"The Lieutenant" by Kate Grenville

Australian author Kate Grenville, in The Lieutenant, has fashioned a loose companion-piece to the powerful and award-winning The Secret River, and in the process has shown an impressive versatility: Not only can she paint convincingly on a large canvas, as in Secret River, can also do great justice with a smaller, more intimate narrative. The Lieutenant is marvelous.

Our laudable author imagines the events which change Lieutenant Daniel Rooke’s life. An officer in His Majesty King George III’s Marines, Rooke sails to New South Wales aboard the flagship of Britain’s first fleet to land and settle permanently. He travels with the reference and recommendation of the royal astronomer, and sees nothing but the grand vistas of new worlds and new opportunity. He chooses, however, to follow his own conscience at a moral crossroads, and it changes his life forever.

The Lieutenant is full of closely-observed thought processes and the internal dialogue of its hero, and we have absolutely no trouble believing it. Based on events in a real officer’s life, Ms. Grenville’s imagining is a triumph – realistic, understanding, compassionate, vivid. The pivotal events in the man’s life don’t need a long exposition, and don’t get any more than is absolutely necessary. This economical treatment accomplishes exactly what it needs to – this tale could very easily be over-told or under-told. This author hits it in the sweet spot.

This holds its place as a companion-piece to The Secret River because of the temporal and geographic proximity, but has not been set up as a prequel. I’m intrigued by its relationship to Secret River and quite looking forward to Sarah Thornhill, the third book in the trilogy. Take up The Lieutenant and travel with its hero, see his place in history, and feel his anguish as he searches his soul during a timeless conflict. Recommended very highly.

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"A Town Like Alice" by Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute proved in The Checquer Board and in A Town Like Alice that he can write unforgettably sympathetic characters in heroic and romantic situations. In Checquer Board a British veteran of World War II returns to Southeast Asia to the woman he loves. In A Town Like Alice a compelling female protagonist, treated mercilessly by the Japanese occupiers in Malaya, discovers after six years that a heroic Australian soldier, whose kindness proves the difference between life and death, is still alive, contrary to what she believed. The heart soars to read these plainly-told narratives.

Jean Paget is a young English girl who spent significant time in her childhood in Malaya, where her father worked for a British company. After passing her teen years repatriated in Southampton, she heads again to the Malay Peninsula to take a clerk-typist job with the same company. War breaks out at this time and the area very quickly falls to Japanese occupation. The book contains a very full depiction of the horrid hardship that follows: a group of more than 30 women and children must march hundreds of miles in the next two years as a series of Japanese commanders shuns them, wanting no responsibility for such a headache. During this time Jean meets Joe Harman, who provides the sorry troupe with meat, medicine, and fresh fruit, clearly saving their lives. Their occupiers found out about the pilferage, torture Joe by beating and crucifixion, and Jean and her group are forced to move on.

The balance of the book involves Jean’s and Joe’s discoveries about each other: Jean discovers that Joe is still alive, and Joe discovers that Jean, whom he first met when she carried a small child on her hip, was never married. Jean’s London solicitor

does what he can to bring them together; the whole is a highly gratifying read, tear-inducing at times. I found the financial dealings in the final chapters captivating, as Jean turns into a tycoon of the Australian Outback.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on the plot here, because it’s set up so well, and allowed to unfold at its own pace, with its own roadblocks and problems. Shute deals with racism, a continuing theme in his work, and war crimes, but the energy generated by our heroic couple and their devotion to each other drives this novel. Shute’s knowing portrayal of the inhospitable Outback, and of the investment required to make it more livable, ring spot-on true.

This novel has achieved the status of a classic, and it’s a designation I fully concur with. It has dramatic action, extreme physical stress, beautiful descriptions of Southeast Asian and Australian landscapes, true love, and a highly honorable moral code. Pick this up and let it accompany you forever.

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"A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson brings his familiar wit and humor to A Walk in the Woods that we’re all familiar with fro such wonderful titles as Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way (1990), In a Sunburned Country (2000), and A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), among many others. In it, Bryson shows a rapt preoccupation for the overwhelming landscape in which he has placed himself and his friend Katz. He also skewers other hikers, the American preoccupation with driving cars everywhere, certain historical aspects of the founding of the Appalachian Trail, the U.S. Forest Service, and of course, himself.

I would be pleased to say that he does all this with the typical humor we’ve come to expect from him, but Bryson’s funny moments are separated here by long stretches in which he recounts the physical trials of hiking the Appalachian Trail (“AT”), what he considers the misguided policies in place which govern the trail, people’s abuse of it, and his own disillusion with some of it. The result is a highly personal and believable account with flashes of charm and I’m going to say it,

with some longuers as well.

Bryson almost never deals with issues in any deep or serious way, principally as a matter of choice, I assume. He does recite certain kernels of environmental orthodoxy, an area where advocates needlessly play fast and loose with fact in the service of laudable goals. In my reaction to the book, this rises above the level of quibble, but not by much.

Overall, this is an enjoyable bit of Brysonia, full of honesty, and full of Bryson’s own affable persona.

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"Lungs Full of Noise" by Tessa Mellas

Tessa Mellas takes us, the uninitiated readers, by the hand and adroitly through the looking glass in her award-winning collection Lungs Full of Noise. And while each story has an underlying potential for a normal plot and characters, it turns out they deal in a madness that resides immediately below the thin veneer of our lives as though it can’t be helped.

Some of these exceptional and engrossing stories portray widespread, cultural neuroses, like Mariposa Girls, which deals with the tortures young girls willingly undergo to look and perform to standards they have no say in setting. And which high school grad cannot say she has encountered a new college roommate so foreign that she must come from one of Jupiter’s moons? Or been pushed into sexual activity by intense peer pressure, like the smart girl in Dye Job? These three stories, respectively shocking, amusing, and disturbing, at least show emotions we can recognize, and social trends all too prevalent.

Then there are the stories of highly personal madness, like The White Wings of Moths and So Many Wings. The women in these stories pursue astonishing courses – projects so bizarre that they barely make sense even to their own addled selves. These two pieces, told in plain and highly effective language, serve to establish the outer boundary of mental instability in these outré stories. And as such, serve to expand readers’ consciousness and establish new perceptive territory, and I can think of no higher calling in quality fiction.

 I want to end on a piece still further from our narrative norms. Landscapes in White consists of five prose poems with apocalyptic tone and content – they deal with birds dying in flutterings of feathers (with the horrific image of dead chickadees with their “claws branching up without leaves”); windblown pages of phone directories, and receipts, and newsprint – “Fall’s foliage stamped with Garamond font.”; acid rain: “Raindrops gorged on nitric acid streak the sable skin of night.”; in stanza 4 the apocalypse seems like it might be over: “When the rain stops, the world is missing its flesh. We walk on its bones …” We finish with an arresting note of festivity-amid-the-apocalypse, where a woman’s sparkler, which she waves around “like you’re conducting the disaster,” ignites without a match. This piece contains the clearest statement of Ms. Mellas’s dark worldview that runs like a bass theme through this collection. It’s a stark, plain-as-day recounting of the logical end of so much reckless will and power.

distant from our narrative norms.

 Lungs Full of Noise contains a few distinct species of short story, and you never know which you’re getting from one to the next. However, each displays Tessa Mellas’s amazing inventiveness, her dark view, and her exceptional flair for the English language. This is truly a brave – and extremely deserving - pick for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and I congratulate the board on its pick.

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"Mr. Lynch's Holiday" by Catherine O'Flynn

For much of Mr. Lynch’s Holiday we wait and watch as Dermot Lynch tries to draw his son out of the wretched place he winds up in after his wife leaves him. He makes his attempts with unsteady progress – after all, the younger Lynch has moved from Birmingham, in the U.K., to the Mediterranean coast of Spain, and the two haven’t seen each other since the death of Dermot’s wife. The surprising and endearing turnabout at the end of this narrative rewards the persevering reader and makes this story well worth taking up.   

Dermot Lynch, retired from driving a bus in Birmingham, decides to surprise his son, living on the Spanish Riviera, with a fortnight’s visit. He finds his son in a strained existence, reeling from his wife’s abrupt departure. The housing development, called Lomaverde, consists of brightly colored cubes on a bluff overlooking the sea. It’s been abandoned by the bankrupt builder, and has fallen into a state of disrepair shocking for such new buildings. This motif of shabbiness closely corresponds not only with young Eamonn’s emotional helplessness but also his youthful self-absorption. His Dad provides good company for a time, a respite from his quirky

neighbors, but soon starts to provide a sterner hand in his son’s life. This impulse leads toward its logical end, but the climax surprises us nonetheless. The more we consider it, the more we feel we should have seen it coming.

Surprising, gratifying, true to life, and populated with intriguing secondary characters, Mr. Lynch’s Holiday deals also with some themes taken from today’s headlines: the depressed European economy, the hazards and fugitive nature of illegal immigration, and class struggle. A bit of a slow liftoff, but beguiling as it goes, and a splendid denouement – this is well done, exceptional.

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"Cries of the Lost" by Chris Knopf

This is an amazingly fun spy caper without any spies. I was at a disadvantage not having read the prequel, but it was nothing crippling, because Cries of the Lost stands really well on its own. Dead Anyway (2012) was a finalist for the 2013 Nero Award, named for Rex Stout’s clever detective, Nero Wolf. Cries of the Lost follows the adventures of Arthur and Natsumi after the death of Arthur’s wife at the hands of a person or persons unknown, and combines enough elements of a mystery and those of a thriller, to be really excellent escapist fare. Throw in the wisecracking protagonist duo, and you have quite a delightful confection.

Arthur Cathcart cannot leave a mystery alone, and he constantly puts himself and his girlfriend Natsumi in harm’s way and back out in the nick of time. Behind it all is a somewhat confusing feud between onetime antagonists in the Basque separatist movement. The FBI and possibly the NSA think Arthur

is a member of a Basque terrorist group, when all he wants to do bring an end to the conflict and an end to the mortal danger to himself and Natsumi. It’s all done at a mile a minute, as the pair duck and weave their way from Grand Cayman to the Côte d’Azur, to Aix-en-Provence and New York City. Throw in a crooked high-ranking FBI agent, and you start to get the idea.

The deepest theme you’ll find here is the corrosive nature of ancient enmity, and a hatred the principals won’t let go. Our central couple is quite endearing, cute really, in their devotion, to each other, and electronic gizmos and hi-tech cloak-and-dagger methods are front and center.

This is a fine romp, which will divert you in ways that are well worth your time. I’m sorry I missed the first in the series. I’m not sure what follows, but the plot ends with all sorts of potential for further fun storytelling. Judging from this single entry, you can depend on this author to deliver the goods.

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“The Map of Time” by Félix J. Palma

Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor. I don’t know how often or how assiduously you have tried to make sense of time-travel conundrums. If, like me, you still struggle with the paradoxes inherent in traveling through time, don’t look to Félix J. Palma’s The Map of Time to help you out. It doesn’t offer solutions, but generally delicious and delightful new possibilities of time travel, starring none other than H.G. Wells, the author of The Time Machine (1895). Imagine Christopher Lloyd’s mad Dr. Emmett Brown frenetically covering all the implications of traveling back and forth in time – but at a more studious pace – but with nary a solution in sight. In fact we end with more questions than answers. And the book is so much more because of it.

 Félix J. Palma wrote The Map of Time in the style of a nineteenth-century adventure story, very apparently admiring the style. The translation serves this purpose well, and never gets in the way. Maybe the time-travel puzzles which constantly pop up, or the occasional authorial intrusions, weigh against the style, but no matter. This is an enjoyable ride,

with wonderful descriptions of Victorian London, a very full biographical treatment of Wells (from which flights of fancy follow), and yes, some actual science fiction. My only quibble is that some characters disappear early and are brought back late in the story, as if by force. I found myself waiting for follow-up treatment of a couple of them, and my wait was in vain.

This book deserves some of the praise it’s received – it’s inventive and fun, and its characters come with full nuancing, but its leisurely treatment (611 pages) and shifting viewpoint bring down its grade.

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“The City & The City” by China Miéville

There are cities in Europe, like Berlin and Budapest, (and presumably elsewhere) that have suffered schisms, or have histories of division. In The City & The City China Miéville carries this theme to an extreme, and in the process gives the reader a highly diverting, atmospheric tour. Add in all the elements of an excellent whodunit-thriller, and you have the heady mix on offer.

The two Eastern European cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma have maintained a fragile coexistence for centuries. They occupy the same space in some sort higher plane in which motorists must avoid colliding with cars from the other city and hitting pedestrians inhabiting the other city, while completely denying their existence. It’s a quirky device beginning to end, to which the reader, even while buying the overall plot, never quite adjusts. And I think Mr. Miéville wants it exactly that way. It’s a tribute to his skill that you spend the whole read a little off balance.

So in the narrative veteran Besźel police detective Tyador Borlú tries to solve a murder and quickly gets tangled up in intercity and inter-dimensional vagaries: he’s forced to work with the police force of Ul Qoma, and relations are not always friendly and trust not always forthcoming, from either side. The two detectives bump and collide with

each other, and with the improbable truths, but finally begin to cooperate and address the wildly speculative possibility of yet another city sharing the same quantum space. We finish with a rewarding denouement, faithful in style and tone with what has gone before.

This extremely inventive novel portrays a present-day fantasy in cities steeped in wrenching geopolitics and lingering Soviet-era inefficiencies. The minutiae of detective work in this through-the-looking glass setup strike me as very believable; the pace is perfect; and the tension builds wonderfully. This book will satisfy anyone looking for an unusual detective story that’s presented in a wholly new and different way. It’s a commendable, interesting effort.

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