"Between Heaven and Earth" by Sue Kerman

Sue Kerman’s research into Jerusalem in the 19^th Century has resulted in a fine, albeit slight, fictionalization of an intriguing character’s career in Palestine of the time. It contains a loose-fitting framework of a contemporary story bracketing a purported history of a Jewish widow who decides she will go to Jerusalem, since she doesn’t have anything too compelling to keep her in New York.

Ms. Kerman tells the story through entries in the protagonist’s journal, and travel articles for the New York Times.  The author intends a portrait of Jerusalem at a time when it was in the control of Muslims, but had significant Jewish and Christian populations, which were socially inferior at the time. At this task, she succeeds pretty well: we get insight into the issues that seem unfortunately to plague Jerusalem almost to this day – fanaticism, tension, intolerance. We get a balanced account of how families and foreigners try to cope and make ends meet, but overall, the story is slight and shallow. Jerusalem is the real center of attention here, but Ms. Kerman does add a twist at the end that partway lays the foundation for the light, oblique touch that precedes it.

If you’re interested in Jerusalem at the middle of the 19^th Century, this book will provide an effective glimpse into it. Also, it’s a light, fairly entertaining read, that will divert you with its construct and inform you with its details.

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"Ten Thousand Saints" by Eleanor Henderson

Ah, parenthood. Nothing challenges or rewards a person like raising children. For some it comes easily, or at least a little more naturally. Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson contains a story of parenthood gone bad, or pursued with less than the necessary commitment. Although it focuses on the lives of a few teens during the punk rock movement of the 1980s, this truly is a story of one generation’s attempt to set right its fumbled of responsibilities to the next.

At story’s outset, protagonist Jude turns 16, it’s New Year’s Eve, and he and his close friend Teddy have soaked a stolen pair of silk panties in turpentine so they can inhale the fumes and get a faint, short-lived high. This is the desperate pass they have come to, since they don’t have any money for their preferred drug, pot. Harriet, Jude’s adoptive mother, manages a weak and hopeless rearing of Jude, which features by turns wheedling and subservience. Teddy’s mother has simply picked up and left her 15-year-old high school sophomore. Eliza is a kind of a cousin to Jude, and she arrives for New Year’s, and the three wait around before heading to a party. The events of the party, tragic and life-altering, set the direction for the book.

The trials of these luckless teens as they face very adult issues of drug overdose, pregnancy, and surviving society’s prejudices against a teen culture out of control, form the meat of this book. Teddy’s older brother Johnny (he’s all of 18 and making it in New York as a tattoo artist and musician) guides Jude into the Straight Edge subculture of the punk rock scene, where drugs and sex are forbidden. Johnny’s motives with Jude and Eliza are pure, but there is more than meets the eye with Johnny. 

This strong story features gritty, realistic details, and hearkens us back to the mid-80s punk scene, and the random violence perpetrated by and against its adherents. There are coming-of-age elements for Jude, and hope for our principals as they mature, but the real caution is for those among us who would have and raise children: neglect your duties and peril will descend upon all. It contains elements as well of an 80s pastiche: neglectful, drug-distracted hippy parents, punk violence, Hare Krishna adherents. Its style mirrors that of punk music, too: straight-on, honest, sometimes brutal. This book aims to shed light on sweeping movements of the mid-80s in music and society, by showing their effects on a small number of young people. It succeeds at these aims admirably. The straight ahead, gruff language belies the human warmth and compassion that shows through in the sympathetic portrayals of its characters.

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"The House of Silk," a Sherlock Holmes novel, by Anthony Horowitz

I’ll confess at the outset that I’m no expert or devoté to the Sherlock Holmes canon. I read a couple of shorter Doyle pieces as a lad, and think nobody will ever equal Jeremy Brett’s portrayal of the master detective on screen (although I am enamored of the latest from the BBC, “Sherlock,” particularly of the Dr. Watson character). But that’s the extent of my consciousness as far as the world-famous consulting detective goes. That, and the relatively recent and brief Michael Chabon piece.

So I approached “The House of Silk” as a relative novice. Curiosity led me to a search of the non-Doyle Holmes stories, and the Mayfield, Mass., library has a convenient list of at least 70 (http://www.wakefieldlibrary.org/book-discussion-groups/sherlock-holmes-by-doyle-and-others/). Proving my novice status, I had no idea there were that many.

Anthony Horowitz, the prolific and best-selling British author, has produced a satisfying addition to this crowded room. Holmes’s intellectual powers impress, even as he’s arrested and held for murder. Dr. Watson’s loyalty and resourcefulness are never in doubt, and he never wavers, even though in this entry he’s married and his wife’s health is failing. Mr. Horowitz concedes a few points to make his story more authentic. Watson, as he writes, is in his final years, and Holmes hasdied. Watson puts pen to paper to record the events of the case of the House of Silk, and exacts promises from his heirs and executors not to publish the manuscript for 100 years. He does this because some of the really depraved villains are prominent in society, and a good distance in time seems like a good idea.

This book is very strong and focused.  We keep Dr. Watson’s point of view firmly throughout. The crimes that drive Holmes and us, are heinous indeed, and resonate as clearly today as ever. Mr. Horowitz inserts a few small touches which put us in mind of the series by Conan Doyle: Watson states he should have had more depth concerning Mrs. Hudson, the ever-present housekeeper. And he hopes Inspector Lestrade knows that Holmes and Watson did actually appreciate his work, even as the good inspector made great advances at Scotland Yard piggy-backing on work Holmes did.

If you’re a Holmes follower, this book will please you with Holmes’s bag of tricks and the close scrapes he gets into. If you don’t care that much about the great detective, this novel is worth your while for its atmospheric treatment of Victorian London, and the convolutions of its crime mystery plot.

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"Crow" by Barbara Wright

Twelve-year-old Moses Jackson is pushed hurriedly onto the porch of his Wilmington, North Carolina, home by his stooped old grandmother. It’s 1898, she grew up a slave and has clear insight into the omens and augurs of the spirit world, and sure doesn’t want the shadow of a crow to cross her grandson. As she feared, she doesn’t handle the job quite in time, and bad things happen to Moses and to the other black citizens of Wilmington.

In a little-known and little-appreciated chapter in American history, the duly-elected government of Wilmington, North Carolina, was overthrown by the white minority in the fall of 1898, at considerable loss of life. Democrats had just won county and statewide elections that reinforced white supremacy that November, but in the city election wasn’t to take place until the following spring. Some white citizens of Wilmington, angered by an editorial in the Record, the only black-owned newspaper in the South, took matters into their own hands.

Barbara Wright’s “Crow,” a fictionalized account of these unfortunate events, comes to us from the point of view of Moses, whose father is a reporter for the Record and an elected alderman. The point of view seems to have made the publisher Random House consider this young adult fiction, but certainly it resonates with any adult fortunate enough to take it up. The point of view also gives us a little distance from the deadly menace and hatred that find vent here, but Moses can’t stay a child for this whole story. In fact, the language, the opinions, and concerns of this boy ring so very true, and Ms. Wright’s handling of them is resounding, flawless. It’s one of the reasons to pick up this fine book. 

Another reason: the fictional subtleties have to be presented by a narrator who cannot be aware of them. As the shadow of a crow passes over the Jacksons’ back yard, pointing to trouble, so does the shadow of Jim Crow stretch its pernicious darkness in the wake of the riot. Two boys from opposite sides of the racial divide, explore together in the pitch black of a tunnel after their lantern breaks. Color is invisible, trust is necessary, and friendship is possible. As with any fiction worthy of the name, the human element is here, even if its violent outlet is too ugly and threatening to countenance.

For me this book a remarkably serendipitous find. Its background events a matter of public record, Ms. Wright gives us a perfectly clear and convincing glimpse into its human cost. Don’t be fooled by the publisher’s arbitrary categorization; its readership should be wide and encompass all ages. An important story in our history, told clearly, and with a commendable and subtle intelligence.

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"Death of Kings" by Bernard Cornwell

The sixth entry in Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles series, “Death of Kings” marks a transition: in it, one main, focal character, King Alfred the Great, dies, and his son Edward succeeds him. Alfred has struggled all his life to unite the Anglo Saxons of the British Island under him, but although he approached it, he did not quite achieve it in his lifetime.

The Saxon Chronicles is a favorite of mine, illuminating in a series of novels a remote moment in time, centrally important to all Anglophones: the unification of Anglo Saxon England and the expulsion from Britain of the Danes, or at least the assimilation of the Danes under English law. They’re told from the point of view of Uhtred, a Saxon warlord who is sworn in service to the Saxon throne. He isn’t always happy in that service, but who can say that they are, in every particular of their service?

“Death of Kings” marks not only Alfred’s passing, but also that of a handful of other kings and pretenders, all Danish, or allied to the Danish side.  We know how the story goes, if we want to, but Mr. Cornwell’s grand success is the vivid telling, and the filling-in of fuzzy (or missing) historical detail with well-imagined and logical characters and events. I like this series because it features an extremely tough and clever general, who gets scared on the eve of battle, fierce as it rages, and never compromises with what he considers as the overweening influence of the Church. He remains pagan – he was brought up in the Danish culture – and this leads to tension throughout the story. Royal advisers don’t trust him, but at least Alfred, and maybe his son Edward, know better.

These novels have everything I could want in a historical series: they portray an epochal time, in which great stakes hang in the balance, their pacing keeps us furiously turning pages, and it transports me to an exotic time with larger-than-life events. It’s hard to imagine better escapist fare, and hard to imagine anyone handling it better than Mr. Cornwell.

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"The Sisters" by Nancy Jensen

“The Sisters” makes us think at the outset we will encounter the tale of Mabel and Bertie, two sisters who become estranged through a tragic misunderstanding in hardscrabble 1920s Kentucky. However, author Nancy Jensen’s narrative grows organically, and it turns out Mabel and Bertie only represent the prototype of all the sets of sisters-at-odds portrayed here. These girls and women seem each to have their own secret which they feel protects their loved ones, but in the end these secrets and entrenched positions do far more harm than good.

Mabel and Bertie inaugurate matters with a story of sisterly devotion gone wrong; Mabel suffers at the hands of her stepfather, and determines to protect her little sister Bertie. But Bertie never learns of the plan Mabel has hatched with the boy who loves Bertie, for escape and deliverance, and becomes embittered. Bertie’s bitterness colors the rest of the novel. She has two daughters in her turn, Rainey and Alma, two very different women whose own estrangement is based on two very different strategies for getting away from Bertie and her husband Hans. Alma, climbing socially, marries a horrid man who is a doctor. Rainey, hopelessly naïve, finds herself in far-too-early motherhood because of her basic lack of understanding of the birds and the bees, which is Bertie’s fault entirely. The real payoff in this novel comes to us when the younger generations mature and find their way. 

I had a hard time setting aside my impatience with the universal intransigence on display. Bertie sets the tone, with her lifelong refusal to even get to the bottom of what happened that fateful day in 1926. Her daughter Rainey inherits the stubborn streak, excoriating her daughter Lynn’s father, her ex-husband, and preventing any contact between him and his daughter. Rainey’s other daughter, Grace, is the one fairly hopeful offspring of all this, and perhaps it’s because of her father (who remains unknown to her), who is an elegant, scholarly, kindly man who has no idea he’s fathered a daughter. That’s because, once again, Rainey kept it secret from him because, I don’t know, perverse stubbornness afflicts everyone in this book.

However all that is, I want to praise the author for the progress of her characters. All these secrets and all this conflict between sisters distills itself into the metal-working craft which the appropriately-named Grace learns and pursues: she makes suits of armor. This is the finest fictional effect in the novel, and maybe the only trope worth the name. And the youngest two characters, the lovely-sounding Taylor, getting set to head off to college, and her sparkling second cousin Sarah, getting ready to enter high school, wrap up this book on a high note, and represent potential redemption for Grace and her sister Lynn.

I liked the clarity of character, although I found the entrenched positions and animosity quite fatiguing. I deeply admired how the story grew, like a living organism, to encompass eighty years of family history and such a variety of women and girls. Although Ms. Jensen goes to considerable lengths to lay the foundation for Bertie’s life of denial and anger, for me it only partly succeeds.

I do like reading debut novels, and Nancy Jensen sustains an energy throughout this multi-generational saga that must be recognized. I applaud the spirit with which the younger generations, beginning with Grace, struggle against the overwhelming energy directed at maintaining ancient resentments.

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"Power Ballads" by Will Boast

Aldous Huxley said, “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” Will Boast poses his own challenge to Huxley’s dictum with “Power Ballads,” a very impressive series of short stories set in the personal and business world of music. The pieces here portray much that goes unexpressed, like one musician’s ambition pitted against another’s inadequacy; like a wife’s devotion to her touring musician husband even as she rebels against it; and like the unforgiving bitterness that drives a man to sabotage a onetime friend’s big recording break. 

 These balanced, reverberant stories play their supremely effective magic in our imaginations and hearts – that this set of short stories won the Iowa Short Fiction Award tells us once again, as though any doubt existed, that they have an unerring eye for sterling short fiction over there in Iowa City.

Several of the stories feature Tim, a drummer getting started and making  his way. This character’s stories flow in chronological order, and we get an early picture of the ambitious musician as a child in the first story, “Sitting In.” Tim’s ambitions get the better of some of the adult musicians, and one shows his fear and inadequacy in a pointed but ineffective act of vandalism. Tim hooks up with a group of aging rockers, onetime true guitar heroes, in the title story, and here Boast captures beautifully the sad yearning for past glory. In the finest Tim-piece, called “Dead Weight,” Tim plays in the studio for an up-and-coming pop phenomenon. The record company has paid off the band’s original drummer, and sent him home to Kansas, and recruited Tim to tour with the group. At the inevitable home-town concert appearance, the old drummer shows up backstage, much to Tim’s discomfort. After perfunctory pleasantries, Tim plays the concert, which that night proceeds with extra energy. At a climactic moment, Tim waves to the original band member to come out from the wings and play. The young doofus just smiles back at him, rocking to the music. He was never going to get out in front of twenty thousand people.  Other pieces dealing with our drummer show his surprise and – relief? – when his engagement falls apart. The manic revenge he and another loser musician play on the cipher-like girlfriend captures the sad wayward course things always go in these people’s lives, and the ambiguity they feel at even the smallest effort to fight back.

The finest piece in this excellent group is “Mr. Fern, Freestyle.” A onetime edgy R&B bandleader finds himself leading an inner-city choir as middle age creeps ever closer. A few of his singers are a problem – sometimes they disrupt rehearsal, but mostly they want to rap together. This very gratifying story contains Mr. Fern’s slow transformation from bête noire to mentor, a balanced treatment of gang behavior, and the main character’s fully-nuanced background and development. It’s exceedingly well done.

That description applies to this entire collection. The prose is sturdy and uninvasive, the characters quite real whether they’re pathetic, greedy, or just trying to hold things together. I appreciated the advance copy from the U. of Iowa, because it treated me to a terrific writer with a unique point of view. I’m antsy to see what’s next from Will Boast.

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"Nobody Move" by Denis Johnson

Early on in Denis Johnson’s “Nobody Move,” hero Jimmy Luntz hears the tiny snatch of a reggae song: “Nobody move/Nobody gets hurt.” Unfortunately the desperate and outcast denizens of this novella move around plenty. 

Denis Johnson, National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prized finalist for the august and delicious “Tree of Smoke,” turns his acknowledged talents to the crime caper here. Well, it’s not a crime caper so much as an adventure story about a gambler who hooks up with a beautiful woman, desperate herself, and tries without much success to stay ahead of the criminals who want to kill him.

The chief delight here is the dialog. It’s frank, laconic, and honest – there isn’t a wasted syllable anywhere. Picking out one conversation that one hopes is indicative of a whole story’s is quite risky, but I’m going to risk it anyway. Jimmy tells his temporary-but-beautiful partner Anita that a new outfit she’s trying on in J.C. Penney’s looks fine on her:

“It fits.”

“You’re sweet,” she said, and she sort of meant it. But not as a compliment. “You’re homeless, right?” [she asked.]

“I have a home. I’m just not going back there, is all.”

“So right there in that shopping bag is everything you own?”

“Everything I need.”

“And your white canvas bag – what’s in that one?”

“Everything else I need.”

“I know what’s in it. A sawed-off shotgun.”

He seemed completely unsurprised. “It’s not a sawed-off, it’s a pistol-grip. And it isn’t mine.”

“I peeked in the bag while you were in the shower.”

“You zipped it up real nice,” he said. “Good for you.”

Events take place in the blond blankness of minor Northern California valley towns, and feature its open fields and forested riversides: folks creep around on the lam and plot escape, revenge, or betrayal. Folks get caught, turn the tables, get shot, and angle for the big payday. Through it all, gambler Jimmy Luntz keeps trying to force his luck, and succeeds for a time. Go down gambling, his actions speak loud and clear, and you may not have to go at all.

I’m cheered and smiling at this mantissa of a story. Even with my challenging schedule, I read it in two sittings, nearly unheard-of for me. Yes, it’s slim, but it’s one of those things you don’t want to stop doing until it’s done, and then you just want to start all over again, like a looping out-of-control water slide. It’s wonderful, it shows Johnson’s force and skill to terrific effect, and well worth your while.

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"Chalice of Blood" by Peter Tremayne

Elsewhere I have extolled the Sister Fidelma mystery series, which Peter Tremayne has set in ancient Ireland. It provides an educated glimpse into an exotic time and place, Ireland in the AD 600s, a place with a more advanced and enlightened (to 21^st century sensibilities) social and legal system than any country near it, and maybe beyond. Mr. Tremayne has invented a nun in her mid-to-late 20s, who serves as a dálaigh (pronounced ‘dawley’), or court prosecutor, and who roves the Five Kingdoms of Ireland tackling conundrums and bringing miscreants to justice. 

One bewitching surprise is that Fidelma is married and has a young son. She has taken Eadulf, a Saxon monk (with his endearing ‘everyman’ quality) as her husband, as the Church has not fully adopted the Roman edict of celibacy. Far from it. And herein lies one of the chief charms of the series: we get a historian’s (whose real name is Peter Berresford Ellis) best attempt to find the tenor of a very fluid time in Church history, and he captures the tension created when encroaching Roman orthodoxy inexorably supplants ancient native traditions. This is a theme in all the entries of this series, but Mr. Tremayne turns it up a couple of notches for “Chalice of Blood,” and this qualitative change is why I’m giving this book space of its own.

The murder victim in this story, a scholarly monk, has returned from his researches in the Holy Land in a state of crisis. He has reviewed documents that shake his faith, and knows that in following his conscience he will risk censure and excommunication as a heretic, and thus bring disgrace to his abbey. So here the author lets the historian in him come to the fore – praise be! – and we get chapter and verse on major treatises in the debate. A second-century Greek philosopher, Celsus, challenged what he thought was the unfounded Christian view of humans as resembling God. After all, why shouldn’t God, if it had taken the absurd step of manifesting itself on Earth, have assumed the form on an insect, bird, or horse? He also takes to task the Hebrew tradition that they are the chosen people, finding it egocentric and preposterous. His texts do not survive, but were taken seriously enough that the pre-Nicene Church Father, Origen, felt compelled to take him on and aver the Church position, point-by-point.  It is from Origen that we know Celsus. Mr. Tremayne has turned a lovely trick and served his readers superbly with this plot device.

So here we have, in addition to well-plotted and -paced mystery, a tantalizing hint of the sweeping nature of the early Christian debate, and some of the work that comprised it. “Chalice of Blood” delivers, very gratifyingly, on every promise.

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