1) "The Colony of Unrequited Dreams" by Wayne Johnston
The subject of this immensely satisfying neo-Victorian (its Canadian author’s fifth novel and first to appear here) is the province of Newfoundland, whose complex political history is incarnated in memorable human form. The story is the generously imagined fictional biography of a real historical figure, Joseph Smallwood, the self-styled “Father of Confederation” who shepherded the former British dominion into full union with Canada in 1949. Johnston’s rich narrative is presented in three forms: Joe Smallwood’s own detailed recall of his life is punctuated by excerpts from the “Journal” of Shelagh Fielding, his lifelong friend and enemy (and, in an odd way, lover), a feisty independent newspaper columnist, and also by snippets from her hilarious “Condensed History of Newfoundland,” a mock-heroic and episodic chronicle that provides sardonic undercurrent to Smallwood’s candid account of his checkered career. The tale begins with Smallwood’s childhood in an embattled family dominated by his eternally drunken, Dickensian father Charlie and “born again” mother Minnie May; takes a critical turn when an anonymous letter falsely attributed to “Smallwood” causes his expulsion from the tony private school where he meets “Fielding” (which is how they address each other thereafter); and embraces Joe’s flirtation with socialism (at home and in America), efforts to unionize fishermen, rise to power (as “interim premier” under Confederation), and betrayal by the hired Latvian economist who involves his administration with “men who wound up . . . all but destroying the country I had sought them out to save.” Smallwood is a wonderfully convincing tragicomic figure, and Fielding an even better one: an embittered alcoholic enslaved to a secret she withholds throughout the pair’s 40-year love-hate relationship. Only in the parallel secret harbored by Smallwood (too nakedly derivative of a similarly crucial incident in Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business) does Johnston’s superb plot deviate from its overall power and originality. As absorbing as fiction can be—and a marvelous introduction to the work of one of our continent’s best writers.
2) "Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie
When Indian novelist Rushdie arrived with Grimus in 1979 we called him "an imagination to watch." And he'll be watched indeed once this bravura fiction starts circulating--a picaresque entertainment that's clearly inspired by close readings of the modern South American fabulists and, above all, Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Rushdie's own Tristram is named Saleem Sinai--and he is born at the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, making him exactly contemporary with the life of India-as-a-nation. In fact, Saleem and 580 other "midnight children" born at that moment grow up to find themselves equipped with powers of telepathic communication, foresight, and heightened individual sensoria: Saleem's particular gift is a "cucumber" of a nose with which he goes through life literally smelling change. The Sinai family, originally Kashmiri Moslems, migrate to Bombay, living in ex-colonial digs. And a switch at birth with a neighbor's baby seeds narrative trouble that flowers at different times later on in the book: opera buffa complications all the way. Saleem seems to be in the middle of all cataclysmic Indian events, too. He's present during language riots and a dinner-party coup in Pakistan (where his mother fled after a marital spat involving the revealed baby-switch). Because of his olfactory talent, he becomes a "man-dog" tracker for a Pakistani military unit during the debacle in Bangladesh. And, back in Bombay, Saleem is clapped into jail with the other "midnight children" by "the Widow"--Indira Gandhi--during the dictatorial Emergency. Rushdie swoops, all colors unfurled, all stops out, through and around his synchronic fable with great gusto and sentimental fizz. And though such a rodomontade would be shameless if made out of more familiar material, the sub-continental excessiveness (and the fascinating history lesson which is incidentally built in) keeps us loading and firing right along. Tour de force, in other words--and so, of course, a little exhausting; but, unlike other fantastical picaresques, this one is truly worth the effort. A big striped balloon of a book, often dizzying with talent.
3) "Company of Liars" by Karen Maitland
Nine pilgrims try to outrun the Black Death in first novelist Maitland’s sensational take on The Canterbury Tales.
It’s 1348, and nonstop rain has been soaking England for months. Plague has struck the port cities, and a half-blind, disfigured peddler stops at a village fair to sell his fake religious relics. He plans to make for an inland shrine, in hopes of wintering far from the encroaching Black Death. The peddler haphazardly and reluctantly accumulates eight traveling companions. Zophiel, a magician and con man who has a wagon and horse, totes cargo (including an embalmed mermaid) that he won’t let anyone touch. Pregnant Adela and her husband Osmond have been banished by their families. Venetian minstrel Rodrigo and his apprentice Jofre have been sacked by their lord. Cygnus is a man born with a swan’s wing. Midwife/healer Pleasance is accompanied by her young albino charge, Narigorm, who casts runes. With echoes of The Seventh Seal and a nod to The Decameron, Maitland describes an England mired in superstition and paranoia as, destabilized by famine, pestilence and climate change, feudal society breaks down. The fugitive pilgrims can never shelter long in any town; either their own behavior (mostly Jofre’s drunken homosexual escapades) or the arrival of plague drives them on. They’re pursued by mysterious wolf-howls, and soon death stalks their numbers as well. After Pleasance is found hanged, they learn she was Jewish, concealing that fact because Jews are banned in England. Zophiel admits he’s a disgraced priest who’s being pursued by a “bishop’s wolf,” a holy hit man. Adela and Osmond may be brother and sister. One of the biggest mysteries here is why the group tolerates bad seed Narigorm. Although they believe in witches, vampires and werewolves, they apparently don’t mind that Narigorm revels in their misfortunes, when she’s not foretelling their doom or torturing small animals.
Decidedly not your English teacher’s Chaucer, but creepy, suspenseful fun.
4) "Hangman Blind" by Cassandra Clark
A medieval nun seeks justice for the poor and noble alike.
As Sister Hildegard strikes out across rain-sodden Yorkshire in November of 1382, she searches for some small abbey where she and a few other women can tend the poor and she may grieve her lost husband. Instead, she finds six dead men in the woods—five hanged outlaws and one wayward youth. Lord Roger de Hutton might have tracked down the killers, but he’s poisoned in his own feasting hall and saved only by Hildegard’s herbs. To flush out the would-be murderer, Hildegard and Roger’s Saxon steward Ulf help the lord play dead while they investigate both the stirrings of rebellion among the villeins and craftsmen and the intrigue among the lord’s possible heirs. They’re accompanied by Burthred, an observant young serf with a way with animals, and aided by the suspiciously charismatic Abbot of Meaux. While a few elements of the mystery are obvious, its complexities will resist most readers until the end.
Deeply embedded in the historical events of the period, this is a rich tapestry; even the small figures are finely detailed and carefully situated in a dazzling array of events. An intriguing and evocative debut.
5) "In Pale Battalions" by Robert Goddard
As a successor to Past Caring (1986), Goddard offers an artful WW I English country-house melodrama featuring an unsolved murder. There is a long, fussy frame, narrated by a variety of characters, but the main action takes place in the summer and fall of 1916 at Meongate, Lord Powerstock's Hampshire estate, and is narrated by Lieutenant Franklin, a battlefield friend of Captain John Hallows, Powerstock's son. There is a brief, effective evocation of the front lines; Hallows is killed and Franklin invalided home, sent to Meongate for R & R. The atmosphere is ominous. While the grief-stricken Powerstock stays in seclusion, his second wife Olivia, a classic femme fatale, is being serviced by an equally classic cad, the American Ralph Mompesson, who has designs not only on Olivia, and on Hallows' pregnant widow Leonora, but on Meongate itself. Leonora gently rebuffs Franklin's attempt to protect her from Mompesson. Then Mompesson is shot in his bedroom and Leonora disappears. The winding trail leads Franklin through the slums of Portsmouth (and another mystery involving the first Lady Powerstock) to the Isle of Wight, where he finds not just Leonora (soon to die from post-childbirth influenza) but Hallows too; the officer had faked his death, then returned to Meongate to save Leonora from Mompesson, but his nerve had failed him; somebody else had killed the American. Feeling disgraced, yearning for a quick death, he persuades Franklin to change places; he returns to the war and is duly killed. The identity of Mompesson's murderer (a minor character) is not revealed until the concluding frame. Fast-moving suspense; Goddard teases the reader along at such a clip that for long stretches the hokey and implausible elements can be overlooked; only in the final section does he flounder, among endless explanations and a final revelation that is too clever by half.
