review – Gideon Defoe

Gideon Defoe’s Pirate! adventure series could quite possibly be one of the most cleverly conceived treatises on existentialism yet conceived.  Sure, each installment is anachronistic, brief, side-splittingly funny, or what the erudites term “humorous”, and given the fact that the whole series not-so-subtly gains its impetus from Defoe’s unrequited love, is besides the point.   Doesn’t existentialism entail all of the above anyway?

In any case, take Defoe’s latest exposition, The Pirates! in an Adventure with Napoleon, whereby our faithful and true Pirate Captain takes a brief respite to ponder his place in the pirate world, and whether perhaps beekeeping or even the unparalleled  superciliousness of an exiled Napoleon can provide some meaning or contentment in this lifetime. For it is here that our fearless captain comes to a realization all Pirate Captains must eventually consider:

The Pirate Captain sighed. ‘Well then, I suppose we’d better go and see what’s more interesting than me.’

Beyond the philosophical reverberations of the work, we have the usual salty complement to offset the dueling shenanigans of the Pirate Captain and Napoleon; specifically, the pirate with a scarf, the pirate in green, and Jennifer the Victorian all lend a supporting hand.  As this is a work of action and adventure, while reading of luxurious beards, ham and the highly democratic war over the St. Helena Residents’ association, take heed and consider your place in the pirate world.

review – modern ranch living

In Modern Ranch Living, Mark Jude Poirier spends a great deal of time detailing the eccentricities of life in Tucson. It’s an entertaining read, as bright and sweeping as the Arizona sun’s perpetual blanket upon the desert. How quaint are the characters within, specifically a sixteen year old exercise-obsessed and grammatically challenged Kendra Lumm, along with her awkwardly inanimate neighbor Merv, Splash World employee extraordinaire who lives with mother…at the age of thirty. How amusing it is to behold Kendra’s incessant indignation toward the unfit and uneducated in the ways of proper weightlifting and dietary habits as well as Merv’s altruism in adjusting the catheters of certain Splash World patrons who need that extra bit of customer support.

One can undoubtedly progress through Modern Ranch Living without much of a care as to the result of the novel’s plot. Roughly, it concerns the whereabouts of a missing neighbor shared by Kendra and Merv; really though, it’s about how the characters find a release from the stagnation of the Arizona summer, as well as their own lives. As carefree as the atmosphere is, Poirier foreshadows almost too well, for towards the very end of the novel he destroys the whimsical and eccentric nature of the desert dwellers with a gut-check of uneasiness lingering well after the novel concludes. Modern Ranch Living deals with overcoming the disturbing behavior that while born out of weirdness and eccentricity, is nevertheless disturbing.

review – the drowned life

Channeling the gravitas of Borges and Calvino, Jeffrey Ford’s collection of short stories titled The Drowned Life, though at times overreaching in scope, sublimely conjures a sense of sheer wonder and befuddlement when confronted with the intersection of everyday life and the dreams that shape it, or are shaped by it.

Ford alternates his stories between the subtle and grandiose, the mundane and the outlandish, incorporating through each a pervasive sense of mystery and weirdness. When he is not detailing the wisdom of a soothsaying octopus, a town’s dependence upon an annual, magical breeze, and the peculiar behavior surrounding the annual “deathberry” drinkers, he describes the power contained within an overlooked scribble, an apartment’s potentially haunting flicker of light, losing a Chinese curse in a poker game, and the dictated writings of a comatose daughter through her mother.

This see-saw between the highly fantastical and the merely strange begs careful attention and even patience of the reader, noting the eternal truth that things are never what they seem. Several stories, especially that which introduces the fascinating Madame Mutandis, are deserving of their own novels. The Drowned Life is a deep and resonating read.

Also worth mentioning is an extended supplement in which Ford describes his biography and approach to writing, both of which explain much and lend credence to the saying that truth is stranger than fiction.

review – company of liars

Imagine yourself involuntarily surrounded by a small group of travelers, forced by circumstance to cut off all interaction with society. Rumors tell of cities overflowing with corpses, and no one knows the cause nor the symptoms until it’s too late. A grand pestilence has infected the ports, and the only safe direction is inland and ever north. Such is the historically fictitious medieval mystery Company of Liars by Karen Maitland.

Maitland takes her fascination of the medieval period and constructs a very convincing and entertaining story around the occurrence of the Black Plague. While citizens are dropping like flies from port to port and across the countryside, Maitland’s company of nine is forced to interact and eventually divulge their secrets, stories and lies in a wayward attempt at survival, claiming each one by one. The pestilence serves not only as the driving force behind the story, but also the invisible element highlighting just how “interesting” the times were to live in during that period. Ironically, her interpretation of Medieval England is surprisingly similar, though a bit more lively (especially in dialogue), to other apocalyptic voices such as McCarthy’s The Road. Maitland skillfully illuminates a culture of indulgences, a preponderance of predestination, Jewish scapegoating, hypocrisy and the human pathos of a medieval mindset which is not so historically distant from ours.

Vivid description is Maitland’s major strength throughout the story. Not only does she deliver a magical element to the company’s progression, she also knows how to tell a story within a story. Each character’s secrets are deftly divulged as the story flows, until the final pages whereupon the reader won’t reach an unexpected twist as much as a cathartic resolution. The story of the camelot is an impressive and engaging read.

review – faces in the fire

Faces in the Fire is a quick and intriguing read in which T.L. Hines very deftly conveys his sense of “noire bizarre” around a curious set of characters, bottom-feeders he stresses, in a nonlinear progression. The characters, a truck driver, an email spammer, tattoo artist and hit man are equally as disparate as the circumstances around which they they cross paths; phantom catfish, haunted shoes, mystical tattoo ink, and a mysterious phone number all contribute to the progression of each character’s interconnected lives.

Hines doesn’t quite offer enough noire to the level out the bizarre. True, it’s a dark and suspenseful enough story but the characters, possessing a sense of anxious desperation, come off as more emotionally exhausted than perhaps darkly humorous or energized. Particularly memorable, though, is Hines’ characterization of Corrine the spammer; he delicately describes a profession and person not normally considered worthy of anything but detest. Hines uses an interesting metaphor of representing the characters’ movement as that of sharks, creatures that can never move backward, but rather only forward in pursuit of their catharsis from years of missed opportunity.

Faces in the Fire is a mysterious and entertaining work which makes the reader think long after the read is finished. Which is, I think, the sign of a well-crafted book.

review – breath

What Tim Winton does very well in his novel Breath is his convey his ability to describe the helpless suffocation of being poleaxed, not only by the unforgiving western Australian surf but also by the fleeting acquaintances who enter our lives and turn them upside down. Yes, Winton assuredly hints, we will thereby grow into better surfers and more complete human beings, but only after being thoroughly dashed and mangled against life’s currents, gasping for some sense of stability.

Pikelet is nary a teenager before becoming introduced to the world of surfing along the lonely Western Australian coastline.  Winton retraces Pikelet’s growth with his friend Loonie as they compete for the “wisdom” of the cryptic surfing master Sando. It’s a story that not only deals with the typical coming-of-age themes, it’s a story that deals with the concept of fear and the nature of accomplishment, both in and out of the ocean. It’s about finding and acknowledging that invisible line across which one will find themselves flailing helplessly when in search for the next rip-current of reality.  Moreover, it’s about our tendency to use and abuse our so-called friends in the process, and the sacrifices we make along the way (school, family, etc.). Specifically, the tension between Pikelet and Loonie is unnervingly palpable; not necessarily sinister, but dangerous nonetheless.

Breath is a concise yet moving novel that touches upon multiple facets of Australian and surfing culture. Winton writes in a style that’s similarly sparse to McCarthy, but flows well in clarity.  One complication of the work is that I feel he lingers a little too long on Pikelet’s relationship with Eva, Sando’s wife.  Though too much is left unsaid between the two, Winton dwells on several of Eva’s proclivities which could comprise a separate novella.  Otherwise, Breath is a sad, thoughtful yet worthwhile read.

review – other electricities

For those wishing to visit the Keweenaw Peninsula, I would suggest reading Ander Monson’s short but dense Other Electricities.  It is a complex yet fascinating collection of stories or vignettes composing the gestalt of  Michigan’s UP.  Sometimes direct, sometimes poetic, though always ethereal, Other Electricities deals with the hardness of living in a place as cold, bleak, and beautiful as upper Michigan.  Monson expertly expresses the weirdness and hardship through a formidable cast of characters which, while representing the whole of a small community, actually resembles that of a family.

It is a place where the only guarantee is that every winter at least one snowmobile rider will succumb to the ice, where a father, perched in his attic will become obsessed with speaking code into his radio throughout the night. A place where an abandoned schoolbus forms a hideout for a disaffected teenager, taking his confusion out on stray cats.  Where a weary snowplow worker reminisces over uncles dying in saunas and cousins holding up banks in the heart of winter, looking forward to nothing more than her stretch of the road. Where a schoolteacher is helpless to watch both the demolition of her school and her students.

Other Electricities is about a community of people and what they do to survive in an unacommodating environment.  It’s about the often unfortunate interconnectedness of their lives told from a stream-of-consciouness point of view.  Beautifully written and imagined, it’s an incredibly deep work, ominous like the lake surroundng the region it so coldly affects.

review – the domino men

Whether burned or bloody, Jonathan Barnes does love to see London in complete chaos.  It happened in his last novel The Somnambulist, and has now continued in The Domino Men.  Few things crossover between the two, save the intriguingly bizarre characters constituting his uber-secret and not-so-normal civil service division called The Directorate.  Oh, and The Prefects, can’t forget them.

The story centers around Henry Lamb, a completely ordinary though perhaps even dull, clerk who through a series of extraordinary  though familial events is drawn into a hunt, a race to prevent London’s descent into utter ruin.  By all accounts he has no business within the Directorate or even approaching The Domino Men, the only ones who can either help or even destroy the chances for success.

Barnes excellently scripts his mystery around the fog that continually encompasses London, though he also lowers a fog over the reader’s mind as well, keeping us in the dark about the major players of the novel.  He offers breadcrumbs about the Directorate and the Domino Men, the comatose grandfather of Henry, and the ever over-confident mastermind Director Dedlock, though his description is never enough to quash the ever-lingering questions the reader may conjure. A frustrating yet gripping method.  We know of a battle waged for centuries and that the Prefects are dangerous to say the least, but Barnes, hopefully in anticipation of another novel, tells us only what were allowed to know of the process.  All that is requested is that we must “trust the process”.  And in the end, the distinction of who the villain was is not at all clear.

In several ways the Domino Men surpasses The Somnambulist; the ending is much more captivating though at times the pacing can be a bit slower.  His inclusion and description of the aristocracy (Prince Arthur in particular) is quite interesting, for it is neither kind nor overtly cruel. The Prefects, however, were a bit under-described as they were in the former. Their playfully comic nastiness, hinted to atmospheric levels, falls just short of their behaviour, though admittedly ruthless and reckless as the story hits its crescendo.  Their actions are more a vehicle of the story than the framework.  Overall, its another fascinating story about London, manipulated by all creatures forceful and ubiquitously normal.  Fun yet creepy, one can only wonder how many times and what twisted ways London has fallen and yet continues to rebuild itself in the mind of Barnes.

review – the atlantic ocean

It’s hard to take Richard Swift seriously at face value.  He looks kinda like Jack Black and has a similar cheekiness in his music. Also like Black, once you hear how adept he is as a musician you’re likely to be surprised.  Unlike Black, Swift is a bit more mellow in sound, his voice sounding like an amalgam of Bob Dylan and Frankie Valli. His surround sound bears a combined similarity to what one would hear on a Wilco album and your local oldies station, all mixed under the purview of Gnarles Barkley’s Danger Mouse.

With The Atlantic Ocean, Swift continues his surprisingly catchy oeuvre after the subtle yet very quality Dressed Up For the Letdown. The Atlantic Ocean is a bit more up-tempo, comprised of a weird yet intriguing inclusion of electronica weaving in between an omnipresent piano, lonely horn section, crunchy guitar and banjo ensemble.

For me, the album starts out as any typical alt-rock album would but slowly morphs into a 70ish guitar driven contemplation, to finally an echoing Motown dirge.  And Swift, with all his weirdness, pulls it off.  Favorite tracks include the immaculate The Original Thought, R.I.P., Bat Coma Motown, The End of an Age, A Song for Milton Feher, and the ultra funky Lady Luck.

The Atlantic Ocean is one of those albums that sticks in your head long after the headset is removed. It may not win many awards, but Swift proves he has a lot of originality to offer. Those taking a chance on Swift will be amply rewarded.

review – officer friendly and other stories

One might surmise that after reading Lewis Robinson’s collection of short stories entitled Officer Friendly and Other Stories, his setting would most invariably be located in the Pacific Northwest, perhaps in Alaska.  Though no less intriguing than the storylines from the shows Twin Peaks or even Northern Exposure,  the content of Robinson’s stories actually take place in the surprisingly curious state of Maine.

Robinson’s collection is an interesting insight just beyond the seemingly perpetual thaw of Maine, not only into local hunting or hockey cultures, but of the ever changing relationships formed in the snow, along the coast and within the forest.  Often the stories deal with an emergence into adulthood, but more so the rites of passages faced by many in Maine, whatever their ages.

The stories themselves range from the creepy to the serenely cathartic, though like the weather, they’re always in a state of flux hovering just around the thaw.  Take for example, the stories The Diver, The Toast, and Ride ; both are increasingly unsettling to say the least, as they introduce to the reader the unfamiliar eccentricities of being foreign to the Northeast.  Puckheads, Seeing the World and Fighting at Night, on the other hand, deliver a sense of fulfillment no matter what was sacrificed from each character.

One captivating attribute of the book is that as a whole, time is not necessarily linear.  The setting can resemble the era of F. Scott Fitzgerald or perhaps that of last March.  Whether duck hunting with one’s father, evading a policeman in the snow, preparing to fight someone named Brick Chickisaw, or leaving home to fish for urchin on a whim, Robinson evokes a sense of wonder and exhilaration regardless of what era he writes.