The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clezio

First published in French in 1963.  This review is of the English edition published by Simon & Schuster on July 14, 2009.

"The Earth is blue like an orange": the words of a clever poet or of a madman disconnected from reality? J.M.G. Le Clezio explores the legendarily thin line separating the mentally astute from the mentally ill in The Interrogation.

Adam Pollo isn't sure whether he has recently been discharged from a mental institution or from the army. He lives in an abandoned house at the top of a hill, spends his days in a deck-chair by an open window, waiting "without moving, proud of being almost dehumanized," in a state he describes as meditative, watching the shadows of insects and "reconstructing a world of childish terrors." Adam is isolated, but claims he doesn't want to be alone: he wants to "exist with the coefficient 2, or 3, or 4, instead of that infernal coefficient 1." He thinks about and sometimes tries to write to Michele, the woman he met on the beach. Sometimes he follows a dog through the streets. Toward the end of the novel Adam makes a rambling speech to a gathering crowd and later finds himself in an asylum where he's interrogated by students under the disdainful supervision of a psychiatrist.

Although the psychiatrist is quick to attach diagnostic labels to Adam's mental illnesses, the reader is less certain, in part because Adam is so adept at verbal jousting with the students. Adam is disturbed and troubled, but those are traits shared by many who avoid institutionalization. It's clear that Adam doesn't function well in society, equally clear that he doesn't much want to -- his isolation is self-imposed, as evidenced by a letter from his mother -- but in his self-absorbed world, Adam's mind flourishes. Adam finds meaning in random forms of light and shadow, the product of a different way of seeing. This resembles mental illness more than genius, but the novel seems to be asking: who is to say? It is Adam, after all, who calls attention to the poetic phrase "the Earth is blue like an orange," asking why its author isn't regarded as a lunatic. Adam defines life as "a kind of disorder of the consciousness," and despite our ceaseless attempts to impose order on our straying and occasionally irrational thoughts, Adam might be right.

I confess that I found some of the novel's middle passages tiresome, particularly when Le Clezio began playing with the novel's form, changing fonts and lining out text and leaving big blank spaces between brackets. The devices approximate the disorder of Adam's mind, I get it, but after awhile reading disordered thoughts gets to be a lot of work. Other parts of the novel, including the interrogation and Adam's interaction with the students, struck me as brilliant.

RECOMMENDED

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

First published in 1951

For a very long time I avoided reading The Day of the Triffids because I thought the notion of flesh-eating plants gobbling up the newly-blind population of England would be the literary equivalent of The Little Shop of Horrors ("Feeeed Meeeeee") -- so awful that it might be funny, but not to be taken seriously. My bad. I finally read it and I wish I had done so years ago so that I could enjoy rereading it now. The Day of the Triffids is a masterpiece.

This is a novel that challenges the intellect. As the story progresses, characters intelligently debate a variety of topics: the nature of leadership, the role of women in a survivalist society (from a 1951 perspective), whether spirituality conflicts with practicality in extreme situations. The book poses moral questions to which there are no easy answers: Should the sighted form their own society, separate from the blind (who arguably would contribute little and drain their resources), to assure humanity's survival? Or should the sighted help the blind survive, knowing that the overwhelming task is mostly futile, that they would merely be postponing the day when triffids will devour the blind, and knowing that they might risk humanity's survival by diverting their attention from efforts to preserve the fittest? When most of humanity is destined to die, should sighted men impregnate as many women as possible to assure that the human race continues, or should monogamy remain the norm? Wyndham provides no easy answers; he raises the questions and leaves it to the reader to decide. Some will dislike that kind of moral ambiguity but the preponderance of five star reviews indicates that most readers enjoy having their minds stimulated by this fascinating novel. I certainly did.

The Day of the Triffids works on many levels: as a science fiction adventure, a love story, a morality play, an allegory about the breakdown of societal structures, and one of the strangest visions of the apocalypse ever imagined. It works so well because Wyndham wrote in a convincing voice, using understated prose, giving believable dialog to credible characters. Some are arrogant, some are decent, some are just lost. He wrote about the fundamental emotions of fear, hope, despair, loneliness, and love. The Day of the Triffids has joined A Canticle for Leibowitz and Alas, Babylon as my favorite post-apocalyptic novels.

RECOMMENDED

The Breaking Wave by Nevil Shute

First published in the United Kingdom in 1955 under the title Requiem For A Wren. 

The characters in Nevil Shute's novels always seem to share two qualities: decency and dignity. The novels are filled with pain and death; war is a frequent theme. Toward the end of The Breaking Wave, Shute writes: "Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over." Despite the tragic events they experience, Shute's characters are kind and helpful and caring. The moral of Shute's novels seems to be: death is inevitable; what matters is that you behave decently during your life, so that you can die with your dignity intact. That's certainly the lesson I took from The Breaking Wave.

