One Dark Night in an African Dreamland

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Drinking from Graveyard Wells: Stories

A recently deceased wife must choose whether to move onto the next life, or become an ancestral avenging spirit in this life. A civil engineer tasked with building a dam must first defeat the carnivorous spirits controlling the river. When houses begin vanishing from an impoverished slum, one gifted girl discovers the disappearances follow a logarithmic pattern. Refugees seeking asylum discover the immigration people aren’t bureaucrats, they’re a priesthood.

Zimbabwean author Yvette Lisa Ndlovu writes from a hybrid perspective: one foot in her homeland, one in the West. Ndlovu herself studied at Cornell and Amherst, and many of her mostly female protagonists are graduates of American (or Americanized) universities. Yet Zimbzbwe’s history, both its ancient past and its recent struggles for independence, remain near the surface. For Ndlovu, Western modernism is usually a thin and transparent veneer.

Many of Ndlovu’s stories fall broadly into the categories of “fantasy” or “horror,” but that’s a marketing contrivance. Though many of her stories involve a monster—a primordial horror dwelling under conflict diamond fields, for instance, or carnivorous ants raised to make boner pills—almost never does the monster drive the story. Usually, Ndlovu’s monsters point her protagonists toward a deeper, more disquieting truth underneath the protagonists’ lives.

Instead of outright horror, these stories mostly turn on the friction between expectation and experience. Our protagonists usually start the story believing something rational, or expecting something reasonable. Recurrent themes include meaningful work and graduating from high school, two of the most common aspirations. But life in post-colonial Zimbabwe, with ancient traditions, modern tools of repression, and widespread poverty, always intrudes on those hopes.

In one story, a Zimbabwean student receives a fluke gift from the ancestral gods: she keeps stumbling accidentally into money. But the more money she fumbles into, the more her family expects from her. Soon the escape she sought becomes the burden she resents—until the gods demand an eternal choice.

When a student suffers blackouts, Western medicine cannot help. She consults an oracle, who finds the cure hidden in the past. To escape her condition, the student must time-travel to early colonialism and recover a military queen whom the British historians erased from living memory.

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu

Ndlovu structures some stories more like fables than Western fiction: an island king discovers immortality, but slowly stops being human. A healer erases the burdens of grief, but secretly serves a master whom her patients never see. A handful of newspaper clippings hide the secret pattern governing city women’s lives.

Not every story is “horror” or “fantasy.” In one story, an American college student discovers a common tool of Zimbabwean folk practice, and finds a way to monetize it, at the people’s expense. In another, poverty forces a talented student to leave school and find work; she pays her bills, but watches opportunities flit past.

Concerns of faith and religion recur. Though many of Ndlovu’s characters are Christian, and quote the Bible generously, they do so in a nation where ancient gods might occupy neighborhood houses. She reads the rituals and habits of government as religious rites, which isn’t a stretch. Issues of daily life contain spiritual depth in a nation where nature, death, and hunger always linger on modern life’s margins.

Ndlovu’s stories range from three to sixteen pages. This means they all make for complete reading in one session, with time left over to contemplate her themes. And those themes do require some deeper thought, because she asks important questions about what it means to be modern in traditional communities, or to be poor in a world with more than enough money. She doesn’t let readers off easily.

Perhaps I can give Ndlovu no greater praise than saying her short stories are genuinely short. Too many short story writers today apparently had an idea for a novel, jotted some notes, and thought they had a story. Not so here. Out of fourteen stories, one feels truncated; the other thirteen read as self-contained and thematically complete. That isn’t feint praise, either. I appreciate that Ndlovu crafts fully realized experiences we can savvy in one sitting.

The title story, which is also the last, asks us whether it’s always bad to go unnoticed. The question comes with piercing directness. Characters find themselves disappearing from a society that doesn’t want to see them. But maybe, for those taken away, it’s a Biblical experience. We can’t know, Ndlovu tells us in the rousing final sentences, but maybe that uncertainty is what makes her characters’ lives worth living.

The First and Last Days of Scottish Witchcraft

C.J. Cooke, The Book of Witching

A calamity has occurred on an uninhabited island in the Orkneys, in Scotland’s sparsely populated far north. Three teenagers reenacted a pre-Christian ceremony, with all the cocksure enthusiasm of teenagers; but it’s ended with one teen dead, another maimed, and the third missing. Now the adults around them must reconstruct what happened, because a malevolent force nobody’s yet seen may have something to profit from the catastrophe.

C.J. Cooke, a sometime university professor, has gained renown for her intensively researched, historically themed dark fantasy novels. This is no exception; not many horror novels include a works-cited page. For this volume, she delves into one of Scotland’s darker episodes. Even by witch trial standards, Scottish trials were notoriously brutal, a revolting mix of Christian piety and state-sanctioned torture which extracted confessions through truly appalling means.

In 2024, Clementine Woodbury struggles to understand the events that stranded her daughter in a Glasgow burns unit. Once lively and free-spirited, Clem’s daughter Erin has grown moody and secretive since becoming a teen mother. With Erin under sedation in a sterile room, Clem can’t ask direct questions about her mysterious injuries, so she takes her granddaughter and commences a freelance investigation. She isn’t prepared for the secrets she uncovers.

Parallel to Clem’s investigation, Alison Balfour stands accused of witchcraft in 1594 Kirkwall. Though the accusation carries whiffs of religious paranoia, Alison quickly realizes the truth: she’s a pawn in a powerful dynastic struggle for control of the Orkneys. Her confession, or lack thereof, will determine which rapacious aristocrat will control Orcadian government—though either outcome will be disastrous for ordinary smallholders like her family.

Cooke’s balance between these two narratives asks important questions. What debts do we moderns owe for injustices performed centuries ago? And what obligations do we bear to future generations? Alison Balfour realizes quickly that she can’t prevent her own unjust death; she can only determine what consequences her death brings upon others. Clem can’t pinpoint what caused her family’s sufferings, but clearly something dark lingers in her heritage.

C.J. Cooke

Though marketed as a “thriller,” this novel’s contemporary portion more resembles an amateur sleuth mystery. While the police struggle to fit Erin’s grievous injuries into their pre-written crime narrative, Clem assumes responsibility for uncovering what happened to her daughter. If this means scrambling into Scotland’s enigmatic, impoverished north to confront a secretive cabal, she clearly considers this an acceptable price for a truth she might not like.

The historical portion, meanwhile, is explicitly political. Orkney suffers under a government that rules by stoking fear among the population, retaining power by convincing the population of an even worse enemy. Alison knows she can’t win this battle. Therefore she’s forced to redefine victory according to what keeps her family and her people alive. Cooke reconstructs a poorly documented time of paranoia, recorded only through state and religious propaganda.

Therein, Cooke tacitly acknowledges something often forgotten in histories of witch hunts: they weren’t the flexings of invincible empires, eager to demonstrate their power. Witch hunts happened after the church-state hybrid began losing unquestioned authority. Alison Balfour’s execution happened a generation after the Scottish Reformation, as the Stuart monarchy clung to dwindling authority. Witch hunts are the superannuated flailings of a broken empire already in retreat.

In this, Cooke shows an aristocracy terrified of its people. Patrick Stewart, Second (and last) Earl of Orkney, sought the church’s benediction because he knew the people already organized against him, that the trade guilds that built his palaces were also hotbeds of insurrectionist intrigue. The Earl and his retinue yearn for unquestioned power, but the very fact they must resort to such extremes proves they’ve already lost the people’s devotion.

Alison Balfour works as a peasant healer among people who survive in nature’s bounty; but palace intrigues and state paranoia drag her into early modernism. Clem Woodbury trusts medicine, modernism, and police technocracy; but she’s forced to delve into her lost heritage and forgotten bloodline when modernity can’t answer her questions. Both women discover truth hiding in secretive corners, that nothing’s ever as simple as the official narrative would claim.

Cooke creates a story of nuance and complexity that rewards multiple levels of reading. She uses the markers of paperback thrillers, and on that level, one could read this book casually, like any other beach novel. But Cooke also asks questions about heritage, responsibility, and power, which don’t yield themselves to easy answers. Especially in Europe, where aristocratic paranoia still casts a long shadow, is the past ever really gone?

The Island of Faith and Lies

Catriona Ward, Little Eve

On a tiny Scottish island forgotten in the backwash of World War I, a strange prophecy has come to fruition. Five people and a horse lie dead, and a 5000-year-old megalith has fallen over. This was the final act needed to purge the world and bring The Adder into the world, purging corrupt humanity. So what exactly happened here? How did one teenage girl cause so much death and destruction? And where, exactly, is The Adder?

This, Catriona Ward’s second novel, debuted in Britain in 2018, but didn’t receive an American release for years. Only after some of Ward’s latter novels, particularly The Last House on Needless Street, garnered American acclaim did anyone think readers across the pond would appreciate this novel. Having read it, I understand why publishers would’ve assumed a limited Yankee Doodle audience: it’s almost aggressively British. Yet I think that only increases this book’s American appeal.

The laird of Altnaharra, one John Bearings—identified throughout almost exclusively as “Uncle”—believes himself a messiah. He receives visions from his snake, Hercules. He has formed a doomsday redoubt inside his ancestral castle, comprised of two common-law wives and four foundling children. He forces everyone else to live austere vegetarian lives (while he indulges in beef and gravy), and performs periodic tests to determine which of his children will become the harbinger of his snake cult.

If this sounds like a frenetic mix of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Wicker Man, I won’t disagree. Ward channels a specific kind of apocalyptic fear, not of the world ending, but of unhinged people awaiting that end. The castle teems with caverns, hidden rooms, and labyrinthine hallways, the lifeblood of gothic horror. As in the best gothics, supernatural occurrences have become seemingly common, but we must wonder how supernatural they really are.

Trapped inside the Altnaharra castle, Uncle enforces capricious discipline, while his children adapt themselves to appease his moods. The war-ravaged outside world is too busy to interfere, so Uncle’s religion becomes ingrown, consuming the children. Teenaged Evelyn particularly struggles with Uncle. She wants his approval, and campaigns to be named his successor; but she also can’t help seeing how manifestly corrupt Uncle has become. Her attempts to escape only make her situation worse.

Catriona Ward

Ward starts her narrative at its conclusion, as the rural villagers living in Altnaharra’s shadow discover the bloodbath. What actually happened unfolds only in flashback, as the massacre’s only survivor dribbles out information sparingly. While the villagers seek pat answers and want to close the coroner’s inquest quickly, the few facts we receive only make things muddier. This is only made worse when it becomes clear that Evelyn has buried key facts, and Dinah, the only survivor, is lying.

It probably comes as no surprise to readers of horror literature that, the more thoroughly we believe something on Page One, the more surely we’ll see that belief shattered. Ward’s other novels have shown her ability to cantilever multiple twists. We attempt to predict what surprises Ward will throw our way, because horror literature since the late 1990s has trained us to watch for rug-pulls in Act III. Ward knows this, and her twists are truly surprising to today’s jaded audiences.

What, Ward asks us, makes a family? Uncle chose his two wives and four children because he needs adulation. He maintains their loyalty, not through love and devotion, but through caprice and Crowleyist woo-woo. Uncle’s wives have differing reactions to his ministrations, and their responses reflect traditions of Jungian psychology. But Uncle’s children choose not to escape, even when opportunities arise, because Uncle’s violent whimsy is all they know. They have no survival skills without him.

This novel also uses themes of religion as a shared activity. Uncle leads his apocalyptic cult unilaterally; he alone receives revelations from The Adder, and dispenses justice that might be god-given, or might be arbitrary. Religion holds Uncle’s ramshackle family together, but it also creates divisions, as cult members try to determine who’s blessed or damned. Capital-T Truth comes from Uncle alone, and his motivations are hardly beyond question.

Ward cultivates fear, not through monsters and blood—despite kicking off the story with a crime scene, Ward uses violence so sparingly that, when it does happen, it’s even more shocking—but through misdirection and claustrophobia. Our narrators lie because lying is the only language they know. The outside world of objective truth and information only confuses them. We see the world through their eyes, and what we see is truly terrifying.

In Orbit Around the Impossible World

Stanisław Lem, Solaris: the Definitive Edition

The distant planet Solaris shouldn’t exist; its orbit defies all known laws of physics. And that’s not the only impossible thing happening there. The planet’s single inhabitant is a massive global organism, which researchers have variously described as a “plasma” and an “ocean,” though both metaphors are imperfect. Precepts of science and human understanding break down near Solaris. Not that this has stopped researchers from trying to understand it.

Polish novelist Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel is perhaps his most famous work, not only in its own right, but also through Antrei Tarkovsky’s notoriously inscrutable Russian-language film (which Lem disparaged). Like Tarkovsky’s film, Lem’s novel rejects conventional structure and practically dares audiences to follow the bumpy ride. Even Lem’s fans will admit this novel is rough sledding, though arguably worth it when you reach his strange, arcane culmination.

Psychologist Kris Kelvin is one among a branch of scientists called Solaricists, an interdisciplinary movement dedicated entirely to studying Solaris. Once the rock stars of deep-space science, Solaricists have become pariahs because their “science” persistently fails to produce answers. After years spent studying Solaris remotely, Kelvin finally gets assigned to the planet’s only space station, which is nearly abandoned and moldering. Except it proves far less abandoned than he expected.

The first English-language edition of Lem’s novel, in 1970, wasn’t translated from Polish, but from a prior French translation. Lem, who could read English fluently but not write it, hated that translation. But then Lem, like the American author Philip K. Dick, with whom he had a love-hate relationship, notoriously hated everything. His hatred wasn’t unfair, though. The first English edition sanded off many of Lem’s more recondite, philosophical maunderings.

Lem was, after all, a trained philosopher. Like Olaf Stapledon, Lem used science fiction novels not primarily as either stories or character studies, but as field tests for philosophical insights. In this case, Lem places highly trained men of science (and they are, indeed, men) in an isolated environment where reason and empiricism disintegrate. How, Lem asks, can humans communicate with alien intelligence, when we can’t communicate with one another?

Stanisław Lem

Once ensconced in the research station over Solaris, Kelvin wants to debrief the skeleton crew. Crewmembers, however, are reclusive and unwilling to communicate. It’s like they’re all protecting secrets. Kelvin’s old mentor, Gibarian, commits suicide rather than admit whatever bleak secret he’s kept on Solaris. However, Kelvin spots that secret walking the vast, depopulated halls, and it’s apparently a woman.

Before long, Kelvin has his own secret: Harey, his college girlfriend, appears in his cabin. She can’t possibly be here, however. Not only did Harey not join the long, arduous interstellar journey to this distant planet, but in a moment of overwhelming despair ten years ago, she also committed suicide. Yet here she is, as alive and unblemished as the last time Kelvin saw her. She’s impossible, but also real.

Tarkovsky’s movie (and Steven Soderburgh’s 2002 remake) focus on Harey, the impossible woman, and the guilt she inspires in Kelvin. But that focus is why Lem disliked the film adaptations. This novel isn’t about human guilt and culpability; it’s about… what? Critics dispute furiously how to interpret this recondite novel. Lem took especial pains to make it inscrutable, immune to any algebraic interpretation. You don’t understand Solaris, you experience it.

Personally, I see Lem talking about the futility of human reason. Every “law” human intellects devised around experimental science falls flat around Solaris. The scientists find themselves reduced to Aristotelian guesswork and mysticism. Throughout the novel, he both uses and scoffs at religious symbolism (Lem himself was agnostic), but finally, even Kelvin admits we apprehend the truth only through that proverbial glass, darkly.

Bill Johnston’s English-language translation is deemed “the definitive edition” because Lem’s estate considered it the most satisfactorily accurate to Lem’s philosophical ambiguity. However, rights issues have tied up publication for years. It’s currently only available in ebook and audiobook editions, not print. Canadian actor Alessandro Juliani expresses the depth and complexity of Lem’s characters, and beautifully captures Kelvin’s journey beyond reason and evidence, into acceptance of a fundamentally absurd universe.

This novel admits multiple interpretations based on available evidence. That, I’d contend, is Lem’s point: no explanation is ever complete and universal, we can argue the evidence endlessly without reaching exhaustive conclusions. In the end, our questions define us, not our answers. Kelvin, and perhaps Harey, don’t resolve their story, they only achieve a higher and more meaningful order of question. And hopefully, after reading this book, so will we.

A Brief History of Germany Before “Germany”

Katja Hoyer, Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871–1918

When the Holy Roman Empire collapsed before Napoleon in 1806, it left a crazy quilt of German-speaking microstates across central Europe. These little Germanies were vulnerable to French, Russian, and Austrian dominion, but for decades struggled to unify. Their separate traditions, laws, and dialects made working together too difficult. They waited in vain for someone to unify them, until a militant nationalist stepped into the role: Otto von Bismarck.

If your high school World History course resembled mine, Germany largely disappeared from discussion between 1806 and World War I. Maybe an Anton von Werner painting depicting the Empire’s proclamation, or an orphan portrait of Bismarck, but certainly not context. German-born British historian Katja Hoyer steps into the vacuum. Her introductory history is broad and sweeping, and provides a good bird’s-eye view, assuming an introduction is what you need.

Hoyer organizes her history into five long, thematically linked chapters: the years leading to unification, Kaiser Wilhelm I’s reign, the tragedy of Friedrich III and Bismarck’s downfall, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s reign, and finally World War I. She attempts to present Germany’s arc in the most sympathetic terms possible. After all, under constant pressure from outside forces, Germany certainly needed a unified state to protect its people and traditions from trampling.

That sympathy isn’t rose-tinted, though. In Hoyer’s telling, Germany provided a necessary defensive service, but at great price. Bismarck, the consummate national organizer, found the common needs of Germany’s tiny states, and played them together under Prussia’s banner. Those common needs, though, were mostly for defense against Europe’s other empires. Therefore Germany was “unified” mainly by its ability to spot, and defend against, perceived enemies, foreign and domestic.

Note the “domestic” in that formulation. While Bismarck, and his puppet emperor Wilhelm I, definitely protected Germany against French and Russian territorial ambitions, Bismarck also despised change from within. He brought the same fervor to suppressing liberal democracy and nascent socialism that he did to expelling tsarists and Bonapartists. Karl Marx himself was never welcome back to his native Prussia, Bismarck saw to that.

Katja Hoyer

Basically, Germany looked at a Europe dominated by various empires in their death throes, violently lashing out at one another like wounded wolves, and thought: I’ll have that. It wanted a unitary monarch to rally around, and Bismarck gave them that, in Prussian King Wilhelm I. Admittedly, Wilhelm never wanted that power, and happily delegated actual authority back to Bismarck, which suited both men, and Germany overall, just fine.

Unfortunately, some people believed the nationalist mythology of a unitary Kaiser, and young prince Wilhelm was one. Though the old Kaiser’s son Friedrich III was progressive-minded, and might’ve extended democracy to Germany, he inherited the throne already terminally ill, and reigned only 99 days. Then power passed to Wilhelm II, who honestly believed the claptrap Bismarck had sold Germany, and set course to rule single-handedly.

History shows how that ended.

Hoyer describes this history in sweeping, synoptic terms. She spends little time unpacking individual events, and nothing on individual personalities, except for Bismarck, the two Wilhelms, and a little about Friedrich III. Hoyer cares less about the events and personalities which comprise the narrative, and more about the overall social forces driving them. Thus she cites names and places, without always explaining why they matter in any particular situation.

She also avoids topics that don’t play into her core interest in political history. The book includes two orphaned references to composer Richard Wagner, and a brief passage about how Germany’s urban proletariat turned culture into a consumer commodity, but nothing much about cultural forces overall. Similarly, though Hoyer admits religion and secularism played into national identity, she doesn’t unpack them beyond how political parties exploited them.

This book therefore courts an audience not necessarily familiar with German Imperial history. And the history Hoyer provides is the history of the German state, not the German people. Readers already familiar with pre-WWI German history will probably find this book excessively synoptic, and readers who don’t necessarily know Germany, but enjoy deep dives into history (like me) will wish she paused to unpack why exactly this story matters.

Notwithstanding Hoyer’s brevity, this monograph concisely introduces an aspect of history often treated hastily. Bismarck’s intricate political horse-trading, and his heirs’ inability to preserve what he started, have plenty of steam-age drama. If Hoyer doesn’t unpack much herself, she at least introduces enough to let us decide what’s worth a deeper dive. I suspect many English speakers don’t know this corner of history, and we should.

India’s History and the War for the Soul

1001 Films To Watch Before Your Nexflix Subscription Dies, Part 48
Santosh Sivan (director), Ashoka

Prince Ashoka has become the most successful general in the Mauryan Empire, a claim he makes despite, not because of, his royal standing. A younger son of a lesser queen in the Emperor’s harem, nobody expects Ashoka to inherit, least of all his favored brother Susima. When Susima deliberately refuses to support his brother in battle, Ashoka manages a massive strategic victory, then returns to the capitol, intent on vengeance.

World cinema should, ideally, offer ambitious audiences an opportunity to immerse themselves in somebody else’s culture for a few hours. Unfortunately, Hollywood’s carcinogenic influence has undercut that recently; filmmakers must appeal to English-speaking audiences to make bank. This Hindi-language movie therefore makes an interesting contradiction. It embraces the full vaudeville cheese inherent in Bollywood masterpieces, while striving to tell an important story of historical and cultural significance.

Despite his military proficiency, Ashoka proves less capable of palace intrigue. His initial plans for vengeance against Susima and his other brothers fails, and he narrowly avoids an attempted assassination. At his mother’s insistence, Ashoka flees the palace, posing as a commoner and sleeping rough. This experience teaches Ashoka important lessons in humility, but it also gives him a long-overdue opportunity for love, when he meets Kaurwaki, exiled princess of Kalinga.

Shahrukh Khan, India’s biggest matinee idol, plays Ashoka in a manner Western audiences might find jarring. One moment, he has smoldering, Brad Pitt-like charisma and an understated performance, stone-faced and impassive, the character happening entirely in his eyes.The next moment, he turns into a caricature, chewing scenery with the aplomb of Gary Oldman. No matter his tone, he always carries a sure and placid confidence in his star power.

These tonal shifts reflect the Bollywood culture that birthed this movie. Bollywood has certain requirements. For instance, every movie requires five tightly choreographed song-and-dance routines. Four routines directly advance or comment on the plot; the fifth is pure lowbrow spectacle. Americanized audiences unfamiliar with Bollywood convention may feel back-footed when the prince begins singing and dancing for the first time. But that confusion is half the fun.

Ashoka is an important figure in Indian history. He pushed the Mauryan Empire to its greatest geographical expanse, and he sponsored massive artistic and public-works projects. Many of his surviving artworks are among India’s national treasures, and have weathered 2,300 years remarkably intact. But at his empire’s peak, he converted to Buddhism, foreswore violence, and rededicated his empire to helping India’s most defenseless peoples. History doesn’t exactly record why.

Kareena Kapoor as Princess Kaurwaki and Shahrukh Khan as Prince Ashoka

This movie speculates on the forces leading to Ashoka’s conversion. The resulting mix is both personal and national, both contemporary and historical. Ashoka’s life among the poor and destitute reflects the Buddha’s own mythological journey outside the palace walls. But his personal romance with a foreign princess reflects important modern concerns, that while Ashoka was a product of his times, he also rejected those times for deeply personal reasons.

Director Santosh Sivan directs this picture in ways that reflect Ashoka’s dualism. He designs his shots with Peter Jackson-like simplicity that makes the Iron Age setting come alive. The Mauryan palace has timber frames and beaten metal ornaments that bespeak both poverty and ambition. Important character moments happen while Ashoka hides out in windswept caverns and candlelit temples. Shadows cut deep across his face as he chews up his enemies.

And chew them up he does. Sivan recreates military conquest in images that would make Cecil B. DeMille envious. The movie cuts from conversations inside stone-walled taverns to massive cavalry charges as quickly and effortlessly as Ashoka’s military lifestyle requires. Ashoka’s relationship with his bodyguard Virat begins with slapstick that would make American directors flinch, and concludes in truly heartbreaking tragedy.

The contrast of tones, not only within the movie but within principal characters from scene to scene, creates a jarring disjunction that English-speaking audiences might find uncomfortable. Sivan includes broad physical comedy in a tragic film, and religious rumination in a war epic. Western audiences aren’t accustomed to such juxtaposition. This film dropped in 2001, about the time American TV and movies shifted to whispered dialog and solemn, unsmiling faces.

However, that very juxtaposition bolsters this movie’s themes. Sure, Ashoka lived around the same time as Alexander the Great, and we’d consider him ancient. But the concerns that forced him to reject empire and embrace transcendence, aren’t only located in the past. Ashoka laughs, gets drunk, and adores his mother; he also gives reign to murderous rages and destroys entire nations. Because ultimately, so do we.

When the Old Gods Join the Army

Deborah Falaye, Blood Scion

Fifteen-year-old Sloane just received her draft notice; she’s now a Recruit in the brutal occupying Lucis army. But it’s worse than just being a child soldier. She’s a Scion, a descendant of the Orisha, the old gods of the conquered Yoruba nation. Sloan faces the double challenge of surviving a particularly brutal boot camp while maintaining her secret, because if the Lucis rulers discover her magic powers, her life would be forfeit.

Debut novelist Deborah Falaye clearly means this novel to enter the same YA science fantasy niche as the Hunger Games and Divergent franchises. She has a similar premise, with a bloated state and a protagonist whose life is circumscribed by violence. Falaye’s story really emphasizes the degrading effects of settler colonialism. But the longer her story continues, the more conscious I become of the movies and other sources she’s plundered for her story.

The story starts well. Sloane is an intrepid youth, orphaned early when the Lucis disappeared her parents. By day, she combs the surrounding foothills for evidence of her mother’s whereabouts; by night, she evades the Nightwalkers, a vicious secret police squad. She survives by wits, ingenuity, and judicious application of her Scion magic. But her powers must never be discovered; state propaganda has made turning Scions over a lucrative business.

Almost immediately, though, the story changes. Sloane receives her draft letter and, knowing that escape is impossible, submits. Boot camp is a relentless liturgy of humiliation and loss, a combination of constant speeches and impossible physical tests. Though an accomplished street brawler at home, Sloane’s skills don’t translate into military applications. She struggles to adapt, plagued constantly with shame and self-recrimination.

That’s where Falaye’s movie influences become obvious. The ritual of humiliating the poor recruit is beloved of countless military movies; think Gunny Hartman in Full Metal Jacket. Sloan’s battalion commander is frequently given to passionate speeches reminiscent of George C. Scott’s iconic performance in Patton. Meanwhile, Sloane descends into a semi-delusional fugue reminiscent of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Deborah Falaye

Moreover, the camp described couldn’t possibly work. Her commanders expect Sloane to perform feats of military precision that nobody could ever do as described. Somehow, Sloane is the only recruit unable to accurately handle and fire an assault rifle the first time they’ve ever touched one, notwithstanding that private firearms are unlawful in the Lucis empire. Likewise, only Sloane fails to scale a rope bridge without a harness the first time.

But even beyond that, the organization wouldn’t work. Sloane’s commanders encourage recruits to fear, distrust, and conspire against one another. Before boot camp, every recruit is required to kill one civilian from their home life; if they refuse, they’ll be killed, and the army will kill their loved ones anyway. On day one, they order her squad to collectively select and kill one recruit, to prove their dedication to the occupying army they were all drafted into.

That’s not how this works. Anybody who’s attended boot camp knows they isolate recruits from home and family. Jody calls and withholding personal mail reinforce the precept that you can only trust your fellow soldiers. But you have to trust your fellow soldiers to have your back, not have you in their crosshairs. And killing loved ones is the recruitment tactic of terrorist organizations like the LRA, not state militaries that have occupied territory for three centuries.

Falaye describes the Nightwalkers using divide-and-conquer tactics familiar from the Stasi, the Tonton Macoutes, and COINTELPRO. But those tactics work against civilian populations. Militaries, including occupying foreign militaries like Falaye describes, have to have operational unity to hold the divided population. Yet Falaye describes Sloane being given an assault rifle and conducting a smash-and-grab raid on the third day of training.

Maybe I’m the problem. Falaye writes for audiences much younger than me, audiences that haven’t watched as many war movies and therefore won’t recognize the stereotypes she recycles. Maybe somebody younger, somebody untainted by experience with popular culture, would receive Falaye’s story with unclouded eyes that I no longer have. But surely anybody would recognize that the military she describes couldn’t possibly work.

Judging by the early pages, I suspect this story might’ve succeeded had Falaye not included the military. Had Sloane remained an outsider, her adversarial position might’ve worked. I wanted to enjoy Falaye’s fable of resurgent old religion versus the bootheel of empire. But around halfway through, I realized I was avoiding the book. It had too many stacked implausibilities. I like Falaye’s premise, but her performance doesn’t work.

Bright Midnight in the Fake Japan

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Mika Martineau in Netflix’s Kate

Kate (no last name) stalks Tokyo’s midnight streets, enforcing terminal contracts on behalf of… someone, it’s never made particularly clear. Despite her gaijin status, she’s become one of Japan’s top contract killers, available on a moment’s notice. Until, that is, someone slips her a lethal dose of radioactive poison during her latest caper. With mere hours to live, Kate has to find her killer and exact her revenge.

What exactly about Japan makes filmmakers believe round-eyes develop superpowers? This isn’t the first movie I’ve watched where the creative team thinks a White character wanders into a world of paper houses and Armani-clad assassins, and begins moving fast enough to dodge bullets. The White Euro-American fetish for Japan as a land of comic-book exaggeration worked when it only happened occasionally, but now, it’s become cliché, bordering on racism.

Netflix’s Kate is merely the latest Western movie I’ve watched that depicts Japan generally, and Tokyo specifically, as a manifestation of anime excess. Like Kill Bill and The Wolverine before it, Kate’s Tokyo teems with bright colors suffused against a background of steel-framed technocratic excess; in several scenes, anime scenes are literally projected onto the surfaces of gleaming skyscrapers. This, of course, when Kate isn’t barging into tatami-mat paper houses.

We’ve seen movies like this before. The tall, unflappable protagonist strides, god-like, through a world of highly choreographed violence, and somehow never gets hurt badly enough to stop her. In substance, Kate is neither revolutionary nor controversial. It’s just another Western attempt to recreate the magic of John Woo “gun-fu” thrillers like Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow. It’s silly and grotesque, but not particularly dangerous.

The parts that frustrate me appear in the background. Kate’s Tokyo is always night, and frequently rainy; the movie’s only visible daylight occurs in the prologue scene, in Osaka. (Even then it’s overcast, and the wet pavement suggests recent drizzle.) The blackened midnight gloom is anything but dark, however, as oversaturated neon colors occur everywhere, from the backlit advertisements littering every street, to the kids’ brightly painted hair and clothes.

Hugh Jackman in James Mangold’s The Wolverine

I’m reminded of James Mangold’s The Wolverine. Though Mangold permits Japan more daylight, multiple important scenes occur in color-soaked midnight. Mangold repeatedly frames scenes so traditional rice-paper houses and cherry-blossom landscapes exist in the foreground, against a skyline of glass-and-steel skyscrapers. Even Hiroshima, for Mangold, becomes a moment of transcendent glory. Mangold’s Japan, like Kate's, is a deliberate mix of Orientalist exoticism and excessive modernity, the hungry Japanophile’s dream landscape.

And, like Kate, Mangold’s Logan engages in battles that only make sense if we pretend we aren't’ aware of flight rigs and fight choreographers. The characters feel compelled to engage in hand-to-hand combat, or even ritualized swordfights, despite everyone carrying fully automatic guns in armpit holsters. Throughout these battles, the White hero never gets hurt, not badly enough to stop fighting anyway, while sharp-suited Yakuza extras die like flies.

At least Mangold’s White hero has literal superpowers: a healing factor, metal skeleton, and retractable claws. Logan’s inability to suffer real pain makes sense, within the character’s X-Men context. Kate somehow suffers advanced radiation poisoning, multiple bullet wounds, fall injuries, and plain old exhaustion, yet nevertheless keeps killing anyone who challenges her. Because of course she does, she’s a White gunslinger in Japan.

Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill

I’m reminded of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, in which the nameless antihero apparently gains killing power by purchasing a katana. Throughout the movies, Uma Thurman’s “The Bride” character slaughters every challenger, apparently because her sword gives her superpowers. Historically, katanas were made of pig iron and, despite Western myths, were actually cheap swords for soldiers. But give a katana to a White woman, and she apparently becomes Death incarnate.

These movies share the mythological backstory of ancient Bushido traditions kept alive amid technocratic modernism, an oversaturation of colors, and a warrior ethos. Japan, for action filmmakers, isn’t a place; it’s an ethical situation into which they ship White characters. Like Neverland or Narnia, Japan becomes a place where laws of physics are suspended and death is paused, so White people can test their mettle and emerge renewed.

Ultimately, these stories, with their White protagonists and dreamlike settings, aren’t really Japanese. For too many White filmmakers, Japan isn’t a place where people live and work and aspire and die; it’s a color-soaked fairyland. It becomes a recipient of Western ideals of magic and transcendence, stripped of anything authentically Japanese. It becomes a cartoon, in the worst sense. Maybe it’s time for Westerners to give Japan back.

The Truncheon of Forgetting, the Hand of Remembering

Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police: a Novel

On a nameless island in a nameless sea, people just periodically forget important things in their lives. Emeralds, perfume, photographs. No, the items themselves never disappear; but sweeping, population-wide amnesia strips the items of meaning in human brains. Our protagonist, a writer, simply takes these disappearances for granted. But some people remember, and their memory is a threat to the island’s deeply bureaucratic social order.

Novelist, essayist, and science journalist Yōko Ogawa is persistently prolific in her native Japanese, but her works have only trickled into English translation. This book, first published in 1994, has only newly appeared in English, rendered by her most frequent translator, Stephen Snyder. Having read one previous Ogawa novel, I awaited this one with great anticipation. Then, sadly, I made a good-faith attempt to read it.

Our protagonist makes her living writing literary novels. (Hmmm.) She writes about people having realistic experiences, which she attempts to analyze, or at least make romantic for the reading populace. But around her, as playing cards and roses and birds become meaningless artifacts which most people remember distantly, if at all, the range of realistic experiences is becoming painfully circumscribed. She struggles to muster ideas and make a living.

A flippant comment forces a realization on our protagonist: her beloved editor doesn’t forget when everybody else does. Our protagonist realizes this makes him a target for the Memory Police, whose ham-fisted but consistently polite raids quietly remove anybody who remembers what the social order deems forgotten. Unique knowledge, or an informed understanding of history, makes people dangerous to life on the island.

You might notice something missing from this synopsis: proper nouns. There’s my first problem with this book. My previous Ogawa experience, her novel The Housekeeper and the Professor, used this expressionistic vagueness to its advantage. But that novel was less than half the size of this one, with far fewer characters, set in a favorably genericized Japanese university city. This larger, busier novel needs some names just to keep the ensemble organized.

Yōko Ogawa

The novelist decides to protect her editor by building a secret annex inside her house. To survive the Memory Police, the editor will have to live inside a tiny basement cube with minimal light, occasional food, and a prison-style toilet. This description combines the most non-specific elements of the Freudian id and Anne Frank’s notorious squat. The product seems both impractical, and artificially constrained.

Meanwhile, the Memory Police stage periodic raids throughout the island, but apparently disappear between times. Our protagonist cycles the city with only momentary twinges of discomfort. This form of intrusive fascism seems uniquely Japanese, in that no matter how meddlesome, destructive, or scary their actions, their behavior is still polite, simply part of a background of social conformity that everyone accepts as necessary and normal.

Even when members of the novelist’s network, actively complicit in her efforts to preserve her editor from kidnapping, get seized by the Memory Police, they simply accept this as preordained. Ah well, they seemingly say, such is the price of stability. Even knowing they’re breaking the law, harboring a fugitive, and keeping him alive through Rube Goldberg-like schemes, they seem largely unperturbed by the ubiquity of the polite fascist state.

Brief reminder, this novel debuted in 1994, during the long hangover from Japan’s hypercharged 1980s economy. As Japan’s industrial state pulled its claws in and waited to see what happened next, people simply accepted their high accrued debts and diminished lifestyles. Japanese capitalism has, for decades, rewarded hard work and self-abnegation, creating that icon of post-boom malaise, the sararīman. Sticking your neck out isn’t considered heroic in Japan.

Therefore, I assume Ogawa’s parable of enforced technocratic blandness must’ve made sense to its intended audience. But that context has gotten lost. A quarter-century later, across the Pacific, the story just feels curiously low-stakes. The Memory Police’s atrocities don’t seem to elicit an emotional response, even from those who perpetrate them. This isn’t helped by the dreamlike lack of specificity; I cared more about Ogawa’s contradictory geography than her characters.

This saddens me. Having enjoyed Ogawa’s writing in the past, my inability to connect with her characters or plot this time around feels disappointing. Ogawa tells us something catastrophic is at stake in her story, but she holds everyone at arm’s length, discussing them with the courteous emotional detachment of an after-church picnic. I care more deeply about my inability to care, than I do about the novel.

I expected so much, but sadly, I feel so little.

New Delhi’s Romantic Rain Opera

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 43
Mira Nair (director), Monsoon Wedding

Beautiful, fresh-faced Aditi Verma returns to her family’s lush New Delhi manor, to participate in an arranged marriage. The Verma family, wealthy and urbane, see this wedding as an opportunity to display their affluence to the extended family, returning home from living scattered in several nations. Only the family patriarch, Lalit Verma, knows he’s actually broke, financing everything on credit. Aditi, meanwhile, hasn’t broken up with her previous boyfriend yet.

According to reputation, screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan wrote this movie hastily, to have something she could workshop for her MFA program. One of her professors, expatriate Indian director Mira Nair, saw something promising in it. Nair set out to realize Dhawan’s story as a combination of an American low-budget indie film, and a Bollywood spectacular. The result straddles two worlds efficiently, capturing the hybrid world of India’s moneyed gentry.

Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah, Gandhi) is a control freak, desperate for a traditional Punjabi wedding. What he really wants, though, is a sleek tourist destination. After all, his family only gets together about once every ten years, and the groom’s family is rich, with connections to American money. Only when Lalit’s credit starts bouncing does he realize he’s tied his personal money into his business, which is critically overextended.

The wedding planner, Dubey, catches the bulk of Lalit’s copious wrath. To his credit, Dubey, a happy-go-lucky kid with seemingly boundless energy and elbows like hatchets, remains unfazed. Until, that is, he glimpses Alice, the Vermas’ patient, doe-eyed housemaid. Alice’s hard work and infinite grace keep the Verma household together, and Dubey realizes he’s become dependent on her to organize this wedding. Maybe he’s starting to feel something more, too.

Aditi, in her middle twenties, agrees to a traditional arranged marriage, to a man she’s only known a few weeks, largely because she realizes it’s advantageous. Her boyfriend, after all, is married. But she has aspirations of being a modern, Westernized woman, like the glamorous Indians living abroad she sees on television. How can she explain to her fiance that she isn’t going to be a traditional Punjabi wife?

Meanwhile Ria, Aditi’s cousin, has thrown herself whole-heartedly into helping Aditi’s wedding preparations. She seems excited for everything happening, until Lalit’s brother-in-law, Tej, arrives from America. Everyone thinks Tej is perfectly avuncular and welcomes him, especially when he offers to cover Ria’s university tuition in America. So why has Ria become suddenly sullen and withdrawn, lashing out at family members with little provocation?

If this seems like a remarkable number of plot threads, I won’t disagree. Like many American indie filmmakers, Dhawan and Nair create an ensemble whose various individual needs are often in conflict; we know somebody is bound for disappointment. The characters achieve their needs only by wheedling and compromising. We wait with anticipation to see how the movie will land all these divergent threads with satisfaction.

Alongside the ordinary, human conflicts, the movie also includes India’s stark economic contrasts. Most of the movie happens on the Verma family’s large gated compound, a spectacle of post-colonial opulence. But to accomplish anything, the characters must venture into streets crowded with cars and beggars. Alice, the maid, lives in a polite but easily ignored cottage on the periphery. Dubey, the wedding planner, lives in a loud, cruddy walk-up flat.

Culture clash dominates. Aditi has lived in New Delhi all her life, but everyone expects she’ll move to Texas with her new husband, which she anticipates with dread. Dubey, clearly Hindu and proud, falls in love with Alice, who sleeps with a crucifix above her bed. Most of the movie’s dialog is in colonial English, and Lalit Verma desperately tries to appear British, but bursts of Hindi appear so often, the movie requires subtitles.

Overall, the movie follows a standard Bollywood beat sheet. It translates these beats, however, for audiences more accustomed to Western cinematic traditions. The song-and-dance breaks for which Bollywood is famous, are replaced by introspective long shots where the sounds of New Delhi come together in almost operatic unity. The love stories resolve themselves concisely, without ever showing anything the state censorship board would consider naughty.

Personally, I was recommended this movie by a clerk at an Indian grocery store. Fascinated by his store’s rack of Bollywood DVDs, I asked for suggestions to get started. He recommended this movie as a good introduction for audiences raised on Western cinema. Because it has its feet firmly planted in two worlds, and explains itself clearly, it proved a perfect introduction for one inquisitive Westerner.

Quatermass and the Risks of Space Imperialism

Richard Fell and the BBC, The Quatermass Experiment (2005)

It’s a narrative as old as science fiction: the intrepid space explorers venture into the mysterious beyond, desperate to discover what’s out there. They venture further into space than the Apollo missions, further than the ISS, further than any humans have ever traveled from Earth before. When they return, they’re feted as heroes to the eager, waiting homelanders. But we quickly discover that they can’t travel that far from home without getting cosmos on them.

When the BBC re-staged their classic science drama The Quatermass Experiment over fifty years after the original, it was undoubtedly a spectacular feast. Producers broadcast the performance live, with on-stage effects (nothing digital) and garffed lines intact. Besides recreating the original experience, though, it also provides an important insight into post-colonial guilt. Watching this performance, one gets the impression that its producers believe its characters have something to answer for. And that something is official.

Professor Bernard Quatermass, of the British Experimental Rocket Group, fears the worst when his astronauts go incommunicado for hours. But they reconnect when the rocket begins its return approach. The capsule crash-lands in a field in Surrey and, to Quatermass’ horror, only one astronaut emerges. He rushes weak, delirious Victor Caroon back to headquarters for treatment. Once there, Caroon shows signs that his experience millions of miles from home has transformed him into something new.

The BBC staged the original Quatermass Experiment in thirty-minute episodes, also broadcast live. Producers reused Nigel Kneal’s original 1953 scripts, lightly updated for current science (only two of Kneal’s six original kinescopes survive). But they make an immediate change by casting Jason Flemyng as a much younger Quatermass. His angular features, looking like he was hand-carved from cedar with a chainsaw, distinguish him from previous, mostly middle-aged versions of Quatermass, emphasized by his rumpled suits.

Back at HQ, Dr. Gordon Briscoe (Devid Tennant) can’t explain changes in Caroon’s physiology. It’s like somebody erased Caroon and recreated him from memory. To everyone’s surprise, that memory starts getting fuzzier, as Caroon becomes aggressive and voracious. Journalists begin asking questions: is it safe to allow somebody so touched by outer space to roam freely on Earth? How has space colonialism changed the colonist? And is the homeland safe with the colonialists in it?

Here’s where my Spidey Sense started tingling. Kneal’s über-British characters, mostly (but not entirely) White, laud the great explorer abstractly, but turn squeamish at allowing him to wander native soil freely. Throughout history, British culture has lauded colonists, like John Smith or Robert Clive, yet made them feel unwelcome when they attempted to return to Britain. It’s like, you can’t travel the Empire without getting Imperialism’s stains on you. And you’ll inevitably change the homeland.

Briscoe (David Tennant) and Quatermass (Jason Flemyng) struggle to explain th
changes coming over Caroon (Andrew Tiernan), in The Quatermass Experiment

Quatermass isn’t conscious of himself as a colonist. He praises the ideas of pure science, and excuses his excesses by claiming his justifications were morally neutral. But, in maintaining the ethost of 1953, as Britain’s last meaningful stabs at colonialism were winding down, Quatermass doesn’t find a universe governed by abstract scientific principles; he finds a universe teeming with life, much of it wildly different from humanity. Victor Caroon has brought some home with him.

What happens next could be interpreted two ways. Either the colonized races, brought back to the Imperial homeland, rampage over our sacred White traditions and threaten to demolish staid British unity; or the chief colonist realizes he’s changed his homeland’s moral fabric forever, and he must abandon neutrality to restore stability. Either way, it’s difficult to separate the hybrid Caroon has become, and the steps Quatermass must take to save Earth, from British imperial history.

In other words, it’s impossible to venture out into the unknown, without bringing the unknown home. American science fiction, like Star Trek, still frequently incorporates mythology of frontier and Manifest Destiny: it’s humanity’s sovereign responsibility to occupy the universe, establishing settlements and broadening our reach. Perhaps only Britain, with its inherited guilt from centuries of imperial expansion, could recognize the moral sand trap this creates for humanity. Imperialism, the BBC acknowledges, permanently changes the homeland.

Quatermass must grapple with science’s moral implications, particularly when science expands the boundaries of human accomplishment. Nothing human beings do is morally neutral, especially not in a universe abundant with life. It reflects Britain’s imperial history that he is able to realize the ways space colonialism transform the homeland. His response could, potentially, admit of racist interpretation, depending on your lens. It could also mean he acknowledges his choices will face judgement from future history.

The Last Train Out of Zombie Town

Yeon Sang-ho (director), Train to Busan

Seok-woo, a tired workaholic Seoul capitalist, doesn’t want to travel; he’d rather be working. But his young daughter, Su-an, has guilted him into giving her the one thing she wants for her birthday, a trip to see her mother in Busan. He tells his assistant not to worry: “I’ll be back by lunch,” he grumbles into his cell phone as the bullet train leaves the station. Veteran audiences know his cynical optimism dooms everyone aboard.

This movie, billed as South Korea’s first zombie film, resembles Western zombie media in certain ways: the checklist of character types, mostly doomed to die. The growing paranoia, heightened by claustrophobia, as nearly the entire film occurs inside a bullet train. The grotesque body horror, as ordinary humans become distorted, twitching revenants driven by hunger. But, in making the transition to Korean culture, the zombie genre also draws in contemporary concerns and important modern symbolism.

Act One resembles a traditional horror movie, replete with little vignettes of friendly anonymity. Seok-woo ignores his daughter, hypnotized by his smartphone. Train stewards conduct business, pasted-on smiles concealing crippling boredom. A high-school baseball team commandeers one entire car. Meanwhile, enclosed in a toilet cubicle, a teenage stowaway with an ugly bite mark struggles with sudden onset of tremors she can’t readily explain. Embryonic horror simmers beneath the everyday banalities, in the Stephen King style.

There’s no transition to Act Two. Everything is normal, then instantly, one zombie becomes two, becomes four, becomes a rampaging horde. Uninfected humans race toward the train’s rear, the only refuge, while the sudden onslaught of monsters pursues them. Seok-woo, who almost loses his daughter to the invasion, becomes the group’s de facto leader when he realizes the infected can’t handle doors. He quickly makes a second discovery: they don’t attack what they can’t see.

Themes develop quickly. Seok-woo must make snap decisions about group safety, sometimes appearing to sacrifice individuals for the community. He tells his daughter she must think only of herself during this crisis, but soon realizes that’s not a sustainable attitude. Only working together will the uninfected survive. Meanwhile, Yong-suk, a fat businessman with obviously dyed hair (ahem), begins dividing survivors into the deserving and undeserving. The undeserving, he urges forward to die for self-serving purposes.

Actor Gong Yoo is most famous in South Korea for leading roles in romantic comedies and melodramas. Even to Western audiences, his appearance as Seok-woo seethes with TV-friendly masculinity. So when he gets angry, savagely attacking zombies to protect his daughter and fellow passengers, the transformation is palpable. Though it’s an ensemble movie, Seok-woo holds our central interest. The contrast between Seok-woo’s sultry good looks, and his blood-stained business shirt, becomes the movie’s dominant image.

Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) prepares his fellow survivors to fight
their way through the zombies in Train to Busan

Survivors become separated into three groups. Trapped at the back, Seok-woo, initially reluctant to fight for others, concludes they’ll only survive together. He leads an assault toward the front, knowing he’ll have to fight through entire cars filled with cannibal undead. In one scene, a high-school baseball star faces his entire team, and freezes. It makes us wonder: if our friends became zombies, could we fight them? Could we kill our friends to protect our families?

While Seok-woo gathers survivors together, Yong-suk encourages others’ paranoia. He insists they cannot know whether Seok-woo’s fighters are trustworthy, and demands they lock the doors ever tighter. Only we insiders, Yong-suk insists, can ensure we’re pure and uninfected; everyone else, even our former friends, are universally suspect. His infectious paranoia costs innocent lives, but protects himself. Seok-woo successfully saves several humans only to find himself shunned and isolated. But Yong-suk’s megalomania becomes his vulnerability.

On one level, this is an intense monster movie. The bullet train simply embodies the story’s massive momentum; the pace never slackens, and every momentary pause lets more terror into the characters’ lives. The combination of high-speed horror, glossy design, and ironic use of oversaturated daylight, gives this movie a gut-level intensity that allows audiences to enjoy it like the monster spectacular it is. You can find the deeper levels, but you don’t have to.

At another level, it’s a commentary about the fears, not always unfair, which emerge from carnivorous post-industrial capitalism. How do we protect ourselves without becoming irrational? How do we organize a community without letting demagogues hijack us for selfish ends? This movie doesn’t answer these questions, and suggests we maybe can’t answer them. Literally every choice has consequences. But it says we have to try, if any of us are going to get out alive.

Trapped In an African Dreamland

Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

The mysterious bounty hunter known only as Tracker sits awaiting execution. We don’t know what he’s done, or whether his condemnation is justified. We only know a holy man named Inquisitor has come to take his final confession. Weary of life and steeped in blood, Tracker has only one power left: to tell his story in whatever way pleases him best. So Tracker launches into a lengthy, detailed yarn of violence in colonial East Africa.

Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Marlon James’ fourth novel, and first fantasy, brims with promise. His mix of realism and magic, of pre- and post-colonial influences, of this world and the next, promises a story rich in symbolism, commentary, and wizardry. You can appreciate his tale of struggles in the early African diaspora, or if that’s too political, you can enjoy his cool monsters. But you can’t help noticing it takes forever to make any progress.

Born between city life and country tradition, Tracker straddles two worlds, occupying neither. Without a sponsor versed in his people’s customs, he’s never undergone adulthood rites. Thus his kinfolk see him trapped in perpetual adolescence; he sees himself unhindered by laws and superstition. (He’s an unreliable narrator, so decide for yourself.) He works for whoever can afford his highly specialized services, and has become highly skilled in rationalizing away his complicity in his employers’ crimes.

James’ storytelling possibly reflects his Caribbean upgringing, steeped in the same storytelling heritage also visible in Edwidge Danticat or Diane Wolkstein. One suspects, reading Tracker’s confession, that there’s a kernel of truth beneath his windy legerdemain, but that he’s spinning a tale, seeking to thrill and horrify an audience. Tracker clearly dislikes Inquisitor, and the official authority of state and religion that he represents; but he’s also desperate for this perceived father figure’s overdue approval.

Tracker’s story begins with a lengthy novella of his youth, his initiation into tribal warfare, and his relationship with the shapeshifter Leopard. Tracker learns his people’s ways later in life than most, and explains his lessons to Inquisitor. These lessons include myth and ritual, but also ceremonies of blood purity which Tracker, prematurely cynical, regularly disrupts. When his people discover he’s been preserving the impure and the tainted, his own kinfolk drive him violently away.

Marlon James

After this purge of delayed innocence, Tracker gets into his real confession. Residing in a city reminiscent of mythical Timbuktu, Tracker survives by on wits and his preternatural ability to find anything lost. Kings and potentates hire him to prevent wars, while princesses and concubines manipulate him to start wars. He rushes profligately through successions of lovers he doesn’t love, mostly but not entirely men. His shield of cynicism doesn’t entirely conceal his pervasive self-hatred.

A slave trader hires Tracker to recapture an escaped boy he considers particularly valuable. This isn’t Tracker’s first time working with slavers; he takes particular care to avoid ever doing anything that would require him to think about the morality of his actions. These aren’t his people, after all; he has no people, not really. But mounting evidence begins to suggest that this slave trader, both despised and admired, has connections more than merely natural.

On the one hand, James pushes Tracker though situations which reveal that Africa, the homeland Tracker partially longs for, is riddled with moral compromise and venality. (James, who has written about Bob Marley and Rastafarianism, reputedly left Jamaica to escape omnipresent homophobia.) Tracker desperately wants Africans’ approval, even Inquisitor’s, even the rich, corrupt slave trader’s. But, working for the people’s richest, most desperate citizens, he’s seen wickedness he cannot ignore, sins which burn his soul.

On the other hand, James has created such a rich, detailed backstory that he needs to share all of it. Eager to keep Inquisitor present and listening, Tracker keeps spinning his tale in degrees of detail that quickly go from lush, to overgrown, to tedious. I found myself hundreds of pages into a very thick book, pushing through yet more picaresque scenes that go nowhere much, and realizing: holy cow, he’s still engaging in exposition!

Apparently James crafted an opulently detailed story bible, then felt compelled to include everything in the text. Everything he’s written is so beautiful, but there’s so much that the beauty becomes an impediment to motion. I wanted to love this book, but nothing keeps happening, and I’d set down the book frustrated, again. One day I set it down and couldn’t bring myself to pick it up again. Maybe that’s everything you need to know.

Zen Chess for Beginners

Shimpei Sato (game designer), Onitama

New board games coming from mainstream publishers anymore tend to be too complex, require huge teams, or tie themselves to lucrative media properties. I seldom see games like chess or Go, timeless exercises of strategy, spatial reasoning, and friendly competition based upon trust and agreed-upon rules. And I especially see few with rules straightforward enough to savvy in one sitting.

Japanese game designer Shimpei Sato designed this game to mimic the experience of a traditional martial arts tournament. The game arrays one master and four pupils across a limited space, and gives them the goal of capturing opposing pieces. It requires players to think several steps ahead, which isn’t always easy. And unlike similar board games, it provides multiple ways to win.

Superficially, Onitama resembles chess, in having a geometric board and pieces. The board measures five squares by five, and each side has five pieces (ten altogether), so one-fifth of the board is occupied at the beginning of the game. But unlike chess, moves aren’t circumscribed by pieces’ nature. Available moves are determined by cards, which are dealt out at the beginning of the game, and which resemble traditional martial arts moves.

Any piece can move according to the cards players have available to them: many of the same basic lateral or diagonal moves that characterize chess. Thus there’s no memorizing which pieces can make which moves. However, here’s the trick: once you make one particular move, you remove that option from your choices, and pass it to your opponent. Any action you take, will become your opponent’s option on their next turn.

The game has sixteen possible moves available for players, but only five get used per game. I still haven’t seen all sixteen options yet (expansion packs are available). This means that every game has a distinct set of moves available, and one game won’t resemble the next. Like proficient martial artists bringing their unique skill sets to competition, this game changes every time you play it. Most board games can’t say that.

So the comparisons to the two obvious choices I’ve already mentioned, chess and Go, make sense. Yet it’s also a different experience, because the elegant simplicity of the rules (it took about two minutes to read the rulebook aloud) and fairly small board mean the game goes fast. It’s certainly possible for timid or deliberate players to drag the game by overthinking each move, but in practice, each individual game runs around fifteen minutes.

Some readers may find my repeated comparisons to chess and Go off-putting, because these games require a long learning arc, and an attention span many players lack in today’s success-oriented culture. I can’t stress enough: you can learn this game in mere minutes. You can play it before your coffee gets cold. Yet you can do this without exhausting its seemingly limitless ability to adapt to you.

The Onitama starting position (left) and in play (right)

Licensed from designer Sato for American production by Texas-based Arcane Wonders, the game design consciously channels images of Japanese beauty and Zen tranquility. The “board” is a scroll, actually printed on a non-skid vinyl mat, similar to a mousepad. The art resembles sumi-e painting, featuring woodland temples and disciples practicing standard moves. This design is somewhat stereotyped, though given the martial arts theme, that stereotype is perhaps earned.

The whole game folds into a box slightly smaller than four-by-eleven inches, smaller than most games manufactured by better-known companies like Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers. That makes it ideal for stuffing into a backpack or attache case and taking it around town. I’ve played in a coffee shop, a bar, and a restaurant, because it’s small enough to travel, and light enough to set up in a public place.

This combination of portability and simplicity makes it a good sharing game. Unlike Go, which can last for hours and involves hundreds of tiny stones that can become easily lost, Onitama has few parts and goes swiftly. Given time, I suspect that playing Onitama in a coffee house may become as popular as playing chess in the park, a boilerplate of good-minded people sharing an experience without spending money.

With very simple rules that make for easy learning, but the ability to evolve from one game to another, this makes an ideal all-ages game, a bridge to learning more complicated traditional board games which may require intense concentration students sometimes lack. I must admit, people playing Onitama against me have repeatedly cleaned my clock. Yet I keep coming back for its simplicity, strategy, and grace.

Midnight Matinee at the All-You-Can-Eat Science Fiction Buffet

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 31
Takashi Yamazaki (writer/director), Returner

The mysterious extraterrestrial Daggra have overtaken humanity’s last fortress. With her species on the verge of extinction, Milly, a hardened, cynical warrior, steps into the time portal which carries her from 2084, clear back to 2002. Her mission: stop humanity’s First Contact with the Daggra, which will happen overlooking Tokyo Bay. But she’s missing important information, like how exactly to find this contact point, or what’s destined to happen.

This movie’s cover art, featuring Takeshi Kaneshiro posing with a pistol, mirror shades, and flapping black coat, suggests it’s a blatant ripoff of The Matrix, which was only three years old when this movie came out. If you think that, though, you’ve set your sights way too low. Writer-director Takeshi Yamazaki pillages story elements from dozens of American and international science fiction films, creating a beautiful, tantalizing smorgasbord of excess.

Arriving in Tokyo, Milly (Anne Suzuki, Snow Falling on Cedars) immediately prepares for violence; instead, she finds a city overrun with neon and commerce, where her wartime skills have little market. Except, of course, for one buyer: the Yakuza. Milly quickly falls in with paid assassin Miyamoto (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who thinks he’s killed her. He’s mistaken, since she arrived wearing armor. Naturally she tapes a bomb to his neck and demands his compliance.

Within the movie’s opening act, Yamazaki openly signals several of the movies he’s ransacking for ideas: the Terminator and Matrix franchises, Japanese kaiju movies like Godzilla, Hong Kong martial arts cop movies, American cyberpunk novels (the Yakuza subplot is redolent with bits recycled from William Gibson’s career-making works), and more. Yamazaki has stolen everything that wasn’t nailed down. It’s messy, and it ought to stink.

But it doesn’t. Yamazaki propels his story with the same playful glee and wretched excess of American directors like Sam Peckinpah and Quentin Tarantino, likewise famous for making massive, cornball collages of their favorite influences. This massive array of familiar science fiction and martial arts tropes, unmoored from their sources and slammed together with joyous fervor, coalesces into something distinct. Like Star Wars or LotR, it outgrows its sources.

Takeshi Kaneshiro (right) and Anne Suzuki on the brink of first contact, in Returner

Miyamoto doesn’t want Milly’s quest; he thinks her story of flying saucers and killer reptiles sounds ridiculous. But he knows her bomb works, so apparently he must comply, and he does. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Milly’s quest overlaps his, since the Yakuza boss he’s tracking has stolen the crashed Daggra spaceship. Cruel, venal Mizoguchi wants to strip the spaceship, and its injured pilot, for black market parts.


Milly and Miyamoto race against time, desperate to prevent the war Milly barely survived, but aware that Mizoguchi could make things infinitely worse. Milly has a secret weapon: she can move faster than the eye can see (“there is no spoon”), but only for short bursts. Soon they discover Miyamoto has his own secret, a telepathic link to the injured Daggra. Milly soon realizes everything she ever believed about her enemy was a lie.

Because of course it was.

Yamazaki brings together an international cast for a multilingual extravaganza. His characters move between Tokyo’s glamorous, colorfully lit upper crust and its suppurating underbelly, a transition made possible by Miyamoto’s lucrative skills in violence. And our heroes find themselves poised on the knife’s edge between pure science and its yucky commercial face. Every aspect of this story turns on themes of balance between mirror selves.

Taken together, this story wouldn’t work in a drier, more self-consciously cinematic picture. This movie is loud, saturated in color when it isn’t completely obscured in soot, and paced like a fireworks display. Yamazaki not only doesn’t disguise his takings from international cinema, he billboards them, announcing his bricolage as something proud and brash. It’s like a master-course in just enough of better films to create something new.

Naturally the film comes courtesy of the production house Toho, famous internationally as home of Godzilla and Akira Kurosawa. Besides its American influences, naked, scaly Daggra connect the story to its kaiju genes, while Miyamoto is clearly a modern, somewhat Americanized samurai. It’s consistent with much prior low-budget Japanese schlock fare, but Yamazaki makes it look anything but low-budget. Because he also steals crisp American cinematic gloss.

Critics hated this picture, naturally. It’s about as subtle as Alien vs. Predator on amphetamines. Yet its complete lack of restraint makes it something else, a big, sloppy applesauce of late-20th-Century cinematic aplomb. It doesn’t apologize for itself, nor should it, because it does what good movies should: it carries audiences along until the final, well-earned moments.

Our Lady Mary Magdalene of Ireland

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 30
Peter Mullan (writer/director), The Magdalene Sisters

In 1964, three women from different parts of Ireland find themselves ripped from their lives and forced into the Magdalene laundry. Overseen by battalions of hard-faced nuns, the girls, none older than twenty, are forced to toil as penance for sexual sins most haven’t even committed yet. They struggle under the convent’s harsh rule, which literally desires to control their souls. But they keep one eye on the outside, and plan for their eventual escapes.

Officially called “Magdalene Asylums,” the Magdalene laundries started out as places prostitutes and other “fallen women” could rebuild their lives and achieve redemption. Many were established throughout the world, including Britain and America; the Irish laundries, however, became an unmitigated horror show. When the nuns operating the laundries discovered they were making a profit, their original Christian mission went by the wayside.

Writer-director Peter Mullan focuses on three women among the dozens held captive at the laundry. Rose (Dorothy Duffy) is an unmarried mother, anathema in a Catholic country. Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) was raped. And Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), an orphan raised in a church home, is simply too pretty and warm to boys’ attention; the nuns at her orphanage believe she’ll inevitably produce more orphaned children for the church to raise.

All three get shipped to the laundry by relatives or caretakers—it’s somewhat murky where the story takes place, though it was inspired by UN reports of abuses at a laundry based in Cork. Mother Superior of the facility, Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), comes across as soft-spoken and amiable to her wards. However, it quickly becomes clear she relishes power, demonstrated by moments of casual sadism, and cares mostly about money.

The girls remain trapped in the laundry for four years, working ten-hour days and six-day weeks. As the only reliable service able to process the laundry produced by a large swath of Ireland, their services are in constant demand. And we see it pays well: the nuns eat buttered toast and bacon for breakfast. The girls who do the actual work, however, eat oatmeal and water.

Worse, the girls are subject to constant abuse. Not only are they overworked by the nuns, and physically punished for insignificant infractions, but the pries, Father Fitzroy, who wants to reform the laundry, becomes corrupted by the culture and starts sexually abusing a developmentally disabled girl. The men who drive the delivery lorries, meanwhile, who are the girls’ only contact with the outside world, often trade sex for favors.

Mother Superior (Geraldine McEwan) leads a line of trapped workers (left to
right Anne-Marie Duff, Nora-Jane Noone, and Dorothy Duffy) in The Magdalene Sisters

Mullan focuses on character drama on character, letting larger history speak for itself. Unlike Neil Jordan, writer-director of Michael Collins, Mullan doesn’t lecture about history, or make Irish facts digestible for international audiences. He instead forces characters into an intolerable situation, and lets their actions speak for themselves. His heroines have two choices: either conform to a corrupt system, or break out by force.

The Magdalene nuns repeatedly promise the girls, when they’ve achieved salvation, they’ll be permitted back into the world. As years drag on, however, and the girls find themselves unconsciously mimicking the power hierarchies that control them, we start to realize: not everyone will escape. They’ve internalized the nuns’ system of abuse. The convent has lost interest in salvation; as Bernadette observes once, they only care whether the work gets done.

The cozy relationship between Church and government during the early Irish Republic often corrupted both institutions. Police helped dirty priests cover their sins, while idealistic young clergy often tried to change the system from within, but found the system changing them. Ireland consistently proves a point I’ve long believed: individual Christians often create powerful good, but the Church, like any other institution, serves mainly to protect itself.

In 1993, long after the events depicted here, property developers working land formerly owned by Dublin’s Magdalene laundry uncovered a mass grave containing 155 skeletons of unidentifiable girls. By this time, the Dublin convent was Ireland’s last Magdalene laundry, and the outcry generated by this discovery forced its closure. Only after the laundries ended did anyone officially discuss their existence, or the church-state relationship that made their abuses possible.

Peter Mullan made this movie partly to raise awareness of the Magdalene abuses, which weren’t officially redressed until 2013. Within Ireland, this movie helped make these crimes visible, but international audiences should watch too. Only by staring directly at the history of religious intolerance and state corruption, can mass populations, Christian or secular, ensure these crimes aren’t repeated. Because bigotry like this still exists in our world.