20080730
Four reviews today.
• Battle Royale (film)
• Norwegian Wood (novel) by Haruki Murakami
• Franny and Zooey (novel) by J.D. Salinger
• Y: The Last Man (graphic novel) by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
Film: Speculative Fiction
Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Year: 2000
Runtime: 122 min.
Wow. Battle Royale was... incredible. This thing was so brutal and compelling that even the Monk could not stop—despite having to avert her eyes every five minutes or so because of bloody, bloody murder.
At the time, Battle Royal was probably closer to spec-fi but now I guess it'd be alt-history fiction since its futuristic horror takes place in the early two-thousand-aughts. Essentially, youth violence, degradation, and autonomy has risen to such a level that the adults are mad as hell and are just not going to take it anymore. So, like any reasonable society, they pass the BR Act, a piece of legislation that requires random classes of ninth graders to be shipped to specially created military camps. While at these camps, the students are given a bag containing a map and compass, some food and water, and a random weapon (anything from a sub machine gun to a pot lid). They are to use the resources at hand to... well, to kill every other student. If within three days there is not a single survivor remaining, the collars fastened to the necks of each survivor will be triggered to explode.
So yeah. Not the most forward thinking of governments.
In any case, despite the sillinesses of the film like the incredulity with which one would approach the idea of a BR Act, Battle Royale is just as I said at the beginning: ruthlessly compelling. Watching these kids deal with either the fact that their friends were murderers or that they themselves would soon be murderers was an arresting concept. The filmmakers give the viewer just enough backstory on a number of the participants to make their involvement and eventual grisly end all the more cinematically worthwhile. And when he confrontations begin, the level of tension does not ratchet down.
Despite flaws in story, script, and subtitling, Battle Royale was worth every moment I spent glued to its unfolding.
Rating: 
Book: Novel
Author: Haruki Murakami
Year: 1987
Pages: 304
Having read Kafka on the Shore, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, After the Quake, and Sputnik Sweetheart, I decided it was high time I read the novel that really put Haruki Murakami on the Map of Superstardom. Norwegian Wood, by all accounts, was the work that made his later triumphs possible. Still, I approached the work guardedly, recognizing that popularity and quality rarely go with hands clasped in loving security.
In short, my fears were deftly allayed.
Norwegian Wood, while boasting none of that surreality that drew me so strongly to Murakami's later works, is still on all counts an excellent novel. It foreshadows the art that he would later hone in more incredible works but is not overwhelmed by its place as Prototype and stands stubbornly under its own worthy powers. The book is emotionally satisfying, wryly humourous, and carries enough of the psychological burden of true romance that I couldn't help but enjoy the journey.
As far as the story is concerned, Murakami pits a young, collegiate protagonist (Toru Watanabe) against a world made crazy by ill-founded idealism and the fascism that idealism nurtures. The world around him feeds on dreams and the need for rebellion—not worthy rebellion but only that typical rebellion that the young feel is necessary to young lives. Even in the midst of his cynicism toward the mindless abandon of his classmates, Watanabe finds himself abandoned to his desperate love for Naoko, the psychologically wounded girlfriend of his now-deceased best friend from high school. Even as he labours to support Naoko through her lengthy convalescence, writing her letters and occasionally visiting her remote community, Watanabe takes the edge off his pining by participating in two oddly similar friendships, both with fellow students of his particular university. These work to show him both who he wants to be and who he does not want to be.
I'm not certain if Norwegian Wood should be classified as romantic fiction, bildungsroman, or as something else. Certainly their are elements of the two well-mined genres, but I can't help feeling that the novel is perhaps something more worthwhile than either of the two classifications. In any case, I liked it well enough and it's normal enough to appeal to even those who aren't ready for Murakami's more curious work.
Rating:
Book: Novel
Author: J.D. Salinger
Year: 1955
Pages: 208
I am the luckiest person in the world. The last few months have led me through an unbroken string of good books. I have had so much fun reading that I'm just in love with books right now.
And isn't that the way it should be?
