Saturday, March 09, 2024

14. The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley

I bought this book new at the great White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. They recommended it as a good fantasy book for a pre-teen and I've been reading it to my pre-teen for the last few weeks.  It was also a favourite of my wife who actually read it as a teen herself.  We read the trade paperback on the right, but she has the lovely original proper-sized paperback, pictured below.  It was written in 1982, back in the day when YA fantasy, though still a sub-genre, was not an industry where every book has to be a series with a netflix tie-in.  It is refreshingly just a book.  Elements of the story and setting are left unexplained for one's imagination to ponder.

The protagonist is Harry Crewe a young woman/older girl (her age is never clearly established), whose parents died and is sent to a remote colonial outpost where her brother is an officer to live with a semi-noble couple.  They are in the desert region of Damar where mining has attracted what their country's expansion.  The natives are called the Hill-Folk and there is a separation between them and the Homelanders as they are called, though not necessarily the violence and genocide that usually comes with this kind of resource colonialism. It's a little hard to figure out what is going on in the beginning, as Harry is new and only overhearing things and the reader sees things mostly through her eyes.  There is a conflict arising with some other Northern tribe, with rumours of strange magic, rumours the Homelanders consider superstition.

The story really gets moving when Harry gets kidnapped by the intense, powerful leader of the Hillfolk, Corlath.  She doesn't know why he took her and it turns out, neither did he.  Rather, he was compelled by his kelar, the innate magic that the Hill-folk cultivate but has been dwindling in recent generations.  The bulk of the narrative is Harry learning about the Hill-folk and becoming a part of them and more, leading up to a battle with the Northerners that is quite cool.  It's an interesting mix of very big and epic changes to her as a character with the action being an important but small tactical battle.

I would say the language and structure of The Blue Sword might be somewhat sophisticated for a pre-teen.  At times, my daughter got a bit confused as to what was going on, as things are often implied or not said altogether so you have to infer from the context and leading narrative as to what is actually going on. I quite enjoyed it myself, but reading it aloud, it is hard for me to give a true impression as my mind can wander and I don't always internalize a book the same way. We both felt that Harry's big emotion of feeling that Corlath was going to be all mad at her was forced and felt artificial, but the rest of it we got quite into and by the end felt very absorbed by the story and the setting.  Recommended.


 

 

Monday, March 04, 2024

13. The Hit by Brian Garfield

I found this in near pristine condition (though faded with age, it appeared that it may have never been opened or at least barely) in a small used bookstore in Nashville.  I quite enjoyed Garfield's Death Wish and he is part of that small group of crime fiction writers of which Donald Westlake is the most famous that made their mark on the genre in the 70s and 80s so I had to pick this up.  

This is one of those thin novels of the past, with a simple premise and a quick resolution (at least compared to the tomes of today).  Simon Crane is an ex-cop somewhere in the Southwest (I suspect a secondary city in Phoenix) who gets sucked into the aftermath of a robbery on a mob safe (and the disappearance of the mobster whose house it was in).  His connection is that he had an ex who was the secretary at the house who discovered the place robbed and was too scared to go the mob bosses and went to him instead, making them both suspects.

The plot itself didn't grab me that much.  I can't quite put my finger on it, but it felt like it kind of went in various directions with new characters popping up but none of them having that much meaning to the protagonist or the crime itself.  When he finally does figure out who did the job, it's not all that interesting.  What was really good in this book was the location.  His description of a desert town that is evolving economically from a kind of shitty backwater to a more respectable and wealthier retirement and tourist area was really well done.  The city itself and the desert outside it are evocatively described as are the various weird characters who live there. The Hit, written in 1970, feels predictive of the desert noir mini-trend that would come two decades later to the movies.



Wednesday, February 28, 2024

12. The Widow of Bath by Margot Bennett

I have been looking for this book forever and finally found this nice trade paperback edition at the White Elephant sale in Oakland.  I'm not a fan of trade paperbacks on principle but this one I have to admit is quite nicely designed.  I think it was Kenneth Hite that made me aware of this book, but I can't remember for sure.  She clearly has been somewhat forgotten.

I enjoyed this book in the end, but I have to admit being quite stymied in the first half.  It was both a bit too sophisticated for me and perhaps too much of its time.  The dialogue was excessively clever to the point that I couldn't understand what characters were trying to say.  Every line was a clever metaphor or indirect allusion or obscure reference.  Perhaps this was how upper class post-WWII drifters talked at the time or perhaps Bennett was trying too hard.  It reminded me a bit of some of the British version of the  worst excesses of John D. MacDonald's hipster early 60s dialogue (though in this case, it was more baffling than annoying).  

