I Am Number Four

It’s been awhile since I’ve reviewed a book–not because I haven’t read some review-worthy books, but because I haven’t had time or haven’t been able to figure out how to accurately summarize my thoughts.

However, I’ve got one for you now. I Am Number Four has received a lot of attention in the young adult realm lately–mostly because it’s just been made into a film. And, like the good reader that I am, I promised myself that I would read the book before seeing the movie (even though Civil Twilight’s song “Letters from the Sky” is on the soundtrack!).

All right, the premise: it’s science fiction (yay!). The title refers to the novel’s protagonist. He is an alien from a planet called Lorian. He and eight other children, along with each of their Cepans (like Watchers…sort of) and the pilot of the spacecraft, managed to escape Lorian during a global war in which the Lorians’ enemy, the Mogadorians, killed the Lorians to take over their planet. The Mogadorians had used up all the resources and their own planet and needed a new home.

The novel follows the fourth child and his Cepan, Henri. Every few months, Four and Henri move to a new small town in an effort to keep Four’s identity secret. Four changes his name each time (he goes by John Smith during the events of this novel). The numbering of each child is important. The Mogadorians have come to Earth to track down the nine children. Once they kill the nine, they can then begin to take over Earth (a planet much larger and more suited to the Mogadorians’ needs). But there’s a curse on the children for their protection: the Mogadorians can only kill the children in order of their number. (I don’t recall whether the number represents birth order or something else. That wasn’t clearly explained.) Every time one of the kids dies, each of the remaining nine gets a ring burned around his or her ankle as an alert that one of their number is gone. The novel opens with Three’s death, which is why Henri and Four must move yet again.

They arrive in Paradise, Ohio, where John soon meets a beautiful girl named Sarah and befriends a sci-fi geek named Sam. From there on out, it’s just what you’d expect from an alien-pretending-to-be-human, coming-of-age tale. John’s in love for the first time, has a best friend for the first time, experiences the arrival of his Legacies (his special abilities as one of the nine–he’s fireproof and able to employ telekinesis), and struggles to decide how to tell both Sam and Sarah about his true identity. And, of course, the Mogadorians find him. Fighting ensues. People discover his secret. Enemies in his high school become allies in the fight against the Mogadorians.

I expected this book to be epic. My favorite parts of this book, as I also expected, were the backstory: how Four and Henri arrived on Earth; why they left to begin with; folklore, history, and tradition associated with Lorian. In general, what I love most about science and/or speculative fiction is the ability of an author to create another world. And Pittacus Lore (a pseudonym that I’ll discuss more in a moment) sets up an interesting world.

But the execution of this story was merely good. I expected something phenomenal, and I didn’t quite get that. At times, the dialogue seemed a bit off, a bit too adult-trying-to-be-teenager. At other times, minor details in the story weren’t explained enough, and in science fiction, the beauty is in the details. For example, when the Mogadorians arrive, Four flees his school and goes back to his house. His girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend Mark (and, therefore, Four’s high school enemy) is sitting at his kitchen table on Four’s Cepan’s computer. It’s never explained why he’s there or how much he knows, but suddenly, Mark is fighting alongside Four and his friends. I was seriously bothered by the inconsistency in Mark’s attitude.

Nonetheless, the story kept me (mostly) interested. I read the book in a few days, and I’m looking forward to the movie. It may be one of those books that works better visually than textually. And I’ll definitely read any sequels that come out. But I’m not dying to know what happens next, as I did with the Hunger Games trilogy or the Chaos Walking trilogy.

One last thing about this book: Pittacus Lore is a pseudonym (obviously). The name will somehow come into play with the history of Lorian–there are references in this first book. I assumed, at first, that Lore was a new author on the scene and just established a pseudonym to go along with the content of the book. However, I searched him on Google after I noticed the first textual reference to a character named Pittacus, and I discovered that Pittacus Lore is actually a collaboration of James Frey and Jobie Hughes. (In fact, in the book, Henri creates new documents for Four to use in the future. Two of those names are “James Hughes” and “Jobie Frey.” Clever.) James Frey is the author of A Million Little Pieces, the “memoir” that Oprah chose for her book club several years ago that was later revealed to be a total fabrication. Frey had written a novel and published it as a memoir, sparking loads of controversy in the publishing world. It turns out that not only is Frey still publishing under his own name, but he’s also working on tons of projects using a variety of pseudonyms. Pittacus Lore is just one of those. This discovery about the real author may have had something to do with my disappointment with the book. I despise a lack of integrity, and no matter how great the writing or the story is, I already had a bad opinion of Frey.

All this to say, I would recommend this book. Just know that it has a few issues, and I wouldn’t rank it among the absolute best young adult novels I’ve read.

Here’s the trailer for the film. I’ve already spotted some differences between the book and the film, but I’m looking forward to seeing it nonetheless:

Dreams are fading out.

When my alarm went off this morning, I woke up from a really disturbing dream. The kind of dream that made me afraid to go back to sleep, even for those 15 minutes until my next alarm. The kind of dream that made me want to squeeze my eyes shut and never open them again. The kind of dream that made me afraid that life had altered irrevocably in the eight hours I’d been asleep.

I wasn’t the main character in the dream, but I felt everything he was feeling. I only remember brief snatches of the dream, fortunately. A man and his son were in some sort of large shopping center or department store (subconsciously pulling in the shopping cart from The Road, perhaps?). It wasn’t a store any longer, though. Some sort of disaster had occurred (i.e. the apocalypse or something), and groups of people were waging a war against each other. I can’t even describe the terror of just moving through the aisles of this store. Anyway, a group of evil men were hunting for this man and his son, and they kidnapped the boy. The man had tried to flee with his son, but to no avail. He dashed into the parking lot, searching in vain for the vehicle they could have escaped in. The parking lot was pitch black dark, with rows and rows of empty vehicles. The man knew that he had arrived at the store in a minivan of some kind, but he couldn’t even remember what specific vehicle was his or where he had parked it. He was desperate and hopeless. When I woke up, he was standing in an empty parking lot, with no one around, absolutely certain his son had already been killed, and knowing that nothing remained that was worth living for.

Dramatic? You bet. My first thought? I’ve got to stop reading dystopian literature.

Over the past year, I’ve read a lot of dystopian novels and seen a lot of dystopian films: the book and film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend; Patrick Ness’ young adult novels The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer; other children’s books like The Giver and The Last Book in the Universe; Alan Moore’s graphic novels Watchmen and V for Vendetta. Books and films that have impacted me greatly–enough so that out of all the books I read and films I’ve seen, these made it into blog posts within the last year or so.

I enjoy dystopian literature and films, in a very strange way. Dystopian texts, and post-apocalyptic texts, remind me that, right now, life is worth fighting for. I have hope in a God who cares for me and for this world, and I’m blessed in immeasurable ways as a result of that. Dystopian settings, depressing and often empty of any higher power, are an other that I can’t really understand outside of my own faith. You can’t understand darkness until you understand light.

I never really realized how much it affected me. Sure, some of my favorite books are dystopian novels that make me feel angry while realizing the power of love. Yes, I wept during the film adaptation of  The Road. Now, my dreams are taking place in a dystopian society, full of fear, hatred, and anger? Maybe I don’t need to see The Book of Eli just yet, even though I’m so intrigued by it.

Maybe I also need to read happier books. I’m working on L.M. Montgomery’s The Story Girl, happy, light reading. But next up on the list is Dickins’ Hard Times for the class on the Victorian Period that I’m auditing. Not so much happy.

At least this dream is making me realize what those books and films do, as well: I have a God who’s in control of everything–my own life, the lives of my students, the lives of baseball players who take steroids, and the lives of poor people in Haiti. I may not live in a utopia, but I certainly don’t live in anything resembling dystopia, either.

It’s the end of the world as we know it…

or, Ten Things I Love Regarding the Apocalypse and/or Alternative Civilization Societies.

The Victorians in Britain were known for their sensational fiction and ghost stories. Why were these tales so popular during the writers’ lifetimes? The writing reflected an anxiety about the culture: one could be haunted by some secret sin, and a ghost could seek revenge for that well-hidden transgression. Additionally, Victorians greatly valued domesticity, and women were idealized as angels of the home. A haunted house was the embodiment of insecrurities plaguing those places where one should feel safest.

In the same way, I think a lot of texts in current popular culture regarding the apocalypse or some futuristic post-civilization society reflect the fear in America (or maybe even the West) today. Since the Cold War, we’ve feared nuclear attack and the end of the world. Technology is changing so quickly that it’s impossible to know where our culture’s dependency on  technology and innovation will be even a year from now. Rapid change brings out anxieties and fears: will we get to a point where technology utterly destroys? Where we devolve into a society where survivial is our only concern?

This seems to be a trend, and one that I’m particularly interested in, although I didn’t really understand my own fascination with it until I sat down to write this list (with actual pen and paper on an old-fashioned wooden desk–shocker!). In the past few years, a lot of the books/movies/TV shows that I’ve really enjoyed have depicted this theme, and I decided it would be fun to make a list of my favorite texts involving the apocalypse. [Note: the order of this list is only the order in which I thought of them.]

1. Absolution, Muse. Their best album (out of an incredible catalog).  [Side note: I haven't bought or even heard their newest album, which came out last week. That album may nullify this point.] I would even argue that this is one of the greatest albums in the history of music. Yeah, it’s that good. This album from a trio of conspiracy theorists/musicians is all about the apocalypse. Examples:

• from “Apocalypse Please”: “It’s time we saw a miracle / Come on, it’s time for something biblical/ [ . . . ] This is the end of the world”
• from “Thoughts of a Dying Atheist,” one of the last tracks on the album: “And I know the moment’s near / There’s nothing you can do / Look through a faithless eye / Are you afraid to die?”

2. The Road, Cormac McCarthy. An incredible, haunting, sparse novel about a man and his son fighting for survival in post-apocalpytic America. Beautiful in its darkness and tragedy.

3. Jericho. A TV show cancelled after a cliffhanger first season, brought back after outraged fans protested, and cancelled again for good after a disappointing, short second season. The setting is a small Kansas town filled with tenacious, ingenius residents who manage to hold onto the remnants of civilization and humanity after most of the major cities in the United States are annihilated by hydrogen bombs. I spent part of last weekend rewatching some of season one when I wasn’t writing papers or grading or planning or anything responsible.

4. I Am Legend, a book by Richard Matheson, and several movies. The book and the most recent film starring Will Smith are the ones I am acquainted with, and the stories are so vastly different that they should be considered separate texts. Essentially, each is the store of the last man left alive (in the movie, it’s NYC, and I don’t remember the location of the book). He has a strange resistance to the vampiric disease that has infected every other human and most animals. He devotes his life to searching for the cause and the cure. The book and the movie each end in a vastly different way. And each is stark and disturbing in its own way.

5. The Giver, Lois Lowry. A classic children’s book about a society of people whose lives are utterly conformed to the set laws of society. A boy named Jonas is chosen to be the Receiver of Memories, and he alone knows the pain, triumph, and love of society, a terrifying and weighty existence. Be sure to read the sequels Gathering Blue and The Messenger. The trio is a great commentary on the importance of both love and pain.

6. The Uglies series, Scott Westerfeld. With its own vocabulary and awesome technology like hoverboards, these books about a futuristic, post-Rusties (a.k.a – us) society are sometimes fun and often thought-provoking. The series deals with some of the same issues as The Giver–what happens when society seeks to conform an entire race? What happens when a select group refuses to conform? (Also–check out the cover to Specials to the left–they have these awesome tattoos called “flash tattoos” that sound painful and super awesome at the same time.)

7. Independence Day. I like films with Will Smith and the apocalypse, apparently. An alien race trying to destroy America + Will Smith + super-nerdy Jeff Goldblum? What’s not to love, really?

8. “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” R.E.M. “…and I feel fine.” Really…why worry?

9. The Host, Stephenie Meyer. Really, how could I not include my favorite Meyer book? The whole world (and many other planets in far-off galaxies) has been taken over by a mild, peaceful race of souls who end all wars and violence and set up a calm and gentle society. With two problems: some humans have escape capture and are carefully hidden, while other humans refuse to succumb to the sould placed within their bodies. In my opinion, this is Meyer’s best work, even if it is slow-moving at first.

10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury. What happens when we begin to fear knowledge rather than revere it? This happens. Firefighters set fires to destroy books rather than putting fires out. Men hide, secretly memorizing the words of great philosophers and writers, so their words will not be lost forever. And one man realizes the value of knowledge and thinking for oneself and attempts to break away from the society that is so binding and restrictive.

You will risk all their lives and their souls.

I saw Watchmen tonight. Before I attempt to organize my thoughts about that film into any readable blog, I need to set you up for why I love the book so much.

I never thought I’d be a fan of graphic novels, really. But Watchmen (actually the third graphic novel I read) transcended all my expectations. It made the short list of Books that Rocked My World.

As Myron, Russ, and I stood outside the movie theater tonight, debating the merits of the book versus the film, Myron and I (like always) moved into a discussion of why we love modern and postmodern literature (including Watchmen). Books written in these time frames are (usually) so real, so raw, so unguarded. When they’re good, they strip away all pretense and get to the core of what’s wrong with society, and sometimes (even simultaneously) what’s good about society (example: The Kite Runner).

Watchmen is a speculation on how society could wind up. But the beauty of the graphic novel is in the details. The subplots that run parallel to the overarching plot about vigilantes trying to save the world. The minute details in each frame of the story. The extensive history (and documentation) on each of the characters that explains their motives. And the incredible, paradoxical, infuriating ending.

SPOILER: I’m talking about this film. If you don’t want to get my honest, unguarded, frustrated opinion, stop reading now. I don’t want to ruin it for you if you keep reading. This might be intense…but what could you expect from a review on a movie that I’ve been waiting months for, a movie based on one of the books that I love?

The Good

To be honest, I got to the end of the movie, buried my face in my hands as the credits started rolling, then turned to Myron and Russ with a stunned expression on my face, saying, “Oh, my God. I don’t even know!” I couldn’t have told you at that point if I liked or despised the film.

There were some good things about that movie. Phenomenal things. It must have been incredibly difficult to take a book that already has detailed, elaborate illustrations and turn it into a film. But Zach Snyder, the director, did a superb job. The characters were almost all exactly as they appeared in the novel. Laurie’s hair, Rorschach’s freckles, even the newspaper vendor…most of them were spot on, appearance-wise. Some of the effects were better than I imagined. (Example: Rorschach’s mask is an ever-changing inkblot. In the book, in each frame, the mask has a different design. It’s a long book–hundreds of masks. In the film, the features of the mask was constantly in motion, and I was quite impressed by the effects.)

The personalities, too–Dan’s hesitation, Dr. Manhattan’s stoicism, Rorschach’s black-and-white sense of justice–almost all of them came across exactly as they needed to. The one exception was perhaps Adrian Veidt. I didn’t quite buy his “brilliant, good-looking man trying to save the world” act in the beginning as much as I did in the novel. I’m sure a lot of that comes from my knowing the ending, however.

The beginning of the movie really had me hooked, too. Within the first minute, I was convinced that I’d been correct in hoping that this would be one of the best movies ever made. Snyder’s effort to make the movie resemble the frames of the graphic novel were excellent. I wish he could have carried that through the whole film without it getting frustrating and tiresome. That wouldn’t have been possible, though. But great job on the beginning!

Some of the music was great, too. I really liked the irony of playing Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” in the opening scene with all the violence of the Comedian’s death. Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” was a good choice. And Simon & Garfunkle’s “Sound of Silence” for the funeral. Perfect! (Some of the other musical choices were not so great, as I’ll get to momentarily.)

The Bad

SPOILER AGAIN: Just in case you weren’t warned enough, stop reading now if you don’t want the ending ruined.

Ahhhh! Why change the ending so much?

Dr. Manhattan was not a scapegoat for Ozymandius’ obliteration of most of the global, urban society! The government blamed it on extra-terrestrials, not the only superhero the world had!

And the book did not end quite so happily, with everyone sure that Laurie and Dan would make it as a couple. The book ended rather shakily. When I finished reading, I felt as though part of me were ripped apart, too. I hated the annihilation of so many people, but in a sick, twisted way, it made sense, too. I don’t have Rorschach’s extreme sense of justice, which is what made the ending so difficult for me to read. I wasn’t sure if the truth would ever be told. I wasn’t sure if it needed to be told. I wasn’t even quite sure what the exact truth was…and that is the beauty of a postmodern novel.

That insecurity is there, slightly, at the end of the film, when the viewers are unsure if the newspaper reporter will reveal the evidence in Rorschach’s journal. But it’s not nearly as extreme as it was in the novel, and I think that’s an important detail that needed to be conveyed.

Also, Rorschach. The man is messed up…for good reason. But viewers of the film don’t get that–little of his history is included. You can’t get the full weight of his neurotic, dangerous, demented obsession with fighting criminals if you don’t know his true motives. I knew stuff had to be cut from the novel in order to make the film, but Rorschach’s history definitely needed to be included in greater detail.

The Ugly

First, the scene in Dan’s owl spaceship. There would have been tasteful ways to convey the intensity of that moment. I did not need an excessive, pornographic sex scene accompanied by Leonard Cohen’s version of “Hallelujah,” which cheapened the moment even more. (I don’t dislike the song–it was just completely inappropriate contextually.)

And the violence. Seeing the implications of such graphic violence in the novel was one thing. Even while reading, there were parts that made me cringe and merely scan the images instead of peering closely at the frames. Dave Gibbons often provided just enough detail to make my mind do the rest of the work. That’s hard to translate to the screen, though, I’m sure. Unfortunately, the result was bloody, gory violence that almost made me get up and leave, that left my stomach lurching. And when reading a book where death is a common theme, I don’t have sounds to accompany the images. It was a hard movie to watch (or to sit with my arms wrapped around my head, trying to block out the sounds and the images).

Conclusion

So thank you, Zach Snyder, for making a film that left me wondering if I loved it or hated it (because there can be no in-between here). Thank you for making a film that evoked the same type of reaction as reading the book did–a knowledge that there were exceptionally good thoughts and concepts presented, an infuriating realization that life often cannot be divided into right-and-wrong, and a desperate wondering if it’s even possible to change a small part of the world for the better. Thank you for taking the near-impossible task of converting a beloved graphic novel onto the big screen and making it look almost effortless. (With the exception of the ending, this is one of the best book-to-film versions I’ve ever seen.)

I don’t know if I’ll see it again. Part of me really wants to–I really enjoyed a lot about this film. The other part of me loathes the very thought. I need a few days to let all of this soak in.

It’s 1 a.m.  I don’t know how much sleep I’ll get tonight. I don’t know how much my dreams will be haunted by the Watchmen.

“Never compromise–not even in the face of Armageddon.” –Rorschach