Michael in Nashville

I’m often asked by friends to recommend a book. Whenever I’m asked this, I’m flattered to do so and happy to make a recommendation. Because of this, I tend to keep a mental list of good books to recommend to friends if the question comes up.

I’ve got a new one to add to that list. “The Double Bind” by Chris Bojhalian.

If you’ve not read it, I highly recommend. I also recommend going into the book completely unaware of any thing more than the dust jacket blurb will tell you.

That said, this is one of those book that will be hard to talk about without addressing the plot twists and revelations that come in the final fifty or so pages. I will try to keep those comments to a minimum until later in this post and I’ll try to warn you again when I’m getting into huge spoiler territory.

“The Double Bind” starts out on a quiet country rode with our protagonist, Laurel, out for a Sunday afternoon bicycle ride. She is met by two men who jump out of a van and attempt to assualt her. Laurel escapes the ordeal with some broken bones because of the clips on her pedals and her holding onto to the bike for dear life.

The novel starts off with this brutal attack and then moves forward seven years. Laurel now works as an advocate for the homeless at a local program. In the course of her duties, she meets Charlie. Charlie passes away, leaving behind a box full of old photographs and negatives. Because of her interest in photography, Lauren is asked to look into the photos and see if they might be used to create an exhibit to honor Charlie’s life and bring some publicity to the group she works for.

What follows is a slow spiral into obsession as Laurel becomes obsessed with putting together the pieces from the photos and discovering who Charlie was. And also, she wants to know why he has a a photo that appears to be her riding along the road where she was attacked.

Interestingly, Bojahalan incoroprates elements from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” in this novel. As Laurel investigates, she finds that Charlie might be the son of the infamous Jay Gatsby from the novel.

OK, now is the point at which if you haven’t read the story, you should turn back or stop reading.

At first, I was skeptical about the incorporation of elements of Gatsby into this story. To make the character from that story part of the real world of this novel seemed a bit of a stretch at first and it slowly began to make me have my doubts as the novel progressed. However, once it’s revealed that this is a world Laurel has created for herself in an attempt to create meaning to the horrible attack she endured seven years before, it all makes sense.

In the last few pages of the novel, we discover that Laurel didn’t escape attack. She was raped and brutally so–three times. Two by one man, one by the other. They savaged her and left her bleeding and for dead on the road side. Laurel convinced herself that she’d escaped attack by hanging onto the bike and being clipped in, but it wasn’t true. This manifests itself in her refusal to ride a bicycle any more after the attack–seeing the bicycle as her savior, but also knowing deep down what has happened and not wanting to deal with it.

As it turns out, Laurel had a pyschotic break. She invents her own reality and is obsessed with the Gatsby novel. She creates or fills in entire bits of conversation in her head to fuel this obession and descent into delusion.

But yet, that’s not the biggest “holy cow” moment of the last few pages.

Part of the aftermath of the attack is that Laurel has an attraction to older men. She is dating one in the book, who has two daughters. One is the beautiful one who wants to act and is everything you think a typical girl of that age should be. The other is awkward, not as beautiful and show as having a bit of a socially awkward relationship with the world. She is less concerned with what people think, even wearing a Junior Mint on her ear and claiming it’s an earring.

In the final pages of the novel, we learn there were no daughters. It was a fiction Laurel created for herself to explain to herself what she was withdrawing from her boyfriend. But it goes a bit deeper. In the girls we see both sides of how Laurel sees herself. It’s a hint of the revelation that she had a pyschotic break and how Laurel sees herself pre and post-attack. In this revelation, the book takes on an interesting twist and leaves you sitting back, reassessing everything you just read and wondering just where the reality lay.

We do see hints of it…and for the most part, we can figure out what was real and what wasn’t upon further examination. The novel end with Laurel being put into a mental facility for her own protection and her inabilty to deal with reality. We hear bits and pieces of the medical reports on her as the story unfolds, but we can easily assume these are reports on Charlie. It’s only when we figure out that its Laurel that we can look back and see how Bojahalan was setting up the entire ending right in front of us, but not giving us the entire picture.

It’s one of those books where the surprise works and it caught me totally unaware. I suspected there was something more to the story than we were getting, but I never quite expected this. And seeing it, it made the entire reading experience that much more rich and enjoyable.

One of the things about being a book geek is that, sometimes, you enjoy getting together with other book geeks and, well, geeking out about books. Part of this is that you it makes you feel better to know others enjoy reading a particular type of novel or genre as much as you do and that while most of your friends and family find your zealousness for said books frightening, there are others out there who understand. And another big part is that you get recommendations for new books you might not normally read.

Last night, I ventured out to my first meeting of the science-fiction/fantasy discussion group at the Linebaugh library in downtown Murfreesboro. I’ve known about the existance of the group for a while now, but hadn’t been able to make a meeting. I’d read a few of the books they’d selected but somehow life always seemed to interfere with my good intentions of actually getting there.

This month’s selection was the Robert A. Heinlein novel, Farnham’s Freehold. Let me preface this by saying that as a science-fiction reader, I find Heinlein vastly overrated. He may have been great in his day, but I’ve found the large majority of his work to be vastly inferior to other contemporaries of his day such as Issac Asimov or Arthur C. Clark. I’ve read a fair number of his bigger works such as Stranger in a Strange Land, just becuase it seems you can’t be a sci-fi geek without having plowed through the book. But apart from Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters, there’s not been a lot of Heinlein I’ve come away really enjoying or thinking I’d actually want to re-read it again someday.

