Batman: The Long Halloween

Widely praised as one of the best Batman stories ever written, I was a bit underwhelmed when I finally got around to reading Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween. Originally published about twelve years ago over thirteen issues, this detective story pits Batman, Jim Gordon and DA Harvey Dent against a serial killed dubbed ‘Holiday.’ Over the course of the narrative, Dent becomes Two-Face.

The novel is a continuation of Batman: Year One, with the mob gangsters making up a crucial part of the storyline. In their zest to bring down Gotham’s crime lord, Wayne, Gordon, and Dent all demonstrate to the reader their varying notions of justice. The three men debate the lengths they will go to bring the Roman to justice, and enter a pact, agreeing to bend the rules if necessary, but never to break them.

Each issue represents a different holiday, which in itself is an interesting tactic: as the series was originally published, each issue would correspond with that time of year. As time goes on, ‘Holiday’ seems to be targeting first one crime family and then another. But eventually the characters and the reader begin to suspect that Dent is behind it all. The inevitable twist at the end of such noir-ish tales was unsurprising and seemingly inconsequential for the greater Batman universe.

I’m honestly not sure why I didn’t like this more. Perhaps the obvious Godfather styled opening turned me off, perhaps I felt there should be a better emphasis on the ‘freaks’ of Gotham taking over for the mob. The best aspect was the different conceptions of justice the three main characters had, and the insights we got into who Bruce Wayne is as a man, even separate from the Batman person. I don’t recall if the particulars of his own feelings of culpability in his parents’ murders had been detailed before, but that delivered an emotional punch unequalled in many comics.

Sale’s artwork was definitely up to the task, capturing the noir look in a way that few can. However, I do feel that the dominantly brown tones that are emblematic of the Godfather movies would have served the story better than the blues and blacks common to Batman. Setting this story in the 1930s also might have been a nice touch, though it would obviously have lost a bit of the connection with Year One.

Still, an entertaining, lengthy story that I am sure everyone else will give his or her highest recommendation. I just wished it hadn’t been hyped to me so much; I might have been able to approach it without prejudging.

The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon

As I briefly mentioned last week when the National Book Award nominees were announced, Aleksandar Hemon left Sarajevo for America in 1992, getting out just before the worst of the Yugoslavian ethnic wars really began. He hadn’t planned on staying, but by the time he was ready to go back there wasn’t all that much to entice his return. He needed cash, so he took some menial jobs and began to learn English.

He was a writer in his native language, and later became a commended writer in English. The comparison with Nabokov is emphasized a bit much in the readings I’ve done about Hemon, but I did see an interesting comment on the two. Nabokov traveled in well-educated circles, whereas Hemon was a canvasser for Greenpeace, and learned English by speaking to all sorts of people one meets when knocking on doors. I haven’t read enough of either author to really weigh in here, but I would say there is a sort of gritty realism in Hemon that is absent in Nabokov.

The Question of Bruno collects many of the short stories Hemon wrote in the late 90s. Like most early works of fiction, even my own, the stories here seem to draw heavily from his own experiences, particularly his childhood growing up in a Ukrainian/Bosnian household and his struggles as a Bosnian refugee trying to make it in America. His prose seems foreign yet familiar. The second-language aspect only really noticeable when he (purposefully) uses a phrase in an abnormal way to call attention his characters’ perceptions of the American world.

‘Exchange of Pleasant Words’ is a fictional memoir of the Hemon family history and a Hemon family reunion of sorts. ‘Inspired by the success of the Sarajevo Olympiad and the newly established ancient family history, the family council, headed righteously by my father, decided to have an epic get-together, which was to be held only once, and was to be recorded as the Hemoniad.’ The story also lays the foundation for various characters named Hemon to pop up all over this book; in many cases the reader is unsure of any relation.

‘Blind Josef Pronek & Dead Souls,’ is a novella that seems a thinly veiled story of the author’s circumstances arriving in America. Though it does display Hemon’s skill with prose, I often found myself bored as I made my way through it. The story is episodic in nature, but even some of the episodes seem to fall flat. I’ve also read that Pronek is the protagonist in Nowhere Man, Hemon’s first novel, and that is a bit troublesome for I do not know if I want to read an entire novel focused on this character.

‘The Sorge Spy Ring’ is an interesting tale of a boy whose imagination about spies hits close to home when his own father is taken. But longer than the actual story are massively long footnotes that did little to add any further meaning. These footnotes concern the life of Sorge and provide an overall biography of the man. The constant interruptions hurt this story greatly.

In addition, a photograph placed before the first page of each story served to set the tone. Some were incredibly well selected, like the photo of Archduke Ferdinand just before his assassination, and where in the background you can see a man holding an accordian that is prominent in the story. Others, only seem to be distantly related and therefore the device loses effect. I know that Hemon uses photographs extensively in The Lazarus Project, and this being an interest of mine will likely lead me to this novel before too long.

