"The Increment"


Here’s my review of the new David Ignatius’ spy novel, “The Increment”:

Compelling: strikes a good balance between naivety and cynicism
My initial encounter with The Increment was unpromising: an omniscient narrator remarking about the actions of the central characters in Tehran and Washington. Fortunately, the narrator’s voice was soon muted, and we were embroiled in a beautifully contrived tale of espionage, betrayal, and geopolitics. On one hand, the idealists; on the other, the cynical opportunists; caught in the middle, those who are revolted by both extremes.
I won’t provide any spoilers, because you really should experience the twists and turns of this narrative for yourself. Ignatius gets extra points for the compelling picture he conjures up of contemporary Tehran (and the rest of Iran). However he loses a star for the gung-ho use of technology, and for a couple of lazily stereotyped characters. Taken together, these factors made a couple of his plot twists wholly implausible. But never mind: it’s a most enjoyable read.

Probably the best spy novel I've ever read

I just posted a review of an outstanding new novel: The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer:

Back in the early 60s, I remember reading a variety of spy novels. On the one hand, there were the exuberant and exotic romps by Ian Fleming; on the other, gritty and cynical pieces like Len Deighton’s Horse Under Water and The Ipcress File. Perhaps my favourites were the early works of John Le Carré, such as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and The Looking Glass War. From the mid-70s onward I stopped reading the genre, however: Le Carré seemed to be more interested in studying varieties of deep personal failure, while writers like Ludlum and Forsyth focussed on action at the expense of realism. And don’t get me started on the techno-thrillers.
So “The Tourist” is the first real spy novel that I’ve read in years. And it’s amazing. I read it in a couple of sittings, and I was completely mesmerized. It’s a complex story, with many actors collaborating and deceiving each other, but Steinhauer keeps everything crystal clear. I never felt the need to backtrack to check something, nor that the author had tried to slip anything past me. The story is seamlessly interwoven with real contemporary geopolitical events; if you’re looking for a primer on the state of affairs in Sudan, this may fill the gap. The complex motivations of the key characters are utterly convincing, and the outcome is sadly satisfying, in the way that Le Carré used to do so well.
I have to say that this feels like the best spy novel I’ve ever read. I’m going to try to get hold of some of the early works of Len Deighton (most of which are, inexplicably, out of print), just so I can compare and contrast. “Best ever” or not, “The Tourist” is outstanding. File it under “Fiction”, rather than pigeon-holing it.

The Art Instinct

I’ve just posted a review of Denis Dutton’s wonderful new book “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution”:

If you’re reading this, you probably enjoy books. You take pleasure from good writing, compelling insights, and the kind of well-turned argument that gives you that “aha!” moment of recognition, identification, and delight.
Imagine then the pleasure of reading a book which not only has these characteristics, but provides a convincing explanation of why you feel that way. And not just of why you enjoy that kind of experience, but why (for example) you would feel disappointed if you learned that the author had plagiarized the material. (Why should you? It’s the same text, isn’t it? There’s something else going on here.)
This is a wonderful book. It’s not just about art, in the same way that Pinker’s work (cited in the blurb) isn’t just about language. It’s about being human, and how the last few hundreds of thousands of years of evolution made us that way. It’s about the complex interplay between natural selection and sexual selection in this process, an interplay which Darwin captured so well in The Descent of Man. It’s about philosophy, too: about ontology and category.
The book draws on art as a rich source of facts and paradoxes about human nature. Does intent matter? Why do artists sign their work while plumbers don’t? What is the relationship between artistic value and monetary price? And (notoriously) can a urinal on a plinth be thought of as art – and why do people get so worked up about it?
I hesitated to choose this book, because I feared that it was going to be just another book on art theory. (And why would that make me reluctant? Hmmm….) I’m really glad that I overcame my hesitation. In fact I’d rank this as the best non-fiction book that I’ve read over the last year – and it’s been a good year. (Best fiction is, obviously Fulghum’s Third Wish, a book that I want to re-read in the light of some of the insights I’ve gained from Dutton.)
Highly recommended.

"Daemon"

There’s a fascinating new “thriller of ideas” out called “Daemon”, and on Friday I got the chance to hear the author, Daniel Suarez, speaking about it. I had previously reviewed the book at Amazon, but after discussing things with the author I updated my review. Here’s what I wrote:

80% great (and there’s a reason for that)
If you’re a gamer, or a geek, or simply fascinated (or scared!) about what networked technology is doing to society and business, this book is for you. Or at least the first 80% is; the last 20% may or may not be. Daniel Suarez has constructed a tight, l33t cutting-edge techno-thriller with a premise that’s hard to disagree with: we are now so dependent on technology that the consequences of its manipulation are almost limitless. Control information, and you control money, and then people. Philosophers and the religious reject the possibility of artificial intelligence and claim that computers will never duplicate human experience; they overlook the fact that for many a good-enough simulation is better than a messy reality, and few people really care to tell them apart anyway.
Suarez leads us into his world step by step, using plausible extensions of familiar technologies: cell phones, GPS, intruder detection system, videogames, WiFi, RFID badges. Individually the changes have been previsioned by TV shows or Wired magazine; collectively they have a plausible and sobering power. We remember Ferris Bueller changing his school grades all those years ago, and it’s “trivially obvious” that it would be easy to engineer the release from prison of an otherwise unremarkable criminal. And after watching “Masters of the Universe” destroying prestigious financial companies with a few keystrokes, we accept that a modern corporation could be blackmailed and co-opted over the Internet.
The first 80% of the book is excellent: exciting, terrifying, inexorable, and mind-stretching. There’s a collection of satisfyingly-complex characters, good and bad, and Suarez orchestrates them very nicely. And we keep reading, because we want to know: how will it all turn out? Will the bad guys transform society into a Matrix-like shell, or will the contingency and serendipity of reality disrupt the best laid plans of cyber-mice and undead men?
I’m not going to provide any spoilers. What I will say is that I was disappointed with the resolution that Suarez chose. It’s hard to tell if it was the way he always intended things to unfold, or whether he simply couldn’t figure out a good ending and took the easy way out.
So a five star book with a two star ending. I’ll give it four, because I did enjoy most of it.
UPDATE: A couple of days ago, Daniel Suarez came to Amazon to talk about “Daemon”, and I asked him about the “resolution” issue. Originally the novel was much longer – well over 1,000 pages – and it was rejected by one publisher after another. So Suarez chopped it into two parts, and self-published the first half as “Daemon”. It was slow to take off, but eventually a number of tech-savvy pundits got wind of it and started a buzz, which led to it being picked up by the publishers Dutton (part of the Penguin empire).
So what I interpreted as the “resolution” of the story is, in fact, “climax”. To follow Freytag’s classic analysis, “Daemon” is all “rising action”: we have merely reached the apex of the “pyramid”, and will have to wait for the second half of the story before we get to the resolution and dénouement.
And when will that be? Well, Dutton wants to follow the standard tempo of hardcover and paperback publication, so Suarez has plenty of time for polishing the sequel. Shucks.

If all that “rising action” stuff is Greek to you, check out the Wikipedia article on Freytag’s model of dramatic structure.

So buy it already! And then be patient until, oh, probably some time in 2010 for “Freedom”….

Historical oddities

I’ve been digging into my American family roots, and came up with a couple of amusing nuggets. My father was American, and his mother was named Kate Denig. This seemed like a fairly easy name to trace, so we worked back through the US Census records at Ancestry.com. There was one significant element of confusion, of which more anon, but eventually I reached my great great great great grandfather, Ludwig Denig, b. 1755. There’s a fair amount of documentary material available: he was a shoemaker, and later an apothecary, in Pennsylvania. He was also a leading light in his local church, and an amateur artist, and I was delighted to discover that a facsimile of a book of his was available: The Picture Bible of Ludwig Denig: A Pennsylvania German Emblem Book. I ordered a copy through Amazon, and it just arrived (from Powells in Portland). It’s in perfect, and beautiful condition.

The Picture Bible of Ludwig Denig: A Pennsylvania German Emblem Book
The Picture Bible of Ludwig Denig: A Pennsylvania German Emblem Book

And the bit of confusion? As we searched the census records for Ohio and Wisconsin, we kept coming across references to members of the “McDenig” family. This seemed odd: I’d never seen a hybrid German-Scottish name before. Eventually light dawned. One of Ludwig’s sons was George Denig, a physician. He married an Eliza McClintock, and their children all took the names of both parents. The next family member in my lineage was his son, Robert McClintock Denig, born in 1813, and a physician like his father. When the census taker recorded his family information, he wrote Robert’s name as “Robert Mc. Denig”. And 150 years later, whoever computerized the census records dutifully transcribed the family name as “McDenig”.
Thus history is made and remade….

The Pains

John Sundman.
John Damien Sundman.
John Compton Sundman.
John. F. X. Sundman.
Who is this man of mystery? I haven’t seen him since early in 2005, when he and I had dinner with Dan Dennett and Doug Hofstadter. But 19 years earlier, we had been an unbeatable team working together at Sun, first on PC-NFS and then the 386i. While I stayed at Sun, John followed a strange journey which ought to be documented some time (but not by me). Two oddly compelling books emerged along the way: Acts of the Apostles, in which I felt that I and all my friends had been sucked into John’s fantasy, and Cheap Complex Devices, in which I felt that a computer’s fantasy had been sucked into my brain. I bought several copies of each to give to friends.
Now comes the latest from John: The Pains. You can read it online, or buy it in dead tree format. Or both. (No Kindle version yet – sigh.) Like Acts of the Apostles, it is set in the mid-80s. No, delete that. It defies easy classification, which is the way I like my novels these days. (Oops – I just classified it as a “novel”. My bad.) Just jam your headphones on, crank up Fig.15 by Human Sexual Response, and read it. When you get to the last chapter, switch the music to Leonard Cohen. (John: what’s the playlist for this piece? I’m serious.) You’ll be glad you did.

Anathem – first thoughts

Over the next week or so I plan to gather together my thoughts about Neal Stephenson’s new book, Anathem, so that I can write a full review. But here are my preliminary reactions:
Anatham is (at least) three books in one. It’s a science fiction yarn, in which geeks indulge in amazing feats of derring-do to save the world(s). It’s a dialogue about the thorny questions at the intersection of many-worlds quantum science, consciousness, and causality. And the background to both of these is a treatise on the role of science in society, and how the two magisteria – the secular and the scientific – might react against each other over the long haul.
I enjoyed and appreciated it immensely. It deserves careful and patient consideration.

Fame!

Mark Rowlands has a new book out called Fame. I liked this sentence from the sumary he posted to Secular Philosophy:

I try to show that our present day notion of fame and the extremes that accompany it are symptoms of a significant cultural change: the decline of Enlightenment ideas has seen individualism eclipse objectivism about value, so much so that what characterizes Western society today is its constitutional inability to distinguish quality from bullshit.

It’s $18.95 for a 160 page paperback, but I imagine that I should focus on the quality rather than the quantity. (On the other hand, the first chapter is entitled “Girls gone wild: fame and vfame”. NSFW?)

Anathem

If it seems as if I’ve posted fewer book-related items recently, there is a simple explanation. I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s latest, “Anathem”, and it’s going to take a while. The good news: I’m reading it on the Kindle, which reduces the weight (and the price!). The bad: it’s still going to take some time: I don’t want to rush it.

Theism, dualism, and brains

I’ve been kicking around an idea for a blog post on the relationship of dualism and religion. The arguments go something like this: small children are natural dualists (and animists) for a whole bunch of adaptive reasons: taking the intentional stance towards stuff is often a good way of modelling the world. And if you never get a chance to question this dualism (and culture, family, language, and wishful thinking can make it hard), you wind up with a worldview which needs some kind of supernatural authority to make sense of it. Etcetera. Not very novel, perhaps – various writers, from Scott Atran to Dan Dennett, have visited this territory – but perhaps it makes clear the fact that arguments about religious epistemology are mostly intended as justification.
And then I started to think about all of the reasons why people do, in fact, question dualism. I imagined that some might reject theism as incoherent, and then find they have no need of the supernatural, while others might come to a materialist monism as the best explanation of the world that they see, and only then realize that they had no need of a deity. “Best explanation of the world…?” What might this be? Mental illness replacing demonic possession? The effects of drugs on the mind, demonstrating an unquestionably physical basis for aspects of emotion and personality?
It was at this point that I realized that I actually knew very little about the history of the brain: how personal experience, evidence, and dogma have influenced the way in which people have thought about brains, minds, and souls over history. And by a happy coincidence I came across a highly-esteemed book on the subject by an author who is a new favourite of mine. So I picked up a copy of “Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain – and How It Changed the World” by Carl Zimmer, the author of “Microcosm”, the wonderful book on E.coli that I just finished.
“Soul Made Flesh” doesn’t pretend to address the entire history of the study of the brain. Instead, Zimmer concentrates on one man: Thomas Willis, a 17th century English doctor who effectively invented neurology. I read the first two chapters over dinner this evening, before going down to the waterfront to watch the Ivars fireworks on Elliott Bay. Zimmer’s style is as deft as it was in “Microcosm”; I’m really going to enjoy this. (And when I finish it, I may be able to write that piece on dualism with a little more evidence to support my hypothesis….) My only frustration? No Kindle edition. Sigh….