Positives from the book

For a Woman: challenge your thoughts, wants, desires, constraints.

For a Man: a little insight into what a woman thinks about, wants, desires and what boundaries she is capable of creating and destroying

This novel does not enlighten the reader on female sexuality (but sure as hell enlightens us on Nikki Gemmell's predilections - which, I have to say are clichéd examples of self absorption and navel gazing). This is yet another poorly written example of 'female as victim' fantasy with the main character inflicting masochistic intercourse scenarios upon herself with nameless, neutral strangers as self-punishment for marrying a heartless bastard.

I'd like some insights into the thing that is Woman, so I read it through. And over and over what came through is what this woman really wanted was power and control, but mostly control. I found the author's and/or narrator's view of marriage and commitment as twisted, dark, and fundamentally wrong. The premise of the narrators was that of someone so incredibly vain and selfish that it infected and adulterated her view of what a relationship or a marriage should be: collaborative on all issues and levels. Her oversimplified point of departure for her relationship with her husband was subservience, surrender, and resignation to stagnation. She chose this path for herself, accepted it, and then blamed her husband for the situation she had helped create. He became the oppressive beast, which so handily facilitated the breakaway with the so very horribly trite love affair.

Then the baby came and the immediate and undeniable bonds of service and sacrifice were no longer an issue. I read this carefully, but the same things that made her despise her husband so intensely were the ones that made her love her baby so much.

Ultimately, it all boiled down to control, control, and control. She loathed the sharing of control with her husband, which she manufactured into his non-existent total control. This gave her the manufactured reason she needed to do what she did. But the baby elicited no control struggle--by the end of the book I was wondering what kind of mother she would turn out to be, and how exactly that little baby would grow up, develop and mature. I feared more for the child than for the jilted husband.

Bottom line: Sure, get this and read it, it'll give you some insight, but hopefully not insight into every woman.

The Bride Stripped Bare purports to be the diary manuscript of an insecure, rather jaded, 30-something woman. The preface explains that the diary has been submitted for publication by the author's mother, the author herself having vanished under highly fishy circumstances. (Car found at the top of a cliff, body never recovered. Cops say suicide; Mum thinks she might have faked her own death). The story begins with the author's honeymoon in Marrakech, Morocco. She is happy, in love, blooming. But right from the start we know that all is not perfect. Hubbie is a decent and well-meaning sort of a fellow but he's selfish and inattentive, especially in the sack. Also, we suspect that he might be having an affair with the protagonist's best friend, Theo; a free-spirited sex-therapist who suffers from an unfortunate sexual condition (“Vaginismus”, if you're interested). Gradually, things get worse and the two grow more distant.

Eventually, our ever-nameless heroine meets Gabriel, a handsome - yet sensitive - Spanish boy. Gabriel is a semi-employed actor who we later find out is also a virgin. This has been bad news for Gabriel and a complete disaster for his girlfriends. But for our heroine it's perfect. She has been feeling neutered ever since her marriage, the loss of her career and her desultory sex life. She resolves to instruct him in the ways of woman. The two begin an affair.

Traditional gender roles are inverted and Gemmell uses Gabriel's vulnerability and sexual inexperience as a way of exploring well-worn themes of possession, control and female empowerment. “An idea, beautiful in its simplicity. To initiate Gabriel, to teach him exactly what you want. To create a pleasure man, purely that, the lover every woman dreams of. You'll be in control, for the very first time, you'll be able to dictate exactly what you want. And there'll be no expectation of how you should act.”

Pliant Gabriel opens a door of sexual liberation, and a series of erotic, Houellebecqean-style encounters ensue. There are taxi drivers, orgies, strangers, Gabriel, of course, and an increasingly confused hubby.

So why is it all so silly?

To begin with there's the pre-canned feel of the sexual fantasy: Sex with strangers? Fluffy-chested virgins? Dashing Mediterranean types who talk about their feelings? Please. This is stock-standard stuff for any chick over 30. See Catherine Millet, Germaine Greer and Shirley Valentine.

Then there's the writing. Gemmell has a funny prose style. “Sensuous”, is the way one reviewer described it, and I suppose in part it is. But it doesn't always work. Her practice is to dump long, flowery descriptions on the back of short, spare sentences that can't always bear their weight. The result is a string of breathy, overwrought sentences, which add little in the way of meaning. Thus, the weather is “unclenching” and the narrator feels “fat with content”. Evocative. But of what exactly?

The tone too, is irritating: Brooding, weepy and utterly inward-looking, as though no world exists beyond one's own emotional landscape. To be fair, this is no doubt what Gemmell had in mind - to tell the story of a woman's inner life. But she delves too deep. In the end, the narrator stands guilty of the same adolescent self-absorption that she has supposedly been railing against.

