Heda Margolius Kovaly's Under A Cruel Star is not a work of crime fiction, although it is full of terrible acts perpetrated by individuals against others. Unfortunately, the Holocaust, and the repressive regimes supported by the Soviet Union in post-World War Two Eastern Europe are all too real, and they happened to millions and millions of innocent victims. This is the true story of Heda Kovaly's Innocence.
The Holocaust only gets about a chapter here, and Kovaly's time in Auschwitz is completely left out. She is sent to the ghetto at Lodz, Poland, in 1941, and from there to various concentration camps. She manages to escape from a forced march at the end of the war, and returns to Prague while it is still occupied by the Germans. She survives this hell - barely, the book is as much about the anguish of survival as it is about the hell of the camps - only to find herself and her young family immersed in the stranger-than-fiction world of Soviet-style communism. Her husband, a true believer, became a government functionary. Kovaly herself never bought into the ideology, although she wanted to believe in a better future for her beloved Czechoslovakia.
"That I myself did not succumb to the lure of ideology was certainly not because I was smarter than Rudolf but because I was a woman, a being much closer to the reality and the basic things of life than he was. I was more interested in what was happening around me in the present, among the people I loved, than in the foggy spheres of ideology. Rudolf could decide on the basis of statistics - mostly falsified of course - that under communism people lived a better and happier life. I saw from close-up and with my own eyes that this was not true." (65)
For his belief in science, and search for a better way, Rudolf is caught up in a web of denunciations related to someone else, imprisoned, tried, found guilty, and executed. Barely a decade later, he and others who were killed as part of this show trial were exonerated, reluctantly, by the government. This is the story of his wife's survival. It is truly a memoir, much in her head, an outpouring of memories that need to be on paper to be preserved. It is harrowing, depressing, unbelievable, and all too real.
When you read this account, you will realize how much of Innocence is drawn from Kovaly's life, and how the isolation of the survivor and the pariah are so similar. Shortly after her initial return to Prague, Kovaly wanders the city, desperately searching for a place to stay that will not betray a friend to the occupying authorities. Near the end of her rope she goes to the last person she can think of.
"I walked up and down in front of the house for a while. I had decided that I would not try to see anyone else. Ruda would not be home anyway. He might not eve live here anymore. Some Germans might have requisitioned his apartment. It was dangerous and hopeless. Still, I wanted to do something: to walk, to think, to see, to postpone death for just a little bit longer. To have someone talk to me. To feel for one more moment that I still belonged to humanity." (36)
Kovaly's survival instinct is her need for connection with other humans, but not just face time, she needs actual engagement, grounded in honesty and respect. Is that so much to ask?, is really the theme here. She does find it, and goes on to lead a long life in the US, even living here in Our Fair City for a time. But her Soviet Prague, even if less violent, is darker and more frightening than William Ryan's Soviet Union - because of course it is real. Under A Cruel Star is not crime fiction, but true crime.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Saturday, June 13, 2015
The Darkening Field
Oops I did it again. It turns out that William Ryan's The Darkening Field (Minotaur Books, 2011, The Bloody Meadow in the UK) is the second, not the third, in his engaging series set in Stalinist Russia. (Those are two words you don't expect to find in the same sentence - Stalinist and engaging - but it's true, this is the kind of book I really look forward to reading at the end of the day.) Regular readers will recall that I liked The Holy Field enough to read The Twelfth Department pretty quickly afterwards, and while I had some quibbles with the latter, I couldn't and still can't argue with Ryan's vivid depiction of the era or his likable hero, Capt. Alexey Dimitrieyvich Korolev.
But reading out of order? The wheels are coming off!
But I digress. In The Darkening Field, Our Hero is assigned to investigate the suicide of a young woman on a film set near Odessa. Why is this Moscow detective assigned to a case so very far away? Because the victim had a cozy relationship with a very highly placed individual in the feared State security apparatus NKVD, and Korolev, having proved himself trustworthy in that case about the icons, is the only man capable of ferreting out the truth and handling it discreetly.* Of course, Korolev also knows that if he gets it wrong, he is likely to end up in a cell at the Lubyanka or worse. Trust, in 1930s USSR, is a close-run thing.
