers for quite a few years now. He has the tendency to take reality, tilt it a bit and inject his own reality in it. Not unlike Douglas Adams in his Dirk Gently books.

While in “American Gods” we followed the old an new gods on a conquest to rule the world, in Anansi Boy’s Gaiman went to Jamaica, in a matter of speaking.

We follow the story of “Fat Charlie” who isn’t really fat, but for some reason got stuck with that name on the trip down his families history. As it turns out he not only has a brother he didn’t know about, but his father also turns out to be a God, Anansi.

Then there is his fiance who seems to fall for his brother and his boss who turns out to be a rather bad person in the end and for some reason all of these people seem to be drawn to the same place in the carribean, including a female cop who for some reason likes Fat Charlie although he seems to be a wanted criminal.

The strength of Gaiman’s prose always was the underlying wit that seems to be oozing out of every sentence. He is by far not the only one, it seems to be a trademark of British writers, much like the BBC they are omnipresent and lend some kind of under current to everything they do.

With Anansi Boys Gaiman takes a further step away from his old writings of the Sandman series but a clear step ahead from American Gods. To say he matured as a writer is probably wrong as he has now been around for long enough, but he is a bit “tighter” in Anansi Boys than he was (in my opinion) in American Gods.

It is an enjoyable read, not as funny as “Good Omens” or some of his older works, but deeper in other regards.

Rating: 4/5

Oryx & Crake is, in essence a love story gone horrible wrong.
Oryx & Crake is also a story about science and how it can spiral out of control.
Oryx & Crake is the story of a world that seems like only a step away from ours.
Oryx & Crake is frightening.

Margaret Atwood has created a world in Oryx & Crake that seems entirely possible from today’s scientific view point. Sure, there are some limits on what we can do (engineering animals from the ground up by recombining genes is still a bit off, not to mention the morality of it) but the pieces are being put into place.

But this is only a backdrop of what the true story is: Love.

Oryx & Crake is the story of two boys in love with a girl and in the course of it bringing doom to the entire human race. It is the story of how to friends ultimately become enemies over a woman and the consequences for the entire world arising out of it.

Margaret Atwood hasn’t visited such a world for the first time. In “The Handsmaid Tale” she already went into a dystopian future that at the same time is frightening and scary. With Oryx & Crake she takes a decisively more scientific approach to the gloom and doom. While in “The Handsmaid Tale” science was merely the backdrop for the human drama, science pretty much took center stage for the backdrop of the human drama in Oryx & Crake.

It is not a happy book. It moves in it’s narrative from the not to distant future, where men still rules the earth to the “present” in which mankind has been erradicated and it seems only Snowman, the protagonist is left. It is scary and yet intriguing. I felt at times like when I watched “The English Patiente” and asked myself “Who was the woman in the plane?”.

A similar question comes up in Oryx & Crake: “What happened”? And like all big things in life, the cause is very slim.

It is a tale of morale, humanity and love, and how we need all three or we are doomed. An appropriate statement on the current state of the world I think.

Rating: 5/5

“Proven Guilty” is the 8th Novel in the Dresden File’s series (and supposely soon a TV movie on the Sci-Fi Network in the US). To put it simply: Harry’s back, and he does not have a good day.

The book pretty much picks up where the last one left off, roughly a year later. The White Council is still at war with the Red Court and things don’t seem to be going to well. Additionally Harry, freshly crowned a Warden and now responsible for the greater Chicago area, finds himself in a warehouse watching the Execution of a young Warlock and starting to get into a pissing contest with The Merlin.

But he does not have a lot of time to wonder about the political implications of his new role (or the fact that a Warden’s rope doesn’t seem to get stained by blood” as he soon finds himself in the middle of a magic attack on a Horror Convention and the realization that the oldest child of one of his best friend seems to be involved in all of this. Really not a good day for Harry.

Butcher’s writing is as “loose” and entertaining as it was in the previous seven books, though I cannot help at times and wonder if a bit of the spark of the earlier books is gone. Harry, although still grumpy, seems to be a lot less outwardly so. This is not necessarily a bad thing, characters can and should evolve, but this does not seem to be the case, rather that Butcher is “cutting corners”, maybe due to other commitments (his other book series, the TV show etc.) or because he just doesn’t feel the connection anymore, the book feels a bit less “meaty”. It also appears shorter (though I do not have the other books here right now to compare), it weighs in at around 400 pages in the hardcover edition and has a rather large print (especially compared with something like Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle).

Proven Guilty clearly drives the story foward and can be seen as somewhat of a setup, as larger things seem to be brewing behind the magic curtain, but we only get a very very tiny glimpse of what may lay ahead.

It is not a bad book by any stretch, in the genre it is in it is easy reading, but at $32 cover price for the hardcover edition it is a steep price to pay, one may be better off to wait for the cheaper Softcover version (a regret I didn’t had with the last book in the series, which in my opinion was a nicer read).

Rating 3.5/5

What went wrong? Was my first thought after I left the theater. Mission Impossible III failed the mission.

And I am still pondering my head over how this actually came to pass. The ingredients were all there, a really really bad bad guy and decent to good actors (Cruise can act in specific roles and it clearly applied for his role as Ethan Hunt in the other two MI movies).

But yet, it didn’t quite excite me as much. The plot was pretty straight forward, the twist was pretty much clear from the get go and in the end I just didn’t care. The explosions weren’t that big, the sceneries (although nice) not as spectacular as one may have hoped. Not even Phillip Seymour Hoffman could save it (and that he can act he proofed in Capote).

So I don’t know what went wrong. Things went boom, it was “fun” for a minute, but it just didn’t carry through the entire length of the movie.

Bummer, really.

Rating 2/5