Terry Brown

The full review is available at The Gray Planet.

Normal People by Sally Rooney is a work of depth and perception unlike any novel I have ever read. It is a Bildungsroman, a very complex and personal one in which two very different coming of age stories are intertwined.

The first story is Connell's, a young man who in high school is a popular athlete and casually brilliant student. Connell comes from working class family with little money and no social standing. The second story is Marianne's, whose family is very well off, who is not popular in school, but is also intelligent and a good student. Connell's mother, Lorraine, works as a housekeeper for Marianne's family.

The story takes place in Ireland over a period of four years, starting when Connell and Marianne are in high school in a small town, and continues through their first years at Trinity College in Dublin. From the moment they meet when Connell picks up his mother at Marianne's house, both Connell and Marianne feel a deep attraction. This attraction drives the narrative with a force that is both engaging and relentless. Rooney's prose and her intimate narrative of the thoughts and actions of her characters draw us into the emotional world of Connell and Marianne, and we can't get out.

This is not an easy book. The characters are so real, their interactions so deeply personal, heartfelt, and sometimes cringeworthy that we find ourselves at one moment wincing with embarrassment and at the next exalted by a deeply personal insight. But even though Connell and Marianne feel they know the other better than they know themselves, simple things cause misunderstandings and the novel becomes an emotional roller coaster, much like Connell and Marianne's relationship. It seems inevitable, even as their social roles transform, that they must be together. Over time, they are and then they aren't and then they are again. Each of them grows and changes significantly over time, but there is one constant–the depth and importance of their connection, or perhaps, addiction, to each other.

The scope of Rooney's story feels narrow at first, but it becomes expansive as we learn how Connell and Marianne struggle into adulthood and move toward and away from each other. As they grow, their personalities solidify in unexpected ways that lead to conflicts and challenges, both personal and relational, that they must face and overcome.

The ending is the weakest part of the novel, particularly on first reading. After the emotional complexity appears resolved, suddenly Rooney thrusts us back into another cycle of their relationship and calls into question the accommodations that Connell and Marianne have made for each other. After more careful reading the ending is consistent, but it does not leave the reader with closure or satisfaction and so it disappoints given how effective the rest of the novel is.

Even so, Normal People is an exceptional book, an engrossing experience that is impossible to put down. It is compelling, not in the manner of a thriller, but because we care about Connell and Marianne as if we are them. Connell and Marianne are “normal people” and we are better for having known them.

The full review is available at The Gray Planet.

I suspect most readers either love or hate Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. They either think he is silly or profound, a doddering fool or a wizard. The same is true of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

His style is at times simplistic, even childish. His prose is sparse, his paragraphs and chapters short. He skitters from scene to scene with abandon, like a child exploring the world. He uses varieties of humor to make tolerable the horror of his subject.

And yet, the effect of this simplicity, childishness and funny stuff is a novel that is profoundly dark, filled with portent and laced by lessons the world and the people in it must learn or forever be doomed. Vonnegut is a trickster, a clever wordsmith who distracts you with a smile and then hits you with a hammer.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the Vonnegut's topic is war, and particularly the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, which resulted in the deaths of 25,000 civilians (although Vonnegut, writing in the 1960s, references then contemporary estimates in the hundreds of thousands–an exaggeration which emphasizes his point). Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut's main character, is a POW in Dresden at the time of the bombing. Vonnegut himself was a POW in Dresden and he speaks, through Billy Pilgrim, with authority about the horrors, injustices, and terrible consequences of war.

For Vonnegut, there is no making sense of this war, nor of this bombing, nor, by extension, of the human condition. And so, Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time and flits back and forth throughout his life, visiting moments here and there, now and then, reflecting on the absurdity of war, the inevitability of death, the chronic sadness of life and the futility of any attempts to make sense of it all.

To add to the absurdity, Pilgrim is abducted by aliens, the Tralfamadorians. The Tralfamadorians are strange-looking creatures with their eyes in the palm of their hands so they have to hold up their open hands to view the world, as if they were saluting, or waving.

