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bukes #57-#58
Oct. 17th, 2009 06:17 pmThe pile of books that I've read but haven't recorded here on LJ continues to grow. I'd hoped to write notes on a bunch of them this afternoon to make the pile a bit less intimidating, but It Was Not To Be. Here, though, are jottings about another couple.
book #57: Debunked!: Conspiracy Theories, Urban Legends, and Evil Plots of the 21st Century (2008) by Richard Roeper
The subtitle of this moderately slender volume gives a fairly clear idea of its subject matter. The book's problem is that it is a moderately slender volume, and it's attempting to cover an extraordinarily broad field. The result is that we find here just a few conspiracy theories and a few urban legends (for argument's sake I assume "evil plots" are conspiracy theories), a high proportion of which the author has room to treat only cursorily. He further reduces his available space by devoting a longish (and to this reader pretty boring) section to sports and gambling, three of whose chapters can be summed up as "Some crazies think these things are rigged, but usually they're not" -- a theme that returns a few chapters later when he talks (yawn) about people thinking the American Idol votes are rigged. To give some idea of the infuriating almost-goodness of this book, in between the above chapters come (a) a very interesting discussion of Curt Schilling's legendary baseball deed of pitching with a disintegrating ankle, (b) an incredibly tedious waffle about the last episode of The Sopranos, and (c) an extremely fine chapter about The Secret whose only flaw is that it could well have been longer.
The final section of the book is another unnecessary add-on, a purported survey of Conspiracy Theory movies which includes Men in Black (aliens are operating among us without us knowing) but ignores all the versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and about a million other cinematic works of aliens-among-us paranoia like The Puppet Masters, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, Invaders from Mars, They Live, This Island Earth . . . Several of the other choices seem similarly random, and I wondered if the only reason for including this section at all was that Roeper is well known for his movie criticism on the telly.
There's no denying I found a lot to enjoy in this book, and a few nuggets I hadn't known before; overall, though, the sense I had as I closed it was one of frustration that it had been such a thrown-together ragbag collection of often only vaguely related materials.
book #58: Humans (1992) by Donald E. Westlake
When Donald Westlake died recently it was a grim day here at Snarl Towers. I think it is no secret that he's been one of my favourite authors since my teens. As with so many of the authors whose work I like the best, I eventually learned to space the books out a bit, with the result that now I still have a fair number left to go -- hurrah. This one I picked up a few months ago when we visited the NJ town of Montclair so that Pam could go and spend money relentlessly in some fabric/yarn store while I did my very best not to spend anything at all in the Montclair Book Center, one of my best loved bookstores. (It's kind of like a smaller version of the Strand in NYC.) I came away having spent hardly anything at all -- well, significantly less than Pam had in the shop down the road.
Westlake played with fantasy and science fiction from time to time during his long career, and in Humans he mixed the two genres. God has become fed up with the pageant of folly that is human behaviour and sends an angel to earth to set things up such that human beings themselves will bring the world -- and perhaps the universe -- to an end. This the angel arranges in somewhat byzantine fashion by gathering together a motley crew of misfits, three of whom are in the last stages of terminal illness, and sending them to take over a nuclear plant. But this is no ordinary nuclear plant: within its precinct is the laboratory of a scientist attempting to bring into our universe a sample of "strange matter" -- stuff from another reality. If strange matter can be tamed, humanity will have a cheap, clean and copious source of energy forever. But if strange matter proves to be untamable, the merest jolt of his sample will spell curtains for us all.
As always with Westlake, what's actually a far more complex plot than I've outlined is set up impeccably (indeed one could complain he devotes too much of the early part of the book to this) and carried through with equal skill in timing and execution. The sole area in which the maestro's touch seems a trifle uncertain concerns a plot-strand in which Lucifer, who's perfectly content with the human race the way it is, sends an emissary to counter the efforts of the exterminating angel. While there are some enjoyable contretemps between the two shapeshifting entities, somehow the strand seems just to peter out through lack of auctorial interest rather than be woven in with everything else as the book comes to its climax.
There are some nice in-jokes for readers of disaster novels. I liked the occasional habit of introducing a character who's fully fleshed out for a chapter only for the clearly anticipated fate of being spifflicated at chapter's end.
In his dedication Westlake says the notion for the book was sparked off in conversation with Evan Hunter/Ed McBain -- another masterful crime writer who dabbled in f/sf and another member of my personal literary pantheon who died not so long ago. This added to the bittersweetness with which I read Humans.
