Seven Down by David Whitton

Published by Dundurn Press/Rare Machines on November 30, 2021

In 2010, several employees of a hotel in Toronto are recruited by an organization they only know as “the company” and trained for a mission. In 2022, they finally receive the instructions to which they have been trained to respond. One of them creates a diversion in the hotel lobby, although not quite the diversion that was intended. Another retrieves a container of chutney from kitchen storage in the basement and takes it to an upper floor. A bellhop swaps clothes with a man in the elevator who takes the chutney from the woman who retrieved it. Events pile upon events. Each person narrates his or her role to interviewers/interrogators after Operation Fear and Trembling has gone awry. The story is told through their interview transcripts.

Through most of Seven Down, the reader must guess at the significance of the characters’ actions. What is the mysterious organization that recruited the hotel members? What is Operation Fear and Trembling? How and why did it fail? What were the consequences of that failure? What will happen to the participants after their interviews are finished? Some of those questions go unanswered, although the reader is given sufficient information to imagine a variety of answers. A summative document at the end supplies some missing pieces. It also makes an observation that the reader will surely appreciate: Operation Fear and Trembling was a needlessly complex means of attaining an end that could have been achieved much more easily. No wonder it went tits up.

As the reader waits for the missing pieces to be supplied, the meandering interviews reveal the personalities of the recruited employees. Leonard Downey, the bellhop who swapped clothes in the elevator, was an anarchist before he took his hotel job. At the time of the interview, he’s being held captive on an island. As one might expect from an anarchist (or maybe from anyone who is being held captive), he's far from cooperative. But he’s also quite funny as he demands cigarettes and dodges uncomfortable questions and tries to justify his decision to set a police car on fire during a G7 protest and complains that, given his experience with mayhem, the company didn’t give him a more active role than trading clothes with someone on an elevator.

Kathy from Catering, the middle-aged woman who delivered the chutney, had a sexual encounter with another character while they were both carrying out their roles, although neither knew that the other was involved in the operation. Their different perspectives on who initiated the encounter and how it went are amusing. One suspects it was initiated by the woman since she repeatedly propositions her interviewer while complaining about her lackluster sex life.

Rhonda handles security in the hotel. She epitomizes the paranoid members of society who think vaccinations will turn them into zombies. She’s convinced that heavy metals in vaccines have turned her into a walking 5G receiver. An officious and self-involved hotel manager and a systems operator who places the company ahead of her family contribute their own quirks to the dysfunctional cast of characters.

The elaborate plot of Seven Down is really just an excuse to bring together a group of troubled people who gravitate toward the company in the hope that it will supply meaning or excitement or a purpose that their lives are missing. Apart from allowing the reader to occupy the minds of its all-too-human characters, Seven Down offers some observations about humankind that are either perceptive or obvious, depending on how much attention you’re paying to the world. A character notes, for instance, that the pandemic “swept its ultraviolet wand over the earth, exposing for all to see the douchebags and sociopaths who had overrun and debased it.” A riff on “disaster capitalists” who hope to exploit the next human tragedy is also worth considering. “Plagues are the future so let’s use them to make money” is a problematic philosophy.

As a dark comedy, Seven Down delivers more chuckles than belly laughs. Still, the characters have attitude and the plot is too unpredictable to permit a reader to lose interest.

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The Midnight Lock by Jeffery Deaver

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on November 30, 2021

The Midnight Lock weaves together several intriguing and timely themes. A tabloid publisher buys the rights to scandalous stories and kills the stories in exchange for political favors. A moderator for a YouTube clone needs to decide whether videos telling political lies or promoting violence should be deleted from the site. New York’s mayor, plagued with bad publicity about unsuccessful law enforcement efforts, decides to take the city’s failure out on private contractors rather than blaming the city’s police.

