Car Short Reviews, Where Are You?
Normally, I don’t do two entries of short reviews in a row, but this first one is the reason.
This is What Happens Next (Necessary Angel Theatre, Toronto, 2010) — I wanted to at least try to get this up before the run of this show ended. It’s Daniel MacIvor. It’s brilliant. What else can I say? If you’ve never seen anything onstage before, or never seen anything but Shakespeare and musicals, see this. It’s funny, intelligent, and full of soul. It has meta moments, a cast of engaging characters (all played by one guy), and a happy ending. MacIvor never forgets that the main difference between theatre and most other storytelling media is that in theatre, you’re there. You can react to the audience and interact with them, make the story happen in the moment in a way you can’t with written work, film, and television.
It’s only 1h 20 minutes long, but each minute of that packs a wallop. You may wonder, if this is such a great medium for telling a story, why I’m not offering anything approaching a plot summary. Well… part of the fun of a MacIvor show is figuring out what the “plot” actually is. Is this the story of a guy who announced he wasn’t going to do another one-man show but found himself putting one together anyway? Yeah. Is it the story of a man who recently broke up with his long-time partner and now wants his stuff back? Yeah. Is it the story of a boy stuck between feuding parents, a giant, and a man named Will, who may or may not be big or tiny? Yeah again. And I’m sure if you go see it, you’ll have another take on it. But MacIvor draws you along in such a fashion that it’s never confusing or unenjoyable — the audience always gets what’s happening, but, like the best stories, the meaning of it all takes some pleasant mulling over that never quite ends.
The Bone Collector (Jeffrey Deaver 1997) — For some reason, I’m on a serial-killer-thriller kick lately, and I don’t know why, especially because it makes me jerk awake at one in the morning wondering if someone’s hiding in my closet. Anyway, this is the story of Lincoln Rhyme, a former forensic scientist who, due to an accident at a crime scene, is now completely paralyzed except for his head, shoulders, and one finger, and Amelia Sachs, a purportedly really, really hot young officer with psychological issues of her own. Oh, and it’s also the story of the Bone Collector, a whackjob who kidnaps random people, leaves the police clues as to where they are, and kills them in ways mimicking a nineteenth-century serial killer if they aren’t found in time, but I was surprised to find myself intrigued enough by the first two characters that the third didn’t always matter.
Deaver knows how to ratchet up the suspense — no matter how many times we see the cops rush in at the last second, there’s always the chance that the next victim won’t be so lucky, especially since we’re shown a couple early failures while they’re still learning the Bone Collector’s game. The Bone Collector himself wasn’t quite as creepy as, say, Hannibal Lecter or the Red Dragon, but as a plot-driving engine, he worked. His eventual motives were somewhat outlandish — the fact that he had motives as well as serial-killing was probably what made him less creepy than the others — and the reveal about him at the end was halfway-predictable, but the mystery was great.
The Number Devil (Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 1997) — Young Robert hates math. Luckily, the number devil is here to visit him in his dreams and show him how cool numbers can be, complete with colourful illustrations.
I’m torn about this book. On one hand, it went into some pretty nifty mathematics, including Fibonacci numbers, the magnitude of infinities, and Pascal’s triangle. On the other, it teetered on the borderline between whimsical and saccharine for me. Every mathematical concept had cutesy names, like “hopping” and “jumping” for multiplication and exponents, or “unreasonable” numbers for irrational numbers. Really? I understand that some readers may be intimidated by long, complicated-sounding names, but aren’t other readers (myself included) going to be confused even more trying to figure out how to integrate what they actually know about math with what’s going on in the story?
I am familiar with most of the concepts Enzensberger brings up, but (maybe because of this?) I had a tough time following every detail of Robert’s conversations with the number devil. In any case, though this is a cute and charming way to introduce anyone, kids or adults, to the amazing world of math, I’d still want an Ian Stewart book or two on hand after the whimsy wears off and the thirst begins.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective (Kate Summerscale, 2008) — Non-fiction, this, which makes me sad, because as a would-be historian, I sometimes can’t read non-academic non-fiction without a twinge of historiographical panic (you can’t think of the past as a story! that’s not a robust way to interpret written evidence! this conclusion isn’t really supported!). But this was an interesting book about one of the first Scotland Yard detectives, the titular Mr. Whicher, and the true case of child-murder in an isolated country mansion that took Victorian England by storm.
If this had been a real murder mystery or marketed as fiction, there’s no way I would have been satisfied by the ending (well, it was likely this person, and it was probably done that way, but no one can ever know for sure), but it was gruesomelt interesting as an examination of where the Great Detective myth started from, and how even things like the truth of who murdered whom are strongly affected by time and place. In Victorian England, there are questions you can’t ask and inquiries you can’t make for the sake of propriety, and there’s no sense that the police should have the immediate priority of securing all evidence and taking over the investigation.
Particularly, it was weird going from The Bone Collector to this — where are the forensics? What do you mean no one can tell what weapon was used to kill the kid? You mean they don’t even know about fingerprints? Very eye-opening.
The Maze Runner (James Dashner, 2009) — Unlucky teenage Thomas wakes up in an elevator with no memory of who he is. He finds himself trapped in a giant, deadly maze with a bunch of other amnesiac boys. Pretty soon, he must join with the others to find a way out of the maze, and maybe back to the life he left behind.
On one hand, this kept me turning the pages with all its mysteries. What is it Thomas doesn’t remember? Why were the kids put in this maze? Why were their memories wiped? Why does Thomas have strange feelings about the maze that none of the others seems to have? Unfortunately, when I finally got the answers, I found them slightly disappointing. I remember reading that when you’re writing a mystery, you should think of the first ten possible answers — and discard them all, because if they’re the first ten you thought of, they’re too predictable. While this may be a bit extreme (and I think the best way of thinking of a mystery is to get at it from the other end — come up with a great plot then all of a sudden realize that if your viewpoint character is coming at what’s going on from a certain angle, it’s gonna be a mystery), maybe Dashner could have stood to add a couple more items to his list before he picked one.
It was fun — I don’t regret reading it and will almost certainly pick up at least one sequel from the library, but if I have to choose between this kids-stuck-in-deadly-game and Suzanne Collins’s… well, comparisons aren’t fair in reviews. But still. (*has cake and eats it, too*)