The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry

Published by Atria Books on May 30, 2023

Spy novels are fundamentally about the betrayal of trust. The strategy of spying dictates that it is dangerous to trust. Yet spies must be trusted by their sources or the sources will not divulge valuable information. Determining the trustworthiness of sources and the information they provide is part of the espionage game. The Peacock and the Sparrow explores the difficulty of winning the game when spies base their assessment of trustworthiness on what politicians want to hear.

Shane Collins is an aging spy who has been posted to Bahrain. He is there in 2012, surrounded by rumors of the Arab Spring. Collins spends most of his time drinking, but he’s developed a source named Naqid. Collins trusts Naqid. The reader will wonder whether Collins is being played.

Collins’ head of station, Whitney Alden Mitchell, is the youngest station chief in CIA history. Mitchell has a strong sense of what his bosses want to hear. He specializes in giving them intelligence that makes them happy and assessing intelligence as unworthy of belief if his bosses won’t want to believe it.

Naqid is a member of “the opposition.” The opposition makes a nuisance of itself, throwing the occasional Molotov cocktail, as it protests the royals who govern Bahrain. There is good reason to protest the royals, as they have no regard for human rights. Yet the US supports them because the US perceives the enemy to be Iran and Bahrain is the enemy of that enemy. On the other hand, the opposition views westerners as infidels, despite Naqid’s apparent friendship with Collins.

A series of minor bombs near coffee shops frequented by Americans are blamed on the opposition. Mitchell has been told that the explosives were provided by Iran. Naqid tells Collins that the bombs were planted by the royals to win support from the Americans, including the lifting of sanctions so Bahrain can better respond to terrorist threats. Mitchell dismisses Naqid’s report because it isn’t what his bosses will want to hear. Could Naqid be telling the truth? Collins believes that what he’s saying makes a certain amount of sense.

The novel raises profound questions about whose side the US should take in the Middle East, or whether the US should be taking sides at all. Certainly, there’s truth in Naqid’s complaints that the ruling family suppresses dissenting voices and tortures prisoners, but the US is unreasonably tolerant of human rights violations that are committed by its allies. By the end of the story, it becomes clear that the opposition’s revolution will not be a favorable replacement for the ruling family. Sharia law is enforced overnight: assaults on liquor store owners, the imposition of strict dress codes, brothels burned, gay men shot, lawyers arrested. American expats who enjoyed cheap rent and cheaper sex are lining up to be evacuated. The CIA is shredding documents before the Embassy is overrun.

The plot follows Collins as he does some remarkably stupid things to assist Naqid, including dumping a dead body and picking up a package in Cambodia. Collins also continues a relationship with an artist named Almaisa after the CIA tells him she’s a security risk who needs to be kept at a distance. Why Collins makes such poor choices might be attributed to the fog of alcohol through which he perceives the world, although we don’t learn his true motivation for becoming the opposition’s courier until the novel’s end.

The Peacock and the Sparrow is unlike most spy novels in that the first-person narrator is not only unreliable but a poor excuse for a human being. Collins’ unreliability pertains to his inability to acknowledge his weaknesses. He drinks too much but denies his alcoholism. He justifies harmful acts by telling himself “I couldn’t have known.” He even asks himself, “What is knowledge?” Do we really know what we know? Collins indulges in philosophy to make his betrayals abstract and less important.

Collins’ first sexual encounter with Almaisa is pretty clearly a rape (he tears off her dress and apparently regards submission as consent) but, while he entertains a moment’s regret, he quickly convinces himself that he did nothing wrong. He meets women in brothels to confirm information he’s been given and, for no operational benefit, sleeps with them on the taxpayer’s dime. He punches Mitchell in the face, which clearly isn’t a wise career move. He tells himself he’s a good spy, but his tradecraft is lax (he doesn’t see a man who hits him on the head and robs him). He puts his hand on a gun that was used to shoot someone, one of several acts that potentially create incriminating evidence that could be used against him.

Collins’ paranoia seems to be sending him off the deep end. Is he being followed? Did someone break into his hotel room and search his luggage? Is Mitchell sleeping with Almaisa behind his back? All those things could be true, but they might be the alcohol-fueled imaginings of a mind that has lived too long in the darkness of espionage. The truth is not always clear, to either the reader or Collins, although most mysteries are resolved in the closing pages. A final twist sheds some light on who the novel’s greatest betrayer might be.

The novel builds tension as it nears its climax, particularly when Collins crosses borders and encounters checkpoints. Strong characterization is supported by observant prose and a grim but authentic sense of atmosphere in Bahrain and Cambodia. Collins isn’t likable but his messy life and dangerous liaisons are fascinating. The Peacock and the Sparrow is a skillful blend of history and fiction. It will certainly be among the best spy novels I’ll read this year.

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Happy Memorial Day!

Swamp by Johann G. Louis

First published in France in 2023; published in translation by Europe Comics on May 24, 2023

Swamp is a graphic novel. It tells the story of three kids during a summer in the Bayou in 1930. An afterword explains that it is a tribute to Southern gothic literature. Johann G. Lewis underplays the grotesque themes that characterize Southern gothic, although racism provides a grotesque undercurrent to the story. The setting includes an abandoned steamboat that is said to be haunted, but the story has no significant elements of the supernatural. To me, the story echoes Huckleberry Finn in its creation of an interracial friendship that defies cultural expectations.

Otis and Red are eleven. They live in the bayou. Neither child’s parents believe white and black kids should mix — not because they are racists, but because it isn’t safe. Yet the kids bond over their shared interests:  skipping school, playing pranks, swimming and fishing.

Otis and Red take an interest in a family that’s occupying a local mansion for the summer. The family consists of a 12-year-old Shelley, her governess, and her mother. Shelley has a heart condition and is not supposed to go outside, but hanging with Otis and Red proves to be more entertaining than sitting in the house all day. Shelley befriends them platonically and equally. This is a simpler time when kids aren’t distracted by gadgets or the pressure of becoming a sexual person.

Black adults are searching for a man who went missing but they won’t talk about his disappearance with Otis. Red’s mother does what she needs to do to pay the rent but Red doesn’t understand why strange men visit the house. A gang of men, protected by the Klansman Sheriff, are killing blacks and causing problems for everyone they dislike. Thugs are smashing the windows of the general store owner.

Red has a vague sense that things aren’t as they should be, but he is the embodiment of innocence. He thinks life is good. Soon enough, he’ll realize that life can be ugly. The reader won’t want Red to grow up, but the best to be hoped for is that he grows up to be a decent person.

The story’s ending is equally sad and hopeful. Nothing good lasts forever but change does not mean the world is ending. Red and Otis are on the verge of transitioning to an adulthood that will probably be difficult for them both, but they’re in no hurry to enter a world that they regard as needlessly complex.

The story makes a simple point, but its simplicity reflects its honesty.  There is nothing natural about racism. Kids don’t care about skin color. They care about being kids. They learn to hate from adults who sabotage the possibility of interracial friendships.

The art is also simple. Most daylight panels are a wash of pale green, reflecting the life of the swamp where much of the action unfolds. The art conveys the swamp’s spookiness with burls and knots that make trees seem human. The story’s sweetness is captured in both the art and the innocence of its child characters.

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Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by Orbit on May 2, 2023

Lords of Uncreation brings The Final Architecture trilogy to a fitting end. It just takes an awfully long time to get there.

In Shards of Earth and Eyes of the Void, readers met the Architects, aliens who (perhaps for aesthetic reasons) reshaped planets, rendering them uninhabitable. Earth was one of their victims. Many humans died but many others scattered to the stars, using throughways that pass through “unspace” to shortcut travel times. Those humans formed colonies that are governed by the Hugh.

Outside the throughways, travel in unspace is precarious. Apart from navigational difficulties, unspace causes a sense of dread, a certainty that a monster is preparing to turn the traveler into a snack. Surviving a journey through unspace usually means going to sleep, but certain navigators called “ints” have had their brains rewired so they can stay awake in unspace without going mad.

The first two novels developed the plucky crew of the Vulture God, a ship that eventually takes on the task of saving humanity from the Architects and their evil masters. The crew interacts with a sect of human female warriors (the Partheni) who initially organized to protect humans, although a faction in the third novel wants nothing to do with other humans. The crew also deals with a spy from Hugh who returns in the final novel. Whether he will help them or kill them is a question about which the spy is of two minds.

Aliens who are also threatened by the Architects include insects that operate machines through collective effort, a race of shipbound aliens who avoid the risk of planetary destruction by living in space, traders that look like crabs, and a few species collectively known as the Hegemony who serve the Essiel, an alien race that likes to be worshipped.

The primary mysteries developed in the first two novels are (1) why are the Architects destroying worlds, (2) who do the Architects serve, (3) why are Architects unwilling to harm artifacts created by the Originators, (4) who were the Originators and what happened to them, (5) what is the scary presence that everyone senses in unspace, and (6) what lives at the core of unspace? Lords of Uncreation eventually answers those questions. The answers make sense within the context of the impressive worldbuilding (or universe building) that Adrian Tchaikovsky undertook.

The trilogy is a strong contribution to the subgenre of far future space opera involving humans (with some alien help, in this case) overcoming an alien menace. The future is created in so much detail that the background is at least as absorbing as the plot. Conflicts between factions of the human race and occasionally between humans and aliens all follow their own logic, the kind of logic that is recognizable throughout human history. The story is, in a word, smart.

