Who is Mr Satoshi?

Jonathan Lee
Who Is Mr Satoshi?

Windmill Books, 2011

Robert Fossick, or just Foss, at the very beginning of the novel becomes a witness to his mother’s stroke in the yard of her home. Once a successful photographer, Foss still can not recover from the death of his wife during their trip to Greece. Mourning, our hero firmly hooked on all sorts of pills to calm his own mind, and now his mind is in a constant fog. He has a slow reaction; he does not leave home for weeks, and he has long abandoned photography, living off the royalties for reprinting his old photographs.

Before her death 80-year-old Foss’s mother Alice casually blurts out that after she dies, he’ll need to deliver a small parcel to a Mr. Satoshi. There is an address in Japan, but it is incorrect. Foss hasn’t not attach much importance to his mother’s words, but at the funeral the photographer is approached by a woman named Freddie, a friend of the deceased, and she reminds Foss about Mr. Satoshi, noting that for Alice this is very important. Foss still has to fly to Japan, where to find Mr. Satoshi a Japanese girl Chiyoko will help our protagonist.

This fragile history, something reminiscent of the S. Coppola’s film, "Lost in Translation", sometimes is almost slipping into melodramatic fiction of not too high quality, but the sense of language saves Jonathan Lee. Plot-wise the film and this book has some similarities: both take place in Japan where a man and a woman with a difference of age meet each other under not normal circumstances, between them some feelings flash but they are afraid to identify these feelings. In the novel Foss and Chiyoko don’t lose themselves in translation. Chiyoko even better speaks English than English protagonist.

Dialogues in the book are one of the most powerful elements there. Meeting of slowliness and taciturn of Foss with the mobility and ardor of the Japanese girl gives birth to hilarious examples of dialogue between the characters. Thу plot line of the relationship between Foss and Chiyoko adorns the novel. But the main storyline – the search for Mr. Satoshi – is somehow predictable and melodramatic. Finding of love of the last one of relatives is a theme quite beaten and not worthy of such an excellent stylist like Lee. He feels the episode, he finds the necessary consistency of style when he wants to portray the dope in the head of the main character, he is able to convey emotion in one sentence. The style of the author is a steam locomotive pulling for a worn-out plot.

The fragility of relationships and emotional rehabilitation, these topics Lee reveals with all possible grace. Looking for Mr. Satoshi, the hero of the novel at the same time seeks an answer to the question of who he is himself and he is the man as he was several years ago.

This book is not without flaws, but Lee masks them with elegance.

Canada

Richard Ford
Canada

Ecco, 2012

For the Parsons family everything began not with a crime, but one crime has forever changed their lives. Dell Parsons was a 15-year-old boy at the time when major events of the book happened. He remembers every detail of the events of that summer, when he is already 65 years old.

From the first page the narrator tells us what has turned his life and the lives of his twin sister and his parents upside down. Della's parents, Bev and Neeva, robbed a bank, although, according to Dell, they were probably the last people on earth, of whom one might have thought that they would be armed robbers.

Della's father, Bev Parsons, was a military pilot, participated in the Second World War, and after 1945 was transferred to a desk work, in the rank of captain. Della's mother, Neeva, was the daughter of Polish immigrants, a teacher with a Jewish appearance. Together with two children twins Parsons did not stay anywhere for long. They lived in small towns, where military bases were located, and where he Bev served. The family was so used to wandering, and that no one really thought that they would settle in one place.

Dell’s sister, Berner, was the opposite of his brother. She was taller that him, with boyish good looks, intelligence and self-willed. They never had friends; they were friends only among themselves. The family stopped in the town Great Falls in 1956, where they lived until the spring of 1960, when the central events of the novel happened.

This is a great book, not crumbling under its own weight. Richard Ford paints his picture slowly, but the main part is known from the beginning - an armed robbery would be committed, and will forever change the lives of one family. Thus, here is more important "how" and "why" rather than "what will happen next." Details, that is what matters, and Ford is just a master of details. The protagonist Dell recalls the smallest details of that fateful summer, with such precision and certainty, as if it was he who kept a diary, not his mother.

The narrative about the past from the present results here for a stunning effect. 15-year-old boy at the time knew nothing, understood nothing and didn’t know what to think. This ignorance is what Ford transfers matsrefully. But at the same time telling the story, as a 65-year-old man, the protagonist knows the causes and consequences and adds in the narrative a judgment from adult’s point of view. What then seemed a trifle, and there wasn’t obvious, 50 years later it is quite obvious. So, uncomplicated adolescent mind is clouded with doubts and regrets of an elderly person. At the same time, 65-year-old Dell does not allow sentimentality and anger in his story. He does not play the game "what if ...". There is no if, for all that had happened, it is already happened. Dell has never been the kind of person that changed his own fate.

Looking at Dell and his sister, we can easily view the differences between them. She is more experienced, close to the living, sentient life, but not tending to the material side of life. Dell is a much more passive, obedient (in response to his father, he always calls him "sir"), he is interested in bees and chess, those things, which are unlikely to ever be useful to him in life. When after his sister’s escape he is still waiting for a mother’s friend, he has no hope for the best; he just gives himself to the discretion of fate. However, in the final part, we see that no matter how different are brother and sister, how they seem dissimilar, their fate is about the same. According to Ford, the fate is God, from whom there is no escape. We try, wrote Ford in the final sentence. We try, but all happens how it’s needed to the fate. We can only try. It’s ineresting to see that neither Dell nor his sister had any children. Childhood trauma has left its mark. Brother and sister did not take responsibility for future generations.

Ford chose such method of storytelling that allowed him to reveal the possible motives of his characters. The author first describes an episode from the point of view of 15-year-old Dell, so much remains a mystery in each episode. And almost immediately, Ford once again describes the same scene, already with all the details that the 15-year-old boy could not have known. This structure keep a reader always in tension (the main thing here is motive, detail, depth of style), and gives the author place to think about fate.

