Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (49 page)

This failure has repercussions also when it comes to the social-commentary aspect of the novel. Yes, we can accept that there's a racist rift in US society because we see it in microcosm in Paxton's horrific charnel house of a camp and because we're
told
this is just an extreme example of a widespread poison, but there's nothing in all these 726 pages that can convince our
souls
this is the case. We just have to accept it as the intellectual truth which it perhaps so obviously is. And thus we underestimate it.

In sum, then,
The Rift
admirably fulfils its function as a rattling yarn: it offers excellent and gripping entertainment. Perhaps, however, those looking for greater depths than this should seek not just elsewhere than in
The Rift
but in a subgenre other than the disaster novel.

—unknown venue

Passage

by Connie Willis

Bantam, 594 pages, hardback, 2001

Connie Willis's
Doomsday Book
(1992) was an sf novel that not only showed both exquisite humanity and an intimate knowledge of the way that real scientists go about their business but also – rarely for a genuine sf novel – transcended all genre limitations, being loved by the "I don't understand science fiction so I don't like it" brigade as much as by the aficionado. At first glance
Passage
looks set to repeat that major achievement: it is entirely accessible to any reader yet is certainly science fiction, while at the same time it has enough of the feel of fantasy to be readable as a technofantasy. By any standards it is a major novel – and I would certainly recommend it to all readers, whether sf devotees or not – but for reasons that I hope will become clear it is by far the lesser of the two books.

The plot goes thus. In Mercy General Hospital, which suffers from an Escher-like construction due to architectural modifications over the years and constant repair work in the now, psychologist Joanna Lander is conducting research into the near-death experience (NDE) through interviewing patients who have successfully been brought back from the brink. Her days are plagued by the presence in the hospital of anti-scientific "researcher" Maurice Mandrake, author of the bestselling
Light at the End of the Tunnel
, who spends much of his energies getting to NDE survivors first and persuading them (through the phenomenon that is known in dream research as "reading back") to remember their NDE as containing all the elements that bolster his own religious bigotry – Heaven, Jesus, the dearly beloved dead, angels and you name it. Obviously such survivors become useless as case studies for Joanna after Mandrake's interventions, because they quite genuinely believe they have experienced all the baloney he has implanted in their memories.

(Infodump. "Reading back", first isolated by researchers under the aegis of the Society for Psychical Research – which in its heyday was as scientifically rigorous as many another more revered 19th-century organization – is responsible for many, probably most, accounts of precognitive dreams. The phenomenon works like this. You might dream that ex-President Bill Clinton drowned in his swimming pool. A few days later, President George W. Bush trips over his own pretzel and breaks his neck. Because of the points of similarity in the two events – president, death – you will remember your dream as one of Bush breaking his neck; especially if there's a further coincidence such as Bush having been playing pool at the time of his accident. In no way will you be consciously doctoring your memory of the original dream; what seems to be the case is that the subconscious does its best to match the dream with the real-life event, and this comes into your conscious as a true memory. Not enough research has been done into this fascinating phenomenon, which is a form of auto-suggestion.)

Into this situation comes neurologist Richard Wright, who has isolated a psychotopic drug that can be used to simulate the NDE. Richard recruits Joanna to his research, and they get a few good results from volunteers. Then, however, a concatenation of circumstances dictates that Joanna herself should become a volunteer, despite Richard's profound reservations.

She discovers that some of the elements of the NDE trumpeted by the hated Mandrake are genuine, as was already indicated by the interviews she has conducted. Typically, her NDE starts with herself in a tunnel, at the end of which is a light. Over the course of several experiments, she reaches that light and progresses through the doorway it represents; however, she finds herself not in Heaven but aboard the
Titanic
scant hours away from its doom. Waking researches indicate that what she witnesses during her NDEs accord with the historical reality rather than with any cultural contaminants that might have affected her, such as watching the movie
Titanic
; yet of course there's always the possibility that she's mentally regurgitating historical accounts she might have read but forgotten having done so (approximately the Bridey Murphy syndrome). Even so, there's independent evidence that other NDE survivors have likewise found themselves aboard the
Titanic
.

Theories spark between Joanna and Richard much as love sparks between them (and it does). The sinking of the
Titanic
– or any other major disaster – might be an analogue of the physiological disaster that is death; the subconscious, seeking to represent the process of the organs one by one giving up the struggle, might use the
Titanic
disaster, in close detail, as a symbol. Alternatively, the despairing signals that the
Titanic
sent out until the final moments before foundering could be seen as analogues of the dying body sending out desperate SOS messages.

The truth turns out to be stranger than that.

There is lots to love about this absorbing novel. Yet it suffers some from serious flaws – really, a surfeit of manifestations of a single serious flaw.

Maurice Mandrake is a bore and a philosophical bigot. Joanna spends much of her time trying to avoid meeting him; sometimes she is unsuccessful in this. She also tries to avoid the volunteer Wojakowski, booted out of her and Richard's program when they discover he's a compulsive (but unwitting) liar; his main character trait is to force his largely fictional war reminiscences on all listeners, however reluctant. Then there's Maisie, the cute kid forever on the edge of death whose hobby is historical disasters; she is a master of the art of prolonging conversations with anyone she likes. And finally there's the insane architecture of the hospital, which involves Joanna (and Richard, the other focus character) having to make protracted calculations every time she wants to get from A to B.

The trouble with portraying boring, tedious characters and circumstances is that in order to convey the boredom and tedium you have to show them being repeatedly boring and tedious ... and Willis spends a great deal of her time, certainly fifty and possibly a hundred pages, doing exactly this. Mandrake might be a comic cut to start with – likewise Wojakowski – but soon I began to dread his every appearance. Maisie is in so many ways an adorable character, but even so I soon tired of her company; she's the kid you babysit for whom you initially love for her inventive ways of putting off bedtime but eventually get heartily sick of. The calculations of navigation around the Escherian hospital pall especially rapidly.

All of these tedia formed an interesting false theory in the mind of this reviewer: that the denouement would be that Joanna was suffering an NDE from the novel's very outset, and that her NDE took the form of an anxiety dream – one of those dreams in which one is eternally entangled in seemingly meaningful pointlessness, and is constantly in the thrall of frustration. To partially reiterate, anxiety dreams are pretty tedious to experience and even more so when recounted by others.

Luckily Willis is an extremely fluent writer; in less deft hands than hers this composite flaw might see the book being thrown at the nearest wall or snored over, but she just about manages to carry one through the frequent scenes of boredom because of her sheer narrative facility – and because the other elements of the novel are so completely fascinating. Coming to the end of reading
Passage
is like having eaten a superbly planned and cooked meal that would have perfectly satisfied you – a delightfully memorable feast – except that some dolt added dodgy french fries, which have both somewhat overfilled you and spoiled the experience as a whole. One wishes Willis's editor had been a bit stricter.

—Infinity Plus

The Haunted Air: A Repairman Jack Novel

by F. Paul Wilson

Gauntlet Press, 462 pages, hardback, limited edition, 2002

F. Paul Wilson should listen a bit more carefully to the music of Meat Loaf. On page 124 of this novel he significantly misjudges the performances of the excellent interpreter and the accomplishments of his primary songwriter, Jim Steinman; in particular, Wilson clearly hasn't paid proper attention to the wit of Steinman's lyrics. Pshaw, I say. And pshaw again.

Repairman Jack and his girlfriend Gia are dragged along by a ditzy friend to see the psychic Ifasen in Astoria, NYC. As soon as Gia steps in the doorway of Ifasen's house there is a minor earthquake, and soon it is discovered that a gaping crack has opened up in the floor of the house's cellar. Ifasen himself is clearly terrified, and Jack spots a bullet hole in the window.

Soon a story emerges. Ifasen is in reality Lyle Kenton from Detroit, and he and his brother Charlie are running a bogus psychic operation. Because of their growing success they're taking customers from other, much more predatory bogus psychics, one of whom is attempting to terrorize them out of business. In an entertaining major subplot of the novel, Jack "repairs" this situation for the two brothers, whom he and Gia come much to like.

The two other, more major strands of the novel are considerably more sombre.

That crack in the cellar heralds the full-scale poltergeist haunting of the house, and Gia sees the ghost of a sweet little girl whose heart has been plucked out. The main protagonists – Jack, Gia, Lyle, Charlie – are obviously keen to bring peace to this pitiful wandering spirit.

Independently, Jack is hired by an enigmatic Irishman to keep watch over the Irishman's "brother" for the few days around the new moon in case the "brother" does someone harm. The brother, Eli Bellitto, proves utterly dissimilar from Jack's employer, but Jack carries out the commission nevertheless. Catching Bellitto and gorilla-like henchman Adrian Minkin snatching a small boy from the sidewalk, Jack, assuming they're paedophiles, rescues the child, beats up Minkin and stabs Bellitto privily.

