Reading to Make Sense of Tragedy: "Nous Sommes Tous Charlie"

In the wake of the slaughter of a dozen people in Paris, ten of whom worked for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, by Islamic terrorists yelling "God is great!", I have been relieved to see how peaceful -- and moving -- reactions have been. But while this horrific attack is clearly the action of a lunatic fringe, it is one of a string of similar assaults, and has provoked a debate over whether this is simply extremist violence that has nothing whatsoever to do with what is happening within France (or the Netherlands, or other Western European nations). On the other hand, some commenters have also taken note of the fact that the terrorists spoke fluent French, and that France has a large and too often marginalized population, some second and third generation French citizens, who are descendants of immigrants from former French colonies in Muslim nations in North Africa and parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Study after study has shown they face discrimination in the job market and in housing -- they can even find it hard to open a bank account.

But let's not venture down this rabbit hole. Instead, I think it's time to take a step back. Because there is one bright spot here, other than the tremendous reaffirmation for free speech and other Enlightenment values on the part of all French people and an absence of any backlash against Paris's immigrant community, outside the city's péripherique highway. That is that the fact that the decades-long tensions between these communities have produced some great novels, many of which Europa Editions has translated and brought to the attention of English language readers. Here are a handful of the highlights.

The first of these is geographically on target -- The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris. To say that Mohamed, author Leila Marouane's protagonist, is conflicted, would be putting it mildly. On the one hand, at the age of 40, he lives with his mother and younger brother in the Algerian neighborhood of Saint Ouen in Paris (better known to tourists as home to a great flea market). On the other hand, he also has "Gallicized" his name; he ensures his skin is pale and that his hair is straight enough that he isn't mistaken for an Arab in real life, so unlike a lot of the guys he knew growing up, he's got a great job. But what Marouane is doing is painting a picture of what it's like for a man in today's France when identities collide in immigrant communities. Which is the real Mohamed? Is he the "Momo" that his community knows, or "Basile Tocquard", the new Gallic identity he has adopted and that allows him to "pass" and be accepted by broader French society in a way that Mohamed never would?


Momo's identity crisis comes to a head when he discovers his dream apartment and sets out to build a dream life in it, complete with (at last!) losing his virginity to what he hopes will be an endless stream of non-Algerian women. "All that remained for me to do was to go over the wall, with the firm intention of becoming an individual who decides and charts his life as a Westerner, on a full-time basis, with every right thereto pertaining." But while he fantasizes about the real estate agent who sells him the apartment, many of the other women he encounters actually turn out to be Algerian, and he is haunted by another the reader never quite encounters, an Algerian novelist named Loubna Minbar. Like life itself, maybe Momo's emancipation isn't going to be quite as straightforward as he had hoped?

The novel starts out as a straightforward chronicle of the adventures of Momo/Basile, only to take on an almost hallucinatory tone, leaving the reading questioning the narrator's reliability and pondering the havoc that discrimination can play on a psyche. A bonus? It's translated by Alison Anderson, who does an amazing job capturing not just the literal translation but providing an individual 'feel' for each novel she translates.

The German Mujahid by Boualem Sansal is another dark novel set partly in the banlieues/suburbs of Paris. Sansal, an Algerian-born writer, has had his works banned in his native country since 2006, and, like Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists, is an equal opportunity critic, although he doesn't work in satire, but uses much darker material altogether.

This novel is so far Sansal's only title to be available here, although as of next week (!), Bloomsbury USA will be releasing Harraga, set in Algeria itself. (I've got it ordered already.) The focus of this book is the diaries of two brothers, Rachel (Raschid Helmut) and his much younger brother, Malrich. On Rachel's death, Malrich discovers that his German father and Algerian mother also are dead -- victims of a massacre in Algeria's bloody civil war between the military and fundamentalist Islamists. Reading Rachel's diary, he unearths uncomfortable truths about his father's youth in the SS -- truths that Rachel found unbearable. But while Rachel found history trapped him, Malrich's own efforts to understand and make sense of his past focus on his present life in one of the Parisian housing projects that are "home" to large numbers of Tunisians, Moroccans and Algerians and others trying to carve out lives for themselves in a largely unwelcoming country.

Malrich already is aghast at the success that radical Islamists are having in radicalizing his community and sees uncanny parallels between the Nazis of his father's generation and the fundamentalists. Sansal's strength lies in his ability to deliver two parallel tales in utterly different and convincing voices: that of a mature man whose world collapses, and that of an adolescent who must find a path for himself that escapes the paradigm of victim and oppressor. Malrich's tone is that of a young guy chatting to his friends; Rachel's is more sober and analytical; bother are utterly convincing. Who is guilty? What does it mean to resist? These are weighty topics and Sansal does an excellent job of engaging with them.

If you need or want a lighter approach to these very weighty and important topics, you'll want to turn to the works of another Algerian-born author, Amara Lakhous. Lakhous, who until very recently has lived and worked in Italy, has written a series of three elegant and often hilarious novels set in Italian cities and focusing on the motley groups of migrants who end up sharing neighborhoods and apartment buildings. Divorce Islamic Style is a slyly funny look at a particular corner of Rome, Viale Marconi, known as "Little Cairo". One of its main characters, Christian, is from Sicily -- but he speaks perfect Arabic and can pass for an Arab. So when the government officials and cops get antsy about the possibility of some kind of terrorist plot brewing, it makes sense that they dispatch Christian (as Issa) to figure out what is going on. There, his path crosses that of Sofia, or Saffia, wife of an immigrant from Egypt. She's delighted with life in Rome -- and young and beautiful. Her husband? Not so much. Trained as an architect, he's stuck working as a pizza chef, and keeps getting so frustrated and fed up that he'll come home and argue with her, to the point that he'll yell "I divorce you!" in the heat of the moment. Whoops... if this happens a third time, she'll be free -- and remarriage won't be very easy at all...

Lakhous's other novels also tackle what happens when people from disparate culture backgrounds try to coexist, with Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazzo Vittoria making the point that for someone in Rome, a guy who shows up from Sicily or Calabria can be just as much (or more) of an outsider as someone who is a migrant from North Africa. Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet even had a reviewer at the Philadelphia Inquirer questioning whether Lakhous was an Italian Camus, writing novels trying to address the 'new Italy'.

The sudden rise of multiculturalism in Europe in the second half of the 20th century -- and the fact that in many countries, in practice, multiculturalism has taken the form of immigration from Muslim nations (in Britain, from Pakistan and Bangladesh; in Belgium and France, from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal and Mali, among other countries; in Germany, 'guest workers' from Turkey) -- has created all kinds of new tensions. Whether those tensions are connected to these horrific acts of terrorism, there's a risk that members of these communities will have to deal with an upsurge in exclusionary nationalism.

Which makes it worthwhile to listen to these voices, as we mourn the Charlie Hebdo tragedy.

"I slipped into art to escape life..."

Every bibliomaniac can empathize with Aaliya, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine's eloquent and simply un-put-downable novel, in her approach to literature. We may not have lived our lives in Beirut in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, dealing with everything from the civil war to overly-curious neighbors. We may not have to deal with accidentally dyeing our hair blue, or deciding which classic work of literature we will translate into Arabic. But in our own ways we have all "slipped off into art to escape life"; we have all "sneaked off into literature" at one point or another.

I read An Unnecessary Woman very early in the new year and am coming back to it today because tonight it will be announced whether it will win this year's National Book Award. I hope it will -- it would win my vote -- though I fear it won't. After all, its rivals include two ultra-popular novels, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (lots of fun, but ultimately just a particularly entertaining and creative dystopian rumination about what matters in life, with predictable answers), and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. I have to confess that I actually feel slight afraid admitting that I didn't love the latter. Did I admire the careful artistry? Sure, but I was so busy admiring that, I never forgot that I was reading a Work of Impressive Artistic Accomplishment. Which, let's admit it, is the kiss of death for a novel.

Here's why Alameddine's novel trumps both of these, and still -- months later -- is on track to end 2014 as my favorite novel of the year. And no, it has nothing to do with the fact that its heroine, Aaliya Saleh, has her own Twitter feed. It has everything to do with Aaliya herself, however, the "unnecessary woman" of the title, divorced, childless, maintaining at best a tenuous relationship with those around her, including her extended family. (She meets her nephew's children at one point and they have no idea who she is.) She came of age in the Beirut of the 1950s; now, decades later, she is elderly and she to question some of her rituals and established ways of existing -- and the decisions that led her to this point.

When the novel opens, another new year is about to begin, and Aaliya has to decide which great novel she will translate next. It is one of her private rituals; one that is most important to her sense of self. She has worked in a bookstore, keeping it open throughout the worst days of Lebanon's civil war, and it is literature that has kept her going. Her choice of translation project is ritualized: only books written in a language other than English or French (the two lingua francae of Lebanon) qualify; she then relies on both the English and French translations to complete her own undertaking: an Arabic version. When it's complete, the handwritten pages are put into a box, along with the English and French versions, and stored in her apartment, in the bedroom originally reserved for a maid. She has completed 37 such translations -- and nobody else in the world is aware of them. Is it time for 38, or is she now too old?

Other changes, too, may be looming. While Aaliya's literary passions have helped her cope with her lot as a surplus woman, with family turmoil, with war, with the loss of her closest friend, with the isolation -- she hears what each of the women in the apartment building is doing and can identify when one is in the bathroom above her or making dinner -- she now finds reality intruding to an unwelcome extent. Her family suddenly imposes on her.  She struggles to decide what to translate next -- would Roberto Bolano be too much of a challenge? Her body isn't cooperating isn't as much as it once did. As she ponders her options, and travels the streets of Beirut, the reader accompanies Aaliya back in time as she reviews her life.

Alameddine handles all of these revelations about Aaliya gradually and almost delicately and the result is a work of great beauty and empathy. It's a pitch-perfect portrayal of an individual's insistence on living according to her own rules and by adhering to her own set of priorities, even in the most impossible circumstances. Aaliya herself is a fascinating and complex character: precisely the kind of person who would have a Twitter account, and who would use it to make scathing comments about the shallowness of much of contemporary literature (a la Peter Stothard?) Did I always "like" her? Nope, but that isn't the issue. She's fascinating, but most importantly, authentic. I'd rather spend a day sitting down and listening to her stories and opinions: she makes the characters in the other two NBA finalists that I've read (the other two, Lila by Marilynne Robinson, and Redeployment, by Phil Klay, I haven't started to read yet) look like milquetoast types in comparison. I fear that may be the reason the book doesn't win: readers (and by extension, judges) like their characters to be a little more, ahem, realateble?)

It isn't that Aaliya isn't, though. She isn't an unreliable narrator, or an unlikable narrator. She is a woman out of place in her era and her geography: someone with intense curiosity and intellectual passion, trapped in Beirut in the midst of a civil war, and belonging to a middle class family that values women as wives and mothers, nothing else. She stares these uncomfortable truths right in the face, and finds a way to live with them. She is devoid of sentimentality -- she even despises the too-easy epiphanies in today's "literature lite". Aaliya makes her choices, and lives with the consequences.

Oh, and did I mention that I loved the writing. Well, there's that, too.

I've read a lot of novels this year. And we've finally reached the part of 2014, when everyone is making their lists -- you know, those "best of" tabulations. And while I still have three or four candidates vying for the top spot in the non-fiction category, it's hard for me to look back and say that a single book has beaten this one out. Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone came close, but I look at that as an older book that I'm only just discovering, rather than a "best book of 2014". And it would take something pretty damn unique to dethrone Aaliya at this point.

Books with Buzz: Justin Cronin's "The Twelve" -- and a Giveaway of "The Passage"

Trilogies are tricky. No matter what you do, if the first book has been a slam dunk success the way that Justin Cronin's The Passage was two summers ago, you'll struggle to deliver something that fans find just as overwhelmingly impressive. On the flip side, the story isn't over yet: your second novel is a bridge that readers need to find compelling enough that they'll read it through and come back for the final installment. None of that is easy.

That said... if you loved The Passage, you'll find a lot in this sequel to like, and maybe you'll even end up loving it, too -- if not quite as much. (Just don't try to read this as a stand-alone book; you'll struggle to make sense of what is going on.) It's just as convoluted and dense a novel, jam-packed with characters. It's actually slightly more confusing, because while in The Passage Cronin began with the events of the year Zero and then moved forward to his main time frame, 97 years later, focusing on the small group of survivors in the Colony in California and the challenges that confronted them, in The Twelve he is trying to wrangle a larger number of characters and a much larger canvas, one ranging from the very real survivor community of Kerrville, Texas, to the surreal/fantastical "world" that Amy visits as part of her own quest. Indeed, each of the main characters is on a kind of quest here, and the novel's focus skips and jumps, back and forth in time and into different parts of the post-viral era to give the reader a complete view of what's afoot. The problem is that there is so much happening that I was a third of the way through the book before I even began to see how the various bits and pieces fit together. And I was more than halfway through before I reached the stage where I couldn't put the book down and do something else.

So, what's the sequel all about? Well, when it opens, the surviving members of the Colony's expedition to take Amy to Colorado are now mostly scattered. Alicia and Peter are still together, but in the Expeditionary, hunting the twelve disciples of "Zero" in hopes to eliminating the viral menace. Michael is working on the oil road, keeping Kerrville supplied with fuel and power. Amy has joined a group of Sisters and is overseeing five-year-old Caleb, the son of Theo and Mausami. But the "survivors" aren't just from the colony; Cronin takes us back to the year zero, and re-introduces us to figures like Lila, Carter and even Wolgast, and introduces us to new characters to help fill in some of the backstory for some of his main ongoing characters and help set the stage for what will happen in the final third of the book. Cronin does a good job of managing the myriad narrative threads and alternating breathtaking suspenseful segments with more thoughtful passages that remind us that there is a new kind of everyday life still going on in the widely-dispersed survivor communities. The question becomes: what kind of survivor existence will triumph? It's hard to say more about the plot without venturing into spoiler territory, but the bottom line is that while it's a less straightforward narrative than in The Passage, the sequel offers a dystopian future that is less nuanced than that Cronin depicted in the Colony, but even more chilling for being more explicit.

Something that struck me more forcefully in this book, and that had begun to irritate me toward the end, is that this novel is even more intensively visionary, with more explicit religious imagery of a Christian nature. There are the Twelve of the book's title -- only instead of apostles, they are virals. Yes, they consume flesh and blood as Jesus invited his apostles to do at the Last Supper -- but they consume human flesh and blood. There's a sacrifice, late in the book, with someone pinned to a Y-shaped frame rather than a cross, preparing to sacrifice their life for their comrades and fellow humans. There is the image of pursuing the light, and the fact that virals (like vampires) cannot sustain themselves in the light. There is resurrection, of sorts, and transformation.  There are the labels like "Michael the Clever, Bridger of Worlds" or "Amy of Souls". At times, this simply became too heavy-handed for my taste, and my religious views aren't such that I would be offended by the hijacking or distortion of the Biblical narrative; those who are likely to take offense to the above, even in the midst of a book whose core message revolves around salvation and divinity, should probably avoid this at all costs.

This isn't a literary novel. Yes, the book is well-written, but ultimately it's an up-market thriller, with Big Themes and Big Ideas, but characters who will be familiar to anyone who has ever read a Good vs Evil chronicle. Admittedly, Alicia appears to be a complex character in this book -- but while her body may be divided, her heart and soul are in the right place. There's really none of the moral ambiguity or grey areas that, to me, characterize a complex narrative. Here, the complexity is reserved for the sprawling plot, and Cronin certainly has enough on his hands dealing with that. Think latter-day "Lord of the Rings" in nature, with (obviously) a very different kind of plot, writing style, characters and setting, but not that different in scope and essential nature.

If you loved The Passage, I'd certainly suggest trying this -- although be careful of letting your expectations become too high. If you haven't read The Passage, don't try this until you have -- and even if you already have read the first book in Cronin's proposed trilogy, it might be a good idea to re-read it before diving into this sequel. Be patient, and brace yourself for the  slow pace of the revelations.

I obtained an advance readers' edition of The Twelve from the publishers at BookExpo (BEA) in June.

The Giveaway!!

Yes, I can almost see you, tapping your toes in impatience, asking when I get to the giveaway...

I am giving away one copy of the promotional paperback edition from BEA AND one Kindle version of The Passage to two randomly selected winners. You must be a follower to enter; e-mail me at uncommonreading@gmail.com and tell me which version you would prefer. (Yes, you have to pick either the dead-tree mass market paperback or the cyber-version.) One entry per person, please. Make sure I have your e-mail address, and I'll let you know directly as well as posting the winner's names here. The winner of the dead-tree book will need to provide his/her mailing address, and the e-book winner will need to give me the e-mail address associated with their Amazon account. Sorry, I'm not set up yet to do this via Nook.  

