The Sea and the Silence by Peter Cunningham

First published in 2008; republished by GemmaMedia on February 1, 2010

The Sea and the Silence tells a bleak story of lost hope, a story that is tragic but rich with emotion. The story is set in Ireland.  Much of it takes place during World War II when (according to one of the characters) an independent Ireland was young "and time is all that is needed for it to come of age." By confronting her grief (over deaths and lost love), Ismay ("Iz") too comes of age; she must decide whether to base choices about her future on practicality or love -- only to find that some choices are out of her hands.

The Sea and the Silence begins quietly and ends dramatically. The novel is oddly structured -- at least it seems odd until the end, when it all makes sense. In a prologue, a solicitor is reading Iz's will; an epilog returns to the will and its impact on one of the characters. The bulk of the story is told in two parts, each written by Iz and delivered to the solicitor after her death. The first describes Iz's life from 1945 to 1963; the second begins in 1943 and ends in 1945. The first section is dominated by Iz's troubled marriage to Ronnie, their financial and marital problems, and her relationship with her son Hector. The second section addresses her family's financial woes, her uncertainty about whether their farmland will be taken and redistributed by the Land Commission, her strained relationship with her sister, the love she feels (to her sister's horror) for a dock worker, and the difficult choices she makes about her life (and those that are made for her) that lead her to marry Ronnie.

The novel explores a number of themes, including long-standing class prejudices and resentment of Irish landowners. Iz comes to wonder whether "the wedge driven by centuries between ... different classes could be removed by something as insubstantial as love." The story doesn't follow the classic pattern of American fiction: poor girl falls in love with rich boy, love triumphs over differences in financial status. The Sea and the Silence is more complex than that, a deeper exploration of the forces (including class, including love) that shape lives.

There are some wonderfully written, deeply moving scenes in The Sea and the Silence. The characters are created in full, carefully detailed and completely believable. The sea -- "resolute and unceasing" -- is a constant presence in the novel. Iz feels drawn to the sea yet learns to prefer the silence and anonymity of her small Dublin garden. I was lulled by Peter Cunningham's elegant prose, believing for most of the book that I was reading a quiet, uneventful story, until events in the final chapters turned it upside down and made me appreciate its structure.  This novel is the work of a skilled craftsman.

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The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji

Published by William Morrow on May 17, 2011

It may be inevitable that The Sweetness of Tears will be compared to The Kite Runner (indeed, the advertising on the back cover of my review copy invites that comparison) but the two novels have little in common. While The Kite Runner is a plot-driven novel that has strong characters, The Sweetness of Tears is a character-driven novel that is structured as a series of interwoven life-stories. They are, for the most part, stories of sacrifice and broken families, interesting and sometimes touching but not quite compelling.

Raised as an evangelical Christian, Jo March has little use for Darwin, but her study of Mendel opens her eyes -- the brown eyes she could not have inherited from her blue-eyed parents. Two years later she meets her biological father: Sadiq Mubarak. Point of view shifts to Mubarak as he recalls his childhood in Karachi, where his mother taught him that tears are sweet when they are born of love and shed for others, but "bitter when we cry selfishly for ourselves," when sorrow turns to anger. While still young, Sadiq is taken from his mother and learns to live a privileged life with his wealthy grandfather -- a spoiled existence that leads to trouble and, at the age of fifteen, exile to America. The story shifts again and again: from his mother's point of view, we again see Sadiq being taken from his mother; from the point of view of Jo's mother Angela, we learn the unhappy circumstances that followed Jo's conception. Other storylines take us to Guantanamo after 9/11 (where Jo is an interpreter) and to Iraq, where Jo makes a pilgrimage after her brother returns home, damaged by his American military service there.

The Sweetness of Tears tries to be a tear-jerker. At least to me, the story seemed too contrived to work on an emotional level. The 9/11 connection is forced; it could have made a fine story in its own right but Nafisa Haji doesn't make it feel real, and it's ultimately overshadowed by tragedies that befall other characters. Jo's visit to Iraq, and what she hoped to accomplish there, seemed particularly artificial. The most effective story is that of Sadiq's separation from his mother. Although Jo is more central to the novel, her experiences didn't resonate with me. Finally, all the storylines tie together a little too neatly at the end.

