Submergence/Red Moon I must say I was not expecting to see so much in common between two books that couldn’t more different. Red Moon is a literary horror-thriller, werewolf-9/11 novel built on the same chapter ending suspense breaks as Dan Brown novels and CSI episodes. For five hundred fast-paced pages we follow more than half a dozen characters on all sides of the “struggle for resistance” as an underground network of lycan extremists in the US hatch terrorist plots in retaliation against American occupation of the Lycan Republic. There’s the sole survivor of the book’s opening 9/11-style attacks get roped right back into the guerrilla warfare; a college-bound lycan teenager flees from anti-terror squads and right into the hands of extremists; and a macho Oregon Governor’s strict anti-lycan rhetoric and policies put him in the crosshairs. Needless to say things go bad very quickly for just about everyone involved. But if I only wanted an exciting read I’m sure there’s plenty of horror pulp out there for me. What makes Red Moon so interesting is how it turns what would otherwise be a straight-to-video monster movie into a sophisticated comment on US foreign policy, the treatment of minorities, and the snowball effect of extremism and extreme homeland (in)security. Moreover the characters are placed in increasingly dire circumstances where their sympathies towards both sides are complicated, leaving them with difficult choices for how to act. You know, the stuff of literature. And the writing itself rolls at a confident clip without a lazy sentence to be found in almost the entire thing. Percy’s a fan of the strong verb. Everyone is spooning their cereal, shouldering doors, knuckling blood from their cheeks. All of which adds up to a reading experience that is smart and fun feels easy to read. Submergence, on the other hand, is a book-length lyric essay/Economist article about deep-sea microbiology and undercover ops paced like a Richard Linklater film. The book is about a man and a woman who fell together for a brief but emotionally lasting encounter one Christmas on the coast of France and the ways their lives and intellectual persuits dovetail and diverge over time. James More is an undercover Secret Intelligence Service agent held captive by al-Qaeda near the coast of Somalia. Danielle Flinders is a biomathemetician and deep-sea explorer who studies the origins and effects of human life. Their story itself is rather simple as the book centers around their few days in France and the ripples it caused before and after. The only true plot excitement is in the form of a spy thriller that acts more as a backdrop for ideas than an engine for the book. What makes the book interesting isn’t so much what happens to these characters as what happens to you, the reader. The book attempts a fundamental adjustment of your perspective, trying to access the scope of not only human existence but the existence of life and the universe. It’s like that picture of earth as a tiny white point in the blackness of space, both humbling and inspiring at the same time. But that’s not to say that the book is only concerned with nature and idea or that people don’t matter. We matter immensely, immeasurably, particularly to one another. What’s remarkable is about it is the way Ledgard makes you care about these two near strangers and the mystery of their near-instant connection, the intimacy of it, the overwhelming emotion, only to place that as a marker of scale of the entire history and future of time. When you have to hold both of those two things in your mind at once you, if you’re anything like me, break down, overwhelmed. It’s a truth our minds are probably too small to hold onto but one that you can feel in your stomach by the time you finish reading. There’s a weight to the book—emotionally and intellectually—that is almost too much to bear. Because these books seem outwardly so different I was surprised to find they contain similar content (terrorist plots, a character we care about held hostage), thematic concerns (nature, the human as animal, extremism), and formal ambitions (to break out of genre and expand what is possible). The conversation between that was much more lively that I could have imagined. Reading though Red Moon and thinking about is in light of Submergence I noticed things I would have otherwise missed about both. The pondering intellectualism of a book about werewolves. The slow burn thriller of a prisoner waiting to escape in a novel about biomathematics and history. I love that these books both have a sense of scope, an impression of scale, and most of all remarkable ambition. Fortunately, for me, the winner is easy to choose. Red Moon is a thrilling novel well told with depth of character, emotion, and ideas. But for me it never felt surprising, there wasn’t much for me to do. It was packaged in a form I was familiar with which felt like I wasn’t really given something new. Submergence challenged me, asked that I align seemingly disparate elements myself, hold a contradiction in my mind and my heart at once. It broken open new ideas for form, for how to frame fiction, for how to talk about the human condition. I was entertained by Red Moon and enjoyed the experience of reading it a lot but Submergence is the book that will haunt me. For that I vote it the winner.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 02:19:09 +0000
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