It's Superman! [Hardcover]

 

 

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I haven't actually read any of this book yet but here is what I can say of it.

1:) It clearly has a lot of story.
2:) It is SUPERMAN. Enough said.
3:) It's a great price.
4:) It is SUPERMAN.
5:) It came very quickly in the post and was completely undamaged despite the age of it.

The choices Tom De Haven has made in the writing of this book are interesting, to say the least. This tale is the origin of Superman at the very beginning of his sixty eight year history. It's set in the thirties and uses the original version of Superman, the man who could leap tall buildings and was more powerful than a locomotive, but did not fly off into space. A man who was not so well-educated, and more of a country hick than any of the more recent iterations.

That said, he also uses a version of Luthor that isn't quite the same Luthor who first appeared in Siegel and Shuster's strips, and he introduces a number of other characters into the story.

But what you want to hear is is it worth buying? It is very, very good. It's certainly the best Superman novel I've read.

The prose is easy to read and moves the story along at a decent pace. De Haven evokes the milieu of the age, the racism, the depression, the storm clouds growing over Europe, but also the music, the films and the culture. Lex Luthor is the scion of a criminal father that has left him bereft of emotions for his fellow man but with a strong ambition to prove himself better than everyone else. He has become an alderman in New York but also runs a criminal empire. A photographer called Willi Berg, who happens to be dating journalism student Lois Lane, is witness to Luthor murdering someone and ends up on the run for his life, only to cross paths with Clark Kent, who has recently learned of his unearthly heritage from his father, Jonathan.

The story moves to Hollywood and back to New York for a finale involving robots, but the tone of the book throughout is so human that it does not feel a bridge too far.

De Haven gets the characters. His Clark Kent is a slightly naive young man filled with anger against injustice, all the while feeling out of place and unsophisticated. His Lois Lane is a woman sure of herself, tenacious and fighting her way up the ladder in a world built for men. The other characters in the book, mainly new, are all well-drawn. There is a wry sense of humour in the book and a great sense of wonder.

It's not filled with fistfights, though there is action, and there's hardly any pseudoscience. De Haven does not make an effort to rationalise Clark's powers because he recognises that it doesn't matter. If you poke at the premise, it will fall apart as has happened in Smallville and Superman Returns, stories that have forgotten the sense of warmth and humanity and wonder that makes up Superman's world, substituting self-absorption instead.

This novel beats Smallville and Superman Returns, and a great number of the comics, into a cocked hat. It's not just a good Superman novel, it's a good novel.

It's NOT Superman.

I began this book full of childish optimism; and to be fair De Haven starts quite well. Clark Kent a young man is on a date at the movies; but he's not with Lana Lang (this perhaps our first indication of things to come). A bad guy racially taunts a young black man; Clark's intervention leads to the villain being killed by his own bullet as it ricochets off Clark's head. Clark is a bit upset, he's been shot at for the first time, and an outlaw is dead.

The story then introduces Lois Lane, who is dating an unpleasant photographer by the name or Willi Berg; It's not immediately clear but it is actually Berg and not Superman who is the principle in De Haven's novel. As he uses Berg to connect the dots. You won't recognise Berg from the comics, although De Haven clearly wants him to remind you of Jimmy Oslen, yet he creates a character as removed from Jimmy as I can imagine.
It is Berg, a thief and a gambler, who discovers Lex Luthor is evil; a corrupt politician and crime boss. Luthor is nothing like the comics versions either, his character defining genius is absent, in it's place is nothing more than a skilled operator borrowing ideas from others.

It gets worse.

De Haven just keeps on introducing at length characters into the book that do nothing to advance the story.
I said at the outset I began the novel with childish anticipation - this was the golden age superman - whose defining characteristic was action! The clue was in the Comic's title Action comics! I expected to quickly advance to Metropolis and read how Superman becomes a hero. De Haven just fails to deliver.

Instead we see Berg making his way to Smallville to discover Clark's secret; then streetwise Berg and an a hick Kent form an improbable duo, despite spending time to set Clark up as a reporter for the Smallville paper, De Haven sends Berg and Kent to Hollywood, where Clark Kent becomes a stuntman! - I kid you not - and then allows those gentle and unexcitable close-lipped hollywood folk see him unharmed after being run over by a stage coach, among other scrapes. Insult to injury Superman's first and brief public appearance in costume is in LA where he busts Berg out of jail; the costume he acquires from a girlfriend - his first love - who is neither Lois or Lana, and De Haven's version of the classic suit is a cast off from a failed picture called Saucer Man.

By the time we reach New York - NOT Metropolis (quite why I'm not sure) we're hundreds of pages into the story; the small time crook Berg has mentored Clark into Superman, we've seen Superman discover his powers in the most dry and unconvincing fashion - and I'm desperate for some real Superman action, I've waded through 3/4 of this book waiting for Lois to meet Clark, and Superman to be heroic, and when it happens it's just awful, Lois is bent over her boyfriend, who isn't Clark or Superman or even Berg for that matter, but an injured cop, and Superman is wrestling a car, and then he gets punched out by a robot, not even a giant robot, and not even a robot invented by Luthor, (but an Italian guy) that happens to have Luthor's name on it.
SO did you get that? De Haven has given us pages of realistic depression racked 30's America, with lots of cultural and period references, and then De Haven imagines a robot invented in this same 1930's New York featuring technology that would seem out of place and advanced even today.
Honestly this is the first book in a long time that I have found myself 50 pages or so from the end and deciding it really wasn't worth the effort finishing.
I just didn't feel attracted to Lois, I didn't want to be Superman, and I sure didn't want to be Berg, and Luthor was just another crooked politico, at least until he managed to get hold of the plot of the movie I Robot.
I was expecting Superman. I was expecting Mr Smith goes Washington meets Mr Deeds goes to town meets John boy from the Waltons; but Clark wasn't just unworldly-but-good, he was a dumb and reluctant hero.

In the past radio, film, television, and novels have contributed to the Superman Story - this book however adds nothing of value, it's dry, unimaginative, and for all it's 30's grit and adult themes it still becomes preposterous and unattractive.

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