Review of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel set during the Spanish Civil War. It is written by Ernest Hemingway who was a war correspondent during that war. It won the Nobel prize for literature in 1954.

The plot of the story seems very simple to begin with. Robert Jordan, an American fighting on the side of the revolutionary communists against the fascists, is assigned the task of blowing up a bridge behind enemy lines. Its destruction will stop fascist reinforcements being sent to an upcoming major attack by the revolutionaries. Sounds simple, but the plot is complicated by many events and challenges, especially the various characters involved. Just about all the novel takes place before the attack on the bridge, so we are kept waiting to find out for whom the bell tolls. Will Jordan successfully blow up the bridge or will he die trying?

At the beginning, Jordan needs to make contact with a small group of partisans to help him dispose of the guards at the bridge. The partisans are led by Pablo who has a mountain hideout not far from the bridge and who has previously participated in other acts of sabotage, including blowing up a train. But Pablo has become a disillusioned drunk and is paralysed by fears of his own mortality. It is up to his wife Pilar, the rock of the group, to keep the partisans together.

The group includes Maria, a young woman who was a prisoner on the train they sabotaged. Jordan and Maria fall for each other. This stretched credibility a bit as Jordan knows he was only going to be there for four days, and he would leave once the bridge is destroyed. But maybe their relationship could have developed as quickly as it did in the novel due to the emotional turmoil of the war.

The novel questioned the war, but it is not an anti-war book. The reader sees what various participants think about war and their part in it. Jordan slowly reveals the corrupt and fragmented leadership of the communists. Their leaders have fled to safety and have little to do with the fighting. Russians step in and are heavily involved in organizing the communist fighting effort. Some of the leaders of the revolution are drunks and psychotics. But Jordan still believes they must defeat the fascists to stop other countries in Europe falling under the fascist yoke.

Pablo just wants somewhere safe to hide. He knows once the bridge is blown the fascist forces will swarm over the hills he hides in to find his group. He was a merciless leader capable of war crimes. Pilar tells a particularly chilling tale of how he executed all the fascists in his hometown. Pilar on the other hand is still committed to the cause. We also get a glimpse into the minds of the fascists guarding the bridge. They are fighting under the duress of execution of themselves and families if they refuse. Some of the communist generals also freely execute soldiers who question orders.  

One of the things that catches a reader’s attention is the writing’s treatment of profanity. Words like “obscene”, “obscenity”, “muck” and “unprintable” are substituted for swear words. The most obvious is muck for fuck. I thought this might have been due to Australian censors, but no, it was done by Hemmingway in reaction to how publishers had treated profanity in his previous novels.

Another attention grabber is the detail Hemingway goes into with Jordan’s battle preparations and the battle scenes. In one scene Jordan orders one of his partisans to not put more tree branches around a machine gun placement as a group of calvary fascists have already been past its location and might notice the difference. Hemingway also details the thoughts of Jordan as he fights. His fears and concerns are constantly in competition with what he needs to do next and his will to successfully carry out his mission.

The novel shows the futility of war when everyone is not on the same page. Ideas of utopia have a hard time winning against corruption and brutal ideology, especially when personal survival is a main concern. The novel takes you into the mind of a soldier, one who is committed to the cause, even though he has his doubts about those leading the cause. The novel also exposes a turning point in world history to the reader.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a great read. It is one of the best explorations of conflict I have read and well deserving of its accolades. It left me wanting to find out more about the Spanish Civil War.

Review of The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger is a novel with a false plot. It is a plot that doesn't matter at all. Things happen and you think they may be connected but that connection is never substantiated. So, it is a frustrating novel for anyone who wants events to come together in the end.

What is it about then? It is about Bobby who has many regrets about his one true love, his sister Stella. She may have desired a sexual relationship which he shunned. She spends a lot of time in a mental institution before killing herself, and he regrets rejecting her and not being there when she died. 

The novel consists of many long conversations between men who seem to be intelligent but delusional about the world around them and their place in it. Perhaps McCarthy is saying something about how deluded Americans have become in the Trump era. 

In between conversations Bobby has many adventures, from racing car driver to deep sea diver, which starts to look like an improbable Forrest Gump type life. The adventures that don’t let him escape from his regret for his sister. 

