The Silent War by Andreas Norman

First published in Sweden in 2017; published in translation by Quercus on September 3, 2019

The Silent War differs from most espionage thrillers, in that it pits two allies against each other. Whether spy agencies should treat any nation as an ally, as opposed to a competitor to spy upon, is one of the book’s salient questions.

Betrayal is the constant theme of spy novels. Betrayal in the form of infidelity is central to The Silent War. Jonathan Green works for MI6 and is having an affair with Frances because their sex is so much better than he has with his wife Kate. Kate suspects Jonathan is seeing someone but she isn’t sure. As the station chief in Brussels, Jonathan has plenty of reasons to be secretive. One of his secrets involves Hercules, an operation proposed by Robert Davenport, head of the MI6 Middle East Department and Frances’ husband. There are leaks galore in the Brussels station, so Hercules will not be a secret for long.

The House in Turkey, near the Syrian border, is a part of Operation Hercules that even the Ministry of Defense doesn’t want to know about. Based on stolen documents, a Swedish intelligence operative named Bente Jensen learns that the Brits are using the House to interrogate prisoners in unlawful ways. That this comes as a shock to anyone in an intelligence service is hard to swallow, but MI6 is willing to go to any length to keep the House a secret, particularly from British politicians who might find it embarrassing.

Robert has a Clash of Civilizations mindset. Jonathan is more reasonable and therefore has reservations about the House, but he must retrieve the documents if he is to keep his job. Jonathan is also tasked with contacting an asset in Syria, a dangerous mission that would not have been assigned if Jonathan had kept it in his pants.

Meanwhile, Bente’s husband Fredrik, like Kate’s, is sleeping with another woman. It is no coincidence that the woman has turned her amorous attention to Bente’s husband, nor is it a coincidence that Bente’s mobile phone has been attacked by a virus. That attack adds to the institutional distrust of Bente, who (in the opinion of her superiors) exercised questionable judgment by accepting documents purloined from the British, potentially creating a diplomatic crisis. Bente is keeping the leaked documents in a safe in her home, which seems like an unprofessional place to stash top secret goodies.

British spies are part of the rich literary tradition of espionage novels. Swedes, not so much. The change of pace, coupled with the diplomatic difficulties of one European nation spying on another, is the most interesting aspect of The Silent War. The focus on cheating husbands and clandestine houses reserved for torture is more typical fare. The Silent War holds few surprises as it addresses those themes.

Characterization is not neglected, although the hand-wringing spouses of both genders who fret about their marriages again offer few surprises. The novel does have some stimulating action scenes near the end. Since they involve agents of friendly powers shooting at each other, they stretch the limits of plausibility. While The Silent War isn’t top shelf spy fiction, it does just enough to warrant its placement on a lower middle shelf, worthy of being consumed after better spy novels have been devoured.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Amnesty by Aravind Adiga

Published by Scribner on February 18, 2020

Dhananjaya Rajaratnam has reinvented himself as Danny, a self-employed house cleaner in Sydney. For four years, he has been “a brown man in a white man’s city.” Danny is Tamil but he has added golden highlights to his hair. The weirdness of his appearance appeals to Australians, or so he believes. Danny was a minority in Sri Lanka but he prefers Australia, where being “not like everyone else” earns respect.

Danny came to Sydney on a student visa, dropped out, and stayed in the country illegally. He finds it easy to become “invisible to white people, who don’t see you anyway.” Danny works as a shelf stocker for an angry Greek shopkeeper. In exchange, he sleeps in a storeroom and gives the Greek half his earnings from cleaning jobs. Danny faces competition from Chinese and Nepali cleaners who offer more people on a team for the same hourly rate, but he scores clients by furnishing his own equipment; “a cleaner impresses with his autonomy.”

Danny is dating Sonja, an Asian whose accepting liberalism makes him comfortable. He has not told Sonja the real reason he can’t return to school or get a driver’s license. Nor does she know that he can’t get healthcare.

Those problems are common to undocumented migrants across the world, but Amnesty highlights a particular problem that has an impact not just on migrants, but on the societies in which they live. Many of the apartments Danny cleans are in the same vicinity. While cleaning one of them, he becomes aware that a crime was committed in another. A former cleaning client named Radha Thomas was murdered. He happens to know (and might be the only person who knows) that another client, a man named Prakash Wadhwa, was having an affair with Radha and had behaved violently toward her. Should he tell the police and risk deportation, or should he protect his own interest by allowing a possible killer to escape justice?

A just society, or even a society motivated by self-interest rather than prejudice, would reward a migrant who reports a crime by granting some form of amnesty. Deporting people who act in a country’s interest discourages undocumented migrants from doing the right thing. Even citizens who hate immigrants, citizens who are motivated by self-interest in the perceived struggle of “us” versus “them,” should be able to understand the logic of rewarding migrants who act in society’s interest rather than their own.

While Danny marvels at the justice system in Australia — a system considerably more just than Sri Lanka’s, were Danny was tortured for being Tamil — he knows that he will not be rewarded for contacting the police. He also knows that if he doesn’t, Prakash might flee the country, perhaps after killing Danny if Danny gives him that chance. Whether Danny will do the right thing under difficult circumstances — contact the police and risk deportation, tell the truth to Sonja and risk the end of their relationship — is the moral question that drives the plot.

The plot, however, is simply a vehicle to explore broader issues of social division. Aravind Adiga accomplishes that purpose with an observant view of Australian society. Danny perceives Sydney as divided between the thick bum suburbs, “where the working classes lived, ate badly, and cleaned for themselves,” and the thin bum suburbs, “where the fit and young people ate salads and jogged a lot but almost never cleaned their own homes.” The thick bums resent immigrants and the thin bums exploit them, exchanging cash for labor without asking questions that might compromise the arrangement.

In Danny’s unflattering opinion, “Australians aren’t particularly bright. They don’t work hard. They drink too much.  So you tell me. Why are they so rich?” The answer, of course, is that average Aussies are rich only in comparison to average citizens of less fortunate nations. Wealthy nations prosper, in part, by taking advantage of developing nations. The unequal distribution of wealth and how that bears on the issue of undocumented migration is one of Adiga’s underlying themes.

But even the brown men in the city are divided by status. The “Western Suburbs Indians, smug in their jobs and Toyota Camrys,” the Australian-born children who look at Danny with “I’ve got nothing in common with you, mate glances,” the Malaysian tourists shopping for cholesterol medication. Since they are Danny’s color, they all see him, and they all look down on him. Hence the golden highlights in Danny’s hair, the insolent indifference with which he returns their stares, the futile attempt to make them think his status might be similar to theirs.

Adiga addresses these urgent themes with his usual ability to find humor in serious issues, although his use of humor — including the social division between thick and thin bums — is less overt than in White Tiger and Selection Day. Adiga portrays Danny not as a stereotype or even an archetype of an illegal immigrant, but as a unique individual who, unlike the illegals he knows, does not experience shame as “an atmospheric force, pressing down from the outside,” but as a force that “bubbled up from within.” His shame is connected to his past in Sri Lanka. He would feel it even if Australia made him a citizen. For that reason, Adiga is an uncommonly sympathetic character, one who deals not only with the external pressure of prejudice and the fear of deportation, but internalized anxiety about his self-worth. In the end, Danny must ask himself what kind of person he truly is.

Amnesty is not a thriller, despite some marketing that suggests it can be read as one. The plot is thin by thriller standards, the action is tepid, and the resolution is unsurprising. As a serious exploration of issues confronting immigrants who lose (or never acquire) their legal status, Amnesty delivers provocative questions rather than chase scenes.  Both in its dissection of pressing social problems and in its portrayal of a complex protagonist, Amnesty is another compelling work from Aravind Adiga.

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Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

Published by Tom Doherty Associates/Tor.com on January 21, 2020

When nine African Americans who gathered for Bible study in a Charleston church were gunned down by a white supremacist, the shooting solidified a long-standing understanding that black lives only matter to some. That massacre, the Rodney King beating, and police shootings of unarmed African Americans around the nation are recurring images in Riot Baby. Black Lives Matter is a dominant theme, but the story indicts not just white violence against blacks but institutional racism that Tochi Onyebuchi imagines will soon be embedded in supposedly race-neutral algorithms. In the novel’s near future society, algorithms determine who gets out on parole, who gets shot or arrested by mechanized police. The algorithms are just a way to mask the race-conscious desire to control blacks, to assure their subjugation.

Ella Jackson has a Thing. She can balance a ball of light in her palm. She can make a rat’s head explode. She can make toilet paper fly off a bodega’s shelf. She can wrap a blanket around her Mama’s neck and lift her until her legs dangle in the air, all without touching the blanket or her Mama. Something is eating Ella from the inside, something that makes her leave home. Only years later does she realize the good that her Mama does, working in a hospital, standing next to trauma surgeons and wiping up the stomach acid that spills from open wounds.

Ella hates South Central, hates that Rodney King can be beaten like all her neighbors are beaten and nothing ever happens to the cops who beat them. Until she moves to New Haven, she protects her brother Kevin, but when Kev goes to prison, he protects Ella by telling her to visit in person, not as a ghost. He doesn’t want anyone to see what she can do. On bad days, though, he wishes she would burn Rikers to the ground.

Kev was born in South Central during the 1992 riots. He decides to live in Watts when he is paroled from his sentence. The parole board sets him up in a community that it controls, puts a monitoring chip in his thumb, and assigns him to a job. Kev chose Watts because it is as far from the East Coast and the trouble that sent him to prison as he can get. Ella is less sanguine about his choice.

After listening to the news in prison — more riots, rising hate crimes, “Nazis in the street killing black folk” — Kev expects to find a post-apocalyptic world. Instead he finds “refugee-type kids walking barefoot with pieces of glass in the bottoms of their feet, not even flinching because living through the End of the World enough times does that to you.” Through Ella, he soon learns that he is seeing change at its advent.

Riot Baby is largely Kev’s story, but the central moral question belongs to Ella, who wonders whether she should use her Thing to punish. A pastor tells her, “We don’t get where we’re going by matching hate for hate,” but Ella considers the reality that slaves were freed at gunpoint. Civil rights legislation followed protest that wasn’t always nonviolent. If she has a chance to be “the locust and the frogs and the rivers of blood,” what should she do? The pastor’s take is appealing, but anger motivates. From that perspective, the Rodney King riots were useful, maybe even a necessary cleansing. If people aren’t angry about living in a society that devalues them, and if they don’t show that anger, their value might never be recognized.

Riot Baby is not a comforting novel. Onyebuchi nevertheless tells a powerful story that invites serious thought about racial oppression and violence. It is possible that a future utopia might follow a dystopia founded on anger. Readers can differ as to whether a utopian outcome of revolution is either likely or worth the pain, but readers who are both rational and compassionate cannot argue with the need for change that Riot Baby dramatizes.

RECOMMENDED

The Rock Blaster by Henning Mankell

Published in Sweden in 1973; published in translation by Vintage on February 18, 2020

At some point during The Rock Blaster, the protagonist comments that there should be more books like those by Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg, whose “characters were not in any way remarkable. They were like all the others. But you get to see how much happened in their lives.” The Rock Blaster is Henning Mankell’s contribution to the literature of the Everyman.

Oskar Johannes Johansson identifies himself as a worker, what would now be called a manual laborer. Construction work, rock blasting, whatever comes along. “He belongs to a group that he sees as clearly defined and also clearly segregated.” His father and grandfather were workers. He has had “the same life as everyone else. Brutal swings between having work and being laid off.” Much has changed during his life but he feels he has had no part in shaping those changes. “The worker is a member of his community, but the forces driving and changing society are wielded by others.”

The narrator tells Oskar’s story in snippets, focusing on events between 1910 and 1969, with diversions that examine Oskar’s roots and the contemporaries who influenced his life. A defining moment comes in 1910, when Oskar proclaims himself a socialist and is no longer allowed to live at home. Another occurs in 1911, when he miraculously survives an explosion in a rock blasting accident. He loses an eye and has his eyelids sewn together rather than opting for a glass replacement. He loses a hand and prefers a stump to a hook. Near the end of his life he has three teeth but can’t be bothered to buy dentures because what’s the point? Oskar lives with deterioration and loss, accepts it and even embraces it as life taking its natural course.

Oskar is dating Elly before the accident, but she gets pregnant while he is in the hospital. By coincidence, he ends up marrying Elvira, her sister. They have children. He goes back to work as a rock blaster. He loses his job in the depression, gets a new one after unemployment peaks. He becomes a widower. He tries to comfort a friend who is losing his faculties to a degenerative disease. He loves the location of his inner-city apartment but the building gives way to a new housing project, forcing his relocation to a suburb. Later in life he spends summers on an island, in an old sauna that he has converted to a single room dwelling. He spends his last years recalling what it was like to be young and vigorous.

Like a Moberg novel, The Rock Blaster is the story of an ordinary life. Ordinary but not uneventful, in the way that all ordinary lives are assembled from a series of chance events. Oskar struggles and perseveres. He feels stupid and lonely, but he manages those feelings. Like a hundred billion others in human history, he’s here and then he’s not.

The Rock Blaster explores the role of ordinary people in Swedish society, people who have “only been allowed to speak in murmurs, yet they were the ones doing all the fighting and being beaten.” They are the ones who build society and keep it running, yet they are at the bottom of the pyramid, holding it up so that the rich and powerful can reap a disproportionate share of the benefits. Oskar becomes disenchanted with the Social Democrats because they focus on civil servants, creating unnecessary jobs that are given to people who develop a sense of entitlement, leaving workers behind. Oskar remains convinced that a worker’s revolution will one day come, although he is sad to have missed it. At the same time, he always says hello to his neighbors because he knows he is part of something bigger than himself. “Whether you like it or not, you’re part of it. Just spit in the ocean once. Then you have all the eternity you need.”

The Rock Blaster is Mankell’s first novel, the latest to be translated into English. It shows the ambition and unevenness of a first novel. The Everyman theme is too heavy-handed, as if Mankell didn’t trust the reader to understand the point of creating an ordinary character. He makes his points with needless redundancy. Still, the story is an effective reminder that, while we become spellbound by the lives of extraordinary people, ordinary people are the foundation of society. And in a sense, most people are extraordinary. To persevere after losing a hand and an eye is remarkable, but people do it all the time. To care about others, to be curious about the world and to wonder how it can be improved, are qualities of people who are gifted with compassion. The Rock Blaster reminds us that to be ordinary makes us a part of something extraordinary, something that we change and shape in our small way, even if we feel insignificant and powerless.

RECOMMENDED

The Boatman's Daughter by Andy Davidson

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD x FSG Originals on February 11, 2020

The Boatman’s Daughter is marketed as a supernatural thriller. While supernatural forces contribute to the thrills, horror novels like this one remind us that humans at their worst are more horrific than the imagined entities that haunt human lives. The supernatural entity who lurks in The Boatman’s Daughter might be less evil than a couple of the human characters.

The boatman is Hiram Crabtree. His daughter is Miranda. The novel opens with the boatman’s disappearance in the bayou when Miranda is eleven. Accompanied by a witch, Hiram embarks on a mission after telling Miranda to wait in the boat. In the horror story tradition, Miranda ignores sensible advice and plunges into the darkness when she hears disturbing sounds. Instead of finding her father that night, she finds a baby, or perhaps an abomination, that she calls Littlefish. She raises Littlefish as an orphaned younger brother.

The witch is an old woman named Iskra who was once scolded by the leshii for having a loveless heart. She is too selfish, the leshii told her, to have children of her own. The leshii, according to various wikis, is a mischievous deity that inhabits forests in Slavic mythology. Apparently one of them made it to Arkansas.

Most of the novel’s action occurs a few years after Miranda finds Littlefish. Miranda has been bedeviled by a one-eyed constable named Charlie Riddle who paid a price for trying to have his way with her. At Riddle’s direction, Miranda uses her boat to deliver drugs through the bayou. A “mad, lost preacher” named Billy Cotton, widower of a woman named Lena who had a gift for perceiving the supernatural, is also involved in the distribution scheme. Cotton was present at Littlefish’s birth, a seriously warped scene that the novel revisits more than once, each time imparting new revelations that tie the past to the present.

Miranda eventually learns the truth about her father’s disappearance and the mysterious origin of Littlefish. The other key character who contributes to the story is the dwarf John Avery, a dissatisfied employee in Riddle’s drug dealing enterprise. And then there’s the girl in the forest who haunts Cotton’s dreams, much as Littlefish does and for a similar reason.

The Boatman’s Daughter tells a creepy story that delivers a regular dose of chills. That’s what horror novels should do, so I rate this one as a success. The supernatural elements are a bit muddled. As they deliver murder and gory mayhem, Riddle and Cotton are sufficiently evil to supply a full quotient of horror, even in the absence of the leshii and mysterious monsters lurking in the depths of the earth. Littlefish and the girl in the forest nevertheless add to the story’s eerie atmosphere.

Andy Davidson’s vivid prose gives the story a cinematic quality. His explanation of characters’ motivations, good or evil, makes it possible to believe in their existence. Miranda’s ability to cope and to redefine herself at the novel’s end is appealing. The novel does not depend on gore, despite the occasional severed head, to instill fear. The story might not persuade the reader to believe in the supernatural, but it will reinforce the belief that horror is a force personified in the lives of horrible people, and that darkness is never so dark that it cannot be overcome by light.

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