Smut by Alan Bennett

First published in the UK in 2011; published by Picador on January 3, 2012

Dry British humor enlivens the two stories/novellas in Smut, a book that, despite its promising title, has little to do with smut.  Its mildly salacious content is more funny than smutty -- which, I suppose, makes the title amusing in light of the book’s content.  In any event, the two stories are charming, wise, a little silly, and very funny, at least for fans of dry British humor.

The newly widowed Mrs. Donaldson takes a job as a “simulated patient,” feigning illness so she can be examined by medical students, a profession Alan Bennett milks for its tremendous comedic potential.  To make ends meet, Mrs. Donaldson takes on a medical student and her boyfriend as boarders.  When they fall short of funds for their rent, they propose to provide Mrs. Donaldson with a voyeuristic thrill in lieu of payment.  The typical British reserve with which Mrs. Donaldson greets the performance is hilarious, yet there’s a serious note here:  what does it take to give an aging widow a sense of freedom, of life renewed?  For all its humor, “The Greening of Mrs Donaldson” has moments of sweet sadness as Alan Bennett puts the reader inside Mrs. Donaldson’s lonely mind.  But don’t worry too much about Mrs. Donaldson:  the unexpected ending is both hopeful and hilarious.

The other story is more about narcissism than voyeurism; Graham likes to look at himself rather than others.  Graham and Betty are mismatched, at least in the opinion of Graham’s doting mother.  Graham is handsome and dashing; Betty is plain.  But what Graham knows (and his mother doesn’t) is that Betty has inherited a large sum of money.  This, in Betty’s opinion, entitles her to marry someone out of her league, someone like Graham.  Shortly before their wedding Graham realizes that he might actually like Betty, but a secret is soon revealed that makes it difficult to believe the marriage will be entirely successful.  Yet Betty is even more doting and accepting than Graham’s mother, and a better cook as well.  Will Graham’s interest be sufficiently sparked to make a marriage work, or will his predilections and self-absorption ultimately lead to the sort of behavior that destroys a marriage?  The story offers an entertaining contrast between the “modern” marriage of Graham and Betty and the more traditional (i.e., all but dead) version endured by Graham’s parents.  By the end of the story more than one secret is being kept, if only because of the “distaste for disturbance” that characterizes married life.  Fun though it is, “The Shielding of Mrs Forbes” concludes a little too neatly and lacks the punch of the first story.

In style and content Alan Bennett reminds me of the American author Jim Harrison (although Bennett is more generous in his use of commas). Both milk the relationship between age and sex for its tremendous comic potential.  Both spice their stories with pithy observations about modern life and its myriad participants.  Bennett’s characters are even quirkier than Harrison’s; the obnoxious ones are a delight to know.  His minor characters play important roles as Bennett holds them up for ridicule.  My only serious complaint about the stories in Smut is that there aren’t more of them.

RECOMMENDED

Everything You Need to Survive the Apocalypse by Lucas Klauss

Published by Simon Pulse on January 3, 2012

For the sake of a pretty girl, the “vaguely atheist” Phillip Flowers finds himself attending a Wednesday night church youth group.  Phillip is a high school kid filled with the usual teen angst.  He hates the track team’s assistant coach and thinks his two best friends have betrayed him by quitting the team.  Rebekah is Phillip’s newest obsession, an improvement over his usual worries about the many possible sources of the planet’s destruction.  Not that Rebekah is much help in that regard:  she turns him onto the Book of Revelation, giving Phillip even more apocalyptic scenarios to fret about.

Rebekah’s evangelical Christian father would be angry if he knew that Rebekah favored Phillip while Phillip’s devoutly atheistic father becomes apoplectic when he learns that Phillip has been attending an evangelical youth group.  Can puppy love blossom when the big dogs are determined to keep their kids apart?  Or will Phillip allow himself to be converted to a new belief system because that’s the way to a young girl’s heart?

Just as troubling for Phillip is his friend Mark’s new allegiance to two kids who regard Phillip as something of a twerp (Phillip’s other best friend, Asher, is having girl problems of his own and may, in fact, have his eye on Rebekah).  To top off his list of troubles, Phillip is having difficulty coming to terms with the loss of his mother, and it doesn’t help that he’s continually embarrassed by his father.

There’s a not-so-hidden message in this book:  that nonbelievers can be just as annoying as believers when they attempt to convert others to their inflexible ways of thinking.  At times, in fact, as when Phillip announces that he “wants a real relationship with God,” I was wondering whether this YA novel is Christian lit sneakily disguised as mainstream comedy.  Fortunately, the novel isn’t that simplistic.  When Phillip has a crisis of faith -- when he realizes he has none, not even in himself -- he discovers that his evangelical girlfriend has problems of her own, despite her devout faith.  He eventually wonders whether people who claim to know the Truth have any more insight into the Truth than anyone else.  Ultimately, Everything You Need to Survive the Apocalypse is a coming of age story with a twist:  coming of age for Phillip means accepting the fact that he doesn’t have -- that nobody has -- all the answers.

