Shelter by Jung Yun

Published by Picador on March 15, 2016

Kyung Cho is a Korean-American, 36 years old, who is married to Gillian, of Irish ancestry. They have significant debt. They are thinking about moving in with Kyung’s nearby parents when Kyung sees his mother, naked and bruised, walking through a neighboring field. He soon learns that something terrible has happened to his parents.

In Kyung’s dysfunctional family, father dominated mother and mother dominated son. It is a family without kindness, a family pretending to be normal. Kyung is trying to break that pattern in his own family, but breaking the pattern with his parents is more difficult. In adulthood, he has limited his interaction with them. Now circumstances force them together, with unhappy results.

Kyung is tense at every moment of this novel. Jung Yun conveys that tension so effectively that I felt tense while reading the story. Kyung is lost. He craves nothing but solitude and resents the well-meaning people who intrude. His parents are crime victims, but Kyung’s focus is on himself. His parents’ tragedy magnifies his own uncertainties and insecurities and discomfort. He desperately wants to be a better person, but he feels he’s never had a chance to develop the generosity of spirit that he sees in others. It’s only a matter of time before he melts down. Much of the novel’s drama comes from anticipation of the moment when it will happen. When drama finally presents itself, in a couple of different ways, it is all the more powerful for the foundation upon which it is built.

The question for the reader is whether Kyung is a victim of circumstances or whether he chooses to define himself as a victim rather than trying to improve his life and attitude. Kyung seems to be incapable of making good choices. It may be that nothing will make Kyung happy because he has chosen to be unhappy. Other characters also talk about how low expectations for life lead to an unhappy life. That’s one of the novel’s themes.

Another theme of Shelter is Kyung’s conflict between his role as a traditional Korean son (a role he plays poorly) and his role as an American husband (which he can play only because Gillian is, for most of his marriage, exceptionally tolerant). He is torn between American values (a husband should put his wife and child first) and traditional Korean values (a husband should put his parents first, his child second, his wife last). Kyung feels a similar conflict between his need to feel proud (or at least to avoid shame) and his need for money (which he could most easily acquire by asking his parents for help). The conflict between father and son is sharpened by the fact that Kyung and his father are so different while, in fundamental ways that are buried deep beneath the surface, they are so similar.

Still another theme is that people react to adversity in unexpected ways. Kyung thinks his parents should react to their painful experience differently than the reactions that they present to him and to their friends. He believes his father and the members of the church who are central to his father’s life have a distorted view of reality. Gillian thinks Kyung should react to his parents’ difficulties differently than the reaction that he presents to her. The point is that how people cope is how they cope ... or how they fail to cope. Their reactions aren’t necessarily right or wrong and it isn’t necessarily fair for others to judge them. At the same time, forgiveness is an essential part of moving on, although as various characters in the novel learn, it takes time to get there.

The novel moves from one dramatic moment to another, but none of the novel’s events are overdone or unbelievable. Yun’s supple prose and strong characterization complement a surprising story. The climax is satisfying, as is the novel as a whole.

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The Lion's Mouth by Anne Holt

First published in Norway in 1997; published by Scribner on February 9, 2016

The Lion’s Mouth begins with the murder of the prime minister in her office. Since prime ministers in Norway are too dull to assassinate, the murder puzzles Hanne Wilhelmsen, who (together with Billy T and every other law enforcement agent in Norway) is assigned to investigate it.

Although the prime minister was not in a locked room, the novel has the feel of a locked room mystery. The entrances to the office are limited. Security guards and a secretary should prevent strangers from gaining access to the office. It should not be possible to bring an unauthorized handgun into the building and no weapon is present at the scene. And, oddly enough, the prime minister’s shawl is missing, along with a pillbox.

The last person to see the prime minister was Benjamin Grinde, a Supreme Court Justice. That makes him a suspect, but an unlikely one. His detention for questioning by Billy T. nonetheless makes a good news story, one that is unearthed by Lise “Little” Lettvik, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking newspaper reporter who is far from little.

All of this is background to an intricate plot that also makes frequent mention of a statistically anomalous increase in childhood deaths in Norway in 1965. That fact comes up so often in the early-going that it will obviously tie into the main plot. The question is: how?

Anne Holt assembles a cast of potential murderers, all of whom seem to have an alibi. Whether the killer’s motivation was political or personal, how the killer managed the crime, and how it ties in with the 1965 spike in dead children are questions the reader is invited to ponder as the investigation moves forward. All of that is handled effectively and credibly. The answer to the mystery becomes obvious a few chapters before the police figure it out, but only a few. And that only means that Holt played fair with the reader, providing clues that the reader could assemble to arrive at the truth. A final reveal at the end, however, comes as a surprise.

Character development is about average for a murder mystery. The discussions of Norwegian politics and history are easy to follow, even for a reader (like me) who knows almost nothing about Norway. Holt’s prose is graceful in translation. I’m not sure I quite accepted the motivation of a key character to act as he did, and a coincidence that occurs midway through the story is a bit too convenient, but those are minor quibbles. All told, The Lion’s Mouth is a fine political mystery/police procedural. It isn’t outstanding but it is enjoyable and a nice change from American or British novels of the same ilk.

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Renée by Ludovic Debeurme

First published in France in 2011; published in translation Top Shelf Productions on February 23, 2016

Renée is a graphic novel with the feel of a sketchbook. The art is minimalist, as is the text. Backgrounds are nearly nonexistent. Some pages are blank. When words appear, they often make an arc across the page. Sometimes the words are intended as dialog, sometimes they are narrative monologue spoken by an unseen character, and sometimes the origin of the words is unclear. Frequently, wordless sequences of five or ten sketches end up with characters curling up into balls.

Renée is a sequel to the author’s Lucille. The characters who appear in Renée are trapped in depressive states, often with good reason. Arthur, who killed Lucille’s attempted rapist in the first novel, is in prison, sharing a cell with Eddie, who accidentally caused the death of a fisherman with whom he was fighting. The others are figuratively imprisoned by the lives they have made for themselves. Renée is seeing Pierre, a married man twice her age who can’t choose between the two women. Lucille is living in a claustrophobic relationship with her mother, a woman she loves and hates in equally stifling degrees.

After Eddie gains his freedom (and, thanks to Arthur’s decency, finds a place to live), Arthur gets a new cellmate who is suspected of being a child molester. The experience changes Arthur and (for reasons I won’t reveal here) eventually causes Lucille and Renée to meet and bond.

The story has surprising depth, given the minimalist nature of the storytelling. Some of the scenes are surrealistic, including a scene in which people crawl out of the cuts that Renée has made in her arms. In a dream sequence, Arthur grows wings and, as an insect, flies out of prison to nest comfortably in Lucille’s hair. Characters enlarge or shrink or parts of their bodies change or they morph into embodiments of ugliness. I’m sure there’s a fair amount of symbolism here that I’m not quite grasping, although I suspect the illustrations stray into the territory of fantasy to express how the characters are feeling at the moment.

Some of Ludovic Debeurme’s illustrations are grotesque but none should be particularly upsetting to readers who are not easily upset. The text, on the other hand, describes events that include rape and incest, topics that might be disturbing to sensitive readers. Those events are not gratuitous; they are necessary to understand the states of mind and stages of life that the characters experience.

The beginning of Renée is confusing. The story is not always told in linear time and recognizing characters can be a challenge, given how their appearances change. The story requires the reader’s effort but by the end, everything falls into place. The ending is left open, with two characters sailing away in search of more answers, or to start another chapter in their lives. Perhaps the intent is for another volume to continue the story, but the ending may simply be meant to remind readers that our own stories never end until we die -- there is always something new, something unexpected, perhaps even something pleasant, awaiting our discovery.

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Flashpoint by Lynn Hightower

First published in 1995; published digitally by Open Road Media on October 27, 2015

A man burns to death in a car. His body is found handcuffed to the steering wheel. Evidence suggests that the killer is a woman. The police nickname the killer “Flash.” Sonora Blair and Sam Delarosa of the Cincinnati police lead the investigation.

Most of the novel’s focus is on Sonora. She is a reasonably well developed character, with two kids, a dead ex-husband, and a thing for the brother of the murder victim. Unfortunately for Sonora, the killer also has a thing for the murder victim’s brother, creating an interesting rivalry between killer and cop.

As Sonora learns more about the killer, so does the reader. Lynn Hightower doesn’t waste time with nonsensical profiling or lengthy character biographies that cause so many thrillers to drag. We learn enough about the killer to make her interesting and credible -- she isn’t a novice at the murder game -- while maintaining a sense of intrigue about the killer’s motivation as the investigation advances.

A brisk pace and clear prose make this an easy story to read. Some of the scenes are chilling. My only objection to the story is that a lone killer manages to cause a fair amount of mayhem under the noses of cops who, budget problems notwithstanding, would certainly make a stronger effort to protect the family members of a fellow officer. In fact, the killer wanders all over Cincinnati, going to obvious places, and the police can’t seem to be bothered to keep an eye out for her.

