The Book of Science and Antiquities by Thomas Keneally

First published in Australia in 2018; published by Atria Books on December 10, 2019

Two stories intertwine in The Book of Science and Antiquities, each following a man to the end of his life. One is the modern story of a documentary maker. The other is the story of Learned Man, whose life in prehistory is imagined to be one of self-sacrifice. While Learned Man’s death seems meaningless from a modern perspective, it was viewed as profound by Learned Man’s clan. The mere fact that Learned Man once lived is viewed as significant by his Aboriginal ancestors.

After meeting Peter Jorgenson, the geomorphologist who discovered the remains of Learned Man near Lake Learned, Shelby Apple decided to make a documentary about the discovery. Jorgenson told Shelby that Learned Man was honored by those who buried him. Jorgenson regarded Learned Man’s death as evidence that “to be human is to have business to attend to, to be on a quest.” While we may want an easy life that includes no pilgrimage, in Jorgenson’s view “we don’t have a life worth having” if we fail to undertake “a dangerous search.” Unfortunately, “being human is a test that kills us.”

What was Learned Man’s quest? As Thomas Keneally imagines it, Learned Man is an otherwise ordinary man who gives credence to dreamt visions. He calls the teacher he sees in his dreams “the Hero,” one of many heroes (gods) who enact laws to govern the growing body of people in their various clans. Learned Man is called upon to enforce the laws that bind the clans when a clan member does an injustice to a woman from another clan. Eventually, Learned Man discovers that a curse has been laid upon the land and this it is his duty to remove the curse. His selfless action in that regard explains why a stone was found with Learned Man that originated far from the site of his burial.

Learned Man lost his Son Unnameable to one of the dangerous creatures that made human life a marginal experience. He quarrels with his wife and fears for the safety of his children. As Keneally portrays him, and as Jorgenson explains, Learned Man is all of us. “He prodded the universe the way we prod at it. He felt overwhelmed by it, but had the human urge to encompass it. He chased love with the same sacred and profane mix of motives we do.”

Keneally tells Learned Man’s story in chapters that alternate with Shelby’s story. Shelby has had a successful career but, with the discovery of tumors on his esophagus, he knows that it will come to an end. He does not fear death so much as he fears the loss of independence. Rather, he denies the immediacy of death, despairing only “the ferocious weight of time” that may run out before he finishes his quests.

Like Learned Man, Shelby cherishes his wife and children. He has taken dangerous journeys to Vietnam and Eritrea, to the Arctic and under the sea, to make his films. He has experienced loss. He has been weak with women. He has taken up the causes of modern Heroes, sages of the human tribe, using film to tell stories of wrongs that would easily be remedied in a less selfish world. He has recently championed the cause of returning Learning Man to his Aboriginal descendants. In that regard, he prevails upon Australia’s prime minister, “a captive of right-wing brutes in his party who still believe in serving the market Moloch as an almost theological duty.”

Keneally gives the reader a lot to chew upon, from the harm caused by white missionaries who provide fish without teaching the less fortunate to fish, to the collection of cells that define us only to betray us, to the ease with which men conceive and devote themselves to destructive theologies. His themes are as big as the meaning of life and of death, but he explores those themes by imagining the connection of individuals, from our earliest ancestors to the present, all surviving against the odds while searching for something in life that transcends mere survival.

As the quoted passages demonstrate, Keneally’s prose is lush and vibrant. He makes it possible to relate to characters whose lives are in many ways unlike our own, yet in fundamental ways exactly like our own. The Book of Science and Antiquities is an ambitious novel, but Keneally maintains control of his narrative, never letting ambition get in the way of telling personal stories about characters (even if from prehistory) to whom readers can relate.

RECOMMENDED

Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on December 3, 2019

Dead Astronauts is told, in part, from the perspective of a fox who merged with a biomechanical version of itself and was sent on missions of exploration, apparently to other times or universes. The fox plotted revenge against the humans who, in its view, were torturers. After all, humans hunt foxes for sport because foxes can’t hunt humans. When it is the fox’s turn to kill, it muses: “Killing is easy. I think that’s why people do it so much.”

One theme of Dead Astronauts is that after centuries of being hunted or used as test subjects, animals might have the last laugh. Scientists who try to un-fox a fox might find themselves outfoxed. In that regard, Dead Astronauts might be viewed as an animal rights story, a reminder that our fear of alien abduction is no different than a bird’s fear of being caged by humans, that gathering data by harming an animal is no different than an animal tearing apart a human to satisfy its curiosity. It’s all just a matter of perspective.

The story might also be viewed as a cautionary tale of the consequences that follow from the human capacity to block unhappy thoughts. The fox imagines what humans might ask if they were honest: “Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?”

While this is in part the story of a fox, it is also the story of all foxes, because the fox as a species knows how to burrow down, to hide, to survive, perhaps to outlast humanity. Sometimes it is the story of birds and fish, both specific creatures and a species in general. We’re all part of the same world, the novel suggests, one that humans are insufficiently meek to inherit.

Yet the story is also told, in part, from the perspective of Charlie X, a human who was still just Charlie when, as a boy, his father worked for the Company. Charlie’s gift was the creation of new creatures, biomechanical life forms with altered genes, some of which he created without the Company’s knowledge. Charlie, like the blue fox he created, viewed his own creator — his father — as a torturer.

Charlie and the Company made something of a mess. The scientists who made the mess, likened to magicians, left destruction in their wake, at least in one universe. A homeless woman from the past named Sarah, contemplating an apparent journal from the future, seems to suggest that there might be something worth living for, even if that thing is unknowable. Just ask the fox.

Maybe those few facts are spoilers (although I would have found a user’s guide to be helpful) because the first three quarters of the novel leave the reader clueless about what’s going on. Those chapters introduce three characters: Grayson, Chen, and Moss. One of them might be a dead astronaut, or perhaps they all are. Shape-shifting Moss might literally be moss, but perhaps none of them are human, at least not now. They seem to be living different versions of the same history over and over, repeatedly encountering a blue fox and a duck with a broken wing, not knowing from one encounter to the next whether those creatures will be allies or enemies. They seem to be looking for Charlie X, although what they hope to accomplish by finding him is unclear. I assume they want to change the past or damage the Company through a strategy yet to be invented.

Does such a baffling story merit a recommendation? At times the narrative approaches incomprehensibility. I suppose the same might be said about Ulysses, a highly regarded classic by those who made it the end, so perhaps hard sledding isn’t a reason to condemn a novel. I can say that the fox has more characterization than is given to the typical fictional fox, and that the broad outlines of biogenetic engineering that form the novel’s background, while common in science fiction, are intriguing. I can say that the prose is sometimes poetic, although Jeff VanderMeer sometimes abandons poetry to repeat the same cluster of sentences dozens of times over the course of several pages. I can say that I would probably get more out of the novel after a second reading, but I don’t know if I will ever find the energy to struggle through it again (I’m still awaiting the strength to take another stab at Ulysses). Since struggle can be its own reward, I’ll recommend Dead Astronauts guardedly with the caveat that the novel isn’t for readers who want the clarity offered by a writer who spells everything out.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Girl on the Porch by Richard Chizmar

Published by Subterranean Press on August 31, 2019

Repeated rings of a doorbell go unanswered until Frank Urban rolls out of bed and finds nobody at the door. In the morning, his wife Angela texts their neighbor. Sarah Tucker remembers hearing their dog barking during the night, so after reading the text she checks the footage on their home’s security camera. The camera shows a young girl on the porch, obviously scared, who appears to have escaped captivity. The police are baffled.

The video goes viral and the town panics. About half of The Girl on the Porch — the good half — is taken up by the police investigation and gossipy neighbors who are looking to cast blame for the mysterious girl’s fate, whatever it might have been.  Intermittently, we learn of events that might either be threatening or misperceived, some focused on the Tuckers: a footprint outside a window, a man who seems to be paying undue attention to the Tuckers’ daughter.

The second half reveals the fate of the girl in the video. The story then focuses on the wife of a main character who, along with the police, begins to suspect that her husband may have been responsible for what happened to the girl.

While The Girl on the Porch sets up an intriguing mystery, the mystery’s abrupt resolution leaves too many threads untied. The resolution gives the impression of a story that was written on the fly by a writer who eventually realized he had no idea how to end it. Fortunately, this is a novella, so I didn’t feel that my relatively brief investment of time in the story was entirely wasted. I haven’t read anything else by Richard Chizmar, but given the novella’s first half, I’m sure he’s capable to stronger work.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Impossible Causes by Julie Mayhew

Published by Bloomsbury on November 19, 2019

Impossible Causes is a Me Too novel, telling a story that demonstrates the collective power of women who finally reveal their stories of abuse. It is also a novel about the corruption of power, a story of men who seek or hold power so that they can abuse it. The framework of the story, involving a remote British island whose religious inhabitants fear witchcraft, is so farfetched that it robs the story of its drama, and the story is so contrived that the title might more accurately have been Impossible Plot. There is much to like about Impossible Causes but the novel’s flaws nearly outweigh its merits.

Leah Cedars is a virgin when Impossible Causes begins. She has a teaching post on the forgotten British island of Lark, an island populated by a religious community that does not welcome the outside world. People not born on the island are known by the derisive term coycrock. Women with black hair, like Leah, are revered as bearers of good luck, but Leah —known to all as “Miss Cedars” after taking a teaching position — feels she has no luck at all. Her brother has fled the island as have many others. Some have chosen to run from evil rather than confront it.

In addition to Leah, the islanders who are most significant to the story are Viola Kendrick and three girls who are approaching adulthood, known collectively as the Eldest Girls of St. Rita, the name their school shares with the patron saint of impossible causes (as well as abused wives and heartbroken women). We learn in the first pages that Viola has found a body, but it is only in the last pages that we learn the body’s identity. The novel jumps around in time to build a backstory of events in 2017 and 2018 that lead to Viola’s discovery.

Viola is a coycrock who craves the acceptance of the Eldest Girls. She is also a drama queen and an attention-seeking liar with a history of making false accusations. She would have been a more interesting character if her lies had not been so obvious.

Other significant characters are Saul Cooper and Ben Hailey. Saul is the island’s Customs Officer, not quite twice Leah’s age but nevertheless smitten with Leah, an attraction that Viola encourages and that Leah does not shun. Saul’s competition is Ben, a young teacher (the first male in that role, apart from the headmaster) who is newly arrived from the mainland. Leah feels destined to fall in love with Ben thanks to a reading of Tarot cards.

Ben also befriends the Eldest Girls, who seem to be monkeying around with witchcraft or summoning the dead while prancing about in the nude at one of those a mystical circles of stones that seem to be everywhere in British fiction. Ben is suspected of playing a role in the slaying of a goat and in the Eldest Girl’s suspected use of the goat’s heart as an effigy to cause a death. Whether Ben has monkeyed around with the girls and/or the goat, whether he is a good or bad guy, is one of the novel’s suspense-building questions.

All of this is background to a plot that leads up to the Me Too moment. While the story attempts to illustrate how women (and men) might remain silent when confronted with sexual harassment and other forms of sexual abuse, the odd setting robs the story of its power. The women on Lark apparently remain silent because they are on Lark and thus unaware that women are no longer putting up with subjugation by men. The fact that women in the real world remain silent is a more compelling story than the one told in Impossible Causes. The behavior of women on a male-dominated religious community doesn’t tell the reader much about the behavior of women in a less artificial and more modern setting.

When the Me Too moment finally arrives, it feels too contrived to be meaningful. The novel’s other key dramatic moment, involving the body Viola discovers, also comes across as a contrivance, an unlikely event involving mistaken identity that exists solely to create drama without regard to its improbability.

While the events of the novel take place in the very recent past, the story seems like an attempt to engraft modern themes (including Me Too) onto a time when people still believed in witchcraft. I suppose an isolated religious community (its leaders refuse to allow the construction of a cellphone tower) might be reality challenged, but I wasn’t convinced

I admired the novel’s character development (apart from the Elder Girls, who have no obvious motivation to monkey about with witchcraft) and I enjoyed Julie Mayhew’s prose. Some of her provocative passages (“Women are the true masters of deception, have always had to be. They don’t get to decide which of their behaviours are virtues.”) might spark interesting book club discussions. The story’s suggestion that religious intolerance and power are destructive forces, while not an original thought, gives the novel some weight. Balancing the positives against the negatives, I can only say that readers who are drawn to the message or the prose without concern for the story’s plausibility will probably like the book more than I did.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

When Old Midnight Comes Along by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Macmillan/Forge Books on December 3, 2019

When Old Midnight Comes Along is the kind of detective novel that should be a model for the genre. Loren D. Estleman’s plot is tight and credible. He conveys the depth of his characters without exploring their backgrounds in unnecessary detail. His prose style is clear and uncluttered while retaining a literary flair. Estelman has distilled, in this 28th Amos Walker mystery, the essence of what a detective novel should be.

Francis Xavier Lawes, a prominent Detroit businessman, hires Amos to find his wife. That could be tricky since Paula Lawes has been missing for more than six years and in less than a year will be presumed dead. Lawes tells Amos he wants to know his wife’s fate because he plans to remarry and would like to get the declaration of death out of the way without delay. Lawes’ intended is Holly Pride, who began working for him as a receptionist before (in my uncharitable interpretation of her intent) she decided to become a gold digger.

Amos starts by charming Deborah Stonesmith at the Detroit Police Department to let him review the file regarding Paula’s disappearance (in other words, she wants Amos to get out of her hair). He learns that Lawes and his wife were overextended on vacation home mortgages and credit card debt. That brings Amos to the police detective who ran the investigation. John Alderdyce has moved on to private security, but he's convinced Lawes murdered Paula and regrets his inability to prove it.

A complicating fact involves Paula’s car, found abandoned near the site where a cop named Marcus Root was killed. A retired police commander, Albert White, tells Amos that Root was shot while he was following Paula’s car. Root’s notebook was missing from his patrol car, suggesting that Root was killed because he had information about Paula that his notebook (or Root) would have revealed.

Other key characters include Oakes Steadman, a former gang member who now works for the police as a gang consultant, George Hoyle, who was having an affair with Paula, and Andrea Dawson, a publicist who was working with Paula when she dropped off the grid. As Amos wears down his shoe leather, the information he gathers about Paula from each character becomes even more confusing. The confusion is compounded when he discovers that a ring — probably but not certainly Paula’s engagement ring — might be connected to a crime.

The various characters provide conflicting clues that Amos and the reader will need to sort out to discover Paula’s fate. The characters have the fullness of unique individuals, unlike the stock characters that so many genre writers recycle. Estleman creates atmosphere without dwelling on needless lessons in Detroit's architecture or political history. The solution to the mystery is clever and not easily guessed (at least not by me). Unlike many modern crime novelists, Estleman finds a plausible way to bring all the characters and clues together and leaves no loose ends dangling. When Old Midnight Comes Along is exactly what an old-school detective novel should be: entertaining, challenging, and satisfying.

RECOMMENDED