"The Jennifer Morgue"
On Friday, I finally finished Charles Stross's Lovecraftian spy thriller "The Jennifer Morgue". It is the second book in the Bob Howard series that follows the former Unix system administrator as he undertakes cloak-and-dagger jobs as part of a secret British gov't organization called "The Laundry". For those not following along, in Bob Howard's world, Alan Turing completed a comptational-demonology theorem called "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-Dimensional Summoning". This theorem (also called the Turing-Lovecraft theorem), creates breaches between universes using some spiffy computational mathematics that routinely attract the attention of big nasties on the other side of this reality's veil.
Because of the nasty things that "go bump in the night", Howard's secret organization is tasked with keeping the rest of us safe from these creatures. In "The Jennifer Morgue", we discover in the opening pages that Howard Hughes's Glomar Explorer wasn't trying to recover just any sunken Soviet submarine, but a special one that was trying to phone in to a deceased but very active denizen of the depths. From the initial recovery mission in the 1960's, we readers are taken on a roller coaster ride consisting of spies, demons, and the occasional encounter with a drone from HR.
For an actual review done by someone who knows how to do reviews, read Stuart Carter's take on the book.
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Now that you're finished reading that, here's my take on the book: I really enjoyed it. It was schlocky in some places, but it was all done in good fun and in homage to Ian Fleming and the James Bond "mythos". I continue to appreciate Stross's use of the Lovercraft mythos. Rather than cast the creatures on one side or the other, Schloss is faithful to Lovecraft and largely keeps the creatures that be out of the affairs of the bald monkeys that they allow to exist on a small subset of the Earth's surface.
I also loved Stross's continued references back to the Lovecraft canon, including a repurposed Dunwich village, descendants of Innsmouth in the service of various world governments, and especially the repurposed Erich Zann violin. In an essay between "The Atrocity Archives" and "The Jennifer Morgue", Stross pens an insightful essay on how the Lovecraftian horror story and the Cold War spy novels are manifestations of the same thing, only with different faces. While "The Atrocity Archives" reads like a classic Robert Ludlum novel, "The Jennifer Morgue" completes the circle by simultaneously imitating and lampooning Ian Fleming's James Bond stories. (A significant portion of the actual plot of the story deals with the Bond archetypes applied in occult settings. How's that for meta?)
In short, I feel that if there were such a thing as custom created fiction, Stross's novels would be the one that the novel machine would spit out for me. It includes elements from some of my favorite kinds of novels, tied in to some of my other interests that I've randomly been picking off over the last few years (including a minor interest in one Howard Hughes). The in-jokes were great and some things introduced in the book (such as including zombie-creating PowerPoint slide transitions) will leave me looking at real-life with a more humorous lens.
In a letter to Robert E. Howard (Stross's protagonist's namesake?), Lovecraft addressed the great fun he was having when other people were claiming that he wasn't writing fiction, but was instead telling the truth:
Stross certainly adopted this technique in his own books and applies it with maximum effectiveness. Why write a spy/horror tale that takes place in some completely fictitious setting when one can repurpose plenty of colorful characters and events from our own history?Regarding the solemnly cited myth-cycle of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Nug, Yeb, Shub-Niggurath, etc., etc.—let me confess that this is all a synthetic concotion of my own, like the populous and varied pantheon of Lord Dunsany’s Pegana... Long has alluded to the Necronomicon in some things of his - in fact, I think it is rather good fun to have this artificial mythology given an air of verisimilitude by wide citation. I ought, though, to write Mr. O’Neail and disabuse him of the idea that there is a large blind spot in his mythological erudition!
(By the way, I'm a huge fan of the cover art for this book. I'd love to see the Bond-esque opening credits of this book should it ever be adapted for the silver screen.)
