"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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"Breaking News" by Shirani Rajapakse

Shirani Rajapakse has produced a series of short pieces in “Breaking News,” and taken together they give us a memorable and highly affecting cross-section of Sri Lanka cringing in the grip of terror. Various viewpoints center the stories, from the man who loses his leg to a land mine (only to go home to misunderstanding and callous disregard), to the woman who loses her husband and two grade-school sons to marauding soldiers in one moment – her husband is killed on the spot and she never sees her sons, aged five and seven, again.

Loss pervades these pieces, some of which are little more than snippets. Atrocities, most of which are attributed to the Tamil Tigers, rip families apart, result in the murder of innocents, and destroy lives. The language is simple and unadorned, marked by a starkness exactly appropriate to the subject matter. The stories contain oblique descriptions of people and places, but pain and loss form the major chord in these related arias. “Emerald Silk” portrays a woman removing herself from a marriage and a concrete high-rise in which she feels herself cut off from the milieu in which she feels most comfortable, the earth. This story, and “Sepalika,” display the collection’s most effective descriptions of natural surroundings.  “The Boy from Wellawatte” depicts a young Muslim man who completely changes what he’s comfortable in, and it isn’t home and hearth. Bodies bob to the surface by the score and run aground in a mournful piece called “Like Driftwood on the Kelani.” As the body count grows and the local population tries to cope, a young woman finally gives up hope of ever seeing her lover again. In this piece, the river is anthropomorphized as an unwilling partner in the terror and war. It is a fine touch.

Whether warfare, poverty, displacement, or terror is the immediate cause, the stories in “Breaking News” lay bare the suffering so widespread in war-torn Sri Lanka. As I said, I found it a highly affecting collection, and apparently I was not alone. It was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize in 2010. The Gratiean Prize honors creative writing in English in Sri Lanka. I congratulate Ms. Rajapakse and thank her for the privilege she bestowed on me by providing a manuscript copy.

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"Rust" by Julie Mars

In a marvelous, winning metaphor, Margaret Shaw, the protagonist of Julie Mars’s “Rust,” wants to learn to weld. Ms. Shaw, a New York artist with more talent than accomplishment, has tired of tending bar, and removed herself to New Mexico. She finds herself at Rico Garcia’s auto shop, and asked if he would teach her. What follows this seemingly random meeting is anything but random, as Ms. Mars takes us through its wake, full of searching, full of hope and fear, and eventually redemption.

 Margaret was effectively orphaned as a little girl when her parents traveled to India and wound up in prison.  Ever since, she has kept herself wrapped tightly against the world, fearing further loss.  She seeks Rico’s instruction, and finds a bit more. Not too much more, but the two become friends amid some fairly strong attraction. Rico’s own history has its rocky patches, not quite on the scale of Margaret’s, but they push him toward the gringa with a fair amount of force.

It isn’t very often that I’m moved to tears at the end of a book, but this one definitely did it for me. Ms. Mars has crafted a fine and satisfying conclusion – actually I wish it had a little more, but understand its construction and intent, and accept it. Well, “accept” is far too passive a term for my feeling about this book and its conclusion. It’s a compulsive page-turner with sympathetic characters and tense, carefully-balanced plot; I embrace it and the plainspoken truths about how rust accumulates on its characters’ hearts and emotions. A superior piece of storytelling, this novel will pull you along with its tone, its perfect pace, and its emotional truth. As satisfying as its payoff is, you will assuredly enjoy the journey just as much. Look for it in February 2012, and pounce!

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