Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolfe

In a strange contradiction, I both didn’t care for this book and at the same time couldn’t put it down. The book has such abrupt direction changes between sections at times it feels more like a collection of short stories with a common hero than an actual novel. The first person narration is flat and unemotional, but instead of being boring it fits the character as his training to be a torturer is supposed to numb his feelings. The plot staggers between vignettes rather clumsily, but an undertone of commentary on humanity is a constant throughout; being delivered through the words of someone causing intentional pain for a living give the analysis a solid weight. Religion, for instance, is aptly summed up: “the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.”

While I found the plot pedestrian, the writing itself is magnificent. “The vanishing sun, whose disc was now a quarter concealed behind the impenetrable blackness of the Wall, had dyed the sky with gamboge and cerise, vermillion and lurid violet. These colors, falling upon the throng of monomachists and loungers much as we see the aureate beams of divine favor fall on heirarchs in art, lent them an appearance insubstantial and thaumaturgic, as though they had all been produced a moment before by the flourish of a cloth and would vanish into the air again at a whistle.” This rich verbiage kept me enthralled throughout, even where the actual story flagged. The ending is entirely too brusque; I understand this is the first volume of a tetralogy, but the plot simply stops dead with the narrator literally taking a break from the storytelling. “Here, I pause. If you wish to walk no farther with me, reader, I cannot blame you.” Glad to know I won’t be blamed, as I don’t expect to read the next book.

First Sentence:

It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future.

Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

I read Kidnapped when in grade school and didn’t really care for it; I somehow decided that all of Stevenson’s works would be similar and so didn’t pick up Treasure Island until just now. What a mistake! Interesting and suspenseful, Stevenson’s story starts out with the arrival of a mysterious seaman and and doesn’t slow down until it’s finished. The adventure is the prototypical quest: a mysterious treasure map is discovered, and the ensuing hunt leads to mutiny and piracy on the high seas. The narrator is (save for two odd chapters right in the middle of the book) young Jim Hawkins and while his telling of the tale is fairly straightforward, the underlying coming-of-age tale is interesting in its own right. Jim’s father dies in the early chapters, and he has several different potential role models, including Long John Silver. At first the pirate presents himself as an honorable man, but as the story unfolds Jim begins to see Silver for who is really is and lets his morals guide him to the truth.

This is clearly aimed at younger boys—Jim’s mother is the only female character and she is out of the picture after just a few chapters. The writing is straightforward and uncomplicated, but at the same time quite effective and descriptive. Take this description of Billy Bones, the pirate who initially possesses the map: “A tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the saber cut across one cheek, a dirty livid white.” The imagery is powerful and makes the character easy to visualize, but the simple words are comfortable for readers of nearly any age. The plot isn’t complicated either, but amazingly compelling—I had a difficult time putting it down! A true classic, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.

First Sentence:

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17— and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.

The Execution Channel, by Ken Macleod

In a world right around the corner from ours, our leaders have seemingly stopped the pretense of serving for the greater good and use lies and torture as a matter of course. The Internet is even more prevalent than today, with many WikiLeaks-style sites, some real and some designed for misinformation. There is a cable station on every network broadcasting executions 24 hours a day, both legitimizing and making normal death as an accepted form of governing. When Scotland experiences a nuclear bombing, who can you trust?

Part Nineteen Eighty-Four and part V for Vendetta, MacLeod tells of a dark future, but not an impossible one. While clearly anti-conservative, the author neatly sidesteps being pigeonholed as a leftist by having Gore win the 2000 election and launch a pre-emptive strike on Afghanistan (partly due to bad intelligence, but possibly also as a way of driving up oil prices to stave off global warming) causing Bin Laden to become a martyr and 9/11 becomes a response to Gore’s warfare rather than coming out of the clear blue sky. Regardless of the instigating actions, people cede more and more authority to government resulting in the beginnings of a police state—clearly an allegory for what is happening in our world today. This is an angry book warning of the dangers of our current course, but also tells an entertaining story along the way.

First Sentence:

The day it happened Travis drove north.

When the Air Hits Your Brain, by Frank Vertosick Jr., MD

Normally, arrogant surgeons and a cynical medical industry are not high on my list of interesting topics. Dr. Vertosick’s horror stories of his medical residency in this field held my attention, though. Routine 100 hour weeks, grueling schedules, and cruel instructors are the norm; a far cry from spending more time on the golf course than in the office! The subject did make this hard for me to read at times, however. A neurosurgeon saved my wife’s life in 1998, and this memoir brought back more than a few difficult memories.

Overall, my low opinions of a self-centered profession weren’t changed. “As I resuscitated a heart attack victim in the ER hallway one night, another patient came up to me, pointed to my expiring patient, and asked if I had tried intracardiac epinephrine yet. I curtly told him to mind his own business and sent him to his own ER cubicle, then promptly loaded up the intracardiac syringe and followed his advice. The patient lived.” This anecdote was presented as a bit of humor (it was bookended with what laymen can learn from television) but I just see a disturbing lack of humility. A second story, though, proved much, much worse.

The author is asked to watch over a baby girl just coming out of a touchy surgery, being told if she could live through the night she had a chance for recovery. He spends a sleepless night making impossible choices between drugs with terrible side effects, only to fall asleep before 5am. When awoken, he finds the baby gone and the surgeon standing over him.
     “Where’s the baby? Did she go back to the OR?”
     “No. I shut off her ventilator an hour ago. She’s in the morgue. Actually, her parents wanted her shut off last night before I left, but I forgot.”
Turns out the family already knew their child’s surgery had failed and the kid was going to die. This other doctor, though, ignored their wishes in order to teach a lesson to Vertosick about pressure. Never mind the extra pain and suffering the helpless baby experienced. I can only imagine the hospital charged the unfortunate family for the drugs, bed space, nurses, and anything else they could manage for the extra night. This reinforces virtually every negative opinion about the medical community I have. Meh.

That said, Vertosick seems to understand this negative stereotype and often counters by showing the more human side of medicine. Take the tale of a young woman involved in a serious car wreck and needing immediate neurosurgery; her parents appear in the trauma room. “To me, she was as much a bureaucratic nuisance as she was a patient. To them, she was a first step, a first word, a first bicycle, a first date.” While too many medical professionals seem to focus more on the nuisance than the emotional side, it is nice to see that at least they recognize there are multiple points of view to every situation. The story with the most impact detailed a patient who needed surgery to live, but the operation would require the termination of her pregnancy. The mother-to-be refused to trade her life for her unborn child’s; the narrative ends with the epitaph, “Sarah Clark. Loving Wife. Devoted Mother.” Hard to read that without thinking about how close I came to being a single father.

In When the Air Hits Your Brain, Vertosick demonstrates both the positive and negative aspects of how a neurosurgeon is trained, and humanizes an arrogant profession. While I am clearly not a cheerleader for our health care system, I am thankful each day that Dr. Gormley made it through his neurosurgical residency and was there when my family was in need.

First Sentence:

July 1. Neurosurgery residency.