Michael Crichton – “Prey”

You often read that Crichton has great science-based concepts but his characterization’s cardboard and the plots cheesy.

I think that misses the point: Crichton’s scientific concepts take the place characterization and plot take in other authors.

At least half the excitement in “Prey” is in reading how Crichton takes the idea of artificial intelligence to its logical extreme – that natural intelligence will develop an autonomous existence and will become a competitor to mankind.

The science-passages in “Prey” are a brilliant literal exposition of this, free of finger-wagging or lecturing.

The characters and the plot do what they have to do to bring it alive.

In this sense, and with a subtlety no-one has yet commented on – as far as I’m aware – Crichton’s characters perfectly embody the “thesis” of his novel. They are the artificial intelligence Crichton’s developed to flesh out his concept about artificial intelligence.

Aside from that, Crichton’s prose is clean and uncluttered. The conversations are sometimes heavy on silliness and an inane over-reliance on four-letter words, but are never allowed to drag on for too long.

T.C. Boyle’s “After the Plague”

The infectious energy of the prose makes up for sometimes static plots. There’s lots of looking back.

There’s a lot of nihilism. The treatment of the characters borders on the patronizing.

There’s some nice experimental stories – “The Black and White Sisters”, for example, which has a good, far-fetched premise – the sisters exclusively wearing either black or white, who hire a guy to asphaltize their garden, then kidnap him for use as a sex slave.

But cumulatively taken the stories become depressing. The Love of My Life is a horrible story about an adolescent love that’s betrayed after a ghastly accident. Boyle’s characters are deeply unsympathetic psychopaths for the most part and once you get into the routine of anticipating the “unpleasant twist” it all does become rather a downer. This is a liability of the short story form when writers resort to a recognizable formula, something Boyle does a few times too often in this collection.

The title story is one of few where the hero isn’t psychotic. Within its context (most of the world’s population wiped out by agonizing plague), the story offers the closest Boyle gets to a happy ending…

The story where I really started to chafe against Boyle’s overkill was “Killing Babies” where the anti-hero a drug-addict starting anew in an abortion clinic loses it, pulls his pistol and starts plugging away at the protesting pro-lifers.

This killer gets given this pay-off: “It was easy. It was nothing. Just like killing babies.”

And my reaction was – “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” – the story and its pay-off were a little too pat in their metaphorical posturing.

My overall feeling was disappointment that Boyle doesn’t use his obvious skill to better effect.

I’ll definitely read more Boyle but if his other work suffers from the same lazy urges he’ll never be one of my favorite writers.

Freddie Omm

Booker Prize – The White Tiger

A lot of rage in the reactions to Avarind Adiga’s debut, “The White Tiger,” winning this year’s Man Booker Prize.

As with the Turner Prize, provoking this rage is part of the point – it ups the coverage and pleases sponsors.

From what I’ve read of the book, you have to make a huge suspension of disbelief to accept its central premise. This is that a dyspeptic Indian entrepreneur would write a novel’s-worth of letters to a Chinese leader visiting India, simply to show him the real India which his hosts will try to keep out of sight.

You have to swallow the scenario because it’s the vehicle for the whole book.

The dyspeptic Indian’s satiric lashings of subcontinental vice – and his semi-pidgin English – provide the laughs.

This soon becomes wearying. To me, anyway. But maybe things improve later on.

The other criticism I’ve read is that all the characters featured are repulsive. No redemption anywhere. The characters are held at arm’s length, shown doing obnoxious things, and are then mocked for it.

But I haven’t read the whole book so I won’t pontificate.

In any case, congratulations are due to the talented Avarind Adiga. Even if this proves to be one of Booker’s Dogs, he’s got plenty of time to improve.

Fred De Baer

John Donne, St Cecilia, King James’ Bible

I’m reading that most unfashionable of books, the Bible, when I come across the following passage:

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.

Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?

For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe…

..But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.

And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are:

That no flesh should glory in his presence.

(I Corinthians 1, 19-21, 27-29)

Two things strike me:

First, the strong resemblance of these paradoxical ideas to  John Donne’s poetry – specifically, in the things which are not/things that are phrasing to Donne’s Ode on St Cecilia’s Day, which echoes the thoughts and words.

Second, how contrary this thinking is to the prevailing tenor of today’s world. The Jacobean take on the Bible (also expressed by Donne – Dean of St Paul’s London – himself) focussed to a far greater extent than most Christians would today on mortification and the subduing of selfish pride.

Many Christians today would rank “self-expression” as a high good. For all John Donne’s sensual side, this would have been quite alien to him and most of our Jacobean forebears.

John Milton, Galileo and Islamist Terrorists

John Milton met Galileo in Florence in 1638. In a New Yorker article, Jonathan Rosen imagines Milton drew on the encounter in creating Paradise Lost. Satan’s shield resembles the moon seen through Galileo’s telescope.

Rosen also fancies a resemblance between Satan and modern Islamist terrorists:

After the attacks of September 11th, it was possible to find Milton invoked to remind us of the nature of absolute evil—his Satan really is a model terrorist, who, having abandoned hope of a happy home, devotes his energy to destroying the lives of others—and at the same time quoted to uphold the rights of individuals whose distasteful views might be curtailed during a time of war.

http://www.newyorker.com/

Writing degree zero

I don’t have a degree in writing.

I was never tempted to take one. I thought it would be a surefire way to lose my writing talent.

My aim was to live in “the real world” and do my writing in parallel. So I got into a career which took me all over the world. I experienced a lot of things that influenced how I look at life, picked up bits of experience I use in my writing.

So, if I were starting out again now, would I take a writing course or would I go down the “real world” route again?

These days, I’m not so sure. The advantages you get from studying writing – contacts, marketing techniques, intensive insight into commercial writing – mean you’re likelier to get published faster, even if you haven’t got a lot to say.

And in the absence of those advantages – contacts especially – people are less likely to want to read what you’ve got to say, once you’ve found it.