Crimson and Clover by Juli Page Morgan (book review)

Juli Page Morgan’s debut novel Crimson and Clover is reissued this week in a brand new, updated edition!

It’s unusual for me to pluck a book off the shelves that’s marketed as “Romance”, but this one is special – it takes place in my favorite era, my favorite place and stars my favorite people – rockers. So I snapped it up.

From Birmingham, Alabama, by way of Haight Ashbury, Katie travels to Swinging London for rock’n’roll, British accents and bacon. She meets rock singer Adam, but soon realizes her mistake – her real passion is for dark-haired lead guitarist Jay Carey. Katie and Jay fall in love, but Jay’s career involves long weeks on the road, where rock’n’roll’s natural companions, sex and drugs, always beckon. And Katie has a secret that’s she sure will drive Jay away if she reveals it – and the secret is one which, if they stay together long enough, he’s bound to learn.

I loved this story, at first for the obvious reasons (Ladbroke Grove, rock music, late sixties) and as I read on, I loved it for other reasons as well. For a start, although Katie is described as wanting a June Cleaver, white-picket-fence family life, she’s no pushover when she encounters the rock stars and their tough managers and road managers. She maintains her own vision as she lives and works among them. And one reason why I normally avoid things shelved in Romance is that I can’t stand the stress of three hundred pages of true lovers being kept apart by step-mothers, angry aunties, finicky fortune-inheriting rules, sadistic lords of the manor, World War II and all the other conflicts writers use to keep couples apart until the Big Ending. In many of these stories I feel the writer wanted to tell the story of How Frodo Got To Destroy the Ring After Three Book’s Worth Of Set-Backs rather than an actual romance. None of that in Crimson and Clover; the pair find each other quickly and satisfyingly, and tension arises naturally from the plot revelations. Given all that could come between them, can Katie really keep Jay Carey?

I think we’ve all seen those movies where Michael York, with his cut-glass accent and wearing a suit with a white carnation in the jacket pocket, has to interact for some manufactured reason with a Freak (played, if we’re lucky by Twink, if we’re not lucky (and we usually aren’t lucky) played by a toffee-nosed RADA graduate in a paisley blouse and fright wig) who says Hey Man and Groovy a lot and eventually persuades ‘uptight’ Basil to wear flares (bell bottoms) and trip out on pot in a Soho basement filled with writhing mini-skirted dolly birds and atonal music by a band probably called The Chocolate Teapot. This is not the book of that movie. As a Led Zeppelin fan, Juli has fully explored the late sixties and early seventies. As a DJ, Juli has met and mingled with real rock stars of various kinds and flavors. She understands (and more importantly, can get down on the page) the power and intensity of rock music and the intervening hours and days of monotony that accompany it – traveling on the road, staying in hotel rooms, bickering with band-mates, managers and wives – and uses the contrast to drive the plot and build well-rounded, fully human characters.  

Disclosure – I’m a friend of Juli’s, in that internet way where we’ve known each other for ages and yet have never met in real life. We bonded on a Led Zeppelin message board (of course) and shared our mutual appreciation of Ladbroke Grove, the late sixties and long-haired rock guitarists – all of which are featured in Crimson and Clover as well as in my own stories.

Read Chapter One of Crimson and Clover here.

Find Crimson and Clover at:  Amazon | Smashwords | iTunes | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | All Romance

Review: Dave Eggers' novel The Circle (2013)

Do you remember this famous quote from the Google CEO Eric Schmidt?

Google CEO On Privacy: 'If You Have Something You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It'

If so you may want to read Dave Eggers' book, The Circle. 

Set in the near future, this book follows the fortunes of Mae, a new employee at The Circle, a thinly disguised version of Google. It treats its employees impeccably, providing all the food, education, sports, entertainment and other amenities on campus so they never have to leave. The Circle wants to accumulate all knowledge – from the web, from emails, from texts and Twitter, from Facebook updates, Instagrams, from biometric bracelets, from universal placement of web enabled cameras, from facial recognition searches in old digitized film, videos and photos, and eventually from always-on cameras carried by increasing numbers of people, who pledge to live their whole life In The Clear (i.e. while being watched by anyone at all times – a choice initially made by canny politicians when they begin to see their colleagues losing their seats for various nefarious activities mysteriously unearthed from their hard-drives and family histories).

After a few false starts, newbie Mae finds that she cannot live without the instant and constant feedback she gets from being connected to her customers and peers all the time. In contrast, one of the founders of The Circle likes his playboy toys. He has a submersible built that can navigate the Marianas Trench, and brings back his finds to keep in gigantic tanks at headquarters. He's particularly fond of watching a brutal Feeding Time ritual for his allegorical shark, which is when we begin to understand the true nature of his company.

The Circle's company values are "Privacy is Theft"; "Sharing is Caring";  and "Secrets are Lies". In droves, the tens of millions of addicted users of The Circle's extremely shiny and time-saving devices, apps and beacons begin to assimilate its company values.

The tension in the book is created by Mae's gradual understanding of the enormity of The Circle's intentions and whether she is in a position to do anything about them. She has developed a rivalry with her original mentor, Annie, which she has to win. She loves her online friends, her new fame as The Circle's Steve Mann-style human video-recorder with millions following her channels, her ability to see everywhere remotely through the proliferating camera network, and above all, she needs the health insurance for her ailing father. Will she wake up and warn the world in time?

This is a long novel with a short, tightly plotted skeleton. The length comes from the inescapable fact that if you have to suggest Total Information Awareness, you have to describe a lot, lot, lot of information about your hapless protagonist, from pulse rates to customer surveys to consumer surveys to customer satisfaction indices to texted friend requests from her horde of followers, and of course her reaction to the requests. Didn't join their LinkedIn network as soon as they asked? Her approval rating is in jeopardy. Didn't retweet their link? Could be a problem. (The book avoids proprietary names like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but it's clear what type of service is being described.) At one point, the whole onboarding/new employee orientation at a large tech company is told in such detail that it was unsettlingly like having to go through one in real life (again). Also, having to script long conversations where one character convinces another that The Circle's company values are actually universal takes up another few dozen pages. (It reminded me of those old-fashioned polemics-novels, like De Sade's Justine or Voltaire's Candide.) It's an easy read, though, and five hundred pages fly by like a short novel.

When a novelist takes on a theme of society being entirely altered by a technology, he's writing Science Fiction, whether he knows it or not. I think Eggers would probably shudder if this was shelved with SF, since it's billed as a novel about society and "digital utopianism". The flyleaf reviews are very keen to compare it to Brave New World (which I assume is too good to be Science Fiction as well), but it reminded me more of Ira Levin's This Perfect Day. The big difference between The Circle and those two books is that the earlier writers assumed that a population must be drugged, or conditioned, or specially bred, to be docile consumers. In The Circle, the population adopts total surveillance willingly, because the chance to be safe from crime, spot strangers in the neighborhood and vicariously live the life of celebrities who do fun things is worth giving up just a little bit of your own privacy, and then a little bit more, until they all tumble down the Well.  Whether this is believable or not probably depends on the reader; I found that Mae had to be written as a ninny for her motivations to make sense, but on the other hand I do know a lot of people who spend a great deal of time sharing things online and fishing for a 'like'.

As for faults, the book has few. I was glad to see a female protagonist, but got irritated when it became clear she had no agency at all. Things happen to her and she rarely makes things happen to others. She does not even realize for herself there is a less-benevolent side to The Circle – she is coached by a shadowy (male) Phantom of the Opera figure. Picking a female for a passive role is an easy, if not actually sexist, choice. There were only a few proofreading or grammatical errors, which is a wonder in this day and age. But as usual, when a novelist gets into the Science! part of the explanations, things become a bit iffy. Shark metabolisms, even allegorical shark metabolisms, simply can't be that fast. And an allegorical shark may metaphorically eat everything from a 100 lb. Ridley's Sea Turtle to a sea horse, but I found the description a bit silly – sea horses are tiny. [*] Anyway, creatures from the Marianas Trench can't live in open-topped tanks in a building. Just no. And fire alarms do not measure carbon dioxide levels.

In sum, it's a good fast read and if you've ever wondered vaguely about how a surveillance society could come about, it's worth a few quatloos.

[*] Edit to add: After sleeping on it, this is probably like saying, "Eating babies is silly, as it takes more calories to have a baby than you get by eating one." But I still think the whole allegory could have been handled better.