It's difficult to write a synopsis of The Breaking Wave without including spoilers, so this will be brief. Alan and Bill Duncan are brothers. They grew up on a sheep farm in Australia. The farm is a big business and the family is rather wealthy. Alan and Bill are both in England during World War II. Alan is a fighter pilot in the RAF; his plane is shot down and his feet have to be amputated. Bill is the equivalent of a Navy Seal; he dies on a mission in preparation for D-Day. (Those aren't spoilers; the reader learns these facts early on.) As the novel begins, Alan is returning to the family farm, having finished his post-war law degree at Oxford. He discovers that his mother is distressed by the apparent suicide of the parlor maid. Alan digs around and discovers the maid's diaries. He spends all night reading them and soon realizes that he had met the woman during the war. What Alan learns about her and about his family changes his life.

The woman's story is incredibly sad. I'm glad I was alone when I read The Breaking Wave because my misty-eyed reaction to the last chapters would have destroyed my carefully cultivated image as a manly man. Yet it's also the story of an eventful life, albeit one that is derailed by tragedy. The woman meets her death with her dignity intact, and Shute's moving story makes clear why she made the choice to end her life. As always, Shute writes with a soft voice; there's nothing flashy about the quiet elegance of his prose; he lets the story unfold without getting in its way. And it's an amazing, powerful story, filled with insight about war and relationships and the human condition. The characters are as real and believable as your neighbors, and probably more likable.

Shute is best known for two wonderful novels -- A Town Like Alice and On the Beach -- but his lesser-known novels are every bit as good. The Breaking Wave is one of his best.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Hidden Man by Charles Cumming

First published in 2003

When Christopher Keen's two children were young, Keen abandoned his family to take a job as an SIS operative. Thirty years later, Keen works for Divisar Corporate Intelligence. His wife is long dead. Keen has reestablished a relationship with his son Mark, but his son Ben refuses to speak to him. Mark is a senior executive at Libra, a nightclub chain that is about to open a club in Russia. The lawyer putting that deal together is under investigation by MI5, in cooperation with Russian police authorities who observed his meetings with an organized crime figure during trips to Russia. Keen has given professional advice to Libra about its Russian business dealings, and MI5 not only wants Keen's assistance, it wants to use him to get information from Mark. Hours after Keen has his first serious conversation with Mark since leaving the family, a Russian with an apparent score to settle enters Keen's flat and kills him. (The killing is actually the first event in the novel; the early chapters fill in the backstory.)

The bulk of the story centers on the sometimes independent, sometimes cooperative efforts of Mark and Ben to learn who killed their father and why. Cumming builds suspense slowly as we learn about each brother: Mark's enthusiastic but naive willingness to assist MI5; Ben's curiosity about a father he's so long detested; Ben's shaky relationship with a wife who finds herself attracted to his boss. Cumming creates a strong sense of atmosphere and danger as the plot develops; a particularly tense scene has the brothers meeting with Latvian gangsters in a strip club. Each brother is a fully developed character; their very different relationships with their father, and their reactions to conflicting stories they hear about him after his death, is fascinating. A turf war between intelligence agencies working at cross-purposes has become standard fare in spy novels, but it's used to great effect in The Hidden Man. The brothers are caught in the middle, they don't know who or what to believe ... it's a great story.

The careful plot, the depth of the characters, and the nice pace at which the story unfolds all make this a rewarding spy novel.

RECOMMENDED

Night Dogs by Kent Anderson

First published in 1996

Kent Anderson was a Special Forces sergeant during the Vietnam War, an experience that informed his first novel, Sympathy for the Devil.  When he returned to civilian life, he took a job as a police officer.  That experience is reflected his second book, Night Dogs.  The novel tracks a short period in the life of a Vietnam veteran who works as a police officer in the North Precinct of Portland, Oregon.

I am not usually a fan of books about police officers, as they tend to be simplistic: they either glorify the job and make the officers appear more heroic than they generally are in real life, or they demonize all cops, painting them as corrupt or (at best) incompetent. I was therefore surprised by how much I enjoyed Anderson's novel. It isn't a thriller, isn't a conventional police novel with a well-structured plot that results in the cop catching the bad guy. Instead, the novel tells the story of a life--the life of a badly damaged man (damaged in large part by his service in the Special Forces) who happens to be a cop, a profession that gives him the opportunity to vent his anger and to unleash his violent impulses. Far from portraying the cop as a superhero, Anderson created a character who is capable of being a jerk, a racist, an ego-driven maniac, as well as a compassionate, funny, sensible human being. It is that complexity, that refusal to stereotype, that makes the character so interesting.

The story meanders from incident to incident, but Night Dogs is less about what the cop does than how he manages to live with himself--and how, in the end, he will deal with his pain-filled life. The writing is sharp, vivid, intense, and incredibly powerful. The story is sometimes tragic, often darkly funny, and always brutally honest. This is one heck of a good novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED