Book Review: The House of Silk, by Anthony Horowitz (2011)

Anthony Horowitz is a British author best known for a series of adventure stories he wrote about Alex Rider, a teenage British agent who is a sort of junior James Bond. My teenage boys liked the Alex Rider books, and read all of them. When I saw that Horowitz had written a new Sherlock Holmes novel, I decided to read it to see if it was appropriate for the boys. As I will explain below, it was not. But I wouldn't recommend it to grown-ups, either.

I can see why Horowitz is so successful at teen fiction. He is a skilled craftsman; this story moves along quickly and easily -- I read the whole thing in a few hours, and I was never bored. Unfortunately, he and I have very different notions about what it means to write a book using someone else's characters.

To me, the man who sets out to write a new story featuring an established character -- whether its Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, or any other similar figure -- should approach his task with humility because he plans to make money off of someone else's intellectual property. In this case, for example, Arthur Conan Doyle did all the hard work -- he invented the characters and grew an audience for them. All Horowitz has to do is come up with a story that will tap into that audience. Under these circumstances, I think he owes it to Doyle -- and the audience -- to make sure his work is consistent with Doyle's.

This Horowitz has failed to do. The Holmes stories plainly offend his modern sense of the politically correct, and so we are forced to sit through agonizing passages where Dr. Watson (allegedly writing at the end of his life) regrets that he didn't spend more time writing about London's poor, or about the fate of criminals after they were captured, or about all of Inspector Lestrade's good qualities. No one who is familiar with the Doyle stories can really believe these passages were written by Doctor Watson at all -- they read as if they had been awkwardly inserted into his manuscript by a suffragette niece.

Horowitz also apparently cannot accept the Victorian world of Good and Evil created by Doyle. Like a true post-modernist, Horowitz is always seeking to add nuance. For example, like everyone who does a Holmes pastiche, he drags in Mycroft Holmes (Sherlock's smarter older brother) and Dr. Moriarty (Holmes's legendary nemesis). (Doyle wrote about Mycroft or Moriarty very rarely -- which helps to explain their lasting power -- but no one else can resist using them.) Horowitz presents Mycroft, who was virtually omniscient in the Doyle stories, as someone terrified by dark forces within the British government. And Moriarty -- Doyle's symbol of pure evil -- is shown by Horowitz to be interested in helping Holmes because he is repelled by certain acts that offend his morals.

Horowitz may believe that his rendering of Mycroft and Moriarty makes these two characters seem more human. But Doyle, a much more talented writer of genre fiction, could have told him that the detective story is a form of melodrama, and that realism is the death of melodrama. No one can actually make characters like Mycroft or Moriarty seem like real people -- the whole point of their existence is that they are supermen. Even worse, Horowitz makes some of detective fiction's most thrilling characters seem boring and ineffectual. We are told that both Mycroft and Moriarty want to help someone get out of prison -- but that neither of them is capable of doing so. This is ludicrous. In Doyle's handling, Mycroft virtually runs the British government, and Moriarty is the master of European crime. Either of them should be able to spring a man from prison without leaving his drawing room. In short, Horowitz has not made his characters more interesting by seeking to humanize them -- instead, he has deprived them of the magic that made them compelling.

Horowitz does somewhat better with Holmes himself. Most modern writers can handle Holmes -- with his artistic and libertarian temperament, he is more at home in our world than a true Victorian like Watson. And Horowitz's Holmes is the only character from the Doyle stories who is truly recognizable here. But even poor Holmes suffers some absurd indignities -- he is overpowered and drugged by his enemies, he is framed for murder and arrested, and he is forced to apologize to the reader for his treatment of the Baker Street Irregulars. Once again, Horowitz has missed the point. We don't read Holmes for his flaws -- we have lots of other stories about flawed characters. We read Holmes to celebrate his triumphs, and to wonder as he pulls together a hopelessly tangled thread of consequences into a deadly noose for the criminal.

