Tell Me an Ending by Jo Harkin

Published by ‎ Scribner on March 1, 2022

Tell Me an Ending imagines a future technology that allows the pinpoint erasure of selected memories. People can elect to remember that they had a memory erased or can choose to have no memory of the procedure that wiped out a bit of their past. A lawsuit compels Nepenth, the company that performs the erasures, to tell the latter group that their memories have been erased. Nepenth is also forced to restore the memories of those who wish to get them back. The novel tells the stories of several characters who either know or learn that a part of their past has been deleted.

The concept is intriguing. Curiosity creates a natural dilemma as Nepenth’s “self-confidential” patients (the ones who choose to forget the procedure) wonder what they’ve forgotten and why they wanted to forget. Some might want to recover the memories to reduce the anxiety of not understanding their full past. At the same time, if the memories were so unbearable that they wanted to erase them, does it make sense to have them restored, only to be tormented by them again? A key character suggests a possible answer: taking away memories also erases identity. How do you know who you are unless you remember who you have been? If you did something bad and wanted to forget about it, how do you safeguard against repeating your past when you don’t know what you did?

Most of the key characters have had the procedure and are wondering whether they should reclaim their memories. When Mirande is offered a memory restoration, she has no idea what she suppressed. Her husband Finn suspects that Mirande had an affair with David while Finn was working in Singapore. Is that what Mirande erased? Would that explain why David is suddenly back in their lives?

William did something during his employment as a police officer that he paid to forget because he couldn’t live with the guilt. It’s not legal for cops to get memory wipes (they need to remember evidence), nor is it legal to erase memories of crimes, but William does it anyway.

Oscar is traveling the world, convinced that someone is pursuing him. He leaves for a new destination every time he believes he’s been found. He has a necklace made of teeth but he doesn’t remember how he acquired it. Nor does he remember his childhood. Oscar is an example of someone whose life was clearly not made better by forgetting his past.

Mei is linked to a different character in a way that Jo Harkin conceals from the reader for much of the novel. She is a failed college student who has vague memories of doing something in Amsterdam. She travels to Amsterdam to reconstruct the missing event.

A couple of other characters, Noor and Louise, work for Nepenth. The organizing plot revolves around Louise’s involvement in a secret project that goes beyond the simple removal of an unwanted memory by experimenting with a more ambitious goal. Louise is dealing with the consequences of that project while Noor, who has been kept in the dark, pokes into Louise’s secretive actions. Louise also had a project of her own that involved making memory deletion available to people who seemed to need it but were not lawfully entitled to it.

Tell Me an Ending explores the moral complications of selective memory erasure. If guilt and remorse are necessary and useful consequences of bad behavior, is it socially harmful to allow the suppression of memories of misconduct? Noor and Louise focus the novel’s ethical theme near the novel’s end as they argue about the benefits and detriments of Louise’s decision to substitute her own judgment for society’s judgment as to who should be entitled to a memory wipe. The debate is about the shades of gray that complicate every moral judgment, as well as the single shade of green that Louise earns from giving people pain relief who aren’t legally entitled to it. Noor has her own reasons for feeling guilty. The two characters lay guilt trips on each other, inviting the reader to decide which one makes the better case.

Apart from Oscar and William, the stories of the individual characters feel incomplete. While the individual stories are a useful means of exploring the ethical ramifications of memory erasure, Harkin shortchanges the emotional development of the characters who cope with the aftermath of Nepenth’s procedures. The novel as a whole is less than the sum of its incomplete parts. The eventual focus on Louise and Noor is unfortunate, as they are the least interesting characters. Still, I give Harkin credit for her thorough discussion of the moral ramifications of a procedure that neuroscientists are likely to learn to perform in the not-so-distant future.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Doloriad by Missouri Williams

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (MCD x FSG Originals) on March 1, 2022

The Doloriad is an ugly story told in beautiful but bewildering prose. My reaction to much of The Doloriad was “ick.” My reaction to the rest of the story was “WTF?” More patient and intelligent readers might take more value from The Doloriad than I mined from it.

The characters believe themselves to be “the last humans ever,” although some suspect, with no real evidence, that other humans have survived whatever apocalyptic catastrophe has destroyed civilization and contaminated the environment. No other people have been seen for at least a couple of generations. The characters live in an encampment on the edge of an empty Prague from which they scavenge. A woman known as The Matriarch has made it her mission to repopulate the planet, a mission that must be based on incest in the absence of abundant breeding stock. Incest produced Dolores, a sad creature with no legs and obvious cognitive deficits. When the Matriarch leaves Dolores in the forest, either as a sacrifice or in the hope that unseen neighbors will find her and breed with her, the community sees it as a sign when Dolores rolls or uses her pudgy arms to crawl back home. Whether Dolores encountered other humans and was rejected, whether her return portends an invasion by outsiders, whether Dolores is simply tenacious, is the subject of unresolved debate.

One of the Matriarch’s brothers is a schoolmaster who lives apart from the family. A large man with no legs (a trait that runs in the family), the schoolmaster believes that “the history of the world is the history of cruelty.” He wants to cocoon himself in a mound with moths. His reasoning is obscure (it has something to do with rebirth), although few of the characters are capable of rational thought. Believing himself guided by a “mysterious power,” the schoolmaster makes a discovery that renews conjecture that the encampment’s residents are not alone in the world. Whether that is true, like most other questions a reader might have, is left unanswered.

The lack of any explanation for the novel’s central events is frustrating. Perhaps Missouri Williams intended to make a point by creating so much bewilderment, or perhaps she was too lazy to invent answers to obvious questions. Since the novel’s twisty (and sometimes nearly impenetrable) prose does not suggest laziness, I suspect Williams intended to leave the reader in the shoes filled by the characters, surrounded by circumstances and events that they cannot comprehend. If that was her intent, the absence of explanation is no less frustrating to readers who know that writers, unlike characters, have the godlike power to explain things, even if they choose to keep “but why?” a secret.

Some of the characters ask whether survival has any point, if there is any reason to repopulate a world that humanity destroyed and will probably destroy again. This, I imagine, is the grim moral lesson of The Doloriad. If we destroy humanity’s home, humanity does not deserve a second chance.

One of the girls is learning to be a storyteller but her stories are modern fairytales of Ivy League schools and incest. In the ugliest scene, Dolores is raped and repeatedly kicked by her brother Jan, who doesn’t seem to need the release since he’s been having (more or less) consensual sex with his other sisters. The siblings worry that Jan will take charge as the Matriarch grows weak. Whether that will happen is another unanswered question.

The characters seem to have television (although how they are finding usable fuel for their generator after two generations without refineries or gas stations is unclear); they watch videocassettes of an old show called Get Acquinas in Here in the Matriarch’s attempt to impose “some kind of order” on “their blank river of time.” The television version of Acquinas dispensed ethical wisdom on his show, but by the novel’s end he has apparently become a character in the book, or at least an observer of the other characters. Acquinas also argues with a philosophical sheep. I’m not sure what that was all about.

In fact, I’m not sure what most of the novel is about. To be fair, I lost interest long before the sheep and Acquinas began to converse. The novel’s long, rambling, dense paragraphs will put off some readers. They did nothing to enhance my appreciation of the story. I must admit that my mind kept wandering. Maybe I was distracted by Russia’s war with Ukraine and other dismal world events of the sort that might lead to the post-apocalyptic setting that Williams creates. At least at this moment, I would rather escape dark reality than read about an even darker fictional future, particularly a future with philosophical sheep. Since I might not have given the book fair consideration, I am tempted to recommend it with reservations, but I can’t find that degree of fairness in my heart. Literary and ancient historical allusions abound for those who wish to decode them. Readers with strong stomachs and infinite patience might find Williams’ unfinished ideas and evocative prose sufficient to make the novel worthwhile.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Fell by Sarah Moss

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on March 1, 2022

At its heart, The Fell is a meditation on the effects of social isolation. Those effects have been exacerbated for some during the pandemic, but loneliness can strike even when isolation is not encouraged by health policies. The story morphs into a wilderness rescue, but the plight of the victim creates little tension. The primary focus is on the thoughts of the central characters: an injured woman, her young son, their neighbor, and a member of the search-and-rescue team.

Anxiety pervades the characters in The Fell. They live in or near the mountains and moors on the outskirts of Greater Manchester in the County of Derbyshire. They are enduring pandemic quarantine rules that trap them in their homes. People are allowed outside only for essential purposes. The police use drones to record and shame people who engage in recreational walking. The central character views the quarantine in the broader context of history, a reminder that “the authorities have never liked to have commoners walking the land instead of getting and selling.”

When life in quarantine becomes too much for Kate, she takes a walk in the fells. (I had to look this up, but “fell walking” in Northern England refers to walking in hills and high land.) Whether the walk is illegal (Kate seems to think so) or only strongly discouraged by government policy (as another part of the book seems to suggest), Kate and her son both believe she should have stayed inside. That becomes obvious to the reader when, quarantine notwithstanding, Kate falls in the failing light and breaks her leg.

Kate is Matt’s mum. He’s alone in house, worried at his mother’s absence. Matt is afraid his mum will be arrested for breaking quarantine. He knows he’s not allowed outside during the quarantine but he visits their neighbor Alice, who won’t let him in but calls the mountain rescue service. All the officials who talk to Matt stay outside or speak to him via telephone with a masked number, which seems improbably cruel given that the kid is home alone with no support system.

Like Kate, Alice spends her quarantine fretting. She thinks about death and cancer and worries about her children. She thinks about Mark, with whom she shared 45 years of life. Alice is the most opinionated character, although the characters all share attitudes of gloom. “Social distancing,” Alice thinks, “whoever came up with that, there’s not much that’s less social than acting as if everyone’s unclean and dangerous, though the problem of course is that they are, or at least some of them and there’s no way of knowing.” She also complains that the pandemic has infected language by turning “distance” into a verb.

Alice thinks rude thoughts about doctors who blame patients for socializing and acquiring COVID. Aren’t patients always putting themselves at risk (she asks herself) by deciding to drive or play sports or sleep with the wrong person or carry a big pile of laundry up the stairs? “Alice thinks, let us give thanks for our pure blind luck as well as our warm beds and safe houses, though the problem with giving thanks for your own luck is that you’re also giving thanks that the misfortune landed on someone else.”

Rob is a first responder. He rescues people who have gone missing on the mountain. Rob’s daughter Ellie is with him for the weekend. She isn’t happy when his job requires him to leave her to search for Kate. Rob, on the other hand, enjoys doing some good by volunteering for the mountain rescue team. He decided to be self-employed so he wouldn’t have to put up with employers who gripe that volunteers refuse to work overtime so they can be available for rescues when needed.

The Fell is a character-driven novel that is undisturbed by a plot. Kate’s disappearance is simply an excuse for the reader to tune into the characters’ internal monologues. After her fall, Kate’s mind wanders as she tries to summon the strength to crawl through the heath. Perhaps she is entering a state of delirium as she converses with a raven. Some of her thoughts turn out to be lyrics from Celtic folk music (I had to google odd-sounding sentences to discover that). It is a reasonable place for Kate’s mind to go, given that she dabbled with folk singing before she met Paul, her ex-husband, a meeting about which she is now ambivalent, as she is about much of her life.

There is something to be said for a novel that recognizes both the public health necessity of a quarantine during a pandemic and the emotional necessity of escaping confinement that is imposed by outside forces. The characters whine about their circumstances a bit too much, but doesn’t everyone? They at least do so in amusingly droll prose. While The Fell might not appeal to readers who require a more substantive plot than “woman goes missing and people worry about her,” this short novel is worth reading for Sarah Moss’ observational take on the depressing nature of life in the midst of a pandemic.

RECOMMENDED

The Silent Sisters by Robert Dugoni

Published by Thomas & Mercer on February 22, 2022

The Silent Sisters is the third novel to feature Charles Jenkins, a retired CIA agent who returned to the agency to carry out a mission in Russia. The novels are all premised on a traitor’s betrayal of seven women in Russia who have served as spies for America. The traitor made Russia aware of their existence but not of each woman’s identity. When Russia discovers their identities, the women die. Jenkins has been tasked with rescuing the survivors before Russia can identify them.

As a tall black man, Jenkins is far from inconspicuous when he enters Russia. Since he was exposed as a CIA agent in the first novel, his ability to pull off a rescue in the second novel strained credibility. In The Silent Sisters, the CIA has given Jenkins a disguise kit that lets him pass as a shorter white man, among other costume changes. That all seems a bit Mission: Impossible, but I willingly suspended by disbelief as the story moved forward. The Silent Sisters is easily the best of the three novels.

Jenkins’ mission is to rescue Maria Kulivoka, the last of the Seven Sisters who is still living in Russia. Maria works for a director of the FSB, Dmitry Sokalov, her unwitting source of classified information. Maria does sexual favors for Sokalov to stay in his good graces, including favors that disgust her. The favors combine with alcohol to make Sokalov forget that he’s revealing classified information. Maria is in a dangerous position not only because she is spying for America, but because Sokalov might be tempted to kill her to keep their affair from being known to his powerful father-in-law.

Early in the story, Jenkins goes into a Russian bar for a beer and a meal. He intervenes when a thug beats a prostitute. Events lead to the thug getting shot, although not by Jenkins. The thug turns out to be the son of a crime boss, making Jenkins marked for death by Putin (thanks to his successful missions in earlier novels) and by a criminal organization.

The shooting is investigated by Arkhip Mishkin, an honest and sympathetic character who is approaching retirement. Mishkin doesn’t want to leave a case unsolved before he retires. To that end, he also wants to find Jenkins, if only to ask him for his version of the thug’s killing.

Strong women had played a significant role in this series. Their strength is fueled by their will to survive. Spies who betray their countries risk daily exposure, so it isn’t surprising that Maria is tough. She achieves that toughness by bottling up the rage she feels toward Sokalov and her disgust with herself. As a crime boss who ascended to the throne when her father was murdered, Yekaterina Velikaya must also play a role to survive. Neither woman can allow her true personality to emerge, if one even exists at this point. Maria nevertheless softens a bit during a long train ride toward potential freedom, when she has long platonic chats with a man that show her a side of life she has been missing.

As always, the plot moves quickly and generates reasonable suspense. Jenkins is your basic aging spy who would rather be bonding with his kids than doing his patriotic duty in Russia. Maria and Mishkin and even Yakaterina are more complex characters. They give the story its heart, elevating The Silent Sisters above a standard action novel.

RECOMMENDED

Sierra Six by Mark Greaney

Published by ‎ Berkley on February 15, 2022

Most Gray Man novels are pretty good. Some are really good. Sierra Six is on another level. It’s the best Gray Man novel I’ve read, in part because it humanizes Court Gentry. Or, at least, it proves that Gentry was once human.

Gentry’s life has changed over the course of the series. Once he was a CIA lone-wolf operative, essentially an assassin. Then he became part of a CIA paramilitary team. Then he was chased by the CIA and marked for assassination. He became a mercenary before he made an uneasy alliance with the CIA. He’s still a mercenary as Sierra Six opens and the fickle CIA wants him dead again.

The story follows two branches, one in the present, one twelve years in the past. In the present, Gentry has been hired through the dark web to plant microphones outside the Turkish embassy in Algeria. He assumes he’s been hired by the Indian government for a mission that India can deny if it goes haywire. The mission goes haywire after Gentry sees a man he thought had died twelve years earlier. Gentry ignores the mission for which he was hired in favor of his own mission: to kill the dead man.

Gentry’s revised mission goes haywire when the man he wants to kill, Murad Khan, eludes him and orchestrates the capture of his handler, a woman named Priya. Gentry adds freeing Priya to his to-do list, along with killing Khan. (Yes, there is a scene in which Gentry screams the name Khan. Yes, I immediately pictured William Shatner as Gentry. Yes, that makes me an aging nerd.)

To achieve his goal, Gentry needs to ask his former boss, Matt Hanley, for information. Hanley, a character who will be familiar to series readers, has been relegated to Palau as punishment for his friendship with Gentry. Another CIA character who will be familiar to readers, Suzanne Brewer, is now in charge of killing Gentry, but that ongoing storyline is only collateral to the main action.

Hanley’s information leads Gentry to a retired CIA station chief named Ted Appleton who is now living in Mumbai. Appleton is initially a character of ambiguous loyalty as Mark Greaney makes the reader guess whether he’s on Gentry’s side.

The story that takes place in the past explains Gentry’s animosity toward Khan. It also explains how Gentry transitioned from being a solitary assassin to a member of Sierra Golf, a CIA paramilitary team. That team and its leader, Zack Hightower, will be familiar to series fans from earlier books. The story explains Gentry’s training and early missions before Gentry tackles Khan’s plan to detonate dirty bombs at US military bases in Afghanistan.

Both stories are filled with action. The earlier story’s action culminates in a helicopter chases, which is a refreshing change from most thriller chase scenes. A helicopter piloted by Gentry chases down three other helicopters flying toward three different destinations while his paramilitary team tries to shoot them out of the sky before they can deliver their deadly cargo. Is that even possible? Probably not, but unlikely action scenes never stop me from enjoying James Bond movies.

The story set in the present culminates with Gentry trying to prevent Khan’s detonation of another dirty bomb, this one in Mumbai. Among other improbabilities, Gentry has to climb a crane and leap into a partially constructed building during a monsoon. We ask a lot from our action heroes, don’t we?

While working with Sierra Golf, Gentry finds himself attracted to a bright analyst in Afghanistan named Julie who, like Gentry, lacks social skills (she freely admits she’s somewhere on the spectrum). In the present, Gentry bonds a bit with Priya. Gentry’s intense desire to protect both women, and in particular his emotional response to Julie, gives Gentry the heart that makes it possible for empathic readers to connect with him. Unlike Hightower, who measures his morality by whether he kills more bad people than good people, Gentry (at least during his early days with Sierra Golf) has reservations about that moral equation.

Mark Greaney generally avoids overt political discussions, or at least he avoids having politics intrude on Gentry’s life apart from the scolding Gentry receives when he tries not to kill the innocent. Gentry is usually too busy avoiding death to give much thought to philosophical questions.

I appreciated the character development we see in Sierra Six and, of course, I enjoyed the nonstop action in the parallel stories. Action novel fans who haven’t read any of the Gray Man novels can easily read Sierra Six as a standalone. As an adrenaline rush, it’s one of the best high-octane stories I’ve read in recent memory.

RECOMMENDED