While the novel is reasonably well-written, Haji is addicted to sentence fragments. Some readers might appreciate the resulting "punchy" style; I found if a little annoying. Moreover, the characters all speak in the same voice and their dialog, too, is heavily laden with sentence fragments.

On a positive note, Haji uses her characters to illustrate worthwhile concepts: the contrast between open-minded faith and closed-minded belief; the need to confess ignorance of other cultures in order to learn from them; the difficulties of women whose rights are suppressed by men wielding religious law. At times, Haji becomes a bit preachy, resorting to lectures via dialog that don't necessarily advance the story. Haji nonetheless teaches useful lessons, particularly about the need to bridge differences: between cultures, between religious beliefs (Sunni and Shia, Christian and Muslim), between rich and poor, between genders.

The Sweetness of Tears is a flawed novel, but it's a quick read and it has something to say, and at the end I liked it despite its flaws. I guardedly recommend it for those reasons.

RECOMMENDED

Fire Season by Philip Connors

Published by Ecco on April 5, 2011

Fire Season chronicles one of the many summers Philip Connors spent as a lookout in the Gila National Forest, sitting alone in a tower, scanning the treetops for smoke. Connors makes the arduous hike to his lookout post every year because "here, amid these mountains, I restore myself and lose myself, knit together my ego and then surrender it, detach myself from the mass of humanity so I may learn to love them again, all while coexisting with creatures whose kind have lived here for millennia." It is writing of that caliber, as much as the content, that makes Fire Season worth reading.

Although Connors writes lovingly of trees and grass, Fire Season is as much a tribute to solitude as it is an appreciation of nature's beauty. Connors writes that he does "not so much seek anything as allow the world to come to me, allow the days to unfold as they will, the dramas of weather and wild creatures." Connors channels (and makes frequent reference to) Abbey and Leopold in his descriptions of majestic nature, but also brings to mind (and sometimes quotes) Thoreau in his loving homage to isolation.

Connors peppers his book with lessons in history (the Warm Springs Apache hid from the Cavalry in the wilderness he now surveys) and biology (while moths, beetles, and tarantula hawks are some of the smaller creatures he observes, bears are a more frequent subject of comment). He provides a brief overview of conservationist philosophy and its history. Connors makes interesting what might in the hands of a less talented writer be dull, but the work still comes across as a hodge-podge: clusters of random facts connected only by their shared geography. Although the book is quite short, it reads as if Connors was searching for filler: a section discusses the unpublished notebook Jack Kerouc kept during his experience as a lookout; another discusses his experiences on 9/11; another recounts the vanishing wolf population in the Southwest. And given that the book it so short, it contains a surprising amount of redundancy: there are only so many times a writer needs to say that some fires are good and others not so good before the reader gets it.

My larger complaint (if it can be called that) about Fire Season is that it contains so little that is fresh. I'm not a biologist or ecologist or forester, but I knew before reading Fire Season (as I suspect most people did) that fires are necessary to the health of a forest environment, that the Forest Service didn't always understand that, and that public policy decisions about whether to let a fire burn are difficult to make and often controversial. Connors adds no depth to that discussion; his job is to look for smoke, not to make policy decisions, and his career is in journalism (and bartending), not forestry or firefighting. (There is, in fact, little in the book about the actual suppression of wildfires. Readers looking for an excellent fictional account of fighting forest fires should check out Andrew Piper's The Wildfire Season.) I'm not sure there's much to learn about fire from reading Connors' book that a reasonably well read person won't already know.

Connors' writing is strongest when it is most personal. Having a spouse who lives by himself in a tower every summer might challenge some marriages (while it might improve others); I thought it was interesting to read about the impact Connors' summer career has had on his marriage. When he writes about finding a fawn (apparently injured) and encountering hikers and the workings of his mind, Fire Season shines. Connors brings his dog into the wilderness for companionship and his description of the dog's personality change when transitioning to mountain life reinforces my belief that all books are made better by the inclusion of a dog.

In short, what Connors does in Fire Season has been done elsewhere, often in greater detail and with more authority, but the book nonetheless has value for the glimpse it provides of the sort of person who is content to sit in a tower for long stretches, pondering the wilderness, and for Connors' beautiful descriptions of (mostly) unspoiled forests and mountains.

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The Profession by Steven Pressfield

Published by Crown on June 14, 2011

The Profession is simultaneously a science fiction novel (to the extent that it's set in the near future), a military novel (although most of the fighting is done by private armies), and a political thriller. The novel works best as a cautionary tale; as a representative of any (or all) of those genres, it's lacking.

In the 2032 imagined by Steven Pressfield, private mercenary forces, primarily serving foreign governments and multinational petroleum companies, are all over the Middle East. Gilbert "Gent" Gentilhomme, who believes himself to be the reincarnation of an ancient warrior, works for Force Insertion, the largest of the private armies. Told in the first person from Gent's perspective, the story begins with furious action as Gent leads a team of mercenaries on a rescue mission. Gent's next mission (in Tajikistan) is assigned by the CEO of Force Insertion, James Salter, a former general and current narcissist who has an agenda beyond that of Force Insertion's customer base.

Cautionary tales can make compelling fiction (1984 is an enduring example); The Profession misses that mark. About a third of the way in, the action halts so that Pressfield can explain the rise of private armies. A longish chapter in the middle recounts Gent's African exploits while he was still a Marine and explains Salter's military downfall -- a Heart of Darkness diversion that contributes little to the plot and adds to character development in only a superficial way. This is followed by another longish chapter that relates the (future) history of the Middle East which, like the (past) history, has a lot to do with war, oil, and American and Saudi politics. All of this mood-deadening exposition acts as a drag on a story that depends on action to justify its billing as a thriller.

The book becomes interesting when Salter decides to engage in a rather aggressive act of nation-building. Salter is a truly scary dude. He describes himself as a warrior who worships "the god of strife," a fighter who strides "into harm's way for no cause, no dream, no crusade, but only for the striding itself and for the comrades at my side." This is the kind of megalomaniac who starts wars solely because he likes war. Whether Salter's actions (and, more importantly, the reactions in the United States and the rest of the world) are plausible is questionable, but this is a work of fiction; I won't downgrade it for telling an unlikely story. I will, however, criticize Pressfield for creating characters who are stereotypes and for killing the novel's momentum in the middle chapters. I liked the beginning and the ending (it avoided the predictable finish that I was dreading) and I appreciated the story's cautionary value, but as a novel The Profession has serious problems.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Infernal Devices by K.W. Jeter

First published in 1987; new edition published by Angry Robot on April 26, 2011

In his introduction to this novel, K.W. Jeter discusses the steampunk phenomenon. Distilled to its essence, Jeter's explanation is: If you name it, they will come. Jeter coined the word steampunk; readers wanted this new thing called steampunk; writers filled the demand for steampunk. Although I'm not a big follower of steampunk, I am a fan of K.W. Jeter, and so I seized the opportunity to read Infernal Devices, first published in 1987 and now reissued by Angry Robot. I quickly found myself drawn into Jeter's sumptuous Nineteenth Century prose, which may have been modeled upon early H.G. Wells but brought to mind Arthur Conan Doyle.

The story follows the hapless George Dower, son of a famous maker of timepieces and other intricate gadgetry, who inherited none of his father's talent but nonetheless keeps his shop open, eking out a living by making simple repairs to his father's mechanical creations. Dower is visited by the Brown Leather Man, who wants him to repair a mysterious device, and then by two people with odd speech patterns who seem intent on stealing the device. Dower's adventure takes him into a red light district whose inhabitants resemble fish and to an estate where he finds more of his father's gadgetry, including a machine that threatens the world.

Infernal Devices succeeds as comedy (consistently amusing but rarely laugh out loud funny) and as a simple adventure story. It clearly isn't meant to be taken too seriously and that's the spirit in which I read and enjoyed it. As is often true of steampunk, the novel isn't straightforward science fiction. Some aspects of Infernal Devices border on fantasy; color me skeptical, but I doubt a lamp that sees into the future can be manufactured from the steampunk technology of springs and cogs (Jeter uses two characters who have seen the future to good comedic effect, contrasting the sensibilities of the Victorian era with the considerably more relaxed moral standards of the Twentieth Century). And then there's the member of an amphibious race who keeps turning up to give Dower an assist. It's all a bit odd and not to my usual taste, but it kept me smiling. If you enjoy steampunk and the elements of fantasy that are often associated with it, this novel should be a treat for you. If you prefer more conventional (but nonetheless outside-the-mainstream) science fiction, I'd recommend Jeter's The Glass Hammer.

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