The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 15, 2011

Of all the Charles Cumming novels, my favorite remains The Hidden Man, a novel that -- like a Hitchcock movie -- generates suspense by placing unwitting individuals in unforeseen peril.  Cumming tries to do that again in The Trinity Six by sending Professor Sam Gaddis on a quest to identify the sixth and final member of the Cambridge spy ring that included the infamous Kim Philby.  While The Trinity Six is an enjoyable novel, it fails to create the same atmosphere of danger that makes The Hidden Man Cumming’s reigning masterpiece.

The identity of the sixth spy is never in doubt; Cumming reveals it on the first page.  Gaddis learns of it after a journalist friend asks him to co-author a book based on a story she plans to write that will reveal the spy’s name to the public.  The journalist dies soon after that conversation, leaving Gaddis to pursue the truth on his own.  His investigation leads him to an elderly man named Thomas Neame who provides either valuable information or calculated disinformation.  For much of the novel, Gaddis remains credibly clueless as he is played by one intelligence agency and stalked by another.  Eventually his search takes him country hopping and, as is typical in espionage thrillers, when he unearths individuals who can bring him closer to the truth they tend to die.

As he does in his other novels, Cumming derives excitement from intellectual challenge rather than shootouts and chases.  The difficult task of separating truth from falsehood animates the story.  That technique worked well in Cumming’s last Alec Milius novel, The Spanish Game, but it is less successful here.  The palpable tension and riveting suspense that characterizes Cumming’s best work never materializes in The Trinity Six.  This is not to say that the story is dull or not well told; Cumming is a fine writer with a literary style that sets him apart from typical espionage novelists.  Gaddis and the supporting cast are interesting characters and the plot unfolds at a steady but unrushed pace.  Ultimately, however, the novel lacks the heft of Cumming’s most enjoyable novels.  I recommend The Trinity Six to fans of espionage fiction, but with the warning that they might be disappointed if they expect it to live up to the standard Cumming set in some of his earlier novels.

RECOMMENDED

Seven Years by Peter Stamm

Published by Other Press on March 22, 2011

Peter Stamm's Seven Years focuses on a German architect named Alex and, to a significantly lesser extent, on his wife (Sonia) and his paramour (Ivona). Told in the first person from the perspective of Alex, Seven Years chronicles Alex's relationship with Ivona from the time he meets her (before he starts dating Sonia) through the seventh year of his marriage. It is in essence a character study rather than a plot-driven novel.

When Alex first meets Ivona (a Polish Catholic who lives in a dorm and works in a book store) he isn't attracted to her. He thinks she's dumpy and boring, but as he walks her home he begins to feel an intense desire for her. Ivona is instantly in love with Alex but won't permit their relationship to become intimate until much later. Alex sees Ivona again during his engagement to Sonia and again after they marry. The lives of Alex, Sonia, and Ivona become complicated in another respect, but I don't want to provide any further details for fear of giving away the story.

While Seven Years held my interest, I failed to form either an emotional or an intellectual connection with the story or characters. The puzzle in Seven Years is Alex's seemingly uncontrollable desire for Ivona, a woman who in many ways repulses him. Since Sonia shows little passion for Alex it might be understandable if he turned to Ivona to meet that need, but Ivona displays even less passion than Sonia. What Ivona provides is unconditional devotion. Alex derives a feeling "of freedom and protectedness" from Ivona; she expects nothing from him, relieving him of the pressure to meet another person's needs. His life with her is an alternate reality, one that he can visit or leave as he chooses. Somehow he convinces himself that he is ennobled by this relationship, that it would be sordid if they were using each other for casual pleasure. Ivona's friend Eva might have the best explanation for Alex's inexplicable behavior: "Men are like that." Maybe, but it isn't a very insightful or satisfying analysis of Alex's involvement with Ivona.

As hard as it is to understand Alex, it's even more difficult to know what Ivona feels (or Sonia for that matter) because the point of view is exclusively Alex's. While Alex's analysis of his life and actions often struck me as the stuff of pop psychology rather than a meaningful internal examination, his understanding of Ivova and Sonia was even less insightful.

Readers who don't like books that feature unlikable characters should probably give this novel a pass. The characters are realistic but awfully self-absorbed. Ultimately reading the novel felt like listening to a casual acquaintance yammer on endlessly about his life, telling stories that have no real point. I don't need to like characters in order to enjoy a novel but I do want the story to make me feel something. Seven Years left me feeling drained. I admired Peter Stamm's prose style but I can't say I gained anything by reading about these characters.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Cold Wind by C.J. Box

Published by Putnam on March 22, 2011

Cold Wind gets off to a promising start as Joe Pickett discovers the body of his mother-in-law's most recent husband chained to the spinning blade of a wind-powered turbine. The plot begins to deteriorate when his mother-in-law, Missy, is arrested for the crime, the murder weapon having been found in the back of her car. The prosecutor, although allegedly a bright woman, believes she has a strong case because one of her ex-husbands claims that she tried to hire him to kill her husband. It apparently never occurs to the prosecutor to wonder (1) how she is going to prove that an elderly woman managed to climb a turbine tower and chain a dead body to a spinning blade, (2) how she will convince the jury that Missy would even want to display his body that way, or (3) why a jury would view the unsubstantiated story told by an embittered ex-husband as credible. The prosecutor seems to be counting on the jury to convict Missy because they resent her wealth and arrogance, but that attitude is inconsistent with what Pickett tells us about her professionalism.

A second storyline is just silly. Joe's buddy Nate Romanowski is living in a cave, hiding from five former members of a "rogue branch" of Special Forces who now work for Homeland Security. An attempt is made on his life, not by the rogues, but by a woman who hires two nitwits to shoot at his cave with a rocket launcher. How the woman acquired the weapon never seems to concern the nitwits and apparently it isn't supposed to concern the reader either, since the explanation eventually provided is laughable. That storyline turns into a fairly pedestrian tale of vigilante justice.

Few of the characters in Cold Wind have enough brain cells to rub together to produce a spark of intelligence. Only Missy's lawyer, Marcus Hand (clearly modeled after Gerry Spence, right down to the description of his hair and attire and the location and nature of his law practice) has any personality, but he is oddly ignorant of criminal procedure (making no protest, for instance, when a Justice of the Peace bases an adverse decision largely on the fact that Missy shops out-of-state instead of buying goods from the JP's feed store). Just as ignorant is the prosecutor, who repeatedly claims it would be "inappropriate" for her to listen to Pickett, a law enforcement officer who has information that might cast doubt on Missy's guilt, when in fact it is her ethical duty to do so. Box's fanciful description of legal proceedings (there are more howlers than those I've described) makes it impossible to take the novel seriously.

On the positive side, the story proceeds at a brisk pace, slowed only by occasional lectures on wind-generated energy that are meant to educate Pickett. Box's writing style is competent: not stirring but not awful. Pickett stumbles upon a crime that, while not terribly relevant to the plot, is inventive (I don't think it would work in the real world, but at least it's interesting). The ending contains a twist that saves it from being as anti-climactic as it initially appeared to be, although the twist was a bit predictable. Overall, Box did enough things right to keep me reading to the end, but not enough to make me encourage others to buy the novel.

A final warning: Some of the characters engage in a fair amount of pontificating about the evils of government support for wind energy. I don't care one way or another about opinions expressed by fictional characters (I don't pick up a thriller expecting to find an accurate, balanced view of energy policy) but some readers prefer their thrillers to remain entirely free of politics. Those readers might want to avoid this novel.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

Published by Random House on March 8, 2011

By the time she is thirteen, Natalia has taken so many trips with her grandfather to visit the caged tigers that she feels like a prisoner of ritual. Then a war hundreds of miles distant breaks the ritual: the zoo closes, curfews are implemented, students are disappearing, and spending time with her grandfather seems less important than committing small acts of defiance: staying out late, kissing a boyfriend behind a broken vending machine, and listening to black market recordings of Paul Simon and Johnny Cash. When her grandfather is suspended from his medical practice because he is suspected of harboring "loyalist feelings toward the unified state," Natalia adopts new rituals that keep her at his side when he isn't paying clandestine visits to his old patients. In return, he takes her to see an astonishing sight that offers the hope for an eventual restoration of the rituals that made up their pre-war lives. Natalia's grandfather tells her that this is their moment: not a moment of war to be shared by everyone else, but a moment that is uniquely theirs.

The Tiger's Wife is filled with wondrous moments, small scenes that assemble into a novel of power and wisdom and beauty. As an adult doctor delivering medicine across new and uncertain borders, Natalia grieves for her deceased grandfather while recalling the lessons he taught and the stories he told -- stories that more often than not center on death: how it is faced, feared, and embraced. Death is everywhere in this novel: death caused by war, by disease, by animal and man and child. And there is death's counterpoint, a character who cannot die (or so the grandfather's story goes). Death is virtually a character in the novel, as is the devil -- although the devil's identity is somewhat obscure, appearing as someone's uncle in one of the grandfather's stories, suspected of wearing the guise of a tiger by others. The tiger, of course, is a force of death -- feared by many, but not by the tiger's wife, who shows us that fear is unnecessary. Ultimately, coming to terms with death is, I think, the novel's subject matter.

Téa Obreht writes with clarity and compassion. She tells the interwoven stories that comprise The Tiger's Wife without judgment or sentiment. Her characters are authentic; with only one or two exceptions, she doesn't go out of her way to make them likable or sympathetic. Nor does she ask readers to hate characters who commit evil acts, although she wants us to understand them. She does not insist that we either condemn or condone the actions of a wife-abusing butcher. Instead, she gives us a chance to comprehend human complexity, to know that there is more to the characters than their offensive or violent actions. The village gossips, knowing nothing of the truth, judge both the abuser and the abused. Obreht shows us how foolish it is to judge others without knowing them ... and how unlikely it is that we will know enough to judge.

Obrecht writes with the maturity and confidence of an accomplished novelist. Her style is graceful. It is difficult to believe that this is her first novel. If she continues to produce work as sound as The Tiger's Wife, readers should wish her a long career. 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Informationist by Taylor Stevens

Published by Crown on March 8, 2011

Vanessa Michael Munroe is a dangerous loner who bears emotional and physical scars, reminiscent of Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander. Like Salander, Munroe is adept at acquiring information. While Salander relies upon her skills as a computer hacker, Munroe infiltrates cultures, sometimes posing as a man, working in developing countries for private businesses and organizations like the IMF. Despite her desperate need for down time and the fact that it really isn't her line of work, she accepts an assignment to locate a wealthy businessman's daughter who was last seen in Namibia four years earlier. The businessman insists that Munroe work with Miles Bradford, a mercenary whose job is to keep her safe. The search takes Munroe to Central Africa, where she has some history that she would prefer to remain buried. Yet she remains a product of her inescapable past: fierce and determined, but tormented by the preaching voices that keep her awake at night. Munroe travels to some nasty places and encounters even nastier people who would prefer that the circumstances of the young woman's disappearance remain a mystery. She also meets up with the life she left behind, including a close friend: a gunrunner from whom she walked away nine years earlier.

If the gunrunner brings to mind Humphrey Bogart, Munroe would have to be a warped composite of Jessica Alba, Angelina Jolie, Uma Thurman, and all three Charlie's Angels. She's a great character: an intuitive, intelligent action hero who speaks multiple languages, practices martial arts, and is handy with a knife; a haunted nomad with a horrific past whose understandable ferocity is barely restrained (except when it's not). She has a (largely unfulfilled) desire for romance that conflicts with her instinct for self-preservation, adding edginess to her character. Munroe has enough appeal to support a series of sequels (which is probably the author's plan). Certainly there are aspects of her persona that aren't fully developed; perhaps Stevens intends to complete the picture in future novels. The other characters have been requisitioned from central casting (Daniel Craig as the mercenary, I think) but Stevens gives them enough personality to keep them from being complete stereotypes.

The Informationist takes place in a setting that will be unfamiliar to most readers, as it was to me, but Stevens brings it alive. She paints a vivid picture of Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea. The African locale is a welcome departure from thrillers set in Uzbekistan or Los Angeles. Munroe's writing style is straightforward; her capable prose isn't stirring (that's rare in a thriller) but it is more than adequate to tell the rapidly moving story. There are times when the narrative is a bit over the top, particularly in its description of Munroe's "blood lust" as well as her tendency to bind people with duct tape and point guns at them (when one of the characters told her she had to stop doing that to him, I had to agree). The last part of the novel turns into a guessing game (just who is betraying whom?) and the unexpected resolution is satisfying.

Sensitive readers should be aware that they might be disturbed by some of the more violent scenes in the novel, particularly those involving Munroe's memories of her teenage years: readers who would be put off by graphic descriptions of abuse involving minors should stay away from this novel. For those who can cope, however, The Informationist offers a unique thriller experience that most fans of the genre should enjoy. 

RECOMMENDED