6) "The Emperor of Ocean Park" by Stephen L. Carter
This sleek, immensely readable first novel by Yale law professor Carter, author of such provocative nonfiction as The Culture of Disbelief (1993) and God’s Name in Vain (2000), is custom-designed for the kind of commercial success enjoyed by John Grisham’s The Firm 11 years ago.
The complicated fun begins with the death of federal Judge Oliver Garland, a black conservative and former Reagan appointee to the Supreme Court—a nomination that fell through when a scandal linked Garland to “underground investment banker” Jack Ziegler, whose shadowy figure initiates the subsequent intrigues into which Garland’s son Talcott (a prim law prof, and Carter’s narrator) is swept up. Talcott’s fiery sister Mariah insists that their father (a presumable suicide) was murdered. Initially unpersuaded, Talcott gradually becomes a believer as he’s alternately stroked and betrayed by various colleagues and pols, stalked, shot at, and thunderstruck by what he learns regarding the (earlier) death of his sister Abigail in a hit-and-run accident, the Judge’s mingled grief and fury thereafter, and the hidden agenda of Talcott’s forceful wife “Kimmer” (Kimberly), an attorney hustling for her own appointment to the federal bench. Almost everybody is other than what he or she seems, including Talcott’s feckless older brother Addison, NBA pro–turned law student Lionel Eldridge, liberal Justice Wallace Wainwright, an ebullient mystery woman named Maxine, and urbane black careerist Lemaster Carlyle. Prominent among the crucial narrative elements are a missing set of “arrangements” supposedly written by Judge Garland, a reputed hit man posing as an FBI agent, baffling references to (the unknown) “Angela’s boyfriend,” a chess problem known as “Double Excelsior,” and several misheard scraps of information. Carter connects all this irresistible hugger-mugger with great skill, building toward a series of staggered climaxes that explode over the final 150 pages. Few readers will refrain from racing excitedly through them.
A melodrama with brains and heart to match its killer plot.
7) "The Little Stranger" by Sarah Waters
A sinister ancestral home in an advanced state of decay, a family terrorized by its own history, and a narrator drawn into these orbits dominate this creepy novel from Waters (The Night Watch, 2006, etc.).
Shortly after the end of World War II, and nearly 30 years after first seeing magnificent Hundreds Hall as an awestruck ten-year-old, hardworking Doctor Faraday is summoned to the now-shabby Warwickshire estate to treat a young housemaid’s illness. Widowed Mrs. Ayres, her son Roderick, crippled and traumatized by injuries sustained during his wartime tenure as a RAF pilot, and bluff, pleasant daughter Caroline quickly accept Faraday as a friend, and he is initially enchanted by the family’s stoical perseverance as Hundreds Hall falls into ruin and farmlands are sold to pay off mounting debts. But worse awaits: The family’s gentle dog Gyp unaccountably and severely bites a visiting young girl, and neither Faraday’s continuing professional ministrations nor his growing love for plucky Caroline can save these reclusive prewar relics from the supernatural presences seemingly arisen from their past. Waters’ scrupulously engineered plot builds efficiently to a truly scary highpoint halfway through her long narrative. But tensions relax perilously, as the doctor’s repeated emergency visits to Hundreds Hall become almost risibly indistinguishable, and even crucial dramatic moments are muffled by fervent conversations among the four major characters. Furthermore, too many crucial pieces of information are relayed secondhand, as Faraday summarizes accounts of other people’s experiences. Still, Waters has extended her range agreeably, working in traditions established by Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan le Fanu and Wilkie Collins, expertly teasing us with suggestive allusions to the classics of supernatural fiction. A subtle clue planted in one character’s given name neatly foreshadows, then explains, the Ayres family’s self-destructive insularity.
Flawed but nevertheless often gripping thriller from one of the most interesting novelists at work today.
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