Used Books Blog

Restless by William Boyd is a fascinating novel that exposes the British Security Coordination (BSC), an extensive British covert spy operation aimed at persuading the US to enter World War II. However, this engrossing spy intrigue is hamstrung by non sequitur characters and over-reaching thematic metaphors.

Restless takes place in two time lines: the mid-1970s and early 1940s. The reader joins Ruth Gilmartin as she discovers the mysterious and heretofore unknown past of her mother - Eva Delectorskaya.

The chapters that chronicle Eva’s indoctrination and participation in the BSC are absorbing and suspenseful. Unfortunately, the chapters that follow Ruth’s daily life wind up a disappointment. Her world is populated with a number of characters and plot lines that never connect to the rest of the story. At the end of the novel I simply regarded these passages as unwanted filler. Instead, I wanted three more detailed chapters on Eva and her relationship with Lucas Romer, her BSC mentor.

The activities of BSC agents, the cat and mouse tactics, are what drive Restless. The concept behind the BSC was to use the media to actively bring the US into WWII. The BSC did this by surreptitiously planting fake stories that pointed at Nazi aggression or expansion past Europe. The BSC was an extensive spy network dedicated to information and spin!

Information wasn’t neutral … if it was believed or even half believed, then everything began subtly to change as a result - the ripple effect could have consequences no one could foresee.

In today’s information rich society, particularly in an election year, this theme resonates strongly. The fact that it was taking place 60 years ago is both interesting and frightening given what could be accomplished today.

The other downfall of Restless is Boyd’s seeming need to make the novel about more than just the personal stories that reveal the BSC. Does anyone really know another person? Are we all waiting for the proverbial other shoe (aka death) to drop? These themes and metaphors are a stretch and, frankly, detracted from my enjoyment of the taut spy thriller that was at the core of Restless.

Last but not least, there was no acknowledgment or afterword that told me what parts of the novel were based on fact. Instead I had to search the Internet to find … a fantastic piece Boyd did in The Guardian titled The Secret Persuaders. If only Boyd had used more of this material in Restless!

I’m being hard on Boyd because Restless was good but had the potential to be great. Ladies, don’t be scared away by the idea that this is a nuts and bolts spy story. It isn’t. The main characters are strong women embroiled in a great and sometimes romantic intrigue. Both my wife and I enjoyed Restless by William Boyd, with reservations, and recommend it as good summer reading.

The Long Rain by Peter Gadol is a great suspense novel that explores relationships, morals and guilt. Jason Dark is putting the pieces of his life back together. He’s moved to a family vineyard, opened up a small law practice in the rural town and is renewing relationships with his estranged wife and troubled son. But then things go awry. On a rainy night on a country road he accidentally runs over and kills a teenager. No one is around for miles and miles.

What would you do?

Maybe the answer is easy for you and you do the right thing, but Peter Gadol explores the sinister side - the weak side - that might try to cover it up. Dark convinces himself that nothing good can come of his admission. The boy is dead and will stay dead. As a lawyer, Dark sees jail or a civil suit that takes away all he’s just reclaimed. He must accept the burden of guilt to protect his family and new life.

The Long Rain is a great suspense novel. Don’t mistake it for a mystery novel. This isn’t a whodunit because you know who committed the crime. It’s not quite a thriller either. You won’t find gory descriptions of a serial killer, no chases with gun waving thugs and nothing blows up in a fiery orange ball. You will be treated to a fascinating internal, psychological drama.

Gadol puts you right smack in the middle of this queasy situation. Good people sometimes make bad decisions. Once Dark lies, he can’t seem to go back and reveal the truth. It’s like that friend you were supposed to call and the longer you wait the worse you feel and the tougher it is to call and explain why you flaked. The beauty of The Long Rain is that you get to live this nightmare vicariously. Guilt and anxiety eat at Dark, threatening to consume his new life. And like Dark, I often found myself sitting, shoulders near my ears, with knots twisting my stomach, thinking ‘will he get caught?’

Vivid descriptions of the vineyard and the detailed process of making wine provide needed breaks from the treacherous plot. Some may find the explanations of the crush, fermentation and cultured bacteria to be too detailed. But if you’re even a little interested in wine, these sections should be interesting. Either way, they are welcome spots of relaxation in an otherwise tense novel. There are also a few overly coincidental plot points, but they weren’t glaring enough to derail my enjoyment of the story.

The Long Rain taps into basic human flaws and puts them on display. It asks and answers a number of unsettling questions. Page by page the anxiety grows. You can’t help but feel the pressure of the situation. This isn’t an easy paint by numbers portrait. It’s a messy, emotional, visceral drama that exposes how secrets and guilt can damage trust and twist relationships. Enjoy the chaos knowing you can always close the book on the drama.

The Last Juror by John Grisham is awful. Seriously, can I get those hours of my life back? The master of the legal mystery delivers a weak attempt at high-minded Southern literature and ignores all elements of a good suspense novel.

I understand that, after cranking out a number of paint-by-numbers, cookie-cutter like novels, Grisham might want to try his hand at something different. I get that. But don’t tell me it’s going to be one thing and then deliver another. Here’s the final line from the back jacket of The Last Juror:

Because as the ghosts of the South’s past gather around Willie, as tension swirls around Clanton, men and women who served on a jury nine years ago are starting to die one by one - as a killer exacts the ultimate revenge …

Sounds exciting doesn’t it? And if that’s really what The Last Juror was about then it could have been a nice, quick read in between more powerful material. I usually rely on a so-bad-it’s-good Stuart Woods novel, but the Stone Barrington series has gotten so bad it’s … well … bad.

Unfortunately, The Last Juror is boring and has little or no intrigue. I kept reading, thinking to myself, it has to get interesting at some point, doesn’t it? Instead the reader is treated to Grisham’s portrait of the South, of small town America dealing with racism and corruption, coupled with a worn out coming of age story. The vengeful killer is an afterthought and, worse, there is no satisfying payoff at the end of the story.

Make no mistake, Grisham is gifted at telling a certain type of story, one that is strong on plot and revolves around the law. However, he fails when the novel is driven by character development and hinges on description and style.

I recommend you avoid The Last Juror by John Grisham and read your voter’s guide pamphlet instead.

Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen is a fantastic mix of literary fiction and mystery. Superbly drawn characters, psychological punch and vivid descriptions are mixed with an intriguing mystery that revolves around the cause of a swarm of earthquakes in the Boston area. Strong Motion is the Jonathan Franzen version of Erin Brockovich. In it, he deftly and intelligently deals with issues of abortion and corporate malfeasance, while retaining the introspective flow of his dynamic characters and their intense interactions.

The novel follows Louis Holland as he deals with a dysfunctional family, middling career and conflicting love interests. Earthquakes are what set this story in motion. They kill his grandmother and bring Renee Seitchek, a seismologist, into his orbit. The paths of many characters get tangled up and converge seamlessly as they delve into his grandmother’s inheritance, which is composed of stock in a industrial chemical company.

This type of convergence-plot seems in vogue recently and it doesn’t always work. It often feels forced, and you can imagine the author struggling to find ways to unify the various plot lines and characters. The links are sometimes tenuous and there are instances when you simply must employ a suspension of disbelief to make reading enjoyable. That isn’t a problem with Franzen’s Strong Motion. The intersecting plot lines make complete sense and bring natural order to the story.

I have a habit of turning down the corner of a page that has a particular passage that I found extraordinary. Sometimes I’ll review them later and not quite know what I found so compelling, but it’s easy to understand my many markers in Strong Motion.

The hum of the fan in the window was the sound of unhappiness in its rotary progress, always developing and yet always the same, a sound that marked every second of the minutes and hours in which improvement was failing to occur.

Obviously, no one had been eager to be personally crushed by falling timbers or to see their possessions go up in flames, but for a few days in the spring Nature had toyed with the city’s expectations, and people had rapidly developed covert appetites for televised images of bodies under sheets of polyethylene, for the carnival-ride sensation of being tossed around the living room, for a Californian experience, for major numbers.

If you get your life in balance with your death, you stop panicking. Life stops being just the status quo that you hope won’t end for a long time.

If you haven’t already figured it out, Franzen likes long sentences and has a penchant for beautifully describing discontent and those things that we rarely admit to ourselves. Strong Motion is a more raw, blunt version of Franzen’s acclaimed The Corrections, which makes it different, not better or worse.

