By Force Alone by Lavie Tidhar

As a kid I read the first three books of Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle (all that were published at the time), his take on the Arthurian legends. I also read an account by Sir James Knowles that a family friend gave me. I’ve encountered versions of it since then (most notably the Fisher King stuff in Last Call by Tim Powers, among my favorite novels). But Arthurian legend isn’t a genre I automatically seek out. But back in 2016 I discovered Lavie Tidhar and had read eight of his books. He is a master of taking disparate genres and making them work together when it really seems it shouldn’t. The elevator pitch for this was that it was Arthur by way of Pulp Fiction or Goodfellas, so given my previous experience with Tidhar’s work, I was sold immediately. And, having read so much Tidhar, I should have known that wouldn’t be all.

That is an accurate take on the beginning and then the ending of the book. After a brief (and brutal) account of Uther, Arthur’s father’s rise and fall (which set the tone for Tidhar’s take on political power as gangsterism), the book picks up with Arthur and Kay as fifteen/sixteen year old gangsters running a protection racket in post-Roman Londinium . This was catnip for me. I love genre mashups and I love both crime and fantasy fiction. It directly references Tarantino and Scorcese and probably more I missed. But Tidhar doesn’t hold that vibe, which could eventually grow old and make for a too on the nose political point, past it’s breaking point. He gives you just enough, before turning to a more fairy/fae/elfland style fantasy, albeit one whose politics mirror the Londinium ones. And before that could grow old, it morphs into a wuxia/kung-fu movie by way of Jewish diaspora. Then it flash forwards to a Roadside Picnic style scifi. (If you’re unfamiliar, that was a big influence on Annihilation, both the Jeff Vandemeer novel and the movie. It was the basis for the Tarkovsky movie Stalker. For the record, I haven’t read the book, but was spoiled on its story.)  Then all the genres and plot strands come together in a big battle that is more Gangs of New York than Minas Tirith. And as divergent as these genres are, Tidhar makes them into a unified whole while creating an absolutely convincing world and point of view.

I do not like didacticism in fiction as a rule. If a novel gets too didactic it puts me off unless there are a lot of other things I love about it to counterbalance it. Wendell Berry does a great job of making me overlook his didacticism. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like books with a strong political point. If the point doesn’t arise naturally from the work, or if it overwhelms the art of the story, I generally get so annoyed that I dock the book, even if I agree with the point. If I want to read an essay or a tract, I’ll read an essay or a tract. I don’t like being preached at. By Force Alone is a clinic in how to do it right, even if he toes that line a couple times. The book’s title becomes a bit of a refrain early on, talking about how power is gained by force. But he stopped that before it became onerous. And by illustrating how much the native characters saw the Angles and Saxons as outsiders invading their country he illustrates how ridiculous white/Anglo-Saxon supremacy is, and makes a strong point about the movement driving Brexit without being preachy. It’s impossible to miss the point, but the book is first and foremost a compelling adventure novel, and the point is made all the more strongly for it. Try explaining to an alien completely unfamiliar with centuries of mythologizing why Arthur is a hero and not a thug. Chivalry would seem like a bad joke to these characters. The book is unrelenting in its portrayal of the brutality that people are capable in their quest for power. It understands that quest is usually built by demonizing another group. 

But for all that, it’s primarily a well written, hyperviolent, funny and compelling adventure novel. I read it in a single day. Tidhar is a master, and this is one of his best books.

Canon Worthy

Owned But Previously Unread 2020 1/

The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

I have a vague memory of an interview with Dennis Lehane in which he said something along the lines that the big social novel of years past had been, to large extent, subsumed into the crime genre. Certainly Lehane’s novels set in Boston (highly recommended, especially Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River), fit that description. Ditto for fellow The Wire writing room alumni Richard Price’s (set in New York) and George Pelecanos’s (set in DC). James Ellroy in LA (for a nihilistic twist on the social novel). Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh. If The Cold Cold Ground is representative, McKinty does the same for Ireland during the height of the Troubles.

