Series Review: The Amberlough Dossier, by Lara Elena Donnelly

A clear-eyed, relevant exploration of the tragic humanity of flawed people, flawed countries, and how impotence does not excuse wrongdoing

I picked up Amberlough, the first of Lara Elena Donnelly’s rich, thoughtful, and distressingly still-relevant trilogy of politics and style, because of the style alone. ‘Ooh,’ I thought, ‘Moulin-rouge-flavoured nightclubs with art-nouveau style, queer flamboyance, and a 1930s-bohemianism! Sounds like fantastic fun! Sign me up!’

And it was fantastic. The absinthe flowed, the nightclub performers danced and bantered and exuded fae-like glamours over their bewitched spectators. What is more, Amberlough city has a functional streetcar system, further adding to its already stratospheric base level of extreme sexiness. But was this series fun? Not really. Because fucking fascism always has to ruin everything.

This series is beautifully constructed in three parts: the fascist take-over, the resistance, and the aftermath. But where other writers might turn this into an inspiring, rah-rah tale of the RISING TO THE CHALLENGE and RESTORATION OF JUSTICE and EVERYMAN HEROES WILL TRIUMPH AGAINST EVIL THROUGH THE POWER OF COLLECTIVE ACTION, this series is decidedly more restrained. Everything is complicated. Everyone is complicated. There is hope for a better future, yes, but the flaws and constraints and uncountable opportunities to make the wrong choice temper that hope in a way that feels both realistic and depressingly relevant.

The story revolves around an interconnected ensemble of key players, who expand and contract in number throughout the series. In Book 1, Amberlough, we have Aristide Makricosta, a wildly popular, glamorous, (ageing) nightclub performer, who has, through a series of disagreeable compromises, entirely remade himself from a country boy of dubious ethnicity to the ne plus ultra of Amberlough nightlife. Cyril DePaul is a government agent who is simultaneously sleeping with Aristide and investigating him (not very effectively) for drug smuggling. Needless to say, this relationship necessitates a certain divide between work life and personal life. Finally, we have Cordelia Lehane, a stripper who works with Aristide at the nightclub. 

When the story begins, the nation of Gedda ---  a loose confederation of different regions, much like the UK --- is preparing for an election in which the governing party, a regionalist faction that favours backing off to let each region govern itself, is facing off against the rapidly strengthening One State Party or OSP. The OSP stands not only for a unified government, but a unified people, a unified culture, a unified ethnicity, a unified morality. People like Aristide, who work the wrong jobs, love the wrong type of people, and walk around with the wrong skin colour and shape of nose, face a rough future if the Ospies take over. And the Ospies have a good chance of it: When Cyril is sent to investigate the possibility of election fraud, they lose no time in finding his weak points and manipulating him to aid their efforts in rising to power.

In Book 2, Armistice, the action shifts to a different country of Porachis. Porachis has a subcontinental flavour, but it’s a subcontinent where British colonialism didn’t happen, and where Bollywood, not Hollywood, defines the international standard of film studio glamour. There, Cyril’s sister, Lilian DePaul, is working in the Geddan diplomatic office. Like Cyril, she is serving the Ospies, and like Cyril, they are enforcing her compliance --- in her case, by threatening her son. Yet Lilian is hardly a downtrodden victim here. She is very good at her job, highly respected in Porachis, and maintains access to her family’s inherited wealth. She may not like the Ospies, but she is doing well under their rule. Aristide, too, is making the best of matters. He has fled Gedda to land on his feet in the Porachin film industry, where he gains international acclaim and spends his time sleeping with handsome men much younger than him, drinking too much, and generally living the life of glorious public dissipation that often betokens internal emptiness and despair. Only Cordelia is suffering under Ospie rule, and only Cordelia has been doing anything about it.