Canada in the novel is a kind of metaphor. Dell’s escape was against his will, Remlinger’s escape was a conscious choice. But they both are the same people as they were before Canada. "Canada" is a state of mind, an internal runaway. But on whatever side of the border a person stands, he remains what he was. People do not change because they do not govern themselves. They are in the hands of fate.

This story is so emotionally gripping that it is hard to imagine anything more perfect. Ford actually had given the name "Canada" to hitherto not named state of the soul, and for this we should be grateful to him.

The Land of Decoration

Grace McCleen
The Land of Decoration

Chatto & Windus, 2012

Imagine a book written from the point of view of a girl, whose mother died in childbirth and whose father a member of Jehovah's Witnesses. This will be this novel by Grace McClean.

Ten-year old Judith Maclean creates in a room in the house where she lives with her father John, The Land of Decoration. The girl builds in the room improvised miniature city in the image and likeness of one, which she lives in. Judith is building houses, roads, animals and people. It is the end of the summer, and the girl has to go back to school and she does not want that. She imagines there will be heavy snow, and throws a toy snow to the Land of Decoration. In a day really heavy snowfall begins in the city.

Father of Judith is a sectarian. He and his daughter regularly go to meetings, read and discuss the Bible, make all the instructions, give up all life pleasures, and often go from house to house, handing out leaflets and urging people to change cheir minds until the end of the world begins. Judith, too, believes in God, but because she is still a child, she does not understand many things and asks many questions. When the same way snow fall again with her desire, Judith begins to think that she has a gift and God uses her to perform miracles. When a girl tells her father about it, the father is angry and tells her she to not invent incredible things. A few days later, the girl for the second time causes the snow. She truly believes that she has made a miracle, but the father does not want to hear about it. Judith seems that her father does not love her. He really does not hug his daughter, does not walk with her, holding hands, does not to say that he loves her. John is still traumatised by the death of his wife, who agreed to give birth and save a child and give up on her own life.

Judith soon begins to hear a voice in her head. That voice is none other than God. God asks her to help him to become his instrument on Earth, and Judith, of course, agrees.

The choice of the protagonist in the role of a ten years old girl has allowed the author to kill two birds with one stone. Actually, this choice and keeps the whole novel. It is extremely entertaining to get inside the family of sectarians. The naive child, while blindly believing in God and at the same time calling into question many of the seemingly obvious to all adult things related to religion, lives with her father, whose way in religion is similar to the way of her daughter, at the end of the novel casting a voice of God out of her head. They both eventually realize that religion entangles the human mind and requires a person to adapt to the faith, and behave not as a life situation demands, and both of them refuse to religion. To behave with dignity is possible without religion.

We see how the girl thinks that she creates miracles, and this creates additional suspense: the reader almost til the end can only guess whether this is her gift or just a series of coincidences. Cut off from the outside world in large part because of religion, Judith replaces the real world so that she created her own. Judith, in essence, is a god herself - the god of the toy city, as to confirm that later in the book, she begins to hear God's voice in her head.

In «The Land of Decoration» by the end takes place the transformation of the two main characters. It's real people, not pale shadows of people. The girl’s father, John, repents, that all this time he has been trying to bury his grief after the death of his wife in God, not paying enough attention to his daughter. Judith in a little time in her life has become aware of many adult things including her father’s life: she’s thought that he did not love her, but his life was just so damn hard to him.

The novel is written not without humor. The author makes the reader smile in those cases when little Judith faces the world of adults and does not understand anything in it.

A memorable light novel.

The Chemistry of Tears

Peter Carey
The Chemistry of Tears

Faber & Faber, 2012

It’s a new multi-layered and complex novel from the two-times Booker winner.

London, 2010. The lover and a colleague of Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, dies of a heart attack. They were lovers for 13 years. No one knew about their relationship, except just another museum employee, Eric Croft, a researcher, historian and master of all that is ticking and tacking, as well as the chief of Catherine. Croft calms Catherine, gives her sick leave so the woman would be able to grieve in solitude, because she even can not appear at the funeral. Catherine worries that her private emails to the deceased lover can be viewed by outsiders. The server with the letters is not yet available, and Catherine is waiting for the moment when she will be able to remove them. Croft also gives Catherine a special assignment - to try to restore the mechanical creation of the middle of the XIX century. Next to the parts of the mechanism Catherine finds 11 handwritten notebooks belonging to someone who was responsible for the creation of a strange automation for over a century ago. Without waiting for an official scanning of notebooks, Catherine begins to read them one by one, gradually learning about the mechanism and the man who took notes. Catherine begins to read the diaries and get drunk every day until she loses consciousness, to forget about the death of her lover. Thus, chapters are alternating, on behalf of Catherine, on behalf of Henry, the author of notes, and the interlude between them, on behalf of both characters.

This multi-layered story is like a mechanical swan, it is hard to piece together, but admirable, being already done. The novel attracts because of mystical and fantastic elements. Mechanical swan, found a half-century before, mysterious notebooks, a crazy inventor and a crazy student of the inventor, all of these elements give us a reason to call “The Chemistry of Tears” a steampunk novel. X-rays, which Catherine was so afraid to do, were able to show the existence of the soul in an automated swan, the author gives an allusion. Amanda, who also has read the manuscript, is guessing that the old mechanism was a prototype for car engine. Peter Carey here raises the question whether all human beings have a soul, and why we believe that an automation doesn’t? This question remains open. But for Sumper, for example, everything is clear: his countrymen, ignorant people, who are interested in nothing, they have no soul, while his creation is more than a duck on wheels.

Two main characters, Catherine and Henry, resonate well, each of whom suffered the loss (though we did not know whether Henry had a duck in time and saved his son from the disease). They are nervous people, but not desperate, just ultimately lonely. Reading Henry’s notes in the place where he writes that love to a child is stronger than love to a person of the opposite sex, Catherine throws his notebook with anger. She believes that it is impossible to compare both types of love. The power of love depends on how many feelings people puts in it. Carey skillfully describes the condition of a person who lost a loved one. Carey is not sentimental, not trying to knock away a tear, does not cut his prose into small pieces-sentences, but his melodic and captivating prose conveys all the emotions.

