Orfeo

Richard Powers
Orfeo

Norton, 2014

Powers's novel tells the story of an elderly avant-garde composer Peter Els, accused of bioterrorism and on the run. In the novel there are the two intertwined plot lines - present, actually where Els hides from the law, and past, which tells the whole story of the life of the composer and DIY-biologist.

The book events begin in 2011 in the noirish tones. Els, who is well over 70, finds his beloved dog dead, panics, dials 911, hangs up, but the police still checks his call. Patrolmen are puzzled by the cause of Els’call and advise to call Animal Control for the proper disposal of dog, noticing Els’ home office, in which the protagonist keeps his tools, flasks, jars with bacteria.

Police notifies the Joint Security Task Force, and two federal agents, who “looked like counterfeit Jehovah’s Witnesses” pay Else a visit, asking him how he set up his home laboratory, what he's doing, what bacteria he’s working on, and then illegally confiscate his incubator for tests. Els hopes that this will be the end to the inquiries, but the next day, returning from a run, he sees outside his home federal agencies vans, Feds searching his house, and a crowd of journalists. Els decides not to voluntarily give up but run, removing a small amount of cash from ATM machine to no longer use a credit card.

Musical title of the novel fortunately does not imply that the novel should be written in musical language, that is a melodic style, that gurgling and strumming, but leads somewhere to the void. Richard Powers’ Orfeo is not a beanbag, designed for public entertainment. Also true that you will not call this an avant-garde novel, despite the genre direction of the protagonist. Novel in this form is quite accessible to the unsophisticated reader. Each chapter has some kind of epigraph, very odd, but that is the end to the experiments with form.

Melody of the novel lies in a different layer. Powers finds a match of the rythmes between the two plotlines of the novel, the past and present. Like a real drummer, the author makes the elements of past and present equal. They may sound one after another, or simultaneously. These lines are of different timbre, but have the overall goal. The present line has alarming notes with noir overtones. Powers took a real case of a homegrown biochemist for adaptation, although if you do not know the whole story it may seem very much like science fiction. This line is not so deep, but it is the driving force of the story and gives you the opportunity to make the book even more full-bodied. Hysteria and obsession with terrorism are exposed in this novel as things dangerous and unpredictable. Intelligence agencies are engaged not in the search and filtering of real terrorists, but in fact they create their own home-grown criminals out of harmless "scientists" (the same applies to bombs makers) to improve their statistics.

The book raises not only relevant, but also the eternal questions. Els’ story is the story of a mad composer, and doomed genius, anda loner trying to remain in eternity. Man creates music, remains alone, and there is no one around to listen to his music. And if you believe the hero of this novel, the music is written not for someone, but for eternity. But eternity is not near enough, and time passes so long. (“The best music says: you’re immortal. But immortal means today, maybe tomorrow. A year from now, with crazy luck.”)

Everything Powers writes about is authentic, no false notes. Biochemistry and music, it would seem, are things that are not compatible, and it is still unlikely to meet a person who understands both. Powers brilliantly passes the test for the plausibility where the whole situation seems to be unplausible.

In Powers’ favor plays his stylistic choice when describing the music. It is basically a mechanical description, the actual technical descriptive process, without heaps of words around music, with a bunch of adjectives and a small share of sense. The main thing is that this choice works. Reading a novel, you feel the greatness of the music created by the protagonist, and the strangeness of his gift.

Orfeo is dear to mind and heart. And the ears, of course.

All the Beggars Riding

Lucy Caldwell
All the Beggars Riding

Faber, 2014

The novel is set in two time layers. In our days, the protagonist of the novel Lara recalls the events of her childhood in the early 1970s. Lara is now trying to write a memoir about her family while attending creative writing courses.

Lara's mother Jane died of a heart disease, and Lara feels like an orphan. To write her family story Lara felt after watching documentary about Chernobyl. In this film, the book protagonist (and narratoe) first saw the effect of a death of a loved one on his survived family members.

Lara's and her brother Alfie’ father Robert died in a helicopter crash in 1985. And it was the father's death, and not the mother’s, that quite devastated little Lara.

Lara begins her memoirs since that year, 1985, when she and her mother and brother went on holiday to Spain, where they had had to wait for their father, a military surgeon, working in Northern Ireland, where at that time the attacks occurred frequently, and therefore the best doctors were invited to work there, where it was often necessary to save the lives of the victims of explosions and injuries from firearms.

This charming story about lies and human weakness begins surprisingly too slow. The author's voice - Lara – seeks too long to right approach to tell her story, and the impatient reader can shut the book, exhausted after the first 30 pages. And he will be wrong, if he does not continue reading.

Lara, of course, is disingenuous when she says that she is not a writer, that she does not know the craft, that her story is awkwardly built and it does not explain a lot. In fact, the narrator, and thus Lucy Caldwell herself, writes professionally, showing events of the novel from different angles and from different layers of time. Lara the child could not know everything, and accordingly, in the book, some questions remain unanswered, that makes it more intriguing. Through child's eyes we see only the visible part of the family story that a child could see and understand. Questions tormenting later Lara the woman torment us too. What Robert and Jane felt, enveloped himself in a web of deception in the first part, we can only guess. The second part opens the curtain from one side. Lara the daughter constructs the story from the point of view of her mother. Lara worked out something herself, her mother told her another part before her death, but the story of Jane turned shrill and believable.

Caldwell did not lay out all the cards on the table, leaving us without a chapter from the POV of Lara's father. In the third part Lara and her brother, children of the deceased surgeon, only build their guesses about who actually their father was, what he felt. So we can either blame Robert or support him. Those chapters that are written from the present at first seem superfluous, but closer to the end we will realize their value. These chapters in detail paint how the children of a man who led a double life turned out.

All the Beggars Riding is also a story about the hard work of a writer. Story is story, it can be exciting, and it can not be, it can be for the mind, and it can be for the heart, but a story still needs to be transferred to paper. And just seeing the writing, you can appreciate the story. The narrator Lara overcame herrself to understand that the writer's voice can be found not at once, but gradually.

Caldwell writes with heart and wit, her book is an undoubted success.

Alpha

Greg Rucka
Alpha

Mulholland Books UK, 2012

Jad Bell, a former military man, who fighted in wars in the elite U.S. troops, now unemployed, remained without a job not a long time. From the head of one of the secret services Jed gets an offer - to become a consulting security manager in one of the largest entertainment parks of the country. Bell feels that something is wrong, but accepts the offer, and the management of the park happily takes Bell to work as an undercover. The park is similar to Disneyland: thousands of visitors every day, billions dollars profit every year, maximum what can happen is one of the kids falls down and scratches his knee. The only thing that gives a signal to the alarm is a dead body of one of park employees found next to a park, and there are serious concerns that a man was killed in the park.

In parallel Rucka tells the story of a young man from Odessa, recruited by a terrorist organization, which makes a young man an American, transporting him to the United States, sending to serve in the American army, and then to university. The Ukrainian, whose real name is Matias, will be a leader of the capture of the park, and Bell will try to neutralize the terrorists, especially since on the day of attack in the park comes Jad's ex-wife and his daughter Athena.

The book has been compared with “Die Hard”, and they do have similarities. The resemblance is superficial, as in "Die Hard" not for the first time the plot about the release of the hostages by a tough guy has been used. Bell, as the military (even then, probably, the word "former" is superfluous), leads a team of soldiers, all of whom serve in the U.S. Special Forces. The point is, a team of terrorists was trained in the same Special Forces. Rucka surprises, when makes Bell’s daughter deaf: Athena and her classmates come to the park from the school for deaf children.

Rucka will surprise the reader a lot of times, especially you here will be tormenting by those questions: who are these terrorists and what they need. Although Rucka also tells the story from the bad guy’s point of view, it does not make the situation clearer. The novel will be read in two sitings, as the pages will fly.

But still: «Alpha» is a good commercial fiction, but not just a good fiction. Too many cliches here, too much calculated, and you can see, how an editor and writer have work on the plot. There is the violence there, but it is harmless. There are twists, but not too much, so that the reader won’t be confused.

Last year, Mulholland Books published two books by Duane Swierczynski, «Fun & Games» and «Hell & Gone». So Swierczynski played with cliches and patterns far more successful, he much less worried about what reader would love and what not. His books are more fun and more original.

«Alpha» is a book from that category, so it is impossible to close the book before the ending, but I hoped it would be something more than this.