Contemporary Interlude #2: The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro

9780307271037
Knopf, 2015
314 pp

hardcover

 “Promise to keep what you feel for me this moment always in your heart, no matter what you see once the mist's gone." 

In a very different approach to how I normally make these posts, the first thing I'm going to do here is to link to what I feel is an excellent literary review since  it says what I would say if I could actually write a literary review. For balance, I'm also linking to the not so positive  The New Yorker's take on it; there are many others floating around out there available for the reading, both positive and negative.

 Simply speaking, it's a book I will never forget, which is appropriate, since The Buried Giant is actually a story that directs the reader to the question of memory and its opposite, that of forgetting.

Beatrice and Axl are an elderly couple who live in a dark-ages Britain during a time of a rather uncertain peace between enemies. War has come and gone, peace has been established, but no one can seem to remember how this came to be. Beatrice and Axl live in a warren without light (shades of Plato's cave here) in a  community where "the past was rarely discussed," not "taboo," but as our narrator reveals,

 "it had somehow faded into a mist as dense as that which hung over the marshes."  

They decide to go and see their son, whom Beatrice can remember "clear enough" some days, while at other times, "it's as if a veil's fallen over his memory." Neither one of them can remember why their son is no longer with them, but Beatrice believes  that "he longs for us to leave this place and be living with him under his protection," so off they go to find his village. Beatrice also suffers from pain, and hopes that on the way to visit their son she can find someone to help her with it.  They are not the only ones on a quest, however; they meet up with others who are also seeking something in their own right.  The "mist" hovers over the land, causing everyone everywhere to suffer a sort of amnesia -- here and there small flashes of the past may seep through, but for the most part, these are just small blips, since the mist prevents everyone from fully remembering either their own individual pasts or any sort of collective history.  Axl and Beatrice set off on their journey and have to move through a land where they encounter knights, ogres, pixies, dragons, a mysterious monastery and much more. And then of course, there's the buried giant, who people take great care to avoid when crossing where he sleeps. For if he wakes...

This book may have all of the elements of a typical fantasy novel, and it very obviously borrows heavily from Arthurian legend, but read closer -- it is a story that uses  standard fantasy/mythological elements to lead the reader to explore the idea of memories of the past that have been obscured in the present.  In an interview, the author says that the question of  "when is it better to just forget things and keep them forgotten?" comes up time and again among the characters.  While there is great food for thought here,  in the context of this rather skittish postwar time of peace, it is a question that  I found most appropriate and well illustrated in the story of Beatrice and Axl.

 I absolutely loved the political implications of this novel, but even more so,  it was the story of this elderly couple that had me grabbing for a kleenex or two at the end. It started earlier with the story of the boatman, whose job it is to ferry a couple over to an island where they can be together always.   His duty, before doing his job, is to "discover if their bond of love is such to allow them to dwell together" there by asking them to recall to him "their most cherished memories."  Later, Beatrice will recall a conversation she once had with a woman who asked her

"How can you and your husband prove your love for each other when you can't remember the past you've shared?"

Without those memories, Beatrice worries that their love will "fade and die," something she greatly fears.

 When I finished the book, even though I'm not a fan of love stories, I was floored more by their story than by anything else in this novel, and it spoke volumes. The novel became much more satisfying once I got past the first 100 pages or so (up to then I remember describing it as a "slogfest"), and I ended up wanting to read it again as soon as I'd turned the last page. When a book I started out not liking can actually end up making  me cry, it's a very good one indeed.  

Painter of Silence, by Georgina Harding

9781408830420
Bloomsbury, 2012 (UK)
312 pp
paper


Historical fiction is one of my favorite reading genres when it's done well. I like more serious novels -- by that I mean I tend to shy away from historical fiction along the lines of The Other Boleyn Girl, which I read when it first came out and found a bit too soap operaish for my taste. Feel free to disagree, and I don't mean to belittle anyone's reading tastes (and how can I, when I absolutely squeal with delight reading books about squid gods) but for me that kind of stuff is more along the lines of historical chick-lit rather  than well-written historical fiction.  So in scouring my shelves I came up with Painter of Silence, a novel that turned out to be quite good and one that is told from a rather unique perspective.  It was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize this year.

As Painter of Silence opens, a young man makes his way to a hospital in the city of Iasi, in Moldavia (Romania) where he collapses on the stairs outside of the building.  He is found, brought in and brought back from the edge of death.  Adriana, the nurse who takes a special interest in him,  tries to find out who he is and where he may be from, but can elicit no information, finally realizing that he's probably deaf and most likely mute. She decides to call him by the name of her son, who went to fight in the war and never returned.  Another nurse, Safta offers to help; she doesn't tell anyone, but she recognizes the man as Augustin, nicknamed Tinu,  her childhood companion and son of her privileged family's former cook. She doesn't know it, but Augustin has struggled to make his way to Iasi to deliver a special message to her.   After he is released  from the hospital and stays briefly with Adriana, he and Safta embark on a journey back to their childhood home, where he begins to tell her his story and deliver her message in the only way he knows how -- through  drawings done from his incredible memory that try to express what he's been through since he last saw her.  As his story is slowly revealed, Augustin's pictures reflect the war's horrors and express the changes as the new Stalinist regime clears out the existing social order and  imposes a new one.  Tinu is not only a witness to  events of this time period;  he also experiences some of them firsthand.   Safta's story is also revealed as the novel alternates between the present and the past.

Sometimes historical fiction authors feel like they have to include a lot of details, sensationalistic scenes of atrocities, or bloody battles that often hold the story down, but not here.  Instead, the novel moves at a slow and gentle pace, condensing  this timewise-small but critical period of Romania's upheaval into a very readable and potent narrative.  Augustin's experiences, his observations  and his incredible memory carry the historical events without the need for extraneous additions.   The author effectively establishes a running  theme of separation/disconnection/isolation throughout the novel:  as Safta notes, disconnecting is what "she and everyone else is meant to be doing these days" under this new order.   Parents are separated from their children;  the fear that pervades this new society detaches previously morally-sound people from who they used to be and their principles and leaves them afraid to speak.  Present is separated from past.  A refugee mentally and physically separates herself from the people who have taken her in.  "Pieces of one's mind"  separate, then come back together in "unexpected ways."  And then of course there's Tinu, who's always stood apart because of his inability to speak or hear.  

Painter of Silence started out a bit slow in getting my full attention, but it eventually started to hook me as I continued to read and got used to the pace and the writing style.  It's very reader friendly and accessible, not bogged down in useless detail, and  a good  novel of historical fiction that is related  from a different perspective than I've experienced before. While the main character, Tinu, is drawn well, there is also a lot of strength in some the minor characters -- the brief scenes with Liviu and Irina Milescu, for example, who live in Adriana's building, offer a realistic look at ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances.  The book tends to raise some interesting questions about the nature of  language but I'll leave that topic  for more critically-oriented people than myself.    What I didn't really like so much was the ending -- I get that the author has left things on a note of hope, but it was a bit unrealistic,  seemed contrived and sort of threw a damper on my overall enjoyment of the novel.   But I can still definitely recommend the book.

Pao, by Kerry Young

9781608195077
Bloomsbury USA, 2011
280 pp
paper**


The lovely island of Jamaica is the setting for this novel which centers around Yang Pao, a Chinese immigrant who landed there in 1938 at the age of 14 with his family after escaping civil war in China.  Approximately fifty years elapse in this story, from Pao's arrival through the re-election of Prime Minister Michael Manley in 1989.  It's an interesting book in which Pao's  story plays out through all of the political, social and economic changes that occur in that 50-year period, taking the reader from the last decades of British colonialism through Jamaica's independence and its aftermath. 

