From the Fatherland, with Love: A Review

Ryu Murakami's From the Fatherland, With Love (translated by the team of Raloh McCarthy, Charles De Wolf, and Ginny Tapley Takemori is a slow-collapse apocalyptic novel spiced up considerably by an intense catastrophe: a back-door North Korean invasion of the City of Fukuoka on the Island of Kyushu, one of the smaller of the four main Japanese Islands.

 

 

 

Ryu Murakami (from here) was born in 1952 in Nagasaki prefecture, Ryu Murakami is the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature. Awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his first book, a novel about a group of young people drowned in sex and drugs, he has gone on to explore with cinematic intensity the themes of violence and technology in contemporary Japanese society. He appears to be best known in the United Sates for his tour through the Japanese sex trade underworld in The Miso Soup. This novel was published in 2005 in Japan, but the translated version here was released in 2013.

The title of the novel, as best I can tell, is a play on the title of Robert Harris' alternate history detective novel, Fatherland (Amazon, Amazon UK), which is set in an alternate reality where Adolf Hitler has won World War 2.

We have a different sort of alternate history here.  Here we have a very slow, grinding collapse.  Although the novel, with its many narrative points of view, has many people who are still doing quite well, Japan has become even more sluggish and economically desperate than its current long decline from the 1990s when the cyberpunk novels had them being the next rulers of the world.  Most of the action is set in the Spring of 2011, with most of it happening over a very short time frame in April.  So if it is not today's (or 2011's) Japan, it is a possible near-future Japan.

 

As we noted at the top, the disastrous event that is the focus of the novel is a back door invasion of the City of Fukuoka by a small elite group of North Koreans.  The North Koreans get the idea from a fictional movie (but based on the actual movie "The Eagle has Landed") to land an advanced group of commandos posing as agents hostile to that dictatorship, and escaping persecution:  armed refugees if you will.  North Korea denounces the rebels, and the rebels await a second much larger (120,000 strong) group of fellow "refugees" to arrive on a motley ramshackle fleet.  The idea is to disguise the invasion aspect of the plan with just enough verbiage to slow Japanese reactions.  The Japanese, pretty much take the bate, and treat the group like violent terrorists holding hostages, rather than the advanced guard that they are.  The timeline of the book is set to the arrival of the second large wave of troops, which will essentially mean that the North Koreans have won.

In addition to the general economic malaise, the author takes issues with some trends within Japanese society.  One is, that within their society, people are very cautious and docile.  In an interview the author notes, "Japan is becoming more and more docile... I don’t know why. People maybe think that nothing will change regardless of what they do".  Within the novel they have come to value the life and well being of individuals so highly, that the threat of violence paralyzes them from reacting quickly to violent setbacks.

Which is a problem when one of your neighbors refuses to civilize with you.  In fact, if the process that leads to civilization leaves a group with the losers' end of the spoils, they may be very determined to not civilize on your terms.  Just as to some extent, Japan didn't want to play along with the new "everyone play nice" European dominated post World War 1 era, the North Koreans have a lot that they are also angry about, and a ruling system that makes sure that they stay angry.

Toward the end, a Japanese mother complains about the inactivity of the Japanese National Government:

Listening to his comments only underlined how gutless the government seemed to be. It was the same kind of attitude her husband had.  He hadn't want to leave his job, but he couldn't bring himself to turn down a friend's request. Similarly, the government didn't want the fleet to reach Fukuoka, but they couldn't risk any [retaliatory] terrorist attacks.  Choosing one thing meant sacrificing something else; so many people didn't understand this... p. 561.

The overlapping, immediate, ground level narrative switches between four general groups of people.  First is the various members of the North Korean advanced guard.  Second, and less frequent as the novel progresses, are the higher ups within the Japanese government. Third, is the Japanese in the city of Fukumo who are forced by circumstances to come into contact with, and variously deal with the occupying Korean forces, and finally a group of criminally disturbed young men who occupy a group home under the auspices of a retired criminal turned poet.

 

The Japanese officials in Tokyo are, if not exactly incompetent, are paralyzed by the

threat of immediate violence, and handcuffed by their own perception that violence is to be avoided at all costs.  When the Koreans counter some of their early efforts to interrupt their operations, they are paralyzed into passivity.  Having always expected the Americans to provide an umbrella of safety, they are not sure what to do when it is not forthcoming.

The local government officials, and media people are in a difficult situation.  They are very much afraid of the Koreans, but feel like Tokyo has abandoned them.  Being in a position where they are subject to immediate violent repercussions, they tend to give the North Koreans what they want: with the obvious irony that from a slightly more distant view, this makes the Koreans appear to be acting in good faith and responsibly.

The youngsters in the group home are a very mixed group.  Although at first they are rather fond of the North Koreans for beating up the local Japanese establishment, they fairly quickly realize that they are a hostile group.  All of the children suffer from severe personal isolation, and are very unstable.  These are not cute little "bad news bears" turned to good.  They have either become insane through suffering violence at an early age, or were insane and turned to violence at some point.  Throughout there activities, various individuals are apt to become casualties as temporary mental breakdowns lead to personally disastrous outcomes.

The North Korean are an interesting group.  Much like the children, they have also suffered from extreme violence, and many of them grew up in times of extreme starvation (the 1990s).  They have some of the same emotional issues as the children (isolation), but because the conditioning plays out within the backdrop of a totalitarian ideology, they tend to channel it through a rigid concept of duty and order.  They start having difficulties when faced with the extreme wealth of Japanese society.  The underwear that they are given (to keep for themselves!) is the finest clothing they have ever seen.  A distribution of watches, as reward for their commitment to duty, causes some breakdown in discipline, as the rank-and-file are not used to dealing with this type of larges.

 

In the end, the youth-group, through their violent insanity, winds up being the only group that mobilizes quickly to counteract the North Korean Advance Guard.  One of  adults associated with the group, a criminal financier of sorts, has spent large sums of money sneaking in a variety of deadly weapons.  The beauty pageant, of-sorts, where he displays this very deadly, but highly eccentric grouping of weapons and uniforms, is a gut wrenchingly funny moment in the annals of mall-ninja psychology. But while they have some weapons, and a lot of strange violent talents, having seen the North Koreans in action, they are very aware that they are absolutely no match toe-to-toe.  So it becomes of contest of violent, brutal, discipline, against violent, poignant, chaos. 

The novel is excellent. It is a rare apocalyptic novel that manages to portray both a grinding slow collapse, and a potentially, lighting fast collapse, simultaneously.   It shows the way that economic chaos, and social disintegration, play into the potential for further problems, and the paralysis that can make solving these problems very difficult.  The portrayal of various types of people, many of them facing very difficult situations, is very telling.  Surviving a collapse is not very likely to be a heroic event, and apocalyptic shoot-em-ups, are not going to be as much fun as they are often portrayed.  The bad guys are not always going to be a bunch of idiots, they often will be better trained, and, for that matter, their "badness" will not always be all that clear.

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high. Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting. Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation. Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

 

Outside of the North Korean backdoor invasion, which the author himself says is highly improbable, the only possible demerit is the use of an alternate timeline.  But if you pushed the Japanese dystopia a little further into the future, even that doesn't seem all that improbable.  It deals with a lot of very real events: people losing their jobs, people worried about losing their jobs, the plight of the unwanted homeless, even living life in a cruel totalitarian state.  The paralysis of a troubled modern democratic state in responding to a crisis is frighteningly real.  The Japanese cultural assumptions are not everyone's, but all cultures have their blind spots.  It is a 7.

Readability is straightforward.  It is a very well written, and the translation is excellent.  Adjusted for its long length, it is a 6.




Area of North Korean "Rebel" Encampment.  They control the box like peninsula area, with their main troop quarters (red box) being between the high rise hotel (top right) and the large hospital (bottom right).

Wolf and Iron: A Review

Gordon R. Dickson's Wolf and Iron is a post-apocalyptic novel set very shortly after a sudden economic collapse has led to the ruination of the primary large urban areas through rioting and looting, with the rest of the country has atomize into smaller localized clusters.

Gordon R. Dickson (1923-2001)P: Born in Edmonton, Canada, after the death of his father, he moved to Minnesota at the age of 14.  After serving in World War 2, he got a degree in Creative Writing in 1948 from the University of Minnesota.  While there he studied with such luminaries as Sinclair Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Poul Anderson.  As a writer, he was most famous for his Dragon-Knight (Dragon and the George) fantasy series, and the uncompleted Childe (Dorsai) Cycle series of science fiction novels: a series of novels that is very influential in the military sci fi of today.  He won numerous awards (source) including a 1965 Hugo award for Soldier, Ask Not; a 1967 Nebula award for Call Him Lord (1966); a 1975 Skylark award; a 1977 August Derleth award for The Dragon and the George ; a 1978 Jupiter award for Time Storm ; a 1981 Hugo award for Lost Dorsai; and a 1981 Hugo award for The Cloak and the Staff (1980) (complete bibliography).  Just prior to his death he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.  This novel appears to always have been planned as a stand alone work.

 

As the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction noted:

Dickson showed a liking, often indulged, for hinterland settings peopled by solid farming or small-town stock whose ideologies, when expressed, violate any simple, conservative-liberal polarity, though urban readers and critics have sometimes responded to them as right-wing.  As late as the Ruined Earth tale Wolf and Iron (October 1974 as "In Iron Years"; much expanded 1990) – which embodies a Survivalist plot considerably deepened by the author's detailed and compassionate attachment to the kind of hero who understands and loves the physical world – he was still mining this fertile soil.

The novel has some interesting intersections with some other published works.  Although the thread is a light touch, it has obvious precursors to the famous Isacc Asimov Foundation series:  particularly the first in Asimov's series.  Our hero and narrative reference point, Jeebbee, much like the famous Hari Seldon, is a social scientist who can use wizbang advance mathematical calculations to predict future sociological events.  The primary driving point for his wanderings is to set up a Foundation-like basis for the fast return of modern society from its collapsed state.  This gives it the sci-fi tropes needed for it to avoid being cast in with the action-adventure survivalist novels of the day.

It is also noteworthy that this novel came out just prior to when James Wesley Rawles started the online versions of what was to become the influential militia-styled Patriots.  Although Rawles threw  some other, at times discordant, ingredients into the mix, the parallels with this novels collapse method, and extended "how-to" instructional set pieces is pointed.

 

The story picks up in the early phases of Jeebee's (a nickname) escape from "Stoketon", Michigan, a small university town where he was working in the new research area of Quantitative  Sociodynamics (QSD).  Using these new methods his group has come to realize that the current order is due for an cascading economic collapse sparked by a series of bank runs.  Mis-timing the collapse, and under estimating how clannish the small town will become,  Jeebee has had to high tale it out of town with his small collection of escape preparations which primarily include a high tech (for the day) solar scooter.  When we meet him, he is traveling at night, trying to make it to his older brother's ranch in Montana.

 

Jeebee, is an innocent, and is not really up to making it in the world on his own.  Through a series of misadventures, Jeebee and the newly met, captive Wolf help each other escape from a small town where the local get dangerous.  Becoming something of a bonded bare,  the two of them have a variety of excursions and adventures.  Wolf is already adapted to this new brutal world, and as time goes on, Jeebee begins to understand, and more importantly live, the world-view needed for survival.

The novels pacing could be thought of as not so much plodding, as detailed, or alternatively, ploddingly detailed.   The author takes sufficient time to describe what is going on, and why.  Since Jeebee is a social scientist he is able to make reasonably plausible assessments of what he observes in his travels.  The author does manage some timeline progression by some soft jumps in narrative time.   The early portions have the feel of a Louis L' Amour western novel, but with more content, and the action less forced.  There is action, but it is of a more sporadic, natural pacing.  Much of it is viewed at a distant, or retrospectively by viewing burned out homes, or by third-person recounting of events.  The book has much more of a naturalist feel than the typical "prepper" style novel.   The book is taking place in the wide out open spaces, with a relatively low population density.  So nature is as dangerous as the people.

 

There is one little part of the story where a young lady is captured by two men to do housework.  A more sensationalist novelist would have turned this into a sexual-predation scenario.  But the scenario is not at all implausible.  Many of the women captured by the Native Americans were not sexually attacked, but were literally put to work.  The work that women did in pre-industrial society was long, difficult, and not a lot of fun.  Even in early modern times, the death of the wife in a middle class English family was a disaster.  The various cooking and cleaning tasks that we now accomplish with machinery took hours.    Bachelors often stayed at a boarding house where at least some of these tasks could be done for them.  Living by oneself, without servants, was not a pleasant idea.  I think our author here understands the dynamics.

 

Did I like the novel?  Yes I did.  I would warn perspective readers that it is not a particularly easy read if you don't like a lot of backwoods survival lore, and skills, enumerated in detail.  To be honest, after a while, you can sort of blur your way through all the arts-and-crafty sort of stuff, if you get anxious to find out what is going to happen to everyone.  Because you take a lot of time with them, the characters that we meet along the way are very real.  Even a few of the characters we never meet in person (the wolf-keeper for instance) we come to feel that we know.

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high.  Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting.  Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation.  Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

Realism:  Given the level of detail, you would think that I would have no problem calling it a 7.  But to my mind, the author was a bit loose with the supply concerns, and a little bit seemed to go a long way.  Ammo was voiced as a "concern", but shoot, Geebee turned down the option of taking trapping gear with him at one point.  So I will hedge a bit and say we have a 6.

Readability:  Long and detailed versus long and plodding, toe-mae-toe, to-ma-ta, and all that good stuff.  It is slow.  You will need to be either a glutton for instruction, or patient.  There is nothing terribly difficult to understand symbolically, and no magical realism to decipher:  a 4.

 

 

Loud Long Silence: A Review

Wilson Tucker's The Loud Long Silence (Goodreads) is an apocalyptic novel set immediately after a nuclear biological attack wipes out the United States in, what was at the time of its publication (1952), the near future.  The story follows the story of Corporal Russell Gary, a World War 2 veteran who is left in the devastated section of the country east of the Mississippi River.  One additional problem, the western section of the country, fearing the spread of biological agents, isn't letting one in.

The relatively elegant first edition cover

Arthur Wilson Tucker (1914-2006) was a prolific adventure and science fiction magazine writer and novelist.  He is considered to be something of a pioneer within the modern science fiction genre.  He is best known for his novel, The Year of the Long Sun, but this novel is also well considered as an early nuclear age apocalyptic novel. He made a habit of using the names of friends and family for minor characters in his novels, and from this sprung the term:  Tuckerization .  He lived most of his life in Bloomington, Illinois.

The novel, taking place sometime in the "near future" of the 1950s, starts of with our "hero" watching an old lady trying  to get across a bridge from the devastated eastern side, to the clean western side of the Mississippi river under the cover of darkness.  U.S. military units gun her down.  Our "hero", ex-corporal Russell Gary than flashes back to how it all came to be this way.

It is obvious from the start that our "hero" is not generally very heroic.  He is not a complete sociopath, and (barely) has his limits, but he is completely out for himself, and is very willing to rob and steal from others if it comes to it.  Mostly he is just manipulative and tries to trick, or coerce others into doing what he wants.  As an experienced World War 2 combat vet, he has a leg up in survival skills from most folks.

We follow Gary around as he meets up with various folks, and run across various situations along the way.  A large portion of the novel involves him trying to come up with ways to get across the Mississippi River, back to the civilization that he misses.  He is warned fairly early on that he, and most of the folks left on the wrong side of the river are probably asymptomatic carriers of the deadly plague, and thus would be of great danger on that side of the river, but he doesn't worry too much about that.  He is reflective in a scheming, rather than wisdom,  sort of way.

There is a deep cynicism to the novel that reminds me of the John Christopher's British-based, No Blade of Grass.  There is a presumption that many people are not very nice when the rules are removed, and that the government is going to deceive, and manipulate the citizens to their own advantage.   Given that a lot of people in the U.S. today look back on the fifties as a sort of golden time, the bleak mode of an author of that time period is rather telling.

What is also interesting is how many ideas about the survival genre get picked up even at this early stage.  They almost immediately begin worrying about burning a smokeless fire, and how to avoid giving away their position, Gary pulls off the old prepper standby of working for a farmer guarding his fields at one point,  by the end of the novel he has come to prefer a .22LR as his primary weapon.  It is quieter and draws less attention than heavier weapons, and is still deadly enough at short range.

 

Did I like it?  Yes, it is bit dated, and the scenario is not one of the more likely play-outs of a post nuclear collapse, but it has a harder edge in its own way than many of the more overly heroic fair that fits within the same genre today.  It even manages to pull off a jaded, slightly happy ending which isn't even remotely reminiscent of the "cozy"-type novel.

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high. Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting. Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation. Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

Realism is straightforward.  It is a novel set within its day.  The bacteriological warfare is a little too quick acting, but it follows the science of it's day.  People who cannot fend for themselves are preyed upon by people like Gary.  I have the scene which hints at cannibalism in my British print that was apparently removed from the U.S. first edition.  Knocking off a point for being a little dated, and another for some of Gary's plot driven, slightly unlikely escapades, I'll call it a 5.

Readability is straight forward.  It is a little chatty, and in its unconventional way, too contemplative to be a modern day page turner.  Beyond that the story moves along fairly quickly, and we get a lot of little vignettes of action:  a 6.

Cover of my copy - a 1980 British edition

The King of Clayfield: A Review

Shane Gregory's The King of Clayfield (Goodreads) is a zombie apocalypse tale that starts of in a small town in Kentucky.  It uses the fairly common zombie-flu to cause a quick and chaotic end to life as we know it.  I believe this is at least a trilogy, and book two is already out.  My "reading" of the novel consisted of listening to the audio version.

Shane Gregory (1971-) grew up in rural Western Kentucky.  He graduated from Murray State University with Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts in 1996, and is now the director of a nonprofit art center (Mayfield/Graves County Art Guild) at the historic Ice House Building. He enjoys painting, running, reading, and writing. He, his wife, and two children live in rural Kentucky with a garden, a few chickens, a dog, and a cat.  This is his first novel, although a sequel has been released. On his facebook page, the author notes that Mayfield is the inspiration for Clayfield with presumably the Ice House Building being were the action starts.

From the blurb:

On a cold February day in the small town of Clayfield, Kentucky, an unsuspecting and unprepared [and occasionally wimpy] museum director finds himself in the middle of hell on earth. A pandemic is spreading around the globe, and it's turning most of the residents of Clayfield into murderous zombies. Having no safe haven to which he can flee, the director decides to stick it out near his hometown and wait for the government to send help.

I say wimpy because he won't do things like run over six-year old boys who have turned into zombies, and generally feels sorry for the ex-people.  The zombies are dangerous because of their infection, but are not a match for a person one-on-one.  However there are a lot of them.

The start of the novel doesn't feel all that much different than the many "realistic" apocalyptic novels, where people somehow know that all is lost, and immediately start battling each other 5-minutes into the "event" (EMP, plague, or economic collapse).  At least with zombies it seems more realistic: no reason to ponder what all the fighting is all about.

The story has lots of activity.   A lot of it is somewhat along the lines of a more typical "prepper" (a.k.a. survivalist) style story. 

The comment is made that the people who survived were the smart ones (the prepared) and the lucky.  The little group that forms realizes that it has been lucky, and goes about some after the fact preparing.  The zombies are difficult, but for the most part can be dealt with.  Thus, you have a lot of talking about what the ideal survival setup might be.  One house has a wind turbine, but they realize that it would be too much of a target once "regular", but not very nice, folks make an appearance.  There are definitely folks who are nicer than others, but there is a more realistic continuum of types.  There are bad guys who aren't 100% cold-blooded killers, and good guys who are dangerous because of their ineptitude.  And folks who shade into an uncomfortable gray area.

So did I like the book? Yes I did.  The author is generally good at the action scenes, which is unusual enough in itself, but also is very good at bringing all of the characters, good, bad, and even some of the zombies (sort of) to life.  The author has a better than average understanding of the weaponry, but doesn't over do it: particularly as the main character does not have this level of understanding.  In the short term survival world, rifles and ammo prevail.  They are not hard to find, and smokeless gunpowder being the equalizer it is, and there not being a super abundance of NAVY SEALs, rangers, and ex-military types sometimes found in our post apocalyptic world, women are just as capable or incapable as the case may be, as the men of holding their own. There is even some funny moments when the women demand to be treated as equals, but still want the guy to go out and do the "fixing" when its dark and cold outside:  the obvious is not ignored.  Because our hero doesn't make too big of an issue of it, our hero does pretty well attracting women.
 

Since, this was an audio book, I will note that the narration was generally well done, although the male narrator was not always entirely convincing with the female version of Southern speech patterns.  I generally don't notice Southern dialect much, as I am rather used to it, and I noticed it here with the women.

 

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high.  Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting.  Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation.  Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

 

Realism is fairly straightforward.  It is a very realistic novel: except for the zombies.  Although I don't normally take off for the cause of the collapse, I do when it has a continuous effect on the story.  There is a fair amount of mystery and suspense as to what makes the zombies tick and while it is interesting, you wouldn't call it "real".   The time frame is relatively short, and with the action starting some time after Christmas, there is a lot of concern about cold weather, and supplies.  It is a 5.

 

Readability is easy. It is a page turner in many locations, and the audio presentation probably actually slows you up at times.  There is some discussion of philosophy, and the greater scheme of life in general, but there is not much in the way of deep symbolism to be puzzled through.  It is a 7.