Customer Reviews

Gun, With Occasional Music: Library Edition

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4 star:		(25)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

"Gun, With Occasional Music" is my first Jonathan Lethem book, and it certainly won't be my last. Although reading just one of his books hardly ranks me as an expert on his career, I will say that this story about a private detective in a future, dystopian nightmare will probably be one of the most unusual experiences you'll ever have with a book (unless you make a habit of reading quirky, ultra bizarre fiction). Lethem must have been the product of a union between Raymond Chandler and William Burroughs, with genetic material donated by Dashiell Hammett and Aldous Huxley. That's the only way to describe this amazing blend of noir, science fiction, and political commentary. "Gun, With Occasional Music" is the type of book you introduce your friends to in order to see their reaction after they finish it.

Lethem's future is one in which I would not want to visit, let alone live in. For private investigator Conrad Metcalf, this nightmare is the only world he knows. What's so bad about this author's horrific visions? In the world of tomorrow, society is quite different from the world we know. For one thing, animals (rabbits, sheep, kangaroos, and cats) now walk upright, speak, commit crimes, and work. It's all a part of what authorities call "evolving," and it isn't just about the animals. Human infants take part in the hijinks as well, since society decided that it takes too long for people to grow up. The result is "babyheads," infants that speak, smoke, and drink thanks to massive infusions of growth hormones. As if that's not enough to cause you screaming fits, and apparently many of the people in this brave new world feel like screaming about it, the authorities provide "make," a drug used to modify behavior. Moreover, people can make their own blends of the drug, adding such great substances as forgettol so they don't have to remember their miserable existence. Those brave souls who wish to challenge the system, or the innocents just caught in police nets, face the dread terror of the inquisitors. This secret police directorate possesses the power to ask questions, arrest people, and carry out sentences that include freezing people for years in a sort of cryogenic state. Conrad Metcalf is a private inquisitor, a former member of the secret police who struck out on his own after his disillusionment with the system led to an early retirement.

Now Metcalf has another case, one that promises to be a real doozy. After a doctor turns up dead in a seedy motel room, a client named Orton Angwine turns up on Metcalf's doorstep. Angwine claims he had nothing to do with the murder, and he wants Metcalf to clear him from the looming cloud of suspicion. Metcalf's subsequent investigation leads him through a labyrinth of underworld types, corrupt doctors, a jilted wife, a cranky babyhead, a kangaroo with a grudge, and inquisitors who would rather see this case disappear forever. Whatever happens in the end, Metcalf must tread a fine line during his investigation because if his personal karma drops to zero he will find himself facing a six year snooze in a cryogenic tank. As Conrad homes in on the murderer, he discovers his noirish wisecracks bring more trouble than answers. The future is a dangerous place, and Conrad Metcalf is right in the middle of it without an umbrella.

You really must love the dialogue in this book. It crackles with snappy comebacks and hooked barbs, all done in a grand tradition which states that detectives in crime noir stories must speak in clever metaphors and insults. What makes it so jarring here is when Metcalf trades verbal jabs with a gun-toting kangaroo named Joey Castle. In "Gun, With Occasional Music," dialogue assumes an added dimension when you realize that the only people allowed to ask questions in the future are inquisitors, thus the reason that Conrad often frets over his inadequate responses when grilling someone for information. His stock and trade is not as a hired gun or bodyguard per se; it literally involves possessing the necessary verbal acumen to properly make inquiries and to look good while doing so. Lethem studied and mastered the style of the noir masters before writing this book, and it shows on virtually every page.

"Gun, With Occasional Music" is weirdness incarnate, but at the same time it is immensely amusing. The best recommendation I can give you is to pay close attention to the various characters Metcalf runs into during the course of his investigation. The twists and turns of the Angwine case are monumental, and easily lost track of amidst the strange scenery Lethem throws at you with unremitting frequency. This book really is one that requires a second reading because there is so much going on. The conclusion is an interesting one that wraps the plot up just as a good noir story should. Yep, all in all Lethem's little beast is a great way to spend a few days. For those unaccustomed to the joys of warped fiction, Jonathan Lethem exists to show you the way.

