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AICN BOOKS! Moriarty On LOST, THE STOLEN CHILD, SAMEDI THE DEAFNESS, and ZOOLOGY!
In the last month, I’ve been sent a number of books for review, and I love the change of pace. With films, I know so much about most of them before I see them that it’s hard to have any sort of pure reaction. But with books, especially ones that are sent to me where I didn’t seek them out, I’m able to enjoy them with little or no baggage at all ahead of time. I’ve spent the last few years really encouraging Frank Bascombe and, more recently, Adam Balm to really turn up the book coverage here on the site, and I think it’s obvious that I should wade in and start reviewing books myself if I’m serious about the site doing more of this.
So far this year, I’ve reviewed a few titles, like Chuck Pahlaniuk’s RANT and that fantastic new THE MAKING OF STAR WARS, but today I’m going to start my own vaguely regular round-up of reviews of what I’ve been reading, and this first batch seems to me to have been an unexpected jackpot of strong material.
LOST by Michael Robotham
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
There are as many writers cranking out crime series these days as there are writers trying to crack the HARRY POTTER market. There are guys who have elevated the crime series to something akin to art, like Michael Connelly and his Harry Bosch books or (my favorites) the Easy Rawlins novels by Walter Mosely. But when someone finds a way to both create a series and also to do something original with the form, it’s worth paying attention.
Such is the case with Michael Robotham’s LOST.
His first novel, SUSPECT, was the story of a police psychiatrist in London, Joseph O’Loughlin, who battles the onset of Parkinson’s disease and a disturbing murder investigation at the same time. Even worse, as he works the case, it becomes obvious that he’s somehow connected to the victim and, possibly, the killer. Now, most authors would continue the series by creating a second adventure for O’Loughlin.
Instead, Robotham includes O’Loughlin in this new book, but as a supporting character. The focus this time is on Detective Inspector Victor Ruiz, who starts the book half-drowned, shot, and completely unable to remember what led up to his near-death. No one believes that Ruiz is suffering from amnesia, and the more he digs into what happened, the more it looks like he had good reason to forget. He’s spent the last few years obsessed with a kidnapping case, and as he starts to put together the events that led to him taking a dive into the Thames, bleeding freely from a few bullet holes, covered in the blood of dead men and somehow in possession of a small fortune in diamonds, he not only starts to crack the kidnapping, but he also makes progress on the mystery of why he is so disturbed by any crime against a child in the first place. Written in first person, Robotham’s novel does an exceptional job of putting character first, but it never skimps on the thrills or the twists readers demand of the genre. It’s got a fantastic sense of voice, and the supporting cast is rich and well-drawn as well.
Even better, the novel stays several steps ahead of you. I read a ton of procedural fiction, and it’s pretty rare that a mystery actually confounds me, but Robotham pulls some pretty slick tricks in an effort to make this a genuine surprise all the way through. There’s a dark streak of sadness throughout, and there are no guarantees of any sort of happy ending for Ruiz or the characters around him, which jacks the suspense up even further. This is a controlled, confident read, and it marks Robotham as an author to keep track of when he releases his next book, THE NIGHT FERRY, and whatever comes after.
This was originally published in the UK in 2005, but it’s just now making its way to the US, so check it out.
ZOOLOGY by Ben Dolnick
Vintage Paperback Originals
Coming-of-age stories only work if you genuinely believe that the character we follow through the story is experiencing something real, something honest. So often, they are an excuse for a young author to just dress up some events from their own life and try to force some sort of profundity on them. It’s hard to find something new to say when the whole point is the sharing of a universal and common experience.
Ben Dolnick worked in New York as a zookeeper for the Central Park Zoo. If you’ve ever been to any of the New York zoos, you know there’s a hierarchy. The Bronx Zoo is probably the most justifiably famous of the bunch, and the Central Park Zoo is much smaller, much less heavily attended. It’s where zookeepers start if they want to work their way up. In Dolnick’s sweet, funny, anxiety-sodden first book, it’s the place where Henry Elinsky spends a summer after flunking out of college while he tries to figure out who he is or what he’s going to do. Dolnick has an exceptional ear for insecurity, and he pulls off the trick of allowing you into the thoughts of this very internal and confused kid. Henry moves in with David, his older brother, who is struggling through his own growing pains regarding his relationship with his girlfriend Lucy, and he settles in for what he hopes will be a relaxing summer where he can figure himself out.
Instead, he only finds himself more confused and unhappy when he meets Margaret, a girl who lives upstairs from him. She’s spending the summer with her father, and so from the moment they meet, there’s a ticking clock. Henry knows she’s going to leave at the end of the summer, and even worse, he knows that she’s got a real life somewhere with a real boyfriend. But for the first time, he’s able to define something he wants, even if he can’t have it, and between that summer-long pursuit and his unlikely relationship with a goat from the petting zoo named Newman, Henry starts to snap into focus. Dolnick’s writing is deceptively simple, and he refuses to build to major epiphanies. Instead, he keeps everything small, intimate, and the result is a beautiful first book. When you factor in that the kid looks like he’s about 12 years old in the photo on the back of the book, his talent is downright infuriating. The book just hit shelves, and I hope it builds a deserved following for this young author.
SAMEDI THE DEAFNESS by Jesse Ball
Vintage Original Paperbacks
This one won’t be available until September of this year, but I’ll say now that I can’t imagine many better novels will be published before the end of the year. Out of the four books I’m writing about this week, this is the one that stands outside any genre, the true original. Moving, disturbing, apocalyptic and funny as shit, this is a detective story with no mystery, a disaster story with no disaster, and unlike anything I can remember reading.
The closest things I can compare it to are MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN by Jonathan Lethem and Mark Haddon’s THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, both of which are brilliant in their own right. Ball is a poet, and the precision of the language here reflects that. His main character is James Sim, a mnemonist who accidentally encounters a dying man in a park one day. Mnemonists are people who are able to memorize gigantic chunks of data for whatever reason, and in Sim’s case, the implication is that he has a mental disorder of some sort, some type of autism perhaps, that makes him specifically suited to the job. The dying man’s last words suggest a world to James that he never imagined, and in this excerpt, you get an idea of the way Ball works on a page:
The man was lying in a crumpled fashion.
-Are you all right?
The man turned on his side. His coat was open and the skin on the front of his body was like a rent and torn shirt. He must have been stabbed at least a half dozen times. James hesitated.
-I’ll fetch an ambulance.
The man made a painful sort of noise.
-Did you see them? the man asked. Did you see them?
-What? asked James.
-They must have gone past you.
How could the man be alive? It must have happened within seconds. But where had the attackers gone?
The man was crouched in a way that James recognized. It was the manner of a dog that had been severely wounded by another dog in the presence of people and other dogs who all had done nothing to stop any of it. Furthermore, he, as such a dog, might feel sternly and clearly that any help soon to be forthcoming would be of no use to him, and that rather, perhaps, it were better that he be left alone, and certainly not looked at in this horrible manner.
-I’m going to get an ambulance, said James.
-There’s no time for that, said the man, grimacing and puffing with his cheeks in an unpleasant way. I’ll be dead before it comes. And what if they come back?
The man began to cough. James looked away at the river. Its surface was wet, and pierced with innumerable rippled and deformities. The liquid came up against the shore, leaving marks of wetness along the sand, along the bases of trees, upon everything it touched. It made him want to vomit.
-That’s no way to talk, said James.
He had put his hands into his pockets. He drew them out, but suddenly didn’t know where to hold them. He put them back in again.
-What’s your name? he said.
He looked at his feet as he said this.
-Thomas McHale, said the man. They’ve killed me. I was one of them, but I left, and they didn’t want me to leave. Have you seen the paper? Samedi? The conspirators? I was one of them. I didn’t have the stomach for it, and I left.
The man groaned and rolled onto his back. This prompted a fresh pulsing of the wounds, more blood issued forth out of his broken chest.
-What’s there to do? McHale groaned. You must do it. You must expose them.
It turns out that James does know what McHale is referring to. In the paper, each day brings a new story of someone killing themselves outside the White House. Each suicide carries a note tying them to someone or something named Samedi and a reference to a timetable of seven days before something terrible is going to happen. There are seven chapters in the book that take place over those seven days, and James finds himself trying to untangle the truth of McHale’s dying confession.
This effort leads him to a strange house that has been established as an asylum for chronic liars, a house which is either the flashpoint for the Samedi conspiracy or the end of the road for James, who finds himself drawn in by a girl, and riveted by the promise of being entangled in a spy plot. Is there anything really happening? Is James mad? Is everyone else in the house? Ball poses provocative questions on every page, and the payoffs are both emotionally devastating and intellectually challenging. SAMEDI THE DEAFNESS casts a paralyzing mood, and once it has you in its grip, Ball downloads a dizzying barrage of ideas and images directly into your head, where I find they’re still rattling around even three weeks later. This dazzling debut is going to make me seek out Ball’s earlier poetry, and I’ll be praying for another novel sooner rather than later.
THE STOLEN CHILD by Keith Donohue
Anchor Books
Last year, M. Night Shyamalan struggled to create a fairy tale for adults that would resonate, and his LADY IN THE WATER fell fairly flat under the weight of his own hubris. It’s a shame, because I think there are some potent ideas buried in the film. If he’s curious to see how the impulse could play out properly, all he needs to do is pick up a copy of Keith Donohue’s remarkable THE STOLEN CHILD, a canny tale, told by two parallel narrators, about what happens when changelings take a young boy from his home in the late 1940s, replacing him with one of their own who then steps into the boy’s life. Henry Day, the boy, tells his story as he gets further and further from human life, losing himself in the world of the changelings. At the same time, we follow the progress of the new Henry as he reclaims his humanity, always afraid he’ll be found out. Both find themselves wrestling with notions of identity. In the case of the new Henry Day, he’s haunted by memories of his first life, when he was a child in Europe, well over a hundred years prior. Each changeling was once a child, it seems, in a never-ending cycle. But for the real Henry, now known as Aniday, he’s the last in line, so he has to watch as the world changes so much that the changelings no longer have a place in it. Somehow, Donohue manages to comment on the nature of mythology and its place in our cultural lives even as he spins a compelling myth that’s all his own.
