Snow by John Banville

Published by Hanover Square Press on October 6, 2020

Most of Snow takes place in 1957, although an epilog recounts a meeting between two characters ten years later. Snow is the first of a two-book deal featuring St. John Strafford, a Protestant detective in Catholic Ireland. The same character appeared in The Secret Guests, a novel set during World War II that John Banville published under his penname Benjamin Black. Apparently, Banville has decided that he no longer needs to publish crime novels under a penname, or perhaps his publisher told him that his books will sell better if he publishes them under his real name.

Strafford is assigned to investigate the death of a priest named Father Tom in a prosperous Protestant home where Father Tom was a frequent guest. The killer cut off Father Tom’s junk, perhaps making the motive for the crime obvious, priests being notorious for misusing their junk.

Since the house was locked on the night of the priest’s death, suspects are limited to family members and the stable boy. The semi-doddering patriarch has a new wife, the first one having died in a fall on the same staircase where Father Tom was murdered. Most of the story’s modest intrigue comes from the interaction of the family members. Banville also tries to generate interest with the church’s desire to avoid publicizing the circumstances of the priest’s death and the discomfort that Strafford is made to feel as a member of a religious minority in Ireland.

Banville gained fame as a prose stylist. Reading the well-crafted language of a Banville novel is always pleasant, but he clearly doesn’t make the same effort in genre novels that he once devoted to literary fiction. His genre prose isn’t as dense or as lyrical as his literary prose. Nor does Banville’s genre work have the depth of his earlier books. While crime is a theme in some of Banville’s literary novels, including his most celebrated work, The Book of Evidence, his genre crime novels lack the heft of his best work.

The difference is evident in Snow. The novel follows the formula of a mystery novel by asking the reader to decide which of several suspects might be the murderer. While the clues seem to point in the direction of one or two characters, Banville employs the misdirection that characterizes the genre, only revealing the full truth of the crime in the epilog. The revelation doesn’t come as much of a surprise, giving the sense that Banville just isn’t trying very hard. The plot is certainly no better than average for a genre crime novel.

A writer can’t be faulted for writing books that sell, and crime fiction typically outsells literary fiction, but the best writers in the crime genre fuse the strongest qualities of literary fiction and genre fiction. Banville hasn’t done that.

I’m giving Snow a cautious recommendation because Banville holds the reader’s interest with a mildly entertaining if undemanding story. Readers who are looking for something more from a writer who was once regarded as a rising literary giant will likely be disappointed.

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The Light Years by R.W.W. Greene

Published by Angry Robot on February 11, 2020

The Light Years builds on a science fiction premise I haven’t seen before. Most elements of the future that R.W.W. Greene imagines are familiar. Traders roam through the galaxy at relativistic speeds, returning home having aged less (relatively speaking) than the family members they left behind. The traders belong to a guild. Investors purchase shares in trading ships, taking a proportionate share of profits that the ship generates. The ships are family-operated, more or less.

Earth is a memory, most of its inhabitants having been incinerated by a solar event. The United Americas evacuated people on a dozen worm-drive ships and a bunch of ships that could not travel faster than light. Other groups of nations joined the evacuation. After the Caliphate and the United Americas settled their respective worlds, they destroyed each other in a war that lasted two days.

Here’s the new wrinkle to that background. Given the nature of relativity, it isn’t productive for a trader to begin a romance, go on a six-month voyage, and return to a lover who has aged fifty years. Traders therefore contract an arranged marriage, usually by bribing a family to donate a spouse in exchange for enough cash to live a better life.

Adem Sadiq is an engineer on the Hajj. His family arranges his marriage with Hisako Saski. They fund her education in physics, with a specialization that might help her understand wormhole drives, a technology that was lost when the UA was destroyed. The arrangement assures that Hisako and her parents will have a better life while bringing fresh blood to the crew of the Hajj. Adem’s only concern is that his new wife won’t want him to sleep with a crew member named Sarat, a pastime he enjoys.

Some of the story revolves around the relationship between Adem and Hisako, which for a long time is platonic, despite their shared interest in music. Adem is a nice guy and Hisako resents being sold into something resembling bondage, a situation that doesn’t lend itself to connubial bliss. That’s an interesting concept, although Greene could have done more with it.

The bulk of the story concerns a salvage operation that the Hajj undertakes. A badly damaged UA ship might yield a treasure trove of lost technology, including both a wormhole drive and the world-destroying weapon that ended the Two Day War. An investor/uncle named Rakin would like to sell the tech while a minority of family members think life-improving knowledge should be given away for the benefit of humanity, although only after instructions for building the world-destroying weapon are wiped from the memory banks. That conflict provides most the tension that develops in the novel’s later stages.

Whether Adem and Hisako will bond is a question that will interest readers who favor romance themes. Since the romantic plot thread never devolves into cheesiness, it contributes something to the story, although the contribution has little impact. Greene does raise philosophical questions about what it means to be happy, questions of a highly individualistic nature to which there are no easy answers. The exploration of those questions isn’t profound, but at least Greene makes an attempt to give a reader something to chew on.

The larger plot, involving the conflict over the salvaged technology, leads to an unexciting resolution. In fact, the plot generally fizzles out after a strong beginning. As a debut novel, however, The Light Years shows promise. With either greater depth or enough action to excite, the novel could have been exceptional. As it stands, it works well enough to earn a mild recommendation but not well enough to suggest it be placed near the top of a science fiction fan’s reading list.

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The Boy's Club by Erica Katz

Published by Harper on August 4, 2020

The largest law firms in the United States believe themselves to be stocked with the best lawyers. That attitude reflects arrogance rather than reality. Most lawyers in Big Law lack creativity and have little regard for justice. They help big businesses move money back and forth while returning scant value to society. None of that comes through in The Boy’s Club, a novel that is not so much an indictment of Big Law as an industry but of sexism in its upper echelons. There is merit in telling that story, but the pseudonymous Erica Katz doesn’t tell it effectively.

As a child, Alexandra (“Alex”) Vogel always did what she wanted to do. Her willfulness got her anything she desired. Her drive got her into a top law school and a job at Klasko, one of the top Big Law firms. Now she wants to make partner in Mergers & Acquisitions, the most competitive practice group in the firm. It’s also the group that generates the most revenue, allowing partners to make their own rules and to break the firm’s rules with impunity.

Alex spends most of her first year deciding whether she wants to “match” with a particular practice group. The group will then decide whether to accept her. Alex hopes to match with M&A, as does her best friend in the firm, Carmen. The M&A group, however, is a boy’s club that selects female first year associates based on how hot they are, not on their talent. (“Talent,” in this case, refers to a lawyer’s ability to attract and retain clients. The firm sees males as more likely to do so, since most of the business executives they deal with are males who bond with their lawyers over drinks at strip clubs.)

Alex has the usual life of a first year Big Law associate, meaning she has no life to speak of outside of work. She’s expected to bill every hour of every day. She is handsomely compensated for her efforts, but Sam, her live-in boyfriend, grows weary of never seeing her. Alex purports to love Sam but that doesn’t stop her from having an affair with the most successful M&A partner, Peter Dunn. Flattered by Dunn’s attention, Alex cheats on Sam while ignoring the likelihood that Dunn is probably sleeping with every woman who meets his standard of hotness.

There’s not much more to a plot that is fairly predictable. All the high-powered men behave atrociously toward women. Catty women talk about Alex behind her back, although it is easy to see why they think she is trying to sleep her way to the top. Gary Kaplan, the firm’s best client, assaults Alex and turns out to be a serial abuser of women. Kaplan relies on wealth and nondisclosure agreements to keep his victims from reporting his assaults. Klasko relies on settlements and nondisclosure agreements to keep female associates from suing for sexual harassment. Eventually Alex does something that she thinks might make the world a better place for women while knowing that the fight must continue.

Katz makes Kaplan over-the-top to make her point. News stories tell us about powerful men who sexually abuse women, but Kaplan actually flies women from Miami to New York and pays them to accept brutal beatings. The point could have been made without bludgeoning the reader with such unlikely evidence that Kaplan is a foul specimen of maleness.

Alex is a spectacularly unsympathetic character. Her primary complaint about life at her firm is not that her boss slept with her but that he didn't sleep with her (and his wife) exclusively. That's a complaint fueled by jealousy, not by sexual harassment. Alex feels sorry for herself when Sam gets tired of her inattention, a rather hypocritical reaction, given that she is cheating on him with a married man. She also feels sorry for herself when she learns that she’s not the only first year associate to be ill-treated at her firm, apparently because she’s too self-absorbed to take note of the firm’s culture. Her belated efforts to change that culture are too contrived to redeem her. Despite a bonding moment in another contrived scene with an associate who is about to kill herself, Alex’s love of money, shopping, and expensive wine clearly outweigh her concern about her co-workers (much less the female support staff, who are barely on her radar).

Promotional materials characterize The Boy’s Club as a novel about “sex and power” that has been optioned to Netflix, presumably because cheesy stories of sex and power have been a consistent television draw since the days of Dallas and Dynasty. I wouldn’t call The Boy’s Club cheesy, but the characters are shallow and the story holds no surprises. From a stylistic perspective, The Boy’s Club is well written. Still, this is a novel in which style triumphs over substance.

The Boy’s Club comes across as a “message” novel. It’s a good message, but only people who willfully ignore the news need to be awakened to the fact that powerful men often behave atrociously. So do powerful women (albeit in different ways). The prose quality and some interesting scenes kept me reading, but the predictable story and unpleasant protagonist kept me from enjoying the book from beginning to end.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Awkward Black Man by Walter Mosley

Published by Grove Press on September 15, 2020

Walter Mosley is known for crime fiction that has the depth, complexity, and prose style of literary novels. The protagonist in the story “Haunted” submitted 1,000 stories to literary journals. Each was rejected because of its “genre” themes. Perhaps Mosley wrote that story as a reminder that fiction of literary quality can still engage themes that are common to genre fiction. Mosley’s fans (and fans of other extraordinary writers of genre fiction) understand that a literary work does not cease to be literary because its characters are not upper middle-class New Yorkers who spend their time regretting failed marriages while doing little to interest readers who are not upper middle-class New Yorkers in failed marriages.

Notwithstanding Mosley’s excellence as a writer of crime fiction, most of the stories in this collection do not fit within a genre. These are stories of life. The protagonists are educated black men of varying ages. Some work for banks or insurance companies. Others are professors. They are awkward for many reasons. The younger ones are uncertain of how they might fit into the world. The older ones don’t know how to talk to women or bosses. Some are insecure. One feels “sure that any woman who showed any interest in me were the ones who had given up, deciding that they’d never get the kind of man they’d really wanted.” When a woman does seem to take an interest in that character, she turns out to be a thief.

Many of the men have been betrayed by women in various ways, although the long-married salesman in “The Letter” is getting over the end of his third affair. Some of the men are going through a crisis, wondering about their relationships or the purpose of their lives. They often question themselves, wonder about the choices they made. Sometimes they question their faith in humanity.

Some of the men struggle with their place in a society that holds them apart. They are burdened by the complexity of life, incapable of glib or superficial responses to social or workplace situations. A man who feels “stuck” has two therapists and lies to them both.

The men are often philosophers, some drawing on the classics and others on the street to inform a perspective on purpose and meaning. Some of the men decide it is time to make a break from the past and to begin a new life. One protagonist, pondering the concept of equilibrium and balance, renounces everything material and, like a Buddhist monk, becomes a beggar during an interval in his search for identity. Another quits his job, walking away from a retirement package, and invites a woman he barely knows to join him as he travels to Italy. Yet another resists a promotion because he wonders whether the position will have a corrupting influence on his life.

Only a couple of stories in this collection might be a comfortable fit within genre fiction. “The Sin of Dreams” involves a murder trial, but it flirts with a common science fiction theme by imaging the transfer of data from a brain to digital storage.  The story asks whether a human soul exists independently of memories and explores the ramifications of replacing natural with synthetic bodies. The writer in “Haunted” dies angry and unpublished. He returns as a ghost to pay for his “small-minded, selfish ways.” It takes years of death to learn how to let go of the anger that consumed him in life.

Mosley’s stories dig into the heart of life. They are heartwarming and heartbreaking. Some of the protagonists have suffered a run of hard luck. Some have fathers who are killers or brawlers. Some of the men might have responded to adversity with alcohol or silence. They might lose hope for a while, but in the end, they might find a reserve of strength that helps them carry on.

Each story in this collection is thought-provoking and each reflects the intelligence and compassion that is emblematic of Mosley’s fiction. Mosley drills a deep hole into the interior of his characters to find the humanity that we have so much trouble discovering within ourselves. Decency is a common theme in the stories. Even when they disappoint themselves, characters generally behave decently because that’s how they are wired. Most of the men refuse to be anything less than caring or understanding when the chips are down, no matter how indecently they are treated by others. These awkward black men are, on the whole, models for all men as they confront the awkwardness of living.

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The Vigilant Spy by Jeffrey Layton

Published by Kensington on May 11, 2020

The Vigilant Spy is the fourth in a series of novels featuring Yuri Kirov, a Russian intelligence asset who defected and joined the western world of private enterprise. He gives the CIA an assist from time to time as the price of freedom. The Vigilant Spy fills in enough details of Yuri’s past that it can be read as a standalone.

The story begins with Uyghur dissidents who believe they are retrieving an underwater surveillance device. To their misfortune, they are are actually setting off a small nuclear device near a Chinese naval base. The operation doesn’t go exactly as planned, but the Russians who conceived it have made the Chinese blame the resulting EMT damage on the United States. The Russian operation is in retribution for China’s earlier antagonism toward Russia, in which China also attempted to deflect blame to the United States for its mischief.

Yuri Kirov was a Russian intelligence operative who is using his knowledge of submarines and underwater drones to win defense contracts for the Alaskan business he founded. The CIA and DOD decide his specialized knowledge will come in handy when it learns of a new Chinese weapon, an underwater drone that moves like a snake, wraps itself around targets, and explodes.

Kirov, a CIA agent, and some SEALs try to break into a Chinese military base to steal plans for the device, a Mission Impossible adventure that, to Jeffrey Lawton’s credit, the heroes must abandon in favor of a slightly more realistic objective. Before the novel ends, Kirov will engage in a daring escape from China with a hostage in tow, while the submarine that supports his mission plays tag with Chinese and Russian vessels in the South China sea.

Lawton writes action scenes that are brimming with tension and sets them up with the kind of groundwork that allows a reader to suspend disbelief. Lawton makes the relatively outlandish plot seems barely plausible, in part because the story never pushes past the outer boundary of credibility. The machinations of China, Russia, and the United States all have an aura of realism. The political intrigue adds a layer of interest to the fast-moving story.

Kirov is presented as a guy who would like to put politics behind him and move forward with his new western family. Characterization isn’t deep but it’s sufficient for an action novel. The fact that Kirov is a Russian spy-turned-defector makes him more interesting than the typical super-patriot thriller hero. The Vigilant Spy isn’t a top shelf spy novel, but it is an entertaining action-thriller.

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