The story actually starts in 1945, when Pao is visited by Gloria, a Jamaican woman who comes to  Pao in Kingston's Chinatown after her sister's been badly beaten by a white sailor.  Since the retirement of Zhang, the Yang family's friend, benefactor  and Chinatown's own local "Godfather" figure,  Pao has taken his place; Gloria comes to him to ask for justice for her sister  and future protection of the prostitutes living and working in her house. It isn't long before Pao becomes smitten with Gloria, but is advised by his friend that she's not the right kind of woman for marrying.   He sets his sights higher, and they land on Fay Wong, daughter of Henry, one of the richest Chinese men on the island, and the two eventually marry and have children.  This move up the social and business ladder is great for Pao at first, but things aren't destined to work out as he planned: Fay can't stand the Pao family home in Chinatown, Gloria's not too happy, and as time goes on, outside forces begin to  take their toll on Pao, his family and even the traditional ways that exist within Pao's Chinatown.   In and around Pao's story the author examines the immigrant experience, Jamaica's  hope for unity once its people gained their independence from the British,  the political conflict that overtakes progress, and the growing awareness of Jamaicans that while their former masters may be gone,  the people are still under outside control in various ways. 

At its heart, Pao is a story about a powerful man who ultimately comes to discover things about himself and the people around him among the political, economic and social turmoil that overtakes Jamaica.  Pao is a complex character: he uses SunZi's Art of War as a guide for decision making and for strategy in dealing with others and is well respected within Chinatown, but at the same time, he can be brutal; he rapes his wife, punches her in the mouth and deals quickly with anyone who may pose a threat to his Chinatown.   While Pao's story is certainly the centerpiece of the book, more interesting (to me, anyway) is what's going on around him on the island in terms of the political, economic and social spheres post colonization, where the author raises some very interesting questions that are pertinent to life in any former colony.

Overall, I liked this book, even though family drama just isn't my favorite reading thing.   I would caution potential readers that the book is written using some kind of Jamaican patois so that if you're not up for a story written in other than the King's English, this may be a bit of a challenge.  But if you stick with it, the novel gets lifted out of the ordinary by the author's placement of the action in several different political eras, giving you a bit of a feel for the resultant chaos and how it affected life for people regardless of their socio-economic status.  Its focus on Chinese immigrants to Jamaica brings something new to my reading table regarding immigrant literature,  and while the Caribbean diaspora has been a topic found in many other books, the author deals with this part of Jamaica's history so that you can really understand the reasons people left their home and hoped for the best somewhere else. I'd recommend it for those reasons, although I'm sure the family saga will be much more of a draw.  Either way, it's definitely a good read.

fiction from the UK

 

** If you want this book, I'm not keeping it -- just be the first to comment that you'd like it.

Waiting for Sunrise, by William Boyd

9780061876769
Harper, 2012
originally published in the UK, Bloomsbury, 2012
353 pp
Hardcover ed.

"Everything is unbelievably complicated.  Everything."

Lysander Rief arrives in Vienna in 1913 to receive psychological help for a sexual problem.  His closest friend in England had convinced him to try psychoanalysis; taking his advice, Lysander took out all of his savings and moved to Austria.  At his first session with Dr. Bensimon, he is advised to keep a journal, which Lysander calls his "Autobiographical Investigations," which Bensimon says will hopefully yield a direct insight into Lysander's unconscious mind during the course of his treatment.  Lysander's first entry details the event at age 14 that led simultaneously to his burden of guilt and his sexual issue.  Bensimon believes the answer is to be found in his theory of "parallelism," scoffed at by Freud,  which is  "basically about using your imagination."   The idea is this:

"If the everyday world, everyday reality, is a fiction we create then the same can be said of our past -- the past is an aggregate of fictive realities we have already experienced -- our memories."

Bensimon's job, as he sees it, is to try to change "those old fictions" Lysander's been living with.  The doctor's brief use of hypnotic therapy plants an altogether-different version of that traumatic day in  a "parallel world" within Lysander's subconscious that Lysander can develop in place of the real one.  This technique aligns with Lysander's profession as an actor, where he is both himself and not himself, where he is always performing, and where it's "just an act, after all..., his métier, his talent, his calling."  But as Lysander is about to discover, he's not the only one who is an actor.  And so begins this tale of deceptions, of shifting identities in a world of duplicity and performance in some fashion or another.  It's a book where efforts to discern what is real and not real and who to trust follow on the heels of the fictions created by Boyd's characters, and really, what better venue can there be for such ideas than a spy story? 

The story moves from Lysander's psychological treatment to his infatuation with another one of Bensimon's patients, Hettie.  She is a sculptor, living a rather bohemian life with her artist-significant other Udo.  Hettie and Lysander enjoy a torrid affair, but out of nowhere, Hettie accuses him of rape; he is placed under arrest and "escapes" with help from fellow countrymen at the British Embassy, leaving him in a lot of debt.  Leaving  Vienna and returning to England, he joins the army as World War I erupts, but his days in Vienna come back to haunt him when he is called upon to perform some secret-agent type work that will take him across enemy lines into Switzerland.  Once home in England again,  he must penetrate the  closed-ranks bureaucracy within the military war machine  to root out who is leaking secrets to the enemy, but some bizarre and unforeseen complications arise along the way.   Lysander notes in his journal at one point that his " life seems to be running on a track I have nothing to do with,” -- he feels like a  "passenger on a train" with no idea of where he's going and the route he's taking.   He makes several references to waiting for sunrise, when "he might know what to do next," or when he has hopes that its arrival will bring  understanding and clarity or "at least clearer vision,"  but the actor who once loved the limelight  learns that it may be safer to remain in the world of shadows. 

Obviously there's much more to talking about this book than space will allow.  I liked this novel immensely.  This book has so many positives, including Boyd's awesome portrayal of a world in flux, a world that was "spinning, faster than ever ...," with time "on the move in this modern world" where the old was "going fast, disappearing and something different, something new, was inevitably taking its place." In 1913 Vienna Boyd's sense of place and time captures the atmosphere of this city on the cusp of an uneasy modernity, and reflect the same in wartime England and on the battlefields of France. There's a fair amount of wry humor that runs throughout, and the character of Lysander's gay uncle  and his African lover brought out the occasional chuckle.  On the down side, readers might be put off by the sometimes-meandering action or the pointless sidelines, for example, with Lysander's off-again, on-again relationship with his girlfriend Blanche.  And if you're looking for a straight-up, full-on novel of high espionage, this really isn't it -- this is much more of a character-driven story than a tale of adventure.

So maybe this isn't the best book William Boyd's ever written, but it's still damn good,  and it will capture your imagination for a few hours as you're transported back in time.  I don't think you can ask for much more than that.

Highly recommended.

Trapeze, by Simon Mawer

9781590515273
Other Press, 2012
published in the UK as The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (Little, Brown)
371 pp

“Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés”


I'm back in my historical-fiction element with Trapeze, a novel that is set in England, Scotland and France during  World War II.  Since reading Mawer's The Glass House, which I really liked, I've been waiting for something new from this author, and it's finally here in a story about a woman in the Special Operations Executive (SOE)  , an organization created to, among other acts of espionage, help local resistance units in their efforts against the Nazis.   Unlike The Glass House, Trapeze takes place over a brief span of time; like The Glass House, it will leave you thinking about this story for a long time after you've turned the last page. 

Marian Sutro is a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF); as the novel opens she has been recruited by the Inter-Services Research Bureau, an organization which "trains people to work in France." Everything is hush-hush; she is not allowed to talk to anyone about what she is doing -- her parents think she's being trained as a nurse. Sent to Scotland for training, Marian goes through an intense series of courses, learning everything from parachuting and  commando skills to other more covert espionage techniques designed to prepare her for the "clandestine life." All of this work is done in preparation for Marian's launch into the French countryside to aid in the resistance effort.   She meets and befriends others working for the SOE, among them a young woman named Yvette who is worried she'll be booted out of the program before she can get to France, and Benoit, a young man who is very attracted to her.  A most important piece of advice Marian and her fellow trainees are given comes in the form of a quotation from one of the fables of Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian: "Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés," -- to live happily, live hidden.