Hemon is a gifted writer, and his strange but interesting prose is worth looking at in TheQuestion of Bruno. But I have read later short stories that I found much more palatable. One thinking of trying Hemon might want to search for some more recent short fiction by the Bosnian-American.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume I: The Pox Party

Though I’ve read very few young adult novels, I honestly haven’t seen what makes them so different from adult fiction. To me it’s more a choice of whether the content can be marketed better to the growing legions of children who only have so much Harry Potter to read, rather than something endemic that delineates it from general fiction. A couple of months ago I read Jenny Davidson’s The Explosionist which I thought was decent, though I did feel that seventeen year old girls likely think about sex more than the protagonist did. But the experience made me want to explore a new area by trying out some of the more acclaimed young adult fiction, especially to test my thesis: is the young adult genre merely for marketing, or is there a real separation between it and mainstream literature.

The touted release of the second volume in M.T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation series called my attention to the first, which won the National Book Award for Young Adult Literature. Entitled The Pox Party, the narrative concerns the young black boy Octavian born shortly before the American Revolution, who is raised in a house with his mother and a group meant to resemble the Royal Society in aim but not in reach. The boy is taught Latin and the arts, learns to play brilliantly on the violin, but also is subject to some rather bizarre experimentation: all his food is weighed, as are his feces, so that calculations as to his usage can be performed.

After the house, the College of Lucidity, loses its benefactor, Octavian begins to get a sense of the treatment other black men and women are subject to. He is deprived of his books and whipped often. In an attempt to study the varying effect of smallpox on a large white and black population, Mr. Gitney, head of the college, recruits those who haven’t experienced the illness and offers to house and infect them with a mild strain so that they may build immunity to the disease without worry that it could be an especially virulent form. Though all are infected, only two people die: one being Octavian’s mother.

The novel is said to be drawn from the later writings of Octavian, and upon witnessing the death of his mother the reader is subjected to the scratching out of print that had already been laid out. While one can make out a word here and there, Octavian’s response to his mother’s death is more powerful for what we don’t see. The page acts as a palimpsest that can be read concurrently in two ways. An intriguing effect.

Where Anderson lost me was in the third section, where all information is conveyed through letters of a Patriot soldier home to his sister. This soldier meets Octavian, who has escaped enslavement, and so we still follow the boy’s story and are filled in on aspects of what is happening within the greater context of the war, a decision I understand even if I don’t share. Losing the voice of Octavian lost this reader, and only when that voice returns in a later section did I reengage with the narrative.

Even without the Volume I on the cover, one would know that a Volume II is planned because we get no real satisfaction out of the journey. In fact, the arc of this novel is hard to establish. I have guesses as to how it can be defined, but without reading the second (and possibly third) volumes, I can’t know if my hunches are accurate or not.

Still, there was a lot to like in The Pox Party, especially the character of Octavian who anyone will come to care about deeply within the first fifty pages. I’ll be reading more of Anderson before too long, though probably not more about Octavian for a while. And I would appreciate recommendations of other young adult literature you feel would be worth looking into.

The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

Though we all learned in a high school government class the actual rules and regulations of Supreme Court practice, what Jeffrey Toobin reveals in his masterful The Nine is that the Court is first a group of individuals, characters if you will, and they are the ones who really run everything. There’s an element of politicking that the justices downplay, but those able to wage a political war effectively often have great influence over their peers, and thus over America itself.

Beginning roughly at the time of O’Connor’s nomination to the court in 1981 by Ronald Reagan, Toobin leads the reader through an exciting account of the major events up to the 2006-7 Supreme Court term. In prose that is eminently readable and often exciting, he is able to throw off the shroud of inner court workings to help the reader see how each justice comes to their decisions and tries to influence others.

Each justice is given several pages dedicated to backstory so we can get a better conception of who they are as people. After reading about his autobiography last year, I feel that Clarence Thomas is one of the most interesting people on the bench. I might not agree with pretty much any of his views, save that both he and I think NASCAR is pretty cool. But seeing the anger that he has carried his whole life, especially after his difficult confirmation, and I can’t help but feel sorry for him. Toobin always drops these mini-biographies into a portion of the greater workings of the court so as to contextualize the proceedings by offering the personal knowledge.

Though it isn’t Toobin’s purpose to explain exactly how the court functions, one is able to learn a lot more about the inner workings of the justices than one would learn from a stale civics book. His style adds a certain amount of romance to the Court, bringing the justices to life as well rounded people rather than old guys in black robes. From my perspective, I felt this more a book of journalism than anything else; no agenda was apparent and only rarely would a word here or there cue one in as to Toobin’s own personal views.

