Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

 

First published in Great Britain in 2011; published in US by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on July 19, 2011

If you read this book expecting it to be a murder mystery that will be solved by boy detectives, you're likely to be disappointed. The story does open with a murder, and young Harri and his friends make half-baked attempts to solve it, but like boys around the world, they're easily distracted. These aren't the Hardy Boys; Harri Opoku's idea of crime detection is to scan the horizon for clues using his plastic binoculars, to conduct stakeouts with an ample supply of Cherry Coke, and to stick tape on random objects near (and not so near) the crime scene to see if he can lift fingerprints. The kids he doesn't like (including the several who bully him) are, of course, his prime suspects. Quite by accident Harri stumbles upon actual evidence. When he gets close to the truth (again, quite by accident) trouble ensues.

Still, Pigeon English isn't a plot-driven novel; it's a chronicle of a short period in a boy's life. When he isn't detecting, Harri talks to his friends about superheroes, goes to school (he's delighted to learn that a lemon can be made into a battery), fights with his sister Lydia (who is keeping a mysterious secret of her own), admires his platonic girlfriend Poppy, and runs away from bullies (some of whom he provokes because he knows he can outrun them). Occasionally Harri thinks about his life in Ghana, where his father and grandmother still live, keeping in touch by telephone. Now and then he contemplates pigeons.

Harri loves pigeons. He believes he's communicating with a special pigeon friend, although he's uncertain whether these silent conversations are real or imagined. From time to time we're treated to a philosophical pigeon's-eye-view of the world. I confess to being a bit puzzled by those passages. Are we really hearing the thoughts of a numinous pigeon who is watching over Harri, or are we hearing Harri's thoughts as he imagines the pigeon's thoughts? The pigeon's voice is different from Harri's, more mature and less slangy, suggesting that Harri does indeed have a guardian pigeon. Either way, the pigeon passages don't fit in with, and in fact detract from, the rest of the story.

Fortunately, most of the novel is in Harri's voice -- a voice that struck me as authentic, although I admit I don't know any preteens from Ghana who are being raised in London. It took me awhile to figure out that "asweh" means "I swear" and I had to use Google to learn that "hutious" is Ghanaian slang for "frightening" but those words contribute to Harri's unique style of speaking. Harri loves words; "paradiddle" is one of his favorites. Sometimes he adopts (and misuses) a new favorite word ("orgasm," for instance) without quite understanding its meaning.

Harri is a completely innocent kid -- he knows several words and phrases pertaining to sex but his understanding of them is invariably inaccurate. When his sister's friend teaches him to French kiss (a skill he thinks he may need if he is to cement his relationship with Poppy), Harri is disgusted by the lesson. Harri understands the world with a child's logic; his observations -- the notion, for instance, that eyelashes are basically bug shields -- contribute a good bit of the novel's humor. Despite his desire to be as cool as the gang members who inhabit his neighborhood, Harri is disturbed by the crime and violence that surrounds him. Harri's innocence in a corrupt world is part of the book's charm.

The mystical pigeon notwithstanding, I enjoyed this quirky, offbeat novel. It captures the universal experience of childhood from an immigrant's perspective. That perspective is important; Stephen Kelman seems to be saying that life might be awful in Ghana but there's no guarantee it will be any better in London. Some readers won't like the ending. I'm not sure I liked it but I think it's honest. More than that I can't say without saying too much.

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The Castle in Transylvania by Jules Verne

First published in France in 1892.  First published in English in 1894.  Published by Melville House on July 6, 2010.

Someone (or something) appears to be living in Transylvania's Castle of the Carpathians. It isn't Count Dracula -- Bram Stoker's novel didn't make an appearance until 1897, while The Castle in Transylvania was first published in 1892. Like the family name "Dracul," however, vampire stories existed in Romania for centuries before Stoker wrote his novel. Jules Verne relied on the superstitions that are rooted in the history of Transylvania -- a land, Verne tells us, that lends itself "to all psychagogic evocations" -- when he penned this tale of an eerie castle. But is this a tale of the supernatural? Verne does a masterful job of keeping the reader guessing until the novel's end. Readers should be warned, however, that the phrase "the original zombie story" on the cover of the Melville House edition is a tad misleading.

Verne's story begins with the shepherd Frick, who takes his first look through a telescope when he meets a peddler offering one for sale. Gazing at the Castle of the Carpathians nestled in the distant mountains, Frick spies smoke rising from the keep. This disturbs Frick because the castle has been abandoned since the disappearance of its owner, Baron Rudolf of Gortz, many years earlier. The castle is never visited by the superstitious villagers for they are certain it is haunted, filled with ghosts and vampires and werewolves, surrounded by dragons and mischievous fairies.