The Bride Stripped Bare may well be the hottest thing in chick lit since Emily Bronte bashed out Wuthering Heights. I'm too boofy to know. But to me it reads like a stern warning to every man who's ever forgotten to put down the toilet seat or switched on the news while his wife was telling him about her day. Indeed, this impression is confirmed by the vaguely menacing dedication that prefaces the book: “For my husband. For every husband.” Gulp. Sleep with one eye open, Mr Gemmell. And if I haven't heard from you by ten, I'm calling the cops.

There are three Dicks at loose in this collection: the dazzler, whose stories feature stunning twists and turns and brilliant extrapolation of the mundane; the pedestrian, where the energy just isn't there and the author's flaws are more evident -- when there's no pizzazz to whisk the reader onwards past the flatness of character and lack of overall richness; and the downright weird.

Dick dazzles us in "Minority Report", where Anderton is head of the Department of Precrime, a policing unit that uses "precog mutants" to spot criminals before they can commit their crimes. When Anderton finds himself up on a charge that he will murder someone it has to be a conspiracy, doesn't it? What else could it mean? Suddenly, there are lots of factions at plays: Witwer, the newly arrived deputy commissioner, keen to take Anderton's place; Anderton's wife, Lisa, tired of him and maybe in league with Witwer; yet others, manoeuvring in the background. Almost with every page, every paragraph, paranoid conspiracies and interpretations of events twist and buck. This is classic Philip K Dick! You can question some of the plot turns -- a bit convenient, a bit too easy -- but it's hard to question the sheer helter-skelter zest of the thing.

He dazzles again in "Imposters", a story centring around questions of identity and shifting perceptions and understandings. No one thinks Spence Olham is really Olham, but he does... They think he's an imposter, a spy for the Outspacers from Alpha Centauri. The shaky underpinnings of reality and our understanding of reality are hallmarks of PKD, as are the frequent points where you pull up short, thinking "how could he get away with that?" or "why didn't they just...?" But the audaciousness of plotting is exhilarating even as it teeters on the edges of believability. What the hell...

"Second Variety" is another good one, although the twists are rather more telegraphed. This is Cold War sf about a war where what remains of UN forces are getting the upper hand by use of lethal robots. Now the Russians want to talk -- but why? This is one of three stories in the collection to have been filmed (by Dan O'Bannon as Screamers) which, with the films made from his novels, makes Dick perhaps the sf writer treated most seriously by the movie industry. But not only is he frequently-filmed, you can see clearly in stories such as "Second Variety" the germs of films like Terminator, with their replicating war 'bots threatening to take on a life of their own with new, improved varieties emerging all the time.

"We can Remember it for you Wholesale" should be familiar as the Paul Verhoeven's film Total Recall. Douglas Quirl is, in his own words, "a miserable little salaried employee" with a wife who knocks him back at every opportunity. He just wants to go to Mars. But he can't afford it and so is left with the next best thing: to have false memories of a visit implanted. If he can't go to Mars, he can remember having been. And from that point on, things get complicated, with the memory implantation process uncovering hidden memories and Quirl's understanding of his self and his past shifting frequently. Great stuff.

"Electric Ant" shows Dick the dazzler at work again. Garson Poole, a successful businessman, wakes up in hospital minus a hand. He just wants to get out of there, but then the doctors reveal something about him that even he didn't know: he's an "electric ant", an organic robot. This leads to something of an existential crisis and provides another wonderful flipping of perceptions as we view this revelation from Poole's perspective: we don't understand our own world, we don't even know ourselves...

In "Faith of Our Fathers" we have Dick getting weird and leaving this reader, for one, far behind. In a 1984-type future Hanoi, with the populace monitored through their TVs, Tung Chien is an official in the Ministry of Cultural Artifacts. When he's handed a new assignment to examine thousands of students' test papers for evidence of political deviance he knows it must be a trap -- a test of his own political values, which are starting to waver. All fair enough, but then he is dragged into the world of their great leader and the plot gets lost in a welter of hallucinogenic meanderings that may well have seemed interesting at the time.

"Oh to be a Blobel!", "War Game" and "What the Dead Men Say" are pedestrian Dick. A war vet struggling to cope with the adaptations he has had to make for war; the testing of a game, produced by potential enemies; a story of what happens after death. All interesting enough premises, but each illustrates how shaky are the foundations of much of Dick's work. In "What the Dead Men Say", death is followed by a period of "half-life", a short amount of time which can be rationed out over long periods in which the dead can be revived -- so that, potentially, they can "live" on for a long time. When attempts to bring back Very Important Businessman Louis Sarapis fail, it's clearly more than mere negligence -- this is Dick, after all. Sure enough, Sarapis starts speaking from beyond the grave. From outer space, in fact... Yet no-one seems terribly bothered, other than those directly concerned in the plot mechanics. Even when entire communications networks -- phones, TV, radio -- are blocked by Sarapis' broadcasts, it doesn't really seem to be a problem. This shows Dick deeply flawed: fiction, whether satirical (or even with outright comic intent - not that this is) or not, still needs to be grounded in a suspension of the reader's disbelief. At his ebullient best, Dick keeps things moving so fast that the reader is swept along, but where this approach fails him all that's really left for the reader is fascination with the workings of his imagination.

What on opening to Shantaram!

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is an universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”

With such an opening and similar passages spread throughout, it becomes a hard to put down book. Add to that an Australian author who has lived in the slums of Bombay, and you almost expect to be enriched by some sort of karmic philosophy. Philosophy and spiritual journey or not, this certainly is no karma in a bottle. The story of Shantaram is a story of adventure and daring, allegedly a fictionalized account of the life of author Gregory David Roberts who was a heroin addict who committed a series of armed robberies. He became known as "The Gentleman Bandit" because he wore a three- piece suit and spoke politely. In 1978 he was caught, tried and sentenced to 19 years in a maximum-security prison. While incarcerated he wrote a book which was confiscated, shredded, rewritten and destroyed again: 600 pages and six years' work were lost.

Then Roberts escaped, apparently by climbing over the prison's front wall, between two gun towers, in broad daylight. He was designated Australia's "Most Wanted Man", spent the next 10 years on the run and wrote his massive book all over again. He calls it "a novel written in blood and tears".

The narrator is a "revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime and a poet who lost his soul in prison". He has ghastly experiences in a torture chamber and on battlefields and in other prisons, "chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed and starved".

Part travelogue, part love letter, part autobiography, Shantaram is a vivid, entertaining but slightly grandiose tale of Lin, an ex-junkie and convicted robber who escapes from an Australian prison then hides in the most alien of places: the hot, filthy, decadent, seaside metropolis of Bombay.

This hero is brutal, passionate and romantic, an action man who sometimes pauses to meditate on the nature of good and evil and describes his extraordinary world with vivid, occasionally florid magniloquence. This vast volume is a remarkable achievement and if it really tells the story of the author's life, truth is definitely stranger than fiction.

Shantaram is no wide-eyed backpacker's Lonely Planet travel guide. Instead, it could double as a guidebook for a fugitive who needs to disappear, counterfeit passport in hand.

Or it could just be a fun read for someone committed enough to stay with this lengthy, impossibly heavy book.

Lin is introduced as he steps off a plane with a new identity. Only the punishing Bombay heat is there to greet him. He is instantly intrigued by the city just as it is by him. He is gawked at by locals for being a gora, and he can't get enough of the never-ending cacophony of the city's life pulse.

Prabaker, an energetic and sometimes irritating city guide, is the first to greet the newly free runaway. He also is one of the book's most innocent and refreshing characters. It is on one of his city tours — filled as much with slums as tourist sites — that Lin meets the mysterious green-eyed beauty Karla Saaranen.

Karla is Lin's love interest and his gateway to Bombay's underworld of German prostitutes, ruthless madams, corrupt police officers, deadly henchmen, Bollywood money launderers, Iranian smugglers and Afghani mafiosi.

It is under the stewardship of one such Afghani don and philosopher that Lin rises among the ranks of an underworld he struggles to moralize in maddeningly unnecessary philosophical passages. It is at these points that the book bogs down.

Despite occasional flubs, much is covered gracefully during the decade time span. Lin briefly lives in a 5,000-year-old village where he earns the name Shantaram, which means man of peace. He starts a medical clinic in a slum, gets beaten up countless times, fights with the mujahadeen in Afghanistan and acts in a few Bollywood films.

Roberts based much of the plot on his own life. He escaped from an Australian prison after being convicted of a string of robberies and spent 10 years hiding in India. Eventually, he was extradited, finished his 19-year term and wrote this book.

Roberts' behemoth is Bollywood-like in its strengths and flaws. Its visceral, cinematic descriptive beauty truly impresses. Although Shantaram gives too much of itself, its redemption lies in its bleeding-heart love letter to a Bombay few ever see.

Courtesy of Peter Deyell

A tightly-focused disaster story about English society under extreme duress, but none of his works grabbed this subject matter with such vigour as The Day Of The Triffids in which the panic and desperation of a blinded populace is revealed.

Plot

An ecological disaster of unimaginable scope...A world wide crisis over oil production...A laboratory created strain of plant life, genetically altered to increase production, proves deadly both to humans and all forms of large animal life...Biological warfare in the form of a new and deadly plague accidentally unleashed, wipes out the majority of the human population...An artificial satellite carrying a new and deadly weapon is triggered, perhaps accidentally, affects the entire earth, not just the population it was designed for...

Cold War

The book is an unmistakable product of Cold War apprehension about what many perceived to be the impending doom of the human race. Written at the time when the Russians had just exploded their own atomic bomb (but before the true nuclear horrors of the hydrogen weapons), the novel is a reflection of the fright that one day (and possibly sooner than later), humanity will slip off the tight-rope of nuclear brinkmanship into the abyss of nuclear holocaust. It is no coincidence that the Russians engineer the triffids in the first place in an apparent attempt to deal with overpopulation, lack of resources, and overcome dependence on capitalist oil. It is ironic, of course, that it takes the greed of Westerners to unleash the scourge upon the world. This was years before the Russians launched Sputnik (1957), moving intercontinental ballistic missiles and satellite weapons from theory into practice. But the writing was on the wall and Wyndham correctly saw it.

Another bit of the Cold War shadow hanging over the book is the touching faith of many Britons in America. It is expressed several times throughout the book and ranges from "the Americans could not let something like this happen to them" to "they will be here any time soon to rescue us." Whether they would was, of course, the quintessential puzzle for the Europeans. Although dismissed by everyone who let himself or herself acknowledge to true magnitude of the disaster, the blind faith in America is touching even today. If America does not save the world, who would? Who could?

Class Struggle/Rise of the Minority

Triffids, like any exploited minority group in history, their true talents were ignored or mutilated and even their intelligence was denied. They were kept in absolute slavery until modern technology in the form of war machines that caused blindness and a plague gave them a chance for rebellion. As in all riots and rebellions of a class that has been kept down too long, what follows is an explosion of violence. The triffids have no thought but to get rid of man once and for all. The point is, while that makes them a horrible and brutal enemy, it was man that made them the enemy.

Morality

In a touchingly realistic scene, once Bill Masen understands the situation, he spends some hours just wandering the streets of London, at a dead loss as to what to do next. He feels he ought to do something, but doesn't know what. He'd like to help the people around him, but doesn't know how. He is overwhelmed. It is the same question raised by the movie, Titanic. In the movie, when all the lifeboats are launched and the ship sinks, there are 1500 people in the water about to die. Should the lucky ones in the lifeboats try to rescue some of them? If they do, what if too many try to climb aboard, sink the lifeboat and no one survives? Yet, to do nothing is to let the people in the water freeze and drown. It's a moral question with no easy answers and it is at the heart of the book.

Bill and Josella have to grapple with the ultimate moral problem: What, if anything, should they do for the millions helpless blind people of London? The heart says "help them," but reason says "impossible." The two resolve to join a group of seeing intent on building a new community, even though this necessarily means abandoning some of the old ways, especially in Christian morality. It is quite astonishing that, just like a Heinlein heroine, it is Josella who quickly realizes that the survival imperative will turn women into children-bearers and men into more (less?) than husbands. That Bill objects to this and has to be persuaded to take on a harem is perhaps even more astonishing. But it is Wyndham's investigation of the morality of survival strategies that sticks: the individual vs. the group, the loss of societal restraints, considerations of feudalism and territorialism.

Survival of the Species/Civilisation

If only a few people are together, all their efforts have to go towards survival and that means their grandchildren will be overworked subsistence farmers. There's a quote from the book that says that a workable society needs a leader, a doctor and a teacher. Bill, as a biologist begins to have ideas about ways to destroy the triffids, but has no possibility of developing his ideas unless he can find a group large enough to help him.

A devoutly Christian community that has split from the original group because of the latter's immoral ways. This community is obviously doomed to a slow extinction, and it finally succumbs to a combination of the plague and the triffids.

Note the rise (Brighton?) of the new semi-feudal order where a bunch of petty tyrants would run their own fiefs populated with blind under the pretext of saving them. They are also busy building an army to fight off possible invasions or invade others.

Characters

It is now very much a period work (50 years since published). Note: - no computers, no genetic engineering, no TV – the absence of blacks and Asians, the prim vernacular, and the ominous Soviet scientists all mark the novel as very much of its time. However, the characters it portrays are still with us - the schoolmarmish Miss Durrant; Coker, the self-educated organiser and uncommitted radical; the well meaning but ineffectual Michael Beadley and the Colonel; and the brutal Torrence.

Modern Woman

For a novel written in 1951, the woman, Joselle, is remarkably liberated. She is consistently strong, sensible and thoughtful. She spends much of the novel on her own so the relationship between the two becomes that of two self-reliant people who have come to love each other. She is part of the decisions they have to make about the future for themselves, their family and friends.

This month's book was Paradigms Lost.

I wasn't able to attend the meeting as I was in Hong Kong at the time.
The group had a heated discussion, so I was told.

The general concensus was an 8 out of 10.

General consensus of "The Last Templar" was of a reasonable read with a very disappointing ending. Scoring was averaged of about 6 out of 10.

Character development was poor. Great action scenes. Well researched and good story jumps into the past.

Our next book is "Paradigms Lost" by John Casti.