Reginald Hill. Exit Lines (1984)

     Reginald Hill. Exit Lines (1984) Saw this on TV first, with some plot simplifications. A police procedural with a difference: the cops are a mixed lot, just like real people. But the writing is merely workmanlike, Pascoe’s private life has no organic relation to the rest of the tale (one could argue it’s there to expand the theme of old age), and a good deal of the “realism” seems forced and gratuitous. A pleasant entertainment, but not an engaging one; I feel no urge to find more Dalziel & Pascoe stories, but I won’t turn them down if they turn up. Three old men die on the same night, one in a road accident that involves Dalziel, one killed in the course of a robbery, and one seems to be an accident until Pascoe’s nosing around reveals it’s really a murder, but not one whose solution gives much joy. ** (2004)

John Gribble and Jeremy Cherfau. The First Chimpanzee (2001)

     John Gribble and Jeremy Cherfau. The First Chimpanzee (2001) The authors contend that humans evolved before chimps, i.e., that chimps are more recent derivatives of the common ancestor. They outline their case in the first couple of chapters, and that’s really all they need: I’m convinced. At least I’m convinced that it’s a tenable theory. I can’t judge its validity, but the rest of the book seems to me to be mostly padding, so I haven’t read it. The style is workmanlike, which means it doesn’t engage, and almost all the information is old news, some of it so old that it’s no longer useful. For example, the authors persist in using the blueprint metaphor for the genome, although this metaphor does nothing to help their case and in fact raises questions they haven’t addressed. Maybe they address them later, but the outline of their case gives no hint of this. I’m surprised at the date of the book: by 2001 many of the notions presented by Gribble and Cherfau were outdated. * (2004)

Helen Reilly. Compartment K (1955)

     Helen Reilly. Compartment K (1955) I bought this book to add to my collection of stories with a railway setting or motif. I’ve tried reading it three times now, and I’ve given up every time. A man is murdered, the heroine’s old flame (now a married man) is mixed up in it somehow, and shelters in her compartment from the prying eyes of the detectives. The police procedure is sloppy in the extreme; not even the fact that this is a romance rather than a crime novel excuses it. Of course the heroine’s reputation is thoroughly compromised, her fiancé dumps her, and the old lover’s wife dumps him. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten, and it’s been heavy slogging, so I’ve given up. I may finish the book some time, but not now. (2004)

Edmund Hamilton. City at World’s End (1951)

     Edmund Hamilton. City at World’s End (1951) A tale from the so-called golden era of SciFi, and it shows. The plot is simple: an atomic “super bomb” rips the fabric of space-time and projects Middletown, a city of some 50,000, millions of years into the future. The Sun has cooled to a red dwarf, the Earth’s core has cooled, too, and the planet is almost devoid of life. The scientists find a domed city, all 50K citizens move to it, an attempt to contact other people brings starships to Earth. The galactic government (run by humans, of course) wants to evacuate Middletown to a better place, but the people resist. A process to start a heavy-atom fusion-fission cycle in the earth’s core works, and lo and behold, grass starts growing, etc. But John Kenniston, the protagonist, decides to go with the star-folk, among whom he has found a possible future mate.
     There are several questions that nag a modern reader (me) of this book. One is sociological: what will the citizens of Middletown do? The mills have shut down to conserve energy, so there’s no work. Lack of work means lack of purpose, yet when the earth is warmed up, people happily return to Middletown. To do what, exactly? Another is biological: without green plants, where is the oxygen on this ancient Earth coming from? A third is cultural: were people in the 50s really so blind to the fact that women are less likely than men to wax hysterical in a crisis? Or that a uniform is no protection against the kind of panic and hysteria that is ascribed to the ordinary people of the city? Or that older folk are more likely to adapt to new situations than younger ones? And so on.
     Of course there’s no sex, just a chaste kiss now and then, and vague references to future plans and such. There is also the assumption that scientific people are not prone to hysteria, panic, fear, depression, or any of the other effects of the kind of shock that the citizens of Middletown undergo. In other words, this is an essentially adolescent fantasy, displaying the lack of awareness typical of that age. The aliens are generally friendly, and not really alien. The government is shown simplistically as bureaucratic. Hamilton gives us future humans who, after millions of years, are essentially the same as modern humans, who are said to be primitive and emotional. IOW, Hamilton seems to be unaware of what he is writing. No doubt the constraints of paperback publishing at the time (“not more than 50,000 words, please”) and the limitations of the demographic for which he wrote account for some of these flaws, but not when one considers that Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, etc were writing around the same time. The book is a neat example of the popular culture of the late 40s, early 50s, but doesn’t have much interest beyond that, at least for me. * (2004)

Martha Grimes. The Anodyne Necklace (1983)

     Martha Grimes. The Anodyne Necklace (1983) Seems like Grimes names her books after pubs. This one is the locus of a D&D style game that eventually provides the clue needed to recover an emerald necklace and solve a couple of murders. Well done, but Jury, the ‘tec, is oddly bland and empty. The other characters tend to be rather more 2D than most, so that the books fails to satisfy. As a police procedural, it doesn’t quite convince, either. A beach or airport read, not more. A few very irritating typos. *½ (2004)

J. Burnley, ed. Penguin Modern Stories 1 (1969)

     J. Burnley, ed. Penguin Modern Stories 1 (1969) Modern is the operative word here: these stories are modern in that curiously restricted sense that never meant contemporary. Current stories aren’t ‘modern,’ they are just stories being written now. There is a deliberate bleakness of vision, an attempt at depicting “real life”, that feels false in these stories. Or maybe it’s the earnestness with which the writers present their ideas, as if no one had ever understood that people are fearful, petty, hypocritical, and very, very confused about life.
     No doubt a generation or two from now people will find some value in these stories; now, I find them of “historical interest” only. That is, they are reminders of a time when writers and other artists very self-consciously set themselves up in opposition to bourgeois tastes (itself a misnomer, since it’s really just common taste, and is shared by all classes at all times). They were heirs of Shaw and Ibsen, but by the time they wrote, the iconoclastic rebellion of Late Victorian and Edwardian times had become the received wisdom. Or rather, it had become merely fashionable. But then fashion relies on the appearance of revolt and change, it must constantly generate the illusion of being in the forefront, while following a safe couple of steps behind.
     The writers (William Sansom, Jean Rhys, David Plante and Bernard Malamud) already seem dated, and their talents seem to me to have been wasted. In other words, it was the fashion to appear to be out of fashion, and that never works. But it takes a while to realise that, and a writer’s life may be done by the time he discovers that he must write what matters to him, not what appears to matter to the taste-mongers. By the time these ‘modern’ stories were collected, Updike and Munro (for example) were already writing, and they made no attempt to be ‘modern.’
     I didn’t read all the stories, skimming most of them. I don’t know if there was ever a #2 in this series; probably not, for by the late 60s a different style of epater les bourgeois had displaced the ‘modern’ one. Not a keeper. * (2004)

Steve Paikin. The Dark Side (2004)

     Steve Paikin. The Dark Side (2004) Paikin, host of TVO’s Studio 2 and Diplomatic Immunity, and a political junkie by his own admission, wrote this follow-up to The Life, intending to show the price politicians pay, and succeeds admirably. He also wants to persuade us the we underrate and undervalue politicians, partly because they have badmouthed each other so much that we believe they are all villains (mud does stick to the slinger), and partly because they are an easy target for our frustration with all the things that inevitably won’t go right in our lives. He comes close to succeeding in this second aim, too, but I suspect that most of the people who will read this book will already be half persuaded. But since accepting his thesis entails a good deal of blame for our own stupidity, persuading others will be much harder.
     Paikin’s style is easy to read, he is a journalist after all, and he tells a good story. This book was a prize I won for my phone-in to CBC North about my relationship with Joe Clark, a man whom I still admire, and who in his interviews with Paikin comes across just as I remember him. A book worth reading, once anyway. **½ (2004)