Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

Battle Royale

Before we start, I have to say that I dig the cover of this novel particularly. Go ahead and click on it and take a look, see for yourself. A little overly clever, but enjoyable.

First of all, it's just interesting to read a novel set in a fascist fictional Japan. Mostly, I've been exposed to images of such possibilities set in America or England. Interestingly, all the modern ones seem to have one thing in common, Battle Royale included - extremist, dictatorial, oppressive governments don't like rock'n'roll. No siree, Big Brother does not rock out. Not even Big Brother-san.

Someone over on goodreads recently described it as "essentially a retelling of lord of the flies, only far more violent". I have to say, I think that completely misses the point. It's more of a complete reversal of LotF. In one, you have a group of kids that are left without any adult guidance who wind up turning on each other because of that lack. In the other, you have a group of children who are forced by adults to turn on each other. It seems to me that Flies is saying "we are not scared enough of what our youth may do" and Royale is saying "we are too scared of what our youth may do".

All that aside, damn fun read. The ongoing death count, the weaving storylines, the vague hope that someone may escape the carnage - this is the kind of adventure I can dig into. The characterizations are a little shallow, but it's entertaining to see teen "types" run true across cultures. The jocks, the nerds, the mean girls, the pop fan. Or is that just a twist of the translation that makes them so familiar?

final thought: This was a good break from all the deep-thought, real lit, cold war and before dystopias I've been bathing in recently.

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore (illustrated mostly by David Lloyd)

V for Vendetta

I watched the movie. It was sort of eh to me, mostly because Portman used up all her acting ability back around 1994. That being said, I dug the concept, so when a cool gal offered to loan me her copy of the collected comics, I pounced on it.

Who doesn't love a little chaos and humor in the face of fascism and repression? Who doesn't love the idea of the everyman who manages to evade the cops, slip between shadows, blow up the broken courts, do away with torturers and pedophilic priests? Do I think that bombing the halls of "justice" is a good way to get my voice heard at this time? Of course not - but I haven't got the government peeping in my bedroom every night yet or banning art and music yet or forcing a power-grabbing religion on me. Yet.

I'm drawn to anarchy as a philosophy. Not the punk's AN-AR-KEE!, necessarily (though I've still got a soft spot in my heart for those kids), but the empathetic don't-rule-me-and-I-won't-rule-you train of thought. Too bad I can't imagine it ever working. Get two people agreeing to pull together, you'll have a third bashing them both in the back of the head while they're busy.

In a less general sense, regarding the actual comic - I loved the story, I wasn't wild about the art. But then, it had a very 80s style that seems a little dated now, which pretty well excuses it. As an American, I have no cultural connection to Guy Fawkes or the masks, but I know enough about the whole thing not to be confused by the allusion and I think it worked. I wish now that I owned the collection, because I'd like to read it again in a few months and see if it's deep or shallow.

Oh, and because I am a dork with a head full of quotes and musical bits, I liked catching the meanings, here and there, of the lines that V dropped. Especially stuff like the Anti-Nowhere League. If you want your comic to have a soundtrack, that's the way to do it.

final thought: I'd like to see an English director film it with an English cast some time.

twentytwelve by Andrew Keogh

twentytwelve

Let me go ahead and admit that I was worried this book would be terrible. Not because of anything related to the book itself, but because the author reads my blog and comments regularly. I figured it was unlikely to suck completely, because his own blog is well written and entertaining, but the fear lingered. Luckily, that turned out to be mostly unfounded.

As you can guess by the title, twentytwelve concerns the near future, a nightmare of a fascist England where leaders openly praise Hitler and anyone nonwhite or Jewish is hunted down and exterminated. The hero, his mom, his half-black daughter, and various others scratch their way across Wales in an attempt to make it into Ireland, land of the (fairly) free. They dodge brutal cops of various sorts, fall in and out of captivity, and so what they can to stay alive and together. An altogether worth it story.

My main criticism comes down to style. I could see in the writing that Keogh is a lawyer by trade. He doesn't fuck around with a bunch of flowery descriptions - the narrative is done in a very "just the facts" style. On the one hand, it keeps the adventure clipping along. On the other, I feel like we miss out on some characterization and motives. All the good guys are resolute, willing, and quiet in their suffering. Maybe it's that "stiff upper lip" Britishism coming out.

The text could also have benefited from a good going over for small flaws, the kind of thing an author can't see after rewriting a novel too many times. A few too many cases of Keogh using the same word over and over in a paragraph kept sort of bumping me out of the story. With this kind of tale to tell - worth reading both as a caution and as simply a "what will they do next?" adventure - a good editor could have made all the difference.

final thought: I suggest this one. Read it now before the government bans it.

The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner

The Sheep Look Up

I actually finished this one last Sunday, but I wanted to mull it over a little before writing about it. This is a classic dying-environment near-future novel from the early 70s. The Mediterranean Sea is deader than the Great Salt Lake, most of Africa is defoliated. What few crops that still grow, despite insane levels of pollution from wars and corporate greed, are being eaten at the root by insecticide-resistant pests. Filter masks are the only thing standing between Americans and miserable lung diseases. Dose after dose of antibiotics are necessary to cure minor infections and rampant STDs. All children born in the US have something wrong with them, from minor asthma to terrible deformity. You can't drink the water. You can't eat the food. Hundreds of years of not giving a fuck is coming back around to bite the us in our collective asses.

We're not there yet. Our water's actually doing a little better than it was in 1972. But you want personal air filters? Smell it. You want antibiotic resistant pathogens? Howdy, Mr. Staph Infection. Government brutality, corporate sins, Brunner knew what he was talking about, and it scares the crap out of me.

But without a story, it's all just Future Shock. And damned if he didn't tell the story brilliantly. He used a cut and paste style, short chunks of a dozen people's lives, moving across the world to show the damage and our response to it. The Trainites (predating and foretelling the coming of the Earth Liberation Front) riot and smash in the name of the environment. The rich ignore the damage they cause, even to their own sons and daughters. The middle class just try to stay afloat with water filters and dreams. Starving Africans are poisoned into madness by the food sent from the US to keep them alive. Brunner wasn't afraid to kill off his main characters, either. Nobody's safe when you've got too many rats and not enough maze.

"Leading" the USA is a president known only as Prexy. I hear he was modeled after then-Gov Reagan, but the media quotes from him sprinkled throughout the text sure sound like another leader known for going by a nickname.

On foreign war orphans being adopted by Americans: "I guess if they can't break down the front door they have to sneak around the back."
On a scientific report showing rising IQs in third world countries and falling IQs in the US due to pollution and lack of nutrious foods in developed nations: "Well, if they're so smart why aren't they clever?"
On Hondorans fighting against American invasion: "If you bite the hand that feeds you, you're apt to get a mouthful of fist." And so on.

final thoughts: If you match Gibson's ideas about current and coming technology with Brunner's image of what corporate and national greed and overpopulation can do to the world itself, you've pretty much got my biggest nightmare. How likely is it? Too likely.

Fatherland by Robert Harris

Fatherland

One of those "what if the nazis won" alternate history novels, this is one of the most mainstream-style reads I've picked up yet. The triumphant Germany of the 60s serves as a backdrop to a police thriller/murder mystery. Berlin's been restyled according to nazi tastes and fantasies - giant looming buildings house the SS and other arms of the ever-reaching government. A tour guide, in one bit, consistently describes certain monuments as "20 times larger than the one in France". Everyone from school children to grannies belongs to a uniformed offshoot of The Party. Well, you have to admit - if there is one thing the stiff right arm boys had going, it was a deep understanding of symbolism and how to use it.

So here's my question - could Germany have hidden the slaughter of Europe's Jewish population from the rest of the world? Could 11 million people have gone up in smoke without the general population of, for instance, America knowing? I mean, we, as a society, certainly ignore some atrocities (Darfur), but in this day and age we do know they're going on. In a time before the internet, before fax machines, before automated media, in a tightly controlled situation, could they have pulled it off? Even then, I have my doubts. The vast majority of people will do nothing to stop a great evil, but a secret spread among workers, those who built the camps, those soldiers running the camps and trains, those filing the paperwork, even the camps neighbors seems to me to be a secret unlikely to be kept. What say you?

(I just now realized that HBO did a tv version of Fatherland in 1994, with Rutger Hauer Miranda Richardson. Shit, I'd watch that. I wonder if I can rent it.)

final thought: I wonder how long the nazis will continue to be such an effective boogyman. Will they eventually pass into mythology of a sort, devil figures from a shady past?