Benjamin Black, “Christine Falls”

Another case of an overqualified author turning out a crackerjack murder mystery. Benjamin Black is a psuedonym of John Banville, the Irish poet and novelist. Which is why, I suppose, we get fabulous sentences like this:  “Suddenly for him death had lost its terrifying glamour and become just another bit of the mundane business of life, although its last.” The irony — and there is a great deal of that quality in Christine Falls — is that the book’s protagonist Quirke is by trade a pathologist. It’s entirely appropriate that death should have held “terrifying glamour” for him and his disillusionment on this score is just one of the sad revelations that rain down on him. (I don’t remember, by the way, ever learning Quirke’s first name. It’s that kind of book and he’s that kind of character.)

Graceful writing is not the only strength here. The novel’s structure is both strong and neat. Looking back, I’m hard put to remember any extraneous characters or plot points. The setting is 1950s Ireland and Massachusetts, that Catholic territory that spanned the Atlantic, with money and people crossing back and forth easily, frequently. What Quirke discovers is traffic in something else again (no, not guns).  The larger plot, with its deceptions and corruptions, mirrors Quirke’s relationships, not one of which is unchanged by the end of the narrative. Black is so good that even the walk-on characters are made complex and believable. The atmostphere, too, is very rich, whether we’re in a depressing Dublin tenement or the overheated conservatory at Moss Manor in Scituate, Mass. And though this is one of your darker tales, you can, if you choose to, permit yourself a flicker of hope at the end, as Quirke rouses himself from his drink-sodden regrets and sets about redressing some wrongs.

As a side note, the cover is brilliant, a trompe l’oeil conceit in a very dark green (for Ireland, right?) “peeling” back from a moody black and white photograph, with white scoring on the back as if the cover had been folded back. It suggests hard wear and nasty secrets. Totally appropriate.

Sybille Bedford, “Jigsaw”

I first read Jigsaw years ago, on the warm recommendation of a friend, and picked it up again when another friend mentioned how much she was loving it. I wasn’t sure that I’d still appreciate what I’d found so compelling 15 years ago, but I did. And then I began wondering why.

It’s very hard to put your finger on what it is that Sybille Bedford does right in this book. She calls it “A Biographical Novel” which I take to mean that she has changed some details and/or names either to protect people or to smooth out the narrative. I never doubted, on either reading, that the hair-raising goings-on had occured more or less as told. The book’s opening scene has Sybille, aged two, parked in a pram in the hall of her mother’s Danish lover. “Please be good, please keep quiet, he hates to have a baby in the hall.” I should just about think so — surely “a baby in the hall” is a pretty serious check on the libido. But looking at it more closely, I think perhaps the way Bedford has written this is a key to the book’s subtle grip on you. “He hates…” Not “he will hate,” which would be a more predictable structure. This is a settled thing with the Dane, a situation he has encountered before and has an opinion about. Has Sybille been previously parked in the hall? All that meaning, packed into one verb tense.

So expand that authorial care to the structure, which covers Sybille’s childhood up to the age of about twenty. Then factor in the extremely eventful youth this woman had: early years with her parents until her mother left. Then she lived with her father on an estate in the Grand Duchy of Baden, rich before WWI, poor afterward. This portion is reminiscent of Gregor von Rezzori’s The Snows of Yesteryear. Then there were a few unsettled years in Italy, with educational interludes (more or less unchaperoned) in England. Most of the book is set in a tiny village on the French Mediterranean, in the later 1920s, before that area was “discovered.”

This French section is indelibly vivid. Light, wind, sea, the houses, the food, the inhabitants, both local and “summer people…” Sybille continues to spend chunks of time in London, while her mother and much-younger stepfather Alessandro make a life in France. (The English life is pretty colorful emotionally, though rather dingy.) Throughout, her mother is the center around which all else revolves — a narcissistic, tempestuous beauty who commands allegiance at a very high cost. Conflict (the essence of drama for the reader) is never distant. The emotional stakes are high for everyone. I had remembered the harrowing final section when Sybille’s mother’s behavior starts to present moral as well as emotional dilemmas. In fact, it’s less than a quarter of the book but the generosity and frankness with which Bedford handles this is a life lesson.

