We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker

First published in the UK in 2020; published by Henry Holt and Co. on March 2, 2021

Life is changing for Chief Walker. Walk can no longer conceal the tremors caused by Parkinson’s. Soon he’ll no longer be able to function in his job as chief of police. He loves Cape Haven but the town is in transition — tourists are buying up the choicest locations — and Walk’s persistent attempts to prevent new building permits from being issued are a lost cause. The only change that Walk sees as an improvement is the release of his childhood friend Vincent King from prison.

When they were both young, Vincent killed a girl in a hit-and-run without realizing that the accident had occurred. Walk found the body. Vincent served thirty years in prison, doing all he could to make the time difficult, apparently to punish himself. He was attacked by another inmate and killed the man. The authorities chalked it up to self-defense, but the death assured that Vincent wouldn’t benefit from an early release.

When Star Radley, the sister of the girl Vincent killed, is murdered in her home soon after Vincent’s release, Vincent calls the police to report the death. The police find him in the home with blood on his hands but they don’t find the gun with which Star was shot. Vincent won’t talk about what happened. Star’s daughter Duchess was out running an errand and her son Robin was in his bedroom. Robin won’t or can’t talk about anything he might have heard.

Vincent is arrested and his conviction seems assured. Convinced of Vincent’s innocence, Walk looks for an alternative killer. He’s joined in that quest by Martha May, who was bonded to Walk and Vincent in high school. Martha is a lawyer who helps abused women, not a criminal defense lawyer, but she’s the only lawyer Vincent will accept. Walk and Martha have two suspects. One is a creep named Richard Darke who apparently tried to take advantage of Star in the past. Vincent refused to sell his family land to Darke, preventing Darke from completing a development that will vastly increase his wealth.

We Begin at the End mixes a murder mystery with a courtroom drama, adds a couple of orphans to beef up the human interest, and injects a bit of romance to balance the gloom of undeserved deaths. The orphans are sympathetic characters with contrasting personalities —six-year-old Robin is a sweet and innocent boy who deals with multiple losses as the story unfolds, while his thirteen-year-old sister has bottled up her emotions and defined herself as an outlaw, the prototypical bad girl who isn’t all that bad. If introducing two plucky kids and a lawman with Parkinson’s seems manipulative, an obvious attempt to tug at a reader’s heartstrings, Chris Whitaker deserves praise for his ability to tell a story that evokes honest emotion without feeling contrived.

The small town where most of the story takes place, as well as small communities in Montana and Wyoming, contribute to the novel’s realism. The plot gives meaningful roles to neighbors who seem to be at war with each other, creating an abundance of suspects for the two killings that become the story’s focus. It also introduces supporting characters who are kind-hearted, if a bit broken, offsetting the more villainous characters. Yet even the villains are multi-dimensional, capable of empathy and refusing to cross certain lines even when they follow their selfish instincts.

The story is sufficiently complex to sustain interest without becoming confusing. Credible plot twists bring new surprises whenever it seems that the mysteries have been solved. The ending is sad but the story as a whole is sad because it reflects the truth that life isn’t always what we want it to be.

Good stories teach good lessons. Much of the story, as seen through the experiences of multiple characters, is about overcoming fear, including fear that we will not live up to our self-imposed standards. There are moments of redemption in We Begin at the End. Moments of hope. Moments in which fears are faced. Moments in which demons are confronted and faced down. They don’t offset the story’s sadness — the sadness gives the story its honesty — but they offer reason to believe that hardship and futility are not the purpose of life, that we can endure suffering if our endurance makes life better for people we care about, that we can learn to trust others and to trust ourselves.

RECOMMENDED

Foregone by Russell Banks

Publsihed by Ecco on March 2, 2021

Foregone might be read as a thought exercise, an exploration of the nature and meaning of change as it applies to a human life. Can people change in a fundamental way? They can try to change. They can pretend to be a different person, as actors do when they take the stage. They can alter their behavior and perhaps their personalities. But can they change their character? Leonard Fife struggles with that question as he approaches death, tries to make a new life with a better character, but perhaps he only succeeds in his imagination.

Fife was a celebrated documentarian in Canada, although his work is unknown outside of his country. He first gained fame with a documentary about American draft resisters who came to Canada. Malcolm MacLeod, one of Fife’s proteges, has agreed to make a documentary for the CBC (to be titled Oh, Canada) about Fife’s life and death. He doesn’t have much time to shoot the film because cancer is eating Fife’s body and perhaps his mind. Using Fife’s signature technique by interviewing Fife under a spotlight in a darkened room, Malcolm wants Fife to talk about his experience as a draft resister, how his escape to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War informed his work, and why he made certain choices while filming various documentaries. Fife has other ideas.

Fife begins the interview by explaining that his story of coming to Canada as a draft resister was an invention. He says he wants to tell the true story because his beloved wife, Emma Flynn, deserves to know the truth about the man she loves. Fife then embarks on a long, detailed story about two marriages in America that he has never discussed, one to a woman of unsound mind, the second to the daughter of a wealthy Virginia family. He had a chance to take over his father-in-law’s family business, but instead went to Vermont and had a brief dalliance with the wife of a friend. The details become progressively foggy as he tells the story, so it is never perfectly clear how or why he ended up in Canada. He was apparently running away, but from his life rather than the war.

As he speaks, Emma becomes increasingly concerned that the process of filming is harmful to Fife and that the finished product will harm his reputation. His Haitian nurse also objects to a process that she sees as cruel and unduly taxing — she thinks Fife should die in peace — but Fife insists that Malcolm press ahead with the interview.

As Fife tells his meandering story, refusing to answer Malcolm’s questions about his work so that he can discuss what he believes to be important, it becomes clear that Fife’s attempt to tell the truth is impaired by Fife’s inability to discern it. Fife is heavily sedated and in extreme pain. As he speaks, details change, times and places become jumbled and distorted. Perhaps he knew Bob Dylan and Joan Baez but did he meet them in Canada or Boston? After a bit, Fife even begins to question whether the words he is speaking reflect the clarity of the story he is trying to tell. He is sure that he has been speaking from early morning to mid-afternoon when Malcolm tells him that the interview has lasted only a couple of hours, and that Fife must have misunderstood remarks that he believes suggest otherwise. It seems unlikely that Fife could have related the entire story, replete with cultural analysis of topics that include Kerouac and cars, in just half a morning. Fife thus becomes the epitome of the unreliable narrator, although not by intention.

On the other hand, it isn’t clear that Fife ever intended to tell the historical truth. He may intend his story to express the deeper truth of how he feels about himself, how his character is flawed in ways that Emma has never understood.

At times, Foregone is a frustrating novel. It seems like a slow walk to an elusive destination that moves farther away with each step taken in its direction. Initially, the destination seems to be the truth that Fife promised, the actual and shocking reason he moved to Canada. But by the novel’s end, the destination has become less important than the journey, a trip that exists only in Fife’s failing and jumbled memory. Perhaps the journey’s true destination is Fife’s end-of-life fear that he hasn’t been the person he should have been, and that his love of Emma, which should have been primary at all times, is all that matters. Emma echoes that belief in her recognition that nothing Fife says in the interview is important. She knows what’s important: he loved her, and she loved him.

When the cameraman asks Malcolm whether he thinks Fife’s story was true, Malcolm shrugs off the question because the truth doesn’t matter. What matters is that he got his film. What matters to the Haitian nurse is something more personal. What matters, Foregone seems to say, is a question of perspective. Perhaps it is only at the end of life that we gain the perspective to understand what is truly important.

Fife’s story, unreliable and frustrating though it might be, is always interesting. Nothing ever seems settled, and if some of the story is true, it seems awfully unfinished, leaving more questions than answers. Those very qualities — faults, I would have called them, before reading to the end — capture the larger truth that so much of life remains unsettled at the end of life. I wouldn’t say that the truths Fife has embraced at the novel’s end are profound — yes, love is a good thing to have; yes, we should prioritize the things that matter — but the story illustrates the profound changes that accompany aging and death, whether expressed as regret or as a last desperate attempt to reshape character, to leave the world as a better person, as if wishing it were true might be enough to make it true.

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A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré

Published by Viking on September 5, 2017

John le Carré created the most extraordinary character in spy fiction when George Smiley appeared in Call for the Dead (1961). Smiley became a primary or secondary character in several other novels, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), the novel that put John le Carré on the map. In the Karla trilogy (1974 to 1979) — the best spy novels and among the finest literary novels I’ve ever read — Smiley unmasks a mole in British intelligence. Smiley was a moral man who used immoral means to do his job well and suffered for it. Younger than Smiley but often at his side was Peter Guillam, a key player who helped Smiley gather information that exposed the double agent and brought down Karla, the mole’s handler.

John le Carré died at the end of 2020, leaving behind a legacy of brilliant spy fiction (plus a mainstream novel that I quite enjoyed). His final novel, published in 2019, was a standalone. Two years before the release of that novel, he penned the aptly titled A Legacy of Spies, the last novel in the Smiley series. In many ways, it showcases his own legacy by reaching back to the events in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and explaining how events leading up to and following the tragedy of that novel — Alec Leamas and Liz Gold are shot at the Berlin Wall — were manipulated by Smiley and the man known only as Control.

At Smiley’s direction, Guillam has kept the true details of that incident out of the official record. Eventually the truth bites at his ankles, as Alec’s son, Cristoph, together with Liz’s daughter Karen, have sued the government, claiming that it is complicit in their parents’ deaths. Well, they’re right about that to some degree, although they don’t know all the details of Operation Windfall, conceived to smoke out the traitor in the upper ranks of the Secret Intelligence Service and to mislead Russia while protecting a vital source, an operation that had unfortunate consequences for Leamas and Gold.

Now the SIS needs to feed someone to the wolves to satisfy Parliament. Smiley is nowhere to be found. Official files have disappeared and, if they could be found, they would be covered with Guillam’s fingerprints. Guillam is politely interrogated before being locked in a library where he can read some of the secret files he hid (although not the ones he concealed off premises) as a prelude to answering more questions. Much of the novel is told in Guillam’s memory as he reads memoranda, some of which he wrote, and tries to assemble a coherent story about the past that doesn’t quite live up to the truth. As he does so, he fears that only Smiley can save him from his own indiscretions.

It put a smile on my face just to read the names of characters who have become iconic in spy fiction: Toby Esterhase, Bill Hayden, and the memorable Jim Prideaux, who makes a brief appearance near the novel’s end, quite unchanged since his featured role in The Honourable Schoolboy. And of course Smiley himself, still idealistic, still troubled by the moral choices that challenge his idealism. Looking back on his life, Smiley admits that he has never cared about preserving capitalism or Christendom. His duty was to England, not the England of Brexit but an England that was “leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason.” That England, he frets, may be moving away from reason and returning to darkness, as was much of the world when A Legacy of Spies was published.

Guillam is old as he tells this story. Unless John le Carré left a nearly finished manuscript lying about, it is his last appearance, a last glimpse of all the characters who did their best during the Cold War to lead England out of darkness. It offers the final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is Smiley’s career and puts a frame around the completed picture. John le Carré did his fans a huge favor, and added to an unparalleled legacy of his own, with A Legacy of Spies.

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The Art of Falling by Danielle McLaughlin

Published by Random House on January 5, 2021

The Art of Falling is a domestic drama mixed with an art drama. The domestic drama involves spouses who have been dishonest with each other, although the wife’s transgression involves a kept secret she arguably had no duty to reveal. Just as their strained marriage seems to be mending, their teenage daughter takes an interest in an older boy whose actions cause mild tension in the family dynamic. Like most domestic dramas, the family’s mundane issues are likely to be of more interest to the participants than to outsiders. Readers who are not fans of generic soap opera plots are likely to be among the outsiders who don’t care much about this family’s dysfunctions.

The art drama is more interesting. It involves a sculpture that (according to one theory) was made from a porous stone so that it would decay with time. Nessa McCormack is negotiating on behalf of a gallery to acquire the Chalk Sculpture from the family of its creator. Robert Locke has been dead for nearly twenty years, but Nessa has done her due diligence by researching his life and art, including interviews with Locke’s daughter, Loretta. The sculpture is believed to be of Locke’s pregnant wife, modeled on a photo of her taken sixteen years before the sculpture was created. Locke’s wife is still alive, but Loretta keeps her sheltered from the world, ostensibly because of her delicate health.

Nessa is surprised when a woman who didn’t come up in her research suddenly claims to have helped with the Chalk Sculpture’s creation. The woman, Melanie Doerr, would like some credit for the role she played. She is both persistent and annoying as she presses her claims. Loretta tells Nessa that she knows nothing about Melanie, but as events unfold, the reader will suspect that Melanie, while possibly daft, might be telling some version of the truth and that Loretta might be shading it, if not telling outright lies.

Most of the characters in The Art of Falling have been untruthful at some point. Sorting out the lies from the truth is a challenge. Did Melanie create the Chalk Sculpture, perhaps while sleeping with Locke? Did Stuart Harkin have just one affair (as he told Nessa, referring to his affair with her) or multiple affairs, as he apparently confessed to his wife Amy. Or was Amy lying when she recorded those affairs in the diary that nobody knew she kept?

Amy's son Luke reads the diary and suspects that Nessa was the cause of his mother’s suicide, fueling the soap operatic nature of the plot. Nessa frets that Luke will reveal the truth to her daughter Jessica when she isn’t fretting that Jessica will sleep with Luke. The affair occurred before Nessa’s marriage to her husband Philip, but her own transgression doesn’t deter her from judging Philip for having his own affair with Cora Wilson (whose daughter Mandy happens to be Jessica’s best friend). That affair isn’t surprising because it is the duty of a husband in a domestic drama to have an affair so he can complain that his wife never lets him forget what a rogue he is.

The Art of Falling is the kind of novel in which characters make a mess of their lives, burst into tears, and spend the rest of the book wallowing in their self-inflicted misery. Stories of that nature tend to overwhelm the reader with melodrama. While The Art of Falling doesn’t overwhelm, it repeatedly serves up scenes that are overly familiar, including Jennifer’s trite response to her mother’s parenting: “I hate you. I’m never going to speak to you again. How could you do that to me?” Nessa worries that “I don’t seem to have charge of her anymore” but since Jennifer is 16, what does she expect?

Danielle McLaughlin is a talented prose stylist. She creates characters in satisfying depth, even if the characters in The Art of Falling are unappealing. The mystery of Melanie Doerr’s claimed contribution to the Chalk Sculpture holds the novel together, giving the reader something more interesting to think about than Nessa’s first-world problems. The virtues and faults of The Art of Falling are in equipoise, resulting in a recommendation only for dedicated fans of domestic drama and, perhaps, for readers who are really into stories about art.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Exit by Belinda Bauer

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Atlantic Monthly Press on February 2, 2021

Exit is a clever murder mystery concerning a death that may or may not be a murder. The story becomes progressively darker and more amusing as other lives are placed at risk from murders that may or may not be consummated.

The story revolves around the Exiteers, a group of people, mostly older, who help the sick and dying end their lives. They don’t want to cross the line by committing murder, so they are careful to take no fatal action of their own. Instead, they advise the soon-to-be-departed of a dentist who will sell them nitrous oxide. At the appointed hour, a team of two Exiteers arrives to provide comfort as their client stops breathing air and starts breathing nitrous. The Exiteers take a copy of the person’s Will (to prove, if they ever must, that they did not benefit from the death) and remove the nitrous cannister, making it appear that the client died a natural death.

The Exiteers are managed by Geoffrey Skeet from his wheelchair. Skeet sends Felix Pink and Amanda Bell to help Charles “Skipper” Cann make his way to whatever lies beyond. The enter the house and find a wheezing man in bed. The man grasps for a mask that is connected to the nitrous but drops it. Amanda makes the foolish mistake of handing it to him, perhaps becoming culpable for his death. That turns out to be the least of their worries when they discover that the person who died from inhaling the gas was not Charles at all, but his son Albert, who apparently thought he was reaching for his oxygen mask. Charles' grandson Reggie eventually reveals that he had arranged for the Exiteers to help Charles die, leading Felix (and the reader) to wonder whether the Exiteers were set up to kill the wrong man and, if so, whether Reggie was behind it.

Horse racing and loan sharks play a role in a plot that has nearly every character worried about paying debts, including Detective Constable Calvin Bridge. Calvin plays the horses and worries that a gangster, who placed a large wager on a horse that Calvin bet on, will seek retribution if the horse loses. Calvin has other worries as well, including his fear that his bosses will discover that his family members are all criminals. His biggest fear at the moment is that he won’t solve the mystery of Albert’s death.

Exit is a comedy of errors in which unexpected plot twists assure that nothing is quite as it seems. Belinda Bauer employs the understated humor that the British have long mastered to assure the reader’s constant amusement. The police get everything wrong and the reader will likely follow in their footsteps. The story does involve culprits and a murderous scheme, but the true culprits are skillfully concealed by Bauer’s deft misdirection. As one of the police inspectors says at the end, “I did not see that coming."

A couple of unexpected romances sweeten a plot that is never in danger of souring. Its focus on Charles, a crusty codger who wants to die, is tempered by the kindness of Felix, who is 75 but still sees the value in all lives, including that of Charles. Yet the novel also suggests, with good humor and a dash of wisdom, that choosing your own time and place and way to die might be all that anyone can ask.

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