Brian McKenzie

See, I was misled. I'm not a big fan of melodrama, and this doorstop (900+ pages) is a genre-defining example. But I was told by friends that this was A Great Novel, you know, literary, thoughtful, philosophical, enlightening. I was told that it was the Harry Potter of its time, turning reluctant readers into enthusiastic consumers of historical fiction and high romance, sparking the boom in equally thick historical tomes by such writers as Philippa Gregory, Bernard Cornwell, Diana Gabaldon and Sara Waters (among many others). I was told it was relentlessly suspenseful and exciting, exceedingly clever in its many twists and turns, and even inspirational (and somewhat anticipatory) for its portrayal of strong, independent women who defy societal expectations and do what suits themselves best.

So, where to begin? I guess with the plot and story structure. For its length this is a book with a surprisingly thin story: the smart, young and industrious (and it must be said, prideful) new prior of Kingsbridge (Phillip) wants to build a cathedral in his backwater village where nobody goes. Hijinks ensue. That's it. That's the story. Highly episodic and cyclical, the novel takes us through a simple pattern:

1. Big problem
2. Clever solution
3. Incremental success
4. Complication and setback
5. Repeat

This pattern repeats, I don't know, eight, ten times and each time we are meant to sigh in relief as the clever Phillip overcomes complications to get his cathedral done (and, sorry, it's no spoiler to say he does. I mean, this wouldn't be one of the most beloved novels of all time (no, seriously) if the whole purpose for the book were never realized).

And what are the obstacles and complications? Two unidimensional guys, Bishop Waleran Bigod (and there's a name dripping with Signifance: the priest who serves two gods, get it?) and William Hamleigh, the villainous, ham-fisted, moustache-twirling Earl of Shiring, both of whom oppose the cathedral because it thwarts their own ambitions and offends their pride and they don't like Phillip because, in customary good guy-bad guy rivalry fashion, he makes them look stupid. They conspire repeatedly to stop the construction using means legal (trumped-up charges), illegal (murder), political (changing allegiance in the civil war), physical (attack and plunder) and ecclesiastical (trumped-up charges again but this time churchy), but each time good Prior Phillip outwits, outlasts and outplays them. Sometimes he gets mad and yells, but most of the time he is serene, urbane, sensible and wise.

The story plays out over 54 years of 12th century English history, beginning in 1120 with the sinking of the White Ship (a maritime disaster that killed the heir to the English throne) and ending in the aftermath of the murder of Thomas Beckett, the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury. We get a Forrest Gump's eye view of this period as our main characters, despite being in the aforementioned backwater village of Kingsbridge, find themselves central to the political and religious intrigue of this period known as The Anarchy. Along the way we are treated to micro-credential courses such as Gothic Architecture for Dummies, Introduction to Feudal Capitalism, Pre-Industrial Labour Relations and Collective Bargaining, and, most critically, Medieval Gender Equity and Feminist Theory. Seriously, at various points throughout the novel, the too-clever-by-half (and highly articulate) characters lay the groundwork for socio-economic developments that took centuries to manifest in Western Europe and North America. I was actually a little surprised that Follett didn't have Prior Phillip invent banking and the stock market.

I can't really offer an in-depth look at all the main characters because they are really just character types. Strong and decent Tom Builder, the stone mason. Alfred, his bullying, thick-headed son who also becomes a stone mason. Ellen the mysterious, incredibly beautiful, forest-dwelling woman who carries a dark secret. Aliena (another Significant Name), the also incredibly beautiful, willful daughter of the original Earl (deposed for backing the wrong side in the civil war). Richard, Aliena's thumb of a brother, good for fighting wars but little else. William the sadist. Bigod the corrupt. Jack Shareburg, hanged mysteriously in the prologue, and father of Jack Jackson who was raised by Tom to be the Greatest Builder Ever. There are more but you get the picture. It's a clockwork novel, and though you hear the machinery creaking, it keeps its steady time and plodding pace, the action rising and falling until we reach the big concluding scene where the righteous get their reward, the unrighteous their punishment, the cathedral its grand opening and the future its path forward. It's easy to see why fans clamoured for more but hard to understand why it took Follett another 20 years to accommodate them. Once he did, he figured out what butters his bread and now there's no stopping him as he has written 5 or so sequels in 14 years.

This book will appeal to readers who like their lines between good and evil clearly marked, their heroes unambiguously good, their villains irredeemably bad, and their plots linear and well lit like an airport runway. Those who seek something focussing more on the conflict between church and crown, or the complex role of religion in medieval life will want to look elsewhere.

This is very clearly an early work by a writer still honing his craft and who perhaps relied on a badly-translated “Guide to Writing Novels” that you used to be able to order from the back of Mad Magazine in the 1960's. It's all very Romantic and picaresque, and cast with stock characters: the mad scientist; the lone wolf; the breathtakingly beautiful but brilliant soldier-woman-scientist; the mysterious keeper of the ancient wisdom; the handsome warrior; the gruff general. All the stuff of a straight-to-DVD SF thriller if it were a movie. What redeems it, if anything, is Liu's innovative explanation for ball lightning (a term that gets used at least 10 times on every page, maddeningly), an elusive and strange natural phenomenon that has puzzled scientists for centuries.