Before she actually leaves for France, Marian, now "Alice," is directed to meet with some people from a different government department, one more secret than the group who originally recruited her.  In addition to the duties she is to undertake for the Special Operations Executive, she is given an additional secret assignment that could help the Allies win the war if successful.  The parachute mission, codenamed "Trapeze" sends her into the southwest of France as Anne-Marie Laroche,  but before too long, she is ordered to Paris, which as Marian very quickly discovers, is a very dangerous place.  Everyone there has the potential of being a collaborator with, or even worse, an agent of the Nazi occupation; she has arrived in a Paris that is a "city inhabited by ... ghosts of young men, ghosts of Jews, ghosts of communists and socialists,"  where the danger, as she puts it, is a "cancer within you, invisible, imponderable, and probably incurable.” When her first-schoolgirl love Clément Pelletier, who remained in Paris during the German occupation, discovers why she's really there, he laughingly refers to her as "The daring young girl on the flying trapeze;" a phrase not too far off the mark, as it will turn out later.

Marian starts out as a young girl who relishes the risk and the potential for actually living; as the recruiter explains, her mission has the chances of survival set about "fifty-fifty," ... "the toss of a coin:"

"How could she not feel fear? But it was the fear that she had felt skiing, the fear of plummeting steepness, the fear she had had when her uncle had taken her climbing, the awe-inspiring fear of space beneath her feet, a feer that teetered on the very edge of joy. She wanted to make a grand gesture, to laugh with happiness and cry Yes!, even to leap out of her chair and throw her arms around this strange man with his shrill portents of doom."

In these early days, she wants to seem "extraordinary in the eyes of the anonymous passerby -- brilliant, adventurous, brave, "and in some ways there is a sense that to Marian the whole thing is a game, and there are many references to a game she played as a child with her brother and Clément called "Pig in the Middle." In one example, during a free-day hike in  Scotland, she and her friend Yvette come across commandos in training, and  Marian comes out of hiding yelling "Bang! Bang!...You're dead," giving herself and Yvette away.    But once in France, it isn't long before she realizes that very real lives may be at stake, including her own; if she's going to play the great game and do it well, those lives depend on her having the "particular skill" to  "appear to be dull and uninteresting."   

The novel reads like an adventure story with a bit of romance thrown in; and while it may be much less of a literary work than his Glass House, what makes this book stand out from other spy-type novels is Mawer's pacing and his prose. He slowly, step by step, ratchets up the reader's degree of interest in this character, going through her recruitment and training, lolling a bit with the love interest and the pre-mission days and into a quiet streak in rural France. But the big payoff is her time spent in Paris. These scenes are the best in the novel, where the reader is there right along with her -- and the combined suspense and unease suddenly become palpable. Combined with his wonderful writing,  Mawer has produced a novel that can only be described as haunting; it becomes even more poignant as you reach the ending, because it hits you that he's based his character Marian on real women who did their parts to bring an end to the war --  all the while knowing and running the risks involved in their missions. On the negative side,  I could have done without Marian getting over her Catholic guilt regarding masturbation and the sex scenes were kind of pointless.  But really, those are minor niggles -- Trapeze is a fine novel, and would be of interest to anyone who reads and enjoys historical fiction.

Gillespie and I, by Jane Harris

9780571275168
Faber and Faber, 2011 (UK)
502 pp
(hardcover)

Exasperatingly enough, Gillespie and I is one of those books where saying too much gives away the show, a potential buzzkill for anyone who may want to read it.  I bought this book last summer from the UK, having read a little about it in various threads re last year's Booker Prize speculations (and because I had enjoyed her The Observations ),  but I had no idea what I was getting into once I started reading.  So I'll keep quiet about what happens in this novel for anyone who may be interested in reading it.  I won't even tell my real-life book friends who  want to borrow it -- the lips are zipped.  So here is a basic outline but I'll leave it to you to read this most superbly-crafted, delightful novel on your own. Just don't miss it, despite the 500+ pages -- it reads very quickly and hooks you from the outset.

The story is narrated by an elderly Harriet Baxter, looking back from 1933 to events in her life from 1888 through 1890.  In Glascow, through a random event, she becomes friends with the family of Ned Gillespie, whom Harriet calls "a man of indisputable talent, but a man hampered by circumstance and responsibility." As a painter, Ned stood outside the privileged circle of artists

"notoriously prone to snobbism, and nowhere more cliquish than Scotland, wherein most established artists were possessed of wealth, an Edinburgh heritage, and a first-rate education,"

many of whom were exhibiting their work at the International Exhibition.  Ned is the proverbial struggling artist, with a family to support: his wife Annie (also an artist),  two young daughters Sybil and Rose; the family  has a small business that is managed  by Ned's brother Kenneth, who has his own personal issues as well.   Harriet believes in Ned as an artist and decides to do what she can to help him, going to her stepfather Ramsay (collector of inventions that don't seem to work) to help in publicizing Ned's work.  He isn't so keen on the idea, but does allow Harriet money for a commissioned portrait.   Harriet decides Annie should do it, and  she decides to lengthen her stay in Glasgow for the purpose. Soon Harriet is a regular household fixture at the Gillespies; she plays with the two children, helps Annie around the house, talks to Ned about his art, etc. etc.  She's there when the older of the two girls, Sybil, begins to exhibit bizarre behavior (painting pictures of penises on the wall, for a start) and  she's also around when a terrible tragedy strikes the household.   Her account of her Glasgow years are interwoven with her current life as an elderly spinster with only two little birds for companions, along with the housekeeper (who doubles as fact checker, etc., for Harriet's memoirs) Sarah. 

So, you may ask -- why is this scenario special? Aren't there a number of books in which the past is related through the eyes of the characters some years later? Well, it is precisely what I'm not saying that gives this book its edge, and far be it from me to spoil it.  At the very beginning, in the preface, the reader is told by Harriet that she has waited quite a long time to set pen to paper, needing to put some distance between herself and a "sequence of profoundly affecting events, none the least of which was that Ned...took his own life."  From that sentence on, you enter Harriet's mind, a very strange place indeed. At first you may feel like you're in some routine period piece set in Victorian Scotland, but it will not be long before you may notice an inexplicable, deep sense of unease starting to creep up on you, compelling you to keep turning pages until it's all over. 

Gillespie and I  is an inventive and ingenious novel, taking you quickly back into Victorian-era Scotland where you immediately become enmeshed in the characters' lives; at the same time it tends to turn your sense of perception on its head.   It is very well paced, extremely readable and deliciously plotted, with equal levels of suspense and disquietude which grow as the story progresses.  Jane Harris is an awesome writer, and I hope she returns with something equally as good very soon.  I absolutely loved this captivating book, and I can very highly recommend it.

sidebar: I read this book on a plane from Seattle to Phoenix and then from Phoenix to Ft. Lauderdale. I hate flying, but was so caught up in this one that I forgot where I was! 

The Silent Oligarch, by Chris Morgan Jones

9781594203190
The Penguin Press, 2012
312 pp.

The Silent Oligarch is Chris Morgan Jones' first novel, and it's a good one. While I'm generally not a huge fan of books in the thriller genre, I actually couldn't put this one down.   The author's firsthand experience in the intelligence-gathering industry lends a great deal of credence to the story he offers his readers, and he leaves behind the usual clichés found in many novels in the genre.

