Gun, with Occasional Music By Jonathan Lethem

Gun, with Occasional Music

By Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 19th, 1964. His mother was Judith Frank Lethem, a Jewish activist, who traced her family roots to Germany, Poland, and Russia. His father was Richard Brown Lethem, a Scotts-English Protestant, and avant-garde painter. Jonathan was the eldest of three children, His brother Blake became the graffiti artist Keo and is still active today training apprentices in the craft. His sister Mara Lethem became a noted translator of books from Spanish to English and a writer in her own right. All three of them grew up in a commune in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn and experienced a very Bohemian upbringing. When he was young his parents divorced and Judith passed away from a brain tumor when he was thirteen. Originally intending to pursue visual art styles like his father, Mr. Lethem attended Bennington College in Vermont but realized that he would rather write and dropped up. After an epic bout of hitchhiking, he ended up in California and worked for used book stores for about twelve years before publishing his first short story in 1989 and novels starting in the 1990s. Gun, with Occasional Music, is his first novel published in 1994 by Harcourt, an American publishing company that was founded in 1905 and bought by Houghton Mifflin and re-branded Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2007. The novel itself was well received and nominated for a Nebula Award for best novel. Let's talk about this book, shall we?

Everything dies and there are a lot of ways to die, some deaths are relatively easy and one could even say a good way to go (In this truth lies half the beginning of the Millennial Death Drive {that sound you heard dear readers was me rolling my eyes}). Others are at least quick and done with a minimum of mess. The society we see in Gun is not dying well, fast or with a minimum of mess (And this is the other half.{Oh please, compared to what people in the 1930s or 1850s had to deal with? Get a damn grip}). It is dying slow, hard, and ugly; and the people caught up in its death throes have no idea what's going on (My God. The author is prescient.{Our society is not dying, it’s having a nasty bout of generational battling}). Set in an alternate 2008 Oakland, Gun takes place in a world where almost everyone is taking drugs to deal with their lives, asking any kind of questions is at best borderline illegal, and humans have increasingly isolated themselves not just from each other but from themselves. Inquisitors have replaced the police and are the only ones really allowed to ask questions in this society. I'd like everyone to sit for a moment and think about what it means when only the authorities are allowed to ask questions. While Mr. Lethem doesn't explore that to deeply, he doesn't shy away from the implications either, showing us newscasts that have abandoned giving any narrative of the news instead using pictures and musical themes to communicate very basic propaganda and the Inquisitors abusing their authority with almost childlike disregard for any consequences (To the world is reduced to Fox News but worse… and the Inquisitors are basically… well the logical conclusion of police now. Gotcha!). After all, how are their abuses even going to be uncovered in the first place if no one else can ask questions? Those who do ignore the law and keep asking questions and acting in ways to disturb the “peace” are dealt with through the karma system, a system of government-issued points kept track of through a computer system and accessed through plastic cards. Acceptable behavior can get you more karma issued. Unacceptable behaviors get karma docked. Hit zero karma and the Inquisitors can come and take you away for any reason and put you in the deep freeze, a cryogenic prison. The only checks on this system seem to be the rapidly disappearing private inquisitors and few semi-honest men and women in the system trying to keep everything from going further off the rails. As you can guess these are rather ineffective checks. Further reinforcing the feeling of a society dying from internal rot is the utter lack of children except for animals mutated into anthropomorphic forms and intelligence, and the babyheads - mutated children,who have completely replaced natural children, and are supposedly more intelligent than their parents, The book provides little to no evidence of that intelligence, just that these children mentally develop faster into self-sufficiency and are borderline sociopaths in their behavior towards the adults (Where oh where did this shit go off the rails? I mean, the living Furries I get because anthropomorphic weasels and raccoons are adorable, but… why Evil Boss Baby? {I’m not sure, on the one hand some characters talk about it as if there was no choice in it happening. Others call it a giant mistake society made}). The remaining unmutated humans deal with this by taking government subsided and approved drugs that have such names as Acceptol, Forgettol and so on, which keeps them docile and in an easily distracted haze.

In the middle of all this works Conrad Metcalf, a private inquisitor. He was once a member of the government force but now plies the trade of asking questions for private citizens. Conrad is an interesting choice of main character. In some ways he's traditional, being a P.I in bad odor with the authorities caught between his idealism and cynicism as he works on the very edge of the law to try and ensure some scrap of actual truth is maintained in the process. He's a person on the margin of society but there because of his own beliefs and choices, not because he was born with the wrong gender or skin color or in the case of this setting species. He's sarcastic with a smart mouth that gets him into trouble and he depends on his wits and observational skills to get himself back out of trouble. In other ways, he's very non-traditional playing with the context of the setting itself. For example, Conrad is literally emasculated, having undergone a procedure where he traded nerve endings with an old girlfriend in what was supposed to be a temporary procedure, which became permanent when she promptly disappeared (Wait. WHY!?). This means while Conrad's equipment (if you'll pardon the euphemism) functions perfectly fine, he gets no real sensation from the function. I'm not sure how that's supposed to work but it colors his relationship with the women characters in the story as he varies from low-level hostile (which is pretty much how he deals with the male characters), to resentful towards desirable woman, to flat out anger and violence when a woman tries to use sex as a bargaining tool. His relationships with men honestly aren't any better with violence being a predominant theme of his interactions with human beings either implied through him coming in and asking invasive questions (which requires a license in this setting) or by him and the other characters trading hits throughout the decaying Oakland streets and parking lots. This gives us a picture of a man who is incredibly isolated and can't reach past his own anger and distaste for the world around him to end that isolation. It also seems to be the norm for his society as everyone else seems very isolated as well. This is vividly illustrated by the man who started this story, Dr. Maynard Stanhunt a former client of Conrad.

Dr. Stanhunt's murder is the event that kickstarts the story but the more I read the book the less sure I am that Dr. Stanhunt was a person. Dr. Stanhunt was estranged from his wife, had a very distant relationship with his medical partner and was so hopped up on Forgettol that his afternoon self had no idea what his morning self was doing. This is literal by the way, Conrad confirms this by telling us that when he called Dr. Stanhunt at the wrong time, the man had no idea who he was or that Conrad had been hired by him. If you're so divorced from your own life that you have no idea what you're doing from 7 am to 11 am and during those hours you don't know a damn thing about your life after 5 pm... Are you a real person at this point or just a set of discordant identities knocking about in the same body? (Two different people maybe?) Can you say you actually have a life or do you just fill up space like some sort of meat Popsicle? We never meet Dr. Stanhunt directly so we can’t really say if he had a life or not. It’s telling, however, that despite him being murdered, there doesn't even appear to be a funeral for the guy. None of the supporting characters ranging from the Inquisitors given the official case, to the doctors' ex-wife, the woman who lives in a nice house and seems to know the ex-wife and doctor well, and the angry kangaroo enforcer who wants Conrad to just go away and stop digging around none of them provide any answers into Dr. Stanhunt’s personhood or lack of it either. Nor do they seem to be mourning him. Conrad himself is more interested in figuring out who killed the Doctor to clear both himself and his new client than he is in answering any questions about personhood. To be fair, given that he is being paid to save his client from being imprisoned for murder so that's likely the priority. As Conrad works to unravel secrets that the doctor was keeping from everyone, including himself, he finds himself at the center of a spiral of crime, betrayals, and increasingly snarled relationships gone bad. In some ways, it mirrors a standard hard boiled detective story but in a lot of ways, it uses the science fiction elements of the story to explore just how easy it is to victimize and crush people when they're isolated and alone. It also gives us a glimpse of how the easiest way to isolate people is to convince them that they have no choice but to be isolated and that there's no way to fight that.

This is a very bleak novel in a lot of ways. I don't really like Conrad, even though he's the most likable character in the novel but I do find himself understanding him and approving of the lengths he goes to for a person he doesn't even like. I do feel Mr. Lethem kinda missed a few opportunities in this story due to his insistence of following the hardboiled format but what he does do, he does well. Do I like the novel? I can't say that I do. On the flip side, I read it twice and both times I read it in a single sitting so I can't claim that I hate the novel either (Maybe one of those things where it is objectively very good and pulls you in but… my god the author needs antidepressants? {That’s definitely a way to describe it!}). It's very well written, intensely in the first person from the view of Conrad and while the plot is a bit of a burning train wreck it's one you can't look away from. Part of the problem is the pacing, Mr. Lethem takes a lot of time to set everything up and illustrate the bleakness of his setting and ends up kinda rushing through the endgame. Additionally, a lot of the supporting characters are left kind of shallow and unrealized. Part of that is the weakness of going all-in on a single first-person narrative, you can only get so far into the other characters that way (Especially if the protagonist hates them and himself.). I would call it an uncomfortable novel but not one that makes you angry through ham-handedness or various other flaws but in how it makes you think. One repeating complaint I see in modern society is how people have fewer and fewer meaningful relationships. I see and hear people talk about how they don't have close friends and struggle to make any friends. I consider myself lucky in that I do have several people I would consider close friends that I can sit down with and talk about emotional issues or just shoot the shit about movies, games, or what have you (Hello! Otherwise why on earth would he put up with me...). I will say that if you're feeling friendless, the first step is to get out there and start meeting people. Join an activity, take up a group hobby, find my other readers and set up a book club discussing books I review. Do something to get into repeated social contact with people outside of your workplace, otherwise, you might end up doing the Forgettol and losing yourself. I'm giving Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem a B. It's a book that's gonna stay with me and gave me a lot to think about despite the flaws in its plot and pacing.

