Elmet by Fiona Mozley

First published in Great Britain in 2017; published by Algonquin Books on December 5, 2017

Elmet is a gut-wrenching story of a proud family living at the edge of society, fighting for their right to be left alone. The story is narrated by Daniel, a 15-year-old boy who knows little of his absent mother because Daniel’s father is silent about Daniel’s mother and most other things. Daniel’s bond with his father is strong but their communication has little to do with language.

Daniel’s father, John, is a bare-knuckle fighter, a man of almost mythical stature, the toughest man in England and Ireland. Daniel lives with his father and his older sister, Cathy, who learns to protect herself (and Daniel) with her fists, although her school did not approve of girls who fight back. John consequently took the kids out of school and moved away from their home town. Daniel’s father trusts Vivien, a neighbor, to teach the kids things that he can’t.

John lives an isolated life with his children, eschewing the company of neighbors. He talks little about his past, but he makes clear to his children that they are his world. He works hard to toughen them, to make them strong so they can withstand the hardship they will inevitably face.

Despite his isolation, John helps people in the surrounding villages and farms. His philosophy is, “You take care of people and it always comes good in the end.” To that end, John helps people in their protest against Price, the wealthy landowner who acts as the landlord for most of the people who live nearby. He also helps them stand up to the landowners who refuse to pay fair wages for the work done by those who farm their land.

Price owns the land on which John has built his family’s home. John will no longer do the dirty work requested by Price, so the family faces an uncertain future. Helping the powerless stand up to Price only makes the family’s future more precarious. The plot builds slowly to a conflict that can’t be resolved with fists alone.

Elmet’s theme involves the resentment that members of the working class (or the barely-working class) feel when land that was once community owned is deeded to rich landowners, who rent it to the same people who have always occupied it, while refusing to make improvements or repairs. Other themes spotlight the virtues of honesty and directness, and of standing up for principles even when the battle cannot be won.

Fiona Mozley’s graceful prose contrasts with the broken dialect of the novel’s main characters. Her observant descriptions of land and scenery create a rich atmosphere that connects the present to the past: “The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives.” The novel’s powerful ending is as unexpected as it is inevitable.

Elmet made the longlist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. The winner, Lincoln in the Bardo, is another fine novel. Elmet is a more traditional example of storytelling. Both books tell a moving story, but I think I would give the edge to Elmet. In any event, they are both rewarding novels

RECOMMENDED

Robicheaux by James Lee Burke

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 2, 2018

Dave Robicheaux falls off the wagon, has a blackout, and finds himself accused of murdering T.J. Dartez, the man who was responsible for his wife’s death. That’s a fairly standard thriller plot but James Lee Burke is not a standard thriller writer.

Dave’s involvement is investigated by an unlikeable colleague named Spade Labiche — unlikeable because he’s racist, sexist, and corrupt. While Dave is being investigated, he’s assigned to an investigation of his own. An acquaintance, Jimmy Nightingale, is accused of raping the wife of another acquaintance, Levon Broussard, after Dave introduced them. Nightingale is a politician who owns part of a reverse mortgage company that preys on the elderly and on Dave’s buddy Clete Purcel. He’s the kind of patrician elitist who tries to convince good old boys that he’s one of them, conning his way to election victories.

Broussard and Nightingale and Tony “Nine Ball” Nemo, who controls the southern branch of a criminal organization, are all involved in the production of a Civil War movie based on one of Broussard’s books. Broussard is a decent guy who has a blind spot about the Civil War. After Broussard shows Dave a Confederate flag carried by a 14-year-old boy at Shiloh, Dave thinks of his friend: “Yet here we stood in reverence of an iconic flag that retained the pink stain of a farm boy’s blood, and whether anybody would admit it or not, the cause it represented was the protection and furtherance of human bondage.” Dave’s daughter Alafair helps write the script, although she doesn’t have much use for Nightingale or Nemo or, for that matter, Labiche.

James Lee Burke’s discussion of the rape investigation presents a balanced view of the difficulty that fair-minded officers have when the truthfulness of a sexual assault allegation is less than clear. He also gives a harsh but unbiased account of corruption and unchecked drinking as a way of life in parts of Louisiana, while extolling the virtues of Cajun culture.

As always, Burke is a keen observer of life. He writes about what Americans do “when we lose faith in ourselves and reach out for the worst members of our species.” He unmasks hate-mongers who disguise their vile rhetoric as a protest against political correctness. All of that adds interest to the story without becoming a distraction.

Dave suspects that Nemo and a cruel character named Kevin Penney were somehow involved in the murders of eight prostitutes (the Jeff Davis Eight) that were the backdrop to The Glass Rainbow. A creepy but oddly principled killer named Chester (a/k/a Smiley) also wanders through the story, complicating Dave’s life with a string of murders.

Burke’s characters are always strong. Dave’s friend Clete plays a significant role as he tries to balance his innate goodness against his desire to destroy evil. Dave has similar problems, although his real battle is with his desire to drown his problems in alcohol, which is what caused the mess that starts the story.

The plot is intricate but credible. Burke doesn’t tidy up every loose end, but life is untidy. Robicheaux isn’t my favorite Burke novel, or even my favorite Robicheaux novel, but Burke is one of my three favorite crime writers and his books never disappoint.

RECOMMENDED

Merry Christmas!

Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali

First published in Turkey in 1943; published in translation in Great Britain in 2016; published by Other Press on November 7, 2017

The initial narrator of Madonna in a Fur Coat is newly employed in a Turkish firm when he meets Raif Efendi, who translates the firm’s documents from Turkish to German. Raif responds to hostility and derision with “unwavering serenity” and calculated isolation. His children and siblings show him little respect because his earnings are meager. Raif responds as if disdain is his due.

From his sickbed, Raif asks the narrator to destroy a notebook that Raif has been keeping since 1933. The narrator persuades Raif to allow him to read the notebook before chucking it into the stove. The theme of the tragic love story that Raif tells in the notebook has to do with the cruelness of fate, the burden we share of accepting the accidents of life that are thrust upon us.

Raif’s story takes him as a boy from a Turkish village to Berlin, where his father has sent him to learn how to make soap. He has little ambition but loves to read. Learning German opens a world of literature that had never been translated into Turkish. Visiting an art exhibition, he is taken by the modernistic self-portrait by Maria Puder of a woman in a fur coat.

Naturally, Raif’s notebook tells the story of meeting the artist and their odd friendship — odd because Maria hates men, hates their arrogant pride and entitlement, and conditions her friendship with Raif on never being asked for anything. But Maria senses an innocence in Raif. He seems like a little girl (a judgment that Raif’s father also bestowed, to Raif’s consternation), and is thus the kind of man she might befriend.

Raif, who has always “shied away from human company, never sharing my thoughts with a soul,” feels overwhelmed by his unspent passion for Maria. His conviction that life has no meaning is suddenly challenged by the meaning he finds in his chaste encounters with Maria as he experiences the thrill of finally being understood. Yet Maria believes that solitude is the essence of life, that “all unions are based on falsehood,” that we construct the partner or friend we want rather than seeing them in their reality, and then flee when the reality replaces the construct. For all their similarities, Raif and Maria have different opinions about love that place a barrier between them.

While the novel describes Raif’s evolving feelings, its focus is on Raif’s philosophy of life. Raif believes that no woman has ever loved him and none ever will because women are incapable of true love. “Instead, they ached for the unattainable — the opportunities missed, the salve that their broken hearts longed for — thereby mistaking their yearnings for love.” But Raif’s peceptions and beliefs change often, sometimes daily, sometimes hourly. Change is Raif’s only constant despite his puzzlement with Maria, who makes a virtue of her inconsistency, telling Raif “that’s just the way I am … one day like this, another day like that.” At the same time, the story is about a man who understands the inevitably of change but is incapable of coping with it, a man whose will to believe in himself is irreparably broken.

As the novel moves to its conclusion, it becomes a story of tragic fate, and it is Raif’s reaction to his fate that defines the rest of his existence. Rather than spoiling the story by revealing its details (the resolution has elements of a soap opera), I’ll highlight some of Sabahattin Ali’s quotable prose:

“Nothing grieves me more than seeing someone who has given up on the world being forced to smile.”

“But isn’t this how souls come together, by holding another’s every idea to be true and making it their own?”

“How painful it is, after thinking that a woman has given us everything, to see that in truth she has given us nothing — to see that instead of having drawn her closer, she is farther away than ever!”

“The logic in our minds has always been at odds with the logic of life.”

“For a brief while, a woman had pulled me out of listless lethargy; she had taught me that I was a man, or rather, a human being; she had shown me that the world was not as absurd as I had previously thought and that I had the capacity for joy.”

Although set in Turkey and Berlin, the story has no boundaries. Its themes are relevant to any time or culture. I might not recommend the story for its plot, but its insight into human nature, its exceptional characterization, and its elegant prose make the novel a standout tragedy.

RECOMMENDED

The Wolves of Winter by Tyrell Johnson

Published by Scribner on January 2, 2018

The Wolves of Winter is best approached as a young adult novel. It doesn’t appear to be marketed that way, but it has all the YA characteristics: a young adult protagonist at odds with an older adult world; the protagonist’s discovery that she has greater resilience/strength/skills than she imagined; a broadening of that character’s life experiences as the novel progresses; her blossoming but chaste love for a good-hearted bad boy; her clashes with adult/parental authority; her reassurance of parental love; her confrontation of easily-resolved moral issues; and an undemanding plot that moves quickly and covers a relatively short time span. That description isn’t meant to disparage YA fiction (some of it is quite good), but readers should know what to expect when they pick up a book.

The Wolves of Winter posits a nuclear war, started (credibly enough) by the America First crowd. When the radioactive dust settles, America is no longer first, because nobody comes in first in a holocaust. America’s real downfall, however, was launching a biological attack on China (or at least that’s what the characters theorize), which backfired when travelers defied the Asian travel ban and carried the virus back to the United States.

The protagonist in this post-apocalyptic novel is Gwendolynn McBride, a 23-year-old who prefers Lynn. She isn’t big enough to avoid being bullied by the survivalist libertarians who seem to welcome post-apocalyptic living because the strong can bully the weak when no society exists to enforce civilized rules. But Lynn’s family is supportive; they deal with problems as they arise.

One potential problem is a wanderer named Jax. He joins the family while recovering from an injury. Lynn is fascinated by him (to her family’s consternation), but Jax’s history might make him a man to be avoided. Jax is being pursued by Immunity and his mere presence brings trouble to Lynn’s family.

Immunity is the shortened version of a longer organizational name given to a mysterious group that purports to be combatting the virus by searching for a way to create (you guessed it) immunity. Lynn’s mother seems to know something about Immunity but she won’t talk about it. Whether Immunity is a force for good or evil is one of the questions that the reader must ponder for much of the novel. Of course, all the family secrets are revealed near the novel’s end.

Another mystery for much of the novel is whether Jax is a good guy or a bad guy. He seems to have enhanced abilities (speed and strength among them) that make him a dangerous fellow, but can he be trusted? Well, this is YA fiction so you can probably guess the answer.

Lynn is the kind of independent, defiant young woman who has become a standard fixture of YA post-apocalyptic fiction. Naturally, she is attracted to Jax, because romance between a young, tough survivor like Lynn and a mysterious stranger like Jax is part of the formula for this kind of book. In fact, much of the book is formulaic. The story holds few surprises and the various threats Lynn faces are easily overcome. Since the story creates no fear that Lynn is ever in serious danger, it also creates little suspense. The ending is improbably happy, but that’s part of the formula. The Wolves of Winter is well-crafted, and if you like the formula, you’ll probably like the book. If you’re tired of the formula or would like to see it wielded with a new twist, you should probably give the novel a pass.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS