Deeds & Words

I bought The Informationist at Darvil’s Bookstore in Eastsound, Washington, on Orcas Island. It’s interesting that the city of Salinas, California, with a population of 150,000, can’t support a bookstore, but the island, whose year-round population is probably about 5,000, does. That may say something about people who live on Orcas, or maybe it’s more about the tenacity of the owners of Darvil’s.

The Informationist, by Taylor Stevens, introduces the latest in the cadre of damaged, kickass and just-plain-badass heroines that started with Carol O’Connell’s Kathy Mallory and exploded into full bloom with Stieg Larsson’s Lizbeth Salander. Stevens borrows freely from the adventure/thriller tradition and the romance novel tradition but mixes it up in a way that leads to a bracing adventure in an exotic, exciting location.

Vanessa Michael Munroe is a master of languages and has the ability to immerse herself in a culture quickly, gleaning facts and context that even government security branches can’t retrieve. She is gray-eyed and super-model slender; she can make herself glamorous and seductive, or pull on a pair of men’s boots, strap up her chest, clip her hair and pass for a slim young man.

Michael, as she prefers, usually works for governments or corporations, but her handler approaches her with a different assignment. A Houston oil billionaire wants someone to make one last search for his stepdaughter, who disappeared in Africa four years ago. He will pay Munroe a hundred thousand dollars just to come listen to his argument.

Munroe was born in Africa, to American missionaries, with a father somewhat like the father in Barbara Kingsolver’s book The Poisonwood Bible. At fourteen, she rebelled and took up with a crew of smugglers. After things went bad, she fled to America, but the African continent is haunted with bloody memories for her, and she is not sure she wants to go back. Something in the billionaire’s story intrigues her, though, and the money is very good, so she agrees.

The search takes Munroe and the reader to Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, and it is here, describing the jungle, the ocean, the tribal capitals flooded with oil-money, that Stevens’s writing pays off. The enervating humidity, the buzz of insects, the taste of Coke, the sting of jungle insects, are all almost palpable. Munroe’s backstory and her description of the demons that haunt her intrigued me, often more than the story’s present-tense machinations.

There were a few too many romance-novel conventions for me at times, especially in the backstory of Munroe and Francisco Beyar, a gun-runner she knew in her youth and hooks up with again in this operation. The language is not gooey, and the sexual connection between these two characters sparkles like an arc of electricity, but their motivations are romance-novel motivations, and that’s too bad. Similarly, Munroe’s acceptance of the billionaire’s story, which is as full of holes as a fishnet (the girl’s been gone for four years—why a new search now?) does not live up to Munroe’s reputation for data-gathering.  These stumbles in the plot caught my attention at the time, but the setting and the playing-out of Monroe’s character kept me reading. I did roll my eyes though, at that too-clever technique Monroe uses not once but twice to get out of handcuffs.

When things go wrong in the operation, there is a stunning scene where we see exactly what Munroe is capable of, and why she calls the voices in her head “demons.” It’s vivid, breathtaking and heartbreaking.

Do I believe that a slender woman who has, by her own count, forty-two knife and bullet scars on her body is so alluring that she can seduce any man she chooses? Not really. Do I believe that her character, as written, would even forgive Francisco for what he allowed to be done to her? Not really. But I tend to disbelieve those things after the fact, and while I was reading, they may have dinged my enjoyment of the book slightly but they didn’t derail it.

The ending did bug me, though. Stevens wants to have it both ways; rough but deserved justice for the bad guys, but moral redemption for Munroe. This leads to a dramatically insincere climax.

It will be interesting to see if Stevens makes the necessary course corrections and maintains her momentum, or if she slides into predictability. I’m hoping for the former.

Well, I see I’ve let time get by me and haven’t posted anything lately.  In a few hours, or maybe  tomorrow, I plan to have some comments up about a book called The Informationist, an engrossing  if slightly derivative thriller that introduces the character of  Vanessa Michael Munro.

Reina Telgemeier and Dave Roman spoke at the Charles M Schulz museum today. Roman is the author and illustrator of Astronaut Academy; Zero Gravity. Telgemeier is the Eisner-award winning creator of the graphic novel Smile. The two cartoonists were born on the same day (month, day and year), he in Long Island, New York, she in San Francisco, California. They share a love of comics and a love of each other – they’ve been married for five years.

Their presentation, which included a Powerpoint, a lecture and a performance section with volunteers from the audience, covered their personal creative histories and some discussion of the power of graphic novels and comics. Each of them grew up reading comics. Raina’s story of her experience with the graphic novel Barefoot Gen resonated powerfully with me. She was used to reading the comics in the  newspaper, and her father bought her Barefoot Gen, probably not realizing that it was about World War II and the bombing of  Hiroshima. “It pulled the rug out from under me,” she said. “I realized then that comics could tell any kind of story; that they could really get to your heart and your emotions.”

Raina pursued a slightly more “starving artist” career path, self-publishing a mini-comic called Take Out, while Dave found a job at Nickelodeon Magazine. Raina’s first professional job was in developing the popular YA series “The Babysitters Club” as graphic novels. Dave got started first as a writer, with other people providing the pictures, and only more recently began drawing as well.

Dave and Raina sparkle with joy and warmth. Toward the end of the formal presentation, they requested the help of some young people in the audience to provide a dramatic reading of a chapter from each work. The kid-volunteers did a good job, and Raina and Dave (and Raina’s dad, in a cameo, playing himself) provided the other voices and sound effects.

The Schulz auditorium surprised me; it was small. It probably seats no more than 120 people. The layout is good – not a bad seat in the place—and the acoustics are crisp. Good tech – none of the common problems of microphones cutting out or feedback whining in an upward spiral. After the presentation the two writers sat in the great hall and signed books. I ran into the award winning graphic novelist Brian Fies, who knows Raina and Dave. Brian was clock-watching, since another friend of his was also doing a book-signing across town at Copperfield’s. It was a busy literary day for Brian.

The museum’s current exhibit has a sports theme. Without being too loud about it, Schulz was a support of athletic programs for women, and the strip Peanuts shows this with Peppermint Patty, the dedicated baseball team manager. I hadn’t known that in the fifties, Lucy was a golf prodigy, but one exhibit is an enlargement of a three-strip arc about Lucy’s championship golf tournament.

When I was a kid, comic books were slightly, well, disreputable. My open-minded parents didn’t forbid me to read them, but my mother sighed and rolled her eyes when she saw me with them; and I was reading tame material like Classics Illustrated, Fantastic Four and Wonder Woman. (Spouse had a sterner mom than I did, and he had to smuggle comics into his room or hide them other places.) A person from the audience asked Dave and Raina if they would speak to ways comic books help children read.

Raina said that comic books improved her vocabulary by giving her big words in a context that meant she could decipher them. Dave’s answer was more interesting. Pictures, he said, help people who get stuck. They can look ahead and help “conceptualize” what’s going to happen, rather than seeing big blocks of text as a frightening obstacle. I wondered if this had been his personal experience. For a child who is having trouble reading, the ability to pull from a different medium to get clues about the story would be a great relief.

I like graphic novels because they let both sides of my brain come out to play. For me, they will never replace pure text, which is like clean water for me – too many days without a book and I start to shrivel up. A graphic novel is like fresh-squeezed orange juice, or sparkling water with a slice of lime, not a staple of my diet, probably, but a treat. And listening to people like Dave and Raina talk about their process, their love of art and story, is a treat too.

Right now the best show on Syfy is Lost Girl, a sexy, smart and quirky import from Canada. In fact, in content and tone it reminds me of another sexy, smart and quirky import that used to show on Syfy, The Dresden Files. Anna Silk, Ksenia Solo and Kris Holden-Reid are incandescent, and secondary characters, like Trick and Lauren, are played by high-quality actors.  Unfortunately, it’s on too late for me to watch except on rare occasions.

