Finches of Mars by Brian W. Aldiss

First published in the UK in 2012; published by Open Road Media on August 4, 2015

Finches of Mars is a political novel of the future. North America is dealing with war and terror and a depressed economy. Settlements on Mars, while funded by the United Universities, occupy six politically segregated towers (representing the West, China, other parts of Asia, Russia, Scandinavia, and at least some of the Middle East).

The colonization of Mars has not gone well. Babies are not born alive on Mars, except for the one that came out looking like an uncooked turkey. No colonist expects to return to Earth alive (those who have tried have rarely survived the trip), so finding a way to perpetuate life on Mars has acquired some urgency. The unwillingness of UU to commit additional funding or to provide adequate food supplies is a cause of concern for the new Martians. Debates rage about whether sending the best and the brightest to Mars is a bad idea when Earth needs them more desperately. Some believe that only outcasts are being sent to Mars.

All of this provides an interesting background for a novel that doesn’t have much of a plot. Dull characters experience random conflicts that fail to cohere into anything meaningful. I got the sense that in the novel’s second half, Brian Aldiss literally lost the plot.

Despite the novel’s promising setting, I found it difficult to sustain interest as I worked my way toward the ending. Even when characters are talking about sex (which they do frequently), their discussions are dull. Making sex dull is no easy task, but if this is (as I assume it must be) a novel of ideas, Aldiss managed to take the edge off of a number of ideas that he would have presented in a livelier fashion earlier in his career. The story comes across as a self-indulgent string of thoughts that are written for the author’s own amusement, not to entertain an audience.

The last twenty pages or so manage to recapture the plot in a surprising way. The ending doesn’t quite redeem the novel but it did make me glad that I did not abandon the novel before it concluded. Out of respect for Aldiss’ shining career, I would like to recommend this, but I would recommend instead that readers who are new to Aldiss start with something he wrote in his younger days. Non-Stop is one of my favorites.

NOT RECOMMENDED

License to Quill by Jacopo della Quercia

Published by St. Martin's Griffin on December 15, 2015

License to Quill attempts to cross a James Bond spoof with a historical thriller. It doesn’t succeed in being either. To succeed as a Bond spoof, it needed to be brasher and bolder. It underplays the spoof and leaves us with historical fiction that is marred by the insertion of a Bond parody. A better novel in concept than in execution, License to Quill has some entertainment value even if it never quite gels.

With Christopher Marlowe condemned to die, William Shakespeare assumes Marlowe’s role as a British spy. This brings Shakespeare into contact with Guy Fawkes and Robert Catesby, who want Shakespeare to write a play that is set in Scotland and includes three witches. Shortly thereafter, Shakespeare is given an assignment as a Double-O operative. He is armed with gadgetry and ravens by Francis Bacon, who plays the role of Q.

As Marlowe slinks about on errands of espionage in Italy, Shakespeare frets about witches and Fawkes in England. Jacopo della Quercia tosses quite a bit of historical fact in with his historical fiction, including The Gunpowder Plot, which lies at the heart of the novel. To prove that the facts are factual, he peppers the text with footnotes, citing original sources. This seems unnecessary -- this is a novel, after all -- and it gives the image of authorial insecurity (“I researched this really really well, just look at all my sources”). As I usually do in a work of fiction, I found the footnotes distracting. They’re also an odd contrast to the silliness of the story as a whole.

Shakespeare and Marlowe have little personality, which seems odd for a well-researched book, given that both playwrights were overflowing with personality. In the hands of other writers, Guy Fawkes has been a complex, multifaceted character, but della Quercia has carved him from wood. Francis Bacon has no more personality than the ravens he controls. This should really have been a livelier novel than the author managed to make it.

The novel’s humor is flat, while the drama inspires too little tension. I didn’t buy Fawkes’ attempt to use Shakespeare as a propagandist, although that aspect of the plot is less outlandish than envisioning Shakespeare as 007. While it is serviceable, the prose is hardly Shakespearean. The plot has some fun moments but I’m not sure that License to Quill will entirely please fans of spy fiction, fans of comedy, or fans of historical fiction.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Citadel by Stephen Hunter

Published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road on January 19, 2016

Citadel is a light war/adventure/spy story with an emphasis on light. It is part of the Bibliomysteries series of mystery/suspense stories that feature books or libraries as a part of the plot. Other entries in the series have been short stories, but Citadel is longer, although certainly not long enough to be classified as a novel. It is probably fair to call it a novella.

In 1943, Basil St. Florian, a British Army captain, agrees to volunteer for a dangerous assignment. His quest is to recover a rare manuscript from Occupied France. The manuscript is a copy; the original resides in a library at Cambridge. The Cambridge manuscript is thought to be a “code book” that allows the Soviets to send messages to a spy in Britain.

Photographing the original in Cambridge is impossible but, rather implausibly, an easier job might be made of photographing a copy in occupied Paris, where it is under the guard of the Germans. That becomes St. Florian’s mission. If he is unsuccessful, the war is likely to be prolonged on the Russian front because, without additional proof that only the code can provide, Stalin will not believe that the British have uncovered Hitler’s plot to deal a sharp blow to the Russians.

St. Florian has the kind of droll wit that suits the era in which the story is set. He would make a good 1940s movie star. He meets adversity with breezy charm.

Citadel is too light to generate true suspense. The action climax left me scratching my head and asking “Why did that happen?” followed by a scene that had me asking “How could that possibly happen?” But Stephen Hunter doesn’t ask the reader to take the story seriously, so I guess believing it doesn’t matter so much. The post-action conclusion, in which the meaning of the code is pondered, is moderately clever, if a bit anti-climactic.

RECOMMENDED

Real Tigers by Mick Herron

Published by Soho Crime on January 19, 2016

Machiavellian office politics blend with the humorous side of espionage in the third Slough House novel. The slow horses are British spies who have been relegated to Slough House because they abused alcohol or drugs or had a gambling problem or just screwed up an assignment and are no longer trusted to run with the fast horses. They are minor league players in the intelligence community, relegated to meaningless tasks with the hope and expectation that they will become frustrated and quit. In Real Tigers, as in the first two novels in this series, the slow horses turn out to be surprisingly resourceful -- when they aren’t screwing up.

Catherine Standish, an efficient PA who has never been a field operative, is snatched off the street. Her fate seems to rest in the hands of slow horse River Cartwright, when the snatchers ask him to acquire and exchange a confidential file for Standish. But an equally pressing question is the fate of Slough House, and whether it can survive the machinations of Peter Judd, the devious new Home Secretary who has his sights set on the Prime Minister’s office. Two other political players complete a triangle of backstabbing as they follow devious plans to maneuver themselves into better positions.

Jackson Lamb, the spy in charge of Slough House, is rude, crude, and lewd. He is so repulsive as to be loveable -- or at least laugh-out-loud funny. His only redeeming feature is a rather selfish dedication to his subordinates -- selfish in the sense that he takes it personally if the enemy (or the British government, the two being difficult to distinguish at times) try to harm or kidnap them.

A droll sense of humor that manages to be at once understated and outrageous is one of the things I love about British writers. Mick Herron’s combination of dry wit and slapstick is perfect, while his ability to mix humor with action accomplishes the difficult task of making a thriller both exciting and funny. Real Tigers is just as good as the first two entries in this series.

RECOMMENDED

The Age of Reinvention by Karine Tuil

Published in France in 2013; published in translation by Atria Books on December 1, 2015

The Age of Reinvention is a novel of breadth and substance, marred by its failure to tell and resolve a convincing story. It focuses on the lives of two characters. One is driven by ambition. The other has little drive to realize his modest ambitions. In ironic ways, their lives follow opposing arcs -- one rises while the other falls, then falls while the other rises. From this they learn lessons about life. The lessons are true enough even if the story seems false.

Samuel Baron and Samir Tahar meet in law school in Paris during the mid-1980s. Baron is the abandoned son of Polish parents who was adopted by a French couple. Tahar is the charismatic son of Tunisian immigrants. Baron drops out of law school to become an underpaid social worker and an unpublished novelist. Despite his self-esteem issues, he manages to marry a beautiful woman named Nina.

Tahar, on the other hand, has opened the New York office of a French law firm and has become a highly successful celebrity lawyer. He has also married a beautiful woman named Ruth, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish client of his firm. To make this life possible, Tahar reinvented himself, fabricating a history that parallels Baron’s. Part of the deception involves the pretense of being Jewish because (he fears) confessing to his Muslim origins would bar his chance of employment in the Parisian legal community.

All of that happens early in the novel, before the central story begins. As the title implies, reinvention is one of the novel’s themes. In Tahar’s case, it is reinvention by deceit. The way people justify deceit and the pain they cause by being deceitful is a related theme.

Tahar and Baron are each pathetic in their own way, Baron because of his inability to deal with his failures, Tahar because of his inability to handle his success responsibly. They are both made pathetic by their shared love of Nina. The second part of the novel is devoted to that dynamic.

Yet Tahar is a virtuous character when compared to his half-brother. Karine Tuil uses the contrast to give depth to Tahar and to make him a little more likable, or at least a little less despicable. Like real people, all of the characters in The Age of Reinvention are a shifting mix of good and bad qualities. None are admirable. Still, as each character, at regular intervals, howls in pain, it is easy to sympathize with them. While all the characters might be a bit too tragically flawed, they are at least more interesting than the flawlessly virtuous characters that populate so many novels.

While The Age of Reinvention is well written, some of it reads like a well-written soap opera. An expository chapter about Samir’s half-brother follows a well-worn path. Women are almost secondary characters in the novel, yet in some ways -- not necessarily convincing ways, particularly with regard to Nina -- the story is about the liberation of women.

The Age of Reinvention is thought-provoking. Interesting discussions of identity politics and identity-paranoia are among its highlights. While I appreciated the novel on an intellectual level, it didn’t grab me on a gut level. I didn’t buy into the plot, which relies on a chain of unlikely events. The most unlikely is portrayal of Tahar as a highly compensated, New York “celebrity lawyer,” given that he handles the kinds of cases that rarely generate fees or make headlines. Perhaps I would have discounted my skepticism if the novel had drawn me into the characters’ lives, but they are too self-absorbed to care much about.

Footnotes in novels are usually an annoying distraction. That was my reaction to the footnotes in The Age of Reinvention, most of which provide an unnecessary sentence describing something about the lives of background characters who make a single appearance. I suppose I get the point -- even people in the background of our lives are important -- but I could have lived without the footnotes.

High quality prose makes the story an engaging read. Despite its melodramatic moments and unconvincing nature, it is nearly always interesting and the final chapter conveys a worthy message. For those reasons, I recommend the novel, but not with enthusiasm.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS