The Cold, Cold Ground

The Cold, Cold Ground is the nth book by Adrian Mckinty which I've ended up listening to in Gerard Doyle's narrative voice.  At such point as I end up reading Fifty Grand, I'll have to make the agonizing choice of print vs audio, since Doyle didn't narrate that one, and the two seem inseparable to me.

In this novel, McKinty puts Doyle to the test, setting the novel near Belfast during the Troubles, with different accents coming thick & fast.  I, of course, can't tell one Irish accent from another (although the Rhodesian one was quite good, I thought), but the sounds give one an idea of the ... I'm not sure what to call it ... ethnic mix isn't right, neither is tribal identities, but Belfast at the time was very divided, the accents are a sort of metonymy for the conflict.  (On a side note, I thought the Doctor's accent came & went a bit, but that's a minor point).

That aside...  how was the actual book?  I quite liked it, although I've got to admit that a priori it wouldn't normally be the sort of book I'd tend to read.  The Troubles aren't really a period that grabs me particularly (although I also liked Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man).  But McKinty's been a writer I enjoy reading since Dead I Well May Be, so I decided to give this one a shot.  After a lyrical beginning, Cold, Cold Ground is stylistically fairly restrained, which lets you focus on the very colorful events going on around Sean Duffy, the protagonist.  A Catholic cop living in a Protestant neighborhood, Duffy is not exactly marked out for a quiet life.  Here, he ends up involved in two murder investigations, one official and one on his own time (more or less).

One thing I liked about Cold, Cold Ground is that the story is very tied to its time and place, but at the same time don't feel didactic.  The Troubles form a necessary backdrop, but somehow it doesn't feel like McKinty wants to lecture me about them.  I guess I'm mostly thinking of Stuart Neville's Ghosts of Belfast, which felt pretty uninteresting to me, because it did feel very moralistic.  Not that McKinty's world lacks a moral center; Sean Duffy is a man with a clear moral compass, even as it leaves him in the occasional quandary.

Two last points.  The amazon review mentions a serial killer.  At this point in my life, I'm heartily sick of serial killer novels, but this one is sufficiently different to be interesting .  Even in the early stages, where it seems more standard, there's enough other stuff going on to keep the story vibrant.  Second, Duffy goes through a bit of a sexual awakening that felt kind of tacked-on (sorry if you're reading this, Adrian).  I assume it'll play out in the later novels of the trilogy, but it just felt kind of extraneous here.

The Lighthouse Land

I think of Adrian McKinty as a crime fiction author, but The Lighthouse Land is an exception, being both a YA novel and science fiction to boot.  So, how does it stack up against his crime fiction, which I've liked in the past?

So, how did it stack up against his adult fiction?  Not so well, I'm afraid.  It's not exactly that it was a bad book, but it didn't have much of the flair that characterizes his other novels.  I mentioned Michael Forsyth's flights of fancy in one of my earlier posts, so I'm not going to rehash it, but I think one of McKinty's strongest points is a very individual voice, and that was a bit lacking here.

My other problem lies in the science fiction aspect.  This book has a heavy emphasis on the science behind the magic, so to speak.  Jamie's arm comes and goes because the salmon scans his DNA, and the missing arm isn't missing in the rebuilt Jamey; humans and Altairians can't have kids because of different biology; and so on.  And once you're going to go that route (instead of a more Star-Wars-y hand waving route), the science has to be pretty solid.  Viruses shouldn't be able to jump to aliens who may not even have DNA; the idea of the salmon rebuilding your body from your DNA is really problematic (how does it know how fat to make you? How does it know how tall you are? etc), and so on.

It's probably churlish to pick on a YA science fiction novel for weak science, but it nagged at me enough that I didn't enjoy the novel.  Paradoxically, these things bother me less in novels where the author doesn't even try to explain -- I find that no explanation is worse for me than a bad one.