I didn’t buy much of the ending, which again depends upon remarkably incompetent police work so that Sonora can have some alone time with the killer. What I do like about Flashpoint is its steady pace, its decent characterization, and its surprisingly strong prose. The plot is the novel’s weakness, but the Flashpoint is enjoyable for its strengths.

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Quantum Night by Robert J. Sawyer

Published by Ace on March 1, 2016

If you could turn the world’s psychopaths into non-psychopaths, but only by turning a much smaller number of people with a conscience into psychopaths, would you do it? What if doing so might prevent a global war? That’s the moral dilemma that animates Quantum Night.

I generally like Robert Sawyer’s novels, and I suspect that my political views are similar to his. But Quantum Night is, in part, a political science fiction novel that is sometimes too silly to take seriously. I won’t spoil the plot by discussing the political events that take place, but I will say that I just didn’t buy most of them, perhaps because Sawyer (ever a pimp for Canada) tries to give his nation a central role in the political world. Some of the novel’s political events are just eye-rolling (perhaps Sawyer has been watching Fox News and taking it seriously), but science fiction demands a suspension of disbelief so let’s put that aside.

The novel’s other, deeper aspect involves speculation about the quantum nature of consciousness. That speculation is at least interesting, but I wasn’t quite able to suspend my disbelief in either the premise or the way the characters behaved.

Quantum Night posits that there are three kinds of people in the world. One group consists of philosophical zombies. They have no inner voice to chat with and therefore aren’t “truly conscious.” They are easily led or misled. Instead of being guided by a conscience, they decide how to behave based on social cues. They account for Germany’s Hitler followers, Canada’s hockey hooligans, and disastrous election outcomes in the United States.

The second group are psychopaths. They carry on an interior monologue but they have no conscience. The third group are conscious with a conscience. They have an inner voice, engage in interior debates, and allow a mixture of empathy and reason to guide their actions. Since the ratio from the first group to the second and third is 4:2:1, philosophical zombies and psychopaths greatly outnumber conscious people with a conscience.

Of course, nearly everyone who reads the novel will think “I’m one of the conscious with a conscience” and many (delighted to know that they are special) will happily believe that there are twice as many psychopaths and four times as many zombies, but I just don’t think that’s true. Yeah, there are a lot of empty heads in the world, but to ascribe their trend-following behavior to a lack of consciousness rather than intellectual dullness doesn’t seem to me to be consistent with the real world. And having worked with and for a good number of bad people over the years, I have to think that Sawyer’s premise vastly overestimates the number of true psychopaths in the world, even giving the term a broad definition. Sawyer talks a bit about Robert Hare, who makes a good living by seeing psychopaths behind every bush, but even by Hare’s dubious standards, I don’t think psychopaths are as prevalent as the book suggests.

But let’s put all that (in addition to the politics) aside and get to the meat of the novel, which involves the moral dilemma I mentioned above. During and shortly after he is cross-examined in court, James Marchuk, a psychology professor who is an expert in psychopathy, discovers he has a six-month gap in his memory. It turns out he was a test subject in a neuropsychology experiment as an undergrad. Marchuk discovers that a classmate, who was also a test subject, has been in a coma ever since. Marchuk sets about recovering his lost memories of a time during which he wasn’t the kind, generous, and humanistic vegan that he has since become. Therein lies the plot.

The utilitarian philosophy that underlies Marchuk’s behavior and the novel’s moral dilemma (borrowed from Kant or Mr. Spock, as you prefer) -- “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” -- suffers from the problem that people rarely agree about the “needs” that should be served or how that can best be done. Sawyer gives scant attention to that issue. Marchuk’s proposed solution to the prevalence of psychopathy is, in my mind, morally unsound and uncloaks the weakness of his utilitarian philosophy. His proposal might serve the needs of the many but only by doing harm to a smaller but still huge number of others, without their knowledge or consent. What could possibly give Marchuk the right to do that other than his own belief that he’s right?

That, at least, gives the reader something to chew on, and that makes Quantum Night worth reading, even if I didn’t buy into the premise. Sawyer is always easy to read, even if his attempts at humor are a bit lame. Sawyer is probably just too nice to do humor with the kind of edge that provokes a belly laugh. Of Sawyer’s books that touch on consciousness, I would rate FlashForward well ahead of Quantum Night, but I enjoyed Quantum Night enough to recommend it, despite my unsuccessful attempts to suspend my disbelief.

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