One of those private contractors is Lincoln Rhyme, the famed New York City criminalist who doesn’t let a wheelchair get in the way of solving crimes by analyzing flakes of dust. As the novel begins, Lincoln is being cross-examined in a murder case that he appears to have solved by analyzing six grains of sand. The cross-examination suggests that he was sloppy. The jury wisely decides not to base a murder verdict on six grains of sand. Outraged over unfavorable publicity about cases that the police seem to have botched, the mayor decides to shift the focus away from the city and blames Rhyme for the verdict. He cancels the city’s relationship with Rhyme and, in what seems like overkill, threatens to jail him for obstructing justice if he investigates any further crimes, and to discipline any cop who helps him.

The new rule might make Rhyme’s marital life awkward, given that he is married to Amelia Sachs, a cop who is intimately involved in his investigations. He also works with a team of cops who promptly ignore the edict and help Rhyme pursue The Locksmith, a fellow who picks complicated locks, enters the residences of women who live alone, and gazes at them. The well-founded fear is that The Locksmith will grow bored with gazing at women and will move on to more violent crimes. The reader will learn The Locksmith’s identity before it becomes apparent to Rhyme and Amelia.

It isn’t immediately clear how the family dispute over a publishing empire will play into the story. Imagine a Rupert Murdoch clone who gains a conscience and comes to believe that he should sell his holdings and invest the proceeds in an institute to advance ethical journalism. Hard to imagine, yes, but it’s easy to imagine that his family members will be displeased. Nor is clear how a social media influencer who has the credibility and following of Q will connect to the larger plot. A social media moderator is another key character who stars in a few chapters before the moderator’s role in the story becomes apparent.

Rhyme novels are always interesting. The Midnight Lock has less energy than some of the other books in the series, although it does give an action role to an ex-cop whose heroic exploits might allow him to return to the ranks of law enforcers. The story seems to be winding down long before it ends. That’s always a sign of misdirection. In a contrived ending, we learn that things were not as they seemed, but the surprise ending isn’t likely to surprise many readers. Still, the plot elements fit together nicely and it’s impossible not to learn something new while reading a Lincoln Rhyme novel. This installment isn’t special, but it's entertaining.

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The Days to Come by Tom Rosenstiel

Published by Ecco on November 23, 2021

I read fiction, in part, to escape from reality. I don’t read many political novels because politics in the US is so ugly that I don’t need the stress of reading fiction that reinforces the ugliness. Escaping from politics with a novel about politics only works if the novel is amusing. The Days to Come isn’t funny but it is only a political novel in part. By the second half, the plot has morphed into a crime story.

The Days to Come is apparently the latest in a series that features political fixer Peter Rena. I can’t review it in that context because I’m not familiar with series.

Tom Rosenstiel imagines an unusual situation: a male Democrat runs for president with a female Republican running for vice president. They win and the president, David Traynor, dies within the first hundred days of his presidency. That’s an interesting plot driver, although the first half of the book seems intended as a blueprint to enact a political agenda. The agenda is worthy — it focuses on taking meaningful action to address climate change and six other crises — but that aspect of the story is a bit wonky to work well in a novel.

Traynor’s grand idea is one he didn’t share with the public before the election. He plans to make a massive public investment in flow batteries, an energy storage device that would allow solar and wind power to supplant fossil fuels. Traynor knows that half of Congress will oppose the investment because they are in bed with the fossil fuel industry and have no interest in solving existential threats, so Traynor uses his emergency powers to execute a secret plan that diverts budgeted money (primarily from national security) to invest in several startups that are working on the technology.

Part I sets up the premise and seems largely geared toward policy wonks. In Part II, the new president, Wendy Upton, worries that Traynor’s machinations, however well intended they might have been, will be exposed, jeopardizing both her presidency and the program itself. She enlists the help of Rena and his partner Randi Brooks to determine whether the startups are secure or whether the battery plan might be leaked to the press or stolen by Russian, Chinese, or Middle Eastern spies. Creeping into the story from time to time is a young man whose weak mind is easily influenced by the Q conspiracies that populate the least rational corners of the web.

Part III begins with a death that seems to be catastrophic for the battery plan. Was the death caused by murder? Well, this is a crime novel so the death is at least suspicious. Still, the primary crime that the book explores is not murder but foreign and corporate espionage. Investors from Russia and China pour investment capital into tech firms, make sure to have one of their own on the firm’s board. That person sends the company’s secrets back to the government that is either employing or threatening them. An FBI agent in the novel suggests that tech spying is commonplace, which is probably true, perhaps making this a cautionary novel. In any event, the protagonists devise a plan to root out spies that drives the last half of the story.

Rena’s background gives rise to a subplot. In his military days, Rena investigated a general, found that the general was guilty of sexual harassment on multiple occasions, and precipitated the general’s resignation by confronting him with the evidence in a way that might have been unnecessarily embarrassing. The internet has tumbled to this news and has gone nuts, as it tends to do, with the far right blaming Rena for destroying a man with trumped up charges. Rena also blames himself for destroying his marriage by creating stress that might have caused his wife’s multiple miscarriages. The net, of course, asserts that the marriage ended because Rena was a wife abuser. Perhaps the novel is also intended as a cautionary reminder of the destruction that is so easily inflicted by internet liars on the far right. If so, I doubt that the book will raise red flags as any reader attracted to this book is probably well aware of the daily onslaught of internet lies that pollute public discourse.

The components of The Days to Come are individually interesting, but they never quite cohere. The story can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a political novel, a murder mystery, a story about radicalized self-styled heroes whose minds have been corrupted by far-right conspiracy theories, a story about the orchestration of internet lies to destroy political opponents, or a corporate espionage novel. Rosensteil tries to do too much and fails to anything well. The story moves in so many directions that it never gains momentum in any direction. On the other hand, as a “message” novel about the need for bold action to solve serious political problems and the risk that corporate espionage will undermine those efforts, The Days to Come has some value.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Happy Thanksgiving!

Harsh Times by Mario Vargas Llosa

First published in Spain in 2019; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on November 23, 2021

Harsh Times is the story of Guatemala in the middle of the twentieth century. The book can’t quite decide whether it wants to a novelized history or a character study. The story is framed by the political actions and personal reactions of several characters, most notably a young woman named Marta Borrero Parra.

Guatemala has a history of “murdered politicians and presidents,” including Carlos Castillo Armas, who governed from 1954 to 1957 and, as Mario Vargas Llosa tells it, took Marta as a lover after she left the friend of her father who made her pregnant in her early teens. Marta weaves in and out of the narrative in the novel’s first half before she disappears for a long while, leaving the story to be framed by a succession of other characters, most of whom serve in government or the military. None of those characters are as compelling as Marta, whose vulnerability as an outsider gives her a unique role in a story about powerful men who abuse their power. Marta’s reappearance in an epilogue adds a few details about her life but does little to wrap up the story, given the conspiracy tale she spins about a character who (like Marta) left Guatemala and reinvented himself. Perhaps Llosa’s point is that separating truth from fiction is a daunting task when some conspiracies are real and others are imagined.

Instead of focusing the novel on central characters, Llosa chose to focus on historical events in Guatemala and other Central American or Caribbean countries. Armas took power in a military coup orchestrated by the CIA with a mandate to root out real and imagined communists, defined as anyone who believed workers should organize, elections should be fair, and power should not be concentrated in the hands of the corrupt.

Llosa spotlights the American anti-communist crusade of the 1950s as the instrumental force in Guatemala’s development. In Llosa’s version of history, the crusade was manipulated by a Machiavellian public relations consultant for United Fruit, a banana grower that oppressed workers and ruthlessly acquired land in Guatemala. United Fruit sought public relations assistance because it wanted to reform its cutthroat image without losing its power. Telling the blatant lies that the PR guru concocted, United Fruit claimed to be the victim of a communist government, although none of its productive land had been nationalized and it was the only grower in Guatemala that didn’t pay taxes. According to Llosa, the pro-democracy government that preceded Armas was simply trying to move away from a feudal society by using eminent domain to redistribute unproductive land to peasants who would put it to good use, a win-win for the peasants and for Guatemalan society. United Fruit thought it was only a matter of time before democracy would result in a government it couldn’t control; hence the deceptive PR campaign.

Nothing serves a public image better than championing anti-communism, even if United Fruit’s true aim (shared by the American government) was to undermine Guatemala’s emerging democracy and quash its efforts to distribute power and wealth more equitably. After the CIA orchestrated the government’s overthrow, Armas nullified deeds to small plots of land that pulled Guatemalans out of poverty and imprisoned or killed union organizers and dissenters. But America wants a democratic façade in its banana republics and Armas, having carried out the country’s shift to the far right with murderous zeal, didn’t even pretend to be interested in democracy. Thus the CIA’s support for the assassination of Guatemala’s president three years after it brought that president to power. A fickle agency, the CIA.

Whether the story’s political background is accurate in all of its particulars doesn’t matter. This is a work of fiction, after all, and while the political narrative is interesting, characters drive literary novels. The narrative weaves back and forth in time, focusing on various players at different times: Dr. Efrén García Ardiles, the friend of Marta’s father who raped Marta and made her pregnant while she was a young teen before marrying her at her father’s insistence (a marriage that allowed Marta’s father to disown her); Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the alcoholic but well-intentioned defense minister who became the pro-democracy president of Guatemala until the CIA intervened; Enrique Trinidad Oliva, Armas’ director of security whose life rises and falls in ways that parallel Guatemalan governments; Mike Laporta, a CIA agent who “couldn’t look more gringo if he tried”; American Ambassador Peurifoy, a willing pawn of Allen Dulles and the CIA; Rafael Trujillo, the ruthless dictator of the Dominican Republic; and Johnny Abbes Garcia, the anti-democratic chief of Dominican intelligence under President Trujillo whose life took unexpected turns after Trujillo was killed.

Marta is the most sympathetic of this large cast of characters, if only because she is so often used and condemned by men. Her shift to the far right when she becomes a radio commentator is an act of self-preservation, as was bedding Armas. Her decision to abandon her child to be raised by her rapist is understandable, as are the choices she makes to survive in a world where men see only a potential conquest when they gaze in her direction.

I’m not sure that the novel’s shifting time frame serves a purpose, other than to remind the reader that this is a novel and not a history text. Still, some chapters read like a lively history text, contributing little but a perspective on history to the story. Llosa introduces a central character to serve as a focal point for those chapters, but those characters tend to appear for a brief time and disappear after they have served their purpose, giving those chapters a disjointed feeling. A cadet named Crispin Carrasquilla, for example, is featured in a late chapter that tells of a clash between military cadets and invading forces. A diplomatic agreement (soon to be violated) resolves their conflict, a small episode that (Llosa assures us) “would hardly appear in the press or the history books.” Crispin’s chapter contributes little to the overall narrative.

The novel’s struggle between its focus on history and its attempt to be a character study causes Llosa to follow characters like Abbes Garcia after he eventually lands in Haiti. While the gruesome end of Garcia’s story would merit its own book, it seems disconnected in a novel that wants to tell a story of Guatemala.

As a broader history, although driven by a mix of invented and real characters, Llosa reminds the reader of important geopolitical realities. Every attempt the US has made to meddle in the internal affairs of governments it perceives as “leftist” has backfired. Llosa argues that Cuba moved in the direction of communism and dictatorship as a direct result of the CIA’s interference with democracy in Guatemala. “When all is said and done,” Llosa writes, “the North American invasion of Guatemala held up the country’s democratization for decades at the cost of thousands of lives, as it helped popularize the myth of armed struggle and socialism throughout Latin America.” Just as salient is Llosa’s illustration of how easily the American public is manipulated by corporate interests that invent fears of communism to conceal the harm their business practices inflict on ordinary people. While Harsh Times might be more effective as a history lesson than a character-driven novel, it is never less than engrossing.

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