Marcus Conway, a sensitive Irish man in his early fifties, hears the Angelus bell, a call to prayer, upon returning to his house in the Mayo village of Louisburgh, where his family has lived for unnumbered generations. He is “pale and breathless” – confused, even – and notes that “There is something strange about all this, some twitchy energy in the ether which has affected me from the moment those bells began to toll, something flitting through me, a giddiness drawing me.” As Marcus muses about his life and family, and his village “blistered with shrines and grottoes and prayer houses and hermitages,” he sees the whole of County Mayo as a “bordered realm of penance and atonement. Author Mike McCormack, winner of the Best Irish Novel of the Year Award for this novel, recreates the life and the memories, of Marcus Conway as one complete sentence, a brilliant way to recreate the shifting thoughts of a man’s memories, and it really works here, drawing in the reader instead of putting him off with its lack of periods. I found it easy to follow after the first few pages, and I became so involved in Marcus Conway’s life and comments about chaos vs. order in his and the world’s universe that I actually forgot that this was only one sentence.
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On a New Year’s Eve in rural England, one would expect the cold to keep most people inside doing their celebrating, but Becky Shaw, a thirteen-year-old whose family has come to town for the holiday, has decided to go out. Leaving one of the “barn conversions” in the village, where she is staying, she suddenly vanishes. At dusk, her family comes running into town, shouting for help, and by the time the New Year is ushered in, a helicopter has been out searching for hours. The mountain-rescue teams, the cave teams, much of the village, and the police have found nothing, and a “thick band of rain [i]s coming in.” With this dramatic opening, author Jon McGregor paves the way for his primary story – the more internal, domestic activity which accompanies the search for Becky Shaw. The whole town is involved in trying to find her, but as time passes without any clues, her disappearance gradually becomes a backstory to the life which continues within the community, a story which features many characters each of whom is trying to make a living and find happiness, despite sometimes ominous odds. Love stories blossom and glorious descriptions of nature provide both irony and context for the lives of the characters here, as McGregor refuses to elevate humans and their lives above animals and their instincts.
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Most of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s novels echo with memories of his own early life and his efforts to come to terms with his parents’ virtual abandonment of him before he was even in his teens. This novel is different, however, unique, a stand-alone. Main character Jean is sensitive, observant, and emotionally free to love, as the main characters appear to be in most of Modiano’s other novels, but in this novel, the main character does not feel like a substitute for the author. Instead, Jean is a young, rather naïve young man, caught in circumstances that he regards as more of a mystery than the serious crime that readers may conclude it to be, a conundrum which he does not fully grasp. Jean is almost certainly a pawn in the hands of clever criminals, rather than the victim of childhood traumas which typify Modiano’s main characters in his other novels. The mystery here may even include murder. Flashbacks, reminiscences, and overlaps between the events from the past and events in the present take place as Jean and the reader are forced to consider what really happened, especially when some of the earlier characters suddenly reappear in the present.
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Jacob Rigolet is attending a 1977 auction of photographs on behalf of his employer, Mrs. Esther Hamelin, a well-known collector of vintage photographs – literally doing her bidding at auctions of antique photographs around the world. Suddenly, he is horrified to see his estranged mother, Nora Rigolet, walk up the aisle of the auction hall. Without warning, she throws a pot of black ink at a photograph taken by photographer Robert Capa during a World War II battle, “Death on a Leipzig balcony.” Jacob’s mother, the former Head Librarian of the Halifax Free Library in Nova Scotia, had been “safely tucked away” at the Nova Scotia Rest Hospital, following a breakdown three years previously, and Jacob has not seen her for over a year. He himself has been busy working part-time at the Free Library and, for the past two years, living in a cottage behind Mrs. Hamelin’s Victorian home. In one of the novel’s many ironies, it is Jacob’s fiancée, Martha Crauchet, a detective with the Halifax Regional Police, who is in charge of Nora Rigolet’s interrogation at the police station. With no sense of fear, Nora answers their questions but provides little insight into why she destroyed this photograph. As the novel develops and the lives of the characters unfurl, the author maintains an air of fun and good humor for most of the novel, even as universal themes of right and wrong, and good and evil, begin to appear throughout, and it is not until the conclusion that the novel’s “noir” elements become more obvious. Norman is a clever author who does not tie all the details into a bow, leaving the reader to solve the mystery surrounding Nora with the clues provided.
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Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomqvist are back in another thriller, the fifth in the Millenium series with began with THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO by Steig Larsson. Following Larsson’s death in 2004, and the posthumous publication of three of his thrillers, his heirs hired David Lagercrantz to continue the series. This is the second follow-up novel by Lagercrantz, a somewhat new approach from Larsson’s, in that Lagercrantz’s work contains less horrific violence and more inner analysis. Here many of the previous characters play roles, and two dozen or so new ones are added. Lagercrantz thoughtfully provides a character guide for those who may be new to the series and those who may want an update. Lisbeth Salander plays her role from prison, where she is serving a two-month sentence for having refused to testify in her court case for abducting a severely autistic child and spiriting him to safety, an event which occurred in the previous novel. Here Lisbeth is investigating a group which performed some genetic experiments twenty-five years ago, one in which she may have been an unwilling participant. Blomqvist is investigating a hacker attack on the Brussels financial markets, especially one company involving a Swedish firm. Eventually the two investigations begin to overlap. Salander and Blomqvist dominate the action less than in the past, and the novel is less violent. Some plot devices may tire the reader and coincidence plays a big role, but Lizbeth may have discovered something important to her own growth. Time and future novels will tell.
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