The Headboard Reviews - 2012

The Search for Modern China
Jonathan D. Spence

It's always interesting to go back and read books that touch on current affairs from a generation ago to see how well they managed to capture the real meaning of what was going on. Jonathan Spence's studious (if a little dry) history of modern China ends with the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and leaves us with the country at a crossroad. Surprisingly, the party's bet that dramatic economic growth and technological transformation could be achieved without fundamental political change has thus far turned out to be a winner. Thus far.

The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics
Ed. by David Kendall

Readers whose only acquaintance with zombie comics has come through Robert Kirkman's overrated Walking Dead series are well advised to pick up this eclectic collection. Standouts include Shepherd and Boney's Dead Eyes Open, Indio's "Might of the Living Dead" (a terrific, if brief, critical analysis of all things zombie), and Scott Hampton's genuinely spooky adaptation of "Pigeons from Hell." There are a few clunkers in the mix, and a couple of artists are overrepresented (one piece by Askold Akishin would have been enough), but this is an anthology that nicely showcases the genre's aesthetic, dramatic and thematic range.

The World: A Beginner's Guide
Göran Therborn

It's quite a feat for an inelegantly written book loaded with facts and statistics to be this interesting, but Therborn's "sociocultural geology" and survey of today's world had me making mental notes throughout. A particularly salient point that I took away was the reassertion of class over nationality as the prime determining factor in contemporary global lifeways - reversing a trend that began in the post-industrialized rupture of the world into developed and developing countries. Deindustrialization, however, has also led to the political neutering of the working class and the poor. In a brief conclusion that looks ahead to where we're heading Therborn suggests the need for a world structured very differently, but the prognosis he delivers is not very hopeful.

Trent's Last Case
E. C. Bentley

What a curious book: both Trent's first (published) case and his last; a pioneering work that inaugurated the Golden Age of detective fiction with an archetypal English country house mystery as well as a send-up of the same. My hunch is that Bentley meant the whole thing, including the really good parts (like the opening chapter), as a joke. And just how did he want us to read the ending? Surely another revelation awaits. If I were Trent I wouldn't sleep too soundly on my honeymoon. 

1492: The Year the World Began
Felipe Fernández-Armesto

These overstated subtitles have become a joke in publishing circles, and it's to his credit that while he thinks 1492 was a pivotal year in world history Felipe Fernández-Armesto never tries to argue that it was the year the world began. In fact, this is a book that really says very little that is new. The major event of 1492 remains the inauguration of the Columbian exchange, with the expansion of European empire being the next big thing waiting in the wings. An attempt is made to provide a global perspective, but Europe is still the main focus. Meanwhile, wherever some revision is attempted - for example, in downplaying the Renaissance and Reformation, or trying to explain the real reason the Americas fell so quickly to the conquistadores - I remained unpersuaded. A book obviously aimed at general readers, who are advised to stay alert to any special pleading.

Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People
Douglas Coupland and Graham Roumieu

I don't know why the dustjacket for this book has pictures of children leaking from every orifice - one boy has shit his pants while another is pissing himself, a girl is crying, and a third boy is disgorging a Niagara of vomit - when this isn't a motif worked into any of the stories. Maybe the publishers were just trying to make the point that while this is a book that is inappropriate for young people, it is wholly appropriate for hip older readers who like to think they're smarter than the average fifth-grader. More curious than risky, but the illustrations by Graham Roumieu are pretty good.

The Map and the Territory
Michel Houellebecq

French author Michel Houellebecq is in danger of losing his reputation as a controversialist with this relatively tame story of an artist, Jed Martin, who becomes rich and famous by photographing road maps and painting celebrities, like Michel Houellebecq. Themes such as the anti-social effect of fabulous, casually acquired wealth and the dismal nature of the human condition are again projected fancifully into the future. And of course both Jed Martin and the character of Michel Houellebecq are mouthpieces for the author's own cynical point of view, which we thus get in stereo. Conventionally unconventional, it doesn't break any new ground but still makes for a good read. One gets a sense, however, that Houellebecq's career trajectory is starting to mirror Bret Easton Ellis's a bit too closely.

Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History
Robert Hughes

The outspoken and opinionated culture critic and art historian Robert Hughes takes on his biggest subject yet in this lively biography of the Eternal City. In fact the subject is a little too big to fit into such a book, especially as it often drifts away from Hughes's strengths (talking about art) and into more general discussions of Italian politics. The chapters on the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation are the strongest, while those on the Roman Empire skim too quickly over well-trodden ground. The book ends with a jaded and curmudgeonly look at the degraded present scene (and this is before the economic collapse and fall of Berlusconi!), but it's still a love letter to a city whose epic history describes "an enormous concretion of human glory and human error."

The Second Crusade
Jonathan Phillips

The most disastrous of the crusades was the first, which ended, shockingly, in the sack of Jerusalem in 1099. The result would be the establishment of the Latin states of Outremer, constantly in need of defending, and a medieval cult of a "Greatest Generation" that later crusaders would be driven to emulate. In short: more crusading. The second crusade (in the normal way of reckoning these things) was a fiasco, its only real success (from the Christian point of view) being the by-the-way capture of Lisbon. Why they kept at it for another hundred and fifty years is hard to fathom today. It seems that one of the lessons of history is that no one learns from the lessons of history. 

The Elizabethans
A. N. Wilson

A. N. Wilson, bestselling chronicler of Victorian and modern Britain, here takes a big step back in time to examine the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, England's "most distinguished monarch." As with his other historical works the emphasis is more on people in high places than social or economic history, with chapters on essential (and familiar) period topics like the religious settlement, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the theatre. Particularly interesting, because debatable, is his observation that the political, religious and educational system created by the Elizabethans only ended in our own lifetimes. Perhaps this is one reason we keep returning to them.

The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici
Christopher Hibbert

Nobody does decadence quite like the Italians. The echo of the Julio-Claudian emperors is heard in more than the title here, as the practical, Augustan example of the first Cosimo - running the show but paying lip service to the idea of a republic - was gradually rejected by his family's increasingly bizarre degenerations. Also in keeping with the Imperial theme is Hibbert's channeling of Gibbon (who would have loved sinking his teeth into this clan). It's not a page-turner, but like most of Hibbert's work it offers a competent overview of the subject, and the Medicis themselves, with all of their bottomless appetites, are great entertainment.

Briarpatch
Tim Pratt

Neither inner nor outer space, the briarpatch is a fantasy realm mapped on top of everyday reality, a bizarre psychogeography that the elect are able to enter through various rabbit holes that only they can see. Both paradise and the mind of god, it is closely associated with the afterlife, and people are literally dying to get in. In this they are assisted by one Ismael Plenty, the deathless leader of a suicide cult. The complex plot involves a bunch of oddballs (some dead, some alive, some immortal), and a killer car. A strange and lively book that neatly sidesteps genre clichés and introduces readers to some truly memorable characters.

The G. N. B. Double C: The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists
Seth

This unpolished story drawn from the sketchbook of the Guelph artist Seth is both a companion to his earlier graphic novel about the comic collector Wimbledon Green and a stand-alone guided tour through the last century of Canadian comics. As so often in Seth's work, the notion of the collector as a preserver of the past is wed to a vision of Canada as a place almost frozen in time, his monumental city blocks as solid and seemingly eternal as the landscapes of forest and snow. But set against the heavy visual architecture is an abiding sense of mortality, the brevity of life and the transience of fame. The Brotherhood is an institution that offers a spirit of reconciliation within its halls, at least for those who still want to visit.

The Hand of History
Ed. by Michael Leventhal

The concept behind this anthology was to ask over a hundred practicing historians (Canadians such as Michael Bliss, Conrad Black, John English, and Charlotte Gray made the list) to select an aphorism or quote about history and then write a brief explanation of its importance or personal significance. Included are most of the classics (Marx's opening to the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is chosen twice), as well as more idiosyncratic touchstones. There's too much emphasis on military history, and the commentary is pretty light throughout, but it still makes for a fun intellectual diversion. Sadly, what would have been my own pick (King William's retort to the ferryman) failed to get a mention.

Nineteen Eighty-three
David Peace

This is the way the Quartet ends, not with a total fudge but with enough murkiness to leave me wanting to go back to the beginning and see if I could somehow put it all together. I know that if I ever do make another attempt I'll try to compose an annotated timeline as I go along. Even then, however, I'm sure not every i would be dotted and t crossed. I suspect Peace himself wasn't always clear in his mind about who was killing whom. I found reading these books to be an often frustrating experience, but they were a nice change from the usual mystery fare. More gothic than noir though.

Nineteen Eighty
David Peace

The third installment of Peace's Quartet spends a lot of time backtracking, trying to explain exactly what happened in the second part. I appreciated the attempt at clarification, even if the ending was a reversion to form that leaves us hanging from a cliff of ambiguity. Also helpful was bringing in an outsider with less of a tortured psyche to investigate all the "murder and lies, lies and murder." I was starting to think that everyone in Yorkshire was evil or insane (or both), and finding the place itself a bit claustrophobic (the "small world" syndrome of most paranoid fiction). Stylistically, the tightening circles of repetition reinforce these feelings, alerting us that Peter Hunter is caught in a trap before he himself is aware of the fact.

Nineteen Seventy-seven
David Peace

The second part of the Red Riding Quartet was the only one to be dropped from the film version (which was thus the Red Riding Trilogy), for what I think are obvious reasons. It is, for starters, easily the most muddled of the four. Peace's interiorized version of Ellroy's late style is often amplified by being broadcast from inside troubled minds, and here he gives a good example of just how confusing the results can be. The real Yorkshire Ripper murders, with names and details slightly changed, provide the backdrop, with two secondary characters from the first novel stepping forward and suffering spectacular mental breakdowns. Sex and violence are the drugs that keep it all going, but they can't hold it together. One can see, however, the larger structure of the quartet starting to take shape.

Nineteen Seventy-four
David Peace

Despite the time-stamped title, the first installment of the Red Riding Quartet doesn't feel like a true period piece. The background music is the main indicator that we're in the disco era. That said, this is a quick and bloody noir import that juggles all the traditional elements deftly, even if it doesn't sort them out very tidily. The nightmare quality, pace, and telegraphic prose (not as overdone as it would become in Peace's later work) go a long way toward redeeming what is an otherwise over-the-top plot that, in typical noir fashion, does more to test the hero's impressive physical resilience than his crime-solving prowess.

Death in the City of Light
David King

Some crime stories are harder to tell than others, but the case of Marcel Petiot has to be one of the hardest. Petiot was a psychopathic doctor in Nazi-occupied Paris who pretended to be a member of the French resistance or underground. People who came to him looking for help getting out of town (mostly Jews, but some gangsters as well) were robbed and murdered. After a circus trial, Petiot was duly sent to the guillotine, but just how many people he killed, when, and by what methods, is still unclear. Historian David King does his best to shed new light on this cold case, but much of the story remains a frustrating, and chilling, mystery.