The Language of Solitude by Jan-Philipp Sendker

Published by Atria / 37 INK on May 2, 2017

Two intertwined stories are told in The Language of Solitude. One is political and the other is not. Both are romantic but in different ways.

In its setting, mood, and emphasis on romance, The Language of Solitude is similar to Jan-Philipp Sendker’s popular The Art of Hearing Heartbeats. I think the political story in The Lanuage of Solitude is more successful than the straightforward romance in the nonpolitical story. The romance in the political  story struck me as being deeper and more meaningful, and its depiction of oppression and corruption in China stand as a lesson about the need for vigilance in maintaining an open and ethical government in the United States.

As in The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, The Language of Solitude is set in Hong Kong and the main character is an idealized male who suffers deeply yet opens himself to love. Paul Leibovitz lives in relative isolation on the island of Lamma. He lost his son and, at 53, is afraid to father another. Before she boards a ferry to a neighboring island, his current lover, Christine, tells Paul that he is hungry for love. That may be Paul’s defining characteristic, although Sendker makes clear that Paul is also compassionate, sensitive, empathic, perfectly attuned to his lover’s needs and moods, and full of emotional depth (in short, the kind of men who are easier to find in fiction than in the real world).

Paul has learned to distrust the illusion of the future, to be suspicious of happiness, to take nothing for granted. Christine Wu, on the other hand, is a dreamer, a woman who places her trust in fate. Christine wonders if Paul is living on the island of Lamma to place himself in exile, but Paul is remarkably dependent on others for someone who has gone into exile. If he doesn’t hear from Christine for a couple of days, he drives himself mad worrying that their relationship is imperiled. So, Paul is ideal but also annoyingly needy, although some readers may find that neediness appealing if it taken as a sign of his love for Christine.

In fact, the relationship is imperiled because, having received unwelcome news of the future from an astrologer, Christine is afraid of the relationship, for Paul’s sake. To placate Christine, Paul also visits the astrologer, and some of the nonpolitical love story is driven by the astrologer’s forecast of his future.

The political story begins when Christine’s brother, Da Long, after being absent and presumed dead during Christine’s lifetime, suddenly resurfaces with a mysterious request. That situation takes Paul and Christine to mainland China where Christine learns the surprising reason why she was summoned to the place of her birth after so many years.

Da Long’s story, which involves his romance with Min Fang during the Cultural Revolution, is more interesting than that of Paul and Christine, if only because it is steeped in a dramatic history. Paul eventually pursues the cause of Min Fang’s current illness, creating conflict with her son, Xiao Hu, and her daughter, Yin-Yin. The conflict illuminates cultural differences between traditional Chinese (who tend to accept things as fate if they feel powerless to change them) and westerners (who often look for ways to change things they do not want to accept).

“A loving heart never gives up” says a character in The Language of Solitude. The story advances that the theme, as well as the need for, and difficulty of achieving, reconciliation and forgiveness. The political themes have to do with the corruption that follows when a  government and businesses become too chummy, the false reliance on “national security” to cover up wrongdoing, the importance of environmental regulations, and the power of the internet.

I thought some of the romantic scenes involving Paul and Christine were a bit sappy. I recognize that some readers will take that as a warning and others will deem it a reason to read the book.

While the other characters all seem credible, I had trouble accepting Paul as a real person. For someone who has lived in or near China for 30 years, Paul is remarkably ignorant of Mainland China’s repressive politics and corrupt government. Or perhaps he’s unreasonably optimistic, which seems inconsistent with everything we learn about him. Maybe he needs to be ignorant to advance the story, but his naivete is not well explained.

The novel’s ending is a bit forced, perhaps to make it fit within an astrologer’s prediction about Paul’s future in a way that will not displease readers. Of course, people who believe in fortune telling are always forcing random events to fit their interpretations of a prediction, but I think the use of astrology in the novel, no matter how important it is in Chinese culture, could have been handled with more subtlety.

On balance, I liked the political story and the romance involving Da Long and his wife. I was less interested in Paul and his romance with Christine. As always, I admired Sendker’s graceful prose. The Language of Solitude is worth a reader’s time, but like other Sendker novels, only parts of this one left me feeling satisfied.

RECOMMENDED

Testimony by Scott Turow

Published by Grand Central Publishing on May 16, 2017

Testimony is the first legal thriller I’ve read that focuses on the International Criminal Court. It is primarily fiction that is only based on fact at the edges of the story, including the ill-considered diversion of arms from Bosnia to Iraq that probably ended up in the hands of terrorists. The guts of the story, however, are pure fiction, written to Scott Turow’s usual standard of detail and deception.

Bill “Boom” Ten Boom has resigned from his Kindle County law firm and left his family behind to prosecute war crimes. In 2004, a group of soldiers allegedly wiped out a village inhabited by 400 Roma in Bosnia. The nearest soldiers happened to be Americans, and the massacre is rumored to have been an act of retaliation for the deaths of American soldiers in a failed attempt to capture a Serbian leader named Kajevic, a war criminal on the order of Slobodan Milošević.

In 2015, a friend of Boom who works for one of America’s spy agencies invites Boom to prosecute the case, which (in the spy’s view) means proving that the killers were not Americans. The thought is that having an American lead the investigation will prevent “some yahoo in Congress” from triggering an international crisis because the ICC is investigating a crime in which American soldiers are the suspected culprits.

Who killed the Roma? A furtive group working for Kajevic? American soldiers? Or, as some insist, did the massacre never happen? Boom’s investigation takes him from the Hague to Washington to Bosnia, placing him in danger while challenging the reader to figure out who is threatening Boom and what really happened to the Roma. Of course, as is common in Scott Turow’s work, the answer requires the careful dismantling of a cover-up.

Boom becomes involved in relationships with a couple of women during the course of the novel. The relationship drama is integral to the story while never threatening to overwhelm the legal drama. While he’s in Holland, Boom also learns something dramatic about his roots, another layer that interweaves with but doesn’t overwhelm the central story.

There are political overtones to the story, but they transcend party politics to ask fundamental questions about the nature of political and military leadership. The novel touches on the colossal political blunder that America made in invading Iraq, and the series of military and political blunders that followed. It also illustrates the debate between those who believe that America should not be subject to international law (among other reasons, because they perceive American soldiers as a likely target of persecution) and those who believe that America should avoid the double standard of judging other countries while being unwilling to be judged by them. The rule of law, after all, should apply equally to everyone, including Americans.

Those issues aside, this is fundamentally a legal thriller rather than a political story. Turow follows Boom and the other characters as they interview, investigate, excavate, and examine the evidence to see where it leads. The book is a model of how all criminal investigations should proceed, as investigators strive to find the truth, not to prove that their pet theory is accurate.

Turow’s characters, as always, have depth and substance. The story moves quickly without glossing over the fact that complex criminal investigations are painstaking affairs. The original plot and the strong characters make this one of the better novels that Turow has written in recent years.

RECOMMENDED

The Only Child by Andrew Pyper

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 23, 2017

The Only Child is a horror novel, but it’s not the horror novel I expected. Is it a vampire novel? Not really, because the vampire genre has devolved into a branch of romance fiction thanks to Twilight and its trashy imposters. There’s only a bit of romantic blood lust in The Only Child, although the protagonist, a fellow named Michael, once wooed Mary Shelley.

Michael is a monster, a blend of Dracula and Frankenstein and Mr. Hyde, who has a taste for blood and nineteenth century horror writers. Give Andrew Pyper credit for drawing on the classics for inspiration.

Michael says he was created to be the prototype of a perfect soldier. Those plans never turn out quite as the mad scientist expects. But whether Michael is telling the truth about his origins is not entirely clear.

What is clear, perhaps, is that Lily Dominick is his daughter. And that Lily’s mother was torn apart by a bear when Lily was six. Except it might not have been a bear. And while Lily’s memories of that day might not be entirely reliable (did she really ride away from the crime scene on a white horse?), it doesn’t take much to convince her that she is a monster’s daughter.

Lily is now a forensic psychiatrist who assesses the mental health of individuals who, more often than not, have committed horrible crimes. The story begins with a man who tore the ears off a stranger so that he would be evaluated by Lily. At least, that’s what he tells her. The man is Michael, who claims to be over two hundred years old.

Michael manipulates Lily in ways that lead her to Eastern Europe and a variety of threatening encounters. Lily wants to learn the truth about the man, about her mother, and perhaps about herself, but separating truth from deception is difficult. The eventual question for Lily is whether she should make an alliance with Michael or with the people who are trying to kill him. It’s a tough question.

Pyper is an excellent storyteller and The Only Child is a truly creepy work of fiction. The plot moves in unexpected directions and the characters are so enigmatic that it’s impossible to decide who to like or dislike until the very end. In fact, the ending redefines the reader’s view of key characters. The Only Child is a well-crafted, surprising novel that plays with the traditions of horror fiction and manages to add something new.

RECOMMENDED

Proof of Concept by Gwyneth Jones

Published by Tor.com on April 11, 2017

Proof of Concept begins with a chunk of expository writing that explains both the premise and the Earth’s current condition. The exposition feature too many exclamation points and graceless sentences like this one: “Things weren’t going too well for life on Earth, in the Population Crisis — once known as the Climate Change Crisis, but population pressures driven by climate change had long ago become the really obvious issue.” It’s really obvious that the sentence could have used a good trimming. Quite a few clichés (“a mystery wrapped around an enigma”) could also have been profitably excised from the introductory text. Sadly, this is the kind of writing that gives science fiction a bad name.

In any event, the story builds on the discovery of a vast cavern deep below the surface of the Earth, which is an ideal place for a Needle that will permit interstellar travel, or multiverse travel, or so its inventors hope. Kir, who has an AI implanted in her brain, is one of the residents living in a framework surrounding the Needle.

Kir seems less interested in the Needle than in having petty arguments with her virtual lover Bill (among others), and feeling petty slights when people do not see everything from her perspective. She is, in short, a drama queen.

There are nuggets in Proof of Concept that could have been fused into an interesting story, but Jones too often relies on science fiction buzzwords like Thought Crime (shades of Orwell!) and baby permits and VR sex and Information Space and Extreme Population Control and Hives (population clusters, not the skin disease) rather than developing something original. A good bit of what passes for a story strikes me as gibberish. Sadly, none of the rehashed concepts come together in a way that could be remotely described as interesting.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Golden Prey by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 25, 2017

Lucas Davenport is adapting to his new gig as a deputy marshal. He doesn’t do the usual boring work that keeps deputy marshals busy — prisoner transport, courthouse security — and his ability to avoid mundane duties causes almost as much resentment as the fact that he drives a Porsche. Even his boss, the marshal in his district, resents Lucas because Lucas doesn’t answer to the marshal. He does help chase the occasional fugitive, but mostly he wants to make his own assignments. He managed this gig because he saved the life of a presidential candidate in the last Prey novel, a fact that apparently disturbed readers of an irrational political persuasion.

The first big job Davenport assigns himself is to track down Gavin Poole, an old-fashioned robber who goes after banks and armored cars and mail trucks. Poole has a lethal girlfriend named Pandora Box (Dora for short). The reader spends some of the novel following Poole and his associates.

Poole recently ripped off a major drug dealer from Honduras, which was not a wise thing to do. Two killers are after him, and the reader spends some of the novel following the killers. They’re quirky, which makes a certain amount of sense since normal people don’t torture and kill for a living, but giving the bad guys some amusing traits is also a John Sandford trademark.

Of course, the reader spends most of the novel following Davenport. For some of the novel he’s teamed with a couple of other deputy marshals. Sandford always give secondary characters believable personalities, and the marshals are a good addition to the cast. The ending hints that they might return in a future novel.

Sandford has a dry and droll sense of humor that infects most of the characters, good guys and bad guys alike. Some of the action takes Davenport to Texas and the southwest, far removed from his usual Minnesota environs. That gives Davenport a chance make wry comparisons of the states and their people.

The last quarter of the novel is essentially an extended chase scene that culminates in an extended shootout, but few writers manage those elements as well as Sandford. The action makes the story race forward, but not so quickly that the characters don’t have time to poke fun at each other. In short, this is a solid entry in a series that consistently entertains.

RECOMMENDED