Guardian by Joe Haldeman

First published in 1992; published digitally by Open Road Media on September 27, 2016

Rosa Tolliver leaves her husband in Boston after he sodomizes their son. Rosa and her son travel to Dodge City, which is still the far west at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of the journey is by steamboat, giving Joe Haldeman a chance to reflect on Mark Twain and to discuss a number of historical facts that he seems to toss out at random. Not much else of substance happens in the first third of the novel, except for the occasional appearance of a talkative but cryptic raven.

Eventually Rosa takes a lover and her son gets the idea to prospect for gold in Alaska. Rosa gets a gig teaching in a small Alaskan town while her son and new lover are off in the mountains mining for gold. Rosa agrees to this plan despite her raven friend telling her “No Gold.” Rosa is eventually accused of being a witch, and she might be one, given the amount of advice she receives from ravens. Or maybe the raven is a witch. Or maybe the local Alaskan shaman gave Rosa some peyote when she wasn’t looking. The would explain the interplanetary travel that pops up in the last third of the novel.

Assuming they’re real and even if they’re not, the aliens Rosa meets are the most interesting part of the book. Until they appear, the story is pleasant and humane but a little dull. After they leave, the story returns to being pleasant and humane but a little dull.

Rosa’s travels with her raven guardian allow Haldeman another chance to philosophize. His musings — metaphor presented as reality — might not be profound, but they are reasonably wise and intellectually stimulating.

Haldeman had an occasional tendency to delve into religious themes (Forever Free being an obvious example). Guardian flirts with the concept of God but doesn’t pretend to offer any answers. Haldeman is at his best when he writes about war and its consequences, and there is a bit of that here. Haldeman’s prose is also, at times, quite elegant, and in places the story is touching.

Despite the injection of the guardian and angelic aliens and a place where souls dwell and a chatty raven, Haldeman manages to make Guardian into a science fiction novel (rather than the fantasy it initially seems to be) thanks to alternate universes, which can be used to explain just about anything if you set your mind to it. Still, the story seems to be inspired by Carlos Castaneda and I have the strong suspicion that peyote is a better explanation for Rosa’s experiences than travels though the multiverse with a guardian raven.

I’m not sure Guardian coheres as it jumbles together an adventure story, a travelogue, an alternate history, religious mythology, and a mixture of fantasy and science fiction themes. There are certainly parts of the novel I enjoyed and I didn’t dislike any of it, but a good bit of purposeless description does little to advance the late-arriving themes that give the story its heft. The really good parts of the novel are too brief to make the novel as a whole really good

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch

Published in the Netherlands in 2014; published in translation by Hogarth on September 6, 2016

Dear Mr. M is one of those books that substitutes initials for the names of certain people and places. That’s fine if you’re Kafka but it’s a little precious when most modern writers adopt the technique. Still, I think it suits the narrator.

M is a literary novelist living in the Netherlands who has had some success but his luster is fading. During interviews, he is grilled not about his books, but about the inglorious role his father played in the Second World War. It is that past, perhaps, that compels M to write so many books about the war.

PartS of Dear Mr. M are narrated by M’s downstairs neighbor, who is rather obsessed with M and his family. The neighbor doesn’t think much of M, but the reliability of his opinions is suspect. On the other hand, M does seem to be petty and shallow and vindictive. He also defends indefensible views. So is he a good person or a bad person? When he defends his writing at book signings, he says he avoids stereotyping by creating characters who are mixtures of good and bad. M is probably just such a mixture, as are most people. But who is the narrator and why is he obsessed with M? Initially nameless, the neighbor’s identity becomes apparent after the book shifts gears.

The shift occurs when the story, now told in the third person, begins to follow students who are suspected of complicity in the disappearance of a history teacher who is rumored to have been overly affectionate with his female students. This lengthy section of the novel is presented as a “true” story upon which M based his most famous novel. A skinny kid who has attracted the most beautiful girl in his class is the dynamic that attracted M’s attention, but M’s novel omitted another girl who is either a friend or rival of the beautiful girl. This section of Dear Mr. M is rich with the jealousies and alliances and insecurities of teens, although it sacrifices plot development for character development.

The sections that follow alternate between M’s present and the past story of the missing teacher. The past and present are eventually connected. Saying anything else about the plot would risk spoiling it, so I’ll leave it at that.

Like many books that feature a writer as a main character, Dear Mr. M is in part about the process of writing. Parts of the book, in fact, seem designed to expose the pettiness of writers, their obsession with sales figures and status within the community of writers. Herman Koch portrays writers as back-stabbers with swollen egos, a description that pretty much defines a subset of any profession. While the extended discussions of imaginary writers were a little too self-referential to hold my interest, M’s self-destructive behavior is entertaining, if only because it is satisfying to imagine that obnoxious people might pay some price for their bad behavior.

In an interview, M explains his departures from reality in his construction of fiction. Those choices are central to the plot. The novel’s conceit (writers steal from and transform reality, but should they pay a price when they borrow from the lives of real people?) is clever, and the payoff at the story’s end makes the novel worth reading. Unfortunately, reaching that payoff requires the reader to wade through descriptions of teenage anxieties that are longer than necessary to set the stage for the ending.

RECOMMENDED

The Ice Beneath Her by Camilla Grebe

First published in Sweden in 2015; published in translation by Ballantine Books on December 27, 2016

Peter Lindgren is a character in a Scandinavian novel, which means he’s depressed. He feels weak and ambivalent and unable to commit to anything. His marriage to Hanne failed long ago. He rarely sees his 15-year-old son. His mother and sister are dead and his father is drinking himself to death. He blames himself for his sister’s death as the result of family drama during his childhood. He’s a homicide cop but arresting people doesn’t make the victims less dead, so he wonders if his life has meaning. That attitude manifests itself in various hand-wringing passages as the novel progresses. Eventually Peter’s self-doubting personality gets old. It also slows the novel’s pace, as does the hand-wringing of the other depressed characters.

Peter and Manfred Olsson investigate the death of a beheaded woman in suburban Stockholm. Her body is in the home of Jesper Orre, a successful Stockholm clothing retailer, but her identity is unknown. There are similarities to a case that has been unsolved for ten years. That prompts Manfred to call Hanne Lagerlind-Schőn. Now retired as a police consultant and in the early stages of dementia, Hanne reluctantly agrees to study the possible connection between the two cases. Yes, this is the same Hanne who was once married to Peter. Hanne, of course, is also depressed, but she has good reason to be, apart from being Scandanavian.

Point of view changes from chapter to chapter. First person accounts of the investigation (and of the general depression that apparently accompanies all life in Scandinavia) come from Peter and Hanne. Hanne’s depression stems from her current controlling husband and the realization that her slow onset of dementia will eventually lead her to lose her memories and, for all practical purposes, to lose herself.

A third perspective comes from Emma Bohman. Emma’s story starts two months earlier, when Jesper doesn’t show up for her engagement dinner. Emma complains that Jesper has been borrowing money from her, which surprises the reader, given that Emma has a drudge job in one of his stores. Emma spends quite a bit of time wondering why Jesper, her secret lover, has suddenly stopped returning her calls. Her self-doubt, like Peter’s, gets old. And like Peter, Emma has a sad childhood experience that left her a little broken.

Using a technique that has become common in thrillers, Emma’s narrative of the past eventually links up to the present narratives of Peter and Hanne. This lets the reader understand the background to the crime and to guess at its solution while the investigators probe the past. The solution is a bit contrived but it’s not over the top, as is the case with many modern thrillers.

Camilla Grebe builds suspense effectively, although this isn’t a frenetically-paced, action-filled thriller. The novel is more about characters than crime, but the characters are interesting and believable (albeit depressed) and the plot is at least moderately surprising. All of that squeaks the novel into recommended territory, but I would primarily recommend it to fans of Scandinavian fiction who have not grown weary reading about characters who are tired of living.

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Rather Be the Devil by Ian Rankin

First published in the UK in 2016; published by Little, Brown and Company on January 31, 2017

Having taken an unwanted pension, Rebus is contemplating the unhealthy results of a life spent smoking, drinking beer, and brooding over unsolved crimes. Not one to let a bit of lung cancer get him down, Rebus begins to nose around after learning from Siobhan Clarke that gangster Darryl Christie has been roughed up. A rival gangster is also interested in learning who attacked Christie.

Darryl Christie and Joe Stark are suspected of doing away with a rogue cop who nearly did away with Malcolm Fox when he was still with Professional Standards. Now Fox is a Detective Inspector in Major Crimes whose first assignment is to learn what he can about Christie’s beating without stepping on the toes of DI Clarke, who is heading the investigation in Edinburgh.

All of this leads Rebus to look into a closed case involving the death of Maria Turquand. Bruce Collier, lead singer for a popular band in the 1970s, was among the persons questioned, but one of Maria’s lovers was deemed the most likely suspect (her wealthy banker husband having been ruled out by virtue of an alibi). There are, of course, several other suspects, given the number of people associated with a band and the fact that Maria was killed in the hotel where the band was staying.

The cold case had last been reviewed by DI Robert Chatham. The review was prompted by a writer who specialized in books about unsolved crimes. They both become important characters who contribute to a subplot in addition to the main story.

The story branches off to encompass a Ukranian gangster, an assortment of British gangsters, Fox’s gambling-addicted sister, money laundering, and an assortment of beatings, killings, and snitchings. The plot is complex but not confusing (although it does tax the memory and might require a bit of note-taking to keep track of all the suspects). As a Rankin fan would expect, the plot resolution is clever.

Occasional references to folk and rock musicians from the UK had me drifting to YouTube to get a sense of the music that surrounds the story. Some of it isn’t bad. Rebus particularly likes Rory Gallagher, whose “concept album” Kickback City includes -- surprise, surprise -- a contribution by Ian Rankin. No surprise, then, that Rebus plays Kickback City on his car stereo.

As always, unexpected bits of humor enliven the novel, usually in the form of dialog. Characterization and plotting are always strengths in a Rankin novel. Rather Be the Devil is no exception. It’s a solid entry in a dependable series.

RECOMMENDED

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

This review was first published in 2013. The novel is now available in a ditigal edition with an introduction by Greg Bear.

First published in 1958; published ditigally by Open Road Media on January 24, 2017

Set in 2049, A Case of Conscience begins with four humans on the planet Lithia. Ruiz-Sanchez is a biologist and a Jesuit priest. Cleaver is a physicist. Agronski is a geologist and Michelis is chemist. They are members of the Lithian Review Commission, tasked with deciding whether Lithia would be a suitable port of call for Earth. Each commission member arrives at a conclusion by a different process of reasoning, although the "reasoning" employed by Cleaver, and particularly by Ruiz-Sanchez, is shaky. Cleaver believes Lithia would be ideal for the development of weapons while Ruiz-Sanchez thinks the planet is literally a satanic creation. Since Ruiz-Sanchez has arrived at a conclusion that is consistent with Manichaeaism, a religious philosophy discredited by his church, Ruiz-Sanchez expects to be excommunicated. He nonetheless casts his vote on that basis and the Commission returns home. The humans take with them a gift from the Lithians -- an egg that will hatch in flight, giving birth to Egtverchi.

The second half of the novel takes place on Earth, where Egtverchi proves adept at exposing human hypocrisy and, in his words, "breeding dissension." Given his own television show, he urges viewers to be mad as hell and not take it anymore, a message that suits his "audience of borderline madmen," as one person characterizes it, or in Ruiz-Sanchez' view, "those who feel cut off, emotionally and intellectually, from our society and its dominant cultural traditions." In other words, they feel alienated, and they identify with the alien who goads them. Egtverchi wants his followers to become wrenches in the cogs, to tear up their identity cards and abandon the cities.

Long before "worldbuilding" became a science fiction buzzword, James Blish carefully created a truly alien world (described in scientific detail in an appendix). Houses are made of ceramic pottery, each one unique. A tree that emits radio waves is the basis for long distance communications. Lithians have no politics, no nations, no media, no celebrations, no religion. The Lithians' science departs credibly from Earth's, in part because it is based on the unique characteristics of the planet Lithia. Blish managed to give the aliens (who resemble tall reptilian kangaroos) a genuinely alien culture as well as a unique means of reproduction and (for lack of a better term) childhood development. It is, in fact, the gestation process, and its apparent confirmation that intelligent creatures are the result of evolution, that convinces Ruiz-Sanchez of Lithia's satanic nature.

The future Earth that Blish imagined is a product of his time. Most people live underground, in bomb shelters the size of cities. The "Shelter economy" that developed eventually produced widespread rioting, which prompted the United Nations to create a true world government. That should have ended the threat of nuclear war and obviated the need for a Shelter economy, but the Shelter economy still prevails, although members of the ruling class live comfortable, decadent lives. Egtverchi is seen as a threat to the continued existence of the class division that serves the leaders so well.

Egtverchi's televised call for civil unrest seems like small potatoes in the day of 24-hour cable pundits, the wackiest of whom urge their wacky followers to do all sorts of wacky things. Yet Egtverchi's message resonates with those whose lives are spent in service of the Shelter economy, meeting labor quotas, never leaving their underground bunkers. To the extent that the Shelter economy is seen as quasi-communism (a frequent theme of 1950s science fiction), Egtverchi points the way to individualism.

A Case of Conscience is notable as one of the first science fiction novels to consider the core beliefs of Christianity in a universe where humans are not the only sentient species. It raises theological questions that are echoed in The Sparrow and some of Philip K. Dick's novels. A Case of Conscience relies heavily on Catholic dogma, and much of that dogma feels dated -- not that the religion has changed, but the world has. Ruiz-Sanchez' belief that if God did not create the Lithians, Satan must have done so (because only Satan would replace divine creation with evolution) seems a little silly (and the silliness of dogma may have been Blish's point), but Ruiz-Sanchez' sincere spiritual debate, the angst he feels while wrestling with spiritual issues, makes him a sympathetic character.

Several other issues of conscience are at play in the novel that make it worth a reader's time. One faction on Earth wants to develop Lithia for the dubious benefit of Earth in a way that will surely harm the Lithians. What, if anything, to do about Egtverchi's rabble rousing poses another dilemma. As a priest, Ruiz-Sanchez must decide whether to carry out the Pope's wishes despite his fear that the Pope's reasoning is flawed, a fear that forces him to confront the heresy that the doctrine of papal infallibility might itself be flawed. All of these issues are interesting, as is the world that Blish creates. If for no other reason, A Case of Conscience deserves to be read by a modern audience for Blish's lush prose.

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