Setting and historical detail are Ryan's strong suit, and you can learn a little bit about why he chose the Soviet film industry as the backdrop for this tale from his Author's Note and more on his website. The film crew - Ukrainfilm, the whole thing modeled loosely on Eisenstadt and his crowd - is working in a small village near Odessa, and is housed at a local agricultural college. But this is no University of Wisconsin-Stout, rather this college has taken over a former great estate that used to belong to an elite family, vanished, of course, in the Revolution. The fading pre-Revolutionary glamour of the grounds adds enormously to the atmosphere, but it also makes you feel a little guilty like when you read about the antebellum South, and think, that sounds like a lovely house, but right, slavery. So go the elite everywhere, although the Russian aristocracy arguably had it a lot worse than Southern slaveholders. In any case, no one is too concerned about their loss.
Ryan chooses instead to concentrate on the ugly side of collectivization in the Ukraine - the famine and destruction and death in the name of wiping out the bourgeoisie, then the peasants' retaliation against the State forces, and their subsequent crackdown and reprisal. It was a terrible cycle that relatively few locals survived, and that left parts of the region scorched and empty and nursing their grievances until an opportunity for revenge presented itself.
"Korolev had heard rumors of what had happened in the Urkraine in 'thirty-two and 'thirty-three - dangerous words heard late at night from sodleirs who'd had too much to drink in the Arbat Cellar. How the Red Army and the NKVD hard forced the peasant to give up ever scrap of food and ho, faced with starvation, they had resisted, futilely, and the shoulders of the Chekists had shot them down. The car passed more than one smoke-blackened church, their domes charred black skeletons, and each village was dotted with roofless ruined buildings. Korolev couldn't help but notice that the few hunched peasant he saw seemed older than their probable years, with barely the energy to lift their feet from the ground." (41)
Now we are all too familiar with the brutal excesses of the Stalinist era, but in 1937 you only knew about it if you'd lived it, and that is the key to this story. And if you know your European history, you also know that there are some folks in Germany around then who were happy to exploit any fissures in the Communist monolith, to serve their own ends. Odessa being a port town, there are plenty of opportunities for illegitimate transfer of information and material (read: espionage and sabotage), so that factors in here as well. It would give away the story to say more, but I'll just note that allegiances - of all kinds - are not always what they appear.
But here is the thing about Revolutionary excess. As we've seen in so many of these detectives-in-repressive-regime stories, such behavior allows Our Hero to maintain his Revolutionary ideals while decrying the horrific acts perpetrated in its name. Communism is awesome except when Stalin does it, and then you'd better be careful that you aren't distantly related to a counterrevolutionary or you may find yourself in Siberia at best, or with a bullet in your back. Ryan adds a twist to the trope, by including a recurring role in his books for the Thieves, the famed precursor to the current Russian Mafia. Their colorful leader, Count Kolya, also trusts Korolev, and lends a hand in an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend kind of way. Of course, the Thieves hate any government, so this isn't so much anti-totalitarianism as it is self-preservation on their part. Korolev gets a sidekick here, too, a plucky Odessa cop named Slivka who just happens to be related to the Thieves. She's tough, wears a leather jacket, and looks the other way when he inadvertently references the Holy Mother. Ryan deploys an array of characters who have private reservations about the regime, but do what they need to do to survive. It makes it easy to like a story, but you might wonder how long this theme can be sustained? When will Korolev's private humanity be denounced? Or will it just wear away, unable to withstand the constant tension of living in a world where simply "asking the question seemed to risk turning the suspicion into fact," and the fact could get you killed. (244) Today's New York Times has a review of Rosemary Sullivan's Stalin's Daughter. Having lived in the belly of one of the most repressive regimes in modern history, it is no wonder that Svetlana Alliluyeva has some issues. Granted, her relationship with Stalin was rather different from Korolev's but it makes you wonder about the emotional toll from walking that tightrope.
*Because as everyone knows, a suicide of a character connected to another prominent character in any story is never a suicide! But as
But reading out of order? The wheels are coming off!
But I digress. In The Darkening Field, Our Hero is assigned to investigate the suicide of a young woman on a film set near Odessa. Why is this Moscow detective assigned to a case so very far away? Because the victim had a cozy relationship with a very highly placed individual in the feared State security apparatus NKVD, and Korolev, having proved himself trustworthy in that case about the icons, is the only man capable of ferreting out the truth and handling it discreetly.* Of course, Korolev also knows that if he gets it wrong, he is likely to end up in a cell at the Lubyanka or worse. Trust, in 1930s USSR, is a close-run thing.
Setting and historical detail are Ryan's strong suit, and you can learn a little bit about why he chose the Soviet film industry as the backdrop for this tale from his Author's Note and more on his website. The film crew - Ukrainfilm, the whole thing modeled loosely on Eisenstadt and his crowd - is working in a small village near Odessa, and is housed at a local agricultural college. But this is no University of Wisconsin-Stout, rather this college has taken over a former great estate that used to belong to an elite family, vanished, of course, in the Revolution. The fading pre-Revolutionary glamour of the grounds adds enormously to the atmosphere, but it also makes you feel a little guilty like when you read about the antebellum South, and think, that sounds like a lovely house, but right, slavery. So go the elite everywhere, although the Russian aristocracy arguably had it a lot worse than Southern slaveholders. In any case, no one is too concerned about their loss.
Ryan chooses instead to concentrate on the ugly side of collectivization in the Ukraine - the famine and destruction and death in the name of wiping out the bourgeoisie, then the peasants' retaliation against the State forces, and their subsequent crackdown and reprisal. It was a terrible cycle that relatively few locals survived, and that left parts of the region scorched and empty and nursing their grievances until an opportunity for revenge presented itself.
"Korolev had heard rumors of what had happened in the Urkraine in 'thirty-two and 'thirty-three - dangerous words heard late at night from sodleirs who'd had too much to drink in the Arbat Cellar. How the Red Army and the NKVD hard forced the peasant to give up ever scrap of food and ho, faced with starvation, they had resisted, futilely, and the shoulders of the Chekists had shot them down. The car passed more than one smoke-blackened church, their domes charred black skeletons, and each village was dotted with roofless ruined buildings. Korolev couldn't help but notice that the few hunched peasant he saw seemed older than their probable years, with barely the energy to lift their feet from the ground." (41)
Now we are all too familiar with the brutal excesses of the Stalinist era, but in 1937 you only knew about it if you'd lived it, and that is the key to this story. And if you know your European history, you also know that there are some folks in Germany around then who were happy to exploit any fissures in the Communist monolith, to serve their own ends. Odessa being a port town, there are plenty of opportunities for illegitimate transfer of information and material (read: espionage and sabotage), so that factors in here as well. It would give away the story to say more, but I'll just note that allegiances - of all kinds - are not always what they appear.
But here is the thing about Revolutionary excess. As we've seen in so many of these detectives-in-repressive-regime stories, such behavior allows Our Hero to maintain his Revolutionary ideals while decrying the horrific acts perpetrated in its name. Communism is awesome except when Stalin does it, and then you'd better be careful that you aren't distantly related to a counterrevolutionary or you may find yourself in Siberia at best, or with a bullet in your back. Ryan adds a twist to the trope, by including a recurring role in his books for the Thieves, the famed precursor to the current Russian Mafia. Their colorful leader, Count Kolya, also trusts Korolev, and lends a hand in an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend kind of way. Of course, the Thieves hate any government, so this isn't so much anti-totalitarianism as it is self-preservation on their part. Korolev gets a sidekick here, too, a plucky Odessa cop named Slivka who just happens to be related to the Thieves. She's tough, wears a leather jacket, and looks the other way when he inadvertently references the Holy Mother. Ryan deploys an array of characters who have private reservations about the regime, but do what they need to do to survive. It makes it easy to like a story, but you might wonder how long this theme can be sustained? When will Korolev's private humanity be denounced? Or will it just wear away, unable to withstand the constant tension of living in a world where simply "asking the question seemed to risk turning the suspicion into fact," and the fact could get you killed. (244) Today's New York Times has a review of Rosemary Sullivan's Stalin's Daughter. Having lived in the belly of one of the most repressive regimes in modern history, it is no wonder that Svetlana Alliluyeva has some issues. Granted, her relationship with Stalin was rather different from Korolev's but it makes you wonder about the emotional toll from walking that tightrope.
