Temple Grove, upcoming Green-Scare related Environmental Action novel by Walla Walla author Scott Elliott due out in May of 2013

Deep in the heart of Washington State's Olympic Peninsula lies Temple Grove, one of the last stands of ancient Douglas firs not under federal protection from logging. Bill Newton, a gyppo logger desperate for work and a place to hide, has come to Temple Grove for the money to be made from the timber. There to stop him is Paul, a young Makah environmentalist who will break the law to save the trees.

A dangerous chase into the wilds of Olympic National Park ensues, revealing a long-hidden secret that inextricably links the two men. Joining the pursuit are FBI agents who target Paul as an ecoterrorist, and his mother, Trace, who is determined to protect him. Temple Grove is a gripping tale of suspense and a multilayered novel of place that captures in taut, luminous prose the traditions that tie people to this powerful landscape and the conflicts that run deep among them.

Scott Elliott is associate professor of creative writing and English at Whitman College and author of the novel Coiled in the Heart. He lives in Walla Walla, Washington.

Book Review: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John le Carre

(Note: this article was originally published in two parts on www.lastwordblog.blogspot.com.)

An obvious fact: Great literature connects the particular with the universal, the banal with the sublime, the mortal with the transcendent. The alchemy of fiction bridges little, familiar things with big, awesome things.

Without thematic transcendence, Moby Dick would just be an extremely long story about a crazy guy trying kill a whale. And without the particulars of Ahab, Starbuck, Ishmael, the Pequod, etc. it would have just been a tortuous, poetical, inscrutable essay on Fate and Mortality and, uh, stuff: half Schopenhauer, half Walt Whitman: the most turgid BS conceivable. Or take Demons (aka The Possessed): like a grown-up version of Ayn Rand, Dostoevsky's characters explicitly discuss the very themes (i.e. Atheism, Justice, Faith, etc.) for which they themselves are metaphors. Lose the themes, and the story becomes an espionage soap opera; lose the plot and characters, and the story become a long, pompous essay.

Or consider Camus' The Plague: it's all very well for him to write in his essay The Rebel that "When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself..." But this cannot convey the moral authority with which Dr. Rieux, physician to the plague-ridden town of Oran, states:

There's no question of heroism in all of this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is--common decency...[I]n my case I know that it consists in doing my job.

For a Europe still in shock at the atrocities of the second World War (not to mention a present that's got plenty of its own atrocities), the struggles of Dr. Rieux and the townfolk of Oran provide an all-too-apt metaphor for the human situation. And we know--because The Plague and The Rebel are essentially the same book, except that one's fiction and one's an essay--that Camus simply couldn't get at the big issues of Meaning and Death and Solidarity in the same way without the slippery, associative logic of fiction.

This is how fiction tricks us: by connecting the particular to the universal (in the same way that, say, a photograph can connect a small object in the foreground to a large landscape in the background), meaning is created.

So it is with le Carre's spy stories. Sure, his plots are wound as tight as Swiss watches. Sure, questions introduced in the first chapters get pulled higher and higher, dangling over the reader's head, tantalizing. And, yes, sure: any spy story with nighttime pistols, tragic loves, and Shakespearean power struggles is surely somewhat escapist. Pudgy, old, meditative George Smiley may not be the anti-James-Bond so much as the believable James Bond, in the same way that 'realistic' films like Black Hawk Down and Gettysburg seduce the audience into the fantasy of Glorious War more effectively than GI Joe or Red Dawn precisely because of their putative accuracy. As the audacity of a protagonist's adventures decreases, their plausibility increases.

Still.

Still, I tell you this: le Carre is a writer for the ages. Le Carre is our Joseph Conrad.

In Lord Jim, for instance, themes of guilt, redemption, courage and chance are woven into the story of the titular Jim, whose moment of youthful weakness haunts him to the ends of the Earth. When we see Jim sweating at his trial, or hopefully growing into the hero he wishes to be, or caught between the story of who he was and the story of who he's become, we see a discussion of big, important questions about how to live as a human being, a discussion that isn't reducible to an expository essay. And this discussion is built up within a straightforward adventure story: a dashing hero fights natives and pirates in an exotic locale. Conrad uses the nautical adventure story as the scaffold on which he builds his high-fallutin' Literature.

Le Carre does the same with spy stories. In Tinker we see a straightforward plot unfold from a simple premise: there's a mole in the highest echelons of British intelligence, and a retired genius quietly returns to give chase. Let's be clear: this is the same plot as the first Mission: Impossible film. This plot could not be more recognizable.

And yet in le Carre's hands, it sheds gold: Percy Alleline and his cabal of usurpers echo Julius Caesar's Brutus and his senators; the mole, orphaned by his own society, a latter-day Richard III ("...since I cannot prove a lover, to entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain..."); the inscrutable Karla, lord of Soviet intelligence, fascinates with his 'immoderate fanaticism' and seemingly-bottomless resources.