Liu would go on to learn a lot more about how to write compelling fiction, and his Three Body Problem made him an international bestselling writer in hard SF. And interestingly enough, he plants the seeds of the latter novel in this one – though whether by design or not is unclear. So should you read it? I don't know. It's really not a great work: wooden dialogue, slothful pacing, cartoonish plot, weak characters, deus ex machina ending. But the premise is interesting, and despite Liu's ham-handedness with the keyboard, there are a few good scenes here and there. Load it on your ebook and read it on your daily commute. If nothing else, it will make the subway ride a little less tedious.

Religious people of all faiths eventually ask one (or both) of the following questions: “What is God's plan?” and “Why does God allow suffering?” And religious or not, I'd wager that more people than we would ever imagine have been faced with a personal existential crisis at some point in their lives and wondered whether life was truly worth living. Add to this some ancillary questions about what are the things that give meaning to a life and how does one reconcile morality with duty and you have pretty much summed up the personal themes this wonderful novel explores.

But it doesn't just work on the personal level. No, this is also a book about The Other – the strange, the unknown, the (pardon the pun) alien – that confronts us and makes us question our beliefs, preconceptions, standards and expectations. Institutionally, societally and again personally, the cast of this story are forced repeatedly to confront what they think they know, and to fill in the gaps of their ignorance; and repeatedly, what they find is not clarity but confusion. In its simplest terms, then, this is a book about the consequences of failing to learn.

Exploration and curiosity are hard-wired in the human brain. We are a race of explorers, and the archaeological record bears this out. With no new terrestrial lands to conquer we have turned skyward, and even as I write this, plans are underway for missions to Mars. We also listen in the remote hope that we will hear the telltale signal that confirms the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. And though, frankly, I'm not sure what we'll do if we ever receive it, this novel posits an expedition, led by the Vatican, to visit The Other in a replay of the 15th and 16th century missions to the New World. We know from our history books how those turned out, and a few dozen kilometres from where I now sit is the Martyr's Shrine dedicated to the Canadian Martyrs, so I wasn't completely surprised that the mission in this novel would turn out the way it did. It's no great spoiler to say that it goes terribly, horribly wrong. It's the reasons why it went wrong that make the novel so compelling. But let me warn you: as compelling and readable as it is, it's bleak. It bares the very souls of its characters and exposes them to the pain, terror and torture of learning the wrong lessons, like the spectator who goes to a public hanging expecting it to be a physics lecture. The reason for their failure? The usual suspects in tragedy: hamartia brought about by hubris and willful blindness.

The joys and horrors of the story are revealed incrementally (echoing a common refrain in the story) even as the characters (primarily Sandoz) are gradually stripped of their humanity. The climax, when it comes, brings the shattering truth that the shattered protagonist, his identity so thoroughly destroyed that he's no longer sure what language he speaks, must choose between impossible alternatives. In agony and permanently scarred (spiritually and physically); and dependent on literal and metaphorical prosthetics, he comes to the only conclusion possible for a man of faith who finds himself struggling to reconcile his belief in a Divine plan and the reality of profound suffering.

I've deliberately avoided mention of all the sci-fi stuff, i.e. the world building, the alien culture, the technology, for the simple reason that they are all McGuffins. This could just as easily have been set in 1647 during the fur trade but the author, Mary Doria Russell, for reasons of her own, decided on this setting in time, place and space. Really, it doesn't matter. Russell's focus is on how faith, certitude, and clarity of purpose, despite good intentions, can lead us to ruin. But to be clear, she's not indicting faith as the culprit. Rather she's attempting to show that faith alone is insufficient, and we must also use our brains, experience, and shared history to avoid replaying the same old tapes.

One of my favourite comedy bits is Robin Williams pretending to be Elmer Fudd singing Bruce Springsteen's "Fire". In a similar vein, I imagine that, in sitting down to write The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry asked himself "what if Terry Gilliam channeled David Lynch pretending to be Franz Kafka writing a Sam Spade novel?" You can almost sense him smirking and glancing over at you as you read along, as if to say "you get it?"

This is a fun novel. It's not exactly weird, it's more unsettling, like a strange noise in the upstairs bathroom when you're home alone and the cat's curled up in your lap. Everything is just . . . off: the endless rain. The retro-futuristic setting. The rigidly bureaucratic, hierarchical Agency. The preoccupation with umbrellas, wet socks and squeaky shoes. It's hard to get a handle on where and when it's taking place, and even harder to pin down the mood. 20 pages in I checked to see if I had missed an opening chapter or prologue; I felt like I was missing some key piece of information that would establish context. Like I said: unsettling.

But then I just surrendered to it and let the story carry me along like a lazy river. The protagonist, Charles Unwin, is a clerk in some kind of monolithic corporate detective agency reminiscent of Pinkerton's. His job is to write the official case reports of his assigned detective, Travis Sivart, based on Sivart's narrative notes. It is a job at which he apparently excels and takes great pride in doing. As the story opens, he finds himself unexpectedly promoted against his will to detective, replacing Sivart who is mysteriously absent. Completely unprepared and unqualified, he sets out to obtain an explanation for, and reversal of, this decision and stumbles upon the murder of Sivart's Watcher (i.e. supervisor) for which he is framed. This sets everything in motion.

All the 1940s detective story tropes are there: the beautiful femme fatale, the mysterious woman in distress, the hardboiled detective(s), the sassy secretary, the frame-job murder, the hapless patsy. But again, things are off. For one, what exactly is the nature of this detective agency? For another, why are people so strangely somnambulant? Why does Unwin's choice of hat matter to his job? What are we to make of the clipped, Edwardian prose, so curiously flat and detached?

The mysteries include the mummy with modern dental work at the Municipal Museum, the theft of the 12th of November (you read that correctly), the 7:27 a.m. train that always runs a minute late, a defunct carnival, dream infiltration, a casino where sleepwalkers gamble with alarm clocks, and a man who has died 3 times. How they are related to the missing Travis Sivart, the murdered Watcher, a recently-resurfaced magician, the menacing, formerly-conjoined twins who drive the steam-powered carriage, and the museum cleaner who wrote the titular "Manual of Detection" makes up the meat of the story.

And what a story. Again, lots of fun, but I confess at times I allowed my attention to wander largely, I think, because of the flat prose style. It's necessary for the key plot point, the dream infiltration reminiscent of Inception, but until you understand that, keep the background music off and eliminate external distractions so that you can focus on the narrative.

Once the pieces start falling into place, the pace accelerates and, again like in a classic detective novel, the good, the bad and the ambiguous all meet their various rewards. Plot twists, big reveals, character reversals, and comeuppances abound. It seems like we're back on traditional ground, but it's all clever parody, subversion, and (God help me) deconstruction. The book leaves us with a number of questions about the nature of surveillance and control, the illusions we trade for reality, and what it means to be "awake". It's not for everyone, and, judging by some other reviews, a lot of readers couldn't/didn't finish it. But if you are looking for something subversive, original, a little confusing, and, yes, fun, give it a go. You might just enjoy yourself.

I'm embarrassed that it has taken me so long to read this novel, a classic of Western literature and favourite of adventure story fans the world over. The story of Edmond Dantés, the hapless sailor unjustly imprisoned over false accusations of "Bonapartism" during France's turbulent civil war period, embroils us in a story of violence, deceit, vengeance and redemption. And though it is most commonly considered an adventure story in the vein of The Three Musketeers or A Tale of Two Cities, I think it's more accurate to classify this fun (and expansive) novel as a genre-defining example of espionage fiction. Yes, Le Carré, Fleming, Deighton and all the others owe a big debt to the structure, plot and style of Dumas' breathtaking and exciting story.

I say this because of all the spy novel tropes Dumas seems to have invented. Disguise, subterfuge, miraculous escapes, clever ruses and traps, exotic locales, secret operatives and operations, compromised dupes, misdirection . . . along with James Fennimore Cooper, Dumas laid down a template that spy novelists to this day still follow. The novel, complex, lengthy, and twisty though it is, has a fairly simple plot which, by now, everyone knows: Dantés escapes from the dungeons of Chateau D'If, recovers a hidden treasure, becomes the fabulously wealthy "Count of Monte Cristo" and sets about avenging himself on the men who had him imprisoned. The fun is in the methods.

Dumas takes great pains to construct Dantes' elaborate plot of revenge, deftly weaving multiple narrative strands together, telling in great detail the many backstories that modern authors would banish offstage and merely summarize through exposition. No, Dumas, clearly paid by the word, lets his story sprawl for over 1200 pages across the Mediterranean. At times you will wonder "why are we suddenly in Turkey? What was the point of the Carnival scenes? Why is the Pope releasing a condemned prisoner?" Not to worry: it all comes together and climaxes with Dantés having his revenge. That's no spoiler. Of course he has his revenge and emerges the victor. Watching it play out, though, is immensely satisfying as we see the way Dantés, playing the long game, builds a sham edifice in which he traps his foes.

But Dumas tells more than a tale of revenge. This is a highly moralistic novel, one that decries the sins of pride, envy, wrath, jealousy -- hell even gluttony and lust show their faces. The ending, while bringing satisfaction, also leaves us a little sad, a little regretful that a good man, faultless and loving, loses himself in the pursuit of his vengeance. Dumas the dramatist tells a compelling, propulsive and ultimately satisfying tale. Dumas the moralist asks us to consider whether it is all worth it in the end.