Bartle Bull's LAND BETWEEN THE RIVERS: A 5,000 YEAR HISTORY OF IRAQ

My home only celebrated its centennial as a U.S. state when I was 20 years old, so it's quite a thing to contemplate a land with over 5,000 years of recorded, settled history. So for me to read Bartle Bull's extensive and exhaustive history of Iraq was to regard our planet's oldest civilization from one of its youngest. 

Then, too, while I am slightly knowledgeable or in a few cases fairly so about certain periods of the region's long history -- chiefly the Sumerian and Alexandrian eras -- I've been largely ignorant of great swaths of it between then and my first personal awareness of Iraq, when the modern nation fought a war against Iran in my childhood. And, of course, when my college campus erupted in "No Blood for Oil" protests when the U.S. took it upon itself to rescue tiny little Kuwait from its big, bad neighbor. 

And then when the second President Bush and his ilk maneuvered us into "finishing" the fight the first one didn't, of course.

And I've read the Koran (in an English translation, of course; I have the merest smattering of Arabic, chiefly picked up while studying Urdu in grad school when I should have been doing my actual course work) long ago, always meaning to read it again sometime as a more mature and better informed adult, but my grasp of the origins and nature of, say, the Sunni/Shia schism was tenuous at best.

It's always bugged me, this barely-more-than ignorance of mine, so when I saw Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000 Year History of Iraq available on Netgalley, I gladly grabbed it, thinking it would serve my purpose well.

 

I had underestimated just how well it would serve, though. Or how compulsively readable it would be. Bull, I knew, is chiefly a journalist, rather than a historian, so I expected a better than average narrative out of this book, but what I got was a truly exceptional as well as informative read! There's something that feels very illuminating about a history that takes in all of the great figures, all the different peoples and cultures, who had an impact on this part of the world, in a single big narrative, Ur to Babylon to Baghdad.

There's a section where Bull makes a choice I find peculiar, though. When it comes time to discuss the Ottoman Empire, sometime opponent of the then-Persian/Iranian powers that held most of Iraq and sometimes that power itself, he chooses to do so thorough the lens of one Ogier de Busbecq, the Hapsburg Empire's marginalized ambassador to the Ottoman court of Suleiman the Magnificent. Heretofore mostly devoid of explicitly European perspectives in favor of sources much closer to the experience of the actual denizens of Iraq and its many conquerors, it seems weird to me to do so at this point in history, where surely a modern scholar has access to more direct sources about life in this fascinating period, especially since Busbecq never visited Iraq. But I am just a humble blogger who's never been anywhere, so who am I to pick this nit?

Except it happens again in later chapters, which are more about European archaeologists digging up the ruins of cities we visited earlier in this history. This is less jarring since it is through their efforts that anyone even knows a lot of what we do about places like Mosul and Nineveh, and this figures like Sir Austen Henry Layard are quite legitimately figures in Iraqi history. But Busbecq?

Anyway...

After years kicking his heels in Constantinople, Layard finally gets funding for a proper dig in what was then Ottoman-controlled Iraq.What Layard encounters as he approaches the likely site of the ancient, Old Testament city of Nimrud is very much the kind of information I hoped to find in these pages: 

"The tiny party alit in the gloaming and made their way on foot to the local village. It was empty, deserted, a "heap of ruins," without even the dogs that Layard was used to seeing in Arab villages. Then, through "the entrance to a miserable hovel," Layard saw the glow of a small fire. 

Inside the ruined house was a sight typical of the devastated country around. An Arab family - a father, three wizened wives, some half-naked children, and "one or two mangy greyhounds" - had taken shelter in the abandoned village. When Layard entered, the family cowered, thinking he and his party were "Osmanlis." Seeing that the newcomers were not Turks but Europeans, the Arabs relaxed. Layard heard their story from the father. "Plundered by the pasha," their sedentary tribe had dispersed across the countryside. This family had taken refuge alone in the abandoned village.

One man's archaeological site is another man's refuge, and the father of the family becomes the nucleus of the European's workforce. How very colonial.

And so begins a long history of locals being employed to dig up amazing artifacts, possibly the work of their own ancestors' hands, to be exported to fill Western Museums and private collections (Hi, Hobby Lobby).*

As I've said, this is an exhaustive work of historical writing, including biographical details of figures from Cyrus the Great through Alexander the Great through Suleiman the Magnificent and King Faisal I of (first) Syria and (later) Iraq in plenty of context. This may be more than most readers are looking for, who want to understand the modern nation of Iraq and its ancient ancestor states a bit better, but I suspect that most readers will not notice that while they're reading. I found no point in this book when I got exhausted and wanted to know how much further I had to go, for instance.

This was a particularly illuminating read in concert with Emmanuel Carrere's V13, in which some of the West's sins with regard to this region of the world were forcibly brought home to roost, meaning this is also an excellent book to which to refer when trying actually to understand "why they hate us" or how Islam can both claim to be a religion of peace and inspire brutal terrorism; indeed, it is the best exploration of many of the divides and schisms in that religion that I have yet found.

Bartle Bull has done us all a great service in producing this outstanding book.

*Of course, it is only due to this colonial extraction that I have ever been able to look at such things with my own eyes at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Nick Estes' OUR HISTORY IS THE FUTURE: STANDING ROCK VERSUS THE DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE, AND THE LONG TRADITION OF INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE

"In a very real sense, the founding of the United States was a declaration of war against indigenous peoples."

From now on, I demand that Nick Estes' exceptional contextualization of the #NoDAPL protests, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, be taught alongside whenever classics like Frances Parkman's The Oregon Trail, Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, to which this book is a necessary foil and reply, and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which Estes both amplifies and magnifies, are on a syllabus. You don't need to have read any of these other books to appreciate this book, mind, but if you aren't at least interested in having a look at one or two of them after reading it, I'm going to wonder if you even read, bro.

With its vast, 400+ year, scope and its long, scholarly title, Our History is the Future may seem like it's going to be a dry and academic study, but it's actually one of the most readable and emotionally affecting books of its kind I've ever encountered, full of candid interviews (wherever possible) with witnesses to and participants in, not only the protest named in the title, but the entire history of interactions between the Indigenous peoples of North America's Great Plains region and the waves and waves of mostly white settler colonists who came to take their land and water, kill them and their non-human relatives (especially the bison herds), infect them with diseases, sell them guns and alcohol, condescend and proselytize to and massacre them. So in addition to the scenes most of us saw on television in 2016, at which Estes (a member of the Oceti Sakowin nation who recently and proudly sent a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The guy speaking on behalf of the Seven Council Fires? That means the Oceti Sakowin, which most of us know as the Sioux) was present, he also has much to share about the original contact, conflict and forced migrations that characterized most of the 19th century, the United States unending history of breaking treaties with Indigenous peoples, the Ghost Dance, lesser known efforts to enforce or insist on treaty rights in the early 20th century, the humongous negative impact of the Army Corps of Engineers' post-World War II Pick-Sloan plan that created several large reservoirs in the Dakotas but flooded out thousands of acres of productive Indigenous lands that were helping to feed several reservations' worth of people, and yes, both battles at Wounded Knee, in 1890 and in 1973.

He also saves a whole chapter for something that many of us -- me, for example -- never knew a thing about: continuing efforts to achieve international recognition of North American Indigenous sovereignty via the United Nations and through shared programs of solidarity with Palestinians, South American Indigenous Groups, and other ethnic and cultural minorities striving to regain or retain their rights all over the world. Estes pays special attention here with the Oceti Sakowin and other groups' joint efforts with the Palestinians -- many Palestinian activists have acted as Water Protectors since the #NoDAPL actions started, partly in reciprocation for North American Indigenous help with Palestinian protest actions over the years. As this book was published before the current genocidal war between Israel and Hamas that is killing Palestinians right and left every day, the current tragedies are not mentioned here but are impossible not to think about and weep over through every page of this chapter. I wonder if there are Oceti Sakowin or other peoples over there trying to help the Palestinians right now; I'm sure some are out there lending their voices to protests against the killing.

Indigenous Resistance is not a one-time event. It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire? Thus, it defines freedom not as the absence of settler colonialism, but as the amplified presence of Indigenous life and just relations with human and non-human relatives, and with the earth.

Estes isn't nearly as interested in documenting the United States' (and some of Canada's) crimes against Indigenous peoples, though, as he is in telling the stories of those who tried to stop them, both well known ones like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull but also Moving Buffalo Robe Woman and Deskaheh and Madonna Thunder Hawk. There is much more pride in Estes' tellings than there is sorrow.

Read this.

Virginie Despentes' DEAR DICKHEAD (Tr Frank Wynn)

Epistolary novels have never been my favorite, but when its author is someone like Virginie Fucking Despentes I'm going to drop everything and read it anyway. 

Especially since it kind of sounds like an epistolary novel of hate, as the title, Dear Dickhead (Cher Connard in French), heavily implies. 

The correspondence that unfolds here is between a world famous French actress and celebrated beauty, Rebecca, and an almost as famous French novelist, Oscar. As we quickly learn, both of them have seen better days; Rebecca has hit middle age, is no longer much of a sex symbol and isn't getting much in the way of work anymore; Oscar has recently come to the attention of the #MeToo movement for his treatment of one of his first publicists, a woman named Zoe Katana (gotta love Despentes' character names; this is the best since Vodka Satana in the Vernon Subutex trilogy) at the start of his career.

They knew each other slightly as children, when Rebecca was the best friend of Oscar's older sister, Corrine, who makes a kind of side appearance in the novel as a topic of discussion between the two, but Corinne is not terribly important. What matters is that Oscar, newly in shock, as he excuses himself, from his exposure via his former publicist's blog, recently made some very unkind remarks to the press about Rebecca's appearance these days. And Rebecca, not one to suffer dickheads gladly, emailed him a scathing personal reply that is... very much the kind of thing I read Virginie Despentes for.

I don't think anyone would truly want to read a novel-length flame war, however, and Despentes has other things in mind than just a moderately novel storytelling device. Not long after the opening exchange of fire, Rebecca and Oscar settle down a bit, not only out of mutual respect for Corinne or their own childhood connection to one another and the memories they share, but out of a simple curiosity that blossoms into empathy and then into a combative kind of friendship. Part of the catalyst for this is Rebecca's own investigation of Oscar's sudden #MeToo infamy, exposed when the publicist becomes a middling internet-famous feminist blogger and tells her side of the story, which we get to see in interludes quoting entries from her blog. 

Rebecca neither leaps to Oscar's defense nor takes Zoe's side, but, through her imperfect understanding of Zoe's experience as filtered through her own, makes a very good attempt at leading Oscar to consider how his behavior might have seemed very different from the point of view of an unwilling object of his attentions. Very good, but not perfect: Rebecca hasn't been as powerless as Zoe was since she was a young teenager, and has since lived the cosseted and insulated life of an international superstar. Still, she starts getting through to Oscar, enough to lead him to start reconsidering many aspects of how he has lived his life and treated other people -- and his relationship with drugs and alcohol.

Before we know it, Rebecca and Oscar have more or less talked each other into getting clean, with Oscar starting to actively go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and soon realizing that he's actually finally found the only people in perhaps the world that don't care about the sexual harassment allegations against him, and, once the COVID-19 epidemic first hits and changes the world/ Rebecca eventually follows him, first lurking on the online meetings Oscar has to resort to when Shelter In Place becomes the new norm and then, discovering the same value that Oscar has found in his participation, cautiously turning on the camera and allowing others in recovery to know that she is there and is also finally ready to admit that her own drug use has maybe been a problem.

The two never share a physical space; everything unfolds in true epistolary fashion through their emails and bits from Zoe's blog that allow us not only to see an outside perspective on what they are doing but also, at least from Zoe's side, the price that Zoe is paying for speaking up as part of #MeToo, because of course Manosphere internet trolls start harassing her, threatening her, letting her know via disgusting physical parcels that they know where she lives and driving home that she is trapped there while the epidemic rages unchecked.

The character arcs thus explored are extraordinary and moving without ever feeling sentimental or manipulative; both Rebecca and Oscar are acerbic, brave and, eventually, honest. They never stop needling each other; Rebecca never really stops calling Oscar a dickhead even after they've both come to realize that they genuinely care about each other. Their individual voices are wickedly fun and brutally entertaining. Zoe's is less so, but she still gets a chance, if somewhat indirectly, to appeal to the reader's understanding and empathy. The result is a novel that not only met my exceedingly high expectations of Virginie Despentes as a novelist (who, let's face it, made my automatic buy list long ago) but exceeded them. Despentes is an absolute wonder, and I can't wait to see what she does next, if she chooses to do anything next at all, which I sincerely hope she does!

Emmanuel Carrere's V13: CHRONICLE OF A TRIAL (Tr John Lambert)

I was emotionally unprepared for what awaited me within Emanuel Carrere's V13: Chronicle of a Trial. I imagine few readers are prepared, except perhaps for those who were present for the terrible events in Paris on November 13, 2015, or who attended the trial of the surviving accused of the multiple attacks at a nightclub, a sports arena, and a few cafes.

Nor did I even know that this same group of men were also responsible for suicide bombing attacks in Belgium, on an airport and a train station, on March 22, 2016, by which time I was even more distracted by events here in the U.S.

Let's be real; the attack I previously knew as "the Bataclan shootings" mostly escaped my notice; there were ridiculously awful things unfolding closer to home then, and I don't follow the Eagles of Death Metal -- the band playing the Bataclan that night -- or international football -- there was a friendly match between France and Germany at the Stade de France -- very closely. I would probably still have been pretty ignorant of this whole affair had it not been a significant element of Virginie Depentes' Vernon Subutex trilogy, which she was still writing when the attacks took place and into which she wrote them with devastating effectiveness. 

Oddly enough, it was as I was grabbing Despentes' newest novel, Dear Dickhead (coming soon to a blog near you) off of Netgalley that I saw V13*, recognized the author (Carrere penned my favorite biography of Phillip K. Dick, I Am Alive and You Are Dead), and noticed the coincidence: she who first made me take serious notice of the Bataclan attack had a new book out, and a book about the trial was there for the taking at the same time. How could I not get them both?

Carrere was present for almost every day of the nine-month trial of the 14 men accused of helping plan or abetting the attacks; most of the men who actually entered the locations, fired the guns, and activated the suicide vests, died in the attacks or in later battles with police (some in Belgium, where the same Islamic State cell carried out additional attacks in early 2016). One of the defendants was supposed to blow himself up but changed his mind; some others were caught up helping him escape; others rented the cars or the apartments in which the attackers stayed, or watched ISIS beheading videos with the attackers at their hangout spot in Belgium back in the day.

Normally propaganda hides horror. Here it puts it on show. The Islamic State doesn't say: this is war, sadly for good to triumph we must commit terrible acts. No, it lauds itself for its sadism. It uses sadism, displays of sadism, and permission to be sadistic to recruit.

As I read Carrere's careful, vivid and extremely empathetic account of the trial, my mind kept looking for diversions from the tragedy, often using my ignorance as an excuse. Thus upon discovering that three of the attackers who killed and died that day rode into Paris in a SEAT, I took time out to reflect on how the only other time I've encountered that model of car in literature was in Graham Greene's charmingly bittersweet Monsignor Quixote, in which the title character and a Communist ex-mayor of a Spanish town drive around the countryside in a SEAT they've christened Rocinante. What becomes of my pleasant associations with that car -- which I assure you has not once crossed my mind since I read the Greene novel sometime in the late 1980s or so -- I started wondering. No, Kate, focus. It's not like this book is boring. It's just unbelievably tragic and tough and terrible. Because Carrere, and his English translator John Lambert, are committed to putting me right there in the courtroom while a few hundred witnesses and victims, investigators and, yes, perpetrators, tell their stories, and some very capable and committed defense attorneys try to do right by their clients... in an utterly unfamiliar-to-me justice system.

In the course of testimony, which includes that of François Hollande (who was the president of France at the time of the attacks), something happens which I can't imagine ever happening in a U.S. trial: the actions of the host nation are called into question, considered seriously as justification for what the accused and the deceased attackers did. France was heavily involved in bombing Syria, attacking the Assad regime that had mounted the first big backlash against the Arab Spring and which was continuing to repress its people -- but also, in attacking the territory ruled by the regime, harming civilians. The V13 attackers, many of whom had gone to Syria to defend Islam, felt that they were striking back. If they were culpable, so was France. And many other countries, including mine.

Carrere also devotes time to the stories of the defendants themselves, several of whom were close friends with the ringleader of V13, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and were involved at various levels in his journey to Syria to help the Islamic State help Assad's victims to fight back, and to establish and defend their hoped-for caliphate. Some even were along for the trip and spent time in Syria, even to bringing along their families -- an account of the experiences of one of their wives is especially memorable and harrowing.

Many of the attorneys on both sides, many of whom became friendly acquaintances of his during the Long months of the trial, also get time in Carrere's spotlight. On both sides they were highly skilled, professional and committed to finding the truth and seeing justice done.

In sum, if you know nothing about the attacks, if you want to know more about them, if you want to understand better what turns ordinary immigrants into terrorist killers, or just more about the French justice system and the investigative process that uncovered the identities of the assailants, living and dead, then you owe yourself a look at V13. If none of those things interest you, but you appreciate top level journalism and non-fiction writing, then you owe yourself a look at V13. Even if non-fiction isn't usually your bag and you just appreciate a compelling story and good storytelling, you owe yourself a look at V13.

Just maybe keep some tissues handy.

*The title refers to the day of the attack -- V for "Vendredi" ("Friday" in French) and 13 for the day of the month. Yes, the Paris Attacks occurred on Friday the 13th because of course they did.

Jeff Vandermeer's ABSOLUTION

Did I know, when I got my ARC of Absolution, Jeff Vandermeer's coda/prequel to his Area X trilogy, that I was about to add a new deity to my shrine of household gods? Of course I didn't. Should I have known that was a distinct possibility? Yes, yes, of course. 

 Listen.

 

When I was a kid, somebody gave me a rubber alligator that I imaginatively named Allie. I was fascinated by everything about it: the smell of the rubber, the textures of its skin and tail, the weird flexibility of its teeth, and especially its evil, oversized eyes. I used to take it with me into our wading pool of a summer, along with my barbies, knock-off and branded. At first Allie attacked them, of course. But later, when I decided it would be more fun if my barbies were villains instead of whatever they were supposed to be, I decided that he was their pet and ally, chiefly used to destroy tiny toy cities or help them to go on terrifying crime sprees. Allie made them badasses, though it would be years before I would dare to use such a word, that had "ass" in it. 

Many, many, many years later, Jeff Vandermeer, who had already written a whole trilogy in which the ecosystem itself has become a kind of villain/punisher figure, or, more accurately, has developed a whole new set of priorities that have nothing to do with humanity at all except in that humanity keeps sending walking and talking raw material into its clutches to play with, brought back these weird early memories of Allie when he wrote the best saurian antagonist since that crocodile ticked and tocked its way through Peter Pan, and he gave this saurian monster the best possible name: Smaug.*

But then, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, he, and his army of biologists who first introduce Smaug onto the Forgotten Coast that will be known as Area X in 20 years, immediately rename her The Tyrant. I hate this decision and stomp my ineffectual little foot at it, but this giant mutant alligator of preternatural awareness and uncanny ubiquity is referred to for the rest of Absolution as The Tyrant. Phooey.

But this is my review, dammit, so I'm gonna keep calling her Smaug.

Smaug and a few other gators introduced to the Forgotten Coast, play merry hell with the biologists who bring them almost from the very first. Collectively known as the Cavalry (Central's code word for the series of enormous" packages the biologists hump into the area, sufficiently large and heavy and mysterious to lead the suspicious locals to conclude that they're not alligators -- which the FC already has plenty of -- but bars of gold with which the biologists will buy necessities and bribe suspicious locals), they're allegedly being released to study their migration patterns and to see if any of them make their way back to their original habititats. Which, of course, they don't. Much more fun to drive scientists crazy with anomalous signals from their tracking harnesses, stalk scientists, mysteriously turn up dead yet still be giving off signals that indicate purposeful movement in other locations, etc. 

I would read a whole novel of this alone, but of course Vandermeer has other, bigger, weirder ideas. Like mysterious echoes of beautiful piano music that turns out to be the exact same piano music played by one of the latter day suspicious locals of Area X in, I think, Acceptance. You know, when Old Jim plays his hands off that one night in the bar. Except, you know, that's 20 years in these biologists' future. 

And the music is the least of their problems.

In these dreams, the meadow "had become some other place," ill-used by "constant battle." A weird green-gold light came from the horizon, framed by the cleft between two mountains. An army of "scientists and psychics" struggled "across a plane of sand and bones toward the light." Grim-looking men and women, "who looked like veterans of some longer conflict..." All three claimed to see figures "stitching their way" through the undergrowth outside of Dead Town, and that these figures wore "old fashioned armor and helmets and some rode upon horses." But these figures had no faces, only the toothed hole of a lamprey's open mouth, endlessly circling a limitless gullet (italics mine)**

This passage is an amalgamation of text from the notebooks of three of the biologists who first bring Smaug to the FC in the first of Absolution's three constituent novellas, "Dead Town," as pieced together by none other than Old Jim, long after Smaug and a mysterious humanoid figure called The Rogue have inflated into legend, yet some time before Old Jim becomes the piano-bashing barkeep of the original trilogy. 

Old Jim, it turns out, was indeed more than he seemed in those original three books. 

Which, now that I think about it, kind of correspond to the three novellas of Absolution: the first, Annihilation, told from the point of view of the 12th Expedition's Biologist, aka Ghost Bird, as she first encounters Area X, to "Dead Town," relating the story of a team of biologists sent to study the region 20 years before it became Area X; Authority, focusing on the bureaucratic eccentricities of the Southern Reach as experienced by the grandson, Control, of the great Jack Severance of Central fame, to "The False Daughter," which relates Old Jim's maddening and dangerous experiences with that same Jack Severance and his terrible daughter/Control's mother, Jackie, as they come to grips with how weird the FC is/was even before the Border came down and Area X became an undeniable thing; and Acceptance, weaving the two prior storylines together even as the whole weird train disappears into the Cacotopic Stain possibly a whole 'nother galaxy or universe, to "The First and the Last," similarly syncretizing the prior two novellas into an even weirder whole that also manages to make the original trilogy even weirder than it already was, just by context! 

Oh, but see all that stuff about "old fashioned armor" and a "plane of sand and bones" and whatnot? Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's goddamned time travel in this witches' brew of a fictional milieu, too. I can't swear on it; I think I need to re-read this whole quartet again, possibly in reverse chronological order, before I commit like that, but I'm pretty sure that both wibbly wobbly and timey wimey are at least factors, if not driving forces, in Area X. Though possibly they've only become so now, as is hinted in bits of dialogue like "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. It should be different already."

But lest I make it sound like Jeff Vandermeer has finally disappeared up his own asshole, I must take this moment to assure you that no, he is still very much here with us and still very much in control of what he is doing. This is still our man at the peak of his powers, and he makes sure he knows it by playing to all of his strengths: rapturously lovely nature writing, deeply researched and probably lived redneck anthropology, grotesque body horror, and, of course, wildlife behaving badly. As in rabbits devouring live fiddler crabs badly. To say nothing of the swimming, wallowing, munching, rushing, biting anomaly that is Smaug and her Manfriend.

Look, I could talk about this all day. I could rage on for a few hours about the howling fantods this book gave both me and my best reading buddy, SJ*** with its extended sequences involving house centipedes. I could share all of our slightly disjointed theorizing about who Smaug's Manfriend "really" is (we were both wrong, by the way). I haven't devoted any lines yet to how the character I despised the most in the original trilogy is now my favorite character in the whole cycle. He really loves drugs, you guys. Like a lot. You think Hunter S. Thompson loved drugs but that was a casual fling compared to how much this character regards drugs with the worshipful devotion of a Bacchante of old. And you really want to know who I'm talking about now, don't you? 

You've got to read the book your own self to find that out. Which, come on: you probably have it from Netgalley already, too. And probably already agree with me that while Absolution may not be the best Area X book, it is absolutely (heh) the most Area X book.

But I'm still gonna buy this when it's available. On audio. I can't wait to hear how a narrator handles this madness.

And yes, I still think Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay is still the retroactive origin point of this whole fictional universe. If that's even a thing. Well, it is now. I've made it one. Area X is Ground Zero of the Kilnification of Earth. If you get it, you get it.

*After the dragon in The Hobbit, natch.

**I'm much too lazy and fatigued from a vaccine hangover as of this writing to check the text right now, but I swear the bit I've italicized is more or less a verbatim description of one of the cacogens in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Possibly even that of my sometime namesake (in that I've copped its name for a gamer tag or social media handle more than once), Ossipago?

***Aka Popqueenie, who buddy read this with me and wrote of Absolution one of the most glorious book reviews of a glorious career of snarky book love. Go read it!

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS

Was Monday Night Rehabilitation your favorite scene of Idiocracy but you wish it was not only serious but a searing indictment of the United States' incarceration- and punishment-focused criminal justice system? Are you looking for some brutal speculative fiction that will also educate you fairly thoroughly (for a novel) about the history of human rights abuses in the prison system, but with a heaping helping of material that illustrates how high technology could make it all magnitudes of order worse? Do you like footnotes* in your novels?

