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I want to knock a star off for being yet another damn trilogy, but I knew that going in so that'd make me a bit of a hypocrite, wouldn't it?

Then again, the novel (or third thereof) is all about getting yourself into things you should see coming, and the setup is so brilliant (and a neat jab in the ribs to too many YA 'verses to boot). The Greek gods are bored and puzzled by mankind (that's always a good start), so they kidnap a few hundred Platonian philosophers from all eras, plonk them down on an antique Greek island along with 10,000 likewise kidnapped children, and tell them "There. Now build Plato's Republic for real, in detail. Go on, teach the kids about beauty and justice, divide them into factions according to their worth, get them breeding without that pesky emotional bond, all that stuff."

Fun fact: Plato, for all his influence on Western so-called civilization, was kind of a fascist asshole, and the Republic may or may not be about as practical as actually locking a cat in a box with some radioactive material. So The Just City comes to be largely about the difference between idealism and pragmatism, theory and practice, freedom and society, all the while gleefully picking apart the old (and I do mean old) divide-the-kids-into-houses-and-put-them-in-love-triangles plot with an only slightly poisoned pen.

No, The Just City isn't perfect. But that's kind of the point, isn't it?

"Det jobbiga med äldre män som har pojkpigga ögon är att smärtan i dem aldrig åldras."

"Nu är alltid en annan tid. Då ansvarar vi inte för."

”Du, det där är en utopi här. Vi har inte ens en politisk elit. Vi har politisk plebs. Så håll hårt i den där korrektheten, annars hamnar ni i skiten. Man måste kämpa för den hela tiden. Hos oss handlar det bara om sanktioner nu, eftersom det har gått så långt. Det går inte att lösa på andra vis längre. Det finns ingen anledning att hänvisa till någon moral längre – det går bara att komma åt med hårda straff. Huvuden måste rulla. Om en parlamentsledamot säger rasistiska saker, då måste han lämna sin position. Och aldrig komma tillbaka.”
David tar en sista klunk ur vattenglaset och fixerar mig med blicken.
”Det måste finnas korrekthet i samhället – politisk korrekthet. Det går inte utan den.”

Jane Eyre IN SPACE? I dunno, but I'm not completely bowled over by it. The setup of a world being destroyed, and the few survivors doing everything to, as far as possible, preserve their culture and way of life while having to become refugees among strangers, is both timely (Lord was inspired by the 2004 tsunami, but hey, look at the world...) and effective, and the worldbuilding is very nicely done, with hints dropped bit by bit rather than in big infodumps, making the reader realise that you already know stuff when it shows up.

Unfortunately the love story itself (which reads as partly classic romance, partly repurposed Spock/Uhura fanfic, not that there's anything wrong with either) overwhelms the plot, which becomes far too episodic and oh-we're-over-here-now for my taste, dragging the story out rather than advancing it.

2.5/5.

Perhaps this is the only workable approach to writing a proper conspiracy thriller that is not Foucault's Pendulum: write it from a discordian POV. If everything true is false and vice versa and you cannot believe anything that is written, hail Eris etc, then the whole mishmash of ancient societies, 60s psychedelia, 70s politics, literary allusions and general weirdness not only makes sense, but makes total nonsense, which of course may be the point.

And for the first few hundred pages, I'm loving this. Shea and Wilson dive in and start connecting the dots between everything and anything so gleefully that you can hear them giggling. They throw everything in there, from ancient myths (real or made up on the spot) to modernist and postmodernist authors (Melville! Lovecraft! Joyce! Pynchon! Vonnegut!), to then-current affairs, mixing fact and fiction in an absolutely dizzying way, pulling together threads to show ideas and concepts shining through, and yanking the rug out from under you anytime you feel like you have a clue what's going on. They even make the weird structure - the POV shifts, the time skips, etc - seem perfectly natural.

But eventually, that's also what makes the book more of a chore to read than a pleasure. At some point, you realise that you're reading page upon page upon page upon page of exposition by characters who are, in-story, either mad, lying, or just plain wrong, and will be proven so in the next 20 pages of exposition by another character (or the same character), who in turn will turn out to be... The joke just goes on too long with no punchline in sight. It's all a bit like... well...

Mike: Rick, you've been looking out of that window for three hours now.
Rick: Yes, well it's hardly surprising, is it? Vyvyan put super glue all over the pane!
Vyvyan: Did I? That was a good joke!
Rick: I'll probably be disfigured for life, Vyvyan, and you'll have to pay! Ha! And then who will be laughing, ha! Not you, matey. That's for sure!
Mike: Yeah, well just don't break the glass when you tear your face off, that's all.
Rick: I won't. I won't because... [quickly moves away from window] it's not true! It was a joke I made up, and you fell for it like the fascists you are!

I'm reading this in 2016 as Complete Idiotism has suddenly become a valid political platform, and it feels oddly prescient, but not necessarily in a good way. I'm wondering where Trump, Gove, Putin, Erdogan, Åkesson et al would fall in the context of this novel. I thought I wanted to laugh at it all, but when bare-faced authoritarianism and ditto irrationalism turn out to get along fine, I don't want enlightenment, I just want to pull a blanket over my head and read something that actually makes sense instead, and doesn't end with the most worn-out cop-out cliché ending in literary history.

Uwe Timm was 2 years old when his brother died on the Eastern front, as part of the Waffen-SS. All he has of his brother is a tiny memory fragment of someone blond, a frustratingly vague diary his brother kept, and the word of his parents that his brother was a good kid. An idealist who didn't hate anyone, who couldn't be a coward and refuse to do his part, who definitely wouldn't have been part of... y'know, that. Who just wanted to serve his country like his father had before him. And sure, his father was a difficult person to live with, but his mother was a truly kind person who could never have raised someone who would do... well, that.

So how come that diary doesn't mention any details? How could a good kid - and by extension, a country full of good people - witness all that, even if they weren't actively part of it, and choose not to see it, and later to see it as something that happened to them? Where does that come from? Isn't that the most cowardly thing of all?

We lost both our home and our boy, was one of the sentences they used to not have to think about the reasons. They thought that with this suffering, they'd done their part in atoning for what happened. Everything was dreadful, partly because they were supposedly victims, victims of an incomprehensible collective destiny.

Timm had to wait until the rest of his family had died to write this; not because he couldn't ask them, but because he'd already heard their answers a hundred times and they didn't tell him anything new. His father who became a bitter drunk mumbling about how they could have won the war honourably if not for Hitler, his mother who kept wondering what really happened to her son, his sister who only remembered him as a... kid. He digs into it, tries to find out what he can about his brother, tries to figure out what Gitta Sereny called the German Trauma. Other writers have written more about that, but he sticks to the personal angle. There are no easy answers there, and in the end the book sort of peters out - as it probably should. But the way there is a fascinating, painful read.

3.5/5

As a work of historical fiction, Segu is often tremendous. Following one family over 70 years of history from the late 18th century to the mid-19th, right at the beginning of European colonialism in inner Africa (which, ironically, was partially driven by the official end of slavery), but from the POV of a family who are intimately involved with the intra-African politics of the time; the power struggle between various kingdoms, the spread of Islam and Christianity colonializing both minds and narratives long before the guns get there, the attempts to adjust the old way of life to new situations... All stuffed with endless details of what came before, of history repeating, of ideas evolving. It's the sort of novel that should really come with a bibliography and footnotes, not because I doubt her, but because I want to learn more.

I mentioned slavery, right? The novel keeps circling the concept, not just in the sense of white Europeans sending black Africans in chains across the ocean and the emerging racism (modern racism being a 19th century construct), but in the slavery that was always there, the subjugation of defeated tribes to victors (the rise of new African kingdoms largely due to demand for slaves from white traders), of women to men, of wives to their husbands, of children to their parents. And all the various ways it's justified, normalised, treated as the Natural Order Of Things without the narrative calling it out. In short, the novel gets really uncomfortably rapey at times. Condé doesn't condemn or condone, just chronicles, almost as if she wants to call it all a circle of submission without spelling it out for the reader; the ideological virus of less-than-thou leading to one huge Stockholm Syndrome of négritude.

That's part of what makes me hesitant to give this a higher grade; the other part is simply that at 501 pages, the novel sprawls quite a bit, following a huge cast of characters to the point where she has to fast-forward a bit too often to let the reader get to know them all, and leaving us just before the shit really hits the fan. It's a good novel, it just doesn't grab me (and yeah, how dare I not be grabbed by human suffering, right?) as often as I'd like.

It's been a long time since I read the 1831 edit, so I can't really compare them. But a few thoughts:

Fittingly for Frankenstein, the author is both alive and dead. "Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley)". Because heaven forfend we think a teenage girl wrote this completely on her own, practically inventing the entire SF genre, with no influence from any editor, or that married couples with the same profession help each other out. The Lone GeniusTM is, after all, male; we will never see a critical edition published as "Paul Auster (with Siri Hustvedt)" or "Stephen King (with Tabitha King)", but the merest suggestion that Harper Lee let Capote read To Kill A Mockingbird before publication and we can all assume that he really wrote it, amirightfolks? That said, having PBS's contributions clearly marked is interesting, and confirms that he was more an editor than a co-creator; sometimes he just adds purple prose, sometimes he helps her clarify themes, but at no point does he seem to invent anything that wasn't already there.

Frankenstein discovered that I detailed or made notes concerning his history; he asked to see them, and himself corrected and augmented them in many places, but principally in giving the life and spirit of the conversations he held with his enemy.

The enemy, the adversary, the creator, the monster. Everybody knows that Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster. Except he kind of is. Whatever Mary Shelley's intended moral of the story, Victor Frankenstein doesn't come across as a very good man. He creates a feeling, intelligent, moral creature in his image, and when he finds it repugnant, abandons and rebukes it until it lashes out. (And I totally just called Adam "it", didn't I?) At no point does he accept responsibility, yet he feels guilt. He claims to refuse the demands made upon him by his creation for the greater good of humanity, yet he's so self-centered that when the monster whose entire strategy so far has been to kill his family to make him suffer tells him he'll "see him on his marriage night", Frankenstein never once considers that the threat might not be on HIS life. Hell, up until the epilogue, you could easily claim that the monster only exists in his imagination. He's the narrator, he's the Man, he's the Hero; of course everything is about him, and when his fiancée drops very unsubtle hints that she'd like to have her own adventures while she waits for him to settle down, he doesn't even notice it. That's not to say that the monster isn't monstrous either, of course; but she does give him several chances to accuse his creator and defend his own actions, while admitting that they are monstrous. Throughout the novel, as much as they try to accuse the other, the lines between them blur.

The Swedish word "mönster" means "pattern". The German word "Münster" means "church". Of course there's a lot of romantic/proto-existentialist playing around with Man vs God here, and Shelley leaves it all wonderfully open-ended; the power balance between creator and creature (etymology!) shifts around, they demand answers and actions of each other that the other cannot give; at the end of Frankenstein wait both Nietzsche and Sartre; the zeitgeist has started accusing God, contemplating His death, but finds the idea both unavoidable and horrific. The Monster is too eloquent; he's learned all this philosophy, and none of it helps him any when Victor simply says "no". Shelley's dynamic duo of Victor and Adam go to their deaths lamenting that they no longer have a reason to live when the other is no longer there to be accused, interrogated, tortured until they accept responsibility, but neither actually kills the other.

My person was hideous, and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.

Of course, most adaptations and more-or-less outright thefts of the story try to simplify it, as if to create much clearer demarcations between Good and Evil; make Frankenstein himself a simple mad scientist with an Igor, and the monster a nearly-mute beast, far from Shelley's constantly orating philosophy student. Introduce a real hero and a few villagers with pitchforks to do the dirty work. Yet in Bride of Frankenstein (the first sequel, confirming that the Monster was simply too cool to not be kept alive through a thousand reincarnations) when the monster kills his creator, the only two characters who remain through all versions, his last immortal words are "WE BELONG DEAD!". "We". And so the author (and reader) remains both alive and dead.