Even the Dead by Benjamin Black

Published in Great Britain in 2015; published by Henry Holt and Co. on January 12, 2016

Quirke begins Even the Dead on extended sick leave, suffering from hallucinations and forgetfulness that, according to his brain specialist, are caused by stress and boredom, as well as an old scar on his temporal lobe. Quirke is a composite of old scars; that a scar explains his current predicament is no surprise to him. Yet Quirke’s lethargy, his indifference to life, seems to him not to be caused by brain damage but by life damage -- he has the sense that something has “gone out,” that his life is over and done, or never began.

Quirke’s assistant, David Sinclair, who happens to be dating Quirke’s daughter, solicits Quirke’s opinion concerning a suspicious bruise on the corpse of a man who is believed to have committed suicide. The suspected murder victim is the son of a well-known scofflaw, the kind of man who “makes a point of being awkward.” Eventually Quirke takes an interest and tags along with his friend, Inspector Hackett, as the death is investigated.

Meanwhile, Quirke’s daughter is asked to help a former classmate who is fleeing from a menace she refuses to identify. The menace, of course, is related to the death that Quirke is investigating. That might seem like an unlikely coincidence but Dublin isn’t huge and the coincidence is therefore not so improbable as to hurt the story’s credibility.

The deceased is a young civil servant, an unlikely candidate for murder. Benjamin Black develops the mystery slowly, dangling potential motives for the reader to consider. The novel features a return to Mother of Mercy Laundry, which played a key role in a couple of earlier novels in the series.

While the story is built upon a murder mystery, the plot is secondary to Quirke’s plotless, aimless life. Although “a stranger to himself,” Quirke is an introspective man, a thinker who can’t quite make sense of his existence. To say Quirke has been a disappointing father would be to understate, but Black does not cheat the father-daughter relationship of its complexity. All of Quirke’s relationships are ambiguous and complex, despite Quirke’s efforts to keep them at a comfortably superficial level.

As a pathologist, Quirke is used to confronting death, but in these novels, he often confronts the deaths (or impending death) of people he knows. Even the Dead is no exception. Yet for all his melancholy and sense of mortality, there are glimmers of happiness and hope in Quirke’s life during the course of the novel. Rebirth or a fresh start would be unrealistic in Quirke’s gloomy world, but Black seems to suggest that even the gravely burdened might find a sort of renewal as their lives progress.

Quirke lives in a world where the rich and powerful can do as they please, without consequence. In other words, he lives in the real world, rather than a fictional world where justice always prevails. The murder mystery and its byproducts resolve in a straightforward way; whether the resolution represents justice must be left to the reader’s judgment.

Black’s prose is, as always, elegant. The lives of Quirke and other characters evolve in Even the Dead -- Quirke most of all -- as lives should in the hands of a capable writer. I don’t know if this is meant to be the last Quirke novel, but it ties up story threads so deftly that it reads as if it might be.

This isn’t an action novel or a suspenseful thriller, but the story moves quickly. Even the Dead doesn’t feature the best plot in the Quirke series but it is sufficiently sturdy to carry a work of character-driven fiction.

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Keep Mars Weird by Neal Pollack

Published by 47North on January 5, 2016

Keep Mars Weird begins in Austin, which undoubtedly contributes to the playful title. Mars was weird once, but now it’s just “a lie propagated by the sinister real estate industry.” Perhaps Neal Pollack intends Mars to be an allegorical Austin. Not living there, I have no clue.

Doing his part to keep literature weird, Pollack imagines a future in which inequality and greed (along with a good bit the Earth’s population) have been eliminated. Everybody has Enough and nobody needs more (or so they are taught). Food production is sustainable, the right to consume marijuana is protected by the Global Constitution (Austin is home to the Willy Nelson School of Natural Pharmaceuticals), and a twenty-hour workweek is viewed as grueling. This is a future to which I am looking forward. Unfortunately, this all takes place 500 years from now, a bit beyond even my most optimistic life expectancy.

