Tag Archives: Mystery

January 20, 2014 · 3:18 pm

Conspiracy of Paper: Cheque that

The trouble with me is that I’m an arrogant reader. Particularly when I’m reading a mystery. I think that because I’m paying attention I’ll sort out the mystery and so this post might otherwise be titled “chagrin.” Chagrin because I thought I’d solved the mystery in David Liss’s brilliantly enjoyable *A Conspiracy of Paper* : a mystery set in London in the 1710s as the stock market is developing and the first (ever!) stock market crash takes place. Around page 300 (of a rough 450) I’d decided that I had it all worked out and so I resolved to make it through to the end to have my conclusion validated by the book. ONLY TO BE WRONG. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, realizing I’d misread the signs. Though our protagonist Benjamin Weaver – a former boxer, turned private detective/thug – isn’t entirely sure by the end of the book that the murderer/conspirator/mastermind really is who he thinks he is. So! Maybe I’m right after all?

And this is the delight of the well wrought mystery. The unravelling of threads reveals not a single person behind the curtain, but rather a set of societal conditions that allowed such crimes to take place that anyone (perhaps) could have been the perpetrator given the right opportunity. That is to say, one person pulled the trigger, but a hundred could have. Moreover Liss’s novel is brilliant for showing how easy it might be for anyone of the characters to have slipped into pulling the trigger, that we are all but a hairs breath – or an opportunity – away from being thieves and killers. That with proper motivation and opportunity we’d all easily fill the role. That the line between virtue and crime is as easily crossed as it is misapprehended.

So the book gives you a host of suspicious characters – lovers, family, friends and supposed enemies – and has each of them vacillate between trustworthy and unreliability. Our protagonist himself, towards the end of the novel, falls under the reader’s suspicion in a masterful play of the unreliable narrator. The story is, after all a first person memoir recounted at many years distance, and this reader couldn’t help but wonder if the usual shades of self-aggrandizing truth that ought to be suspected in a first person narrative weren’t being underdrawn in suspicious ways.

The one way I wasn’t arrogant in this reading is that I am entirely ignorant of all things stock market, and moreover intimidated by economics, investments, stocks, etc.  In another brilliant move Liss anticipates this (potential) discomfort with the stock market among his readers and so positions his protagonist as similarly ignorant and so a suitable surrogate to ask the obvious and naive questions. Through Weaver we explore the history of the stock market without the burden of overly technical or alienating facts or details, instead we get repeated explanations of the significance of such and such an event or practice through his Uncle or best friend. This gentle introduction to the history makes it both enjoyable and accessible, to the extent that I think I have a decent grasp of not only the emergence of the stock market, but a confidence enough to translate the historical circumstances to the present to ask questions about the abstraction of currency: talk to me about Bitcoin! I have thoughts now. Maybe.

Oh and I should say, too, that the narrative is written – as you’d expect – in the (supposed) diction and phrasing of eighteenth century London. So I learned some new words and had to catch myself as I started inserting ‘countenance’ into everyday conversation: always a joy.

All this to say an entirely enjoyable read – captivating mystery, thoughtful pacing and introduction of historical details and compelling (enough) characters.

 

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November 25, 2013 · 8:40 pm

Lost Girls: Ice Cold

Rating: If you’re so inclined, or you shouldn’t

I love thrillers and police procedurals. So much. Law and Order is a staple in my life – feeling anxious? watch the predictable unfolding of 44 minutes. With Andrew Pyper’s *Lost Girls” (see a few posts ago for his Demonologist) I wanted to be swept up and riveted by the book. The back cover made me hopeful. The early chapters even more so. But, like the Demonologist, the premise and the opening salvo left so much to be desired.

In reading the acknowledgements (aside: I *love* the acknowledgements in novels. I wish they were longer – see Dave Eggers’ acknowledgements in AHWOSG for a good model – just kidding, but not really) I noticed that Pyper had previously published sections of the novel in journals. I suspect (because the book makes me a detective?) that the few chapters at the beginning – briefly returned later in the novel – focused on the young kids at the lake was a brilliantly written and published short story. But the rest of the novel that tries to take this exceptional opening premise and extend it is just… not good. 

The suspense isn’t suspenseful. I don’t care about our protagonist. I don’t believe his fear. Even if I did, I don’t care whether he’s scared. The unbelievable elements – ghost woman at the lake who steals children – is introduced as a ghost story within the narrative, not as something compelling or real in her own right. As a result the story-within-a-story that lacks the thematic depth that you might expect from a story-within-a-story and instead serves a simple plot purpose: to introduce the complicating “ghostly” element of the murder mystery. It’s a weak way to introduce this element and that the rest of the plot is premised on this weak element means that well… the rest of the plot is similarly shoddy.

So no, I won’t read anymore Andrew Pyper. Even if all the Canadian presses keep telling me he’s all that. I get it. He’s got some great components, and I’m guessing he’s a brilliant short story writer. But going 0-2 makes me less willing to climb on board again.

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November 7, 2013 · 2:36 pm

The Demonologist: Plot comes first

I’m generally wary of self-described “literary” texts. It feels like a bit of a pre-emptive strike or (to mix analogies) like arrogance masking insecurity to claim “this is a literary thriller.” All the same, this is getting close to a literary thriller (note I said *close*).

There’s certainly the pacing and plot of a thriller: Kidnappings, women in fashionable suits, private jets and fancy hotel rooms, hitmen and demons Not surprising the acknowledgements of the book point out that this book is being turned into a movie. And this is one of my complaints with the plot: it reads like it wants – desperately – to be turned into a movie. Forget spending time examining the thoughts and beliefs of any one character – or how they might change! – we! have! plot! to! consider! It is a gripping plot, though. I made it through the book in two days and wanted, very much, to be reading it. 

I do have other complaints though – are these outweighed by the compelling plot? hard to say. I was okay with the demons and the parallels with the Da Vinci Code (mostly because this was much better written). I was less okay with the various explanations for why our narrator was beset with demons. The novel suggests that demons are all around us, and those suffering from depression may be more likely or more able to “see” these demons. Okay. I’ll accept. But then the novel trots out – almost on a chapterly basis – different hypotheses for why the demons have decided to wreak havoc with David’s life. Not that I’m not interested in the theories, but that each one was presented as “the” reason, so I’d try to absorb that reason and make it fit with the bizzare plot elements only to have “the” reason change a chapter later. It made character motivation and action hard to believe and it made subsequent “reasons” for the demons feel like they were created to suit the particular plot point.

That is to say, the plot was so overpowering that everything else – including reasons for plot points – had to be subsumed to the whim of plot. 

So there’s no real character development – David doesn’t come to understand his father, brother, lover, wife, daughter or self any differently than he did before, now he just accepts demons exist because they showed up and ate his face (not really) – no sense of setting (they drive across the continent and it reads like a movie script describing them in a car rather than the setting having any meaningful relationship to the story). No real thematic or moral question, except perhaps “what would you do for a demon?”

So yeah. “Literary”  if you take literary in the sense that the writing wasn’t terrible – there were some okay descriptions and useful figurative language. And for all those complaints, still undeniably readable. LIke gobble it up readable. I might even read Pyper’s other – more famous – “Lost Girls” if only to see if the idea of “literary thriller” exists or if my bias against the genre outweighs any strength in the writing,

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June 29, 2013 · 2:58 am

Mr Peanut: Hates Women

I think Adam Ross thinks that *Mr Peanut* isn’t a novel about hating women. I also think maybe Ross thought he had to be overly simplistic and overly didactic in theme because otherwise his reader might not get it.  The reason I think Adam Ross thinks this way and not the speaker or a character is that *Mr Peanut* is as much a book about metafiction as it is a meditation on gender, matrimony and identity. 

The novel opens with a brilliant montage of possible ways a wife could die. The images set up the premise of the novel: husbands (note: not partners, but definitely male spouses) want their wives to disappear, and the easiest (or least imaginative) way for that to happen is for them to die.

I don’t think Adam Ross trusts the reader to be very clever, because the rest of the novel belabours this premise with repetitious lines like “if only she would disappear,” or “she became invisible” or “she disappeared” or “she vanished.” These direct statements are couple with the none-to-metaphorical “disappearance” of Alice as she loses 200 pounds or the growing invisibility of whatsherface as she takes on jobs outside the home. 

Where the novel is brilliant is in the nesting of the detective’s narrative within the murder mystery – a doubling of mysteries that resonates into the readers present as a matryoshka doll where eventually you are meant to lose track of who the narrator is and wonder/realize that we’re all meant to either want to kill/disappear our wives, or we are all women on our way to being replaced/disappeared.

And why erase women? Principally, it seems, because we are bodily. We have materiality – blood, fluids, gases – that make us inconvenient distractions from the pursuits of the mind: fantasy, abstraction, *metafiction*. The male mind – taken to such abstraction as to be avatars (hammered home again in the last line of the novel *as if we didn’t get it* from David’s job as a video game designer and the repeated descriptions of him enacting GTA-like adventures with voluptuous women). The contrast of the bleeding (heart) women with the obtuse/abstruse (purposefully juxtaposed here) men serves no thoughtful purpose. That is to say, I’m okay, or at least willing to entertain, a reductionist rendering of gender if it *does something interesting*, if it draws attention, or asks a question, or forces us to look again. But this rendering of the gender dynamic – for all the self-congratulatory self-awareness our author seems to possess – appears to take place without recognition of its gross essentialism.   

So while I enjoyed moments of *Mr Peanut* for being clever, I was, overall, dissatisfied because the novel didn’t trust *me* to be clever: far too much explaining, too much symbolic/dialogue repetition of key themes, far too little in the way of mystery for a book purportedly a murder mystery. And while I enjoyed the exploration of men’s perversity and the unsettling realization that our lives are *not* unfolding in multiple universes (with as many iterations as there are attempts to play a video game) nor are they unfolding with the glamour of a video game – I found the essentialist rendering of gender to be both uninteresting and offensive.

And not offensive because I am a feminist, but offensive because I’m a smart reader. 

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