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“Marjorie’s Missile” book review

August 2, 2011 / Debo posted in Books / No Comments

I have a minor obsession with things that I can’t find on the WWW.

I was recently traveling in Nova Scotia, and I stopped in at a used bookstore in Halifax. My eyes alighted on a strange, thin book that almost appeared to be self-published. Called “Marjorie’s Missile”, it was printed in 1986 and typeset in fixed-width Courier.

It was written by a computer science teacher who was teaching programming to young “Indian” (I guess they were still calling them that then) students on a reserve in Alberta. Envisioning something like Neuromancer meets Dances with Wolves, I was piqued. I immediately searched for it on the web.

I couldn’t find anything. As in, not a single hit for the search term “Marjorie’s Missile”. I suspected that Bing was simply being obtuse (there is the occasional disadvantage to WP7), but the prospect of potentially owning a book that hadn’t fallen under the gaze of the WWW was enough to make me buy the book on the spot.

When I ran the term through Google later, I did turn up a single hit, but it was simply that of an antique bookseller. I just searched again now, and there is an entire page of hits today (including one on Amazon.com), but again, they are only from booksellers liquidating inventory. There isn’t a single review to be found. The author doesn’t seem to have any Web presence, either.

So now, I am a bit curious. What happened to Colin McKinlay, the author? He obviously had an early predilection for computers. Did he die young? Disappear into the North? Publish Marjorie’s Missile under a pen name? I hope that someone who knows the answer will someday stumble across this post and tell me. Until then, all I can do is briefly summarize the book for you.

Marjorie’s Missile reads sort of like a Kurt Vonnegut-style novel, in that the setting is very plausible but the events that occur in that setting verge on fantastical. The main character Marjorie is a computer programmer who works a cushy job for the CIA. When a cruise missile is lost during testing in an Alberta Native reserve, she is offered a field job to retrieve it. If she succeeds, she will be given 1 million dollars and the option to retire. She accepts.

The other main characters in the novel provide most of the interest. Lionel, Marjorie’s “temporary” husband for the mission, is an eccentric white Canadian man who has been accepted by the people on the Reserve. He teaches computer science to the kids there. (Sound familiar?) The main Native character in the book, “Earthman”, lives in a high-tech building that he has built for himself that he has called “High Rez”. He is also the ferryman for the Reserve. He claims to be over 100 years old. The main villain is a prototypical despotic American CIA agent who has gone rogue, and basically exemplifies North American greed and cronyism.

There is a smattering of other Native characters in the book, and they are all quite interesting as well. I found the Native characters and their stories to be the richest part of the novel by far — I’m guessing that a lot of the authors’ personal experience with the Natives on his reserve found its way directly into this book, and even though most of the stories are bizarre, they are believable in that “truth is stranger than fiction” sort of way.

The other white characters and the delivery of the story itself are thin, but still better than I expected. The bulk of the plot is progressed in one giant chunk through flashbacks, which are extracted by Marjorie when she adminsters truth serum to her “husband” and a Native companion of his. After that, the story dashes quickly towards its absurd but comical conclusion, which includes Marjorie falling predictably in love with the Natives she once considered to simply be fleshy obstacles between her and retirement.

The book is short enough and weird enough that I’m glad I read it. The question is, did anyone else? There was a page of reviews printed in the back of the book, the most significant of which was from the Edmonton Journal, but I can’t tell if these were falsified as a self-deprecating joke or not.

Assuming this was a first novel, there was enough potential here that I feel like the author could have made a career of writing. The answer is probably out there on the Internet somewhere…

On the road…

January 9, 2011 / Debo posted in Books, Literature / No Comments

I started reading Kerouac’s “On the Road”. I sort of wish I’d done this when I was living in the Bay Area. File under “better late than never.”

I prepared to take notes, but I instead found myself just copying quote after quote out of the book. This seems to recapture my feelings about it much better than anything else I could have done. Here are some of my favorites as I arrive at chapter 12.

Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.

I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races.

They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

I climbed in and there he was, sleeping with his girl, Lee Ann — on a bed he stole from a merchant ship, as he told me later; imagine the deck engineer of a merchant ship sneaking over the side in the middle of the night with a bed, and heaving and straining at the oars to shore. This barely explains Remi Boncœur.

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief. I was getting the bug myself. I even began to try to see if doors were locked.

The one about Remi and the bed is definitely my favorite so far.

Thoughts on ‘Burning Chrome’ by William Gibson

November 17, 2010 / Debo posted in Books, Literature, Thoughts / No Comments

Just finished up Burning Chrome a couple of days ago. I read it mostly on the subway, which was definitely the right environment for it.

My general impression is that there was too much outer space. I hate outer space about 75% as much as I hate time travel. However, there was at least one story in the collection that did it well (“Hinterlands”), where governments send these poor folks into this weird slipstream thing because they know they’ll come back from some unknown place with high technology. This is the first time I’ve heard of the the theme of the “cargo cult”, so it was worth the read for that alone:

A cargo cult is a religious practice that has appeared in many traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults focus on obtaining the material wealth (the “cargo”) of the advanced culture through magic and religious rituals and practices. Cult members believe that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors.

Thanks, Wikipedia. You can go back to begging for money now.

My favorite story by far was “The Winter Market”. It’s about this girl who is completely paralyzed, but is able to retain mobility by wearing this exoskeleton thing that jacks into her brain and moves her body for her. A wheelchair on steroids, basically.

It’s really a story about ambition and the nature of circumstance, though. She’s hellbent on landing a contract where she can upload her entire being into a computer and let her body die, and the story is written from the perspective of an editor of “dream albums”, since buying and sharing albums of the dreams of “dream artists” is this story’s equivalent of the music industry. The main character is wigged out by how determined she is, and then he’s even more wigged out when he catches glimpses of her in a moment of weakness the night before she suicides her way into the bitstream. It’s one of those tales that makes the back of your spine tickle a little, and sort of coerces you to look at your own foibles in a different light. (Or any light at all, depending on your personality.)

The collection was definitely worth the read. The thing I like most about reading really early work from successful authors is that the quality of their writing usually isn’t too far from that of a beginner — namely, myself. And it’s pretty evident that they got where they are now by practicing their craft, a LOT. So that’s sort of inspiring, huh?

Mr. Vertigo redux

November 5, 2010 / Debo posted in Books, Literature, Thoughts / No Comments

I’m sitting here in a Starbucks right now with a friend who is pretending to work and I’m sketched out of my mind after overdosing on caffeine (as is my friday habit). While waiting for the transfer to the next venue, I finished off Mr. Vertigo.

Not a bad piece of work. It kept me turning the pages, but often at a rate that signified I was just trying to rush ahead to the next plot point at the expense of missing big chunks of prose. The biggest sticking point I had with the book was the deliberate fakeness of the dialogue. No kid would ever be capable of talking with the simultaneous crassness and sophistication that the main character has. Not even this one.

I guess I should actually talk about the book itself. It goes like this. Walt is born in 20s America into a particularly base geneaology. Some urbane dude called The Master finds him in the street and promises him fame and riches. If Walt is not famous by his 13th birthday, the Master agrees to let Walt chop off his head.

The Master teaches Walt how to levitate. He does this through a 33-step program, most steps of which involve some sort of torture. At first, the Master appears to be completely infallible, and mostly evil fellow. As time goes on, you find out that he does have many flaws, and that he is actually quite a stand-up guy. It is really hard not to like him. He and Walt bond closely.

The rest of the story describes Walt’s (literal) rise to fame, which is quickly followed by massive failure and the death of the Master. In the wake of Master Yehudi’s passing, Walt occasionally picks up a successful venture by virtue of his own grit, but without the strong value system imposed by the Master, his victories are always fleeting.

I guess the Master is supposed to represent the combination of virtue and ambition (and the willingness to trade them off) that was the spirit of the early 1900s America. Auster practically rams the spirit of the book down your throat on the last page, but the way it is done was actually rather enjoyable, in my opinion:

We’re not as tough as we used to be, and maybe the world’s a better place because of it, I don’t know. But I do know that you can’t get something for nothing, and the bigger the thing you want, the more you’re going to have to pay for it.

…

Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us — every man, woman and child — and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of duplicating the feats I accomplished as Walt the Wonder Boy.

Mother Sioux, on love

November 5, 2010 / Debo posted in Books, Literature, Thoughts / No Comments

They love and they hate, they grapple and spoon, they want and don’t want, and as time goes on they each sink deeper under the other’s skin. It’s a real show, patty-cake, the follies and the circus all rolled into one, and dollars to donuts it’s going to be like that till the day they die.

From “Mr. Vertigo” by Paul Auster

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