The show’s lead in is Being Human, which starts at nine o’clock. This is Being Human’s second season. The premise behind Being Human is clever; a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost are room-mates, trying to have “normal” human lives. Admittedly, this is somewhat ex post facto for the already-dead Sally. Aidan and Josh work at a Boston hospital. Aidan is a nurse and Josh, who was at medical school at MIT, quit when he became a werewolf, and now works as an orderly. Sally – well, Sally is dead and hangs out at the creepy house they managed to rent cheap, for obvious reasons.

I want to like Being Human more than I do. I like Sam Waterman, who plays Josh, and even though Josh is a nebbishy worry-wart, I kind of like his character. Sam Witwer plays vampire Aidan like a GQ model, all skin-tight jeans and wraparound sunglasses. As we all know, I guess, vampires function like organized crime families, and Aidan, who killed his creator Bishop last season, is now second-in-command to a vamp princess (played by an actress who was one of Eliza Dushku’s podmates in The Doll House).

Sally (Meaghan Rath), meanwhile, came to some resolution about why she was haunting the house, but stayed behind in this realm instead of moving on. Now she is considering a way she can possess a baby, with the approval of Zoe, a pediatric nurse who can see ghosts and lets ghosts “reincarnate” into the bodies of sickly babies who probably won’t make it otherwise. The ethics of Zoe’s behavior is iffy – the ghosts aren’t “incarnated” as much as possessing the bodies of the infants. That isn’t even the weirdest part of the story; Zoe is dating a ghost.

Josh has a girlfriend named Norah and he accidentally infected her, so she’s a werewolf too now. This is the most interesting subplot of the three.

It took me a while to figure out what irked me about Being Human. In large part it’s the rhythm of the show. Since this is an ensemble, each episode tracks a full plot for each of the three characters. This means the tension rises in unison for all three stories and usually resolves about the same time. The show also leaps forward in time, in ways that are disconcerting and create brain-strain. Because some of the characters are lunar monsters, the week to week stories often reference the full moon. This means a month has gone by. Since very few other time-markers are used; birthdays, holidays, etc, at this rate the show will basically go through one year in a season. Is this the intent? Frankly, following a story that involves Aidan or Sally while leaving Josh and Norah at the midpoint of their cycles would make more sense.

While the writing among the three roommates is clever, and the three leads have developed a nice chemistry, overall the stories are either predictable or bland. I also have a little trouble with the world-building here. Vampires, mob bosses. Not original. Can a werewolf couple find happiness? This has some legs. Sally, as the ghost, is the least plausible supernatural character, since she violates all the rules of ghost-hood. She has resolved the mystery of her death, meted out justice to her killer. She should have moved on. If there is some secret, unresolved issue in her life, er, afterlife, it should start being hinted at by now. Much is made of the fact that Sally, who is learning to consciously manipulate physical objects, can’t push the Start button the microwave, but Josh expects her to unlock the padlock on the storage unit he’s rented for when he turns into the wolf, and she has no problem with that.

On a completely superficial and trivial note, I think we should start a Facebook campaign to allow Sally the ghost to get a bigger wardrobe.

I think the biggest problem I have with BH is cultural, believe it or not. This show is copied from a British show with the same name. The motives and behaviors of our Boston friends seems decidedly British-TV-like; good impulses sour, things attempted for a good motive turn and go bad, leaving the situation worse, while any selfish, bad, destructive idea works out better – or worse – than expected. If Syfy had imported the British show and I was listening to Josh whinge about how he can’t have a life, for instance, with a British accent, I’d accept it more easily.

I’ll have to decide if I want to pay-per-view Lost Girl, since I can’t stay awake to watch it in the schedule. As for Being Human, my interest, rather like the moon, is starting to wane.

