I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to read Jonathan R. Eller’s Ray Bradbury Unbound in preparation for a review for the journal Extrapolation—loved it.

The review itself will have to wait for late 2015, but below is the brief note I did on Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1051331889?book_show_action=false

Rafeeq





For right now, I will simply comment that Jonathan R. Eller'sRay Bradbury Unbound is a top-notch conclusion to the two-volume biography of perhaps the most famous name on modern speculative fiction, by perhaps the top scholar of Bradbury textual criticism. While the book of course discusses the author's life after Fahrenheit 451, it is not simply a chronology of personal matters but an explanation and analysis of Bradbury's development as an artist. As such, this study will be enjoyed by scholars and non-academic readers alike.

A fuller 1400-word review will be forthcoming in the academic journal Extrapolation in late 2015.

6 October 2014

About a year and a half ago I picked up a 1963 Pyramid printing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 The Lost World,  and I finally got around to reading ’er.

Really, it was quite a fun read.  Below is a review I did at Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1042538401.

Rafeeq






Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 The Lost World is, for its period, a very nice five-star adventure story. While the very beginning, with its seemingly conventional sentimental claptrap of competing for a lady's approval, is perhaps the weakest part of the tale, we soon get down to treacherous Amazonian jungles, conniving betrayals, and prehistoric beasts galore--and the close of the novel reveals that, as conventional sentimental claptrap goes, the author actually is a jolly good sport about poking mocking holes in it.

The tale begins when the narrator, Edward Malone, an Irish rugby champion and now earnest young reporter for the Daily Gazette, desireth for the purposes of marriage the hand of Miss Gladys Hungerton. This coolly superior icon of desirable young womanhood, however, is swayed neither by words nor by flowers but by deeds. Heroism is required, she preaches from the comfort of an English drawing room. Only a hero can win her, for only then can she be "what [she] should like to be,--envied for [her] man."

This may not be the deepest or most flattering thing a girl has ever told a suitor, but 'tis enough to send the love-struck newspaperman to attempt the closest thing he can to heroism: interviewing the imposing Professor Challenger. Challenger, after all, already has violently assaulted several who doubted his stories of finding during his most recent expedition to South America a seemingly inaccessible plateau in the depths of the jungle, along with the sketchbook of a dead American artist depicting pterodactyls and other Jurassic beasties. When the bristly Challenger speaks at the Zoological Institute, he of course is denounced as a charlatan, and it is agreed that a mission shall set out to the Amazon to prove orthodoxy still correct. Professor Summerlee, Challenger's most vociferous critic, calls for volunteers to join him, and Malone literally jumps to his feet, followed by adventurer and big-game hunter Lord Roxton. Miss Hungerton's suitor will have his heroism, apparently, or die trying.

Adventure ensues. Really, the standard travelogue of the deep Amazon, replete not only with danger but also with both beauty and wonder, is a fine read, and it is spiced with the amusing conflicts of the exquisitely arrogant Challenger and the equally determined, if more restrained, Summerlee. Once the explorers surmount the seemingly unclimbable plateau--and, naturally, are trapped upon it--we will see rookeries of huge pterodactyls, great iguanodons and freshwater sea monsters, unclassifiable dinosaurs like giant toads, and even savage "missing link" ape-men. That 1300 rounds of rifle ammunition listed in the supplies definitely will come in handy, eh, what?

This book is not necessarily the place to turn for modern paleontologic or evolutionary theory, of course, nor is it for modern race relations. The trope of "faithful Negro"--who calls his British employers "Massa," no less--versus sinister and sneaky "half-breed" is painful, but it should not be a surprise, given the time of writing. In terms of outmoded ideas, however, at least when what I might call something of the intellectual narrative frame closes, the notion of jousting for a fair lady's honor takes a lovely little drubbing.

Most importantly, though, despite occasional scientific or ethnographic shortcomings inherent to its era, The Lost World simply is a fun and entertaining adventure, and even more than a hundred years later it still remains well worth reading.

1 September 2014

I just read Natives of Space by Hal Clement, which is actually a collection of three novelettes, one from 1946, one from ’43, and one from ’42.


It’s been quite a while since I’ve read, say, Eric Frank Russell’s Men, Martians, and Machines or A.E. Van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle, but I found this maybe half a notch below what I remember those other two to be.  I seem to recall the Russell being a bit less serious, mind you, but for the adventure it was, it was just fine.

Still, this early Clement was indeed decent fun, and worth reading.  Below is the review I did at Goodreads:  
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1036418510?book_show_action=false


Natives of Space is a 1965 repackaging of three 1940s Hal Clement novelettes from, it appears by the Street and Smith copyrights, Astound Science-Fiction.

Assumption Unjustified of 1946 follows a pair of aquatic aliens who stop off on Earth to withdraw some blood--painlessly and carefully--from an unconscious Terran for use in a rejuvenation treatment. Mildly amusing attitudinal irony abounds, but the aliens' mistaken conclusion at the end is a whopper, and therefrom springs the title.

The 1943 Technical Error is one of those classic puzzle stories of the humans-must-figure-out-ancient-alien-technology variety. Here the only hope of spacemen marooned on an asteroid by the meltdown of their atomic motors is to make use of a seemingly inscrutable alien ship before their air runs out. It is good as far as it goes, but modern readers might the piece frustrating because the artifact, with its recognizable ion engines, electrical cables, and whatnot, simply isn't alienenough.

Impediment of 1942 returns to the third-person-alien point of view when telepathic moth-like creatures from a low-gravity planet must try to communicate with a human in hopes of finding on Earth the materials with which to replenish their ammunition supply so that they can return to their feudalistic, warring solar system. Clement's investigations on the biochemical nature of thought are interesting, but the notion that the human character, "like many people, involuntarily visualize[s] the written forms of the words he utter[s]" is a gimmick that seems completely divorced from reality...

So long as the reader understands that, despite its funky mid-1960s cover, Hal Clement's Natives of Space actually is a product of the simpler days of the pulp magazines circa 1942 to 1946, it can be considered a decent three- to four-star read. Rounding up a tad, I'll call it four.



24 August 2014

Some time ago at The Reading Place in Charlotte, Michigan, I picked up a nice 1963 Dell reprint of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers—no “invasion of” in the original title, apparently.  It was a marvelous read.

I cringed whenever the main characters ventured out of each other’s sight.  I frowned at their attempted rationalizations of the unbelievable things they had seen.  I gaped when, after finally having captured a cop’s service revolver, the protagonist ends up throwing it away because he cannot carry it inconspicuously—Come on, Doc, no jackets in 1955...?  Really, though, every sidestep and piece of self-doubt made perfect sense, and it simply set us up all the better for the time when the baddies trot out the fuller explanations.

In any event, below is the review I posted at Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1034719193


Jack Finney's 1955 The Body Snatchers is an exquisitely terrifying story of alien invasion which, despite the basics of its plot having become cultural tropes in the succeeding decades, remains as suspenseful as the day it was released.

Point of view, style, and setting here work together to make the unbelievable seem completely possible. First-person narrator Dr. Miles Bennell is the perfect character to deliver this story. The small-town doctor is well-educated, of course, and as a lifelong resident, he has the good general practicioner's eye for detail and tolerant understanding of human behavior, along with an intimate knowledge of the residents, geography, and history of the city of Santa Mira, California, population 3,890. His prose is matter-of-fact, sometimes wry, sometimes mildly self-deprecating, and when he begins by "warn[ing]" us that the tale "is full of loose ends and unanswered questions" and admitting that he "can't say [he] really know[s] what happened, or why, or just how it began, how it ended, or if it has ended," we are hooked.

The 1950s small-town setting then allows Finney both a nostalgic backward look and the firm grounding in prosaic reality needed by any good story of extraterrestrial invasion. The direct-dial telephone has been put in only within the previous year, for example, and the sexual tension between the divorced young physician and his divorced high school friend Becky Driscoll, with its mixture of amiable man-of-the-world roguishness and rather touching hesitance, is a subtly rendered portrait of early postwar mores. The familiar streets of the town, the back yards and porches where Miles played as a boy, the countryside where he hunted rabbits with a .22--in the warm sunlit day, all of these belie the seemingly impossible thing, human and yet not, that he and Becky see in the nighttime basement of the grim and frightened Jack and Theodora Belicec. Yet see it they did.

