The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Our book today is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, and if your first reaction is anything like ours here at Stevereads, you're headed out the door with a tightly courteous little rictus on your face. Yes, yes: the book has perhaps the most regrettable title in recent memory - it reeks of twee preciousness, that heavy-handed almost leering juxtaposition of art and quotidia that wants to intrigue you so desperately it almost immediately repulses you.

What can we say? Mistakes happen, and perhaps the monstrous title of this book wasn't strictly the idea of its two authors - publishers can be a crass lot, and publicists are even worse - gawd only knows the algorithms they use to arrive at the products they push. In any case, disregard the title! Disregard the title and read the book.

The book is just about as charming and heartfelt and utterly involving a work of fiction as any we here at Stevereads have read this year, and we, we need hardly remind you, read lots of novels in any given quarter.

This story takes place in postwar England, in a time of rationing and coupons when everybody has their own memory of the Blitz and the bombings. At least one person made out well from those horrible years: writer Juliet Ashton, whose "Izzie Bickerstaff" columns gave a war-weary populace a few grim laughs at the worst of times. She's stopped writing those columns now, but their resale in book form has made her comparatively wealthy and sought-after on the admittedly meager postwar book-tour circuit. This is an epistolary novel (gawd help us) that hauls the reader into Juliet's world so quickly and so confidently that before you know it, you're every bit as involved in the lives of all the characters as the characters are themselves.

And such characters! Juliet is the best of them, but she's given some serious competition by the members of the eponymous literary society itself, each one of whom bonded to a love of reading (and bonded to each other) under the grimly capricious rule of the Nazis. Through the letters these characters exchange, the reader is taken on a marvelous journey, one none of you should miss. The book's two authors are to be hugely congratulated - and urged to collaborate again.

Epistolary novels are the hardest of all to quote in a review, and this book is no exception. Rather than try to give you all a sample of its glories and possibly fail (unthinkable, we know, but still), we here at Stevereads will instead urge you in the strongest possible terms: when The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society comes out, read it - borrow it, buy it, however you do it, but read it. Ignore the title, and you'll be very much pleased.

In the Penny Press! Three Coins in a Fountain!

Three points of interest in last week's New Yorker, each more disturbing than the last.

The first up is David Denby, the reliably schoolmarmish maiden aunt of movie-reviewing. In the issue in question, he reviews 'Shooter' and '300' - and oh, he isn't happy about either. Like every other reviewer in the country, he mysteriously, inexplicably, unaccountably refuses to call Mark Wahlberg a BAD ACTOR. Denby goes only so far as to say "Wahlberg has an unpretentious air about him," which is similar to all the other softpedalled evasions various critics have been using. The origin of this is not far to seek: Wahlberg got an Oscar nomination for 'The Departed.' It wasn't in any way conceivable on the face of the planet a SENSIBLE nomination - the so-called performance was cussing only - but it instills FEAR in the trembling hearts of professional movie reviewers, an inherently cowardly lot (with one or two notable exceptions, as the readers of this blog well know). That nomination means the utterly talentless Wahlberg will be treated to nonsense phrases like 'has an unpretentious air about him' for at least a few more crappy movies, instead of anybody just saying he can't act worth a crap.

But as bad as that-all is, Denby's ultimate reaction to 'Shooter' and '300' is even worse. He lowers his granny glasses down to the tip of his nose and pronounces that these two movies together "feel like the products of a culture slowly and painfully going mad."

Geez. Go to bed, Aunt Bea. They're only movies.

More disturbing was Jane Kramer's piece about the relationship between the forces of radical Islam and those of the Vatican, in the person of the current Pope, the Nazi Benedict XVI. Kramer tries her level best to portray things in a calm, reasonable light, but it completely doesn't work.

Try as she might to paint a veneer of civility over everything, Kramer can't really disguise from her readers the plain fact that the great religion of Islam is currently being spearheaded - and gaining its characterization in the West - by a narrow cadre of reactionary fanatics intent on violence and radicalism ... and that the great religion of Roman Catholicism is currently being spearheaded - and gaining its characterization in the Middle East - by a narrow cadre of reactionary fanatics intent on wealth and insularity. Not since the Battle of Lepanto have the two religions been in a worse position to talk to each other.

The blame is about equal, but it need not have been, if another man sat on the throne of St. Peter. The former Cardinal Ratzinger, in his brief time in charge at the Vatican, has proven even less interested in the daily lives of ordinary Catholics than his predecessor - which, during his predecessor's long and oblivious life hardly seemed possible.

But the problem is deeper than the fact that Ratzinger clearly prefers the palaces-and-parades style of Catholicism of earlier centuries. Nazis share a particular mindset that's disasterous in the present crisis: they not only aren't willing to entertain the viewpoints of others, they regard the EXISTENCE of viewpoints different from their own with a loudly snickering contempt. The Nazi Pope Benedict XVI is no different in this regard - at the exact moment when all men of influence on both sides of the question should be striving to develope some kind of dialogue, both side are afflicted with leaders constitutionally incapable of doing so.

In a perfect world, Ratzinger would be sitting in a Swiss jail for his orchestration of the murder of Pope John Paul I. Alas, this isn't a perfect world. One almost envies the Buddhists.

But the most disturbing thing in this issue of the New Yorker wasn't an article at all but a picture accompanying an article. The piece is a profile of British chef and all around lout Gordon Ramsay, about what an ogre he is to his loyal staff, how gratuitously vicious he is to his loyal staff, etc.

You're supposed to come away hating Ramsay, a petty tyrant made possible only in the ridiculous micro-culture of haute cuisine. He's a blip (that is almost certainly the ultimate source of his much-vaunted all-purpose rage) and of no consequence whatsoever, so that's not the disturbing part.

No, the disturbing part is the accompanying photo of Ramsay. He's standing against the grey steel backdrop of a restaurant's kitchen, and he's holding a little lamb up to his chest. The lamb is alive and looking in the direction of the camera, and the composition of the piece is so elegant and strong (it's by the always-reliable Jillian Edelstein) that you're a minute before you realize that you're not looking at a cuddly picture - Ramsay is holding up a MENU ITEM.

It's a quietly staggering image, not least because of the horrible portrait of the human in the frame. Most of you will never have spent any quality time with a lamb, so you'll be unaware of their nature. If so, allow us to confirm what your own eyes can tell you: they're open-hearted and goofy and entirely GOOD. They lose some of the goofiness when they grow up into sheep, but they still stay entirely good.

In that photo, Gordon Ramsay is holding up the best invitation to vegetarianism imaginable. Because it's not just the ogre Ramsay - it's every three-star restaurant, it's every no-star restaurant, it's every snack-shack and kiosk and McFranchise from one end of the world to the other. That lamb's innocent, goofy face - the face of a PERSON, someone markedly different from the other lambs with whom she was born -(and, needless to say, someone very different from Ramsay) represents the right way, and Gordon Ramsay with his puffy carnivore's face represents the wrong way.

Here in America, at least on the two coasts, the choice is always there and always easy: don't be Gordon Ramsay. Eat no meat harvested from innocent, loving beings, eat no bloodkill. You can go the whole length on your own if you so desire - you can disavow everything that isn't strictly vegetable and leave it at that - but at the very least, you can - we all can, no matter how enamored we've been in time of bacon, that sacred provender of the gods themselves - skip all bloodkill, regardless of how we might once have loved such things. Let that poor doomed lamb, not the Gordon Ramsay inside, have the final say.

Comics! Immortal Combat in the JSA!

It wasn't peppery young Elmo nor yet our archnemesis Pepito who provided us with the fourth issue of Geoff Johns' relaunch of Justice Society of America - it was instead our smart, laid-back (and, not incidentally, pretty damn funny) young friend Mr. Allison, who seemed impressed by the issue (Elmo had already warned us that the issue was a 'feast').

And feast it certainly is - Johns again demonstrates a beautiful sense of pacing and character. He's completely wrong for a big, sprawling team book, but watching him try so hard to prove otherwise is worth the price of admission every issue.

And he's not afraid of the epic, either - he shares that with Brad Meltzer over in Justice League. There, a newly-intelligent Solomon Grundy uses a sooped up Amazo to attack the Justice League; here, Vandal Savage uses crews of super-powered Nazis to attack the descendents of the original Justice Society. Both are great big ambitious plots, and both writers fail them miserably.

Hard, without an abacus handy, to even count all that's wrong with this Justice Society issue. Dale Eaglesham's artwork is wonderful as always, but it's hampered by a choreography that sucks like a sump-pump.

Take the opening combat between Vandal Savage and Wildcat's kitty-cat young son (can we have a moratorium, please, on cat-based superheroes? Every single last one of them - most certainly including this new one, ripped from four panels of 'Kingdom Come' - are unbearably lame-ass): in one panel, the two of them are squared off face to face. In the next panel, Kitty-cat is leaping over Savage's left shoulder from behind. And so on and so forth (there isn't a panel of the Wildcats/Savage fight that makes a lick of sense).

Or take the Blue Valley scene, in which a detachment of the JSA rescues a bunch of civilians from a bunch of the Nazi super-villains dispatched by Vandal Savage. Has a lamer sooper-battle ever been contrived in a modern comic? There's a super-speed battle between the Flash and 'Baroness' Blitzkrieg that's more boring to look at than two pensioners playing chess in Central Park, but there's not much else.

And that doesn't hold a candle to the other set-piece of the issue, the confrontation in Philadelphia between another squad of the JSA and an even bigger batch of super-powered Nazis (one of whom is a super-powered version of a TOPLESS BISMARCK ... an idea that could ONLY have made sense while the Johns was deeply, philosophically stoned). Yeesh, what a disaster. Here the artwork is at its most static, and with its most crippling lack of credibility. Captain Nazi opens the sequence by hurling the Liberty Bell at a hapless group of civilians. He's duly chastised for this by our very own useless heroine Liberty Belle, right before Hawkman and Green Lantern engage with this Captain Nazi in close-on combat. That fight should by rights last an entire issue (and end only one way), but here it's over after a page, and it happens OFF PANEL. In the meantime, Damage blows up the fat Bismarck-guy and accidentally catches useless little Liberty Belle in the concussion. She very melodramatically falls down, but she's back on her feet, apparently unharmed, in four panels. The new useless Hourman helps her up, and he and she and Damage have a nice cozy little chat right there in the heat of battle, just as we see a trim and healthy Captain Nazi tossing aside an unconscious Hawkman and Green Lantern. This patent piece of silliness is done only to set up a face-to-face confrontation between Damage and Captain Nazi. Just as the evil Nazi is taunting Damage about his disfigured appearance, he's finally struck down - not by Hawkman, the seven-thousand-year-old warrior-hero, and not by Green Lantern, one of the most powerful beings in the DC universe ... nope, by useless little Liberty Belle THROWING THE LIBERTY BELL at him. So remember that, the next time you're facing a super-powered Nazi: when battle-maces and energy-rings fail, just hit him with a cracked, 260-year-old BELL.

But the biggest problem with this issue is also its biggest strength: Vandal Savage.

Mr. Allison isn't the only comic-reader we've known who puts his finger right on it: Vandal Savage is a seriously kick-ass villain. It's odd that DC, with its long and rich history, doesn't have more of these, but in this as in so many things, much depends on the execution. There's Lex Luthor, of course, but the whole gimmick of villain-as-respected-businessman only works for limited time (although the current run of DC continuity - most certainly including the latest twists and turns over in '52' - has milked it a wonderfully long time). And there's Darkseid for the epic dimension, although even thirty years ago, Keith Giffen in 'Ambush Bug' was keen to how easily the character can be tipped into parody. And there's the Joker, easily DC's most complex and compelling villain (the only one the other villains should be afraid of ... in other words, the villain-equivalent of Batman), although the number of DC writers over the years who've been able to convey that can be counted on the fingers of one hand (and that number certainly won't be increased by the next Batman movie, Heath Ledger being a literally incomprehensible casting choice).

But Vandal Savage? He's the serpent in DC's garden of Eden - an immortal who's been around since the birth of mankind, EVIL the whole time (the corresponding good guy, Immortal Man, was always a wuss by comparison and proved it by DYING in the first Crisis, the tool). No superpowers to speak of, although tough as nails, and most of all, embodying every time the intangible quality of COOL. Meltzer over in Justice League chose brute force - Grundy and Amazo - over that element (ironically enough, one of the prime candidates for that category in the DC universe is Doctor Destiny, who makes a surprise appearance at the end of this very JSA issue), but Johns clearly had the peculiar generational nature of the JSA in mind when he picked a villain who's seen the team in all its incarnations (this could also be said for Per Degaton and the Ultra-Humanite, but to say the least, they both lack the aforementioned cool factor).

The problem is, Vandal Savage should be unbeatable. The only way to make him NOT unbeatable is to indadvertently make him ridiculous, which is what happens in this issue. He boasts of starting world wars, of being the power behind Hitler, of discovering fire - but what's he DOING while he's boasting of all this? Breaking crockery in a tiny kitchen fighting Wildcat's gay kitty-cat bastard son. Cue the ridiculous.

Vandal Savage should be unbeatable because ANY immortal would be. If you want to eliminate the next generation of the Justice Society, you don't send stupid-ass Nazi death-squads to ambush them at family reunions; you pay a drug addict $20 to plow a car through an intersection and flatten them when they're five. You pay an orderly $2000 to pinch an IV when the next generation is in its cradle. Against an enemy who implaccably hates you and who has forever to do it, mortals - no matter how brave or powerful they might be in the maturity between their helpless infancy and their defenseless old age - cannot possibly win. If you make Vandal Savage that implaccable, undying enemy, you create a story with only one plausible ending.

Needless to say, pinched IV's are not the stuff of four-color comics, so this issue has dorkus-malorkus Nazi death-squads and Vandal Savage fighting a kitty-cat in a kitchen and eventually getting hit by a truck (guess the one thing he didn't learn in 100,000 years was to LOOK BOTH WAYS). So a carefully-laid and meticulously-crafted plan to eliminate the Justice Society fails because some guy gets hit by a bell and some other guy gets hit by a truck. And for this Johns gets to call himself a writer.

And yet, and yet ... the issue, the whole storyline, has been FUN, something that's certainly missing over in Justice League. And with the promise of Legion activity right around the corner (Dream Girl AND Lightning Lord on the last page!), it looks fair to KEEP being fun. We here at Stevereads will certainly be there to see.