Alas, Farnham’s Freehold feel in the category of how I feel about the majority of Heinlein’s work–vastly overrated.

The front cover states this is “science-fiction’s most controversial novel.” Maybe in 1964, it was but the story is really showing signs of age. The story centers on Hugh Farnham and his family. Hugh has built a nuclear bunker under his house, which comes in handy when the U.S. in nuked by the Russians. Hugh, his family, a friend and their servant all hide out in the bunker, emerging to find that the bombs have somehow shifted them forward in time. The book then becomes a survivalist type of story about forging their way in a new world, until it takes an abrupt left turn about 150 pages into the book. The group is discovered by the new rulers of this world, all of whom are African-American. In a role-reversal of the time it was written, all the white people are treated as slaves, with the men nuetered.

Now, all of this may have seemed edgy, contemporary and brilliant social satire in the mid-60s, but today it all seems dated. The story lacks focus and abruptly shifts in tone and focus too much as the story unfolds. Even though the book barely hits the 300 page mark, it feels too padded and long, with Heinlein spendng a lot of time on the initial days in the new world and only hinting at the better novel that could have been in the last two pages. This is a novel that could have been a better novella.

But the biggest thing is that in a story about the survival of humanity, there should be at least one person you want to survive. That’s not the case here. It’s hard to identify with any of them or really care if they make it or not.

That said, as much as I didn’t enjoy the book, it was interesting to be part of a discussion with people who had different views. One person shared my view on the lack of enjoyment in the book but others did like it and were able to share why. It didn’t change my overall feeling on the book, but it was interesting to think about.

Orson Scott Card is probably best-known for his Hugo-award-winning Ender’s series of novels. The series combines hard-core military strategy with moral and ethical dilemmas that make for not only good science-fiction, but good literature. I’d heartily recommend most of the Ender’s series to anyone who wants to see just how good science-fiction can be when done well.

Card’s other novels have been hit or miss for me. I loved Enchantment, but could barely force myself through his last novel, Magic Street. That said, there are more Card stories I’ve read I’ve enjoyed than those I haven’t and I’d even go so far as to consider him one of my favorite authors. He’s also one that when I hear a new novel is coming out, I will immediately go and put it on reserve.

Even as his worst, Card combines big-ideas with realistic characters. And as I said before, he’s shown a good ability to make military sci-fi relatable and interesting.

Which is why going into his latest novel, Empire, I had high hopes. The novel is a depature from the typical Card story (not there really is such a thing). It’s the near-future (from details in the novel I’d say after the elections of ‘08 or ‘12). Al Quieda attacks the United States, wiping out the president, vice president and several other senior officials in one fell swoop. In the chaos that enuses, the Speaker of the Senate is made president, something certain sects within the military don’t like. Before long the military has broken off, declaring themselves the legitimate government of the United States and fighting to preserve and restore the Constitution. The country falls into civil war, pretty much divided along the red states vs blue states lines.

Card’s near-future thriller, at times, reads like a Tom Clancy techo-thriller. A battle across the streets of New York against mechancial killing machines, designed to target authority figures feels like vintage-Clancy
.

The problem is that while Clancy can pull of the high-tech mystery thriller believably, Card fails to do so here. The plot takes absurd twist after absurd twist. The hero of our story, Major Ruben “Rube” Malek is one part Jack Bauer, one part Fox Mulder. He wrote up a briefing on how terrorists could attack and cripple the United States, only to see it used in the course of the novel. He become paranoid in the extreme, feeling he’s being set-up by every side and that he can “trust no one” as he tries to make sense of the attacks and who is behind them. (There are hints the proposal was leaked by high-ranking governemental officials to create hysteria and put them into postions of power).

Rube is a conservative, married to a liberal who used to work for the (now) President and many such political debates ensue. In the Ender’s novels, the debates from both sides of the aisle worked well but here it just seems like pages of political rhetoric thrown-in with no real impact on the overall story or the plot development.

As for the plot itself, there are some major loopholes that too glaring to make the book truly enjoyable. For one thing, it’s hard to fathom that the United States would be attacked so by Al Quida and then forget about it. It seems as if Card wanted to find a way to bring about his civil war and did so using the threat of terrorism. You would think America might feel a bit outraged at such an attack, no matter who is in the Oval Office or his or her popularity, but that thread is barely given more than lip-service here. Perhaps that will be a thread of later novels (the ending does leave it open for more novels to come, should Card choose to do so), but it comes across as too obvious an exclusion here.

The biggest problem with Empire is that it’s got some good pieces but those pieces don’t come together to form a complete novel. The first half is good but the last half of the story which features bizarre plot-twist after bizarre plot-twist quickly loses steam. Which is a shame. This had the potential to be great and could have been the start to a great new series of novels for Card. As it is, it’s just a mess and a disappointment.

Being the book geek I am, I’ve signed up for a few book related newsletters. One of them is a sci-fi newsletter highlighting recently published books or novels by new authors that might be of interest.

The newsletter comes out approximately once a month.

And every month I seem to have the same frustration with it. I will read the write-up of a new sci-fi novel, be intrigued enough to want to give it a try and then click on the link to reserve the book. Only to find, nine times out of ten, the library system doesn’t have the book.

Talk about frustrating….