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bukes #71-#82
Dec. 17th, 2009 12:21 am The end of the year is fast approaching, reminding me I should catch up on my book notes. Of course, the "50" of the term "50 Book Challenge" is long behind me now, so the point of this anyway reasonably pointless exercise seems even more distant than ever; but, well, blame it on my Scottish Presbyterian upbringing and associated work ethic, or something. (It'd just be nice if the said work ethic helped me out in other, more useful spheres, hm?)
book #71: A Simple Plan (1993) by Scott Smith
A few years back I watched the 1998 movie based on this novel, and loved it to pieces: it's the most wonderful noir tragicomedy, eliciting bleak laughter at the same time as a profound sorrow at the way potential human destiny and dreams are forever thwarted by human stupidity. So, although I picked up my copy of the novel a while ago, I fought somewhat shy of actually reading it in case I found it a let-down.
Not so: it's wonderful. And here, too, we have one of those very rare instances where, even though the movie is (according to my memory) very faithful to the book, the two also complement each other. Part of this may be the movie's casting of Bill Paxton in the central role of Hank, the upright and uptight accountant who with ne'er-do-well brother Jacob and Jacob's even ne'er-do-weller pal Lou comes across, in the midst of an Ohio snowfield, a crashed light plane containing a dead pilot and four million bucks. The three reckon the money must be illicit or there'd have been a hue and cry about the lost pilot; so Hank and his wife Sarah decide the best course is to sit on the money for a few years before leaving the area and living the life of Riley somewhere safely afar. Unfortunately, this simple plan starts unraveling pretty soon because, essentially, Jake and Lou are too stupid to follow through on it.
Not that Hank's any genius; indeed, when blood starts to be shed, Hank proves to be the most ruthless member of the little gang, a trait that brings problems and complications of its own.
A Simple Plan is something of a white-knuckle read, which may tend to obscure the fact that it's also quite beautifully written. And, once you've read it, get hold of the DVD -- or vice versa.
book #72: The God Particle (2005) by Richard Cox
The cover blurb was promising: particle physics, shifting realities and perceptions thereof, yer quantum, cod spirituality . . . all things that would tend to tailor-make a book for moi. And then the result was so depressingly disappointing!
US wheeler-dealer Steve Keeley, abroad on business, is thrown out of an upstairs brothel window in Zurich, but miraculously survives the fall thanks to, he's told, a brilliant surgeon. Only . . . only it seems he can now see and interact with the Higgs Field! Could he but tame this talent, he might be able to alter his surroundings at will, float through the air or see the future or read minds or . . . Certainly, this seems far better a deal than getting bit by a radioactive spider and becoming a power excretor.
Meanwhile, under the Texas desert a billionaire entrepreneur has succeeded in building a precursor to the Large Hadron Collider. I/c the science at the site is two-fisted, rock-jawed physicist Mike McNair, who's convinced the big breakthrough -- isolating the Higgs boson (or "God Particle") -- is just around the corner. Little does he know that twisted sociopath and fat assistant Larry Thing is out to get him and will even sabotage the project to further his vengeance. Larry's fury rises when poutingly, curvaceously intelligent local tv presenter Kelly Smith falls hook, line and sinker for the boss, because Larry is an avid local-tv-news-watcher and has been lusting after her for years. Sinister Swiss businessmen with a penchant for fondling white cats and uttering BROUWHAHA MISSTER BONT from time to time are lurking around somewhere, and . . .
Well, not everything in the preceding para is factually 100% accurate, but most of it is and it certainly represents the way I started feeling about this book before I'd got halfway through. When the characters aren't behaving stereotypically they're behaving like adolescents. Needless to say, one of the baddies is an ex-Nazi who harks back to the glory days under the Reich. Cox has difficulty depicting what the Higgs Field "looks" like, for the very good reason, of course, that we're dealing with an area of physical reality where commonsensical human understandings don't operate; yet, even granting this, even granting that his "descriptions" of quantum reality must necessarily be a matter of a lot of smoke and many, many mirrors, I still felt shortchanged: I was being offered something clunky and mundane and told it was really something wonderfully strange and incomprehensible.
The writing is, I guess, adequate; although the use of present tense seems pretentious in what is essentially a pulp tale; as with so many authors, Cox has occasional difficulties when dealing with past events within his present-tense narrative. (Note to writers using the technique: if you find yourself moving into the pluperfect, you're almost certainly screwing up.)
I'm perfectly prepared to believe that others will love this book. For me, though, it was as I say a bitter disappointment.
book #73: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005; trans from the Swedish 2008 by Reg Keeland) by Stieg Larsson
A few weeks ago Pam and I went to the excellent Housing Works in NYC to see a presentation celebrating the launch of the second Interstitial Arts anthology, Interfictions 2. In case you don't know of it (and we didn't until that night), Housing Works is a large bookshop staffed by volunteers and stocked by donations only, with all profits going to housing the homeless and helping addicts out of their hell; I plan to shop there again, and often. Whatever: just before we'd left the house, I'd been reading a conversation on LinkedIn where someone said the best book he'd read all year was Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and we should damn' well all go read it for ourselves. Once we'd reached Housing Works, I looked around aimlessly. The first book my eye lighted on was, you guessed it, Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Natch, I regarded this as a message -- and went straight to the checkout counter with the book.
