Jack Heath's Blog, page 2
February 18, 2021
If he hadn't decided to become a writer, Terry Hayes would have made an excellent terrorist.
The villain of I Am Pilgrim, who is referred to mostly as the Saracen, has an ingenious plan. The amount thought he's put into it (and therefore the amount of thought the author put into it) is incredible. This isn't the kind of book where a bad guy simply steals a biological weapon from a top secret medical facility. This is the kind of book where the bad guy spends five years getting a medical degree so as he can remove someone's eyeballs so as he can fool a retinal scanner and infiltrate a top secret medical facility so he can steal a vaccine, so as he can inoculate himself, so as he can safely reverse engineer a biological weapon... and so on. Every step is meticulous and cunning, in a way that I don't think I've seen in any other work of fiction.
The Saracen's dedication to his evil plan, demonstrated over decades, makes him an oddly sympathetic character. It's hard to dislike someone with so much grit, even if his end-goal is to murder millions. In one nailbiter of a scene, Australian soldiers have the Saracen pinned down in an abandoned village filled with booby traps, and the reader genuinely wants him to slip through the net. The audiobook is read by Christopher Ragland, who reads these scenes with characteristic intensity. (A necessary disclosure - Ragland also reads the audiobooks of my Timothy Blake series.)
The protagonist, by contrast, feels a bit hollow. He has many names, but we're told none of them are real. He has plenty of attributes, but none of them seem important. His drinking problem isn't a problem - he brushes off the cravings with no apparent difficulty. His past as a drug addict has given him the ability to quickly calculate dosages but has done him no harm whatsoever. His relationship with his adopted father, while well articulated and touching, serves only to ladle some ennui over the proceedings.
I Am Pilgrim was published in 2014, but the story is aggressively post-9/11. The narrator is a courageous American male. He's a former spy (the best ever, we're told) and also the author of an investigator's handbook (also the best ever). He's summoned by a second courageous American male (a New York City cop who pulled survivors from the wreckage of the World Trade Centre) to assist with a homicide investigation. But before the ex-spy can be of much assistance, he's summoned by a third courageous American male (the US president) to help save the Western world from a terror attack. He's sent to Turkey, where almost everyone he meets is slimy, cowardly and corrupt. This justifies the hero's methods, which are sometimes more harsh than clever.
The worldview of this book could be concisely summarised as America good, Muslims bad. (The existence of American Muslims is not acknowledged.) At one point, the hero contemplates kidnapping and torturing a Turkish cop who has not, at that stage in the story, done anything wrong. At another point he stabs a struggling Turkish bass player for the crime of being surly, and then tells him to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, just like in American Psycho. Unlike in American Psycho, the musician is inspired to better himself by this incident. (As a bassist myself, I might have taken this personally.) The heroic president is a union-buster, and the terrorist plot hinges on American manufacturing jobs moving offshore. If not for the undeniable humanity of the Saracen, and the book's obsession with the horrors of the holocaust, the whole thing might seem uncomfortably MAGA.
Sexism is splashed around as well. The US president demonstrates his tenderness and humanity to the whole world when he's photographed hugging a crying man at his dying wife's bedside - but only after waiting a minute or two for the guy to get a hold of himself. Several characters are described as "an intelligent woman" as though this is a quality that most women do not have. In a surreal, meta exchange, one woman at a seminar criticises how the narrator writes about women. When the narrator defends himself by saying that he's had "quite a lot of success with women," his accuser is immediately charmed and seduced.
Still, there's more to a book than just how woke it is, or isn't. Telling a coherent and compelling story over 912 pages is quite an accomplishment, no matter how old-fashioned parts of it may seem. The murder mystery element doesn't take up many of those pages, but it's genuinely brilliant. Having said that the Saracen was my favourite character, the book would have been worth reading even if he and his terrorist plot weren't in it. The narrator's deduction involving a mirror is astounding. The language Hayes uses to precisely capture every moment is fluid and beautiful. And the level of research he has clearly undertaken into virology, geography, history, spycraft, language and religion gives the whole thing an impressive air of authenticity. I may grate against some of the politics of this book, but I can't accuse the author of ignorance. In fact, I have to tip my hat to him. He's clearly as patient, dedicated and resourceful as the terrorist he created.
The Saracen's dedication to his evil plan, demonstrated over decades, makes him an oddly sympathetic character. It's hard to dislike someone with so much grit, even if his end-goal is to murder millions. In one nailbiter of a scene, Australian soldiers have the Saracen pinned down in an abandoned village filled with booby traps, and the reader genuinely wants him to slip through the net. The audiobook is read by Christopher Ragland, who reads these scenes with characteristic intensity. (A necessary disclosure - Ragland also reads the audiobooks of my Timothy Blake series.)
The protagonist, by contrast, feels a bit hollow. He has many names, but we're told none of them are real. He has plenty of attributes, but none of them seem important. His drinking problem isn't a problem - he brushes off the cravings with no apparent difficulty. His past as a drug addict has given him the ability to quickly calculate dosages but has done him no harm whatsoever. His relationship with his adopted father, while well articulated and touching, serves only to ladle some ennui over the proceedings.
I Am Pilgrim was published in 2014, but the story is aggressively post-9/11. The narrator is a courageous American male. He's a former spy (the best ever, we're told) and also the author of an investigator's handbook (also the best ever). He's summoned by a second courageous American male (a New York City cop who pulled survivors from the wreckage of the World Trade Centre) to assist with a homicide investigation. But before the ex-spy can be of much assistance, he's summoned by a third courageous American male (the US president) to help save the Western world from a terror attack. He's sent to Turkey, where almost everyone he meets is slimy, cowardly and corrupt. This justifies the hero's methods, which are sometimes more harsh than clever.
The worldview of this book could be concisely summarised as America good, Muslims bad. (The existence of American Muslims is not acknowledged.) At one point, the hero contemplates kidnapping and torturing a Turkish cop who has not, at that stage in the story, done anything wrong. At another point he stabs a struggling Turkish bass player for the crime of being surly, and then tells him to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, just like in American Psycho. Unlike in American Psycho, the musician is inspired to better himself by this incident. (As a bassist myself, I might have taken this personally.) The heroic president is a union-buster, and the terrorist plot hinges on American manufacturing jobs moving offshore. If not for the undeniable humanity of the Saracen, and the book's obsession with the horrors of the holocaust, the whole thing might seem uncomfortably MAGA.
Sexism is splashed around as well. The US president demonstrates his tenderness and humanity to the whole world when he's photographed hugging a crying man at his dying wife's bedside - but only after waiting a minute or two for the guy to get a hold of himself. Several characters are described as "an intelligent woman" as though this is a quality that most women do not have. In a surreal, meta exchange, one woman at a seminar criticises how the narrator writes about women. When the narrator defends himself by saying that he's had "quite a lot of success with women," his accuser is immediately charmed and seduced.
Still, there's more to a book than just how woke it is, or isn't. Telling a coherent and compelling story over 912 pages is quite an accomplishment, no matter how old-fashioned parts of it may seem. The murder mystery element doesn't take up many of those pages, but it's genuinely brilliant. Having said that the Saracen was my favourite character, the book would have been worth reading even if he and his terrorist plot weren't in it. The narrator's deduction involving a mirror is astounding. The language Hayes uses to precisely capture every moment is fluid and beautiful. And the level of research he has clearly undertaken into virology, geography, history, spycraft, language and religion gives the whole thing an impressive air of authenticity. I may grate against some of the politics of this book, but I can't accuse the author of ignorance. In fact, I have to tip my hat to him. He's clearly as patient, dedicated and resourceful as the terrorist he created.
February 17, 2021
Don't you just hate the coast? You get sunburned, the sand makes you itchy, and then some weird fungus starts growing all over your Mum.
At least, that's the way things often go in Gulpepper, the town at the centre of Alan Baxter's new book, The Gulp. There are five novellas in this collection, all set in the same town. A delivery driver gets stranded when his truck breaks down, and witnesses a horrific crime in the motel room next door. Two teenagers try to hide their mother's death to avoid foster care, and soon find themselves hiding the thing that used to be their Mum. A backpacker goes to a gig at a pub, and his friends refuse to accept that the after party is going on too long, and the band is a tad sinister. (The band members include Shirley, Howard, Edgar and Clarke - their elderly housemate is Bram.) A drug mule who loses $60,000 worth of product has only 48 hours to pay back his terrifying boss. And a lonely fisherman falls head over heels in love... with an egg he's just pulled from the ocean.
The bizarre happenings in these stories only work because Gulpepper feels utterly real - you'll find yourself checking maps to make sure it isn't there. The atmosphere, the activity and the attitude are all spot on for every small Australian coastal town I've ever been to, but not in a way that demean the locals, which is a nice change. The language is great, too. Baxter knows plenty of synonyms for spongy, slimy and rotten, and the music of Blind Eye Moon is so vividly described that I could practically hear it in my head.
I recently read Uzumaki by Junji Ito, which is not unlike The Gulp - a collection of bizarre stories with vaguely linked events all set in one cursed town. In both books, each story builds and builds... and then ends, a bit matter-of-factly, with the reader feeling confused and uneasy. This is cosmic horror, which is heavy on dread and light on explanation. It works better here than in Uzumaki, because the five protagonists of The Gulp all have depth (not hidden depth, since you find out everything about them in the first few of pages of each story, but depth just the same) and while the rest of the cast leans toward the archetypal, nothing seems false or forced. I've heard it said that two-dimensional characters are a feature rather than a bug of cosmic horror, helping to emphasize the insignificance of humans in a threatening universe. I don't agree, and I'm glad that Baxter doesn't seem to either.
It's impossible not to empathise with the doomed heroes in The Gulp. The band are clearly vampires, or werewolves, or something - why won't Ciara listen to Patrick? Those bumps under Troy's skin where you touched the egg are clearly bad news - just go to the doctor, man! Why doesn't everyone just flee this terrible town?! As each protagonist wades deeper and deeper into a mess of his or her own making, you'll find yourself gritting your teeth and clenching your fingernails - in a good way. Tell you what, though, I'm not going to be eating any seafood for a while.
The bizarre happenings in these stories only work because Gulpepper feels utterly real - you'll find yourself checking maps to make sure it isn't there. The atmosphere, the activity and the attitude are all spot on for every small Australian coastal town I've ever been to, but not in a way that demean the locals, which is a nice change. The language is great, too. Baxter knows plenty of synonyms for spongy, slimy and rotten, and the music of Blind Eye Moon is so vividly described that I could practically hear it in my head.
I recently read Uzumaki by Junji Ito, which is not unlike The Gulp - a collection of bizarre stories with vaguely linked events all set in one cursed town. In both books, each story builds and builds... and then ends, a bit matter-of-factly, with the reader feeling confused and uneasy. This is cosmic horror, which is heavy on dread and light on explanation. It works better here than in Uzumaki, because the five protagonists of The Gulp all have depth (not hidden depth, since you find out everything about them in the first few of pages of each story, but depth just the same) and while the rest of the cast leans toward the archetypal, nothing seems false or forced. I've heard it said that two-dimensional characters are a feature rather than a bug of cosmic horror, helping to emphasize the insignificance of humans in a threatening universe. I don't agree, and I'm glad that Baxter doesn't seem to either.
It's impossible not to empathise with the doomed heroes in The Gulp. The band are clearly vampires, or werewolves, or something - why won't Ciara listen to Patrick? Those bumps under Troy's skin where you touched the egg are clearly bad news - just go to the doctor, man! Why doesn't everyone just flee this terrible town?! As each protagonist wades deeper and deeper into a mess of his or her own making, you'll find yourself gritting your teeth and clenching your fingernails - in a good way. Tell you what, though, I'm not going to be eating any seafood for a while.
January 27, 2021
I'm planning to review all the books I read this year.
Theoretically those reviews will show up here! Hope you like 'em. Let me know.