The two strands in due course coalesce. The ghost-child, Tara Portman, is only one of a long, long succession of children murdered so that a thirteen-strong group, the Circle, can attain immortality through periodically eating the still-beating hearts of the "lambs" they seize.

This, the sixth in Wilson's series of novels about Repairman Jack, is at one level a tremendously enjoyable ghost story. It bears a few superficial similarities – mere coincidental details – to Clive Barker's recently published
Coldheart Canyon
, but as a ghost story is far more successful.

It is arguably far more successful as a novel, too. Although the plot presents plenty of opportunities for gratuitous gore, Wilson wisely eschews them, instead concentrating on the action and the fun. And there some pleasing ideas floating around as well, among them one that Wilson has been developing over the series. There is no such thing as a good God or an evil Satan each trying to gain dominion over the world, according to this notion. Instead, there are two competing entities in creation, neither of which is more good or more evil than the other – neither of which, in fact, gives a tinker's cuss about humanity. The one that would like to take over Earth is called, in Jack's terminology, the Otherness. He has no real name for the entity who currently "owns" us, calling it by default the anti-Otherness.

Through his earlier adventures, Jack has come to be regarded by the anti-Otherness as a useful tool. One could regard him as one of the anti-Otherness's field agents were it not that this term would imply Jack was promoting the anti-Otherness's cause of his own volition. In fact, Jack is emotionally not really on either side in this unseen, unimaginable contest; his allegiance is to human beings and, even more narrowly, to those human beings close to him. That the Otherness's behaviour is generally so destructive and disgusting does mean that it generally suits Jack to act in accordance with the wishes of the anti-Otherness to counter the efforts of the Otherness. The possibility remains open, however, that one day Jack will find himself in a situation where it is the anti-Otherness he wishes to fight against; should Wilson decide to explore that possibility it will make for an extremely interesting piece of fiction-writing.

One side-effect of Jack's having become the anti-Otherness's catspaw is that there is no longer any such thing in his life as coincidence. A detractor might scoff that this facilitates Wilson's plotting no end – it is, after all, a diminishingly small probability that the person whom Jack is hired to watch over, among the millions of people in NYC, should be the very villain whose deeds explain the haunting of the Kentons' house. But such a gibe would ignore the elegance of the notion that both Otherness and anti-Otherness are engaged in what is fundamentally, as it were, a contest of storytelling. Each is trying to carve out
stories
that will be to its own advantage; we are merely characters in those stories, largely subject to the authors' whim. Jack, of course, is again the wild card in this conceit: he is the character all fiction-writers talk about who takes on a life of his own, who is conscious of the author and who may or may not do what he's told. At the moment, as noted, he does largely what he's told; much of the dynamic arises from that possibility that this may not always be so.

There is some laziness in
The Haunted Air
's characterization. Jack and especially Gia never become particularly clear as real people, although this doesn't matter much in an action tale. Gia's daughter Vicky is a complete cypher. Where it grates a little is in the Identikit characterization of Jack's pal Abe, who is so stereotypically Jewish that you keep expecting him to burst into one of the songs from
Fiddler on the Roof
just to make sure the reader really does
realize
he's, you know, Jewish; and the similar treatment of the Kenton brothers, who are by far the most fully rounded and likable characters in the book despite, rather than because of, Charlie's constant and ever so self-conscious use of supposed African-American street slang. (Lyle occasionally lapses into it as well, although he has educated himself to speak quasi-instinctively as an East African, that image being better for business.) It is as if Charlie, every time he gets to the end of a sentence and realizes to his horror that nowhere in it has there appeared an item of identificatory black idiom, tacks on an extra clause just to make absolutely bloody sure we know he's not a honky. Much of this unnecessary, artificial verbiage disappears from his speech during the book's most dramatic sequence, when Charlie and Gia are fighting for their lives against supernatural malice; one wishes the same could have been the case throughout.

Wilson is no high stylist, but his prose in this novel performs its function well. The overkill present in some of his other novels – where it can seem that, whenever stuck for a new plot development, he defaults to extreme cataclysm – is absent here, and that is much to the novel's benefit. Indeed, I would recommend this brisk and lively novel to anyone who has tried Wilson before and been at best so-so about the prospect of trying him again:
The Haunted Air
is very good entertainment.

One can even – almost – forgive the author his silly remarks about Meat Loaf.

—Infinity Plus