Ian Thornton

This one is a fairly hard book to review because I've been fascinated by Crowley in the past. I mean, did you know that his visage graces the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? That the man was the original sensationalist, welcoming all kinds of defamation and horror story for the sake of building up a legend, right or wrong? That he was the original flower child, a bold climber of Everest, a thumber-of-noses at all kinds of hypocrisy, and he believed in rebellion with a capital R?

I liked him. Who cares if he called himself The Beast and signed with 666? Or that he was called a satanist for most of his life? I played D&D as a child. Back in those days, Parent Teacher Associations used to burn books and say that my gamebooks were written by the devil. *rolls eyes so hard that they pop out of his grinning skull*

If my mild storytelling sessions were that evil, I had to see what else the "world" is lying about.

This book on Crowley DOES have a ton of historical fact about Crowley, but it is conflated with a ton as well. He may or may not have been a British Secret agent, but this book definitely goes all into that. And I DO like all the Rebellion stuff. A lot. The sixties were Crowley's time, after all, having blazoned the way for several generations of people who are sick of the lies and just want to revel in truth, pleasure, and kindness.

Kindness? Crowley? Well, let's put it the way he puts it. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will." Love? Love? Hello! That sure sounds evil. lol

So WHAT ABOUT THIS BOOK? Why do I only give it 3 stars? Because... it focuses on spycraft and faking his death and his childhood. It's okay. It's FINE. But it's also meandering and directionless until we get to the whole revolution stuff later. And what I really wanted was either a full-out magical extravaganza a-la the best Fantasy novels of our time... or a tight thematic homage to the core principles of what Crowley taught. Or both! We can add some spycraft later, I suppose, but Crowley doing his best to out-do Marilyn Manson before Marilyn Manson is PLENTY interesting all on its own without turning him into a super-hero.

Maybe that's just me.… (mais)

Apparently the full title is The Great & Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms: How One Man Scorched the Twentieth Century But Didn't Mean To. That is a pretty lengthy title. If nothing else, this book might win the award for the longest titled book I've ever read.

Sometimes I read a book and from very close to the first page, I know this isn't a book for me. I know stories come to the author as they come; an author cannot necessarily give his characters or her setting some drastic makeover to appease me, a small-time writer in a distant corner of the internet, still, when it comes right down to it, the best I can say about this book is that it is about a bland man, who has a bunch of bland friends and moves around Europe inoffensively interacting with the local populace, with the exception of one event near the beginning of the novel, when he drives the car in which Archduke Francis Ferndinand is assassinated in. So there's his bit of exceptionalism, along with almost having beaten a chess master as a child, which, I guess, is supposed to make up for his monotonous personality through out the rest of the novel. Bland plus minutely exceptional still equals dull.

The characterization of the non-Johan characters in this novel is easy to comment upon, in that there isn't any. Secondary characters have no depth and seem to exist soley to prop Johan up - from his friend Cicero who putters Johan around after Johan starts to lose his mind, to Count Kaunitz who essentially gives Johan an everlasting and infinite amount of money to propel him through the rest of the novel, to his true love Lorelei who decides to be faithful and search forever for her lost love Johan to remind us constantly, basically in every chapter, how extraordinary Johan is, even though there's no logical reason why she would spend the rest of her life pining over someone who is, essentially, a lump of person with no personality. Lorelei is, essentially, like every other woman in the novel - there to actualize the male. None of the women (Johan's mother, Lorelei, Cicero's two wives, Cicero's daughter, all the nurses Johan encounters) have any purpose or motivation that isn't intrinsically tied to either Johan or Cicero, neither of whom are compelling enough to merit this; when characters need conventionally attractive sycophants to reassure readers how marvelous the characters are, that's lazy writing. Plus, I haven't read such a nurse fixation since Garp:

"He was the most grateful recipient of the nurses' toil and of the generosity of spirit which is unique to their calling, the selfless act of giving care to the injured, sick, and dying ... From the nurses and their love, (Johan) extrapolated a theory that explained everything."

And so we get to another part of this book that is not for me: the quirky bits of overwriting. Some people like this. They find it twee and endearing and sort of charming. Me, I sometimes think that we should ban all adjectives, similes, and metaphors, or at least, one should require a license, gained after extensive testing, to use them. For example, this book uses resplendent three times. That is four times more than necessary. One never needs to use resplendent, in the same way I don't ever need to read

"the now rhythmic pentameter of a matured summer storm, finger drumming on the cracked pane behind him"

or

"Cicero's smile dislodged osmotic endorphins from within Johan"

or

"stroppy, ignorant, short-tempered, garlicky, sweaty, stumpy Frenchman"

or

"The long-term effects of booze intake had permanently loosened his retinal musculature."

Too many words. I will allow however "shitting a sea urchin" to stay. That one was amusing enough.

By the end, maybe in the last fifty pages, Johan sort of grew on me, basically after most of his friends had died and I realized that this wasn't actually a time-traveling story like I thought it was (based on a off-handed remark of Johan's in the opening pages:

"These things you see here are my vortex, my portal, a wormhole in the space-time continuum, my passage back in time."

Yeah, he meant memory and I totally spaced on that, plus my mind still on the previous book I read, which was about alternate universes). Although, a time traveling story might have made some sense as to why Johan, as a student in 1912, had both Ulysses (published as a book in 1922) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (published 1928) on his "dustless shelves" and how, while confined in a mental asylum in 1941, Johan was having imaginary discussions about the Marshall Plan (developed 1947, implemented 1948) with Churchill. I also wonder about Johan's infinite wealth in that in 1914 his wealthy friend put Serbian money in an Austrian bank account for Johan, and with World War One, hyperinflation, the Anschluss and conversion to Reichsmarks, World War Two, and then conversion to what after that - Austrian money? Yugoslavian money? that the initial Serbian money would have stretched out until the end of the novel, sometime in the 2000s. Would it have? I need to find a monetary historian of Europe to ask. But, of course, if he were a time traveler, I assume money would be no object, so he is a time traveler? I don't know.

Now that I've started the train of questions, why was there the framing device where the son is telling the story that his grandfather heard from Johan? That seemed unnecessary. I guess I could suppose it's also a true story and the author is less of an author and more of a transcriber. But, by now, there's a lot of stuff I need to be convincing myself to make this novel make sense.

Who should read this book: I started this review by saying this was not a book for me. Ergo, is a book for someone else. Usually when I think of the idea of someone else, what I am really thinking about is my mother. Now, my mother likes to read and I like to read, but we rarely enjoy reading the same thing (obvious exception in that we both love White Teeth, as most people do). But I think my mother would like this book. It's similar to another book I disliked, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared, which I gave to my mother because I knew she would enjoy it, and she did. The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms is similar in that, other than a suspension of belief, the book asks very little of its reader. Unfortunately, that's just not my bag.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.… (mais)

Don’t be that guy

The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms by Ian Thornton (Touchstone, $15.98).

Imagine being that guy. The one who inadvertantly screwed up and caused a huge calamity, perhaps forgetting to flip a switch at the nuclear power plant and causing a meltdown, or maybe accidentally misreading the radar and telling the president that the Soviets have launched their missiles.

There’s always that guy. He’s at the bottom of every catastrophe, and the Great War, the “war to end all wars,” is no exception.

Meet Johan Thoms, the brilliant college student from the University of Sarajevo who, on a bright and sunny summer day, took a wrong turn and made it possible for Gavrilo Princip to successfully kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, thus unleashing World War I on the world.

If ever there was a soul who so enshrined the “for lack of a nail” principle, it’s Johan Thoms. What’s really surprising, though, is that Ian Thornton has managed to write an engaging—and comic, rather than tragic—debut novel about the life of the guy who changed everything and whose name remains unknown.

Being a bright guy, Johan’s first instinct is to disappear. But life has a way of catching up with you, even in those long-ago pre-Google, pre-Facebook days. While Johan’s belief that he, personally, is responsible is a bit overdone, it’s easy to see how he could come to that conclusion (after all, how would a student who drives a limo know that the Great War was the inevitable result of dying empires, overly-militarized societies, and a bunch of egomaniacs with no concept of negotiation?).

Thornton uses his hapless protagonist as a way to cover a lot of European ground, and fans of historical fiction with quirky, Tom Jones-like characters will thoroughly enjoy this novel.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com… (mais)

My Summary: Johan Thoms is a genius. Literally. He frequently dazzles his colleagues with displays of his sparkling wit and vast knowledge.
Nobody expected 'the man who knows everything' not to know how to reverse out of a turn; nobody expected the car transporting the Archduke and his wife to be targeted by assassins. And nobody - not even Johan Thoms - could have predicted the chain of events that would be set off by the deaths of the Archduke and his wife.

As the smoke clears, Johan knows he must disappear. Bogged down by the guilt of an entire wars worth of deaths on his conscience, Johan assumes a new life away from the world he once knew, burying his past so deep that not even those who know him best have any idea of what secrets he's keeping.

But the past is coming back to haunt him, and not even Johan Thoms can figure out what to do when the love of his life appears on his doorstep, and when it appears that his old life is not as hidden as he'd hoped.

My Thoughts: I had a great time with this novel. The writing style was very witty, and the author's way of describing characters made me chuckle more than a few times. The characters themselves were incredibly interesting -- I loved the idea of one person having such a huge impact on the world and history as a whole.
The pacing was done quite well, and the story itself was easy to follow. The dialogue between the characters made the novel for me, as well as it being a fresh take on a subject matter that's been written about countless times.

Final Thoughts: I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys historical fiction as much as I do, and to anyone looking for a refreshing read to start off the cold weather months with!… (mais)