Blue Labyrinth

The Case Of The Toxic Elixir

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s creation Aloysius Pendergrast, is an FBI agent, and a thriller hero like no other. He has immense personal wealth and works for the FBI for the adventure. He is very handsome, has a face “so finely modeled that it could have been carved by Michelangelo,” and responds coolly to every crisis by inclining his head.

In the 14^th book of the series, however, he is mostly out of action. It begins with the corpse of his son Alban being deposited on his doorstep. An autopsy that Pendergast watches expressionlessly,  reveals a rare turquoise stone in the dead man’s stomach. Pendergast is convinced this is a message sent to him, but why and by whom—he has to find that out, even it means going over the heads of the cops investigating the murder, and travelling to strange places.

In a parallel plot, a guard at the New York’s Museum of Natural history is found murdered, and there seems to a link between the two seemingly unconnected incidents.

When Pendergast follows the lead of the blue stone, he is exposed to a deadly poison that leaves him bed-ridden and will lead to a very painful death, unless an antidote is found very quickly. Pendergast’s adversary is a ruthless billionaire avenging his own son’s death, which was caused by a genetic illness, which in turn could be traced to a deadly elixir made and sold by Pendergast’s great-great-grandfather a century ago.

The plot is as convoluted as it is bizarre and because it has so many what-the-heck moments it is also hugely entertaining.  Eventually, two very accomplished women race against time to look for the precious ingredients for the antidote to the toxin that is killing Pendergast.  One of them is the elegant Constance Greene, who lives with him as his “ward;” the other is his old friend, Margo Green.

The breathless climax leads to mayhem and massive destruction at the Museum, as well as the Brooklyn Botanical Garden housing rare plants. The weaponry goes from a giant Indonesian buckthorn to bottles of acid. It takes a fiendish imagination to cook up a plot like that; the next Pendergast book will be keenly awaited, just to see how the writers top this one.

Blue Labyrinth

By Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Publisher: Grand Central

Pages: 403

The Luminaries

Tough Times, Tough Men

Like Eleanor Catton’s superb The Luminaries, that won the Man Booker Award last year, and revealed a little know chapter in the history of New Zealand (the gold rush), this year’s winner, Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road To The Deep North, brings out a shocking episode during World War II—a story of unspeakable cruelty, eclipsed perhaps because the horrors of the Holocaust simply dwarfed everything else.

In 1943, the Japanese Emperor ordered the construction of a railway line-- the 415-km-long Burma-Thailand railway--to be built by 30,000 prisoners of war of many nationalities converted to slave labour. The men were forced to work under inhuman conditions, with little food, no healthcare and hardly any tools. The Japanese armymen who had to meet unrealistic targets without any resources, treated their prisoners worse than animals. To the Japanese way of life, a prisoner of war should have died of shame rather than be dishonoured; on the other hand they wanted to show the whites, that Asians could also manage great feats of engineering.

Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan’s book The Narrow Road To The Deep North (the title comes from a poem by the great master Basho) is a tribute to his father who survived the horrors of the Death Railway, or The Line, as it came be known, while thousands (the number is put at 14,000) died of starvation, illness or torture by the Japanese.

The narrator is Australian military surgeon, Dorrigo Evans, the commanding officer of just one division, trying to keep his men alive under hellish conditions. He was later feted and lionised for his heroism on the war front, but the horrors that he witnessed, do not allow him to feel any pride.

For the reader,  the relentless suffering of the men gets to be stomach-churning (a cheerful soldier, Darky Gardiner, is beaten mercilessly till the attackers can go on no more, and then dies an ignoble death drowning in the communal latrine’s river of filth), but Flanagan concedes that the Japanese commanders were helpless too. For a Japanese, failure is akin to death—the system of hara-kiri (ritual suicide) is part of their culture.

The Japanese commanding officer, Nakamura, ill and drug-dependent himself, tries his best to meet crazy targets with a dying workforce. Later, he cunningly escapes being tried as a war criminal, and realises the real perpetrators were never punished; as it always happens, the juniors took the rap.

