The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

Published by Knopf on August 7, 2012 

“There is no hyperbole anymore just stark extinction mounting up.”  So says Hig.  A survivor of the flu and blood disease and whatever killed the trees and trout, Hig and his neighbor Bangley have formed a partnership born of necessity rather than friendship.  Hig flies his Cessna, taking off from a runway in Erie, Colorado, scouting for trespassers who might enter their perimeter.  If he spots any, Bangley kills them.  Thus the men stay alive symbiotically, maintaining an uneasy peace between them.

Hig is a man with few choices left to make.  His wife is dead.  His dog is old.  He loves to fish but only carp remain.  Flying is his remaining passion, but runways are deteriorating and aviation fuel won’t last forever.  Everything ends.  Hig knows that but still he perseveres.  Even in sorrow.  Even in grief.  Even when every day is filled with pain.  Hig perseveres and wonders why.

Bangley is the counterpoint to Hig.  While Hig wants only to soar above the world, “to animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty,” Bangley’s sole desire is “to kill just about everything that moves.”  Hig has befriended and sometimes assists a colony of Mennonites, knowing most of them will die of blood disease.  Bangley would just as soon help them to their deaths, thus lessening the risk of his own infection.  Still, Hig longs for something more than Bangley’s uneasy companionship, and his quest to find it drives the novel’s second half.

To some extent, The Dog Stars reminded me of On the Beach -- the sense of profound loss and sadness, the search for other survivors, the protagonist’s fading hope that something good might be left of the world.  Yet this is both a darker and a brighter story than Neville Shute’s, one that places a greater emphasis on evil while offering a glimmer of hope.  What I think Cormac McCarthy tried to do in The Road -- reducing man to a primitive state to illustrate the eternal struggle of good versus evil -- Peter Heller does with more subtlety in The Dog Stars.  Heller may even be making a mildly sarcastic reference to McCarthy when Hig says “I’m the keeper of something, not sure what, not the flame ….”

While reading the first quarter of the story I wasn’t sure I liked it.  By the halfway point I was completely absorbed.  Hig has gone a little crazy in his isolation and sorrow but he’s retained a sense of humor and, more importantly, his humanity.  The second half opens up, combining a rapidly moving adventure with a poignant love story.

The book is written in choppy prose, not quite stream-of-consciousness but not far removed from it.  It is the language of a man alone too long, a man who, talking to himself, has no use for grammar.  Sentences often end with the word “and” or “but” to represent his half-completed thoughts.  Heller nevertheless brings a rough eloquence to Hig’s first person narration.  I doubt Heller will write it, but The Dog Stars easily merits a sequel.  I would love to know what happens next.

RECOMMENDED

Thy Neighbor by Norah Vincent

Published by Viking on August 2, 2012

Now that Norah Vincent has Thy Neighbor out of her system, perhaps she will apply her talent to a more meaningful project. The novel's protagonist, Nick Walsh, is such a caricature of an immature male that I wondered whether Vincent modeled him after someone she felt the need to ridicule. Nick's friend Dave is just as bad.  Every significant male character, in fact, is either abusive or emotionally stunted.

The story is told in the first person from Nick's perspective. Vincent doesn't write with a convincing male voice. Nor is Nick a convincing character. He is both extremely shallow and intensely self-analytical, two conflicting qualities that do not belong in the same persona. Although Nick is self-deprecating to the point of being self-eviscerating, his descriptions of himself read as though they are being supplied by a third party -- which, of course, they are.

Nick's personality is a checklist of male stereotypes. He is self-absorbed. He fails to clean up after himself. He doesn't know how to take a proper interest in women. He doesn't listen. Although he wants to feel loved and appreciated, getting laid is his defining desire. He is intimidated by any woman who has a brain -- like his sex buddy Monica. While Vincent takes shots at needy overweight women and the "hausfraus" who watch Ellen and Oprah, immature and abusive men remain the bulls-eye in her satirical dartboard.

Why is Nick such a mess? We are well into the novel before Vincent reveals Nick's dark secret, but by then I didn't care. The reader suffers through many chapters filled with Nick's tedious introspection while waiting for something interesting to happen. When he's not bemoaning the existence of Facebook or opining about the nature of trust, Nick indulges in whiny and self-pitying monologues about his horrible childhood. To the extent that the story has a plot, it is driven by accusations (founded and unfounded) of pedophilia, by Nick's use of hidden cameras to spy on his neighbors, by the badly behaving daughter of Nick's cougarish neighbor, and by Nick's connection to another neighbor, Anita Bloom, whose daughter (Nick's childhood friend) went missing thirteen years earlier. Nearly two-thirds of the novel passes by before the plot develops any sort of momentum. Not that it matters; the story that finally emerges is so preposterous that I didn't believe a word of it.

