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

Charlatans

Bad Docs

Robin Cook is to medical thrillers what John Grisham is to the law.  Ever since he hit the bestseller lists in 1977 with the truly chilling Coma, he has churned out 35-odd books set against a medical backdrop, and picking holes in the so-called ‘noble profession.’

The title of his latest, Charlatans, is self-explanatory; the novel opens with the detailed preparation for an operation at the prestigious and state-of-the-art Boston Memorial Hospital. The surgery was supposed to be routine, but the patient dies on the operating table. The arrogant, high-flying surgeon, Dr. William Mason, blames the anesthesiologist, Dr Ava London, and she points fingers at him. But when three such deaths occur, there is cause for suspicion. An ambitious young chief surgery resident, Dr. Noah Rothauser, is caught in the crossfire, when he has to investigate the deaths.

He is attracted to Ava, but also finds that her lifestyle is way more lavish than a doctor could afford, and there are other strange things about her, like her obsession with social media under assumed names. Turns out she works as a lobbyist for the Nutritional Supplement Council, and the plot gets more complex and dangerous.

The novel, like all of Cook’s work, makes valid points about medical malpractice, but the books, too high on procedure and jargon, are getting increasing tough to get through, without some speed-reading.  But, at least they are eye-openers in one way of another. There are good doctors, and then there are the greedy and evil kind.

Charlatans

By Robin Cook

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 448

The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye

The Girl Is Back Again

Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson created in Lisbeth Salander a heroine for our age—a young woman who rose above her horrific past to become virtually indestructible, both physically and mentally.

The first book, The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo became an instant international bestseller, followed by The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. Larsson died tragically young  in 2004, after finishing three books that make up the Millennium Trilogy, but it would be a shame to kill of his characters too, so his estate decided to pick David Lagercratnz to continue the series starring Salander and the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist. 

Salander’s hacking and martial arts skills came to Blomkvist’s aid many times in his journalistic career and saved the magazine he works for, Millennium, from shutting down. He is one of the few men she trusts and he feels protective towards her.

The first book by Lagercratnz, The Girl In The Spider’s Web was as intricately plotted and written with the same energy and chutzpah as Larsson’s work. The second, The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye is out now, and happy as fans are to have Salander back, the main grouse is that there isn’t enough of her in the book.

In this novel, Salander is in jail for a flimsy reason, to do with her shenanigans in the last one, in which she had saved the life of an autistic child. Having suffered an abusive childhood, she cannot take injustice or victimization of the weak, which is why she takes on the prison bully Benito (who named herself after Mussollini) and the entire system, because they torture a Bangladeshi prisoner, Faria Kazi.

Faria’s story of oppression by her strictly Islamist family is one of the main plots of The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye; the other has to do with an awful genetic experiment conducted in the past on racial minorities,  in which Lisbeth Salander also suffered.  Her origins story runs somewhat parallel to that of twins Leo and Daniel.

When Salander’s old and ill mentor Holger Palmgren is murdered in his own home, Blomkvist and she try to unravel the mystery that involves evil scientists and a kill-all-witnesses kind of cover-up.

The book is readable alright, but has too many subplots, too many flashbacks (why is Blomkvist’s past love life of interest to the reader?) and Lisbeth Salander not at her Amazonian best, though, of course even in prison, she manages to reach a computer and that makes her nearly invincible. But she does not have a villain worth fighting with, and then, she gets her ribs kicked in twice, instead of causing the other party equal damage.

Let’s hope the next book places her right back in the spotlight where she belongs.

The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye 

By David Lagercrantz

(Translated by George Goulding)

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 362