Lucas Klauss writes easy, breezy prose that makes the novel a quick read.  I love the dialog.  Klauss perfectly captures the attitude and language of high school kids.  His adult characters are less convincing.  The assistant track coach, in particular, I didn’t buy at all:  his actions and motivations are unconvincing.  My only other gripe is that Phillip’s relationship with his mother is developed in a series of flashbacks that are interspersed with the rest of the story, a technique I found distracting.  In fact, the subplot involving Phillip’s mother is so cheesy that it detracts from the main story.

For the most part, however, the novel is funny, entertaining, and moderately insightful.  It neither bashes nor endorses religion; it simply tells an amusing story about religion’s impact on different people, and on a young man’s struggle to understand it all, and to understand himself.  I guardedly recommend it for those reasons.

RECOMMENDED

The First Rule of Ten by Gay Hendricks and Tinker Lindsay

Published by Hay House on January 1, 2012

Having spent his childhood shuttling between Paris and Dharamshala (where he was raised in a monastery by his Tibetan father), Tenzing Norbu has never felt entirely settled. He feels even less settled after being nicked by a bouncing bullet. Ten decides that being an LAPD detective is no longer the path to a satisfying life, so he retires and begins a career as a private detective. It doesn't take long before he's in the morgue, identifying the body of a woman he'd met only briefly. Of course, Ten decides to investigate the death, leading him to a retired musician who is being threatened by "the mob" and to a mysterious cult (the Children of Paradise). He eventually uncovers an extraordinarily unlikely scheme involving "key man" insurance policies and over-the-hill entertainers.

Every modern private detective, it seems, needs a friend who is a gifted computer hacker. The rest of Ten's supporting cast includes his former LAPD partner, a hungry cat, and a new romantic interest. The relationship subplot is marred by an undue amount of psychobabble, mostly from Ten but occasionally from his new girlfriend. Maybe Buddhists living in California feel the need to analyze their intimacy issues on a second date, but I didn't think their tiresome discussions added anything to the story.

Other aspects of The First Rule of Ten are equally troubling, including the notion that a Buddhist who values serenity, who meditates and has a Zen garden, would join the LAPD and indulge a gun fetish. To their credit, the authors make an effort to deal with that incongruity; they just don't do it very convincingly. I was even less convinced of Ten's ability to induce a cat to drop a captured bird by transmitting mental images to the cat, or to surround a dying hospital patient with "a peaceful light." I think the authors may have watched one too many Kung Fu reruns. (At one point there's even a Kung Fu style flashback to Ten's life in the monastery as he recalls a lesson imparted by his monk father.)

As a character in a detective novel, there are times when Ten is too sunshiny for my taste. Maybe he's just too well-adjusted to be credible, despite his unconvincing claim to experience moments of rage. When it comes to Buddhist detectives, I prefer John Burdett's complex, conflicted hero; in contrast, Ten is almost smug in his shallow enlightenment. In fact, Ten is so into himself that I occasionally found the character to be overbearing. Ten also has an annoying fondness for glib aphorisms: pop Buddhism with fortune cookie insight. Toward the end he becomes preachy, imparting a message that is likely intended to be profound but comes across as a page torn from a well-worn self-help book.

Ten's commitment to kindness and serenity is sort of odd given that he behaves like an angry jerk toward his new romantic interest and then feels sorry for himself because he's not living up to his expectations. If that's supposed to humanize Ten, it doesn't work; it just makes him more tedious. Why a man whose life revolves around opening his heart to people can't do so with his new girlfriend is inexplicable (again, the authors attempt an explanation, but fail to concoct one that's credible).

Putting aside my reservations about the construction of the central character, there are some positives about The First Rule of Ten that deserve mention. The book is written in a clear, clean prose style that makes it easy to read. The novel's plot is reasonably entertaining, although a subplot involving the cult is both underdeveloped and predictable. More creative is the evil scheme that Ten uncovers. Whether it is plausible is a different question, but detective/thriller fiction often skates of the edge of plausibility. That part of the plot is at least clever and comes to a reasonably satisfying conclusion.

On the whole, The First Rule of Ten pairs a moderately strong story with a weak, annoying character. The novel isn't wholly unlikeable but I wouldn't read another book that features Ten.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Empire State by Adam Christopher

Published by Angry Robot on December 27, 2011

Start by combining a depression-era gangster story with a comic book saga of superheroes wearing rocket boots, mix in a private detective, toss in a rogue robot, add an alternate history in which a parallel version of New York City is isolated and at war with an enemy that surrounds it, top it off with transdimensional travel and time confusion and you’ve got Empire State.  Sounds like a mess, doesn’t it?  Empire State is such a strange novel that, despite being unimpressed with Adam Christopher’s prose and unenthused about the storyline, I kept reading just to find out what would happen next.  I suppose that’s a recommendation of sorts.

