Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow - A Review

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So, a certain book came into my possession. A space book. A cosmic space book. A cosmic space kapow book. A wonderful wonderbar book.

It starts, as all good books start, with a corndog. And, of course, a spaceship. A talking spaceship. Jacob and his best friends, Sarah and Dexter, make the trade of a lifetime and blast off into space.

Accidents, of the hilarious kind, ensue. Dastardly villains appear - Space pirates... and substitute teachers. I mean, what could be more villainous? (And I say that having been one. A substitute teacher, that is. My spaceship's broken.)

The book, as anyone who might know the author would guess, is funny. Charmingly funny. Kids will love this. And quite a few adults channeling that inner child, too. Or channeling that inner substitute teacher. One or the other.

But, more than that, it's a good book. A story of friendship, of three kids having an adventure... and finding their way in the world (or the universe - slightly broken as it might be). Three kids who, if they hadn't blasted off for space, might have found a home (a few years later and a little older) at Hogwarts Academy. A story of three friends whose pasts shape who they are, and shape who they might be. A poignant story of a boy and a missing father, a story of what a child might do to fill a lonely void. And the friendships they find along the way.

Coming in May, 2011, from Dial Books for Young Readers.

So long, and thanks for all the laughs...

How Did Big Brother Forget to Mention that Info Dumps are a Thoughtcrime?

Winston Smith begins to write illegally in a diary.

This is basically, um, the entire plot for the first 120 pages of Nineteen Eight-Four. Mr. Orwell, why is it so? Why, Mr. Orwell, why?

Yet there's certainly some briliance about this book. But it's like Mr. Orwell wants to intentionally slap me in the face while enticing me onward, the sadist tickling the masochist on from page to page.

These first 120 pages are, shall we say, philosophically and psychologically oriented. And there's some fine writing and even finer thinking in this section of the book. This is certainly the best psychological portrait of the three dystopian books I've looked at during Dystopia Month. Yes, it's still a rather didactic novel, and Winston Smith still feels a bit like a speakerphone at times... and yet it charts the course of his thoughts, his struggles with conformity and the authoritarian control of the Party. There's certainly some human realism here, that sense of a mind under pressure from all sides, endlessly seeking release.

The problem is that nothing happens in the opening. And, yes, part of this is likely to reflect that sense of containment in the culture, that sense that nothing really can happen. The bolts have been tightened down on everyone. They can't move, can't speak, can't think. An original and real action, a new thought... this is crime, and the Thought Police will arrive and spirit away the offender. So the structure, in a sense, reflects this. And yet I can't help feeling that this could have been done in less than 30,000 words.

Structural reflections of theme can be effective, and yet to me there's always a sense of clumsiness, or, perhaps more accurately, of an over-heavy hand. I think the reader often "gets it" fairly quickly, with that "Okay, already, everyone's locked up tight, I get it already, please please please get on with the show."

This plotlessness gives the opening a more abstract feel, less vivid and experiential than it might have been, though the prose is fine at times and tries to tune the reader into the dark mood as a way of creating a sort of dramatic tension, an aura of contained violence. And there's that sense almost of claustrophia as we're pulled through Winston Smith's unsettled mind. Yet I found myself frustrated with the lack of movement, the static nature of the narrative and character. The themes and ideas are pounded in heavy indeed, and I don't think I needed so much to get the picture. Though, perhaps, this was more difficult for me, since I'd just read the book's predecessors, and many of these ideas (or their forefathers) were already spinning around my head? It's certainly a possibility, I think. Yet the lack of movement, at times, is almost overwhelming.

After that first section, however, things begin to pick up. Winston begins an affair, which creates both character and narrative movement (thank you, God and Orwell). That sense of isolation is relieved a little - Winston is not alone, not the only one who still thinks, who still seeks some sense of personal freedom. And the affair with young Julia is dangerous. If discovered, the Thought Police will arrest them.

I found the story here much more effective, for now the tensions between the individual and the culture are being dramatized rather than merely expounded upon. We have action instead of exposition. Tension builds. The affair leads Winston and Julia (though mostly Winston - I need a good feminist critic again, folks...) to new thoughts, new desires. A bit of stolen happiness is not enough, and they seek out active resistance, trying to join the Brotherhood (a supposed underground rebellion) through a man named O'Brien.

