Braised Pork by An Yu

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Grove Press on April 14, 2020

Braised Pork tells the story of a woman who is struggling to cope with the demands of a changing life. Wu Jia Jia’s husband, Chen Hang, killed himself while kneeling over their bathtub, leaving her with an expensive apartment and little money with which to maintain it. She wants to sell the Beijing apartment, but rumors of her husband’s suicide have made buyers view the apartment as a place of misfortune.

Jia Jia thinks about moving in with her father, but is shocked to learn that he remarried while she was grieving her husband’s loss. Her other option, living with her grandmother and aunt, is difficult because they have settled into a way of life that makes her feel like an outsider. Finding a new husband might solve her problems, but the parents of the only man she has dated — the bartender at the tavern where she spends her evenings — believe it would be bad luck for their son to marry a widow.

Jia Jia attended art school and has some talent, but Chen Hang thought it would be inappropriate for her to sell her paintings. Now that he is gone, she contemplates a sketch he made of a fish with a man’s head. She obsessively paints her own version of the fish man but can never visualize the face that belongs on the fish’s body. In the meantime, she has been commissioned to paint a scene with Buddha on the wall of a friend’s home.

All of this is background for the true story, which involves visions or dreams or shared experiences in which Jia Jia and others encounter the fish man in a world made of water — a world that, in their view, represents true reality. Jia Jia feels compelled to take a trip to Tibet, where she finds a crude sculpture of the fish man in a small village and later discovers a connection between an old villager and her own family.

The recurring appearance of the fish man is something that might be found in a fable, but most of Braised Pork is grounded in a more recognizable reality. Exactly what the fish man represents or symbolizes — whether the fish man even exists, or is the product of mental illness — is ambiguous. In at least one case, the belief that we live in a world made of water seems to drive someone mad, perhaps because that person believes the world of water took everything from her. That person’s husband comes to believe that there are “two kinds of people: those who need boundaries, and those who will die from them.” Whether the body can be separated from the rest of human experience is one of the philosophical questions that An Yu poses to her readers.

I’m not sure quite what to make of the fish man. Despite its central importance to the story, I was drawn more to the life that Jia Jia is trying to make after the death of her husband — her uncertain relationship with the bartender, her reconnection with her father, her decision to start making art again. Jia Jia has an appealing resilience. Whether she has experienced visions that open a gateway to a different concept of reality or is suffering from a mental illness, her determination to place the best interpretation on her encounter with the water world, and to take something positive from its darkness, offers a ray of light in an otherwise dark story.

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The Cask by Freeman Wills Crofts

First published in 1920; republished by Dover on May 15, 2019

This hundred-year-old classic was mystery writer Freeman Wills Crofts’ first published novel. Notable for its detail, the novel is both a police procedural and a detective story that challenges the reader to guess both whodunit and how’d he do it.

While supervising the unloading of casks from a steamship, a young clerk discovers gold sovereigns and a woman’s body in a broken cask. He and the manager of the shipping company report the discovery to Inspector Burnley at Scotland Yard. By the time Burnley arrives at the ship, however, the cask has disappeared.

Burnley’s investigation is methodical. He first tracks down Léon Felix, to whom the cask was shipped from France, and gets an elaborate account of the circumstances that led the shipment. Felix produces a typewritten letter from the sender, Alphonse Le Gautier. Felix assumes the cask contains a statute and some money. Burnley then tracks down the cask and opens it in the presence of Felix, who is distressed to find the body of Annette Boirac, the wife of Raoul Boirac. On her body is a typewritten note that refers to the repayment of a loan.

Burnley works with the chief of a Paris police, Chauvet, to investigate the crime from the French side. Chauvet assigns a detective named Lefarge, with whom Burnley has worked before. The two police detectives learn that Annette had taken leave of Raoul, who seems genuinely sorrowed to learn of her strangulation. The detectives assemble a case that points not to Raoul as the killer (he has an alibi) or to Gautier, who denies writing the letter or note, but to Felix, who was once infatuated with Annette, although he claims that the infatuation died before she married Raoul, a fellow art collector with whom Felix became friends.

The meticulous investigation involves multiple witness interviews, inspections of typewriters, and the discovery of incriminating evidence in Felix’s home. The police take care to make no assumptions and to look for all possible evidence of innocence as well as guilt, providing a model that modern American police detectives should emulate. Although they work long but civilized hours, Burnley and Lefarge never miss a meal, often dining together and enjoying a bottle of wine before resuming their investigation.

The case seems airtight, but in the exercise of due diligence, Felix’s solicitor hires a private detective named Georges La Touche. The detective admires the strong work done by Burnley and Lefarge, retraces every step of the investigation, and cannot spot a flaw. There seems no hope for Felix until, inspired by the sight of a beautiful woman in Paris (and who wouldn’t be?), he moves the investigation in a different direction and solves the crime.

Will the reader solve it? The whodunit offers only a few suspects, so guesswork might lead to a happy result, but the “how” is so intricate that the reader will need to be a more skilled armchair detective than most to figure it out before La Touch explains it all.

Crofts’ characters all display old world charm. The plot is enjoyable, although the wealth of detail requires patience and a good memory. No stone is left unturned, and then La Touche turns them all over a second time. This is a police procedural on steroids, although one that relies on plodding attention to detail rather than Sherlockian insight. Fans of fast-moving modern thrillers who can’t abide sentences of more than six words will probably find The Cask to be a poor choice. Readers who prefer cerebral fiction to shootouts will find pleasure in this ground-breaking novel.

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Surrender by Ray Loriga

Published in Spain in 2017; published in translation by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books on February 25, 2020

In spirit and tone, Surrender brings to mind José Saramago. Ray Loriga’s style is less delightfully rambling than Saramago’s, but it is chatty and intimate, as if the author were telling a meandering story to a good friend. The story combines surrealism with the realistic fears of war-torn people who are willing to surrender their individuality for the sake of gaining security through conformity.

The place where the war occurs is unspoken, as are its participants. We know only that the war is not going well for the place where the narrator resides. His two sons went to war, but the narrator does not know if they are still alive. The bombs are coming closer. The only good news, from the narrator’s perspective, is the appearance of Julio, a mute boy who wandered into the narrator’s life. The narrator and his wife keep Julio hidden in their basement. “If all goes well and he behaves himself, maybe we’ll move him upstairs one day, to our sons’ room.”

The zone agent tells the narrator that the decade-long war is being lost, that everyone must evacuate to the transparent city. The narrator has no choice but to trust the government, provisional though it may be, because the alternative is anarchy or death. After all, the government protected them from their wet nurse who cared so tenderly for their children. They made no protest when the government took her because they were grateful for its vigilance.

The story follows the narrator, his wife, and Julio as they make a difficult journey to the transparent city, where everything is indeed transparent. Walls are made of a transparent crystal; everyone is visible to everyone else as they shower, shit, shag, and sleep. The experience leads the narrator to understand that “although some of us have more flesh in this or that place and others have less, we’re basically all the same.”

Everyone in the transparent city is required to take three showers a day, but the water has properties that go beyond washing away dirt. The narrator soon finds himself unreasonably happy, so happy he doesn’t object when Julio’s tutor takes the narrator’s wife to bed. “My perennial happiness stuck to me the way goat poop sticks to your hunting boots.” Yet the narrator has a premonition that his happiness will come undone. “Sometimes you have to wait for things to unfold, even though you already sense what’s going to happen, because if you don’t, people will call you crazy.”

People in the transparent city must do what they are told, lest their heads be posted at the front gate. At first, surrendering control of his life seems fine to the narrator, because contentment has always been his goal. “Once you admit that god hasn’t chosen you to do anything extraordinary, you start to really live the way you should, with your head and feet inside a circle marked in the sand, not stepping out beyond your terrain or hankering for what isn’t yours.” When he recalls his past, the narrator occasionally searches his soul “for some shred of my old self, but it was useless, I couldn’t find it.”

“What malice lurks in the soul of a man who doesn’t recognize himself as one among many?” the narrator asks. The question is poignant in a time when selfish people eschew social distancing, but Loriga turns the question on its head. The narrator feels that the “tiny circle of my affections and concerns” helped him understand what matters, while being “part of something functional that assures my well-being and calls for my participation” makes him “feel inexorably excluded from the common good.” The resolution of that conflict, Surrender suggests, requires individuals within a society to retain their individuality even if they are necessarily part of something bigger.

The novel is also an argument against contentment as an ultimate goal. Nobody in the transparent city is hungry or sick, everyone is forced to feel protected and happy, “but was that enough to live?” The narrator misses doing things that cause pain, simply because the pain resulted from his free will. And in “the strange peace of the transparent city,” he and his wife have stopped loving each other, perhaps because they have stopped struggling together to attain the things that the transparent city gives them. Or perhaps it has something to do with the wife shagging the tutor.

At some point the reader will wonder whether the narrator is reliable. Is it true that nothing smells bad in the city, including the excrement that the narrator hauls away on a tractor every day? Is Julio really a savant, as the narrator believes, capable of speech but wisely remaining silent? In the end it doesn’t matter. The story is strange and wonderful, and even if the narrator can’t be trusted to tell us the truth, Loriga conveys many truths about the conflict between the demands of society and the needs of the individual.

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A Shadow Intelligence by Oliver Harris

First published in Great Britain in 2019; published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on April 14, 2020

Not many novels are set in Kazakhstan. A Shadow Intelligence earned my interest just by sending characters to a country that is difficult to spell. Add a campaign to spread disinformation on social media, private militaries controlled by oil companies, and Afghan smugglers to a mix that includes British and Russian spies and you’ve got an unusually intriguing story.

A Shadow Intelligence doesn’t feature a superhero who fights and shoots his way out of every problem. Nor does he wear an exploding watch. Elliot Kane employs tradecraft, but he basically blunders into situations and hopes for the best. Elliot’s fallibility is another aspect of the novel that appealed to me.

Elliot begins the novel in a funk, having been recalled to London from an undercover assignment in Saudi Arabia that ended with the arrest of his agent. When he checks his email, he finds a coded message telling him that either he or the sender is in danger. Hidden in the message is a digital picture. He’s in the picture, talking to a person he doesn’t know in a room he’s never seen.

The message is from Joanna Lake, an MI6 field officer for whom Elliot has feelings. He asks colleagues about her status, only to learn that she’s no longer employed. She was last working with the Psychological Operations Group, a combined effort of MI6, the British military, and GCHQ, the British version of the NSA. Elliot doesn’t know what project occupied her time, but he learns that her unit was shut down, that she was escorted from the premises, and that security officials have been asking questions about both Lake and Elliot.

Elliot’s effort to find Joanna leads him to a dead body, an oil company called Saracen that is buying land in Kazakhstan, and a firm of private intelligence analysts (including many who recently jumped ship from MI6) called Vectis. Elliot travels to Kazakhstan, where his presence is noted by Sergei Cherenkov, who tries to recruit Elliot to spy for the Russians. Eliot begins to wonder whether the same pitch was made to Joanna and whether she accepted.

The web of intrigue convinces Elliot that previously unknown oil fields in Kazakhstan may lead to a Russian invasion and a war in which China will intervene. The international stakes are high, but from a personal standpoint, Eliot wants to know whether Lake is still secretly working for MI6, whether she was hired by Vectis to do sketchy work, or whether she is working for the Russians. A social media influencer in Kazakhstan named Aliya, the pro-western daughter of Kazakhstan’s president, and an Afghan smuggler who has a history with Elliot also feature in the mix.

The novel is an effective blend of mystery, suspense, and action. As an international conflict looms, the plot encourages the reader to join Elliot in speculating about Joanna’s role and why she messaged Elliot. Events have been shaped in a way that mislead Elliot (and thus the reader) before the dots connect in a way that makes sense. The story’s focus on the recruitment and deception of social media influencers to drive public opinion in directions dictated by governments or private businesses gives the story some currency.

Near the end of the novel, when Elliot has been identified as someone who should either be arrested or shot on sight, it seems unlikely that he can make it to the end of the book without being tracked and apprehended. That he does so is a mild stretch. Elliot’s fairly standard spy persona would have benefitted from a bit more character development. Those are relatively minor complaints in a plot-focused novel that delivers the kind of byzantine international jousting that makes spy novels so entertaining.

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Masked Prey by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 14, 2020

Readers who believe that the Deep State exists and is a threat to their way of life will probably want to bypass Masked Prey. Amazon reviews of an earlier John Sandford novel proclaimed Sandford to be a left wing propogandist because Lucas Davenport, who is pretty far from left wing, prevented the assassination of a female Democrat who was running for president. Those readers will be apoplectic if they read Masked Prey, notwithstanding that Davenport’s motivations are never political. The reality is that Sandford is just as likely to skewer politicians from both parties as he is to mock the extremists who ramp up hatred over the Deep State.

A hidden website called 1919 has posted grainy photos of the children of politicians. One of those children, the daughter of a Democratic senator, is a teenager who blogs about being hot in D.C. Her boyfriend is trying to see whether other sites have picked up the pictures she posted when he stumbles on 1919. The website takes its name from a doubling of the 19th letter, or SS. Viewing the site as an invitation to make political statements by killing kids, the FBI becomes involved. And since the case has a political slant, Minnesota’s Democratic senator calls Davenport, a federal Marshal who is on the senator’s speed dial.

Davenport enlists the help of Bob and Rae, two Marshals who have become recurring characters in the series. Their light-hearted banter balances the darkness of the plot as Davenport pokes his nose into the various rightwing groups that might have created or taken an interest in the 1919 website. Some of those groups, of course, blame the left for planting a false flag. The truth about the site comes as a surprise.

The novel’s creepy entertainment value comes from Davenport's encounters with white supremacists, militia groups, and members of other fringe organizations, each with a different take on how government is a force for evil and why their own insular group holds the secret to human salvation. Sandford plays fair, making it clear that however whacky most of these folk might be, and however much they love their guns, most of them aren’t interested in carrying out acts of violence (if only because they fear arrest or being killed). They may be repulsive but killers tend to be lone wolves, not the sort who seek out validation in packs of like-minded screwballs. Sandford nevertheless recognizes the unfortunate reality that some people who hold beliefs far removed from objective reality are both deranged and dangerous.

Like all Sandford novels, Masked Prey moves quickly. Davenport makes a couple of morally questionable decisions, the kind of decisions that prove he is motivated by a desire to be effective rather than poltical or self-righteous beliefs. Davenport isn’t always admirable but he’s always interesting. That’s one of the reasons I keep coming back to the series. The larger reason is that Sandford is a born storyteller. He peppers the text with wit, clever observations, and sudden plot twists. If it were possible to go to the beach in the age of COVID-19, this would be the kind of fun, fast read that makes a good beach novel.

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