Three Years with the Rat by Jay Hosking

First published in Canada in 2016; published by St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books on January 24, 2017

Scruffy has been grieving the loss of John and Grace, causing him to enter a depressive self-destructive state, much to the consternation of everyone who knows him, particularly Nicole, his former girlfriend. Scruffy probably has a real name, but if Jay Hosking revealed it, I missed it. Scruffy calls Nicole Trouble and Nicole calls him Danger, but most of his friends seem to call him Scruffy if they use his name at all. Maybe the absence of an identity is meant to symbolize the illusory nature of reality that is (I think) the story’s point.

John was Scruffy’s good friend and Grace is Scruffy’s sister. Grace has been missing since 2006, although there have been some sporadic Grace sightings since then. John, after trying to harm himself, spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. Immediately after his discharge in 2007, he starts building a box. In 2008, John is also gone, and it falls to Grace’s brother to remove the box from their apartment. He also adopts Buddy, John’s lab rat.

There are mirrors on the walls inside the box and … well … other things. Scruffy reassembles the box and enters it. The experience is unpleasant. Eventually Scruffy’s life becomes unpleasant, or at least odd, as he enters a reality in which memory of his existence fades away.

The story bounces around in time, which seems appropriate since time plays a key role in the story. Grace and John were researching the difference between objective and subjective time. Once Scruffy starts messing around with their experiment in an attempt to rescue John and Grace, he finds himself in a reality that differs from the one he remembers.

Even if the shifting time frames sort of make sense in the framework of the story, the technique is usually used to bring different timelines together in a way that slowly reveals whatever the author has been concealing from the reader. Sometimes the technique works well, but in this story it contributes little more than confusion. The hidden fact (what happened to John and Grace?) could have been revealed with just as much impact, and probably more suspense, if the story had been told in a linear fashion.

Eventually — and it takes too long to happen — the novel morphs into a horror story melded with a science fiction story. It is an imperfect meld because the horror isn’t frightening and the science fiction builds rather unscientifically on concepts that been around for decades.

That doesn’t mean Three Years With the Rat doesn’t have entertainment value, but the slow development doesn’t lead to the big payoff that justifies investing so much time to get there. I found myself asking “But why?” at several places in the climactic scene, and never quite puzzled out the answer. Fortunately, Hosking writes smoothly and his agreeable prose style offsets some of the novel’s weaknesses. Still, I can only give Three Years with the Rat a qualified recommendation because too much of it makes too little sense.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Fifth Element by Jorgen Brekke

Published in Norway in 2013; published in translation by St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books on February 28, 2017

Rolf Fagerhus takes advantage of his position in the police to steal an Oslo drug dealer’s stash of cash. His wife has taken his daughter from him and Fagerhus intends to take her back. With the cash and forged passports, he plans to spirit his daughter away to Central America. His plan is complicated by his rushed decision to kidnap the drug dealer’s son, who witnessed his crime.

Odd Singsanker also works for the police. His wife, an American ex-cop named Felicia Stone, has disappeared, at least from Odd’s perspective. She had become irrationally jealous, they had a spat, and she went to Oslo to visit his son. But then she didn’t return to Trondheim as planned. From Felicia’s standpoint, she just dropped out for a while, making a series of impulsive decisions fueled by alcohol. When Felicia decides to go back to Trondheim, the weather impedes her return home, and since she wants to explain herself to Odd in person, she doesn’t call him before she rents a car and begins a treacherous drive. That’s always a dumb thing for a thriller character to do, and it doesn’t work out well for Felicia.

Like a good Scandinavian, Felicia takes time away from her life-threatening adventure to reflect on all the depressing events that have shaped her life, beginning at age 5. Felicia is so introspective, if not self-obsessed, that I liked her the least of all the characters.

Nearing the midway point, the novel takes a break from Odd and Felicia and tells the story of a young man named Knut who finds himself on the wrong side of a nasty drug dealer. Not long after that, it takes another break to tell the story of Sving, who solves the nasty drug dealer’s problems with a baseball bat and whose girlfriend wants him to blow up her husband. Sving’s section of the novel is quite amusing.

