Asunder by Chloe Aridjis

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on September 17, 2013

As much a work of philosophy as fiction, Asunder is an impressive examination of the search for meaning in a solitary life. On one level, it is a love letter to art museums and their contents, the works of art and the humans who admire them. On another, it is a story of entropy, and of one woman's struggle to resist its pull.

Marie loves art, so hers seems to be the ideal job. She is a guard at the National Gallery, a career that lets her sit or stand all day, mostly unnoticed, contemplating art. Her friend Daniel was fired for excessive pacing and now works at Tate Britain, where the modern art troubled him before he adapted. Marie is content to be motionless and, like Daniel, she prefers to protect the old masters. In her free time she creates miniature landscapes from eggshells and moths. They are fantasy worlds into which time collapses, but eventually the moths disintegrate.

During the course of the novel, we learn about Marie's great-grandfather, who was a warder at the National Gallery in 1914, when a suffragette took a meat cleaver to a painting in an act of political protest; about Camden, where Marie spent her younger years and where, on a shopping trip with her morose flatmate, she reencounters her former lover; about Daniel's poetry and his penpal friendships with an international selection of poets he has never met; about the women who were once regarded as hysterics, posed and photographed for the benefit of their observers; and about Marie's long-abandoned penpal relationship with a prisoner (an example of the safely unavailable men to whom she is always drawn). We also learn about craquelure, the network of cracks that mark (and add depth to) an aging painting, and are invited to consider the quiet and largely unnoticed decomposition of paintings as a metaphor for life. Like paintings, people are always in the process of cracking apart, but they also gain a kind of hidden beauty as they age.

The first half of Asunder seems like an amiable character-centered novel with little in the way of plot development. A bit of understated drama ensues in the second half, when Marie and Daniel visit Paris to take advantage of an empty apartment that belongs to one of Daniel's unmet poet-friends. There they encounter some odd characters, including pensive Pierre, a poet from Stockholm who, in his rare waking moments, exerts an unnatural influence over Daniel -- or so it appears to the disgruntled Marie. One of the characters we meet is present for only a few pages but he plays a vital role. He is a living example of entropy, a man whose life has come apart.

Readers looking for plot-heavy, action-filled stories should look elsewhere. Asunder is not uneventful, but the events are small, and the reader needs to weave them together, to search for commonalities, to understand their importance. The key event comes near the novel's end, as Marie must decide how she wants to live her life. We might all disintegrate in the end, Chloe Aridjis seems to be saying, but we can embrace the inevitability of own craquelure and make the most of the time we have before we disintegrate.

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Cross and Burn by Val McDermid

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on October 22, 2013

Carol Jordan, unemployed and burdened by her sense of guilt for her brother's death, is getting her life back together (or not) by restoring the barn in which her brother was murdered and by caring for a new dog. Paula McIntyre, a member of Jordan's Major Incident Team with the Bradfield Metropolitan Police before it was broken apart, is newly promoted to Detective Sergeant. Paula would like to investigate the disappearance of Bev McAndrew, whose 14-year-old son is disturbed that she didn't come home, but Paula's new DCI puts her to work on a brutal homicide instead. Paula nonetheless devotes herself to investigating McAndrew's disappearance because disobeying their bosses is standard procedure for fictional police detectives. Soon enough, we learn that a serial killer is kidnapping, tormenting, and killing women who happen to look like Carol. Eventually the evidence points to an unlikely suspect, and it is up to Paula to determine whether that series regular is innocent or guilty.

Val McDermid understands the tendency of police detectives to focus their tunnel vision on the first suspect they encounter, working thereafter to prove that suspect's guilt rather than continuing an open-minded investigation. She also recognizes the tendency of police officers to believe that everyone is entitled to a defense except the suspects they arrest, who are by definition guilty scum undeserving of a presumption of innocence. Paula's obnoxious DCI, who succumbs to both those tendencies, is the novel's most realistic character.

Point of view rotates through the cast of characters, including various victims of the serial killer. One of the more prominent characters is Carol's former love interest, Tony Hill, a psychologist who doubles as a profiler. Like most fictional profilers, Tony has analytical powers that border on the psychic. He is also a good friend of Paula, who is tedious in her insistence that she is soooo very compassionate and cares soooo much about victims, unlike all the people who make her soooo angry because they have soooo little compassion. Both Tony and Paula are obnoxiously self-aggrandizing.

Carol's personality is similar to Paula's except that she's even more ridiculously judgmental. Carol is tedious in her insistence that the police are always pure of heart and that criminals are always monsters. That's bad enough, but she's just as harsh when it comes to judging her friends. Sometimes there's value in making a protagonist disagreeable, but I found little value in reading about Carol, in part because much of her anger seems artificial, a contrivance that allows Carol to make deep and meaningful adjustments in her thinking before the novel is over, leaving her fans smiling because Carol once again becomes the justice-craving person her fans want her to be. It's just too obvious to be compelling drama, and in any event, she's still a shallow binary thinker at the novel's end.

McDermid's bad guys are consistent with Carol's binary view of the world. There is no nuance in McDermid's cartoonish depiction of purely evil villains. Her descriptions of the serial killer's formative years are both unimaginative and unconvincing.

Characters frequently interrupt the plot to talk about their failed romances or their relationship anxiety or to "listen to each other's pain." They're so busy being a support group for each other that it's amazing they have time to do any police work. The conversations are a dull drag on the novel's momentum.

The plot hinges on too many unlikely coincidences. Coincidences happen all the time so I'm willing to give writers the benefit of their use, but when they start to pile up, the plot loses its credibility. The ending is much too tidy, and the novel loses credibility points there, as well. Still, the story moves quickly and McDermid's unblemished prose style is easy to read. The novel held my attention despite its unlikable characters and unconvincing plot. Series fans will no doubt like Cross and Burn more than I did.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Comets! by David J. Eicher

Published by Cambridge University Press on November 27, 2013

David J. Eicher is a lifelong fan of comets. His enthusiasm is reflected in the exclamation point in the book's title and in his discussion of the subject matter. Eicher isn't the most scintillating science writer I've encountered -- Comets! is disorganized and too often redundant -- but his prose is reasonably lively and he packs a good bit of interesting information into a fairly short book without becoming too "sciency." In other words, this is a book the casual reader can appreciate.

Eicher gives the reader a short history of comet observers, featuring familiar names like Thomas Aquinas, Edmond Halley, and Carl Sagan, as well as many that (to me, at least) are less well known. He devotes a later chapter to the hobby (or passion) of comet hunting. He catalogs comets that have coincided with historic events (Halley's Comet, in particular, has often been regarded as a good or bad omen, depending on what side of history the observer was rooting for). He discusses comets as a component of cultural history, from Aristotle and Seneca to Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy. Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were among the early astronomers who pondered and debated the nature of comets, as did Chinese sky watchers and Louis XIV. He also describes more recent observations of comets, some more interesting than others (Hale-Bopp, which was linked to the Heaven's Gate suicides, and Kohoutek, which turned out to be a dud as compared to predictions of the awe it would inspire, are the best of these). Eicher writes intriguing descriptions of "flybys" by spacecraft that have flown near (and sometimes into) comets and their tails, taking pictures and gathering samples. Several of the resulting photographs (which tend to reveal comets as rocks shaped like cosmic potatoes) are reproduced in the book.

A chapter that explains the composition of comets is a bit dry (although I appreciate Eicher's candor in admitting how much of that explanation is educated guesswork). It's interesting, in fact, to learn how little is known about comet formation and disintegration, about the differences between different comets, and about the unclear distinction between asteroids and comets. Did comets deliver the water and amino acids to Earth that made human life possible? Did comets, in fact, bring life to Earth? Are comets seeding life throughout the universe? Maybe, but many unanswered questions would need to be resolved before any of those possibilities could move from speculation to well-supported theory.

A chapter on where comets live and how they die is informative but, like other parts of the book, seems a bit padded with historical theories that have been supplanted by better information. A final chapter filled with technical tips for imaging comets will be of greater interest to night sky photographers than it was to me.

Of course, what we really want to know is whether a comet is likely to blast into the Earth's atmosphere and destroy all life on the planet (or maybe just Canada). A comet might have exploded over Siberia in 1908 but the jury is still out. Maybe it was an asteroid, not that it matters much to the Siberian tigers who were unlucky enough to be caught in the explosion. In any event, Eicher tells us that space debris pummels the Earth all the time and that Jupiter was smacked by a comet in 1994, so it's not inconceivable that a comet has Earth's number. With so many more imminent threats to human existence looming, I'm not going to lose sleep over that one.

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Mars, Inc. by Ben Bova

Published by Baen Books on November 15, 2013

Mars, Inc. is a book about an aging man written by an aging man. It has the feel of 1950s science fiction. Sometimes that's a good thing. I like the "sense of wonder" that pervades a lot of 1950s sf and Bova captures a little of that here. But in style and content, Mars, Inc. seems like a novel written by a science fiction writer who is stuck in the past.

A billionaire named Art Thrasher persuades other billionaires to invest in a manned mission to Mars because ... it's the right thing to do? Bova's optimistic view of capitalism, and of the willingness of billionaires to spend billions on a project that is unlikely to return their investment, seems naïve, but that's the premise. Thrasher spends half his time complaining that politicians have devoted their lives to spending his wealth and the other half complaining that politicians aren't giving more funding to NASA. He doesn't have much insight into his own hypocrisy but most people don't, so in that sense Thrasher is a realistic character. The fact that he's an old horndog is the most interesting aspect of his personality. In most other respects, Thrasher is a pretty boring guy, despite Bova's effort to give him the feistiness of a Ross Perot.

Bova generally skips over the details of rocket design and manufacture, focusing instead (in a fairly simplistic way) on politics and finance. He does give us a tour of the spacecraft, a conventional vehicle that has been described by sf writers hundreds of times. Eventually the plot incorporates a mystery theme as Thrasher suspects the Mars project is being sabotaged and that someone is trying to take over his company. Bova invites the reader to select from the several suspects he puts on display. The method of detection that uncovers the culprit has more to do with wishful thinking than forensic science, and the reveal is less than surprising.

While sex gives Thrasher something to do in his free time (and something to think about the rest of the time), a subplot of romance that emerges in the novel's second half would be at home in an old, black-and-white television sitcom. It contributes to the story's dated feel. Apart from being stale, the story as a whole just isn't as interesting as science fiction should be.

Mars, Inc. certainly isn't an awful novel. It moves quickly and it's easy reading. Bova is a capable writer who knows how to keep readers turning the pages. The story lends itself to a sequel and I might even read it. This time out, however, Bova didn't write anything that hasn't been written before, and long ago.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Our Picnics in the Sun by Morag Joss

Published by Delacorte Press/Random House on November 26, 2013

A bursting blood vessel in Howard Morgan's head and his wife's fall from a ladder set the stage in Our Picnics in the Sun, Morag Joss' story of an aging couple in South West England. The action resumes three years later. Point of view shifts between Howard, who struggles with speech and mobility, and Deborah, who is neglecting their sheep and barely tending to Stoneyridge, their decaying bed-and-breakfast. We also see Howard and Deborah from the point of view of Adam, their 28-year-old son working abroad, who is determined to avoid them as much as he can. An unexpected guest named Theo seeks accommodation at Stoneyridge on Adam's birthday and eventually insinuates himself into the Morgan family drama, sparking changes in the attitudes and interactions of the Morgan clan while forcing Deborah (and, indirectly, Howard) to confront the feelings they have kept hidden from each other, and possibly from themselves, since Adam's birth.

Our Picnics in the Sun is about the essential role that kind treatment of our children and parents and spouses plays in a healthy existence. But the novel also helps us understand why kindness so easily disappears, why we sometimes struggle to bestow it upon the people we love. Neither Howard nor Deborah are ideal parents or spouses, and Adam is less than an ideal son, but it is easy to feel sympathy for all of them. Howard, a controlling twit who has devoted much of his self-absorbed spiritualistic life to bearing a well-deserved sense of guilt, is now a mind trapped in a dysfunctional body, incapable of articulating his thoughts, often experiencing inexpressible hunger and cold, regretting all the years that he refused to notice Deborah "fading and slipping away from him." While it is tempting to judge Deborah for the uncaring care she gives (or withholds from) Howard, she has limitations of her own -- she can only "breathe freely" when she's away from Howard -- and it isn't her fault that her anger and frustration is not alleviated by Howard's helplessness. Adam, impoverished and home-schooled to the point of ignorance as a child, deprived of everything he wanted (including a feeling of normalcy), can't abide a return to the source of so many unwelcome memories. Deborah lives in denial of Adam's detachment from the family, convincing herself each year that Adam will appear for his birthday picnic on the moor, a ritual he dreaded as a boy.

Flashbacks to Adam's significant birthdays furnish the links that allow the reader to see the chain of the Morgan family history, including the oddly obsessive birthday picnics. Late in the novel we learn some things that force a reinterpretation of Howard and Deborah and that shed light upon the annual pilgrimages to the moor. A jolt in the last pages helps make new sense of much of what came before.

Is it too late for the Morgans to recapture the sense of kindness that has been missing from their lives for so long? The answer is moving and surprising and insightful. This is a deft piece of storytelling by a writer with a compassionate understanding of human nature who is in firm control of her compelling characters.

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