Written in 1958, when the author was only twenty-three, this debut novel is stunning for its depiction of two societies–the society of peasant villagers who live in a remote and nearly inaccessible mountain village, and a society created by young delinquents when they are abandoned and blockaded inside this small village. Away from normal society, the boys are free to express their own emotions, and the narrator and others quickly show their inner humanity. The narrator’s much younger brother, an innocent, depends upon the narrator, who is protective and warm towards him, with several people protecting also the young daughter of the woman who died from plague, a girl who was abandoned when the villagers evacuated and left all the “undesirables” behind. As the boys help each other, the author creates a real sense of pathos about their sad predicaments. Passages of great beauty–especially the morning in which they discover snow–contrast with the misery of their attempts at survival. Five days later, everything changes.
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Henry Smart, born at the turn of the century, leads such a miserable childhood that he is on the streets by the age of five and solely responsible for his younger brother Victor by the age of nine. Always cold, hungry, and lacking a warm place to sleep, Henry and Victor are at the mercy of the elements, so concentrated on staying alive from moment to moment that they have no time to think toward the future. By the age of fourteen, Henry has met up with other poor who have some of the same resentments he has toward those who have dominated the land and commerce for so long. In 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood takes over the General Post Office on Easter Monday, declares the establishment of a new government, and raises its flag, and Henry is there–not out of a sense of patriotism so much as a sense that he is at home–and is fed–when he is among these people. When the shooting starts, Henry’s first bullets are aimed not at the British or at the police, but at the store window across the street, which he sees mocking him with its shiny new boots, something he has never had.
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The twenty-four hour train ride from La Paz, Bolivia, to Arica, Chile, through the Andes at an altitude of up to 16,000 feet, from which the railway descends to the sea, provides the “closed room” setting for a murder which takes place in 1952, somewhat akin to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934). The key difference, however, is that the passengers on the Andean Express are, for the most part, local people traveling for a variety of reasons, and not wealthy Europeans traveling for pleasure. Their issues and resentments are local, based on their long histories with the victim, a man so loathsome that few can find anything positive to say about him. “Killing Alderete would not be murder; it would be a settling of accounts,” one remarks.
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Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason begins his mystery series starring Detective Inspector Erlendur (the Icelandic people do not usually use “last names”) of the Reykjavik Police in this dark and engrossing novel, first translated into English in 2004. Since then, five more novels in the series have been released, all to enormous acclaim. Erlendur, fiftyish and divorced for twenty years, with almost no contact with his ex-wife, tries to maintain contact with his children, his daughter Eva Lind, an actress and active drug addict, and his son Sindri Snaer, who has recently been released from drug rehab for the third time. Called to investigate the death of a sixty-nine-year-old man named Holberg, who has been murdered with a crystal ashtray, he has few clues, except for the unusual message left on the body which says, “I am him.”
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Esteemed novelist Jane Gardam follows up on the success of Old Filth, her highly successful 2005 novel about the life of Sir Edward Feathers, with the companion story of Sir Edward’s wife, Betty. Each novel benefits from the other, and together they are a stunning study of a marriage–not ideal, but “workable.” Beginning with Old Filth allows the reader to set the story and see the marriage from the point of view of Sir Edward. That novel is sophisticated and subtle, much like Sir Edward himself, with a sly sense of humor which allows the reader to feel part of the scene. Betty, someone we really see for the first time in this novel, is also a product of the same time, place, and class. The sophisticated style of Old Filth, appropriate for a novel about Edward, yields in this novel to a more down-to-earth and overtly romantic style, more typical of Elisabeth, with coincidence and romantic intervention playing a part. The often hilarious (and ironic) dialogue combines with a wry satiric sense to produce a conclusion which is everything that such a novel deserves.
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