The Antagonist by Lynn Coady

Published in Canada in 2011; published by Knopf on January 22, 2013

The Antagonist is based on an intriguing premise: How would you react if you recognized yourself as a character in a book that someone you know has authored? "There he was, the character I knew to be me, lumbering in and out of scenes, and I'd be outraged when he was like me, -- because that was stealing, -- and outraged when he wasn't, -- because that was lying."

The Antagonist is written as a series of autobiographical emails from Rank to Adam. Unhappy that Adam's novel depicts him as an "innate criminal" -- Adam, according to Rank, is "vampiring the good and the real out of people's lives" -- Rank, approaching forty, decides to tell his own story, in which Adam plays a prominent and unflattering role.

Rank's story starts with Gord, his embittered father, who, as a matter of pride, unwisely invested in an Icy Dream franchise instead of a Java Joe's. Gord's efforts to make a living are hampered by his desire to banish punks (i.e., teenagers) from the restaurant. Rank's father has anger management issues, unlike his mother, who died when Rank was sixteen and remains perfect in his memory. The circumstances of that death, revealed late in the novel, have a profound impact on Rank, and he is particularly enraged that Adam's novel reduced his mother to nothingness with an off-handed comment about her death.

After Rank has a growth spurt at fourteen, most people regard him both as a man and a thug, while his father delightfully assigns him to work as a bouncer at Icy Dream. Based on a punch to the face that leaves a punk brain damaged, Rank finds himself in juvenile court -- and Adam finds a character he can paint as a criminal. That act of violence becomes a defining moment in Rank's life -- he can't read T.S. Eliot without being reminded of it -- making it easy to understand why Rank is upset to see it glorified in Adam's novel.

Much of The Antagonist is about Rank's relationship with three friends (including Adam) during his college years. Adam and his dope smoking friends, the reader suspects, become Rank's replacement for hockey (a scholarship sport until he walked away from it), his connection to something larger, and Adam becomes his silent confidante, always listening but never sharing. Of course, confiding in Adam is what produces the series of emails that Rank spews forth after he reads Adam's book.

Telling his story gives Rank a chance to explore his first serious romance and to search for his former girlfriend (who was, at the time, a devout evangelist) on Facebook. It gives him the opportunity to better understand his self-centered friend Kyle, as well as Rank's acerbic father, for whom he is now caring. It makes him come to terms with the unintended consequences of two violent events in his life, with his mother's death, and with his own mortality. Finally, having blown off steam, it gives him a chance to consider whether Adam's book is, in the grand scheme of things, all that meaningful.

The Antagonist has some features of a coming-of-age novel, although the moral growth and character changes that are so much a part of that genre are muted. To the extent that Rank changes, it is in reaction to the process of reflection as he authors his emails. Maybe it would be best to describe The Antagonist as a coming-of-age-in-middle-age novel, although what Rank experiences is more catharsis than maturation.

However the novel might be categorized, it is a sensitive and insightful examination of what it means to a child in an adult's body, a person who is instantly regarded as a brawler because he looks like one, a kid who never has to grow up because, from the age of fourteen, he's living in an adult body and is treated accordingly. Lynn Coady explores the role that expectations play in shaping a young adult's life, and the difficult road a young adult must follow if he chooses to resist those expectations.

The Antagonist is written in energetic prose that reflects Rank's desire to unleash his anger and frustration. It's a powerful story but one that is rich with humor and compassion.

RECOMMENDED

Revolution 19 by Gregg Rosenblum

Published by HarperTeen on January 8, 2013 

So in 2051 there's a robot revolution, with all the military robots turning against the humans who once controlled them. A robot apocalypse ensues, the surviving humans who are not held captive take refuge in the woods, and the story follows from that unoriginal premise. Fourteen years later, Kevin and Nick and Cass, along with their survivalist parents, are living in a Freepost, hiding from the bots. Their Freepost is the nineteenth either mistakenly or deliberately branded as revolutionary (hence the title), leading to a robot attack. The kids escape but their parents and some of their friends are captured.

The plot eventually follows the plucky kids as the sneak into the city to rescue their parents from the killer robots. The city is filled with forgotten technology like elevators and Segways (which is pretty much already a forgotten technology). They meet a plucky city kid named Lexi, who also happens to be pretty, and she decides to help them because Nick, having knocked down a surveillance bot in a David vs. Goliath moment, has become a rock star among city kids. Apart from the need to add a predictable romantic angle to the story, that's presumably why Lexi likes Nick so much (she clearly couldn't be attracted to his mind).

To be fair, Revolution 19 is less a robot apocalypse novel than it is a novel about the aftermath of the robot revolution. The robots have a benevolent purpose, so rather than enslaving humans, they give humans microchip implants and send them to reeducation classes where the humans learn to be peaceful and obedient -- sort of Nineteen Eighty-Four with robots playing the role of Big Brother. How benevolence squares with the slaughter of humans before reeducation began or with the execution of humans who don't respond to reeducation is never explained, probably because it can't be. You'd think robots would have a better sense of logic, but logic would just get in the way of the plot.

The kids are plucky but not very bright. Kevin's idiocy causes the robots to discover his Freehold, but he arguably didn't know what he was doing. Once in the city, Nick knowingly does some blindingly stupid things. Kevin and Cass decide that attending a bot-patrolled school would be better than hiding in a basement, despite the absence of any possible reward that would offset the risk of being caught. So are three monstrously stupid kids really smart enough to defeat an entire army of revolutionary robots? They don't actually save the world, but the story sets up a sequel in which they probably will.

Gregg Rosenblum deserves credit for dealing with technology intelligently, something that isn't always present in YA science fiction. Rosenblum deserves no credit for making life inside the city improbably easy for our intrepid heroes. They need chips to avoid capture, so -- happy fortune! -- Lexi knows a doctor who can implant chips that -- happy fortune! -- are supplied by a tech-wise kid whose reeducation apparently didn't work very well. Our heroes want to attend school so -- happy fortune! -- the tech-wise kid is able to hack into the school computer and fabricate school records for them. The bots are ridiculously easy to defeat in combat -- one of the kids even manages to beat up a bot -- which makes one wonder why adults couldn't successfully mount a counter-revolution before the three plucky kids give it a try.

To be fair, this is young adult fiction, so perhaps it is meant to be formulaic and unchallenging. It isn't the kind of high quality young adult fiction that Robert Heinlein used to write -- the kind that adults can still enjoy more than half a century after it first appeared -- but Rosenblum's writing style is fluid and the main characters are likable despite their density. While a young reader's reaction to Revolution 19 might therefore be more favorable than mine, I'd recommend that young readers with an interest in robots search out some old Asimov stories. They're easy reading but they're also about intelligent people (and intelligent robots) who behave in intelligent ways.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Ignorance by Michèle Roberts

Published by Bloomsbury USA on January 22, 2013 

Ignorance tells the story of Jeanne Nérin and Marie-Angèle Baudry before, during, and after Germany's occupation of France during World War II. Marie-Angèle is the daughter of a devout Catholic, a middle class grocer in a small village. Jeanne is the daughter of a Jewish washerwoman who converted to Catholicism in 1920, the year of her engagement.

When her widowed mother enters the hospital, nuns take on nine-year-old Jeanne as a charity boarder in the convent. Jeanne is joined by her friend Marie-Angèle. Two formative experiences in her early teens shape Jeanne's understanding of womanhood. While Marie-Angèle looks on, Jeanne is required to expose herself to a priest who uses the sight to achieve sexual gratification. That experience provides her with context when she visits a Jewish man known to the Village as the Hermit, a collector of pornography whose wife was murdered in a pogrom. The Hermit draws pictures of Jeanne, sometimes dressed in his wife's clothes, sometimes nude.

Most of the novel focuses on later events in the lives of the two girls. By the time the war comes, they have left the convent. Jeanne begins a relationship with a Frenchman and eventually gives birth to a daughter she names Andrée. Marie-Angèle's parents do business with a black market supplier named Maurice who eventually seduces, impregnates, and marries Marie-Angèle. At the same time, Maurice is visiting a bordello in a neighboring village where he runs into Jeanne, who is working as a cleaning woman.

Michèle Roberts offers a nuanced portrayal of French families struggling with the hardships of war. As a coping strategy, they try to forget that the war surrounds them, that their country is occupied. They conveniently regard the resistance as communist controlled and want nothing to do with it while adopting a wary "live and let live" attitude toward their German occupiers. On the other hand, they often reveal their anti-Semitic attitudes in their harsh judgments of Jeanne and the Hermit while choosing to live in ignorance of Nazi atrocities.

The two girls are rich, complex characters. Marie-Angèle is convinced that her family belongs to a better class than Jeanne's family and has decidedly mixed feelings about Jeanne. As does everyone else, she assumes Jeanne became a whore when she moved into the bordello. Marie-Angèle helps Jeanne give birth to her child but is unwilling to renew their childhood friendship. During the celebration of Liberation, when Jeanne is marched down the street with women who serviced German soldiers, her head shaved bald to mark her "betrayal of France," Marie-Angèle feels a mixture of compassion and loathing for her former friend. Feeling repentant, she feels she is doing Jeanne a favor by arranging her transportation to London, where no one will know her, and by forcing her to give up her child for adoption.

Maurice is a more enigmatic figure. He shows one face to Marie-Angèle, another to Jeanne. Whether he is supports or opposes the occupation is never certain, although it seems clear that he is entirely motivated by self-interest. He smuggles Jews out of France but only if they have money. He helps Jeanne's mother but there is a price to pay.

Roberts has a keen eye for detail and a pitch-perfect ear for descriptive prose. Here she describes the women in the bordello: "Decked in skimpy pastel crêpe de Chine slips, arms and legs bare, feet swinging high-heeled satin mules, eyelashes brushed black, mouths transformed into sharp red bows, they waited to be bought." Captivating descriptions of scents and textures season the story.

Two sections of the novel are less satisfying than the rest. One concerns Andrée as she is raised by nuns who unjustly belittle her as the illegitimate child of a whore. The other is told from the point of view of a nun named Dolly who, until that point, has been a rather unsympathetic background character. Both stories are too abbreviated to add significant depth to the novel. The final chapter, taking the reader to London with Dolly, is also abbreviated but it provides, if not exactly closure, a fitting end to the story.

RECOMMENDED

Enemy of Mine by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton on January 15, 2013 

Enemy of Mine does what an action novel needs to do: it delivers action. Along the way, it tells a surprisingly intelligent, carefully plotted story.

The prologue to Enemy of Mine begins with a nightmare (always a bad start to a novel) as Pike Logan dreams about the murder of his wife and child four years earlier. The main story begins with the assassination of an investigator who had gathered evidence implicating the Syrian government and Hezbollah in the 2005 death of Lebanon's prime minister. The assassin (a freelance terrorist known as the Ghost) then accepts an assignment to kill the American envoy to upcoming peace negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. A competing freelance assassin, an American named Lucas Kane but known by the code name Infidel, turns up to add spice to the plot. Pike encountered Infidel in One Rough Man.

Pike's ultimate mission, and that of the counter-terrorism Taskforce to which he is assigned, is to prevent the envoy's assassination. When they aren't with Pike, other members of the Taskforce come into focus, particularly Jennifer, an anthropologist who kicks butt when she isn't educating the other Taskforce members about world history. Knuckles and Decoy will also be familiar to series fans, while a new guy named Brett joins the team. Pike and Jennifer, however, are the only characters who gain new depth in this novel.

Occasionally the story spotlights Col. Kurt Hale, who commands the Taskforce from Washington D.C. Hale sits on an oversight committee that answers to the president (the only elected official on the committee). Since the Taskforce operates "outside the bounds of U.S. law" (it doesn't notify Congress or obtain Congressional approval before kidnapping or assassinating its targets), Hale and Pike and everyone else on the Taskforce, as well as the president and everyone on the oversight committee, is by definition a criminal. A reader needs to accept this unlikely premise (at least, one would hope it's unlikely) in order to enjoy the story. Since modern thrillers are almost always built on unlikely foundations, I rolled with it.

The main plot is cunning, bringing to mind (without overtly stating) the familiar Arabic proverb, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Of course, sometimes the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy. A couple of assassination schemes that unfold during the course of the novel are quite clever. The last quarter of the novel, after the main plot has wound down, seems like padding but it's enjoyable padding. A key subplot depends upon a wildly improbable coincidence that is easily forgiven since it drives the action at the end of the novel.

The story moves at a brisk pace. Brad Taylor's prose is straightforward but Enemy of Mine is about story, not style. The story is entertaining, although some events are predictable. Pike gets into bar fights to prove what a tough guy he is, just as he did in The Callsign. He risks his team and his cover to save a girl he doesn't know, after being ordered to cease operations, simultaneously proving his heroism and independence. In fact, Pike frequently disregards orders and never suffers any consequences because he always turns out to be right. Knuckles gives us the usual detailed description of the care a sniper takes to fire an accurate long-distance shot. The oversight committee is predictably bureaucratic in its refusal to trust the judgment of Taskforce members in the field. None of these scenes are bad, but they've all been done many times before.

Taylor has a more nuanced view of the world than some action novelists. He acknowledges that terrorists can be intelligent, that they do not share a unified ideology, and that the differing motivations of terrorist organizations lead them to pursue conflicting goals. Although Pike obviously disagrees with it, Taylor presents the Lebanese perspective on Hezbollah and the 2006 war with refreshing honesty, while Hale recognizes that there is a difference between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Unlike most action novel heroes, Pike knows that using torture as an interrogation technique is more likely to produce lies than truth. And unlike the vigilante "heroes" that populate so many thrillers, Pike has moral reservations about revenge killing, creating a dilemma when he experiences an overwhelming desire for revenge.

In short, this is an impressive action novel with a solid plot that reflects an unusually sophisticated worldview. On top of that, it's fun.

RECOMMENDED

Bibliomysteries by Laura Lippman and William Link

MysteriousPress.com is publishing (in digital form) a series of stand-alone mystery stories by popular crime authors in which books, bookstores, libraries, or manuscripts play a central role.  I don't usually review individual short stories, but I'm making an exception for the Bibliomystery series because the concept is interesting and the authors are well known.

"The Book Thing" by Laura Lippman was published on January 15, 2013.

Expensive illustrated books are disappearing from the children's bookstore in Tess Monaghan's North Baltimore neighborhood. Since Tess wants the store to survive so her daughter will have a place to shop for books, she agrees to investigate despite the owner's inability to pay her. It doesn't take Tess long to discover how the thefts are being committed.

While Tess tries her hand at social work and matchmaking before the story is done, the tale's best moments belong to the thief rather than the private investigator. He is drawn with uncommon understanding and compassion. The thief prompts Tess to think about the lives that books live, they ways they die, and the purposes they serve.

Given the uncertain future of brick-and-mortar bookstores, the story is notable for its condemnation of tacky readers who get free advice from bookstore owners and then download the recommended books into their eReaders from online retailers. The story also has a telling message about parents who burden their kids with their own childhood favorites (potentially killing the child's desire to read) rather than letting their children discover their own treasures. In short, this bibliomystery isn't much of a mystery, but it's a fine examination of the role books play in our lives.

RECOMMENDED

"Death Leaves a Bookmark" by William Link was published on December 11, 2012.

Troy Pellingham, hoping to speed up his inheritance, kills his wealthy uncle, the owner of an antiquarian bookstore, by toppling a heavy bookcase on him and smashing his skull with a heavy art book.  Police Lieutenant Columbo investigates the death.

All the familiar Columbo props and mannerisms are showcased: his cigars and rumpled raincoat; his search through every pocket for the one that's holding his notebook; his disarming pretense of forgetfulness; his habit, when questioning a suspect, of saying "Oh, just one more thing" as he is about to leave; his repetition of phrases like "boy, oh boy" and "That's a new one on me!"

In "Death Leaves a Bookmark," Columbo doesn't piece together clues like he did on the television show. In fact, he solves the crime without much effort at all. Still, the murderer and his attractive cousin (who plays a vital supporting role) are well defined characters, and their interaction adds spice to the story.

If you are unfamiliar with Columbo and don't see Peter Falk in your mind as you read "Death Leaves a Bookmark," I would recommend this story with resrvations because there isn't much to it. For Columbo fans, I recommend it whole-heartedly just for the joy of seeing the weathered detective in action again.

RECOMMENDED