Evans is haunted not just by the POW experience, but also his all-consuming affair with his uncle’s young wife Amy, as he goes through his loveless marriage of convenience to the dull Ella, and many infidelities.

Flanagan said about the book in an interview, “"I felt I carried something within me as a consequence of growing up as a child of the death railway. People come back from cosmic trauma but the wound does not end with them. It passes on to others.

"I didn't want to write this book but in the end I couldn't escape it. If I didn't write it, I'm not sure I could write another book. I had to deal with things which could become a stumbling block within me. I had to define them."

It took him 12 years to write the book, in which the reader can only imagine the terrible ordeal the men suffered— the indignity of their grim existence,  as bad as the physical privation.

The novel has already been hailed as a masterpiece and an epic comparable to the best in contemporary fiction. It is not an easy read, the love story is also full of guilt and torment.  Dorrigo Evans is a complex protagonist— heroic but not particularly admirable.  Still, what one takes away from the book, is a story of courage and will to survive.

The Narrow Road To The Deep North

By Richard Flanagan

Publisher: Chatto & Windus

Pages: 464

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Web of Murakami Magic                                                                             

Haruki Murakami’s last book 1Q84 was such an astounding achievement in fantasy fiction, his millions of fans must have wondered what he would next. The writer of such contemporary masterpieces as Kafka On The Shore and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle has never failed to awe and delight.

The Japanese writer’s books have been translated into dozens of languages, and for a while now, his name pops up every year as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Perhaps his huge popularity and relative ‘youth’ (he is just 65) comes in the way.

His latest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, has all the elements familiar to Murakami readers (including bits of erotica), but it is also simpler in structure and more accessible than some of the earlier books. Maybe that will get him readers in even larger numbers— there have been grumbles about his plots being too complicated and his mysteries unresolved.

Colourless sold sold a million copies in a week in Japan—a record many writers would kill for—and rave reviews too. Philip Gabriel's English translation has kept the book on the bestseller list for months.

It is about the kind of adolescent trauma that many must have gone through and grown out of. But the protagonist Tsukuru Tazaki is unable to forget a slight, and his life comes to a halt.  At school, Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends, who, oddly enough, had names that had a colour in them—the two boys were called Akamatsu (red pine) and Oumi (blue sea), and the girls were were Shirane (white root) and Kurono (black field). Tazaki was the only one who lacked a colour and was the odd one out—if it weren’t for him, the group would have kind of symmetry, but they think of themselves as the five fingers of a hand.

One day his friends decide never to talk to him or see him ever again. Without giving any reason or explanation, they cut him out of their lives.

Tsukuru, whose name means ‘to make’ is obsessed with train stations and after completing his education finds his dream job, building and refurbishing stations. He has no other ambition in life and just one as yet unexpressed desire—to find out why his friends threw him out of their circle. The trauma caused him such crippling despair that he nearly committed suicide.

With great difficulty he befriends another young man, Haida, whose name means ‘gray field’, also a name with a colour. Haida and he swim together and the new buddy introduces him classical music. The strains of Le Mal du Pays, reminds him of the past, since Shiro used to play this piece on the piano. Then Haida vanishes too, leaving Tsukuru alone with his pain and bafflement.

Finally, it is girlfriend Sara who prods him to go on and connect with his old friends again and ask them why they banished him. To push him off the wall of self-pity that he has built around himself, the practical and efficient Sara traces the friends using the internet and gives him the nudge he needed to embark on his ‘pilgrimage’ to search for the truth. She realises that till he finds out the reason for his abandonment, he won’t be healed and their relationship will be doomed.

This time Murakami does not take the surreal or ambiguous route and actually lets Tsukuru find out what happened. Over the pages the reader comes to care for ‘colourless’ Tsukuru Tazaki, even if his self-inflicted misery would have been exasperating, were it not for Murakami’s gentle treatment of his conflicted protagonist.

Still, Tsukuru with his ordinariness and humility is one of Murakami’s most endearing characters, and this book compulsively readable. If a reader is entering the world of Murakami for the first time, then maybe Tsukuru’s story makes for a good introduction.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage

By Haruki Murakami

Translated by Philip Gabriel

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

386 pages

Orphan Train

Lost & Found Kids

Orphan Train picks its idea from the real instances of orphans loaded on to trains in the period between 1854 and 1929, by well-meaning social workers and handed over to families who would accept them. Some were treated kindly by their adoptive parents, others like unpaid labour. 

Christina Baker Kline's book that has been on the bestselling lists for months, follows young Irish immigrant, Vivian Daly. She has led an adventurous life amidst a succession of strangers, some generous many cruel. Mementoes of her colourful life, and diaries are stored in trunks put away in her attic. They are opened by a student Molly Ayer, an orphan herself, living with uncaring foster parents. Clearing and cataloguing the contents of Vivian's attic is her community-service project, meant to keep her out of a juvenile reform home. An unlikely friendship develops between the girl and the old woman, who have a lot in common.

Orphan Train

By Christina Baker Kline

Publisher: Random House

Pages:  304

The Heist

Artistic Spy

The fourteenth book in Daniel Silva's series about Gabriel Allon, a master art restorer and reluctant spy-assassin for the Israli secret service.  Silva's books with Allon as hero are well-researched, giving as much information about art as about Middle East politics. Keeping Israel safe from terrosists is Allon's greatest mission, even as he keeps trying to quit and settle down to a peaceful life as an artist with his wife Chiara. In this book, he sets out to search for a stolen masterpiece by Caravaggio. To do this, he has to pull off an art heist himself to smoke out the bunch of villains from their global dens. After the superb The English Girl, the latest Allon novel stands alongside the best in thriller fiction.

  

The Heist

By Daniel Silva

Publisher: Harper

Pages 475

The Bone Clocks

Glimpses Of The Future

When readers start on David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, they get into the working class Irish world of Holly Sykes, an angry young woman who is cruelly dumped by her boyfriend. She has already fought with her mother and left home, so can't go back.

From such an ordinary opening, the book goes into a maze of multiple narratives, romance, fantasy, sci-fi and doomsday scenarios. By the end Holly Sykes is seen as an elderly grandmother in a remote village in Ireland, looking after two kids. It is a dark future in 2043, when today's excesses have rendered the world short of electricity, water, food, and helplessly dominated by the Chinese.

In between, other characters enter and exit, secret cults have dangerous to-the-death battles, and somehow Holly Sykes is involved, either directly or peripherally.

There are a thousand twists and turns, and unless one is peeking at pages to come, there is no way of predicting what will happen next.

David Mitchell spins a seductive web over the novel's 600 odd pages, and never lets the pace or inventiveness flag. He blends his real and fantasy narratives seamlessly to create a bookwhich is sprawling in his reach, and always a few steps ahead of the reader's anticipation. But he never takes the reader's attention of patience for granted. He is quoted as having said in an interview, "One of the questions I always try to keep in the front of my mind is to ask why would anyone want to read this, and to try to find a positive answer for that. People’s time, if you bought it off them, is expensive. Someone’s going to give you eight or ten hours of their life. I want to give them something back, and I want it to be an enjoyable experience.”

Like his earlier book Cloud Atlas, this one too has six interconnected tracks that move from 1984 to 2043.  Linked to Holly Sykes are Hugo Lamb, a greedy, nasty Cambridge undergraduate; Crispin Hershey, a successful English writer who is suffering from writer's block, Ed Brubeck a war correspondent with whom Holly has a child. 

When she was younger, Holly heard voices and had visions; as an adult she still goes into occasional trances that frighten people around her. She doesn't know how, but she is linked to two warring groups of immortals-- the Horologists and the Anchorites. 

When she had run away from home, she had encountered a strange old woman, Esther Little, who made the strange declaration that she may need “asylum” if “the First Mission fails.”  When she was seven, Holly was treated by Dr Marinus, a Chinese child psychiatrist to cure her of her mental "Radio People."  These characters return in various incarnations; there are others who help Holly never to be heard of again-- like her co-worker at a strawberry farm; or the horrid critic against whom Crispin Hershey launches a vicious revenge for writing a career-destroying review of his book.

Mitchell has as much fun with his stories and his characters as the reader he so clearly wants to engage and entertain. Some characters, like Marinus not just take different forms in this book, he appears from Mitchell's earlier novels.

The portion in the middle, where the Horologists and Anchorites battle it out is a bit juvenile and video game-ish, with dialogue using sci-fi gobbledygook, but get past it and the book finds its steady, grown-up feet again and ends with a flourish.

The Bone Clocks

By David Mitchell

Publisher: Random House

Pages: 640

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Sisters And Other Creatures

For a change, Rosemary Cooke starts her extraordinary story in the middle and loops it around her memories. Perhaps because starting at the beginning would be too painful for her. Karen Jay Fowler’s award-winning book, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is about the Cooke family, seen from the point of view of the daughter Rosemary or Rosie. Her life and that of her family—parents and brother—has been deeply scarred by the sudden disappearance of her ‘sister’ Fern.

Five-year-old Rosie is sent away to live with her grandparents, because, as she finds out later, her mother was having a nervous breakdown.  When she returns she finds that Fern is missing and no explanations are offered. Then her beloved brother Lowell leaves home in a rage and embarks on a path of self-destruction as an animal rights activist.

Somewhere along the way, the reader discovers that Fern was a baby chimpanzee, brought into the home by Rosie’s psychologist father, to conduct an animal-human behaviour experiment.  While the impact of human interaction on the primate is observed and recorded by her father and his students, nobody is too concerned on the impact of having a chimp sibling has on the girl child.

"Most home-raised chimps, when asked to sort photographs into piles of chimps and humans, make only the one mistake of putting their own picture into the human pile. This is exactly what Fern did," Rosemary recalls. "What seems not to have been anticipated was my own confusion."

As she is left mourning the loss of her playmate, she finds that other children in school find her behavior bizarre and call her Monkey Girl.  Must later in college, she is befriended by the unruly Harlow, who is so weird herself that she does not even notice Rosie’s strangeness. When Rosie first encounters Harlow, she is breaking up with her boyfriend and smashing furniture in the college cafeteria—which leads to her and Rosie’s arrest. To Rosie’s still grieving and conflicted mind, she is a human version of the hell-raising Fern.

Both Rosie and Lowell’s lives are spent in trying to find Fern and undo the wrong done to her in the name of research. The book is as much about family loyalty as it is about animal rights. The question it raises over and over again is, can humans justify the horrific cruelty they inflict on animals, because the results of their experiments could help improve human lives? Does the end justify the means?

The book is deftly blends profundity and humour with Rosie’s emotions of pain, confusion and guilt. It also leaves the reader caring as much for the damaged Rosie, Lowell and Harlow as for the innocent Fern, who had no way of preventing what happened to her. A must-read book by the author of the highly regarded The Jane Austen Book Club.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

By: Karen Jay Fowler

Publisher: Marian Wood/Putnam

Pages: 320

Korma Kheer Kismet: Five Seasons In Old Delhi

Food Frolics

It happens often that we see our own country better through the eyes of an outsider. Many of us may have visited Delhi and made the mandatory trip to Chandni Chowk and Bengali Market, but how many explored fully the delights of the city’s street food and dug out long-cherished recipes?  Pamela Timms does just that with a foreigner’s sense of excitement and wonder, and comes up with a slim book that is a delightful revelation of some of old Delhi’s best-kept culinary secrets, hidden away in its gullies and mohallas. Along with the food are word portraits of the people who have kept old cooking traditions alive. The book would inspire the reader not just to try some of the recipes, but also put aside fear of the infamous Delhi Belly and go in some of the food trails opened up by the intrepid Timms. 

Korma Kheer Kismet: Five Seasons In Old Delhi

By: Pamela Timms

Publisher: Aleph Book Company

Pages: 175