Walking on the Moon

I think that the best discriminator between mystery readers is how much they care about the mystery.  I get the impression that there are folks out there who live for the most perfectly crafted puzzles.  They love puzzles that play fair, that challenge the intellect, that stand up to careful analysis long after the book is complete.  I am not one of those people; every mystery is a McGuffin to me.  I like to see interesting characters,  a sense of place, great writing – the sorts of things that make a great novel.  The mystery format can be a great structure on which to hang those elements, and Barry Fantoni does a nice job hanging his writing here.

The  hook – and one can almost always characterize a modern mystery by its hook – is that the eponymous private eye is in his eighties.  This fact is both central to the novel and peripheral to the proceedings.  Structurally, it doesn’t change the process of unravelling the mystery much at all.  Leg work is leg work, and an old man can work a .38 and a tough line as well as anyone.  There is refreshingly little outright violence, though.

Harry’s an interesting guy in how independent he is and how he sticks to being who he is.  I don’t mean independent in the sense of “not in a nursing home.” He is who he is.  He doesn’t seem to have close friends or family around, but he’s not the less for it.  He’s still who he wants to be.  It’s  nice to see a story about an older fellow that’s light on the lamentation.

I also liked Fantoni’s evocation of Florida.  This isn’t the Florida of Hiaasen, filled with crazies and wild beauty, but the Florida seen by a still adventurous older man.  There are no poetic passages about the Everglades, but you always know where you are.

Thematically Harry’s age plays large.  Underlying all of this are questions about the protagonist that loom large but aren’t directly answered.  Why is he doing this job at this age? is the big one, of course, but there are others about friends and family.  It turns out that the answer to the first answers the others, but not in a terribly direct way.  It’s a nice piece of understatement, leaving the big questions and the big answers for the reader to find and answer.

Overall, a fine little mystery with a  compelling protagonist and some nice ideas.

Recommended.

I really wanted to like this history of Commodore by Brian Bagnall, but I ultimately disliked the writing too much.  The topic itself is interesting.  Commodore produced some great pioneering hardware and introduced a lot of people to computing.  I had Commodore machines in high school and graduate school.  Supporters of the company and the technology tend to be fans for life, so I was very curious to hear about the company history.

But, man, 500+ pages without getting to the Amiga line is a lot of text.

It doesn’t help that Bagnall tells his story completely from the words of his interviewees without interpreting at all.  He often makes an assertion, then produces quote from a participant that says the exact same things, and then moves on.  There isn’t enough attempt to provide a context or an understanding of the whole picture.

There’s a good argument that this first book should be about Commodore’s founder and CEO pulling them into the computer business and then being ridden out of the company.  It’s a compelling narrative, and the CEO in question seems so larger-than-life that a book about him is a sure winner.  But Bagnall gets lost in minutae that don’t advance the overall story.  Those side trips are more often than not about technical issues, but I never got the feeling that Bagnall understood what was interesting and important about them in the big picture.

I got the feeling that Bagnall conducted his interviews, broke out the interviews into chronologically ordered quotes and framed each quote in a paragraph.  That makes for a decent high school term paper, but over 500 pages, it gets old quick.

Brendan Koerner has found an amazing corner of history to explore and does it with verve.  The corner is the rash of skyjackings from the mid-1960’s to the mid-1970’s, and it’s amazing to the point of unbelievability. I’m old enough that I remember comics using getting skyjacked to Cuba as a punchline, but even in the late 70’s it seemed stale and overblown. Skyjackings always seemed rare to me, and air travel simple and safe.  Mentally disturbed people shot public figures to get in the news; they didn’t reroute aircraft.

But, oh, things were not always thus.  If I were 10 years older, skyjacking punchlines would not seem like “take my wife” lines, but like the edgy references they were. The golden age of skyjacking was short lived – about a decade – but spectacular.  Before the airlines finally began using metal detectors, skyjackings were a weekly occurrence – if not more frequent.  Koerner uses a particular 1972 skyjacking as a case study/framing story and there were 2 skyjackings that day.

It is a fascinating and alien world where the airlines are fighting metal detectors as impractical and intrusive in the face of armed passengers frequently commandeering aircraft.  And the skyjackers are an amazing lot as well.  Some want to get the attention of the media, some want the money, some want to leave the country.  One fellow flees to Italy and becomes a celebrity and movie star based on the skyjacking notoriety. As, I say, fascinating.

Koerner’s framing story captures the spirit of the times by following a specific case.  A troubled veteran and his hippy girlfriend carry out a less-than-precision operation that takes them to Algeria to  join a set of Black Panthers in exile.  The original plan was homesteading in Australia after a stopover in Vietnam, but improvisation is apparently a hijacker’s best friend.

Koerner follows them as they appear and disappear, joining Paris society and eventually (for at least one of them) wending their way back to the US. It’s a remarkable story, and the backdrop and snippets of other skyjacking tales capture a nigh-unbelieveable period in American history with clarity and style.

Highly recommended.

This is the first novel I have read by John LeCarre, and it is excellent. He’s well known as one of the grandmasters of spy fiction – a genre I have some affection for – but I’ve never picked one of his works up before.  I won’t hesitate to pick one up in the future.

Unlike many spy novels I’ve read, Truth draws the reader in from the first sentence.  I was expecting some scene setting, and then the intricate plot coming into focus.  Instead, LeCarre drops the reader in media res with taut, suspenseful writing that amps the tension up immediately.  And he does that in a description of an older diplomat pacing the floor of a motel room.  That bit of writerly craft is awesome to behold in and of itself.

From there we get a tangled web of deceit and compromise that ensnares disparate characters.  There are a few who are moustache-twirlingly evil, but not many really.  By and large we get to see a set of reasonable, even virtuous, people who construct an undeniably twisty set of circumstances and actions that lead to a tragedy.

Conscience and other forces crack the uneasy and distributed alliance, and much of the book is how and how much that collusion cracks.

The characters and their lives are believable, as is the technology and the machinations that are the problems.

Many spy/adventure novels are very much escapism.  Good guys make last second escapes, and the bad guys go to prison or the grave as punishment.  The world is saved and laurels are passed around.  Truth is not like that at all. These characters live in a world that is real enough that none of that is automatic. LeCarre shows us a world where what is right is abundantly clear, but where doing what is right costs more than a sane person would pay.  Often more than one can pay. It’s  not so much a world of shades of grey in morality, but of the compromises one faces because everyone seems to be making compromises.

One is left with a thrilling, well-written adventure yarn that shows a realistic world of moral appeasement.  It’s tough to do better than that.

Strongly recommended.

When I talked about Eating The Dinosaur, I said:

Klosterman is a man who takes ephemeral and sometimes frivolous things seriously, and then subjects them to a meticulous dissection under the light of a strong intellect.  Then he composes those thoughts in a way that is compelling and diverting.

That’s an apt a description of I Wear The Black Hat as it is of Dinosaur. These essays are somewhat more thematically related, as they are all about villainy in one form or another, but I wouldn’t say that they cohere into a book-long discussion of the topic.  That doesn’t trouble me much.  I’ll pretty much read a pack of Klosterman essays for any reason at all.

Strongly Recommended.

Dead Pig Collector is a novella or short story or some form of short fiction from Warren Ellis.  He should call it whatever he gets paid most for writing. Whatever one decides to call it, Collector is an excellent one.

Ellis paints the picture of a man doing a very distateful job very well. As with many undertakings that make the average person queasy, Ellis has thought through the details carefully.  More to his credit, he has created the sort of character would realistically do that job for a living and brought him to life for us.  He’s not likeable, really, but he is believable.

The action follows our realistic character through a – nearly every adjective I considered here was an unfortunate double entendre – complicated day.  It’s a day worth checking out.  If you have never read any of Ellis’s fiction, this is a pretty good starting point.

Stongly recommended.

Andres Neuman’s Traveler of the Century  is a self-consciously literary novel. Its characters all serve clear symbolic roles, the central romance is carried out in an intellectual salon, and the main plot follows the seasons. Such a set-up can easily turn boring and pretentious; for my money, Neuman manages the opposite.

From the beginning Neuman engages the reader by not giving anything away.  Even the setting in mid-1800s Germany slowly peeks out of comments and allusions rather than beng dropped in some exposition bomb. The characters similarly reveal what they reveal about theselves slowly.  The titular traveler is a point-of-view character whose mysterious nature remains in the shadows for quite some time. That’s true even though we spend some time falling in love with him.

Neuman is not shy about using his characters and the salon setting to take the reader down some intellectual side trips. The romance at the center of the narrative is explicity a romance of the mind, and Neuman makes that work by taking us through the arguments and mental jousting that makes up such a romance.

The salon and the romance also provide a backdrop for Neuman to talk about literature and writing in the novel itself. This is all nicely metafictional – commenting on setting inside his setting at the same time he’s explaining how and why setting affects a work, for example. Neuman finds the right tone to make this interesting. He winks enough to show the reader that he knows he’s commenting on himself, while also keeping the analysis and literary argument sensible and engaging.  Even that has two levels: the argument makes sense in the abstract, and also in the setting coming out of the mouths of the characters. It’s not an easy thing to pull off, and he does it while keeping the whole thing engaging.  First rate work.

An important sidelight of that is the amount of time and space his characters spend talking about translation, which is because they’re translators.  Of course I read the work in translation, which adds aother nice loop.  The translation discussions are some of the most diverting in the book, even without realizing that I was reading them in translation.

There are some places where the plot rambles a bit, and some bits that one could read as extraneous. It’s not a maximally tight tale.  I found the diversions more interesting than distracting, but I can clearly see the other position.

In many ways, how much a reader likes this work is going to depend on how well the  reader thinks Neuman has executed this writing.  I think he’s written a very engaging, multi-layered work that lives up to the literary aspirations it wears on its sleeve.  I can easily imagine a reader being less charmed than I was.  But they’re wrong.

Strongly recommended.

I know Scott Meyer from his excellent webcomic, The Basic Instructions. Instructions showcases Meyer’s snappy dialog, so when he published a novel I checked it out.

Off To Be the Wizard shares Twilight‘s strong wish-fulfillment component. Wizard is about nerds who learn to control reality with their cell phones and become medieval wizards and Twilight‘s about a teen girl who falls in love with a magical brooding vampire.  Clearly these are authors giving their audience a world they want to live in more than a literary experience. I enjoyed both Wizard and Twilight, so maybe I’m a target for this stuff.

It was a fun story.  There were twists and turns, and the characters were all likeable and reasonable as well. There’s even some commentary on the social dynamics of the tech world.

Basically, it’s a pretty well done fantasy story for nerds, heavy on the wish fulfillment.  It’ll make an airline flight more pleasant.

You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me is kind of hard to get a handle on.  It’s not quite the sort of travelogue that it seems like it might me from the title/blurb. Nathan Rabin does take us on a tour of both Phish sub-culture and Insane Clown Posse sub-culture with interviews and first person accounts, but somehow neither the bands nor the fans take center stage for long.  It’s not completely a memoir, because the whole narrative is viewed from the viewpoints that these sub-cultures come to represent.  It’s a strange book to put a label on.

It’s also a difficult book to put down.  Rabin underwent a reluctant transformation during the time he put this thing together, and those personal experiences are the core of the book. This is the kind of transformation that ends with “and what the hell’s coming next?” not “and we all had a good laugh looking back.”  Rabin does an excellent job telling his story honestly, neither trivializing the small personal moments nor generalizing for false universality.  While I think many people will be able to relate to his journey, it is very much his journey.

Rabin’s writing supports this unusual narrative.  When he is introspective and analytical about what he has experienced, his thoughts are clear on the page.  When he’s spinning a yarn that happened to him on a Greyhound somewhere his descriptions are vivid and memorable.  Both of these make the story work.

Overall, an unlikely melange of memoir and reporting that is intelligent, diverting, and honest.

Recommended.

Gilbert King won the Pulitzer Prize for Devil In The Grove, and it’s easy to see why.  This is a well written, meticulously researched history of a horrifying miscarriage of justice in a 1949 rape case.  King collects a dizzying array of facts and testimony that make clear just how badly America treated its black citizens.  It’s the kind of sobering history that makes you worry how much has changed.

The case is cut and dried by any reasonable standard: several of the men convicted had never laid eyes on the woman they were alleged to have raped, all were beaten until they confessed (or it was clear they wouldn’t), the trials were all overshadowed by mob violence, and defense attorneys nearly lynched.  When a new trial was ordered by the Supreme Court, the sheriff simply shot the two defendants on the way to the court house (one miraculously survived).  No charges.

King makes it clear that it was also cut and dried by the unreasonable standard of the day: a white person claimed rape by blacks, so they were guilty.  A lot of the impact of Grove is how well King brings that standard home.  The case was the kind of media circus that happens with alarming frequency today – as I write this the Trayvon Martin case is the analog – but the lynchings and shootings were considered expected.

Understanding central Florida’s history here makes people’s reaction to the modern case much clearer.

Grove is harrowing and essential reading.

Strongly recommended.