Books don’t need to be likeable for readers to derive enjoyment from them – the characters don’t need appeal, and the plot doesn’t need to go in a satisfying direction, but there’s got to be something there for you to latch onto. And Symmetry does not have that something.

I liked Audrey Niffenegger’s previous novel, The Time Traveller’s Wife (though I enjoyed the time-travel knottiness of the plot more than the romance, and I can’t tell you the number of arguments I’ve had¹ with fans of the book who insist it’s not sci-fi, even though it totally is), and I thought I was going to like Symmetry a lot more than I did. It starts off well: middle-aged Elspeth dies, leaving her London flat to her American nieces Julia and Valentina, the twin daughters of her own identical twin sister, Edie, whom she’s been estranged from for 20 years following a mysterious falling out.

So Julia and Valentina leave the US for the UK, move into the flat and eventually meet their unusual neighbour Robert, Elpseth’s grieving lover, who’s writing a thesis on the next-door Highgate Cemetery. The opening chapters are slow but dreamy, promising a delicately unfolding plot… which never comes.

Halfway through the book steers off Whimsical and into Stupid, and it’s possible to pinpoint the exact moment this happens: it’s when Elspeth, who’s been reincarnated as a ghost but confined to her flat, gains the strength to communicate with Robert and the twins. None of these characters are especially flabbergasted by this, and it’s the first in a series of bung notes.

After that, they come thickly: Valentina hatches a profoundly boneheaded plan to escape the clutches of the gregarious Julia; Niffenegger takes disastrous shortcuts with her characterisations, dubbing Valentina “suicidal” and Elspeth discompassionate even though us readers hadn’t previously seen any traces of those things; and the plotting becomes laboured and detached.

And the finale – blech. Really. Blech. It’s  contrived, especially when it’s revealed why Elspeth and Edie fell out, and worse, the resolution of the main storyline is so horribly off-putting. Like I said in the first paragraph: repellant.

It’s not all bad. Julia and Valentina’s upstairs neighbour is Martin, an obsessed-compulsive crossword compiler whose disease has alienated his wife, Marijke, who’s fled to her native Amsterdam and left him alone in his flat which he refuses to leave. He’s an eccentric, genuinely appealing character.

The other appealing character is Highgate Cemetery and London itself. Niffenegger worked as a tour guide in the cemetery while researching the book (and her devotion to the place is evident), and she nails what it’s like to live in a historically, culturally rich place like London.

1. I must’ve had that argument… twice!

There’s a lot to like about Will Grayson, Will Grayson: it’s strong and honest and funny, its teen melodramas feel so authentic (when you’re a teenager everything is so! important! and! dramatic!), and some of its characters are truly likeable.

But… I’m not sure I liked this book.

That’s because, despite its title, Will Grayson, Will Grayson isn’t actually about someone called Will Grayson. The dominant character is Tiny Cooper, an ironically named high-schooler whose body is almost as big as his personality. Tiny is the long-time best friend of Will Grayson, a pessimistic introvert who’s determined to avoid any sort of emotional experience. By a strange quirk of fate he meets another Will Grayson: this one is starting to open up about his sexuality, and entranced when he meets the openly and extremely gay Tiny.

The book wavers between the viewpoints of Will Grayson and Will Grayson (Green wrote from one point-of-view, and Levithan from the other), and it’s cleverly written – it’s a book with gay characters, though it’s not a gay book. (Not that there’s anything wrong with gay books, as such; I mean it’s not a Problem Novel about being gay.)

(For the record, the gay Will Grayson was my favourite Will Grayson.)

I found Tiny annoying, and it annoyed me that the other characters fawned over him so much – the book literally ends (spoiler!) with scores of people declaring to Tiny how much they appreciate his sheer awesomeness. If you’re like me and don’t buy into Tiny’s awesomeness, this is a serious problem. I didn’t really get why Tiny, who’s so overbearing (not to mention gay to the point of stereotype; he reminded me of “too gay to function” Damian from Mean Girls), is so important to these characters.

That said, I did like that the straight Will and Tiny have a friendship where sexuality is not an issue. And a crucial part of the adolescent experience is having at least one friend who is kind of a dick. (Years later, you reflect on your teenage years and wonder why the hell you spent so much time with so obvious a jerk.) Perhaps this is what Green and Levitan are really writing about – major kudos to them if so, though such an analysis seems like a bit of a stretch.

For example: I read it while holidaying in the Cook Islands, on a tiny dot of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. “I’d be pretty safe from a zombie invasion here,” I thought. Then: “… right? What if the zombies crossed the sea somehow? What if the island became crowded with refugees, who carried the zombie infection? Would my hotel room provide a safe place to hide from zombies?” (I decided it wouldn’t.) It’s an exciting book, in the literal sense of the word.

It’s told as a series of short stories documenting the experiences of people all over the world¹ before, during and after the zombie apocalypse, and though I’m not paticularly enamoured of the zombie genre (all those eviscerations and eyeballs hanging from stalks. Eeeeewwwww), World War Z is fascinating in its realism. Yes, realism. It’s an odd word given the subject matter, but this truly feels like what would really would happen if a mysterious virus started turning its victims into the flesh-hungry living dead. The human weaknesses that allow the zombie plague to spread and the (sometimes shockingly cynical) strategies that enable the survivors to win are convincing, propped up by Brooks’s incredible attention to detail – especially when he imagines scenarios that aren’t immediately obvious: what would happen aboard an international space station during a zombie invasion? How do you train dogs to detect and attack the living dead? What animal species would be ravaged by the zombie war (spoiler alert: the whales bite it. Sad face)?

What’s also surprising is that World War Z isn’t a gore-and-guns splatterfest that glorifies weapons and gung-ho violence. It’s hopeful, unexpectedly uplifting, partly because it’s set after humanity’s victory (mostly) over the zombies), so you know it has a happy ending (again, mostly); but also because it’s a celebration of humanity’s pluck and moxy. Many of the people respond to the zombie crisis as selfishly as you’d expect, but many more behave admirably. (And there’s a strong satirical undercurrent that keeps it all from ever becoming too mushy – win!)

If you’d rather listen than read, the audiobook sounds excellent, and the upcoming film adaptation is also promising.

The book almost makes me wish that the zombie apocalypse really will happen. Fingers crossed it won’t break out till after I track down a copy of Brooks’s companion book, The Zombie Survival Guide…

1. Unfortunately, Australia is hardly mentioned. Did we endure the zompocalypse or not?!

Not all the stories live up to the rule (I won’t name names, but a handful are so uninteresting that surely they only made the cut because the writers are pals of Gaiman and co-editor Al Sarrantonio), though almost all of them do, and many exceed it. An everyday husband develops a taste of blood (and then what happened?). An elderly woman’s dead twin sister attempts to manipulate her way back from the grave (and then what happened?). A “retired” serial killer releases his victims before killing them… mostly (and then what happened?).

There are many other tales worthy of a mention, but including synopses of them all would make for a super long post, so I’ll just say: there’s a heck of a lot of imagination stuffed between the covers.

The stories range from chilling to funny to outright bizarre, from the very short to the very long, and while they cross genre lines there’s a touch of fantasy to almost all of them (not to mention a pervading theme of death). It’s such a diverse collection of superb writing that there really is something for everyone – assuming that “everyone” likes their stories black.

(PS: This is my first book review in ages not because I haven’t been writing them, but because I’ve been trying to learn French in the time usually allotted to reading. But then I went on holidays for a week and read like a mofo, so.)

The little lunch. The word for “lunch” in French is “le dejeuner”¹, and the word for “breakfast” is “le petit dejeuner” – “little lunch”. (Extra trivia: “jeuner” means “to fast”, so the French word for “lunch” translates literally to “un-fast”, similar to the English “breakfast”.)

Lemons and limes. In French, a lemon is “un citron“, and a lime is “un citron vert” – “a green lemon”.

Apples and potatoes. This is one of my favourites. An apple is “une pomme“, and a potato is “une pomme de terre” – “apple of the earth”. Something about that is just utterly lovely, the idea that a potato is an apple’s earthy cousin.

Redfish. In French, a goldfish is “un poisson rouge” – making it a redfish if translated literally.

1. I believe there’s an accent over one of those Es – but I have no idea how to format those on my Anglo keyboard, so I’m not going to bother with them

Reminds me of this, and not just because they both have unicorns:

Coincidence?

"So what's new, Grimey?"

In his review of the two newest episodes of Futurama, Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club (which: is one of my favourite websites. If you are a geek who adores crazy-in-depth pop-culture analysis, subscribe to it now) goes off on a thoughtful tangent in which he proposes that the episode ‘Homer’s Enemy’ marks “the beginning of the end” of The Simpsons.

If you’re not a Simpsons nerd and can’t identify episodes by their titles, ‘Homer’s Enemy’ is basically The One with Frank Grimes:

A fastidious new employee at the plant [Frank Grimes] doesn’t get along with Homer, who is anxious to make amends. Meanwhile, Bart comes into the possession of an abandoned factory.

Wikipedia rightly identifies ‘Homer’s Enemy’ as “one of the darkest episodes of The Simpsons“: Grimes, who’s “had to struggle for everything he ever got”, becomes increasingly furious with Homer and the ease of his accomplishments. It culminates with Grimes – nicknamed “Grimey”, against his wishes – impersonating Homer’s buffoonery, electrocuting and killing himself in the process. Homer then ruins his funeral by snoring during the service.

It is indeed dark. Handlen, while declaring the episode “hilarious, no question” (it is),  argues that “it fundamentally and permanently undermines the series’ core” – The Simpsons, he says, is built on “family”, and the series “can’t support that level of darkness without losing its heart”.

I disagree (though I do agree with Handlen’s other point, that the episode is “a clever piece of meta-commentary on certain basic elements that have been with the show since the beginning”), because The Simpsons has always had dark elements, particularly concerning Homer’s behaviour – consider ‘A Streetcar Named Marge’, in which he flat-out tells Marge he doesn’t care about her interests, or ‘Lisa’s Substitute’, where he says pretty much the same thing to his eight-year-old daughter. Both stories are wrapped up tidily, though in neither does Homer really earn his redemption (I remember being shocked by his selfishness in ‘Streetcar’ even as a small child)¹.

Note that both these episodes are from early on in The Simpsons‘ run (seasons four and two, respectively); Homer was a much darker, more selfish character before he morphed into the loveable idiot we’re familar with. ‘Homer’s Enemy’ really just combines those two sides of his character  in a single episode.

1. One could argue that Homer earns his ‘Lisa’s Substitute’ redemption in the later instalment ‘Lisa’s Wedding’, which functions as a sort of unofficial sequel; both episodes are about Homer’s relationship with other men in Lisa’s life.

ABC news: It’s their lead story!

The Australian: The lead (ie, the image slot) is the Afghan war. Rudd doesn’t even get his picture! Predictably dry of the Oz.

News.com.au: Top story – Photoshopped World Cup malarkey. (Of course that is their top story.) Rudd has an image, at least.

Ninemsn news: “CEO’s sticky fingers” wins the lead spot, but Gillard has her picture up there.

SBS World News: It’s the lead story, natch.

SMH.com.au: Seinfeld vs. Gaga is deemed the most important story (to be fair, SMH has five rotating “lead” spots, though none of them is devoted to Rudd/Gillard). The Rudd leadership threat is right up there, though.

However, every time I watch this episode – and it airs on pay TV frequently – I get anxious. Because it’s never made clear whether Elaine has made copies of the Soup Nazi’s recipes; if he was to snatch the recipes back from her, her gloriously delivered revenge would collapse. And even though I’ve seen the ep enough times to know he doesn’t snatch the recipes back, the dread always lingers in the back of my mind.

Solution: travel in time to 1995, request that Jerry Seinfeld and  writing team insert awkward line into the scene along lines of, “Hello Soup Nazi: I, Elaine Benes, have already duplicated your recipes, thus rendering your attempts to snatch them back from me ineffective. Next!” Sparkling dialogue!

It’s unknown what Charlie in the White House would’ve been about, beyond the obvious implied in the title. In Glass Elevator Charlie and Willy Wonka rescue an American space hotel overrun by Vermicious Knids (among other things; the scariest and therefore best part of the book comes when one of Charlie’s grandparents takes too many age-reversing pills and has to be rescued from Minusland, a gloomy underworld inhabited by the Gnoolies), and in recognition of their feat they’re invited to visit the White House by President Lancelot R. Gilligrass, a buffoon in the thrall of his strict nanny.

Presumably Willy Wonka would’ve mindfucked Gilligrass a little more in Charlie in the White House but Dahl only wrote one chapter, which is apparently on display in the Roald Dahl Museum in England. Unfortunately they don’t have said chapter available on their website – a shame, since there must be a tonne of adults out there with fond Charlie memories (like me!) who’d love to know what Dahl had in store for him next. Maybe next time I’m in England I’ll pop in and ask to have a quick read.

(Pictured: the Glass Elevator cover I had as a child. Probably the only Dahl book I owned that wasn’t illustrated by Quentin Blake.)