Nov 30 2010

Purple Jesus by Ron Cooper

Regular readers will recall that I am a bit of a sucker for quirky novels that deal with faith or religion in some way.

So when I heard about Purple Jesus I was intrigued by the promise from the publishers blurb:

As funny as it is sad, as beautiful as it is ugly, as authentic as it is shocking, and as powerful as anything you ll ever read, Ron Cooper s Purple Jesus is a murder mystery, a love story, a religious allegory and, most importantly, a dark and comic descent into the lives and world views of three unbelievable and unforgettable characters.

So did it deliver? Sort of.  I will confess that any religious allegory or philosophical insight went right over my head (I admit I am not one to catch symbolism and the like). And it wasn’t really much of a love story.

What really sets the book apart is the “a dark and comic descent into the lives and world views” aspect. The capture of a time, place and culture rescues the book in my opinion.

Keep Reading

By Kevin Holtsberry • Reviews • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

Nov 29 2010

Red Star Rising by Brian Freemantle

When it comes to espionage fiction I am usually in the cold dark and gray camp. LeCarre (early not late), Deighton, etc. so Brian Freemantle’s Charlie Muffin seemed in my wheelhouse.

Despite my preferecne of reading a character of series in order I decided to read Red Star Rising without having read any of the previous books.

It turned out to be classic cold war spy fiction even though it was set in post war Europe. Here is the plot summary from the dust jacket:

The body of a murdered, tortured Russian has been found in Moscow, which isn’t unusual in the crime-ridden city. What is different is that this corpse is on the lawn of the British embassy.

Eager to prevent an international incident, London dispatches veteran MI5 agent Charlie Muffin to investigate. Charlie is an old hand who recognizes that little has changed in the post–Soviet Union, most definitely not the espionage enmity between Russia, Britain, and America. The search for the identity of the murdered man enmeshes Charlie in what might be the biggest attempted espionage coup of his career.

Being in Moscow has very personal implications for Charlie, too. It provides the opportunity for a re-union with his Russian wife, Natalia, and their young daughter, whom he had to abandon because of a hurried recall to the UK five years earlier. It’s also the chance to persuade the reluctant Natalia, an officer in Russia’s FSB intelligence service, to return with him to London.

In classic spy fiction fashion Charlie is fighting the bad guys, often his superiors and his own demons/past. On top of this you have a constantly shifting set of puzzle pieces that he has to put together.

On a basic level there is the mystery of the dead body. On another level is the internal-politics and security of the embassy. And over it all is the geopolitical maneuvering motivating it all. And if this is not enough Charlie is attempting to put his family back together.

Freemantle does a good job of weaving all of this threads together and keeping the pace moving. Just when you think you have a handle on what is going on the puzzle pieces move and you have to rethink. And it is never clear, to Charlie or the reader, just exactly what Charlie really wants professionally or personaly.

Booklist has a nice description of Charlie and the book:

Alternately cautious and daring, self-critical, pragmatic, and fatalistically idealistic, the maverick Muffin will appeal to fans of John le Carré’s George Smiley and to readers of classic espionage novels. The USSR is now Russia, and the KGB is now the FSB, but this is still a story of telephone booths and old-school spycraft—old-school quality, too.

If I had one complaint it was that the twists and turns at the end threatened to overwhelm the story. It gets rather complicated and convoluted by the end. Freemantle pulls it off but it is a bit much.

That aside, fans of classic espionage fiction will enjoy this version updated to the post-cold war world.

By Kevin Holtsberry • Reviews • 0 • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Nov 28 2010

LA Times on Kind of Blue

Kind of Blue by Miles Corwin is one of many many books that pile up in the TBR pile but don’t get read because of time constraints, my reading choice idiosyncrasies, etc.

Carmela Ciuraru’s review in the LA Times, however, will force me to give it another look:

“Kind of Blue,” named for the seminal Miles Davis album that Ash loves, avoids the overheated prose so often found in crime fiction. Corwin is a minimalist, yet his descriptions are precise: Blood spatter at a crime scene looks like “a miniature pointillist portrait,” and the Los Angeles River is “a thin stream of brackish water purling down the graffiti-scarred cement banks.”

Nor does Corwin resort to scenes of cheap, grisly violence in the name of so-called authenticity. His concerns are psychological — revealing how criminals think, how cops think and how criminals think when they happen to be corrupt cops. And “Kind of Blue” is genuinely suspenseful: Although there’s no question that Ash will solve the crime that haunts him (and the one he’s been hired to solve), how he gets there is far from predictable.

By Kevin Holtsberry • Reviews • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

Nov 26 2010

In the Mail: Original Sinners

Original Sinners: Why Genesis Still Matters by John R. Coats

Publishers Weekly

An entertaining narrative voice, personal reflections from the author’s life and insightful interpretations combine to produce this accessible and lively new addition to Genesis scholarship. Coats, a former parish priest and management consultant, cogently applies source theory—the hypothesis that four separate documents went into the first five books of the Bible—to familiar stories whose ethical and spiritual DNA seeps through Western culture. Through his approach, the author makes complex biblical scholarship comprehensible, while challenging the reader to examine the actual text. Asserting that biblical characters are rather relentless in their mirroring, Coats uses second-person hooks (Imagine yourself as the first human being) to invite readers to use their own perspective to interpret the text. Cheeky chapter headings entice and inform; First, about the ark, which is most definitely not a boat begins his analysis of Noah and the flood. While cultural references from Maimonides to Mae West spice up the narrative, Coats’s exploration of how his own history and self-understanding inform his interpretations makes the most compelling reading. His reflections on his own aging and his analysis of the stories of Noah and Abraham prove compelling and thought provoking.

By Kevin Holtsberry • In The Mail • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

Nov 19 2010

Where Are the Conservative Novelists?

Mark Goldblatt wonders:

You have to wonder, under the circumstances, whether the ambitions of a young conservative novelist would be unreservedly encouraged and diligently nurtured in a contemporary MFA program.

If the answer is no, then the ramifications are profound — and profoundly disturbing. For the issue here runs deeper than the run-of-the-mill ideological browbeating that goes on in college classrooms across the country. Students can always weigh their professors’ rants against more moderate views, and indeed contrary ones, that they hear off campus. But MFA programs now seem to exercise a gatekeeper function. If you don’t pass through one of them, your odds of literary recognition are vastly diminished. It may be that we’re cutting off future generations of conservative novelists at the knees.

That’s not fair. Fairness, though, is a secondary consideration. If conservatives are being denied entrée into the halls of literary production — not by a sinister gentlemen’s agreement but by an inbred ideological disdain — then what we’re cutting off is not just a group of writers, or a political agenda, but an entire sensibility.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

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