Jordan Kinkaid, having just completed his five years of mandatory government service, is now free to do what he wants with his life, if he can decide what that might be. Jordan has a slacker friend named Leonard and a wealthy friend named Dave. Dave lives on Mars, where men still brawl and women are chill. Circumstances send an unwilling Jordan to New Austin on Mars. Having nothing better to do, Leonard goes too. The story follows the divergent paths along which Jordan and Leonard drift.

Things are different in New Austin on Mars. The drugs are better, but maybe they are too good. Trendy consumerism is rampant (not everybody has Enough because the rich have More). Life on Mars does not live up to the hype. The difference between hype and reality drives the plot, as conflict arises between people who prefer the old Mars (the one that really was weird) and those who benefit from the current version.

Much of the novel’s humor depends on an extrapolation of politically correct trends and on a world where the current generation has grown up pampered. Lampooning political correctness can be tricky but Pollack does it with good-natured, rather than mean-spirited, humor. The future generation he depicts is obviously based on a recent generation of young people who were raised to believe they are the greatest creatures ever to roam the planet and should not be burdened with undignified tasks like work. Again, a writer needs to be careful when taking potshots at people (even those who are “a walking id”), but Pollack’s humor is never offensive. At least, it wasn’t offensive to me. Your mileage may vary.

In an even-handed approach to satire, Pollack also lampoons people who aren’t politically correct, particularly real estate developers who base their lives on greed and exploitation while extolling the economic virtues of inequality. And then he lampoons militants who protest against greed and exploitation. And then he lampoons police/military agencies that try to suppress the militants. From libertarians to socialists, from young people to the elderly, from fashionistas to the fashion-phobic, from Uber to manga, Pollack skewers pretty much every group and every trend.

Satire wears thin quickly but Keep Mars Weird is too short and fast-moving to become tiresome. I would say that the novel ends with a couple of unexpected plot twists but the reader should expect nothing but plot twists. The final revelations are a little silly but they fit the tenor of the novel as a whole. Keep Mars Weird isn’t profound but it doesn’t really try to be, despite the sociopolitical lesson that pops up at the end. It tries instead to be funny, and in that it succeeds.

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Three Brothers by Peter Ackroyd

First published in Great Britain in 2013; published by Nan A. Talese on March 4, 2014

The Hanway brothers, born on the same day in three consecutive years, grow up in a London neighborhood. Their mother absents herself from the home when the oldest, Harry, is ten. Their father, a failed writer working as a nightwatchman, allows the boys to fend for themselves. Harry is athletic and adventurous; Daniel is scholarly and gay; Sam is melancholy, considers work to be a form of death, and might not be entirely connected to reality. In middle school, the brothers begin to drift apart ... or rather, they flee from each other and from the institution known as family. Each chapter that follows tends to focus on a single brother -- Harry pursues a career in journalism; Daniel pursues an education; and Sam drifts into an interior, quasi-religious life -- although their lives occasionally intersect.

What initially seems like a meandering character study (or perhaps a family study) eventually blossoms into a tightly woven story with an amusingly twisted plot. At some point, all three brothers become entangled with a notorious slumlord named Asher Ruppta, although no brother realizes that either of his other brothers also knows Ruppta. The brothers' lives intertwine in other ways that they don't realize. The cleverness of the plot assures a steady supply of surprises and the writing is full of wit and whimsy, although some aspects of the ending are incongruously bleak.

The tongue-in-cheek story consistently amuses. Three Brothers is not entirely without substance but the brothers are superficial and the targets of Peter Ackroyd's arrows (including wealthy hypocrites, sex-starved cougars, and literary academics who are jealous of younger or more successful writers) are fairly obvious. Three Brothers seems like a somewhat paler version of a novel Kingsley Amis might have written half a century ago, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it.