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has you covered, friends. 

These are not complaints about his book, by the way. Quite the opposite!

Chain-Gang All-Stars is one of those books that you go into expecting to be emotionally and spiritually slapped around and punched in the gut for your own good, and you will be, but it's far from being the mere hybrid of Oz and The Hunger Games that its marketers would have you expect. For one thing, it's primarily a love story, if a most unconventional one. And no, I'm not calling it "unconventional" because the protagonist and her lover are both women. Or both incarcerated. That's actually pretty conventional for stuff that I read. And anyway, I don't mean that kind of love story; this isn't a romance novel. A love story. 

First, though, a basic outline of the book's premise, which alone is enough to induce nightmares. In a dystopia near you, technological advances in prisoner control have reached nightmarish levels, to the point where new inmates are subjected to the implantation of devices that allow their jailers to literally drag their bodies along with magnets, or hold them motionless, or, most horribly, induce levels of direct neurological pain beyond anything previously known to science without doing any actual physical damage. Just a load of psychological damage to personality-warping, or even erasing, levels.

This alone would make for a harrowing story, but Adjei-Brenyah has more horrors for us. For not only are prisons now fully privatized, and seem to have completely absorbed entire sectors of the U.S. economy like manufacturing, food processing, anything that requires, you know, labor -- but the mega-corporations who own them have decided that their neo-slaves should also become the entertainment industry. Select inmates are pulled out of their ordinary prison-hells and turned into modern-day gladiators, forced into nomadic lives marching in small teams called Chains from city to city all over the country, and when they reach the next city on their eternal itinerary, fighting to the death in sports arenas before enormous live crowds and worldwide television (holographic?) audiences.

Oh, and pretty much all their time trudging between cities and camping overnight is a reality show that's every bit as popular as the games. No holds barred. No privacy at all. So, e.g., if our heroine, Loretta "Blood Mama" Thuwar and her lady-love Hamara "Hurricane" Stack choose to enjoy intimacy in their tent at the end of the day, four or five little autonomous drone cameras will be in there with them, getting all the angles for the titillation of millions.

Why would anyone agree to such an existence? Well, first of all, did you pay attention to the horrible coercion technology I described above? And second, it's kind of a way out of the prison system; if you're killed in battle or en route (or in camp by a member of your own Chain), you are regarded as Low Freed. If you survive a set number of battles, you can be High Freed - as in released back into the general population, on your own recognizance. Back in the real world.

We don't just follow Thuwar and Stack on their bloody perambulations, though. Interspersed chapters introduce us to some ordinary prisoners and let us share their brutal daily lives by way of tracing a person's journey from, say,  neo-slave meatpacker to becoming one of the guys destined to face Thuwar's nasty, heavy war hammer or Stack's vicious scythe.

And we also meet a few people on the outside, including the host of the premium sports feed of the actual battles (only the reality show of between-battle life is free; tickets to the fights are hideously expensive, and the telecasts aren't too cheap either) and his wife who is slowly being seduced into becoming a fan of the show, and a handful of activists who still think all of this is wrong, wrong, wrong, and are trying to do something about it.

Most poignant of these is Patricia, a woman who dedicated her career to ending the kind of pain that tormented her father as he slowly died from bone cancer in her youth, but whose work (you can just feel it coming already, can't you?) wound up actually yielding the pain-inducing technology the prison system has come to rely on. Her story alone would make a compelling novel, but is much more devastating woven in here with those of the victims she never intended and the people working for a little bit of clemency for them. 

But remember how I called this a love story? It truly, truly is. Thuwar and Stack are lovers, sure, but not in the, say,  Mickey and Mallory Knox sense that a scenario like this might lead us to expect. They are convicted murderers, both of them, and have each killed many more people since their original crimes, but they are both still committed to maintaining their humanity and dignity -- and to helping the rest of their Chain to do the same. While most Chains are free-for-all blood-baths of treachery and literal back-stabbing, Thurwar and Stack have managed to make theirs more like a family, though it's one of which they, and particularly Thuwar, who is pretty much the G.O.A.T., are in charge, and since it's composed of murderers and rapists turned bloodsport athletes, it's an all but farcically dysfunctional one. 