The guy on LinkedIn wasn't far off in his judgment: this is a very, very good book. Muckraking journalist Mikael loses a prominent libel case and has to retreat from the public eye for a while. A reclusive ancient industrialist, richer than God, hires him to try to solve the mystery of a girl who disappeared forty years ago from the family home on a small island which circumstances had that day completely sealed off: it was almost impossible for her to have escaped or for any murderer to have disposed of her body, while a search of the entire island left no stone unturned but revealed nothing. So Mikael goes a-digging . . . with the help of a strange, antisocial hacker/researcher called Lisbeth -- the girl of the book's title. Abetted by a top-notch translation, what starts as something close to a mainstream novel becomes in turn a literary-style detection, an edge-of-the-seat mystery/psychological thriller and finally something close to Grand Guignol; further, it's a book that's aware of and acknowledges its literary antecedents, as per the nod it gives to Val McDermid's novel Place of Execution, which starts with a similar premise but goes somewhere else thereafter.
All in all, great stuff! I'll definitely be looking out for the other two of Larsson's The Girl . . . novels. (He delivered the manuscripts of all three to his publisher just before dying suddenly of a heart attack, aged just 50.)
book #74: Fludd (1989) by Hilary Mantel
Mantel won the Booker Prize a few weeks ago for her new novel, which alas sounds totally unappetizing to me. However, I decided it really was about time I read some of her work -- and Fludd was the first book that came to hand.
In the mid-1950s in a ghastly English Midlands village called Fetherhoughton, whose shambling atavistic inhabitants regard themselves, probably wrongly, as at least superior to the denizens of neighbouring village Netherhoughton, there's trouble afoot in the Catholic church. The local bishop wants to impose "modernization" on crusty old Father Angwin and his flock. To this end he demands the statues of the saints and Virgin be removed from the church and insists he will inflict a new, young curate on the priest. Meanwhile, in the nearby convent comely young Sister Philomena is bridling against the dictatorial regime of Mother Purpiture. And then one day the new curate arrives, called Fludd, like the 17th-century alchemist . . .
The blurb, picking up on the Fludd connection, is full of hifalutin stuff to the effect that this is "a novel about alchemy and transformation", and maybe the intention was there. For me, though, the book read more like something the lovechild of Diana Wynne Jones and Tom Sharpe might produce, especially if assisted by the ghosts of Stella Gibbons and Mervyn Peake. The writing ranges from the entrancing ("Christ died to free us from the burden of our sin, but he never, so far as [Sister Philomena] could see, lifted a finger to free us from our stupidity") to the Thog's Masterclass (". . . the very suggestion . . . was enough to make them close their minds and occupy their eyes with their shoelaces" -- ouch!). Although I'm not sure, then, that Fludd is great literature and worth all the plaudits it got from the posh press, I certainly enjoyed its bitchy humour and its mercilessly exaggerated characterization. A fun read.
book #75: Amsterdam (1998) by Ian McEwan
I've enjoyed previous McEwan books I've read, so when this one floated to the top of one of my many to-be-read piles I seized on it.
At the London funeral of Molly Lane, four men interact, these being her publisher husband George and three of her lovers: Vernon, who edits a national broadsheet newspaper, a "quality" which he's trying to make more tabloid; Clive, a somewhat pretentious composer who's been commissioned by the government to produce a Millennium Symphony; and Julian, a cutthroat rightist politician who's currently Foreign Secretary but is aiming higher. The three latter are pretty vile, self-centred specimens, even though Vernon and Clive (who are our main focus in what follows) would regard themselves as quite the opposite.
These two have been friends for many years. Having heard the news from the Netherlands that assisted suicide is to become legal there, they make a pact that, should either become terminally gaga, the other will do the merciful thing. They then carry on in their completely self-absorbed fashion: Vernon is determined to "out" Julian, whom he loathes, as a transvestite, no matter how loudly he's told that exposing personal peccadilloes does not constitute political debate; while Clive regards his composition as so important that he declines, because eager to jot down a melody before he forgets it, to intervene to help a woman defend herself from a murderous rapist.
Unsurprisingly, comeuppances are on their way for both men; but the book's denouement, and the plot mechanism whereby it's brought about, seem clumsy and farfetched to me. This isn't the only reason why it seems puzzling that Amsterdam walked off with the Booker Prize in the relevant year: there's some very tedious sub-Wainwrightian padding going on in the overlong lead-up, set in the Lake District, to Clive's avoidance of confrontation with the rapist -- padding that's doubly obvious in what is a fairly short book. All in all, although this is pleasant entertainment, Amsterdam seems to me to be as slight in import as it is in extent.
I've had McEwan's Atonement on my shelves a while; I'm hoping that, when I get round to reading it, it'll prove a bit meatier!
book #76: Killing Wonder (1981) by Dorothy Bryant
Quite a few years ago, the author of this book and I were both members of a sadly now defunct "international journalism community" called BlueEar -- it's the site that commissioned and published the first version of my satirical novel The Dragons of Manhattan. At some stage Bryant mentioned in passing that, a couple of decades back, she'd written a detective novel that had been much admired by the feminists of the day. Naturally, out of interest, I went online and bought myself a copy. Before I'd gotten around to reading it, though, there was yet another tsunamic influx of books into the house and Killing Wonder was submerged. The other day, though, I spotted it . . . and its moment had arrived.
While the central character, the victim and almost all the major support characters are female, I'm not absolutely sure why this should have been hailed as a feminist book; perhaps the cultural climate in the US in 1981 was different from that obtaining in the UK. Leave that aside, though. After a slightly creaky start, this becomes a joyously entertaining cozy mystery that also has quite a lot to say about the matter of being a writer -- not about writing, not about the book trade, but about how authors interact with each other and and are supported and/or preyed upon by the reading public.
Decades ago San Francisco author India Wonder wrote a roman a clef that has been a bestseller ever since, the inspiration of countless young female writers including our heroine Jessie Posey. But India has never written a book since then, although it's widely acknowledged that she's in the final stages of a new book, again a roman a clef, this time eviscerating her closest literary associates . . . all of whom have been invited to the party where India, mid-declaim, drops dead of cyanide poisoning. Everyone there but Jessie has a motive.
Promptly recruited as aide by handsome cop Jim, Jessie begins probing the mystery, interviewing varyingly eccentric members of the dead author's circle and herself being threatened by an anonymous phonecaller who plagues those involved. The book dances cheerfully along -- a very funny seance is a highlight -- until reaching its three denouements, the first two of which are plausible but incorrect solutions and the third of which is the correct (and most satisfying) one.
book #77: Lives of the Monster Dogs (1997) by Kirsten Bakis
A few months ago I read Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller, and obviously I was reminded of this -- since both are New York novels featuring intelligent talking canines -- when I picked up Bakis's book. In reality, the two are quite different creations: Emshwiller's is a feminist surrealist satire while Bakis, a significantly more disciplined writer, has produced a very moving book that, while not without its own satirical and surrealist moments, approaches its subject matter almost reverentially.
Back at the end of the 19th century and first part of the 20th, mitteleuropean sociopath Augustus Rank had a dream of creating, by use of prosthetics, dogs that could walk and talk. Fleeing eventually to Canada where he founded a remote settlement to further his project, he was still never to see the success he craved. Those who survived him, however, did manage to bring into being the monster dogs of the book's title -- dogs who, in our present (the book's near future), massacre their human creators and come to New York in hope of finding their place in human society . . . and also of rediscovering their own past. By happenstance, a young woman called Cleo becomes their chronicler. You might expect that those chronicles of hers would comprise the novel's text, but no: here we have Cleo's own informal reminiscences of her encounters and interactions with some of the canine leaders and intellectuals, plus various documents -- even including an opera libretto! -- depicting the dogs' past. Far too soon, though, the dogs realize they can have no future -- that their construction includes irreparable flaws -- and they prepare the way for their species to have a dignified exit.
To say this book is odd would be trite -- and also misleading, because one of the wonderful things about it is that it's almost not odd: before very long I found myself accepting its narrative, which avoids all temptations to lurch into Dr Moreau territory, as something quite naturalistic, as if there were nothing outrageous at all about a community of talking dogs having implausible adventures in NYC. This is a haunting, marginally disquieting book that I suspect I'll be remembering for a very long time to come.
book #78: Through the Cradle of Fear (2009) by Gabriel Hunt "as told to" Charles Ardai
The Gabriel Hunt series, published by Leisure, is the brainchild of Charles Ardai, best known as the creator of the astonishingly wonderful Hard Case Crime imprint. Although each book is supposedly by Gabriel Hunt, who's also the protagonist of these wild and woolly adventures, obviously it's his "co-author" (there are several writers involved in the series) who's responsible. I'm not sure how many of the Gabriel Hunt novels have been published by now -- I think it's four -- but naturally I wanted my introduction to it to be one of Ardai's own offerings.
The series is very obviously modeled on the exploits of Indiana Jones -- perhaps "homage" might be the favoured term. This is both a blessing and a curse. The opening of Through the Cradle of Fear is pure Indie, as our near-superhuman hero craftily and spectacularly manages to escape seemingly certain death, saving not only himself but the scantily clad "romantic interest". Breathless after that, I prepared to find some ballast within the novel to hang onto while I readied myself for the next spectacular. Instead I was given a text that remained relentlessly light and superficial throughout, as if it thought I couldn't be trusted to plough through anything requiring even a scintilla of concentration. The result is a book that's not only immediately forgettable but also not hugely exciting even as one's reading it: without much by way of character creation, plot underpinning or scene setting in between times, the supposedly thrilling passages soon start failing to thrill.
This all probably sounds as if I disliked the book a lot. Not so (although I was mightily pissed off to discover when I got there that the last 45 pages or so of the book were a "bonus" adventure novella unconnected to the rest; had I known this to be so I'd have bought a different book). Hunt and his cohorts are engaging enough, and the froth entertaining enough, that I might well find myself buying another book in the series for a long plane journey, or whatever. But I'd been expecting a white-knuckler and it failed to materialize.
book #79: Void Moon (2000) by Michael Connelly
This is a standalone title, not one of Connelly's Harry Bosch novels, and it's an out-and-out suspenser rather than a mystery or a psychological thriller. Years ago Cassie Black acted in collaboration with her lover Max Freeling to rob Vegas casinos, until one terrible night when they were caught and Max was killed. Now on probation after serving her time in jail, Cassie dreams of the day she'll be able to reclaim -- or steal -- her and Max's daughter Jodie from the child's adoptive parents and make a new life for them both somewhere far away. To this end she allows herself to be persuaded to take on the customary "one last job" . . . and of course it goes awry, bringing her back into the sights of the casino-employed private-investigator-cum-wetwork-operator responsible for Max's death, the sociopathic Jack Karch. Karch in effect goes on a sanctioned killing spree to eliminate all those involved in Cassie's latest heist and recover the dough, yet he too is being doublecrossed -- as he eventually discovers.