The deadline? Next Wednesday, October 17, the day after The Twelve hits bookstores. I'll select the winners at 11 p.m. (Eastern) North American time.

My Pick for the Booker: The Garden of Evening Mists

Later this week, the suspense will finally be at an end, and we'll know which of the half-dozen novels on this year's shortlist will win the Man Booker Prize. While I loved Hilary Mantel's sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, my favorite candidate has to be this nearly perfect novel by Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists. It's one of those rare novels to which I want to award a sixth star, just for reminding me that there is always something new to discover in the world of books, and that there are authors out there capable of crafting prose that I have to stop and savor every few pages.

When this novel opens, Yun Ling Teoh's professional career is ending; she is retiring after many years as a judge in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, a career that began when, in her early 20s, she joined the team prosecuting Japanese soldiers for the crimes they committed during the World War II occupation of the then-British colony of Malaya. As we soon realize, Yun Ling's life -- however successful she has been in her career -- essentially ended when, at the age of 17, she herself became one of those victims, and the sole survivor of a hidden camp in the Malayan jungle. Tan Twan Eng deftly steers the reader back and forth from the past to the "present" (the 1990s), as Yun Ling's experiences during the war and her later attempts to come to grips with them at the height of the Malayan "emergency" in 1951 (a Communist insurgency) are set in the context of her final attempt to bring about a kind of resolution.

At the heart of this story is the garden of the title. It was designed by a former gardener of Emperor Hirohito, a Japanese expatriate named Aritomo, whom Yun Ling seeks out after the end of the war, in 1951, to ask him to design a garden in memory of her sister, who died at the hands of the Japanese. Aritomo refuses -- but he agrees to accept her as an apprentice. In order to achieve her goal, Yun Ling must find a way to swallow her revulsion for Aritomo -- a Japanese, and moreover, one connected to the emperor himself -- and learn from him. While the garden itself, Yangiri, seems to be a place disconnected from time and space, it proves to be anything but, as the Emergency becomes more intense, martial law is enforced more stringently, and the terror-style tactics of the Communist guerillas threaten Yun Ling, whose recent legal cases have involved prosecutions of some captured leaders. All this is set against a much later narrative, as Yun Ling returns to Yangiri -- now her own property -- for the first time since the Emergency -- to finally address all her demons. By the novel's end, we have learned the answers to the questions that emerge gradually as the story unfolds; how Yun Ling came to be the only survivor from her camp; how she came to own Yangiri and why she has allowed a Japanese scholar to visit her now to study Aritomo's ukiyoe prints.

One of the elements that made this novel especially vivid for me was the fact that I had visited the Cameron Highlands, where it is set, in the 1980s, and was left stunned by its beauty (imagine, for a moment, seeing poinsettias growing wild against a backdrop of tree-covered mountains shrouded by a hazy mist) and fascinated by its history. It's the kind of landscape in which mystery and concealment are eminently possible; indeed, at one point, Eng introduces the reader in passing to one Jim Thompson, a former intelligence agent turned silk entrepreneur in Bangkok, who would later vanish while out on a Sunday walk in the same area. Eng captures the setting and the atmosphere of the various time periods in which he sets this novel, especially the Emergency, which he portrays mostly through the eyes of three different kinds of outsiders -- Aritomo, a Japanese; Yun Ling, member of the Straits Chinese minority (a privileged group) and Teoh family friend Magnus Praetorius, a South African Boer with little love for the British colonial rulers of Malaya.

Any attempt to describe this book is almost certain to be inadequate. To me it's the epitome of what a novel that wins the Booker should be: beautifully written (that's a given), with strong characters and a vivid setting, but, above all, a narrative that makes the reader stop, think, re-read, and stop to ponder once more. It has won a spot on my personal "top 100 books of all time" list, although I confess I haven't yet decided which book to kick off it to make room. Just read it. I can't imagine that you'll be disappointed. Although I will be if it fails to win the Booker, despite the fact that it has some tough competition this year.

The Fabulous Adventures On Which An Unreliable Narrator Can Take You...

I happen to believe that unreliable narrators -- yes, including ones who aren't all that appealing -- are among the biggest gifts that an author can present to his or her readers. It's easy -- relatively speaking -- to come up with a likeable character: all you need to do is imagine someone you'd love to spend time with or fall in love with, endow them with all kinds of characteristics, from beauty and wisdom to wit and charm, and send them marching through a plot that is calculated to show all those qualities to best advantage. Wrangling an unreliable or dislikeable narrator, on the other hand, is far trickier. Somehow, you need to delicately, over time, make it clear to the reader that this is a flawed person, someone who perhaps can't be trusted, but still the only person able to tell this particular tale the way it should be told. Someone you can't rely on, but whose narrative and character quirks you can resist, even as you sometimes end up squirming in discomfort.

I've run across a few novels of this kind in recent months that I found extraordinarily good -- all have ended up on my "best books of the year" longlist -- and although none of them need all that much more publicity, I can't prevent myself from giving them another round of applause on this blog.

First of all, there's the tour de force that is Gillespie and I by Jane Harris, published last year in London, and which appeared on the Orange Prize shortlist early this year. It's a tribute to an author's skill in bringing to life an unreliable narrator, this time in the form of one Miss Harriet Baxter, spinster, who recounts her experiences in Victorian London from the "safety" of London in 1933, many decades distant. It's hard to go into details without delivering spoilers, so let's just say that Harriet is telling us the story of her relationship with the painter Ned Gillespie -- unjustly overlooked, in her eyes -- and his family. Throughout, we get a lot of reasons to second, third and even fourth-guess ourselves and the narrator -- which could have been bad news had it not been that Harris's hands are very trustworthy ones for any reader to find him/herself in. Great Literature? Nope. But it's creative and imaginative in a very different and yet familiar way -- combining what feels like a Victorian gothic with a classic suspense novel. I was surprised to see that Politics & Prose (my fave bookstore in Washington, DC) had classified it as a mystery -- at that point, I had read the first 60 pages or so -- but after finishing it, I understand why. But in contrast to a conventional mystery, this story is full of mysteries, layers upon layers of them, and the author can never be entirely sure if the narrator is misleading herself as well as us. If all this sounds oblique, it's because to say too much about it gives away some of the joys of discovery. What I most delighted in is the extent to which, even at the end, Harris still leaves a lot to our imaginations. Could it be that...??? This was a 4.8 star book for me -- and a "thumping good read".

My second candidate, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, is still up there on the bestseller lists -- and rightfully so. (I liked it so much that I raced out to get one of Flynn's earlier novels, Dark Places, which also promises to be excellent but perhaps even darker....)  By the time Nick Dunne, one of Flynn's two unreliable narrators in this suspense novel, tells us that he is "a big fan of the lie of ommission",  we've already figured it out, thanks to Gillian Flynn's masterful ability to drop one twist after another into this chilling tale, in such as a way to cause a kind of literary double take of such magnitude that if it were a physical response, I'd by now be hospitalized with whiplash. We know he is a liar -- we just don't know what lies it is that he is telling, to whom, and about what. Until Flynn slips the truth in slyly and takes the reader's breath away. In all likelihood, this is the best thriller I'll read this year, and possibly this decade -- and I don't say that lightly. Flynn took me on a hair-raising journey, the equivalent of speeding along a slick, twisting highway at night, with not even a railing separating the car from a plunge down a cliff and into the ocean -- and I simply couldn't put the novel down. Every time I thought I had figured out where she was taking me -- and at what point this novel would relapse into classic "thriller mode", with a relatively predictable denouement -- she proved me wrong. Better yet, she made each twist completely convincing.

The novel itself is the saga of an unraveling marriage that climaxes in the disappearance of Amy Elliott Dunne, Nick's wife, on their fifth wedding anniversary. It's an ironic nod of sorts to so many true-life tragedies (there's even a vitriolic Nancy Grace-style television commentator!), but also a deep dive into a kind of toxic relationship that had me thinking three or four times about every individual I've come into contact with. Amy is the photo-perfect victim: blond, beautiful, the model for her parents' best-selling series of children's books featuring "Amazing Amy". But just how amazing is Amy? Well, fairly -- if perhaps not in the sense that we are used to viewing our "victims". Because, you see, Amy is our second unreliable narrator -- how much can we rely on what she tell us through her diary, or in person? The slow and gradual revelation of the layers of this story is tantalizing; the nature of what is revealed is chilling. And the real climax of the book is quite possibly the best I've read in any thriller -- Flynn shuns any thought of the "easy out" when looking for a conclusion. Good to hear this already has been optioned by Hollywood (Reese Witherspoon has apparently picked up the rights.) The bad news? Well, be prepared to distrust everything that anyone tells you and question even your relationship with your spouse. That's how convincing a tag time of unreliable narrators can be in creating an ominous atmosphere. This is going to stay with you for weeks, and will chill you to the bone no matter how hot it is outside. 4.5 stars. 

