The Burning Lake by Brent Ghelfi

Published by Poisoned Pen Press on May 3, 2011

The Burning Lake is the fourth in Brent Ghelfi's series of novels featuring Volk, a Russian colonel who dabbles in crime when he isn't doing assignments for "the General" or engaging in personal quests for revenge (which is one of his primary occupations). Revenge drives the plot of The Burning Lake, as Volk investigates the death of a journalist (and former lover) named Kato. Her body is found buried with those of some missing students near the site of a Russian nuclear weapons design facility. It quickly becomes evident that someone killed Kato to prevent a story from breaking. Volk's efforts to track down the story (and thus Kato's killer) take him to Las Vegas (where he reunites with Brock Matthews, a CIA agent who has appeared in each of the previous novels) and to Tijuana, where he meets a former intelligence officer named Stone who now runs a private security firm.

Ghelfi's first Volk novel (Volk's Game) remains my favorite, followed closely by the third (The Venona Cable). The Burning Lake is more tightly plotted than the second novel (Shadow of the Wolf) but fails to develop Volk's character as fully as the first three. In each novel, Volk is filled with internal anguish.  In the first two particularly, Volk questions the beliefs that drove his rather ugly past; in the third, he questions his father's loyalty to Russia. I was disappointed that the storyline in The Burning Lake is more conventional. We still see some of Volk's inner turmoil but the focus is almost entirely on external events rather than Volk's ongoing struggle to confront his past and change his present. Volk does find himself regretting actions that further harmed his troubled relationship with his girlfriend, Valya, but that storyline was less interesting than Volk's remorse over his role in the suppression of Chechen dissent (a primary focus of the first two novels).

Still, the engaging, action-filled story unfolds at a swift pace, the point of view rapidly shifting between Volk and Stone. There is considerably less of the violence and brutality that characterized the first two novels, but no Volk novel would be complete without a certain amount of bloodshed. This novel works well as a stand-alone; Ghelfi presents enough information about Volk's past to help the reader understand his history without slowing the pace with needless exposition. While The Burning Lake isn't my favorite Volk novel (and, in fact, is probably my least favorite), I enjoyed breezing through it. I recommend it to Volk fans and I recommend the series to thriller readers. If you want to understand what makes Volk such an intriguing character, however, it's best to start at the beginning and read them all.

RECOMMENDED

Theories of Flight by Simon Morden

Published by Orbit on April 26, 2011

Samuil Petrovich, the unlikely hero of Equations of Life, begins this novel by creating artificial gravity.  At some point between Equations of Life and Theories of Flight, Petrovich married Madeleine who, when we last saw her, was a gun-toting nun.  Madeleine apparently had a crisis of faith; she’s now a gun-toting sergeant in the militia that is guarding the Metrozone from Outzone intruders -- including, evidently, Madeleine’s own mother, who shoots Madeleine early on in the novel.  Other key players who survived Equations (including Marchenkho, Sonja, and Chain) return in this one, although in lesser roles, and a couple of interesting new characters are introduced.  The New Machine Jihad is also back, albeit in a somewhat different form.  The plot involves Petrovich’s more-or-less single-handed effort to prevent the “Outies” from invading the Metrozone.

Theories of Flight fleshes out the post-Armageddon world of Simon Morden’s creation.  The Metrozone (what’s left of London, also called the Inzone) is shrinking; its residents are in danger of losing their relatively privileged lifestyles to the uncouth Outies who seek a share of the pie, or perhaps just want to stomp on the pie (sounds like class warfare, doesn’t it?).  The Outzone is expanding, encroaching on the Inzone; the Outies have devolved during the two decades since Armageddon, losing their culture and their language skills.  Across the Atlantic, in Reconstruction America, cultural conservatism prevails:  “you can’t book even a twin room without a copy of your marriage certificate.”  (I’ve gotten used to the ever-so-sophisticated British portraying us Yanks as a bunch of hicks, and perhaps we deserve it, but the notion that Armageddon will cause Americans to forego premarital pleasure seems a bit farfetched.)  Speaking of America's demons, let’s not forget the CIA, which in Morden’s future is still playing dirty tricks on the rest of the world.

In some respects the second novel is better than the first; in others it is not as good.  I like that Morden seemed to be taking the story a bit more seriously; Theories of Flight isn’t as outlandishly tongue-in-cheek as the first novel (losing the fighting nun concept was, I think, a good move).  On the other hand, Theories seems less focused, less driven, than Equations.  There’s a lot going on in Equations (perhaps a bit too much), while an extended section of Theories feels like the literary equivalent of a movie chase scene -- or perhaps an intelligent version of the movie 300.  It isn’t boring; on the other hand, it doesn’t keep the brain buzzing like Equations did. 

A second complaint is that the AI advising Petrovich is intent on debating Petrovich’s love life with him (does he love Madeleine or doesn’t he?) -- an ongoing conversation that just doesn’t work.  A third is that Madeleine's near-fatal encounter with her mother seems like a significant plot point, but it isn't developed.  Maybe Morden will tell us the rest of the story in the next book.  Finally, while I like Petrovich’s opinionated, sarcastic, antagonistic nature, there were times when the action came to a halt so that he could deliver one of his passionate lectures.  Inspiring as they may be, a bit less of that would have helped the story maintain its momentum.

The concluding chapters wrap up the main story nicely but the short last chapter is an information dump.  The world undergoes dramatic change in this novel.  I hope the next one gives us a closer look at the messy political situation Petrovich manages to create.

If you enjoyed Equations, I think you'll like Theories, even if it lacks some of the first novel's virtues.  Theories starts well, the middle is action-filled but light on substance, and the ending carries enough promise that I'm looking forward to reading the trilogy’s conclusion.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

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.

RECOMMENDED

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.

RECOMMENDED