In the story there are several dead-end lines that are puzzling. Why did Croft introduce Amanda and Catherine’s lover’s son? There is also unclear moment with Croft trying to flirt with Catherine. He just does not want to take the place of Catherine's lover, but his desire to protect Catherine, even after her recovering after the death of Matthew, is difficult to explain. Closer to the finale, they argue, but then, as if nothing had happened, in the restaurant celebrate presentation, and Croft even kisses Catherine on the cheek.

Carey has definitely written a captivating story of grief, hope, despair and loss.

Mudwoman

Joyce Carol Oates
Mudwoman

Ecco, 2012

Before us lays the story of woman of mud, Mudwoman, whose mother threw her as a 4-year old to die in the marsh area in a puddle of mud, so the girl got her nickname from that fact. No one, however, does call her that, except herself.

The novel is set in two time layers, one of which tells of Mudwoman’s childhood, the other - of her present, in the 2000s.

Abandoned by the crazy mother, Mudwoman, Jewell then, has been found by not entirely sane local man. Girl didn’t speak at all, that’s why the guardianship concluded the girl is slightly retarded. Police had tried to find Jewell’s mother and her younger sister, but the woman was gone. The girl ends up in a shelter that the Skedd family keeps. They raise orphans from all around the area, some of them after being adopted. In the house the girl learns how to think like everyone else, how to speak, remembers her name. Skedds is a married pair, who likes children, but if the children do something wrong, they use corporal punishment.

After spending some time in a shelter, a couple adopts the girl, whose daughter had recently died. New Jewell’s parents are Konrad are Agatha Neukirchen.

Like other novels by Joyce Carol Oates, this is good, but not enough for a happiness cry. A solid prose, a good plot on not the most original material, the depth study of the main character, an interesting structure, but something is missing.

The story of an abandoned girl, now grown and succeded, and is by no means new, but Oates refreshes bored premise. If many of the book characters are not written properly, then M.R., Mudwoman herself is a very deep character. The author shows in detail how the past intrudes into the present and destroys it. All that was forgotten for years, suddenly goes out. Genes have an effect, Mudgirl becomes Mudwoman. Alternating time layers adds intrigue to the book, gradually revealing the nature of M.R.

The style of the book is directly connected with the plot. When M.R. starts to recall her past, her thoughts now and then are stumbling, jumping, making prose more confused (in a good sense of the word), M,P. now and then repeats her own words.

The book has two flaws. Oates is trying to weave modern politics in the novel by placing a layer of the novel in 2002-2003 - the beginning of the war in Iraq. But in addition to non-developed speculations on the topic of democracy the novel does not offer anything new. Awkwardness of the book can be considered as a murder (or rather, an accident) of one of the characters. Oates certainly wanted to shove an unexpected death into the book, but death itself doesn’t lie into the canvas, and reliability suffers. As a result, the murder is forgotten soon enough, becoming merely a pretext for the heroine’s nervous breakdown.

This book is better than many others, but it is not ideal.

The Holy Thief

William Ryan
The Holy Thief

Minotaur Books, 2011

In a normal working day, Captain of Moscow Militia Alexei Korolev goes to his office in the building at Petrovka, where the statue of Commissar Yagoda is removed and ready to be replaced with a statue of Yezhov. In Moscow, 1936, no one is protected from NKVD, even the investigators of the Criminal Investigation Division. Yesterday’s Stalin's loyal assistant Yagoda becomes an enemy of the people, and cleaning can hurt anyone. A colleague of Korolev ckracked jokes about Stalin, and now no one knows where the joker has gone, and the Korolev’s chief General Popov, responsible for his subordinates’s long tongue, may soon go to the camps as well.

Korolev is in good relations with the authorities; he does not talk much, reveals complex cases with unusual zeal, supports the party line and believes in God, which, of course, hides from everyone. When at the church a disfigured body of a young woman is found, Popov gives the case to his best detective. Murdered woman is a foreigner, and it interests chekists. The colonel of NKVD Gregorin does not take the case himself, but asks Korolev to report to him in detail. Gregorin also throws up to Korolev the information on the identity of the murdered: she was not only an American (with Russian roots), but also a nun. Soon after that the body of a Thief is found, killed and disfigured in the same way as the American nun. Korolev concluded that the two murders had a connection. Captain seeks help to Babel, the very same author of "Odessa Tales" and "Red Cavalry" who is close to the criminal world, to help him to establish the identity of the Thief who was murdered. Korolev will have to reveal a very tricky conspiracy and stay alive.

Ryan, a Londoner, who studied in Ireland, suddenly has written a successful book on the Moscow of the 30s. If the cover stood a Russian name, probably no one would have guessed that it’s written by an Englishman. Englishness of the novel only gives the charm to the book. If you do not take into account the interrogations in the basement of NKVD (because no one really knows what and how exactly was happening there), then the book has almost no factual errors (although I'm generally not an expert on the era). Several times not so young characters are called by their pet names and vice versa, young police officer is called by name and patronymic; camps are called the Zone, though, I think, this name of places of deprivation of liberty came later, but the rest looks all right. Heroes smoke papirosas, eat blinis, sometimes Ments are called Ments.

The British origin of the author affects humor side of the novel.Humor here is typically British. Only Korolev’s skirmish with neighbors in kommunalka and gatherings at Babel’s are very funny. Anyway, it is impossible not to smile (and I even laughed), reading the dialogue like this:

«Are you a football fan, Comrade? Spartak also?»

"I'm sorry, Comrade Starostin - Dinamo."

"No reason not to support them, they're a good team. I toured with some of them a few months back and a nicer bunch of lads you couldn't meet."

