Books Read in 2023, Part 2

More books!

--

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson)

Many years ago I read a Gibson novel called Zero History, which – I now know – was actually the concluding volume of the trilogy that starts with Pattern Recognition. I don’t remember much about Zero History other than that it seemed to involve a lot of discussion of fabric and it was clearly a sequel to something, so here we have another project. Set and written not long after the 9/11 attacks, which play a large part in the background, this is the story of Cayce (pronounced “Case”) Pollard, an artistic consultant whose primary traits are an unerring ability to know at a glance whether a proposed brand logo will work (a trait that earns her living) and a PTSD-like reaction to most other brand logos. She is also part of the worldwide fandom of the Footage – short, cryptic clips from what appears to be a very artsy sort of movie that appear randomly and are discussed obsessively in online forums. These traits collide when she takes a job with Blue Ant, a marketing company run by Hubertus Bigend. When he hires her to seek out the artist behind the Footage the story descends into a noirish blend of found alliances, betrayals, skullduggery, and international travel that covers London, the US, and Japan before settling into post-Soviet Russia. It’s a well-told story for the most part, though the ending is rather sudden and ties things up a bit too neatly.

Spook Country (William Gibson)

David Eggers once noted that there are basically two kinds of plots in modern fiction. There are photography plots, where the task of the author is to frame something just so in order to tell the story, and there are mousetrap plots, where the author very carefully lines everything up until you get to a trigger point and then the conclusion snaps into place. In the second of the Blue Ant books, William Gibson sets up a complicated mousetrap, with three distinct groups of characters and one giant MacGuffin that all come together in the final part of the story. Hubertus Bigend is here again, though this time mostly as an offstage facilitator whose bottomless pockets and resources magically make things happen. This isn’t his story the way Pattern Recognition was. One of the character groups is headlined by Hollis Henry, the former lead singer of a moderately famous band called Curfew now trying to make ends meet as a journalist. She has accepted a freelance contract from a magazine called Node – which might or might not exist and in any event is funded by Bigend – to research a particular form of digital conceptual art in Los Angeles. In her group of characters are Odile (a French woman whose main function is to connect Hollis to other people), Inchmale and Heidi (former bandmates), and Bobby Chombo, the reclusive tech wizard making the art possible. A second group features Tito and his family, Cuban exiles in New York City at least for the moment, descended from and trained by shadowy intelligence operatives and now offering their services for hire in a post-9/11 world. Tito lives in a world where Cuban folk gods make their presence known to him regularly, where “protocol” is nearly sacred, and where nobody ever really knows anyone else’s name. The third group consists of Brown, an agent of some kind though it’s never really clear for whom, and Milgram, his captive junkie and a rather phlegmatic and thoughtful soul, whom Brown uses for whatever errands he deems necessary. All of these characters revolve around the MacGuffin, which is a giant cargo container whose location and contents are known only to some. It will all come together neatly in the end as the mousetrap snaps shut, with a conclusion that mostly wraps up the loose ends without really threatening anyone, and then we’re on to the next Blue Ant story.

Zero History (William Gibson)

And so we come full circle, back to the book I read a decade ago before I realized it was Book Three of a series. It makes a lot more sense now, as one would imagine. Hollis Henry is still vaguely employed by Bigend and many of the characters we met in Spook Country reappear, but in many ways the main character of this is Milgrim, now dried out and restored to sobriety through a fairly expensive process paid for by Bigend. Milgrim is, of course, deeply in Bigend’s debt and working for him on a project involving clothing patterns – Bigend would like to break into the market for clothing based on US military designs, which is apparently a more dangerous thing than you’d think. Much of the plot revolves around a loose cannon named Gracie who would very much like to inflict harm on Bigend, Blue Ant, and everyone associated with it. On the good guys’ side there is Heidi, Garreth, Bobby Chombo, Inchmale, an American DCIS agent working on her own project that intersects with Milgrim and whose interests line up with Bigend’s, the motorcycle courier Fiona, and the mysterious designer of a line of clothing called Gabriel Hounds whose name is never revealed though eventually it does become clear if you’ve read the previous books. As with the earlier books this is a quick-moving, entertaining, fairly light story with enough of an edge of danger to make it interesting but without too much grievous harm done to anyone. Most of the characters end happily, and Milgrim most of all. Gibson clearly had a lot of fun with this series, and mostly he seems to have wanted his readers to do so as well.

Why is that Bridge Orange? San Francisco for the Curious (Art Peterson)

This book was given to me by a friend who has since passed on, and it is pretty much exactly what it sounds like it would be – a quick, breezy, heavily illustrated guide to some of the more picturesque and interesting things in San Francisco, a city I have been to several times. There are about eighty or so short chapters (2-3pp), each one devoted to a landmark, a question, or a general happening that visitors might want to know more about – including the title question – and Peterson provides not only some historical and social context but also one or more color photographs. If you’ve been to the city and remember some of these places, it’s a fun ride. It probably would mean more to residents, but it will be a handy thing for the next time I go back.

Erasure (Percival Everett)

Thelonius (“Monk”) Ellison is a university professor, a writer of abstruse and critically acclaimed novels that nobody outside of academia will ever read, a socially awkward misfit genially mystified by personal interactions, and a man constantly being told he’s not “black enough.” His father is dead, leaving behind a box full of family secrets. His mother is slowly slipping into dementia. His brother is divorced, having finally come out as gay, and seems to hate him. His sister is a respected doctor. But as his family unravels in front of him, Monk finds himself confronted by a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto – a slapdash, borderline racist portrayal of black American life written by an affluent black woman who had visited Harlem for a few days, an affront to everything Monk holds dear as a novelist and a black man, and very quickly a national best seller. In a fit of rage he dashes off an equally slapdash, borderline racist parody of that book that he entitles My Pafology and sends it to his agent along with his new pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh (which was my favorite thing about Everett’s book). When that book too becomes a best seller and provides the financial windfall that Monk desperately needs, he will have to confront who he is and who he is not and what has been erased in his attempt to live as a black man in America. It’s a thoughtful, angry book in many ways, and a well written one. This is a book that Lauren read for her African American Literature class and the second one from that syllabus that I’ve read so far. Perhaps I should have just taken the class.

Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo (Tim Parks)

There is something about a train that appeals to travelers. Trains are not as direct or frenetic as a car, nor as fraught as air travel these days, and they give you the freedom to do other things while the countryside passes by outside. You get thrown in with people, which can be good or bad depending on your views on such things or the specific people you find. And you see things that you don’t see from the highways. Tim Parks has been living in northern Italy for decades after leaving his native England, and he has written several books about the experience. On the surface this is about his travels by train in Italy – between Verona, where he lives, and Milan, where he works; from Milan to Rome, from north to southwest (Sicily) and southeast (Otranto) – but this is just a lens for Parks to discuss Italy and Italian culture, everything from the convoluted and nearly incomprehensible processes governing ticketing to the role of the railroads in the Italian economy, Italian unification, and the current Italian position in the European Union, to the various places he gets to and from via Trenitalia and other networks less well known. Parks is a talented writer with an eye for telling details and an ear for a story, and in the end you will know more about how Italy works from following his train travels than you would know from any amount of food tourism.

The Hero’s Way: Walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna (Tim Parks)

Italy is both a very old and a surprisingly young nation. It has a coherent history stretching back millennia to the Romans and Etruscans but as a modern united nation it is barely a century and a half old. Two hundred years ago it was a patchwork of small kingdoms, most of them ruled by foreign powers – particularly France and Austria-Hungary – or the Pope. The Risorgimento, the independence movement that created a united Italy, began in 1848 and finally succeeded in 1871 when the Papal States (including Rome) fell into Italian hands. One of the key figures in this struggle was Giuseppe Garibaldi, the epitome of the Romantic hero – a dashing, charismatic, and committed man ennobled by tragedy and rendered glorious by victory. But in 1849, that victory seemed a long way away. The Italian versions of the Revolutions of 1848, when liberal forces rose up against conservative authoritarianism across Europe, collapsed in 1849 and Garibaldi had to lead a dwindling and outnumbered fugitive army east from Rome across the Apennines in a mad dash to escape the French and Austrian armies pursuing him. With him were his Brazilian wife, Anita, as well as a handful of colorful and unforgettable characters whose fates intertwine and cycle back. Into this story comes Tim Parks – as noted above, an Englishman who has lived in northern Italy for decades – and his Italian girlfriend Eleanora, determined to follow in Garibaldi’s footsteps. In the summer of 2019, 160 years after Garibaldi’s march, they set out to retrace the retreat from Rome to Ravenna on foot, matching his progress day by day. Each day gets a chapter filled with nearly equal parts historical information (Parks relies heavily on several books written by Garibaldi’s surviving companions, as well as the man’s own memoirs) and their own struggles to walk nearly four hundred miles through Italy in August. Parks writes well and you always get a feel for the landscape, the people they meet, the struggles of trying to be a vegetarian in modern Italy, and the intersection of history and setting that never seems to be far beneath the surface of life in that country. Toward the end Parks notes that he is writing the last parts of the book during the first month or so of Italy’s COVID lockdown in 2020, which makes him wistful for the freedom he and Eleanora experienced in their long rambles. It’s less of a view of Italian culture through a specific lens, the way Italian Ways was, and more of a simple travelogue through both space and time.

Season of Skulls (Charles Stross)

Concluding the Starkey subseries within the Laundry Files, Stross now shifts his focus almost entirely over to Eve – the sister of Imp, the unwilling bride of Rupert, Baron of Skaro, and a powerful sorceress in her own right. Rupert, it turns out, was not quite dead (or not dead enough, as it’s a fine line) and his return to the present is full of horrors and difficulties for Eve. When Rupert disappears into the dream roads back to an alternative version of Regency England in 1816, Eve has no choice but to follow – for one thing, Rupert’s plan is clearly to invoke the Mute Poet and consume humanity, and for another the New Management very clearly wants her to go. But when she gets there she finds herself trapped in a world where Regency Romance tropes bend her to the narrative and The Village from the old television show The Prisoner has been recreated a century and a half before her time to imprison her. How she gets back to her own time is the bulk of the story, and in that process she will meet scoundrels and heroes, demonic beasts and sorcerers. Imp and his friends are here reduced to a very limited supporting role, and for the first time this trilogy intersects with the actual Laundry in the person of Persephone Hazzard, but this is Eve’s story and she makes the most of it.

