Walter Mosley, 2004, Little Brown and Company.

Another Easy Rawlins mystery. This time, Easy is called on by the police to help defuse a complicated situation emerging right after the Watts Riots of 1965. Of the series, Little Scarlet is perhaps the most intense, direct, and linear. There are fewer twists and turns, and things are much more what they appear to be — which is to say that they are a subtle, complex pattern of race relations in post-riot Los Angeles. Sure, things are less deceptive. Mosley deftly tells us a story, while revealing an evolving and fluid situation with regards to how people of different races — and classes — coexist in Los Angeles.

Fritz Kreisler, 1915, read as an e-book from BlackMask.com

This is a curiosity. A very patriotic little text on the horrors of the Eastern Front in World War I, written by a violinist who went on to compose famous works.
It is clear that Kreisler wanted to express the glory of the battle as a good patriot. The short text is filled with the kinds of things attacked by many other survivors of the war like Wilfred Owen and Reiner Maria; how bold and noble and glorious are the soldiers and the officers. Yet, Kreisler is also clearly horrified by what he has seen, by the slaughter and waste. He spends a lot of time trying to put a good light on events. He focuses on the camaraderie between the soldiers, even with their enemies, and on the positive things that the life of a soldier brings to a man. He obviously wants to write a patriotic text, and yet we can’t avoid seeing the negatives, the pointless battles, the waste of life, the privation, and the suffering. With the added benefit of historical hindsight, this probably reads quite differently than he intended. His closing words, about being proud to have given a contribution, no matter how small, to the glory of the homeland seem a tragic joke today.

Jose Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, 2000/2002, Harcourt Books.

This joins the list of books that can only be described as a pleasure of ambivalence. Saramago relies on his reputation (not to mention that Nobel Prize for literature) to encourage you to slog through the long, long sentences that are bereft of conventional punctuation. Sometimes unravelling the dialogue can be like a particularly challenging Scrabble game postmortem. And Saramago does not limit himself to making the mechanics of reading the only difficulty awaiting the reader — there are many self-indulgent asides, where he explains why he chooses a given adjective to describe a character, or engages in a stylistic monologue on why he varies the names by which he refers to the characters.
Once getting past the barricades that Saramago erected, we find ourselves in the world of an old potter in a beautiful, simple dystopian world. This world is familiar: the villages are being absorbed into the city, and the ciy is being absorbed by a shopping/planned-living facility known simply as The Center. The potter struggles with his changing world, the shift of the economic environment, and the usual issues of family, inlaws, and an adopted pet. These struggles are beautifully depicted, alternating between bold strokes and subtle details, and Saramago’s genius shows clearly.
The ending of the story comes abruptly, and, although we’ve been prepared for many of the circumstances, at least one aspect (the most significant, perhaps, and one for which the book is named) seemed forced. Perhaps it’s my ignorance, perhaps it’s due to the shallowness of my understanding of Plato, but the impact of the critical event didn’t make sense to me.

Patrick McCabe, 1999, HarperCollins

While I think I can see why this was nominated for a Booker Prize, I was left cold. It’s the reminiscences of a transvestite prostitute from Northern Ireland, who, in an open secret, was born to a young woman who was impregnated by her priest. His story is mostly thinking back on the bitterness of his childhood, his revenge fantasies towards his father, swooning over the exotic shoes and clothing his various boyfriends gave him, and odd memories of his friends who were caught up in The Troubles, either with the Royalists or the IRA.
This is one of those books that leave me feeling that I should have enjoyed more than I did. It’s difficult to say exactly what I found off-putting. It’s well written, the narrative voice is strong, and the situations are interesting. And yet, for some reason, I never found myself completely engaged.

Jack Womack, 1987, Grove Press Books.

It seems to me that there is a grand poker game among speculative dystopian writers, dating back to Huxley, Zamyatin, and Orwell, if not even farther, with each player trying to out-play the previous extreme. If this is indeed the case, Burgess pushed out Orwell with the low spade in the hole, only to have the table taken over by a bunch of young, cocky beatniks and science fiction writers: Burroughs, Ellison, Bradbury, and Vonnegut. Then Philip Dick started dominating the game, even while Brin, Atwood, and Walter Miller, Jr played a hand or two. Things changed again when Varley and Gibson anted up. Varley called, Dick folded, then Womack saw Gibson and raised him an apocalypse or two. While there are still hands to be dealt, it seems that Womack is currently the player to beat.
Womack clearly has a debt to a number of the other players. Most often noted is Burgess, as much of Ambient is told in future dialects of English; also noteworthy, perhaps, is Chandler, who taught many of the players the rules of the game in the first place. But Womack brings an amoral ruthlessness and matter-of-fact brutality to his tale that outdoes his predecessors. It’s not that Womack’s dystopia is just a nasty place, it’s that there’s concerted, unrelenting nastiness oozing out of every alleyway, human oriface, and gun barrel. Do we find any sympathetic characters? Not a one. Do we still flinch at the outrages they endure? Yes, we do. Ambient is so over the top that it would be easy to dismiss it as an exercise in exaggeration and sick bravado. But it’s clear that it was written with a sense of (warped, black) humor, which allows us to stay with the story through otherwise untenable situations.
Yeah, there’s nothing like a good dystopian science fiction novel. Always make me want to write a few of my own. Fortunately for you, that desire fades quickly away, and I go play a few rounds of Counterstrike or something.