After reading Letham's less-than-coherent "Amnesia Moon," I almost made the mistake of not reading him again, but a couple of reviews posted here convinced me otherwise. This book was magnificent: brilliant ideas and brilliant writing. I'm just surprised that I hadn't heard more about this author, because this work is far superior to most modern fiction I've read. Not being much of a genre fan myself, it was nice to see a hard-boiled detective story in a sci-fi (though entirely conceivable sci-fi) setting. Rich, developed characters (be they detectives, doctors, evolved apes or tiny mental giants) and a thick plot with no holes in the story to worry about. Be forwarned, its a real page-turner, and not something you want to pick up unless you've got a day or two free.

"You got SF tropes in my hardboiled crime story!" "No, you got a detective story in my dystopian-future novel!"

As others have said, this book is excellent, and definitely worth the read (the style alone is worth the price of admission, even if you ultimately decide you didn't like the admittedly tough-to-favor story.) However, I feel compelled to interject that I thought its focus tended to waver. Most of the book was a detective novel; but there were several portions that abandoned that storyline entirely and just wandered off into worldbuilding. Indeed, this book would have been nearly the same if the often murkily-explained SF stuff had been removed entirely. (it took me a while to figure out exactly what a babyhead was, and I'm still unclear on why people thought it was a good idea to make so many of them.)

However, the SF portions of the story _do_ serve well to make the setting more bizarre, and separate from the real world--and that's what books are all about. I'd have just liked to see better integration between the setting and the plot.

I read this book in one sitting, feeling like I had snorted a mixtue of Regrettol and Addictol, two of the many govenment-sponsored drugs made available for free to citizens of this future world. The narrator's personal blend of drugs was "skewed heavily towards Acceptol, with just a touch of Regrettol to provide that bittersweet edge, and enough addictol to keep me craving it even in my darkest moments." The blend he delivered to me, however, was light on the Acceptol.

This bittersweet story would be too depressing to recommend to anyone were it not for the humor, which had me laughing out loud. Metcalf and the kangaroo are worth reading again and again, but with little jokes like Testafer "Here's a tip, Grover. You're supposed to go first-" "Shut up." Well, I'd tried to warn him" I was reading dectective fiction as good as Chandler, to whom the book is inscribed.

This is some of the best fiction I've ever read and I recommend it highly.

This is a hard book to pin down. It begins as a strange but fun pastiche/satire of Dashiell Hammett in a science fictional vein. Specifically, the general atmosphere, penchant for tortured similes, and basic plot devices (private detective, etc.) are borrowed from Hammett, while the dystopic future is a variation on Orwell and Huxley. The plot turns that follow allow Lethem to show us how his near-future dystopia evolves over time, which eventually leads to an immesely satisfying ending (which, of course, I cannot explain without ruining the surprise).

Lethem's skill as a writer is evident in the fact that he manages to make a number of utterly absurd details seem real and consistent: "evolution therapy," a biotechnological advance that results in sentient kangaroos, kittens and sheep who make up a socially inferior caste in society, as well as in super-smart infants and toddlers who congregate in seedy "baby bars" to escape the unexplained side-effects of their condition; a narrator who sometime in the past had his sexual responses switched with an old girlfriend's, so that now, while possessing a functioning male apparatus, he experiences sex like a woman; government-sponsored "makes," drug mixes with which everyone is kept high and in the mental state they most desire; and on and on. I would hesitate to call Lethem a fully original writer, but at the same time, his imagination is impressive, and the future society he envisions is convincing. The Hammett satire is worth a few chuckles as well.

For a book that fails to reveal a single real weakness, I recommend this highly. It isn't great literature, but it's a worthwhile read.

How do you make an hard boiled Sci-fi story?Take a cynical but really golden-hearted (proportions of cynicism and goodness may vary) private-eye in less tan friendly terms whit the official cops,some client in deep [trouble] who's innocent,some big rich jaded family in murky liaison whit ruthless mobsters,some fascinating dangerous babe, some ghastly creep,and you have the hard-boiled part. For a Blade-runner-like scenario you have only to add an oppressive police-state regime, some creepy genetic extravaganza,
an overall gloomy athmosphere...and the cocktail is done. Lethem knows it. What he did'nt know when he wrote this book is how to keep the reader interested. Exasperated,I flew toward the solution of the rather messy story and...my jaw fell to the floor,as I was literally flabbergasted. But I was not amused.

