Monday, March 24, 2014

I find your lack of Yeti disturbing...

With a name like The Abominable and most of the book taking place on Mount Everest, I was really expecting more Himalayan snow demons in Dan Simmons' newish book.

Lord knows I'm been joking around about this lack of furry murder monsters on the peak on Facebook for most of the duration of my read, but honestly, the book is well written enough that the severe lack of hairy killer beasts isn't actually much of an issue.

We start our very long journey up the slopes of Everest in 1992, when the author goes to Colorado to meet Jake Perry, an elderly man with cancer, who was on the 1935 Antarctic expedition with Admiral Byrd. (Jake, it seems, managed to annoy Byrd enough that he got to winter in the Penguin Observation hut on Cape Royals, watching penguins that had already headed out to warmer climes.) Simmons mentions some of the stuff that he'd written about previously in The Terror, leading the reader to assume that Jake also inspired that interesting history of the search for the Northwest Passage.

Jake ends the conversation (which somehow revolved around an Antarctic expedition being menaced by giant mutant killer penguins and not Yetis) by asking Simmons to read his story of Everest in 1925, following the previous year's failed expedition by Mallory and Irvine. Simmons agrees to read it to make the old man happy. The old man dies, but it takes Simmons about 20 years to get the manuscript due to familial inheritance and someone not directly forwarding it on after Jake's death. Which, after reading, Simmons decides to publish.

We meet a much younger Jake, sitting on the summit of the Matterhorn with his Alpine climbing buddies, Richard Davis Deacon (an English Peer who really never uses his title) and Jean-Claude Chamonix (of the French Chamonix alpine guides). It's June of 1924, and news of Mallory and Irvine's disappearance on the way back down Everest is front page news. There's also odd news of the unrelated vanishing of one Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer, witnessed only by German climber Bruno Sigl and his party of German climbers around the Second Step of the North Face of Everest.

Deacon, while smoking a pipe at the high altitude of the Italian/Swiss border (also unsurprisingly yeti free), asks the gentlemen if they'd like to climb Everest the next Spring. Unsurprisingly, both Jean-Claude and Jake agree.

Which sets up the ostensible reason for the 1925 Deacon-Bromley expedition. Lady Bromley, Percival's mother, remains convinced that her son is alive on the mountain, and employs Deacon and party to go find him and bring him home. Or, if they find him dead, do their best to recover the body and bring it home to England. They are to go to the Bromley family's tea plantation in Darjeeling and meet Percy's cousin Reggie, who will guide them to Everest and help arrange the actual climb.

With that narrative hook, the trio begin researching Percy's death and begin the fun of getting equipment for an Everest expedition. As unrelated at this entire section seems to be, it does manage to give us much information on mountain climbing techniques and equipment, and give us tantalizing clues about the Yeti. We also meet Bruno Sigl in Munich (where Jean-Claude refuses to go, having lost family to the Germans during the Great War) at the Bürger Bräu Keller, the Beer Hall where Sigl's political hero had recently been arrested during a failed attempt at government overthrow. Sigl's devotion to National Socialism is very disturbing to me, but then I live nearly a century after seeing what his glorious der fuhrer actually did to the world after taking power.

Anyway, with new, better climbing ropes and new 12 point crampons, as well as lighter and better designed oxygen tanks, the trio rater quietly make their way to Darjeeling to meet Percy's cousin Reggie. Now, in what's a surprise for them, but not for us, since it's revealed on the dust jacket, Reggie is female and has ever intention of trying to summit Everest along with Deacon and crew. As well as recover Percy's body, where ever it may be. She has previously been to Everest searching with her doctor and friend Pashang. Reggie also has all the papers to get them through to Tibet, since the Dalai Lama at the time has closed off expeditions following Irvine and Mallory's failure. The official reason has to do with the amount of litter on the mountain, including bodies, oxygen tanks, etc, but according to Reggie, has more to do with a British supervisor who pressured the Dalai Lama into cutting off the route. (Evidently, Nepal was closed to foreigners during this period, making the North route the only one available.)

This begins the middle third of the novel, wherein we learn the intricacies of the siege of Everest, with advance teams going up head and laying paths for porters to come up with the heavier gear. The setting up of camps on various ridges, each given a number after the Base camp. (Pretty sure most modern folks use the south route from Nepal and use 4 camps. The route taken here has at least 7 camps and a bunch of glacier walking.) We meet the bandits, lead by James Kahn, as well as the monks of the Rongbuk monastery. We lost a sherpa along the way and witness an air burial (which I was only familiar with thanks to Gaimen and his Sandman series.)(One side note here. They mention the provisions taken by Mallory and Irvine up the mountain to eat at high altitude. I find the idea of dragging Fois Gras up a few miles of vertical rock amusing.)

Which sets up the third section, which start with meeting the sherpas at Camp IV, having climbed up from base camp, convinced that the yeti had killed all of their friends.

It's a fascinating and thoroughly researched book. Simmons, despite his occasional prejudices, is a master at descriptive language, making it easy to visualize such things as an oxygen tank falling around 2 miles from the North Col onto the glacier below, or the mummified remains of climbers found along the way. Or the very graphic depiction of the air burial, which is a lot more involved than At World's End let on. The breathtaking chase up the mountain in the last part of the book had me gasping for air along with the characters, even as the previous section with the climbs up and down the mountain had me feeling like I was watching Benji or Chariots of Fire, wherein I felt as though I was climbing right along with them.

By far the biggest thing was the reveal of what The Abominable actually is. Much like our narrator, I was kind of disappointed by that big reveal, but in the wrap up, I think I better understand what the point was. And part of me was very touched final result of the expedition.

As another reviewer said when I was looking for a good synopsis to figure out if I wanted to read this, (To be honest, the last Simmons I read was the Illium/Olympos duology, which while fascinating and very good, suffered from a touch of Simmons anti-Islamic leaning. It's odd, Simmons seems to be fairly right wing Libertarian in most of his views, but on that, he seems to not be as open.) The supernatural in The Abominable is a bit like seasoning in a very rich stew. It isn't the focus of the meal, but rather helps bring out the other flavors in the broth. Even if there weren't wall to wall yeti stretching from Wales to Tibet, the book is well worth the read. Just keep Wikipedia or Google open nearby to look up some of the references, since it occasionally takes a while for one of the characters to explain something.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Three Words. Possessed Poetry Magnets.

On one of my last library trips, I happened to glance at a display rack, catching a glimpse of some blurb how this book is something Neil Gaimen fans would be immediately taken. Given said blurb was via Publisher's Weekly, I took it with a grain of salt, but I did enjoy reading J. Lincoln Fenn's Poe anyway.

We start off meeting our narrator, Dimitri Petrov, who narrates the book in First Person Present Tense. (Which, as mentioned previously, takes a bit of adjustment.) Dimitri lives and works in the small New York town of New Goshen, writing obituaries for the local paper.Given the average age in New Goshen is well over 60, he keeps quite busy with this. He has a casual flirtation with Lisa, who works at a receptionist at the local nursing home; Lisa is also a source of information that rarely makes it in to the obituary.

Dimitri's boss, Mac, decides that Halloween night would be a perfect excuse to send Dimitri (and Mac's son, Nate, who does editing work) to a seance at the local run down haunted mansion, Aspinwell. The medium is their coworker Myrna's sister, Maddy. Aspinwell has quite a history, involving murder and fire, and all the gothic conventions. Lisa, who has never met Dimitri, crashes the party for reasons that don't become clear until the midway point.

Given the book wouldn't have much of a plot without a narrative hook, Myrna succeeds quite well in channeling a spirit for the seance. It in fact causes some violence within the medium, who crashes through the rotted floor of the mansion. Mac goes to get help as Lisa and Dimitri head to the basement to rescue Myrna. Well, they try, anyway. Dimitri finds out the hard way there's a well in the basement when he falls into watery darkness.

Cut to a few days later when he wakes up in the morgue. Now thankfully, due to being misdiagnosed, the hospital takes rather good care of him as he recovers, if only to avoid a lawsuit. Mind you, Dimitri is still semi remembering a woman he saw in the well, whom he nicknames Poe. Poe continues to haunt Dimitri after he's released and begins to sort of date Lisa. Poe starts off doing poltergeisty activity (broken windows with the glass making patterns), but eventually settles into using Dimitri's mother's poetry refrigerator magnets to pass on some basic information. Well, at least until the dreams/hallucinations start.

We also learn a bit of Lisa's backstory. Like her paranoid schizophrenic brother who tried to kill her.

Eventually, all the plot threads connect, wrapping up exactly who Dimitri's parents were, what's so important about his ring, what's really going on with Lisa's brother, and why the heck Rasputin (yes, Rasputin) had two magical grimoires.

It's a bit uneven at times, and things seem to be last minute additions toward the end, but for the most part, it remians interesting and fun to read. It even gets bonus points for Dimitri;s relationship with his guardian, which reminded me of several conversations I've had in a similar vein.

Also, it has about as much in common with Gaiman as a horse has with a crab.

Monday, March 3, 2014

The Revolution Will not be Televised, but it will be Tweeted.

A bit of preface to this entry. A few years back, a friend of mine recommended I read a book by Walter John Williams. Sadly, I wasn't able to find that book until recently (I know own the paperback and the nook version), but the library DID have a book called This Is Not A Game. That particular book followed a character named Dagmar Shaw around as her ARG (Alternate Reality Game) went off the rails and wound up with murder and Russian Mafia hits.

I found out recently, and quite by happy accident, that Mr. Williams has since released 2 more books about Dagmar. The first, Deep State, is much like it's predecessor in the very layered approach as to what the heck is actually going on.

The prologue introduces us to two geek at an American listening post in the mountains of Turkey. They've been trapped for a few weeks due to a military junta displacing the government, making it impossible to do anything resembling their contracted jobs. As the military approaches the listening station, they try to escape, but find out as they stop at a monastery, that they have the XBox, not the laptop with the very classified files on it.

Cut to: Turkey a few months later, where Dagmar and her Great Big Idea team are running an ARG to promote the new James Bond movie, Stunrunner, featuring Ian Attila Gordon, a Scots pop star. Most of the puzzles have to do with crosswords that are roughly the same in Turkish and English, making it easier for players in Turkey and North America to play along. However, during a stop in Ankara, Dagmar and her crew get to forcibly meet General Bozbeyli, now president of Turkey and leader of the junta. While the entire thing is a PR event, Dagmar ends up trading veiled barbs with Bozbeyli, who in turn makes life difficult as the game rolls into Istanbul (not Constantinople).

As the game ends, one of Dagmar's liaisons, Lincoln, hires her for government work. This sets up the next part of the novel, as Dagmar, a few of her Great Big Idea people, and some hires of Lincolns converge at the RAF Airbase on the Greek side of Cyprus. Their mission, astroturf a revolution in Turkey to overthrow the ruling junta. Using crowdsourcing, spam e-mail, and a few instigators on the ground, they set off at achieving this goal, which takes up the bulk of the book.

There's much thematically here, as we see echoes of the Arab Spring, with news going out via twitter... Revolution creep, wherein other countries start demonstrating with the Turks... Using crowdsourcing to get information needed to advance the goals. There's also push back from the junta, whom no one believed to be technologically savvy. It actually reads a bit like the old movie Hackers, only a lot more informed on what's possible.

Mind you, it's obvious Williams has researched Turkish culture and civilization, and he does an ok job of getting most of it across. However, parts of it sent me running for wikipedia and other online resources looking for better explanations of what the heck he was talking about. Which I found really can't be explained in simplified terms. (Alevi, Kurds, TCP/IP....)

What I'm left with after reading is a desire to see Turkey myself, maybe even sailing the Bosporus myself to Greece. My suggestion would be to keep Google Image Search open, to get a feel for the sights as the characters find them, from the Hagia Sophia to the phallic stone where Aphrodite first walked out onto the sands of Cyprus.