CBR III Week 10: A Certain Justice by PD James

One thing that happened this week was that I managed to slice open my thumb on my new chef's knife that Chandler gave me for my birthday (and that I refused to use for .58 years so it would always be beautiful and new) thereby christening it with my blood. It is ruined now--marred forever--so I will continue to use it to chop vegetables and do other awful, mundane things with its fancy sharpness.

One thing that did not happen this week was me writing 6 reviews. I don't have an excuse, but I do have a fourth review.

A Certain Justice is a murder mystery featuring Commander Adam Dalgliesh, of New Scotland Yard, who has been around for longer than most of the people I know, and maybe that's why he's so competent. This time around, an extremely unpleasant piece of work named Venetia Aldridge (a defense attorney by trade) (and an apparent victim of Classy Naming) has been found dead in her office in Pawlet Court. First of all, do you know about the Courts? It is all very confusing to me, but a defense attorney is still a defense attorney (probably).

Anywhizbang, the murder looks like an inside-the-office job, but initially the strongest suspect is a young man whom Venetia (I KNOW that this isn't a made-up name, but every time I hear it I picture a gondola) defended. Garry Ashe had been accused of killing his aunt, with whom he had been having a creepy incestuous relationship. All incest is creepy, but not all of it involves photographing your prostitute aunt having sex with her johns.

For two novels in a row, PD has featured an incestuous relationship, and what is that about, please?

After Venetia defends Garry successfully, he seduces Venetia's daughter. Venetia obviously flies off the handle, since she suspects that he was guilty, but mostly because she dislikes how it will affect and reflect upon her. In addition to being sort of a terrible mother, Venetia is extremely ambitious and makes enemies of many of her co-workers in her quest to become Head of Pawlet Court. She is also having an affair with a married politician, because obviously.

The feminist that lives in my left ear was sort of unhappy to see a powerful woman in such an unpleasant light, but maybe wielding the kind of power Venetia does requires one to be...ungracious...at times, precisely because one is a woman. Aside from that, I really enjoyed this. It was so, so creepy in its depiction of Garry Ashe, who, if not a sociopath, was definitely deeply disturbed. Also, there's a nice bit of substance under all the plottyness: the novel is very much concerned with the limitations of the justice system in actually administering justice. Defense attorneys, especially, have a strange role to play: their asessment of their clients' guilt has almost nothing to do with the job they must do. Theoretically, they bear no responsibility for the future behavior of the people they get off, and yet, in practice, it's often difficult not to assign them some blame, especially when, like Venetia, they view the law as an intellectual exercise and not as the expression of our deep-seated need for justice. The practice of the law is so cerebral, but to seek justice is so instinctual--a matter at least as much of the heart as the head.

As with all of James's mysteries, the plot is intricate. The solution to the murders (there is a second one half-way through), in keeping with the theme, illustrates the difference between knowing something and being able to prove it. For example, I could still be in my pajamas in the afternoon, but can you prove it? No you cannot. 

This NYTimes review of the book is delightful.

CBR III Week 9: A Feast for Crows by George R R Martin

Since I've already reviewed the Song of Ice and Fire books that preceded this one, I'm not going to rehash all the things I said about the series in general. Instead I'm going to ponder whether it was a mistake to release this book or not. A Feast for Crows is, qualitatively, on par with Martin's other writing, but it's gotten some very middling reviews, because it only follows some of the characters we've grown to know and love (if memory serves, they are: Cersei, Jaime, Brienne of Tarth, Sansa, Arya, some Greyjoys, some Martells, and Samwell). Basically, Martin's manuscript got too long for publication and so it got split up into two volumes, by geography, A Feast for Crows being the first. This would've made sense if the two volumes had actually been published together, or within a year of each other, but instead, Martin took the second of these two volumes and expanded it (?) into a whole new fifth volume bla bla bla, which he's still working on. 

I suppose it made commercial sense to do this, since Martin is a relatively slow writer (not that there's anything wrong with that), and Feast is a nice sop to fans. In the end though, it feels like exactly that: a half-baked attempt to maintain reader loyalty that doesn't necessarily make sense in terms of telling the story. Where is Tyrion, guys? Tyrion is like 95% of the reason I'm reading these books. In addition to the cranky-making absence of a dwarf, the format sacrifices a lot of the dramatic irony that makes the series so delightful. If you happen to be making your way through the series, I would advise you to stop at A Storm of Swords, and wait for the next book in the series to come out before reading Feast.

