Book Review Club: Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero by Larry Tye

(This is the June 2013 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For a complete list, click on the icon after this review.)

Without a doubt, the new Superman movie, Man of Steel, is the one movie I am most looking forward to this year. To help do what I always do--immerse myself in a property--I’ve been reading my old Superman comics, enjoying Superman: The Animated Series episodes, and watching the older movies. I was happily surprised to discover that there was a history of Superman just waiting to be read. Perfect timing.

Larry Tye’s Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero was published in 2012 and it tells the story of Superman from his creation by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster all the way up to the Man of Steel movie which, at the time of publication, was “the new Superman movie next year.” The story of Kal-el and his handlers is a microcosm of 20th American history in general and the comic book industry in particular.

I’ve always been fascinated why and how the 1930s produced such a wide variety of heroes. I’m convinced it’s a product of the times, when dire economic times and the worry it produced created a yearning for honest-to-goodness heroes with a firm moral code and little or no gray to their characters. You know: they guys who always wore the white hats. When you look at the all the parts of the “pulp soup” that was being mixed in this decade--Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Green Hornet, John Carter, Tarzan, and more--it’s pretty simple to think that someone like Superman would be created. In fact, it wasn’t until I started reading the Doc Savage novels that I discovered that some of the Superman tropes--his first name, the Fortress of Solitude--were lifted straight from Lester Dent’s imagination. It’s a wonder he didn’t sue. As a writer myself, it’s kind of nice to read that it took the pair six years to land a publisher. Perseverance pays off!

In this modern age of consumerism, it was eye-opening to learn just how many things Superman has sold. With tongue firmly in cheek, Tye even labels one of his chapters “Superman, Inc.” with a familiar refrain of “Ka-ching” throughout that chapter. Not sure why it surprised me, but it did. Speaking of superheroes selling things, am I the only one who misses the little one-page ads where Superman, Batman, or Spider-man would catch the crook because the evil doer was seduced by a Twinkee?

Speaking of seducing, the chapter on the 1950s crackdown on comic books was also quite interesting. From my own knowledge of the medium, I knew that it was the crime and horror comics that fed the fire of Dr. Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, the book and movement that strove to bury the comics industry by pinning all of society’s woes on the exploits of people in comics. Makes me wonder what he’d make of the internet...

As someone who grew up in the Bronze Age of comics (roughly 1970 to 1986), I have always enjoyed the zaniness of comics. Granted, some of that zaniness was gone by the mid 1970s, but it was interesting to learn how Mort Weisinger, editor at DC Comics and Superman titles in particular, actually went about consolidating the Man of Steel and all that goes with him. It was so wide and varied that the mid-1980s event, Crisis on Infinite Earths (the comic book story that shrank all the parallel Earths down to just one) was destined to happen.

There’s the legal stuff, too. Siegel and Shuster basically sold their most famous creation for $130, losing control of the thing that generated billions. Yes, it was a business and businessmen do what businessmen do, but it’s still a shame. From these two all the way up to Alan Moore in the 1980s, comic creators often found themselves on the short end of a dollar bill. Tye even goes into some detail and explains why the new movie is being released this year.

And I learned the names associated with Superman and the 75 years of his history. That’s a real benefit , so much so that, a few weekends ago at Houston’s Comicpalooza, I found a few old Superman titles in the $0.25 bin (!) and bought them based solely on the authors of the tales. I also met Kevin J. Anderson and picked up an autographed copy of Enemies and Allies, his novel in which he reimagines the first meeting of Superman and Batman in the 1950s. And, if you are still in the Superman mood, you can always read Tom DeHaven’s “It’s Superman” (my review).

Oh, and there are some comics to read, too. Seventy-five years worth of comics. Not all of them are good, but some are great. Some of my more-recent personal favorites are All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely and Superman: For All Seasons by Jeph Loeb. All-Star Superman has been made into an animated movie, but I suggest you read the books. It spends much more time in this one-off story. I love it so much that I am tempted to say that it’s the best Superman story in the last 25 years (easily) and ranks as one of the best of all time.

So, after you see Man of Steel and are curious about the history of the Last Son of Krypton, read this book. You will certainly enjoy it.

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Book Review Club: Caliban's War by James S. A. Corey

(This is the May 2013 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list, click on the icon following this review.)

Well, it’s been a month and I’ve devoured another giant book of space opera. In last month’s review, I wrote about James S. A. Corey’s Leviathan Wakes. I loved it so much that I moved on to the sequel, Caliban’s War. If I have to sum up my thoughts on this second book in the series, it’s this: Corey suffered no sophomore slump.

Caliban’s War picks up a year after the events of Leviathan Wakes. Jim Holden, captain of the four-person ship, the Rocinante, and one of the two main characters from the first book, has been working for the leader of The Belt (as in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter). He’s basically a cop keeping the pirates in check. As good as the work is--what with all his repairs being paid for by Fred Johnson, the Belter Leader--Holden is missing something. Part of it is a purpose. The other part is that special thing that used to be his trademark, that part of him that made him different than the pure thug he’s kind of turned into. He’ll find that purpose on Ganymede, one of the moons of Saturn and the primary food outlet for the outer planets.

What sequels are all but required to do is introduce new characters and amp up the action. With Leviathan Wakes being a lengthy book, you get a good chance to get under Holden’s skin and into his mind, so much so that you basically know what he’s going to do in any given situation. That’s a tall order to top with Caliban’s War as Corey introduces three new characters that, as the novel unfolds hold themselves up very well.

Bobbie Draper, female Marine from Mars, is on Ganymede as the military force for Mars when a shooting war starts. The Saturnian moon is basically a little like Berlin in the Cold War, divided up between Earth, Mars, and the Belt. When the shooting starts, Bobbie and her platoon rush to aid her fellow Martians against the Earthers...until she sees what is truly happening: the Earthers are fleeing from some thing. That thing is walking, no, running on Ganemede’s surface without a suit, and ripping through her entire platoon. We readers are familiar with the creature: it’s a black-skinned human/alien hybrid made from the proto-molecule from the first book. She is the only survivor, and she is sent to Earth to give her report to the politicians who think more of their own careers than they do about human lives.

One of those politicans is Chrisjen Avasarala, a high-ranking official in the United Nations who swears like she’s a sailor. She has to deal not only with the same politicians Bobbie goes up against (but Avasarala has a much better political acumen than does the Marine) but she’s also up to her eyeballs with the UN military brass and their desire to keep the truth of what happened on Ganymede a secret. Why? That’s one of the questions Avasarala must grapple with as everything starts to go south.

Then there is Prax Meng, a biologist on Ganymede who is trying to find his missing daughter. A divorcee, he learns his daughter, May, was kidnapped right before all the stuff hit the fan. All he wants to do is find her. In the prologue, we readers are privy to her abduction, so we pretty much know that she and the other children taken are likely to be used as human experiments with the proto-molecule. He is out of money and out of resources and out of options until he recognizes one man who has come to Ganymede to find out what’s going on: Captain Jim Holden.

Just like the first novel, Corey mixes the points of view for each chapter. Knowing the template, even though all the characters start the story strewn across the solar system, you know that they are going to end up together. That they do, and the action is just as good the second time around.

But what makes these two books special for me is the quiet moments. There’s a good amount of them as they face challenges and meet them with the resources on hand. It’s the best of the Star Trek spirit, if I can make a comparison. You really get into the skins of these characters. You feel with them. You cheer with them, and then you get your blood pumping with them.

There’s an elephant in this story: Venus. The culmination at the end of Leviathan Wake involved Venus and, all through Caliban’s War, what’s happening on Venus is in the back of everyone’s mind. I have a prediction, one that I’m not going to share here in case you have a hankering to read these novels. I have really enjoyed them, and eagerly await the release of book 3, Abaddon’s Gate, in June. Highly recommended.

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Remembering David Bloom: Ten Years Later

(A decade is a long time, and, yet, one that can easily be remembered. Here, in 2013, we are marking the decade anniversaries of the Iraq War. One of the things that I always remember were the reporters embedded with our fighting forces, David Bloom in particular. Today, on the anniversary of his untimely passing on the battlefield, I am reposting the essay I wrote for and was published in the Houston Chronicle. Bloom died of a blood clot brought on by deep-vein thrombosis. It can be prevented, and you can learn more at PreventDVT.org. Mr. Bloom, we all still miss you.)

April 7, 2003, 8:18PM (Tuesday)

The war came home for me Sunday.

I hesitate to write that sentence because the war in Iraq is almost 4-weeks-old now and there have been at least 108 coalition soldiers killed. Each one of those families already has the war at home with them. The war sits down to dinner in the empty seat of the missing father. The war is in bed with the newly widowed wife, the empty space next to her now a hollow hole in her heart.

I have no relatives fighting in Iraq. In this country of more than 280 million people and about 1.4 million people who serve in the all-volunteer military, I am one of many in America whose freedom is defended by someone nameless.

But those who cover the war aren't nameless, and one of the best things to emerge from the war is the reporting by embedded journalists in the field. With new technology and 24-hour news channels, the war --with its images of reporters in military gear – is simply always on. Yet, while I admire the courage of these reporters, some of them look out of place.

One reporter who seemed exactly in his place was David Bloom, a journalist for NBC. Ever since his unit -- the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division -- moved out, David was dirty. He was the first reporter to beam live images of the moving convoy of tanks. I remember seeing these images and being astounded that I was witnessing live war footage. He had a "boyish enthusiasm" when he described military details, and he knew his role exactly: Bring home the war to the American people.

But the war details were not the entire story. He also knew that his greater responsibility was to show America the lives these soldiers were leading. He let us know that MREs were not all that bad. He let us know how big a Bradley vehicle was and yet how cramped it could be when fully occupied. He let us know how dusty it was by never cleaning up for the camera. He let us -- the ones the soldiers were protecting --know what it was like to be a U.S. soldier in Iraq.

David Bloom seemed to always be on the air. Iraq is nine hours ahead of Houston, but no matter the time of day here, there always seemed to be the word "Live" on the screen. He was live during the middle of the night talking with Lester Holt, live during the Today show and even live during the evening news, giving Tom Brokaw the absolute latest. When I flicked channels between the three major network news channels, if David Bloom was on, I stopped and listened. He was, for me and for my wife, Vanessa, our favorite reporter, a friendly voice from the front line.

He died Sunday of a pulmonary embolism. Based on what I learned that day, he took power naps and would stay awake for hours. Perhaps that is why he seemed to always be on, live, no matter the program or time. The retrospectives told us that he was a driven man, one who always had to be where the action was. He volunteered for this assignment and, I think, broke the mold as a front-line combat reporter.

I was feeding my son when the news broke. I am used to nameless numbers when the media talk about casualties, men and women who have laid down their lives for me. But when the news anchor said David's name, my heart was pierced. Tears seeped into my eyes for a man I never knew but, somehow, knew. My wife cried, too.

The embolism was a noncombat death, but it really is a combat death. David went to Iraq partly out of a duty to his profession, but also partly out of a loyalty to this country. He is a casualty of war, just as are the other fallen soldiers. They all are heroes.

I have never been a soldier, but I am a writer and I know what that is like. David Bloom and the more than 600 embedded reporters are heroes to me. With them, the war is very close.

With the intimacy of television, perfect strangers can seem like friends to us. We viewers think of Dave or Jay, not Mr. Letterman or Mr. Leno. David Bloom's constant presence on the television, his mannerisms, his wit, his focus on the ordinary humanness of our soldiers made him seem like "David" to me, a person I knew on a first-name basis. And he was, in a way. That is the nature of television.

But on Sunday, upon learning that I'd never again hear his voice, upon learning that he left his family to go and do something bigger than himself, upon learning of his ultimate sacrifice for his country and his profession, he was Mr. Bloom. That is the nature of heroes.

The war came home for me that day.

Book Review Club: Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

(This is the April 2013 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list, click on the icon following this review.)

Let's get this out of the way at the start: Leviathan Wakes may be space opera, but it's not your grandfather's space opera.

Your granddad, if he were a mind, probably cut his teeth on Edgar Rice Burroughs, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Leigh Brackett, or any of the writers from the golden age of SF. Your dad probably cut his teeth on the likes of Michael Moorcock, Star Trek, Star Wars, or any of the things that have come in their wake. When you mention these authors or shows, certain things come to mind: spaceships, lasers, dreadful monsters, dashing heroes, and lots of derring do. Oh, and physics doesn't count because there's artificial gravity, warp drive, hyperspace, and all the usual stuff you associate with the genre.

Leviathan Wakes, then, is somewhat of a new animal. It's a space opera yarn for the 21st Century. It is not the only one, to be sure, but it is the first of its kind that I've read. Author James S. A. Corey (actually a pen name for the authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) has set the first of a trilogy (aren't they all?) in the near distant future and entirely in our solar system. I say "near distant" because it's a few centuries away, but not far enough that all the parts of this universe isn't too far gone to be recognizable. By setting the entire story in our own solar system ensures the reader that the tale will be on the frontier, but a believable frontier complete with all the human problems that we early 21st Century citizens can understand.

The story follows two main characters. Jim Holden, Earth-born, is the executive officer on the ice hauler, Canterbury. The 'Cant' receives a distress call from the Scopuli and, under common practice, they answer it. Holden leads a crew of three on their smaller shuttle to investigate. They find evidence of piracy and attribute the origin to Mars. On their way back to the mothership, however, the Canterbury is attacked and destroyed. Distraught with emotion, Holden sends a message across the entire solar system that all but accuses Mars of being the perpetrators. Naturally, this stirs up some animosity between Earth, Mars, and the Belt (the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter).

The other main character is Miller, a police detective born and raised in the colonized asteroid Ceres. Granted, he's your typical noir-inflected character, but he's tasked with a new, off-the-books assignment: Find Julie Mao and bring her back, by any means necessary, to her parents.

Well, as it turns out, Julie was on the Scopuli, so, naturally, you pretty much have Miller and Holden angling on a collision course both between themselves and the entire system.

This book gets a lot of things right. This is space opera on the believable level. Yes, there are lasers, but not any photon torpedoes. There is no light speed and it really does take a long time to get from place to place. The characters experience G-force pressure when accelerating, nearly to a dangerously high level. Communication is not instantaneous. A "live" conversation has scores of minutes in lag time. The space combat is brutal and not without a comparison to old-style naval combat. All told, these characteristics of the story give this tale life, a vision of the future that you don't get from Star Trek.

Each chapter is told from the POV of either Miller or Holden. For the first third or so, they are separated, enabling the authors to comment on the events from a distance. Once the heroes meet up, the authors can show and tell of the events from the different POVs. Holden is an earnest man who believes that, if everyone knew all the facts, they would choose the right course of action. Miller is the cynic, the real world man who knows that is rarely the truth. Together, these two world views clash and strive towards the conclusion of the book.

Leviathan Wakes is satisfying on a host of levels, but none more than this: I've easily transitioned to the second novel of the trilogy (Caliban's War) and eagerly await the concluding volume later this summer. If you have a taste for blockbuster space opera in book form, Leviathan Wakes is your food. Devour it and enjoy.

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Book Review Club: Bloodhype by Alan Dean Foster

(This is the March 2013 edition of Barrie Summy's book review club. For the complete list, click the icon at the bottom of this review.)

Sometimes, you're mother is really correct.

Bloodhype is Alan Dean Foster's second published novel. Published in 1973, it is part of his Humanx Commonwealth, his version of the future where humans and Thranx (insectoid aliens) have created an alliance and spread their influence across this arm of the galaxy. The enemy of the Commonwealth are the Aann, spacefaring reptiles that are not unlike the Klingons. Well, to be honest, the Thranx are not unlike the Vulcans, but there is much more to the universe than the inspirations from Star Trek.

The titular substance, bloodhype, is a drug that, according to the dust jacket, is instantly addictive. Vanished from the galaxy for years, an improbable pair is assigned the task of tracking down its reappearance on the planet Repler: a young human woman (Kitten Kai-sung) and a furry raccoon-like thing (take a look at it up on the cover). Naturally, they meet up with a captain of a shipping freighter, the latter being the one who inadvertently discovered the presence of bloodhype.

Their investigation runs alongside the sub-plot of the Vom, a creature that is like a ebony blob. In my mind's eye, I kept imagining a sentient oil slick. The Vom is stranded (imprisoned, actually) on a dead planet, and yet the Aann remove it to Repler. It doesn't take a genius to imagine that the Vom, bloodhype, the trio, and the bad guys will all mix and mingle with various results.

Another pair of characters also make an appearance: Pip and Flinx. Foster's first book, The Tar-Aiym Krang, is the debut appearance for his most famous creations, Flinx and his flying snake, Pip. I bring up this fact because Foster had originally intended to make Bloodhype a stand-alone novel set in the universe, but the publisher prompted the author to include Pip and Flinx in the novel. Foster complied, but the Pip and Flinx don't really act like the versions you see in the first book. Turns out, after Foster wrote twelve more books featuring his famous duo (fourteen total), that the events of Bloodhype occur in the eleventh position. Rather odd, if you ask me.

Bloodhype is a decent book, especially if you can wrap your head around the fact that it really isn't a Pip and Flinx Adventure, but an adventure in which the pair make an appearance. The Tar-Aiym Krang is a much better book (and is part of a trilogy along with Orphan Star and The End of the Matter).

The reason I bring up my mom is this. Foster was my first favorite SF author when I discovered the genre back in the late 70s. At that time, there were only four Pip and Flinx books: the  aforementioned trilogy and Bloodhype. One day (probably at the B. Dalton in Westwood Mall in Houston), I took Bloodhype to my mom. She had to review and clear books for me if they weren't YA. She read through it, cleared it for me, but told me that I probably wouldn't enjoy it. My young self certainly would not have enjoyed it--in fact, I never read it back then. My fortysomething self am glad I've read it--being the completist I am--but I doubt I'll ever re-read it (as I have the trilogy). Moms: they really know their children, huh?

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Book Review Club: The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford

(This is December 2012 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For a complete list, click on the icon at the end of this review.)

One hundred and sixty-nine years ago this month, Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol. A few years ago (2008), Les Standiford published The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits. Standiford, a novelist and popular historian, fully acknowledges that much of what he has compiled in The Man Who Invented Christmas is available in other works and biographies. The beauty of this little book is the prism with which Standiford examines Dickens. It’s only about the Carol and how Dickens came to write it, the influences, where Dickens was in his life when the inspiration for Scrooge, Marley, and Tiny Tim struck his imagination, the immediate aftermath of the book’s publication, and its influence on western culture.

The book opens on 5 October 1843. Dickens, aged thirty-one, is on a Manchester stage, part of a fundraiser for the Manchester Athenaeum. He is to speak but he is distracted. His current novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, was not finding the dazzling sales figures of earlier novels like The Pickwick Papers or The Old Curiosity Shop. Not a Dickens scholar I, this fact surprised me. I just assumed Dickens’s stardom, once attained, didn’t wane during his lifetime. It was up and down for Dickens and in October 1843, Dickens was down. With sales figures dropping, his own debt rising—including his parents’ debt which he took pains to absolve—and a new child, his fifth, due early in 1844, Dickens needed to do something extraordinary in order to get back on the financial horse.

After he gave his part of the fundraiser, Dickens walked the dark streets of Manchester and the germ of an idea planted itself in his mind. With the memories of a recent trip to a “ragged school”—a school for poor kids—fresh in his mind, Dickens did something fascinating: he examined himself, as an artist, a man, a husband, and found that he could improve his position. According to Standiford, “Perhaps he [Dickens] had let his disappointment with America in particular and with human nature in general overwhelm his powers of storytelling and characterization in his recent work—perhaps he had simply taken it for granted that an adoring public would sit still for whatever he offered it.” The Chuzzlewit sales and themes proved this to be true. He tried to beat his readers over the head with his earnestness and the readers let him know they didn’t like it. He needed a different method to convey what he wanted to convey. And he needed it to be entertaining.

A Christmas Carol was the result. We all know the story so I don’t need to retell it here. But what is utterly compelling when you stop to think about it is that Dickens went through a transformation not unlike Scrooge, just without the ghosts. At a time when he could have moved to Europe, contented himself with travel writing, and cleared his debts, he chose to challenge himself. To do so, he needed to change. So he changed how he approached this book and its publication. I wonder how many of us have the courage to do that in our own lives to say nothing of something as public as a novel.

With numerous quotes from Dickens’ own writings and those of his contemporaries, Standiford shows us how excited Dickens became at his “little Carol,” how it cheered him, made his cry, and, presumably, warmed his heart as the book has done these past 169 years for the rest of us. The haggling, the negotiations, the business of writing, producing, securing the artwork, and all the other minutia needed to publish a book in 1843 is captivating. You realize that, in many ways, it’s the same then as it is now. The most paradoxical thing I learned was Dickens’ decision to publish A Christmas Carol on his own. You what that means, don’t you? A Christmas Carol was a vanity book. A self-published book.

As far as the claim that Dickens “invented” Christmas (Prince Albert also had a hand with his Christmas trees), Standiford goes into some good detail on how the celebration of Christmas had devolved to a holiday that was barely celebrated. He needs to do this and lay out for the reader where Christmas was in 1843 in order for the reader to understand the profound impact the Carol had on society. Christmas, for Dickens had the same enchanting power over him that his story has over us. That’s ironic considering the humiliation of his childhood—of having a father in debtors’ prison and being forced to leave school and work in a factory to help the family—made Christmas for Dickens not the overabundant thing it is today. The season of Christmas “accounts in large part for his development as an artist.” As Dickens himself wrote, “Any iron ring let into stone is the entrance to a cave which only waits for the magician, and the little fire, and the necromancy, that will make the earth shake.” There is a certain magic during this time of year and Dickens captured it between pages. It’s no wonder the story has thrived.

The Man Who Invented Christmas is a charming book, uncluttered with footnotes so it’s easy to read. (Standiford cites his sources at the back of the book.) The book contains just over 200 pages so it won’t take you many hours to read it. I recommend it for anyone with a little curiosity about how a great work of literature came about. It’ll remove the gauzy trappings that can sometimes surround a book—you know, the awe we writers and readers impose on great works of literature, how the author must’ve been touched by a literary god and the work just fell from the pen—and reveal a real man who experienced real worries but also created something special by means of his own imagination, sweat, determination, and perseverance. It’s a good lesson for all of us.

For all you writers out there, think about this. Where we you this year on 5 October? Imagine not having a word written in a new work. Imagine, now, getting that idea and you burn the midnight oil—you still have a day job, don’t forget—and finish a manuscript by the end of November and the book you just wrote is published today. Think you could do it?

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Book Review Club: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

(This is the November 2012 edition of Barrie Summy’s Book Review Club. For a complete list of the other titles, click the icon following this review.)

Generally, mystery writers don’t ask the historical question “what if.” Science fiction writers are the ones who ponder the questions of alternate history. What if the South won the Civil War? What if Rome never fell? What if Hitler won World War II? One of the few examples of “counterfactual history” in the mystery genre is Richard Harris’s Fatherland. In that novel, he deposits his detective in 1964 Berlin, in the days leading up to Hitler’s birthday. Aside from this major example, alternative history mysteries rarely exist.*

So it took a writer not usually associated with the mystery genre to ask another what if question. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon extrapolates an entire separate universe from a little-known event in our actual history. In 1939, as Hitler was rounding up European Jews, Harold Ickies, the Secretary of the Interior, floated an idea of allowing Jewish refugees to settle in part of what was the Alaskan Territory, Sitka. An influential Congressman killed the bill in committee and the resettle never materialized. In Chabon’s book, however, it is the Congressman who is killed, and the Federal Jewish District of Sikta, Alaska, is born. The looming shadow throughout the entire book, however, is Reversion. That is, at the end of 2007, the Sitka District, a federal district within the state of Alaska, reverts back to ownership by the state. As the story starts, Reversion is merely two months away.

For new writers—and not a few old ones—the directive has always been to write what you know. For a place that never existed, Jewish Alaska comes alive like a tourist brochure, complete with the cold, constant rain, and the salty smell of the surf mingled with cabbage. One of the first things a reader notices is the tense. Chabon used the present tense. That little nuance is one of the major aspects that helps to bring all the characters and this non-existent city to life. Had the author used the past tense like so many others do, the idea that Jewish Alaska could actually exist would be more difficult. Just like a reader who opens a book of ancient history, the past tense would have relegated Sitka to the past. Maybe it existing, maybe it could have existed, but not really. The present tense verbs (and flashbacks in the past tense), reinforces in the reader’s mind, with each passing sentence, the possibility that the Sitka District is real. Better go check the atlas or the internet just to be sure.

Chabon sets this story in 2007, the present day (it was the present day when I read this book the first time back in 2007). While echoing Chandler and other great mystery writers from the Golden Age, Chabon puts his characters in the 21st Century. Sure, the good folks of the District might speak Yiddish, but they have the internet, cell phones, and 24/7 cable news. They also have murder, conspiracy, terrorist, and a bureaucracy that can make James Ellroy’s LAPD proud.

The reader experiences Sitka through the eyes of Meyer Landsman, a down and out homicide detective (is there any other kind?) whose only true friend seems to be the bottle. Chabon is a fan of the stories of both Sherlock Holmes and Phillip Marlowe. The Holmes stories endure because of the atmosphere. We want to return to the late Victorian era London time and time again. Despite the protestations of my science fiction book club who said that this story didn’t have as much Alaska-ness to it, I got the definite sense of atmosphere to Jewish Sitka. From Marlowe, nearly a quintessential 20th Century example of a hardboiled detective, Chabon fashioned Landsman, almost Marlowe’s Jewish cousin. How both inspirations work together is fascinating to watch and read and the pages go by.

Like any good hardboiled detective novel, a murder is what sets this story going. One of the fellow residents in the down and out hotel (is there any other kind?) Landsman lives in turns up dead. The superintendent, knowing Landsman is a policeman, asks the shamus to have a look. Naturally, Landsman gets himself on the official case and wants to investigate the shooting. But, with Reversion on the horizon, his superior officer—who just happens to be his ex-wife—wants to close out all outstanding cases and doesn’t want to open a new one. Landsman objects, and begins conducting his own, unauthorized investigation, and it is here where we get the tour of the world of Jewish Alaska. We get glimpses of how the Jews interact with the Native Americans in the area, how all the sub-groups within Sitka interact or have power over each other, and how the Jews see themselves within the broader world. Utterly fascinating stuff. 

Now, the novel is not without its faults. Sometimes the plot plods along in fits and starts, lurching in one direction while stopping in other spots. But what carries it all along is Chabon’s prose. It is magnificent, magical, lyrical, and, as one of my fellow book club members said last night, remarkable how the author crafts interesting words into sentences and paragraphs heretofore unknown in the English language. Having been the only one of us four to have previously read Chabon (this counts as my third Chabon book this year), all of them are looking forward to reading more, despite their issues with The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Having re-read this book, I can again attest to the joy I always have when I read a Michael Chabon novel.

*If you know of other alternate history mysteries, please let me know.

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@Barrie Summy