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The Gun by Fuminori Nakamura

First published in Japan in 2003; published in translation by Soho Crime on January 5, 2016

Fuminori Nakamura’s crime novels are built on psychological suspense rather than action, but they move at a brisk pace, thanks to a writing style that wastes no words. The Gun, Nakamura’s first novel, doesn’t have the depth of The Thief. It nevertheless creates a reasonable amount of dramatic tension as the reader wonders about the fate of the central character.

Walking along a street on a rainy night, Nishikawa feels a deep sense of satisfaction, even elation, when he discovers a gun near a dead man’s body. The gun gives him a sense of fulfillment; he knows he cannot part with it. When he picks up a girl and has sex with her, he realizes the next day that she did not compare to the pleasure he receives from handling the gun.

Soon, just knowing that he has the gun is not enough. Nishikawa begins to carry it around, savoring the tension he feels. Of course, he has fantasies about shooting the gun and, of course, those fantasies become darker. Nishikawa is consumed and controlled by the gun. Decisions are made by the demanding gun, not by Nishikawa.

Nishikawa is emotionally stunted, a characteristic Nakamura develops through Nishikawa’s distracted relationships with women. Nishikawa lives inside his head but seems incapable of understanding his feelings and motivations. He has a problem with impulse control, while the impulses he manages to resist turn into obsessions and plans. Nishikawa’s half-hearted attempts to analyze his urges provide no insights that might help him to control them.

Whether and how Nishikawa will use the gun are the questions that keep the pages turning. The speed with which the story moves is due in part to its focus on Nishikawa. Other characters make brief appearances, but we learn little about them. Instead, we learn much about Nishikawa’s life and how that life changes as the result of a chance encounter with a gun.

The abrupt ending comes as something of a surprise despite its inevitability. While The Gun lacks the richness of The Thief, its noir sensibility showcases Nakamura’s ability to delve into tormented minds.

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House of 8 Orchids by James Thayer

Published by Thomas & Mercer on January 5, 2016

House of 8 Orchids follows the arc of a good adventure novel: a roguish but likable protagonist goes on a journey, overcomes life-threatening obstacles, and learns something about himself along the way. The time and place (China during the Second Sino-Japanese War) add color to the story, while a variety of convincing secondary characters add to its sense of authenticity.

John and William Wade, the children of an American diplomat, were kidnapped in Chungking in 1912. The story begins in 1938. John and William both serve Eunuch Chang, who presides over the House of 8 Orchids. Eunuch Chang kidnaps orphans and fosters their talents for nefarious purposes. William’s talent as an artist makes him a skilled forger. John is trained as an assassin and a thief. Less fortunate orphans are relegated to the Rough Boys, a group whose members develop their muscles rather than their minds.

The latest addition to the House, via kidnapping, is Wu Luli. Unlike most of Eunuch Chang’s victims, Wu Luli is a woman of some prominence in Chinese society. Chang plans to sell her for a good price. William is quite taken with her and that leads to trouble for both William and John.

John’s trouble takes him on an adventurous journey across China that involves Japanese bombings, bandits, monks, Chiang Kai-shek’s army, a brave American doctor, the United States Navy, and villagers who are victimized by both the Chinese and Japanese armies (and by gangsters). At the same time, it is a journey of self-discovery, as John is forced to make a compromise between the unsavory values he learned from Eunuch Chang and his observation that the people he admires are more inclined to help strangers than to harm them. He also learns something about his past that may or may not inspire him to redefine his identity.

James Thayer paints a detailed picture of the Chinese countryside and enlivens the story with Chinese legends. The story has the feel of a modern legend, filled as it is with folk beliefs and rural Chinese traditions, feats of daring and acts of grace. As you would expect from a legend, everything is a bit oversized, from John’s ability as a knife fighter to a dog that is as big as a small horse.

Adventure novels typically work their way to a predictable ending and this one is no exception. It is nevertheless a satisfying ending and the story holds a surprise or two as it speeds toward its conclusion. House of 8 Orchids isn’t a deep novel but its entertainment value is heightened by its setting and its strong characters.

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