Reviews: Books – Slow River, Running, Oryx & Crake

A few days ago I finished What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami. When I first heard about this new memoir, I resolved to wait until it came out in paperback to buy it. I ended up buying it while it was still in hardcover for a couple of reasons. Murakami is my favorite author, and I was eager to read something new in order to forget about the disappointment I felt after reading his last novel, After Dark. Also, next week I’ll be running the Toronto Waterfront Half-Marathon, my first half-marathon ever, and I thought I would reward/inspire myself after all my hard training by reading a book on running.

Yesterday, as I was off on an 11.5 mile jog, I was thinking about the Murakami book, as well another book I’ve read recently, “Slow River,” by Nicola Griffith, the TV show Heroes, and the Kowloon Walled City, which I’ve become obsessed with as of late.

First, the Murakami book. I honestly didn’t expect a huge amount from this book. I always expect a MAGICAL AND MINDBENDING transformative experience from Murakami’s fiction, which is why I find it so disappointing when a novel fails to live up to this expectation. But I flipped through this book while at the bookstore, and it seemed like it would be pretty fluffy, which ended up an accurate guess. The book is part memoir, part something most closely resembling an advice column or inspirational self-help book. The memoir-focused chapters are the strongest. My three favorite sections of the book were Murakami’s descriptions of his experiences running from Athens to Marathon in the mid-summer heat, running a grueling 62-mile ultra marathon, and the first time he decided to write a novel. Two of these sections were taken from previously published essays, which might explain their deviation in style. The descriptions of these runs were fantastic and really resonated with my experiences as a runner. The rest of the book was hit-or-miss.

One thing Murakami did many, many times in this book was make a incredibly specific statement about his own feelings, but write it in a way that made it sound like a general philosophy that he was applying to everyone. Then, right after concluding the thought, he would say “But please don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean that everyone feels this way, just me” or some such thing. I found this maddening. One of the reasons I love Murakami is because he is able to write about something very specific, like the inner thoughts of a disaffected 30-year-old married salaryman protagonist, living in Tokyo, with an earlobe fetish and a penchant for Miles Davis, and still have his story resonate with millions of different people from all over the world. And he was still able to do that when he was writing about his very specific experience running from Athens to Marathon. Even though I have never done any such thing, he still managed to convey a set of thoughts that I could understand and identify with. But when he would go off on these weird general philosophical tangents about “how one writes” or “why people run,” he would end up sounding trite and even kind of cheesy.

In one of the chapters of this book he gave his answer to the question “What do you think about when you are running?” He described a kind of void in which he was thinking about nothing at all. For me personally, when I’m running long distances my mind starts to wander all sorts of places. Sometimes I’ll be listening to a podcast about a topic I find interesting and my mind will still wander off to some distant land of future photography projects or what I would sing to piss off Simon Cowell in the unlikely event that I found myself on American Idol (answer: “You Love It” by Peaches). I got the same kind of feeling while reading this book. I would go through a couple of pages and then realize that I had been thinking the entire time about what I wanted for lunch the next day and had absorbed almost nothing of what I had read.

One thing Murakami and I have in common is that we’re both more well-suited to long-distance running than any other athletic discipline. Team sport require other people, and running short distances generally require speed and acceleration. Long-distance running, on the other hand, is a solitary pursuit that allows a person a generous amount of time to really get into a groove. Another reason I love it is because it allows you a lot of time to think. Running short distances taxes your heart and your lungs. When I’m out of breath and my heart is beating out of my chest, I can’t think of anything other than pulling in air. During long distance runs, however, I’m often breathing just fine, but my muscles are screaming in pain to stop. And that’s when I generally decide to let my mind wander. For instance, yesterday, instead of thinking about the pain running up and down my exhausted thighs, I worked myself up into a lather over the show Heroes. Stark and I have been watching the first season on DVD and it has quickly gone from mildly entertaining, to unbelievably stupid, to infuriating.

The writers of this show are clearly the laziest bastards in Hollywood. What first drove me crazy about this show was the lack of continuity in the plot or the characters, the blatantly inaccurate science, and the scary eugenics-laced voice overs. I am all for suspending disbelief and for comic book-style adventures, but if you’re going to make up a universe different from ours, keep it consistent within itself. And if you’re going to use our universe, do a decent job of researching it. I’m sure the entire show has Darwin rolling in his grave. Poor misused and maligned Darwin. If you’re going to mention Darwin, at least bother to read his books. And if you’re going to base your entire show on the Human Genome Project, at least read a few Wikipedia entries on genetics. IT’S NOT THAT DIFFICULT. If you don’t feel like following the laws of science, then make up your own. Don’t mangle real science! I dropped out of bio in college and I’m far from an expert, so if even I can spot the gaping holes in your understanding of genes and find that nothing you’ve said has made ANY SENSE, then… well, your show is basically crap.

This complete lack of understanding of genetics pales in comparison to the blatant plagiarism by the writers of this show. Basically the entire plot is cobbled together from plot elements of The Watchmen and The X-Men, but with none of the power or the meaning. As an unpopular queer nerd growing up, X-Men was really important to me. The oppressed and persecuted mutants were symbols of any and every group of Others, and when the comic tackled AIDS and how conservative politics and fear can lead even the most well-meaning society down a very dark road to genocide, it was powerful. It had meaning. It was saying something. Heroes, on the other hand, has no political stance, has no higher meaning, and says nothing. It exploits the imagery of the Holocaust and of 9/11 to go for sensationalism and ratings. It makes evil trivial and human tragedy just a neat plot twist. There was more emotional resonance in an old episode of the Saturday morning X-Men cartoon than in an entire season of this inane show. Ugh. I would love to hear from the people who like this show. It seems so popular these days and I have no idea why.

Another thing I was thinking about while my legs were setting themselves on fire was the book Slow River, by Nicola Griffith. I loved this book – it hit all my kinks and is definitely now up there in my list of favorite books of all time. As I was running, I was thinking about this book in comparison to another of my favorite books, Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood. They don’t have a lot in common in terms of plot, but in the way they depict the future, I think that Oryx is sort of like the pessimistic side of the same coin. Which is not to say that Slow River is a completely optimistic vision of the future, but I guess anything is optimistic when compared to Oryx & Crake, which is one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read.

Both visions of the future are continuations of the world we live in now – with ineffectual governments controlled by corporate interests, an exploding population fast outstripping available resources, a rapidly decaying ecosystem, and a technology and entertainment obsessed society unwilling to deal with the problems ahead. Margaret Atwood concludes that this track leads to complete and utter destruction by way of Chicky-Nobs. Oh boy, thanks a lot for the nightmares, Margaret. Nicola Griffith creates a world in which, once business interests realize there’s money to be made in saving the planet, society survives, albeit mired in even more debt to greedy corporations. Although the prospect of total devastation and destruction is a wee bit more terrifying than living in a world that is just a slightly more dilapidated version of the one we live in now, I find the world of Slow River to be an equally meaningful rebuke of the way wealthy countries are currently behaving. “Keep watching American Idol on your iPod while corporate lobbying groups continue to burrow their way into the government,” this books seems to warn, “and you’ll have no one to blame but yourself when hospitals and schools and even wars are run by contractors and you have to pay Monsanto for the privilege of not dying from eating a salad.”

Slow River, written in 1995, is eerily prescient. While many of the more popular contemporary sci-fi and cyberpunk authors were so excited by the rapid advance of computers that their books read now like quaint mash notes to virtual reality and jacking-in, this book has become only more relevant with age.