In any case, Salinger's Franny and Zooey is the most recent in what I hope will be a continuing tradition of engaging, well-written stories. I have to admit I approached the work with some skepticism, having been wholly uninterested in Catcher in the Rye when it was forced upon me in high school (and now, I am looking forward to going back and reading Catcher).
It's really in the dialogue that Franny and Zooey shines. I found their discussions completely absorbing and their subject-matter intriguing. Even the correspondences represented in the work are fun and filled with the kind of silly banter that reminds me of my own letters to my wife before she was my wife.
As far as story goes, it really is pretty slight and primarily relies on four distinct conversations over the course of a few days in which Franny has a sort of spiritual nervous breakdown. I found the whole thing—the breakdown, the conversations, the conclusions—all to be uncomfortably believable in that I could easily imagine such a set of things occurring somewhere in real life.
To conclude, Franny and Zooey is a short book that can be swallowed at breakneck speeds. It would be worth seven times the amount of time I spent on it.
Rating:
Book: Graphic Novel (10 vols.)
Author: Brian K. Vaughan
Artist: Pia Guerra
Year: 2002-2008
Pages: 1487
Imagine a world in which every creature possessing a Y chromosome has just died. In a single moment, the world's animal population has been reduced by roughly half. This is a world where most of the world's politicians, most of the world's scientists, most of the world's military, most of the world's pilots, most of the world's film-makers, and most of the world's businessmen are no longer with us. This is a world of chaos and desperation, a world trying to find its way in the cataclysm-wrought darkness.
And this is a world of nightmares and madness for Yorick Brown, the lone surviving man.
Y: The Last Man begins on July 17, 2002—about a half hour prior to the great extinction, and introduces Yorick, his pet monkey Ampersand (also male and also a unique survivor of the coming pandemic), and the beginning of a large cast of well-conceived female characters (for the curious, publisher Vertigo offers the first chapter in PDF). The second chapter picks up several weeks after the plague hit, revealing a world very much changed. Apart from those women who are simply scrambling to survive in and make sense of this new world, the new society-in-flux has given rise to numerous factions struggling with and abusing power. From the ultra-feminist Amazons who burned all the sperm banks to assure that the world would never again be plagued with men to those women who were involved in politics and the military prior to the fall of man, author Brian K. Vaughan presents a world that believably captures both the horror and hope of the human condition.
And all the while Yorick is racing from Boston to find his would-be fiancée Beth, who was participating in anthropological research in Australia when the plague hit.
It's a very slow race. The entire scope of the ten-volume series covers approximately five years and follows Yorick as he and his two companions Agent 355 (an American spy) and Dr. Allison Mann* (a bioengineer who hopes to clone Yorick to preserve the human race) as they traverse the globe (via foot, train, and boat) in search of Yorick's Beth. Because of their travels they experience enlightening episodes with Amazons, astronauts, agents, assassins, actors, antagonistas, androbots, atheists, angry Arizonans, and a whole mess of lesbians (both long-time and newly blossomed).
As far as speculative fiction goes, Y: The Last Man is really the creme de la creme, hitting all the right notes and being funny, grim, and mind-blowing for its duration. Vaughan has lessons to leave and pedagogy to forge, but he never gets preachy—and the moment he begins wading in that direction, his characters themselves seem to call him on the carpet for it. These are intelligent people and pretty well representative of the human race. While the book most overtly concerns Yorick and his quest, this is merely a framing device for an exploration of humanity itself (and to a lesser degree, women). Vaughan succeeds wholly in taking a genre concept that could have been been the basis for the typical male fulfillment fantasy and spinning into one of the most worthwhile fables of the last hundred years.
Y: The Last Man gets my highest recommendation.
Hm. As an epilogue, I suppose I should speak briefly about the art. Largely visually composed by Pia Guerra, the illustrations of the book sing in their subtly. This is not a book featuring dynamic duos or caped crusaders. It's about real people. And Guerra's line captures that about as well as any artist out there. So goo is her skill that I cannot imagine any other artist succeeding so well at capturing Vaughan's story, characters, and setting. Her talent is made more so obvious by the occasional instances of filler artists.
*note: Allison Mann is A. Mann, get it?
Rating:
Labels: comics, literature, movies, reviews