Some of the scenes in Thy Neighbor are disgusting. Descriptions of repulsive behavior don't bother me if they serve a purpose, but Vincent had no purpose that I could discern. Perhaps she was going for shock value (is there such a thing these days?). If so, she sacrificed credibility for the sake of cheap thrills. The penultimate scene is over-the-top and the story's conclusion, while meant to leave the reader gasping with surprise, is so contrived it made me giggle.

Vincent's capable prose style kept me from ditching Thy Neighbor and turning to something better -- that, and the hope that Vincent would work her way to a story worth telling. She knows how to write zingers, some of which are reasonably funny, and she occasionally produces a clever metaphor. In the end, though, melodrama dressed up in a stylish, sophisticated form is still melodrama. Sometimes I'm a fan of melodrama, but not this time. I would include a warning that, due to its foul language and scatological content, this book isn't appropriate for minors, but really, I can't think of an audience for whom it might be appropriate.

NOT RECOMMENDED

In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 7, 2012

The banyan tree in the courtyard represented a place of safety in war-torn Cambodia for seven-year-old Raami and the royal family to which she belongs -- at least it did until the Khmer Rouge chased the family members from their home.  The Khmer Rouge soldiers are in the vanguard of a “revolution” that, in the mid-1970s, turns Raami’s family into refugees.  Raami’s father, Ayuravann, is a prince and a poet, her grandmother is a queen, but these distinctions merely put the family at greater risk than the displaced peasants they soon join.

In the Shadow of the Banyan is a stirring account of Raami’s young life under the control of the Khmer Rouge.  The Khmer Rouge leaders do not want any Cambodian to remain rooted; individuals must be replanted, must take on new lives in service to the Revolution.  When her family is divided and forced to relocate to a rural village, Raami begins her life anew, concealing her past and watching as friends and relatives -- the ones who aren’t killed by soldiers -- die of malnutrition and disease.  Having been stricken with polio in early childhood, Raami’s limp saves her from the arduous labor to which most villagers are assigned, but nothing can spare her the grief of loss or the pain of hunger.

Vaddey Ratner’s novel is rooted in her own experience as a child in Cambodia.  It tells an emotionally intense story of courage and sacrifice.  While the story is often tragic, rebirth and transformation are the novel’s strongest themes.  Another striking theme is the commonality of man, the shared dignity of rich and poor, royalty and peasant.   “We are all echoes of one another,” Ayuravaan tells Raami, a truth the novel vividly illustrates.

Images of hope and beauty balance the despair that pervades the story. Despite the devastation she must endure daily, Raami never forgets that she is surrounded by beauty. She discovers that a momentary glimpse of the commonplace -- a dragonfly in flight -- can turn the ordinary into something beautiful. “We are capable of extraordinary beauty if we dare to dream,” says Auyravaan as he encourages Raami to dream of flight, to soar with spreading wings, to overcome her disability and the external strictures that govern her life. Although similar metaphors often descend into cheesiness in the hands of uninspired writers, Ratner avoids crossing that line by anchoring her story in truth while avoiding artistic manipulation.

The novel’s imagery is astonishing.  A farmer carves a calf from wood to hang around a cow’s neck, not to replace the mourning cow’s dead calf but “to give shape to her sorrow” -- the kind of sorrow Raami comes to understand all too well.  Recurring images -- serpents, birds in flight, the moon, gardens, mirthful spirits, an epic poem called Reamker, and (of course) banyan trees -- give shape and context to Cambodian life, connecting past to present.  So do the charming folk tales the characters tell each other.

Despite the well-documented atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, Ratner writes of individual “revolutionaries” with perception:  they are often just kids, too immature to understand the consequences of their behavior, following the Movement only because it is easier to carry a gun than to push a plow.  Big Uncle says they are “like boys playing war.”  They are illiterate, resentful of the educated, unaware of the “cause” their revolution supposedly intends to achieve.  They glorify violence to mask their own ignorance.  Given her experiences, it is a tribute to Ratner that she writes of them with such understanding.

Ratner is a graceful writer.  Her sentences flow with balletic precision.  Her word choice is impeccable.  Even if the story had been less captivating, I would recommend this novel for the beauty of its prose.  Every now and then Ratner includes a word in Raami’s native language.  Its meaning is usually apparent from the context, but even when its meaning is obscure, Ratner resists the temptation to interrupt the narrative flow with an English translation.  That might bother some readers but I’m more bothered by writers who can’t use a foreign word without immediately supplying an English translation.