Tough P.I. Conrad Metcalf is having a rough time lately. The instrumental news on the radio hints of bad things coming. It's getting tougher to figure out what his clients want, because they all snort so much government-supplied Forgettall that they don't know who he is, let alone what they do for a living. Only Private Inquisitors like Conrad are allowed to ask any questions at all, in fact. Conrad's got it tough: he needs to see his old girlfriend about a personal matter, half his customers are evolved animals, one of his suspects is a brain-evolved, drunken, sarcastic, three-year-old babyhead, and the gangsters in the back room of the Fickle Muse have sicked a kangaroo hit man named Joey on him. What kind of catastrophe could have produced an insane world like this? Why are the children being turned into babyheads, and why evolve animals to take their places? Why is everyone upside-down on free dope all the time, why is the news just sad or happy music, and why do people have appliances as parts of their names? Why does the government freeze you if your karma drops too low? And how the heck can you shoot someone with a gun that goes "Dum, da dum dum" when you draw it? Ah, ah, ah: no questions allowed. Just sit back and watch this thing unwind. There's a real hard-boiled private eye in this book, but he's a gorilla. That didn't even surprise me after the sheep was murdered. Even though justice is a lost cause and human rights an interesting problem, Metcalf fights on for his client's freedom, risking his own karma in the process. Lethem himself obviously has karma to burn.

What a blast! My first exposure to Lethem has me hooked.

I am sure this is the first time I ever thought there could be some connections between drugs, guns, karma, kangaroos, and a few others you have to read to believe (probably the last time, too, unless he has written a sequel).

This is a very funny mix of science fiction, fantasy, detective, dystopia, noir and a few more genres, I'm sure. Lethem told his story tightly, with an unbelievable group of Characters ("C" not "c").

Toward the end, I had to make myself slow down so it would last just a little longer. I highly recommend this book to all who enjoy off-beat, hard to label reads.

Starting from the beginning, Gun, with Occasional Music is ostensibly a detective story in the traditional of Raymond Chandler. That short description is not quite apt, though--it's like saying Beck or Oasis is pop music in the tradition of the Beatles. There are some striking similarities in structure or theme, but the frills are quite different. Lethem's Los Angeles is filled with the products of evolution therapy-- animals that walk on two legs and mostly fill the menial roles (akin to Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind) and babyheads, children that have been treated to have adult mental abilities while their bodies still are those of their age. Drugs are legal, available from corner "makers", who can mix your preferred blend like today's tobacconist, from substances called Avoidol, Relaxol, Acceptol, Believol, and, especially, Addictol. People carry around "karma" cards, that contain a collection of points, earned by doing good deeds, and subtracted from when caught in a crime including being rude. Instead of CNN, there's the music news, where one tries to understand if something bad has occurred based on the amount of bassoons or bass in the orchestra. Newspapers are collections of uncaptioned pictures. And people, unless police or licensed private investigators, find it the ultimate in rudeness to ask or be asked a question. Conrad Metcalf may sound like Sam Spade, but the world in which he tries to exist is not conducive to his anti-establishment position.

The murder that Conrad attempts to solve is fairly straightforward, although Lethem does throw in a few really nice twists that fit with his world and the characters. For all its outre ideas, Lethem keeps the world consistent, as if he had thought while writing it, "What would a hard-boiled detective do if found in this situation?" The result is clean, crisp, often incredibly funny, and yet the ending is as tough as these novels come, with an additional bonus of an ending moral. Separately, Lethem's ideas are nothing new in science fiction. Together, and in a noir style, they make a fresh and witty adventure.

I'm sorry that I took so long to turn to Lethem, and you can be assured that the other books will not linger long on my to-be-read shelf.

This was a stunning debut and a sure sign of things to come from this gifted and wildly imaginative writer. "Gun, With Occasional Music" takes the hard-boiled noir detective genre and twists it around like the torso of a man watching a good-looking woman pass him on the street. Conrad Metcalfe is a two-bit scuzz-bag P.I. ripped from the pages of Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald, spaced out on nose candy and 25 karmas away from an upstate vacation on a cryogenic slab. His nemesis, Joey Castle, is an evolved kangaroo born into a marsupial mob and working his way up from being Danny Phoneblum's flunky to being Mr. Big. Taking the case of a chump doctor set up to take the fall for the murder of his partner, Metcalfe uses guile, snappy repartee and dumb luck to blow the case wide open. If you start reading this book, be prepared to look stupid because you will have an ear-to-ear grin on your face until you put it down. This book will be for Generation X what Tom Robbins' "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" was for the Baby Boomers - a cult classic enjoyed by those in the know. Jonathan Lethem deserves much more of a following than he has. Reading this book will certainly get the ball rolling.