Review of M. J. Carter's The Strangler Vine

The Strangler Vine by M. J. Carter

I was intrigued and tantalized by The Strangler Vine, by M. J. Carter (G.P. Putnam's Sons, March 2015), which is on the long list for the 2015 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award. The reason it caught my eye is that I have been a fan for a long time of grand sweeping sagas that take place long ago in faraway lands.

M. M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions was my first taste of Indian history in the days of the British Raj. The title refers to a vision of the mighty Himalayas as seen from a distance. This is a romantic tale of exciting adventures in a backdrop that spans almost the entire Indian subcontinent during a time of great unrest. This was in the late 1850s, just after the Sepoy rebellion.

The conflict began as a mutiny of Indian soldiers against the East India Company's army and it led to the final dissolution of the East India Company and to the British reorganization of the army, the financial system and the administration of India. Rumors that the British were out to destroy the religions of the Indian people was the spark that ignited what turned into a blaze of death and destruction.

Ashok Pelham Martin, a boy born in India of British parents, masquerades as a native until he is grown, and then joins the military. He falls in love with a princess and conspires to save her from certain death.

Kaye, who was born in India and spent much of her early life there, tells her stories with authority. Her father, grandfather, brother, and husband all served the British Raj. Another of her novels, Shadow of the Moon, is about a young British heiress who returns to India and meets her protector, a British military man, who tries to help her during the tumultuous war times of World War II, when the empire is about to topple. Kaye, who followed the drum during her marriage, also has a series of murder mysteries in locations such as Kenya, Cyprus, Berlin, and Kashmir. These are all places she lived in for a while.

If you want to lose yourself in another time and place, you couldn't do better than taking a dip into Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. This I did long before it became a television mini-series.

Beginning with The Jewel in the Crown, Scott tells the story of the final years of the British Raj in India. The epic begins in the year 1942, around the time Mahatma Gandhi was calling for the British to cede this particular part of the British Empire, the jewel in the crown as Queen Victoria called it, back to the Indians. These novels look at the many facets of life in India from the points of view of all the players: the British, the Hindus, the Muslims and the Anglo-indians. It is a fascinating series with a wealth of ambience and history.

Carter's The Strangler Vine takes place almost a century before in 1837, during the days when the British East India Company was at the peak of its power. It leads up to the time of the first rebellion of the Indian soldiers.

The East India Company was formed as early as the 1600s in order to promote trade with the East. Over the next two centuries, it built up its own private army and began to rule and control large parts of India. The company gained power and wealth by levying taxes and by creating a monopoly in the opium trade with China.

The narrator of The Strangler Vine is young William Avery, an ensign in the East India military. He has recently come from England to Calcutta and is fiercely homesick on the one hand and getting himself into a life of dissolution and debt on the other. He is quite naïve, believing everything he is told about the great East India Company, despite the evidence of his eyes. He is actually rather thick and very judgmental.

One of his strong points is a love of reading. His favorite author is Xavier Mountstuart, who had been living in and writing about India for some years. Mountstuart's most recent work is raising a lot of official eyebrows, as it suggests that certain important people in the company are leading disgraceful lives. His work in progress is about the cult of the murderous Thugees, ritual mass murderers who worship the Goddess Kali, she of the many arms and necklace of heads around her neck.

The problem is that Mountstuart has disappeared. The military authorities have asked a certain Jeremiah Blake, a former member of the army who has gone native and who shows little respect for the powers that be, to find him. Avery is promoted to Lieutenant and told to accompany Blake and to keep an eye on him. They travel as rapidly as possible to the heart of northern India, where the author was last seen.

Once there, they find a conspiracy of silence. Blake, who is a polyglot as well as a master of disguise, speaks several Indian dialects as well as Persian, so he is able to gather information from all quarters.  He can sense the discontent and the anxiety of the locals and the distrust of the East India Company wallahs, who want the farmers to grow opium and indigo when the fear of famine is all too real. Avery, on the other hand, speaks nothing but English and is oblivious. He is more concerned about Blake's drive to complete his mission in the face of the disapproval of the territories' military commanders.

It becomes clear that Blake, Avery and their small group of five are in danger and the only way to survive is to trust each other. But unless the scales fall from Avery's eyes, they are doomed.

Okay, so more than once I wanted to smack Avery upside his head or shake some horse sense into him. Some critics have suggested that there is a Sherlock/Watson partnership going on here. But Watson was never this slow to see the obvious.

The title of this novel refers to a vine, which grows in among the trees and chokes the life out of them. It is a metaphor in this case for the way the British East India Company infiltrated a country and tried to obliterate customs, religions and behaviors they considered uncivilized by choking them off.

This is a gripping story––no pun intended.  The tension slowly grows and I experienced a desire for the smugly self-righteous to be taken down several pegs. Knowing the  historical outcomes doesn't take away from the drama, dread and fear as it builds to an exciting climax. I read that there is another installment of the Blake and Avery adventures due out this year, so Ill be looking for it.

Spring Preview 2015: Part Five

As much as I enjoy nature waking up after a long winter slumber, there are aspects about spring in California I dread. Tule fog is one of them. It's the implacable ground fog that forms after the state's first heavy rains. It becomes trapped between the mountains in the Great Central Valley, although sometimes you'll even find it drifting into San Francisco and seeping out into the Pacific through the Golden Gate Bridge. Driving in tule fog can feel like a variation of blind man's bluff. There is nothing like a set of red tail lights popping up inches in front of you to give you that heart-leaping-into-your-mouth sensation. Unless you want to talk about reading mysteries or thrillers, of course. Let's consider some good-looking ones coming up.

