As soon as this chapter begins, it makes me want to bang my head against the wall. This is the opening paragraph:
Had I known Laurent’s story earlier, I might have forgiven his putting a memory-wiping drug in my tea during Tor’s dinner party. Actually, I did forgive him. (page 69)
Um… what.
I shall refrain from making a very off-color joke about John’s fate. Laurent slipped him a roofie. What kind of people are Tor’s groupies?
Rummel definitely has a knack for coming up with such unbelievable scenes out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing, and never mentioned after one brief paragraph. So, as typical of Rummel’s style by this point, John and Laurent discuss history as if nothing had happened. It seems that John is still conscious for the next several hours even though he’s been given what is essentially a date rape drug.
John and Laurent discuss the Black Death, mistakenly calling it the “Black Plague” all the while. Laurent compares the plague to the mass killings of the twentieth century. This is all more foreshadowing, which might have been somewhat interesting had the readers not already been told what was going to happen by the book’s summary. Instead, the readers are bored out of their minds while waiting for Rummel to get to the goddamn point.
At the end of the dinner, we learn that Tor’s groupies are officially called the Survivor’s1 Benevolent Society. I will still call them Tor’s groupies because it’s funnier. We won’t learn of what this society actually does this chapter, anyway.
Tor interrupted my maudlin thoughts. (page 70)
Pfft, who uses the word “maudlin” these days? Sometimes a writer needs to use a thesaurus because they know that there is a word which fits their sentence but cannot remember it. Most of the time, however, use of a thesaurus is completely unnecessary. This is one of those times.
Tor mentions that several of her groupies could not make it to their club meeting in person, so they’ll be quite literally phoning it in, much like Rummel when he was writing this book. We get some pointless information about one groupie who died in the 9/11 attacks after being in a coma for presumably three months. This would be quite sad if we had heard anything about this character beforehand, but here, it’s just superfluous. We find out that he had lived through the Bosnian ethnic cleansing, so thank God that we are spared one Very Special Flashback Sequence. Alas, we still have plenty more through which to suffer.
Speaking of which…
Yep. There’s another one this very chapter. Gu Yaping tells of her time in Communist China. Rummel already gave us a Flashback Sequence set in Red China which I mercifully skipped. It is not usual for him to double up like this, so he must really want us to know how terrible China is. (In fact, two entire books in this series will have the Chinese as the villains.) Look, there are far worse countries to live in, buddy. Ever heard of North Korea?
Oh, and John points out that Gu’s eyes are “double-lidded” and slightly slanted. You know, ‘cause she’s Asian. Did we really need this, Rummel?
LINE BREAK!
Of course John feels the need to brag about his mad lecturing skillz, and tells Gu about the first Very Special Flashback Sequence, the one he made up, involving a Chinese student during the Cultural Revolution. Gu, of course, says that his made-up story is so accurate and that she knew someone who had died in the same manner described by John.
It is at this point that we learn that Rummel’s transliteration of Chinese is one of the most ad-hoc, inconsistent transcriptions ever. So far, the one named Chinese character has had her name given in the Pinyin romanization. However, starting in this Very Special Flashback Sequence, Rummel switches to the rather inelegant and outdated Wade-Giles romanization. This is probably because the Pinyin romanization was promoted by the communist government of China, and Rummel doesn’t want to use any commie spelling, but in that case, he should have picked one system and stuck with it! It’s also a really stupid idea.
Gu begins her Very Special Flashback Sequence by telling John information he already knows but which the readers of this book might not. These two paragraphs really should have been cut. If Rummel needed to tell his audience the exact details leading up to the Cultural Revolution, he should have done that in a less obtrusive way.
On page 72, we have more Product Placement, with Rummel describing the exact brand of cigarettes that Gu smokes. Was this really necessary? And I’m pretty sure that it isn’t proper etiquette to smoke in the presence of non-smokers. What’s more, she rudely waves her lit cigarette in John’s face. Is there a reason that she could not have stepped outside for a moment to light up? Considering Rummel’s love of stereotyping, I’m a bit surprised that Gu isn’t using a hookah.
To summarize this flashback so that it doesn’t take forever like the other ones, what happened in China was that Gu’s husband was falsely accused of being a subversive, and he was executed. It should be pointed out that of all the characters who get Very Special Flashback Sequences, only the females have significant others whom they lose. The men aren’t allowed to get emotional. The women are required to get emotional. I find this rather distasteful, Rummel.
Apparently, the communist director of the institute in which Gu’s husband worked before he was killed was named Wu Zhen.2 Now, how do you think Rummel got this name?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3lLYOGDsts
a. He made it up, but it’s a legitimate Chinese name.
b. He made it up, but it’s pure gibberish.
c. He took it from a history book.
If you guessed C, you guessed right.3 Wu Zhen was a painter of the Yuan Dynasty. Just so have some perspective, the Yuan Dynasty was founded by Kublai Khan. No twentieth-century Chinese person would have a name like that. Modern Chinese names have three syllables, which would be obvious to anybody who read a history of the Cultural Revolution!
Over the course of her story, Gu happens to mention Chiang Kai-shek. For some inexplicable reason, this causes John to pipe up and give the audience a short infodump on the man. Even Gu is clearly annoyed by John interrupting her. Now, why did Gu mention Chiang Kai-shek? Because, one of Wu Zhen’s agents told her that he had read a book called Tales of the Plum Flower Society, in which Chiang Kai-shek is the main villain. Now, I searched for that title, and the first hit was none other than Rummel’s ebook. Now, it is possible that there is such a book, written in Chinese, and so I would not find it by searching for an English translation of the title, but I think I can safely say that there is no such book. In the aforesaid book, the leader of Chiang’s spy ring is named Peng Jiamu. We learn now (and not when he is first mentioned, for some reason) that Gu’s husband is also named Peng Jiamu. Now, there was a real Peng Jiamu, who was a scientist, but he lived until 1980. In other words, he survived the Cultural Revolution. This is important, because literally all the “evidence” given that Gu’s husband was a capitalist spy was that he coincidentally shared the name of a character in a novel. Of course, Peng Jiamu was alive during the Cultural Revolution and he was not purged, so if there really was such a book, that means that the Communist Party directors were able to distinguish fiction from reality. I know that Rummel wants to make it perfectly clear that the communists were bad, but this is just stupidity. What happened to making the bad guys evil by showing what they actually did, instead of making stuff up?
I am sorry, but Rummel’s idiocy here knows no bounds. He pretty much says goodbye to the notion of having realistic villains at this point. There is a line break, after which Gu details her escape from China after the arrest of her husband, but I’m not going to elaborate upon it. Anyone who read Tor’s or Laurent’s flashbacks would pretty much have read this already. This whole thing just goes on for too long. We know that all of Tor’s groupies escaped from their native countries, Rummel, since they’re narrating these scenes. We don’t need to know the minutiae of how they do so.
I will say this, though. Rummel had Gu escape China by stowing away on a ship, and seemingly for no reason except to add more darkness to this story, Gu is forced to basically be a prostitute until she gets off the ship. She seems to be taking this whole affair rather well. For God’s sake, Rummel, we have to tell inexperienced adolescent fanfic writers not to have their character be raped for the hell of it. You are a grown man, you should know better.
And with the end of that Very Special Flashback Sequence, the chapter ends. The plot has not moved one inch in two chapters. If it’s going to keep collapsing, then it really shouldn’t have taken up jogging as a hobby.
Footnotes
1 Note the incorrect placement of the apostrophe. It should be after the S.
2 …And now we’re back to Pinyin romanization. Keep it consistent, Rummel!
3 And if you guessed A, you don’t know anything about Rummel.
swenson on 22 November 2012, 18:29 said:
Oh burrrrrn, son, burn.
Ooh, ooh, but is she hot? You know, because all Asian women are hot? Even after being starved and tormented and walking through the jungle for days and suffering through their husband dying?
Otherwise known as the As You Know, Bob trope.
That… is extremely interesting. I like when you do research for these things. You turn up such fascinating information like this!
And, really, I think we can all safely agree that the Cultural Revolution was terrible, even without turning the Chinese government into complete idiots and monsters. Your villains don’t have to be SO HORRIBLE in EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, you know. They can still be evil villains even if they have a brain in their heads.
RC on 22 November 2012, 21:19 said:
I usually just lurk but I feel the need to point out that not all Chinese names nowadays have three syllables. I mean, yeah, they usually do, but I remember there was a guy around the same age as me whose Chinese name only had two syllables. Because that was the first time I’d met someone like that I asked my mom and she said it was his parents’ decision.
Just me being nitpicky.
Epke on 23 November 2012, 06:53 said:
“… But ever after, I had trouble sitting and would sometimes lock myself up in the bathroom, painting myself with cheap lipstick and yelling at myself in the mirror. But I forgave him.” Hey, wait… if John got a date rape drug, how does he remember this afterwards?
It’s almost eerie how similar their stories are then… as if John might’ve read it somewhere, hm? Because honestly, I don’t trust Rummel to be able to make up a good story if he drank the mead of poetry till he passed out.
If a scene, chapter or paragraph doesn’t add, change, or further (or is in anyway relevant) to the plot, shouldn’t it just be cut altogether? Granted, this feels like an exposition chapter(s) where the reader is smothered by the info-dumping that might be relevant later, but as of now, this entire Tor and the Groupies (coming to your city soon!) just feels like Rummel going: “Do you SEE how bad war is? Because it’s bad! Like, totally bad! BAAAD! And people are EEEEVIL!” without adding anything. Especially if John’s been slipped a memory-wiping drug…
Taku on 23 November 2012, 07:50 said:
Following from RC’s comment, I would also question the assertion:
This, to me, smacks of No True Scotsmanism. China isn’t a single uniform culture, no matter how hard the current regime tried to pretend. China isn’t even a single uniform ethnic group, there’s something like 50-odd ‘recognised’ ethnic groups, and over 290 living languages. You would think they’d have pretty diverse naming conventions as well.
Not speaking in defence of Rummel, who probably doesn’t know better, just trying to make the point. Absolutes are almost never absolute.
Brendan Rizzo on 23 November 2012, 11:23 said:
Okay, that was ignorance on my part.
LoneWolf on 25 November 2012, 04:48 said:
Rummel really needs to work on his pacing.
Brendan Rizzo on 25 November 2012, 13:24 said:
You don’t know the half of it. The pacing is the worst aspect of the series. Not only is the first book filled with these flashbacks that add nothing to the plot, but the entire third book is pure filler. I don’t consider that a spoiler because it’s right in the title. These novels were just a means for Rummel to lecture on his political views, rather than telling an engaging story.
Emma on 21 March 2013, 14:21 said:
OK, what happened in this story? because you keep alluding to it but never telling us