And George Smiley, le Carre's best-known protagonist, sniffing around the circumstances of Control's ouster like an unsexy Hamlet. Smiley, to my eye, is basically a contemporary moral hero: in the amoral world of Cold War espionage, he fumbles through, trying to do what's necessary or, failing that, to at least not make things worse. See this scene in which he lies in wait for the mole he's hunting:

Like an actor, he had a sense of approaching anti-climax before the curtain went up, a sense of great things dwindling to a small, mean end; as death itself seemed small and mean to him after the struggles of his life. He had no sense of conquest that he knew of. His thoughts, as often when he was afraid, concerned people. He had no theories or judgements [sic] in particular. He simply wondered how everyone would be affected; and he felt responsible.

Smiley's good at exactly one thing, and that's his Zen-like approach to intelligence. Everything else in his life--from his marriage to his retirement to the simplest social meetings--is a mess. Yet for all that, he accomplishes much more than his peers--mostly because he doesn't make things worse. Slowly, methodically plodding through his work, courteous to a fault, without a vindictive bone in his body, Smiley strives to understand. Only then does he act.

If that's not moral, I don't know what is.

Book Review Pt. 2: How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen

Note: this was originally published at www.lastwordblog.blogspot.com.

An Overview of How to Be Alone

1) 'A Word About This Book'
Authors' prefaces are nigh upon universally self-indulgent; it's hard not to masturbatory and derivative be when you're writing about your own writing. If the original writing was well-done in the first place, what more could there be to say? So Franzen's introduction is not the best piece in this collection. That said, it's interesting (in a Behind the Scenes EXCLUSIVE! kinda way) to hear his straightforward lament of being a novelist in a world where novels are obsolete and irrelevant, where interviewers "hadn't read the essay, and...the few who had read it seemed to have mis-understood it," and where "Americans seem to be asking even fewer questions about their government today [circa 2002] than in 1991."

2) 'My Father's Brain'

Book Review: Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carre

John le Carre's been a bestselling author for twice as long as I've been alive. By itself, that doesn't mean much: Michael Crichton, whose novels are marginally more intellectually stimulating than repeated punches to the head, published the breakout-hit The Andromedea Strain in 1969, just six years after le Carre's career-establishing bestseller The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Popularity is no guarantee of quality.

But neither does popularity preclude it. (Witness JK Rowling, William Shakespeare, and Salmon Rushdie.) While it's easy to presume le Carre's work to be standard 'page-turner' pulp like John Grisham or Dan Brown--in which cardboard characters and shallow cliches are hitched to a fast-moving plot--the fact is that his novels are of a different order than the rest of the bestselling thrillers he's shelved with. Le Carre, above all, is a master of psychological motivation: his spy stories show us characters whose talent at dissembling wreaks dysfunction on the rest of their lives. His spymaster George Smiley is the anti-James Bond: a humble, thoughtful, slow-moving investigator whose success at espionage is matched only by his incompetence at real life.

Le Carre is also one of our best social prophets.

Book Review Pt. 1: How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen

Note: originally published at www.lastwordblog.blogspot.com.

WARNING: PLOT SPOILERS (a bit).

Jonathan Franzen has been accused of exorbitant grumpitude, for example here (and here and here and sort-of here too). One gets the idea that he just sort of crouches in his artist's garret, chainsmoking and brainstorming lists of what's wrong with the world, muttering and spitting on cats like that guy in Camus' The Plague.

Book Review: Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

Once upon a time, in the sixties, there was this group of male actors called the "Rat Pack" because they were manly and roguish and did caper films. Then, once upon a time in the eighties, there was this group of young actors called the "Brat Pack" who made teen movies. Critics who remembered the "Rat Pack" of their own youth presumably 1) lacked the originality to come up with a non-derivative title for this group, and 2) liked the patronizing way "Brat Pack" contrasted the young, whiny 80s stars against the old, tough 60s stars. Finally, once upon a time in the slightly later eighties, an article in The Village Voice called a couple of young writers "the literary Brat Pack" and the name caught on.

One of these authors was Brett Easton Ellis, who at the time had published Less Than Zero (about being young, hopeless, beautiful, sexed, and coke-addled) and went on to write one of the most important and controversial novels of the nineties, American Psycho. (I review American Psycho here.)

PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD. Another was Jay McInerney, who'd written Bright Lights, Big City. It's the story of a young, educated writer struggling to come to terms with--we eventually discover--spousal abandonment. This struggle, plus some unresolved stuff with his family, which complements the wife-thing nicely, constitutes the emotional core of the story.

Review: The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. LeGuin

If you've read my review of LeGuin's Planet of Exile, then you already know how I feel about this book because you already know how I feel about all of LeGuin's work: it's uniformly smart, sometimes brilliant, always entertaining. Lathe just brings in more evidence in favor of this bias.

In the best tradition of sci-fi, the book begins by asking, What if X happened?--in this case, What if one man's dreams changed reality? This single element leads to dramatic outcomes: after George Orr realizes that his dreams change the substance of reality (but no one other than him notices), he submits to therapy in order to bring himself under control. But when his therapist discovers the power at hand, Dr. Haber decides to play God: he uses Orr's dreams to 'improve' reality.

If you have much background in sci-fi, you'll recognize this as the most basic and venerable plot-device in the genre. For instance: in Arthur C. Clarke's Rama, this was, What if an alien spacecraft passed near Earth? In Flowers for Algernon, it was, What if we could artificially raise someone's IQ? In Asimov's I, Robot, it was, What if we built conscious robot slaves, governed by three rules?

This What If plot-device is the sort of sci-fi corollary to the MacGuffins of mystery-thrillers. With a MacGuffin, several characters all compete to get control of the same object (a suitcase full of gold, a bomb, a diamond, etc.). This competition drives the plot. In What If sci-fi stories, the development of a hypothetical situation drives the plot; the story essentially consists of the author walking us through the implications of her What If.

But sci-fi, as Alan Moore has said, is never really about the future (or the distant past, or the alternate universe, or whatever). With sci-fi and fantasy, you're always writing about our world, right now. The subtext is relevant, however weird and distant the story itself may be. What sci-fi and fantasy elements give you is a bit of elbow room, some space to make the familiar seem unfamiliar to your readers (case in point: Star Trek's 'A Private Little War,' in which American involvement in the Vietnam war gets disguised as a story about Federation and Klingon involvement in a primitive planet's war). This gives the reader a chance to think in new ways, instead of automatically deferring to what they already opine.

Lathe has both the What If-plot and the subtextual-commentary down pat: the worlds through which Orr's power leads are all disturbingly plausible (starting with an overpopulated, resource-strapped planet and leading to a world where having cancer is grounds to be arrested). We can recognize our own possible futures in the worlds Orr creates.

The third and perhaps most important level on which Lathe works is that of a moral tale. Beyond a clever plot, beyond social commentary, The Lathe of Heaven is portrayal of two human tendencies in combat over how to use power. Orr never asked for the power to change reality, and his agenda throughout the novel is simply to refrain from causing harm. He strives for balance and internal control. Dr. Haber, on the other hand, scarcely even believes in subjectivity, much less cosmic balance: for him, concrete improvement in the world is what counts. He is sanctimonious hubris personified:

"To a better world!" Dr. Haber said, raising his glass to his creation, and finished his whisky in a lingering, savoring swallow.

When science fiction is working at the highest level, it consists of interesting, entertaining stories which trick the reader into thinking about 1) the contemporary, political world in which they live, and 2) timeless, human questions about stuff like love and power and death. LeGuin consistently accomplishes all of these goals. And the moral message in all of her work is consistently concerned with issues of balance, humility, and inner (dare I say 'spiritual'?) health or integrity. In an age when we relate to our tools in the way that ancients related to Fate, this message is profoundly relevant.

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The Man Behind Dave Robicheaux James Lee Burke talks about violence, writing, littering, alcoholism, liberalism and bestsellers.

An awesome article/interview from 2002 my mother dug up, thanks Ma!

___________________

June 5, 2002

James Lee Burke has seen and heard enough to fill a book. Actually, make that 22 books.

Burke is best known for his novels featuring Dave Robicheaux, an Iberia Parish detective who sees the world in black and white, a man who is haunted at times by his own alcoholism and his desire to do right in a world ruled by insanity.

At 65 years old, Burke is a demure man with small, penetrating eyes and a disarming smile. His laughter sounds as if it’s rattling itself free from his bones. There are times he laughs so hard it ends in a coughing fit.

He writes about man’s depravity and his grace, his beauty and his vulgarity. His novels have engaged millions of readers all over the world, propelling him to the top of The New York Times’ bestseller list. But for the man who lives in New Iberia, with a second home in Missoula, Mont., life hasn’t always been a gravy train. The ride to the top has been riddled with detours and unexpected delays.

The Times recently sat down with Burke at his home along the banks of Bayou Teche. He was preparing for a national book tour in support of his latest Robicheaux novel, Jolie Blon’s Bounce. In his office, bathed in sunlight filtered through an oak tree outside of his bay window, he gave some insight into the man behind Dave Robicheaux.

Before drawing any comparisons between Robicheaux and himself, Burke points out the differences between the two men. He says of Robicheaux, “The character defects are mine, none of the qualities.”

He laughs so hard he’s headed for a coughing fit.

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