The real historical figures, such as Babel and Starostin, enhance the effect of humorous books. The novel, which, in general, in the opinion of the publisher was to show Russia choking with fear, produces such effect not due to the atmosphere of fear. Instead, William Ryan presents another surprise. His book is "The Master and Margarita", passed through the prism of Dostoevsky and the British surrealism. «The Holy Thief» is not about fear at all, but about how lonely a man becomes entangled in his life and can not find the exit. Fear all the time is inside’s feeling, not outside’s, but inside of Korolev there is no fear, only a confusion. Around the middle the book turns into a series of surreal episodes, so you finish it, with your mouth open. Meeting with the Thief Kolya, looking over all Moscow; Babel-cat-Behemoth; football fans’s brawls; interrogation in the basement of Lubyanka; the Bible under the mattress, reading "A Hero of Our Time"; a good chekist. All of this can not be reality; it’s a dream of unconscious Korolev. The fifth dream of Alexei Dmitrievich.

A very strange book.

The Uninvited Guests

Sadie Jones
The Uninvited Guests

Chatto & Windus, 2012

In the center of this tragicomedy is the Swift family. At the beginning of the XX century in a small village in England the Swift family owns an estate in the two houses, the New House and the Old House, as the owners call them. Widowed, three years after the death of her husband, Charlotte Torrington married a lawyer Edward Swift, one-handed, but a with good heart, a real gentleman who loves Charlotte, as she does him as well. The financial affairs of the family, however, are not so good, and to preserve the estate, Edward will have to take a large loan, and he is not sure he will get it. The older children of Charlotte, Emerald and Clovis, 19 and 20 years respectively, do not like his stepfather, but they see his love for their mother. The youngest daughter, Imogen, or Smudge, as everyone calls her, often dwells alone, forgotten by everybody. The mother loves her very much, but not always finds time to spend with her daughter. The girl grows a little bit strange.

All the events of the book actually take place in one day, and it is Emerald’s birthday. On the eve Swift goes to the city for apply for a loan, and the family slowly begins to prepare for the birthday. Emerald waits for the arrival of her guests: her girlfriend Patience Sutton and her brother Ernest, who should come out of the city, as well as a wealthy gentleman, John Buchanan, still unmarried, living nearby in his own estate.

While maids help the birthday girl to smarten up and cook, Clovis, who met brother and sister Sutton at the station, has returned with unexpected news: there has been a railway accident, the locomotive derailed, and dozens of people can not continue their journey. Luckily nobody has been hurt, but the security guard at the railway station has asked Clovis to accommodate all the people who were traveling by train to the Swift’s house. Servants start to bring up the victims.

And soon, people in small groups, mostly not rich, but rather poor, who were traveling in economy class, begin to fill the house.

It's really a very nice comedy with some tense scenes and a handful of fascinating characters, but, perhaps, it is nothing more. Sadie Jones harness for a long time. The first one hundred pages, even before the general assembly of guests,invited and uninvited, comes to a dinner, have stylistically all the flaws of the so-called serious prose. A rich family, but on the verge of bankruptcy, strained relations between children and step-father, marriage of convenience on a rich neighbor, a child with oddities. Taken from different places, these components are already fairly worn out to give them any significance. In addition, putting novel’s action in the early XX century, you have a risk becoming a pale shadow compared to the authors who wrote at the time. The second part, in fact, birthday itself, is livelier, with growing intrigue. And if the comic part of it is a success (the girl Smudge and her horse are worth much), the psychological one not quite. Charlotte’s past, risen to the surface, remains an unsolved problem. The children, initially stunned by story of the mysterious visitor, do not know how to behave now with their mother. But later they are together again, happy family, although this transition should not be so smooth. Jones, however, dismissed from the looming conflict: laughter, supposedly, solves all problems.

The book is not without a happy ending, but it is here on the right place. The tone of the novel sets up that everything will be fine. And indeed, a close-knit family will overcome all adversities, and you can’t tell your heart what to do.

Norumbega Park

Anthony Giardina
Norumbega Park

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

Still young enough Richie Palumbo and his family - his wife and two children - are going to celebrate Thanksgiving, but in the dark Richie gets lost, and the family travels to the town of Norumbega, near Boston. There Richie immediately falls in love with a house and decides that the house should belong to him. Later Richie buys the house.

Richie is one of the top managers at a defense plant. He recently has been promoted, but the war in Vietnam is nearing to the end, and the company should move to a peacetime production. Richie in the midst of changes buys the house from the owner, an elderly widow, at an inflated price.
Thus, we trace the fate of the Palumbo family for nearly forty years, from 1969 to 2007. In the next part Giardina gives us a closer look at the children, Jack and Joannie. Jack graduated from school and must apply for a college or university, but Jack, a gifted, the most gifted person from school, according to his father, is not very eager to study and does not submit an application in any university. Jack is popular among girls and dates with one of them, Ellen. But later at the dance, Jack leaves Ellen and switched to a modest Christina.

Later, Christina goes to the University of Massachusetts, and Jack goes New York to live from the saved-up money. Thus begins a free life of Jack away from home.

At the same time, Jack's sister Joan, who has always been a religious girl, closed and unsociable, goes the other way. She decides to become a nun.

«Norumbega Park» is a very complex novel. Simplicity of plot (the usual family saga, a temporary walk from point A to point B) is subject to the greatness of style and charm of the composition. Heroes do not make as much action as they analyze his actions, repeatedly and from different angles. Each family member of Palumbo family considers the causes and consequences of brief but important episodes in their lives. Giardina raises an important question in the book: how fragments of our lives, mini-events, affect the general course of life, our destiny? Each hero has a few such episodes, and each seems to them the turning point. Stella, Richie's wife, finds her reasons for excessive physical desire first in severe son’s birth, and later in the scene when she sees her son sleeping naked next to a girlfriend. Jack has even more those episodes, from a date with Christina at the lake to oral sex with one of his gay roommates. For Richie new life in Norumbega began when he saw the skaters on the ice pond. The novel ends with his daughter and her husband skating as well.

Each of these microevents is like a lymph node in the novel. To the reader they are emotionally intense and give reason to think: do these episodes really change the life of the novel’s character or is it just the imagination of the character.

Each character is chasing by the past and stays in the past almost always, and no one even tries to escape from the past. Past has a life; there is something elusive in it, what is missing in the present. All Palumbo are passive, they are more likely to think what they have done wrong in the past than to do something in the present.

«Norumbega Park» is a book of mistakes. The one that does not tell us that mistakes should be corrected, but the one that says that the mistakes of the past are need to think about. Full of nuances, the characters are the happiest people on earth and the unhappiest at once.

Giardina is a brilliant stylist, and the novel is brilliantly written, 95% of 100%. The imperfection of the novel lays only in the fact that in a family saga you can not give equal attention to all. If the male characters are very complex there, the women do not have enough space. Joan’s decision to become a nun is not convincing, the author told a little about the girl’s growing up Torment of Stella, her struggle with husband’s loneliness, too, are described briefly.

Such book as this proves that the genre of a family saga is still alive and capable of much.

Guilt by Association

Marcia Clark
Guilt by Association

Mulholland Books UK, 2011

A Deputy DA Rachel Knight walks home along the dark streets of Los Angeles when he hears the sounds of fire sirens. Out of curiosity, Knight, taking advantage of an acquaintance, steps on the police cordon area to take a look. From the cheap hotel where has been a fire, the coroner’s assistants come out with two bodies, and in one of them she recognizes her colleague, also a DA Jake. When later it appears that the second victim was a young boy prostitute, Knight can not find a reason what Jake would do in a place like that with a male whore. Jake as Knight knew him was sweet and kind person. FBI starts an investigation, working a theory that it was a murder/suicide: a pedophile Jake first killed the boy and then himself. Knight does not believe in this version and, risking his ass, tries to lead an independent investigation. The main case in this novel becomes another investigation: rape of the daughter of a rich doctor, holding a few clinics in LA. After the death of Jake his working cases have been spread out to other prosecutors, and Knight gets not the easiest one of them. Knight uses help of LAPD Detective Bailey Keller in searching for criminals (rapist and Jake’s killer). Soon Knight gets more threats, and what was obvious, becomes no longer obvious.

A former prosecutor herself, Marcia Clark knows how the justice system works. Knowledge of the inner game is a huge plus of the novel. We have read many books where the detectives conduct their own investigation against orders. And in these books, everything goes quickly and smoothly. In «Guilt by Association» Clark describes in detail the danger of interference with the investigation, which FBI is involved in. Knight then actually risks not only her career but also her freedom, risking ending up behind bars.

Both cases investigated by Knight are not the easiest, with a minimum of clues, but impudence and connections help the main character and her partner press to nail one suspect after another.

Despite the fact that Knight works in «Special Trials, the small, elite unit that handled the most comlex and high-profile cases», she has to deal with not high-ranking officials and corporate owners, but with the petty criminals: bangers, drug addicts and thieves. «Guilt by Association» has a very tight plot, no rabbits out of hats.

The main character Rachel Knight is not quite an original character, though. She is hard outside and soft inside. When she sees the body of her colleague, she almost loses consciousness. Several times throughout the book, the woman barely holds tears back. At the same time, Knight shows the hardness of the decisions and actions. To achieve justice and restore the honor of the late colleague for her is more important than losing a job.

There are also a few comic moments, such as the gang leader, who flirts with the prosecutor, which almost puts murder charges on him, or a police lieutenant who lives at the expense of what he and his brother used to come up developed a popular computer game.

Sometimes the novel gets too women-ish: Clark pays too much time choosing clothes for the heroine, and chapters begin with Knight’s mornings. Actually, you can immediately get down to business without having these details.

On the cover James Ellroy's blurb suggests that it is «a damn, damn, good thriller». It is difficult to argue with it.

The Best American Noir of the Century

The Best American Noir of the Century
Ed. by Otto Penzler and James Ellroy

Windmill Books, 2011

James Ellroy in the old interview had said about noir this: «Film Noir died 1959-1960. We love it. It's never going to come back. That's that, dig it. You can't go back. You cannot disingenuously go to tiki lounges and drink those big drinks, think that it's cool and it's not gonna kill you. You can't smoke unfiltered cigarettes in cocktail lounges all day, every day. It's over. The seduction of the past is just that. It's the past. We know more now and you can't go back. Film noir circumscribed an era and was fueled by the morays and repression of the era. You can't go back. You can imitate it and if you imitate it, it had better be something other than a stylistic and thematic imitation of film noir. L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia ape noir, they're historical novels. They trade on film noir but they're not film noir. Noir is over.» In the introduction to this collection Ellroy writes: “The subgenre officially died in 1960. New writer generations have resurrected it and redefined it as a sub-subgenre, tailored to meet their dramatic needs ... Noir will never die - it's too dementedly funny not to flourish in the heads of hip writers who wish they could time-trip to 1948…”

Ellroy is controversial as always, but by and large he’s right: noir is dead, but it will always live. What today is called noir, it is scarcely noir, or rather it is not noir at all, but noir is so rooted in contemporary culture that is sometimes difficult to say if this is not noir, then what's this then? Although from the collected 35 stories in the book, only 12 were written before 1960, all other have features of noir as a subgenre. This is, perhaps, not quite honestly, that this book is called «Best American Noir», but the title «Best American Noir, Neo-Noir, Post-Noir» would be too long and awkward, so just forgive it.

Even the earliest examples of noir literature, such as «Spurs» by Todd Robbins or «Pastorale» by James M. Cain, are not dated, but rather look here perhaps better than another stories. They are dated because of their language and their subjects. The later stories are often more elegantly constructed plotted, but bear the shade of a secondary nature: the story is old, but the details are new.

This is an incredible collection, even though there are a few missteps. Stories by Gil Brewer and Mickey Spillane are written as if only for the final twist, the Lorenzo Carcaterra’s story is overly schematic, and «Iris» by Stephen Greenleaf, in my opinion, and is not noir at all.

On the back cover the publisher writes that the book includes «many page-turners». For me, noir is just the opposite of a page-turner. When you read noir, to flip a page is not desirable. The body is paralyzed, because then lay the darkness, the abyss, the gas chamber and infinity.