In the grand space opera tradition, characters engage in acts of heroism, sometimes valiantly (including a Partheni who joins the Vulture God’s crew), sometimes reluctantly (including the int who is often part of the Vulture God’s crew and who holds the key to solving the mysteries described above). Even characters who are very different from 21st century humans are relatable in their emotions and desires. Characters evolve over the series; the spy, for example, turns into a better guy than his nature initially seems to permit.

The mysteries are answered with a creative (albeit incomplete) reinterpretation of what the universe is and, to some extent, how it was created and shaped. Suffice it to say that humans and aliens think too much and that all that thinking is troublesome to the shapers of the universe. There is a man-behind-the-curtain component to the mystery that will be satisfying to readers who agree that might doesn’t make right, particularly when the might is wielded by the weak to create the illusion of strength.

My knock on the last novel in this trilogy is its unnecessary length. Modern sf writers seem to feel the need to cram six or seven novels into three fat books. The worldbuilding and action in the first two novels is sufficiently interesting to overcome their length. This one seems wordy for no purpose other than to grow the word count. The first half not only struck me as padded but rushed. Tchaikovsky can be a skilled wordsmith, but the early prose in Lords of Creation is sometimes awkward or clichéd. Fortunately, his prose in the last 200 pages is sharper and the story comes to a satisfying finish that makes it worth wading through the unnecessary verbiage.

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The Last Songbird by Daniel Weizmann

Published by Melville House on May 23, 2023

The Last Songbird has the feel of a classic mystery in a modern setting. Adam Zantz is pushing 40. He drives for Lyft on the web of LA highways. He’s also Annie Linden’s personal driver; that is, she books him off app. Adam arrives a bit late in response to her most recent call, only to find that she’s missing. The police question Adam because her security guy, Troy Banks, is dead. So is Annie, as Adam soon learns when a jogger finds her body on a beach.

Annie was a popular singer-songwriter who was nominated for a Grammy in 1974. She was 73 when she died. Adam began driving for her after his mother “went batshit” and his girlfriend and songwriting partner dumped him. He feels Annie’s loss profoundly, in part because she praised his songs. She was the last person on Earth who believed in him.

Adam was once licensed as a private detective. He spent three weeks doing Google searches for a real detective before he quit. Annie wanted him to find someone and help her piece something together, but she didn’t give him any details before she was killed.

Annie had recently fired her personal assistant. Bix Gelden had known Annie since childhood and had been fired regularly, but the police think he had a motive to murder Annie so they arrest him because he’s convenient. Adam decides to use his meager detective skills to investigate his guilt.

Adam’s search leads him to Haywood Kronski, Annie’s not-quite-ex-husband and former producer; Eva Silber-Alvarez, Annie’s spiritual mentor; her fan club president; two young people who might be Annie’s drug dealer; the man who taught Annie to play the guitar; a jacuzzi salesman; a massage therapist/yoga practitioner; and a dead urologist. Playing detective also gets him arrested. He’s repeatedly threatened, his tires are slashed, he’s on the wrong end of a car chase. The Last Songbird isn’t a particularly violent novel, but what’s a detective story without an occasional fistfight?

Every lead Adam follows turns out to be productive, usually in improbable ways. That’s common to modern crime novels. I suppose writers fear that readers will be bored if detectives chase leads to dead ends, but it’s hard to believe that a random bookmark taken from hundreds of books in a storage shed, or a bootleg concert tape purchased on impulse from a hippy, would help Adam find Annie’s killer. Chalk it up to karma? It’s LA, after all.

With a little help from the guitar teacher, Adam muses about the nature of songs and songwriting. Older readers (and younger ones who know their pop music history) will appreciate the references to songs of Annie’s era. The story also features an interesting aside about the rise of the red pill movement, a collection of misogynistic incels who blame feminists, Jews, and people with dark skin for their inability to get laid.

Adam’s encounters with people in Annie’s life leave him with conflicting impressions of Annie. Some saw her as a totem, others as a user. Adam’s view of Annie evolves as he learns her secrets. The story suggests that artistic icons are never who we expect them to be. They’re just people, with all the complexity that defines human existence. Maybe we have no right to expect them to be anything other than creators of work we admire.

The novel’s intrigue comes from being an unconventional family drama, a story of family members who worship or detest each other. Adam’s own family gives Adam a bit of drama when he enlists their support for his investigation. His sister thinks he’s a loser. As a Lyft driver pushing 40, his circumstances suggest that the perception is valid if uncharitable. Whether Adam will use the investigation as a springboard to self-improvement adds to the intrigue that drives the story.

Daniel Weizmann invokes a classic confusion of identities to bring the novel to a close. Adam’s ability to piece together vague clues to catch the killer is improbable but the story follows a thread of logic that never breaks. Adam attains an awareness of the demons that have driven his own life as he solves the murder, bringing the story to a satisfying resolution. The Last Songbird is a good choice for fans of classic mysteries.

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