Finney here is a master of the night, and much of the action of the novel takes place after the comforting sun has set, in creepy basements lit by a single overhead bulb or by a dim penlight, on deserted roads where anything, anything at all, might wait in the dark beyond the headlights, in locked rooms where to sleep might mean to lose one's very self. Back and forth Finney deftly works us between the utterly shocking evidence seen firsthand at night and the sheepish uncertainty of plausible-seeming explanations in the morning. Clues are parceled out adroitly, and the protagonists' doubts, even as we wish to shake them into immediate understanding, are achingly believable. Yet eventually even these level-headed people must admit to themselves that something awful truly is going on, something inexplicable and threatening, a conspiracy that grows and grows, unseen and unsuspected by anyone but themselves.

The era of The Body Snatchers was, of course, ripe for such beautiful literary paranoia. Once the war had been won and the world apparently made safe for American ideals again, why, new threats suddenly lurked everywhere. The Berlin Blockade of 1948 brought American and Soviet armed forces to a precarious standoff in Occupied Europe, while the hugely populous former ally of China fell to Communism in 1949. Despite the testimony by General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, that it would take the Soviets twenty years to develop the atom bomb, August 1949 saw this event, and the beginning of war in Korea in June 1950 seemed to many as if it may have been a feint to draw Western forces away from a forthcoming thrust in Europe.

Yes, Cold War sparring, Red spies, agitprop, suspicion--these helped prepare readers for The Body Snatchers, and of course for Robert A. Heinlein's 1951 The Puppet Masters, but Finney's novel does not have to be approached from this mindset. The book, after all, in its writing is as matter-of-fact as a Life magazine article, and the science-fictional notion of spores drifting slowly across interstellar space, from soon-to-be-ruined world to world to world, replacing one's most trusted friends and family with emotionless doppelgangers, is chilling. The Body Snatchers remains a top-notch, scaring read.

23 August 2014

I confess that when I think of Lester Del Rey, I happen to be rather more familiar with his 1950s YA works--The Mysterious Planet, Moon of Mutiny, or Rocket Jockey, for example—than I am with his adult pieces.  I did read “Nerves” in Healy and McComas’ Adventures in Time and Space, and in the last couple of years I got around to The Eleventh Commandment and Preferred Risk, but it seems to be my teenaged readings of the juvies that have stuck with me.

And while I of course had seen the 1971 Pstalemate on the shelves as a kid, I never picked it up...until recently, that is.  Actually, I bought a copy at The Reading Place in Charlotte, MI, and then, maybe a year later, I apparently forgot I had it, so I picked up a different edition in the local library’s basement sale...  Anyway, I finally pulled one off the shelf a few days ago and read the thing—definitely worth waiting for.

Below is the review I did at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1031264524?book_show_action=false.

Rafeeq



Lester del Rey's 1971 Pstalemate is an intriguing and nuanced tale of a man who suddenly realizes--despite his disdain for what he regards as merely a "current fad in science fiction," despite his singular lack of luck at any sort of guessing games, and despite apparent common sense--that he himself possesses psionic power.

It makes no sense to bight young mechanical engineer Harry Bronson. Or...well, does it? Occasionally, after all, Harry has flashes of inexplicable dread, or even voices seeming to call him. His complete failure at guessing Rhine cards, moreover, actually is just a little too complete, a statistical aberration no less than had he gotten them all correct. And certainly his own past is strangely shrouded, with all memories of life before age ten, and of the death of his parents, now lost to amnesia.

But telepathy exists, the unwilling Harry discovers, and even precognition, too. His own parents had set up some kind of colony or commune of believers, now disbanded, of which little is known anymore, and he begins as well to be able to sense the mental presence of others like him in sprawling New York City. Yet he senses also something he can term only "the alien entity," a force utterly unknowable and frightening, and which seems to be trying to take possession of him.

Extrasensory perception, a researcher's lifelong notes reveal, first truly manifested itself following a mutation caused by petrochemical pollution just three generations earlier. Yet although the people whom the increasingly sensitive Harry from a distance comes to recognize as fellow telepaths seem, in general, more decent than the average human being, he begins to realize that he finds only the young, never the old...for some intrinsic factor of the mutation drives all to inescapable madness. And now Harry's precognition tells him exactly how long he has: three months, and then descent into the living hell of insanity.

Despite his delayed awareness of his abilities, Harry Bronson actually may be the strongest telepath still living. But he has only three months to solve the mystery of himself, lest he lose his own self, and this strange mutation prove merely an evolutionary dead end rather than a transformative quantum leap in consciousness. As Harry and his new wife, once his childhood friend and a telepath as well, race desperately for an answer, Lester Del Rey explores with subtlety and insight the very fundamentals of the human condition--growth and maturity, love and sexuality, and the nature of consciousness--and thereby gives an exciting, intriguing, sometimes touching story.

20 August 2014

Stanley G. Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey, with its title story’s colorful depiction of the strange, affably amusing, and yet ultimately enigmatic Tweel, is something that readers always hear about from the critics, historians, and fellow authors of science fiction.  Perhaps we nod, or shrug, or think Hmm...  Certainly I had never read the thing, though I have been reading SF for over 35 years and have read a boatload of references to it.


I had indeed picked up a copy in the last year or two, one with one of those distinctive semi-psychedelic covers of the early 1970s, so at last I read the book, and it was really quite good for the mid-1930s, with only one of the five stories being ho-hum.  The others were entertaining and imaginative, and, actually, the introduction by Sam Moskowitz was helpful as well.

Below is the review I did at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1028584906.

Rafeeq


A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum has some of the occasional creakiness to be expected of Golden Age science fiction--conventions of the era, really, rather than actual true authorial failures--but for its period of the mid-1930s this book of five stories does indeed show a great deal of innovative imagination, and of course quite decent storytelling as well.

The title story, the 1934 "A Martian Odyssey," is one of those original "classics" about which the SF reader always hears, such as, say, John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" or Robert A. Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" or Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall." Having read the Weinbaum at last, I confess to considering it perhaps a half-notch below these others, but as Sam Moskowitz reminds us in his introduction, it does indeed bring some subtle and mature thinking into the pulp magazines.

On the one hand, the breezy first-person narrative with the occasional interjections from shipmates with cutesy German or French accents is not exactly James Joyce's Ulysses, and while I like otherness as much as the next fellow, the habit of ostrich-like Martian "Tweel" of jumping high in the air to land literally, cartoon-wise, head-first with his beak in the sand seems just too damned cute as well. But Weinbaum's careful and persistent depiction of the creature as being not just as intelligent and as noble as a human but even more so is well worth the read. Tweel is sometimes comic, and often inscrutable, but he is a true character rather than a cardboard cutout; his riddle may not be solved in this tale, but it suggests that the universe, even the smallish part reachable by Golden Age rocketships, contains both wonder and humbling mystery aplenty. And when the deeply affected narrator, having been saved from death a couple of times by this completely alien thing, shows that he is not simply a "native" to gawk at or look down upon, we find something very modern, worthwhile, and even touching.

The book's second story, "The Adaptive Ultimate" of 1935, has Frankensteinian overtones as a biochemist develops a serum that, presumably by benign genetic mutation, increases an organism's "adaptation" such that disease and injury can be repaired in mammals with the ease of a severed flatworm turning into two creatures. When a young woman almost dead of tuberculosis is injected, she is cured in days, but the adaptation goes farther than ever could have been imagined. The drab and almost penniless young woman becomes, very subtly, beautiful and self-assured and calculating...and uninterested in mere morals that could get in the way of her own survival. She can out-think and out-charm any man--perhaps ensnare is the better word--and because her body now can heal even knife wounds or gunshots instantaneously, she seems unstoppable as she maneuvers politicians toward another world war that somehow will leave her as, essentially, empress of the world. When reduced to these outlines, it may sound silly, but the story is really quite decent indeed.

"The Lotus Eaters" of 1935, which follows the Venusian honeymoon/exploring expedition of a female biologist and a male engineer, is even more dated in terms of planetology and xenobiology than is "A Martian Odyssey," but its creatures are just fine for the era, and the writing is arguably better than that of the title story, too. Again Weinbaum brings in new and unusual, even unsettling, ideas. If a newly discovered yet infinitely weary and almost extinct colony of Venusian plants, for example, is shown to be far superior to humans in intelligence and knowledge...well, how does this affect the mindset of the hairless ape of Sol III as it clambers via rocketship from its own jungles into those other worlds? There is something grandly melancholy in the dying-off of this weird species of semi-mobile plants that have no individuality, no drive, no will for survival, but which, termed godlike by the deeply sobered explorers, know more than ever can be communicated to the newcomers, let alone explained.

"Proteus Island," first published in 1936, returns to the genetic interests of "The Adaptive Ultimate" when a zoologist exploring an isolated Australasian island finds that since the last mariner's visit of just a couple of decades earlier, evolution seems to have run completely and unbelievably wild: of all the strange plants and animals, not a single one is like another--no species has more than one member. Again there is a "girl," and again there is an attraction the protagonist tries to resist, but here the girl ends up being more the solution than the problem. The scientist's high-handed attitude toward his Maori boatmen grates even for the 1930s, but the puzzle is indeed fascinating, and it is solved, at least given the science of the era, fairly believably.

And about the book's final chapter, "The Brink of Infinity" from 1936...really, it is a comparative throwaway, a piece about a mathematician abducted by a crazed chemist who, by using what is basically a "What number am I thinking of?" game, gets back at the profession whose member crippled him with a miscalculation. Now, that is a pulp story. It is not actually even science fiction either, nor would it necessarily be out of place in the mimeographed newsletter of some old high school math club.

Notwithstanding the dully echoing kerplunk of its last story, Stanley G. Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey remains an interesting four-star read for anyone exploring the Golden Age origins of the mutants, the extraterrestrial landscapes, and the remote and inexplicable alien intelligences that have come down through countless 1950s movies, now-familiar Star Trekepisodes, and on into the futures of the present.


16 August 2014

I was waiting for what seemed like forever for a copy of Anthony Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue to arrive.  I don’t really know much at all about mysteries or detective stories, and I haven’t even read Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in a good quarter century or more, though I do happen to be very fond of the Jeremy Brett portrayal from the ’80s and ’90s.  I had heard, however, that Robert Heinlein was one of the murder suspects, so I figured it would be at least passably interesting.  Well, that old 1967 paperback reprint came at last, and it was indeed an exceedingly fun read.

Below, therefore, is the review I did at Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1022796955.

Rafeeq



Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue is an ingenious mystery and also a particular delight to anyone interested in the "pulp" era of science fiction.

The novel opens in prewar Los Angeles with Lieutenant Terrance Marshall, amiable family man and homicide detective, feeding the baby and answering his wife's question of "Anything interesting happen today?" Nothing interesting, of course--just a ho-hum corpse dead of low-caliber lead poisoning in a flophouse...only the murderer has not bothered to take the $300 of 1941 cash from the room, while the dead man's jacket holds an oddly distinctive rosary and the telephone number to a "[v]eddy veddy swank" apartment hotel. While Marshall's mystery-minded friend, Sister Ursula, looks into the singular religious artifact, the Lieutenant's investigation of the apartment hotel leads by complete happenstance to the plump, pretentious Hilary Foulkes, heir to his very famous father's literary estate, and a man thoroughly disliked by several science fiction writers. Now, Foulkes just happens to have had a couple of odd close calls recently--a falling brick, then a box of poisoned chocolates--and during Marshall's interview there arrives a package that ticks loudly, so...

Well, as one can see, pleasant tangles and red herrings abound. There are professional jealousies and monopolistic squeezings, a glamorous Mrs. Foulkes with little love lost, a brother-in-law who is next in line as literary executor of the lucrative "Dr. Derringer" series, a deferential cousin/typist, and a classic locked room mystery. For amusement we have sentences of the droll "She crossed her legs (she knew they were good) and leaned forward (she knew they were good too)" variety, a promotion-seeking flatfoot from Pasadena, installments of an exquisitely awful space opera being hacked out at a penny a word, and the wry wit and wisdom of the Manana Literary Society.

Boucher's depiction of this real-life group of California fantasy and science fiction writers, with its scarcely disguised members such as Robert A. Heinlein and others, is a particular joy. Each of these fellers, of course, has a perfectly acceptable reason for not necessarily relishing the continued corporeal existence of the vain and penny-pinching Hilary Foulkes, but it is the combination of pontificating about the history, future, and meaning of speculative fiction, plus numerous in-jokes, that make them doubly worthwhile. Austin Carter, for example, the Heinlein character, is suave and talkative and completely unflappable; when he says to Lieutenant Marshall something that it seems only the attempted murderer could have known, he then shrugs to the sputtering man, "'I believe I am supposed at this point to light a cigaret nonchalantly? Very well, I hereby do so.' The flame of the match was steady in his hand." This is hard not to adore.

Even if one were not already familiar with the lovable cranks of the quirky real-world Manana Literary Society--and I confess to knowing exceedingly little about anyone except Heinlein--all of these factors add up to a very enjoyable five-star mystery from the pulp era of science fiction. In addition to the occasional wisecracks and the literary history and the in-jokes, there really is a mystery here, and its unexpected solving is definitely worth the wait.

10 August 2014

When I finally scored a copy of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit last week, I also picked up, from the very same twirly-rack, a nice old 1961 copy of The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick—the latter of whom was co-author of Fail-Safe, by the way.  Anyhoo, this was a real ‘50s find, something that could have been improved only by bumping it up to a trifecta had there also been a copy of, say, Grace Metalious‘ Peyton Place, which there unfortunately was not...

Lederer and Burdick were, in their geopolitical context, a solid 5-star read, so I did a review on Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1016746356, copy-pasted below.

Rafeeq



The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick is lifelike and rich, a sometimes wry and ironic panorama of the mid-1950s ideological and military front lines of the Cold War drawn, we are informed in the Epilogue, often almost directly from the authors' own experiences in Southeast Asia. Though it thus is fictionalized, the book--I would not quite call it a novel, really, as the characters are so disparate, and only a few of them turn up here and there throughout--reads with the veracity of a diary or a journalistic account. Sometimes the events and characters portrayed are cringe-worthy in the extreme, but we know very well that such arrogance, such blindness, such bombastic buffoonery were far from uncommon; indeed, the Epilogue explains, point by point, exactly how close certain little anecdotes are to the truth.

The back cover of my 1961 Fawcett Crest edition of the book asks, in boldface type, "Is President Kennedy's 'PEACE CORPS' The answer to the problem raised by this book?" Perhaps so. Certainly the colonial French and the American diplomats who didn't bother learning the language or culture of the region did not seem to do much to keep the dominoes from toppling. While Lederer and Burdick do not appear to have noticed the long-term damage done by United States support of any ol' dictator so long as he was anti-Communist, and by shenanigans such as the U.S.-orchestrated coups in places such as Iran and Guatemala, they on the other hand probably do not exaggerate the dirty tricks and the viciousness of the other side.

It would have been interesting to explore a little more deeply exactly what, aside from legitimate anti-colonial sentiment and ginned-up anti-Western propaganda, motivated the average Communist guerrilla. Perhaps, though, this is a bit much to ask of a piece published so soon after the fall of besieged Dien Bien Phu, when it urgently appeared that with the right kind of effort, shoring up Indochina would prevent the fall of further nations all the way back to Africa. The authors do, however, at least show with care the motivations of a disparate host of well-meaning and motivated characters on this side of the Bamboo Curtain, whether religious or military men or idealistic rather than opportunistic diplomats, trying their best to help free peoples live as they themselves choose. Could these amiable folks willing to live in the boondocks, eat the food, learn the language, and share and communicate instead of impose from above really make a difference? Very possibly, at least when measure by goodwill on the ground rather than by the speeches in the national capital; with luck, they at least can help offset the damage of the stuffed shirts and the fools.

Lederer and Burdick's vivid snapshot from the height of East-West sparring, when the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the Berlin Blockade, the fall of China, and the bloody Korean War were threats seen in contemporary headlines rather than mere chapters in a history textbook, is politically dated, of course. The places the authors wrote about, the seemingly clear-cut ideologies, the pressing national issues--such things now have been settled decades ago. Nevertheless, The Ugly American reminds us, long after the brushfire conflicts of the Cold War have burned out, of the fundamental human values of courage, respect, and friendship, whose worth certainly does not diminish.

4 August 2014

Having seen the film a number of times, I had wanted to read The Man in the Gray Flannel suit, but I hadn’t happened to run across a copy until a couple of days ago.  The movie is very good for its era, and of course the novel is even better.

Below is the review I did on Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1009625789.

Rafeeq



Whenever I watch The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit with Gregory Peck, I say, "Boy, it'd be nice to read the original novel by Sloan Wilson sometime, wouldn't it?"...and when I at last came across an old 1956 printing in the local library basement sale, this old paperback shouldered its way immediately to the top of my reading list. I was not disappointed. It is an enjoyable and moving five-star work.

The basics of the novel--a combat veteran haunted by memories of the men he killed, and by the brief, desperate love he found in Italy, tries to turn his mousy career and his dispirited marriage around by joining the "rat race"--are familiar to anyone who has seen the film, so there is little need to cover them here. The novel, of course, is more finely grained in its telling detail than any film, and such detail is lifelike and good, and ultimately moving.

On the one hand, Wilson's narrative voice can be urbane and gently wry. After spending most of the first page describing a question-mark-shaped crack in the wall of the couple's dingy house, for example, the text reports with calm irony that this suspicious shape "d[oes] not seem symbolic to Tom and Betty, nor even amusing"--and in case we still don't get it, another nudge points out that everyone else cannot help staring at the thing. Sentences of the offhand "It was fashionable that summer to be cynical about one's employers..." variety are a similar joy.

Coupled with such minor authorial games, however, is a rich investigation of the mind of ex-paratrooper and now vaguely wary husband Tom Rath. During the Second World War, in close combat, Rath killed seventeen men--a fact "he simply hadn't thought about for quite a few years" rather than "a thing he had deliberately tried to forget." Mm hmm. And yet, as he thinks of those years, "His mind [goes] blank. Suddenly the word 'Maria' flashe[s] into it"...and yet, at least this early on, all we will get is that single word, and then the narrative tacks intriguingly away.

Wilson will give more in due time, of course. He will show us Rath's bleak fatalism of December '44, when after two years of fighting in Europe his unit is to be sent to the Pacific, and he knows--knows--that his luck will run out, and in another jump, or two at the most, he will be dead. The future he will never see, the cold beer he will never drink, the rare steaks he will never eat, the lovely wife waiting at home, to whom he will never make love again--they do not seem real, while only the vulnerable and passionate Maria makes life at all palatable. And of course, just before shipping out to the Pacific Theater, he learns that there may be a child...

The friend killed by Rath's grenade, the unacknowledged longing for Maria and his abandoned child, his own absent father shell-shocked in the First World War and then likely suicided in the '20s, the ancient grandmother with her tales of family glory, the faithful wife who wants to see him happy and successful--the introspective Tom Rath is pushed and pulled by impetuses he struggles to understand. And if he is to start living again, truly living, he will have to face the truth, as he has been avoiding for so long.

Is the ending a little too pat? Perhaps. Certainly Betty Rath, after a revelation that could indeed finish many a marriage, ends up being an astoundingly good sport about it. Would Tom be as forgiving, one might wonder, if Betty, as convinced as he had been of his imminent death, had found comfort as he did in Rome? Maybe at this stage of the novel he might. Wilson does not quite raise the question, however--unfortunate, as even a few lines would be worthwhile.

Nevertheless, the conclusion may indeed be believable. Betty Rath, after all, begins to realize that she has never had a clue about even a tenth of what the man sleeping beside her all these years has suffered, and her sympathy is touching, as are her husband's final simple and heartfelt, almost awestruck professions of love. Tom Rath in the end has nothing to hide, and for the first time in years he feels not cynical and bitter but happy, within himself and within his marriage. After delving so believably into the mind of a privileged college boy turned killer, then turned corporate drone, and finally turned balanced human being, Sloan Wilson brings The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to a conclusion that is life-affirming and even heartwarming.

28 July 2014