 Anne Enright's latest novel, The Forgotten Waltz, is a different kettle of fish. It's a literary novel, not a mystery or suspense yarn, and the narrator isn't consciously deceiving us, her readers. Rather, she is deceiving herself -- but it's up to the reader to decide when that takes place. Are her lies about not being interested in the married man she first meets at her sister's holiday barbeque? Or is she lying about being happy later, after both she and he have left their spouses (not a spoiler: it becomes clear that this is the denouement fairly early on in the novel) and moved in together? When Gina first meets the man who will become her lover, she reflects, he "is just a little rip in the fabric of my life. I can stitch it all up again, if he does not turn around." This novel captured for me, better than any other I have yet read, the irrationality and occasional downright inconvenience of unexpected love. Gina Moynihan knows not only that this is a person who is married and thus technically out of bounds, even if she weren't already with the man who will become her husband; she is also clear-eyed, at least in retrospect, about the many ways in which she finds him odd or even how he should not appeal to her. And yet...  Gina evaluates her own behavior and finds it as irrational as others might; describing and not really falling into the trap of rationalizing or excusing her actions. But is she deceiving us?

To many, Gina will end up being not merely a mildly unreliable narrator but a downright unappealing one, to boot. She's an adulterer -- and apparently is rewarded for her misbehavior, in contrast to Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, who suffer miseries before they expire for their sins. Unacceptable, immoral behavior to many. But it's about real-life situations, and it's a story about getting what you think you want and then realizing that life is still "real life".  Gina recognizes this: "I thought it would be a different life, but sometimes it is like the same life in a dream: a different man coming in the door, a different man hanging his coat on the hook... I don't know what I expected. That receipts would not have to be filed, or there would be no such thing as bad kitchen cabinets .... Sean exists. He arrives, he leaves. He forgets to ring me when he is late and so the dinner is mistimed... sometimes the intractability of him, perhaps of all men, drives me up the wall."

Enright has found a lot of critics for letting the story be told by a relatively unrepentant and unapologetic Gina rather than by one of the "victims" of the story. But Enright doesn't ask us to approve of Gina's choices or even to let her off scott-free with her rationalizations or self-justifications. It's one woman's story, and I rated it 4.4 stars despite the occasionally rambling, discursive style that left me feeling claustrophobically trapped inside the narrator's head.

Three very different books; three different kinds of unreliable narrators -- and three very good novels.

Frayn Does Farce -- And Very Nicely, Too!

Why is a mysterious woman attending a gala event at a prestigious international foundation, wrapped only in mosquito netting? Why is she being pursued by apparently identical Greek taxi drivers? What's really going on involving the mysterious Greek financier and the even more mysterious Russian oligarch, and the swimming pool being built for the foundation's guests? Why is the mobile phone belonging to the much-lauded keynote speaker for the gala event residing at the bottom of a different swimming pool at the other end of the island, Skios? And who is the mysterious and mysteriously attractive Oliver Fox, who has appeared in place of that guest speaker (and adopting his identity), to bamboozle and charm Dr. Norman Wilfred's intended audience? Why does Georgie find herself trapped at a villa with Dr. Wilfred, and taking refuge in the bathroom from him and an apparently insane cleaning woman? Above all, will the cool, cool, cool Nikki Hook -- the epitome of grace under pressure -- do so well organizing the gala event that she becomes the next director of the Fred Toppler Foundation?

By the end of Michael Frayn's new novel, Skios, you'll have answers -- of a sort -- to those questions and many, many others. But as with a lot of novels, the fun isn't about what you find on the last page but what you experience along the way. And in this case, that's a lot -- Frayn has crammed a considerable amount of mayhem into 257 pages and events that stretch out over perhaps 36 hours, if that. Think Shakespeare's comedy -- no, I'm not comparing Frayn's prose or even his wit and humanity to the master, but a lot of the themes are that venerable. And many of them have popped up before in Frayn's work, although those who know him best as the author of Copenhagen, the tour de force drama featuring a debate about the nature of the universe and the meaning of life between physicists Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, are likely to feel a bit taken aback by the radically different nature of this novel. On the other hand, my first exposure to Frayn was waaaay back when one of his early plays, Noises Off, was appearing in the West End in London -- it was my senior year of high school, and was one of the plays we saw on that occasion. (And I definitely enjoyed it far more than I did Coriolanus at the age of 16....)

Skios is farce -- high farce, of a kind that will be familiar to fans of British comedy. Its characters aren't yukking it up -- they are deadly serious. Nikki wants the job (and true love); Georgie wants a fling. Norman thinks he wants to deliver his already well-traveled lecture (yet again), although -- hmm, maybe not? And Oliver -- well, Oliver is a professional charmer finally being taken seriously, although it seems only when he dons someone else's identity. And yet, the novel has all the hallmarks of the classic drawing room farce. Its characters lose their way, their luggage, their mobile phones, their identities and even their sense of self and their minds in this romp of a novel that takes great joy in poking fun at the whole phenomenon of Davos, Aspen and similar gatherings of "the great and the good."

I had a lot of fun reading this novel -- it's light and frothy and silly and, if you follow the self-important stuff that happens at Davos and Aspen, you'll enjoy the parody, too. Is it a "Booker novel"? In other words, does it deserve its slot on the longlist? Hmm, I'm not sure. It's nice to have a well-written book that doesn't take itself ponderously and seriously, by an author who is obviously having fun writing it. Is it memorable? I'm not so sure. I'm in no hurry to de-accession my copy (obtained thanks to the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program) but, as with even the best kinds of cotton candy, a little can go a long, long way. 4 stars.

"I guess there are times when war doesn't exactly make sense"

The American soldiers stationed in a remote outpost in Afghanistan in this excellent novel by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya don't want to become "just another failed tribe", and fall victim to the region's apparently endless and ugly battles. Some want to make a difference in the lives of the region's inhabitants; others have a different mission, seeking revenge for the terrorist attacks of 9/11 or combating an ideology they despise, even if they don't understand the difference between someone who wears a black turban because he's Taliban and someone who wears it by right of descent from the prophet Mohammed. And then there are a handful who can only think of getting home alive. Regardless of their widely-varying wishes and hopes, they are all stranded together in this isolated locale when a serious attempt to overrun them is made and only barely repulsed. A few days later, a young woman -- or, at least, a figure in a burkha -- appears with a cart. Nizam, like Antigone before her in the classic Greek tragedy, has come to claim the body of her brother, who led the raid. But the soldiers have already told their headquarters that they have the body of a Taliban leader (as they believe) and as soon as dust storms clear, helicopters will come to carry the corpse off for public display by the new Afghan regime. But until then, the woman and the soldiers are trapped, one on the outside of the razor wire protecting the camp, and the others on the inside.

The author does an excellent job of capturing the ensuing tension between the men and Nizam, and among the men themselves, in this claustrophobic environment. Nizam's arrivals has caused all certainties to evaporate: whereas the men could fight together to repel armed invaders, she disarms them, literally and rhetorically. Nizam is "outside the template", as the first sergeant remarks to the captain, and her presence in the midst of what had been a battle zone leads to predictable yet unanswerable questions -- why are we here? who are the good guys? what is justice?

The nature of these questions may be predictable enough, but it's Roy-Bhattacharya's ability to get under the skin of the characters that is most striking. We understand and grieve for the first lieutenant's lost idealism -- he has read and acted in Antigone, and now lives out a classical Greek tragedy of his own. There is an angry young Afghan interpreter, who is among the most insistent that Nizam may be a man under the burkha, and almost certainly is a Taliban "plant", and who also insists on casting the Americans in the role of defender of his country's citizens and their rights -- to their own discomfort. As one enlisted man remarks, dryly, he's only doing his job.

As the standoff drags on -- Nizam refuses to leave; the soldiers refuse to relinquish the (now decomposing) body of her brother -- the tension grows and misunderstandings multiply. We see the chain of events through a series of narratives, with Nizam's coming first in that sequence -- and only gradually do we recognize the extent to which those misunderstandings are merely small-scale versions of the larger ones between nations and peoples. For instance, the lights that Nizam believes are designed to keep her from sleeping at night turn out to have a far more compassionate purpose, as we discover when the anecdote is told from someone else's perspective. Ultimately, it's impossible not to feel empathy for everyone, from the rigid officer with a limited imagination, to the veteran sergeant, who has seen it all and is exhausted by the emotional damage done by war. Roy-Bhattacharya has succeeded in making Greek tragedy contemporary -- and reminding his readers that the very nature of tragedy is human, and not specific to any era, part of the world, or nationality.

I confess I cried when I finished this novel -- it doesn't happen often, but what affected me was the fact that the narrative itself was so unsentimental, even as it dealt with emotional issues ranging from death and betrayal to comradeship and despair. This isn't an "anti-war" novel, any more than it is a "pro-war" one; rather, it's the story of the people who are caught up in any war and how they try to resolve the conflict that that always exists between their role as warriors and their nature as human beings. If you have read Sebastian Junger's excellent chronicle of life in the forward battlefield posts in WAR, this would be a great fictional counterpoint. 4.4 stars; definitely recommended. (As a side note, I also relished the author's previous novel, The Storyteller of Marrakesh, which adopted a similar technique, recounting a central narrative by using several narrators and points of view. If that approach annoys you, you'll probably want to avoid both novels, but in my opinion, Roy-Bhattacharya does a great job keeping the narrative tightly focused in both books and particularly in this one.)

Genocide Fiction? Yes, It Can Work...

 I know, the idea of writing a novel whose plot revolves a human tragedy of the horrific scope of genocide is somehow...  disconcerting. Not only is it an ambitious undertaking on the part of the author -- how to do justice to such tragedies? -- but these novels can be hard to read, dealing as they do with such extreme examples of man's inhumanity to man. Still, over the last few decades, there have been countless novels written about the Holocaust and the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazi regime leading up to and during World War II. (Most memorably, of late, I'd point to The Emperor of Lies, a novel by Swedish author Steve Sem-Sandberg about Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a businessman who became the Chief Elder of the Lodz ghetto and one of the most controversial figures of the Holocuast -- although almost certainly aware of what was going on outside the ghetto walls, he was as oppressive a figure as the Germans themselves within it, all in the name of keeping them within the ghetto.)

But while the Holocaust may be the most dramatic, the most determined and the largest-scale effort to wipe out a single population from the world, the 20th century has given birth to other tragedies of a similar kind, including the Turkish massacre of its Armenian population (the Turks still deem it a criminal offense to refer to this as "genocide"), which Raphael Lemkin had in mind when he first coined the phrase genocide in 1943. And now there are two new novels -- one very good, one not quite as good as it could have been -- that look at stories tied to two of these "other" genocides, one in Cambodia and the other, set in Syria, based on the Armenian genocide.

 First, the good news. Vaddey Ratner's debut novel is an impressive achievement -- no wonder the folks at BookExpo/BEA were buzzing about this title. (I got an advance reading copy from Amazon Vine; the book itself is due out on August 7; yes, it's worth putting your order in today.) Raami, the narrator, is only seven when the novel opens days before the Khmer Rouge show up in Phnom Penh, where she and her family live comfortably despite the conflict, which until now has been almost a background noise to Raami's life. More important is her idolization of her father, elegant, wise and cultured, a prince descended from the Cambodian king, Sisowath. (This mirrors the author's own family history; she has given Raami's father the name of her own father.) She also idolizes her beautiful mother and laments that she will never be able to emulate her gliding walk, since a childhood bout of polio means she walks with a limp. And she tolerates her little sister. But with the advent of the Khmer Rouge in April 1975, who force Raami's family onto the road along with all the other inhabitants of the Cambodian capital, she realizes slowly that "normal" life is gone for good, that their adventures aren't simply a short-lived adventure -- and that she must find a way to exist in a strange new universe. "I told you stories to give you wings," Raami's father tells her, at a particularly poignant turning point in the story. And as the novel unfolds, it is clear that she will need every iota of strength she can muster to endure and survive.

What lies in store for Raami and her family in this novel is now clear to anyone who recalls or has read about the events of the next few years, but it only slowly becomes apparent to Raami the child. (She doesn't quite understand why no one should know her father's true name or what might have happened to the Buddhist monks in the temple compound in which they have found a temporary refuge.} It's extremely hard to do a good job of telling a novel for adults through the eyes of the child. Some authors extricate themselves from the dilemmas in which they find themselves stuck by adopting a kind of 20-20 hindsight/omniscient first person voice, as if today's adult is looking back on the child of years ago. The other risk is that the novel comes across as too limited in emotional scope or range to be of interest. Dealing with such dramatic events, Ratner has an edge here -- and yet I was left in awe at her seemingly effortless ability to put herself back in the shoes of a young child, narrate the story in a convincing way. She never made the seven-year-old Raami sound older than her years or more knowing; Raami is aware of the adult world, but hasn't quite figured out the way its relationships work. But Ratner's quasi-fictional character is observant and curious, and we discover more about the nature of the Khmer Rouge and its brutal regime as she puzzles it through herself and fits the pieces together until both she and we understand the full horror. I don't know how Ratner did it, but I'm in awe at the skill it took to make Raami such a compelling character.

Ratner also avoids another all-too-common trap -- that of sentimentality. The appalling nature of the Khmer Rouge rule defies words and language, and it's all too easy to become trapped in easy cliches, or to end up relating one horror after another in purple prose. Anyone can be forgiven for doing so. And yet Ratner never forgets that this is Raami's story. "The dead watched us from everywhere," Raami muses -- but it's the relationship with her own dead, watching her from the moon, that dominates her own experiences and thus the book. You don't get the visuals of killing fields here -- instead, you see through Raami's eyes what it's like to hear someone being pulled through the rice fields a few feet away from where she has taken refuge to have a nap, on the way to their death. It's more subtle, and much more effective way to convey the true horror.

Another bonus: Ratner throughout tells us the kind of stories her own father told her and that Raami's tells her -- of the rabbit in the moon, who sacrificed his life for the Buddha; traditional Khmer folk tales, poems -- and gives us a sense of the Khmer culture that the communist regime tried so hard to eradicate. They came close -- by the time the killing ended, there were few classically-trained dancers, few Buddhist monks, few poets and intellectuals in the country who had managed to survive. Through Raami's and Ratner's tales, we can capture a sense of Khmer culture and society before the violence -- a valuable contribution.



Vaddey Ratner lived through the events she chronicles in this novel as a slightly younger child than her fictional creation, Raami. There are plenty of memoirs already about this era, and rather than add another to the mix, Ratner chose to tell her story as fiction. That enables the reader to immerse him- or herself in that story by providing a bit of distance. That's not always a comfortable experience, of course, given the nature of the events the author is chronicling -- murder, starvation, disease, oppression and terror are at the heart of this book. But it works, and we witness Raami's transformation, mourn her loss of innocence and celebrate the strength and courage she develops.

The Cambodian genocide has spawned a lot of vivid memoirs, and a handful of great non-fiction narrative works, such as The Gate by Francois Bizot. I feel this is a book that I have been looking for for decades without ever doing so consciously, one that manages to capture the essence of the events in the form of a novel. It's not flawless, but dwelling on minor shortcomings would seem churlish in the face of Vaddey Ratner's accomplishments. Whenever a novel gets as much advance buzz as this, I tend to be more skeptical and harder to win over as a reader: this book is the exception to that rule. Highly recommended; 4.7 stars.

On the other hand... I read Chris Bohjalian's just-published novel, focusing on the Armenian genocide of 1915 and onward a few weeks before  I tackled Ratner's book. Like Ratner, Bohjalian is basing his story against a background that is deeply personal -- he is Armenian, and he is telling the story of a genocide that his ancestors experienced through the eyes of a contemporary narrator of roughly the same generation that he is. But in this case, I found myself wishing that Bohjalian had been able to craft a plot and characters that measured up to the kinds of events against which he set his novel; it turned out that the horrors of the events he chronicles had much more impact on me than the novel. Bohjalian certainly deserves praise for taking on the task of trying to make the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the desert wastes of Turkey and Syria as vivid in our imaginations as is the Holocaust. But this isn't a great novel, merely an adequate and rather predictable one. We know from the first pages that the narrator's Armenian grandfather and Boston-born grandmother meet in Aleppo (modern-day Syria) at the height of the massacre, and end up building a life together; the only question becomes how that happens. Obviously, Armen must survive the genocide and Gallipoli, and Elizabeth must make it out of Aleppo -- but the only question is how. Obviously,  any barriers to their love prove surmountable.

There are horrors here -- very vividly depicted, in sometimes nauseating detail. But without the sense of our primary characters -- Armen, Elizabeth or Laura, the present-day narrator -- having their lives at stake or their sense of selves deeply threatened -- it is too often a less engaging narrative than the nature of the story demands. Perhaps had Bohjalian chosen not to blend Laura's quest for the truth of her grandparent's experiences with the main story set in 1915, I would have found myself as caught up in Bohjalian's fictional story as I was with the historical facts? Perhaps, too, this is a better novel for someone to read who isn't at all familiar with the history. I had been lucky enough to read another novel about 18 months ago, Erevan, by Gilbert Sinoue, which has yet to be translated into English. This novel is much better -- but it has yet to be translated into English, alas. By contrast, Bohjalian's novel, for all the gritty detail, felt more "Hollywood", complete with pat yet not really convincing instant romance, than "real".

Part of the problem was that Bohjalian wasn't able to craft characters that measured up to the history.  Laura tells the reader her quest for the truth is unsettling and that she is driven -- but she came across to me as little more than a notch above mildly curious and there's no sense her identity is shaken by her discoveries. Elizabeth's character doesn't really change throughout -- she starts as an independent-minded woman intent on cutting her own path, and ends up that way. Other characters are there to serve the author's purpose, and never really become three-dimensional.

By all means, read this; indeed, you should. Especially if you've read novels set against the backdrop of the Holocaust but are only vaguely familiar with the Armenian genocide from occasional references in the papers. I hope that it also turns out to be a compelling fictional world in which you find yourself while you are reading; that wasn't my experience, but I wish it had been. I'm giving it 3.5 stars.

Edith Wharton Meets 21st Century Jewish London??

 

Francesca Segal has chutzpah -- that's one thing of which I'm convinced after reading this ambitious re-imagining of the story at the heart of Edith Wharton's masterpiece, The Age of Innocence. Whether Wharton's novel was a favorite of Segal's or whether she simply looked around and found in the tightly-knit Jewish community in Northwest London (Golders Green, Belsize Park, Hampstead, etc.) some uncanny parallels to the highly-structured community in which everyone is even more familiar with your history, personality quirks and family story than you may even be aware, remains unclear. Regardless, in this novel Adam Newman, a London lawyer, becomes the Manhattanite, Archer Newland; his cherished and protected fiancée is no longer May, but Rachel; and Rachel's cousin is the outsider -- not quite an outcast, but no longer one of the group in the same way that Ellen Olsenka was in Wharton's opus -- who comes along to disrupt the ordered and predictable lives they all are living. 

Adam has grown up in this world, one in which the children he played with became the teenagers that he went on trips to Israel with and then the young adults who are marrying the women they have known much of their lives; women who, Adam realizes, end up integrated into his own life as childhood friends of Rachel's and because they also have become the girlfriends and wives of his own childhood friends. But Adam is aware that this existence is almost hermetic, and experiences waves of yearning for the unexpected; for something different that he can't quite name. It's clear that being like Jasper, his friend, is not what he wants for himself: "for Jasper, parties would continue to be what they had always been -- opportunities to spend time with exactly the same people he spent time with everywhere else." All that has changed is that instead of CDs, they listen to music on iPods; that the homes they visit belong to themselves and not their parents; that they are allowed to stay up past midnight (when wives and girlfriends permit them). What does Adam (aka Archer) want -- and will Ellie (aka Ellen) be a part of that or is she simply a beautiful and intoxicating distraction?

The problem with this, as with any literary homage, the reader is likely to be at least somewhat familiar with the original work to which the author is paying tribute. That means that either the novel should be very well written and feature characters and situations that can stand on their own merits, or else relatively straightforward and unambitious. (Re the latter, think of all the knockoff versions of Jane Austen novels, with Elizabeth Bennets and Mr. Darcys transplanted to various unlikely eras and locales, most of which fall squarely into the chick lit genre.) While Segal has delivered an interesting novel that certainly is worth reading in its own right, she is trying to deliver more than just a chick lit knock off -- and her reach slightly exceeds her grasp. It feels as if she is confined by Wharton's narrative, meaning that with rare exceptions, even some of her main characters never become fully alive, while the secondary ones are simply placeholders. One notable exception to this is Rachel's grandmother, Ziva, a Holocaust survivor; I am quite convinced that if I stroll down Hampstead High Street one Sunday, I'll cross her path, so vivid was Segal's portrayal of this indomitable woman, at once cherishing her errant granddaughter, Ellie, while appearing to understand, with compassion, the plight in which her presence has placed both Adam and Rachel. On the other hand, what it is that attracts Adam to Ellie -- other than lust and the allure of the different -- remains unclear. Yes, both lost parents at an early age, but while Segal offers that up as a reason, the roots of Adam's restlessness aren't explored enough to make them convincing, at least, not to me.

There are challenges involved in re-imagining Wharton's novel in a contemporary setting. However close-knit the social group with which Adam's life is bound up, breaking free is a far more realistic option, as it is for Ellie. He has real choices, of a kind that Wharton's characters, more than a century ago, did not. And there are plot twists here that are a part of the original novel that don't work nearly as well when transplanted to contemporary London.

Still, anyone who wants to read this as a novel in its own right is likely to find plenty to relish in Segal's portrayal of the clannish Jewish community of North London, one which will rapidly circle the wagons to prevent one of its own from rocking the boat (forgive the mixed metaphors.) Interference, yes -- but also support, as Segal has Adam remarking to himself early on in the novel. I'm not Jewish and I don't live in London, but I know people who are part of that community, and Segal's view into their community is not only vivid but strikes me as being pitch-perfect. Read the book for that reason alone, and if you become frustrated by an oddly flat character, or a plot element that doesn't seem to make sense, shrug it off as a part of the "homage" that doesn't quite work. This is a 3.9 star book for me -- good, but not great. Still, Segal can write, and I'll look forward to whatever she devises next. I'm quite certain that when she isn't trying to translate a century-old plot into a contemporary setting, but devising her own characters and plots, the result will be a stronger novel. Mildly recommended; pick it up from a library, wait for the paperback or a sale, or borrow it from a friend.

Mission: Stop the "Hags!"

If you're at all interested in time travel and dystopian novels, this is a book that you will not want to miss. "Zed", aka Z, lives an unspecified number of centuries in the future, when a Conflagration of some kind (the reader never really can nail down the details) has dramatically reshaped the world, forcing survivors to work cooperatively in order to survive, and for the government authorities to severely restrict their access to historic knowledge, in case it causes them to focus on all those pesky things that we let divide us, from religious conflicts and family vendettas to race and national pride. That kind of stuff is banned in Zed's "Perfect Present", and his job is to travel back in time to our imperfect era to make sure it stays perfect. You see, historical agitators (aka "hags") have figured out time travel as well, and are using it to try and change humanity's fate, whether by killing off Hitler in his cradle or -- most significant -- preventing the Conflagration itself. In Zed's era, they can be detected by their relatively pale skins -- they haven't allowed family members to mingle much with others, so have become a tiny minority in a dark-skinned homogeneous world. But they believe they are on a mission for humanity's good, and are so determined that the only way Zed can stop them is to terminate them.

To ensure that the Conflagration happens on schedule, Zed has to protect a series of events that involves some nasty regimes and their shenanigans, and some events surrounding that in Washington DC. He's a bit out of his comfort zone -- his usual stomping grounds are the 1930s and 1940s -- but nonetheless finds some things about "contemp" society to enjoy, like the fresh air and sunshine -- but his real problems are only beginning. The latest assignment has left him with his GeneScan out of whack, and he struggles to do his job and increasingly finds himself confused by what he's been told to do -- it doesn't seem to make sense. Zed -- known in this strange world of today's Washington as Troy Jones -- ends up interacting in one way or another with contemps who inadvertently leave him still more muddled. Tasha has lost her brother in an overseas war, and is angry enough to ponder leaking "smoking gun" documents to WikiLeaks-style rebels; Leo, an ex-CIA agent, is told to stop her but complicates his mission by stumbling across Sari, a young Indonesian girl who is virtually enslaved by her Korean diplomat employer and his wife, but who may be the key to the secret that Zed has to protect.

