I'm not sure if any of you have run into this "genre" before, but as for myself, it's a first. Here is a review from the NYT Sunday Review of an eco-mystery, entitled "Where the Wild Things are Victims." (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/books/review/Pogue-t.html?ref=books). Is the writer capitalizing on the current trendiness of environmentalism or is there more to it?
Where the Wild Things Are Victims
By DAVID POGUE
Published: February 13, 2009
Not many authors are equally successful at writing books for adults and children, but Carl Hiaasen seems to have made an effortless transition. His first and second books for young readers, “Hoot” (2002) and “Flush” (2005),won awards and legions of fans. His latest, “Scat,” won’t disappoint Hiaasenphiles of any age.
What’s truly amazing is how much mileage Hiaasen gets here from mining the same narrow niche. Every novel is an eco-mystery set in Florida. Every plot features a greedy businessman (with a dumb-as-bricks henchman) bent on getting rich at the expense of Florida wildlife. Each plot is energized by improbable and hilarious action sequences.
In “Hoot,” “Flush” and “Scat,” the hero is a middle-school boy with a feisty female sidekick. Secondary characters include a delinquent bully and a mysterious, benevolent stranger. (In “Scat,” the stranger has wandered in from another Hiaasen novel: he was the protagonist in “Sick Puppy.”)
Yet despite the similarities, the novels don’t feel repetitive — especially not “Scat,” which stirs some new, more ambitious elements into the formula.
This time, the mystery involves Mrs. Starch, an unpopular biology teacher who disappears during a disastrous field trip to an Everglades swamp. At first, it’s hard for Nick, our hero, and his friend Marta to care. After all, Mrs. Starch is a nearly six-foot-tall tyrant who wears “her dyed blond hair piled to one side of her head, like a beach dune.”
But before long, Nick is up to his neck in secondary mysteries. What was the tan-colored, fast-moving blur on the video he took in the swamp? Who or what caused the swamp wildfire that day? Why has Smoke, the class arsonist/slacker, suddenly cleaned up his act? Why is Mrs. Starch’s home filled with stuffed animals (of the taxidermy sort)? And if Mrs. Starch is missing, then who’s driving around town in her blue Prius?
“Scat” is by far the plottiest of Hiaasen’s young-people books. The story lines — involving Nick, Marta, Smoke, their parents, Mrs. Starch, local fire and police investigators, the mysterious stranger and the two hilarious bumblers who run the Red Diamond Energy Corporation’s illegal drilling operation — are intertwined in ways that must have required a spreadsheet to track. Not surprisingly, all of these strands are neatly and satisfyingly resolved at the end of the story.
This is also the most contemporary Hiaasen book, dropping names like Facebook, “Harry Potter,” the TV show “COPS,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper — and the war in Iraq.
And here’s the most startling deviation from the Hiaasen formula. Just when the fun is hitting its stride, we learn that Nick’s father has been wounded in Iraq; his right arm is blown off by a roadside explosive. The story returns periodically to monitor the stages of his recovery: his bandages, his infections, his attempts to work with his remaining hand, and so on.
This is all handled unsentimentally and with a positive spirit; Nick conceals his grief, calls his dad Lefty and tapes down his own right arm in solidarity. But this subplot introduces some new, grimmer notes to the series, and not every young fan will know what to make of it.
Still, the ingenious plotting makes “Scat” more engrossing than either of its predecessors. The characters are richer — two of them turn out to be not at all the caricatures they seemed at first. And even the title is a clever pun, referring both to the good guys’ message to the bad guys, and to the panther droppings that hold a key to the mystery. In short, Hiaasen’s novels for younger readers seem to be maturing right along with them.
David Pogue writes about technology for The Times. His first children’s novel will be published next year.
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Urszula,
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this. Children's literature is a growing area of interest to me, particularly as it concerns the environment. I wanted to mention, in addition to the information that you passed along, that there's an article on NY Times about the increase of environmental children's literature. Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/books/review/Royte-t.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
My kids loved Hoot, the movie based on Hiassen's novel. The DVD comes with a slew of extras, most of them educational clips expanding on the themes of the movie, the zoology of owls etc.--There is a Texas writer named Les Coalson (www.lescoalson.com) who writes environmental mysteries for adults that are quite enjoyable. Tony Hillerman has at least two environmentally-themed mysteries. The genre itself isn't completely new--the Canadian turn-of-the-century writer Ernest Thompson Seton went into that direction, too, except that in his case the perps are usually the wild animals--a discovery that prompts him and the reader to want to find out more about them.
