Tuesday, January 16, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Changeling by Victor LaValle





  Victor LaValle's novel "The Changeling" is described by a USA Today blurb on its Amazon page as a "Modern" or "Dark" Fairy Tale set in New York, and that's a pretty accurate description to a certain extent.  It's actually kind of a spoiler to call this book either a "Fairy Tale" or just a "Fantasy" novel in general, since no fantastical elements don't appear in the book till well into the book's second half.  But it's such a central element of what this book turns out to be (and Amazon doesn't exactly hide it) that it's probably doing an injustice to a prospective reader to hide it, and spoiling this fact shouldn't ruin the reader's experience (if I wasn't spoiled by the Amazon page, I probably wouldn't have read the book myself).

Of course, "Modern" or "Dark" Fairy Tale is also an inadequate descriptor.  The Changeling is a very clear response to issues of racism/sexism, the "nostalgia" for a time when racism/sexism were more acceptable (the idea that this is nostalgia is not mine, but the book approaches it as if it truly was).  More centrally the issue of men refusing to listen to women is kind of the big theme of the book in the final third.  The book can sometimes be a bit heavy handed - to a jarring detriment at a few points - but it works incredibly well due to the characters and dialogue being incredibly well written.

Note:  This was my latest completed audiobook.  The author himself reads the audiobook, and he does a fine job - characters don't really have unique voices, but it's a fine solid reading.

More after the Jump:

--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
Apollo Kagwa was born in New York to a black immigrant mother, Lillian, and a white father, Brian.  When he was a toddler, his father disappeared, and Apollo had recurring nightmares of a creature with his father's face coming back for him.  As an teen, Apollo learned first to love reading, and then to become a businessman selling the used books/mags he read to others who wanted those works.  He expanded that business as an adult, becoming a book-man - combing through estate and library sales for valuable books cast off without knowledge of their true value.

But Apollo's greatest accomplishment as an adult was finding Emma Valentine, a librarian from the Bronx, and convincing her to marry him.  Together they had a son, Brian, and Apollo tried his damn best to be a good father.  And it seemed like everything was going well.

But then things went horribly wrong.  Apollo again starts having the nightmares he had as a child.  Emma started to act weird, as if something was wrong with bay Brian.  She supposedly received photos as messages on her phone of Bryan and Apollo, taken by a mysterious stalker, but those photos would find themselves deleted before she could show them to anyone.  And then a tragedy struck, and Emma disappeared.

His heart torn apart, Apollo can only search for answers - what truly happened to Emma Valentine and their son?  That search will lead him throughout the City of New York, a City that contains stranger and more unreal things than Apollo could ever have dreamed of.  Add these dark elements to the ordinary perils for black men in New York City, and it's a search that Apollo may not survive...if he even wants to.
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The Changeling's story is incredibly powerful and it's helped by some really really good narration.  The first probably third of the book could just be described as telling the story of Apollo's life as he grew up but the narration makes this potentially uninteresting plot still gripping - the thoughts and dialogue of the characters feel no only real but interesting, even when little is seemingly happening other than the daily life of the characters.

And those characters are excellent.  Apollo, Emma, Apollo's friend Patrice, and several spoiler characters all ring incredibly true and it didn't take long for me to begin caring about all of their fates.  Everything they each do is definitely believable by the end, and even the antagonists (who I will not name for spoiler purposes) wind up being believable in their actions and intentions - not that I'm calling them anything but evil, mind you.  The book also plays fair - at one point the book suggests it's about to take a reversal on one of the characters who I'd grown to like, but then abandons that line to reveal it was a fake-out, and the book is all the better for it.

This is also easily the best use of the New York City area of any book I've read in quite a while.  It's naturally fairly common for books to be set in New York, but if you read many of these books, they don't really use the location as anything more than it's function as a big city.  Not so for The Changeling, which features the various parts of the City prominently, as well as the features of NY that are well known to those of us who live in the area.  One prominent scene early features two words every NYC Subway commuter hates to hear - "It's Showtime!" - and it will be immediately hilarious and recognizable to anyone with any familiarity to it.

As I mentioned above the jump as well, the plot is incredibly relevant to today's world - particularly with the election of Donald Trump (despite the book ending in 2015) and the increase in women coming forward to report sexual assault.  It may not always be so - and I hope the world will change so that it isn't, though I'm not optimistic in that respect - but the book is incredibly timely.

The story isn't entirely perfect - largely in it being sometimes a bit TOO on the nose with its messages.  The book was published mid-2017, which means it was probably being written/edited during the Trump presidential run, and it shows sometimes too blatantly - at one point an antagonist shouts to a group of fleeing women "I alone can fix things" and it's a bit jarring.  But for the most part, the whole story works and resolves satisfactorily.

If you're not averse to a story that will involve the real world and issues we see every day, I'd recommend The Changeling.
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