The novel frequently goes into the schizophrenic mind of Stella as she hallucinates conversations with the imaginery Kid who has been damaged by Thalidomide. The Kid tries to keep her amused by hosting not very good cabaret acts. Who knows why she chooses a character who had Thalidomide as the drug was never approved in the US, so they did not have the flood of babies born with its birth defects.  

McCarthy continues his habit of no quotation marks and no attributions for dialogue, which may have not mattered much for his other novels, like the dialogue sparse The Road, but becomes a pain for this one with its masses of dialogue. I was frequently wondering who the hell was speaking and had to go back and re-read, but even then found it hard to track down who was speaking. 

The passenger in the title might be Bobby's regret about not being there for his sister or it might mean that he has no control over his life and is just a passenger being taken wherever fate decides to take him. Or it might just be a reference to the plot red herring at the start of the novel where a passenger has disappeared from a crashed plane. 

Overall, if you want a novel with a resolved plot, don't touch this. If you want a novel where you think you may be able to resolve the plot from clues in the book, don't frustrate yourself with this. If you want a novel that ruminates on America's delusions then this might be the novel for you.

Review of The Dark Man by Referral by Chuck McKenzie

The Dark Man, by Referral and Less Pleasant Tales is a collection of ‘horror’ short stories. I put the horror in quote marks as the stories are not that horrific. They are more thriller stories in the tone of the Twilight Zone, with a bit of added humour. There is no blood and gore or scary shocks, but there are plenty of twists. Most of the stories are about people getting their just deserts, so readers can feel good about what happens to the characters.

The title story, The Dark Man by Referral, is a prime example of bad people getting their just deserts. It is a tale of a boy whose mother is in a relationship with an abusive man. The boy meets a mysterious dark man who gives him a toy that is not as innocuous as it looks, at least to his mother’s partner.

Confessions of a Pod Person would make a great movie. It is Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the point of view of the body snatchers. Unlike in the movie, their invasion fails, and the pod people have to deal with the consequences. This was perhaps my favourite story in the collection.

Other stories include Bad Meat, a zombie tale of sorts. While Retail Therapy will have a reader thinking about justifiable homicide, as a customer endlessly tries to bargain with a shop owner. The Eight-Beat Bar is about being tortured by a musical earworm, like having Hotel California constantly groaning on in your head until you really want to ‘check out’.

All up, there are 20 stories in the collection. Some are as little as a paragraph, while others are a lot more substantial. McKenzie concludes the book with a heart-felt outline of what inspired him to write each story. He tells us that he gave up writing for years, but now he thankfully has his muse back. All the stories have been published in other magazines and collections. Even though the stories were written over decades they seem to belong together.  

I very much enjoyed reading this collection and recommend it to anyone who has had a bad day and wants to see someone get their just deserts.

Review of The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

The Stone Sky is the third novel in the Hugo award winning Broken Earth trilogy. While perhaps slightly less engrossing than the other two novels, it is still a grand finale to the series. The trilogy features incredible original world building. Its various elements interlock with a thorough consistency. The characters control the world, live the world, breathe the world.
                

The series is set in a world dominated by seismic events. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions regularly send the world into a fifth season, which is an extended winter where the sky is full of dust and the sun is blocked for years on end. This causes widespread famines. Tsunamis from the earthquakes also regularly inundate coastal areas.

There are a special class of people called Orogenes who can sense these seismic events about to happen and, depending on the orogene’s power and the severity of the event, can limit their destructiveness. The orogene can also cause these seismic events, either deliberately or as a result of out-of-control emotions. Consequently, they are feared by the general population, and any child found with these traits is murdered unless they are taken by the Guardians.

The Guardians teach the orogenes to control their power and use it to limit seismic events. The Guardians have powers that can control the orogenes and can hurt the orogenes to discipline them. They subject them to a servitude that verges on slave labour.

The trilogy’s main character is an orogene who goes through various names. She comes to the attention of a Guardian who then trains her. She is then sent out into the world to use her abilities to stop seismic events or use them to do things like clear harbour entrances. But she goes rogue. In the third novel she is searching for her daughter, Nassun, who was taken by her husband. Nassun is also an orogene. Mother and daughter are unaware they have two competing goals, one wants to stop fifth seasons from occurring forever, while the other wants to destroy the world.

