Moral Disorder and Other Stories | Margaret Atwood | Doubleday | Margaret Atwood is pissed off at the state of world affairs. Or so I thought based on “The Bad News,” the first of 11 intertwining stories, which dives through a wormhole from an aging couple’s breakfast over the papers to life in a Roman colony besieged by barbarians who “prefer to invade on beautiful days.” But it’s a bait and switch: rather than political allegory, the rest of this slender volume is relentlessly domestic and carries with it much of the monotony of household chores.
Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar | Moazzam Begg with Victoria Brittain | New Press | In January 2002 Moazzam Begg–a Briton whose parents were Pakistani immigrants–was abducted by the CIA from his home in Islamabad, Pakistan. The Pentagon claims that Begg trained with Al Qaeda to fight with the Taliban against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but he was held without being charged with any crime and detained for three years at some of the U.S.’s most notorious prison camps.
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Green Town, Illinois–a fictional version of Bradbury’s hometown of Waukegan–is just as idyllic on the surface here as in the earlier book, and it’s also every bit as terrifying, as its slightly preposterous tale of a war between young boys and old men unfolds in a series of tempests in teacups. But as with the first book, you don’t read this for the plot, you read this for the language, as breathtaking metaphor meets jaw-dropping turn of phrase again and again, and Green Town becomes a nightmarish place because its utter unreality is so beautiful. Bradbury’s perfectly capable of workmanlike pulp prose. That he chooses so unequivocally not to use it here shows the tender esteem in which he holds the seriousness of his dreamy protagonists’ surreal struggles–right down to the all-too-literal conversations with the, er, Generative Principle at the book’s end. | Monica Kendrick
Dan, whose hard-boiled crime story about a farm equipment dealer run afoul of drug-dealing rednecks actually shows real talent, is mocked by the pompous Newton for his pedestrian literary aspirations, yet the teacher steals lines from the student’s work in his epistolary flirtation with Rio, a saucy Pittsburgh lounge singer whose stories are more like friendly letters about her romantic entanglements. A third student, the adulterous housewife Linda, appears to be stalking Newton as her submissions get more and more familiar–and more and more unhinged. With characters like these it would be easy for an author to come off as arrogant as his own main character, but Carter, an English teacher at Georgetown College in Kentucky, shows all concerned plenty of affection. | Jerome Ludwig
Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake | Trevor Dann | Da Capo | At the current rate of postmortem deification, Nick Drake will have eclipsed both Kurt Cobain and John Lennon by 2012. Drake, a gifted songwriter on the British folk scene during its heyday, died at the age of 26, in 1974, of a drug overdose. In death, his scope of influence swelled greatly, as did his record sales, thanks to that VW commercial set to “Pink Moon.”