With this review done, loyal readers we head into February, where we discuss the works of Philip K Dick.  Our esteemed Patrons have voted that our focus for the next month be the short story We Can Remember it for You Wholesale, which most of you would know better under the title Total Recall.  So we'll be covering the story, both movies and even the television show!  Speaking our Patrons you can join their ranks for as little as a 1$ a month and get a vote on what books get reviewed as well as discussions on theme months or any other suggestions you'd like to make.  Just join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads.  Hope to see you there and as always, keep reading!

The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley

The Emperor's Blades

by Brian Staveley

Welcome back readers to the first review of 2020! (Insert Barbara Walters joke here) Let me start by chatting about our author. Brain Staveley is an American fantasy writer who currently lives in Vermont with his wife and young son. He holds a Bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College and a Masters in Creative Writing from Boston University. He is also a veteran teacher, having taught courses in Literature and History at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School as well as Creative Writing and Medieval History for The Putney School in Vermont as part of their Pre-College Oxford and Pre-College Tuscany programs. The Emperor's Blades was published in 2014 by Tor books. Tor Books was founded in 1980 by Tom Doherty, who used to be a publisher for Ace Books. In 1987 Tor Books was bought by St. Martin press who was in turn bought by Macmillan Publishers. The Emperor's Blade did fairly well, winning the Gemmell Morningstar award for best debut novel and being nominated for Locus and Goodreads Choice Awards. So let's take a look at it.

The Annurian Empire is the most powerful state in the world, stretching across two continents and ruling millions of subjects. None of its neighbors are even close to its weight class when it comes to wealth or military power. The Annurian Empire however, has a problem because its Emperor was just assassinated (Gotta love a monarchical assassination. I know I do! Regicide! Regicide! {I don’t see the point in cheering, it's just replacing one monarch with an even bloodier minded one}). To compound the issue the heir to the throne is a young boy named Kaden, who at the age of seventeen isn't really set to take over anything (One of the perils of monarchy… feature not bug.). Worse, he's only half-trained at best having spent the last eight years at the edge of the Empire at a monastery being trained in mental and emotional discipline by a band of monks (Wait, what? I mean, that’s fine and all, useful even, but come the hell on! Leto Atreides and the Lady Jessica were able to train Paul in both the Benne Jesserit arts and the Mentat and he was all of fifteen! These guys are way behind the curve!) This means the heir has no idea what the current political, military or economic state of the Empire is and on top of that he's hideously vulnerable to his enemies because those monks are not a martial order. Instead they pursue a state of emotional detachment and emptiness that they call the vaniate (WHAT!? WHAT KIND OF SUCCESSOR GROOMING IS THIS!? HAS THIS IMPERIAL HOUSE FALLEN TO DECADENT NAVEL-GAZING? {There’s a reason for it, but they don’t explain it until near the end of the book, I'm going to leave it alone because it is a spoiler}). The vaniate heavily echoes Buddhist ideas of achieving enlightenment through emptiness to me and was fascinating to see how Mr. Staveley used the central idea but stripped out the Buddhist context to give us something incredibly specific to his world. As well as how he rooted it in the history and requirements of his world. Honestly I can see how being able to enter a state of emotional detachment would be useful to a ruler as well but I would think political and military training would be more immediately useful (Right! Because you never know when your Imperial Majesty is going to keel over and die! He could trip and break his neck getting out of bed, choke on a cherry pit, catch a disease or get murdered in the night by assassins! So you start training the kid in statecraft early and if you’re lucky you can train him in personal enlightenment when he’s ready to take the Golden Throne in a pinch! I am a freaking communist, I should not have to lecture the monarchists on these things!). Of course, there are other reasons why it's necessary that the Emperor be able to do this but that would require spoilers to get into. Interestingly enough Kaden is actually the youngest of his father's children. His elder sister Adare is disqualified due to being a woman, which has plenty of precedence but is honestly boring (Also stupid. Male-only primogeniture is always stupid. So many dynasties have collapsed because of that bullshit.{I don’t disagree, after all Elizabeth and Victoria were just as good as their male counterparts but it is common}), Kaden's older brother Valyn however is disqualified because of his eyes. Both Adare and Kaden have glowing eyes that mark them as descendant from a goddess and therefore having divine right to rule (I would quibble over why a woman with the blessing of a goddess can't rule but the Japanese felt the same way historically, as they believe the Emperor to be descendant from Amaritsu, the goddess of the sun). Valyn's eyes don't glow, therefore he can't take the throne, so they ship him to the Kettral, a band of special forces style lunatics who ride giant hawks behind enemy lines to perform Navy SEALS style missions (Wait. Hold the phone. If they are all siblings doesn’t it stand to reason that they are all descended from the same deity? What the hell is this. “Sorry kid, despite our best Imperial Inbreeding your eyes are not the right color, so you cannot be emperor.”? You know what? I’m done. Monarchy is so stupid that it basically covers any stupidity within the system itself.{It’s basically taken as the goddess annoucing that he’s not meant to rule.  Frankly?  I think the goddess made the right call.})