The protagonist is Hugh Everton, an embittered hotel reviewer for a travel agency.  It is suggested that though he himself was not wealthy, that he had in the past hobnobbed with a wealthy or at least upper class set.  There was a scandal while he was working for the British embassy in Paris that ended with him in prison for cheque fraud (after being rescued from being drowned in the Seine).  He runs into two women from that scene at a mediocre resort on the English coast, as well as a stiff military man named Atkinson who looks almost identical to a Ronson, but behaves differently, who was responsible for his fraud and near-drowning incident.

One of the women is the beautiful Lucy, who was the one who needed the money that Everton made the fake cheque four.  She is now married to a judge.  She persuades Everton to come back to his place on the hill and while there, a dog howls, a shot is heard and the judge is found dead in his room, while the other four were all playing bride, alibis established.  And thus the mystery begins.

Everton is kind of a broken man, but also impulsive. Part of the narrative arc alongside the mystery itself is him finding his moral core.  The story gets quite good by the end when the murder moves beyond just personal motives into post-war smuggling of undesirable "refugees" from Europe.  And the mystery itself was multi-layered in a complex yet reasonable way that made the resolution fairly satisfying.  I couldn't entirely shake the distancing of the weird characters and their crazy dialogue, so I'm not sure I'll seek out her other books, but if I stumble upon one, I will pick it up and read it.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

11. Affliction by Russell Banks

Nice edition
Readin me some literachoor!  I think I must have been drawn in by the trade dress as this is a nicely produced paperback with a great illustrated cover and layout from 1989.  A part of me was also curious about Banks' work, which I guess I learned about when The Sweet Hereafter movie came out.  Since it was Canadian, it got a lot of press with the assumption that everybody should know who Russell Banks was.  Well I guess I finally do now know.

This is a sad book.  It starts out seeming to be like a good noir, with a brother telling the story of his older brother's crime (not yet detailed) and subsequent disappearance.  But it is much more of an exploration of male violence and small town New England.  The protagonist, Wade Whitehouse, is the high school cool guy with a mean streak who has lost his way, now the local police officer (basically directing traffic in front of the school) and dogsbody for a local developer.  His ex-wife has moved with their 11 year-old daughter to the bigger city down south and Wade keeps screwing up every time it is his turn for custody. As the brother unveils his investigation into Wade's unravelling, we see into his mind and slowly get his entire history, especially that of the abuse he suffered at the hands of their alcoholic dad.

It is a moving book and a stark portrayal of what today is known as toxic masculinity.  In my adult life, I have been tangentially exposed to the working class side of New England, where the proximity of Boston and New York City, as well as just being older, makes the distinctions between the rich and poor much more stark than on the west coast.  Affliction really gives you a look at the roots of the poverty and resentment from a neglected small town where everybody with any spark or imagination flees.  In the description of the fictional New Hampshire town of Lawford, it reminded me a bit of Stephen King's It, though obviously somewhat less fantastic.

Though many mainstream reviewers called this noir and tried to compare it to a hard-boiled thriller, it really isn't.  There isn't much of a mystery, besides what is held back by the narrator.  It lacks the punch of a true noir because it is so verbose.  However, it does deliver some thoughtful and powerful substance on what makes men violent and some ideas on how we can stop being so.



Friday, February 23, 2024

10. Perilous Passage by Arthur Mayse

This is another entry in the great series or reprints of lost Canadian "genre" books by Brian Busby working with Ricochet books.  I assumed this was going to be another Montreal-based book but was pleasantly surprised to learn it was a west coast thriller, taking place in the waters outside Northwest Washington State in the 50s.  Thanks to the nice forward by the author's daughter, Susan Mayse, I learned that Arthur Mayse was a long-time journalist and writer in the B.C.  He had quite a cool, old school, hard knocks B.C. life back before it it's suburban respectability facelift.

The story starts out like a classic hard-boiled thriller of the period.  Clinton Farrell wakes up on a boat in bad shape with a young girl holding a rifle leaning over him.  His recent memory is gone but he knows he is a drifter on the after having escaped juvie, done some boxing for money and eventually got a job working on a troller.  The girl, Devvy, turns out to be the surviving daughter of a failed farmer who found his boat drifting when she was out fishing.  She has taken over her father's farm, with the help of a mysterious old character who has a more prestigious past but has taken to the bottle.  

As usual, in these kinds of books, the plot is actually fairly simple but hidden away from the reader due to the memory loss among and distrust among potential allies.  The pleasure is in the peeling away of the layers to figure out what is going which is only mildly interesting here.  However, the characters themselves, the location and action is all pretty exciting, so the simple plot is excusable.  The bad guy first takes the form of Joe Peddar, childhood friend of Devvy, sometime boyfriend by default, from the bad family who himself has turned quite bad.  There are some great fights between him and Clint, described in almost technical detail yet exciting and really tough.

It's an interesting read, as the tone is an odd mix of, dare I say it, American and Canadian.  On the former side, it is quite hard-boiled.  The bad guys are nasty and the punches feel like they hurt.  On the other hand, there is an undercover RCMP agent who is almost like a superhero and the whole thing wraps up on a very optimistic note.  Here is a great quote that thrust the tone from grim to almost melodramatic, in a way that I quite enjoyed:

Patty straightened his hunched shoulders. The change in him was almost frightening. Behind the hired man's ragged clothes, behind the dry and easy humor, you could see the grim manhunter whom neither fear nor pity could swerve.

Here is the original pocket book which would be a sweet find!


 

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

9. This Boy's Life: a Memoir by Tobias Wolff

My sister really wanted me to read this as she quite enjoyed it.  I found it quite good but have trouble moving it into the excellent category.  I feel like these kinds of memoirs came out in the late 80s early 90s and furthermore these kinds of books are just not my jam.  I say all that to make clear my biases, because objectively speaking it is a really enjoyable and interesting read, with emotional and intellectual resonance.  It's Wolff's narrative of his own childhood following his divorced mother around as she tried to make a go of it in various cities.  The bulk of the narrative takes place in Chinook, Washington, where she eventually gave in to the ministrations of a pathetic and abusive mechanic named Dwight to marry her.  He is a real asshole, especially to Tobias, but the writing is so subtle in its tone that you are almost sympathetic to him rather than outraged, which I think is Wolff's ultimate revenge. 

It has a removed tone and a clear style, which made the pages really turn for me.  They are also a real counterpoint to today's youth culture of self-diagnosed anxiety and trauma as identity.  This kid really had a rough upbringing but he didn't realize it himself until much later.  There is no self-pity here, which makes you sympathize with him even more.  I am glad to hear that this book is sometimes used in the high school curriculum, because I think it portrays the freedom and fear that used to be childhood back before we started putting foam on every counter corner.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

8. Stopover Tokyo: A Mr. Moto Adventure by John P. Marquand

This was a thin novel that I should have finished in a few days.  Unfortunately, it was so boring and overly-written and predictable, that I had to force myself to get to the end, with my mom telling me to just skip to the end and stop complaining.  She's wild.  I see this is the last Mr. Moto adventure and Marquand died at only 60 a few years later.  I guess he was trying to get out of the game himself, because the theme is of the spy in the business who allows himself to become personally involved and thus compromises himself.

The story, as far as there is one, is centered around all-American 50s spy, Jack Rhyce, going after the "commies".  The red menace here is insanely vague, akin to the I Was a Communist for the FBI radio series.  There seem to be a lot of very real-seeming Americans abroad who have somehow been indoctrinated and now work for the other side, but what they actually do that is so bad is barely explained. Only at the end, do we learn that they plan to assassinate a liberal Japanese politician and blame it on the Americans.

But really nothing much happens in this book except Jack meets a beautiful female spy and they have endless conversations where they play their roles and then complain about playing their roles until I guess they fall in love and decide to leave the business when this job is over.  Of course, she gets killed (and worse).  Mr. Moto is on the sidelines being suspicious and then assisting.  The only element of interest is the background on Big Ben, the big commie who was snubbed at a Southern college so decided to destroy America, I guess.  There was some hints at interesting class issues, but otherwise this book was a snoozer, too caught up in its time to say anything interesting about it, yet not committing to the insanity of that time to at least have fun.

I read that this was an outlier of the Mr. Moto books as the others were pre-WWII and not dealing with the cold war, but I didn't love the first one so despite the beautiful paperback designs, I am done with Mr. Moto.

Lies!