Doughnut by Tom Holt

Published by Orbit on March 5, 2013 

Doughnut is a playful take on the multiverse hypothesis. If you can travel between universes, does that make you a god?

Theo Bernstein is an unlikely god. Theo put a decimal point in the wrong place and the Very Very Large Hadron Collider blew up, along with some of Switzerland, so now Theo is looking for a job. That the accident left his right arm invisible only makes it more difficult for him to secure employment. Theo eventually returns to Switzerland to pick up a mysterious bottle bequeathed to him by Pieter van Goyen, a recently deceased colleague. The trip becomes more interesting when he meets a girl on a train who shows him some equations before she vanishes. Theo soon finds himself in YouSpace, sort of like Second Life combined with Westworld except that his destinations all seem to be random (and dangerous) points in the multiverse. A note left by Pieter tells Theo to have fun with it. Fun is pretty much out of the question.

Pieter's note also directs Theo to a job at a hotel that has only two (odd, mysterious) guests, where he works alongside (odd, mysterious) Matasuntha and her (odd, mysterious) boss. As Theo explores the multiverse, barely escaping multiple deaths (or not), he finds himself interacting with his a-hole brother and mentally ill sister, further enhancing his misery.

Theo is a likable if somewhat hapless protagonist, stuck with a dysfunctional family and used as a pawn by people he thought were his friends, making it easy to root for his success. As is often true of science fiction stories, whether Theo will prevail depends upon his ability to outwit everyone else.

Some aspects of Doughnut are hilarious, particularly when Tom Holt pokes fun at Microsoft. The overall story is clever, funny, and deep enough to provoke thought about the multiverse hypothesis without bogging down in discussions of science that may or may not be sound. I'm not sure the science (as Holt explains it) entirely makes sense (I'm skeptical about the invisible arm) but I am sure it doesn't matter. The point of comedy is to be funny, and Doughnut consistently made me smile.

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All the Light There Was by Nancy Kricorian

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 12, 2013 

The best stories illustrating the hardship and suffering of war are personal, and that's how All the Light There Was begins. For Maral Pegorian's family in occupied Paris, the war is about hunger, curfews and boredom. When Maral's Jewish neighbors are being rounded up by Germans, Maral's family -- survivors of the Armenian Genocide -- hide a neighbor's baby. Similar scenes have been written many times before, and this one highlights the problem with the Nancy Kricorian's novel: for the most part, Maral is nothing more than an observer describing events from which she often seems distant. When the war finally has a predictable impact on Maral's life, it does so in a way that seems forced.

The members of Maral's family are familiar: the sullen, proverb-spouting father, the tearful/fearful mother, the spinster aunt, the reckless brother. In her desire to illustrate the importance of family in Armenian culture, Kricorian gives scant attention to the individuality of family members. Each member plays a defined role but no member behaves in a surprising or unexpected way. They give each other hope, and Kricorian's point seems to be that families exist for that purpose. It's a valid point, but again, a point that has been made many times in similar ways.

What Maral knows of the war, or for that matter of her boyfriend's fate when he is captured after playing a murky role in the French Resistance, comes from her brother Missak, whose role in the novel is to disappear for awhile and then reappear with a news bulletin. The novel might have been more engrossing if it had been built around Missak, who at least seems to know what's going on around him. Maral spends quite a bit of the novel worrying about her hairstyle which, regardless of the importance of her hair to her heritage, makes for less than riveting fiction.

The romance between Maral and her boyfriend is based on predictable scenes: walks in the park, initials carved into a tree, the tentative first kiss, Maral writing variations of her (anticipated) married name in her notebook. The scenes are written in fine prose but they're unimaginative.

Of greater interest is the response in the Armenian community to Armenians who play different roles in the war. Some join the French Resistance; some of those are apprehended and executed. Some, formerly in the Soviet Army and captured by the Germans, join the Wehrmacht (at the urging of an Armenian war hero) as an alternative to the starvation of POW camps. For their families, the question that arises is not easily answered: Is it better to die as a martyr or to survive as a coward? And then, when Paris is finally liberated, Armenian-American soldiers appear and everyone eats lamb and drinks raki in celebration. I expected more to be made of the theme of conflicting Armenian roles in the war -- the most interesting in the novel, I thought -- but it isn't well developed.

Instead, the novel's drama (such as it is) stems from the various Armenian suitors who woo Maral and the choice she must make among them. Once again, the novel follows a plotline that is all too familiar. Since the suitors are virtually indistinguishable from one another, Kricorian gave me no reason to cheer for any of them or to care about the choice that Maral ultimately makes. Her disappointingly banal insights about the need to sacrifice "true love" for "duty" are just as unoriginal as the story, which ends with chapters that are both contrived and dull.

Kricorian is a capable writer. Her prose is graceful and occasionally she crafts a scene that's quite touching. Her insights into Armenian culture are interesting. Unfortunately, much of the story she tells is not.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Black Russian by Vladimir Alexandrov

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on March 5, 2013

Both history and biography, The Black Russian is sort of a Horatio Alger story with a twist. Hard work and perseverance are the formula for success, but in this case success was possible for a black American only because he became an entrepreneur in Russia, where his race was not an obstacle to achievement.

Born in the Mississippi Delta to recently freed slaves, Frederick Thomas was raised in a successful farm family. Unlike many Delta blacks, Thomas was given the opportunity to discover that there was more to life than "an endless cycle of labor, food, and sleep." When his father and stepmother lost their property to an unscrupulous white landowner -- a swindle that was partially rectified after a protracted legal battle -- Thomas learned how quickly the course of a life can change. More than once, his own life followed a similar "rags-to-riches-to-rags" pattern.

Supporting himself with service jobs in restaurants and hotels, Thomas made his way to Chicago and then to Brooklyn. He escaped American racism by moving to London and then to Paris. Thomas worked his way through Europe, refining his skills in the restaurant and hotel trades, and in 1899 made his way to Russia. Thomas eventually settled in Moscow, an ethnically diverse city that drew no color lines. In 1912 he entered into a partnership to turn an old Moscow theater into a classy establishment that offered fine dining, dancing, and stage entertainment. By the end of its first season, Thomas was a rich man. His success encouraged him to make new investments.

To protect himself (and his businesses) from the consequences of war, Thomas became a Russian citizen in 1915. Just two years later, in a time of revolution, his status as a "prosperous bourgeois capitalist" worked against him. To avoid arrest, he made a perilous journey from Moscow to Odessa, but he was still at risk. Fortunately, Thomas never informed the United States of his new citizenship and neither did Russia, omissions that benefited Thomas when, in 1919, having lost the wealth he accumulated over twenty years to the Bolshevik Revolution, he fled Odessa with the help of the American consul.

At the age of forty-seven, virtually penniless, Thomas arrived in Constantinople determined to reinvent himself. An influx of Westerners created opportunities that Thomas was positioned to exploit. Thomas knew how to provide the elegant and sophisticated food and entertainment that wealthy foreigners craved and that conservative Turks condemned. Despite complications caused by an ex-wife and a racist American bureaucrat, Thomas was able to replicate (at least to some degree) his success in the entertainment industry. After a few years, however, it became clear that Thomas had escaped from one volatile political situation only to find himself in the midst of another. Denied the benefits of an American passport, apparently due to a combination of racism and incompetence in a State Department that refused to acknowledge his American birth, Thomas was stuck in Constantinople. He ended his days in prison, unable to pay the debts that accumulated after the Turkish government made a point of sabotaging foreign enterprises.

The Black Russian makes clear that Thomas was a remarkable man. He had as many successes and failures as Donald Trump (although, unlike Trump, he couldn't rely on bankruptcy courts to rescue him from hard times). His successful introduction of jazz to his clientele in both Moscow and Constantinople seems both visionary and quixotic. Yet as a biography, The Black Russian is curiously detached from its subject. We see hints of Thomas' personality from time to time (sometimes boastful, sometimes devious, and oddly unattached to his children), but I never got the sense of knowing Thomas as a person.

The Black Russian is clearly the product of meticulous research. History is often based on inference, but Vladimir Alexandrov is careful to distinguish between known and assumed facts. There are times when the book threatens to bog down with detail, and several collateral passages come across as filler that have little to do with Thomas' life. Still, the book isn't dull. While Alexandrov's writing style isn't always lively, it is neither dry nor overly academic. Although The Black Russian is filled with census data and other statistics, Alexandrov gives careful attention to the cultural atmosphere that surrounded Thomas, both in the United States and abroad. Alexandrov paints a descriptive picture of the entertainment business in both Moscow and Constantinople, underscoring the contrast between their repressive governance and the public's lust for the things their leaders condemned as decadent. In short, The Black Russian tells an interesting and informative -- but not particularly captivating -- story of a largely unknown American entrepreneur who found success in surprising environments. 

RECOMMENDED

The Curve of the Earth by Simon Morden

Published by Orbit on March 19, 2013 

Samuil Petrovich is back. A rather quiet decade has passed since the events described in Degrees of Freedom. The evil Americans are still ruled by religious fanatics, but the Freezone is cooking along with a proto-democracy. Major decisions are made by a consensus of individuals chosen by computer who serve on small committees organized on an ad hoc basis -- a nifty idea. Despite the abilities Petrovich has gained by virtue of his cybernetic components and his connection to the Artificial Intelligence named Michael, Petrovich follows the Freezone rules -- as he should, since the Freezone is pretty much his creation.

Petrovich's adopted daughter Lucy has lost contact with the Freezone. Petrovich nominates himself to find her. Since Lucy was doing research in Alaska when she disappeared, a hapless FBI agent named Joseph Newcomen is assigned the frustrating task of assisting Petrovich -- a man who requires little assistance and desires even less. Petrovich and Newcomen spend the first half of the novel sparring until, at about the novel's midpoint, Petrovich begins to get a handle on the reason for Lucy's disappearance. She's seen something, or learned something, that involves the apparent destruction of a satellite that was blown out of the sky. Just what Lucy found is the mystery that drives the novel. Are the Chinese and/or the Americans up to something nefarious? The answer is interesting, a little surprising, and a clear set-up to more Petrovich novels.

