Frog by Mo Yan

Published in China in 2009; published in translation by Viking on January 22, 2015

Wan Zu (also known as Tadpole, among other names) writes to a man he addresses as sensei, who gave a lecture on "Literature in Life" in Wan Zu's remote village. Impressed by his meeting with an obstetrician who is Wan Zu's aunt, the scholar asks Wan Zu to send him the story of his aunt's life. Frog tells Gugu's story, but it is also the story of China over the course of Gugu's lifetime.

While she is still a young village girl, Gugu learns the healing arts from a visiting westerner. Her knowledge of obstetrics soon shames the elderly midwives who are more likely to kill their patients than to help them give birth. At the age of 70, forty years after leaving the village, Gugu returns for a celebration.

The politics of China are inseparable from Gugu's story. The background to Book One is the struggle between Mao and Chiang Kai-shek. Gugu is a steadfast Communist. Her advocacy of planned pregnancies and of treating male and female babies as equals impairs her popularity despite its consistency with Mao's edicts. Living in changing times, Gugu discovers that it is possible to a friend of the revolution one moment and an enemy of the masses a moment later.

Book Two begins in 1979. The Cultural Revolution is an unhappy memory but Gugu is still a devoted Party member who is even more committed to the policy of one child per family. The policy of enforced birth control also shapes the story in Book Three. While much of the focus remains on Gugu, the "one child" policy also plays a defining role in the life of Wan Zu.

China has undergone more changes by 2005, when Book Four begins. People are free to live where they please (as long as they live in China). The entrepreneurial spirit prevails, which means family planning rules apply to the poor more than they apply to the nouveau riche. Gugu has also changed, or at least her opinions have changed. Despite her regrets, she remains determined to follow her principles (even as they shift), while Wan Zu has always felt that his life is subject to the whims of fate. Those whims take his life in interesting directions (which, as we all know, is a Chinese curse). By the time Book Five rolls around, Wan Zu has been inspired to write a play that he aptly entitles "Frog." The play adds a new dimension to the story and sheds additional light on some of the characters.

Naturally, frog imagery pervades the novel. Frogs have an impact on the lives of several characters, while other characters recount the role that frogs play in Chinese mythology. Appropriately, given the novel's subject matter, Wan Zu tells us that the title (wa) can be taken as either qingwa (frog) or wawa (baby).

Wan Zu discusses his struggle to write the play throughout the course of the novel. He talks about the darkness of the play when his thoughts are dark, how he wants to write about life rather than death, about hope rather than despair. But life includes all of those things, as does the novel. The story Mo Yan delivers is about persevering in the face of adversity, about feeling and releasing guilt, about adapting to and instigating change. It is also about the value of freedom, even if freedom introduces disharmony into a society that values harmony (and that institutionalizes anyone who threatens that harmony). Frog is a novel of great breadth and depth. It is nothing less than the story of modern China told with humor and compassion.

RECOMMENDED

Get in Trouble by Kelly Link

Published by Random House on February 3, 2015

There's something a little out of whack about the worlds in which Kelly Link's characters live. Babies are born without shadows or with an extra shadow. Superheroes have useless powers like the ability to know the correct time without looking at a clock. Strangeness is the background but never the focus of Link's stories. Well, almost never. Instead, Link's characters are strange in perfectly normal ways. They are motivated by the same jealousies and insecurities and resentments as people who live in more familiar environments.

The genre-bending stories collected in Get in Trouble are wildly inventive. They are invariably witty. Link's economical language has deeper meaning than is apparent on the surface although some observations, like telling us there is there is "a fine line between being cuddled and squeezed like a juice box," are just funny.

"When he wasn't getting right with God, Fran's daddy got up to all kinds of trouble." Fran has her own trouble as she carries on the family tradition of serving "The Summer People," my favorite story in the collection.