Word of the smoke spreads rapidly throughout the village. The villagers readily accept Frick's explanation: a fire in the keep has been set by the Chort -- that is, by the devil. The village leaders meet to discuss what becomes one of the novel's most interesting themes: the adverse economic impact the village will suffer if travelers, fearful of the supernatural, decide not to tarry in the village shops and inn (not to mention what the Chort might do to their property values!). The leaders draft Dr. Patak to investigate since he has often derided their superstitious beliefs. Patak isn't happy to be chosen and agrees only after forester Nicolas Deck volunteers to accompany him. A voice then fills the inn, warning Deck that if he goes to the castle, misfortune will befall him. This foreshadows a terrifying adventure for Deck and the doc, and the events that follow certainly terrify Patak.

Is the castle infested with evil spirits or are the villagers falling prey to their own superstitions? It falls to Count Franz of Tellec -- who travels through the village by chance -- to answer that question. Count Franz and Baron Rudolf happen to have a dark history involving a beautiful opera singer. Is the opera singer alive or dead? Or is she undead? The genius of this story is the mystery that Verne creates. The reader doesn't learn until the final chapters whether supernatural beings inhabit the creepy castle. Unfortunately, Verne resolves part of the mystery in a clumsy narrative that slows the novel's momentum. Still, the story gets back on track before it ends.

Verne devotes a fair amount of this novel to the creation of atmosphere. The book is replete with information about Transylvanian history and customs. Readers who crave nonstop action might be put off by Verne's digressions, but I thought they added interest and authenticity to the story. Besides, reading Verne is a pleasure; even at his least exciting moments, his prose is never dull. The pace quickens considerably in the last third of the novel. The conclusion (like an earlier chapter involving the opera singer) is melodramatic but that's hardly a surprising feature of a nineteenth century story. This might be lesser Verne but it's still a story that fans of horror fiction, mysteries, and Victorian literature should enjoy.

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Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper by Geoffrey Gray

Published by Crown on August 9, 2011

Acting on a tip, Geoffrey Gray began searching for the true identity of D.B. Cooper, the man who hijacked a 727 in 1971, exchanged the passengers for $200,000 in cash, and parachuted to freedom (or death) somewhere over the Pacific Northwest. Gray hadn't heard of Cooper when he received the tip, which tells me that Gray (like a growing number of people) is younger than I am. I wasn't all that old in 1971, but I recall that Cooper became part of the popular culture, a folk hero whose "perfect crime" was glorified in song. After 9/11, it's difficult to imagine an American admiring a skyjacker, but at the time, Cooper's theft of money from an airline, without injuring the passengers or crew, was seen by many as a symbolic protest against corporate greed and by others as a brave act of banditry.

Gray's tip originated with Lyle Christiansen. Lyle is certain that D.B. Cooper is Lyle's brother Kenny, who died in 1994. There is some evidence to support the theory but there are also reasons to doubt that Kenny is the culprit. As Gray dreams of solving the crime and winning a Pulitzer, his investigation takes him to a number of plausible suspects. A man who in 1972 hijacked a 727 in Utah and exchanged $500,000 for the passengers before parachuting from the plane might have been a copycat criminal or he might have been D.B. Cooper. A woman claims her husband confessed on his deathbed to being D.B. Cooper, and that remarks he made during her marriage (to which she attached no significance at the time) implied his familiarity with Cooper. Another theory -- one the FBI refuses to entertain -- is that D.B. Cooper is a woman named Barbara. This sounds implausible on its face until the reader makes sense of a series of vignettes that are initially mystifying. If that theory seems wild, consider the possibility that the skyjacking was a "black ops" mission underwritten by the CIA.

The mystery is indeed intriguing. Some of the $200,000 was found on a sand bar in the Columbia River. How did it get there? An informal team of scientists attempted to answer that question, and they're just as interesting as Cooper. A few have become obsessed with the search -- they've succumbed to what Gray characterizes as "the curse." The poster boy for "the curse" is a man named Jerry who has spent more than twenty years wandering through the woods, looking for Cooper's skeleton and the money. Jerry has no use for the loosely-affiliated contributors to a website who, taking a more analytical approach to determining where Cooper might have landed, think Jerry has spent his life looking in the wrong place.