The prose for this novel is some of the best I have read in genre fiction. N.K. Jemisin really knows how to construct descriptive narratives. I was often marvelling at a sentence she had written. The characters, for the most part, have a real emotional impact on the reader. The reader develops a strong empathy for their situation and their planned actions, even though they could involve the deaths of millions.

The Stone Sky finally brings in the backstory that shows how the world became so susceptible to seismic events. It does this by introducing the story of a group of exploited orogenes from the distance past. The mother and daughter then have their confrontation that brings the series to a compelling conclusion.

This is one of the best fantasy trilogies I have read. I find fantasy full of wizards and trolls and, dare I say, hobbits, so boring these days. This series thrashes most fantasy because of its sheer originality and the author’s writing prowess. It is not a novel for the faint-hearted as it contains physical child abuse. Good and evil are not as clear cut as it is in most fantasy. All three of the trilogy’s novels won Hugo awards, which is a feat unmatched by any other series.
                 

Review of Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Kindred is a harrowing time-travel novel that is rightly acknowledged as a science-fiction classic. It is the story of a black American writer, Dana, living in 1976 with her white writer husband Kevin. They are moving into a new house when she collapses and is transported back to the America of 1815. There she meets one of her ancestors, Rufus, the white child of a slave owner. A boy who she will encounter many times over his life. She saves Rufus’ life but is still treated like a slave by the boy’s father. A special slave with medical knowledge that is useful to them, but she is still beaten and whipped when they deem that she has misbehaved.

The novel very much explores what it was like to be a slave, a possession that can be used as the owner likes. It could be worked until it collapsed, beaten when it disobeyed, raped, bred and its children sold. It was not human, just a farm animal. The slaves don’t behave like farm animals as they create their own community. They look after each other for the most part. They accept Dana and try to help her adjust to her circumstances.

There are four classes of slaves. The lowest being those who work in the fields. Then there are the house slaves: the cooks, the cleaners etc. Above them, for the most part, are slaves who were sired by the slave owner, and then there is Dana. But no matter their rank, they all risk being beaten, whipped, raped, or sold off, even if they are married to a slave who is not sold off.

There are two pivotal plot factors that affect the direction of this time-travel story. The first is that Dana can return from the world of the early 1800s to 1976 when certain events occur. The second is that she must ensure that the somewhat reckless Rufus survives for herself to be eventually born.  The relationship between Dana and Rufus is complex, but in the end, it boils down to him being a white slave owner and her being a slave.

Dana’s reactions to the situation she finds herself in are believable. She quickly decides to keep her origins secret as the people of 1815 would not believe her and think her mad. This changes as she gains the trust of others. She does not freak out. She decides to keep a low profile and not draw attention to herself. An unrealistic book would have her go on a crusade to free the slaves. Mentally she is a strong woman.

The book creates a real empathy for the plight of Dana and the slaves on the estate. I desperately wanted characters like Alice, Carrie, Luke, and Dana, of course, to survive, gain their freedom, live as equals, and prosper. I hoped the civil war was around the corner and would put an end to slavery, but that war was decades away. If these slaves were going to gain freedom, they were going to have to do it themselves.

Those readers who treat the novel as a thriller may be disappointed with the ending as we never learn why Dana is being transported back to the past. But that is not the point of the novel, it is an exploration of slavery and the inhumanity of whites towards blacks. It is a challenging read, especially for a white guy like me.

I want to say that it is a book everyone should read, but that is such a cliché. But everyone should read this book. America has much to be ashamed of in its past. So does Australia, where Indigenous Australians were exploited as unpaid labour and pacific islander slaves were used in its sugar cane fields. This book really exposes our past and continuing inhumanity to each other and our pathetic disregard for human rights. How greed will have us rationalising the exploitation of others. I would like to say that it shows those under adversity banding together to help each other, and it does, but they are forced to band together to survive, it is not something they have chosen to do.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted. It is not a book for those who think justice will occur in the end. In a world full of greed and divided into tribes who can’t understand each other, justice is still elusive. American, like Australia, is still a hotbed of racism. Kindred is a book that will make you angry. If it doesn’t you are probably a racist.   

Review of Never-Ending Day by Graham Storrs

Never-Ending Day is an enjoyable read. Its title comes from the fact that most of the action takes place in a Dyson wheel which is a structure built around and enclosing a star, so those inside always have the star’s light shining on them.

The story is set hundreds of years into the future where a police officer, Tara Fraser, is chasing a terrorist, Yuna, across space. Tara comes across the previously unknown Dyson wheel, and his ship is captured and dragged in. He assumes the same thing happened to Yuna with her ship, so he goes looking for her, thinking that when he captures her he will worry about escaping the Dyson wheel. He is a really committed cop.

He discovers the wheel is inhabited and stops to ask the natives if they had seen Yuna, using his computer implant to translate. Instead of helping, they capture him. He now has another problem, dealing with a treacherous native population.

The story is written in a light-hearted tone, along the lines of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A tone I found refreshing after reading a lot of hard science-fiction and literature. This tone is reflected in the banter between Fraser and Yuna. Fraser is a stick in the mud, doing everything by the book even though he knows his employers are not the nicest people. While Yuna loves to break laws and rules and is prone to impulsive actions. Some of which are successful, others which are not.

I have read a couple of other of Graham Storr’s novels in the Timesplash series, which I plan to return to with his third novel in that series. They are time-travel thriller novels, while Never Ending Day is more of an adventure novel with plenty of humour.

I did find the dialogue slightly disconcerting to begin with, as Yuna and Fraser conversed like they were living in the late 20^th Century. But who knows how people will talk in the future. I recently listened to a radio program on trends which said that everything old is coming back in again, so maybe in hundreds of years times it will be trendy to talk like people in the 20^th Century. The dialogue was very funny at times.

 After reading a lot of hard science-fiction, I enjoyed reading something fun. I very much cared for the protagonists and really hoped they could come to some mutual arrangement to escape the wheel and its somewhat suspect inhabitants.

A review of Julia by Sandra Newman

I can’t remember reading a more harrowing novel than Sandra Newman’s Julia. The novel really had me fearing for the two main characters and where our society might be heading. Julia is the story of Winston Smith’s lover from the novel 1984. I read 1984 decades ago, so I am not sure how much the story in Julia diverges from Orwell’s novel, but Julia seems to be set in a lot more desolate world than what I remember of Orwell’s 1984.

Julia is much more than the story of her relationship with Winston Smith. We meet Julia as a child of well-off parents, but then the parents get on the wrong side of Big Brother, and they are banished to a special area zone. A zone full of proles and labour camps. But with the help of her mother, Julia manages to get a job in the Ministry of Truth. She is a mechanic whose main task is to keep the machines running in the Fiction Department. A department that, among other things, rewrites novels and poems to make them suit the Big Brother ethos. It is there that she meets Winston Smith.

Julia lives in a rundown dorm with other unmarried women. It is very basic, just a bunk bed with a cupboard and surrounded by telescreens to keep an eye on the women. The dorm has no showers, and the toilets keep getting clogged. It is in a state of decay like the rest of London, except for the Party areas. Apart from the failure to fix and clean the infrastructure due to resources being spent on the ongoing war, many areas of London have been bombed and continue to be bombed.

Julia is a product of her environment. She keeps to herself, hardly trusting anyone. She hides her occasional sexual activity, as unmarried sex is illegal. Like many, she pays lip service to the plethora of Big Brother rules. She is definitely guilty of Wrong Think as she pretends to display hate during the daily hate broadcasts. She puts on a total front to the world. She is a strong woman whose sole aim is survival, but she is also a victim of the society she lives in. She has no intention of rebelling against Big Brother.

On the other hand, Winston Smith is full of secret bravo about taking on Big Brother. He seeks the truth and is looking for a way to fight to achieve it. When they first meet, Julia thinks he is somewhat naïve. She eventually sees him as someone totally deluded by thoughts of a successful rebellion.

The ending of the novel looked like it was going to surprise, to leave the reader with hope for Julia, but that hope is squashed under yet another boot.

As I read the novel, I found myself becoming paranoid about who might be watching me and how much of a performance everyone is giving to me. That is the sort of effect this novel can have. It is an excellent read, and really rams home the warning that we should be wary of ceding our freedom to bright and shiny false hopes like Trump and Putin.

I think Julia will be considered a classic in the not-too-distant future. Either that, or it might be rewritten to suit the authoritarian government of the day. I also would not be surprised if a Big Brother of the future recommends school children read Julia so they will fear the consequences of Wrong Think.