"The Devil's Footprints" by John Burnside

Author John Burnside leads us, the intrigued readers, on an intimate tour of the unaccepting and brutish heart of smalltown coastal Scotland in “The Devil’s Fooprints.” But that exploration serves as just the appetizer for the first-person narrator’s – Michael’s – descent into his own low-key, “elective” madness. The devil does indeed leave his footprints all over this story, and in some way, Michael, by turns willfully and unwittingly, follows them. Rather closely.

As Michael grows up his parents are reviled as outsiders. His parents die within a few months of each other during his university years, his mother in negligent homicide, his father in weighted solitude. Michael’s own history includes his victimization by a bully for several months when a grade-schooler, an episode in which Michael finds courage and turns aggressor. However, these just set the stage for Michael's reaction to the horrific suicide by a townswoman, years later, who kills two of her sons along with herself. This precipitates a downward spiral in Michael, mainly because he thinks he may be the father of the victim’s fourteen-year-old daughter.

All this sounds dreary indeed, and I regret that, because Mr. Burnside handles all this with such straightforward earnestness, and the exactly appropriate level of somberness, that Michael’s character generates our sympathies. We’re sympathetic when a prank against an old oppressor turns freakishly fatal, but perhaps less so later when he perpetrates a felonious flight with a minor girl. You’ll not find the stunning, hurtling violence of the internal dialog that so distinguishes Anne Enright’s “The Gathering,” not here. Here we find the contemplative, self-aware, well-meaning man, aware of his ever-loosening grip, yet unable to do anything about it.

The title refers to the town legend that one morning, many years ago, after a night of snow, the early townspeople found footsteps in the snow, deep and burning, sulfuric and discoloring, clear trough the snow to the ground. They are clearly not human, and no known animal could have made them. They hop fences and go right up the side of the church, across the roof, and down the other side. Michael’s misadventure with his purported daughter ultimately results in an impossible trek on foot that nearly kills him, and the ruminations during this walk are worth the price of admission by themselves. Suffice it to say that what possesses people who act like demons becomes far more familiar to us, and is not at all what you think. Pick this piece up and  reflect with the author on the durable fear that priests and landowners feel about the demons that threaten to take them over.

I recommend this book very, very highly. Here’s why: the language will stun you with its simple effectiveness and the rightness of its diction. The characters will strike you as real, as will their symptoms. And the thematic issues of motivation, secrecy, and near-demonic possession will challenge you and bring you new understanding. You will understand more about human nature, and there is no higher compliment I can give to a piece of fiction. Congratulations to Mr. Burnside for this quiet, shaded triumph.

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"Miss New India" by Bharati Mukherjee

“Miss New India” contains the story of Anjali (Angie) Bose, who grows from sheltered nineteen-year-old in a backwater India town into a sadder but wiser young woman with growing skills and ambition. It embraces a much larger canvas, though, nothing less than the dizzyingly rapid modernization of the second most populous nation on Earth. Angie Bose’s journey opens this transformation before our eyes, cutting a clear slice for us and laying it on a slide for our microscopes.

Growing up quietly, steeped in traditional middle-class (and middle-caste) Indian virtues, Anjali, from the northeastern Indian state of Bihar, learns good, accentless American English, and shows a spark of intelligence. She gets an associate degree in business and hopes the husband her father finds for her can be intelligent, good-looking, and kindly. Unfortunately her betrothed young man mistreats her badly - criminally - in their one brief meeting, and she escapes to modern, bustling, 21st-century Bangalore. Things don’t go very much better for her in the big city, though: at rock bottom she ends up in a holding cell in a Bangalore jail, facing every manner of threat and menace.

What a creation is Miss Anjali Bose! Pretty, innocent, lucky, unlucky, endlessly engaging, unforgettable. Author Bharati Mukherjee draws such a realistic girl; she’s nineteen going on thirteen, it seems, for much of the book. I kept waiting for her to grow up a little, get some perspective, make a mature choice for a change! Then I would cast my mind back to her origins, and the scant weeks since her emergence from her sheltered existence, and I reflect that she’s perfect. She has the exact worries, hopes, and reactions that such a girl would in real life. Congratulations and laurel wreaths to Ms. Mukherjee on her perfect creation.

Through this endearing and frustrating heroine, the author shows us the wrenching changes now contorting India and changing its face. In graphic detail: the closed, insular town with its backward-looking mores, the mod big-city aspirations, and the mod-big-city criminality. The flooding of India with apparently limitless new rupees (lakhs and crores of them!) brings with it every new convenience and technology, and unfortunately every new kind of venality, too. Some plot elements seem, on surface, over-contrived – Angie’s falling in with a vastly wealthy family, the spurious international terrorist roommate, her serendipitous relationship with the entrepreneur Girish, the looting of the crumbling Raj-era estate – but these chances and drawbacks represent the new chances that India is taking with itself. May she ride a hot streak to glory!

It’s been quite a while since I met a character as charming and demanding of our attention as Angie Bose. I trust she will make thousands more readers as besotted with her as I am. Watch for this publication in May, and don’t let it go by. It will clearly be worth your attention for its great virtues: its unblinking look into modern India, and its main achievement, the quirky, delicious heroine.

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"Stations West" by Allison Amend

Allison Amend brings us the multi-generational saga of the Haurowitzes in “Stations West,” published by the Louisiana State University. It covers the settlement and development of Oklahoma from territory to state from the late 19th Century through the years of the Great Depression. We follow the lives of Boggy Haurowitz and his descendants through settlement, oil and the dust bowl. It’s typical of generational sagas: it deals with long lives of the principals, and in this example, not much of those lives turns out very well.


Boggy’s grandson Garfield’s bitter, alienated narrative takes up a lion’s share of this story, but his stubbornness and irascibility and loneliness don’t seem completely grounded in his childhood experience. The women’s stories are of course more difficult, more subject to caprice, and more unjust. The stigma of having a child out of wedlock dooms one to a lifetime of servitude and yearning. Another’s deafness makes her somehow a match only for a simpleton. Garfield’s mother spends her entire life a whore, and dies alone in a Sierra Nevada winter.

The other chief “character” is the Oklahoma landscape, by turns dusty, barren, and dusty, filled with men with dust in the creases of their careworn faces. This narrative lays out the modest successes and grand tribulations of three generations of Oklahoma settlers, but delves deeply into the internal dialog none. Conflict tests and batters and alienates and sometimes kills the principals, but resolution to these conflicts is too often hopeless. A particular example: the disgraced and disfigured Dora, secretly the mother of an illegitimate child, who has pined after Garfield all her life, so thoroughly takes charge over his funeral arrangements that only then is she believed to be his wife.

Hardship, doggedness, and luck of all kinds will ever determine the path of people’s lives, and, in settling the American West in particular, these character traits and fortunes become displayed in high relief. We could look to Willa Cather for depth and focus in covering this ground. In any event, pioneer sagas will never be my particular cup of tea.

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"Rodin's Debutante" by Ward Just

“Rodin’s Debutante” comprises the story of Lee Goodell, native of a small town near Chicago; he attends a private prep school, overhears things in his home that would get him into deep trouble, and becomes a sculptor.

This bald exposition does nothing to tell how engaging Lee or the other characters are, or how deep and cutting the issues on display. Ward Just, former National Book Award finalist with 1997’s “Echo House,” displays immense skill as he unfolds this drama. And this high skill, in competition with Just’s deep compassion – well, they finish in a dead heat at novel’s end.

Lee’s idyllic childhood features the best of both worlds: a close-knit, secure town, with deep porches and leafy streets, and, a bonus for any growing boy, a wild and possibly threatening area at the base of a high escarpment, known as “under the hill.” Lee and his friends must cross this escarpment to explore the wastes there: unkempt scrub and trees, secret trails, and fire pits set up among the rail spurs by tramps and hoboes. (Lee lives his childhood in the years just before and during World War II.) As Lee approaches his high school years, two separate attacks occur, which completely explode this Eden. His parents decide to move to an affluent suburb, closer to Chicago.

And this escarpment divides the rest of the book. Lee, it turns out, is a talented sculptor, whose successful debut show gets him off and running. But the first carving, done during his years as the U. of Chicago, reflects Lee’s own pain and injury from an attack he suffers on his street. Lee also serves as the thematic bridge that connects the two sides of this divide: he knows the hoboes who live "under the hill," works in a dangerous section of Chicago, and his early artwork is a series of versions of this bifurcation. This thematic escarpment also cleaves the life of a young girl, who not only loses her own idyllic childhood in a horrific attack at high school, but all memory of the event. We feel for Lee, and understand his struggle in the scene where this woman visits with him a few years later. To his credit, and to Mr. Just’s, he comes through with the support and frankness his character requires.

It’s been a while since I encountered characters so engaging and sympathetic. The only recent piece I can compare, in this vein, is “The Widower’s Tale,” by another great talent, Julia Glass. This is no Pollyanna piece, however. The big city’s dark side is open and displayed for all to see, and so is the small towns. Read it for Mr. Just’s deft capture of an era, for his so-real characters, for his prose, and his exact emotional feel for his characters.

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Throughout History: My Pet Mystery Series

The occasion of finishing “The Dove of Death” by Peter Tremayne makes a perfect time to review three detective series I have enjoyed over the years, but have not included here. An ancient setting recurs through these three series, which is a complete coincidence, a thing that evolved from simple preferences. Let’s start with the series the entry from which I finished just today. Each has its devoted followers (this is not a discovery piece, this is an appreciation).

Sister Fidelma, by Peter Tremayne

Set in Ireland in the seventh century CE, this series features a youngish nun who exercises the powers of a duly appointed investigating officer and advocate in the Five Kingdoms on the Island of Hibernia. Tremayne, real name Peter Berresford Ellis, studies English and Irish history professionally, and builds his rewarding stories around the customs and conflicts of the time, which to me is a wonderful extra spice in these pieces. His scholarship shows in such themes as the spread of orthodoxy of the Roman Church. Many professionals, particularly in the legal system, joined the Church as a way of pursuing their careers without interference, and Fidelma is no exception. You will not read of her in any sort of cloister or silent meditation; she does in fact marry a Saxon monk and have a son. However, a series of focused and fervent churchmen work tirelessly at spreading the celibate orthodoxy espoused by Rome. This doctrine is very slow to take hold in ancient Ireland.

The books stand very well as mysteries, and Fidelma is a memorable, intrepid character. These mysteries keep you guessing, often until the last dozen or so pages. Fidelma always guards her secrets well; often there is a reason she can’t even tell her husband Eadulf whodunit, because it could endanger him. One or two quibbles on these. The writing, particularly during conversation, can run a tiny bit stilted, as though Mr. Tremayne does not want his characters to sound vernacular or familiar. And he finds it too frequently necessary for Fidelma to cop an attitude about what she does, often putting a stuffy or prejudiced official in his or her place. Small quibbles, no doubt. A very worthwhile series, I have thoroughly enjoyed it.

For more information; click http://www.sisterfidelma.com/


Roma sub rosa, by Steven Saylor

Beginning late in the life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, (d. 78 BCE) and extending through the collapse of Republican Rome and the establishment of the Empire, Gordianus the Finder finds murderers, thieves, conspirators, and more in a series of superb-down-to-the-details mysteries set in ancient Rome. Highlights in this series include intimate fictional portraits of Cicero, the famed advocate and statesman of Rome (for whom Gordianus does a series of tasks, sometimes grudgingly), and the cunning, charming, and ruthless Julius Caesar. The principal attraction of this series lies in the engrossing verisimilitude of Rome at its height. The sights, smells, commotion, attitudes, backroom political ruthlessness, and religious traditions all flow from the extensive knowledge of Mr. Saylor, who, like me, remains entranced by all things ancient Rome.

Gordianus must navigate his way through the shark-infested waters of Roman power politics. He must find murderers and unearth conspiracies, freeing his slave and marrying her along the way. In his life he must balance the interests of the state, his clients, and his personal life, and he does it all with a rigid personal moral sense. Much of the brutality of the time leaves him aghast, but he doesn’t question slavery, or the preeminence of his homeland in the world. The rogue’s gallery in this series is a highly entertaining one, whether it involves historical characters or the anonymous gladiator/thug. This series remains a prized favorite.

For more information: http://www.stevensaylor.com/RomaSubRosa.html


Brother Cadfael, by Ellis Peters

Portrayed through 22 novels published between 1977 and 1995, and brought to the small screen in a terrific BBC series with the divine Derek Jacobi in the title role, Brother Cadfeal ranks as one of the best-loved and most-followed detectives in all of mystery literature. These novels feature the eponymous Benedictine monk, who serves his abbot and neighboring nobles by investigating murders and other crimes. This series shares with the Gordianus novels a highly charged political backdrop, which allows for all kinds of machination and skullduggery. Cadfael’s time encompasses the civil war that raged in England in the 1130s and 1140s, between adherents to two contenders for the throne, Empress Maud and King Stephen.

Edith Pargeter, self-taught scholar and translator, published well-researched fiction and non-fiction after World War II. Under the name Ellis Peters, she published her first Brother Cadfael book, “A Morbid Taste for Bones,” in 1977, beating by three years Umberto Eco’s very well-received “The Name of the Rose,” a novel that famously deals with similar material. In her Cadfael series, Peters maintained an excellence in her plots and in her renderings of a far-off world. Her mysteries contain anything and everything the reader hopes for in this genre: distinctive sets of suspects, games of high-stakes political shenanigans, plenty of physical danger for our hero and other virtuous souls, and plenty of surprise twists and gratifying endings. There are a lot of reasons for Cadfael’s popularity, and I’m sure it will endure for generations.

For more information: http://www.steveconrad.co.uk/cadfael/

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"Seven Years" by Peter Stamm

Alex pursues a career as an architect: he passes his exams, he draws, he puzzles over his influences, frets over the lack of creativity he sees in himself. He marries Sonia, a gorgeous, intelligent, ambitious fellow architect who represents everything he wants in a woman. Or almost everything.

With “Seven Years,” Peter Stamm has come out with the story (translated from the German by Michael Hofmann) of Alex, the weak and selfish young professional who splits his long-term commitments between a happy-on-the-outside marriage and an affair with a plain, uninteresting woman who immigrated to Bavaria from Poland. This bifurcation and its effect on everyone represent the bulk of the plot. The first-person narrative alternates between the current time and a sustained flashback which dictates the novel’s unsurprising outcome. Alex sees his wife Sonia as an ideal partner, principally because he sees that everyone else would think it. But he returns to undemonstrative, monosyllabic Ivona, his Polish lover, again and again, to make callous use of her. He finds her puppy-like devotion by turns infuriating and degrading. On the one hand, Hr. Stamm gives us Alex’s outward striving, where he looks for his place in society, viz. the successful firm, the beautiful wife and home. On the other, we get his yearning for dim, plodding Ivona. Ivona is the one who presents Alex with offspring; I always had the feeling that although she checked out physically fine, Sonia represented sterility, or the emptiness of our modern striving.

Hr. Stamm portrays his characters with high skill. Every action and reaction rings true in today’s image-conscious world. In the end we nod appreciatively as Alex learns he must cope with life with only his own devices, such as they are. Our appreciation for this outcome shows how successfully Hr. Stamm has drawn out his modern, cautionary tale.

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"Bridge in the Rain" by Bianca Lakoseljac

I made this choice from my good friends at NetGalley, not realizing it was a series of short pieces. However, the collection contains well over its share of striking and memorable characters in the throes of epochal moments. Such is the stuff of fine short fiction.

Ms. Lakoseljac presents in the title piece a man who in the present day lets his jealousy of the relationship between his wife and Vincent van Gogh lead to cruel negligence and disastrous – life and death – consequences. “The Perfect Woman” follows the marriage-ruining self-absorption of a woman who learns through fantasy and brinksmanship that she may not measure up to the perfections of an inflatable doll. Is the doll real? The efficacy of this question leaves us in no doubt of the author’s haunting strength. “Years of Silence” chronicles the sad and, again, self-absorbed, saga of two friends who have been out of touch for years. The stirring and captivating use of the long letter from long ago ranks as one of the finest effects in this collection. In “Heads or Tails” Ms. Lakoseljac reduces the stay-married-or-not issue to the flip of a coin. Very nearly.

Just as certain themes and personality traits dominate the majority of these pieces, I think it no mistake that the author leads off and finishes with uplifting, hopeful stories, and even presents a foreword that establishes the recurring talisman: a park bench in Toronto. We read through a confusing, unsettling fairy tale after the foreword, and it reinforces the writer’s mission, although for me, it isn’t needed. It seems a true, if charming, piece of self-absorption for the author herself. However, “Night Walk” portrays a true-feeling change of heart in a young woman who opts to stay with a position she loves in a children’s library, rather than take the grand opportunity in an adults-only office in another city.

It’s been some years since I devoted any energy to short fiction. These pieces, though, have refreshed me in this area; they are consistently excellent. We witness the doubting, troubled internal dialogues of people at crossroads or crises. Seldom do characters behave in any sympathetic way, and if we’re lucky, we might get a hint of some trouble that led the character to do what he or she does. For those who enjoy short stories, these belong in the very first rank. Trust me.

I was a little befuddled as to how to rate these pieces. On the whole there is somewhat of a sameness to the characters, but individually, the stories shine. They're clear, direct pieces, and very enjoyable.

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"The Widower's Tale" by Julia Glass

All hail the retired, erudite, put-upon, devoted Percival Darling, hero of Julia Glass’s “The Widower’s Tale.” He endures the frankness, foibles, and utter foolishness foisted upon him by friends and family. Ms. Glass presents us a cornucopia of au courant issues through this exceptional character’s thoughts and statements: homophobia, gentrification, immigration reform, environmental awareness, even the vicissitudes of health care. I noticed all the issues and how current they were, but given the engrossing cast of characters here, the extravagant plot, and the thoroughly engaging prose, I didn’t mind. More precisely, I enjoyed this confection thoroughly.

Percy Darling has lived in the same ancient house in a leafy Boston suburb for nearly five decades. Only a small fraction of that time was he blessed by the presence of his beloved wife Poppy, who he loses when his two daughters are in the eighth and ninth grades. Alone, Percy raises his daughters, pursues to retirement his career at Harvard’s Widener Library, and goes his own way in terms of interacting with the world. In a very beautiful sustained feat of realistic and sympathetic character-drawing, Percy flaunts his erudition and his wit, and doesn’t pay much attention to people’s reaction. His progress through the thicket of this plot molds him into someone a little more guarded in his speech. He needs the reformation, but it doesn’t stop him from striving to help his loved ones.

The story opens with the refurbishing of the barn behind Percy’s home and its conversion to a nursery school for the children of the village’s elite. For Percy, this is a very painful process and it presages changes even more painful. We meet teachers and administrators, Percy’s grandson who attends Harvard, his daughter the prominent oncologist, his other, far-less-organized daughter, and a careless and charismatic ecoterrorist whose prankish tricks lead to the very surprising denouement. Percy starts to date again, at age 70, but this sweet excitement turns grim as events Percy couldn’t predict nor particularly deserve crash into his retired life. The grandson, Percy’s closest friend in the world, becomes unwittingly entangled in criminal acts, and his “problem” daughter faces yet another crisis and yet another career change. Ms. Glass has plotted the novel tightly, and we see the elegance of the intricate interactions.

Through all this, Ms. Glass devotes her considerable skill to drawing us into Percy’s circle, and we wind up wanting what’s best for him. She renders certain chapters in Percy’s first person, making this book truly his tale. I was non-plussed by the inclusion of quite so many of today’s hot issues; they balance well with the plot and characters, but I would have wished for a more subservient role. I think political issues should always rank below characterization, structure, and theme, as they do in Ms. Glass’s previous efforts which I have read (“Three Junes” and “The Whole World Over”). But that’s just me. Judge accordingly for your own taste.

I would be very hard-pressed to name an author publishing today who produces more realistic, or simultaneously, more sympathetic, characters. In itself, that is quite an unlikely achievement. And it says all you need to know about Julia Glass. While I may not rank this as her best work, I will remember it, and appreciate having spent time with it.

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"To Account for Murder" by William C. Whitbeck

I read where “To Account for Murder” was an on-again, off-again labor for William C. Whitbeck over a couple of decades. The result, Mr. Whitbeck’s debut work of fiction, stands as a combination historical novel, thriller, and political exposé. Mr. Whitbeck, himself a high-ranking Michigan appellate judge and close confidant to more than one Michigan governor, knows whereof he speaks. His research into the corrupt legal and political environment of Detroit and Lansing before and after World War II must have been exhaustive, given the detail here.

“To Account for Murder” delves into the sordid and appalling particulars of the political corruption charges and counter-charges of the time – this forms the bulk of the book – and wraps a personal-history yarn around it for presentation’s sake. Perhaps he should have played the legal procedure card less, and the character-development card more. As I started this, the conscienceless, ruthless ambition on all sides rings true (I have some first-hand experience in the political arena), but as the machinations and the murders mount up, I grew numb to it. Mr. Whitbeck’s compulsion to get it all down on paper costs his plot and his characters a measure of reality, and the cardboard-cutout aspect of his characters takes over. Likewise, I find legal procedures fairly easy to follow in fiction, but the book portrays so many in-court and ex parte moves, motions, and counter-motions, ranging from simple persuasion to murder and blackmail, that they lose their immediacy and generate little tension.

The author does manage one nuanced character: the first-person narrator Charlie Cahill, who has little trouble ignoring his conscience – at least he has one to ignore. He also has a haunting personal history, in which he relives the terror of the D-Day invasion. In an interesting device, our narrator confesses to the reader that he has killed the infamous state Senator, and needs to direct the investigation away from himself and the murder victim’s wife, whom he loves. This, however, may only be a trick played on the reader, but that would hardly be fair, would it, given the mileage other characters make from it throughout the narrative.

I do appreciate the author's inclusion of a pithy thematic statement, put in the mouth of the central character, the prosecutor who would be governor: on leaving a saloon packed with legislators and lobbyists, he says, "You could empty a 12-guage in there and not harm an honest man." The reader will begin to wonder how Michigan’s government ever made it through the period, so pervasive is the corruption on display here.

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"Bound" by Antonya Nelson

Author Antonya Nelson populates her latest, “Bound,” with frail human beings who exhibit their weaknesses for the reader, and leave us with the question, how does one rise above temptation? However, the specific question Ms. Nelson poses at the novel’s end, where she directs our attention to the similarities between a serial adulterer and a serial murderer, strikes at the true heart of the issues.

This novel consists of the stories of a handful of Midwestern American women, known to each other, who come from a variety of backgrounds. Misty Mueller, killed in a car accident early on, was high school best friends with Catherine Harding. These two could not have come from more diverse backgrounds: Misty’s home is full of sullen male relatives who keep engine blocks on the kitchen table; Catherine’s mother has achieved prominence as a strong-willed no-nonsense professor at the University. Misty surprises: she's the one who becomes a mother, and the plot revolves around the eventual unification of Catherine with Misty’s orphaned daughter, Catherine’s namesake, called Cattie. Catherine is also Oliver’s third wife. He, pushing 70, is a generation older than Catherine, and has retrogressed to a still-younger generation, having fallen in love with the Sweetheart. Oliver provides the full force of the conflict here. An inveterate philanderer, always "trading up" from young to younger. Cattie’s arrival signals an end to these episodes, he seems to realize, and he finds by story’s end he has more in common with his wife’s mother than with any other woman in the book.

Ms. Nelson does a decent job of balancing the bad (Oliver) and ghastly (the serial killer occupying the news in the background) men, with the nobler, put-upon women in her story. She does this by portraying the women as shrieking harridans, or vapid nobodies, or sullen, rebellious 30-somethings who have failed to emerge emotionally from high school. Cattie's arrival at Catherine's and Oliver's home, brings him up finally, to a point where he realizes his game is up. This next-generation distillation of Catherine and Misty triggers a new and promising comprehension in our reprehensible Oliver.

At the point of wrapping things up, the author sets up a rather heavy-handed comparison: in the background, a serial killer binds, tortures, and murders a series of victims. Oliver, of all people, sees how his own failure to resist his urges corresponds at some level to the murderer’s dark impulses. I wanted to be careful comparing these two, because I wanted to be fair to Ms. Nelson’s intent. I believe finally, that the author set up the serial killer as a shadow figure, to give Oliver's antics a deep, sinister accent. And if we pay attention to Oliver's own cogitations, where he finally realizes that evil and self-absorbed impulses can indded be resisted, then the damage he inflicted - two ruined marriages and a third one threatened - can be viewed in better perspective. Serial adultery is like serial killing in attitude but not degree.

It did at length occur to me: among other things, the “Bound” of the title clearly indicates the nature of women’s relationships with men. Ms. Nelson, formidable, all-seeing, shows us our weaknesses in the unblinking light of her highly professional, yet distinctive, prose. There may be writers out there exhibiting characters as real as these, but none are any more real, or more honestly portrayed.

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