In many respects, the amateur investigators turn out to be better than the FBI agents who failed to follow up obvious leads. At the time, the FBI floated the story that Cooper didn't survive the jump, an easy explanation for the Bureau's failure to capture him. The FBI's current theory seems to be that D.B. Cooper is the skyjacker from Utah. It should be easy to determine whether Cooper and McCoy are the same person by using modern technology to test the DNA on the eight cigarette butts Cooper left on the plane, but the FBI seems to have misplaced them. How convenient.

I don't know that Skyjack answers any questions, but it is a fun and lighthearted romp through an enduring puzzle. Gray used to cover boxing for the New York Times and he writes like a gifted sportswriter (I consider that high praise). Using powerful prose and vivid imagery, Gray surrounds a dramatic story with convincing detail. We meet passengers and crew of the 727, scientific experts and law enforcement agents, and an abundance of people looking for their fifteen minutes of derivative fame, if only they can solve the mystery. Sometimes the book seems a bit disjointed, but on the whole I think it succeeds as entertainment, if not as a thorough and dispassionate examination of the evidence.

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Undercurrents by Robert Buettner

Published by Baen on July 5, 2011

Undercurrents is the second novel in the Orphan's Legacy series. The Orphan's Legacy series is set in the same universe as, and is a successor to, Robert Buettner's Jason Wander series.

Kit Born, a United States Army colonel assigned to special operations, is violating the Human Union Charter by conducting surveillance upon the planet Tressel. She hopes to determine why military officers in Tressen (one of Tressel's two nations) are collaborating with military officers from the planet Yavet. Unfortunately for Kit, she's captured by the Yavi and held by Major Ruberd Polian, Yavet's ranking military officer on Tressel pending the arrival of General Gill. Point of view then shifts to that of Jazen Parker, a retired special ops officer who owns a tavern on Mousetrap. Jazen is recruited to complete Kit's mission on Tressel. He reluctantly agrees to resume his military career only because a secondary objective of the mission is to locate Kit. As far as Jazen is concerned, his mission is to rescue his former lover.

In the best tradition of action fiction, things go wrong for Jazen from the start. In a scene that is reminiscent of Starship Troopers, Jazen plunges to the surface of Tressel from an orbiting ship. His insertion doesn't go as planned, leaving Jazen injured and isolated as he struggles with amphibians that want to turn him into lunch. Soon after that he finds himself fleeing from Major Polian and the Tressen navy. At some point the chapters begin to alternate between Jazen's first person account of his actions and third person descriptions of the events surrounding Polian and Gill. The Polian/Gill chapters eventually reveal the reason for the Yavi's sudden interest in Tressel.

Tressel is a sparsely populated planet but members of its two nations -- the Tressens and the Iridians -- have hated each other for centuries. The Tressens oppress the Iridians by denying them the right to own property and to procreate. The Iridians rebel as best they can. Jazen needs Iridian support to spy on the Tressens and to that end he is assisted by a one-handed man named Pyt and an eleven-year-old girl named Alia. They are charged with leading Jazen to the Iridian rebel leader, Celline, who -- like Princess Leia -- is descended from royalty.

Unlike Pyt, Alia, and Celline, Polian and Gill are interesting characters. Polian has the sense of honor and duty that are standard in military science fiction, but he's also plagued by insecurity. Gill, unlike Polian, has reservations about Yavet's policy of controlling population growth by killing illegal newborns. Polian favors torture while Gill insists on playing by the rules. Neither one trusts the other and there may be good reason for the mistrust. The conflict between the characters adds a bit of needed depth to the story.

Jazen is less interesting. He is a "Trueborn" (his parents are from Earth) but he was born illegally on Yavet, never knew his parents, and spent his young life trying to avoid extermination. Despite that background, Jazen is a stock "reluctant warrior" character, unhappy to be uprooted from a life of relative peace and returned to the landscape of battle. Given his background (he identifies neither with the Yavi nor the Truebloods), Jazen is a surprisingly dull guy. Kit is virtually a nonentity; she's there to give Jazen something to do. Kit exudes a shallow idealism that is supposed to conflict with Jazen's pragmatic desire to keep her safe. It isn't convincing. As is usually true of military science fiction, however, the characters in Undercurrent are secondary to the plot-driven story.

Three minor gripes: (1) Gill asks Polian a number of basic questions about the reason for Yavi collaboration with the Tressens. While the ensuing dialog educates the reader, it makes no sense that Gill wouldn't have that information before assuming command of the Yavi operation. (2) Saddling Jazen with a wise-beyond-her-years eleven-year-old spying partner is an obvious contrivance that might appeal to preadolescent (maybe even early adolescent) readers but it didn't work for me. Despite an ending that attempts to make her significant, Alia adds nothing but empty chatter to the story. (3) The method by which Undercurrents sets up the next book in the series is a bit too obvious.

Gripes notwithstanding, I liked Undercurrents. The story moves quickly, the actions scenes are well done, and the plot is satisfying if unspectacular. Hardcore fans of military science fiction will almost certainly enjoy it, while fans of action-oriented sf will likely find it a pleasant enough read.

RECOMMENDED

Smuggled by Christina Shea

Published by Black Cat (a paperback imprint of Grove/Atlantic) on July 5, 2011

In 1943, five-year-old Éva Farkas is hidden in a sack of flour and smuggled by train across the Hungarian border. From there Éva is transported to a Romanian village that was once part of Hungary. Her father's sister, Kati, has agreed to keep her. Éva's mother is Jewish but the village has already been searched so Kati believes Éva will be safe. Kati gives Éva a new identity -- Anca Balaj, the fictitious niece of Kati's husband Ilie -- and tells Éva she is now a Romanian and must never again speak Hungarian. All of this is a dramatic and unwelcome change for Éva, who misses her mother, thinks her new name sounds like glass breaking, and lies in bed "feeling helpless against the invading Romanian." When Éva protests that she is Éva, not Anca, Ilie tells her that "Éva is dead."

So begins Éva's story, a story that is in some respects familiar and in others remarkably fresh. It is a bleak story that is both political and personal, a story that for much of the novel is dominated by isolation and oppression. While it takes place in a part of the world that changes repeatedly during the course of a lifetime, the story derives its power from the impact those changes have on a single person.

In 1947, after Romania falls under Soviet control, Éva secretly befriends a Gypsy boy but loses her friend when his family is driven out of the country. In the early 1950s, Soviet domination and fear of informants join racial and religious intolerance as the defining characteristics of Éva's environment, although growing discord between her aunt and uncle has a more immediate impact on her life. In the late 1950s, Éva feels oppressed by the Jewish members of the Communist League who interrogate her about her relationship with a childhood friend from Hungary. In the 1960s, Éva enters into a troubled relationship with a man she comes to view as a changeling because of the ease with which he transforms himself from passionate communist to passionate Zionist. In the 1970s, after she marries for convenience, she loses her place as a top tournament ping pong player after her husband defects.

With good reason, Éva often feels that her existence is precarious. She learns that it is unwise to trust others, no matter how similar their lives seem to her own. Smuggled illustrates how easily the oppressed can become oppressors, how quickly the informed upon can become informants. At various times during her life Éva endures beatings and sexual abuse. She makes compromises that are necessary to her welfare. Death and abandonment are constants in her life. In 1991, having survived fascism and communism, she feels worn out. When, toward the novel's end, a friend tells Éva she has to stop "peeking through her fingers," we wonder if it's possible for Éva to set aside her ingrained caution, to live without fear of living. Yet throughout the novel Éva is able to find small moments of pleasure: from perfecting her tennis game and losing herself in a ping pong match, from eating slices of banana and watching a cat play with a pill bottle. The reader's hope is that Éva will come to know the more fundamental pleasures of life, a safe home and a loving partner chief among them.

Éva's personality throughout the book is characterized by a protective meekness. She would like to stand up for herself and for others but her life has taught her that being noticed carries the risk of grim consequences. Near the book's end, however, there is a wonderful image of Éva riding on a train traveling over a great plain and feeling "as though she is moving along a deep seam, repairing." The novel also draws a lovely parallel between Éva and a little dove that returns home, bloody and battered from its journey but safely home nonetheless.

Christina Shea's writing style is as restrained as Éva's personality. Shea's prose is deceptively simple. She doesn't overreach; passion lurks just below the surface of her words. I particularly liked Shea's use of the novel Frankenstein, which Éva reads twice, once as a university student and again at the age of fifty. The first time Éva relates to the monster's desire to be loved in a cruel world while her second reading focuses on Victor Frankenstein's failure to take responsibility for his actions. I loved that change in Éva's perspective, as I love many other aspects of this book. It's awfully rare that at the end of a novel I want a character to step out of the pages so I can give her a reassuring hug. Smuggled did that to me. For that alone I must recommend it.

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