Liberation Movements

Liberation Movements is Olen Steinhauer's fourth novel set in an imaginary Eastern Bloc country; each novel has taken a look at this country in a different decade.  Liberation Movements is a bit of an odd duck in the series, for a couple of reasons.  One of the major players is kinda-sorta psychic (her abilities are given a rational basis, but they're still supra-normal), whereas up till now the series has been very much of this world.  It's also set almost entirely outside of the home country of the series.

I think that both of these differences lead to a weaker book than the first three.  Part of the problem, I think, is that one of the strengths of those books was the relentless feeling of suffocation.  By setting so much of the novel across the border, Steinhauer relaxes the tension somewhat; in addition, I found the psychic a distraction, and the "explanation" of her abilities made it worse, because it took me out of the novel while I thought of how implausible the explanation is.

It's still a solid novel, and I'll certainly pick up the last of the series, but it just felt like a let-down after the first 3.

36 Yalta Boulevard, Beat the Reaper

Olen Steinhauer's 36 Yalta Boulevard is the third book in his series chronicling an unnamed Soviet buffer state.  Each one is set almost a decade later than the one before; in this way, Steinhauer will bring us close to the present in the fifth book.

The first two books were murder mysteries tinged with the politics of living in a statist regime, but this one is a flat-out espionage novel taking place in 1967.  The protagonist is Brano Sev, who was a state security officer in the earlier novels.  As the security officer watching over the men in his office, Sev was not a sympathetic character, and Steinhauer makes the bold decision not to make Sev more appealing, even as he stars in his own book.  Instead, we see Sev as a believer in the promise of socialism, even as he knows about the awful things done in its name.  He has been alienated from his family since driving his father out of the country 20 years ago.

The plot is as slow and byzantine as anything from the pen of John LeCarre, but it's better than anything LeCarre's written in the last 15 years.   Steinhauer deals in the same moral ambiguities, the same questions about ends and means, but manages the further trick of writing it from the perspective of the "wrong" side.

Beat the Reaper, by contrast, is a breezy, showy novel, with no real depth at all.  Maybe the contrast with 36 Yalta Boulevard made me more willing to go with it than I might otherwise, but whatever the reason, I loved this book.  Author Josh Bazell has a very funny authorial voice with an edge to it.  The climax is a real show-stopper, and it'll be interesting to see how Bazell tops it in his next book, or if he even tries.  It's probably the most over-the-top macho thing I've read in a long time.

The Bridge of Sighs, Blood of the Innocent

I read Olen Steinhauer's Confession a while back, which was his second book about a fictional Soviet buffer state.  It was very good, gripping in its depiction of a totalitarian state.  The Bridge of Sighs is the first book, set a few years earlier.  Steinhauer apparently wants to give us a view of the state over a few decades, and the first one starts not that long after WWII, while the Russians are still cementing their control.  Already the Stalinist system is in place, with files on everybody, but there isn't the paranoid feeling of the later novel.

I'm not sure if the difference is really supposed to be there, though.  The second novel shows Steinhauer as a much better novelist than this first one, much more in control of his material.  This novel starts with Emil Brod, the protagonist, at his first day on the job; his colleagues are suspicious of him, because they suspect he's a spy from the state.  Fortunately for Emil, it's resolved relatively quickly, but not so fortunately for us readers.  It's a pretty clear case of the author setting the stage to have Emil being sent to investigate an extremely dangerous case by himself; his superior doesn't trust him, so he assigns Emil to the case hoping he'll fail, even though Emil is too junior to be handed such a case under normal circumstances.

It all feels very arbitrary, and the arbitrariness continues.  The main love interest never really gels, except that Emil needs someone to care about who can be held hostage.  The resolution doesn't quite make sense either, although I enjoyed its irony.

It's not that The Bridge of Sighs is a bad novel; it's just not as good as the later novel.  If Steinhauer gets better, then I should be in for a treat in the next few books.

E. O. Wilson (I think) called the mystery genre a travelogue.  He was being disparaging, and I disagree with the general thrust of his argument, but there's a germ of truth there.  In addition to Steinhauer's exploration of life in a Soviet buffer state, I read Leighton  Gage's Blood of the Wicked, set in Brazil.  Gage uses the conventions of the mystery novel to show up the vast divide between rich and poor in Brazil, as well as the corruption left over from the days of military rule.  Unfortunately, one convention he doesn't use is that the detective should be an important factor in the plot.  Instead, he creates an interesting detective in Mario Silva, establishes that said detective will bend the rules if necessary, and then drops him into a situation where his hands are completely tied and he does nothing.  By the end of the novel, it's clear that events would have played out exactly the same even if Mario had never showed up on the scene.

It occurs to me that I had the same issue with The Shape of Water, which is one reason I write this blog -- it lets me keep track of my thoughts so that I can revisit them.  I'm more willing to give Camilleri a second chance, though, because his secondary characters really jumped out at me.  Gage's characters are really there just to dramatize his concern about the wealth divide in Brazil; they never gelled as actual characters for me.