Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge

Published in China in 2006; published in translation by Melville House on July 13, 2021

Strange Beasts of China was written and published while Yan Ge was living in China, which might explain why the book reads as if she used metaphors drawn from fantasy to avoid censorship. Her criticism of authoritarian rule is indirect but unmistakable. In one chapter, for example, the government operates a fantastic scheme that coerces the loyalty of the middle class, creating “an unquestioning devotion” to their rulers “that would never be overturned.” The scheme comes at a price, as the ruler “wins over his people, but only when they have lost their minds. . . . Is this gaining or losing? No one can say.” An authoritarian mind might accuse Yan of being subversive if she made her criticism any plainer. An American reader might think about how authoritarian rulers in the United States encourage reality denial, a form of lunacy that assures the unquestioning loyalty of their voters. Notwithstanding that theme, the book is not primarily concerned with political governance.

Each chapter in Strange Beasts of China introduces a new beast. Yan makes a point of telling us that each type of beast is very like a human despite their distinguishing characteristics. One type of beast has gills behind the ears. One type has coarse and “mottled black” skin. One is grown like a sapling that eventually takes on human form. One lives underground where bodies are buried. They tend to be male and female but they don’t always reproduce in conventional ways. Some types are violent and other are passive. The beasts are a diverse group, a fact the fictional city of Yong’an should (and sometimes does) celebrate, but the differences that distinguish beasts from humans also cause discomfort among the city’s homogenous human population. The beasts tend to be tribal, sticking to their own, although some types are admired by humans. Some of those are prized as possessions. Others are feared and, thanks to human efforts, are bordering on extinction.

The novel’s narrator is a writer whose stories about beasts (as well as food columns and trashy romance stories) are published in a local newspaper. While each chapter incorporates a different kind of beast into the narrative, the book reads as a novel because of the larger story that runs through the chapters. That story belongs to the narrator. She is a lonely woman, “truly scared. In all the vastness of the city, I don’t have a single blood relative, no family at all.” Her friends die or leave or enter asylums or turn against her. She is depressed. "For many years now," she writes, "I hadn’t felt anything like joy.” As the chapters unfold, she learns truths (or potential truths, as objective truth is never quite clear) about her own identity. Her parents, friends, and former lovers have all deceived her at some point. She is frightened of how easily she believed them, how she imagined she was loved. But maybe she was loved by others, people whose love she failed to recognize.

When she isn’t chasing after strange beasts, the narrator spends much of her time drinking and feeling sorry for herself at the Dolphin Bar. A recurring story line involves the narrator’s complex and evolving relationship with the zoology professor who took a special interest in her for reasons that are initially obscure, and maintained that interest — or perhaps maintained an interest in emotionally abusing her — after she dropped out of college and became a writer. A later story line adds a younger man, also a favored student of the professor, who maintains an ambiguous relationship with the narrator — a relationship that, like all relationships, the narrator finds confusing.

Yan seems to have a dual purpose, illustrating how distant individuals are from each other (“You don’t know my story, and I don’t know yours. We poured our hearts into our own stories, but never shared them with each other.”) while illuminating the close connections between people who seem to have nothing in common. Perhaps the narrator is a strange beast. Perhaps everyone is. When the narrator asks whether love is possible between humans and beast, she is really asking whether love is possible between two humans who can never really know each other.

A wry humor infects the novel, evident (for example) in Yan’s descriptions of the varying preferences of the different types of beasts (Joyous Beasts “enjoy fantasy novels, and hate Maths”; Heartsick Beasts enjoy steamed buns and char siu pork while Impasse Beasts survive on a diet of human despair). Yet the novel’s themes, including depression and loneliness, death (by suicide, by murder, by fate), oppression, prejudice, and the apparent impossibility of understanding ourselves, much less another person, are far from light. Yan achieves a fine balance of comedy and tragedy.

At times, Yan states the obvious, or perhaps the meaningless, as if she is stating something profound. At other times, she expresses deep thoughts that, if not entirely original, are provocative because of the original way in which they are showcased. The last chapter, an attempt to reimagine the entire novel, falls flat. The novel as a whole, however, is creative, surprising, and enjoyable.

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The Heathens by Ace Atkins

Published by ‎ G.P. Putnam's Sons on July 13, 2021

In his usual masterful style, Ace Atkins constructs a story from multiple perspectives, then accelerates the pace in the second half by shifting rapidly among the plot threads, creating the sense of simultaneous action on multiple fronts. He does that without sacrificing characterization. In fact, The Heathens is one of the best installments of the Quinn Colson series, precisely because Atkins develops the personality of a key secondary character in surprising depth while telling an engaging story.

