“Merde alors! That was all you ever said.  Merde alors! she thinks, a prayer of a kind, as the red light blinks off and the green comes on and the dispatcher shouts, ‘Go!’ and there’s his hand on her back and she lets go, plunging from the rough comfort of the fuselage into the raging darkness over France.”

In this novel about a woman who works in Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II, author Simon Mawer focuses on Marian Sutro, a composite character representing the fifty-four women who served in France between May, 1941, and September, 1944. Of those real women, thirteen were murdered by the Germans following their capture.  Recruited to perform extremely dangerous duties, all these women were fluent in French and often bilingual, and all of them were willing to perform under extraordinarily dangerous conditions.

Marian herself is a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force when she is recruited for more serious duties and sent to remote Meoble Lodge in Scotland for SEO training.  She attends parachute school and becomes a paratrooper, a skill she will need when she is dropped into occupied France to help ferry scarce supplies to the allies and help ferry out people who urgently need to return to England – or are needed by the British for their unique skills in the war effort at home.  She practices to become a sharpshooter, and learns codes and double codes so she can operate as a “pianist,” a wireless operator. She develops physical strength and speed and eventually spends several days on her own undergoing final testing in a remote area where she must avoid tails, find food and safe houses, and refuse to give up information if intercepted.

Known to her team as Alice, she carries identification papers as Anne-Marie Laroche, a name that changes when necessary.  Just before she leaves for France, she gains additional responsibilities as part of Wordsmith, a top secret group responsible for atomic research.  Her primary responsibility for them is to spirit a former flame, Clement Pelletier, away from the lab at the College de France and get him aboard a small plane to England, where he will join some of his former colleagues who have also escaped.

While thinking of her growing responsibilities one day beside a river in the countryside, Marian notices that “In the water there were trout beneath the surface, hanging in the flow and swinging their tails against the current.  That was what an agent had to be,” she decides, “a fish in water, entirely at home.  But at Meoble Lodge they had learned how to catch trout by placing their hands in the icy stream beneath the animals and then flipping them, helpless, out onto the bank.”  Even fish in water are subject to extreme danger from anyone determined enough to catch them.

Marian’s work takes her throughout much of France, from the drop areas in the southwest to Paris.  Everyone she meets is a potential enemy and a potential traitor, and she must operate on her own most of the time.  Many different factions with many different goals operate among the allies in France, and additional dangers from the police, French collaborators, and the Germans, make every moment a trial, especially in Paris.  “The danger of Paris is a cancer within you, invisible, imponderable, and probably incurable,” she notes.  Despite all this, Marian does manage to find comfort with two men, as she tries to figure out whether she is in love with both, with one, or with neither.

Like his more serious literary fiction, such as The Glass Room, The Fall, The Gospel of Judas, and Mendel’s Dwarf, Trapeze is full of excitement, but unlike those novels, this one is an entertainment, with a “Maisie Dobbs” quality – historically focused and fun to read but less serious stylistically and thematically than literary fiction.  While the reader will learn new information about occupied France and the efforts made by the British to turn the tide against Germany, Marian’s own story feels thin.  Her character at the beginning seems to be that of a smart, somewhat fun-loving girl with a sense of mischief, but that characterization wanes as the novel progresses and Marian becomes more predictable. The many plot lines which take her all over France do little to enhance our real understanding of how she thinks and how much she grows, and the love stories sometimes feel like a distraction, rather than an integral, necessary part of the novel.  Some betrayals are foreshadowed from early in the novel, and some of the repeating villains are stereotypes.

The novel’s focus on the women who helped advance Britain’s goals within occupied France provides enough impetus to make this an interesting adventure story, but while individual events hold their excitement, the plot ultimately feels almost as chaotic as the war itself.  One is never sure, in the conclusion, just how much Marian has actually grown during her tour of duty, and how much she is at the whim of fate, and she and the people with whom she works never seem to develop into living, breathing humans.  The statement by one of Marian’s superiors, early in the novel, proved sadly prophetic:  “From now on, it is not your work that is secret; your whole life is secret…You have to appear to be dull and uninteresting.  It is a particular skill.”  Perhaps it is this secrecy which makes Marian less appealing than one might have wished, but the exciting events and wartime drama which highlight the work of the women in the SEO will keep most readers on the edge of their seats.

ALSO by Simon Mawer:  THE GLASS ROOM

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from  http://www.knihazlin.cz

The giclee print of trout in water by Bern Sundell appears on http://www.riverstonegallery.com

Parachute school: http://www.squidoo.com

The Citroen Traction Avant, the classic car used by enemies of the allies, appears throughout this novel and may be found on http://upload.wikimedia.org

Cavendish Lab at Cambridge University is where atomic research was done by the British during World War II and where the allies hoped that Dr. Clement Pelletier would work if Marian could spirit him out of France. http://www.cambridge2000.com

“We can’t escape what we are.  Every time we look in a mirror, every time we feel personal or professional failure, that tide rises again, reminding us of our weaknesses, our cowardice, and our self-sacrifice.  And we are left without excuses.  That is why we need someone to save or someone to condemn.  Some object of our love or our hate.  Someone who makes us forget.”

Set in Spain in 1941 during the rule of General Franco and the Falangists, with their connections to the Nazis, and again in 1981, in the run-up to the first real democratic elections, debut author Victor del Arbol creates a whirlwind of mysteries within mysteries that will keep even the most demanding reader entertained.  Filling the novel with twists and turns, surprises, and action that doubles back on itself, the story line constantly changes, rewriting the information we think we already know, and creating new complications to ponder as we try to reconstruct what we think is happening.  The interrelationships among the main characters and their families continue for the forty years of the time span, becoming ever more complex as motivations, betrayals, lies we have accepted as truth, and characters who are not who we think they are become central to the action.

Ultimately, the novel raises questions more challenging than those of the typical thriller:  questions of our own identities, our perceptions of ourselves and others’ perceptions of us, along with the deliberate manipulation of those perceptions by groups or individuals (often politicians) who wish to affect our ideas of guilt and innocence, right and wrong.   Extremely clever, unusual in its focus, and carefully plotted to keep the interest and excitement high, this novel could well become one of the hits of the summer.

As the novel opens in May, 1981, thirty-five-year-old Maria Bengoechea lies dying in a Barcelona hospital from a tumor.  A successful lawyer who has prosecuted people regarded by the government as dangerous to the country, Maria is having difficulty reconciling herself to her fate.  A coup attempt, which occurred in February of that year, has led to the arrest of a few of the main conspirators, but many of their right-wing supporters remain in office, and Maria, who knows some of their secrets, is unwilling or unable to reveal them.  A police guard outside her door remains there, in case she changes her mind, but she has no intention of telling the police what they want to know – there is too great a chance that those who still retain power might act against people she feels honor-bound to protect.  As one of her former clients had warned her recently, “This democracy of ours is like a little girl who has already learned how to hide her dirty laundry before she has even learned to walk.”

