The Chimera Vector by Nathan M Farrugia

Published digitally by Momentum (Pan Macmillan Australia) on May 1, 2012

The Chimera Vector is sort of a Jason Bourne story, except this version of Jason is named Sophia. She’s a little more fine-tuned than Bourne, but she’s basically a black ops super-killer whose actions are controlled by something called The Fifth Column, a nickname for “the world’s military-industrial complex.”

After mistaking a civilian family in Iran for enemy soldiers and wiping them out before mistaking some “friendly forces” for terrorists (and wiping them out), Sophia and two Mark I operatives on her Fifth Column team are on the run. The Fifth Column regards them as “defective operatives.” Well, they do seem to be a bit confused. Programming glitch?

While working her way through a standard action plot, Sophia is presented with a plan to end psychopathy through eugenics. The reasoning in support of the plan is shaky -- stopping psychopaths from reproducing won’t produce “a world without evil” since abundant evil is caused by non-psychopaths -- but Sophia is troubled by the moral implications of involuntary gene manipulation for all of five seconds before signing on. Couple that with a genetic enhancement that quadruples lifespans, and you’ve got yourself a muddled plot.

The two genetic plans are at odds with each other since a psychopath who lives to be 350 can do a lot of damage without bothering to reproduce and spread his psychopathic seeds. That tension only contributes to the plot muddle, which occupies the novel’s second half. Rather than trying to make sense of it, the reader can wade through action scene after action scene, during which characters engage in constant banter. Long fights last far too long, and the wisecracking combatants made me think that the fights couldn’t have been nearly as intense as Nathan Farrugia made them out to be. I mean, if you’re making chit-chat while dodging knife thrusts, the knives can’t be all that worrisome.

The Chimera Vector isn’t a bad novel, but after a decent start, it nearly fizzles out. If you research this novel, you’ll find a lot more written about the marketing hype that made the book popular than the novel itself. Kudos to Farrugia for his marketing skill, but this novel didn’t convince me to read the others in the series.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

I Don't Like Where this Is Going by John Dufresne

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on April 11, 2016

I didn’t like where this book was going (it didn’t seem to be going anywhere) until about the last third, when it finally hit its stride. By the end, however, I wondered whether the author had a plan in mind when he sat down to write. The plot makes a certain convoluted sense but it is interrupted by events that come across as filler. Some of the events are interesting but too many are not.

The early pages of I Don’t Like Where This Is Going provide what I assume to be an update on events that occurred in the first novel in the series. Not having read it, I felt a bit lost until the current story began to move in the direction of a plot. That takes place after Wylie "Coyote" Melville and his friend Bay watch a woman plunge to her death at a Vegas casino, where they have gone to chill out until it is safe to return to their usual Florida residence. In the story that follows, Wylie and Bay try to get to the bottom of the woman’s death.

Wylie is a therapist, although his wanderings make it difficult for him to serve an established clientele. He passes the time by volunteering at a crisis center when he’s not solving murders or avoiding his own murder. Wylie is a good guy who likes to help people, a point that is emphasized by contrasting his goodness to the sleaze of Vegas. That struck me as a bit obvious and superficial. In general, characters in the novel tend to preach about society’s evils, repeating stories that are (mostly) urban legends in an apparent effort to highlight social problems that are (mostly) overblown.

There are some clever sentences in I Don’t Like Where This Is Going, some amusing observations of Vegas (admittedly an easy target), and a few action scenes in the novel’s second half that generate excitement. Unfortunately, those positive attributes are balanced against extended chunks of the novel that seem purposeless.

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The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror by Joyce Carol Oates

Published by Mysterious Press on May 3, 2016

Joyce Carol Oates always creates strong characters, but she is particularly adept at working her way into the minds of troubled children and their dysfunctional parents. Many of the stories collected in The Doll-Master showcase that talent. While the subtitle suggests that these are “tales of terror,” many are tales that explain why people do terrible things. Others focus on the fear of terror more than the terror itself.

“The Doll-Master” is a story about Robbie, whose younger cousin Amy died of leukemia just after she turned three. Afterwards, Robbie stole Amy’s doll. When his father took the doll away (because it’s not good for boys to play with dolls), Robbie was displeased, to say the least. It soon becomes clear that Robbie is a deeply troubled, unreliable narrator, whose infatuation with dolls conceals a deeper, more troubling obsession. The story is suitably creepy, revealing the inner workings of a demented mind, in a fashion that will be familiar to fans of Oates’ unsettling fiction.

“Soldier” is written from the perspective of a man who is being held in custody as he awaits trial, having been accused of being a “rabid racist murderer.” Whether the story’s narrator acted in self-defense is the initial mystery, but the bigger mystery is why so many people in the community turn him into a soldier for their particular cause. As she often does, Oates works her magic to make the reader understand the naive narrator, probably better than he understands himself, and to understand how private tragedies explode into political theater.

More than two dozen years after a shooting death, a woman in “Gun Accident” is trying to come to terms with her actions when, as an insecure girl, she was pleased to be asked to take care of her teacher’s house while her teacher was visiting her hospitalized husband. The story’s title summarizes the plot, but Oates builds suspense from the opening paragraph, inviting the reader to imagine how one awful event will change the girl’s life.

On the vacation described in “Equitorial,” the character known as “the wife” fears that the character known as “the husband” is trying to kill her, easing the way for yet another transition to a younger replacement wife. Fear grips her in Quito. She loses it in Galapagos but regains it on a cruise. The beauty of this story is its ambiguity. Is the husband having an affair or not? Is he planning to kill the wife or is she being paranoid? Readers who deplore uncertainty may not like this story, but Oates is making the point that life is uncertain and that it is often impossible to recognize the difference between founded and unfounded fears.

A friendless child makes the wrong kind of friends in “Big Momma.” The story plays on fears of child (and pet) abduction. This seemed to be a predictable story until it took a wild turn. “Big Momma” is probably the creepiest of the stories collected here.

“Mystery, Inc.” was published as part of the Bibliomysteries series and is reviewed here.

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The Eloquence of the Dead by Conor Brady

First published in Ireland in 2013; published by Minotaur Books on March 15, 2016

Decades after the Famine, the owners of large estates in Ireland have agreed (or been forced) to sell their land to the government, part of a plan to give Ireland back to the Irish. Corruption in that process provides one of the plot threads in The Eloquence of the Dead.

The story begins in 1887 with the murder of Ambrose Pollock, a pawnbroker in Dublin. The police, eager to avoid any actual investigatory work, are quick to blame the pawnbroker’s sister, Phoebe Pollock, who has gone missing. The question soon arises whether she is missing or dead.

DS Joseph Swallow investigates Ambrose’s murder and Phoebe’s disappearance. His investigation requires him to consider a robbery, the origin of rare coins that are turning up in Dublin, and a land fraud scheme. The interweaving of these plot elements is sufficiently complex to hold the reader’s interest without becoming convoluted. The story works its way to a conclusion that is satisfying if not particularly surprising.

Certain that his Catholicism will prevent him from rising above his current rank, Swallow wonders whether he should pursue another profession as he chases down a variety of criminals. Swallow is typical of a crime fiction police protagonist in that he has difficulties with relationships, grievances about being underappreciated, and complaints about cops who are more committed to making themselves look good than to catching criminals.

A number of other characters, including detectives and criminals, are given about as much characterization as they need in a murder mystery. One of the stronger characters is Margaret Gessel who, having sold the family land, traveled from Ireland to London, only to be disappointed that her cousin, a prominent politician, is barely acknowledging her existence.

The politics of the time and place add an extra layer of interest to The Eloquence of the Dead. The novel illustrates that some things never change. Power protects power, whether in England and Ireland of the 1880s, or any other place at any other time.

Conor Brady’s prose is above average for a mystery, although about average for Irish crime writers, and well above the prose wielded by American crime novelists (featuring single sentence paragraphs and single page chapters) who too often dominate the market. The writing, characters, and plot make Brady’s second Joe Swallow novel an entertaining read, although I wouldn’t shelve it with the best examples of Irish crime fiction.

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Zero K by Don DeLillo

Published by Scribner on May 3, 2016

Is life anything more than the absence of death? The question is at the heart of Zero K, a novel about life and death. What else would a Don DeLillo novel be about?

DeLillo tells us that death is coming. It may claim an individual (cancer, heart failure) or a large population (terrorism, pandemic, global warming). The odds are good an extinction event will eventually wipe out humanity. “Catastrophe is our bedtime story.” Yet even as life becomes more fragile, humans find the possibility of death increasingly unacceptable.

Jeffrey Lockhart’s wealthy father has taken Artis, his current wife, to an underground facility in a remote part of the world where she will be placed into cryogenic suspension, followed by emergence “in cyberhuman form into a universe that will speak to us in a very different way.” The facility’s approach to death avoidance, unlike Jeffrey, is deeply philosophical, blending science with a variety of new age perspectives, some of which DeLillo presents with tongue-in-cheek.

The first section of the novel takes place at the facility, to which Jeffrey has traveled at his father’s request so he can be present when Artis dies. Jeffrey engages with his father and with Artis as she prepares for death, preservation, or transition (whatever that fate might turn out to be)). He also engages with contemplative individuals who serve ambiguous purposes within the facility. While Jeffrey’s engagement is more an act of observation than interaction (he prefers to invent names for people rather than learning their actual names), one of the monks me meets is even less interactive. Perhaps being surrounded by death has that effect.

DeLillo may have intended Jeffrey to represent what life has become in the 21st century, as acts of atrocity and terror bombard us from screens that isolate us from the horror those scenes should inspire while impairing the ability to form true connections with others. Jeffrey sees a fair share of horror on screens (horror as art) during the novel, including one particularly jarring incident to which he should have a personal connection, but it isn’t clear that he processes what he sees on a human level, not in the way he experienced his own mother’s lingering death when he was a child. Perhaps the point is that 24-hour news coverage has inured us to death, has made death impersonal even when it should be very personal.

In the novel’s second part, the emphasis shifts from death to life. Jeffrey’s life involves a woman named Emma and her adopted Ukranian son. According to his father, Jeffrey has drifted through his life without having lived it. Later in the novel, Jeffrey acknowledges that he has made wasting time a life pursuit. Yet he inspects every minute in his life, counts his strides as he walks. He lives in the moment, as self-help gurus urge us to do, but is that enough? Jeffrey observes the homeless but he cannot image their lives. He interviews for jobs he will never accept. The reader is prompted to wonder whether, in Jeffrey’s case, the difference between life and death is significant. In the grand scheme of things, will Jeffrey’s life (or anyone’s) matter?

Depressing thoughts, yes, but DeLillo always adds humor to his darkness. Zero K is in part a playful novel about the power of language. Jeffrey sees the world in relationship to the words that define it. As a child, he was obsessed with precise definitions, often concocting his own, giving substance not just to the word but to the thing the word symbolizes. Like inventing his own names for people, concocting his own definitions is a habit he never lost.

The themes of language and death come together as a character suggests that “we have language to guide us out of dire times.” Perhaps we can defeat death by talking about it. Or perhaps we can assure that our consciousness will persist after our bodies die if we “follow our words bodily into the future tense.” As a novelist, it may be DeLillo’s hope that words live on even after the body dies.

The new universe that Artis will enter (Jeffrey is told) will have its own language, the language of truth, free from metaphor and ambiguity, something akin to the language of mathematics. Yet as she approaches or enters death, Artis is a being “made of words.” She does not know what the words mean but she feels they are important. What is time? What is now? What is place? “What does it mean to be who I am?” That is life’s fundamental question and, if it is unanswerable, DeLillo at least has fun exploring it.

Zero K doesn’t cohere as well as I might have liked, but neither does life. I have admired other DeLillo novels more than this one, but I suspect that this is a novel that improves with a second reading. Maybe I'll give it one if I live long enough.

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