The Kettral are both a great and terrible part of the book for me. I love the idea of a corps of Hawk flying special forces manics operating behind enemy lines but the execution leaves me cold. A lot of pages are eaten up with Valyn's super hard training from hell, although we're only seeing the endpoint of eight years of training. Which Valyn started when he was 10, which just seems wildly unnecessary. I mean yes, you have knights and such who started training at a young age but a large chunk of an upcoming knight's training was social and political. Knights had to learn how to dance and play a musical instrument for example. While the Kettral are learning how to operate unconventionally, I’ve got to point out that it usually doesn't take the better part of a decade. On top of that, the structure and how the Kettral were run was a bit mind-boggling to me. For the most part, you don't take rookies fresh out of training and throw them together all on the same unit without a couple of veterans to provide a stiffening element. You definitely don't take a kid right out of training and give him command of a unit made of his training mates. You most definitely don't take any chummy social cliches (like say the training unit's noble-born sociopath and his followers) and make them a unit without any supervision! All of this makes me unsure how the Kettral avoids becoming an unholy mess of internal rivalries and backstabbing between units (That’s probably exactly what it is! Given the author’s knowledge specialty, he knows all this.{That’s certainly possible but he’s not really showing it well in the book}). There's a lot of potential in this idea and Mr. Staveley certainly hit on the right idea of having them be a special forces analog but the organization and logistics are gut-churning (Except that clearly this empire has descended into Imperial Stupidity.). This third of the plot is dragged out by Valyn not being to able to connect the dots as he becomes aware of a plot against his family and finds out a member of the Kettral may be in the conspiracy (Well of course not! He has no political training!). He also starts investigating the murder of a local whore who was killed by a member of the Kettral, to be honest, this is the most oblivious parts of the book and I actually talked myself out of the correct conclusion a few times because it seemed to bloody oblivious and told myself that I was missing something in the story. By the time Valyn caught up to the rest of us and figured out who his enemy was I was wondering if maybe some royal concubine had used his newborn head for a damn drum at some point (Is he even literate?). So I found myself rather frustrated here but it wouldn't be the only time I was frustrated with Valyn who honestly comes off as rather dim. His best buddy and sidekick La Hin was frankly more compelling than he was and I kinda wish their fates had been switched (No no! This is the point. See Valyn is Important with a capital I because he’s nobility and thus destined for great things, while his competent sidekick can never rise above being a sidekick due to the vaguarities of which family several units of time ago managed to call themselves demigods and have it stick.).

The majority of the rest of the book is focused on Kaden, as Adare doesn't get a lot of screen time (but I'll come back to this). Most of this is set up for the climax of the book, as Kaden tries to figure what is preying on the monastery’s goats and eating their brains. He's also trying to survive his new mentor from hell who thinks burying him up to the chin for 7 days is a good way to get results. Worse is that the mentor seems rather allergic to explaining what he wants from Kaden but expects Kaden to have already figured all of this out (This seems to be the sort of dickery unbecoming of monks who have mastered a state of personal detachment and emptiness.). This refusal to explain things to Kaden is a recurring theme in the novel as it's only towards the end that the monks bother to explain to Kaden why the heir of the Emperor is sent to a bunch of monks in the middle of nowhere. Now some of this part of the plot is rather interesting, as we learn more about why the vaniate is so important for the Emperor and the origins of the practice which is great reading. This is interspersed with what honestly feels like padding. It's possible that most of this was set up for plot elements in future books, which is fair enough but I have to go with just what is in this book and this part of the plot felt like it could have been half as along. Kaden himself is an interesting character as he struggles to piece together what everyone wants from him and just what he can do about everything that is going on. So I'm not as frustrated with Kaden as I am his older brother, although I am left somewhat irritated with his teachers (Just from this description, they are shitty teachers. So you should be.). Mainly because they only think to explain why it's so important that he learn the vaniate after trying to teach to him for seven bloody years. Now, I'm not monk, nor can I make any claim to enlightenment but I kinda think that if you're going to teach someone something, having them understand what it is and why it's important might be good steps to include early in the process.

Lastly, we have poor Adare, the eldest child of the Emperor with the right glowing eyes, who happens to have girl cooties so she can't sit in the big chair. Unlike her brothers, she was trained by their father in politics, economics and all those things that come up when you're running a country. She's also right there in the capital when he dies and is able to look into it straight away, aided by the fact that her father left her the position of Minister of Finance in his will. Adare doesn't get a lot of time in the book, most of it focused on her trying to bring down the priest who is preaching replacing the monarchy with a theocracy and who she is pretty sure actually killed the Emperor in the first place. However, we don't get to see her do a lot of political maneuvering. She keeps talking about how the other ministers hate her for being a girl (also for likely just being handed her position but I do think they would hate her less if she was a prince) but we don't see her attempt to make any allies or build any bridges. In fact, she mostly just holds herself aloof from everyone except the regent, who makes a big show of being a simple soldier. This frankly isn't a good way to play the political game, she's the minister of finance! She literally runs the money department now, let her blackmail people, or offer to help expand their budgets or the hundreds of other ways you can get people on side when you control the money! I do think some of the space given to the boys could have been handed to Adare without losing anything and honestly, she's the only one of the three I wanted to see more of by the time the book was over.

There's a lot of interesting world-building in this book and honestly, the minor and supporting characters are actually pretty interesting. Kaden is a good character but just needs more to do with the number of pages handed to him. On the flip side, the Kettral are a mess of good ideas and awful execution (Is it terrible execution in the sense that it’s actually bad writing, or is it terrible execution in the sense that the organization is internally rotten and dysfunctional? {I’m… Not sure.}). I know most readers won't care about it but I was groaning at parts of it and applauding at others. For example, the climax of the training is super dangerous and can cripple you for life even if you survive. One of those crippled survivors insists on coming out every year to warn the recruits of the dangers they're risking and encourage them to think twice. This is masterfully done! Of course, I also have to ask why you wasted time giving all of these people unneeded specialization training that they can't use and might even lessen their chance of passing the test? Seriously there's a reason why we only train people who have passed basic training in things like sniping and demolitions. It cuts down on the wasted time and resources to train someone who won't even make a decent line trooper. The Empire itself is interesting but we're given very little information. For example, I know there are noble houses but also Ministries where most of the officials rose by talent and they do the actual work of governing the Empire it seems? So I'm not sure what it is that the noble houses do except scheme and politically maneuver. This could have been answered if Adare got more time on the page I think. Additionally, the plot often hinges on Valyn being utterly unable to connect the simplest of dots and on people refusing to discuss things with each other and that's infuriating. This leaves a book that is in parts very good and then kind of a hot mess in other parts. All in all, it averages out to... Average. So I'm giving Blades of the Emperor by Brian Staveley a C. I honestly wish I could give a higher grade but then I would lying to y'all. Well, maybe I'll like the next book better.

Well everyone welcome back!  I hope you enjoyed this review, if you did and you would like to vote on upcoming reviews or make suggestions for theme month reviews or anything, please consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads Where a vote costs as little as a dollar a month. Next week join us for Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem and in February Philp K Dick month returns!  Let's make this a good year folks, Keep Reading!

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders