Glass Houses

Conscience Comes Calling

In Louise Penny’s bestselling Armand Gamache series, the Canadian village of Three Pines, outside Montreal seems like heaven on earth. The tiny village that does not even appear on most maps, is where Chief Superintendent of the Surete du Quebec, comes home for warmth and peace after the chaos of his days dealing with crime in the city.

His loving wife Reine-Marie, his friends, his daughter and son-in-law, have the village’s charming bistro sun by Gabri and Olivier at the centre of their lives in Three Pines. In the thirteen book of the series, Glass Houses, one Halloween night, when they have guess from Montreal, a dark, hooded figure appears on the village green. It just stands there, doing nothing, but the tranquility of the village is shattered. Everybody expects top cop Gamache to do something, but since no crime has been committed he is unable to get rid of the spooky character.

One of the guests, a journalist, recalls a story he did on an old Spanish tradition, of the cobrador or “debt collector” who is hired to just follow a debtor or stare at him, so that he is scared into paying up. Gamache’s son-in-law and second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir does some research and finds the story of the origins of the cobrador, which was like a conscience calling out not a financial but a moral debt. Gamache realizes that “someone in the village had done something so horrific that a Conscience had been called.”

Then a murder is committed, the cobrador vanishes, and Armand Gamache is called upon to testify in court. Oddly enough, the prosecuting lawyer, Barry Zalmanowitz grills his own witness so vicously, that the judge Mauteen Corriveau suspects that there is something more to it that meets the eye, and she is right.

Gamache’s career and several lives are at stake, and the outcome of the case is crucial to a plan the Chief Superintendent, Beauvoir, and their Surete colleagues have been working on secretly for months, to fight the drug trade in Canada.

The suspense builds up as slowly as the heat in the courtroom becomes stifling. The case tests the nerve and loyalty of everyone in Gamache’s circle, and they all rally around wonderfully.

Conscience, duty, and love of family and friends are always underlining these books about Armand Gamache and Three Pines.  Glass Houses is one of Loiuse Penny’s finest. It is difficult for the reader to step out of beautiful village when the story (with its terrific climax) comes to an end.

Glass Houses

By Louise Penny

Published by: Hachette

Pages: 391

Autumn

An Enduring Friendship

“What you reading?” Daniel Gluck asks whenever he sees Elisabeth Demand in Ali Smith’s latest novel, Autumn. They have a strange friendship that easily transcends the sixty-nine year age gap between them.

This relationship, Brexit and the colourful life of British pop artist Pauline Boty form the core of this moving novel, the first of the four Ali Smith plans to write with the seasons as titles.

Autumn, shortlisted for the Man Booker Award this year, moves between 2016, when Daniel is 101, lying comatose in an elder care hospital, and different points in the past when he becomes a friend, philosopher and mentor to his young neighbour.

He unwittingly nudges Elisabeth into doing her dissertation on Boty, who fought male prejudice against female painters to do her bold and original work, but slowly fell out of favour.  When he is lying in hospital, Elisabeth visits him regularly, pretending to be his granddaughter, and reads to him.

In the world outside,  Britain has voted to leave the European Union, and the people are shocked.  The country as Daniel, Elisabeth and her somewhat batty mother Wendy know it, turns into a suspicious, hate-filled, barbed-wired place. Someone has spray-painted the words “GO HOME” on the house of a family, presumably immigrants.  Later, when passing the same house, Elisabeth sees the words “WE ARE ALREADY HOME THANK YOU” painted right below, with a tree and bright red flowers. A gracious response to boorishness.  

The writing is non-linear-- dreams, memories, impressions,  interspersed with reality.

Then there are the playful bits that portray the friendship between Daniel and Elisabeth.

 “Very pleased to meet you,” Daniel says when he meets the eight-year-old for the first the first time, “Finally.”

“How do you mean, finally?” Elisabeth asks. “We only moved here six weeks ago.”

“The lifelong friends,” Daniel says. “We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.”

The next book in the series will be Winter, and Ali Smith admirers can only wait with eager anticipation.

Autumn

By Ali Smith

Publisher: Pantheon

Pages: 272

Y Is For Yesterday

Alphabet Soup

In 1982, Sue Grafton started her Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series, with A is for Alibi. She has gone through almost every alphabet in the English language, and with Y Is For Yesterday, she has written 25 bestselling novels starring the feisty private detective, with just Z Is For Zero to go.

Kinsey Millhone is one of the most popular characters in detective fiction, a single (with occasional, very brief romantic entanglements), independent, courageous, witty and totally kickass female, who through A to Y has solved crimes and fought felons up and down her stomping ground of Santa Teresa, California. She lives in a studio apartment, owned by the octogenarian Henry Pitts, who is also an expert chef, and her best buddy. His fun family of long-living Pitts is like Kinsey’s surrogate clan, and their watering hole of choice is Rosie’s bar and restaurant owned by a ferocious Hungarian woman, who often feeds them foul-sounding delicacies from her homeland, with Kinsey’s preferred drink of chilled chardonnay.

The series has remained in the 1980s, so no cell phones, computers just about making an appearance, phones are rotary, and notes typed on manual typewriters or handwritten on index cards. The most advanced gizmo of the age is the copier.  By 1989, when this one is set, VCRs have made an appearance.

Y Is For Yesterday starts with a prank that snowballs into a tragedy. A girl calls Iris steals a question paper to help her friends Troy and Poppy pass a tough test. An unsigned note to the principal gets them caught and suspended. The school bully Austin claims that their classmate Sloan snitched, and instigates a social boycott of the poor girl.

Austin is also the mastermind behind a porn tape in which his friends Fritz, Ted and Bayard sexually assault a drunk Iris. Sloan steals the tape so that she can force Austin to call off the ostracism. She ends up dead, with Fritz and Troy going to jail.  Bayard turns informer and is released, Austin vanishes without a trace.

When they are released, Fritz’s parents receive a copy of the revolting tape with a demand for money if they don’t want it to reach the police and send the boys right back in prison.  Which is when Fritz’s mother Lauren calls Kinsey to try and trace the blackmailer. They don’t intend to pay and open themselves up for more blackmail demands, but the flip side is their beloved son being arrested again if the tape reaches the police.

The novel moves between 1979, when the cheating, rape and murder occurred, and 1989, when Kinsey starts investigating.  She has problems of her own, when the psychopath Ned Lowe, who tried to kill her in the last book reappears, and starts stalking her.

Much to Kinsey’s annoyance, the genial Henry agrees to play host to a couple of homeless tramps and their dog.  There is a minor subplot involving Kinsey’s cousin Anna and her romantic shenanigans.

Kinsey is still her brave, likeable self, but the students who had caused the scandal, now grown up into not-very-nice adults, make her efforts to help them feel like a lost cause.  Since it is written in a flashback-flashforward style, in which the same incidents are seen from the points of view of the various characters, large sections of the book seem repetitious.

 Still, for fans who have been with Grafton right from the start, the ending of the series would be like losing a friend.

Y Is For Yesterday

By Sue Grafton

Publisher: Marion Woods/Putnam

Pages: 483

My Absolute Darling

Dangerous Love

Gabriel Tallent’s first novel, My Absolute Darling is a bleak disturbing yet always gripping story of 14-year-old Julia ‘Turtle’ Alveston, who lives with her father Martin in a distant shack. Her grandfather, Daniel, lives in a trailer nearby and disapproves of the way the kid is being raised by her father.

On the one hand he teaches her to handle guns be tough and on the other mentally and physically abuses her so badly, that the girl loathes herself and is confused about her feelings for him. Because Martin discourages interactions with anyone outside, Turtle has no friends at school, and is not even allowed counselling when a sympathetic teacher, Anna, want to help her.

Martin is a despicable monster, who idea of expressing love is violence. But, like victims of Stockholm Syndrome, who get attached to their abductors, Turtle is tied to her father, because, as he keeps emphasising, “You are mine.”

In Turtle’s decrepit home, she eats raw eggs, the dishes are left outside for the raccoons to lick clean, and she runs about the forest barefoot, with her gun for company.

The fierce-yet-vulnerableTurtle realizes that other people do not live like her when she encounter two boys lost in the woods, Jacob and Brett, who treat her as a buddy and invite her into their clean, warm, loving world.  They jokingly call her “the chain-saw-wielding, shotgun-toting, Zen Buddhist, once-and-future queen of postapocalyptic America,” as fascinated by her toughness as she is with their wit.

When Jacob and she fall in love—though she has trouble understanding or articulating the emotion—her father goes wild.  And when he turns up after a long absence with another little girl, Cayenne, Turtle knows it is time to escape.

If description of the lush landscape are poetic, the violence is brutal, and the story moves towards a predictable tragedy, still, the reader avidly waits for the explosion.  This is not an easy book to read, but heralds a brave new voice in literary fiction.

My Absolute Darling

By Gabriel Tallent

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages:  417

History Of Wolves,

Girl Interrupted

Emily Fridlund’s debut novel, History Of Wolves, has made it to the Man Booker Awards shortlist; to be listed alongside some of the finest novelists is quite an achievement for a young writer.

It is a moving coming of age story about 14-year-old Melinda (shortened to Linda), whose life changes over one bitter-sweet summer. She is a lonely kid, called “commie” and “freak” by her schoolmates, because her parents used to be a part of a commune. The others drifted away, but they remained behind in the shabby lake-side shack in the middle of nowhere.  Linda, who narrates the story when she is 37, says of herself, “I was flat-chested, plain as a bannister. I made people feel judged.”

A new history teacher, Mr. Grierson gives her an opportunity to represent the school and make a presentation, that wins her a prize. It is about wolves, that gives the book it title. Linda gets fixated on Mr. Grierson, even when he is fired on charges of pedophilia, on the complaint of a dyslexic student, Lily.

What also causes an upheaval in Linda’s life is the family that comes to spend a summer across the lake. A young woman, Patra, is left alone with her four-year-old son, Paul, while her husband Leo does some important-sounding work in Hawaai. Patra hires Linda to babysit Paul, but it’s more because she needs someone to talk to, stuck as she is in the wilderness.

Paul is a sweet kid and comes to love Linda, but things unravel when Leo arrives. He is a Christian Scientist who has a strange power over his wife and child.  When it becomes clear that Paul is seriously ill, Leo lets him die (it’s no spoiler, the death is mentioned right at the start), because his faith does not allow medical intervention.  Later, there is a trial and Linda is summoned to testify.

The aftermath of both incidents is hazy,  what remains firmly in focus is Melinda’s state of mind. Due to her  circumstances, she is not a normal teenager, and her responses to events around her could be seen as off kilter. The novel does not follow the usual trajectory of a novel about a young girl—there is no romance, no sexual awakening, no major life-changing experience, still Linda’s future is oddly tainted by incidents in which she was just a bit player.

Maybe the book could be faulted for underplaying the drama, but she keeps up the chilly mood she sets describing the Minnesota landscape; except for a small beam when Patra befriends Linda, sunshine rarely shines on this set of damaged, wounded people. Still the book makes one care for Linda and what happens to her, and the prose is remarkably precise.

History Of Wolves

By Emily Fridlund

Publisher: Grove Atlantic

Pages: 304

Every Last Lie

Accident Or Murder?

In Mary Kubica’s suspense drama, Every Last Lie, Clara Solberg’s life comes crashing down when her husband Nick is killed in a car crash; their four-year-old daughter Maisie, who was in the backseat, miraculously survives unhurt, with no memory of the accident.

When Clara gets the news, she has just delivered her son, Felix for days ago.  Her father and Nick’s friend Connor helps her cope with the tragedy.  But there are expenses and unexpected crises that keep popping up.  Clara had put all her savings into Nick’s dental business; her father offers to help, but she knows that he has his own burden to carry, what with his wife suffering from dementia.

Maisie is an annoying, self-centred kid, the kind who will demand to be taken to the bathroom at the most inconvenient time, and throw tantrums at the slightest opportunity. Clara is unable to tell the child that her father is dead.

Then Maisie lets drop that a “bad man” was after them, and gets hysterical at the sight of a black car. Clara suspects that her husband’s accident may have been murder. The cops are not in the least cooperative, so a grieving Clara, tries to investigate herself.

Kubica writes from Clara and Nicks’s voices—she in the present discovering things Nick hid from her; he in the past, talking of the trouble he is facing in his business that is spiraling out of control.

The pace and suspense build up to a point, but redundant characters like the neighbour with an abusive husband and Clara’s ill mother, hamper the flow; too many red herrings are bunged in, so that the climax comes as a downer, and the narrative of Clara’s problems is left dangling.

Every Last Lie

By Mary Kubica

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 331

Elmet

Children Of  Nature

Fiona Mozley’s debut novel Elmet is a surprise pick on the Man Booker Award shortlist this year, making the 29-year-old writer one of the youngest to make the grade. She wrote the book on her train commute from York to London, which makes the end result all the more amazing.

Elmet gets its name from an ancient Yorkshire kingdom; the narrator Daniel, his sister Cathy and father John—whom they call Daddy—live in seclusion in the forest, in a house they built themselves; their Spartan existence more medieval than modern.

‘Daddy,’  hulking giant of a man, was famous in those parts as a bare-knuckle fighter, who was never beaten. Now, he stays away from that violent life with his children, growing their own food and hunting for game with homemade bows and arrows, to eat. Their rough life has made the teenage Cathy strong and fearless. When they were still living amidst civilisation, she had thrashed a group of boys who picked on her and Daniel.

 They had very little to do with their mother who drifted in and out of their lives and finally vanished. They were raised for a few years by their grandmother, till she died. In the village,  John makes arrangements for them to be educated by a mysterious female friend who lives nearby, but only Daniel is interested in books and knowledge; Cathy is more of a wild child.

In their tranquil life, a threat comes in the form of powerful landlord, Price, who claims that the land they have built their house on, belongs to him. But there is a history to his hostility, because in the past, John used to be his muscle-for-hire henchman.

Price’s two thuggish sons harass Cathy, while the father threatens John.  When John becomes one of the leaders of an uprising against the exploitative ways the landlords, Price and his men get even more vicious.  The tragedy that follows is heart-rending.  There is also a touch of the mythical in the fight between evil and elemental purity.

Mozley uses Yorkshire speech in her dialogue, the way characters say “doendt” for doesn’t and “wandt” for wasn’t. But there is a kind of lyricism with which she describes the copse, the animals and birds that surround this strange paradise this family of three has created for themselves; Daniel comes up with observations like: “The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives.”

The book deserves the acclaim and attention it has received so far, and Mozley is writer to watch for.

Elmet

By Fiona Mozley

Publisher: JHodder & Stoughton

Pages: 311