A Man Called Ove (2014) by Fredrik Backman

Ove, our narrator, is a grouchy old man, overly obsessed with following the rules. He's curmudgeonly and close-minded. However, he represents something all people should aspire to: He knows exactly who he is and what he wants.

He’s never understood young people who natter on about “finding themselves.” He used to hear that nonstop from all those thirty-year-olds at work. All they ever talked about was how they wanted more “leisure time,” as if that was the only point of working: to get to the point when one didn’t have to do it.

In this fashion he's somewhat of a mythical creature. Since a very early age Ove has consciously recognized his strengths: He's a handyman; good with machines and desiring of work that allows him to use his hands to fix a problem. So Ove needs very little to be happy; a job that allows him to diagnose problems, tinker, and arrive at solutions.

Ove is fallible in that he is a wholly concrete thinker. There is no room for the abstract in Ove's world. Everything he does makes sense on paper. The problem with this, of course, is that human beings often don't. So Ove finds himself struggling, particularly when dealing with people. I enjoyed this aspect of the book and, indeed, found its narrator to be compelling for this purpose. Backman continues to throw colorful characters at Ove, and it's enjoyable watching him respond. Ove could easily have fallen prey to cliché, but his touching moments when dealing with people who are worlds different from him made for some nice twists in Ove's story:

He’s silent. And then they both stand there, the fifty-nine-year-old and the teenager, a few yards apart, kicking at the snow. As if they were kicking a memory back and forth, a memory of a woman who insisted on seeing more potential in certain men than they saw in themselves. Neither of them knows what to do with their shared experience.

A Man Called Ove is cloying at times, and obviously shoots for for sentimentality, but the character of Ove's back is strong enough to bear the brunt of it, and Backman—earnest in what he's set out to do—is a skilled enough writer in his tuned-down, low-key way that it all somehow works without feeling like it's trying too hard:

“I feel so much loss, Ove. Loss, as if my heart was beating outside my body.” They stood in silence for a long time, with their arms around each other. And at long last she lifted her face towards his, and looked into his eyes with great seriousness. “You have to love me twice as much now,” she said. And then Ove lied to her for the second—and last—time: he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn’t possible for him to love her any more than he already did.

A Man Called Ove is ultimately a very light read, but it's earnest and it's happy, and we could all use a bit of that these days. It doesn't quite reach the happy-go-lucky heights of something like Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, but it strives for it, and it doesn't strive poorly, and sometimes that's enough. Highly recommendable to pretty much everyone, easy to read, and competently crafted.

⭐⭐⭐

Abaddon's Gate (2013) (The Expanse, #3) by James S.A. Corey

There's a cardinal sin of fiction in which the writer (or in this case, writers) stop using their characters to work through questions and predicaments they find interesting, and begin using them to lecture their readers and pontificate instead on the solutions the writers believe to be correct. If I want to be instructed, I'll read non-fiction. When I pick up fiction, it's to exercise my empathy muscle and to gain valuable context to use via the lived experience of others, so that I may arrive at my own conclusions with as much information and emotional experience as possible. Fiction provides this in a way which non-fiction does not; it allows us to experience emotions that we'd never be in a position to experience in real life. I will likely never travel in a space ship. I will surely (hopefully?) never come into contact with alien technology. I will likely never be in a crew like the one in the Rocinante, nor will I experience a political conflict like the one between Earth and Mars. I read series like Expanse to try and sample how I might apply my own moral compass in reaction to such things. I don't read it to have the authors tell me how I should be solving the problems that arise within this world.

I bring this up because a strength of Corey's Expanse series is its characters. The crew of the Rocinante work really well together on the page. They have a really endearing dynamic, and each are memorable in their own way. They call forth a Kingesque vibe of the lovable losers; people who are altogether competent, but have suffered some downturn in their lives which have placed them on the path of the less fortunate. It's enjoyable riding along with them and watching them grow. They feel like friends.

Unfortunately there are notable instances in this book in which certain characters stop talking like themselves, and start speaking with the voice of the authors. You can feel the writers' hands on the scales as they artificially manipulate dialogue and character interaction to make a point, which is never good. Nobody wants to feel like they're reading propaganda, and at times that's what Expanse feels like. Of course, some great writers do this quite often, but James S.A. Corey—in my opinion—are not skilled enough writers to pull it off in a way which feels natural. Done wrong, it's crippling. And in Expanse, it's jarring and immersion-breaking, causing me to wonder where the characters I've known and grown to like have gone, and why the authors are choosing so obviously to insert their own voices in these characters' mouths. Characters will pull a complete one-eighty on a decision they've just made in less than a page, and suddenly say something like "wow, jeez, I am such an asshole! That was wrong of me!". This is clearly not a natural piece of character growth—it's the author appearing within the story, and letting the reader know they think their character is being an asshole and is wrong. True change in a deeply held opinion does not occur like this in human beings; people will often break before they bend. True change in opinion requires catastrophe, pain, tragedy, and James S.A. Corey do not seem to understand that. When things like this occur in the story, it breaks the characters completely, rendering them flimsy cardboard cut-outs of the human beings they used to be to us. And it's frequently glaringly obvious why the writers are doing it—They want to speak from on high to their readers by creating a contrived situation in which their character does something the writers find distasteful, and then continuing by lecturing their readers on how wrong it is through the mouth of said character. It's insulting and amateurish. Allow your characters to be human, and grant your readers the benefit of the doubt in that they might read the situation correctly. The best fiction presents complex, inspired problems and allows its characters to approach solving these problems from various different positions. If the writer is writing fiction to teach their readers a lesson, their fiction is probably shit.

Although I do enjoy the characters when they're themselves and not James S.A. Corey, Expanse's strength has always been in the fresh world Corey have created. It's nice reading a space opera which preserves the laws of physics, rather than handwaves them away with technology so advanced it may as well be magic (looking at you, Mass Effect). Expanse's political dynamic between Earth, Mars, and the belt is engrossing and intriguing, and it plays off of very human aspects such as prejudice, fear of the unknown, and greed. It all works really well and it's the single strongest aspect of this series that keeps me coming back.

In addition to their falling victim to speaking through their characters' mouths, Corey are not very skilled writers of prose. Maybe this is just me donning my book-snob hat for a go at the new and popular thing, but there are notable instances of clumsy prose that seem, to my ear, to require editing (and if anybody's an expert on shit prose, it's me, lemme tell ya).

It was the smart thing. The wise one. He was neither smart nor wise.

 

An hour or two with some structural steel and a couple welders and the place could be almost defensible. He hoped it wouldn’t need to be. Except that he hoped it would.

Egad.

I can excuse some shoddy sentences if the book is strongly plotted, and Expanse usually is. However I've noticed, particularly in Abaddon's Gate, that the authors have begun to press a thumb on the scale in their plotting in the same groan-inducing way they tend to speak through their characters' mouths in order to lecture their readers. There are multiple instances in Abaddon's Gate in which the plot is clearly manipulated by impossibly coincidental circumstances that challenge the reader's suspension of disbelief in order to get the plot to where the writers clearly want it to go. Characters will make unlikely jumps to conclusions in order to facilitate the decision the writers want them to make. Characters will show up just in the nick of time to save someone's life.

There's one particularly egregious instance at about the midway point of the book in which one of the key character's lives is at stake. At first I congratulated Corey, as killing this character would have taken admirable writing cojones, and the waves created from the character's death would have significantly impacted all of the characters in the story, thus changing several major characters and putting them on a darker turn and presenting them with new challenges that I'd have found fascinating, and further propelling them down the road of change.

But it doesn't happen. Instead of being a fantastic, growth-inducing moment, it's played for a cheap thrill, because ultimately, that's the kind of story Expanse is. When the chips are down, Corey make it clear that their story has no real aspirations of affecting its readers in a profound way. Instead, it becomes a schlocky, disposable network television soap opera. A character who has no reason to spare their victim suddenly hesitates for no reason, then another character shows up, coincidentally, just in the nick of time, and prevents the murder from occurring. It's really too bad, because such a turn would have been really intriguing.

This sort of thing happens regularly, and it's disappointing. This series was originally created as a world in which to set a roleplaying game, and it shows, because worldbuilding is the only thing it does truly well. Expanse could have been so much more. It could have been ambitious; the framework (its worldbuilding and character construction) is in place for it to become a space opera with literary aspirations, dedicated to exploring big ideas and challenging the humanity of its characters. Instead, it relies on flimsy and artificial character turns and clichéd, convenient plot turns. It leans too heavily on these ultimately disposable turns that serve only to get the reader's gander up for a dozen pages or so, before dissipating in a typically wimpy manner common to most low-effort fiction. Thus it ends up affecting nothing at all, and the entire series is relegated to an airport-read-for-nerds that will be forgotten just a few weeks after the reader has finished consuming it. 

Expanse is a sugary treat, one which is enjoyable at the moment, but ultimately not satiating in the same way a hearty meal such as A Song of Ice and Fire aspires to, and is. Despite what Corey frequently say, it has no true aspirations to telling a human story and affecting its readers. It just likes to think that it does. And so Expanse is, to me, one of the few works of fiction that makes for a better television series than it does a novel series.

⭐