With its different episodes, The Fifth Element reads more like a series of related short stories than a novel, but the stories are all entertaining and they eventually link together. Maybe Odd Singsaker fans would want to see more of Odd, who plays almost a collateral role in the novel, but this is the first one in the series that I’ve read so I have no emotional investment in the character. All of the characters are portrayed with enough depth to give them substance, and the linked stories are engaging. Their eventual connection is clever, as later stories explain events that took place in earlier stories. Jorgen Brekke deserves credit for constructing the novel so carefully.

The ending is a little hokey, and the novel’s reliance on coincidence stretches the boundaries of plausibility, but those are minor flaws. On the whole, The Fifth Element tells an entertaining story that is enriched by interesting characters — although I generally found the crooks to be more interesting than the good guys.

RECOMMENDED

Desperation Road by Michael Farris Smith

Published by Little, Brown & Co. on Feb. 7, 2017

Newly released from a Mississippi prison, Russell returns to the town where his father is waiting for him. Russell’s mother died while he was in prison and his father filled the unbearable silence by bringing a woman, an undocumented immigrant, into his home. In addition to his father, trouble is waiting for Russell, old scores that people feel a need to settle. Russell did something stupid but not malicious. He can’t put the crime behind him and neither can the malicious people who think he was not sufficiently punished for it. His former fiancé called off his marriage after he went to prison and now has three kids and a life she regrets. Russell isn’t searching for forgiveness or redemption, nor does he believe he deserves any.

Larry and his brother Walt are the key antagonists who trouble Russell during the novel. Larry isn’t allowed to see the son from his first marriage and his second wife is publicly and repeatedly unfaithful to him. Seeking revenge against Russell may be a way or restoring his sense of manhood.

The other desperate character in Desperation Road is Maben. Broke and homeless, she’s taking her daughter Annalee back to Mississippi because she has nowhere else to go. Desperate circumstances motivate her to take a desperate action. Soon enough, she needs to leave, but again has nowhere to go, no plan, no help, and no hope. Her road intersects with Russell’s a bit beyond the novel’s midway point. That part of the novel hinges on a large coincidence but coincidences happen. This one isn’t so outrageous as to damage the story’s credibility.

Some of the supporting characters are drunks and scoundrels, or just drunks, but other characters are living a responsible life, doing their best with what they have, which isn’t much. Michael Farris Smith’s muscular prose captures the rural southern characters who inhabit his novel (“Russell came across the pond bank and said how you doing old man and the old man grinned with his lips held tight to keep it from getting away from him and he gave Russell a solid handshake as if he’d just sold him a calf”).

I’m impressed with the humanity and understanding that shines through in this novel, the recognition that people are defined by more than their mistakes. Russell believes that rough lives get rougher and he doesn’t believe in fairy tale endings, but the reader hopes that he will manage to find a way out of his various predicaments.

In that regard, I’m also impressed with the suspense that Smith builds. Whether things will end well for Russell and Mabel is the question that hovers over the story. These are people for whom nothing ever seems to end well, so the sense of foreboding is palpable even as the reader roots for their survival. If they stay alive and stay out of prison, that’s the best they can expect. They are, in the novel’s words, “holding on,” and whether they can hold on a while longer is the question that keeps the reader involved with this quietly intense story.

RECOMMENDED

Sandstorm by Laurence Gough

First published in Canada in 1990; published digitally by Endeavour Press on November 28, 2016

Sandstorm takes place well before Arab Spring and the death of Mu’ammar al-Gadaffi, but it does not feel dated. The story is true to the time and place in which it is set and the atmosphere is convincing.

Charlie McPhee lives in a sketchy part of Cairo where the police rarely venture. His passport is expired. Two years earlier, the woman Charlie was planning to take to Cairo left him. Charlie decided to go on their planned vacation anyway, and couldn’t think of a reason to return.

Charlie has some skills, one of which is the ability to defeat security systems and break into safes. When a safecracker dies and needs to be replaced, Charlie is a convenient, albeit unwilling, replacement.

Charlie’s storyline soon intersects with that Jack Downey, who works for Richard Foster, the CIA’s chief of station in Cairo. Downey’s current assignment involves Gadaffi. To pursue his ends, Downey brings Hubie Sweets and Mungo Martin to Cairo from Columbia, where they were busy fulfilling a CIA contract by killing coca harvesters. Downey also has need of a security system specialist and Charlie fits the bill.

Downey is ruthless and manipulative, as he demonstrates when he recruits a young woman in London whose father was killed in Libya. Downey needs Jennifer Forsyth to get Gadaffi’s attention. I won’t reveal anything else about the plot, because its impact comes from various surprises that are revealed as it unfolds.

The story moves quickly, enlivened by occasional shootouts and fights and chases as Downey’s gang of rogues get into a number of scrapes. The action scenes are more-or-less credible, or at least no more improbable than those in most modern thrillers.

As B-list spy novels go, Sandstorm is a decent read. Readers who want their heroes to be heroic and for the good guys to prevail against all odds should look for other escapist avenues. Sandstorm serves up some of that, but none of the characters are icons of virtue. I appreciated that. The characters tend to be stereotypes but they are interesting stereotypes, unlike the stale Special Forces action-figure superheroes who dominate more recent thrillers. Sandstorm isn’t a first tier spy novel, but I would place it high on my list of second tier action-oriented novels with an espionage theme.

RECOMMENDED

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

Published by Hogarth on October 11, 2016

Hag-Seed is a book for fans of The Tempest. I’m sure it can be enjoyed by readers who are unfamiliar with the play, but its great value lies in its exploration of the play’s themes and characters. That exploration will likely resonate more deeply with readers who appreciate the play.

Felix starts Hag-Seed as the artistic director of a summer theater company in Makeshiwig. Felix’s life has been falling apart since his wife left him, leaving him to parent their daughter Miranda, who died from meningitis at age 3. But Felix refuses to believe that Miranda has vanished from the universe. Felix decides to perform a sort of reincarnation by staging The Tempest and making Miranda “the daughter who had not been lost.” This evasion of death will give Felix a chance to glimpse, through his art, the adult daughter he will never know.

Unfortunately for Felix, his artistic concepts (Caliban as a paraplegic) don’t go over well with the Board, although he fears he has been undermined by Tony, to whom he always delegated interaction with the theater’s patrons. Tony, of course, has been maneuvering behind the scenes to replace Felix. After that happens, Felix finds himself teaching Shakespeare in prison, and producing plays with a cast of prisoners.

I like the idea of teaching Shakespeare as part of a prison literacy program. Of course, objections are raised that prisoners are too stupid to learn Shakespeare, but Margaret Atwood provides a blueprint for how it might be done. She also anticipates and addresses short-sighted objections by "law and order" types who think prison should punish (and punish and punish some more) rather than rehabilitate. That's an issue that probably resonates even more strongly in the United States than in England, where the novel is set. The American public loves punishment, the harsher, the better.

Eventually, circumstances (and the plot) dictate that Felix will produce The Tempest in prison. The prisoners like Macbeth because of its sword fights. They like Julius Caesar because they understand betrayal. They like Richard III because they can relate to power struggles. But the prisoners (and government officials) have some qualms about The Tempest, which seems a little gay to them. Felix nevertheless convinces them to see Ariel as a space alien, not a fairy (or air-spirit), and the show goes on.

The play is modernized a bit with the addition of rap and some contemporary language so that the prison audience can follow it, but fans of The Tempest should love this book for the insightful analysis of key scenes and characters offered by Felix and the inmates. There’s always a schemer in a Shakespeare play, and so it is in this book about the production of a Shakespeare play. Felix hatches a scheme that might be worthy of the Bard. It might not be credible, but the credibility of a plot never bothered Shakespeare, so why should it concern Margaret Atwood?

The situation in Hag-Seed sets up as a comedy and much of the story is amusing, but it’s impossible to read Shakespeare without learning something, and Felix learns something about himself as the story unfolds. Felix is haunted (or comforted) by the ghost (or memory, or fantasy) of his dead daughter, and the play teaches something about the power of illusion ... and about the need to set illusions free. And of course, the prisoners learn something, because The Tempest is (as the novel reveals) a play about prisons and the different ways of living within them. And, as the last line of The Tempest reveals, the play is about pardons, which must be earned. The modern illustrations of the lessons taught by one of Shakespeare’s best plays make Hag-Seed a fun and informative read.

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