Imperial Bedrooms by Brett Easton Ellis

Well, he's tried Stephen King. What about Raymond Chandler? Lunar Park I didn't like much, but this is a lot better. How much, I'm still not sure.

Like Chandler it's set in LA and nobody knows what's going on. People are followed, other people go missing. The narrator is repeatedly told he's not seeing "the big picture." It's a murder mystery where the murder happens at the end and the identity of the killer isn't a mystery.

Luckily we have our hero Clay on the case (as well as many of the Less than Zero cast.) Not exactly a knight in tarnished armor, Clay. As mean as the streets, in fact. Detached to the point of autism, manipulative, sadistic, capable of horrible things and unexpectedly needy. His character is one of the most succesful aspects of the book.

So...the nasty bits. Well, it's really all contained in a sequence towards the end which is connected to the rest of the story only obliquely. It's certainly very disturbing, and it works character-wise. But a hater (not me, clearly) would wonder if it's been shoehorned in for the fanboys. I remember reading an interview where Ellis said he had to get wrecked for days at a time to write the infamous bits of American Psycho. How hard is it for him these days?

I've had a bit of a rocky relationship with this book. It took me a couple of goes to get into, then I was hooked - Ellis back to his best. Then I'm thinking - actually this is just the same as his early stuff - what's the point? I was disappointed when I finished this a couple of days back, and I'm liking it the more I think about it.

Here are the weak points - it's too short. It's not funny, like Psycho or Glamorama. I didn't understand the ending and had to look up wikipedia (I think this was me being stupid, rather than a clever chandler-esque end to the novel.)

But the big plus point - this is proper Bret Easton Ellis.

What I'll need to do is re-read Less Than Zero, then this again. And maybe Glamorama again. Maybe by then I'll be up for American Psycho again, though I've read it to death (ho!) Then, perhaps, a revisiting of Lunar Park whereupon I'll realise it's a misunderstood modern classic.

1491 by Charles C Mann

In the late 15th century the Inkas controlled the largest empire in the world. It encompassed some amazingly inhospitable terrain - high mountain ranges, deserts, rainforests. Yet there was a road network covering 25,000 miles. Populations were moved around on a scale not seen again until Stalin. And there was no money. The government controlled everything.

It took fewer than 200 conquistadors to overthrow the Inka Empire. There were no Spanish casualties.

Pre-columbian American history is some of the most fascinating you'll ever read, but it's treated almost as an afterthought in most histories of the world, even modern ones. This book takes a much needed look at exactly what was going on over there, and why it all stopped. It turns out most of what we assume is wrong.

First off, the "new world" is a bit of a misnomer. The cities of the Norte Chico in Peru date back at least to the 30th century BC. That makes it the second oldest civilisation in history, after Sumer. And they had pyramids centuries before the Egyptians.

The scale of the history here is amazing. From the Mississippian mound builders to the ancient Olmecs with their massive, beautiful stone heads. From the awe-inspiring cities of the Maya and the Aztecs to the untold thousands living in the Amazonian rainforest, sustaining themselves in ways we're only beginning to understand.

If you've ever read your Jared Diamond you'll know what went wrong. Not so much the guns and the steel. More the germs. The Americas never really had any domesticable animals, so people never lived in close proximity to livestock. That means they didn't have generation after generation building up resistance to their diseases. The number of people who lived in the Americas in 1491 is still hotly disputed, but as much as 95% of the population may have been killed by smallpox.

This is how Pizarro was able to defeat to the Inka empire - the epidemic had caused untold deaths and then civil war. But it's also why in North America there built up a myth of the noble indian living in harmony with nature. We've heard about the herds of thousands of bison sweeping across the plain when the white man first arrived. That's because smallpox got there first and killed most of the people. The bison had the place to themselves.

There's lots to ponder here. Guilt, for one. In the main, this was accidental genocide. The conquistadors and pilgrims didn't know about germs and there's no way they could've predicted the epidemics. They thought the indians lived like degenerate savages, not realising that these people were like post-apocalyptic survivors. It was the Europeans' fault, but they didn't mean it.

The second issue if about the determinism of history. The book has many stories of history hanging on a horseshoe nail - the Mayflower pilgrims surviving their first winter, Cortes taking Tenochtitlan, Pizarro defeating the Inkas. But these American societies were doomed from the moment they first had contact with people who were, if not necessarily "more advanced," certainly more riddled with disease.

Yes, this book is without doubt heavily inspired by Jared Diamond (Collapse, as well as Guns, Germs and Steel) but I prefer 1491. Diamond is certainly fascinating and groundbreaking, but his writing can be a little flat. Mann is a journalist and knows how to tell a story from many different angles. He's also great on the vicious, petty squabbling which seems endemic among historians and archeologists.

I've actually been listening to more music recently (thank you all the bloggers on Advance With Sound) so I haven't been listening to books on tape. Inspired by the Gagarin anniversary, I've already started Cosmonaut Keep by Ken Macleod. He of the "communism in space" fetish. So far, not enough communism.

Stone Junction by Jim Dodge

A forward by Thomas Pynchon would usually be enough to put me off a book, but I'm glad I started Stone Junction. Not so glad I finished it, however.

It's about a chap called Daniel Pearse, who grows up in a idealised counterculture with his mother in California. He's then passed between a series of tutors who show him how to meditate, play poker, grow and take drugs, disguise himself and, finally, perform actual proper magic. Then there's a heist which goes....strangely.

I really enjoyed much of the book. It's very earnest, there's a lot of pseudo-mystical balderdash and the lead character's kind of a blank slate. But I did like the folksy American style and the love of rebelliousness. I'm no fan of hippies of course, but there's always something to be said for sticking it to the man. There are also some great passages - a botched plutonium raid, rebuilding a riverboat casino, playing a high stakes lo-ball game. And the writing style won't be to everyone's taste, but it rattled along nicely and was nothing like Pynchon.

But this is a failed novel. From about the halfway point it starts going downhill and gathers momentum until the truly horrible ending. It's hard not to suspect that the writer didn't know where he was going, so he thought big handfuls of drugs would dig him out of a hole. This makes it sound better than it is.

In fact, there is a decent plot going on. There's a big mystery about what happened to Daniel's mother, and two people trying to figure it out and there's even a relatively satisfying answer, but it gets buried under truckloads of bollocks about magic, love, madness and a big diamond. Again, sounds like it could be good. But not good in any way.

It's a real pity because I was loving this at the start, and there are so many interesting avenues I thought it was going to go down. Colourful characters appear and vanish a couple of pages later. One important character from the beginning turns insane, then disappears until the last couple of pages. They never get the riverboat casino back under steam!

My suggestion would be to read the first half, then make up the second half yourself. And you should probably take less drugs than the author.

Now re-reading an excellent history of pre-columbian America and listening to a very interesting book by Tony Blair's ex-chief of staff, looking at his rise to power and the challenges of office through the lessons of Machiavelli.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Good thing I managed to avoid the movie version in the cinemas. It's much harder to go from film to book (tried it with the Damned United recently) than the other way around. However I still imagined Skinny, New Spiderman and The Other One when reading it. They were pretty good, actually, even if they were just in my head.

Mild spoiler time - this is science fiction. It's set in shabby genteel England in the 80s and 90s, but it gradually becomes apparent that something's very different and very wrong in this society.

It starts with Kath, who's a "carer" for "donors," looking back at her time at a kind of boarding school called Hailsham, then into adulthood, with her two friends Tommy and Ruth. Tommy's an angry misfit, almost a rebel. Ruth is what Cartman would describe as a "super king kong megabitch", but it's not really her fault.

The genius here is the focus on their relationships. The real story - their actual situation - is, for the most part, kind of a side issue. It's assumed we know about it. There's a great bit when they discuss how they're gradually told at school about what they are, but always when they're slightly too young to understand it. It's like boiling a frog - do it bit by bit so it always feels normal. The same trick is played on the reader.

It's a very creepy and horrible world that's portrayed here, and totally believable. Civilisation is always good at rationalising evil, if the benefits are worth it. Slavery's an obvious comparison, but for some the farming of animals and abortion are equally abhorrent. Most people don't really want to think about it, and we use euphemisms like "beef" for "dead cow" or "abortion" for "killing a fetus." Here it's "donations" and "completion."

I really liked this book. It made me angry. There's a similarity with Ishiguro's Remains of the Day - that friction between the repressed characters who accept their position, and the emotional turmoil that's being portrayed. Masterful stuff.

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Morality is how we want the world to work. Economics is how the world actually works. Abortion reduces the crime rate. Taking your child to museums won't keep them off drugs. Guns don't kill people, swimming pools do.

Freakonomics is a study in comforting lies and unintended consequences. It reveals a world which at first glance appears counterintuitive or chaotic, but is in fact driven by incentives which you can tease out by asking the right questions of the data.

What's made this book a big hit is the range of systems it looks into - cheating by sumo wrestlers, weird baby names, the history of the Klu Klux Klan and dealing crack. It's all about getting information, collating it and finding out what's happening.

So there's a lot of light-hearted stuff here (crack and the KKK are funny, right?) but there's some in depth looks at big issues - bringing up your children for instance. It turns out parents have a big influence on the future success of their brat, but it's all stuff which happens before the birth - income, education level, etc. None of that endless fussing seems to make much difference. Even whether parents are still together or not isn't a big deal.

Of course, this is a book about using statistics to look at complex systems, and there's always going to be questions over how you use the data. There's been a big stramash over the authors' assertion that legalised abortion caused a steep decline in the crime rate seventeen years later. That's been criticised heavily on economic as well as moral grounds. The most interesting accusation is that Levitt whitewashed his earlier finding that a higher rate of abortions by black mothers-to-be in US cities was in fact the important factor in the crime drop. Now if that's true, what happened to economics over morality?

Anyway, it's always a very interesting read, and a great reminder not to put your faith in received wisdom and wishful thinking.

PS christ knows what I've done to the font. I actually posted this to Advance With Sound by accident, then had trouble getting it back. Now it's all wrong.

The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria

Let's think way back to the 1890s. Britain rules a quarter of the world - the biggest empire the world has ever seen. It's position seems to be unassailable. But, starting with some pig-ignorant Dutch farmers causing trouble in South Africa, things start going wrong. A few decades later, and it's all gone.

Now, America's not quite in the same position, but it should be sobering for them to reflect on how quickly it can all go away, and how to cope when the decline happens.

The title of this book's a bit misleading. Zakaria's talking about the rise of a multi-polar world over the next few decades in which the USA still plays a major part. But it's only since the 1990s that America's been the sole superpower, and if they think that's the way it'll always be, they're deluded.

Zakaria looks in depth at China and his home country India (he's now American.) China's the big boy in the coming years, and a bit of a mystery. What does it mean to be communist and capitalist? How nuts are they about things like Taiwan? And how scared should we be of them? The author's pretty sanguine about the Chinese, arguing that it's very different to how it was under Mao (a sadist's plaything) and despite some nasty human rights abuses and no democracy, it's heading in the right direction.

The real weakness of the government is a paranoia about their position, manifested in a fear of social unrest - why do they get their knickers in a twist about Falun Gong? Recent protests, incidentally, have been slapped down with a mixture of quite effective internet sabotage and good old fashioned stomping.

India's a strange one. It's economy is growing really fast - hourly wages have doubled in the past decade. Lots of people are getting rich, but there's still staggering poverty - 50% of infants suffer from malnutrition. Also the politics is rubbish, and there's stacks of corruption. Zakaria says the big plus for India is stuff left over from the British Empire - the English language and legal system, which means they know about contract law.

The USA is still going to be on top for a while to come, according to the author, although he again picks out the weaknesses. He rightly points to the political system becoming dangerously corrupt and ineffective due to special interests and the sensationalist media. Zakaria doubts that hard geopolitical choices which have to be made in the future (e.g. unpalatable but necessary concessions to China) will be possible in the increasingly strident bubble of US politics/media.

So things are looking up for China, India - even America. So who's really going to suffer in the coming years, according to Zakaria? Well....it's us. Western Europe's going down the pan. China can do manufacturing better than us. India trumps us on technology. We've got a big public sector, a dwindling private sector, an ageing population and a boneheaded aversion to immigration because "they're taking our jobs - we can't afford them." We're toast.

Really worth reading this book if you're interested in how the future's going to unfold. It's clear and engaging despite often being about pretty dry stuff like economics. Although, I've just been enjoying Freakonomics as well, so perhaps the subject isn't as boring as The Man has led us to believe.

The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach

So, German sci-fi? Metropolis, but that's a film. Anything more and I'm struggling. Kurt Vonnegut? He bummed about in Dresden for a bit, but he was American. Von Daniken? Swiss, and he thinks it's all true.

Luckily we've got Andreas Eschbach. Only one book in English though, but it is a great one.

It starts in the desert, describing a society dedicated to the making of carpets for the Emperor's Palace. They're made from the hair of the makers' wives and daughters, and each one takes a lifetime to complete. The only clue that it's science fiction at the beginning is the rusted and useless rayguns carried by the merchant's guards.

I'm not going to give much else away, because the plot unravels really nicely - each chapter's like a short story focusing on one character, but all the pieces fit together. The sense of scale, both in time and space, is immense and it's contrasted with the second by second ritual of tying these carpets together.

There's also friction between the cynical and gloomy worldview about politics, power and faith, and the role that love plays in changing the rules.

A big recommendation from me - beautiful and poetic with big ideas about science fiction and human nature.