Acclaimed Montreal literary fiction writer Trevor Ferguson writes crime fiction under the pen name John Farrow. His Detective Sergeant Émile Cinq-Mars is an ethical, yet practical French-Indian who combines a Sherlockian mindset with a dogged determination. His sterling arrest record has made him a local legend.

We meet Cinq-Mars for the first time in City of Ice, when he investigates the death of an Armenian student, found dressed in a Santa suit on Christmas Eve, hanging from a meat hook with a message to Cinq-Mars around his neck. In The Storm Murders (Minotaur, May 26), the DS is newly retired, and his wife, Sandra, wants him to stay that way. Then an FBI agent asks for help. The murders of a Montreal farm couple, killed after a blizzard, may be connected to similar murders in New Orleans. To make his consultation in New Orleans more palatable to Sandra, Cinq-Mars combines business with a vacation and takes her along. As experienced crime fiction fans, we know this is a recipe for disaster––and Sandra ends up kidnapped. Kirkus Reviews states, "One of the best mysteries from Canada in some time, this fourth book in a strong series is equally good at capturing the atmosphere of New Orleans and the distinctive qualities of Montreal."

The madness and tragedy of the Vietnam War have resulted in some outstanding novels. The Sympathizer (Grove, April 1) begins as the Viet Cong take over Saigon in April 1975. It's the first novel written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, an associate professor at USC, who originally came to the United States with his family as Vietnamese refugees in 1975. His writing style has been likened to "Alan Furst meets Elmore Leonard."

The book's narrator is a South Vietnamese army captain, whose poor Vietnamese mother raised him in the absence of his French father. After college in the United States, he returned to Southeast Asia to fight in the war. The Captain assists his general in composing a list of those who will board American flights out of Saigon for exile in the United States. There, among a community of exiles trying with varying degrees of success to create new lives in America, the General involves himself with raising money to fund a rebellion back home. The conflicted Captain, who tells us from the beginning, "I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces," observes this and reports it all to his Viet Cong handlers in Vietnam.

I'm usually skeptical about authors' blurbs, but reviewers' remarks about The Sympathizer are in line with those of writer T. C. Boyle: "Magisterial. A disturbing, fascinating and darkly comic take on the fall of Saigon and its aftermath and a powerful examination of guilt and betrayal. The Sympathizer is destined to become a classic and redefine the way we think about the Vietnam War and what it means to win and to lose."

I blinked when I read the comment of Otto Penzler, head of Mysterious Press, about Joyce Carol Oates's Jack of Spades (Mysterious Press, May 5): "This is Joyce Carol Oates at her most diabolical—no small statement." I'll say. Oates is the woman who recalls one of her first childhood stories was Poe's "The Gold-Bug." In a career that has spanned almost 50 years and produced more than 100 books, Oates has written family chronicles, gothic horror, and psychological suspense. A favorite topic is violence and victimization among complex characters living in a rural or small-town setting, where the most common details of everyday life can assume disturbing meanings.

Jack of Spades is about a bestselling mystery writer's slide into madness. The writer is Andrew J. Rush, whose 28 tastefully-written books have earned him the reputation as "the gentleman's Stephen King." All seems to be going well for Rush, a model citizen of a small town in New Jersey, until one of his three adult children, Julia, finds a copy of A Kiss Before Killing in his office and questions him about it. Unknown to almost everyone, including his wife, Rush writes a lurid and super-violent series under the pen name "Jack of Spades." Shortly thereafter, a local self-published writer named C. W. Haider, who has a litigious history involving well-known crime-fiction writers, sues Rush for not only pinching her ideas, but actually stealing her work. It may not be a terrible mistake to sue Rush, but it could be a mistake to end all mistakes to sue the Jack of Spades. I have a feeling Oates enjoyed writing this, and it should be a lot of creepy fun to read it.

Speaking of creepy fun, I had to investigate when I saw the cover of M. J. Carter's first novel, The Strangler Vine (Putnam, March 31). The title refers to the jungles of India, where creeping vines choke trees until vines and trees are impossible to tell apart. It is into the jungle that novelist Xavier Mountstuart has disappeared after visiting the Honorable East India Company's thuggee department in Calcutta in 1857. The Company is determined to eradicate the thuggees, notorious bandits known for silently strangling their victims. Col. Patrick Buchanan sends Jeremiah Blake, a scholar and Holmesian special inquiry agent, and William Avery, a naive young lieutenant in the Company's army, to find him.

This book combines a history of early Victorian India with the derring-do of a couple of mismatched buddies on a quest to find a vanished writer, based on the real-life figure Philip Meadows Taylor, author of the 1839 novel, Confessions of a Thug (see the review of Tabish Khair's The Thing about Thugs here).

So, tell me, how do you not read Claire Fuller's Our Endless Numbered Days (Tin House, March 17), when advance copy readers rave, warn you to read very carefully and not to read ahead; and Publishers Weekly tells you it has "the winning combination of an unreliable narrator and a shocking ending"?

The unreliable narrator is Peggy Hillcoat, who begins her dual-timeframe tale as a 17-year-old in 1985, when she has returned to her mother's home in London. Then we are taken back to 1976 when Peggy is 8-years old and living with her father, James, and Ute, her German concert-pianist mother. James and Ute are ill matched and arguing all the time. Without Ute's knowledge, James, a survivalist, packs Peggy off to a small log cabin in the Dutch forest, far away from everyone, and tells her the Earth's population has been destroyed, and the two of them are the only humans left alive. James and Peggy live off the land, and chapters fill in the story until the two timeframes meet. This sounds like an extremely interesting variation on coming of age in the post-apocalypse.