In short, this is a stunning work, a powerful story skillfully told.  Although grounded in Ratner’s personal experience, it reads like the product of a seasoned novelist.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch

Published by Del Rey on July 31, 2012

Quantum entanglement is just pixie dust with the word quantum thrown in.  That, at least, is Constable Peter Grant’s explanation of magic.  Whether magic is caused by quantum entanglement or pixie dust, Grant is slowly learning to master it, a hobby that serves him well in his career with London’s Metropolitan Police.  He is assigned to the Folly, the hush-hush department (known more formally as the Specialist Assessment Unit) charged with investigating cases when “things get weird.”  Things get weird when an American named James Gallagher is stabbed to death with a sharp bit of pottery in London’s Underground -- weird in part because it isn’t clear how Gallagher got into the tunnel (his staggering exit at one of the platforms is captured on CCTV).

Something odd is taking place beneath the surface of London and it’s up to Grant to connect the underground madness to Gallagher’s death.  The mystery takes Grant (together with boss Nightingale and apprentice Lesley) on a tour of the Underground’s tunnels and London’s sewers.  A variety of magical types turn up to provide assistance or trouble (or both), including river goddesses, an Earthbender, and a half-fairy (on his father’s side).  And then there are the mysterious dwellers below London’s surface….

Grant is sort of a neophyte magician so the novel is relatively light on magic -- a good thing, from my perspective.  I’m more partial to detective work and/or humor than spell-casting and ghost-busting.  The familiar elements of a police procedural give the novel its shape and keep it moving forward at a steady pace.  Still, I recommend Whispers Under Ground not so much for its convoluted whodunit plot but for Ben Aaronovitch’s humor.   Aaronovitch’s take on law enforcement officers is consistently amusing and his good-hearted American-bashing (like his French-bashing) is priceless.

Whispers Under Ground is written with enough attitude to keep the story interesting even when it lags, as it does from time to time.  Unlike the London Underground, the plot doesn’t consistently stay on track.  Grant’s burial by the Earthbender, for instance, leads to an extended scene of no clear relevance.  It is one of a few passages that add nothing to the narrative.  Still, Aaronovitch’s snappy prose held my attention even when the story didn’t.

Aaronovitch makes occasional references to events that occurred in earlier novels in the series.  Having not read the earlier installments, those references baffled me.  I don’t think it’s necessary to read the earlier novels to understand this one, but doing so would provide helpful context.  Fortunately, although I sometimes felt like an outsider who didn’t understand the novel’s in-jokes, Aaronovitch coaxed a smile or a snicker on nearly every page, and that sufficed to earn my recommendation of this offbeat novel.

RECOMMENDED

The Snow Bees by Peter Cunningham

First published in Great Britain in 1988 

Peter Cunningham is an extraordinary writer of moving family dramas, including the Monument novels, set in rural Ireland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also written more than a half dozen thrillers, including The Snow Bees.

The Snow Bees is a standard story of drug cops battling drug lords with a slight twist: the man who infiltrates the cartel, Patrick Drake, is an accountant, not a cop. Drake volunteers for the assignment after his brother-in-law, Alan Ridgeway, a fellow accountant in the same prestigious London firm, is murdered at a winery he was auditing in France. Ridgeway had discovered that the winery was shipping more wine than it produced. He suspected that the winery was involved in illicit activity and that the accounting firm's founder, John Abelson, was involved.

In a related plotline, a DEA agent working undercover in Spain is murdered, but not before telling his brother, D.C. drug cop Joe Vendetti, that someone high in the DEA's hierarchy was working with the cartel. It is Vendetti who recruits Drake to infiltrate the cartel. The novel's other key player is drug lord Marcellino Adarraga, who lives in Columbia but dreams of freeing his homeland, Euskadi, and uses his profits to fund Basque terrorists.

Patrick manages to join the cartel with improbable ease, and the relationship he develops with Adarraga's beautiful lover is both predictable and unlikely. As was customary twenty years ago, the "good guys" in The Snow Bees indulge in a fair amount of overwrought hand-wringing about the evils of cocaine. Notwithstanding those concerns and despite the all-too-conventional plot, The Snow Bees tells a rousing story that features strong characters and tense moments. Cunningham writes with the same grace and style that make the Monument novels so memorable. The Snow Bees is far from Cunningham's best work -- it hasn't aged as well as his other novels -- but the quality of Cunningham's writing and the excitement that he manages to generate make it worth reading.

RECOMMENDED