Deeds & Words

9Tail Fox

Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Nightshade Books, 2007

As it turns out, Bobby is, because he resurrects a day or two later, clear across the continent, in the body of an awakened coma patient, and not just any awakened coma patient but the perfect awakened coma patient, someone who’s been unconscious since childhood, outlived all his relatives and, due to the settlement from the accident that put him in the coma, has boatloads of money.  If you have to come back into the body of a coma patient, this is the one to pick.

Bobby Zha even makes it back to San Francisco in time for his own funeral.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood plays fair with his readers about this body-leaping, giving us enough back-story and clues to figure out that Bobby’s soul-shuttling is not purely supernatural.  There are human agencies at work.  Back in San Francisco, Bobby, impersonating an agent from some super-secret no-name organization, begins to explore the events leading up to his death.  He also will not keep away from this wife—or more accurately his widow—and his daughter, even though he really should. 

As Zha uncovers his partner’s treachery, the mystery  of a  Russian icon, and the rumor of dead babies with tails, Grimwood uncovers more of Bobby Zha’s personal history for the reader.  Nominally Chinese-American, Zha is actually another one of the writer’s multicultural boys who fetched up on San Francisco’s shores.  His mother was Caucasian, his maternal grandmother English; he had an aunt who lived in Paris.  And he had a powerful Chinese grandfather who taught him about culture, honor and the Jinwei Hu, the celestial nine-tailed fox that acts as a psychopomp, kind of, guiding Bobby from life to death, death back to life, and then to. . . ?

The book veers into complete implausibility during the brief section set in New York, when Bobby wakes up in his new body.  Fortunately, this section is short. To some extent the implausibility is forgivable, the more so as we come to realize that the choice of coma victims was not accidental or coincidental. Once we are back, grounded in San Francisco, it is easy to surrender disbelief and go along for the ride, to follow Bobby and his interactions with some very strange homeless people, his adoption of a crack-addicted cat, his difficult new relationship with a former fellow officer and his frequent slips as he forgets that he can no longer be Bobby Zha.

 Anything Grimwood lacks in plausibility is more than excused by his amazing compression.  He gives us a complex, layered story with convincing characters in just under 260 pages. I did think, however, that I never really knew whether Bobby was as good a cop as he seemed or as big a screw-up as people later say he is.  I think this is an artifact of severe editing (that compression thing).

I think this book would have been more difficult for me if I had not read Grimwood previously.   In fact, if I didn’t think that Pashazade was published in England before 9Tail Fox, I would have seen Zha as a cartoon or rough sketch for Ashraf Bey, who is sometimes called ZeeZee.  Zha echoes ZeeZee in ways other than phonetic; sexual encounters on airplanes, lovers with streetwise fourteen-year-old brothers—oh, and a fox. Having read stories with Raf/ZeeZee, a story with Kit Nouveau and a story with Zha, I’m beginning to see a sort of underground connection among his characters.  There is a hint they’ve all been altered in some way, whether it’s brain surgery or something at the level of DNA.  Are all of Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s characters connected, through time and alternate realities, some kind of shadow brotherhood even they don’t know about?  Or is it just that he’s found a good thing and wants to stick with it?

Although the reasons for Zha’s return from death are technological and driven by human motives, the numinous is not absent from this story.  Zha meets the nine-tailed fox shortly before he is killed.  Later it comes to him in dreams, speaking to him in his grandfather’s voice, to warn him that he doesn’t have much time.  At a crucial point in the plot, one of Zha’s army of homeless people sees the fox following Zha’s daughter Kris, and by the end of the book, even Kris can see it.  It isn’t an hallucination or a mirage.  It is real, a being from another plane, whose motives and behaviors do not match ours.  The otherworldly frequently makes an appearance in Grimwood’s books.  It doesn’t have to be explained or rationalized.  It’s just there for those who can see it.

9Tail Fox is not perfectly plotted or perfectly paced, but the world created is three-dimensional, filled with sound and smells and real people, people we begin to understand even if we don’t like them.  The book evokes San Francisco with a few telling details and little bits of history tossed off as grace notes. It’s a puzzle and thrill-ride, with a side order of redemption and a mystical nine-tailed fox.

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
John Milton, Paradise Lost

Boneshaker
Cherie Priest
SciFi Essential Book, Tor, 2009

Briar Wilkes Blue is a woman of secrets, the widow of one notorious man and the daughter of another. In 1880 Seattle, Briar and her teenaged son Ezekiel live in aching poverty on the outskirts of the ruined city. Downtown Seattle has been destroyed and walled off, filled with a fatally toxic gas called the Blight. The Blight kills, transforming the infected person into a living-dead revenant with no thought or instinct except for the hunger for flesh. The man who released the Blight into the city 16 years ago was Leviticus Blue, Briar’s husband. He drove his subterranean drilling device, Boneshaker, under the streets of the financial district, causing streets and buildings to collapse, and opening the fissure that released the gas.

The city was evacuated and a twenty-story wall erected around the infected area, downtown and the financial district. Briar, like thousands of others, fled her Denny Hill home carrying nothing but the household silverware and, although she didn’t know it then, Levi’s son.

As seems to be the case with any sub-genre that ends in “punk”—in this case steampunk—drugs and drug-dealers drive much of the plot of Boneshaker. Unscrupulous and inventive chemists have discovered that a distillation of the Blight gas, called “lemon sap,” is a highly addictive and ultimately fatal drug. This means there is traffic between the walled city and the outskirts. There are two ways in; over the wall via dirigible or airship, or under, through the sewer outtakes.

Briar is a woman of many thoughts and few words, and for fifteen years she has said nothing to her son about his father, or his grandfather, Maynard Wilkes, who holds legendary status in the ruined city. They have gone back to the name of Wilkes, even though everyone knows who they are, and both Briar and Zeke face constant harassment, and they live in the old Wilkes house. Maynard died of the Blight, a lawman who risked exposure to help others evacuate, and Briar hasn’t entered her father’s room since the authorities dug up his body and took it away to make sure he would not regenerate as a “rotter” or zombie. When Zeke gets it into his head to go into the ruined city to find some evidence that will exonerate his father, Briar prepares to go after him by entering her father’s room and donning his hat, his overcoat, a belt with a wide buckle with the initials MW, and taking his goggles, an old gasmask, his leather satchel and his Spencer repeating rifle. The tone of the scene is somber, Briar a young knight preparing herself for a quest. Her quest is for her son.

Zeke enters the city through the sewer tunnels, and immediately discovers that there are more than “rotters” in the walled city. There are humans, drawing clear air into underground chambers via long standpipes and suction fans, wearing gasmasks for the brief periods they are out and exposed to the Blight, using the tops of the highest buildings to rendezvous with airships. Priest reminds us of the masks constantly and there is no monotony in it. Masks are life. Zeke and Briar, newcomers, are more aware of them than the locals. Masks restrict vision. The activated charcoal filter pads that capture the Blight must be changed out frequently. In an early scene, Briar is running from rotters, laboring for breath, her lungs and ribs hurting as she tries to suck clean air in over clogged pads. Imagine running for your life while breathing through a pillow. The masks sweat inside. Zeke and Briar frequently hit them when they reach to scratch an itch or rub away a sting. Toward the end of the book, Zeke, who is underground, has lost his mask. In trying to escape, he gets a mask from a dead man. He thinks, as he fastens it on, that the condensation on the inside came from the last breath of that man. The equation is that simple.

The use of masks also makes it easier for Priest to create the air of mystery that surrounds the elusive and powerful Dr. Minnericht. Minnericht lives in the main train terminal, which was completed just before the Boneshaker collapse. He has refurbished it with electric light and many elaborate inventions, some of which Briar recognizes from her dead husband’s sketches. Minnericht has accrued tremendous power in the city, through his clockwork inventions and his drug dealing, and many of the surviving humans suspect that he is, in fact, Levi Blue. They go to him for help, they fear him, but no one dares confront him because he is too powerful, and now it appears that his wife and his son have entered his kingdom.

Briar carries with her two disparate legacies; through Levi, that of destruction and horror, and through Maynard, one of order and peace. Her identification as “Maynard’s girl” gives her entrée into the ruined city and affords her some respect, although it is not enough to protect her from Minnericht. Briar is strong, stubborn, brave and intelligent, all the while accepting the estimation of her father and later her husband; that she was of little worth, mainly “something to look nice in the parlor.” Throughout the book she defines herself as a bad mother, even though she is courting nearly certain death to save her son.

The book is full of action and derring-do, and captures the sense of a frontier. Priest unapologetically plays with history, making the Klondike gold rush happen earlier and having several characters mention that the United States civil war is entering its nineteenth year (but the South will cave soon, everyone says). The inventiveness of the underground society in the ruined city is wonderful, with its lifts, its rickety wooden ramps and bridges above the soupy yellow fog of the Blight, with the human-powered air exchangers and air tubes. People have managed to thrive, and Minnericht, of course, has nearly built a kingdom. At the same time, no one mounts an expedition to try to close the fissure from which the deadly gas leaks. As Lucy, a mechanical-armed bar owner, points out, the walled city is filling up like a bowl being fed from the bottom. Some day, or some year, the gas will reach the top, and then spill over the side. A couple of times during the book, people wish that the government “back east” would look away from the war and consider making Washington a state, and come help. As most pioneers know, however, when you’re at the edge of the frontier, if you want something done, you do it yourself.

The book periodically suffered from anachronistic language, but there was so much happening in this book that I didn’t really mind it. The pace is not break-neck, but once Zeke and Briar are both behind the wall, the action never really stops. Briar is an intriguing, compelling character and just who you want at your side in a fight. At times the sensibility is like that of H. Rider Haggard or Jules Verne. This is a SciFi Essential Book. I don’t know what that means, but it’s essential to my bookshelf.

It’s not your mother’s Sherlock Holmes. It’s not Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, or Gene Wilder. Robert Downey plays the world’s most famous consulting detective as a rock star, analytical and unstable, brilliant and self-destructive, self-aware and vulnerable. And he’s an action hero. He and Watson both are thinking action heroes. It’s refreshing.

Jude Law’s Watson is as close to the character from Conan Doyle’s stories as any I can remember. He is very smart, practical, brave—and he knows how to handle Holmes when Holmes slips into the funk that follows a successful case, when that razor-sharp mind turns in on itself, when boredom and a fear of irrelevance drives Holmes to drugs and destructive behavior. As the movie opens, Watson is planning to move into a new place preparatory to his marriage to his fiancé Mary. Holmes is not-so-secretly terrified of this development, because he knows that Watson is his lifeline to sanity.

This gives the movie complexity and slows it down too much in the beginning. After a thrilling action sequence opening, we bog down for a bit in this kind of emotional exposition. It makes the movie not too long but too slow. The audience quickly realizes that the villain in that opening sequence is not going quietly to the gallows and that Holmes isn’t going to like Watson’s fiancé no matter what kind of person she is. After a while, though, a mysterious woman—”the woman,” Irene Adler—shows up and we all breathe a sigh of relief. If Adler’s on board, things are going to be exciting.

One interesting bit is Holmes’s mental rehearsal of fight sequences. We see this twice. It’s nice to see Holmes’s mind at work, not just in collecting data but in physical campaigns as well. It’s also nice to watch the relationship between Watson and Holmes. Watson isn’t a lackey. He’s an equal. Even though he and Holmes are fighting, they work together with the instinct and rhythm of the team they are. Whether it’s Watson immediately starting a forensic review of some burned pages found in a dead man’s laboratory, or Holmes murmuring “Meat or potatoes?” as the two of them face three adversaries, one of whom is a giant, we see the years of experience these two men share.

The plot will seem reminiscent of several other movies or books, particularly From Hell. This doesn’t matter. It’s Holmes’s deductions and how he turns the tables on his adversary that matter. CGI of the Thames and the sweeping panoramas of London are beautiful, as are Adler’s (Rachel McAdams) glamorous costumes. Sets are darkly lit and luscious, evoking the feeling of Victoriana (I have no idea how accurate the sets are). The movie is chock-a-block with mazelike scenes—a street carnival when Holmes follows Adler after she leaves Baker Street; the slaughterhouse before its devastating explosion; the shipyards; the underground of Parliament. An added bonus for some of us, Celtic music, vocalized by the Dubliners, shows up now and then!

The movie is entertaining. I think the critics probably won’t like it. I hope audiences will. Three smart strong characters exchanging witty dialogue, leaping across chasms and dodging through labyrinths, disagreeing about many things but ultimately loyal to one another, while Celtic fiddles play in the background; what’s not to like?

Christmas day dawned clear, blue and cold. Over coffee, orange juice and fresh cinnamon rolls, melted butter seeping into the pastry cracks, the day seemed much better than yesterday. I’m in a much better mood. I said I had hoped I would be boasting over the books we got, and that’s what I’m going to do, right now.

I got the following very cool books:

A Children’s Book, by A.S. Byatt

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Steig Larrson. Score! Total score; I didn’t know this was released in the US yet.

9Tailed Fox, Jon Courtenay Grimwood. Can’t wait! Before the Larrson? Yes, I think so.

Deadly Beautiful, Sam Baker. This is a murder mystery set partially in Japan. I haven’t read anything by Baker, who currently edits Red magazine in the UK. The story looks intriguing, a sort of high fashion/high danger/serial killer mystery.

The Book of Tea, Kanuzo Okakura. A copy with its own slipcover, very understated and elegant, found used. I am delighted!

Ella Young, Irish Mystic and Rebel, Rose Murphy. My friend Kathleen gave me this book about an Irish rebel and writer. She hung out with people like Yeats and Ansel Adams.

The Sig-O did not make out as well as I did. He got:

Ghost Wars, Steven Coll. Afghanistan and the Taliban.

Boneshaker, Cherie Priest. Seattle-based steampunk with zombies.

Artic Drift, Clive Cussler.

He, however, got more bookstore gift cards than I did, so he will be stocking up here pretty soon.

Let the reading begin!

I hope that tomorrow or the day after I will be posting a blog full of joy and light, boasting shamelessly about the wonderful books I got for Christmas, or reviewing a movie I saw, or something. Something fun. Something light. That’s what the holiday is really about, isn’t it? The return of the light?

Tuesday and Wednesday, the county I live in (and for which I work) made it into the New York Times and Fox News over a flap regarding Christmas tree toppers. A dedicated atheist who is also running for office came into a county office and complained that the angel decoration on a tree was a violation of the Constitutional promise that government would not sponsor a religion. Actually, he quoted the “church and state” thing, but that’s not in the Constitution. Anyway, the county took all the angels and stars off the office trees. Then the newspaper got hold of it. Then people got mad, and they did a follow-up article. Fox News loved this, of course. Their lead? Something like, “In Sonoma County, apparently the top of a Christmas tree is no place for an angel.” By ignoring the “government office” part of the guy’s complaint, they spun it into another skirmish in their “War on Christmas.” And our guy got two days of free publicity. Thanks. Really. I just can’t say enough. Then, in case we didn’t already look silly enough, the county bowed to public pressure and said, “Fine, put the angels back and we’ll talk about it later.” They said this at 3:00 pm on the day before the county closes, due to a nonpaid furlough because of budget problems, that’s going to last for 5 working days. Who’s there to put the angels and stars back? Answer, no one.

Some of us have to work the furlough since we provide emergency services. I am managing a building where nearly forty people will be working. The first day of the furlough, which also happened to be Christmas Eve, someone broke our five of our windows with rocks. Walking through the hallway to the lobby after the police cleared the building for us to enter, I could hear little granules of tempered glass crunching under my footsteps like sand. All the county offices were closed, so I had to call Facility Operations, Fleet Management and our department head at home. They boarded the building up with particle board and we were operational at 8:00 am, when our doors would normally open. I had to wonder, who would do such a thing? Why us? If you’re mad about the county closure, why beat up the one building that’s open? If you’re mad about angels and stars (in either direction, pro or con, I don’t care) hey, we didn’t even have a tree. We’re innocent! And why do you have to trash a building that only offers help to people who are down on their luck. . . you know, young mothers with new babies and no money to stay at a hotel, kind of like that story some of you tell. You know, that Christmas story thing.

Later we found out that whoever broke out out windows also smashed the windshields of over 50 county vehicles.

Hey, dude, or dudes, it’s taxpayers’ money. It’s taxpayers’ money–that means yours, or more likely your mom and dad’s–to fix those windshields and replace my windows. And more importantly, just what is the matter with you?

So I didn’t have a happy day. On the bright side, however, it was clear and crisp, the sky was blue, and in my neighborhood the houses twinkle with multicolored lights. The dough for tomorrow’s cinnamon rolls is rising. The gifts are wrapped. CSI is on, with a lovely red-and-green color scheme. I think the red is blood and the green is mold. It will be better. Tomorrow will be better. My inner grinch will go away, and I will rejoice in the return of the light.

This is my 200th post. I’m posting it on Winter Solstice, 2009, which seems appropriate.

I looked back at my very first post in March, 2008. I said I might blog about books, movies, trips and experiences, random thoughts, and chocolate. I’ve been pretty consistent, except chocolate has been under-represented.

I don’t write about as many books as I thought I would. I’ve only posted 29 book reviews, although I’ve written about books in other posts. Still, I thought originally that book comments would make up the bulk of the blog. View From the Road is the largest category. This is surprising because I travel very little. My road runs pretty close to my house. I also put things like theater reviews in that category, for the simple reason that they are neither books nor movies, each of which has its own category.

I never would have guessed that a wild Presidential campaign and the introduction onto the national stage of a former beauty-queen half-term governor of a northern rural state would get me interested in politics, but 2008 was better than any soap opera, or Lost, when it came to out-of-left-field drama. Mrs. Palin, no longer technically a political figure, manages to provide lots of material for a lazy blogger. I mean really, practically any day of the week I can link to an article or post a quote from her. Thank you, God!

When you start a blog, everyone tells you to read other blogs to see what the form is like. I did that and was stricken with doubt. Political blogs, well-researched or not, are opinionated, tough and dramatic. You’d better have a thick skin if you’re going to write one. Some people blog in encyclopedic detail about their hobbies; scale modeling of various things, hang-gliding, river rafting, knitting or medieval history. Some blog about helping in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, building schools in Afghanistan or surviving breast cancer. And I’m all, “here’s a nice place to get a coffee.” Yet, sometimes, I think, it’s good to be reminded about small everyday things—a See’s candy employee buying an elderly customer a second lollipop, the farmers’ market, a homeless man and his demons, and, yes, a place to get a good coffee drink.

And some experiences cry out to be shared. I never thought I’d go to a fund-raiser at Sonoma Mission Inn where they raised $118,000 for the Women’s Shelter in 40 minutes; watch orange lava flow into the ocean, or see The Tempest performed with puppets. Why wouldn’t I want to share that?

I notice that when I started, back in 2008, weeks would go by between postings. Now I try to post two times a week at least. I don’t always hit it, but I’m getting pretty consistent. Sometimes a posting isn’t a story, a review, or a mini-essay. Sometimes it’s a picture, or a link. I think that’s acceptable.

Late in 2009 I decided I wanted to blog somewhat about writing. The problem is that I have very little to say. National Novel Writing Month helped, and so did the Mendocino Writers’ Conference. I hope to be a little more conscious of my writing process in 2010, and share that on this blog.

What about my readership? There’s a grandiose word! Thanks to the two or three of you who look at this once in a while. A couple of months ago someone at work looked at the blog while I was in her office. While we were looking, a third person came in and said, “What’s that?” and looked over the first person’s shoulder. I was like, wow, my readership just doubled. To be honest I think the numbers have swelled to nearly eight. Once in a great while someone I don’t know comments, and every once in a while my blog shows up when I Google certain topics. It’s like, it’s out there. You can’t see it from space, but it’s out there, a tiny message in a bottle bobbing on the swells of the world wide web.

Is it a message in a bottle, or am I just writing for myself? I don’t know. Is the Internet the new marketplace of ideas, or a giant echo chamber? Is this recursive, self-indulgent delusion, or real communication? I don’t know that either.

The only thing I know for sure is, as I said earlier, chocolate has gotten short shrift on this blog in the first 200 posts, and in 2010–this is my solemn pledge– that’s going to change.

Thanks! Which holiday, exactly?

The Winter Solstice is upon us. The darkest days of the year are about to lighten again. We join together to celebrate the ending of one year and the beginning of the next. It’s a time of impending rebirth. Even in these Arctic blasts of winter, there is the scent of Spring. In a time of shared hardship, there is the aura of hope. We are at the turning point of the year, the symbolic moment of starting over.

How to really start over? Or perhaps the question is, Can I really start over if I simply continue doing the same things in the same way that I’ve been doing them?

Most of us spend most of our time thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings, and reacting with the same reactions, over and over, day in and day out, year in and year out. We live our lives in “Review,” replaying our thoughts and feelings out of habit rather than creating new thoughts and experiencing new feelings by reacting to events with a spontaneous and experimental approach to life.

Setting goals for the coming year is all well and good but our resolutions tend to reflect our desire to change outer habits or achieve outer objectives. As an alternative, “Previewing” the year-to-come means envisioning the inner qualities we are going to develop and enjoy–qualities that will make us more adaptable, more successful, and happier.

Here’s the link to the entire article.

Here is a link to the very sad story of the closure of the last bookstore in the town of Laredo, Texas. Not the last chain bookstore. Not the last independent bookstore. The only bookstore.

I worry about us.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34452179/ns/business-retail/

I suspect they meant to write “antidote.” This way, though, it’s almost a koan. What anecdote would you share with fear?