Collected Miscellany

The Faithful Spy: A Novel

I used to read a great deal of espionage thrillers.  I especially liked a series with a repeating central character.  In high school and college I used to devour them.  I would find an author I liked and read every book they had written.  There was somehing satisfying about being emersed in a series and a character.

These days my tastes are a little more eccelctic and I have a great deal less time.  No more going back and reading a newly discovered author’s backlist from the start.  This bugs me because I am the kind of person who likes to read a series in order for fear of missing some key fact or even just the more nuanced perspective you get from reading every book in a series or even in an author’s career.

But when Alex Berenson’s latest John Wells novel, The Silent Man, arrived at my door I felt like I needed to read the first two books before jumping in.  Thankfully it was only two books and they are quick reads.

Which brings us to the first book in the series, The Faithful Spy, which won the Edgar Award for a first novel in 2007.  If you like “ripped from the headlines” thrillers with a nice blend of action and geopolitical tension then The Faithful Spy is your kind of book.

Despite being firmly in the international/espionage thriller camp, Berenson brings a great deal of plausibility to his plots and depth to his characters.  They are fast and entertaining reads.

More below.

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Cover of Knockemstiff

I will admit it.  I am a bit of a squish; a wimp; a prude even.  It is not that I don’t read books that touch on darker subjects or explore issues like sex and violence.  But I will admit that I prefer those subjects in small doses.  And I will further opine that few writers do these sorts of subjects well.

All of this is a roundabout introduction to my feelings on Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock.  I ordered this collection of short stories on my Kindle after having heard about Pollack’s unique path from mill worker to Ohio State student to author.  As an Ohio based blogger it seemed something I should check out.

So I did.  But I ran into a small problem.  While I could recognize that talent was involved in writing these stories, I just couldn’t bear to read them in anything but small amounts.  So I would read a story or two on the bus or before bed, but I had to spread them out over a period of time.

Publishers Weekly’s review might help give you a sense of why I had this reaction:

A native of Knockemstiff, Ohio, Pollock delivers poignant and raunchy accounts of his hometown’s sad and stagnant residents in his debut story collection that may remind readers of its thematic grand-daddy, Winesburg, Ohio. The works span 50 years of violence, failure, lust and depravity, featuring characters like Jake, an abandoned hermit who dodges the draft during WWII, lives in a bus and discovers two young siblings committing incest on the bank of a creek, and Bobby, a recovering alcoholic who must face the imminent death of his abusive father. The language and imagery of the novel are shockingly direct in detailing the pitiful lives of drug abusers, perverts and a forgotten population that just isn’t much welcome nowhere in the world. Many of the characters appear in more than one story, providing a gritty depth to the whole, but the character that stands out the most is the town, as dismal and hopeless as the locals. Pollock is intimate with the grimy aspects of a small town (especially one named after a fistfight) full of poor, uneducated people without futures or knowledge of any other way to live. The most startling thing about these stories is they have an aura of truth.

Amazon listed it in their Best Books of March last year and summed it thus:

Pollock pulls no punches–his prose is blunt and visceral, as well as stylish and skilled–and reading these mini grand guignols can be like crunching on a mouthful of your own broken teeth. He resists casting judgment (or sympathy) on his doomed reprobates; predator or prey (or sometimes both), Pollock contemplates his characters with all the warmth of a “frozen bleach bottle.”  It’s an astonishing debut.

All of the above is true and accurate to my mind.  It is an astonishing debut.  It is gritty and shockingly direct.  It does have an all too depressing aura of truth.  But in many ways I just didn’t want to keep reading.  Only my stubborn insistence of completing books helped get my through.

Pollack is clearly talented – the language and imagery involved prove that – but most days I just don’t feel like crunching on a mouthful of my own broken teeth.  So if you are made of hardier stuff than me – if you enjoy this punch in the gut kind of writing – then be sure to check out Knockemstiff.  It is a shinning example of this genre.

Those of you more faint of heart or easily depressed might want to avoid it or, like me, take it in small dozes.

When last we saw J.J. Liddy he was trying to put his memory back together after a trip to T’ir na n’Og.  He has saved the Land of Eternal Youth by finding the leak that allowed time to trickle into that magical world from our more mundane one.  This leak was stealing time from earth and causing T’ir na n’Og to age rather than remain timeless.

In The Last of the High Kings Kate Thompson picks up the story 15 years later.  And things haven’t gotten any easier for J.J.  As a husband and father he just has a new set of problems:

Why does his daughter Jenny roam barefoot through the wilds, when she should be in school? When did the mysterious white goat begin to patrol the hillside? What is the secret project that J.J.’s son Donal is attempting? And who is the ghost guarding the stone beacon at the top of the mountain—and why has Jenny befriended him?

This sequel to The New Policeman continues Thompson’s creative blending of Irish myth and fairy tale with contemporary Irish life.  And she continues to bring a nice blend of wit and suspense to the story while adding in some great new characters.  Jenny in particular is an interesting, but in many ways elusive, character; the Puka continues to bring a blend of magic and menace; and there are lots of interesting dynamics that result from being part of a large – and unique – family.

But I found this book not quite as engaging as the first and at times a little too preachy. Read the rest of this entry »

To continue my recent spat of readings on the American Civil War, I just read Confederate Ironclad Vs. Union Ironclad by Ron Field.  It is an excellent and brief description (76 pages) of the famous  naval battle between the CSS Virginia and the USS Monitor at Hampton Roads in 1862.

The book traces the design and development of ironclads in the United States Navy and the Confederate Navy (Field also includes a snippet or two about the development of ironclads in Europe as well).  The book also describes the personalities behind the designs of the ironclads.  For instance, Swedish-American John Ericsson faced opposition from many U.S. naval officers when he unveiled his designs for his ironclad (USS Monitor) because they did not believe that a semi-submerged ironclad warship could float. Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing in our theme of myths and literature, I happened upon a YA novel that fits in with my reading perfectly: The New Policeman by Kate Thompson.  This creative novel uses a love of traditional Irish music and the myths and legends that so often form their subject matter to create a witty and immaginative adventure story.

Here is the publishers tease:

Who knows where the time goes?

There never seems to be enough time in Kinvara, or anywhere else in Ireland for that matter. When J.J.’s mother says time’s what she really wants for her birthday, J.J. decides to find her some. He’s set himself up for an impossible task . . . until a neighbor reveals a secret. There’s a place where time stands still—at least, it’s supposed to. J.J. can make the journey there, but he’ll have to vanish from his own life to do so. Can J.J. find the leak between the two worlds? Will a shocking rumor about his family’s past come back to haunt him? And what does it all have to do with the village’s new policeman . . . ?

And it worked for me.  I picked it up at the library and started reading it immediately.  It turned out to be one of those books that reminds me why I read YA fantasy fiction.  Quick reads that are creative and imaginative in ways that “adult” fantasy fiction often isn’t.

For more see below. Read the rest of this entry »

Catching up in my reading of the Cannongate Myths Series, I decided to read a book I have had on my shelf for a while: Victor Pelevin’s take on Theseus and the Minotaur The Helmet of Horror.  Some years back I had read Pelevin’s Buddha’s Little Finger and I picked up his contribution to the myth series when it came out.  But for some reason it never got read.

So when I began to catch up on the series (see here and here) I picked up The Helmet of Horror.  I am glad I did as it was a quick and fascinating read, but one not easy to describe.  Here is the publishers description:

Victor Pelevin, the wildly interesting contemporary Russian novelist who The New Yorker named one of the Best European Writers Under 35, upends any conventional notions of what mythology must be with his unique take on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. By creating a mesmerizing world where the surreal and the hyperreal collide, The Helmet of Horror is a radical retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur set in an Internet chat room. They have never met, they have been assigned strange pseudonyms, they inhabit identical rooms that open out onto very different landscapes, and they have entered a dialogue they cannot escape — a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. Its wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown.

The Helmet of Horror is structured according to the way we communicate in the twenty-first century — using the Internet — yet instilled with the figures and narratives of classical mythology. It is a labyrinthine examination of epistemological uncertainty that radically reinvents this myth for an age where information is abundant but knowledge ultimately unattainable.

The chat like dialog makes for quick reading and the mysterious nature of the setting is quite compelling.  You find yourself reading feverishly trying to figure out what is going on.  And for those with a background in philosophy and literature there is a deeper level of symbolism and argument going on; most of this went over my head I am afraid.

But in the end the absurdist nature of Pelevin’s style leaves the ending rather unsatisfying and incomplete.

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Kevin asked whether I wanted to read and review H.W. Crocker’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War.  I said I would, but I was not quite sure what I was getting myself into.

Let me get the basics over with first.  The book is 337 pages.  It is divided into five parts that are entitled: Why the South Was Right; The History of the War in Sixteen Battles You Should Know; Eminent Civil War Generals; Call in the Cavalry; and Beating Retreat.  These parts are then further divided into various chapters.

Obviously, based upon the title of the first part (Why the South Was Right), Crocker is a Southern apologist.  Being a Yankee, this does not bother me because I at least know where he is coming from.  He brings forth some of the same worn out reasons for defending the South – mainly that the war was for state’s rights and not slavery.  Initially, that may have been the case for most people on both sides, but that was quickly changed once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation (it was not a matter of how the Proclamation was to be enforced, but how it was perceived – this was the main reason why the French and British shied away from supporting the Confederacy).

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