Category Archives: Mystery

September 5, 2012 · 4:06 am

The Secret History: Whiz, Bang!

       I’m behind on my blogging by TWO books! Sincerest apologies to those of you waiting with bated breath to find out what I read on the great family cottage vacation 2012. And the scoop? I made my way first through Donna Tartt’s *The Secret History* which I finished now TWO weeks ago (and so my review will necessarily miss some of its usual punch as I find myself fiddling about in my defective memory…). 

The story opens its first scene with the murder of Bunny. And then back tracks in time to invite the reader to follow along in discovering how six young people could murder a friend. The plot proper begins with our first person protagonist arriving at his liberal arts college and finding himself – nearly by accident – enrolled in a highly selective Greek program: he will be taught all of his classes by one professor and in a class with only six other students. The plot builds slowly – the book comes in at just over 500 pages – with the layering of character motivations, complex relationship and the kinds of influences they are suspect to (the usual sorts of influences that 20 somethings should worry about – alcohol, procrastination, sleep deprivation, sexual desire – but also the more pernicious influences of their narcissistic professor, their callously indifferent classmate (psychotic?) and the danger of rationalism taken to its extreme). 

For our protagonist events and decisions seem to happen *to* him, as if by accident or change, evoking questions of free will, determinism and ethical behaviour. Indeed, that the students are all intensively studying Ancient Greek nicely aligns with the thematic concerns with the extent of individual will, the hazards of an overly rational mind, the limits of community and the perils of group persuasion. 

The novel doesn’t spend all its time in these heady philosophical questions; rather, the richly layered and complex plot pulls these questions to the fore without explicitly evoking them in a marvellous demonstration of the literary possibilities of a well crafted mystery-thriller. 

I’d strongly recommend this one to anyone interested in such a literary thriller. It comes with full character development, unpredictable – even as it is self-reflective – decision making by such characters, and an entirely suspenseful plot. Well done. 

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July 14, 2012 · 12:53 am

Blackout: History! War! Time travel!

        So I loved *Blackout*. Not only for the fact that its set in WW2 (is it weird to have an immediate attraction to a WW2 novel? probably.) and not only because it features historians and historical fiction and not only because it’s about time travel and the risks therein. No, I also loved *Blackout*  for its masterful use of form to play with the readers’ expectations and sympathies.

The book opens with a split chronology as the reader moves between 2060 and the Blitz. In 2060 the time traveling historians are busy planning their research trips: finding period costumes, implanting period knowledge (the dates of bombings, available technology, current cultural references) and language (American accents), determining a back story, a job and necessary papers. Throughout these sections the reader is presented with bits of information from the third person omniscient narrator that suggest all is not well with the technology of time travel; however, the historians themselves remain entirely oblivious to the potential hazards of their upcoming trips.

Meanwhile, the Blitz chapters introduce us to our three protagonists – Polly, posing as a nanny for evacuee children; Merope, posing as a shopgirl on Oxford street; and Mike, posing as an American reporter covering the evacuation at Dunkirk.

SPOILER ALERT**

As the reader becomes familiar with the general pattern of chapters – 2060, WW2, WW2, 2060, WW2, WW2, 2060, 2060, WW2 etc. –  the reader comes to expect a necessary “return” to 2060 as inherent in the structure of the book itself. So when the three characters find themselves *stuck* in their respective WW2 temporal-spatial locations and unable to access the “Drop” that is meant to return them to their own time, the reader is jarred right along with the characters as the reader too, finds herself without access to 2060. The chapters narrating this period simply stop, allowing the reader to feel the same disorientation, anxiety and bewilderment as the characters: what *has* happened to 2060? And we don’t find out! The narrative ends without letting the characters OR the reader return to 2060 and so we are all left puzzling whether the course of history has been changed such that time travel *no longer exists* or whether their colleagues in 2060 have met some unfortunate end or whether they have simply been “lost” by their 2060 protectors.

And perhaps this will be my frustration with the novel – even if it’s a necessary frustration in order for the brilliance of the book to be realized – I would have liked the book to resolve these questions. There’s a second part to this series – All Clear – where presumably the conflict is resolved or at least further climaxed, but for this reader I could have done just as well with a serious division between the two parts but the amalgamation of the two parts in one text. I suppose I’m just not a fan of the deliberate cliff hanger that requires seeking out the next book. I can easily borrow it from the library or download it, but wouldn’t it be just as easy to package it as one narrative in the first place?

Small complaint for an otherwise fascinating book that does terrific work highlighting the complexities and possibilities of formal play.

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November 19, 2011 · 4:30 am

The Cement Garden: Imitation or Isolation?

                          Ian McEwen’s first novel, The Cement Garden, shares the suffocating claustrophobia of DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and the same preoccupation with the weird intimacy of familial love. Is it unfair to compare and collapse novels in this way? To see such parallels that it becomes difficult to separate plot? (What are the other doppleganger novels?) If the author self-consciously evokes a predecessor is that more excusable than the author who (seemingly) accidentally replicates the themes and questions of an existing work? I’m not demanding the invention of new stories or themes – far from it, I think there is a decidedly short list of topics and questions in literature – rather the mirroring of mood, tone, point of view, theme and abstracted-plot, do provoke questions about the expectation for the ‘new’ when we read, and whether this is a fair or desirable thing.

Proviso! This parallelism may very likely be an exaggeration of my part. I could write a persuasive essay on the similarities, but I suspect that in the conclusion of that essay I’d be pointing too often to “mood” or “atmosphere” rather than plot or character – and replicating a “mood” hardly feels like a justifiable case for inquiring about the boundaries of originality.

No surprise then that I’ll commend The Cement Garden for outstanding development of an oppressive – dare I say “fixed in stone”? – atmosphere. The characters each evolve over the course of the novel, but only within the extreme confines of both their setting and psychology. The narrative only leaves the house on one, brief, occasion, and that journey precipitates the crises that undoes the fragile – and perverse – family dynamic, as if to suggest that any alteration to this (or a?) family ecosystem risks not simply disruption and disorder, but disaster. That we exist as families only in the temporary space of the home and only insofar as we refuse the entry of outside people and outside events. Within these confines, behaviours and morals might be set by the family itself, and it is only with the introduction of these outsiders – whether death or a courting man – that moral codes can be recognized as immoral. Put simply, only in contrast can something be recognized for what it is. So the attempt to seal up and cement over is an act of preservation not just of a body, but of a code and way of life that does not see itself as deviant, but does recognize that the operation of its difference relies on an enforced isolation (and so singularity).

I think DH would like this one. I know I did.

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October 30, 2011 · 2:40 pm

City of Glass: the Mystery of Self

                 A few pages into Paul Auster’s City of Glass I realized I’d read the book before. Except this realization proved false, as I soon worked out that I’d read the first few chapters before, but never the whole thing. From this uncanny beginning of recognizing what I thought ought to be unfamiliar, the book proceeded to confirm my initial suspicions: this is a book I’ve read before, but forgotten, as all books are those we have read before, but forgotten – as all people are those we’ve already met. And ourselves? We are perhaps people of convenience, decision makers of circumstance, individuals without a tether: kite strings caught in a hurricane.

The narrative follows Daniel Quinn Paul Auster William Wilson Henry Dark Paul Stillman a character as he wanders the city trying to work out the mystery – or the potential for a mystery – of who is (or might be) (or will be) out to harm Stillman and moreover who is (or might be) (or will be) Daniel Quinn. The plot itself is brief and focused, principally the actions of Quinn, but peppered with thoughtful conversations with other characters that meditate on authorship, credibility and the continuity of self.

A passage to clarify this kind of embedded musing (that masterfully does not annoy as some quasi-philosophical ramblings do, but does not go unnoticed as a passage on Who We Are): “Was ‘fate’ really the word he wanted to use? It seemed like such a ponderous and old-fashioned choice. And yet, as he probed more deeply into it, he discovered that was precisely what he meant to say. Or, if not precisely, it came closer than any other term he could think of. Fate in the sense of what was, of what happened to be. It was something like the word ‘it’ in the phrase ‘it is raining’ or ‘it is night.’ What that ‘it’ referred to Quinn had never known. A generalized condition of things as they were, perhaps; the state of is-ness that was the ground on which the happenings of the world took place” (207-8).

This passage well captures the tone of the book – somewhere between detached third person omniscient (a suitable choice given the premise that the events are being reported by a third person who has stumbled on Quinn’s account recorded in a red notebook) and minimalist. The passage also highlights the preoccupation in the narrative with the parallel opacity of language and selves. In this sense Auster (reasonably we might think) connects the post-structuralist boo-ra-ha-ha about the permanence of language, the (supposed) crisis in epistemology and extends this to the condition of individuals as patchwork pieces continually reconstituted.

The book was written in 1985. An important date only if you’re concerned that these ideas are old hat. Not so, I think. I’m sure there too many narratives written that ask the same questions: who are we? why do stories matter? how can we know anything? anything about ourselves? But Auster’s text is simply masterful in asking these questions as genuine concerns. The narrative wants no answers, it argues against the possibility of answers, instead it contents itself with being as the New York Times Book Review says on the back cover “for all those who seek the truth behind the fictions they read and the fictions they live.” And why shouldn’t I end with the NYTimes? Their words are mine, too.

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