The next scene flashes back to 1941, when a beautiful and influential woman, Isabel Mola, and her disturbed son Andres are waiting for a train that will take them away from her abusive husband Guillermo, whose assassination she had plotted. Though Isabel never appears again in the story, her long-felt influence continues throughout the novel.  Who killed her, who witnessed the killing, who is lying, and, more importantly, who, if anyone, is telling the truth, are issues which continue for forty years and are still an issue as Maria lies dying in hospital forty years later.

Maria and her father Gabriel, a metal worker who refuses to leave his home in San Lorenzo in Catalonia for medical treatment, are two parts of this story, but Maria does not know any of the important facts about Gabriel and his war-time past, and Gabriel, a widower, is not  telling.  Andres, Isabel’s disturbed son, whose sadness at Isabel’s disappearance has been alleviated by the gift of a Japanese katana (saber) he had coveted, is another part of the story, but he is incapable of understanding all the issues and he is hidden away, guarded from public eye.  Isabel’s older son, Fernando, who hates his father Guillermo, is a reluctant soldier who is sent to the Russian front as part of Spain’s support for the Nazis, and he is unable to see what is happening in Spain.  Upon his return from a prison camp, much later, he finds Spain changed and his father hostile.  Even in the later part of the story, 1981, all the earlier characters are still involved, and the government is still secretive.  Democracy is not yet in flower, and those politicians with guilty consciences have surrounded themselves with others who will support them in exchange for favors which they themselves need to protect their own lives and reputations.

The third part of the story surrounds Andres’s teacher, Marcelo Alcala, who came to Barcelona in 1941 to teach Andres, bringing his son Cesar with him.  Though Marcelo disappears from the action, his son Cesar later becomes a police officer whom Maria eventually puts on trial.  Again, the reality of the situation is very different from the “facts” given in the “corroborating” evidence, and even Maria suspects she has made a mistake, though it is not one she can correct.

Throughout the novel, everyone has reason to ignore the truth and to want to hide his/her collusion in unsavory events.  Blackmail keeps many of them from opening their mouths, and threats made against family and those they love “convince” others to play along with manipulators, no matter how much they may suffer personally because of this.   Most serious is the conspiracy by some politicians and army officers to topple the government just before the national elections.  The conspirators are right-wing collaborators who feel endangered by the democratic process and by the prospect of socialism, and they feel impelled to protect their positions and their wealth.  Fate or chance plays a big part in many events, but blackmail also affects outcomes.

Complex and challenging in its plotting, the novel is a real thriller, energetic and fast-paced.  The characters are memorable, in part because none of them are perfect, and several are trapped into committing terrible acts because they believe they have no choice.  The interrelationships between guilt, innocence, chance, and fate keep the reader engrossed, and though the violence is sometimes melodramatic, even lurid, the author avoids neat “fictional packaging” in his ending.  Fate rules.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://rac1.org

Rural San Lorenzo in Lleida is where Maria grew up and where her father still lives.  This photo by Manuel Portero is one of many beautiful photos on this site: http://www.flickriver.com

This Japanese katana (saber) was made during World War II and may resemble the one given to Andres by his father. http://www.aliexpress.com

Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo (left) embraces Adolfo Suarez (right), who was Prime Minister of Spain from 1976 – 1981.  Calvo-Sotelo was Prime Minister from Feb. 25, 1981 – Dec. 1, 1981.  The conspirators in this novel were plotting a coup to undo some of Suarez’s reforms.

Andres lives in seclusion near the Tibidado overlook in Barcelona. http://somedayillbethere.com

“Those you seek are wolves. Wolves do not wish to be found, they are themselves the hunters, slipping between trees, out of eyesight, close to the ground. They survive, they thrive, on their cunning…They have been at their trade for hundreds of years. This way of life it is in their blood, their bones.”—comments made to Driver after he has suffered repeated attacks.

I make no secret of the fact that I think James Sallis is one of the best writers in the US today, regardless of genre. Though his novels recently have been firmly categorized as “American noir,” a genre I do not particularly enjoy because of the sometimes extreme violence, I do find Sallis’s writing style admirable, if not brilliant, for his ability to say much in few words and to convey tension without being melodramatic. His dialogue, usually terse, says all that needs to be said, and his ability to describe in perfect images of few words is unparalleled. “Minimalism” takes on new meaning in his hands. His earlier novels, such as the John Turner trilogy, combined under one title as What You Have Left, are noir interpretations of the Southern Gothic genre, and his recent novel The Killer is Dying is a unique combination of three separate stories of three separate characters whose lives just glance off each other near the end, and then continue on separately. That novel is compressed, every image counting, and his themes of man’s isolation are well developed through his vibrant characterizations.

His novel Drive, recently made into a hit film starring Ryan Gosling, precedes this novel, Driven, and both are short novels which lack the fully developed characters one finds in Sallis’s other novels. Drive, the story of a man who works as a stunt driver by day and as the driver of getaway cars by night, is full of violence, and the body count in the book and film is extremely high, some of the deaths coming at the hands of Driver himself as payback for egregious betrayals. At the end of the novel and film, Driver drives off, seriously wounded.

Driven begins six years later. Driver has been keeping a low profile under the pseudonym of Paul West in Phoenix, and he has been successful in avoiding trouble – and in falling in love with Elsa. The novel starts with a bang. On page one, Driver and Elsa are attacked, and though Driver manages to disable one attacker, the second one fatally stabs Elsa before Driver can take care of him. He has no idea who the attackers are and why he was selected for attack. He ends up going to Tempe, where he buys a 1970s Ford Fairlane and adapts it for the hard driving he expects he will have to do in the coming days. Several more attacks occur, always involving two people, always involving fatalities, but, still, Driver has no idea who is behind the attacks or why. Eventually, the trail leads to New Orleans, but his own connection there remains obscure. As one of Driver’s friends comments, “Do the dots connect? Could be all random. Separate storms. And in the long run what does it matter? The question’s always the same: What do you do? How do you act?…If you don’t want to carry through, you can go away again. Be missing.”

Driven is a peculiar book, one that feels unfinished to me. The back cover sports a sentence which I regarded at first as an obvious spoiler: “Driven tells how [Driver], done with killing, becomes the one who goes down ‘at 3 a.m. on a clear, cool morning in a Tijuana bar.’ ” Yet that scene never occurs in this novel, despite the misleading suggestion that it will be Driver’s fate.  It is a quotation from a screenplay which his friend Manny wrote years ago, and it has nothing whatever to do with this novel.   The novel, less than one hundred fifty pages long, with large type and wide margins, feels a bit like an outline, rather than the compressed but fully developed novel which Sallis is known for. The ending of this novel suggests that there might yet be another novel about the life of Driver.

Those who have not read Drive or seen the film will want to do so before reading this continuation of Driver’s story. And those who have never had the pleasure of reading Sallis at all may want to start with something else. (My own favorite among the recent books is The Killer is Dying, a terrific novel which is one of my Favorites of 2011, despite its noir focus.)  Though I enjoyed seeing what happens to Driver after Drive ends, this novel felt too abbreviated and too undeveloped, even for minimalist fiction, to stand with Sallis’s previous novels, at least to me. Time will tell if it, like Drive, is optioned for another film, and whether there is another novel in the works, making this part of a complete trilogy.

ALSO by Sallis:  DRIVE,

DRIVE (the film),    THE KILLER IS DYING (Cripple Creek, Cypress Grove, and Salt River under one cover), and     WHAT YOU HAVE LEFT

Photos, in order: The author’s photo by Karin Sallis appears on http://www.noexit.co.uk

The 1970 Ford Fairlane with “429 cubes” may be seen on http://www.musclecarclub.com

The photo of Ryan Gosling (Driver) may be found on the Drive Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/DriveTheMovie

“Could you live here and not suspect? People were disappearing right and left, all over the country. Not a handful. Thousands. They were being held in secret camps, tortured and murdered by the government – all with the complicity of the police, the courts, the Church. And they weren’t low-lifes nobody would miss. They were lawyers, students, factory workers, priests. They had families, bosses, employees, neighbors, friends. Didn’t people wonder?”

If this novel were a “thriller,” it might be possible to dismiss the horrors contained within it as fiction. Not so, with this book. This dramatic and heart-stopping novel recreates very real events of shocking, unimaginable brutality which take place in Argentina in the fall of 1979, three years after the end of the Peronist democracy, and you will not forget these events. After the military seizes power, the characters, as real as you and I, and with the same goals and dreams, have no alternative but to go about their lives trying to maintain a low profile, and as the atrocities continue, they soon affect these characters and the people they know and love. The novel becomes a revelation in which one cannot help but wonder, ultimately, how these atrocities were allowed to begin at all, and, even more importantly, how they were able to continue unimpeded within a country which was part of the Organization of American States. Was the belief, widely accepted outside Argentina, that subversives were trying to destabilize the country, and that dramatic steps were therefore needed to prevent anarchy, enough to justify the tortures and horrific deaths imposed on ordinary citizens? And why did no other country, especially the United States, ever sound the alarm?

That is the question at the heart of this novel by Edgardo David Holzman, who grew up in Argentina and graduated from law school there, then went to Washington, D.C., in 1974 to work for the Organization of American States. As part of a delegation investigating the human rights situation in Chile a year after the Pinochet coup, he came face to face with stories of unimaginable atrocities. When Argentina joined the list of countries with military dictatorships in 1976, they used the same enforcement methods as Chile had used.

Ultimately, Holzman decided to write a novel about the period, believing that “Fiction, paradoxically, is the closest thing we have to real life. It seeks to stir the heart as well as the head. It’s where readers can inhabit characters, feel what those characters feel, and experience their world.” With this novel Holzman fully achieves his goals, and few readers will emerge from this story unscathed – or unashamed. In Malena he recreates the period and its horrors by keeping the focus squarely on a series of characters whom the reader comes to know and, in most cases, like, people so closely resembling the reader, regardless of cultural differences, that identification with the characters is easy and natural. Their fates become the fates of our “friends,” and their futures become the hopes and dreams any civilized human being would have for them.

Kevin “Solo” Solorzano, an Argentine-born interpreter living in Washington, is sent to Buenos Aires to act as an interpreter for Admiral Rinaldi, Argentina’s Foreign Minister, during the visit of President Jimmy Carter. Rinaldi, very smooth, has hired an American PR firm for his speeches when he has been in the US, and he has spoken in the past to Senators Jesse Helms, Claiborne Pell, John Glenn, Bill Bradley, and Susan Sigal, a Representative from New York. Part of a delegation from the Organization of American States, Solo has not been to Argentina for sixteen years, but he looks forward to visiting with a dear friend, Malena Uriburu-Basavilbaso, daughter of a well-connected family and now the aide to the Ambassador to the US, and with Ines, a young woman he almost married when they lived together in New York City. Solo’s mentor, Alberto, in New York, has also asked him to take some money to his aunt and uncle in Argentina and see if he can find out what happened to their daughter, son, and daughter-in-law, who have disappeared.

At the same time, Captain Diego Fioravanti, a young soldier caught up in events that are moving too fast for him, witnesses the beating and horrific assassination of three “subversives.” Though he has been a protégé of Col. Indart, his squeamishness about the events he witnesses raises questions about his suitability for his job, and he will be put to increasingly traumatic tests to be sure that his humanity has been wiped out. Diego is the lover of Ines, Solo’s former fiancée.

As Solo’s life and his experiences with Ines and Malena, unfold, often dramatically, the reader comes to know Solo as a warm and caring man of great humanity. His visits to prisons, where some inmates have insisted on telling him what is really happening there (though they know they will undoubtedly be killed for telling him) torment him, and as he learns more about the active involvement of the Church in the massacres, about the secret deals that various officials have made with each other and with officials in the US and elsewhere, and about the tens of thousands of “desaparecidos” (“disappeared”) of whom there is no record at all, he is devastated. At the same time, he is also dealing with personal issues back home affecting his own family, while also investigating how his father drowned in a ship accident in Argentina sixteen years ago. The various characters come together when Diego, the unwilling soldier, is targeted for assassination.

Rich with history, the novel is populated by a large and well developed cast of characters. The reality of the events in which they find themselves is so horrific that every reader will cringe at what is happening to people with whom they can identify. The insights into the US position regarding the human rights abuses in these countries, and the secrecy with which they were treated are illuminating, as is the collusion of the Catholic Church in the abuses. Ranking among the best debut novels I have read in years, this novel is an incredible achievement, not only because of the subject matter, but because the pace and the plotting keep the reader on tenterhooks from beginning to end.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on his publisher’s website: http://nortiapress.com/

The OAS headquarters in Washington, DC:  http://www.caribjournal.com

A woman marches, bearing witness to her missing children in Buenos Aires: http://mujereslibres.blogspot.com

On November 9, 2011, people gathered in Buenos Aires to await the verdict in the trial of twelve military officers accused of crimes against humanity carried out at the ESMA Navy Mechanics School, one of Latin America’s most notorious torture centers.  All twelve were declared guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. http://mujereslibres.blogspot.com/

The U. S. Embassy in Buenos Aires:  http://www.msg-history.com

“I am a poet of space and form. Of light, of light and space and form. Architects are people who build walls and floors and roofs. I capture and enclose the space within…”—Rainer von Abt

While on their honeymoon in Venice, Czech citizens Viktor and Liesl Landauer meet architect Rainer von Abt at a party given by an acquaintance in an ancient palazzo. The next day he shows them display models of the dramatically different buildings he has been creating, and after indicating that he was once a student of Adolf Loos, who hails from their Czech city (known here as Mesto), he extols “the virtues of glass and steel and concrete, and decrie[s] the millstones of brick and stone that hung about people’s necks.” He believes that Mesto is now looking toward the future, and he wants to be part of it, explaining that “Ever since Man came out of the cave he has been building caves around him…But I wish to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air. I wish to give him a glass space to inhabit.” Viktor is enthralled, suggesting, “Perhaps you could design a Glass Space (Glasraum) for us.”

The house, von Abt believes, “should not look like something. It should just be, a shape without references.” Ultimately, the architect agrees to build the house, “But form without ornament is all I can give you…Here, in the most ornamental city in the whole world [Venice], I am offering you the very opposite.” And after he arrives in Mesto and surveys the site, with its slope down into a garden, he declares, “ I wish not just to design a house but to create a whole world. I want to work from the foundations to the interior, the windows, the doorways, the furnishings, the fabric of the place as well as the structure. I will design you a life. Not a mere house to live in, but a whole way of life…Your abode will be a work of art at which people will wonder.”

And so begins an enthralling tale in which the building of a spectacular and unusual house becomes the framework for a story about the social and political changes which occur in Eastern Europe between the two world wars, all of them affecting the fate of the house and the architect’s dream. But it is also a story of the family, Viktor and Liesl Landauer and their children, who build and live in the house. Though Liesl is a gentile, Viktor is Jewish, and when the National Socialists seize power in Austria and begin their campaign to dominate the Sudentenland of Czechoslovakia, Viktor quickly realizes that they must leave the house, the Glasraum they love, and sell his business (the famed Landauer motor cars) to Liesl’s Christian family, if they are to survive. “If you play with mad dogs, you are going to get bitten,” he declares.

Author Simon Mauer has always created exciting plots with important thematic overtones, and in this novel he outdoes himself, incorporating the broadest scope of any of his novels so far. Beginning in 1929, the story and the history of the house continue up to the 1990s, exploring the sociopolitical traumas of the era, from National Socialism through the Communist takeover, and the rebellion and eventual liberation of the country. Subplots and many secondary characters repeat throughout, connecting and reconnecting over the sixty-year time span. Viktor Landauer’s infidelities, including one with a woman who later becomes the nanny of his children and a friend of his wife, set the Nazi takeover into sharp relief, and his eventual arrival in the United States becomes a stopping point in the novel but not its conclusion.

Though Mawer never mentions the real house on which the novel is based, it is easily identifiable as the Tugendhat House, built by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in what is now Brno, Czechoslovakia. The use of the “Landauer House” as a Nazi office building, a biological research lab, a temporary stable, and a gym for handicapped children, mostly polio victims, parallels some of the uses of the Tugendhat House, as does the eventual restoration of that house, which opened to the public on March 6, 2012.

Mawer’s pacing is flawless. He keeps the reader completely occupied as he explores the issues of the house and the Landauers’ relationship, their friendships (and/or infidelities), and their household staff, which stays behind when they leave. Hana Hanakova, Liesl’s close friend, a sexually adventuresome free spirit, apparently bisexual, expresses her genuine love for Liesl throughout. Even after Liesl leaves the house, Liesl and Hana remain in touch. Kata, hired as the nanny, is Viktor’s mistress, though she and Liesl become good friends, as do their children, with whom they share the Landauer House. Kata and Marika, her daughter, accompany the Landauers when they leave the house, becoming “six characters in search of a home.” Lanik, their untrustworthy chauffeur, assumes the role of caretaker of the abandoned house, eventually becoming an official with the Red Army. As time passes and the various characters make their peace with the circumstances in which they find themselves, for better or worse, the reader feels the whole weight of history unfolding, both politically and emotionally.

Focusing initially on the story of a great architectural achievement, the novel also explores several stories of love and betrayal; stories of love sanctioned, illicit, and forbidden; and the fraught history of Czechoslovakia (and peripherally, Austria) between the wars. Though few exact dates are provided, the novel reflects the growth of the Nazi movement, the exodus of those Jews fortunate enough to have the means to escape, and the aftereffects on the Landauers, their household, and on the Glass Room. Mawer’s prose is efficient, and his style keeps the reader on pace, never having to stop to figure out what the author “really” means. Filled with vibrant imagery, both of the external and internal worlds of the characters, the novel has something for everyone. Ultimately, the stories of all the characters are resolved, with only one loose end, and readers who enjoy this novel will want to reread the preface for further insights after completing the novel. A fully-developed and thoughtful novel with a unique focus and point of view.

This remarkable “Tugendhat Walkthrough,” programed by by Matthew J. Sama, is something that a lover of architecture will not want to miss!

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://www.amazon.com

The Tugendhat Villa is shown on http://en.wikipedia.org

This black and white photo shows the “honey-colored” onyx wall (center), which features in the action of the novel.  Also shown, the piano (left), which is a motif which echoes throughout.   http://brnonow.com

The restored dining room and living room, on opposite sides of the onyx wall, are shown on as part of a story on http://www.architizer.com

ALSO by Simon Mawer:  TRAPEZE

“…The day-to-day business of dying ran on relentlessly, a ferocious, semi-public labour.  What sense did it have beyond the workings of a certain crude biology?  What good lesson could be learned from watching someone die?  Was it just to throw you back harder against your own life, to make you see the necessity of getting on with it…a glib reminder that ‘soon you shall be as I am’?”

Revealing the final days of Alice Valentine, a former headmistress who is being attended by her sons and closest friends, Andrew Miller’s thoughtful novel Oxygen remains remarkably hopeful, never descending into the bathos of so many other end-of-life novels.  Alice’s dying, though realistically described, becomes, in fact, the fulcrum upon which the novel studies three other characters as they gain new insights into their own lives.  All of them have some “unfinished business” with which they have not come to terms, and as these characters focus their attention on Alice, while reminiscing privately about their own pasts, the novel goes far beyond the customary focus on the meaning of life and death to include each character’s secret failures, the guilt accompanying these, the nature of true happiness, and what it requires to become a “successful” human being.  Ultimately, Miller’s characters ask “Who are we?”  As Alice herself muses, “Was the ‘she’ who thought all [these things] just a brain that would die when the last of the oxygen was used up? Surely there was something inside, some inward shadow, the part that loved Mozart [perhaps].”

Alice’s elder son Larry, a handsome, well-built, former 1980 French Open tennis champion now living in the US, has starred in a TV series, now canceled.  His alcohol and cocaine consumption have jumped, leaving him in financial straits, and his marriage is in trouble. By keeping his California life secret from Alice, Larry remains the apple of her eye.  The least sensitive among the people at Brooklands, Larry wants to tell his mother that her vision of him is false – and the fact that he has sunk to a new low with his latest film project weighs heavily upon him.  He is “agitated by a great backlog of thinking. He could not decide whether there were a great many decisions to be made, or none at all; whether his situation warranted some explosion of energy, some drama of action, or if he should simply wait and see; if indeed there was nothing he could do that would make the slightest difference.”

Younger son Alec, a thin aesthete, works as a translator for Laszlo Lazar, a Hungarian playwright living in Paris who is working on a new play.  At some point in the past, Alec has had a mini-breakdown, during which he was found wandering along Brighton Beach.  Despite his own problems and the pressure of his work, he has been attending his mother, though hard pressed to control his resentment of his favored older brother who has been unavailable for most of the emergencies involving his mother.  Still desperate for Alice’s praise, Alec has his mother’s best interests at heart, but he is squeamish about illness and the details of dying, and is guilt-ridden because he cannot make himself attend to all her physical needs.  “Though he had visions of [hugging her], making some show of his own pain, he did nothing, for fear that whatever he could say or show would be grossly inadequate.  For fear, too, perhaps, of what might happen if he did manage to express what he felt.”

Laszlo Lazar, a Hungarian playwright living in Paris, fought during the Hungarian Freedom uprising and was the only one of his brigade to survive, but he feels guilty about a close friend whose death he blames on himself.  He tries to avoid looking back:  “How could he look back when there was only shame to look back on?  What pride could he take in consummate failure?…He wanted to forget forever.”  Though he has no direct connection with Alice, he is dependent upon Alec for his play, and Alec is not in London working.  The play, called Oxygene in French, provides a dominating image for the novel.  Requiring two sets, it is the story of a mining disaster in Eastern Europe, with action occurring both above the ground and beneath the ground.  As the oxygen in the mine runs out, the behavior of the desperate rescuers and the desperate miners becomes more frantic, with the play’s ending showing many parallels to what is happening at Alice’s bedside and within the psyches of Laszlo, Larry, and Alec.

As the action rotates among these characters, their interactions with each other reveal them beginning, individually, to look for ways to atone for their past failures, if atonement is necessary, and as Alice’s health begins to fail dramatically, their responses show them beginning to find new ways of behaving. The reader sees clearly how they all ache to be connected to a positive force which will give meaning to their lives (and, perhaps, end their nagging guilt about their failures), just as Alice improves when she is connected to oxygen.  Laszlo’s chance to atone for the past is particularly dramatic, and Alec’s is life-changing.

Despite its complex, seemingly depressing subject, the novel is actually thrilling to read, in part because of Andrew Miller’s skill as a novelist.  One of the clearest, cleanest writers in the world today, Miller chooses exactly the right word to meld perfect images with universal themes in new ways.  His characters feel real, and their behavior and internal crises feel “normal.”  (After all, who among us does not have regrets about certain aspects of our lives, or decisions we have made which we now regret, or opportunities we have squandered?)  Perhaps it is this reason that the book speeds along, despite its heavy subject matter.  Every detail is necessary to the overall story, and every detail works.  An elegant novel told simply.

Note: Miller’s debut novel, Ingenious Pain, won the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Oxygen was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award.  Miller’s newest novel, Pure, due to be released in paperback on May 29, 2012, has already won both the Costa Best Novel Award (formerly Whitbread Award) and the Costa Book of the Year Award.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo by Gretel Insignia appears on http://www.metro.co.uk

Brighton Beach, where Alex was found wandering, at one point, is shown here:  http://www.earth-photography.com

The poster for the 1980 French Open at Roland Garros Stade, is seen on http://en.wikipedia.org The tournament that year was actually won by Bjorn Borg.

Laszlo Lazar lives in Paris in an apartment building overlooking Montparnasse Cemetery, where Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone deBeauvoir, and Samuel Beckett are buried.  http://www.momondo.com

Laszlo meets someone who may help him change his life at Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, shown here.  http://arquitectura.mapolismagazin.com

Eat your chocolate, little girl;
Eat your chocolate!
Believe me, there are no metaphysics in the world beyond chocolate;
Believe me, all the religions in the world do not teach more than the sweetshop.
Eat, dirty girl, eat!— “The Tobacco Shop” by Fernando Pessoa

In this complex, challenging, and unconventional novel, Iraqi author Ali Bader takes on nothing less than the ethnic and political history of the Middle East from 1926 – 2006 for his scope. An unnamed Iraqi writer, whose life parallels that of the author in many ways, has been asked by USA Today News to ghostwrite a 1000-word article about the murder of Kamal Medhat, an eighty-year-old Iraqi violinist whose body has recently been found. Because Baghdad is so dangerous and so risky for westerners, the speaker will do the investigatory work there, but the finished story will appear under the name of John Barr, one of USA Today’s senior correspondents, a common practice for western news media these days, the writer explains. The Press Cooperation Agency and AC Media & News group also want a full-length biography of Kamal Medhat, however, and they will pay all the speaker’s expenses and supply him with files and documents for the eventual biography which he will write under his own name. As a result of this support, the writer will stay in Baghdad’s Green Zone for a month; in Tehran where the violinist stayed on several different occasions, before going to Moscow, where the writer will also go; and in Damascus where the writer spends another two months of research. What he discovers about the murdered violinist’s life becomes the main narrative of this book.

To call this book a murder mystery, as it is called on Amazon, is like calling Joyce’s Ulysses a travel guide to Dublin. Kamal Medhat, it turns out, is one of three completely different identities and separate cultural backgrounds used by the same man, the only common thread being his virtuosic skill at the violin, and the writer is hard pressed to follow the violinist’s trail as he moves through Iraq, Iran, Syria, Russia, and even Czechoslovakia. Yousef Sami Saleh, the earliest identity, is a Jewish resident of Baghdad from 1920 – 1953, who moved to Israel and (officially) died in 1955; Haidar Salman lived in Tehran as a Shia, then returned to Baghdad in 1958, and after a coup, escaped back to Tehran before moving to Moscow; and Kamal Medhat Mustafa, an Iraqi Baathist, had to deal with the Iran-Iraq War, the rise of Saddam Hussein, the Second Gulf War (the invasion of Kuwait), and the Third Gulf War, launched by the US. All three “identities” are the same man, married anew under each identity and the father of a son by each of his three wives.

Author Ali Bader has long been fascinated with metaphysics and views of identity, as he has previously demonstrated in his novel Papa Sartre, and he uses the violinist’s three personas with their different personalities, in direct parallel with the three personas used by Fernando Pessoa in his poetry book The Tobacco Shop, selections of which begin the novel and echo throughout. Pessoa considered men to be of three personality types: the keeper of flocks, the persona known in the poetry book of The Tobacco Shop as Alberto Caeiro; the protected man, known as Ricardo Reis; and the tobacconist, known as Alvaro de Campos, giving the lie to any concept of an essential “identity” since all of them are part of the identity of Fernando Pessoa himself. Each of the violinist’s sons, who grow up in different countries from the violinist, also parallel the identities of Pessoa’s characters in The Tobacco Shop.

The author continues the metaphysical parallels by suggesting that similarly, three different identities pervade and overlap among the Middle Eastern countries of Iraq, Iran, and Syria, with Israel providing yet another set of characteristics and identity, and that it is these competing ideas of their own national identity which are responsible for the succession of wars among these countries. Though the US is sometimes considered responsible for the Third Gulf War in Iraq, the author also suggests that by the time that war broke out, the revolutions in both Iran and Iraq and the rise of the clerics had led to a mob mentality. “Distinctions of class had disappeared and easily manipulated groups had emerged onto the scene. The mob would march and burn and destroy with a blind, random force that knew no bounds.”

Carefully organized thematically, the novel is unconventional in style. The first thirty pages summarize by date the history of the Middle East, especially of Iran and Iraq, with information about the various personas of the main character, where he is, and what he is doing inserted into the chronological context. Resembling a dissertation, this section creates the feeling that this is complex non-fiction, and, though necessary for understanding the book, it is challenging to a reader unfamiliar with this history.

Some confusion also results from the fact that the journalist who is the speaker is telling a story about his search for information about Kemal Medhat. He is “reporting about,” rather than bringing a character to life the way one expects in fiction. The main character’s story feels like a biography, more than fiction, though that is also related to the fact that the speaker is a journalist, accustomed to using that style. The journalistic style allows the author to tell about many issues and to describe a huge number of characters as the speaker discovers information about them. Of necessity, it also means that one does not “get inside” the characters. Rather, we see how they behave (or have behaved) and figure out what it all means on our own.  The author walks a fine line here among genres, since his use of parallels between the three-part main character, the three personas in Pessoa’s The Tobacco Shop, and the interconnected histories of the countries involved are needed to provide a broader, more universal thematic context than one gets in biographies. Ultimately, the author writes a novel of broad import from a unique point of view, making it understandable to the western reader despite the complexity of the historical record underlying the story. Different from the typical novel in style, this is very challenging but very rewarding.

ALSO by Ali Bader:  PAPA SARTRE

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from http://www.banipal.co.uk

The portrait of Fernando Pessoa by Jose de Alamada Negreiros appears on http://expatinlisbon.com

The violinist is seen here:  http://www.focusonlinecommunities.com

The Prague Concert Hall, where Haidar Salman plays, is from http://www.dreamstime.com

The battle scene from the Iran-Iraq War may be found here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com

“Suppose I had stayed [in rural northeast England]—like my mother. [Imagine] a sort of castaway girl who lived there all her life like Robinson Crusoe. I’d give her a library—her dead grandfather’s vicarage books…I’d give her knowledge of the heart’s affections. And I’d show the power of her childhood landscape, the enfolding murmuring magical marsh so flooded with light sunshine, silvery rain and mist, and the running sea.” – Jane Gardam, Preface, 2011.

In the introduction to this re-publication of Crusoe’s Daughter (1986), author Jane Gardam admits that “This [is] by far the favourite of all my books.”  Brought up in near isolation in the rural north of England, like the main character of this novel, Gardam herself eventually escaped to college in London, but though she joined London’s academic world and had great success as a novelist, she admits “It was the elf-light of childhood that still hung about, the wonder of the marsh…the people still more real to me in the vanished place than most of the people I’ve met since.” Her mother remained in the rural north for her whole life, and Gardam uses her mother’s life as the starting point of this novel, setting it at the turn of the twentieth century on the northeast coast (in or near North Yorkshire and Northumberland, judging from her geographical clues). Though Polly Flint differs in significant ways from her mother, as Gardam explains in the Preface, she admits that when she finished the novel, “I felt I needn’t write any more books. Take it or leave it, Crusoe’s Daughter says everything I have to say.” Fortunately for us, she did write additional highly successful novels, but this one, her favorite, is the most poignant, told with an honesty and affection for her setting that her dryly humorous, more satiric novels lack, however wonderful they are in their own right.

As the novel opens at the beginning of the twentieth century, five-year-old Polly Flint and her father arrive at Oversands, a big yellow house on England’s wild northeast coast, by the river Tyne. Her father, a sailor whose wife died when Polly was an infant, had left her with a series of foster mothers in Wales during her first five years, and his visit with Polly to the home of his wife’s older, unmarried sisters is completely unexpected by those quiet ladies. Shortly after arriving at Oversands, Polly’s father dies, leaving her to be brought up by her Aunts Mary and Frances in a place so isolated that there are virtually no other children. Though she likes her aunts and is particularly fond of her Aunt Frances, she admits that “I would not have known what to do with love if it had been offered.” There is no school she can attend, but she is bright and curious, and she quickly learns to read from her aunts. Through the unpleasant Mrs. Woods, who also lives at Oversands, she also learns French and German. Every day is predictable, however, and the same people come to the house for the same purposes every week.

In her loneliness Polly finds her greatest solace from the books in the library of the house, especially when she discovers Robinson Crusoe, whose twenty-eight-year isolation on an island offers her a way of dealing with her own isolation. Crusoe, an obviously pragmatic man who must deal with each day as it comes, relies on his own ingenuity to solve his problems, just as Polly knows she will have to do. Her first real conflict with the aunts comes when she is twelve, as she firmly rejects being Confirmed in the church, refuses the idea of communion, and criticizes the church’s large wooden crucifix with carved blood dripping from it. Her aunts’ religiosity cannot stand up to Robinson Crusoe’s realism for Polly. “I’m young and I’m empty of life. I just am,” she cries. “I can’t ever forget myself and how I have to be. All the hymn-words spring up and the Collects, Creeds, and Epistles. There doesn’t seem to be anything else.”

Love and death eventually complicate life at Oversands, and in her teens Polly goes to stay with elderly family members, Arthur Thwaite and his sister Celia, who live on the Yorkshire moors, some distance away. Their house, an artists’ retreat, expands her vision of life dramatically, though she is not sure if it is a madhouse, a hospital, or a private asylum. Poets, writers, and musicians, some of them failed, provide a totally different kind of life for Polly, the other extreme from what she has known, leading Polly to tell her Aunt Frances in a letter that “I don’t believe I shall ever fit in anywhere.” A few friendships and one or two romantic crushes give Polly’s life a semblance of normalcy as she matures to her twenties, but as the novel continues to progress up to the 1980s, two world wars, industrialization, and population growth create chaos even in the rural countryside.

Gardam creates real atmosphere here in both time and place, and rural northeast England becomes almost a character of its own, a place filled with wild beauty, harsh weather, and untamed landscapes. The novel’s realism keeps Polly’s story from becoming a romance, however much the reader may empathize with her, and the author’s honest feelings for her characters, many of them based, in part, on her own family members, endow the novel with a poignancy that one does not often find elsewhere in Gardam’s novels. The Robinson Crusoe leitmotif is well integrated, running throughout the novel over the course of more than eighty years, and it firmly connects all aspects of the novel’s long chronology.  A delightful “conversation” between Polly and Crusoe on the nature of fiction, late in the novel, is one of Gardam’s classics. “[Fiction] will have to change,” Polly tells Crusoe. “It’s become quite boring – all about politics or marital discord. The minutiae. You should see the fiction they have thought up about you and Friday.” To which Crusoe replies, “Yes, well, he could be very trying.”  The novel’s final pages, as close to a grand finale as Gardam will probably ever get, will leave a smile on the face of every reader – filled as it is with the dry wit and sense of dramatic irony for which Gardam is so famous, a perfect ending to one of her warmest and most enjoyable novels.

ALSO by Gardam:  GOD ON THE ROCKS, QUEEN OF THE TAMBOURINE, THE PEOPLE ON PRIVILEGE HILL,     OLD FILTH, and     THE MAN WITH THE WOODEN HAT

Photos, in order: The author’s photo by Eamonn McCabe appears on http://www.guardian.co.uk

The photo of a yellow house in South Shields, on the Northumberland coast by the river Tyne, is by demonsub and appears on http://www.flickr.com

The untamed moors leading to the ocean are shown on http://www.enjoyengland.com

An old edition of Robinson Crusoe appears on http://imaginactory.com

“My God, what have I done that You take everything from me?  I’m wrapped up in myself, separated from the others, deprived, guilty, because of Your Law, which I submit to like a humiliated child.  Will the barrier fall?  Will sweetness be given to me, rendered up to me…?”

An author revered as much for the controlled lyricism of his prose as for his uncompromising characterizations, Swiss author Jacques Chessex (1934 – 2009) was the first foreign citizen to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award.  In this dramatic novel, he tells the story of Jean Calmet, a thirty-eight-year-old schoolteacher, whose physician father has just died and with whom he has had a fraught relationship.  The youngest of five children, Jean both loved and feared his father, with good reason, and he is glad that his father has been cremated, rather than buried.  “The doctor would be reduced to ashes.  He could not be allowed any chance of keeping his exasperating, scandalous vigour in the fertile earth,” Jean thinks.  “Make a little heap of ashes of him, ashes at the bottom of an urn.  Like sand. Anonymous, mute dust.”

As the family gathers to choose an urn, Jean meditates on his father’s relationships with the whole family.  His meek mother has lived for fifty years “under the weight of the doctor’s shouts, orders….bent under the tyrant, broken, destroyed.”  His brothers and sisters have gone on to lives of their own and do not return home often, while he, “the Benjamin,” the Biblical youngest and best-loved son, is unmarried and lonely, though no longer living at home.  His job as a teacher provides him with a “refuge from the authority of that father who is bearing down with all his weight on the rest of the world,”  but he has few friends, and though he mentors his students, he is emotionally much like them, still in the thrall of a domineering parent.  He recognizes that “At all costs he must avoid having his father’s urn remain at Les Peuples (at the family home).  It had to be locked up far from here, imprisoned behind a solid iron gate, one that was permanent.”

Death soon becomes Jean’s constant companion.  One of his students, Isabelle, is dying of cancer but refuses to give in, insisting on living every minute of her remaining life, sketching, writing poems, and visiting with friends.  By contrast, Jean is obsessing about death, seeing ghosts of his father, and even seeing a porcupine as a symbol of a “wild, happy freedom” which he cannot feel.  He thinks about the fire in the crematorium as a “beautiful purifier,” even as he is dwelling on moments in which his father has yelled at him for being a “cringing, muddleheaded weakling.”   He thinks of the monument to Sire Francois at the Jacquemart Chapel, 1362, one that is covered with snakes and toads.  Thoughts of sex get confused with death, as he remembers seeing his father in a relationship which he should never have seen, and he is unsuccessful in his own relationships.   With no emotional resources to sustain him, even by the age of thirty-eight, he is a completely lost soul, someone ready to become a victim of others, if not himself.

When student demonstrations take place at Jean’s school, there is an element of excitement and camaraderie, a shared commitment which gives purpose to the lives of some of his students in ways that Jean himself has never known, and when he takes a group of them on a school trip to Bern, his observations are quite different from theirs. The “Ogre Fountain” and the Bear Pits, regarded as sightseeing destinations for the students, take on ominous symbolic meanings for Jean.  The symbols of a cat, a rat, and a coin add to the heavy sense of his own oppression.

In an age in which TV, the internet, and social networking are ubiquitous, it is difficult to identify fully with someone who feels as isolated – and, more importantly, as helpless –  as Jean Calmet.  I found myself becoming a bit impatient with this thirty-eight-year-old man who has more in common with his students than with the adult world, and as he becomes more and more obsessed with his own problems and less connected with the outside world (if that is possible, considering his record of inaction), I had a hard time identifying with him in the way that his readers from 1973 must have done.  And when he makes the statement with which I begin this review, “My God, what have I done that You take everything from me?  I’m wrapped up in myself, separated from the others, deprived, guilty, because of Your Law,” it is easy to see that whether he is blaming God or his father, whom he often sees as the same, he is accepting no responsibility for choices he has made on his own.  Though his father is clumsy and crude, he has tried to reach out in his own way to the son he cannot begin to understand, and Jean’s four siblings have managed to escape his father’s complete domination.  One has to wonder how much the author expects us to identify with Jean, who rationalizes that “he had remained in his father’s power, and he had been murdered.”

The glories of nature, lyrically described, add to the depth of this novel, and one would think they would be comforting to Jean, whose aesthetic sensibilities are finely honed.  Unfortunately, any beauty Jean sees seems to vanish as he contemplates death as a destroyer.  His personal neediness overwhelms any sense of perspective that he may have, as his meeting with George Mollendruz shows near the end of the book. When, late in the novel, he sees a dead animal, he observes that “One is not safe being independent in our part of the world. Not safe staying wild and uncompromising in the city,” offering yet another observation about his own inaction (though he himself could hardly be considered “wild and uncompromising”).  Ultimately, I found this novel a fascinating set piece about life in the late 1960s and early 1970s.   Now, forty years after this novel was written, it would be much more difficult to feel as isolated, lonely, and hopeless as Jean Calmet does, and readers now may have more trouble identifying with the main character of this intense psychological novel.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://www.espaceculturel.ch

One image with which Jean always identifies his father and his home is the Morbier clock, “tall as a coffin,” that dominates the dining room.  From http://duetime.wordpress.com

When Jean has a loss of control, at one point, he imagines the Jacquemart Chapel, 1362, in which the statue of the deceased is covered in snakes and toads.  (That is difficult to see here, but one snake is on the upper arm, and more are on the legs, obvious symbols.)  http://www.lake-geneva-region.ch

The school trip to Bern features a visit to the “Ogre Fountain.”  http://www.garden-fountains.com

The Bear Pits of Bern, a tourist attraction, feature bears begging for their food from deep inside their prison.  http://www.gourmantic.com – yet another symbol.

“A murder is a white whale. A missing person is a white whale. If you’ve seen a white whale twice, it’s the same whale.”

In this seventh novel in the Harry Hole series to be translated into English, author Jo Nesbo, with over eleven million thrillers in print, continues to detail Harry’s fight against the symbolic “white whales” of injustice. Here, all Harry’s experience and knowledge as an Oslo policeman are readied for the biggest fight of his life, one to which he willingly makes a complete emotional commitment. Though he has lived in Hong Kong in self-imposed exile for three years, Harry has just learned that Oleg, the son of Rakel, the love of his life, is now jailed on remand in Oslo for the murder of a drug dealer. Harry has always had problems with alcohol, bureaucratic nonsense, and self-control, even during his career with the Oslo Police, and he has battle scars, both visible and invisible, which have made him a cynical man.  He immediately returns to Oslo to review the case, hoping that he can save Oleg, who has always thought of him as “Dad.” Now “clean,” Harry needs to find out more about Oleg’s involvement in this case that he must win.

What follows is the most emotionally involving of all the Harry Hole novels to date, one that readers of the previous novels will want to read but for which I must give a sharp warning: Avoid reading reviews of this novel! Though it is not being released in the US until October, 2012, it is available already in the UK, and reviews of it there, even by the mainstream press, have often included unconscionable spoilers. Some of these spoiler-laden reviews have obviously been written by people who have not read the whole series and do not realize how carefully Nesbo has prepared the reader over time for Harry’s battle with this “white whale,” nor do they understand how readers have slowly built up a reserve of sympathy for Harry, who, despite his personal problems, is motivated by what he knows is right. Readers who have followed the Harry/Rakel/Oleg story from the beginning deserve better from careless reviewers with their spoilers, and those who have not read most of the books to date will want to do so to understand past history before starting this one. Though he continues to provide new visions of life in Oslo here, Nesbo does not give as much background information as many new readers may want or need to appreciate the action surrounding Harry and Oleg, but this is a book that will strike chords with all the diehard Harry Hole fans throughout the world.

Nesbo gets a bit cute (or darkly humorous) with the beginning of the novel, which he tells from the point of view of a rat trying, unsuccessfully, to reach its hungry babies. The reason she cannot reach them is that the body of a wounded young drug addict is blocking her access. The point of view then switches (via change of typeface) to that of the dying young man, Gusto, who is reviewing the circumstances of how he ended up where he is, knowing that he is dying and unable to save himself. Each of the first three parts of the novel begins with the rat and the drug addict, as Nesbo carefully reconstructs the immediate circumstances of his death. Through these sections, the author provides Gusto’s history from Gusto’s own point of view, even as Nesbo is moving backward and forward in time through the other characters in the body of the novel.

(No spoilers.)  Gusto has been friends with Oleg for several years, and both have been associated with a dealer nicknamed “Dubai,” who controls the most addictive new drug ever to have appeared on Oslo’s busy drug scene – “violin,” a synthetic which does not need raw materials from Afghanistan. Dubai is a phantom, a man who stays hidden, unless he is disguised, and he uses surrogates, his own thugs, informers, and corrupt officials to keep his business the most active in Oslo. Only Dubai’s dealers have violin, for which there is the biggest demand in the city, and they distinguish themselves from other drug gangs by wearing Arsenal football shirts, which tip off their customers but not the police. As the demand for violin increases with the instantaneous addictions of all users who ingest this drug, the success of the other gangs fades by attrition, either through violent attacks or arrests. Dubai is in the catbird seat, and when the supply of violin begins to dry up due to a shortage of materials relative to demand, some, including Harry, begin to wonder whether Dubai and his street dealers are being protected by police and politicians.

A complex novel to track as all the relationships among the characters unfold, Phantom provides enough action to keep even the jaded reader actively engaged, with threads related to how pilots can actively participate in the spread of drugs internationally, how dealers exploit their victims, how the drug lords reinforce their power, how police and politicians become corrupted, and the extremes to which drug addicts will go to obtain even one more fix of violin. Harry, as he investigates, is a constantly moving target for the bigshots who have everything to lose if Harry wins, and he treads as carefully as someone like Harry can, always remembering that a misstep can endanger both Oleg and Rakel. Occasionally, the details of the various thread lines become a bit fuzzy and some local slang (not familiar in the US) can occasionally be mystifying, but Nesbo is careful to bring every plot line together in the conclusion. Parts of the story become absurd, even bleakly funny, in retrospect, but Nesbo’s pacing will keep most readers from questioning what is happening – Harry being saved, at one point, by an empty Jim Beam bottle is a classically ironic event, as is his break into an old woman’s house in the middle of a gunfight. Ultimately, Nesbo brings this novel to its conclusion in grand, emotional, and cinematic fashion. Readers who have read the previous Harry Hole novels will not want to miss this one, preferably before the spoilers begin to get more publicity than the novel itself.

Also by Nesbo (in order):   THE REDBREAST,   NEMESIS,    THE DEVIL’S STAR,      THE REDEEMER,     THE SNOWMAN,     THE LEOPARD.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from http://www.extendedworldtravel.com

The Arsenal football shirt is depicted here: http://store.nike.com

Several scenes take place at the Gamblebyen Cemetery: http://flickrhivemind.net

The famed Monolith in Vigeland Park, a place Harry runs to, is from this website:  http://www.douglas.stebila.ca