More Holiday Fare

Hubby and I plan to spend Thanksgiving with friends rather than relatives this year. By now, I'm so accustomed to a family holiday dinner that's akin to pro tag-team wrestling, I barely remember how one eats in a relaxed and civilized setting. This time, I won't sit down while beaming mental death threats to the Tactless Relative and silently pleading with the Always-Leaves-the-Table-in-a-Huff Relative. During the meal, I won't keep a foot cocked for delivering an under-the-table kick to my husband, who inevitably brings up the one topic I specifically warned him against, or take part in the traditional political discussion that degenerates into yelps and yells.

Instead of a fateful family dinner destined to burn itself into our memories, perhaps this Thanksgiving can include a discussion of memory, probability and destiny, and free will and fate––and the books that deal with these topics.

One example is Natasha Pulley's intricate first novel, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (Bloomsbury USA, July 2015). We tag along with Nathaniel Steepleton, a Home Office telegraph clerk in 1883 London. We take side excursions to Japan during the Meiji Restoration and Oxford, where we meet young physicist Grace Carrow, chafing under the restrictions society and family place on her research into the propagation of wave-based light, and her suave friend, Akira Matsumoto, who is related to the Japanese emperor.

These people are all linked through Keita Mori, a London watchmaker originally from Japan, whose talents involving time go far beyond his abilities to make enchanting clockwork devices. (I would kill to own Mori's little clockwork octopus pet, Katsu.) One of Mori's products, an exquisite pocket watch, mysteriously appears in Thaniel's room and enables him to escape a Fenian bombing without injury. Is Keita behind the bombing? And, in general, is Keita a good or bad guy, and what does it mean to become close to him? Like clockwork, Thaniel and Grace maneuver to answer these questions––and others about the nature of loneliness, love, and loyalty––in a hybrid of mystery/steampunk/speculative fiction. The atmospheric setting includes Victorian methods of detection, the struggle for women's suffrage, Gilbert and Sullivan music, and the experiences of Japanese immigrants in London. The puzzles of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street's characters and plot reveal themselves slowly, but, for the reader who is willing to wait, what you'll discover is a charming and thought-provoking read.

When You're Too Tired to Sleep

What do you do when you fall into bed exhausted and then can't get to sleep? After rejecting ideas too masochistic (scouring out the bathtub, ironing) and even worse (lying there and making a mental list of where you've gone wrong since first grade, pondering our current US Congress), you should reach for a book or a DVD and the remote. Which one all depends on how you feel.

Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins

If work has you feeling imprisoned and you've got a life sentence with those in bed beside you: your spouse, snoring and snorting in his sleep, and your dog, who won't stop licking his privates: Break out with George Clooney in O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, if you're hankering for a Coen brothers movie with bluegrass music, or Out of Sight, if you're more in the mood for an escaped Clooney pining after Jennifer Lopez, who plays a dedicated US marshal in a movie based on the Elmore Leonard novel. Perhaps you like the idea of the prison being a World War II German POW camp, and your thoughts about the escapee run to the more the merrier, and include Steve McQueen on a motorcycle; if so, fire up The Great Escape. You could watch a cult favorite, The Shawshawk Redemption, featuring unconventional prisoner Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), and his buddy, the prisoner/entrepreneur, Red (Morgan Freeman).

Or, crack open Michael Robotham's Life or Death (Mulholland, March 2015), for a look at another enigmatic prisoner, Audie Palmer, who climbs out of a Texas prison the night before he's due to be paroled. Audie had admitted his involvement in an armored truck robbery that led to the deaths of four people. He was sentenced to 10 years, but the missing $7 million was never recovered. Weaving in and out with Audie's back story are the efforts to find him by pint-size FBI Special Agent Desiree Furness; the sheriff, who as a deputy shot Audie in the head during the robbery; and a prison buddy named Moss. Aussie author Robotham's storytelling kept me turning pages, but some British substitutions for their American counterparts (such as bank "queue" rather than "line") were a little distracting. More distracting are the length of Audie's sentence (c'mon, this is Texas, not Scandinavia), the fact Audie even survived in the joint, given the particulars, and the ease with which he escaped; however, these quibbles weren't enough to keep me from enjoying it. This isn't one of those pulse-pounding thrillers; it's the kind that makes you want to know what happened in the past and how things would end, and, no, I didn't peek.

For when you're so tired, you're feeling less than human––in fact, you're wondering if you're lower on the mammal totem pole than your dog: Empathize with Jax, a mechanical servitor who longs for freedom in Ian Tregillis's The Mechanical (Orbit, March 2015), a hybrid of steampunk, fantasy, and alternate history set in the early 1900s. The book opens with the public execution of some Catholic spies and the destruction of a rogue mechanical man. In the 17th century, the work of scientist Christiaan Huygens led to the development of a Dutch army of automata powered by alchemy and clockworks. These "Clakkers," capable of independent thought, but enslaved through a built-in hierarchy of obligations called "geasa" to their masters and the Queen on the Brasswork Throne, allowed the Netherlands to become the most powerful nation in the world.

There is now an uneasy truce between the Netherlands and the remnants of its opposition in New France (in Canada). In the capital of Marseilles-in-the-West, spy-in-charge Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord has her hands full with a dangerous Game of Thrones-like situation. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, her small espionage network is disappearing. One of her spies, Luuk Visser, a Catholic priest working undercover as a Protestant pastor, gives Jax an errand and then, oh man, you really must read this book for yourself. Everyone is passionate and scheming away like mad. I've never read anything quite like this cinematic novel, and I bet we'll see it eventually on the big screen. It tackles free will, what it means to be human, identity, loyalty, the meaning of faith and religious freedom, and revenge and redemption. Tregillis doesn't shy away from harming his characters, so you can't assume anyone is safe. Some people may find Berenice's foul mouth offensive, and there are a few scenes I found genuinely disturbing. Some scenes drag a little bit, but these flaws are minor. I'm glad there are two more coming in the Alchemy Wars trilogy because this book was great reading on a sleepless night.

If you'd rather watch a robot than read about one, there are the Terminator movies with our former California governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a cyborg sent back from a future in which machines rule the world. I'm telling you, Schwarzenegger was born to play this role. Blade Runner, based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, features Harrison Ford as Los Angeles cop Rick Deckard, who is called back to duty in 2019 to track down and kill rogue replicants. James Cameron's Aliens has a cyborg on hand when Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver was born for this one) returns to the planet of Alien. Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie, Robocop (forget the re-make), is about a Detroit cop, killed in action, who returns to the force as half-human/half-robot. (And they say Humpty Dumpty couldn't be put back together again.) There are many more of these movies worthy of the time it takes to pop corn and wash it down with a Coke, such as the charming animated flick, The Iron Giant; Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope (thank goodness there's no Jar Jar Binks)....

Say you're in that half-asleep/half-awake state when your identity feels like a mirage, so you could really get into something to do with spies: Of course, you can't go wrong with another viewing of The Third Man, set in Allied-occupied Vienna and starring Joseph Cotten as pulp western writer Holly Martins and Orson Welles as his childhood friend, Harry Lime. We could argue whether it's the best-ever espionage movie. In Éric Rochant's 1994 film, Les Patriotes (The Patriots), Ariel Brenner (Yvan Attal) leaves his home in France for Israel on his 18th birthday. There, he joins Mossad and loses his idealism in a morally fuzzy world. Naval commander Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) takes up with Susan Atwel (Sean Young), the mistress of US Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman), in 1987's No Way Out. Susan's murder cues the spinning of a web of deceit. This is a re-make of a terrific 1948 movie, The Big Clock, with Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, and Maureen O'Sullivan. In the German movie, The Lives of Others, it's 1984, and Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is compelled to launch an investigation of the celebrated East German playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) by a man who has designs on Dreyman's girlfriend. Don't you love wheels within wheels? 

Make sure you leave the butter off your popcorn if you decide to watch your spies on the page instead of on the screen. Don't waste time piddling around when you're tired; go straight to the British novels. What is it about MI5 and MI6 that makes seeing them under the microscope so diverting? We'll think about that while we cringe at some of these British writers' disdainful depictions of the CIA "cousins" as demanding and inept, throwing around cash, bigfooting joint operations, and screwing them up because they think about short-term payoffs rather than long-term consequences.

I kept a stiff upper lip about the cousins and enjoyed Charles Cumming's A Colder War (St. Martin's Press, 2014). It's the second series book about Thomas Kell, an MI6 agent disgraced during the Witness X affair, whom we first met in the 2012 Steel Dagger winner, A Foreign Country (see review here). Kell has now once again been hauled out of the cold, this time to investigate the death of Paul Wallinger, head of the SIS station in Turkey, in an airplane crash. MI6's Amelia Levene thinks three recent intelligence disasters point to a mole in the SIS or the CIA.

Yeah, looking for a mole is nothing new, but Cumming does a good job with it. He takes his time; there are close to 400 pages. Notable are the clarity of the writing, use of locations, and the charm of the descriptions. It was a pleasure to learn what Tom is reading and to see what's on his shelves. Cumming once worked for MI6, and I liked his knowledge about how the agency works (the extent to which personal relationships affect spying is interesting) and his familiarity with spycraft. The life of a Cumming spy definitely isn't for everybody. Their careers ruin their family relationships and make keeping their stories straight––to themselves, as well as everyone else––almost impossible. They are betrayed by ass-covering superiors and ambitious colleagues, and they need a good night's sleep and sweet dreams as much as anybody. At least a gorgeous young woman falls into bed with Tom, a lonely man in his mid-40s. You might roll your eyes at this, but, hey, while Tom's no James Bond, he's not John Gardner's cowardly Boysie Oakes of The Liquidator fame, either. I'm looking forward to seeing Tom again on a night I can't sleep.

Reading Treats for Halloween

Happy Halloween!

I hope you're all set. Plenty of candy, terrific costumes. And a great book for after all the lights are doused except the one you use to read.

If you don't yet have a book, check out the ones below. Not everybody enjoys being terrified, so some of them are simply entertaining. I like being scared on occasion, but there are some novels I'm too chicken to read. Take, for example, Ryu Murakami's Piercing (an obsession with an ice pick, I'll spare you the rest), Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon ("harvest" is an unnerving enough word right there) or Jonathan Aycliffe's Naomi's Room (ghost of a murdered 4-year-old, so nunh unh!). I'm afraid to crack open Jack Ketchum's famously horrifying The Girl Next Door, which involves the torture of a child.

I did read American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis and found it outrageous and disgusting. On the other hand, I've enjoyed many types of horror including The Wolf's Hour by Robert R. McCammon (a British secret agent--a werewolf, I kid you not--goes behind German lines in WWII), Joe R. Lansdale's The Drive-In (the horror fest isn't restricted to the screen), Ray Bradbury's From the Dust Returned (it's homecoming time in Illinois for the Eternal Family), Scott Smith's The Ruins (a group of friends finds terror in the Mexican jungle), Joyce Carol Oates's Zombie (Quentin P. is a young sexual psychopath; I can't believe I read it let alone liked it), Stephen King's Pet Sematary and The Shining, Thomas Harris's Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs and Ramsey Campbell's Incarnate (an experiment in prophetic dreaming goes wrong). Let's see some more.

Lock the doors. In The Wolfen, by Whitley Strieber, New York detectives Becky Neff and George Wilson investigate a wave of suspicious deaths, after the mauled corpses of two cops are found in a junkyard. These killings were not committed by a Fido or a Buddy. To say this novel, narrated by both humans and intelligent nonhumans, is suspenseful is an understatement.

When Cambridge professor Andrew Martin solves a certain math problem, the super-advanced inhabitants of the planet Vonnadoria are alarmed. The Vannadorian narrator assumes Martin's appearance but he knows nothing about humans. "Martin" arrives on Earth to destroy anyone who knows that the problem was solved and to gather more information about Earthlings. He is confronted with Martin's neglected wife, his moody teenage son and unfooled dog. The Humans by Matt Haig (2013, Simon & Schuster) is a sweet and funny novel about what it means to be human.

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is a haunted house classic for its characters and the pacing of its rising terror. Dr. John Montague, who is interested in the supernatural, rents Hill House from Luke Sanderson. Theodora and Eleanor, both with previous paranormal experience, arrive at Dr. Montague's invitation to aid him in his investigations. At night, the caretakers wisely stay away while the others get little sleep.

A fun caper novel in which agoraphobic Bernadette Fox, a talented architect, disappears from her Seattle home the day before the family leaves for Antarctica. Her teenage daughter Bee is determined to track her down using emails, articles and receipts. Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (2012, Little, Brown) contains eccentric characters and is charming.

There's something about Halloween night that makes me think of steampunk. James P. Blaylock's comic sci fi novel Homunculus is his first book about scientist/explorer Professor Langdon St. Ives. It features gigantic emeralds, a ghostly dirigible flying around Victorian London; and the evil Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, who hopes to raise the dead.

Dan Simmons has written many standout sci fi/horror thrillers. His Carrion Comfort, about a group of people with a psychic "Ability" that has allowed them to control other people's behavior at a distance throughout history, is a disquieting 750 pages.

Red Sky in Morning (2013, Little, Brown), by Irish writer Paul Lynch, is noir with beautiful, lyrical writing. The story concerns an accidental murderer named Coll Coyle, who's pursued across Ireland to Pennsylvania in 1832. Fans of Cormac McCarthy should take note.

Helen Oyeyemi, a 28-year-old British writer, is someone to watch. Her 2012 book, Mr. Fox, is an examination of marriage through an unusual love triangle involving a writer, his wife and the writer's character. White Is for Witching is another unconventional book. It has a complex structure and multiple narrators. The story centers around fraternal twins Miranda and Eliot Silver, who live in England, in a Gothic house haunted by generations of its inhabitants. After the death of their mother, Miranda develops an insatiable and violent pica (a craving for nonfood items). Disturbing and mesmerizing, it will keep you awake.

Hannah Kent's Burial Rites (2013, Little, Brown) is based on a true story. In 1829, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, convicted of murder, is sent to an Icelandic farm to await execution because there is no prison available. The farmer's family at first wants nothing to do with her but they warm to her as time passes. Agnes confides some of her story to Tóti, a priest, but she tells us everything. This book, with an atmospheric setting and fascinating characters, is outstanding historical fiction and a moving story.

Roger Zelazny's satirical A Night in the Lonesome October features a nonhuman narrator, Snuff, Jack the Ripper's dog. Other characters come from Victorian Age Gothic fiction and they all have an intelligent animal "familiar." During October, everyone becomes Players in the Great Game, culminating in a ritual on Halloween. Then, doors appear in the fabric of reality separating this world and the world of the Great Old Ones. The fate of mankind hangs in the balance at this time. If you think it sounds weird, you're right, but I was transfixed.

Let's close with Edgar Allan Poe, whose Complete Tales & Poems is particularly well suited for reading on Halloween.

Book Review of Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

Here's the thing. I very rarely give a book an unadulterated rave review. As a Mainer, I was brought up to practice moderation. To say I liked a book is fine, even that I liked it a lot, but to say I loved it is a display of flamboyant emotion my fellow Mainers would look at askance. But there's no help for it; I did love this book.

Now the hard part. What's it about? Well, it's an old-fashioned tale of British Empire swashbuckling adventure (think The Man Who Would Be King, or King Solomon's Mines, for example), a science fiction technology fable, a family drama, a coming-of-age story, a jeremiad against contemporary finance-world fiddles and the modern Orwellian state that tortures its citizens to protect our freedoms, and also a tragedy, a comedy, a romance. Hmm, that's not very helpful in giving you a picture of the book, is it? What if I say it's about a supervillain known as the Opium Khan who, with his "Ruskinites," an army of black-clad man-machines, and the assistance of the cynical complicity of the modern security state, works tirelessly over decades to achieve the power of a god over all of humanity, all the while countered by ingenious men and women and their steampunkish submarines, trains, various other devices and a network of extremely quirky characters and one ancient, blind, bad-tempered and one-toothed pug? No, I thought not.

Let's try another tack and look at the plot. Joshua Joseph ("Joe") Spork is a young London clockmaker and restorer of various types of clever machines, like Victoriana automata. He is the son of the late flashy gangster, Matthew "Tommy Gun" Spork, and the grandson of Matthew's disapproving clockmaker father, Daniel. Despite his love for his father and affection for the gangsters of the Night Market, where the criminal underworld meets periodically in a grand secret bazaar, Joe is so determined not to be like him that he has, as he says, dedicated his life to being mild. He's a quiet, law-abiding man, so shy and retiring he can't bring himself to follow through on the world's most obvious hint when a generously bosomed barmaid takes his hand and holds it over her heart.

Joe isn't a complete saint, though. He knows the sin of covetousness when he doggedly visits ancient Edie Bannister and feels sure she's working up to offer him some really excellent piece of machinery to work on. And she is, but she might have left it just a little late. What she has is a piece of a device that, like the atomic bomb, has the power to end all wars or destroy the planet, depending on who controls it. And, suddenly, a lot of very bad men, including government men, want to be the ones to get their hands on it and are willing to do whatever it takes to Edie, Joe and everyone they ever knew, to achieve their goal.

There follows a tale of dazzling imagination and invention that takes us back in time to Edie's youth as a highly skilled secret agent, doing battle with supervillain Shem Shem Tsien and falling in love with Joe's genius inventor grandmother––the creator of the sought-after device. This long trip into the past is no digression, though, because everything that happens there is supremely important to Joe's story in the present.

Have fun storming the castle!

In fact, though this is a long book crammed to the bursting point with anecdotes, people, places and things, not a single bit of it is frippery. It's all a part of the grand and intricate machinery that drives this epic story, one in which Joe ceases to be mild and embraces everything he ever learned from Matthew and his world. Why? So he can save the universe and get the girl, of course.

All of the characters in this book are deftly drawn, the plot is always easy to follow despite its complexity, and Harkaway writes with a scintillating and abundant style that is just to the good side of florid. I'd say the book would make a crackerjack movie, except you'd miss the playful ingenuity and repleteness of Harkaway's prose.

Harkaway is the son of famed espionage writer John le Carré. I imagine he knows a thing or two about growing up with a larger-than-life father, and that has added poignancy to Joe's story. Harkaway has chosen to follow his father's career and we should be glad he did. Though I warn you, this book may ruin you for any other reading for awhile. When I finished it, I was still so far under its spell that nothing else appealed to me. Everything else seemed muted and timid by comparison. I know, I finally thought: I'll just go find a copy of Harkaway's first novel, The Gone-Away World!

Angelmaker was published in the U.S. by Knopf on March 20, 2012.

Note: I did not receive a free copy of this book. I bought the audiobook and may well go out and buy a copy of the hardcover; that's how sure I am that Harkaway is going to become a big name and that I'll want to savor this book again. As for the audiobook, I just want to say that Daniel Weyman is the best possible narrator of this material. He understands that this is a story that needs to be acted, with absolute abandon, and he throws himself into it with all the energy and dash it deserves.

A version of this review appears on the Amazon product page, under my Amazon username.