Bao Ninh's THE SORROW OF WAR (Tr Frank Palmos & Phan Thanh Hao, Narr James Langton)

Kien himself would have been dead long ago if it had not been for the sacrifice of others; he might even have killed himself to escape the psychological burden of killing others. He had not done that, choosing instead to live the life of an antlike soldier, carrying the burden of every underling.

I've known more than a few United States veterans of the Vietnam War, listened to them talk about survivors' guilt and how that can color absolutely every aspect of their post-war lives, and that's hard enough for me to imagine -- but what if you were also living out that life in the same territory where you took your wounds, watched your buddies and rivals die? Which was also where you grew up, first fell in love, buried your grandparents or parents? Comparing these experiences is, of course, pointless. So I won't say one is worse than another, but, well, the most emotionally harrowing parts of the only novel I've read about this war from the perspective of the Vietnamese, Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War, take place on former battlefields long after the Yanks went home.

Our point of view character, Kien, has, like Bao Ninh himself, finally concluded, after years of failing to re-integrate into daily life in his home city, the much-revived and gentrified Hanoi, that the only real reason he has been forced,  by circumstance and conscience, to carry on, is to record his experiences for posterity. And so he has done, and is doing, for The Sorrow of War isn't just about his experiences of preparation, combat and aftermath, but also of remembering and writing what will essentially become this very novel. The one can be as harrowing as the other, as anyone with PTSD* can tell you. And as difficult to convey in words!

The Sorrow of War, like Slaughterhouse Five, pulls its narrator character unstuck from time, though without any of the (possibly imaginary) relief of S5's science fictional frame narrative. We see Kien on an MIA detail, retrieving bodies after hostilities have ended, in various medical camps recovering from injuries, taking damage from explosions of buildings, trains, planes overhead, with his childhood sweetheart as a teenager, misunderstanding his father as an even younger teen, rescuing one woman from assault and likely rape, failing to rescue another one, encountering still another woman he last saw as a worshipful little girl watching him bravely march off to war with her adored big brother only to find her forced into prostitution as an adult... and Bao Ninh via Kien is there to make sure we feel every second of Kien's pain, guilt, concern, helplessness, rage, love, fear, disappointment and, yes, immaturity and emotional stuntedness. War forces one to grow up too fast in some ways, and stops him from growing up at all in others. We do not see Kien's attitude about women evolve much beyond what it was when he was rolling around in the grass with his gorgeous first love at the age of 17. But he learns every other lesson imaginable, and doesn't shy from showing us that even from his perspective as a lonely middle aged man, he still has some growing to do.

All of this is conveyed with considerable introspection and tenderness by narrator James Langton, whose voice I associate more with the colder and more empirical narratives of science fiction writers like Adam Roberts than with the emotional scenes this book demanded. I mean to say, here, that Langton would not have been my choice for The Sorrow of War but that I would have been wrong. He hits the right note every scene, and even when he sounds like he's at his most detached, still also manages to sneak in subtle hints that it's all an act. I still think I would have rather read this one in print, but I'm poor and my beloved public library only has the audio edition, so that's what I got -- but I did not suffer for it. At least, not in terms of quality.

I suffered in lots of other ways, of course. All of them the ways that fiction intends. And I also got to visit, in my minds eye and through the beautiful words of Bao Ninh, Frank Palmos and Phan Thanh Hao, a beautiful country that I'll never see with the eyes of my body -- at both its best and its worst. Wow.

*And to this I can relate, in my different but still pretty fucking intense way. 

Jerrod Edson's THE BOULEVARD

Not since Robert A. Heinlen*'s Job: A Comedy of Justice gave us the jovial, folksy Devil in the person of Jerry Farnsworth has Old Nick himself aroused my positive emotions as he does in The Boulevard, Canadian novelist Jerrod Edson's not-really Allegherian literary train ride through the Underworld. Though in this case, Jerry Farnsworth is kind of split into two people, the Devil and Ernest Hemingway.

And yes, the third figure on the book cover is Vincent Van Gogh. All aboard!

The premise, or at least the inciting incident, of The Boulevard is pretty simple. A nearly-ignored email, checked almost too late, informs the staff of Hell that, for the first time ever, God Himself is planning on coming down for a visit to see what they've made of the gloomy void he condemned Lucifer and all of his rebels to, eons ago. He's heard such magnificent things...

Only the Rebels have actually just settled it like any of us would in playing a simulation game, starting with mud huts for shelter in the stygian gloom and crafting their way up to something like civilization (occasionally stealing a few resources from the world of humans now and then. Like light. But not enough of it), though they've had to make do with some poor substitutes like painted metal representations of the flowers that won't grow Down Below and were, in a charming early anecdote that would have done the Heinlein of Job proud, the original source of their trouble. They've made a decent go of it, these Infernals have, even unto bringing into being one real miracle of beauty and light that is the great joy of every demon and condemned soul, The Boulevard.

But if God sees that Hell is not, in fact, a lake of fire filled with torment and agony and eternal ugliness, sees that his employees are maybe enjoying their work and afterlives, well, just imagine Elon showing up at a Tesla factory one day and seeing that George Clinton was supplying the house band and all the assembly line workers were enjoying themselves while building cars that not only didn't lock passengers inside at the first sign of an engine fire but also don't treat pedestrians as targets! That's no way to run a torture chamber factory! There'd be Hell to pay. 

OK, I'll stop with the puns and the Heinlein comparisons. Just, Job was baby's first blasphemy book.**

The aforementioned train ride is one that Satan is making across Hell, to meet with his estranged friend and tenant, Van Gogh, without whose work the Boulevard would still just be a dark and depressing street in Hell's Capital City, and break the bad news that his greatest work, his shining triumph, his immortal glory, his 60-block-long celebration of art, has got to go in order to save them all from the literal wrath of God.. Um.

Hemingway just happens to have been on the same train, traveling with a Jean Rhys whose brief appearance is one of The Boulevard's few lowlights. She's drunk, she's disgraceful, she has no reason to be there except as unpleasant comic relief, and for someone Hemingway can bitch about misogynistically. Boo. Anyway, the Devil, Ernie thinks, will be better company, especially since he's in a confessing mood. He seems to carry a lot of guilt over his relationship with Van Gogh. Uh oh.

Much of the meat of the book, thus, consists of Satan narrating the life of Van Gogh as observed by a secret manipulator, now disguised as a magpie and captured in a famous early painting, now scrubbing the floors of his famous room at Arles, now appearing as a chance met companion for an easel-side chat in a wheat field, but always subtly guiding the artist towards the desired end, or ends. This exposition dump -- for that is what it is as far as the frame narrative of the journey is concerned -- could have been just a dull, short retelling of famous scenes from Van Gogh's well-documented life, but the Devil's perspective on them gives them immediacy and freshness, helped along by frequent pauses for Hemingway's usually sardonic commentary. If you're looking for a charming, brief and bittersweet biographical sketch of one of the greatest painters ever to do it, you could do a lot worse than pick up a copy of The Boulevard; it's worth the cover price for this alone, with its entertaining and occasionally profound frame narrative an added bonus that will make you pause and think more than a few times.

Alas, I came away from this a little bit disappointed, because it feels unbalanced. There are a few jumps back to the titular Boulevard where Satan's minions are busy getting ready to undo all of the hard work that has gone into making the Capital City and all of Hell's other cities into the thriving metropolises that they are, but we get only the briefest of glimpses of these. The fact that they're enacted by the likes of Al Capone especially makes these bits feel inadequate for their brevity and their one-note treatment of what is going on; it's all logistics and very little emotion, and Capone and the other doers of Satan's bidding really beg to be fleshed out as characters in the ways that the riders on the train are -- especially Ms. Victoria, the book's other female character, frequently admired for her va-va-voomery but never allowed to become a person even though we learn she's been right there with Satan and the Boys since they were all angels and he went by Lucifer. I wanted this side of the story to have something closer to equal weight with the Satan and Ernie show.

But that show is glorious, and the imbalance isn't enough of a problem to stop me recommending that you pay The Boulevard a visit at your earliest opportunity. After all, unlike Hemingway and Van Gogh and Al Capone, you don't have to die to check it out. You just have to get your hands on a good book.

It's just a bit of a shame that it's not a truly great one.

*I know.

**My disappointment that none of RAH's other books were remotely like this still makes me sigh. 

Ursula Whitcher's NORTH CONTINENT RIBBON

Sometimes there's a better way to show me the society, the world an author is imagining than via a single piece of narrative fiction. If you've created a truly richly developed culture that really differs from ours, it can be more effective, by which I mean both more efficiently communicative and more interesting for me as a reader, to show me facets, via vignettes or mini-biographies or, most gracefully, short stories about different characters occupying different roles in that society. And the stories need not necessarily overlap or interact, nor do they have to depict earth-shattering crises or huge personality conflicts or major civilizational turning points, either. An older example of this is Lucius Sheperd's story cycle surrounding the vast corpse of The Dragon Griaule; but I've found an even better one here.

Ursula Whitcher's phenomenal story suite, North Continent Ribbon, where, as the cover explains to us, "every contract is a ribbon, and every ribbon is a secret," depicts one of those imagined worlds that would feel like a fantasy setting if the tales within were read out of order; several of them involve no science fictional wizardry or even much-beyond-medieval era technology. Were it not for its opening matter, which declares that it comes from a larger work named Cross-Planetary Investment: A Practical Vraselian's Galactic Opportunity Handbook and informs us that the planet on which most of these stories take place is an important source for "faster-than-light vehicular components sourced from a high-orbit E-type singularity," the society on the North Continent of Nakharat would be all but indistinguishable from one of the weaving planets in Andreas Eschbach's The Carpet Makers, for instance.

But amidst its tales of ribbon-crossed lovers and sundered families and somewhat shady business dealings, we get hints that there's a lot more going on than just trade and agriculture and the many different ways love can come and go in human lives. There's the question, for instance, of how those aforementioned vehicular components, once assembled into faster-than-light vehicles that navigate through what this culture refers to as the deep*, are sourced. And what they even are. Which, it might seem as one pages through this slim little volume, are questions that might not get answered? At least not explicitly?

At least, not if you're not well versed in the kinds of science fiction and fantasy that I love best, where what's going on between the characters is not the whole of what's going on in the book, might even be a distraction from that, actually. See also Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison and Frank Herbert and Alastair Reynolds.**

But even if you're not willing to plumb the weird and somewhat distressing secrets of this world, Whitcher still has plenty of rewards for your attention in store; these stories feature deftly drawn characters facing dilemmas that are delicately fantastic yet still mundane enough to be believable, from clandestine business machinations by rival corporations vying for profit, to local political scandals, to estrangement between children and parents, to inappropriate workplace love affairs, to secret labor union conspiracies, to the threat of imminent invasion by military forces that might just be coming to restore peace and safety, but might also come to impose new tyrannies over old -- all amidst some stunningly good line-for-line science fiction writing, like this in an earlier story, "The Fifteenth Saint":

The new text began with a litany: an electron's internal spin, the electron dancing around a nucleus, the shiver of atoms within a rock, all the way up to the slow rotation of the galaxy's arms and the slide of entire galaxies. Twisted behind and within and around all of these things was the deep, that other space where starships cut between stars. At every shift in scale, the book said, we experience a loss. But at every shift in scale there is the deep, thus at every shift in scale we find eternity; at every shift in scale there is the beloved, who has always been the beloved.

The text under discussion in the above, by the way, is a sort of samizdat that is buried in a book that has found its way into the hands of one of a district's hard-working political officials, who is starting to suspect that some of his co-equals in power and responsibility not only aren't holding up their ends -- he has just had to spend a whole day solving what should be a trivial problem for somebody else's constituent, only to be stymied repeatedly by layers of bureaucracy that he didn't even know had been imposed because things have been so compartmentalized -- but might actually be corrupt! But the culture of Nakharat is far too subtle for a samizdat to just come out and say things like that; far better to do so indirectly, poetically and above all memorably.

But also, and this is what makes Nakharat feel truly fantastic to a 21st century reader in most of the English-speaking world, the situation that official just had to deal with is really more of an exception than the rule, because Nakharat has a fundamentally different conception of how a civilized society runs. Among other things, the military forces on this world do not exist primarily to fight wars or extend or exercise the domination of a particular polity. No. As two characters in a later story, "Ten Percent for Luck," discuss as one explains to another why she's chosen the career path she has:

"But why the military?" Because it sounded like Inkar hadn't just taken a Contract with Otter Company. Her parents might have had actual shares. People with that sort of income didn't join up, not usually, not even with a paid commission.

"Because I wanted to build something."...

"Don't Companies build things?"

"For themselves. So they can take tolls. The army, we protect everyone. It doesn't matter who you are."

And I haven't even gotten into the lovely grace-notes present throughout these stories, like the whole ribbon thing. Almost everyone on the planet wears their hair in braids decorated with colorful ribbons that show their various personal and professional affiliations. Look at a person's hair and you can see where they went to school, to what professional societies they belong, if they are married and/or have children, if they're a high official in a Company or a public servant or a member of the military or a sex worker -- but only if you are on close enough terms with them to see them without their turban. Every contract is a ribbon, and every ribbon is a secret. And yes, there are some people who have no braids, no ribbons at all, and who flaunt this with loose, flowing hair not wrapped up in a turban. Those are very special people indeed, and yes, we meet one, kind of. But that person is maybe not as unencumbered as his hair suggests, hmm?

All in just 154 pages. My goodness!

Lots of people have had a good chuckle at the fact that North Continent Ribbon was short-listed for the 2025 Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction, and that the author is also named Ursula, as though the fix is in. But her own prose above and Your Humble Blogger are here to assure you that Whitcher deserved the honor, actually. And she's just revving up; this is her first book. And whether she chooses to continue writing, publishing and collecting Nakharat stories, or tries her hand at something else entirely, I'm here for it. Though I reckon I'll have to be patient, as she is a working mathematician, too.

I'm gonna choose to believe that she's taking her poet's ribbon at least as seriously as her math one, though. Because I definitely want to see more of her stuff. I'll put one in my hair, too, if need be. I've been growing it out again. And hey, it's grey now, so whatever color she chooses, it won't clash! Lemme know, Ms. Whitcher!

*Which I think is basically what most science fiction calls hyperspace or wormhole space or folded space. Use your favorite hand-waving term for how we cross the stupefying vastness of space without wasting human lifetimes in generation ships here. "The deep" seems just fine. I like, too, that it's treated as nothing special, so that it doesn't even get capitalized.

**What? You didn't know that the secret of the Revelation Space universe's Conjoiner Drives is explicitly revealed within that series? Tell me you haven't read Reynolds' short stories without telling me you haven't read his short stories. My goodness!