Savage Country by Robert Olmstead

Published by Algonquin Books on September 26, 2017

Everything about Savage Country is stark:  its landscape, its language, its characters. Biblical imagery abounds, from a plague of locusts to kids named after apostles. The novel has an Old Testament feel with its brutal justice and harsh injustices as characters struggle to overcome sinful thoughts in a moral wilderness. Savage Country is a story of ambition and hubris, and stories with Old Testament themes rarely go well for people whose ambition is the pursuit of worldly goods. But New Testament virtues are also on display in Savage Country as characters strive to find their better selves by caring about the less fortunate.

Michael Coughlin is a British citizen who fought for the South in the Civil War. He travels to Kansas in 1873 to pay his dead brother’s mortgage. The payment saves the land from Whitechurch, who held the mortgage and planned to seize the farm. If not for Michael’s stern resolve, Whitechurch might not have accepted the payment. But Whitechurch does not easily let go of his desires, and his need for vengeance is one of the story's themes.

Michael’s brother had intended to mount a hunt for buffalo but died before the hunt could start. His brother’s wife, Elizabeth, intends to follow through on that plan, using the proceeds of the hunt to repay Michael and to meet her living expenses. Michael feels no choice but to accompany her since he cannot dissuade her from entering the savage country where the last buffalo herd roams.

The story details conflicts with man (white men versus Native Americans, white men versus black men, white men versus women of all heritages, bad men versus good men), but the greater part of the plot is driven by conflicts with nature (fire and floods, snow and wind, locusts and drought, buffalo and wolves). While the white men think they are the only ones entitled to make a living and resent the employment of black men (some things, it seems, never change), the greatest conflict is with disease in an era before antibiotics were available to save lives. And while literature professors teach that the three literary conflicts all involve man, Savage Country teaches that nature against nature (wolf versus buffalo, water versus stone) is a larger part of our planet’s story.

Michael plays his part in the decimation of the last remaining buffalo herd, and he does so with regret, knowing that he is stealing from nature, taking something precious from the land. It is the same regret he feels when he kills people, always in the belief that he has no realistic alternative. His choices are dictated more by expedience than morality: the death of buffalo allows humans to survive and prosper; a man in the wilderness who contracts rabies needs to be put down so that he does not imperil the lives of the healthy. It falls to Michael to deal out death because he can.

Robert Olmstead’s research resulted in a detailed description of the work that goes into assembling the scallywags, oxen, mules, wagons, provisions, and supplies required to mount an expedition for buffalo. His description of the buffalo hunt and subsequent skinning and butchering, the smells and sounds and sights, has a visceral impact. His description of a desolate, unforgiving, and savage land is vivid.

Savage Country tells an intense, powerful story that lives up to its title. Yet a strong horse and a loyal dog can provide comfort even in a savage land. People can take care of each other by banding together and forgetting their differences. That may not be enough to assure survival, but the Olmstead seems to be telling the reader that it is the only way for decent people to live.

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Safe by Ryan Gattis

Published by MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux on August 1, 2017

Like many good crime novels, Safe is about moral dilemmas. The story features two sympathetic characters, both skating between the right and the wrong side of the law, who steadily move toward a confrontation with each other while trying to do decide whether and how to do something decent with their lives, although for much different reasons.

A locksmith whose nickname is Ghost helps the DEA break into LA drug houses and opens any safes they find on the premises. Ghost has a need for money, although not for his own benefit, and decides that helping himself to cash in a safe will solve the problem. Of course, he trades one problem for another.

As a former addict and gang banger, Ghost has ample reason to regret much of his life. Thanks to the death of a woman named Rose, a woman who helped him find a reason to live before she died, Ghost has been living in pain for a long time. But a bad past has given him a good heart, and Ghost wants to make amends before he dies. Stealing from drug dealers (or, as the DEA might see it, stealing from the DEA) gives him the opportunity to do that. Ghost isn’t exactly Robin Hood but in his state of redemption, he’s a good, likable guy who is taking risks because he doesn’t have much to lose. He's kind of a Robin Hood from the the Hood.

