Gun, With Occasional Music : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Noir, With Frequent Weirdness
Review: "Gun, With Occasional Music" is my first Jonathan Lethem book, and it certainly won't be my last. Although reading just one of his books hardly ranks me as an expert on his career, I will say that this story about a private detective in a future, dystopian nightmare will probably be one of the most unusual experiences you'll ever have with a book (unless you make a habit of reading quirky, ultra bizarre fiction). Lethem must have been the product of a union between Raymond Chandler and William Burroughs, with genetic material donated by Dashiell Hammett and Aldous Huxley. That's the only way to describe this amazing blend of noir, science fiction, and political commentary. "Gun, With Occasional Music" is the type of book you introduce your friends to in order to see their reaction after they finish it.

Lethem's future is one in which I would not want to visit, let alone live in. For private investigator Conrad Metcalf, this nightmare is the only world he knows. What's so bad about this author's horrific visions? In the world of tomorrow, society is quite different from the world we know. For one thing, animals (rabbits, sheep, kangaroos, and cats) now walk upright, speak, commit crimes, and work. It's all a part of what authorities call "evolving," and it isn't just about the animals. Human infants take part in the hijinks as well, since society decided that it takes too long for people to grow up. The result is "babyheads," infants that speak, smoke, and drink thanks to massive infusions of growth hormones. As if that's not enough to cause you screaming fits, and apparently many of the people in this brave new world feel like screaming about it, the authorities provide "make," a drug used to modify behavior. Moreover, people can make their own blends of the drug, adding such great substances as forgettol so they don't have to remember their miserable existence. Those brave souls who wish to challenge the system, or the innocents just caught in police nets, face the dread terror of the inquisitors. This secret police directorate possesses the power to ask questions, arrest people, and carry out sentences that include freezing people for years in a sort of cryogenic state. Conrad Metcalf is a private inquisitor, a former member of the secret police who struck out on his own after his disillusionment with the system led to an early retirement.

Now Metcalf has another case, one that promises to be a real doozy. After a doctor turns up dead in a seedy motel room, a client named Orton Angwine turns up on Metcalf's doorstep. Angwine claims he had nothing to do with the murder, and he wants Metcalf to clear him from the looming cloud of suspicion. Metcalf's subsequent investigation leads him through a labyrinth of underworld types, corrupt doctors, a jilted wife, a cranky babyhead, a kangaroo with a grudge, and inquisitors who would rather see this case disappear forever. Whatever happens in the end, Metcalf must tread a fine line during his investigation because if his personal karma drops to zero he will find himself facing a six year snooze in a cryogenic tank. As Conrad homes in on the murderer, he discovers his noirish wisecracks bring more trouble than answers. The future is a dangerous place, and Conrad Metcalf is right in the middle of it without an umbrella.

You really must love the dialogue in this book. It crackles with snappy comebacks and hooked barbs, all done in a grand tradition which states that detectives in crime noir stories must speak in clever metaphors and insults. What makes it so jarring here is when Metcalf trades verbal jabs with a gun-toting kangaroo named Joey Castle. In "Gun, With Occasional Music," dialogue assumes an added dimension when you realize that the only people allowed to ask questions in the future are inquisitors, thus the reason that Conrad often frets over his inadequate responses when grilling someone for information. His stock and trade is not as a hired gun or bodyguard per se; it literally involves possessing the necessary verbal acumen to properly make inquiries and to look good while doing so. Lethem studied and mastered the style of the noir masters before writing this book, and it shows on virtually every page.

"Gun, With Occasional Music" is weirdness incarnate, but at the same time it is immensely amusing. The best recommendation I can give you is to pay close attention to the various characters Metcalf runs into during the course of his investigation. The twists and turns of the Angwine case are monumental, and easily lost track of amidst the strange scenery Lethem throws at you with unremitting frequency. This book really is one that requires a second reading because there is so much going on. The conclusion is an interesting one that wraps the plot up just as a good noir story should. Yep, all in all Lethem's little beast is a great way to spend a few days. For those unaccustomed to the joys of warped fiction, Jonathan Lethem exists to show you the way.

Rating:
Summary: Fun and imaginative
Review: This is a hard book to pin down. It begins as a strange but fun pastiche/satire of Dashiell Hammett in a science fictional vein. Specifically, the general atmosphere, penchant for tortured similes, and basic plot devices (private detective, etc.) are borrowed from Hammett, while the dystopic future is a variation on Orwell and Huxley. The plot turns that follow allow Lethem to show us how his near-future dystopia evolves over time, which eventually leads to an immesely satisfying ending (which, of course, I cannot explain without ruining the surprise).

Lethem's skill as a writer is evident in the fact that he manages to make a number of utterly absurd details seem real and consistent: "evolution therapy," a biotechnological advance that results in sentient kangaroos, kittens and sheep who make up a socially inferior caste in society, as well as in super-smart infants and toddlers who congregate in seedy "baby bars" to escape the unexplained side-effects of their condition; a narrator who sometime in the past had his sexual responses switched with an old girlfriend's, so that now, while possessing a functioning male apparatus, he experiences sex like a woman; government-sponsored "makes," drug mixes with which everyone is kept high and in the mental state they most desire; and on and on. I would hesitate to call Lethem a fully original writer, but at the same time, his imagination is impressive, and the future society he envisions is convincing. The Hammett satire is worth a few chuckles as well.

For a book that fails to reveal a single real weakness, I recommend this highly. It isn't great literature, but it's a worthwhile read.

Rating:
Summary: Best Novel by Letham
Review: This is simply one of the best novels I've ever read, and most definitely his work of legacy.

The plot and story is likable to the post-apocolyptic existentialism of Vonnegut, Huxley, Orwell, and even Chuck Palahnuik, however the combination of sarcasm and detail is unique to Letham alone. The metaphors aren't obscure and there isn't a trace of the condescending intellectualism that is considered apt social criticism as is commonly found in most of this genre, but it is still brilliantly clever.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, with occasional confusion
Review: "You got SF tropes in my hardboiled crime story!" "No, you got a detective story in my dystopian-future novel!"

As others have said, this book is excellent, and definitely worth the read (the style alone is worth the price of admission, even if you ultimately decide you didn't like the admittedly tough-to-favor story.) However, I feel compelled to interject that I thought its focus tended to waver. Most of the book was a detective novel; but there were several portions that abandoned that storyline entirely and just wandered off into worldbuilding. Indeed, this book would have been nearly the same if the often murkily-explained SF stuff had been removed entirely. (it took me a while to figure out exactly what a babyhead was, and I'm still unclear on why people thought it was a good idea to make so many of them.)

However, the SF portions of the story _do_ serve well to make the setting more bizarre, and separate from the real world--and that's what books are all about. I'd have just liked to see better integration between the setting and the plot.

Rating:
Summary: The brilliant novel that started a brilliant career
Review: One of my favoirte books of all time. I love Lethem's gooey mix of scifi and gumshoe fiction. Part satire, part surrealism, with a rapt attention to language, a highly personal style and an utterly unbridled imagination. A dream of a book and a total page-turner. If you can imagine a sultry blonde dame killing her sleeping husband by smothering him with a Magritte painting of dogs playing poker, you'll love it.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing, With Occasional Lapses
Review: Hats off to Jonathon Lethem for fashioning some hardboiled prose that nearly defies any genre with this tale of Conrad Metcalf, Private Inquisitor, not exactly hot on the trail of Celeste, the spouse of an affluent urologist ... but nothing -- and I mean absolutely nothing -- is quite what it seems.

Lethem clearly is channeling Chandler here, and, for that, he deserves much praise, as does much of the novel. Despite whether or not the reader can believe in a world where genetically-enhanced talking kangaroos can tote .45s for nefarious purposes, the power of tale is so overwhelmingly intoxicating that the reader has no choice to accept the peoples, places, and things as entirely plausible. In short, it fits in its own bizarre way, and Metcalf -- as the protagonist -- does his best, despite his own addictions, to keep himself and the plot moving at a pace where the reader has to keep up.

I did find a few sections of the book to be weighted down a bit by some obtuse humor, but, all-in-all, GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC (hang on until the end to understand what the title means) was nonetheless fascinating.

Rating:
Summary: accept-all. regret-all.
Review: "Gun, with Occasional Music" is confusing at times; I never did figure out the "babyhead" thing. For the sin of obtuseness, "Gun" is docked one star. But, there's an awful lot to like, too. The narrative voice drips noir's style and deftly negotiates Lethem's strange world. The plot has all the usual twists and turns one might expect of the detective novel. The characters are all interesting in one way or another. Metcalf, a PI, is a drug addict (Acceptol, with just a touch of Regrettol for that bittersweet edge); the requisite gunsel is a talking kangaroo. "Gun, with Occasional Music" somehow manages to use all the tools of the detective novel (cynicism, murder, twisty plot) and a certain kind of non-space-setting science fiction (dystopian future, bizarre uses of technology). The marriage is stronger, and stranger than any book has a right to be.

Rating:
Summary: Mystery, with occasional fantasy and science fiction
Review: Starting from the beginning, Gun, with Occasional Music is ostensibly a detective story in the traditional of Raymond Chandler. That short description is not quite apt, though--it's like saying Beck or Oasis is pop music in the tradition of the Beatles. There are some striking similarities in structure or theme, but the frills are quite different. Lethem's Los Angeles is filled with the products of evolution therapy-- animals that walk on two legs and mostly fill the menial roles (akin to Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind) and babyheads, children that have been treated to have adult mental abilities while their bodies still are those of their age. Drugs are legal, available from corner "makers", who can mix your preferred blend like today's tobacconist, from substances called Avoidol, Relaxol, Acceptol, Believol, and, especially, Addictol. People carry around "karma" cards, that contain a collection of points, earned by doing good deeds, and subtracted from when caught in a crime including being rude. Instead of CNN, there's the music news, where one tries to understand if something bad has occurred based on the amount of bassoons or bass in the orchestra. Newspapers are collections of uncaptioned pictures. And people, unless police or licensed private investigators, find it the ultimate in rudeness to ask or be asked a question. Conrad Metcalf may sound like Sam Spade, but the world in which he tries to exist is not conducive to his anti-establishment position.

The murder that Conrad attempts to solve is fairly straightforward, although Lethem does throw in a few really nice twists that fit with his world and the characters. For all its outre ideas, Lethem keeps the world consistent, as if he had thought while writing it, "What would a hard-boiled detective do if found in this situation?" The result is clean, crisp, often incredibly funny, and yet the ending is as tough as these novels come, with an additional bonus of an ending moral. Separately, Lethem's ideas are nothing new in science fiction. Together, and in a noir style, they make a fresh and witty adventure.

I'm sorry that I took so long to turn to Lethem, and you can be assured that the other books will not linger long on my to-be-read shelf.

Rating:
Summary: Lethem nails the hardboiled voice
Review: I'm reading this one right now, and I think I'm going to just love it. It's a witty sci-fi/mystery. Lethem's books are always interesting and usually funny, and I seem to be able to "hear" them as I'm reading because he captures the narrator's voice so well. In this book, the narrator is a Private Inquisitor named Conrad Metcalf. Metcalf sounds exactly like a Raymond Chandler PI. Chandler's style is often imitated, but Lethem really seems to nail it - enough to bring a huge grin to my face as I read. Here's an example:

She and Stanhunt had been freshly separated, and the electricity between them had still been going strong--back when Stanhunt was still capable of generating electricity. Now there was a blackout. I wondered if the lady behaved any differently in the dark. I wondered if maybe she was the one who cut the wires.

Now, if you watch "Between the Lions" at all, use your best "My name is Spud, Sam Spud..." voice to read that and you'll know just what I mean.

Lethem's got a heck of an imagination too. Metcalf's world has evolved animals in addition to the regular people, and Lethem really knows where to insert them. There's a kitten who gives Metcalf the opportunity to use the line: "Hello, little girl." There are rabbits in the dentist's office and an Irish Setter who delivers for the local deli. Good stuff.

This book is going to be so much fun to finish. I hope I can make it last more than a day or two!

Rating:
Summary: Better noir SF than detective fiction . . .
Review: NEWSWEEK called this a marriage of Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler (actually, I think they meant Dashell Hammett), and that's pretty close. Conrad Metcalf is a gumshoe in the old noir mode, but in this near future -- or parallel present -- he's a "private inquisitor" in a world in which it's not only very rude but aggressively antisocial to ask questions, a world in which "evolved" animals have begun to fill the lower social niches (from a kittenish kitten and a P.I. gorilla to a dangerous kangaroo gunsel), a world in which an addictive psychoactive drug is not only tolerated but encouraged, and in which the karma credits on your card had better not run down to zero. All of this, frankly, is far more interesting than the somewhat lame murder plot, involving gangsters, addicts, crooked cops, and innocent bystanders who get vacuumed up. The concluding section, however, set six years later -- or three days, depending on your viewpoint -- shows that no matter how dark things may get, they can always get worse. Despite numerous recommendations of his work, this is the first novel I've read by Lethem, and even with the caveats given above, it's good enough to lead me to try more of his stuff.