Illegal Alien by Robert J. Sawyer

Published by Ace on December 1, 1997

There are a number of similarities between Illegal Alien, published in 1997, and Robert Sawyer's more recent Calculating God. In both novels, aliens who are apparently amiable travel to Earth. In both, crazy humans make trouble for the aliens. And human and alien characters in both discuss evolution and debate the likelihood of divine creation. Where that discussion becomes the focus of Calculating God, it is a sideshow for most of Illegal Alien, a novel that reads like a John Grisham courtroom drama with the addition of an alien defendant. Still, alien concepts of divinity do become a significant plot point in Illegal Alien, adding to the sense that Illegal Alien was a test run for (or perhaps inspired) Calculating God.

A handful of aliens known as Tosoks come to Earth seeking help for an engine problem that has stranded them in our solar system. Two key members of the team assigned to interact with the aliens are Frank Nobilio, the president's science advisor, and Cletus Calhoun, an astronomer who hosts a popular show on PBS. While parts are being fabricated to repair the alien ship, the aliens go on tour. They happen to be in California when Calhoun is found dead, his leg having been amputated and some of his organs removed during a crude dissection. A Tosok named Hask is arrested for murdering Calhoun. He's defended by a Johnnie Cochran clone named Dale Rice. The story turns into both a whodunit and a whydunit. Sawyer's answers to those questions are clever and satisfying.

I give Sawyer credit for doing his homework. His explanation of legal procedures is accurate and his consideration of defense strategies is sound. As courtroom dramas go, this one is about average, but the alien angle gives it an offbeat appeal. Through Hask and other characters, Sawyer indulges in fairly astute commentary on a variety of social issues, including the American system of criminal justice, racism and xenophobia, and the causes of crime, while feeding the reader useful information about evolution and astronomy.

Sawyer has some fun with cameo appearances: Barbara Walters interviews Hask; O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark walks through the courthouse; broadcast journalist Miles O'Brien interviews Calhoun; Steven Spielberg attends a reception for the Tosoks. His invented characters (both human and alien) aren't as fully formed as those in Calculating God; they seem like pencil sketches of real people. The novel is nonetheless worth reading for its engaging plot, one that should appeal to fans of science fiction and legal thrillers alike.

RECOMMENDED

Slash and Burn by Matt Hilton

Published by Harper on October 25, 2011

Some of the blurbs for Slash and Burn compare Joe Hunter to Jack Reacher. Hunter is like a copy made on a Xerox machine that's out of toner. Lee Childs' Reacher is an action hero who is capable of subtle thought. Matt Hilton's Hunter is about as subtle as a hand grenade.

The plot can be summarized in a few words because there's so little of it. An NYPD officer named Kate Piers hires tough guy Joe Hunter to help her find her missing sister, a woman who is in trouble with a sinister character in Kentucky. As they pursue the sister, Kate is taken captive. Hunter recruits two tough guy friends to help him find Kate (and her sister) which can only be accomplished by killing a mess of people, although most of the killing is done by Hunter alone, causing his friends to complain that they weren't part of the fun. Cars explode, a helicopter crashes, lots of people die. The story is all in the title: Slash and Burn.

Like many tough guy heroes, Hunter is insufferably self-righteous. That can be an interesting character trait in a novel of greater depth, but depth is not a strong point of Slash and Burn. In common with other vigilante tough guys, Hunter defines himself by his sense of honor. He tells us that he takes pride in not shooting someone who is running away from him, even knowing that the person will later try to kill him. Yet just pages earlier, Hunter shoots a man in the head who is sitting helpless and dazed behind the wheel of a crashed car because the man could conceivably recover sufficiently to emerge from the car, arm himself, and distract Hunter as he tries to kill several other bad guys who are gunning for him. Apart from Hunter's flexible notions about shooting the helpless, the concept of a vigilante with a meaningful moral code is a joke (there's nothing moral about murdering someone simply because the vigilante decides he deserves killing, or shooting a man between the legs because the man "raped a woman's mind"), but the glorification of the moral vigilante is standard fare in tough guy fiction. The best tough guy characters are either amoral -- they don't care if their actions are right or wrong -- or recognize the inconsistency of their moral standards and are troubled by their actions. Hunter has none of that complexity. He's a remarkably boring killing machine.

As is customary in the worst tough guy fiction, the bad guys are cartoons, so obviously evil that the reader will cheer when they are killed by our vigilante hero. And killed they are. When the heroic tough guy gets into a shootout with six bad guys in a novel like this, you know the good tough guy will escape with a flesh wound while his adversaries are felled by bullets placed between their eyes. A novel with this much action shouldn't be dull, but Slash and Burn is so unimaginative that it was putting me to sleep.

Final complaint: Hunter has no problem carrying his guns onto airplanes because he has false documents identifying him as an air marshal. We're asked to believe that neither TSA nor the flight crews ever wonder why they weren't notified that an armed air marshal would be taking a particular flight. That implausible explanation for Hunter's ability to fly while armed smacks of lazy writing.

Do I have anything positive to say? Hilton writes in a reasonably fluid prose style. The pace is quick. The novel is easy to read. It just isn't interesting.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad

Published by Riverhead on October 13, 2011

Times are changing for the nomadic tribes that move with the seasons between Pakistan and Afghanistan, leading sheep and camels to new grazing lands. Both nations now demand travel documents that tribal members with no birth certificates cannot obtain. The nomads consider themselves citizens of all countries, or none; they have no wish to be rooted. The conflict between ancient traditions of tribal life and the evolving demands of government is the most interesting theme developed in The Wandering Falcon. Another theme concerns the difficult lives endured by tribal women. Sadly, the novel's themes are stronger than the story it tells.

At the age of five, a boy who comes to be known as Tor Baz watches his father shoot his mother in the back to save her from the fate that his father will soon endure. Baz then watches as members of the Siahpad tribe stone his father to death to avenge his parents' sinful insult to the Siahpad: his father, a camel herder, fell in love with his mother, the wife of his father's employer, and fled with her across the barren land, hiding at a military outpost for five years before being discovered. The Siahpad leave Baz to die in the harsh environment, where he is found by a traveling party of Baluchs, desert-dwelling rebels against a government that has usurped the power of their tribal chiefs. Tor Baz is the novel's recurring character, although he disappears from time to time as other characters emerge. More than once as the story progresses, Tor Baz begins his life anew.

In the first two or three chapters, the elegant simplicity of Jamil Ahmad's writing style and the evocative landscape he creates reminded me of J.M. Coetzee. Unfortunately, that's where the comparison ends. While Coetzee's novels inspire the reader to draw larger truths from small, personal stories, Ahmad tells the reader too much. As is often true, the novel is at its best when it spotlights individual lives. When Ahmad attempts to broaden the story to encompass the plight of entire tribes, his narration becomes a bit heavy-handed. The novel shines when Ahmad uses individual characters to explore tribal customs and the political relationships between tribes and governments. When Ahmad pauses to comment upon the problems of nomadic groups around the world, the story loses its momentum and the novel suffers.

Too often, the story loses its focus. A chapter describing a kidnapping of urban dwellers by tribesmen (Tor Baz plays a tangential role as an informant) illustrates the political dynamic between the tribes and the government but contributes little to plot development. In a middle chapter, point of view abruptly shifts from third person to first as a German man whose father was born into a tribe describes his visit to the land of his father's youth (Tor Baz is one of his guides). The abrupt change in point of view to that of a new character was jarring. The German serves as a vehicle for more stories about tribal politics, particularly about the tribes' shifting roles during the Second World War, but does nothing to advance the story. In the remaining chapters, point of view returns to third person. The next two chapters introduce new characters (women who are treated as property), setting up a final chapter that brings Tor Baz back to the forefront. The ever-changing storylines, only some of which tie together to form a coherent whole, give the novel a disjointed feel.

In the end, I appreciated The Wandering Falcon for its educational value, but I formed no emotional attachment to it -- or rather, I lost the attachment I was beginning to form in the early chapters after the story lost sight of Tor Baz. We never get to know any character well, while Tor Baz, although positioned as the central character, remains an undeveloped enigma. This book might have worked better as a collection of short stories. Still, the strong writing and fascinating cultural issues make The Wandering Falcon well worth reading.