I believe I came out with a greater appreciation of Stephen Breyer than I have had before, due to his personality and ability to influence others. Breyer has been criticized for being a moderate, but to me he comes across as quite practical, always thinking about how cases will affect the real world. This kind of thinking is evidenced in his decision to remove the Ten Commandments from courtrooms yet let the old statue of the Commandments at the Capitol here in Austin remain. To me, those are sensible decisions that should appease the majority of the people.

One also sees new Chief Justice John Roberts philosophy of narrow decisions is seemingly a good one. Decide cases in the narrowest way possible in order to reduce the effect on other laws. Yet that very practice is now allowing he and the conservative majority to write around previously established laws without overturning them. Stare decisis, or precedent, is slowly but steadily vanishing from influence.

The Nine was named one of the ten best books of 2007 by the New York Times, and though I didn’t read every book published last year, I’d have to agree. I don’t have cable so I am unsure as to what kind of on-air commentator Toobin is, but if his voice there even remotely resembles the book then he is one of the better people in cable news.

Gods of Night by David Mack

As I am still trying to figure out what I want this site is evolving into, I realized that I don’t really want to write reviews of everything I read. But what I do want is to respond with a post on most of what I read, whether that is a review or just a starting point for a discussion about something else. For my own clarity as much as everyone else’s, I wanted to say that the books, television, occasional movie, and other readings that headline these entries are merely the beginning of my thinking.

David Mack’s Gods of Night is the first novel in the supposedly earth-shattering Destiny trilogy, an event so large it could change the face of ST literature forever. Sounds corny, but that’s what has been promised. Intended to be a crossover event, we get no crossover at all here: Picard is on the Enterprise, Riker is across the quadrant on Titan, and new captain Ezri Dax is in the Gamma Quadrant. And we also see what happens to Columbia after the events of Kobayashi Maru, though the same battle in the two novels couldn’t have been presented any more differently. You’d think the novels had two different editors. But they didn’t.

The Titan thread carries on the character development from that series quite well. The Enterprise one carries on from it's series too, but not so well. Due to the very good work in the former and the atrocious character assassination in the latter, one might just chalk this up to Mack doing the best with what he had. The previous ‘Enterprise after Nemesis’ books have been pretty fucking bad.

The Dax thread doesn’t work. Stuff happens that needs to happen for the plot, but Ezri is the only prominent of the DS9 Relaunch to appear and what’s happened to her since Fearful Symmetry is played so close to the vest that her inclusion seems to be a token one.

What really bugs me is how Ezri Dax became a captain: both her captain on the Aventine and her first officer were killed, so she got the promotion. Why didn’t they bring in someone else? The explanation given is that the advanced officer ranks were thinned out mightily during the Dominion War five years before. Plausible, until one looks at the number of Starfleet officers in this very series who are at the commander rank or higher and aren’t in a command:

• Worf
• Dr. Crusher
• Christine Vale
• Tuvok
• Deanna Troi
• Geordi LaForge
• Miranda Kadhota (maybe, sources differ)
• Two additional commanders who are watch officers on Enterprise

Assuming that Starfleet is at fifty percent of its ideal troop level four years after the Dominion War, which I think is granting more than has been demonstrated, the fact that nine commanders are currently stationed to only two ships, some with over a decade of service at the highest levels of day-to-day ship operations, makes me unable to believe that there aren't dozens, if not hundreds of people more qualified. And not only that, but then Dax got to replace her whole command crew with more inexperienced officers. That just doesn’t make any sense to me.

I’ve written before about my issues with the Enterprise crew between the end of the Dominion War and Nemesis before, so I won’t rehash those arguments here. But such decisions make it incredibly hard to suspend my disbelief.

But a recent online discussion with some friends made me realize that this isn’t such a clear-cut issue. Gods of Night would be a difficult novel for someone only familiar with the television shows and movies to pick up and really get. Picard and Crusher are married and having a kid? Wasn’t Ezri Dax an ensign counselor in DS9? Didn’t Janeway kill the Borg forever in Endgame? There’s not a lot that someone would find familiar, or even probable. I’m not saying this is a fault of Mack per se, but the inability of an outside reader to be able to penetrate the complex continuity of the novels is somewhat alarming for someone who is a fan and sees the broadening of the fanbase as good for the fiction line.

That said, having familiar characters from the shows remain together does reinforce to some degree a sense of continuity for an outsider to lean on until he figured things out. Maybe it would make more in-universe sense to have Worf, Tuvok, and others captaining their on ships, but such a move would likely alienate readers.

Perhaps I am being too hard on the creators at Pocket Books, especially as much of their work has been constrained by the canon issues of Nemesis. It’s sort of a lose-lose situation.

