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

Cottonwood by Scott Phillips

Published by Ballantine Books on March 29, 2005

Scott Phillips' first two novels -- quirky, darkly funny crime stories set roughly in the present -- proved that he can write. In Cottonwood, Phillips departed from the conventions of crime fiction to write a quirky, darkly funny western. Crime works its way into the story, but the crime plot is secondary to Phillips' strong characterization.

Cottonwood takes place between 1872 and 1890. Essentially a mixture of a western and a thriller/mystery, Cottonwood tells the story of Bill Ogden, a photographer who comes to the frontier town of Cottonwood, Kansas to homestead a farm with his new Dutch wife and their son. Ogden doesn't take to farming, so he hires a hand to do most of the work while he establishes a saloon and photography studio in the town. The handyman catches the attention of Ogden's wife, a circumstance that would probably be more upsetting to Ogden but for his uncontrolled gift for charming women, married and unmarried alike.  Eventually he becomes entangled in a dangerous affair, starts wondering about the mysterious disappearance of visitors to Cottonwood, gets involved in an old fashioned shootout, and begins a journey that years later brings him back to a very different Cottonwood.

The story works because Ogden is such a strong character. As he struggles to build a life, struggles with romance, struggles with family, and struggles with moral decisions, the novel's fascination comes from watching him confront (or dodge) those challenges. Phillips tells a lively, imaginative story that is enhanced by his incorporation of a family of Kansas killers into the plot that actually existed. As he did in his first two novels, Phillips proved that he can write. This fine effort deserves a wider audience.

RECOMMENDED

Second Genesis by Donald Moffitt

First published in 1986

In Donald Moffitt's sequel to The Genesis Quest, Bram and his fellow humans are on their way to the home of Original Man, some thirty-seven million light years from the homeworld of the Nar. The humans were created by the Nar from the genetic code provided in a transmission that originated from the Milky Way. That story is told in The Genesis Quest and is summarized in chapter two of Second Genesis, a longish chapter you don't need to read if you've read and can recall the first novel. By the same token, the second chapter is so detailed that it's possible to read Second Genesis without reading The Genesis Quest first.

As they travel, the humans encounter an astronomical event that threatens the Nar worlds and the humans who remained with them. Much later, nearing the home of original man, they encounter a huge disc-shaped world, prompting an extended discussion of the engineering involved in its construction. A good chunk of the novel describes the archeological digs that enlighten the travelers about the lifestyles of Original Man. Additional adventures include contact with well-imagined insect-like aliens and confrontation of a crisis that threatens to doom the second incarnation of humankind. The novel ends with a nice symmetry that should please those who have read both novels.

The most serious problem with The Genesis Quest is its wordiness. Moffitt could have eliminated about 40 percent of the text, leaving a tightly spun story of mankind's search for its roots. Moffitt tends to get carried away with science lectures. For that reason, the narrative sometimes tends to drag, although a welcome dose of action in the last third of the novel brings the story back to life. Moffitt isn't particularly skilled at crafting sentences -- the novel has an unpolished feel -- but the writing style is an improvement over his first novel, The Jupiter Theft. As always, his human characters lack individual personalities. The novel's strength is the powerful imagination Moffitt brings to his epic view of the future, particularly with regard to evolutionary responses to extinction events. Most fans of future histories and space opera should enjoy Second Genesis.

RECOMMENDED