The two superheroes who once protected New York City -- the Skyguard and the Science Pirate -- have taken a holiday from crime fighting so they can battle each other, leaving the depression-era city at the mercy of bootleggers and mobsters, predators and corrupt officials.  One defeats the other and a gangster named Rex Braybury seems to defeat the winner.

Years later, a private detective in Empire State named Rad Bradley (who bears an uncanny resemblance to New York’s Rex) is hired to find a missing woman. The woman’s corpse turns up before Rad has a chance to conduct a serious search.  The evidence suggests that the woman was murdered by a robot but in this novel things aren’t always as they appear.  Besides, robots are generally found only on the ironclad ships that sail off to war in defense of the Empire State, never to return -- except, that is, for the ironclad that recently came home and is now quarantined at a safe distance from the port.  Could a killer robot have come from the ship?  Rad, his reporter friend Kane, and a strange character named Captain Carson resolve to find out.  Rad soon uncovers secrets about the war and the robots that are concealed from the Empire State populace.  Later he learns an even bigger secret about the nature of the Empire State itself.

Adam Christopher’s writing style is ordinary, at best -- not awful, but this isn’t a novel you’ll read for the beauty of its prose.  The convoluted plot just barely holds together.  In the end I thought this was a novel in search of an identity; it doesn’t know quite what it wants to be.  It doesn’t work as a crime or detective story, despite the presence of a detective and mobster, nor does it succeed as an action/adventure story.  Empire State is more tongue-in-cheek sci-fi than serious speculative fiction (I wouldn’t even regard it as serious comic book fiction; I’m not sure why superheroes are part of the plot) but it often reads as if it were meant to be taken seriously.  Still, if you ignore the absence of any reasonable explanation for nearly anything of consequence that happens as the story unfolds, Empire State does have some limited entertainment value.

Part of the fun of Empire State is picking out all the in-jokes.  In the Empire State, Seduction of the Innocent isn’t Fredric Wertham’s infamous diatribe against comic books but a quasi-religious “moral code” written by The Pastor of Lost Souls.  (Of course, a character named Frederick turns up in the novel.)  From a street named Soma to a theater production called Boneshaker, the novel is filled with thinly veiled references to the history of science fiction and comic books -- the character Kane, for instance, brings to mind Bob Kane, who created The Batman.  Mix together Bradley and Braybury (the twinned characters from the parallel worlds) and you get Bradbury.

Based solely on its audacity, I am tempted to recommend Empire State, but I can do so only with the warning that its many flaws nearly outweigh the fun factor that might motivate a reader to give it a try.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS 

Children of Paranoia by Trevor Shane

Published by Dutton on September 8, 2011

Children of Paranoia begins with a murder: an efficient strangulation. We soon learn that Joe, the murderer, is a professional killer, part of a group of assassins who carried out a series of murders that same day. Their motivation, revealed in an early chapter, is linked to the novel's premise: a clandestine war is afoot, waged by participants who begin training at sixteen and begin killing at eighteen (unless they are assigned to be intelligence officers or breeders). Trevor Shane is less quick to explain the war's purpose, why it started and what the two sides represent. Joe doesn't know. He simply believes he's one of the good guys and that the world will be a better place when all the bad guys are dead.

The war seems like one of those Hatfield-McCoy style feuds that has lasted for so many generations nobody can recall why it started. The beauty of this story lies in the uncertainty: Why is this war being waged? Are the bad guys really bad, the good guys really good? When two people on different sides happen to be friends, neither of them aware that the other is involved in the war, should their status as soldiers overcome their friendship?

The story of a professional killer in an unlikely war eventually intermingles with an even less likely love story as Joe meets the woman of his dreams while stalking his latest target. Most of the book, in fact, is written in the form of a letter (a very long letter) to the woman Joe loves (a technique that is ultimately flawed, since Joe ends up giving his lover detailed accounts of events she experienced firsthand). Due to a bizarre rule that binds the war's combatants, that relationship eventually causes a problem for Joe. While the rule and the problem create the dramatic conflict that drives the second half of the story, I have trouble making any sense of the rule. My inability to suspend disbelief ultimately made it difficult to remain engrossed in the novel. More troubling is that the story's second half tends toward melodrama. It sometimes has the feel of a made-for-TV-movie; at other times it seems like a cheesier version of Logan's Run. The second half is redeemed, however, by a strong ending that truly surprised me.

Putting aside my reservations about plot development in its second half, I consider the novel as a whole to be a worthwhile read. Shane writes in a compelling style, deftly mixing scenes of death with images of ordinary life, creating sympathy for those fighting on both sides of the war. His point, I think, is made rather explicitly when one of the soldiers comments about fighting in three wars -- Korea, Vietnam, and this one -- and complains that he was lied to each time about the threat posed to the "good guys" by the "evil enemy."

I don't know that the premise underlying Children of Paranoia merits a trilogy but it isn't fair to judge books I haven't read; they might turn out to be stellar, and this one sets up the next one quite nicely. Children of Paranoia showed enough promise that I am mildly interested in reading the next one, if only to find out whether Shane can concoct a plausible explanation for the secret war.

RECOMMENDED