A tree of immense girth grows from a tufted shoot; a terrace of nine levels rises from a clump of soil; a journey of a thousand miles begins under the first tread.
--Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 64
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The Big U, Neal Stephenson (1984), 308 pp (tpb).
I've been a Stephenson devotee for years, ever since, while idly browsing through the SF section of a bookstore in Ann Arbor (not the old Borders on State Street, amazingly) I picked up--without ever having heard of either author or book--a copy of Snow Crash and tumbled headlong into its utterly manic first chapter ("The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here....The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit."). Shortly after that, I'd purchased that bad boy and was enthusiastically annoying my good-natured but resolutely non-tech, non-SF-fan roomate by reading the first chapter to him. The rest of the book doesn't quite live up to that sizzling opening--it has awkward slow spots, and I'm with the seeming majority that finds the ending abrupt and unsatisfying--but in my book, Snow Crash is still a classic. Diamond Age has some great ideas and some good story, which makes it all the more disappointing that it really loses it somewhere in the final third or so. Ah, but Cryptonomicon! There, my friends, is a gem. I adore that book. It's not perfect--I could pick itty bitty nits, were I so inclined--but every so often an author will spin out a narrative so compelling, in a voice so finely tuned to your tastes, that all you can do is praise God and hope for more in the future. Stephenson hit it out of the park with Cryptonomicon, and speaking of more, I sure wish he'd finish Quicksilver Real Soon Now.
All of which is a lengthy and not entirely necessary lead-in to the actual book at hand, Stephenson's first published novel. And its "firstness" really shows; I wouldn't call The Big U an actively bad book, but it clearly demonstrates that he progressed to his current heights from, if not the utter depths, then at least a literary embarkation point an awful long way down the slope. Many of the things that make him such a pleasure to read now can actually be discerned in larval form in The Big U, but in such rough, unhoned, undisciplined condition that they haven't yet become virtues. One problem that probably rests as much with me as with him is that, in many ways, I'm not really an ideal audience for many flavors of satire (I'm not sure I always understand its forms, for one thing, and I'm a little too ingenuous a reader, for another), and much of The Big U is pretty unsubtle satire.
As its title indicates, The Big U is about a large, impersonal university called, appropriately but unimaginatively, American Megaversity. It's entirely located in a massive building complex that has a huge, sprawling base, topped with eight towers, and containing dorms, classrooms, offices, and all the other facilities of the university. Within this self-contained city, several diverse characters emerge from the teeming stew of whacked-out student organizations to become acquainted with each other and, over the course of the academic year, knit into a loose confederation that will have a vital part to play as events lurch toward a loopily apocalyptic conclusion.
As a unified whole, The Big U can't be called a success, but it does have some worthwhile parts. Stephenson doesn't have control of voice yet; one thing that I found really jarring was how it would slip, entirely without warning, from a straightforward third-person narrative to a first person account in the words of the putative narrator, a young professor living as a resident advisor in one of the dorms. Nor does he have a firm grip on the manic invention dial just yet--anything and everything seems fair game, and he throws a ton of stuff into the mix. Still, if you throw enough stuff at the wall, some of it will stick, and The Big U has some decent, if unkind, sketches of the elements of insanity that infest a large university--the Stalinist student activists and their ultra-conformist nemeses; the urbane, machiavellian administration; the goofy wargaming/roleplaying club; the brilliant sysadmin that really runs things, more-or-less.
I can't really recommend The Big U, unless one has a lot of built-up spleen to vent on the topic of big, impersonal institutions of higher learning, and wants to read along with someone else who did as well, and wrote it all down. Even then, one might find it a bit too meandering and unfocused to get the job done. But like I said, there are a few interesting nuggets embedded in the matrix, and it is interesting to see the seeds of talent that are there waiting to be nurtured and polished, until coming to such fine fruition fifteen years later.
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Joy in the Morning, P.G. Wodehouse (1947), 296 pp (hb).
After the thing was all over, when peril had ceased to loom and happy endings had been distributed in heaping handfuls and we were driving home with our hats on the side of our heads, having shaken the dust of Steeple Bumpleigh from our tyres, I confessed to Jeeves that there had been moments during the recent proceedings when Bertram Wooster, though no weakling, had come very near to despair.
"Within a toucher, Jeeves."
"Unquestionably affairs had developed a certain menacing trend, sir."
"I saw no ray of hope. It looked to me as if the blue bird had thrown in the towel and formally ceased to function. And yet here we are, all boomps-a-daisy. Makes one think a bit, that."
"Yes, sir."
"There's an expression on the tip of my tongue which seems to me to sum the whole thing up. Or, rather, when I say an expression, I mean a saying. A wheeze. A gag. What, I believe, is called a saw. Something about Joy doing something."
"Joy cometh in the morning, sir?"
"That's the baby. Not one of your things, is it?"
"No, sir."
"Well, it's dashed good," I said.
And I still think that there can be no neater way of putting in a nutshell the outcome of the super-sticky affair of Nobby Hopwood, Stilton Cheesewright, Florence Craye, my Uncle Percy, J. Chichester Clam, Edwin the Boy Scout and old Boko Fittleworth--or, as my biographers will probably call it, the Steeple Bumpleigh Horror.
It goes without saying, naturally, that horror for Bertie is high comedy for the rest of us. Joy in the Morning is a novel, and in fact, structurally it bears quite a few resemblances to its immediate J & W novelistic predecessor, The Code of the Woosters. Bertie is once again unwillingly enlisted to leave the metropolis and head out for a sojourn in the arcadian splendours of a rural village. Once again, there are two separate young engaged couples who face obstacles to their matrimonial goals, and Bertie finds himself not only caught up in schemes to smooth these obstacles, but inadvertently re-engaged himself (he managed to escape the first time, in a previous adventure) to Florence Craye, a Very Formidable Woman. The really central couple of this delightful farce, however, is composed of Boko Fittleworth, a school friend of Bertie's and now a successful author (aka "literary fathead"), and Nobby (Zenobia) Hopwood, a lively young woman, who, being not quite twenty one yet, requires permission from her guardian (and Bertie's uncle) to marry. Too bad Uncle Percy, a no-nonsense shipping magnate, doesn't much care for literary fatheads in general, and most certainly not for this one in particular.
"Hullo, Bertie," she said. "Are you paying a neighbourly call on Boko?"
I replied that that was about what it amounted to, but added that first I required a few moments of her valuable time.
"Listen, Nobby," I said.
She didn't, of course. I've never met a girl yet who did. Say "Listen" to any member of the delicately nurtured sex, and she takes it as a cue to start talking herself. However, as the subject she introduced proved to be the very one I had been planning to ventilate, the desire to beat her brains out with a brick was not so pronounced as it would otherwise have been.
It was while reading this book that I had an epiphany. Well, okay, that may be overstating it a bit, but what occurred to me is that these books are really describing an alternate reality. And not because they purport to sketch a time and place (early 20th century England) with which many, if not most, readers have little familiarity. No, these come to us from an alternate reality because they are filtered through a narrator who is so cheerfully unaware that he's an idiot, and so blithely assured that what he's describing is the way it is, that his conviction creates a world in which the laws of nature and social interaction really do function as he seems to think they do.
Alright, tongue a little less in cheek, they're really farce or humorous satire. But I like my alternate reality theory, too.
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Sharpe's Siege, Bernard Cornwell (1987), 316 pp (tpb).
This is Cornwell's chance to show a British naval officer who is venal and militarily incompetent (he must have gotten tired of reading about Jack Aubrey, who, whatever one can say about his various shortcomings, is at least supremely competent militarily). Sharpe gets stuck leading a detachment of Rifles as part of a Navy-led expedition to raid a fortress town on the French coast. Sharpe assumes that he'll be leading the landward part of the assault, but once under way, the ambitious Captain Bampfylde informs him that he (Bampfylde) will be at the head of the death-or-glory charge, with Sharpe's men cooling their heels in reserve. So of course Sharpe has to flitter off, foil an ambush that would have chopped up Bampfylde's force, and take the fortress anyway.
Due to machinations that I won't bother to detail, Sharpe and his small detachment get stuck in the gutted fort while a rather large French force descends on them to root them out. Their nominal enemy, an American privateer captain (I'm taking his name, Cornelius Killick, as an obscure nod to O'Brian's Preserved Killick), has to save their bacon by evacuating them out the seaward side as they're about to be overrun. This was an entertaining enough installment, but I didn't find it as enjoyable as some of the other episodes.
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