Month: July 2018

David Weber’s Honor Harrington books are set in a far distant future, a time when humans have spread out to settle on hundreds of other planets far, far away. The title character is an officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy, Manticore being an independent star kingdom comprised of a small group of planets that were settled a century or two previously. The series tells of Honor Harrington’s career, from her time in military academy, through her first assignments and then to her promotion to ever increasing levels of responsibility. In this far future, navies consist of spaceships rather than sailing ships; but Weber’s universe is very much analogous to that of C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, which is set in Europe at the time of Napoleonic Wars. The first novel of Weber’s series, On Basilisk Station, is dedicated to Forester and it is surely no accident that Weber’s hero has the same initials as Forester’s. 

The Honor Harrington Universe, as the marketers call it, consists of a large number of works, some of which are collaborative projects of various kinds. But the ones I have in my remaining four and a half feet of books are eight of the early Honor Harrington books, all written by David Weber himself and published between 1993 and 1998. The eight volumes take up a full eight and a half inches of shelf space. Zounds! How could I have saved so much Weber, when so much else went by the board? Well, basically they are great stories superbly told. The situations are complex and so are the characters. Also, the hero of the series has a pet: a twenty-pound, six legged, telepathic animal called a treecat that often rides on her shoulder. That’s really all you need to know. (But I’ll blather on a while anyway.)

Great adventure stories benefit from great settings and in creating this fictional universe Weber really covers the ground. For one thing, there are detailed discussions of military armaments and tactics. As the series progresses, new and more powerful weapons systems are being developed and deployed by Honor’s navy and also by her enemies. If you’re nerdy at all, you’ll find these discussions fascinating, especially as they relate, literally, to matters of life and death for the characters. These details also help prepare the reader to better appreciate Weber’s stirring and suspenseful descriptions of battle scenes, sometimes with our heroes outgunned and desperate, and sometimes with our heroes having a bundle of aces up their sleeves. Besides all that, Weber also wants us to understand the political and diplomatic context of military action, so the stories always include extensive scenes showing the thoughts and interactions of the civilian leaders as they strategize about how best to deal with their interstellar rivals. In this area, Weber covers the leadership of the both the good guys and the bad guys, giving great attention to the decision making of the bad guys and to the internal rivalries among them.  

At this point I can imagine someone saying, “I’m sorry, but that sounds totally dull!” Ah, but that’s just the beginning. What Weber really cares about and what he spends most of his time on is character development. Beginning with Honor Harrington herself, Weber creates dozens of fully realized characters, all of whom have their own virtues and weaknesses, their own kinds of insight and their own kinds of blindness. Weber is interested in courage, both moral and physical, and in its opposite. And he is very interested in honor, something we don’t run into very much in the universe that we inhabit, at least not in the public sphere. But his characters also run the gamut of human behavior and psychology. He gives us high-minded idealists, cynical political hacks, weary pragmatists, nerdy technicians with unsuspected depths, devious plotters, religious fanatics, and a host of military types including useless blusterers, deadly tacticians, far-seeing strategists, raw recruits, small-time racketeers, and long-time NCOs who are martial arts masters, to mention just a few. It’s important to note that Weber’s characters often make mistakes. If they are lucky enough to survive, the smart ones always learn something, sometimes on their own, sometimes with the help of their friends. Weber’s characters must also deal with injustices from time to time, and–as in our world–some of these can be remedied and some cannot. The key to the success of these novels is that they’re only partly about politics or technology or war. They’re mostly about people, about the qualities that they bring to the table and how they interact with one another, with good intent or ill.

Weber provides these imaginary people with a massively detailed alternate universe in which to operate. It is not, of course, our world, but it is not so different either. Way back in February, when I looked at Vladamir Nabokov and John Hawkes, I noted that both of those authors wanted to be clear that they were not trying to represent the reality of this world but rather wanted to create new worlds with their own realities. The writer of science fiction and fantasy doesn’t have say that; it’s obvious that the world of the novels is different from our own. And yet, we find that the work of all these writers is jam packed with obvious analogues to our world and that many of these offer implicit commentary on our real world.

One such theme is Weber’s vision of the military virtues: courage, fighting instincts, analytical thinking, sacrifice, perseverance, honor and loyalty–both loyalty to one’s nation and personal loyalty to one’s immediate group. In our country, these virtues are somewhat out of fashion. It’s hard for people to admire anything military because in the last fifty years our forces have so often been used for distinctly non-admirable purposes. For me, it is a pleasure to be reminded of these virtues and to see them exemplified by soldiers in fictional situations that are less ethically challenged than our real ones. 

Another matter of relevance to us is that Weber’s imaginary world is very much politically correct in many ways. It starts with the fact that Weber’s military hero is female and that most of his interstellar cultures are gender neutral. I haven’t counted, but my impression is that about half of his characters are men and half are women; certainly that is the case when we consider characters in positions of authority. Equality of opportunity and of achievement is a given. There are, in fact, a couple of planets in the Weber’s universe on which women are very much subordinate, but this becomes a major issue that plays out over the course of several novels as these cultures find themselves having to interact more and more with the mainstream interstellar culture in which equality and inclusion are the norm.

Also on the PC side, race is basically absent from Weber’s worlds. Skin color is mentioned here and there, notably in regard the royal family of Manticore who are very dark skinned, but in these worlds skin color doesn’t mean anything and racial issues as we know them do not exist. There are no LGBT issues either, but that’s because there are no LGBT people and such matters are never or very rarely mentioned. I’m not sure how PC that is! There is hardly any sex or romance of any kind in these stories, but there are a lot of marriages and all of them are het.

The many  analogues between Honor’s universe and our own include religious fanaticism, rogue states, social welfare schemes, entrepreneurial capitalism both enlightened and not, and the difficulty of rational compromise among competing interests. Weber’s discussion of the varying political styles of his various star nations forms an implied critique a some of the nations of our own time and in so doing presents a kind of sanitized version of what we call democracy. Weber’s model societies, such as Honor Harrington’s home nation of Manticore, face some of the same problems we have. There are corrupt officials, dishonest business people, psychopathic criminals, and one or two aggressively imperialist star nation neighbors. Then too, voters in a democracy are not always reliably sensible and some portion of the population are gullible enough to believe the big lie.

But there are also certain problems that Manticorans don’t have to deal with. In Manticore there are no arguments about environmental pollution, no immigration problems, no racial issues, no crumbling infrastructure, and no history of having built their new society by destroying the native culture that originally inhabited the land. There is no unemployment and no mention of any citizens who are unable, for whatever reason, to be fully functioning and productive. Also, disease has been eliminated and natural resources are abundant. Manticoran citizens tend toward mild religious beliefs chiefly involving ethical behavior and tolerance. On the other extreme, Weber’s evil individuals and collectively evil societies are really, really evil and often succeed in causing a great deal of suffering. So it’s a great pleasure to see them defeated. No wonder you can lose yourself in one of these novels and then want to start right up with the next one. Weber’s world is clearly a nicer place to live than ours is. 

Do these books have weaknesses? Hmm. Well, my only real complaint is the these eight novels together comprise 3,850 pages and that’s too many. There’s a little too much back story and quite a bit too much talking, especially in the later novels. You might have to skip a page or two.

Once the great purge was complete, my fiction collection was reduced to just twenty-seven novels. Three of the twenty-seven are by Haruki Murakami. Why this disproportionate number of books by one author?*  Do I just happen to be crazy about Murakami? Well, kind of, but it’s also that in the latter stages of my reading career I have become more and more focused on foreign language novels. The peoples of the world are all so different and yet all so much the same, a lesson that must be learned and relearned. It is because of this that in the final six chapters of the After the Purge project, I will be discussing only one Anglo writer–and that one a cultural outlier in his way. 

So what about Haruki Murakami? The great thing that strikes me is that his work is so absorbing, so difficult to put down, and at the same time so much of it is so quotidian, so unspecial. Murakami is one of the least poetical authors I know. The events that take place in the lives of his characters and the emotions that they feel are not really narrated in the manner of most novels. Rather, they are carefully and analytically described, as if each sentence had been prepared as part of an official report. Why is this not boring? It’s true that some interesting and extraordinary events occur in Harukami’s books, including magical ones, but even these are usually described in a spare, dry style. You could easily say that much of Murakami’s writing is–to use his word–colorless. So why is it that his books so quickly and thoroughly draw us in? Well, for one thing, the writing is often really funny. But that’s only a part of it.

Let’s look first at Norwegian Wood, the novel that made Murakami famous. Before NW, Murakami had published several earlier novels and had enjoyed moderate success. His 1985 book, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, had been a magical fantasy. Appearing in 1987, Norwegian Wood was much simpler, at least superficially, with no magical elements at all. It was something of a nostalgia piece, whose main characters were all college age students back in the sixties, twenty years prior to the year the novel was published. It was partly a portrait of that era and in it Murakami critiqued both sides of the classic sixties divide, that between student revolutionaries on the one hand and amoral careerist climbers on the other. But that wasn’t all. It was really about young love, idealistic and uncompromising. And it had sex in it. There wasn’t too much of it and it was more reported than narrated, but that was surely one reason that the book sold ten million copies in Japan plus two or three million more copies world-wide. And speaking of sales, the website Ranker.com (as retrieved on 7/11/18), lists Norwegian Wood as the 76th highest selling novel of all time. (Reaching for a grain of salt here? You wonder about their methodology? Never mind.) Wikipedia reports that world-wide sales of Norwegian Wood totaled about 12.6 million. For what it’s worth, that’s at least two million more copies than The Cat in the Hat, The Joy of Sex, or A Brief History of Time; but it is also roughly thirty-five million fewer copies than such true classics as The Bridges of Madison County, Anne of Green Gables, or The Hite Report. In any case, it is, as I have confirmed on rereading, a classic and sadly beautiful story in the coming of age tradition. 

Published twenty-five years after Norwegian Wood, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is another Murakami book that doesn’t depend much on magical elements. It recycles the themes of youth remembered, but it is more focused on a single mysterious event, something that the title character has never understood and which he strives to come to terms with many years later. This book is distilled Murakami: no magic, no sex, very few cultural signifiers from either the past or the present, and no final answer to the central question. It is a quest novel consisting of some not particularly dramatic events and some potentially important conversations that don’t always seem to move things along very much. But there are waves beneath the surface, events that are neither explicit nor explainable, currents powerful enough to move the reader as well. (The word that can be spoken, says the Tao, is not the true word.) Like other Murakami protagonists, Tsukuru is indeed rather colorless in some ways, but not so colorless as he thinks he is. He has the reader’s sympathy immediately and constantly; the fact that we care so much about him is mostly what keeps us turning the pages, unable to turn away. The novel’s finale is both undramatic and unforgettable.

Kafka on the Shore is also a quest novel, but this is Murakami vivid and unbound, and I have to say that it is my favorite novel of the three. It has a younger but also quite sympathetic hero. The plot is picaresque, a fundamentally magical journey to escape an Oedipal curse; it rocks, rolls and rambles. The characters range from unusual to bizarre. There are a host of political and cultural references as well as several talking cats. It also features a Mazda Miata MX-5, a car model with which this writer is quite familiar and that Murakami himself is said to have owned. 

Judging from my brief forays onto the Internet, Murakami is something of a divisive figure. Earlier, I wondered why his sort of writing wasn’t boring. Apparently, for some people, it is boring, as boring as all get out. Stultifying. Some call Murakami one of the most overrated novelists ever. Oh well. Count me on the other side of that divide.**

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*I have also kept three John Hawkes novels, but as I explain in my posting on Hawkes, that’s because two of them are really skinny (easy to keep and transport) and because they all have beautiful cover art. My Murakami books, on the other hand, are all fat and their covers are so-so.

**But though I did keep three Murakami novels, you may notice that  1Q84 was not among them.