This is a real humdinger of a thriller which had me reading later than intended a couple of nights and, during the intervening day, sneaking quick reads when I was supposed to be doing other, more important things. To be honest, the plotting seems to fall apart a bit -- to rely too much on the implausible -- during the final stages, when it has to engineer the mechanics of Cassie getting into a hotel suite to rescue Jodie therefrom, but by that point in the book the momentum of my reading was at such a feverishly high level that I didn't really care.
book#80: Lullaby (1989) by Ed McBain
This was the old maestro's fortieth novel in the 87th Precinct series, and it's one of the longest and best. The main plot strand has Carella and Meyer tracking down the killer of a babysitter and baby during the early hours of New Year's Day -- a killer who's not unafraid to kill again. In the usual McBain fashion, there's plenty of dirty laundry that comes out during the two cops' investigation. Meantime, Kling has saved the life a small-time hood who promises, not as a favour but more as a matter of shared self-interest, to elucidate the details of an enormous drug transaction due to go down in Isola during the next few days. Little does Kling realize it, but he's being sucked into a vortex involving extraordinary inter-gang carnage. In a third and significantly lesser plot strand, Eileen Burke, who has been Kling's significant other, is undergoing psychotherapy in order to cope with having killed a man in the line of duty and earlier having suffered rape during undercover work; should she carry through with her intention to resign the badge, and should she make her separation from Kling permanent?
It's all great stuff, with the characteristic McBain mixture of gritty reality, casual violence, integrity-versus-venality, verbal pyrotechnics and frequent blithe humour. I'm beginning to run out of later 87th Precinct novels that I haven't yet read, and may have to go back to the beginning of the series to reread the ones I first (thanks to the bookshelf and generous lending of my older cousin Brian) encountered as a schoolboy . . .
book #81: Hold Tight (2008) by Harlan Coben
"Hold tight" is, of course, the phrase that every parent uses to a small child in a crowded or disorienting situation: keep a tight hold of my hand and don't stray away. It's also the thing that many parents find it difficult to stop doing when their children are a bit older and want to assert their independence, lead their own lives. This novel is really about both senses of the term. Mike and Tia Baye are concerned for their adolescent son Adam in the wake of the suicide of his best friend Spencer. Convincing themselves the invasion of his privacy is their duty as his parents, they install surveillance software on his computer so they can follow all his internet activities. Meanwhile, Spencer's grieving mother discovers evidence that Adam may know far more than he's prepared to let on about the events leading up to her son's death . . . which may not, in this new light, have been suicide. As a seemingly unconnected backdrop, there's a serial killer terrorizing the neighbourhood.
Of course, this being a Harlan Coben novel, these and other plot strands are not unrelated at all, and the latter part of the book is spent drawing them all together to show how really they're each a part of a single, complex story. There were times, I confess, when I had to focus hard to make sure I was keeping proper track of everything; it was at such times that I mused on the fact that the only movie so far made from his work has been French (Guillaume Canet's 2006 movie Ne le Dis à Personne, based on Coben's novel Tell No One) -- there are few Hollywood concessions to simplisticism in Hold Tight.
book #82: The Book of Lost Things (2006) by John Connolly
In the midst of World War II, young David is mourning the death of his mother. Withdrawing from family and friends, he notices that the books in his bedroom have begun whispering to him, late at night as he lies in the dark in his sleepless bed. Soon fantasy takes a more active role, and he is catapulted into the midst of an otherworld that comprises a mixture of various classic fantasyland precursors (the snow-and-wolves theme of Narnia's early stages, for example). He is, natch, a chosen one of sorts here; he must quest to the castle of the dying king to retrieve the volume called The Book of Lost Things. Various humans and nonhumans aid and befriend him along the way, although most of the world seems out to get him; his recurring foe is the sinister Crooked Man, ye5t even he might not be so antagonistic to David's aims as he seems . . .
This is for the most part extremely jolly stuff, conveying something of the affect of the original English and European fairytales before the Victorians came along and stripped out all the good bits -- the blood and the sex. It is not, despite the age of its protagonist, a children's book. And it's not without its teeth. There's a powerful passage towards the end where the Crooked Man, of all people, argues strongly against our reflexive reaction that we should always return home from our forays into fantasylands, that the real world is the place we ought to be. Here are this longish passage's first few lines:
And, the reader inevitably adds, it is little better now.
Yet there are doldrums in the tale too, as if Connolly experienced a few periods where inspiration deserted him but he kept on churning out the words anyway, then later lacked the ruthlessness to slice them out again. By far the worst of these is where David encounters analogues of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the latter form an autonomous collective that's a straight pinch from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, complete with Eric Idle's accent. I very nearly threw the book at the wall at this stage; later, I was glad enough that I'd persevered.
I read this book some months ago (the bookmark I left in it is covered in notes I scribbled to myself while writing my novella The Lonely Hunter [forthcoming Fall 2010 from PS Publishing, folks!]). By strange coincidence I'm currently reading Brian Hall's The Saskiad (1997), a book with a remarkably similar initial premise yet an absolutely different development. It is certainly the case that The Book of Lost Things loses in the comparison between the two (at least, so far as I've got through The Saskiad), but overall it's a pretty damn' fine book in its own right.
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I have at last -- fanfare of trumpets -- caught up with myself: I've written notes on all the non-research books I've read so far this year. I can hardly believe that the To Be Written Up shelf is bare.
As stated, I'm reading Brian Hall's The Saskiad right now. If all goes according to plan -- which it won't -- next up is Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Angel's Game, which I've been saving as a holiday treat, and then Vikram Chandra's monumental Sacred Games. That should take me to the end of the year, and quite likely beyond it -- the Chandra book is well over 800 pages long. Or perhaps, instead, I'll grab me some antique thrillers: there's a "double" of The Lady Vanishes and Laura that's been calling my name for some time now. Or maybe I'll . . .
book #71: A Simple Plan (1993) by Scott Smith
A few years back I watched the 1998 movie based on this novel, and loved it to pieces: it's the most wonderful noir tragicomedy, eliciting bleak laughter at the same time as a profound sorrow at the way potential human destiny and dreams are forever thwarted by human stupidity. So, although I picked up my copy of the novel a while ago, I fought somewhat shy of actually reading it in case I found it a let-down.
Not so: it's wonderful. And here, too, we have one of those very rare instances where, even though the movie is (according to my memory) very faithful to the book, the two also complement each other. Part of this may be the movie's casting of Bill Paxton in the central role of Hank, the upright and uptight accountant who with ne'er-do-well brother Jacob and Jacob's even ne'er-do-weller pal Lou comes across, in the midst of an Ohio snowfield, a crashed light plane containing a dead pilot and four million bucks. The three reckon the money must be illicit or there'd have been a hue and cry about the lost pilot; so Hank and his wife Sarah decide the best course is to sit on the money for a few years before leaving the area and living the life of Riley somewhere safely afar. Unfortunately, this simple plan starts unraveling pretty soon because, essentially, Jake and Lou are too stupid to follow through on it.
Not that Hank's any genius; indeed, when blood starts to be shed, Hank proves to be the most ruthless member of the little gang, a trait that brings problems and complications of its own.
A Simple Plan is something of a white-knuckle read, which may tend to obscure the fact that it's also quite beautifully written. And, once you've read it, get hold of the DVD -- or vice versa.
book #72: The God Particle (2005) by Richard Cox
The cover blurb was promising: particle physics, shifting realities and perceptions thereof, yer quantum, cod spirituality . . . all things that would tend to tailor-make a book for moi. And then the result was so depressingly disappointing!
US wheeler-dealer Steve Keeley, abroad on business, is thrown out of an upstairs brothel window in Zurich, but miraculously survives the fall thanks to, he's told, a brilliant surgeon. Only . . . only it seems he can now see and interact with the Higgs Field! Could he but tame this talent, he might be able to alter his surroundings at will, float through the air or see the future or read minds or . . . Certainly, this seems far better a deal than getting bit by a radioactive spider and becoming a power excretor.
Meanwhile, under the Texas desert a billionaire entrepreneur has succeeded in building a precursor to the Large Hadron Collider. I/c the science at the site is two-fisted, rock-jawed physicist Mike McNair, who's convinced the big breakthrough -- isolating the Higgs boson (or "God Particle") -- is just around the corner. Little does he know that twisted sociopath and fat assistant Larry Thing is out to get him and will even sabotage the project to further his vengeance. Larry's fury rises when poutingly, curvaceously intelligent local tv presenter Kelly Smith falls hook, line and sinker for the boss, because Larry is an avid local-tv-news-watcher and has been lusting after her for years. Sinister Swiss businessmen with a penchant for fondling white cats and uttering BROUWHAHA MISSTER BONT from time to time are lurking around somewhere, and . . .
Well, not everything in the preceding para is factually 100% accurate, but most of it is and it certainly represents the way I started feeling about this book before I'd got halfway through. When the characters aren't behaving stereotypically they're behaving like adolescents. Needless to say, one of the baddies is an ex-Nazi who harks back to the glory days under the Reich. Cox has difficulty depicting what the Higgs Field "looks" like, for the very good reason, of course, that we're dealing with an area of physical reality where commonsensical human understandings don't operate; yet, even granting this, even granting that his "descriptions" of quantum reality must necessarily be a matter of a lot of smoke and many, many mirrors, I still felt shortchanged: I was being offered something clunky and mundane and told it was really something wonderfully strange and incomprehensible.
The writing is, I guess, adequate; although the use of present tense seems pretentious in what is essentially a pulp tale; as with so many authors, Cox has occasional difficulties when dealing with past events within his present-tense narrative. (Note to writers using the technique: if you find yourself moving into the pluperfect, you're almost certainly screwing up.)
I'm perfectly prepared to believe that others will love this book. For me, though, it was as I say a bitter disappointment.
book #73: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005; trans from the Swedish 2008 by Reg Keeland) by Stieg Larsson
A few weeks ago Pam and I went to the excellent Housing Works in NYC to see a presentation celebrating the launch of the second Interstitial Arts anthology, Interfictions 2. In case you don't know of it (and we didn't until that night), Housing Works is a large bookshop staffed by volunteers and stocked by donations only, with all profits going to housing the homeless and helping addicts out of their hell; I plan to shop there again, and often. Whatever: just before we'd left the house, I'd been reading a conversation on LinkedIn where someone said the best book he'd read all year was Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and we should damn' well all go read it for ourselves. Once we'd reached Housing Works, I looked around aimlessly. The first book my eye lighted on was, you guessed it, Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Natch, I regarded this as a message -- and went straight to the checkout counter with the book.
The guy on LinkedIn wasn't far off in his judgment: this is a very, very good book. Muckraking journalist Mikael loses a prominent libel case and has to retreat from the public eye for a while. A reclusive ancient industrialist, richer than God, hires him to try to solve the mystery of a girl who disappeared forty years ago from the family home on a small island which circumstances had that day completely sealed off: it was almost impossible for her to have escaped or for any murderer to have disposed of her body, while a search of the entire island left no stone unturned but revealed nothing. So Mikael goes a-digging . . . with the help of a strange, antisocial hacker/researcher called Lisbeth -- the girl of the book's title. Abetted by a top-notch translation, what starts as something close to a mainstream novel becomes in turn a literary-style detection, an edge-of-the-seat mystery/psychological thriller and finally something close to Grand Guignol; further, it's a book that's aware of and acknowledges its literary antecedents, as per the nod it gives to Val McDermid's novel Place of Execution, which starts with a similar premise but goes somewhere else thereafter.
All in all, great stuff! I'll definitely be looking out for the other two of Larsson's The Girl . . . novels. (He delivered the manuscripts of all three to his publisher just before dying suddenly of a heart attack, aged just 50.)
book #74: Fludd (1989) by Hilary Mantel
Mantel won the Booker Prize a few weeks ago for her new novel, which alas sounds totally unappetizing to me. However, I decided it really was about time I read some of her work -- and Fludd was the first book that came to hand.
In the mid-1950s in a ghastly English Midlands village called Fetherhoughton, whose shambling atavistic inhabitants regard themselves, probably wrongly, as at least superior to the denizens of neighbouring village Netherhoughton, there's trouble afoot in the Catholic church. The local bishop wants to impose "modernization" on crusty old Father Angwin and his flock. To this end he demands the statues of the saints and Virgin be removed from the church and insists he will inflict a new, young curate on the priest. Meanwhile, in the nearby convent comely young Sister Philomena is bridling against the dictatorial regime of Mother Purpiture. And then one day the new curate arrives, called Fludd, like the 17th-century alchemist . . .
The blurb, picking up on the Fludd connection, is full of hifalutin stuff to the effect that this is "a novel about alchemy and transformation", and maybe the intention was there. For me, though, the book read more like something the lovechild of Diana Wynne Jones and Tom Sharpe might produce, especially if assisted by the ghosts of Stella Gibbons and Mervyn Peake. The writing ranges from the entrancing ("Christ died to free us from the burden of our sin, but he never, so far as [Sister Philomena] could see, lifted a finger to free us from our stupidity") to the Thog's Masterclass (". . . the very suggestion . . . was enough to make them close their minds and occupy their eyes with their shoelaces" -- ouch!). Although I'm not sure, then, that Fludd is great literature and worth all the plaudits it got from the posh press, I certainly enjoyed its bitchy humour and its mercilessly exaggerated characterization. A fun read.
book #75: Amsterdam (1998) by Ian McEwan
I've enjoyed previous McEwan books I've read, so when this one floated to the top of one of my many to-be-read piles I seized on it.
At the London funeral of Molly Lane, four men interact, these being her publisher husband George and three of her lovers: Vernon, who edits a national broadsheet newspaper, a "quality" which he's trying to make more tabloid; Clive, a somewhat pretentious composer who's been commissioned by the government to produce a Millennium Symphony; and Julian, a cutthroat rightist politician who's currently Foreign Secretary but is aiming higher. The three latter are pretty vile, self-centred specimens, even though Vernon and Clive (who are our main focus in what follows) would regard themselves as quite the opposite.
These two have been friends for many years. Having heard the news from the Netherlands that assisted suicide is to become legal there, they make a pact that, should either become terminally gaga, the other will do the merciful thing. They then carry on in their completely self-absorbed fashion: Vernon is determined to "out" Julian, whom he loathes, as a transvestite, no matter how loudly he's told that exposing personal peccadilloes does not constitute political debate; while Clive regards his composition as so important that he declines, because eager to jot down a melody before he forgets it, to intervene to help a woman defend herself from a murderous rapist.
Unsurprisingly, comeuppances are on their way for both men; but the book's denouement, and the plot mechanism whereby it's brought about, seem clumsy and farfetched to me. This isn't the only reason why it seems puzzling that Amsterdam walked off with the Booker Prize in the relevant year: there's some very tedious sub-Wainwrightian padding going on in the overlong lead-up, set in the Lake District, to Clive's avoidance of confrontation with the rapist -- padding that's doubly obvious in what is a fairly short book. All in all, although this is pleasant entertainment, Amsterdam seems to me to be as slight in import as it is in extent.
I've had McEwan's Atonement on my shelves a while; I'm hoping that, when I get round to reading it, it'll prove a bit meatier!
book #76: Killing Wonder (1981) by Dorothy Bryant
Quite a few years ago, the author of this book and I were both members of a sadly now defunct "international journalism community" called BlueEar -- it's the site that commissioned and published the first version of my satirical novel The Dragons of Manhattan. At some stage Bryant mentioned in passing that, a couple of decades back, she'd written a detective novel that had been much admired by the feminists of the day. Naturally, out of interest, I went online and bought myself a copy. Before I'd gotten around to reading it, though, there was yet another tsunamic influx of books into the house and Killing Wonder was submerged. The other day, though, I spotted it . . . and its moment had arrived.
While the central character, the victim and almost all the major support characters are female, I'm not absolutely sure why this should have been hailed as a feminist book; perhaps the cultural climate in the US in 1981 was different from that obtaining in the UK. Leave that aside, though. After a slightly creaky start, this becomes a joyously entertaining cozy mystery that also has quite a lot to say about the matter of being a writer -- not about writing, not about the book trade, but about how authors interact with each other and and are supported and/or preyed upon by the reading public.
Decades ago San Francisco author India Wonder wrote a roman a clef that has been a bestseller ever since, the inspiration of countless young female writers including our heroine Jessie Posey. But India has never written a book since then, although it's widely acknowledged that she's in the final stages of a new book, again a roman a clef, this time eviscerating her closest literary associates . . . all of whom have been invited to the party where India, mid-declaim, drops dead of cyanide poisoning. Everyone there but Jessie has a motive.
Promptly recruited as aide by handsome cop Jim, Jessie begins probing the mystery, interviewing varyingly eccentric members of the dead author's circle and herself being threatened by an anonymous phonecaller who plagues those involved. The book dances cheerfully along -- a very funny seance is a highlight -- until reaching its three denouements, the first two of which are plausible but incorrect solutions and the third of which is the correct (and most satisfying) one.
book #77: Lives of the Monster Dogs (1997) by Kirsten Bakis
A few months ago I read Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller, and obviously I was reminded of this -- since both are New York novels featuring intelligent talking canines -- when I picked up Bakis's book. In reality, the two are quite different creations: Emshwiller's is a feminist surrealist satire while Bakis, a significantly more disciplined writer, has produced a very moving book that, while not without its own satirical and surrealist moments, approaches its subject matter almost reverentially.
Back at the end of the 19th century and first part of the 20th, mitteleuropean sociopath Augustus Rank had a dream of creating, by use of prosthetics, dogs that could walk and talk. Fleeing eventually to Canada where he founded a remote settlement to further his project, he was still never to see the success he craved. Those who survived him, however, did manage to bring into being the monster dogs of the book's title -- dogs who, in our present (the book's near future), massacre their human creators and come to New York in hope of finding their place in human society . . . and also of rediscovering their own past. By happenstance, a young woman called Cleo becomes their chronicler. You might expect that those chronicles of hers would comprise the novel's text, but no: here we have Cleo's own informal reminiscences of her encounters and interactions with some of the canine leaders and intellectuals, plus various documents -- even including an opera libretto! -- depicting the dogs' past. Far too soon, though, the dogs realize they can have no future -- that their construction includes irreparable flaws -- and they prepare the way for their species to have a dignified exit.
To say this book is odd would be trite -- and also misleading, because one of the wonderful things about it is that it's almost not odd: before very long I found myself accepting its narrative, which avoids all temptations to lurch into Dr Moreau territory, as something quite naturalistic, as if there were nothing outrageous at all about a community of talking dogs having implausible adventures in NYC. This is a haunting, marginally disquieting book that I suspect I'll be remembering for a very long time to come.
book #78: Through the Cradle of Fear (2009) by Gabriel Hunt "as told to" Charles Ardai
The Gabriel Hunt series, published by Leisure, is the brainchild of Charles Ardai, best known as the creator of the astonishingly wonderful Hard Case Crime imprint. Although each book is supposedly by Gabriel Hunt, who's also the protagonist of these wild and woolly adventures, obviously it's his "co-author" (there are several writers involved in the series) who's responsible. I'm not sure how many of the Gabriel Hunt novels have been published by now -- I think it's four -- but naturally I wanted my introduction to it to be one of Ardai's own offerings.
The series is very obviously modeled on the exploits of Indiana Jones -- perhaps "homage" might be the favoured term. This is both a blessing and a curse. The opening of Through the Cradle of Fear is pure Indie, as our near-superhuman hero craftily and spectacularly manages to escape seemingly certain death, saving not only himself but the scantily clad "romantic interest". Breathless after that, I prepared to find some ballast within the novel to hang onto while I readied myself for the next spectacular. Instead I was given a text that remained relentlessly light and superficial throughout, as if it thought I couldn't be trusted to plough through anything requiring even a scintilla of concentration. The result is a book that's not only immediately forgettable but also not hugely exciting even as one's reading it: without much by way of character creation, plot underpinning or scene setting in between times, the supposedly thrilling passages soon start failing to thrill.
This all probably sounds as if I disliked the book a lot. Not so (although I was mightily pissed off to discover when I got there that the last 45 pages or so of the book were a "bonus" adventure novella unconnected to the rest; had I known this to be so I'd have bought a different book). Hunt and his cohorts are engaging enough, and the froth entertaining enough, that I might well find myself buying another book in the series for a long plane journey, or whatever. But I'd been expecting a white-knuckler and it failed to materialize.
book #79: Void Moon (2000) by Michael Connelly
This is a standalone title, not one of Connelly's Harry Bosch novels, and it's an out-and-out suspenser rather than a mystery or a psychological thriller. Years ago Cassie Black acted in collaboration with her lover Max Freeling to rob Vegas casinos, until one terrible night when they were caught and Max was killed. Now on probation after serving her time in jail, Cassie dreams of the day she'll be able to reclaim -- or steal -- her and Max's daughter Jodie from the child's adoptive parents and make a new life for them both somewhere far away. To this end she allows herself to be persuaded to take on the customary "one last job" . . . and of course it goes awry, bringing her back into the sights of the casino-employed private-investigator-cum-wetwork-operator responsible for Max's death, the sociopathic Jack Karch. Karch in effect goes on a sanctioned killing spree to eliminate all those involved in Cassie's latest heist and recover the dough, yet he too is being doublecrossed -- as he eventually discovers.
This is a real humdinger of a thriller which had me reading later than intended a couple of nights and, during the intervening day, sneaking quick reads when I was supposed to be doing other, more important things. To be honest, the plotting seems to fall apart a bit -- to rely too much on the implausible -- during the final stages, when it has to engineer the mechanics of Cassie getting into a hotel suite to rescue Jodie therefrom, but by that point in the book the momentum of my reading was at such a feverishly high level that I didn't really care.
book#80: Lullaby (1989) by Ed McBain
This was the old maestro's fortieth novel in the 87th Precinct series, and it's one of the longest and best. The main plot strand has Carella and Meyer tracking down the killer of a babysitter and baby during the early hours of New Year's Day -- a killer who's not unafraid to kill again. In the usual McBain fashion, there's plenty of dirty laundry that comes out during the two cops' investigation. Meantime, Kling has saved the life a small-time hood who promises, not as a favour but more as a matter of shared self-interest, to elucidate the details of an enormous drug transaction due to go down in Isola during the next few days. Little does Kling realize it, but he's being sucked into a vortex involving extraordinary inter-gang carnage. In a third and significantly lesser plot strand, Eileen Burke, who has been Kling's significant other, is undergoing psychotherapy in order to cope with having killed a man in the line of duty and earlier having suffered rape during undercover work; should she carry through with her intention to resign the badge, and should she make her separation from Kling permanent?
It's all great stuff, with the characteristic McBain mixture of gritty reality, casual violence, integrity-versus-venality, verbal pyrotechnics and frequent blithe humour. I'm beginning to run out of later 87th Precinct novels that I haven't yet read, and may have to go back to the beginning of the series to reread the ones I first (thanks to the bookshelf and generous lending of my older cousin Brian) encountered as a schoolboy . . .
book #81: Hold Tight (2008) by Harlan Coben
"Hold tight" is, of course, the phrase that every parent uses to a small child in a crowded or disorienting situation: keep a tight hold of my hand and don't stray away. It's also the thing that many parents find it difficult to stop doing when their children are a bit older and want to assert their independence, lead their own lives. This novel is really about both senses of the term. Mike and Tia Baye are concerned for their adolescent son Adam in the wake of the suicide of his best friend Spencer. Convincing themselves the invasion of his privacy is their duty as his parents, they install surveillance software on his computer so they can follow all his internet activities. Meanwhile, Spencer's grieving mother discovers evidence that Adam may know far more than he's prepared to let on about the events leading up to her son's death . . . which may not, in this new light, have been suicide. As a seemingly unconnected backdrop, there's a serial killer terrorizing the neighbourhood.
Of course, this being a Harlan Coben novel, these and other plot strands are not unrelated at all, and the latter part of the book is spent drawing them all together to show how really they're each a part of a single, complex story. There were times, I confess, when I had to focus hard to make sure I was keeping proper track of everything; it was at such times that I mused on the fact that the only movie so far made from his work has been French (Guillaume Canet's 2006 movie Ne le Dis à Personne, based on Coben's novel Tell No One) -- there are few Hollywood concessions to simplisticism in Hold Tight.
book #82: The Book of Lost Things (2006) by John Connolly
In the midst of World War II, young David is mourning the death of his mother. Withdrawing from family and friends, he notices that the books in his bedroom have begun whispering to him, late at night as he lies in the dark in his sleepless bed. Soon fantasy takes a more active role, and he is catapulted into the midst of an otherworld that comprises a mixture of various classic fantasyland precursors (the snow-and-wolves theme of Narnia's early stages, for example). He is, natch, a chosen one of sorts here; he must quest to the castle of the dying king to retrieve the volume called The Book of Lost Things. Various humans and nonhumans aid and befriend him along the way, although most of the world seems out to get him; his recurring foe is the sinister Crooked Man, ye5t even he might not be so antagonistic to David's aims as he seems . . .
This is for the most part extremely jolly stuff, conveying something of the affect of the original English and European fairytales before the Victorians came along and stripped out all the good bits -- the blood and the sex. It is not, despite the age of its protagonist, a children's book. And it's not without its teeth. There's a powerful passage towards the end where the Crooked Man, of all people, argues strongly against our reflexive reaction that we should always return home from our forays into fantasylands, that the real world is the place we ought to be. Here are this longish passage's first few lines:
Listen to me. [. . .] Let me tell you the truth about the world to which you so desperately want to return. It is a place of pain and suffering and grief. When you left it, cities were being attacked. Women and children were being blasted to pieces or burned alive by bombs dropped from planes flown by men with wives and children of their own. People were being dragged from their homes and shot in the street. Your world is tearing itself apart, and the most amusing thing of all is that it was little better before the war started. [. . .]
And, the reader inevitably adds, it is little better now.
Yet there are doldrums in the tale too, as if Connolly experienced a few periods where inspiration deserted him but he kept on churning out the words anyway, then later lacked the ruthlessness to slice them out again. By far the worst of these is where David encounters analogues of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the latter form an autonomous collective that's a straight pinch from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, complete with Eric Idle's accent. I very nearly threw the book at the wall at this stage; later, I was glad enough that I'd persevered.
I read this book some months ago (the bookmark I left in it is covered in notes I scribbled to myself while writing my novella The Lonely Hunter [forthcoming Fall 2010 from PS Publishing, folks!]). By strange coincidence I'm currently reading Brian Hall's The Saskiad (1997), a book with a remarkably similar initial premise yet an absolutely different development. It is certainly the case that The Book of Lost Things loses in the comparison between the two (at least, so far as I've got through The Saskiad), but overall it's a pretty damn' fine book in its own right.
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I have at last -- fanfare of trumpets -- caught up with myself: I've written notes on all the non-research books I've read so far this year. I can hardly believe that the To Be Written Up shelf is bare.
As stated, I'm reading Brian Hall's The Saskiad right now. If all goes according to plan -- which it won't -- next up is Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Angel's Game, which I've been saving as a holiday treat, and then Vikram Chandra's monumental Sacred Games. That should take me to the end of the year, and quite likely beyond it -- the Chandra book is well over 800 pages long. Or perhaps, instead, I'll grab me some antique thrillers: there's a "double" of The Lady Vanishes and Laura that's been calling my name for some time now. Or maybe I'll . . .
