Deeds & Words

                                                                “I am your father, Luke.”

                                                                                    Darth Vader

                                                                                    The Empire Strikes Back

 

Wanted

Directed by:  Timur Bekmambetov

Written by: Derek Haas, Michael Brandt

Starring:  James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie

 

CONTAINS SPOILERS

 

This is the story of a young man who leaves behind a cubicle existence to seize his destiny as a motivational speaker.

 

I usually stay to watch the credits all the way to the end, but I saw this movie with my Significant Other (henceforth referred to as the Sig-O) and he doesn’t like to do that, so I didn’t stay to see the disclaimer that must have read, “Absolutely no rats were blown up in the making of this movie.”  I felt bad for the fictional rats in this movie.  I mean, here you are, an innocent rat going about your rat-life, eating garbage and spreading disease, and without warning you are drafted as a suicide soldier in a human struggle of evil against . . . not-so-evil.  Is that fair?

 

We had decided that we wanted to see a movie, and the Sig-O had said, “That killer-for-hire one looks interesting.”  He said he thought it would be a thriller; I think he wanted to see it because Angelina Jolie was in it.  I wanted to see it because Timur Bekmambetov directed two Russian movies, Daywatch and Nightwatch (from the fantastical novels by Sergei Lukyanenko) which I thoroughly enjoyed.  Bekmambetov must have been jumping up and down hugging himself with glee at the thought of making a movie with an American movie budget.

 

We walked down to the cinema which is about a mile from our house.  For the previous week we had uncontrolled wild fires in northern California.  The sky had been the color of tarnished silver and walking more than a block hurt my throat and burned my eyes, but this Saturday the air was much clearer and there was even blue at the sky’s zenith.  We got our popcorn and settled in for Wanted.

 

Wanted is loud—really loud; bright, brutal, frenetic, funny and strangely fun.  It is stylish as hell.  The plot makes no sense, and the laws of physics were checked at the door, but it really doesn’t matter.  You root for the so-called hero in spite of yourself, you laugh at the right places, you gasp at the right places, and you don’t feel a need to scream, “I want my life back!” at the end of the two hours.

 

James McAvoy plays a cubicle rat named Wesley whose father disappeared from his life when he was seven days old.  This is the defining fact of Wesley’s existence.  The movie employs a lot of voice-over narration, which usually signals to me that the screenwriter can’t tell the story, but in this case it actually works.  McAvoy’s slacker-sarcastic comments capture the not-so-quiet desperation of his life. “You know what I like best about the end of the day?” he snarks in one sequence.  “Knowing that tomorrow I get to get up and do it all again.”  Wesley is on medication for what he thinks are anxiety attacks, but he doesn’t know that his episodes of accelerated heart rate and surges of adrenaline are the result of a genetic anomaly that gives him the reflexes and the heightened perception to be a super-assassin.  Two other men in the movie have this ability.  Angelina Jolie does not have this super-power.  Angelina Jolie’s super-power is being Angelina Jolie.

 

In large part this is an Angry Man movie, or perhaps an Angry Young Man movie.  It reminded me simultaneously of Fight Club and An Officer and a Gentleman.  Wesley’s live-in girlfriend is having sex with his so-called best friend at the office; Wesley knows this and does nothing.  He chews his anti-anxiety meds by the handful.  This brings him to the drugstore one night where he is accosted by Fox (Jolie) a super-assassin who wears too much eye make up and tells him that the master assassin who killed his father the previous day is now after him and is, in fact, lurking behind the reading glasses display right now.  An action sequence ensues, which moves quickly from on-foot to a car chase; delivery van, complete with collection of bobble-heads, versus Jolie’s sexy red car.  After endangering the lives of about 240 civilians, Fox and Wesley escape.  She introduces him to the Fraternity, a secret society of assassins that has existed for the past one thousand years, killing people randomly based on information received from the Loom of Doom—sorry, I mean the Loom of Fate.

 

More about the loom later.

 

Wesley runs home, but later has a great blow-up scene at work (we cheered) and walks out.  Very Fight Club.  He goes back to the Fraternity and begins to train as an assassin.  This mostly consists of getting beaten up by various people.  It’s kind of like bad group therapy from the 1970′s with a dash of Richard Gere blubbering “I’ve got no place else to go!” thrown in.  It really shouldn’t work, but McAvoy is convincing.  Fox makes Welsey run along the top of the El Train, a really fun scene.  We see this two more times.  One of them is a game of Capture the Flag and Wesley’s joyous confidence in this scene is a delight.

 

There’s also this repeated theme about getting the trajectory of a bullet to curve.  I don’t know why this is a big deal.  In the second scene of the movie we see a bullet that loses and gains altitude as needed, and goes around corners.  We’re also seen the racy red car levitate straight up, do a barrel roll (side-over-side 360-degree flip) and land with zero suspension damage.  Makes shooting in a curve seem pretty ho-hum.

 

In addition to Fight Club, the movie borrows heavily from Batman Begins, The Matrix and in some ways Nightwatch itself, where a gifted boy comes to know himself and makes a choice between good and evil.  The movie doesn’t look like any of them, although a little bit like each of them.  The loom, while making no logical sense, is pretty, and the textile mill that is the headquarters of the Fraternity looks like a castle. 

 

The loom sends back the names of targets via binary code (zeroes and ones) transmitted by checks in the material it is weaving.  The loom weaves itself.  Sounds kind of Zen; The Loom that Weaves Itself.  Oh,wait, that’s a book on Chinese medicine and it’s The Web That Has No Weaver.  Anyway, one thousand years ago, the loom developed a binary code to transmit the names of targets to the weavers.  Isn’t it interesting that they had binary code in 1008?  (I know you’re going to say, “But Marion, I read some where that weaving technology is one point in a line that leads directly to binary code!”  And I’m going to say, “Yes, that’s true; it was a different kind of weaving, and it employed punch cards.”) Doesn’t matter; the loom is still cooler than cool.  Morgan Freeman, the current leader of the Fraternity, is the only person who is allowed to decipher the loom’s messages.

 

Of course the plot follows a “rogue” assassin named Cross who has left the Fraternity and is allegedly taking out the remaining killers.  Freeman expands on the tale that Cross killed Wesley’s father. At this point the Sig-O leaned over to me and murmured, “I am your father, Luke.”

 

Wesley gets the name of his first target, but backs out of the killing.  How can he know if the mark is truly evil?  Fox tells him a heart-tugging story that is the equivalent of “There was this guy who wore his seat belt and his car caught on fire and he couldn’t get out, so seat belts are bad and I shouldn’t have to wear one.”  His moral qualms suitably soothed, Wesley takes the shot, then goes after Cross.

 

This takes place in Morovia; but before we get there we get a montage of action scenes, including that great barrel-roll again, this time in a gold vintage Mustang.  Much later I remembered the witch’s magical red car in Daywatch.  I imagine Bekmambetov once again coming to grips with the American budget:  “I want to barrel-roll another car,” he says, wiping his sweaty palms on his pant-legs. “Sure, Timur, whatever you want.”  “Really? Okay, I. . .in the final sequence I want. . .five hundred rounds of ammo—no, no a thousand rounds!  No, four thousand, wait, forty thousand, I want forty thousand rounds!  And exploding rats!”

 

It is absurd to argue with the morality of a story about assassins, and difficult to quibble with the logic of a movie that is, after all, based on a comic book.  That said, I had some trouble with the Morovia section.  Some of it just went by too quickly for me.  Did the guy in the Morovia monastery have another loom?  Mainly, though, it’s the train sequence.  Wesley chases Cross onto a train, while Fox follows in a stolen Audi or Citroen or something.  We see an arial view as she parallels the train through lush, flat farmlands.  Seconds later, we’re in the mountains, high in the mountains.  Mayhem happens, and then the train starts across a trestle that spans a really, really really deep gorge. . . a gorge so deep that I was actually jerked out of the movie thinking, “If that existed, wouldn’t it have been in every nature photography calendar and screensaver program for the past ten years?  How did they get from the flats to the stratosphere so quickly?  Where is this gorge?  Where did all the innocent passengers go?” By this time, Fox has crashed her little commuter car through the window of the train and is on board, and the games begin.  Wesley shortly discovers that Things Are Not What They Seem.  The scene looks really cool, and that deep, deep gorge is not wasted.

 

Sometime after this comes the ultimate battle (exploding rats!) and it is awesome.  It’s the kind of scene I hate intellectually and I didn’t care, I still liked it.

 

Then we get to the end of the movie and you’re thinking, “Well, what now?” McAvoy tells you.  He looks straight at the camera, peering around the barrel of his father’s long-distance super-gun, and says something like, “I discovered my destiny, I left behind my boring little job, and I killed a whole bunch of people.  What the f*** did you do today?”

 

Can you imagine that at your next staff meeting?  Wesley comes and tells the story of his life; office drone to hired killer.  Wouldn’t that just totally inspire you to go to Peru and help build a school, or at least take that on-line Excell class you keep putting off?  I know it would me.

 

But it works.  It works in part because the arc of the story is not evil versus good, but ignorance versus self-knowledge, engagement versus apathy, strength versus self-abnegation.

 

It works for another reason; it’s funny.  The sticky-note gags are funny. One of the funnier things  is the deceitful, cuckolding best friend, played with perfect pitch by Chris Pratt.  This actor wrings more readings out of the line “You’re the man,” than anybody.

 

 

 

This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S.Eliot, The Hollow Men

 

Southland Tales

Written and Directed by Richard Kelly

Starring:            Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Wallace Shawn, Jon Lovitz, Justin Timberlake, John Larroquette, Christopher Lambert, Mandy Moore and a whole bunch of people you would recognize including that guy from American Pie and Bulletproof Monk.

 

(Contains Spoilers)

                       

So I watched Southland Tales.  I think this brings the total viewership up to twelve. Was this direct-to-video or what?  Did it really get nominated for a golden palm at Cannes in 2006, or is that a hoax?

 

This was in the “Cult” section of my favorite movie rental place.  I’ve heard it described as “science fiction” and “futuristic.” Richard Kelly, writer and director, is the creator of the cult classic Donnie Darko, so you kind of expect weirdness.  With Southland, Kelly brings the weird.

 

The movie is episodic, a little slow to get started, and over two hours long. I thought perhaps I dozed off between the time that Rebekah del Rios sang the national anthem aboard the giant zeppelin and the point where the ice cream truck hit the ATM machine being dragged behind the SUV and went airborne, but later I figured out that, no, I didn’t really. . .just that nothing much happened for a little bit. 

 

I ‘m not sure, but I think the movie is meant to be funny.  I think it’s a satire on current political and pop-cultural events, including (maybe) the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger is California’s governor (“Boxer Santeros” is a Schwarzenegger-type character, right?).The movie seems funny.  Dwayne Johnson does funny stuff, Sarah Michelle Geller is delightfully deadpan, and it’s got all these great comic actors doing darkly comedic things.     

 

I could try to recap some key plot points here, but what would be the point?  If you’re really interested in what people think the movie is about (and you’re not) go look it up on imdb.com.  Okay, here are a few elements:  1) Richard Kelly has unresolved issues about gunshot wounds to the head; 2) there is an alternate energy source that also may confer telepathic ability on people who inject it as a drug;  3) neo-con fascists have taken over America; 4) liberals are stupid and duplicitous also; 5) “Southland” is southern California; 6)Geller plays an ex porn star and 7) that hair she has at the beginning of the movie has to be a wig.  Oh, wait—there a metaphysical time-travel element (sound familiar at all?), a giant zeppelin, and Justin Timeberlake, as Pilot Abilene, hanging out on the beach, quoting the book of Revelations and shooting people with some fancy-schmancy hi-tech sniper gun. He only shoots people we don’t like, though, so it’s okay.

 

(The metaphysical time-travel element is a temporal rift.  Really, I don’t think people realize just how serious a hole in the fabric of time/space is.  It’s not like you can just slap some two-sided tape on it.  I am outraged that the conventional media has not addressed more air time to this serious problem.)

 

If I were going to complain about the plot—which is what I usually complain about—I would say that Kelly short-hands too much stuff at the beginning of the film. He could cut a good ten minutes here and we’d never miss it, and yet the back-story isn’t fleshed out. He resorts to voice-over narration which is almost always, to me, the sign of a failure.  This time however, it kind of worked for me; even though the computer view screen and the anagram stuff got annoying quickly. After some aimless darting around with pseudo-plots about amnesiac-Republican-movie-action-heroes, screenplays, blackmail, double-triple-quadruple crosses, the movie kind of gets down to it with the guy from American Pie, who plays a dual characters, twins.  Only, remember there’s a metaphysical time-travel element, so maybe he’s not exactly a twin, but . .  These characters become the heart of the movie in some strange way, along with Timberlake’s apocalyptic v.o. narrator and a slacker kid who shoots down the zeppelin from atop a levitating ice cream truck while Dwayne Johnson does a three-way tango number (no, the dance, mind-in-the-gutter) with Geller and Moore.

 

Really.  I don’t think I’ve got it wrong. That is what happens.

 

Did I mention the music video segment where Justin Timberlake sings something like, “I’ve got soul, but I’m no soldier?”

 

And then, when we’re on the big blimp (and should I get the reference to the name of the thing?) am I crazy, or does it start feeling a little bit like 1969′s The Magic Christian?      

 

Throughout the movie, characters say, “Not with a whimper, but with a bang.” Unless they are referring to Geller’s ex-porn-star character’s profession, they’re wrong.  It’s a whimper. The characters I liked best were the porn-producer/blackmailer and her friend/lover(?).  They were kind of blue-collar and cool.  And I liked Timberlake’s weird, damaged war veteran, and the twin guys too; they were all right.  I thought Johnson gave a fine performance in a movie no one will see; I admire Geller for the whole post-modernist-ironical thing, but she didn’t really show us anything new here except for the hair she has at the end of the movie.  She should definitely go back to being brunette. The actress who played Starla was screamingly funny (spoiler alert) right up until she was shot. Far, far, far too many people put guns against their temples.  You know what?  It was actually funny when Cleavon Little did it in Blazing Saddles and it has never been funny since.  Richard, find another theme.

 

So did I like it?  Not really and yet. . .kinda.  Why?  You’re thinking, “Why on earth would she have liked it?” and I would have to reply that sometimes, for me, an intriguing failure holds my attention more than a by-the-numbers success.

 

Maybe Kelly is self-indulgent and undisciplined, or maybe this is just the way he makes movies.  He seems big on poetry. Maybe he approaches these projects as sprawling visual poems rather than coherent stories.

 

I don’t think Southland Tales is as good as it could have been, but it’s a fine might-have-been of a movie. It feels like it could make a nice triple feature with Kiss Me Deadly, and Strange Days, as long at there were lots of margaritas at the party.

 

This is the way the movie ends,

This is the way the movie ends,

This is the way the movie ends,

Not with a whimper but a “hunh?”

My friend took us to see the Kilauea lava flow.  As you head south into the Puna district on the big island of Hawaii, you pass a mileage sign that says something like, “End of the Road, 5 miles.”  The road really does end, because lava flowed over it.

 

Right now most of the lava flow comes from the Pu’u O’o vent. Where the hot syrupy rock drips into the ocean, a convoluted plume of white steam roils up at least four stories high. People think of a geyser.  It doesn’t look like a geyser.  It looks like a pillar of twisting white cloud, streaked or dotted, at times, with puffs of brown or silvery gray.

 

We followed the signs and the park rangers’ directions along a rutted dirt road onto a section of paved road that has been turned into parking lot.  The parking lot is open until 8:00 pm; viewing is possible until 10:00 pm.  The rangers, in florescent green and orange vests, wave you into your parking space (you have to back in).  You walk past a short promenade of vendors selling coffee drinks, handmade jewelry and photo prints of lava, and between an honor guard of porta-potties—one brand name is Rent-a-Lua—onto the lava.  The first thing you see, and many ignore, is the large Safety sign.  My friend’s son, Daniel, said, “I want to actually read the safety sign,” and he did.

 

The current trail is picked out in green and orange pylons, about three feet high, and brick-shaped adhesive markers stuck onto the rock itself.  In some places the rock looks like glass, shimmery, iridescent, multi-colored, and in other places it looks like rope, or silk drawn through a ring, or intestines.  These smooth ropy tendrils of lava are called pahoehoe lava. Vivid green fern fronds have already pushed their way up through the gaps in the rock, as have a few “For Sale by Owner” signs.  It’s a good buy if you have five hundred years to wait for it to be arable, or you don’t mind building your house on a place where you know molten rock has been flowing continuously since the 1980s.

 

You walk across lava.  If you’re an urbanite, you could kid yourself, for a while, that it’s just a really uneven blacktop parking lot—until, at some point, you remember that none of this cracked and stair-stepped blacktop was here two months ago.  You look at a bush that the lava detours around.  You stop and look down at the bush, and you realize it isn’t a bush.  It’s a tree, a tree that’s about twenty feet high, and only about three feet of it now rise above the rock.

 

The rangers said it was about a three-quarter mile walk, but it didn’t seem that long.  Together with many other tourists, we drifted out onto a small arrowhead-shaped scarp, cordoned off with more of those handy fluorescent pylons, roped with orange safety tape.  Here’s where you really get the point; just past the pylons, the lava drops off abruptly, about a fifteen foot drop to the previous lava flow, which drops off into the ocean.  The surf was up and breakers were hurling infinity-sign streamers of white froth into the air.  To our right, across a wide band of black, the steam pillar writhed. It’s hard to judge the distance, but I think we were about a mile away.  In sunlight, all you could see was the steam, churning steadily upward.  If you looked back up the slopes of Mauna Loa, you could see a delicate line of stream rising from the earth, where the lava flows underground towards the ocean. The sky around the pillar, and toward the mountain, looked hazy or cloudy as the steam spread out, and the air smelled like sulfur. My eyes and the back of my throat started to sting.

 

End of the road, here.

 

All this was before sunset.  The sunset alone was pretty spectacular; with multicolored clouds drifting over the crest of Mauna Loa.  Once the earth turned and the sky grew darker, you could see the golden and orange globs of lava as they flowed into the water. It isn’t like water from a faucet. It’s irregular. Gouts of orange light leapt up, diffused by the steam, while lozenges of fire-colors rippled in the water.  All kinds of colors melded there, the bluish, purplish sky, gray and white steam cloud, water that was a hundred different colors, the reds and oranges of the molten rock from under the crust of the planet.

 

Think about vents in the earth’s crust that release this ribbon of melted rock (2200 degrees Fahrenheit), think about it spinning out like sugar syrup boiled for candy-making, resting in long folds and interlocking loops, streaking down to drop into water, the most abundant element on the planet.  Imagine the necessary heat exchange taking place, the energy of that exchange turning the water into a swirling column of steam.  I picture the “skin” of these worms of lava cooling first, getting tacky and sticky, while the center of the worm, still fluid, extrudes into the water.  I probably don’t have the science right, but it’s still awesome.

 

If you’re of a more fantastical, or spiritual, turn of mind, you can see this elemental play as the work of the gods.  Pele (rhymes with jelly) is the volcano goddess of Hawaii and it is easy to watch this dynamic dance of earth and fire, water and air and see a powerful dancing goddess at its center. You could believe that this churning of elements is a battle– or love-play–between Pele and her adversary/lover Kamapua’a. In the stories about Pele she is strong, powerful, a force not to be ignored; destructive sometimes, passionate always.

 

And all of this, all of it, is about real estate.

 

Yes, it is.  Not the “for sale by owner” kind; the real kind. This is about creating earth, the kind we walk on, build on, grow our food on. Earth magic or earth science, the lava flow is about putting stuff on the top of the planet’s crust, or into its atmosphere, that wasn’t there before; minerals, walk-able space, earth. Somehow the human ability to push filler out into a waterway or swamp and then build structures on it, structures that often fall down during the first earthquake, seems piddly and childish. Look at me, mommy!  I made real estate!  That’s nice, dear.

 

The spewing lava forms a platform for spores and seeds that will blow or be dropped there, to take root and grow.  Obstructions in the ocean will affect wave action and air flow.  In a few years, this will be surface; in a thousand years it will be dirt, and in ten thousand years, a jungle. 

 

This violent, impressive, colorful process is all about making earth. Science, ancient gods, and real estate.

 

If you are going to see the lava flow, it is best to wear sturdy, thick-soled shoes and carry a working  flashlight for each person in your party.  Coming back in the dark is treacherous and the lava is sharp.  In Hawaii, no matter what you are doing, it’s a good idea to have water, mosquito repellent, sun-block and a hat.

       “Good Lord, woman, where have you been?” he cried furiously.

      A morbid lunacy overtook her.  She smiled fiercely at [Piotr] and held up the bag.  “Shopping.”

. . .”Want to see what I bought?” Cordelia continued, still floating.  She yanked the bag’s top open and rolled Vordarian’s head out across the table. . .It stopped face up before him, lips grinning, drying eyes staring.

Piotr’s mouth fell open.

. . . Aral was perfect.  His eyes widened only briefly, then he rested his chin on his hands and gazed over his father’s shoulder with an expression of cool interest.  “But of course,” he breathed.  “Every Vor lady goes to the capital to shop.” (Barrayar, pg 353.)

 

The Vorkosigan Saga

Lois McMaster Bujold

(Baen Books, find them used)

 

         Do you like fancy military uniforms?  Shiny spaceships that blow things up?  Brooding aristocrats with hulking stone castles and dark secrets?  Snappy come-backs and one-liners?  Voluptuous women warriors?  Swords and secret passages? Surprising twists on standard military tactics of engagement?  Richard III?

            If you answered Yes to three or more you will like the Vorkosigan Saga.  I hear some of you saying, “Richard III?”  I threw him in because the hero of several of the books is a hunchbacked dwarf.

            Bujold started writing this series in the mid-80s, and began publishing in the late 80’s/early 90’s.  She is still cranking out books in this series although, with uncanny market instinct, she has moved to fantasy for her most recent novels.  The Vorkosigan books started out as space opera, even having maps of the various planets and star systems with those so-convenient wormholes linking everyone together.  Later books have become more grounded and sociopolitical.

            Originally, the stories had an outsider-not-fitting-in slant.  Cordelia Naismith, a native of the Beta colony, raised in a tolerant, sexually open, egalitarian, high-tech and seriously bureaucratic society, clashes with and ultimately falls for a warrior-prince from a rigid, military patriarchal one.  She marries him and moves to his provincial, backwater world, Barrayar. The usual culture-shock ensues.

            Actually, Cordelia, galactic survey captain and sometime soldier, manages to adapt very well, as you can see from the quote at the top.

            The books quickly shift to the adventures of the son of Cordelia and Barrayaran aristocrat Aral Kosigan.  “Vor” is an honorific given to an elite of families on Barrayar, changing the name from Ko-SEE-gan to Vor-KOS-e-gan. The Vor are the highest stratum of this highly stratified society.

            The Vor (and all the people of Barrayar) worship racial purity and physical strength, and are terrified of mutation, for reasons that are clearly and credibly delineated in the back-story.  Miles is the in utero victim of an assassination attempt against his parents (poisoned gas) and is born stunted, with very brittle bones.  In a society that values physical perfection, this is a serious drawback, made, perhaps somewhat more serious by the fact that his father is the Regent for the boy-emperor Gregor, six years Miles’s elder.

            In The Warrior’s Apprentice, Miles, at 17, has just failed the physical exam for the Imperial Military Academy.  Despondent, he goes on a family trip to Beta.  In short order he rescues an on-the-skids jump-ship pilot, co-opts a mercenary fleet, styles himself Admiral Naismith and saves the underdogs in a nasty civil war, pausing long enough to suffer pangs of unrequited love and jealousy over his childhood playmate Eleni, and pick up a Barrayaran military deserter who is a genius with engines. 

            It appears that Miles is also a flippin’ genius at strategy and tactics (years of dodging the neighborhood bullies at home?) but his real gift is that of inspiring loyalty, and to get people to work at their maximum capacity, or beyond it.

            As the series progresses Miles embarks on a long affair with one of his mercenary captains, Ellie Quinn.  In later books, Miles meets his clone-brother, who was created and surgically altered, again and again, to look exactly like Miles.  This entails breaking a bone every time Miles breaks one, which is about once every fifteen minutes.  Needless to say, the clone doesn’t like Miles much.  The clone is supposed to be the key to fiendish plot to murder Aral Vorkosigan, Miles’s father, and mess with Barrayaran politics.  Miles thwarts the plot and sets his clone free.  In Miles’s head are pleasant fantasies of finally having a brother.  In the clone’s head are many different fantasies, not so pleasant.

            By now Miles has two identities, his “real” Barrayaran identity and the cover role of Admiral Naismith, mercenary commander (secretly in the employ of Barrayaran Intelligence). The clone, now named Mark, is in effect a third personality—another “road not taken” by our diminutive hero.

            This is, in fact, one of the fun things about the early Miles Vorkosigan books—the idea that the bluffing, one-upping, dueling, raygun-toting, spaceship dodging, make-it-up-as-I-go hero is four feet tall and has bones that will crack if he sits down too hard.  He also talks as fast as a teenager on her seventh Rock Star energy drink, and like William Ryker on Star Trek, he never met a (female) alien he didn’t like.

            (Actually there are no aliens.  All planets have been or are being terra-formed—all allies and enemies are conveniently human).

 

*

            I like these books; they’re a romp.  I come away from them just a little dissatisfied. They lack. . .emotional resonance?  Gravitas?  I’m not sure exactly what.  While most of the stories aren’t dark, there is real darkness in the pasts of these characters.  The recurring theme of rape as a weapon of terror in Warrior’s Apprentice and Barrayar is disturbing and realistic.  In a novella called “Infinite Borders,” Bujold captures the power of brain-washing in a way that only the North Koreans have surpassed. Miles has a dark side and tendency to slide into despair—except sometimes it looks more like wallowing in self-pity.

            Part of the problem is something Bujold has dubbed “Son of a Great Man Syndrome.” She sees herself as a daughter of a Great Man, so this is a personal issue for her.  Because it draws so much energy from her, I would like to see it be more real.  The characters in this saga worry about being competent, not about being worthy of love.  That’s. . .admirable, I guess.  Miles is periodically desperate to have the love and approval of his strong and powerful father, and there’s the problem—he already does. Miles looks willfully blind to that fact as the books continue.

            The deeper problem is with the father, Aral, himself.  It’s not clear why he is so comfortable, so supportive and trusting of a son who looks likes a mutant and behaves like a loony.  Aral is a product of his environment.  His love for Cordelia made him change in many areas, and opened his eyes to many things, but it is impossible that he could change everything that made him Vor and still be successful in the Vor society. For one thing, there is no discussion about why Cordelia and Aral never had other children after Miles.  There is every indication that they could.  Aral lets his fragile, damaged only child and heir gallivant around the galaxy with nothing more than raised hands and an “Oh, well, what can you do?”  Then he finds out there is a clone; a second chance, only to discover that the clone has been deliberately damaged and made fragile.  I won’t say he doesn’t react—he does have a heart attack, but it is described as an aneurism, not related to the emotional stress of this situation of son/clone. The stories would work better if Aral loved Miles unconditionally but worried about him more.

            I have the same issue with Cordelia.  As a character, she is an awesome woman and an unconvincing mother. Part of this is because we are never in her point of view in the Miles books.  She’s just too darned enlightened and detached.  In Mirror Dance, here she is having a discussion with Mark, her genetic son (as a Betan, she considers him her son) about her husband, Mark’s genetic father:

 

. . .He took a small breath.  “A sodomite.”

She tilted her head, “Does that matter, to you?”

“It was . . . prominent in Galen’s conditioning of me.”

. . .

“Aside from Galen, does Aral’s private orientation matter? To you?”

“Truth matters.”

“So it does.  Well, in truth. . .I judge him to be bisexual, but subconsciously more attracted to men than to women.  Or rather—to soldiers.  Not to men generally, I don’t think.  I am, by Barrayaran standards, a rather extreme, er, tomboy, and thus became the solution to his dilemmas.  The first time he met me I was in uniform, in the middle of a nasty armed encounter.  He thought it was love at first sight.  I’ve never bothered explaining to him that it was his compulsions leaping up.” (Miles Errant, p528)      

           

Enlightened, or creepy?  You be the judge.

            Still, a younger, newlywed Cordelia gets one of the better lines in Barrayar, when she has this exchange with the villain, at a formal reception:

 

            He paused, watching Aral, watching her watch Aral.  One corner of his mouth quirked up, then the quirk vanished in a thoughtful pursing of his lips.  “He’s bisexual, you know.”  He took a delicate sip of wine.

            “Was bisexual,” she corrected absently, looking fondly across the room.  “Now he’s monogamous.” (Barrayar, pg 85)

 

            However, the gold medal winner for too-perfect-to-be-true is Gregor, the Emperor of Barrayar and Miles’s foster brother. Both of Gregor’s parents were killed—murdered—before he turned six.  He was the object of more than one abduction and assassination attempt after that.  Being a project of his environment, this doesn’t really shake him up too much at all, as we see in The Vor Game:

 

[Gregor] raised his head to say tiredly, “Commander Cavilo, both of my parents died violently in political intrigues before I was six years old.  A fact you might have researched. Did you think you were dealing with an amateur?” (Young Miles, p545)

 

            What we do see in Gregor is a fear that he will develop the same sadistic tendencies his father, Prince Serg, gave full rein while he was alive (by instituting rape as a weapon of terror among other things).  It’s good that Gregor worries about this.  Once. For the most part Gregor functions as an acerbic deus ex machina.  The most egregious example is in A Civil Campaign, when, a week before his own royal wedding, a wedding that will join two formerly feuding planets, in the middle of two votes in the High Council that will radically change Barrayaran society, Gregor takes a call from a nine-year-old boy, sends  his private troops off to address the boy’s situation, then leaves the council chambers to take a hands-on interest in these events. . . all without getting grouchy and snapping at anyone.  Was the little boy’s situation serious?  Yes, and for Gregor to handle it makes him a man of his word.  For him to do it without taking some irritation out on someone makes him unbelievable. He’s the freakin’ Emperor! If, in subsequent books, we see Gregor’s dark side and the cost of all this control, then I will say that this perfection works.  Until then, however, I just don’t think so.

 

            Two later books in the series, Komarr and A Civil Campaign, are the least successful for me.  A Civil Campaign is supposed to be a comedy of manners, and it doesn’t quite work.  Bujold doesn’t do Madcap well.  I will let her off lightly, however, because comic novels are hard.  It has to be serious enough to hold our attention but light enough to let the comedy come through; and I think she misses in both directions, but this book unfolds the new woman character of Ekaterin (introduced in Komarr) who is interesting.  Bujold uses Ekaterin as a template for Ista in her later fantasy novel Paladin of Souls. Ekaterin is a mother who can and does express worry for her genetically fragile son.

 

            My last quibble; her prose!  Oh, please!  Several hundred years in the future, on a planet colonized by Russians, Greeks, English and maybe some French, a character says, “Hot damn!” when things start going his way. Military slang is current-day. Commander Cavilo (see above) threatens to have some one “ground into hamburger.” Wow, you’d think meat processing would progress somewhat in a few hundred years. Periodically, when she is setting up a really good line, characters drop into ironic mannered diction, which functions as a flashing neon sign to the reader.

            That said, I repeat—I like these.  Great fun; a fine summer read.

            Several of the Miles Vorkosigan books have been reissued in omnibus, trade-paperback volumes:  Young Miles, Miles Errant and Miles In Love. I had no trouble finding them used.  The pre-Miles books (Shards of Honor, Barrayar) I had to order through Abebooks.  These books were actually written after Bujold wrote Warrior’s Apprentice.

            I may roll my eyes at her line-by-line prose, I may wince at the too-clever, too-perfect characters, I may shake my head over the studied drolleries of Aral and Cordelia, but I also stay up way too late into the night to finish one of these. For storytelling, that’s what counts.