Lame superheroes lurk in the background of two stories. In "Secret Identity," the author of a letter to someone she met in an online game tries to explain why she is not the person she appears to be. The story's moral is that you can learn a lot about yourself by pretending to be someone else, but you can learn even more by being yourself. "Origin Story" is apparently set in the same universe as "Secret Identity," but I found "Origin Story to be less appealing.

Ghosts provide the theme for two stories. "Two Houses" is a ghost story about astronauts on a spaceship who tell ghost stories. "I Can See Right Through You" is about the lives of two actors who once kissed in a popular vampire movie. The kiss, portending a real-life relationship, is the male actor's defining moment -- unless you count the sex tape or a version of Ghost Hunters that searches for a lost nudist colony. This is my second favorite, thanks to a neat twist at the end that forces the reader to reinterpret much of what has gone before.

Is it better to have something that is perfect but fake or imperfect but real? A girl in "The New Boyfriend" gets a fake boyfriend for her birthday -- a ghost vampire boyfriend that has been recalled by the manufacturer. But what happens when her friend falls in love with her fake boyfriend? Just like having a fake identity can help you learn about yourself, it seems that having a fake boyfriend can help you learn about real relationships.

Mummies, pyramids, pool parties, Raves on the moon, and Faces programmed to replace children so parents can avoid public embarrassment all appear in "Valley of the Girls," a tragic love story that might be a futuristic version of Romeo & Juliet if Shakespeare had been dropping acid. Even stranger is the background of "Light" -- pocket universes, warehouses full of sleeping people -- a domestic drama about a woman, her missing husband, and her gay brother. "Light" is my least favorite in the collection, primarily because I don't know what to make of it, but none of the entries in this odd collection of light-but-serious fantasy stories are bad.

RECOMMENDED

All the Old Knives by Olen Steinhauer

Published by Minotaur Books on March 10, 2015

All the Old Knives tells a compelling story. It is a simpler story than the plots found in many spy novels. The central idea is the traditional fare of spy novels -- a mole in the CIA has given information to the enemy and the reader is challenged to discover the mole's identity -- but the focus of this relatively short novel is on just two characters engaged in an intricate dance, probing each other over a quiet dinner. Having cut away the complexity of plot that often attends such stories, Olen Steinhauer is free to focus on the complexity of two primary characters, each of whom is haunted by the past.

Information received from a Gitmo prisoner in 2012 suggests that a traitor within the American embassy assisted a terrorist attack at the Vienna airport six years earlier. The improbable accusation sends Henry Pelham scurrying off to interview people who might have relevant information, including Celia Favreau, a former lover who left the CIA and is now married with children. Pelham meets her in Carmel, "a perfect place to live if you want to be someone other than you once were." Pelham is prepared to end her life, if necessary.

This sounds like a plot that's been done before but Steinhauer makes it seem fresh. The theme of betrayal is common to books about espionage but the best ones use betrayal to teach a lesson. The lesson here is that betrayal, whether by individuals or governments, will almost always come back around to bite you in the backside. Steinhauer illustrates that lesson in a story that is tight, tense, and convincing. All the Old Knives doesn't have the breadth of the best spy fiction and the ending is a bit weak, but it is nevertheless a worthy read.

RECOMMENDED

Unbreakable by W.C. Bauers

Published by Tor Books on January 13, 2015

After she lost her parents, Promise Paen left the planet Montana to join the Republican Marines. The Marines send her back to Montana to act as a liaison between the planet's government and an Admiral who is trying to gain the planet's trust. The Republic is at odds with the Lusitanian Empire which has designs on Montana. Against all odds, Paen and the Marines she commands, along with a ragtag local militia, eventually defend Montana from the Empire's incursion.

As is common (and unoriginal) in military science fiction, flashbacks tell us about Promise's enlistment and training. Those obligatory scenes are not as lengthy or familiar as in some novels, but their inclusion makes Unbreakable read like formula fiction. Which, in fact, it is.