Walking With Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain (Andrew McCarthy)

El Camino de Santiago holds a certain attraction to both the faithful and the secular alike. A five-hundred-mile walk across northern Spain – from the French border to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, in honor of St. James the Apostle – that has been a popular pilgrimage since medieval times, it provides a vast wealth of time and focus that allows those taking part to consider their lives and concerns in new lights. Andrew McCarthy, perhaps best known for his roles in many of the teen drama movies of the 1980s but more recently an award-winning travel writer, made the journey as a young and fairly lost man, and always wanted to go back. When his nineteen-year-old son Sam agreed to go with him, they flew out to the beginning point and started their trek. In some ways this book is pretty much what you would expect it to be, with reflections on parenting and aging taking center stage – you learn a lot about McCarthy’s own family life as a child, in addition to how he is adjusting to a son emerging as an adult in his own right – mixed in with thoughts about the Camino itself and how it has or has not changed in the quarter century since McCarthy tried it the first time. Along the way we meet a host of companions thrown together by the shared experiences and spaces of the Camino, most of whom are given affectionate nicknames (The Boys, Irish, The White People, Taxi Roger, and so on) and whom McCarthy and his son grow rather fond of. McCarthy introduces us to the terrain, the climate, the food, and the various innkeepers, waiters, and others they meet along the way. And in the end they make it to the Cathedral, maybe not completely different people but perhaps with a bit more depth than when they started. It’s a well-written book as you would expect given McCarthy’s credentials and it generally stays on the right side of the emotional line that divides thoughtful reflections on parenting from mawkish sentimentality. That McCarthy never once mentions the Proclaimers is a notable achievement, really, and demonstrates far more restraint than I would have had in his situation. Sometimes I think I enjoy reading about other people’s travels more than actually traveling, but this is perhaps not that bad of a thing.

S. (Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams)

This is a dark and foreboding story told on at least five different levels, perhaps more. At its most basic, it purports to be a novel by a reclusive and mysterious author named V. M. Straka entitled Ship of Theseus, the last of 19 novels attributed to him. Nobody really knows who Straka was, how many of the novels he wrote by himself or with others, or even whether he really existed at all – he might have been the code name for a collective of authors (whose own identities are not clear either), or a front for one or more of the collective working together – and the literary arguments over his identity are fierce, career ending, and at times physically dangerous. Straka, if he existed, was a dangerous man often involved in violent events and political upheavals. The novel tells the story of a man who washes up in a harbor in an dark old city, somewhere in the late 19th or early 20th centuries most likely, with no memory of who he is or what his life might be like, and it follows him through a dark and slightly surreal life of searching – for the life he lost, for the woman who was with him when he was shanghaied onto a mysterious sailing ship with a monstrous crew, for the time he loses while aboard that ship, for vengeance. He gets involved in nameless revolutions in nameless cities, discovers deadly skills and unsettling places, loses friends and colleagues, but in the end not much is ever made clear to him about any of those things, though much is made clear about others. Underneath this – literally – are the footnotes, written by F. X. Caldeira, Straka’s main translator and (perhaps?) mutually unrequited love, whose notes are less explanations of the text and more fictional devices to send messages back and forth between her and Straka, or to whomever reads it. Not all of the codes get broken. In the margins of the text there are several layers of annotations in distinctive colors. The oldest, in a faded grey, are the notes made by Eric when he was 16 and first reading the book. The book is found in the library of Pronghorn University by Jen, a second-semester senior, who writes notes to Eric (by now an expelled graduate student in literature at Pronghorn) and he responds – a running commentary that loops back on itself as they read and reread the book together. There are several layers of their notes in their distinctive handwritings as they document their lives and growing relationship with each other, the oldest red and blue, then orange and green, then black and red, and finally just black. Jen and Eric also leave objects in the pages for each other that further the story – letters, post cards, photos, maps, and so on, which are all included in the book on specific pages so you have to be careful when handling the book – and as they get pulled deeper and deeper into the mystery of V. M. Straka, the threats that come from exploring this mystery, and the troubles of their own lives, it becomes an odd sort of love story as well. There is a heavy, foreboding and slightly surrealistic early 20th century Eastern European feel to the whole thing, and it’s the sort of book you have to read fairly slowly if you want to catch everything – I read it in one swoop, both Straka/Caldeira and Jen/Eric’s notes together – but apparently you can read each bit separately if you want. I have no idea how. By the end you do feel for them all – Straka, Caldeira, Jen, Eric, S. – though in a dark and complex sort of way.