Interlibrary Loan by Gene Wolfe

Published by Tor Books on June 30, 2020

A sequel to A Borrowed Man, Interlibrary Loan is Gene Wolfe’s final novel. Wolfe reportedly turned it over to his publisher shortly before his death, but it feels incomplete. Perhaps if Wolfe had survived, an editor might have wanted him to flesh out the story, or at least to provide additional context for the ending, but Wolfe died and the manuscript is what we have, take it or leave it.

The 22nd century world established in A Borrowed Man makes cloned authors available to library patrons. Check out a cookbook author and you can get a hands-on cooking lesson. Check out Ern A. Smithe, a “recloned” mystery writer, and perhaps you can get help solving a mystery.

The background is interesting but it was largely established in A Borrowed Man. I’m not sure that Interlibrary Loan adds anything noteworthy to the concept.

The plot sends Smithe and a couple of female reclones (one a cookbook author, the other a romance novelist) to a smaller library on an interlibrary loan. Smithe prefers the library where he was residing but any chance to be checked out is welcome. Being checked out once a year pretty much guarantees his future. A prolonged period of being ignored might cause the library system to burn him as an unwanted book.

The little girl who checks out Smithe at her mother’s direction explains that a dark spooky shape invades her mother’s bedroom at night. The mother, Adah Fevre, wants Smithe to solve a mystery involving a treasure map pasted into a book. The map has hallucinatory properties. Why this should be true is, like much of the plot, is never adequately explained. The beginning of the story seems like a collection of false starts that might have been trimmed away if Wolfe had lived to give the manuscript the rewrite it needs.

The story sends Smithe and a reclone named Audrey (famed for writing books about her adventures as an explorer) to Corpse Island, where Adah’s estranged husband finds cadavers that his anatomy students can dissect. The husband is busy having sex with the reclone romance writer (who doesn’t seem to mind) and Smithe gets busy with Audrey (to their mutual satisfaction, at least in Smithe’s opinion). Adah is jealous but Adah is also crazy so nobody pays much attention to her unless she’s holding a knife.

Something like an adventure story that turns into a treasure hunt follows the arrival on Corpse Island. A treasure is located but its purpose or properties are never explained. Reclones come and go, sometimes returning as different reclones of the same dead author. It’s all a bit confusing, made all the more so by an unexplained portal to an ambiguous place through which nebulous beings travel for mysterious reasons. Perhaps Wolfe intended to elaborate on the other world in a later book. Perhaps he simply sent off an unfinished manuscript because he didn’t want his estate to refund his advance for failing to submit the book. We’ll never know.

The story and the relationships are sort of intriguing, but the novel’s merits are balanced by its flaws. Fans of A Borrowed Man might want to read Interlibrary Loan simply to immerse themselves further in the strange future that Wolfe created. Other readers might find it more satisfying to read or reread Wolfe’s earlier and better books.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Nine Shiny Objects by Brian Castleberry

Published by HarperCollins/Custom House on June 30, 2020

Knowing only that the book had something to do with lights in the sky, I thought Nine Shiny Objects might be a science fiction novel about first contact with aliens. It isn’t. The novel is more of a generational saga. The only aliens are Mexicans and Asians who immigrated to the United States to give their children the hope of a better life. The hope is realized for some of those children but not for the one who dies.

The story is told in nine chapters, each focusing on a different character, each beginning about five or ten years after the last chapter ends. The novel spans a period from 1947 to 1987. While the chapters are linked by certain locations and events, they read very much like self-contained short stories. Brian Castleberry’s goal is to show connections, cause-and-effect relationships, actions that set events in motion, spiraling into unexpected outcomes. While the characters and their lives are intriguing, I’m not sure the stories cohere in a way that creates a unified story.

The novel begins with Oliver Danville, who reads about a sighting of nine objects in the sky at Mount Rainier. Danville makes a pilgrimage, convinced that he will encounter a guiding intelligence that will give meaning to his aimless life. As he approaches his destination, he meets a farming family. Saul and Martha Penrod agree to join him on his quest, leaving behind Paul and Jack, their two adult sons. For years Paul will carry a grudge against Danville, who (in his view) lured their parents away, never to return. Jack later wonders whether that event instilled the anger that motivated the rest of Paul’s life, the hatred of hippies and commies and nonwhites, of anyone who did not fit within his narrow vision of what America should be.

Danville has a sister named Eileen, who in the next chapter falls in love with a waitress named Claudette, a character who reappears at the novel’s end. Eileen believes her brother, who now calls himself the Tzadi Sophit, had a vision, that he carries a message transmitted to humans by aliens. He is, in other words, the leader of a cult that might be a forerunner of Scientology.

The novel’s focal point, however, is a Long Island real estate development called Eden Gardens, a place that Eileen designed and that Seeker Industries built. Eden Gardens is on the outskirts of Ridge Landing, a community that is barely tolerant of its Jewish residents and that relies on a racial covenant to exclude people of color. Eden Gardens was imagined as a shared community and disparaged as a commune, a tract of houses that sat empty until 1957 when, in the dead of night, the Seekers’ leader filled it with his racially and ethnically mixed followers. Paul Penrod, an avowed racist, is there when Eden Gardens is being built, and plays a key role in the violence that shapes the rest of the novel.

From that foundation, the story lurches onward. A young black man named Stanley West witnessed the events in Eden Gardens. In a chapter that takes place a few years later, we learn how West's short stay in Ridge Landing affected the course of his life. A songwriter stars in a chapter that tangentially reintroduces Max Feldberg, who was a child of dubious parenting in Ridge Landing. That chapter culminates in ambiguous events involving another perceived cult that sends shock waves into the future. We learn about that event in a chapter that focuses on one of the Ridge Landing bigots who resents hearing about it from Morley Safer on 60 Minutes. By the end of the chapter, the bigoted character hints at the possibility of learning to overcome the senseless hate that has infected her community.

A popular radio talk show host with an affinity for conspiracy stories carries a chapter. Max’s daughter carries another. The last chapter brings back Paul and Jack. One of them is dead and the other doesn’t seem to realize, or care, that he’s interacting with a ghost.

At its best, Nine Shiny Objects tells a story of intolerance and its consequences. Without preaching, it touches on some of the low points in American history, from McCarthyism and entrenched racism to Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War. There is a bit of hope in the story, if only because the reader understands that prejudice endured by gay and black and Mexican characters will inspire civil rights struggles that will slowly erode (but not defeat) bigotry. Sadly, we know from the nightly news that the struggle must continue through future generations if the American ideal of equality and progress is ever to be realized.

At its worst, the novel is a surprisingly vague in critical moments. Max, for example, seems to have been leading a watered-down version of a Manson-like cult, but I would have enjoyed hearing Morley Safer's report given the absence of detail that we get from Castleberry. The same is true of Danville’s cult, about which we learn too little. These omissions seem odd, given Castleberry’s talent for delivering fully formed characters and imagining in depth the communities in which his characters reside.

I regarded the last chapter’s reliance on a ghost as having gone one contrivance too far. I’m not sure that all parts of the story contribute to a cohesive whole; at times, the novel seems a bit wobbly. As is sometimes true of first novels, Castleberry’s ambition may have exceeded his ability to tell a manageable story. The novel's drama tends to get lost in the wealth of background detail. But I love the complexity of the characters, the fluidity of Castleberry’s prose, the ways in which the chapters vary from each other, and the core message that envisioning a perfect community is much easier than building one.

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Highfire by Eoin Colfer

Published by Harper Perennial on January 28, 2020

I don’t make a habit of reading books in which dragons play a central role — or any role — but Highfire delivered the offbeat humor that the description promised. It’s hard to take a dragon seriously when he wears a Flashdance t-shirt and cargo shorts.

Vern (a/k/a Wyvern, a/k/a Lord Highfire) is, so far as he knows, the last dragon on Earth. Humans “managed to all but extinctify dragons back the day with nothing but crossbows and malicious intent,” leaving Vern with a serious grudge against the human race. He lays low in a Louisiana swamp, where he is occasionally forced to teach the alligators who’s boss.

Although Vern does his best to stay away from humans, he crosses paths with a teenager named Everett “Squib” Moreau. Squib has taken a summer job running moonshine and untaxed cigarettes for Bodi Irwin. He hopes to pay off his mother’s debts so that he and his mother can move away from the swamp. One motivation for moving is to protect his mother from Regence Hooke, whose duty to enforce the law has been corrupted by the cash he makes running errands for a drug cartel. Hooke has his eye on Squib’s mother but he’s preoccupied with a scheme to advance his career by running guns from Louisiana (where they are cheap and plentiful) to California (where they are regulated and therefore command a higher price).

Squib is transporting moonshine through the swamp when he witnesses Hooke commit a murder. Fleeing before he can be identified, Squib comes upon Vern. He flees again before Vern can toast him. With both Vern and Hooke chasing after him, thinks look bleak for Squib. Circumstances nevertheless conspire to turn Squib into Vern’s employee, as Vern needs someone to make his beer runs, his mogwai buddy Waxman having gone into hibernation.

The plot generally involves Squib’s effort to stay alive as Vern and Hooke go to war against each other. You would think a dragon would have the upper hand, but Vern is getting old and he doesn’t always have the oil in his system that he needs to fuel his fire. Hooke, on the other hand, is heavily armed and can call upon the resources of a cartel for assistance. The novel culminates in a glorious battle of the bayou.

If the plot sounds silly, it isn’t meant to be anything else. The story works because Eoin Colfer writes a laugh or two into every page. Colfer litters the text with jokes, inventive dialog, and commentary that is both irreverent and irrelevant (Vern hates the way dragons are depicted on Game of Thrones but the song “Blue Bayou” brings a tear to his eye).

The novel does have a serious message about prejudice and tolerance — in this case, prejudice against humans, some of whom are admittedly intolerable. “Humans, dragons, mogwai —ain’t no bad species nor good species,” Waxman tells Vern, who sort of agrees by the end of the novel, given the efforts that a few decent humans make to save his dragon skin (before it sheds). Replacing “species” with “races” brings the message closer to home, but Highfire isn’t a preachy novel. It is instead a very funny novel, one that makes me glad I overcame my own prejudice against books that feature dragons.

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The Red Lotus by Chris Bohjalian

Published by Doubleday on March 17, 2020

The Red Lotus is the name of a plague that has been weaponized as a bioweapon. It is a bit chilling to read about a plague in the midst of a pandemic, but the pandemic discussion is prescient. Says one character: “Got to be ready for the next pandemic. Got to have new antibiotics. Got to know what we’re up against. I mean, it’s coming, and New York City is the perfect place for a catastrophe. We have lots of people living in very close quarters.” Chris Bohjalian got that right.

The Red Lotus plague is carried by rats, although the weaponized version can spread from person to person. We learn quite a bit more than I needed to know about the rat world. Whether Vietnamese rats, having been exposed to Agent Orange, have evolved to be tougher than New York rats, which have been exposed to New Yorkers, is a question that preoccupies some of the characters. Saying much more about the nature of the plague might reveal spoilers. Instead, let’s look at how the plot sets up.

Alexis Remnick is an ER doctor who has a history of teenage angst that involved cutting herself. Now she blocks the pain by cutting her patients and sewing them back together, a task that helps her tend to herself by tending to others. Alexis met Austin Harper when he came to the ER for treatment of a gunshot wound, having been shot for apparently random reasons while playing darts in a bar. One thing leads to another and before long, Alexis and Austin are going bicycling in Vietnam, where Austin feels the need to pay his respects to relatives who were wounded or killed during the war.

Austin disappears in Vietnam. When his body is found, the police conclude that he was the victim of a hit-and-run while biking by himself. Alexis identifies his body in the morgue, but she also inspects it from a physician’s perspective, taking note of a puncture wound in his hand that isn’t consistent with a bicycling accident.

Back in America, Alexis meets with Austin’s parents and learns that the story he told about the war experiences of his relatives was bogus. Alexis hires a private investigator named Ken Sarafian to help her uncover the truth about Austin's death. A Vietnamese cop, an FBI agent stationed in southeast Asia, and friends of Alexis all play varying roles in helping Alexis understand what Austin was up to in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, it had something to do with rats. Intermixed with those chapters are chapters that follow the bad guys who had something to do with Austin’s death, or with rats, or both.

For the most part, characterization is strong. I’m not sure I quite bought Alexis’ need as an adult to get out her X-Acto knife and ponder the merits of once again being “the captain of her own pain” by cutting herself. Maybe old habits die hard, but it struck me as a contrivance in an adult who has made something of herself. Alexis is a smart, resourceful, and likeable character who would have earned just as much sympathy without the cutting.

While I didn’t entirely buy into the plot — Austin’s motivation for his actions is less than satisfying — I was carried along by Bohjalian’s smooth prose. The story is engaging because it requires some concentration to keep track of all the moving pieces. All of the pieces come together in an ending that isn’t particularly surprising until the epilog comes along. If for no other reason than its timely reminder that the United States should always be prepared for a pandemic, The Red Lotus is a thriller that merits attention.

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The Falling Woman by Richard Farrell

Published by Algonquin Books on June 23, 2020

The Falling Woman tells a fascinating story. Erin Geraghty knows her death from pancreatic cancer is approaching. Against her husband’s wishes, she flies across the country to attend a retreat for cancer victims. Somewhere over Kansas, the plane on which she is flying explodes. Erin should fall to her death — a quicker death than the one she has been expecting — but she miraculously survives. And then, without contacting her husband or her two daughters, she disappears, leaving them to assume that she died in the crash.

Part of the story addresses how surviving the immediate threat of death, against all odds, alters Erin’s life, in part by vanquishing her fear of death. The bulk of the story, however, follows Charlie Radford, an aviation accident investigator, who is charged with investigating whether rumors of a crash survivor are real. Charlie is understandably skeptical. He is a rational man whose life is cabined by facts. His job is to ask the right questions and to let the facts carry him to a logical conclusion. Airline passengers who survive a six-mile fall are not part of a rational, fact-driven crash investigation. But the media will not let go of the story and families will not let go of the hope that a loved one might have survived. Charlie is therefore assigned to conduct what amounts to a missing persons investigation that he views as a fruitless distraction from the work he should be doing.

There is an element of the miraculous in Erin’s survival, but people have survived such falls. The story does not suggest that Erin was the recipient of divine intervention. Rather, it posits that she simply benefitted from a freakish but plausible set of circumstances that slowed the final stage of her fall. Erin is nevertheless left to wonder at the irony of knowing that each of the other passengers would likely have had a much longer reprieve from death if they had survived in her stead.

The story gains a sense of realism from its detailed depiction of a crash investigation and from the bureaucratic infighting of the crash investigators. Like all sizable offices, some employees compete to be recognized, some are driven by flashes of insight, and some succeed by plodding through the details. Charlie does not do well with office politics. Yet he’s always wanted to work a major investigation and this is his chance. Being detailed to chase down a rumor rather than performing useful and productive work is a nightmare that, he fears, will make him the agency laughingstock.

While the plot is compelling and fast moving, characterization is the novel’s strength. Charlie’s sense of self-worth comes from his work. He grew up wanting to fly but a heart defect killed that dream. His wife should understand that he is driven to be the best crash investigator he can be (he is the same person she married), but her maternal instincts are kicking into high gear, perhaps because she craves the constant attention that a baby, unlike Charlie, will provide. Charlie repeatedly puts off talking about the baby issue, creating a rift in their relationship and providing some of the novel’s tension.

In some ways, Charlie’s relationship with his wife parallels Erin’s relationship with her husband. Erin’s husband was, she admits, a reliable provider and a fine human being, but she regards him as stiff and incapable of satisfying her need for spontaneity. Having fallen from the plane and into a new life, she turns for help to a married man who once satisfied her needs, but he thinks she is cruel for wanting to hide instead of returning to her husband and daughters.

The reader might also judge Erin for being selfish. At times, she judges herself. Yet as Erin and Charlie have long and meaningful talks about their lives — talks they never had with their spouses — they each learn something about themselves, and the reader learns that it isn’t easy to judge someone without living their lives.

The novel’s central question and dramatic focus is whether Charlie will be loyal to his agency by revealing the circumstances of Erin’s survival, or will respect Erin’s desire to be left alone so that she can live the last few months of her life in peace. There are strong arguments to be made in favor of either decision and it is a tribute to Richard Farrell that the outcome is far from clear until it arrives. In that sense, The Falling Woman succeeds as a suspense novel. In a broader sense, it succeeds as an insightful character-driven novel of substantial literary merit.

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