The one area where Franzen seems one-dimensional is sex. The sexual interactions between characters are confrontational and often mixed with violence. I don’t doubt that this is part of the broad spectrum of sexuality, but it seems a bit one note and distracting at times. I think it’s a red flag if I’m wondering whether Franzen just has some horrible sexual past he’s trying to work out on the page or if he’s trying to make a point through or about sexual intimacy.

I’m being hard on Franzen, but only because there’s nothing else to pick on. Strong Motion is that good. Franzen delivers gripping personal portrayals, frightening human insight as well as a taut and well plotted mystery. I highly recommend Strong Motion, for fans of The Corrections or those new to Franzen’s work.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon is a slim, but satisfying mystery as well as an insightful examination and extension of a beloved fictional character. The story revolves around Linus Steinman, a nine year old mute, who escaped Nazi Germany with an African gray parrot named Bruno. Bruno’s past associations coupled with his numerical utterances bring the greedy and amoral to his lodging house.

The New York Times Book Review says The Final Solution is “On par with the best, most tightly written sections of Chabon’s last novel, the marvelous The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” I’m not the NYT, but I’d beg to differ. I’m a huge Kavalier & Clay fan, and while The Final Solution is good, it simply doesn’t bristle with passion and power of the former. And I guess Chabon’s Summerland doesn’t count as a novel?

Instead, The Final Solution is a bit aloof like the unnamed detective who works to solve the mystery. So while the tight plot is enjoyable, the only character that truly jumps off the page is the aged Sherlock Holmes. And even then we’re never told it is that famous detective. So it reads more like a great cover band, or maybe Sammy Hagar as the front man for Van Halen. The ’story’ stands on it’s own, but is certainly given considerably more weight given Chabon’s literary history.

I found some of the P.S. features very interesting. The NPR interview in particular revealed Chabon’s admiration for David Mitchell and Cynthia Ozick. I’m a huge Mitchell fan and immediately picked up an Ozick title. I find the relationships between authors, most often exposed in the acknowledgments, to be a fascinating and valuable tool in finding other great reading.

For example, in Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys, he acknowledges Neal Stephenson of Cryptonomicon fame. Similarly, Susanna Clarke acknowledges Neil Gaiman in the fabulous Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I’d be extremely interested in a LibraryThing like interface that exposed these connections to readers.

So, pick up The Final Solution by Michael Chabon and then cross your fingers and hope that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union returns Chabon to his Kavalier & Clay form.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff is a condensed, fast-paced, insightful romp that walks the line between gritty literary realism and surreal science-fiction. I’ve been waiting for the next Ruff novel for quite a while and Bad Monkeys will hold me over until I get my next fix.

Bad Monkeys revolves around Jane Charlotte as she converses with a psychologist and explains how and why she’s now arrested for murder. The explanation is, as you’d expect from a Ruff novel, a whopper! Jane details two secret societies locked in a battle of good and evil.

She explains how, as a child rejected by her mother, she found herself in central California on the trail of a serial pedophile and murderer dubbed The Angel of Death. It’s here that she first encounters the ‘organization’ and uses an NC gun to fend off and kill the The Angel of Death. What’s an NC gun? Come now, it’s a gun that kills by Natural Causes. Quintessential, inventive Ruff!

As you may have realized, the topics covered by Ruff aren’t shallow or glitzy in an Elmore Leonard way. Like Set This House In Order, he’s dealing with serious issues that fracture the lives of people. Bad Monkeys covers some of the same ground as Set This House In Order, and nearly feels like a mash-up of that novel and Sewer, Gas & Electric.

But Ruff makes it different enough and keeps you guessing as to whether Jane is just a very troubled woman who’s built a fantastic and bizarre world as a coping mechanism, or if she’s on the level and is on the front lines in the war against evil. Just when you think you know which way it will go, that’s when the plot twist(s) make you doubt yourself.

I read Bad Monkeys in two round-trip BART rides. It’s a rather short novel, particularly for the usually Homeric Ruff. So part of me wishes he’d taken one more year and written another 200 pages to fully explore the fantastic framework he established. Another is happy that the next novel is that much closer.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff is a good read and Fool On The Hill is required reading. Extra credit? The Matt Ruff home page.