The story’s focus is on a teenage girl named TJ Byrd. TJ has always been a troublemaker, but Atkins makes the reader sympathize with her delinquent nature. There aren’t many roads to a happy life for a girl who needs to raise her younger brother while her mother is making one bad decision after another, typically involving drugs and abusive men. Gina’s latest bad choice is Chester Pratt, who sees Gina (and indirectly TJ) as the solution to his debt problem. Pratt is the last straw for TJ, who takes her little brother and hits the road with her boyfriend, Ladarius McCade, and her best friend, Holly Harkins.

The disreputable sheriff in a neighboring county happens upon a dismembered body that has been soaking in a barrel of bleach. Quinn, the sheriff of Tibbehah County, enlists the help of his former deputy and current US Marshal, Lily Virgil, to identify the remains. As Gina’s lifelong friend, Lily recognizes a tattoo that confirm Gina’s identity as a murder victim.

Since TJ is on the run, she becomes the prime suspect, a suspicion that Pratt does his best to fuel. Quinn isn’t convinced of TJ’s guilt, but Pratt has an alibi. As Quinn conducts his investigation in Tibbehah County, Lily follows TJ’s path into Arkansas and Louisiana. TJ is pretty easy to follow, given the trail of stolen cars and burgled houses she and Ladarius leave in their wake. TJ meets a disgruntled princess named Chastity in one of those houses who turns TJ into an Instagram sensation. Telling your story on Instagram turns out to be a bad way of traveling on the down low.

The series’ recurring villain (the one who is still alive, at any rate) is Johnny Stagg. He plays a role in the unfolding events, but the most villainous characters are a father and son thug team named Daddy and Dusty Flem. Most of Colson’s evil characters are corrupt and violent, but Daddy and Dusty are unthinking and unfeeling monsters. Yet they are just as realistic as more nuanced villains who have bedeviled Quinn in earlier novels.

Quinn’s wife and her son, as well as Quinn's new baby, his mother and his friend Boom Kimbrough play their expected parts, reminding the reader of Quinn’s fundamental decency and the difficult times he has overcome. But the novel’s star is TJ, who fights for her freedom and survival, battles her emotions and forces herself to be brave for her bother’s sake because he has no one else. She’s a strong, sympathetic, but vulnerable character, instantly likeable because she won’t tolerate being abused, even if — as any girl of 16 would — she makes some immature choices along the way.

The reason Gina was killed isn’t necessarily what the reader will expect. There is a bit of a whodunit plot mixed with a fast-moving action story as various characters try to be the first to find TJ — some of whom do not have her best interests at heart. Atkins mixes his characteristic humor into the story with throwaway lines like TJ’s brother’s description of his mother’s death: “She’s up there in heaven with Jesus and Dale Earnhardt.” Atkins continues the noir atmosphere of corruption, degradation, and hypocrisy that he has established throughout the series. All of the novels in this series are good but the effort that Atkins put into TJ makes The Heathens one of his best.

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Ascension by Oliver Harris

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books on July 13, 2021

Ascension is the second Elliot Kane spy novel and the better of the two. It combines crime and suspense with themes of espionage. The result is an unusual but fascinating story that unfolds on a desolate island in the South Atlantic.

Oliver Harris informs the narrative with the history of Ascension Island, a place that few have visited and that even fewer want to see again. Ascension is governed by the British and is valued as a strategic jumping off point when the Brits find the need to invade the Falklands. The BBC maintains a relay station on Ascension. The European Space Agency maintains a rocket tracking station there, as did NASA for a period of time. The US has an air base on Ascension and the US Space Force uses it for whatever Space Force does. Thanks to Darwin, the arid volcanic island now has some trees, but Harris makes clear that it isn’t a place where anyone would want to spend a vacation. The novel gets its noir atmosphere from the island’s bleak nature and despondent residents.

The island has been used as a relay station for underwater cables for more than a century. Harris, who obviously engaged in meticulous research to support his novel, uses the cables as a jumping off point. A new transatlantic cable is being installed in Ascension. British intelligence wants to tap into it because there’s no such thing as privacy. Of course, the Brits don’t want the Americans to know what they’re doing.

Kathryn Taylor, who runs the South Atlantic desk for MI6, gives communications specialist Rory Bannatyne a cover story and sends him to Ascension to execute the cable-tapping plan. Taylor worked with Bannatyne when he was tapping a cable on Oman. Taylor bribed Bannatyne’s way out of trouble in Oman after he became uncomfortably close with some minors. Taylor never reported the incident to MI6, which is why Bannatyne is still available for the job. Unfortunately for Taylor, Bannatyne apparently commits suicide shortly after a young girl on Ascension goes missing.

Taylor sends Kane to Ascension to find out what happened to Bannatyne, whether he had anything to do with the missing girl, and whether it is safe to continue the cable intercept operation. Kane is undercover as an historian. Since there is only one flight to Ascension per month, Kane knows he will be there a while. When he arrives, however, he discovers that the hotel where he booked a room has closed, forcing him to take up residence in the home that was just vacated by the parents of the missing girl.

Kane’s investigation brings him into contact with a teenage boy who is suspected of murdering the missing girl. The boy’s mother is a General in a branch of the American military. After Kane befriends the General’s husband, a second girl goes missing. Kane is suspected of kidnapping the girl because he has befriended an unpopular family and, since he’s new on the island, he’s a convenient suspect. What seems to be an interesting crime story later changes gears as Kane discovers that the island is keeping secrets that may imperil the national security of Great Britain and its allies. Kane’s life and Taylor’s career are both threatened as suspense builds in England and on Ascension.

Harris’s intelligent plot is meticulously constructed. Its eventual destination will keep most readers guessing.

Taylor is the kind of character who is a fixture in espionage fiction, a spy who defies orders because she knows something is rotten and doesn’t trust her superiors to resolve the problem. Kane seems to be a more emotionally complex character in Ascension than he was in A Shadow Intelligence. Maybe he’s just growing on me. In any case, while most spy novels follow a well-traveled path, Harris has, for the second time, found a new story to tell. His second effort proves that he’s earning a position as a top shelf spy novelist.

RECOMMENDED

An Ambush of Widows by Jeff Abbott

Published by Grand Central Publishing on July 6, 2021

The plot of An Ambush of Widows is about 70% believable. That’s probably average for modern crime novels. In one scene, the driver of a moving car tries to shoot a character who is standing inside a restaurant. The shooter just isn’t the kind of person who would be stupid enough to think that (a) the shooting will be successful or (b) the driver of a vehicle in urban traffic is likely to avoid the police after attempting an assassination. More than a few relationships between characters, some of which are kept secret, are difficult to believe. Some of those are too coincidental to be credible. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the story and that’s what counts.

The premise seems simple. A woman in New Orleans gets a call from her husband’s cellphone. The caller advises the woman that her husband has been killed in Austin. Who called her and why? Who killed her husband and why? The woman, Kirsten North, suspects the call is a prank because her husband Henry is in New York. When she can’t reach Henry, she looks at the news in Austin and discovers that there were, in fact, two recent murders in the same Austin warehouse. One of the victims is unidentified. Kirsten immediately flies to Austin to investigate. Most rational wives would call the police before booking the flight on the theory that the police should know about the call immediately. Kirsten’s failure to do so creates the yet another credibility issue.

Henry is, if fact, one of the murder victims. Henry owns a small computer security business. The other victim is Adam Zhang, a wealthy partner in an investment group that develops high tech businesses. Kirsten knows of no connection between the two men. Neither does Flora Zhang, Adam’s wife. Kirsten decides to ferret out that connection with the help of her former foster brother, Zach Couvillon.

The seemingly simple plot will eventually invite the reader to make charts and diagrams as it becomes more complex. Keeping track of the various ways in which characters are connected to each other, often unknowingly, is something of a chore, but that’s not unusual in novels of this nature.

Kirsten’s backstory as a foster child occupies a good chunk of the novel and adds to its complexity. Suffice it to say that her foster dad was not the nice guy Kirsten believed him to be. Kirsten’s teen years include a dramatic episode involving Zach, her foster parents, and Henry (who was her neighbor at that point). The drama eventually shapes the events that follow, although Kirsten doesn’t understand all of the ways in which that will be true.

All of those characters and others — from Adam’s live-in cousin to the incredibly polite homeless man who finds the bodies — play a role and could be murder suspects. Planted evidence adds to the threat that an innocent person will be blamed. The police suspect Kirsten or Flora because the spouse is always guilty, but the reader knows that Kirsten was in New Orleans and couldn’t have killed Henry. Everyone else is fair game. The reveal again tested my willingness to suspend disbelief, but Jeff Abbott doesn’t cross the line between implausibility and impossibility.

As Kirsten plays sleuth, she sneaks around and unearths clues with unlikely success. Those scenes create a bit of tension, but the action only creates a true sense of danger near the novel’s end. Also near the end, a character steals a computer from a house filled with security guards with no explanation of how he accomplished that feat. I felt a bit cheated by that.

While Kirsten benefits from the greatest degree of character development, a contract killer who becomes a key character spends much of his time worrying about getting home in time to be with his wife as she gives birth. I enjoyed the incongruity of an apparent sociopath’s concern about being a good husband. Zach, on the other hand, could have used a bit more character development, given his importance to the story.

The plot is unnecessarily convoluted and depends too much on coincidental or secret relationships. Still, the story held my interest until the action ended. The last several pages are devoted to an expository explanation of how all the loose ends tie together. Some of that seemed a bit contrived. Fortunately, the fun of trying to puzzle out the story’s various mysteries outweighs the novel’s flaws. And the very last chapter, a short one, contains an out of the blue surprise that overcame any reservations I had about the story’s weaknesses.

RECOMMENDED

The Cover Wife by Dan Fesperman

Published by Knopf on July 6, 2021

In a certain kind of spy novel, nothing is as it seems. There are secrets within secrets. False identities conceal other false identities. Telling the good guys from the bad, the truth from lies, becomes as difficult for the reader as it is for the protagonist. Spy novels of that nature are good fun when they are handled skillfully. The Cover Wife is Dan Fesperman’s tutorial in deception.

Professor Winston Armitage, a scholar of Aramaic and Arabic languages, has written a book that contends the Quran has been mistranslated. The virgins that have been promised to martyrs are actually raisins or white grapes. Since terrorists would be unlikely to sacrifice their lives for raisins in the afterlife, even particularly delicious raisins, the book is intended to cause a stir in the terrorist community. At least, the CIA hopes that will be the result. Armitage is going on a book tour at the CIA’s expense, a scheme of information warfare cooked up by Paul Bridger, who manages operations across Europe.

Claire Saylor has a complicated history with Bridger. He assigns Claire to the team that will guard Armitage. She will play the role of Armitage’s wife. In an unofficial role, Bridger wants Claire to conduct surveillance in Hamburg. She conducts unofficial surveillance of her own and photographs someone in Hamburg who might be running the operation, using Bridger as a front.

Two other characters in Hamburg are important to the story. One is a young man named Mahmoud who seems to be a willing and eager recruit to Osama bin Laden’s cause. The other is Ken Donlan, an FBI agent in Hamburg who has worked with Claire in the past. Claire and Ken encounter each other while they are both keeping a clandestine eye on Mahmoud.

They observe that Mahmoud seems to be getting along well with a group of young Muslims who are associated with terrorism. One member of the group is getting married. Another of Mahmoud's friends is already married but is being sent away on a mission. The young man’s headstrong wife entreats Mahmoud to talk her husband out of doing whatever he has been assigned to do. Mahmoud is enchanted and unnerved by the woman’s beauty. Even seeing her uncovered face seems like a sin for which he will need to atone. Mahmoud feels torn by divided loyalty to his friend and to a woman who will be at risk if she interferes with his friend’s assignment.

The plot could move in many directions. Part of the intrigue is generated by uncertainty. What is the story about? What is Bridger’s endgame? Who is the mysterious man in Claire’s photograph? What plan is taking Mahmoud and his friends away from Hamburg? The questions eventually converge, yielding a surprising answer that causes the reader to rethink assumptions about how the plot has unfolded. Fesperman misleads the reader, but only because his characters are misled. In fact, the reader will come to understand the story’s key truth before it becomes apparent to the characters.

Claire and Ken are reasonably complex and likable characters. They play the civil servant role that is common in espionage thrillers — spies who want to do the right thing but haven’t been told the secrets that will help them understand what is right and what is wrong. They work for bureaucrats who are also common in spy thrillers, employees who have risen in the ranks because of their ability to stab others in the back to protect their positions.

Fesperman conceived an excellent idea and avoided being overly ambitious in its execution. He puts all of those elements into play to tell a relatively simple story that seems complex to the characters, simply because they aren’t allowed to see the big picture. For pulling off a credible surprise — the kind of surprise that, when the truth dawns on the reader, will provoke an “Oh wow” — at the end of an entertaining story, Fesperman earns an easy recommendation.

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