And this brings me to my last set of complaints. The Holmes stories are meant to be adventures -- you start with a weird and inexplicable set of facts, and marvel as Holmes explains them to us. The surprise is a big part of the fun. But I don't think anyone will be surprised by Horowitz's story, which basically combines two plots of the quality you could see on a CBS crime show any night of the week. Even these plots are not handled very well -- they are full of holes that even the most eager reader will find difficult to ignore. I couldn't even pass the book along to my boys -- the heart of Horowitz's story involves a sexual element that (in the opinion of this parent) makes The House of Silk improper for the teenage boys who should be Horowitz's (and Holmes's) natural audience.

Horowitz obviously spent a lot of time working through the Holmes canon in preparation for this story -- he makes his version of Watson repeatedly refer to canonical stories in a way the real Watson never would. But in retrospect, I think he should have spent more time studying the BBC's modern interpretation of Sherlock. The BBC set its version in the modern day, but its writers understood that Holmes is a tortured genius, that Lestrade is in over his head, that Mycroft is omniscient (and possibly omnipotent), that Moriarty is never troubled by scruples, and that Watson is an Army man motivated by patriotism and honor, not a maudlin whiner. Most importantly, they understood that Sherlock Holmes stories are supposed to be entertainments, not excuses for modern writers to bemoan the shortcomings of the Victorian world. Holmes fans would be well advised to watch the BBC shows again, and to avoid Horowitz's effort.

Not recommended, either for teenage boys or their parents.

Book Review: Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline (2011)

Some book ideas are so good that the book just seems to write itself, and my guess is that this is how Ernest Cline felt when he came up with the idea for Ready Player One. Cline is a true American nerd, born in 1972 in Ashland, Ohio -- a great time and place to have been born as a nerd, just at the beginning of the computer and sci-fi revolutions. Cline is the sort of person who, in 1996, wrote a sequel to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension and posted it on the Internet (it has since been taken down). If that sentence gives you good feelings about Cline, then you will like his work. He wrote a screenplay called Fanboys about a group of Star Wars geeks who decide to break into George Lucas's ranch to steal a print of The Phantom Menace before it is released to the public (boy, they must have been disappointed). According to Wikipedia, he wrote another screenplay (which apparently has not been made into a movie yet) called Thundercade about a video-game junkie in his 30's who learns that a young gamer has broken a record he set as a teenager, and who travels with his friends to the world's largest gaming championship to restore his glory. Do you see the pattern yet?

Fortunately for Cline, he has come along at a time when nerds are apparently tired of reading about cool guys having adventures and are ready to be the heroes of their own stories. TV shows like Chuck and The Big Bang Theory have already had fun with this concept. But Cline's new book has managed a clever twist on the old set-up -- a much more clever twist, as far as I can tell, then he had in his two screenplays.

The set-up for Ready Player One -- and by far the best part of the whole book -- is this: Approximately 30 years from now, our modern civilization has largely collapsed. Due to the usual Daily Show worries about American life -- climate change, the energy crisis, poor schools (basically everything liberals have worried about since around 1973) -- most Americans live crowded lives of near Third-World squalor. The only good thing left about the country is a wonderful online role-playing game called OASIS. Virtually everyone spends most of their time in this imaginary world, which has made its creator (a recluse named James Halliday) impossibly rich. But when Halliday dies, his will reveals that he has left his controlling interest in OASIS -- an interest that will immediately make its owner the wealthiest person on earth -- to whoever can find some sort of doodad that he has hidden inside the game. And here's the catch: Halliday was himself a child of mid-America in the 1970s and was (you guessed it) obsessed with 1980's nerd culture. So to win the prize, millions of people all over the planet become experts in things like Family Ties, Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, and, of course, Monty Python.

This combination of three geek obsessions -- a future dystopia, role-playing games, and 1980's trivia -- creates what has been accurately described by sci-fi writer John Scalzi as a "nerdgasm." And, to be honest, your interest in Ready Player One will ultimately turn on how much you enjoy the premise. Cline is a pedestrian author. He is pretty much incapable of following the "show don't tell" rule of writing, and long portions of the book read like excerpts from the film treatment that was presumably the basis for this work. Also, his characters are immediately recognizable as good guys (nerds and people who are nice to nerds) and bad guys (anyone who has a job that requires them to show up on time and be functional from 9 AM to 6 PM). I would be stunned if anyone over the age of five were genuinely surprised by anything that happens in this book.

But these comments do not do justice to the humor and joy with which Cline has attacked his project. The man knows his nerds, and anyone who has a working familiarity with that culture will have a lot of fun seeing what Cline does with old favorites like Wargames, the rock band Rush, and Ultraman. (I wish Cline could have worked SCTV into the book, but of course he was too young to have seen it in its glory.) There are also great scenes of video game play that any gamer will enjoy. (Number 2 son ripped through the whole book in about a day, and thoroughly enjoyed it.) And if the plot is somewhat two-dimensional and unrealistic -- well, that is true of countless nerd favorites, from Star Wars to Spider-Man. If you like the premise, you'll like the book. You can't ask fairer than that.

My own reading, however, left me with two annoyances that I would like to raise. First, given their obsession with political dystopias, I am frustrated that almost no one in the sci-fi / fantasy crowd has the least understanding of politics and how they actually work. Their only idea is to exaggerate whatever aspects in modern life they don't like in order to create a dystopia, and then to make up some magical amulet (the Force, a video game) to make things right. One of the problems with the three Star Wars prequels was that when George Lucas turned his attention from the Saturday matinee shootouts that dominated the original movies to give some sort of explanation as to how his galaxy got into such a mess, his analysis of Old Republic politics was simplistic, unrealistic, and absurd. Similarly, the whole set-up of Ready Player One requires us to believe that the U.S. government is virtually non-functional, and that almost all power has gone to a few high-powered corporations. But if this were really the case, then his plot would be impossible, because the evil corporations could persuade the corrupt judicial system to throw out the will and simply give them control of OASIS. Cline would no doubt say that I'm over-thinking his story, but it always annoys me when the sci-fi /fantasy folks spend so much time on figuring out how the blasters work in their particular universe, and so little time trying to understand human nature.

Second, I was left with great sadness for the poor education that almost everyone in the United States received during the 1970's and 1980's. Across America you had literally thousands of extremely bright boys who were, for the most part, bored out of their minds because we had nothing to do. How many of us were given an education worthy of our time and talents? Very few. The Founding Fathers were taught Greek and Latin, they could run huge farms, build furniture and houses, conduct ground-breaking scientific experiments, and quote Shakespeare and the Bible by the hour. How many of even the brightest 40-somethings today could do the same? Read the speeches of FDR or John Kennedy, read any major magazine published before 1968, pick up well-known detective stories from the 1930's, and you will find yourself in a world of gracious and well-organized prose, a world grounded in history, and poetry, and an appreciation of art and beauty. Compare any of these documents to a modern example, and you will find a depressing drop-off. We weren't taught about history, or about foreign languages, or about the great minds of the past, or about how to write a good sentence. Desperate to fill their heads with anything, and not knowing how to tell good from bad, kids in the 1970's and 1980's soaked up the stuff in Cline's book: old Japanese cartoons, sit-coms, Hollywood movies, comic books, and the lyrics of pop songs. And that's what the best minds of our generation learned; most folks didn't even get that. Some of us had parents who gave us more, and we were lucky, but parents can only do so much -- our society expected very little from our education, and that is what most of us got. It's a shame, and we will have to hope that our children do better, but at least it prepared us to enjoy Ready Player One.

1974 (1975-preview edition)

Well, "Tech Note" fans, I today want to apologize for 2011's 1974 indulgence.

I also today want to announce plans for a 1975 indulgence--beginning in 2012. I think i've figured out how I want to do this--in terms of setting up YouTube and eBay searches, Google alerts and my Christmas list--and I think 1975 is going to end up being a much more satisfying endeavor. For me. So I'm very excited.

Another big deal is that I am going to forgive myself in advance for falling behind. I'm constantly falling behind in my now world, so it's unreasonable for me to hold myself accountable to being on time in my then world. So, I forgive you, me.

In this spirit, here's what has happened in the 1974 World Series as of Oct. 16, 1974.



And here are what were the current football standings.







I'm pretending like, sometimes, my TV set goes on the fritz or things get busy down at the office.

I have managed to keep up with the third Bob Newhart Show season. Episode 5, which originally aired on Oct. 12, 1974, delivered at least a half-dozen out-loud laughs--none louder than the "Foster child" gag between Dr. Hartley and his sister.