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The thirtieth Book Review Blog Carnival is posted at the Book Review Blog Carnival" blog. Who woulda thunk it?




The next edition will be hosted by Linus's Blanket on November 22nd. Submit your reviews now at our Blogcarnival.com page.

The Lost Symbol

Dan Brown

I'm probably the last person in the wold to write a review of the latest mega best seller by Dan Brown, who burst onto the scene with The Davinci Code in 2003. In The Lost Symbol, Brown brings back his professorial protagonist Robert Langdon once gain, to obfuscate a plethora of historic trivia and build yet another pyramid of innuendo.

The target of his misinformation this time is the Freemasons, a fraternal organization with a history dating back to the 17th century. There have been rumors about the rather theatrical rituals of Freemasonry, drinking wine (or blood some say) out of a skull and such, which Brown makes free use of. Brown is careful, though, to picture the Masons as the misunderstood good guys in The Lost Symbol. Perhaps he was sufficiently cowed by the reaction to his treatment of Opus Dei, a relatively innocent Roman Catholic fraternal organization, that Brown demonized in The Davinci Code. I will cite one glaring example of Brown's misuse of historic information in pursuit of his plot. He claims that Thomas Jefferson, in assembling the "Jefferson Bible" was trying to preserve the "Ancient Wisdom" in the new testament, the references to supernatural powers that are alleged to be available to all of us if we study and practice. In fact Jefferson cut out of his new testament all of the miracles, anything, in fact, that was contrary to physical science as it was known in the late 18th century. His was an attempt to preserve the humanistic lessons of Jesus, for example the Sermon on the Mount. Jefferson redacted the water into wine, healing of lepers and raising the dead, the very things that Brown wishes to emphasize and implies that Jefferson was pursuing.

There have been hundreds of fraternal organizations, ranging from the Elks Club to the Klu Klux Klan, founded in the United States. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, membership in one or more of them was standard for middle class adult male Americans. Almost all of them have, or had, some secret initiation ritual. The Freemasons, being the oldest of them has the richest history of ritual and possibly the weirdest. The Masons claim to fame is that George Washington was a member. Washington was also a founding member of the Society of the Cincinnati, a club for Revolutionary War officers who all swore to return to civilian life and not pursue political power, modeling themselves on the Roman dictator Cincinnatus, who resigned and returned to his farm.

In The Lost Symbol Brown makes use of the "Ancient Wisdom" often touted in New Age literature, and discusses mystical powers of the mind to affect the physical world with pure thought. I often heard spooky whoo whoo music in my head while reading the book. Of course there is a mad evil villain who is trying to steal the Masons' secret rituals of supernatural power, which don't exist and a scientist studying "noetic science." Brown uses this idea of transcendent powers as a plot device yet it appears to me that he is a bit embarrassed by them. At no time does Brown exhibit the actual use of any transcendent powers in the story, although there were several opportunities for him to do so.

The CIA is there, too, flying around Washington DC in black helicopters, chasing Robert Langdon. The reader gets a virtual tour of the Capitol building, the library of Congress and some parts of the Smithsonian Institution. These are almost worth the price of admission themselves.

Dan Brown knows how to write a page turner, even though is language can be a bit florid at times and even embarrassingly awkward. Poor Tom Hanks, if he makes another movie from this book, will not have a love interest unless they give the story a bit of a rewrite. A rewrite might be a good thing.

Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon

This new novel by the author of Gravity's Rainbow and V is written in the style of a hard boiled detective novel. It is also classic Pynchon. The story is set in Los Angeles in 1969 with a central character who is a pot smoking disillusioned hippie turned private invvesigator, a veteran of the early 60's surfer scene, named Doc Sportello. Sportello's bete noire is L.A. Police detective Bigfood Bjornson, an aggressive, rule bending, Dirty Harry like figure who turns out to be a henpecked husband with a sentimental streak.

Pynchon's ever present themes of paranoia, conspiracy and corruption are to be found in Inherent Vice. As in his earlier novels there is a secret society, this time called "Golden Fang," which is introduced as the name of a schooner which slips in and out of the harbor at night on mysterious errands, but is also an investment group run by dentists, a drug cartel, the owner of a run down casino in the wrong part of Las Vegas, a real estate development company, a right wing political group and a rehab clinic.

Sportello wanders in a marijuana induced haze, through the streets of Los Angeles searching for clues into the disappearance of developer Mickey Wolfmann. He is given bits and pieces of information by a wide variety of characters, heroin addicts, surfers, the saxophone player in a psychedelic surf band working undercover as a police informant and political provocateur, a former teenage runaway and her dentist/lover. Each revelation makes the plot more convoluted but seems to lead toward a hoped for but never revealed resolution. Doc Sportello is as clueless at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. There is never a denouement where Sortello reveals his clever solution to the crime. He does get paid, though, by the conspirators themselves but in a plausibly deniable way.

Although Pynchon uses themes from film noir and the novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and makes references to John Garfield movies, this is not a mystery novel in the classic sense. It is a rambling, paranoiac Thomas Pynchon novel. As in all of Pynchon's work, the confusion and sense of pointlessness you are left with are the whole point of the book.

Thomas Pynchon has made somewhat of an enigma of himself. He does not allow himself to be photographed and keeps his whereabouts a secret, as though he were one of the characters in his novels. Rumor has it that Pynchon is up for a Nobel Prize in literature. All he needs to do is reveal himself as a female writer from a third world country and he's in like Flynn.

The Development

John Barth

Fresh out of college, with my shiny new BA in English in hand, I discovered John Barth. His early books, The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, and particularly The Sot Weed Factor and Giles Goat Boy, were wondrous to me, and fresh, pushing the cutting edge of 20th century literature.

His middle works began to seem formulaic, or I had learned the extent of Barth's bag of literary tricks. I knew that he would move his characters in and out of time, put them in the middle of ancient folk tales, bring them back to the Chesapeake, just because he could. They still held my interest, particularly as I had migrated to the scene of his writing. I was sailing the same wine dark sea -er- Bay, as Simon Behler, in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor and Peter Sagamore of Tidewater Tales. I was eating the same steamed crabs, drinking the same National Bohemian beer and watching the same sunsets.

Barth's later books became one trick ponies, the point of which seemed to be to remind the reader that Barth is the Author and he can do whatever he wants with his books, which brings us to this latest short work of fiction. It's not a novel. It's not a collection of short stories. It doesn't have a plot structure, the way I learned in school that stories are supposed to. It starts and stops at will, changes direction, changes narrative point of view ambiguously, stops in the middle of a chapter and refuses to finish it. This would be self indulgent in a younger author. For Barth in 2008, when The Development was published, it just seems exhausted.

The characters in The Development are pencil sketches at best. Residents of a fictional gated community "Heron Bay Estates," they do remind me of the denizens of Heron Point, a gateless retirement community, located at the edge of town. Barth does not give any of them the time to develop. He does kill several of them off and, in one case, Barth simply refuses to continue writing about a couple, prematurely ending the chapter without reaching any point whatsoever - the omnipotent Author rearing his ugly head.

He makes several changes of narrative point of view, which is OK, but at one point he interrupts the narrative to ask the reader to guess who is writing now. No, I know yo aren't Dean Potter Simpsonof Stratford College, or George Newett, who you tried out as a narrator earlier, or Carol Walsh or Amanda Todd or . . . It's old John Barth down there on Broad Neck, pecking away at his old typewriter or his new Mackintosh. Give me a break, John.

What held my interest, again, was the local connection. Barth changed the name of our little town, calling it Stratford, dubbed our little liberal arts college, Stratford College, gave it a,similar overly large and cursed, Shakespeare prize in literature to replace the one named after Sophie Kerr, and re-named our county after an inflatable dinghy. I kept hoping to recognize some of the people in town, however he seems to have made all of his characters up out of whole cloth and not just changed the names to protect the innocent. Or perhaps he runs in different circles than I. We never meet at dinner parties, although I sometimes spot him on the street or at the supermarket.

All in all, I would have to say that The Development would probably be a crashing bore to anyone not familiar with Chestertown and it's environs. To me it was like reading my own name in the Kent County News.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

David Wroblewski

This is another book that I learned about by listening to the Diane Rehm Show on the radio. The author was on for an interview and aroused my interest because Diane, David Wroblewski and I are all dog people. Wroblewski has written a novel set in an unusual dog breeding kennel which produces unusual dogs and the dogs are central to the story he tells. The founder of this kennel, the grandfather of it's central character, had the idea to breed dogs based on behavior instead of conformation. He took dogs of many, and sometimes no breed, that had performed unusual and sometimes heroic acts, dogs that got written about in the newspaper, and he created his own breed of dogs. He clearly researched both breeding methods and obedience and service dog training for the book, although the results achieved by this fictional kennel are probably not possible.

The book is written from many points of view, sometimes even that of one of the dogs, but never sinks to a level of cuteness or anthropomorphism while doing so. The difference between us and our animal companions is one of degree and not of kind, Descartes notwithstanding. The idea of creating these dogs that are intelligent and loyal but able to to make moral choices is a fascinating one. It gives the book a kind of Sci Fi speculative edge. What if you bred and trained dogs for intelligence and judgment? How far could you take them? What part of their behavior is learned and what effect does inheritance have? This question is played out in the dags and in the humans in this story.

This is a coming of age novel, as many first novels are. A young man, Edgar, grows up on this farm, where his parents are engaged in breeding and training these amazing dogs. Edgar is unable to speak, although he hears normally, and communicates with a half made up sign language, to everyone, including the dogs. Edgar is destined to take over the kennel and continue breeding and training these amazing dogs.

But this coming of age novel takes a wrong turn when Edgar's uncle Claude comes home after a long absence. In fact, not until Edgar's father suddenly dies and Claude starts paying unwanted attention to Edgar's mother, does the reader realize the Wroblewski is re-telling the story of Hamlet on a dog breeding farm.

Like the play, the novel ends tragically. I won't spoil it by telling you how. It is a satisfyingly thick book, a good long read, and I highly recommend it.

Note: revised 12/22/08

So Long Tony Hillerman

Tony Hillerman, author of the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police crime novels died today in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Hillerman was 83 years old. Hágoónee' Tony, my friend.