In Book 3, Amnesty, the Ospies are gone, and Cordelia is a hero. Hooray! But that doesn’t mean everything is all right again. Are the heroes of the resistance the right people to lead a country once they’ve overthrown the government? Aristide and Lilian have returned home to Amberlough --- but how can you pick up the threads of your old life, when you and your home and all the people you once knew and loved have changed so much? And how can you build a future when the misdeeds of the past --- arms-dealing, drug-smuggling, collaboration with the enemy --- are brought into the open for some long-delayed justice? What value is there in justice, if it cannot bring back the dead, and serves only to hurt the living?

These books are profoundly melancholy, because they identify so precisely all the complications inherent in a story that a simpler book would present as a rousing, heartening, rallying cry to resist oppression and build a better world. Cyril and Lilian’s collaboration with the Ospies seems utterly unforgivable from the outside, the weak actions of weak people (especially Cyril --- oh, especially Cyril!) but when we see the story from inside their heads, it’s brutally clear why they act as they do. Aristide’s collapse into dissipation and despair is distressing --- but what would you do if you had clawed your way from the dregs of society into a moment of glittering triumph, only to have everything you’d built, and everyone you loved, ripped away from under you?

The set dressing of this story --- Art Deco Europe --- gives the rise of the Ospies a classic Nazi odour. But the book has more universal applicability than that. The publication dates (2017, 2018, and 2019) makes one suspect that a great deal of this series was inspired by living through the rise of the far right and the first Trump administration (although the parallels break down a bit now, during the second Trump administration, largely because the Ospies have much less interest in destroying science and medicine and general government function than MAGA). The agitations of regions wanting to break away from the central government give Brexit referendum vibes, or Scottish or Catalan independence. The complex relationships between certain regions within Gedda and other countries outside Gedda have a distinct whiff of Northern Ireland. And that’s not even leaving Europe! The reality is that every complex society will have its agitators against central authority, and authoritarian assholes are always lurking, eager to assume control. The central themes of this series, the flawed actors, the flawed governments, the flawed cultures, the flawed movements, are not specific to one point of time. They are universally, tragically, perpetually relevant. 

And what is worse, it remains unclear how much power any individual actually has to change anything. Would the Ospies still have come to power if Cyril hadn’t been coerced to aid them? Probably! Would there have been a resistance to bring them down if Cordelia hadn’t gotten involved? Maybe! Will Lilian be able to affect the form of the new government once the Ospies are gone? Who knows? This series is full of sympathetic, flawed humans, committing tragically understandable misdeeds, with no guarantee that anything they do matters. It is bleak. It is grim. It is complicated.

And yet: there is hope. The Ospies come to power, but they can be overthrown, and although we don’t know if Amberlough will find its way to a just future --- with or without Lilian’s involvement --- there is a path in that direction. People and society are complicated. The world of Amberlough is complicated. But so is ours; and it is a comfort to see these complications acknowledged on the page, without losing sight of the possibility of hope. 

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The Math

Nerd coefficient: 9/10, very high quality/standout in its category

Highlights:

• Complex people, complex setting, complex themes
• Glamour and style
• Melancholy
• Streetcars 

References:  

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Amberlough. [Tor 2017].

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Armistice. [Tor 2018].

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Amnesty. [Tor 2019].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.

Review: Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel

What if the President of the USA acted more level-headed than the current one?

Fletcher Knebel’s 1965 novel Night of Camp David has a particular distinction: one of the few novels I’ve ever seen that does not have its title on its cover. The novel is a reissue; Knebel was a novelist of some repute in the ’60s, as well as a famous journalist and liberal firebrand. The reason I’m taking the time to discuss this book, as well as the reason the book was reissued to begin with, can be seen on the cover: “What if the President of the USA went stark raving mad?” Made frustratingly, infuriatingly, and frankly depressingly relevant in the light of the current administration (it was reissued initially during the first Trump term), it has been brought back by Penguin Random House to make more money off of our national dysfunction.