This is the first in the Detective Sean Duffy series which was recommended often on The Coode Street Podcast earlier this year (I usually discover SFF books from them, but I’m glad these got mentioned). Duffy is a Catholic detective in an agency and city dominated by Protestants. The Catholics, most sympathetic the IRA, don’t care for Catholics working for the Police. So he’s dealing with his Protestant coworkers and neighbors who don’t trust him, and his purported cultural allies the Catholics who don’t trust him. When a serial killer who targets gay men (during a time in which homosexuality is illegal in Ireland) shows up, he’s left to solve that case and how it relates to politics among the various religious millitias.

That case is as good a crime thriller as could ask for in its own right. But what takes the book to another level is the setting. McKinty is masterful in making the tension of the Troubles inherent in the background build along with the tension of the murder case. I don’t know much about the Troubles (beyond being a huge fan of Seamus Heaney), but this book invokes the anxiety that must have been endemic to living in that milieu. It is tense. McKinty’s prose is excellent, and his outlook bleak. This is a great crime novel on all levels. A great social novel too.

Canon Worthy

Christmas Gifts and Everything Else 2020 48/35

(I love that all the titles in this series come from Tom Waits songs.)

Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard (2020 reread)

Slightly updated review: 

I was right last year when I said I wouldn’t wait another seventeen years to reread this. I agree with what I said last year, in my review, copied below. I will add that I must have been in a different state of mind this year. I was in less of a mood for Dillard’s style, but since I had decided to put this on the annual reread list I pushed through, and was won over completely by the second chapter. Dillard’s prose is ecstatic and compelling. But moreso, her clear eyed approach to the evil in the world and frank admission of her doubt, while still believing (though I think in later years she may have left the faith) is bracing.

Still Canon, and now in the yearly rotation.

Rereads and Everything Else 2020 49/35

2019 Review: There was a time in the early aughts when I got a lot of flack from certain friends because I was always flogging the work of my three favorite writers at the time: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and Annie Dillard (and to a lesser extent Frederick Buechner). I’m endlessly hopeful that people will like what I like, sometimes in face of evidence to the contrary. I didn’t manage to convince many of them to read the books. Over the years my affection for O’Connor remained more or less the same, even if other authors (Gene Wolfe, Octavia Butler, Elmore Leonard, Vladimir Nabokov, Kelly Link, Cormac McCarthy (for a time)) eclipsed her. I still like aspects of Percy, but I’ve grown cooler towards him over the years. As for Dillard, I nearly forgot her; or rather, I didn’t return to her as often as Percy or O’Connor. I reread The Writing Life a couple of years ago after remembering the line, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Otherwise it’s been over a decade since I read any of her work.

I’ve been planning to reread Pilgrim at Tinker Creek soon, having recently purchased the audiobook. This brought Dillard to mind and I remembered an online friend including Holy the Firm among his favorite books. I pulled it off the shelf to read a couple lines. I read the entire thing in one sitting. It’s short, so that’s not some great achievement time commitment wise. But the book is a marvel.

Dillard’s writing is Psalm-like. It is in an ecstatic mode intended to evoke awe at nature, often turning that towards God. That is what attracted me to her writing at the time. What discomfited me was how her God never really fit squarely with Christianity. As she said in a later work, For the Time Being, she was spiritually promiscuous. Much of her work seemed borderline pantheistic. Like Frederick Buechner, she dealt very frankly with doubt. I last read Holy the Firm at 2002. At the time I was devout and a stickler for orthodoxy. I was just then learning to doubt and feeling the first rumblings of the unease with Evangelicalism that ultimately led to me leaving it. I wasn’t entirely ready for the book at the time. Reading it again now without the need to try to squeeze it into an orthodox shape was a profound experience.

The three essays here contain some indelible images. A moth flies into a flame. A plane wrecks and injures an innocent child. From these Dillard crafts what are essentially prose poems. They are worth reading just for the prose. But her act of looking so closely at these images forces the reader to observe their own surroundings in a similar way.

 I will not wait seventeen years to read this again.

Melville: A Novel by Jean Giono

This is a literary oddity that I got as a Christmas present. Giono, a respected novelist who I had not heard of before this was brought to my attention earlier this year, and a friend fell in love with Moby Dick and translated it into French. The publisher asked Giono to write an introduction, and instead he wrote this novella with a fictional version of Melville as the protagonist. It’s a fascinating idea that is a little bit of a mixed but mostly positive bag for me on first reading.

Some of this is pure fantasy, and some of it is probably based on actual events, but until I read a biography I don’t know how much of the realistic points actually happened. The book begins with what reads like literary criticism but then transitions into an imagined version of Melville’s trip to visit his English publishers to deliver the manuscript of White-Jacket. Along the way he is visited by an angel and wrestles him like Jacob. In the process he becomes dissatisfied with the seafaring adventures he’s been writing. While in England he meets a woman (who runs contraband wheat to the Irish during the famine as England watched them starve!) and between her and the angel decides to aim higher. When he gets back to America he writes Moby Dick.

I really love some of the language, and, obviously, the appreciation for Moby Dick. There are some really beautifully written passages here, especially a speech by the wheat smuggler. Writers writing about writers can get old fast. But if you’re going to write a book about an author literally wrestling with an angel on the way to literary greatness, it’s less onanistic not to write it about yourself (at least not directly). For some reason this didn’t completely land for me. Then again, neither did Moby Dick the first few times I tried. I may like this more on a second pass, and I’m certainly open to reading more of Giono’s work. But for now, it’s a mild recommendation.

Recommended.

Gifts and Everything Else 2020 47/35

The Thin Man by Daschiell Hammett

 The Thin Man has long been a favorite movie. A delightful screwball comedy masquerading as a crime picture. Powell and Loy are seemingly effortless as Nick and Nora Charles. The dialog is sharp and they deliver it so well. I think I’ve seen at least one of the sequels, but I can’t say for sure. But if I say I’ve watched the first one a dozen times, I’m probably not exaggerating. A few years ago I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen as part of a double feature with Sorry Wrong Number at the Carolina Theater in Durham a few years ago and won a copy of the book as a giveaway. I finally got to it last week, and while it has the bones of the same story and much of the wit, it is something else entirely.

Having read The Maltese Falcon years ago(though I should reread it as I don’t remember it well) and Red Harvest (among the best things I read this past year), I thought that the Thin Man movie was significantly different tonally from his work. And that is very true. The film version of The Thin Man is a masterful comedy that happens to have a mystery plot. The book is far darker than the film, or at the very least the darkness pushed far deeper into the subtext of the film. That’s not to say that the book isn’t funny; it is. It’s just that the book is a sleazy noir that happens to be very funny. All the caricature and innuendo that made it to the film is spelled out a little more here. 

All in all I loved this. Between it and Red Harvest (a flat out masterpiece), Hammett has risen in my estimation, and I’m regretting not having read more after The Maltese Falcon. I’m also thinking that I probably underestimated that novel. Hammett’s prose is masterful, and his dialog is up there with the Coens (who clearly have read him) and Elmore Leonard. A couple more this good and he’s up there just behind Leonard at the top of my crime writers list. Next up is The Glass Key and a probable reread of The Maltese Falcon, but I plan to read them all eventually.

Highly Recommended/Canon Worthy

Owned But Previously Unread 2020 83/75

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish kept me up late; I read it in a couple long sittings yesterday. I picked up three books at the North Carolina Book Festival in February (one of my prearranged exceptions for my goal of not buying books in 2020), and as much as I enjoyed the other two, this was by far the best of the three. It reads like Southern Gothic by way of Nabokov, but structured by David Mitchell. But it would be reductive to say it was just that. It is its own very disturbing thing, as unsettling as any horror novel.

The book starts out in heavy territory; two sisters, 16 year old Edith (Edie) and her younger sister Mae have moved from Louisiana to live with their estranged father, Dennis, a famous author and former Civil Rights activist) in the wake of their mother’s (Marianne) suicide attempt. The narration is fractured. Edith’s sections are first person present tense as the events happen in 1997. Mae writes in the past tense from an initially indeterminate perspective. There are interjection chapters, usually in the past tense from other characters. Interspersed throughout are letters to and from the parents, passages from their journals, interviews, transcripts of phone calls and notes from the mother’s psychiatric hospital. I’m on record saying that this is one of my favorite narrative techniques, and Apekina is a master at it. It fits the material so well. It allows the reader’s sympathies to be drawn in entirely the wrong directions then brought back with force without cheating.

It has very potent political themes. The hypocrisy of a lot of leftist white people being woke for shady reasons, without denying the importance of being politically aware. The damage that one man can have on the women around him. But, like Nabokov, the work is not some vessel for ideology. Apekina cleverly has Dennis say his books are not propaganda while his interlocutor says maybe a little of that isn’t too bad? And while there are a couple of chapters that show that Apekina has a point of view, she clearly takes the position that the art is more important. And the political points are only strengthened by that approach.

The book also raises ethical questions of how much real life should be put into a work of art. Discussion of this point will involve spoilers, so skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want them. Initially the book sets the reader up to be sympathetic toward Dennis, the father driven away by his wife’s problems who gladly seizes an opportunity to take in his daughters even after years of estrangement. Edith’s resentment of him seems to be on a trajectory of eventual reconciliation and Mae’s instant acceptance seems more reasonable. But as the novel progresses Dennis is gradually revealed to be a monster of sorts. He seems to have used the Civil Rights stuff as literary fodder, and he abandons his comrades in arms after they are no longer useful to him. He then grooms the underage Marianne, marries her when she is 17 and then abuses her into being a muse. Edie is right to flee him and Mae’s attachment to her father seems to be another grooming situation. This is dark dark stuff. Many make art out of their trauma, but where’s the line between that and creating trauma to create art? This very nicely undercuts, or at least complicates, the myth of the artist while also affirming the importance of art. And while the women in Dennis’s life are clearly his victims, they have their own issues as well and are not painted as mere wide eyed innocents. And this is not set up as some sort of moral equivalence between them and him; it just gives everyone their humanity.

This is a tough read content wise, but on prose and structure levels is absolutely compelling. It deals with trauma and mental illness in an emotionally real way without being overly sentimental. The structure of the book gives it enough unreality to give it a mythic quality that is satisfying. It is unrelenting in its portrayal of the darkness of the world it explores, and yet it is not hopeless. I will certainly be reading Apekina’s next book. This one was outstanding.

Canon Worthy

Book Festival Exceptions and Everything Else 2020 45/35

Wyoming by JP Gritton

I heard JP Gritton read at the North Carolina Book Festival this past February, and his debut novel Wyoming was one of the three books I picked up there as exceptions to my no book buying this year policy. A friend of mine, one of the organizers of the festival, recommended this and The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina as the books represented there that would most likely fit my tastes. He was right on both counts.

Wyoming sits comfortably on the same shelf as Winter’s Bone, No Country For Old Men or Tishomingo Blues. I love rural noir, and this is an admirable entry in that genre. Like the first two of those, it would make for an excellent movie in the right hands. Shelley Cooper is a protagonist with a deep seated anger and a propensity to make the worst possible decision every time he gets a chance. His resentment of his brother, his best friend, his ex-wife and others appears boundless. The cruel world of bone deep poverty in which he lives explains a lot of this, and explains why when asked by his brother to deliver pot grown in Colorado to Texas (the state of the title is metaphor not setting) he has to take the chance. Predictably, given the genre, the poverty and Cooper’s sheer cussedness, things go awry after the dropoff.

*Spoiler in this paragraph*

The narrative alternates between the delivery/its aftermath and the story of Cooper’s past. As in most rural noir, the world is a cruel, unrelenting place and Cooper’s mindset fits this world perfectly. What keeps this from being performative nihilism is that the reader gradually realizes that Cooper is a closeted gay man and dealing with the dual pressures of that and poverty have driven him to a very dark place. I probably should have picked up on this earlier in the book, but I twigged to it about halfway through. How this would play to a gay reader, I can’t say, but it worked for me.

*End Spoiler*

This is an excellent debut novel. On the basis of it and the essay that Gritton read at the Book Festival, I am looking forward to more of his work. 

Highly Recommended

Book Festival Exceptions and Everything Else 2020 44/35