Former journalist Ben Webster works as investigator for Ikertu, a private firm that specializes in gathering intelligence for those who can pay for it.  The company's newest client is one Aristotle Tourna, whose goal is to bring down the corrupt Russian energy oligarch Konstantin Malin, "the power behind the throne at the energy ministry," ... "the silent oligarch" and "gray cardinal of the Kremlin."  Tourna is accusing him of global money laundering via a corporation known as Faringdon, which owns most of the assets. On paper, the owner of the corporation is Richard Lock, attorney and front man for Malin, but Tourna is alleging that Malin is the actual owner, which just happens to be true. But Lock and Malin operate in a world where there are carefully-built layers of secrets and zealously-guarded fictions, putting Lock in a tenuous spot: in this world, the two men "cannot divorce." It is Lock who will ultimately have to answer when Tourna brings his case to the courts. 

Webster realizes that Lock is the key to getting to Malin, that bringing him in and turning him will produce needed results.  But when Lock's carefully-built fictional affairs start receiving unwanted attention, and after various law-enforcement agencies start to take an interest,  Lock starts getting nervous. When a former colleague is found dead, Lock begins to unravel.   Webster tries to convince him that he and Ikertu may be Lock's only hope, but Lock doesn't know if there is anyone he can trust. Webster is not without his own battles in this particular case -- his family is being threatened, he may have discovered a link between this current case and the death of a friend ten years earlier, and people are starting to die after he asks them pertinent questions. He begins to question how much longer he can go on with the investigation, or if he is really the right man for the job.

There are a number of very good things about this novel to recommend it. First,the  author has done a good job with his characters, most notably that of Lock.  While a bit on the naive side, deep down inside he knows he's not hard enough to survive in the world he's working in. He's a credible character who finds himself in way over his head, not always making the smartest decisions, but as the story progresses, so too does Lock's desire to make a break and try to regain his own identity. Webster, on the other hand, is not as nicely filled in as Lock, which is a bit surprising, considering that the author once played a role similar to Ben's.  The prose is approachable, intelligent and never overdone, and while there's always enough suspense to keep the reader engaged, the author doesn't have to result to general thriller gimmicks to move the story along. But what really stands out in this book is the idea  that life is not actually divided into black and white, but rather that the world moves in patches of muddled grays.  As Lock notes at one point: 

  "So Malin's bent. So what? ... Everyone's bent.  Tourna's bent, Jesus. He's worse. And all those blue-chip companies, you think they haven't got someone like me to hide things, help them avoid tax? They've got legions of them. I'm just one man." ... "Ben, we both work for crooks. We play our parts, and that's it. And if we didn't someone else would. That's the world."

The Silent Oligarch is a good read, with enough action to make thriller readers happy, while at the same time offering less "pulse-pounding"-oriented readers a glimpse into how things work behind the scenes of the world's richest players.  It's an eye-opening story as well. I never knew that organizations like the fictional Ikertu existed, but when I received the book, it came with  article from the New Yorker (you can read the abstract here ) profiling Jules Kroll, head of the real-life organization for which Chris Morgan Jones used to work.  Definitely recommended. 

My thanks to TLC Blog Tours, and to the publisher for sending me a copy of the novel. 

You can find other tour hosts and reviews for Silent Oligarch here. 

Gods Without Men, by Hari Kunzru

9780241143117
Hamish Hamilton, 2011 (UK edition)
384 pp

There is just something in my genetic makeup that draws me to anything out of the ordinary, so when I read the blurb on the back cover of Gods Without Men, I knew that this book and I were going to get along splendidly. And we did. 

The setting for this book is California's Mojave desert,  and begins with a brief episode entitled "In the time when animals were men,"  where Native American lore of the Coyote morphs into the tale of a white-bread and ramen noodles-eating, RV-driving crystal meth producer, who dies several times but it is resurrected by other mythical figures: Gila Monster, Southern Fox and Cottontail Rabbit.  At the end of it all the crystal is made and the Coyote disappears, just as in legend the Coyote disappears into the Land of the Dead, waiting for someone to take his place so he can return to the world. The crossing point between the two lands is said to exist in a cave under the Three-Finger Rocks, and it is at or near this natural formation known as The Pinnacles that people have converged over the centuries.  These rocks, with their spires pointing toward the skies, are believed by many to hold the keys to  transcendence -- but what that means to anyone at any given time varies  through time and circumstance.  From Native Americans to UFO cult members to hippies, and on into the contemporary world, different people have written their own meanings onto this landscape. While this all may sound a bit on the new-age side, there's a great deal to this novel that is grounded in real and modern concerns -- war in the Middle East, the economy, and the challenges immigrants face in coming to this country.   It's also a story about wanting to believe and the need people have to understand the incomprehensible, and it's a story about transcendence -- on many different levels.

It is in this bit of desert where where the four-year-old son of Jaz Matharu and his wife Lisa vanishes while the family is on vacation.  Jaz, the son of working-class immigrant parents from India, has a great job on Wall Street and is married to Lisa, whose parents are Jewish.  Jaz's parents continue to maintain old traditions and as much of their culture as they can while living in Baltimore.  When Jaz and Lisa's only child Raj is diagnosed with severe autism, Lisa seeks out reasons for Raj's condition, collecting scientific information, attending conferences, and trying different treatments, diets, etc.  Jaz, on the other hand, deals in reason, and for him, rationality  is a way to "limit the chaos that had overtaken their life." At the same time, he finds himself wishing that their life could back to the way it was before Raj.  Lisa stays at home with Raj while Jaz works, and Jaz's attitude toward Raj's illness and Lisa's efforts adds resentment  to an already-strained situation.  Jaz decides that the family needs a vacation to find time to work through their issues and to heal.  They decide to go west, and find themselves in an old motel near the Pinnacles.  While on an outing, Raj disappears. While the family is put through hell on television, in newspapers and in vicious attacks on the internet, the divide between them grows.  While Jaz insists on placing his faith in reason and physical evidence to find Raj, he is overcome with guilt, wondering if somehow his desire for life the way it used to be has played a part in Raj's disappearance. Lisa withdraws, eventually re-emerging on a different side of things.

Around the core story of Jaz, Lisa and Raj, there are narratives that illuminate others who have passed through the desert and found their way to the Three-Finger Rocks.  These include the stories of a friar in the 1770s, a Mormon miner in the mid 19th century, a veteran of the first world war who brings his wife with him as he studies Native American lore and language, and then there's the story of Schmidt.   Seeking to "get back right with the world" after being consumed with guilt over events in his life, Schmidt began looking for some hidden truth hoping to find his way back. He finds it in  airplanes -- in how "the earth relinquished them and gently welcomed them back." Believing his salvation would come in a union of  the technological with the spiritual, after the Hiroshima bombings, he left his job, went out into the Mojave and looked to the skies for answers, having decided that advanced technology would bring some kind of order to the chaos of the world. Add to this group of characters some Iraqi immigrants hired by the military in a simulation exercise for American troops heading to Iraq, a British rockstar who's hit his own rock bottom, and even a supercomputer named Walter that has been programmed to examine randomness and find patterns, and you'll begin to discover how very unusual a work Kunzru has put together here.  And then, of course, there's the figure of the Coyote that is present throughout the novel. 

Gods Without Men is a wonderful book, one in which events from the past reverberate into the present and vice-versa.  There are some very surreal moments throughout the story as well as many things that are left unexplained. If you must have a linear read you may come away a bit unsatisfied, and you may be looking for patterns that aren't always there or difficult to find.  I spoke to someone else recently who'd also read this book, and her  biggest issue was that she found herself flipping forward to catch back up with the story of Lisa and Jaz, and found many of the rest of the stories getting in the way. But I think that if Lisa, Jaz and Raj were  the main focus  of the novel, that would have been the story that the author would probably have written.  It definitely may not be for everyone, but it is highly engrossing and I found it to be very approachable as a reader.  Awesome book -- and I definitely recommend it for anyone who wants something very different.

*The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

978022409413
Jonathan Cape, 2011
150 pp


   "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."


I don't often expect much out of a book that is only 150 pages long -- actually, I don't remember the last time I read one this short that I walked away from simply dazzled.  But there's so much in this little book that gives one pause to think about his or her own life, especially when you get to a certain age and something happens to make you look back over the past.  And like the main character, Tony, in this novel, you get older physically but inside your head you tend to hold on to the you of an earlier, more youthful age, often revisiting those times in your memory every now and then.   The trouble is, how accurate are those memories? Memory, like time, is malleable, and when confronted with a reality that doesn't exactly coincide with how you remember it, what do you do?  How do you deal with your younger self from the point of view of your older self? I think this is why this book kept me engaged ... it's something that happens to everyone.

There's a mystery at the heart of this novel: Tony Webster, retired, has received a letter from an attorney informing him that he's been left 500 pounds from the mother of his first girlfriend Veronica.   The second part of his inheritance is the diary of his school friend Adrian, a larger-than-life figure from Tony's school years, who had, later in his life, committed suicide.  As he's pondering what all of this means, he begins to go back through his memories of Adrian, Veronica and his own life, or at least what he thinks he remembers.  As he notes, he feels no "nostalgia" for his school years, but he needs to "return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty." 

The story is related in two parts: the first is the story of Tony Webster  looking back over his time at school in the 1960s in the sixth form (it's equivalent to our American senior year) with his group of friends, then on to his days with Veronica at university.  The second part (which throws into question some of what Tony remembers from the first part) follows Tony as he tries to piece together the real story.  He attempts to get hold of Adrian's diary, which Veronica refuses to give up, hoping that the real story is in there somewhere.  Veronica has only allowed him a small piece of Adrian's writing, enough to tantalize him into discovering what part he might have played in later events.  But what he discovers will bring him around the inevitable conclusion that

 "You get towards the end of life -- no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life.  You are are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?"

and by then he realizes that there's no way to go back and change either the situation or himself, that any possibility for change has long-since ended.  

Considering its brevity, there is a great deal in this little book, and like all good books, it gives the reader a great deal of material for thought.  There is a great deal of insight in here, as the narrator reflects on memory and its influence, the gap between our older and younger selves, aging and regrets. But one of the most important things I take away from this novel is the question of what I think I know about myself juxtaposed with the reality of memory as an imperfect entity. It's a lovely and poignant book, very well written, very thoughtful.  Julian Barnes never disappoints, and this book is no exception.

fiction from the UK

*Pigeon English, by Stephen Kelman

9780547500607
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011
263 pp

Pigeon English is Stephen Kelman's first novel. It has had an interesting journey, moving from potential obscurity in a publisher's slushpile to the Booker Prize shortlist. Although the story is set in London, the issues it describes are just as relevant in major cities here in the US or anywhere else.  It is structured so that each section pertains to a month in a young Ghanian immigrant boy's life in a London housing project.

The story is told through the eyes and voice of Harrison (Harri) Opuku, eleven years old. Harrison is just eleven; he came to the UK from Ghana with his mother and his older sister Lydia. The family was able to get a council flat in an poor area of London, but Harrison's father and his baby sister Agnes had to stay behind in Ghana until there's money enough to bring them out. The story begins just after another boy (a "half-friend" of Harrison's) has been stabbed to death. Harrison and his friend Dean decide that the police are never going to solve this crime so they take it upon themselves to do so.  Dean is a huge fan of CSI, and knows all of the things the two will need to do: surveillance, gathering fingerprints on tape, getting DNA, and watching potential suspects for any signs of guilt. They plan to take the reward money and buy new bicycles.  This bit of child's-play detective work is really the frame for the novel rather than the real story.

Harri may be eleven, but he's different from the other kids.  Not because he's from Ghana (there are a number of immigrant families in the complex), but because of his innocence.  He tries very hard to fit into his new life, taking the time to memorize the "rules," over one hundred of them, but for the most part they're general kid-type rules for fitting in, and he forgets a lot of them:

"No running on the stairs
No singing in class...
Jumping in the puddle means you're a retard
Going around the puddle means you're a girl
The first one to answer the question loves the teacher...
The library stairs are safe...

He has a crush on a girl at school, paints his tennis shoes to look like Adidas, likes stuff kids his age normally like, is fascinated with Haribo gummy candies, and in general is a typical boy. He is friendly with everyone, and when the Dell Farm Crew gives him an opportunity to join with them he's tempted, even taking but failing their entry tests.

While Harri is offering his often-delightfully innocent viewpoints throughout the book, things are going on all around him that he misses. He sees and hears things that even at his age should make him put two and two together and come out with four, but doesn't get it.  How ironic, if you think about it...here this boy is playing at being a detective, but has no clue how to put all of the facts together once he has them all within his grasp. It's not that he's dense; he's an intelligent kid, but he's been sheltered. Harri's brief memories of life in Ghana reveal that he came from a place where the extended family and others in the community were a part of his upbringing. Moving to London, that support system's been removed, and his mom and sister try to shield him from the negative realities of living there. They get it:  mom has succumbed to some shady dealings, his sister is peripherally involved in what's going on with the Crew, and his Aunt Sonia's story speaks for itself -- but  their attempts at protecting him, along with his natural optimism and quirky views on life, sadly leave him without the resources he needs to adjust and conform. 

I liked this book, and with a few exceptions, found Harri's voice to be pretty consistent throughout. I also found this story to be convincing and once I started it, couldn't put it down.  So many people have taken an ardent dislike to this novel, mostly to do with the issue of the child narrator.  That didn't bother me, even though sometimes it got too cutesy and sometimes wore a bit thin;  my beef is with the pigeon.  I can sort of get where Kelman is coming from, but it just didn't work for me. A pigeon as a spokesperson was just too much, dropping the credibility factor a point or two.  But when all is said and done, if you can get past the annoying bits, there's a good story in here.

*Jamrach's Menagerie, by Carol Birch

9780385534406
Doubleday, 2011
295 pp.

"...the time before the dragon and the time after are not the same."

I love all things Victorian; I love Victorian novels, well-written Victorian imitations, and I just have a thing for this time period in general.  Two things about this book grabbed me from the very start: first, the fact that it's set in 1857 and second, the only illustration in the book, that of a fiendish-looking waterspout on the open sea standing just behind a ship at full sail.   And as it turns out, most of the way through the novel I was a very happy reader.  More on this later. 

Jamrach's Menagerie is Carol Birch's eleventh novel; she published her first book in 1988. It is told in the style of a Victorian narrative, although probably not as well imagined as Derby Day, which to me is a much better imitation of the style and better use of idiom. The story is related through the eyes of one Jaffy Brown, who is eight years old at the outset of the novel, and follows Jaffy through to adulthood.  It is told in three parts: Jaffy's childhood and his fateful meeting with a tiger on the loose in the streets of London's East End; the events during a three-year sea voyage on which Jaffy was a crew member, and finally, Jaffy's return from the sea.

In Part One, we are introduced to Jaffy, his mother and the streets of the East End. Having been forced to move to Watney Street, one day Jaffy is out running an errand and comes upon a tiger moving down the middle of the Ratcliffe Highway.  Awed by its beauty, and without fear, Jaffy lifts his hand to touch it, and is snatched up in the beast's jaws.  Jaffy is fine, but the meeting with the tiger leads to a meeting with its owner, the Jamrach of the title.  It is then that Jaffy's life changes -- he gets a job with Jamrach tending to his menagerie of exotic beasts. It is also then that Jaffy meets several people who will remain important in his life throughout the story.   But it is how Jamrach obtains these creatures that is important to Jaffy's story, and which  leads us to part two of the novel -- Jamrach arranges expeditions to capture and import the animals after a collector has decided upon his choice.  As part two begins ("So much for Jaffy the child. He didn't last long, did he?"), a Mr. Fledge, "who always wanted what no one else had ever had," has decided that now he must have a dragon, an "ora".  One of Jamrach's associates, a sea-faring adventurer named Dan Rymer, had related that he knew of a place where he could obtain this creature, on an island east of the Java Sea.  Jaffy and his friend Tim are recruited to go on Fledge's ship the Lysander along with Rymer and the ship's whaling crew to catch and return the dragon.  Promised that upon their successful return, they would never have to work again, the ship sets sail.  While there is much speculation as to the nature of the dragon before the ship arrives on the island, it is finally captured (it turns out to be a komodo dragon or something along those lines) and caged on board the ship.  But it isn't long until mayhem ensues and the ship is wrecked, forcing the crew to take to the whaleboats.  The rest of part two is the story of the crew's adventures on the sea, reading much like the narrative of Owen Chase in The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, also retold in Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea. If you've read either of those, you will know how things come out; if not, well, you're in for something pretty gruesome. (As an aside, I can highly recommend both books).   In Part Three, Jaffy returns to England (neither surprise nor spoiler since Jaffy's telling the story), where he tries to make sense of his experiences and to find his own sense of place and peace after the horrible events of the voyage of the Lysander.

