Fatherland - R. Harris

The year is 1964. Germany has reigned supreme since Hitler's victory in World War II, and Berlin is gearing up to celebrate Der Fuhrer's seventy-fifth birthday. Homicide investigator Xavier March is called out of bed early one morning after a corpse is found on the muddy bank of Lake Havel. When he discovers that the dead man was once a high-ranking Nazi, March is told to turn the case over to the Gestapo, and he realizes that this is anything but a routine investigation. Continuing his inquiries against orders, March uncovers a chilling conspiracy designed to erase all evidence of an unbelievable atrocity - something so inhuman, even the powerful Third Reich might not survive once the truth is revealed. Divorced, still trying to be a father to a son who longs to join the Hitler Youth organization, Xavier March is the antithesis of the obedient German citizen - a disillusioned Sturmbannfuhrer driven to find the truth at any cost. Although his son calls him "an asocial," March is able to elicit help in his investigation from his office-mate Max Jaeger, his old U-boat comrade Rudolf Halder, and a young American journalist named Charlotte Maguire. March's most mysterious ally is Artur Nebe, head of the Reich Kriminalpolizei - a man who understands that knowledge is power. "You're not telling the truth, are you? Or at least, not all of it," Nebe says to March. "That's good." Published in 1992, Fatherland has been compared to Martin Cruz Smith's "Gorky Park," and to the work of John le Carre. If Ian Fleming and George Orwell had ever collaborated, this is the kind of novel that they would have co-written - a thriller laced with pulse-pounding intrigue, set within the confines of a soot-streaked bureaucracy, a paranoid and fearful society where children show more loyalty to the State than to their own parents. Winston Smith from "1984" would feel right at home in Harris' novel. What else can one say about Fatherland after showering the book with praise and urging others to read it? Its plot, pacing, characters, dialogue, and impeccable research are all above reproach. If forced to find fault with the novel, one might say that March's investigation uncovers a dark part of recorded human history, and so the reader sees through the mystery while March is struggling to understand the evidence he has collected. Still, by presenting March's findings piece by piece, Harris forces readers to reconsider Nazi atrocities as if for the first time. Paradoxically, by presenting facts and authentic documents in the guise of fiction, Harris makes history come alive. Fatherland was Robert Harris' first novel, and remains a remarkable achievement.

I am legend - R. Matheson

The story takes place between January 1976 and January 1979 in Southern California. The novel opens with the monotony and horror of the daily life of the protagonist, Robert Neville. Neville is apparently the only survivor of an apocalypse caused by a pandemic of bacteria, the symptoms of which are similar to vampirism. He spends every day repairing his house, boarding up windows, stringing and hanging garlic, disposing of vampires' corpses on his lawn and going out to gather any additional supplies needed for hunting and killing more vampires.
Much of the story is devoted to Neville's struggles to understand the plague that has infected everyone around him, and the novel details the progress of his discoveries.
One day a dog appears in the neighborhood. Neville spends weeks trying to win its trust and domesticate it. He eventually traps the terrified dog and wins it over, but it dies from the vampire infection a week later.
As the story progresses, it is revealed that some infected people have discovered a means to hold the disease at bay. However, the "still living" people appear no different from the true vampire during the day while both are immobilized in sleep. Thus, along with the vampires, Neville kills the still living people. He becomes a source of terror to the still living, since he can go around in daylight (which they can only do for a short length of time using a special pill) and kill them while they sleep.
They send a still living woman named Ruth to spy on Neville, and they replicate Neville's relationship with the dog. Ruth, terrified of Neville at first sight, goes against her role of spying on him and runs away. Rather than spend weeks trying to win her over, he attacks her and drags her back to his house. Eventually Neville performs a blood test on her, revealing her true nature to him right before she knocks him out with a mallet. Ruth leaves a note telling him about the group of people like her, explaining that she was sent to spy and how monstrous he appears to them. Months later, the still living people attack, injuring Neville, but taking him alive so that he can be executed in front of everyone in the new society (which Neville finds very primitive).
Before he can be executed, Ruth provides him with an envelope of pills. Neville takes the pills to commit suicide before the still living execute him. As he dies he reflects on how the new society of the living infected regards him as a monster. Just as vampires were regarded as legendary monsters that preyed on the vulnerable humans in their beds, Neville has become a mythical figure that kills both vampires and the infected living while they are sleeping. He becomes a legend as the vampires once were, hence the title "I Am Legend".

Influences
I Am Legend influenced the vampire genre and popularized the fictional concept of a worldwide apocalypse due to a disease. Although classified as a vampire story and referred to as "the first modern vampire novel. Legend made an impression on the zombie genre by way of film director George A. Romero. Romero has acknowledged the influence of the novel and its 1964 adaptation on his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Critics have also picked up on similarities between Night and Last Man on Earth.[5][6]
Stephen King said, "without Richard Matheson I wouldn’t be around."[7] Some film critics have noted that the 2002 British film 28 Days Later and its sequel 28 Weeks Later, which feature a rabies-like plague that ravages Great Britain, are similar to the scenario in I Am Legend.[8] The recasting of undead creatures as disease victims is also comparable to recent zombie media such as the Resident Evil series, the Blade trilogy, and the 1984 B movie Night of the Comet.
A straight-to-DVD film by The Asylum called I Am Omega was released at the same time as the 2007 film I Am Legend.

1985 - A. Burgess

At the novella's beginning, the protagonist, Bev Jones, confronts the death of his wife. She was in hospital when it caught fire. As the firemen's union was striking, the hospital burned to the ground. (In reality, the UK firemen's union had taken industrial action for the first time ever, in 1977, presumably when Burgess was writing the novella.) Bev is left alone with his special needs daughter Bessie, who is thirteen years old but sexually precocious and unable to comprehend the difference between reality and fantasy, due to a thalidomide-like drug taken by her pregnant mother.
The death of his wife engenders in Bev a deep-seated hostility towards the union system - her last words were, "Don't let them get away with it". This is however not the first time Bev has been forced to oppose, for he had previously been a history lecturer who stepped down as his work was considered expendable by the union-based system which favoured education of practical value.
Employed at as confectioner, he goes to work one day despite his union being on strike. For working during a strike, his union membership is revoked, making him effectively unemployable. Knowing that he will soon lose his home, he takes Bessie to a state-run facility where she will be cared for with other girls like herself.
Bev then becomes something of a vagrant, travelling around London and falling in with a group of similarly unemployable dissenters. With these, he engages in petty theft from shops in order to survive. Apprehended during one such sortie, he is sentenced to re-education at a state institution, which is neither a prison nor a psychiatric hospital, but contains elements of both.
At the re-education centre, Bev is subjected to propaganda films and lectures, which have the aim of converting him into a useful member of society (a theme which Burgess also examines in A Clockwork Orange). He meets the powerful union official Pettigrew, who warns Bev that his day is over and that unionisation is the future of Britain. Despite this, Bev is unconverted and - having served his sentence - leaves as a free man.
Having been informed that Bessie will be ejected from the care facility because he refuses to recant his beliefs, he returns to London. In need of an income and a place to live, he joins a network called The Free Britons, which aims to provide infrastructure and order during the increasing strike-related chaos sweeping Britain. Bev effectively sells his daughter as a wife to a wealthy sheik, who takes a fancy to her during a visit to the Al-Dorchester, reasoning that at least this way she will be safe and satisfied. Meanwhile, he discovers that The Free Briton is a front for an Islamic group aiming at the re-establishment of Britain as a Muslim state.
Bev, because of his education, is employed as the mouthpiece of the Free Britons and called upon to report on the events of the general strike. He is frustrated when his work is censored by the leader, a man known as Colonel Wallace. The spreading strike action reaches fever pitch and becomes a general strike, reported to the reader mostly in diary form. King Charles III takes command of the country as it grinds to a halt. A few months after the strike, Bev is arrested again and sentenced to life in a secure institution, which again is neither prison nor hospital. The only way out of this facility is to be retrieved by a family member.
There, he revives his teaching career by giving informal history lessons to other prisoners. As the years stretch on, his syllabus (which had started with Anglo Saxon England) passes through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and approaches modern times.
Snippets of news often circulate among the inmates, some of which suggest that the Muslim conversion of Britain is well-advanced (for example, it is claimed that inhabitants of the Isle of Man have recently discovered that a stimulant-depressant drug has been replacing alcohol in their beer for several years, in line with Muslim prohibitions). There is however no way in which the inmates can verify whether these news items are correct.
Bev finds it increasingly difficult to explain the continuity of history in terms of the present. Unable to do so, Bev suggests that they can start over again and work their way back to the present, after which his class spontaneously dismisses itself. Alone at night, Bev slips out of the dormitory in which he sleeps, creeps out into the grounds of the institution and kills himself by deliberately touching the electric fence.

Them who?

Don't believe them for a moment
For a second, do not believe, my friend

When you are down, them are not coming

With a helping hand

Of course there is no us and them

But them they do not think the same

It's them who do not think

They never step on spiritual path

They paint their faces so differently from ours

And if you listen closely

That war it never stops

Be them new Romans

Don't envy them my friend

Be their lives longer

Their longer lives are spent

Without a love or faithful friend

All those things they have to rent

But we who see our destiny

In sound of this same old punk song

Let rest originality for sake of passing it around

Illuminating realization number one:

You are the only light there is

For yourself my friend

There'll be no saviors any soon coming down

And anyway illuminations

Never come from the crowned

Illuminating realization number one:

You are the only light there is

For yourself my friend

eXistenZ

eXistenZ, the latest from iconoclastic director David Cronenberg (Crash, Dead Ringers, The Fly), looks at the dangers of virtual reality. The movie seems to have been designed as a cautionary tale, and, as such, contains elements of pointed satire. Unfortunately, the production as a whole has a disjointed feel, and the flaw is compounded by several ill-advised casting decisions, a meandering middle act, and an ending that cheats the audience by employing the kind of plot twist that just about anyone can see coming from a mile away. Because of the potential of the idea and Cronenberg's reputation as a film maker, it's a real disappointment to watch eXistenZ fall apart the way it does.
eXistenZ also suffers from the distinction of being the weakest of three films, all released within a month's time, to toy with the line dividing reality from fantasy. Both The Matrix and Open Your Eyes do similar things to those that Cronenberg attempts, but with far greater success. Consequently, eXistenZ comes across like a wannabe toying in an arena where the real players have already displayed their superior skills.
The movie's opening is promising. We're introduced to Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the shy designer of a breakthrough virtual reality game called "eXistenZ" (pronounced like "existence" with the accents in all the wrong places). On this night, set some time in the near future, she is about to test the game with 12 randomly selected players chosen from a live audience. While their bio ports (holes in their lower backs that allow direct access to the spinal cord) are being connected to one of 12 "metaflesh game pods", Allegra describes eXistenZ as being a "whole new game system" that expands the concept of virtual reality. No sooner has she started the demonstration game, however, than shots ring out. A member of the audience, shouting gibberish and waving a bizarre gun, attempts to assassinate Allegra.
She is whisked out of harm's way by Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a marketing trainee for Antenna Research, the company that Allegra works for. Soon, the pair are on the run from persons unknown. To complicate matters, eXistenZ was damaged during the assassination attempt, and Allegra needs help entering the system and making sure that it's intact. When she decides that she can trust Ted, she enlists his aid, but there's a problem: he doesn't possess a bio port, so they have to find someone who can install one illegally. Their quest leads them to a strange corner gas station run by an oddball (Willem Dafoe) then to the hide-out of a scientist living in the woods (Ian Holm).
It's after the movie shifts to the world within eXistenZ that things start to crumble. Put simply, it's not a very compelling fake reality. There are lots of weird, squishy "mutated amphibians" running around, and much of the so-called action takes place in an old trout farm or at a Chinese restaurant. There are conspiracies and double-crosses, and the requisite confusion about what's authentic and what isn't. (When Allegra and Ted exit the game at one point, have they really departed, or is the game just making them - and us - think they've left?) By the time the film limps to the ending, we're expecting at least one of the climactic twists, and its obviousness leaves a bad taste. It probably would have been more interesting for Cronenberg not to employ such an transparent "surprise."
Casting is another problem. In presenting Allegra as an introvert who would rather immerse herself in eXistenZ than face the real world, the versatile Jennifer Jason Leigh is virtually the only actor to create a credible character. Jude Law (the "donor" in Gattaca), as Allegra's game-playing partner and potential lover, is bland - hardly the type of personality we want for a hero. Law may be a better actor than Keanu Reeves (who fulfilled a similar function in The Matrix), but, when it comes to screen presence, he's inferior. The gifted Ian Holm is saddled with a ridiculous Eastern European accent (it's so outlandish that the script jokes about it) and a miniscule role. Also criminally underused are Willem Dafoe and Sarah Polley (who can currently be seen in Go). There's a lot of sexual imagery in the film, especially in the way that Cronenberg equates game playing with the sex act (the symbolism - of a plug being inserted into the bio port - is more than a little heavy-handed), and the superlative set design is an undeniable asset. However, while not exactly wasted, this production element could have been used in the service of a better-realized script. eXistenZ's overall message - presumably a warning about the addictive nature of games that draw players away from reality - isn't exactly new. In fact, the same ideas were presented in a more compelling and controversial fashion several years ago in the James Cameron/Katherine Bigelow collaboration, Strange Days. Cronenberg, who is known for pushing the envelope, shows surprising restraint here, which may be a mistake, since he fails to accomplish anything noteworthy with a premise that, at first glance, seems foolproof. While eXistenZ contains a few enjoyable sequences (most of which occur during the first 30 minutes - I liked the development of Allegra's character and the introduction of the "Corner Gas Station"), the overall impression is of a missed opportunity. Fans of the director will probably be divided about eXistenZ's merits and impact, but most everyone else will find this to be a meandering and pointless exercise in duping an audience.

Review by J. Berardinelli