The other key character, whose nickname is Glasses, works for a major drug dealer. His tendency toward decency is not so much a moral choice as an aversion to the violent methods his drug boss employs. But the novel’s strongest point is that there are different ways of being honorable, different paths to being good or bad, and life just isn’t as black and white for most people as the narrowest minds want it to be.

Ghost and Glasses both care about the people in their lives, which sets them apart from the novel’s more sociopathic characters. But none of the characters are truly evil — even the ones who do evil deeds live by a code that hints at moral principles — and that compassionate understanding of people whose lives have been shaped by unfortunate influences is one of the things I like about Safe.

Quite a bit of Safe (particularly when narrated by Glasses) is written in street prose, eloquent and creative in its own way. The plot is engaging but the depth of the characters sets Safe apart from most crime novels. Some aspects of the novel (including the disease that motivates Ghost to make the choices that drive the story) might be a little too convenient, but that didn’t stop me from appreciating the novel’s poignant moments. And the ending is such a gut punch that I would recommend the novel for the last few pages alone.

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Red Swan by Peter T. Deutermann

Published by St. Martin's Press on August 22, 2017

A new CIA operative, Melanie Sloan, is recruited to a mission that asks her to become intimate with the chief of China’s Ministry of Security Services. Preston Allender, a consulting psychiatrist for the CIA, has selected Melanie and one of his female associates trains her in the art of seduction. That sort of thing happens all the time in spy novels, but P.T. Deuterman makes the set-up seem credible … or credible enough that I happily bought into it for the sake of the story.

About a third of the way into the novel, a trap gets sprung and the story takes a twist, one I haven’t seen before in the many spy novels I’ve read. Kudos to Deutermann for his cleverness. But the story doesn’t stop twisting until it reaches its end. The consequences that follow from Allender’s scheme set up the remainder of the novel.

Red Swan also differs from most spy novels in the way that Allender’s scheme backfires, not because it is unsuccessful, but because it is so successful that it has political ramifications. Heads must roll and Allender’s head is most convenient. The political and bureaucratic aspect of the novel is sharper than most American spy novels manage to convey. But again, the reader sees only the tip of a political struggle that will gain depth at the plot moves forward, entangling the CIA’s director and its top two deputies, as well as a Congresswoman and a slew of American and Chinese spooks.

Allender is a character I would like to meet again. He’s known as Dragon Eyes because his yellow eyes are unusually intense, an attribute he put to good use as the CIA’s chief interrogator before his retirement. He also has a preternatural ability to anticipate what someone is about to say, a talent he uses to convince people that he can read their minds — and maybe he can, in a limited sense. An interrogation scene at the end of the novel is very cool. All of that makes Allender an interesting character without taking him too far over the top, as so many recent thrillers have done with their protagonists.

Red Swan is a fun novel. The plot kept me guessing about which purported were really good guys and which apparent bad guys were actually the enemy. That's what a spy novel should do. Low-key action keeps the story moving but I was engrossed by the puzzles that torment the key players. Deutermann writes in the confident voice of a seasoned author. If this is the start of a series, I look forward to the next installment.

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To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann

Published in Germany in 2015; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 29, 2017

On his deathbed, Walter’s mind returns to the war. Walter was a dairy farmer, just turning 18 and working for the Reich Food Estate thanks to his inability to shoot straight during his term in the Hitler Youth Corps. Unfortunately for Walter, the war is nearing an end and Hitler needs bodies to move forward and die, followed by more bodies who move forward and die, so Walter is drafted and sent to Hungary, where the Waffen SS is trying to stop the Russian advance. But because he has a driver’s license, Walter ferries supplies rather than fighting at the front. He fires only one shot during the war, but it is a shot he will never forget.

After Walter has a moment of heroism, he is rewarded with the opportunity to search for his cruel father’s grave. That quest takes him even closer to the Russian front, where the consequences of war are stark. Hopelessness pervades the novel. Civilians lose their homes and towns, deserters flee the front only to face execution. The Germans are fighting “a war for cynics, who don’t believe in anything but might makes right” — the same thinking that starts every war. The war pits enemy against enemy but also friend against friend when Walter is ordered to be “stronger than your own scruples.”

The horrors of war are seen from the perspective of soldiers fighting and dying for the losing side. Some of those horrors are inflicted by the soldiers, following orders from officers, on civilians suspected of being partisan, or just to satisfy their blood lust. And some horrors are inflicted on soldiers by their own officers, as the story illustrates in its most dramatic moment. Walter comes of age with an act that no teenager (or adult) should be forced to undertake, and then swallows that moment, concealing it deep within his being for the rest of his life — a fact that is revealed in the opening pages and again, indirectly, through song lyrics that Walter's son recounts in an epilog.

One of the story’s themes is that life moves on, even as individual lives end. Walter believes there will always be a need for milkers, but learns at the war’s end that he will soon be displaced by machines, his three years of training leading only to personal obsolescence. But change is inevitable and the brief time that Walter serves in the war brings about many changes in his life and country. Some of those changes he will live with until he dies, will make him welcome his own eventual death.

To Die in Spring is written (or translated) in smooth prose with no wasted words. It tells a small story at the end of a big war, developing the central character in depth and providing enough context in the atmosphere of war and supporting characters to make the story both convincing and compelling. To Die in Spring isn’t quite as atmospheric as All Quiet on the Western Front, but it conveys similar truths about war's impact on soldiers with nearly the same power.

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Elle by Philippe Djian

First published in France in 2012; published in translation by Other Press on May 23, 2017

Michèle lives in fear, sometimes in a state of panic. She believes in signs and portents that she sees everywhere. She receives anonymous texts that might be perceived as threatening, and she assumes they came from her rapist. Michèle treats the rape as a fact of life, in much the same way as she regards less significant events in her life.

The forces that shaped Michèle quickly become apparent. Michèle’s father has served thirty years in prison for a monstrous crime that occurred during Michèle's childhood. Her mother is paying young men for sex. Michèle isn’t pleased that her mother wants her to visit and forgive her father.

Michèle’s job is to evaluate screenplays. She doesn’t like Richard’s, a subject she danced around during the years they were married. Michèle left Richard before he learned about her affair with Robert, husband of her best friend Anna. Her son Vincent has been rude to her ever since the divorce. Vincent’s girlfriend Josie is pregnant by another man.

All of this we piece together in the first thirty pages of a novel that is largely based on Michèle’s fragmented thoughts. She is surprised when a rivalry develops between Richard and her married neighbor Patrick, with whom she’s thinking of having an affair, although she’s also thinking of ending her affair with Robert. As the novel moves forward, Michèle makes some decisions, defers others, and allows some decisions to be made for her. In other words, her life proceeds as lives do, although hers is more dramatic than most.

Michèle is a woman of moods. She wants to sleep with Patrick and then she doesn’t and then she does and so on. She hates her mother and then loves her and then hates her and so son. Sometimes she thinks she should change her ways; other time she looks forward to having more “unusual adventures” (i.e., sleeping with married men). Eventually (and I write this as a warning to sensitive readers) she indulges in rape fantasies that become realities.

There were several times when I thought (as I suspect many readers will), “Why is she doing this?” But it’s clear that Michèle doesn’t always know why she behaves as she does. The closest she comes to an answer is, “sometimes people would do just about anything to feel a tiny bit better.” And “just about anything” can include behavior that might seem rewarding in the moment even if, viewed later with a more rational mind, the behavior is self-destructive. As she tells her cat, “It’s a little complicated to explain,” probably because we can’t explain what we don’t understand.

To her credit, even when the circumstances of her life have victimized her, Michèle does not play the role of victim. She uses adversity to learn truths about herself, not all of which are pleasant. She moves forward, and whether those moves are healthy or not, they are preferable to wallowing in self-pity. Michèle might not be an exemplary person, but she isn't a bad person. Her character is a reminder that people respond to difficult childhoods in many different ways. It would be easy to judge Michèle, but she doesn’t deserve to be judged. All of that makes her a strong literary character.

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