Knebel’s novel has become “retroactive alternate history,” i.e. fiction that was, at the time it was written, a speculation of future events, but has now been surpassed by the inevitable march of time. This type of fiction is often of interest to those of us who are fans of alternate history; it provides insight into just how the past could have changed, if only from the vantage point of people in said past. There have been online works speculating about the world of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example (I wrote one in high school, and it won an online award). The end result is a sort of genre shift over the course of the work’s existence, one that was probably foreseeable by the author, who wrote a lot of political fiction (by that point, works akin to proto-Tom Clancy had already been written, such as George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking or Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands). As such, they have more in common, to the contemporary reader, with modern speculative work.

This novel stars a senator from Iowa with political aspirations who is asked away from the busy hubbub of national politics in Washington to speak with the President late at night at Camp David (the presidential retreat in rural Frederick County, Maryland, northwest of Washington) to talk about the upcoming national election. The President asks the Senator if the latter wants to be his running mate, as his current Vice President is under the cloud of scandal. During this meeting, the President voiced his support for a law legalizing the warrantless recording and storage of all telephone calls in the country. That is the first of many erratic, authoritarian things that the President expresses over the course of the novel, leading the senator to look to see if something is amiss.

The 21st-century reader will note that we already have a system of warrantless collection of information that dwarfs anything beyond a simple pile of telephone call transcripts; if anything, this being the sign of looming insanity comes off as quaint, its proponent as rather tame next to the many horrible real-life cases that would follow, and the book's author as somewhat naive. This is one of a number of things that show the limits of Knebel’s imagination: he is that sort of white liberal writer who believed that ‘it’ could not happen here, in America, land of the free and home of the brave. He had an implicit faith in the American people that I don’t think has ever been warranted.

The novel works well as a depiction of the backrooms of high-level Washington politics, and it’s clear that Knebel knew his facts. He’s acutely aware of the wide variety of strange personalities that populate that world, from lawyers to activists, and how they grease the wheels of politics. Here, Knebel does not come off as so naive, as he shows you how even the most virtuous-seeming people in politics have skeletons in their closet (including the bright young senator around whom the narrative revolves). It does, though, show its age in how most of the politicians and indeed people on the Hill are white men, although there are women outside of formal positions who are nevertheless quite influential to the proceedings. There’s also a paucity of nonwhite characters. Knebel does have enough foresight to have a Black man as a major figure in Congress, but he seems to be the only one. Given that this was written in the ’60s, I’m not really sure we could have expected any better, but it’s noticeable.

Knebel is very good at pacing, and the book’s plot ticks along like a metronome. He was an accomplished writer of political thrillers and it shows here. There’s an economy to how this book uses its scenes, and not a single of them feels wasted, even ones that clearly diverge from the main plot. A drive around the country to find evidence feels earned, as does a vacation jaunt to the Bahamas for the senator. There’s an adept combination of different plotlines in the Bahamas, so that an absence never feels like an absence, but rather a suspension of the presence in the main plot that lets you look back at the significance of what has occurred up to that point. Many lesser authors could have made such a detour feel superfluous, but Knebel knew how not to.

Night of Camp David is both a perfectly enjoyable political thriller and a cautionary tale about speculating on the future. Like so many works that came before it, and not a few that came after, the passage of time has only laid bare a certain lack of imagination, less so of the author and more so of the age in which they worked. Knebel’s great weakness was assuming that the ‘normalcy’ of mid-century America would last forever, or indeed that it was ever really a thing to begin with. I absolutely see why the folks at Penguin Random House chose to reissue this novel so recently, but if anything, it serves to emphasize the sheer madness of the current administration, if not in actual mental state, certainly in its outlandishness. We’re living through times that our progeny will write lurid historical novels about, unfortunately, and an actual novel does as good a job as any to lay that truth bare.

Reference: Knebel, Fletcher. Night of Camp David [Penguin Random House, 1965].

