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.

RECOMMENDED

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.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Night Shift by Robin Cook

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on December 6, 2022

Not many writers have the requisite knowledge base to produce medical thrillers. Robin Cook might owe part of his popularity to his ability to write credible thrillers set within the environs of the medical industry. He’s prolific, but perhaps a bit too prolific, as his work often seems unpolished. Perhaps his books don’t seem that way to him. While I’ve enjoyed some of Cook’s plots, Night Shift is predictable and only modestly suspenseful.

Jack Stapleton is a medical examiner in New York City. He works for his wife, Laurie Montgomery. Jack and/or his wife have been the central characters in about a dozen of Cook’s novels. Jack spends most of the novel feeling abused because the rest of the world will not defer to his superior knowledge, although he does make an effort to preserve domestic peace by attempting to compromise with his wife about his anti-vax mother-in-law and the proper response to his daughter’s autism. At least Cook makes an effort at characterization, even if he didn’t (in Jack, at least) create a likeable protagonist.

Dr. Susan Passero is a good friend of Laurie and tangentially of Jack. She dies in her car in a hospital parking garage, presumably from a heart attack. Jack performs the autopsy but can’t identify an apparent cause of death. He feels pressure to prepare a death certificate and release the body because Susan’s husband wants to adhere to a Muslim tradition of prompt burial. Her husband also wants the death certificate so he can make a prompt life insurance claim. Jack knows the husband but didn’t know he is a Muslim and is suspicious of his insistence that a death certificate be issued quickly.

Jack violates medical examiner rules that his wife is supposed to enforce by interviewing witnesses to conduct a death investigation. He cheeses off a hospital administrator by snooping in Susan’s office and talking to support staff. He learns that Susan also cheesed off people in the hospital by seeking a position on the committee that reviews patient deaths, which Susan seemed to think had been increasing for reasons that were unrelated to the pandemic.

Jack’s investigation leads to the death of one of the people he interviewed and eventually leads to a couple of attempts to murder Jack. Two scenes involving Jack’s attempted murders create the novel’s most suspenseful moments, although the suspense is limited. After all, if you don’t count James Bond (movie version) or Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle version), it’s not often that series protagonists die. Even more rarely do they stay dead.

Cook’s explanation of the medical jargon and difficulty of establishing a cause of death is credible and interesting. I enjoyed his insightful portrayal of hospitals as profit centers administered by businesses that have more interest in the bottom line than patient care.

The reader learns the killer’s identity while a third of the book remains, which takes some steam out of the story. My primary gripe is that Cook’s writing style makes the novel come across as a first draft. Cook is in love with needless adverbs. His characters engage in robotic dialog intended to educate the reader, not to create the illusion of two real people having an actual conversation. A couple of characters say that things need to be done “pronto,” just one example of dialog that doesn’t ring true. Police officers take time in the middle of a gunfight to get Laurie up to speed about why they’re shooting. A couple of careful rewrites might have made Night Shift a better novel, but not without adding some twists and thrills to enliven the rather conventional plot.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS