Inspector Hobbes and the Bones - Wilkie Martin

   2017; 345 pages.  Book 4 (out of 5) in the “Unhuman” series.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Dark Humor; Paranormal Fiction; Humorous British Detective Cozy Mystery Fantasy.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

 

    Life is tough right now for Andy Caplet.

 

    His wife Daphne has left him.  Okay, not permanently, but to go on an archaeological expedition in Egypt.  Who knows how long she’ll be gone?

 

    But the other things are a bit more mysterious.  Some stranger walking past him just punched Andy in the nose for no discernible reason.  Then a passing car almost ran him over, and still later somebody shot him in a most sensitive area with an air rifle.  Talk about having a bad day.

 

    Maybe these things are all just a bunch of coincidences.  Maybe not.  Maybe it has to do with that less-than-glowing restaurant review Andy wrote in the newspaper that he works for.  Chefs can be hypersensitive about and criticism of their dishes.

 

    About the only good thing that happened to him so far today was a ravishing blonde named Sally who came on to him right after he was almost run over.  Sexy young women rarely do that to Andy.  True, he’s a married man now, but Daphne is far away in Egypt.  Sally has just invited him to lunch, and since nothing will come of it, so why shouldn't Andy accept?

 

    Be sure to smile for the camera, Andy.

 

What’s To Like...

    Inspector Hobbes and the Bones is the fourth book in Wilkie Martin’s “Unhuman” series, which I'm reading in order.  Daphne’s extended absence allows Andy to once again play Dr. Watson to Inspector Hobbes’s Sherlock Holmes in another paranormal whodunit full of scary not-so-humans,  charming wit, and groan-worthy puns.

 

    The plot structure will be familiar to readers of this series: we start with a simple case of who-or-what killed Skeleton Bob’s pet pig, and things quickly get more complicated and weird for our sleuthing duo.  Andy is always two steps behind Hobbes in the investigation, but in the end serves a crucial, if unwilling, part in the solving of the case.  It all may be formulaic, but I quite like the formula.

 

    Once again, I learned all sorts of British terms that somehow didn’t make it across the pond: bollocking, budging up, wellies, wotcha, holdall, snogging, doxy, a gippy tummy, a plastic wheelie bin, and lots more. Then there are the alternate spellings: pyjamas, sceptical, foetid, kerb, maths, and many others.  Who says English isn't a foreign language?

 

    I also enjoyed being immersed in English culture.  The English breakfasts are a true gustatory delight; I’ve had them a couple times while over there.  Hobbes is a Cryptic Crossword fan; so am I.  And I chuckled at the different views as to what is “recent” and what is “ancient”.  In England, something from the Middle Ages is recent history; in America anything even 100 years old is ancient.

 

    The story is told in the first-person POV, Andy’s, and is set in and around the fictional Cotswold village of Sorenchester.  There’s a nice mix of paranormal critters, some recurring, others new, and most of which are not precisely identified by unhuman type (another formulaic trait of this series).  This is a cozy mystery: there's no R-rated stuff, a minimum of violence, and only about a dozen mild cusswords in the entire book.

 

    The ending is okay, but not spectacular.  Andy, Hobbes, and Billy the Dwarf combine to save the day, although Andy (and therefore the reader) somehow misses all the excitement.  The last chapter serves as an epilogue, tying up the usual plethora of secondary plot threads, including the boar, the embarrassing photos, Mimi, and the unruly rugby players.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Bespoke (adj.) : made for a particular customer or user.

Others: Wittering (v.); Wendigo (n.); Hoik (v.); Wazzock (n.); Scrag (v.); Yomping (v., a Britishism).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 424 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.18/5 based on 1,283 ratings and 122 reviews

 

 Excerpts...

    “Do you know anything about her?”

    “Not a great deal, dear.  She brought a lot of bother to the old fellow a few years ago.  I gather she was something of a man-eater.”

    “Do you mean she fancied him?”  I’d always struggled to believe any woman, or at least any human woman, could have the hots for Hobbes.  There was just something too feral about him.  Besides, not even his mother would have considered him good-looking, though, in fairness, there was a rough gallantry about him.

    “No.  She ate men.  Really.  Well, bits of them.  Perhaps she was more of a man-taster.”  (loc. 2316)

 

    “You may well be right about this being their accommodation.”

    “Thanks, but … umm … thinking about it again, I’m not so sure.  She, Hilda that is, was really smartly dressed, at least I think she was, and she didn’t look like she’d been sleeping in a hut.”

    Hobbes shrugged.  “If she’s what I suspect she is, she could easily appear smart to one such as you.”

    “What d’you mean ‘one such as me’?”  (loc. 3161)

 

Kindle Details…

    Inspector Hobbes and the Bones is priced at $4.99 at Amazon right now, the same as for Books 2 and 3.   Book 1 costs only $2.99, so does the newly-released fifth book, Inspector Hobbes and the Common People, which I snatched up during a much-appreciated “pre-release” special.

 

Her distrust and dislike had multiplied after I accidently hit her in the face with a dead rat.  (loc. 1044)

    I enjoyed Inspector Hobbes and the Bones, but did find some things to nitpick about.

 

    While the pacing is pleasingly brisk – Andy never seems to run out of ways to get himself in trouble – it did feel like a lot of time was spent on inconsequential tangents.  The boar investigation and Daphne’s archaeological journey both chewed up a lot of pages, but the former seemed to be nothing more than a distraction, and the latter felt like it was only there to give Andy an excuse to move in with Hobbes and Mrs. Goodfellow for a while.

 

    To boot, we really make no progress in learning exactly what sort of otherworldly creature Hobbes and some of the secondary characters are, including the main baddies.  Yes, Hobbes certainly exhibits werewolf traits.  But is he really one?  If so, how did he get that way, how many centuries old is he, and does he have a hairy, lupine Achilles’ heel?  Ditto for the creatures called “the sly ones”, the wendigos, and Stillingham stilthounds.  Inquiring minds want more details about the various beasties, even if things are revealed bit by bit, and book by book.

 

    But I pick at nits.  The emphasis in the Unhuman series is on Andy’s antics, Hobbes’s hunches, and the abundance of wit and ha-has that Wilkie Martin manages to work into each tale.  The series' target audience isn’t so much the lovers of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, as it is the lovers of Terry Pratchett's Rincewind.

 

    7½ Stars.  The first three e-books in this series all came out within a 12-month period in 2013-14.  Then there was a 2-year lag before this one was published.  The gap between Books 4 and 5 was even wider: 4½ years.  This makes me wonder:  has Wilkie Martin grown tired of writing this series, the way Arthur Conan Doyle grew tired of penning Sherlock Holmes tales?  Let's hope not.

Proxima - Stephen Baxter

   2013; 489 pages.  Book 1 (out of 2) in the Proxima series.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Colonization.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    It is an unprecedented opportunity.  One of the planets that orbits Proxima, the nearest star to us (not counting of our own sun), a mere four light-years away, appears to be able to sustain human life.

 

    Of course, four light-years is still a tremendous distance to travel, but this is 2155 AD, and there must be lots of intrepid people out there who’d love to be included on the first spaceship to another star system.  It would be just like being one of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower when it first set sail to the New World a half a millennium ago.

 

    Hmm. Come to think of it, life was pretty brutal for those settlers back in the 1600s.  Disease, hostile natives, and starvation all took their toll, and when things got tough, the nearest help was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.  It’ll be even worse here: just sending an SOS message from Proxima back home to Earth takes four years.  So maybe we won’t get many volunteers for the mission.  Maybe we won’t get any at all.

 

    We better think of alternative ways to “recruit” settlers for the Proxima mission.  I seem to remember one method found to be effective was called “shanghaiing”.

 

What’s To Like...

    Proxima is a “hard science-fiction” novel, wherein Stephen Baxter presents a plausible scenario for traveling for the first time outside our own Solar System.  The two main protagonists are Yuri Eden, who discovers he’s been drafted to be one of the first colonists, and Stephanie “Stef” Kalinski, a leading authority on “kernels”, a high-energy/high-density ore-like material discovered on the planet Mercury.  Kernels can be used to build propulsion systems capable of unheard-of power, although Einstein’s principle remains sacrosanct: you still can’t go faster than the speed of light.

 

    Yuri arrives on Proxima around page 50.  Stephanie remains in our Solar System, although she planet-hops a bit.  Each gets his/her own storyline, and although you know they’ll eventually meet up with each other, trying to guess just how that's going to happen is one of the delights of the story.

 

    The first half of the book deals mostly with the challenges that the exoplanetary settlers face on Proxima-c, or, as they rechristen it, “Per Ardua”.  Stephen Baxter has a lot of fun speculating about what divergent paths evolution might take on a different world.  He also mixes in a dash of quantum mechanics, but to say more about that would entail spoilers.

 

    Critter-creating on Per Ardua is done sparingly.  It’s mostly confined to “kites” and “builders”, although evolution allows for lots of variety within both of those species.  I enjoyed flying through the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud on the way to Proxima, as well as the concept of “programmable matter”.  The use of a “silo” habitation system in harsh environments reminded me of Hugh Howey’s Wool trilogy.

 

    The history of Earth from the present to the start of Proxima was both detailed and thought-provoking.  Some reviewers didn’t like the way China was portrayed in this, but I thought it was eminently plausible and liked that the Chinese characters in the book were developed as 3-D entities.

 

    The ending is mainly just a stopping-point along the way.  It’s not a cliffhanger, but there’s a major and weird twist at the very end that changes the complexion of the tale thanks to one of the fascinating facets of quantum mechanics.  None of the plot threads are tied up.  It is important to realize that Proxima is Book One in a duology, with Book Two, Ultima, presumably assigned the job of bringing everything to a satisfactory conclusion.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.1/5 based on 32 ratings.

    Goodreads: 3.81/5 based on 5,960 ratings and 552 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

    Conurbation (n.) : an extended urban area, typically consisting of several towns merging with the suburbs of one or more cities.

 

Excerpts...

    “I am Angelia,” said the woman.

    That puzzled Stef.  “That’s the name of the starship.  The Angelia."

    “I know.  I am Angelia.  I know what you’re thinking.  That I am a PR stunt.  A model, hired by your father to personify—”

    “I don’t actually care,” Stef said abruptly.

    That surprised Lex.  “You’ve got an impatient streak, haven’t you, Kalinski?”

    “If somebody’s being deliberately obscure, yes.”  (pg. 31)

 

    “So you may as well keep going, right?”

    “Through another door, yeah.  And another.  What else is there?”

    “I’ll tell them what became of you.”

    Yuri grinned.  “Well, maybe we’ll be back to tell it all ourselves.”

    “You really think so?”

    “No.”  (pg. 449)

 

“I still say you’ve got big dreams for a bit of farm machinery.”  (pg. 146 )

    There are some things to quibble about.

 

    The book’s timeline is both extensive (2155 AD to 2217 AD; for a total 62 years) and non-linear.  There are valid reasons for that, which we won’t disclose, but it does mean trying to figure out where and when both Yuri and Stef are at any given moment is a bit of a challenge.

 

    As for R-rated stuff, the book is relatively clean.  There is some violence, mostly offstage, and a small amount of cussing (9 instances in the first 10% of the book), but nothing really lurid or graphic.

 

    Perhaps the biggest gripe is the pacing.  The first half of the book dragged at spots as the colonists try to avoid starving to death on Per Ardua.  But I imagine the Pilgrims had lots of tedious stuck-in-a-rut days too.  Things move along faster in the second half, but the bottom line is: this is a Hard Science-Fiction story, not a Space-Opera Star Wars type of tale.  Tediousness is a part of being a settler, and it beats being sick, starving, or having an arrow in your throat.

 

    Lastly, it bears repeating that this is not a standalone novel.  When you decide to read Proxima (at 500 pages), you’re really signing on to read Ultima (another 500 pages) as well.

 

    7 Stars.  It’s hard to give a proper rating to Proxima since I haven’t read the sequel yet.  Ultima is on my TBR shelf, awaiting my attention, and it will be interesting to see whether the weird tone-shifting plot twist plays out for better or for worse.

The Discovery of Socket Greeny - Tony Bertauski

   2010; 252 pages.  Book 1 (out of 3) in the Socket Greeny series.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Techno-thriller; Fantasy; Science Fiction; Virtual Reality; Teen & Young Adult.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    There’s something to be said for “normal”.

 

    Unfortunately for Socket Greeny, he only realized how much he appreciated a normal life once it was taken away.

 

    “Normal” for Socket used to be hanging out and going on VR (Virtual Reality) quests with his high school  buddies Chute and Streeter.  They made a pretty good team, particularly when they hacked into other people’s virtual game worlds, slaughtered the sims there, and made off with lots of Experience Points.  Sometimes their own sims got killed, of course, but hey, that just meant Socket and his friends got kicked back into the real world to rebuild their sims and try again.

 

    Alas, this time they’ve hacked into a new game world called The Rime, and things are going horribly wrong.  The line between the real and virtual worlds seems to have blurred, and all of a sudden they’re feeling the pain of their sims’ wounds.

 

    It’s almost as if someone deliberately set a trap for them.

 

What’s To Like...

    The “real world” portion of The Discovery of Socket Greeny is set in and around Charleston, South Carolina, which happens to be the author’s stomping grounds.  However, a lot of the story takes place in the virtual dimension, both the standard internet role-playing type and a special sort of otherworld with strange creatures and different laws of physics.

 

    The story takes place at some point slightly in our future.  Socket Greeny’s high school life seems normal enough, but muggles (to borrow a term from J.K. Rowling) have some neat new technological gadgets, including transplanter discs, lookits, and way-kewl gizmos called nojakks, which I gather is some kind of implanted cell-phone.

 

    The title can refer to either Socket’s discovery of another “hidden” world, or that’s world’s discovery of the latent talents of Socket.  Books Two and Three in the (completed) trilogy are titled The Training of Socket Greeny and The Legend of Socket Greeny, which gives some idea of where the overarching storyline is headed.

 

    There’s no shortage of new creatures to meet and greet: grimmets, servys, dupes, crawlers, daddy long legs (jumbo-sized), lookits, minders, and paladins.  Some are good, some are evil, and a lot of them are mechanical.  This is both a “chosen one” tale, and a “coming of age” story.  It reminded me a lot of the Harry Potter series, which I’m currently working my way through.  Indeed, the sport of tagghet that we encounter here especially reminds me of Harry’s quidditch.  If you’re a Potter-head, I think you’ll enjoy meeting Socket Greeny.

 

    The story is told in the first-person POV (Socket’s).  I have a feeling that his two besties, Chute and Streeter, will play prominent roles throughout the series, and since Chute’s a girl, a puppy-love romance may also be in the works.  I thought the grimmets and the art of timeslicing were nice literary touches.

 

    The ending is decent.  The Paladin Nation (say what?!) is revealed to our “real world” courtesy of a climactic battle with some baddies.  The storyline ends at a logical spot, with Socket poised to take the next step in his newfound career.  The last of the 33 chapters is a touching epilogue that I quite liked.

Ratings…

    Amazon:  4.1/5 based on 133 ratings.

    Goodreads: 3.69/5 based on 432 ratings and 91 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    Grimmets.  Hmmmm.  Tiny dragons speaking on nojakks, apparently with their mind.  We missed that species in biology class.  And from the Milky Way?  We missed that in astronomy.  Of course, we never covered timeslicing in physics.  I reached for Sighter, wanted to poke him, make sure he was real.  He snapped my finger with his tail, like a wet towel.  (loc. 1294)

 

    “You are a genetic mutation and that’s why so many Paladins are all enthusiastic about you.  They love mutations.  They have this false hope that nature will provide the right combination of DNA to improve our race.  But if you want to know the truth, you are just an abnormality, a random chance.  If you think about it, it’s like squirting paint on a canvas hoping it will become the Mona Lisa.”  He twitched.  “Do you understand?”

    Did I just get insulted?  (loc. 1392)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Discovery of Socket Greeny sells for $2.99 at Amazon right now.  The other two books in the series go for $3.77 apiece.  Tony Bertauski has several other series (most notably his Claus series) with lots of other e-books, all in the price range of $1.84 to $4.99.

 

“Have you ever noticed cockroaches following you?”  (loc. 1101)

    There are some nits to pick, but no show-stoppers.

 

    There’s a fair amount of cussing (18 instances in the first 10%), but I wouldn’t call that excessive, and it’s nothing a young adult doesn’t hear every day in high school.  I don’t recall any other R-rated stuff.  You’d better like a story with lots of internet-accessing, role-playing, and virtual reality escapades, and not be bored silly with yet another tale where a teenager finds himself called upon to save the world.

 

    There were quite a few typos, although not to the point of being a distraction.  Most of them were “spellchecker errors”: There/They; then/than; wind milling/windmilling, horde/hoard, and whatnot.  The isle/aisle boo-boo even managed to show up twice.

 

    But I think most of these quibbles won't bother the target audience at all: YA readers looking for a lively, fast-reading story, with lots of action and a bunch of teenagers getting drawn into an exciting adventure.  In that regard the clever blend of fantasy and sci-fi encountered in The Discovery of Socket Greeny delivers nicely.

 

    7 Stars.  One trivial anecdote.  I was impressed by what seemed to be a geezer-music nod in the early going when "Justin Heyward Street" was mentioned.  The old prog-rock group The Moody Blues had a guitarist by that name, and I was surprised that Tony Bertauski knew about him.  Alas, the last name of the musician was Hayward, not Heyward, so I fear it was just a coincidence.

The Queen's Gambit - Walter Tevis

   1983; 243 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Chess; Contemporary Fiction; Coming of Age.  Laurels: Adapted for the 2020 Netflix series of the same name.  Overall Rating: 8*/10.

 

    It was the worst of times.  Eight-year-old Beth Harmon survived a car crash that killed her mother and landed Beth in an orphanage.  But in retrospect there was a silver lining: it was at the orphanage that Beth was introduced to a fascinating game, and by Mr. Shaibel the janitor, no less.

 

    Chess.

 

    At first, Mr. Shaibel only allowed her to watch him play it by himself, moving both the Black and White pieces on a green-and-white checkerboard he’d set up in the basement.  That was interesting, and little Beth found she could do that in her head at night, by simply imagining the board and randomly moving the pieces.

 

    Then one day Mr. Shaibel taught her how to actually play and shortly thereafter Beth lost her first game of chess, to him, via something Mr. Shaibel called “The Scholar’s Mate”.  But now that she knew how each piece moved, Beth could lay awake at night, making real moves in her mind, until she found a way to parry the Scholar’s Mate.

 

    And never again lose a game to Mr. Shaibel.

 

What’s To Like...

    Why is it that every world chess champion so far has been a male?

 

    To break that streak would be a major undertaking, but based on all the recent world chess champions, it most certainly would start with a young girl being found to be a chess prodigy.  Walter Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit envisions Beth Harmon being such a wunderkind, and we follow her from an 8-year-old coming to grips with life in an orphanage to a 19-year-old trying to figure out how to outplay the (Russian) reigning world champion.

 

    Along the way, Beth learns how to resign when a chess position is hopelessly lost (which she doesn’t like), how to read and write chess notations, the wonders of a book called Modern Chess Openings, how to use a chess clock, and the thrill of playing, winning, and collecting the prize money in chess tournaments.   Beth beams after each of those advancements, and I thought the author caught the “feel” of playing in chess tournaments particularly well.

 

    But with fame comes frailty and Walter Tevis portrays Beth as a flawed character.  She battles addictions, steals from those who trust her, and (horror of horrors!) steals from bookstores.  Her capers have mixed results: sometimes she gets away with them, sometimes she gets caught, and sometimes the addictions cost her chess games.

 

    It's no surprise that The Queen’s Gambit is a very “chessy” book.  The names of several dozen openings are mentioned (all real), as well a number of famous chess grandmasters of the past, although Walter Tevis abstains (and IMO, rightfully so) from subjecting any presently-active (in 1983) chess greats to the embarrassment of losing to up-and-coming Beth.  I liked that he refrains from implying that misogyny runs rampant in the male-dominated chess world.  Yes, the best chess players hate to lose, but they hate losing to women, men, oldsters, youngsters, computers, and every other category.  Simply put, they hate to lose.  To anyone.  It's part of what makes them great.

 

    The ending – a key game with the current chess champion – is a mixed bag.  There really aren’t any surprises: things go bad for Beth at first, but she pulls herself together, rallies at the chessboard, and achieves the predictable result.  The game is not for the world championship, so there’s room for a sequel, but I doubt it will be ever written, especially since The Queen’s Gambit is now a Netflix series.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.7*/5, based on 14,730 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.21*/5, based on 56,191 ratings and 7,367 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Precocity (n.) : exceptionally early or premature development.

Others: Inchmeal (adv.).

 

Excerpts...

    “It talks about the orphanage.”  Beth had bought her own copy.  “And it gives one of my games.  But it’s mostly about my being a girl.”

    “Well, you are one.”

    “It shouldn’t be that important,” Beth said.  “They didn’t print half the things I told them.  They didn’t tell about Mr. Shaibel.  They didn’t say anything about how I play the Sicilian.”

    “But, Beth,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “it makes you a celebrity!”

    Beth looked at her thoughtfully.  “For being a girl, mostly,” she said.  (pg. 95)

 

    She leaned wearily back in her chair with her eyes still closed and let the screen of her mind go dark for a moment.  Then she brought it back for a final look.  And this time with a start she saw it.  He had used his bishop for taking her rook and now it could not stop her knight.  The knight would force the king aside.  The white pawn would queen, and mate would follow in four moves.  Mate in nineteen.  (pg. 241)

 

“Firm up your pectorals.”  (…)  “I thought that was a kind of fish.”  (pg. 197 )

    There are a couple of quibbles.

 

    First, be aware that there are adult situations and language in The Queen’s Gambit.  It may be a coming-of-age story, but I wouldn’t recommend this for a six-year-old girl, unless you want to answer questions about sex and drugs and self-destructive behavior.

 

    I found the storyline to be rather straightforward and lacking twists.  Beth kicks chess-butt with very few losses (and no draws!  How is that possible?) on her way to the top, and when her addictions catch up to her, the rehab seemed incredibly quick and easy.

 

    But most obvious and most important, this is a book about chess.  Lots of chess games.  Lots of thinking about chess positions.  Lots of talking about chess.  If you don’t happen to play chess, you’re going to be bored to tears, skipping over oodles of paragraphs, just hoping to get to the non-chess parts.

 

    Fortunately, I’ve played chess all my life, so for me The Queen’s Gambit was entertaining from start to finish.  Can I relate to the pressures Beth faces?  Not really.  I’m good at the game, but not to where becoming a grandmaster was ever a realistic goal.  There's no way I could ever envision or calculate a mate-in-nineteen.

 

    8 Stars.  As of 2021, there still has never been a female world chess champion, but one came extremely close.  She was a Hungarian phenom named Judit Polgar born in 1976 and rated #55 in the world at age 12.  She became an international grandmaster three years later, and had a peak ranking of #8 in the world in 2004.   She has two sisters, one of them is also an international grandmaster, the other is “only” an international master.

 

    The Wikipedia article about her is here, which will give you the Polgar family secret for developing and raising a challenger for the world chess title.  The short answer is: “Nurture over Nature”.  Papa Polgar's method may be controversial, but there's no disputing it worked for each of his three daughters.

Riding The Iron Rooster - Paul Theroux

    1988; 481 pages.  Full Title: Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Travel; China; Railroad Travel; Non-Fiction.  Laurels: 1989 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award (winner).  Overall Rating : 5½*/10.

 

    China.  1986.  Mao Zedong died ten years earlier, and Deng Xiaoping now heads the country.  Under his guidance, the dreaded Cultural Revolution has died out, and the subsequent  economic reforms and the opening of Chinese markets have led to dozens of Western corporations vying to form joint ventures there.

 

    Enter the American author, Paul Theroux, with the aim of traveling around in China and writing a book about it.  That's no small feat, since China is freaking huge.  You can freeze in the north, with winter temperatures dropping to as low as -40°C.  You can swelter in the south along the tense border with Vietnam.  Western China is incredibly dry and barren, and eastern China is incredibly crowded.

 

    To boot, Paul Theroux isn’t satisfied with being a sightseer and going on a bunch of tours with other westerners.  He wants to see the “real” China – the out of the way places, and talk with the “real” citizens.  But traveling by car would take forever, and you can’t get to most of the remote places by plane.  That leaves one other option, but fortunately it is probably Theroux’s favorite means of transportation.

 

    Traveling by train.

 

What’s To Like...

    Paul Theroux loves trains so much that instead of flying to China to start his odyssey, he takes a train clear across Europe and Asia (England to France to Germany to Poland to Russia to Mongolia) to get there.  The first chapter in Riding The Iron Rooster is devoted to that journey, highlighted by the fact that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred while he was traversing Russia, meaning he possibly got zapped by the escaping radiation.

 

    There are 21 more chapters, most of them covering the various train trips he took during his yearlong stay in China.  I noted at least 28 cities that he visited, including hitting two of them, Canton and Shanghai, twice.  The book’s title refers to a grueling 4½-day (one way) train trip from Beijing to Urumchi, a city in the middle of nowhere in the deserts of western China.

 

    I delighted in Paul Theroux's vocabulary choices.  Some of my favorite (English) words are given in the next section, but Theroux also shares lots of Mandarin Chinese words and phrases in pinyin (without the tonal marks, but we’ll cut him some slack on that).  There’s even one Tibetan phrase.  You’ll find lots of the useful travelogue information about the quality (or lack thereof) of the food, accommodations, touristy trinkets, weather, local populace, and transportation in the various cities, hotels, and railcars wherein the author stayed.

 

    You get a fair amount of history (the sad plight of Pu Yi, the last Chinese emperor), trivia (“Ulan Bator” means “Red Hero”), handy railroading tips (they change the bedding very early and very forcefully in sleeper cars), interesting folk remedies (medicinal urine), and the slew of books that Paul Theroux read while getting from place to place, including one titled The Golden Lotus, a 500-year-old Chinese book of erotica that makes 50 Shades of Grey look tame.  I learned what the universal phrase “Shansh marnie” means, and in light of our present Covid pandemic, was sobered by the fact that the Yunnan and Qinghai sections of northern China were just recovering from a serious outbreak of the bubonic plague when the Theroux was visiting there.

 

    My favorite trip was the visit to the Harbin Ice-Sculpting Festival, which took my (figuratively) and the author’s (literally, since it was -30°C) breath away.  The list of Chinese inventions amazed me.  I was tickled that “heffalumps” get mentioned twice, and had to wiki Sam McGee to understand that reference.  It was neat to see “Om mani padme hum” mentioned; it's my favorite Tibetan Buddhist mantra, although I learned it with an aspirated “hrih” added to it.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Fossick (v.) : to rummage; to search through (Aussieism).

Others: Importune (v.), Tumuli (n., plural), Twee (adj.), Stodge (n.), Solecism (n.), Meretricious (adj.), Spiv (n.), Recrudescence (n.), Comprador (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 183 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.03/5 based on 8,574 ratings and 343 reviews

 

“Things That Sound Wrong, But Aren’t…

    “I have my mother’s sister in a box.”  (loc. 4135)

 

Excerpts...

    The following day I sneaked downstairs, skipped breakfast, and was on my way out the front door of the hotel when Mr. Fang hurried towards me, making a noise.  It was a kind of laughter.  By now I was able to differentiate between the various Chinese laughs.  There were about twenty.  None of them had the slightest suggestion of humor.  Some were nervous, some were respectful, many were warnings.  The loud honking one was a sort of Chinese anxiety attack.  Another, a brisk titter, meant something had gone badly wrong.  Mr. Fang’s laugh this morning resembled the bark of a seal.  It meant Hold on there! and it stopped me in my tracks.  (loc. 2778)

 

    In Canada people joke and gloat about the cold.  In Harbin and in Heilongliang in general no one mentioned it except outsiders, who never stopped talking about it.  I bought a thermometer so that I would not bore people by asking them the temperature, but the damn thing only registered to the freezing point – zero centigrade.  The first time I put it outside the red liquid in the tube plunged into the bulb and shriveled into a tiny bead.  So I had to ask.  It was midmorning: minus twenty-nine centigrade in the sparkling sunshine.  By nighttime it would be ten degrees colder than that.  (loc. 5130)

 

It is wrong to see a country in a bad mood: you begin to blame the country for your mood and to draw the wrong conclusions.  (loc. 4667)

    Sadly, there’s a lot to quibble about in Riding The Iron Rooster.  From least important to most:

 

    There are more than a dozen typos, although most of them looked like scanner errors, so maybe they’re only in the e-book version.  I don’t expect the author to catch these, but the proofreaders should be fired.

 

    There’s a very handy 2-page map at the start of the e-book, with a very annoying page margin down the middle that blotted out critical parts of the map.  Surely a better one could’ve been found.  There’s a smattering of footnotes that are quite enlightening, but seem to be only used in chapters 8, 12, and 16.  There is a small amount of cussing, and discussion of some weird things like penile reattachments.  There’s also a steamy excerpt from The Golden Lotus, but hey, you've already been warned about that.

 

    Twice we have to endure the author telling us about his dreams, and he seems to have a thing having Ronald and Nancy Reagan in them.  He also insists on using the anglicized spellings of Chinese proper nouns, the most glaring being choosing “Peking” over “Beijing”.  But this was 1986, and maybe "Peking" was the preferred linguistic choice for western writers back then.

 

    Finally, and most egregious, the author seems to have a predetermined crappy attitude about China, its government, its food, its weather and almost all of its citizens, and it shows throughout the book.  1986 was a relatively joyous time for the Chinese: Mao Zesong and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were things of the past.  The people who Theroux meets and talks with are happy and outgoing, yet he’s fixated on making them recount and relive those awful days of internal terrorism from ten years earlier.

 

    The Chinese government eventually gets wind of the Theroux’s sentiments and assign a chaperone to accompany him in his travels.  They are polite and full of information, but Theroux delights in ditching them every chance he gets and quizzing everyone about one topic only: how bad they had it during the Cultural Revolution.

 

    In the final chapter Theroux journeys to Tibet, and unsurprisingly he’s completely enamored by everything Tibetan.  They may not bathe, but he doesn’t mind.  They may yearn for independence and for the Dalai Lama to return, and he heartily supports that.  The weather may be just as cold as in Harbin (except that the here altitude here is above 7,000 feet and it’s hard to breathe), but he rejoices in the brisk conditions.  If only all the Chinese would pack up and leave Tibet, Theroux would be completely happy.

 

    5½ Stars.  For the record, I totally sympathize with the Chinese government and their decision to assign a chaperone to monitor Theroux's travels and interviews.