High on atmosphere, low on plot
John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row was originally published in 1945. The title refers to a waterfront neighborhood in Monterey, California known for its sardine canneries. In this district the reader finds the local grocery store run by a Chinese immigrant, a bordello operated by friendly prostitutes, and a vacant lot and unused building inhabited by bums and squatters. In a neighborhood populated by quirky characters, the Row’s most unusual inhabitant is Doc, a marine biologist who runs a laboratory that sells sea creatures and other animals for scientific and educational use. Doc is beloved by his neighbors for his generosity and wisdom, so much so that the bums decide to throw him a party. Though set during the Great Depression, Cannery Row is predominantly a lighthearted novel focusing on the camaraderie among the denizens of the district.
In the second half of the 19th century, San Francisco established itself as America’s primary literary center west of the East Coast, due in large part to author Bret Harte and his literary journal The Overland Monthly. Born in Salinas, Steinbeck is the culmination of a distinguished tradition of Northern California literature that includes eminent authors Jack London and Frank Norris. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Cannery Row. The quirky characters, comic situations, and depictions of merriment amid squalor call to mind the mining town tales of Harte and London, while Norris’s genius for naturalistic description, as seen in novels like McTeague and The Octopus, is reflected in Steinbeck’s vivid depictions of urban life and the California landscape.
The best thing about Cannery Row is its setting. Steinbeck does a great job creating an inviting atmosphere and involving the reader in the lives of the district’s inhabitants. As great a writer as Steinbeck is, however, there is no denying that as far as plot goes this is mostly just a comedic story about a bunch of bums throwing a party for a friend. Occasionally Steinbeck will inject a more poetic interlude to remind you that you’re reading a work of literature, but often this strategy backfires as one style clashes with another, like when a poetry reading interrupts a wild party (literally in one instance). One chapter, apropos of nothing, inexplicably gives us a glimpse into the lives of a married couple that are unmentioned elsewhere in the book. Though this passage sticks out like a sore thumb, it is one of the few that seriously addresses the social conditions of the Depression, as Steinbeck did much more concertedly and effectively in The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. For the most part, the economic reasons for the preponderance of homeless persons in Cannery Row is glossed over in favor of near-slapstick humor.
Another odd thing about the novel is that while Doc is supposedly the protagonist, he is the character about whom we learn the least. It is hinted in several passages that he is a womanizer, but the reader never actually sees him with a woman. Doc is absent from much of the novel and is largely defined by what the other characters say about him. When he is present in the narrative, Steinbeck lovingly describes his laboratory and his profession in fascinating detail, but we never really get inside Doc’s head the way we do with Mack or the other bums.
Cannery Row may not be Steinbeck’s best-written or most profound novel, but it is still a fine work of American realist literature. It is apparent that he had a lot of fun writing it, and there is certainly enjoyment to be had in reading it.
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Some interesting ideas rather simplistically executed
Comic book artist extraordinaire Jack Kirby is best known for his pioneering creation of enduring superheroes for Marvel Comics, but later in his career he also briefly worked for DC Comics. In the 1970s, Kirby was granted a fair degree of autonomy to create new titles for DC, and it was during this period that he came up with some of his more outlandish and idiosyncratic creations. One such creation was OMAC, the One Man Army Corps, which only ran for eight issues from 1974 to 1975 (though DC would later resurrect the concept in other incarnations). Jack Kirby’s OMAC, a 2008 volume from DC Comics, reprints all eight issues of Kirby’s OMAC series in full color, along with an introduction by Kirby’s biographer and former assistant Mark Evanier.
OMAC is based on an unrealized idea Kirby had at Marvel to create a Captain America of the future. In a not-so-distant dystopian world, average joe Buddy Blank is transformed into the superhero OMAC, a soldier for the Global Peace Agency. In this new form, he is not only possessed of super strength and speed but also psychically linked to a sentient orbital satellite named Brother Eye, who endows OMAC with auxiliary powers through the transmission of molecular beams. The almost personality-less OMAC is not a particularly compelling hero, but the title allows Kirby to present his science fiction visions of the future of human society. Unfortunately, most of the ideas Kirby comes up with aren’t all that different from what you might see in science fiction movies of the ‘60s, such as android dolls created for human companionship, wealthy oligarchs with private armies, and elderly brains transplanted into beautiful young bodies. Kirby unveils his most original and ingenious idea in issue number 7, “The Ocean Stealers,” but issue 8 ends in a cliffhanger and the storyline is never resolved.
Beyond each story’s presentation of the futuristic villains’ nefarious plans, the stories presented in these eight issues are mostly just simplistic punchfests with terrible dialogue. There is little of the narrative complexity and attention to character development that marked the early Stan Lee and Kirby masterpieces. These 18- to 20-page OMAC stories feel like 7- or 8-page sci-fi tales from 1950s issues of Strange Adventures that have been stretched out to fill a larger page count. The art is not quite up to Kirby’s usual standard of excellence either. Perhaps his herculean workload caused him to cut corners, perhaps one can blame it on the inkers, or maybe the fault lies with DC. While Kirby’s layouts for Marvel were always bombastically action-packed and dynamic, his OMAC frames are much more static and simple, as is historically characteristic of DC’s artistic style, though occasionally you get one great, highly detailed splash page that calls to mind his former glories. After his ‘70s tenure at DC, Kirby would return to work for Marvel and do much better work, both writing and drawing, on their Captain America title (see the paperback volume Essential Captain America, Volume 5). OMAC, however, calls to mind Kirby’s early ‘80s work in animation for Hanna-Barbera, like the cartoon series Thundarr the Barbarian.
Kirby’s 8-issue run on OMAC inspires mixed emotions. On the one hand, you get to see a genius at work; on the other hand, this isn’t exactly a work of genius. If you are not a diehard Kirby fan, you might be better off skipping OMAC and exploring other Kirby worlds like those of the Eternals or the New Gods.
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Four score and seven years of dictators, diplomats, and dissenters
Originally published in 1986, Century of the Wind is the final book in the Memory of Fire trilogy by Uruguayan journalist and novelist Eduardo Galeano. Like the two volumes that preceded it, Century of the Wind is not exactly a novel, but rather a unique literary composition of hundreds of brief historical vignettes based on fact but creatively embellished by the author. Through these myriad scenes, arranged chronologically, Galeano gives the reader a sweeping overview of Latin American history. While the first book in the trilogy, Genesis, covers the years 1492 to 1700, and the second volume, Faces and Masks, focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Century of the Wind chronicles most of the twentieth century, from 1900 to 1986.
Though the narrative pieces are arranged in strict chronological order, Galeano jumps around considerably from topic to topic and from country to country. Early on, one would think that this is a book about the Mexican Revolution since the author devotes so much coverage to the political turmoil in that nation. Other themes eventually arise to take center stage in their turn, however, such as the United States’ imperial interventions in Nicaragua and the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Galeano intersperses such political and military events with cultural developments as well, highlighting artists, writers, and movie stars, most but not all of whom are Latin American. (Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, for example, make repeat appearances.) Overall, however, Galeano’s main concern is to provide a people’s history of social injustice, and Century of the Wind stands as a record of the political oppression and brutal violence inflicted on Latin American peoples throughout the twentieth century.
The result can be both shocking and depressing, as a horrific cycle repeats itself over and over in nation after nation, not only in Mexico and Nicaragua but also in Guatemala, Panama, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Venezuela, Haiti, and on and on. Homegrown revolutionaries attempt to rise up against capitalist colonialism by fighting to establish socialist regimes. To protect its corporate interests, the United States supports reactionary rulers in crushing these rebellions. These puppet leaders then rise into full-blown dictators who rape the resources of their nations for their own profit and practice institutionalized torture and murder against Indigenous people and the laboring classes. The book is frequently punctuated by shockingly graphic descriptions of atrocities. Galeano clearly writes his eye-opening history from a leftist perspective, and not surprisingly the book is more likely to appeal to those with a similar political outlook.
