Suicide Club by Rachel Heng

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 10, 2018

Suicide Club takes the concept of “pro-life” to its logical extreme by imaging a near future in which severe consequences attach to any behavior that might shorten a lifespan: eating red meat, drinking alcohol, listening to jazz, failing to exercise, exercising too much. Americans are genetically assessed at birth. Those who are designated as “lifers” become vegetarians and meditate daily. They avoid stress because cortisol is harmful, but they don’t run because running is bad for the knees.

As long as lifers return a value to society that exceeds the cost of keeping them alive, they are entitled to enhanced skin and tissues and organs, at least until they reach the end of their allotted extended lifespan, when maintenance is withdrawn and the enhancements begin to atrophy, leaving lifers trapped inside a decaying body that does not easily die. Life extension is an instrument of control; Americans who fear death behave as the government wants them to behave, for fear of losing their enhancements.

Why all of this is true is unclear. The concept is interesting, but the political environment that would allocate life extension is not developed. Governments have a tendency to control their populations and to help the powerful retain power, but all of that would happen naturally as a function of wealth, without government-imposed genetic assessments. One of the novel’s weaknesses is its failure to explore the political conditions that would allow the imagined society to exist.

In any event, Anja’s mother has reached the end of her allotted life extension; having lost her health subsidies, she is lying in bed, waiting but unable to die. Anja turns to the Suicide Club for help because, when enhanced skin and muscles are almost impossible to cut, suicide is a challenge. The government opposes the Suicide Club because, with its low birth rates, American supremacy would be challenged if people choose when to die rather than letting the government decide that they are no longer useful. That premise seems doubtful (if population were the key to supremacy, India would be more powerful than the United States), but I rolled with it for the sake of enjoying the novel.

At the age of 100, Lea Kirino still has her original body. Lea’s father Kaito has been gone for 90 years. He’s regarded as an enemy of the state. Lea works for HealthFin and follows all of society’s rules. Believing she sees her father, or perhaps his ghost, she steps into traffic to cross the street and finds herself placed on an Observation List, her Tender having concluded that she tried to commit suicide. The conformist Lea is thus assigned to the Wecovery group, where she meets the subversive Anja. How that will work out is the dynamic that drives the story.

Suicide Club rests upon intriguing themes. Healthy living, at some point, removes the flavor from life (and from food). What’s the point of living a longer life if the joy of living must be sacrificed? Sex can be risky, but it’s also fun. Taken to its extreme, as this novel suggests, healthy living might preclude attending live concerts (although current thinking is that regular attendance at live concerts actually helps people live longer). As the novel points out, notions about what is or is not healthy regularly change and are often contradictory. Still, America’s most repressive traditions have always held that if something feels good, it must be bad for you and should be forbidden.

As is customary in novels, key characters cast off the assumptions that have driven their lives and discover important truths. At the same time, I can’t say that Rachel Heng made me care whether the key characters lived or died. Anja and Lea are both too lifeless to worry about; they might as well be dead already.

There are times when the plot seems forced, as if it is meant to teach lessons rather than to tell a story. Even the subtitle (A Novel about Living) force-feeds the novel’s lessons to the reader. For those reasons, while Suicide Club is interesting and while Rachel Heng’s writing style makes the novel easy to read, the story falls short of being compelling.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Iceman by P.T. Deutermann

Published by St. Martin's Press on August 21, 2018

I’m a sucker for submarine novels. I probably read them as I would a horror novel because I would be terrified to be in a submarine, particularly when torpedoes and depth charges are trying to sink it. I’ve rarely met a submarine novel I didn’t like, and I liked The Iceman more than most.

Malachai Stormes is a World War II submarine commander who has a well-deserved reputation for being aggressively crazy when it comes to killing Japanese soldiers and sailors. His insubordinate attitude doesn’t sit well with all of his superiors, but they let him slide as long as he keeps sinking enemy ships. His latest success earned him a promotion and a bigger sub in the Pacific. He takes command in Australia and is quickly dispatched to Guadalcanal with orders about torpedoes that the reader expects him to ignore. One of the book’s themes is the shoddy nature of American torpedo manufacturing and the tendency of submarine captains to ignore senseless orders that assure their torpedo use will be ineffective.

Malachai takes his sub, the Firefish, on a number of missions, sinking tankers and destroyers and shooting an occasional hole in an aircraft carrier. The missions are tense and exciting, as they should be in a submarine novel. Malachai is determined to be innovative, as he demonstrates (to his crew’s horror) by staying on the surface to attack tankers so that he can shoot them with the deck guns. He also has to deal with a nasty fire (never a good thing on a craft that is underwater and filled with explosives) and with a crisis at the novel’s end.

Apart from dazzling submarine warfare scenes, the novel builds interest through Malachai’s interactions with his superiors, his XO, and a woman in Perth. His superiors are unhappy with his willingness to criticize their orders, although they can’t do much about it given his record of success. His XO can’t handle Malachai’s bloodthirsty intensity, particularly when he sinks a Japanese seaplane and then orders the deaths of the survivors so that they can’t reveal their knowledge of the sub attack if they happen to be rescued. The woman in Perth, on the other hand, enjoys Malachai’s company despite his cold-hearted, controlling, and isolated nature.

The Iceman combines suspense with realistic images of war and a believable submarine captain who was damaged by life even before the war threatened to strip him of his remaining humanity. The love story holds no surprises, but it nicely balances the war story. I could complain about some scenes that might be a bit too predictable (has there ever been a fictional submarine captain who didn’t take his sub below its rated depth to test its true crush depth?), but frankly, I enjoyed every underwater scene, predictable or not. Thriller fans, war story fans, and particularly submarine fiction fans should get a kick out of The Iceman.

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Holy Ghost by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on October 9, 2018

The Virgin Mary’s appearances at a small church in Wheatfield, Minnesota have revitalized a dying Rust Belt town. Quick to take advantage of the miracle are J.J. Skinner and Wardell Holland, the two men who orchestrated it with the help of Janet Fischer.

Taking advantage of the gullible is a time-honored way of making money and, in this instance, would have been relatively harmless had it not inspired a sniper to begin wounding townspeople and tourists who venture near the church. At least, the working theory connects the shootings (and perhaps subsequent murders) to the Virgin’s appearances.

Virgil Flowers is dispatched to Wheatfield to help the locals find the shooter. His investigation proceeds in Virgil’s usual ambling way as he chats and jokes with townsfolk while appreciating the local women and keeping an eye out for clues. He’s eventually joined by regular series characters, including BCI investigators Jenkins and Shrake, creating the opportunity for the kind of banter at which John Sandford excels.

Virgil’s investigation is complicated by the fact that no witnesses hear shots fired, nobody sees a shooter, and nobody is sure of the direction from which the shots came. Nor can anyone explain why all the shots that nobody heard were fired at the same time of day. The whodunit and “how was it done?” storylines are well executed, but it is the likeable characters that keep readers coming back to Sandford.

In addition to his regular characters, Sandford has fun with Skinner and Holland, who might not be entirely honest but have good hearts. He populates Wheatfield with a number of colorful characters. Virgil’s interviews with crime suspects and witnesses are always amusing, as is Virgil. I like his realistic view of law enforcement officers (a third are pretty good, a third are “just getting through life,” and a third are “poorly trained or burned out, not too bright, have problems handling their authority”). I wish more real cops were like the fictional Virgil.

Holy Ghost speculates about the connection between religion and violence and pokes gentle fun at paranoid survivalist gun nuts. That will turn off some readers, but readers who are looking for an excuse to become outraged have objected to Sandford novels in the past because characters held political positions with which the readers disagreed. Judging from Amazon reviews, some readers object to Sandford novels because his characters interact with Democrats without regarding them as demons.  Sandford adds a couple of ineffective Minnesota Nazis to the cast of this novel, perhaps to appease a segment of the reading community that should probably stick with Mitch Rapp novels.

There’s nothing politically correct about Virgil, but he doesn’t see it as his duty to offend people for the sake of exercising his right to be obnoxious. Open-minded readers will appreciate Virgil’s open mind and his willingness to engage the world in a sensible but light-hearted manner as he goes about his business of investigating and stopping crime. Holy Ghost is another in a long string of Sandford novels that are just plain fun to read.

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Relic by Alan Dean Foster

Published by Del Rey on August 14, 2018

Relic is sort of a “last man standing” novel, the last man being the last surviving human. So I guess that makes it a post-apocalyptic novel, except that the apocalypse is a really big one.

The last man (as far as he knows) is Ruslan. He has a natural immunity to a biological weapon that killed all the other humans on his world, and apparently on all other worlds to which humanity has spread. Aliens find Ruslan, restore his health, and propose to recreate human civilization by cloning him, adding such genetic variants as they can to create males and females capable of reproduction. Ruslan opposes being the model for a future race, but the aliens — a scholarly race of tripods who are quite fascinated by humankind — hope Ruslan will teach the clones how to be fully human. In exchange for his cooperation, Ruslan wants the Myssari to find Earth (its location has long been lost to history) and to take him there.

To search for Earth, the Myssari look for clues on other planets that humans colonized. Ruslan’s existence soon attracts the attention of another alien race, the Vrizan, who are a bit closer to humankind in both appearance and behavior, which is not necessarily a good thing given human history. Eventually the Myssari and the Vrizan are in conflict about possession of the last surviving human.

By the novel’s midpoint, the reader will learn whether Ruslan is, in fact, the only human left alive. Other challenges Ruslan faces include whether he will be treated as a lab specimen that belongs to either the Myssari or the Vrizan, as opposed to an individual with all the freedoms that individuals should have, and whether as a human he has any claim on now-abandoned human worlds, including the one on which humans originated.

Relic tells a simple story that is pleasant and consistently interesting. It holds few surprises and the aliens seem more alien in appearance than behavior — they could almost be humans if they weren’t so unfailingly civilized. I think a serialized version of Relic could easily have been published in Galaxy or If during the 1950s. I got a kick out of its throwback nature, and I enjoyed it more than a couple of sf novels with more modern themes that I recently started and abandoned. Unlike some writers who are managing to get published, Alan Dean Foster at least knows how to construct a graceful sentence.

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The Lady Killer by Masako Togawa

First published in Japan in 1963; published in translation by Pushkin Vertigo on October 30, 2018

Pregnant from a one-night stand, Keiko Obana hangs from a windowsill until she plunges to her death. The police rule the death a suicide, but the inspector who investigates the case believes Keiko killed herself because of the pregnancy. So does a woman who believes her death is attributable to the rogue who made her pregnant.

After that prelude, the story follows Ichiro Honda (the rogue) as he seduces one woman after another, always assuming an identity other than his own, generally pretending to be foreign visitor to Japan. Honda keeps a diary of his sexual conquests that he refers to as his “Huntsman's Log.” The reader also follows Honda’s surprised response when he discovers that some of the women he seduced have been murdered. He even finds one of them dead when he turns up for a new assignation. Of course, the reader knows it is only a matter of time before Honda is blamed for the deaths.

The novel’s second half shifts the focus away from Honda to a young lawyer named Shinji who is helping an older lawyer handle Honda’s case. The older lawyer is the novel’s Sherlock, while Shinji does all the investigative legwork. Shinji is startled to learn that one of Honda’s conquests was a woman he was dating in college. Masako Togawa uses that coincidence to develop Shinji as a dispirited and lonely young man who is also a bit judgmental about Honda’s promiscuity — unless he is simply envious.

The Lady Killer creates a mystery for Shinji to unravel (how and by whom was Honda framed?) but it maintains interest by giving Shinji a series of interviews with characters who are carefully developed despite their brief appearances. Those characters — a medical intern, a salaryman, a salesman, a day laborer, and a gay prostitute — open a window on different aspects of Japanese life. The investigation also reveals how people are like “toothed cogs; once one cog slips out of sync, it damages not merely those around it but also others having no direct connection with it.”

The novel is noteworthy for its glimpse of Japanese culture, including the divide between older people who hold traditional values (for example, values that compel suicide for disloyalty) and younger people who have adopted a western approach to moral decision-making. Themes of duty and loyalty are prevalent throughout the novel. The Lady Killer also explores social norms, not unique to 1960s Japanese culture, regarding the judgment that society visits upon men who use women, even if the women happily agree to be used for a night of passion, and upon women who are branded as promiscuous because they enjoy casual sex.

At the same time, Honda’s view of himself as a hunter and of women as his prey makes it difficult to feel sympathy for Honda, even though he is an innocent accused. Yet Honda is far from being the most aberrant character in a story that exposes the dark side of humanity. This example of Japanese noir strives to spotlight darkness rather than to promote empathy for its characters.

The plot depends on an elaborate scheme to frame Honda for multiple murders that will expose him to the death penalty. My initial reaction was that the killer could more easily have killed Honda; the decision to kill several innocent people struck me as an unlikely way to seek revenge. By the end of the novel, however, a plot twist allows the reader to see the story in a different way. Combined with an epilog that fills in the gaps, the mystery’s resolution is credible, surprising, and satisfying.

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