Shell by Kristina Olsson

First published in Australia in 2018; published by Atria Books on October 9, 2018

Shell is about finding the shapes of the world. Pearl Keogh learned from her father to see the world as a triangle, the privileged residing at the apex, the masses providing the support that allows the privileged to stay on top. Axel Lindquist is searching to find the shapes that will express the identify of Sydney, Australia by examining its history, geography, and litter.

In 1965, Australia is about to start drafting soldiers to fight in Vietnam. Because she joined a protest against the draft, the newspaper that employs Pearl questioned her objectivity and relegated her to the women’s section.

Pearl’s younger brothers are draft age, but they ran away from the nuns that were minding them after their mother died. Now Pearl wants to find them, to protect them from the war. She does not think of them as missing. It is her old self that has gone missing, hidden behind “a veneer to protect herself, a shell she could slip beneath, to hide from the predatory world.” That’s one of several instances in which the novel’s title is used as a metaphor.

Kristina Olsson develops Pearl’s pain-filled backstory in detail, making clear her need for a purpose in a life that has closed all doors to opportunity. Pearl doesn’t realize that in the years since she last saw her brothers, they might have developed opinions about how to live their lives that she does not share.

Pearl’s story alternates with that of Axel, a glassmaker from Sweden who has been commissioned to make a piece for the foyer of Sydney’s controversial opera house. The architect who designed the opera house, Jørn Utzon, is a Dane who apparently became acquainted with Axel’s parents two decades earlier when Utzon helped smuggle Jews out of Denmark. Axel explains to Pearl that his father went missing in those years. That Pearl and Axel will get to know each other intimately is inevitable.

The story of conflict over Vietnam, turning neighbors against each other and causing pro-government Australians to spy on resisters, parallels the story of America, both during Vietnam and in our current climate of division. So does the story of art’s intersection with politics, as many come to view the opera house as a waste of money because conservative politicians oppose public art, preferring to fund bombs instead than beauty.

Other pervasive themes include the role of women in Australia’s male-dominated professions (particularly news media) during the 1960s; the way cultures sit atop each other, the new burying the old; the way architecture that “aspires to myth and dream” creates a “spirit of inquiry” that confronts or threatens residents who cling to parochial perspectives of their city; the way men and women around the world toil “without choice and little reward” while gaining strength and dignity from labor; the heavy weight of the past; and how intense experiences influence the creative process.

Olsson uses evocative prose to paint Sydney during the 1960s as a city divided by age and politics, while stressing the Australian quality of “mateness” that binds together its male residents. The resistance to Utzon’s design of the opera house is fascinating. My only criticism of Shell is that the story is too often dull. Pearl and Axel both live largely inside their sedate heads, and despite its attempt to make gain mileage from a late-blossoming plot twist, the novel builds no tension until its final pages. Still, the ending is dramatic, and for the ideas the story conveys, as well as the language that conveys them, Shell is worthy of a reader’s time.

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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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