Got that?? If you don't, don't worry... Unlike Connie Willis's  time travel narratives, All Clear and Blackout, I found most of the important plot elements are simple to follow. (I enjoyed the two Willis books a great deal, but had to shut off that voice in my head that said, but the time travel element is really confusing me, and if I think about it too much, my brain will explode.) This isn't really a sci-fi novel about time travel, but rather a book about politics vs human beings, in both the present and the future, aka the Perfect Present. What kind of freedoms will people relinquish to live comfortably and quietly? What causes someone to muse, as one character in this riveting drama does, that "maybe it was good to live under a dictator"? What are the triggers that cause them to look at the world around them with fresh eyes and realize that they have become dupes, agreeing blindly to things to which, if they stopped and thought about them, they would have profound moral objections.

The narrative jumps among the four main characters, so we see the same events through each of their eyes. The "contemps" are reacting in ways that all of us might: we can't know the future, so we can do only what seems best to us in the present moment. Zed, in contrast, knows what is to come, is increasingly uncertain of what would change that future and whether it's a good or bad thing and of his mission, and has an utterly different kind of moral dilemma to resolve, one that depends on the kind of omniscience he has and that's he increasingly ambivalent about. There are some holes in this story, and a few heavy-handed and improbable moments (such as the one when Zed realizes that his cover story has an uncomfortable parallel with his own "real" life in the far distant future). And yes, The Revisionists owes a lot to other classic dystopian books, such as Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (only this time around, it's history rather than books per se that are banned in order to keep people happy in some future world.) Don't expect this novel to break fresh literary ground -- but then, that's not its mission. It's a "thumping good read" that ties with Lev Grossman's The Magician King for my favorite rollercoaster ride of the year. Perhaps it's not as accomplished or purely imaginative as Grossman's novel, but in my opinion that was offset by the fun I had imagining what it might be like to return to our 'civilization' from the far distant future, or musing what kinds of events might cause me to re-examine my priorities as Tasha does hers.

So if you're looking for a "thumping good read" to keep you thoroughly engrossed and to block out your own ugly realities one rainy weekend, look no further! 4.3 stars, recommended.

I obtained an electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

“In Russia … there are only crime stories.”

Nick Platt moved to Moscow in order to break out of the rut of his existence in England, feeling himself falling into the "thirtysomething zone of disappointment, the time when momentum and ambition start to fade"; it doesn't hurt that his law firm promises him that if he does well structuring client deals in the wild East, flush with oligarchical cash, he'll become a partner more rapidly: when Snowdrops by A.D. Miller opens, it's clear that something has gone very wrong indeed with that plan, but not why.

Somewhere along the line, in his quest to leave behind his boring existence and live for the day as do the Russians who surround him, Nick crosses the line to become the kind of individual he had never dreamed of. The nature of that betrayal becomes clear to the reader of this excellent debut novel only slowly; the story unfolds as a written confession by Nick to an unnamed woman back in England whom he intends to marry. At the beginning, we know that there is a death coming, but we don't know whose, or what Nick's role in it may have been. All we know is that as the final winter of his Moscow sojurn begins, Nick is edging closer by the day to some kind of unforgivable crime or betrayal, something that will make him just as shady as the corrupt Russians for whom he structures deals during the day and whom he affects to despise. Not surprisingly, it all starts with a woman, or rather, two women, whom he meets by chance in the subway system. Masha and her young sister -- or cousin? -- Katya become his close companions; he allows himself to dream of a future with Masha who, Nick convinces himself, has no ulterior motive in becoming his girlfriend. After all, she isn't pushing him to buy her clothes, jewelry or a trophy pedigree puppy.

Nick's friend Steve, a jaded hard-drinking journalist, tries to sound the alarm bell. In Russia, he warns Nick, there are no business stories or even political stories. There aren't even any love stories. In Russia, he cautions Nick, everything becomes a crime story. But Nick is in no mood to listen. He's too busy crafting a project finance deal for a rather odd character known as the Cossack, who may be an oligarch or may be a member of the FSB, Russia's secret police. But everyone has a vested interested in seeing the deal go through, so why ask too many tough questions? And then Masha and Katya ask them to help their aunt, Tatiana Vladimirovna, an elderly survivor of the siege of Leningrad, swap her apartment in a prime location in downtown Moscow for something more modern in the still-rural outskirts. Bit by bit, Nick finds himself blinding himself to all that he doesn't know -- and doesn't want to know -- about the various deals in which he's playing an increasingly important role. As the winter becomes fiercer and the snow masks the physical ugliness of Moscow, Nick is able to blind himself to the realities of his situation but when the snow melts to reveal ugly truths -- including a corpse -- he can no longer avoid acknowledging what the winter's events have shown about his own character, about his lack of both courage and morality.

This is an extraordinarily good first novel, and it's no surprise to me that it has found its way onto the longlist for the Man Booker Prize this year. Indeed, it's the first of the longlist nominees that I believe is worthy of ending up on the shortlist. Miller -- a correspondent for The Economist who worked in Moscow -- does a superlative job transforming the ugly truth about Russian politics, business and everyday skulduggery as one desperate Russian looks for someone else to take advantage of, into a novel that isn't just fascinating but eloquently written. This isn't just a novel that dresses up current affairs as fiction, or a thriller drawn from the headlines, but rather an excellent story about a man forced to confront the consequences of his reluctance to ask questions about things that seem too good to be true. Yes, the reader is always a step ahead of Nick in the way that the novel is structured, but that doesn't spoil the tension: while I knew the scams would claim victims and that Nick would be an indirect casualty, the nature of the crimes and the way Miller brings together the various strands of the story were compelling enough to keep me reading.

It helps that Miller can turn his hand to fiction as readily as to news reporting. He handles deftly what someone else might have botched up, drawing parallels between the winter weather and the scams; he draws on his observations of daily life in today's Russia -- the drunken passengers who dance a jig in the aisle of a plane as it lands safely -- while never hammering home in such a way as to holler to the reader "look how well I know this place!" Even the minor-characters are vividly portrayed, including journalist Steve, "one of those lost foreign correspondents that you read about in Graham Greene, a citizen of the republic of cynicism."

I had been wary of this book at first, afraid it would be one of those "wink, wink; nudge, nudge" books written by a former expat who just wants an excuse to write about sexual exploits with young, gorgeous and desperate Russian women, or a so-so thriller. Instead I found a fascinating novel that is now on my best books of the year list. 4.5 stars; recommended.

A Novel That Will Haunt You Long After You Put it Down

It's been a day or two since I finished reading The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers, one of the novels short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize. Often, when I finish a book and move on to the next one, the one I have completed subsides gently into the background of my mind. But this time, I actually found myself dreaming about Jessie and her world last night -- not a terribly comfortable state of affairs, given the bleak world in which Rogers set her novel and the kind of choices Jessie finds herself making about her life. To me, that says that even if Rogers hasn't quite managed to craft a novel that I think will win the Booker, she's written something chilling and memorable and thus well worth reading. (It's not out in the US as yet, and I don't see a publication date yet, but it's a paperback that you can order from Amazon.co.uk.)

When the novel opens, we meet Jessie, chained by the legs with bicycle chains to stop her running off and doing something -- and we soon discover that it is her father who is restraining her. What could have driven him to such extremes, when it's clear from the narrative that they have an exceptionally strong and close relationship? But the world Jessie and her family live in is a crumbling one; an act of bioterrorism has led to a new disease, MDS, that afflicts any woman who becomes pregnant -- kind of a horrible combination of AIDS and mad cow disease. The only treatment is for the victim to be "put to sleep"; millions of women are dying. Jessie and all her teenage friends are fitted with Norplant-like devices, but that simply stops them from falling victim to the disease -- it doesn't give them a reason to live. And, being teenagers, that's already a problem. Some become animal rights activists, convinced that the toxic virus is simply another manifestation of man trying to monkey with the natural world; others turn into radical feminists, arguing that the virus is simply another instance of men treating women as objects. Jessie, like many other 16-year-olds, is already looking at the mess her parents' and grandparents' generations have made of the world and reacting with disgust, arguing against a family vacation that will consume carbon or when her father proposes a trip to the seaside in the car.

But her father's lab, along with others scattered around the world, has reached a kind of breakthrough. Scientists have found that after years with no children born -- forcing humans to come face to face with their own sudden extinction, a scenario also explored in The Children of Men by PD James -- that it's possible for young women with MDS to give birth to children after all. The catch is twofold: their children will also be afflicted with the virus, activated on pregnancy, and the women won't survive. These "Sleeping Beauties" are put into induced comas until their children are delivered and then "put to sleep" permanently. The first round of these pregnancies were accidental ones -- young women who became pregnant unaware, in the earliest stages of the epidemic. But now science is making it possible for pre-MDS embryos conceived through IVF and frozen to be immunized and implanted into young women. But the outcome for the "mothers" doesn't change -- they will still die -- and this time the women will need to be volunteers -- and teenagers, since that will boost the odds of success...

You can kind of see where this is heading, I'm sure, and that's not a surprise as it's clear relatively early on that Jessie is fascinated by the idea of making a difference in a world that is going to hell in a handbasket. Could she actually help to save the human race? The author does a good job of exploring what is going on inside her mind -- the mind of a teenager -- and showing the conflict between her and her parents, who are normal people accustomed to ordinary failures and who, like most of us, have long since forfeited their idealism. Rogers sometimes displays a heavy hand in describing the post-MDS world in which Jessie and her friends are coming of age, and too many of the characters are simply walk-on parts, part of the backdrop to the core drama that is the conflict between Jessie and her family. Still, it's a chilling page-turner; if you've read and enjoyed novels like Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and are intrigued by "what if" scenarios of the dystopian kind, this is the kind of book that you'll find unforgettable. It's not as well conceived or impeccably structured as Ishiguro's or as The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and if you pause to think about it while you're reading, you'll spot the flaws. But the power of Rogers's tale and Jessie's testimony is that you won't stop -- you'll be swept along by the story. And beware, because it's likely to haunt you for days.

The Story of a Boy and a Bear -- and an Unbearable Loss

When Summer of the Bear by Bella Pollen opens, it's the summer of 1980, and Letty is driving north to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland with her three children, Georgiana, Alba and Jamie, but without her husband, Nicky. It takes only a few short chapters for the reader to learn that Nicky is dead -- just how he died, however, is the puzzle around which this novel ostensibly revolves.

But while Nicky's death, and the context for it, may make this sound like a mystery novel, it really isn't. Instead, it's the story of how terrible grief devastates families, driving members apart. Letty fears her husband has killed himself, or that his death wasn't an accident, and retreats into herself, leaving her children to cope on their own. Georgie is tormented by memories of a trip to Berlin with her father shortly before his death, a trip that MI-6 agents later interrogated her about at their home in Bonn. Alba is just angry at everyone, but especially Jamie, the youngest of the clan, for what she views as his simple-mindedness and lack of subtlety. But Jamie, who struggles with learning disabilities of some kind as well as incredibly literal mind (when his sister tells him sarcastically to look up Heaven in the Yellow Pages, he does just that -- and shows up on the door of a thinly-disguised brothel searching for his father) simply won't believe his father his dead. Perhaps he's off somewhere, on a secret mission -- after all, hadn't everyone told him that his father was "lost", and wasn't he really a spy?

Over the course of their summer at the family home in the Hebrides, all four survivors must find a way to cope and move on. Their conflicts are set against the backdrop of life in the still-remote community, under increasing siege from the modern world, and their memories of the diplomatic world that they have left behind them. And in the background, there is the bear: escaped from its owner, the grizzly has taken refuge in a cave. Jamie becomes increasingly fixated on finding the bear, associating it closely with his father. Is it possible that the spirit of the lost bear and his lost father could somehow combine...?

This is a beautifully-written novel, one that captures the emotional impact of a devastating loss and the uncertainties of childhood and adolescence without a false note anywhere. Jamie, in particular, is a heartbreaking character: the adults in his world don't understand him; Alba and his peers bully him ruthlessly and yet his insights and thoughts are clear and simple. The climax, in which Pollen brings together the multiple threads of the plot, offering a solution to the mystery of the bear and the mystery of Nicky's death, may feel contrived, but only when looking back on it after finishing the book. At the time, it just feels like the only proper way to wrap up the novel.

I devoured this book, one page after another, and was bitterly disappointed when I finished -- but only because I didn't have more to read. An impressive novel, crafted from the author's own knowledge of the Hebrides and the real-life escape of a bear the same summer in which the novel is set. I'll be looking out for more novels by Bella Pollen, and recommend this one whole-heartedly. I wouldn't go so far as to call this Literature with a capital "L", but it's an above-average novel with a plot and characters that will captivate and haunt you, and I'm giving it 4.6 stars.

Full disclosure: I obtained e-galleys of the book from the publisher via NetGalley.com.

Man Booker Prize Longlist: "Far to Go" by Alison Pick

I'm not a literary prize shortlist junkie. But I reserve the right to make exceptions to this rule... For instance, if I hadn't decided to sample some of the previously-unknown or relatively unknown authors on last year's Man Booker longlist, I wouldn't have stumbled over The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, which I loved, much less The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson -- which I said I hoped would win the award when it was still a long shot. (It did...)

This year's longlist was announced on Tuesday, and now that all the frenetic speculation about who's going to be on it is over (notable by their absence are authors like Amitav Ghosh and Graham Swift), I'm deciding which of the 2011 nominees I'll read. The first book I picked up turned out to be [Far to Go] by Alison Pick, a novel that has been released in paperback in the U.S. but that seems to have sailed under the radar so far -- a pity, as it's a very good novel that certainly meets the threshold for being a "thumping good read", even though I'd be surprised to see it make the leap onto the shortlist in a few weeks' time.

You'll need a bit of patience to get into Pick's tale, which starts out with some kind of omniscient observer ruminating on toy trains (with obvious parallels to the cattle cars of the Holocaust, which is the background against which the novel is set), leaps to an archived document, another first person segment, then what turns out to be the story of the sibling of one of the main characters in the book. Finally, you'll get into the main story, told through the eyes of Marta, the Czech (and Christian) nursemaid to the Bauer family, secular and Jewish, living in the Sudetenland in 1938. If you're a historical junkie like me, you'll immediately realize that those facts and dates spell trouble ahead, and you'd be right.

But rather than trying to recount the horrors of the Holocaust itself in fiction -- something I think is doomed to failure -- Pick opts to tell an essentially domestic story of love and betrayal, set in the midst of the years when it finally became clear just what was happening; by the time realization had set in, it was too late for many trapped Jewish families to act. Again, Pick makes a clever decision by choosing to tell the story through Marta's eyes (for reasons that only become clear at the end of the novel); if the Bauers are stubborn in refusing to grasp the implications of the Munich pact, Marta is even more bemused; she simply can't understand why anyone else, especially her lover and the Bauer plant's manager, Ernst, would view the Bauers as anything other than Czech.

But there are undercurrents in the domestic situation. Anneliese Bauer is a troubled woman: her elegant and polished surface conceals much. Pavel Bauer thinks of himself as a Czech nationalist, only to become aware too late that his Jewish identity is something of value. Their five-year-old son, Pepik, clings to Marta in the face of the upheavals that follow the "Kristallnacht" riots. And those tensions lead to betrayals that seem inconceivable.

Pick does a brilliant job of capturing the atmosphere of a small-town Czech community and its cultural divisions; of Prague in the early years of the German occupation; of the world and concerns of the Holocaust researcher whose first-person narrative occasionally interrupts the main story. From the letters and other documents included in the text, we come to know the fates of all the main characters, including the fact that Pepik is one of the children separated from their families and whisked away to safety in the "Kindertransport". What we don't know is how those events come to pass -- or the narrator's relationship to the Bauer family, specifically. Why has the narrator chosen to tell us about this particular family, rather than one of the thousands of others? When that became clear, I was forced to take a step back and rethink the entire nature of the narrative and the concept of the 'unrealiable narrator' took on a new twist. And I suspect it's that revelation -- about the very nature of the story that we've been told -- that raised this novel to the level that it was placed on the Man Booker shortlist.

This is the third novel I've read this summer that focuses on World War II as a domestic event. I've already blogged here about my thoughts on Rosie Alison's The Very Thought of You, in which a child's evacuation from wartime London transforms her life and future. Equally underwhelming (to me, at least) was 22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson, which displayed the author's heavy hand in the plot from start to finish, and where even the writing succumbed too often to the floridly banal. Both hovered in the 3.3 star range. Where those two failed to rise above the mediocre, this succeeds, despite the initial confusion in the rapidly-shifting perspectives in its first pages. I'd rate it 4.2 stars, and recommend you hunt it down. Available in paperback! and affordably on Kindle, as well.