“I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars.”

Almost bailed on this one quite early. I had qualms going in based on my presearch – that’s research before reading. Basically, I had several books by the author, and wanted to find out which one was his first book, but also discovered the author stood for some fringe left-wing group in the 2001 General Election. Oh-oh: set “political soapbox threat level” to orange. Then, it opened with a prologue off densely obscure descriptive passages, followed by a first chapter that ends with a kinda graphic description of a sexual encounter between the hero and his insectoid lover. [Well, it’s perhaps not THAT graphic, but the concept is easily far enough out there, to be disturbing]. If I’d realized at the time that the book was 867 pages long, I might have skipped it too. Fortunately, the Kindle does not care for such things: all books look the same, regardless of their length.

I say, “fortunately,” since even though this took about six months to get through, read almost entirely on my 15-minute break at work, it’s a wonderfully inventive piece. Even my political fears were largely unfounded: while depicting what could be described as a police state, this is a minor aspect, and actually seems a fairly high-functioning regime. It’s set in the world of Bas-Rag, and in particular the city of New Crobuzon, where a multitude of races more or less co-exist. As well as the insectoid Khepri, you have the avian Garuda, the Cactacae (take a guess), the aquatic Vodyanoi, and so on. Science and magic are both in play, converging in a kind of occult steampunk known as “crisis energy”, which the hero Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin researches in his shared warehouse.

He is commissioned by a Garuda, Yagharek, who has lost his wings, and wants Isaac to provide an artificial alternative. Following a fairly complex set of incidents, doing so unleashes a plague on the city, in the form of a pack of slake moths – insects that suck the minds of their victims dry, leaving them drooling idiots, and which operate across multiple dimensions, making them almost impossible to kill. Oh, and if you look at them, you’re toast, as their wings form patterns that instantly hypnotize any viewer – no saving throw. Taking them down before they breed will require Isaac to form, and handle, a very shaky alliance between creatures, even more bizarre than those already described.

It becomes easy to understand why the author needs 867 pages for this. Part of it is his desire to construct a full world, so he includes a fair amount of stuff that’s not strictly necessary to the plot – politics, religions, etc. – which helps flesh out the bare bones. And you can multiply all those aspects by each of the species involved, with all the description that entails, although it never feels like pointless padding, Miéville doing a good job of mixing it well with sequences that move the plot forward. The results are positively cinematic, and I’d love to see this as a film, even if that would likely take a couple of hundred million to do it justice.

On the other hand, even beyond a massive budget, there are aspects here which would be very difficult to translate; yet removing them would undeniably weaken the effectiveness of the work as a whole. One character vanishes in the second-half, then returns, and it’s hardly a happy ending. And Miéville also pulls a switch very late on, with a reveal concerning the nature of another character – arguably, the most “heroic” in the entire book – that causes both us and the other participants to re-evaluate their entire relationship to that entity. If it works well on the printed page, the result would be almost impossible to pull off on the screen, since it’s so much of a deviation from cinematic structure.

I was somewhat annoyed by some of the pretentious little flourishes, such as persisting in spelling it “chymical”, and never using a two-syllable word when a five-syllable one can be located in his thesaurus. Miéville’s efforts to explain the “crisis engine,” a device which plays a key role in the plot, were also a dismal failure, descending into a mire of tedious pseudo-occult philosophigobbledygook that was completely unenlightening. However, you can’t expect a book of this mammoth size to exist without a few weak spots, and the positives, such as the battles against the slake moths, are page-turners of the highest order. If you’re looking for a richly-detailed work of imagination, with as much effort put into the setting as its plot and characters, this comes highly recommended.

“Old stories would tell how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act–to Weave–was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.”

a.k.a. The Other Hand

“We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, ‘I survived’.”

Another book that falls into the category of “ones I’d never had read without this project,” it turns out to be a worthwhile endeavour. By coincidence, it’s a story told, like the last book I covered, Cold Mountain., in chapters that alternate between two very different viewpoints. That is really about the only similarity though: while Cold was very much a period piece, this is perhaps even more relevant now – the weekend of the Paris terrorist attacks – than it was when it came out in 2008. It tells the story of “Little Bee,” a Nigerian refugee, who flees a hellish civil conflict in her home land to England, and is then held in an immigration detention center for two years. When let out through a bureaucratic bungle, she makes her way to the home of the only people she knows, the O’Rourke’s, a couple she met on a Nigerian beach under disturbing (and initially vague) circumstances. The other half of the narrative is Sarah O’Rourke, a magazine editor, devoted mother and not-so-devoted wife, who is understandably surprised to see an escaped refugee show up on her suburban doorstep.

Cleave worked in one of the detention centers for a while, and wanted to write the book to humanize refugees, by picking out one of the myriad of stories present. On that basis, he succeeds, with Little Bee certainly a sympathetic character. She’s smart, despite her lack of education, teaching herself English during her incarceration, and independent, making her way from the center, through London, to the only address she knows. She even has a dry, self-effacing wit. It’s just like an illegal immigrant version of Finding Nemo! [Okay, that’s a stretch] Sarah is… considerably less so, coming over to a certain extent – particularly early – as the kind of whiny media luvvy deserving of mockery. That becomes muted later on, when the facts of her first encounter with Little Bee become apparent, and what that cost Sarah, both physically and personally – you can certainly argue that the price she paid, included her husband, is almost as much as that of Little Bee.

You do gain an insight into, and appreciation for, the plight of the “true” refugee, and the author is also to be commended for laying off any obvious political message. While it’s clear he’s saying we need to be more tolerant of, and treat better, those who come to our country seeking sanctuary, he avoid doing so through “soapbox writing,” and largely lets that come through the actions and thought of his two main characters. However, it all seemed more than a little contrived towards that end, in terms of both those he portrays, and the events that happen to them. I sincerely doubt Bee’s story is even slightly typical of most asylum-seekers, and that makes it relatively easy to dismiss as unrepresentative. As usual, the truth is not to be found at either extreme; neither Bee’s near-saintly acts, nor in the “benefit scrounging scum” beloved by certain tabloids. Though it would have been more of a challenge, and more impressive achievement if successful, to have taken one of the latter and turned them into a hero or heroine.

I’m not certain of the reason for the difference in title: in the US and Canada, it’s called Little Bee, while the original one was The Other Hand. While it was the former version I read, and so have used as the main title throughout this piece, I must say, the latter probably makes a good deal more sense, having a double meaning, one of whose aspects is reflected in elements of Sarah’s story. I can’t say it has necessarily changed my view on the thorny topics of immigration [it’s a nightmare trying to come up with any kind of regulatory system – something undeniably necessary – that can cope fairly and justly with the vastly differing circumstances thrown at it], but the book did still give me food for thought, without ramming its opinion down my throat.

“Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.”

Until last weekend, I had never been on a cruise. The closest was probably the overnight ferry from Newcastle to Esbjerg which opened more than one Inter-Rail holiday as a student, and which counted as a cruise to about the same degree Aileen Wuornos qualified as an escort. They just didn’t appeal; my interest was much more in the destination, not the journey there, which should be as quick and painless as possible. But when Chris’s company picked her to go on the last pre-opening sailing of Royal Caribbean‘s newest mega-liner, Anthem of the Seas, it would have seemed churlish to refuse, even before the words “all expenses paid” and “yes, that includes all your drinks” were heard around TC Towers. For Chris, it was a “familiarization trip,” an experience which would allow her better to sell the company’s cruises to customers. For me… Did I mention the free drinks?

We flew out on Saturday, arriving in Newark with the night free, to do as we pleased. This would involve not staying in Newark, which is an endless warren of industrial depots and so many freeway cloverleafs they might as well change the name of the city to “Bear Left,” going by the frequency that instruction showed up on Google Maps. We headed into Manhattan for the first time in 15 years or thereabouts; yes, the last occasion, there were still twin towers on the skyline. It hasn’t actually changed much otherwise, though Times Square is now infested with about a million costumed “characters”, extorting photo ops and money with vague menace. You really haven’t lived, until you have been harassed by a six-foot tall Elmo with a thick foreign accent.

We did get to the 9/11 memorial, which was impressive in scale, consisting of a pair of gigantic reflecting pools, an acre each in size, with the names of all the victims inscribed on panels along the edges. Not sure if the moderately heavy spray being blown out of them was intentional, perhaps as a metaphor for souls escaping; I’d like to think so. One thing we had forgotten about was the hell which was New York traffic. Fortunately, we were driven around by Chris’s long-time friend Denise, but I have clearly lost the knack of big city life after a decade and a half in Phoenix, where “gridlock” is defined as “only being able to drive five miles per hour above the speed limit”. In New York, red lights are more a suggestion – oddly, that seems to be especially the case for nature’s most vulnerable species, cyclists and pedestrians, both of whom plunge into traffic with an instinct for self-preservation more befitting a depressed lemming.

Somehow, we survived, and made our way on Sunday morning to the Anthem of the Seas. It’s big. As in, one hundred and eighty-six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six tons big. As in over three football pitches long, at 1,142 feet. And as in implausibly tall. I get icebergs floating: 90% is below water, so it kinda makes sense. But this ship stands 135 feet above the water, about five times what’s below it. Sitting on our 11th-floor balcony, gazing over the side, this appears an affront to nature; I had a genuinely disturbing feeling nature was suddenly going to realize this, and correct things by flipping our luxury cruise into a real-life re-enactment of The Poseidon Adventure. That it didn’t, can only be the result of dark, Satanic forces at work.

Speaking of which, equally eerie was how freaking quiet it was. We didn’t realize we had set sail, until we noticed the dock moving past. Well, we’re still in the harbour, it’s probably because the engines are probably just ticking over. Nope. Even going full steam in the Atlantic, I couldn’t hear them at all; the only exception was coming back, when we shuffled up to the wharf sideways. You couldn’t even feel any vibrations; if you weren’t looking at the ocean, you might as well have been tucked away in a luxury resort somewhere. Hell, one of the bars even had pool tables, that’s how confident they were of the ship’s stability. Admittedly, the calm conditions helped, but this ship could probably have snuck up on and surprised a ninja. Not sure how it managed this; I’m guessing regular human sacrifices in the bowels of the engine-room somewhere.

Two other things surprised me in particular: how seriously they take both safety and personal hygiene. I’m used to planes, where the demo consists of 45 seconds of token verbiage, recited by a bored stewardess, because we all know that in the highly unlikely event of a water landing, the fact your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device is not going to be remotely relevant. On the cruise, however? A full-on, 20-minute presentation, with all ship facilities closed, at which attendance was mandatory and roll-call taken through scanning of our key-cards. Though I’m unsure how good the record-keeping actually was, because we got a stiff letter warning us of our absence, despite having actually been present. I was also somewhat concerned about the life-boats, which supposedly hold over 300 people each, despite being little more than the size of an average bus.

The presentation opened with a three-minute animated film on the importance of frequently washing your hands, and the entire ship was littered with hundred of dispensers of hand-sanitizer, even outside the poshest of the boutique stores. Want to go to the buffet? You can only enter it, after being diverted past a line of sinks. I washed my hands so many times over the two-day cruise, I felt like Lady Macbeth. I can certainly understand the point of this OCDness, Chris having shared some real horror stories about the evils of norovirus. It may explain why the check-in process also included being quizzed about our recent health, although I doubt someone who had felt ill would actually answer the questions honestly, any more than people would admit at the airport, “Why, yes – I did leave my luggage unattended, thank you for asking!” If I’m well enough to make it to the docks, I’m going on this cruise, dammit!

Rather than burden you with a detailed account of events, I’m just going to pick out a few other things that stood out, and comment on them in more or less detail.

• The lifts had plaques on the floor with the day of the week on them, which were presumably switched out every 24 hours [is that a full-time job?] Probably wise, since it’s probably easy to lose track of time completely on an extended cruise.
• There may have been an incident where someone – let’s not mention her name – was unable to get out of the cabin. Turns out the cabin doors on Anthem open outwards, which, I believe from people who have done this kind of thing before, is not standard.
• When you’re 100 miles out at sea, there’s not a lot going on. Seriously, I was expecting the ocean to be teeming with life like a Sea World show [future generations of kids! Ask you parents!], but the only whale-watching we got to do was seeing them attack the buffet. We didn’t even get start-studded night-time vistas as it was cloudy. Sort this shit out, Royal Caribbean, for that is how you get one-star reviews on Yelp.
• The Two70 lounge. Holy IMAX. During the day, you get vistas three-quarters of the way round. At night, the windows turn into, effectively, a single video-unit, perhaps 200 feet across, operating in 12K, onto which exterior scenes or custom projections are displayed. Throw in another half dozen independent screens, which “float” in the air, moving on hydraulics, and you’ve got the potential for a full-on multi-media experience.
• Which is what Spectra’s Cabaret provides, combined song, dance, aerialists, music and that video system, into something which feels like an hour-long segment of Fake Off. I was sold, from the moment it opened with a full-on Las Vegas show style interpretation of Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. Somewhere in heaven, Ian Dury is looking down with a bemused smirk.
• The food was solid, though sometimes required a bit of a hunt – Sunday night took us four venues to find a restaurant. Michael’s Pub was “not serving food on this voyage,” Johnny Rocket’s closed at 5pm and Devinly Decadence – yes, that’s how it’s spelt – has a private party. Still, the Windjammer buffet came to our rescue, and proved more than up to the task.
• Though the item which will live in our memory longest was the Napoleon pastries. Damn, those things were perfect, and a significant part of the reason why I came home 10 pounds heavier than I left it. Turns out combining the lifestyle of a unemployed sloth with the calorific consumption of a Tour De France cyclist may lead to a weight gain. Who knew?
• Maybe we should have taken advantage of the more energetic activities available, like the sky-diving simulator, or the FlowRider, a surfing pool where the water is squirted out fast enough, and uphill [those are some powerful pool motors], to create waves on which you can surf. Nah. The latter was much more fun as a spectator sport.
• It’s hard to get a feel for what the cruise would have been like on a regular cruise. As it was, you were never short of space, could find a seat anywhere, and hardly ever had to queue for longer than seconds. But I’m certain this was not the full 4,900 capacity, and I don’t think I saw anyone under the age of 21. Both those factors would probably make for a radically different experience.

However, while this was a remarkable trip, and one which we’ll remember for a long time, I can’t say I am necessarily sold on the whole cruise thing. Our everyday lives are generally fairly structured and active, while there are certainly things you could do on the ship, it felt strange to have significant stretches of time (typically, bounded by meals) without anything to do. I think, if we were going on a cruise, it would need to be one with frequent stops and shore excursions. Lying on a lounger is all very well, but I tend to the view that holidays should be spent doing things you can’t do at home, rather than doing things you can, just in a different location. A river cruise down the Danube, arriving every day in a different city, would seem more likely than anything involving an extended time at sea.

Besides, I get the feeling that any regular cruise ship – and, in particular, any cruise ship we are able to afford – will likely pale in comparison beside the sleek and luxurious high-tech wonder that unquestionably is the Anthem of the Seas. As far as cruising goes, it’s all downhill from here, folks.

“She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse.”

This is the sort of find which makes the Kindle Surprise project worthwhile. Because it’s a very enjoyable book, that I would almost certainly never have read if it hadn’t been part of the package. The movie version, starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman (not to mention, Jax from Sons of Anarchy!) also managed to escape my eyeballs: I think my subconscious probably dismissed it, based on the title and Western location, as some kind of sequel to Brokeback Mountain. Or worse, The Asylum mockbuster version, likely starring Casper Van Dien. Either way: nein, danke.

Instead, it’s a Civil War story, set towards the end of that horrendous conflict. Inman, a soldier on the Confederate side, was wounded in battle, but realizes during his convalescence, that when he’s well, he’ll simply be shipped back into the conflict, and may not be as lucky next time. So he walks out of the hospital, and begins the 250-mile trek back to his home near the titular peak. The other half of the novel is about Ada, a young woman for whom Inman carries a largely undisclosed torch. She has been thrown on her own talents, after the sudden death of her preacher father, and finds her abilities short of what’s necessary.

The chapters alternate between the main protagonists: Inman, making his way across North Carolina and encountering both the good and bad of humanity, while Ada struggles with the problems of everyday lifer, helped by Ruby, a homeless woman to whom she gives shelter [In my imagination, Ruby was black; given she’s played in the movie by Renée Zellweger, I guess not…]. Of the two, I found Inman’s story more compelling, largely because there’s much more significant threat to him, with danger lurking around almost every turn, especially since he’s basically a deserter. Ada meanders round her farm with her sketch-pad, vaguely concerned about running out of food. It’s only after Ruby shows up – and, in particular, when her no-good father Stobrod arrives in tow – that any kind of urgency comes to play here.

But even when the pace is more languid than urgent, Frazier has a wonderfully descriptive tone, capable of capturing both the rural setting and its inhabitants perfectly. Nor does he soft-pedal the hell of war: some of the traumatic events described by Inman seem too horrific to be real, yet they appear based on real battles. For example, the Battle of the Crater saw Union forces dig a 500-ft long tunnel under enemy lines, pack it with 8,000 pounds of gunpowder, and blow it up; the resulting hollow can still be seen today. You can’t make that kind of shit up. The impending threat of violence looms large, and you just don’t know until the very last page whether the lovers get to live happily ever after, or are doomed to be just another casualty of war. I found myself caring about the outcome, in a way few novels manage; some works by Thomas Hardy, and I’m hard pressed to think of many others, since I ran weeping to my mother as a seven-year-old, after Boxer died in Animal Farm.

It is kinda odd to have a love story, where the two protagonists don’t share a scene, except in flashbacks, until the last ten percent of the novel. However, it doesn’t negatively impact the emotional content; indeed, it perhaps heightens the sense of relief felt by the reader, when they are finally together, albeit under some pretty harrowing circumstances. Yet, just when you think they’re safe, there’s one final peril to be faced. It did feel like a long read, and there were times when I seemed to be making no progress at all. Yet unlike some, it was never a chore, and I’m now certainly going to have to see the movie version, and find out how it compares to the source material.

“For you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn’t changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You’re only left with your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not.”

“It’s been my experience that people who make proclamations about themselves are usually the opposite of what they claim to be.”

I went into this with absolutely no knowledge of Ms. Handler. I had not watched any of her TV shows. I had not seen any of her stand-up. All I know about her, I learned from this book. And having read the first couple of chapters in her autobiography, I was able to come to a single rapid conclusion.

Chelsea Handler. What a cunt.

The first story she tells dates back to when she was nine, and fabricated an entire career to her school classmates that she was an acting prodigy, about to take on a role as Goldie Hawn’s daughter in a sequel to Private Benjamin. This wasn’t your typical childish lie either. No, this was a monstrous, extended deception, perpetuated over months, in an effort to be popular. It’s presented in such a way that I suspect this is intended to be adorable or something, but the result was actually to generate a kneejerk loathing for a spoiled and entitled little brat. When you open by revealing yourself to be a liar on a pathological scale, it doesn’t exactly encourage the reader to a) have much empathy for you, or b) believe anything you say in the rest of your book.

The self-portrayal didn’t improve in the next couple of chapters, which cover a babysitting incident in her teenage years, followed by her being arrested and spending a weekend in prison for drunk driving. Turns out, Handler is not just an egocentric bitch, she’s a borderline sociopath. And this is the kind of person who becomes “famous” in modern society? I was giving serious thought to dumping this entirely, and might well have, if not for the rules of thus challenge, dictating that I only get to quit if I can come up with 500 words on why the book was so bad. Repeating “Chelsea Handler. What a cunt” 100 times would too much like a cheap cop-out, unfortunately. So I persevered. And somewhere in the middle, I realized this was actually a masterful put-on.

Satire only makes sense if you know it’s satire. That has always been the case, going back to Jonathan Swift suggesting that babies make good eating. Take the suggestion seriously, and you’ve lost the argument before it begins. The same goes for more recent work too. Take Sacha Baron Cohen’s character, Borat. Operating in a vacuum, it’s a hellish, reprehensible creation, vilely intolerant and repellent. But if you’re in on the joke, it’s absolutely glorious. I’m thinking that is the problem with this book. Lacking any background to Handler, I have absolutely no context into which to place these anecdotes, and so am unaware that in this book, she is apparently playing a character who just happens to have the same name – in a way not dissimilar, say, to Stephen Colbert. The quote at the top of the piece is absolutely key, given the entire book is basically proclamations about Chelsea.

Not that even figuring this out makes it great literature. It’s mostly strikingly unfunny, with about the only memorable chapter describing her interaction with an alcoholic midget, brought over to be a guest on one of the shows on which Handler worked. It’s a glorious exercise in non-PC. Otherwise, this is more a slog than a pleasure, since the character here is spikily unlikeable, and doesn’t have much to say. There are only two kinds of people who should write memoirs: those who have had interesting lives, and those who have enough writing talent, that they can make the humdrum interesting. Based on what we see here, Handler (the writer) doesn’t fall into either category, perhaps because Handler (the character) is not as interesting as Handler (the writer) seems to think.

Still, I can’t help but begrudgingly admire what appears to be a sublime piece of trolling, and on that basis, need to amend my original conclusion regarding the author.

Chelsea Handler. What a smart cunt.

“A homeless man with a dog approached us and put his hand out. This happens to be something I have a real problem with: homeless people with pets who approach you for food. How can they have the nerve to beg for food when they have a perfectly delicious dog standing right there? I didn’t care if this guy understood English or not. Tell me when you’re out of dog, buddy. Then we can talk about splitting a falafel.”