ReplyDeleteI blazed through most of Carl Hiassen's novels in the years I lived on St. Croix. He's a great beach read, though I see him as more of a one-trick pony than David Pogue does. The resulting comments from Magda and Christoph, however, tie into something I've been thinking about since the beginning of the course, so I am going to use Hiassen as a springboard into my thoughts on ecocritical children's literature. I'm sure he wouldn't mind.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how many of you made this connection, but the first thing that I thought of when I read Buell's statement that "it is self-evidently ... problematic for an ecocritic to presume to speak for 'nature'..."(8) was The Lorax. The Lorax, as we know, has no compunction about speaking for the trees. His refrain is "I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees," and the book is as enjoyable as it is environmentally didactic. Capitalist villain, the Onceler undergoes a conversion of the type that is erroneously attributed to Audubon, but only once it is too late for him to correct his errors. The Lorax's parting word "Unless" is directed at Seuss' young readers, implying that their incorporation of his ethic might stave off environmental catastrophe.
Most children's books and films have strong didactic messages, whether they be about crosswalk safety, the value of friendship, or the environment, but the one that keeps coming to mind in the context of this class is Pixar's Cars. This talking car movie, to risk understatement, is not an overtly environmentalist film. In his New York Times review, Manhola Dargis writes:
An animated fable about happy cars might have made sense before gas hit three bucks a gallon, but even an earlier sticker date couldn't shake the story's underlying creepiness, which comes down to the fact that there's nothing alive here: nada, zip. In this respect, the film can't help but bring to mind James Cameron's dystopic masterpiece, "The Terminator," which hinges on the violent war of the machine world on its human masters. To watch McQueen and the other cars motor along the film's highways and byways without running into or over a single creature is to realize that, in his cheerful way, Mr. Lasseter has done Mr. Cameron one better: instead of blowing the living world into smithereens, these machines have just gassed it with carbon monoxide. (June 9, 2006)
Despite its anthropomorphism, Pixar's Cars is a site where anthropocentrism breaks down, but the result is not, as Dargis points out, ecocentric. This is a disturbingly machinocentric world that seems to exist for the sole purpose of burning fossil fuels, and yet the issues we have been discussing come up again and again in the text.
Lightning McQueen's personal growth develops, in Beullian terms, through a cinematically "self-conscious sense of an inevitable but uncertain and shifting relation between being and physical context" (62). McQueen learns the Pixar values of friendship and altruism as he becomes more and more attached to the small, rural town of Radiator Springs, and to the natural beauty of its environs. Dargis looks for animals in the film and misses the trees, but McQueen's Porsche love interest, Sally, knows how to value them. Sally is a big city lawyer who broke-down in Radiator Springs and fell in love with its pace and natural beauty, and she teaches racecar McQueen a Thoreau-style simplicity that preaches the virtue of withdrawal from the rat race and a local, rural level of place-attachment. Among the lessons that McQueen learns in Radiator Springs are the joy of driving backwards (a move away from the progress narrative?) and how to drive on dirt (the car equivalent of waking barefoot in the grass).
I could go on and on, but the point is that within this car-centered, anthropomorphic yet neither anthropocentric nor ecocentric world that seems so dystopic to Manhola Dargis, there is a strongly local and rural leaning advocacy of place-attachment and a reverence for the natural world (if only picturesque landscape) that undercuts the "Life is a Highway" theme song. In fact, even this feel-good, anti-environmentalist Rascal Flatts song takes on a new meaning when viewed through the lens of the film's highway vs. freeway mentality. When considered in those terms, the old stretch of Route 66 that the film celebrates is a place worth becoming attached to (and saving) while the freeway that isolates the community is the non-place agent of a form of social injustice that the film's child viewers are encouraged to fight.
Authors publishing Eco mysteries for teens and middle grades include Hiasson, jean Craighead George ... For my list visit Amazon's Listmania. Hope the keep on writing in this genre.
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