Words From Vaish

A well-made popular is not to be sneered at. The problem is that there aren’t all that many. A cursory trawl through the display racks of many an airport and railway station book stall reveals the usual suspects; the Dan Browns , John Grishams, J amesPattersons , Jeffrey Archers, et al. The best you can say about many of these prose potboilers is the writing style is pedestrian, the plotting perfunctory, the characters cardboard, the dialogue dully banal. Some, particularly the works of Dan Brown and Eric Van Lustbader, also suffer from laboured Germanic sentence formation that appears to indicate that English is the second language of these authors. You might have ploughed through the kind I’m talking about; with single sentences the size of an average paragraph, packed with subordinate clauses like an overloaded freight train so that the narrative chugs along sluggishly. If simple entertainment is the aim, most fail dismally. Take that doyen of the spy stor...

The Queen Of Attolia Megan Whalen Turner Greenwillow Books 2017                                                                                            359 Pages “I wonder why it is so dull, when so much of it must be untrue.” -           -   Catherine Morland on the subject of history,            in Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen History, for far too many long-suffering students, is a boringly stupefying recitation of dates and dynasties – with all the r...

Judging Dredd As a child, I didn’t much care for the few British comic books we did get in India . The condescendingly simplistic stories, burdened with a lot of explanatory exposition, talked down to us and seemed to be mostly about schoolboy football heroes or jingoistic World War 2 action (I found the histories of the actual conflict far more interesting). The art was usually a dreary black-and-white and pretty static, too.  The British comic strips’ art lacked the quality, color and fluid dynamism of the American imp orts. Honorable exceptions were the comic book adaptations of the Gerry Anderson sci-fi TV shows; Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, Stingray, Fireball XL5… The optimistic 1960s view of the future that those TV Century 21 comic strips had, with all their glamorous high technology, has now dated somewhat. Ironically, what was once futuristic has now become nostalgic.  The Anderson stable did serve to get me hooked on science fiction, though. A l...

THE INDIAN SPY Mihir Bose Aleph Books 2017                                                                                                       350 Pages In the course of their clandestine activities, the attitude of spies towards their ostensible masters can evolve towards antagonism. However, the late Bhagat Ram Talwar code-named Silver, the protagonist of The Indian Spy, started off working AGAINST British interests before working for them.   But then, the only quintuple secr...

My Not So Perfect Life Sophie Kinsella Bantam Press 2017                                                                                                     391 Pages Author Sophie Kinsella’s patented chick lit formula is the literary equivalent of blandly satisfying comfort food like mashed potatoes and chicken soup. My Not So Perfect Life constitutes another helping, only slightly more astringent in flavour. That faint tinge of bitter comes from the setting of the cutthroat w...

The Operator Robert O’Neill Simon & Schuster 2017                                                                                               358 Pages The US Navy’s elite Sea/Air/Land (SEAL) teams became more widely known to the general public thanks to Hollywood. But it was the real life raid on Abbotabad, Pakistan, Operation Neptune Spear writing finis to Osama Bin Laden, that really put Navy SEALs on the cultural radar. These naval commandos played a prominent role in two movies made about the success...

[FICTION] The Everything Box Richard Kadrey Harper Voyager  369 Pages A religious/mystical/historical artifact desperately desired by disparate groups of people willing to stop at nothing to acquire it. This has been the plot engine behind everything from  The Maltese Falcon  to  Raiders Of The Lost Ark . Now, writer/photographer Richard Kadrey tries his hand at something also done before in  Good Omens  by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Not to mention the humorous apocalypses of Douglas Adams and Christopher Moore... A Los Angeles cat burglar named Charlie “Coop” Cooper - a specialist in purloining magical objects - steals and delivers a small box to the mysterious client who engaged his services. Coop doesn’t know that his latest job could be the end of him - and the world as well.  What follows is madcap mayhem of confusion and double-cross straight out of the pages of Elmore Leonard and Thomas Perry. For a secret US gov...

I’ve recently read “The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” by Stephen Pinker. The author’s contention is that a plethora of civilizing influences such as the rule of law replacing vendetta, humanistic education and the complex socio-political inter-relationships caused by commerce have caused a general decline in violence worldwide. Your chances of getting murdered were much more in 1700 than today. While this may be hard to believe, given the accounts of sexual assault and homicide that greet us in the daily newspapers every morning, I think that Pinker might be on to something.  To be fair, the author makes explicit that social violence has declined, but not uniformly worldwide, and is still far from completely extinct. The level of decline also depends on how evolved a society is and how far removed from tribalism it is. Pinker also makes the point that if the conditions that caused this decline are reversed, violence could well enjoy a late resurg...