All human vices, all the dark corners of the human soul, all fallings into hell, and all the terrible repetition of the darkest moments of life - it's all there in this book. 615 pages of falling into the abyss, from which there’s no exit.

Osama

Lavie Tidhar
Osama

PS Publishing, 2011

Joe, a private detective, lives somewhere in the back of Asia, smokes a lot and drinks whiskey. When once he returns from the bar to his office, he is suddenly visited by a woman with a soft voice. She doesn’t reveal her name and asks Joe to find Mike Longshott, a man whose name is written on covers of a popular series of pulp novels with the main character with the name Osama Bin-Laden. A woman leaves a credit card to pay for expenses, says she will contact the investigator, and evaporates.

The publisher of Longshott’s books, Medusa Press, is located in Paris, but «the address was merely a post office box, not a street address». After talking with a bookseller friend, Joe finds that Mike Longshots is a pseudonym. From the same seller the detective discovers that Medusa Press publishes all sorts of pulp, from thrillers to softporno. «Filth. Utter junk, of course. Wonderful stuff» - says about these books the seller.

Joe immediately books tickets for a flight to Paris, but before leaving, someone attempts to kill him. To solve the client’s case, Joe will have to go to London and New York, meet with shady characters who work for the state, a mysterious private investigator, booksellers and opium dealers. His entire journey, Joe will be reading Longshott’s books, trying to get closer to unraveling the truth.

World of Joe is a world in which we haven’t lived, a world without terrorism. Explosions of buildings and airports, 9\11 - this never happened in the world of «Osama». And you begin to undersand it only some time since the beginning of the book, when Joe reads Longshott’s novels, and we know that he reads books about the bombings and deaths of thousands of innocent people as fiction. He reads and wonders: in his world, it was nothing like this. Joe travels around the world, but perhaps not as a private detective, but as a universal consciousness. Terrorism covers all countries and nations, even those there terrorist attacks have never been. And Joe is just the invisible element that unites the nations, though Joe himself has no idea about it.

Yes, the protagonist here drinks hard, sometimes is trying to crack jokes, falls in love with a client, whom had seen only once, but it is all the formal signs of what «Osama» is not, namely, a PI novel. If Tidhar’d make Joe not a detective with a license, but simply "a master of all trades", this would only make the book better. One can hardly believe in Joe’s detective skills, but he does not pretend to be able to find someone. Joe's more comfortable to sit at the bar and sip alcohol, walk through the streets of capital cities, than in solving the case. Joe, and this is obviously, is one of those who are looking for himself, not for others. Tidhar is lucky that with the search of himself, Joe finds what he was looking for, otherwise the novel would fallapart.

Lyrical style of the author alone is at odds with a pace of a thriller, who then serves as a screen. But behind the screen is just lovely Tidhar’s prose, with its accurate descriptions of urban landscapes and the ability to capture the sadness of man in a bar with a glass in his hand (Tidhar sometimes overdoes lists, it should be noted):

«The air felt humid, feverish, but not of the tropics: a city's smell hung on it like limp laundry, a smell of pavement slabs and concrete blocks and cars and fumes and smoke and food and urine and spilled alcohol and spilled tears, it was a smell of many lives».

It is difficult to say, has Bin-Laden turned over in his grave after this novel or not (even harder to say is Bin-Laden alive or dead), but who cares about Bin-Laden? Just read «Osama».

Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded
Ed. by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Tachyon Publications, 2010

In the introduction to this collection the VanderMeers do not give a clear definition of what is steampunk. In the last paragraph of the introduction the editors, however, notice that «steampunk is alive and well and manifesting in a myriad of different ways». This is where the editors are right. After reading «Steampunk II» you are unlikely to become clear what steampunk is, but the diversity of the stories will give an idea how wide the scope of this subgenre.

Steampunk’s grandparents had sci-fi roots, but it does not mean that the whole steampunk is definitely SF. There are stories here that in spirit and entourage tend toward fantasy, there are those that can be called science fiction, and there are simply examples of "weird fiction."

The strongest stories here «Dr. Lash Remembers» by Jeffrey Ford, where an unknown virus that causes disease blur the line between reality and fantasy, «O One» by Chris Roberson, a fantasy in which the action takes place on Chinese soil. Among the representatives of the weird fiction stands out David Erik Nelson’s «The Bold Explorer in the Place Beyond», where the first-person narrator tells of the clash of two worlds. «Tanglefoot» by Cherie Priest is a bit lightweight, but Priest puts the best from Victorian prose in her story of a mad scientist.

Three more stories related to the theme of the South. In «The Steam Dancer (1896)" Caitleen R. Kiernan tells unusually touching story that could happen in our world in the Wild West, but the presence of elements of science fiction helps to better describe the character of the heroine of the story, a dancer from the title. Wild West is the entourage of another story, pure western, but with robots, «The Cast-Iron Kid» by Andrew Knighton. Steampunk-western is even better than Spaghetti Western! «Machine Maid» by Margo Lanagan takes place not the Wild West, but it could happen there. Noirish elements are heard in this tense tale of the maid and her master.

This is not an ideal anthology, there are some mediocre stories. But «Steampunk II» by its very existence proves that if a genre has borders, they are very fragile.

Defending Jacob

William Landay
Defending Jacob

Delacorte Press, 2012

The book opens with an interview before the grand jury a year after the main events of the books. Andy Barber, whose is the narrator of the story, answer the questions to the prosecutor Logiudice, but the narrotor hides from us what this grand jury is about, returning us to the history of events in April 2007.

In the town called Newton 14-year-old boy Ben Rifkin is found murdered. He was killed in a park near the school with three stabs of the knife in the chest. The lessons in the school are cancelled, and on the place detectives attached to the case arrive with the prosecutor – assistant district attorney Andy Barber. He is 50-year-old man, experienced, who often takes the resonant cases. Barber immediately assumes that this case will get much publicity. Barber is not confused that Rifkin studied in the same class with Barber’s son, Jacob, because there is no indication that the killer is one of the children. No evidence has been found on the ground, no weapon, too, and five days after the murder, the police still have no suspects and versions. There is one clue, however: on the ground a fingerprint has been found.