RECOMMENDED

The Dog Who Knew Too Much by Spencer Quinn

Published by Atria Books on September 6, 2011

A detective story narrated by a dog.  What could be better?  Apart from his impressive understanding of the English language and his ability to narrate books, Chet is very much a dog:  loyal, forgetful, easily distracted, always hungry, fascinated by odors and averse to loud noises, often puzzled by humans but usually willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.  Chet prefers a clear head to deep thought.  He’s a literal thinker:  when he hears that someone is wearing ratty clothing, Chet looks for the rats; when he hears he’s in a one-horse town, Chet looks for the horse; when someone comments that a character’s behavior stinks, Chet wonders why he can’t smell it.

Chet’s partner in the Little Detective Agency is Bernie Little. Bernie is hired to protect a woman from her ex-husband.  The mission changes when the woman’s son disappears on a camping trip.  With Chet’s help, Bernie searches for the missing boy (searching for things, particularly hot dogs, is a task at which Chet excels).  When the search leads to the discovery of a murder victim in a gold mine, Bernie begins to suspect that the woman hasn’t been wholly truthful about the reason he was hired.  A conspiracy is soon unveiled that threatens to separate Chet from Bernie.  As the story progresses, Chet has some solo adventures while maintaining a stream of consciousness commentary on items of interest to the canine nation.

This isn’t the kind of book you want to overanalyze.  Spencer Quinn has a dry sense of humor that matches my own.  He’s a keen observer of dogs; his take on how dogs think kept me laughing from the first page to the last.  The Dog Who Knew Too Much is meant as an entertaining romp and that’s the spirit in which I enjoyed it.  This is apparently the fourth in a series of Chet and Bernie books.  I’m so in love with Chet it made me want to read them all.

RECOMMENDED

Men in the Making by Bruce Machart

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on October 25, 2011

The titular Men in the Making are men learning to accept responsibility and to value their friends and family. Most of them have dirt under their fingernails: they work in sawmills; they farm; they clean the messes made by hospital patients. They live in Texas and Arkansas and Oklahoma. They drink Lone Star and listen to Conway Twitty and Willie Nelson on the jukebox. They spank their children without worrying whether it's politically correct.

Most of the men in Bruce Machart's collection of ten stories are enduring growing pains. They are physically or emotionally scarred. Their wives and mothers have died or abandoned them. They're often longing for something they can't identify. The stories are slices of lives that have already been badly sliced.

My favorite of the ten, "What You're Walking Around Without," is about a man who, after falling from an oil rig, is "stricken with purposeless afflictions, with a lazy eye and a bum leg and a nervous tic, with a hand he can't hold steady enough to touch a woman the way a woman wants to be touched" -- a man who curses himself for resisting his pre-accident girlfriend's pleas to take her virginity, who saved himself for marriage (and protected his girlfriend's virtue) because he believed that to be God's desire. Marriage to the girlfriend is no longer an option (she wants a "whole man"); he now deems himself unfit to marry any woman. As his thoughts return to those long nights of passionate embraces, he cannot understand why his piety was rewarded with pain, why he was left to live. After years of brooding about "a world all too willing to inflict wounds at random," a few words spoken by a neighborhood boy start him on a path toward acceptance of his fate and a better understanding of the life he must live.

Another standout is "Among the Living Amidst the Trees," a story that tells of a distressing day in a man's life. A gruesome race-related murder on Huff Creek Road brings a news crew into a tavern in the mistaken belief that it is a hangout for skinheads. They spark anger that leads to a moment of violence, provoked less by the news crew than by all the pain and anxiety that has engulfed the man. Its cathartic release leads him to a deeper appreciation of his wife.

At his best, Machart reminds me of Donald Ray Pollock and Tim O'Brien. When he's not on his game, however, Machart is like a tennis player who serves with power but lacks finesse. He scores points but in the absence of a complete game he can't compete with the best players. Machart doesn't write with the lightning-flash intensity of observation that characterizes Pollock's work, nor does he have O'Brien's consistent ability to make me feel the depth of a wounded man's soul. A couple of Machart's stories have an insubstantial feel; one reads like the floundering work of a new writer.

Machart's characters are the opposite of Pollock's. His men are decent, sometimes admirable. They try to behave honorably, following codes instilled by the generations of hardworking men who preceded them. They tend to avoid violence and to feel shame when violence overwhelms them. They are humble men trying to make the best of uncertain lives. While the stories aren't consistently first-rate, the best are gems, as are the men he's created.

RECOMMENDED