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Review: Captain America: Brave New World

Neither brave enough nor new enough

There has always been a tension in how a particular sort of liberal-leaning-leftist viewer has perceived the character of Captain America (and I absolutely include myself in that qualification). As an American, particularly a Filipino-American, there is a part of me that has been seduced by America’s self-flattering myths, and perhaps worse, wants to be seduced. As stirring old Red Army marching songs make you want to believe in the worker’s utopia of the Soviet Union and forget about the Holodomor and the Rape of Berlin (I’m reminded of what Joseph Goebbels said about Battleship Potemkin: “anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film”), the best Captain America media makes you want to believe in the old pablum about the land of the free and the home of the brave, and forget about the carnage in Gaza. Chris Evans as Steve Rogers certainly made you want to salute Old Glory, to believe in white America’s view of itself. He (Evans and Rogers both) is what the twentieth century would have called “All-American”—white, blonde, and wholesome. In the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Disney made Sam Wilson, played by Anthony Mackie, the new Captain America, which attracted aplomb and controversy as he is Black. Mackie and Wilson get their first spin at the role on the big screen in 2025’s Captain America: Brave New World.

This is a movie that, for better or worse, has a very defined place within the broader mythos of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I have seen people frustrated that it is in some ways a sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, the only time Edward Norton ever played that role. It is a film I confess to have enjoyed. The ties to that film are made very clear by virtue of the very important role of Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, now played by Harrison Ford in his gruff twenty-first-century demeanor. The thematic thread that connects this film and the Hulk film is that they are focused more than other MCU entries on the interaction between superheroes and the United States government. The film uses some of these connections in smart ways, but those who wanted a broader political statement will see any such statement hampered by the politics of the plot, and the politics of The Walt Disney Company.

It is Ford’s President Ross around which so much of the film’s themes rotate. He has served in a number of incidents involving superheroes and their adversaries, and he has parlayed that into a successful presidential run. As you would expect, he has skeletons in his closet that come into play over the course of the story, all running through high-level politics. He is a geopolitical hawk and a loud personality, reminiscent of a certain current occupant of the Oval Office, but compared to that one, Ross is so lucid I would pick him in a heartbeat. The film portrays him as a deeply flawed, ambitious man, obviously a climber. But it also gives him a moral core, a certain sense of decency, that he can act on when prompted enough, especially by Sam Wilson. It is there that the film becomes divisive.

Walking out of the theater and later discussing it with a friend as I drove him to a board game night, I concluded that Captain America: Brave New World is an enjoyable enough supervillain film whose politics I disagree with; my friend said that is what he expects of MCU movies, and I can’t really disagree with him. I like Sam Wilson in this role as a patriotic hero, and Ford is good as Ross. The action is well done, with appropriate weight given to punches, and there is a very good scene involving fighter jets. None of those are really the issues I have with this film. The issues come from the fact that I studied international relations in college with plans to join the US Foreign Service, until I read about the Nixon Administration’s support of the Bangladeshi Genocide so that it could keep Pakistan as an intermediary during the leadup to Nixon’s visit to China, was terrified at the prospect of becoming another Archer Blood, and then decided I couldn’t morally accept such employment.

I think this is a good time to note the presence of Ruth Bat-Seraph, played by Shira Haas, who has been the subject of some internet controversy. The character Ruth Bat-Seraph is a form of the comic character Sabra, who in-universe is Israeli, as is her actress. The name ‘Sabra’ refers to a prickly pear native to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, often used as an affectionately jocular autonym referring to how Israelis are said to be prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside. Certain groups on the internet find her name deeply offensive, as Sabra is also the name of one of the refugee camps (along with Shatila, which is commonly mentioned in tandem) in Lebanon, where Israeli-backed Maronite militias slaughtered innocent Palestinians and Lebanese Shias (a fact that directly preceded the founding of Hezbollah) during the Israeli invasion of that country in the ’80s. The character was created two years before the massacre, so I am confident that the name is a coincidence. Its actual portrayal in the film is rather bland, frankly; anything of real interest, including the name ‘Sabra,’ is hacked off in an attempt to dodge controversy in light of the Palestinian Genocide; she is mentioned to have been born in Israel in a way that perhaps vaguely refers to the Mossad’s reputation, but I can’t really detect any commentary beyond that. I don’t view the presence of an Israeli character in itself to be offensive (much as I don’t find the presence of a Russian character, vis-à-vis the invasion of Ukraine, to be offensive in itself), but I have seen her presence brought up in broader (legitimate) critiques of how Disney relates to the Israeli government. All told, the whole thing has amounted to a tempest in a teapot.

The case of Ruth Bat-Seraph is emblematic of a broader problem with the film, going right down to its foundations. The whole plot is framed as a single bad actor within the US government exploiting the weakness of a flawed politician who nevertheless has some decency. There is never, at any point, an attempt to interrogate the structures of the American government that could make any of this story, any of these deceptions and deaths, possible. The film comes closest through the abandoned super soldier Isaiah Bradley, played by Carl Lumby and imported from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but it never goes as far as it really ought to have. Such a critique would have been extremely relevant given the American-backed razing of Gaza, but there is absolutely no engagement as to why this country, founded on slavery and genocide, feels entitled to bestride the world as a colossus, murdering tens of millions without accountability. There is no attempt to see how this corrodes a nation’s morality. The first sequence of the movie is set in Mexico, and another is set in the Indian Ocean. The film is just close enough to realizing that corrosion, as Aimé Césaire so boldly put it in 1950’s Discourse on Colonialism, but the film is simply not brave enough.

That is really the core issue with the film: it is not brave enough (ironic, given its literal title), and it really doesn’t bother being new enough either. By the end of watching it, you will have spent roughly a hundred minutes with a reasonably entertaining superhero movie, which is about what I expected. The problem, ultimately, is that this movie was exactly what we expected it to be, and nothing more.

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Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Microreview [book]: Binary by Michael Crichton/John Lange

Binary

Michael Crichton (writing as John Lange)

Hard Case Crime

The Meat

I have previously written on this blog about my admiration for hacks. Hacks are like session musicians: their job is to produce efficiently and effectively. And well. And often. Some of my heroes are hacks. Mark Twain was a hack. So was Chet Atkins.

Michael Crichton was in medical school when he wrote his first novels. Medical school. How he managed to write a single novel while in med school is beyond me—I can barely write my dissertation and that’s all I have to do. But he wrote them. Binary is the second that I personally have read. (Full disclosure: It’s also the second Crichton novel that I have ever read.) This was an enjoyable novel, plot and nothing more. Crichton shows expertise in pacing and suspense, moving the story along to a somewhat forgettable conclusion. But I enjoyed getting there.

Crichton's hackery, in other words, was evident even as a student.  

The story: It’s 1972. Millionaire playboy and wannabe terrorist John Wright plots to kill President Nixon—and much of the population of San Diego—with VX nerve gas. John Graves is an intelligence agent out to stop him. They’re both unstable geniuses, so there’s a lot of outwitting and attempted outwitting at the heart of the story.

This is a humble novel, not promising more than what it can deliver, which was an enjoyable Sunday afternoon. There’s little character development, with Crichton cleverly slipping enough background information on the rivals at the center of Binary to give the story a bit of dramatic flavor. The book is mostly plot, each scene’s sole purpose being to move story forward. A couple of moments did feel forced and, in contrast with the rest of the book, wordy. Particularly the lecture on VX nerve gas—though I did learn something.

The writing here is largely economical, just enough description and dialogue to push through to the conclusion. Crichton’s age shows—he’s still learning here—but there’s also clear expertise and skill demonstrated throughout this book. Crichton had certainly developed his craft in the five years between Binary and Scratch One, which I reviewed here a few weeks back. Binary is also more than thirty pages shorter than the earlier novel. One point bonus. (But I’m penalizing the book one point for the villain’s erectile difficulty as the cause of his terrorist behavior. The vague John-Wright-is-mad-about-China thing didn’t really make sense, but still…)

And it should be noted that there were very few instances of actual violence in the story and only a handful of guns. Bravo.

The Math

Objective score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for very few guns; +1 for being only 220 pages

Penalities: -1 for impotence

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10