Of the published volumes, I think the first and third are the most effective because they each contain events that are major game changers. They read like Greek plays: their tragedies are on that scale. A Feast for Crows doesn't do much more than build up momentum. 

Can I get a slow clap for the Arya storyline, though? She gets more emotionally complex with every chapter. Martin has made her transition into adulthood painful and fascinating, and I love that there's this potential that she'll grow up to be somewhat of a monster (like "sociopath", not like "Godzilla"). Talk about high stakes.

CBR III Week 8: In the Woods by Tana French

This book left me feeling, I don't know, maybe bereft is the word? Having read Faithful Place and Even Stevens's review of In the Woods, I knew I wasn't going to have a run-of-the-mill mystery on my hands, and In the Woods did not disappoint. The story has lingered in my head even weeks after I finished reading it.

As I've written before, one of the reasons I find mysteries so lovely and fun to read is because much of the time, the character I'm most attached to is fundamentally separate from the central drama of the story. Even when the detective or whatever is in danger, you sort of know that for the story to continue he or she needs to be ok, right? At the end of the story there's usually a putting-everything-in-its-placeness that makes me feel like a little kid picking up my toys at the end of an afternoon of play. French takes our assumptions of safety and just totally crushes them. To great effect! To survive is not necessarily to be alright and to look for answers is not necessarily to find them.

Let me tell you what the book is about, before I continue to make vague, mysterious pronouncements: a young girl's body is found at an archeological site outside the village of Knocknaree, which itself is a detached suburb of Dublin built in the seventies in some sort of developers-gone-wild frenzy. Two detectives from Dublin's elite murder squad are assigned to the case: Cassie Maddox (a fantastically realized female character, can I just mention that? no wonder she's the star of French's second novel) and Rob Ryan. As it turns out, Ryan himself grew up in Knocknaree, and was probably the only survivor of three children who went missing there in the eighties. He was known as Adam Ryan then, and after his two friends disappeared (never to be seen again), he was found clinging to a tree in the woods outside Knocknaree, his shoes soaked in blood and his memory wiped utterly clean of whatever horror he may have witnessed. Rob keeps his past a secret, even when he becomes involved in the investigation of the newer murder. He's drawn to the new case (inevitably, one feels) and for the first time in his life, he is forced to come to terms with how his childhood experience shaped him.

One thing I like to do when I really enjoy a book is to go on Amazon and read people's reviews of it, so I can feel vindication and contempt for other readers, in turn, depending on whether they agree with me or not. Obviously! So without going into details that will spoil this book for you, I will say that there's controversy all up in the ratings, but that's because French doesn't treat her characters like toys. Like any really good writer, she's willing to make her characters face the one un-faceable thing in their lives (and isn't that why we read good books?); she doesn't seem content with low stakes or facile endings.

My one little quibble: at times, this book was maybe a little over-written, especially when compared to Faithful Place. French is such a sensuous writer that it's probably inevitable that her prose occasionally gets a little overwrought. It's interesting to see how French is evolving, and I for one am looking forward to reading more of her stuff.

CBR III Week 7: Death in Holy Orders by PD James

Lately, I sit down to write things and before I can put a single word down, I look to my left and see my new nail polish and decide to paint all my nails jade green, because why not? I love jade green!

Anyway, my goal is to post a review every day this week and clear my backlog of books I've been meaning to write about.

I read PD James’s Death in Holy Orders so many weeks ago that it was still snowing then or something, probably. It’s a mystery, or did you get that from the d-word in the title? Specifically, it’s a mystery set in a remote Anglican theological college called St. Anselm’s. When I say remote, what I mean is that this place is like ten years from falling into the sea off East Anglia and when that happens exactly no one will notice. Adam Dalgliesh, James’s great poet/detective, visits St. Anselm’s one weekend to unofficially look into the mysterious death of one of the ordinands, at the request of his wealthy father. Dalgliesh’s weekend visit throws him together with a number of characters that are both temporary and permanent fixtures at the college, several of whom may have had motives for murder. Shortly after Dalgliesh’s arrival, another murder occurs, and Scotland Yard launches an official investigation into the people at St. Anselm’s.

