This book has a lot of reasons not to like it. The writing has all the charm of a tax audit, and it constantly adopts that horribly artificial ‘and nobody would have believed what was going to happen later’ tone that tries inject tension into real stories as a way of substituting charisma. There’s a whole genre of these kind of books that seem to want you to feel they’re paced like a TV show with regular cliffhangers and I find that style intensely irritating. I was irritated a lot by the Radium Girls.
But my word, what an astonishing and genuinely upsetting story. It’s the tale of how, in the pursuit of the profit to be made from luminous clock faces, over fifty women ended up being afflicted with radiation poisoning. The work was largely hand-painted, and the women working for the United States Radium Company were given guidance that – in order to keep paint-brushes at a sharp point – they should repoint the brushes regularly with their lips. The company knew, because they always do, how dangerous the radium was. They still fought the women to an absolute standstill – often with the full support of the legal system – when it came to compensation for the horrendous injuries they had afflicted. The stories of the court battles that followed the radiation poisoning are harrowing. Refusing to publicly acknowledge their own complicity, doctors were pressured to diagnose syphilis rather than a more honest – and potentially legally damaging – condition. After all, who would go to bat for sexually promiscuous women in the 1920s?
I would have liked this story to have been told by a better writer, but I still thoroughly recommend this enraging book to anyone who – somehow – still needs evidence as to how the working class have always been the raw fodder of capitalism – to be exploited and abandoned in the service of extraordinary profits.
The Searcher
This book introduced me to Tana French, and since then she has become one of my favourite authors.
I read a lot of books – that’s probably obvious to you – and I enjoy well-written books. A clever turn of phrase can propel me past a lot of minor concerns. It is rare however that I stop reading to go back to appreciate once more a passage of writing. And yet I did that constantly with The Searcher. I’d finish a paragraph and think, ‘Nope – can’t just let that skip past. Gotta read that beauty again’. I have read a fair amount of Tana French since, and while I think she is a wonderful writer I will say that I think The Searcher is the most transporting in those terms. It’s just gorgeous.
Given that this is a crime mystery, there’s a hard-limit to what I feel I can and should say about it. But the basics – Cal Hooper is a retired policeman, disillusioned by his time in Chicago, who has decided to see out his remaining years in rural Ireland. Although not looking to freelance as a private detective, he is convinced by a young kid to investigate the disappearance of an older sibling. This brings him directly into conflict with the locals, who already suspicious of the outsider, find his meddling to violate a number of hidden codes of rural conduct.
That’s all I’ll say, but I loved this book – it’s so culturally insightful and pragmatic in its morality. It ties together themes of belonging and responsibility into a taut, thoughtful tale of the meaning of justice. While I think it doesn’t dig into these themes quite deeply enough, it was certainly enough to make me what I suspect will be a lifelong fan of Tana French. I haven’t read a bad book from her yet.
Solutions and Other Problems
Allie Brosh is probably the funniest blogger that I have ever encountered. She was the author behind the truly wonderful site Hyperbole and a Half for the period between 2009 and 2013, at which point the blog was largely left to go fallow as she battled with what were obviously some genuinely devastating life changes. Her first book (also named Hyperbole and a Half) made me laugh so hard that I’d have to stop reading just to stop the pages from getting too wet. From tears, I mean. It’s a treasure of a book.
Solutions and Other Problems is her second book and it is also a treasure, but in a very different way. Yes, it has sections that moved me to tears of laughter but it’s also a lot darker. It’s a more adult meditation on loss and coming to terms with tragedy. I’d describe it as ‘poignant in all the wrong places’ because it’s not structured like a typical book of its type. The poignancy comes in from unexpected directions with unexpected ferocity. The laughs come at you with an uncomfortable and weird rhythm. It’s a book that leaves you feeling off-kilter a lot of the time as you lurch from one tonal shift to another.
The thing is – I don’t get the impression any of that is accidental. It’s actually a masterful book in making you feel things. A lot of the time when reading I just wanted to wrap my arms around her and tell her that, despite it all, everything was going to be all right. And then she’d turn around and whip a hilarious aside my way that left me briefly stunned before I burst into laughter.
If you were intrigued by her work, I’d probably say ‘Start off with her first book’. Or even just catch up on her blog. There’s an earnest intensity here that may not exactly harmonise with your expectations if you go by the art alone. Give yourself a bit of time to acclimate yourself to her work, but definitely do take the opportunity if you can.
The Dresden Files, Book One: Storm Front
I went into this with no real expectations. I knew it was an extremely popular series of books focused around a kind of freelance Consulting Wizard, but that’s all I knew. It was an absolute delight then to find a witty, wise and stylish urban fantasy told in the style of a piece of Detective Noir pulp fiction. It turns out that kind of thing is entirely My Jam.
As with any initial entry into an eventual franchise, it takes a bit of time to find its feet. I don’t think it’s entirely successful at finding a consistent tone between sardonic humour and grimdark modern mythology. Aside from Harry Dresden himself it draws its characters with shallow strokes. It relies somewhat heavily on cliche and stereotype. In many respects it reminds me of the first Discworld book. Colour of Magic had a similar thing where it relied heavily on parody but had sufficient backbone that you could see something of real consequence lurking underneath the surface. The more I read, the more I found the promise in the pages to be compelling. I don’t think this is an outstanding novel – I think it’s very good, on the whole – but I think it hints at outstanding things to come.
Stephen King once said that writing a book was like uncovering a skeleton – that you gently brushed away the dirt and dust until you finally realised what it is you’ve revealed. I think what’s been uncovered here is a little misshapen – perhaps comprised of several rough beasts that were smashed into each other by the slow accumulation of centuries. But I think once the work has been done to properly deconstruct them there will be something special that emerges as a result.
I hope so, anyway. I thought the same thing about the Laundry Files and found that two books from that series was more than plenty for me. I liked Storm Front enough to blow into the next book, but I haven’t fallen in love with the series yet.
The Testaments
If the Handmaid’s Tale was unending bleakness (and by and large, it was) the Testaments is cautiously optimistic – a paean to the possibility of change even in the darkest scenarios. It digs more deeply into the context of Gilead revealing even darker contours in its politics. It many ways it reads like an expose – which, in fact, is an entirely intentional part of its framing. The secret interior lives of those in power are a big part of the narrative. As are the private recriminations and regrets of those who find themselves forced to conform to a perception wildly at odds with their inclinations. Aunt Lydia, a major antagonist in the Handmaid’s Tale, is rendered in more subtle shades here. She’s less cartoonish, more sophisticated, and yet not meaningfully more likeable. Her sins remain, but her redemption is more within reach than might have been expected from Offred’s original story. She’s both collaborator and conspirator, trying to balance self-preservation against the downfall of the regime. She’s tyrant and informer, and the assumed author of The Testaments, which would eventually become archaeological records much disputed and discussed in the aftermath of its story. We get to see a much wider cross-section of society here – fading Commanders, budding wives and aunts, covert children and more. These narratives flesh out what sometimes felt like a thin context in the original book.
Margaret Atwood, of course, writes beautifully but returning to a book like the Handmaid’s Tale fifteen years after its publication is always a risky endeavour. Sure, the political context of the time may have created a pressing need for her to get it out there but we’ve managed for a long time without a sequel. The danger is in the production of something that, in the end, feels unnecessary. And, to be honest, that’s kind of how the book felt to me – worthwhile, genuinely engaging, narratively tight and well-observed in its characters… but ultimately something that served to extend a story that felt finished. The Handmaid’s Tale is ominous. Unremitting. Bleak. The Testaments adds in a dose of cheer, of light, and of hope. Maybe that’s what was needed, but I don’t know – as much as I enjoyed the book (and I really did) – I’m not sure the world of Gilead is enriched by its publication.
The Vexed Generation
Oh boy.
I loved the first Magic 2.0 book. And I really enjoyed the second one. And from that point on each subsequent book has been a little more disappointing than the last. The Vexed Generation accomplishes the feat of pulling the series out of a nose-dive, but all it does is arrest the fall. It doesn’t gain much in the way of altitude.
For those that may not have seen earlier discussions of the series, the basic premise is that the main characters have all found a mysterious computer file, the alteration of which has impact on the real world. Think of it like getting access to the developer cheat console for life. They use this access to make themselves great wizards, witches and sorcerers and the books chart their subsequent misadventures.
It’s a really strong premise, let down over time by the fact that genuine peril is almost impossible to convincingly evoke when everyone has access to God Mode. Any attempts to add a sense of danger to the hijinks inevitably either draws from a repetitious well or comes across as preposterously unconvincing. All the characters can travel through time, halt the aging process, teleport at will, maintain an immunity against damage and harmful effects, etc, etc. Everyone is Superman – endlessly competent – but without the balancing factor of Kryptonite.
With all of that, ‘risk’ is a difficult thing to manifest. Everything as a result feels a little too… even. Things happen, but it’s always hard as a reader to care very much because all danger is illusory. Sure, that’s true in many books in a long running series but most of them do a better job of hiding the Deus Ex Machina. It even feels at this point like the author doesn’t care very much. The jokes aren’t funny. The story isn’t engaging. The stakes are very low. The characters aren’t well-defined and exhibit almost zero growth or development. Perhaps fittingly for a book that implicity argues that all consciousness is simulated, everyone behaves like a badly developed NPC in a low-budget roleplaying game. It reminds me a lot actually of the Long Earth series of books – an amazing premise squandered by the fact that each following book feels like it was written out of obligation rather than a sincere need to tell a story. It comes across, to me at least, like each of the last few Magic 2,0 books has been written for no grander motive than ‘people will buy this’.
I think The Vexed Generation is the last of these books I’m going to read, unless I hear very convincing testimony that a follow-up is actually worth bothering with.
Woke Inc
This suffers deeply in comparison to the book I reviewed a few months ago (Woke Racism). It covers much of the same territory, although it spends a lot more time talking about the inauthenticity of ‘woke capitalism’ and a lot less time talking about woke racism. That’s understandable given the differing foci of the two authors. But the problem is, I guess, that Woke Inc is preaching a message that is all too familiar. We all know corporations don’t have beliefs. We all know they don the cloak of progressivism because of the business advantages it brings. I doubt many people genuinely believe that corporations are trying to do good in the world. Again, it’s tribal – people want to see the corporations they support being ‘on their side’, they care less about whether or not those corporations do good. We know that every decent thing a corporation does is offset by a hundred shitty things. The book’s main argument is that corporations are, by a long stretch, the worst vehicles by which to push social change. That it is the role of government to set the acceptable limits of society, and that corporations distort the landscape by CEO whim. All very familiar.
But that’s not to say the book doesn’t have anything interesting to say. It is unashamedly pro-Capitalism in its pure form – that is to say, corporations as mechanisms for generating profit with no pro-social incentive. It’s not wholly convincing in that frame, but it’s more convincing than you might think. The book makes a cogent, albeit not entirely persuasive argument, that corporations enforcing social policy is a massive overreach when you consider what a corporation is supposed to be. The author notes that the general liability shield that goes with a corporation is being misused when C-Suite executives use it as a way to do risk-free social advocacy. I was largely unmoved by the argument that corporations should pursue profit to the exclusion of all things. I was more moved by the argument that social activism should not be covered by the general corporate exemption for litigation.
So, it’s a book that has something to say, but really the thing that irks me the most about it is that the reason I’m unconvinced is that the book fails to really cohere into a meaningful thesis. It’s a scattergun approach that takes potshots at the cynicism of progressive capitalism. At the end of it you’re wondering, as the reader, how point A connects to conclusion B. It reads, in other worlds, like a first draft of a student thesis. These usually make sense when you take each thing in isolation, but the mark of a coherent piece of work is that the reader is never in any doubt as to how each discussion point informs and addresses the research question. I think with a diligent rewrite this book could offer a strong contribution to the discussion around capitalism and performative social justice. In its current form, it’s too much of a rambling, disjointed rant.
Woke Racism
Oh boy, this book rubbed me up the wrong way when I started reading it. As you all probably know by now, I like to read books from all perspectives. It’s how you attain an informed opinion. It doesn’t make you popular with devotees of one ideology or another, but one of the biggest problems of our time is polarization. I used to do this back in the day as a ‘know your enemy’ kind of thing, but now I’m less inclined to think of the ‘other side’ as the enemy.
Anyway, this is the kind of book that owning marks you out as a heretic if you profess to being part of the left, because John McWhorter commits one of the greatest crimes of modern identity politics. He’s a black man who doesn’t align with left ideology. He devotes a considerable section of the start of the book to the idea that he’s an Uncle Tom, or a race traitor, or ‘not Black enough’. And that’s what I didn’t like about it from the start – that it’s an angry introduction to a book I am already predisposed to dismiss because of my own political biases.
But I kept going, because underneath his often overly defensive denigration of critics, there’s an obvious hurt running through it. But more than a hurt, there’s a righteous indignation that modern Woke ideology is, at its heart, profoundly racist while professing to be the opposite. And you know what? I think he’s right. And more than that, I think once you get past the off-putting introduction he makes a very coherent, very credible case for it.
But really that’s not what’s most interesting about the book – it’s that it delves into territory I’ve been mentally exploring for a while. It’s not just that extreme Wokeism is racist, but rather it’s now ossified to the point of a religion. It has its secret shibboleths. It has its professions of original sin. It has a catechism to which adherents must cleave. It has its rituals and edifices. It has its prophets and priests. It has its apostles. And it has, at its heart, an absolute loathing for intellectualism and argument. That ‘woke thought’ is a crowd-sourced secular religion is not a new argument – BJ Campbell made that claim back in 2018 – but it’s expressed here with the clarity of a credible intellectual who forensically builds the case with well chosen rhetoric and evidence.
But note here what’s being said – it’s not that progressivism is a cult, or that left-leaning doctrine is a religion. McWhorter is explicitly taking aim at the far-left extremists who have poisoned so much online discourse behind an unconvincing façade of inclusion. The people who have made my job so much harder because of their insincere appropriation of laudable causes they can stitch onto their personas like Scout badges. Those that want all of the recognition without doing any of the work. And the ones that have made questioning and compromise impossible because of the unyielding extremism at the core of their movement. Whether we’re talking about the far-right or the far-left, we should be avoiding all engagements with zealots.
In the end this isn’t a book that’s right wing, even though you’d expect it given the title. It’s a book that’s, if anything, profoundly centrist with a core philosophy of non-engagement with intellectual terrorists. And that, of course, is the greatest of all sins because extremists don’t want moderate viewpoints. Collateral damage and escalation are not unfortunate side-effects of the munitions deployed in the culture war. They’re the main goal of the process. It’s the Internet of Beefs all the way down, as it always is.
Woke Racism is well worth reading. Don’t be fooled by the smokescreen of rage put up by those trying to set civil discourse alight.
It’s okay, don’t worry – next month I’ll be reviewing a more obviously ‘lefty’ book!