Petrovich hasn't exactly mellowed as he's aged, but what fun would a mellow Petrovich be? He spends much of the novel berating Newcomen who, in Petrovich's view, doesn't think or fend for himself and has committed the unpardonable sin of being an American. At times Petrovich becomes wearisome in his bullying self-righteousness. He's often having a tantrum. That's amusing for awhile but it wears thin by the end of the book, particularly since he has the same tantrum over and over and over. Apparently near-omnipotence has made it difficult for Petrovich to get over himself. At other times he's surprisingly insecure about being a science geek (apparently the kids at school picked on him) and takes it out on others by belittling anyone whose knowledge base consists of subjects that require more subtlety than the rote memorization of "the value of the gravitational constant." It was good to see Petrovich growing up a bit in the trilogy that introduced him. Clearly the dude needs to grow a bit more, starting with a lesson in humility. I'm hoping that happens in future novels.

The dystopian America Simon Morden envisions, a government controlled by the religious right, also wears a bit thin, only because it is an underdeveloped, one-note song. The novel's premise that Americans would willingly give up their right to curse suggests that Morden has never visited Texas ... or Chicago ... or the East or West Coasts. On the other hand, his satirical look at American excesses when it comes to airport security and immigration queues are spot on, and Evil America serves as a counterpoint for Freezone values -- openness, governance by consensus -- that make the Freezone seem like an appealing place to live.

Morden peppers the swiftly moving story with high energy action scenes, some of which are impressively original. To the extent that The Curve of the Earth feels like an extended set-up for the next novel in the series, it at least whets my appetite for whatever might be coming next. There are passing references to earlier events that might befuddle a reader who hasn't read The Petrovitch Trilogy, but The Curve of the Earth should be enjoyable for readers who haven't read the earlier novels.

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The Andalucian Friend by Alexander Söderberg

First published in Swedish in 2012; published in translation by Crown on March 12, 2013

Jens Vall is an arms dealer in Stockholm. While trying to deliver a shipment of weapons, he's thrust into the middle of a turf war between two organizations of drug dealers. One is headed by Ralph Hanke and the other by Hector Guzman. While Hector is in hospitalized, he forms a bond with a nurse, Sophie Brinkmann, and invites her on a date. Gunilla Strandberg, who runs a unit of misfit police officers, notable only for their loyalty to her, is after Hector and wants to use Sophie to spy on him. The police use threats and blackmail to make Sophie and others cooperate with their investigation. In fact, it's difficult to find a difference between the police and the criminals. If anything, the police are more brutal. Readers who are looking for a clear distinction between the good guys and the bad guys should give this novel a pass.

In addition to the crime family showdown and the arms delivery gone wrong, the plot features a blackmail scheme involving a midlevel manager at Ericsson. The plot never crosses the line from complex to confusing, but with so many characters entering and leaving the story, concentration is required to keep it all straight. Sophie remains the novel's focus, a strong, relatively innocent widow caught in a nightmare.

The plot is interesting but the characters make the story worth reading. They are authentic, filled with contradictions, nagging doubts and hidden emotions. Sophie comes from a background of family discord. (As you might expect in a Scandanavian novel, the family members view Sophie's sister, Jane, with suspicion because she's happy.) Sophie is transformed by her experiences with Hector and the police but, at the same time, remains grounded in her relationship with her son. Gunilla is ambitious, ruthless, and as much a criminal as the thugs she pursues. Hector, on the other hand, is capable of gentleness and sensitivity, at least in his interaction with Sophie. One of the officers Gunilla recruits, Lars Vinge, a man with some serious pharmaceutical issues, is unhappy with the limited role Gunilla has given him and decides to do something about it. If there's anyone in the novel worth cheering for other than Sophie, it's Lars, despite his problems, which include an unhealthy obsession with Sophie. Unlike the other police officers, Lars has a conscience. His motives are never purely altruistic, but he's not evil, as are the novel's most thuggish characters.

The Andalucian Friend blends action (and blood) with intrigue and suspense. It moves at a steady pace, not so quickly as to short-change character development, but not so leisurely that the reader's attention wanders. Alexander Söderberg doesn't invite the reader to make a deep emotional investment in any of his characters; readers who have that desire will probably find the novel unappealing. Some might also be displeased with the novel's ending -- it leaves lives unsettled -- but I thought it was satisfying. It isn't exactly a happy ending, but the unexpected karmic twists are true to the story that precedes it.

As the first novel in a trilogy, I have to expect the next story to go in a different direction, since not many of the characters introduced in this one are alive when the novel ends. I look forward to seeing where the next installment takes the survivors.

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