Halcyon by Rio Youers

Published by St. Martin's Press on July 10, 2018

Martin and Laura Lovegrove have two daughters, Shirley (15) and Edith (10). Edith used to suffer from night terrors, but a therapist helped her put that in her past. Until now, when she has a vision — a premonition — that she somehow projects to her sister, of an explosion that kills hundreds of people. Three days later, a young man who has apparently been brainwashed drives a homemade bomb into a nightclub, causing the scene that Edith saw. A woman who suffers from the same affliction, psychic signals crossing over into the realm of perception, teaches Edith to cope.

Martin is recruited to join Halcyon, which Nolan, the recruiter, defines as a better and safer America, a self-sustaining community with no crime, no poverty, no discrimination, no tech, and no clocks. Its founder, Mother Moon, is its spiritual leader, but Nolan denies that the community is a religious group, a cult, or a hippy commune (although it sounds like a combination of all those). Halcyon is on an island and, for reasons I won’t reveal, what happens in Halcyon stays in Halcyon. It’s like Hotel California: you can check out, but you can never leave. Except for Mother Moon, who apparently spends some of her time at a mysterious place called Glam Moon, which may or may not be an imaginary world.

Mother Moon is Valerie Kemp, who sold her body for drugs in Manhattan until she found the Society of Pain. The Society teaches that pain is the path to enlightenment, although its members prefer to witness the pain of others than to experience their own.

Eventually this all ties together but I cannot say that the connections are seamless. The novel feels like it was compiled from three related stories, each of which are more interesting than the story they create when assembled. That’s partly because it just takes too long for Halcyon to get where it’s going. Halcyon’s The novel’s pace too often lags. Perhaps a less ambitious story would have been tighter and more compelling.

Halcyon benefits from moments of strong writing, particularly when Edith discovers that she can’t suppress or hide from a nightmare premonition. The story has supernatural elements, or at least psychic themes and the suggestion of a hellacious afterlife, but it isn’t sufficiently frightening to be classified as a horror novel. It’s just a little too strange to be scary, unless readers are frightened by malicious roosters.

Nor is Halcyon sufficiently thrilling to be classified as a thriller, although it does feature elements of crime and mystery. The story addresses terrorism in an abstract way that divorces terrorism from its political roots, which divorces the story from the realm of terrorism-based thrillers. I’m not so anal that I need to classify every novel — some of my favorite books defy classification — but it is difficult to know just what to make of Halcyon.

Notwithstanding its faults, Halcyon introduces the reader to sympathetic characters and occasionally builds tension by placing those characters at risk. School shootings and other acts of mass violence are an early theme of Halcyon, but they are not sensationalized. The story is not pro-gun or anti-gun; it is pro-empathy for families touched by violence. While Halcyon might be predominantly a horror story, the novel recognizes that there is plenty of horror in the earthbound world, and that horror must be balanced with compassion. The story struggles to follow a consistent theme as it moves from cults to sadists to mass killings to domestic drama to interdimensional portals, but it has something worthwhile to say about how victims can become monsters. That earns Halcyon a guarded recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Rust & Stardust by T. Greenwood

Published by St. Martin's Press on August 7, 2018

The first thing a potential reader should know about Rust & Stardust is that it addresses the sexual abuse of a preteen girl. Scenes in which the abuse occurs are far from graphic, but sensitive readers who would be severely distressed by the subject matter itself might want to avoid the novel.

The story is based on a young girl’s kidnapping that Nabokov read about while he was writing Lolita and to which he referred in the text. In fact, the title Rust and Stardust echoes a line from Lolita. That is where the comparison ends. Nabokov portrayed Lolita as a seductress who is far from innocent, while Rust & Stardust portrays the sexual assault of a clear victim.

Rust & Stardust begins in 1948. At age 11, Sally Horner is plump and friendless. A cruel trick by her classmates — a “single act of careless unkindness” — changes Sally’s life by placing her in the hands of a man who is posing as an FBI agent. Believing she’s about to be taken to FBI headquarters, Sally tells her mother she’s been invited to go with her friend on a vacation to Atlantic City, a story the man confirms in a telephone call. The man who calls himself Frank (his last names vary) holds Sally in Atlantic City for a month before Sally’s mother learns that Sally isn’t staying with her friend.

Frank eventually takes Sally to a string of cities, adopting new identities, sometimes enrolling her in school, and eventually tiring of her as she enters puberty. The police are slow to follow, despite prodding from Sally’s sister and her sister’s husband Al, who plays amateur detective. Sally’s mother frets and feels guilty but is otherwise useless. Sally makes friends along the way, but people who suspect she is in some sort of trouble do nothing to confirm their suspicions until Sally is gone.

Various characters, including Sally’s mother, feel guilt while the predator feels none at all. To a large extent, their guilt is the force that drives the narrative. The classmates who trick Sally eventually come to understand that their prank set the stage for the predator to kidnap her. They must live with that guilt as they get older. Sally blames herself, as children often do, for being a bad daughter who has earned the abuse she suffers. The predator’s friends facilitate his crime, only to feel remorse when it is too late to undo the harm. Sally’s mother has more than enough reason to blame herself for failing to prevent the kidnapping and for waiting so long before contacting the police.

While Rust & Stardust revolves around Frank’s abuse of Sally, T. Greenwood makes clear that Sally is also the victim of poor parenting, tabloid journalists, and a criminal justice system that (in the novel’s time frame) treated child victims as if they deserved to be incarcerated. The story covers all of those issues in convincing detail.

The story is disturbing because life is disturbing, including the life of Sally Horner as Greenwood imagines it to have been. But Rust & Stardust disturbs for the sake of offering insights into how victims and families handle trauma, not for the sake of sensationalizing a horrific crime. Most “every parent’s nightmare” stories overplay the melodrama that is inherent in stories about victimized children. Those that don’t too often read like a documentary, presenting just the facts in order to avoid obvious manipulation of the reader’s emotions. Neither a weepfest nor a clinical report constitutes good fiction. Greenwood manages to get the balance right, creating sympathy when characters deserve it without exploiting trauma for the sake of creating a spectacle.

RECOMMENDED

All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

First published in Great Britain in 2018; published by Atria Books on November 20, 2018

Abhay Chan, known to most as Myshkin Rozario, finds trees and dogs to be better companions than humans. He is an old man who faces ridicule, yet the reader comes to understand him as eccentric in the best way, shaped by good intentions and disappointment with the human condition. Like everyone, has been shaped by his past. Unlike most, the details of his past have been concealed from him. Only later in life does he appreciate his need to fill in the missing pages.

Myshkin tells the story of his youth, but it is really the story of his mother, Gayatri, who (unlike most Indian women of her time) was raised not to catch a husband but to nurture her gifts for art and music. Gayatri’s father traveled abroad with her until, after his death, her brothers began the task of finding her a husband who was willing to tolerate a sharp-tongued woman who had wasted her youth by crossing oceans. Finding Gayatri a husband meant exhibiting her as livestock while suitors and their families drank tea in the drawing room and inspected her hair. The family’s choice boiled down to the only man who would have her, a Northern Indian twice her age whose scandalous contempt for caste and religion did not overcome the family’s desire to rid themselves of Gayatri.

It is in chapters like those narrating Gayatri’s arranged marriage that Anuradha Roy captures the India so familiar to readers of UK fiction and that so often wins (or is shortlisted for) Booker prizes. It is an India that awards only such freedom to women as self-congratulatory men choose to give them, that refuses to abandon a caste system even as it rebels from British colonizers with grand speeches about the importance of equality and self-determination.

Myshkin recalls a German writer/artist/musician named Walter Spies who appeared in search of Gayatri, having met her years earlier in Bali. Spies is accompanied by Beryl de Zoete, a scholar of dance who once rescued Jewish dancers from Germany and now sees Gayatri as worthy of rescue. Gayatri has felt stifled since Myshkin’s birth, as if the beginning of his life put a stop to the rest of the world, and it is knowledge of that fact that shapes Myshkin’s memories of his childhood.

Indian history is central to the novel in other respects, as well. While mostly hiding in the shadows, Myshkin’s father claims to follow the spiritual leader Mukti Devi in her nonviolent resistance to British rule. Myshkin’s father views Mukti Devi as an exemplar of women’s liberation. Gayatri can only wonder why his enlightened view of women’s role in society does not extend to his own home. Later, Myshkin can only wonder about the fated moment when his mother leaves home without him. From her perspective, Gayatri had no choice: obedience and propriety were the top entries on her personal list of deadly sins.

The novel’s first half sets up Myshkin’s life as a child abandoned by his mother. The story then moves through his father’s efforts to cope with his loss of Gayatri, the impact of World War II on India and on Myshkin’s father, the evil nature of governments that define protest as sedition or homosexuality as a crime, the different attitudes toward women in Indian and Balinese society, and Myshkin’s evolving understanding of his mother. The novel invites a sympathetic response both to Myshkin (who yearns for a lost mother) and Gayatri (who abandons a child to avoid going mad but must live with the maddening consequences of that decision).

A couple of lengthy sections comprised of Gayatri’s letters home create a lull that is the novel’s only misstep. The letters illustrate Gayatri’s growth and they add new insight into Gayatri’s decision to leave her husband, but Gayatri’s anxiety-filled travelogue lacks the immediacy of the narrative that precedes and follows the letters.

One letter accuses someone in Gayatri’s past of “feckless self-indulgence,” a criticism that might seem hypocritical given the choices that Gayatri made. The novel’s value is that it invites the reader to weigh Gayatri’s choice and to consider whether, on balance, it was the right choice to make. I appreciate Roy’s decision to allow the reader to judge Gayatri, or not, rather than insisting that only one judgment is possible.

In any event, judgment is not the point of All The Lives We Never Lived. As the title suggests, all lives involve choices. Each choice sends us on a path that forecloses other paths. With graceful prose and compelling characters, Roy reminds us how the same choices can be both liberating and confining as they lead to unknowable futures and cause unforeseeable consequences.

RECOMMENDED

Blackout by Ragnar Jónasson

Published in Iceland in 2011; published in translation by Minotaur Books on August 28, 2018

A tourist discovers a dead body in one of Iceland’s unpronounceable northern villages. The murder victim, Elías Freysson, was beaten to death with a board. It’s the kind of story that Ísrún would like to cover, but the Reykjavik newsroom only assigns her fluff. Her editor, in fact, fears that Ísrún might be promoted over his head. When Ísrún fights to cover the story, it is clear that she is pursuing a personal interest, but the reason for Ísrún’s intense desire to investigate the murder will not be revealed until the novel nears its end.

Why Freysson was murdered is revealed in flashbacks that develop his unhappy past. We also learn, rather quickly, that Freysson was connected to a young woman who has been brought to Iceland under false pretenses and who is now locked away. Yes, this is another human trafficking story, but the trafficking is a background element that doesn’t try to milk the hysteria that so many human trafficking thrillers depend upon.

Freysson had been working on a construction site in another unproduceable northern village, where Ari Thór Arason is trying to make a career with the police. Hlynur Ísaksson has more seniority than Arason, but the boss believes that Hlynur has lost his edge and assigns Ari Thór to find out what he can about Freysson. Hylnur has been receiving disturbing emails about his bullying past, a distraction from work that becomes an important subplot.

Learning who killed Freysson requires Ari Thór to figure out why he was killed. The reader soon suspects that Freysson was engaged in unlawful behavior and that others within his orbit may also be at risk. Ari Thór wonders if the murder was linked to a retired doctor whose alcoholism was responsible for three patient deaths. He also explores Freysson’s link to a man who was raised on the same abusive farm when Freysson was a child.

All of that gives the reader a good bit of substance to ponder as the story picks up steam. The various subplots give Ragnar Jónasson the opportunity to develop interesting (and usually tormented) secondary characters with nearly as much depth as he brings to the primary characters.

Ari Thór has a caustic personality that certainly doesn’t breed respect for the police. His personal problems stem from his broken relationship with the woman he left behind in Reykjavik, opening the door to another subplot that contributes to the action in the novel’s last chapters.

After developing characters and story threads, Ragnar Jónasson opens the throttle in the novel’s concluding chapters. This is Iceland, so there aren’t any mindless shootouts or the kind of fights that let dimwitted heroes with Special Forces training demonstrate their martial arts prowess. Rather, Jónasson demonstrates his ability to escalate tension without undue violence. The focus is on people and their emotions, not action, but that focus does not diminish the pace. Blackout is easy to recommend as a fine addition to the reader's shelf of Icelandic crime fiction.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Tzer Island will return on Friday with a new review.