And the pair have at least partly made names for themselves for extending love not only to their fellow gladiators, but to their opponents (Hamara telling each that she loves them, and holding them tenderly as they die) and even the spectators getting their jollies by ogling them, catcalling them, betting on them and watching them murder other human beings. You know, the thing they got sentenced to prison for. 

Love, too, pervades the stories of the abolitionists trying to end this system, some of whom, we find, have every reason not to want these inmates back in society. Adjei-Brenyah has a fine sense of drama.

He also, and this may make this book more attractive to some readers than it did to me, very good at writing fight scenes and other violence. You players of, like, Mortal Kombat and whatnot will be very satisfied on that score. No character wholly escapes the brutality, and we're not spared it either. It's not stomach-churningly gory, but it's very, very violent. And very, very sports.

I like neither of these things, nor do I like reality TV. But I like books that confront the kind of issues that Chain-Gang All-Stars does, especially when they do it as well as Chain-Gang All-Stars does.

But yes, I skimmed the action scenes. 

*Adjei-Brenyah employs footnotes throughout the book for two distinct and interesting purposes; one, to convey factual information about our own actual world of 2024 in the U.S.A. in all its merciless ugliness, and two, to offer a running meta-commentary on the characters the narrative introduces to us, makes us care about, then kills off spectacularly. The combination forms a unique rhetorical device that I hope does not become a tiresome trend but wouldn't mind seeing a little bit more of. Speaking of which, I really hope there's a sequel to this because I really want to watch what happens to [REDACTED] next!

Tim Powers' MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

Anglican Church," he muttered. "You nearly never go to church anyway -- your church is the moors, your priest is your dog, your God is -- I don't know what. The wind.

Anybody who's been reading this blog for more than ten minutes knows how much I freaking love Tim Powers. He was the first author I ever put on the Automatic Buy list, long before I realized I even had such a thing.

But because he was the first and was, for a long time, the only, I still collect him in hardcover. Which is a format which I read with increasing difficulty as the years go by.

So while I was running around screaming like a little kid on Christmas Eve waiting for Powers' latest, My Brother's Keeper, to come out, had pre-ordered it the moment that was possible, I'm only now, almost a year later, finished reading it.

I beg you, do not take that as any kind of commentary on its quality, anymore than you should take its dirt-common title or its cover blurb from, of all people, Orson Scott Card.*

Because My Brother's Keeper is Tim Powers' tensest and creepiest read since he invented his own micro-genre of literary historical weird fiction (which lesser mortals have failed to duplicate. Cough. Seth Grahame-Smith. Cough) with The Stress of Her Regard, to which he returns here, not with a sequel like the serviceable but not exceptional Hide Me Among the Graves, but a true spiritual successor, pitting the Brönte sisters, their hapless brother and their Yorkshire parson father against a family of sort-of werewolves. I say "sort of" because these are werewolves in the way that the lamiae of Stress/Hide Me are vampires. This is still Tim Powers, an OG chaos magician of literature, the kind of guy who says "what if these classic monsters but both cooler and more sorrowful?"

And yes, of course there is a very Heathcliff-esque character striding the moors with Emily Brönte and her gigantic bull mastiff, Keeper (who is one of the best dog characters I've encountered in recent years and within recent years I read Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City trilogy. Keeper ranks up there with Wood!), but he is not an inspiration for Heathcliff; the Emily of My Brother's Keeper already has a completed manuscript of Wuthering Heights in her writing case, has indeed been tempted by her brother, Branwell, to meet the wonderfully sinister and perfectly named villain, Mrs. Flensing, by suggestions that Mrs. Flensing has publishing connections in London. 

No, Powers just lets Alcuin Curzon, the "one-eyed Catholic" whom Emily and Keeper rescue one day, serve as a sort of unremarked-upon slant-rhyme to Heathcliff, the better to enlarge the imaginative power of she whom Emily Dickinson named "Gigantic Emily Brönte" by his presence, instead of diminishing her by creating a lame figure for her creation to be based on.

I like it.

Honestly, I haven't been this excited by a Tim Powers novel since the very first time I read Last Call. Do not snooze on this one, or I'll let Mrs. Flensing get you.

*Just, remember that we liked Card once, and he wrote some good books before he started milking his IP dry.