A Quiet Flame, Philip Kerr
This is part of Kerr’s Berlin Noir series featuring Bernie Gunther, a detective during the Nazi era. This installment takes us to Argentina, where Gunther has fled because in the previous novel in the series his identity was confused with that of a Nazi. I was vaguely aware that a number of Nazis fled Argentina after the war, but I had no idea of how explicitly the red carpet was rolled out for them. Also, my sense of the Perons was (laughably I know) influenced by the Evita musical (or possibly the film starring Madonna, both of which I haven’t even watched). Anyway, this novel was a good history lesson in that sense. As a detective story it was interesting and fast-paced until Gunther solves the first mystery, even though that too he solved because someone told him to look for someone and that someone turned out to be the person wanted. Then it got ever more complicated, and of course Gunther had to get involved inappropriately with some woman.
Orbital, Samantha Harvey
I didn’t expect to take months to finish this Booker prize-winning novella, but yeah I read it in slivers, savoured it. The novel is told over a 24 hour period during which a international space station-like craft orbits the Earth 16 times. There are six astronauts on board and we are privy to their thoughts – both trivial and profound. There is no plot as such, just meandering thoughts. At one point, one of the astronaut’s mother dies, but she cannot be there for the burial. Another astronaut is preoccupied with a typhoon crashing into Southeast Asia: his thoughts are with a Filipino family he met there. In between there’s something profound about a Velazquez painting.
Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.
They feel space trying to rid them of the notion of days. It says: what’s a day?
From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and the illuminated filament of roads. By day, it’s gone. It hides in plain sight.
Do you know what I’ll look forward to getting back to when the time comes? he says. Things I don’t need, that’s what. Pointlessness. Some pointless ornament on a shelf. A rug. Roman laughs. Not alcohol or sex or – just a rug.
There in his chest is a heart that tilts an pitches. He can keep its beats slow and smooth, quell its habits of fear or panic or impulse, stop it yearning too much for home, curb its unhelpful states of abandon. Calm and steady, clam and steady. Metronome pacing out the breath. Yet still at times it tilts and pitches. It wants what it wants and hopes what it hopes and needs what it needs and loves what it loves.
How are we writing the future of humanity? We’re not writing anything. It’s writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re jut the leaf.
Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford
A noir detective story set in a fictional 1920s American city where the indigenous people are a dominant majority with significant political power. Very satisfying.
London Falling, Patrick Radden Keefe
There was a lot of buzz about this book, and I suggested it for our book club, despite the seemingly depressing subject – the death of a young man, and his parents search for answers. The young man in question – boy really, all of 19 years old – was from a well to do, but not fabulously wealthy family. His parents, after his death, discover he’s hobnobbing with the wealthy by posing as the son of a Russian oligarch.
The first part of the book was fairly triggering for me because it was about the difficulties, and in some ways, unknowableness of teenage boys. Years ago, someone at a dinner party warned me that when boys become teenagers, they become like a black box, and it’s really hard to communicate with them. And as a young mother, whose son is still like a physical extension of her own body, you can’t imagine it, and then your son becomes a teenager. Later in the book, Keefe mentions Anne Frank’s father Otto’s feelings on reading her diary: how he had never known his daughter at all, and so maybe this is just a function of raising children. I was extremely close to my mother growing up and yet, she did not know a lot about my inner world.
Another thing that struck me in the book was the dissonance Russians feel about living in a world where you can’t believe anything. The police will arrest someone and you think, yeah maybe they did, but maybe they didn’t. And you live in this space of never knowing because of the opaqueness and corruption of all the institutions.
In the case of Zac’s death, his parents experienced this to some extent. For one, the London police’s handling of the case was far from ideal. But they also discovered the shadow world of criminals and gangsters that they’ve probably been unwittingly brushing up against but never really registered. By the grace of god, most of us will not actually come face to face with this violent underbelly.
Also, the inadequacies of the criminal justice system. Yes, failing the innocent, but also the release of really violent people, people who seem incapable of reform (at least in the system as it is), people who yes are a product of our society, but are now an extreme danger to it. What does society do with them, when even prison cannot contain them?
In terms of the craft of writing, Zac at the time he died was not very likeable. But because the writer tells us the tale through the eyes of his parents, we see him sympathetically, as a lost boy. Structurally, there’s a lot of background – Idi Amin, Putin whatnot – but it all actually connects back, and although it’s apparently a chonky book, it doesn’t feel like it in the reading. If I have one complaint, it’s that most of the baddies are foreigners – Indians, Russians – and although the book tries to avoid it, the sense is that this is what has contaminated the metropolis in the end.
Brothers in Arms, Lois McMaster Bujold
This is part of Bujold’s Vorkosigan sci-fi saga, starring unlikely hero Miles Vorkosigan. Started out ok and then took a very different turn that upped the plot several notches.
The Examiner, Janice Hallett
Very clever but leaves one cold at the end. The characters are plot devices like everything else. There’s an interesting “moral” at the end that elevates it somewhat.
Good People, Patmeena Shabit
This been on my radar for a while. I was more interested in it because of its portrayal of the Afghan diaspora, but it’s a banger mystery as well. A young woman, the daughter of a wealthy Afghan businessman in Virginia, dies, and the story is essentially trying to piece together what happens. It does so entirely through the viewpoints of other people – members of the Aghan community, neighbours, investigators, lawyers, people who had peripheral contact with the family. We never hear from the girl, Zohra, or her immediate family. Like London Falling, this book touched a nerve because this is about teenagers and how they can suddenly become unknowable to their parents. But it also raises questions about social responsibility, raising children in the diaspora, true crime, and Islamophobia
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