“Hi. Here’s my business card. I’m not a copper — I did used to be but I got struck off for drug abuse. I’m really a scientist; no, really, I am. I study genetics. As you might remember, you donated your DNA ten years ago as part of some criminal investigation. You were eliminated as a suspect, of course, but we hung onto your DNA. Just because we can, you know, British government and all.  I don’t work for the police lab anymore, but a friend is smuggling out DNA samples for me to manipulate illegally, and yours was one of those.  I have some bad news for you. You have a bad genotype. It’s the same kind of bad genotype that psychopathic serial killers have. Wait! Put that down! I’m not saying you are one, honestly! Just that you could be, if you got stressed. Stressed? Oh, I don’t know, like if some bloke came around and gave you his business card and told you that you had the same genetics as a serial killer. That sort of thing. Could be stressful. Stress is bad for you. You should control it. Well, that’s it. I’m off, those other possible-psychotic killers won’t track themselves down. Call me!”

That, in one paragraph, is the premise of John Macken’s Breaking Point, a British science-thriller set in London. Maitland,the main character, is a geneticist who has discovered that every serial killer in Britain that they have  DNA on have the same five broken genes.  Maitland has developed a theory that DNA screening can be used to identify future serial killers before they kill. In an American book, this concept would ignite a firestorm of debate about personal liberty versus public safety; innocence versus “preemptive” punishment; predestination versus free will, and lots of social issues. In Britain, apparently, not so much. This is a fascinating idea that was squandered, for me, by the unconvincing characters and stodgy, eipsodic nature of the book. Ten pages from the end, I put it down. I don’t really consider it a DNF, but at ten pages from the end, there is at least one question about whether a major character is alive or dead, and I find that I didn’t care.

Breaking Point reads like it wants to be a British TV thriller. There is a part set in GeneCrime, the Metro crime lab a la CSI, with stereotypical characters sitting in meetings, leaving work early to talk with friends, going out to pubs for retirements, wakes and a assortment of social obligations. There is a part set with Maitland and his fat partner, and I call him that because that is the only character trait Macken really gives us about him. Maitland used to run GeneCrime but his hubris and his drug use caught up with him. Now he is pursuing his DNA theory, while two GeneCrime employees slip him DNA samples.

GeneCrime is chasing a elusive killer who is poisoning people on the London underground. Maitland, meanwhile, discovers that someone has targeted men who have the “bad genotype” and is threatening them; beating them up, following them, threatening their families. Clearly this is being done to elevate their stress, with a goal of tipping them over into violence. Why? It’s pretty clear why, and that means it becomes pretty clear who quite early in the book.

Macken makes a connection between  the two criminal storylines. It seems rather forced. The underground killer doesn’t fit the profile of psychopathic killers as they are described elsewhere in the book, but at the end the two separate mysteries are jammed together with an awkward denouement.

This is the second book in a series, apparently, and while Macken, a former forensics technician himself, knows his way around the scientific method, his writing still needs to grow. Action sequences have point of view glitches, dialogue is stilted and expository, and once in awhile he uses baffling constructions, like, “his genetically imbalanced mind.” I know what he’s going for there, or at least I think I do, but constant niggles like this make it difficult to fall into the text.

I really do think some of my disappointment in the book is cultural. Brits don’t feel that they have a right to privacy. Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) is everywhere in London, apparently, and one of the weaknesses in Breaking Point is how much the GeneCrime team spends staring at CCTV images from the underground. The Blooding, a true-crine book by Joseph Wambaugh, addresses a famous serial killer case in Britain that was solved by the use of DNA, and law enforcement bascially asked every man in the country to voluntarily supply DNA samples. It is amazing how many of them did.

That said, the least believable thing here is that private citizen Maitland and his partner would drive around London seeking out the “bad genotype” guys and reasoning with them. And the” bad genotype” people put up with it!

This was a bookstore-closing sale book, so my disappointment is tempered by fact that I only paid two dollars for it. I think Macken has interesting ideas. I think he is falling short in his execution. It’s possible that he is going to improve, or already has, but I won’t be reading more to find out.