Bedford’s own life was the source for most of her fiction, and certain episodes or characters recur throughout her work, but she never becomes tedious. Actually, you feel privileged to share her life with her — though I also admit to a great deal of relief that I didn’t have to live through all the drama.

Frank Tallis, “A Death in Vienna”

A murder mystery set in Vienna in 1902 sounded like a terrific idea. Teaming up to solve the mystery: Oskar Reinhardt, a detective, and his friend Dr. Max Liebermann, a doctor who experiments with the new treatment known as psychoanalysis. (Naturally Dr. Freud appears in a walk-on part.) The victim is a beautiful blonde clairvoyant who has been shot in a locked room.  Along the way, the author places his characters in the famous coffee houses, at the Secession, and he even sets the climactic scene at the peak of the famous Reisenrand, the Ferris wheel in the Prater that Hitchcock so memorably employed in The Third Man.

It almost works, but Frank Tallis isn’t a terrific writer. Much of the historical and local color seems obligatory: why tell us exactly what everyone orders each time the characters sit down for a cup of coffee? Why trace their steps — right on this strasse, left on that brücke — when these are routes the characters would follow without thought? Why pause to tell us that Liebermann’s new coffee table was made by Koloman Moser? It’s all clumsy. And Tallis’s word choices are sometimes labored. “Weak spears of watery light angled through the mossy curtains, illuminating motes that glided through the air with the lymphatic grace of protozoa.”  ”Lymphatic grace?” If you say so.

That being said, the plot is satisfying and the pacing works nicely. The characters all feel a little bit second-hand, as if we’d met them before in other books (the bluestocking English governess, the sexually abusive bank president and his downtrodden wife, even the slightly plodding policeman Reinhardt and the more intuitive Dr. Liebermann). But the murder itself is quite ingenious and when all’s said and done, turn-of-the-century Vienna is a fine place to spend a few hours.

Deborah Crombie, “Necessary as Blood”

What a terrible title! I still can’t figure out how it pertains to the book, and it’s the kind of non-sequitur that I know won’t ever stick in my brain. Nor does it tell you anything about the novel. Maybe we Deborah Crombie fans are just supposed to grab the next one regardless, like the Sue Grafton books, whose alphabetical titles are pretty thin on the information, too.

Next complaint: there’s a little too much going on here. Crombie has created a rich and satisfying environment for her Scotland Yard detectives Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid. We’ve got their respective kids, their bosses, their underlings, their friends — even their vet appears in this one. It all hung together and everyone’s appealing enough but there just aren’t enough pages in the book to do justice to the supporting characters and the plot.

For this book Crombie turned to London’s East End, which clearly fascinates her. In fact you could say that the neighborhood around Shoreditch and Bethnal Green is one of the protagonists of the novel, because it throws together an unlikely mix of characters who end up interacting in interesting ways. The plot is not actually complex — Sandra Gilles, an English artist and mother, is married to Nasir Malik, a Pakistani lawyer. One day Sandra mysteriously disappears. A few months later, Naz also vanishes, and it’s at this point that the Yard is called in. The candidates for baddie range from Sandra’s unsavory drug-dealing brothers to a mysterious club owner to a smarmy veterinarian. The novel doesn’t really spend enough time on the various options — one of the reasons I like the traditional procedural is that I enjoy witnessing the detectives winnowing the evidence, bringing their keen observational skills to bear on the various suspects. In this novel the villain doesn’t spend enough time on our radar for us to actually engage with him, or with his evil deeds. That part all feels sketched in. Overall, Crombie is such fun to read that I could almost overlook this flaw. Will Gemma marry Duncan? Will Melody tell her father to buzz off?  Yet — why should I be worrying about this when there are dead bodies lying around?

Nick Hornby, “Juliet, Naked”

Juliet, Naked was supposed to be light relief after A Place of Greater Safety, but that may not have been fair to Nick Hornby. I was remembering him as essentially readable. I mean, who else could have gotten me through a novel about a bunch of people who meet when they all try to commit suicide on New Year’s Eve? And I recalled A Long Way Down as surprisingly entertaining. So maybe I started Juliet, Naked with the wrong expectations. Or possibly this is just a more complicated venture.

