Flowers of Darkness

Flowers of Darkness by Tatiana de Rosnay 256 pages

I’m still thinking about this novel almost a week after I finished reading it. It’s creepy and disturbing!

The story is set in the near-future in Paris (I peeked at other online reviews, and they guess the time frame to be somewhere anywhere from 10 to 50 years ahead.).  Life on the whole has not really changed that much, except that many of the world’s most recognizable landmarks are gone---having been bombed (The Eiffel Tower and the Sistine Chapel are two that are mentioned.) years earlier and climate change is in full bloom.

Clarissa Katsef has left her husband of twenty years because of his infidelity. She has applied for residency at one of the most high-apartment buildings in Paris, not that far from where the Eiffel Tower once stood. It’s a residence meant to encourage art---from musicians, to painters, to writers, to sculptors. Clarissa is a writer with several notable book to her name. She is accepted, to her surprise, and snags the top eighth floor apartment.

The apartment in very, very, very high-tech. It comes with a personal assistant, whom she has named Mrs. Dalloway, after her favorite writer Virginia Woolf.  Mrs. Dalloway is creepy al by herself! The residents are filmed at all times (for “security reasons”), except when they are in the toilet room and hit the option of “intimate mode” for sex while in the bedroom.

Clarissa is trying to figure out what direction her life should take. She has her daughter, Jordan, and her granddaughter, Andy, her first husband, Toby, and a cat named Chablis. Her current Francois is trying desperately to get her to come home. Clarissa had just walked out, leaving all her possessions behind.

It is Andy who first mentions the clicking noise and other odd happenings that Clarissa thought were the result of trying to write another book and the break-up of her marriage. Now Clarissa must investigate what in the heck she has gotten herself into. She makes friends with another resident, but he promptly disappears.

Intermixed with all this drama are a few journal entries where Clarissa tries to find Francois’ mistress, and what she discovers is horrifying and disturbing.  I won’t even get into that part of the novel.

Technology is great, it’s wonderful, but de Rosnay gives readers a peek into what our future holds that doesn’t really appeal to me.

 I don’t know really how to score this novel. I want to give it 5 stars since it has stuck with me; 3 stars for it’s creepy and disturbing nature. I can’t say I would recommend it, but I wouldn’t say whatever you do, don’t read this one. Therefore, Flowers of Darkness receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

Elementary Particles

The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Frank Wynne, 264 pages

Michel Houellebecq's novel of the twilight of Western civilization is the story of the nearly parallel lives of a pair of half-brothers, one focused on seemingly abstract scientific theories and phenomena, the other preoccupied with fantasies of sexual conquests, the former oddly detached, the latter pathetically desperate.  Each is, in related ways, less than fully human.

The Elementary Particles is a portrait of a dying world that has abandoned the intellectual and moral to pursue the physical to the exclusion of all else.  Houellebecq writes with a clinical objectivity, analyzing his characters rather than sympathizing - or inviting the reader to sympathize - with them.  Unfortunately, like Chuck Palahniuk, his attempts to shock his readers sometimes seem desperate.  The novel might be called pornographic in that it is explicit without being erotic, simultaneously obsessed with sex and pervaded by a sense of futility.  From this bleak vision, Houellebecq offers no hope of renewal or escape.

Submission

Submission by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Lorin Stein, 246 pages

Submission is the story of Francois, a professor at the Sorbonne specializing in the work of JK Huysmans.  He is a comfortable hedonist, a man who likes good food and enjoys a succession of girlfriends primarily drawn from the ranks of his students.  He is somewhat aware that there should be more to life than mere enjoyment, with both his beloved Huysmans and his own aging flesh constantly reminding him, but any change would require commitment - a conversion - and that he cannot make.  At least, not until an Islamist victory in the French elections puts the choice in starker terms, and Francois discovers that far from being incompatible with his yearnings for material comfort and security, submission may in fact be the key to a safe domesticity that fulfills his strongest desires, as limited as they are.

Houellebecq's novel is ambiguous in an intriguing rather than a frustrating manner.  His near-future history is reasonably plausible, at least in its broad outlines.  His Frenchified Islam is vague in its tenets - none of the newly converted Muslims seem to have any reluctance to consume alcohol, nor is it clearly explained where all these now polygamous men are going to get their supply of willing wives.  Most of all, the author's own attitude towards his protagonist's thoughts and actions is unclear - Francois is not nearly as autobiographical a creation as Huysmans' Durtal.  The result is an engrossing portrait of postmodern life, open to multiple interpretations.

Catholics

Catholics by Brian Moore, 107 pages

In the near future, the Fourth Vatican Council has declared the Mass to be merely symbolic and abolished personal confession.  In this atmosphere, a monastery off the coast of Ireland where the Mass is still said in Latin and private confession still practiced - for pastoral reasons - becomes a center of pilgrimage and media attention.  To forestall an ecumenical disaster that threatens to derail talks with the Buddhists, the Vatican dispatches a liberal American priest to squelch dissent at the monastery.  Father Kinsella must confront a cadre of true believers among the monks, as well as deal with the abbot, a man tormented by his own doubts and torn between personal judgement and the authority to which he has sworn obedience.

Catholics is a novella loaded with thick, gooey ambiguity, which is entirely appropriate given its time and theme.  First published in 1972, a mere seven years after the end of the Second Vatican Council, the novel asks what many Catholics and non-Catholics are still asking - whether the painful changes called for by the Council marked the beginning of a renewal of the Church, or the beginning of an end in which the Gates of Hell prevail at last.

Children of Men

The Children of Men by PD James, 241 pages

In the near future, the human race has suddenly, inexplicably become sterile.  Theodore Faron is an Oxford history professor, teaching ever-dwindling numbers of ever-aging students, increasingly a relic of the past in a world that has no future.  His only child died as a toddler in a tragic accident, and his role in the accident destroyed his marriage.  When a former student asks him to deliver a message to his cousin Xan, the dictatorial Marshal of England, he reluctantly obliges, never suspecting that events are already conspiring to turn the ineffectual resistance group to which she belongs into the most important people on the planet.

James, best known as a mystery writer, is trying something different here, though like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with which it shares much, The Children of Men is not really a science fiction novel - the unexplained apocalypse is only a background intended to throw themes into sharp relief.  James pulls this off superbly, creating a fast-paced story with memorable characters and an ambiguous ending that leaves the readers asking the same questions the author has been asking all along.

California

California by Edan Lepucki
320 Pages

In the near future society in the United States has crumbled into  a series of walled communities who primary commodity is safety.  Cal and Frida don't live in a community but in an isolated rural area.  When Frida discovers she is pregnant she starts to desire other company than just Cal.  So they set out to the nearest settlement.  It seems things will be better in the company of others but secrets begin to emerge that are disturbing to the couple.

You don't really get too much of why the United States has failed except for mention of a series of calamities.  This is more a quiet novel about the nature of man when the thin veneer of civilization cracks.

Afterparty

Afterparty by Daryl Gregory
302 Pages

Lyda Rose leaves the sanitarium after a fellow patient kills herself after suffering from withdrawal from a new brain-altering drug called Numinous which lets you feel the presence of God.  This drug is too close to the one Lyda Rose took years earlier that left with a permanent guardian angel that only she can see.  Lyda feels obligated to track down from where this new drug is coming.

Set in the near future where any drug can be printed on a chem-jet printer this novel has some humor and some interesting premises.