One of the most valuable aspects of Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy is his extensive bibliography. Each historical vignette is typically supported by at least one cited source, but many of the scenes in Century of the Wind are missing their citations, which I suspect may be an editorial error on the part of the ebook publisher rather than an oversight by the author. Because of the way history repeated itself relentlessly in nation after nation, at times reading Century of the Wind feels like treading a brutal hamster wheel. This third volume lacks some of the epic grandeur of Faces and Masks, which highlighted several successful wars for independence over the course of two centuries. Nevertheless, Century of the Wind makes an estimable capstone to Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, the whole of which is an impressive achievement that I would recommend to anyone interested in Latin American history, literature, and culture.
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Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism demystified
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| Bertrand Russell |
In Proposed Roads to Freedom, Nobel Prize-winning philosopher, mathematician, and essayist Bertrand Russell thoroughly and thoughtfully explains the political and economic systems of three potentially viable alternatives to capitalism: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism. The book was published in 1918, when these movements were likely at their height on the world political stage and in the public’s collective consciousness. At that time, all three were ambitiously active in Europe and America, but it is hard to imagine the average reader having a minute understanding of their doctrines, which is where Russell comes in, as an eloquent interpreter of political economy for the masses. Today, in the age of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when the term Socialism inspires knee-jerk anger, Anarchism inspires fear, and Syndicalism inspires a head-scratching “Huh?”, we could use a book like this now more than ever.
Russell begins by devoting a chapter to each of the movements, defining their basic premises and providing historical background for each. He then goes into exploring specific issues of government and society by comparing and contrasting the three systems, examining such questions as how many hours workers should work and how they would be paid under each system, how would a nation operating under one of these philosophies conduct itself in international relations and war, and to what degree would art and science flourish or stagnate in a Socialist, Anarchist, or Syndicalist society. Russell states honestly that he does not think capitalism is the ideal economic system under which mankind should conduct itself, and that we should be working towards an alternative system. What’s refreshing about this book, however, is that Russell is no utopian optimist. Rather, he admits that any of the three systems in question are likely to fail in the face of mankind’s inherent greed and propensity to violence. Russell doesn’t advocate any of the three as his personal preference, but rather proposes a fourth alternative, a British form of Syndicalism known as Guild Socialism, which combines some of the better elements of all three. In the final chapter he outlines what his perfect world under Guild Socialism might look like, but again he states his case in a tone more hopeful than dogmatic.
As one would expect, Russell uses the writings of Karl Marx as the basis for his explanation of Socialism. For Anarchism, his main source is Peter Kropotkin. With Syndicalism, no one sage rises to the top, so Russell draws from a variety of texts, mostly of French origin. If Russell commits one error in his writing of this book it is that he quotes too extensively from the original doctrinal texts. I’m reading this book because I don’t want to read Marx’s Das Kapital, so I prefer it when Russell explains these ideas in his own words. Those wishing to read deeper can draw a very good bibliography from his 61 footnotes. Because the book was published a century ago, it contains a few unfortunately antiquated comments on race, such as when Russell expresses concern over “the exploitation of inferior races” where we today would use the term “developing countries.”
Russell doesn’t claim to have all the answers in Proposed Roads to Freedom, but he sure does provide the reader with an in-depth education on the subjects at hand. If more philosophers could write like Russell, using clear and accessible language without insulting the reader’s intelligence, perhaps philosophy wouldn’t be so frightening to the typical nonacademic reader (in America, at least). Russell’s body of work is a treasure trove for the rationalist and freethinking reader, and I look forward to digging deeper into his extensive catalog of writings.
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All over the (space-time) map
Award-winning and critically acclaimed science fiction author Clifford D. Simak’s final novel, Highway of Eternity, was originally published in 1986. Since publisher Open Road Media recently began rereleasing Simak’s works in ebook form, I have reviewed over 20 of his books and given many of them five-star ratings. Simak is easily one of my favorite science fiction writers of all time, and one subject in which he particularly excels is time travel. Therefore I had high hopes for Highway of Eternity, but unfortunately it is not one of his better novels. While the book contains some good ideas, it may contain too many, for few if any are developed to the point where they amount to much more than mere foggy notions.
The weirdness starts right out of the gate, as the reader is immediately introduced to two characters with unusual powers. Boone has the ability to inexplicably “step around a corner,” which is his rather inadequate way of describing the fact that when he feels threatened he somehow involuntarily transports himself to a realm seemingly outside of time and space as we know it. His friend Corcoran, on the other hand, at times experiences the power to see things that normal humans cannot see, such as beings or object that are invisibly present but out of phase with our own time-space. In the course of investigating a mysterious disappearance, these two stumble upon a family of revolutionary refugees from mankind’s future who dwell in an 18th century English manor house that has been removed to an isolated bubble outside of time and space. The cast thus enlarges to about eight or nine main characters, and the rest of the novel follows their diverse travels through time and space as they flee persecution from a foe that threatens the end of humanity as we know it. Over the course of their space-time peregrinations, they encounter everything from saber-toothed tigers to sentient robots to various races of aliens.
As one might surmise from that description, there isn’t a great deal of rhyme or reason to the goings-on here. It is as if Simak merely came up with a bunch of “wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if” moments and then lumped them all into one book. The robots and aliens are barely described, leaving much to the reader’s imagination, and the same could be said for most of the novel’s scientific concepts. Six or seven different methods of space and/or time travel are presented over the course of the story, and they are all so vaguely defined as to border on the magical, making this more of a fantasy novel than anything firmly rooted within the science fiction genre. Though Simak, as he often does, addresses deep philosophical issues of mankind’s purpose and future, the prose is often written with a deliberate simplicity that evokes the feel of young adult literature. The dialogue frequently consists of rapid exchanges of vague phrases of five words or less, a stylistic choice that annoys more than it enlightens. It is as if Simak was after some sort of fairy-tale feel to his prose that garishly clashes with the speculative sci-fi subject matter at hand.
Highway of Eternity is by no means a terrible novel, and those who enjoy Simak’s writing will still find patches to admire and enjoy amidst this hodgepodge quilt of meandering plotlines and partially developed concepts. Those wishing he had gone out on a high note, however, are likely to find this a disappointing swan song.
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Lanny Budd’s North African interlude
Presidential Mission is the eighth book in Upton Sinclair’s 11-novel Lanny Budd series, not to be confused with the similarly titled fifth book in the series, Presidential Agent. Published in 1947, Presidential Mission is set amidst the events of World War II from 1942 to 1943. As established earlier in the series, Lanny is a wealthy French-born son of American parents who uses his career as an art dealer to gather intelligence for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Pretending to be a Nazi sympathizer, he is able to strike up acquaintances with high-level Germans including Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Rudolf Hess, as well as other powerful personages in Europe and America. Lanny’s globetrotting occupation and access to world leaders offers Sinclair the opportunity to provide a detailed look at historical events of the twentieth century, as told through his leftist perspective as an outspoken American socialist.
Presidential Mission opens at the point when the United States has decided to enter the war in Europe, but they have yet to make a decision as to where to land their troops. FDR sends Lanny to North Africa to gather intelligence, gauge the response of the locals to an American invasion, and recruit sympathetic anti-Nazi agents to work with the OSS (the precursor to the CIA). France controls most of North Africa, but France itself is occupied by the Nazis, and it is unclear to what extent the French armed forces will greet the U.S. troops as friend or foe. Lanny travels extensively in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, pretending to shop for Islamic mosaics while spying for FDR and forming alliances to support an Allied invasion.
As always, the intricacy with which Sinclair plots the events of World War II is impressive, and the way he works Lanny into the proceedings is ingenious. Lanny’s seemingly unlimited access to FDR strains realism, however, as does the fact that he only reports to the President in person. This causes Lanny to repeatedly trod a triangle from Washington to Vichy France to North Africa and back again. The novel treads water like this rather tediously for two-thirds of its length. From there, however, the pace picks up considerably and veers off into a totally different direction about which the less said the better, to avoid spoilers. Suffice it to say that the final third of the novel is a considerable improvement over what comes before.
Thankfully, Sinclair devotes very few pages in this novel to Lanny’s annoying hobby: séances, mediums, and talking to the dead. Unlike in other novels of the series, the supernatural plays no important part in the plot of Presidential Mission. The main fault of this novel, and of the series in general, is that for an espionage narrative it lacks any real sense of danger. Because the plot is so firmly tied to historical events, the outcome of Lanny’s efforts is rarely ever in question. We know how the war is going to end. We know Lanny is going to survive until the 11th book. He almost never fails at any mission he undertakes, because to do so would be to alter the course of history, which would defeat Sinclair’s purpose for the series, to provide a leftist history of the war. As a result, though Lanny is integrally involved in major historical events, his contribution to those events feels largely inconsequential. By the end of Presidential Mission, even Lanny himself admits that the intelligence he gathered really wasn’t all that crucial to the war effort.
Though this novel does have its faults, it does succeed as an eye-opening alternative perspective on world history. The Lanny Budd novels often fall short of perfection, and Presidential Mission is certainly not the best book of the bunch (so far that would probably be A World to Win), but the series as a whole is undoubtedly a monumental achievement.
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Innovative and inspiring, if a bit grueling
Though the film adaptation of Cloud Atlas got its fair share of bad reviews, I rather liked it, so when the 2004 novel by David Mitchell came up as a Kindle Daily Deal, I snatched it up. By the time I got around to reading it, a couple of years had passed since I had seen the film, so I had forgotten the details of the plot, and the novel was by no means predictable. Cloud Atlas is a truly unique reading experience, primarily due to its unusual structure. The book consists of six intertwined stories that take place in six different time periods, from the nineteenth century to a post-apocalyptic future. These narratives are nested within one another, arranged in an ABCDEFEDCBA pattern. The links between the stories are varied and often fleeting. The protagonist of one story might read a book or enjoy a work of art created by his or her predecessor in an earlier narrative. One repeated but only briefly mentioned symbol hints at reincarnation, but that concept is never overtly explored.
Because two of the book’s six narratives take place in the future, Cloud Atlas is classified as a science fiction novel, but it certainly doesn’t read like one. In the mid-nineteenth century, American lawyer Adam Ewing takes passage on a ship through the Chatham Islands near New Zealand, where he witnesses British colonialism and the enslavement of the Indigenous population. In 1931, Robert Frobisher, a young man hoping to carve out a career as a composer, takes up residence in the Belgian home of an established mentor and becomes intimately involved in his host family’s personal lives. In a mystery novel set in 1970s California, journalist Luisa Rey investigates corruption at a nuclear power plant. In present-day Britain, aging publisher Timothy Cavendish finds himself, through a series of comical circumstances, imprisoned in a home for the elderly. In a dystopian Korea of the future, Sonmi-451, a clone manufactured for the food service industry, begins to awaken to her own humanity. On one of the Hawaiian islands, centuries in the future, a man named Zachry and his fellow survivors in a post-apocalyptic society struggle to eke out a peaceful agrarian existence while suffering the attacks of a warlike, cannibalistic tribe.
No matter the time period, Mitchell proves himself an author of rare talent and eloquence. The problem with Cloud Atlas is that each of the six narratives overstays its welcome. The book is not six connected short stories but rather six complete novellas. Once you enter each world, you might be stuck there for an hour and a half of reading. This is too long for even the better of the narratives (the future scenes and the mystery novel), and can prove quite tedious in the case of the book’s worst entries (the stories of Timothy Cavendish and Robert Frobisher). In Mitchell’s world, almost every narrator is a veritable James Joyce of thesaurus-wringing verbosity. Overall, however, the impressive achievement of the whole outweighs the faults of its parts. If there is a point to all this interconnection, it lies in the fact that each of the six protagonists is struggling in his or her own way to achieve personal freedom and social justice. Thus, as a whole Cloud Atlas amounts to an epic centuries-long affirmation of the human spirit that leaves the reader astonished and inspired.
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