*Because as everyone knows, a suicide of a character connected to another prominent character in any story is never a suicide! But as
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Innocence
Innocence, by Heda Margolius Kovaly, is a pretty good work of noir crime fiction. But Kovaly's own story is what really keeps the book in your hands. This "new" work from the Soho Crime Club (first published in Czech in 1985, translated and published in English by Soho Crime, 2015) is both a personal story and an homage to genre.
The author's son Ivan wrote the introduction to this edition of Innocence and you might find it the most interesting part of the book. Certainly it is as at least as dramatic and thought-provoking as the fictional events. Kovaly, author of the well-known holocaust memoir Under A Cruel Star (Plunkett Lake Press, 1986) was a Jewish woman living in Prague when the Second World War rolled over Europe. She survived deportation to the Lodz ghetto in Poland and subsequent transfer to Auschwitz, and managed to find her husband and her way back to Prague at the end of the war, participating in the Prague uprising (you can get all these historical details and more through the ol' google, or just by reading the introduction, which is my source. ) and the subsequent installation of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Then things went downhill. Her husband was falsely accused of some crime against the state, and executed along with ten others in an infamous show trial in the mid-1950s. Heda eventually remarried, and took up work as a literary translator. She made her way to the US in 1968, to Our Fair City, in fact, where she worked at the Law School library and continued her translation career. Why is this important? Because among the many literary luminaries whose works she translated was Raymond Chandler, whom everyone knows was one of the leading lights of mid-20th c. American crime fiction. Kovaly was inspired by Chandler to try her hand at crime fiction, and Innocence is the result.
We call this fiction, and it is, but it won't take you long to see through the thin veneer of Helena's story and understand that is strongly based on Heda's own. While there is a murder at the beginning, and another at the end, in many ways these events are only tangential to the complex web of spying and secrets and above all lies that tie these brief-but-sharply-drawn characters together. There are so many of them (and their names are surely difficult to pronounce what with lots of Czech characters), and essential characteristics are revealed only at the end of a chapter - in a sort-of a HA so HE is sleeping with HER style - that it is a challenge to keep them straight. Most have just a few distinguishing characteristics, and everyone, with the exception of Helena, is spying on someone else. Why they are spying, you never learn, only to whom they've been reporting their non-findings. This is critical to understanding this book, which I can only assume is an accurate representation of life in a Stalinist state. Toward the end, everyone attends a funeral of another character, and as they stand around the coffin, "Each of them was so different from the others that if anyone had been able to see into their thoughts, they would never have guessed that they represented the same person. As is true for all of us, Mrs. Kourimska's innermost self was cut into a thousand facets and everyone who knew her found at least one of them that reflected what they were looking for, based on their own personalities." (202)
It is only into the mind of Helena that you go farther. Surely only someone who has been through the agony of a loved ones' false imprisonment could write so searingly about loneliness. "Maybe it didn't matter so much what people said to each other. The reason we talk isn't to share nuggets of wisdom, but to pause a moment in our flight through life, to make a connection, reassure ourselves we've got something in common - a human word, a human voice. Also, when you talk to another person, you think differently than when you talk to yourself. Maybe words, any t all, directed to someone else, are an act of love in a way. When I talk to you, I enter your life and you enter mine. We share our worlds with each other." (46) It is kind of obvious logic, nothing you haven't thought of before, but in the context of Helena's situation it resonates with an almost unbearable poignancy.
Now, the Chandler/noir piece is present, and perhaps a touch distracting at first. There are hard-boiled characters, and sex, and dark streets, and tough talk like this exchange:
" 'Well, that was a smooth move getting her into the Horizon [that is the movie theater where most of the story takes place]. She pounced on it like a wildcat. Sure, it looks suspicious, but it might not mean anything. When a gal's man is in the clink, she's happy to take the first job that comes along. Bur any way you slice it, I've got nothing to report.'
'Well, see to it that you do. And pronto. Remember, sweetie, you've got a lot to lose. I've been satisfied in the past, but things're dragging a bit this time. And when I say you've got a lot to lose, I don't just mean this flat.' " (52)
I don't love it, and it feels a bit forced at times (could that be the translation? I find that is often the case with any work in translation), but after a while the novelty of the language recedes and the central themes of deceit/honesty and guilt/innocence come to the fore.