This book has so many good things to offer, but there are also a few things that bothered me.  Birch gives us a vivid picture of street life in London -- the mix of colors and smells, the descriptions of  people at their occupations, the  living conditions of the poor, the circus of people on the Ratcliffe Highway.   The sense of place is well evoked; the East End comes alive.  Life at sea is also well described, and through her characters, Birch manages to get across that the whaling industry is on the wane;  a longstanding way of life for so many is about to end.  And even here, it's like she'd been on a whaling ship herself: the scenes where the crew captures a whale and its guts are all over the decks are so real I was kind of gagging just picturing it.   Later there are some pretty tense moments during the capture of the dragon on the island and  on board the ship,  but surprisingly, even though what comes afterwards in the whaleboats will both haunt and  come to define Jaffy's post-Lysander life, the telling of these events comes across as rather flat.  And even more surprisingly, other than the group of three main characters Tim, Rymer and Jaffy,  I didn't find the rest of them  to be as well developed, always staying on the periphery of becoming real people to which readers could relate, maybe with the exception of Skip.

Other than those issues with the novel, I actually ended up liking Jamrach's Menagerie -- it may have been a bit on the shallow side at times but overall it was one of those books you want to call a "rollicking good yarn."  Seen in that context, it was a pretty good read.

*A Cupboard Full of Coats, by Yvvette Edwards

9781851687978
Oneworld  Publications, 2011
260 pp

 A Cupboard Full of Coats is Yvvette Edwards' first novel, and I'm happy to see that it was made available via an independent publisher, Oneworld .  I went to their website and found a few more little gems I'm probably going to check out in the near future.  I love that Indie publishers are represented on this year's Booker Prize longlist; let's hope that this is a trend that continues well into the future. 

A Cupboard Full of Coats is another one of those novels that I probably would never have read had it not been placed on the Booker Prize longlist this year.  It skirts the boundary of what I consider "women's fiction," but at the same time, there's another story embedded within dealing with the experiences of Afro-Caribbean immigrants, so it's a bit difficult to affix any particular label to this novel.   It has a very well-developed sense of place, and even the mentions of the food throughout the book add to the overall atmosphere of the story. 

The main storyline follows and is related primarily by the main character, Jinx, a young woman who works as a cosmetologist at a funeral home.  She is living apart from her husband and her little boy, largely because she seems to have no capacity for caring for anyone. She's cold as ice, and even when her son comes for his visits, she has no idea how to relate to him.  She's happier to be around dead people -- all of which stems from an incident fourteen years earlier when her mother was murdered in the family home.   Throughout all of those years, Jinx has felt guilty about her role in her mother's death; that event and her guilt have left her emotionally paralyzed.   Now, as the novel opens, it's all brought back to her in the person of Lemon, who wants to relive the events of the past -- all symbolized by the cupboard full of coats left behind by Jinx's mother.

My feelings about this novel are a bit mixed -- I am not a huge fan of this type of story at all and  it's tough to get past the fact that this is the story of a young girl who comes of age while living under the same roof as her mother's abuser. You know, the kind of stuff you could tag as dysfunctional family lit.  And while I am fully conscious of the fact that abuse against women is prevalent and needs to be brought out into the open, those types of novels just aren't my thing.  At the same time, I'm very interested in novels dealing with the stories of immigrants, especially about children born to immigrant parents, and that was the novel's selling point for me.  The story of Sam, Jinx's best friend in high school, offers a look at the kind of dilemmas these children face, as does the story of Jinx's mother being left behind and finding a way out in marrying a much older man.  I only wish there had been much more along these lines; for the most part, the past story (the story of how Jinx's mother came to be murdered) was much more interesting than the narrative occurring in the present.  I also found Jinx as a character to be emotionally overwrought in that melodramatic sort of way that makes for great women's fiction, but a bit overdone for my own particular tastes.

However, I will say that many people absolutely LOVE this book, and that 4- and 5-star ratings abound everywhere a rating can be given.  And considering the fact that this is Ms. Edwards' first novel, it's a good debut -- and how many first novelists end up on the Booker Prize longlist?  I'd probably give her next novel a go if it's more about immigrant experience and less women's fiction-y. This one is just a bit more mainstream than literary for my own enjoyment.

fiction from the UK

Hangover Square, by Patrick Hamilton

9781933372068

Europa Editions, 2009
334 pp
originally published 1941

Hangover Square is only one of a long list of novels by Patrick Hamilton.  Hamilton also wrote three plays, two of which were turned into movies and may be a bit familiar:  Rope, directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1948, and Gas Light, brought to the screen by George Cukor in 1944.  I've never read anything by Hamilton in the past, but after reading Hangover Square, that will not be the case in the future.  It was, in a word, amazing, and I can't remember reading anything even remotely similar.   The book examines one man's  tenuous hold on reality that is threatened by obsession, alcohol and illness.  It reads a bit on the noir side and would be equally good for readers who like that genre and  readers of literary fiction.

Opening Christmas of 1938, continuing on through 1939, the scene is Earl's Court, a small neighborhood on the seamier side of London. A small hotel room in Earl's Court is home to George Harvey Bone, the main character is this story.  Since his schooldays, George has had what he calls his "dead moods," where all of a sudden everything changes from normal to where "there was only himself -- his dreary, numbed, dead self."  George suffers from schizophrenia, and lately gets a "click" in his head when he's about to change. He goes into a state where it's like being at a movie where the soundtrack is missing, where people move about and do their thing but he's unaware of them. In this mode that he is surprisingly the most rational, a different George Harvey Bone, whose thoughts are clear as day.  He has trouble remembering what he was doing beforehand,  and he doesn't remember his actions or thoughts during these  dead moods when he comes out of them.  However, his main focus while in this state is trying to remember that there's something to be done -- and that is to kill Netta. 

George has an overpowering yet unrequited sexual obsession with the beautiful Netta --  she gets him to the point where "he could hardly breathe or think, in which he was choked by the mist of his sensous anguish."  She, on the other hand, uses him shamelessly when she needs money, or for other self-serving purposes.  For her, George is repellent; he's a pest, the butt of her set's cruel jokes, but he buys the booze and buys her dinner.   Time after time George tries to stay away from her, but he always comes back, even after realizing the truth about Netta, and even after a low and devastating blow during a trip to Brighton that would have sent a normal man packing.  He literally cannot help himself, even though his infatuation brings him only pain, loneliness and severe depression.

When he's not in a dead mood, George is  quiet, polite and sensitive, finds solace in a white cat and David Copperfield.  Netta and her friends  out  in the bars and pubs of  Earl's Court, where life is generally based on daily rounds of excessive drinking:

"When you met in the morning, all you talked about was last night -- how "blind"' you were, how "blind" Mickey was, my God you bet he had a hangover. ("Taking a little stroll round Hangover Square" -- that was Mickey's crack.)...And when you had a lot more to drink you felt fine again, and went crashing round to lunch upstairs at the Black Hart (the table by the fire) where you ragged the pale waiter and called attention to yourselves."

 George also drinks  heavily, although he's not pleased with himself and even notes that it's likely at the bottom of much of his unhappiness.  He  does the rounds of the pubs to be with Netta and drinks to mask his loneliness and pain of the hopelessness of the situation.   It's during these bouts of drinking when Netta and her friend Peter discuss their admiration of Hitler and Facism and their view of Chamberlain as a hero, views shared by many during this time period.    While wasting their days drinking,  rambling on about politics and denying the possibility of another war, George in his dead-mood time disagrees -- realizing that they had "turned their ignominious desires into beliefs."

But it's only during these dead moods  that he can cope with his obsession and make plans to escape it.  He picks up the thread of killing Netta each time, and imagines himself doing the deed and going off to Maidenhead, site of an earlier, happier time in his life.  George is not normally prone to violence, and his dead-mood episodes allows him to imagine things he would never otherwise consider.   There is no question that at some point George's divided self is going to overcome him, and  as the blurb on the cover notes, "one part of George must win out over the other, but which will it be?"  Sadly, this is but a  bare-bones outline; to give away any more would be to wreck it for others.

Hangover Square is an amazing book. While an easy book to read, it was a bit personally disquieting, not so much because of the ending but because I was so divided in my sympathies at the end.  It's one of those stories that makes you question your thinking, and I believe that the author had to have done this on purpose.  Once in a while you read one of those rare books where you're emotionally floored at the end; this is one of those.  There is absolutely nothing feel good or happy between the covers of this book, yet I was totally compelled to read it in one sitting -- it's that good.   George Harvey Bone and Netta will keep you turning pages, but in and among that story there is also a look at  social class, the interwar generation and their misguided ideologies, and the utter waste of productive, good lives as a period of peace is about to explode into a dark time of war.   I highly recommend this novel -- but don't read it while you're depressed.  It's one of my favorite reads for 2011.

posted also at the Europa Challenge Blog. 

*Derby Day, by DJ Taylor

9780701183585
Chatto and Windus, 2011
405 pp

Derby Day "...gives all London an airing , an 'outing,' makes a break in our overworked lives and effects a beneficial commingling of the classes."
 -- Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold ("The Derby", in London: A Pilgrimage, 1872)

Doré and Jerrold made their observations about the annual Derby happening at Epsom, but they are also describing DJ Taylor's newest novel.  Like his book Kept (which I read some time ago and really enjoyed), Derby Day is subtitled "A Victorian Mystery," and there is enough intrigue and foul play scattered throughout the novel's 400+ pages to keep a mystery reader happy. At the same time, it's a novel that brings together several characters from different walks of life in Victorian England, many of whose fortunes hang in the balance based on the performance of a race horse named Tiberius.  Derby Day does indeed offer its readers a "break" in their "overworked lives": although his Victorian narrative style may not be everyone's cup of tea, the story is a great deal of fun. And I would have bought this book even if it had not appeared on this year's longlist, because of my previous enjoyment of Taylor's Kept.

In Lincolnshire, Samuel Davenant is the owner of a horse named Tiberius, who had

"won the Epsom's Two Year's Old Plate, altogether ran away with the Trial Stakes at Abingdon and absolutely tied with the Duke of Grafton's Creditor for the Middle Park Plate."

Although the horse has great potential in the upcoming Derby, Davenant is deeply in debt, scarcely able to feed it. After the disappointing purchase of two other horses on the back of Tiberius' reputation ("thinking that where one animal had gone others might follow"), and an unsuccessful  lawsuit against a neighbor, Davenant has mounting bills that he cannot pay. He's a quiet man, preferring the solitude of his home, Scroop Hall, where he lives with his daughter Evie. At the same time, in London, Mr. Happerton is a rakish young man who is fascinated with Tiberius, noting that "There are men who would pay five thousand to have him running under their name." Happerton knows Davenant's financial situation and has been quietly buying up his debts, secretly planning to take Tiberius when the bills come due and Davenant is forcibly pushed into bankruptcy.  The problem is that his scheme requires an outlay of capital which Happerton doesn't have.  To remedy that situation, Happerton marries Rebecca Gresham, daughter of a well-to-do lawyer.  But while his father-in-law's money isn't enough to fully finance his plans, Happerton's not too worried: he is a man ready with a few more tricks up his sleeve.


The action is not as cut and dried as one would think and there are a number of surprises that unfold as the novel progresses, keeping things moving with rarely a dull moment in the story. The sense of place is vividly evoked as the reader travels through the fens and wild landscape of Lincolnshire (where it "would not have been strange to peep between the fence posts and see Lady Dedlock out a-wandering"), as well as through the upper-class London neighborhoods and their counterparts in the seamier sides of the city. And Epsom, just before and during the Derby, comes alive with its sights, smells, noise and carnival-like atmosphere, all beautifully imagined by the author.  Subplots abound as in any good Victorian drama, and the ever-expanding cast of characters presents a range of personalities: the cream of London society, a young governess in the bleak Lincolnshire countryside, an enigmatic jewel thief whose past is his major preoccupation, a disgraced army officer who frequents the billiard halls (a nod to Thackeray's "English Raff," from his Book of Snobs,) an older jockey on the portly side and the crowds who attend the Derby, to name a few.  Twists of fate and "odd conjunctions" bring these people together from time to time, making for great dynamic among the characters, but most especially between Happerton and his wife.  While Mrs. Carmody's Book of Genteel Behavior of 1861 offers the Victorian woman tips about married life and one's place in society, Mrs. Happerton turns Mrs. Carmody's advice on its head, to the point where the reader begins to doubt who really has the upper hand in that relationship.

Derby Day is one of those books that will appeal to a wide variety of readers -- it is filled with plotting and machinations that will satisfy readers of melodrama and mystery, it offers an intriguing portrait of a slice of time for historical fiction readers, and its constant nod to Thackeray throughout the novel will make Victorian fiction readers happy as well. If I have any complaints, they are minor -- the amount of subplots is a bit dizzying at times, as are the number of new characters that appear here and there that tended to distract my reading flow.  Otherwise, Derby Day is highly entertaining, and I can definitely recommend it.

Snowdrops, by A.D. Miller

9780385533447
Doubleday, 2011
262 pp.

If nothing else, this has to be one of the most atmospheric novels I've read in a long while.  Set in Moscow in the last decade, Snowdrops is framed as a letter to the main character's (Nicholas Platt) fiancée, an answer to her question of why he never talks about his time in Russia or why he left there. He's writing it down so he wouldn't have to watch the fiancée "make an effort to put a brave face on things," and maybe because he wants to come clean about his past.  

There are really three threads of plot that compose this novel.  Tired of England and the ho-hum life he sees all around him, likely afraid that he'll end up like his parents,  Nicholas, an attorney, takes a job in Russia where at present the firm is acting for a consortium of banks who are about to lend money (a mere five-hundred million dollars) to Narodneft, the state energy company.   Narodneft and an unknown logistics firm are planning to build some sort of floating oil terminal in the Barents Sea. The company is ready to list shares in the NYSE so everything needs to at least look kosher. Nicholas and his coworkers sense that there's something not quite right, but they do what they're hired to do anyway. The firm's contact is known only as "The Cossack," who is a rather shady character at the heart of the deal.   Thread the second: while at the subway one day, Nicholas stops a purse snatcher, and meets the intended victim Masha, along with her sister Katya. Nick finds himself quite infatuated with the furtive Masha, and eventually they get together.  Masha and Katya have an aunt, Tatiana, who lives in what is now a prime piece of real estate, but the girls have been trying to convince her to move out and sell the flat, which is worth a fortune. Nicholas has agreed to help with the legalities of the transaction, but as he will find out soon enough, and as he hints in his narrative, there's more to these girls that meets the eye.  And finally,  Nick is also involved with his elderly neighbor, who has asked for help in locating a missing friend.  The friend's apartment is occupied, but it's not by the friend. 

Miller's Moscow is a place where money can buy the most outlandish forms of fun, sex, and pleasure (all neatly detailed in Nick's narrative); it's an environment where it's difficult not to become enmeshed in the atmosphere of corruption that permeates the place, and it's a city where what might seem to be a  lack of morality for some is a normal way of life and a way to survive for others. Above all, it's definitely not a place for the faint of heart.  As one of Nick's friends puts it:

Russia...is like Lariam. You know, that malaria medicine that can make you have wild dreams and jump out of the window. You shouldn't do it if you're the kind of the person who gets anxious or guilty, Nick. You shouldn't do Russia. Because you'll crack.

But by the time this advice is offered, it's a bit too late for Nick:  his lack of common sense and moral compass seem to have been hijacked somewhere along the way as he becomes swept up both in events and in living in Moscow. I can sort of understand Nick in that light. It doesn't mean I like him.

Snowdrops is one of those books where the reader knows exactly what's going on, or if not exactly, has a sort of premonition that there are bad things brewing. What I liked about this novel is that the author managed to set up the situation by dropping hints here and there that all is not what it seems, so that the reader has the anticipation of watching things unravel as the story progresses. I also loved his descriptions of life in Moscow and of a society gone a bit crazy.  On the other hand, the story is dark and often claustrophobic -- there were times when I couldn't wait to put the book down and take a breath of fresh air.

What I didn't find at all plausible was the letter format -- way too much dialogue for a letter; way too much descriptive language; although Nick needed a vehicle for telling his story, it didn't work for me. But overall, Snowdrops is a good read; the scenes depicting a nearly-lawless Moscow are probably the best part of this book.  The plot is a bit obvious in several places, but you will definitely find yourself turning pages to see what happens.

*Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household

9781590172438
NYRB Classics, 2007
182 pp.
originally published 1939

I first noticed this book some time ago when perusing the CWA list of Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, first published in 1990.  With the hope of someday being able to get through all of these books,  I bought the NYRB edition of Rogue Male to add to my ever-growing mountain range of books to read.  Funny though -- it's not what I would consider a crime novel, per se; imho it reads more like a spyish/thriller type thing, somewhat reminiscent of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps. Nevertheless, it was quite intriguing (and I can now cross it off of the list), well written and life outside of this book just sort of melted away as I was reading it.  It's the sort of story where once you get comfortable with the action, things take another turn, so that you never quite get into a complacent mode and it ends up leaving you a bit unsettled.

As the novel opens, the narrator, an unnamed man (likely someone of importance and means in Britain)  has just escaped death after he misses his target of an attempted assassination somewhere in Central Europe, an unnamed dictator. He has obviously been held and questioned, his captors wondering whether or not he was an agent of the British government on a mission. His answer was that he was "a sportsman who couldn't resist the temptation to stalk the impossible," hoping to make them believe that he was a "bored and wealthy Englishman who had hunted all commoner game" who found "perverse pleasure in hunting the biggest game on earth." In the long run, he realized that no matter what they believed, his days were numbered, and that his captors would have to kill him. After being severely tortured, he was taken to the edge of a cliff and put over, but he managed to hold on until he dropped, crashing into a deep marsh. The plan -- his body was to be discovered for some time at the foot of the cliff so that it would look like an accident. But the narrator has other plans that did not include dying.  The authorities realize soon enough that he's still alive, and he has to make his escape without leaving any traces. That story is harrowing enough, but the main thrust of the novel is what happens once he makes it back to England ... it is then that  that the reality becomes one of the hunter becoming the hunted as he realizes that no matter who or where he is, his enemies cannot allow him to stay alive. He has to literally "go to ground," in hopes of surviving.

Rogue Male is written in the first person, a look back at events that transpired some time earlier.  The narrator doesn't always put things in a linear perspective, and if not read carefully, the story might seem a bit confusing; above all, the why of how our narrator finds himself with a rifle in his hands aiming at this dictator is not so clear.  He claims not to be an anarchist or to have any specific political leanings, says he's not on a government mission, so the question is one of how all of this came to be.  Eventually even the reader doesn't know whether or not he can actually trust the narrator on that point.  But the in the long run, what makes this book such a  good read is how the author sets the tension level high to begin with, then ratchets it up bit by bit to pull off a rather nail-biting tale of suspense.  His use of first-person narrative offers his readers a more  more human and realistic perspective of the plight of the main character, and there's no space or time wasted on superfluous dialogue that would have little or no bearing on the story. And by keeping the whys until the very end of the novel, the reader finds him or herself focused only on the immediate action at hand.

As noted, once I started reading, things outside of me and this book just disappeared and I managed to finish this novel in one sitting.  There's a certain element of the whole "cat-and-mouse" game here, especially toward the end, and it was a delight to watch events transpire as I felt my own tension level rising wondering how the heck the narrator was going to get out of his various predicaments.  This is one of those novels you have to read for yourself to fully appreciate, but it's wholly satisfying as far as action, writing and especially getting into the psyche of the narrator as he fights to stay alive and out of the clutches of his enemies.  People who enjoy well-written suspense will enjoy this book, and those who are interested in the early days of the genre will probably also like it.

*The Painted Veil, by W. Somerset Maugham

Vintage International, 2004

0307277771 

Originally published 1925

My first book by Maugham, but definitely not my last. If someone would like to recommend a good one by him, I'd be more than grateful. 

As a young man, the author took a trip to Italy, where he studied Italian with a tutor. Maugham began reading Dante's Il Purgatorio and came upon the story of one Pia de Tolomei of Siena. It seems that Pia's husband believed that Pia was involved with another man, so rather than risk her family's displeasure by murdering her, he decided to take her to his castle in Maremma. According to Maugham in the preface to Painted Veil,  the husband figured that the "noxious vapors" of the place would do her in.  He realized that it would make a great story, and later, when in China, he realized that it would be the perfect setting, voilá -- The Painted Veil comes into being. Yet, the finished product actually turns out to be much more character rather than story driven.  

Set in the 1920s, the main character of this novel is Kitty Fane, whose socially-ambitious mother wanted her to marry into a prominent family. Kitty is not interested in marriage until her younger sister becomes engaged to a member of the baronetcy.  It is at this point that Walter Fane, a physician and bacteriologist appears and professes his deep love for Kitty and asks for her hand. Kitty finds it expedient that Walter has to leave immediately for China where he is doing research, because if she marries him she will not have to take part in her sister's wedding and have everyone talking about her. Kitty does not love Walter, but she marries him anyway. Off to Hong Kong they go, and as the story opens, Kitty is having an affair with a married British diplomat, having become quickly bored with her husband.  Walter discovers her infidelity and presents her with a choice that ends up with Kitty following him to Mei-tan-fu, a rural Chinese region where a cholera epidemic rages through the population.  Walter has taken the place of the local physician and also spends much of time researching the disease, while Kitty is left alone to ponder why he has really brought her there. 

While the story belongs mostly to Kitty and how she is able to dig deep and discover certain truths about herself and life in general,  the more interesting character, imho, is Walter, who exemplifies that old adage that still waters run deep.  Underneath his mild and taciturn appearance, a great deal of passion flows through this gentle man's veins, staying largely unrecognized until it  leads him to force Kitty into following him into the heart of a cholera epidemic. But here lies the heart of the story: human beings are often misguided when their actions stem from their emotional natures, sometimes causing them to make serious mistakes. In that sense, both Walter and Kitty are two sides of the same coin.

This was a very good read, certainly recommendable to readers across different genres. Romance readers will find something here, as will chick-lit connoisseurs, and it's a good book of literary fiction. I do want to say something about the 2006 film adaptation: it veers from the book quite a bit, especially at the end, so if you are considering watching it my advice would be to read the novel first to see where Maugham was really going with this story.