We live in a world that increasingly not only encourages but expects, indeed requires us to embrace contradictory ideas. Religious belief and science-proof faith are now the stuff of science, hard-wired into our brains to ensure that we discover that the science which brought about that discovery will never satisfy the brains that created the science in the first place. The whole thought-path is enough to make the brains that lead the way hurt.
Humanity's literature is no less self-contradictory. Charles Stross is a perfect example, a science fiction writer who wrote a novel that was lampooned as impossible to write by another science fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem. In Lem's 'A Perfect Vacuum,' which purports to be perfect reviews of non-existent books, there's a review of Toi, a French experimental novel written entirely in the second person. It's a great joke. But when Charles Stross actually wrote 'Halting State,' he brought that joke to life and while the novel itself is quite funny, it is no joke. It's a superb crime novel, written in the second person, and seemingly an impossible act to follow.
Credit Stross then for ignoring the impossibility of his own achievement and upping the ante in 'Rule 34,' the second Liz Cavanaugh near-future cyber-crime procedural — also written in the second person. I suppose it's not surprising that I can tell readers — you’re going to enjoy 'Rule 34' immensely. But I do suggest you read 'Halting State' first.
Stross may be churning out the novels at a speed that seems ill-advised for superb literary quality, but that he manages to do so is probably not the last self-contradictory thought you'll encounter in his vicinity. In theory, writing a novel in the second person presents a difficult challenge for the writer and the reader, but tuck into 'Rule 34' and you'll wonder why it isn’t done more often. That's because Stross makes what must be rather difficult to write engagingly easy to read. He mines the immediacy of the second person to turn what would otherwise have already been a page-turning crime novel into well, an even more page-turning crime novel.
The trick here is not just the second person perceptions, but Liz Kavanaugh's voice. She's a perfect vehicle for the day-after-tomorrow sensibility that Stross succeeds in creating. She's wry, funny, and tends to be self-disparaging even as she finds herself plunged into fairly horrific crimes. Keeping up with the whole aura of self-contradictory themes, in 'Rule 34' it is criminals who are being murdered, and extremely unsympathetic ones at that. But Stross manages to keep the reader's sympathies as Cavanaugh and her unit pursue a criminal who may help to redefine the word.
With prose that is consistently funny and often quite rude, without being out-and-out crude, characters we really care about and a near future that's built from imperishable pieces of the past and present, the first and main victim of 'Rule 34' is any doubt the reader may harbor that Stross can pull off the impossible twice. One is more given to wonder just what sort of wonder he will perform next.
06-13-11: Jo Nesbø Builds 'The Snowman'
Heart of Ice
Harry Hole is not a happy man. It's an unsuitable state for driven cop with a drinking problem, an ex and her son. He starts at complicated, and then things get messy. Which, conversely, is why he is so well suited to solve complicated crimes where evidence, suspects and victims all seem to be in conflict, completely unassociated with one another. Harry Hole need only look within to find the same sort of violent chaos.
But Norwegian author Jo Nesbø has something special on ice for Harry Hole in 'The Snowman,' (Knopf / Random House ; May 10, 2011 ; $25.95). And like most terrible things, it starts quite simply, with a snowman found by a boy in his front yard. The snowman is wearing the boy's mother's scarf — and the mother is missing. But that's not the strange part. What bothers Harry, and the boy, is that the snowman in front of the house is not looking out on the street. It is looking up at the house.
Nesbø is a master of building suspense, layering in his clues and his miscues with close attention and detailed, almost gnarly prose. He revels in the grit of Harry's unfortunate life and Harry's bad choices. Those bad choices have led Harry to some very bad people, including the man who sent Harry a note months ago, signed "The Snowman." Winter is coming and Harry will soon find out how cold his heart can be.
'The Snowman' is the seventh Harry Hole novel, and the fifth to be published in English. The first two are slated to be published in English soon, so if you want to wait and read the whole series in order, the wait may not be that long. But it's going to be hard for most readers to hold back from such a tantalizing book, especially since it lives up to the setup. "The Snowman" is a tense, terrorizing novel, with a great gallery of characters good, bad, and distressingly evil.
The first strength of the Harry Hole novels is the cast of characters that Nesbø has created, and those who are added for each book. Harry Hole himself gets more and more complex and detailed with every outing, and even readers who have not read the series before will find him an alluring and innovative take on the classic broken-man detective. His new partner, Katerine Bratt, is smart and self-possessed enough to keep up with Harry, providing a protagonist who, in fighting with Harry, manages to bring out the strengths of both. Rakel and Oleg, his ex and her son, provide even more context. Nesbø's ability to evoke thorny relationships gets under the reader's radar. We feel we might know these people outside the book.
Don Bartlett's translation of Nesbø's prose is really quite superb. 'The Snowman' has a creepy, sort of horror-novel feel to it. Nesbø is quite descriptive and his evocations of landscapes, crime scenes and even everyday domestic tableaus are somehow chilling beyond the frigid weather. The weather doesn't hurt, though, and Oslo itself seems on the verge of becoming a character.
But we ostensibly read mystery novels for plot, and Nesbø keeps us riveted and off-balance by zipping back and forth, offering us one suspect here, two there, building something up and then effectively misdirecting the reader. 'The Snowman' plays fair, but like Harry Hole, readers will find themselves up against an exceptionally smart and powerful antagonist. This is why we read mysteries, and 'The Snowman' is dark and dense enough to bear a second reading, as the first two books come into English. We have a long journey ahead of us with Jo Nesbø. Harry Hole has a story all his own, and 'The Snowman' is a chilling entry in a superb series.
New to the Agony Column
05-16-12: Commentary : Mark Sundeen Pays Out 'The Man Who Quit Money' : Over the Edges
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Interview with Mark Sundeen and Daniel Suelo : "What would happen if we actually practiced this stuff?"-Daniel Suelo
05-15-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Clive Barker 'Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War' : Impure Life
05-08-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Clive Barker 'Abarat' : Reading in Color
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Phone Interview with Mark Sundeen : "...over the years, I had heard through my friends that he had stopped using money and was living in a cave..."
04-30-12: Commentary : Christopher Moore Follows 'Sacré Bleu' : A Story in Color
Agony Column Podcast News Report: A 2012 Interview with Christopher Moore : "...it often isn't efficient to tell a story in chronological order..."
04-27-12: Commentary : Lisa Lutz on 'Trail of the Spellmans' : Meta-Fiction is Fun
Agony Column Podcast News Report: SF in SF from February 11, 2012 : Panel Discussion Moderated by Terry Bisson and Interviews with Rudy Rucker, K. W. Jeter, and Jay Lake
04-26-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Emmanuel Carrere 'The Adversary' : The Enemy Within
04-23-12: Commentary : T. M. Luhrman Listens 'When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God' : Science and the Supernaturaly
04-18-12: Commentary : Gregg Jones Stirs Through 'Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines and the Rise and Fall of America's Imperial Dreams' : A Dream Of Today From Yesterday
Agony Column Podcast News Report: A 2012 Interview with Gregg Jones : "The Philippinos would welcome us with open arms and greet us as liberators."
04-17-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Caleb Carr 'The Alienist' : Subterranean History
04-16-12: Commentary : Richard Zacks Visits 'Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York' :The Wild, Wild East
Agony Column Podcast News Report: A 2012 Interview with Richard Zacks : "Roosevelt and Riis were out looking, and if they did find a cop, he was talking to a streetwalker."
