Conspirator by CJ Cherryh

This is the first book of the fourth trilogy of the Foreigner Series, book 10 in the series. Okay, we’ve wrapped up the coup, right? Bren and Tabini can get back to governing the atevi, right? No way. Due to a housing shortage, Bren ends up having to go to his estate on the coast. In just arriving, light shows conspiracies everywhere, and they all point back to the Marid, the Southern Reach of the atevi world.

The cell phone plague now preoccupied humans on the island of Mospheira, a plague making them walk into traffic while in conversation that preempted their awareness of their surroundings; a compulsion that suddenly rendered them incapable of ignoring a phone call in the presence of actual people they should be dealing with.

The opening of this book meanders: Bren to the estate with Barb and Toby, then Cajeiri arrives, then Ilisidi, then Tabini, then he leaves, then new bodyguards arrive from Tabini, and then, finally, we get to the start of the story. The directionless opening only interests when Bren’s arrival allows things to go wrong immediately, small things like a neighboring estate owing his estate some money, and these mushroom into very big things that threaten civil war—not because Bren cares about a couple thousand moneys that much, he doesn't have that much of an ego, but because these small symptoms are emblematic of a much larger root cause. And once the reader realizes that these small wrongs lead to major fractures, the book works brilliantly.

Now he had to ask himself which language he was thinking in. Now he routinely limited his human impulses and curtailed his human instincts, shaping himself into something else . . . A good talent, up to a point. He didn’t know if he’d passed that point. Maybe he’d passed it somewhere in that voyage, when they’d all gone out to get a human station removed from where it had no right to be. . . .

That’s not to say that specific scenes in the early portions of the book are bad—Cajeiri almost drowning is one of those scenes I look back on as one of the best in the whole series so far. But by being disjointed, the confusion I feel wondering what’s going to be important and what’s not—Cajeiri almost drowning ends up mostly unimportant, who gives the info to help rescue him ends up most important—helps color the whole opening poorly.

Aijiborn: Cajeiri was apt to do any damned thing, was what, and neither species was going to predict him. A brilliant, if erratic prospect. If he lived to grow up.

I am a Cherryh fan. I know she often starts slowly, establishing the characters and situation, then putting new info into the mix to stir everything up suddenly for a breakneck finish that leaves the reader to figure out some of the plot and actions. I like this tactic and think, to some extent, that Neuromancer also pulls this off very well. (I don’t necessarily feel compelled to write like this, though I like reading it.) But in this one book it seems more like Cherryh casts around looking for a plot, looking for a story. And I think this because so few of these early scenes change characters fundamentally: the scenes themselves seem mostly forgotten in a series where almost every scene ends up being important later.

People could get killed over bad information. Information and the misconstruction of information was, history told him, exactly the sort of thing that had led humans and atevi to war—bad information coming too fast, too easy interaction, too many people who thought they understood each other.

The ending, where the Edi and Gan tribes start to ally with Ilisidi and Bren, kind of comes as a surprise. The book is about uncovering the conspiracy of Baiji, and Cherryh throws in some false leads—those unrevisited scenes I discuss above. And that the conspiracy uncovers two potential allies as well interests me, but could have used more foreshadowing. If I knew more about the Edi and Gan before they showed up, it would have been easier to feel more importance to their arrival.

“Mountain air is chill. It stimulates the wit, young man. Choler only ruins one’s digestion.” It was good advice. He had been in Great-grandmother’s mountains. He had been in the snow. He understood. And like nand’ Bren’s rock, paper, scissors—he had seen how wit beat choler, every time.

So that’s the book: a setup for what becomes a great story arc. But the opening is rough around the edges. It didn’t deter me from reading more, but I could see somebody not liking this book more than the other books in the series. The most interesting part for the series as a whole would certainly be that we finally get a glimpse of a stupid atevi, Baiji, and how that brain works, the flipside of the way the culture is setup, the bad potential to the good we've seen so far.

He just didn’t have the vision of the future he’d used to have. It was all dark up ahead, and he couldn’t see.

+++

Bren took his former seat, trying to find in himself what he had used to feel, some sense of sympathy for a dead enemy, regret for the waste. It was there, but it was scant at the moment.

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

My introduction to this novel, novella, short story with a gland problem, came earlier this year. I read it three times this year, for reasons. This book more aligns with mood pieces and stream-of-consciousness, and less with plot and a thematic focus. If you need known in your reading, read another book. If you enjoy or find interest in post-modern books exploring reality, meaning, and culture, then this could be your book. I find this easy to say. I find it much harder to state what I think about this book. It brought up lots of thoughts.