And then, of course, we get the mother of all Info Dumps. Dear Orwell, I almost do not know what to say... Almost. Orwell, dear sir, never do this to me again.

Winston gets a book, supposedly expounding the history of the Party and the goals of the Brotherhood. And Mr. Orwell provides a big section of the book just for us to read! For thirty pages. He pretty much shuts down the story for thirty pages to give us some worldbuilding, with a few philosophical sidenotes.

This is a cruel thing to do to someone reading late at night. Why, Mr. Orwell, why?

Okay, let us just say that I do not think the minor positive values of this section are well balanced against the large narrative negatives. I shall shake your hand, Mr. Orwell old chum, and clap you on the shoulder and smile nicely.

And luckily the best part of the novel is still to come! Luckily, as soon as The World's Grandest Info Dump is completed both Winston and Julia are captured by the Thought Police. And never have I been so happy for some torture. Okay, yeah, that sounds bad, but you know what I mean.

The last section, I think, is the strongest of the book. It is still full of philosophical and political arguments, but now they're well embodied in characters and scene. Conflict! There are some interesting psychological dynamics at work here, both realistic and non. Orwell, I think, is partly interested in a realistic understanding of a character under interrogation and conditioning, and yet he's also operating on a symbolic level, making a statement on the nature of totalitarian regimes. Yet the ending is certainly vivid, the character of O'Brien both fascinating and disturbing. And Orwell's philosophic calculations here are all the more profound for how they're rooted in the story, in the specific experience of Winston.

The last section, I think, is truly a fine and interesting achievement, a fitting captstone for a fascinating (though often uneven) book.

It's been interesting, too, to see how We and Brave New World and Nineteen Eight-Four have built on each other, extrapolating and expanding on earlier ideas. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the most difficult and frustrating, and yet it's also the best psychological portrait and the most philosophically advanced. Brave New World has a fascinating world and ideas, and reads quite well for all its flaws. And yet I'd have to say that We is still the best book, first written and certainly not last in achievement. I think it has the best synthesis of idea and story. It has the most interesting prose, and it was certainly the most pleasurable to read. Though even as I say that I know that the last section of Nineteen Eight-Four is what will stay with me longest, lingering and haunting itself about my skull. Oh, the rats, the rats, the rats...

Compulsory Promiscuity!

So we're now onto Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and, yes, compulsory promiscuity is part of this dystopic future. Though, I must say, I've known a few fellows for whom this wouldn't be, um, exactly dystopic. But let us go onward nonetheless!



I enjoyed this book, and it was a relatively easy read despite some of its flaws. And yet for all my liking, those flaws still jump out at me - though Huxley does his best to dance around them.

The first word that came to mind while I was evaluating how this book was structured was "clumsy". Yet that's not exactly right. Certainly the craft in this book is not clumsy, indeed it is often quite fine... but it's a fineness, I think, often put to use in disguise, in trying to hide the essential flaw of this book.

In my eyes, at least, that flaw is that the characters are provided as symbols, as opportunities to create philosophical scenarios, and their specific nature, their basic humanity, is mostly superfluous. It starts with their names, of course. Bernard Marx, Lenina Crowne (Lenina being the Russian feminine for Lenin), John Savage. And there's even an Engels!

But the author's concern with ideas over characters is clear early on, and at much deeper levels than the naming of characters. The first real character in the novel, Bernard Marx, isn't introduced in the novel until the middle of chapter 3. Lenina comes in not long after. Yet what comes before? Well, today we'd call it worldbuilding and info dumps.

Now, part of this is our distance in time from the conception of this novel. The novel form has changed, and this delay in action is partly a result of that, of more relaxed views on pacing and narrative. But part of it, too, is that the real central character of this novel is the setting itself, the dystopic world Huxley has created.

For the first part of the story we follow Bernard Marx, a man who feels different in this homogenized world of the future, and yet it's mostly because he's a runt for his class, and feels shut out from the full privilege he feels is his due. He thinks about cultural change, but mostly because of this sense of isolation, and his sense of frustrated entitlement is grand indeed. He mewls and whines a lot (and is rather hard to like).

On a side note through this part we follow Lenina Crowne, who we want to like... and yet she, too, falls short of real humanity and our hope for some sort of transformation is never really realized. She finds herself liking the people who are different, first Bernard Marx and then John Savage, and yet she never really finds her own real sense of individuality or difference and is used mostly to reflect the culture of the dystopia back at the male characters, a lens to focus their struggles. She is a cultural mirror, in a sense, whose only real difference - her love for John - is used only to delineate a philosophical conflict rather than to explore her character in any sense as a real person.

This, perhaps, is the nature of the story in a nutshell, a sort of human construct to explore ideas and philosophical/political structures.

At the midway point in the story we meet John Savage, whose parents were from this dystopic world, but who grew up in an untouched free reserve (remember, his name is Savage...). The reserve is people mostly with Native Americans (whose representation I found a little troubling - and the fact that the one who's taken back to shake the dystopic world is seemingly the one and only white man there... also a little troubling). At this point the story half-forgets about Bernard Marx. He has served his purpose, perhaps, his sense of difference used as a way to explore the dystopia, to set up a contrast. And there's a feeling, too, that Huxley simply got bored with Bernard (perhaps not surprising). That contrast accomplished, we now have John Savage, who provides a different contrast, a contrast between cultures, between someone who actually knows freedom and the totalitarian world of the dystopia. This, in a sense, deepens the philosophical conflicts and adds a depth to our understanding of the ideas at play. And yet it's a little disappointing from a character standpoint. I mean, we follow Bernard along for the first half of the novel, without anything really happening, hoping that something will... and as soon as it does he's practically dropped. He was a vehicle of transmission, really, and that's all.

John Savage does bring in new conflicts, and he is a little more likeable than Bernard. And yet he still has the feel of a symbol - he represents something, and rarely is he ever uniquely himself. He quotes Shakespeare relentlessly, even though that seems unlikely given the context provided to us about his upbringing. And yet he provides a mouthpiece for the philosophical and political contrasts that Huxley is interested in.

Even the climax comes quickly, with little set-up, and it turns out to be, in truth, a little anti-climactic. An attack? A fight? A trial? No, a very long lecture by the World Controller, after which they're sent on their way.

And yet, for all that, it's quite readable. The pace is much better than you would expect for such a didactic piece of writing. There's some interesting craft at work, as in the third chapter. Huxley knows he's basically dropping bomb after bomb of pure information and backstory, much of it in dialogue. "As you know, Bob..." Yet what he does to combat this is to fragment four or five separate scenes into one, each with different characters and engaging in different conversations. He splices the dialogue from each one in one sentence at a time, so you start and leave each conversation and then circle back to it after you cycle through the others. It's disjointed, yet after a bit you can follow each conversation. What's lost in flow, however, is made up for in the contrasts created by the method. Bits of information and character responses from different conversations are juxtaposed against each other to create meanings and tensions. It's an interesting thematic move to provide drama abstractly, in the absence of any sort of literal dramatic action.

So here we have some of that disguise, that sense of pulling the veil over the reader's eyes. Doing his best to cloak his ideas in flesh, and when failing waving his magic wand in a way to distract the reader and create something new.

And still the book works, in the end. It works because the central character is vivid and fascinating. Not Bernard, not John... but the world itself. Huxley pulls you into it, deeper and deeper, and then he sets it on edge, plays it against the tensions provided by Bernard and John. It's an interesting feat, really, and there's depth to this world.

I'm not sure there if there is any certain indication that Huxley read Zamyatin's We, yet it seems likely, as this world he's created seems built on the bones of Zamyatin's. So many of the themes and ideas are mirrored here. Huxley has taken them and run with them, playing out possibilities, reflecting them back and forth off each other. As a philosophical work it is the greater, and yet it lacks the humanity of We, the pleasure, the vibrancy of the voice and prose. In the end, I think, We is the better story.

I and You and Me and We

Ah, Fellow Sophisticates, we have come to it at last, diving into the nitty and the gritty of dystopia. First up is Yevgeny Zamyatin's brilliant WE, an odd and wonderful book, a book which we were pleasantly surprised with. Our expectations can play a role in how we perceive a book and they can shape our experience of it. If you expect something to be great and it's merely good... good can be disappointing. But for WE I had a bit of fear. I was looking forward to this book, but at the same time sort of feared it. I feared... dryness. I feared a cold and bitter satire, a diatribe against Communism or totalitarianism. I feared something didactic and preachy. And part of my love for this book stems from how it is so unlike these expectations.

WE is full of life. It's a voice novel, a novel propelled by its style and personality as much as by its plot. The novel, the voice, bursts with life. Intelligent and logical at times, and yet emotive, fluid, tumbling and rolling and falling back upon itself and then washing out again. A piece, here, from the opening of the novel:

"As I write this, I feel something: my cheeks are burning. Integrating the grand equation of the universe: yes. Taming a wild zigzag along a tangent, toward the asymptote, into a straight line: yes. You see, the line of the One State - it is a straight line. A great, divine, precise, wise, straight line - the wisest of lines."

and then...

"As I write this: I feel my cheeks burn. I suppose this resembles what a woman experiences when she first hears a new pulse within her - the pulse of a tiny, unseeing, mini-being. This text is me; and simultaneously not me. And it will feed for many months on my sap, my blood, and then, in anguish, it will be ripped from self and placed at the foot of the One State.

But I am ready and willing, just as every one - or almost every one of us. I am ready."

And here we have the novel laid out for us, in a sense. The character's rationanlity, his logic, his sense of the unity of the One State. And yet already within it is the seed of change, of discontent, the "almost every one of us". For the One State is totalitarian, a world of homogenized sterility, a world of concrete and glass. Indeed, the buildings are made of transparent glass, the homes they live in broadcasting their lives to the world. What is their to hide when the whole world is organized and everyone runs on a monotonous schedule? Only an hour here and there for free time, often for sex. It's the only time the shades come down in a home, when people are having sex. Romance is buying a ticket for somebody and taking it to an office where the sexual rendezvous will be approved or not... and an appointment allotted.

The city is sterile. Indeed, the rest of the world is kept beyond the Green Wall that surrounds the city. Forests, jungles, wildlife... and the last free humans. Yet there are those within the city, the "almost" from the "almost every one of us", who still value freedom, who hunger for novelty, for a path that it is not known and scheduled beforehand. They are in touch with the outside world, and want to bring a little anarchy into the order of the One State.

D-503, our hero (for everyone here is a number, a designation), is building the Integral, a spaceship which will transport the ways of the One State into space. A blazing line, a straight line... and yet into the unknown. D-503 wants to record his thoughts and experiences as the Integral approaches completion, and yet he finds his words lead him to strange places.

"... the pulse of a tiny, unseeing, mini-being."

People in the One State do not raise their own children, and yet the opening foreshadows this conflict: parenthood, desire, the need for an autonomous love. D-503here writes a little predestination of his own, and yet it operates as a metaphor as much as an act of foreshadowing. His words are his child, and they are a new life within him. The act of writing itself, of recording, of seeking and claiming and understanding, is an act of exploration, of anarchy and awakening.

Love, of course, is hard to contain within walls and schedules. Life resists boundaries, always pushing, pushing, pushing, as with the living world against the Green Wall. D-503's act of introspection and exploration leads him into conflict, both externally and internally. This is the conflict of the state, of the individual against society, against repression. It is the I and the We.

It is not a perfect novel, certainly. Some of the cultural propaganda lacks subtlety, the facelessness of society too entrenched. And D-503 swings too often between extremes, between the mind-washed pursuit of rationality and conformity and the impassioned awakening to love and need and the newness of experience.

And yet it is a success, a welding of a philosophical framework to a human voice, a voice alive in the prose. It is a balance of the grim, dystopic future against the human experience of one man, the whims of life against the encroachment of conformity and death.

"Do you believe that you will die? yes, people are mortal and if I am a person, then, of course... But that's not what I mean. I know that you know this. I am asking: has it ever happened that you have believed in your own death, believed in it totally, believed in it, not with your mind, but with your body, feeling that one day the fingers that are holding this very page will be yellow, icy...?

No: of course, you don't believe in it - and that is why, up to now, you haven't jumped from the tenth floor into the street, that is why up to now you have been eating, turning pages, shaving, smiling, writing..."