Author Elizabeth Taylor, who failed her entrance exams to university, never let that get in the way of her writing career. Like Angel in her novel of the same name, she began writing as a teenager, finishing her first novel before she was sixteen, and writing constantly ever after that. Unable to get any of her work published until she was in her early thirties, she made up for lost time, however, publishing six novels between 1945 and 1953, and five more between then and 1971. A Game of Hide and Seek, published in 1951 and recently republished as a New York Review Book Classic, is one of her most intensely psychological novels, the story of two young people who spend their time in self-imposed isolation, their paths crossing briefly when, as teenagers they find themselves sharing summer vacations. By the time Harriet Claridge and Vesey Macmillan are eighteen, they are being encouraged to play with Harriet’s younger cousins to keep them busy during their summer vacation in the country, and they sometimes use hide-and-seek games to be together in the loft where they wait for the younger children to find them. They are, however, shy, innocent, and self-conscious, despite Vesey’s uncontrollable malicious streak (which Harriet sometimes thinks she deserves), and so they sit in the loft or the barn “in that dusty stuffiness, among old pots of paint, boxes of bulbs, stacks of cobwebbed deck-chairs, rather far apart and in silence…The only interruption was when one of them timidly swallowed an accumulation of saliva.”
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Jussi Adler-Olsen’s fifth novel in the Department Q series, under the “leadership” of Copenhagen Detective Carl Morck, continues the story of Morck and his unconventional assistants who operate out of a basement office dedicated to the solution of cold cases. This novel begins obliquely. A man from a Baka village of pygmies in Cameroon, Louis Fon, is working with a Danish bank which funds development work in the rural Baka area of the country. After receiving a cellphone call in the jungle, he realizes that his discovery of funding irregularities puts his life at risk, and he has only enough time to type out a message (which is unreadable) before he is attacked. Further development of this plot line shows the massive corruption of the funding bank in Denmark, and the administrators in Cameroon who are responsible for using the funds for the betterment of the rural Baka area. A second plot line takes place Copenhagen, where a group of gypsies, mostly children, under the leadership of a sadistic and violent “spiritual” leader, roam the streets, picking pockets, begging, and doing petty crimes in order to meet their monetary quota each day. Marco, one of the young men still in his early teens, publicly challenges the leader, his own uncle, and, as a result, finds himself running for his life. A third subplot concerns a cold case in which a woman is killed in the explosion of the houseboat on which she lives, and questions arise as to whether this was an insurance scam, a murder by her husband, or some other kind of crime. Adler-Olsen has always excelled at keeping interest high both through his dramatic action and through his use of wonderful repeating characters as they continue to develop.
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There’s an irony to the Amazon reviews of this elegant, but unpretentious examination of time present, past, and future, which the author reveals through the most “normal” of families and the way they live their lives. A large number of reviewers have downgraded this book because it has “no plot,” “nothing happens,” there’s “not much point,” the language is “pedestrian,” and the story is too “domestic.” For me, this was a rare and engaging novel with “voices” that speak directly from the characters’ hearts, and there is little sense that an author is present, pulling the strings and determining outcomes. It is 2006, and Ireland’s economy, the Celtic Tiger, is at its peak. Main character Fintan Terrence Buckley, age forty-seven, works as a legal advisor at an import/export firm in Dublin. Happily married for twenty-four years, he has a doting wife, one son out of college, one son just starting, and a seven-year-old daughter. Fintan, however, has been having some recent episodes in which words and language become strange to him as he stares at objects and people, and on one occasion, “It was as if the air had thinned out and the man [in front of him] was like something that had dropped out of the sky…” He is confused by his own reality and fascinated by the antique photographs at the restaurant where he has met this person. One photo from the past shows a terrible train accident at Harcourt Street Station in 1900, in which a locomotive slammed right through the wall and out the other side, without killing anyone. He also notices pictures of streets he has walked, past buildings he recognizes, though the people in the photographs are long dead. He ponders, even questions, the reality of these scenes.
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A rural village schoolmaster, named Jacques, already sounds old, as this small novella begins. In actuality, he is only twenty-one, however, almost a boy, but one who has already seen too much of the sameness of rural life. He has returned to Contulmo, his rural village in southern Chile after college, to be close to his mother. His French father left them the year before to return to France, shortly after Jacques received his elementary teaching certificate from a college in Santiago. “I got off the train and he got on, boarding the very same car…I didn’t even get a chance to open my suitcase and show him my diploma.” Now Jacques sees no opportunities to broaden his view of life. He does get occasional translation jobs, translating French poetry into Spanish, but these poems are simple, “the things the people around here can understand. Poems by Rene Guy Cadou, village verses, not cathedrals of words,” like the monumental poems published in the Santiago newspapers. Though he is friendly with the local miller, who was his father’s closest friend, he himself is lonely and always sad. “Ever since Dad went away, I want to die.” His life changes when one of his students, a fifteen-year-old boy wants to have a man-to-man conversation with him, then asks outright if Jacques has been to the whorehouse in Angol, the next big town a train-ride away. The boy wants to know what it costs for a woman. Soon Jacques sets out with the miller to find the answer, a quest which produces answers to some questions he has not even thought to ask. On my Favorites list for the year.
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In the second of the three Laidlaw novels, written between 1977 and 1992, author William McIlvanney, considered the “father of Tartan noir,” continues a series that is so masterfully written that calling his novels “noir mysteries” underestimates their universal literary power for the reader. Though few American readers know of these now-classic novels, Europa Editions has decided to change that by reprinting all of them, and anyone who has ever enjoyed a noir novel or who loves mysteries is in for a rare treat. McIlvanney’s ability to describe, to connect even the homeliest and most ordinary details to the grand themes of literature, to create unique characters who linger in the memory, and to make his plots come alive, often with humor, is rare, if not unparalleled. Laidlaw, an iconoclastic police investigator is involved in trying to solve three murders that connect many different levels of Scottish society.
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