Falling Glass, War and Peace, Gene Wolfe short stories

I'm just going to quote my own amazon review here...
I came to Adrian McKinty's Falling Glass after listening to the Michael Forsyth trilogy (but not having read Fifty Grand). The first thing that struck me is how much the pyrotechnics (both plotwise and stylistically) are cooled down.

In the Forsyth books, there are multiple shootouts that can end up stretching credulity; here, we have a more cat-and-mouse plot, with a lot of energy going into characters hiding out from other characters. It's a nice refreshing change, as much as I loved the Forsyth books. Killian, the hero of the novel, is no superman, and so there's a constant knife-edge of tension, since odds are, if he gets in a fight he'll lose. I also liked that not every confrontation is resolved in a gun battle; it keeps things unpredictable.

Stylistically, McKinty has cooled down as well. The earlier books have longer poetic flights of fancy, which are notably absent here, except as the occasional special effect. One major improvement is that McKinty has moved away from his too-heavy foreshadowing of the earlier novels, which keeps the tension at a higher pitch.

I'm also chugging along through War and Peace and The Best Gene Wolfe Short Stories.  Now that I'm about a third of the way through War and Peace, I'm finding it to be just a very long novel.  That sounds kind of stupid, but what I mean is that, other than being very long, it's not structurally different from other novels, the way that, say Ulysses and Infinite Jest are.  The length isn't there because Tolstoy is trying to be innovative; instead it's there to give him space to devote to the many characters he's juggling.

And it's really an incredible juggling act.  Even though I don't think I could list all the major characters without a cheat sheet, every time one comes back on stage, it feels like they're fresh in my memory; Tolstoy never lets too long a time pass between mentions of each one.  Also, each character is so vivid that I can picture them clearly, so when they re-appear, it's not hard to remember who they are.

War and Peace also has a fair bit of satire (though I wouldn't call it a satirical novel).  There's a funny bit where one commander in the Russian army is chasing another division, so that he can take command, and they keep running away.  Pierre's attempts to remedy the lot of the poor also ends up being the stuff of satire.

The Gene Wolfe stories are, as I mentioned before, a really varied lot.  Since I posted, I've read two of the more enigmatic ones, "Forlesen" and "Seven American Nights."  I'm not sure that there is a hidden layer to be discovered in "Forlesen;" it feels more like a satire on business practices, with just enough clues to keep you guessing if there's not more.  "Seven American Nights," on the other hand, is pointedly elusive.  There's a lot going on behind the scenes, with at least one night missing from the journal, references to Easter week, possible hallucinations, and so on.  I'm not sure I have a solution for the puzzle, but it's an entertaining story, even on the surface, which is always the most important thing.

Revelation Space, Hidden River

I finally finished Revelation Space, which I previously wrote about here.  It was a fun read, mostly because it gave me that mind-blowing feel that only science fiction can give, of a universe where all sorts of crazy things are possible.  As science becomes more and more esoteric, I think it becomes ever-harder to write this sort of sf correctly but still keep it comprehensible for the lay reader.  (Reynolds is already on pretty thin ice by the end, where he talks about space-like particles switching places with time-like particles inside the Schwarzchild radius; I've read enough physics books to know what he's talking about, but I'm sure most readers haven't.  The thing that saves him there, I think, is that it's a couple of not-so-important pages in a 580-page tome).

Reynolds also has all the problems of "classic" sf, particularly in his characterization, which is pretty flat. Looking at the amazon reviews, it seems that this aspect of his writing doesn't improve, while his imagination gets more decoupled from real science, which seems like a lose-lose situation to me, so I guess the search for great sf continues.

I don't know if Adrian McKinty originally planned for his Dead trilogy to be a trilogy, but in any case, he interrupted it after the first book to write Hidden River, and Hidden River offers an interesting comparison to Dead I Well May Be.  Before I start on that, I should make clear that Hidden River  is an impressive novel in its own right, and doesn't need to be coupled with Dead.

Both novels are about an intersection of Ireland and the US.  Hidden River spends much more time in Ireland than Dead (as well as a crucial bit of time in India), but its center of gravity is Denver. Alex, the hero of Hidden River seems to know a lot about US politics for a recent immigrant, down to the difference between Senators and Representatives, which bothered me a bit, but it does give McKinty space to poke fun at US politics from an outsider's perspective, and it's handled well.

Both books are very heavy on the foreshadowing, Hidden River even more than Dead. I must say that I found it annoying after a while; it's as if McKinty doesn't trust the reader to remember that John is going to die, that everything will go to hell in a hand-basket.  It seems McKinty may have decided the same thing, since the other two Dead books have this aspect much more under control.

I loved the ending of Hidden River, more than any of the Dead books.  It doesn't have the visceral satisfaction that they have with the violent denouements in each case, but its made up for in believability.  When characters get into a shooting-match against incredible odds, there's always a feeling of unreality when they emerge unscathed, no matter how skillfully the author orchestrates things.  By opting for a quieter ending, with much of the Mulhollands' downfall off-screen, McKinty leaves the focus on Alex's character arc, as well as closing on a more realistic note.

Bloomsday Dead, On Beulah Height

I just finished a couple of books that made me think about the intersection of the readership for detective novels and "high art" books.  Adrian McKinty's Bloomsday Dead is a violent thriller that is riddled with references to Joyce's Ulysses, from the title and first line ("Stately plump Buck Mulligan") through the chapter titles, all the way to the closing line ("yes").

And these aren't just clever references; the theme of homecoming and wandering is woven through the novel.  Michael Forsyth finally comes back to Belfast, his Ithaca, after 10 years of wandering, to be reunited with Bridget Callahan and her daughter Siobhan, respectively his Penelope and Telemachus.  And the action takes place over a single day, just as Ulysses does.  Of course, the novel is not as schematic as that, just as Ulysses is not a copy of the Odyssey.  Rather, these thematic undertones add resonance to the sense of closure at the end of the book.  But I wonder, how many devotees of both hard-core modernism and hard-boiled noir are out there -- it seems like McKinty's is deliberately aiming at a very small audience.

On Beulah Height is another in the Dalziel/Pascoe series.  It was excellent, with Reginald Hill at the top of his form.  But, reading it at the same time as I was listening to Bloomsday Dead made me wonder again about that intersection of high and low art.  Hill throws in a number of references to the Aeneid (and, with the benefit of reading the novel 10 years after its original publication, I already know that the next novel is called Arms and the Woman).  Now, it's true that the Aeneid is not as obscure as Ulysses, but I can't help feeling that "Of arms and the man I sing" is not exactly a widely-known line, nor will references to Pascoe as "pious Aeneas" ring a lot of bells.  So, is the expectation that those who get it will be happy, and everyone else just ignore it, or what?

And, of course, while I get to revel in my smarts, I can't help wondering what references I'm missing elsewhere.  For example, anything that references, say, Tolstoy is going to go right over my head.

The Dead Yard

I finished The Dead Yard this morning while feeding the baby -- I think I'm going to be going through audiobooks a lot faster these days...

Although I mentioned in my previous post about The Dead Yard that the book seemed to start as a farce, it certainly doesn't end as one.  Michael infiltrates an IRA splinter group, and at the beginning they're mostly pathetic.  There's a funny scene where they rob a bank, but all of the big bills are in the safe, and the tellers are telling the gang that they ought to wait around for the manager to return.  It teeters on the edge of violence, but ends calmly.

The gang's next attempt is also a big screw-up, but this time McKinty ratchets up the tension a bit by turning it into a hostage situation, and we see that even these screw-ups can create a situation where innocents can die.  From that point, the game turns serious, until the exciting finale.

I'm not really sure what I think of this novel vis-a-vis the first one.  On the one hand, there's no question that most of my issues with the first one have gone away here.  The plot is less straight-forward, and right until the end there I didn't know how it was going to end.  (Obviously Michael's going to get away, but what about Kit or Peter?)  Also, in Dead I Well May Be, Michael was strongly developed, but the other characters not as much.  Here, Kit stands out as a great character, but on top of that, even a minor character like Jacky is more nuanced than, say, Fergal or Andy were in the first book.

On the other hand, there's a sort of macho posturing here that I didn't like as much.  In the first book, Michael would say that he'd use his army training to sneak into some place, but then follow that up immediately with something like "who am I kidding?  I was in that course for two days and then kicked out."  Even in the coda to that book, in which he's much more self-confident, there's a sort of self-deprecatoriness that I found appealing.  Here, we get Michael saying things like "I swear that I will avenge you, Samantha," but with no self-deprecatory follow-up, and I found myself missing it.

All these differences point to one larger fact, that this book is a big departure from the first novel, and I really like that risk-taking.  McKinty could've gone back to do another story about Michael in the big bad city, but instead he struck out in a very different direction; I always think it's cool when authors do that, especially when the new work is as satisfying as this one ultimately is.

As a final though, I think Michael ducks his own responsibility for the way events unfurled.  At one point, he escalates the situation, hoping for a big score, and then sort of plays down the aftermath.  I don't know if McKinty glosses over that because he wants to make Michael a bit of an unreliable narrator or if he didn't want to make Michael too unappealing, but I think it's important.

Death Masks, Dead I Well May Be, Shriek: An Afterword

This is what I get for putting off posting for so long -- a lot of new books, including a couple I'm skipping.

These are three pretty disparate books, and I think they show disparate approaches to style. Jim Butcher's Death Masks is almost anti-style -- the author will happily butcher the language (pun intended) as he tries to get his story across. The characters are all smart-alecky, he re-uses phrases (like the incessant "Hell's bells"), and, in short, can really grate on the ear. But, for all that, I enjoyed the book -- I can give Butcher a pass on the style, because the story's so entertaining, and he's playing with some clever ideas. It also helps that the novel is pretty short, because if a book like this starts to drag, you end up thinking about the writing instead of the plot, and that's the kiss of death in such a plot-driven book.

Adrian McKinty's Dead I Well May Be takes pretty much the opposite approach. It's a pretty standard revenge story about a man set up for a crime who escapes to seek revenge on the people who set him up. McKinty's style, though, rescues this book. Michael, the protagonist, has a beautifully expressive way of telling a story, and is very funny to boot. He complains that when he's fleeing the police (in handcuffs), nobody tries to stop him -- "have they no social responsibility?" I think he's also a great incarnation of a character who's very clever, but is ultimately feckless because he just can't get motivated. In the end, I was a bit sorry that the plot-line was so weak, but I certainly want to read more about Michael, so I'll tune in for the next installment and hope that McKinty brings his talents to bear on a worthier plot.

Jeff Vandermeer's Shriek:An Afterword is a perfect marriage of plot and style. The set-up at first seems rather precious: Janice Shriek, sister of Duncan Shriek, is writing an afterword to her brother's brief history of Ambergris. She thinks he is dead, and so her afterword turns into a memoir of her interactions with him. He, however, is not dead, and has scribbled his emendations into her text (though he is also an unreliable narrator). On top of all that, Janice is in a disturbed frame of mind, and she keeps backtracking on her story, even starting over a couple of times.

In practice, though, the artificiality of the device fades as we become wrapped up in the story. This is a story about an enigma -- what are the Gray Caps, and what do they want? At least so far, they're ultimately unknowable, and so this fractured view is the only way to tell this story. In a more straight-forward attempt to tell the story, we'd lose much of the mystery -- what did Duncan find underground? Is a sea-change actually happening in Ambergris, or is it just Janice's imagination?