Killing Commendatore

Murakami In Wonderland

The English translation of Haruki Murakami's book was eagerly awaited, even though reviews of the Japanese original were not exactly raving

Still, Murakami could never write a bad book; even if he did, it would be a great read. Murakami with his surreal style, may be an acquired taste but his books are addictive. About time he was awarded that elusive Nobel (and also the Bad Sex prize given out annually).

Killing Commendatore, translated by Phillip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, follows the strange adventures of the unnamed protagonist, a popular painter of portraits, whose life comes apart when Yuzu, his wife of six years announces that she wants to leave him for another man.

He gets out of home, drives around aimlessly for a while till his friend Masahiko Amada offers him the use of a remote mountain cottage, where his father, the great artist Tomohiko Amada used to live and paint. He suffers from dementia and was moved to a care home.

The narrator wants to be a 'real' artist and no longer wishes to paint portraits but inspiration does not strike even amidst peaceful, picturesque surroundings. To pad his dwindling bank balance, he teaches at a nearby art school. He also starts casual affairs with two married women, one of whom stays around for a while, bringing him news from her "jungle grapevine."

Then, three things happen, he gets offered a huge amount of money to paint a portrait of the mysterious Menshiki, who lives on a hilltop mansion nearby. Menshiki has been inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, except for the lavish parties. He also lives in splendid isolation and has a peculiar obsession for a young woman. (Later, homage is  also paid to  Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland.)

Menshiki claims to have retired rich from the sale of his tech business, but there is no trace of him online. His most remarkable feature is his snow white hair. He drives expensive cars, wears stylish clothes and has a hidden agenda for seeking out the artist.

Then, the narrator discovers a painting titled Killing Commendatore by Amada hidden in the attic, which bewitches him. The genesis of the painting inspired by the opera Don Giovanni, lies in the time Amada spent studying art Vienna.

The third strange occurrence is a the sound of a bell that wakes up the narrator at night, till he and Menshiki trace it to a pit in the forest nearby. Disturbing the stones on the pit unleash a creature who plays a big part in what happens next.

It would be a spoiler to reveal any more, but the book has to be read at leisure, savouring Murakami's descriptions of food, clothes, music, books and art.

Very few writers can throw logic to the winds, forget about connecting dots and tantalise the reader regardless. The one annoying thing about this book, is the writer's breast fetish-- his conversations about breasts, particularly with a thirteen-year-old girl, are creepy. Ignore that and the novel will please a Murakami fan.

Killing Commendatore

By Haruki Murakami

Translated by Phillip Gabriel, Ted Goossen

Publisher: Knopf

Pages: 674

Transcription

Cloak And Dagger

There was admittedly some reluctance in picking up yet another World War II novel, but Kate Atkinson’s deliciously twisty Life After Life and its sequel (or companion piece as she called it) A God In Ruins, were such favourites that one could not resist a new book by her. And Transcription it turned out to be fast-paced, suspenseful and very readable.

The protagonist is 18-year-old Juliet Armstrong, who is newly orphaned, and hoping for a better life. She gets the excitement she wants, but not in the way she expected. She is suddenly summoned to the offices of MI5, Britain’s security services, to be recruited, along with several young women, including the aristocratic Clarissa. For reasons she cannot fathom, she is picked by the enigmatic and handsome Peregrine ‘Perry’ Gibbons to move in next door to a flat where fifth columnists (British Nazi sympathizers) have their secret meetings. They do not know that their handler, Godfrey Toby, is not the Gestapo agent that he claims to be, but an MI5 spy.

The walls of the flat have been fitted with recording equipment—even then the techie was a clever teen-- and Juliet’s job is to transcribe the tapes. It would have been terribly dull work, were it not for her infatuation with Perry, and her involvement with the more dangerous job of taking on the fake identity of the posh Iris Carter-Jenkins and infiltrating the circle of the traitorous Mrs Scaife.

Juliet discovers that not only does she have the imagination to fill in the blanks in the conversations next door, but also the courage to survive the lies, deceit, the cloak-and-dagger of the spy business. 

After the end of the War, when she is working on a children’s radio programme with the BBC, she suddenly runs into Toby, who refuses to recognize her. Characters from the past, that she thought she was done with when she ceased to be spy, tumble out, and she starts getting threatening letters (“you will pay for what you did”) and people following her. It turns out that the warning about the work of the secret service never getting over, was right.

Juliet tries to find out just what is going on, and gets embroiled in events beyond her control. It is impossible to tell if people are who they claim to be (is the pesky assistant a spy?); whether a double agent is actually a triple agent, and why she is being targeted for her actions during the War, which were, after all not of her own choosing, and were meant to be for the benefit of her country.

Transcription is a wonderful book, based on some true characters and events, about how multiple identities, crime, punishment, the conscience and, of course, the political choices people make, trace the course of their lives. It reads like a spy thriller, but sprinkled with wry British humour and ruminations on what constitutes patriotism. Poor Juliet’s love for Perry brings the pages some of its funniest scenes and lines; like when he takes her on what she believes is a date, but turns out to be a hilariously unromantic outing.

Juliet Armstrong, caught though she is in the web of history, is a girl for all times— intelligent, intrepid, and calm in a crisis. This novel is begging to be turned into a movie.

Transcription

By Kate Atkinson

Publisher: Doubleday

Pages: 352

Two By Nora Roberts

Psycho Alert

Two of Nora Roberts books have psychopathic villains—the kind with dangerously devious minds and the means to wreak havoc.

The gun control debate in the US comes up every time there is a mass shooting. In Nora Roberts’s Shelter in Place, three young men enter a mall in Portland, and start firing randomly. Many people are killed, and some in moments of heroism that automatically emerge when there’s a crisis, manage to save lives.

Simone Knox, who just happened to go out of the movie theatre to the washroom when the attacks took place, manages to call the emergency number 911, for which she is hailed as a heroine—without her presence of mind, more lives would have been lost.  Knox loses one of her best friends, and suffers from survivor’s guilt, leading her to go live on Tranquility Island, with her bohemian grandmother, CiCi, who is an artist, and seek solace in clay art herself.

Another survivor, Reed Quartermaine, befriends a young cop, Essie McVee, who had shot one of the killers, and becomes a cop too. All of them try to cope with the nightmarish memories, when suddenly, someone starts to target the survivors and kills them in horrible ways. The murderer, an expert with disguises and fake ids, stays several steps ahead of the cops; only Reed sees the connection, between the mall massacre in the past, and the current spate of killings. The novel is part thriller, part romance and very readable.

Shelter In Place

By Nora Roberts

Publisher: St. Martin's

Pages: 448

******************************

Come Sundown by Nora Roberts takes a germ of an idea from Emma Donoghue terrifying Room, in which a man abducts a young woman and imprisons her in a basement.

Alice Bodine, a rebellious young woman, on her way home, is kidnapped by a religious psychopath, who shackles her in a room, beats and rapes her and takes away the children she gives birth to. He forces Alice to call him “Sir” and believes a woman’s place is to serve men and give him sons. Alice is so brutalized that she loses her sanity.

The discomfiting horror of Alice’s plight, is juxtaposed with the life of ambitious Bodine Longbow, who runs her family’s Montana resort and has made a success of it. Her father and brothers run a ranch and they all live happily in a close-knit family, with grandmother and great grandmother around.  Bodine is even happier when her childhood crush Callen Skinner, returns to town and starts working with the family enterprise.

Then, two women are found murdered on ranch property and a vengeful cop tries to pin the blame on Callen. But that is the least of the family’s problems—a mentally traumatized and severely battered Alice is found on the road, and getting her back to normal is a challenge.

Callen and his beloved horse Sundown are shot at, and suddenly the Longbows have more problems than they are used to dealing with.

Roberts successful thriller-romance formula seems to work quite well here too, even though many readers could be put off by the violence inflicted on Alice. There is also some kind of judgment here, unintended though it may be-- women who don’t stay within the protective ring of their families, are risking Alice’s fate.

Come Sundown

By Nora Roberts

Publisher: St Martin’s

Pages: 480

Red War

Dead Man Walking

Vince Flynn wrote popular political thrillers (American Assassin being the best known, turned into a movie) with Mitch Rapp, a CIA counter-terrorist operative, as his protagonist ; after his death in 2013, Kyle Mills continued to write them, under the current publishing trend of keeping characters alive ever their creators have passed way to continue a profitable franchise.

Mills, a bestselling writer himself, has done a fine job with Mitch Rapp, his Russian frenemy Grisha Azarov and CIA boss Irene Kennedy appearing in great form, along with some other regulars like Scott Coleman, Mitch’s partner Claudia Gould and her daughter Anna (his girlfriend died in an earlier book).

Red War, the seventeenth Mitch Rapp novel, has as the villain, a Vladimir Putin-like Russian autocrat Maxim Krupin. When he finds that he has brain cancer and will probably not live too long, he is quite willing to start World War III to keep up his image as a strongman in the eyes of the people.  Facing protests in the streets for the poor conditions in the country and unable to trust anyone in his inner circle, he springs out of retirement, the psychopathic General Andrei Sokolov, who will stop at nothing to bring back the glory of Mother Russia.

Krupin and Sokolov plan to destroy NATO, attack Baltic countries and engage the west in a war that would benefit nobody but himself—and as a man with nothing lose, he is a tough adversary.

He is the kind of tyrant, who would mess with the power grid of Costa Rica to have his former hitman Grisha Azarov killed. Azarov has quit the madness periodically unleashed by power-hungry leaders, and is living peacefully with his girlfriend Cara, when the Russians attack. Rapp and Coleman happen to arrive in the nick of time to pull him out of his burning house, but Cara is badly wounded. Azarov is furious enough to consider mounting a hit on Krupin.

Meanwhile, Krupin hides out in the back of beyond, where medical personnel he has kidnapped conduct ghastly experiments on innocent civilians who have the same symptoms as Krupin, in the hope of finding a cure.  The CIA wonders why Krupin is behaving so erratically, and correctly conclude that he is terminally ill.

As the threat of nuclear war looms, it is up to Rapp and his new ally Azarov (who had tried to kill him in the past and had badly wounded Coleman) to find a way to stop the two Russian madmen.

Mills gets his politics right and the reader gets a worrisome look at the precarious state the world is in—for a change, the enemies are not middle-Eastern terrorists, but Russians with a death wish. The book is action-packed, pulse-pounding and scary for how realistic it is, even within the incredible two-man-army scenario.  Even if Mitch Rapp’s perfectly-timed appearances, hair-trigger escapes and way of getting out of every violent encounter unscathed seem exaggerated, and the CIA’s protector-of-the-world stance ridiculous, Red War is a hugely enjoyable read.

Red War

By Kyle Mills for Vince Flynn

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 400

Lethal White

Strike Four

A lot has happened since Robin Ellacott got a job as a temp in the rundown office of Cormoran Strike, disabled war veteran-turned-private detective.  In Lethal White, the fourth book in the series by Robert Galbraith (a pseudonym of JK Rowling), Robin moves up the ranks to partner, marries her disgruntled boyfriend Matthew Cunliffe, and secretly yearns for her boss; the man, described as a big, hairy, one-legged and perpetually sullen, somehow manages to get a string of beautiful girlfriends, the latest being Lorelei. But his heart still beats for his ex-Charlotte, now married but still dreaming of him!

There is murder, mystery and enough red herrings to sink a boat in this fat novel, but also too much Mills & Boon-ish romantic mooning holding up the pace, when the reader just want the story to move forward briskly, dammit!

The book is set just after the last one (Career Of Evil, 2015), so Robin still has a raw knife wound on her arm, inflicted by a serial killer, and Strike is grumpily acknowledging the fame and money that followed the capture of the notorious Shacklewell Killer.  London is in the grip of the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics—the influx of tourists as well as Leftist protests-- when Strike is thrown into a strange case.

A mentally disturbed young man, Billy Knight barges into Strike’s office to babble about the murder of a child that he witnessed many years ago, and then vanishes just as abruptly. Strike is mulling over this when he is hired by the Minister of Culture, Jasper Chiswell, who is being blackmailed by Billy’s brother Jimmy, and Geraint Winn, the creepy husband of the blind Minister of Sports, Della Winn. He wants Strike to find some dirt on the two, so that he can deflect them.

Robin is sent undercover into the grand building that houses the offices of the ministers—and there are vivid descriptions of the place. Chiswell’s daughter Izzy and her disgraced half brother, Raphael are around, working for their father, and all is not well between them and their stepmother, the temperamental, horse-loving Kinvara. Robin is as excited as her new husband is furious—he does not want Robin to do such dangerous work for so little pay, and is also quite blatantly jealous of Strike.

Almost half-way through the book, a murder takes place, the plot actually kicks in and all the various strands of the book finally converge.

Each chapter is headed with a quote from Henrik Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm, which has no direct connection with the goings-on in Lethal White, but for broad thematic indicators of moral and political conflicts.

The many twists keep the reader engrossed, but there are a few needless characters and digressions—the book could have done with some ruthless editing. Galbraith also uses the unforgivable device of having the killer explain his motives and modus operandi in a leisurely manner, even when it is in his interest to quickly shoot his victim and get out of his lair.

Hopefully, by the next book, Cormoran and Robin will sort their romantic and sexual tensions—both could do with some lightening up—the pain of his stump and her panic attacks take up far too much space.

Lethal White

By Richard Galbraith`

Publisher: Hachette India

Pages: 650

The Disappeared

The Reluctant Detective

CJ Box’s hero, Joe Pickett,  is a Fish And Game Warden in Wyoming, which gives the writer a chance to go all lyrical in describing beautiful landscapes, even as mysteries are being solved.

In the eighteenth Pickett novel, The Disappeared, Pickett finds himself in a corner, pushed there by the new governor of the state, who hates his guts. He cannot protest when Governor Colter Allen sends him to hunt for a high-profile British traveller,  Kate Shelford-Longden, who vanished without a trace after leaving the exclusive Silver Creek Ranch after her vacation, to Denver Airport from where she was to fly home to London. If he turns down the assignment, or fails at it, his job is at stake.

Pickett has to drive to the Ranch in the middle of the bitter January winter to solve the case that has baffled the county Sheriff and the Wyoming Department of Criminal Investigation. Luckily for Pickett, his daughter  Sheridan, works at the Ranch as a horse wrangler, and worked with the missing woman. She is also familiar with the staff at the Ranch (including new boyfriend Lance Ramsey) and the people around town.

It does seem as if someone does not want the case to be solved, because as soon as Pickett gets to the town, the notes given to him by the governor’s unpleasant chief of staff Connor Hanlon, are stolen. Pickett’s old friend, the outlaw falconer, Nate Romanowski, who is not supposed to be involved with the case, as per orders, turns up to ask for a favour.  Pickett, the reluctant detective, ends up solving both, in this enjoyable and fast-paced read.

The Disappeared

By CJ Box

Publisher: Putnam

Pages:  400