In Gooleness, a godforsaken resort town on England’s northeast coast, Annie is getting tired of her boyfriend of 15 years.  Duncan, whose great interest in life is the reclusive singer/songwriter Tucker Crowe, is a whiny pedant and we wonder how Annie can stand him for an instant longer. The third protagonist is Crowe himself, who abandoned his career after the success of an album called “Juliet.” He stopped performing one night in Minneapolis and has been more or less silent and invisible ever since. This makes him perfect fodder for a handful of devotees who spend hours on the Internet arguing about him and trading misinformation.

Hornby’s a terrific writer so when you actually encounter Crowe you do get a shock: wow! There he is! It was so easy to find him! He’s so refreshingly normal!  Actually, Tucker Crowe is full of regret and self-loathing and has done nothing whatever with his life, save fathering too many children whom he doesn’t know. Somehow Hornby manages to make him likable — almost. Annie posts a comment about Crowe’s music on the website Duncan moderates and…. Crowe writes back to her. A flirtation ensues, followed by an actual encounter, followed by some rueful growth and character development for everyone. Though probably not enough for Tucker, in my view.

Hornby’s thoughts about creativity are moderately interesting and I liked his grappling with the weird doubling of the virtual/real Tucker Crowe. But overall I felt thwarted. Nick Hornby is funny, and the laugh moments were a little scarce here. What’s more, the characters are mired in boredom, passivity and loneliness. Hard to make that dramatic. Basically, I feel as if I’d had a craving for a Hostess Twinkie, and tried to distract myself with a granola bar. I’m not hungry any more but I’m not satisfied either.

Hilary Mantel, “A Place of Greater Safety”

Bullet points:

*The French Revolution was very confusing.

*Only the most dedicated readers will persist for 747 pages.

*The Committee of Public Safety was, in some respects, similar to a co-op board or a PTA: factions, alliances, occasional moments of grace.

*Hilary Mantel does, as I’d read in a review somewhere, manage to make Robespierre sympathetic.

*Robespierre said, “History is fiction.”

Well, what novelist wouldn’t want a protagonist like that? As in Wolf Hall, Mantel is very concerned with the power of words. There’s a phrase in the more recent book where Cromwell thinks that writing a law is the ultimate test of the function of the words in it. Here, Danton (a legendary speechmaker) ruminates that “actions are being manufactured out of speech. How can words save a country? Words make myths, it seems, and for their myths people fight to win.”

I had hoped for something a little clearer than A Place of Greater Safety turned out to be. I hoped I would finally be able to slot into place the various forms of government: National Assembly, Legislative Assembly, National Convention, etc. Nope. On the other hand, I will never again forget which one was Danton and which Robespierre, the Incorruptible. And both of these are to some extent outshone by Camille Desmoulins, the volatile, charming journalist who did a great deal to popularize the theory of the revolution. Mantel has him thinking, “Writing’s like running downhill; can’t stop if you want to.” She gives him near-universal sex appeal and flexible sexual morals; a gorgeous wife similarly equipped, and a wicked wit. It’s always nice when an author can make you fall in love with her creation.

Mantel’s contemporary voice was not a surprise this time, and I found it very effective. Managing more characters, she sometimes has them address the reader directly, and sometimes lists dialogue as in a play. The flaw in this book, though, is that it gets hard to wade through. I’m a motivated reader: I finished Simon Schama’s Citizens. But round about page 500, with the length of a normal novel still to go, I flagged. A great deal of the conflict is simply argument. Alliances change, and, sure, lives are at stake but it’s very hard (despite the list of characters at the front) to keep track of who’s who and why being a friend of Brissot’s (or Fabre’s, or, ultimately, Danton’s) was such a bad idea. We know that most of these people will end up on the scaffold anyway.

And then, of course, it’s all pretty depressing. These men began with good intentions and deep affection for each other. They go through loyalty, mutual concern, tolerance, mistrust, suspicion, conciliation, renewed affection, willed indifference. Danton and Desmoulins died on the same day. Robespierre lasted a little bit longer, as one might expect of the cool customer with apparent ice water in his veins. And of course the French Revolution, according to some historians, took another hundred years to play out in its entirety.

 

 

Lionel Davidson, “Kolymsky Heights”

A find, by gum! A friend with good taste recommended Lionel Davidson. Sight unseen, I bought Kolymsky Heights and found it quite satisfying. It’s as if someone had put John Le Carré, Lee Child, and Michael Crichton in a Cuisinart together. True, they didn’t get completely blended, and also true, the best things about each author didn’t quite make it into the recipe. But you know, a literate B+ thriller is definitely good enough for me.

It starts out with Le Carré — why, now that I think of it, in Oxford! What’s present: spycraft. What’s missing: that dark tidal pull of melancholy. We crank the story up very slowly with a great deal of circumstantial detail about the mysterious mail of an Oxford don. Eventually we shift into Lee Child territory, with the introduction of Dr. Johnny Porter, the sulky but brilliant Canadian Indian who has an astounding gift for languages. He gets recruited for a spying task and it turns out that like Child’s Reacher, Porter is up to pretty much any task, including buildng a four-wheel drive vehicle from scratch and casual bare-handed manslaughter. Davidson’s pace — as befits an Englishman born in 1922 — is less heart-pounding than Child’s. But that’s basically OK, we’re having fun with the spycraft.

The Michael Crichton section — and it is a discrete section — is the least interesting. Porter ends up infiltrating a secret Siberian scientific station (I swear there was no way to avoid that alliteration), where groundbreaking experiments have been hijacked for military purposes. My interest flagged. I don’t read Crichton for the science.

Then we’re back into what is effectively an extended chase scene across eastern Siberia at the winter solstice. Need I say that the weather is as much of an enemy as the bad guys?

It’s all very professional. I don’t feel obliged to read another one of Davidson’s books right away, but I’m delighted to know that they exist.

A.S. Byatt, “The Children’s Book”

What an ambitious book this is! And a puzzling one as well. There’s sometimes something quite dull about Byatt’s writing — I think it has to do with the distance she maintains from her characters. And yet it’s also completely absorbing. I found myself thinking a great deal about it and wanting to get back to it when I wasn’t reading it.

The premise is wonderful: Byatt opens with three boys in their teens at the South Kensington Museum, in 1895. Two of the boys are educated, upper-middle class children, and the third is a runaway from the Potteries in central England, camping out in the museum and drawing what he sees. The book is going to be the tale of these children and their families. Byatt points out that in the large families of the era, “relations shifted subtly as new people were born — or indeed, died — and in which a child also had a group identity as ‘one of the older ones’ or ‘one of the younger ones.’” The central clan here is the Wellwood family, the seven surviving children of Humphry and Olive Wellwood, earnest, liberal, and more complicated than they appear.

The novel, 675 pages in hardcover, spans twenty-four years. Do the math: it takes us to 1919. This may be the weakness of the structure. The book is paced with considerable leisure at first (echoing a child’s perception of time?) but speeds up toward the end, when World War I breaks out and the characters who were children in England and Germany at the turn of the century necessarily get caught up in World War I. Most of the men die in the usual places (Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele) and the women serve as VADs or doctors. This material felt unfortunately familiar after the magic of the earlier sections — maybe it was supposed to? Maybe adulthood is just like that? Lord, I hope not.

And perhaps the end suffers mostly in contrast with the earlier sections. I’m not kidding about “magic.” It’s everywhere — in Olive’s tales, in Byatt’s appreciation of the English countryside. Some of the characters are German theater people and puppeteers, providing opportunities for us to experience stage magic. Only a writer as good as Byatt could hope to approximate that art form in words. Yet she is equally insistent about historical context and “real life,” with substantial sections of narrative that set the background for the characters’ actions but read like a textbook. I have to assume this is intentional; possibly we readers are to feel the shift between fiction and fact, in the way her characters toggle between real life and fantasy? There’s certainly a lot of structural doubling going on  – Olive Wellwood grew up in a mining town in the north, many of her tales feature tunnels and underground life, and what were the trenches but another version of muddy claustrophobic horror? The runaway boy in the first scene turns out to be a genius potter, and nearly meets his death buried in the clay of Flanders.

Maybe this is what’s going on: Olive writes a tale for each of her children: each has his or her own book, specially written and bound to suit his or her character. Each has his story. Who writes the story? Who chooses it? Who tells it? How much of it gets told, and to whom? Maybe Byatt’s book is the meta-version, the fiction of all of the children.