The Thing in the Snow by Sean Adams

Published by William Morrow on January 3, 2023

This strange story is filled with the low-key humor that comes from transplanting characters who might be at home in The Office or Severance to an arctic research station. The station has been closed but not abandoned. Only four people haunt the empty building. Gilroy is the only remaining researcher. Without lab equipment, he conducts his research by staring into space and making notes. He wants to “get in touch with the cold,” which he envisions as a malicious entity whose “end goal” is “a full-blown castration of the soul.” The other three are maintenance workers who perform such important tasks as opening and closing doors to determine whether they make noise and, if so, to record the volume and source of the noise so that repairs can be scheduled.

As the supervisor of the three maintenance workers, Hart completes the paperwork associated with their assignments (filling in the blank that follows such questions as “How many chairs need replacement?” after they sit on each chair and shift from side to side). Hart places the completed forms in a drop box on the roof. Pat, his boss, dispatches a weekly helicopter to collect the forms and drop off new assignments.

Hart is convinced that their work is of the utmost importance. Researchers might die if they fail to identify work surfaces that are not perfectly flat (the tragic accidents and ensuing chaos he envisions are imaginative but implausible). Hart is sometimes paralyzed by the fear of making an error. His coworkers do not seem to share that fear; they’re simply unmotivated.

Hart believes he is locked in a power struggle with Gibbs, who clearly (and perhaps correctly) thinks she can lead the team more capably than Hart. Cline regards himself as an artist, but he doesn’t ask for art supplies to be delivered on the weekly supply run because he’s not sure he wants to paint a landscape of snow.

The tasks assigned to Hart’s team are so pointless that Hart has lost track of whether the team has done them before. They often need to start over because they become distracted and can’t recall, for example, whether they rolled all the window shades in a particular room up and down. Hart wonders whether the nature of monotonous work might “propel it straight past a casual memory into the arena of trauma, where it would likely be repressed?”

The concept of inept workers struggling to perform tedious make-work chores is funny, but the nature of the workplace adds to the novel’s humor. After a windy night, the workers see something in the snow. They can’t identify it. They aren’t sure whether it moves when they aren’t watching it. When they stare at it, hours elapse. In fact, lost hours are common in the facility, at least for Hart, who can never remember how he spent his weekends. In fact, Hart has lost track of how long the team has been working at the facility.

When Hart sends Pat a Post-It note asking if she knows about the thing in the snow, she asks for more information. The three workers quarrel about who should prepare a description. Rather than collaborating, they decide to resolve their differences with a writing contest, then argue about who wrote the best description of a lamp. Their dysfunction as members of a team is hilarious, although instantly recognizable to anyone who has been part of a dysfunctional team. Pat’s eventual response to the question about the thing in the snow produces something approaching panic, followed by another series of failed experiments.

In addition to mocking make-work jobs and teams that can’t master the art of collaboration, The Thing in the Snow questions the concept of leadership. Hart is ridiculously impressed with himself because he supervises two subordinates in a pointless job. He reads a series of novels that are meant to provide instruction or inspiration for leaders, but they fail to transform Hart into something he is not. A reader might suspect that the endless supply of “How to Be a Leader” books are equally useless. Still, the plots of the leadership novels that Hart reads are so outlandish that I would probably read them.

A contracted wellness provider whose basic care only measures body temperature within a range of 3 degrees (premium care offers whole numbers; with platinum care you get decimals) offers some of the novel's funniest moments. A story that draws humor from absurdity doesn’t need to make sense, but Sean Adams impressed me with an ending that explains why the three maintenance people and the lone researcher are really working at the facility. The novel deliberately leaves lingering questions that add to the fun. In the end, I think The Thing in the Snow is about the need to find purpose, or at least to feel a purpose, in work or in life. When a goofy story turns out to make a meaningful point, I have to recommend it.

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Happy Holidays!

An Impossible Return by Caroline Laurent

First published in France in 2020; published in translation by Amazon Crossing on December 1, 2022

An Impossible Return takes place during one of the historical tragedies that most of us never hear about because it happened to someone else, to some other people in some other land. Mauritius is an island nation in the Indian Ocean. It was under French control for a hundred years before it became a British colony. The people of Mauritius gained their independence in 1968, but the British, the US, and the new political leader of Mauritius cut a secret deal to split off the Chagos Archipelago, which became a British territory. The island of Diego Garcia was leased to the US for a naval base, a land grab justified by the “war on terror.” The lease required all Chagossians to be expelled before the base was constructed.

In an afterword, Caroline Laurent explains that she learned about the ordeal endured by Chagossians from her Mauritian mother. Laurent’s novel tells the story by creating a protagonist who, despite poverty and the absence of a formal education, fights back against injustice. The protagonist’s son brings the story forward, into the recent past, with intermittent commentary on a legal proceeding before the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

The protagonist, Marie-Pierre Ladouceur, lives on Diego Garcia. She shares herself with two lovers as the mood strikes her. She has a daughter named Suzanne and doesn’t know which lover is the father. When a handsome young man named Gabriel Neymorin arrives on the island, Marie aggressively takes his virginity. Gabriel is enthused to discover the new sport of sex, although his petulant refusal to dance with Marie at a wedding motivates her to shag one of her former lovers. Marie greets her pregnancy with the hope that Gabriel is the father, but the baby does not have his fair skin or European features. Gabriel nevertheless assumes that Joséphin is his son and loves him as a father should.

Gabriel grew up in Mauritius with a brother and sister. His father sent him to the Chagos to work as the secretary for Marcel Mollinart, the colonial administrator. The assignment shattered Gabriel’s hope of studying in London, a dream that his more favored brother was allowed to pursue. Some of the story involves a family drama as the siblings become distant from each other and from their racist father. Another family drama occurs when Gabriel comes to suspect that he is not the biological father of Joséphin.

History begins to take center stage when Gabriel learns of the plan to evacuate Diego Garcia. The plan calls for volunteers to leave first (without telling them that they can’t return), followed by cutting off supply shipments to the Chagos, with the eventual forced evacuation of diehards who remain. Gabriel is sworn to secrecy by the British government and blackmailed by Mollinart to hide the truth from Marie. Gabriel’s dilemma leads to an even deeper schism in his relationship with Marie and Joséphin, particularly after Marie learns that Gabriel lied about the fate of her sister, who took a trip to Mauritius to buy supplies and failed to return as Marie expected.

The novel’s most moving scenes follow the upended lives of Chagossians who are cut off from supplies and later evacuated at gunpoint. The evacuation scene is horrifying, particularly for dog lovers. Marie and Gabriel are separated in the confusion, just as other families are torn apart. Travel to Mauritius in the hold of a ship (reminiscent of slave ships) is harrowing, as is life for Chagossians in a Mauritian slum that is torn apart by a cyclone with no support from the governments of the UK or Mauritius.

Racism explains why the British and Americans felt entitled to force black island residents to abandon their land, property, and culture, to endanger their lives, to separate family members, and to provide them with no support on Mauritius. Laurent illustrates racist attitudes in other ways: Mollinart’s wife can’t believe that he feels sympathy for black people; Gabriel’s father berates his sister for befriending an Indian girl on Mauritius.

Some plot elements could be the stuff of melodrama (the uncertainty of Joséphin’s paternity, the abusive relationship to which Marie’s sister clings, Gabriel's awareness of his father's abuse of a servant, an unexpected death), but even the most dramatic moments in the story of Marie and Gabriel are understated. Their story primarily exists as a frame for the larger story of Chagossians who were uprooted and forced to wait decades for the opportunity to return to their homeland. Marie becomes an unlikely spokeswoman, something of a media celebrity, in her efforts to force the UK to acknowledge its wrongdoing. The British try to take advantage of the Chagossians with an illusory settlement before they are forced to answer for their colonial sins. The larger historical context produces a stirring story that resonates with the kind of truth that refuses to be silenced.

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Three-Edged Sword by Jeff Lindsay

Published by ‎ Dutton on December 6, 2022

Three-Edged Sword is the third Riley Wolfe novel. I started reading the first one but I was so turned off by Wolfe’s boastfulness that I set the book aside and never got back to it. The second book evaded my radar. By the time I saw this one, I had forgotten about the first one, so I gave it a try. I am pleased to report that Wolfe, while occasionally reminding the reader that he is the best criminal in the history of crime, has toned down his arrogance.

Wolfe’s real name is Wiener. He uses aliases because that’s what thieves do and besides, Wolfe is so much cooler than Wiener. As a successful thief, Wolfe has plenty of money. He needs it to maintain security and to keep his mother’s body breathing, despite her brain death.

As the novel begins, Wolfe’s companion (not quite a girlfriend despite one blissful night together) Monique is in a coma. She was working for Wolfe when she took a blow to the head and Wolfe feels responsible for her welfare. Wolfe knows she will recover because he dictates outcomes. Well, apart from his mother. As much as Wolfe believes he can will it to happen, nobody wakes up from brain death.

While he’s waiting for Monique to awaken, Wolfe attempts to pull a complicated heist involving diamonds in Botswana. The target turns out to be a setup. A CIA agent named Prescott recruits Wolfe to steal a flash drive from a safe at the bottom of a missile silo on a heavily guarded private island. In exchange, Wolfe can keep the Ushakov icons that are stored in the vault. Also, Prescott will release Wolfe’s mother and Monique, who are being held hostage to assure Wolfe’s cooperation.

The plot follows Wolfe as he creates and executes a plan to steal the drive and icons from a fellow who once ran an espionage circuit for the Soviet Union. Wolfe’s plan is reasonably clever and more believable than your typical Mission Impossible plot. Once Wolfe discovers the contents of the drive, he turns his attention to Prescott and to his imprisoned mother and friend.

Three-Edged Sword moves quickly, fueled less by the fights that are typical of thrillers than by the con artistry and parkour that are common to heist stories. Notwithstanding his conceit, Wolfe is a welcome break from the tough guys who dominate crime novels. As he proved in his Dexter novels, Jeff Lindsay can make dark personalities appealing, even if you might not want to befriend his characters. I wasn’t convinced to give Just Watch Me another try, but I’ll look for future entries in the series with the hope that they match the energy of this one.

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The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi

First published in Japan in 2008; published in translation by HarperVia on December 6, 2022

This thoroughly odd novel was apparently a hit in Japan, where it was adapted as an anime television miniseries (because Japan). I watched the trailer on YouTube and it’s, um, colorful? Anime rarely speaks to me, but different strokes.

The book was apparently followed by a “spiritual successor” and an actual sequel. The sequel also became an anime miniseries in Japan that has apparently been released in the US on Disney+ or Hulu. (I glean this information from Wikipedia so take it with a grain of salt.) The sequel (Tatami Time Machine) will be published in translation in 2023. I think I’ll give it a pass.

The novel is set in four parallel universes. It tells, at times, a somewhat interesting story. It is typical in a novel of this sort to illustrate how a life might be different if a person makes different choices. Tomihiko Morimi eschews the typical by imaging a character who makes similar mistakes and encounters similar misery in every life he lives. The story is, at times, so absurdist or surreal that it might have been inspired by Borges.

The unnamed narrator is a college student who, in each universe, is beginning his junior year, having accomplished nothing during his first two years. He is pretty much the same guy in each reality. He consistently lives in a four-and-a-half tatami room and he always has a porn collection. Ozu is always his friend and a man Ozu calls “Master” always lives above him. He always reads Jules Verne. Some passages, including his description of the regret he feels for wasting his first two years at the university, are repeated verbatim in each section.

The stories diverge in other details. In each universe, he flashes back to his first year in college, when he examined flyers for student clubs and, although they all seemed “pretty shady,” chose one he would later abandon. He makes a different choice in each universe. The first is a film club called Ablutions. In the second universe, he becomes a disciple of Master Higuchi (although for two years, the narrator is not sure what kind of disciple he was).  The third is the Mellow Softball Club. In the last universe, the narrator joins an underground organization, Lucky Cat Chinese Food, and more particularly, the Library Police, a suborganization that has taken on the life of an intelligent organization.

The narrator sees the clubs as opportunities to expand his nonexistent social contacts. The narrator has limited social skills, which might explain why he ends up making friends only with Ozu, a troublemaker who might or might not be a good companion. In the third universe, he practices conversation with Ozu’s love doll; in the fourth, a plot is afoot to kidnap the doll. In the first, the narrator calls himself the Obstructor of Romance because of his unsuccessful love life. A mysterious fellow “who dared call himself a god” is apparently trying to decide whether to play cupid with the narrator or his friend Ozu. The god is not clear that either of them are worthy of Akashi, a judgmental engineering student who (in some universes, at least) makes a “positive impression” on the narrator.

The god tells the narrator that he ties and unties the red threads of destiny each year. That’s quite a job, but the god seems to tie and untie them in nearly the same way in each universe. While the details vary, the narrator’s life always begins with hope and seems to end with a feeling of lost opportunities. In repeated universes, a fortune teller advises the narrator to seize chances. He finds it difficult to heed that advice. He knows he should ditch Ozu, who is something of an albatross, and pursue paths to happiness — perhaps Akashi — but the narrator is incapable of overcoming his social ineptness. Even moths are better at socializing than the narrator.

The last section creates a source of hope in a bleak story. The narrator finds himself in a labyrinth (hence the Borges comparison) consisting of endless four-and-a-half tatami rooms. The contents are not always identical (Ozu’s love doll appears from time to time) and some might come from one of the other realities, but the food supply (fish burgers and sponge cake) is always the same. The narrator makes infinite decisions during the 80 days he spends wandering through the rooms, creating the possibility of infinite fates, but his fate always seems to be another four-and-a-half tatami room. In the end, an escape changes the narrator’s life, but he won’t talk about that drivel because (as he observed in another reality), “There’s nothing so worthless to speak of as a love mature.”

I’m not sure what to make of The Tatami Galaxy. The novel alternates between being engaging and boring. The narrator is frustrating in his incapacity for change until he changes. The idea of living a life in alternate realities is a clever variation on the venerable time loop story, but the final journey through a labyrinth piles fantasy on top of fantasy and distracts from the story’s point, assuming Morimi had one. Maybe I need to watch the anime miniseries to make sense of it all, but lacking the motivation to do that, I’ll leave it to readers to form their own conclusions.

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