There’s a section of the book where Henry reads a scholarly paper on the origins of the changeling myth, and it’s sad, raw stuff. Basically, the paper posits that the myths were created to explain away infanticide when a family was given a child that they simply couldn’t endure. Deformity, mental illness, or children of adultery were routinely destroyed, and the story was that the children weren’t children at all, but goblins who had run off with the “real” babies and who had to be destroyed to save the families. Donohue taps into the underlying horror and sadness of that mythology and weaves two compelling stories that entwine in fascinating ways. By the time the book wraps up, I found myself wanting more. I was so absorbed by the world that Donohue evokes that I wanted him to continue. I think SAMEDI THE DEAFNESS might be the most impressive and significant of the books in this column, but I think THE STOLEN CHILD is the one that I connected to the most deeply. It’s gorgeous and powerful, and if you, like me, missed it in hardback, I would urge you to pick it up now that it’s in trade paperback.
I’m still just starting to catch up after my week away, and I’ll have more for you as I am able to organize all the notes I took and transcriptions I did while I was gone.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
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wooooo!! get in!!
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Adding all of them on my To Read list. Thanks Mori, I hope AICN continues in the book realm.
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Sounds like a decent premise
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Going to check that one out. Great that you're doing (more) books Moriarty. You want to check out last years Wolf Boy by Evan Kuhlman, about a kid who draws comics as reaction on the death of his brother. Powerfull book.
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Thanks for the review, Drew!
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I'm intrigued by this new development. When will I see your review of The Cow Goes Moo, sir?
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Moriarty controls the universe with his feelings. Shush, Don't tell anyone.
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... is proving to be a GREAT addition to the site. I had no idea it was Mori doing the reviews! Keep up the good work. I have two recommendations from last year (which you might have already covered?). The Ruins by Scott Smith (A Simple Plan) and The Terror by Dan Simmons. Both great.
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Loved The Stolen Child - it was one of two books that cured my 'hangover' from reading 'The Time Traveler's Wife' by Audrey Niffenegger (maybe the best book I've read in five years) - would possibly make a great screenplay in the right hands). After reading 'Wife', I was disappointed in anything I read, until 'The Stolen Child', and a book by David Mitchell called 'Black Swan Green'. I read a lot of good books last year, but these three were good enough to make me forget the titles of almost everything else. Have to second cowboyone's recommendation on 'The Terror'. Another great book I recently read - "Water for Elephants' by Sara Gruen.
Great to see your book reviews, Moriarty! -
i became interested in it after reading a review of it by one of my favourite authors - graham joyce. it reminded me in some ways of one of joyce's own books - the tooth fairy which is easily my in my top 5 favourite books. ever. it has a similar *real world* setting with fantasy/horror aspects. please check that one out too.
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and so sad....
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This is an excellent novel, well worth your valuable time. I actually interviewed the author; ou can hear the mp3 here:
http://tinyurl.com/2r3xek
He offers a lot of interesting insights into the book. And tells us we can expect another slightly odd book next time 'round.
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Strike a blow for literacy! Books are "cool" to, after all.
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It's now at the top of my queue (right after I finish THE ROAD -- another awesome read). Thanks, Mori.
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Just read an ARC of his new novel due in September. It's huge and amazing. Best American novel of the last few years, and it's been a big few years.
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Besides The Stolen Child,which I found very well executed.
Winkie by Clifford Chase-Absurd satire on current events about a teddy bear brought up on charges of terrorism. Think Snuggles meets 1984.
The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch...a bit overwritten, but worthwhile read about an adventurous teenager lover of the Pacific Northwest wildlife.
One Mississippi by Mark Childress...a comic slice of life combining love for Cher with interracial curiosity, marred by a bad ending (I won't spoil).
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn...A media critic who actually can write better than the writers she critiques, although I really don't get her hate for the Veronica Mars rape arc considering her characters are just as cruel and dastardly.
The Dead Fathers Club by Matt Haig... entertaining adolescent take on Hamlet, if you can bear the fact the entire novel carries no quotations.
The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz...VI Warshawski meets Gilmore Girls. Breezy and off beat.
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And if you love that one and The Time Travellers Wife, you should try Murkami's Kafka on the Shore. My fav. book of the last year.
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Thanks, Morpheus! It's screaming it's way to me now via amazon's 'one-click'.
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Drop me a line at morpheus@wxs.nl when you read it, k? :)
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coz books are just as cool as movies, t.v. shows and comics.
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Just got an advanced reader's copy and it is freaking great. It takes a couple of pages to get used to Ball's writing style, but then it is mind blowing. It left me in awe.
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