Continuing on with my literary ramblings, for those who may be interested…

Books Completed in 2008 (fiction)

1. In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason
2. Fatherland by Robert Harris
3. An Environment for Murder by Rod Decker
4. Battle Ax: Volume 1 of The Green Angel Stones (unpublished) by Brian Lee Durfee
5. Raiders of the Lost Ark by Campbell Black (*re-read*)
6. Grease Monkey (graphic novel) written and art by Tim Eldred
7. The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
8. Six Great Sherlock Holmes Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
10. The Tales of the City series by Armistead Maupin:

• Tales of the City
• More Tales of the City
• Further Tales of the City
• Babycakes
• Significant Others
• Sure of You
• Michael Tolliver Lives!

It was a good year for fiction, without a major clunker in the bunch, so forgive me if I go on for a while and discuss each of these titles.

In Country is a terrific novel that perfectly captures both a moment in history (the early ’80s) and a certain time in a young woman’s life. It’s a coming-of-age story, both on a personal level for Sam, the young woman, and a national one, as the United States begins to come to terms with the Vietnam War. The road trip undertaken by Sam with veteran uncle to see the newly dedicated memorial wall in Washington D.C. is a metaphor for what the entire country was going through as it struggled to put aside the mythologies that surrounded that war and the men who fought it, and figure out how to move forward as a society. A moving story about real people and big issues that works best when it’s at its most subtle; it’s the sort of novel I hope to write myself someday.

Fatherland is somewhat predictable but nonetheless enjoyable, a well-conceived “alternate history” set in the 1964 of a world where the U.S. and Nazi Germany signed a treaty instead of fighting a war, and a 75-year-old Hitler is about to host President Joseph Kennedy on his first diplomatic visit to The Reich. The big mystery that our dogged policeman protagonist is snooping out is, of course, no great surprise — hint: it concerns all those people who supposedly “went east” during the ’30s and ’40s — but the pleasure comes, as in most alternate history stories, in exploring how this world differs from our own.

An Environment for Murder, a small-press novel by a local television personality, is a serviceable mystery at best, but it offers great fun for Salt Lakers in the form of familiar settings and issues, and in trying to figure out who the real-life inspiration for each character may have been.

The unpublished novel Battle Ax was written by a friend of mine who asked me to read his manuscript. It’s an epic fantasy, not my usual thing at all, but I nevertheless thought it was a real page-turner. Brian’s constructed a believable world that has many parallels to our own but still has its own identity and rules, and he’s also created some compelling characters. I think he displays a genuine talent for storytelling, and I wish him luck in finding a publisher.

Re-reading my tattered old copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark was, as you can probably guess, inspired by the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I haven’t looked at this one in years. It’s pretty good as novelizations go, but it was obviously based on an earlier draft of the screenplay than the one that was actually filmed, so several key scenes are different than we remember and the characterizations aren’t quite what we now understand Indy, Sallah, and Marion to be, either. Also, the book has a much darker tone than the finished film, and certainly moreso than the later films in the series. The hints we get of Indy’s backstory with Marion are pretty seedy, and their sexual attraction to one another is more, ahem, blunt than in the movie (there’s a scene in Sallah’s house in which Indy watches her sleep and thinks about how she’s, um, matured since he last saw her; also, the book makes it clear that running the bar in Nepal isn’t the only way she’s paid the bills since Abner’s death, if you get what I mean). All in all, though, it’s an fascinating glimpse at the Indiana Jones that might have been, one that may arguably have been a more interesting character than he became but one who probably didn’t have it in him to be the iconic hero we now know and love. I was reading my 28-year-old copy, of course, but I believe it’s recently come back into print to tie in with the release of Crystal Skull, if you’re interested.

Grease Monkey is a delightful graphic novel, a humorous coming-of-age story set against a space-opera backdrop. Characters include an all-female fighter-pilot squadron, a callow boy just out from Earth, and an artificially evolved talking ape who’s extremely protective of the ships he maintains and the women who fly them. Now how can that not rock? Check out the official site here to get a taste of what it’s all about.

The Difference Engine is another alternate history, but this one begins from an idea that’s far more mind-blowing than Fatherland‘s premise. In this novel, we see a Victorian England where Charles Babbage’s all-mechanical computer was actually built, and it worked, and it ushered in the Information Age a century before it happened in our history. The book is somewhat frustrating in that nothing really happens — there are several separate plotlines that all involve the same macguffin, but they never add up to anything — but as with Fatherland the point isn’t really the story itself but the world it inhabits. The book’s setting is extremely well thought out, with an excellent combination of historical and imaginary detail, and the mechanical computing technology is plausible. I just wish it had been put to more use. Finally, the book’s epilogue is… well, confusing. I imagine it’s supposed to depict some sort of singularity based on mechanical rather than electronic computing, but it’s pretty much left to the reader to make that interpretation, and I can’t imagine someone unfamiliar with the idea of the singularity would be able to fathom it.

