Review of “ALL THE DARK WE WILL NOT SEE” by Michael B. Neff
If only my sore eyes, bloodshot from pollen, stress, and lack of sleep, had noticed the first ill omen, waving like a red flag on Waimea beach when surf’s up, on the scintillating cover of this book. A list of names that reads like the playbill for Superman, after he had saved the world yet again, whose meaning I didn’t grasp until my mind had been dulled by drinking in this tale of star-crossed lovers swimming in a shark-infested bay connected to an ocean filled by prehistoric behemoths, a vast chasm only glimpsed by their perspicacious intellects, unobserved by unsuspecting mental midgets like myself. The forbidding cover, a vigilant guardian of truth and their giant eagle, reached into the depths of my soul, like a Stephen King novel on a stormy night, and warned me as clearly as a sunny day, to go no further. Yet I was driven by the will of Vishnu …
Enough of that. My point is that this book is written like poetry, filled with allegory and metaphors. At first I thought this was a great way to reveal Edison Eden’s tragicomic perspective, but the author used it for the narrator … pretty much everyone whose point of view is displayed in this tragic tale of deception, manipulation, betrayal and outright insanity. The feelings of the characters are amplified wildly by the writing style. It was a bit much for me.
This is a well-written book with some annoying grammatical errors, e.g., systematic missing possessive apostrophes in the same person’s name. Almost like a machine wrote it. Probably the publisher’s editing software.
This is a work of fiction, so the Office of Special Counsel and several other whistleblower protection agencies, were replaced by the fictitious Office of Whistleblower Counsel in the novel. The author weaves a believable imaginary world around this dim space in a concrete bastion erected on K Street, populate by gods, demons, acolytes, and other celestial beings.
It isn’t my cup of tea, but it’s a good read if you like metaphorical writing …
Review of “Sleeping Giants” by Sylvain Neuvel
I’ve been reading science fiction in preparation for a writers workshop, focusing on the First Contact sub-genre. This commercially published book violates most of the rules that were introduced … we were also warned that publishing is a crap shoot. This isn’t actually as bad as you might think.
For one thing, this is a great title. It grabbed my attention on the lower shelf at Barnes and Noble, and that takes a lot of effort (kneeling down, trying not to be trampled). It was nestled between a lot of second and third books in trilogies. I guess not many people get past the first one. In fact, the fine print says this is book one of the Themis series. Fortunately, it is fine as a standalone story, ending on a hopeful note but giving the curious reader the chance to see how humanity screws up this galactic opportunity. I like the happy ending and skip the sequels.
The story begins with a little girl falling into an unexpected hole and landing in the palm of a twenty-foot hand. I thought the newspaper story style was convenient, but the entire book is written as interviews, reports, and diary entries. I eventually decided that the unnamed interviewer was the narrator and central character. As you might imagine, this killed the action scenes. They aren’t nearly as exciting when related after the fact. To reveal how the characters feel and their romantic lives, the narrator asks rather personal questions; they aren’t a therapist but only a program manager.
A lot of backstory is introduced by characters introduced simply to supply information. I felt I was missing need-to-know information because of this plot gimmick, until it was too late. Kind of like Perry Mason and his suddenly appearing witnesses.
There isn’t a lot of action, even accounting for the delayed reporting used, but there is a love triangle, jealousy, and even a suddenly psychotic evil scientist. The author’s choice of using an interviewer is interesting but it makes the entire story feel distant, like reading the newspaper, and that isn’t why I read novels.
I’m ambivalent about this story. It isn’t bad and, fortunately, not drawn out, so my recommendation is that it won’t put you to sleep … nor will it keep you on the edge of your seat. After what I said above (about the publishing business), I applaud a publisher willing to take a chance …
Review of “Dreams in the Eternal Machine” by Deni Ellis Béchard
There is no surprise ending to this speculative science-fiction novel. The secret is in the title and explicitly introduced in the first few pages. Everyone on earth, including the planet itself, has been assimilated by an artificial super intelligence whose rapid development far surpassed its creator’s imagination. So what is the plot?
Wrapped in a science fiction cover is a Shakespearean story of betrayal between young people who accidentally meet in an American divided by civil war. Their story is integrated with their separate experiences after assimilation into the machine, and it remains unresolved. The only other evidence of a plot is the general decline in cognitive and emotional wellbeing of the majority of people. This process is explored through several characters whose importance to the plot is never clear. In fact, no one really stood out as being the central character, other than the two young people mentioned above. Having a plot doesn’t require the central character to succeed; failure is the stuff of tragedy and perfectly okay, but no one really struggled against the antagonist (obviously the eternal machine). Their situation is hopeless and there is no chance of escape — not even the slightest. Hopeless.
Given the lack of a coherent plot or even a central character, this story is fundamentally about the response of people to a hopeless situation in which there are no threats of any kind. The machine not only feeds and cares for its dependents, it creates any world they want to see and experience. Spoiler alert: Heaven gets old after a few centuries.
The writing is very good, and the author doesn’t miss a trick to get an agent’s attention and produce a popular book. It seems to me that agents probably don’t think very hard about the books they represent. And, of course, the reader doesn’t find out until it’s too late, the money spent. That’s how I felt. As far as the reviews, I never cease to be amazed at the glowing reviews written about this novel; I guess critics don’t read books either.
Review of “Rabbit, Run” by John Updike
The author of this literary fiction must have been a student of James Joyce (Ulysses) because it is primarily a stream-of-consciousness portrayal of several months in the life of a young man who is trying to escape his pregnant wife and young boy. The plot is secondary to the writing style, which really placed me in the mind of a character I despised throughout, although several of the other characters found him charming and wanted to be around him. I thought about writing this review the way the book is written but decided that would be too much work. I can’t imagine keeping this up for 325 pages and, apparently, it was difficult for this iconic American writer too; like most of the books I’ve reviewed, it starts unravelling about halfway through.
The plot is as much based on the thoughts of the characters as their actions. This is a tragic story about a young man (Harry Angstrom) who dwells on the good old days, when he was a basketball star in a small Pennsylvania town, while selling vegetable peelers at a department store. After abandoning his family, he ignores the advice of everyone around him, even his beloved coach, who turns out to be mortal when viewed through Harry’s cynical eyes. Indecision and feelings of duty lead Harry to reversing course several times, ultimately leading to personal tragedy and humiliation.
Part of the book (there are no chapters) applies the close point-of-view method to several characters and this is where Updike’s skill as a writer shines. While maintaining the stream-of-consciousness style, he eloquently presents several characters’ perspectives on Harry’s predicament.
No detail in any scene is too small to warrant description, but this is where the story gets a little sketchy, especially towards the end. I think the author was running out of metaphors. Nevertheless, I was impressed with how he brought inanimate objects like streets to life, making them characters rather than backdrops. His detailed descriptions of the town where Harry lived are probably excessive, except that some of these paths were followed more than once, each time from a different spatiotemporal perspective, as Harry’s mental gymnastics evolved.
I don’t like tragedies personally because I hear them all the time in the news, but this book was published in 1960. I enjoyed reading about anachronistic devices, e.g. rotary phones with handheld receivers, from a time when I was a young child. Like I said, nothing is overlooked, not even a meal eaten with chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant in a small Pennsylvania town.
I am currently writing a science fiction novel, and I can already see Updike’s influence on my writing; however, I won’t be describing dappled shade as “…a darkness in defiance of the broad daylight whose sky leaps in jagged patches from treetop to treetop above him like a silent monkey.”
That is damn good writing, but maybe it’s meant for writers rather than the average reader.
This is excellent literary fiction.
Timothy R. Keen 
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