Like many military novels (not just sf), Unbreakable includes a scene in which a grizzled officer quotes from All Quiet on the Western Front and admonishes younger soldiers that they should never glorify war. The remaining scenes, of course, glorify war while pretending to do the opposite. Stories of that nature can be fun but they are rarely deep. Unbreakable isn't All Quiet on the Western Front. It is a moderately enjoyable novel that can be quickly read and forgotten. Phrases like "the weapon belched fire" and "give the [enemy] a one-way ticket to hell" and "grenades rained death" are best forgotten quickly.

Like the story, characters are superficial. The ghost of Promise's mother shows up regularly to offer unsolicited advice. That's a clumsy literary device that I could have done without. Promise's relationship insecurity ("I'm not good with men and I don't feel pretty") is more suited to a trashy romance novel than military sf. So are the scenes in which "Promise's insides turned to goo" because her dance partner touches her back. My brain turns to goo when I read sentences like that.

The last long stretch of the novel is a battle to save Montana from the Empire. It is filled with the usual chest-thumping Marine bromides about duty and loyalty and bravery and semper fidelis. Promise gets to make stirring speeches that make her ghost mother proud. Nothing in this section is fresh. Readers who enjoy reading this sort of thing over and over will be happy to experience standard battle scenes fought by standard soldiers with standard high tech weaponry. Readers looking for original thought will come away disappointed. Unbreakable is no worse than average military sf but it is certainly no better than average.

NOT RECOMMENDED

A Pleasure and a Calling by Phil Hogan

Published by Picador on January 6, 2015

William Heming is one of the most unusual protagonists I've encountered in a crime novel. He's likable enough if you overlook his penchant for killing people when it makes his life more convenient. He has some other odd habits that, in a real person, would be a bit frightening. At the same time, A Pleasure and a Calling is so well written that I was happy to get to know Heming as a fictional character, even if I wouldn't want to be his neighbor.

The Cooksons return from vacation to find a week-old dead body in their garden. Heming is their estate agent. About two-thirds of the way into the novel, we learn how the corpse arrived at its destination. We work our way there in a story that moves with a deliberate pace as Phil Hogan devotes attention to characters, setting, and dark humor.

Since he was a young boy, Heming has been a snoop. Early chapters in the novel recount his life-long obsession with stealing keys, entering homes and offices, learning people's secrets, and occasionally taking a souvenir (a ball of rubber bands, for instance). A career in real estate, where keys are simply handed to him, is a perfect calling. Heming is not a thief in the conventional sense. He steals the privacy of his victims, solely to satisfy his own curiosity. That makes him creepy but mostly harmless -- until his hobby gets the better of him.

Back in the present, Heming has a mild confrontation with a man named Douglas Sharp whose dog left an unwelcome deposit on a walking path. The intensely curious Heming makes it his business to learn about Sharp. He becomes convinced that Sharp is having an affair with a librarian named Abigail and, having taken an instant dislike to the man, decides to meddle in his life. In the course of meddling, William becomes unaccountably besotted with Abigail.

The consequences of Heming's prying and meddling occupy the last two-thirds of the book. Most of the consequences result from Heming's frequently mistaken certainty that something nefarious is afoot. He sets in motion a chain of events that are perfectly logical and highly entertaining. In fact, the logic of the story sets it apart from most modern crime novels. Events build upon one another in a way that makes an improbable story seem perfectly natural.

Heming is an engaging character although, in real life, he would justly be regarded as sinister and well deserving of incarceration. He is a bit of a rogue, using women and leaving them, although he leaves to protect himself from falling in love and the pain of love's inevitable loss. He's charming and polite and never dishonest about his intentions, so the women don't seem to mind being used. Firm in the belief that the only constant in life is change, William prefers "the intimacy of serial love" to the illusion of lasting love.

A Pleasure and a Calling is a leisurely novel of elegant prose. Hogan develops tension at appropriate moments but this is more a character-based novel than a thriller. It took me some time to invest in the story but Hogan's prose pulled me forward until I became hooked on the characters and the unusual plot. I'm not sure the story lends itself to a sequel, but if Hogan decides to revisit the character, I'd be happy to read more about his peculiar obsession.

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