Mockingjay; oh my

There's a scene in the otherwise not terribly good The Fugitive where veteran scene-stealer Tommy Lee Jones surveys some or other chaos and says "My, my, my, my, what a mess." I felt like that as I came to the end of Mockingjay, with which Suzanne Collins, bless her, tries to wrap up a trilogy which I can only assume she never planned. 

As with the other two books, I'm impressed by what Collins doesn't give in to. She doesn't go for a neat ending, she doesn't resolve the emotional tangles with heroic sacrifices and she's absolutely ruthless about the expendability of the supporting cast. And her characters are realistically frail; every time something gets all explodey, the survivors wake up in hospital, rather than bouncing back into action.These are brave choices, but they don't get her off the hook over things which go wrong. 

What goes wrong? Well, there's the lack of a clear master plot line. The first book works quite well because it's a horribly claustrophobic piece that motors along quickly enough that you overlook the lack of plausibility to the overarching idea. The second book struggled to find a way to reimpose that claustrophobia and failed, largely because it blew its pacing in the middle and then looked like it was trying to get the sequence's mojo back by hastily scrabbling its way back into the arena where everything had been nice and simple. The third book is kind of like the second book all over again, but peters out messily instead of giving a sense of resolution. Not having a neat ending is one thing; making a mess out of describing the mess is another thing entirely.

Where it all goes wrong for me is the way that Collins keeps crabbing back to the things which worked in the first book; the over-the-top spitefulness of the killing machines in the arena and the creepy moral unease that comes from knowing that the only way you're going to live is if everyone else dies. The efforts to get back to that successful formula get ever more strained, and it's never a good sign when the reader, a third of the way from the ending of the book, is muttering under his breath "Oh dear, here we go again." 

Oddly enough, I suspect that these books are going to be perfectly successful movies; the way they've been put together will probably work better in film terms than they do on the printed page. But having found my way to the end of the books, I'm kind of wishing I'd left well enough alone.

Catching Fire; Hunger Games II, Electric Boogaloo, the Encatchening

Sequels. We live in a time of sequels, though, as I had cause to point out just the other day, it's easy to imagine the audience at the Globe Theatre grumbling that Shakespeare was just grinding them out. "'Enry Four? It's all just sequels now, innit? And he's just cashing it in nah, breaking it up into two parts anall. Sod this, I'm off dahn the pub."

I'm not sure if Suzanne Collins knew at the outset that she was going to need to write three books about Katniss Everdeen, but I have my doubts that it was all fully fleshed out in her head as she picked up her quill for page one of The Hunger Games. Turns out that I was wrong about cultural stasis persisting in Hunger Games land for thirty years; it's persisted for 75 years. I'm trying, without very much success, to think of a period of history where a whole continent stayed under one management for 75 years without any real change to the arrangements. It's easy enough to argue that the US has been under a single management for more than two hundred years, until you pick apart those two hundred years and all the changes in society which have swept through the continent in that time. You need to go back centuries before you can find a society which bobbed along with no real dynamism, and in most cases our impression of stasis is really down to ignorance of detail. There are enough throw-away lines about new consumer distractions and inventions for the wealthy that science has to have been plugging along, and with new inventions come new ways of looking at things and social change in their wake. No, it just doesn't make sense, any more than the convenient notion that the former USA can break into twelve districts each of which specialise in a different primary production sector. That's the kind of dynamic you see in a computer game, not the real world.

But those are the quibbles of the last book, persisting into the second when I'd hoped they might be sorted out a bit. What actually happens in the second book? Some good stuff, actually, at least from a character point of view. Our three main characters remain a little bit too good to be true, but I like it that the ludicrously chaste love triangle doesn't turn into some angst ridden pain in the neck. I like it, too, that Katniss is starting to hate herself for what she had to do to get as far as she has. And that despite this, she's toughened up a bit; killing people isn't bothering her as much as it used to, which seems to be pretty much the way that it goes for people in the real world. There's something real going on in her mind, for all the nonsense going on in the actual world, and I like that.

Stlll, it's a very middle-y book. An awful lot of running time goes on a victory tour which doesn't really deepen our understanding of the world enough, and just feels like marking time. And then we get the big obstacle; oh noes, Katniss has to go back in the arena again. Because the Capitol keeps changing the rules, and just when you think you're safe, they wind you back in. This is a perfectly worthwhile piece of vileness, but it happens at the wrong point in the action, so that resolving it winds up rushed and awkward, and indeed almost as though Collins has run out of ideas and all she can think of is to chuck her protagonist back into the arena again because that worked so well the last time. There was a different, and perhaps better, arena to be navigated; this would have been the ideal place for Collins to show us more of the Capitol, and the inner workings of the lunatic government which controls all of this sadism. That's more or less what I'd been expecting, but instead we're kept back in the narrow compass of District 12 and then the arena, and we still have no better idea of how this show could be kept on the road or what's going on below its surface. There are any number of hints that there's a deeper game in play, but they're not pulled together in a way which convinces. One big plot twist is that Haymitch survived the last 25th anniversary games, which were made extra ugly by doubling the number of players; it's weird that this was never mentioned before now, since it would have been quite the talking point at the time, and indeed, it was designed to be a talking point so that each generation would be aware how screwed they really were. Which is a good moment for me to mention that I can't think of a single government in history which has prospered by telling its population that they're screwed and there's nothing that they can do about it. Even the really nasty ones still insisted that they were actually benign and had everyone's best interests at heart. Bwahaha is NOT a headline strategy for a working polity.

The good news, I suppose, is that by the time we get to the end of the book, everything has fallen thoroughly apart and it doesn't seem that likely that we're going to get ANOTHER oh noes, back to the arena reveal in the third book. But before I can figure that out, I have to go and follow the footsteps of that great humanitarian, Hannibal Lecter.

Robert Harris: The Fear Index

There's something profoundly inessential about the books of Robert Harris. Fatherland has been taking up a lot of space on my bookshelves - I bought a remaindered hardcover edition - for many years without me ever feeling the urge to revisit it. Harris is one of those writers who gets An Idea and then crafts a narrative around the idea. He's a perfectly adequate writer, so the characters are workmanlike - they suffice for the work in hand - but once they've played their part in illuminating the Idea, they're not so interesting for their own sake.

I started reading The Fear Index a couple of weeks back, not expecting very much out of it, and by the end of chapter 2 I could tell that it wasn't going to be worth putting a lot of effort into getting to the end of it. It went to one side until I was coming back down from the Hidden City and grabbed an arm-load of books to have something to read while I was home. Having finished The Gone Away World, I figured to read something more disposable and resumed the Harris.

I've got a feeling that for Harris' target audience, there's a wow factor in the big reveal that drives the book. For anyone who's read any science fiction, ever, or even Frankenstein, the punch line's about as surprising as dipping into a historical novel featuring an Atlantic crossing in 1912 only to discover that there are icebergs. Genius creates computer trading system in order to exploit the extremes of algorithmic trading, only to have it become self aware; this story about computing is older than actual computing, if I had the patience to look it up.

It's very competently carried off; everything's in its place and there's a praiseworthy effort to respect the Aristotelian unities by having everything happen within a day. It's a profoundly screenplay friendly book, as you'd expect from a writer who's had most of his work turned into movies of one kind and another. In due course, it may become a movie, though it suffers a bit from a lack of relatable characters; the protagonist is the misguided genius at the centre of a hedge fund, which is a pretty hard thing to get someone to root for in the day and age.

Probably the most useful thing in the book is a half page about two thirds of the way through where one of the characters explains a hedge fund's working with an incredibly simply minded analogy. It would be a huge time saver if you ever had to explain one yourself, but that's a requirement that comes up less often than you'd expect. And once you look at the mechanics of hedging, it's hard to see how you could AVOID making money doing it; essentially, it's being a bookie with stocks and shares (and the like) rather than horses, and just like being a bookie, as long as you make sure that a) you're using other people's money; b) all your bets are balanced off against other bets so that you can't really lose and c) there are far more gamblers than bookies, it's pretty much a license to print money. 

Mind you, it wasn't just the familiarity of the premise that hung heavy on my patience this afternoon; it was the familiarity of the writing. It reminded me of that patch Philip Kerr went through when he wrote high concept potboilers, including one called Gridiron, which pretty much has the same McGuffin 17 years ago, albeit with a quasi autonomous building rather than a trading system. And both of them reminded me of Michael Crichton, albeit on a bad day. Michael Crichton was not a very good writer, but in his heyday, he was a welter of genuinely new notions; you didn't read his books and think "Hang on, I've been here before." Still, I've been complaining for a while that something needs to be done to up the quality control of the stuff which is being unearthed from Crichton's sock drawer and unleashed on an unsuspecting world. You could do worse than giving the scripts to Harris.

Nick Harkaway: The Gone Away World

Since this is fundamentally a blog about snarking things off, it's always hard to know where to begin with something that I admire. The Gone Away World was something I decided not to read when it came out. It seemed like something I wasn't going to like; too whimsical or serious or literary or something. Four years later I somehow changed my mind and decided to give it a shot, and I've been slowly reading it over the course of the past week. Slowly, because occasionally you hit a book which you want to take your time over; I rarely read a full chapter at a sitting until I'd got to the magical point where what was left of the book was too thin to hold comfortably in one hand. Whereupon, as you do, I galloped through the last eighty or so pages in one go.

Harkaway shares with Neal Stephenson a nerdly willingness to digress off into detail about small things which matter to specialists of one kind and another, but unlike Stephenson, he can usually keep it in check. So every few pages, there's a diverting little aside which leaves you wondering if it's true, or just something that sounds odd enough to be true. It's probably best to assume that most of it is genial blather, not least because Harkaway does genial blather so well that I ought not to have been surprised to read in his afterword that one of his big influences was PG Wodehouse. It's a very un-Wodehousian book, until he mentions it, and then you're running back over it and realising that it is exactly what might have happened if Wodehouse had been a huge modern nerd with an interest in martial arts movies and science fiction, and had set one of his farces in a post apocalyptic wasteland. 

It's a crafty book; there's a killer reveal in the middle of it which has been artfully foreshadowed and yet is completely organic to the plot. Yes, I thought, of course. Everything has been leading up to this point, and every little thing which has bugged me about the narrator's story so far has just neatly fallen into place. It's quite wonderfully cunning. In a way, it's too good to top, so it's a pity that the book still has some way to go before it gets to the end. I'm not sure that anything could be done about that, short of ripping it all up and starting again. You could run with the reveal early and then go through the working out, or you could leave it even later, but then there's no time for the loose ends. Or you could opt for the tricky structure that Iain M Banks adopted in Use of Weapons, but as I thought about that, I thought of the way that Banks' debut The Wasp Factory managed the tricky business of a narrator who isn't at all what we think. Yes, it can be done, but my word, it's tricky. 

The Gone Away World is, at one level, simply a book with a truly clever gimmick at its heart, and a very intricate master plot all around the edge of that. But if all it was was a gimmick, I'd have raced through it and moved on to something else in the monster pile of books sitting around the house. Instead I savoured it, because it's a really nicely written book; the narrator's voice is entertaining and comfortable, and his vision of the world as being perfectible, if hardly perfect, is an infectious one. I wanted to take my time with it, the same way that you don't want an enjoyable evening to end. Nick Harkaway seems like he'd be a nice bloke to have a drink with. He also has the kinds of doubts about our modern world that I've harboured for most of my own life. He's not really hiding them, either. The Gone Away War, which is the inciting incident for most of the action, revolves around the use of a bomb which removes the information from mass and energy, so that it doesn't know how to exist any more and just disappears. The problem, as only becomes apparent when the great powers have their Oppenheimer moment after the fact, is that something has to fill the information vacuum this creates, and that something is whatever random thoughts are running through people's minds in the neighbourhood. An antidote is needed, some kind of nonsensical and meaningless information which will fill the gap without creating any new reality. That antidote is referred to as FOX. Of course it is.

The Dark Knight Rises; less would have been more

The Dark Knight Rises is pretty heavy going, and after I'd sat through about the length of a normal movie, I figured out why. Batman himself is actually pretty dull. He's got tonnes of gadgets, but he's got no real personality and no sense of humour either, so you're kind of sitting there, waiting for the villains to give you a bit of fun. By the time I had figured this out, there was still something like an hour more of the movie to sit through, and it didn't get any better. It didn't get any worse, but I was reduced to keeping myself amused trying to figure out just how many cameos had been levered in. Who was that special forces guy who got killed after about six lines of dialogue? Could that really be The Rock? No, turns out it was Franco from Rescue Me, which meant I was probably the only person who recognised him even vaguely. Are any of these guys playing prisoners famous? Yes, it turns out, one of them was Tom Conti. Because Chris Nolan can get just anyone, these days, no matter how little they have to do. Could that really be Cillian Murphy slumming over there as the judge of all? Yep, it was. Matthew Modine playing the inept chief of police? My word, that's just who it is. What with Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy, it was for all the world as though Nolan cleared his throat at the end of Inception and said "Did I say any of you could leave?"

I think that if we lived in a world where The Dark Knight didn't exist, The Dark Knight Rises would seem like a pretty good Batman movie. But Heath Ledger's Joker ruined movie villaindom for everyone else, somehow managing to find a way to play a maniac who made sense as a maniac. Villains in superhero movies don't usually have sensible plans, and you kind of have to roll with it if you're going to get through the thing without laughing in the wrong places. Ledger's Joker was somehow crazy enough that it made some kind of sense that he'd be doing insane things just for the fun of it, and just scary enough that you could believe that other people would go along with the plan for fear of what might happen if they didn't. And the scale of his operations was somewhat plausible. 