First and foremost: this writing is spectacular. Pynchon’s ability to list goes over the top in all the right ways—right now I can’t think of a better lister, but some poets probably slip my mind. Let me just quote two lists here, out of this book:

She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to—an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.

The Saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor than was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe or outside, lost.

These fantastic lists come hot and heavy throughout the book. It’s often a sentence, then four paragraphs of exposition of that sentence, then another sentence, rinse and repeat. I mean, if I talk about who this writing reminds me of, it’s Vonnegut, Eco, and Nabokov. And that’s some heady space to be in for my personal pantheon of great writers.

Another thing the writing does well is showing instead of telling — Pynchon never says she’s pretty, but every man around her wants her.

(But the flipside of the writing is me: I am personally sick of books like this. This writing is what every writing program I’ve experienced or heard of tries to train students to ape. And by this stage of my life and this type of writing, I’m a bit sick of it. I know this one is foundational and this is one of the pioneers and this is part of the reason everybody wants to write like this, but now, 53 years later, it’s been done, and I find it more groundbreaking when somebody tells me something really well. That’s just me today though, and I’ll try to put myself in the mindset of this being groundbreaking because I believe it was.)

The storytelling seems based on detective fiction. In one sense this shows the lady in red doing her own investigation. In another sense, this could be more of a hero’s journey because she changes more than the typical private eye does. On another hand this clearly shows a woman whose men run her life, changing to a woman who runs her own life. Yet one other probably valid interpretation shows a series of absurd scenes with little tying them together except an investigation into a conspiracy or secret society. But this varied book full of examples where meaning fails could also be an extended metaphor of a life. She starts off alone and bored and dependent on others—if there isn’t a better description of a baby, I don’t know. Baby can’t communicate or understand, can’t entertain or sustain itself. Then the teenage years of a hot car, a band, and a fling with an older man land her in the most happening place ever, LA. Then the dark underbelly of LA rears its head in the crazies, and she has a choice: either continue to ignore what probably ain’t true, or investigate it for truth. (That seems to be mostly what drives her, truth-seeking, and where she ends up shows Pynchon questioning whether that should drive her.) Then the sunset of life as the connections surrounding her slowly fall away: her lover leaves her for a younger woman, her husband loses his mind, and everybody around her disappears or dies. It’s like she’s going through a whole life in this book, birth to death. And this god-like figure, this ex-lover, the book stops just before she learns whether he is still alive or is actually dead.

This storyline allows Pynchon plenty of space to talk about California culture in the 60s, America during the McCarthy era of the Cold War, death and the choices people make that lead to it, the weight of personal connections in the free-love era, conspiracies and secrecy, etc—more themes than Pynchon can really deal with in the space the book takes up. If there is a central theme, I’d be guessing to try and come up with it. Maybe it’s a question of what we spend our lives focused on and how those things arrive through accident, coincidence, and effort. In other words, Obsession. Every character in here is a study in obsession. Stamp collecting, kinky London stuff, the death of inventing, entropy of communication, having been a child actor, etc.

But the quarter of me with reservations starts to notice that this book may be too open-ended for me to want to reread it again and again. The writing astounds me, and the humor helps ease my way through the book, but it could also be exemplified by the obscure references of the title, it may be a touch clever for clever’s sake—in that way I’m like the director, pissed off at every grad student trying to wring too much meaning out of every little phrase. “Shall I project a world?” Pynchon questions. Ugh, I answer. Too much, bro. My personal experience with writing programs bores at somebody else trying every tactic ever used in writing, and coming up with a bit of an unfocused mess.

“You don’t understand,” getting mad. “You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but—” a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head—“in here.”

So, I’m torn. On the one hand I love this book. This is near the heights of the genre of writing I call “Literary”, especially in this post-modern era that questions the natures of truth and futility. Well worth the read. On the other hand, while I’m glad I read it a few times—re-reads certainly helped me appreciate the quality of the writing and the potential central metaphor of a life lived—I’m more glad I don’t have to read it again. I like the unknown in writing, I really do. But there may be just a little too much unknown here for what the authors seems like he was trying to do. Or maybe it’s too short to delve into the themes effectively. Or maybe that’s just me being too stupid to put this book on the top shelf, next to Vonnegut and Eco and Nabokov. It’s just too easy to pull any random quote out of this book and argue that it’s all about that quote, like the last one:

“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
“Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”

I do want to mention that this seems in a similar vein to Kafka, Borges, Eco, Joseph Heller, DFW, Vonnegut, Nabokov, and others like that.