As for Gods of Night, it was a better written novel than I had expected from Mack, but it all seemed to be set-up for the next (or possibly final) book. Basically the first third of a 1200 page book rather than the first book of a three-book trilogy. He did well with what he had, but I kind of think that I figured out the whole Borg aspect already. More to come when I get around to the rest of Destiny.

Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde

The only town in Eastern Bosnia to avoid ethnic cleansing, Gorazde was surrounded by hostile Serbian forces for most of the mid-1990s. Though many of us may know a fair amount about the conflict, especially as it pertained to the Clinton Administration’s failure to stop the genocide due to the previous military failure in Somalia, the perspective shown in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde is likely unfamiliar territory.

Sacco trained to be a journalist in school, yet was unhappy with the jobs he found afterwards, feeling that he couldn’t write long, involved stories on specific subjects. He turned back to cartooning in order to make a living, and lucky for us, he managed to blend the two into some of the most moving comic work one will ever read. Like his acclaimed Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde is a sort of personal documentary.

Told mostly through the experiences of Edin, a graduate student in Sarajevo before the war, Sacco blends the stories of others along with his own. It’s not hard to see how television news affected the narrative: as a character relates his/her story directly to the reader, Sacco often slides in a comment here and there to contextualize. At times it really felt like I was reading an episode of 60 Minutes.

Though I did not feel like I got a better understanding of the Bosnian region and conflict, I also don’t think Sacco was aiming that direction. Instead, we see a slice of life from the community, knowing what it was like for those men, women, and children to live through a war. Of course, not just any war: a war where Muslims were killed just for being Muslim.

As Sacco leads us through the interviews and story of his time in country, we are occasionally given a glimpse at the outside world, especially as the Dayton Accords draw ever closer. As the residents of Gorazde rejoice with the truce, almost none feel that the war is truly over. At the book’s conclusion, Sacco returns a year later and we see how various people we’ve met have gone on in the following months. Though we are pleased to see Edin finishing his degree, we cannot help but feel sorry for others who sometimes are less happy now than they were when on the front lines.

Sacco is doing something so far outside the mainstream in comics that one wonders why more attention is not directed his way. Safe Area Gorazde is the equivalent of an episode of Frontline, done in a medium that is dying for creators to push such boundaries. It’s great journalism, it’s great comics. And as soldiers from the Iraq War come home and look to tell their stories, it would be surprising if a few didn’t follow in Sacco’s footsteps.

The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford

As I attempted to begin this review for the past few days, I was at a loss on how to situate myself within the work of Jeffrey Ford or how to situate his work within my life. I only knew him as a fantasy author, a genre that I care little to nothing for, so the fact that I even listened to an interview with him on the Bat Segundo show is surprising enough. That I was persuaded to seek out some of his non-fantasy work is even a little more unlikely, and that I enjoyed his new short story collection The Drowned Life as much as I did highly improbable.

That’s not to say that I thought it was a great collection; it’s not. There are a number of fantasy-laced tales involving manticores and other bizarre scenarios that I found hard to make much of. The title story involves a man who drowns, finding that an entire world exists among the people who have met their fate in such a way, yet finds communication with the world above possible. While this situation is not without interest, I never felt any real emotional connection with the protagonist.

Where Ford shines is in stories that lack a fantastical element. “The Bedroom Light” begins with a couple lying in bed and gossiping about the neighbors, while avoiding the elephant in the room: the woman’s recent miscarriage. The emotion crackles on the page, the dialogue and description equally well done. Yet the narrative goes on a few ages too many, and a enlightening conclusion for the reader seems forced. This happens again and again in Ford’s better stories: plot seems forced upon us, epiphanies feel false and/or unnecessary.

The best piece might be “The Scribble Mind,” in which a young acquaintance of the narrator tells him that she’s discovered a scribble that appears in all sorts of places that she believes is a symbol of those who can remember their time in the womb. As she tries to get closer and closer to the secret, sinister forces seem to move against the couple, as she slowly drives herself near insane trying to duplicate the scribble herself. This oddball premise reminded me of Ted Chiang or Jonathan Lethem, though perhaps not as skilled as either.

Ford studied with John Gardner, so I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that I enjoyed this collection, nor that the epiphianic endings are omnipresent. The fact that plot slips into these situations in a seemingly unnatural sense is likely more the cause of my own biases than anything else. But it seems to me that Ford is like a Triple A baseball player. He can do a lot of things well, but he can’t hit the curve ball. The characterization is there, the situation is there, even the prose is decent. But he can’t seem to put it all together and make it to the show.

The Drowned Life has some good stories, and it has some bad ones. I hope in the future Ford can put it all together and write a really great piece of fiction.