Tag Archives: historical fiction

Cryptonomicon

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This review is somewhere between days and weeks late; I just haven’t simultaneously felt like writing anything and had time to. I’m not entirely clear on whether that confluence of events has in fact occurred now, but I pretty much have to get over the hump, right? The sad part is, I absolutely adored Cryptonomicon. I mean, I’ve heard of Neal Stephenson and Snow Crash years since, but I never got around to reading it because I could never get into Gibson, and that made me think I wasn’t into cyberpunk. The jury is out on that question, I guess, as to my way of thinking Cryptonomicon doesn’t really qualify as cyberpunk, at least not the way I understand it.

That said, I’m not really sure how to classify it, except to say that the lone Half-Price Books I found that had shelved most of Stephenson’s books under general fiction instead of sci-fi/fantasy was clearly the correct one. It’s a book about cryptography from the early days of World War II up through modern times, where modern works out to mid ’90s, and a book about the unexpected interrelationships between a couple of families during the same span. The viewpoint characters are all either endearing or at least interesting, as are a majority of the remaining characters. The villains of the piece are not so much written ham-handedly as we are given almost no insight into their motivations at all. In a way that’s a complaint, but for the most part the book wasn’t really about bad guys, so it’s not much of one. Along with the story, which is engagingly written in exceptionally good prose, Stephenson spends a lot of time explaining about advanced mathematical concepts (well, not actually advanced, but advanced for the vast teeming majority of people who will read the book), statistics, cryptography, and the internet. While the internet is pretty much my field, most of the remaining topics are not. I therefore feel that I’m sufficiently lay of a person on those other topics to say he does a good job of explaining every point he’s trying to get across in such a way that a layperson can follow it pretty easily. Which is the kind of thing I mean when I say it’s not really cyberpunk. It’s in no way so dense that you have to know a pile of things to even wade through it, and anyway the setting is neither futuristic nor dystopian, even though there are hints of that potential for the future. Since those hints also exist in real life, I don’t think that counts as very cyberpunkish either.

And I continue to have trouble classifying it, despite odds and ends of thumbnail sketching I’ve already done. There’s World War II, of course. Lots of philosophy. A treasure hunt. Future directions that the internet can and probably should take, if it hopes to remain the repository of free information that it is now for most people around the world. More than one love story. A compelling view of undiagnosed mental disorders in people who, through luck and circumstance, end up being more or less functional in the world. A completely incomprehensible (in more than one way) island of people off the coast of Britain. Counter-counter-spying techniques. There’s just a pile of things going on, is what I’m saying. As there should be, with over 1100 paperback pages.

Mostly, though, I’m a little annoyed that nobody insisted I read this sooner, ’cause, wow.

The Historian

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It has taken me, wow, over a month to read a book. It was a big book, yes. But the real issue was the moving. I am astonished, nevertheless. The next few should be faster, though I’m still pretty sure I won’t reach fifty for the year. (For reference, I’m at … huh. I’m at forty, with two more partials in the works. (Or forty-one and three more, if you count a couple of novel sized and quality fan fictions I’ve read over the past month. I haven’t yet decided whether to review them or not.) So maybe I’ll reach fifty after all. Who knew?) But I’m done moving, and I’ve finally made good unpacking progress, so even though it will still eat my time, it won’t be nearly as bad anymore, and that means that I’m going to stop using it as a crutch. Yay!

Anyway, there’s this book, The Historian, and I totally judged it by its cover. I was in Half-Price Books and there were stacks of it sitting at the end of a row. Cool name, right section, I looked at the back cover and read the line, “My dear and unfortunate successor,” and I was convinced it was the book for me. Then I didn’t read it for a while, because that’s almost always what happens. Then I finally did, and read it for so long that a Stephen King book has been out for weeks, completely untouched by me. That’s a weird feeling. Be that as it may, though, the point is I read it, and discovered that it kind of was the book for me after all.

A girl and her diplomat father are living in Cold War Europe, and one day she accidentally discovers some of his private papers. Completely forgivably, considering the above-referenced opening line of the letter she found, she reads through them to discover that her father has a past that pre-dates his current state department career. Over weeks and months he gradually unfolds to her a history of himself and his grad school adviser that hints, nay implies, nay outright states that they were on the trail of vampires and possibly even Dracula himself in the years before she was born. And then one day, her father disappears.

Despite an almost entirely fictional tale, a lot of historical research went into the book, and it shows. Europe in the late 15th and mid 20th century alike is a vibrant place, full of knowledgable allies and dastardly foes. And that’s without even paying heed to the vampires. I’ve reached the point in my life where there are some actual European and American histories that I ought to read, because I’d find them nearly as fascinating as I do the ubiquitous fiction I surround myself with. But until I get up the gumption to do research and pick and choose what books have the highest quality (that is to say, ask some people), it’s nice to know that there are reasonably solid history books out there masquerading as fiction to trick me into learning things.

As far as the fiction part, it was solidly okay. Good story. Mid-book pacing problem that either eventually resolved itself or I eventually got used to. Compelling characters and a mystery that was doled out entertainingly. The biggest single problem was just how anti-climactic the climax was, especially relative to the build-up. In a way, though, the subject matter made it a really difficult task, so I can forgive that. As I said, the rest of the book was solid, and that makes the anti-climactivity of a nearly inevitable conclusion fairly forgivable.

Freedom and Necessity

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I think I may be getting bad at this. At least, lately I’ve been at a loss for descriptive words. In this case, my lack is for how to describe Freedom and Necessity, other than to say I liked it. I did, unquestionably, despite being of an insufficiently philosophic mind (or at the least insufficiently grounded in the basics of philosophic thought) to understand all of the historical nuances of the debates around Hegelian logic. …see, and this is exactly what I mean. Although Brust is very good at writing books that make me feel inadequate to fully appreciate them, that’s no excuse for me to make them sound like dry treatises with dense and well-disguised themes when I could as easily and far more approvingly describe them as rousing tales of adventure and skullduggery. So, y’know, bad. At this. (Also, I’m disregarding Emma Bull’s contribution to my enjoyment, but that is only because I’ve read nothing else by her and as a result can’t really put together in my head what that contribution was.)

So, I grabbed this book because of how Steven Brust is one of my buy on sight authors, these days. He is right to be, because of how everything I’ve read of his has a great authorial voice, humor that makes me laugh out loud[1], and plots that, though sometimes dense, always seem to hinge on exciting matters of life and death (and on occasion far more grave) that are guaranteed suck me in. As you might expect, this was just such a book.

Set in 1849-1850 England, this epistolary novel follows the loves and politics of a family that has just been struck by tragedy in the form of drowned James Cobham. Except that, two months later, he sends a letter to his cousin Richard informing that he is alive and without memory of his recent past. From there, the story quickly branches out to the addressing of that conundrum and a number of other family mysteries, the struggle between the proletariat and its oppressive masters, affairs of state, a magical conspiracy, blossoming love, and of course murder most foul. Allowing one of the characters eidetic memory combined with a penchant for writing letters long enough dam the Thames was perhaps overly transparent of the authors, but the unique and entertaining voices of all four main characters (one of whom cannot end a sentence to save her life) more than made up for that lone violation of my suspension of disbelief.

[1] I’ll admit here that I might seem to some people to laugh easily; to those people I would say that in fact I have a highly refined sense of humor, but choose to surround myself with people and things that activate it. So there.