When Barber receives an anonymous e-mail with a link to the facebook group "Friends of Ben Rifkin," created after his death, on the wall Barber reads an entry written by a friend of Jacob, Derek, in which Derek says that Jacob has a knife. Later, Jacob is arrested on suspicion of murder, Andy is suspended from work, and the family starts to prepare for trial.

This novel, unlike Jacob, do es not need to be defended, so good it is. It needs to be praised. «Defending Jacob» is very realistic novel. The multi-faceted, exciting, intense, knocked down. The premise seems to be simple: the prosecutor's son is accused of murder, and father has to defend ot not defend his son. And the child needs defendung because he is your son, you are responsible for him, you raised him, and then gave him a "murder gene", even if it's just speculation. Andy Barber within all the book length tries to convince himself and all others that Jacob is not guilty, but deep down he just does not doubt that his son is a murderer; Barber's actions give him away. He finds a knife and throws it away without giving the examination. He deletes the information from Jacob’s computer. He argues with his wife, accusing her of that she sets herself against her son, comes up with things.

But the thing is that the author really does not point who is the killer. The choice of the narrator here is perfect: who killed the boy, may know only Jacob, but from him we learn nothing, so we can just as his father, wonder, had he killed, or hadn’t? Landay has built a book around a slippery case. It seems that there are facts, and they show on Jacob, but if you look closely, it's not even the facts, not even evidence, they are just speculation and doubts. And the jury is not sitting there in the courtroom, on the pages of the book, we are the jury, we are here to judge.

It’s interesting to see Logiudice in the book, who is acting as the dark half of Andy. Again, the author leads the reader on a slippery slope. What Logiudice is so actively trying to put Jacob behind the bars, can be regarded as a personal grudge against Barber. This is an attempt to drown the son, and at the same time his father, to remove a competitor. But Barber sees the situation in that way, he is generally can not be trusted. Loguidice asks all the questions which Barber asks himself. Logiudice is a worm of doubt, the devil on Barber’s shoulder.

The book really knocks down, but not by some individual moments, but by the whole complex. How does it feel to see your son before the trial, and you do not know he is guilty or not? What is above, the blood or the law? Is a father responsible for a son and grandson for his grandfather? «Defending Jacob» raises these questions and more in full growth. Here are collisions between speculation and science, law and justice, the father and son, society and the individual.

Reading the book, one can’t not to get into Barber’s skin, it is impossible not to feel fear when the day of trial approaches, it is impossible not to simpatize - not to the boy but for father. Landay describes with the great delicacy the entire proceedings, interrogations, legal tricks. This is a pleasure to watch how Barber follows the battle of the prosecutor and attorney, noticing mistakes, lucks, the reaction of the jury.

The hero of the book Andy Barber is a good man; this is not going to argue. After all, what makes a person good person? A good man and good father would believe his son to the last, will defend him to the last. But are you a good man if you defend the criminal, your son criminal?

«Defending Jacob» is a portrait of justice, a portrait ugly but honest.

The Locked Ward

Dennis O`Donnell
The Locked Ward

Jonathan Cape, 2012

The author of this book, Dennis O`Donnell, is a former hippie, an English graduate, a short, balding man. Not a fighter, as he says about himself. Not a fighter he is, in the sense that he has never fought and doesn’t and can’t fight. In fact, because he is not a fighter, O`Donnell never thought that he would work as a nursing assistent at the intensive psychiatric care unit. But when position is opened, the work is offered to him. "I don’t need fighters. I need people who can listen listen", says the Charge Nurse to Dennis.

And Dennis agrees. The author of this book had enough experience. When he was a student, O`Donnell worked in a mental hospital in the summer, helping the staff. The work was physically very hard. 13 hours on feet, constantly in motion, because the patients are always in need of something. And because patients often can’t do anything themselves, the staff must help them get dressed, feed them, wash, clean up after them, lay sleeping.

After that summer O`Donnell for 30 years worked on some work, adding only that in the end he hated that job, so why he decided to go into psychiatry. He’s taken position of a nursing assistant in a Psychogeriatrics ward. He’s worked with elderly men whose memory is gradually fading, at first short-term - up to a certain point in the past. Every day for such patients is no different from the previous one. As the author notes, “They were living Groundhog Day”. The work has been exhausting: 13 hours per shift, continuous client care, as they are known nowadays. Dennis, vicious by nature, yet always found common ground with patients, he knows how to listen. The author continues his gallery of characters. Anyone whom the author remembered, he describes the way that even the most incidental character on a certain amount of time becomes the protagonist of the book.

Nevertheless, Dennis takes the position of a nursing assistent at the intensive psychiatric care unit. After a course of Control and Restraint, O`Donnell starts work there. He gradually becomes acquainted with his colleagues, both men and women. The job at the new location has its pluses and minuses. In Ward 25 mainly young people are treated, men and women, there are no frail elderly people here. Among the disadvantagesof new work: the aggressiveness of the patients. An elderly man who can’t walk without help is not a threat, in contrast to the 30-year-old thug who suffers from schizophrenia and passionately does not want to take his medicine. In a Locked Ward you can’t relax at all. Any omission may result in a series of unpleasant events. These unpleasant events filled the second half of the book.
Actually, O`Donnell’s book is not only a gallery of characters, always colorful and memorable, but also the history of diseases. A story about one of the patients is accompanied by a description of his or her illness. Whatever the disease is, the author never allows himself to coarse remark against some of the patients or the mockery of a patient. The author not only doesn’t allow this to himself, but he doesn’t write about any cases when someone from the staff abused a patient, no matter how many problems this patient delivered. "Do not forget, he is sick", often nurses say to each other.

The absence of ridicule on patients does not mean that «The Locked Ward» is a book written with a grim seriousness. Quite the contrary. There is no such chapter which would not have caused a loud laugh. Sometimes, even while reading you’re risking tore your stomach, so ridiculous situation O`Donnell writes about. The reason to this is the author’s ability to notice small but important details that make a character alive. For example, the author describes a patient named Gilbert, a 50-something-year-old man, a schizophrenic, who considers himself a lord, and asks to call him only as Lord Gilbert. To show the true nature of this "Lord", O`Donnell shows Gilbert in conversation.

”"Gilbert! Teatime!
”Lord Gilbert, if you please. And if you insist on addressing me simply as Gilbert, you odious little cunt, you shall kick your fucking shitpit in.
”Okay, your lordship. Tea or coffee?”
”Tea, please. Do you have any Darjeeling?”
”Sorry, no. Sweeping of the factory floor in teabags only.”
”Well, my boy, you know what you can do with that effluent. You can stick it right up your fucking hole. Toodle pip.”"

The book is full of such gems, like the dialogue, you can quote pages. The sense of humor does not leave O`Donnell even in those situations where it is supposed to be no laughing matter. When two police officers have brought in a schizophrenic named Robbie, he refuses to take medication. Dennis at the mere sight Robbie is sick: "When he looked at me, my sphincter puckered so far into itself that, if I’d stuck a straw up it, I would have emptied a pail of dandelion and burdock via the back door." The O`Donnell’s colleague has gone somewhere, and only Dennis and two police officers have left, three to one, Robbie, handcuffed, and they do not feel safe. After all, now becomes a moment when you have to remove the handcuffs and put a drugs shot into Robbie, and Robbie refuses to accept "this poison." Dennis has already imagined tomorrow's newspaper headlines: "Meek hippie grandad killed at work," "Devout coward slain by madman," "Garotted with his own underpants."

Humor here is situational (and truly there’s no end to funny stories here) and verbal. O`Donnell is able to insert the desired comparison, to answer with a joke on an awkward question, that’s why it is often patients do not like him and his jokes.

The author is an English graduate and it’s visible to the naked eye. Each chapter offers an epigraph from the classics, whether it's Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Coleridge, and so on. In describing himself or the patient the author can insret a literary comparison: «Like Shakespeare's Don John, I am not of many words», «So far as looks went, he might have been Dylan Thomas ...» O`Donnell sometimes read the work of patients and finds their literary endeavors very talented.

O`Donnell without didacticism debunks myths about mental illnesses and the mentally ill people. He seems to be saying: there are ill people, there are well people, everything in life happens. We learn about the true nature of disease and the true nature of the patients.

O`Donnell did not hide the fact that after seven years he had made friends with many patients and that this work, no matter how hard it was, brought him satisfaction and joy. «The Locked Ward» is an incredibly funny book about human nature, about the thin line that separates healthy and sick people.

Zona

Geoff Dyer
Zona

Canongate Books, 2012

240 pages about Tarkovsky's film "Stalker". Simultaneously, it’s memoirs, essays about everything, film history analysis, travelogue, but at the same time, not a collection of all the above, but something still not hasn’t been seen before. A novel about the film. Or this: a novel around the film. A new kind of film criticism. That you can write about a movie like that, everyone seems to understand since the birth of cinema, but nobody, however, hasn’t thought that it is still possible. Shot by shot analysis of the film, which was originally conceived as a film shot by one shot, but it’s a literature analysis. The transmission of each shot through the prism of your own "self."

The book begins as, in fact, the film does: with a description of the bar, where a visitor enters to. After that, Dyer suddenly jumps to a description of the phenomenon of the Zone, a place where the meteorite fell. And then Dyer jumps next, comparing Tarkovsky and Antonioni. These three very different fragments give an idea of the three main vectors of the book: Meditation and a retelling of what is happening in "Stalker", an essay on the abstract theme, inspired by the film; cinematic analysis of the film and its connection with European cinema in general. It is difficult to believe that 250-page book about a film can be read at one, but it is.

The excitement of "Zona" lays in a good composition of the three main components. The author does not go too far in favor of one of these components. Analysis of film history is replaced by inserting memoir, memoir by retelling of the film, it in turn by an essay, for example, on the topic of labor camps, and essays - by the story of the filming of "Stalker". Dyer juggles these components, entertaining the reader, but "entertaining" is not quite the right word. Dyer is still not a street circus and not a clown who uses tricks, and hard to find entertainment, once again, in a 250-page book about a film. However, Dyer manages to entertain with no very easy material. Dyer tries on different masks - what the reader will be closer to. To film lovers Dyer offers a deep analysis of the effect of "Stalker" on other films of that time (and the movies of our contemporaries), the intersection between all the films of Tarkovsky, the history of film. For fans of Tarkovsky Dyer offers reflections on the incarnation of Tarkovsky in the form of Stalker, on Tarkovsky-man and Tarkovsky-director. To a simple reader Dyer appears in the image of the swell guy: he jokes about group sex, drinking at the bar, the writers' craft and a backpack as a gift. All jokes, it should be noted, are funny, intelligent cast, and some flow in or derived from clever and subtle reflections on life.

His knowledge of the topic Dyer shows in copiously sprinkled throughout the book footnotes. Recently, I have not seen a non-academic book, which would have at least one footnote. Footnote here can take four pages, and some are a couple of paragraphs long.

Do you need to see "Stalker" before reading this book? For example, I have not seen it, but it does not interfere with the perception of the book, because "Zona" is also a novel. Dyer describes the film shot by shot: the picture appears before the eye of the reader.
The final of the book is in a particularly striking. Dyer seamlessly replaces a book about the film to a book about human desires. The room where wishes come true, remains for the stalker - and for the author - unattained.

The only flaw of this book, perhaps, is that the Strugatsky brothers, on whose novel "Roadside Picnic" was written the screenplay, had been just left on the roadside. The film, of course, is very different from the book. All the sci-fi components had been removed from the screebplay. And yes, this book is about Tarkovsky and "Stalker" and not about Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, but I still feel the injustice, because the immediate source was left beyond the scope of the book.

In general, it is clever and profound book - and in many ways unique.