Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt

Published in Great Britain in 2015; published by Little, Brown and Company on July 3, 2017

The device that drives Devastation Road — a man wakes up in unfamiliar surroundings, having little memory of his past — has been used by many authors. The memory loss is meant to create suspense while leading to a surprising revelation when the protagonist’s memory returns. Jason Hewitt achieves the intended effect in a carefully controlled, moving novel that surprises again and again.

Owen wakes up on a riverbank, not sure how he got there or why he has a gun in his pocket. He has a vague memory of being on a trolleybus; he knows he is from England. He sees dead bodies in the river. He eventually meets a boy named Janek who speaks a Slavic language Owen doesn’t understand. Owen is able to piece together enough information to realize that he’s in a country he has no recollection of visiting, and that the year is 1945, about four years after the last year he remembers.

Finding a map on a dead soldier, Owen recognizes none of the place names, but feels drawn to the word Sagan. For lack of a plan, that becomes his destination, the boy his willing companion, although it soon becomes clear that Janek has an agenda of his own.

Fragments of memory return as Owen makes the journey with Janek. They are eventually joined by a Polish-speaking woman named Irena and her baby, apparent victims of war’s devastation. But Irena, like Janek, also has an agenda, and Owen finds her to be even more baffling than the boy.

As is customary in memory loss novels, Hewitt plants questions for the reader to ponder. What is the significance of the button in Owen’s pocket and the patch inside his jacket? Where is Owen’s brother Max and why does Owen feel that he somehow left Max behind? What was Owen’s relationship with Max’s fiancé? Owen’s background is mysterious due to his memory loss, but other central characters are also a mystery. Why is Janek searching for his Czech brother in Germany? Why is Irena so ambivalent about the baby she calls “it”? Unanswered questions drive the plot while sustaining the reader’s interest.

The questions are eventually answered in ways that are credible and unexpected. The plot is strong — it scatters enough dramatic moments to fill a trilogy — but the novel’s greater strength lies in its characterizations, its demonstration that it is impossible to truly understand other people, particularly when their behavior is a complex response to desperate circumstances, and that it might be just as difficult to understand ourselves. The powerful story and multidimensional characters make it easy to forgive the memory loss contrivance.

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Ironclads by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by Solaris on November 7, 2017

About 20 years after Brexit, England becomes an American territory, giving the U.S. a convenient military base and a stepping stone to Europe, where ideological conflicts are translating into military conflicts, primarily with the Swedes and Finns, collectively known as the Nords. Sgt. Ted Regan and his two buddies (Sturgeon and Franken) are asked by a corporate Scion to find the Scion’s cousin, who disappeared on the front, the weaponized armor that encased him having gone dark. Since the military does whatever powerful corporations ask, the three grunts are separated from their assignments and sent to the front where they will carry out a rescue mission.

They are joined by a Brit named Lawes and a corporate tech guru named Cormoran who flies drones and hacks systems. Eventually they’re joined by a Finnish bioweapon named Viina. Needless to say, the mission is quickly FUBAR and the reader is treated to some battle scenes that are more intelligent than those served up by typical military sf. The soldiers struggle along until they discover just why they were tasked for this seemingly impossible mission.

Apart from the usual tech that attracts readers to military science fiction, there are some clever ideas here, including the notion of breeding and releasing millions of little bugs to block satellite views of troop movements and defenses. This is a relatively short, fast-moving novel, that tells an uncluttered story. Characters are adequately developed and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s prose is sharp.

The point of Ironclads is that most modern wars (and presumably future wars) are fought to advance corporate interests rather than national interests, and that politicians and military leaders are easily manipulated by corporations. That point has been made by other science fiction writers in more detail than Ironclads, but the theme is a good one, and it gives the entertaining story some bite.

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Darke by Rick Gekoski

Published in Great Britain in 2017; published by Canongate Books on November 21, 2017

Darke is the kind of novel that starts out being one thing and ends up being something quite different. The ending puts the beginning in perspective by casting the protagonist in a penetrating light that removes him from the shadows and illuminates his interior.

James Darke is a former schoolmaster. Now he has arranged his life so that he will never need to leave his home. He can no longer bear the presence of other people, “even to dismiss them.” He has no use for their opinions or jokes. He is intolerant of any preference that diverges from his own (the notion that some people might prefer green tea to coffee is proof of their stupidity and perhaps their Green Party membership). James has had enough and is ready to say no mas to the world like a defeated fighter. The novel is his journal, the thoughts of a recluse who explains how he came to reject humanity.

James does not limit his disdain to ordinary people. In some of my favorite moments, he savages T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Yeats, “that blubbery piss-artist” Dylan Thomas, “that dreadful gasbag” Kahlil Gibran, and Philip Roth, whose characters “speechify” for paragraphs at a time while always sounding like Philip Roth. James has spent years trying to write a monograph about Dickens, a writer he decides is “slobbery” by the novel’s end. Yet as a teacher, James encouraged his students to read literature with an open mind, to consider multiple viewpoints with humility, to “allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound,” so that “each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being.” Good advice, but James has come to reject his own counsel, having decided that “nothing assuages the pain of being.” In fact, he hates wisdom, and is engaged in the British project of searching for its antidote.

As much as he fears admitting it, James also suffers from loneliness in his self-imposed isolation. Thus he finds himself discussing Dickens with Bronya, his Bulgarian cleaner, who startles him with insights that had never occurred to him. It seems the old dog is capable of learning new ideas, even if he would prefer not to. But will he repair his self-imposed exile from a pained and loving daughter?

How did James Darke become so dark? Much of his journal recounts his past, introducing the reader to the highs and (mostly) lows of his life. The reason for his morose withdrawal from society eventually becomes clear, and the description of the events leading to that point are intense and painful to read. Knowing how his past has shaped his present allows the reader to understand the emotional overload that underlies James’ escape from the world of the living.

Darke is deft in its transition from light comedy to dark comedy to tragedy. Some of James’ humor might be described as socially incorrect; his rant about female tennis players who grunt when they serve is priceless. James also has strong opinions about what a novel should be; he skips past descriptions of trees and searches for “human content,” characters who are passionate or ironic. Which is very much a description of Darke. This is a novel that closely observes people, not the quality of sunsets or the shimmer of a rainy sky.

The novel’s ending, which explains and addresses James’ rejection of his daughter, is powerful. Rick Gekoski sets aside the jokes in favor of a gut-wrenchingly honest examination of a man who was forced to make an impossible decision and then to find a way to live with its consequences. The ending makes it possible for the reader to reinterpret James. He still might not be likable, but he’s sympathetic, a flawed but caring human who is doing his best to confront adversity even if, in his own words, his best isn’t very good.

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Head Games by Craig McDonald and Kevin Singles

Published by First Second on October 24, 2017

This version of Head Games is a graphic adaptation of Craig McDonald’s debut novel. Published in 2007, Head Games was nominated for an Edgar as best first novel. McDonald has written nine more novels in the Hector Lassiter series in addition to a few other books.

Head Games is set in 1957. The premise is that Yale’s Skull & Bones, clubhouse to America’s elite, collects the skulls of famous persons. It wants to acquire Pancho Villa’s skull, which falls into the hands of Hector Lassiter and prompts a shootout with Mexican police.

Rumors link the skull to a map that leads to Villa’s hidden stash of gold. Lassiter is soon teamed with a young poet and a Mexican woman who apparently has a thing for older men. Young women who fall for an aging hard-boiled detective is part of the noir tradition, but McDonald twisted that tradition by making Lassiter a hard-boiled writer.

Lassiter and his entourage (plus Pancho’s skull) travel from Mexico to Hollywood, where Lassiter has a meeting with Orson Welles about a film script he’s writing. The trip also gives him a chance to cash in on the skull. Once there, Marlene Dietrich asks Lassiter to patch up his feud with Ernest Hemmingway. Yeah, there’s a lot of name dropping in this book, but the names belong to interesting people.

A bunch of people want to kill Lassiter, including (possibly) Pancho Villa’s buddy, who really shouldn’t still be alive, and maybe even Prescott Bush. Yes, that Bush. The CIA (always a friend of Skull & Bones) is interested in the skull, and the FBI is interested because J. Edgar Hoover has a bug up his bun about the CIA, which is spying on the FBI.

Despite all the people trying to kill Lassiter, it seems more probable that he’ll kill himself. Diabetes is messing up his vision and throwing off his aim. He’s getting old and often feels like he’s on the verge of having a stroke. And having sex with the beautiful young woman is likely to give him a heart attack. In short, Lassiter is a good noir character.

The name dropping is pretty outrageous but so is the plot. The story is different, more imaginative than most modern noir, and it even seems plausible. The main story is followed by two more, almost like dual epilogs, that carry the plot forward by a couple of decades. The story has a timely message about hubris and leadership, but message or not, the story entertains.

The art in this graphic adaptation is distinctive and consistent. Some of the story drawn in black and white (adding to the noir feel), but it is often supplemented with gold, which both suggests the gold that is central to the plot and adds sort of a sepia tone that is consistent with a story set in the past. More importantly, the art often carries the story. Too many graphic adaptations of novels try to cram too many words into each frame, but Head Games translates the words into drawings, and we all know how many words a picture is worth.

I haven’t read the original novel, but an author’s note at the end explains that this version expands the original, adding characters and events from other novels in the series. Whatever changes might have been made, the graphic novel tells a good story.

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Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam

Published by Random House on July 4, 2017

Who is Rich? is narrated by Rich Fisher, a cartoonist locked in a middle-age crisis who teaches an annual “semibiographical comics” workshop at a summer arts conference. The other teachers range from nobodies a Pulitzer winner. Based on his one published book six years earlier, Fisher ranks himself among the has-beens. He has two children and a vanishing sex life.

Rich loves his wife, although they have the kind of biting conversations that couples with children often thrive upon. The conference gives Rich an annual opportunity to escape from his middle-aged responsibilities, much to his wife’s consternation. It also gives him an opportunity to pursue an affair, to find “a potential alliance in this war against morbidity and death.” One of his flings, with a woman named Amy, has gone on for some time and she continues to occupy his thoughts. Amy, in turn, views Rich as preserving her sanity, although she does not intend to leave her cold but wealthy husband despite her litany of complaints about feeling ignored and lonely.

Rich’s confrontations with his wife are uncomfortable to read, which is a tribute to their realism. Robin, Rich’s wife, is a less-than-ideal parent and Rich doesn’t know how to cope with her anger. Flashbacks take the reader through their courtship and marriage, demonstrating that Robin is high-maintenance and that Rich isn’t emotionally equipped to maintain her. Flashbacks also make clear that Rich sacrificed friendships and harmed his relationship with Robin by depicting the people in his life as unpleasant or foolish characters in his comic.

Who is Rich? Rich is a complete mess, a scattered man who is pulling himself in so many different directions he seems likely to be torn apart at the seams. He makes impulsive decisions that he immediately regrets. His encounters with Amy are the high point of his existence because they demand no responsibility. “I’d never have her, I’d never lose her. It wasn’t real, it didn’t matter, would never sour, never fail.” Of course, the reader knows that none of that is true. One of the things that Rich learns from a rival cartoonist, and that he experiences on his own, is that getting what you want is never as good as you expect it to be. But in most middle-age crisis novels, the protagonist learns a good bit more, and it isn’t clear that Rich is capable of internalizing any of the many lessons he should be learning.

The plot elements are typical of those of a family drama with the feel of a soap opera. The novel touches on familiar issues: dementia in an aging parent; the impact on parents of babies who don’t sleep through the night; the impact of quarreling children on parents; a man who cycles between the belief that he would never harm the family he cherishes and the belief that he needs a completely different life; marriage partners feeling lonely because they aren’t getting whatever they think they need. All of this has been done many times, but some of the details of Rich’s crisis-driven life, both interior and exterior, give the storya measure of freshness despite its familiarity.

Rich is intensely introspective and, at times, I found my attention wandering because he cared about his life much more than I did. That’s natural enough, but the writer’s job is to make the reader care, or at least to be absorbed in the narrative, and I was sometimes absorbed but other times not so much. A strong ending might have made a difference in my overall reaction, but the story fizzles out more than it ends. Stories about writers are often self-indulgent, and this one indulges a bit too much. The novel’s admirable strengths roughly balance its weaknesses, making it hard to recommend. Because it does have its virtues, however, I am recommending Who Is Rich? for readers who are prepared to accept its faults.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS