The final Y is also the best. Not only that, it’s the best in the best way: in a way that wraps up the series but isn’t too neat; that brings together the thematic threads but isn’t too obvious; that doesn’t leave you wanting more because more would only ruin the grace of the ending.
I really don’t want to ruin the ending for anyone, so I’m not going to go into any spoilers. Instead, I’m going to talk a little bit about what makes this a good end to a series and the place I have to start is where I last left off – furious. That’s what I was at the end of the penultimate volume because it looked like the series was ending not with a bang but with a really stupid whimper. The first thing that made this a perfect ending was that it restored your faith in Vaughan. It said, “Hang on a bit. You didn’t give me enough credit. You think everything one of my characters says is true? That’s ridiculous. One of the series’ themes was doubt: self-doubt, doubt of society, doubt of humanity. Did you really believe that the ending wouldn’t involve doubt as well?”

Which brings us to the second reason that this was a great series closer: thematic wrap up. For graphic novels, plots are often not that important. Frequently, they’re ridiculous. Themes, on the other hand, are everything. Every major theme in this series finds a grace note in this final volume. Doubt I’ve already mentioned. Suicide, one of the biggest themes of the series, finds different expression in three characters. Escape, similarly, is explored in multiple characters. But the biggest theme of the final volume, the one that unites all the others, is scales falling from your eyes – that moment when you realise that what you projected onto the world was not of the world and was something you did for yourself and, most importantly, isn’t anyone else’s fault. That theme is finished perfectly in one climactic revelation. A revelation that you probably tried not to see coming, which is part of what made you like Yorrick.

Ultimately, the ending is graceful and that’s why I liked it. The plot doesn’t work perfectly – there are still things that don’t really make sense. The future world that we jump to in the final pages is not entirely believable (and not just because France seems to be the centre of considerable global power). But you are left with a sense of closure without knowing the ending, and that’s probably the best thing that can be said about a thought-provoking series closer.

The opening of this book is fun, well written, tongue in cheek, intriguing. The middle of this book is dull, slow, uneventful, frustrating. The end of this book – the very end – is fantastic. Also, it’s the second book to get my “Awesome First Sentence” Award.

Here’s the first sentence: “In two or three hours . . . well, it’s hard to tell . . . in three hours, surely, or at the very outside, four hours . . . within four hours, let us say, I’ll be dead.” (p. 3) The awesomeness of this first sentence speaks for itself, but, just to be plain, it’s the self-conscious playing with a cliche that I like. I especially like that the purpose of the cliche is to create drama for a writer too word-poor to create it on his own and that Bayard completely and purposefully undercuts all the possible tension and yet, somehow, keeps a dramatic punch.

Anyway, this is a murder mystery book set at West Point Academy in the 1830s. It is narrated by the detective, Gus Landor, a retired police detective from NYC with a sad personal history, a drinking problem, and a dry wit. He is assisted in his investigation into the murder and ritualistic disfiguring of the cadets by one of the cadets, a Mr. Edgar A. Poe.

And that’s my first problem – though it’s not a big one. I tend to feel that when an author descends to using a real life person as a major character in one of their novels, they’re doing it to cover up for an inadequacy with their own writing. There are exceptions, and this is probably one of them as Bayard does an excellent job of creating a likeable and enjoyable Poe, but even for those exceptions I’m forced to ask why the author felt the need to include a real person rather than simply giving a different name to the character they had created. The only thing it adds, as  far as I can tell, is borrowed lustre — it is a borrowed cloak too small for a good author and too large for a bad one.

The opening, as I said, is really well written. It’s playful and intriguing. You care about the administrative backdrop of West Point because you feel that they really care about the cadets. You care about and like Landor. You laugh at and smile for Poe. The middle drags horribly. Landor seems to do no detection at all — he sits around drinking and occasionally references how he did do some detection at some point. Poe is in love like an idiot and with an idiot. The villain seems clear though how and why are not. And the ……… plot …………. advances ………………… very ………………………………. slowly. Or not at all.

Then comes the end, but I can’t talk about that without this warning: SPOILERS BELOW!

So, the mystery is all solved in a predictable and hum-ho fashion, even if the dramatic last scene is well written and I’m sitting there thinking “that sucked,” when we start the story of Mattie – lovingly written – and the interview with Poe – perfectly odd. Mattie, Landor’s raped daughter who committed suicide, turns out to be the driving force behind the whole book because Landor was the murderer – yes, an unreliable narrator – and he was avenging his daughter on her rapists. The ritualistic disfigurement was done – at least in the first instance – by the people who we thought committed the murders.

And it was all there to see. Why was Landor not investigating? What happened to the other heart? Why the ritualistically damaged animals _after_ the first murder? Landor leaves things out of his story to us, yes, but he doesn’t lie to us and looking back over his behaviour you see how he found out everything he needed to and how he accomplished his crimes. And it’s brilliant. You’ll never see it coming.

But hold on a second. Why will you never see it coming? Because you’re too bloody bored to be looking. The middle drags so much that I stopped caring about the clues or the occurrences. In an absorbing mystery I’m trying to make the pieces fit even as I read the novel. In this one, I barely kept them in mind any more. On the other hand, the dragging middle is perfect because that’s exactly how Landor gets away with it. He makes himself so dull — so uneventful — that your eyes gloss over him. He’s a thousand times smarter than anyone else in the book, and you know it, but his talents seem so drowned in alcohol and so wasted that you’re content to accept his cultivated uncertainty about what happened and who did it. Which is perfect as a character sketch but a little irksome to read.

I can see people thinking that the end – which I loved – justifies the middle and makes the book. I can see people thinking that the end is not enough and being disappointed by the book. I’m somewhere in the middle.

Truly a strange spy novel. Almost beautiful, highly aesthetic moments in an otherwise almost obnoxiously masculine book. No good people. No desperate, driving plot. No major intrigue. But it works. Once Trevanian decided to write a spy novel modelled on the ancient Japanese board game, Go, I guess the result was always going to be unpredictable.
I want to start this with a quotation from one of surprising moments in the book. One character is trying to explain how he is using the word “shibumi.”

Oh, vaguely. And incorrectly, I suppose, I suspect. A blundering attempt to describe an ineffable quality. As you know, shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances. It is a statement so correct that it does not have to be bold, so poignant that it does not have to be pretty, so true it does not have to be real. Shibumi is understanding rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence. In demeanor, it is modesty without pudency. In art, where the spirit of shibumi takes the form of sabi, it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. In philosophy, where shibumi emerges as wabi, it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming. And in the personality of man, it is . . . how does one say it? Authority without domination? Something like that. (p. 77)

Some of this is over the top, no doubt, though I really like “eloquent silence” and “authority without domination.” What makes this surprising, is that it comes in a book in which every woman (with one small exception) is a sex object. A book which is such an adolescent male fantasy that, at one point, the author breaks the fourth wall (so to speak) and adds the book’s single footnote in which he boasts about the power of his writing and the fact that he is initiated into such deadly methods of using household objects and such dangerous and advanced sexual techniques that he dares not share them with the reader for fear of causing us poor, lesser mortals injury (p. 167). A book, indeed, that is willing to defeat its own search for shibumi by showing complete disdain and scorn for almost everyone else. Though, I admit that the scorn can be amusing:

Americans are constantly described as culture-less, barbarian celebrators of mediocrity, and the main character comes “to think of Britons as incompetent Americans and Australians as Americans-in-training.” (p. 136) That one stung a little, though I forgave Trevanian because he remembered, unlike everyone else, that Australia was part of WW2. (p. 91) Another example – upon learning that one (female) character majored in sociology, the main character thinks: “He might have guessed it. Sociology, that descriptive pseudo-science that disguises its uncertainty in statistical mists as it battens on the narrow gap of information between psychology and anthropology. The kind of nonmajor that so many Americans use to justify their four-year intellectual vacations designed to prolong adolescence.” (p. 307)

However, despite the teenage voyeurism and lonely fantasy that gives this book its impetus, it’s actually pretty enjoyable. The main character is intriguing, even while being a little ridiculous (I mean, honestly, taking revenge by having sex with someone so well that none of their future sexual experiences will seem even vaguely satisfying by comparison? Come on. (pun intended (sorry))).  The plot is ridiculous – the Mother Company controls the world’s governments through oil and land purchases and secretly manipulates all the world’s interest groups through such pawns as the CIA and, as a result …. honestly, it’s too silly to even explain. Suffice to say that the official plot revolves around a minor incident of no real importance whereas the real plot is the main character’s story.

Apart from enjoying the book for its ridiculousness, the real reason to read it is for the grace notes in the patterns that the book draws. Patterns, mainly, in the lives of the main character. Moments of grace. Few and far between, perhaps, but there and gentle when you reach them. Which is, I admit, a bit like Go.

The only appropriate reaction to this volume of Y is “……wait, what?”

For those of you who watched the final season of Sopranos, remember that moment when the screen went blank without warning? Remember how you jumped up and shook the TV, desperately trying to re-establish whatever connection had broken and robbed you of the ending? That’s how I felt when I finished reading this volume, though, unlike for Sopranos, I didn’t have the feeling that, somehow, the ending was appropriate and almost perfect. Instead I had the feeling I had in those first, panicked moments of black screen “Who stole my story!!”

Now, there is one more volume, so I don’t want to pre-judge the ending of this, on the whole, excellent series. But the ending of a series like this is the crucible. With a build up like this series’ there needs to be one hell of a pay off. Otherwise you end up wishing that the smoke monster would just eat Jack and be done with it. (Today seems to be a TV references day.)

SPOILERS BELOW!

But, come on, what the hell? We shall tell you how the plague was caused! Magic-like-pseudo-religious-non-scientific-doesn’t-understand-the-first-thing-about-evolution-psychic-connection-nonsense! That’s satisfying, right? Also, evolution travels at the speed of light…..as a shock wave. Are you fucking kidding me? Now, there is a chance that, yes, Vaughan is fucking kidding me. He gave himself an out. This could just be the rambling of an insane whack job with the real explanation  still to come. I’m ok with that, if that’s what happened. So…..next complaint.

Ok, all we need to save the world is this one monkey, so you, last living man, you can just trundle off to Paris now. Ummm….what? He’s the last man on earth (essentially). He doesn’t get to wander off to Paris for a romantic weekend. How can they be sure, I mean completely sure, that the solution is in the monkey’s poo? It’s an excellent theory, sure, but until it is completely confirmed, separating the last man and the geneticist is crazy talk. What is that theory is wrong or something time sensitive needs Yorrick? At the very least he should be locked in a palatial cell somewhere so that he can be protected …. and re-populate the planet. They’ve already lost 4 good breeding years with only a girl (useless!) to show for it. It was all part of this volume’s attitude of “ok, we’re done here, time to go home. Bye!” that just kind of came out of nowhere.

Volume 10 had better fix all this, Vaughan, or I’m coming for you.

This is a really, really great sci-fi novel with the usual inexplicable dose of sexism added in. But it’s the sort of book that should be studied by sci-fi writers because it avoids all the incredibly annoying pit falls of bad sci-fi, which is really what this review is going to be about.

Pitfall 1: Terrible Science
I hate this so much. You’re reading along and, all of a sudden, the author decides he can solve the great mystery in the plot by “sling-shot-ing” around a star and hence creating a “worm hole through time” (that’s right, Star Trek, I’m looking at you). It doesn’t make any fucking sense and it annoys the hell out of me. I know this is the future and I’ll accept weird things like teleportation and faster-than-light travel (even faster-than-light travel that isn’t time travel, though I don’t understand why not – I guess Einstein was wrong? – whatever). What I won’t accept is sound weapons in space or other ridiculously stupid crap. This book is blissfully free of that nonsense. In fact, though there are mistakes, it does a really good job of trying to make sense of the physics. The “Ringworld” is like a scaled-down Dyson’s sphere (which is a big old sphere built an Earth’s-radius away from, but surrounding, the sun). In other words, it is “man”-made. Which makes it a fascinating artefact right from the start. The anthropology of why it is built and so on are pretty well done. In other words, we have a believable setting that is fun to explore. Which is the whole bloody point of sci-fi.

Pitfall 2: Dated By the Time it is Published
I’m thinking in particular of books like the “I, Robot” series which have these fantastically advanced robots which are stupider than the things that build your car. I know I, Robot was written decades ago, but it’s still damn stupid to go so far into the future that we’re living in cities the size of countries and waltzing around on other planets and yet have Robots that are barely smart enough to mine for minerals. How does Ringworld avoid this? By flying to this place called Ringworld where the once great civilisation has fallen into barbarism. Now, that’s not the only way to avoid instant irrelevance, but it does put the focus where it belongs: on humanity. Sci-fi is meant to be about believable settings that are fun to explore and which tell us something about ourselves. It’s like Y: The Last Man – what’s good and fun about those books is that we’re imagining people in a really strange situation and really thinking through how they would react. This book does that really well.

Pitfall 3: Ridiculous Inability to Imagine Social Advancement
The second I, Robot book (Caves of Steel) is a perfect example of this. Women are basically from the 50s – they cook and clean and hope the men-folk will protect them but make stupid mistakes whenever they try and do things on their own. It’s really, really stupid. I mean, we can make robots that make you think they’re human but we still don’t have equality of the sexes? It’s just narrow thinking. This book isn’t nearly that bad. Not even close. But it does have only two women in it and one of them is a prostitute more skilled in sex than any character since the prostitutes in the later Dune books and the other one is a ditzy 20-year old girl. Actually, Teela turns out to be the coolest part of the book (she’s incredibly lucky, which ends up being not so much a blessing for her or the people around her as a curse. It also makes her somewhat in-human. I mean, how can you empathise with people if you’ve _never_ been hurt. I mean, never even stubbed your toe?). But it’s still a little sigh-worthy when the most advanced civilisation ever runs inter-stellar missions with a crew of 30 odd male crewmen and 3 female prostitutes. I mean, honestly.

Not one of my favourites, but still good. What’s particularly good about this one is that Gardner tells you everything you need to know in order to solve the mystery so that even though you probably won’t work it out, you could.
I might as well admit that my favourite Perry Mason books are the ones where the great punch line comes during the trial. Hits all the great lawyer fantasy high spots. This isn’t one of those  stories. It’s much more akin to a normal detective story except that, of course, Perry Mason spends most of the time on the run from the law.

While I’m admitting things, I might as well also admit that whenever I read one of these books I’m secretly hoping that Della Street and Mason finally start dating. For one thing, they’re made for each other. For another, it would make me feel better about having a certain amount of hero worship for a guy who has a secretary who is clearly in love with him and whom he pulls close and kisses whenever he is stressed and then promptly ignores while he does whatever he wants. I guess all heroes are egomaniacal bastards.

As for the mystery part of this one – it’s almost locked door-y. The set-up doesn’t really change throughout the book. We know, more or less, who the limited list of suspects are from the very beginning and we simply go through the ridiculously hectic motions of Mason’s investigative method (basically, running around being smarter than everyone else and having private detectives do all the work for him while he takes ridiculously exaggerated risks). Fun stuff.

And it’s classic good hard boiled fiction. By which I mean that it is a hell of a lot better writing than the standard “It was a dark night. The rain fell like specks of wet grime on my trench coat as I watched her. She was worth watching, but that wasn’t why I was here. I was here about the murder.” But, of course, nowhere near as good as Chandler or Hammett (is anything?). There’s no great description or evocative mood-writing. There’s just a tough man with ethics of steel* living in a gritty world and kicking the holy crap out of it.

* You know, except for using Della like some kind of pick-me-up. Oh, Della.

So ummm ….. yeah. There’s nothing really to say about this one. Building to and end. Some minor/potential revelations. Fun story. But, y’know, nothing really mind blowing. Still good, but like trying to write a post on a chapter of a book when you’ve already written 7 increasingly asinine posts on previous chapters. Very much like that, in fact.

This is a book that tries to be scrupulously honest and is intensely uncomfortable about doing so which, in and of itself, is pretty honest. It’s well written and interesting, though those looking for huge laughs, a “tell-all,” or a retrospective of his movies will be disappointed.

This autobiography only covers Martin’s stand up career (with a chapter on his childhood and a bit about his first film, The Jerk). It’s not about his later films, his writing or his marriages and personal life. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing personal in the book – it’s deeply personal – but most of the romantic entanglements that occur during the time period he covers are either dealt with quickly or passed over. This isn’t a book about celebrity gossip, it’s a book about the life of a stand up comic who ended up being phenomenally successful.

Ultimately, Martin’s discomfort is the most interesting aspect of the book. He’s uncomfortable with his own success but, more importantly, he’s also uncomfortable exposing himself. And yet, he does it. I’m really not sure why – I assume it isn’t for the money, since he must have plenty. It’s all part of the big puzzle at the heart of the book: Why does an introverted, awkward, anxious, shy person choose to be a performer and a celebrity?

Martin seems to believe that he has part of the answer when he retells the story of his father’s death. On his death bed, Martin’s father said “You did everything I wanted to do,” and Martin responded “I did it for you,” but, in the book, Martin goes on to say “I was glad I didn’t say the more complicated truth: ‘I did it because of you.’” (p. 197) Martin’s relationship with his father was a bad one, best summarised by Martin’s response when his father’s friends talked about what a great guy his father was after his death. Martin writes: “I was surprised . . . . He had evidently saved his vibrant personality for use outside the family.” (p. 19) Moreover, Martin clearly didn’t perform his comedy, day-to-day, for his father’s pleasure. After Martin first hosted Saturday Night Live, just as his fame was starting to really get going, his father wrote a bad review of his performance. (p. 171)

So what does Martin mean when he says that he perused comedy because of his father? The simple answer – that his father caused him to retreat inside himself – is probably the right one. Martin’s life during this period sounds intensely lonely. A wanderer without ties, cut off from his family – an awkward man inhabiting a character even more awkward than himself and consciously trying to make everyone laugh at him. Comedy as a defence mechanism is hardly a new theory, or a particularly insightful one, but this book is a case study of how it isn’t the being funny that’s the defence. It isn’t really about making people like you, though that’s part of it. It’s about having an impenetrable shell. Absurdist, distancing, awkward humour is perfect when you don’t want anyone to really know you. Especially if you don’t really want to know yourself.

So, the book is an intensely sad book. Not sad the way a tear jerker is sad. Sad in the way that loss is sad. Sad in the way that being lonely and unhappy in your skin is sad. Sad in a dull way. Sad under the surface. And because the book is a sad book, and because the book is a personal book, it has funny moments. Normally, the funniest lines in the book are right next to the most personal comments and revelations.

Martin hints that his life after this period got better and that he overcame some of his anxieties and psychological scars. I dearly hope so.

Nothing much to say about this one. It’s another “we just had some story and we’re going to have more story later and that’s enough to keep you reading, right?” book. Unfortunately for my bank account, yep, he’s right. The bastards.

TV shows do this all the time. They show you some fantastic episode with great character development and interesting story beginnings. You tune in next time and you get … some of the incredible dross that monkeys produce while they’re typing away producing Hamlet. The good shows eventually make good on the plot-tease. Well, this volume is very far from being dross – I really enjoyed it – but it’s a plot-tease and make no mistake about it.

I do want to give it credit for one thing in particular, though. In the last volume I complained about the bizarrely over-the-top reaction Yorrick had to his two friends having some quality alone time. In this volume Vaughan attempts to offer an only-slightly-psycho-babble-y explanation for his descent into pulpy, day-time-TV melodrama. I, at least, am willing to forgive and forget.

The one thing I’m really starting to be curious about is how he intends to end this series. Are we going to find that the monkey has the cure and Yorrick can just inseminate about a million women (presumably attractive women, since only attractive women appear to have survived the plague – strange that) and re-boot the human race? Is Yorrick going to die (I’d never see it coming and it would be a really impressive way to end the series)? Are we going to have an uncertain ending (that’s my bet)?

I really hope it doesn’t end in a way that is too schmaltzy (Yorrick and Beth, reunited at last, smile into the sunset and set about re-populating the human race on their own). For one thing, that’s an insufficient gene pool. So it’d have to be more like Yorrick and Beth, reunited at last, smile into the sunset and set about re-populating the human race with Beth as First Wife in a harem of hundreds. For another thing, it’d be disrespectful to the realism that has (more or less) been what was so impressive about this series.

Will Yorrick end up a slave in some kind of grow-a-generation plant?

It’s a good series that lets you really enjoy speculating about how it will end. Now, where’s my next volume…