There’s something so workmanlike about PD James’s writing. I can’t call to mind many writers who are quite so clear or self-effacing; she writes with so little ego. If I’m honest, I have to admit that I prefer this kind of writing to something highly stylized—there’s a wonderfully honest plainness to it: an understandability and accessibility that are possible, I think, only when a writer has great confidence in herself and her skills. So quietly authoritative is her voice that it allows her to insert any number of unlikely coincidences and subplots into the story without stretching believability. So, Adam Dalgliesh spent several summers in the seminary as a boy. So, one of the characters just happened to write down the thing that gets her killed in a diary (not a spoiler, actually!). Well, of course. In James’s hands it all seems sort of inevitable.

This is very much in the tradition of a British pre-war country house mystery, in that there’s a limited number of suspects, and the murderer must be found among them. It’s an interesting update on that concept actually, as it is profoundly concerned with elitism and tradition, and the cultural upending England has undergone since WWII, which has endangered both, for better and worse. 

James had me right up to the very end. I had only one real problem with this book, but it’s a bit of a doozy. Without giving anything away, I had a hard time buying the murderer’s motivations for what he had done. I’ve recently finished another of James’s books (A Certain Justice), and in both the motive for murder is quite similar, and the murderers are characters that remain rather hazy to us, but the difference in believability is enormous. In the case of Death in Holy Orders, it feels as if, at the end, James had to fit the character to the plot, rather than the plot to the characters, which gives the whole story an unfortunate mechanical quality: it fails to convince us that it’s more than a cleverly constructed puzzle, and so lacks the power to move us.

CBR III Weeks 4,5, and 6: A Song of Ice and Fire Books 1-3 by George R.R. Martin

I picked Game of Thrones up as a direct result of all the attention the forthcoming HBO series has been getting on Pajiba, and I’ve been (mostly) really pleased. So much so that I read the next two books in the series (A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords) right after. Song of Ice and Fire is a high-medieval fantasy about the descent of a kingdom (Westeros) into civil war even as it’s threatened by malevolent outsiders, including the Others (ice zombies!), and the arrival of a years-long winter. At the beginning of the story, King Robert—who himself snatched the throne from its previous rightful holder—dies under suspicious circumstances, and two noble houses (the Starks and Lannisters) enter into contest for the Iron Throne. Other would-be kings emerge and soon enough, chaos rules.

Martin hasn’t reinvented the wheel or anything, when it comes to fantasy fiction, but he’s put together a great story in these first volumes of what is really an as yet unfinished mega-novel. In a lot of ways, Westeros feels like it was cobbled together from a catalog of fantasy fiction clichés: there’s the Wall-Type Thing Behind Which Evil and Blight Reside (which you may recognize from Lords of the Rings, or Robert Jordan’s work), there are dragons, there are humanoid beings, and magic. At times, Martin’s commitment to creating an original world can feel a little half-hearted. He’s no Tolkien, you know? But—and this is what’s so great about Martin—it doesn’t matter, because that’s not what the story is about. It’s all about the human drama: the machinations of men and women obsessed with power, the drive to survive, the need to avenge. They could be Tudors. Setting his story in a fantastical world merely serves to liberate him from the strictures of our own history.

There isn’t one character in here that is purely good. Honorable characters are often very foolish, and even many “evil” characters have their odd moments of introspection and kindness. My allegiances changed about as often as the characters’—which is to say constantly—and by the end, I don’t think there was a single person that I had cheered for throughout. Except Tyrion. Tyrion could shake a baby, and I’d still like him. Just as surprising as Martin’s willingness to make his characters complex and unlovable is his willingness to kill them. Even the POV ones*. DUN DUN DUN. It’s that kind of story.  

As a writer (in the technical sense of the word), Martin is serviceable. If he could have used a stricter editor to cut down on purple prose and the occasional pointless digression, well, at least he isn’t constantly repeating himself. I like that: I think it speaks to a certain amount of respect and trust in the reader that is often lacking in genre fiction. In Robert Jordan’s books, for example, about 20% of the text could probably be eliminated if Jordan hadn’t assumed we were all suffering from a tragic case of short-term memory loss. Martin ends almost every chapter at a moment of suspense, which is cheap, but effective. The chapters are short, so I didn’t mind so much.

I’d like to address the question of sex for a second: there’s a lot of it (especially in Game of Thrones), and I would argue that a lot of it is written to titillate, rather than to develop the story. Is the sex part of character development? Absolutely. Did I need every last sexy detail of a thirteen-year-old girl’s…um…rape? No. Frankly, it’s distracting. It’s probably more of a problem of style than the actual content. I’m kind of creeped out by the sense that Martin really enjoyed writing all the sex…it’s like a stranger on the bus telling you all about his fantasy involving a peep-toe heel and a lizard named Elmo, and that’s awkward. Even if it is informative.

I recommend this, overall, if you really like fantasy as a genre, and I can’t wait to see what HBO does with it.

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*I’m the kind of loser who needs to know exactly which character is going to die, or I get so anxious that I can’t enjoy the book. Am I alone in this?

CBR III Weeks 2 and 3: Gorky Park and Spending

Long time no see, Cannonballers. I’ve been awfully lazy lately, when it comes to blogging, but today, to make it up, I’ll be reviewing two books: Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park and Mary Gordon’s Spending. And yes, I will be using all the Russian words I know.

Fist up is Gorky Park: a murder mystery set in Brezhnev’s USSR. The titular Gorky Park is a real park in Moscow, where three corpses are discovered one spring. They’ve been shot and mutilated so as to preclude easy identification and, as it turns out, they’ve been hidden under the snow for several months. Chief investigator Arkady Renko is assigned to the case.

Renko is a man born to the nomeklatura, who rejects the advantages conferred on him by parentage. For reasons that remain sketchy (although I guess his father does seem like an asshole of the first water), he’s extremely skeptical of bureaucracy, which in his experience always devolves into rule by lowest common denominator. He abhors the amount of hypocrisy he’s expected to spout, so while backstabbing apparatchik flourish, Renko’s career has stalled.

Renko’s insistence on the primacy of truth is his tragic flaw, and the closer he gets to solving a case no one wants solved, the more it costs him, personally. Still he persists. Renko is in no danger of going down as one of literature’s phenomenal detectives; every revelation feels deeply earned and he goes down more wrong tracks than right ones. The mystery itself is involving and complicated enough that unraveling motivations is as interesting as figuring out what actually happened. I’m not going to spoil things by going into specifics like Wikipedia (thanks a lot, guy who gave away the end of the book in the character description, when all I wanted was to remember Recurring Marginal Character #347), but suffice it to say that in communist Russia, the mystery solves you.

(Nyet! YOU are more tired that Britney Spears’s weave. Whatever, let’s not fight.)   

Reading this is in 2010, it feels like a time-capsule: a glimpse into the paranoia, disorientation, and disillusionment that dominated the Soviet 1980s. Cruz Smith has a lot to say about police states in general, but he never makes the mistake of letting it shape his story, and the picture he paints of Moscow is full of vivid detail, idiosyncrasy, and even affection.  Here are shabby offices, dim apartments, cheap cigarettes, bad marriages, and Russian cold so vividly evoked that I kept wanting to crawl under a blanket.

Which is why it’s so unfortunate that the story goes totally off the rails about 2/3rds of the way through. There’s a location change (to the USA!), which really took the zip out of the story. His descriptions of NY don’t live up to what he does with Moscow (of course, I’ve never been to Moscow, so maybe that’s the difference). And the ultimate answer to the mystery, when it comes, is sort of disappointing. Still, worth a read if you’re curious about the later Soviet era.

My second review is for Spending, which was a book I read for school. It’s about a middle-aged woman painter who meets a man—whom she calls B—who offers to be her muse. Not only does he want to inspire her, he also wants to offer her financial assistance, so that she can give up her teaching job and devote herself to painting full-time. Complications arise almost immediately when they jump into bed about ten minutes after meeting.

I read this book in the context of a class about writing sex into stories. Spending is about sex (alooooot of sex), but it’s also about creativity, and a woman’s relationship with her work. It charts the confluence of all of Monica Szabo’s passions. It starts with a sexual encounter, and sex is both the catalyst and inspiration for a series of paintings that make Monica’s reputation as an artist. Sex very much defines character: Monica’s sense of joyful abandon during the first sex scene, which surprises even her, is part of our first impression of her. Although we’ve only been acquainted with the character for a few pages, it’s clear that something important is changing for her (“In the morning when I woke up, I was shocked” she tells us). Throughout the novel, the sex Monica has reflects her needs, her frustrations with her work, and the necessary selfishness--maybe even narcissism--she has to assume in order to finish her project. And that project is in itself about sex: she sets out to paint a series of post-coital men modeled on great classical paintings of Jesus shortly after the crucifixion. She draws a direct line from religious ecstasy to sexual abandon.  

This all sounds very cerebral—and Monica is a clever, engaging narrator—but it all ends up being really lightweight, because there isn’t any real conflict. As soon as anyone has a problem, it’s already been solved. B loses all his money about halfway through the book, but hey, look! Monica’s rich now and she loves him. This isn’t even a spoiler—it’s part of the jacket copy. Without a sense of risk and danger, the story turns frothy and inconsequential despite its interesting, unconventional narrator, like chick lit for smart women. It’s the kind of book that you should definitely read if you find it in someone’s bathroom and you’re super-bored of their party.

Next up: A Game of Thrones 

CBR III Week 1: Tana French’s Faithful Place

This is my very first Cannonball III Review, and right off the bat, let me make a confession: I didn’t read this. I listened to it instead. I hope you all don’t mind, but my commute is ridiculous and a girl can only listen to so many NPR stories about genocide/plagues/the endtimes before she begins to get depressed. For me, it’s more like National Panicking-quietly-in-my-car Radio, but I digress.

So: literary mystery set in Dublin. Undercover detective Frank Mackey is forced to return to the home he ran away from decades before when a mysterious suitcase is discovered in a neighboring abandoned house. Mackey’s childhood home—where his parents and older brother still live—is located in a cul-de-sac called Faithful Place: a claustrophobic place full of the kinds of characters that can only be played for laughs or tragedy. It’s the kind of little neighborhood where everyone is drunk, unhappy, or desperately oblivious.  Anyway, perhaps the most defining choice of Frank’s life was to leave Faithful Place, but the appearance of the suitcase (or, rather, what he discovers subsequently) completely changes how he perceives the events that lead up to him making that choice. As the bodies pile up, Frank is drawn further and further into “the bubbling cauldron of crazy that is the Mackeys at their finest”, and is forced to confront the history he’s been avoiding for so long. And what a history it is. French has an enormous gift for making every character feel alive, their wrinkles well-earned, their traumas and disappointments important in our judgments of who they are and what they have done. The result is that what could easily be a melodramatic story about the way violence taints its victims feels wholly original. There’s a once-beautiful, abusive, alcoholic father figure—that old standby—and even that feels fresh.

One of the most surprising things about the way this novel was put together is that we’re given the answer to the mystery about halfway through, but French actually shows us Frank and the other characters dealing with the fallout of what has happened. It’s a rare thing and a great part of the book’s success that the detective character is so invested in the results of what he’s investigating. The more he learns about who his family was and is, the more difficult his position becomes. There’s an awful sense of the real consequence of violence: that, unlike you or Hercule Poirot, the characters in the story are never going to be able to walk away from what has happened.

For next week, I’m trying to finish Great Expectations*, and I think I’ll end this with a little Pip:  “What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the natural sunlight from the misty yellow rooms?”

*(No, not because Oprah said to.)

200 Word Review: Andrea Camilleri’s The Terracotta Dog (audiobook)

I listened to this on my way down to Florida, the sunshine-induced-headache state. Chandler thought it was just ok, but that’s because he reads mysteries for the suspense and surprise, while I read them for food and place descriptions. I mean, I love a puzzle and some DANGER, but the ambiance is what really makes it or breaks it. The setting was $money$, even if you could see the ending coming from, basically, page 3. I’ve been to Sicily, where I stepped in dog poop 134,986 times, and I kind of disliked it, but this book makes me want to give it a second shot. Right in the head!

Sorry, the book was full of that kind of humor. Something happened when I heard this book read out loud: the dialogue became super-embarrassing. I don’t know why it didn’t bother me in print; it’s all either corny or melodramatic. After a little while you get used to it, though, like living with someone who farts in public. It’s kind of catching, actually. I mean the language, not the farting. I think at one point I was like “We’re low on gas. What has become of us? We’re the empty shells of the people who left Charlotte. GET IT? IT IS A PUN. I AM PULLING INTO A SHELL STATION.”