The Tralfamadorians have solved all the problems Billy sees–they simply ignore them and remember the good times. But even though Billy may want to do this, it doesn't work for him. He cannot control his skipping through time and this results in reliving moments where he is witness to horror and death because that is what happened. There is no escape for Billy. In the unreality that Vonnegut creates where Billy moves spontaneously from one time to another and where he is a specimen in a Tralfamadorian zoo, he cannot escape the reality of his own experiences and of his own world. He is unstuck in time, but stuck in his own life and his own world as he experienced it. He cannot change it, as much as he might desire to.

That Vonnegut can create such complexity and depth of meaning with simple prose and absurd action is wizardry. We read breezily through the asynchronous events of Billy's life, flying along through short chapters and brief paragraphs, but long before we arrive at the end, we realize that this is a tragic story, and it is our story, everyone's story. So it goes.

Is this science fiction? Yes, but not really. There are certainly science fiction tropes here: time travel; aliens with a unique culture; even virtual space travel. But none of these are the focus of the novel as they are in real science fiction. The science fiction elements of Slaughterhouse-Five are simply plot devices, tools which Vonnegut uses to expand and elaborate his themes.

LeGuin, in The Left Hand of Darkness creates an alien culture and uses it as a means of exploring human sexuality. For LeGuin, the story follows from the world she has created, and the story cannot exist without the science fiction element. Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five tells a mundane story of a man devastated by the experience of war and the manifestations of his trauma include experiences that he describes in science fiction terms. This enhances the unreality of Billy's experience, and allows Vonnegut to point out how absurd his reality is–that World War II and the Dresden bombing have caused him to become unstuck in his own mind and to retreat to a fantasy of alien abduction to save his sanity. This juxtaposition of fantasy and reality and the ill-defined border between the two for Billy provides Vonnegut with a means of framing his anti-war polemic. How can it be, Vonnegut asks, that human beings can treat each other so? Do we not see the unreality and absurdity of it? Do we, like the Trafalmadorians, simply ignore it and therefore trivialize it? So it goes.

In this sense, time travel is not important to the story, it is a plot device used by Vonnegut to illustrate the profound effect that Billy Pilgrim's war experiences have on his psyche–Billy Pilgrim is not really unstuck in time, this is just a manifestation of trauma he has experienced–his center cannot hold and his mind flits randomly from memory to memory.

Nor is the story built upon the existence of the Tralfamadorians, they are a foil to provide Billy Pilgrim with simple but effective answers to the question of how to live with his trauma–remember the good times, ignore the bad. Similarly, Billy's kidnapping by the Tralfamadorians and his time in the Tralfamadorian zoo with Montana Wildhack are Vonnegut's method of providing Billy with some relief from his despair and confusion. On Tralfamadore, with Montana, Billy is content in a way he is not in his own world. He treats Montana with respect and is rewarded. In the zoo on Tralfamadore with Montana is the only time that Billy is content. But this contentment comes with a price–Billy is unable to change anything, because, as the Tralfamadorians explain, everything has already happened.

The result of all of this is a novel that stays in one's mind long after reading it. Where other novels, as compelling as they may be, fade away after a few months, Slaughterhouse-Five blazes like the afterimage of actinic light on your retinas even after fifty years.

It has been years since I read a science fiction novella (or novel) that was as good in as many ways as This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

This is an immersive book–we are taken directly into a complex and unknown world with little expository explanation. I didn't know who Red and Blue were, nor why they were fighting a war in time. The descriptions of action were fuzzy at best. I almost gave up, and would have if the book was longer.

Then, subtly, slowly, I was drawn in to this curious epistolary relationship between Red and Blue, two major players on opposite sides of a generations long, galaxy spanning war in time.

This Is How You Lose the Time War is all about love and erudition and language and poetry and the obsession that drives two people in love under impossible circumstances. El-Mohtar and Gladstone make the book complex and poetic, literary and romantic. Their collaboration is perfect, their words matched to the tone and setting. Red and Blue riff off each other with perfectly constructed styles using metaphors and imagery with cultural and literary references. This epistolary novel is as complex in structure as the time strands that Red and Blue traverse and manipulate in their generations long war over interstellar distances.

Although the time war has little detail or explanation, it provides the connection between lovers, a challenge for them to overcome, and crucially, the structure for their redemption.

We feel deeply for Red and Blue and we feel their precarious situations amid the uncertainty they live in where time and worlds are mutable. They question their own motives and actions, and those of others, while regaling each other with romantic letters transmitted through subtle and abstruse steganography.

In alternating narrative strands and in the letters of Red and Blue, El-Mohtar and Gladstone build a world, they build lives, they build romance and they create magic.

Read it.

The full review is available at The Gray Planet.

Only Human by Sylvain Neuvel is the final installment of the Themis Files trilogy. The first book was Sleeping Giants, the second was Waking Gods.

In Only Human, Rose, Vincent, Eva (Vincent's ten year old daughter by Kara Resnick), and General Eugene Govender, have been transported to the home planet of the creators of the giant robots after the events of Waking Gods. As with the other two books of the trilogy, the book is epistolary—the story consists of a sequence of documents or interviews of the characters.

Only Human is a quick, breezy read. Chronologically, we skip back and forth between the time Rose, Vincent and Eva spend on Esat Ekt, the home planet of the Ekt, the builders of the robots, and the present time of the novel, which takes place on Earth, after the three have been transported back home in one of the giant robots, Themis.

Neuvel has a style that gives immediacy to his characters as the point of view switches frequently from document to document in the epistolary style. We slowly learn how Rose, Vincent and Eva end up back on Earth, and more details about the political situation on Earth. Neuvel occasionally dazzles with interesting perspectives on the cultural and political situations he has created on Esat Ekt and on Earth. But these deep insights are not enough to give the novel the depth necessary to make it significant. Neuvel attempts to define the driving cultural and political forces on Esat Ekt, but doesn't succeed. He doesn't quite make me believe in his world, particularly Esat Ekt, and the narrative becomes trivial.

Similarly, the events on Earth and Vincent's and Eva's actions within them are unrealistic and without sufficient motivation. Neuvel creates a complex situation in the conflict between Vincent and his now grown daughter Eva, which seems portentous and which is intertwined with the political rivalries of nations. But neither Vincent nor Eva has anything invested in the political sides they end up fighting for. Sides are chosen for them, or occur by happenstance—they are not the agents of their choices and again the resulting conflict becomes trivial.

Rose is not engaged in any of this—she is distant from it, and from most events in the novel. She longs to return to a normal life, to abdicate the pressure and responsibility of the position events and her own actions in the previous books have thrust upon her. But Neuvel ignores this and uses Rose as the agent who resolves the world's conflicts even though she has done her best to abdicate her responsibility and authority. Worse, the solution Rose implements is Machiavellian at best and cruel and inhuman at worst.

I enjoyed the book and wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it, but if you expect a satisfying resolution to the situation Neuvel has created in the first two books of the trilogy, I fear you will be disappointed like I was.

It has a main character named Georgie McCool–how cool is that?

It has time travel, of sorts, for those of us intrigued by science fictional tropes, but it isn't technical wizardry science fiction that would ruin the mood for others.

It has pugs, two of them, Porky and Petunia. It has pug puppies, newborns nestled in the clothes dryer.

It has a rom-com ending that isn't sickly sweet, but perfect, with enough ambiguity to make one consider life carefully.

It is thoughtful and funny and marvelous and you read it word by word careful not to miss anything and you are sad when it ends, but only because it ends, not because of the way it ends.

It's a nearly perfect book. It is a perfect book, except for the “discussion questions” at the end. Don't read the fucking discussion questions!