Believe it or not, I somehow made it through 39 years of life without ever reading a Sherlock Holmes story. I was familiar with Holmes, of course, through the old Basil Rathbone movies and, to a lesser extent, the Jeremy Brett television series on PBS (not to mention the fun, if extremely non-canonical Young Sherlock Holmes), but I’d never experienced any of the original source material. This particular book was a cheap-o introductory collection I picked up at Barnes & Noble. The individual stories have blurred together in my mind so I can’t offer any meaningful commentary about any of them, but I will say that I enjoyed them and found them to be surprisingly fresh even after so many years, adaptations, parodies, and outright rip-offs. I can see why they’ve endured. If you’ve never read Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, I heartily recommend them.

The weirdest book I read last year — one of the weirdest I’ve ever read, actually — was Geek Love, the story of a circus family in which Mom and Dad deliberately mutated their own kids into sideshow freaks. It’s beautifully written in a strong, rich voice, and is by turns touching, funny, insightful, and horrifying. Like an actual freak show, the book is equal parts attractive and repellent. It’s got a lot to say about family, love, guilt, obligation, pride, and self-identity, but it’s sometimes an ugly slog through places you don’t really want to go in order to get the messages.

And finally, I ended the year with the seven volumes of Armistead Maupin’s immensely satisfying Tales of the City series. Like many people, I imagine, I was introduced to Tales via the charming television adaptation of the first book that aired on PBS in the early ’90s. I immediately ran out and bought the book, read it, and loved it. I then spent the next 15 years slowly acquiring the rest of the series from remainder tables, one volume at a time, telling myself I wouldn’t read any more of them until I could do the entire series beginning to end. Last fall, with my San Francisco trip looming, I at last bought the missing volume and figured it was time.

Tales of the City began as a newspaper serial chronicling the social scene of mid-1970s San Francisco. These humble origins create a few problems: chapters are sometimes frustratingly short, and space constraints required Maupin to write in a concise prose style that’s often composed of more dialogue than description. Also, plot developments can be unnervingly abrupt, especially in the earlier volumes; I’m thinking in particular of a major character’s death, which occurs “off-stage” and with no warning whatsoever. I suspect things like this are a sign that Maupin was tweaking the series in response to reader feedback, or possibly his own whims.

The strengths far outnumber the weaknesses though, and the greatest strength of the series is the sprawling ensemble cast of believable, colorful, and (mostly) sympathetic characters. Maupin ensures that every point on the social, economic, political, and sexual spectrum is represented: straight, gay, young and not-so-young, wealthy and dirt-poor, conservatives and hippies… they all somehow pass through 28 Barbary Lane, the fictional address where the core cast members live. Real-life personalities like Rock Hudson (unnamed, but obviously the person being referred to) and Jim Jones occasionally put in appearances as well. The ways in which the characters’ lives intersect and intertwine are often coincidental and sometimes downright absurd, but somehow Maupin sells it, and you continue reading because you just plain like these people. They’re vividly drawn, and as real in my mind as my own neighbors.

If all you’re looking for is an entertaining read, the first three books are the most fun. They’re representative of the time that produced them, as well as the core characters’ places in life: they’re young, largely carefree, somewhat decadent, kind of silly. Beginning with the fourth book, the series evolves into something very different, and much grimmer. The 1980s arrive. Our heroes grow up, and begin taking on adult responsibilities and worries. Relationships change, and not always for the better. Worst of all, AIDS appears, and suddenly the freewheeling party days are over. (Maupin is credited with being the first author to deal with AIDS in his fiction, and his blunt depiction of the effects of the disease on the city make the latter three volumes as heartbreaking as the earlier ones were heartwarming.) Again, though, it’s love of the characters that keep us turning the pages, right up to what seems to be a definitive ending in Sure of You.

It would take years before Maupin finally returned to his Tales with the seventh book, Michael Tolliver Lives!. This one is something of a different animal from the rest of the series. In fact, when it was first released, Maupin tried to argue that it wasn’t part of the series at all. It’s written in a different voice, for one thing — first person instead of third — and it’s entirely centered on a single character instead of the previous ensemble. But his argument was frankly ridiculous, considering that most of the important characters from the Tales are at least mentioned and all the threads left dangling decades before finally get tied up. In fact, the earlier series almost appears to function as nothing more than a lengthy prologue for Michael Tolliver, in which Maupin seems to finally find the words to articulate everything he wants to say about life and love and family. I defy anyone who has followed this series and gotten to know the inhabitants of Barbary Lane not to find a softball-sized lump in their throat at least half a dozen times during the course of this mature, sensitive novel. A masterful work of fiction.

A word of warning, though: If you are at all squeamish about male homosexuality, this probably isn’t a series for you. Maupin is an openly gay man, and the character Michael Tolliver is his alter ego in the story. The books grow progressively more concerned with Michael’s life and issues as they go along, and they get more explicit in the bedroom scenes as well.

Actually, scratch that thought. If you’re squeamish about homosexuality, then maybe you really ought to give these books a try. What else is literature for if not to provide a window into unfamiliar ways of life and to prove that, when you get right down to it, we’re not all that different from each other? We’re all human beings, and we’re all just trying to find someone to spend our lives with and take care of us in the end…