By contrast, Bane, the villain of the piece for tonight's feature presentation, is completely nuts and working on a scale too vast ever to make sense. And crucially, he's not funny. This is the script's fault; in Inception, Hardy's character got most of the good one-liners and made hay with them. If there was anything there that could be spun for fun, Hardy would have found a way. And Bane's got movie villain delegation syndrome; not since John Lithgow in Cliffhanger (a film which also featured a mid air assault on one plane from another one!) have I seen a criminal mastermind with such poor management skills. Killing your subordinates whenever they annoy you may well keep them on their toes, but after the first couple of weeks, they're mostly on their toes looking for a good place to stand when they stick a bunch of knives in your back. Yet somehow we're supposed to figure that this is a guy who attracts slavish loyalty from a huge gang of minions over a period of years. I could not get my head round that problem.

It falls to Anne Hathaway to plug the chuckle gap. As comforting news goes, this is kind of like being told that it will be Steve Buscemi's job to lead the elite team of commandos in hand to hand combat with space aliens; you want to believe this is all going to work out, but it's not how you would have planned it if someone had given you a blank sheet of paper. Catwoman's always in principle a fun character and Anne Hathaway does her best, but the material isn't always there. And there's precious little light relief from anyone else.

I have to make allowances; Nolan is setting out to make a set of serious movies about what superheroing would be all about, so he's going to be aiming for a certain portentous tone, but dear god in heaven; it's superhero movies. Ludicrously scaled villains. Maniacal revenge-driven plots which don't make a button of sense. A man wearing a mask he can never take off (which just left me wondering how he ate). A whole city cut off from the rest of the world and held hostage with a nuclear bomb for months. That's kind of balderdash, no matter how seriously you're pitching it. There's no point in being quite so po-faced about it.

As always, Caine is fun and Morgan Freeman twinkles reliably. Joseph Gordon Levitt once again steals the movie off the ostensible principal cast; I'm not sure what he does when he sets his mind to it, but he has few equals in the odd business of playing a smart guy trying to solve a problem. And there's any amount of pretty good set pieces, including the air assault at the beginning of the movie (Oh look, Aidan Gillen has added sleazy CIA contractor to his list of scumbag characters! And, oh, sure, it's completely unexpected that one of the three guys with bags on their heads will turn out to be the villain after all.) So it's not like this is a bad movie. It's just not a good Christopher Nolan movie, is all.

Without wanting to go all Joel Schumacher on it and have nothing but comedy villains with punchlines for every occasion, it would have been better with a funnier villain to balance the fundamental humourlessness of Christian Bale's Batman impersonation (Bale was quite wry as Bruce Wayne in the earlier films, but the downbeat tone of the whole movie has really cut that away). And it would have been better as a smaller, more intimate movie. Smaller stakes wouldn't have taken so long to set up, and would have been every bit as powerful as the over the top plot we actually got.

Shooting the Messenger

I've ruminated in the past on the need to remember that at some point, we're all the guys who have to ask a silly question, if only because questions tend to arise from localized silliness. And I preached toleration in the face of those questions.

There are people, however, who can't even come up with the stupid question on their own, and the question is, should we be so lenient with people who come bearing borrowed idiocy?

You'll always know these clowns, because at some point in the conversation - sometimes, presciently, before they say anything else, other times defensively, when they've already said too much - they will utter the words "Don't shoot the messenger!"

To which I've always said, "Well, why the hell not?" The notion that you shouldn't kill the messenger goes back to the medieval origins of diplomacy, when it dawned on kings and tyrants of one kind and another that if they took to whacking emissaries from distant tyrants, nothing would ever get done. Like most medieval ideas, I think it's a little past its sell by date, and besides, nothing I've ever seen of diplomacy has left me with the notion that it's a vital public service without which the world might end. Thus, my working approach to poor long suffering messengers was to put them out of their misery as briskly as possible. Such messengers were a bug up my ass, a pox on my day, a nuisance and a setback in buzzing, gnat-like, almost-human form. Killing them was fun, and carried a number of collateral benefits. If I killed enough of them, one of two things would happen; either they'd stop coming altogether, freeing me up to deal with something more interesting, or whatever boss-level moron was sending them would be forced to lever himself out of his mud encrusted lair and lurch down to convey his stupidity in person, which would lead either to me schwacking him, to the general benefit of the populace, or teaching him to be less stupid, to the slightly smaller benefit of the populace but presumably the greater benefit of my soul. 

So, with a sense of regret (occasional, it must be admitted) I would bludgeon the benighted and get on with my day. It was unfortunate that undeserving schlubs had to feel my wrath in order to make the world a better place, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs (though - it turns out - you can break any number of eggs and still not make an omelette).

Lately, I find myself working with people who have tested that simple sense of justice to its sticking point, and I feel a subtle shift coming on. I have concluded that messengers actually deserve to be schwacked, and that whatever they get, they got coming.

I used to buy into this self-serving schtick that they were just innocent victims, powerless to prevent that old debbil boss from telling them to come and ask me questions for which the only honest answer was measured in foot-pounds of impact energy to the solar plexus. But I'm getting older, and I have realized that this is no more an excuse than any other variation of "I was only following orders." If you know you're being told to do something stupid, you still have choices. You can refuse, you can pitch alternatives, you can tell the idiot that the only way to sell something so monstrously dumb is to use the weight of their authority directly. And yet, the messengers troop down to my lair and beard me just like it wasn't a thing.The problem, I've come to see, is that I'm living in a world where people are more afraid of their bosses than they are of me.

It is plainly time to revisit some of these lenient policies which have led to me being seen as a soft touch. Starting with this lax notion of shooting messengers. I'm thinking skulls on stakes round my doorway.

Micro; Zombie Michael Crichton lurches through Hawaii

A couple of years ago, I slogged quickly through Pirate Latitudes, a book they found in Michael Crichton's desk drawer after he died. It struck me at the time that there was probably a lot of other stuff there, and it would, with any luck, never see the light of day. Luck isn't so kind, and the process of hiring people to flesh out the outlines is now thoroughly under way. They hired in Richard Preston, who's mostly a writer of non-fiction about micro-biology, and got him to finish off the first of them. I'm guessing they led with the best; not an encouraging sign for anything else they've teed up.

Towards the end of his writing career, Crichton seems to have lost whatever spark of novelty he had. He'd never been good at characters or dialogue and he got by from the outset on a fertile imagination and a knack for explaining tricky things. It's only as I read things like Micro that I realize that one of the other early strengths was his preference for talking about skilled professionals tackling something they thought they understood, but which were actually a bit beyond them. Somewhere along the line, he seems to have bought into the Hollywood notion that engaging fiction needs a cast of relatable everymen  who the audience can see as surrogates for themselves, and once he went down that road, the books got a lot worse. 

Crichton's real breakthrough was The Andromeda Strain, which pitted a cast of experts against a space virus. They'd been specifically selected by people who knew they'd be out of their depth, and the planning had included planning for what people might get wrong when they were baffled; part of the fun of the book is how planning wasn't quite enough, but it was still a tribute to the idea that when you want to get a job done, you hire people who know how to do the job. Micro pits a bunch of graduate students against something they don't even understand and are completely unprepared for. It's very Hollywood, and it's not very good.

What's disappointing is that the book is all about something which the early Crichton would have made a much better job of. The McGuffin is technology which can shrink people to a half an inch high, which lets them explore the world of insects and spiders from a novel perspective while exposing them to the hazard of being eaten by what they're studying. Early Crichton would have seen that as more than enough to be getting on with, and would have shown us a whole A team going in prepared to the hilt and having a bad time anyhow. (Congo is a perfect example of how he could have kicked off). Instead, Micro chucks half a dozen ingenues into the wilderness because they're the victims of an evil plot, which means that no-one has a clue what they're doing, and half of the book is about evil plot when it could be about the myriad cooler  and unusual things which it ought to be about. 

I don't know why Crichton drifted into the idea that everything ought to have a villain, though I'm inclined to blame the dumbing down that comes with movies. What struck me this morning was the way that the villain in most of his books was always the same villain, the megalomaniac CEO of the reckless high tech corporation. Was that a reaction to endlessly dealing with the megalomaniac CEOs of media corporations, or was he driven by the current argument that corporations are the great sociopaths of the modern age and that there's ample evidence that the sort of people who wind up running them are troublingly similar to serial killers in real life? I've read his nonfiction essays and they don't shed much light on that question. He was, however, a man with very strong ideas about things that were being perceived wrongly and most of his books were written as a warning about something that was bugging him. So I'm not ruling out a meta-message in his recurring choice of bad guys.

Still, I could wish that instead of giving the outline to Richard Preston, they had somehow found a younger Michael Crichton, one who would have run with the wonder of the central idea and realized that a grown up book about a different world would have enough marvels not to need hokey corporate shenanigans. And I could hope that whoever's sitting on the rest of the stockpile will read this, or just figure that out on his own, and that any more of this stuff does more justice to what Crichton was best at.