books #16-#19

Catching up again on the recording (for reasons unknown and unguessable) of bukes read for leisure . . .

 

book #16: The Appeal (2008) by John Grisham

 

Once upon a time there was this author of tremendous page-turning legal thrillers that could have you up half the night, not necessarily just because of the taut action but also, often, because of the moral/ethical themes being worked through by the protagonists. Then, somewhere along the line, this author seemed to lose the knack of thriller-writing; his novels could often still be interesting for their exploration, sometimes satirical, of current ethical issues affecting -- or, perhaps more important, failing to affect -- the practice of US law. Every now and then he'd still produce a thriller. More often, you'd find yourself reading what had more the affect of a semi-fictionalized true-crime book of the sort one used occasionally to pick up guiltily in paperback, usually based on a murderer or murder case you'd never actually heard of and also, typically, long on event but short on analysis.

 

The Appeal is, alas, one of those. It's entertaining enough in a take-it-or-leave-it sort of a way. An offshoot of ghastly company Krane Chemical, largely owned by the even ghastlier trillionaire Carl Trudeau, has been dumping toxic wastes near a small Mississippi town, poisoning the local water supply and causing a few score local deaths. Against the odds, local mom-and-pop legal firm scores a big one in court, getting a settlement that, while insultingly tiny in terms of the suffering perpetrated, still looks pretty goddam hefty on paper. So rather than actually fucking pay for what's basically an act of mass murder, Trudeau decides to fight the verdict in court as far as he can; further, in order to aid his chances, he employs a bunch of white-collar criminals to oust one of the sitting judges on the Mississippi Supreme Court and replace her with someone "sympathetic to the cause of business".

 

I read this around the time of the anniversary of the Exxon Mobil disaster, the start of a long chain of legally sanctioned crimes committed by the corporation in question -- whose relevant executives should, frankly, be behind bars for their disgusting acts -- so, believe me, the theme of The Appeal had a decidedly immediate resonance for me. But it somehow didn't seem to be a novel. Five stars for worthiness, then; but only about one star as a piece of storytelling.

 

book #17: The Black Book of Secrets (2007) by F.E. Higgins

 

By contrast, this is one of those books that bedclothes and flashlights were invented for. Young pickpocket Ludlow Fitch escapes his frightful parents in the City and finds himself in the remote village of Pagus Parvus. There he's taken in as apprentice by another newcomer to the village, Joe Zabbidou (as in "Zabbi Zabbi Dou!" this erstwhile Flintstones fan kept thinking), who's a pawnbroker of secrets -- that is, people tell him their deepest secrets while Ludlow records them in Joe's mysterious black book, and then Joe pays them. At first Ludlow naturally thinks the purpose is blackmail, but that isn't it at all . . .

 

I assume there's a paperback of this by now, but I haven't seen it. The hardback, though, is only $14.95, and I would say worth every penny. Not only is this a book you'll probably want to read again yourself, you're likely to find yourself forcing it on your friends. But that's not the only reason you might want to opt for the hardback. Whoever designed this (Susan Walsh for the book and Rich Deas for the cover, it says here) was obviously as nuts about the novel as I am, because everything about the production looks, feels and even smells appropriate for what's essentially a modern rendering of those books that have had generations of kids reading them obsessively and clandestinely. My only quibble with The Black Book of Secrets is that Higgins seems to be setting herself up at the end for a sequel or even a series, and this is a book that should be left to stand alone as the wonderful creation it is; any sequel can only, by its very existence, detract.

 

book #18: La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl (2002) by David Huddle

 

To judge by the author bio, Huddle is one of those authors -- of poetry and essays as well as fiction -- upon whom the literary establishment smiles. This is far from necessarily a recommendation, and indeed about fifteen or twenty pages into this novel I was ready to throw it at the wall on the grounds of Stark Pretentiousness Above and Beyond the Call of Duty. Luckily there wasn't a wall to hand and I persevered, because I ended up enjoying the book really quite a lot. Prissy, fortyish Vermont art history prof Suzanne and her spindoctoring businessman husband Jack are not so much an odd couple as a couple whose ways started diverging in two incompatible directions fairly soon after they married. Now their marriage is clearly falling apart; that Jack finds solace in boffing the earthy Elly whenever he can is a symptom of this rather than, as both he and especially Suzanne believe, a cause. Habitually reserved, Suzanne escapes the turmoil of her personal life by constructing a fantasy about the 17th-century French painter Georges de la Tour; in this extended daydream, de la Tour discovers that Vivienne, the village teenager he has taken on as his new model, has a patch of wolflike hair on the back of her shoulder of which she is (improbably) completely unaware.

 

What Huddle has constructed with this novel is a sort of rope of stories, and I'd guess it was Story that was really his preoccupation when he was writing it. Whatever, once he'd hooked me I stayed hooked; and by the final page I discovered that Suzanne was a far more interesting person than I'd earlier believed.

 

Beware of those first fifteen or twenty pages, though.

 

book #19: Playing with Fire (2004) by Peter Robinson

 

What more can you say about a Peter Robinson novel than that the maestro is at the top of his game yet again? He and Ian Rankin have a very similar ability to immerse the reader entirely in the lives of their protagonists to the extent that it can be a struggle for readers to pull themselves back into the real world. Yes, these are crime novels, and, yes, there's a strong element of mystery too, but to say only that would really be to mislead.

 

This latest installment of the Yorkshire DCI Alan Banks chronicles begins with the destruction by fire of two derelict canal barges and the squatters dwelling within. Forensics soon reveal arson, and that the target was one of the barges, occupied by an unsuccessful artist; the casualty in the other barge, junkie Tina, was either just "collateral damage", as the disgusting euphemism has it, or, perhaps worse, was a deliberate piece of misdirection by the arsonist to obscure his motives. Banks and DI Annie Cabbot and their crew -- notably DC Winsome Jackman, with whom I could all too easily fall in love -- soon unravel an art-forgery conspiracy, especially when there's another arson murder just a few days later; but they also, with the aid of innocent bystander Tina's hotheaded wastrel boyfriend Mark (about whom one begins to care inordinately) uncover a nasty backstory for her involving childhood sexual abuse. Robinson's working through of these two plots in parallel is mesmerizing.

 

Each time I finish one of Robinson's novels I wonder briefly why I don't read them more often, and then almost immediately the answer hits me: they're far too good to waste on a binge. Rather, I need to spread them out and savour them, waiting for le moment juste before I pick up the next one. But what a moment of happiness that moment usually proves to be!