While I've not read any Chandler (I know! And I call myself a crime fiction enthusiast, shame.) I can't imagine that he'd be able to pull off a scene like the one toward the end of the book, where you are not quite sure if Helena is going to end it all.
"She fell asleep in her clothes on the couch, with one hand under her head. All night long, drops slid from the pools in her eyes on to the coarse cloth of the upholstery, but gradually the deep lines around her mouth faded.
The snow outside the window thickened, lofting up with the wind, the flakes dancing and swirling in all their sparkling glory, until finally they fell to the ground and transformed into mud.
But every now and then one of them got caught on a tree branch or in a crack between the centuries-old tiles of the Mala Strana rooftops, so even though the snowfall lasted just a while, some glittering touches of white remained tucked away till morning, when the people began to emerge form their homes into the new day, into the same old aimless wandering." (208-9)
You might say that Kovaly never did write crime fiction, just true crime - crimes against humanity.
The author's son Ivan wrote the introduction to this edition of Innocence and you might find it the most interesting part of the book. Certainly it is as at least as dramatic and thought-provoking as the fictional events. Kovaly, author of the well-known holocaust memoir Under A Cruel Star (Plunkett Lake Press, 1986) was a Jewish woman living in Prague when the Second World War rolled over Europe. She survived deportation to the Lodz ghetto in Poland and subsequent transfer to Auschwitz, and managed to find her husband and her way back to Prague at the end of the war, participating in the Prague uprising (you can get all these historical details and more through the ol' google, or just by reading the introduction, which is my source. ) and the subsequent installation of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Then things went downhill. Her husband was falsely accused of some crime against the state, and executed along with ten others in an infamous show trial in the mid-1950s. Heda eventually remarried, and took up work as a literary translator. She made her way to the US in 1968, to Our Fair City, in fact, where she worked at the Law School library and continued her translation career. Why is this important? Because among the many literary luminaries whose works she translated was Raymond Chandler, whom everyone knows was one of the leading lights of mid-20th c. American crime fiction. Kovaly was inspired by Chandler to try her hand at crime fiction, and Innocence is the result.
We call this fiction, and it is, but it won't take you long to see through the thin veneer of Helena's story and understand that is strongly based on Heda's own. While there is a murder at the beginning, and another at the end, in many ways these events are only tangential to the complex web of spying and secrets and above all lies that tie these brief-but-sharply-drawn characters together. There are so many of them (and their names are surely difficult to pronounce what with lots of Czech characters), and essential characteristics are revealed only at the end of a chapter - in a sort-of a HA so HE is sleeping with HER style - that it is a challenge to keep them straight. Most have just a few distinguishing characteristics, and everyone, with the exception of Helena, is spying on someone else. Why they are spying, you never learn, only to whom they've been reporting their non-findings. This is critical to understanding this book, which I can only assume is an accurate representation of life in a Stalinist state. Toward the end, everyone attends a funeral of another character, and as they stand around the coffin, "Each of them was so different from the others that if anyone had been able to see into their thoughts, they would never have guessed that they represented the same person. As is true for all of us, Mrs. Kourimska's innermost self was cut into a thousand facets and everyone who knew her found at least one of them that reflected what they were looking for, based on their own personalities." (202)
It is only into the mind of Helena that you go farther. Surely only someone who has been through the agony of a loved ones' false imprisonment could write so searingly about loneliness. "Maybe it didn't matter so much what people said to each other. The reason we talk isn't to share nuggets of wisdom, but to pause a moment in our flight through life, to make a connection, reassure ourselves we've got something in common - a human word, a human voice. Also, when you talk to another person, you think differently than when you talk to yourself. Maybe words, any t all, directed to someone else, are an act of love in a way. When I talk to you, I enter your life and you enter mine. We share our worlds with each other." (46) It is kind of obvious logic, nothing you haven't thought of before, but in the context of Helena's situation it resonates with an almost unbearable poignancy.
Now, the Chandler/noir piece is present, and perhaps a touch distracting at first. There are hard-boiled characters, and sex, and dark streets, and tough talk like this exchange:
" 'Well, that was a smooth move getting her into the Horizon [that is the movie theater where most of the story takes place]. She pounced on it like a wildcat. Sure, it looks suspicious, but it might not mean anything. When a gal's man is in the clink, she's happy to take the first job that comes along. Bur any way you slice it, I've got nothing to report.'
'Well, see to it that you do. And pronto. Remember, sweetie, you've got a lot to lose. I've been satisfied in the past, but things're dragging a bit this time. And when I say you've got a lot to lose, I don't just mean this flat.' " (52)
I don't love it, and it feels a bit forced at times (could that be the translation? I find that is often the case with any work in translation), but after a while the novelty of the language recedes and the central themes of deceit/honesty and guilt/innocence come to the fore.
While I've not read any Chandler (I know! And I call myself a crime fiction enthusiast, shame.) I can't imagine that he'd be able to pull off a scene like the one toward the end of the book, where you are not quite sure if Helena is going to end it all.
"She fell asleep in her clothes on the couch, with one hand under her head. All night long, drops slid from the pools in her eyes on to the coarse cloth of the upholstery, but gradually the deep lines around her mouth faded.
The snow outside the window thickened, lofting up with the wind, the flakes dancing and swirling in all their sparkling glory, until finally they fell to the ground and transformed into mud.
But every now and then one of them got caught on a tree branch or in a crack between the centuries-old tiles of the Mala Strana rooftops, so even though the snowfall lasted just a while, some glittering touches of white remained tucked away till morning, when the people began to emerge form their homes into the new day, into the same old aimless wandering." (208-9)
You might say that Kovaly never did write crime fiction, just true crime - crimes against humanity.
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Children of the Revolution
Crossing the pond, I dipped a tentative toe into the pool of books-about-detectives-whom-I've-seen-on-the-telly with Inspector Alan Banks of "Inspector Banks" fame. It will not surprise anyone when I say that I love love love British telly mysteries. I think their adaptations of the many series that make British crime fiction so great are just wonderful - think of Inspector Morse, Lewis, and Endeavour, Wallander, George Gently, Foyle's War, Broadchurch, Death in Paradise, the new Sherlock, those marvelous Poirots with David Suchet, heck I'd even throw in Father Brown. OK, I am mixing in some that didn't start as books but you get the point. I'll watch any old Brit myst at least once and probably more. My DVR is packed with 'em.
But to Banks. Our Hero here is DCI Alan Banks, of Yorkshire, who, you know, like all the others, solves crimes. Sometimes they are pretty nasty crimes, and the point of that in all of these is to show that bad things lurk even in these charming wee villages or ancient cities or stunning country landscapes. Here in the Yorkshire setting of Children of the Revolution (2014, William Morrow but probably earlier and called something different in actual England), we get a fair amount of moors and a whole lot of rain. It rains on an off pretty much this entire book. The premise is straightforward: a loser-kind-of-fellow is found dead, and while everyone would like to think it was suicide because he had never recovered from losing his job as a college lecturer, and was in debt and poor health, it is pretty obvious that he didn't do himself in. The 5,000 pounds found on him would also indicate otherwise. So Banks and his colleagues, with at least one of whom he has a complex relationship, must investigate.
The investigation is straightforward: the coppers look into the deceased's past, make connections to the present, get warned off, find other connections, and eventually solve the crime in a violent scene in the driving rain. The plot develops skillfully, with no ridiculous revelations or hidden secrets (although Banks favors the "I think I know what happened but why don't you tell me" approach to questioning suspects, implying that it will come out eventually and it will go better for you if you tell me now). Mostly things are sorted out by talking, and research, rather than fisticuffs. The writing here is also entirely serviceable, which is to say, it doesn't distract (that is good). And there are occasional scenes that will make you wish to be in England, with moody clouds lowering over bleak moors and rain lashing the greenhouse roof, that sort of thing. As you can tell, I like this, it was a mildly diverting read, but it didn't grip. That said, I suspect there is more to author Peter Robinson than comes across in one reading.
I didn't expect the Banks-of-the-book to be quite as enthralling as the show, and that was exactly the case. Somehow when a character is written as a thoughtful divorced man who has a deep knowledge of music and wine and sits around drinking the later while listening to the former and reading case files, it feels a bit obvious, or maybe too good to be true is another way to think about it. I'd certainly pick up another Banks story, although it would have to get in line behind the many others piled up next to the tub. Perhaps I was misled by whatever blog or article suggest I start with this one, which is about the 20th in the series! Note to self: stop jumping in to series in the middle, it doesn't serve them well.
But to Banks. Our Hero here is DCI Alan Banks, of Yorkshire, who, you know, like all the others, solves crimes. Sometimes they are pretty nasty crimes, and the point of that in all of these is to show that bad things lurk even in these charming wee villages or ancient cities or stunning country landscapes. Here in the Yorkshire setting of Children of the Revolution (2014, William Morrow but probably earlier and called something different in actual England), we get a fair amount of moors and a whole lot of rain. It rains on an off pretty much this entire book. The premise is straightforward: a loser-kind-of-fellow is found dead, and while everyone would like to think it was suicide because he had never recovered from losing his job as a college lecturer, and was in debt and poor health, it is pretty obvious that he didn't do himself in. The 5,000 pounds found on him would also indicate otherwise. So Banks and his colleagues, with at least one of whom he has a complex relationship, must investigate.
The investigation is straightforward: the coppers look into the deceased's past, make connections to the present, get warned off, find other connections, and eventually solve the crime in a violent scene in the driving rain. The plot develops skillfully, with no ridiculous revelations or hidden secrets (although Banks favors the "I think I know what happened but why don't you tell me" approach to questioning suspects, implying that it will come out eventually and it will go better for you if you tell me now). Mostly things are sorted out by talking, and research, rather than fisticuffs. The writing here is also entirely serviceable, which is to say, it doesn't distract (that is good). And there are occasional scenes that will make you wish to be in England, with moody clouds lowering over bleak moors and rain lashing the greenhouse roof, that sort of thing. As you can tell, I like this, it was a mildly diverting read, but it didn't grip. That said, I suspect there is more to author Peter Robinson than comes across in one reading.
I didn't expect the Banks-of-the-book to be quite as enthralling as the show, and that was exactly the case. Somehow when a character is written as a thoughtful divorced man who has a deep knowledge of music and wine and sits around drinking the later while listening to the former and reading case files, it feels a bit obvious, or maybe too good to be true is another way to think about it. I'd certainly pick up another Banks story, although it would have to get in line behind the many others piled up next to the tub. Perhaps I was misled by whatever blog or article suggest I start with this one, which is about the 20th in the series! Note to self: stop jumping in to series in the middle, it doesn't serve them well.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
A Thief of Time
Ack, as Bill the Cat might say, where has the time gone? I'm into my third book since my last post, and haven't said boo about the previous two. So in a break from procedure, I'll post two capsule reviews in one post. Partly because I don't have tons to say, and partly because I've already returned the books to the library!
I'd listened to a Tony Hillerman audiobook years ago, and enjoyed it, but never actually read anything in this fine series about policing in the Navajo Nation. Hillerman's Hero is Joe Leaphorn, a cop with the Navajo Tribal Police. There are a number of Leaphorn stories, but this one earned Hillerman a Public Service Award from the Department of the Interior for the way it highlighted the issues of graverobbing and the vulnerability of sacred archeological sites in the Southwest. In A Thief of Time (1990, Harper and Row), Leaphorn, struggling to get past the recent death of his wife, is drawn into a missing-persons investigation, surrounding an archeologist who specializes in Anasazi pottery. When bodies start piling up - everyone from a small-time pothunter to an aging but still powerful local farmer - Leaphorn can't quite turn his back, although he is just two weeks from retirement. Aided by Jim Chee, a local non-tribal cop, Leaphorn draws on both his native heritage and his police training to find out what happened to the missing archeologist, all the dead people, some stolen machinery and most importantly, who is stealing pots from sacred sites.
What Leaphorn does not use is "modern" technology. It is the late 1980s - we don't have cellies, or email, or even, really, computers. We have brains and payphones and heavy duty trucks that we drive hundreds of miles to talk to witnesses and find remote sites. Leaphorn must rely on his own physical skills, knowledge of the terrain, and brains to sort out the central mystery. He also must trust that the message gets through, that someone will answer the phone, or follow his instructions. We trust our technology now perhaps more than we trust our colleagues and contemporaries. Leaphorn doesn't trust himself to get past his wife's death, but that is really another story. The point is just that people can solve complex situations, too.
The other thing that I particularly liked about A Thief of Time was Hillerman's restraint surrounding the didactic narrative. What is that, you ask? A term I've just coined, denoting the author's desire to instruct his/her audience about whatever arcana illuminates the story. Look, we love it when authors write about things we don't know about - that's why we read, right? To learn about and be immersed in somewhere that isn't here. But as regular readers will know, I really hate it when characters engage in artificially-enlightened conversations, where they trade facts and ideas about topics, just so the reader can then be more informed. Christopher Fowler is guilty of this in the last of his otherwise delightful Bryant and May mysteries, and I think Martin Walker has done this more and more in his otherwise equally charming Inspector Bruno series. Hillerman, on the other hand, somehow manages to interweave a great deal of information about modern Navajo and ancient Anasazi ways, without ever distracting from the plot, or making you feel like are reading a monograph on the subject. Maybe it is because his characters expound at a more advanced level - it is kind of assumed that you have some understanding that the Anasazi are not the Navajo - so it feels a little more naturally connected to the plot. Has the missing gal actually solved the great mystery of what happened to the Anasazi? Well, that is a larger question that may or may not be answered here. But you'll enjoy thinking about it with Joe Leaphorn as your steady guide. His NYT obit provides a better introduction to Hillerman and his works than I can.
This is not a capsule review. I'd better start a new page!
I'd listened to a Tony Hillerman audiobook years ago, and enjoyed it, but never actually read anything in this fine series about policing in the Navajo Nation. Hillerman's Hero is Joe Leaphorn, a cop with the Navajo Tribal Police. There are a number of Leaphorn stories, but this one earned Hillerman a Public Service Award from the Department of the Interior for the way it highlighted the issues of graverobbing and the vulnerability of sacred archeological sites in the Southwest. In A Thief of Time (1990, Harper and Row), Leaphorn, struggling to get past the recent death of his wife, is drawn into a missing-persons investigation, surrounding an archeologist who specializes in Anasazi pottery. When bodies start piling up - everyone from a small-time pothunter to an aging but still powerful local farmer - Leaphorn can't quite turn his back, although he is just two weeks from retirement. Aided by Jim Chee, a local non-tribal cop, Leaphorn draws on both his native heritage and his police training to find out what happened to the missing archeologist, all the dead people, some stolen machinery and most importantly, who is stealing pots from sacred sites.
What Leaphorn does not use is "modern" technology. It is the late 1980s - we don't have cellies, or email, or even, really, computers. We have brains and payphones and heavy duty trucks that we drive hundreds of miles to talk to witnesses and find remote sites. Leaphorn must rely on his own physical skills, knowledge of the terrain, and brains to sort out the central mystery. He also must trust that the message gets through, that someone will answer the phone, or follow his instructions. We trust our technology now perhaps more than we trust our colleagues and contemporaries. Leaphorn doesn't trust himself to get past his wife's death, but that is really another story. The point is just that people can solve complex situations, too.
The other thing that I particularly liked about A Thief of Time was Hillerman's restraint surrounding the didactic narrative. What is that, you ask? A term I've just coined, denoting the author's desire to instruct his/her audience about whatever arcana illuminates the story. Look, we love it when authors write about things we don't know about - that's why we read, right? To learn about and be immersed in somewhere that isn't here. But as regular readers will know, I really hate it when characters engage in artificially-enlightened conversations, where they trade facts and ideas about topics, just so the reader can then be more informed. Christopher Fowler is guilty of this in the last of his otherwise delightful Bryant and May mysteries, and I think Martin Walker has done this more and more in his otherwise equally charming Inspector Bruno series. Hillerman, on the other hand, somehow manages to interweave a great deal of information about modern Navajo and ancient Anasazi ways, without ever distracting from the plot, or making you feel like are reading a monograph on the subject. Maybe it is because his characters expound at a more advanced level - it is kind of assumed that you have some understanding that the Anasazi are not the Navajo - so it feels a little more naturally connected to the plot. Has the missing gal actually solved the great mystery of what happened to the Anasazi? Well, that is a larger question that may or may not be answered here. But you'll enjoy thinking about it with Joe Leaphorn as your steady guide. His NYT obit provides a better introduction to Hillerman and his works than I can.
This is not a capsule review. I'd better start a new page!
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